On his third full-length as Porcelain Raft, Mauro Remiddi continues to put out sumptuous dreampop that's easy to mistake as style over substance.

Microclimate

Since he first started putting out solo singles as Porcelain Raft in 2010, former Sunny Day Sets Fire frontman Mauro Remiddi has built a career on an indie/electro/dreampop blend so smooth it often obscures his songwriting gifts. With Microclimate, his third Porcelain Raft full-length, Remiddi grows as a songwriter/arranger while refining the subtlety of his approach. Of course, the problem with subtlety is that it’s not particularly noticeable when you get better at it. So when you compare Microclimate to 2015’s Half Awake EP, 2013’s Permanent Signal, and his 2012 full-length debut Strange Weekend, Remiddi doesn’t appear to be offering much of anything new.
Like those previous releases, the sense of space on Microclimate is so vast and full that it’s as if Remiddi and mixing engineer Chris Coady meant for the music to be projected across a fluffy cloudscape that stretches for miles. The wide-angle scope of the music can sometimes engulf its central figure, especially as he relies more heavily on soft electronic beats and plush reverbs. On skittering numbers like “Distant Shore” and “Kookaburra,” for example, Remiddi recaptures the vibe of “West End Girls”-era Pet Shop Boys—but it takes multiple listens to notice that he’s managed to do so in his own image.
If, say, Remiddi dressed these tunes in stripped-down arrangements centered around piano or acoustic guitar (as he does at the beginning of “Kookaburra”), the somewhat oddly-shaped relationship between his chord progressions and melodies would occupy center stage. Instead, you get songs like “Rising,” where the quietly moving parts nearly drown in a kind of auditory soup.
On the other hand, wading through all the heavy layers of atmosphere to discern the song at the core of each track is one of Microclimate's rewards. Like the last two albums, Microclimate was heavily inspired by locale—this time, the California desert. Remiddi has expressed both a romantic fascination for place and a sense of rootlessness in the past. Lyrically, the new material covers very little new ground with its airbrushed images of distant shores, breezes, trees. For a person who has worked as a circus musician and shaken hands with Kim Jong-un, Remiddi’s lyrics don't disclose much. On “Big Sur,” he implores an unspecified person to come “to another world” and “come on come on come on this way.” At the end of the song, he reassures us that “before you know it/all the answers are on the way.”
If the song asked more questions, perhaps the mystery of those answers would be more enticing. And when the album closes with the line “We are falling... falling into the sun” on “Zero Frames Per Second,” it would be nice to get a better sense for the kind of all-encompassing dissolution Remiddi wants to evoke. Nevertheless, as a pedal steel glimmers like setting sunlight reflecting over ocean waves on “Big Sur,” it's virtually impossible not to get nostalgic—even if you've never been to Big Sur. The music on Microclimate can be so potently affecting that the lack of lyrical precision ceases to matter.
“Microclimate” is the formal term for a set of climatic conditions that apply to a small ecosystem within a larger one. Remiddi chose the title as a way of signaling that he wanted each song to stand apart from the rest. Sure enough, each song pulls you into its own standalone “world,” so to speak. But because Remiddi also sustains an ear-pleasing flow between those songs, it may take a few listens to recognize and appreciate what an artistic success Microclimate actually is.


London-based producer James Parker, aka Logos, makes grime music that unfolds with an almost meditative calm. The songs on his excellent debut, Cold Mission, could be moody jungle breakdowns shorn of context, left to mark time in a state of infinite suspense.

