The Philadelphia rapper’s new EP may be more straightforward than usual, but even at her most conventional, Whack is at least attempting to keep you off-balance.

Rap?

In a world where rappers are all but encouraged to drop music as often as possible, Tierra Whack is content to play the long game. She cut her teeth on the Philadelphia cipher circuit under the name Dizzle Dizz before embracing her birth name and bowling over the music industry with her 2018 debut album Whack World. Part rap album and part experimental film exhibition, the project—15 songs, each only 60 seconds—birthed elaborate worlds from Whack’s demented imagination and sheer rapping skill. It was delightfully weird, catchy, and colorful.
Whack didn’t exactly disappear after Whack World, but her output remained mercurial. She recorded unreleased songs with Meek Mill and Childish Gambino and briefly toured with 6LACK. She dropped a handful of singles through her Whack History Month series in 2019 and found creative partners in Adobe and Adult Swim. Instead of barreling ahead with another project, Whack took advantage of the time and resources afforded to her by Whack World’s success to metamorphize within a technicolor cocoon of her own making.
That sense of fun and feeling things out has permeated the nearly dozen singles Whack has released since 2019—which have seesawed in quality. It’s strange to consider that with all this baggage, Rap?—her first proper project in almost four years—has touched down with very low stakes attached. This isn’t a Whack World sequel; in fact, these three songs have more in common with loosies like “feel good” and “Dora” than a shapeshifting collaboration like the Flying Lotus-produced “Yellow Belly” from 2019. Rap? may be more straightforward than usual, but even at her most conventional, Whack is at least attempting to keep you off-balance.
The most disarming aspect of Rap? is how little of it actually disarms. There are no surprises waiting to be unpacked and few risks taken across its barely 10-minute runtime. Whack’s vocals remain the most exciting part of her music; she’s constantly searching for new pockets to settle in and new melodies to turn into earworms. “Stand Up” and “Millions” are flex anthems that tease at the impish nature of her infamous Instagram freestyles without rocking the boat too hard. That’s not to say she doesn’t occasionally impress—“Millions” has a handful of clever bars (“I’ma do ’em nasty like sugar and grits,” “On these nigga’s head like a white boy beanie”)—but Whack sounds content to push along at a lower gear. “Meagan Good” sidesteps these problems with a story about finding space for self-love in the ashes of a failed relationship, Whack’s growing confidence shining through in her words and steely delivery.
Whack is still rapping well, but the production leaves much to be desired. Producer and frequent collaborator J Melodic handles two cuts, including “Millions,” whose bouncy piano keys and vocal coos make it the most inviting beat of the bunch, while the minimal synths and kick drum of “Stand Up” offer the song a pulse but little else. The submerged sounds of “Meagan Good”—produced by T-Minus, J Louis, and Sam Gellaitry—feel like they were sourced by searching “Meek Mill introspective rap type beat” on YouTube. Whack’s earlier singles like her breakout hit “Mumbo Jumbo” or 2019’s “Unemployed” were as jittery and expansive as Whack herself, their respective pools of personality pushing both higher by association. By contrast, most of the production on Rap? either sounds ready for an Apple commercial or seethes and fades into the background like afternoon shadows swallowed by approaching dusk. It’s a strange dichotomy.
Since she first made it big, Whack has thrived on unpredictability. Her output has been on a hyper-controlled drip, which trains audiences to expect the unexpected and gives her room to expand in any direction she wants creatively. That said, while Rap? has interesting moments and Whack is still engaging as a vocalist, its production renders it largely lowkey and indistinct. Whack’s music doesn’t have to be experimental or off-kilter for it to be good, but these songs are largely lacking in personality, especially compared to those loose singles. Whatever comes next, maybe this will prove to have been a stopgap worth taking.

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On his new set of late-night country disco, the Texas singer known as “Big Velvet” leans into the cartoonish undertones of his booming baritone. He always sounded oversized—now he makes music to match.

Country Coming Down

A native of Tyler, Texas, Paul Cauthen paid his dues on the red-dirt country circuit as part of Sons of Fathers, an Americana duo who released a pair of sturdy LPs in the first half of the 2010s. He went solo in 2016 with My Gospel, an album that emphasized his debt to the original country outlaws; often, it sounded like Johnny Cash fronting Waylon Jennings’ lean, hard-driving backing band. My Gospel and its sequel EP, Have Mercy, were earnest throwback country records that placed his booming baritone—a voice that’s earned him the nickname “Big Velvet”—squarely at center stage. But just when Cauthen appeared to be walking a fairly conventional country road, a devastating breakup led him to a squalid sojourn at the Belmont Hotel in Dallas, where he wrote the roiling, nocturnal songs for 2019’s Room 41.
Country Coming Down, Cauthen’s third full-length album, proves that the outlaw funk of Room 41 highlights like “Cocaine Country Dancing” was no detour: It was a new direction. But where that album documented a dark night of the soul, Country Coming Down is a gaudy funhouse, illuminated by glitterball. In these songs, Cauthen discovers a whole world within the pulsating disco beat of “Cocaine Country Dancing,” doubling down on its after-hours decadence and creating an overblown hedonistic persona to match his nickname.
Listening to Cauthen bellow about drinking a 30-pack a day or brag about visiting a Piggly Wiggly over a big, dumb beat raises a simple question: Is he being serious or is this shtick? Cauthen admitted to Rolling Stone his latest music is a “little bit of mischief, little bit of fun,” suggesting the puffed-chest bravado of first single “Country as Fuck” is satirical. (Lyrics that take a swipe at the old Kenny Chesney hit “She Thinks My Tractor’s Sexy” also suggest as much.) But the odd, ingratiating thing about Country Coming Down is how the tacky thump of its lead-off track echoes through the whole album, blurring the lines between act and authenticity. If the single is intended as a lark, why does it have a close cousin in “Country Clubbin’,” a purportedly straight funk jam propelled by a fuzz guitar so compressed it sounds like a synth? Plenty of other cuts mine a similar country-disco vein, such as the chilled-out groove “Champagne & a Limo," the fuzzed-out blues “Cut a Rug,” and the riotous “Fuck You Money,” a stomping rocker delivered with a nasty sneer.
By indulging the lurid elements of his late-night country, Cauthen has discovered a distinctive voice, one that leans into the slightly cartoonish undertones of his booming baritone: He already sounded oversized, and now he makes music to match. The softer moments also benefit from Cauthen going for broke. The simmering “Caught Me at a Good Time” splices modern R&B inflections with old-fashioned country soul, “High Heels” eases into satin-draped sensuality, and the shimmering keyboards on the placid “Till the Day I Die” give the ballad a slight chillwave air.
Astute listeners will note that the title Country Coming Down is a tip of a hat to Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” a hangover treatise that became a standard at the dawn of the 1970s. Cauthen is surely aware of the allusion, and by nodding to the outlaw past, he demonstrates how he no longer follows their blueprint. He’s also not quite following in the footsteps of Kacey Musgraves or Ashley Monroe, who blend modern dance, throwback pop, and country with a distinctly contemporary flair. Cauthen remains a traditionalist in some respects—his sensibility and funky sounds are almost defiantly retro—but Country Coming Down illustrates he’s no longer beholden to the past. He’s ready to have fun with it.


With chintzy synths and cryptic lyrics, the artist formerly known as Inga Copeland challenges deep-seated assumptions about musical taste and emotive songcraft.

The Smoke

Lolina doesn’t give the impression that she especially wants to be understood. As one half of the experimental electronic duo Hype Williams and as a solo artist, the musician formerly known as Inga Copeland has resisted easily legible narratives at every turn. She’s said little about herself in the few interviews she’s given, and her music tends to confound most of the expectations a listener might bring to it. Her latest full-length release, The Smoke, centers Lolina’s singing voice more than her solo debut, Because I’m Worth It, but that doesn’t make it any easier to grasp. Where the human voice often asks listeners to identify with the person behind it, Lolina’s only deepens the sense of bewilderment that her music often provokes. Listening to The Smoke is like hearing a voice trying to locate itself in an unstable environment, rubbing up against strange synth textures, asymmetrical beats, and jagged melodic phrases. Like her contemporaries Klein, Mhysa, and Jenny Hval, Lolina challenges ingrained assumptions about what songs are and what they can do, dragging her listeners through an exhilarating funhouse of sound.
Because women are often presumed to make inherently confessional, diaristic music, it’s a thrill to hear a voice like Lolina’s get tangled up in songs that can’t be tied to anyone’s personal life, hers or otherwise. The Smoke is adamantly suspicious of emotionality and literal meaning; like SOPHIE’s songs, whose lyrics often riff on an abstract handful of words, it’s pure play. Lolina harbors skepticism toward the idea of body music, too. While much electronic music lives and dies on the beat, Lolina’s compositions don’t pound or thump. Instead, they inch, squirm, and writhe through their runtimes. Dull bass drums, hand percussion, and finger snaps, often playing polyrhythms, jolt each track along. Above them, Lolina’s voice, an M.I.A.-style speak-sing, floats on a pulse all its own.
Like the Knife often did, Lolina tends to reach for synth patches that sound cheap or chintzy, like they’ve come out of the sound card of a 1990s home computer barely clinging to life. Combined with her queasy, unresolved melodies, those textures compound The Smoke’s dizziness: Nothing sounds quite like it “should,” and everything is always shifting slightly out of place. Against a deep, swaying bassline, an itchy synth figure scrapes its way across “Fake City, Real City”; on “A Path of Weeds and Flowers,” a stiff arpeggio cages a flurry of chirps; fake strings slash through “The River’; and “Style and Punishment” builds on tense, rattling notes that oscillate like a snore. These are all annoying sounds—in a more traditional album, they might be intolerable—but when Lolina deploys them, she tweaks the subliminal cues by which discerning listeners learn to sort the “bad” sounds out from the “good.” The absurd musical hierarchy called “taste” comes into relief here, with all the goalposts moved and all the mirrors concave. The Smoke doesn’t want to prove itself to you so much as it wants to shuffle your foundation, to make you think about what you take for granted when a piece of music makes you feel affinity or aversion.
In her casual, teasing register, Lolina does occasionally sing lyrics that hit on a gut level. When, on the throbbing, swarming “The River,” she murmurs, “You say you care for me/That means you don’t,” she haloes her words with a trace of pathos. All throughout The Smoke float snatches of human movement: desire, disgust, shame, sorrow. They never cohere into anything like narrative, but they’re enough to ground the chaos flitting around them. As soon as she’s lured you into identifying with her, though, Lolina likes to change the subject, to move from something poignant to something inane without missing an off-kilter beat: “Run, baby, run, I’m at the bus stop/One pound fifty takes you anywhere you wanna go.” There is meaning and then it dissipates, leaving you pondering what it takes to make meaning in the first place.


For the first time ever, the Southern metal expats return with the same lineup as their previous album. A little outside input could’ve gone a long way.

