With a production assist by LA producer Alchemist, Boldy James' new My 1st Chemistry Set reveals an artist who has been steadily deepening, as a writer and rapper. Guests like Action Bronson, Earl Sweatshirt and Freeway breeze through, but none overshadow Boldy.

Boldy James / The Alchemist: My 1st Chemistry Set

My 1st Chemistry Set

Rapper Boldy James was born in Atlanta, hails from Detroit, and sounds like he's never stepped outside of Queensbridge. The producer Alchemist is from Beverly Hills, but has produced some of gangsta rap's bleakest East Coast rap, for Mobb Deep and others. The two of them together makes perfect sense: For them, Queensbridge is a state of mind, a place to visit within the world of records. On My 1st Chemistry Set, they key into that thick atmosphere like a couple of virtuosos.
The obvious out of the way first: Boldy's voice is a dead ringer for Mobb Deep's Prodigy. The resemblance is so strong it raises hackles the first time he opens his mouth. But like Action Bronson, who has ambled past his constant Ghostface comparisons to his own persona, Boldy sneaks a unique sensibility under the cover of a very familiar sound. He's a dead-eyed tough guy, a position that starts at "unamused" and goes darker from there, but beneath the pose, his words leap eagerly around, betraying his dirty secret: enthusiasm. "I used to write raps off of my spelling words, so I could learn the meaning of them and how to spell them," he told David Drake back in 2012. "Because if you use a word in a sentence, and don’t know the meaning, you can use the words around it to get the definition of the word you were looking for." Respectfully, this isn't the most intimidating sentiment in the world, and it positions Boldy closer to someone like Black Hippy's resident word-nerd Ab-Soul.
On "Moochie," he gives a slang lesson that isn't a lesson at all, but a chance to render you glassy-eyed: "My dank Mary Jane and my big chain Julie/A deuce is a split, a baby is a stoolie/A kilo is a brick, a quarter is a cutie/If you tellin you a snitch/county is the skidooski." Got that? On "Rappies," he mutters "Slow rolling them snow bunnies in Clinton Township/Them bastards trying to give me about sixty/For transacting them Graham crackers of that brown shit" and the syntax—*transacting them Graham crackers of that brown shit—*blooms and lingers.  Oh, and he's got a deadpan sense of humor: "Life is Precious/a fat ugly bitch that'll get you whacked," he cracks on "What's the Word". On "Traction," he slyly quotes Redman's "Time 4 Sum Aksion", and while Boldy isn't exactly a straitjacket-straining wildcard like Red, their rhyme pads could definitely be friends.
Alchemist, for his part, brings his most muted and sensually gloomy side to the project. Boldy has a lot to say, and Alc, though the bigger name of the pair by far, settles back, each beat just present enough to give the exact right cotton-mouth coating to Boldy's verses. "You Know" loops a busy bass line and almost nothing else—some wisps of strings, a clipped vocal like a red sock in the dryer. "Moochie" is just a shiver of violin tremolos, scratches, and some highly unsettling music-box chimes. The drums don't knock, and in fact barely rise above a cough.
There are guests that breeze through. Freeway continues his murderously intense lap of the mixtape circuit's lower rung; when he raps, it's impossible not to want him to be back on top, at least for that moment. Action Bronson trades bars with Boldy on "Traction." Earl Sweatshirt delivers a thicket of quotables—you need to hear what he does with the rich rhyming possibilities of "Tan Cressida", which he lays out and then attacks like a juicy steak. But none of them eclipse Boldy, who makes the most of this opportunity and delivers some of the best verses of his career. He has been steadily deepening, as a writer and rapper, and by now, the lousy emotional weather of QB rap is his own, a personal storm cloud he generates wherever he goes.


This unlikely pairing turns out to be Freeway's best solo project in at least four years. And Girl Talk's production is legit: he has the sound and feel of early Roc-A-Fella releases internalized, and he spits it out convincingly.

Broken Ankles EP

There should be a German word for the mixture of joy and sadness felt in watching the giants of 2000s Roc-A-Fella navigate the nostalgia circuit. Cam'ron? He has embraced his role as Internet hero, selling capes, dancing the meringue in Vines, and occasionally releasing mixtapes with moments of low-rent greatness on them. Right now, he's collaborating with A-Trak on an EP, Federal Reserve, which places him lovingly back in the chirpy '03 soul-rap that defined his peak. "To me, the intersection between my world and Cam’s world is very much tied to that New York, downtown, street wear kind of movement," A-Trak told Complex. "It’s kids that are happy to hear his music and also jump around to electronic music and hear some Atlanta stuff and some new rap."
This sounds an awful lot like a Girl Talk show, where the above scenario would take place in three minutes. In many ways, Girl Talk's music is the gushing id of dilettante culture, a glutinous ball of disparate pop songs mashed together so you only taste the sugar. Now, Gregg Gillis has found himself working with Freeway and the partnership has the same bittersweet tang to it. Since departing officially from Roc-A-Fella after 2007's Free at Last, Freeway has been in search of a cultural foothold; his attempted rebrand as a Rhymesayers artist was too slippery to stick, and then he drifted momentarily to Babygrande. Throughout, he's never lost his fire, but without a larger context or a new story to tell, he was stuck in an uncomfortable limbo.
Collaborating with Girl Talk doesn't exactly free him from said limbo. But it does give him something more temporary and invigorating—a shot in the arm, a needed jolt of energy that his last two releases have lacked entirely. Girl Talk's production is legit: he has the sound and feel of those early Roc-A-Fella releases internalized, and he spits it out convincingly. "Tolerated" gets things off to a rickety start; the big faux-Just Blaze beat Girl Talk provides is too top-heavy and cluttered to move effectively and Waka Flocka Flame raps at about 12-percent energy. The chorus is awkward and strained, all elbows.
But from there, things take off. "I Can Hear Sweat" has a strafing arpeggiated synth and a heavy-breathing Biggie sample from "Who Shot Ya" that is so tailor-made for a Jadakiss guest verse that you almost hallucinate him rapping on it before he appears. He is murderously intense on it, as is Free. "Suicide" fits a lot of little events into the beat without getting too distracting—eerie childlike vocal effects, spaghetti-western whistles, KRS-One vocal snippets. The taffy-pulled strings on "Tell Me Yeah", a bald-faced appeal to "Oh Boy" nostalgists, are stretched out just right. There are one or two "Oh come on, why is THIS happening now?!" switch-ups in the beats, which feel like Girl Talk elbowing his way to the fore. But they are rare, and there is a palpable love in the details in Gillis's production. The highest compliment you could pay his work is that it's easy to forget he's involved at all while it's playing. What Gillis has given Free is his best solo project in at least four years.


The Guatemalan musician’s second album explores the friction between interiority and exteriority; blooming with ecstatic synth riffs and spirited cello, the record captures the sound of a mind abuzz.

Mabe Fratti: Será que ahora podremos entendernos

Será que ahora podremos entendernos

Mabe Fratti’s debut album, 2019’s Pies Sobre la Tierra, focused on the distance between the physical world and the world inside one’s head. Her second, Será que ahora podremos entendernos, does too, delving even further into the friction between interiority and exteriority. With Fratti’s quaking cello as their ground, the record’s nine tracks flicker in the discontinuity between a thought and its outward expression, oscillating between feelings of hope and apprehension. But just because it’s pensive doesn’t mean it’s restrained; the record blooms with ecstatic synth riffs and unselfconscious bowing, capturing the sound of a mind buzzing at the threshold of some great vision.
In an interview around the release of her first album, the Guatemalan-born, Mexico City-based cellist cited the ambulatory, multilayered narrative of W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as a source of inspiration. Like the narrator of Sebald’s novel, Fratti wanders through Será que ahora podremos entendernos, building each song from improvisations between fixed start and end points—a practice she calls “diagramación.” A form of surrender, it’s audible in the shifting layers of guitar, cello, and synths that collapse in on themselves, like the walls of a burned-out house, on the psychedelic instrumental “Inicio Vínculo Final,” or in the second half of “Aire,” as a wave of frantic sawing envelops Fratti’s war-cry falsetto. On “Cuerpo de Agua,” she articulates the fear that underlies the album: “Como sabes si lo que sientes es lo que dices” (“How do you know if what you feel is what you say”). Her experimentation proposes that maybe it’s OK not to know.
Again and again Fratti wonders, almost as a thought experiment, what it would be like to be understood absolutely. She is an economical writer and as a singer tends to repeat words and draw out syllables until her lyrics transform into abstract tones. Every song, barring the record’s three instrumental tracks, depicts just a single introspective moment or passing encounter with an imagined other. She rarely references the world outside of those moments of communion; when she does, it’s only to tether them to an elemental image like the sea, the moon, or the air. The effect is that of someone who is trying to pin down the act of communication like a specimen under glass—to turn it into an object she can turn over with her hands, inspect, and manipulate.
At times, Fratti seems to imply that by choosing her words carefully and alchemizing the right combination of voice, strings, synths, and birdsong, she can erase all barriers in communication. At the center of “Mil Formas de Decirlo,” the album’s second song, is the repeated word “balbuceo”—“babbling.” As Fratti sings about her fear of speaking without being comprehended, the word’s four syllables mold to a four-note cello phrase that loops, unimpeded and funereal, for the length of the track, laying bare its natural melody. It’s a moment of precise alignment between lyric and instrumentation that captures the incantatory power of Fratti’s music; you can feel her trying to conjure the truest form of herself through sound.
“Hacia el Vacío” features Texan percussionist and composer Claire Rousay, whose artistic practice revolves around field recordings of everyday clatter and the flashes of the sublime accessible within them. Her recordings of trickling water and indistinct chatter anchor Fratti back to the tangible world, one that her lyrics barely interact with, and allow her a moment of clarity: Understanding can’t be achieved by yourself. Birds sing in the background while Fratti asks, “¿Puedes tomar mi mano al vacío?” (“Can you take my hand as we go into the void?”). Her voice is like a piece of gauze draped over the song, supported by a strummed phrase on her cello but threatening to slide off and disappear at any moment. She keeps it aloft long enough to properly steel herself against her fear of the unknown, accepting that the gap between feeling and speaking only narrows when you put trust in someone else.