Cold Mission

It feels appropriate that Logos took so long to produce an album. After all, he makes music with supreme restraint that seems to unfold with an almost meditative calm, every silence, every reverb tail painstakingly considered. This isn’t a quality commonly associated with grime. But while, at this point, it may be tempting to declare its co-ordinates firmly triangulated—Dizzee, Wiley, Musical Mob’s Pulse X—over the past year a new generation of producers has shown that there's still territory left unmapped in this decade-old style.
The London-based James Parker co-runs Boxed, a regular club night that's become something of a hub for this globally dispersed scene. But unlike many new grime artists—the likes of Visionist, Wen, Inkke and countless others—Parker doesn’t bring a youthful vigor to bear on the form. In fact, he’s something of an old hand: his love affair with UK dance music goes back to the late 90s and jungle; by the mid 2000s he was a devotee of legendary dubstep nights FWD>> and DMZ, whilst avidly absorbing grime through pirate radio.
Dubstep singles credited to Logos appeared as far back as 2008, but it wasn’t until last year that Parker would make a splash with the Kowloon EP. Its conceptual conceit was simple—Parker took Wiley’s remarkable and oft-referenced Eskibeat sound and jettisoned it into the cold void of space—but the results were surprisingly rich and absorbing. Cold Mission is Parker’s first solo release since that EP. So while it is, in a sense, one of the first major LPs to emerge from recent currents in grime—and certainly the best—it also belongs to an earlier moment. Parker’s focus on space and the careful application of pressure seems inspired by dubstep. He also invites parallels with other producers who grew to prominence after the style’s demise: "Ex 101"'s gorgeous warped chords are strongly reminiscent of Jam City’s "Club Thanz", for example.
Mostly, however, Parker works at the coalface of grime. "Surface Area (Main Mix)", with its shattered glass percussion and fanged bass pulses, follows Kowloon in its ultra-minimalist deployment of grime signifiers. The drums function more as interjection than propulsion, and a pervasive ground hum rears up in the in-between spaces, as if we’re hearing the amplified sound of a studio left idle between sessions. Elsewhere this familiar toolbox of sounds is turned to more aggressive ends: in "Seawolf", baleful square wave motifs and gun-cocking samples; in "Menace", downpitched strings and hovering-UFO bass. In each case Parker’s treatments manage to be both incendiary and wonderfully graceful. It’s like observing some sort of martial art in action, deadly but balletic.
It’s a hackneyed comparison, but Parker’s sonics often evoke rainswept urban dystopias of the Bladerunner variety; or, more specifically, Vangelis’ soundtrack to that film as channeled through the Akai samplers of countless jungle producers (think Dillinja’s evergreen "The Angels Fell"). Often, in fact, these tracks could be moody jungle breakdowns shorn of context, left to mark time in a state of infinite suspense. It’s an approach that recalls another explorer of rave’s hinterlands, Burial. But unlike his forebear, when Parker pays homage to the nocturnal spaces of his city—"E3 Night Flight" references an East London postcode—it’s not to mourn but, furtively, to celebrate (the track’s twinkly synth swells reach almost Oneohtrix proportions in the latter half).
As with any truly gifted producer, Parker folds all of these points of reference into an aesthetic that is fascinatingly, unmistakably his own. The only flaws in Cold Mission, in fact, come from the outside. "Swarming", with Houston newcomer Rabit, is a macabre delight, but two other collaborations sit like thorns in the album’s side. The fidgety bell-like motif on "Alien Shapes", featuring Keysound label bosses Blackdown and Dusk, feels almost painfully literal compared to the artful abstraction found elsewhere. "Wut It Do", meanwhile, is one of a string of collaborations between Parker and Mumdance: a body of work with its own internal consistency, but whose ruffneck intensity feels thoroughly out of place here. Still, Logos redeems himself at the close. The “limitless” mix of Kowloon highlight "Atlanta 96" sets those ornate synth riffs billowing across gorgeous, glistening, devotional space. It’s as if Parker is drawing a throughline from his past work, via the present, into some unknown future. While it’s not quite perfect, Cold Mission should give us all cause for optimism.


Much-maligned band follows the crossover hit Hot Fuss by switching its influences from the Cure and 1980s UK new wave to Bruce Springsteen and 1970s earnest U.S. classic rock.

