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 Warren Zevon’s 1976 breakthrough, an unforgettable collection of rock songs as short stories set in a seedy, mythological American West.

Warren Zevon

“Desperados Under the Eaves,” the tale of personal and ecological apocalypse that remains Warren Zevon’s single greatest song, takes place at the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel. It was a real establishment where Zevon stayed sometimes—the sort of seedy old Los Angeles joint where the songwriter felt most at home. After an orchestral introduction and a few lines about margaritas and an empty coffee cup, there’s a premonitory flash of Beach Boy harmonies, and the stakes rise dramatically along with Zevon’s singing voice:
And if California slides into the ocean
Like the mystics and statistics say it will
I predict this hotel will be standing
Until I pay my bill
The lyric, like many of Zevon’s, invests a scene of real-life debauchery and turmoil with mythological significance. During the six-year stretch between his failed first album and his miraculous second, he availed himself mightily of the various temptations early-1970s L.A. offered. He had an appetite for booze, pot, acid, sex, and fighting that led to frequent separations from the mother of his first child, born when Zevon was 22. During one such bender, he was holed up at the Hollywood Hawaiian when he realized he didn’t have enough cash to cover the bill. A friend came and helped him escape through the window.
According to legend, he came back years later and attempted to make good. That second album, self-titled, had been only a modest commercial success upon its release in 1976, but Zevon’s name was still in the papers. Critics hailed him as a major new talent. His compositional ambition, writerly wit, and general air of rakish malignancy all helped set him apart from his peers in the soft-rocking L.A. songwriter scene he’d been kicking around for years. The hotel didn’t want to take this newly minted rock star’s money. They accepted instead a few copies of Warren Zevon, which closes with “Desperados Under the Eaves.”
Zevon had already accrued substantial debts, financial and emotional, at this relatively early juncture in his life, and he would continue racking them up for a long time after. Only those who knew him well—the friends he alienated, the wife he subjected to drunken beatings and threats of suicide, the children he all but abandoned, and whoever happened to be around when he indulged in his habit of firing guns indoors as a joke—can say with any authority whether the music he left behind is enough to repay them. His self-titled album, at least, settled his bill with the Hollywood Hawaiian.
Zevon sometimes seemed to view his own story as a sort of fable scripted either by fate or the doomed protagonist himself, if those two entities could even be separated. “I’ve been writing this part for myself for 30 years, and I guess I need to play it out,” he quipped upon learning, in his mid-50s, of the mesothelioma that would soon kill him. Take the Zevonian view, and you might wonder whether some larger cosmic debt at the Hollywood Hawaiian remains unpaid. The author and tragic hero of this fable is no longer with us. The hotel has changed names in the decades since he stayed there. But the building still stands.
~
Christmas, 1956: A mobbed-up professional gambler arrives unannounced at the home of his wife and 9-year-old son. He’s bearing a gift of a Chickering upright piano, taken as winnings from an all-night poker game and presented to the boy as his very first musical instrument. Mom isn’t having it, perhaps because dad refuses to maintain more than a sporadic presence in their lives. She calls the piano a “headache machine,” and orders her husband to remove it from the house. Her husband’s name is William, but his intimates call him Stumpy. Stumpy Zevon—a name straight from the paperback crime novels his son would grow to love—takes the carving knife that Beverly has set out for the Christmas turkey and hurls it toward her head. He misses by mere inches. She flees the house, and Stumpy soon leaves again, too, telling his son he won’t be back this time. Surely, young Warren is traumatized. But at least he has a piano.
Music and violence, creation and destruction, remained entwined for much of Zevon’s life. He took to the piano quickly after that Christmas, and later the guitar, building a reputation as a prodigy that eventually, improbably, reached the awareness of Igor Stravinsky, perhaps the greatest classical composer of the 20th century, a Russian-French expat then living in L.A. Thirteen-year-old Warren took a few lessons in music composition and appreciation at Stravinsky’s home. In yet another heavy-handed symbolic twist in the myth of Zevon’s self-immolating genius, it was at one of these initial encounters with the highest echelon of musical achievement that he first drank alcohol, the substance he would come to believe fueled his creativity, even as it ravaged him.
Zevon’s mother eventually found a new partner, who openly resented and sometimes beat her son. He also kept the house stocked with booze, which became teenage Warren’s clandestine supply. A decade or so later, while preparing to record Warren Zevon, he was drinking a quart of vodka a day.
That album’s second song is an explicit account of Zevon’s parents’ chaotic marriage. “Mama Couldn’t Be Persuaded” isn’t morose, or even particularly serious; it’s positively jaunty. The chorus—“Mama couldn’t be persuaded when they pleaded with her, ‘Daughter, don’t marry that gambling man’”—delights in its own assonance and alliteration. One backing singer practically yodels the word “mama.” A fiddle reels across the instrumental breaks. If you weren’t familiar with Zevon’s biography, you might take it for another song set in the old West, like the album-opening “Frank and Jesse James.” His childhood tormentors are abstracted through the distances of time and irony into harmless and even laughable archetypes.
One particular line hints at the bitterness Zevon must have still carried toward his family, and the separation he’d carved out for himself in the intervening years. “Her parents warned her, tried to reason with her/She was determined that she wanted Bill,” he sings in the first verse. “They’d all be offended at the mention still/If they heard this song, which I doubt they will.”
~
Depending on your perspective on Warren Zevon, he might have looked either like a has-been or a promising new contender in those early-‘70s years spent flopping between Hollywood apartments and hotels. He had dropped out of high school, scored a modest hit at 19 as one half of the paisley-patterned folk duo lyme and cybelle (Zevon, an e.e. cummings fanatic, had insisted on no capitalization), and another as a songwriter for the Turtles; a third song earned him his first Gold record when it landed on the soundtrack for Midnight Cowboy.
But early success turned to early failure. His first solo album, 1970’s Wanted Dead or Alive, was a collection of bluesy and psychedelic hard rock that bears strikingly little resemblance to the masterworks that would follow, and that almost no one bought or heard. Without a recording contract, he found reliable but unglamorous work as the live bandleader for the Everly Brothers, hitmakers of the ’50s and early ’60s who now drank heavily and fought relentlessly: heroes of an earlier era gone to seed, like characters in a Warren Zevon song.
Attempting to escape the bad behavior that L.A. brought out in both of them, Zevon and his wife Crystal bought a pair of one-way tickets to Spain, where they hoped to start a quieter new life. It was beginning to look as though his career as a recording artist was over when he received a transatlantic postcard from Jackson Browne, beckoning him back to California with the promise of a record deal. Zevon had never stopped writing songs, and he played them for anyone who would listen. In his years as a part-time musician and career partier, he’d built up an impressive roster of friends and admirers, Browne chief among them. The star singer-songwriter convinced David Geffen, self-styled benevolent patron of the L.A. scene, to give Zevon a shot at his label, Asylum, with Browne producing.
How impressive was that roster of admirers? Look at Warren Zevon’s credits. Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks, with whom Zevon shared an apartment for a while. Don Henley, Glenn Frey. Phil Everly. Bonnie Raitt. Carl Wilson himself singing and arranging those Beach Boy harmonies on “Desperados Under the Eaves.” Zevon was not remotely famous at the time; short of Browne’s involvement behind the boards, there was no guarantee that the album would be a success. These people were there because they believed in Zevon’s work, a singular blend of hardboiled storytelling, old-school melodic know-how, and raucous rock’n’roll. That, and the fact that the recording sessions were all-night ragers, fueled by cocaine and liquor, which probably didn’t hurt, as far as convincing them to drop by the studio.
The decision to return to L.A. had not been an easy one. After the tumult of the previous years, Spain represented an idyll for Warren and Crystal, one they were reluctant to abandon. According to Crystal, it was Warren who pushed hardest against the idea of coming back. As they were preparing to leave for Europe, he’d written “Backs Turned Looking Down the Path,” an underappreciated gem that he would later insist was his catalog’s crown jewel. It is the lone oasis of pure sweetness on an album otherwise characterized by dark clouds, desperation, and gunfire.
“Backs Turned Looking Down the Path” centers on a couple, like the Zevons leaving L.A., who have decided to put their checkered pasts behind them, striking out anew with only love as their guide. Atop gentle acoustic guitars from Buckingham and Browne, Warren delivers a rare line not shaded by irony or varnished by any other overtly literary impulse. He speaks plainly: “Nothing matters when I’m with my baby,” stretching the last word to three syllables and wielding it like an amulet against the outside world’s incursions.
Given the betrayal, abuse, and eventual divorce that accompanied Zevon’s rise to fame back home, “Backs Turned” becomes especially poignant: the last glimpse of a path not taken.
~
The junkie’s lament “Carmelita” is about as perfectly written as a song can be. Its protagonist sits by the radio in Echo Park, listening to a staticky broadcast of mariachi music and dreaming of a lover in Mexico. He has pawned his typewriter for heroin, an acknowledgement of the deleterious effects of substance abuse on creativity that the songwriter himself would avoid facing for another decade. He is one of several narrators on the album who are on the brink of suicide, a grim reality that Zevon makes palatable through elegant and grimly funny obfuscation: “I’m sitting here playing solitaire with my pearl-handled deck.” Decks of cards don’t often come with handles, pearl or otherwise.
But these finely wrought details are not the first things about “Carmelita” you notice. You might listen for years before the true meaning of the solitaire lyric strikes you. What you notice first about “Carmelita” is the chorus, which hits like a bear hug from an old friend. It’s the sort of song that feels like it’s always been there, waiting for you to sing along at midnight, like it might have somehow written itself if Zevon never came along to do it. You needn’t have special education from Stravinsky; nor, for that matter, any experience with heroin addiction. (Zevon himself, with typical bravado, once said that his own encounters with the drug amounted to a “brief flirtation and not a tragic love affair.”) All you need to know is the feeling of wanting to be someplace other than where you are, with someone who might hold you close.
Zevon spent much of his free time in the years around his self-titled record and its follow-ups working on a symphony, which never saw the light of day outside of a few interludes on Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, his fourth album. Between Wanted Dead or Alive and Warren Zevon, he began work on a record whose entire second side would consist of outré sound experiments. It never came out. Years later, he conceptualized a release that would incorporate formal influence from the groundbreaking novels of Thomas Pynchon into music that operated on several divergent narrative and melodic threads at once. He admitted bashfully in one interview that what he’d made instead was a rock album.
For all Zevon’s literary ability and aspirations toward some putatively higher form of art, rock’n’roll—music that works instinctually, moving you in ways that all the world’s theorizing can’t quite articulate—was his calling and his fate. With the help of Browne and his other collaborators, Zevon crafted an album that is sumptuous and inviting despite its intricate writing and often painful subject matter. The music is never a mere vehicle for the words. The ascending guitar riff of “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me” and the sweeping melody of “Hasten Down the Wind” could rouse even a listener who isn’t paying attention to what Zevon is saying. As a vocalist, he has an appealing mixture of everyman humility and committed showmanship: the bespectacled loner who hops onstage and discovers a powerhouse frontman lurking somewhere in his id.
Of course, rock was a hot commercial prospect in the mid-’70s, and Zevon made no bones about his desire for stardom. But there’s also something generous about the way his songs reach toward the audience and embrace them, rather than retreating inward. Zevon was often selfish and indulgent in his personal life, but in his music he was intent on giving something to listeners, something they could feel.
Even a song like “The French Inhaler,” whose narrator condescends toward a woman who uses sex to survive in a town that values her for little else, is kind in its way. Its chorus of backing singers and close attention to the details of her nighttime existence affords her a dignity that the song’s narrow-minded observer refuses to see. Zevon wrote it for Tule Livingston, the mother of his first child. “Despite the subject matter,” their son Jordan told the Guardian, “my mom would play that song to me after a couple of glasses of wine and laugh and say: ‘Isn’t that brilliant?’”
~
Warren Zevon’s first and last songs begin with the same overture, played on solo piano on “Frank and Jesse James” and later arranged for strings on “Desperados Under the Eaves.” That conspicuous reprise, along with a few recurring images in the lyrics, suggest that this is a concept album of sorts. Zevon himself envisioned it as such, according to C.M. Kushins’ biography Nothing’s Bad Luck: The Lives of Warren Zevon, and at least one critic picked up on the thread at the time. “Who could have imagined a concept album about Los Angeles that is funny, enlightening, musical, at moments terrifying, and above all funny?” wrote Stephen Holden in his 1976 Rolling Stone review. Kushins expands further on that claim: “Experienced in chronological order, the songs told an entire epic of the American West.”
This notion, along with many in Zevon lore, is both a little true and a little preposterous. Warren Zevon renders L.A. with remarkable vividness, creating an entire noirish world from Topanga Canyon dancefloors and Echo Park fried chicken stands. Allow your imagination to roam, and perhaps you’ll see the separated lovers from “Hasten Down the Wind” peering at each other across the bar in “Join Me in L.A.” But the thematic unity arises from the strength of Zevon’s writing, not because of any grand narrative about the making of the American frontier. In “Poor, Poor Pitiful Me,” an antic rocker about one man’s prodigious sexual exploits and self-loathing, he compares one especially crafty paramour to Jesse James. The callback feels more like a delightful cameo than an operatic leitmotif.
Rather than a thesis statement, “Frank and Jesse James” is an album-opening outlier, the story on Warren Zevon most distant from the songwriter’s own personal experience. (He apparently took inspiration from his time roaming the country with the Everlys.) A heroic piano-led number, it follows the arc of popular legend about the Jameses, positioning them as Robin Hoods of the Old West rather than the anti-abolitionist terrorists the historical record shows them to be. If there is a thematic thread in “Frank and Jesse James” that the rest of the record unspools, perhaps it lies in that very evasion: the hope that a good story might be enough to make the ugly truth invisible.
“Don’t the sun look angry through the trees?” Zevon asks 10 songs later in “Desperados Under the Eaves,” a final flash of daylight on an otherwise nocturnal album, the warm rays conveying retribution rather than relief. “Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves?” he continues. “Don’t you feel like desperados under the eaves?” Maybe “Frank and Jesse James” is a dream of the sort of noble, swashbuckling existence the album’s wayward men convince themselves they are leading. In a moment of astonishing audacity, “Desperados” closes with Zevon mimicking the hum of an air conditioner. Its gentle drone, massaging the raw edges of a hangover, becomes a triumphant melodic theme, with piano and strings soon arriving to accompany the humming, like the music that might play at the end of a cowboy movie as the heroes ride off across the plain.
Just before the air-conditioner orchestra, Zevon revises an earlier lyric: “Don’t the sun look angry at me?” There is a certain addict’s grandiosity and egocentrism that runs through Warren Zevon, especially in the idea that a collection of songs about one man’s hopes and foibles could tell the story of an entire city or state. The album’s failure to live up to its ostensible concept is only appropriate for a collection of songs that grapple with hopes dashed, ideals unmet, and dreams of a life more romantic than the sum of its sad particulars. It’s a good thing he called it Warren Zevon, because that’s what it’s really about.
~
Most of Warren Zevon’s songs are narrative, more like short stories than poems. “Mohammed’s Radio” is a notable exception. It foregrounds the single mysterious image of the prophet and his transistor, leaving any questions about literal or symbolic meaning unanswered. A few colorful archetypes drop by for a line or two—the sheriff, the village idiot, the general and his aide-de-camp—but the song also makes attempts to address a universal condition: Everybody’s restless, everybody’s desperate. Its central mode of address is direct second-person. Don’t it make you want to rock and roll all night long?
My best guess—and one others have ventured before me—is that “Mohammed’s Radio” is about the redemptive power of music. Everyone huddles around the speaker: “You’ve been up all night listening for his drum/Hoping that the righteous might just, might just, might just come.” Appropriately, Zevon and his collaborators convey this message most persuasively in the sound itself, using their singing and playing to fill the gaps in the lyric sheet. This is gospel music for churches with booths and stools instead of pews. Zevon and Browne, on piano and guitar, delicately interweave. Nicks and Buckingham, at their most soulful, provide cascading backing vocals. Bobby Keys, saxophonist and honorary Rolling Stone, works his Exile on Main Street magic. You can practically see the bartender filling his mop bucket in the back room, preparing for the hour when the few remaining patrons have left and it’s his job to make the place clean again.
This minor exaltation lasts for just shy of four minutes, and then it’s on to “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead,” whose pounding groove signals the triumph of our most destructive impulses. “I’ve got a .38 special up on the shelf,” Zevon snarls. “If I start acting stupid, I’ll shoot myself.”  Whatever flickering grace a song like “Mohammed’s Radio” may offer its performers and listeners, it can’t save us on its own. You can rock and roll all night long, but you still have to face the morning after.


