The madcap duo’s second album is about many things—junk food, being dumb, the ska revival—but mostly it’s about two savants making pop music sound absurdly fun.

10,000 gecs

In the seven years since Laura Les and Dylan Brady first released music as 100 gecs, they’ve been elevated to the patron saints of hyperpop: musically chaotic and poly-gluttonous, profoundly specific and yet totally random, ideal vessels of the 21st-century’s post-pastiche pop culture. Theirs is the sound of a zillion infostreams from the depths of your social feeds shooting into your eyes at once, both poisoned by irony and aware that if you follow irony into its own ouroboros, you will discover the antidote.
As dirtbag omnivores with identical peroxide dye jobs, they’ve been deified by the Discord masses, valiantly representing the depressive, blue-collar, white, queer kids alienated by their small towns for being “freaks.” In the video for 10,000 gecs’ pop-punk lead single “Hollywood Baby,” the lyric “at the crib goin’ crazy” is visualized by Les and Brady lighting fireworks in the kind of shitty house you might rent on the cheap when you’re 23—it’s busted and the toilet probably doesn’t work, but you love it because it’s yours. A few decades ago, a person feeling ostracized in their hometown might have just moved to barely-affordable cities like New York or the Bay. Now they can delve into the warm crevasses of the weird internet, to see and be seen and indulge every impulse.
With 10,000 gecs, Les and Brady have the unenviable task of translating their chaotic hyperpop to a major label, all while pickling their madcap sound experiments just enough to evolve. Underlying this is the fact that they are big-ass music nerds, virtuosic, even—the kind who could have been studio academics with Berklee degrees if they’d made a different choice in the multiverse. 10,000 gecs telegraphs that their potentially larger ambitions—a chart hit in the footsteps of Sum 41, say—may not fundamentally change their ethos, but it has furthered their interest in thrash guitars, ska revival, and pop-punk that generally sounds quantum-leaped in from a turn-of-the-century Hot Topic. You thought you loved computer glitch but, my friends, have you met slap bass?
Opening song “Dumbest Girl Alive” is 10,000 gecs’ big statement piece, turbo-charged with thrash metal riffs and stoned sub-bass, and it dunk-tanks us into what we’re in for. Les, snarling from a depressive perch, frames proper phone etiquette as a mortal threat (“Yeah, I’ll fuckin text you back!”) and shouts out plastic surgery (“I did science on my face”), but also gives us a decent thesis for gecs’ whole thing: “I’m smarter than I look/I’m the dumbest girl alive.” It’s a deceptive anthem, in that it’s so stupid and fun but also melancholy and self-denigrating, with a request to “put emojis on my grave.” It’s followed by a more traditional gecs number, “757,” glimmering with technicolor glitch and further chagrin, as Les voices a conflicted internal monologue: “I’m dumb and hypocritical/I’m taking things too literal/When it was hypothetical.”
On the surface, gecs are the least serious group this side of early-’90s Ween, always game for a deceptively asinine good time. That the few samples on this album come from Cypress Hill, Scary Movie, and Lucasfilm, in the form of the THX Deep Note, tell you all you need to know: The internet is an earwig that has broken millennials’ brains. 10,000 gecs sounds like being hit in the face with pies for approximately 26 minutes, two best friends having the greatest time throwing all the dankest shit from their musical file cabinet at you while you accept your ridiculous fate. It’s a reevaluation of the most declassé and dunderheaded rock genres that roiled the 2000s, positing that when it’s not delivered by misogynistic frat guys, it can be terrific music. 100 gecs are speaking to and for the regressive ids of us all; dumb shit should be inclusive too. This is a discomfiting and liberating revelation for those of us whose hangover from the era is still acute. At least younger listeners hearing these genres for the first time will be spared the green sky.
100 gecs’ aesthetic, of course, is to throw shit at the wall until it slithers down in a slimy, glittery goop. “Billy Knows Jamie,” a paranoid meditation on a homicidal stalker, is a fairly straightforward number based on bass chunking and turntable scratches that sounds a lot like Limp Bizkit until it spirals out into its death-metal outro. “One Million Dollars” is that phrase repeated ominously over a cut-and-paste sound sketch of drum machine, funk-metal bass, grunge guitar, and clipped dubstep, a frenetic warning that a million dollars rules, but actually might kind of suck. On the brilliant “The Most Wanted Person in the United States,” a laff riot written from the perspective of a serial killer on the lam, Brady and Les trade verses about imaginary victims over a pitched-down iteration of dancehall’s iconic Sleng Teng riddim, and include the lyric “I got Anthony Kiedis/Suckin’ on my penis.”
I mean, it rhymes! But as an evocation, it aligns 100 gecs with the boneheaded horniness of early Red Hot Chili Peppers. Sloughing off a large amount of the glitch, gecs seem to aim evermore in that general greasy direction: Primus, Mike Patton, Ween, with all the unevenness that implies. The ska-punk revival joint, “I Got My Tooth Removed,” is more Reel Big Fish than Sublime, but it’s still a good time, even if it conjures mean SoCal boys singing thickheaded lyrics about scene girls. (Its mournful lyrics about dental care—it’s a break-up song about a tooth extraction—are both reclamation and send-up of exactly how ignorant and sexist some of those songs were.) The unifying factor here, as ever, is their cleverness. It’s the type of absurdist sensibility that, if it came from a friend, might inspire you to put your hand on their back and lovingly ask if they’re doing okay. But here, that emotional wall is the gag, like when you want to play the rubbery lullaby “Frog on the Floor” for a small child, except then you’d have to explain what a kegstand is.
In the gecs’ worldview, nothing is serious and yet every chord change is deeply felt, which, after a few listens, may be a bit more interesting in concept than execution. At the same time, this album is so short that you might only come to that conclusion after running it back for the twenty-third time, by which point you’re hitting repeat on the janky car stereo while you’re chain-vaping a nicotine flavor called “Watermelon Brizz Ice,” you’re mainlining Monster Energy drink and moshing solo in your living room until it hurts, you’re copping $600 Collina Strada jeans embellished to look like Ed Hardy’s brainwaves, you’ve got your face entombed in a VR headset and you’re wondering whether you still have a torso, you just want to hug your friends even though they haven’t bathed in weeks. 10,000 gecs is something like astral projection, allowing you to ever-so-briefly shake off the constant doom scroll of life for a hot second of unencumbered fun. In that sense, it’s a perfect outro album for the end of the world, a reminder that in the worst-case scenario, we might as well go out mindless and partying.


The two Golden State rappers sound like naturals on their funky, easygoing collaborative album with New York producer Harry Fraud.

Jay Worthy / Kamaiyah / Harry Fraud: The Am3rican Dream

The Am3rican Dream

Jay Worthy and Kamaiyah are both California stalwarts committed to keeping tried-and-true West Coast music alive. Worthy’s smooth, almost monotone reflections on street life tend to be couched in stately G-funk and wavy samples, while Kamaiyah’s airy dirty-macking tales usually glide over the bounce of hyphy, sounding like Too $hort with a taste for AutoTune. Both have a penchant for autobiography and fly shit, and when they get together, like on 2020’s “Bullshit” or last year’s “Good Lookin’”, they sound like naturals. It’s as though they should already have five albums and yearly nationwide tours together.
Now they’ve finally released a full-length project,The Am3rican Dream, produced by Harry Fraud. Largely known for his adaptable sample-based production, the New York producer meets his collaborators halfway, offering a mix of traditional East Coast loops and sunny G-funk for their slick pimp talk. This is Kamaiyah’s first time rapping over samples for a full project, and the simmering, mid-tempo beats give her sing-song vocals room to breathe. She soars over the synth rock of “Entrepreneur.” On “Ragtop Riches,” she slinks between twinkling keys and bass as she grills a potential new girlfriend about what her sugar daddy does. The beats don’t coax her to new places lyrically, but it’s nice to hear her stunt over a different backdrop.
Meanwhile, Worthy is fully in his comfort zone, telling straightforward stories about his lifestyle like a mafia don lounging in an easy chair. Every action—hitting rivals in the head with Hennessy bottles, hitting the stroll with sex workers and drug dealers—is rendered in the same amber hue, like he’s living out a movie in real time. That said, his writing lacks the specificity of fellow mack-daddy savants like Larry June or Roc Marciano. His ideas can occasionally grow stale: “Figueroa Fortunes,” where he flies solo over smooth yacht rock guitars, is just a checklist of lust, drugs, and money that sounds labored and awkward.
Their styles may be different, but Worthy and Kamaiyah play off of their contrasting approaches well. Take the triumphant closer “Streetlights,” where they both share success stories over a drumless synth line and a wailing vocal sample. Worthy delivers a ruff-and-tumble recounting of beating federal cases and basking in musical heroes like Oakland rap legend Spice 1. Kamaiyah acknowledges how she went from being a neglected child to major-label hopeful to staunch indie artist who still snagged big-time co-signs. Each verse is inspiring on its own, but the interplay between Worthy’s stoicism and Kamaiyah’s melodies brings both accounts into clearer resolution.
Both Worthy and Kamaiyah are so charismatic and laidback, they seem to not care if you’re listening to them or not. They bring sauce to even the most banal observations, which, on top of Fraud’s consistently plush production, makes THE AM3RICAN DREAM float by in a cool haze. It’s not adventurous, but it sits just right like your favorite New Era fitted.


After top-shelf work apart-- Lindstrøm's 2008 LP; Thomas' remixes-- the space disco pioneers re-team for a new record that bests their debut.

