The best album of the Philadelphia band’s deep and underappreciated catalog dares to ask what comes after indie rock.

Remembering the Rockets

For Strange Ranger, indie rock isn’t just a genre; it’s an actual lifestyle, the prism through which every aspect of adulthood can be projected and understood. The 2016 album Rot Forever, by an earlier incarnation of the band, started its 72 minutes of Up Records fanfic with the line “She played rock guitar” and peaked with “Won’t you come see Pile with me?” Going by the name Sioux Falls at the time, core members Isaac Eiger and Fred Nixon were kids in Bozeman, Montana, who were prone to let one or two ideas stretch out for six minutes because that’s what their heroes Built to Spill and Modest Mouse would do. They moved to Portland for the followup, Daymoon, and it felt like a higher education, going deeper into the Pac NW canon and local scene politics (key song: “House Show”). They’re now in Philadelphia, and Remembering the Rockets is everything one might expect from an ambitious, reverent band moving to the epicenter of American indie rock: It’s sharper and more purposeful, forged by the pressure of real expectations. The best album of their deep and underappreciated catalog, it also imagines a life after indie rock.
Eiger’s in no hurry to get there just yet. Remembering the Rockets operates from a mid-twenties contemplation stage, having enough distance from the crippling insecurities and dependencies of youth to start formulating an adult identity through jobs, relationships, and homeownership—but not to the point where the impending financial and familial obligations aren’t something to recoil from reflexively. Strange Ranger may present as a scrappy indie-rock quartet, but the emotional pitch of their songs honors this liminal stage of adulthood by operating at the excitable internal frequencies of teen pop.
Strange Ranger songs still emulate Buzz Bin bands of yore, though Remembering the Rockets tends to aim higher than the band used to, evoking the headliners of Lollapaloozas past rather than indie rock’s ragtag insurgents. More provocatively, the album often makes the case that both camps were playing the same game: Opener “Leona” sees no reason “Pictures of You,” “Semi Charmed Life,” and “Carry the Zero” couldn’t have coexisted on a Winamp playlist to commemorate a new crush or a fresh heartbreak. The most effortlessly anthemic Strange Ranger song to date, “Leona” volleys two chords and two states of being, giddy anticipation and paralyzing doubt. The lyrics are littered with the potentialities that get people up in the morning—the arrival of Friday night, a ticket for a trip abroad, a new love that leaves room for nothing else—yet Eiger sighs, “Not to say these things fix everything,” as though still distrustful of the idea that things could ever be this good forever. It ends with a symphonic burst of gratuitously overdubbed infinity guitars, a vision of endless uplift that’s at stark odds with the next song, “Sunday,” where Eiger is jobless, aimless, and washing the dishes just for a sense of purpose. “What if I just went away?/I’m alone in the world,” he sighs.
Throughout, Eiger and Fiona Woodman vacillate between blind optimism and a nihilism that feels more justified with each passing year. The fear of apocalypse is ever-present on the Woodman-led “Message to You” and “Living Free,” synths shimmering like pink mist, while Eiger ends “Beneath the Lights” melting into a puddle of Auto-Tuned isotopic waste. These are the tracks that give credence to Eiger’s Yves Tumor and Oneohtrix Point Never namedrops, even if those are clearly inspirations and not models—the loops on “Nothing Left to Think About” and “Planes in Front of the Sky” are more in line with the Eiger-endorsed “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth With Money in My Hand,”  watching time slip away, one lazy summer night after another.
But Strange Ranger still leave open the possibility for indie rock to swoop in and save the day. On the piano pounding yowler “Ranch Style Home,” Nixon yelps requests for sex and “French fried potatoes” in a caricatured cowpoke accent. But in a moment of true candor—“I need my gal holding my hand/I need my pals packed in my van”—“Ranch Style Home” makes a silent point: Is that kind of itinerant indie-rock lifestyle the only sensible one when nothing feels permanent anymore? “Awkward angels in the snow/What if I just want a family,” he wonders during “Living Free,” putting a fine point on a question hinted at throughout: Is it morally justifiable to bring children into a planet that’s going to be irreversibly worse for every successive generation? Eiger is on the verge of drifting through another morning on “Planes in Front of Sky” before everything snaps into focus: “I walk to work in fading light/Daddies with their kids/I still want that.” On Remembering the Rockets, Eiger is trying to create a legacy as a musician and a person; given the way the ice caps, indie rockers’ economic future, and maybe even human decency itself are all eroding, his hope isn’t just inspiring, it feels downright rebellious.


The Detroit rapper and the Dallas producer team up for another satin-smooth album of street hustler stories.

Payroll Giovanni / Cardo: Big Bossin Vol. 2

Big Bossin Vol. 2

Two years ago, Big Bossin Vol. 1 was a revelation: a luxurious gangster rap album made by a producer living in exurban North Texas and a rapper from hollowed-out, post-industrial Detroit. Cardo and Payroll Giovanni transcended geography for something sun-kissed and glowing with rude, vibrant health. They weren’t hand in glove, they were convertible on Pacific Coast Highway, or silk on skin. Vaguely coastal and entirely sumptuous, their sound was exciting enough to bring about a deal with Def Jam for the next edition of the world’s most extravagant leadership seminar.
As with the first iteration of Big Bossin, Cardo—whose name should be written in turquoise velour, amethyst neon, or maroon suede—is greatly responsible for the second volume’s indefatigable glamour. As always, his beats are unhurried, lush, and somewhat placeless. Cardo’s core influences are the golden triangle of the East Bay, Los Angeles County, and Houston. He synthesizes the menace and bounce of mobb music, the “Funky Worm”-style wail and whine of G-funk, and the slow, mellow churn of mid-late ’90s Houston rap into a sound that’s simultaneously reverent and refreshing. The guitar sample on “5’s and 6’s” belongs on the television menu of a Hawaiian hotel. His “So Young” instrumental could’ve backed ’80s R&B ballads by Dennis Edwards or the Whispers. The saxophone on “Rapped My Way” belongs in the too-orange sun of Biscayne Bay or Newport Beach. Like palm trees in cool ocean breezes, Cardo’s beats bop and sway.
If Cardo’s instrumentals are an unbuttoned, eleven-color Reyn Spooner Hawaiian shirt, then Payroll Giovanni’s rapping is the inevitable glowing sunburn. On Vol. 2, he shows little outward interest in, say, presidential elections, police brutality or gender inequality—topics which typically garner other rappers serious critical consideration. Rather, he keys in on a solitary concern: the realpolitik of drug sales and its material and social rewards. From a scholarly remove, it’s well-trodden territory, but, honestly, fuck scholarly remove. Or, as Payroll raps on “In Me, Not on Me,” “Bloggers be like, ‘He talked about the drugs almost the whole song’/But you ain’t from where I’m from, so get the fuck on.” What Raymond Chandler was to steely-eyed bombshells or Denis Johnson to sodden burnouts, Payroll is to Detroit hustlers. He has a relish for quick cash, an intimacy with the metric system and an affinity for Cartier frames, and that’s a rich enough palette.
Big Bossin Vol. 2’s particular splendor brings to mind an oxymoronic aphorism: There’s hardness in softness. More specifically, it takes overwhelming self-confidence to project oneself as a tough guy while also appearing vulnerable, often by enjoying styles or sounds considered feminine. (Some examples: pimps with flowing, permed locks and glowing manicures; Rick James’ flamboyant outfits and sometimes violent behavior; Ice Cube’s Jheri curl; rappers’ enduring affinity for Sade.) For Cardo and Payroll, that means the contrast of lyrics about gangster derring-do and selling pounds of opiates, set to pastel-hued beats that aren’t far removed from boogie and R&B.
Ultimately, Cardo and Payroll Giovanni’s mastery of their self-defined genre is Big Bossin Vol. 2’s greatest artistic strength and its biggest potential weakness. On its own merits, it’s excellent, even if it doesn’t significantly expand the duo’s oeuvre. If you enjoyed Vol. 1, then you’ll surely enjoy Vol. 2. It isn’t meat-and-potatoes rap, but surf ‘n’ turf rap. It’s rap that’ll make your wheezing subcompact feel like a fine-tuned German coupe. It’s the sound of sipping palomas poolside at the Beverly Hills Hotel, or shucking oysters beside the silvery crash and hiss of the Pacific, or yachting on crystalline waters.


For the past decade, Sandro Perri has followed his muse across dance, avant-garde, and roots-rock boundaries. The Toronto musician/producer's new album is his first to truly synthesize these musical interests.