Sam's Town

Rock music in the 21st century has been subject to an unprecedented emotional arms race of Cold War proportions. Displaced from its traditional role of party music by dance and hip-hop, rock has focused more than ever on introspection, aiming for resonant feelings rather than escapist fun. Hence, pop-punk has given way to emo, hard rock acts dust off the power ballad to get airplay, and groups like Coldplay and Green Day fill stadiums with soul-searching anthems. It's only natural that the emotional ante would be rapidly rising, until it reaches the climax of triggering arena-rock's nuclear option: The Boss.
The Killers would seem unlikely participants in the battle to protect The Great American Rock Song, having drawn more comparisons to Duran Duran than Bob Seger on their awkwardly-titled debut Hot Fuss. But for all the band's synth-pop dressings, their greatest success, both artistically and commercially, was with "Mr. Brightside", a woe-is-me epic that skillfully deployed the group's flimsy new-wave organ to shift the song into a second gear of cinematic sorrow. No dummies, the Killers choose to stay on the horse that got them to the A-list with Sam's Town, spending an entire album looking to build on that track's unabashed glory and so drafting as their muse someone who knows a bit about glory, one Bruce Springsteen.
It's worth noting that the Killers aren't the only contemporary artist to recently start drawing inspiration from Jersey's poet laureate, with everyone from Destroyer to the Hold Steady making like they're the E Street Band this year. Springsteen may seem like a weird indie-fluence, but given his talents for transforming the passions and struggles of the common people into earnest vocal-cord-splitting rock mythology, it all makes sense. Just take a listen to the young man's melodrama of "Born to Run" without the "Greatest Song Ever" baggage it has accumulated, and wonder why Springsteen wasn't ordained as the patron saint of emo years ago.
However, emulating The Boss isn't as easy as hiring a sax player and tying a bandana to your head-- and missing the mark by mistaking Springsteen's broadness for simplicity can lead a band toward an ill-advised and pretentious flop. On Sam's Town, the Killers attempt to incorporate several components of the Springsteen formula: super-sizing their guitar sound, creating fictional characters to externalize their angst, singing boldface banner statements in an impassioned vibrato. Most tellingly, the band's willingness to flirt with ambition is so daring that they include an "Enterlude" and an "Exitlude", bookends that aspire to set these songs within a setting that may or may not be based on the Vegas townie casino of the album's title.
When the Killers hit their mark, they create refreshingly huge rock, the sound of a band unashamed of their success; when they miss, it's testimony that the right ingredients don't always create the same dish. Both of these outcomes are simultaneously present in lead single "When You Were Young", which successfully inherits the thrilling synthesizer peaks of "Mr. Brightside" while tripping over the "Thunder Road"-aping refrain "he doesn't look a thing like Jesus,"-- clumsy, second-hand religious imagery masquerading as lyrical depth. Over and over again, the Killers get the medium mostly right (the sledgehammer chords of "This River Is Wild", the canned-string crescendos of the title track), but whiff on the message, too often resorting to Cliff-Note Americana like highways and rivers or cartoonish character studies like the addict protagonist of "Uncle Johnny".
The easy target for these near-misses is the madeover Brandon Flowers, though the Killers' new image means he's faced with the difficult task of shifting abruptly from his Robert Smith nasal-whine to Springsteenish bellow. For instance, quiet moments, like the bridge of "When You Were Young" or the outro to "This River Is Wild", reveal the heretofore unknown fact that aiming for Springsteen and missing even slightly results in Meat Loaf. Not that Flowers' bandmates help out any, as a key element of the arena-rock epic, awesome fucking fist-pumping backing vocals, are bungled at every opportunity, from the awkward "I SEE LONDON, I SEE SAM'S TOWN" of the opening track to the faux-Queen ("multi-tracking is hard, what if we all just sing in unison?") of "Bones".
Other places indicate that the band may have just gone for the wrong rock-icon; the reverb-chirp "higher and higher" peak of (seriously) "Bling (Confessions of a King)" indicates that the Killers are more successful impressionists of Achtung Baby-era U2. Perhaps it's that the comparatively vague platitudes of Bono fit the Killers more snugly than Springsteen's folk-based specificities, approaching the epic from a universal top-down rather than blowing up life's small moments into monuments (something the Hold Steady album, released on the same day as Sam's Town, gets more consistently right). Not fully realizing where their strengths and weaknesses lie makes Sam's Town, despite the drastic makeover, roughly equivalent to Hot Fuss, a mediocre album surrounding a few towering singles.


On the punky indie-pop band's sharp sophomore album, singer/songwriter Ben Potrykus casts himself as an unlikable blowhard, and gets away with it in part because Bent Shapes' music is so inherently likable.

