Written and recorded in just 77 hours, the bassist and singer’s limited-release album is a heady, jazzy range of intricacy and improvisation, a monument to her skills as a composer and performer.

Exposure

When singer, bassist and composer Esperanza Spalding announced the organizing conceit for a new album, it wasn’t immediately clear how to categorize her idea. Write, rehearse, and record a full-length set in only 77 hours—including naps, breaks, and meal-times?
The time limit was hardly unprecedented, given how artists schooled in jazz-performance practice have long been able to create memorable recordings in a single afternoon. Plans to livestream the entire studio session on Facebook Live provided a legitimately new angle. The radical transparency of that move also lent the forthcoming album’s title, Exposure, some extra conceptual depth. But none of these quirks were meant to be more important than the music resulting from the sessions. And Spalding’s fans had little way of knowing how the album might sound. Would it be akin to her more improvised gigs? Or patterned after the intricate singer-songwriter style that shaped prior releases like Emily’s D+Evolution? The implicit response from Spalding’s team was: “Watch and find out.”
For its part, Spalding’s label had to cover its own bet on the project. Before the studio microphones and cameras went live, Concord Music Group settled on a limited run of 7,777 copies, split between CDs and LPs. No digital purchases would be possible, and the album would never be available to stream—another somewhat radical move, for late 2017. With price points set rather high—$50 for a promised 2-CD set; $60 for the vinyl edition—Spalding entered the recording booth, on September 12, 2017.
This limited-edition run sold out well before the following 77 hours had elapsed. The livestream clocked 1.4 million views; those who stuck around for any real length of time watched Spalding put on a dizzying creative clinic. Her intensity and purpose were obvious, moment to moment. But her inspired pace did not carry a frazzled air. With the support of some quick-reacting audio engineers, Spalding could sketch out a melody on her double bass before beginning to create harmony vocal lines. At one point, when watching Spalding refine and re-record specific notes within a long-lined motif—only minutes after settling on the overall hook—I pre-ordered my copy.
In between watching the livestream and receiving the mastered, finished album in December, it was possible to wonder whether the multi-day rush of watching Spalding work might always loom larger than the experience of listening to a 10-track, 40-minute recording, no matter how good. Yet after a few weeks with Exposure in hand, the record clearly seems a worthy follow-up to the bold, theatrical Emily’s D+Evolution. It reprises that prior album’s interest in diverse stylistic reference points—with its first and last tracks containing obvious traces of jazz fusion and progressive pop. Though while the set is more compact—in terms of track-length and overall running time—Exposure also manages to range more widely.
Side B opener “Coming to Life” relies on the rich, wordless vocals of guest contralto Lalah Hathaway and acoustic guitar from Spalding’s bandmate Matthew Stevens. At first, the production sounds muffled, as it would if you were overhearing an intimate performance taking place in another room. As the song develops, the sound becomes crisper. The next track, “Geriment,” revels in some stark, marching piano progressions and Spalding’s comparatively lighter voice. A label executive might grimace at these two wordless, somewhat abstract pieces running on the same album, let alone back-to-back. But on a project like Exposure, you’re pre-committed to releasing what artists set down in the studio. Happily, these particular compositions come across as a graceful diptych in between some of the more obviously ambitious numbers.
Elsewhere, the material that stomps really stomps: “Public Trance It” contains some of Spalding’s most locomotive acoustic-bass riffing. The baroque pop colors of “Heaven in Pennies” suddenly give way to dreamy plumes of reverb-heavy rock, before the composer clears her canvas again—giving pianist Robert Glasper space for a darting jazz solo. Each guest-star appearance seems perfectly placed, as when violinist and vocalist Andrew Bird appears for an easygoing, seductive duet with Spalding, on “The Ways You Got the Love.”
A second CD, titled Undeveloped, accompanies the proper album (and helps make the price-point seem slightly more reasonable). As a document, the additional CD is fascinating, as it gives us a look into Spalding’s training process, ahead of the livestream session. The artist told Billboard that she “practiced this mode” of on-the-fly composition, but that she hadn’t completed any of her trial tracks quickly enough to feel confident with the 77-hour deadline.
Spalding’s irrepressible musicality is present throughout the earlier sessions but, tellingly, nothing as strong as Exposure songs like “I Am Telling You” pops up during rehearsal. Even this difference between the practice sessions and the for-real album helps her overall concept come into clearer focus. As tempting as it may be to think that disciplined artists like Spalding can just turn on a genius tap and let the product flow, Exposure reveals some measure of what is required when an established artist hopes to improve and innovate.


The Secret History, Vol. 1 is the first in a five-part rarity series that will cover Pavement's proper LPs. They’re being framed as "shadow albums" that illustrate how productive Pavement was in their heyday, and Vol. 1 collects rarities, live tracks, and other odds and ends from 1990-1992, the hallowed Slanted & Enchanted period.

The Secret History, Vol. 1

Pavement haven’t released a proper album since Terror Twilight in 1999, but the industry around the band has consistently reminded you of their importance with a variety of compilations, live documents, and reissues. This was aided in part by the group’s reunion in 2010. The collection coinciding with that reunion was the 23-song compilation Quarantine the Past: The Best of Pavement (which came out in both regular and Record Store Day editions). The title was a clever way of saying no, you really never can quarantine the past. Especially not when you can make money from it.
The newest installment to the discography is The Secret History, Vol. 1, which is the first in a five-part rarity series that will cover the band's proper LPs. They’re being framed as "shadow albums" that illustrate how productive Pavement was in their heyday, and how strong the material was that didn’t make it onto the albums themselves. This one collects rarities and live tracks and other odds and ends from 1990-1992, Pavement’s hallowed Slanted & Enchanted period. I was a teenager then, and in love with Pavement, and it honestly was great. S&E was one of those albums I owned on vinyl and cassette (two copies, because one got burnt out), and then I found a third copy of the cassette in my backyard after I put on a show. It was everywhere for a certain small group of people, and it meant the world to them.
It still means a lot in 2015, though it’s tricky to calculate how much importance we can place on its B-sides and other miscellany, especially when all of these songs were available as part of the 2002 Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe 2XCD. Right, all of them. Even the liner notes included here—blurbs from Matador head Gerard Cosloy, Drag City head Dan Koretzky, Stephen Malkmus, Spiral Stairs, and the booking agent Boche Billions—are from the 2002 edition.
If you're looking for silver linings, it’s the first time 25 of the 30 songs have appeared on vinyl— purists, there’s that. And, of course, the music itself is mostly great. You won’t need to hear the entire 1992 Brixton set from Pavement's first European tour opening for Sonic Youth more than once, but there is plenty of slacker charm to Malkmus’ between-song banter—his references to Echo and the Bunnymen (who the band went on to cover in 1997) and the Beatles in the same sentence, his nods to the elder Sonic Youth in their The Year Punk Broke moment, the wisecracks and asides. But the studio versions of the same songs are undeniably better, and the live takes occupy 13 of the 30 tracks here. (That said, the way they rip through "Summer Babe" reminds you how important we all knew that song was, and it can still deliver shivers.)
Otherwise, you get their first and second Peel session, the 7" version of "Summer Babe", the fuzzed-out, grunge-nodding alternate take of "Here", and the rest of the Redux "Slanted Sessions" (a cleaner, more pristine "Here" shows up as part of Peel Session 1), "Sue Me Jack",  "Greenlander", and "So Stark (You're a Skyscraper)" from the Watery, Domestic sessions (I love that EP, and wish it was here in full, maybe instead of the live material), and etc. It’s a bit like Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho, though the sequencing is different from the 2002 version, and you get different cover art.
In the middle of the Brixton set, while introducing "Frontwards", Malkmus deadpans: "‘Frontwards’ is the name of this song, it’s about moving forward obviously." When Stuart Berman interviewed Malkmus (and Spiral Stairs) about these compilations and asked "Whose idea was it to go back and repackage these songs?," Malkmus answered "Not mine" and when asked if they added up to a proper album he replied: "No way. That’s just fuck-around shit, off-the-top-of-the-head stuff, and B-sides." Of course, the members of Pavement have moved forward: they're making music, writing about food, bartending, being horse racing buffs, and Gary Young. At this point, you wish the industry around them would, too.


After their sudden dissolution last year, the Toronto noise duo return just as suddenly with a new album. Like their previous work, it’s full of pain, dissociation, and hopelessness—and surprisingly, a new tranquility.

Forever in Your Heart

There’s a lot of pain, death, and destruction in the music of the Toronto noise duo Black Dresses. Across four full-lengths—as well as a smattering of EPs and other projects—Devi McCallion and Ada Rook detailed horrors both personal and cosmic, worrying about the end of the world and wondering how to trudge onward when it felt like everything was caving in. And yet, they always did. Rook put it memorably in the opening moments of their 2020 album Peaceful as Hell. “Even in the depths,” she sings. “I treasure everything that we’ve become.”
And then the project ended, or so it seemed. In May 2020, Black Dresses posted a statement on Twitter suggesting that the band would “no longer exist” as a result of “harassment” that McCallion had experienced from fans. It was a shocking announcement, given both those circumstances and the timing, just a few weeks after the release of Peaceful as Hell. But the bright-burning energy of their music—steadfast and focused—couldn’t stay extinguished for long. As suddenly as they broke up, they returned this year with Forever In Your Heart—a new album full of static-scoured and wounded reflections on the troubling present and unknowable future.
Like a lot of Black Dresses’ work, Forever In Your Heart can seem bleak. Especially in contrast to Peaceful as Hell, which found the duo dabbling in the swirling neons of a new industrial-pop sound, this new record is often heavier and more upsetting, full of digital hardcore, damaged metal riffs, and shrieking electronics. They sing about dissociation, hopelessness, and anguish, but they do so in a way that feels cathartic and transformative. It’s the sound of overcoming, of finding beauty amid the maelstrom.
The record even considers the possibility, however unlikely, that all the suffering they describe might reach an end. It’s a distant thought, buried in the distorted squeals of songs like “PEACESIGN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!,” on which Rook murmurs apocalyptic visions of messages from God burning in the clouds. Amid twisted industrial metal riffing—which underscores Rook’s avowed appreciation for Slipknot—they ponder what life would be like in a better world. “Could we make something beautiful?” Devi wonders. The ache in her voice suggests the answer, but the fact that she’s even asking implies a distant faith. Later, on the blown-out shoegaze ballad “Waiting42moro,” Rook offers a hopeful echo: “I can almost see, I can almost taste, I can almost touch that better place.”
It may seem surprising given the noisy, harsh tangles of their songs, but tranquility has become a recurring theme in Black Dresses’ music. And as much as Forever In Your Heart emphasizes the duo’s heaviest impulses, it makes room for quiet moments too. There’s moments of intimate studio chatter—like on “Silver Bells,” when McCallion tenderly interjects “Are you ok?” after a particularly grueling scream—and minimal ballads like “Mistake.” In the record’s closing lines, McCallion sums up her feelings with a sigh. “I couldn’t keep it together,” she sings. “But it’s not that bad.” So they’ll keep pressing on, just like they always have.

