J Spaceman’s latest opus is gloriously satisfying and self-referential, refining his orchestral space rock with alchemical power.

Everything Was Beautiful

Through sheer force of habit, sailing un-buffeted and serene through the winds of musical fashion, Spiritualized have reached their fourth decade as a paragon of musical constancy. Everything Was Beautiful, their ninth studio album, calls back to many of the band’s habitual influences: The Stooges, gospel, blues, free jazz, the Rolling Stones, et al., which the band finesses into a hypnotic mixture, capable of both savage intensity and benzodiazepine drift. More than anything, though, Everything Was Beautiful refers back to the band’s own gilded history—which would be a problem if they didn’t do it so shamelessly well.
While recording Everything Was Beautiful, Jason Pierce, once again operating under the J Spaceman moniker he has used periodically since his Spacemen 3 days, called on lessons learned when mixing Spiritualized’s classic third album, 1997’s Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, notably the power of carefully constructed layers. The two albums share a spellbinding mixture of astral ambience, artfully tailored musical density, and occasionally sharpened live fury, as well as an emotional depth not always evident in the band’s more glazed-out moments.
The similarities only creep onward: Like Ladies and Gentlemen, Everything Was Beautiful comes packaged as a medical accessory, the deluxe vinyl edition including gold foil inner sleeve and pop-out medicine boxes. There are plenty of musical and lyrical allusions as well, from the Quindar tones on “Always Together With You” to the choir on “I’m Coming Home Again.” Even the former track, the album’s lead single, speaks to Pierce’s retrospective bent: It was originally released in lo-fi quality on The Space Project, a 2014 compilation based around recordings from Voyagers I and II.
And yet, Spiritualized have refined their orchestral space rock into an alchemical power that goes beyond concerns about novelty. Relatively minor tracks like “The A Song (Laid in Your Arms)” or “Crazy” become heroically satisfying when bathed in the band’s familiar soup. Fuzzed-up guitars crash into towering string sections with the power of vengeful meteorites; rolling drum beats and tumbling bass move with the irresistible momentum of freight trains; thick brass arrangements coat the music in fat bluesy lines; choirs gild the vocal melodies with cosmic sheen; and you’re never far from a vertiginous climax.
Stronger songs become transcendent. “Let It Bleed (For Iggy)” has the kind of chorus that seems to have arrived carved in stone and handed down from the ages, its devotional howl the perfect cathartic payoff to the verse’s creeping melancholy. “The Mainline Song” captures the narcotic rush of adventure in a handful of well-chosen vocal lines that call back to the propulsive, Krautrock-in-space roll of classic Spacemen 3 songs like “Big City.” Elsewhere, “Best Thing You Never Had (The D Song)” glides with the yearning inevitability of the best blues melodies, its chugging guitar more akin to the Rolling Stones’ 1964 cover of “(Get Your Kicks on) Route 66” than anything released in the last 30 years.
At their best, there is a power and immediacy to these songs that lifts them beyond 2018’s compact and casual And Nothing Hurt, the simple melodies connecting like the call of a beating human heart. It helps that the sound is big but not bloated: Pierce plays 16 different instruments and employs more than 30 musicians and singers (including his daughter Poppy and longtime collaborator John Coxon), but individual sounds are well balanced in a mix where detail is not sacrificed to depth, the ligneous clatter of castanets still audible among the heavyweight sounds of brass and guitars. Audiophiles and headphone listeners will find much to enjoy; but there is an energy that belies the album’s long mixing process, suggesting these songs will be huge when taken live.
You could take issue with Spiritualized for sticking so closely to the blueprint they inaugurated more than 30 years ago. But the band always felt built for repetition and refinement, a cosmic home for Jason Pierce to grow comfortably old, away from an ever-changing musical world. And if Everything Was Beautiful calls back to Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space, it does so in a way that suggests that the fires are still burning, only slightly dimmed by the passing of time. Everything Was Beautiful is like meeting an old friend and finding new shared memories, the nostalgia not yet worn thin. It’s another glorious argument in favor of getting high on your own supply.


Why The Mountains Are Black is Third Man’s two-disc collection compiling over 50 years of "primeval Greek village music." Remastered from Grammy-award-winning producer Christopher King's expansive archive of 78rpm recordings, every square inch of these songs brims with primal indignance, a sense that when times are tough, you break out the booze, sing louder, and dance more fervently.

Various Artists: Why the Mountains Are Black: Primeval Greek Village Music

When most Westerners think of Greek music, they probably picture the rickety, bouzouki-driven dance music showcased in films like My Big Fat Greek Wedding (arguably the most enduring portrayal of today's Greeks in mainstream media), or perhaps, the cheesy balladry of singers like Demis Roussos, the one-time progressive musician-turned-superstar who went on to sell over 60 million albums in the '70s and '80s. The predominant sound is cheerful, celebratory, welcoming, sincere, just like the Greek people: Throughout the nation’s history, woe—the invasions of Persians, Turks, and Nazis, starvation and famine, sickness or death—results in revelry. When times are tough, Greeks break out the booze, sing louder, and dance more fervently. And it shows in the music.
Unlike the rest of contiguous Eurasia, Greece’s unique geography has enabled it to remain impervious to Western influences: the northern border is shaped by treacherous mountain ranges, while the south and east is dominated by hundreds of rocky, isolated islands. These barriers have also enabled each individual village to retain its unique cultural identity in relation to the broader canon of demotika, or Greek folk music. Such is the focus of Why the Mountains Are Black, Third Man’s two-disc collection compiling over 50 years of "primeval Greek village music": Remastered from Grammy-award-winning producer Christopher King's expansive archive of 78rpm recordings, this compilation traces the lineage of demotika through the mountains and across the sea.
The 28 tracks King’s assembled for Why the Mountains Are Black sound nothing like the chirpy, cheery music of those Athenos feta commercials—in fact, it sounds downright inhospitable at times, closer to free jazz or even drone music. The instantly-recognizable bouzouki is largely absent, as is any distinguishable melodic patterns, with fiddles, lutes, and thunderous drums kicking up a maelstrom in its stead. The pipiza (a blaring, needle-sharp wind instrument) takes on a role akin to a jazz saxophone, screeching stream-of-consciousness phrases above the din like a furious harpy. And yet—these are celebratory songs with clear form and purpose, defined dances that continue to be performed to this day, if not on a national scale then a local one. The steady 4/4 beat of contemporary dance music, after all, is a Western creation. Greek musical tradition is instead rooted in time signatures (7/8, 5/8, and so forth) that date back to the Byzantine era—so, while songs like "Enas Aetos - Tsamiko (An Eagle ? Dance)" and "Syrtos Haniotikos (Syrtos Dance from Hania)" are likely to make a non-Greek throw up their hands in confusion, anyone who’s ever attended a Greek dance will recognize the constancy latent in these eccentric tempos.
Speaking with the LA Times, King argued that suffering—rather than celebration, or simple expressions of hometown pride—provides the spark in these maddened, frantic songs. "The function of music among the countryside-dwelling Greeks was both to ameliorate an often short, hard and somewhat isolated life," he noted, "but also to protect against….'Dangerous Hour': the times of crisis, danger, uncertainty, pain, longing and death that faced rural Greeks for millennia." From the shoddy recording quality of this collections’ tunes (made all the more abrasive by King’s remastering) to the aforementioned howls of fiddles and pipizas gasping into the din, every square inch of these songs brims with primal indignance, no matter how formally sequestered they may seem. Every "Opa"—a globally-recognized expression of joy and excitement—doesn’t just feel like an order to pick up the pace, but an affirmation of life in spite of all that these musicians had to endure. It is this spirit—and King’s awareness of it—that enables this initially baffling collection to transcend its esotericism and connect with a global audience, perhaps even with those who’ve never had a sip of ouzo in their life. After all, from the mountains of Greece to the hills of Appalachia, to dance in spite of certain doom is to be human.


I hate talking about press kits, but I'm gonna drop the rule this time\n\ around. Press kits, for ...

Keep it Like a Secret

I hate talking about press kits, but I'm gonna drop the rule this time around. Press kits, for the uninitiated, are like a sales pitch. You get a letter from some yahoo behind a desk who has this neat band they want you to check out. To get you to do that, they also include various write-ups and reviews for a previous work or, in the case of a new band, loads of "Next Big Thing" accolades. Usually, a press kit is a dozen pages or less. The Built to Spill press kit, on the other hand, may be the next great American novel. First, a three page letter from the publicist. Secondly, an 8x10 publicity shot featuring Doug Martsch flanked by bandmates and sitting on a radiator playing a guitar. (I'm sure he plays on the radiator all the time, or so the world of publicity shots would have me believe.) Then, twenty-eight pages consisting mostly of unanimous rave reviews for their last album, the fucking awesome Perfect From Now On. Finally, a four page article from the new issue of Spin regarding the new release... which is somewhere in the envelope. I had to turn the kit upside down and start shaking until a white cardboard promotional CD case came a-tumbling out.
I put the disc in the player and began to leaf through the kit. Sure, I was just looking for my name somewhere in the clippings, and I suppose it would have helped to have previously written about them before. But that's fine because I can sit there and mock my fellow writers by playing the "Sounds Like..." drinking game or trying to find the biggest cliché of them all. The winner was a tie between Mr. Showbiz's Grant Alden, who referred to Perfect as "...less ebullient than its predecessor, and has a wry durability about itself, yielding polished gems..." and the usual hands- down winner, Will Hermes of the Village Voice, who actually managed to string together the words, "As far as rock goes, the stay- at- home types seem peculiarly American these days, a gesture from a post- grunge culture weary and dubious of being the biggest, loudest, and most important, just as current Britpop might be read, in part, as postcolonialist white British weary of apologizing for its history and looking to feel good about itself again" and call it a coherent sentence.
The one thread that held every single review and article together was how different Perfect was from the band's previous release, 1993's There's Nothing Wrong With Love. Love was built on short, sharp, and snappy pop songs, but Perfect was-- as everybody went on to note-- "epic." Indeed, the 1996 release had few tunes under six minutes and wove dense guitars, emotional debris, and schizophrenic song structures into something gorgeous and fascinating. As avid readers of music publications will note as the reviews trickle in, Keep It Like a Secret will be heralded for retreating back to the pop songs of Love while keeping a foot inside Perfect's scrimmage line of dexterity and guitar heroism. (My friends, I think when the next album's press kit arrives, I'm going to win my own petty game with that last sentence.) It also recalls last year's fine Halo Benders release, The Rebels Not In, the album Martsch recorded with Beat Happening's Calvin Johnson and former Spinanes and current Built to Spill drummer Scott Plouf. And that's not a bad thing at all.
Seriously, Keep It Like a Secret has already been spun at Club Jason five times within the past 24 hours. That's not a frequent occurrence-- not unless it really, and truly is, love. Doug Martsch just knows how to tickle me in all of the happy places, and he accomplishes that on the merits of the opening number alone. "The Plan" is a brisk, weaving anthem complete with a solo that would make Thurston Moore green with envy. "Center of the Universe," the second cut and first single, conjures up some XTC and a little bit of Barnacle Pete's finer sea shanties. And what have we here? It's the downright pretty "Carry the Zero," which merges Cocteau Twins- esque guitars and melody with equal sigh and much more articulate lyrics, none of which I'm going to quote to you. "Sidewalk" is classic indie rock in sound, classic rock in execution-- something I've been waiting a long time to hear.
Speaking of classic rock, "You Were Right" is a tongue- in- check number about spitting back classic rock lyrics ("You were right when you said all we are is dust in the wind/ You were right when you said that we're all just bricks in the wall"), although why he's doing it is a mystery. But it's a fun mystery. You know, like "Mystery" on PBS, only without that meddling Alistair Cooke. Believe me, if there's one man who can spoil a rock and roll party, it's that evil tool of the Mobil Corporation. Luckily, he's passed on, leaving Diana Rigg to run the show, and she's no match for Martsch. Keep It Like a Secret? No, at the risk of hopping on a cliché wagon, I think I'm gonna tell all my friends about Built to Spill. Try and stop me, Diana.