This 4xCD retrospective of a group synonymous with Britpop’s worst excesses captures their pop peacocking and genuine charm, accompanied by a lingering feeling of trying too hard.

The Menswe@r Collection

Pop music’s history is best written not by the winners or the losers, but by the bands who fall in between: the latecomers, coattail riders, and almost-made-its whose relatable success gives the closest insight into what a musical scene was really like after the outliers and innovators had blazed their trail. In this sense it is Menswe@r—well-connected London scenesters whose moment in the sun was as brief as their rise was meteoric—who, more than Pulp, Blur, or Oasis, epitomised Britpop in all its plasticky glory.
Formed in 1994, the year of Our Lord Parklife, Menswe@r signed a v@st record de@l after a handful of gigs, appeared on Top of the Pops before their first single was released, and scored a Top 20 hit with their debut album, Nuisance, before heading into sharp decline. A flagship single flopped, the band parted company with their label, and a second album, the Camden country-flavored ¡Hay Tiempo!, was only released in Japan. In 1998 Menswe@r called it a day, their name a lingering reminder of the worst excesses of Britpop, as British music fans en masse tried to pretend they had actually always been more into Radiohead.
Menswe@r’s persistent infamy, while perhaps inevitable in the UK’s fast-moving music scene, was not entirely deserved. The Menswe@r Collection, a 4xCD box set that rounds up almost everything the band recorded, does unwittingly highlight a number of Britpop’s glaring faults, packed as it is with retro obsessions, dry production, and a lingering feeling of trying far too hard. “Daydreamer,” the band’s best-known song, sounds so loaded with naked commercial ambition that it is hard to imagine it was born out of actual human emotion. At the same time, the song is a telling example of Menswe@r’s Wire-meets-Roxy Music pop peacocking, with enough sultry hooks, glam strut, and suggestion of sexual misadventure beneath the radio-friendly sheen to make it an acceptable bedfellow to Suede’s poppier moments. If you were a major-label A&R in London during the Britpop era, you would have bid big money for them too.
Nuisance, remastered for disc one of this set, is essentially more of the same Britpop bombast: acute pop hits, angular attitude, and one-paced gloss; music for trying out cheap copies of expensive shoes. That the band eked three Top 20 hits out of the album is a sign of both how dominant Britpop came to be and Menswe@r’s infectious commercial confidence; the hooks on “Sleeping In” and “Stardust” are as sharp as the band’s mod suits and twice as well worn.
Disc two, A Sides and B Sides, while considerably more varied, largely proves that the British music industry’s taste for endless new chart-eligible formats in the 1990s was tinged with delirium—would any sane record company executive have greenlit Menswe@r’s drum’n’bass-driven cover of PIL’s “Public Image”? Menswe@r evidently picked their best songs for their first album, although the spaghetti Western boogie of “26 Years,” a B-side on Sleeping In, shows that the band could be considerably more interesting when they rolled up their shirt sleeves and let down their hair. The disc is also home to the deeply unloveable “We Love You,” the song that sunk Menswe@r’s career by stalling at a then-unacceptable 22 in the UK charts. It’s the kind paper-thin faux epic British bands were so keen on at the time, a song that strains every artless sinew in an attempt to be anthemic.
The feeling of fruitful relaxation that runs through “26 Years” continues toward the back end of disc four (Rarities and Demos) as we see the band reach beyond the Sta-Prest glam punk of their debut album on their way to ¡Hay Tiempo! A promising set of songs from the second album’s sessions shows the band dabbling in Small Faces-style blues psychedelia (“She Makes Him”), the baroque pop of the Zombies (“Is This the Way”) and Valium-era Beach Boys (“Pick Me up on Your Way Down”). It’s sweet, unoriginal, and rather intimate—a drunken bearhug to Nuisance’s cocaine stare—although the band’s light-fingered approach to melody once again lets them down on “Something for Nothing,” which is like Radiohead’s “Planet Telex,” telexed.
¡Hay Tiempo!, in solitary majesty on disc three, isn’t quite the abrupt left turn the band would like it to be. Menswe@r singer Johnny Dean recently described ¡Hay Tiempo! as “a punk/indie band, suddenly making five-minute acid-tinged country-rock pieces.” But, as ever when a British band shoots for country, the results end up closer to the Rolling Stones’ rootsy dalliances than to country music itself, while the acidic touch of ¡Hay Tiempo! is more the citric suckle of home-pressed lemonade than a full-on psychedelic freak out.
You can understand why a conservative record company got spooked. ¡Hay Tiempo! often feels like Menswe@r trying on other bands’ clothing, rather than finding themselves: “Lower Loveday” is Menswe@r does Spiritualized; “Holding Tight” is a second-hand Sweetheart of the Rodeo; “Shine” is Menswe@r on potent early Verve—and so on. It’s a rather faceless release for a band who once traded on image. But ¡Hay Tiempo!’s gilded grooves are far more listenable in 2020 than the band’s overly brittle debut album, thanks to some emotive songwriting (“Silver Tongue” especially) and reassuringly expensive production, including contributions from Pee Wee Ellis (once of James Brown’s band) and the High Llamas’ Sean O’Hagan.
¡Hay Tiempo! isn’t a lost classic, then, and The Menswe@r Collection won’t propel Menswe@r to the top—or even the top two—shelves of British indie rock. But it should help musical history look more kindly on a band whose vaguely androgynous charm and sharp edges have aged a lot better than the Oasis-lite and bedwetting indie that came along in Britpop’s wake to hold the UK charts in a relentlessly beige headlock.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The grammatical inequality in the band name She & Him is significant, even if it's a joke or a mistake: The female with the nominative pronoun is Zooey Deschanel, the actress whose credits include *Elf*, *All the Real Girls*, and *The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford*. The male with the objective pronoun is Matt Ward, the John Fahey and Hank Williams acolyte who in eight years has risen from indie label obscurity to, arguably, the three or four spot in the active Merge Records rotation. Both Deschanel and Ward have their own successful careers, but on