Impossible Spaces

Sandro Perri has never shied away from expressing his admiration for Arthur Russell; among the highlights of the Toronto musician/producer's decade-plus-long career was a distended, 21-minute reinterpretation of Russell's already lengthy Dinosaur disco classic "Kiss Me Again". But as Perri's discography has pluralized and diversified in unexpected ways, Russell has become less of a direct musical influence than an inspirational model of following one's muse across dance, avant-garde, and roots-rock boundaries, and marking those stylistic shifts with different, highly evocative aliases. Since first establishing himself in the early 2000s as a producer of aquatic, cerebral techno under the Polmo Polpo moniker, Perri has variously indulged his interest in Nigerian juju and shantytown funk with one-album wonders Glissandro 70 and dubby disco as Dot Wiggin. But since 2007, he's been releasing albums under his own name, signaling a singer-songwriterly shift that foregrounds Perri's considerable talents as a pedal-steel guitarist and fondness for 1970s AM-radio pop, even going so far as to faithfully cover Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" and Harry Nilsson's "Everybody's Talkin'".
Scanning the tracklist on Perri's new album, Impossible Spaces, you're first greeted with another familiar title: "Changes". But while the song that bears its name turns out not to be a version of either the David Bowie classic or the Black Sabbath piano ballad, Perri at the very least embraces the root sentiment behind that well-worn title. Though "Changes" picks up where 2007's tropically tranquil Tiny Mirrors left off, there are some immediately noticeable developments: Perri's plainspoken voice is several inches higher in the mix, and the sound has been thickened considerably by warm organ tones and more scabrous electric-guitar lines, while drummer Dan Gaucher sounds like he's itching to kick into a more robust backbeat. But then after three and a half minutes of stop-start teases, "Changes" does just that, by shifting into a glorious instrumental coda-- powered by a chugging Afro-funk groove and analog-synth starbursts-- that feels like an ecstatic, out-of-body-experience answer to the more tentative passage that preceded it.
"Changes" effectively confirms Impossible Spaces as the first Sandro Perri release to truly synthesize his myriad musical interests and place equal emphasis on rhythm, texture, and melody. With Perri backed once again by a coterie of Toronto improv-scene all stars-- who provide him with all the queasy-listening sophistication of a more inebriated Sea and Cake or a less spastic Dirty Projectors-- the album strikes an uncanny balance between sounding ambitiously executed and completely off-the-cuff; an epic of both accident and design. Perri isn't afraid to push his song lengths past the seven-minute mark (or thematically link shorter tracks into two-part suites), but Impossible Spaces never feels taxing or overwrought. Rather, extended and exceedingly patient pieces like the woodwind-powered "How Will I?" and the exquisite 10-minute beast "Wolfman" yield a sustained thrill of discovery as, with each new verse, they wind and wander into an ever-dislocating swirl of brass, flutes, electric guitar, strings, and synth drones.
Throughout it all, Perri's invariably calm tenor assumes the reassuring presence of a tour guide who won't tell you where you're going but ensures you pass through safely: He rarely sings his verse melodies in any kind of formalized cadence but always returns to a familiar chorus refrain at just the right time to help you get reoriented. In that sense, Impossible Spaces isn't simply the most accessible and immediately rewarding album to bear Sandro Perri's name, it also serves as a handy musical roadmap to its maker's sinuous creative course.

Electronic / Experimental / Folk/Country


With a concussive sound and a deceptively lean setup, the doom duo returns to terrifying basics on a macabre and strangely exhilarating album about anguish.

I’ve Seen All I Need to See

The doom-metal duo the Body have rarely been only those things. Sure, for the past decade, guitarist Chip King and drummer Lee Buford have practically oozed plangent distortion and martial rhythms, doom criteria as conclusive as any. Glance, though, beneath their hostile surface or inside their loaded rests, where they stuff eerie choirs and corrosive electronics, grinding samples and unnerving jump cuts. This is doom as mutilated by Merzbow, then reassembled into a beast so uncanny it makes Eyehategod sound like modern rock. King and Buford are ardent collaborators, too, as much a symptom of their stylistic catholicism as its cause. They’ve made albums with belligerent grinders Full of Hell, sludge punks Thou, and shadowy producer the Haxan Cloak, then turned their catalog over to artists like Moor Mother. For King and Buford, the Body is a post-everything permission slip.
King and Buford put that restlessness on temporary hold for I’ve Seen All I Need to See, their first album as a pair in three years. It is a harrowing meditation on death and despondence, ruthlessly delivered by the Body’s core duo. A few old friends show up to add jagged piano here, robotic narration there. But it’s mostly King’s low-strung guitar, so massive and mean it conjures an army of bassists frying amplifiers, and his high-strung voice, as piercing as the melting Wicked Witch. Buford is an indomitable powerhouse, swiping at his drums as though his sticks were battering rams. The results are harsh but exhilarating, loud enough to make you worry about your speakers and anguished enough to make you worry about your sanity.
I’ve Seen All I Need to See begins like a short horror film. A stoic reading of Douglas Dunn’s “The Kaleidoscope”—written after the early death of the Scottish poet’s wife, Lesley, in 1981—unspools beneath curdled chords and foreboding drum knocks. Dunn’s poem is about the Groundhog Day-like torture of wanting to care for someone who is no longer there, of being forced to relive their death daily. The Body spend the next 37 minutes considering this grim scene from every angle, from the loneliness of the end to the dour acceptance of the living.
Still, the sounds hurt more than their underpinnings. During “The City Is Shelled,” the Body quake like a once-mighty band trying to fight through actual rubble. For almost four minutes, “The Handle/The Blade” rumbles beneath a bed of ricocheting noise, like the soundtrack to chronic pain. It’s almost impossible to decipher King’s words; the music makes it unnecessary.
These two-piece blasts are not some nativist retreat, as if King and Buford were out to prove the Body remain unchanged. Instead, they weave a decade of collaborative lessons into these songs. Opener “A Lament” uses the dramatic hip-hop cuts they’ve embraced (and sometimes overindulged) just enough to make you uneasy. The triumphant lift at song’s end, meanwhile, recalls Thou, who often offer a glimmer of relief just to revel in pulling it away. During the finale, “Path of Failure,” they lurch into a skittering instrumental section that suggests the Mahavishnu Orchestra abandoning its spirituality. This small format forces King and Buford to fold their strangest impulses into their most basic setup, meaning I’ve Seen All I Need to See gets more intense the more you listen.
There’s another reason it’s never seemed correct to call the Body a duo: For a decade, Buford and King have worked largely with one producer—Seth Manchester, at Rhode Island’s Machines with Magnets. He’s steadily learned to harness the Body’s high-volume spectral madness, becoming a de facto member. For I’ve Seen All I Need to See, he manages dual tricks that seem paradoxical. The Body sound live here, with crackling distortion and concussive tones imitating the middle-ear torment you feel when they’ve loaded into a club. “Tied Up and Locked In” thunders and shivers, as if the loudest band in the world were in town and you were grabbing pizza next door. Yet these recordings have such texture and depth they resemble topographic maps, perfectly preserving every peak, valley, and crevice. Never mind the shrieking—the back half of “They Are Coming” is almost delicate, the drones and drums moving in a mad waltz. The Body often seem like a mess on the surface; perhaps for the first time, Manchester has managed to capture the control they lord over this supposed chaos, the sophistication among these mangled layers.
Arriving at a moment when staggering death tolls come with the morning news, these eight diatribes plunge you into a pit of despair and demand that you take in the inevitability of our end. Can you muster a musical idea bleaker than a man howling, “The screaming of children/The fog of smoldering” like a stuck pig while he and his buddy maul your speakers? But this music is so bluntly fatalistic—in idea and execution—that it feels life-affirming to experience, as cleansing as scalding water. The Body have embraced that sensation since finding it on their 2010 breakthrough, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood. On I’ve Seen All I Need to See, it is mercilessly distilled and efficient, reminding us there’s no time to waste.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On a thrilling slab of punk-jazz noise, the D.C. duo argues for the centrality of black American culture in the fight for the nation’s soul.

Blacks’ Myths II

Armed with a pulpit, an amp, and impeccable timing, Blacks’ Myths II rolls up to the intersection of two contemporary cultural storylines—one thematic and one musical. There, where history and sound meet, the Washington, D.C.-based duo, bassist Luke Stewart and drummer Warren Crudup III, cobbles together an unlikely, thorny recording: a slab of punk jazz that is outside of genre and era but can also be heard as an auspicious fight for the soul and sound of a nation—noisy minimalist improvisation as a present-day language communicating timeless truths.
The broader narrative that Blacks’ Myths’ sophomore album embraces is America’s current reappraisal of blackness as central to the country’s meaning—which in the eyes and ears of Stewart (of Irreversible Entanglements and Heroes Are Gang Leaders) and Crudup (stickman for James Brandon Lewis, among others) is taking place too late for the entire planet’s health. The album’s core narration comes in the form of four monologues courtesy of Dr. Thomas Stanley, whose polymath resume (poet, black studies professor, astral jazz and (P-)funk scholar, DIY concert producer) makes him a uniquely qualified collaborator. His noetic visions not only feed into the resonance of the band’s name; they are also a counterpart to recent journalistic works like Hannah Nikole-Jones’ “The 1619 Project.” Instead of wanting to fix America’s manifest history, Stanley and Blacks’ Myths are looking to wipe its slate clean for whatever comes next.
This plot is underpinned by music only slightly less grand—and engages a pair of debates being waged inside the jazz and noise/punk communities these two musicians call home. The central questions here are “What is it?” and “Who is it for?” One springs from a new generation of players reassessing jazz’s structure, language, and storied place within the African American tradition. The other is forcing punk to figure out how to embrace its black roots and ascertain its musical purpose in a Trump-era cauldron. On the evidence of the album’s messy lo-fi textures, pervasive rock dynamics, and two-player intricacy (Stewart’s electric bass and electronics and Crudup’s kit account for all the sounds), bolstered by Dr. Stanley’s inquests, Blacks’ Myths are eager to partake in all these and any other discourses America may want to throw at them.
II’s conversations actually continue the ones Stewart and Crudup kicked off on Blacks’ Myths self-titled 2018 debut, even as they also lurch into the unknown. The first album’s atmosphere had traces of ferocity but was more occupied by hypnotic revolution—minimalist dub notes and figures, or slow-developing tides of sound, wrapping around rhythm and reflecting back upon themselves, only occasionally coming to a boil. It was wordless and musically potent, sketching a great migratory movement and a past that came alive in symbiotic bass-drums interactions. Filled with worried notes of Stewart’s distorted upright, first-take-best-take slurred lines, and low-frequency electronics, its sound remains unlike any album in recent memory, a perfect addition to the gathering storm of improvisational oddities charging the atmosphere in all corners of so-called “jazz.”
The follow-up is cut from a familiar heady cloth but powered by a distinct energy. If Stewart and Crudup’s communication was previously built on groove telepathy, here the objectives are more specific, feral, primordial. It’s a prehistoric creation of post-history power sources: cascading feedback, barbed electronics, and oversized drums. Stanley’s own words seize upon the environmental theme, describing the “goo” covering much of the planet as “the source of history… carry[ing] forward the stark relationship of matter to itself.” The world-building scope is boundless, on the scale of Stanley Kubrick or Octavia Butler, as living sound, fed through one of Crazy Horse’s Marshall stacks from Rust Never Sleeps but emanating music from Arc.
Over half the tracks are short, rising bursts with distinct roles to play. Some are vehicles for the album’s themes, with Stanley’s words—on the heroism of “non-violent warriors empowered by myth science” fighting “the triumph of white supremacy gentrified as American exceptionalism”—gliding over Stewart’s unnerving electrical currents, or amplified by Crudup’s volcanic thrashing. Others are here to keep punk’s loud-fast rules at the center of a conversation that can admittedly turn bookish and didactic. Only a moment with the strumming thrash of “Rapture” or the martial power of “Northern Confederate” is needed to once more quicken the pulse.
Yet it is the longer pieces that push Blacks’ Myths II beyond mere post-hardcore prophecy toward something approaching transcendence. Carrying titles weighted with meaning for black America (“Stand Your Ground,” “The Bluff,” “Mammy’s Revenge”), they bring together composition and improvisation as pursued through a playful, masterly push-and-pull between technology, electricity, and rhythm; by design, it is only tenuously controlled. Take “Free Land,” the album’s centerpiece and vessel of its most distinct melodic figures: Stewart’s stately motif, played on a deeply distorted electric bass, sounds capable of being swallowed up at any given moment, even as its echoes begin to reverberate in a kind of elegy. Or take “Redbone,” on which Crudup digs out an elastic pocket while Stewart whimsically messes about with a set of fuzzed-out, organ-like textures, moving from a heavy-metal Jackie Mittoo vibe to approximating the sound of steel-drum dub. The acoustic mis-recognition and contextual confusion provide a rare kind of delight.
These exercises in structured freedom and interrogation of form, amid a historic pool of boundless blackness, bring to mind a compliment that the artist/filmmaker Arthur Jafa paid black America a few years ago: “We create culture in freefall.” Imagine the hope in that statement. Stewart and Crudup soundtrack a version of that engagement with American gravity, one existing at an intersection that, though specific to our recent times, also has lineage and precedents. As their band’s name makes clear, these sounds did not arrive here by chance.
Correction: An earlier version of this review misstated the name of one of Warren Crudup III’s collaborators; it is James Brandon Lewis, not James Branford Lewis.