II

Mellow, smooth, relaxing: In traditional pop music lingo, these are euphemisms for "boring as hell." But traditional pop music lingo never got around to anticipating the downtempo, prog-infused strain of house music that eventually became generally known as space disco. At its best, it's music that throws you off by how calm and airy it feels on the surface, and right when you're about to be lulled halfway to inattention, the rhythms start to build on top of each other and the melodies start seeping into the forefront and you're hooked. You have Norwegian producer, studio wizard, and multi-instrumentalist Hans-Peter Lindstrøm to thank for helping space disco evolve into its current 21st century incarnation, and countryman Thomas Moen Hermansen (aka Prins Thomas) to thank for giving it a serious foothold by joining Lindstrøm on their first, self-titled collaborative album in 2005. After the two producers crafted some of their finest work last year-- the epic Where You Go I Go Too for Lindstrøm; a host of top-shelf remixes for Thomas (including a staggering reworking of City Reverb's "City of Lights")-- the timing's right for a full-length return to their partnership, even if they have some triumphant recent history shadowing them.
Fortunately, II isn't a letdown-- assuming you don't count its lack of immediacy as a disappointment. On the first Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas album, eight out of 13 tracks ran less than six minutes, and most of them gave you a pretty good idea of where they were going right away. Here, only one of the eight songs clocks in under seven-and-a-half, and the standard structure relies on slow-build compositions that stretch out, decompress, and mutate; they don't so much segue from track to track as they melt into each other. And while it might feel a little like a marathon anywhere other than the dancefloor, there's more than enough going on over the course of a track-- instruments warping themselves into new beats, new riffs, and new melodies-- to give it a certain dynamism. Listen to a song as a whole, and it'll sound like a gradual ramping-up from a simple theme into a jammy, psychedelic expansion; listen to it again and zero in on just the percussion or keyboards or guitar and that experience will be brought into a vivid, deep focus. But it still works in a way that never really overwhelms the song's driving rhythmic backbone-- light as some of it may feel, it's still dance music.
The first four tracks on II are more than vivid enough to draw the first-time listener in, even if they defy easy description. Opener "Cisco" is the track that has some people dubbing this L&PT's "rock" move, but its multi-tracked guitars chime and twang over a bongo-accented funk groove with a tone that's about as close to the Alan Parsons Project as Chic were. By the time it hits its full stride halfway through, drenched in towering synthesizers and phase-shifted fuzztones, it's a sturdy embodiment of what makes both producers such kitchen-sink auteurs. That momentum continues over the next few tracks, whirring like an irregularly-orbiting satellite around hyper-dense drums and Moroder/Vangelis atmosphere in "Rothaus", trembling and then briskly trotting beneath the wintry, shapeshifting piano theme in "For Ett Slikk Og Ingenting", and loosening its joints for the crackling energy of the shifty "Rett På", the most tightly-packed song on the record; it sounds like there's about a half-dozen different rhythmic ideas going on at once there, and they all somehow manage to sync.
The last four tracks are a little less frenetic, if no less involved. The final two in particular-- "Note I Love You + 100" and "Flue På Veggen"-- are more than  24 minutes combined, and they both hit an interesting nerve of cross-era aesthetics, particularly in how the former features a mid-70s Fender Rhodes that slowly liquefies into a burbling new-wave synth, and the latter fuses a disco drum machine with haywire analog burbles, wordless vocal melodies, and crystalline chimes. You can kind of imagine the ingredients for this album coming from a number of different sources-- prog rock, krautrock, disco, funk, MOR pop, maybe even some folk here and there-- but at this point there's just so much potential influence it's hard not to hear the whole instead. And it's a hell of a lot of whole, too: It's mellow and smooth and relaxing, sure, but it's also unpredictable and full of little revelations and turns of sound that make it one of space disco's crowning recent achievements. If Lindstrøm and Thomas ever drop a III on us, it'll have a lot to live up to.


A Hard Day's Night is from an era when pop and showbiz were inseparable-- and if it doesn't transcend that time, it does represent its definitive peak.

A Hard Day's Night

Pop in 1964 was part of showbiz: Once the Beatles hit a certain level of box office, there would never have been any question over making a film. Pop music meant teenagers, which meant fads, which meant the clock was running on the band's fame. The jazzman George Melly, who was writing about pop in the UK press at this time, remembered being convinced several times that the Beatles had hit a peak and their fans would soon desert them. I doubt this was an unorthodox opinion.
A film career might extend the fame a little, and smooth the band's inevitable transition to light entertainment. If the film was an enjoyable romp, so much the better-- John Lennon asked for A Hard Day's Night director Richard Lester on the basis of a comedy short he'd made (later referenced in the film's famous "Can't Buy Me Love" sequence), but Lester had also helmed 1962's It's Trad, Dad!, a snapshot of the British pop world just pre-Beatles (Tagline: "The newest, most frantic fad!"). He knew how to mix music and feelgood filmmaking to commercial effect.
A Hard Day's Night, in other words, is a crucial inflection point in the Beatles' career. Coinciding with their leaving Liverpool and moving to London, this could easily have been their first step on a road of crowd-pleasing predictability: Instead, both film and this soundtrack album are a testament to how fabulous pop can be when you take care over doing it.
The album is most famous now for being the first all-original record the band put out-- and their only all Lennon-McCartney LP. Formidably prolific at this point, the pair had been creating songs-- and hits-- for other performers which must have given them useful insight into how to make different styles work. There's been a particular jump forward in ballad writing-- on "And I Love Her" in particular, Paul McCartney hits a note of humble, open-hearted sincerity he'd return to again and again. His "Things We Said Today" is even better, wintry and philosophical before the surprising, stirring middle eight.
But the dominant sound of the album is the Beatles in full cry as a pop band-- with no rock'n'roll covers to remind you of their roots you're free to take the group's new sound purely on its own modernist terms: The chord choices whose audacity surprised a listening Bob Dylan, the steamroller power of the harmonies, the gleaming sound of George Harrison's new Rickenbacker alongside the confident Northern blasts of harmonica, and a band and producer grown more than comfortable with each other. There's detail aplenty here-- and the remasters make it easy to hunt for-- but A Hard Day's Night is perhaps the band's most straightforward album: You notice the catchiness first, and you can wonder how they got it later.
The best example of this is the title track-- the clang of that opening chord to put everyone on notice, two burning minutes thick with percussion (including a hammering cowbell!) thanks to the new four-track machines George Martin was using, and then the song spiraling out with a guitar figure as abstractedly lovely as anything the group had recorded. John Lennon's best songs on the record-- "A Hard Day's Night", "Tell Me Why", "When I Get Home", "You Can't Do That"-- are fast, aggressive, frustrated and spiked with these moments of breathtaking prettiness.
The Hard Day's Night film itself was also a triumph in its way-- Lester's camerawork capturing the frenzy of Beatlemania and the way the group's music was feeding off it. It had the happy effect of introducing the group's millions of new global fans to their world-- the fire escapes, boutiques, bombed-out spaces, and well-preserved salons of 60s London. In fact the film's knowing dialogue and pop-art cinematography has a level of surface sophistication that the Beatles' records don't approach for another year or two (though they were already far more emotionally nourishing).
Watching the film you're reminded that what the Beatles had set in motion was pop music's catching up with the rest of British popular culture: In art, in TV satire, in film and fashion and literature, the 60s were already a boom time. Pop had been left behind-- tastemakers looked instead to jazz and folk to soundtrack this creativity. What the Beatles had-- accidentally-- unlocked was pop music's potential to join, then lead, the party-- though it wasn't yet a given that they'd be the band to realize said potential. A Hard Day's Night is an album of an era when pop and showbiz were inseparable-- and if it doesn't transcend that time, it does represent its definitive peak.
[Note: Click here for an overview of the 2009 Beatles reissues, including discussion of the packaging and sound quality.]


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the famous ’90s compilation that bottled the essence of commercial new age music.

