After more than five years spent battling media hypocrisy (and most of his family), hip-hop's most notorious white rapper returns with his first full-length since his well-received performance and Oscar-winning musical contribution to 8 Mile.

Encore

In 2000, Eminem was frequently vilified as a hatemonger, homophobe, and misogynist; in 2002, he was on the shortlist for Time magazine's "Man of the Year." America loves a tale of redemption almost as much as one of comeuppance, but at the start of the decade you'd have gotten pretty long odds on the media and cultural elite spinning the Marshall Mathers yarn as the former before the latter. And yet, somewhere between hugging Elton onstage at the Grammys and sending that guy in the Pistons jersey to pick up his Oscar, Em was feted by many of America's best-known cultural crits, columnist, and pundits: Frank Rich, Andrew Sarris, Maureen Dowd, Greil Marcus, Neal Gabler, and Paul Slansky (among others) either laid garlands at his feet or rhapsodized about the supposed transformation of the rapper/actor.
The epistolary weepie "Stan" and the survivalist self-helpisms of "Lose Yourself" played a part in the slow mainstream media embrace of Eminem, but it's that "slash" that seemed to complete the embrace. For whatever reason, a film career can do that-- maybe it's the ability for a lengthy narrative to be more explicitly mutli-dimensional or maybe it's just lazy thinking and knee-jerk reactionary assumptions about pop, but you're now as likely to see Em torn down on Vibe than The New York Times Magazine.
Well, Maureen, Andrew, and Greil, get ready to be excited; most of the rest of you-- the ones who've been held enthrall by Em's complex games of shifting his identity, challenging hypocrisy, baiting liberal guilt, and spitting deft rhymes with his labyrinthine flow-- prepare for disappointment: Encore is a fourth fascinating record from Eminem, but it's also easily his weakest and, in many ways, tamest album to date.
Eminem's reaction to respectability seems to have been to move in two different directions: introspection and reconciliation on the one side, and bodily fluid-obsessed humor on the other. Tracks in which Em offers confessions, explanations, and apologies for previous comments and his participation in high-profile beefs share time here with belching, farting, vomiting, and urinating. He's also scrubbed his lyrics of homophobia (instead, the fascinating and eyebrow-raising homoeroticism hinted at on The Eminem Show-- and literally fleshed out in his music video cross-dressing-- colors a handful of his songs here) and, save a few blasts at Kim, any elements of misogyny.
Therefore, if Encore is anything, it's a transitional record. After an image-confounding trio of pseudo self-titled records, the Eminem of Encore is wounded and weary; he's removing the layers of meta, still laughing and nodding but rarely winking, and not disappearing behind what The Village Voice's Frank Kogan once labeled Em's lyrical "trapdoors and escape hatches." Instead, the LP is the sound of a man who seems bored of re-branding and playing celebrity games, and often seems to be rapping only to entertain himself with little regard for any potential audience. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Despite the album's pronounced maturity/infantilism divide, it's a different dichotomy that characterizes the album's highlights: Here, Em is at his best when he's either more focused than even before or at his most scattered and playful. Unfortunately, most of the tracks that don't veer toward either extreme are plodding and unremarkable.
Much of the first third of the record features Eminem unloading his emotional weight. Childhood tale "Yellow Brick Road" is the closest thing to biographical narrative he's ever done, and his remorseful explanation of the situation around which he, as a hurt kid, lashed out in a few racially-tinged rhymes at a black girl is not only compelling but effectively diffuses Source editor Benzino's long-running attack campaign on the rapper. It's also Em's best exploration of living his life in the rare space between America's too-wide racial divide. Fittingly, it leads into "Like Toy Soldiers", a public hand-wringing over the feuds that Em and 50 Cent have been drawn into, the consequences of these battles, and-- most importantly-- the toll they've taken, both physically and emotionally. The martial beat is a bit heavy-handed, but it's counterbalanced by the pleasantly surprising chorus' sample of Martika's "Toy Soldiers", perhaps a nod to either Kanye's helium-vocaled samples or the 00s trend toward trance-pop covers of 80s hits.
Em also shines when he spins well off his axis, as he does on both the hilarious "Rain Man" and the R. Kelly/Triumph the Insult Comic Dog-baiting "Ass Like That", songs that both tell a lot of the same sort of celebrity- or redneck-oriented jokes as previous Em tracks, but have new punchlines and almost completely skip the need for structure. The songs sound more like mixtape or freestyle material than album tracks, and they're better off for it.
Outside of those tracks and a few lively guest spots from the usual suspects (50 Cent, Nate, Dre, Obie-- hey, where's Proof?), things get sketchy. "Mosh"-- sadly, not yet completely past its sell-by date-- seems more like a plodding dirge here among the spry string of tracks that surround it. "Just Lose It" is still most notable for dancing with paedo and homoerotic imagery: It's the one track here that seems as potentially multilayered as the best of The Marhsall Mathers LP, yet it's still more curio than anything else. On one of the two Kim tracks, Em confuses domestic violence with commitment, an awkward flirtation with the idea that you only hurt the ones you love. Elsewhere, with their relationship now more deteriorated than ever, poor Kim only rates a "you make me puke" where she once was murder ballad "worthy."
Sonically, the record is more of the same: simple minor-chord piano lines, Dre's elastic funk, Em's clicky and too-often weak drums. A "Crazy on You" sample is wasted on a weak track ("Crazy in Love") and the belching chorus of "My 1st Single" threatens to pulls the rug out from under an otherwise durable song. The advantage of Em going back to same musical well is that he's become so adept at riding these types of beats that his delivery and tangible personality are compelling almost no matter what the content of his rhymes; he even mixes things up with drastic shifts in cadence-- sometimes within the same track-- and occasional impersonations.
In the promotional run-up to Encore's release, Eminem has been dressed in his courtroom best, suits and wire-rims-- again, great for the Manhattan media, but another MOR flag. At 30-plus, he's also worried about his legacy, trying to mobilize his version of a live-free-or-die army, and the record even drops very vague yet odd hints at retirement. Em has specifically said that the curtain isn't coming down, but the almost afterthought with which the record is framed (packaged and titled more like an addendum to The Eminem Show rather than a follow up with a two-year gap), its jaw-droppingly weak single, and the smoke-and-mirrors of coasting on talent and skill indicates that he either needs a breather or a new well of inspiration.


After more than a decade away, the New York screamo band draws inspiration from keyboard-led, laser-show prog on this challenging and rewarding reunion album.

The Loser

If you’re going to take a 16-year break from releasing music, your new material might as well acknowledge it. Gospel came out of nowhere in 2005 with their ambitious prog-screamo debut, The Moon Is a Dead World, and then vanished back into the ether. The guys who returned last November with the single “S.R.O.” are not the same spry, melodramatic twentysomethings they were the last time we heard them, and they make no effort to conceal that. Vocalist Adam Dooling opens the song with the reluctant revelation you might have when you see a new wrinkle, feel a new ache, or wonder when your grays started outnumbering your other hairs: “He’s just an old soul living in a young man's body/Now is it a middle-aged man’s body/Or a slightly older man’s body?/He’s just an old man living in an old man’s body.”
It’s not just Dooling’s lyrics that hint at the years gone by; his voice, once an open-wounded wail, is now a ragged scar, full of a grit that usually precludes a band from being deemed “screamo.” Gospel arrived when the genre was in full swing, their debut building on the template of pioneers like Orchid and Saetia while taking the emotive sound to stranger places than commercially successful contemporaries like Thursday and the Used. Their connection to progressive rock was more in spirit than in practice—sure, they made a few epic-length songs and were fond of heady compositions, but there was no mistaking The Moon Is a Dead World for Close to the Edge, even during the parts Dooling wasn’t shredding his vocal cords. But The Loser, on the other hand? *Slaps car roof* There’s a whole lot of ’70s laser show prog in this baby.
Jon Pastir, credited with keyboards and guitars on Gospel’s debut, joined the band when all but one of the songs were written. The song in question, “A Golden Dawn,” just so happens to have the album’s wildest keyboard solo. In old live videos, Pastir hops on keys every now and then but mostly plays rhythm guitar—on The Loser, I’m not sure he ever even touches a guitar. His playing takes centerstage on the album, throwing it back to prog’s heyday with hi-sheen tones on “Hyper” that recall Rush’s synthy mid-’80s, a mellotron outro on “S.R.O.” reminiscent of early King Crimson, and on nearly every song, an overdriven organ that, apart from its association with ’70s AOR, also gives Gospel their first-ever connection to the genre of music with which they share their name. Although Dooling shreds like he still has a rhythm guitarist backing him up, Pastir is The Loser’s leading light—Rick Wakeman clad in flannel instead of a cape.
Ragged, middle-aged screamo and keyboard-led prog make for odd bedfellows, but somehow, Gospel pull it off. The dare-I-say jaunty “Tango” sounds like Drive Like Jehu covering Emerson Lake and Palmer’s jazzy “Bitches Crystal” but somehow doesn’t suck. Drummer Vinny Roseboom and bassist Sean Miller deserve credit for not letting this thing fly off the rails, with Roseboom in particular managing to keep his dizzying, fill-heavy style intact without adding to the sometimes-confusing chaos of overlapping guitar and keyboard wig-outs.
If you can vibe with The Loser’s jarring marriage of genres, there’s also a rewarding narrative in the lyrics. Dooling sets his sights on white dudes over a certain age. He seems to be talking about himself on the aforementioned “S.R.O.” lyric, but later in the same song, he offers some larger context: “But your father’s still around/And his straight white version of events/Isn’t how this shit goes down.” We get more of that sentiment on “White Spaces,” which contrasts that demographic’s fondness for ownership with their inability to own up to their wrongs (“For all you own/You won’t own this”), as well as “Metallic Olives,” which lashes out at flat earthers and longs for praxis. Closer “Warm Bed,” which is the closest the album gets to the prettier sounds of Gospel’s debut, ironically carries its biggest divorced dad energy. “Oh, let’s hear it for the boy,” Dooling sings, quoting the Footloose soundtrack, “How he makes a rotten man.” Gospel’s unorthodox approach makes their return feel even more poignant: In the past, their sporadic reunion shows have helped friends and family pay medical bills, and now, The Loser is something that will challenge aging screamo fans both musically and existentially.