The post-punk band’s new seven-song collection owes a conspicuous debt to New Order, and while the presentation begs to be called “spooky,” they’re having fun with it.

Fate in Seven Lessons

In 2013, Cold Cave’s Wes Eisold had just released a single called “People Are Poison.” He was detoxing from the bad vibes that surrounded 2011’s Cherish the Light Years, the band’s final release for Matador, and recovering from professional backlash after booking controversial noise artist Boyd Rice as a tour opener. But his own vision of his band’s frosty darkwave sound was more positive, and in the years since, Eisold has tried to bring the two into alignment. Cold Cave downsized, releasing singles at a slow, steady drip on their own Heartworm Press. After years of chaotic personnel shifts, Eisold shares songwriting duties with his wife, Amy Lee; their son Rainer adds childish vocal color and harmonica. Guitarist Anthony Anzaldo is a founding member of Ceremony, a band that traced a similar path from hardcore to gloomy post-punk.
At seven songs and 32 minutes, Cold Cave’s new compilation Fate in Seven Lessons is not quite an album, yet too substantial to qualify as an EP. Each of its seven tracks present an easily identifiable theme (“the New Order one,” “the Depeche Mode one”) to lure the casual observer, promising thrills for all ages and minimal risk. On 2014’s Full Cold Moon compilation, Cold Cave erred towards minimalist and morose, an understandable reaction to Cherish the Light Years’ brickwalled bluster. Fate in Seven Lessons walks a middle path, genuflecting towards goth-pop royalty, establishing a liaison between Cruel World headliners and newer bands who now consider Cold Cave elder statesmen.
Resolutely mid-fi production continues to subdue Eisold’s vocals, blunting the rock-star charisma that separated Cold Cave from their peers, but it no longer feels like penance for having aspired to actual rock stardom. Fate in Seven Lessons recalls Cold Cave’s penchant for wearing all black leather at scorching summer festival dates: the presentation begs to be called “spooky,” but they’re having fun with it. Their idea of post-punk is more New Order than Joy Division, and the gnarly, sawtooth basslines of “Prayer From Nowhere” signal trashy fun rather than menace. The most memorable lyrics play on Eisold’s vampiric image; “I thought substance abuse could be cute/But now I dream of silence and gardens” is wordplay more fitting for a guy wearing an argyle sweater.
Though Fate in Seven Lessons earns its claim to “return to form,” it awkwardly finds itself competing with the very record that broke that form. Later this year, Cold Cave will play tenth anniversary shows for Cherish the Light Years, a collection of roaring, jet-black jock jams that did not make Eisold famous but put him through all of the Behind the Music drama anyway. No other band from this realm has aspired to make an album with its maniacal, moonshot ambition. The aim of Fate in Seven Lessons is more obvious: Modern English’s lawyers might be interested in the chorus of “Love Is All,” while “Happy Birthday Dark Star” takes significant liberties with the Cure’s “How Beautiful You Are.” “Psalm 23” unlocks memories of “The Hearts Filthy Lesson,” or just the general sound of David Bowie and Depeche Mode adjusting to industrial and big-tent electronica. “Night Light” begins in a fog of sustained synths before the sequenced beat drops. There’s probably a half-dozen New Order songs that pulled the same trick, but why deny the most euphoric song Cold Cave have ever written? Their diehard fans know all these references and the band is done trying to court anyone else.

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An in-studio set featuring nine songs plucked from LCD's entire career, London Sessions captures one of the greatest live bands out there in top form.

London Sessions

For a group whose albums often seem like work of one studio-perfectionist mastermind, LCD Soundsystem have turned out to be one of the greatest live bands of the last decade. In fact, they do just about everything a great live band-- especially a great live dance band-- should do. Known to stretch their songs out to "special disco version" lengths, they're able to bring audiences from simmering anticipation to hands-up screaming release in the span of a song, and then do it again. And then again. Like Remain in Light-era Talking Heads, the closest comparison to LCD at their current "locked-in but loose" onstage peak, they could release a live album that might offer equal thrills to their studio discs.
But London Sessions is not LCD's The Name of This Band is Talking Heads, and at least one reason why not is because live in-studio sessions like this one tend to capture artists in a slightly different mode than during a full-on concert, where a band can feed off the energy of thousands of sweat-soaked fans. The band mentions iconic BBC radio host John Peel's legendary program when talking about the album for a reason: Like those old Peel sessions, this set finds the band offering tighter, cleaner, more focused versions of their live staples, running through all nine songs with an electrifying, stripped-down effortlessness.
Here, James Murphy proves that even without the thick, enveloping sound his production chops lent This Is Happening, he can match his heroes' delivery: His rare ability to snap from mordant humor to affecting pathos comes through loud and clear with back-to-back takes on "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" and "All My Friends". But as great of a frontman as he is, LCD's shit-hot rhythm section, anchored by drummer Pat Mahoney and ex-!!! member Tyler Pope, nearly steals the spotlight. Their interplay is as mesmerizing to listen to here (especially those perfectly timed keyboard jolts that spike the intensity of "Get Innocuous" just a little higher each time) as it is to watch in person. And for a kinda-sorta disco band, they tear the roof off in a live-and-loud way. The sense of possible frenzy that lurks behind the slightly-too-hot "metronomic" groove of "Us V Them" builds to an edge-of-control climax that's even more thrilling than if the band had actually spun into a freakout.
Of course, since these tracks aren't exactly radical live reconstructions, there aren't a ton of surprises on London Sessions. But it's still a wonder to hear a band this committed, this on its game, without the studio tweaks. Plus, you've got to consider what a debased format LCD is working with here. The number of actually transcendent live records-- whether recorded at a radio station or in an arena-- is almost laughably small considering how many exist. This one's a gift, the second LCD's given us this year.


The Queens legend tests out an unwieldy rap-rock hybrid with a few promising moments that will test even his most devoted followers.

Pharoahe Monch / Th1rt3eN: A Magnificent Day for an Exorcism

A Magnificent Day for an Exorcism

Since emerging from South Jamaica, Queens as one-half of Organized Konfusion in the late 1980s, Troy Jamerson has hewed closely to a recipe of complex rhyme patterns, intelligent social observation, and near-total lack of commercial compromise. For his tenacity, he’s been rewarded with a dedicated fanbase and the tag “underrated,” which sticks to him like spray paint to a wall. His audience will always be extremely loyal, so Monch’s first album in seven years—and first real crack at rebuking recent American nightmares—is a tantalizing prospect. What he delivers is a strange and in many ways confusing project that will test the limits of even his most devoted followers.
On paper, a Pharoahe Monch rap-rock hybrid album isn’t a totally outlandish prospect—his music has sometimes bared a hardcore edge. Previous project P.T.S.D. (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder) was a concept record about mental health that deployed heavy guitar lines to help depict the disintegration of the cerebrum. A Magnificent Day For an Exorcism eschews beats for a live band set up, as Monch teams up with drummer and Jack White collaborator Daru Jones and guitarist Marcus Machado to form the band Th1rt3en. The musicians thrash out blood-raw rock instrumentals for Monch—taking up the role of frontman—to rap, sing, and croon over. Promotional material connected to the record even shows the 48-year-old with an overgrown beard, kitted out in leather jacket and bandana. It’s all a bit “Kids, your father is in the basement, jamming with his friends.”
The Th1rt3en sound lands somewhere between Sabbath-esque metal, Onyx’s hard-moshing hardcore hip-hop, and Kid Rock. Machado’s guitar is turned way up in the mix and Jones’ drum thwacks land forcibly. But the predictable riffs and cheesy solos make for stodgy rap instrumentals. When Monch tries a rapid-fire flow over Machado’s fret-wrangling and Jones’ drum solos on “The Magician,” the whole thing collapses into a mess. Then Monch starts shouting “voodoo” and “magic,” as if to invite the spirit of Jimi Hendrix to come through and help out.
Take “Fight,” featuring Cypress Hill, a takedown of police brutality on Black Americans, with B-Real describing a cop removing his body cam before aiming a gun at the rapper’s head. The righteous anger is sapped away by the repetitive and clichéd guitar riff lurching underneath.
On top of unfurnished instrumentals there is unfocused songwriting. Opener and single “Cult 45” promises an admonishment of Donald Trump’s presidency that strangely dropped just days before the inauguration of Joe Biden. The cult of MAGA remains, of course, and ripe for probing, yet Monch’s shots are disappointingly shallow. “Nauseating, I'm angry, Bill Bixby/Exorcist, make the president's head 360,” is a fun piece of wordplay but hardly thought-provoking. “Racist” does feature one of the album’s most interesting loose bars as Monch takes a rare stance for a rapper and criticizes US drone warfare, something that predates Trump: “Send the drone strike to a school, call it political/Use Obamacare to get my brain operated on.” Sections of the song see Monch inhabit the persona of an American racist by parroting offensive language without taking the opportunity to go any deeper, and referencing Trump’s Muslim ban, revoked by Biden two days before the album’s release.
The saving grace is Monch’s performance. His flow, naturally funky and with a light lisp reminiscent of Kool G Rap, still embodies classic New York street-rap cool. The brain-bending flows of “Triskaidekaphobia” spark thoughts of Aesop Rock and confirm that even at this stage of his career, Monch absolutely loves rapping. At times he proves an adept rock vocalist too, and there are some interesting experiments on the record’s final third—the made-in-the-garage soul of “Amnesia”; the Japanese arcade sounds of closer “Kill Kill Kill”—hinting at promising future directions for Th1rt3en.
The most impressive song, though, is “Oxygen.” Monch croons an ode to perhaps god or maybe the air we breathe (or both), sounding like a holy man as he yells, “I need you in my life like oxygen/Holy water come and wash away the sins.” There is no direct reference to the death of George Floyd, but with the words “I can’t breathe” rippling through the social consciousness, Monch’s inclusion of these words in the chorus feels timely and pointed. Here, the band sounds tight and well-drilled, helping Monch navigate the corridors of his brain. Magnificent Day may be rough going at times, but he has chemistry with this group, and in the best moments, you can hear why Monch wants us to follow him down this particular path.