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After the fantastical Age Of, Daniel Lopatin plays it relatively straight on this four-track EP, though reworks from Ryuichi Sakamoto and (Sandy) Alex G take his material in intriguing new directions.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Love in the Time of Lexapro EP

Love in the Time of Lexapro EP

Daniel Lopatin’s Oneohtrix Point Never project is a study in futuristic doom told with a smirk and a pair of very small Neo sunglasses. For the past 11 years, his music has dealt both seriously and playfully with the advent of AI, posthumanism, the dream of befriending extra-terrestrials, the idea that robots will one day rule us all, and now, the notion that Lexapro and other SSRIs are messing with the fabric of human sexuality, partially culpable for a sex recession among millennials. Or at least it would seem his work is headed in that direction, given the cheeky title of his latest EP, Love in the Time of Lexapro. A brief EP of exclusives and reworks, it’s Lopatin’s second release in this style to follow his lush, conceptually inclined Age Of.
There is no overarching theme that binds this record together. What Lopatin shares with us are four songs of varying viscosities, each well executed in its own right, but all more or less entrails left on the cutting-room floor, most likely to appeal to people who think going to MYRIAD is a good first-date idea. The album’s title track is pure ambience that goes from surface dive to Mariana Trench belly crawl in a smartly paced four-minute descent. Unlike some of his recent work, it’s immediately accessible. No gears are being grinded; there is no harsh noise to drill through to get to the sweet stuff. You could almost hear this play in the background of a movie where the two main characters kiss for the first time. But then, if we take the title at face value, this song is supposed to be about Lexapro. Perhaps the cool bass tones and distant drum-machine thuds are supposed to be a metaphor for, like, how we are all anesthetized.
Lopatin’s underwater nose dive continues with the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto's rework of “Last Known Image of a Song,” Age Of’s final track. OPN’s original was warm and fleshy, with upright bass and bursts of television static that gave off the vibe of a deep-space supernova. Sakamoto takes the song and flattens it, removing any naturalistic elements from the original and wringing them out into a dense cloud of ticking clocks and motherboard exhaust. Sakamoto and Lopatin make a formidable team, and listening to this version leaves you hoping that the two will continue to work together in larger capacities.
The record’s B-side is less inspiring. On “Thank God I’m a Country Girl,” the song’s provocative title doesn’t really amount to much. The synth warbles are repetitive and quickly grow stale; the processed piano is more likely to induce napping than trance states. (Sandy) Alex G’s appearance on a new version of the Age Of ambient-country curio “Babylon” is the EP’s most outré endeavor, albeit not in the way you’d expect. With its plain acoustic guitar and stripped-down vocals, the track’s first two minutes could easily cosplay as any song off of Rocket, effortlessly evoking crisp fall days and Philly basements. But then Lopatin bruises it up, adding a string section that collapses into pitch-shifted heartbeats and oozing gusts of noise. Hearing Alex G cover an OPN song might make you roll your eyes. But then, this is essentially an EP of bonus material. If Lopatin’s going to experiment with indie, this is the space for him to try it out.
But it’s hard not to wish his experimentation had ventured a little further. Love in the Time of Lexapro could have been a searing critique of Big Pharma. One of Lopatin’s most compelling traits is the mystery he’s capable of evoking with his vividly detailed tableaux. After the maze-like worlds conjured by Age Of and Garden of Delete, Love in the Time of Lexapro plays it disappointingly straight.


The latest solo project from Michigan guitarist Shelley Salant feels like a travelogue that uses simple lines of electric guitar to craft engaging tunes that say a lot without needing any words.

Shells 2

In the world of instrumental solo guitar, where John Fahey and his finger-picking descendants still loom large, there is so much acoustic-based music that it’s practically taboo to play electric. But there are always some reminders around that amplified strings can be as versatile and expressive as their acoustic counterparts. In 2016, Willie Lane spun mesmerizing electric avant-blues on his album A Pine Tree Shilling's Worth of Willie Lane, while last year Bill Orcutt made perhaps his best record yet by attacking American standards with his buzzing electric guitar.
The music of Shells, the solo project of guitarist Shelley Salant, is not as openly experimental as that of Lane or Orcutt. But in her own assured way, she creates just as compelling proof of the infinite possibilities of instrumental electric guitar. On her second album, Shells 2, she uses pretty basic rock tools—simple lines, repetitive strums, shimmering overdubs—to craft engaging tunes that say a lot without needing any words. A veteran of the Michigan rock underground and current member of Tyvek, Shells naturally infuses her songs with garage energy. But each of the 14 tracks on Shells 2 feels like its own little world, where a new idea is launched and explored to the fullest.
The exploration in Salant’s songs comes in part from their constant motion. That’s reflected in her titles, which conjure a travelogue across roads, lakes, fields, and shores—all part of, as one song calls it, “Passing Through.” Shells 2 starts with “Driveway,” a prime-pumping rev-up, and ends with “Field,” a thoughtful denouement in which a rare bit of acoustic strings mixes with electric chords. In between, Salant winds through many byways and cul-de-sacs—sometimes wrangling her sounds into abstract noise, sometimes stretching into beatific contemplation, sometimes simply rocking forward like a one-person band.
In its best moments, Shells 2 is all of the above and more. Slower tracks such as “North Shore” and “Break” are deceptively mellow, as Salant takes time pealing out her chords, but layers and counterpoints them so that they poke and prod rather than float. On songs where she adds drums, like “Nacimiento Road” and “Out There,” she switches gears without letting up on the gas, continually ascending by leaning harder and harder into her riffs. She can add noisy edges—rippling glitch, fried distortion—without falling into dissonance for its own sake. There’s an open universality to her music, too, so Salant naturally evokes some worthy fellow travelers. The patient lines of “Recollection” echo David Pajo’s pastoral instrumentals as Papa M, while “Sandy” evokes the abstracted rock of Steven Smith’s work under the monikers Ulaan Khol and Ulaan Markhor.
It’d be unfair to go very far into comparisons when attempting to describe the music on Shells 2, though. Salant’s sound is firmly steeped in rock and roll, and she’s a natural at turning a couple of chords into a solidly-structured, carefully-unfolding tune. But her formula sounds distinct because of her confident choices. She knows when to turn up the heat, when to ride the curves, and when to break against the grain. The result is music that moves and vibrates until it seems to spill out of the speakers. Just like her chords that sound like mantras, Shells 2 is built to be repeated. It’s a journey that only gets stronger the more you join her on it.


Diplo, Sia, and Labrinth combine forces for an album of truly forgettable pop music that is too tired to be wired.

LSD

Pop is dead; here is its corpse; here is Diplo attempting to make the corpse dance. Diplo, for whatever reason, is centered as the main attraction of Labrinth, Sia, and Diplo’s insane trio, whose initials just happen to spell out LSD. The first track on their self-titled album ends with a blaring announcer voice welcoming “people of earth, boys and girls, people of ages” to “the wonderful world of Labrinth, Sia, and Diploooooooooooo.” The vowel stretches for a solid six seconds. It’s the first of many grating miscalculations in an album conspicuously calibrated for radio play and sweaty basements. Who loves Diplo so much that they’re not annoyed by this shout? Who loves Diplo so much at all?
Enough people, apparently: LSD is Spotify’s 151st most-listened-to band in the world and they have even snagged a spot on Now That’s What I Call Music! 69, a nice fact until you realize that not even LSD themselves call this music. One of their lead singles is “Audio,” a cloying tangle of onomatopoeia, booze, and droopy synths. “Make the bomb bomb beat, I’ll give you melody,” is a refrain that only gets worse as it scrapes your speakers nine times in three minutes; “We got audio,” Sia breathes as Diplo Diploes on. Audio is the only metric of success here, the only box that needs checking, and they are, at least, loud.
Labrinth, Sia, and Diplo seem to only exist together for the listener to go, “Oh! Huh...” and press play. Instead of complementing each other, they cram every space of a song with noise. Labrinth, a UK singer and rapper who’s remained relatively unknown despite appearing on Nicki Minaj and Rihanna albums, oscillates between bland, soft vocals and self-important rasping. Diplo wedges thumps and loops into songs that would be better off without them, giving texture without substance. The tragedy of this odd mix is that we lose Sia. This isn’t the jagged vocals, the hidden eyes, the Sia that felt like something close to original. This is Diplo bastardizing female vocals until they’re barely distinctive, and then they just exist to fulfill the “woman crooning something in a pop song” part of the equation.
LSD sound like an algorithmic midden of pop music. There are melodramatic orchestra swells. There are gaudy basslines. There’s something suspiciously close to a xylophone. Honest-to-god handclaps speckle a track. The words “da dum dum dum” are intoned. LSD’s lyrics are asinine—repetition is what they’re after, as the songs whittle down your critical receptors and blanket you in great errors of language. Some choice snippets: “I’mma be the angel to your snow,” “You put the running into run,” “We got our champagne dreams in an endless drought.”
If LSD were really trying to capitalize on popular music trends and lean into its “how do you do, fellow kids” core, their sound would be sadder. Sia would hurl some line about Xanax. Labrinth would adopt a Post Malone slur-croon. Diplo would let his synths slink instead of clunk. Pop music isn’t fun anymore, not without at least a little nuance, and it’s jarring to go from LSD’s “Today’s Top Hits” neighbors—Billie Eilish, Juice WRLD, Twenty One Pilots—to inane lyrics about getting high and “love” without context or emotion.
More than anything, this album is both tired and wired, like drinking Red Bull after a fifth Red Bull. Not even a Lil Wayne remix can yank it to life. He hops on gamely and recites nonsense like, “Molest you with intellectual,” and, “My love is so ambidextrous.” This is an obviously calculated album that comes across as thoughtless, a thrashing neon garble. Frat boys might enjoy chanting “ge-ge-ge-ge-ge-genius” at each other, but for everyone else just hit next on whatever playlist these songs end up on.


"Cameras or guns, one of y'all gonna shoot me to death..."
Aesop Rock is having trouble adjusting to fame ...