Volume One

The grammatical inequality in the band name She & Him is significant, even if it's a joke or a mistake: The female with the nominative pronoun is Zooey Deschanel, the actress whose credits include Elf, All the Real Girls, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. The male with the objective pronoun is Matt Ward, the John Fahey and Hank Williams acolyte who in eight years has risen from indie label obscurity to, arguably, the three or four spot in the active Merge Records rotation. Both Deschanel and Ward have their own successful careers, but on Volume One-- the first offering from their new collaborative band She & Him-- him is less than she. Although Ward produced the record and closet songwriter Deschanel only started sharing her songs at his request, the album succeeds mostly because those songs feel like familiar AM radio classics and because her voice offers instant emotional empathy. Ward's tasteful playing and sparse arrangements just serve to make something good that much better.
She also narrates the 11 songs here, all about her changing relations to an anonymous him: On the charming "Sentimental Heart", she's wrecked, crying on the floor, lonely without him. One song later during "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?", she's sitting on the shelf, playfully waiting for him to come over. On the petulant "Take It Back", she doesn't want to be loved, fooled, or wooed by him. One song later during "I Was Made for You", she's giddy over the smiling him in the street. The him in question changes throughout Volume One, but she relates to the masculine through a consistently naïve romanticism, whether it's riding a tandem bicycle alone on the somehow upbeat "Black Hole" or cheerfully telling girlfriends that love is a glorious but interminable conquest on "This Is Not a Test". Aside from two duets and obscurant backing vocals on one track, Ward serves as him only sonically, servicing the songs from the wings; thematically, Deschanel sings about a him that's not Ward at all.
But Ward and the team he gathered for two Portland, Ore., sessions in Fall 2006 and Winter 2007-- Norfolk & Western/Decemberists/M. Ward drummer Rachel Blumberg, Saddle Creek production mainstay Mike Mogis, Devotchka violinist Tom Hagerman-- are invaluable to Volume One. Deschanel writes old pop songs built around black-and-white, simplistic emotions and dotted with vintage sexual innuendo (see "Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?" and "Black Hole"). Her precious delivery suggests Loretta Lynn or any number of jazz vocalists minus a bit of brio, and the band-- which either builds gradually into its walls of sound or keeps things spartan and pristine-- helps the songs make sense. Ward provides an anxious staccato string arrangement and a Mellotron hum on "Sentimental Heart", teasing an optimism that, like Deschanel's romanticism, is always denied. Above Mogis' plaintive steel sighs and Ward's indifferent acoustic waltz on "Change Is Hard", her fragility becomes personal and endearing. Blumberg's big drums and Ward's stuttering electric line offer a platform for her elation on "I Was Made For You", and when Ward trails her voice on "You Really Got a Hold on Me", he's the perfect complement, his voice the shadow behind her sunlight.
Deschanel is more convincing when she's on an extreme end of romance-- either losing it or being swept into it-- than when she's trying to rationalize it. She makes that mistake three times on Volume One. The other sense of disappointment here comes from the promise Volume One suggests but doesn't deliver: Deschanel's writing is too canny ("Why do you edit? Give me credit") and her voice too natural (listen for that Feist-like crack on "Change is Hard") to sit on the tribute shelf very long. Granted, the retro exuberance here will be what sells She & Him to those beyond the indie realm. Don't be surprised when Garrison Keillor jumps on board. But with this successful introduction and the admitted homage to influences it entails finished, Deschanel has a solid foundation for building her own classic sound. After all, she's a readymade star who's already found a pretty fantastic facilitator in him.


Mary Timony led Helium into the outer sci-fi reaches of ’90s alt-rock. Their new career-spanning box set captures their singular, influential style of punk mysticism and righteous shredding.

Helium: Ends With And / The Dirt of Luck / The Magic City / No Guitars

In the early 1990s, riot grrrl rose in the Pacific Northwest, making charged feminist statements with bands like Bikini Kill and Bratmobile leading a semi-underground punk revolution. Their movement was partially a response to the male-dominated grunge era, which had already achieved commercial success. An emerging crop of female voices like Alanis Morissette and Tracy Bonham rose to mainstream status in the mid-’90s alongside iconoclasts like Björk and Polly Jean Harvey, but flying somewhat under the radar was Mary Timony, a singular talent in her college town of Boston.
Declaring and expressing your feminism wasn’t easy in an industry controlled and executed mostly by men, and those who did were the brave souls who paved the way for a new era of female-fronted bands to come, among them Gossip and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, about a decade later. Mary Timony also took on sexism and sex workers, but in more subtle fashion. The cellular makeup of her music seemed inscrutable. She was one-part shoegazer, one part rocker; another part punk, another part mystic.
At that time, Timony was just getting started in what has become her winding walk around the block of American indie rock, leaving a lasting impression that she’s continuing to craft after nearly three decades of making her brand of math-prog-punk. Called a prodigy by music teachers during her formative years, Timony ignited her start in 1990 as lead guitarist with the short-lived D.C. Dischord lady band Autoclave, fronted by Christina Billotte. Fast-forwarding to 2014, Timony announced Ex Hex, the garage-rock trio that made waves with Rips. In the middle of a long and storied journey, Timony spent several years doing solo projects, a one-year stint in 1999 with Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein in the Spells, and from 2010–2013, pounded out post-punk jams with supergroup Wild Flag, again with Brownstein, plus S-K/Quasi drummer Janet Weiss.
But from 1992–1997, there was Helium, a five-year riot of rock’n’roll. They were central to East Coast indie, and the band’s history comes full-circle with Matador’s vinyl re-release of their 1995 full-length debut, The Dirt of Luck, and a double LP of Helium’s second and final LP, The Magic City, combined with the No Guitars EP. Matador also gives us Ends With And, a double LP collection of Helium rarities, singles, EPs, and demos that were pulled out of the dust of basements and attics.
As singer and guitarist, Timony played the role of songwriter-in-chief for Helium, but the band’s hardiness is owed in large part to bassist Ash Bowie, he of critical guitar acclaim for Polvo, and Shawn King Devlin on drums. Interestingly, Bowie had never played bass before Helium, and Helium didn’t exactly start as Helium. In the early formation days in Boston, Helium was a quartet called Chupa with only one constant: Devlin. The rest of band included Brian Dunton, Jason Hatfield (Juliana Hatfield’s brother), and Mary Lou Lord on vocals and guitar. As a recent Boston University grad, Timony replaced Lord shortly after formation, because Lord wasn’t a fan of electric instruments.
Sound-wise, Helium was influenced by prog and paired well with Touch & Go bands like Blonde Redhead and Polvo, and Sub Pop’s the Spinanes. Restless but not reckless, Helium mixed themes of beauty and femininity with underlying dirty, dark, and masculine tones. Their lyrics are sometimes angry, other times mysterious and melancholy, and almost always a little mythical. As the band progressed, some Helium songs became complicated and heady. Angels, skeletons, and prostitutes are some of the characters you’ll meet on The Dirt of Luck. Timony tells tales of troubled young souls, though you can’t always make out the lyrics when her vocals are drowned out by heavy guitar. On the first track, “Pat’s Trick,” Timony introduces her monotone voice and a chugging guitar/bass melody, a song that mentions flowers and power, but with absolutely no hippie references. On “Baby’s Going Underground,” Devlin’s drums build like thunder as Timony sings, “Baby, I saw they kicked you down/Now you’re the only dirty trick in town/The stars are bright under your nightgown/A star is bright, a star is round.”
Helium took a leap forward with 1997’s The Magic City, with Timony’s vocals ringing louder, the band emitting more collective confidence, and the sound becoming richer with the addition of keyboard, sitar, and harpsichords. Magic City songs are often like fairy tales, covering topics ranging from devil’s tears to magic crimes in ancient times, and even aging astronauts. You could find early Genesis influences on the eight-minute epic, “The Revolution of Hearts Pts I and II.” On “Lady of the Fire,” Timony sings, “I was born underground, I have two horns/And I’m gonna make love to a unicorn.” It was a strange confluence of alt-rock and fantasy, both kinetic and transportive.
Which leaves us with the finale: Ends With And, a collection of songs pressed onto blue and yellow vinyl. Timony said that she “pored over hours of unlabeled cassette demos, odd test pressings, and DAT tapes” to assemble songs like “Green Chair,” which as you learn from the liner notes, was created in 1997 with their friend Kendall Meade (Mascott) while touring Europe with Sleater-Kinney. These liner notes are one of the best parts about the double LP, akin to a fanzine filled with the inside scoop about the band, by the band. Also included in the set are clips of reviews from Sassy and Chick Factor, official arbiters of cool back in the Clinton era.
At a time when riot grrrl aimed to change the game for female musicians, Mary Timony played for both teams. She was simultaneously respected by the politically charged Pacific Northwest scene—and continues to collaborate with them today—while making a statement as a badass woman guitarist in Helium. Helium’s sound is cemented in the ’90s, but the curiosity of Timony and the far-out ways of her music let this music live outside of the standard imagery of college rock and grunge. Her impact on music is both indelible and ever-changing, and most importantly, far from over.