Wolves of Want

It's got plenty of competition, but the most perceptively funny song Jonathan Richman of the last 10 years or so might be a gem called "My Affected Accent." Basically, it's Richman looking back at himself in high school, four decades on, and fessing to how insufferably pretentious he was. "I used big words, I talked through my hat," he sings. "I said 'the aforementioned' when I should have said 'that.'" He marvels that he wasn't bullied more than he was.
It's quite likely that another good-humored Boston songwriter, Ben Potrykus of the punky indie-pop quartet Bent Shapes, will look back at his youth and share Richman's regrets. Potrykus writes in the language of the educated elite, and uses words that would make him unbearable to converse with in real life, like "matriculate," "stultified," and "conscripted." But if nothing else, he's in on the joke, and on the band's sharp sophomore album Wolves of Want, his verbosity becomes a kind of running punchline. On "USA vs POR" he tries his grad-student vocabulary on a girl at the bar during a World Cup match, and it doesn't get him anywhere. He even ends the album with an apology of sorts for being so long-winded, which is itself really long-winded: "There's no neutral narrative / Or, at least, that's what I've been parroting / in so many words (mostly intransitive verbs)." This is a guy who clearly gives a fuck about Oxford commas.
It's a clever songwriting gambit, casting himself as an unlikable blowhard, and Potrykus gets away with it in part because Bent Shapes' music is so inherently likable. Crisply, unobtrusively produced by Titus Andronicus's Elio DeLuca, Wolves' revved-up tunes crackle with ringing guitars and sugar-rush choruses that are as succinct as Potrykus's prose is overblown. As on the band's debut, Feels Weird, there are times when the band's youthful, excitable energy flirts with emo, but they always pull back before crossing that line. They're too self-aware to cut loose like that—or, as Potrykus puts it on the Los Campesinos!-peppy "86'd in ’03," "self-aware, but not too cool to care."
And as part of his insecure-cool-kid act, Potrykus makes a lot of references to his record collection. "86'd" ends with him getting high and shouting along to Nirvana's "I Hate Myself and I Wanna Die." The title of the anti-social media screed "What We Do Is Public" plays on the Germs' "What We Do Is Secret," while the song opens with a callback to the Beatles ("I've just seen a face / I can't forget the date and place") and closes with one to Pink Floyd ("All in all / You're just another pic on my wall.") A tangle of C86 guitars, "Samantha West" bows out with a nod to Outkast: "I'm sorry, Mrs. West / but I am for real."
Wolves is Bent Shapes' first album for Slumberland, and like many of the label's newer signees —Joanna Gruesome, The Mantles, Young Guv, among them—the band is versed in the label's past but never overly beholden to it. For Potrykus there's a kind of security in this tuneful, wound-up pop. Its cheerfulness gives him cover not only to poke fun at himself, at his music scene, and the world in general, but also to voice his very real struggles with anxiety. On the closer "Intransitive Verbs," he dials back his smart-assery long enough for a few blunt verses about his demons. "I've been working so long to prove myself wrong when I said puberty would be my midlife crisis," he sings. He's a skilled enough songwriter that he could probably pull off an entire sobering album about this stuff. Instead he made a really fun, self-effacing one.


On the latest in a series of EPs, the unique Atlanta rapper creates his own cocoon in which to hone his craft.

Proboscidea EP

In October of 2019, Atlanta rapper Grip released the album Snubnose, a concept record exploring the vicious cycles of poverty and gentrification associated with gun violence in the United States, told partially from the perspective of a handgun. As weighty as the subject is, Grip’s energetic flows and ear for kinetic beats ensured the album didn’t devolve into a TED Talk. Just under a year removed from his breakout project, Grip remains interested in the art of rapping without being shackled to a narrative. “I wanted to break the stigma that I’m just a great storyteller. That’s cool and all, but nigga, I rap,” he told DJBooth earlier this year. On PROBOSCIDEA, the second in a series of self-released EPs, Grip creates his own cocoon in which to hone his craft.
Even without an overarching story, the EP’s title shoehorns a loose theme in between the songs. The Proboscidea is a once-massive order of mammals that now has only one living representative: elephants. By taking the name, Grip marks himself as one-of-a-kind in a sea of rappers: “Proboscidea, yeah the route that we chose is similar, but my flow is sillier/Plus I hit the ground running so hard, if you tried this you’d probably explode your fibula,” he gloats on “Grip 3:16.” His nasal delivery and slant rhyme-heavy rapping style aren’t exactly novel, but his energy is magnetic. Listening to Grip rap in this environment is like watching a rising basketball star during the preseason; the stakes are lower but a good maneuver or jump shot can still turn an audience’s heads.
Grip uses the freedom of PROBOSCIDEA to vent some professional frustrations, chin-check his competition, and continue the autobiographical streak his raps have taken on since his last EP, HALO. He writes off labels who take meetings with him only to turn him down and reminiscences on nights crashing on his friend’s couches. On “LET EM KNOW,” he compares himself to Kevin Durant and scolds recording booth gangsters fronting for streams. For all the biographical details scattered across PROBOSCIDEA, Grip is at his most compelling when he’s crushing his opponent’s jugular with his microphone.
“Grip 3:16” is the EP’s undeniable highlight. Frequent collaborator Tu!, who produces the entire project, laces Grip and fellow Atlantans Kenny Mason and J.I.D with a fast-paced piano loop and drum track the trio proceeds to tear to shreds. All three rap in double-time, rattling personal tales and boasts at breakneck speeds like Super Saiyans zipping across the skyline. It’s almost enough to make you wish the three would release an EP together.
Grip’s energy is infectious, but not every bar lands. There’s a line about raping the rap game near the end of “LET ‘EM KNOW,” a metaphor that feels tacky and distasteful even by braggadocio standards. It’s the one moment on the project where Grip’s command of language leads him to the lowest common denominator, one that’s been played out since Pharoahe Monch dedicated an entire song to it at the turn of the millennium. On a project this short, the flaws stick out more.
Like HALO before it, PROBOSCIDEA is a feat of rap calisthenics. There are no grand statements or attempts to turn well-worn concepts on their heads. It’s a COVID-mandated stopgap on the path to Grip’s next major project. Either way, any rapper should hope to be as limber as Grip in their warm-up phase.