Bazooka Tooth

"Cameras or guns, one of y'all gonna shoot me to death..."
Aesop Rock is having trouble adjusting to fame. Just a few short years ago, Ian Bavitz was still selling his own handmade CD-Rs on the streets of New York, but it didn't take long for him to find his way into the spotlight: his groundbreaking Def Jux album Labor Days was an instant underground smash. Now, in the face of label inconsistency and heightened expectations, his new album, Bazooka Tooth, shows him struggling with the pressures of the media and a rapidly growing fanbase.
Aesop Rock's abstract lyricism and gravel throat have earned him critical acclaim and a rabid following, but he's no longer just a Long Island poet-cum-cipher slayer, and some of the changes he's made to his style on Bazooka Tooth are drawing attention. Bavitz spent the early part of his career tied to a sluggish, steady delivery, but here, he's upgraded his style from a nicotine-tinged calm to a more natural, accessible flow. Now attacking his beats with a mix of nervous energy and raw confidence, the new Aesop Rock cracks, lisps, bends his pitch, and most importantly, confronts his listeners rather than choosing to subtly persuade them.
His delivery isn't all that's changed; there's been a shift in subject matter, too, as this album sees Bavitz branching out from the singular topic of Labor Days to a variety of subjects, including the emergence of young killers ("Babies with Guns"), fondness for his home state ("N.Y. Electric", "No Jumper Cables"), and disillusionment with the media ("Bazooka Tooth", "Easy")-- and all while offering his usual mix of hard-edged rhyme schemes ("Park your bets, sharks or jets/ It's bark marked targets where the barnacles nest") and clever idioms ("They burrow deep under the carnivore's flesh, without a trace/ Carnival games, like try to shoot the star out of his space").
The track with the most buzz so far is also the one that has the least to do with Aesop's personal life: "We're Famous" features Def Jux CEO El-P in what serves as a company mission statement, Demigodz diss, and subterranean "Grindin'" response all in one. Cycling through harsh jackhammer synth stabs, toy gun alien abduction crescendos, and a crunk funk handclap-assisted drum line, El-Producto lambasts critics claiming "hip-hop's over," disses Esoteric ("You ain't a vet, you're just old"; "Some of these faggots used to send me their demos/ Breeding their puppy styles in the Company Flow kennels") and closes the verse with, "I'll slap the shit out of you to continue my nerd rap/ I'm making this money fist over fist, fuck what you heard." Aesop doesn't let the topic drop, claiming, "The revolution will not be apologized for," and, "B-boy, feed that to the needy/ Check your liquor hole, fuck you in 3-D, easy." The one-two combination makes for one of the most addictive diss tracks this side of Jay-Z's classic "The Takeover".
Most of the early disappointment regarding Bazooka Tooth came as a result of Aesop's decision to self-produce the record. While the Blockhead and El-P compositions stand out as the work of professional, time-tested beatmakers, Aesop's production style has a loose, raw intensity of electronic emotion that hearkens back to Company Flow and early Tricky. From the windy stadium synth-wave rocker "No Jumper Cables" to the city-stomping drum march and twisted gypsy vocal sample pan of "Frijoles" to the boogie synth, clanging staircase sample and (in the second movement) Atlanta hi-hat crunch of "Mars Attacks", Bavitz evolves from the one-dimensional sample work in which he once dabbled, and makes the step into the realm of mentionable producer.
The transition, however, isn't completely smooth, with some of the interludes adding dead weight, a couple of songs failing to stand out among the pack ("Super Fluke", "N.Y. Electric"), some unremarkable beats, and a few unrealized conceptual possibilities limiting the total ascension of neo-Rock. Fortunately, the album has more than enough solid material to keep heads coming back again and again. No big surprise: Bazooka Tooth is another strong outing from one of underground hip-hop's most talented, thanks in no small part to its unprecedented wealth of lyrical depth and individual production style.


The buzzed-out San Jose rapper, who says thrash metal and Biohazard were the music of his youth, has rapped over Suzanne Vega and Goldfrapp samples. On his debut for Das Racist member Heems' Greedhead label, his personality is ahead of his artistry.

In Dark Denim

A little background on Antwon: the San Jose rapper reps thrash and Biohazard as the music of his youth, while his clips for "Helicopter" and "Living Every Dream" are rife with 90s-baby cinematography that suggests an equal amount of time given to "Yo! MTV Raps" and "Saved By The Bell." His buzzed-about mixtapes Fantasy Beds and End of Earth featured production from Salem and Pictureplane, and he’s rapped over Suzanne Vega and Goldfrapp samples. In short, he's a perfect fit on Heems' Greedhead label; between himself, Le1f, Big Baby Gandhi, and others, it crosses nearly every racial, sexual, cultural, and aesthetic barrier and presents the most comprehensive picture of hip-hop’s reach in terms of both fans and performers. But while In Dark Denim is certainly heartening in how it shows Antwon's various eccentricities to have currency and mass appeal on the whole, like too many of his peers, his multifaceted personality strains to compensate for his deficiencies as an actual recording artist.
Though he slots into whatever internet-rap zeitgeist of 2013 you can think of, when Antwon makes multiple namechecks of Sex Style, it's worth remembering how much Kool Keith in his various guises appealed to the kids who were otherwise into punk rock. This is true in regards to prolificity and especially true in regards to scatology. If you're gonna be turned off on general principle by lyrics such as "sexiest nigga/ lesbian couples wanna solo/ tongue inside her pussy now she send me naked photos" or "I'll send you love letters when I fuck you on your period," you probably won't last five minutes.
Much to his credit, Antwon never strikes you as being needlessly repulsive; at best, he considers sexual congress as something of a quid pro quo and considering he'll throw in a goofy, heartfelt line like "and them titties are like the highlight of my weekend" during "3rd World Grrl", In Dark Denim comes off as wish fulfillment, more like a teen's giddy recount of his first time at a strip club rather than a jaded misogynist that sees it as a confirmation of a proper gender relations. Moreover, Antown's facility with hooks make "Werk 4 Me", "3rd World Grrl", and "Boomerang" sound like all-ages party starters even though they'd require chanting "three rounds in a row she gon' work for me/ pussy all wet, let it squirt for me" and "I bet that coochie tastes real good/ tight real nice for the boys in the summer."
While his various appetites have earned him comparisons to a multitude of overweight lovers, Antwon's hardcore past is very much evident in his vocals, an effective, one-note attack that’s half playground bully, half class clown. Or, within the context of *In Dark Denim'*s musty, Thrasher VHS production, something like Death Grips if they showered up and decided to write the vast majority of their songs about oral sex. There are times when Antwon gets into bleak sociopolitics and warrants similarities to his fellow Bay Area noise terrorists, but make no mistake, In Dark Denim is for the most part absolutely filthy, turning its title in an uncomfortable double entendre.
With that in mind, it’s not surprising that guys like Cities Aviv and B L A C K I E lend their production efforts, as they share a similar, unshakeable conviction about the compatibility of punk-rock aesthetics with twerk-rap lyricism. But much like Aviv's most recent tape Black Pleasure, In Dark Denim appears to be the work of someone who values ideas at the expense of execution. Or, on a more mundane level, the actual listening experience of In Dark Denim is inexcusably flawed for Antwon's most high-profile release to date.  For one thing, the mixing is atrociously muffled and off-balance, and rarely in a way that enhances the experience.  Something like the volatile, Afrocentric "Burn Away" benefits from the clatter, but otherwise "1MillSnippet" and "Boomerang" sound like poor YouTube rips and gain nothing from the bouncing reverb and complete lack of bass. Meanwhile, Antwon's flow on "Still Guarded" is barely on speaking terms with its beat, an unfortunately fitting closer for a mixtape that simply sounds rushed as opposed to urgent.
Curiously enough, the tracks that delve into Antwon's darker past are the most underdeveloped. "Burn Away", "1MillSnippet", and "Rare 2000s" contain intriguing details-- talking shit to his parole officer, friends dying of meth addictions, nights at the local park-- but either cut off short or rely on outside sources to drive their point home. All things told, Antwon has the inverse problem of most rappers-- his persona is fully formed and he has a gift for choruses, it's every other part of the songwriting process that tends to get shortchanged. These are fixable problems, though. So while In Dark Denim is an occasionally fascinating look at an intriguing talent, that doesn't mean it’s a success on its own terms.


This six-track EP sees Sam Beam go electric. Recorded with producer Brian Deck, Woman King inches Beam away from his scratchy lo-fi origins without sacrificing any of the microphone-eating intimacy that made his work so appealing to begin with.

Woman King EP

There are a lot of ways to describe Iron & Wine's dark, woozy folk songs: writers and fans scramble to find the appropriate modifiers, the correct verbs, the variations on "hushed." We make references to babies and jokes about his beard, launching sweeping comparisons to bedroom poets past, yapping happily about Beam's "quietude" and "grace." And now, for the very first time, "loud" can be added to that arsenal of adjectives: the six-song Woman King EP, a follow-up to 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days, opens with relentlessly click-clacking pieces of wood and a brash slide riff, booming out in all directions. And we haven't even gotten to the electric guitar yet-- or the distortion.
Over the course of two full-lengths (and their accompanying EPs), Sam Beam has tweaked and re-imagined Iron & Wine's whisper-folk imprint to include a much broader palette of sound-- anxious and intense, Woman King inches Beam even farther away from his scratchy lo-fi origins without sacrificing any of the microphone-eating intimacy that made his work so appealing to begin with. Woman King was recorded at producer Brian Deck's Engine Music Studios in Chicago (under identical circumstances, but separate from the Our Endless Numbered Days sessions) and features Deck's trademark mix of grainy, untreated percussion and spare-but-layered production (not atypically, Deck is also credited as a band member). Somehow, each step Beam takes feels organic, proper, true-- Woman King (much like Our Endless Numbered Days) is different, but fundamentally linked to its predecessors.
Iron & Wine's album titles are almost always prophetic (2002's The Creek Drank the Cradle dealt with fizzled innocence, 2004's Our Endless Numbered Days tackled human mortality) and Woman King is, for the most part, about girls-- fallen, absent, beloved, virginal, and nefarious.
Thwarted religion has always provided prime lyric fodder for Beam, and the stunning "Jezebel" recounts the rise and fall of the Bible's most infamous Phoenician princess, a pagan follower who becomes involved in a political marriage to Ahab, the crown prince of Israel. According to the Bible, Jezebel caused loads of trouble for Israel until Jehu, the head of a company formed to overthrow the house of Ahab, has her snatched and tossed from a window. Her blood splatters the palace wall; Jehu, on horse and chariot, charges across the body. Later, when palace servants return to recover Jezebel's corpse for burial, all that's left is her skull, her feet, and the palms of her hands. Jehu announces that Jezebel was chewed up by a pack of dogs, fulfilling the divine prophet Elijah's earlier prediction that "the dogs shall eat Jezebel by the wall of Jezreel."
Beam gently acknowledges Jezebel's brutal end ("The window was wide/ She could see the dogs come running"), but doesn't necessarily swallow the Bible's cautionary bent: Jezebel is typically read as villainous (with decent reason: she falsely accuses citizens of blasphemy and treason, and orders them stoned to death), but recent feminist re-interpretations of her story have questioned whether or not that vilification can simply be chalked up to the threat she posed to ancient patriarchal orders. Beam plays with his words (a glance at the lyric sheet reveals that he's actually singing "wholly Jezebel," but, you know, say it out loud), and laments how Jezebel was "gone" before he ever got to say "Lay here my love/ You're the only shape I'll pray to, Jezebel." Ultimately, Beam casts Jezebel as more of a heroine (or an object of worship, even) than a righteously fallen pagan, turning "Jezebel" into a perfectly chilling ode to potentially misunderstood women.
A stripped-down version of "Jezebel" can be heard on the officially unreleased (but slipped under many pillows) bootleg 9/20/02 Home Recordings, a collection of demos largely believed to be the Iron & Wine songs Sub Pop opted not to use for Beam's debut. Still, the studio take of "Jezebel" is far fleshier, with Beam's classic guitar and banjo strums backed up by tinkling piano and tiny dulcimer swats-- a dizzying, wispy haze of strings and high, falsetto-coos that hold up well against Beam's very best work.
"Freedom Hangs Like Heaven", while no less religiously charged ("Ain't nobody knows what the newborn holds/ But his mama says he'll walk on water and wander back home"), is a boisterous, slide-fueled throwdown, perfectly acceptable for barn-dancing or open-armed room stomping. "Gray Stables" shows off Beam's knack for harmony (while singing with sister Sarah), "My Lady's House" is vintage Iron & Wine, all acoustic guitar, slight piano, and lovelorn laments, while closer "Evening on the Ground (Lilith's Song)" is a tense, distorted ode to dark garden trysts (interpret "We were born to fuck each other/ One way or another" however you like), complete with spider bites and broken locks and urgent, throaty vocals.
Woman King will provide eager Iron & Wine fans a welcome holdover between proper albums, but the EP also serves a larger developmental purpose, marking one more evolutionary hop for Sam Beam, and christening a new genre-- post-basement.