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The Hessle Audio cofounder’s exuberant new album is stuffed with high BPMs, ribcage-vibrating basslines, and richly hued synths. Club music this banging is rarely so nuanced.

Changing Channels

A minute or so into the opening song on UK electronic musician Pangaea’s Changing Channels, something strange happens. Over a rubbery, insistent bassline and crisply swinging drums, an unidentified vocalist is spitting out a string of unintelligible syllables when a hissing refrain seems to materialize in the air, like a message left by an agitated ghost in a fogged-up mirror: “Hessle! Hessle!”
That might not be so odd—after all, Pangaea’s latest album appears on Hessle Audio, the label he co-founded in 2007 with Ben UFO and Pearson Sound. But the phrase’s sudden appearance is also unlikely enough to make you doubt your own ears. For one thing, Hessle Audio has never been one to toot its own horn. Though it’s one of the UK’s most respected club labels—beloved for its unflagging dedication to both crowd-moving rhythms and innovative, brain-bending sounds—Hessle has always let the music speak for itself, with little self-promotion or social-media bluster. More to the point, the vocal in question is pure gobbledygook, a glossolalic rush cobbled together from stray phonemes and gasps of breath. Pangaea, aka London-based musician Kevin McAuley, has used the same Frankenstein-like technique to whip up monster anthems out of sampled lyrical detritus before. The Changing Channels opener might not really be saying “Hessle! Hessle!” but once you’ve heard it that way, you can’t unhear it. Maybe Pangaea hit upon those fortuitously soundalike syllables and decided to leave them in, an Easter egg for the label faithful.
Pangaea does have a deep mischievous streak, after all. Though he got his start making shadowy dubstep derivatives indebted to the dark, silky garage of acts like Horsepower Productions, it didn’t take him long to begin adding sneakily unsettling elements, like a mad professor ominously pontificating about the soullessness of gray matter or a choir chirpily invoking the end of the world. In recent years, he’s increasingly gone all in on big, lapel-grabbing heaters, and Changing Channels contains some of his biggest and brashest yet; it’s a high-BPM, full-throated defense of fun as the most important ingredient in dance music.
The club scene has undergone massive changes since bouncing back after the pandemic doldrums of 2020-2021. Tempos have soared, and so have moods. Even in corners of the underground where more serious modes once reigned, an insouciant spirit has wormed its way in, yielding brighter colors and wigglier basslines. Two Shell might be considered the poster boys for that shift; they got their start making relatively restrained DJ tools on Livity Sound (a UK label whose leftfield mission and positioning loosely align with Hessle’s) before graduating to their more notorious, helium-fueled hijinks. Pangaea mines an adjacent vein of ’90s garage and 2-step, and he pursues a similarly playful approach with his serotonin-boosting vocal chops.
Whether on or off the dancefloor, Changing Channels is wildly and viscerally pleasurable, full of ribcage-vibrating basslines, richly hued synths, and adamantine percussive details. In “Installation,” rosy sunrise pads smooth out the choppy groove while a mosquito-beaked synth riff nods simultaneously to ’90s Eurodance and Y2K-era dancehall. In “If,” lush organs and jagged synth stabs dial up the contrast around the cut-up vocal, while dub-techno chords carve diagonally through the mix, as though opening up a shortcut to a different musical dimension. Pangaea delights in mixing up tropes from genres that are rarely seen together in public. “Hole Away” slathers the buzz-bomb synths of drum’n’bass over a Strictly Rhythm-style NYC house vocal, while the coolly driving title track might be the answer to a thought experiment: What if Basic Channel, but speed garage? That might sound like an arcane proposition, but there’s nothing nerdy about Changing Channels. Its ultra-vivid palette of tinkling bells and ASMR-grade shakers and hi-hats is practically Pavlovian, bursting with textures as crisp as the moment you put on new eyeglasses. Club music this banging is rarely so nuanced.
Subtlety comes to the fore on the penultimate track, “Squid,” where a spidery synth melody carefully picks its way across a gliding, four-on-the-floor house beat, while carefully manipulated delay and swing settings throw further kinks in the groove. The vibe is unexpectedly dreamy, almost bittersweet. The only song here that’s not angled at peak time, “Squid” is so good that it makes me want to hear a whole album’s worth of Pangaea in contemplative, dewy-eyed mode. But the way it differs from the rest of the material is part of what makes the song special. To underscore that point, Changing Channels goes out with a bang. The closing “Bad Lines” is so upbeat it’s practically cartoonish: a 160-BPM juggernaut of sped-up house pianos and candy-colored trance stabs. It feels almost tongue in cheek, although knowing McAuley’s roots—long before he got into more rarified styles, he taught himself to DJ with hard house and trance records from his hometown’s HMV—leaves little doubt that his homage is sincere. Notice how lovingly he has rendered the genre’s over-the-top supersaws and strafing filters: What at first scans as ridiculously extra turns out to be, upon closer inspection, just right.
It might seem surprising to hear Pangaea lock into a mode that’s swept clubs and festivals for a while now; Hessle Audio have prided themselves on being ahead of the curve. In a recent interview alongside his co-founders, Ben UFO explained how the label had managed to remain outside the blast radius of many dance-music fads: “Because we’ve always been focused on music that sounds new to us, we’ve ended up surviving those trend spikes. That’s a great position to be in—to have people expect that a shift in flow might be round the corner.” In his testament to the importance of letting loose, Pangaea doesn’t just offer a gentle rebuke to the glowering, stone-faced, arms-crossed gatekeepers of the underground. His record is also refreshingly free of a feeling that has plagued the recent craze for chart-pop samples and Eurodance classics: a vaguely guilty-pleasure insinuation of getting away with something naughty. Cheeky but never corny, Pangaea’s album proves that you can get silly without sounding stupid. Right down to its title, Changing Channels captures a welcome shift in flow.


The buzzy New York City rock quintet’s debut taps into a vivid sense of place. Their keening intensity captures a snapshot of a city coming unglued.

Scream From New York, NY

Somewhere between the release of Meet Me in the Bathroom (the book) and Meet Me in the Bathroom (the documentary), New York’s early-aughts rock revival entered the realm of classic rock. The Strokes are fêted with vinyl box sets and a decades-too-late Grammy. Interpol are touring behind the 20th anniversary of Antics. LCD Soundsystem are in their residency era, like an Eagles alternative for people who tried Four Loko twice. And perennial underdogs the Walkmen have shape-shifted into reunion darlings.
It’s all romance and mythology now. Those bands’ classic albums are as old now as Fear of Music and Parallel Lines were in 2001. Now the city’s been reborn after another world-shifting tragedy, but—amid exorbitant rents and the displacement of the creative underclass—it’s hard to imagine a new crop of bands reinvigorating the rock scene.
Enter Been Stellar, an NYU-formed quintet who’ve become a ubiquitous and ambitious presence in the downtown music scene. “All of those bands—the Strokes, the Walkmen, Interpol—were a galvanizing thing for us,” guitarist Skyler Knapp recently told an interviewer. Been Stellar’s career has accelerated with similar speed. Before releasing an album, they toured with the 1975 and opened for Interpol. When I saw the group at Mercury Lounge last year, they played with a bombast and gusto that signaled they were destined for bigger venues.
They may wince at being added to playlists with names like “Meet Me in the Bathroom Take 2” and grumble about Strokes comparisons, but can you blame depressed millennials for wanting to believe in the myth of rock renewal? Been Stellar may be victims of projection, but rarely has a young, hungry New York band made being a young, hungry New York band so central to their identity. On an early cut called “Manhattan Youth,” they pondered the NYC childhoods these transplants never had. Now they take inspiration from the wordless screams and chaotic sounds that define daily life in New York and title their debut album Scream From New York, NY.
In the urgent, combustible opener, “Start Again,” singer Sam Slocum wanders First Avenue, trading words with a well-dressed alcoholic, before yowling a climactic refrain of “New York wasted/Start again, start again!” It’s a thrilling statement of intent. The band’s strongest songs are often rooted in the city’s peculiar landmarks. Across its formidable six minutes, “I Have the Answer” marshals waves of shoegaze sludge as Slocum describes an epiphany at the American Museum of Natural History’s whale exhibit. (Noah Baumbach, eat your heart out.) The rousing title track summons an image of the East Village’s Middle Church burning in a 2020 fire as Slocum transforms a hokey Reagan slogan (“Morning in America”) into a refrain laced with noise and dread.
Funny thing is, Been Stellar don’t sound too much like the Strokes. Slocum’s throaty growl sounds a bit like Julian Casablancas, but he also sounds like a young Johnny Rzeznik or Joseph D’Agostino. He sings with earnest emotion, not disaffected cool, and injects each chorus with breathless urgency, even when it’s hard to tell what he’s so worked up about (“Passing Judgment”). After the roiling punk of the opening numbers the album’s tempos slow, and brooding standouts like “Pumpkin” and “Takedown” recall the grandiose angst and soaring melodicism of the mid-’90s UK wave—early Verve, Bends-era Radiohead. If Been Stellar seem like a nostalgia magnet, they can’t help but summon top-shelf influences.
Across these 10 tracks, Been Stellar make a claim as one of New York’s most promising bands, but they don’t always land on a clear identity of their own. “Can’t Look Away” summons the grit and swagger of their heaviest tunes, but much of the record’s latter half blends together in an indistinct mid-tempo haze. They lack the spiky eccentricity or creativity of rising NYC peers like Godcaster or Water From Your Eyes, and some of their songs (“Sweet,” “All in One”) carry a vague, imitative quality. No matter what, there’s an earnestness that belies the jokey, tossed-off band name.
Still, Scream From New York, NY harnesses the group’s keening intensity and taps into a vivid sense of place. They’re not the first songwriters to draw inspiration from the chaotic thrum of New York City, but they bring this literary tradition into a troubled new era. On the title track, Slocum sketches a compelling snapshot of a city coming unglued. That the song’s grim imagery—black smoke, people coughing through masks—evokes several very different real-life events only underlines how many crises of apocalyptic proportions New York has endured this century. To live here is to watch the city swing between collapse and rebirth and back again. Been Stellar may not usher in a full-scale rock revival, but at least they’re making the bad times sound good.


