The Ohio rapper’s new album sounds like a randomly generated playlist: tons of options, very little soul.

Pegasus

Trippie Redd still wants us to believe he can do it all. Since the start of his career, the Ohio rapper has embraced a passion for rap of every possible variety. He likes to glide on top of cloud-rap beats, kick rhymes over hard-nosed boom-bap drums, skip over trap hi-hats, and wail and thrash over crunchy emo-rap fusion and booming EDM drops. He doesn’t just wear multiple hats; he stacks them on top of each other like he’s trying to start a TikTok challenge. Trippie’s musical wanderlust sounds great on paper and works decently in short bursts, but in practice, and particularly on his latest album Pegasus, he sounds like a randomly generated playlist: tons of options, very little soul.
Trippie has cited Prince as an influence on the album, but many of these songs lack one of the core tenants of the Purple One’s music: personality. Passion isn’t a replacement for voice, and Trippie has burrowed further into the bad habits that plagued his bland 2019 sophomore album !. His musical ambitions are still scattershot, bouncing between different poles of rap from song to song, but he does attempt to branch out lyrically. Pegasus features more love songs than usual, a marked evolution for a rapper who once couldn’t be bothered to chase the feeling on the first “Love Scars” from 2014. It may be a change of pace, but it doesn’t boost his writing, which is as nondescript as a PornHub comment. “Transmission went out/Transitions, my house/New positions to try out,” he belts on “Love Scars 4.” Whether he’s talking about revealing new love (“Let It Out”) or navigating charged emotions (“Mood”), the songs feel anonymous, like any of his immediate peers could’ve written them.
The lack of a personal touch follows Trippie across Pegasus’ more amped-up sections as well. When he tries to inject more personality into a song, he often comes out sounding like someone else entirely. His flows and inflections on “The Nether” sound like Wiz Khalifa circa 2012. He channels Roddy Ricch’s nasal tone on the title track and Pi’erre Bourne’s bouncy melodies on “Good Morning.” When he does manage to stand out, his punchlines are jokes that wouldn’t pass muster in a middle-school cafeteria cipher. “Them hollows hit your chinny-chin, I’m like the Crimson Chin,” he growls on the hook for “Kid That Didd,” draining all momentum from the track.
Casting such a wide stylistic net yields a few successes across the album. Trippie settles into a nice rhythm on “No Honorable Mention,” outpacing guests Quavo and Lil Mosey with a fast-paced verse about flexing through trauma. The second entry in his “Oomp’s Revenge” series, dedicated to his late brother, provides a steady beat for Trippie to continue eulogizing his fallen soldier. Other highlights across Pegasus come from its many guests. There are scene-stealing features from PARTYNEXTDOOR, Young Thug, and Future. The most bizarre song on the album is “I Got You,” where Trippie swaps verses with Busta Rhymes while interpolating the chorus to Busta and Mariah Carey’s 2003 song “I Know What You Want.” Somehow, it’s also the most effortless collaboration on the entire project.
The scope of Pegasus — 26 songs stretched across 74 minutes, not including an extra six songs worth of “Spooky Sounds” — is staggering. It’s double the length of ! while retaining many of the same problems. Trippie would benefit from selecting a few of the several styles he insists on sampling on every project and focusing his energy instead of trying to be all things to all people. Until he’s ready to reel it in, he won’t be fit to claim mastery over any of them.

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The singer’s latest mixtape is soulful, summery, and without borders. Thanks in part to the production of Mixpak’s Dre Skull, Santigold commits to a careful interpolation of the dancehall sound.

Santigold: I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions

I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions

The Gold Fire Sessions summons the ghosts of dancehall hits. Dub goes well with glossy pop but the combination sometimes resembles the island-inspired singles of more mainstream acts like Major Lazer and PARTYNEXTDOOR. The du jour familiarity of the music might make it seem that Santigold is pulling from a convenience store of readymade cool instead of offering an authentic upgrade on her long-simmering indie signature. But from the start of her career, all the way back to her 2000s Philly-based punk band Stiffed, dancehall, grime, and ska influences have always gilded Santigold’s releases. Santigold doesn’t sound like her peers, her peers probably sound like Santigold.
I Don’t Want: The Gold Fire Sessions was produced primarily by DJ and Mixpak founder Dre Skull, along with a few unreleased songs conceived with Ricky Blaze and Diplo. The project finds her totally self-possessed and exuding a playful freedom that preserves the bubbly tone of its predecessor, 2016’s 99¢, but plays with the swagger of a top shotta; Santigold is unimpressed by big men with fat pockets who believe she might be bought on “Coo Coo Coo” and she dabbles in timely political commentary by “Crashing Your Party.” She relishes her freedom, owns her own lane, and is unafraid to challenge existing expectations about who she is and what she does.
Santigold trades in the occasional soundsystem flourish to commit to a careful, non-traditional interpolation of the dancehall sound. “Wha’ You Feel Like” is just breezy enough to take the hot weather house party scene by storm, borrowing from Sister Nancy’s time-honored "Bam Bam" riddim, while “A Perfect Life” throws back to the ’80s nostalgia of Brat Pack-era pop soundtracks, and “I Don’t Want” is a trap slow-drag driven by a pitchy pop vocal derived from the intersection of soul singer Deniece Williams’ upper register circa “Free” and the nasal performance of Bernard Wright on 1981 funk classic “Haboglabotribin.” All along, Santigold leans into vocal experimentation to expand upon her singular artistic footprint.
There are, however, moments when her Gold Fire Sessions performance comes across like borrowed clothes; the florid chords of “Don’t Blame Me” favor Tory Lanez and Ozuna’s “Pa Mì” while the melodic flow of “Wha’ You Feel Like” recalls Rihanna’s “Bitch Better Have My Money.”  Though endlessly fun throughout, Santi’s aesthetic visits the realm of Afro-Caribbean inspired pop typically dominated by the likes of Rihanna and Gwen Stefani, and occasionally riddled by controversy when major rap acts have borrowed from the riddim and patois of island culture to the point of caricature.
As if to preempt any comparison in mainstream pop—or perhaps to justify her own indifference to crashing the boards in search of megastar status—she utilizes the refrain of “I Don’t Want” to clarify the ethos behind her musical and stylistic ideals. No fast talkin’ millionaire, no regrets, no saying what she doesn’t mean:

Don’t want to be a fake
I don’t want to beg
I don’t want to be a waste
I don’t want to be a lie
It ain’t sincere if I hold it back

Her approach to a career in the music industry prioritizes cool and creative freedom as the more valuable commodities, above commercial success.
The Gold Fire Sessions combines Santigold’s musical past with a passion for spontaneous experimentation. It plays like a distillation of joy. “Crashing Your Party,” “A Perfect Life,” and the titular closing track dip into the sonic territory of Blondie, bhangra, and afrobeats to suggest that Santigold created The Gold Fire Sessions much like she created herself: without borders or rules or walls.


Nails make music for when you look at life and see little of value, for when you're feeling bitter and alone. On their latest, they make a little room for others to stare at the void with them.

You Will Never Be One of Us

Over the course of their seven years in action, Nails have dedicated themselves to exploring the isolating nature of existential malaise. They’ve called their two full length LPs Unsilent Death and Abandon All Life, and on those two records, the Oxnard, California trio have perfected their defiant approach to the yawning void. They preach fatalist atheism or enact brutal masochism while diving headfirst into hardcore's darkest corners (grindcore, powerviolence, and d-beat just to name a few), and that’s all in the course of just a minute or two. It's music for when you look at life and see little of value, for when you're feeling bitter and alone in the face of chaos. Vocalist Todd Jones made his intentions clear at the peak of the 2012’s “No Surrender”: “My goal/Cause you pain.”
To that end, You Will Never Be One of Us will live up to the expectations of anyone who’s experienced a Nails album before. Eight of the record’s ten tracks are under two minutes long, and each is built around monochromatic blasts of distortion, double kick drums, Jones’ paper-shredder growls, and depressing track titles to match (see: “Life Is a Death Sentence,” “Violence Is Forever”) . The high-speed anxiety of tracks like “Made to Make You Fail” are as volatile and propulsive as jetfuel. It’s as hard as ever to make out Jones’ lyrics, but producer Kurt Ballou (of Converge, who also produced the band’s other two efforts) has gotten better at shaping his guttural abstractions.  Even if it’s unclear exactly what he’s saying, the effect is crystal: he hurts and so will you.
Even in the record’s title, however, Nails have made it clear that their darkness is now just a little more complicated than the music they’ve made in the past. The video for the record’s title track opens with a host of friends (including Baroness’ John Baizley) uttering the ominous phrase, but it sounds natural regardless of who says it, as if anyone is capable of owning the sentiment as long as they’re willing to get in the right mindset. Though it’s a negative statement, defined in opposition, Jones has said in an interview that he intends it as “inclusive.” Each track on the record can be read as an invitation to join him in his unsettled meditations.
Knowing that you’re welcomed in, some of the differences between this record and those that preceded it become apparent. You Will Never Be One of Us feels less like a brick wall. This is most evident in the eight-minute closer “They Come Crawling Back,” which experiments with al sorts of unfamiliar sounds for Nails: There's frosty tremolo picking, bleak doom riffs, and siren-like leads before building into the sort of off-to-the-races hardcore they’re known for. It’s all of metal’s most downcast corners shoved together into a single eight minutes that fades slowly to nothingness. It’s a little something for anyone included in the “us” in the title, for everyone who’s ever found meaning in a flurry of fists in a mosh pit.


With his new band Pillorian, former Agalloch vocalist/guitarist John Haughm dives more heavily into his former group’s black and dark metal roots. Their furious first album is slightly underwhelming.