On his third album created primarily with modular synthesizers, the longtime Sea and Cake frontman makes fascinatingly abstracted music about the act of listening itself.

Comma

The best thing about Sam Prekop’s solo electronic music is the way that it leaves space for the listener. Across three albums—2010’s Old Punch Card, 2015’s The Republic, and now Comma—the Sea and Cake frontman has used modular synthesizers to make pieces that don’t fit neatly into any one category; nor do they tell you how to feel or suggest what the music might be good for. Prekop gives you a handful of carefully chosen sounds and then bends, stretches, and arranges them into beguiling shapes until they sink back into nothingness. Seemingly by design, the particular “meaning” of a given track—not just in terms of genre, but the emotional content—is entirely up to you. By listening to Prekop’s creations—taking in the array of sounds, noting placements and proportions, and mapping the result onto our own memories and associations—we also complete them.
Compared to its two predecessors, Comma has rhythms and melodies that suggest pop, if never quite embracing the verse/chorus form. In a recent interview with Chicago Magazine, Prekop admitted he allowed the music to drift in a more song-oriented direction when assembling this record, and he also mentioned adding new hardware alongside his modular synth rig, including a Roland SH-101 (a favorite of Boards of Canada) and a drum machine. The continuous pulse, marking the passage of time, is one of the record’s core elements, but there’s nothing like a dance beat here. We often equate “space” with silence, and there’s not a lot of it on Comma—Prekop fills the sound field at all times, which is partly why Comma demands attention, even though it’s occasionally quiet. This isn’t background music.
The synth textures, generally clean and clear, so that your ear can pry one layer apart from another if you wish, evoke the last few decades of the 20th century, when it was still possible for electronic technology to convey hope. The drifting “September Remember,” which begins with a gentle drone and a steady click that’s bathed in dubby artificial reverb, is as close as the record comes to ambient music proper, and there’s something uncanny about it. It’s not especially “warm” in the way we think of modular synth music by, say, Emily Sprague or Cool Maritime, nor does it have the chilly distance of digital, more overtly ’80s-flavored synth music. It hangs between these poles, floating back and forth, a chime pushed by the wind.
Elsewhere, Comma embraces beauty unreservedly, though still with characteristic subtlety. “Approaching” is particularly gorgeous, with its throbs of static and hiss, metallic shimmer of percussion, and a music-box synth melody. It offers the kind of tech-aided path to the sublime that Kraftwerk sometimes laid out in their earliest work, though Prekop goes easy on the drama. “Wax Wing” begins with the sort of eerie synth Brian Eno favored on Apollo, and then Prekop subjects it to weird processing, turning it into a high-pitched squiggle that allows you to picture what happens when one harnesses electricity but just barely controls it.
Comma is an unusually immersive record, with evident foregrounds and backgrounds, and sometimes you can feel the music moving past you as it unfolds. At one point during “Never Met,” an acid-inflected synth pattern seems to appear in the distance, gradually inch closer, and then brush by you before proceeding on to somewhere else. Prekop makes choices, placing elements in the stereo field according to his sense of design, but the individual affective response to his choices could go any number of ways. Once again, it’s possible to imagine the music as open-ended, a series of intriguing possibilities not pointing anywhere in particular. We, the audience, do half the work, simply by being engaged as the music unfolds.
It’s tricky to praise music so clearly based on form and balance. Comma isn’t filled with a mind-warping atmosphere you’ve heard nowhere else, it’s not an invitation to meditate or do yoga, and it probably won’t make you cry. It offers something ineffable that I can best call a “presence,” and its ability to center you in the here and now is, in its own low-key and meticulous way, overwhelming.

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A set of recently unearthed studio recordings sheds light on the country icon’s remarkable comeback in the early 1990s.

Songwriter

When Johnny Cash teamed up with Rick Rubin for 1994’s American Recordings, their partnership launched one of the great final acts in 20th-century American music. Yet such a comeback would have seemed vanishingly unlikely at the dawn of the ’90s. Left without a major label for the first time since 1958, Cash had resigned himself to the ignominious depths of Branson, Missouri, the Ozark town known for tacky theaters housing fading stars from yesteryear. The country icon couldn’t even get that right. His financial backing went belly up prior to the launch of the Johnny Cash Theatre in the summer of 1992. When he did finally play the venue a year later, he was stuck filling in for its new headline attraction: the notorious lounge lizard Wayne Newton.
The previously unheard demos on Songwriter, a posthumous new album, shed light on that comeback, a narrative so immutable that it today seems etched in stone. They’re drawn from sessions at Nashville’s LSI Studios, where Cash set up at some point in the early ’90s to record a clutch of newly written songs. John Carter Cash—the only child of Johnny and June Carter Cash—recently discovered the recordings, but the artist’s intentions for them remain unclear. Cash’s decision to record at LSI may have been partially altruistic, as it was the joint property of his stepdaughter Rosie and her then-husband Mike Daniel, and thus an easy way to funnel some funds their way. It’s also possible that the demos were meant to persuade another label to sign the country veteran—a goal that was met by other means once Cash met Rubin in 1993.
Two of the tunes on Songwriter, “Drive On” and “Like a Soldier,” also appear on American Recordings, and their simultaneous presence illuminates the distance between the two projects. They’re two of the lighter moments on the spare, stoic American Recordings and two of the weightier songs on Songwriter, a record that finds plenty of room for Cash’s humor and sentimentality, character traits Rubin staunchly avoided. The two qualities combine on “I Love You Tonite,” a love letter to June Carter Cash in which he marvels that they’ve made it through the decades and wonders if they’ll last until the new millennium.
Some big concerns nag at Cash—he ponders the fate of the planet on “Hello Out There”—yet he generally spends Songwriter operating at a smaller scale, penning character sketches of single mothers sustained by their love of James Taylor, flirting with a woman at the laundromat (“Well Alright”), and writing an ode to all the pretty girls from Little Rock. There’s no sense of foreboding here; it’s as light and rambling as any of the LPs he cut during his waning days at Columbia in the early 1980s or the unjustly maligned Mercury platters from later that decade.
Songwriter distinguishes itself through its posthumous production. Working with longtime engineer David Ferguson, John Carter Cash labored to break these dated LSI demos away from their origins, stripping down the recordings—and adding new parts from players like Vince Gill and Dan Auerbach—so they feature little more than voice, a little guitar, and, in two cases, harmony vocals from Waylon Jennings. The presence of his fellow Highwayman illustrates that these original LSI recordings were no solitary affair. At least 10 session players are thanked in the liner notes, including Marty Stuart, who was among the many musicians enlisted by Carter Cash and Ferguson to transform the tapes into a record that feels closer to American Recordings than Boom Chicka Boom, to name one of those final Mercury records. Their work is so nuanced and sympathetic to Cash’s idiosyncrasies that Gill’s vocal harmonies on “Poor Valley Girl” and Auerbach’s guitar on the after-hours blues “Spotlight” barely register: The focus remains solely on Cash.
That John Carter Cash and David Ferguson succeed in freeing these tunes from their period trappings, creating a record that’s conceivably a cousin to the sepia-toned traditionalism of American Recordings, is no small feat. It can be difficult to hear Cash’s charms through the bright, digital clang that plagues his ’80s recordings. The refurbished warmth of Songwriter makes it easier to concentrate on the clever turns of phrase and solid construction of these excavated tunes. As pleasurable as they are—and they’re quite endearing, particularly for listeners who enjoy the silly and tender sides of the Man in Black—it’s also clear that if they’d been released as an album in 1993, these songs wouldn’t have altered the course of Cash’s career the way American Recordings did. That album demonstrated a real understanding of Cash’s mythos; Songwriter is mostly a testament to the sturdiness of his craft.


The jazz trio’s follow-up to 2021’s Uneasy is irresistibly listenable, an immersive 66 minutes that exhales a particular aesthetic history even as it pulls on the pain and anxiety of our present.