The Detroit punks Tyvek flex their mastery over their multifaceted sound on their new album—these wordy, detail-stuffed songs are fast and staid, intense and gentle, paranoid and curious.

Origin of What

Tyvek have been going for over a decade, and at different points throughout the Detroit punks’ tenure, at least 22 people have counted among their ranks. Kevin Boyer’s voice, guitar, collaged cover artwork, and lyrics have always been at the band’s center, but he’s quick to point out the obvious—that each contributing member brings something unique to the table. “Tyvek is always changing,” Boyer told Maximum Rocknroll. “There’s always a period of relearning, half-retracing our steps, but we always find ourselves in a different place from where we left off.” They change their approach semi-regularly, but they don’t sound like a brand-new band with every release.
The band’s sound is fairly well-defined. It’s loud punk music, guided by Boyer’s shouted abstract poems. Sometimes the songs are faster, sometimes they’re more anthemic, sometimes they’re choppy, and sometimes they’re all over the place. It really depends on who’s playing. Beyond the more visible albums and singles released by bigger indie labels, they’ve put out piles of CDRs and tapes. Then there’s the sprawl of music released by the members’ other bands. Mountains and Rainbows and the Intended, for example, both had strong debut albums arrive this year. Members of Protomartyr and Saturday Looks Good to Me have played in Tyvek. The list goes on like that for a while.
Tyvek’s new album Origin of What is an acknowledgement of the band’s history; it features seven musicians from across the band’s lineups. Every new song shuffles the players, and other than Boyer, the only constant is Fred Thomas, who recorded the album and drums on 10 of the 12 tracks. Thomas and Boyer go way back: Thomas recorded a 2002 Boyer solo project, and more recently, worked on Tyvek’s On Triple Beams. These two anchors become important when Origin of What weaves between slower, paced material and all-out bashers. The opening two tracks “Tip to Tail” and “Can’t Exist” fall at the rowdier end of the spectrum, showing Tyvek at the height of their kinetic earworm powers. It’s also a one-two that shows a huge range in guitar tone—bleary echoing guitars linger in the background of the former while the latter is all crunch and distortion.
The faster, punchier stuff is counterbalanced by songs like “Origin of What”—a six-minute track with a more gradual, dense tread that addresses U.S. Steel and the decline of the Euro. Boyer has talked about the importance of the “subtle tics” in Tyvek songs, which is true—details and texture are always key to the character of their records. There's a moment on “Choose Once” when a once-prominent vocal is suddenly swallowed beneath the song’s huge primary guitar line, as if Boyer’s mic was kicked over. Then there’s “Tyvek Chant,” a song comprised of repeated screams and guitars that seem to come through an AM radio feed, abstracted by crackles and fuzz.
Several pieces on Origin of What show that the Tyvek operation is generally more subtle than their shout-along, high-speed rock‘n’roll masterworks might suggest. “Underwater Three Dub” is the most gentle point of the record—a collaboration between Boyer, Thomas, and Shelley Salant (who makes spacey, hypnotic instrumental guitar records under the name Shells). While this melody floats and shimmers, Boyer sings a mantra of sorts: “No limits. Smash limits.” Aided by the instincts of his collaborators, Boyer threads together these wordy, detail-stuffed songs that are fast and staid, intense and gentle, paranoid and curious. Punk can be uniform and boring. By spreading out and proving adept at several modes, Tyvek show that this music can be plenty inclusive—that there are no limits.


The NYC band’s first album in seven years is sluggish and slight, rendering their signature sound as background music.

The New Abnormal

Just as the clock struck midnight on a new decade, Julian Casablancas delivered the news that Strokes fans had been waiting to hear. “The 2010s, whatever the fuck they’re called, we took ‘em off,” he announced at the band’s New Year’s Eve show in Brooklyn. “And now we’ve been unfrozen and we’re back.” No matter where the last 10 years have left you—Angles defender, Voidz apologist, Meet Me in the Bathroom nostalgist who gave up hope a long time ago—it was easy to feel a trickle of excitement. After all, what Strokes fan wouldn’t want to believe this band’s spotty recent output was the result of a long-dormant period and not because, you know, they all hate each other and have a dozen other projects they’d rather focus on? And what better time to launch their comeback than a holiday marked by great expectations and even greater partying?
The New Abnormal, the Strokes’ sixth album and first in seven years, mostly just feels like a hangover. It’s sluggish and slight, and the strongest hooks are so familiar that they require additional writing credits for the ’80s hits they copy note-for-note (Billy Idol’s “Dancing With Myself” in “Bad Decisions,” Psychedelic Furs’ “The Ghost in You” in “Eternal Summer”). Of course, the Strokes have never been subtle with their references—that’s part of the fun—but they’ve become increasingly uninterested in the tight, classic songcraft that once felt entirely their own. With producer Rick Rubin, a presence so hands-off as to feel merely symbolic, their signature sound is rendered as background music, a set of bleary-eyed mood pieces, all hovering around the five-minute mark before fizzling out with a shrug.
A generous read is that it’s a style they have never attempted before: pushing their songs to their limits, maintaining a state of Zen in their machinelike interplay. In the nearly 20 years since Is This It, the Strokes have never quite found a way to successfully expand on their blueprint. There are the loungey, drum-less ballads you can expect to find about halfway through all their tracklists (“Ask Me Anything,” “Call Me Back,” this album’s first single “At the Door”). And then there are the proggy, metallic experiments that Casablancas now seems content to channel through Voidz, a project he has plainly admitted is where his passion lies. Historically, neither mode has led to anyone’s favorite Strokes songs. And so the best moments on The New Abnormal, like the genuinely pretty “Ode to the Mets,” feel like a step in the right direction. When everything locks into place, it’s like watching an old pinball machine light up, one level at a time.
Another small victory is that Casablancas’ falsetto has improved. What once felt like a novelty (at best) actually leads to some striking moments. The verses of “Eternal Summer” are sleek and exciting—that is, until the unfortunate Austin Powers impression of a bridge waltzes in to kill everyone’s buzz. “The Adults Are Talking,” with its steady build and soaring climax, adds to their legacy of great album openers. After his distracted performances on Angles and Comedown Machine, Casablancas now sounds tasked with keeping spirits light; from the slurred Sinatra croon in “Not the Same Anymore” to his pop-punk sneer in “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus,” he seems up for the challenge.
But the spark fades quickly, and you’re left with a set of promising ideas for Strokes songs with their fire stomped out. Casablancas has spoken about a politicized edge to his recent lyrics, but his allusions to the climate crisis (“Eternal Summer”) and body-shaming (“Selfless”) fail to inspire much urgency in his bandmates. And while their trademark fuzz once made their albums sound like well-loved mixtapes handed down through the decades, the same quality now makes you feel like they’re piecing together scraps. Disjointed songs like “Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus” and “Selfless” literally grind to a halt and start over after each chorus, like they tried to figure out a better transition and then just gave up.
“You’re not the same anymore/Don’t want to play that game anymore,” Casablancas sings in a ballad near the end of the album. And why should he? No band deserves to be held to the standard they set in their twenties, and no fan should want to hear their heroes rehash old poses for a quick paycheck. The current democratic nature of the Strokes (the music is credited to “The Strokes,” while the first three records were credited exclusively to Casablancas) means that simply bringing ideas to fruition requires more compromise—that is to say, more work. It also means that a band who should be settling into their legacy is still suffering from growing pains. “There was never a feeling of: we fucking made it! Roll credits!”, Albert Hammond Jr. recently confessed about their rise to fame. “It was always this kind of half-anxious, half-exciting ‘What the hell is happening?’” For all its faults, The New Abnormal might capture how the Strokes are feeling: not ready to fade out, not primed for a comeback. Right now, they’re just way too tired.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Danny Brown's XXX was a concept album about desperation and Old is a concept album about existential confusion. Growing up might not be as dramatic a subject as burning out, but it's more relatable to most of us, and it's no accident that it resulted in the best and most resonant album of the rapper's career.

Old

Danny Brown's XXX was a concept album about desperation; "If this shit don't work, nigga, I failed at life!" he wailed on the opening song. Old is a concept album about existential confusion. Danny Brown has not failed at life—he's independently successful, with a fervent fan base both inside and out of rap. Now he's got to sort out how to best continue living. It might not be as dramatic a subject as flaming out, but it's more relatable to most of us, and it's maybe no accident that it resulted in the best and most resonant album of Brown's career.
In preparing critics and fans, Brown went to great lengths to warn us not to expect another XXX—"If people are just looking for dick-sucking jokes, there isn't too many of them," he said back in January. "I listened to Old every day and thought, ‘I need to make this more entertaining," he told Pitchfork later. When I ran into him at SXSW and introduced myself, he gave me a quizzical smile: "I'm challenging ya'll with the next one," he joked, looking slightly uneasy. The irony of Old, of course, is that Danny Brown's version of a sober, measured, mature album still features plenty of lines about snorting crushed pills, throwing up in hotel sinks, and smoking so much kush you feel yourself falling off of the earth. Some things haven't changed.
The album is divided into a "Side A" and a "Side B," an act of aesthetic devotion that signals Danny Brown's unusual investment in the arcana of music fandom. Last year, he famously told a bewildered A$AP Rocky that one of his heroes was Arthur Lee before lecturing him on the merits of Forever Changes. The structure here suggests two LP sides, neatly divided, but one of the best things about Old is how mixed up it is—Brown's past, his present, his deranged side, his reflective side, his party songs and his nightmares. "Problems in my past haunt my future and the present," he moans on "Clean Up". The album is 19 songs, ranging across so much emotional terrain that it almost needs to be tackled in stretches.
Side A contains the heaviest, most harrowing material, but the demons he exorcises there don't stay put. Bad memories pop up everywhere on Old, including the louder, more festival-ready second half. The album's structure pokes at the notion of forward motion: At the end of the first track, an unrelentingly ugly crack-sale reminiscence taking place in an abandoned house in Detroit, A-Trak scratches in a hook from "New Era", a song off of Brown's 2010 release The Hybrid. An incident Brown alluded to on XXX's "Fields"—"mommy gave me food stamps, told me buy some Wonderbread/ On the the way, these niggas jumped me, left with knots in my head"—gets expanded to song-length on "Wonderbread" and then referenced again at the end of the album. The cumulative message is layered: 1) Stop asking for the old Danny Brown, because I've been working double-time trying to escape him, and 2) Stop asking for the old Danny Brown, because he's obviously still here.
There are multiple "old Danny Browns," as well: There's the kid from "Torture", whose mind "ticked off, desensitized to a lot of things" after watching "unk beatin on my auntie" and a fiend "damn near burn his top lip off." There's the crack-dealer, who Brown is similarly eager to dispense with: "This the last time I'mma tell it/ Wanna hear it? Here it go," he says on "Side B," before launching into the details of his old trade. And there's the drug abuser, whom he catalogs unsparingly on "Clean Up", ignoring text messages from his daughter while he gets high in a hotel room.
This is a complicated narrative to keep running but Brown is equal to the task. In his berserk originality, writerly flair, emotional impact, and old-fashioned craft, Danny Brown belongs in any conversation about the best rappers working, and he's at the top of his game here. His rapping is abrasive and visceral, but it's also musical, a quality he doesn't get much credit for because of his vocal tone. Listen to the way he rolls the word sounds "fucked up" and "knuckles" on "Dubstep" off of a perfect little woodpecker-stutter of percussion. Or his subdued performance on "Lonely" featuring a fluid, airy beat by Paul White built from two Morice Benin samples.
The production is richly textured, unlikely, and surprising, solidifying Brown's left-field taste. He bends your ear back rapping over conventionally gritty hip-hop tracks from Oh No and Paul White and tackles a range of things that most rappers would run from, including the Rustie-produced electro-squelch "Way Up Here", a cluttered, frantic beat that feels expressly designed to trip rappers up. Ab-Soul and Brown muscle the octopus-armed thing to the ground. He barks over airhorn-shrill party anthems like "Dip"and "Handstand" and broods conversationally on the Charli XCX-featuring "Float On". Brown has always made a compelling case for being weird, but he's never sounded this realized or confident in his weirdness before.
"Float On", which closes the album, is an "Elevators"-like lope, complete with woodblock knock, that finds Brown clearing away the static and bearing down on the only thing he's certain about: "Nothing else matter except my next rhyme," he murmurs. Remembering a time when he had "music in my heart, but my thoughts wouldn't listen," he prays to get old so that he can "see my influence on this genre of music." It's the humblest and most powerful wish I've heard on a record all year.