Pure Moods, Vol. 1

On weekday mornings, sometime between 1 a.m and 5 a.m., lawless fantasia used to appear on television like a good recurring dream. Today, the rhapsodies are duller, stricter, and more subdued, but in the ’90s, they came in the form of ads for phone sex lines, softcore porn, and low-resolution infomercials that sold the mirage of a life fantastic to a woozy after-hours audience. The colors were always saturated, syrupy, rich as cream; the tones sedate, misty, and mostly libidinal. Whether bored, sleepy, incapacitated, or horny, this tribe—routinely or accidentally—was well acquainted with the call of Pure Moods.
Unexpected, unbidden, and more or less unnecessary, Pure Moods is a piece woven with some wear into the silk of the popular unconsciousness. You may not remember hearing this work, but after watching the commercial, you might find yourself feeling that you’ve always known lines from its script. Swooning and naked in its pride, the 17-song compilation album, advertised in 60-second hallucinations disguised as infomercials, was a warm vat of music that we might today refer to loosely as “new age.” Its carefully selected tracklist—a mosaic made largely up of film or television scores, or trance remixes thereof—seemed engineered to induce a ridiculous sort of fugue state. For some, hearing the album might pang a Proustian memory of falling asleep on a familiar sofa. For others, it can suggest an intensely ambivalent mixture of pity and allure. Pure Moods’ essence is safe, formless, and mostly meaningless, like a piece of art hung in a bathroom. For me, and for many others, it felt like paradise.
Before the shadow of Bezos, before the Zuck, before, even, the contemporary comedy provided for us by the insidiously dippy Elon Musk, there was Sir Richard Branson. In 1970, 22 years before he would publicly weep while selling his record label/airline/mobile-phone/space-tourism conglomerate, Virgin, for over a billion dollars, the rugged and floppy-haired Branson invented the mail-order model of record distribution out of the usual entrepreneurial cocktail of luck and generational wealth. Twenty and lordly, then-helming his small but pop-savvy lifestyle magazine, Student, he noticed the UK’s Retail Price Maintenance Agreement—which kept strict restrictions on the saleable cost of vinyl records—had been quietly lifted. Seizing the sword of opportunity, he quickly took to the back pages of his paper to be the first to offer a good bargain. “Name any record you want,” his ad read, “and we’ll sell it to you 10% to 25% cheaper than anyone else.” A business was born. Branson’s arbitrage paid off well in an unwittingly fertile market, functionally reconfiguring a luxury product into a more petty-bourgeois pleasure. High off the fumes of his boon, he assembled a team from his editorial staff, bought a manor, refurbished it into a recording studio, and christened the effort “Virgin” in honor of his fumbling inexperience in the music industry. It would become one of the largest and most powerful record agencies in the world.
After the first ripe boils of the young label’s hardships had been lanced (Branson was noted for having “no musical taste whatsoever” until enlisting his avant-minded second cousin to arrange a roster of artists for him), Virgin enjoyed a mainstay on the tone and volume of music sales for many years. They held court, especially in the early ’70s, to a certain genre fit for the bookish, acid-dabbling Eurodude who read NME and dreamt of armfuls of warm Eurogirls who did the same. A river of German esoterica gave the label several releases by the psychotropic faerie proggers Faust (who were deftly marketed as “the German Beatles!”) and the rhinestoned scuzz of Tangerine Dream, but the pièce de résistance of Virgin’s inertia lay in a freaky slab of music by a shy 19-year-old composer named Mike Oldfield.
That an album with a title and sound true to the phrase “Tubular Bells” could have eventually sent the world into a mania for two 20-some-minute, mostly repetitive instrumental opuses of glockenspiel and honest gibberish is testament to the strength of Virgin’s aspirational animus. After hearing the mesmeric and thoroughly uncommercial music Oldfield had designed in the wake of a disturbing LSD trip, Branson backed his production efforts in full at the Virgin manor. It was clear that the future mogul yearned to head the most influential label in an industry that he knew incredibly little about. What he did understand, however, was that there was a vested, collective, and profitable desire for music that made audiences feel like connoisseurs of a higher order.
Cannily, Branson invited Britain’s leading tastemaker and radio host, John Peel, onto his houseboat for lunch, during which he played the entirety of Oldfield’s finished two-track, 49-minute Tubular Bells to the captive presenter. Miraculously, Peel adored the record and premiered it in full on his show. “One of the most impressive LPs I’ve ever had the chance to play on the radio,” he purred on his May 1973 transmission. Rolling Stone later called it “a debut performance of a kind we have no right to expect from anyone.” Tubular Bells would launch the Virgin empire by earning the label million-dollar financing from its investors, become the third-best-selling album of the ’70s in the UK, provide theme music for William Friedkin’s 1973 blockbuster, The Exorcist, and sell more than 15 million copies globally. Almost exactly 20 years later, Tubular Bells would lay at both the spiritual and literal centerfold of our Pure Moods.
The full ad for the U.S. release of Pure Moods lives on in accurate fidelity on YouTube, but it would be a shame not to recollect it for you here. First, a call bursts from a black screen. A quick time-lapse of a sunrise fades into a husky, lusty voiceover (“Imagine…a world…where time drifts slowly...”), which lays cozily across a shot of an autumn mountaintop. At least a dozen vignettes ensue. A woman spins in a woven dress as a unicorn gallops into translucence. A faraway man walks through a fast-moving river. The unicorn reappears, newlyweds gaze and grope at one another before a soulful kiss, waves crash onto a dusky beach, a swarm of hummingbirds eject from a cloud—each image t-boned into one another in an effort to inspire a feeling of chaotic, seductive fantasy, soothing by way of arousal.
First released as Moods - A Contemporary Soundtrack in the UK in 1991, the compilation was rebranded as Pure Moods upon reaching the U.S. in 1994. The slightly fatter American version contains songs that are as decadent and suggestive of Tolkienian lore and day spa imagery as the montage in the commercial, each composed by artists that, when written out, sound like a cast of villains and druids. There was Enya, Vangelis, the Orb, Enigma. Together, they formed a New Age Mount Rushmore, chiseled in lavender quartz.
These were tracks and artists never designed to be played alongside one another, tracks and artists, for all intents and purposes, mostly foreign to one another except in essence. Their clunky but satisfying cohesion can be attributed to the cataloguing done by the Virgin heads, who arranged the piece on a lark, “stumbling into the project” as an experiment to determine if an album could be successfully telemarketed and sold far before its release date. The model, deemed “a huge buzz” after selling more than 2 million copies prior to its formal drop, would be replicated five times over with a tetralogy of sequels in the releases of Pure Moods II-IV. Later, it would fuel a variety of spinoff flavors, like Gregorian Moods, Christmas Moods and Tranquil Moods: The Ultimate New Age Collection. (I will freely offer that these should be sold as a box collection, titled, simply, “Mood Ring.”)
No claims were made over precisely what sort of mood Pure Moods would put you in, but the album summoned a particular soul of Virgin’s experimental curios and left-field aberrations that signaled a certain taste, ease, and class of listener. It was something like a lifestyle brand touting self-care avant la lettre. Suitable for the essential-oiled and candlelit bath, the head shop, or for popping into the cassette deck of your Corolla on a summer’s night with the windows down and your children asleep in the backseat, Pure Moods arranged a prefab state that, for the listener, may have summoned a feeling they didn’t know they needed. Likewise, for Virgin, Pure Moods was something of a sample platter made in quiet tribute to the unexpected blessings in their own roster: the artists, tracks, and rogues that had clinched the success of the label in stupefying spades.
At the spine of both the UK and U.S. versions of the album lives the baroque jangle of “Tubular Bells” (though excerpted from its original sprawl to a reduced-fat 4:58). Flanking “Bells” are tracks from Enigma, a louche and late-stage ’90s-era cousin of Oldfield’s success. “Sadeness (Part 1),” the first Enigma single, is a porny, breathy, breakbeaty song, with Gregorian chanting giving way to a French voice pining orgiastically for the 16th-century erotic writer, Marquis de Sade, atop a downy bed of trip-hop. It somehow defies both anarchy and order, any sense of convention, and the usual formula for anything resembling commercial success. Yet, beginning in 1990, it lived on the Billboard charts for five unbothered years, reached the Top 10 in several countries, and made Enigma the most successful act signed to Virgin at the time of its release. (Unintentionally, the Gregorian chanting endemic to the track created a global hunger for sacred Latin monophonic music: In 1994, an unrelated album titled Chant from three dozen Benedictine monks living in a Spanish monastery went double-platinum.)
True to their title, Enigma remained heroically and consumingly atop the charts for the majority of the ’90s. “Return to Innocence”—whose indigenous Taiwanese vocalizations blast at the top of the commercial, responsible for waking thousands of half-asleep American citizens on couches—is a glamorous smoothie of pseudo-erotica, a treatise on nostalgia and self-help. Seemingly custom-made for the proto-Y2K fetish for exploring one’s attitude with slogans across graphic t-shirts, its first four lyrics are just words (“Love...devotion…..feeling….emotion”) both inspiring and completely drained of meaning, at once empty and rich. It enjoyed a No. 1 one position on the charts in over 10 countries.
Non-Virgin releases on Pure Moods share the twin tenets of mild conceptual lunacy paired with baffling commercial success. There’s Enya’s immortal “Orinoco Flow (Sail Away),” which, upon its release, the Los Angeles Times scoffingly noted as part of an album filled with “nothing more than unusually windy New Age music.” “Orinoco Flow” is, in fact, an island archipelago of a song, with choral arrangements as lush and fabulous as the remote wonders it promises. It seems to give off its own aromatherapeutic odor and made Enya—a woman who does not tour, who never has toured, and whose perfectly inverse ratio of near-total reclusiveness and global omnipotence inspired an entire phenomenon known by business students the world over as “Enya-nomics”—one of the wealthiest and best-selling musicians alive today.
There’s the four-minute throb of “Oxygène Part IV,” courtesy of one Jean-Michel Jarre, who once bore ownership of the Guinness World Record for hosting the world’s largest concert (3.5 million in Moscow, 1997). DJ Dado, an agent of chaos, remixed the theme from The X-Files into his “Dado Paranormal Activity Mix,” ascending an already astral, imminently whistleable piece of art into the Burning Man mesosphere of dream trance (a top 10 hit for weeks across Europe). Kenny G, the saxophonist known in most minds as the human incarnation of a scented candle, contributes a satiny number titled “Songbird,” a song that became the first instrumental to reach the top 5 of the Billboard Hot 100 since the “Miami Vice Theme” by Jan Hammer (who is also featured on Pure Moods).
It’s no surprise that so many of these tracks were either born or retrofitted into movies and commercials. From Karl Jenkins’ “Adeimus” (now known as part of an indelible Delta Airlines spot), David Byrne’s “Main Title Theme from The Last Emperor” (self-explanatory) even to David A. Stewart and Candy Duffer’s silken, sax-laden “Lily Was Here” (of the 1989 Dutch film, De Kassière, later to become a mainstay of the Weather Channel “Local on the 8’s” music) these were spectral mood-pieces, if not tailored for, then entirely befitting of, calibrating emotion. When divorced from the screen, scores take on new life when soundtracking yours.
But an album that capitalizes on tracks that would serve as well as closing-credits for a lovesick drama as they would in an airport bathroom does not, necessarily, a serious album make. Even without looking at the melty watercolor cover or hearing the title of the compilation, the songs summon the solace endowed by inspirational posters and cruise brochures that now feel bathetically out-of-touch: blue horizons freckled with soaring birds, pistachio mountaintops, forests of fluff and fungi, images of women with their hair thrown back in smiling rapture. Are these parodies of paradise, or can we see them in earnest? The commercial unhelpfully adds that the album is delivered “direct from Europe,” wherever or whatever that may be.
If you, like I, have struggled manfully to crack the riddle of whether the album is glib, good, or good in its glibness, the idea of camp may be a sound starting point. As Susan Sontag details in her 58-point treatise from 1964, camp is work characterized by a sort of “seriousness that fails.” Or, a unique “spirit of extravagance [that] cannot be taken altogether seriously because it is ‘too much.’” That too-muchness—from the commercial’s art direction to its deliciously sleazy voice-over, promising that this album was specifically “for your way of life”—was enough for mine, and for hundreds of thousands of others. Pure Moods peaked at No. 10 on the Billboard chart the week of July 26th, 1997, the same week the Men in Black soundtrack secured first place.
An inspired and perfect choice, then, that Pure Moods begins its downtempo descent with Angelo Badalamenti’s “Theme from Twin Peaks,” that totalizing Lynchian ballad of too-muchness. Regardless of whether your first encounter with the music was within the hundreds of scenes it was deployed in during the television series, in the later-lyricized Julee Cruise version, titled “Falling,” or, even, within Pure Moods, Badalamenti’s score from a show that—like the album—embodied mesmeric alternate realities, sentimental chintz, and a strangely narcotized, palliative hopefulness, sealed the work tightly with a sad, bassy kiss.
For everything that Pure Moods is, one thing is certain: Pure Moods is not kidding. Pure Moods aimed to sell the awe and wonder of music’s ability to change you. It is work that is genuinely, and for better or worse, peddling you a vague miracle. It is quietly saying that you will feel good for having listened to it. Even if it reeks of patchouli and a joke now, it also reeks of something like purity.
Even those most irony-poisoned among us can wrap ourselves around the fullness of Pure Moods as a pop object that’s completed its natural tour of meaning: a curio first taken in earnest, then as a joke, now as a museum fixture that holds both forces in its heart at once. It also illustrates the great life cycle of art’s journey through critical response—how spectacles are typically born as novelty, laid to rest as cliché, and resurrected as nostalgia.
Watching the ad for Pure Moods today can impart a sort of joyous nihilism by laying bare the architecture of the more complicated—but no less fantasy-enabling—advertising so inherently part of our lives now. And, in an hour when everything feels alien and existence slippery, falling in love with Pure Moods’ lawless pageantry is worth any mild cognitive dissonance it suggests. “People who share this sensibility are not laughing at the thing,” goes Sontag, again. “They’re enjoying it...it is a tender feeling.”
I grew up watching infomercials with the focus of an obsessive. Longform ones, like that of the especially good spot for the Magic Bullet blender (a full 30-minute, eight-actor orgy of disbelief), or that of the Xpress-Redi (in which two people praise a countertop griddle) were especially rich for their steeply-sloped story arcs, climaxing in money shots of satisfied men and women leading their lives with new, happy ease. These half-hour-long paeans to kitchen appliances were absurd moments of absolution; they worked like slow-acting pills against the usual symptoms of childhood melancholy. Their taglines and promises buried themselves inside me like hymns or worms. For the child who slept belly-down in front of a television nearly every night, exhausted by the glow of a screen, these moments felt like satisfying surrender to a particular sort of commercial rapture.
And this is what Pure Moods inspires—rapturous, wild, ridiculous satisfaction, each song over-indexing on its unspoken bond to bring fantasy to an otherwise quotidian life. Like the seconds before losing consciousness, it re-created a floating, near-delirious state as image and song wrapped each other in a duvet of chloroform and melatonin. To so many, Pure Moods guaranteed a feeling so total, so rich, so sedative and decadent, that it approximated, then begat, real beauty. The miracle was the point. To see salvation suddenly offered to you—a proposal to make life easier, more fantastic, purer—was a bargain at $19.99, rush shipping notwithstanding.