Vijay Iyer / Linda May Han Oh / Tyshawn Sorey: Compassion

Compassion

Few pianists vary a theme better than Vijay Iyer, whose new album Compassion, with bassist Linda May Han Oh and drummer Tyshawn Sorey, flows with the smooth, pathfinding quality of shallow water in a rocky stream. The 52-year-old’s fingers worry over melody: He reconsiders, restates, and repeats phrases as though he hasn’t quite made himself clear. What does Iyer need to tell us so urgently? Motion itself is the message, how life barrels forth during periods of unimaginable struggle.
Iyer’s overpowering voice on the piano means that he takes center stage even when he tries not to—such as on his searing, topical post-9/11 collaboration with experimental rapper Mike Ladd, In What Language? The gravitational pull of his keys sometimes evokes Keith Jarrett, who similarly occupies the spotlight while sharing billing with fellow musical titans. And both pianists have track records with ECM, a long-time hub for jazz and contemporary classical marked by a fluid, pristine, often fusion-friendly aesthetic. Compassion is Iyer’s most characteristic release since he started recording for the German label more than a decade ago: The album is irresistibly listenable, an immersive 66 minutes that exhales a particular aesthetic history even as it pulls on the pain and anxiety of our present.
The album eschews the electronics of his phenomenal ECM debut as leader, 2013’s Mutations, and the tabla that lifted the deft interplay of 20ll’s Tirtha beyond blinkered American custom. Working with just three instruments, Compassion feels like the most sweeping outing of his oeuvre, stretching the hookier moments of this combo’s much-lauded 2021 inauguration Uneasy into extended meditations and relentless workouts. The trio’s take on Geri Allen’s “Drummer’s Song” reappears here as not only a fantastic closer, but also a barometer for their ongoing growth. Uneasy stripped the cheeky maximalism of the late pianist’s initial arrangement to essentials, while Compassion blurs the song at its edges, letting it bleed into the band’s take on a composition by beloved saxophonist John Stubblefield. Compassion is widescreen in both emotion and concept. Uneasy poked at news stories of the day, notably the Flint water crisis. The group’s latest paints its thematic tableau in broad strokes of sanguinity: “It Goes,” “Overjoyed,” and “Panegyric” suggest expansive, resilient sentiments that burn on in spite of the claustrophobia of moment-to-moment fear.
The songs on Compassion had different genesises, but they’re in conversation, like answers to questions that Iyer has posed since his career’s start. Several of the numbers were written for an event honoring COVID victims, while others took shape as part of a project saluting poet and scholar Eve Ewing, whose nonfiction has most famously explored the bigoted legacy of school closures in Chicago. “It Goes,” a ballad with a dreamy, singular cadence that raises a potentially slow stretch to profundity, was originally penned as a setting for lyrics that imagined Emmett Till had lived a long life—instead of being kidnapped, tortured, and lynched by Mississippi racists at the age of 14.
Compassion shivers with the horror of these roots, but its relentless sense of pacing means that the album never feels like a compilation of works written on commission. “Panegyric” slows the disc down after several numbers glide and ripple, while the Roscoe Mitchell cover “Nonaah” forms a dissonant scar in the LP’s center, beautifully disfiguring an otherwise tuneful mood. Compassion’s brushes with social history are hardly uncharted for Iyer, even when he holds himself solely to instrumentals, as he does here. Still, the casually-worn expertise and inlaid sorrow that he brings to the task seem like the culmination of a life pursuit.
On the level of performance, Iyer operates in his heroic strain—how Coltrane sounds on “My Favorite Things,” as though despair and giddy optimism are always just a note away. On the electrifying “Maelstrom,” his arpeggios sound like a chorus of voices, circling each other in a canon. His static harmonies and slippery refrains, though, float along thanks to the life raft offered by Oh and Sorey.
The double bassist, whose The Glass Hours was an excellent, overlooked jazz release from last year, approaches her instrument with a melodic facility that refuses flashiness. Oh often solos on the lower register of her upright, as Iyer points out in the liner notes—capturing ghost images that are faint but alter their surroundings dramatically. Elsewhere, she subsumes and redefines the pianist’s lead lines, taking over the head of the gorgeous “Arch” so that it thrums like a fading memory. Stately “Where I Am” is a roomier opportunity for her to rove, while her interplay with Sorey on the final cut fosters the record’s busy apex, an exhibition of each player’s individuality that serves a sprawling scape of collective feeling—grief for the dead, like admiration for the living, is layered with a knowledge of life’s immense and terrible possibility. Compassion flourishes in this furrow between awe and hardened forbearance.
Sorey can feel restrained with this three-piece, in comparison to his often prickly, uncompromising work as a bandleader. He plays with fewer frills than he did on Uneasy—but his fantastic instincts make the consistency of his beats another motor behind the record’s forward locomotion. The serpentine “Ghostrumental” emerges from his boom-bap constancy, before a stutter-step snare enables the track’s genius climax. He knows how to accent and echo Iyer’s piano on the limited tonal palette of a drumset, and his supple touch on the cymbals and toms, a surprising quality from a percussionist who can thrash with his wildest peers, gives the record a palpable sense of texture.
Compassion never puts us face-to-face with current events. Instead, it builds an imaginative space within the real world, a reverie that begins when you stop cogitating and allow minutes to embark on their unstoppable march. Listening to Compassion at home, on headphones, my mind drifted to Emmett Till, and after to the thousands of children in Gaza who have been slaughtered in recent months. Such lives would have taken countless different directions had they continued, and perhaps the only assured commonality is that each of these hypothetical adults would have had to navigate a shifting relationship with time as they aged—decades, memories, and experiences that accrue to bend and kink duration. Getting older is a human right too often denied, perhaps why Compassion feels inescapably political. To hear the seconds elapse alongside Iyer, Oh, and Sorey—as they braid motifs into something so lifelike that it can outlast hopelessness and cynicism—is a gift, a tool, and a reality check, served up in the hopes that one day all people will have the luxury to sink into their dreaming.


On her first album in a decade, the New York guitarist returns to her pyrotechnic displays of virtuosity. The pace is fast, the tone raw, the mood appropriately triumphant.

The Comeback Kid

In the decade since her last LP, New York City lifer Marnie Stern stepped back from her solo career at the edge of math rock to focus on domestic life. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, she was at the forefront of the new millennium’s wave of noisy, kinetic rock acts, showing off a gymnast’s flexibility on a string of high-energy records. In a twist on a day job, Stern has spent much of the last 10 years playing guitar in Seth Meyers’ late-night backing band—a gig more conducive to raising kids than the interminable grind of touring. But, she says, she never lost sight of the guitar as a “blank canvas.”
Stern reclaims her place among the era’s most commanding guitarists on her polished fifth LP, The Comeback Kid, a densely packed showcase of her distinctive style. The latest set is noisy at the core and fuzzy at the edges, heavy on fingertapping and busy melodic displays that snap together elements of punk, grunge, and surf rock. Re-sharpening the rounded edges that shaped much of 2013’s The Chronicles of Marnia, Stern flaunts a reinvigorated spirit in searing songs that live up to the playfully celebratory mood she establishes in the album’s title.
In press materials, Stern described making the new LP as an exercise in learning to “start being myself again.” Any time she wondered whether a choice was too strange, she’d remind herself that this was her project: “I’m allowed to do whatever I want!” In that spirit, “Plain Speak” opens the album with bright, bristly, major-key riffs that she tempers with layered vocal harmonies. “I can’t keep on moving backwards,” she barks, standing firm at the center of the song’s dizzying tilt-a-whirl spin.
She leans further into her idiosyncrasies on “Believing Is Seeing,” unleashing a creepy, almost cartoonish cry—“This place is cold! I can’t hear you!”—over icy ostinato guitar before stepping sideways into a series of riff-heavy passages. “What if I add this? And this?” she asks as she heaps layers of guitar onto the mix, playing up the self-referential humor. The churning energy of “The Natural” and the short bursts of “Oh Are They” both channel classic elements of ’80s and ’90s underground rock; her repeated yelps have the feeling of a rallying cry.
Like the oaky notes of aged bourbon, the particulars of Stern’s technique have only gotten richer since The Chronicles of Marnia. Her dives feel more dramatic, as when she approaches power-metal poses in “Forward” or shreds up a storm in “Working Memory,” and she reaches piercing vocal highs that land between a ’70s psychedelic shriek and a winged mythical beast. Drummer Jeremy Hara is Stern’s reliable companion throughout, complementing her breakneck fretwork with powerful percussive blasts.
After the gleeful pirouettes of the A-side, the album’s back half becomes more reflective. Even when she pursues a more linear path, Stern moves with surprising intensity. She grapples with the blues in the striving “Get It Good,” and “Earth Eater” fizzes with nervous energy as Stern contemplates lingering pain. The ragged, grungy sound of “Til It’s Over” gives it an even darker cast. Hara’s drumming pushes the song relentlessly forward, as if hitting the gas on a long stretch of open road at night.
The Comeback Kid blasts by in under half an hour, and Stern’s impulses to chase her weirdest muses serve her well throughout. She lands her adventurous leaps with breathless energy. Aglow with her triumphant shredding, Stern’s howling return is a neon-haloed song of herself.


The UK band’s overstuffed debut melds indie-prog, rock, folk electronica, and post-punk into an expansive new sound.

This Could Be Texas

On This Could Be Texas, English Teacher outline a landscape burdened by prejudice, the cost-of-living crisis, mental health issues. The band’s name couldn’t be more apt—it’s here to school us in 50 minutes. They sweep up myriad literary and cultural references and dabble in several genres to dole out endlessly twisting melodies. If a synth flutters into mellow guitar rock, into wandering piano, into drums, out of drums, into layered vocals, with a squeaky guitar on top, you’ve about covered the dextrous three minutes of track one.
This Could Be Texas takes a wider angle than English Teacher’s more personal 2022 EP Polyawkward and 2021 song “R&B,” which gained significant traction online (and is reimagined here). “R&B” harnesses singer Lily Fontaine’s experience as a frontwoman of color (“Despite appearances, I haven’t got the voice for R&B/Even though I’ve seen more Colour Shows than KEXPs”) in service of a larger message. Bouncing between disdain and rage, many of the debut album’s best moments adapt those small, personal pieces that defined Polyawkward and blow them up to fill out a long-player.
English Teacher can’t leave a song alone: Not a track goes by without a twist or complication, whether a time-signature change, an instrumental flourish, or a sudden wall of sound. Those quirks are most effective on “Broken Biscuits,” where Fontaine’s dry tone makes things like government negligence and societal breakdown appear droll rather than devastating. But the energy starts to pick up, and she becomes more insistent. The move between meandering, Jon Brion-esque runs with spots of bright, plunking keys to sudden sped-up sections, where the vocals struggle to keep up, are propulsive: She spits out complaints, places blame, and explodes with anger at uncaring rulers.
Most promising, and core to This Could Be Texas, is the band’s interest in melding indie-prog, rock, folk electronica, and post-punk into a new package. It’s something akin to Black Country, New Road’s Live at Bush Hall: an attempt at massive, epic-scale work, a post-rock entrée with the wingspan of the genre’s greats. And like Bush Hall, it’s a first step in the band’s imagination, hinting toward something more explosive to come.
Take “Not Everybody Gets to Go to Space.” Evoking some Elon Musk-type figure, offhand jokes like “If everybody got to go to space/All of its bars would have a line” seem to fall flat. But as the song progresses to those who did make it to space, the music shifts from spare drums and bass to a rollicking backbeat, pulling in another voice and building into an echoey, bassline-built chasm with overlaid vocals and a persistent melody, blanketed by Fontaine’s shaky yelling. The re-recorded “R&B” is also significantly more intense. As the backing instrumentation ramps up with a stronger bassline and chunkier feel, Fontaine is more forward, too. Separating just the slightest bit from the impulse to speak-sing, she sounds more in control of the song. Like much of the album, it’s full of “I ams” and “I’m nots,” culminating in a question: “If I have stuff to write, then why don’t I just write it for me?”
The idea of ownership makes for some of This Could Be Texas’ strongest moments. The keening of “You Blister My Paint” intensifies the song’s post-breakup anguish, striking the album’s most personal tone. Notably sung and not spoken—sometimes airy and at others almost jazzy—the gentle piano and vocal distortions are a heart-wrenching package. The grandness is baked in, rather than applied: Every choice rings out with intention, hinting at an even more compelling story waiting in the wings.