By bouncing among eras and albums, this enormous box set of sessions and broadcasts offers an elliptical, revisionist portrait of a band whose legacy is largely undecided.

R.E.M. at the BBC

Nearly a decade after they broke up, R.E.M. still elude final judgments. Weird but refined, popular yet coy, they confounded the dreary sellout-versus-purity narrative for so long that they seem now to go unnoticed in each context. With eight CDs and one DVD, the new box set R.E.M. at the BBC reveals moments of persistence amid that flux, from near-unknowns playing provincial towns to Glastonbury headliners at the end of the millennium. The first disc alone draws on five different radio sessions spanning 17 years, from the poised group courting MTV in 1991 to the exhausted one circa 2008, gamely playing their new single “Supernatural Superserious.” Recorded far from home, these tracks document a band made restless by history, the blur caught in a distant mirror.
The breadth of R.E.M. at the BBC does become a little absurd; as much as I love “Losing My Religion,” I’ve never wanted to compare six slightly different versions. (There are also more manageable two-disc or two-LP distillations, divided between sessions and broadcasts.) Such redundancy might be misleading: Due to R.E.M.’s delayed fame in Europe, the set often elides their commercial peak during the early 1990s. Rather than a coming-of-age story culminating in Automatic for the People, the tracklist circles around a disorienting crisis, the departure of drummer Bill Berry in 1997—he’d suffered a brain aneurysm onstage two years earlier and tired of touring life. Shifting back and forth in time gives the sequencing a sense of rumination, which dovetails with Michael Stipe’s own voice: opaque detachment, resolved by earnest need.
The rarest material here is the third disc, which captures an entire Nottingham concert from 1984. The host introduces them as “those boys from Athens,” as if Reckoning had just been released by Wham! instead of a band that would peak in Britain nearly a decade later. “We’re R.E.M. We’re here from Georgia, which is in the southernmost part of the United States. We’re not proud of our president. We’re sorry,” Stipe says before asking whether somebody can lend a 9.5-sized shoe to replace his broken one. I was struck by how raucous the band sounds, how young. They run through the chorus of “Hyena” like they’re baying at the moon. Bisexual anthem “Pretty Persuasion” gets introduced and interrupted by off-key harmonica as Stipe switches between pronouns, singing “god damn your confusion” with bratty frustration. The show doesn’t have the arena-filling scale of R.E.M.’s later performances, but you can hear their gaunt energy gathering itself into something more.
The subtle revisionism also highlights 1994’s Monster, adapted nearly in its entirety for a 1995 show divided across two discs. Following three platinum-selling records, that album was a back-to-basics move turned perversely false. The lyrics hint at intimate obsessions; the production smears guitar filters over Stipe’s vocals like bleeding lipstick. I love Stipe’s sardonic moue during “Crush With Eyeliner,” about characters failing glamorously at gender: “She’s a real woman-child.” All of these sleazy, lascivious songs sound fabulous live, their artifice translated to theater. Monster’s songs keep returning to the mutual dependency between fan and idol, and here the former can talk back, asserting a little dominance of their own.
As Bill Berry withdrew from R.E.M., the band recorded some of their most delicate work, sad and pretty songs of deepening ambiguity—like “Imitation of Life,” which I find intensely comforting despite or because it begins with the verset “Charades, pop skill/Water hyacinth/Named by a poet.” Whenever such tracks appear here, the lack of studio effects heightens the feeling of absence. During a 1998 Peel Session, the group plays “At My Most Beautiful,” an overt Brian Wilson pastiche written by bassist Mike Mills, who used to drive around Georgia with Berry singing along to Beach Boys 8-tracks. The whistles from the audience fall silent. For several long moments, the only noise is a piano melody and Stipe’s voice: “I count your eyelashes secretly/With every one, whisper, ‘I love you’/I’ll let you sleep.” Those guileless harmonies take over, their hum seeming to double as it meets the crowd.


The London duo incorporate more varied and esoteric sounds to create an album of fun but flawed 1980s-inspired sophisti-pop.

Althaea

Trailer Trash Tracys are a London-based duo who in name and in conversation almost beg you to judge a book by its cover. Of course, there’s their choice of name, which musicians Susanne Aztoria and Jimmy Lee have tried to spin silly, fantastical lies about the origin of, crediting everything from a troupe of Russian ballerinas to a caravan of wandering aborigines. Their first album, Ester, was inspired by Sufi poetry and they played their instruments in an obscure and mystical tuning scale called the Solfeggio. Of course, they were trolling.
The frontwoman of the band, Susanne Aztoria admits some of these stories were propagated by gullible journalists. And when you start listening to their songs, especially the ones that got them notoriety—a handful of fuzzy, fizzy dream pop demos from 2009—you’d realize they were about as complicated as a fistful of pop rocks downed with a swig of cola. Static and heavy guitars, blow- out drums, droll vocals, and a general too-cool attitude made them what could be the British answer to Smith Westerns.
Six years since their debut, Aztoria and Lee continue to bill their band as a rather esoteric pop project. Althaea, their second record, is supposed to pull from “Filipino carnival music,” “Latin rhythms,” and “Japanese tropical music.” On paper, that can be difficult to parse, and it's even harder to Google, but simply put, in all the time they’ve been researching how they’d like to reinvent their sound, Aztoria and Lee discovered polyrhythms and bright synthesizers.
If you ignore all of the things they have to say their music, what you get with Althaea is an album of fun but flawed 1980s-inspired sophisti-pop. It’s tightly produced and clean sounding but almost generic in its hipness, like the droves of artisanal Tiki bars that have opened up in your neighborhood. A gloss of tropical melody haunts every moment of this album in the form of acoustic percussion and bubbly synth rhythms. It renders almost everything Aztoria and Lee in a kitschy light.
When the music works—like the neo-new wave of “Eden Machine” or the lounge pop of “Money for Moondogs”—the players are gaudy but restrained. These songs allow Azoturia, the strongest member of the group, to use her chameleonic voice, the band’s greatest asset. She can as easily channel the hypnotic effect of Elizabeth Fraser as she can the dreamy trills of Lætitia Sadier. On “Eden Machine” specifically, with its shimmying bassline and Copacabana drums, the vibe is pleasing but not overwrought.
But, for the most part, Althaea, is filled with songs that are busy and overly thought. “Gong Gardens,” which, like its title suggests, is a gong-filled affair that’s heavy on the echo and far too silly too boot. In other places like “Betty’s Cavatina” or “Singdrome” they take their supposed Asian music inspirations a little too far, with stock sound effects and rhythms that sound pulled from an overdubbed martial arts film.
What is always going to be nagging about Trailer Trash Tracys (aside from their name) is how far they will go to willfully obscure the good time they’re trying to have. Baked into their music is also the weird rhetoric of being a band that would like be seen as difficult, or at the very least, super knowledgeable. Althaea tries to flex their bona fides or worldliness hard, but it feels flat in the end. And that’s because past all the talk, Trailer Trash Tracys are very component pop band, capable of writing a sugary hook and stringing together a sticky melody. Perhaps they’re too-smart-for-their own good, but in the moments they can get over themselves, Althaea, at least for a flash, can offer more than just a thrill.


Solo record from ex-Lost Sounds singer, guitarist, and keyboardist Alicja Trout.

Tronic Blanc

It's tempting and intriguing, but ultimately reductive, to hear Black Sunday's Tronic Blanc as a reaction to the collapse last year of Memphis up-and-comers the Lost Sounds. First, there's the name Black Sunday: Whether it refers to Thomas Harris (who wrote a novel of that name about a blimp crash) or to the Great Depression (a tremendous dust storm obliterated millions of acres on Sunday, April 14, 1935), the phrase evokes immense disaster, widespread destruction, and an aftermath of funereal grief.
Then there's the fact the Black Sunday is essentially Alicja Trout, who previously sang and played keyboards and guitars for the Lost Sounds and has recorded with various one-off lineups and incarnations, including the Clears, the River City Tan Lines, the Fitts, and, most recently, Mouse Rocket. Aside from a few guest musicians (including former Lost Sound Jay Lindsay, who plays drums on two songs), Trout plays all the instruments and wrote all but one of the songs, so Tronic Blanc (which she recorded in her Memphis studio, called Tronic Graveyard) sounds like her most solo album-- and, in some ways, the best realization of her unique aesthetic.
As such, Tronic Blanc's technofear and paranoia-- not to mention its jaded resentment-- can be attributed solely to Trout. "First, I cut my arms for you/ Then I cut my scars for you," she sings on "Torture Torture", with an immediacy that's chilling. Most of this personal angst surfaces in clone imagery-- not genetic regenerations, but mechanical substitutes. Songs like "Torture Torture", "This Heart Is Now Aluminum", and "Modulated Simulated" voice a very specific fear: That some enormous upheaval, like a bad break-up, will so overwhelm her that she might lose her emotional faculties and become a cold, metal-hearted machine.
This panic is reflected in the music on Tronic Blanc, which pits live instrumentation against synthetic noises. On "What I Think Is Wrong", live drums compete with meowing keyboards, while on "You're Gonna See Me", real guitars counter canned beats. But Trout complicates that tension by making the drums sound preternaturally rigid and the guitars electronically sculpted, while her keyboard runs-- which have been a trademark at least since her days with the Clears (their one album is well worth seeking out and prefigures the current New Wave revival by almost a decade)-- often give the songs their heartbeat pulse. The line between the actual and the artificial constantly blurs, mirroring her confusion over real and false emotions. In a sense, Trout is Dr. Frankenstein and Tronic Blanc is the monster she's created in her studio lab.
But complicating that literary comparison is the simple and overwhelming fact that despite the pain and fear the songs convey, Trout's music is exuberant, inventive, and full-to-bursting with ideas. As with previous projects, Trout's preferred m.o. is the restless, reckless conflation of genres: songs like "This Heart Is Now Aluminum", "Modulated Simulated", and "Little Bird" beat with garage-rock swagger and taut new wave grooves, while "Destroy Everything in Your Path" and "Next Girl Detour", with its shout-out chorus, swing with surf guitar momentum. Elsewhere, the DIY aesthetic lends "Little Bird" and "On the Way Downtown"-- about the dangers of the Mississippi River-- their rough immediacy, as if Trout recorded them as soon as the ideas popped into her head. All these elements belie the grim undertones of Tronic Blanc, suggesting that simple expression can be not only catharsis, but a powerful defense against the dehumanizing disappointments of other people.