As can be gleaned from the cover of her one and only record, Linda Perhacs was a stunning, beautiful love ...

Parallelograms

As can be gleaned from the cover of her one and only record, Linda Perhacs was a stunning, beautiful love child. Anyone who spent the $200-400 necessary to obtain copies of the original vinyl could attest that the music she made was comparably stunning and beautiful, infused with all the trappings of being a late-sixties love child (in the best possible way).
Ace of Discs reissued her album after unsuccessful attempts to track her down, mastering from a poorly pressed vinyl copy. For whatever reason, the first issue on CD was completely unlistenable on headphones, although delightful in the open air. Since that first go-round, Perhacs has come out of her obscure Pacific Northwest woods with quarter-inch reels of the sessions, and now that Ace of Discs comes round again with a vindicating, expanded reissue, the tray card photo reveals: she's still a babe.
Anyway you eye it, this is a magical, sublimely singular piece of gentle folk-psych that belongs with those lone album classics by folks like Skip Spence or Vashti Bunyan (or the countless other souls that only released one record before disappearing into history's communal farms or funny-farm madness, like Elyse). It is a sound so personal and intimate that I can only hear it in the privacy of my own room. Although it's been near-impossible to gain biographical information about her, the experience of hearing her music reveals so much about her soul and mindset at the time that I really don't think I could share it with anyone else.
As mentioned above, she's a love child in every sense, a young woman blossoming into her sensual world. Of the elements, every song culls its images from her forest environment, permeating down into her own physical core. "Chimacum Rain" is not only the forest's silence and that sound of rain washing over her, but the palpable sexual presence of her lover, too. In almost every evocation of a tactile natural image, there is a mysterious man who physically embodies these characteristics, a tension courses through her body as she sings about these near-deities. And as she reaches the bridge with lines such as "I'm spacing out/ I'm seeing silences between leaves...I'm seeing silences that are his," her voice begins to echo within itself, and her sung notes assuage open the aural synesthesia of the words. The diaphanous taste of lysergic acid creeps to the fore, and what was once a moderately played acoustic song about the forest expands into a hallucinatory clearing as her multi-tracked held tones meld with the infinite. As her voice dilates, so does the background, now all electrically-processed source sounds like xylophones and wind chimes, and all is enveloped by a low, distorted drone that would one day sound like Phill Niblock, created by-- as the liner notes so baldly state it-- "amplified shower hose for horn effects."
It's nothing compared to the album's peak, "Parallelograms". Perhaps you fantasize that Joni Mitchell teaches painting and pottery at your high school, or that Chan Marshall mumbles about the Apocalypse poets during English class, but Perhacs teaching geometry is tantrically hot for teacher. To just read the lyrics of "Quadrehederal/ Tetrahedral/ mono-cyclo-cyber-cilia" is to miss how she and producer Leonard Rosenman assuredly layer her heavenly-sung rounds in concentric circles over a cycling guitar-picked figure, a cumulative effect that reveals a dimension scarcely achieved anywhere else in the world of music. Closer to the Mysterious Voices of Bulgaria or Tim Buckley's cellular self-choir "Starsailor" than Melanie or Linda Ronstadt, Perhacs drops us into drifting clouds of reverberating bells, echoing flute, and ghostly effluence, her throat outside of time. That a dental assistant in Northern California could more effectively convey the psychedelic experience through the use of the technology of experimental effects, be it early Pink Floyd, Fifty-Foot Hose, or Buffy Saint-Marie's electroacoustic Illuminations, is, in every clichéd use of the word, mind-blowing.
Other songs deal with girly things like brawny mountain men, dolphins, moonbeams and cattails, the pastel colors of dawn, and the recently-unearthed "If You Were My Man" reveals that she could've gone pop with a Karen Carpenter wispiness. Listening to her home demos and studio notes to Roseman though show that she was cognizant of the sound and vibration she wanted. The tape collage lobbed from "Hey Who Really Cares?" is competent-- if in hindsight, passé-- all disembodied, television voices and a telltale heart beat leading into its pastoral prettiness. Her most folky tunes stand up to the times too, but it's the fact that Linda Perhacs' entire cosmos (and whatever those times entailed) could inexplicably fit inside the confines of Parallelograms that remains the true testament to her beauty.


The masterpiece from the preeminent minimalist composer is an as-yet-unfinished piano solo played on a piano tuned specifically to elicit unfamiliar emotions from unfamiliar harmonies.