The debut album by Moscow-born, Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based producer Slava can offer the armchair musicologist hours of entertainment dissecting his attempt to reunite house's splintered factions. Analysis aside, it's also a very solid collection of viscerally compelling dance music.

Raw Solutions

For years, dance music was gripped by a compulsion to sort its constituent material into ever more finely grained categories, so that a style like drum n' bass could spawn dozens upon dozens of sub-subgenres, each with its own precise aesthetic definition. Thankfully the easy digital exchange of music and the influx of new participants in the culture who aren’t bound by received orthodoxies has helped to break this taxonomical fever, and the dance music artists most worth paying attention to right now are the ones paying the least attention to the lines drawn between styles.; ones like Moscow-born, Chicago-raised, Brooklyn-based producer Slava Balasanov, for instance.
Balasanov (who records using just his first name) has in the past been associated with the seapunk and witch house movements, but that’s more a side-effect of putting out music on labels like Coral Records and Tri Angle than because of any particular stylistic affinity. He identifies simply as a house musician, which is much closer to the truth, although still inexact. On his debut full-length, Raw Solutions, Balasanov gives the impression of someone taking all of house's splintered, baffling stylistic descendants, and attempting to fuse them back into one unified whole.
While Raw Solutions takes a holistic view towards house, with an apparent goal of touching on every possible variation of the form, Balasanov obviously has some favorites. He gets the most mileage out of a Chicago-specific stylistic continuum that starts in first-wave house and moves on through ghetto house, juke, and footwork, folding an entire evolutionary branch back in on itself in an atemporal collage of stuttering high-speed beats, raunchy vocal loops, and retro-ravey synths.
As interesting as Balasanov’s attempt to create an ur-house may be-- as well as his excursions further afield into R&B, moombahton, and beyond-- his emulations of those sounds wouldn’t be proper tributes unless they bumped. Which they do, it turns out. Raw Solutions can offer the armchair musicologist hours of entertainment dissecting it, but stepping away from the analytical perspective reveals it to be a very solid collection of viscerally compelling dance music.
Balasanov has a deeply intuitive understanding of house’s build-and-release dynamic, as well as its give and take with its audience, which he applies in interesting ways. The return from the breakdown on the opening track, “Werk”, which nods at salsa and 90s club music, is a piece of subtle, nuanced craftsmanship that’s the polar opposite of the walloping EDM drop. The triptych of “Girls on Dick”, “Wait”, and “On It” comprise a two-part exploration of ghetto house’s hypnotic salaciousness, split up by a brief, juxtapositional trip into chillwave-inflected ambience.
Raw Solutions is more ambitious than the average dance album, both in terms of the span of sonic territory that it covers and its attempts to synthesize all of it into one cohesive work. And it’s more successful than most. Track-by-track, the music’s potent, but like Balasanov’s approach to making it, it’s much more than simply the sum of its parts.


Though far from their debut, the band’s 1975 self-titled album felt like a debut: a pop-rock statement and the unexpected intersection of two parallel spheres that offered something genuinely new.

Fleetwood Mac

Fleetwood Mac existed for nearly a decade prior to the release of Fleetwood Mac in 1975 but not in a manner that modern audiences would recognize. The story of how Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks transformed the British blues band anchored by drummer Mick Fleetwood and bassist John McVie is well and often told in countless documentaries, retrospectives, and such reissues as this new triple-CD/single-DVD Super Deluxe Edition. Repetition has curdled this fascinating tale, rendering happy accidents as the work of divine providence, but by adding a disc of rough alternate takes along with a disc of live material, this Super Deluxe Edition helps make the familiar seem fresh once again.
Tired though it may be, the prehistory of Fleetwood Mac is essential to understanding the album because the record exists at the intersection of two very different rock’n’roll aesthetics. By the time 1975 rolled around, the Mac were survivors. Mick and John—the two constants in the band since its inception through today—had the luck to work with two troubled guitar geniuses. Peter Green dominated the group’s earliest and bluesiest records, eventually succumbing to LSD right around the time his cohort Jeremy Spencer abandoned music for a religious cult. Neither departure was clean, but guitarist Danny Kirwan acted as a bonding agent for the band until they found Bob Welch, a rocker with a sentimental streak who seemed content to linger in the amorphous space separating AOR rock and adult contemporary pop. If all this turnover wasn’t confusing enough, the band had to combat an imposter Fleetwood Mac assembled by their former manager.
All these names have wound up as footnotes to Fleetwood Mac history because Mick Fleetwood happened to fall for a demo from the unknown SoCal singer/songwriters Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks. If producer Keith Olsen, who helmed Buckingham Nicks’ self-titled 1973 album, never played Mick that tape, odds are good Fleetwood Mac would’ve wound up hiring some other hotshot blues guitarist. Instead, Fleetwood wound up finding something he’d later call “IT” within Buckingham Nicks, a folk-rock duo whose music shared almost no similarities to the albums Fleetwood Mac made prior to 1975. The one possible musical connection between the two groups was the melodicism of Christine McVie, a singer-songwriter who played piano with the blues combo Chicken Shack prior to her marriage to John. Once they were bride and groom, Christine officially joined the band in 1971, contributing appealingly soft and hooky counterpoints to the spacey rock of Kirwan and Welch.
Nevertheless, there was no clear analog in the Fleetwood Mac discography to the dreamy folk of Nicks and the barbed pop perfectionism of Buckingham, sounds that were as distinctly American as Fleetwood Mac’s blues jams were British. Buckingham Nicks were also survivors of languishing in musical limbo the West Coast, but were not quite naive upstarts when they accepted Fleetwood’s offer to join Fleetwood Mac: they had been playing the same game for just as long as the Mac, only in a different league. That’s why the 1975 album called Fleetwood Mac—the group’s second album to be named after the band; according to David Wild’s liner notes in the 2018 Super Deluxe Edition, fans apparently distinguish it from its predecessor by calling it “the White Album” but it’s hard to imagine there are many listeners who bother with such a distinction—feels like a debut: the unexpected intersection of two parallel spheres offers something genuinely new.
Listening to Fleetwood Mac now, decades after it turned the group into superstars, it still seems fresh, unlike any other of its 1975 peers, and that’s all due to how the band merged two aesthetics. Fleetwood Mac, especially in the years following Peter Green’s departure, were something of a mood band, achieving a hazy, spacious vibe that lacked definition. Buckingham Nicks were their counterparts, focused not just on the precision of songs but also productions: their 1973 album captures nascent versions of the two singer/songwriters, where Nicks’ delicateness is balanced by Buckingham’s manic perfectionism.
Buckingham did attempt to get Fleetwood Mac to march to his beat—legend has it he was attempting to tell John how to play a part until the bassist put the hammer down, telling Buckingham that the band was named after him—but wound up settling for compromise, assisting Nicks and Christine in deepening their compositions, while his band gave soul and elasticity to his tightly wound songs. Such synthesis is the appeal of Fleetwood Mac, in part because it’s assembled from so many lingering ideals from the ’60s: hippie mysticism, pop practicalism, R&B grooves, and rock rebellion all molded into music that is simultaneously professional, personal, commercial, and eccentric.
By piling on alternate takes, single edits, and live material, the Super Deluxe Edition underscores how Fleetwood Mac worked at achieving this fusion. Maybe the early versions are rough, but they feel kinetic because the band is figuring out just who they were. Even better is the live material, where the band navigates the distance between their early blues roots and newly discovered immaculate pop. Because he plays lead guitar and sings, Buckingham winds up dominating, but the wonderful thing about these versions of “Oh Well” and “The Green Manalishi (With the Two Pronged Crown)” is that they’re blues tunes fronted by a musician whose instincts pushes him in the opposite direction of the blues, which gives these performances a thrilling energy.
Even if the bonus material is worthwhile, the music that remains marvelous is the proper album. Perhaps its origins are in leftovers—many of the songs were originally intended for a planned second Buckingham Nicks album, “Crystal” is revived from the first, the brilliant power pop of “Blue Letter” is taken from the unheralded Curtis Brothers—but the Fleetwood Mac feels unified because this album is an album of convergence. Every element of the album teems with boundless possibilities, so much of which could be found in the absolutely bewitching Nicks-helmed “Rhiannon,” which is why Fleetwood Mac seems thrillingly alive and resonant longer after it has been absorbed into our collective consciousness.


A million years ago, Vanessa Carlton released "A Thousand Miles", the pop song that launched a generation of piano lessons. Now, she's releasing the raw, muted, refreshingly weird Liberman, a record that could share headspaces with Perfume Genius or Angel Olsen.