The soundtrack for a new Amazon Original series seeks to emulate the magic of Fleetwood Mac. More often than not, it ends up sounding like a Broadway tribute.

Aurora

In Daisy Jones & the Six, the bestselling novel inspired by Fleetwood Mac’s tumultuous history, Taylor Jenkins Reid writes an album’s worth of song lyrics to hint at her fictional band’s pathos. In the climactic “Regret Me,” frontwoman Daisy Jones delivers a devastating burn to her co-lead and songwriting partner, Billy Dunne: “When you think of me, I hope it ruins rock’n’roll.” It’s a terrible line, but in the book it’s met with shock and awe. Reid’s lyrics are packed with zingers capturing the vocalists’ romantic tension, a strain that ultimately spells the Six’s undoing.
“Regret Me” gets the full studio treatment in the Amazon Original series, an adaptation of Reid’s book. While the TV version of that song is outfitted with new lyrics, the barbs are similarly clunky: “Go ahead and regret me/But I’m beating you to it, dude.” Still, the soundtrack album accompanying the series, Aurora, is a can’t-lose proposition for producer Blake Mills. With crack session players and a fathomless budget behind him, he gets to chase his own Laurel Canyon masterpiece; the fictional conceit provides cover when he falls short. Contributors on this record include Marcus Mumford, Madison Cunningham, and Roger Joseph Manning Jr. The fact that they got the Jackson Browne to write music for the adaptation of a supermarket novel says more about the record biz than Amazon’s mockumentary possibly could.
At its most ambitious, Aurora approximates the incremental trajectories of Fleetwood Mac’s late-’70s work. “Let Me Down Easy” and “Regret Me” careen through striking melodic pivots, anchored by warm Rhodes keys and the vocal harmonies of actors Sam Claflin and Riley Keough, who play Jones and Dunne in the series. On “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb),” the acoustic chords and kick drum gather momentum en route to a soaring single-chord guitar solo. It’s a clear nod to Rumours’ “The Chain,” but the degree of intricacy—not to mention the bravura guitar work—makes for a rewarding homage.
Mills knows that trying to replicate Fleetwood Mac’s opus is a fool’s errand, so he hedges his bets. The title track is more redolent of the Nashville machine than Laurel Canyon, and the vocal duets betray a Broadway sheen. On “Look at Us Now,” Claflin’s exaggerated vibrato fails to compensate for underwritten lyrics: “I don’t know who I am, baby, baby, baby/Do you know who you are? Is it out of our hands?” There’s no symbolism or mystique, no white-winged doves or Rhiannons—it’s hard to imagine any of these adult-contemporary show tunes cracking the FM rotation, let alone in 1977.
For the most part, Keough and Claflin sing the way they act—sweet and earnest, with no discernible angst. Keough plays Jones as she appears in Reid’s novel: a tressed enigma with an ineffable darkness about her, drawn to Billy against her better instincts. Claflin never nails the California-by-way-of-Pittsburgh accent, but his hair looks great. Aurora’s finale “No Words,” an inane ode to writer’s block, typifies the series’ portrayal of music-making. The prosaic writing mirrors the chirpy dialogue, the throes of desire and rejection reduced to window dressing.
But Mills and the band really go for it on “The River.” A propulsive, full-bodied production, it deploys an unabashed melody and succinct metaphors, relishing a moody post-chorus and roomy instrumental breaks. The verse structure maximizes the vocal duet; for once, Keough sounds like a rock singer instead of an actor playing one on TV. As she vamps through the breakdown bridge, it’s easy to imagine her whirling around in one of Stevie Nicks’ bangled getups.
In Reid’s novel, Aurora is the soft-rock holy grail, an achievement that transforms American music and rends its creators in the process. The series is burdened by the same strictures as folk musicals Begin Again and Juliet, Naked, not to mention low-prestige cable dramas Vinyl and Dave: In dramatizing the creative process and the difficulty of genius, the work becomes secondary. Logistically, a narrative hinging on transcendent music is undone when the songs are just pretty good. The album struggles to apprehend Fleetwood Mac’s audacity, conflating a ‘70s rock pinnacle with easy-listening ballads. Aurora is bold only as far as tribute-band supergroups go.


Justin Timberlake’s fifth album is a huge misstep for the pop star. It is warm, indulgent, inert, and vacuous.

Man of the Woods

It’s remarkable how few ideas are contained within this hour-plus Blue Ridge Mountains mood board of an album. Man of the Woods is a misstep large enough to merit relitigating Justin Timberlake’s status as a pop superstar. How much of his career should we chalk up to fortune, privilege, and an essential malleability? Is working with Pharrell Williams and Timbaland—pantheon-level producers who collaborated extensively with Timberlake at or near the peak of their powers, and continue to do so—an act of creative genius, or just kismet? There may be no definite answers. But Man of the Woods’ failure invites the questions.
Timberlake wants to be thought of as an innovator. He struck gold at the beginning of his solo career with “Cry Me a River,” an icy amalgam of beat-boxing and Gregorian chants that’s still thrilling 16 years later. He had the gall to name an album FutureSex/LoveSounds and filled it with pop inventive enough to live up to the title. He embraced auteurist extravagance across the messy, occasionally brilliant halves of The 20/20 Experience. When he unveiled Man of the Woods, his first album in five years, he framed his new music as the product of an audacious fusion of Southern sounds. Its problems invite the listener to scrap this narrative and stitch together a different story. Forget the album’s trailer—in which Timberlake comes out of the closet as a fire-building, creek-wading, baby-clutching Jeremiah Johnson cosplayer—or the baffling videos for singles like “Filthy” and the Migos-meets-preppers joint “Supplies.” It’s all there in the music: warm, indulgent, inert, and vacuous.
Man of the Woods rings hollow with familial contentment: Timberlake’s wife, the actress Jessica Biel, sings or speaks on a handful of tracks, and closer “Young Man” comes complete with a cooing feature from Timberlake’s toddler. Even the credits have a no-new-friends feel: The majority of the album was made in tandem with the Neptunes, Timbaland, and Danja, the chief architects of his sound from Justified onwards. Instead of surging forward with a new vision for pop music, it leans on the sounds and genres that have become American comfort food: country, soul, funk, disco, gospel.
Matrimonial and paternal pride suit Timberlake nicely under the right circumstances, and they’ve certainly brought him success in the past. The 20/20 Experience highlight “Mirrors” is a genuinely touching tribute to a partner without whom Timberlake feels incomplete, and a treacly bit of disco cut from the Trolls soundtrack became one of the biggest hits of his career. There are a few endearing moments on Man of the Woods that operate in this mode, songs anchored by one soupçon of detail that keeps them from dissipating into pure meaninglessness. He recounts an awkward introduction on the swaggering “Higher Higher,” one that ends with Timberlake and his partner dancing to Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” The late-’70s Bee Gees throb of “Montana” is the perfect fit for a romantic—and potentially hallucinogenic—evening in the mountains. And while “Breeze Off the Pond” leans on a layered-harmony trick Timberlake’s been using for a solid decade, it also invites you to imagine him taking a stoned canoe trip soundtracked by “Tiny Dancer.” Timberlake is such an abjectly poor lyricist that scraps like these feel like manna from heaven.
Too much of Man of the Woods is musically and thematically shallow; at 66 minutes, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep. There’s a point midway through the album—right around the threadbare-shirt hymnal “Flannel”—where you realize “modern Americana with 808s” wasn’t just a cute tagline: That’s really the whole idea, and it quickly wears thin. Timberlake may have yanked back the reins on the interminable song lengths of The 20/20 Experience, but many of these tracks still manage to overstay their welcome by a minute or two. They don’t have the hooks or the dynamism to justify their continued existence: phrases get recycled, breakdowns feel like intrusions from completely different songs, grooves are sought but remain undiscovered. “Midnight Summer Jam” is a sub-Robin Thicke boogie with a sub-John Popper harmonica solo; “Sauce” is Beyoncé’s “Don’t Hurt Yourself” cut with a jug full of pond water.
And there’s no refuge from the lyrics, which in many places engender the same mix of emotions you’d confront upon walking in on your parents having sex. Timberlake never quite oozed virility—he topped out somewhere around “Hollister model breaking bad”—but this aspect of his persona has aged particularly poorly. The horny android moans and tiger growls of “Filthy” are sensual and elegant compared to “Sauce,” which invites you to imagine a partner’s “pink” pressing up against Timberlake’s “purple.” The title track features this charming depiction of foreplay: “But then your hands talkin’, fingers walkin’/Down your legs, hey, there’s the faucet.” He takes a break from amassing iodine tablets on “Supplies” to reminisce about an early morning flight home, “just to show up and hear your sounds (The multiple times!)” That last phrase is delivered with a puff of Auto-Tuned harmony and driven home when the beat cuts out for a split-second, which is just enough time for you to realize how excited he is about making his wife orgasm more than once. Whether or not the faucet is running at this point remains unclear.
This isn’t just prudishness at work, either. The songs that have nothing to do with coital bliss are just as lifeless. “Say Something,” a duet with beloved Nashville star Chris Stapleton, defies every attempt to discern some kind of through line or coherent message; the profound conclusion reached during the bridge is that “Sometimes the greatest way to say something/Is to say nothing at all.”
Father-to-son message “Young Man” is similarly devoid of any meaningful advice. According to Timberlake, here’s a short list of things a young man should know: stand for something; don’t back down; don’t act out; don’t stay down; you’re gonna break somebody’s heart, because “that’s what we do.” Other artists of Timberlake’s stature have written songs in this same vein imbued with anxiety, regret, and hard-earned wisdom. When they’re done right, they glow with the unconditional love parents feel for their children. “Young Man” is an insipid birthday card by comparison.
Timberlake is performing at his second Super Bowl halftime show as a solo artist this weekend. He’s returning to the stage as an old family friend, one unblemished by the “wardrobe malfunction” that kneecapped Janet Jackson 14 years ago. The incident is a microcosm of Timberlake’s career: At no point has his ascendance been interrupted by anything like negative consequences. He played a pivotal role in one of this century’s defining TV controversies and was happily invited back to the scene of the crime little more than a decade later. He rush-recorded and released a massive two-part album to fulfill contractual obligations and was welcomed back into the music industry with arms wide open. He wore a full denim suit and cowboy hat on the red carpet; he played a crucial role in The Love Guru. None of it mattered. When you skate through your life unscathed, you accumulate hubris. And it takes a lot of hubris to make an album like Man of the Woods.


