A new Ray Charles reissue finds the maestro in thrilling form in Switzerland—and those Quincy Jones charts are just gravy.

Ray Charles: Swiss Radio Days Vol. 41 - Zurich 1961

Swiss Radio Days Vol. 41 - Zurich 1961

All is not well with Ray Charles’ catalog nowadays. Digital retailers in the US can’t sell or stream the entirety of titles like Genius + Soul = Jazz. Same goes for both volumes of Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music. While the pianist, vocalist, and composer’s essential 1950s sessions for Atlantic Records remain in print, CD editions of his classic 1960s albums for ABC are only available on budget import labels. One exception to that rule—Concord’s five-CD box of the ABC singles, issued in 2011—has already been discontinued. This isn’t remotely fine. But until new distribution agreements are hammered out, that’s where the situation rests.
At least the general scarcity has a way of making a fresh discovery seem all the more exciting. Now, a new entry in the long-running “Swiss Radio Days” reissue series gives us Zurich 1961, a concert that certainly qualifies as thrilling. On this 79-minute gig, captured that year in a Swiss concert hall, Charles’ big band rips into a few tunes he’d already made popular, in addition to songs and arrangements crafted by a certain up-and-coming talent named Quincy Jones. (The two men met in their teens; Jones later gave Charles some arrangements that he’d already released on his own.)
Charles’ band begins this Zurich date with two Jones charts: “Happy Faces” (originally by Sonny Stitt) and then “Along Came Betty” (a Benny Golson composition). The opener leaps out with an urgency that stacks up well against Jones’ original version (as heard on The Birth of a Band LP). Charles isn’t audible on these first two performances, but his band delivers the hard-charging riffs and cooler, finger-snapping rhythms with regal confidence.
Charles’ composition “My Baby” follows, and the track serves as his formal introduction to the audience—as well as that of the Raelettes, a quartet of backup singers. As an ensemble within the larger group, the Raelettes provide suave harmonies and bluesy, solo exclamations. They offer swinging support behind Charles’ lead vocals during the uptempo “Sticks and Stones”—a cover that Charles found success with, two years prior. The only thing dragging this song down is the fact that the leader’s piano is mixed too low. As the crowd’s post-song applause dies away, you can hear a tense bit of chatter from Charles, addressed to an unidentified colleague, as the pianist slides into the introduction of “Georgia on My Mind.” (At one point, it sounds like he says, “I can’t hear, man; I told you.”)
The balance problems are fixed in a hurry. The subsequent performance of “Georgia” is a soulful revelation, as Charles stretches the tune to over six minutes, supported by bass and flute. He teases like hell with his vocal and piano lines, while David Newman’s flute pirouettes in a showier manner. At its close, the full band’s entrance makes for deliriously hot stuff. After you’ve heard this take, you might never need to hear the comparatively chaste studio version ever again.
The rest of the concert repeats this recipe: an extended jam that allows big band members to flex their soloing muscles, and doesn’t always feature direct involvement from Charles himself (including “Blue Stone,” written by Charles’ musical director, Hank Crawford.) Then he swoops in to make everything that much better, as you can hear on a strutting sequence that includes “Margie” and “Hit the Road Jack.”
By this point, all of Charles’s contributions are being mixed properly—and everything is coming up god-level. His high screams and gully-low growls cavort with barroom piano trills during “I’ve Got News for You.” The Raelettes outdo their past work with Charles on a shattering, occasionally hushed “I Believe to My Soul.” This version of “Come Rain or Come Shine,” in a modernized Jones arrangement, is another powerhouse that makes the canonic ‘50s studio reading seem bashful. The blending of styles is so transporting, it can be easy to neglect all that's going on—the flashes of R&B, soul-jazz, gospel, post-bop and blues that pull together. The result is some of the best American pop that’s ever been made. The way things have been going in the world of distribution, this CD will probably fall out of print in a few months. Sleep on it at your own risk.


Mixing up elements of kuduro, dancehall, baile funk, and other global sounds, the Berlin-based producer channels the sound of traveling with no fixed destination in mind.

Pèze-Piton

“My music is a big mash of fusions and re-imaginings,” Phoebé Guillemot recently said about the music she makes as RAMZi. That mash is as slippery as anything currently being made in electronic music. Across a series of cassette releases and 12”s, Guillemot has presented sounds from around the world as though mapped onto a wad of Silly Putty. On the nine-track Pèze-Piton, RAMZi makes the most club-friendly iteration of her music yet, signaling a pivot away from its gooier aspects.
Nose flutes, kuduro rhythms, bits of bandoneon, and dubby bass tones all bob to the surface of “MWI Intro” before a sturdier beat overtakes “Backin.” RAMZi has said that she gravitates to kwaito’s 100-bpm rhythms, and “Safe” hovers in that range before a heavier drum pattern drops. Brief bits of German and Portuguese can be discerned, another hallmark of her work. Beyond a surface similarity to Kanye’s sped-up soul productions of the early 2000s, the mix of slowed-down, molasses-like voices and high-pitched chirruping brings to mind the giddy sensation of traveling in another country and sitting down at a café, where conversations swirl around you, none of them quite making sense.
That sense of peregrination with no exact destination in mind speaks to our present moment in music consumption, in which listening takes the form of skipping from tracks on SoundCloud to YouTube videos suggested by friends to whatever tickles us in the moment.  It’s an overwhelming array (and amount) of music for any listener and music producer to digest, which seems in part how RAMZi herself approaches it. Nigerian hip-hop, the bewildering modern batida of labels like Príncipe Discos, the spongy dancehall of Equiknoxx, Brazilian baile funk,  Ugandan electronic music—all come to mind when listening to her productions, mixed in a way that can feel dizzying.
The title of “Brazili” might evoke the South American country, but RAMZi refuses to make such an easy comparison; the bustling percussion and echoing whoops that make for the album’s most satisfying track could really be from anywhere. “Fly Timoun” is the longest track, and also the one with a hand-drum pattern that makes you drunk in trying to move with it as cowbells and organ slosh around the song’s perimeter. Midway through, RAMZi wanders away from the beat, and the club walls give way to bird calls, dense foliage, and the butteriest pronunciation of the word “chocolate” possible. Rather than stay on the grid like so many electronic producers, RAMZi knows that getting lost in a new place is one of traveling's biggest thrills.


A 149-minute anthology maps the UK producer’s expanding multiverse, gathering nearly every solo tune he released on Hyperdub in a fertile, eight-year run of EPs full of surprises (and vinyl crackle).

Tunes 2011 to 2019

Over a decade ago, Burial came down to us, mapped a blueprint for a sound, and perfected it. But what followed his remarkable 2006 self-titled debut and the glorious 2007 follow-up Untrue was mostly silence—or, if we were fortunate, the odd collaboration. It looked as if Burial might have said all he intended to. With tabloid newspapers launching campaigns to unmask the then-faceless producer, online communities scrutinizing any breadcrumbs in the trail, and a transfixed music world gazing at him like an oracle, Burial was probably left asking himself whether this was the life he wanted after all.
It transpired that he did. The floodgates opened. While the pined-for third album has yet to emerge, 15 standalone EPs and 12"s did, and you wouldn’t put it past him to drop another while this compilation cools on the windowsill. Much has changed, but Burial’s wily nature remains undiminished. Tunes 2011 to 2019 features every solo Hyperdub cut from that eight-year-span (barring “Rodent,” for reasons unknown). The two-and-a-half-hour comp proves that, for the most part, Burial was successful at outrunning the long shadow that iconic wall cast. Bucking all prevailing logic, the rush actually was better the second time around.
Burial is one of the few active electronic musicians who simultaneously commands the intrigue of professorial types and cultivates a fanbase dedicated enough that, on Christmas Day 2012 in the UK, he was physically outselling Adele, One Direction, and Bon Iver. But idolatry doesn’t last long in electronic circles. The whimsical appeal of an anonymous dubstep superhero rapidly decayed as we turned a corner into the 2010s (on that note, the 2016 Zomby collaboration “Sweetz” is nowhere to be seen). An unusual relationship developed between the audience and Burial—too rare a talent to jettison but too weird an entity to treat sincerely—leading to an obsession that grew both stronger and sillier. It leaves Burial walking an unenviable tightrope. He must live up to his own supersized reputation, while progressing a popular formula—rumpled kicks and bass, maudlin atmospherics, and the dual crackle of vinyl static and rainstorms—familiar enough to be a punchline.
The most inspired stretch of Burial’s second decade came with 2012’s Kindred and 2013’s Rival Dealer, two of the most magisterial EPs in the history of electronic music. The choice of format made for an intriguing gamble. Wishful thinking suggests that they should have been a complete album rather than separate vote-splitters. But it never could have worked that way. Kindred was a line in the sand, brilliantly welding Burial’s signature to the pulse, structure and dynamics of house and techno. With Rival Dealer Burial crossed that line and picked up a personality that went beyond representing an avatar for our moods. Where once there was mostly Pensive Burial, now there is Poppy Burial, Lovesick Burial, Euphoric Burial, Queer Burial, Consolatory Burial, Ambient Burial and even—if you cock your head at a certain angle to “Subtemple”—Burial Gone Fishing.
Tunes 2011 to 2019 lays out this Burial multiverse, telling conflicting stories of a sound that has increasingly functioned as a Rorschach test for listeners. Some saw the turn on Rival Dealer toward big drums, unadulterated human voices, and major-key chord progressions as a sign that he was going soft. Others point to pupil-dilating warpers like “Claustro” and “Rough Sleeper” as a sign that Burial, who professed in early interviews to be a non-raver in spite of how well he captured rave culture’s integral spirit, had since donned Balenciaga, hit an off-location party, and hammered it until daybreak.
As Burial’s output expanded, there have been fewer attempts at alchemy. He used to be deft at gelling numerous styles while leaving the end product sounding unmistakably Burial-esque. Now it’s obvious when he is trying his hand at dronescapes or pinging arpeggiated trance. These experiments might suggest that he was becoming more one-track-minded, but another recurring theme suggests he is an incorrigible commitment-phobe: his tapestries of ideas that never quite came to fruition. The sound of a tape flipping; a cloak of fuzz that swallows one track and coughs out another form; a quick, stapled-on coda—all are now as common in his songs as the skip-and-clank rhythms and pitch-shifted R&B vocals that became synonymous with his name. While listening to Tunes 2011 to 2019, it’s not hard to find yourself wishing Burial would do himself a favor and expand certain snippets, such as the stunning piano trills on “Ashtray Wasp,” that are more powerful than most producers’ entire catalogs. Yet this tendency toward symphonic mini-suites (or, less charitably, a mental block in getting stuff over the line) is one of the quirks that keeps Burial as compelling as ever.
Tunes 2011 to 2019 is as much of an undertaking as you might expect a 149-minute compilation to be. The chronology is a little scrambled, but it is effectively a backward walk from the present day, which means beginning with recent 12"s that few, if any, treat as Burial’s golden age. Sequencing helps illuminate the strengths of ponderous, heavily textured, largely beatless songs—“State Forest,” “Beachfires,” “Subtemple,” and “Young Death”—that felt unremarkable as standalones. The effect is akin to taking a muscle relaxant and watching black waves crashing against a beach in slow motion, a dark night of the sandy soul. Filtered synths on “Nightmarket” arrive like a flare exploding across the milky sky, and “Hiders,” which was Christmassy enough to begin with, is now stirring to the point of hilarity. The first bells are so loud in the mix they resemble the crash of a gong at the end of 40 minutes of tantric deep breathing. Placing 2019’s speed-garage romp “Claustro” after “Come Down to Us” signals a tonal shift from winter wonderland to a basement club at peak time, walls clammy and bodies writhing. After a long and winding road we have reached Bangerville, and the compilation barely lets up from here.
The first half of CD2 is the apex of Burial’s dancefloor material, truly as good as it gets. Angry static buzzes around the margins while basslines churn fitfully. Fractional details—the desperation of cloaked cries on “Kindred,” “Rough Sleeper”’s spurts of stop-and-go motion, tinny drums ticking down to something untoward on “Truant”—now loom massive, accruing intensity as they go. The strobing synths on “Loner” are revelatory all over again: It is one of the best rave anthems of the 21st century, and should be celebrated as such. The three songs from the Street Halo EP, which sounded dolorous upon initial release in March 2011, are positively a relief here. “Stolen Dog,” with a backbeat pliable enough that it found itself wound around Sisqo’s “Thong Song” in the mash-up of the decade, has the becalming effect of a cup of tea after a heavy night out. The wispy “NYC” rounds things off with a whisper, a soft landing to close out a feral run.
In spite of the alien qualities of his productions, Burial has been so widely successful because of how much he gets it. He trained on great intangibles with a marksman’s precision, articulating the smudged highs and lows of nocturnal inner-city life, evoking the feeling of being utterly alone while placated by a strange sense of belonging. Songs like “U Hurt Me” and “Near Dark” were the saddest shit imaginable, yet somehow glinting with hope. Tunes 2011 to 2019 is a far cry from the Burial of 2005 to 2007, but he’s as capable as ever of unlocking those same feelings—just now with a different set of tools.
The last voice we hear on Tunes 2011 to 2019 is that of The Wire’s inscrutable villain Marlo Stanfield: “Don’t rush me on shit. I’ll get at you when I’m at you.” Stanfield goes from being untouchable to considered a diminished force, but fundamentally stays undefeated. Given that all his moves seem loaded in one way or another, it’s easy to imagine Burial wielding this sample with deliberately renewed purpose. He’s there when he wants to be, out of the shadows, often at a moment and in a form you don’t expect. He was the beneficiary of an unrepeatable set of cultural and technological circumstances, but he’s massaged the myth adroitly. It makes following him as fun as any other musician working today—so we remain hooked, even if we kid ourselves that we’re over it.