Stone

The only essential moment on Stone, the sixth album by beloved metal transmogrifiers Baroness, arrives just four minutes after the record begins and lasts only 30 seconds. As the band reaches the end of the chugging chorus that anchors “Last Word,” its newest member, Gina Gleason, rushes ahead, her guitar line swiveling like some snaky Chuck Berry lead that coils so tightly it snaps, leaving her to reassemble the pieces in a rush of squealing notes. It is a perfect guitar solo, a thrill ride so disorientating you’re left to wonder where you are not just in the song but in the world.
Gleason’s paroxysm complete, Baroness retreat into a haze of tremolo guitars, reorienting themselves until they can return to the tune’s main premise—that is, a plodding and byzantine reflection on mortality that suggests the Foo Fighters for a particularly bookish biker gang. Neither “Last Word” nor Stone ever returns to the ecstatic heights of Gleason’s shuddering solo. By record’s end, you may wonder if Baroness can reach them at all.
Baroness emerged in the mid-’00s as perhaps the most exciting and versatile band in a teeming renaissance of Southern metal. Leader John Baizley paired his strong-jawed stentorian bark with an unfailing sense of melody and real compositional ambition—think the Allman Brothers Band, Pink Floyd, and even Genesis, strained through the malevolence of swampy Southern forebears like Eyehategod. Even as the lineup often shifted, they made stepwise career moves, signing to genre bastion Relapse for a series of stunning records. After a devastating 2012 bus crash splintered the lineup, Baroness regrouped, launched their own label, and pursued slightly more commercial impulses, meting out eccentricity inside wildly accessible songs. “Shock Me,” the Grammy-nominated powerhouse from 2015’s Purple, should still be a radio staple, as should “Tourniquet,” from 2019’s Gold & Grey. At multiple points during the last 15 years, Baroness seemed on the verge of becoming a very big rock band.
But Baroness decided to downsize for Stone, their first album in four years, converting an Airbnb along the mountainous edge of Pennsylvania and New York into a studio where they could do everything themselves. This marked the first time that the same group of musicians who recorded the prior Baroness album reconvened to make the next one. Stone, however, begs for an outsider’s input, for someone to have said, “No, that’s not it.” So much of Stone feels like stitched-together composites of what has worked well in the past. Momentum is often squandered, and the electrifying bits rarely rise into something more.
Several minutes after Gleason’s blessed solo, for instance, “Last Word” wanders into a repetitious wash of electric jazz, as if Baroness didn’t know where else to go. These individual pieces are interesting enough, sure; note for note, Baroness remain one of the most remarkable and capable bands at the intersection of heavy metal, hard rock, and psychedelia. But this is Baroness as disjointed prog, their songs now composed of rusting spare parts that don’t work together. “Anodyne” is a pouncing rock song, its four-on-the-floor march boosting a tremendous Baizley hook. As it dips and dives into assorted breakdowns, bridges, and solos, however, Baroness never capitalize on their own might, never overwhelm or even exhilarate. Then it just stops, as if both tape and ideas simply ran out.
Baroness do try a few novel sounds, but they don’t fare much better. Early on, they devote a quarter of the album to a three-song suite that may be the nadir of their career. A ringer for an overly fussy Clutch jam, “Beneath the Rose” slams into “Choir,” a laughable spoken-word tale about Satan’s mistress murmured above an elementary Motorik improvisation. The triptych ends, mercifully, with a minute-long folk farewell that might have made a lo-fi Shrimper Records mixtape in an off year. You can almost picture Baroness in their Appalachian Airbnb, throwing things at the wall just to pretend they stuck.
The songs get stronger toward the end. With its forlorn acoustic preamble slowly yielding to shout-out-loud aplomb, “Magnolia” summons a frail body slipping into extravagantly engraved armor, formidable but delicate in the way Baroness’ best songs have always been. “Under the Wheel,” written by bassist Nick Jost, takes a similar dynamic path from somber to stomping. But its textures—crosshatched dissonance, fluttering falsetto, preening basslines—feel fresh for Baroness.
Even the acoustic closer, “Bloom,” is a corrective for the six-string bauble that begins Stone, a placeholder that even Baizley admits was little more than a mood-setter. “I lost my scepter/I lost my wings,” Baizley and Gleason coo in this sweet little country hymn of mortal homecoming. “Leave me a simple life.” By the time a gentle noise collage marks its end, Stone feels like you’ve sat through a half-hour mixtape of Baroness’ past flotsam just to arrive, possibly, at a 15-minute suggestion of its future.
Baizley often contemplates oblivion and the end during Stone, with bells tolling and suns setting and pyres burning. But near the close of “Under the Wheel,” the album’s clear winner, he sings, “So take the best of us/And burn the rest,” stretching the syllables into an unexpected hook that feels optimistic, as if he looks forward to the serotiny that can come with fire. There is at least a hint of hopeful concession there, of rising above some temporary station by recognizing something’s got to change. Now they just have to set flame to the pieces of the past they no longer need.


Pains of Being Pure at Heart's 2009 debut introduced a band that had not only mastered their influences, but seemed on the brink of doing something truly new with them. On their new Hell EP, which features an original and quick covers of Felt and James, it's clear they have no real interest in that.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Hell EP

Hell EP

For all the instant good will they stockpiled with their woozily sincere take on ’80s and ’90s indie-pop, the Pains of Being Pure at Heart have always invited doubts that they were, at their core, little more than gifted impressionists. Mostly they’ve let any criticisms about their originality bounce right off of them. Instead of trying to prove themselves more than the sum of their record collections, they’ve simply continued showing off how vast those record collections are. 2011’s Belong expanded on their debut’s C86 jangle with blood-rushing alternative rock, while last year’s understated Days of Abandon took an even deeper tour through the Hall of Semi-Obscure UK College Rock than their debut did.
That tour continues on their new Hell EP. It’s one of the band’s most low-stakes releases yet: an original song, which band leader Kip Berman first posted as a demo along with several songs that didn’t make the cut for Days of Abandon, and two quick covers. In hindsight, he might have done well to find room for Hell's title track on Days of Abandon; its chipper spirit would have helped lighten an album that sometimes begged for a pick-me-up. Like nearly every Pains of Being Pure at Heart track, it’s obsessively specific in its influences, with a sticky disco groove that nods to Orange Juice and the puppy-dog giddiness of an early Close Lobsters single. Even Berman's vocals feel like an homage; he sings in a warbled sigh that sounds a lot like Pete Shelley.
Given how openly the band has always embraced their influences, it’s surprising they haven’t recorded more covers—Berman often seems to be channeling other artists’ voices and accents anyway, so it’s not much of a leap to sing their words, too. Each of Hell’s covers serve as a statement of taste. One celebrates one of the quintessential overlooked British guitar-pop bands Felt’s “Ballad of the Band”, while the other reclaims a familiar if underappreciated hit, James’ “Laid”, a treasure of a song that lost much of its cache when the American Pie franchise claimed it as its own.
Both are too faithful to offer any real surprises, and the band’s last album already owed so much to Felt that their “Ballad of the Band” almost feels redundant. “Laid” delivers more of a kick. Their version doesn’t quite capture the orgasmic glee of James’ original, but it features a game lead vocal turn from A Sunny Day in Glasgow singer Jen Goma, who’s been moonlighting with Pains since their recent lineup shakeup. Unlike Berman, she’s not afraid to leave her own stamp on her cover, and she punctuates the song’s most biting line with just the right amount of a punk snarl: “Dye my eyes and call me pretttttttty.”
Pains’ debut album introduced a band that had not only clearly mastered their influences, but seemed on the brink of doing something truly new with them. Six years later, it’s now clear they have no interest in that; Berman is too reverentially devoted to his muses to risk bastardizing them. When a band’s output is this consistently pleasant, it's petty to complain too much about originality, but Hell is the group’s second overly safe release in a row, and it’s hard not to wish they’d start taking a few more chances. This band is talented enough to be aiming much higher.


On her first album in six years, Chan Marshall roams the many moods of her songwriting with a careful, soft-spoken power.

Wanderer

Chan Marshall’s career is solitary and self-sustaining like few others. Her catalog is a mountain range, each peak indifferent to what preceded it and unconcerned with what follows it. With barely more than her voice and a guitar, she has built a rich and variable universe spanning an array of moods—unnerving, consoling, paranoiac, sensual—and her albums situate themselves along those moods like stations of the cross. They don’t change much from one to the next, but even if they sound similar, they each feel different.
Wanderer is her 10th album, her first in six years, and the first that revisits each and every one of those moods, at least fleetingly. The opening title track brings her wondrous voice to the fore, highlighting the chocolate rasp she used so well on 2006’s The Greatest. “Robbin Hood” is based on the same minor chord as “Werewolf” from 2002’s You Are Free. I spent minutes trying to figure out which song “You Get” directly reminded me of before realizing it reminded me, indirectly, of all of them—any time she’s ever picked up a guitar, summoned a few words of generalized wisdom, and dug into the song’s veins to scrape out all the feeling she could.
These are paths Marshall has led us down before—the piano chords pooling into their own delay pedals, fingerpicked guitars lingering on a minor chord like a blank stare held a beat too long. Rob Schnapf, who’s also produced for Elliott Smith and Beck, shapes the record with an ear for low, bass sounds, both the throatier, huskier notes in Marshall’s voice and the rounded pop of the hand-slapped percussion on “In Your Face.” The resulting mood lands somewhere between swaying hips and nervous rocking. The blissed-out piano of “Horizon” feels both beautiful and slightly vacant, like it could be streaming down from heaven or piping weakly into a drugstore. It is one of the album’s most arresting songs, in part for the brittle, anxious energy rattling around inside it.
Marshall’s lyrics, as they often do, arrow themselves towards an unnamed “you,” carrying notes of resentment and affirmation. On Wanderer, she often blends the two, warning, indicting, and soothing all in the same breath. “There is nothing like time to give you things you can need,” she advises on “You Get,” an echo of Sun highlight “Nothin’ But Time,” and a piece of wisdom near-grandmotherly in its affect. But then, from the same song: “You never listen to time, you never build up the times.” Only a slight rewording, and yet it feels pregnant with meaning, an accusation lobbed at someone who has never had to rebuild themselves after trauma.
Most of her lyrics don’t ask to be typed, because they live inside her phrasing, the hesitant way she holds the words in her mouth, like she is considering them as she sings them. This oblique, ambulatory phrasing can sound like rambling, but within the music, it works more like pacing—her repetition loosens you up, and then she slips the knife. Consider this stretch from “Black”:

A dead man now, once was a friend
Ran all the way upstairs just to make my defense saved me
Threw me in the bath, with the ice and a slap
Can of Coke down my throat, almost his whole hand fittin’ in—I was dying
First I was amused, close to death ever been
But when the white light went away I knew death was setting in

It is a crystalline, harrowing short story in one verse, and the entire album could stop here for you to live inside its bleak details—the can of Coke, the “dead man now, once was a friend,” the “first I was amused.” But Marshall, and the song, murmurs onward.
There are a few other moments on Wanderer that truly freeze time this way. The Rihanna cover “Stay” reminds us how Marshall can rearrange a song simply by squinting at it—suddenly the most important line was buried somewhere in the middle. The lyrics on “Stay” are pared back but otherwise recognizable, as is the arrangement, but the pauses happen in all different places, making Marshall’s “I want you to stay” a completely different sentence from Rihanna’s.
Another time-stopper is the Lana Del Rey collaboration “Woman.” Their voices—deep, confident, hooded—blend into one, with Del Rey technically on backup. Del Rey’s universe, full of bright candy reds and pastels, does not resemble Marshall’s on the surface, but the two of them share a weary resignation, a survivor’s determination, that makes their duet feel like two halves of one circling thought. The chorus is simply “I’m a woman,” but repeated with varying shades of defiance, pain, pride, warmth, and urgency. The word “woman”—as label, as cultural identity, as epithet—streaks its way up into the sky, glittering and burning off the fog.
Apart from these moments, Wanderer drags just the tiniest bit. It speaks softly from the echoes of the best Cat Power moments, which means it doesn’t ice-pick you in the center of your most treasured insecurities the way some of her most celebrated music has. She just doesn’t aim there—she aims for your affirmation, she pierces your armor. It seems churlish to miss the impact, but it’s equally difficult not to yearn for it.