On her band's second album, it can feel like Florence Welch is simply holding out a single note at top volume for an hour. Instead of Lungs' charming, discombobulating diversity, Ceremonials suffers from repetitiveness. The few tracks that do deviate from the heaven's-crescendo formula hardly curb frustrations.

Ceremonials

When I first saw Florence and the Machine two years ago at New York's cozy and beloved Bowery Ballroom, leader Florence Welch's voice was simply too loud for the room. She sounded massive, but shrill. Overpowering. If the show took place in an X-Men movie, the wind gushing from Welch's lungs would have propelled several patrons smashing through the Bowery's back window onto Delancey Street. The next time I encountered That Voice, it was five months later, in the relatively gigantic Terminal 5 on Manhattan's far west side. And while that venue is often knocked for its booming, detail-abolishing acoustics, and concrete-slab atmosphere, it was a much better fit for Welch, who hopped, ran, and wailed while 3,000 giddy fans looked on, awestruck. For this band and this singer, nothing could be too big. Or so it seemed.
Growing up, Welch was met with stern eyes when she was caught singing her favorite hymns with a bit too much verve. Her unbridled talent is the type of thing producers of TV singing contests fantasize about. It's soulful. It's instant. It's blaring. On "American Idol", contestants like Welch are invariably deemed "quirky" and doomed to runner-up status. And though Welch is a more convincing Artist than even the best "Idol" has to offer, make no mistake that her voice-first delivery is perfectly tailored for a generation who grew up judging singers as much as they listened to them. Even the hopelessly hip crowd that showed up to see Welch at Vice's Creators Project event last month saved one of their biggest ovations for the moment when she held out one piercing note for an exaggerated period of time-- a primal sign of skill that banks on nothing less than sheer audacity.
The same can be said of Florence and the Machine's second album, Ceremonials, which can feel like Welch simply holding out a single note at top volume for an hour. On paper, the album takes a wise path. After trying out a few different producers and styles-- garage-pop; vampy twinkle-pop; and tribal, mystic-pop-- on her debut, Lungs, Welch settles almost exclusively on the latter for Ceremonials, bringing along producer Paul Epworth, who was so good at the mystic stuff on the first record, to oversee the whole thing. So what we get is Florence trying very hard to top the gargantuan drums and cascading harps and chest-thumping choruses of Lungs hits like "Cosmic Love" and "Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)" on damn near every song. Instead of Lungs' largely charming yet discombobulating diversity, Ceremonials suffers from a repetitiveness that's akin to looking at a skyline filled with 100-story behemoths lined-up one after the other, blocking out everything but their own size.
Some of these world wonders stand tall despite their surroundings. First single "Shake It Out", a stadium-willing anthem about getting past one's troubles, sets a new high for this group. As does the similarly barreling "No Light, No Light", which is one of the few tracks where Welch sets aside her usual flighty, dreamy, goth-y lyrical go-to's-- ghosts, graveyards, devils, angels, myths, drowning-- for something a bit more personal. "Would you leave me, if I told you what I'd become," she sings during the track's magisterial bridge, "'Cause it's so easy to sing it to a crowd/ But it's so hard, my love/ To say it to you out loud." The lines double as a snippet of self-criticism; perhaps Welch finds it "so easy" to sing her tunes to thousands because they often lack an individual touch that could send them even further skyward-- the same touch that comes so naturally to fellow UK chart queen Adele. But by the midway point of the LP, its endless crescendos start bleeding into each other, and the loudness soon tires itself out.
The few tracks that deviate from the heavens-broken-open formula hardly curb frustrations. The haughty "Breaking Down" could be an outtake from MGMT's career-stalling Congratulations, dirge-y "Seven Devils" aims for Beelzebub but is about as haunting as a toddler with a pitchfork. In what's becoming an increasingly annoying problem in this era of iTunes bonus tracks and myriad deluxe editions, it's the extras not included on the proper album that offer reasonable outs for Florence's Big issues. "Remain Nameless" replaces the record's corporate-rock drums and overzealous whoosh with an electronic minimalism similar to Welch's pals the xx. The song's allowed to breathe, and is all the better for it. Other bonuses include a few demos of some of the record's huger cuts (and the term "demo" is relative here-- these stripped-back tracks are still pristine). Backed by only acoustic instrumentation, we finally hear the creases in Welch's voice that the album whitewashes at every turn.
"I don't want your future, don't need your past/ One bright moment, is all I ask," sings Welch on choir-aided closer "Leave My Body". Ceremonials is so hell-bent on providing such "bright moments"-- that flash of overwhelming emotion resulting from ramped-up strings or a frantic harp or a particularly audacious vocal run-- that it never zooms out to consider its own listenability. Welch is 25, and she's likely chuffed at the thought of bringing these massive songs to equally immense crowds at festivals all over the world for the next two years. And that's where many of these tracks will have the greatest chance to thrive-- in the open, with heads as far as one can see. On record, though, too much is crushed by blind ambition.


David Grellier returns with a collection of filmic mood pieces that work well as a sound package but begs for some kind of visual accompaniment.

Shanghai

When the French electronic musician David Grellier landed one of his songs on the soundtrack to Nicolas Winding Refn’s 2011 film Drive, it must have felt a little like a prophecy fulfilled. Grellier, better known as College, has been taking cues from Hollywood aesthetics since the beginning of his career. The sleeve of 2008’s Teenage Color EP could pass for a knocked-off John Hughes poster; the cover of his debut album, Secret Diary, echoes imagery from Risky Business, Body Double, and Flashdance. The sound of those early recordings is no less faithful to silver-screen staples like John Carpenter (particularly his Assault on Precinct 13 score), Tangerine Dream (specifically, their sultry Risky Business contributions), and zapping and squelching synth-poppers Yaz.
But once you’re known for a filmic style, those associations can be difficult to shed. Grellier has let moving images—or at least the imaginary stills from the neon-tinted mood board in his mind—do much of the heavy lifting on his music. On 2011’s Northern Council and 2013’s Heritage, his two-minute sketches often came off frustratingly half-finished. It was easy to wonder if he was resting on his laurels—or even getting tangled up in them. Just as Drive’s “A Real Hero” was inspired in part by Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who wrangled US Airways Flight 1549 to a water landing on the Hudson River, *Northern Council *features a track titled “TWA Flight 450”—which, coincidentally or not, is also the number of another flight rescued from the brink of disaster.
In its mood and its discipline, Shanghai is the most focused work that Grellier has done. Where previous albums often felt like collections of excerpts scooped up from the cutting-room floor, Shanghai’s 15 tracks fit together so snugly that they could easily be repurposed for an actual film score. He has largely jettisoned the percolating synth-pop of earlier albums, instead favoring slow-moving synthesizer bass, airy pads, and plenty of empty space. A less-is-more approach prevails: There are rarely more than three discrete elements in play at any given moment, and few tracks stretch beyond two-and-a-half minutes. With the exception of “Hotel Theme Part I” and “Hotel Theme Part II,” two organ variations that lend a sense of déjà vu to repeat plays of the album, tracks don’t necessarily repeat themes or even specific synthesizer patches, but in their muted colors and economical gestures, they all feel like parts of a greater whole. Like a roomful of minimalist canvasses, each one feeds off the others.
At their best, his patient miniatures waver between wistful and distant, leaving plenty of room project your own emotional states. Album opener “A Strange Guide” has sunrise chords and scene-setting crickets; “Bloody Palms” lingers on bittersweet major sevenths, lilting and understated; the regal “Hotel Theme Part I” evokes Philip Glass’ organ thrum. Only the album’s lone vocal cut, “Love Peas,” featuring a singer named Hama, breaks the mold: A soft-focus swirl of plucked strings and hushed legato. It’s pretty, almost cloying, and its wide-eyed sparkle comes closer to the work of M83, another Frenchman with a penchant for ‘80s blockbusters.
The only problem is that none of it is quite enough; there just aren’t enough musical ideas here to sustain an entire album—at least not if Grellier wants to aim for anything more than background listening. Take “Briefcase,” a single coldwave arpeggio extended for two minutes, or “Mansion Road,” a brooding bit of keyboard noodling: These aren’t songs, they’re cues in search of a scene. The album is meant as an homage to 1920s Shanghai—a tribute to “a fantasized and blurry period of time,” as the press release puts it. But that is barely the kernel of an idea, and the music doesn’t develop it beyond the level of an elevator pitch. There’s nothing specific to China, or the 1920s, in his synths or tentative melodies, and the ill-advised album cover—a pastiche of the old movie-poster trope where the male protagonist clutches a woman to his chest—doesn’t do the project any favors. Whatever he was going for, it comes off instead as an Orientalist cliché. Next time, instead of looking abroad for inspiration, Grellier might do better to start closer to home—to find his own story to tell, one that doesn’t require moving pictures in a darkened room to bring it to life.