La Monte Young: The Well-Tuned Piano 81 X 25 6:17:50 - 11:18:59 PM NYC

The Well-Tuned Piano

The story of La Monte Young’s solo piano composition “The Well-Tuned Piano” feels infinite. Though he hasn’t performed this massive piece in many years and he has never considered it finished, it is possible to quantify some moments on its timeline. After Young conceived “The Well-Tuned Piano” in 1964, a decade passed before he performed it in concert, and another 13 years went by before he released a commercial recording. The work itself, which he’s played in public over 60 times, takes him up to six hours to execute on a piano that needs a “minimum of a few weeks” to be tuned and ideally remains in its exact location for three months before a concert. The first commercially available recording, a 1987 five-disc box set on Gramavision documenting his 55th performance of the piece in 1981, lasts a little over five hours.
But how long does it take to understand “The Well-Tuned Piano”? Judging by all the literature and analysis surrounding it, the answer could be “forever.” Young’s own notes are long, detailed, and deeply technical. They include a four-page list charting the exact times of over 400 “Themes, Chordal Areas, and Durations,” which bear titles as basic as The Chorale Theme and as fanciful as The Flying Carpet and The Cadence of Paradise. Many others have attempted to explain “The Well-Tuned Piano” too, the most monumental effort being Kyle Gann’s 30-page 1993 essay in Perspectives of New Music, which mapped out its inner workings using numbers and graphs. The mere idea of listening to a five-hour piece of music is daunting enough. But immersion in the legend of “The Well-Tuned Piano” reveals it to be not just a work of art, but a complex mathematical and philosophical system, one to which scholars could devote whole lifetimes.
Despite the piece’s staggering reputation, there is at least one simple idea at its heart: Specific sounds can create specific feelings. Young came upon this idea through his obsession with “just intonation,” the tuning system on which he based the composition. Most pianos are “well-tempered,” meaning each note is slightly off-center so that all 12 musical keys can be played. Young’s version of just intonation, by contrast, is more exact, with the intervals between each string following rigid whole number ratios. It’s difficult to tune a piano this precisely, which is why the process starts well in advance of the performance, and why Young usually plays on specially-modified pianos. As he put it, “The manner in which I play the piece, and how well, is directly inspired by the nature of the tuning.”
But the goal of “The Well-Tuned Piano” is less technical precision than emotional expansion. “It seems to me that each harmonically related interval creates its own unique feeling,” Young says in his box set notes. “Through this system we can, first, catalogue each feeling with its corresponding rational number, and then actually create, store, and retrieve, and finally and most importantly, repeat the feeling, relative to the musician’s ability to tune the intervals.” Even further, because “The Well-Tuned Piano” uses novel and rarely-heard intervals, it could potentially upend conventional notions of which emotions different keys produce. Young suggests it could even induce feelings that have never before been felt in response to music.
The musical path that led Young to “The Well-Tuned Piano” was a kind of avant-garde roller coaster. He studied jazz saxophone at UCLA, soon playing with such stalwarts as Eric Dolphy and Don Cherry. As a graduate student at Berkeley, he experimented with tape and electronic music pioneers Terry Riley and Pauline Oliveros. He moved to New York in 1960 to study with the groundbreaking avant-garde composer of chance music John Cage, later creating conceptual compositions in conjunction with George Macunias’ Fluxus movement (which included Yoko Ono). In the mid-’60s, Young delved into long, sustained tones with the Theater of Eternal Music, birthing a new movement that would soon be known as Minimalism. That group included future Velvet Underground member John Cale and multi-media experimentalist Tony Conrad (whose math expertise helped lead Young toward whole numbers and just intonation). In the late ’60s, just a few years after he conceived of “The Well-Tuned Piano,” Young and his partner Marian Zazeela encountered the work of Pandit Pran Nath, whose perfectly in-tune singing and the emotions it elicited changed Young’s life.
Much of this personal musical history poured into various sections of “The Well-Tuned Piano,” which began life in 1964 as a 45-minute improvisation in Young’s New York loft. Though the piece constantly evolved over the next decades, some portions date as far back as when Young improvised on his grandmother’s piano as a teenager. His studies of other composers influence numerous passages, including some with explicit titles like Homage to Brahms and Hommage a Debussy. And his extensive multicultural knowledge played a heavy role. Young felt his tuning system helped him access the feelings associated with “the modes of such ancient classical systems as the musics of Greece, Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and the Far East,” offering him “an infinite universe of eventual possibilities.”
Perhaps most importantly, Young’s playing in “The Well-Tuned Piano” is an extension of his early saxophone work. The piece begins in the key of E-flat, which he first grew accustomed to on his E-flat sopranino sax. In the ’60s, he devised a method of playing his horn so fast that it sounded like he was creating sustained chords rather than flurries of notes. Young translated this technique to his piano, concocting “clouds” of sound, or as he put it, “extraordinary periodic acoustical beats [that] became suspended in the air like a cloud over the piano.” This is perhaps the most emotionally affecting aspect of “The Well-Tuned Piano.” When Young’s notes coalesce into whirlwinds, dazzlingly alien sounds emerge. “The flow of momentum marshaled the vibrations of air in the room, slowly making the ear aware of sounds that weren’t actually being played,” Gann reported from one performance. “The play of combination and difference tones created astounding aural illusions.” As a result, Gann was convinced that Young was singing—though he never did—and also thought he heard bells, foghorns, and machinery.
While Minimalism is often more about hypnosis than engagement, “The Well-Tuned Piano” is enthralling and rarely a “difficult” listen. Young’s playing is filled with dramatic changes, moving ambiance, and cinematic swells. As critic Robert Palmer wrote, “Unlike much of the work of the academic avant-garde, it is music that asks to be experienced, that seeks to produce an immediate, deeply felt sensation.” Even when he repeats notes for long stretches, Young creates compelling beginnings, middles, and ends. There are lots of stories inside “The Well-Tuned Piano.”
Of course, whether anyone can actually be fully engaged by anything for five straight hours is almost unanswerable. The very concept of absorbing one piece of music for that long seems absurd, requiring a new conception of what it means to listen to an album, much less to just simply listen. Though I’ve owned a CD copy of “The Well-Tuned Piano” for over a decade, I’ve only once found the time to hear it all in one sitting, following along with Young’s roadmap the whole way. I’m not sure how often I was focused completely on the music—I’m not sure the word “focus” even has meaning here—but I do remember how striking the piece’s circular arcs were when heard all together. “The Well-Tuned Piano” is distinctly about themes and variations, filled with tensions, climaxes, and resolutions.
That sets it apart from the more static and repetitive work of Steve Reich, Philip Glass, and much of the Minimalism movement of which Young is often cited as a father. As Gann puts it, “...while both Minimalism and Serialism aim for music devoid of memory or anticipation, Young plays Wagner-like, with constant suggestions of themes past and present.” Gann even insisted this piece shouldn’t be called minimal—his Village Voice review was titled “Maximal Spirit”—although Young was apparently happy to use that name. Ultimately, “The Well-Tuned Piano” sits between traditions and movements. It’s equally possible to hear it as a repetitive work erasing the concept of time, as a narrative in which ideas emerge, dissipate, and return in progressing cycles or an unclassifiable hybrid that feels static and moving at the same time.
The diversity and richness of “The Well-Tuned Piano” come not only from Young’s innovative tuning and compositional structure but from his improvisation. He always performed the piece from memory, without a written score. He saw each chance to play it as an opportunity to advance it, making it a living, unending composition. With each public iteration, he added new sections and changed existing ones. (The piece was well-suited for such expansion: At one point in the 1970s, two major portions were added when Young simply changed one note of his tuning). “I get no satisfaction unless the piece grows,” he once said.
Its evolution might seem irrelevant when listening to a single fixed recording. But this version that was released—which Young titled to include the show’s date and start and end times—was, in fact, one of his most improvisatory. Though he claims that “I would [always] follow the dictates of my muse, no matter how extreme,” Young usually played with a clock at his side, so not to spend so long on any one section that he’d run out of steam for the rest. But during the October 25, 1981, performance, he left the clock at home and was surprised afterwards to find that what usually took him three to four hours to play lasted over five. He called it “not just the longest, but most imaginative and creative realization of ‘The Well-Tuned Piano’ that I have yet played.” A few years later, he claimed that the piece had grown so much that no single performance could contain it all.
With only one other recording to compare it to (a harder-to-find DVD of a 1987 performance, released by Young’s own MELA Foundation), it’s hard to judge if this version is the most imaginative. But it certainly feels remarkably present and immediate, as if Young has discovered and inhabited an infinite, ever-expanding moment. Moods change rapidly given the piece’s scope, and even when he’s traversing slower, quieter passages, tension courses. Often the drama comes not just from its arcs and shifts, but also from the sense that at any moment something new—or something that you haven’t heard in a while—lies just around the corner. That something new might even be a feeling, an emotion familiar yet uncannily novel, tweaked into an outer realm by Young’s devout interval-shifting. If any five-hour work can keep you on the edge of your seat, this is it.
That sounds almost like a magic trick, and it’s tempting to assign a mystical aura to “The Well-Tuned Piano.” Many of Young’s other projects—with their references to dreams, and in the holistic experience of his New York space The Dream House—suggest his creative approach has a spiritual aspect. But when writer Ian Nagoski expressed surprise that Young’s devotion to just intonation wasn’t about the harmony of the spheres, Young replied, “I really work with sound as it appears in the real world.” By doing so, he discovered profundity in concrete things: mathematical equations, thought-out structures, individual sounds as direct catalysts for individual feelings. He found a way into the core of music and its effect on the listener through exacting methods, accessing a reality no other artist ever had, simply by tuning and playing piano in his own singular way. Which means one simple statement he made sums up “The Well-Tuned Piano” perfectly: “Equal temperament reminds one of the truth; just intonation is the truth.”


England's prestigious Touch label offers this collection of hypnotizing ambient alien drones from experimental guitarist Oren Ambarchi.

Grapes from the Estate

On a day when your transmission drops to the asphalt and the humidity's enough to fry brains, Oren Ambarchi's resonating, disembodied guitarisms establish a soothing alternate universe. With his third solo project for Touch-- following 2001's Suspension and 2000's Insulation-- the Australian guitarist unwraps the warm chilliness of past efforts, organizing a languid, abstract world of lulling harmonics and slow-drip tones with the on/off attenuation of strings, bells and percussion.
Raised in Sydney, and of Sephardic Jewish heritage, Ambarchi's performed and recorded with labelmate Christian Fennesz, Sachiko M, John Zorn, Keith Rowe, Phill Niblock, Toshimaru Nakamura, Martin Ng, and others. But while he's been performing live since 1986, guitar in tote, I'd prefer to keep Ambarchi as a one-dimensional wraith flittering about my cramped apartment: Nothing like seeing a guy sweating over knobs and cables to drain the magic from twilight overtones.
As is, Grapes from the Estate's ambient clusters navigate a field of emptiness. The first composition, "Corkscrew", would make an ideal soundtrack for one of Bill Viola's single-channel watery videos, especially the moments in which a microscopic lens outlines the surprisingly complex contours of each droplet. The piece consists of electric guitars, but sounds like an echoed tone generator, the occasional circles surrounding a submerged stone, or a fading gong.
"Girl with the Silver Eyes" bulks up with Hammond organ and drums, but casts a similar shadow. The most noticeable difference is a fairly distinguished bass overload. These gentle, heavy pulsations are the only cacophonous wavelengths on this album, and they're pretty minor. Otherwise, at the near-midway point, regulatory brushes and snare wraps surface, followed by an intermittent kabuki melody that rises like an afterthought. The track resolves as the pantomime of a quietly corroding music box unleashes its last gasps.
"Remedios the Beauty" opens with a hook and maintains the "riff" throughout: Mixing acoustic and electric guitars, piano, bells, drums, and the strings of Veren Grigorov and Peter Hollo, it comes off like sheets of crystalline snow spiked with a looped Four Tet yarn or a twangy western Matmos two-step at its center. Entering the pop realm, it's the most obviously musical, least enigmatic of the compositions. Still, it works in setting up the starkness of the final 20-minute "Stars Aligned, Web Spun", which brings the album full-circle. Ambarchi, again alone with this electric guitars, ups the enveloping absence of "Corkscrew", doubling its duration. Over time, the sprawl unfurls like found inhuman frequencies: Ambarchi's patience in allowing calm tones to live healthy, long lives creates a blinking grid. It's what I imagine a black and white Lite Brite would sound like if it were allowed a temporary whisper.
No matter how camouflaged, a guitar is a guitar. Though it may be hard to believe this flickering six-string sunspot emerged from an instrument that established Steve Vai and Yngwie Malmsteen, Ambarchi makes his solo talk without resorting to a single spell-breaking finger-tap, mathy scale, or screeching whammy bar. Wonder what he could do with "Hot for Teacher"...


Two-thirds of The Comet Is Coming, plus poet and saxophonist Alabaster DePlume, offer ecstatic anthems for battling fascism, capitalism, and catastrophe.