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Using field recordings and modular synths, the UK-based electronic musician channels the holistic energies of forest bathing.

a journey…

Is it possible to perceive the natural world as part of our emotional being? For practitioners of Shinrin-yoku (Japanese for “forest bathing”; the term means to immerse oneself in the atmosphere of a forest), the two are inextricable; the self is indistinguishable from nature. a journey…, the debut album from ambient composer and sound designer Hinako Omori, is rooted in this philosophy. Across 10 tracks that seamlessly flow into one another, Omori invites her listener on a participatory journey in which memory and consciousness are configured through forests, oceans, and gardens. In the process, she harmoniously reconciles the self and the natural world.
Since childhood, Omori, who was born in Japan and raised in England, has been collecting soundbites from the natural world. Experimenting with noise—and the act of listening itself—from such a young age led her to study music technology at the University of Surrey before becoming a session musician for several British musicians, including Georgia and Kae Tempest.
Drawing upon several years’ worth of field recordings and synth experiments, Omori created a journey… at a recording retreat at Peter Gabriel’s Real World Studios during WOMAD at Home’s immersive audio series. While there, she took a binaural head—two microphones placed inside a human dummy head—to record the sounds of the surrounding Wiltshire countryside. Binaural techniques tend to result in a 3D simulation of sound, mimicking the aural interaction between our bodies and the environment that surrounds us, producing the illusion that we are inhabiting the same space as the song.
Omori takes an ecological approach to the production of sound on a journey…, which sounds like a cosmic forest in a galaxy of noise. Much of the music on the album was made almost by chance, stitched together from happy accidents made using Omori’s semi-modular synth patches or circular, randomly occurring sounds from her natural environment— flashes of nature that evoke shards of memory. It’s quite remarkable, then, the way that a journey… patches these many fragments together into a coherent, continuous whole.
The album is held together by synthesizer drones that are subtly detuned in order to reproduce so-called therapeutic frequencies; sound imagined as a form of healing. It’s a new-age approach to ambient composition that artists like Jenny Hval have used to interrogate cliché, but there’s no such meta-commentary on a journey…. Omori sincerely commits to the new-age form, but rather than scanning as corny, the transcendent textures appropriately reinforce the album’s grand, cosmic vision.
a journey… comes in and out of being like the birth and death of a planet. On “Spaceship Lament,” Omori gives shape to the atmosphere with the sound of crackling gray noise, dripping water, and coruscating space-age synths that briefly intertwine. The inharmonious sounds of a forest give way to a strong, low-frequency melody that overtakes the entire sonic picture in the album’s title track. “Will You Listen In?” is a meditation on the act of listening itself, and is the album’s most impressive binaural moment. Bird calls drift horizontally, forming their own geography from northwest to southeast, scattering flapping sounds from one ear to the other.
The album invites a deep, openhearted, and immersive listening experience. “Let me be your eyes/Let me guide your light through the darkness/I promise there’s a way,” Omori breathily sings on “Snow,” as her Moog Matriarch plods like a glockenspiel. There are moments that are almost overwhelmingly beautiful: the urgent gust of voice and moonburnt synth on “Ocean”; the quasi-ecclesiastical synth symphonica of “Heartplant.” With deeply warm overtones that drift in and out like sleep, it’s easy to get swept up in a journey…. Omori’s album is like sonic positive reinforcement that inspires a kind of hypnosis with its constant reassurance: Keep moving. It’ll be OK. Nature provides a pathway.


Gothenburg trio Amateur Hour translate their hometown’s DIY ethos into an hour-long dream-pop epic, balancing lo-fi scuzz with welcoming intimacy.

Amateur Hour: Krökta Tankar och Brända Vanor

Krökta Tankar och Brända Vanor

In recent years, Gothenburg’s underground music scene has offered a refreshing reminder of the power of the DIY ethos. The city’s musicians are publishing zines, being choosy about their interviews, and releasing albums in tiny batches of CD-Rs. Curiously, the YouTube channel for Discreet Music, the record shop and label that much of this world revolves around, has a lot of its content marked as “made for kids.” One repercussion of this is that you can’t get notifications for such videos; their songs won’t reach your inboxes or social media feeds through the PR-backed campaigns that many celebrated experimentalists rely on today. Instead, this music—often lo-fi, homespun, and without contextual narratives—demands to be sought out and understood on its own terms.
Gothenburg locals agree that the scene’s underground renaissance began with Neutral’s 2014 debut album, Grå Våg Gamlestaden. The duo featured Dan Johansson, a musician who has had different aliases and played in multiple groups throughout his decades-long career. On Amateur Hour, his band with Hugo Randulv and Julia Bjermelind, they reach an arresting midpoint between their ramshackle noise or ambient-folk projects (Sewer Election, Enhet För Fri Musik) and their more popular rock bands outside the scene (Westkust, Makthaverskan). With their third album, Krökta Tankar och Brända Vanor, they aim for an hour-long dream pop epic, doubling down on both the scuzzy production and intimate atmospheres that have made them such alluring figures since their 2016 debut.
The confluence of the raucous and introspective is apparent right from the start. After the introductory ambient wash of “Skeva,” the band employs shoegaze fuzz on “Baby You’re All I Want.” Its percussive taps and genteel vocal melodies recall ’60s girl groups, and they opt for the same trick that made Les Rallizes Dénudés cult icons: bury the pop sensibility in a wall of noise. When the track unfurls into an amp-blown freak-out, it doubles as meditative psychedelia. The same holds true for “Brända Tankar,” which is an entirely instrumental exercise in guitar-driven cacophony, though its second half tones down the volume to settle into a drone indebted to Hindustani classical music.
Many Amateur Hour songs unravel in similarly unexpected ways. Take “Bortom Oss,” which begins with manipulated vocal gargles and periodic, high-pitched tones. Soon, an ambient pad rushes in like a beam of light cutting through clouds, and the reverberating guitar chords that follow buoy the heavenly mood. Most emblematic of this flowering song structure is the 15-minute “...But if Teenage Is Forever You Will Look for Something Better,” which begins as a pop song with alien synth warbles, capturing the joy and strangeness of aimless teenage nights. After two minutes it devolves into a gurgling swamp of tape detritus, percussion, and synth flurries, reminiscent of the longform drones that defined cassette labels throughout the 2000s. But at the 10-minute mark, the melodies reemerge from the muck; after such turbulent clamor, these melodies—representative of youthful comforts—scan as wistful nostalgia. Even though lyrics are hard to parse throughout Krökta Tankar och Brända Vanor, their contemplative emotions ring loud and clear.
Though Amateur Hour’s latest LP clocks in at double the length of their previous albums, its 16 tracks are cohesive. “Drinkars Boning” aims for the Durutti Column with a folksy charm, and it sits nicely alongside “Utan Andetag,” whose processed strings channel a moment of celestial floating. This overarching ethereal feeling suffuses every track. "Tidens Tempo" is little more than a resounding bell and some wind, but the simple addition of a childlike synth melody grants it a beguiling aura. The vocal-driven songs are especially inviting, with the Grouper-esque “Buried Alive” being a standout: Bjermelind’s voice lopes around like a wandering specter over flickering electronics. Listening to Amateur Hour always sounds like stumbling upon something special by chance. When Krökta Tankar och Brända Vanor concludes with a short feedback-riddled outro, this unceremonious end proves apt: Amateur Hour capture the magic of music meant to remain small and private, yet otherworldly.