Obsidian Arc

Agalloch’s dissolution last year was a huge loss to bear, and only half of that has to do with how beloved the groundbreaking black metal group were. Vocalist/guitarist John Haughm was at the root of the breakup, something he’ll own up to: he wanted to tour more than the rest of the band, especially guitarist Don Anderson, who chose to focus on his academic career. Haughm irked fans by referring to himself as a “visionary,” not only committing the sin of Having an Ego (see: any time Kanye West makes headlines), but also marginalizing the contributions of his bandmates. Anderson was a key songwriter and brought much of the folk element to Agalloch. And Aesop Dekker, a powerhouse drummer who also plays key roles in VHÖL and Worm Ouroboros, crucially filled out their live sound.
To his credit, Haughm realized he had to break away from the Agalloch name and start anew. His latest group, Pillorian, strips away some of Agalloch’s neofolk influence and dives heavier into their black and dark metal roots. That he’s rebuilding is obvious throughout their debut Obsidian Arc. For a less experienced band, the album would be a promising starting point. For someone of Haughm’s caliber, it’s slightly underwhelming.
Pillorian’s strengths come from Agalloch’s familiar comforts—layered, sonorous riffs and tonal shifts as smooth as the guitars are heavy—delivered with more immediacy. “By the Light of a Black Sun” opens with the contrast of bright acoustic guitar and rolling metal waves that was a staple of 1999’s Pale Folklore and 2002’sThe Mantle. The allure reigns brief, before succumbing to Haughm’s torrents of fury, assisted by drummer Trevor Matthews and guitarist Stephen Parker. While there is another acoustic break towards the end of “Sun,” the song sets the tone for the rest of the album, specifically its reliance on more metallic drivers and moods. Like Agalloch, Pillorian still finds a balance between soft and loud closer to their more progressive rock influences—King Crimson and Genesis’ artier takes and Rush’s more hard-rock based brand—than post-rock. It’s a little more evident here, since Arc is Haughm’s most “metal” record thus far. Arc is far from breezy—no interludes, no folky passages—which clashes with Haughm’s evident urgency to get it out there. “The Sentient Arcanum” is the exception, drawing up on Haughm’s solo guitar ambient works, more Fennesz than Fleurety.
The rest of Arc is more furious, but no less majestic. “A Stygian Pyre” feels angrier than anything he’s ever done, an example of spark and quickness working in his favor. Haughm has a knack for elevating black metal’s fast-picked tremolos, revealing their symphonic potential. They are the fuel for Arc’s momentum, especially in “Sun” and “Pyre.” “Archanian Divinity” shows an affinity for Swedish black metal—especially Watain’s slower breaks and Dissection’s frosty, florlorn atmosphere and blackening of classic metal melodies. Haughm is a living Jon Nödtveidt without an accessory to murder charge, one who saw towering might in pushing the melodic pillars of Priest and Maiden to new heights.
While Agalloch existed in black metal’s progressive wing, they were still a metal band, and thus understood the magic of a rapturous solo. Those moments are rare in Arc, which is its main problem. Haughm knows how to give his songs heft, but he’s missing that lighter fluidity that complimented Agalloch’s nature themes. One exception is “Dark is the River of Man,” the closer, where those leads cut through the brooding atmosphere. It resembles Katatonia if they’d honed in on their death/doom sound, instead of turning into goth AOR. “Forged Iron Crucible” also features choral vocals that gleam at what made Agalloch great. Some more bursts of beauty like that would help.
Arc showcases Haughm’s singular metal voice and commanding presence, but it also reveals what a group effort Agalloch was. Haughm is floundering without the right partners; it proves why his “visionary” claim felt dubious. For any creative endeavor, a little self-assurance is necessary for survival. But no matter your skill, with a band, you can’t go it alone.


The Minneapolis duo's surprise hit album finds them less narcissistically emo than on previous efforts; rather than himself, Slug explores a procession of rust-belt standbys-- late-shift waitress, warehouse worker, deadbeat dad, homeless man, Tom Waits-- straight out of Studs Terkel.

Atmosphere: When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold

Drug addiction is bad, but drama addiction might be worse. That is the lesson of "Shoulda Known", Atmosphere's salvo at that stock character, the enabler. Taken from Minneapolis duo's fifth studio album, When Life Gives You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold, the song is more dramatic monologue than soliloquy-- one of those rare moments when Slug isn't plumbing the depths of his favorite subject, Slug. (Watching the video for "Shoulda Known", you might gather that Slug's new subject is soon-to-be-rescued American Apparel models.) Even the album's title-- judged against their college-rap classics Overcast and Lucy Ford-- hints that this outing may be less, well, narcissistically emo. Could Atmosphere's sad-clown era really be over?
Slug's lyrics, it turns out, are refreshingly mundane. When Life Gives You Lemons comes off not so much as a memoir of a bohemian artist, but as an old liberal's debut short-story collection. It isn't as dull as it sounds. The enabler is one of many resolutely unglamorous figures here, joining a procession of rust-belt standbys-- late-shift waitress, warehouse worker, deadbeat dad, homeless man, Tom Waits-- straight out of Studs Terkel. It's a noble idea, but it doesn't quite suit Slug's talents, which can veer, in typical backpacker fashion, toward the didactic and sentimental. Even so, it is a welcome leap for the MC to step out of his turbulent inner life and into the shoes of unsung-- at least, unrapped-- working-class men and women.
Producer Ant isn't retracing old paths either-- though he finds more success than his partner. He sets "Shoulda Known", for instance, above synthetic handclaps and a glum, coldly fuzzed bass that, together, seem like the embryo of a Justin Timberlake track, before the star's producers add the de rigueur layers and velocity. It's a far cry from the humbly retro collage of samples that grounded Ant's signature sound in the past-- and it works. In a marriage of live instrumentation and vintage analog synths, Ant finds a new way to build set pieces for Slug's tortured narratives. Take the soulfully cheesy, ersatz-Gnarls Barkley "You", for instance. Sticking to the second-person perspective, and unburdened by the gnawed-to-oblivion themes of drug abuse, "You" could have been a strong lead single. Everyone knows about the needle and the damage done; the question forgotten by too many songwriters, faithfully remembered here, is how ordinary folks make it through the day and make ends meet. Along the same lines, at the heart of "Dreamer" and "Guarantees" are families trying to get by in a broken, dead-end economy.
Obviously the trials of parenthood, not exactly a staple on DJ playlists, loom large in Slug's visions of 9-to-5 life. Lyrically, like the songs in between, those that bookend When Life Gives You Lemons are adventurous precisely because they're not adventurous, not spectacular, not sensational. "Like the Rest of Us" introduces the album with a sleepy melody from a child's music box. The song proceeds with a loop of smoky-nightclub pianos, a plaintive backdrop for Slug's smooth whispers about mothers-to-be and casual cocaine users. But a brighter, faster music box gives the album's closer, "In Her Music Box", a vibe that is wrier and angrier, perfect for a song about the R-rated nihilism streaming out of parents' car radios. The thread that runs from the first song to the last is a warm sympathy for working-class heroes and antiheroes-- especially the ones trying raise kids.
More energy and less uniformly drab scenery might have kept these well-intentioned stories from blurring into each other. One that stands apart is the mainstream-aimed "Guarantees", which treads dangerously close to mall-core. Too often the duo's slow, spartan approach just assures that songs like "Your Glasshouse" and "The Skinny" never leave the ground. And the middling tempos are only partly to blame. "Wild Wild Horses" leans on a metaphor that, let's face it, will never be pried from the Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers.
That said, When Life Gives You Lemons still helps lift Atmosphere further out of indie-rap territory. The shaggy-dog narratives of ordinary people buffeted by everyday tragedies are still rare outside the genre, despite rap's origins in exactly that hue of storytelling. So even when Slug gives in to his inner corniness, we let him off the hook. Granted, the production makes the naturalism pill easier to swallow. Open-minded fans will thank Ant, whose piano-driven works ("Yesterday", the opening two tracks) and darkly pretty "Painting" reveal a mind keeping up with his partner's, amplifying and deepening and, in his phrase, Quincy-Jonesing the record's vistas of blue-collar melancholia.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the duo’s first and only album, a cool and atmospheric bomb thrown into the waters of ’90s R&B.

Groove Theory

Bryce Wilson founded Groove Theory to resuscitate his creative drive. The Queens native had joined the hip-house group Mantronix as a teenager in the late ’80s to chase rap dreams, but the group’s dense, racing production left little room for the battle rapping and beatboxing he grew up on. A few years later, burned out after touring and recording two albums, Wilson quit the group. “I didn’t want to do dance,” he later told the music weekly Echoes. He did still want to make music, though, so he embraced producing, hoping it would take him where Mantronix hadn’t.

Wilson bought equipment and started messing around. He had no clue what he was doing, so he’d listen to records by soul maven Donny Hathaway and new jack swing architect Teddy Riley and reconstruct them. For a year, he fiddled around in his home studio, refining his beat-making bit by bit. He eventually became skilled enough to land a publishing deal, and Groove Theory soon followed, its name intended to invoke body and mind, impulse and intention.
The group’s eventual 1995 debut touched down during an R&B explosion years in the making. Mariah Carey, Toni Braxton, and Whitney Houston topped the charts with soaring, melismatic ballads. Yearning boy bands like Boyz II Men and Soul for Real sang wistfully of bended knees and candy-coated raindrops, while teen dynamos Brandy and Monica crooned about crushes and shit days. TLC crept; Jodeci feened and freeked; D’Angelo and Mary J. Blige repurposed ’70s soul for smoky fusionism and slick blues. The genre was so ascendant that even pop provocateur Madonna drew from its waters, roping in super producers Babyface, Dallas Austin, and Dave Hall for her uncharacteristically earnest sixth album.

Groove Theory peered into this vast, teeming ocean and shrugged. United in contrarianism, Wilson and eventual bandmate Amel Larrieux defined themselves against the dominant sounds of the day and set about toning down spectacle and emphasizing atmosphere. Their first and only album together, a moody, downtempo R&B record, posited Quiet Storm, a radio format that celebrated generations of Black music but was often hostile to rap attitudes and sounds, as R&B’s next frontier. Imagine Belly’s iconic title sequence—goons snaking through a throng of clubgoers, warm blue light encased in darkness, the icy melodies of Soul II Soul’s Caron Wheeler—and then escort all the occupants outside. That resulting husk of space is Groove Theory: vacated, lonely, but still communal, traces of others lingering in the air. By the end of the decade, the pair would split, Larrieux diving into jazz and soul, and Wilson producing for bigger acts like Toni Braxton and Mary J. Blige. But in the few years they were together, Groove Theory quietly resisted the rising tide.