The Chicago rapper’s collaborative EP with the L.A. producer Terrace Martin is a jubilant six-song burst of summertime grooves and throwback funk.

Ric Wilson / Terrace Martin: They Call Me Disco EP

They Call Me Disco EP

Burgeoning Chicago rapper Ric Wilson is a throwback to a certain type of ’70s-era do-everything star: part MC, part bandleader, he’d be at home rapping with the Sugarhill Gang or shouting adlibs over fellow Chicagoan Frankie Knuckles’ thumping, soulful house. Wilson, who has a string of singles and EPs to his name, came up with the same Young Chicago Authors collective that birthed Noname, Saba, and Chance the Rapper, among others; like those artists, his verses often veer toward the poetic and cerebral, eschewing traditional rhyme patterns and subject matter for free-associative dives into the personal, political, and nonsensical.
They Call Me Disco, Wilson’s collaborative EP with the prolific Los Angeles producer  and multi-instrumentalist Terrace Martin, is a jubilant six-song burst of summertime grooves and throwback funk. Martin, a longstanding collaborator of Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar, and a producer for several other West Coast mainstays, is in his comfort zone, assembling four-on-the-floor drums, thick slabs of bass, and simple but rich chords throughout to create a warm facsimile of old school funk—spanning Lakeside to The Gap Band—with a dose of neo-soul sprinkled in. Wilson and Martin’s chemistry is undeniable; while not nearly as nimble (technically or lyrically) as Kendrick, Kurupt, DJ Quik, or any other of Martin’s nasally L.A. collaborators, Wilson’s conversational verses nonetheless sound just as natural over Martin’s layered beats. They’re not reinventing the wheel by any means, but on They Call Me Disco, Martin and Wilson know how to make your feet move, and, more importantly, how to make you feel good.
Wilson’s greatest strength—his undeniable enthusiasm and charisma—is also at times his biggest downfall. His obvious musicality and inventiveness notwithstanding, Wilson’s eagerness can exacerbate the fact that he’s often stringing together irreverent non-sequiturs. When he tries too hard to espouse a worldview beyond peace, love, and confidence, he can come off as cringey (“Slappin’ hoes with my left/Fight for rights with my right,” he raps on “Breakin Rules”) or sophomoric (“Global warming is swarming/Beyond the matrix/While we out killing /For colorism and hatred,” he ponders on closer “Beyond Me”). They Call Me Disco, as a title, suggests the birth of a new persona, but in reality it’s more like Wilson figuring out what he wants to say in real time.
Despite these moments of little sibling-like eagerness, Wilson’s—and by extension, Martin’s—giddiness is mostly contagious. And when Wilson doesn’t try too hard, the EP is pure joy, a transportive, funkified missive from another, happier dimension. “Don’t Kill the Wave” is the best of the project’s collection of dancefloor-fillers (though “Move Like This” is a close second): a foot-stomping, synth-flooded smash, it takes a page from Kendrick’s pulsing, Martin-produced “King Kunta” and adds some Dâm-Funk flair, as Wilson gleefully anoints himself “the disco Kaepernick.” Wilson and Martin have more than one gear, too—standout “Before You Let Go,” which features a lush contribution from singer Malaya, has shades of frequent Martin collaborator Thundercat, complete with spaced-out chords and a slinking half-time groove as Wilson courts a potential lover.
Wilson ends the EP with a question. “Why do I see color when I’m livin’ in gray?” he asks, uncharacteristically somber. Instead of an answer, They Call Me Disco provides a perspective shift: in a moment when we’re all living gray, Wilson and Martin are here to remind us of the color that never left.


Australian band with radio-friendly ambitions follows its "Sweet Disposition" single with a record that shoots for the heights of the Arctic Monkeys or U2.

Conditions

The Temper Trap didn't come out of nowhere. But even in an age of instant global communication, Australia is still pretty far away from most of the rest of us. So when this Melbourne rock foursome with stadium-sized ambitions first landed in my inbox last October, it was a modest revelation. Curtis Vodka, Alaska's remixer extraordinaire, was pushing all the right tech-textural buttons on an epic reworking of "Sweet Disposition", a majestic anthem which, if annoyingly derivative, had "mainstream hit" written all over it. Listeners who Shazam'd the original after hearing it in ads for Sky Sports TV in the UK-- or, stateside, on the trailer and soundtrack to alt-emo romcom (500) Days of Summer-- probably know the feeling.
Hemispheric differences may have given the Temper Trap room to develop their radio-friendly sound without getting pushed prematurely into the spotlight (for real: sorry, Black Kids), but otherwise their debut album could've been made just about anywhere. Conditions is one for the Coldplay set-- all tightly executed grandiosity and U2 pedals, generally with [pounding](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbE1-ZPz-Cg "The Doves, "Pounding"" ) drums, soaring vocals about steadfastness or mortality or whatever, one rumbling bass note per arpeggiated guitar chord, and a modest drizzling of synths. Unfortunately, when you adopt the trappings of revolutionary significance without showing much interest in advancing beyond the revolutions of 20 years ago, you sound ridiculous. Southern conservatives are super concerned about racial discrimination now, you guys.
Defined by almost any measure except musical creativity or lyrical ingenuity, the Temper Trap are a lot better than I'm making them sound. Dougie Mandagi's virtuosic falsetto is the kind of instrument that should come with a money-back Jeff-Buckley-comparison guarantee. When Mandagi comes in, over ecclesiastical keyboard stabs and handclaps on opener "Love Lost", there's a brief glimmer of hope Conditions will end up being more like TV on the Radio, with all that New York group's restless adventurousness, than, um, whichever band we gave that "U.2" rating. His bandmates are no slouches, either, as instrumental finale "Drum Song" shows. If its jagged rhythmic attack owes something to Arctic Monkeys, then it's no coincidence-- producer Jim Abbiss also helmed the brainy Brits' fateful debut, along with albums for Kasabian, Adele, and others.
What the Temper Trap do devastatingly well is drape post-office-party mistake-hookup tackiness in the lofty imagery of global struggle. You can just picture Mandagi standing on a mountaintop for "Sweet Disposition", his hair blowing in Bono's wind, but remember, ladies: Some insincere sketchball with limited imagination is going to use this to try to get you to have sex with him. "Just stay there/ 'Cause I'll be coming over," Mandagi booms. "Won't stop to surrender." Well, love is a battlefield, right?
Elsewhere, the Temper Trap's pairing of sweeping portentousness with mundane douchebaggery is trickier to overlook. "I pledge myself allegiance to a battle not to sleep at home," Mandagi clarifies on another single, the reasonably catchy uptempo electro-rocker "Fader". Synth-dripping slow jam "Fools" adds, "I want it, I want it, I want it," amid rebukes to unnamed, uhh, fools. Cold War Kids-ish indie nod "Down River" pulls out all the orchestral, choral, and vaguely baptismal flourishes in Neon Bible's book to repeat, "Go, don't stop." And remember "Love Lost"? It adapts a line from "Amazing Grace" into a request to "flash your heart." Yeah, open up your shirt and-- ohhh. One more in the name of love: Latest UK single "Science of Fear" samples Robert F. Kennedy's famous remarks on the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. I take it Mandagi still hasn't found what he's looking for.
It's telling to learn where, in fact, the Temper Trap did come from. The first thing producer Abbiss apparently heard from the band was a demo of "Soldier On", Conditions' Muse-rific nadir. Mandagi tells the BBC, "His wife really liked it so apparently they had a moment together and out of obedience to his wife Jim decided to record us." The six-minute track moves from Grace-ful guitar and falsetto into gnashing prog-rock bombast, until Mandagi is seriously howling at "death." I'm gonna assume he means the little one-- what the French call "la petite mort."


Recorded in 2010, Prince’s first posthumous album of all unreleased material is a state-of-the-union concept record in which he bluntly broadcasts his opinions on taxes, technology, drugs, religion, and the music industry.