Liberman

Let's get "A Thousand Miles" out of the way. Fourteen years ago, Vanessa Carlton made a very popular song that will follow her around forever. Fair enough; it's very catchy. But times have changed. Can't Vanessa? She recently told CBS News that she "learned a lot" since her debut album, "which is mostly that you don't know anything." That's as good a place as any to reset, which she does with the refreshingly raw Liberman.
Like the bulk of her recordings, it's still comprised of her honeysuckle voice and piano licks, but Liberman (so named after Carlton's grandfather, one of whose paintings of nudes hangs in her home and served, she says, as a sort of inspiration) either lets those components stand alone or accentuates them with mild indulgences, like blunted brass or hand claps. The bare songwriting is not something you would identify as avant-garde, but Carlton's inclinations are a lot weirder than they used to be. Take the album cover, which with its thick white border and bold black type resembles a Gentlewoman magazine cover. This isn't quite an album of Swiss design-inspired art jams, but maybe it's her version. The single "Operator" has Carlton using the huskiness of her voice to sound threatening in a way that makes you wonder what a truly severe Vanessa Carlton album might sound like.
Still, Liberman is excellent on its own. Carlton's voice is the key attraction on songs that register between low-key pop, rock, and folk. Early single "Blue Pool", for example, touches on each in a way that feels refreshingly old school, as though pop radio these days was comprised of Fleetwood Mac and the Mamas and the Papas. The song's latter third is given over entirely to arpeggiating keyboard runs in a way you don't notice at first, because it's so atmospheric and catchy. But it's also odd—is this a sketch of a song? An extended outro? What is it doing here?
The album is pockmarked with quirky decisions like this and it's better for it. Were Liberman the creation of a heretofore-unknown artist, it's difficult to imagine an album of such earnestness generating the kind of pre-release interest that would deem it worthy of CBS News. But that's the pickle of early success. The flipside is that it's also harder to imagine fans of punkier singer-songwriters like Angel Olsen or Tobias Jesso Jr. embracing her. She should share a stage with Perfume Genius. They both have beautiful voices and something to say.
For Carlton, that message is a simple, almost sisterly, "You got this." "That's the way it is, love," she sings on "House of Seven Swords", breaking the fourth wall with some mild real talk. This is the person I want to hear tell me "shit happens"; the confidence in her voice is very reassuring. Perhaps that is the source of some of Carlton's magic, that she herself is delivering the shaman's prayer she sings about on album opener "Take It Easy". "When heaven wraps around you/ And she will/ Take it easy". Don't mind if I do.


On the synth-pop group’s latest album, they incorporate eerie and inventive production that sometimes overpowers their strengths.

Madness

Since Poliça first gained traction in the early 2010s, vocalist and synth player Channy Leaneagh has been their franchise player, doing the lion’s share of press and standing in the spotlight during live shows and videos. On the Minneapolis synth-pop group’s latest album, Madness, there’s a shift: Leaneagh’s swooping voice is less central than it was on 2020’s When We Stay Alive, an album that combined ruminative lyrics about injury and recovery with arrangements that felt a little too slick and mechanical. Madness flips that approach. The instrumentation is more laid back, but the vocals—always a key part of Poliça songs—receive a surreal, futuristic sheen.
Madness makes prominent use of Allovers, an “anthropomorphic production tool” designed by producer Ryan Olson (also Leanagh’s husband) and Seth Rosetter. In 2019, the pair incorporated it into a MASS MoCA sound installation that transformed a museum building into a kind of living instrument, generating music based on the idle chatter and movements of patrons. On Madness, it blends the percussion with the swelling synths to create an uncanny valley quality—too organic to be digital, but too robotic to be analog. What might have been a stack of synths and drums on an earlier Poliça record now has an unpredictable rhythmic and sonic variance, like the familiar yet bizarre refractions of artist Alexander Mordvintsev’s DeepDream technology.
The use of Allovers leads to some interesting textural moments, like the oscillating, tinny ding behind the neo-soul groove of “Blood” or the guttural gurgling underneath “Away.” In general, however, Madness plods more than the band’s best work and doesn’t make as novel use of Ben Ivascu and Drew Christopherson’s dual drummer setup. The most musically interesting Poliça records, like 2016’s United Crushers, balanced moments of ambience with jagged, uptempo anthems that invited dancing. At just seven songs, Madness devotes nearly half its runtime to burbling ballads that lack structure, denying the catharsis of those career peaks.
Madness is billed as a “companion piece” to When We Stay Alive, an album partially inspired by Leaneagh’s recovery from a debilitating fall that reshaped her perspective. None of the lyrics here hit with the same level of urgency or intensity, although “Fountain,” with its description of a tumultuous relationship, comes closest. (“Don’t you calm me when I speak/I will never be that weak,” Leaneagh warns.) In early interviews, Leaneagh explained her resistance to being perceived as a singer-songwriter, claiming to focus less on enunciation than conveying emotions, and this record makes her writing feel secondary to the music.
Leaneagh has been obscuring her voice and coating it in digital effects since the band’s debut. But coming off a gripping lyrical record like When We Stay Alive, it’s hard to feel as connected to Madness, particularly when the most compelling lines are swallowed by the production. “Alive” features an impassioned vocal performance, but the actual lyrics are obscured behind the oscillating synths. The juxtaposition of Leaneagh’s falsetto and Chris Bierden’s bassline on “Sweet Memz” is enchanting—she holds long, elegiac notes while his fingers move nimbly around the fretboard—but its introspective message is bogged down by clunky lines like “I ain’t special, just one of a kind.” The intense delay used on Leaneagh’s voice on “Fountain” overpowers the melody, and that’s emblematic of an issue with several of these songs: The band succeeds at setting a solemn mood, but mood itself is often all they communicate.
Poliça emerged at a time when the sound of fellow synth-pop bands like Chvrches and Purity Ring was both commercially viable and cutting edge. Those groups have tried various deviations and tweaks on their original formula over the years, and Poliça now appear in search of a middle ground that combines their visceral songwriting with Madness’ inventive textures. At their best, these songs offer hints of that forward trajectory: Blending naturalistic elements with an eerie, post-modern edge, Leaneagh’s voice guides us through the maze, reminding us that human emotion still has a role in the cybernetic future.


The Australian metal band’s sixth album is dense and disorienting, collapsing the boundary between the human voice and machine-made clamor.

Avow

There is no escaping a Portal record. The Australian avant-garde metal band deliberately packs every bar of their music to attain maximum carnage. They do not yield to melody, space, or enunciation. Instead, they “selfishly explore the abhorrent side of life,” as guitarist Horror Illogium once put it. Portal’s sixth album, Avow, is especially punishing. Each of its six tracks is dense with mayhem—fast-flying shrapnel that tears through the temporal lobe and leaves you in a state of frenzied delirium. In Portal’s world, the path to transcendence is not meditation but the merciless bombardment of life’s ugliest shit. Somewhere in that thorny tangle lies divine madness—ecstasy bred from agony.
Portal shroud themselves in self-made mythology, swapping their real-life identities for esoteric pseudonyms like Aphotic Mote and Omenous Fugue. In concert, they opt for dark theatrics, shielding their physical forms with ornate and ritualistic costumes. Mysterious frontman the Curator has appeared as an evil pope, a grandfather clock, and a tentacled demon in Renaissance garb, to name a few. The same meticulous attention to detail exists within their music. As Avow unfurls, Portal find new depths to their technical, transgressive death metal. Ignis Fatuus pummels his drum kit at speeds comparable to the discharge of an automatic weapon. Guitarists Illogium and Mote sound like they are attacking their strings with hacksaws instead of picks. The Curator lurks in the shadows, waiting until you’ve settled in before unleashing his furor.
Technically, there is a break between each song on Avow, but you won’t find refuge there. (As if this music wasn’t extreme enough, Portal dropped a companion album—the unruly noise LP Hagbulbia—the very same day.) Like their best records, Avow blares and pulsates as a unified whole. With tracks ranging from five minutes to 10, it is an act of stamina that ends in elation. Opener “Catafalque,” the longest track, rides the ceaseless onslaught of guitar, disfigured by distortion and performed with calculated violence. It takes two whole minutes before the Curator storms in with his malignant growl—a guttural, subhuman sound that further defiles his bandmates’ noise.
Though it is half the length of “Catafalque,” “Offune” is Avow’s most distressing cut. Battered toms and the Curator’s breath-of-death are its major planes of sound, but it’s the prickling guitar riffs that burrow under the skin. High-pitched and clipped, they prod and poke at the psyche like subliminal messaging in a horror film. On “Manor of Speaking,” Portal play with psychoacoustics, the collective snarl of their instruments taking the shape of a disembodied scream in the song’s final moments. The inability to differentiate between machine-made clamor and the human voice is a natural evolution of Portal’s disorienting tactics. Sounds bleed into one another and bloom into a mammoth squall. The long-term side effects include a dizzying, unnameable dread, something that sticks in your gut long after you’ve turned off your stereo.

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On their bona fide all-stars album, everyone from DRAM to Amber Mark to The-Dream cannot save the electronic duo from their tastelessness.

Head Over Heels

Karl Marx said that history repeats “the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.” Like a slap bass or Zapp drum, it’s an irresistible cliché, but useful. Chromeo first got me thinking about Marx because they got me thinking about Daft Punk. Like the louche robots, Dave 1 and P-Thugg began in Francophonic bedrooms with a strong personal style and a predilection for funk licks, which they took to increasingly vast crowds as white, heterosexual guys rediscovered the joys of dancing their girlfriends and gay friends and POC acquaintances never forgot. Cue a crisis of credibility perhaps inevitable after sticking around for fifteen years and voila: Chromeo’s Head Over Heels, a bona fide all-stars album, Random Access Memories-style, that attempts to show off their own bona fides.
Head Over Heels aims lower than its counterpart from a few years ago, and in all fairness, does achieve a funky kind of farce. Chromeo rounded up some studio legends—Jesse Johnson, who co-wrote classics like “The Bird” and “Jungle Love” as an original member of the Time; Raphael Saadiq, who seemingly produced every hit of the ’90s; and Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins, who did the same in the ’00s, or at least those not produced by The-Dream, who also sings on this album—and enlisted their solid musicianship in the service of some really dumb ideas.
Which is all to say, Head Over Heels sounds expert, expensive, accomplished, while being distasteful in almost everything else. First single “Juice” pours out a sugary, intoxicating groove reminiscent of ’80s boogie masters Mtume, whose Tawatha Agee provides backing vocals, then sours it with some gross ideas about power dynamics: “Relationships ain’t a democracy,” oh, Jesus, gross. “Must’ve Been” is a sort of “Fuck You” after the weed kicks in; it’s hard to get excited about a talk box these days, but Johnson’s guitar is so ticklish, and DRAM’s harmonies so pretty, you might as well giggle, if you can, at the lyric’s macho theatrics. To be fair, it’s the cost of doing business if you’re a fan of the band that brought you “Needy Girl” and “Sexy Socialite.”
If the album is typically weird about women, it’s worse about money. “Slumming It” starts out with, “She got lipstick on my blue collar,” and it’s downhill from there. Imagine “Common People” without the class consciousness, or “Uptown Girl” with a protagonist even less believably marginalized than Billy Joel and a (pretty good) saxophone solo instead of the faux-Frankie Valli lilt. And “Bad Decision” is a very Ivanka Trump kind of love song, in which a guy gives his future over to the credit industrial complex to show his devotion. “Let’s book a shopping trip, maybe I could charter a jet/And I don’t give a shit if I never get out of debt,” he croons. “Take out all my money from the bank/Take you around the corner, buy a ring…You make me want to make a bad decision.” Falling for this acquisition-as-affection is a bad decision too.
On the upside, “Just Friends” could tear the roof off a particular kind of penthouse party in DTLA or Williamsburg, mostly due to the super-charismatic Amber Mark and a groove that stays out of her way. But you might as well listen to Maroon 5 if you enjoy the slickness, and there are dozens of better bounces to be had from Atlantic Starr to Daft Punk themselves, nevermind Nite Jewel and Thundercat and Ariana Grande and the list goes on. Head Over Heels might replace the duo’s trademark mannequin legs on the cover for their own, but these days such co-opting of realness is real meh. It’s genderfluid like a tech bro in a stunt romper drinking a Monster. The farce is strong with these ones.