Before Wilson met Larrieux, the groove was truly theoretical. As Wilson recruited singers for Groove Theory, even one from Mantronix, no one seemed to understand his spare, chilled-out production—especially his publisher, Rondor Music, who wanted him to make tracks that featured the explosive, adrenal rhythms of new jack swing. He found a kindred spirit in Larrieux, a songwriter, and assistant to Karen Durant, the music exec who signed Wilson. At 19, she already had a well-developed artistic identity after attending Philadelphia’s High School for Creative and Performing Arts and growing up in the West Village’s famed and eclectic Westbeth building, a rent-controlled apartment complex for artists. A lover of poetry, jazz, and Sade Adu with a subdued, sensual style, Larrieux clashed with producers who wanted her to be loud and sexy.
Wilson was different. At the recommendation of Durant, Larrieux wrote lyrics to one of Wilson’s beats and then went to his home studio to record a demo. They recorded it in his tiny bathroom, and Wilson was so mesmerized by their chemistry that he invited her into the group. She seemed to share his commitment to drawing outside the lines. “Her melodies and her notes were just like coming from a totally different angle,” he explained.

Larrieux accepted, and subsequent bathroom sessions produced the single “Tell Me,” their forthcoming hit and most canonized song. Built around a supple bassline, slick percussion, and soft keys, “Tell Me” blurs admission and confrontation. “I’ve been doing my own thing/Love has always had a way of having bad timing,” Larrieux sings, winding up for a question that’s actually a command. The track’s throbbing rhythms and cool mood embodied Wilson’s vision for the group, R&B as body high and head-trip.
Larrieux and Wilson had no attachment to the song though, because Larrieux had originally written the lyrics for another singer. Pawning off “Tell Me” to British group Rhythm N Bass, they left it behind as they recorded Groove Theory, returning to it at the butt end of the process just to pad out the album—and not at all expecting it to be a hit. In their view, “Tell Me” was too easy to make, “so straight up I’m embarrassed,” Larrieux said as their official version charted. It also wasn’t innovative enough.

Wilson hoped to, in his words, “kill new jack swing,” a goal borne out of his battle rap-bred competitive spirit and his frustration with music execs asking him to copy his muse Teddy Riley. And Larrieux wanted to dethrone sex as the default language and image of love. In a 1995 interview, she said, “I’m trying to make the impression on young women that you don’t have to be this sexy goddess—just have a love for music.” Groove Theory’s second single, “Keep Tryin’,” subtly broadcasts their anti-pop creed. “Your day is coming though it seems far/Things will be clear when you love who you are,” Larrieux sings with sweet conviction.

Groove Theory did avoid overt sexuality, but the omission was more a product of contrarianism than prudishness. “We have no desire to make ‘fast food music’ or sound like everyone else on the radio,” said Wilson in 1995. That deviant ethos drove them to seek themes other than heartbreak, desire, and romance. Although there’s plenty of all three on Groove Theory, songs like “Baby Luv,” a sweet ode to Larrieux’s daughter, and “Time Flies,” a track about the whiplash of growing up, explore passion without eros.

That divergent impulse extended to their influences, which ranged from soul and R&B classics to their contemporaries. Their lush cover of Todd Rundgren's “Hello It’s Me” is indebted to the Isley Brothers’ classic take on the song, radiating both longing and melancholy. The track doesn’t feel like a throwback though; compared to the Isley version, Groove Theory’s drums are snappier, the bassline meatier. And Wilson’s jazz-inflected production on “Time Flies” and “You’re Not the 1,” which was originally written for Mary J. Blige, channel the slick-but-street beats of Q-Tip and DJ Premier. Groove Theory detested the radio, but they loved Black music.
One significant difference between Wilson’s beats and those of rap producers is a complete rejection of samples. Although the rhythm elements on “Tell Me” sound eerily similar to the ’80s classic “All Night Long” by the Mary Jane Girls, the song, like every other track on Groove Theory, blends programmed beats and live instrumentation. Session musicians, especially producer Darryl Brown, who Larrieux dubs the third member of the group in the liner notes, are heard across the album. Brown’s bass and guitar touches on “Come Home” offset Wilson’s thundering drum programming, underscoring the hope in Larrieux’s downcast writing. “The street will never love you like I do/So leave that life behind and come home/Come home/Baby, come home,” she pleads.
Brown’s deft hands also guide “Ride” and “Hey U,” Groove Theory’s takes on G-funk. Larrieux’s coyness short-circuits the former. When she sings she wants to go for a ride with a lover, she truly means getting into an automobile and turning a key. There’s no adventure, escape, or innuendo to the statement, a far cry from Adina Howard unsubtly beckoning “Do you wanna ride?” or Dr. Dre rolling in the four with 16 switches. The slow-burning “Hey U” fares better at funking out, Larrieux’s aching melodies and breathy harmonies wafting over Wilson and Brown’s sauntering, hydraulic beat. “All that’s left to say is hey you/Hey you,” she coos, stretching the embarrassment of seeing a rejected ex in public into graceful resignation.
Although Groove Theory’s fusions never feel as audacious as the worldbuilding taking place on other syncretic mid-’90s R&B albums like Meshell Ndegeocello’s Plantation Lullabies, Sade’s Love Deluxe, D’Angelo’s Brown Sugar, and Janet Jackson’s janet., there’s no friction from all the blending. Groove Theory imagined R&B as a tentpole genre that could house jazz scats, funk grooves, and rap edge without conflict. It’s no accident that the terms most often used to describe the group are “cool” and “smooth.”

That lack of tension turns out to be a feature as much as a bug. Larrieux sometimes seems so intent on avoiding histrionics and melodrama that she undersells her most impassioned writing. “10 Minute High” and “Boy at the Window” center on a teenage girl addicted to a drug and a boy who idolizes a womanizing, absentee father, but the characters are so tragic that they don’t feel real. And Larrieux’s restrained vocals drain the songs of urgency. She clearly had Sade songs like “Tar Baby” and “Maureen” on her mind (and probably some Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye cuts, too), but she hadn’t yet learned to wield melancholy and darkness rather than just evoke them.

Groove Theory’s arch R&B didn’t take hold among listeners or their peers. “Tell Me” went gold, as did the album, but most modern mentions of the group are soaked in nostalgia, the music invoked as a portal to adolescence and young adulthood. “‘Tell me’ IMMEDIATELY takes you back to the 90s,” writer Panama Jackson wrote for The Root in 2018, a typical paean. The group’s musical legacy is also scant. “Tell Me” has been sampled by Sadat X, G-Unit, and Wale, and Solange, Hikaru Utada, and Kelela have cited Larrieux as an influence, but Groove Theory ended up being a marginal record in a decade where all strains of R&B reigned supreme. A faint line can be drawn from Groove Theory’s hushed sensuality and hard beats to Little Dragon, the xx, and R&B duos like Denitia and Sene and Lion Babe, but it would be imposed rather than traced.

That small footprint is in part a product of the group essentially breaking up when Larrieux left over creative differences and launched her idiosyncratic solo career. Wilson later recorded a second Groove Theory album with singer Makeda Davis that reimagined the group as radio-friendly, but that refurb—which was shelved and later leaked—only underscores the charms of the original lineup. That sequence of events and occasional reunion concerts have prompted interviewers to regularly ask Larrieux and Wilson about the possibility of a true Groove Theory sequel, a question both artists have answered enthusiastically. But it’s probably more fitting that an album designed to bypass radio and commerce lives on in memories, unmoored from the music industry and canons but appended to bodies that, during some distant commute or club night or first kiss, felt, and still feel, the groove.


The instrumental duo of guitarist Patrick McDermott and pedal steel player Barry Walker meld country-folk composition with ambient sonics, creating a languid and colorful world.

Roped In

One joy of ambient music: the space it gives a listener to just be. Departing from prescriptivist emotional cues and binary thought, the genre rewards patience without demanding a verdict. A country-indebted subgenre has emerged within that universe thanks to the pedal steel guitar, a notoriously fussy and expensive instrument that delivers heavenly tones for all the trouble it demands, as suited for conjuring mystical desert landscapes as it is for adding elasticity to country classics. Following leads from Susan Alcorn and Daniel Lanois, acts like SUSS, Chuck Johnson, Mute Duo, and now North Americans have all recently gamboled in that realm. The project began as a vehicle for Los Angeles-based acoustic guitarist Patrick McDermott, who is joined by Portland pedal steel player Barry Walker on Roped In, a rich and languid addition to the country-ambient canon.
Roped In bears some of the hazy float of Walker’s 2018 album, Diaspora Urkontinent, but a softer, more melodic focus sets it apart from both Walker’s more free-ranging solo work and McDermott’s earlier material. On Going Steady, the previous North Americans album, the guitarist occasionally tucked his fingerpicking under sheets of fuzz, but he allows himself more breathing room here, drawing out melodies between Walker’s resonant curls. “Good Doer” is the album’s closest thing to a downer, with an anxious guitar line and fuzzy pedal steel, but even it can’t sour the album’s sanguine mood. Whatever you need to feel, Roped In gives you space to feel it.
The album’s nine pieces are all fairly short, none of them lasting for more than four and a half minutes. Rather than prioritizing complete sensory immersion, Roped In focuses on the tension of form and formlessness between the acoustic and pedal steel guitars, emphasizing the former’s agility and the latter’s unbound contours. On “Rivers That You Cannot See,” Walker curves sustained notes over McDermott’s short cycles of strumming, then layers his own picking into a dense peak. The pair slow to a molasses-like slide on “Run Down,” with low reverb forming a droning foundation to their interplay. They’re at their strongest with “American Dipper,” where their tumbling instrumental lines become almost inextricable.
While Walker and McDermott make a capable team, guest appearances from guitarist William Tyler and harpist Mary Lattimore bring more nuance to their efforts. Tyler’s contributions bookend the record—opener “Memory of Lunch,” plus the album’s final two tracks—and his own lithe fingerpicking style is well-matched to McDermott’s without upstaging it. Meanwhile, “Run Down” and “Furniture in the Valley” show Lattimore’s knack for bringing extra sparkle to everything she touches.
The soft edges of Roped In make it both a sublime record in its own right as well as a pleasant, inviting portal into a wider world of simpatico artists. The album feels like the aural equivalent of gazing into a massive and well-appointed aquarium, a vessel for color and movement that quietly soothes as it shuttles along.

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Carter Tanton has played with artists like Lower Dens, Twin Shadow, and Marissa Nadler. For his latest solo record, he transforms himself into a Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter, building a record around a single theme: the slow destruction of a relationship.