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On the sequel to 2017’s FEELS, the Iranian Swedish singer’s dramatic take on soul finally bears fruit.

-Ugh, Those Feels Again

For LA-based singer Snoh Aalegra, feelings hit like tear gas, seeping into the skin and scrambling the senses. Whether in the throes of love or heartbreak, the romance she sings of is forever smoldering, a breath away from flaring into full-blown passion or asphyxiating into ash. Snoh has been workshopping this dramatic take on soul for half a decade, and on her second album, the process finally bears fruit.
Signed to No I.D.’s ARTium Recordings alongside Vince Staples and Jhené Aiko, Snoh is a bit of a polyglot, straddling R&B, soul, and rap. She has described her music as “cinematic soul,” and the label is florid but not inaccurate. -Ugh, those feels again is a sequel to her 2017 album, FEELS, and shares that record’s emphasis on mood. In the vein of her idols Stevie Wonder and Whitney Houston, Snoh prefers lush, grandiose arrangements. That grandeur often served as a crutch on FEELS and the EPs that preceded it, puffing up vanilla writing and competent but anonymous singing, but on Ugh, indulgence becomes integral to the storytelling, swelling and subsiding in cadence with Snoh’s impassioned vocals.
Snoh wrote Ugh after returning to dating following the end of a long-term relationship she’s characterized as “depressing” and “exhausting,” and that freshness of perspective resonates throughout. She sounds excited to be back in the mix, complications and all. “I Want You Around” pairs the zero-gravity nausea of a fast-evolving fling with the thrill of defining its pace. “I don’t wanna kiss you, yet/I just wanna feel you,” Snoh sings, dousing the flames without extinguishing them. “Situationship” swings between frustration and insouciance, questioning an undefined relationship with a whimsical, almost anthropological curiosity. “So many times you and I made love in my mind,” Snoh sings, thinking out loud yet going with the flow. There’s a clear sense of wonder beneath the “ugh”; for Snoh, a vexing romance is at least a new experience.
The record’s sequence allows the highs of life on the rebound (side A) to give way to loneliness and reflection on past love (side B). The pivot makes sense thematically, but stylistically it’s regressive. The front half is full of strobing midtempo compositions that push Snoh to perform intuitively, switching between compact rap-inflected flows, glossy melodies, and sultry ad-libs. As she trades moans with the electric guitar on “Toronto,” leads a choir on “Find Someone Like You,” and bounces with the bass line on “Whoa,” she feels loose and personable.
The tracks on side B often push her into a corner, forcing old habits. The Portishead-indebted flip of “Danube Incident” on “Peace” is lazy and dry. No I.D. and Steve Wyreman’s psyched-out swirls of synths on “Charleville 9200, Pt. II” are beautiful, but Snoh’s writing can’t match the lavishness. Though her smoky, melancholic voice has plenty of heft, when she sings, “Paris doesn’t feel the same,” and “LA doesn’t feel the same,” it feels like she’s drafting humblebrags for Insta rather than mourning lost love. Wintry, ethereal production by Toronto’s Maneesh on “Be Careful” fits better, but Snoh’s pen again falls short. “These are bad times,” she reads from a church marquee.
The album’s nucleus is a three-song run in which Snoh addresses her recent ex directly, moving from abandonment (“You”) to bitterness (“Njoy”) to intolerance (“Nothing to Me”). The strength of the sequence is Snoh’s candor, which she applies to herself as well as her ex as their love definitively becomes past tense. “He wants to hold me/I’m alone,” she sings bittersweetly on “Nothing to Me.” That sense of quiet resolution is what makes Ugh such a leap for her. The feels remain noxious and suffocating, but as she embraces the delirium, the “ughs” slowly turn into insights.


Inspired by rom-coms and Kimya Dawson, Gen Z songwriter Bea Kristi uses the slanted melodies and flannel-loving aesthetics of ’90s alternative rock in service of massive pop hooks.

Fake It Flowers

Bea Kristi writes songs for the movies of her dreams. Though her music gained traction on the comparatively small screens of TikTok and YouTube, the 20-year-old guitarist and singer fantasizes through a cinematic lens: Tom Hanks is her hero; the Juno soundtrack introduced her to the folksy side of indie rock. The Hollywood sensibility carries through to her music, which she releases as beabadoobee, a moniker invented as an Instagram handle. And rather than discuss musical or lyrical themes, she describes her work in visual terms: The songs on her full-length debut, Fake It Flowers, have self-described “end of ’90s movie vibes” and remind her of a “2000s chick flick.” In case her floral motifs and rose-hued music videos don’t state it plainly enough, Kristi steps in to shade the finer details of her Nora Ephron-esque vision: “The girl finally gets with the boy at the end.”
As a troublemaking teenager in London, Kristi found solace in a guitar her father gave her, teaching herself to play from YouTube videos and channeling rom-com inspirations and her parents’ love for ’90s alt-rock into grainy recordings. The first song she wrote, “Coffee,” was loosely based off the first song she learned on guitar, Sixpence None the Richer’s “Kiss Me.” In a fittingly cinematic escalation, “Coffee” found minor success on YouTube before the Canadian rapper Powfu interpolated it into a lo-fi hip-hop track. His remix exploded on TikTok, eventually landing Kristi’s gentle strumming in a Dunkin’ commercial. With just two chords and a shoddy amateur recording, Beabadoobee had begun soundtracking the lives of her peers.
Her viral success attracted the attention of Dirty Hit, the British power-pop label behind the 1975 and Wolf Alice. With their backing, Kristi released 2018’s Patched Up and 2019’s Loveworm and Space Cadet EPs, each straying further from the sheepish melancholy of bedroom pop. By the latter, she had perfected a combination of grunge’s quiet-loud dynamics and the faux disaffection of pop-punk. Like a well-curated For You page or the soundtrack to a Fox Searchlight film, Kristi’s music is adorned in pop culture references: “I wish I was Stephen Malkmus,” she cried out on her eponymous 2019 single. Fake It Flowers builds on the ambitions of those releases, pairing her knack for knock-out choruses with violins, handclaps, and Slumberland-worthy reverb. But rather than attempting mimicry, Kristi cherry-picks the most potent elements of her broader ’90s palette for maximum impact. For young millennials and Gen X spawn who, like her, grew up on an eclectic diet of Avril Lavigne and the Cranberries, the melodies are immediately comforting.
With the aid of producer Pete Robertson (formerly of British punk revivalists the Vaccines), the album is relentless in its pursuit of a massive hook. “Worth It” refashions the lush strings of Britpop into a climactic motif that builds with each arena-sized refrain; “Charlie Brown” pairs subdued verses with simple, shout-along chorus, practically built for Kristi’s imaginary big screen getaway-car syncs. And where “Coffee” and other early singles relied on predictable chord progressions, Kristi reaches for open tunings and sly tempo changes on “Dye It Red” and “Care,” achieving an intuitive approach to pop that still scans as left-of-center.
But like a good soundtrack in a CW drama, her music still operates best in the background. Despite her love for ’90s alt-rock poets, a closer listen reveals her writing to be disappointingly prosaic. Her lyrics seem designed for shape, rather than color, rising to the level of math class margin notes and locker graffiti: “Kiss my ass/You don’t know jack,” she sings on “Dye It Red,” with almost comically sentimental delivery. The album is broadly about the trials and tribulations of young love, specifically with boyfriend Soren Harrison, but it rarely escapes the most straightforward expression of those thoughts—“It’s hard cause it sucks,” she moans on “Further Away”; “I think I want to marry him,” she sings blissfully on “Yoshimi, Forest, Magdalene.” “Horen Sarrison” (get it?) leans more heavily on figures of speech, offering a glimpse of poetic potential in the doe-eyed metaphors of its verses: “You are the smell of pavement after the rain/You are the last empty seat on a train,” Kristi sings, a welcome moment of intimacy in a record made up of tossed-off generalizations. In the editing room, it would be easy to cut to her outsized choruses, but in real time, her greenness is harder to ignore.
Fake It Flowers is an album of vibes: It uses the slanted melodies and flannel-loving aesthetics of alternative rock in service of pop hooks that are almost impressively simplistic and repetitive. The hope, as Kristi tells it, is that you sing these songs into your mirror, blast them in your car, and scribble them into a diary post-breakup. Too often, she jumps to John Hughes-ian climaxes without laying the foundation that would grant them the proper emotional heft. But Kristi shines as a guitarist and a composer; even the sternest skeptics might be forced to headbang once the power chords crash in on a particularly distorted chorus. Beabadoobee needs to punch up her script, but the set is perfectly lit.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Norwegian vocalist’s new covers album offers spare, chilly takes on songs from post-punk Manchester, 1970s New York, and Elizabethan England.

