Best known as veterans of the beloved, defunct L.A. punk band Mika Miko, Jennifer and Jessica Clavin's new Shangri-Las-inspired project has the incisive, live-feeling production that their alma mater needed, but never quite had on record.

Ride Your Heart

"It's a song about being in love but also being independent," Jennifer Clavin said of "Next Stop", the rollicking single from L.A. garage rockers Bleached's debut LP Ride Your Heart. Like Bleached's sound, the video pays homage to the retro cool of the Shangri-Las (motorcycles, leather jackets, ponytails), but it also mines the tension of that thematic split-screen Clavin mentions. It cuts between Jennifer, lounging around with her guy and joyriding on the back of his motorcycle, and bassist Jessica, causing all sorts of trouble at a party with her friends. Bleached aren't presenting romantic love and roguish independence as two mutually exclusive entities: In the video, both of them seem perfectly happy. But they communicate this same message more viscerally in the sound of their music, where sweet, manicured melodies and and pummeling, dirt-under-the-nails punk energy collide. It's one of the more commanding revisionist takes on the 60s girl group sound to come along in a minute.
The Clavins are best known as veterans of the beloved, now-defunct L.A. punk band Mika Miko, where they both cut more colorful figures than they do in Bleached: Jessica set the pace for the band's manic, pogoing, sped-up surf-rock rhythm section, while Jennifer's (better known then by her Dracula-esque stage name, Victor Fandgore) signature move was singing (though more often, screaming) into a rotary telephone rigged up like a mic. Three years after their break-up, Mika Miko's legend is established yet ephemeral; like so many underground heroes, they never made a record that quite captured the caterwauling craziness of their live show. Not that they cared: "I think we come off better live than we do recorded," Jessica said in a 2009 interview, "It's better to have that impact as a live band though, isn't it?" The rest of the band nodded in agreement.
It's kind of ironic, then, that Ride Your Heart succeeds precisely where the final Mika Miko album-- the spirited but thin-sounding We Be Xuxa-- failed: it manages to capture some of the infectious energy of the Clavins' live show. The difference is all in the production: Ride Your Heart is lush but still maintains a certain loose, inviting sloppiness, which suits the more upbeat songs particularly well. Opener "Looking For a Fight" lurches forward with a grumbling, belligerent swagger, while Jennifer's whiplashed howl on "Next Stop" ("Until next tiiiiiime") makes the song feel like an adrenaline rush: It sounds like she's shouting the whole thing out of a convertible as it zips around a tight corner. Jennifer's vocals sound comparatively stiff and uninspired on "Dreaming Without You" (she doesn't find much emotion in the repeated refrain "Baby, don't cry/ Baby, don't cry"), but the stomping percussion and guitar solo (which sounds straight out of a Flamin' Groovies track and cuts through like a beam of California sunshine) shakes the song out of its stupor.
Not every song on Ride Your Heart is so lucky. Bleached's songcraft often feels bland and unimaginative, relying on familiar, pop-worn imagery ("Waiting by the Telephone") and generic declarations of love. (The inert "Outta My Mind" doesn't move far beyond its girl-group-revival-by-numbers hook, "Get out of my mind, boy/ You know I think about you all of the time.") Though there's an electric current coursing through Ride Your Heart, it's too often wasted on mundane material-- which is especially disappointing given how zany and lyrically imaginative their previous band was. Hopefully more of that signature flair will creep into future Bleached releases: It's hard to be content with them waiting by the telephone when we've seen them scream into it.


Australian improv trio the Necks have condensed their approach on this new double LP for Stephen O’Malley’s label. The experience feels like a ceaseless fever dream.

Unfold

The Necks have never been much for tracklists. With some early and not always impressive exceptions near the dawn of the group’s almost three-decade career, the improvisational Australian trio has preferred to go the distance in one, perhaps two extended takes. For an hour or so at a time, restless drummer Tony Buck, patient bassist Lloyd Swanton, and soulful pianist and organist Chris Abrahams would slip into sound worlds of their own design and slowly morph, as if on an evolutionary timeline. Their best records, like 2001’s essential Aether or 2013’s consummate Open, gradually subside and swell, drive and drift. By stretching pieces past the hour mark, they could change one’s very sense of dynamics, where tiny shifts in volume or tone or speed suddenly felt revelatory. With the Necks, it seemed, anything could happen if you listened long enough.
But that approach ends abruptly on Unfold, the Necks’ 19th album and first for Ideologic Organ, the label of fellow slow-motion traveler Stephen O’Malley, of Sunn O))) fame. For this double LP, the Necks devote each of four sides to one improvisation. With runtimes between 15 and 22 minutes, they’ve chopped the typical Necks tune into thirds or quarters. What’s more, there’s no intended sequence for these sides, meaning you could start with the hectic, gamelan-like rumble of “Timepiece” or end there, a move that makes the entire experience feel like a ceaseless fever dream. It’s a surprisingly indeterminate decision for a group whose output has always felt, no matter how improvisational it was, meticulous, even hermetic. Since the mid-’90s, the Necks’ records have invariably offered micromanaged adventure; with Unfold, they let you shape your own tale by giving you tracks without a tracklist.
Still, all of the Necks hallmarks appear at some point during Unfold—hyperactive drumming that expands and contracts any real sense of meter; piano lines that can summon a storm or conjure a presiding calm; bowed bass that rattles the room*.* And though the Necks look like a jazz trio, their swing is tempestuous and their approach nebulous, with touches of post-rock and soul and Stockhausen and gospel wrapped into their orchestrated mess.
But Unfold’s unconventional format forces the Necks to condense its typical approach, to push and pull all the usual peaks, valleys, and arcs into more manageable spans. Everything speeds up just a bit. With that, by the end of the first two minutes of “Blue Mountain,” the bass, drums, piano, and organ are already intertwined and active. Buck’s distended drum rolls ricochet between layers of blue piano fragments and organ peals. And during the tumultuous “Rise,” which is so disorienting that the trio seems to be playing both meter and melody inside-out, the requisite moments of calm are fleeting. Here, the Necks make you gasp for air, never allowing for time or space to breathe very deeply.
Splintering the usual runtime of a Necks album into four largely disconnected pieces seems like it would fragment the experience—that is, turning a Necks record on, then disappearing inside it. Is Unfold the trio’s first album for our ever-shortening attention spans, at least since their salad days of placid bop in the late ’80s?
Turns out, not at all: The Necks’ newfound density is intoxicating. The ideas fly by in a way they never have with this band. Each compressed piece simply pushes you along to the next, eager to witness how a quarter-century-old act can again reshape your perception of drums, piano, and upright bass. After the Necks answer the psychedelic, wildly melismatic organ runs of “Overhear” with the pensive, clinched gaze of “Blue Mountain,” hearing what else is possible becomes a compulsion. (And if you’re new here, the quest can and should send you deep into a rich back catalog.) The relatively succinct tracks of Unfold aren’t some cynical concession to an audience’s fractured attention span or some attempt to become suddenly accessible. They are, instead, the result of a band that’s always tested supposedly solid borders—between jazz and rock, between acoustic and electric, between composition and improvisation. On Unfold, they’ve wondered aloud if the spell of their long-form magic works when stunted by the limitations of physical media and shuffled by the will of the listener. It does.


Densely packed and deeply sincere, the latest chapter of David Bazan’s musical memoir project spans a decade of life, from eighth grade into his early 20s.

Santa Cruz

The first song on Santa Cruz, the seventh full-length album from Seattle’s Pedro the Lion, paraphrases no fewer than four separate Bible verses. More to the point, singer-songwriter David Bazan speaks in the kind of idioms that anyone who’s attended a Wednesday night youth group or summer church camp could instantly clock. Bazan repeats the lines, “If I make myself friendly/Put others’ needs before my own/Don’t let my heart be hardened,” then ends “It’ll All Work Out” with one load-bearing word: “Lord.” If the hymnal lyrics, somber synth notes, and slow-boiling discordance hadn’t fully illustrated his cry of prayer, the picture is complete now.
This has been Bazan’s superpower from the start. He speaks to specific experiences with the requisite references, yet he doesn’t alienate the uninitiated. The Conflicted Christian, the Struggling Addict, the Anti-Corporatist, the Angry Ex, the Disillusioned American—all complex viewpoints vividly inhabited across Pedro the Lion’s discography. But since the band’s return from a 15-year hiatus in 2019, Bazan has narrowed his framing devices. Phoenix triumphantly kicked off a planned five-album arc, pairing big, resonant guitar chords with stories of formative years spent in the titular hometown. Three years later, Havasu relaxed its grip on rock theatrics to gently explore the thrills and contradictions of being a lonely, God-fearing seventh grader. With Santa Cruz, Bazan brings the theme of life as the preacher’s kid whose family moved around a lot into tighter focus.
In just over a half hour, Santa Cruz spans a decade of Bazan’s life—from eighth grade into his early 20s, and the four cities he called home during that time. The songs cover an impressive amount of ground in painstaking detail, often within just a few minutes. The title track never drops its mid-tempo pulse as Bazan breathlessly recounts his embarrassing junior high backpack, C.S. Lewis novels, and how he can’t wait to get married and have sex. He’s never sounded so much like Mark Kozelek in his delivery, especially when the glut of stanzas forces him to cram in a line off-rhythm. “Teacher’s Pet” jumps from story to unfortunate story while fleshing out a bristly ode to teenage rebellion and learning through failure. The overtly Beatles-inspired “Little Help” shares how befriending a kid from church and discovering the White Album gave him confidence among the California beach town’s surfers and skaters.
Santa Cruz is packed with memories, musings, and personality, like a well-used diary covered in old stickers. But where the lyrics and themes are consistently charming, the music isn’t always. Bazan frequently uses synths in the arrangements, and their presence in some of the best songs is refreshing: Downcast and dejected, “Don’t Cry Now” revolves around a chunky arpeggio that—somewhat incredibly—sounds lifted from an old Junior Boys single. The bobbing keys and quiet guitar on album standout “Tall Pines,” at first so contained, burst to envelop Bazan’s unflinchingly measured delivery like a sudden fog. “Parting,” however, is about as middling and generic as Pedro the Lion’s indie rock gets—unfortunate given its moving story of a high school senior whose parents move once again, leaving him to finish the year in Seattle. At least when the music is less than compelling, there’s always an affecting story to follow.