A songwriter best known for her work penning hits for Ariana Grande, Khalid, and Panic! At the Disco claims the spotlight for herself, but she struggles to define what makes her unique.

We Need to Talk

Of all the female songwriters who have helped pen chart-topping hits, only a handful have picked up the microphone in the 21st century—Julia Michaels, Bebe Rexha, and, perhaps most famously, Sia. But a host of others have been trying to launch their own recording careers for years: Emily Warren (best known for her work with the Chainsmokers), Bibi Bourelly (Rihanna), and Diana Gordon (Beyoncé). Now, it’s Tayla Parx who steps up to bat, attempting to crack the seemingly impenetrable barrier between being behind the scenes and in the limelight.
The 25-year-old songwriter born Taylor Parks is used to lighting up the U.S. top-songs chart, having co-written plenty of hits for pop titans like Mariah Carey, Fifth Harmony,  Chris Brown… the list goes on and on. But last November, Parx landed a milestone by co-writing three simultaneous top 10 singles: Ariana Grande’s “thank u, next,” Khalid and Normani’s “Love Lies,” and Panic! At the Disco’s “High Hopes.” (Ebro Darden incorrectly dubbed her the first female songwriter to make the achievement, but Ashanti was the first to do it, back in 2001.) On Parx’s We Need to Talk, the follow-up to 2017’s Tayla Made, her songwriting prowess is evident, falling in line with today’s catchy country-pop and R&B. But without compelling star power and a coherent message, Tayla encounters the same pitfalls that have held back many songwriters who attempt to break through as performers.
The best parts of We Need to Talk arrive in the moments when Tayla Parx’s charisma starts to shine through. The Joey Badass-featuring “Rebound” sounds like an update of Ciara and Bow Wow’s classic 2005 R&B duet “Like You,” except Tayla is scorned instead of smitten. Riffing on  a cheeky extended sports metaphor, she flashes a glimmer of sassiness when she sings, “Now I’m Dikembe with the block,” referencing the now retired basketball hall-of-famer. On the album’s title track, Tayla belts melodramatic house-diva runs over a drum’n’bass-inspired shuffle; it’s the song where she sounds like she’s finally doing her own thing.
But these moments where Tayla reveals her own personality are few and far between. The majority of We Need to Talk attempts to replicate the magic of other great pop stars. “Tomboys Have Feelings Too” features the country-pop twang of Kacey Musgraves; the soaring ballad “Easy” sounds like Julia Michaels’ breakout solo single “Issues”; and “What Do You Know” could almost be a vowel-bending SZA banger, if only it had a couple more self-deprecating zingers. Though Tayla’s chameleonic abilities are an advantage when she’s flitting between songwriting sessions for Christina Aguilera and Quavo, that flexibility undermines the cohesiveness of her own album. These songs are all also conspicuously labeled as “interludes,” even though they could be promising, full-fledged singles if they were fleshed out a little more. Instead, they come across as unfinished bits of songs, maybe even rejected pitches that were initially meant for other artists, adding to We Need to Talk’s lack of consistency.
Ahead of the album’s release, Parx hinted in an interview that We Need to Talk would also broach themes of gender and sexuality. “The coolest thing about starting my own album is really getting across my ideas of feminism, my ideas of gender-reversal… Breaking out of all those boxes,” she said, citing “Slow Dancing” as an example of a song in which she blows apart long-established gender roles. But a line like, “I like diamonds, I like pearls/Guess I'm a typical girl/Making love around the world,” isn’t doing much to subvert conventional notions of femininity. Even the music video seems like an apolitical, watered-down version of Janelle Monáe’s “PYNK,” which Tayla co-wrote. Elsewhere, songs with names like “Homiesexual” and “Tomboys Have Feelings Too” hint that Parx might play with ideas of non-heteronormativity, but she never really ends up going deep on her ideas.
Before she wanted to be a solo artist or songwriter, Parx was an actress, starring as Little Inez in the 2007 Hairspray film and going on to appear in Nickelodeon shows like “Victorious” and “True Jackson VP.” In a recent interview, she recalled the difficult transition from acting to songwriting, “I went through this journey of saying, ‘Because I became more successful as an actress first people will see me as an actress who is trying to do music.’” To overcome the “actress” tag, Parx said that she “stuck it out and became a student of my craft.” Now, she has to learn to do the hardest thing an artist can do: discover her own point of view.


The bandleader, composer, and pillar of Chicago arts and culture follows up the acclaimed 2019 LP he recorded with the Black Monument Ensemble with another grand and luminous statement.

Damon Locks / Black Monument Ensemble: NOW

NOW

For over 30 years, Damon Locks has been in the middle of Chicago arts and culture. Locks moved to the city in the late ’80s to attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the first of many local pillars that would become well acquainted with the multi-talented composer, musician, educator, and visual artist. He’s worked for cultural institutions ranging from the cherished indie label Thrill Jockey to the world-famous Field Museum where, legend has it, he once planted a cassette of his punk band Trenchmouth in the African exhibit.
His endeavors look different today, but his ethos has hardly changed: Locks uses every connection at his disposal to raise artistic voices from the street level to the eyes of downtown and beyond in the name of healing. He’s worked with the Center for Urban Pedagogy and teaches art at a state prison, as well as at schools all over the city. But today he’s probably best known for fronting the Black Monument Ensemble, a collective of singers and players ranging from ages 9 to 52 that explores what Locks calls “the Black nod,” referring to a private, unspoken acknowledgement between Black strangers in public. With the ensemble, which played a significant role in the meteoric rise of the exploratory digital-jazz label International Anthem, Locks has grown something pure and organic, straight from the ground, and touched the sky with it. Fitting, then, that the ensemble’s acclaimed 2019 debut LP, Where Future Unfolds, was recorded in front of a live audience at an idyllic, colossal greenhouse situated at the center of Chicago.
Its follow-up, NOW, was made amid two challenges. One was logistical: how to safely record an album with a half-dozen singers and a couple wind instrument players in the middle of COVID’s second wave. Locks’ solution was to split the recording into two sessions: the first one outdoors, in the studio’s backyard, for the breath-dependent vocal and instrumental parts, and the second one indoors, with masks and abundant hand sanitizer, focused on rhythm. That meant recording the explosive live drums and percussion of Dana Hall and Arif Smith, but also shaping and producing the beats, rife with samples, loops, and squelching digital accents.
As a result, listening to NOW feels like being in two distinct places. On the one hand, there are several-minute stretches where you feel yourself in the humid yard with the ensemble, the voices of the singers enveloping you and Angel Bat Dawid’s clarinet solo directly in your ear. And on the other, you’re in Locks’ mind, hearing snippets from old films and rhythmic phrases cycling on repeat. There are as many traces of Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat as of Locks’ fellow International Anthem leading minds: Dawid solos on the opener and closer in typically assertive fashion, Ben LaMar Gay appears on cornet, and while jaimie branch is technically absent, her glitchy, beats-over-trumpet project Anteloper seems to have made an impression on Locks. None of this is an extreme deviation from Where Future Unfolds, which also featured film samples and looped rhythms playing against its visceral live-album feel. But Where Future Unfolds felt more like a live album, where NOW plays like a studio creation.
The second challenge had more to do with the album’s spirit: the question of what to say, exactly, at such a dark, solemn, and high-stakes moment in the nation and world. When the ensemble got together for the first session in August 2020, Chicago was still smoldering and the bridges were still up. That session also fell on the anniversary of both Emmett Till’s murder and the 1963 March on Washington, as well as the day of Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman’s untimely passing. How would Locks—a human amplifier, a natural behind a bullhorn—approach this opportunity? He faced some of the same dilemmas as those protesting in the streets: Assembling is not without risk right now, but this message cannot wait.
The answer, he decided, was to honor the present moment—not just the historical moment unfolding before us, but every ticking, mundane second. NOW bleeds with the awareness that tomorrow is never guaranteed. The most self-affirming thing that you can do, then, is to claim your time, to fill it with your own noise. Locks’ lyrics, animated by a six-piece choir, long for an undistracted, unburdened existence. “Keep a space for the colors to process/Your body aches under the weight of the metropolis,” opens the jittering “Keep Your Mind Free.” Even though Locks wrote and composed these songs, they also function as frames for improvisation—a discipline all about momentary essence. Dawid’s and Gay’s solos are dented, beautifully imperfect, and alive in the moment. At times, the beat-crafting feels improvisational, too, as Locks dots these tracks with sounds according to his whims.
One sound, in particular, presides over NOW: the noise of buzzing cicadas, picked up by the outdoor microphones. They enter only a minute into the opener, humming along to the singers calling out for a “forever momentary space,” and return later in the album. They’re hardly an ambient touch—they’re given such prominent space in the mix that they practically serve as a second, competing choir. You could read all sorts of meaning into their appearance: Cicadas spend their spare days on Earth making a primal noise unique to themselves; they call out in congregational songs, rising and falling together and only capturing our attention when acting as an ensemble; their noise might be coming from the studio’s adjacent cemetery, which, by grim coincidence, is the city’s largest. And while it’s probably not safe to assume that any of that was by design, you might still find meaning there, and it emerged because the cicadas were simply a part of that moment: alive, singing, and accepted.

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The Detroit rapper/producer follows up the instrumental The Rebellion Sessions with a solo rap record that confirms him as a serviceable emcee—and a session leader with a sense of purpose.