Welcome 2 America

Prince has some great protest songs—“Sign o’ the Times,” “1999,” “America,” “Ronnie, Talk to Russia,” and “Love Sign,” to name a few—but he was never a great protest songwriter. Amid all of the dizzying ups and downs of his four-decade career, one of the few things that remained constant was his willingness to put subtlety and artifice aside if there was a message that he felt needed to get across, be it “Abraham Lincoln was a racist,” “Let’s take all the guns away,” or “Don’t let your children watch television until they know how to read.” He had some good points, and he could be passionate in his conviction and poignant in his starry-eyed pleas for peace, but the intricacies of his songs about love, sex, and God didn’t always carry over to his polemics.
Welcome 2 America is the first posthumous Prince album to consist entirely of unreleased material, discovered by the late pop star’s archivist Michael Howe in the form of a fistful of CD-Rs with tracklists scrawled on their surfaces. As the title suggests, it’s a state-of-the-union concept album, with Prince’s opinions on taxes, technology, drugs, religion, and the music industry broadcast clearly and bluntly over taut power-trio backing by bassist Tal Wilkenfeld and drummer Chris Coleman. The 12-song set was recorded in 2010, and he had high enough hopes for it to name a tour after it. Then he shelved it for unknown reasons, most likely because Wilkenfeld couldn’t join the tour, making the album an obsolete representation of his live sound—though, given how consistently his performances outpaced his recorded work in the latter part of his career, it wouldn’t seem to matter much.
Prince had a lot on his mind in 2010, and contemporaneous Prince albums like Lotusflow3r and 20Ten were no less shy in making dire predictions and grave diagnoses. Those were not among his strongest albums, and neither is this one. But Welcome 2 America fares a little better because of the construction of the album itself. At 54 minutes, it finds a nice middle ground between the bloat of the Lotusflow3r triple-album package and the slightness of 20Ten. Welcome 2 America is well sequenced; none of the songs feel like filler; the trio format imposes a consistent sound and style. But a Prince album devoted almost entirely to socially conscious material inherently plays against his strengths as a writer, and he gets in his own way too much for Welcome 2 America to occupy the upper tier of his catalog.
The opening track, “Welcome 2 America,” is by turns funny, embarrassing, and preposterous. A chestnut like “land of the free, home of the slave” actually has the potential to be controversial in a time when the term “critical race theory” has been recast as a red herring to avoid acknowledging systemic racism in the first place, but most of the targets on Prince’s laundry list are too broad for us to really know what he’s pissed about. “Distracted by the features of the iPhone”? Instagram, sure—but did he really have a problem with Voice Memos? “You think today’s music will last”? Elixer hasn’t. “Truth is a new minority” could be a jab at double-talking politicians, but he could just as well be telling us to keep our third eye open; this is a man who apparently believed tuning his songs to 432 Hz made them more aligned with the universe. The best line he manages is razor-sharp and searingly specific. “Hope and change?” he scoffs at President Obama, then a year into his first term. “Everything takes forever.”
Prince sounds strangely detached from this material. He narrates “Welcome 2 America” in a petulant monotone that sounds more smug than righteously angry. “Born 2 Die” is a morality play about a drug-pushing drifter, and it’s so dispassionately narrated it doesn’t really seem to wound him that this girl threw her life away. “Hot Summer” deserves a scorching vocal, but he’s so sedate that we don’t really believe he’s going to have a hot summer, just that he’s writing a song for someone else’s. He cedes the microphone to an animated lineup of female singers for much of the record’s runtime, and they sound like they’re having a lot more fun than he is (though “Same Page, Different Book” does not break the “Cindy C” / “Alphabet St.” streak of unfortunate backup-singer rap verses). Prince slinks between these vocalists instead of standing in front and taking charge. He’s the master of ceremonies on his own album, forever welcoming us to America, never really showing us around.
“Sign o’ the Times” worked because Prince set a scene rather than flatly reading the country’s diagnosis. Each verse focused on a person, not a platitude, and his guitars and LinnDrums generated enough heat and pollution that the song seemed to take place in the very urban hellscape he described. Welcome 2 America, meanwhile, doesn’t take place anywhere but within the cloud-painted walls of Paisley Park. The production is immaculate throughout, cushioned with chimes and big swooning synths, as if Prince is delivering his missives from within the folds of a zebra-print couch. The reverb synonymous with his production style is absent, along with any sense of grit, space, or atmosphere. “Check the Record” wants to be a mid-tempo glam-rock rave-up like “Darling Nikki” and “She’s Always in My Hair,” but it’s so dryly produced that it comes across like a pale idea of a rocker rather than getting into our bones.
Given the incongruously plush sound, it makes sense that one of the record’s best songs, “When She Comes,” isn’t about Uncle Sam at all but is simply one of those Prince sex jams that’s way more ambitious than it needs to be. He luxuriates in the silky spaces between the beats, making lines like “she can see stars shoot all over her sky” somehow sound like affirmations of the beauty of life even as we know he’s just being naughty. It’s one of the few moments on Welcome 2 America where form meets content. Another is the cryptic “1010 (Rin Tin Tin),” whose eerie synth stabs summon the right atmosphere of impenetrability; it lives in mystery, which is always a good place for Prince. There’s also a cover of fellow Minneapolitans Soul Asylum’s “Stand Up and B Strong,” good enough to raise the question of why “Stand Up and B Strong” wasn’t always a half-time slow jam.
It’s easy to praise Welcome 2 America just for being protest music, so long as you believe any ammunition against ignorance is worth throwing into the cannon. This stuff might strike more of a chord now with a disillusioned American public than if he’d released it amid the tentative optimism of the early Obama years, but the recordings have not grown any more or less inspired since they were made, and if they’re “prescient” or “timely,” those are facts, not virtues. He could’ve opened this album by predicting a Trump presidency and a Capitol riot, and it wouldn’t make Welcome 2 America the next Sign o’ the Times; it was and is a spotty album from a time when Prince was making a lot of those.

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Combining archival material and contemporary reflections, the composers and sound artists’ joint album celebrates their long and resonant partnership in art and life.

Ruth Anderson / Annea Lockwood: Tête-à-tête

Tête-à-tête

In 1973, the late Ruth Anderson wrote an exercise for her students at Hunter College in New York City. It was titled Sound Portrait: Hearing a Person, and its instructions reveal a remarkable sensitivity for how art and interpersonal relationships are intertwined. “Listen to a piece of music,” it begins. “Think of someone you love. Do not think of the music. When you find your thought of the person is gone, bring it back gently.” Sound, Anderson believed, held the power to increase “wholeness of self and unity with others.” Later that year, Anderson went on sabbatical and her post was filled by Annea Lockwood, a New Zealand composer recommended by Pauline Oliveros. Anderson and Lockwood fell in love within three days of meeting. “Ruth was totally enchanting,” Lockwood has reminisced about their initial encounter. “How could I not fall in love with her on the spot?”
Tête-à-tête, an arresting new album featuring works from the couple, is a testament to their lasting romance. Its centerpiece is “Conversations,” a joyous 19-minute track built from phone calls they had while living more than 200 miles apart: Lockwood teaching in New York, Anderson away on sabbatical in Hancock, New Hampshire. For nine months, Anderson secretly recorded their calls, and in 1974 she pieced them together into a longform sound collage. Eschewing extended dialogue, she collaged scores of brief utterances into a mosaic of their growing affection. While prior works like “DUMP” and “SUM (State of the Union Message)” were just as funny and spirited in their reconstructions, “Conversations” is rooted in the giddiness and surprise of passion. By incorporating pop standards from yesteryear, including “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby” and “Oh, You Beautiful Doll,” Anderson revels in a shared feeling that’s as pure and grand as those old love songs promised.
Anderson made “Conversations” as a private gift for Lockwood, and until now, no one else had heard it in full. While only they could fully appreciate everything it contains, the rhapsodic honeymoon phase on display overflows with emotion. In this piece, much like her Sound Portrait exercise, Anderson engages in a form of deep listening that encourages intimacy. To hear it as an outsider, decades removed from its conception, is to marvel at the way love is sensed in smaller details of speech. “Conversations” is not really the sound of anything in particular: It’s just two people who are madly obsessed with each other, who struggle to hang up the phone because every second is a chance to listen and understand someone in all their mannerisms—every plosive and fricative, every chuckle and creasing smile.
If “Conversations” is a playful manifestation of Anderson’s listening practices, then 1984’s “Resolutions” is an austere counterpart. “They slow me down to a state in which I’m just at peace,” Lockwood has said of her partner’s works. “She intended that with them.” For 17 minutes, we listen as rich tones extend and gradually descend in pitch. This was Anderson’s final completed electronic composition, and as with previous works like “Points” and “I Come Out of Your Sleep,” it is deliberately minimalist. To fully appreciate the hypnotic pull of its drones requires a complete surrender to its subtle rhythms and pulses. By the time it concludes, its meditative purrs recall the wild cats in Lockwood’s erotic sound-art piece “Tiger Balm.” This synergy is a reminder that everything Anderson and Lockwood composed was in pursuit of understanding—be it the world around them, themselves, or each other.
Tête-à-tête’s greatest accomplishment, more so than with their previous albums together, is in demonstrating how attentive listening fosters closeness. On 2021’s “For Ruth,” the album’s third and final piece, Lockwood revisits “Conversations” and adds field recordings made in and around Hancock. We get a sense of the local flora and fauna, but it’s the sustained tones that supply the piece with its multitude of emotions: a sense of mystique, a sacrosanct aura, even a bit of mourning. We hear clips from the same 1973 phone calls, though Anderson’s death in 2019 now casts them in a different light. The piece merges the formalism of “Resolutions” with the diaristic nature of “Conversations,” but is framed by the riveting three-dimensionality of Lockwood’s sound maps. Where her maps trace real geographic space, “For Ruth” points only to the couple’s boundless, eternal love. “We’re really gonna do everything together?” we hear at one point. The answer is immediate: “Yes.”


The rising EDM star swerves left on an insular, personal record that's more suited for winding down than turning up.

Mija : How to Measure the Distance Between Lovers EP

Amber Giles has been a rising star in the EDM world since 2014, when a DJ set with Skrillex vaulted her from the Phoenix rave scene to the world stage. Giles, who records and performs as Mija, has gone on to play Coachella and experiment with styles ranging from tropical house to chiptune to drum ‘n’ bass. In 2016, she put her DIY promoter skills to the test, organizing a 12-city tour with support from dance and hip-hop acts like A-Trak, Nosaj Thing, and Joey Purp under the banner of “Fk A Genre,” her own name for her eclectic aesthetic. It’s been a swift, dazzling ascent, with plenty of next-big-thing buzz. There’s one question Mija hasn’t gotten around to answering yet, though: Can she follow through on her growing popularity with a cohesive full-length statement?
How to Measure the Distance Between Lovers, Mija’s new seven-track EP, sidesteps that debate. Where her past output has suggested a possible future in mainstream dance-pop or something wackier (she loves happy hardcore, for instance), these songs opt for another path entirely. It’s an insular, personal record about relationships, more suited for winding down than turning up.
Lovers uses negative space and hushed vocals to create intimate pop songs, many of which Mija—a former choir member and a classically trained vocalist—sings herself. Lead single “Bad for U,” featuring Portland singer Kelli Schaefer, echoes Purity Ring and the chilly futurism of UK label Night Slugs. Its most compelling moment comes after the drop, which slides the track from subdued synth-pop into experimental R&B territory, à la Kelela. Elsewhere, “Notice Me” is a subdued torch song that turns turbulent: “I want you so badly in this weather/If only we could be together,” Mija sings.
Even at this EP’s clubbiest, Mija’s palette stays dark and remote. “5AM in Paris” is a bit of icy trance that chops her vocal like the wind whipping through a just-barely-opened car window. On “Falling apART (again),” she paints a picture of a failed relationship, assuring an ex that he’ll come back to her eventually. “Speak to Me,” another love song, has self-aware but clunky lyrics (“Speak to me in philosophies/Then drown my heart in poetry”), and a somewhat overwrought backing of sitar, orchestral strings, and pan pipes. (Shout-out to Yanni.) Still, it’s a bold gamble and the only point on the EP where genres are truly and meaningfully fk’d.
Mija has already proved that she can draw crowds and hold her own alongside EDM’s biggest stars. With How to Measure the Distance Between Lovers, she shows that she is also an earnest, convincing songwriter. Whether she wants to combine those talents more directly is up to her. Earlier this week, days before the EP arrived, Mija released a remix of Justin Bieber, BloodPop, and Julia Michaels’ “Friends,” turning that 2017 hit into an off-kilter banger—stranger, catchier, and way more fun than the original. The pop star path is still open to her, if she wants it.