The acclaimed jazz bassist’s latest project, a three-part suite inspired by meditation and healing practices, seeks to alleviate the stress and upheaval of a pandemic year.

TRIANGLE

With her latest three-song suite, Esperanza Spalding follows a long line of Black artists who have sought to bring out music’s untapped potential for healing—from the rich oeuvres of John and Alice Coltrane to the John Coltrane Church that still stands over five decades later in San Francisco. Inspired by a far-reaching array of influences (Sufism, Black American and South Indian music), Spalding etched out early versions of the tracks and shared them with would-be collaborators. After consulting with music therapists, neuroscientists, and other practitioners, the resulting TRIANGLE suite is both meditative and operatic by design: Each “formwela” (song) not only elicits a different emotional response, but also attests to an intended outcome and benefit for the listener.
In recent years, Spalding’s albums have, in one form or another, delved into the connections between our physical and metaphysical selves: In 2016, Emily's D+Evolution lent a voice to an alter ego derived from her middle name, while each song on 2018’s 12 Little Spells corresponded to a particular body part. In the years since her breakout Grammy win for Best New Artist in 2011, Spalding has—like her predecessors—emerged as a vessel for boundless creativity and experimentalism. Her longtime bandmates (and fellow Berklee alumni), drummer Justin Tyson and pianist Leo Genovese, provide the ground required for her to soar and be more fully present in the music. With TRIANGLE, the 36-year-old singer and songwriter’s intentions are omnipresent, exploring the deeper, more tangible healing properties that music can provide.
The seeds for TRIANGLE were planted not long after the release of 12 Little Spells. Taking a leave from her work at Harvard, Spalding aided the renowned multi-reedist and composer Wayne Shorter, then in ailing health, and contributed the libretto for his opera (slated for release in fall 2021). Over six months, Spalding reportedly witnessed Shorter spring “back to life,” she told the New York Times, speaking to the restorative powers of music. Then, at the start of the pandemic, she found herself in Wasco County, Oregon, about 100 miles from her native Portland, where she was able to realize a years-old dream of opening an artists’ retreat. As she sat alone in a garden on the sprawling land, another glimmer for TRIANGLE came to her, and she began conceiving of different ways that music might alleviate the mounting stress of prolonged isolation during COVID-19.
“Formwela 1” opens with a mesmeric chant from Spalding, and soon “finds her center” with her upright bass and opening lyric: “Sink into the ground wide and steady while the burning/Flickers to a glow out the temple of your ear.” Accompanied by the musician and producer Phoelix on Rhodes, Spalding’s simple piano chords add further grounding to the track. Drawing from the elements of a meditation practice, the intended benefit is to root yourself, allowing whatever comes up to come up and to be receptive to it.
Countervailing the opening track, “Formwela 2” brings the listener into a more subconscious state of meditation. The intensity builds behind Ganavya Doraiswamy’s vocals, which are layered over Spalding’s hushed falsetto as she introduces her guiding mantras: “Remember the works of sun/Surrounding/Love/All grounding/Doesn’t mean it’s time to/Burn it to powder/Maybe now we learn to/Ride it out.” Her words feel especially evocative in connection with Portland, one of several cities nationwide that erupted in protest last summer following the killing of George Floyd. Spalding enlists the help of several percussionists—Steve Turre on conch shells, LaMont Hamilton on bells, James Greeley on bone whistle, and longtime collaborator Tyson on drums—offering her own version of nature and environment as a means to cope with the starkness of present-day society.
With the final track “Formwela 3,” we are drawn back to a conscious state, returning to reality once again. Arguably the most composed of the three tracks, there’s an overwhelming sense of abundance and release as Spalding’s mantric words grow in size and heft: “Wide atmospheres breathe and surround you/While we are stuck inside.” Each repetition of this closing mantra grows more palpable and lasting, achieving a powerful—albeit momentary—reassurance that life will eventually go on, that perhaps someday soon, it could even be better than before. The hopeful feeling is reaffirmed by Shorter himself, who emblazons the track with a fiery yet mindful dose of color on reeds.
Co-produced by Raphael Saadiq and recorded at his studio, TRIANGLE arrives via Spalding’s Songwrights Apothecary Lab, an online platform that promises to allow musicians, music therapists, composers, and others to incorporate therapeutic and healing sounds into their work. The convergence of jazz and spirituality, at one time, provided a platform for John and Alice Coltrane, Sun Ra, Weldon Irvine, and Pharoah Sanders, each imbued in an unbridled freedom to conjure untrodden and, often, intergalactic realms not previously taken by Black artists. As Esperanza Spalding now embarks on this new venture to help people through music, she rests on the shoulders of artists who made similarly bold attempts, while remaining mindful that even this form of self-care, especially today, is often considered a political act.

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On the follow-up to 2014’s electronic departure, Celestite, the Olympia band stumble in the attempt to find their way back to classic black metal.

Thrice Woven

Celestite, the fifth album from Wolves in the Throne Room, was a major departure for the Olympia, Washington, black metal group, foregrounding synths and drones and forsaking most traces of metal. Drummer Aaron Weaver reveled in the change, explaining how Detroit techno was black metal’s spiritual cousin and that their newly acquired gear didn’t always jibe with their rural surroundings. That proved to be a lot more interesting than the record itself, a poor imitation of German electronic music like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze saddled with a vague, esoteric veil that’s worn thin since their heyday. Thrice Woven is WITTR deboned. As welcome as it is that they’ve dropped Celestite’s pseudo-kosmische schtick, they’ve come back with a facsimile of what once was.
Returning to black metal lends a nostalgic feeling, though it’s unclear what exactly they’re nostalgic for. It’s not for Weakling, the San Francisco group that was their primary influence and for USBM as a whole, as WITTR have lost any warlike propulsion in their riffing. Most of Thrice Woven is spent crossing paths they’ve laid down and don’t seem enthusiastic to revisit. It’s still guitarist and vocalist Nathan Weaver’s show, even with the addition of Aldebaran guitarist Kody Keyworth. “Born From the Serpent’s Eye” starts off with some inkling a fire has returned, hinting at black thrash about three minutes in. But by “Angrboda,” Thrice Woven sounds tired, like WITTR imitating themselves. Even with choral vocal breaks, it’s doesn’t represent the intersection of sublime and feral that used to be natural. The album is dimmer than their previous works, but they’re not trying to return to USBM’s raw, buzzy, and confused beginnings. WITTR stood in opposition to rawness for the sake of rawness and to the bastardized European sounds that characterized so many American bands before them. At least, that’s what the optics suggested. Now, it’s not clear where they stand, or if they care about their own position.
Even their usual routine of bringing in notable West Coast musicians falls flat with Neurosis guitarist Steve Von Till contributing acoustic guitar and gravelly vocals on the doom-laden “The Old Ones Are With Us.” It’s their most high-profile guest contribution, and while he brings heft Thrice Woven needs, he can’t shift ennui on his own. Electronics, the focus of Celestite, are heavily scaled back, and in their supporting role they fail to uplift. There is a return to Celestite’s drone on “Fires Roar in the Palace of the Moon,” and noise is interspersed throughout “Angrboda,” but both songs’ synth work feels slight enough that if it were mixed out, it wouldn’t radically alter the songs. Faced between doubling down on a style that got a mixed reception or refining their old sound, WITTR instead go a middle route that’s almost as boring as it is reliable.
Thrice Woven lays out the harsh truth about WITTR: They’ve been eclipsed by the movement they spearheaded. USBM has expanded in many different directions, from injecting itself into the avant-garde to embracing America’s own folk music; one of their descendants is considered a capital-M Metal band that opens for Slipknot and Danzig. A decade ago, they released their second record, Two Hunters, where they strengthened the marriage of Weakling’s might with celestial beauty, coming out as a legitimate new black metal voice. “I Will Lay Down My Bones Among the Rocks and Roots” remains a modern classic for taking the Cascadian sound to heights only rivaled by Emperor and Viking-era Bathory, and there simply isn’t anything half as powerful on Thrice Woven. Innovators stop innovating at some point, and the strength of a metal band that’s at least a decade in comes from balancing small tweaks with consistency. They failed about reinventing themselves, and now they’ve failed at finding their way back.