Jettison The Valley

Carter Tanton is a tough guy to pin down. Since 2005, he’s fronted hyped rock bands (the sadly defunct Tulsa), released solo records that jumped wildly from genre to genre, and collaborated with numerous top-tier indie acts, including Lower Dens, Twin Shadow, and Marissa Nadler. He's a hard worker with serious chops—as a guitarist, a vocalist, and a producer—but his career’s volatility has tended to keep these talents on the sidelines.
Jettison the Valley marks a fresh start for the Baltimore native, an attempt to reintroduce Tanton as a thoughtfully earnest singer-songwriter. (Tanton considers Jettison to be his first proper solo album even though it’s the third he’s released under his own name.) His last effort, 2011’s admirable-if-uneven Free Clouds, flirted with synth-heavy electronica, country, shoegaze and Paul Westerberg-worshipping indie rock—all recorded under a lo-fi haze. On Jettison, Tanton’s work coheres into a single musical vision—lush Laurel Canyon folk—and a single theme: the slow destruction of a relationship.
A bad breakup can be a crutch for a songwriter who isn’t sure of his abilities, a source of lazy metaphors and cheap emotion. But Tanton handles the story (Carter and his British girlfriend move to England, where they live in a caravan outside Bristol and later in a tiny attic apartment in Oxford, before calling it quits) with nuance and compassion. Tanton wrote the entire record in Britain while the relationship disintegrated, and the sorry tale serves as a much-needed counterpoint to the record’s florid, over-bright production.
Jettison’s excellent first three tracks set the tone: elegant fingerpicked guitar, pedal steel, thick harmonies, and supple, kick-heavy percussion reminiscent of Neil Young’s Harvest—a vision of sun-dappled California as seen through rain-drenched British pub windows. On the gorgeous opener, "Twenty-Nine Palms," Tanton finds himself standing in the California desert with his mind on a woman (possibly across the Atlantic, it’s not entirely clear) "who took me rather far out of view." While on the next track, "Fresh Faced Claire," the perspective flips: Now Tanton’s stuck in "the old empire" living in a "halfway home for the breaking down," his relationship slowly collapsing as he longs to return to the sunny West Coast. This dichotomy—California vs. England, sunlight vs. clouds, movement vs. stasis—remains in tension throughout Jettison, lending weight and a sense of drama to an otherwise rather straightforward collection of songs.
Beck’s Sea Change—a shining example of the hoary old breakup record if there ever was one—would be the obvious musical touchstone here, if it wasn’t for Tanton’s emotive, breathy, very un-Beck-like tenor. It’s an undeniably beautiful thing, and Tanton has never sounded more self-assured, particularly on the languid closer "Diamonds in the Mine" and on "Through the Garden Gates" and "Twenty-Nine Palms," both of which feature a welcome vocal assist from Sharon Van Etten. But Tanton’s voice is strong medicine: All that sweetness can turn cloying when the arrangements and reverb-heavy production are just as syrupy, as they are on the brooding Smiths-tribute "Poison in the Dart."
All of which leaves Tanton’s fluidly inventive guitar playing as the record’s most enduring pleasure. British folkies like Richard Thompson and Michael Chapman are lodestars, as is, oddly enough, James Taylor, whose mannered melodicism shows up on "The Long Goodbye." There are surprises too: The rambling title track (starring Marissa Nadler on lead vocals) stops abruptly just before the four-minute mark before embarking on an extended instrumental coda that builds to a hot rash of dueling 6- and 12-string guitars.
For his first major statement as a solo artist, Tanton could have made an entire record of jagged indie rock (see Free Clouds’ "Horrorscope"), woozy shoegaze (see Free Clouds’ "Fake Pretend"), or Day-Glo electronica (see anything from his recent synth project Luxury Liners). Instead, he made a fairly conventional country-folk record about a breakup.  And yet there is great satisfaction in witnessing a creatively manic artist like Carter Tanton finally settle in to himself. On Jettison, Tanton quietly sits down, picks up his guitar, and, without fuss or self-importance, transforms himself into a singer-songwriter. Surely that is a statement worth making.


The Brooklyn artist’s debut is 20 minutes of chaotic, passionate, electronic rage music. Think Lil’ Kim and rhinestones, Bring Me the Horizon and silver spiderweb bras, Death Grips and latex doggy gear.

CAROUSEL FROM HELL

LustSickPuppy—who makes a madcap meld of punk, digital hardcore, rave, and rap—typically exerts a hyper-confident lusty indignation. It’s not that Tommy Hayes, the mind behind LustSickPuppy (LSP to the heads), doesn’t ever mention romance or melancholy within the turbulence of their mostly self-produced discography, which now totals 27 songs and a tad over 45 minutes, all counted. But all over their debut album CAROUSEL FROM HELL is the image of peeling back: “Peel ya skin back/Peel back all of my layers.” We get one surprising moment of tenderness with an almost sweetly sung “I love you, I love you/I want you to stay,” but as we move along, this peeling works in reverse, the tenderness revealed to be anger, as though to say the deepest of feeling is passionate rage.
This is the kind of music you get with or you don’t. It’s hard, it’s fast, it’s ambitious, loud, a maelstrom of genres and references only someone who grew up in Crown Heights going to punk shows and traipsing on the weirder corners of the ’00s internet would want to make. In response to my attempt to explain exactly what LSP does, a friend said “I can’t keep up with the kids.” But in certain circles of a DIY scene that centers harsh noise and breakbeats—such as those familiar with what was once called The Mutants and included Deli Girls, Dreamcrusher, and Kill Alters—LustSickPuppy is royalty. Fans will have lyrics memorized within days of a drop; they’ll bark when ordered to bark.
At barely 20 minutes, CAROUSEL is the longest LSP release to date—which I suppose is what makes it an album and not an EP, like 2020’s COSMIC BROWNIE or 2022’s AS HARD AS YOU CAN. It’s COSMIC BROWNIE’s “Graveyard Smash” and AS HARD AS YOU CAN’s “Ego Bruiser” that are key to this world—a world Hayes told Office Mag was built with and for “weird little creatures who like to dance until they die.” The former is a flip on “Monster Mash,” crawling with “Ghouls and goblins, creatures mobbing.” The latter is a sex romp (“This pussy I keep it sticky”) whose zany video features Hayes as a blonde-wigged bodybuilder. There’s always humor. This must be emphasized. CAROUSEL’s final song “Chokehold” rhymes “Tamagotchi” with “Hitachi” and throughout are tongue-in-cheek quips and self-references, giggles and lols.
The LSP universe includes but is not limited to: Lil’ Kim and neon clown makeup, Foxy Brown and rhinestones, Bring Me the Horizon and silver spiderweb bras, Death Grips and latex doggy gear. They once, for Halloween, had a prosthetic hand giving the finger made as a mask. Hayes tweets such things as, “I hate being referred to as mother plz instead refer to me as overlord,” and suggests one listen to CAROUSEL plugged into Doc Brown’s enormous amp from the beginning of Back to the Future. A porn site ad-esque gif promo-ing “CHOKEHOLD”: “Are u a Sick Puppy?? LustSickPuppy wants to put YOU in a chokehold. You won’t last 2:07!!!” CAROUSEL is missing the goofy found sounds and allusions and some of the playfulness I so loved about their previous output, but it doesn’t lack for moxie.
Hayes floats somewhere between self-drawn cartoon character and dominatrix daddy you’re dying to please. The personality is inextricable from the music, which is breakneck and uncompromising. It’s all ego, but it’s an ego that’s welcoming, not self-centered but self-assured, one that rolls between tender outrage at rigged systems and furious sensuality. Maybe it’s not so surprising, after all, that there’s some sweet-sounding affection tucked into all the chaos.


Nine years after the Rapture’s final album, the group’s singer/guitarist returns with his debut solo album, grappling with fatherhood and legacies of trauma in adventurous, ambient-infused art rock.

1

The Rapture were so good at being a dance-punk band that it’s easy to forget they spent much of their existence chafing against being pigeonholed as one. Go back and listen to the three albums they released between 2003 and 2011 and what you hear isn’t so much a cool, club-conquering groove machine as a strange, vulnerable, occasionally psychedelic pop group trapped inside one. If signature songs “House of Jealous Lovers” and “Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks” brought panic to the disco, curveball ballads like “Open Up Your Heart” and hippy-dippy detours like “Live in Sunshine” revealed the Rapture wanted not just to dance until the break of dawn, but to stick around for breakfast, too.
As it turns out, that tension between late-night decadence and morning-after innocence was about more than simply sidestepping indie-dance trends; it was also a reflection of the emotional tug-of-war playing out in singer/guitarist Luke Jenner’s life. As he’s since made clear in interviews, the Rapture’s ascent had a damaging effect on his marriage, while the arrival of his son in 2006—and the death of his mother by suicide that same year—put him in the nigh-impossible position of trying to be both a successful, globe-trotting musician and a present, engaged family man. Eventually, he put his career on pause to focus on being a better dad. “Well, we’re all getting bigger, but it takes time to be a man,” Jenner sang on the last song of the last Rapture album to date, and he wasn’t bullshitting. In his case, it’s taken almost a decade—a period spent reconnecting with his family, getting involved with his local community, and confronting the darkest moments of his past.
Jenner’s musical equipment hasn’t exactly been collecting dust that whole time—before reuniting the Rapture for a couple of dates in 2019, he kept busy playing drums in the DIY no-wave group Seedy Films (which he formed with some amateur musician friends he’d been mentoring) and making bedroom techno under the name Meditation Tunnel. But while 1, the first installment of a planned trilogy, marks his first proper solo album, it’s less a confessional singer/songwriter record than an abstract reimagining of one, where raw lyrical introspection and open-hearted devotionals are filtered through the exploratory ethos of an ambient soundtrack producer. While a handful of tracks provide distant aftershocks of the Rapture’s dancefloor pulse, the guiding principle isn’t so much post-punk as post-Floyd, foregrounding languid acoustic pastorales, stargazing electric-guitar slides, and ominous sound effects (ringing alarms and explosions included) that hark back to the classic-rock icons’ mid-’70s imperial phase.
Jenner has said he named his Meditation Tunnel project after a sleeping-aid toy for kids, but 1 takes that concept to a more literal level—this record isn’t so much a collection of songs as a group-therapy session, its tracks connected by various field recordings of Jenner interviewing members of his community about the meaning of life and love. As in those sorts of meetings, Jenner’s objective is to create a safe, welcoming space before working up the courage to open up and bleed. We don’t even hear his vocals until a full 10 minutes into the record, partway through the epic second track, “All My Love.” With the song’s Funeral-marching beat providing moral support, Jenner reveals his self-doubt, but that anxiety soon turns to exultation as he reaffirms his loyalty to his family en route to a triumphant, Joshua Tree-scaling finale.
On 1, Jenner finally embraces the domestic bliss he once dreamed of on those Rapture records, but the album doesn’t shy away from delving into the struggles he endured to get there. Jenner has said that his desire to be a more committed father to his son stems from his fear of replicating the dysfunctional family environment he was raised in, and 1’s most captivating moments reverberate with the aftershocks of deep-seated trauma. “Asshole” is a frank account of sexual abuse that, in perverse Lynchian fashion, accesses the past through a nostalgic doo-wop serenade. A similar combination of candor and valor pervades the piano ballad “You’re Not Alone,” a devastating portrait of bullying and parental neglect that manages to spin personal pain into communal healing.
As tracks like these confirm, Jenner is no longer the hyperactive shrieker of old. While throbbing, bass-driven instrumentals like “If There Is a God” (whose storm-cloud ambience suggests a disco remix of “Riders on the Storm”) may whet the appetite for a new Rapture album, he mostly favors a tender, graceful delivery that both reflects his current lot in life and respects the sensitivity of the album’s subject matter. In fact, 1 could use more of his voice—Jenner’s lead vocals are heard on only four of these 10 tracks and, after a while, the soundscapes start to blur into one long slow-motion, cosmic campfire hallucination.
Fortunately, Jenner outfits this meticulous album with a pressure-release valve in the closing “About to Explode,” which feels less like a spontaneous combustion than a slow, satisfying exhale. Over a gleaming melody that hovers somewhere between “Heroes” and Disintegration, Jenner leaves us with a thought that echoes his previous sign-off: “It takes time to get to this place/It takes time to finish this race.” On an album that celebrates Jenner’s hard-fought contentment, it’s a sobering reminder that overcoming trauma and becoming a better husband and father aren’t some magical end state, but an ideal to work toward every day.
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Burial’s longest release in years doubles down on his signature sounds and downcast mood. A collaged chorus of voices holds together a windswept expanse of undulating nothingness.