The Oakland producer finds a middle ground between her atmospheric tendencies and her more percussive productions, pairing raw, footwork-inspired drum loops with ethereal synths.

Crazy Trip EP

In 1992, Warp’s Artificial Intelligence compilation launched a movement of cerebral, Byzantine techno rooted in proggy concept albums by ’70s visionaries like Kraftwerk and Pink Floyd. Informed by the rawness of footwork, contemporary rap, and even indie rock, the work of California’s Tomu DJ extends IDM’s lineage by focusing its energies on emotional intelligence. Mostly recorded around the same time as her atmospheric 2021 album FEMINISTA and its more percussive follow-up, Half Moon Bay, Crazy Trip occupies a surprisingly straightforward middle ground of simple, intersecting loops and gentle drum programming. The synth patches and drum patterns she favors may be familiar to DJs and listeners tapped into club music’s international underground, yet the final product feels original. Where some artists with similar tastes may aim for transcendence, Tomu DJ zeroes in on grounding introspection.
Crazy Trip leads with its most traditionally arranged tracks: a pair of 120 bpm house cuts built around four-on-the-floor kicks. Despite their shared tempo, the two songs chart contrasting routes. On “Mewisc,” blocky, static drones resonate and overlap like singing bowls, forming a loop propelled less by melody than simple addition and subtraction. New elements are gradually revealed as silhouettes in the synth-pad fog: A bassline slips through like a nudging elbow, tamped down by soft kicks and claps. “Pretty Funny,” similarly constructed with basic modular parts, eschews this unfolding structure and instead creates an immersive space that persists for just over two minutes. The three-chord loop in the backdrop remains unaltered throughout, putting emphasis on the rhythmic interplay between chromatic tom drums and the syncopated snares and hats pulled into their orbit. Instead of following the linear structure of a typical house production, Tomu DJ is more interested in condensing an idea into its most emotive moments.
The EP’s most inventive offerings are those that allude to Tomu DJ’s formative years booking Teklife members like DJ Spinn and DJ Manny for college parties. “Band Man” filters the new-age-adjacent timbres of her more ambient work through the frenetic, mirrored lens of classic footwork, segmenting Rhodes chords into fragments to match an antsy kick pattern. Lightly edited, pitched-up breakbeats and steady claps hit with rudimentary charm, while rapid-fire hi-hats and atonal, groaning synth effects rush to fill the remaining space. The contrast between gritty repetition and more expressive decoration generates a comforting feeling of weightlessness, shifting the center of gravity in several directions until its focus lands amid a whirlwind of percussive debris.
“Bedroom DJ,” Crazy Trip’s best track, is an ambient reimagining of ghettotech motifs in which Brooklyn rapper Petty Getty turns DJ terms into double entendres over loose, cozy R&B instrumentation. Though this song also prominently features a dreamy chord progression, there’s a whole biome of strange harmonic interplay that lives beneath the surface. Sine waves slalom between the keys, taking short, strategic detours into dissonance or unexpectedly stuttering out of time, giving the song a loose, improvised feel.
Despite drawing from an array of regional scenes and subgenres, Tomu DJ’s self-taught production doesn’t quite fit the buzzy “post-genre” tag often applied to the new wave of club experimentalists. Instead, it re-interprets specific dance sounds from the perspective of the online enthusiast, piecing together a unique aesthetic that gives equal weight to the energy of the dancefloor and the mysteries of a hidden browser tab.


The East Atlanta rapper’s second album doesn't try to take on the world and is all the better for it, showing that J.I.D. has much more to offer than his formidable rapping chops.

DiCaprio 2

Four tracks into DiCaprio 2,  J. Cole, shows up for a feature. Typically, on these sort of master-student collaborations, the less-experienced rapper’s strain is audible as he attempts to show he can hang. Here, it’s the opposite: J.I.D’s opening verse is so gleeful, so effortless and so fast, that when it comes Cole’s turn to rap, you can almost hear him brace for impact. Cole gets off a strong verse, and the song, “Off Deez,” is one of many standouts here. But you can just imagine them stepping out of booth, J.I.D pumped and ready for more; Cole relieved that he can still rap as well as his younger signee.
J.I.D’s confidence comes from years of work. Finally starting to get his due at the age of 28, Destin Route built up a head of steam in the old-fashioned way (circa 2007, or B.I.G., Before Instagram), releasing mixtape after mixtape until he turned heads with the first DiCaprio project, an EP released at the top of 2015. He signed with Cole’s label, Dreamville, in 2017 and his debut album, The Never Story, was released in March and converted rap fans all year mostly off the strength of the rapper’s technical ability and the delight that he takes in displaying it. That ability has been refined further on DiCaprio 2, but J.I.D’s second album has more to offer than simple rapping chops.
Let’s talk about those for a second though. J.I.D’s hyper-enunciated, high-pitched whine of a flow is initially reminiscent of Kendrick Lamar’s, but that comparison feels narrow. (He plays with the connection explicitly on “Despacito Too,” interpolating Kendrick lyrics in a narrative about his own individual development.) J.I.D’s melodic instincts are strong, sharing ties with Isaiah Rashad and even, occasionally, Bone Thugs, and he has the ability to get jokes off even in the midst of triple-time rapping, a la Big L or Lil Wayne. Though he can rap faster than almost any newcomer in recent memory, he uses the speed as one of several tools and his flow is chameleonic, suited to the given moment. (His pen name comes from his grandma’s chosen adjective for him, “jittery,” and it’s the right word for this restless rapper.)
And then, of course, there are little lyrical gems. The best lines here feel like J.I.D is performing acrobatics on a 20-foot tightrope; many of his lyrics operate on the basis of his speed jousting with listener's expectations and making his songs surprising and relistenable. A bizarre line zips by in “Westbrook,” an A$AP Ferg feature, “Live life like a baby that was dead at birth but came alive and fucked the nurses,” the deadpan absurdity hitting your ears so quickly that you want to hear it again, just to confirm that he really said it. He also makes great use of little switchbacks; on “Off Da Zoinkys,” an anti-drug anthem, he thanks Ronald Reagan (ostensibly for the War on Drugs) and as you’re gearing up to react, he immediately takes it back, calling the 40th president “racist as fuck.”
“Off Da Zoinky’s” gives a window into J.I.D’s appeal. Given that it’s an anti-drug sermon of sorts, it could easily have been sanctimonious. Instead, it’s self-aware (“I ain’t nosy but I know what I know, Mr. Know-It-All, oh here he go”) and it builds over time. J.I.D. eventually says that the reason he stays drug-free is that he wants his mind clear and his focus sharp because he’s trying to be the greatest. That higher purpose gives the song more in common with Andre 3000 on “ATLiens” (”No drugs or alcohol so I can get the signal clear as day”) than with J. Cole’s album-long campaign against sin, KOD.
DiCaprio 2’s lyrical showcase takes a turn on “Workin’ Out,” and across the remainder of the album, J.I.D tries different things, usually successfully. (The clear exception is “Skrawberries,” a thick-headed treatise on gender relations that wastes a Mac Miller beat and comes complete with the line “[she] got a couple abortions, now that pussy’s a haunted house.”) “Tiiied,” a song about relationship drama, opens on J.I.D fighting with his girl at the movies sounding a little like Anderson .Paak with a fine eye for detail. The song is produced by Dreamville’s Elite and Ron Gilmore and it’s filled with jazzy musical flourishes that, like many of the beats here, catch your ear anew once you’ve become familiar with the verses. But the strongest song on the album’s back half is “Hot Box,” as J.I.D works out his New York fetishism with a head-turning guest verse from Method Man and some lovely neo-boom bap courtesy of Skhye Hutch (who’s produced for Ab-Soul and Kendrick) and Zorro.
J.I.D’s presence on Dreamville makes all kinds of sense. He shares Cole’s values and the priorities and pleasures of his music are those of an older generation. On the late-album standout “Just Da Other Day,” he says “I’m tryna get my fuckin goals, not a goyard,” and his anti-materialist outlook and low-key contempt for his contemporaries tracks perfectly with his label boss. But nothing about J.I.D is crochety or bitter. His songs are about joy and hunger and reflection and fun. Not one of them feels as if it’s trying to save hip-hop.


Tindersticks have never released a bad album, never made an opportunistic, trend-driven shift, and have never done anything that might date their music to its moment of origin. They’re the rare group that can lay claim to a signature sound, yet tweak the formula from album to album so that each of their 10 records possesses its own distinct character.

The Waiting Room

Tindersticks turn 25 this year. It’s a remarkable feat for any band, but even more impressive than the Nottingham outfit’s longevity is their consistency. Tindersticks have never released a bad album (or even a middling one), never made an opportunistic, trend-driven shift, and have never done anything that might date their music to its moment of origin. They’re the rare group that can lay claim to a signature sound, yet tweak the formula from album to album so that each of their 10 records possesses its own distinct character. The skies in their world may be forever gray, but the clouds are always moving and morphing, letting in the faintest flickers of light that change the size and shape of the shadows they cast.
The richly atmospheric, nicotine-stained quality of the Tindersticks’ music makes it an ideal complement to TV shows and films, whether their songs are soundtracking pivotal scenes on "The Sopranos" or comprising entire scores for French art-house maverick Claire Denis. But on The Waiting Room, that dynamic is reversed: the band handed off its 11 tracks to various filmmaker friends (including Denis, Christoph Girardet, Pierre Vinour, and Gregorio Graziosi) as inspirational fodder for accompanying short films packaged with deluxe editions of the record. The album opens with a cover of Polish composer Bronislau Kaper’s "Follow Me," aka the theme song from the 1962 film adaptation of Mutiny on the Bounty; in Tindersticks’ hands, the original’s tiki-torch splendor is given a gritty makeover that pushes it closer to Midnight Cowboy territory. It’s a perfect scene-setter—The Waiting Room may not feature any songs about oceanic expeditions, but the band sure know their way around tales of backstabbing and betrayal.
Yet for all the band’s filmic qualities, the action in frontman Stuart Staples' lyrics is always more psychological than physical. The weightless Wurlitzer tones of "Second Chance Man" and "Were We Once Lovers?" respectively set Staples’ inner turmoil against brassy swells and disorienting disco. And just as the latter track appears to achieve liftoff, Staples delivers a dispiriting chorus line—"how can I care if it’s the caring that’s killing me?"—that forsakes rapture for rupture.
The Waiting Room might be Tindersticks’ most subdued effort to date, but it still flashes the irreverence that enlivened efforts like The Something Rain and Falling Down a Mountain. On "Help Yourself," an uncharacteristically louche Staples shakes off his troubles by swaggering onto the floor of the Shrine in Lagos circa '72 (and the novelty of the Tindersticks going Afrobeat is savvily mirrored by Denis’ companion clip, which depicts French-Caribbean actor Alex Descas roaming the shopping-mall concourse of a French train station, nonplussed by the white European consumer culture surrounding him). An even more wondrous surprise arrives in the form of "Hey Lucinda," a wobbly-kneed waltz that finds Staples communing with the spirit of the late, great Montreal chanteuse Lhasa de Sela, an occasional Tindersticks collaborator who died of cancer in 2010. It’s like a fleeting reminiscence of someone who’s passed, but one that leaves you smiling from the warm memories rather than weeping over their absence.
The beautifully languid "Hey Lucinda" contrasts sharply with The Waiting Room’s other big-ticket matchup, "We Are Dreamers," which sees Staples joining forces with Jehnny Beth of Savages and the Tindersticks tapping into that band’s brooding menace. It’s the moment where all of The Waiting Room’s mounting tension is finally released, into an outsider anthem that recasts material impoverishment as spiritual empowerment ("You can rob us/ You can trick us/ Peer over our shoulders and steal our ideas") as Beth and Staples’ voices intertwine and overlap before locking into the song’s rallying cry: "This is not us/ We are dreamers!" But in the Tindersticks’ world, every dream is followed by a rude awakening; following that climax, the bitterly fatalistic closer "Like Only Lovers Can" pairs '70s soft-rock sway with a cutting chorus: "We can only hurt each other the way that lovers can/ So where do we go?" Appropriately, many of the visuals that accompany these songs emphasize distance and emptiness: black-and-white footage of a wedding from the '50s; a seaside fairground after the tourists have gone home; taxidermied animals. They’re moments and entities once bustling with life, but which now exist as faded memories or shells of their former selves. And for so long as we pine to make them real again, there will be exquisite Tindersticks songs to help us fill the void.