The bohemian Detroit rapper’s latest collaboration with producer Chris Keys feels as blissful as a beer buzz on a hot summer afternoon.

Quelle Chris / Chris Keys: Innocent Country 2

Innocent Country 2

You’ll never catch Quelle Chris doing what’s expected of him. The bohemian Detroit rapper-producer hit new levels of excellence on both the Jean Grae joint project Everything’s Fine, and Guns, his meditation on American violence. On the back of those wins, a sequel to Innocent Country—the 2015 collaboration with producer Chris Keys—seemed as unlikely as it was unnecessary. Take it from Quelle Chris himself, who when ranking his projects back in 2017 for Vice, placed the record fourth on a six-album list. But the pair enjoy the relationship of two old buddies naturally cozy in each other’s presence. “I think at that time I would be at Chris’s spot in Oakland and we’d just smoke, chill, watch random shit, get food, listen to some music, make some beats, write songs, repeat,” Quelle told Vice.
On the sequel, the pair recaptures this easy chemistry, serving up a set as blissful as a buzzed-on-beer snooze on a hot summer afternoon. Keys’ soft piano, organ keys, and light rat-tat-tat drums call on the soulful spirit of old Minnie Riperton instrumentals, and the melancholic jazz of “Black Twitter” could pass for an old Bob James cut. It’s fair to say the lack of tension can feel like the album’s weakness—Innocent Country 2 could use something like “Wild Minks,” Chris’s team-up with Mach-Hommy from Guns, to break up the good vibes—but Keys’ beats stay as perfect a fit for Quelle as his high-peaked baseball caps, helping the album’s lengthy running time to breeze by.
Whenever Innocent Country 2 threatens to fade into a pleasant blur, guests help pick up the pace. Homeboy Sandman storms onto “Sacred Safe,” raging that “Every single person on Earth irks me,” while the churchly sounds of “Mirage” might be the brightest beat Earl Sweatshirt has rapped over in ages. Other appearances are less expected. Merrill Garbus appears on three songs, the best of which, “Graphic Bleed Outs,” shows the Tune-Yards singer scale down her usually powerful voice to line up with Keys’ dreamy flutes while she asserts that a lover has slashed at her spirit like a cold blade piercing her lungs. The counterbalance of gore and tranquility is jarring, but if there’s one thing you need to enter Quelle Chris’s world, it’s a mind open enough to reject conventional logic.
It’s Chris, finally, who anchors the project. Unlike Guns, his goals here are modest but fully realized. He can swing from wry one-liners to guy-in-bar observations; he can offer goofy jokes or cutting narratives. “Living Happy” investigates the idea of crossing to the other side; in a delivery that sounds more traveling preacher than rapper, Chris envisions his own death: “Couldn’t find the energy to fight the call of the tunnel’s light,” he asserts before describing the angels on the other side.
The warped and winsome grand pianos of “Sudden Death” honor the flaws of life: “It’s not for certain, but life ain’t perfect,” sings Chris, his voice squeaky and whimsical. Not allowing the pursuit of perfection get in the way of the celebration is a fine microcosm for Quelle Chris, who never lets kinks in his grand plan stop him. There is a fine logic to everything he does, even if it’s apparent only to him; returning to his Innocent Country franchise and outstripping the original just asserts that he always gives you something, even if it’s never what you expect.

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Lucrecia Dalt’s sixth album is a marvelous exploration of mercurial ambient music whose aesthetic is so singular, it feels like she dreamed it into being.

Anticlines

Over the past decade, the albums of Colombian musician Lucrecia Dalt have moved steadily away from playfully experimental indie pop into increasingly deeper levels of abstraction. There was a marked shift between 2009’s tuneful Congost—released under a previous alias, the Sound of Lucrecia—and 2012’s murkier Commotus, whose abiding sense of mystery recalled Argentina’s Juana Molina. By 2013’s more electronic Syzygy, her songwriting began to feel like it was tracing the shape of overgrown ruins; melodies jutted to the surface only to be subsumed again in drifting synths and thickets of reverb.
On Anticlines, her sixth album, the former geotechnical engineer’s metamorphosis is complete. Anticlines takes the scraped drones and ethereal tone clusters of 2015’s Ou and distills them into cryptic miniatures reminiscent of the spectral frequencies summoned decades ago by Daphne Oram, of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The palette is suggestive of rubbed wineglass rims, faraway theremins, fields of crickets; it is punctuated by small, dissonant explosions of what might be guitar or a plaintive pump organ. Silence yawns: “Concentric Nothings” is fashioned out of what sounds like a quarter spinning to rest on the floor of a vast, empty chamber, while “Axis Excess” isolates a sound that could be stalactites dripping. The beats, when they occur, are slow, metallic pulses loosely rooted in coldwave and industrial music, though that link feels more like an accidental byproduct of her electronic tools than anything she might have intended. Nothing about Anticlines could be construed as a genre exercise. Quite the opposite: The album’s aesthetic is so singular that it feels like something she has dreamed into being.
Anticlines would be fascinating enough had she left it at that: an exploration of strange, mercurial ambient music with a mind of its own. But what makes this a truly special record is its vocal dimension. A world away from her singing style on previous albums, Dalt’s performance here combines captivating spoken-word passages with subtle vocal processing that sounds like the product of a chromed larynx. Just six of the album’s 14 tracks foreground vocals, but they comprise the record’s emotional and conceptual core. Her lyrics draw upon the language of geoscience and quantum physics—“Glass Brain” nods to the Boltzmann brain paradox, the theory that the universe might be a self-aware system—to unpack metaphysical questions about the nature of being. Those queries double as ruminations on the poetics of boundaries and the limits of communication itself. “Could it be found in errors of skin/Could it be found in gardens of dust,” she asks in “Errors of Skin,” seeking the secret of existence in a concatenation of things (“masses of big,” “leanings of self,” “multiples of stupor”) whose curious grammar suggests the divine hand of an artificial intelligence.
On the opening “Edge,” she speaks from the perspective of el Boraro, a mythological beast said to suck out his victims’ insides and then, blowing through a hole he has pierced in the tops of their skulls, fill them full of air and send them on their way. There’s so much going on here that it’s almost dizzying. There’s the clinical nature of her musing, which is something like the opposite of body horror (“What does the body want except to pass blood through tiny vessels and keep the whole shape intact?”). There’s the unmistakably erotic tenor of the way she enters her interlocutor, pressing against “the inside of your navel, the slippery side of your throat.” And then there’s the sound of her voice itself: a strange, zig-zagging sing-song at once reassuring and unsettling.
There are hints of Laurie Anderson’s incantatory style in her measured tone, but Dalt’s diction is unique. Rushing and slowing unexpectedly, her voice moves like eddying floodwaters seeking a vacuum to fill. In the background, hard-panned clusters of tones sound more like pools of light than notes; a high whine could be air escaping from a leak. The album’s title refers to a kind of geological formation, but Anticlines has more in keeping with the properties of matter as it shifts from liquid to gas and back: It’s an album full of interstitial forms that flicker in between fixed states, and its magic lies in that liminal no-man’s-land.


Drawing as much from punk as roadhouse blues, Lucinda Williams’ loud and unsparing new album is some of the heaviest, most inspiring music of her career.

Lucinda Williams: Good Souls Better Angels

Good Souls Better Angels

Good Souls Better Angels rises from the darkest corners of Lucinda Williams’ world: down desert roads, in a barren country, through the windows of homes and churches that don’t offer the sanctuary they promise. These 12 songs are tough and haunted, built on simple blues progressions that twist and pull until they fray. Williams recorded the album in Nashville with her touring band, Buick 6, in concentrated bursts, live in the studio. While her recent records have used their sprawl to navigate a wide array of styles and moods, she now finds a range that pulls her into focus. It is roots music, bursting from the ground, changing form in the light of day.
The album arrives after two moments of retrospection for the outlaw country legend: 2017’s re-recorded version of her 1992 album Sweet Old World and 2018’s anniversary tour behind 1998’s Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Inspired by the latter experience, Williams enlisted a collaborator from that classic record, Ray Kennedy, to co-produce. He joins Williams and her husband, manager, and songwriting partner Tom Overby for an album that collects some of her saddest music along with some of her heaviest and most inspiring. “Let’s break the rules,” Williams said upon launching her own label in 2014 after decades of being misunderstood and mistreated within the music industry. “We can do what we want to do now.” Good Souls follows through.
From the beginning, Williams seemed to exist between genres: too rock for country, too country for rock. She had an ethos aligned with punk but she could also write catchy anthems that became radio hits for acts like Mary Chapin Carpenter. At 67, Williams now has a voice that can make anything she sings sound like a genre unto itself: It is a raspy plume of exhaust, highlighting the shapes of her words as much as their hard meanings. She spent the first decade of the 2000s hardening her delivery into a bluesy speak-sing and the second decade leaning into more varied, psychedelic settings. On Good Souls, she finds an edgy growl that can sound tender or enraged, enlightened or possessed, all within a single couplet. In the opening track, “You Can’t Rule Me,” she lists the things that cannot be taken from her—her soul, her money, her point of view. As she counts them off, she seems to take spiritual inventory, meditating on the desperate fight for each one.
Over this gnarled, electric music, Williams writes in stark, chantlike verse. “Wakin’ Up” is a harrowing portrait of a woman escaping from—or dissociating during—an abusive relationship. Its visceral tug is carried by a vocal delivery like she’s spitting each word from under her tongue. That song finds a spiritual contrast in the serene, breathtaking “Big Black Train.” It’s a soulful ballad carried by a slow pulse—echoing electric guitars, a lapping rhythm section—as Williams narrates from the throes of depression, her voice alternately breaking and soaring. “I don’t wanna get on board,” she sings as the music shows how easy it might be to disappear.
Williams weaves these intimate scenes through other songs that take political aim. As with all her best love songs and travelogues, she sounds more interested in dissecting the heartbreak of modern life than simply railing against it. The righteous “Man Without a Soul” is a protest song full of patience and nuance that culminates with the deepest cut imaginable from Williams’ pen: “You bring nothing good to this world,” she seethes. Above all else, she judges people by the mark we leave behind, the afterlife we build for ourselves.
Without the cinematic detail or rich scenery that once defined her work, Williams draws on the lessons of her years. On the title track of her last solo album, 2016’s The Ghosts of Highway 20, she gestured toward, “Southern secrets still buried deep/Brooding and restless ’neath the cracked concrete.” In these songs, she pulls us down with her, where we can feel the gravel and see for ourselves. Like “Drunken Angel,” her signature ode to the late folk singer Blaze Foley, the gentle “Shadows & Doubts” addresses a tortured, self-destructive figure who might be beyond help: “So many ways/To crush you,” she sings in the chorus with a bleak sense of inevitability. And yet, nearly every one of these songs searches for a way out, a crack of light. “I’m gonna pray the devil back to hell,” she sings. Her guitar rattles and her voice shakes, and suddenly it sounds like an actual, physical battle.
“It’s on the top of everybody’s minds—it’s all anybody talks about,” Williams wrote earlier this year. “Basically, the world’s falling apart.” In her characteristic no-bullshit manner, she was describing the inspiration for these apocalyptic songs and forecasting the landscape she would release them into. Like all the writers she admires, from Bob Dylan to Flannery O’Connor, Williams will always be drawn to capturing the essence of the times she lives in: “All I can do is write about my feelings and the world’s feelings,” she explained. Suspending and swelling for seven-and-a-half minutes, the dreamlike closing track, “Good Souls,” sounds like her version of a prayer: “Help me stay fearless,” she sings. “Help me stay strong.” By the end, the music fades into a kind of sketch, an atmospheric waltz cycling between just two chords, the band leaning forward and waiting for her signal to close. But she keeps on singing; she’s on nobody’s time but her own.