Technomancer is certainly Travis Egedy’s most nicely produced output yet, with his voice coming through stronger than ever. Yet its reach is not as big as its grand potential. Slowing down and going for a clean sound is a fine aesthetic choice, but the songs' final feeling is one of aiming at something and not quite making it.

Technomancer

The world that these songs on exist in, as Pictureplane’s Travis Egedy sings to us, is a dead one (where, of course, people get it on in the ruins of a shopping mall). The arrangements on Technomancer frequently play like droning or piercing alarms, particularly on tracks like “Sick Machine” and “Death Condition,” the latter of which is laden with clunky, mechanical percussion that makes it sound like a vintage video game. Whereas Pictureplane’s 2011 record Thee Physical spun queer and cyborg theory into fuzzy house-inspired electronica, Technomancer plays like a soundtrack to a sci-fi dystopian film. It works well as a concept record about trying to break out of one’s oppressive urban regime, with Egedy weaving his whispery conspiracy theories into every track.
But while Pictureplane’s signature ’90s-evoking female vocal samples might sing soulfully in the distance, the record feels drained of the energy his previous albums showcased. The common setting on Techomancer is slowmo, with most tracks favoring ethereal, romantic ’80s synths over the pumped up, choppy compositions on Thee Physical. Even the breakbeat intro on “Harsh Realm” cuts out a minute in, favoring a more chilled out, awkward see-saw synth progression before returning to the sound of the song’s start. The blaring airhorns and record scratching sounds on “Street Pressure” feel like they’re working against the soft, sultry melody Egedy builds on that song, like a jokey nod to traditional club music. All of this seems at odds with the sound Pictureplane has cultivated thus far. There’s a tame, almost downtempo vibe to a lot of this record that keeps it from beginning to end in a sluggish, not very dance-friendly territory.
Technomancer is certainly Egedy’s most nicely produced output yet, with his voice coming through stronger than ever on a lot of these songs. “Crack all the windows downtown, it’s that new American noise,” he sings to a “renegade street trash” on the more traditional, radio-friendly pop track “Riot Porn.” But the noise of Technomancer just plays too comfortably. Technomancer is very high concept in its man vs. machine dystopian themes, but the darkwave-edged beats Egedy constructs, while bleak, don’t possess the same level of imagination. In seemingly trying to make more cinematic and visionary electronica he ends up making pretty lackluster, slow-burning pop. On Technomancer Egedy’s typically wire-frayed, wall-of-sound ’90s mixtape sound feels stripped into something more pedestrian rather than futuristic.


Early last year, Markus Siegenhort, leader of the German black metal explorers Lantlôs, elected to split with Neige, the leader of France’s Alcest and one of the key figures in carrying black metal past its atavistic beginnings. Despite the breakup, on Melting Sun, Lantlôs’ fourth and most cohesive album, Siegenhort likewise sings sans ire, his mid-range croon ferried upward by a set of gentle effects.

Melting Sun

Death, murder, betrayal and suicide: Thanks to the salacious deeds that helped to shape the face of black metal and the hyperbolic reports that galvanized those bygone deeds as modern music mythology, those options might seem to be the only such ways bands split with their members. But nearly a quarter-century after Dead made good on his name, the characters and the contents of black metal have evolved. Knotty, nasty fury has given rise to bands who couch assaults in pretty, dramatic shapes—shoegaze atmospherics, electronic environments, symphonic structures.
Early last year, Markus Siegenhort, leader of the German black metal explorers Lantlôs, elected to split with one member not through torture or even a tantrum, but instead through a fawning email. “I am very thankful, not only for your singing, but also for pushing the band and last but definitely(!) not least for your friendship. … Though, we can’t go on like this,” he wrote. “I hope you understand our/my situation and don’t see this as total cut on all edges. I still like you as a person and still want to be friends. Needless to say this!!!”
The singer receiving the email was Neige, the leader of France’s Alcest and one of the key figures in carrying black metal past its atavistic beginnings. In Lantlôs, he shared vocals with Siegenhort for 2010’s .neon and 2011’s Agape, albums that countered roars with post-rock drama and jazz redirection to varying degrees. With his own project, Neige had moved steadily from the belligerent black metal of his youth to gentle, sophisticated, metal-barbed rock. But with Lantlôs, he could still scream. Now they didn’t need him anymore. “I want to do vocals on this thing,” Siegenhort wrote to Neige of the next album. “I am so proud and I feel like my voice suits the music that I feel like it was nonsense giving it away for the sheer sake of friendship.”
Given the genteel manner of Neige’s excommunication, it seems needlessly provocative to suggest an emerging rivalry between Alcest and Lantlôs. But their respective new records do just that. Released in January, Alcest’s Shelter found Neige stepping cleanly out of his shadowed past to coo over washes of reverb-tempered distortion and arpeggio splendor. He committed so fully to the saturated sound of shoegaze and the ascent of post-rock that he recorded Shelter in Sigur Rós’ own Icelandic bubble with guest vocals from Slowdive’s Neil Halstead. In spite of the ostentatious production, though, Shelter sounded thin and hesitant, a concession to obsessions rather than a victory over them.
On Melting Sun, Lantlôs’ fourth and most cohesive album, Siegenhort likewise sings sans ire, his mid-range croon ferried upward by a set of gentle effects. As with Alcest, Lantlôs has largely let go of the black metal to be found on those earlier albums. Now a trio, the band has retained a love of shrieking-and-stacked guitars, though they now flood less-claustrophobic post-rock forms in order to arrive at a sort of over-amplified and intoxicating dream pop. Where Alcest’s own step into the light revealed a withering paleness, Melting Sun is sanguine and bracing, an album that doesn’t lose power simply because the band has discarded a once-central element of its sound. Siegenhort was right: Lantlôs didn’t need Neige, after all.
Lantlôs runs on efficiency during Melting Sun. In the past, they’ve slipped into tangents that, to some extent, only showed just how beyond metal they’d gone—into the era of electric Miles, the atmospheres of krautrock, the brow-beatings of doom. But for these six tracks, they smartly splice those influences into one another, a move that maintains momentum. The most aggressive bits bear texture, and the most billowing moments don’t float too far afield. Lantlôs finds unexpected ways to link hooks and heaviness while mostly splitting the space between them.  “Jade Fields,” for instance, cycles through celestial harmonies and refracted, kaleidoscopic guitar notes that suggest Dustin Wong, but the rhythm section beneath them is a coil of muscle. A minute into “Cherry Quartz”, Lantlôs races through one of the album’s few black metal spans. Beneath the harsh haze, though, there’s a romantic slide guitar part, the bait left waving in the wind. The moment suggests the Twilight Sad sporting full sleeves. Even closer “Golden Mind", which drifts into a Beach House-esque reverie, carries a vaguely sinister air.
At the midsection of “Aquamarine Towers”, the three-piece shifts instantly out of a march, turning the meter into a trap of tripwires and the riff into electronic noise that creeps like volunteer vines. The moment suggests that Lantlôs should be the next ostensible “metal” act on Thrill Jockey, a label that’s managed to move between Tortoise, Oval, and the Body during the last few years. After all, such willful hybridization is what ultimately makes Melting Sun so much more compelling than Shelter, the latter which follows a definitive stylistic choice to its mannerist and rather boring end. Instead, Melting Sun pulls every trick in Lantlôs’ past into the present, making for charged pop that’s short neither on volume nor surprises nor impact. Melting Sun, like Shelter, is gorgeous. In this case, though, that’s only the start of the compliments, not the end.


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 1978 album from an icon of soul and disco, a formative record in the queer canon.