Continuing his impressive run, MIKE links with the Brooklyn producer for a deliriously fun record of low-stakes raps and bubbly beats. It’s the most energetic project the rapper’s ever made, an unexpected but welcome vibe change.

Pinball

MIKE’s been stepping out from the shadows lately. For years, he’s trafficked in a faded photograph sound, his rich baritone melting into beats that could disintegrate if you held them too long. His gluey flow often obscures the beauty of his lyrics, which can move from self-examination to nostalgia to empowerment within a few seconds. But beginning with 2022’s Beware of the Monkey, MIKE started to pry the boards off the windows, illuminating the darker corners of his work. Faith is a Rock, a contemplative collaboration with Wiki and the Alchemist, dropped less than a year later, and shone with the clarity of a bright winter’s morning. Three weeks after that, MIKE released Burning Desire, a meticulously crafted opus that signaled MIKE had fully entered his charged-up era. Now, continuing his impressive run, he teams up with Brooklyn producer Tony Seltzer for Pinball, a deliriously fun record of low-stakes raps and bubbly beats. It’s the most energetic project MIKE’s ever made, an unexpected but welcome vibe change.
MIKE and Tony Seltzer have worked together before, but not like this. Seltzer produced two songs on MIKE’s 2017 breakout, May God Bless Your Hustle. His work on that album was deeply chill: “STANDOUT” married mechanical drums to atmospheric pads, a nod to the bygone cloud rap sound, and “Paul” was glistening chimes and screwed-down boom bap, barely recognizable as a Tony Seltzer beat. The two stayed in touch over the years and reconnected while MIKE assembled Burning Desire. He’d wrap up a song for Desire at his apartment, then head to Seltzer’s studio to clear his head. Seltzer would play whatever beats he’d made that week and MIKE would stop him when he heard something that stuck. The two made “R&B” more as a fun exercise than anything else, but the work felt so effortless they decided to keep going.
On Pinball, Seltzer’s in top form, providing MIKE with cartoonish trap beats, candy-colored drill, and quiet storm snap music. His drums bounce around themselves with a raised-eyebrows energy, as if they’re friends who didn’t expect to see each other show up at the same party. They seem to scatter as they hit, leaving wide-open spaces for rappers and samples alike to ooze into. The barely-there percussion on “2k24 Tour” gives the orchestral loop ample breathing room, the occasional 808 downbeats providing a hypnotic propulsive feel. On “Lethal Weapon,” Seltzer’s sporadic hi-hats and rimshots turn chintzy MIDI instruments into a pastel swirl of Delta 8 psychedelia, and the ’80s synth pads of “Skurrr” drape over deep bass like satin sheets on a marble statue. The wild jump between sounds isn’t ever jarring, though. The longer you listen, the more lush and inviting it becomes.
MIKE folds himself completely into Seltzer’s production, radiating like he’s having an absolute blast making these songs. He’s been especially invigorated across his projects for the last couple of years, but this sounds like the most fun he’s had rapping lately, perhaps ever. He stretches his voice into new territory, mutating his aqueous delivery on every song. Every phrase sounds like it originates in the back of his throat, as if he’s rapping in concave, ducking and compressing syllables to fit into the pocket. Moments like the light Auto-Tune use at the end of “Two Door” showcase his willingness to experiment, while others, like changing the pitch of his voice to match Seltzer’s half-step modulation at the end of “Skurrr,” reveal his commitment to the craft. At 25, he’s an incredibly accomplished artist, understanding the impact small details have on a composition.
Though Pinball’s subject matter is much lighter fare than most MIKE albums—his writing largely revolves around his good weed, his sizable bank account, and how good he is at rapping—it’s no minor entry in his discography. MIKE is ultimately a thinking man, and still drops stark gems of wisdom here and there. For every material boast, there are flashes of unflinching reflection, like when he admits “I had to do a homie bad, I ain’t proud of it” on “R&B.” It’s astonishing how consistently great MIKE’s catalog has been, especially given how prolific he is. Pinball is celebratory, a victory lap in the middle of the game. It’s a deepening of MIKE’s skillset and a progression that feels natural and essential, yet another confirmation that he’s destined to be a legend.


Alice Coltrane teamed with Joe Henderson for this 1973 jazz classic, an album where each member’s playing is in service of a single, cosmic statement of music.

Joe Henderson / Alice Coltrane: The Elements

The Elements

The early 1970s were a unique time for jazz because the era was impossible to define. The major innovations of the previous decade, from free improvisation to the first stirrings of jazz fusion, had been embraced as part of jazz proper, and a new sense of possibility loomed. The electric groups that would move huge numbers in the decade were all rolling by 1973—Weather Report, Return to Forever, Mahavishnu Orchestra—but the avant-garde, though still vital creatively, was moving back underground. The commercial success of Impulse! in the ’60s, fueled by John Coltrane’s astonishing run during his final years, hadn’t been able to sustain itself, and “out” jazz became once again more of a niche concern, with some of the most exciting music emerging from the DIY New York loft scene. Meanwhile, the incorporation of non-Western instruments into jazz, helped along by John Coltrane himself in the early ’60s (see his piece “India”) was developing into something truly beautiful under the watchful eye of the late giant’s collaborators, including Pharoah Sanders and John’s wife Alice.
In this hothouse environment, Joe Henderson—a widely respected but relatively traditionally-minded saxophonist—could try his hand at flowing, impressionistic music with a decidedly global bent. On 1973’s The Elements, newly reissued in a Concord Music series that highlights out-of-print vinyl, he found himself with a band of visionaries that included bassist Charlie Haden, violinist Michael White, and percussionist Kenneth Nash. But the crucial energizing spirit behind the record is Alice Coltrane, who, in a rare role as a side musician, contributes harp, piano, tambura, and harmonium. After her husband’s death, the vast majority of Alice’s recorded output was recorded under her own leadership, but though this is Henderson’s record and these are his compositions, on The Elements, she and Henderson are essentially equal partners.
Henderson’s early background, dating to his emergence in the early ’60s, found him playing funky hard bop, and he was a regular fixture on dates for the Blue Note label. As the decade turned, he began to explore new settings for his music, including a brief stint in the jazz-rock band Blood, Sweat & Tears. But The Elements was basically a one-off for Henderson as a leader. Arrangements like these, found on records like Journey in Satchidananda and Ptah, the El Daoud (the latter album features Henderson) are where Coltrane created her most stirring work, and this record has to be counted among them.
The Elements is a sort of concept album—its four tracks are titled “Fire,” “Air,” “Water,” and “Earth.” The music is an unusual assemblage of open-ended blowing, loping funk, and drone, with a heavy emphasis on sounds and scales from North Africa, the Middle East, and India. The live interplay is important, but a metallic studio crispness provides an intriguing tint: Henderson’s horn is often processed electronically and obvious tape splices and overdubs appear throughout.
The compositions range from horizontally expansive tone paintings to sample-begging groovers that touch on R&B. “Fire” is a percussion-heavy workout with a slight Latin tinge. Henderson’s horn is slathered with echo and delay, giving it an exploratory spaciness amplified by Coltrane’s dreamy comping on harp, while White’s violin sawing brings the piece back to the ground. “Air,” with Coltrane moving to piano, plays like an explosion in slow motion, as instruments cluster and swell and decay, riffing on tonal color rather than harmonic structure. “Water” begins with Coltrane setting the table with buzzing drone on tambura as Henderson plays a pinched and fractured solo, his horn heavily treated. The mix of electronics and drone and the strong feeling of studio creation brings “Water” into the realm of ambient pioneer Jon Hassell, whose album 1977 Vernal Equinox would lay the foundation for his future/past “fourth world” musical conception. The closing “Earth” incorporates aspects of the previous tracks, but adds a seriously sample-ready bass/drums groove to mix, bringing the album in conversation with contemporary developments in soul and funk. Each piece is distinct, but they lock together perfectly, offering different angles on similar ideas.
The reissue itself, newly remastered from the original analog tapes (not a given these days), is exceptional, with rich sound and packaging that focuses on quality and staying true to the original issue rather than offering sheer heavy-cardboard weight. And its attention to detail reinforces something important about the record as a whole: how well The Elements works as a single statement. There are no earth-shattering solos, no star turns, every musician is there to create this primordial sound-world. This collective approach is something Alice Coltrane did particularly well. Spiritually-minded cosmic jazz came into its own at the turn of the ’70s, and this is one of the best albums the scene produced.


The soundtrack to David Lynch's surreal 1977 cult film is given a lavish vinyl reissue by Sacred Bones. Thirty-five years later, the gorgeous sound design, built on the rumble and hiss of industry, remains a masterpiece of dark ambiance.