Though he recruits Tegan and Sara and a member of Protomartyr here, the producer’s voice emerges as the real star of these darkly funny, magnetic songs.

Bunny

Imagine an octopus: agile, stealthy, colors in flux. Now imagine the ink spreading out, the black fog of the disappearing act. Over the past 19 years, Matthew Dear has been a little like that cephalopod, flitting between aliases and sounds—bristly minimal house, thundering peak-time techno, shape-shifting electronic pop. On 2007’s Asa Breed, he reinvented himself as an unconventional singer-songwriter and black-hearted crooner; his voice has been his ink ever since. It has never been thicker than it is on Bunny.
Dear has always been a trickster. He likes slow-motion house grooves designed to wrongfoot would-be dancers—slick with grease, the rhythms kinked, synth tones distended and dissonant. In his early years, his music was notable for its brittleness; his beats sounded like they’d been frozen and smashed into a million pieces. But his music has gradually gotten more and more viscous. On Bunny, that starts deep in his throat. His voice is Bunny’s focal point, allowing him to stay hidden and slip the bonds of the confessional singer.
Mixing blurry bits of new wave, disco, and indie rock, his productions are plenty interesting, but that voice lends the essential element of intrigue, helping blur the contrast between Dear and the subjects of his songs—between the family man of his biography and the narrator of “Bad Ones,” who admits, “I played a role in all your tears/Hate flowers but they seem to work on you my dear.” He growls, purrs, and bellows, diving down to the depths of his lower register and dredging it up like silt. His voice is less a manifestation of his being than his being is a manifestation of his voice. All that artifice—the lung-scraping vowels, the charred vocal fry, the cartoon-villain sneer—becomes its own reality.
Dear has long relied on a fairly simple set of tricks to manipulate his voice. He’s especially fond of doubling it, so that a quavering falsetto hovers like a halo over his gravelly baritone—a fitting split, given his propensity for angels-and-devils dichotomies in tales of love and self-loathing. He’s still using the same techniques here, but more than ever, he’s exploring the sheer physicality of his instrument by reveling in the grain, the flesh, and the phlegm. And in the process, his voice is becoming more his own. On previous albums, he sometimes felt like he was trying on his best Bowie impersonation. Traces of that linger—“Modafinil Blues,” one of Bunny’s highlights, sounds like it was written in Blackstar’s shadow—but he’s casting a wider net for inspirations here. He draws in bits of Gary Numan, Peter Murphy, Leonard Cohen, and even Johnny Cash, distilling them into his own distinctive strain.
Bunny doesn’t break in any real stylistic way from its predecessors. Dear’s beats still shuffle and drag, relishing the friction of heavy objects on sticky floors; his palette still brims with dark streaks of synth, dubbed-out effects, daubed-on funk. The occasional novelty helps this material feel fresh. Protomartyr’s Greg Ahee lends a Vini Reilly-like guitar touch to the opening “Bunny’s Dream.” On two songs, Tegan and Sara make good on Dear’s longstanding but largely sublimated desire to make actual pop. His music has never sounded more forceful than it does on songs like “Can You Rush Them,” a slow, woozy anthem in which the layers are fused together until they suggest a cyborg take on Tuvan throat singing. “I was a bad man/Until I found God—asleep,” Dear begins. The way the song builds from this opening, with its playful inversion of classic redemption narratives, is thrilling. It all comes down like a mudslide.
In mood and tone, Bunny marks a subtle shift from its predecessors. (Just compare the pink sleeve with that of Beams or Black City.) On the sex-slathered Black City, Dear’s obsessions took the form of charged images (“little red nightgown”) chanted in a leaden voice. But here, on the greasy slab of dissonant disco, “Electricity,”  he’s got a manic glint in his eye, even if he sounds perpetually at war with his worst instincts. On “Bad Ones,” when he pleads, “I haven’t told you lies this year,” there’s little doubt that the wounded Lothario’s plea for sympathy is itself the biggest joke.
There are no great revelations in the lyric sheet. Most of these lines wouldn’t survive more than a few minutes without the oxygen he gives them. Instead, the album’s pleasure is in its gooey matrix of conflicting sensations: the slapback delay on his vocals during the swampy “What You Don’t Know” or the gloopy tangle of “Duke of Dens,” an instrumental whose layers resist teasing out. In “Modafinil Blues,” a silky new-wave-disco song about desperation, the breakdown shows how careful Dear’s touch is. He fleshes out an unusual groove, then strips it back to leave room for a single synth, shining like a silver dollar in the gutter. The album drags a little in the middle, and its Ricardo Villalobos-sampling conclusion feels anticlimactic. But at Bunny’s best, Dear is as slippery as ever. Following in his purple wake and soaking in his twisted tragicomedy is a chase to be savored.


The short-lived but powerful Texas band Mineral have reunited and are playing shows and they've also reissued their two proper full-lengths with bonus material. These two records find them roughly comparable to era peers like Sunny Day Real Estate, but with a darker tint and more jagged edges.

Mineral: The Power of Failing/EndSerenading

The Power of Failing/EndSerenading

Mineral always felt private somehow. The Austin-via-Houston group wasn't together all that long—they released two full-lengths and some singles, and by the time of that second album, they'd already broken up. Their short run may have contributed to a feeling of anonymity. To me, they were different from relative peers like Promise Ring or Lifetime, groups that seemed communal; Mineral weren't a guilty pleasure, more like a prized secret. They've been described as a Sunny Day Real Estate rip-off, but that never seemed quite right to me—there was more lo-fi jangle and hiss to Mineral's songs, and the production wasn't as big. In a way, Mineral were more aligned to the darker pop of mid-1990s indie-rock groups like fellow Texans Bedhead, and they didn't strike me as quite so "hardcore." The connection with SDRE that did exist, though, was in the angsty, acrobatic vocals of Chris Simpson, which were in the same vein as Jeremy Enigk's, but rougher.
Take, for instance, "MD", the B-side to 1996's "February" 7", included on this new retrospective, 1994-1998 - The Complete Collection. On it, Simpson is about to visit his older brother ("It's good to know we haven't outgrown the love we shared as children"), and meet the woman that brother plans to marry. He talks about the secret language they shared at a young age, when they dressed up as Batman and Robin for Halloween ("Everybody laughed at us and said we had it wrong 'cause you were the taller one"), and ends the track with all the force he can muster: "She's beautiful/ And I know that you'll be happy/ So take this as my blessing/ Wrapped up with all the love that I can send/ 'Cause you are my brother/ My friend/ And my superior/ Till the end." On paper it reads like a note you'd send to a sibling; in song, it's towering.
The emotions here are emo, no doubt. This is the kind of music where people yell "I stand on a building and throw up my arms to the sky/ I swallow my pride" and "This is the last song that I should ever sing/ Just one more time and I'll shut my mouth forever" amid huge crashing guitars. Simpson sings about coming of age, feeling unloved and embarrassed ("I bring it on myself/ I know I bring it on myself"), and also the innocence of youth, being in love, loving your family, and what those connections and relationships mean. There are stabs at '90s DIY politics, and he articulates being human and lost in great detail: "When I'm finally naked and standing in the sunlight/ I'll look back at all of this selfishness and foolish pride/ And laugh at myself." The melodrama, in general, is great, and the music around it rises to the occasion. The songs are intense, catchy, over-loaded with feedback and beauty, and meant to be yelled.
Though they didn't release much, their two proper albums are markedly different. The sound of 1998's EndSerenading was softer, and more glistening than 1997's Power of Failing. It hinted at what Simpson would do with bassist Jeremy Gomez in their next band, the Gloria Record, and perhaps, in retrospect, suggests why the group went in two different directions: guitarist Scott McCarver and drummer Gabriel Wiley formed Imbroco then went on to found other projects separately. EndSerenading album was a pop, and not a lo-fi or punk gesture, and it's just not as compelling as Failing. It has plenty of good moments, but it can also feel overthought and staid. Part of what makes The Power of Failing a classic is that its raw feel and execution matches its emotions.
Mineral formed in 1994, and released some singles and toured like crazy, so Failing felt like a culmination. Conversely, EndSerenading, which they recorded with producer Mark Trombino (Blink-182, Jimmy Eat World), felt, at times, like a lukewarm new beginning. They were supposed to do a third album for Interscope, but, of course, it never happened. Which, honestly, is probably for the best. There's momentum on Failing that was already getting hemmed in on End, not to mention the addition of labored song titles like "LoveLetterTypewriter", "TheLastWordIsRejoice", and "&Serenading". It's easy to imagine them becoming even shinier and more staid on a major label debut.
Not to say End is a failure. Title aside, "LoveLetterTypewriter" is an excellent, moving opening track, and one of their best. Simpson sings the words patiently, and with more refinement than in the past (and, honestly, more like Enigk): "Summer unfolded like a tapestry/ And you were there as you have always been/ There glowing where the sky meets with the trees/ Air softly crowing, singing fears to sleep/ Will you ever know how much I love you for that?" It's a constant build that crashes into the next track, "Palisade", a song that serves as climax and release before moving into another direction. It's an exciting one-two: these pieces pick up where Failing left off; the formula is updated, but not abandoned. The same goes for the group-singing of the next song, "Gjs". But then, they take it down a few notches, often ending up too mid-tempo and over-long. The music remains pretty, and even knottier, but feels less life-affirming.
For instance, the spacious, ultimately clamoring "&Serenading" would be a good closer ("When I was a boy I saw things/ That no one else could see/ So why am I so blind at 22?"), but instead of the gorgeously repeated finale ("the sound of the driving snow that drives me home to you"), it's the downtempo, shimmering acoustics and humming vocals of the pretty-but-slight "TheLastWordIsRejoice" that serve as our exit. Like the forced titling, it's inoffensive, but feels unnecessary, as do other grown-up touches on End. That line from "&Serenading" quoted above reminds you just how young these guys were, though, and why they might feel the need to ratchet it up on their sophomore record, considering the attention given to the first.
Not that it mattered, of course. They ended and then, as bands do now, they reunited; this remastered two-disc compilation is a good way to hear it all in one sitting (the reissues are also available, without the bonus tracks, on vinyl). None of the alternate take bonus tracks here are especially riveting, and the covers of the Psychedelic Furs' "Love My Way" and Willie Nelson's "Crazy" are mostly forgettable (the latter's actually pretty bad), but it's great to have the relative lo-fi "Rubber Legs", from the 1997 (Don't Forget To) Breathe compilation, the punked-up "Sadder Star", which appears on the 1997 First Crush compilation, and, most importantly, the 1996 "February" b/w "M.D." single, which includes a couple of their best songs.
When I listened to the Power of Failing in real time back then, it was often on a cassette that I'd dubbed from the vinyl, for when I was traveling. Because of that, I always thought "February" and "M.D." were part of the proper record, and was surprised to realize they weren't. That's just one example of how music becomes personal, and shifts according to your own relationship with it. It's something you're faced with when the music of your youth keeps resurfacing, and it can be weird, but also somehow touching. For instance, it's been good going back to these records so many years later, and realizing I find myself moved more by the songs about family than the ones about wondering on roofs alone.