Coming after a 17-year hiatus, the second LP by American Football* *might be the most highly anticipated emo album ever made.

American Football

American Football were a band destined to flourish in a specific time and place—it just happened to come at the turn of this decade, 10 years or so after they stopped making new music. Earnest, energetic and often ignored by critics, late-90s, Midwestern emo—defined by American Football, Braid and the Promise Ring—was ripe for reassessment around 2010 and fittingly found its audience in a moment where indie shifted hard towards avant-R&B  cool and college-quad chill. Regardless of when this new vanguard emerged, it’s proven incredibly resilient, with nearly all of its scene leaders releasing their best work in the past year. Unlike, say, freak-folk or dance-punk, emo in the 2010s doesn’t seem like a reactionary microtrend so much as the current prevailing sound of indie rock. And its single biggest influence is American Football’s sole, self-titled album of elliptical, post-rock and jazz-inflected emo, which transmogrified from one of the many short-lived and modestly revered offshoots of the Cap’n Jazz family tree (i.e., Friend/Enemy, Owls, Make Believe)  to an essential part of the canon—steering the genre from Hot Topic and Warped Tour into headier territory. Earlier this year, Mike Kinsella told us American Football never intended “to be popular, or even be a band.” They’re unquestionably both now, and the second American Football might be the most highly anticipated emo album ever made.
Kinsella is too self-deprecating to milk whatever mystique American Football has accumulated; LP2 exists because the band enjoyed touring but was tired of having to play the same songs. He’s also too self-aware to not acknowledge that LP2 has expectations. “Where are we now?” he asks on the first new American Football song of the 21st century. “Both home alone, in the same house”—you know, like the one on both album covers. The title of each song here is the first line; on American Football, they were the last line. The think pieces write themselves.
But upon establishing this type of secret-handshake rapport with the diehard listener, the type for whom this is the equivalent of anxiously awaited, decades-spanning sequels m b v or Wildflower or Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...Pt. 2, “Where Are We Now?” pivots and speaks to the festival crowds and the 3,000-cap rooms. For one thing, there’s a chorus— something that American Football lacked altogether—a klieg-lighted, waltz-time sway with moaning guitar leads, the kind that typified Sunny Day Real Estate in their later prog phase. The 4/4 kick drum thump in the first verse of lead single “I’ve Been So Lost For So Long” works on a similar level—the crowd is going to clap along to this one, it’s “the hit” now. While the new wave of emo hasn’t yet produced a Jimmy Eat World-level crossover, these songs ask, why not American Football themselves?
Produced in spurts of Dropbox exchanges and playdates over the span of two years, but working on a strict deadline, LP2 stresses proficiency and immediacy. Play it back-to-back with the original, knocked out in a weekend with college graduation looming, and Kinsella’s stated belief that American Football circa-2016 is a massive upgrade doesn’t seem all that heretical. The production is bracingly bright and crisp compared to the overcast American Football, hitting like the first true fall chill after a muggy Indian summer. They’re also sharper songwriters than they were as University of Illinois undergrads—the twin guitars no longer intermingle with fuzzy friction, they’re gridlocked into Pinback-like metronomy on “My Instincts Are the Enemy,” while “Desire Gets in the Way” punches out of the somber Side B, almost indistinguishable from Kinsella’s punkier protegees from Into It. Over It.
Sturdy song structures, legitimate hooks, a full-time bassist (Mike’s cousin, Nate Kinsella)—some of this can be seen as troubleshooting for a bigger audience. But the aspect upon which every opinion on LP2 will hinge is that American Football has a *frontman *now. There are no instrumentals or even the extended passages of “Honestly?” and “Stay Home” that predicted the sweeping post-emo of The World Is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die and Foxing. With his vocals pushed pop-star high in the mix, Kinsella is a dominating presence, and LP2 sounds suspiciously familiar. Nine songs of Mike Kinsella assessing his self-worth in taut, spare songs of spindly guitar and tenderized vocals, well—that essentially describes Kinsella’s long-running solo project Owen.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Owen albums are consistently pretty good, but there are nine of them: including one that came out not three months ago. The King of Whys is the first Owen release to follow the American Football reboot and whether or not that was responsible for a heightened interest in the project, the album was recorded with a full band and an outside producer who likes the same bells, whistles and trumpets—it’s the Owen record that sounds the most like American Football.
For fans who want a second masterwork as vindication for American Football, LP2 doesn’t exude the stakes it should, not when it’s so easy to see “Empty Bottle” and the Volcano Choir-esque “Settled Down” as possibly culled from the same well of inspiration that provides “I Need a Drink (Or Two, or Three)” and the “Holocene”-esque “Home Is Where the Haunt Is.”  In a more tangible way, the rebrand of American Football as a straightforward songwriting outfit inevitably relegates their inventive musicianship to the periphery. Within limited pockets of space, “Give Me the Gun” reconfigures American Football’s history to place them as contemporaries and neighbors of Tortoise as well as acolytes of Steve Reich and the Blue Nile. Meanwhile, the spiraling codas of “Born to Lose” and “I Need a Drink (Or Two or Three)” are layered, nuanced, emotionally complex and in sharp contrast to the record’s clunkiest vocals (“dead eyes, why such vulgarity?,” “I can’t break this bender, to it I surrender”).
And as he is on Owen records, Kinsella is a high-variance kind of lyricist here. Kinsella admitted that he was writing lyrics for LP2 until the last minute and at points, it's questionable whether he would've been better off spending more effort writing or less. Stock phrases can work as mantras when they stay within their cadence (“Home Is Where the Haunt Is”) and other times, lyrics that read embarrassing from a guy pushing 40 can conceivably work in an arrested-development, Beach-Slang sort of way. Then again, James Alex’s sole purpose is to remain in his 20s; when Kinsella plaintively sings, “Doctor it hurts when I exist” and “I’m as blue as the sky is gray...I’m gonna die this way,” it’s unclear whether they’re meant to be taken at face value, or if we’re all supposed to see it as an emo elder statesman playing the role for laughs.
But this question doesn’t really change the nature of the band—American Football wasn’t some self-released obscurity in 1999 when Kinsella was best known as a former member of Cap’n Jazz and even then, “I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional” alone proves Kinsella doesn’t see sincerity and self-awareness as opposed. But even if the influences and underlying sentiments are quite similar this time out, American Football shouldn’t be expected to musically, or emotionally, express themselves the same way they did when they were in their late teens. Made by, and largely for, college-aged emo fans, American Football reflected a time when hours on end could spent staring off into the distance to consider the changing leaves and lost loves while “The One With the Wurlitzer” faded out. In 2016, the members of American Football have spouses, kids, publishing careers, office jobs, the things that makes nostalgia for a bygone moment an indulgence rather than a sustainable worldview. To paraphrase Homer Simpson, LP2 is by and for people who are lucky to find a half hour a week in which to get wistful.


The steely Dublin post-punk band infuse the bitterness and rage of The Fall with punch-drunk romanticism.

Dogrel

In its original form, post-punk was essentially punk rock with the rock stripped out, putting a premium on rhythm over riffs, atmosphere over songcraft, and abstract lyrical impressionism over circle-pit chants. And on first pass, Fontaines D.C. seem like faithful students. Over the past year, they’ve swiftly staked out an elevated perch alongside IDLES and Shame amid a young class of groups from the Britain and Ireland who are embracing post-punk antagonism as a necessary response to modern-day discord. And in Grian Chatten, they have a frontman blessed with Ian Curtis’ intense stare and Mark E. Smith’s megaphone mouth, favoring a sternly delivered, free-ranging shout-speak that frequently veers far outside the lines of traditional pop-song structure.
But Fontaines D.C. are fueled by neither IDLES revolutionary fervor nor Shame’s festering disgust. They’re not raging against the current state of affairs as much as lamenting the local communities and culture in danger of being steamrolled by the march of modernity. As such, Fontaines D.C. are very much a post-punk band reclaiming a certain pre-punk innocence. Their origin story is so quaint and anachronistic, it verges on flaneur cosplay, with the quintet reportedly bonding over a mutual love of Joycean poetry and pub nights spent scribbling out and reciting verses to one another. That old-school approach finds its analog in a raw, robust twin-guitar attack that’s more jangly than jagged, nodding to ‘60s garage, surf, and early rock‘n’roll while projecting a confrontational fury.
Fontaines D.C. hail from Dublin, a fact that would be instantly obvious even if Chatten didn’t open Dogrel by emphatically declaring, “Dublin in the rain is mine/A pregnant city with a Catholic mind.” His unvarnished, melody-averse brogue is the band’s most distinctive feature, and his lyrics are loaded with the sort of regional-landmark references and vivid scenery that will send non-Irish listeners to Google Street View. But while Fontaines D.C. are eager ambassadors for Dublin’s past, they’re less enchanted with its present status as one of Europe’s most bustling tech hubs—and the widening income inequality that comes with it. The jackhammered opener “Big” centers around a bold declaration—“My childhood was small/ But I’m going to be big!”—that initially echoes another famous statement of purpose: Oasis’ “Rock N’ Roll Star.” But in a world where there’s no rock‘n’roll stardom left to aspire to, “Big” doubles as a cautionary caricature of blind ambition and aspirational greed.
The rest of Dogrel likewise walks the tightrope between surly and celebratory. “Too Real” hits the streets with a careening intensity rarely heard since The Walkmen’s urban-paranoia classic “The Rat,” but as guitarists Carlos O’Connell and Connor Curley shoot off feedback sparks like a getaway car scraping a guardrail, Chatten takes a surprise back-alley respite from the surrounding clamor, marveling at the wintry skies and garbage swirling in the wind. And if the staccato rumble of “Sha Sha Sha” depicts the very act of existence as just another clock-punching routine (“Now here comes the sun/That’s another one done”), the sweet, simple rattle of a tambourine appears partway through like a flower rising from a sidewalk crack.
Fontaines D.C. have cited fellow Dublin noisemakers Girl Band as a crucial influence, as much for their eccentric spirit as their abrasive sound. “Before that, the only way to sound Irish was to be fuckin’ ‘diddly-diddly-aye,’” Chatten recently told Noisey. “They modernized Irish music massively.” To wit, the band’s most heroic anthem, “Boys in the Better Land” may have been inspired by Chatten’s encounter with an Anglophobic Dublin cabbie, but it takes the form of a riotous, British Invasion-styled rave-up that frames distinctly local issues as universal truths.
Still, as a band defined by its love/hate relationship with its hometown, Fontaines D.C. can’t help but indulge in one hallowed Celtic-pop tradition: the Guinness-hoisting last-call ballad. Chatten fully embraces his inner Shane MacGowan on “Dublin City Sky,” a comedown closer that finds the singer plying his rigid voice around a sensitive, romantic serenade—and though it doesn’t yet feel like a natural fit, the poignancy is undeniable. Slow-dancing in some Chinatown bar, feeling “as drunk as love is lethal,” Chatten reminds us that the most effective means of psychological survival in a big, ever-changing city is to savor the intimate moments.