Eraserhead

The first and most important thing about the soundtrack to David Lynch's surreal 1977 cult film masterpiece is that it's not like any other soundtrack in your collection. This is no "music from and inspired by" set and it doesn't gather orchestral cues from the film's score. Eraserhead is a sound track (two words) in the literal sense. It contains 38 minutes of the sound that accompanies the 89-minute film's picture. When you are listening to this LP, you are hearing a movie. And it works, because Lynch and his late collaborator, Alan Splet, had a rare ear for the immersive and emotional possibilities of sound. The sound design in Lynch's films is consistently brilliant, brimming with details that enhance the mood and further the narrative. And here on Eraserhead-- Lynch's first feature, most personal film, and in many ways the strangest movie he ever made-- his and Splet's aural genius was already fully formed. Working with the analog technology available in the 1970s, they created a richly textured and evocative world.
The narrative details of Lynch's movie aren't essential to this set, but they do help to put the album into context. Eraserhead tells the story of Henry Spencer, a strange and quiet man with bushy hair who goes about his business in a parallel universe with a skewed relationship to our own reality. The streets in Henry's neighborhood are empty and dark, but you can hear dogs barking in the distance and you feel like something unpleasant might be lurking around every corner. Somewhere out of sight, enormous boilers and blast furnaces are constantly churning, belching soot into the sky and pushing tendrils of steam into cramped one-room apartments. It's a lonely, menacing place, modeled in part from Lynch's memories of his time living in a rough neighborhood in Philadelphia. Eventually, Henry finds that his girlfriend Mary has given birth to...what, exactly, is never clear. "They're still not sure it is a baby!" she cries at one point on the soundtrack. Lynch and Splet render this setting with a varied mix of creaks, rumbles, hisses, and roars. Theirs is a place of polluting industry, clacking trains, dangerous electrical whirrs, and a screaming infant from the unknown.
Purely as a listening experience, you could file Eraserhead next to the ice cold drift of Thomas Köner's Permafrost, the tape-heavy pieces found on the first Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, the subliminal voice and sound-effect rumble of Robert Ashely's Automatic Writing, and the fuzzed-out radio transmissions of Music for Nitrous Oxide-era Stars of the Lid. Throbbing Gristle's "Hamburger Lady" channels a comparable nightmare, the swampiest and most decayed bits of Brian Eno's On Land might be found somewhere inside this world, and you could imagine the metallic drones of Nurse With Wound's Soliloquy for Lilith leaking out of Henry's floorboards. Eraserhead is dark ambient, in other words, a few years before that term had come into wide use. And despite its origins as the sound component of a film, it works terrifically well as music, provided your definition extends to the artists mentioned above. You'll hear some funny dialog about things like "man-made chickens" here and there, delivered in that distinctively Lynchian sing-songy deadpan. But the album as a whole is something you sink into, a shadowy vision of a frightening place.
Beyond the machines and industry, two more traditionally musical elements are found on the album. One recurring motif is the use of solo organ pieces from the 1930s played by Harlem jazz legend Fats Waller. The creaking organ tones, played by a man from years ago on a wheezing mechanical device, form a natural complement to the sound effects; they cycle in and out, bringing to mind a cracked memory of another time or place that never quite comes into the focus. And then there is the song "In Heaven", sung in the movie by a tiny woman with disfiguring acne who lives in Henry's radiator and serves for him as a source of warmth and comfort. "In Heaven" developed a life of its own outside of Eraserhead, most famously in the indie rock world when it was covered first by the Pixies and then, later, when incorporated into Modest Mouse's single "Workin' on Leavin' the Livin'".
"In Heaven" still fascinates because of its ambiguity. It's both deeply creepy and somehow a little bit uplifting, never quite sure if it's celebrating life or death. On this vinyl reissue from Sacred Bones, it's also included as a 7", the flip side of which is an instrumental piece in a similar style laid out by "In Heaven"'s composer, Peter Ivers. Taken all together, this beautifully packaged reissue is a thorough and complete presentation of Lynch and Splet's soundworld, complete with photos and stills from the film set on heavy card stock. It takes something moving and important that is in danger of being lost and bring it to a new audience, which is exactly what a reissue should do. And there's something reassuring about knowing that Lynch's "haunting dream of dark and disturbing things" lives on, finding people willing to put it on the turntable and make their own pictures.


The Seattle duo Bell Witch aims for (and often achieves) symphonic grandeur on Four Phantoms, an album of very heavy metal that celebrates life by staring straight at death.

Four Phantoms

The colossal pieces on Four Phantoms, the second album from Seattle duo Bell Witch, aren’t merely about death. Instead, they detail painful, violent ends inflicted by nature’s four forces—fire, earth, water, and wind—that the dead are forced to endure for eternity. There’s a suffocation, where the victim breaks teeth to keep breathing, and an immolation, where the narrator becomes "the blooming ash." One ghost falls into an endless canyon forever, while another buried at sea swims in salt water and skin. A case-by-case survey of horrible ways to go, Four Phantoms is appropriately and hyperbolically morose for the subgenre known as "funeral doom." But Bell Witch answers the extreme, existential despondency of these motifs with absolutely triumphant songs, built with heroic riffs and headstrong rhythms. Four Phantoms, then, is like second-line funeral doom—very heavy metal that celebrates life by staring straight at death.
Though Bell Witch were good from the start of their 2012 debut Longing, bassist Dylan Desmond and drummer Adrian Guerra are great on Four Phantoms because they’ve recognized and addressed their own faults. Longing, a six-song set that also examined mortality, was promising but unfocused, moving between lethargic 20-minute slogs and mid-tempo marches, horror-sample instrumentals and tone-obsessed drifts. Desmond plays a six-string bass, meaning he’s able to elicit piercing, guitar-like leads and subdural lines from one instrument. On Longing, the capability felt like a compositional toy he was still learning to wield.
But the pair refined their approach for Four Phantoms, eliminating extraneous elements and moving fluidly between what remains. Recorded by resurgent metal impresario Billy Anderson, this hour is sharper, louder and brighter than the last one. Too often with doom or stoner metal, the mantra "everything louder than everything else" leads to self-defeat, where members crowd each other out of the mix and reduce the music’s overall impact. (See, for instance, Windhand’s Soma.) Due in part to the band’s slim configuration, Four Phantoms feels sculpted, each part perfectly visible and framed.
The result is a high-tension, high-contrast mix of ideas and idioms, where brutal doom and filmic post-rock share space with melodies worthy of glam-rock and manipulated textures similar to experimental acts like Locrian. These four pieces collectively suggest that metal is an incremental form: Substantial differences in how something sounds and in what niche it lands stem from subtle decisions about how fast, long or loud certain parts are played. Bits of opener "Suffocation, A Burial" sound like thrash metal drugged to stoner speed. "Judgment, in Fire" suggests Sunn O))) exploring liturgical music and adding a percussive pulse.
This hybridized scheme gives Bell Witch an uncanny appreciation of momentum. The type of low-and-slow music Bell Witch makes often requires a real commitment from the listener, a certain patience with songs that creep through half-hour spans to reach their high-volume peaks. But even during the pair of Four Phantoms numbers that break the 22-minute mark, Bell Witch don’t stall. Sure, they lock into loud, sustained roars, as with the start of "Judgment: In Air", and lurk in muted valleys, as when Desmond takes a glacially paced bass solo during "Suffocation, A Burial". But they emerge from that last reverie with a  jolt so loud it’s terrifying, especially if you’ve fallen for the bass’s soporific sway. As the song marches toward its end, Guerra doubles and triples his steady beat, and Desmond plays a melody so radiant it seems like an isolated Van Halen lead. Like the album itself, the moment aims for (and often achieves) symphonic grandeur, both in scope and sound.
Bell Witch's commitment to progress is most obvious on "Suffocation, A Drowning", the longest song of their career and their best use of a guest musician to date. Both Guerra and Desmond sing, but their ranges are typically limited to ghoulish incantations, monstrous growls and terrified screams. So they recruited a real vocalist—Erik Moggridge, who sings solo and plays acoustic guitar as Aerial Ruin—to create what’s essentially a long-form power ballad. It arches and lifts, arriving at a hook so intoxicating you can envision lighters being raised. As Moggridge croons about "the strangling beast" of the ocean around him, Bell Witch turns funeral doom and its moribund focus into a beautiful hymn meant for the living.


Rico Nasty’s latest project skews wider and weirder, even for her. Combining patented rage raps and tender singing, its variety is overwhelming in every sense of the word.

Las Ruinas

Rico Nasty’s earliest and most recognizable songs, like the 2018 loosie “Smack a Bitch,” exist in the space between a hip-hop tribute to Lisa Frank and the mosh pit at a local dive’s pop-punk night. Genre-blending is a part of her musical DNA. Though Rico’s breakout project Nasty would be defined by the cathartic crunch of songs like “Bitch I’m Nasty,” its most interesting legacy has been as a foundation, the first time Rico’s influences—rap, nu metal, pop-punk, hyperpop—clashed and mutated against each other. She’s not the first artist to collapse these binaries, but her raw skill and enthusiasm make her output staggering. The thumping hardcore of Nasty’s “Trust Issues,” the murky boom bap of “Relative” from 2019’s Anger Management, and the jagged, sugary melodies of “IPHONE” from 2020’s Nightmare Vacation were all concocted by the same person.
At the outset, Rico compartmentalized her interests into personae like the softer, melodic Tacobella and the more aggressive Trap Lavigne. But after the success of Nasty, the alter egos became less useful as Rico began to embrace newfound stardom: Her musical and emotional range are elastic no matter what name she’s using. Even by Rico’s own grand standards, Las Ruinas—which she’s gone out of her way to label a “mixtape” and not an album—stretches her talents to their breaking point. Half the fun of a Rico Nasty project is seeing what spaces she’ll squeeze her vocals into next, and Las Ruinas skews wider and weirder than before. Its variety is overwhelming in every sense of the word.
Whatever you may think of her last few projects, particularly her last proper album Nightmare Vacation, her ability to host so many sounds without them dissolving into a mess is impressive. The first half of Las Ruinas continues to pit her patented rage raps against the wildest beats she can find. On “Vaderz,” Rico and guest Bktherula thrash their way through Ben10k, Danes Blood, and Dirty Dave’s 8-bit siren and craterous drums. Rico devours the scenery on standout track “Gotsta Get Paid,” which reunites her with Dylan Brady of 100 gecs. The duo, along with producers 18YOMAN and MXXWLL, use slinky drums and twangy synths—including a classic “dwoink” sound effect—to bridge the gap between rap bravado and Scooby-Doo: “Ain’t in my lane, what the fuck is you drivin’ for?/Pedal to the floor, they hatin’ because they bored.”
These slight deviations and tweaks to Rico’s formula are predictably tight, but the bolder experiments are a mixed bag. Las Ruinas is effectively split into two halves—the first one harsher, the second one softer—that have so little to do with each other sonically and thematically, they almost feel like separate EPs smashed together at the last minute. Right after her solid but unnecessary remix of electronic producer Fred again..’s “Jungle,” Las Ruinas’ tone shifts drastically. The put-downs and shit talk on the first half of the project disappear, giving way to a doomed love story told through bouts of electro-pop and grungy rap-rock that are raw at their best (“Into the Dark”) and fluffy and indistinct at their worst (“Focus on Me”). But “Easy” and closing track “Chicken Nugget,” in particular, strip away the bells and whistles to create two of the most tender moments in Rico’s catalog. Neither song features any rapping; instead, they lean on Rico’s soft singing voice for a lament about a past relationship with a manipulative partner and a touching ode to her 7-year-old son Cameron, respectively. They’re measured, pensive, and achingly intimate—firsts for any Rico Nasty song.
Las Ruinas’ best songs are sincere and heartfelt, regardless of genre, but it’s also the most unwieldy project of Rico’s career to date. The magnetic pull that held together Rico’s previous work feels less powerful. Transitions between songs can be stilted and awkward—the saccharine bubbliness of “Phuckin Lady” doesn’t flow into the metallic thump of “One on 5” and the “Jungle” remix has no business being the divider between the project’s two halves. Jumbled presentation can dull the impact of even the most sincere music, and Rico’s skill and imagination can’t save songs like “Black Punk” and “Dance Scream” from the filler bin. But beneath the technicolor pileup lies some of Rico’s most vicious (“Vaderz,” “Gotsta Get Paid”) and most sensitive (“Skullflower,” “Easy”) material yet. With a little finesse and better sequencing, it could’ve been greater than the sum of its parts.