When last we left our D\xFCsseldorfer heroes, Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger,\n\ they had left Kraftwerk, overcome their ...

Neu! 2

When last we left our Düsseldorfer heroes, Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger, they had left Kraftwerk, overcome their fear of broccoli, saved Camp Chippewa from the machinations of an unscrupulous real estate developer, and recorded a masterpiece that would influence independent music for decades to come. The year is 1973, and again the dynamic duo is holed up in a studio with Can/Kraftwerk producer Conrad Plank to record their sophomore effort.
Neu 2 stands primarily on the strength of its eleven-minute lead-in track, "Für Immer." The song is pounding and serpentine, its straight-ahead rhythms approaching punk, while guitars buzz like helicopters overhead. As Plank twists the knobs, the drums take on a thin, mechanical quality. The guitars are banished to the background, only to be inverted again with renewed force. Washed-out feedback drones in and out, while the bass plods on with undeterred aggression.
"Spitzenqualitat" is equally confrontational, dominated by hard, reverberating drums pounding at various tempos somewhere in the deep space of whispering guitar effects. The track proceeds as if Plank somehow turned up the gravity in the studio: the percussion becomes slower and heavier, as the guitars grow emptier. "Spitzenqualitat" simply falls apart as if it can't be sustained; the silence is too dense. "Gedenkminute" is nothing but the sound of that dissipation; something of a throwaway, it consists of nothing but wind and the occasional clock chime. "Lila Engel" is truly krautpunk, featuring Dinger's nonsensical chant: a cross between Damo Suzuki and Johnny Rotten. It's dour but explosive, channeling Neu's fierce repetition into something anthemic.
Then something happens. In the Nintendo world, the sound of tinkling electronic music suddenly running at double-time can only signal one thing: you are running out of time. But in the real world, it means something else entirely: you are running out of money. I guess it's to their credit that our insolvent heroes didn't simply pad out the remainder of Neu 2 with a giant sucking sound, or the minimalist ambient textures of Rother and Dinger turning out their pocket linings. Instead, they proceeded by inventing the modern remix.
"Neusachanee 78," "Super 76" and "Super 78" are surgically deformed versions of the album's two singles, "Neuschnee" and "Super." Fragmented, spliced, and filled with background noise and studio chatter, these tracks lay bare the process of studio production. Likewise, the tapes in "Hallo Ecentrico!" rewind, fast-forward, and are eaten up by the machine. An inventive way to compensate for lack of funds, and even an ingeniously subversive commentary on music-making, these broke-ass experiments don't satisfy like the original tracks. Thankfully, the budget allowed for the album's superb closer, "Super," a heavy, yet fluid assault of pounding drums and rubbery bass, complete with Dinger's savage howls; "Super" may just be the Boredoms' long lost uncle.
And so, with an album, half-brilliant, half-ludicrous, in their hands, our heroes go out to face a cold world armed to the teeth with "You so poor..." jokes. Will they redeem themselves before God, country and indie posterity? Will their albums ever see U.S. release? Will East and West Germany ever be reunited, and if so, will Roger Waters make good on his promise to stage The Wall live in Berlin? Will Pink Floyd even record The Wall?
Stay tuned, true believers.


Assisted by Oren Ambarchi, Konrad Sprenger, and Joachim Schütz, the iconoclastic instrument builder lays down a hypnotic set of minimalist, microtonal guitar music.

Resolve

As a child, Arnold Dreyblatt quit his piano lessons instead of learning to read sheet music. He was expelled from music class for only pretending to play the recorder. Later, his guitar teacher labeled him “tone deaf and unteachable.” Dreyblatt read the writing scrawled across the wall and opted to study video art instead of music at SUNY Buffalo, but a 1974 performance of Alvin Lucier’s “Still and Moving Lines of Silence in Families of Hyperbolas” changed his mind. The piece, in which pure sine waves ricochet off the walls to vibrate the head of a playerless snare drum, reduced the sheer physicality of music to its simplest elements: air moving through space. Dreyblatt immediately moved to New York to study under La Monte Young. He spent the rest of the ’70s turning his defunct musical education to his advantage, designing his own instruments and developing a new tuning system unencumbered by Western notions of melody or harmony.
After years of deconstructing and rebuilding string instruments, Dreyblatt made a name for himself with the Excited Strings Bass, an upright bass strung with piano wire from which performers can coax complex overtones by applying gentle pressure on the strings while striking with the bow. His Orchestra of Excited Strings combines this bass with other instruments modified to play in the Dreyblatt tuning system of 20 tones per octave. The Orchestra went through several iterations in New York before Dreyblatt reformed it in Berlin in the early ’80s, leaving the notorious downtown scene to peers like Rhys Chatham and Arthur Russell. But beginning in 1995, Jim O’Rourke led a revival of Dreyblatt’s work that resulted in a series of reissues on Drag City, Oren Ambarchi’s Black Truffle, and Konrad Sprenger’s Choose Records. Though his work as a composer with other groups has continued apace, Resolve features the first new music from the Orchestra itself in over 20 years. Unlike the New York and Berlin ensembles, the current lineup of the Orchestra consists of younger musicians—Ambarchi, Sprenger, and Joachim Schütz—whose sensibilities have been formed within Dreyblatt’s increasingly long shadow.
This trio makes for a perfectly sympathetic collaboration on Resolve. Schütz and Sprenger play modified guitars—including Sprenger’s computer-controlled ax showcased on 2017’s excellent Stack Music—that ring out with unnerving clarity, sounding utterly human despite their robotic precision. As on Ambarchi’s recent work, the band plays with more abandon as the music grows more complex, accelerating like a bullet train. Album opener “Container” is built on a driving, relatively straightforward stomp that allows the harmonic density of the three-guitar attack to spiral out in slow, lofty arcs. On “Shuffle Effect,” the steady patter of closed hi-hats complicates the beat, while the guitars wind outward in complicated interlocking figures. The quartet takes off in a tightly controlled launch on “Flight Path,” propelled by Sprenger’s bouncy uptempo percussion. Dreyblatt has compared his bass playing to juggling, hitting the strings at just the right moment to send resonances skyward. The ensemble joins his act, keeping those resonances aloft in arabesques of shimmering guitar.
On the 17-minute B-side “Auditoria,” Dreyblatt’s backing trio summons a shapeshifting drone that recalls Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument, with microtones humming, buzzing, and fluttering in metallic dissonance. Halfway through, Dreyblatt introduces his Excited Strings Bass with the simple bowing exercise that opens the first Orchestra album, 1982’s Nodal Excitation. It’s a wonderful moment, as if the band had unrolled a grand red carpet for Dreyblatt’s entrance. He and his bass then step out in front, parading the guitars through a meditative groove that accumulates layers of harmonic complexity until it fades out in a swirling, shuddering hum.
Resolve is dazzling proof of this Orchestra’s musical prowess as well as an astonishing technical achievement. With longtime Ambarchi collaborator Joe Talia mixing and mastering, the subtleties of Dreyblatt’s microtonal tuning system are rendered in vivid constellations of minuscule details. And by circling back to some of Dreyblatt’s earliest ideas, the album proves him to be a crucial link between the New York minimalists and the newest generation of the avant-garde. For all the microtonal discord of his music, this is a moment in which his career resolves in perfect harmony.


On her split EP with the producer Kingdom, Dawn Richard offers a diorama for love’s life cycle, encompassing everything from death defying adoration and righteous anger to, best of all, forgiveness.

Infrared

In the middle of her new song “Paint it Blue,” Dawn Richard sings to the high heavens, “Even if I wanted too/I could not be with you/How did you paint it blue?” The loaded lyrics define the mood of her newest release, a collaborative 4-track EP with Fade to Mind’s Kingdom (aka Ezra Rubin) titled Infrared. She told us earlier this year that her artistic career was entering the red era, defined by a new vibrancy and “full of rhythm.” And even though the title of this EP is Infrared, a kind of prologue to the forthcoming RED•emp•tion, the atmosphere, the production, and lyrics of this beautifully gauzy and experimental R&B journey, amidst all that red, points to a brief flirtation with a sort of “blue” period as well.
The collaborations between Kingdom and Richard were teased last year in both a Rinse FM mix and at an event called “WAVES: Nexus Re-Morph” for the Pérez Art Museum in Miami. At “WAVES,” Kingdom, Richard, and the visual artist Kyselina™ designed a “non-linear R&B opera” complete with a sixty-minute performance filled with insane visuals, Kingdom’s razor-sharp beats, and Richard’s inimitable voice. The event was supposed to capture “the soul of R&B distorted in space-time, and rendered as a high-tech video vortex.” What we get in *Infrared *is a concentrated form of that vortex, rendered across 14 engrossing minutes.
Opening up with the three-minute echo-chamber of a love song, “Honest” lays out the themes of the EP: She “just wants to be honest” about the pain of love, the contradictions of break-ups. Her smoky, dulcet voice is at its most raw when she sings lines like “Loving you is like smoking spliffs/It's a temporary high laced with side effects” or “Hate you unless I touch you..I should light this cess smoke until I choke then.”
It's all complemented by Kingdom’s most pared-down and cushioned production effort. In *Infrared *he’s reached a new level, dissolving down all the best parts of his tropes (very heavy bass, knife-sharp synths, and echoing percussion) into an ideal backdrop for Richard’s velvet voice. He works low key magic all over “How I Get It” where he plays with expectation and hesitance in spectacularly novel ways. As Richard sings “Bitch I don’t lose,” Kingdom lets loose a gentle waterfall of synth notes, elevating her war cry with victorious energy.  The two move seamlessly from the swagger of “How I Get It” to the plaintive doubt of “Paint it Blue” and “Baptize.” She sung “Baptize,” the album’s closer, during her set at the Pérez last year. In the performance, a kaleidoscopic beam of light shines down on her as she pleads to her lover and the world at large to let her voice cure all it all, “Don't be frightened by the thunder/Let the water wash all over...So please be forgiven then we'll baptize you.” In the 14 minutes of Dawn’s brief blue period, she and Kingdom did what few can do—build a diorama for love’s life cycle, encompassing everything from death defying adoration and righteous anger to, best of all, forgiveness.


Having abandoned his lo-fi roots in the South Florida rap scene, Lil Pump has become a caricature of himself. His second album is sometimes fun but mostly unnecessary.