Step II

On New Year’s Eve, 1986, Sylvester appeared on The Late Show With Joan Rivers in a towering, orange sherbet-colored wig and a sequined pantsuit. It had been nearly a decade since his breakthrough single, the mirrorball disco hit “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” from 1978’s Step II, and the famously androgynous San Francisco singer had built up an easy rapport with Rivers; they’d previously worked together at an AIDS benefit, before the pandemic gained national attention. The conversation eventually eased into some expected ribbing: “What did you say when your family found out you wanted to be a drag queen?” Rivers asks.
“I am not a drag queen!” the singer guffaws, tossing back that fiery mane. “I am Sylvester.”
Simple and matter-of-fact, the retort is a snapshot of the disco maven as he forever intended himself to be: a one-of-a-kind talent in no uncertain terms—Sylvester—destined for stardom long before the world was prepared for it. He melded gospel, funk, and disco to create a spangled, unforgettable impression on the ’70s and ’80s, and through it all, Sylvester remained resolutely himself. The qualities about him that were so often marginalized—Black, gay, and feminine—were the same ones that made him an undeniable star.
Born Sylvester James in South Central Los Angeles, he was fed an early musical education from his doting grandmother and Pentecostal church choirs, where he studied Aretha Franklin interpretations and honed a featherlight, inimitable falsetto. Sylvester joined a troupe of drag queens named the Disquotays in his teens, fixing the crew’s wigs and outfits and floating from party to party under the cover of night to dodge laws forbidding drag in California. He left home in 1970 for San Francisco. It was there, in the queer, roving melting pot of the Castro, where Sylvester began to perform.
Sylvester flourished in San Francisco, which quickly became his adopted home city for its sense of sexual liberation; no other city could quite contain him. He joined the renegade drag act the Cockettes and taught them gospel, but otherwise clashed with their outrageous brand of sketch comedy. Yet his appearances with the group—and especially his soaring solos—quickly turned Sylvester into an underground sensation. In 1972, when David Bowie failed to sell out his first San Francisco show, he told reporters, “They don’t need me; they have Sylvester.”
A seed had been planted, and Sylvester began to perform solo as the doyenne Ruby Blue, a jazz and soul persona influenced by his grandmother that he’d first assumed with the Cockettes. He played at the Rickshaw Lounge in Chinatown, singing standards by early icons like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Lena Horne. Ruby came about, in Sylvester’s words, to inhabit “the mystery of it. The freedom of it. The glamour of it.” Here, the genesis of Sylvester’s music was born, rich in soul and spiritual traditions, with a high tenor capable of trying on different feminine vocal styles at a whim.
Sylvester’s gender identity was purposefully inscrutable. His costumes oscillated between feminine extremes, sporting tinsel tutus with bouffanted wigs, but offstage he could be just as muted. Sylvester was equally comfortable trying on “butch” signifiers like leather pants or a close-cropped haircut; both sides lived within him at all times. He insisted that he never thought about his sexual identity onstage, citing a piece of advice given to him by another one of his idols, Josephine Baker: “The illusion you create onstage is all.” Sylvester defied categorization at every opportunity, and shrugged off questions intended to pin him down with the same cool he maintained on record: “Look dear, being gay means absolutely nothing except to straight people,” he sniped to a nosy reporter in 1978.
By the time Sylvester began to cut his own records, having signed to the San Francisco label Blue Thumb, he was still finding a niche. His rock-funk music, performing as Sylvester and the Hot Band, was far from the synthy, formulaic disco beginning to dominate both the charts and the gay clubs he frequented. Sylvester was a casual disco fan at best, and it wasn’t until he signed with jazz label Fantasy, by way of veteran producer Harvey Fuqua, that he fully leaned into the vision. Sylvester released a soulful self-titled album in the summer of 1977 and followed it up the next year with the glittering Step II, which remains his most precise and dazzling album.
The album’s opening one-two punch, “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” and “Dance (Disco Heat),” both flaunt Sylvester’s musical genius, but the former is his his crown jewel. Working with a band led by guitarist James “Tip” Wirrick, the singer intended it as a traditional ballad and wrote lyrics off the cuff in the studio. The arrangement morphed into something else entirely once Patrick Cowley, a friend and producer obsessed with Giorgio Moroder and Euro-dance eccentrics, got a hold of the song and infused it with a synthesized disco pulse. (“I’ll always love and be grateful to you,” reads Sylvester’s dedication to Cowley in Step II’s liner notes, “for being right on time.”) “You Make Me Feel” pumps with the same space-age DNA as Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” released just the year before, only with Summer’s wispy voice replaced by Sylvester’s high-wire depiction of the era in San Francisco: “To dance and sweat and cruise and go home and carry on and how a person feels,” as he described it. His falsetto dances along with tense breath control until he screams that orgasmic chorus, a full-throated Pentecostal spiritual transformed into an instant disco crowdpleaser.
Sylvester believed there were “enough love songs in the world like there were enough children,” yet Step II throbs with passion. Sylvester covers Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s swaying “I Took My Strength From You,” elongating his vocals into gossamer threads and bending the song into a pure devotional. “Was It Something That I Said,” a rolling R&B song co-written with Fuqua, opens with a back-and-forth between Sylvester’s beloved backup singers, Martha Wash and Izora Armstead (aka Two Tons o’ Fun, who would later form the Weather Girls). “Child, have you heard the latest?” they titter. “Uh-oh, what’s goin’ on now? About Sylvester breakin’ up?” He recalls receiving a letter with a phone number, only to call and find it disconnected. The fallout leaves him overcome, a miniature tragedy writ large with funky keys, horn licks, and a spoken-word bridge.
Step II and “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” led Sylvester to international success. The album went gold (celebrated by the label with wine bottles pressed with Step II labels, no less), and Sylvester made a slew of TV appearances where he put on brassy performances for national audiences. He opened for acts such as the Commodores, the O’Jays, and Chaka Khan, and extensively toured Europe, whipping fans abroad into a Beatles-style mania. Practically overnight, all of Sylvester’s dreams of stardom had become a reality, and he hadn’t forsaken any part of himself to get there.
Sylvester received the keys to San Francisco on March 11, 1979, and “You Make Me Feel” was inducted into the Library of Congress in 2018, formally confirming Sylvester’s impact on American culture at large. Go to any gay club or Pride event worth its salt and you’ll hear “You Make Me Feel” blaring over the speakers at some point, spinning open and sending every person to the dancefloor to commune. Remnants of the ballad version appear on a reprise halfway through Step II, but look no further than the ascendant, gospel rendition on 1979’s live album Living Proof, recorded at San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House, for hard proof of the song’s divine power, no matter the conduit: Sylvester breaks from the propulsive beat for a slowed-down interlude bolstered by a choir, his voice climbing into an angelic upper register that blows the wind out of you.
Sylvester died at 41 of AIDS in 1988, just a year after his longtime husband, architect Rick Cranmar, died of the same. Cowley, too, died of AIDS in 1982, the same year the two recorded the sleek Hi-NRG blast “Do You Wanna Funk?”; Cowley became one of the first publicized deaths from the virus. Sylvester also put a face to the crisis when he led the People With AIDS group in a wheelchair at the 1988 San Francisco Pride Parade. “He’s allowing us to celebrate his life before his death, and I don’t know a single star who has the integrity to do that,” the novelist Armistead Maupin wrote afterward.
The toll that AIDS took on our queer forebears can never be overstated, but Sylvester’s loss is especially heavy on the mind. He often said he would earn enough money to retire at an early age, move somewhere bucolic, and do absolutely nothing for the rest of his days. Even with over 20 years of glamour and success, it hurts that Sylvester never got that future. “I don’t want much—just a fabulous time,” he said the year Step II came out. “I have quite normal feelings but I like to take on a little bit more excitement than most. I am what I am, I do what I do, I know what I am, I live for what I feel.” Through his extraordinary style and boundless imagination, Sylvester generously paved the way for all of us to do the same.

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On his third full-length album for Rune Grammofon, Supersilent's virtuoso trumpeter explores the genesis of his own life, drawing from a wealth of home-taped sounds from his youth.

Strjon

To call the Norwegian group Supersilent "post-rock" is a misnomer: Their music is pre-rock, or, in a sense, pre-genre. It's the kind of amorphous sound mass you imagine at the beginning of the universe, an obliterative black-hole suction that takes modern cues only from the intuitive progressions of jazz and the chaotic sound atmospheres of electronic devices. Not to mention that post-rock is in the habit of forcing its cues, determined to hit that cathartic peak before the tape runs out. Supersilent, meanwhile, arrives at catharsis torturously if at all, preferring to let their variations unspool organically, reveling in unresolved tension and inertia.
On his third full-length album for Rune Grammofon, Supersilent's virtuoso trumpeter Arve Henriksen explores the genesis of his own universe: Strjon is the medieval name of Henriksen's home town-- it roughly means "streaming water," which even the most unsympathetic listener would have to admit is germane to the album's fluid, natural sound. Drawing from a wealth of home-taped sounds from his youth in Stryn, Henriksen recruited his Supersilent band mates Ståle Storløkken and Helge Sten to produce the album and to add keyboards and guitars to Henriksen's trumpet and electronics. But Strjon isn't an early demos thing; Henriksen simply used these early sketches as templates, allowing his modern polish to dovetail with his youthful zeal.
The result is a quietly stunning album of fugues, stasis, and moods. Given the starkness of its sound palette and the restraint of its compositions, its allure is uncanny-- that melancholy trumpets threading through evocative drones doesn't wear thin over the album's forty-seven minutes is a testament to Henriksen's compositional ingenuity and ace musicianship. The album opens with "Evocation": The sinuous, quavering trumpet figure is at once ominous and inviting; it has a palpable whooshing quality that makes it sound almost like a reed instrument, and you get a distinct sense of the musician's subtle embrasure behind the sounds. As a bowed drone pushes in for contrast, Henriksen's theme breaks out of its unsteady rut and waxes lyrical. Amid the gently reverbed guitars of "Leaf and Rock", Henriksen plays a slightly throttled and darkly romantic theme that cracks emotively at its root notes. His trumpet springs tiny, squealing leaks over the angelic glimmer of "In the Light", and lurches through damaged iterations of the caesurae-divided theme of "Evocation".
Elsewhere on the album, Henriksen breaks away from this satisfying but circumscribed approach to tinker with rhythm and mood. On "Twin Lake" cavernous guitar twinkles play off of hovering keyboards and Henriksen's bracingly high trumpet runs. Its nighttime-at-the-wharf aura is so strong you can practically smell the brine; all that's missing is the caw of gulls and the lonesome clank of a rusty pylon bell. The title track consists of nothing more than a primordial, modulating rumble; it's a study in soupy inertia. "Green Water" is light and airy with an atonal atmospheric buffer; percussive pings make it feel less nebulous than most of the album. "Black Mountain", a gyroscopic whirl of clipped, aggressive synth peals, is also atypically kinetic. And on "Glacier Descent", which is remindful of Growing with its shivering melodic cycles and low textural rumbles, Henriksen intones clear vowels over droning throat singing, gradually gathering it all up into a celestial crescendo. It's worth noting that the presence of a voice doesn't humanize "Glacier Descent" to any greater degree than the instrumental songs on Strjon, an album that is remarkable for its intimacy and wordless expressivity.


Singer-songwriter Julie Byrne’s* *new album has the lucidity and tactility of a healing crystal. Not unlike Phil Elverum, she paints sublime, awestruck moments when simple things become overwhelming.