In a departure from its typically cutting-edge electronics, the Ugandan label Nyege Nyege Tapes unearths vintage recordings of an mbira master whose lo-fi sonics are every bit as arresting.

Ekuka

If you’ve ever thumbed a metal comb, flicked the tab atop a Coke can, or run a stick along a wrought-iron fence, you know the visceral pleasures of making metal sing. It’s a sound that has long fascinated musicians, children on playgrounds, and even our ancestors: Early metal-tined lamellophones found in Africa can date back 1,300 years. The buzz of those instruments, and its inharmonic overtones, carry an especially hypnotic charge. You can hear thumb pianos, mbiras, or kalimbas—the name varies, but the principles are the same—plink and twinkle through the music of Björk, Earth, Wind & Fire, Pharoah Sanders, Konono No°1, and Four Tet, to name a few.
The instrument can be heard in most field recordings made in Uganda spanning the 1950s through the 1970s, but this collection of radio sessions from Ekuka Morris Sirikiti, a legendary griot in Northern Uganda, presents his mbira in far scruffier yet mirthful settings. Originally broadcast on Ugandan radio circa 1978-2006, Ekuka is a rare vinyl release from the upstart Nyege Nyege Tapes, which has so far released just over a half-dozen tapes documenting the modern scene in Kampala, and it also marks the label’s first archival release. Just what connects the gabber-speed frenzy of their Sounds of Sisso compilation and the Spartan synth tessellations of Jako Maron to these mbira performances might not be evident at first, but Ekuka is a paterfamilias to the new wave of rappers and producers hailing from Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya.
With the reign of General Idi Amin in the ’70s and the civil unrest that has erupted in the country in the decades since (most recently with the brutal beating of parliament member and musician Robert Kyagulanyi, aka Bobi Wine), that Ekuka didn’t have access to proper recording studios isn’t so surprising. While the set says the recordings are taken from radio broadcasts, that’s not quite true; the tapes don’t originate from any station’s archives but rather from recordings made by listeners at home. Which means that the cycling rhythms and percolating twangs of Ekuka drift through an array of radio static, lo-fi hiss, and distortion. “Pwan En Obalo Gum Waa” arrives submerged in sludge: Ekuka’s growls disintegrating in the red, the wind brushes against the mic like white noise gauze, yet his nimble mbira lines bob up like quicksilver in pea soup. Same goes for the melodic distortion of “Pwoc Bot Lira Dpi Miyo Pikipiki,” Ekuka’s voice muffled and the mbira galloping, blurry as a watercolor.
Distorted thumb piano is nothing new, as the mighty Konono No°1 and their audience well know, but this set doesn’t quite belong in that category. If anything, it feels of a piece with the other artists on Nyege Nyege Tapes, who utilize whatever gear they have at hand to push the sound somewhere new and undetermined, rolling with the grit and the glitches. Another important aspect of Ekuka’s performances sets them apart from contemporary releases on the label with a more heavily electronic bent. As the liner notes explain, Ekuka’s nonstop patter could cover an array of topics: Be a good husband, take your kids to school, and whatever you do, don’t upset your son’s wife. He also set government PSAs to music, whether they be about preventing the spread of venereal diseases, not drinking alcohol to excess, or paying taxes. The metallic flutters of “In Balonyo for Ayinet” are dizzying enough; then, near the song’s end, Ekuka’s punchlines land, setting off a crowd that bursts into wild laughter—a sound that adds yet another visceral thrill to the music.


The Canadian noise-pop duo’s music conjures a psychotic slumber party, or a Second Life rave, but remains grounded in the bittersweet beauty of lifelong friendship.

Peaceful as Hell

On April 12th, Black Dresses hosted a livestream listening party for Peaceful as Hell that doubled as a two-year anniversary celebration of their debut album, Wasteisolation. In a blue and purple-lit room, Devi McCallion and Ada Rook, the duo who make up this Canadian noise-pop project, were grinning and headbanging and throwing up the sign of the horns as their fervid fans (the kind that inspire Sauron memes) wrote messages like “go off microbiology queen,” “TRANS RIGHTS BABY,” and “this is the cutest thing that’s ever happened” in the sidebar. It’s all very fitting: Devi and Rook’s collaboration started via Twitter DM, sending loops and beats back and forth from Vancouver and Toronto; they live in the same city now, but the Black Dresses origin story, and their intimate online connection with fans, is something of a beacon in this hyper-isolated time. As Devi put it in a 2018 interview, “It’s very friend-oriented music, even though it’s about isolation.” (Their music is a reminder of the ways in which people have always been marginalized and alienated from each other—even pre-pandemic.)
Peaceful as Hell is softer and more accessible than Black Dresses’ previous output, but "accessible” is relative: The music still teems with metallic riffs, industrial noise, pop-punk that got stuffed into garbage disposal, and a good amount of digital caterwauling. It’s fun and loud as hell, as per usual; a psychotic slumber party, a Second Life rave. But the crackly, jabbing sounds are toned down here, and you can hear Devi and Rook more clearly than ever.
In this new space, they stretch and shapeshift, making the most of their hybrid angel-demon powers. “CREEP U,” a coolly anthemic track which imagines a body as a haunted house, is not only the most straightforward pop song Devi and Rook have ever written, it might be one of their best (it’s also their longest to date). It’s filled with their characteristic questions about self-knowledge, and singular humor: “Empty windows shine so strange/Like there's someone behind the pain/Of glass,” Devi sings, over a simple guitar line before saying, “That's my idea of a joke, did it make you laugh?” “MAYBE THIS WORLD IS ANOTHER PLANETS HELL?” a track about making the best of a shitty situation (Earth, society), wouldn’t sound too out of place on Miss Anthropocene—that’s new for them, and the languidness is welcome.
As always, even when they’re imagining themselves as angels, like on the fiery “SHARP HALO,” or as a “bloody worm goddess” on “SCARED 2 DEATH,” it’s all so human. It is decidedly music about being trans; it is music about being alive. It is music about the ways in which pain and joy swim together, the frustrations of trying to connect with others when even self-knowledge is elusive and chaotic. There is so much packed into Peaceful as Hell—complexity of inner life, dissociation, climate disaster, biblical imagery, the future—and yet it ultimately feels simple and unmistakable, as though it has fallen out of Devi and Rook. “So once again/Here we go again/It’s all we have/Okay,” Rook mutters on “BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP” before Devi joins her in shouting: “Beautiful friendship/Burning up in this/Tiny little moment of time/We will always try our best/To shine bright!” Especially with the world’s hellishness currently blaring at us, every social disparity spotlighted and exacerbated, loneliness and doubt deepened to an extreme degree, Peaceful as Hell is perfect medicine.


Nineteen years after their last album, the Jesus and Mary Chain pick up where they left off, offering their usual mix of feedback-spiked rockers and stoned ballads.

The Jesus and Mary Chain: Damage and Joy

Damage and Joy

Whether they’re playing 15-minute gigs or taking 19 years between albums, the Jesus and Mary Chain have always put a lot of care into the appearance of not giving a fuck. Ever since they first erected their wall of squall on 1985’s Psychocandy, brothers Jim and William Reid have remained permanent residents of a world where sunglasses never come off, cigarette smoke doubles as dry ice, and the only illumination is provided by strobe light. None of the albums they’ve released since has sounded quite the same, but they all invariably feel the same. As the Mary Chain’s first full-length since the late ’90s proves, it will take more than a nearly two-decade recording hiatus to diminish the band’s intrinsic ultraviolet vibe.
Despite the epic lag between releases, Damage and Joy feels very much like a logical extension of its predecessor, 1998’s seeming swan song Munki, because the Reids had been unwittingly leaving a breadcrumb trail between the two records this whole time. Half of its 14 tracks are re-recordings of songs that were previously released in some form—as Jim Reid solo releases or as part of their sister Linda’s Sister Vanilla venture. In the case, of “All Things Pass,” it’s a revved-up revamp of the lone song the Mary Chain have officially released since the Reids buried the hatchet back in 2007 (because, presumably, leaving it for dead on the “Heroes” soundtrack seemed too ignoble a fate). Jim recently told Pitchfork that all those castaway tracks “really should have been Mary Chain songs,” if only the brothers’ notoriously combative relationship hadn’t deep-sixed the band after Munki.
By that time, the Reids had eagerly accepted their destiny as cranky old men. Where Psychocandy used harsh noise to conceal tender feelings, Munki’s streamlined motorik’n’roll laid the middle-aged Mary Chain’s hilariously hateful lyrics bare. (It’s hard to pick a favorite from “Commercial”: “McDonald’s is shit!” or “Children are fools!”) They were always an insolent band, but Munki marked the first time the Reids seemed to be having fun with being assholes. And on Damage and Joy, that regression continues apace, with the Reids acting like 50-going-on-15, giddily riffing on drugs, guns, erections, girls with curls, and “fly”/“high” rhymes you can spot from miles away.
Beyond the blatant nods to the group’s past (“Song for a Secret”—one of two duets with Isobel Campbell—manages to sound like “Sometimes Always” and “Just Like Honey” simultaneously), some of the brothers’ lyrics sound here like they were actually salvaged from an early ’90s scrapbook. The puerile robo-blues romp “Get on Home” finds Jim spending a night with a “blow-up girl,” “some LSD,” and “the MTV”; William’s ridiculous “Simian Split” rehashes a hoary old Kurt Cobain murder conspiracy as if the song was written after watching the El Duce interview in Nick Broomfield’s Kurt and Courtney. And then there’s “Facing Up To the Facts,” on which Jim unleashes a corker that could’ve easily materialized at any point in the Mary Chain’s history: “I hate my brother and he hates me/That’s the way it’s supposed to be.”
But it’s easy for the Reids to milk that line for laughs, because Damage and Joy sounds bereft of any conflict or tension. The brothers made the record with producer/bassist Youth (with support from touring drummer Brian Young and Lush bassist Phil King), and it feels more like an intimate recording project than a live band document, mostly splitting the difference between routine electro-Stones rave-ups and strung-out ballads. The Reids score most consistently in the latter category, likely because it forces them to keep their adolescent id in check and deal with more adult emotions. The illicit-affair account “Black and Blues” is gilded gospel Americana dressed up in Velvet-y “ba ba bas” and a winsome guest vocal from Sky Ferreira, who’s thus far batting 1.000 in duets with Scottish rock institutions. And the Spacemen 3-style stoner jangle of “War on Peace” grapples with every aging rebel’s existential crisis—“What if I run?/Where would I run to?”—before issuing a proverbial “fuck it” and stomping on the pedal for an adrenalized, fuzz-powered finale.
But the biggest eye opener is album centerpiece “Los Feliz (Blues and Greens).” This luminous, orchestral acoustic lullaby plays like a misanthropic answer to Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’,” its idyllic California scenery—topped with a chorus of “God bless America!”—undercut by a deep-seated despair (“In the land of the free/Wishing they were dead”). Where they were once defined by a collision of face-melting feedback and soothing melody, the modern-day Mary Chain are governed by a different set of extremes: the pent-up desire to act like goofy, hormonal teenagers and the sobering knowledge those days are long gone. But as the brothers recruit their sister/mediator Linda for a closing reboot of Sister Vanilla’s “Can’t Stop the Rock,” the song’s cheery rallying cry—“I’m falling, and I’m happy!”—carries the reassurance that now, more than ever, the Jesus and Mary Chain are united in holy acrimony.