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With this chilly, quietly compelling EP of piano ruminations, Montreal producer Mike Silver unveils his most intriguing material to date.

Exercises EP

Earlier this year, Virgin/EMI released A Victim of Stars, a two-disc compilation by former Japan frontman David Sylvian. The set includes "Forbidden Colours", the mannered ambient-pop singer's piano-led 1983 collaboration with former Yellow Magic Orchestra member Ryuichi Sakamoto. The song was the theme for the film Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, and after watching Sakamoto work on the score, Sylvian was quoted as marveling at how the Japanese composer tried to create "a sense of place, a landscape in the mind of the listener."
The refined, piano-driven torch song bears on Montreal producer Mike Silver's quietly compelling new EP as CFCF in more than one significant way. Exercises consists of eight minimalist, keyboard-based tracks, all but one of them instrumental, with Silver citing Sakamoto alongside 20th-century composers Philip Glass and David Borden as inspirations. The lone song with vocals, "Exercise #5 (September)", is actually an expansive reinterpretation of the opening track on Sylvian's gorgeous, Sakamoto-arranged 1987 album, Secrets of the Beehive. And although CFCF has progressed at a staggering rate over the past five years, mental landscapes have always been this project's specialty.
The geography of Exercises is chilly, spacious, and oddly out of time. Where CFCF's only proper full-length to date, 2009's increasingly vital Continent, conjured up the neon glow of a 1980s Michael Mann soundtrack, and 2010's RVNG-issued The River EP explicitly sought to evoke the Peruvian jungle of Werner Herzog's 1982 film Fitzcarraldo, this time around Silver has been comparing his music to the kind of blocky concrete structures that sprang up throughout the 1960s-- such as New Hampshire's Phillips Exeter Academy Library, which is depicted on the artwork.
There's a premature-ruin-like quality to brutalist colossuses like Boston's City Hall or Washington, D.C.'s J. Edgar Hoover Building,  and it's this combination of imposing austerity and weathered familiarity that Silver seizes upon to make his current landscape hospitable. The organic-toned keyboards here are familiar from CFCF's piano-house-tinged 2011 "Cometrue" 12", but Exercises mostly forgoes beats, letting those concentric patterns of melody build on each other meditatively, ornamented lightly by fuzzy glints of synth. The post-Jamie xx bedroom-disco grooves of "Exercise #2 (School)" and "Exercise #8 (Change)" mix up Silver's template just enough.
Exercises' "September" cover nearly quadruples the length of Sylvian's sparsely poetic original, transforming the genteel piano ballad into billowing, understated synth-pop. "We say that we're in love/ While secretly wishing for rain," Silver sings, his calm, reassuring voice much more out in front here than on Continent's snowblind Fleetwood Mac cover.  It's a deeply evocative track with potential crossover appeal, and finding it tucked away in the midst of a disc of mostly melancholy contemplations only makes it feel more special. Much as Sylvian-Sakamoto's exaggerated artificiality can be more poignant and, ultimately, no less sincere than traditional displays of earnestness, so the piano-recital functionality of these self-described "exercises" belies the EP's very pop emotional wallop. By stretching out into classical- and kosmische-informed keyboard selections, CFCF has reached a place where his next options are almost limitless.


This new London quartet's debut puts a personal and affecting spin on an array of alt- and indie rock influences from the 1980s and 90s.