FEVER

It’s bad news for a football player when a scout marks him down in a draft report as having tight hips. The suggestion is a lack of fluidity, a general sense of strain. It’s a weighted assessment generally reserved for skill players, like running backs or wide receivers, for whom looking stiff can forecast injury or inertia. Black Milk used to rap like a skill player with tight hips. His flow can be jerky and the calculated stammer in his delivery can reveal his straining. But a few years ago the Detroit artist seemed to switch positions for the better, slowing down and loosening up to take the load off his raps.
At the same time, over his last few albums Black Milk has sidled into the role of bandleader first and rapper second, to the point that his last record was an entirely instrumental affair. He didn’t play any of the instruments on the meandering The Rebellion Sessions, for which the leader and his band were billed as Black Milk & Nat Turner, but he produced and arranged every song. Freeing himself of the pressure of the microphone—he was always a producer first—seemed like an epiphany, and the album was one of the most gratifyingly experimental that Black Milk has recorded. His new one, a solo rap record called FEVER, confirms he’s still a serviceable emcee prospering as a session leader with a sense of purpose.
FEVER continues the Detroit rapper/producer’s expanding live hip-hop jazz-band tradition and leans into psychedelic neo-soul in the process, something like P-Funk meets the Ummah. Black Milk is using a softer touch with drums than his previously bludgeoning  boom-bap productions might have predicted, with a pair of accomplished session players, Chris Dave and Daru Jones, at the center of the mix. Their shuffling breaks—loose but punctual, and never boxy—quietly gas most of the record. The whole album has a warm hue, but the shape and pace of the tracks morph quickly.
Opener “unVEil” tumbles a dreamy reggae step out of the hum of a wavering synth line. Guitar guitar licks are frequently ornamental filigree on top of bulbous bass notes. “But I Can Be” has the rigid loop of a traditional Black Milk beat, but most of the songs take a more open-ended shape and allow room for woozy wandering. In the very middle of the record, a floaty instrumental interlude without any drums captures the muddy palette of the whole thing as warm synths flutter around each other and under a reverberating guitar. On “Will Remain” Black Milk channels a softly bubbling jazz soul, while “Drown” is a swampy funk groove.
Lyrically, FEVER reads like Black Milk has been stewing in political turmoil and is now breaking his silence with calculated thought. “Everybody hot in fever pitch/Heat is rising you can see the temp,” he raps bruskly on “unVEil,” setting the album’s tone. On “Foe Friend” his flow swings naturally across a pair of verses about backstabbing and greed. Throughout, soulful guest vocalists dot the landscape with side chatter and choruses that bleed out of the mix.
“Drown” is a pensive rage against police violence over a sparse, rattling funk groove: “Do you feel like you drownin’?/Walkin’ round black in a world trapped feeling surrounded.” He often still raps in a jittery stop-start flow that can split his words in awkward, unconventional halves—he rhymes “mission” with “quicksand”—but there’s a budding economy to his raps that leaves much of the show to the music. “Laugh Now Cry Later” epitomizes the effect with a groggy and unconnected series of gut checks in spare couplets. It’s the same free-association trick he’s been commanding as a band leader. Less than a minute in, he ad-libs to himself, “Let me try something else,” and changes his course. It’s good to hear him loosen up.


The Philadelphia indie rock trio’s debut is gentle in both sound and spirit. Singer Michael Doherty can turn simple moments of reflection into marquee statements with his outstanding voice.

New Music and Big Pop

Another Michael make songs rooted in empathy and connection. Take “New Music,” the opening track off the trio’s debut New Music and Big Pop, which begins with, “We were up late online talking about new music/And you sent me a link to a song that I’d never heard before.” Who among us has not been in this exact position more times than they can count? But the band’s vocalist and songwriter Michael Doherty digs deeper, and over a softly ruminative melody, this commonplace experience gives way to existential ruminations about ambition, the creative process, and finding meaning in art. “And I want to make something timeless/The time isn’t on my wrist/I am willing to hold myself and put up with this awful loneliness,” Doherty sings before landing on a delicate conclusion: “I’m kind of new.”
Although “kind of new” is really no longer the case for the band. Another Michael began around five or six years ago in Albany as the solo project of Doherty and grew to include guitarist/keyboardist Alenni Davis and bassist Nick Sebastiano. After relocating to Philadelphia, their first record as a trio, 2018’s Land EP, co-mingled their interests in indie rock and pop. Now, New Music and Big Pop pushes this envelope further in more subtle ways. Comprised of 10 songs penned between 2016 and 2018, the record is warm, playful, and self-aware—yes, Another Michael, their eyes knowingly roll.
New Music and Big Pop was recorded outside Ferndale, New York, a site that is reimagined by artist Jaime Knoth on the album’s cover: a tiny rowboat dwarfed by green hills and a sorbet-colored sky. Like this scene, the record carries an innate gentleness in both sound and spirit; one of the band’s Bandcamp tags is simply “nice.” “I’m fine, but I know a lot of people who are feeling a bad way,” Doherty sings midway through the record. Just a few minutes later on a song called “What the Hell Is Going On?”, he reiterates the desire to be a vessel of placidity: “I don’t want to be a bummer in these darker times.” And so Another Michael move forward with a light but direct touch in the easygoing vein of Whitney, LAKE, or Real Estate.
As a lyricist, Doherty is plainspoken and specific, lingering on small details but not forcing their depth. “It’s not often that I notice a sunset/So I point it out again,” Doherty sings on the upbeat closer “Shaky Cam”; sometimes a moment of reflection can be as simple as this. The second of the album’s titular songs, aptly-named “Big Pop,” opens with an effervescent bit of color: “Big pop, lemon drop, sipping the whole way through/Tiptop, circus cop, I’ve got something crazy to tell you.” The lines are silly enough to momentarily border on cutesy, but they provide a nice, light match for a narrative about believing in your own artistry.
This sort of gentle, heart-on-its-sleeve music walks a fine line: too slight and it slips into the abyss of forgettability; too self-referential and it becomes an inside joke to which the listener is not invited; too sincere and its emotional stakes disappear in a puff of smoke; too obsessed with profundity and it loses all meaning. But New Music and Big Pop nimbly avoids all of these traps by letting big questions simply exist. The centerpiece might be the ambitious “Row.” Beginning as a lush, sweeping breath of classic rock about conflict, the song grows to reveal the group’s tight-knit cohesion, bright harmonies, and willingness to put their own spin on a variety of touchstones. Doherty’s springy falsetto gets a moment to flex and gives Justin Vernon and—dare I say it—Shawn Mendes a run for their money; there’s even a hint of Joni Mitchell in the way he sings “California on my mind.” To flashback to the late-night song sharing on “New Music,” it’s easy to imagine passing “Row”— and New Music and Big Pop as a whole—to a friend. It would be a nice thing to do.

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As engineer at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, Rashad Becker has mastered and cut at least 1200 dance, electronic, and experimental albums. It’s no shock then that the first record of his own music-- think Black Dice without beats or Fennesz with the serene poignancy replaced by a prankster-ish sense of play-- sounds great, too.

Rashad Becker: Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. I

Rashad Becker makes a living with his ears. As engineer at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering, he's mastered and cut a massive amount of dance, electronic, and experimental albums (his credits include at least 1200 records). He’s built a reputation for creating great-sounding vinyl, so it’s no shock that the first record of his own music sounds great, too. Traditional Music of Notional Species, Vol. 1 is thoroughly clear and precise. Everything on it is boldly legible, and though there are tons of sounds intersecting and overlapping, nothing is blurry. It’s as if Becker’s mastering his own brain and transferring what he hears in his head with little if any generational loss. It’s all pretty unpredictable, sure, but he’s always in control of his busy mix.
What is surprising about Traditional Music is how singular it sounds. Becker has listened to so much music that it should be impossible for him not to copy some of it. And in fact there are moments that recall other artists (if you need a frame of reference, think Black Dice without the beats, or Fennesz with the serene poignancy replaced by an prankster-ish sense of play). But while you may have heard some of Becker’s sounds before, the way he glues, melts, cuts, layers, and stretches them is unique. So is the effect of all that activity-- I rarely think of other music when I’m listening Traditional Music, since the connections and juxtapositions Becker makes between the sounds themselves are more than enough to occupy my attention.
Much of that attention-grab comes from how concrete Traditional Music sounds, a rarity for work this abstract. There are few sounds here that you’d automatically associate with particular notes, keys, or instruments. But every moment feels real in a tangible, three-dimensional way. Often music like Becker’s can seem dislocated from the material world, cut off from any physical events that might have created the sounds. But Becker’s mix lives and breathes in pointed, often hilarious detail. His sounds actually sound like things, be it growling animals, buzzing flies, distant echoes, whirring sirens, or blipping radars.
It’s up to you to choose which associations work, which makes Traditional Music a kind of sonic mood ring. Think of one track as underwater rumblings and suddenly you can hear bubbles popping, waves rolling, and depth-charges rippling; think of another as a conversation and soon every sound takes on the inflections and innuendoes of human speech. Smartly, Becker refrains from suggesting interpretations, titling half of his tracks “Dances I-IV” and the other half “Themes I-IV”. He seems so thrilled with all the possibilities in sound creation that he’s happy to let you divine the meaning in his madness. The only thing he seems to want you to do is have fun figuring it all out.
Given Becker’s background as an engineer, it’s tempting to see Traditional Music as a kind of sound-effect library or technical demonstration disc, and maybe it is. But if so, it’s similar to Raymond Scott’s early electronic experiments, which were lab exercises that produced engaging music. Scott tinkered with technology and pushed at the boundaries of the medium, but he was out to do more than wow laymen with his toys. His musical sensibility and thrill of discovery birthed pieces that were compelling and often even moving, regardless of how they were created. The same goes for Becker’s music. You can start by gawking at his surprising, hilarious, exhilarating sounds, but you’ll likely find many more reasons to return to Traditional Music of Notional Species, Vol 1.


On their third duo album, the two longtime accomplices balance free-improv flux with compositional rigor in a suite-like piece for guitar, electronics, and tabla.