Antidawn

Burial’s Antidawn opens with a sound so subtle, so instinctive, you might miss it the first half-dozen times: the muted harrumph of a throat being cleared. But no opening line or expository declaration materializes in its wake. Instead, a thousand shades of gray rush in to fill the void. In the background, a blunted stylus pushes its way endlessly through a dusty vinyl rut, the Sisyphean loop that carries all Burial’s music. Chimes shimmer in the darkness; a low wind blows. Far in the distance, a voice faintly reminiscent of Gregorian chant flares up and is snuffed out, like a votive in a drafty nave. Almost a full minute passes before we hear the next thing resembling a melody—a brief snippet of a voice plaintively singing, “You came around my way”—but its appearance is fleeting, followed only by more emptiness.
Across five tracks, Burial proceeds like this for nearly 44 minutes, teasing imminent emotional payoff and then slipping back into the murk. It is his longest offering since 2007’s Untrue—long enough to qualify as his long-awaited third album, if he had chosen to call it that. But it is also the London musician’s most insubstantial release, seemingly by design. The music simply meanders, drifting across stray synthesizers, snatches of voice, and Burial’s habitual diegetic sound effects—coughs, lighter flicks, crickets, thunder, rainfall—severed from any context. There are few musical landmarks and little in the way of recognizable compositional form. Crucially, there are almost no drums. Not the 2-step rhythms that have defined Burial’s work since the very beginning. Not the thrumming trance and techno pulses that have been leaking into songs like “Space Cadet” as of late. Not even the soft downbeat grooves of a ballad like “Her Revolution” or “His Rope.” (The salient exception: a brief stretch of muted kick drums, halfway through “New Love,” whose cottony thump recalls Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project.) Burial is no stranger to doom and gloom, but Antidawn is a barren wasteland, warmed only by the occasional church organ or doleful scrap of love song.
This is not the first time Burial has muted his drums. He did it on 2016’s “Nightmarket,” an eerie collage of beatless synth melodies and static that marked a significant break from the hard-charging “Temple Sleeper.” The following year’s spacious “Subtemple” and “Beachfires” descended deeper into ambient music’s chilly nether regions, and he went undersea spelunking once again with last year’s “Dolphinz,” a nine-minute expanse of cetacean wails and ominous sub-bass drone. Within the ambient corner of Burial’s oeuvre, what distinguishes Antidawn, beyond its extreme sprawl, is the collaged chorus of voices that holds together its windswept expanse of undulating nothingness. Mostly sung rather than spoken, these sampled utterances coalesce around themes of absence, desire, and unease.
“Hold me,” pleads a voice in the opening “Strange Neighbourhood”; “Nowhere to go,” murmurs another, before a third answers, “Walking through these streets.” “Shadow Paradise” deploys entreaty after entreaty: “Let me hold you”; “Come to me, my love”; “Take me into the night.” It sounds as though Burial has gone through his record collection and gathered all the bits where a singer begins a verse with little or no accompaniment, except perhaps a single quavering synthesizer. Particularly on the closing “Upstairs Flat,” the cumulative effect is like a love letter written in disappearing ink, the narrative reduced to just a few brushstrokes: “You came my way”; “Somewhere in the darkest night”; “When you’re alone”; “Here I am.” Against the ticking of a grandfather clock and a few mournful notes of muted trumpet, the record ends with a garbled plea that sounds a lot like “Come bury me”—a fitting capstone for this intensely interior EP.
Is Antidawn a potent distillation of Burial’s aesthetic, or a caricature of it? I keep vacillating between those two assessments. Few artists are as beholden to their stylistic tics as Burial; by all rights, he should have painted himself into a corner long ago, yet he’s kept things interesting by splashing garish colors and jarring details—the gospel house of “Dark Gethsemane,” the acid-trance arpeggios of “Chemz”—over his resolutely grayscale palette. Antidawn makes no room for that kind of surprise. Instead, it doubles down on his signature sounds and steadfastly downcast mood; its melancholy is so pervasive that it risks being sucked into a maudlin undertow.
Still, if you are in a mood to submit to its spell, Antidawn can exert a powerful pull. Burial has never displayed much fealty to the gridded regularity of most contemporary electronic music—he claimed to create his early songs using rudimentary audio editors that lack the quantized precision of advanced music-composition software—and Antidawn drifts further from conventional musical meter than ever. Even in the near-total absence of drums, however, a different kind of rhythm begins to suggest itself. For all the music’s apparent aimlessness, these synths, voices, sound effects, and pockets of silence are carefully paced; they add up to a kind of tidal ebb and flow, a give and take as natural as breathing.
In recent years, Burial has increasingly tried to escape the linearity of dance music by cobbling together pieces of songs into multi-part suites. With Antidawn, he makes the most of that technique; every track is riddled with fake-outs, false endings, and trapdoors. In that sense, despite the record’s heavy-handedness, there is something playful about Antidawn. Burial’s relentless refusal to deliver anything like closure suggests an acidic sense of humor, the musical equivalent of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. I keep returning to that cough at the beginning of the record, and the curious sense of absence that it signals. I imagine a portrait sitter clearing their throat and abandoning the scene: Only the mottled velvet backdrop remains, yet the painter persists. The background becomes the foreground; the artist’s private obsessions—ruminative, claustrophobic, maybe even alienating—swell to fill the frame.

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Citing death metal and Phil Spector as influences, the Kentucky metalcore band turn in an absurdly heavy EP that tells an even heavier story about death and grief.

Knocked Loose: A Tear in the Fabric of Life

A Tear in the Fabric of Life

If Knocked Loose haven’t been subject to much critical analysis, that’s just an occupational hazard of the kind of gut-level metalcore the quintet play here: the guitars churn out either dyspeptic, detuned chug or octave-shifted panic chords. Vocalist Bryan Garris is a one-man Milgram experiment, shrieking like he’s getting a 285-volt shock and bellowing demonically like the guy pushing the button. Dramatic cymbal accents come courtesy of a guy from Kentucky nicknamed “PacSun.” There are video game samples, car crash sound effects, and a point when the music drops out for a deadpan recitation of the title. Many times, similar gestures amount to a caricature of intense, serious music that’s nearly impossible to take seriously. But while A Tear in the Fabric of Life still sounds hyperbolic enough to override any left brain activity, Knocked Loose apply themselves with purpose to tell a story with real emotional depth.
Though Knocked Loose’s studio albums have been hailed as modern scene classics, they fall victim to another occupational hazard of metalcore: being seen as the “home version,” secondary to the irrefutable ferocity of the live show. In 2021, Knocked Loose occupy a space similar to that of, say, Code Orange or Turnstile before they got snapped up by major labels—currently too aggro to appeal to the average music fan, yet too big to overlook. A Tear in the Fabric of Life isn’t the crossover event one might expect after the band’s 2019 breakthrough A Different Shade of Blue; it’s a conceptual EP accompanied by an animated short film and a wealth of references. Before the deadly car crash that sets the narrative in motion, a distracted flip of a radio dial lays out A Brief History of Knocked Loose: a dialogue sample from the psychological horror video game P.T., first heard on 2019’s “In the Walls”, the lyrics of which are later used for a climactic plot twist on “Return to Passion”; a snippet of “Blue,” the Leann Rimes song that Knocked Loose used as walkout music during their last tour; and an Alabama Sacred Harp Singers spiritual featured in Cold Mountain.
Knocked Loose’s commercial and critical fortunes have grown in direct proportion to their uncompromising approach, so they don’t even pay lip service to conventional accessibility. They cite death metal and Phil Spector as the EP’s main influences, though their only nod to ’60s pop is a literal one: A sample of “God Only Knows” serves as a contrasting moment of levity and a binding agent within the storyline. With Knocked Loose, it’s not the chorus or the melody or the build that matters; to the extent these even exist, they’re in service of bringing back the nasty riff but slower, or introducing a new one in double time. If anything, the band has only become more adept at recreating the sound of reckless driving, all slammed brakes, sudden veers, and riffs that sound like a truck backfiring in a ditch.
The EP’s subject matter and concision moderate some of Knocked Loose’s more taxing qualities, so while it’s certainly heavy, A Tear never feels melodramatic. Garris’ vocals have the shellshocked sound of a man trying to lift a midsize sedan with bare hands and adrenaline, and the compressed, face-to-the-glass urgency of Will Putney’s production ensures the fatal wreck feels as real as Garris’ struggle with survivor’s guilt. “God knows I belong in hell/That’s why he left me there by myself,” he howls. A Tear in the Fabric of Life will, understandably, inspire some people to simply bypass the lyrics and fixate on whether the swole riffage of “Where the Light Divides the Holler” and “Forced to Stay” can help them get that last rep. Give A Tear in the Fabric of Life the attention it deserves and it becomes clear why every song needs at least two things called a “breakdown”: This is the sound of a man at physical and emotional ruin.