Go Dig My Grave

If one were to put together a list of songs that most discerning music lovers would never want to hear covered again, Leonard Cohen’s endlessly battered “Hallelujah” and Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” would surely contend for the top spots. It is almost impressive, then, that in 2006 Norwegian vocalist Susanna Wallumrød had a crack at both on Melody Mountain, her second album with keyboard player Morten Qvenild as Susanna and the Magical Orchestra. Unfortunately, her versions of both songs slowed down the originals to a pained crawl, leaving them devoid of any spark.
Wallumrød’s moves since then have resembled an act of penance for that questionable early-career choice. Her 2013 album The Forester was an elegant collection of original songs recorded with strings, woodwind, and theorbo (a lute-like Baroque instrument), while 2016’s Triangle was an extended meditation on mortality, perhaps more impressive than enjoyable. Go Dig My Grave, Wallumrød’s sixth solo album as Susanna, sits somewhere in between those two poles. Over the album’s 10 tracks, Wallumrød covers both traditional folk songs and more contemporary numbers from Lou Reed and Joy Division, along with one original based on a Baudelaire poem, with accompaniment from the hushed tones of harp player Giovanna Pessi, Ida Løvli Hidle on accordion, and fiddle player Tuva Livsdatter Syvertsen.
It’s an eclectic lineup, although Wallumrød’s unwavering approach to her source material means that the differences between post-punk Manchester, 1970s New York, and Elizabethan England are rendered largely moot. Taken individually, her bare renditions of “Cold Song,” “The Willow Song,” and “Lilac Wine” are beguiling. But the sparse instrumentation puts too much responsibility on Wallumrød’s vocals, whose crystal-clear tone, evoking icy rivers and Nico’s doomed romanticism, feels one-dimensional over the course of an album. It is telling that the one song where she sings with a smidgen more warmth and energy, a gently rolling cover of Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train,” proves to be one of the most engaging.
Dig deeper, and flashes of brilliance emerge from the album’s hushed instrumental bed. “Rye Whiskey” introduces a menacing accordion drone that briefly overwhelms the song midway through, sending it into a darker and more interesting place. During Joy Division’s “Wilderness,” Hidle adds a piercing accordion note that sounds almost like guitar feedback, the song ending in a crunching acoustic mess that resembles the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.” “Wilderness” then segues into “The Three Ravens,” an English folk ballad first published in 1611, with that discordant coda still echoing in the mix, drawing an intriguing parallel between two songs separated by more than three centuries of history.
Inspired moments like these, when Wallumrød emerges from the long shadows of her source material, elevate Go Dig My Grave beyond the beautifully rendered, if rather pointless, collection of covers it sometimes threatens to be. The only shame is that the album ends with her lugubrious take on Lou Reed’s well-trod “Perfect Day”—a truly unnecessary rendition whose forced sense of grace feels like a return to the bad old days.


The audible friction between Davis and Coltrane on almost every number of this four-disc set makes for a fascinating listen, a live document of two players undergoing tectonic shifts in their style.

Miles Davis / John Coltrane: The Final Tour: The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6

By 1960, modern jazz was in upheaval. This shift was thanks in no small part to the seismic, artistic advances that Miles Davis and his quintet had made the year prior when he released Kind of Blue, a still-astonishing document of restraint and free melodic expression that would go on to become one of the best-selling jazz albums of all-time. That same year, John Coltrane also pivoted to the cascading changes and torrential outpouring (deemed “sheets of sound”) of his breakout solo album, Giant Steps. Distinct from the restrained and cool sound of his boss, Coltrane was well on his own skyward trajectory when Davis brought him back to the fold for a European tour booked by jazz impresario Norman Granz, which also featured Stan Getz on tenor sax and Oscar Peterson on piano. It marked the first time Davis would tour with his own band, and they were met with packed houses and rapturous applause each night. But as Davis wrote in his 1989 autobiography: “[Coltrane] decided to go with us, but he grumbled and complained and sat by himself all the time we were over there.”
These three weeks of grumbling and complaining comprise Miles Davis and John Coltrane: The Final Tour, the sixth edition of Columbia’s Miles Davis Bootleg Series. Across the five previous installments lies a latent theme of tension and change, each volume revealing a transitory aspect of Davis’ sound. But none bear the audible friction between Davis and Coltrane on almost every number of this four-disc set, which draws from two concerts in Paris, two from Stockholm, and one from Copenhagen. You can hear the sideman straining to push past Davis—the man primarily responsible for realizing that Coltrane could be Coltrane. In turn, Coltrane’s stratospheric rise would soon lead Davis to raze his sound to its foundation and build it up anew in the years to come.
From the song selection on this volume, it’s clear Davis is already approaching a crossroads in his own repertoire. He wants to explore both the Kind of Blue material still fresh on his mind while also satisfying the crowd with the type of exquisite balladry that had helped make him one of the most famous jazz artists of the era. So the fake book standards from his 1957 album ’Round About Midnight are juxtaposed with the emotive modal jazz monoliths “So What” and “All Blues” from Kind of Blue, all featuring the blowing of Coltrane, who sometimes sounds like he’s trying to explode the songs from within.
For instance, Davis and band move at a dizzying double-time tempo on the four sprawling takes of “So What.” Rather than the iconic smoldering slink that opens Kind of Blue, Paul Chambers’ slow vamp speeds up to a roiling bassline. At this speed, it’s a treat to hear the nimble pianist Wynton Kelly tackle the number, adding a bluesy and rollicking feel to the chart. On the first performance at the Olympia in Paris, Davis soars to the upper register in his solo before drifting back down. Coltrane enters with a bluesy phrase that briefly aligns with Davis before his vibrato opens wide. Coltrane starts pushing at the boundaries of the song, the flurry of notes coming faster and faster.
Coltrane sounds a little confined in the changes, like he’s straining to break free not just from the song but the earth’s gravitational pull. Nearing the nine-minute mark, his overblowing and dissonance elicits a few hoots and whistles. While the “new thing” in jazz was already stirring and gaining steam thanks to the likes of Ornette Coleman, Cecil Taylor, and Sun Ra’s reedsman John Gilmore, few in the European audience would have experienced such new sounds live.
The raspy dissonance Coltrane flashes on “Bye Bye Blackbird” earns plenty of whistles and shouts, and only on “Round Midnight” is he compact and concise within the song. Whether it was from the promoters, the press, or Davis himself, who never had a good word to say about the free jazz stylings of Coleman or Taylor, Coltrane feels a little bit more reigned in after this particular night.
Not that there isn’t plenty to admire outside of the outré. Kelly’s take on Bill Evans’ original, more ascetic piano lines adds a new wrinkle to “All Blues,” swinging between two chords and giving the horns plenty of space to move. Meanwhile, Coltrane’s solo fidgets like a hummingbird around a blossom, attacking the song from as many angles as manageable while Kelly’s own turn features playful cascades and big shimmering chords.
The solo order remains the same throughout the set (Davis, then Coltrane, then Kelly, and sometimes Chambers), so a sense of predictability does settle in across the four discs. Which is not to say that there’s still not plenty of play to be had here, as sly allusions abound throughout: Davis quotes a line of “Dixie” on one version of “Walkin’,” Kelly plinks in a phrase of Monk’s “In Walked Bud” during “So What,” Coltrane quotes “Willow Weep for Me” one night in Stockholm. And amid Coltrane’s nightly quests through “So What,” he starts to sow the seeds for what would in a few years become one of his signature songs, “Impressions,” itself built on the same harmonic structure as the Kind of Blue song.
That’s not the only advance Coltrane made on his last tour with Davis. “Before he quit, I gave him that soprano saxophone,” Davis recalled in his autobiography, the instrument that would come to signify Coltrane’s ascension to spiritual jazz. “I always joked with him that if he had stayed home and not come with us on this trip, he wouldn’t have gotten that soprano saxophone, so he was in debt to me for as long as he lived.” It’s a patented Miles blend of joke and hyperbole. But his relationship with Coltrane proved to be the kind of impetus that would push Davis to reinvent himself, as well. Soon after, neither star would sound quite like this again.


The Archers of Loaf frontman's first new album in five years finds Bachmann getting a tighter grip on who he is as a human and as an artist, and more deeply appreciating his past and the influences that got him to this point.

Eric Bachmann

Eric Bachmann and his longtime label Merge Records would have us believe that the Archers of Loaf frontman's first new album in five years is a radical reinvention. The truth is far less dramatic. The forty-something singer-songwriter can't really escape himself or the raw, unaffected sound, gruffly melodic vocals, and pointed lyrical approach that he adopted in the early ’00s when he started recording as Crooked Fingers. Instead, this short, engaging collection of tunes feels more like Bachmann getting a tighter grip on who is as an human and as an artist, and more deeply appreciating his past and the influences that got him to this point.
That idea is laid bare in the album's eponymous title and the cover art, which features a picture of Bachmann as a gangly, bright eyed Little Leaguer. And within the music itself, he introduces a broader array of sonic inspiration: the fizzy highs of ’60s pop, the glossy production style of ’70s country, and a hint of British post-punk fervor for good measure. Some songwriters who drink from those wells let their creations become busy and dense, but Bachmann leaves plenty of empty space, using small signifiers—the “Be My Baby” drum hits that kick off “Mercy,” the piano line of “Dreaming” that feels drawn from slow dance mainstay “Color My World”—to do big work. The only indulgence he allows himself here is the inclusion of gospel-esque backing vocalists, but even they only come when a certain lyrical phase needs to be driven home.
The decision to release the album under his own name is also connected with the more personal nature of these songs. It's a move he has made once before, in 2006, with To The Races, a plaintive collection that centered on his voice and acoustic guitar and lyrics that spoke to his wanderlust and his fraught romantic life. Both of those concerns have been, for the most part, quelled: Bachmann is married to his frequent collaborator and touring partner Liz Durrett, and the long-time North Carolinian seems to be comfortably settled in Athens, Georgia. That opens him up to take on some broader issues.
Primary among them is Bachmann's political frustrations. He uses the true stories of murder and ill-fated justice to opine, over a ska-like drum beat and a bouncing piano melody, that “what should be an old relic by now should never have been/the South is a ghost, a ghost is a lie.” Elsewhere, in the stormy “Mercy,” he relishes the irony of using a church-like choir to back him as he sings about his disbelief in a higher power and marveling that “I've got friends and I've got family/from Alaska to Miami/you won't believe the crazy shit they sometimes say.” These songs were likely recorded months ago, but they reflect current fractious political conditions, ones that have allowed his home state's legislature to pass a bill that overturns LGBT protections.
As frustrated as those songs are, there's also a ruminative quality to their lyrics that carries throughout the album. It feels like the product of a man finally settling down after years of travel and activity, and not liking what he sees. That goes for himself as well. For as much appreciation as Bachmann exudes with regards to life and love, the emphasis is really on regret. He reopens former emotional wounds on the noir-ish album closer “The Old Temptation,” and sounds surprised at his own panic in “Separation Anxiety.” And the album is peppered with references to the dead and dying. Bachmann, who knows more than ever that his time on earth is finite, is going to say his piece before he goes. Again, none of this signals a huge shift for Bachmann. But after spending a long stretch of time playing with his former band and as a member of Neko Case's backing band, it's good to see that he can return to the mold of singer-songwriter with a little extra fire in his belly.
Correction: The original version of this review stated that Georgia passed a "religious liberty" bill into law. It's been corrected to reflect that the governor vetoed it before it became a law.