Harverd Dropout

Since becoming an internet phenom at 16, it seems like Lil Pump has spent the better part of his life surrounded by yes-men. Every impulse, every idea sprouted from Pump’s mind is, without hesitation, ushered into this world on a major label’s red carpet. For his 17th birthday, the label rented out a strip club and watched cheerfully as Pump cut into his Xanax-themed cake. Maybe these people are paid to gas Pump up while he plays “Fortnite” like, “Bro you’re the shit, Mr. Pump” or “Damn, Mr. Pump, you have so much money.” Then on very special days, they would chauffeur Pump into a studio, tell him to hop on a beat with EDM horns that will sound great at Rolling Loud, and let Pump churn out enough songs to make his second album, Harverd Dropout.
Lil Pump never needed a first album, let alone a second. In late 2016, when Pump shed his label as Smokepurpp’s younger sidekick and rose to the top of South Florida’s rap scene, he became the prototypical one-song rapper. Everything Pump released was tightly crafted to fit his polarizing, pink-dread-swaying character. Each Pump single hovered around the two-minute mark, featured sinister keys, distorted bass, and lyrics that made more sense if you frequented DJ Akademiks Twitch streams. And importantly, Pump didn’t flood the market or suffer from leaks like many of his peers; his singles would drop months apart and he’d ride the wave expertly until the hype died out.
Eventually, as the labels preyed on Lil Pump, he abandoned his near-flawless template and pushed away from the Chief Keef-by-way-of-Miami aesthetic in favor of being positioned as a pop star. In 2017, Pump was a sensation who felt like he was famous by mistake, but on Harverd Dropout that feeling has vanished, his act is contrived, and the catchphrases sound like they were spat out through predictive text. Often, Pump doesn’t even feel like a real person. The only sign on the album that Pump wasn’t actually born as a 16-year-old in a SoundCloud-funded lab is an occasional pop culture reference like “iCarly” or Derek Fisher.
On Harverd Dropout, Pump exists as a less edgy version of a former Odd Future slogan, “Kill People, Burn Shit, Fuck School.” Pump’s only motivation is to stunt on his old high school teachers. That theme is heavy-handed on the album, as Pump bashes us with a running joke about how he used to go to Harvard before dropping out. Do you get it? It’s because Harvard is for smart people and Lil Pump is, as he says, “A millionaire, but I don’t know how to read.” Pump doubles down on his vendetta against adults on the album opener “Drop Out,” inserting flexes that don't really flex: “Dropped out, now I’m richer than your mom.” (My mom is a high school teacher, Pump.) And most of his money-motivated boasts are similarly head-scratching, like on “Multi Millionaire” when Pump says he’s so rich that he gets on a plane to get Wingstop; download the Yelp app Pump, there are definitely some good local wings in your area.
It’s off-putting when, in the wake of Lil Peep and Mac Miller, Pump trades in his anti-education bars for some easygoing gloats about his drug addiction. “I been smokin’ since I was 11/I been poppin’ pills since I was seven,” Pump says on “Drug Addicts.” His need to brag about drug addiction isn’t alluring, it comes off as a desperate ploy for attention.
Pump’s poor decision making carries over to his beat selection, rapping over instrumentals that sound like he got really into DJ Carnage EDM sets in the last year. The high-budget production does have some bright spots, like unleashing Pump’s purest pop form on the Lil Wayne assisted “Be Like Me.” But a contribution from the reliable Ronny J, who delivers the signature South Florida distortion on “Vroom Vroom Vroom,” is a reminder how far removed Pump is from his lo-fi roots.
And so Lil Pump has become a caricature of himself. He could use a reinvention, or he could reconnect with his hometown scene where he made his name. But with nearly 18 million Instagram followers, Pump has become a behemoth, unlikely to look back. This is now Lil Pump: a timestamp of pop culture clinging to his youth, who just also happens to rap.


Unlike Dedication 2 or Da Drought 3, Wayne's new mixtape sounds like the work of a mortal-- who raps very well.

Sorry 4 the Wait

Lil Wayne spends so much of Sorry 4 the Wait, his new mixtape, rapping about guns and drugs and sex that it's easy to miss one telling little lyrical detail. Rapping over Rick Ross associate Gunplay's riotous bass-bomb "Rollin'", Wayne says, "I cut down on the syrup/ Now I'm in better shape." That qualifies as a big admission for Wayne. Back when he was on his historic mid-2000s mixtape rampage, Wayne's constant consumption of codeine cough syrup, a drug that has contributed to the death of more than a couple of Southern rap legends, was a genuine cause for concern. But Wayne's on parole now after serving eight months in Rikers Island. He has a whole lot of consequences in store if he gets caught with drugs anytime soon. Wayne's bottomless appetites once informed both his public persona and his firing-in-every-direction, mad-genius rap style. But on Sorry 4 the Wait, he sounds at least somewhat reserved and controlled; that sense that he could fly off into pure gibberish at any moment is gone. Unlike Dedication 2 or Da Drought 3, Sorry 4 the Wait sounds like the work of a mortal human being. Happily, that mortal human being still happens to be very good at rapping.
Wayne's actually having an excellent 2011. On Sorry 4 the Wait, he revives his old mixtape trick of rapping over a bunch of the songs currently tearing up rap radio. It feels a bit incomplete, though, since so many of those songs-- the ones conspicuously absent from the tape-- already feature Lil Wayne rapping on them: Chris Brown's "Look at Me Now", DJ Khaled's "I'm on One", Ace Hood's "Hustle Hard Remix", Wayne's own "6 Foot 7 Foot" and "John". On those tracks, Wayne sounds like a man possessed, completely missing the rust and out-of-time lostness that affects so many rappers just out of prison. (Wayne's time in prison was short, and it ended several months ago, which almost certainly has something to do with his relative freshness. Still, it's notable and impressive.)
Relative to those tracks, he sounds subdued and uncommitted through most of Sorry 4 the Wait. The title itself speaks to a certain just-fucking-around modesty; it's just a quick-and-dirty collection thrown out into the world to atone for all the delays in Tha Carter IV's release date. Compare that to his last mixtape, No Ceilings, its title itself an act of sky's-the-limit bravado. Even when Wayne dropped No Ceilings nearly two years ago, it seemed weirdly lazy and passe for an A-list rapper to drop a mix of freestyles and nothing else; after all, guys like Gucci Mane crank out entire tapes of fully realized songs at frightening speeds. But if Sorry 4 the Wait is a throwaway, it's an awfully fun one.
Occasionally, Wayne will come up with an extended piece of casual, free-associative lyrical inventiveness, like this one, from his version of Miguel's "Sure Thing": "Lord knows I'm a sinner/ Pain pills for dinner/ Bitch, I'm getting money like I got a money printer/ Got a chopper and a trimmer/ Shooting like Jimmer/ You're coming in that water, boy, you better be a swimmer." More often, though, he's letting off silly Drake-style hashtag-rap punchlines and sticking with blunt-but-effective Rick Ross rhyme patterns. And yet it mostly works, because it's just a blast to hear him having fun for 41 minutes straight instead. He can get overwhelmingly self-aggrandizing: "My girl pussy feel like heaven to a god." He can get goofily puerile, using Drake's gorgeously conflicted sensitive synth-rap confession "Marvin's Room" to bust off some irreverently nasty sex talk: "She take it every way except personal." He indulges in plenty of singsong cadence, but all of it sounds like rapping, and none of it comes with the Auto-Tune he kept using for too long. When Lil B, a stylistic descendant in many ways, shows up on a freestyle of Waka Flocka Flame's "Grove St. Party", Wayne sounds comparatively focused-- and "focused" isn't a word I would've used to describe Wayne at any point over the last couple of years. Even on autopilot, as he often is here, Wayne sounds like a man reawakened and re-energized.
The most-fun part of the mixtape doesn't really have anything to do with rapping at all. The final track is a six-minute non-rapping rant over the clipped, fired-up dancehall of Beyoncé's "Run the World (Girls)" (itself a flip of Major Lazer's "Pon De Floor"). Wayne's track is a sort of extended multi-tracked ad-lib, with a whole mob of Waynes yelling incoherently throughout. One of those Waynes yells about all the things going right with his life right now: "I am happy! I'm in love! I'm in love! I picked up a new hobby! I make way too much money! My kids are growing up healthy and beautiful and intelligent! My mom's getting married! Congratulations!" Another Wayne shouts out an endless parade of random people. Still another indulges in some pure non-sequitur ridiculousness: "Rest in peace John F. Kennedy! Rest in peace Marilyn Monroe!" The tape is an encouraging indication that even a cleaned-up Wayne has plenty of insanity left in him. And I, for one, hope that insanity is all over Tha Carter IV.


The Salon des Amateurs resident DJ combs his collection of exotica to produce a compilation of globe-trotting ambient and drum-driven dancefloor cuts.

Various Artists: Tropical Drums of Deutschland

Tropical Drums of Deutschland

It takes a singular DJ to find dancefloor material in the catalogs of artists like Rüdiger Oppermann’s Harp Attack—a German who specialized in Celtic harp and whose taste in puns led to titles like “Harper’s Delight” and “Unchain My Harp”—but that’s Jan Schulte for you. In his years of digging, Schulte, a resident DJ at Düsseldorf’s famously eclectic Salon des Amateurs, has amassed legions of peculiar albums from forgotten German artists who were fascinated by sounds from other cultures. Dabbling in fusion, classical, folk, and ethno-jazz at a time when “world music” was just coming into its own as a category, these European artists absorbed sounds from around the world—African drums, Indonesian gamelan, Irish flutes—and worked them into their own compositions. Now, Schulte combs his collection of globetrotting German oddballs to produce Tropical Drums of Deutschland, a compilation that hangs in the balance between cultural appropriation, kitsch, and the kinds of fourth world sounds that are currently in vogue in electronic music.
Om Buschman’s 1988 album Total provides three tracks. The set opens with his “Klang Fängt An” (“Sound Begins”), a fake-ethnographic ambient track full of spare, clattering percussion, tinkling wind chimes, and strummed zither that evokes Laraaji. Similar chimes shimmer amid the bird calls, water sounds, and wordless chants of Total Art of Percussion’s “Wuhan Wuchang,” and Argile’s “Kleine Rosa Wolke” drifts into new-age territory with its placid strings and floating flutes. In a similar vein, Rüdiger Oppermann also contributes a beguiling track entitled “Troubadix In Afrika,” full of dizzying kora runs, rattled gourds, and Indian tabla.
The latter half of the compilation utilizes those titular tropical drums less for texture and more for tempo. Om Buschman’s “Prima Kalimba” takes the instrument, also known as mbira or thumb piano, and bolsters it with a battery of hand drums. (Running water also features here, though in this baffling instance, it comes from a flushing toilet.) At the comp’s heart are its two heaviest percussion tracks. The duo Drumming Birds’ “Boat Song” is a kind of conversation for talking drums, while Ralf Nowy’s “Akili Mali” sounds like a library-music version of a Voudou ritual, the drums deep and entrancing while the flute line is full of whimsy.
For the last two selections, Schulte appears as Wolf Müller, the alias he has used on percussive, polyrhythmic remixes for artists like Africaine 808, Jose Padilla, and Wildbirds & Peacedrums’ Mariam the Believer. Reworking Om Buschman’s “Hey Tata Gorem,” he foregrounds an eerie tribal chant and peels back all the extraneous percussion until one drum part throbs like a migraine. His edit of Toney Carey’s “At the Water-Hole” is the compilation’s outlier, if only because Carey (who once manned synths in the hard-rock outfit Rainbow) is American, but it might also be the most crackling track here. Carey utilized scales and tones from Japan and Egypt on his 1984 album TCP, which he recorded in Frankfurt and released on Germany’s X-Records. Here, Müller’s edit accentuates the drums’ tropical thunder and the shrill synthesized bird calls that evoke that most absurd of imaginary landscapes, the German rainforest.
Without Discogs, it would have been easy to guess that Schulte had slyly made all these tracks himself; the well-paced set deftly traces an arc through ambient rainforests and gong baths into imaginary rituals and drunken drum tracks. While the original artists’ acts of appropriation might seem problematic from today’s perspective, Tropical Drums of Deutschland succeeds on a purely sonic level: Sounds that once seemed cheesy have aged into a form that now sounds strangely contemporary.