Tactics EP

For most of a decade, London’s Soccer96 were satisfied with simply being fun. Most every track from the explosive electronic duo felt like another instantaneous celebration: two or three minutes of carousel keyboards and squealing synthesizers, stretched like neon spandex across a skeleton of dancing drums. Soccer96 bestowed these kinetic pieces with puns and playful references, even employing personal aliases that suggested gaming handles. “Our music feels like playing a game,” Danalogue, or keyboardist Dan Leavers, once acknowledged, “on two-player mode.”
Tactics, Soccer96’s first release in two years, is as propulsive as anything from that past. Betamax, or drummer Max Hallett, pairs the spring of prime disco beats with the long-range insistence of krautrock. Danalogue shapes mellifluous melodies that flash out of the dark, like a nightclub’s synchronized lights. Peppered with cowbell and buttressed with bass from engineer Capitol K, these tracks unfurl like extended instrumental mixes of some irrepressible dance hit.
But on Tactics, Soccer96 have added an element so obvious it may seem overdue: a lyrical theme. Working with saxophonist and poet Alabaster DePlume, who’s already released one of this harried year’s most heavenly records, Soccer96 build a three-song suite that excoriates infinite capitalism, lambastes generational apathy, and foretells a perilous revolution. Tapping deep traditions of revolutionary jazz and radical punk, Tactics offers motivational anthems not only for keeping up the fight but for shaming others to join in, too.
Soccer96 exist in tandem with The Comet Is Coming, Betamax and Danalogue’s trio with visionary saxophonist Shabaka Hutchings. After Hutchings sat in for some of their early sets in London’s hotbed of hybridized jazz, they launched their spiritual-jazz-meets-ecstatic-electronics wonder. Hutchings is a master of shaping larger conceptual frameworks for his music. Sons of Kemet’s Your Queen Is a Reptile, for instance, celebrates the stories of Black women while chastising the British monarchy. Shabaka and the Ancestors’ We Are Sent Here by History reimagines the future of utopias by reconnecting with ideas from South Africa.
Soccer96 have now borrowed that guiding principle—that they can sound fun and say something—for themselves. “I Was Gonna Fight Fascism” is a seven-minute sendup of would-be protestors who are too busy, preoccupied, or scared to help save society. Though a trenchant mockery, it’s as delightful as LCD Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge” or ESG’s “Erase You,” twin predecessors that turn taunts into hooks. During “Children Will Dance,” DePlume evokes the elegant menace of the apocalypse-minded David Tibet as he offers up nightmarish scenarios of exploitation. With its rubber-band bassline and acid-house keyboards, though, the song sounds like a refutation of that doom, a dance one step ahead of the demons.
“Buy It” is the true call to arms here, begging to be stretched for a quarter-hour onstage in front of a sweaty crowd yelling the title back at DePlume in belligerent antiphony. As the drums and circuits tango around him, DePlume recites a sardonic list of the pleasures people try to purchase: sexual satisfaction, a head of hair, a just future, more money itself. “Do you want personal distance from the colonial crimes that made your comfort and nourishment possible? Do what everyone else does,” he commands at one point, smartly breaking his grand self-indictment across the beat. “Buy it,” he sneers, the band joining his Greek chorus of condemnation.
When exasperation overwhelms DePlume, he screams into his saxophone, summoning the brittle pleas of Albert Ayler. Betamax and Danalogue rush like a river beneath him, ushering him toward his next anti-capitalist grievance. This vitriolic liturgy reinforces the little ways we can wound capitalism—that is, we can’t buy happiness, so stop trying. More important, though, it’s a pointed reminder to challenge the broader systems that perpetuate inequality, the final boss of our global video game. At a moment when white folks solicit multi-generational forgiveness by Venmo-ing Black people a few bucks instead of demanding larger conversations about reparations and reshaping policy, “Buy It” feels like theme music for the bigger battle. This isn’t the kind of carefree video-game glee Soccer96 might once have imagined. But their reinvention arrives right on time.

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This L.A. funk and soul musician, known as a member of Vulfpeck, meanders through a handful of solo joints about love and basketball.

Game Winner EP

As a member of the web-savvy funk band Vulfpeck, the Los Angeles songwriter Joey Dosik is usually off to the side playing saxophone or keyboard. But in a recent YouTube video, the group gathers around Dosik and performs one of his songs, a throwback soul track called “Running Away.” Like many of Vulfpeck’s popular studio clips, the performance is garnished with a dose of music-nerd excitement, this time in the form of a pair of cameos from noted session drummer James Gadson (Bill Withers, Quincy Jones) and guitarist David T. Walker (Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye). The dream-team lineup isn’t wasted on Dosik’s song. They take his self-absorbed fantasy that someone out there is thinking of him and turn it into something gorgeous.
Unfortunately, this isn’t the version of “Running Away” you’ll hear on Dosik’s new Game Winner EP, an expanded re-packaging of his 2016 release of the same name. Instead, you’ll find two others. The official “Running Away” is a subdued hum, a victim of production that turns a sweet song into something quaint and soulless. The alternate mix, with just Dosik’s buttery voice and muted drum and bass tracks, splits the difference; the session is so minimal that it reads like a songwriter’s demo and vocal audition in one. To be sure, Dosik has written a very good song, but he doesn’t quite seem sure of what to do with it.
Game Winner has 10 tracks, but only three full original songs. The rest are alternate versions and plodding piano interludes to pad out the EP’s tenuous concept: It’s a set of romantic sketches filtered through a vague basketball metaphor. On the gospel-indebted title track, Dosik sings, “Give me the ball/I’ll hit the game winner/Oh take a chance on me,” wrestling the corniness out of the gesture simply by sounding so genuine. His voice has a serene, plaintive quality. Light as it is, his singing does the heavy lifting throughout.
More than anything, the EP casts Dosik as a deeply mellow writer and performer. With its gentle guitar fingerpicking and twinkling piano riffs, “Competitive Streak” is a blue-eyed soul track that, if you tilt your head, casts Dosik suddenly and creatively as a new-school James Taylor. He’s similarly economical in his writing and has a chipper, pattering melody for even the downest moments. “Couldn’t possibly blame me/More than I blame myself,” he sings. Later on the same song, though, his idée fixe gets the best of him, when he awkwardly blurts out a reference to Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The final track on the EP’s original tracklist is Game Winner’s most refreshing moment. Predictably, it’s a riff, the remix to “Game Winner.” Dosik uses the more sensual revamp to finally lighten up. “Sit back and enjoy a piece of the remix,” he sings, stepping out of the stuffiness of the previous version. Dosik got his start as a jazz musician, and maybe that’s where he got his inclination to iterate on a good piece. But he could stand to loosen up a little and take risks earlier in the game.


So this is it. The great follow-up to Homogenic we've anticipated\n\ since that overcast late-September afternoon in 1997 ...

Vespertine

So this is it. The great follow-up to Homogenic we've anticipated since that overcast late-September afternoon in 1997 when we first sat listening to the album for the first time, wondering what she might do next. Somehow, it doesn't seem worth the wait.
Homogenic, still the most innovative and substantial release of Björk's solo career, spilled over with rich melody and sybaritic imagery. Its dense, programmed percussion reflected IDM's infancy (The Richard D. James Album being a frequent point of comparison), yet submerged it in brooding Russian strings buoyed by thumping bass hits and Björk's urgent frustrations. The album's cavernous echoes and masterful arrangements sprang to larger-than-life proportions like the American musicals Selma fantasized about in Dancer in the Dark. Both cohesive and inconceivably modern, Homogenic sounded like the future-music of childhood dreams.
While undeniably beautiful, Vespertine fails to give electronic music the forward push it received on Björk's preceding albums. Rather than designing sounds never before imagined, the album merely sounds current, relying on the technology of standard studio software and the explorations of the Powerbook elite. There are few surprises here for the Björk fan, and fewer for the electro aficionado. Sure, it's nice to listen to, but it rarely challenges like Post's "Enjoy" and "Headphones," or like Homogenic's "Pluto." And what's a Björk album without the ambush?
That said, Vespertine has more than just a handful of charms. The record is gorgeously orchestrated with the Icelander's neon string sections, chiming music boxes, and intricately arranged background Björks. Its production, though never truly groundbreaking, is always beautifully executed with washes of harp, organic synthsounds and majestic, dreamlike effects. Björk hasn't lost her ability to create forested sonic otherworlds, or to achieve an overwhelmingly full sound while maintaining an air of wide, open space. In fact, it could be argued that, texturally, she has mastered her trademarks with this album.
"Hidden Place" opens Vespertine with a glitchy, almost lo-fi melodic loop, paired with the deep sub-bass attack that has dominated the low-end of Björk's music in recent years. "Aurora" begins with rhythmic broomsweeps and awakens with delicate frosted chimes and angelic choirs. "Heirloom" alters between what sounds like a samba preset on a vintage Wurlitzer organ and skittering breakbeats, and is decorated with inverted synthtones and analog keyboards. And these songs, like all the others, are saturated in a thousand layers of whirling, grandiose strings and porcelain pings of fragile concordance.
Yet, Vespertine is riddled with sameness, and the unshakable feeling that you've heard these songs before. And coated in such a delicious sheen, it's easy to miss that the music here lacks a major component of Björk's past recordings; strip Vespertine down to melody alone, and you're left with little substance. Only on occasion does Björk rise above the swelling symphonies and swirling digitalia with a memorable piece of music, and when she does, it seems fleeting. Perhaps it appears for a moment in the repetitious chorus of "It's Not Up to You," or the album's shimmering closer, the Oval-sampling "Unison." But blink and you'll miss it, as it's invariably swallowed whole by the album's vast, ethereal instrumentation.
Glitch wizards Matmos were called in during the Vespertine sessions to co-produce many of the record's tracks. I wonder where they are. Nowhere is their signature sound even remotely traceable. A theory: starstruck by Björk's iconic visage, they lent what they felt she would want, and left the experimenting to their own releases. Clearly, Björk realized that this duo was capable of inventing sounds beyond her wildest dreams, but the end result is typical; not exactly a rehash, but nevertheless predictable.
Still, Vespertine makes for an intriguing listen, and manages to hold its own after hours on repeat. Were it not for the fact that Björk had already visited this terrain so reliably on previous outings, it could very well be her landmark achievement. But with the astounding Homogenic behind her, its melodies timelessly memorable and its production similarly captivating, Vespertine stands only as a pleasant journey back through her usual netherworld.


Setting Dawn Richard’s agile voice against Spencer Zahn’s lush chamber arrangements, the two musicians push each other into an atmospheric zone that’s new for both.