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Yūgen is a five-track EP for Young Turks that forms the most significant Koreless release to date, a weightless record that finds Lewis Roberts exploring feelings of loss, hope, and unease.

Yugen EP

There was once a sense of momentum to the music made by Lewis Roberts, the Glasgow-based producer who records under the name Koreless. "Up Down Up Down" from 2009 matched elegant patterns to a skittering beat, delivered via a YouTube clip depicting traffic pouring in and out of a city. Now, some four years later, Roberts is all about suspending figures in time, chopping out the forward thrust altogether. The basic elements were already in place-- cut the beats from "Up Down Up Down" and the track wouldn't sound out of place on Yūgen, a five-track EP for Young Turks that forms the most significant Koreless release to date. But this isn't simply a case of Roberts figuring out where he can go by muting the drum tracks on his sequencer. There's a whole world of thought in Yūgen, a creeping sense that its weightlessness was only arrived at after long hours of procrastination.
Roberts discussed how his music is positioned far from anything that could be described as
"real" in a recent Rising feature, emphasizing his love of artifice and rigidity. There's no looseness here, no feeling of him trying to overmatch the binary code scrolling down his screen. Instead, there's a sense of parity between man and machine, of Roberts respecting the framing devices his artificial working partner puts around his output. There's a feeling not dissimilar to the one Kraftwerk found on "Computer Love", where a tender synthesis of human emotions and mechanics are set in motion. At its best, on a track like the stuttering closer "Never", this EP resembles something like dialect between Roberts and his computer, getting close to Isaac Asimov's concept of a study of the personalities of intelligent machines. It makes even more sense when you learn that Roberts is a committed sci-fi fan.
If the goal of Yūgen is to remove the everyday from the equation, it only partly succeeds. But this isn't necessarily a failing of the piece; far from it. In fact, the sense of human emotion that bleeds into each track is what makes it so inviting. It shifts through feelings of loss, hope, and unease, with Roberts often fudging the sound to take it to the brink of malfunction. At times it's reminiscent of a clear-eyed take on the experiments Daniel Lopatin has uploaded to YouTube under his SunsetCorp moniker, especially when he splices the vocal sample on "Ivana" across acres of chimerical synths. It's a very visual record, reflecting the way the Haxan Cloak's Excavation conjured up images of a painfully laborious stumble through the afterlife. But Yūgen is more future dystopia than hellish fantasia. "Sun" is all glassy skyscrapers crashing into a purple sea, ripped straight from the cover of a pulpy mid-century science fiction novel.
While lost in Yūgen's world, it is useful to think back at how the Koreless sound has evolved; the earlier "4D" had traces of a soulful vocal, something Roberts would surely balk at now. His remix work for Foals seems even more incongruous, but presumably the paycheck makes up for it. Still, even in those pieces you can hear him slowly beginning to erase the world from his work. Yūgen is likely to feel similarly transitory to those early releases. This feels like a beginning, a place that Roberts has worked toward that isn't necessarily going to be where he's going to land. In the Rising feature he talks of more rules, more restrictions, getting to a point where "I don't get any input into it," as he puts it. That thought echoes common considerations about true artificial intelligence, something that feels potentially terrifying and revelatory, but leaves the future tantalizingly wide open.


The amazingly explicit Chicago rapper has begun to embody the totality of her experience on record. Social issues, violence, and wild sex are all approached with the same fiery conviction.

Queen Elizabitch

The opening track of Queen Elizabitch is a scathing onslaught set to disquieting keys and decaying synths as CupcakKe reveals herself as a rapper to be taken seriously alongside songs like “Best Dick Sucker” and “Deepthroat.” She’s the artist that tweets things like “I’m spring cleaning out this pussy” on a Saturday morning and affectionately refers to her fanbase as “slurpers,” but album opener “Scraps” sets a different tone.
She offers a critique on the poverty that marked her upbringing and the crime that came with it, deadbeat fathers (including her own) and the judgmental eyes that pathologize these experiences. This is far from the version of the now 19-year-old that honored her vagina and favorite pastime—“Juggle them balls in my mouth, deep throat circus”—but it remains the most compelling. Born Elizabeth Harris and raised on Chicago’s South Side, CupcakKe attended the same elementary school as Chief Keef and is a musical byproduct of the drill style he helped popularize. Her raps are underscored by the fearless resolve shared by her scene peers, but her versatility in sound and subject adds another weapon to her arsenal.
Like the three albums that preceded it, Queen Elizabitch juxtaposes reality rhymes with the comically obscene. CupcakKe commits fully to her angles, attacking sex, social issues, and violence with the same level of conviction. She sounds no less authentic when she asks, “Can I measure it with a ruler, papi chula/Hit a split on that dick in the back of the Uber” on lead single “Cumshot” than she does on “Tarzan,” one of the album’s few true-to-form drill records, when she raps “Niggas came after me, I took they salary/Pull out the chopper then test out the accuracy.”
Her willingness to embody the totality of her experience on record, to resist the urge to commit fully to only one part of her identity at the expense of others, feels defiant and brave in an industry that tries to shrink artists into marketable boxes. The whimsical moaning on ode to oral “CPR” does an abrupt 180 into “Author,” a combative diatribe depicting the aggravation of trying to trust a man she believes is cheating. The album seesaws often in this manner, but the presentation is both honest and necessary: Women can, at once, be shameless and vulnerable, sexy and brilliant—the former doesn’t cheapen the latter.
In just forty minutes, Queen Elizabitch finds every corner in CupcakKe’s mind. On the jungle-like trance of “Biggie Smalls,” she tackles traditional beauty standards and eating disorders through the lens of body positivity, reassuring her fans that “big or small, I love you all.” She showcases a level of pop sensibility on songs like the effervescent victory lap “33rd,” but that potential is further revealed outside of this album on a spotlight feature on Charli XCX’s cascading “Lipgloss.” Their contrasting voices—Charli’s in cutesy animation, CupcakKe’s passionate and fiery—work well, perhaps foreshadowing a future where CupcakKe embraces more features on her own work. For now, she stands alone.
The album closes the way she started it: somber and introspective. “Reality, Pt. 4,” is an a capella confessional and a continuation of the respective tracks from 2016’s S.T.D. and Cum Cake. It’s a reminder that this party didn’t come without a cost, that CupcakKe herself is nothing short of a miracle. She emerged from some of the worst life can offer with an extraordinary sense of humor and music that makes the case for subversion by magnification. She turns any semblance of respectability politics inside out, walking in a truth, exaggerated or not, that she’s earned the right to tell. But assigning buzzwords like “sex positive” or “body positive” is to miss the point. While she is certainly all of those things, her mere existence in rap and as a whole is resistance, and CupcakKe is mostly just doing whatever the hell she wants. If she just so happens to shift a dominant paradigm or two, well, we’re all the better for it.


DJ Quik's new album is sharper and more brittle-sounding than his last album, 2011's The Book of David. The Midnight Life is a reminder that 25 years into Quik's career, he is still discovering how two or three sounds can make you momentarily forget how rap songs usually go, the directions they head in.