The New Orleans trumpeter and composer’s latest album continues to stretch the language of jazz, further embracing electronics and an increasingly broad approach to rhythm.

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah: Ancestral Recall

Ancestral Recall

Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah has been working toward a unified, multicultural idea of improvised music for much of his career. But the New Orleans-raised, Berklee-trained trumpet prodigy could hardly have known that the concept he dubbed “stretch music” (on a 2015 album of the same name) would be so well timed to jazz’s reemergence into mainstream consciousness. What he has called an attempt to “stretch—not replace—jazz's rhythmic, melodic and harmonic conventions to encompass as many musical forms/languages/cultures as we can” coincides with an erosion of boundaries that is central to the current jazz renaissance. Ancestral Recall, aTunde Adjuah’s ninth studio album as a leader and his most progressive statement of stretch music yet, is a testament to the contemporary flexibility of the jazz tradition; at times, it also constitutes a hyperspace leap out of it.
What makes Ancestral Recall’s radicalism beguiling is that stretch music’s insurgency is a product of jazz’s oldest and most traditional wing. aTunde Adjuah’s status as a third-generation Mardi Gras Indians chief (grandson to legendary Big Chief Donald Harrison, Sr.) is often overshadowed by his youthful experience in his acclaimed saxophonist uncle Donald Harrison, Jr.’s group, but the influences worked hand in hand. Scott’s community-minded education in the tribe, coupled with an unorthodox relationship to his instrument—he started playing late (for a New Orleanian) and once said that he began designing his own horns with unusual tonal ranges because of his “hate” for the sound of the trumpet—fostered a creative and social perspective atop NOLA’s canonical jazz studies. aTunde Adjuah recognizes that “Tiger Rag” and, say, Juvenile’s bounce emanate from the same source, and he rejects their segregation, whether by race, class, technology, cultural narrative, or media distribution, among other factors. Stretch music is less a marketing plan than an expression of the philosophical necessity to make sense of the world.
Stretch Music was aTunde Adjuah’s initial attempt to reconcile change with tradition. The easiest way to track his intentions was in the beat. The fractured, polyrhythmic base he had already spent two albums developing with drummer Jamire Williams (now a central figure in his own right among L.A.’s new breed) had mutated into a technologically robust structure: Joe Dyson Jr. and Corey Fonville’s interlocking beats (some programmed, some hand-played) spoke to planet drum not in some pidgin blend but in precise polyglot, while aTunde Adjuah and flautist Elena Pinderhughes soared above them. Two years later, over the course of 2017’s sprawling The Centennial Trilogy, the explicit musical nods to tradition became rarer. aTunde Adjuah’s pieces stepped further from the blues vernacular, toward something more environmental, while the digital beats became even more pronounced. His strong, cinematic horn lines could still invoke classic players and familiar phrases, but the territory around him was now an ocean of sound. On the surface, it harked back to fusion recordings that Bill Laswell made with all-star casts of jazz, hip-hop, “world,” and experimental musicians for Celluloid and Axiom in the 1980 and 1990s. Yet occasionally, the deep dives harvested glorious originals, like “Encryption” (on The Centennial Trilogy’s Ruler Rebel), a spectacularly organic synthesis of jazz improvisation with trance-like rhythms and Detroit techno’s sci-fi dread.
On Ancestral Recall, few elements are left tethered to the time-worn rules of “jazz,” yet, as the title makes abundantly clear, the past remains paramount, and old global cultures the preferred engines into the future. Led by voice, drums, and electronics, this version of stretch music cuts most recognizable instrumental sounds loose. Players, too. Pinderhughes features on three of 12 tracks, longtime keyboardist Lawrence Fields and bassist Kriss Funn on two apiece; the only other horn present, Logan Richardson’s alto, is reduced to a solitary feature. That otherworldly quintet track, “Songs She Never Heard,” is one of two instances where Recall approaches standard song form, yet even its textural presentation—mixed through a digital filter, with light percussive loops bouncing throughout, a synth wash arriving late in the song—implies that maybe some standards did indeed arrive from Saturn.
The drum corps, on the other hand, feels omnipresent. On Recall, it is the harmonic center that builds on aTunde Adjuah’s previous rhythm forays. Fonville, master djembe player Weedie Braimah, and aTunde Adjuah’s own extensive electronics are the core, providing scaffolding for almost all the tracks here; three other percussionists join the proceedings for the electric one-two opening, “Her Arrival” and “I Own the Night.” The latter is among the three appearances by Saul Williams, whose vocal timbre and poetic charge provide the perfect narrative foil whenever it appears, and whose in situ delivery bears a majesty not dissimilar to that of aTunde Adjuah’s horn. “I Own the Night” is one of Recall’s hard-to-describe masterpieces, that rare track that naturally splits the difference between electronic club music and ritualistic trance.
When the drummers do recede, much of Ancestral Recall unfolds as a set of ceremonial processionals: music for holy and open space. With the exception of “Diviner [Devan],” made from layers of horns and flute in astral interplay, it also finds aTunde Adjuah often working alone. The trumpet (or some digitized facsimile of it) is rarely missing, abetted by hand drums, an occasional MPC, and industrial loops, with electronic vocal samples unfolding as melodic blankets to keep this increasingly melancholy tone afloat; aTunde Adjuah’s instrument appears primarily as a tool of composition rather than spontaneous expression.
Inasmuch as it invests in rhythmic expansion, Ancestral Recall also marks a turn inward. It is an exciting strategic choice for stretch music, the philosophy born of cultural amplification and group interplay. It almost feels like a hint that simply playing the changes—no matter how many different kinds, or with how broad a cast—is no substitute for understanding how to live through them.


Eighteen months after Matthew Arkell and Aaron David Ross released the Giza EP under their Gatekeeper alias, they return with a 35-minute LP that sounds gigantic, often gloriously dumb, and, in its finest moments, promisingly brazen.

Exo

It's around 18 months since the New York-based duo Matthew Arkell and Aaron David Ross released the Giza EP under their Gatekeeper alias, positioning themselves as another act to ride one of the plentiful waves of 1980s nostalgia. That release was fixed as a dystopian electronic fantasia, which Pitchfork's Jess Harvell correctly placed somewhere between Cabaret Voltaire, Detroit techno, and Vangelis' bled-dry soundtrack to Blade Runner. Here on Exo, the duo's debut album for Hippos in Tanks, the fundamental Gatekeeper template has been stretched and tweaked, putting one tentative foot forward into the future while the other remains firmly rooted in the past. It's muscular and brutish, often gaining mettle from a Lords of Acid-style mesh of post-industrial density and Shoom-era acid house sounds. But there are other elements at work, including an adherence to playfulness, humor, and a rich seam of pomposity, all of which prevent it from becoming a straight-down-the-line exercise in po-faced replication.
There's an unashamed ambition that takes hold of Exo from its first few seconds and doesn’t let up until the last strains of the wonderfully over-the-top closer "Encarta" fade to black. Occasionally there's a sonic similarity to big beat in its prime, particularly when the twists of acidic synth bleed firmly into the red. But there's also a shared sense that all this work was deliberately mapped out in a gigantic space, where every last synth line and beat is designed to sound as "big" as possible-- a notion Gatekeeper share with acts like the Chemical Brothers in their prime. There isn't much room for subtlety and nor should there be-- "Exolift" and "Hydrus" find their weight from being gloriously dumb, driven by sledgehammer riffs that only increase in intensity as each track progresses. Even tracks that take more subtle turns ("Bog", "Pre-Gen") are propped up by an overwhelming feeling of grandiosity, lending a magisterial quality to the entire enterprise.
The media campaign for Exo matches the sense of aspiration that percolates throughout the LP, with special fonts released to decipher hidden messages, plus an as-yet unseen first-person gaming environment designed by Tabor Robak to help explore "various worlds inspired by the tracks on the album." Such ideas mirror the prog leanings the album sometimes buffers up against, although Exo is mercifully untethered from that world by its brief, 35-minute runtime. Gatekeeper never fully reach down into that environment in the same way Justice did on Audio, Video, Disco, instead choosing to take their rock cues from even more unlikely sources. "Encarta" is the kind of ludicrously grand musical gesture that would have Meat Loaf producer Jim Steinman beaming with pride, with its bombastic vocal chants leading the march toward a bedlam-fueled conclusion that bears more of a resemblance to a battering ram than it does to anything musical.
Ending Exo in such a supercilious way is a marvelous act of insolence, hopefully hinting at freshly brazen territories Gatekeeper can move into on further releases. It would certainly be better than the tendency this duo has for dipping a little too hard into the acid vaults. On "Encarta" they can overcome that by the sheer vigor of the other musical ideas, and occasionally that tendency does hit odd moments of inspiration-- the opening "Imax" pines for an era that's yet to pass, attempting to accelerate the nostalgia cycle by retro-frying the present-- but elsewhere their leap into the future is stunted by the past bearing down too hard on their coattails.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the oft-overshadowed debut from indie rock icons, a smaller and more intimate look into the mercurial world of Jeff Mangum.