Pigments

Dawn Richard’s music feels as if it’s emanating from a higher plane than ours. Even back in her more radio-friendly days with Danity Kane and Diddy, the New Orleans singer imbued her songs with a rare vulnerability, emerging from the hedonistic landscape of late-2000s hip-hop and R&B with earnest, heartbroken compositions about losing love and finding it beneath the strobe lights of the dancefloor. She’s a singer of big emotions, and even as she’s pushed her solo work further into experimental realms, she has continued to foreground feeling above all else.
Pigments takes this evolution a step further, transforming Richard’s voice into a luminescent mist. Conceived with bassist and neoclassical composer Spencer Zahn after the two collaborated on his 2018 debut, the album captures the sensory, abstract feel of Richard’s solo work, but from an entirely different vantage point. As Richard sings impressionistic songs of love (and self-love), Zahn’s radiant chamber music works like a prism, splitting her voice into beams of pure color. An avowed Mark Hollis fan whose work draws from ECM’s celestial approach to jazz, Zahn crafts some of his most nuanced arrangements yet, each softly strummed guitar and closely mic’d clarinet breathing with effortless ease. Not only do the two of them make a remarkably natural pair—they each bring out some of each other’s best work.
Throughout Pigments, Richard’s voice appears and dissipates, guiding the listener along on a gradual drift downstream. Where Zahn’s instrumentals are often measured and gentle, Richard’s performance is dynamic, regularly growing from a soft quiver to a mighty, all-encompassing wail and back again. After the opening “Coral” sets the stage with a yawning, Gavin Bryars-like hum, Richard materializes on “Sandstone,” imbuing Zahn’s arrangements with enormous power. “Dreamer,” she announces like a specter emerging from a fog, “I want to love like you/I want to see the world through your eyes.” As the song swells to its climax, Richard’s voice fuses with Zahn’s instruments until they become indistinguishable from one another. The duo returns to this swooning psychedelia throughout Pigments: “Vantablack,” in particular, seems almost to melt, Richard’s vocal runs drizzling over Zahn’s shuffling drums like warm sap.
Richard’s greatest gift to Zahn as a collaborator is the way she keeps his music from getting too comfortable. As sumptuous as his arrangements may be, a vocalist like Richard requires heft: After “Cerulean” opens with a hypnotizing wash of synthesizers and saxophones, Richard begins building the song to a gut-wrenching peak. “You can’t choose who you give your heart to,” she declares, and suddenly the doors are flung open, Zahn’s synthesizers thrumming like a cathedral organ at the dawn of the rapture—there’s even a wailing electric guitar solo that somehow doesn’t feel too dramatic. The more relaxed “Saffron” has the feel of an otherworldly late-night waltz, its upright bass and saxophone answering Richard’s repeated question—“Can you save me the last dance?”—with all the theatrical flair of lost lovers singing to each other in the dark.
The tracks where Richard takes a back seat spotlight Zahn’s remarkable maturation as a composer; overcoming the slightly somnolent pleasantness of his previous work, he creates rich, mesmerizing arrangements that subtly shift the mood from piece to piece. On “Sienna,” a quiet clarinet intro slowly gives way to unease as synthesizers begin turning backwards, while blurry vibraphones cloud the frame. After Richard’s intense pleading on “Cerulean,” Zahn’s plinking, icicle-like sounds on “Opal” serve as a serene comedown, returning the music to a hushed place of peace. Details like these make his soundscapes as calm as they are captivating.
Richard has hinted in the past at being enthralled with the worlds of neoclassical and new age—her own father, to whom the album is dedicated, has a master’s in music theory, and Richard has spoken about growing up surrounded by Debussy, Bach, and Enya. As the album nears its end, Richard and Zahn begin to introduce a club-like thump to the music once more, first with a minimally pinging-ponging drum machine on “Crimson,” then in a full-on groove on the get-up-and-move closer “Umber.” It’s these moments when Zahn and Richard come together that make Pigments such a remarkable endeavor, one that combines the properties of both artists’ music until it becomes a pristine, unified feeling.


The Hot Chip member’s third solo album proffers empathetic pop-house as the cure to what ails us. But in a divided world, politeness only goes so far.

Harmonics

Feeling down? Weary? Out of sorts? Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard has got you covered on Harmonics, the London producer’s third solo album and a record so relentlessly empathetic it can feel like getting smothered by a pack of golden retrievers.
Goddard has history here. Hot Chip, the group he co-founded with Alexis Taylor, are known for their arm-around-the-shoulder melodies, while his project the 2 Bears, with Raf Rundell, once released the charming “Bear Hug,” a song that literally promised to take you in its arms. Goddard’s 2011 single “Gabriel,” meanwhile, is such a beautifully rendered, deeply felt pop-house song that it almost managed to escape from the charred emotional void at the core of VULTURES 1’ “Beg Forgiveness,” where Ye flipped its chorus into a defense of Chris Brown, of all people.
But Harmonics really is a festival of warmth, from its cordial name down. Goddard designed the record, he says, to be “loving, romantic - and fun,” and this approach extended into Harmonics’ production; Goddard tried not to force meaning onto the music or his collaborators. Certainly, it all sounds very welcoming: The beats largely bounce along at an inclusive 125-ish BPM as the music takes a soothing stroll through the dance styles that have long dominated Goddard’s work, namely house, garage (both UK and U.S.), funk, and soul. The synths shine persistently bright and a stream of guest vocalists pour their hearts out on songs that are heavy on tales of romantic intrigue.
Still, Harmonics isn’t really a happy album—more a wistful one, with a deep strain of “chin up mate” encouragement. Goddard’s melodies tend toward the doleful, and an understated melancholy runs through Harmonics like late-summer nostalgia. Sure, there is romance, but we are far from the happily ever after. “Why do we love then in this world/Why must we try again, hurt ourselves,” Goddard ponders on “Follow You,” a vaguely gothic rock-soul number. The album’s guests don’t sound in much better humor: “Deep inside I know just what to do/But how do I find healing in the song?” Milan-based singer-songwriter Fiorious croons on the gospel house of “New World (Flow)”.
This melancholy dance format produces some beautiful moments. “On My Mind” is the kind of ruminative 2-step that Jamie xx wishes he could achieve, while “Summon,” with former Wild Beast Hayden Thorpe, is a Larry Heard-esque fantasy of deep-house beats and disco introspection. At times, though, the relentless march of default mode boom-tish house and bittersweet synth melodies gets a little stifling—less comforting than simply comfort zone.
What’s frustrating is that there is a more adventurous album trying to escape from beneath Harmonics’ house-y shroud, one where Goddard’s more intrepid collaborators really take the lead. “Miles Away,” with Guinean vocalist Falle Nioke, and “Progress,” with Ibibio Sound Machine, both touch on Afro-house; “When Love’s Out of Fashion,” with British rapper Oranje, detours into hip-hop; and “Revery,” with Alabaster DePlume, has a touch of Underground Resistance-style space jazz to its saxophone groove.
That these are among the best songs on the record is no coincidence. Goddard’s compassionate attitude is a welcome antidote to our divided world, and it does often bear fruit. But little truly great art is made by committee. Harmonics’ collection of relatable songs and interesting ideas could use a stronger hand on the tiller to reach its intended destination.


Liz Harris’ sparse, 22-minute record follows the trajectory of her 2014 album Ruins to a place that feels even more wind-blown and remote.

Grid of Points

Grouper once said releasing an album was like trying to secretly sink a heavy object in a lake: “Find a quiet corner, gently slip it under the surface, watch the ripples for a moment, and steal away.” She was referring to her end of the process—the immediate aftermath of putting one’s work into the world—but the analogy works the other way around, too. Listening to a Grouper record, meaning generally evades me, or at least the kind I can articulate does; I grasp at an expression of exactly what a song is “about” as it slips through my fingers like water. Sometimes it feels like the record is sinking through me, ending up somewhere deep and unreachable, leaving me with the dazed feeling you get when you die in your dream.
The seven songs on Grid of Points, the latest album from Liz Harris, were written and recorded in a week and a half during a residency in the wide-open space of Ucross, Wyoming in 2014. She describes the process being abruptly halted by sickness, like a sign from the world that the album was complete despite its slightness. Or rather, because of its slightness. “The intimacy and abbreviation of this music allude to an essence that the songs’ lyrics speak more directly of,” Harris writes. “The space left after matter has departed, a stage after the characters have gone, the hollow of some central column, missing.”
Lately, it’s felt as if Harris has taken measures to translate that essence more directly, with as little interference as possible. 2014’s spare and devastating Ruins forewent the layers and layers of effects pedals that made her best-known releases so displacing, focusing on just the piano, her voice, and the ambient sounds of her recording space. Grid of Points follows this trajectory to a place that feels even more wind-blown and remote, its compositions shaped as much by negative space as they are by instrumentation; the mundane sounds of earthly existence—an empty room, an inhale—are not background noise but essential parts of the whole. It is easy to find yourself hanging on to every press of the piano’s sustain pedal, holding your breath as Harris preserves what is left of the note until there is nothing at all.
But where Ruins showcased Harris’ vocals as uncharacteristically legible, Grid of Points burrows back into ambiguity, the vocal harmonies overlapping in foggy indeterminacy even when they are unaccompanied by any other instrument. And yet they are more heavenly than ever, Harris’ melodies drifting in almost liturgical directions; on “The Races,” not even a minute long, her voice sounds as though it’s echoing off cathedral marble. Of its handful of lyrics, I could recognize only three abbreviated lines: “Smells like rain/It is raining/The races.”
Typed out, these lines—and others across the album’s 22-minute span—might as well be haiku poems cloaked in song form. Imposing formal restrictions on one’s work can have a weirdly freeing effect, and it would seem that Harris’ increasingly minimal arsenal of instruments is akin to the best haiku poets’ austere character count—less a strict rulebook than an exercise in expression at its most essential. Sometimes, that includes language itself. For the first minute of “Blouse,” Harris seems to be singing words that are not quite words, somewhere between a heavy sigh and a sob. But the feeling is translated clearly, the ache of the melody saying everything that needs to be said.
The sparseness of Grid of Points creates a sense of hyper-awareness; as such, I’ve found it hard to listen the album seated in front of a laptop, compelled instead to wander out into the world. I recently found myself on the shore of a nearby beach, where my thoughts had turned to death—an event I sometimes imagine should be soundtracked by Grouper’s music as a universal rule. Even as it floats just beyond my literal comprehension, the album seems to be explicitly about grief, though I suspect other listeners might have similarly strong convictions that it is about something else entirely. Grouper records are like that—as though the way Harris sublimates herself into her world leaves space for its audience to become its protagonists. Sitting on the beach, I think a helicopter might be overhead. In fact, the walls of the room in which Harris recorded “Breathing,” Grid of Points’ last song, seems to have collapsed away—a visceral wide-opening. For the album’s final two minutes, the only sounds are those of a steadily oncoming train; and then nothing.


Nas' 10th studio album, featuring production work from NO I.D., Buckwild, Salaam Remi, the late Heavy D, and Swizz Beatz, is his strongest in a few presidential administrations.