French duo the Blaze are better known for their powerful short films, in which music—their slow, mournful take on house—allows for profound catharsis. But the tracks lack nuance without the visuals.

Territory EP

The Blaze’s debut single, “Virile,” originally appeared on the Bromance label’s Homieland Vol. 2 compilation last year, but if you have come across the French duo’s work, there’s a good chance that it has been in their capacity as filmmakers. The video for “Virile” has logged 1.4 million views in the space of just over a year; their second, “Territory,” has racked up 1.6 million plays in just the past month, and along the way they have earned accolades from Romain Gavras, who directed M.I.A.’s “Born Free” video, and Moonlight director Barry Jenkins, who called their “Territory” clip “THE best piece of art I’ve seen in 2017.”
Both videos, which the artists directed themselves, are visually and conceptually provocative. “Virile” features two men listening to music late into the night in a bare-bones apartment in an urban tower block. They are presumably of North African descent (an impression reinforced by the Arabic titles at the beginning of the clip). Over the course of the video, they smoke spliffs, spar, and—possibly under the influence of MDMA—exhibit a tenderness that’s rare to see between two men on screen, including a will-they-or-won’t-they moment leading up to the edge of a kiss. “Territory” is more straightforward: Here, an emigré returns home to Algiers, where he is tearfully reunited with his family. Like “Virile,” it is a meditative mood piece sumptuously arrayed in shadows and slow motion, and it climaxes with a daybreak dance party on a rooftop overlooking the Mediterranean. In both, music—specifically, the duo’s slow, mournful take on house—serves as the vehicle for the most profound kind of catharsis.
Aside from the videos’ warm portrayal of Arab masculinity, a topic rarely broached in Western media, what is notable about both is what goes unanswered. Are the men in “Virile” lovers, straight men swept up in the moment, or something else? What is the link between tenderness and aggression? Unfortunately, presented without visuals, the Blaze’s music doesn’t display the same degree of nuance. All four songs on their debut EP—“Territory,” “Virile,” and two new tracks, plus two interludes—are cut from the same cloth, with minor-key pianos pooling tearfully around crisp machine rhythms. They represent perfectly capable takes on the style sometimes called UK bass, but they rarely soar in the way that the music so clearly wants to. The perfunctory boom-tick rhythms drag, even with an added push from syncopated 808 toms; the four-bar chord changes feel pat, and the details—a plucked kalimba in “Sparks & Ashes,” a percussive synth counterpoint in “Territory”—aren’t enough to break gravity’s spell. The lone exception is “Virile,” in which rising and falling synthesizers contribute to a state of tension that’s genuinely moving.
The main sticking point is the vocals. It’s not so much that English isn’t the duo’s strong suit; they get the basic ideas across just fine, despite the occasional clunker (“They light me up your flying clouds/They ever get me high like a cool blunt smoke”). But, whether compensating for their accents or their untutored voices, they’ve aggressively pitched down the vocals on all four tracks, rendering dancehall-inspired cadences thick and gelatinous. Processed vocals are par for the course in this strain of bassy house music, but they simply don’t work here. Instead of coming off as druggy and suggestive, they sound mannered, lugubrious, gloopy. The backing tracks might have held up better with a stronger vocal performance; instead, both beats and vocals feel like scratch tracks in search of a final take. The good news is that, once you’ve seen the videos, the visuals are so strong that the music is likely to function mainly to trigger memories of the visuals. Club tracks like these are a dime a dozen, but the vision the Blaze display is far more rare; whatever they do next, you can bet that it will be worth watching.


In 1981, Rush fully transformed from a prog-rock trio to a mainstay of classic rock. A 40th-anniversary reissue of Moving Pictures captures the band at their absolute peak.

Rush: Moving Pictures (40th Anniversary)

Moving Pictures (40th Anniversary)

Dismissed by critics as Led Zeppelin wannabes, the Canadian prog-rock trio Rush spent the ’70s converting adolescents to bookish fancies with Alex Lifeson’s six-string runs, Neil Peart’s percussive kinetics, and a dexterousness on bass by Geddy Lee that complemented a vocal approach best described as a legible shriek. It awed kids who grew up with Rush. In 1997, Stephen Malkmus devoted a stanza to Lee in Pavement’s “Stereo.” So the Canadian trio and Zeppelin had similarities after all: Like Robert Plant, Lee sang as if he were a second guitar. Differences too: Where Zep stank of sex, Rush smelled of bookshelf dust.
Gauche enough (i.e. young enough) to laud the “genius of Ayn Rand” in the liner notes to 2112 (1976), Rush flitted through the decade setting their influences to music. Now that no one younger than 50 gives a damn about why punk recoiled from prog, those albums before 1980 offer solid, stolid musical elongations on the addled fiction familiar to, say, fans of Genesis’ 1973 album Selling England by the Pound. With Rush, though, there was a turbulence, an aversion to the ornamental. When they discovered they could sound pretty on A Farewell to Kings’ “Closer to the Heart,” it was a glass of wine after years of grape juice.
Touring had taught Rush the interior design of their own material. Moving Pictures is the result. Released in 1981, their eighth studio album—reissued in honor of its 40th anniversary in a sumptuous multidisc/multi-LP set—mastered concision. Instead of three- and four-minute things like “Fly By Night,” “The Trees,” and “Closer to the Heart” acting like smoke breaks between epics, the ten-minute “The Camera Eye” is the anomaly amid a suite of often severe tunes with choruses and middle-eights. Taking seriously the notions of progress espoused by their lyrics, Rush must have noticed these bright, shiny tunes on the FM dial mostly recorded by younger men whose brevity matched their hair length.
And rhythms too! Not quite mystic ones, but Rush’s instrumental chops and charming, gawky futurism produced a supple incorporation of dub and reggae. Someone in the Rush dressing room must have loved the Police who were, at the time, three albums into a career that would turn them into the world’s biggest band and most fractious trio. To absorb Black rhythms through the filter of another white trio works as insurance: It’s less fraught to get blamed for borrowing from people who look like you. Rush experimented with a slight skank on Permanent Waves’ “The Spirit of Radio,” which might explain why it became an actual hit in reggae-drenched England than in an America that went through the trouble of keeping Black disco-tinged acts off the air. With Lifeson playing up- and downstrokes, Moving Pictures’ “Vital Signs” shows the most obvious signs of Police work, but the sequencer may bear the influence of Peart’s beloved Ultravox. After all, to quote him, “Everybody got to deviate/From the norm.”
To write a manifesto is folly; songs become manifestos. Such is the case with “Tom Sawyer.” Rush’s signature song embraces technology without succumbing to its dazzle. 1981’s version of Mark Twain’s 19th-century warrior with a mean, mean stride does many things that make sense only in Peart and co-lyricist Pye DuBois’ notebook, but the enthusiasm of Lifeson’s guitar fills and Peart’s nervous triplets are matched by Lee’s Oberheim-OBX solo. The simultaneous lateral and forward motion of their music matched the positivity of the lyrics. As proof they were regular dudes who like the cars that go vroom, Rush offered “Red Barchetta,” an ode to the Italian roadster that idles and revs like one; Lifeson goes from pinched intro to an interlude that cracks the song in half.

As Rush matured into their Moving Pictures era, their instrumental flourishes matched their newfound plainspokeness. An inspiration for bucketloads of maudlin crap, the touring life didn’t affect a muse that had shown to this point little interest in the larger world. “Limelight” presents no complaints—advice not wisdom, remarks not pronouncements. Bands who envy Rush’s gilded cage “must get on with the fascination/The real relation, the underlying theme.” Before anyone can say, “Speak for yourselves, dorks,” the trio builds toward a break less impressive for how Lifeson outdoes David Gilmour in guitar dive-bombing than in Lee’s bass licks. That’s why they’re Rush and you’re not.
And sometimes words are crap. After Hemispheres’ rather ponderous “La Villa Strangiato,” Rush present “YYZ,” an instrumental ready for new wave on which Lifeson and Lee circle each other, back off, and let Peart offer a series of rolls that are the stuff of which fanzines are made.
Thanks to its tautness, conceptual integrity, and the fortuitous manner in which their career ambitions and radio programmer taste intersected, Moving Pictures functioned as much a harbinger of a new artistic era as David Bowie’s Young Americans. It peaked at No. 3 in America, their best chart position to date; the RIAA would certify it five-times platinum. “Tom Sawyer” brushed against the Top 40 gates without gaining entry. Best, Rush was constitutionally incapable of cynicism. “Alienation is the craze,” sang the Cars two years earlier, sounding neither crazy nor alienated but arch; “Put aside the alienation,” Neil Peart countered on “Limelight.” Optimism without sentimentality? In this biz? For a couple of hours, this Moving Pictures package envisages a world of love and light.