The Midnight Life

The sun is always shining in DJ Quik's music. You can hear it in his light, affable voice, the bright and exuberant sounds he surrounds it with. But death and rot and despair are always nearby. Estranged family members stalk his lyrics, threatening to bring chaos. He flirts with bitterness and jaundice—"Anything I do in music is never celebrated," he laments on "Pet Sematary," from his new album The Midnight Life—but he backs away carefully, with a chuckle. This peculiar brand of pathos, a mixture of the antic and the mournful, should have its own word—"Quikenfreude," maybe.
And The Midnight Life is rich in Quikenfreude. The album opens with a goofy, self-deprecating skit in which some reverent young rappers ask Quik what the rap game needs, and he responds, to their bewilderment, "a banjo." It's a little joke about the West Coast pioneer's career-long preference for obscure, unfashionable sounds and instruments, and he dials up a banjo sound on the first full song to underline the point. Against this playful backdrop, though, he unleashes a torrent of bile and resentment, lashing out against men, women, fans, and enemies alike. "You're lucky my security don't want it to pop/ They looking out for you bastards, if it was me you'd be shot," he warns. The picture he paints of himself—alone, ridiculed and envied by locals, and preyed upon relentlessly by close friends and associates—is bleak.
The Midnight Life is accordingly sharper and more brittle-sounding than The Book of David from 2011, which glowed with warm horns and jazz piano. But the enlivening Quik touch is everywhere: 25 years into his career, he is still discovering how 2 or 3 sounds can make you momentarily forget how rap songs usually go, the directions they head in. "Trapped On The Tracks" begins like his version of hyphy before rewinding and fast-forwarding itself into something much stranger and unclassifiable. "Shine" is one long loop of piano that keeps doubling back on itself, as if the track is gasping, while warped bells chime like bowed cymbals dipped in water. Even the straightforward rap/R&B hybrids have something startling going on in them.
His records are also increasingly beautiful in his late career, matching pristine clarity with palpable warmth. He loves session musicians, and keeps a small army of them in business— including guitarist Robert "Fonksta" Bacon, whose clipped rhythm guitar murmurs from every corner and who gets his own interlude to stretch out. On "El's Interlude 2", bongos start playing, and they are simply the most gorgeously recorded bongos you've ever heard in your life. This might sound insanely trivial, but really—you need to hear them. You can hear the thumb callouses.
These little moments are far from trivial for Quik's music--they comprise its essence. To hear the loving way he treats synths and keys, letting them blur into a composite glimmer, on "Pet Sematary", is to appreciate what lifelong love, diligently applied, sounds like. Few rap producers have communicated as much visceral joy in the craft of record-making as Quik."And when I play this guitar, it's gonna make my dick hard," he crows on "Life Jacket", and it might be the most quintessentially Quik line ever.
He's claimed this is his most carefree, unencumbered record, but if that's true, free time only makes him fiercer. "I got niggas in my hood that can't even buy gold/ But swearin' up and down they ballin out of control/ You niggas is fakin, acting like they got cocaine bakin/ With a fuckin' day job at the train station," he sneers on "Pet Sematary". Enough? No, not quite, as he adds, "And they gotta apply every year for that job." Nothing summons eloquence from Quik quite like scorn. "Produce Whitney and Janet!/ Oh, you can't." Can you shut someone down faster than that?
Quik has been complicit in downplaying his own rapping occasionally—"I almost talk; I don't even rap," he observed to Complex—but he's criminally under-appreciated as a lyricist,and might be the best and most original of his generation of producer/rappers. On "The Conduct", he's on his "Third passport, poppin Ambien on international flights." He pulls the top back on his car on "Puffin Tha Dragon" to "Let the raindrops kiss me on my angelic face." He's poetic; he's hilarious; he's catchy; he's poignant. "I'm a geek I suppose/ I'm a freak I suppose/ I'm whatever you want me to be this week I suppose," he offers slyly on "That Getter". He's the tortoise and the hare, impossible to pin down and sure to outlast us all.


After perfecting anthemic dancefloor fantasies with fine-tuned tracks like “Yoohoo,” Dusky offer a sentimentalist hodge-podge designed to prove that their mettle extends beyond the dancefloor.

Outer

In the UK, they’ve gotten dance music down to an exact science. Just listen to an artist like Duke Dumont or Disclosure: From the methodical arrangements to the meticulous sound design, every element is perfectly deployed to ensure maximum dancefloor impact and maximum earworm potential. The decade’s reigning blend of pop melodies and ’90s house tropes is lush, polished, and it sounds expensive—which is ironic for a decade in which the music industry has cratered and actual nightclubs are increasingly gentrified out of business. Still, fantasy is a hell of a drug.
Dusky haven’t had the chart success of Disclosure or Dumont, but they represent a similar impulse. Alfie Granger-Howell and Nick Harriman got their start in the late ’00s as Solarity, recording bright, melodic progressive house for the trance trio Above & Beyond’s Anjunadeep label. As they moved toward a darker, deeper sound, they adopted a new alias at the opposite end of the spectrum: Dusky. Their career until now has constituted a search for the perfect fusion of underground affect, big-room punch, and just enough heart-on-sleeve emotion to make their productions sound weightier than the club tracks that bookend them. It’s safe to say they perfected that mix on tracks like “Yoohoo” and “Love Taking Over,” both marked by the duo’s characteristic balance of hard and soft: While drums and bassline thump you sternly in the chest, echo-soaked loops of vocals swirl like victory pennants over a smoldering battlefield, at once triumphant and sad. So here, on their second album, the question becomes: Where now? To answer that, they follow the same course as a million dance long-players before: a sentimentalist hodge-podge designed to prove that their mettle extends beyond the dancefloor.
You may have already figured out how this story goes. Soaring, percussion-free intro and ambient interludes; wavering falsetto vocals; slow, sensitive closing song—all the tropes of the grown-up electronic album are here. So are the requisite guest appearances, beginning with an awkward Wiley cameo, “Sort It Out Sharon.” It’s an obvious nod to the broad sweep of British rave history—the intro is a nearly note-for-note rewrite of 808 State’s “Pacific State”—and perhaps there’s something novel about putting a grime MC over a Balearic house beat. But Wiley feels hemmed in by all those steady kick drums, and the rest of the track, with bass like a Foley artist’s thunder sheet, can’t escape the shadow of influences like Joy Orbison and Boddika. The Gary Numan feature “Swansea,” on the other hand, is too reverent: A slow, chugging, gothy number with Numan in peak warble, it offers no compelling reason to listen to it instead of virtually any song from Numan’s own back catalog.
The album isn't without its moments: The genuinely thrilling “Trough” finds a new sweet spot somewhere in between James Holden’s synth flare, M83’s widescreen drama, and the needle-nosed tone clusters of the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds. You can hear Granger-Howell’s formal training in composition paying off here, where they stuff every available crevice with harmonies until the spectrum sparkles like diamond pavé. And their finesse comes to the fore in other places as well: the synthesizers in the lumbering “Songs of Phase” flicker like colored flames, and “Tiers” masterfully layers its interlocking synths.
The real problem is that their moments of pathos don't often feel earned. The album opens on such a dramatic peak—part ambient come-up, part breast-beating cry into the void—that it leaves little room to progress from there. The close-harmonized vocals of “Tiers” (“Like tears falling,” unless that's supposed to be “Like tiers falling,” which wouldn't make any sense at all—but why title it “Tiers,” then?) are cloying and sticky-sweet, and the same goes for “Long Wait,” whose DNA can be traced back to songs like Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” and Moderat’s “Bad Kingdom”: the surging strings and Solomon Grey’s pinched wail are simply syrupy. “Marble,” topped with Granger-Howell’s own surprisingly capable falsetto, is actually pretty effective for a downtempo Bon Iver knockoff; freed from the need to move bodies on the dancefloor, it can settle into its melancholy and wallow for a pleasant while.
The dancefloor cuts, on the other hand, are torn between competing impulses. After “Yoohoo,” the soaring piano-driven uplift of “Ingrid is a Hybrid” feels pat. “Runny Nose” opens with what I hope is a tongue-in-cheek snapshot of coked-up nightlife philosophizing and shifts into a peak-time techno take on Banco de Gaia’s vague exoticism. And “Songs of Phase,” the toughest, most effective club track on the album, sells itself short by falling back on snippets of an instantly recognizable Ursula Rucker a cappella, sourced from a 1994 King Britt production, that’s been reused in many, many songs over the years. (Budding producers can even get it for themselves on Beatport.) “As I journey deeper inside myself,” she gravely intones, but nothing on the album suggests much in the way of inner quests; Outer, fittingly enough, projects its energies relentlessly outward, broadcasting its emotional content in a way that too often feels heavy-handed. It’s as though Dusky didn't quite trust their listeners to meet them on their own terms. With every laser sweep and strobe burst, you can imagine them anxiously scanning the audience's faces, looking for evidence of rapture and pushing their faders further into the red.


Composer Olga Bell's Tempo resembles dance music as glimpsed through a funhouse mirror: strangely distorted, sometimes goofy, and deeply pleasing on a simple, almost childlike level.

Tempo

Where Olga Bell's last album, Край (Krai), offered an imaginary tour of her native Russia's hinterlands, Tempo represents a very different sort of ethnographical expedition: into contemporary club culture and '90s dance pop. In preparing for the album, the conservatory-educated musician made a habit of frequenting events like François Kevorkian's Sunday-night Deep Space parties at New York's Cielo club, where she would dance, Shazam, and, above all, listen closely to the inner workings of what she heard. (She made these research trips alone, she says, in order to avoid the distractions that would have accompanied going with friends.) Back in her studio, she browsed producers' forums to find out which VSTs young EDM producers currently favor—"I wanted to use sounds that I thought of as really commercial and almost kind of gross," she says—and she wrote out measure-by-measure transcriptions of vintage songs like Snap!'s classic "Rhythm Is a Dancer" and 2 Bad Mice's "Like It Deep," the better to understand their structural underpinnings.
But if this all sounds very academic, the project was motivated by a far simpler impulse: The desire to make joyful, body-moving music. She was especially inspired by the way that different tempos evoke different physical responses, so she began most songs by deciding which tempo matched her mood that day—hence the album's title—and then letting the music come to her as the metronome tick-tocked steadily away. The process yielded an array of rhythms across the spectrum, from woozy trip-hop to peak-time house to 160-BPM footwork.
The results resemble dance music as glimpsed through a funhouse mirror: strangely distorted, sometimes goofy, and deeply pleasing on a simple, almost childlike level. Pitch-shifted voices zoom across the stereo field like unknotted balloons, and bursts of tuned 808 toms and rimshots chatter like wind-up teeth. Common dance music tropes get magnified to exaggerated proportions: Trap finger-snaps echo through hangar-sized reverb in "ATA," and in the giddy "Randomness," trance stabs and synthesizer leads congeal into an ungainly heap, like a Jell-O mold filled with Eurodance. The bridge of "Power User" turns hip-hop's call to throw your hands up into a sing-song jump-rope rhyme. Stylistically, the music has little in common with Край; last year's Incitation EP anticipates Tempo's electronic palette but not its spunky sense of play. But what unites the three records is Bell's evident delight in the plasticity and malleability of sound. She's particularly fond of portamento, the effect that connects a run of notes in a long, sweeping motion, which she applies liberally to synths and voice alike, giving her melodies a springy, elastic sense of movement.
Bell may have trained as a pianist, but she proves to be a formidable singer: expressive, playful, inventive, and acrobatic without being showy. Just listen to the finely calibrated timing and the carefully cracked pitch of the way she sings, "You sulk, sit alone in a bar / Looking a little like a punchline, buddy" (from "Power User," which is decidedly not a toast for the douchebags). She can go from operatic finesse to a conspiratorial whisper in a single phrase, and she's never too polished to make time for hiccups, chuckles, and vocal fry. In fact it's often her voice that carries the day: Subtract the synths and beats from the gooey R&B jam "Zone," and the tune would hold up just fine as an a cappella, her multi-tracked harmonies stretched across the frame like a web of chewing gum.
Fortunately, despite Tempo's unusual backstory, nothing here scans as ironic. And in a few cases, Bell's outsider-looking-in setup has little bearing on the music itself. "Ritual," a full-blooded house anthem featuring the singer Sara Lucas (sounding a lot like Roísín Murphy in late-night-diva mode), wouldn't sound at all out of place on a crowded dancefloor at three in the morning. And the closing song, "America," makes for an uneasy comedown from all the carefree hijinks that have preceded it. Over a minor-key dirge, she gives her adopted homeland a stern talking-to—"Is that what you fear? That you're not forever?"—while tremulous organs and gleaming sawtooths explode like a halftime show. In the song's refrain, she jams an extra pause into the world and accents the final syllable—"Ameri-ca"—to make it suddenly sound foreign and strange. If the message of the song is that we can't dance away the end of empire, there's a subtler truth being made here: that we can wear our otherness like a badge of pride.