The pop singer’s full-length debut is a bold and uproarious introduction, buoyed by sturdy songcraft and steely indifference to good taste.

Chappell Roan: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess

The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess

You grow up in the Midwest; your dreams sprawl wider than the freeways; the big city starts to beckon. Chappell Roan, daughter of Willard, Missouri, secured her ticket out through YouTube, where as a teenager she uploaded the cover songs that got her a major label deal before she finished high school. She started spending time in L.A. and recorded a series of dour, downtempo pop tunes. But Willard still had her in its grasp: In a promotional video from 2017, released around the same time as her first EP, Roan gazes mistily out a plane window and admits, “When I go back to L.A., I just don’t feel as grounded as I do when I’m home.”
When her music lacked place and purpose, Roan found both at the Abbey. The storied West Hollywood gay bar inspired “Pink Pony Club,” a disco ball-dappled ode to escaping the suburbs for the California nightclubs. The song, released in 2020, effectively ended one chapter of Roan’s career: Her label, Atlantic, dropped her after its release. But it also pointed in a new direction. The “Pink Pony Club” is back open for business on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, Roan’s full-length debut, a bold and uproarious pop project stitched with stories about discovering love, sex, and oneself in a new place. Marking her debut for Island Records, it’s buoyed by youthful vim and steely indifference to the bounds of good taste.
Midwest Princess was written and produced with Dan Nigro, the onetime indie frontman who has recently gained prominence via his creative partnership with Olivia Rodrigo. As songwriters and performers, Rodrigo and Roan agree on a lot: Both are committedly theatrical and wickedly funny, even in the face of emotional indignity. “Casual,” Midwest Princess’s high point, lobs a cocktail of sorrow and scorn at a romantic partner who refuses to acknowledge the significance of their situationship. “Knee deep in the passenger seat and you’re eating me out/Is it casual now?” Roan deadpans in the chorus, cramming one of the record’s most vivid images into a single breath. The outro turns up the heat and raises the stakes: “I fucked you in the bathroom when we went to dinner/Your parents at the table, you wonder why I’m bitter?”
Roan is blessed with a powerful and versatile voice, heard in full force on the blowout final line of “Casual.” On the otherwise unremarkable “After Midnight,” she floats some lovely whistle tones; on “Picture You,” she channels Patsy Cline, her voice warm and full-bodied, her phrasing immaculate. But, also like Rodrigo, she can be persuasive with less precise or tuneful deliveries. In the half-spoken, half-yelped bridge of the yeehaw booty call “Red Wine Supernova,” her comedic potential is maximized (“I heard you like magic?/I’ve got a wand and a rabbit!”). She zips through the verses of “Hot To Go!” with all the urgency of a spark burning through a fuse, then calls in the pep squad to spell-sing the title.
Across the album, gang vocals have big cheerleader energy, tapping into an aesthetic that has been co-opted and queered in a cultural lineage running, within Roan’s lifetime, from the 1999 cult classic But I’m a Cheerleader all the way through Mia Berrin’s indie rock project Pom Pom Squad and this summer’s teen sex romp Bottoms. It’s not the only high school touchstone on Midwest Princess: In the wide-eyed, disco-pop awakening of “Naked in Manhattan,” Roan plays the eager ingenue, her fantasies pasted on a glittery moodboard that includes queer-coded slumber parties, hair pins, lip gloss, and Regina George, the teen antagonist of Mean Girls. In her visuals, Roan plays putt-putt and references the 2006 mermaid romcom Aquamarine; onstage, she has worn a blonde wig in tribute to Hannah Montana, the fictional pop star that Miley Cyrus portrayed on the Disney Channel between the ages of 13 and 18. Roan is 25, but this suite of references maps to a cultural moment that is, even more so than usual, fixated on youthful femininity. It also speaks to the experience of coming into your sexuality in your 20s—something akin to a second adolescence.
In its subject matter, but also in its target audience, Roan’s music is explicitly queer; she has attributed her artistic breakthrough to her decision to “stop trying to impress the music industry and start trying to impress gay people.” Roan—who touts her outsider credentials, calling herself “the pop star of Goodwill,” despite being signed to a major label—seems happy to skip a bid for the center and plant herself in the margins, where she leans into drag aesthetics and camp. “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl” opens with a main-character monologue, condemns “hyper-mega-bummer boys” for the high crime of wearing “fugly jeans,” and glibly references planetary collapse. It understands house music through the lens of Madonna’s “Ray of Light” and RuPaul’s “Supermodel.” It’s dumb, and electrifying. Zanier still is “Femininomenon,” a Frankenstein’s monster that splices stacked vocals à la Lorde, ad libs à la Kesha, a synth that sounds like a groan tube, and the inane lyric “Get it hot like Papa John!”—perhaps the pizza franchise’s biggest pop crossover moment since they plastered Taylor Swift’s face on their boxes.
As the album opener, “Femininomenon” feels like a test of listeners’ tolerance, designed to drive away those that can’t hang with the excess of it all. At the same time, such gags function as decoys, distracting from how sturdy and studied Roan’s songcraft actually can be. One of her oft-cited references is Katy Perry’s Teenage Dream, an album lab-engineered for catchiness and mass-market saturation, and for all her outré qualities, Roan has a clear connection to this pop lineage. She generally favors conventional song structures and builds to seismic choruses. Her writing is focused and concept-driven, often scaffolded around a single word or image. “Coffee” and “Kaleidescope” are lesser examples—not coincidentally, both are rather somber piano ballads—but “Picture You” is perfectly executed, conjuring drawn curtains and flickering candles in the bedroom where Roan fantasizes alone, “counting lipstick stains where you should be.”
If listening to “Picture You” feels voyeuristic, it’s not because of its intimacy or innuendo, but because of its implication of shame: “I’m too scared to say/Half of the things I do when I picture you,” Roan quivers. Slivers of doubt hang around the edges of Midwest Princess, adding dimension to its narrator and enhancing its sense of defiance: When Roan’s friends call her a loser, or she imagines her mom pearl-clutching over her behavior, their disapproval and doubt threatens to puncture her hard-earned exuberance. In closer “Guilty Pleasure,” Roan attempts to blunt their weapons, positing her guilt and pleasure as two sides of the same coin. “I want this like a cigarette/Can we drag it out and never quit?” she sings, relishing the freedom of making an unhealthy choice. Sneakily, she’s also suggesting a framework for interpreting her more over-the-top gambits: so bad they’re good, so dumb they’re smart.


The Brooklyn indie rock band’s fourth album is an anxious and sour record that copes with capitalism and its knock-on emotional effects.

Frog in Boiling Water

It’s been five years since DIIV’s last album—clearly, there has been some lingering tension. To set the table: After lead singer Zachary Cole Smith was arrested in 2013 for heroin possession preempting his first trip to rehab and DIIV’s former bassist Devin Ruben Perez was kicked out of the band for making racist comments on 4chan, DIIV “essentially broke up” in 2016. Then, after another stint in rehab, Smith and the band pulled it together for their last album, 2019’s Deceiver, but by this point, frustration was embedded in their dynamic.
Press materials are pointedly vague about how the band worked through “suspicions and resentments” before completing Frog in Boiling Water, their sour new album coping with capitalism. Its chiffon layers of reverb wrap around the guitars like a burial cloth, and Smith accepts the boat ride down to purgatory in distant vocals. “Will you please leave me alone,” he implores on “Reflected,” floating through lost souls with self-possession. He’s gotten used to the dark.
Other DIIV albums are more concerned with inward darkness, the addiction and depression that dot the band’s history. But Frog acknowledges that these illnesses feed off of and into an already miserable society. “Systems fail and empires fall,” Smith shrugs under raindrops of guitar on “Fender on the Freeway,” sounding jaded and overstimulated. While Frog's vocal melodies are often simple, with nursery-rhyme lightness, tuning into their lyrics make them seem more like sugar-coated pills. They establish Smith as both an objector of the failing system and another one of its many idle subjects, free-floating in the rush of disappointment. The weightless “Frog In Boiling Water” blames technology for this half-hearted complacency, smothering disappointment in reverb the way some people replace unpleasant sensations with posting online.
Leading up to Frog’s release, DIIV published an unhinged, endless scroll, Web 1.0 site called soul-net.co. Its content informs visitors that “we are all greasing [the capitalist machine] with our blood and sweat.” Under this text, a naked fairy GIF waggles blue wings, a list combines “the smokestacks, the camps, the landfills, the DEPARTMENT OF MOTOR VEHICLES,” and there’s a PNG of John Hancock’s signature. It goes on and on like this, like the ramblings of a computer-savvy serial killer in the ’90s. The site also has a song on autoplay, “Soul-net,” which appears on Frog as the mirage of a star, a glimmer of irony: “I’m not afraid,” Smith affirms, “I love my pain.”
You could glean some of the band’s anxious hysteria out of this. They revel in images and ideas usually associated with suspicious Facebook grandmas worried about “seed oils.” Like an anonymous account might say alongside an image of lizard Joe Biden, Smith is disturbed by how “the rotating villains profit off suffering.” He sneers at a good citizen’s purpose, to be “fodder for the army op.” But he also sings with soft insistence, and his restraint is convincing. Everyone has a good reason to feel as fractured as Frog sounds. Its guitar-led production makes sense of the stress by dumping it into pressure-cooker whining.
Though, more often, the guitars would rather loaf in the mud. The band takes pleasure in simple melodies with muscle, like on the melancholy “In Amber.” There, the rhythm guitar bounces like a nervous leg until the lead guitar wrests the song open. DIIV repeatedly employ this tactic throughout the album, presenting each song like a cold tomb to be set on fire, typically, by a one-note guitar solo you can feel drilling into your stomach. It’s thrilling. “Little Birds” is like a dry lightning field, empty aside from the occasional crackle of distortion. But its lead guitar always returns to the same note, filling the space with an insistent echo. These repetitive moments come on like a ticking clock, and Frog in Boiling Water operates with a prophetic understanding that time has already run out.