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A new reissue highlights the ongoing relevance of Lou Reed’s opus about his hometown in the era of AIDS and Reaganism, a protest album unlike any other

New York: Deluxe Edition

Lou Reed was unusually hard to pin down in the 1980s. After the gay-rights-rallying cry of Transformer in 1972, he spent a decade mating queerness with rockn’roll and flirting with his own homosexuality in public statements, an identity that seemed to culminate in 1979, when he came out to Creem Magazine. Hardly a year later, he was celebrating married love on Growing Up in Public and, by 1982, heterosexuality in more general terms on the nonetheless excellent The Blue Mask. Reed’s subject matter changed because his life did—he got married in 1980—yet his newfound pop persona as a successful heterosexual capitalist coincided with the rise of Ronald Reagan, who was murdering gay people with his refusal to acknowledge the AIDS epidemic while helping to make greed and white-collar success culturally ubiquitous. Reed never supported Reagan’s policies, but he gave the impression of a star wearing the garb of his own era, scrawling an ode to his New Jersey country home as easily as he once caked on glam rock make-up. And then he made New York, a record of unmistakable conviction, one so direct and literary, erudite and rageful that it resembles no protest music written before or since.
Released in January of 1989, days before George H.W. Bush’s inauguration, New York treats straightforward hard rock and clean-toned, mesmeric guitar as blank pages on which to lay down a series of news stories, urban setpieces, and liberal-minded principles. Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani appear in its hyperdense lyrics—gleefully, Reed subjects both to horrific calamities. He once stated that he wanted to write “the Great American Novel” using “the rock’n’roll song as a vehicle," and on New York, the directive feels apt rather than pretentious. The city of his birth becomes his Yoknapatawpha County, a location for synecdoches that encompass large swatches of experience. Like much great fiction, Reed’s handling of his themes—a depleted environment, indigenous persecution, pro-lifers, police killings, racial violence—has aged into greater relevance today.
Though Reagan is never named, New York is nonetheless a dispatch from the fear-ridden two terms of our 40th president, an album that touches on aspects of the ‘80s ignored by the era’s major-label music. Prince, Cyndi Lauper, and Reed himself worked HIV/AIDS into earlier songs, yet those few instances shied away from connecting the epidemic to the gay community. “Halloween Parade” uses the eponymous West Village tradition to show the hole that AIDS left in queer life:

There’s a downtown fairy singing out “Proud Mary”
As she cruises Christopher Street
And some Southern Queen is acting loud and mean
Where the docks and the Badlands meet
This Halloween is something to be sure
Especially to be here without you

Reed’s songwriting always shined when he wrote about subjects other than himself, and New York is structured around characters: the Romeo Rodriguez of the thrilling opener “Romeo Had Juliette,” its turns of phrase packed as tightly as Dylan’s in the mid-’60s; the abused young Pedro on the three-chord single “Dirty Blvd.;” the proverbial whale—which might be a novel, or might be an endangered species—on the VU-esque highlight “Last Great American Whale.” We have references to Michael Stewart, a black graffiti artist murdered by the police, and Bernard Goetz, an NRA-embraced vigilante who shot four black teenagers on a subway train. Over 57 minutes, New York transforms from a collection of diffuse character studies into a concept album about the futility of the individual to be a meaningful agent of political change. On the penultimate track, “Strawman,” Reed provides his album with a thesis in reverse: “Does anyone need another self-righteous rock singer?”
The danger of this kind of music is the ravaging that time does to proper nouns and political stances. Shockingly, Reed’s liberalism still feels progressive. The one exception is on the taut, distorted “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim,” about Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign, and an incident in which he referred to Jews using the ethnic slur “hymies.” Reed was understandably offended, but he peppers his song with ripostes that have aged poorly, notably interrogating Jackson’s belief that U.S. leaders should meet with the Palestinian Liberation Organization. Contextualized by the multiperspective New York, though, the song fits: it evokes someone agitated at home, arguing with the evening news while the city rumbles by outside.
The new deluxe edition of New York contains live versions of every track, glizted-up arrangements of the Reed standards “Sweet Jane” and “Walk on the Wild Side,” one non-album instrumental, a long-out-of-print concert film, and a number of demos and rough mixes. These works in progress largely serve to show that Reed got it right with the album’s final version.
When New York was released, Reed was 46 and seemingly done trying lifestyles on for size. He’d made something that echoes James Baldwin’s Another Country in its depiction of a city tensely cohabitated by gay and straight, black and white, Latinx and Jewish—one that nonetheless holds a candle for the possibility of utopia. New York also introduced a loose trilogy of works (including 1990’s Songs for Drella, about Andy Warhol’s death, and 1992’s Magic and Loss) that animated middle-age from a point-of-view that was not explicitly gay but also glaringly non-straight. AIDS is never mentioned outright, but the records are undoubtedly products of the epidemic: They focus on the inadequacy of saying farewell, avoiding “Family values” as well as family relationships to consider the anguish of losing friends to disease.
There’ll be no Halloween Parade in the Village in 2020. In a year of virus, election, publicized police abuses, and natural disasters, it’s a minor yet sorrowful loss. We don’t need a self-righteous rock singer now—probably, we never did—but on New York, we got a worried and determined one. After dressing up in so many different costumes, Lou Reed revealed himself to be like the rest of his city: reasonable and resilient in a crisis, staring grimly at authorities too big to wrap a song around.

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Following his high-profile features on records by Kanye and Kendrick Lamar, the veteran dancehall deejay returns with an idiosyncratic album that subtly challenges the conventions of dancehall itself.

Hope River

To many listeners, veteran dancehall MC (or, deejay, as they would say in Jamaica) Assassin, aka Agent Sasco, may be known solely as the rough baritone bawling “Action ting, yo a badman ting” on “I’m in It,” a particularly dark and raunchy LP cut on Kanye West’s 2013 opus Yeezus. It’s an unforgettable irruption into an album packed with thrilling moments, largely due to Sasco’s unforgettable voice: a vocal attack that might best be visualized as a river of gravel rendered capable of human speech. Yet within the all-encompassing scale of the Kanye-verse, Sasco’s contribution to Yeezus was such a footnote that his writer’s credit (listed under his government name, Jeffrey Campbell) was attributed by some outlets to a guy who designs shoes. It would not be any underestimation of Sasco’s talent to point out that Kanye used his powerful voice and undeniable flow as a sort of instrument, a particularly bold timbre with which to offset the other colors (de-tuned 808s, say, or pitched-up Nina Simone samples) comprising the aural painting that is Yeezus.
Sasco’s voice filled that role so well, in fact, that it wasn’t long before he was called on by another rap auteur to add his instrument of mic destruction to yet another multi-textured opus, and in 2015, he brought the whiff of scorched earth to Kendrick Lamar’s “The Blacker the Berry.” Its early release as a teaser for To Pimp a Butterfly ensured that it would be many fans’ first real glimpse of the album’s themes; it also helped cement Sasco’s place as someone who could be counted on to provide the oracular role within Lamar’s latter-day tragedies, a wrathful prophet with a distinctly Kingstonian cadence to his fiery declamations.
These two high-profile features embody a sea-change of sorts in the ever-shifting dance between hip-hop and dancehall reggae. Sasco is being called on to provide neither gangster credibility nor a catchy, shake-your-ass hook; it’s pure gravitas. But what’s just as notable is how these cameos have in turn affected Sasco’s own art. His album Hope River is powerful evidence that he came away from them a changed deejay, determined to be his own auteur as well as his own instrument.
The first clue that Hope River might be read as a post-Yeezus dancehall album is the stark and bass-heavy palette from which it draws. Eschewing the bright keyboard riffs and lilting Afropop melodies that define much of modern dancehall, Sasco’s more melodic hooks are fleshed out with funereal organ chords and metal-pipe snares, but the album consists mostly of several subtly different flavors of overmodulated bass, ranging in texture from rubber to mud.
“Change,” featuring Stonebwoy, Kabaka Pyramid, and Spragga Benz, is a perfect example of the impact that’s possible with skillful use of this palette, and it is used to equally spooky effect on the album openers “Energy River” and “Banks of the Hope” (the Hope River is both a real body of water that flows just north of Kingston and a guiding metaphor for the album’s lyrical themes, a sort of secular scripture premised on forward motion against all odds, no matter how daunting). There are side channels to this general flow. “Mama Prayed” and “My Song” carry the listener through gospel territory, while “New Day” is roots reggae of the kind that would be recognizable as such to contemporaries of Bob Marley. But for the most part, Sasco seems very tightly focused on developing Hope River’s distinct sound world and increasing the vocal textures he can create with in it, from echoey whisper to full wrath-of-god baritone. It feels as if Sasco deliberately wants to subvert the expectations placed on dancehall.
There is some precedent for this approach. If there is a third star alongside Yeezus and TPAB in Hope River’s guiding constellation, it is undoubtedly ‘Til Shiloh, the landmark 1995 LP from Buju Banton, to whom Assassin’s voice has been often compared. Shiloh saw Buju abandon the raunchy lyrics and fast bogle riddims that made him a star in favor of a quieter, acoustic approach that caught many fans by surprise. It’s an influence Sasco hints at in the way his chanting flow wraps around the nyabinghi drums of “Winning Right Now”; there’s another clue in a sampled snippet of a 2004 Buju interview wherein he namechecks the younger deejay as a talent to watch.
Ultimately, however, Hope River simply does not deliver the highs that could stand up next to the truly great LPs that are its primary influences. All three of those albums spawned huge singles which nevertheless fit into the overall album statement. But Hope River sometimes feels like all glue and no glitter, composed entirely of the kinds of moody album cuts and codas that can give a great album depth and coherence, but without the standout songs that give it, well, altitude. Coming from a genre where most LP releases are really just collections of 45s or dancehall singles from a particular year or studio, Sasco delivers an idiosyncratic dancehall concept LP with nary a dancehall hit—let alone a cultural touchstone on the scale of “Alright” or “Black Skinhead.”
This is a bold move in and of itself for a dancehall artist, and it feels deliberate, even willful, on Sasco’s part, adding a kind of enigmatic satisfaction even to its limitations. If Hope River falls far short of greatness, it falls short in such an original way—not only a milestone in Sasco’s personal evolution but perhaps even subtly altering the course of the wider river that is dancehall itself—that it is almost certain to be a sort of sleeper hit with the fans it does find. In that sense, perhaps the best key to his project here is not the riverine theme or the single “Change” but the collaboration with Toronto’s Kardinal Offishall that immediately follows it, “Legacy.” Over a bed of hauntingly distorted choral voices and pulsing bass, Sasco growls about eagles in cages before cutting to the chase: “You’ll never see you dream if you nuh brave/That’s why you’ll never see the critics on the stage.../Let me tell you what you’ll never see/You’ll never see your own legacy.” More water may have to pass under the bridge before we see what ripples are created by Sasco’s odd, contrarian, and highly personal statement.