The prolific Maryland rapper is alternately serious, silly, and soulful.

Broken

There might be more than one other rapper taking their name from one of America’s most popular anti-anxiety medications, but Prince George’s County, Maryland’s Xanman raps better than any of them. The only thing faster than the 19-year-old rapper’s flow is the prolific pace at which he releases music—Xan has released almost 30 projects on mixtape-hosting service Spinrilla in the past three years, though only a handful of those have made it over to Spotify. He’s been making music for much longer than he’s been releasing it: Xan started rapping at age 5 and had his own studio by the time he was a preteen. A six-month stint behind bars on undisclosed charges briefly interrupted his output, but he’s been grinding harder than ever since his release in May. He’s released multiple projects this year, but Broken is the first that approaches retail-album length.
Given his age, Xanman’s extensive discography is made even more impressive by being mostly self-produced. Like the state he hails from, Xan’s beats—which he refers to as “Xanstyles”—split the difference between North and South. There’s heavy Zaytoven influence to the glittering keys, MIDI strings, and organ swells on songs like “Broken, Pt. 1,” but an undeniable East Coast love that comes through in his affection for hip-hop instrumentals that he’s barely old enough to remember, like 50 Cent’s “Many Men,” Mary J. Blige’s “Family Affair,” and Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop (That Thing).”
Whether his words arrive over straight-up trap or something more soulful, Xanman has a fondness for hashtag rap, using punchlines to detail his plans to cause physical harm: “Flava Flav/You get clocked in the head,” “I put that bitch underground/Harriet Tubman.” At its best, Xan’s love of non-sequiturs gives his lyrics a light surrealism, but it encourages some cringier instincts: casual homophobia, jokes about Paul Walker’s death, and some especially regrettable bars about R. Kelly and Bill Cosby.
Even then, he lets out his soulful side enough to keep the whole project mostly serious. For as many colorful metaphors Xanman comes up with to describe his guns, there’s an underlying sense of heartbreak, as the album title and cover indicate. His hooks are more often repeated expressions of emotional uncertainty—“Why you gotta be like that?”; “Have you ever been in love?”; “How would you feel?”—than declarative statements.
In classic DMV fashion, Xanman doesn’t let the beat dictate the direction his flow takes, almost as if he’s in competition with it. He crams words into tight spaces and lets them spray in rapid bursts, sounding most at home over menacing, mosh-ready beats like “Brick Paper” and “Back Up.” Reigning rap queen Rico Nasty shows up for a co-signing spot on the remix to “Gucci Down,” the closest thing Xan has had to a hit thus far.
Xan’s vocal delivery is the kind we’re used to hearing digitally manipulated, but he’s comfortable enough pushing himself into different registers, from a gruff low end to a twinkling falsetto, that he doesn’t need a computer to do it for him. Xanman has a mixtape series called “Luther Xandross,” which seems to suggest how he’d like to think of himself: as a soulful vocalist, not just a rapper. It’s hard to catch every single word he says, but the skill is clear enough.


Working within a fairly heavy philosophical framework, New York’s Photay has made some of his most captivating electronic music yet, with nimble house and disco rhythms and real emotional weight.

Onism

Photay’s Onism begins from what sounds like a fairly heavy premise: The album takes its title from John Koenig’s philosophy of the same name, which deals with “the frustration of being stuck in just one body that inhabits only one place at a time.” (Honestly, the idea that it might be otherwise had never occurred to me, which makes learning about onism feel a little bit like having your first experience of Santa Claus being told that he doesn’t exist.) Fortunately, there’s nothing frustrating about the record. Onism—his third album, following the self-released 1st and a self-titled album for Astro Nautico—is playful, joyful, and downright frisky in places. It takes the Woodstock, N.Y., musician’s interests in African percussion and zippy electronic funk and weaves them into the most captivating and inventive music he’s made yet.
Despite the philosophical subject matter, Onism is first and foremost about pleasure. When he turns his thoughts to the dancefloor, Photay (aka Evan Shornstein) trots out nimble house and disco rhythms touched up with live drumming and rolling Latin percussion. “Inharmonious Slog”—definitely a misnomer—boasts the same kind of effortlessly gliding synth melodies that marked early Floating Points singles like “Truly” and “Vacuum Boogie.” The record’s clubbiest cut, “Screens,” tips its hat to Four Tet in main-room mode and piles on strings and winking brass synths.
When he eases into slower tempos, his wheezy organs and spacious beats share something in common with James Blake. But unlike the reams of “chillstep” producers that came along in the latter’s wake, Photay is less interested in industrial-strength side-chain tricks or vertigo-inducing drops than he is in intrigue and surprise, which manifest themselves in odd arrangements and hidden trap doors. In “Off-Piste,” the rickety drum groove and fat, stacked chords perpetually build toward a climax that never comes; where other producers might insert a Pavlovian drop, Photay simply lets the floor fall out, and a good quarter of the song’s running time is taken up by an extended denouement. “Eco Friend” is a polyrhythmic tug-of-war between African percussion and 808, but after two minutes of stark slinking and strutting, it tips over into creamy sax riffs evocative of late-night cable-access television: potted palms, red and blue neon, the works.
But it’s the tactile nature of his sound design that really makes Onism so thrilling. His synths have the warbling quality of audio tape drifting through someone’s fingertips; his drum sounds come wrapped in a weird, crinkly sheen, rattling like gelcaps in blister packs. “Screens” sets warm, naturalistic piano and strings against a beat imbued with an otherworldly quiver; the bass synth in “Balsam Massacre” sounds like an asthmatic duck honking through fan blades. In “The Everyday Push,” one of the album’s two damn-near perfect songs, the clicky intro hiccups like a stuck alarm clock; a series of small, splotchy chords makes the most of the electric piano’s overdriven harmonics; and somewhere there’s a sound like an old guitar amp being kicked. The buzzing tone of the balafon, a West African xylophone Shornstein learned to play during a stint in Guinea, only serves to accentuate the song’s ragged textures, and when the kick drum hits, you can practically feel torn speaker cones flapping in the wind.
All these pleasures are hardly limited to the visceral realm; the record’s best songs are imbued with real emotional weight. “Outré Lux,” the album’s other highlight, doubles as a showcase for the remarkable voice of New York’s Madison McFerrin, the daughter of Bobby McFerrin. She first appears as a pastel swirl of close harmonies bobbing above footwork-paced 808s: “Can you see me,” she murmurs over and over, half hidden in software. But when she steps out from behind all the computer processing and sings, “‘Cause I don’t wanna play this game again,” it’s as though Photay’s expertly constructed digital world had dissolved beneath her breath. “Why must I always defend/What it means to be free/To be myself,” she sings at the song’s climax, splitting once more into umpteen-part harmonies. Strings swell; there’s a harsh digital crackle, like a cable being jiggled in a socket; the song hovers hesitantly between the real world and the virtual. If we can’t truly inhabit any perspective other than our own, Photay seems to say, here’s a workaround, via multi-tracked vocal parts that refract a single voice into a rainbow of tone, and drum sounds that dissolve into tiny droplets. Everywhere you listen, unities are breaking down.


Rhye leader Michael Milosh remains king of the most respectable horny music possible. His new album testifies to those talents without calling too much attention to itself.

Home

Michael Milosh was born with the gift of a golden voice. His swooning, androgynous countertenor—which has been compared to Sade’s so many times she should probably receive a portion of Milosh’s royalties by now—seems to radiate desire and longing with every vibration. At times, he sounds a little like Marvin Gaye at his most weightless, with the anguish shaved off.
That voice has been the beating heart of nearly every song released by Rhye, the musical project Milosh founded a decade ago with producer Robin Hannibal and of which he is the only continuous member. So it’s striking that Home, the group’s latest, is the first Rhye album to make significant use of voices other than Milosh’s. Forty-nine voices, in fact: Home begins and ends with ghostly, wordless cantos sung by the 49-piece Danish National Girls’ Choir, which took advantage of Danish grant money to travel to Los Angeles to record with Rhye. Midway through “Holy,” the album’s muted climax, those cherubic voices “Oooh” and “Aaaah” their way into the groove, like sunlight streaming into a dim room.
Perhaps the moment resonates because it evokes a particular kind of musical togetherness that’s been lost to the pandemic: large choral groups singing together in the same space. (Since the early spread of COVID-19, choir performances have been linked to outbreaks in the United States, Germany, England, and other countries; these recordings, thankfully, are from 2019.) It’s a form of communion that’s clearly meaningful to Milosh, who sang in a choir as a child. Or maybe it’s just a supremely well-engineered slice of downtempo bliss, as Rhye is wont to deliver. But the choir also stands out as one of the few aspects of Home that breaks substantially from the group’s by-now-familiar soft-pop formula.
Otherwise, all the usual elements of a Rhye album are here and accounted for. Milosh still slips in and out of falsetto with enviable grace. He still addresses most of his lyrics in the second-person—“The more I love your face/The more I get to taste,” “Can you feel my fire deep inside/Can you feel my fire growing high,” etc.—cooing sweet innuendos to the object of his desire. The album cover once again depicts a woman, naked and tastefully cropped. And the title is another one-word noun—Home—meant to signify the house in the Santa Monica Mountains that has been both a home and creative base for Milosh and his partner/collaborator, Geneviève Medow-Jenkins, since 2019. (That’s where the album first took shape, and where the couple has been broadcasting experiential events incorporating ambient music, massage, and meditation in recent months.)
On Home, Rhye remains enamored with the sonic touchstones of early ’80s sophisti-pop and smooth R&B: softly puttering beats, slinky bass lines, half-whispered vocals, and sultry grooves that rarely rise above a sleek, expensive-sounding murmur. (Milosh doesn’t just borrow from the aesthetic of quiet storm—he literally incorporates the phrase “quiet storm” into the lyrics of his songs, like Sade did on “The Sweetest Taboo.”) Analog synthesizers fill out the sound on “Helpless,” whose velvety groove sounds a little like Steely Dan’s “My Rival” with the urgency sucked out.
On tracks like “Holy,” the mix is so intimate you can hear the piano creak and rattle. Elsewhere, Milosh revs up the tempos and arrangements from 2019’s meditative, piano-driven Spirit, incorporating ornate string arrangements. “Come in Closer” is a particular delight: The track opens with little more than a tapping Wurlitzer and some falling rain. After the drums come in—forming an unexpected syncopated counterpart with the Wurlitzer—the song builds to a stirring orchestral climax. The retro disco-pop of “Black Rain” is an appealing jolt of adrenaline, and the Danish choir makes a welcome return in “Hold You Down.”
But a solid chunk of Home blends into the background, with songs that introduce all their moving parts at the beginning and don’t particularly build anywhere. Lyrically, the album’s carnal imagery hints at an interest in dominant and submissive play: There’s “Safeword,” with its thumping drum programming and tightly coiled strings, and there’s “Sweetest Revenge,” with its lurching funk licks and lines like “Oh, I don’t like to behave/No more master to slave.” But the music is so bloodless and restrained that it doesn’t evoke freaky sex at all. Milosh remains king of the most respectable, dignified horny music possible, and Home testifies to those talents without calling too much attention to itself.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about Home is that, including Spirit, it’s Rhye’s third release in three years—an impressively prolific burst, considering the five-year gap between 2013’s Woman and 2018’s Blood. But as the albums pile up, they can also blur together. Like those meditation broadcasts, Home works as a sensual mood-setting exercise, but less so as a distinct creative statement.