With some modern flourishes, Kool Keith, Dan the Automator, and DJ QBert reconvene mostly for a boom-bap throwback to the ill and the grotesque style of their first 1996 outing.

Dr. Octagon: Moosebumps: An Exploration Into Modern Day Horripilation

For a certain kind of hip-hop fan—say, those who proudly owned a Mo’ Wax T-shirt—the return of Dr. Octagon is big news. Although often seen as a Kool Keith solo project, Dr. Octagon’s 1996 debut album Dr. Octagonecologyst sprang from a collaboration between Keith, producer Dan “The Automator” Nakamura, and turntablist DJ QBert (with input from KutMasta Kurt). The group assembled an album that delighted rap fans with its left-field production and grotesque humor. Moosebumps is not quite the sequel to that record (that dubious honor falls to 2006’s disastrous The Return of Dr. Octagon), but Moosebumps certainly feels like it should be, as Keith, Nakamura, and QBert reunite to cook up a faithful reproduction of the Octagonecologyst sound.
Of the three, QBert’s work on Moosebumps is perhaps least essential but most instantly impressive. His brand of battle turntablism may have fallen out of fashion since 1996, a year when crabs, flares, and tears were part of stock hip-hop vocabulary, but he remains as sharp as ever, spraying the mix with frantic, jazzy scratches that enhance the music without overcoming it. “Bear Witness IV,” a woozy remake of Octagonecologyst’s “Bear Witness,” shows QBert at his freeform best, his dextrous work a reminder of how scratching can make the turntables just sing.
If QBert’s contribution is the whipped cream to the Octagon gateau, then Nakamura provides the cakey base. Nakamura uses dusty drum breaks, funk bass lines, horns, piano, and strings, peppered with just the right amount of weirdness, to recreate the surreal boom bap soundtrack style of Octagonecologyst. Those who welcome Moosebumps as an exercise in sentimentality will find Nakamura’s production to be a very satisfying retread of old ground—the haunting violin sound on “Operation Zero” raises happy memories of Octagonecologyst’s “Blue Flowers,” for example—but some of the best moments come when the producer switches things up a little, using sleazy guitar riffs on the swaggering “Karma Sutra” and a sun-swept ambient funk on “Flying Waterbed.”
On Dr. Octagonecologyst, Keith employed vivid non sequiturs, free association, and catchphrase-friendly punch lines as he brilliantly traced the adventures of a homicidal, sex-obsessed surgeon who can travel through time. On Moosebumps he returns to Octagonecologyst’s central character but the results are considerably less sharp, with moments of pointed comic brilliance like, “You wait for X-rays having sex with a neck brace” swamped by a lackluster opacity. Opening track “Octagon Octagon” is the worst offender, with Keith reeling off an increasingly exasperating list of Octagon products (“Octagon rice with octagon beans with octagon shrimp”) as he rips the momentum from under one of Nakamura’s strongest beats.
Nakamura says that Dr. Octagon has “always looked to the future.” But rather than a futuristic conquest, Moosebumps brings to mind a collection of recently discovered Octagonecologyst outtakes. Dr. Octagonecologyst was an album that offered a genuinely unhinged alternative to the 1996 class of hip-hop and Keith, Nakamura, and QBert have recreated its uniquely creep chemistry in style. And yet only a handful of the tracks on Moosebumps—“Operation Zero,” the ghoulish head nodder “Area 54,” and maybe “Flying Waterbed”—would have stood a chance of making it onto the group’s first album. Like Wu-Tang revivals and a good pair of Wallabees, Moosebumps will make aging hip-hop fans very happy. But new listeners are unlikely to come running at the good doctor’s call.


Latest from the Chilean producer, one of the central figures in minimal techno, is technically an EP, but its four percolating tracks stretch to nearly 50 minutes.

Achso

Here's a little fact to ponder: Google tells me the words "Ricardo Villalobos" appear in six out of the eight "Month in Techno" features Big Phil Sherburne penned for this site in the year 2005. I can't find anyone else who approaches that. Not Dominik "K-hole" Eulberg. Not Michael "International DJ Superstar" Mayer. Not Hans-Peter "Space Disconaut" Lindstrom. Apparently in 2005, the geist of techno swung to Mr. Villalobos, brittle zeit.
As the person most responsible for "ketamine house," sweet Ricardo has been chasing his personal white rabbit down any number of holes for the last few years now. (On record, of course.) Alcachofa redrew "jazzy house" with a broken piece of charcoal. Thè au Harem d'Archiméde approached drooling stasis through geologic repetitions. And in 2005 he seemed to have given up on the album format entirely, producing a series of singles that stretch right to the lip of the vinyl, unafraid of what goes on over the edge. Mssr. Sherburne has already commented that if you could get more than 15 minutes of decent sound on a vinyl single, Villalobos would just keep going and going and going.
Slipping out in the last weeks of December and at just a hair under 50 minutes, Achso is not an EP. The only thing that has kept it from receiving the same attention as Villalobos' two albums is form: a vinyl double-pack in an era where many music hipsters have given up even CDs. This is a shame because it might be his best work.
"Ichso" opens as a rustle of hi-hats, clipped male grunts, and a snaking, almost Native American melody. Less than a minute in, a more sure-footed and jacking rhythm drops. The melody becomes a chiming guitar pricking a handful of nylon notes, and back again. Then, after two minutes, he does the wholly unexpected and throws in a breakbeat-like kick, turning this swirl of tiny things nearly club-ready. A distorted chord clangs around five minutes in as the drums become more agitated and the guitar peals. Everything drops out at around seven minutes for a stretch of bass and drum that sounds like desiccated UK garage strafed by intermittent Death Star fire. By minute nine it's a sea of percussive onomatopoeia as the melody reappears. Then the whole thing slows to half time until fade out, a Timbaland rhythm pattern happily chewed on by Perlon grubs and mites.
That's just the first track.
And so it goes. "Duso" strings Orientalist guitar runs (that sound like they were recorded with an underwater microphone) through a now trademark Villalobos percolating groove, heavy on the hollow kick drum and gurgling off-beats. Halfway through he treats us to elephants stomping bubble wrap in an empty warehouse. Rusty screen doors shudder in the wind and dot matrix printers crank. "Erso" is a chiming sea of fizzy chirps and ISDN line noise like breakers against a shoreline. (Or, if I wanted to be reductive, a dancefloor Autechre.) At the four-minute mark, everything gets farty and it's the most cheerful thing the man has put his name to. "Sieso" is a percussive monster: Sizzles like grease popping from a frying pan, big ugly hammering klangs, contact mic'd dragonfly flutter, all held together by the thinnest Aphexian lunar melody that gorgeously modulates throughout. Patterns are constantly reshuffled, new ticks and tocks and tsssh's. More beats (or beat sounds) per bar than some dance producers manage in an entire career.
Achso is minimal because it doesn't announce itself with big riffs or overt melodies, and it's "minimal" because that's where it gets slotted in stores. But there's more going on in these four sides than the entire Get Physical catalog. I have no idea if these records would work in any club context; my instincts tell me no. But in a genre that often holds up anonymity as an aesthetic virtue, Villalobos records are as immediately recognizable as a Stereolab single, as considered as Morton Feldman, and as expansive as John Coltrane. Say whatever you will: He's the first true genius 21st century techno has produced.


The Boss returns, with the E Street Band in tow, for a surprisingly complex album that hides its disillusionment deep within its music, mingling it with a weary optimism that has not diminished with age.