After losing a member, one of K-pop’s most consistent and internationally appealing groups returns as a quartet for their fourth album. Casual listeners don’t need to be heavily invested in the K-pop world to get the appeal of f(x)’s music, and 4 Walls is an enjoyable listen even for those not looking to broach the language gap.

4 Walls

Over the last couple of years, f(x) have become one of the few K-pop groups with real international appeal and a sizable fan base in the States. The group's sophomore album, 2013’s Pink Tape, was a pop collage of ambitious sounds and ideas that tinkered with K-pop formulas, and it still stands as one of the best records the genre has ever produced. Last year’s Red Light offered a decidedly edgier synthpop sound that leaned more toward the club, though it didn’t quite meet the standard set by its predecessor. And during the promo for Red Light, group member Sulli, an actress and star for the conglomerate S.M. Entertainment, was noticeably absent from scheduled media events. After talk of mental exhaustion and a temporary f(x) hiatus, Sulli officially withdrew from the group in August, leaving K-pop’s most consistent act in a state of flux.
4 Walls is f(x)'s fourth album and first with four members—hence the name—and it lands right where Pink Tape and Red Light intersect, creating a sleek electropop fun-house filled with an eclectic group of generation-spanning pop singles that fit together as a long-playing piece. It’s also the first K-pop comeback to fully acknowledge a lineup change—going as far as incorporating it into the album's marketing and lyrics—but it doesn't change much about the group’s sound. This is a superficial rebirth; though the album’s lead single and title track has veiled references to changing and becoming new, f(x)’s synthpop bounce remains steadfast and uncompromised. And though Sulli was undoubtedly a standout among the group, her departure allows others to grab the spotlight: Now, not only does rapper Amber have the opportunity to rap more, she also gets the chance to use her alto range to flesh out harmonies and bring greater balance to records like "Rude Love", an ambitious, hook-heavy tune that rivals the group's most infectious songs.
Many tracks on 4 Walls are sourced through Jam Factory, a music publisher that uses American musicians to create lyrics and melodies for Asian markets. The company’s strength lies in penning sounds without borders, and some of 4 Walls’ strongest collaborations involve producer LDN Noise, who creates pop songs with bridges that function as hooks and transitions that overlap to keep songs stimulating. Album closer "When I’m Alone", meanwhile, was originally co-written by Carly Rae Jepsen for her recent E•MO•TION album. But the real X-factor is longtime f(x) collaborator, writer, and K-pop superproducer Kenzie, who wrote two of the album's most curious songs: "Papi" and "Cash Me Out". A Berklee School of Music grad, Kenzie navigates the cultural divide better than anyone.
Listening to any K-pop record (or any foreign language record, really) can prove to be a challenging experience for casual listeners simply due to the added communication barrier. You can also lose some key information in translation—even when you know what's being said, there's a layer of context missing. Still, just like any other type of music, a listener has the opportunity to fill in some of that context on their own; stripping Korean of its code is no different than reinterpreting a really dense English lyric. 4 Walls is even more accessible because f(x) songs tend to have a lot of Western cues: Many of the melodies recall songs from the American pop canon and, as with many K-pop songs, there are English lyrics spliced in throughout (at one point, Amber raps, "I was low key/ That’s the old me/ Now there’s Top 10 honeys tryna phone me").
Western pop fans don’t need to be heavily invested in the K-pop world to get the appeal of f(x)’s music, and 4 Walls is an enjoyable listen even for those not looking to broach the language gap. Korean is a beautiful language with long multi-syllabic words that unspool in clumps and it carries American-stylized pop melodies fluently, breaking up long vowel sounds to fit into sonic phrases. There are few better introductions to K-pop than f(x), and 4 Walls is a strong introduction to f(x) 2.0.


Now a roaring, technically adept band rather than Dylan Baldi's bedroom solo project, Cloud Nothings undergo a total overhaul on their bracing Steve Albini-recorded second LP.

Attack on Memory

About a year ago, it seemed easy to predict what Dylan Baldi's first great album would probably sound like. After the release of the Turning On, a self-recorded collection of CD-Rs filled with tuneful alt-punk songs wrapped in tinfoil and steel wool that was released by the tiny California imprint Bridgetown Records, Cloud Nothings' self-titled debut on Carpark was an identifiable point on a familiar trajectory. The clarity afforded even by its modest budget made sweet and airy singles like "Forget You All the Time" and "Should Have" sound revelatory, while more overtly aggro tracks like "Rock" and "Not Important" felt thin and regressive, unnecessary vestiges of lo-fi provocation that didn't do Baldi many favors.
And then "No Future/No Past" arrived as the first single from Attack on Memory. It was brightly produced but tonally dark with a queasy anti-melody-- a confrontational act that suggested that Baldi was going off script. Turns out "No Future/No Past" is the least representative track on Attack on Memory, but it opens the album with a necessary slate-clearing. While a full record of fizzy pop-punk would've been welcome, Cloud Nothings are trying for more. As an accidental concept album affirming the enduring power and purity of early emo (as defined by Dischord, Deep Elm, and especially Jade Tree), Attack on Memory feels above all necessary, a corrective for indie rock making allowances for everything except music that actually rocks.
The overhaul is radical: It's literally a different band from the one that made Cloud Nothings. For one thing, Cloud Nothings is actually a band now rather than Baldi's solo project, retaining the lineup that toured with Fucked Up and likely learned a lot from them. While the freedom and ease of being a bedroom artist has its advantages, you can't make your own Sunny Day Real Estate and Wipers records without a beastly rhythm section. Even beyond the short window of time that passed between Cloud Nothings and Attack on Memory, this is a record that crackles with "let's get this on tape now" immediacy-- eight tracks, about half an hour, blunt lyrics, big choruses, lots of screaming. Fussing over these songs would've sapped their urgency.
"No Future/No Past" is the first gauntlet Baldi throws down but it's not the most daunting. At more than nine minutes, "Wasted Days" is far longer than anything on Cloud Nothings. As a radio edit, it could be something like Cloud Nothings' answer to Foo Fighters' "Everlong", a fanged beauty of barbed chords, torrential drum rolls, and impassioned emoting. But as it rolls on, "Wasted Days" becomes simultaneously forbidding, disorienting, and psychedelic, something like a black-and-grey kaleidoscope. As the band hurtles to the finish, Baldi repeatedly yells, "I thought! I would! Be more! Than this!" in a high-voltage scree as a painful paradox after such an ambitious display of more.
Baldi has always been a hooks guy*,* and Attack is every bit as catchy as the more rigid and user-friendly Cloud Nothings, and the spaciousness of Steve Albini's recording gives plenty of room for these hooks to careen into each other: "Stay Useless" is an anthemic tantrum that shifts rhythm without warning, the bludgeoning riffs of "No Sentiment" give way to the plaintive vocals and jittery snare runs on "Our Plans", while "Cut You" fades out the record on a gracefully arcing chant that's equally vengeful, self-loathing, and hopeful.
There's the temptation to give too much of the credit to Albini, whose open-door policy has attracted an endless number of cred-deficient bands.  Attack on Memory is unmistakably his work-- Baldi's vocals are close-mic'd and raw, the drums are loud as hell, the guitars are economically panned and almost entirely free of effects processing, and there's actual space in between of all of them. But here's Baldi explaining Albini's role to Pitchfork's Jenn Pelly: "Steve Albini played Scrabble on Facebook almost the entire time [we were recording]. I don't even know if he remembers what our album sounds like." It was meant as a compliment, but the lesson is clear: A lot of producers would be better off stepping back and doing nothing. Attack on Memory isn't what typically gets classified as a "headphones record," but that's the best way to first experience how alive it sounds, aggressively leaping out at you with real dynamics. Check the giddy explosions out of the pockets of silence punctuating "Stay Useless", the offbeat harmonies and rhythmic stumble that sound like happy accidents on "Fall In", or Baldi's serrated bark shredding the uneasy full-band détente following the solo of "No Sentiment".
That's where you'll find Attack on Memory's key lyric, "No nostalgia and no sentiment/ We're over it now and we were over it then," making the title's implications clear: If you enjoy this as a work of art, there's an invitation to adopt it as cultural critique. Baldi shares stages and a label with Toro Y Moi and joked about "Forget You All the Time" being "our most chillwave song" at a Los Angeles show, so the title is more of a call to be heard in the current climate rather than a total negation of it. But the last Fugazi album came out when Baldi was 10, and it's easy to see "memory" as a stand-in for indie's stylistic pervasiveness: de-emphasis of guitars and live performance, passivity over aggression, past over presence, singing like you don't care if you get understood or even heard. That just doesn't cut it for a lot of people his age who wonder if they'll ever witness "The Argument"'s kind of life-affirming vitality firsthand.
There's a fundamental irony in how a record titled Attack on Memory is such a sonic throwback, while Baldi's lyrics obsess over arrested development and missed opportunities. But like the best of indie's recent guitar bands that dare to skew retro-- Yuck, the Men, WU LYF, to name a few-- Attack on Memory is too visceral to feel like escapism, too vital to feel like cheap revival. Not when this sound's death was the wrongful diagnosis of trendwatchers: Those of us who grew up on Drive Like Jehu, Braid, and Jawbreaker can listen to Attack on Memory and sense their artistic legacy is in good hands, but there will inevitably be teenagers for whom Attack on Memory stands to be that kind of record to call their own. And hopefully we'll all meet up in the mosh pit.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit a blockbuster R&B comeback record from 2005, an unofficial marker of a more self-actualized Mary J. Blige.