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After training as a traditional Nguni spiritual healer, the South African musician returns with a 13-piece band for an album of divine orchestral soul.

On the Romance of Being

Desire Marea’s healing powers don’t vanish when he steps off stage, and now he has the credentials to prove it. After the release of his eponymous debut, a record of otherworldly club music suffused with erotic vitality, the queer South African artist underwent training as a traditional Nguni spiritual healer, or sangoma, accepting the call from above to serve his earthly and ancestral communities. His second album, On the Romance of Being, is a collective affair, with Marea stepping out from behind the laptop to front a 13-piece band culled from South Africa’s avant-garde jazz and experimental music scenes. Together, they take a leap from Desire’s digitized churn to swooning orchestral soul, dancing across the divide between flesh and spirit.
Opener “Ezulwini” slowly rolls out the record’s cast of musicians as it conjures a seance. Sibusiso Mashiloane and Sbu Zondi hold down the rhythm section on piano and drums respectively, stirring up a gentle mist of twinkling keys and light cymbal taps before Portia Sibiya and Andrei Van Wyk activate a volcanic eruption of distorted bass and guitar, giving On the Romance of Being its decisive moment of liftoff. Marea explores the full range of his operatic vocals over their triumphant post-rock stomp: “I want to see you levitate,” he repeats, rising from a piercing falsetto to a commanding shout.
The album burns brightest on a pair of songs in which Marea recognizes the limits of his grace in the face of emotionally unavailable lovers. On the bilingual “Be Free,” he sways between mockery in English (“I find it very lame/That you fear yourself”) and generosity in Zulu (“My cup runneth over, yet you are afraid/Why do you cower in the face of love?”). Eventually, his patience runs thin, and the song erupts into a blast of strings and wordless cries as he chooses himself. “Makhukhu” takes a softer approach: Marea’s bitterness toward a partner’s opacity—“It’s oh so quizzical/Perplexing perhaps/All the depth that you lack”—is framed by quivering eighth-note piano chords and a slinky bassline. He sings of mountains piercing clouds and gateways to bliss, but as the band climbs towards a glittering crescendo, hopes for a shared romantic vision crystallize into a lonely mirage.
Given the density of demanding vocal performances and show-stopping instrumental shredding, it’s natural that Marea and his bandmates would want to catch their breath. While “Skhathi”’s new wave guitar figures and warbled vocals are pleasant enough, its comparatively tame groove feels out of step with the album’s dazzling hairpin turns. But Marea redeems himself immediately with closer “Banzi,” a nine-minute electronic free jazz workout featuring four gloriously grueling minutes of rhythmic shouts and growls. With one final naked cymbal crash, the room clears, leaving Marea alone at the microphone—a vessel for two worlds, eager to be refilled.


Kieran Hebden’s new live album reminds us that he is a stellar performer, not just a producer.

Four Tet: Live at Alexandra Palace London, 8th and 9th May 2019

The British producer Kieran Hebden has one of the most distinctive signatures in electronic music. First, a gravelly drum machine; then, some jewel-toned synth pads; and, finally, a strip of harp or chimes or wordless cooing, unspooling like wrinkled ribbon.
Hebden gets plenty of mileage out of this trim set of sounds, and Live at Alexandra Palace, London 8th and 9th May 2019 makes for a good display of his range. Drawing mostly from 2017’s New Energy and 2013’s Beautiful Rewind, he fuses everything into nearly two hours of surging buildups, placid comedowns, and hard lefts. The album shows just how dynamic his modest toolkit can be—and proves, by extension, that he is a stellar performer, not just a producer.
Last year’s Live at Funkhaus Berlin, 10th May 2018 was Four Tet’s first official live album in 14 years (on Bandcamp and on a clandestine Spotify page, he has since added archival live recordings dating from 2004, 2010, and 2013). The Funkhaus show wasn’t as radically improvisational as his live shows once were; instead, it offered a medley of catalog favorites. Live at Alexandra Palace follows almost the same setlist as the Funkhaus, but the crescendos are more forceful, the moments of chaos more tumultuous, the transitions more drawn out.
Alexandra Palace does away with song titles, with tracks named simply “Part 1” through “Part 5,” an implicit acknowledgment that Four Tet’s catalog is a series of variations on a theme. “Part 1,” an extended mash-up between “Planet” and “Dreamer,” opens the album on a high note, hitting Four Tet’s sweet spot of muscular groove and wistful melody and then drawing it out for 16 minutes. “Part 2” turns more labyrinthine: First an ambient snippet of “Ba Teaches Yoga” leads into the stately “Two Thousand and Seventeen”; then, after eight lulling minutes, that song abruptly twists into an extended passage of rapid-fire machine hits, alarm bells, and analog squeals. It’s a neat trick, flipping Four Tet at his most sentimental into an ear-splitting din.
Parts three and four, with a combined runtime of 75 minutes, comprise the bulk of the album. Here, Hebden whips through “Scientists,” “Ocoras,” “Only Human,” “Lush,” “Kool FM,” and “Spirit Fingers,” followed by “LA Trance,” “SW9 9SL,” “Locked,” and “Teenage Birdsong”—though close listening reveals trace elements of songs like “Sing” woven into the mix. “Part 4” is particularly impressive: The way he flips melodies and tone colors over shifting beats brings to mind someone snapping the rows of a Rubik’s Cube back and forth.
The live shows must have been something to behold: Visual designer team Squidsoup turned the 10,000-capacity hall into a space reminiscent of Yayoi Kusama’s infinity mirror rooms, stringing up 40,000 digitally controlled LEDs in a massive, three-dimensional grid surrounding Hebden, who performed at crowd level. Video of the event suggests a translation of Four Tet’s flickering rhythms and textures into something you could almost reach out and touch. The audio recording doesn’t capture any of that, of course, but it’s still gratifyingly immersive. There’s just enough crowd noise mixed in to lend the suggestion of being there without being distracting. And for those who haven’t caught Four Tet in concert, Live at Alexandra Palace offers a new way of hearing his music. Much like Daft Punk did with their 2006 Coachella pyramid show, it suggests that Four Tet’s catalog is essentially one endlessly remixable song.


The fist-pumping Nashville pop punk band Diarrhea Planet's sophomore album I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams is fun and ingratiating (many of the songs could pass for KISS). It's an album you yell along to, preferably into the face of someone else who is yelling back.

Diarrhea Planet: I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams

I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams

I was lucky: I was spared the knowledge of Diarrhea Planet's name when I discovered them. Walking into a low-ceilinged club in Austin at this year's South by Southwest, I was assaulted by the sight of six twenty-something guys, all shirtless, seemingly none of them over 5"4, essentially scaling the walls. There were guitars played behind backs, over heads, with teeth. I'm pretty sure three guitar solos were happening at once. The people in the audience looked happier than anyone I'd ever seen. It was only when I tapped someone on the shoulder to find out what this band, this epochal experience, called itself, that I learned the awful truth. It didn't help that the exhilarating song they were blasting out, the fan-favorite encore, was called "Ghost With a Boner".
My experience is a luxury you have been denied, which is unfair and I am sorry. You are, naturally, wisely skeptical-- this picture probably doesn't help. But "skepticism" and "Diarrhea Planet" cannot meaningfully coexist. They are matter and antimatter, Superman and Kryptonite. Their new album, I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams, is fun and ingratiating, and you can hear some of their joyfully fist-pumping spirit coursing through it. But by itself, it doesn't make the case for why you should take a band with this name to your bosom. Aggressive ridiculousness is a wonderful tool for inducing joy, but it's tricky and risky getting the dosage correct, and the main problem with a Diarrhea Planet full-length, amazingly, is that it's somehow not quite ridiculous enough.
There are some really good moments, here, to be sure. Diarrhea Planet are a pop punk band, essentially, one that has iron-enriched its sound with the good-times hedonism of hair metal and Tenacious D-style guitar heroics. Their songs sound as much like teen-movie ideas about rock-and-roll bands-- the Wyld Stallyns, the Lone Rangers-- as they do the work real-world rock bands.
Tellingly, many of the songs on I'm Rich Beyond Your Wildest Dreams could pass for KISS: "Lite Dream", in particular, sounds like an Ace Frehley vocal take. There are furtively odd moments in the songs that remind you they are being made in 2013, not 1977, like "Lite Dream"'s shivery little outbreak of Sonic Youth guitars in the bridge, or the almost-Strokes high notes in the intro to "Separations". But they are usually shoulder-checked into a locker, moments later, by a battalion of wind-milled power chords.
This is an album you yell along to, preferably into the face of someone else who is yelling back. Listening to it on headphones at a cubicle desk is like playing It's Dark and Hell Is Hot while doing your taxes: It may work, it may not, but it was certainly not designed for those listening conditions. The most satisfying songs on I'm Rich are the ones that adapt a bit to the fact that all six members, logistically speaking, cannot be present to scream every note in your face as you listen. The wistful tinge in "Kids", for instance, makes the song stand out.
Some of the lyrics hint at love and longing, sort of: "White Girls" sketches out a break-up happening amid a "drunken chorus of bros." But the back-to-back songs "Skeleton Head" and "Baby Head" are little more indicative. Some of it grows a little same-y. But seriously, and I simply cannot stress this enough: if Diarrhea Planet are playing in a 100-mile radius of where you are sitting, go there. (And for God's sake, make sure you stay for "Ghost With A Boner.") The next day, this album will be here to remind you, however faintly, of the experience.