Hence

In the early 21st century, Oren Ambarchi and Jim O’Rourke were working at opposite ends of the spectrum (and the world). Australia’s Ambarchi came up in frenetic noise bands and self-released his experimental guitar albums, while the U.S.-based O’Rourke was producing Wilco and Stereolab while also serving as the fifth member of Sonic Youth. But at the root, both men’s music shared a mix of patience and steadfastness in their craft. When O’Rourke relocated to Japan in 2005 and returned to his free-improv roots, the sympathies between the two players deepened and they soon found themselves backing artists like Keiji Haino in a deconstructed rock power trio as well as collaborating together.
Their third duo album, Hence, carries on the template established on their 2011 debut, Indeed, and reiterated again on 2015’s Behold: forty-plus minute suites split across two sides of vinyl, each cagily alternating between improv and composition, feeling at once like a squishy amoeba as well as something with an underlying skeleton. As veteran craftsmen and listeners, Ambarchi and O’Rourke display an unusual ability to give a barely perceived shape to assemblages of small, almost incidental moments.
On Behold, Ambarchi returned to his first instrument, the drums, to give the piece a sense of propulsion. So it makes sense that the duo would again use percussion, though this time they recruit Hironori Yuzawa, the Japanese tabla player who goes by U-Zhaan. Fans of early 21st-century electronic fusions might recall that U-Zhaan provided the room-spinning tabla work in Asa-Chang & Junray, giving their already alien sound the distinct sensation of hovering a few feet off the carpet. The three have improvised live as a trio, and there was also a glimpse of their collaboration on Ambarchi’s 2014 album Quixotism, where O’Rourke and U-Zhaan both performed (alongside Thomas Brinkmann and Eyvind Kang) on the album’s flickering 15-minute finale.
Hence’s opening moments seem to pick up where Quixotism’s conclusion receded from earshot. O’Rouke’s modular synths and Ambarchi’s guitar slowly emerge across the first minute and a half before U-Zhaan’s first thrums on tabla make the piece blossom. Ambarchi methodically thwacks at his guitar strings, hammering at harmonics that bring to mind adventurous players like Fred Frith or Henry Kaiser. As he attacks his axe and U-Zhaan adds heartbeat-like palpitations, O’Rourke pulls at all the frequencies like taffy, swatting away some tones and stretching others into queasy new shapes. The second half opens up even wider, slowly introducing new timbres and textures without letting its atmosphere dissipate. The piece has the characteristics of a group improvisation, but O’Rourke’s real-time processing gives it a more coherent and organized feel.
Hence’s pacing is so careful that at times it reminds me of a raga—an impression reinforced by the presence of the tabla—while the subtle mutations of the instruments also bring to mind composers like David Behrman and Alvin Curran, who melded together acoustic elements with electronic processing to achieve an uncanny new amalgam of sound.
While the participants hail from Australia, Japan, and the Midwest, there’s something here that suggests the expansive and disorienting vistas of the American West. U-Zhaan’s pitch-bending tabla, Ambarchi’s whammy-bar work, and the upper frequencies conjured by O’Rourke all contribute to a sensation where the elements of the piece warp, shift, and flutter in and out of focus. Between the twang of the guitar and the space between each sound, Hence starts to take on the shimmering illusion of a desert horizon.


The reliable Southwestern indie-rockers’ ninth album is full of impassioned stories about border politics and environmental disasters.

The Thread That Keeps Us

Calexico rarely make explicitly political songs, though circumstances can sometimes make them feel that way. Over the last two decades, the Arizona band’s principals, Joey Burns and John Convertino, have written often about transient workers, the homes that they make and the ones they leave behind; their music, too, crosses borders, blending American folk traditions with styles rooted in Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America. Even more than its predecessors, the band’s impassioned ninth album, The Thread That Keeps Us, is dedicated to immigrant experiences and the pains of displacement. As always, Calexico are more interested in storytelling than grandstanding, but it’s hard to miss the role that border politics and environmental disasters play in the band’s latest batch of character sketches and vignettes. This is an album that pointedly humanizes the disenfranchised people whose voices are too often shut out of policy debates.
Calexico recorded the LP in California, and you can hear the impact of the wildfires that have blighted that state and their native Arizona in the past year all over Thread. Burns fills the record with imagery of falling ashes, smoke-stung eyes and abandoned homes. “Running through fields of flowers and smoke/Leaving behind all that we’ve built,” he sings on the brooding “Voices in the Field,” a song that embodies the album’s tougher tone. “My focus was blurred as the world became consumed,” he sings on “Bridge to Nowhere,” over clenched guitars that conjure the destruction. The emotional subject matter gives the band cover to play to the rafters in a way they don’t frequently do. Introducing the apocalyptic imagery that carries through the album, opener “End of the World With You” announces itself with a gust of pomp and grandeur right out of a Broken Social Scene album, while. The chest-beating “Eyes Wide Awake” is driven by a tense, distinctly “Where is My Mind”-esque guitar riff, building to a dramatic fanfare from the band’s dual trumpeters.
Those tracks offer potent reminders of what an effective meat-and-potatoes indie-rock band Calexico can be, though as is usually the case with Calexico albums, Thread’s most memorable pleasures lie in its worldly tangents and genre fusions. “Flores y Tamales,” sung in Spanish by Jairo Zavala, one of the band’s many crack multi-instrumentalists, lightens the album at its halfway point with mariachi horns and a cumbia rhythm. “Under the Wheels” spins a ghostly reggae shuffle into a gregarious art-funk number with shades of ’80s Bowie, while “Another Space” nods to Bitches Brew with wild scribbles of trumpet and guitar.
Throughout, Thread is noisier and messier around the edges than its predecessors, with an overarching turbulence that creeps into even its more upbeat songs. Even “The Town & Miss Lorraine,” a 1960s sunshine-folk throwback with a chipper orchestral accompaniment, is upended by tragedy: “There’s a bad accident on the interstate/A snake of engine oil reaching out,” Burns sings. And on “Dead in the Water,” the closest the album comes to directly commenting on the Trump doctrine, a blustery antagonist wields his power vindictively, threatening “a new kind of wrath.”
That sense of chaos and danger is what distinguishes Thread from the many similarly far-reaching records that Calexico have released since the late ’90s. They’ve been around long enough that they’ve lost much of their capacity to surprise; at some point, they fell into a pattern of making very solid hangout records, where even their most adventurous stylistic gambits began to feel like a kind of comfort food. This album’s clear stakes, though, make it feel vital in spite of that familiarity. Calexico have made records that sound like this one before, but they’ve never made one with quite this much fight in it.


The Southern gothic band explores small-town violence, wry self-deprecation, and character sketches on its latest record.

Go-Go Boots

There is a corpse on the Drive-By Truckers' new album, Go-Go Boots. Both the title track and the eight-minute forensic epic "The Fireplace Poker" are about a woman who meets a bloody end at the hands of her husband, who is a preacher. These two songs are the inverse of the true-crime saga "The Wig He Made Her Wear", a standout from the band's 2010 album, The Big To-Do, about a woman in a small Tennessee town who shoots her allegedly abusive husband, a Church of Christ pastor, in the back with a shotgun.
"Go-Go Boots" is the better of the two new songs, not only because it's shorter but because songwriter Patterson Hood is more interested in the aftermath than the murder itself. The pastor's ne'er-do-well son, with a pregnant teenage girlfriend and a job pumping gas, can't confront his father for fear of losing his temper, so his anger just sizzles and fizzles inside him, with no outlet. Hood intimates a sad arc to his life in a single verse, an impressive lyrical trick that lends the song its considerable gravity. By comparison, "The Fireplace Poker", with its curious guitar curlicue wrapping around Brad Morgan's stoic drumbeat, just recounts the details of the crime and sits aghast at a man's capacity for cruelty.
Enthralled by small-town violence (he's reportedly working on a film about a southern crime syndicate), Hood has explored this material before, documenting crime scenes in song and relating blood splatter and gunshot residue in verse while the band draw the chalk outlines on the floor. As always, it's the carefully chosen details that give these songs heft and personality and keep them from becoming redundant. Hood is telling stories that are rare in rock music, if not altogether nonexistent, and the Truckers boast two other songwriters with similarly distinctive styles and subject matter. Mike Cooley writes in a cursory first-person, emphasizing aw-shucks wordplay and wry self-deprecation: "The Weakest Man" is classic AM country at its wryest, while "Cartoon Gold" is his Zevon anthem, set in a dark L.A. bar seen through even darker sunglasses. "I think about you when I can," he laments, "and sometimes when I do I still get caught."
Over three albums (she's been playing for five but only writing songs for three), bass player Shonna Tucker has grown into a sharp, imaginative lyricist, and her one track on Go-Go Boots shows she's absorbed Hood and Cooley's knack for character sketches. "Dancin' Ricky" depicts a dancer out on the floor with a tight shirt and "freedom out in the open," which I read as "tight pants." Rather than depict this person as a fool, she paints a sort of antihero: "Hey Ricky, don't let the Diabetes get you!" Tucker cheers. Tucker may not have written "Where's Eddie", but she sings it like she did, in a performance that's restrained and soulful-- a bit of feminine guile to offset so much masculine songwriting.
Eddie Hinton wrote "Where's Eddie", and the Muscle Shoals Sounds singer and friend of the Hood family figures prominently on Go-Go Boots-- just as prominently as murderous preachers. The band recently recorded two covers of Hinton's songs for Shake It Records' singles series (Afghan Whigs' Greg Dulli has also contributed), and both sides appear on the album, forming a mini-tribute to the troubled artist, whose success never equaled his talents and who died in 1995 largely unknown. Hood doesn't quite have the vocal chops to put across "Everybody Needs Love" as confidently as Tucker sells "Where's Eddie", but thanks to the band's exuberant take, it proves a potent block of southern soul that reveals the Truckers' range and sensitivity beyond the Crazy Horse guitar attack of recent albums.
In fact, Go-Go Boots sounds like a slight retreat from that rock noise, indulging Cooley's country jones as well as the band's more acoustic tendencies. It's a more dynamic record than The Big To-Do, recalling the ramshackle vibe of their first two albums. There's a greater textural range, from the noir ramble of "Ray's Automatic Weapon" to the spidery tension of "Used to Be a Cop", one of Hood's best character sketches. On the heels of Go-Go Boots comes the DVD release of the documentary The Secret to a Happy Ending, which chronicles the period in the mid-2000s when the Drive-By Truckers almost broke up. There's a telling moment when former guitar player/songwriter Jason Isbell asserts that that line-up was the most solid and the most creative in the band's long history of turnovers. It's no reflection on him, but Go-Go Boots goes a long way to proving him wrong, suggesting a band that knows where all the bodies are buried.


After some fairly rough—if creatively fruitful—mental times, Dara Kiely brings heavy vibes and great songs to Girl Band's new album. Should you laugh? Holding Hands With Jamie is as discomfiting as Kiely’s mental state.