Mess is the first Liars album that could be given a “dance-” hyphenate since their debut; it’s physical, bodymoving music for people who don’t have much interest in proper dance music.

Mess

Liars have been one of the 21st century’s most confounding and consistent bands because they make two kinds of albums: ones where they don’t know what they’re doing, and ones where they’ve figured it out. Since arriving in 2001 as inside operatives bent on dance-punk’s destruction, their career has alternated bizarre and divisive left turns with records that vindicated their artistic vision. This risk/reward dynamic is even more pronounced with the release of their seventh album, Mess. The sleek contours of 2012’s WIXIW betrayed Liars’ self-admission that they were learning how to use computers and sequencers on the fly, downplaying the extreme shift from the caveman garage rock and scabrous art-punk of Liars and Sisterworld. And now Mess feels like Liars getting their driver’s license after fumbling with a learner’s permit—you can have a lot more fun with this machinery once you stop worrying about totaling the thing.
If you didn’t care for WIXIW’s muted introspection, Mess is a welcome counterpoint; the dance-punk throwback “Brats” was tacked onto WIXIW seemingly as a random addendum, but Liars have a way of using late-album cuts as foreshadowing. And in fact Mess is the first Liars album that could be given a “dance-” hyphenate since their debut. As with They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, it’s physical, bodymoving music for people who don’t have much interest in proper dance music. A pitch-shifted Angus Andrew begins Mess demanding to be depantsed (as well as “eat my socks”), and after the pummeling beat of “Mask Maker” drops, it could be heard as an alternate history, one in which Liars continued on the path of electroclash subversives.
Liars have never been futurists, and a curious byproduct of their electronic shift is how it’s made them strangely retro. Their previous record’s clicks and whirs hearkened back to early 2000s IDM and lap-pop such as the Notwist and Dntel, where the first half of Mess takes its cues from the festival-EDM that was thoroughly trendpieced around the time of WIXIW—Hoovering bass, crowd-pleasing drops, air raid synth lines. Mess bangs from the start, albeit in a way that tends to flatten out the dynamics, as the introductory duo of “Mask Masker” and “Vox Tuned D.E.D.” could be mistaken for an eight-minute suite, a fairly predictable means of expressing their past physicality in an electronic setting. The relatively quieter moments are where Liars show their newfound confidence and instrumental facility: an organ break reminiscent of OutKast’s “Ghettomusick” pierces through “Pro Anti Anti”, while the frazzled, free-time “Can’t Hear Well” hints towards the second half’s turn towards more abstract composition.
Mess turns out to be an admirably diverse album that foregrounds the big-beat material: “Darkslide” and “Boyzone” find Liars imposing their will on electronic music rather than the other way around, the tribal rhythms and perverted vocals of Drum’s Not Dead updated with fancier software. The closers “Perpetual Village” and “Left Speaker Blown” actually revisit the unsettling atmosphere of They Were Wrong So We Drowned and contain some of Andrew’s most evocative lyrics if you can manage to suss them out. But at a combined 16 minutes of slow-moving murk and half-illegible, half-inaudible vocals, they’re more exciting as clues towards speculating Liars’ next move than they are in the present moment.
Which at least cuts against the narrative that Mess is a fully-realized mission statement; Andrew confessed to being riddled with spiritual and artistic doubt throughout WIXIW, but Mess is far more dilettantish and can register as being every bit as cynical as the murderous, anti-Los Angeles screed Sisterworld. At points, Andrew confesses “I am old/ Endless monotony dulls all alternatives/ Life is long, way too long” and “I heard the wild world is wicked/ And the modern one is out for blood.”
Seven albums in, the respectable qualities of Liars’ music have been well-documented, but it’s worth asking: do they make moving, ingratiating music or simply admirable art? Does anything on Mess have the capacity to inspire emotional investment?  Does any of it stick with you? Or, more importantly, where is the Liars-ness in Mess? Mostly, it comes from Andrew’s voice, still intimidating in its lowest registers and frightening when given to wraith-like moans; we get both modes during obvious highlight “Mess On a Mission”.  But it’s been 10 years since Liars were notoriously and short-sightedly called “unlistenable” by major publications. In 2014, Mess might be called "challenging" out of habit, but is anything here capable of scaring off the squares?
In fact, Mess can sound pretty tame compared to electronic acts which can be linked to their ultra-percussive, post-punk aesthetics such as Factory Floor or Fuck Buttons. As enjoyable as it can be, Mess is a centrist record from a band without a lot of centrist strengths and appreciating it can feel like a symbolic gesture: it’s easy to support a band who’s achieved their level of success while making conceivably challenging music. In other words, it’s easy to admire because Liars are easy to admire.


With big hooks and breathless romance galore, Carly’s leftovers from last year’s Dedicated show off her range, even when the songs start to lose their spark.

Dedicated Side B

The Hulu television series Normal People, which follows a tenuous love affair between two academically bright but emotionally obtuse students, has everything your sophisticated millennial could want. Based on a Sally Rooney novel of the same name, the sexy Irish drama serves you wispy bangs, small boob representation, and—if you squint!—Marxist undertones. But it also offers a soft and stunning exploration of desire, the kind of intimacy that strips you of pretense, leaving you vulnerable to the world. The show features music of varying resonance: Selena Gomez’s too-precious “Rare” soundtracks a party scene when the doe-eyed ingenue meets a sadist, and Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek”—hallowed season finale material—is sacrilegiously wedged into the second episode. But midway through the series is a perfect alignment of song and scene. The morning after sleeping together, two friends linger in the kitchen. Everything is new, provisional: their conversation is suffused with longing. Wafting in the background is Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Too Much,” about the tingly uncertainty of liking someone: “Is this too, is this too/Is this too much?”
This too much-ness, the spilling over boundaries of acceptable displays of emotion, undergirds much of Carly Rae Jepsen’s breathless music. Her songs brush against a scary reality. You may insist on your independence, your detachment, your self-conscious cool, but one day you will be unraveled by someone: their look, their memory, their touch. In Carly Rae Jepsen’s songs, there is always a “you” pressing against the “I,” a slippery object of yearning that colors its subject. Or as she sings on her last album Dedicated, “I think I’m coming alive with you.”
A year after Dedicated’s release, Jepsen has surprise-dropped a collection of outtakes from the album, just as she did for 2015’s Emotion. Side B arrives at the perfect time. For many, quarantine has stalled romantic intrigue; without someone to pine over, our cramped, dull existence seems even more confining. Whereas Dedicated started out low-key, its counterpart immediately explodes with feeling: ’80s-inspired opening track “This Love Isn’t Crazy” pairs a volcanic chorus with pleading “baby/crazy/save me” rhymes. It’s a little too conventionally CRJ, but it’s still a joyful reprieve, like a fizzy drink after some 9-5 drudgery. As Jepsen tells it, “I wanted to flip the switch and just be like, ‘Welcome to love, everyone! We’re going to have a party! Stop cleaning your house!’”
Side B demonstrates her range, teasing a few different lanes from the original’s “chill disco.” She originally wrote 200-something songs for Dedicated, and had such difficulty whittling it down that she floated the idea of a 50-track deluxe edition. With its tinsel synths and watery marimba, “Now I Don’t Hate California After All” sounds like Christmas on the beach; “Window” is buttery funk-pop that gestures toward her debut, Tug of War. Her lyrics venture away from shy flirtation, hinting at bickering, cruelty, and ambivalence. “I’m at war with myself,” Jepsen admits on the hazy, wistful “Comeback.”
Some songs, meanwhile, are unapologetically hot. The feathery, mid-tempo “Felt This Way” shows Jepsen obsessing over a lover’s touch; “Stay Away” is the same song after a shot of vodka. The double-hitter is a peek into Jepsen’s songwriting process, revealing how the same text can be manipulated in different but equally compelling directions. “Both our hands speak for us and complicate it,” she sings. “How can I stay away?” Equally sexy but weirder is “Fake Mona Lisa,” which recalls the reckless fun of Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night.” For a brief moment, Jepsen’s lover is hypnotized by the lipstick-smudged woman in the DaVinci print, who becomes Jepsen’s sexual competition. Then he comes to his senses, and undresses her.
A few years ago, Carly Rae Jepsen proclaimed to “really really really really really really like you.” She thrived in this gap, between the intensity of the “really really”-s and the hesitation of the “like.”  When she tries to bridge the divide on “Let’s Sort the Whole Thing Out,” it’s a little jarring. The song is about feeling insecure in a new relationship, only for your partner to ardently commit to you out of the blue. Its twinkly, vacant Mattel doll sheen makes his chirped “I love you” seem implausible, perfunctory—simultaneously too much and not enough. (It doesn’t help that it sounds like the Crazy Ex-Girlfriend theme song “Meet Rebecca!”) “Let’s Sort The Whole Thing Out” is one of a few deflating moments for an otherwise exhilarating artist; another is “Heartbeat,” a total snooze of a prom song. While Jepsen makes B-sides markedly better than other artists’ A-sides, she can still falter; some points feel like kissing a crush for the first time and missing the spark.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Auckland bedroom pop artist Amelia Murray is the latest signee to Flying Nun. She honors her label’s history of making effortless pop songs that are far less effortless than people think.