Savant was the early-'80s project of Kerry Leimer, and their recombinant avant-funk approach had something in common with Brian Eno’s work during the period, particularly his David Byrne collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.

Artificial Dance

"The intelligence resides in the work, not the individual," explains Kerry Leimer in the liner notes to Artificial Dance, a retrospective collection that highlights the unpredictable alchemy of his early 1980s studio project Savant. The Seattle experimentalist is best known for the woozy ambient music he has released as K. Leimer, but Savant’s approach was something like an avant-garde jam band re-imagined as musique concrète. Riffs, grooves, and rhythms were crafted on a wide array of instruments—electric bass, drums, Oberheim DMX, Prophet 5 synthesizer, and objects identified in the credits with names like "Percussion (Wood, Silver, Plastic)," "Guitar (Prepared, China)," and "Guitar (Cloud Guitars)"—and then broken apart, looped, layered, run through primitive effects, and reassembled at last by the razor-wielding producer across lengthy spools of reel-to-reel tape.
The recombinant approach had something in common with Brian Eno’s work during the period, particularly his David Byrne collaboration My Life in the Bush of Ghosts (Eno, too, was fond of fanciful instruments like “snake guitar”), and the results similarly hovered somewhere between funk, loosely speaking, and more abstracted forms of ambient sound. Debut single "Stationary Dance", with its breakbeat structure and a voiceover sampled from an instructional LP, anticipated cut-and-paste artists like M|A|R|R|S and Coldcut by six or seven years, while the watery B-side, "Sensible Music", sounds today like a more muscular, lo-fi version of Talk Talk’s later work. Listeners familiar with Leimer’s solo catalog will detect echoes of that music here: the glassy synthesizers of his ambient recordings trace serpentine paths through Savant’s songs, and the rolling, otherworldly drum programming of K. Leimer’s 1983 album Imposed Order bleeds through into the stop-start rhythms of "The Neo-Realist" and "Indifference".
But the bulk of Savant’s catalog sounds like nothing else that had come before. These tracks, where skeletal dub rhythms underpin an array of daubed-on splotches of electric bass and Clavinet and atonal guitar, feel less like "songs" than amorphous organisms where a rippling pulse is the only constant. The structure can be hard to follow but in a fascinating way—long and convoluted 10-bar phrases are not uncommon, and it often feels like a rug is being pulled out from under you, even when the bassline plunges deep in the pocket. "Shadow in Deceit" begins with a flurry of bells and post-punk bass and gradually transforms, via interlocking marimbas, into a vivid template for Four Tet’s brand of new-age techno. "Heart of Stillness", with its unsteady pitter-patter percussion and dripping guitar tones, has an even headier rainforest vibe; it feels like sound just on the cusp of coalescing into music, or perhaps vice versa.
Given that the bulk of the album’s tracks were made between 1981 and 1985, it’s harder to judge the final three cuts, all previously unreleased, which date from between 2009 and 2014. "Facility" is dark and alluring, and it’s not hard to imagine it appearing on a contemporary label like R&S. But the context differs so radically from the early work that the later songs might as well constitute a different project altogether. But that’s OK—the 11 songs that comprise Savant’s prime output amount to some of the most striking and original American electronic music of that period, so much so that it seems almost inconceivable that it went largely overlooked until now. Had a tastemaker like Detroit’s Electrifying Mojo gotten his hands on Savant’s slim catalog, who knows how things might have turned out. Artificial Dance is enough to make you rethink what you thought you knew about that era—and to make you wonder what else might be out there, just waiting to be rediscovered.


In a way, Black Moon Spell is King Tuff mastermind Kyle Thomas' post-fame record: the tales are taller, the drugs are better, the women wilder, and there’s a conquering hero at the record's center to tell us all about it. If the stories are slightly different, for better or worse, the songs remain the same.

Black Moon Spell

There has to be some chemical in vinyl that brings out the most embarrassing kind of rockism in people who sing about it. Obviously, U2 would fall victim—you could only acquire Songs of Innocence by doing the exact opposite of crate digging, and yet they put a damn LP on the cover anyway—and even a goofball like King Tuff (aka Kyle Thomas) is not immune. “Black Holes in Stereo” is the tenth song on his new album Black Moon Spell, and it threatens to topple his entire garage-glam enterprise. As you might be able to tell from the title, it’s a tribute to wax for people who felt “Spin the Black Circle” and “45” were a bit too wishy-washy. Imagine what it takes to out-earnest the likes of Pearl Jam and Gaslight Anthem, and then see if Thomas’ lyrics do the trick: “Girls and boys come from outer space and so does music too/ I learned more workin’ at the record store than I ever did in high school.”
Fortunately, he’s got a sense of humor about himself that counteracts all of that, and besides, “Black Holes in Stereo” is actually the truth—for him, classic rock is elementary, glam is higher education, and a masters degree is earned by trolling through the deepest recesses of garage rock obscurity. That’s the world in which King Tuff lives and thrives, where airbrushed van paintings come to life and “stoner rock” still means something Spicoli or Wooderson would listen to, not the slow and low likes of Sleep or Kyuss. Likewise, there are no institutions of the square—and that includes school, monogamous relationships, jobs, and standards of beauty. Black Moon Spell lives life with a foam dome and beer-colored goggles.
This world may be Thomas' construction, but it’s real to King Tuff, and on his self-titled sophomore bow from 2012, he pronounced himself as the universal rock star—songs like “Anthem”, “Bad Thing”, and “Keep On Movin’” were self-fulfilling prophecies, assumed classics delivered with a playfulness and unabashed hookiness that his more mannered peers like Ty Segall and Thee Oh Sees lack. In a way, Black Moon Spell makes King Tuff realer by continuing that narrative, as it’s a post-fame record in that sense: the tales are taller, the drugs are better, the women wilder, and there’s a conquering hero at the record's center to tell us all about it. The title track, “Rainbow's Run”, and “Eyes of the Muse” seem to be tributes to rock mythology itself, King Tuff ascending to the level of the gods before returning to let the common man in on what gets discussed up there.
If the stories are slightly different, for better or worse, the song remains the same. King Tuff is kind of a knucklehead, but Thomas can be a clever songwriter; the slight modulation in the title track’s brown-sound riff makes its very insistent repetition warranted, while “Headbanger” is a love affair between metal record collectors set to riffs that jut like Iron Maiden’s font and melted psych-rock harmonies. And though he’s more hi-fi than most in his field, Black Moon Spell is still all treble and midrange in a logical way—pre-EQ’d to sound like it’s playing in a car’s cassette deck.
But otherwise, if Black Moon Spell doesn’t instantly recall “Bad Thing” (“Beautiful Thing”) or “Keep On Movin’” (“Black Holes in Stereo”) in either structure or melody, it ends up recalling other songs on Black Moon Spell. Both narrower than King Tuff and with a longer tracklist as well, Black Moon Spell scraps the surprisingly lovely midtempo “ballads" from its predecessor, which allowed a sigh of relief amidst the beer-bonging. He's too genial for the stock characterization of women on “Sick Mind” and “I Love You Ugly” to cause much alarm, though “She was born with a filthy desire/ More sex, more drugs, she can always get higher” is meant as a compliment and thus forces the issue.  Just as disappointing is Thomas’ stock characterization of himself; halfway through his third album, he sings “King Tuff is my name/ I got madness in my brain/ Pleased to meet you, I’m gonna eat you/ Cause I’m batshit insane.” It's a presentation of King Tuff for the sake of King Tuff on a record that already didn’t lack for filler.
On King Tuff’s prettiest song, Thomas sang,“ You always wanna know you’re not alone/ In the unpopular world,” a show of empathy towards the listener who hadn’t found their own personal King Tuff-style way out of being a misfit yet. He then offered some do-as-I-say and do-as-I-do advice: “I’m going deeper into the unusual world.” He's gone even deeper on Black Moon Spell, but with the release of any sort of emotional tether to Kyle Thomas, he might've left the rest of us behind.


The National's other pair of brothers, Brian and Scott Devendorf, team up with Beirut's Benjamin Lanz to pay homage to the headier aspects of the 4AD catalog with an enjoyable yet uneven debut.