Magic

Bruce Springsteen occupies a unique place in American popular culture. He doesn't have the cachet that Bob Dylan has, yet he's much more approachable-- populist in practice, not just in theory. He has inspired pale imitators (Tom Petty, John Mellencamp), but has no peers to speak of. Unlike similar 1980s supercelebrities Prince or Madonna, he remains artistically viable and culturally relevant two decades after the height of his popularity. In the 1970s, he was never hip, but in the 2000s he has gained a considerable following among indie rock bands like the Hold Steady, the Killers, and the National, among many others. Because his music has lost none of its triumphant rock'n'roll kick-- no matter how many times you hear it, "Born to Run" always kills-- he has become today what Brian Wilson was 10 years ago: the indie ideal.
And yet, his popularity extends far beyond the indie realm. His mainstream audience remains fanatically loyal, making him one of the few artists that both you and your boss enjoy. Springsteen's success continues despite the constantly shifting ground that finds him on one side of certain cultural and political lines, then on another. His 2002 album The Rising was received as a post-9/11 salve, a paean to American resilience in the face of tragedy: The same people who died or lost loved ones in the attacks-- cops, firefighters, corporate grunts, their wives, husbands, families-- were said to be the very same people who inhabited Springsteen's earlier songs, now facing hard, cold reality. So it's forgivable if many heard the album they believed the country needed instead of the one Springsteen actually made.
Despite the nickname, the Boss has never inhabited his iconic status comfortably. Devils & Dust followed The Rising in 2005*,* trading the E Street Band's full sound for acoustic contemplation and spinning a much grimmer version of America that was full of unrealized dreams and insoluble injustices. We Shall Overcome, his album of Pete Seeger covers and his best late-career album, proved much subtler in its subversiveness, communicating an anti-establishment stance through decades-old tunes. That's nothing new for him: The E Street Band's enormous, exuberant rock'n'roll has always hidden darker currents of American realism, most famously on "Born in the U.S.A.", a song about disillusioned Vietnam vets that was hilariously co-opted by Ronald Reagan's 1984 presidential campaign as a theme song.
That's the secret power of Magic, Springsteen's 15th album in 34 years: The album hides its raw disillusionment deep within the music, mingling it with a weary optimism and a thoroughly committed lustiness that have not diminished with age. The result is a surprisingly complex album that recalls The River in its heartfelt populism, Darkness on the Edge of Town in its small-town scope, and Tunnel of Love in its mature take on love and sex. On "I'll Work for Your Love", which could be a cover of an outtake from the first half of The River, he tells a woman he's "counting the bones in your back like the stations of the cross"-- a concise fusion of the sexual and the spiritual. Where he once chronicled youthful abandon in the face of life's possibility, now his subject is the wonders of middle-aged contentment, as if he can't believe his own luck. It's a surprisingly durable subject, one that fits his outsize sound perfectly.
On the other hand, Springsteen's prickly angst makes songs like "Last to Die" and "You'll Be Comin' Down" sound like challenges to, rather than platitudes for, regular Joes. On second single "Long Walk Home", he considers the small(-town) satisfaction of having distinctive local landmarks and knowing everyone you pass on the street. That such pleasures are slowly dying makes the song both a romanticizing ode to an American ideal that may never have existed as well as a clear-headed lament that we no longer yearn for those securities. "You know that flag flying over the courthouse means certain things are set in stone," he sings, "who we are, what we'll do and what we won't."
If Magic revisits the subject matter of previous career crests, it unfortunately recalls The Rising in its sound: Brendan O'Brien returns to the producer's seat, once again shuffling most of the E Street Band to the music's margins and focusing his attention squarely on the Boss. In addition to drenching slower songs like "Your Own Worst Enemy" and "Devil's Arcade" in melodramatic and totally unnecessary strings, the producer too often glosses over the creaks and wear in Springsteen's voice-- like air-brushing a model's face to look younger-- when it's the imperfections that give him his particular authority. Springsteen should sound more like Tom Waits, less like 3 Doors Down.
But then there are the songs that get everything exactly right, like the gorgeous "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" and "Livin' in the Future". On the latter, the E Street Band are given freer rein to revive and even update the boardwalk strut and namesake shuffle of their early days. Clarence Clemons' sax is integral to the modified doo-wop groove, drummer Max Weinberg swings easily, guitarists Steve Van Zandt and Nils Lofgren trade out licks, and Patti Scialfa's tender vocals echo Springsteen's excited performance. While he doesn't have the youthful eye for detail and narrative he once had, Springsteen's more concise songwriting style allows for some nice observations and surprisingly playful comparisons. "Then just about sundown, you come walkin' through town," he sings on "Livin' in the Future", "your boot heels clicking like the barrel of a pistol spinning 'round." He-- and the E Street Band-- actually sound hungry and, yes, just a little pissed off. It's an angry song, with a rumbling undercurrent of dread ("Woke up Election Day, sky's gunpowder and shades of gray"), but damn if it doesn't sound awesome when you're speeding down a back road with the windows rolled down.


Finally available on streaming services, the UK art-pop pranksters’ throwback rave anthems, jock-jam singalongs, and mischievous myth-making prove as enduring as they are audacious.

Solid State Logik 1

To be a follower of the KLF is to be a scholar, an acolyte, a digital monk treating zip files like illuminated manuscripts. Trawling forums and message boards for shards of the apocryphal mythos, sifting through various international versions of The White Room and multiple mixes of “3 A.M. Eternal,” finding hidden resonance in the absurdist symbolism of the number 23 or the sudden appearance of ice cream vans. KLF fandom is a secret language and a circle of rituals, intensely ironic but also deadly serious, like the music of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty itself.
This year opened, entirely unexpectedly, with the quiet release of Solid State Logik 1, a compilation of the KLF’s most heavyweight jams—an unexpected move from the group that fired blanks into the crowd at the 1992 BRIT Awards and then deleted their catalog. Drummond and Cauty have poked their heads out at various points over the years, most recently in 2017, to pay some kind of respect to the 23rd anniversary of their infamous ritual burning of a million pounds. But this wasn’t some Glastonbury cash-in reunion set; the K Foundation returned as a literal undertaking business, selling a “MuMufication” package to their devotees. For £99, you can purchase a custom-fired brick, which contains a slot for you to insert 23 grams of your ashes upon death; post-mortem, your brick will be joined together forever with other justified, ancient, and hopeful KLF fans in a “People’s Pyramid,” a bizarre but bittersweet literalization of how deeply music can shape one’s personal identity and relationships. Though music streaming might seem antithetical to the KLF’s anti-establishment mentality, the Solid State Logik compilation serves as a pyramid of its own, a step at preserving their paradigm-shifting experiments for the future.
Drummond and Cauty began gaining notoriety in 1987 with a series of releases as the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu: bootleg hip-house records featuring Scottish-accented shout-raps atop extended, unauthorized interpolations of songs by ABBA, the MC5, and Whitney Houston, among others. But the KLF (allegedly short for “Kopyright Liberation Front”) quickly achieved crossover success as the Timelords, with an unabashed, unapologetic novelty. “Doctorin’ the Tardis” audaciously pasted together the Doctor Who theme and the pounding jock-jam beat of Gary Glitter’s “Rock & Roll, Part 2”—with a football chant thrown in for good measure, in case the masses didn’t dig it enough. Despised by the serious press, adored by pop audiences, the Timelords hit No. 1, then infamously wrote a how-to guide for others looking to mechanically engineer chart hits. With an iconography pilfered from Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus Trilogy, Drummond and Cauty set out to blow up the British pop-music industry from the inside, then withdrew—whether forever or for their promised 23 years remained to be seen. Everything else that followed has only contributed to the legend.
Most of the KLF’s body of work is centered around four pillars: “What Time Is Love?,“3 A.M. Eternal,” “Last Train to Trancentral,” and “Justified and Ancient,” each of which exist in various iterations, ranging from marginally different mixes to almost unrecognizable reinterpretations. Though the KLF were criticized in some corners for their creative recycling and meta-plagiarism, habitually releasing different versions of the same product, this kind of self-reference is maybe their most divinely inspired creative instinct. In some ways it mimics another three-named, post-hippie sci-fi writer: Philip K. Dick, who in his mammoth The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick reread and reinterpreted his own work with a Talmudic thoroughness, turning to his own writing for higher meaning as others might to scripture. By repeating and reworking sonic symbols and lyrical themes, the KLF constructed what sometimes truly feels like a religion: a cultish, albeit still tongue-in-cheek, worldview, with a body of psalms sung a little bit differently every service, and two pop prophets at the helm who ask you to follow them with faith into the darkness of the rave.
“Last Train To Trancentral - Live From The Lost Continent” is among their most euphoric and ascendant recordings—“what KLF is about,” as the song’s opening line states bluntly. It’s a bullet express direct from the future, a symphony of jangly breakbeats, blissful piano lines, robot voices, church bells, and train whistles. More than any of their other songs, “Trancentral” both sums up the era of its production and transcends it.
Compared to the hi-NRG of “What Time Is Love? - Live at Trancentral,” “America: What Time is Love?” is utter cacophony. It’s a century of American cultural imperialism on fast-forward, suturing together The Wizard of Oz, “Aquarius” from Hair, and the big riff from “Ace of Spades”—a comic-book montage that draws the line from John Philip Sousa marches to hair-metal guitars, all while Glenn Hughes of Deep Purple demands a pound of your sweat. “America: What Time Is Love?” expresses the same perverse fascination with mass-produced Americana as the more respectable but equally sample-heavy Chill Out, just accelerated to hell, pedal to the floor of the ice-cream van, stove turned all the way up.
The KLF only existed at extremes: chilled out or hyped up, jokingly cynical or politically serious. Even if to differing sonic ends, the duo’s ambient designs and sound-collage stadium house are built on the same principles of literal and figurative sampling, and exhibit a similar interest in the crass mass culture America has exported to the world. The closest American analogue to Drummond and Cauty’s worldview might be David Byrne, who is similarly awed and repulsed by commercial culture. The KLF are clearly having a laugh at the Top 40’s expense, but their fondness for Tammy Wynette is no joke.
Maybe the KLF’s most straight-up, stripped-down dancefloor cut is “It’s Grim Up North,” which indicates the more dour direction they might have been headed in, channeling the oxidized futurism of Northern England’s bleep-techno scene as Drummond bitterly rattles off the names of cities and townships in the region. Beyond this, Solid State Logik 1 holds particular interest for the evidence it contains of the KLF’s unrealized metal opus, The Black Room—described at various points in the early 1990s as “the complete yang to the yin of The White Room,” “electro turbo metal,” and like “Megadeth with drum machines.” The compilation closes, as is only appropriate, with a studio recording of the startling grindcore version of “3 A.M. Eternal” performed with Extreme Noise Terror as part of their piss-off to the music industry. It’s straight-up high-powered hardcore punk—completely new ground for the KLF, but for some wiry glitches and Drummond’s distinctive voice buried in the mix, and another curious hint at what rooms might have lain ahead.
But maybe, in some ways, it’s good that the KLF burned themselves to a crisp instead of fading away—they gave us a true machine-gun blast of creativity, like the Beatles’ brief decade but bolder and faster, before building their own wicker man and taking a flamethrower to it. These songs throw every musical idea at the wall, along with decades of pop-culture ephemera, and somehow it all sticks. It would have been entirely possible for the KLF to coast along on the merits of their public antics or imaginative music videos, but the singles themselves are undeniable gold. Though this compilation revisits their biggest hits in newly monetized form, finally giving in to the exigencies of the modern music business, the hymns of the Mu Mus will always belong more to the choir of believers who sing them than the music-industry televangelists who sell them.

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After sessions last year with Japanese improv legend Keiji Haino, the powerful metal trio ripped its newest songs open, filling the negative space with improvisational gusto to become a stunning band.