Originally sold as MP3s, then a collection of three-song EPs, then as a CD in Japan last year, this collection of Thom Yorke remixes-- from such electronic all-stars as Burial, Four Tet, the Field, the Bug, and Various-- finally gets a U.S. full-length release.

The Eraser Rmxs

When the nine remixes that make up this CD officially hit the web in December 2007, surprisingly few paid them much attention. It wasn't a quality issue as much as timing-- an incredible marketing plan/album called In Rainbows had been set upon starving web consumers just two months before, and Radiohead fans were still in the glassy-eyed-wonder stage. At that point, Thom Yorke's The Eraser seemed like a harmless but necessary detour. While only a few would name The Eraser as their favorite Radiohead-related LP, the 2006 record gave Yorke the chance to air out his electrohead side before heading back to the band for In Rainbows-- the most naturalistic Radiohead album since OK Computer. The assumed logic seems sound: no Eraser, no In Rainbows. A little over a year ago, The Eraser was a tiny lily pad, so why fret about these redos courtesy of dudes from Yorkie's dubstep-heavy iPod?
Though there's no discernible reason for The Eraser Rmxs finally getting a U.S. release right now (the songs were originally sold as MP3s, then a collection of three-song EPs, then as a CD in Japan last year), it sort of makes sense. Though the original album may have caused Radiohead to not make a record that sounds like it, the LP has caused some guy named Kanye West to do his best impression of it. Of the influences West cites in his recent Grammy ad, The Eraser lies directly in his head space. And there's no denying the spare sonic similarities between the record and West's current 808s and Heartbreak, which currently sits at No. 5 on the Billboard charts. Its current single, "Heartless", is No. 3. So it turns out The Eraser played a large part in both Radiohead's consensus return-to-form LP as well as one of the most galvanizing pop albums in recent memory. Maybe this record's more important that we originally thought.
And so: The Rmxs. Always looking out for the next weird, bassy, scatterbrained electronic thing, Yorke collects a coterie of producers that would make Aphex Twin-philes split their pants. (Alas, Afx himself could not be reached for comment.) Three of dubsteb's most notable names-- Burial, the Bug, and Various-- chip in, along with laptop gurus Four Tet, the Field, and Modeselektor. Considering the amounts of hands turning knobs both tangible and virtual, there's an impressive consistency about The Rmxs. While The Eraser saw Yorke sulking about end-times and hopeless love against a pristine backdrop of ambient loops and tiny, click-clack percussion, The Rmxs dirties things up considerably. This is rebel music. No longer is Yorke wailing in his bedroom; he's whispering in a basement, plotting an overthrow.
Burial starts it off and, in essence, ends it with the disc's best track. All the standard tics from dubstep's most enigmatic figure are apparent on his "And It Rained All Night" redo: sub-bass adorned with nothing but atmosphere-- Zippos flicker out and the clink of bullet shells hit the floor. Who's been shot? Nobody's saying. If this song soundtracked that awful Bacchanalia scene in The Matrix Reloaded, that movie would automatically be 10% more enjoyable. Unsurprisingly, Yorke's voice suits Burial's soupy concoctions just as nicely as those mysterious R&B divas he's usually fond of-- if this team ever decided to meet on an LP level, few would oppose. Cristian Vogel contributes two remixes, one of them the token overlong vamp that largely deletes Yorke's voice entirely, which is just silly. The Bug's "Harrowdown Hill" takes the singer's seething political indictment and turns it downright deranged-- it's almost Tricky-esque. The Field and Four Tet offer the only moments of relative hope with tracks that lift more than pummel. Four Tet even makes that "artichoke heart" line go down easy, with xylophones and pillowed drums sliding into a future with fewer head-scratching surprises, fewer reasons to throw things at the television.
And, of course, In Rainbows' secret weapon was the H word our current president is so fond of. The Eraser is relevant now, but-- specifically at this moment, days away from that crowded Mall-- it also sounds like a relic. Even Kanye made sure to graft the record's sonics onto something-- searing, thoughtless emotion-- more evergreen than dystopian riddles. Economic crash withstanding, Radiohead turned out to be quite prescient, coupling their most openhearted LP with a new era of genuine compassion (maybe?). The Eraser Rmxs is an insulated, paranoid, technically proficient reminder of a time when it seemed like there was no way out. "This is fucked up," repeats a pitch-shifted Yorke on Vogel's Bonus Beat "Black Swan" mix. And it is. But not as much as before.


Michelle Zauner (a.k.a. Japanese Breakfast) and Ryan Galloway of Crying form a socially distanced, easy-going pop duo whose music offers a brief respite from the times.

pop songs 2020 EP

Recently, a few critics have classified the year 2013 as a pivotal moment for mainstream music. Remember those days of yore, back when Vampire Weekend reigned supreme, Chance the Rapper felt groundbreaking, and Sky Ferreira actually released music? But 2013 was also a big time for the little guys. That summer, Michelle Zauner, then a member of the rock band Little Big League, shared her first project as Japanese Breakfast, an experimental song-a-day collection titled june. A few months later, Crying, an indie rock by way of chiptune trio out of SUNY Purchase, released their bubbly debut, Get Olde.
Now, Zauner and Crying guitarist Ryan Galloway have collaborated under the name BUMPER. Though Galloway and Zauner live in the same Brooklyn neighborhood, due to COVID-19 quarantine restrictions, BUMPER’s debut EP, pop songs 2020, was constructed over email. These four songs benefit from the ease of its creation; the stakes feel low, just two friends passing drafts back and forth like pen pals.
pop songs 2020 fully indulges the grandiose flourishes that wind through Zauner and Galloway’s respective projects. Opening track “You Can Get It!” is a jolt of pop effervescence that begins with whimsical Lullatone-like electronica and blooms into wistful ’80s sparkle; the impromptu guitar solo that rips through the ending is just icing on the cake. “Red Brick” is similarly pleasant: “Day by day, you give and take/On and on until there’s something,” Zauner sings as the boom of a timpani crashes through her veil of uncertainty. The track is full of other eccentric embellishments—swelling strings, corkscrewing synths—but never becomes bogged down by its jam-packed arrangement.
Lyrically, pop songs 2020 leans towards the gauzy. There’s a general sentiment of chasing something just out of reach, but the verses are hardly specific. “Black Light” approaches an emotional arc as the song’s narrator gazes at a night-owl neighbor devoted to his beats. “First light flits shy in the distance/Your techno jam is through,” a double-tracked Zauner breathily murmurs. “I close my eyes but my heart’s still thumping/And in my dreams your loops.” As a whole, the EP offers a much-needed dopamine rush, but it ends on a melancholic moment. The aptly-titled closer “Ballad O” is a gentle piano and synth reverie that soundtracks the recollection of various mistakes and regrets. “I never knew I’d wind up here, to take up arms/At men at bars,” Zauner concludes forlornly.
Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, some have fretted about whether or not upbeat pop music has a place during an international time of mourning and upheaval. But pop songs 2020 is a reminder that euphoric music will always be a balm, a temporary escape from reality.

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Two ambient-leaning auteurs unite for a charming exercise in bright guitar tones and wistful moods, rooted in their mutual admiration for Manchester legend Vini Reilly.