The Breakthrough

Mary J. Blige wasn’t ready for a greatest hits moment just yet. By 2005, she was coming off her sixth studio album, Love & Life, an exuberant but untruthful Diddy-helmed affair that Blige later called a misstep. Within two years, her label Geffen had started prepping a legacy project in its wake titled Reminisce, which seemed like a career bow-out for Blige, then 34. She didn’t feel finished and had just, in fact, spent her past three projects introducing the world to a new and freer Mary. She felt confident enough to scrap the greatest hits set and fast-track her next album for a December 2005 release.
At the time, Blige was awash in bliss, two years into a marriage with her manager, Kendu Isaacs, and ready to sing it to the heavens. Though the press described her seventh album, The Breakthrough, as a love letter to him, Blige insisted it was deeper than that. “It’s not just about choosing to be in love with him—it’s about choosing to be in love with myself,” she told Newsweek in 2005. The album reads less as a tribute to him and more like a sermon between Blige and the congregation of women who’ve seen themselves in her over the years. “I’m freeing myself,” she said to NPR in 2006, defining her breakthrough as not just one epiphany but an endless series of revelations. “I don’t think any of us will be free completely. It’s gonna take a lifetime to really get to that point.”
What separates Blige from many other artists is that she is a believable work-in-progress. Every Mary J. Blige album is a chance for her to decompress, reboot, and present a stronger but softer version of herself. And yet, the dominant narrative is that Blige sings better when she’s in despair. Everybody wants her to stay sad for them. “I can make twenty more really depressed albums, but I choose to do something different,” Blige told NPR in 2006, echoing the classic text Sex and the City when a Paris-bound Carrie tells Miranda, “I cannot stay in New York and be single for you.”
After 30 years of being trapped in heartbreak and misery, Blige deserved her redemption arc. Geffen positioned The Breakthrough for success, releasing it eight months after Mariah Carey’s own comeback effort, The Emancipation of Mimi, which proved how much a veteran R&B star could dominate pop with a resilient narrative if they also had a No. 1 hit like the Jermaine Dupri-produced “We Belong Together.” Jimmy Iovine, then chairman of Interscope Geffen A&M, commissioned producer Bryan-Michael Cox, who’d co-written Carey’s smash, to replicate a hit for Blige’s album. Relishing the opportunity to prove himself a legit hitmaker outside of working with Dupri, Cox composed the simple, rapturous piano melody behind The Breakthrough’s lead single “Be Without You” in under 15 minutes, then called in his frequent collaborator Johnta Austin, who’d won his first Grammy for writing “We Belong Together.” In a 2007 interview, Austin recalled nearly scrapping the hook for “Be Without You” at first (“We’ve been too strong for too long...”) because he said he’d “never really heard Mary sing a straight-up love song.”
In reality, Blige had a track record of romantic hits—What’s the 411?’s sweet missive “Real Love,” Share My World’s fizzy “Love Is All We Need”—but many of them are more about searching for the right love than finding it. On “Be Without You,” she’s practically levitating. It’s a stunning vocal showcase amid a litany of lyrical vows that capture the ecstasy of the honeymoon phase. The song secured Blige her comeback and spent 15 weeks atop Billboard’s Hip-Hop/R&B Songs chart, a streak broken only recently this past May by SZA’s “Kill Bill.” The Breakthrough became Blige’s third No. 1 album and sold 727,000 U.S. copies off the bat, giving her the biggest first-week debut for a woman solo R&B star to date. She scored eight Grammy nominations, winning three, and the album stands as a fitting midpoint in her catalog, an unofficial marker of a more self-actualized Mary, post-No More Drama. That she’s since divorced the “con artist” who inspired some of the album’s cheerier tracks after 13 years of marriage makes the experience all the more rich.
The album opens with a vivid portrait of matrimony and the tender, sped-up wails of a 1976 O’Jays record on “I Swear, I Love No One But You,” set over the J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League’s smooth, glistening production. Blige is slick and swooning, praising a new love who’s “just above the best, I must confess the best love that I ever had” and offering gushing metaphors. “About You” is a similarly euphoric ode where will.i.am boldly chops and syncs Nina Simone’s classic, swaggering “Feeling Good” vocals with Blige’s own, turning the song into a stomping, if relatively flat, declaration of loyalty to a partner.
Blige often communicates with her past selves in her music. Here, her use of first, second, and third person in songs feels more prominent. The 9th Wonder production, “Good Woman Down,” addresses listeners directly, extending a hand to the women who remind Blige of a young tragic Mary. The song is a plainspoken survival story about escaping a childhood of abuse only having it spill into her adult relationships: “When I used to see my daddy beat my mother down, down to her feet/I used to say that ain’t gonna never be me,” Blige recounts, her vocals, as always, scratched with disillusion. The reflective gaze is pretty and clearest on tracks like the plaintive ballad “Take Me As I Am” and the standout “Baggage,” where Blige sings about recognizing patterns, over a sprinkling of synths that sound like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis throwing a fistful of glitter over the track: “Don’t wanna make you pay for what somebody else has done to me/I don’t know what to do.”
Blige has described the challenge of being raised by a single mother with tragic clarity. In her self-produced 2021 documentary My Life, she talks about hearing her father’s soul music in the house while growing up in Yonkers, New York, and being particularly intrigued and haunted by the “my life in the sunshine” refrain on Roy Ayers Ubiquity’s “Everybody Loves the Sunshine.” Blige recalls, “That record made me feel like I could have something, but I couldn’t get my hands on it.”
The doc is a somber retelling of Blige’s origin story, beginning with the trauma of her dad leaving when she was 4. About three years later, once she moved to the Schlobohm projects with her mom and sister, the violence in the environment started to change Blige profoundly. “I never smiled when I was a teenager… You turn to anything that can numb you from feeling the sadness,” she says later on in the doc, before describing her spiral into alcohol. Her only therapy as a young child was singing into a brush in the mirror.
Then, in 1989, she recorded a demo tape of Anita Baker’s “Caught Up In the Rapture” at a local mall and handed it to her stepdad, Jeff Redd, who routed it to Uptown Records’ late founder and CEO Andre Harrell. He took a trip to the Yonkers project where Blige lived and signed her to his imprint on the spot. It was kismet that Diddy, then an Uptown A&R looking to make a name for himself as Puff Daddy, partnered with Blige and gave her an unofficial title as the Queen of Hip-Hop Soul, heralding a new flavorful ’90s subgenre. At the time, only Blige could weave the slickness of rap with the emotion of blues so seamlessly.
There’s always been a hint of resentment in Blige’s vocals, and The Breakthrough exorcises that lifelong suffering. On the thumping, Rodney Jerkins-produced “Enough Cryin” and “Ain’t Really Love,” Blige leans into the independence she’s earned, rapping on the former track, even if the flow isn’t as smooth as on What’s the 411? That alter ego also takes over “MJB Da MVP,” a mixtape-esque take on The Game’s breakthrough 2005 single “Hate It or Love It” that was originally intended as a teaser for Blige’s greatest hits album. The song is Blige’s round of applause to herself, reminding listeners of how long she’s been facilitating other people’s breakthroughs. The record could’ve come across as simple rehashing or boasting, but there’s something charming about Blige’s ownership of her influence, knowing how much she rejected it before. When she duplicates Ayers’ “my life, my life, my life” line in the bridge, it’s a touching full-circle nod to her own album, the music she loves, and a young Blige who absorbed the original as an earworm growing up.
The Breakthrough is so self-referential that it almost does function like a greatest-hits record the label wanted. Blige acknowledges the criticism from fans expecting sadness from her, but ultimately she enters a space of self-acceptance that’s carried throughout the latter half of her career. You can hear it in moments like the opening keys of the lavish dance floor cut “Gonna Breakthrough,” which sounds like sunrise breaking through a morning window. Jay-Z plays hypeman on “Can’t Hide From Luv,” a record about mastering and unlearning the art of self-sabotage. And “Can’t Get Enough” is another clear-headed ballad about finding commitment, though it still finds Blige looking for a type of idealistic love that’s like an organ she can’t live without.
Two standout tracks highlight Blige’s imperfect blues voice. The power ballad “I Found My Everything” is one of her strongest vocal performances, a soft, transcendent duet with Raphael Saadiq where his buttery background vocals shine next to Blige, who cheekily sings, “You’ve given me a reason to smile, baby.” Another blockbuster moment comes on the closer “One,” Blige’s searing takeover of U2’s stadium anthem and an example of her ability to personalize a universal record with shades of triumph and torture. Bono steps out and wisely relinquishes the moment to Blige, who sings lines like, “You act like you never had love/And you want me to go without,” with an intensity that suggests she’s feeling the sentiment deeply and adding her backstory on top.
Nearly two decades after its release, “Be Without You” is still listed on streaming services with the parenthetical “(Kendu’s Mix),” a credit to the person who facilitated both the making of the song behind the scenes and Blige’s broader breakthrough. Blige filed for divorce in 2016 and accused Kendu of being unfaithful, demeaning, and greedy in their relationship. She’d experienced alcohol and substance abuse, but she said it was divorce proceedings that left her feeling the most emotionally naked and humiliated. Again, in interviews, she spoke about not loving herself enough. When Blige returned to NPR for a 2017 interview for her album, Strength of a Woman, still in the thick of divorce, she confessed, “I don’t mind the pain. I don’t mind it all because it hurts so good. It hurts so good.” Once that good pain goes away, there can be moments like The Breakthrough, a testament to the self-love Blige has curated for herself and a rejection of the old love she once knew.