Love in Shadow

Though he does not play a single note, the Japanese improvisational nonpareil Keiji Haino is partly to thank for one of this year’s most audacious metal statements. In the summer of 2017, Sumac—then a rather untested trio of West Coast metal veterans including guitarist and singer Aaron Turner of Isis, bassist Brian Cook of Russian Circles, and drummer Nick Yacyshyn of Baptists—traveled to Tokyo to record and perform with Haino after he unexpectedly accepted an unsolicited invitation to jam. For 40 years, Haino has crisscrossed the borders of rock, noise, blues, and even a cappella balladry, disregarding structural and linguistic conventions with a singularly surrealistic vision. On American Dollar Bill, he did much the same with Sumac, helping the trio splatter its volatile and involved doom against the studio wall, throw it down the stairs, and splinter it into shapes of joyous abstraction.
For Sumac, it must have been like seeing yourself in a cracked mirror and realizing there’s something fundamental about yourself you should change. Though the band had already written its third record, their time with Haino prompted them to reconsider the possibilities of open space and internal deconstruction, to ponder anew the room where a solo or breakdown might once have gone. Love in Shadow is both daring and daunting, with Sumac disrupting their customary marches with frayed instrumental improvisations that feel as if they may fall apart and building 15-minute opuses with assorted blocks of dead-ahead pummel and dissonant impressionism. They have hinted at this path in the past, particularly on 2016’s What One Becomes, their stormy and suggestive second album. But Haino and American Dollar Bill catalyzed Sumac’s progression toward Love in Shadow, a four-track, hour-long, monumental album that feels like the arrival of a band newly unbound.
Love in Shadow may at first feel unapproachable, like some steamroller you can only watch plow past. Or perhaps it sounds unseemly, like some gangly beast whose long limbs and bulky body don’t cohere. The first response is a symptom of a truly powerful trio, a band capable of shifting from athletic thrash to viscous doom with unwavering force; when “The Task” begins in italicized fury, for instance, you simply want to get out of its way. The second impression stems from the improvisational impasses where they trade rugged melodies for warped variations: When Turner shapes a spider web of piercing notes, à la Derek Bailey, toward the end of “The Task,” one wonders how it all fits together. All four pieces pivot between brute strength and ponderous retreats. After the seven-minute tirade that opens “Arcing Silver,” Sumac go nearly silent before conjuring emotional images without a word, much like Loren Connors. They sprint toward the end, as driving and relentless as they have ever been. The listener is left dumbstruck by whiplash.
Where the music can often seem like a slingshot, Turner pulls a narrative cord tightly through Love in Shadow, offering a stabilizing factor amid all the commotion. Rendered in language that laces eroticism with existential anxiety (and vice versa) and harkens to poet Octavio Paz, these songs address our dogged pursuit of, need for, and battle with love—or, as Turner phrases it, to find “our better blood” alive and flowing in someone else. Turner returns time and again to the vulnerability inherent in love, as if making a commitment turns us into supine beasts exposing our soft bellies to the whims of another. As he wrestles with these feelings, barking and bellowing one clipped phrase at a time, the band wrestles alongside him. As he faces some wall of worry, the band collapses into one of its paroxysms, looking for the answer. The longer you listen, the more cohesive and magnetic Love in Shadow becomes, revealing itself as a reluctantly romantic opera all clad in black. Here’s a record about love as you’ve never heard it.
The toil and triumph Sumac document and illustrate so gamely during Love in Shadow represent an accidental analogue for Turner’s own trajectory. Twenty years have passed since Turner cofounded Isis, a band whose fluid shifts between musical frames helped reshape a generation’s expectations of what metal could be. He did (and, to a lesser extent, still does) the same with his label, Hydra Head, and a string of bands that have all pressed against the boundaries of heaviness in peculiar ways—the spasmodic Old Man Gloom, the immersive Mamiffer, the radiant Jodis. Turner is as inquisitive and essential as any other figure in heavy metal in the United States this century, but his creative unrest and quest to issue his music on his own terms have long kept him at the edge of wider success. Here he is anyway, radically reinventing the possibilities of a band that has leapfrogged from good to staggering in a single record. Love in Shadow is a testament to perseverance in the face of uncertainty from a bandleader who has lived, worked, and loved by that ideal.


After a solid stretch of singles and remixes, this UK squelch-pop group aims to make a successful transition from producer to album-oriented act.

Nights Out

Nights Out is the latest electro assault from the UK's growing brigade of squelch pop bands, joining the ranks of the Chap, Late of the Pier, and other synth sadists making NME giddy and audiophiles want to remove their frontal lobes. That's not to reduce Brighton's Metronomy to a fad, especially since they've proven their mettle on dozens of high-profile remixes and their own impressive singles. The transition from producer to album-oriented act, however, remains tricky for them. Their 2005 debut, Pip Paine (Pay the £5000 You Owe), incongruently forced together delicate dancefloor pop and harsh rock touches. And while Nights Out better corrals these influences, creating a much more cohesive album, it still suffers from a lack of consistency.
Metronomy singer/producer Joseph Mount describes this album as a soundtrack to a tumultous weekend, and sure enough, there's plenty of drink-fueled lust, driving, partying, and of course, dancing. It's no surprise, then, that two songs about cardiac health-- "My Heart Rate Rapid" and "Heartbreaker"-- contain the majority of the album's hooks. The former is a ramp-up to Metronomy's bacchanalian rager, its chipmunk vocals speeding up lockstep with the disco pulse. "Heartbreaker" immediately follows, squashing those increased serotonin levels, with Mount's effects-free vocal performance recalling Junior Boys vocalist Jeremy Greenspan's breathy bedroom croon. The resulting ballad, effective enough to tame the otherwise ADD production, provides an emotional comedown that also gives the listener's ears a breather.
Unfortunately, Metronomy can't maintain the momentum. Throughout the album, they sprinkle cute instrumental interludes that feel more like production exercises than effective segues. The vocals don't exactly carry their weight, either. With the exception of "A Thing for Me"'s excited cat calls, Mount douses his voice in self-conscious irony (and studio effects) to the point of near-total detachment. It'd be unfair to expect Metronomy to match the hooks of similar acts like Hot Chip or LCD Soundsystem, but even those groups manage to give the heartstrings an occasional tug, whereas tracks like "Back on the Motorway" or "On Dancefloors", two of the more tender moments here, simply seem to ponder how kooky 80s music was.
Then again, these drawbacks don't make Nights Out any less appropriate a soundtrack to clubbing adventures, pub crawls or one-night stands. Although uneven, some of these random spurts seem to disorient intentionally, like “Side 2”, the dark intermission track that ushers in the album's, uh, darker second side. Yet the frenzied first half showcases Metronomy's strengths right off the bat: glitzy glam rock guitars butting heads with stubborn electro beats, neurotic disco paeans, and loads of synths. Nights Out may turn in a little too early, but for about three songs, it wrests synth pop supremacy from Metronomy's many competitors.


Phil Elverum returns with the latest piece in the epic, ongoing existential puzzle he's been constructing for nearly 15 years.

Wind's Poem

At this point, some 13 years after those first Microphones cassettes and eight years since the watershed The Glow, Pt. 2, we tend to know what to expect from Phil Elverum. The production will be cavernous and downright primordial, the instruments resounding as though carved from bone and strung with wool. Natural and elemental imagery will abound. And, of course, we'll be treated to Elverum's unmistakable, unsophisticated, ever wonder-struck mumble. Yet Elverum has a way of playing with those expectations. And, more to the point, knowing what to expect can make us underestimate, which can in turn lead to surprise. If last year's Lost Wisdom outing with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire served to remind us that, stripped of all the scuzz and sonic bramble, Elverum is a damn good songwriter, then Wind's Poem now reminds us that with all his characteristic production dressings in place-- surprise!-- Phil can still be a force of nature.
Poem has been touted as Elverum's "black metal" album, and Phil has made no secret of his relatively newfound affinity for Xasthur and other lynchpins of the unholy genre. Yet apart from opener "Wind's Dark Poem", a slice of bona fide hellfire, any outside influence here feels wholly absorbed into the fabric of what is every bit a Mount Eerie concoction. Even "Wind's Dark Poem" retains the singer's characteristic vocal delivery and cadence, and other loud ones-- "The Hidden Stone", "The Mouth of Sky"-- smack as much of the chunky, bowel-rattling heavy riffage of The Glow, Pt. 2's "I Want to Be Cold" and "Samurai Sword" as anything else. All of which makes Elverum less chameleon and more collector of sounds, assimilating them as he sees fit to suit his grand artistic vision. A vision, as he also told us, that's been there all along: "I think I've always been drawn to things that sounded massive, or at least created this feeling of an immense vibe."
And massive and immerse are certainly two ways to describe Wind's Poem-- though they hardly tell the whole story. To better do so we might divide the 12 tracks that comprise the record into two rough camps: the loud and thoroughly rattled, noted above, and the renewed and becalmed, chief among them "Summons", "Ancient Questions", and the epic lullaby "Through the Trees", which effectively swallows whole any hell raised by "Wind's Dark Poem". The story, then, emerges from the way these songs alternatingly devour or are born from the smoldering ashes of one another, clear skies giving way to ferocious muddle, which in turn begets light and insight anew. The lyrics, appropriately, deal in fundamental dualities. "My Heart Is Not at Peace" and "Summons" each posit wind as both "destroyer" and "revealer," "Ancient Questions" pits doubt against a sense of purpose, and closer "Stone's Ode" is divided into two distinct movements, one assured and awash in the clarity of day, one less so and detailing the onset (literal and metaphorical, one assumes) of night.
What makes Wind's Poem among the most compelling and fully realized Mount Eerie releases to date is the record's ability to satisfy several types of listeners on several contextual levels. The iTunes shuffle junky, for starters, can excerpt almost any selection here and find something to marvel at on its own terms. The Elverum obsessive will waste no time seeking god in the details, the recurring musical and thematic touches, and the intertextual puzzle created across the artist's catalog. Even considering the most basic mechanics of the album format, Poem gets it right: a rock solid opener that draws the listener right in, an effective closer that recapitulates lyrical and musical motifs from across the record, fine pacing, well-balanced dynamics, and the overall sense that one has completed a journey and emerged in a slightly different metaphysical place by the end of those 55 minutes. But then, too, there are the 11-and-a-half-minute second track, the pure pulsating noise cut, and other outliers, as if to remind us that despite any concessions made to the listener-- and Phil has moved well beyond the often formless experiments of the early Microphones releases-- this is still by no means a record to be digested lightly. And thank goodness for that.