Holding Hands With Jamie

Girl Band’s debut EP, 2012’s France 98, was good but unremarkable, the sound of four young Irish guys experimenting with dissonance but rarely straying from ten-a-penny post-punk gloom. By contrast, last year’s "Lawman" was the sign of a band that had found their own sharp footing. Writhing, sexy, and strange, the Dubliners soldered frenzied hi-hats to an industrial mess that recalled early Liars, and Dara Kiely had found his yowling voice located somewhere between his apparently unhinged jaw and spirit. The revelation was nothing compared to what the song did for Kiely himself. During a period of poor mental health, the euphoria he experienced from writing the song (which dealt with a recent breakup) triggered within him a superhuman complex. "I had this thing, this, ‘You are your own god, you are your own master’, this extreme idea," he said. "It was the most amazing feeling I have ever had… I thought I could control the weather. Everything."
Kiely spent a while living in a tent in his back garden, and the episode became so severe that his mother took six months off work to care for him, encouraging him to write when he couldn’t do anything else. Eventually, he had a breakdown and checked into a hospital, and emerged, he says, genuinely at peace. The rest of Girl Band had continued to write while he was away, and on Kiely’s return, he fitted observations from his journal to their squall. His wit hadn’t vanished alongside his sense of reason. "The Last Riddler" repeats verbatim the moment where he asked a doctor for their favorite band. Given the reply "ABBA", Kiely presented him with a piece of paper that read "the winner takes it all," along with some cryptic advice: "Think about it." Elsewhere he’s more fragmented: He "snorted a wasp and told them to eff off" on "Pears for Lunch", where he struggles with body dysmorphia and has a self-loathing wank in front of "Top Gear". Acutely attuned to the goings-on of the natural world, he scraps with pigeons, toys with fetid food, and watches a girl “[race] her slugs to the salt lines." His tragi-comic tidbits combine to a universal portrait of idle squalor and degradation that trumps his realist peers, and aligns him with absurdists like Captain Beefheart or cult poet Patricia Lockwood.
Should you laugh? Holding Hands With Jamie is as discomfiting as Kiely’s mental state. "Pears for Lunch" swells with dangerous fearlessness, recalling '90s news reports of bad amphetamines that made hopped-up kids think they were Icarus, while at the end of "The Last Riddler", Kiely’s screams and explosive bursts of roiling guitar and drums give the impression of a man running amok with a chainsaw. "Paul" picks up the conversation between techno and industrial music that Girl Band started on their cover of Blawan’s "Why They Hide Their Bodies Under My Garage" and takes it somewhere utterly godless and glorious: seven minutes of ravenous, gathering violence comprised of screaming guitar, lurching bass, and superhuman effort from drummer Adam Faulkner.
Where this spring’s The Early Years EP—led by "Lawman"—either went hell for leather or slowed the pace entirely, on Holding Hands… Girl Band have mastered suspense. "Baloo" chugs like Battles’ Mirrored retooled from corroded scrap metal; "In Plastic" has a pendulous, borderline romantic quality. They self-produced, and the record often sounds as if it was recorded on the other side of a warehouse wall, like muffled industry contained within a rubbery membrane. This strange distance could be frustrating, but it becomes an integral part of Girl Band’s sound, which feels unique right now. Traces of Liars’ DNA persist, as do similarities to those tireless Texans Shit and Shine, but it’s hard to think of another guitar-based band conjuring fear this exhilarating and volume this rapturous.


Grime outsider Trim teams up with James Blake and other members of the British electronic music scene for an intriguing, somewhat-cluttered collaborative mixtape.

1-800 DINOSAUR Presents Trim

Trim is Javan St. Prix, an East London native who has been active in the UK grime scene for the last decade and a half, most prominently as a member of Wiley’s Roll Deep Crew for a chunk of change in the mid-’00s. He left after a dispute with his compatriot Flowdan, and he’s charted a steady career of mixtape releases in the last ten years that have characterized him as the scene’s preeminent outsider. As opposed to, say, Skepta, his flow is a little more melodic, erring towards spoken word, and leans harder into patois. The producer’s he’s courted have a decidedly weirder vibe also (Mark Pritchard, or Mumdance for example).
He met James Blake not long after peeling off from the Roll Deep Crew, when Blake remixed Trim’s 2007 song “Confidence Boost.” Blake invited Trim to the music video shoot for the the remix, and they’ve kept in touch since. Meanwhile, Blake started 1-800 Dinosaur sometime in 2013, after hosting a club night with his manager and fellow producer Dan Foat. They invited members of Blake’s band Airhead (Blake’s live guitarist, Rob McAndrews), Mr. Assister (Blake’s drummer Ben Assiter), and Klaus (Nick Sigsworth, Blake’s tour DJ) to round out the crew, and a year later they started an ad-hoc record label that mostly released one-off 12-inches. For their first full-length release, they’ve invited Trim to be the voice of a curated selection from the 1-800 crew and friends in the wider circle of left-field British electronic music.
As such, Trim’s newest mixtape and 1-800’s first release is muddled in terms of accreditation. Just look at the title: *1-800 Dinosaur Presents Trim, *which announces immediately that this is a 1-800 Dinosaur project and Trim is merely the vessel. When you listen to the album, this attitude is uncomfortably palpable, as if Trim is a side attraction and the sound studies by 1-800 Dinosaur the main event.
The album only ever feels truly collaborative when the beat feels like something chosen with his voice in mind. In the opener, the Airhead-produced “Stretch,” he rasps his way through lines that mimic poems like Shelley’s “Ozymandias” (“Got me thinking how dare I throw up signs/From such an eroding monument/While they whisper my accomplishments”) in an ear-catching cadence closer to spoken-word. The mix of unapologetic distaste for the state of UK rap and almost-neurotic self-aggrandizement in his lyrics borders on grating later in the album, but in “Stretch” it’s simply fascinating. In “Waco,” also produced by Airhead, the sound thoughtfully suits Trim’s lethargic pace, and counts for one of the most clever instrumentals I’ve heard all year. The percussion slithers around Trim’s voice, breaking out into a fragmented staccato when the song hits its peak.
But other songs, like the James Blake-produced “RPG,” feel totally off-center, almost selfish in how they occupy the same space as Trim’s voice and crowd the frame. Blake’s rough chiptune synths and high-pitched vocal samples are almost unlistenable next to Trim’s baritone drawl, and there are times on this cluttered album where Trim seem so mismatched that I wished the entire set was just instrumentals.
In the face of unsympathetic production, Trim’s lyrics seem blunter, less imagistic, and clunkier over time (“Fuck him this duckling’s ugly and I’ll pop off if you ask for the spinach” from “White Room”). At the same time, his obsession with his ostracization from the “scene” at large can be tiresome. He harps on his individuality in contrast to the rest of the sheeple (“Most man need a collective”), and showcases a kind of unintentionally hilarious unproven swagger as his defense (“My album cover is perfect..I haven’t brought an album out/But I’ve touched a nerve”).
In a recent interview with Complex, Trim even threw some shade at this project, saying that the mixtape has nothing to do with his future work,  and that he felt like he had to dumb down for this project to work on what he called “a wider scale.” Elsewhere in this interview he disavows grime completely, saying he would rather be considered part of his own “genre.” Taking his comments in light of this muddled, occasionally fascinating album, it's easy to see that despite all the talent and vision involved, something about this collaboration just didn't work on a fundamental level.


John Darnielle confronts death once more, this time through a series of mortals, spirits, and superheroes.

The Mountain Goats: Hex of Infinite Binding EP

Hex of Infinite Binding EP

The Mountain Goats have long employed vivid characters, both real and fictionalized, as conduits for complicated ideas. In the past decade, the band’s lead singer and songwriter, John Darnielle, used an aging goth to tell a story about mortality and a professional wrestler to discuss the brutality of middle age. Then in 2017, he released an EP entitled Marsh Witch Visions all about Ozzy Osbourne. Now the North Carolina-based group is back at it with a new set of mortals, spirits, and superheroes tackling a range of issues on the surprise EP Hex of Infinite Binding.
There’s Dr. Ted Sallis, a cult Marvel character who tragically morphs into a woeful swamp creature named Man-Thing, and Percy Grainger, an avant-garde Australian composer with a penchant for transforming traditional British folk songs into symphonies. These are the strange influences camping out under the covers of “Song for Ted Sallis,” the opening track of Hex of Infinite Binding. Unlike the bulk of the Mountain Goats’ recent work, the four tracks here—all of which were written and recorded at different times and places over the course of the year—aren’t united by a single concept. Instead, themes like death, depression, and existential crises drop by only to reappear later, propelled along by the breathy woodwinds section of multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas.
Inspired by Grainger’s masterpiece “Lincolnshire Posy,” the soft buzz of the woodwinds on “Song for Ted Sallis” and “Almost Every Door” lift both pieces into meditative dimensions. On the former, the gentle, padded sounds of the bass clarinet transform depressive lyrics like “Wherever my former self went/It was an accident” into spiritual reassurances. Better to surrender to the circumstances of your existence, the tender melody suggests, then to rage against them. The soul of Dr. Ted Sallis may now be lost somewhere inside a swamp monster, but he isn’t gone forever. We can choose to believe, as Darnielle does, that one day Sallis will “be found in the vortex shortly before sundown.”
As will Judy Garland. She is the main character in “Hospital Reaction Shot,” a pleasant tune inspired by a photograph of Garland’s final husband, Mickey Deans, alerting the press of the actress’ death. “Let the tube lights buzz overhead/Tell the papers that you’re dead,” Darnielle solemnly sings. It’s a sad scene, but the delicate guitar-based lullaby unfurling behind the vocals brings comfort to the tragic situation, as does an uplifting string arrangement orchestrated by Chris Stamey and executed deftly by Aubrey Keisel on viola and violin and Leah Gibson on cello. Darnielle’s light touch soothes mourners and suggests, once again, that death doesn’t have to be a destructive force; Judy Garland and Ted Sallis are just energy, and therefore can never be destroyed.
But they can be tested. We all can, and sometimes life, as Darnielle has documented so brilliantly in the past, is sad as hell. A depression sets in on the last track of Hex of Infinite Being, “Tucson Fog,” and it carries a return to Darnielle’s earlier stripped-down, pleading recordings from the All Hail West Texas era. In this case, the acoustic call to arms, rendered even more urgent by a taut violin performance from Keisel, unleashes then defeats the monster inside Darnielle’s mind: “The fog takes shape/Like a golem with a vengeful eye/Limbs like rippling swans’ necks/At least a hundred stories high.” Darnielle has battled this beast before, so channeling Dr. Sallis who once declared, “Whatever you fear is shadow mist!,” he frantically strums his way towards accepting that this too shall pass. Eventually, the fog will lift and reveal that “all worlds are dream and sleep,” and those we fear are missing will live on endlessly as our muses and fixations. In the case of the Mountain Goats, death is just another one of life’s plot twists.


The Ninja Tune star has assembled his newest album-- his best in seven years-- as if he's decided he's exhausted the possibilities of musical instruments themselves and gone outside with a microphone to find out what sort of ambient sounds would make good beats.