Not Even Happiness

There are two things you can’t escape: the sky and yourself. It serves us, then, to understand both. Not Even Happiness, the pristine new album from singer-songwriter Julie Byrne, probes cosmic notions such as these with wonder and aplomb. Wanderer, dreamer, naturalist, loner, romantic—with her bold fingerpicking and deep voice, Byrne makes these well-worn identities feel newly alive. Not Even Happiness has all the lucidity and tactility of a healing crystal—or more to the point, a rose quartz, the one that might help you to love.
Blending folk, new age, and silence, Not Even Happiness is a balm. In both sound and sensibility, it strives for clarity, that ultimate marker of enlightenment. Orchestral arrangements sit subtly in the mix; an occasional flute slides in, or a sample of crashing waves. Byrne solemnly charts the places she’s seen—Kansas, Arkansas, Montana, Wyoming—and fills her lyrics with elemental things. She lies in a “verdant field,” catches “stars from a back porch,” watches a “dove over the prairie.” Her language is diffuse, braiding together themes of autonomy, desire, and struggle, but despite the heft of her poetry, the music exudes disarming ease. It feels much shorter than its 33 minutes. Not Even Happiness imagines a cross-section of Leonard Cohen’s mysticism and Judee Sill’s vulnerability—like the latter artist, Byrne’s keen pop sense and stacked harmonies play out like wind carrying her along. “Because they take themselves lightly, angels can fly,” the philosopher Alan Watts notes in his book Become What You Are, and Byrne seems to mind this idea sonically.
Byrne named her album Not Even Happiness because happiness, perhaps, is not always the point. There are virtues beyond happiness—strength, wisdom, integrity, self-possession—and Byrne honors these. Though she is a nomad, she doesn’t romanticize the position; her rootlessness sounds more like a calling, one that chose her, with sacrifices and doubts. “I have dragged my lives across the country/And wondered if travel led me anywhere,” Byrne sings on “I Live Now As a Singer,” conjuring the sweep of This Mortal Coil’s “Song to the Siren.” She sounds devoted to an inner compass only. On opener “Follow My Voice,” Byrne sings, “I was made for the green, made to be alone,” and she prioritizes her solitude with a sly turn: “I’ve been called heartbreaker/For doing justice to my own.” Not unlike Phil Elverum, Byrne paints sublime, awestruck moments when simple things become overwhelming. “Will I know a truer time/Than when I stood alone in the snow,” she sings. “And the moon was in the sky and shone.” Nearly a capella, she intones, “I’ve been seeking God within.”
Despite this self-reliance, these are patently love songs, processing the unravelling of a heart sewn shut. The human heart is never easy in a Byrne song, though, by nature of its connection to an active human mind. Byrne knows the difference between solitude and loneliness, and she bears the lessons of the former while endeavoring the enormous task of navigating the latter with dignity. On “Morning Dove,” her tone evokes Gillian Welch, as she vividly paints her surroundings—the woods, the endless river—but sweetly admits to trailing off: “I thought of you so presently,” she sings. “I could not wait to tell you the truth.”
Gleaming and steadied and wide, “Sleepwalker” is Not Even Happiness’ most gripping moment. It captures both the infatuated feeling of nascent love and how a dream of life can tempt you to lose control of your own. “I traveled only in service of my dreams,” Byrne sings, “I stood before them all/I was a sleepwalker.” Few contemporary songwriters earn a comparison to Angel Olsen, but in its acuity and grace—what Leonard Cohen called “that kind of balance with which you ride the chaos that you find around you”—Not Even Happiness makes a case for Byrne as one of them.
Throughout Not Even Happiness, Byrne sounds like a person who might worship the sky, but the majestic “Natural Blue” is a proper ode. There’s nothing particularly unusual about her tale of driving through familiar southwestern towns on tour, but her images evoke the life-affirming feeling of catching the exquisite light just so through a moving car window, while meditating on the changing scenery as it flickers by. “When I first saw you/That feeling, it came over me, too/Natural blue,” Byrne sings. Were “Natural Blue” released a decade ago, perhaps the poet Maggie Nelson would have found something in it to include in her 2009 prose-poem Bluets, a radiant reflection on the color. “When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light” goes Bluets’ final sentence, and a similar logic guides Not Even Happiness, in which the most worthy wandering happens on roads within.


Eef Barzelay produces his group's latest SpinART LP-- the band's fifth overall.

End of Love

Eef Barzalay isn't as weird as he'd like you to think; he's just another quirky singer-songwriter trying to figure out how the universe works. But his insights are filtered through a very personal perspective and come out his mouth as lyrics that are skewed, surreal, and often humorous. On Clem Snide's fifth album, End of Love, he sings about the nature of love and the mysterious doings of God. On the title track, love becomes just another hipster trend, a comparison that gives Barzalay the opportunity to scold a fickle trend-follower ("You're the first to know when a movement's come and gone") and observe that "no one will survive the End of Love." On "Jews for Jesus Blues", he peruses the promises of Christianity and realizes "now that I'm saved I miss being lost." And he tries to answer the age-old question, Why do bad things happen to good people?, on "God Answers Back", and comes up with something much better than, say, "God Shuffled His Feet": "Your blood will color every sunset/ Your tears will help Me grow some trees."
These are big big issues (are there any bigger?), inspired by the deaths of his mother and his mother-in-law. But Barzalay works better with small moments, things that everyone experiences but few actually take time to consider. Through these instances (as on "Joan Jett of Arc" from The Ghost of Fashion and "Made for TV Movie" from End of Love) he catches brief glimpses of life and death but only hints at their dwarfing magnitude. When he faces them head-on, they ironically become smaller in scale-- less daunting and therefore less affecting.
So End of Love isn't Barzalay's best collection of songs, and the production tends to gloss over the instruments so songs like "Collapse" and "When We Become" sound subdued and blandly unobtrusive. Still, the album has some unaffected gems, including closer "Weird", which sounds like it was recorded during a party and effortlessly pops the bubbles of the self-proclaimed oddballs who "aren't as weird as you'd like me to think." Best of all is the quiet "Made for TV Movie", in which a Lucille Ball biopic inspired a Tolstoyian revelation: "They would never make a movie if everything was great/ Because happiness is boring."
What makes "Made for TV Movie" so sublime (in the sense of both overwhelming and mortally terrifying) isn't the playful songwriting, but the sound. An unidentified young girl, no more than four or five, sings on the bridge, a couple of measures of wordless la la las. But she's utterly charming, not only in her innocently arhythmic delivery but in the reaction she solicits from Barzalay. He turns his attention from the microphone to the child, and the world closes in around them. It's maybe the most intimate moment captured on a Clem Snide album-- completely unrehearsed, unaffected, and endearing.


Where the South African singer-songwriter’s work was tinged with melancholy, their new album, executive produced by Nile Rodgers, renders carnal ecstasy in bright tones and major keys.

Nakhane: Bastard Jargon

When Nakhane began writing Bastard Jargon, they were hell-bent on making “a sex album,” as they explained to Vogue earlier this year. The South African singer-songwriter, now based in South London, devised their third full-length as an outburst of joy—a jubilee meant to contrast with their earlier, more melancholy work. But even as they built each song drums first, crafting experimental dance pop pulsing to four-on-the-floor beats, darkness found a way of creeping in. “It ended up being what I call an existentialist sex album,” Nakhane said in the same interview. “It’s fun, but there’s always this kind of memento mori in the background, a fear that you’re fucking up, or a reckoning with your mistakes.”
There isn’t much in the way of explicit sex on Bastard Jargon, but you’ll catch quick glimpses of erotica, like sneaking a peek through a cracked bedroom door. Nakhane presents themselves as vulnerable and emboldened in these personal vignettes: They moan, recline “splayed and physical,” and replay nights of carnal ecstasy while sipping their morning coffee. Nakhane’s scenery is hushed and intimate, so they designed their narration to feel familiar, as if they were serenading someone over the phone, or chatting with a lover in bed, each word muffled slightly by pillows. But rather than calibrate the instrumental tracks to mirror that intimacy, Nakhane and a cast of contributors—including executive producer Nile Rodgers, John Congleton, and Max Hershenow (aka Alexmaax)—occasionally clog the album with dated production and unimaginative arrangements. Nakhane’s songs have strong bones, but they could benefit from fewer—or different—collaborators.
Nakhane was intent on recording a big, blissful third album, and most of the songs on Bastard Jargon are written in major keys. But instead of resembling modern dance hits, certain songs sound taped from pop-rock airwaves of the late ’80s and early ’90s, and the layers of instruments fail to add nuance or depth. “The Conjecture” plods along to tin-can drums and a bristly synth pattern that loops for most of the song. The thin backing track can’t stand up to Nakhane’s velvet-lined voice, and the effect feels a bit like a pop diva doing karaoke. Their multi-tracked chorus doesn’t help: the melody is fluffy and a little too sweet, like a bale of cotton candy.
Early single “Do You Well” is a slight improvement, but it still has the gloss of generic feel-good disco. The addition of Perfume Genius does little, as his voice gets smothered in snapping drums and reverb. On the chorus, bright keys follow Nakhane’s vocal hook like a dot bouncing across words in a lyric video, an on-the-nose choice that feels especially cloying. The “memento mori” Nakhane spoke of is nowhere to be found in these melodies. Both “The Conjecture” and “Do You Well” might have flourished with a few dark or subversive production details.
Getting a little ragged and dirty serves Nakhane well, as evidenced by “Tell Me Your Politik,” Bastard Jargon’s best song. The track bumps to big nasty synth blasts, live percussion, muted hand claps, and sampled shouts that erupt just beneath the surface of the mix. Nakhane coats their voice in subtle distortion, eliminating any potential schmaltz, while a warm, crackling sax solo from Shabaka Hutchings lends a handcrafted feel. At the center of “Tell Me Your Politik” is a verse from South African artist Moonchild Sanelly, who snaps and flexes in English and her native Xhosa. It is an energetic contrast to Nakhane’s elegant timbre.
Opener “The Caring” is also propelled by less obvious parts: a drum machine that sounds like a crumbling rock, a programmed squeak that recalls a Brazilian cuíca. The chorus hearkens back a few decades, but it nods to post-new wave bands like General Public and Londonbeat—a forgotten but spry vintage of pop music. “The Caring” is also where Nakhane unwittingly articulates what might be Bastard Jargon’s chief flaw: “I was so full of light/I was blinding,” they sing over palm-muted guitar. Nowhere is this truer than on stadium-pop ballad “Hold Me Down,” which has the DNA of a huge hit but the production value of a compressed demo. The angel-choir backing vocals feel cheap and cheesy, as do the glowing beams of synthesizer. The chorus is so catchy, Nakhane’s voice so lush, that “Hold Me Down” could have been recorded with a fraction of the bells and whistles—the light that bounces off of them is blinding indeed.