R.A.P. Ferreira (formerly milo) makes his most free-spirited project yet, rapping gleefully over lively and wayward production.

Purple Moonlight Pages

Rory Allen Philip Ferreira retired his milo alias in 2018, emerging in 2019 as R.A.P. Ferreira, a play on his name. Under the new moniker, he’s emphasized rapping as independence in action. His Biddeford, Maine storefront and his record label, Ruby Yacht, embody that ideal in structural ways, but his music has always been the proof of concept. On Purple Moonlight Pages he fully embraces his blueprint, rapping with an irresistible freedom and joy so that others may follow.
He’s been a rigorous technician since his earliest releases, but as Ferreira he’s more free spirit than showboat. Produced by the Jefferson Park Boys, a Cali jazz trio comprised of producers Kenny Segal, Mike Parvizi, and Aaron Carmack, the record’s mood is beckoning and whimsical. Purple Moonlight Pages is an obstacle course of shifty rhythms, twinkly brass and keys, and gales of noise that Ferreira waltzes, bops, and struts through. Instead of loops, the Jefferson Park Boys provide lively dynamos that lurch and sway like Howl’s Moving Castle. Ferreira has worked closely with Segal for half a decade, and the Jefferson Park Boys provided a beat on his last album as milo, but the production here is wayward, more frayed.
Ferreira tackles the implicit challenge with poise, dueling with horns, humming to chords, springing off the downbeat. There's always been a dexterity to his writing, which is intricately syllabic and layered, but here even the knottiest schemes feel casual and loose. “This beat sound like a long walk to the dumpster/Funk like nostrils of muenster/Made myself an apostle of wonder,” he raps on “OMENS & TOTEMS.” On “NONCIPHER,” he ties references to Aquemini and The Wire into a Dadaist bow: “Tell yo’self that ain’t odious, ock/It’s only obvious/That’s bogus whoadie, I’m Bodie Broadus/Singin’ Spottie Otie.” His rhymes have the zip of epiphanies, off-the-cuff yet fully composed.
Ferreira’s raps feel built for private delight as much as public spectacle. When he raps something like “Mister lime rickey, tickin’ off beat/Parseltongue-like feet” or “In Tim Hortons, dressed like a Transformer/Talking ’bout Jacob Lawrence portraits,” his word choices are appreciable for both their meaning and their mouthfeel. He lacks the quantum unpredictability of Young Thug, but he feels equally unbothered, prioritizing fun and caprice over structure. “Ambiguity defeat the pattern recognition,” he says on “RO TALK.” and it’s the closest he comes to spelling out his strategy.
One of the starkest shifts here is Ferreira’s warm and puckish demeanor. “LAUNDRY” is a bouncy ode to chores. Instead of the wife-guy strain of J. Cole’s “Folding Clothes,” Ferreira leans into the endearing corniness of domestic bliss: “I’m just humming in the kitchen/My son listening/He’s staring at me with them wide ole eyes.” On “LEAVING HELL,” he ambles out of meter to share an anecdote about a time he pooped at a gas station and read a two-part exchange about the purpose of life that was carved on the stall. As milo, he favored a cold deadpan that lent itself to searing humor and heady metaphysics but lacked the whimsy and joy on display here. His newfound warmth makes his sermonizing feel informal and intimate, like he’s sharing advice while cutting your hair.
Purple Moonlight Pages follows in the footsteps of recent records like Some Rap Songs, Red Burns, and When I Get Home, which, to different ends, used jazz’s esoteric rhythms in service of fostering community and self-recognition. Jazz has long been an easy refuge for artists seeking to mine a sense of black authenticity or to signal a “refined” palette, but these records don't feel born of posturing. Instead, they are attempts to unspool and unlearn, to map the future by probing the past.
What’s missing from the record is a sense of interaction with the larger world. Ferreira’s self-possession and nimbleness play out in his performances, but his acrobatics rarely engage with rap outside his indie sphere, in lingo or in form. Compared to JPEGMAFIA’s web trawling or even the anthropological noir of fellow Kenny Segal collaborator billy woods, Ferreira feels like he’s on an island. While he never claims himself the GOAT and has repeatedly said he’s happy to be underground, his freedom feels conditional. Purple Moonlight Pages shows him at ease. What does he sound like under pressure?


A wildly diverse range of house and techno artists bring rich colors and unexpected energies to this bail reform fundraising compilation.

Physically Sick 2

One year ago, the Brooklyn-based feminist dance music collective Discwoman protested President Trump’s election by shining a light on some of electronic music’s most vital and underrepresented artists. Together with Berlin producer Physical Therapy’s Allergy Season imprint, they assembled an expansive collection of avant-garde house and techno titled Physically Sick, releasing it day the before the inauguration. The “full strength protest compilation” benefited the ACLU, Planned Parenthood, and other organizations, and was billed as “a middle finger from the underground to the future powers-that-be.” Their passion was admirable, but their mission was broad—too broad, perhaps, to achieve the impact they wanted. For their 2018 follow-up, Physically Sick 2, they’ve kept the music far-reaching but focused their fundraising efforts to a single cause: bail reform. By donating proceeds to the Brooklyn Community Bail Fund, they aim to draw attention to the deeply broken American prison system and its racist, classist effects on society.
Discwoman’s very existence is a form of protest. The DJ booking agency exclusively represents artists outside the dance music industry’s white, male, cisgender default. And although a few men are included on the new compilation (Anthony Parasole, Matrixxman, Le1f), the vast majority of its 44 tracks are produced by women pushing the envelope. There are only two repeat artists from last year—UMFANG and Physical Therapy, who curated the project with Discwoman co-founder Frankie Decaiza Hutchinson—which keeps the focus on new, gutsy talent, flooding the tracklist with rich colors, intricate textures, unexpected energies, and challenging arrangements.
Some of the compilation’s most exciting works are its most abstract. Album opener “pre-extinction (incompatibility),” by Fatima Al Qadiri, sets a dramatic tone with ambient synths over what sound like the controlled throat-singing of Tibetan monks. On the other end of the BPM spectrum, Berlin producer Ziúr’s frantic “Damage-Relate” refuses to commit to a groove or tempo, bursting and zipping with ecstatic polyrhythms that feel turbulent and deliberate.
There’s a striking diversity of sound to Physically Sick 2: Some tracks delight in less-is-more minimalism (Nikita Zabelin’s ticklish “Four Gents,” the space disco frost of Kiki Kudo’s “Freakey Ke Ke”), while others, like M.E.S.H.’s “Gov Patrol,” seem to flex every muscle. Foozool & 8ULENTINA—co-founders of Club Chai, Oakland’s answer to Discwoman—present their first official collaboration with the frenetic and mechanical “Plasma,” which feels like peeking behind the plate into a computer’s frantic motherboard.
The strongest tracks here imply a sense of order in the chaos; when that’s lost, it can be easy to lose the plot. “pre-copy,” credited to the virtually unknown alias Oprah Goldberg, makes you wonder if there’s been a caching error or if you’re missing the metaphor. And the constant hiccups of silence in Xexexe’s “Air For One” are brow-furrowing and interruptive, like static chop on FM radio right when you’ve snagged a good song.
Kerrie Ann Murphy, the DJ/producer known as BEARCAT, delivers the most dance-friendly selection with “VIVA,” a dusty hip-shaker with staccato acid pricks and a Middle Eastern-tinged synth line. Lauren Flax’s “Earthquake” is a close second, with Tigga Calore spitting breakneck rap verses over yips, howls, and tightly wound riffs that swirl in the distance like a looming tornado. Si Begg’s “Sick and Tired of the Bullshit” and Lady Blacktronika’s “Crazy Bantu Boy” are full-throttle electro cuts, and when the latter erupts into a soulful house break, it’s the collection’s most climactic moment.
Tygapaw’s psychedelic “BLACK WOMXN EXPERIENCE” is the one that lingers the longest. A hazy blend of shimmering chimes and spoken word poetry about black American resilience, it’s disorienting and breathtaking, like you’re floating outside yourself. (A subtle but excruciating touch: the voices are often drowned out by an atmosphere of white noise.) Several artists on last year’s compilation have since emerged as rising stars on the wider circuit, including Octo Octa, Yaeji, and Jayda G. This year, Tygapaw and BEARCAT are ones to watch.
This compilation is ultimately vast and hard to define, but that’s the point. Discwoman and the thriving underground it serves are founded on inclusivity, experimentation, and free expression. The artists here represent the broad range of voices—new and established, international and domestic, male and female and nonbinary—echoing through warehouses and clubs around the world where people are coming together to connect and resist.


This 17-track compilation on XL Recordings offers a snapshot of the new generation of London’s rappers, singers, and dancehall kings.