The Foley Room

For someone with such an uncanny aptitude for evoking a wide range of cinema-friendly mood music, Amon Tobin's potential as a soundtracker seems to have been largely unrealized. What he does have on his resumé-- the scores to stealth-kill video game Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, a surrealist, morbid Hungarian film about taxidermy, and a car commercial in which a group of presumably nude silhouettes contort their way into the shape of an SUV-- hints at why. Since Tobin makes no distinctions between background and foreground music and tends to wring as much distortion, dissonance, and rhythmic unease as he can from his jazz and orchestral-skewing sample sources, his music tends to evoke a malevolent presence that, whether skulking or charging, easily overwhelms all but the most immersive and eye-catching visual accompaniment.
The irony in Tobin's The Foley Room is that his cinematic ear has spurred him toward different motion picture-derived source material. Paring down his repertoire of bop debris and Ennio Morricone/Jerry Goldsmith evocations, Tobin's assembled his newest album as if he's decided he's exhausted the possibilities of musical instruments themselves and gone outside with a microphone to find out what sort of ambient sounds would make good beats. It makes sense in that the only thing that separates the manipulated sound of a household appliance or the drone of machinery from an electronically generated percussive effect is the element of familiarity; given the way Tobin's samples tend to transmutate traditional orchestration into concussed unrecognizability, manipulating a non-musical effect into a similar state is an inevitable step, one that he initially took in 1998 with Permutation and has been creeping towards ever since.
But while other musique concrète specialists such as Matmos aim to bring specific messages to mind with their thematic choices of sound manipulation, Tobin's approach seems to aim strictly for the aesthetic-- like two slabs of raw steak smacked together to simulate a punch to the head in some 1930s radio serial, the meaning of the medium's less important than how the end result sounds. Some of the effects' usage is a bit self-aware of their non-musical origins: "Kitchen Sink" is just that, a booming series of splashes that sound like elastic liquid dripping into a stainless steel basin and ricocheting its way down the drain; the fuzztone in the metallic drill-n-bass of "Esther's" is boosted by the rumble of a motorcycle engine, "Leader of the Pack" style (a rumble augmented by, and this required looking up, the sound of restless wasps); the title track introduces a few clamorous mess-making tumbles and crashes, shaped into something that sounds like the collapse of a kitchen shelf set to an Art Blakey drum solo.
But not everything is as blatantly laid out: The Robitussin whir that "The Killer's Vanilla" breathes through could be anything from a slowed-down pipe organ to a creaking set of gears passed through a filter or three, not to mention the way "Keep Your Distance" blurs the lines between woodblock-and-cowbell percussion and what seems to be the clamor of a recycling bin tipping over. Since Tobin still uses his share of musical instrumentation (including a memorable Slavic-esque string melody contributed by the Kronos Quartet on "Bloodstone"), figuring where the musician ends and nature or the machinery or the junkpile begins is intriguingly confusing. Supposedly there are recordings of ants eating grass and building acoustics somewhere on this record, but damned if they're easy to pinpoint amidst the beats.
Once the novelty of the record's field recording collage-job settles down, The Foley Room proves to be rhythmically consistent with Tobin's glitchy, post-jungle M.O., if somewhat exploratory; a couple moments flirt with dubstep but get too twitchy and restless to segue all that comfortably into your typical Burial track, and the broken-down carnival dance-rock of "Always" is just close enough to a genuine crowd-pleasing dancefloor number that it's a bit startling when the inevitable diamond-crushing load of distorted bass comes in. In the end, what makes The Foley Room Tobin's best album in seven years is the way his bent for organized chaos manifests as a deft control of every sound that surrounds him: Anything's a beat, everything's a break, and the difference between sound and music is entirely contextual.


The full-length debut from the Philadelphia metalcore band folds in industrial and ambient textures into a brutal sound that’s still, thankfully, based around big, slamming breakdowns.

Only Self

Jesus Piece rage at the nexus of hardcore, death metal, industrial, and ’90s metalcore. They’re part of a new metalcore movement that proves that experimentation and succinct, clobbering riffs can not only coexist, but make for natural partners. On their first full-length, Only Self, they make the case that such should be the new tradition.
Self bolsters the industrial elements that Jesus Piece toyed around with on a 2016 demo and a 2017 split with Florida hardcore band Malice at the Palace. While they are still based around big, slamming beatdowns, the textures are more worked in and they don’t just act as segues. Vocalist Aaron Heard and guitarist John DiStefano are also in Philly’s Hell to Pay, who take similar influences in a more noise-grind direction—it’s a natural progression for them. The rapid-fire bass intro to “Punish” is one of the most intense moments on the album, a fusing of industrial metal’s pulverizing coldness with hardcore’s brisk energy. “Punish” maintains that fury when Jesus Piece switch back, a testament to how, in their short existence and even quicker shift in sound, they can still get all sorts of windmill kicks going. Opener “Lucid” and “Curse of the Serpent” don’t bask in the band’s new direction, and they don’t need to: they’re chunky death metal bursts set to bouncy hardcore tempos—as good of a foundation as any.
“In the Silence” switches between shimmering, submerged cleans and the band’s crushing breakdowns and Heard’s yells take on an abyss-staring personality when confronted by these more placid moments. More than a simple contrast between volumes, the ambient base knocks the metal out of its grounding, lending to an unease that lingers when the guitars roar back in. It has the same vibe as Chicago hardcore band Harm’s Way’s “Temptation” from earlier this year, which also contrasted droney textures with aggressive hardcore. Like Harm’s Way, Jesus Piece see industrial’s fraught marriage with metal in the ’90s as ripe for reinterpretation, giving it new life through hardcore’s immediacy. “Silence” solves the conundrum of being split between wanting to listen to Eno or Hatebreed.
They expand on the template further and chop it in half on the last two tracks, “I” and “II.” “I” is all free, gorgeous noise with soft cymbals distorted into lush puddles, while “II” brings back crunching guitar but at slower paces and a more layered feel, like Jesu stuck in purgatory. At first, it feels anticlimactic to end a metalcore record on a hanging note, no last bash to re-energize and go out in a circle pit of glory. Jesus Piece are not here for the meathead-aversion to change, even if they do enjoy a lizard-brain riff.


The legendary band's first full-length in eight years is a besotted concept album about the desert, once again revealing the depth of their imagination.

Deserted

As someone who has stood in the middle of the Texas desert and gazed up at the night sky, I can appreciate the near-drunken wobbliness with which Tom Greenhalgh sings “How Many Stars.” As the Mekons play a gently swaying, not-quite-reggae rhythm, the vocalist/guitarist/founding member sounds like a man overwhelmed by the brilliance of a clear night sky dotted with billions of points of light, and all he can muster in response is a fumbling, not-quite-rhetorical question: “How many stars are out tonight? How many stars? How many stars?” When the rest of the band abandon their instruments to harmonize with Greenhalgh, it becomes a besotted sing-along, which is another way of saying it’s a Mekons song.
The inspiration, according to the song’s author, was not Texas, but a desert on the other side of the globe: the Australian outback. “I was standing out in the middle of nowhere, where there are no lights on,” Jon Langford recently told the Quietus. “Because it’s the other side of the planet, they don’t have the same constellations. Just the sheer number of stars was extraordinary.” Fittingly titled Deserted, the Mekons’ latest album (and their first studio full-length in eight long years) is inspired by these remote places where civilization cannot easily thrive but humanity and wonder can.
Lately, the band has been fascinated with overarching, often charmingly unwieldy concepts. Their last album, 2011’s Ancient & Modern, compared the world of 100 years ago and the world of today, while 2014’s Jura,featuring alt-country Rasputin Robbie Fulks, was not only recorded on that Scottish island but addresses issues of isolation and the weighty history that comes with the dour weather. Deserted was recorded in Joshua Tree National Park in California, and begins with the raucous, recklessly paced “Lawrence of California,” which barely holds together as the band reimagine T.E. Lawrence organizing an insurgent army somewhere in Death Valley. “Harar 1883” offer a bleary vision of poet Arthur Rimbaud hallucinating in Ethiopia. The glam-stomping “Weimar Vending Machine” even traces a handful of sand that ends up in a baggie sold to none other than Iggy Pop.
Rarely do the Mekons get quite as loose as they do on Deserted, alternating between arid, nocturnal atmosphere that seems to emanate from Susie Honeyman’s fiddle and moments of near hysteria, as though their sun-baked brains have gone haywire. These songs take their time to wander about, even getting lost in the vast expanse — sometimes a little too lost, as on the rambling “Mirage.” But even that song reveals the Mekons’ versatility and imagination. There is an intoxicating beauty to the harshness of the desert, an inspiration to be drawn from the hardiness of the life found there—and that pretty much describes this unkillable band.


In ninth grade, I brought some tapes to my school band teacher. It was stuff my then-band had been working ...

Panda Park

In ninth grade, I brought some tapes to my school band teacher. It was stuff my then-band had been working on in my scant, single-mic'd bedroom. We weren't a bedroom pop outfit by any stretch; back then we played dour, emotionally apoplexed emocore. And what we played weren't quite songs, per se: There were chords, and some faint attempts at melodies, but that was about all you could make out underneath the tumescent basslines and audible flying shards of metal from my cymbal crashes. Still, Mr. Rotello put his blistered ear to speaker and carefully considered our laughable concoctions. When it was over, he declared, "I think you guys need a piano."
I like to kid myself and think that if we'd taken his advice, stayed together, and learned to play our instruments, like, really well, we might today sound akin to 90 Day Men, whose piano-driven compositions resonate with Biblical intensity. The fact is, no one does: 90 Day Men are one of the most original bands underground, and their instrumental competency offers something for high school freshman everywhere to admire. The band has been labeled everything from prog rock to "hardcore pop," but so far no one's been able to pigeonhole their sound successfully-- and actually, I think it would be doing the band a disservice to shoo them into any genre or subgenre just yet.
Panda Park, the band's third full-length release in four years, updates a sound that was already intriguing and distinctive on To Everybody and the pompously titled (It (Is) It) Critical Band. By now, the Men have earned the right to sound as pretentious as they did on their debut album, but opt instead for a more honed approach. At a modest 32 minutes, Panda Park is like a French dinner: a tight package of intensely rich compositions, best taken one forkful at a time, accompanied by a gracious interlude to help cleanse the palette and, of course, a decadent finale. But where the band's earlier material was dreary to a point of being downright oppressive, Panda Park utilizes lighter textures to help brighten the milieu. "Chronological Disorder" and "When Your Luck Runs Out" contain sufficient helpings of electronic sugar, making the songs blithely enjoyable, and at times even a bit (gasp!) uplifting.
A naive conception commonly held is that instrumental skill must always upend a song's integrity by superseding everything that makes music meaningful to us. 90 Day Men seem as if they're on a mission to erase that fallacy. But before calling compositionally intricate songs such as "Even Time Ghost Can't Stop Wagner" prog-rock, be aware of the implications. These guys aren't Queensryche: every 32nd note and oddly syncopated melody feels meaningful and integral to the overall piece.
As for the piano, its presence fits right in to the clamorous mix. Like Menomena on last year's I Am the Fun Blame Monster, 90 Day Men gracefully interweave high-volume electronics and acoustic elements. Andy Lansangan's listful keyboard and piano parts often serve as the driving melodic element. In the grandiose chorus of "Chronological Disorder", an ideal side-one closer, he and Case team up for their best "November Rain" impersonation-- which actually isn't such a bad thing: Like all the bold ideas on Panda Park, the move is pulled off tastefully and with just the right restraint. Case's arena rock caterwauling is reserved for a few well-placed choruses, which is symbolic of the huge strides 90 Day Men have made with this album. The band have finally mastered the monstrous proportions of their diffuse talents and arranged them in ways that are wholly satisfying and distinctly unique.