The astonishing Innervisions is suffused in the sound and politics of 1973, a conceptually ambitious and sonically innovative pillar of Stevie Wonder’s classic years.

Innervisions

Stevie Wonder was pretty shaken up in 1972. It was the year that his marriage to musical and romantic partner Syreeta Wright came to an end, and the year he opened for the Rolling Stones on the debauched American leg of their Exile on Main St. tour—a trek remembered for hard drugs, bombings, and arrests. By 1973, he was fixated on death.
It was a fantastic era to be spooked: Stock prices tanked while oil prices soared, all amid a steady trickle of news about a scandal revolving around the reelection of President Nixon. In New York City, a 10-year-old Black boy named Clifford Glover was killed while walking with his stepfather to a South Jamaica junkyard when an undercover cop jumped out of a Buick and shot the boy. (“A policeman who shot down a 10-year-old in Queens stood over the boy with his cop shoes in childish blood and a voice said ‘Die you little motherfucker’ and there are tapes to prove it,” Audre Lorde recalled in her poem “Power.”) The optimism of the ’60s had washed away in the blood of murdered Black leaders, revolutionaries, and innocents like Glover. Wonder sang at the young boy’s funeral, stressing to Jet afterward that his outlook was grim, and fast action was imperative: “I hope Black people realize how serious things are and do something serious about it.”
Since 1971, Wonder had been composing in almost daily sessions alongside the artists and engineers Malcolm Cecil and Robert Margouleff. The unlikely but successful partnership birthed 1972’s Music of My Mind and Talking Book, two genre-busting, head-to-toe classics where the two musicians offered an outside perspective, helping Stevie to challenge Motown convention and experiment with synthesizers and overdubs rather than working quickly with a team of writers and session players. The feat boosted Stevie, a reliable hitmaker up until then, into a different milieu, establishing him as a master of the album format while launching back-to-back chart-toppers in “Superstition” and “You Are the Sunshine of My Life.” Touring with the Stones provided access to rock audiences. And Cecil and Margouleff were pushing hard on lyrics, getting Stevie to touch on the political and metaphysical issues he fixated on in private, to sing less about romance and more about the state of the world. “I’d encourage him to write more songs that had bite,” Cecil recalled in author Mark Ribowsky’s 2010 biography Signed, Sealed, and Delivered: The Soulful Journey of Stevie Wonder. “Whenever Stevie came in with a song, I’d twit him, ‘Oh, another bloody love song, huh Stevie?’” He teased what he’d worked on in the studio that summer with the first single, “Higher Ground,” which doubled down on the synth-laced funk and spiritual concerns of “Superstition” as Wonder imagined a better life at the end of the toils of this one. The tragedy of Clifford Glover colored the second single, “Living for the City,” the centerpiece of Wonder’s 1973 classic Innervisions.
“Living for the City” is the key to understanding the many intersecting tensions upon which the greatness of Innervisions rests, the push and pull between the engineers and the artist, the technical innovations, the conceptual bombast, the bond between man and machine, and the roiling sociopolitical outrage. The narrative traces the plight of a Black man from the South devoured by cruelty and systemic racism in the North. Like a Greek tragedy where the protagonist’s fatal flaw is thinking he could escape bigotry, the tale of the boy from Mississippi mirrors experiences of Black American workers since the Great Migration, when redlining, biased policing, and judicial system jank enforced a second-class citizenhood. Wonder sings insistently over a driving funk rhythm—Cecil would interrupt vocal takes in order to rile him up—and coaxes the groove to a climax with atmospheric sounds from stacks of keyboards and synthesizers, chiefly Cecil and Margouleff’s room-sized polyphonic synth, called “The Original New Timbral Orchestra,” or TONTO.
When Wonder first arrived in the ‘60s, he shocked audiences as a young unsighted singer-songwriter, and then wowed them again with a revealing and killer drum solo at 1969’s Harlem Cultural Festival, which was recently resurfaced by Questlove’s Summer of Soul. He later impressed a television audience with his ease with machines in a memorable 1972 appearance on The David Frost Show, where he demoed the ARP 2600 synthesizer and showed his talkbox off in a stunning medley of the Carpenters’ “Close to You” and the Jackson 5’s “Never Can Say Goodbye.” (Creators of these instruments loved the promotion. They put Stevie in the adverts.) He was an autodidact without the benefit of sight, and Innervisions was a wide-ranging display of his talents and interests. Wonder plays every sound on the record, save for some electric and acoustic guitar and bass parts and bits of the percussion, and gives a virtuosic performance, speaking to a universal audience while centering the prideful perseverance of a Black America failed by its own country.
The ’70s were boom times for groundbreaking work with synths, following ‘60s innovations at America’s Moog Music, the UK’s Electronic Music Studios, and elsewhere. In 1971 and 1972, synthetic, sequenced sounds swept into art-rock and jazz, trickling down into popular music. Caped keyboardist Rick Wakeman joined English prog group Yes and played the Minimoog on 1971’s Fragile. Todd Rundgren used EMS’s portable VCS3 synth on his early solo records. It’s the mess of knobs to the right of the singer-songwriter in the studio pic in the liner notes of 1972’s Something/Anything?, a crucial ingredient in the Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” and the instrument Brian Eno played in Roxy Music. Wonder pushed the envelope not just by playing most of Innervisions by himself at a time when popular Black artists could not all count on enjoying such freedoms, but also in his commitment to tones and textures still new to mainstream music. When summarizing he appeal of synthesizers to the presenter David Frost, Wonder said,“The whole point of the instrument, being that you can do so many beautiful things with it, [is to] make sounds that are bigger than life.” Stevie reveled in the funky possibilities of the clavinet on “Higher Ground.” In “Golden Lady,” a Moog bass stood in for the fretwork of a gifted session bassist, to say nothing of Wonder’s ease with the mercurial TONTO, innovation borne out of the artist’s insistence on recording with a skeleton crew.
Innervisions is a tricky album, very much a soul thing with direct ties to records in its Motown lineage like Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, whose social consciousness Stevie tried to channel on 1971’s Where I’m Coming From, although it is best remembered for “Never Dreamed You’d Leave in Summer” and “If You Really Love Me,” notable detours from its political messaging. Innervisions surveys scenes outside of Motown. The anti-drug anthem “Too High” gestures to the technical, intricate grooves of jazz-fusion; “Living for the City” is as much art-rock epic as funk/soul masterpiece. Wonder traveled around the world in nine songs, matching the proggy experiments in contemporary rock gems like Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Todd Rundgren’s A Wizard, a True Star; the playful synthesizer parts in the funk bombs from Birds of Fire by Mahavishnu Orchestra and Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters; the nervous hope of Donny Hathaway’s Extension of a Man; the acoustic jazz of Baden Powell’s Solitude on Guitar; and the horn-filled salsa of Willie Colón and Héctor LaVoe’s Lo Mato. Innervisions collapsed the spaces between avant-garde and mainstream, rock and soul, and jazz and pop music. They had all been playing the same instruments.
Like What’s Going On, Innervisions lays out a problem, then offers solutions: The stresses of the modern age are many, but with truth, goodness, love, and faithfulness, we can beat back the darkness. Wonder’s albums had never been this concise or cohesive in message. Innervisions was his first full-length without any co-writers or covers, a monumental endeavor for both Motown—a hit factory betting against its history again by letting an artist write his own songs—and Stevie, who was pulling thematically consistent pieces out of thin air. The album doesn’t judge or sell easy answers. It nudges you in the direction of a more mindful stewardship of our world and then lets you know that the task will be difficult. (“Jesus Children of America” is fascinatingly slippery. It implores you to place less stock in physical gratification and more in the edification of the mind and soul. It reminds you that this path is riddled with grifters and conmen. And it’s way too hyped about transcendental meditation to qualify as run-of-the-mill church proselytizing. Innervisions is a potpourri of ideas from Eastern and Western philosophies, but its call to inspire change through personal and cultural reckoning is grounded, less pie in the sky and more mutual aid and good vibes. It’s a very ’70s outlook, a specific response to the reverberations in modern bohemian culture as the counterculture grew more fractured and paranoid, but it still rings true in its questing for peace and love in the shadows of systemic racism and widespread political corruption.
Three days after Innervisions was released, Stevie Wonder was traveling through North Carolina on the way to a benefit concert for an independent Black radio station when his driver bumped a flatbed truck packed with wood logs, sending one careening through the windshield into Wonder’s forehead, causing a brain contusion. (It is said that upon hearing “Higher Ground” while in a coma, Stevie moved his fingers.) Perhaps he was right to be terrified in 1973. He was right that America was in dire straits. Nixon resigned in 1974 with Innervisions’s “He’s Misstra Know-It-All”—“He’s a man with a plan/Got a counterfeit dollar in his hand”—still rattling around as Stevie’s latest single. The album’s strides in exploring a wider palette of instruments for Black funk music were met and matched in the brilliance of Parliament-Funkadelic and Prince in later years. (The LinnDrum, American designer Roger Linn’s matter-of-factly titled drum machine, is as crucial to Prince’s ’80s as TONTO is to Stevie’s ’70s.) Innervisions endures as a touchstone for young auteurs crafting expansive, orchestral music and songwriters tackling big issues without overwhelming listeners.
Genius shines in any setting. This is music pliable enough to have been reworked by Barbra Streisand, who had a hit in 1974 recasting Wonder’s conciliatory breakup tune “All Is Fair in Love” as an orchestral ballad; Madlib, whose side project Yesterday’s New Quintet turned “Visions” into a Brazilian jazz workout on the 2004 covers album Stevie; and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, whose rendition of “Higher Ground” on 1989’s Mother’s Milk added screaming guitars and gang vocals. When R&B group Troop sang “Living for the City” in Mario Van Peebles’s 1991 crime flick New Jack City, it highlighted how little in the character of New York had changed since Stevie sang about the city destroying young Black men almost two decades earlier, a truth reinforced in hundreds more accounts of horrific police killings and brutality stretching out into the 21st century. Innervisions addressed the musical tastes and political jitters of 1973, but foresight keeps it relevant. It implores us to keep striving.