On Avery Island

In the mid-’90s, Jeff Mangum moved into a haunted closet in Denver where he had dreams of women in fur coats drinking champagne, yelling at him to get out of their house. During a snowy Colorado winter, the Louisiana-born songwriter and his childhood friend Robert Schneider set about recording what would become Neutral Milk Hotel’s debut album. They worked feverishly, going out to smoke cigarettes when they hit a roadblock, until, in May of 1995, they had a finished record. The North Carolina indie label Merge scooped up the young band and quietly released On Avery Island the following March.
At the time, Neutral Milk Hotel were bit players in a wave of buzzy psychedelic indie pop. Virginia songwriter Mark Linkous released his debut album as Sparklehorse in August of 1995; Oklahoma City stalwarts the Flaming Lips released the cult favorite Clouds Taste Metallic later that same year. Beck’s omnivorous breakthrough Odelay and Super Furry Animals’ debut Fuzzy Logic both came out midway through 1996, while Grandaddy issued their first LP in 1997. The record industry was in the best shape it’s ever been in, and even majors were willing to take chances on messy, ramshackle bands that took cues from the 1972 psych-rock compilation Nuggets as they coasted on the drift of college radio powerhouses like R.E.M. It was a good time to make weird shit.
Unlike the Flaming Lips and Beck, Neutral Milk Hotel didn’t set their sights on breaking through to the mainstream. They subsisted happily as part of the Elephant 6 collective, a group of psychedelic musicians based first in Denver and then in Athens, Georgia, who played unlikely instruments like the singing saw and the accordion in each other’s bands. Alongside Neutral Milk Hotel, the collective included the Apples in Stereo, the Olivia Tremor Control, and Elf Power. They issued a few early records before most of their groups signed to established and better-resourced labels. In the midst of a college radio renaissance, Elephant 6 carved out a colorful niche.
On Avery Island earned a handful of positive reviews from music magazines, and after its release, Mangum got a band together and toured steadily. In February 1998, Merge released the band’s second album, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, expecting to move about 7,000 copies. It did sell modestly at first, receiving warm but not effusive reviews in the music press. Mangum kept touring, and the band’s profile grew; fans showed up at NMH gigs knowing every word to his songs, and often sang them louder than the frontman did. Music magazines started asking for interviews, and Mangum found that he hated explaining himself. By the end of 1998, Neutral Milk Hotel turned down the opportunity to open for R.E.M. Disturbed by the unexpected success of his project, Mangum withdrew from music and spent a few years in a state of panic. Neutral Milk Hotel vanished almost as soon as it had arrived. And then music nerds figured out they could share mp3s with each other on the internet.
In the early aughts, Aeroplane became a cherished totem among people who hid from the world in strange music. A sweeping, surrealist concept album loosely based on the life and death of Anne Frank, its carnivalesque singalongs and horny, apocalyptic lyrics attracted people too young to have followed NMH while they were active. That the band was in stasis and Mangum gone from the public eye only added to the record’s mystique. It was just a few years old, but it felt like an artifact unearthed and shared covertly among those in the know.
Aeroplane might be an offbeat record—its unwieldy title, its songs about cum and communism, Mangum’s brassy, abrasive voice—but its songs are simple and tuneful enough to be played at expensive weddings. In 2005, the teen drama “The O.C.” featured a cover of the album’s title track in an episode, causing a mild uproar over possessive fans who didn’t want normies in their midst. But the word was already out, and Aeroplane became something of a sensation, a living record of an extinct band.
There are NMH devotees who will argue that On Avery Island is the better of Mangum’s two official LPs. It’s certainly less spoiled by exposure, and certain songs, like “You’ve Passed” and “Gardenhead / Leave Me Alone,” easily rank among NMH’s best. Within the fan community, On Avery Island served as a throttle between Aeroplane’s broadening pop appeal and the sprawling collection of bootleg concert tapes that could be easily snapped up via file-sharing programs. There are some curios in Mangum’s back catalog—minutes of unintelligible screaming, rackets of ear-scraping noise, a prank call where Mangum pretends to be an old man asking a phone sex hotline for bestiality roleplay—and there are also some of the most moving, sublime songs he’s ever written, preserved only in the tape hiss of early demos and live recordings. On Avery Island bridges these two worlds. It offers a glimpse of a pivotal songwriter in transition, moving from making shoddy cassettes for his friends to making art rock that spoke to untold thousands of lonely teens listening to pilfered mp3s late into the night.
All the seeds of Aeroplane can be heard scattered throughout On Avery Island. Mangum already balanced the gross and the transcendent in his lyrics: On “A Baby for Pree,” he imagines a pregnant woman full of bees who spews infants until they fill up her bedroom. Throughout the course of the rambunctious, trombone-heavy opener “Song Against Sex,” the speaker kisses another boy while the apocalypse sets in, complains about the porn he hates and the drugs he won’t take, and then lights himself on fire.
Certain songs hit closer to the bone than anything on Aeroplane. “You’ve Passed” envisions a woman’s spirit coursing away from the hospital where she’s just died, while “Three Peaches” articulates an uncanny emotional register between mourning and celebration as Mangum sings to a friend who survived a suicide attempt. It’s one of the hardest NMH songs to endure; Mangum sings from the very bottom of his diaphragm as if dredging up muck from beneath the earth’s crust, dragging out the words “I’m so happy” while sounding like he’s about to keel over with grief.
There are love songs here, too, like the effervescent “Naomi” and “Leave Me Alone,” and there are spooling, chaotic instrumental tracks: “Marching Theme,” which rolls along on a breathing drone, and the 14-minute closer “Pree Sisters Swallowing A Donkey’s Eye,” which rides the album’s final triumphant burst out into a slow-growing silence. The album veers wildly between the accessible and the inscrutable, like putting the Velvet Underground’s best-of collection on shuffle with excerpts from Lou Reed’s squalling feedback symphony Metal Machine Music interspersed. The abrupt transitions between perfect pop melodies and gaseous balls of noise lend the album a certain wildfire charm. It has less varnish than Aeroplane, and that raw face makes it a little easier to see into the mind of the guy who wrote it.
Aeroplane’s thematic ambitions can make it feel bigger than any one person: It’s an album about death and loss and evil, and about how human beings keep searching for the good in ourselves despite our long history of being awful to each other. On Avery Island’s scope is narrower. Mangum sings about himself and the people he knows. Instead of mountaintops and oceans, he sets his songs in bedrooms and public parks. His characters smoke cigarettes and hate themselves for being horny. They break up and hook up and yearn for each other like teenagers. They fall asleep on other people’s floors, listening to the rain hit the streets outside.
Mangum swirls mundane imagery into surrealist fantasy, sprinkling bizarre references to angels and halos throughout, as if contemplating an aunt’s ceramic cherubim while on an acid trip. Grounding these jerky lyrical turns are horns, organ, and fuzz bass, which all sprout distortion like moss. If Aeroplane sweeps you off your feet through time and space, rocketing back and forth between World War II and the present, On Avery Island roots you in the here and now, strange as it may be.
In their postmortem popularity, Neutral Milk Hotel would become a beacon for a glut of aughts bands who never quite achieved their idols’ specificity. Arcade Fire, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Wolf Parade, and Beirut all sprang up on the ground Mangum cleared, mixing boisterous vocals with antique instrumentation. But even the most lyrically adventurous songwriters of the aughts never approached the way Mangum saw the whole world as if it were melting. On his first official release, he established himself as the sort of artist who feels everything at full volume, who bellows through the mess of his life because it’s the only thing he knows how to do.
I was biking home from a movie one summer night in Denver when it crept up on me, a feast of color illuminating the riverside trail. There is an old amusement park on the other side of the river from the buildings that make up the skyline. It pops into view unexpectedly when you’re driving on Route 25, a tangle of wooden roller coasters and Starflyer rides rubbing up against the Colorado sky. It looks out of place, especially at night, when it leaks neon into the dark. In “Gardenhead,” Mangum sings about a roller coaster that crashes into the ocean, and there’s a B-side from 1996, a fan favorite, called “Ferris Wheel on Fire.” On Avery Island is a theme park plopped down on a city: It rushes the fantastical into the everyday, conjuring the weird sensation of getting knocked loose from a rut into the intoxicating unknown of what’s still to come.


On his debut mixtape, the south London rapper floats over some great jungle and grime grooves—you just wish he’d loosen up a little.

40

Jawnino is prone to the type of errant observations that stumble across your mind when the drugs and drinks are hitting especially hard, glitchy epiphanies spurred by Red Stripe and ketamine. His raps drape languidly over jungle and grime grooves; no matter the BPM, his bars rarely move faster than a jog, refusing to break a sweat. Across his debut mixtape 40, the south London grime rapper comes off calm, cool, and collected—you just wish he’d loosen up a little.
Jawnino isn’t too straight-laced for ecstasy or situationships, but he’s no blissfully unaware club rat: hedonistic inclinations aside, his eye for detail can’t ignore the “needles on the pavement” littering a drunk walk home. This gritty realism is paired with a wonky sort of transcendentalism, the kind of simple metaphysics that would lead someone to earnestly deploy a koan like, “If time exists, then it heals.” This is less annoying on record thanks to his ear for instrumentals, which ensconces Jawnino in warping breakbeats and incorporeal synths.
These digital backdrops suitably accentuate the placid bounce of Jawnino’s flows, like when he murmurs, “Never went to art school/likkle in me artsy” on “Scr33nTim3” or when he scoffs, “who d’you think brought all the girls outside?” on opener “2trains.” Although his bars can be bland, 40 remains broadly compelling whether stalking through icy nights or throwing its hands up in packed-out nightclubs. Woesum-produced “40wave” buzzes like a brood of cicadas; the wubby jungle of “Lost My Brain” papers over mundane one-liners like, “I need me a leather jacket, I told Renzo I want it in brown.”
Jawnino’s stoic vocals rarely betray any serious feeling, leaving emotional regulation up to the producers behind the boards. That can be a problem on slinkier tunes like “Dance2,” where Jawnino adds little to the song’s groove, or on more grandiose tracks like “Wind,” where his smoldering verses are doused by a heavy-handed chorus. Or take the rushing strings of album peak “Westfield.” Jawnino sounds pretty good until fellow Gen Z grime MC Kibo comes barrelling in: “The game is bossman’s fridge/The coldest ones will stay at the back.” Being shown up by your guests can be a mark of respect, but as with the MIKE feature “Short Stories,” Jawnino’s inability to stand tall beside his peers only emphasizes the room he has to grow as a lyricist.
A trio of remixes at the record’s close help to tease out latent emotional threads by treating Jawnino as just another musical element to be pitch-shifted and skewed. Evilgiane preserves the squeaky nightcore hook of 2022’s “3styl3” but swaps the spare shuffle of the original for wrecking ball 808s; Airhead ditches the woozy melodies of “Can’t Be” in favor of eerily pinging synthesizers. “sentfromheaven” ranks among 40’s better solo outings thanks to Jawnino sedately detailing a faded tryst, but a remix by Night Slugs co-founder Bok Bok pushes the track into far headier terrain; the effect is akin to seeing the same painting with and without glasses.
On his 2019 breakthrough single “It’s Cold Out,” Jawnino turned his steely eye toward the grinding economics squeezing Britain’s working class ever tighter. Here, that same song is appended with an agile new verse that crushes romantic fallout up against the thrill of dating around. Still, even with money coming in, he can’t escape the rat race: “Jawns is hot property like when you got a yard in Shoreditch with no mortgage.” Everything’s paid off—who needs to go hard?