Life Is Good

Nas has been disappointing people nearly half his life. By now, the passion play of raised and swiftly dashed hopes that occurs whenever he announces a new album has repeated itself enough times to officially qualify as farce. You'd think he'd be exhausted by now, and there were times over his last three sleepwalking efforts when he sounded just that: a guy wearily familiar with his own towering mythology, and increasingly disinterested in living up to it.
But what if Nas stopped fretting about blowing people's minds or disappointing them and just, you know, made a record? It's the kind of question Nas devotees have spent years pondering, and Life Is Good, his 10th studio album and strongest in three or four presidential administrations, is basically the answer. Song for song, it's his most solid, disaster-free album since, well... we won't go there, as comparing Nas albums is like comparing birthdays where your father showed up late instead of not at all. But for once, Nas sidesteps oblivion. Life Is Good finds him avoiding most of his worst impulses, scraping the pseudo-mystical Righteous Teacher patina off his crown and touching back down in the Queensbridge of his sense memory over late-summer-light production.
Life Is Good is so consistent, in fact, that it's disorienting, and those of us with a long history navigating Nas albums will have a lot of pressing questions: What are all these top-shelf beats doing here? Where are the queasy sex jams, the songs rapped from the perspective of heroin spoons or discarded E&J bottles, the choruses about being a Warrior and a Hero? Where is the blindingly ill-fitting Nas Radio Bid? (The lone example, the Swizz Beatz-produced "Summer on Smash", is just inoffensively generic.) But above all: What happened this time?
Part of the answer is clear. The last few years have been turbulent ones in Nas' personal life -- his brutally public split with Kelis, the costly settlement, the embarrassing fiasco with his teenage daughter tweeting pictures of a bejeweled box of condoms in her bedroom. Historically at his best when shaken, Nas has rich material to work with here, and he's more open-hearted on Life Is Good than he has been since God's Son. "Daughters", his sweetly reflective response to the condom-gate that is no less sweet for its slight lyrical awkwardness (he refers to what is presumably Twitter just as "the social network"), finds him examining the responsibilities of fatherhood with fond bewilderment. The song aimed directly at Kelis ("Bye Baby"), meanwhile, is more a good-times remembrance than score-settling. "You screamin' at the racist cops in Miami was probably the highlight of my life," he recalls, the affection audible in his voice.
It's also entirely possible that Nas fans have No I.D. to thank for Life Is Good's quality. In the recent Complex cover story on Nas, I.D. said that he "wanted to make a soundtrack that allowed Nas to be Nas." Mentor to Kanye, a Chicago rap veteran, and the current executive vice president at Def Jam, No I.D. seems to be cementing his role as the Rap Whisperer: He recently guided a deeply confused Common to his first good record in nine years, and it's likely he exercised some of the same gentle-but-firm guidance here. He produces five of 14 tracks on Life is Good, and they all exude the warm TV-fireplace crackle of the best throwback production. You can feel the July city-heat sweat drip off the wooly saxophone on "Stay", while "Back When" flickers like a dim neon sign. The lyrics to "Back When" don't even do much besides gesture at Nas' musty mythology: "check out the oracle bred by city housing," Hollis Ave, Shan, and Marley, "you love to hear the story of how it all got started," etc. But he breathes through it with old-Shakespearean-actor fondness-- he was, after all, there, and No I.D. provides just the right lighting.
The rest of the production list reads as if it were crowd-sourced by exacting Nas purists: Buckwild, Salaam Remi, the late Heavy D (who gave Nas "The Don" before he passed away). Remi's blaring beat for "A Queens Story" is like a louder, more dramatic version of "Get Down", its tension ratcheted up by James Bond-theme horn blurts. There are a couple of playful, possibly shameless nods to Illmatic: On the intro to "Loco-Motive", a suspiciously familiar-sounding subway train rolls over tracks in the distance. Nas dedicates the song to "my trapped in the 90s niggas," a line that could be used against him but that sounds, in the album's context, like playfulness. You can't recapture lightning in a bottle, or age backwards, but you can settle gracefully into strengths. Nas isn't back; he's just here.


As they enter their second decade, the indie-rock veterans gently expand the borders of their suburban ennui with plush arrangements and new voices.

The Main Thing

When a rock band enters its second decade, fatigue sets in, no matter how successful their previous albums. It’s an existential problem most groups don’t live long enough to face; many that do choose to disband, finding they’ve run out of important things to say or interesting ways to say them. Some veteran acts take a collaborative approach, bringing in outsiders to expand their sound—Yo La Tengo’s annual Hanukkah performances have become a kind of indie-rock showcase, featuring younger artists like Snail Mail, while Conor Oberst found inspiration in kindred spirit Phoebe Bridgers. For Real Estate frontman Martin Courtney, survival similarly required ceding control to new contributors. Their resulting fifth album, The Main Thing, coats their suburban ennui in plush arrangements.
The new vastness of their sound—the sweeping synth that opens the album on “Friday,” not dissimilar to the boot-up chimes of a MacBook; the shrieking strings that introduce “Paper Cup”—reflects not only their outsized ambitions (“We were trying to accomplish making the best record we’ve ever made,” Courtney said), but the physical distance separating the members. As he did on 2017’s In Mind, Courtney recorded their demos from hundreds of miles from most of the band, with only percussionist Jackson Pollis and keyboardist Matt Kallman remaining in their adoptive city of New York. Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, a featured vocalist on “Paper Cup,” composed her own harmony for the part, further broadening the album’s palette.
As a result, the The Main Thing has an ensemble feel, a give-and-take between the musicians that feels more like jam bands than indie rock. The title track—with its freewheeling drum fills and little jazz-fusion-inspired guitar solo—focuses on each player, rather than melting into hazy harmonies. The jammier moments come across as alternately goofy and genuinely self-serious, an appropriate mix for a band helmed by a father of three.
Parenthood is at the forefront of Courtney’s lyrics here. Real Estate has always looked backward; even songs written ostensibly in the present tense were weighted with autumnal melancholia. There’s a slight twist to that formulation on “You,” in which Courtney bemoans the eventual anxieties his children will have to face: “Just dream your time away/I see no better use for it/For soon you’ll be awake/Then you’ll have to get used to it.” Sung dreamily over glassy guitar, it comes off like an oddly practical lullaby, a childhood cautionary tale filtered through the inevitability of adulthood. On “Silent World,” he speaks in harsher terms about his Catcher In The Rye-like desire to protect his children: “Can’t let you wander off/Out in this wicked world.”
Courtney has mentioned a desire to be more outwardly political in his lyrics, in part to justify his band’s continued output during times of national strife. It’s a stretch to say that poeticized anxieties about adulthood, laid out by a pacifying tenor and backed by ornate arpeggios, rise to the level of protest music. But his lyrics instead touch upon a cognitive dissonance—between the personal nature of restless anguish and the broader societal forces that underpin it—that fits nicely with the band’s graceful guitars and rounded basslines.
Elsewhere, despite the band’s claim that producer Kevin MacMahon asked them to carefully consider each word, the writing falls a bit flat. On the Lynch-penned “Also A But,” the glacial track references natural disaster through nuclear war metaphors that sound immediately dated (“Floating atop a mushroom cloud,” he sings as the song peters out). “Falling Down” traffics in shallow witticisms (“The wind’s the only thing that’s fully free”), redeemed only by Courtney’s tranquil delivery.
Growth, on an album-to-album basis, can be difficult to measure for a band like Real Estate. Despite novel collaborations and a lush cornucopia of additional instruments, their basic patterns—open chords, lilting vocals—ground The Main Thing in a familiar context. The most memorable moments come with the small flourishes—a folksy piano accompaniment on “November,” pizzicato violins that swirl into a dramatic crescendo on “Falling Down,” programmed drum beats that blend the outro of “Sting” into “Silent World.” Interviews with the band evoke a palpable pressure to leave an imprint on the world, to make a new record feel necessary, and not simply obligatory. Real Estate doesn’t upend their own foundation; they instead find beauty in filling in its empty spaces.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Strokes' creative linchpin follows his solid debut Yours to Keep with another tasty helping of power-pop, though on ¿Có**mo te Llama? he sheds the inherent modesty of a solo spin-off and stretches his songs' components across a wider array of styles.

¿Cómo te Llama?

This is the second Albert Hammond Jr. album released since the Strokes' last album, 2006's First Impressions of Earth. The rumor mill may be aching for new Strokes album details, but Hammond-- always pegged as one of the band's creative forces-- is doing his best to ensure our survival until then, and the extra face time's well-deserved. Hammond follows his solid debut Yours to Keep with another tasty helping of power-pop, though on ¿Cómo te Llama? he sheds the inherent modesty of a solo spin-off and aims higher.
Although his songwriting credits with the Strokes are slight, Hammond retains his band's melody-first minimalism. The arrangements here remain just as efficient and inconspicuous as YTK, and Hammond's vocals unequivocally steer the songs, his even-keeled delivery resembling a less id-driven Julian Casablancas. However, Cómo veers from past work by stretching these straightforward components across a wider array of styles and histrionics. You can still distinguish all the Guided by Voices, Beach Boys, and new wave building blocks, but in spots they're re-appropriated for, say, a disco or reggae soundclash.
At times, the added bombast helps trick listeners into thinking they're listening to something more complex than power-pop. Opener "Bargain of a Century" enters with fanfare, bookending its devil-may-care verses with a melodramatic riff that scales Arcade Fire to Hammond-friendly proportions. On paper, "Victory at Monterey" reads like a potential disaster, its disco bassline and piston-pumping Franz Ferdinand riffs running the risk of kowtowing to New York dance-punk douchebaggery. Fortunately, Hammond never lets the focus shift from catchiness to genre fidelity, and the track's an unlikely highlight.
Surprisingly, Cómo only contains a handful of single-friendly, three-minute pop songs. First single "GfC" and "In My Room" make nuanced changes to the formula of YTK singles "In Transit" and "Everyone Gets a Star", but other similarly structured tracks skew Hammond's pop sensibilities. The verse and chorus of "Borrowed Time" sound like totally different animals, shifting harshly from reggae to lead-footed rock. The super-twee "Miss Myrtle" and "G Up" also stumble by deviating too far from the norm, especially when they don't deliver the home run choruses Hammond's led us to expect at this point.
On the whole, Cómo's not a weaker album than YTK, but it sounds like it's overcompensating for its likely increased exposure. A seven-minute instrumental, "Spooky Couch" nevertheless feels tacked on. The inconsistent genre surfing could work if Hammond had greater charisma as a vocalist, but, considering the stylistic pratfalls on First Impressions, eclecticism's never been a strength for him or his kin in the first place. The crazy thing is, these missteps don't hinder the half-dozen or so gems that stay lodged in your noodle long after playing. At a time when indie audiences are demanding more and more esoteric touches like Afro-pop, lo-fi C86isms, or Balearic revivalism, a songwriter like Hammond feels like a well-needed junk food binge. He may not blaze new paths, but his sickening talent, when coupled with all these accessible touchstones, often proves more than adequate.