Alexis Georgopoulos / Jefre Cantu-Ledesma: Fragments of a Season

Fragments of a Season

It’s funny how much a clean electric-guitar signal can signify. What should be the instrument’s default setting has itself become, more than a half-century after the discovery of distortion, an aesthetic choice. For any listener raised on punk, metal, indie rock, or any other hegemonic strain of guitar music, an undistorted guitar today is far more noticeable than a distorted one.
In a world where feedback rules everything, to forsake the fuzz pedal is to stand naked and vulnerable, abandoning the crutch of solid-state circuitry to rely on one’s own frail fingers. That’s what the Durutti Column’s Vini Reilly did, back in the early 1980s: Countering punk rock’s cacophonous orthodoxy, he went not just post-punk but anti-punk, abandoning overdrive in favor of a pure, intimate sound. Recently, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma has followed in his footsteps. For years, the Brooklyn musician’s recordings struck a rumbling balance between ambient and shoegaze. But echoes of Reilly’s crystalline tone and spindly melodies have gradually come to play an ever greater role in Cantu-Ledesma’s records, and Fragments of a Season, a collaboration with New York’s Alexis Georgopoulos, is his clearest homage yet to the Manchester icon’s playing. It came together, the musicians have said, after sharing their mutual fondness for the Durutti Column and Belgium’s Les Disques du Crépuscule, a Factory-related label known for its chilly tranquility; having discovered that both were independently working on solo material of a similar stripe, they joined up for the year-long sessions that resulted in Fragments.
Georgopoulos, who also records as Arp, is no stranger to homage. His early records under that name are intensive studies in Germany’s kosmische electronic tradition, while 2013’s More and 2014’s Pulsars e Quasars draw on the sound and style of Brian Eno circa Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy) and Another Green World. But Fragments of a Season has little of the complexity of Georgopoulos’ solo work, just as it strips away the sandpapery signature for which Cantu-Ledesma is best known. The 36-minute album is first and foremost a mood piece. Its 11 instrumentals revolve around soft, jazzy chords, with clean guitars run through a faint halo of reverb and arrangements painted on in uncomplicated strokes: simple bass melodies, blocky piano, percolating drum grooves from the Roland CR-78 and Roland TR-77, rhythm boxes from the 1970s with an unmistakably vintage air. The prevailing feel is both wistful and a little whimsical, suggesting the Durutti Column’s overcast atmospheres tempered by some balmy Balearic calm. Raindrops drying on a sunlit window come to mind, at once clear and slightly blurry. A short story by Leigh Gallagher, included on the album’s inner sleeve, fleshes out the scene with a pensive tale that leads from a crowded city to an unnamed Mediterranean island where olive trees dot the landscape, goats roam wild, and sex and melancholy go hand in hand.
For the story’s soul-seeking protagonist, time blurs—it’s unclear whether days pass, or weeks. A similar thing happens in the music, which mulls over such a limited patch of ground that the songs soon become almost indistinguishable over the course of the album. At first, each stakes out its own terrain: “The Letter” opens the record with pensive chords and clockwork pulse; “Marine” pairs a kind of sublimated funk with rueful guitar counterpoints; “Madagascar” lets bold piano and crisp drums take the lead. But it all quickly turns into a hazy fever dream of feathery strumming and measured tempos. This may well be intentional. A few songs that follow nearly identical chord changes feel like variations on a theme, and “Vanishing Point” is a slowed-down and pitched-down version of “Marine”; it closes out the album like the memory of a memory, fading to silence like ice cubes pooling in the bottom of a glass. Despite its bittersweet air, though, Fragments of a Season is never less than pleasant. It’s a fine Sunday-morning listen, as quietly transporting as a daydream committed to tape.


The Australian post-punk band takes aim at the crooks and scammers on its most political album yet.

Call Me Terry

Call Me Terry, the fourth album by Australian post-punk four-piece Terry, seems disarmingly chipper at first glance. Its title is back-slapping and genial, and its songs have the swaying, hummable feel of nursery rhymes. The arrangements are locked into metronomic grooves but alive with whimsical detail, like the faint woodblock on “Gold Duck” or the skronking, overblown saxophones that crop up from song-to-song. “Jane Roe” even features a garbled number chant—“4-5-6-9-1-1”—like a Wiggles sing-a-long gone wrong.
Except those numbers have a stinging significance: $456,911 is the amount of money that the right-wing anti-abortion lobby paid to Jane Roe, aka Norma McCorvey, to reverse her stance on abortion and pretend to be an evangelical pro-life advocate. Beneath its jaunty veneer, “Jane Roe” is hardened and cynical, a fairground ditty sung through gritted teeth: “Paid a sum/Took the sum to play a role/Change of mind/Baby, baby, baby, it’s your choice, you choose,” Amy Hill and Xanthe Waite sing in unison. As with nearly every song on Call Me Terry, it’s a bait-and-switch: jangly, absurdist post-punk hiding lyrics that are needling and pessimistic, drawing lines between historically significant vignettes and modern brutality.
Call Me Terry is the most political album yet from a band that was already nearly monomaniacal in its study of Australia’s rotted colonial legacy. Where you may have once been able to ignore their staunch but sometimes cryptic ideology, that’s impossible here: It’s spread across the album’s sleeve, each song paired with a photo of a politically toxic site—like the headquarters of mining giant BHP or a building belonging to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp—and a polemical blurb. (The wryly comic writeup attached to “Balconies,” the News Corp song, reads: “Family violence is preventable. Those with a mouthpiece refuse to do anything. What does power look like? Gramsci is buried in Rome.”)
Opener “Miracles” sets the tone: Drawing from the tropes that Scott Morrison, Australia’s smug, devoutly Pentecostal former prime minister, would use in his most boneheaded speeches, it’s a bouncy, increasingly frantic dance into hell. The band, in a unified deadpan, references Morrison’s bizarre promise that he would “burn” for the Australian people if elected, before turning his assertion that his wife taught him to empathize with victims of sexual assault into a perverse hook: “Jenny, Jenny, Jenny says.” Sung in the band’s affectless tone, over synths and horns that seem to be stuck in a death spiral, the words seem even more like crookery—a jingle designed to absolve guilt and keep images clean.
Appropriately, “Miracles” introduces an album that directs seething hatred toward the political elite’s crooks and scammers. “Centuries,” a crunchy, chugging barnstormer, plays a surreal game of connect-the-dots, identifying ways that those in exalted professions stay in power (“Let me take the stand/Take the taser/Take the land”) while the pummeling “Excuses” draws a line from unaccountable CEOs to their private school-educated sons: “Blazer boys take after father/No excuses, knowing loopholes/Excuses for the entrenched.” The second half of the song devolves into a squall of layered saxophones and guitars, and it plays like a pure expression of frustration: the noisy, embittered sound of letting off steam.
At times, Terry take a sideways entry toward a greater point. The Raincoats-indebted “Golden Head” seems vague and imagistic (“Replacing the golden head/Shiny yellow/Shiny confident”) unless you’re familiar with the niche politics of the Melbourne suburb of Northcote, where a golden bust was placed illegally in the center of a public park. It was rumored that the statue was supposed to be Tyler Cassidy, a 15-year-old boy shot to death by police in the same park; the statue was tipped over and removed, only to be replaced by the guerilla artists. The song’s steely lyrics, from the point of view of one of the artists replacing the head, offer rare respite, and even hope on an album whose outlook can be depressingly bleak. In this story, Terry find kinship with everyone using absurd, avant-garde methods to fuck up the system—if only a tiny bit.


Cold Beat is a San Francisco quartet fronted by Grass Widow bassist Hannah Lew. The sequencing of the band's second album plots a journey between endearingly scrappy garage rock and mechanistic, melancholic electro-pop, lending the compact album an epic sense of scale.

Into the Air

Google’s new logo apparently requires just 305 bytes of data to load compared to 14,000 for the old one—and you won’t find a person who gives less of a fuck about that than Hannah Lew. Last year, her label Crime on the Moon released San Francisco Is Doomed, a compilation of local acts—including Thee Oh Sees, Mikal Cronin, and Erase Errata—railing against the Google-led tech boom that’s pushed rents into the stratosphere and made America’s historic counter-cultural capital increasingly unaffordable for starving artists. Meanwhile, Lew used Cold Beat’s 2014 debut length, Over Me, to address the situation in more oblique terms, mining the feelings of dislocation and depression that result when your city no longer feels like home, and everything that once made it special has given way to consumerism and conformity. A glance at the imposing, sterile glass skyscraper on the cover of Cold Beat’s sophomore release, Into the Air, would indicate Lew is still waging war on search-engine ostracization. But, at the same time, the parting clouds above it suggest she’s starting to appreciate the silver linings of her situation.
Like Over Me, Into the Air thrives on the oppositional tension between frigidity and motion inherent to the Cold Beat name, through a yin-yang balance of winsome '60s girl-group melodies and icy '80s post-punk. But the synth and drum-machine experiments sprinkled among Over Me’s guitar-battered rave-ups have been given much more room to flourish here. It’s to the point where Cold Beat effectively resemble two discrete bands: an endearingly scrappy garage-rock act and a mechanistic, melancholic electro-pop outfit. However, Into the Air’s savvy sequencing plots a gradual journey between these two poles, lending this seemingly compact 10-song, 31-minute album a more epic sense of scale. Into the Air is frontloaded with the most exuberant pop songs Lew has written to date—in particular, the gleaming jangle-punk jewel "Broken Lines", which barrels forth like a joyous, C86-ed take on Blondie’s "Dreaming". But by letting in more sun, Cold Beat also produce deeper shadows—after whipping through two breezy verses on "Bruno", the song’s propulsive bassline leads us into an exhilarating, stomach-turning descent that makes you feel like you’re rolling down Powell Street on a cable car with broken brake lines.
Tellingly, the flow of Into the Air mirrors the very process of gentrification that’s weighed so heavily on Lew’s mind, transforming the opening tracks’ raw and restless energy into a more orderly and austere second act. "Cracks" is the album’s key transitional track, pitting Lew’s beautifully sighed chorus and circular-saw guitar noise against synth oscillations and a motorik rhythm track to usher us into the album’s electro-oriented back half. But as her sonic environs turn more chilly, Lew cranks up the heat: she delivers Into the Air’s most captivating performance on the Chromatics-tinted nocturnalia of "Spirals", while on "Ashes"—which evokes a classic David Bowie song in both name and ping-ponged synth squiggle—she renders post-apocalyptic scenes of fiery, floating detritus with an elated, operatic coo, as if gazing wondrously into a snow globe filled with black flakes. The San Francisco she once knew may indeed be doomed, but Lew will be ready to rebuild it from the rubble when the bubble inevitably bursts.


SBTRKT's self-titled debut showed a lot of promise, but the producer's sophomore effort messes with the formula and piles on the guest appearances. Jessie Ware, Sampha, Raury, Ezra Koenig, and others contribute.