The experimental R&B artist tempers the ecstatic joy of his latest album with a breezy companion EP, offering subtle updates on its plainspoken songs of love and friendship.

DEACON’S Grove EP

Serpentwithfeet sings with an exultant tenderness that could make wilted flowers bloom. He is so adept at using his silvery vibrato to convey the extremes of human emotion that the baseline when considering his music is elevated: Even when the subject matter is dark, the starting point is radiant beauty. On this year’s DEACON, he moved away from the anguished lyrics and baroque gospel and chamber-pop production that established his singular sound on releases like 2018’s soil. Instead, he spent these songs singing so earnestly about love that the results deliberately bordered on corny. The music was more accessible than ever, but his technical skill and commitment to celebrating Black queer love made the music feel uniquely his own. DEACON’S Grove, a new companion EP, features remakes of three songs from DEACON and two previously unreleased originals. Without offering much we haven’t heard from serpentwithfeet before, it is a quick, breezy project that leans into his newfound sense of ease.
Of the two new songs, “Shoot Ya Shot” falls into that category of “beautiful because serpentwithfeet made it,” without leaving much of an impression beyond that. He yearns for a lover at the end of a long day, singing over synth bursts that sound like glitter was poured straight into the mix. It’s pleasant but ultimately leaves you searching for deeper emotion or more specific storytelling. “Down Nuh River” is more interesting. Serpentwithfeet has said he was trying to channel the songs that “me, my friends and cousins made up as kids... on the playground and the porch.” There is a childlike wonder to the lyrics: He teases someone to “tell your brother that I kissed ya” and urges a friend to swim to the deepest part of the river because “that’s where all the wishes are.” Propelled by an eerie mesh of piano and synth and chanted vocals that echo and twist like children playing hopscotch, it’s the most exploratory song here.
The version of “Amir” that appeared on DEACON was bursting with nervous energy. Serpentwithfeet meets a man and is immediately eager to know the intimacies of his life: “What’s the longest you held a grudge?” “Do you like beer or like rosé?” The reprise on DEACON’S Grove is sung in hindsight, reminiscing on the moment they met. He doesn’t ask any questions. By now, he’s made up his mind: “You’re something sweet,” he sings, “so I’m all in.” The rush of meeting someone new has been replaced with quiet gratitude. On DEACON album closer “Fellowship,” he extended his devotion to his friends: He gushes about watching Christmas films in July and drinking Prosecco together. The version on DEACON’S Grove incorporates dreamy, delicately-sung verses by collaborators Ambré and Alex Isley. They sing about gratitude, warm smiles, and borrowing each other’s clothes. Ambré and Alex Isley’s voices break up serpentwithfeet’s verses nicely, turning this simple ode to friendship into a communal project.
Musicians who start out singing about their sadness often worry about losing their spark should they heal, and DEACON showed that there is power in sharing the specifics of your joy: how it feels to be fully understood, to name and pursue your desires, to access emotions that once felt foreign. DEACON’S Grove pulls back from that ecstasy without moving significantly into any new emotional territory. With a project like this, it’s hard not to compare him to his own high standard. When you know the intensity that serpentwithfeet is capable of conveying, the subtle joy of these songs inevitably feels slight.

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Stepping out from her futuristic soul duo with Sene, Denitia’s electro-pop Ceilings is her most fully formed solo effort so far.

Ceilings

Sometimes clarity means moving away from the places where you’ve staked your dreams and quieting the noise of outsiders in order to hear your voice. For Denitia, that meant getting out of Brooklyn—where she’d met musical partner Brian Marc to form futuristic soul duo Denitia and Sene—to the Rockaways. In the placid Queens suburb, the singer-songwriter searched for herself in the music she was making, a portion of which she offers up on her new EP.
Ceilings is Denitia’s most fully formed solo outing. It’s more an expansion of last year’s love and noir. project from Denitia and Sene than of her guitar-soul work of old. Musically, the compact four-song EP, which was co-produced by Daniel Schlett, dances in colorful dream and electro pop tones, accented by Denitia’s satiny vocals. In principle, it’s a manifestation of the Houston-native shedding the “protective layers her career had imposed and rediscover[ing] what songs and sounds came naturally to her.”
There’s a sense of vulnerability in her lyrics, but she sounds confident standing in her own radiance. On opener “Bound to Happen,” she’s clear-eyed, taking stock and ready to move forward the “one way [she] want[s] it.” The synths stab through the bass as assured as Denitia sounds for a dense, cinematic effect. The narrative advances on the summery “Waiting,” which finds her in a perpetual chase of the unattainable. “We’re all just waiting, we’re all the same/Looking for a reason, looking for a change,” she sings, capturing a feeling of overcome angst; a breezy saxophone melody carries the song out.
Denitia tends towards upbeat, brighter textures here, but the EP’s darkest moment is also one of its most vivid. The title track slows the pace to a crawl, the seclusion that inspired the project at its most palpable. The production, evocative of an aural heaven, is unhurried and delicate, and Denitia’s voice is given room to soar. Rising to the occasion, her vocals feather across the glowing synths without flaw. Despite the somber sound, “Ceilings” is marked by a level of rosiness (“I will see you again/We will meet in dreams” she sings on the hook) rather than defeatism that comes with missing someone or something. It’s convincing and tugs at the heart.
”Planes” snaps the EP back to a more cheery space as it brings everything to a close. The piano and percussion combination makes the track feel effervescent and hopeful even though the search of the preceding songs isn’t resolved. The sounds become fuzzy and distant, and a bell tolls as if Denitia is soon to wake up from this hypnotic state.
In leaving behind the city’s bustle, she also found a new musical territory that seems to suit her. The EP is as spacious as her beach-side community—the potential possibilities are visible on the horizon and within reach, but the pressure to navigate them in this moment is absent. Her liberation or, as she calls it, her “awakening” give the project an overarching sense of peace. It’s brief, but it’s there, and with Ceilings, she proves the music of her own heart is the strongest.


The New York pianist’s stripped-back companion piece to her electronic-tinged 2018 album Ultraviolet is an engrossing ode to the act of creation.

Origin EP

Kelly Moran’s Ultraviolet grew out of a period of writer’s block. Her usual method of composition—painstakingly plotting every note on staff paper, as much a mathematical process as an intuitive one—felt stiff. So she did something that not many classical players often do: She set aside her scores and began improvising. The recording sessions yielded lyrical, free-flowing rhapsodies couched in the unpredictable sonics of the prepared piano—liquid meditations crosscut with doorbell buzz and felted whispers. Captivated by the results, she ended up studying those tapes for two months, transcribing her improvisations, and finally re-recording them. Then, she spent three more months editing and processing the new material, layering it with synthesizers and electronics, to achieve Ultraviolet’s final form: lush, mercurial, almost hologram-like in its flickering dimensions.
The Origin EP takes a step back from that dreamlike vantage: Most of its tracks are unedited documents of her initial, searching improvisations. The seven-song, 36-minute EP amounts to a fascinating snapshot of Moran’s process—a chance to eavesdrop, to perch behind the piano bench and witness her feeling her way out of a creative cul-de-sac.
“Reflexive Music (Autowave)” establishes the record’s skeletal palette and contemplative mood. Where its Ultraviolet counterpart, “Autowave,” was wrapped in cathedral-grade organ buzz, here the denuded piano has nothing to hide its battered timbre and detuned harmonies, which take on the tarnished-metal qualities of Indonesian gamelan. It’s striking how closely the re-recorded piano of the Ultraviolet version resembles this original improvisation—clearly, Moran was meticulous in re-scoring her initial flash of inspiration. But what’s even more interesting is how the quality of the piece changes once the electronic swaddling is stripped away: The tone is no longer grand or regal, but delicate, bruised, brittle as birds’ bones.
“Water Music (Piano Solo)” and “Night Music” also come from those initial improv sessions, and they share the exploratory quality of the opener. Worrying their way up and down the scale, treated notes periodically toss off the errant bong of a busted grandfather clock; the sustain pedal scatters high frequencies like mist off a waterfall. Moran recorded the pieces in her parents’ home on suburban Long Island in high summer, and if you listen closely, you can hear the faint chirping of insects in the background of “Night Music”—a fitting counterpoint to the rattle and buzz of her own instrument.
A few pieces here date from different sessions. “Halogen (Una Corda)” is a gorgeous, Debussy-like fantasia on a comparatively untreated piano. “Love Birds, Night Birds, Devil-Birds” is a recent improvisation created to accompany a video installation by Moran’s friend Cassie McQuater; recorded with electronic delay on the piano, it takes on some of the textural and harmonic fullness of Ultraviolet. Best of all might be “Helix (Piano Solo).” It’s actually the very same recording heard on Ultraviolet’s “Helix,” but stripped of the synthesized bass that fills out the more elaborate rendition. In this bare form, it reveals a kind of dogged minimalism, carving lines into the floor as it paces back and forth.
If Ultraviolet represented an attempt to freeze the act of inspiration, examine it, and ultimately embellish it—like painting atop an X-ray transparency—Origin drinks directly from that unmediated rush of wonder. More than just a glimpse of Moran’s methods, these improvisatory pieces prove engrossing in their own right. In fact, in their own quiet, unguarded way, they might even make for a more rewarding listening experience than the album eventually fashioned out of them. Where Ultraviolet’s electronics sometimes risk flattening the material, carpeting the piano’s nuances in velvety bass throb, Origin is a testament to both the subtleties of Moran’s instrument and the act of creation itself. For all the outward fragility of the sound, the EP has a wiry resilience; fleeting though these ideas may have been, their impact lingers.