LNZNDRF

Whether you are a hardcore fan of the National or think the Brooklyn-based band is everything wrong and annoying about indie rock (and to judge from their YouTube comments, there are a fair number of you in both camps), it's hard to argue against the prowess of the Dessner twins, Bryce and Aaron, who help power the band's sound. They are frequently namechecked as the engine behind the band: Both help run the venerable artpop boutique label Brassland Records, whose flagship act Clogs is one of the foremost names in indie classical. Bryce, meanwhile, collaborated with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto on the Golden Globe-nominated score to The Revenant and recently saw his compositions interpreted by the Kronos Quartet. Additionally, both Dessners performed in Scandinavia last year with the Copenhagen Philharmonic and the Amsterdam Sinfonetta.
But now it's time for the National's other pair of brothers, Bryan and Scott Devendorf, to show their willingness to go off the grid. Working in collaboration with fellow 4AD signee Benjamin Lanz of Beirut, the newly minted trio LNZNDRF recorded their eight-song debut LP in two and a half days inside of an old church in the brothers' hometown of Cincinnati. Yet from the direction the group is taking here, you'd think they transported themselves to Conny Plank's Cologne studio in the early days of Sky Records. The group chose to play Germany before New York on their brief international tour leading up to the album's release, and the pulse of motorik powers the songs here. Yet this is no aimless joyride down the Autobahn: Lanz and the Devendorfs are as much fans of the 4AD label as they are clientele, and the influence of the imprint's more psychedelic excursions are palpable, especially across the four mesmerizing instrumental cuts here, all of which were mostly improvised as producer Justin Newton rolled tape.
The hypnotic groove of Lanz's guitar on opening cut "Future You," for instance, invokes a more visceral variation of Michael Brook's work with Pieter Nooten of Clan of Xymox. As the backbone of the National, Bryan Devendorf isn't really given the kind of material that really brings out his true chops as a drummer, but on the perpetual-motion machine of "Hypno-Skate" or the bubbling, Spacemen 3-spiced closer "Samarra," he gets to reveal himself as a student of such krautrock masters as Jaki Liebezeit of Can and Neu!'s Klaus Dinger in ways he never could otherwise.
That the Achilles' heel of LNZNDRF comes from the vocal territory should come as no surprise. But it's not as though the singing, done by both Lanz and Scott Devendorf, is no good. It's just that when you hear a pedestrian, moderately chillwave-ish song like "Mt. Storm" or "Kind Things" sitting amongst the instrumentals that tower over them, it feels woefully mismatched in the same way that cover of David Essex's "Rock On" sits like a wart in the middle of the new Tortoise album. The two sides finally come together on the record's penultimate cut, "Monument," a convincing homage to the Pale Saints.
The Pale Saints are ancient history to 4AD now: These days, the label is more known for their advancements in the world of next-level dance pop like Grimes, Purity Ring, Holly Herndon, and tUnE-yArDs. LNZNDRF is a fine-if-flawed testament to the company's Thatcher years, but it could have been tremendous if they had kept it strictly instrumental. If the Devendorfs were allowed to bring some of this fried psychedelia to the National, alongside the Dessner twins' neo-classical grandiloquence, the National's next album could really be something.


This four-song EP features two versions of its title track-- one recorded in the studio, another recorded live-- plus a Feels-like ballad and a vocal effects-laden piece.

People EP

"People" is a pretty good example of what turns some off from Animal Collective. The whole song is just a repeating guitar line, a held chord, some squiggly percussion, and Avey Tare doing a little self-stim call-and-response, alternating "Yeah, ye-AH" with the equally profound "Yeah, YE-ah". Oh, and screaming "People!!!" at throat-shredding volume through a distortion pedal every few bars, followed by a banshee wail that echoes between the speakers via a crude delay. And that's about it. Add to this the usual speculation about the sincerity of a young pack of art-rockers based in Brooklyn, and it's not hard to imagine large swaths of indie music fans moving on to something else.
Here's the thing though: "People" is also a good example of what turns the rest of us on to Animal Collective. I'm hearing a horizontal piece of music, built from a single idea that takes its time to explore the (admittedly limited) possibilities of its premise, and then moves on. And the peaks are thrilling; with sufficient volume this thing induces the sort of satisfying bliss only possible through well-executed drone rock. The song doesn't mean anything, of course, and I'm sure it wasn't difficult to make, but none of that matters: It still sounds damn good while managing to transport me to a very specific place. Animal Collective thinks enough of "People" to include an additional live version at the end of this four-song EP, a track with a bit less power and focus that nonetheless suggests how well the song could blend into a show. Its recording date indicates that they've been playing it live for close to two years, meaning it's incubated long enough to get it onto a record.
As far as the other two songs here, "Tikwid" is a sweet, slightly twisted ballad very much in the vein of Feels, specifically echoing bits of "Grass" with its sing-songy melody. It's almost good enough to work on that record, actually, becoming even more appealing during its soaring wordless section where Avey Tare airs out his falsetto and cuts the sunny warmth with odd vocal effects. Speaking of which, vocal effects are the sole focus of the two-minute snippet "My Favorite Colors". Here the Collective channels their barnyard brethren, wrapping their exaggerated vibratos around a wisp of tinkly piano to sound like Ethel Merman slurring her way through a version of "Old MacDonald". It's an ultimately inconsequential track deservedly fated to round out a stopgap EP, but it's another example of something that Animal Collective fans are likely to find interesting, while most of humanity lurches for the skip button.


After his Willie Nelson-inspired record, Matthew Houck stays firmly in the world of country music rather than the wilderness folk he'd previously crafted.

Phosphorescent: Here's to Taking It Easy

Here's to Taking It Easy

In 2009, Phosphorescent released To Willie, an album dedicated to covering songs written or popularized by Willie Nelson. At the time it seemed like a stylistic sidetrack-- not only did Phosphorescent mastermind Matthew Houck dig more deeply into traditional country music than ever before, a few of his interpretations also evinced far more playfulness and fun than any of his original offerings. Surely, the next proper Phosphorescent effort would find Houck returning to the forlorn wilderness folk he'd howled out on his first three albums though, right?
Not so fast: To Willie turned out to be more harbinger than lark. Phosphorescent's latest record, Here's to Taking It Easy-- with a full recording band in tow-- is by far the most conventional music he's ever made. Luckily, Houck and his cohorts compensate for a dip in idiosyncrasy by inhabiting the tropes of beer-soaked, sun-baked country-rock with fullness, commitment, and chops, all while finding enough room for Phosphorescent's trademark ragged lonesomeness.
The opening "It's Hard to Be Humble (When You're From Alabama)" announces its shit-kicking intentions with hot guitar licks and blaring horn charts; it may be the first Phosphorescent song more impressive for what the music's doing than for what Houck's singing or how he's singing it, but it ain't the last. "I Don't Care If There's Cursing" is lyrically monotonous but boasts a vibrant bassline and sterling pedal steel while "We'll Be Here Soon" expertly recreates the feel of a late-night Mexican cantina (proving Houck's internalized Nelson exceedingly well). Then there's the closing "Los Angeles", which offers up a faithful facsimile (maybe a little too faithful) of Neil Young's bruised guitar heroics.
Speaking of L.A., it plays a substantial role in the album's lyrics, which chiefly concern the strain placed on relationships by life on the road. Perhaps the touring-man blues of "Tell Me Baby (Have You Had Enough)" feel a bit shopworn, but Houck proves himself capable of redeeming the tropes with a line like, "I wish those nights of pleasure and days of pain weren't so tightly bound," (from "Heaven, Sittin' Down"). And that's nothing next to the staggering, heart-crushing "The Mermaid Parade", the record's runaway best song, which finds Houck's narrator wandering around Coney Island to shake his mind off of a broken marriage, finally sputtering out with gut-piercing specificty, "Goddamn it, Amanda, goddamn it all."
All that said, there's no need to fret that quavering nature boy Houck's been lost entirely beneath all the musical carousing and Angeleno smog, not when the album also contains the spectral, gospel-haunted "Nothing Was Stolen (Love Me Foolishly)" and the evanescent, elliptical "Hej, Me I'm Light". Here's to Taking It Easy is a great record, but I feel like Houck's best is still in him-- the one where the deep roots of tradition will finally be inextricably fused with his own weird, shambling soul.


On the UK road rapper’s heavy third album, Nines ably explores the conflict between his old life and his new one with typical flair.

Crabs in a Bucket

On Christmas Eve 2011, UK road rapper Nines uploaded an 8-minute video to accompany his new song “My Hood”—a standout from his From Church Road To Hollywood mixtape. In the video, he hands out Christmas turkeys to needy members of his community in North West London. The track itself is a lyrical collage, as he runs through shout-outs and namechecks for his friends. Almost 10 years on, Nines has signed to a major label and his third studio album features a track called “Monsters.” Here, the namechecks come for his peers in the UK’s blossoming rap scene. “The fame ain’t changed me/I’m still the same, I just live in the suburbs next to AJ Tracey,” he spits, “Or I’m overseas ’cause the ends is dead.” It’s not clear whether he’s trying to convince himself or his listeners. The song’s second half returns to familiar subjects—flipping weed, making money, and the Church Road housing estate that raised him—and becomes a microcosm of Crabs in a Bucket. As a street documentarian, Nines’ authenticity is both his yardstick and his biggest source of inspiration: Can he hold onto it even as he leaves his old life behind?
This conflict sits at the heart of the album, and is one Nines has documented throughout his career: He titled a 2015 mixtape One Foot In, while his debut studio album was called One Foot Out. With Crabs in a Bucket, Nines claims he’s moving on, all the way out—escaping the people and behaviors set on dragging him down. His last two albums broke new ground for UK rap, both entering the top five in the UK album charts.
But his retreat to the same old tropes and tribulations suggest street life will always have a pull on him. “I ain’t a rapper, I’m a drug dealer that raps,” he goes on “NIC.” It’s a mantra that appears throughout, and a personal mythology evoked in his series of comic short-films that depict a semi-fictionalized account of his drug-dealing come-up. “Intro” lays the dilemma out with rare vulnerability. Nines opens up about his father’s cancer diagnosis, a knife attack that left his face badly scarred, and paranoia about street surveillance, before submitting himself to the pressures of his environment: “I guess the hood got me institutionalized.” Where the same internal wrestling played out 2018’s Crop Circle with some levity, here it weighs heavier.
The album isn’t entirely devoid of light relief, and Nines’ characteristic wit still sparkles in punchlines like “Fuck a middleman, I even get my water from the spring,” on “Lights.” The production remains laid-back and luxurious too, more suited to road trips in the high-end cars that pepper his lyrics than the live stages he rarely graces. Despite signing with Warner, Nines forgoes the draw of the major label contact book for the most part—choosing instead to pull in features from those who deserve some shine. “All Stars 2,” a follow-up from its namesake on One Foot In, pushes up-and-comers Frosty, Clavish, Q2T, and Chappo CSB into the limelight to piercing, edgy effect; long-time sparring partner Skrapz adds a swift dose of street wisdom on “Energy;” Tiggs Da Author contributes a soulful flourish to “NIC.” Elsewhere, UK drill’s crown prince Headie One glides effortlessly on “Ringaling,” while Afrobeats boyband NSG prove the exception to the rule on playlist bait “Airplane Mode.”
The rare confessional glimpses on tracks like “Intro” and “Energy” are what sets this album apart from Nines’ previous releases. But when he raps on the former “This shit got my blood pressure high/I just wanna be free like some doves in the sky,” he could equally be talking about the new demands of his music career as the stresses of street life. He sounds most free when he’s spitting thin gruel about weed, money, and blowjobs on the swaggering “Clout.” As he pulls himself from the bucket, he’ll need to decide which crabs to fling back into the brine behind him.

Buy: Rough Trade
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