New Gen

You can find the beating heart of the U.K. rap underground online, somewhere among the thousands of kids desperately spitting bars on YouTube in hopes of getting noticed. On channels like SBTV, Link Up TV, and GRM Daily, no-name rappers spit (mostly written) rhymes for “freestyle” competitions, battling for relevance in a digital Hunger Games for the chance to be anointed as the next Stormzy or Skepta.
It’s from this pool of hopefuls that New Gen was born; at first, as a showcase for promising talent stymied by London police’s aggressive targeting of rap shows, and later as an Sunday afternoon radio show on Radar Radio. The latest incarnation is a compilation of original songs on XL Recordings, a 17-track album meant to be a snapshot of the new generation of London’s rappers, singers, and dancehall kings. Grime is still the city’s most famous urban musical export, but the youngest members of the U.K. scene seem less concerned with subgenre—on New Gen, you’ll hear garage, dancehall, reggae, and R&B singers alongside the grime and hip-hop MCs, the lines bleeding between each without regard for the old guard’s gatekeeping.
New Gen is the brainchild of Caroline SM, a GRM Daily editor that had found success breaking rappers on the site’s YouTube channel. Barely in her 20s, she's worn many hats: editor (GRM Daily), host (NewGenRadio), A&R (XL Recordings), executive producer (the New Gen LP), and artist manager (Bonkaz and J Hus, who each signed to Sony in 2015 and 2016, respectively). As much as any of the New Gen rappers, she’s carving her own role in the industry, with each gig feeding exposure and opportunity to the other, vertically integrating A&R, production, management and publicity under one brand. Though her sole appearance on the comp is to intro Kojey Radical’s “Fuck Your Feelings,” in effect, New Gen is her debut album.
But it’s the producers that keep New Gen from simply being a collection of hard YouTube bars. Seeking to mimic the creative energy of production camps like Rick Rubin’s Malibu retreat or Kanye’s Hawaii sessions for My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Caroline SM and her fellow executive producer, the MC Renz, recruited Jevon, Nyge, and Soul to handle all the production duties, with artists popping in and out of different rooms at Red Bull’s studios in London. The three manage to weave a handful of styles from hungry artists with varying dialects into a cohesive statement, from the sinister synths on the opening track (Avelino & Bonkaz’s “Welcome to the New Gen”) to bouncy R&B (Ray BLK’s “Busy”), to a tasteful sample of Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” (“Man of the Hour”), somber King Krule-ish guitar tones (“Life Support”), or a dancehall spin on the Atlanta strip club sound (“Money Haffi Mek”). It’s no small feat.
Like a lot of U.K. hip-hop, New Gen may require a bit of lyrical decoding for an American audience; even if you’re familiar with the various Caribbean patois and know that “Money Haffi Mek” means “money to be made,” there’s plenty of British slang that requires translation. Despite this, you might be able to deduce what AJ Tracey means when brags that he’s “still got these yatties up in my gaf,” or the “skengs in the rides” on 67’s “Jackets” are weapons meant for nefarious purposes. The dialect may be different, but the tried-and-true topics of sex, haters, and violence are apparently universal.
Among all the artists featured on the compilation, Avelino & Bonkaz stand out as the most polished talents. Avelino, a 23-year-old from Tottenham, has three mixtapes and the EP F.Y.O. under his belt, while Bonkaz, the latest MC out of the South London town of Croydon (Krept and Konan, Stormzy, A2, Section Boys), is in the second year of a deal with Sony Music. Their tag-team on the LP’s first track is an opening salvo, a two-minute barrage of lyrical punches that never quite gets topped: “A: Welcome to the New Gen/B: Funny how sometimes the new friends can be the real friends/A: You should mind your business, I know dragons in a few dens/B: It's like a whole family camping, them niggas too tense.”
New Gen feels like a proof of concept—that given the means and opportunity, these YouTube warriors can create work worthy of coming back to. For curious Americans who’ve only just heard of Skepta and Stormzy, it’s a preview of the artists in the London underground most likely to break through, cheesing at future MOBO Awards, taking down trophies (New Gen artists WSTRN & Abra Cadabra were already honored at the 2016 edition in November). And while a cynic might see New Gen as merely a reflection of Caroline SM and Renz’s taste and grassroots network; an optimist might say it’s an underground scene collectivizing for its mutual benefit. Nevertheless, it’s one of the more impressive collections of underground talent of late.


The 21-year-old songwriter’s latest album is irritating enough to activate the mildest allergy to sincerity.

Pony

Alex O’Connor self-released bcos u will never b free, his first modest bedroom project as Rex Orange County, in 2015. It’s not hard to hear the appeal of that first tape: The songs were imperfect and angsty, with an amateur production style that fit Rex’s creaky nasal voice. “Pizza box/Wedding ring left amongst the crust,” he drawled, sketching a banal, absurd image of a crumbling relationship. “Don’t miss me when I’m dead,” he pleaded, and then followed up with an earnest rap verse about rejecting peer pressure.
His sound also appealed to Tyler, the Creator, who recruited the English singer and songwriter for his 2017 album Flower Boy. It became Rex’s breakout moment. After meeting Tyler, he rushed out another album, Apricot Princess, so that people who learned about him from Flower Boy would have something to listen to. This week, he released Pony, his first album for Sony and the third entry in Rex’s slim, sentimental catalog.
Rex’s distinctive voice has earned him the epithet “old soul,” but his newest music is relentlessly juvenile. When he landed a Spotify deal that offered the opportunity to work with an established artist on a cover song, he picked Randy Newman and “You’ve Got a Friend in Me.” On Pony, a collection of 10 new songs irritating enough to activate the mildest allergy to sincerity, he sings about being young and in love; about getting a little older but not yet old enough; about feeling like a comic-book superhero and getting “Stressed Out.” “When we have to speak I usually shoe gaze,” he admits on “Laser Lights,” with a delivery style equally indebted to Chance the Rapper’s singing and Ed Sheeran’s rapping.
Pony employs a more childlike musical palette than Rex’s earlier projects—bubbly synths, electric piano, programmed beats, bells, strings, and bird chirps—and though there’s still a waxy haze surrounding them, the intensity is dialed up. There’s always something jumping out of the mix to compete for attention—sometimes a pop of cartoonish horns, but more often Rex’s quavery voice, a limiting factor Pony tries every possible way to work around: chipmunk squeaks (“Stressed Out”), Vocoder (“Never Had the Balls”), digital barbershop quartet (“Face to Face”), distant-sounding piped-in vocals set to strings (“Pluto Projector”) or a disco beat (“It Gets Better”). The lyrics to “Never Had the Balls” feel extra crude because the setting is so immature; the treacly piano love song “Every Way” would be more believable from Mr. Rogers.
None of this straining supports an interesting idea. “Four years later/Look where we really are/Look how far we’ve come,” Rex sings on “It Gets Better,” over tinny, melodramatic electric strings. He’s not talking about graduating, or growing up in general—he’s talking about a girl who’s transformed his world in ways apparently not worth itemizing. You won’t find a wedding ring in a pizza box here. The album’s most salient detail is when Rex recalls a particular house where he once vomited.
Pony’s best line comes at the opening of “Pluto Projector,” a slow, Frank Ocean-esque ballad. “The great protector/Is that what I’m supposed to be?” Rex asks. “What if all this counts for nothin’/Everything I thought I’d be?/What if by the time I realize/It’s too far behind to see?” Toward the end, the song takes a weird turn: a pitched-down vocal coda that makes Rex sound like he’s drop-shipping counterfeit “Nikes.”
But Rex Orange County isn’t Frank Ocean; he stacks vast emotional weight on predictable, inoffensive songs until they buckle like wire shelving. Pony is simplistic, clueless, subtlety-free. “Didn’t understand until the age of 18/Even then I was blind,” he sings on “It Gets Better.” Over and over again, Rex sounds like he hasn’t begun to realize how much he doesn’t know.


The second solo album from ex-Moloko frontwoman Roísín Murphy is a superb collection of 21st century disco that will sadly, inexplicably struggle in the pop marketplace.

Overpowered

Roísín Murphy casts a wide net: Avant-pop aesthetes fell for Moloko's screwball trip-hop; Ibizan disco bunnies made "Sing It Back" a pop anthem; nightcrawlers found a postergirl in the booze-hound sleeve of Statues; style-mag fantasists never tire of her covers. Even Sky Sports succumbed, making "The Time Is Now" the unofficial anthem of 21st century soccer.
So why isn't she a huge star? It's a question that has likely been taxing the minds of EMI, who, to their credit, have taken a punt on Murphy after her 2005 solo debut tanked. Recorded with tech-jazz savant Matthew Herbert, Ruby Blue was a brilliantly inventive collection of cut-up pop that confounded her label and failed to find an audience. According to her new bosses, Murphy has got all that self-indulgence out of her system, and is now stepping up to the plate to make a "career record." She has the potential, they claim, to be a kind of beloved entertainer on the level of another investment of theirs, Robbie Williams.
In truth, Murphy is closer in spirit to the late Associates singer Billy Mackenzie, another maverick celtic diva torn between the arthouse, the punk club, and the disco. Mackenzie could never quite knuckle down to the career frequently promised him; one suspects Murphy won't fare any better. Her position is perfectly illustrated in Scott King's artwork for the album and singles, setting Murphy on the streets of east London, having evidently just beamed down from the planet Gaultier-- a pop peacock out of place and time in the mundane Kate Nash-ville of British pop 2007.
The record itself finds Murphy on her best behaviour, however-- wearing its natural wildness and eccentricity lightly, Overpowered is focused solely on the dancefloor. Her collaborators, from Bugz in the Attic and Groove Armada, have constructed a gleaming shrine to the spirit of Bobby O and Giorgio Moroder: The lead single and title track borrows a primordial bassline squelch from the dawn of cosmic disco-- La Bionda's "I Wanna Be Your Lover"-- and the follow-up, "Let Me Know", shamelessly plunders the chorus of Tracy Weber's 1981 classic "Sure Shot".
Murphy is the singer that the mid-00s British nu-pop of Richard X and Xenomania has so dearly missed: A dramatic yet unshowy singer, versatile enough to take in the regal hauteur of "Primitive", the cerebral chill of "Dear Miami", the randy glee of "Footprints", the chutzpah and grace of "You Know Me Better". She's funny, clever, heartbreaking, and strident, the kind of disco singer Dusty Springfield never quite had the abandon to become. At times, however, she's almost too willing to play it straight. "Movie Star" laces itself a little too tighly into Alison Goldfrapp's glam pop corset, while "Cry Baby" is stuffed to the gills with syndrums and cowhorns to the exclusion of much else. And the dubby song for her dad, "Scarlet Ribbons", is sweet but feels a little out of place. But these are quibbles. In a year of low-stakes disappointment for European pop, Overpowered is a triumph.