Their second LP in a matter of months, Move of Ten is a beat-driven complement to Oversteps' dubstep-nodding ambiance.

Move of Ten

It's not unusual for Autechre to go a couple of years between full-lengths. So two in the span of a couple of months-- Sean Booth and Rob Brown have never released two Autechre albums in a single year-- is a pretty big deal. Why the quick follow-up to Oversteps? From the sound of these two records, it seems possible that Booth and Brown generated a large batch of material in the two years since Quaristice and decided to split it into complementary records, each with a different focus. While Oversteps had a number of drifting, ambient pieces mixed in with rhythm-oriented tracks that at times nodded toward dubstep, Move of Ten puts its emphasis on sharp beats that mostly stay within conventional meters. With these two records following on the more variable Quaristice, an album of shorter tracks that seemed to touch on almost every sound they've ever tried, that makes three pretty different albums in a row for Autechre, which is encouraging.
I say "pretty different" because we're not talking about records that sound like they could have come from completely different artists. Even if the title of opening track "Etchogon-S" didn't clue you in to who we're dealing with, the skittering half-broken beat and sharp synth stabs that verge on sounding random would do the trick. The track almost seems designed to inspire a "Yep, sounds like Autechre" sigh from its first few seconds, which isn't going to bring back anyone who tuned out somewhere around the time of 2001's Confield. Autechre have fiercely loyal fans who look forward to whatever they do next, but my sense is that they used to attract a lot more of the merely curious than they do now. And for those who followed along for a record or two a decade ago before finding more pleasure in something like, say, Four Tet, there's little here to bring them back in the fold. Autechre still specialize in dense, complicated, and texturally rich sounds that upend ideas of what music might be. Word that they are continuing these experiments while bringing 4/4 beats into the mix won't be enough for most.
But for those who want to give them another try, this is the most forceful Autechre record in a while. Their beats are stripped down and hit a little harder, and their skewed takes on dance music-- techno and especially electro-- are convincing. Autechre's love of electro and the production of old school hip-hop producer Kurtis Mantronik in particular has been a steady source of inspiration since their inception. When you listen to Mantronik's productions for Mantronix or rapper Just-Ice, you get a sense of just what Autechre heard in his music: The sharp crack of the era's drum machines and the wild stabs of synth both sound very 80s and also like another era's interpretation of the future. They also sound like brilliant examples of urban culture using discarded bits of its past in a new way.
Certain tracks here, like "pce freeze 2.8i" with its booming low-end snapped tightly into a computer grid or "rew(1)" with its slippery alien bassline and hissy electronic handclaps, sound like they could be the instrumental realization of the new century being imagined 25 years ago. This stuff is strange and eerie and off-kilter but still in its own way funky, and it's the kind of thing Booth and Brown have always done better than just about anyone else. "M62" with its steady kickdrums and jittery but warm synths is a warm and inviting bit of Detroit-style electro in the vein of Drexciya, where the following "ylm0" is the album's "pretty" track, sounding a bit like a Boards of Canada interlude playback powered by double the suggested voltage.
At 10 songs and 47 minutes, Move of Ten is relatively lean and digestible. There's none of the formal innovation that Autechre were doing around the turn of the millennium, but for my money that's a good thing. They claimed their new ground long ago, and since then they've been growing new music on it. Some of it has been excellent, some a shadow of past glories. With the addition of this solid LP, the 2010 harvest suggests that the soil has a few seasons in it yet.


Against a blend of narcotized trip-hop and uplifting R&B, the New York rapper’s fourth LP flips all traces of self-doubt into a source of power and independence.

JP4

Over three brash, gut-busting albums, Junglepussy (aka Shayna McHayle) has established herself as one of New York’s funniest and most unpredictable rappers. Her music fizzes with outlandish, sex-positive lines delivered in a rollicking flow and bolstered by her endless self-reliance in the face of shitty men. There’s very little she won’t try musically or otherwise, even making a stellar acting debut opposite Regina Hall in the 2018 dramedy Support the Girls. Junglepussy follows up that performance with her fourth album, JP4, an eclectic blend of narcotized trip-hop and uplifting R&B that expands on both her sound and themes of self-sufficiency by leading listeners deeper into her psyche than ever.
Junglepussy’s vervy punchlines are still her strongest asset, and her bars delight and divulge in equal measure. She’s obsessive to a fault on “Telepathy,” with a monotone delivery that contrasts her single-minded lust: “No more drunk sex in your Porsche/I’m my own snack, why you brought me to the store?” she asks over knocking drums and a squawking synth from producer Dave Sitek—before clarifying that her friends think she should dump this guy. “What a waste of toothpaste/Brushing my teeth only to smile in yo face,” she seethes later on the bouncy “Morning Rock,” accompanied by the sound of scrubbing and spitting into the sink. “Brushing my teeth but the regret donʼt erase.” The back-and-forth between her authoritative declarations and admissions of inner turmoil tee up Junglepussy’s comedic lines for head-spinning effect.
JP4 slips through many mercurial moods, yet solid production choices enable all of them to resonate as distinctly Junglepussy. Trip-hop is the main touchstone here—on the taunting “Spiders,” lurching drums and a distant bassline from Nick Hook recall Massive Attack, while the spooky laughter and ad-libs echoing in the background intensify the uneasiness. Sporting Life (formerly of Ratking) submerges late-album highlight “Arugula” in an amniotic glow, with a looped, pitch-shifted horn sample that recurs like the fog of breath on glass. Junglepussy adopts an affecting mumble that magnifies her lyrics, which sound on the verge of a crack-up: “Congratulations, maybe Iʼm jaded/I couldʼve sworn I seen you loving things you said you hated/Wasnʼt I the one to make you love the shit you hated?”
Junglepussy is more in her head than usual throughout JP4, but she transforms all traces of self-doubt into a source of power and independence. Over a ruptured backdrop and roiling synths on “What You Want,” another Sitek production that evokes his more agitated songs with TV on the Radio, she broods on making an exit from the music industry: “I canʼt afford to mingle it cost me my sanity/I be happy out the industry like Iʼm Kelis/Rock stars is Black farmers peep the harvest.” But she always finds a way through. On “Out My Window,” a feel-good centerpiece that’s close in spirit to 2018’s buoyant JP3, she recruits Brooklyn gospel/R&B singer Ian Isiah for a sunny chorus that builds to the funk-inflected bridge where she sing-songs her boasts: “When youʼre poppinʼ you confuse them/Make them pay for the amusement.” JP4 embodies that sure-footed confidence, creating another lane for Junglepussy to mold in her own image.

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The very first recordings of Aretha Franklin, captured in Detroit when she was all of 14 years old, are remastered and offer a window into the early sounds of a genius.

Aretha Franklin: Songs of Faith: Aretha Gospel

Songs of Faith: Aretha Gospel

These are the very first recordings of Aretha Franklin, live from the New Bethel Baptist Church on Hastings Street in Detroit, Michigan, where she used to sing for the congregation, accompanying herself on piano. You hear her voice, and she is already Aretha. There are phrasings and turns you are already familiar with. She was 14 years old in 1956 when these songs were captured, which is sufficiently impressive, but she had begun singing in church at the age of nine, which is something else entirely. Her brother Cecil Franklin said of the Franklin family, “We were blessed with the precious genes of our musical ancestors. But Aretha manifested that talent at an ungodly early age.” Smokey Robinson maintains, “She came from a distant musical planet where children are born with their gifts fully formed.” Songs of Faith is the evidence backing that claim.
Aretha’s father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, was at this point a national star of the Baptist church, his Sunday sermons broadcast on radio. Rev. Franklin was invited to preach at congregations around the country, and Aretha traveled with him. “I essentially opened for my father,” she said. Her father’s stature also ensured Aretha’s exposure to the leading gospel singers of the day, particularly Clara Ward, regarded as one of the greatest soloists in gospel history. It’s not an accident that on this record, Aretha tackles not one, but three songs that Ward often performed when the Ward Sisters appeared with Rev. Franklin. Her sister Erma posited that Aretha sang those songs “to prove her abilities,” while her brother Cecil maintained, “If you hear a 13-year-old girl sounding older and wiser than a 31-year-old woman, it isn’t because Aretha was trying to outshine Clara. It’s just what happened when my sister got up to sing.”
These early recordings of Aretha were captured by Detroit entrepreneur Joe Von Battle, whose record shop was just down the street from New Bethel on Hastings Street, the heart of Black Detroit at that time. Von Battle began recording and distributing the Reverend’s sermons in 1953, and these recordings on Songs of Faith are his handiwork as well, captured with one lone microphone; given the environment and the limitations of the technology, the clarity of the audio is impressive, and this reissue is billed as a remaster, which does slightly improve the fidelity of the previously circulating recordings.
History lesson aside, the phenomenal element of this release is the opportunity to hear Aretha’s voice in its early stages, already imbued with the power and authority she would become known for. Her ability to convey a range of emotions, moods, and colors both on the keyboard and in the vocal delivery is already present. It’s no wonder that she and her father would soon decide that she needed to make a break with gospel and turn to popular music, because her abilities dictated that the sky was the limit.
This is less an album than a collection of recordings, some gospel classics, like “There Is A Fountain Filled With Blood,” which was Clara Ward’s signature number; it seems impossible that this rendition is being delivered by a teenager, as Aretha summons a pathos that feels ancient. “He Will Wash You White As Snow” and “Yield Not To Temptation” are church favorites that she proudly makes her own: There’s a freshness and modernity to the vocal delivery as well as a decidedly secular bounce in the piano arrangement.
If you are not likely to spend half an hour of your time listening to half an hour of Aretha Franklin’s musical ministry, it is worth the six minutes to listen to her rendition of “Precious Lord,” split into two parts here so that it would fit on one 78 RPM record. Mahalia Jackson sang "Precious Lord" at Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral, and Aretha herself sang it at Mahalia's funeral. But it’s 1956, and none of this has happened yet; the point is that this is a stone gospel standard in the repertoire of the greats, being performed at that level by an artist who had only been on the planet for little more than a decade. The last minute and a half of part two, when she is invoking the last three lines of the song, are unparalleled in their magnificence.
At the river, Lord I’ll stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand
Take my hand, precious Lord, and lead me home
She is shouting, she is testifying, she is proclaiming, she is calling for glory; she is achieving all of this, and then some.