Wonder Where We Land

It may not have maintained the low-key genre-fusing mystique that it had back in 2011, but SBTRKT's highly enjoyable nexus of R&B, bass music, house, and dubstep on his self-titled debut still sounds as sleekly well-balanced as it did four years back. The music's appeal hasn't changed, but what it means has, at least where career-arc-plotting curiosity is concerned. Its release saw Aaron Jerome move from across-the-board multigenre remixer (Basement Jaxx's "Scars"; M.I.A.'s "XXXO"; Mark Ronson's "Bang Bang Bang") to someone wielding a consolidated, self-contained signature sound, which gave his future endeavors a lot of promise.
What SBTRKT means now, however -- especially in the wake of a you-had-to-be-there live album and three underdone instrumental EPs tellingly named Transitions—is weighted down by the old expectation-dashing "what could have been" question. It's not always a given, but the sophomore slump for rising artists pushing into pop crossover potential is frequent enough that even looking at the guest list for Wonder Where We Land looks like a warning that he's tried to mess with the formula Too Much Too Soon. And the music bears it out: if you think the idea of an album that tries to incorporate scene-stealing hip-hop and indie rock figures into a once emotionally nuanced style is ominous enough, the execution is somehow even more chaotic.
Let's dig to the core first: three years would be a long time to wait for a slight re-envisioning of what worked the first time, but the finer points on this record nearly approach the better midpoints of the debut. Sampha's coolly ambivalent yet reservedly powerful vocals have always been one of the stronger elements in SBTRKT's arsenal, and he's all over this record: Fighting against a subwoofer earthquake with multitracked, reverb-blurred warmth that even makes the phrase "what the fuck is that?" sound cosmic on the title track, trembling his way towards a punch-back chorus on "Temporary View", alternately reining in and showing off his rangy melisma as he slides through the stripped-back disco-house of "Gon Stay". For an album that features one of Jessie Ware's best icily delivered leads since Devotion ("Problem (Solved)"), it's saying a lot that Sampha is the best thing going on this record.
It's not saying too much, though. The two best singers on the debut are, perhaps not coincidentally, the two best singers here, while the bigger-name guests—the ones that stretch SBTRKT's sonic reach the furthest—just don't work. Ezra Koenig isn't exactly the most egregious feature here, but the enigmatic jokiness of "New Dorp. New York." isn't done any favors by the free-associative lyricism. Are Black Israelites supposed to be wacky NYC cultural flavor? And is the line about "baseball bats that never hit home runs" a reference to threatening weaponry or just another joke at the Mets' expense? The two hip-hop crossovers trip up the album even more, not so much because they're not that good but because they just don't click with the rest of the album: singer/rapper Raury's run-on restrained intensity brings a personal edge that isn't done justice by its ambiguous coffeehouse surroundings. As for A$AP Ferg's soul-baring, shakily-singing turn on unlikely closer "Voices in My Head"—detailing his self-medicating efforts to deal with his father's death—it feels so much like an ambush of untethered feeling that it pretty much washes away the more subdued pleasures of the Sampha, Jessie Ware, and Denai Moore cuts that precede it.
With all the work to try and incorporate these far-afield guest vocalists aside, it's worth noting that the production itself is more reliant on them than ever. Underneath them, the music is often flat and unadventurous, tasteful where it could stand to be raucous and rigid where it needs to be limber. A two-minute arpeggio-riddled uptempo cut called "Lantern" is the most energizing moment here, as the rest of the backing tracks lean so heavily on darkly hovering minor-key bass murmurs, gloomy piano chords, and soppily distorted digital strings that it's easy to forget how intriguingly off-kilter some of his drums can be. From here on out, expecting SBTRKT to promise anything in particular is going to feel like a gamble, and probably a pointless one. But at least it's clearer than ever that there's a side to him which he's stronger at expressing.


The Australian band’s reverence for reference is part of their allure and their fifth album sticks to the tried-and-true pop formulas of the past.

Haiku From Zero

Cut Copy have always been a band of fans, dedicated students of composition and production whose ideas feel reverential rather than revolutionary. Looking back over the Australian quartet’s lengthy career—their ’80s mish-mashing debut, Bright Like Neon Love, came out thirteen years ago—you can trace the zeitgeist of a decade of what we once called “dance-rock” but now identify as the electrofied, groove-led sound of contemporary indie rock, from Tame Impala to Glass Animals.
After riding the DFA-adjacent wave of ’00s indie disco towards festival-slaying status alongside bands like Soulwax and Metronomy, Cut Copy got bigger and slicker; 2011’s Zonoscope embraced the MOR of ’80s Fleetwood Mac and the after-dark euphoria of Chicago house, while their foray into baggy rave on 2013’s Free Your Mind coincided with a mainstream wave of ’90s dance nostalgia that included Disclosure and Jamie xx. Even the left turn of last year’s January Tape, an instrumental homage to ’80s new age, felt on-trend alongside the recent swell of new age reissues and musical quotations. But Cut Copy have never denied their magpie-eyed approach; they’re all about “reinterpreting the music we like within our own records,” as frontman Dan Whitford previously told Pitchfork.
Last year’s cassette of heady, downtempo instrumentals could have heralded a shift away from their unceasingly upbeat, festival-friendly attitude, but the band’s fifth album, Haiku From Zero, mostly sticks to tried-and-true pop formulas. Despite the tropical breeze blowing through these nine tracks, it’s obviously not all poolside piña coladas for Whitford; he’s no longer the carefree embracer of life and love we encountered on the saucer-eyed peaks of Free Your Mind. Where that album pushed its positive mantras to the brink of silliness (“You gotta reach the sky if you want your life to shine,” and so on), Haiku From Zero hides a nugget of anxiety and sadness under every cheerful melody. Gone are the piano vamps and pulsing kick drums in favour of a febrile, itchy funk inspired by early ’80s new wave (most obviously, Talking Heads circa Remain In Light—a sensible inspiration for anyone looking to bury unsettling lyrics in endless grooves) and the polished synth-pop that emerged in its wake.
The album opens on a wistful note with “Standing in the Middle of the Field,” a title that seems to transport us to the moment right after the closing notes of Free Your Mind, as Whitford realizes that the party’s over and everyone’s gone home. “Oh, oh, oh, watch me slowly fall apart,” he sings over percussion that’s a little bit “I Zimbra” and a little bit Mickey Moonlight. “You gotta give up the things you love to make it better.” On “Stars Last Me a Lifetime,” the chugging chorus revisits ‘80s pop-rock through a smeary chillwave filter, as Whitford loses himself in the memory of a lost love: “Every time the stars reappear, I wonder where you are/Baby, is it right that I can only hold you there?”
Song by song, the album gathers more and more emotion, from personal anxieties on the wiry dance party of “Living Upside Down” to global-scale fears the ‘80s radio-rock nod “No Fixed Destination,” until it spills over on the closing track, “Tied to the Weather.” The bare-bones torch song plays like the emotional crux of the album just as it’s ending. Sounding older, wiser, and possibly still enduring a hideous comedown, Whitford warns us: “Don’t mistake familiar love for loneliness/The things you take for granted, they might fade away/And then you wake, and find your bed is cold and vacant.” It’s poised and graceful, yet deliciously bitter—a refreshing antidote to the slickness of the previous eight songs, even the previous few albums.
Aside from these updated lyrical concerns, the band’s archive-mining M.O. often feels too literal, too easy. On the album’s first single, “Airborne,” the scratchy guitar licks and elastic bassline immediately bring to mind Orange Juice’s “Rip It Up” There’s a futility to this kind of homage, where formal innovations get flattened into superficial signifiers. In 1983, “Rip It Up” broke molds as a fusion of contemporary styles and technology, famously the first UK chart hit to feature the Roland TB-303 before the bass synth became the squelchy linchpin of acid house. Now, this reverential recreation of other band’s ideas has come to define Cut Copy.That’s a shame, because as the closing track of Haiku From Zero shows, when Cut Copy take a step back from the small details, forget about their perfect record collections for a few minutes and actually expose themselves as human beings, they hit on a sound that really rings true.


Responding to harsh realities, Jamison Isaak uses softsynths, guitar amps, and his sensitive way with melody to craft an idyllic space.

Themes for Dying Earth

Stardew Valley is a fictitious rural region in a 2016 video game of the same name. Described as an “open-ended country-life RPG,” it is essentially a game about unplugging from the modern world and embracing the beauty of simple living. You, the customized character, quit your soul-sucking office job, move to an inherited farm, live off the land, and become a part of the small community in Pelican Town. You can get married and start a family, or just live alone with your farm animals. You can go on adventures. It’s a story about escapism in a medium rooted in escapism, at a time when most everyone could use an escape once in awhile.
Among Stardew Valley’s many fans is Jamison Isaak. The Canadian artist recently tweeted that playing the game has helped take his mind off the woes of the world, a small but important act of self-care. And it’s not unlike the creation of his newest album as Teen Daze. When Isaak moved from the city of Abbotsford, British Columbia, to a more secluded part of the Fraser Valley, he began work on Themes for Dying Earth as a way of processing recent bouts of anxiety. The warm lullaby “First Rain” and its calming lilt operate like the soft-beating heart around which the record was built. In that way, Themes deals with harsh realities—personal, environmental, social—by seeking solace in nature. “Deep inside the woods is where I go to understand,” Nadia Hulett sings on the downcast “Lost,” as if inviting us to follow.
The appeal is irresistible, and once wrapped up in Themes, it’s hard to imagine leaving its embrace. Isaak’s music has come a long way from his earliest material, the pop-friendly electronic stuff known as chillwave, but these songs also take a step back from the live band setup explored on 2015’s Morning World. Like any well-adjusted adult, Isaak has found a happy compromise here, creating a lush paradise with guitar amps and softsynths alike. It’s not that he hasn't used his pop sensibilities and sensitive way with melody to conjure the idyllic before—Themes is just a more fully formed, comprehensive utopia. From “Cycle”’s gentle glide to the weightless “Breath,” an unbroken feeling of tenderness flows gracefully.
Such continuity comes down to the album’s careful pacing, as winsome singalongs give way to fluttering ambience or uplifting instrumentals. Despite such a consistent, good-natured tone, Themes never grows stale or turns saccharine. A song like “Water in Heaven” has the solemn majesty of a hymn, while “Cherry Blossoms” evokes the miniature splendor of M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts. Isaak treats these lofty moments with the same care and attention as the more subdued ones, allowing the meditative “Dream City” nearly five minutes to flutter and loop like a kite in the wind. When a pedal steel guitar shows up in “Anew,” its presence is strange, but it reveals an artist looking to color even the album’s smallest corners.
Themes was recorded entirely within the Fraser Valley region. It was released on his own label, and each physical copy comes with a unique photo shot by the artist, which are said to showcase the local landscapes that inspired the music. It all makes for an exceptionally personal album from someone known for his intimate songwriting. And yet Themes’ subtle power is rooted in the dichotomy of someone running far from the madding crowd, only to open themselves to the world’s problems and offer the comfort of a brief reprieve. For every smack in the face, Themes pauses, grins, and returns a kiss on the cheek.