Morningside

Amelia Murray, the 24-year-old Auckland musician who records as Fazerdaze, is the latest signee to Flying Nun Records. On her debut LP, Morningside, it’s instantly clear that she is not beholden to the label’s signature style of Velvets-indebted guitar pop known as the “Dunedin sound.” Her potent indie pop of goes for a feeling of clarity instead.
Murray draws from a relatively limited pallet—guitars, drums, the occasional keyboard line—but Morningside is notably more confident than anything on her debut EP from three years ago. She moves through styles gracefully, from straight-ahead fuzz guitar riffs to more subdued collages of sound. Opener “Last to Sleep” begins with just Murray’s airy vocals and steady strums; the song steadily grows, adding in shuffling percussion and synth beeps as it zips by. The chipper lead single “Lucky Girl” amps up, layer by layer, from its acoustic intro to a sticky chorus (“I know I’m a lucky girl”), as if Murray is repeating the sentiment to make herself believe it. Closer “Bedroom Talks” would feel at home on the next Orchid Tapes compilation with its bubble-pop electronic drums, cricket chirps, and Murray’s sweet vocals dripping in reverb. It is a web of a song that sounds made to be played at dusk.
Behind all the bright melodies and earworms, Murray is frequently writing about worry. Low-level relationship anxiety is ingrained in the makeup of practically every song. “And I’m trying not to try so hard for you,” Murray sings over the melancholy of “Shoulders,” a song that builds several times over its brief three minutes and refuses ever let go of its tension. Murray may at times be a little too reliant on reverb as a default texture, evoking the nostalgic warmth of a summertime day. But she knows when to crank up the distortion for a good yelp of catharsis, as on “Misread” or the especially explosive “Friends.”
Morningside is what happens when a bedroom pop record gets too big for just a single room, but all the while never loses its intimacy. Whatever the destination, it’s unlikely Murrary is concerned. She sounds concentrated on the one thing every great Flying Nun band aims for: making effortless pop songs that are far less effortless than people think.


On their sophomore album Soft Opening, Seattle indie rockers Posse imbue their no-frills, rumpled indie rock with a discernible point of view and more importantly, a personality.

Soft Opening

Posse does not have some kind of marvelous origin story, there is no blood oath or volatile, undeniable chemistry. The songwriting duo of Paul Wittmann-Todd and Sacha Maxim met during a show at a Seattle lesbian bar and decided to collaborate because the former "didn't have a lot of other options." On their sophomore album Soft Opening, Wittmann-Todd and Maxim exhibit that same kind of non-committal camaraderie, as their vocals do not harmonize or intertwine or do battle; most of the time, they exchange one-sided conversations, acknowledging each other and going about their business. Every instrument is given enough space to do whatever it wants as long as it cleans up after itself. It's the musical equivalent of roommates who randomly linked up on Craigslist and totally worked things out. Whatever qualities this might suggest in Posse as people lend a lived-in bumminess to Soft Opening, imbuing its no-frills, rumpled indie rock with a discernible point of view and more importantly, a personality.
That’s important, because this is really no-frills indie rock. The most notable studio tricks Posse employ are a fuzz pedal, a tambourine, and the occasional echo on Maxim’s vocals. Either Wittmann-Todd is playing an extremely avant-garde solo during a portion of “Jon” or they simply didn’t feel like overdubbing a flubbed take. On the up-tempo numbers, Posse recall a rainy day Real Estate, a less bookish Galaxie 500, or Yo La Tengo driven by a equivocal, platonic friendship. On slower-than-slowcore “Talk", they’re all but mesmerized by their own torpor, situated somewhere in between Pavement’s “Stop Breathing” and Built to Spill’s “Cleo” in terms of uncomfortably numb guitar heroism. Similar to those bands, Posse make music that is lo-fi without sounding cheap, purposeful minimalism that can sound strangely expansive: Maxim and Wittmann-Todd’s vocals are barely projected without being off-key, and the guitar leads have an effortless melodicism whenever they take over. Even if most of these songs could be strummed out from a beanbag chair, Posse always add a chord that fancies things up just enough.
Posse describe their sound as “delay pedals and 27 years of disappointment”, which may not be factually correct; you hear a lot more of the latter than the former, and the second line of opener “Interesting Thing No. 2” is “You turned 25, so many things you haven’t tried.” It’s theoretically sound all the same, since Soft Opening’s self-deprecation is a big part of its appeal. For all of its invocations of 80s and 90s A-listers, Soft Opening is an of-the-moment record in the way it aligns with the sort of sitcoms that dominate the viewing habits of people Posse’s age: the actors involved are presented as friends, yet they don’t really seem to like each other all that much.
In the case of Soft Opening, nearly every song is a subtly hilarious metacommentary on some sort of communication breakdown. Maxim sings, “I know you’re gonna talk through this and not care,” and you can easily visualize the shoulder shrug, the eye-rolling, the internal defeat she anticipates with this interaction. With every repetition, it cuts deeper and deeper as an insult: you are someone who simply can’t handle sitting in silence with their own feelings. A song later on “Shut Up”, a drunk and bored Wittmann-Todd fantasizes about a time when he’s going to work up the nerve to tell someone to shut their yap, even if it’s himself: “I’m gonna watch you go outside now/ And make a stupid face/ And shut up."
And yet, none of this venting comes off as mean-spirited. In fact, most of Soft Opening unwinds with the casual bonhomie of three post-work beers over darts; the deleterious effects are minimal compared to the necessary release and bonding. And hell, if Posse seem to have a strange enjoyment for each other’s company in spite of it all, well, it’s because the outside world doesn’t have that much more to offer. “Cassandra B.” relates a date between overeducated, underfunded Seattlites as they down too much vodka, go to an “intelligent rap” show (“A bald white guy/ With a mumu onstage”) and lie about reading Willa Cather books that were bought at college and promptly shelved. As with every dryly hysterical line on Soft Opening, there’s never any “pitchiness”; it’s never trying to be any more droll and absurd than life itself.
Despite the litany of disappointments, misunderstandings, and aimlessness befalling the narrators in these songs, Soft Opening is a record of oddly stoic presence. For one thing, the austere sonics and plainspoken lyrics ensure that nothing gets glossed overso it's a tough record to tune out. But also, Posse sound exactly like the band they want to be—you don’t sense any musical ambition unmet, any word misplaced. It’s a modest record done confidently, enough to end with a six-minute guitar workout based around the lyric that perfectly encapsulates Soft Opening’s comforting sadness, its satisfied misanthropy: “Don’t touch me/ I’m in my zone.”


Returning home to Humboldt after 20 years of roaming, Ben Chasny finds new connections between the modes—fingerpicked guitar, hushed folk, experimental noise—that have long crisscrossed his work.

Time Is Glass

As with all Greek myths, there are several contradictory versions of the story of Hephaestus, but in each one, he was exiled from paradise and forced to toil at his craft on the Earth before he could go home, transformed into an artisan god. I’m sure Ben Chasny wasn’t making such lofty claims when he gave Hephaestus’ name to a song on his new album, but the parallels are plain.
Back when Six Organs of Admittance was a few years old and still fairly divisible by Leo Kottke and the No-Neck Blues Band, Chasny left Northern California as a stern fingerstyle guitarist with penchants for Asian modes, lo-fi noise, and occult antiquity. After 20 years of roaming, he returned to Humboldt as a more tempered songwriter and a superior sound artist of capacious scope. Alone, he drew the ancient redwoods around him like a curtain and set to work on Time Is Glass. Rather than adding new experiments to those spread across his dozens of releases, he resumed them, using all the powers he’d banked, from the special vantage of where it all began.
“Hephaestus” is just the latest time that Chasny has set an instrumental on Greek marble—he memorably put Actaeon, who was turned into a stag and eaten by his dogs for glimpsing Artemis bathing, in the first song on Luminous Night—and it’s probably the best. On Time Is Glass, the song is a dramatic outlier: a musky, supple, soul-shivering drone piece that credibly evokes sparks peeling from a divinely immense anvil. But this is what passes for a back-to-basics Americana record in Chasny’s expandable world, and most of the songs sink deep acoustic roots before growing in gratifying ways, whether subtle or surprising.
The bookends, “The Mission” and “New Year’s Song,” lay out his songwriting materials in their sparest pieces—the room tone chirring like cicadas, your ear right up against the hole in the guitar, and a thin, sweet, slightly aloof voice floating down from somewhere above. Replicating them four or five more times with some atmospheric interludes would have made for a fine record. But Chasny has never been content with fine, and with his unusual blend of restlessness and focus, he keeps breaking new connecting paths between leafy, well-worn ways.
This exploration unfolds with intense patience, each song striking out a little further. An electric guitar glints like light through the clouds in “Slip Away” before “Theophany Song” reminds us exactly why Chasny was once so associated with Devendra Banhart, and then the forge heats up for a spectacular second half. “My Familiar” is a haunting dirge until an electric guitar appears, the muted riffs and sailing leads structured tightly as a proof. It continues the uncanny chimera of Steve Stevens and Bill Frisell solos that Chasny concocted on his last album, The Veiled Sea. “Summer’s Last Rays” seems like a pure technical showcase of fanning runs, leaps, and trills until an invasive species of reversed, gurgling effects starts tugging at the relentless figures, refuting their rigid account of linear time. The two and a half minutes of wistful acoustic sprays that open “Spinning in a River” set up a drop so good, so unguessable yet fitting, that I genuinely don’t want to spoil it.
Lyrically as well as musically, Chasny accretes meaning in thin layers of glaze. His words don’t look like much on the page but drench the music with emotional color. It would be unseemly for any one line to stand out too much; everything he makes is shaped to its purpose, without extra parts or redundant functions. After 25 years of Six Organs, you almost have to wonder what deal he made with the gods to keep him from either settling into a rut or taking ill-considered detours. Being so well established, he could easily spend a few years here and there just strolling through his richly timbered guitar playing. But he hasn’t. You still never know from one song what might appear on the next, or even where the song you’re listening to might go, and it keeps the music fresh even when it’s retreading hallowed ground.