Using samples from thrift store LPs and dollar bins, Deerhunter drummer Moses John Archuleta crafted a diffuse solo effort where sweet melodies gleam from beneath grimy noise.

Lifetime of Love

“It is all pink candy,” Vladimir Nabokov once said of Maxim Gorky’s short story Twenty-six Men and a Girl, “with just that amount of soot clinging to it to make it attractive.” There’s something of a soot-caked candy quality to Lifetime of Love, the debut album of Moon Diagrams: sweet pop melodies gleam out beneath a gauze of grimy noise, muffled like the sounds of the dancefloor heard from the bathroom stall. The effect is certainly attractive. All efforts to reimagine pop music as a lo-fi endeavor—to warp it, flatten it, to smother it in reverb and distortion—exploit the appeal of that contrast, that incongruity of candy and soot. The risk, as Nabokov believed of Gorky, is that under the likable veneer lurks nothing so substantial.
Moon Diagrams is Moses John Archuleta, drummer and founding member of Deerhunter, who have many times enshrouded buoyant pop songs—think “Memory Boy,” “Vox Humana,” “Nothing Ever Happened”—in a dense, discordant pall. But Deerhunter is chiefly a rock band, and they write substantive, at times conventional rock songs; the cassette-hiss and ambient noodling that enriches their aesthetic are ornamental. Archuleta’s solo work is much more amorphous and diffuse. He doesn’t write orthodox pop numbers and simply twist them a little toward the avant-garde. Rather he seeks out glimpses of pop—snatches of a lovely tune, echoes of an irresistible beat or bassline—and assembles them, hazily, dreamily, into a nebulous pop-noise hash.
Lifetime of Love arrives with a making-of narrative that both contextualizes its sound and amplifies its mystique. Archuleta says he lifted the constituent elements of the record arbitrarily from thrift store LPs and dollar bins, turning remnants of musical glory past into loops and samples. The technique, of course, is hardly novel: crate-plundering has been responsible for some of the most dazzling albums ever recorded, from Endtroducing..... to The College Dropout. But few musicians gravitate to the kinds of sounds that seem to interest Archuleta: ambient whirs, lugubrious synths. The result is not a variegated collage so much as a downbeat, strangely uniform muddle.
And yet the muddle, more often than not, sounds quite good. “Nightmoves,” one of Lifetime of Love’s most emphatic and coherent tracks, is a meandering, largely shapeless six and a half minute slab of minimalist ambient-techno in the tradition of GAS’ Pop—and it’s sublime. The sprawling, atmospheric “The Ghost and the Host”—thumping along to its chintzy drum-machine beat—dithers unvaryingly for nearly a quarter of an hour without overstaying its welcome or exhausting its appeal. Even when morose, as on the understated 11-minute soundscape “Blue Ring,” Archuleta retains a certain command: no matter how long he lets an idea linger, he never seems to let it drag on. You can sense his design guiding the album even at its most indefinite and indistinct.
Lifetime of Love is the product of a decade’s labor. Archuleta began experimenting on his own in 2007, after the release of Deerhunter’s acclaimed Cryptograms, and from those early sessions produced “Nightmoves” and the gentler “Bodymaker.” Then came a memoir’s worth of private turbulence: divorce, drug trips, world tours, alienation. Archuleta claims to have recorded much of the album over a series of “fugue states.” The extent to which all this turmoil manifests in the music itself is unclear: exquisite as a great deal of Lifetime of Love sounds, it is not an album especially rich in emotional depth or apparent meaning. Its merits, not to be shrugged off, are nevertheless mainly superficial—the slight but definite virtues of a decidedly minor record. It is, in Nabokov’s phrase, pink candy. But the soot makes it very appealing.


The Melbourne songwriter’s classic influences guide her toward an album that feels proudly out of time. Its nine songs feel like variations on one stark, psychedelic vision.

Refuge Cove

Grace Cummings broke through with a Bob Dylan cover filmed in her Melbourne, Australia home, a performance so brilliant that it earned her a record deal with King Gizzard’s Flightless Records. A few well-placed props in that video provide some visual insight into what makes her debut album Refuge Cove so strange and captivating. There is, of course, a photo of Dylan himself above her right shoulder: an immense influence on her bold acoustic strumming, harmonica playing, and imagistic songwriting. There’s also a Grateful Dead record on the turntable, keying into the more cosmic places she takes those sounds.
The most visible face in the video is her most unlikely source of inspiration: a Rolling Stone cover featuring the late AC/DC frontman Bon Scott, displayed prominently on her shelf. His band’s libidinous ’70s party anthems might seem miles away from her sparse psych-folk, but the two artists have more in common than just where they grew up. Like Scott, Cummings isn’t content to merely sing along to her melodies. She tears her low, surging voice to shreds, braying like she’s beckoning you from the opposite end of a crowded room. It adds an eerie, intense quality to her music—a desperation behind the calm of her arrangements. In another era, she might have fronted her own rock’n’roll warhorse.
Her classic influences guide her toward an album that feels proudly out of time, and its nine songs feel like variations on one stark, psychedelic vision. Many of them are written in open tunings so that the lowest strings rattle pleasantly in the background, complementing the natural movement of her voice and words. In the opening track, “The Look You Gave,” her lyrics summon the ocean, moonlight, and wind through mountains, as her delivery, slow and ebbing, strives to create its own atmosphere. “In the Wind” closes the album at the piano, the gravel in her throat summoning the darkness in her words.
The few musical accompaniments on the record feel spontaneous and half-imagined. The delicate backing vocals and fingerpicking in “Paisley” and the out-of-tune piano in “Sleep” give the sense of something captured just before the feeling was lost. Her lyrics add to this elusive quality. On the album’s shortest song, “Just Like That,” she asks for someone to join in harmony but cuts herself off before she seems to have figured out the melody. A similar sense of uncertainty carries the highlight “Sleep.” In each successive chorus, she compares herself unfavorably to a legend in a different field: artist Brett Whiteley, Big Star songwriter Chris Bell, and Meryl Streep. It might sound like self-deprecation, but Cummings casts it as a kind of affirmation. With Refuge Cove, she’s carved her own path worth following.


The enigmatic Los Angeles rapper-producer's latest is a journey of discovery within a world of shadows, and his best and most stimulating music yet.

BLQLYTE

The elusive Los Angeles rapper-producer and engineer Zeroh, born Edwin Liddie Jr., has been active for nearly a decade, but he’s been covering his tracks. As Blaqbird, Zeroh, and a few other different names, Liddie Jr. released music for free on Tumblr, eventually linking up with producer Jonwayne, electronic musician Shlohmo, and the Wedidit crew. He became immersed in the L.A. beat scene, sampling Flying Lotus and Georgia Anne Muldrow and working with producers like the late Ras G and Low Leaf. For a while, some assumed Zeroh was the rapper behind the Captain Murphy character because of his connection to Low End Theory, his knack for hiding in plain sight, and his smudging, multisyllabic wordplay.
In many ways, BLQLYTE is a culmination of his many years of experimentation. Created over a six-year span and entirely self-produced, his debut for Leaving Records is a journey of discovery within his world of shadows, and it is his best and most stimulating music yet. In its consideration of the effects of psychoactive drugs on the mind, the album shares lessons learned through introspection, though not in any straightforward manner. Just as a black light often reveals things unseen by the naked eye, on BLQLYTE, Zeroh illuminates the things that go unobserved in dark places.
It can sometimes be difficult to derive any linear meaning from Zeroh’s songs, but their freeform narratives can be riveting just for how they sound. He revels in challenging listeners, and his sentences break apart until they begin to smear. On the title track, his bars dissolve into a phonetic soup (“Hue imbued human suit on two-inch tape/Tried and true like chest techniques”). The deeper you get into any verse, the more unbound it seems to become, and they are even headier when taken in the context of a psychedelic odyssey. “You should be shrooming in the ashram/Superhuman in the strug’/Levitating through the chasm/Cause hitting rock bottom may never be enough,” he raps on “4D.” There is something to be gained for the casual listener, the careful listener, and the mindful one.
More impressive than Zeroh’s improvement as a beatmaker or his sharpened skill as a writer is his evolution as a producer. If there was ever a knock on his music before, it was that nothing bound his projects together, but BLQLYTE shows a gloomy and glitchy personal style forming. The whirring vortex of synths on “Invaluable” sounds like being sucked into an airlock. On “Mudblood,” wheezing electronics and misfiring drums settle into a mosaic, his raps skipping along the edges. Closer “Aquamane” is hushed, rippling, and bottomless; it sounds like the ocean floor. There are a handful of mentions of microdosing, and it feels like Zeroh is trying to induce a mini-hallucination or trigger some sort of breakthrough—if not in you, then in himself. His production is nearly heady enough to pull it off.
Zeroh’s nature is to obfuscate, but here that obfuscation is stylized and purposeful. He wrings meaning from murk, tangible feelings from riddles. “It definitely feels like stuntin’ when you bend/blur the lines and show people what’s possible,” he recently said, and according to this metric, he is definitely stunting across BLQLYTE. In so doing, Zeroh both reintroduces himself and redefines what is possible for his music.

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