Yuck

A revival of the 1990s, a decade unusually obsessed with postmodern revivals in fashion and culture, was always inevitable. But it isn't exactly overdue. In fact, over the past few years, the return of bands and styles from the Clinton administration has almost become cliché. Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., the Dismemberment Plan, Jawbox, and even Blink-182 have reunited. Guided By Voices reassembled their 'classic lineup.' And Weezer recently reprised their beloved mid-90s albums in their entirety at live shows. Among younger artists, the college-rock subculture of the 80s and 90s has been resurgent for some time, whether in the Slumberland-streaked indie pop of the Pains of Being Pure at Heart or Best Coast, the artful squall of No Age, the achingly nostalgic paeans of Deerhunter, the ambling guitar epics of Real Estate, or the slacker punk-pop of Wavves.
There's no escaping it: If you've heard anything about Yuck, it's that this London four-piece loves the 90s. The band's members are very clearly products of the web rather than any particular geography; their self-titled debut evinces tastes that run toward fuzzy indie bands from both sides of the pond. Yes, there's a bit of the wah-pedal guitar violence of Dinosaur Jr., and a little of the lackadaisical detachment of Pavement, but there's also the rich tunefulness of Teenage Fanclub and Velocity Girl, and at times the unadorned resignation of Red House Painters or Elliott Smith. However, like so many artists saddled (fairly or not) with the "revival" tag, from post-punk and garage-rock to nu-disco or neo-soul, Yuck are worth hearing not so much because of who they sound like, but what they've done with those sounds: in this case, make a deeply melodic, casually thrilling coming-of-age album for a generation that never saw Nirvana on "120 Minutes".
As with their best peers in the Fat Possum stable, Yuck distinguish themselves by knowing their way around around a catchy, emotionally evocative song. Sometimes these can be bright and optimistic, almost twee, as in the peppy boy-girl endearments of "Georgia", or the midtempo acoustic yearning of "Shook Down". Elsewhere, they can be gritty and urgent: Screeches of feedback occasionally drown out drowsy vocals on "Holing Out", nicely suiting lyrics about communication problems; likewise, the distortion-blistered repetitions of "The Wall" suggest the Sisyphean efforts they describe. Then there are the heartfelt mopers: the stripped-down comfort offer "Suicide Policeman", the Galaxie 500-meets-"Nightswimming" "Stutter", or the lonely post-breakup jangler "Sunday". Seven-minute closer "Rubber" is the type of gorgeously incantatory slow burner veterans like Yo La Tengo stlll make (see "More Stars Than There Are in Heaven", from 2009's underrated Popular Songs)-- not to mention Mogwai, who've remixed it-- but too few bands successfully emulate. Add up these different types of tracks, and you have an unusually coherent album-length experience.
If you've heard anything else about Yuck, it might be that two of the band members, singer/guitarist Daniel Blumberg and guitarist Max Bloom, used to play in Cajun Dance Party: ambitious and typically spazzy post-Arctic Monkeys NME faves who issued a Bernard Butler-produced debut album, The Colourful Life, in 2008 on XL. As with that former band, Yuck are occasionally guilty of some awkward lyrics-- the seemingly gratuitous "crucifixion"/"benediction"/"addiction" rhymes on note-bending love ballad "Suck" come to mind-- and it's hard to guess how long they can keep this particular sound going (a Yu[c]k side project offers intriguing hints). But together Blumberg, Bloom, drummer Jonny Rogoff, and bass player Mariko Doi, joined on certain tracks by part-time backing singer Ilana Blumberg, have taken a giant step forward. As Blumberg sang with his old band, the one he started as a 15-year-old, "This is now and that was then." Or as he sings now, on instantly searing album opener, "Get Away": "I can't get this feeling off my mind." Whether they remember the 90s or not, more than a few people could end up saying something similar about Yuck.


Danilo Plessow and Marcus Worgull's second full-length ambient project strips away percussion and focuses on the soul and timbre of classic analog synthesizers.

II

It continues to be a long, dark winter for new ambient music. Warm fuzzies are in short supply; doubt and discontent prevail. Think of Huerco S.’s lo-fi churn, Sarah Davachi’s stark drones, or Egyptrixx’s battered futurism. But there are some glorious summers hiding in Suzanne Kraft’s recent What You Get for Being Young and Brian Eno’s latest generative composition Reflection, which often evoked the stillness of an autumn evening. Also retreating from icy climes is the German duo Vermont, who've followed up their self-titled 2014 debut with an ambient album far warmer and more beautiful than its predecessor.
Vermont was an unexpected development from Danilo Plessow and Marcus Worgull, the two artists behind the project. Plessow made his name in the late ’00s making crisp, finely crafted house and disco as Motor City Drum Ensemble, while Worgull has spent the past dozen years refining his minimalist house epics for the Innervisions label. And while Kompakt has made a cottage industry out of ambient thanks to the label’s annual Pop Ambient compilations, Vermont sounded different. It grew out of a series of open-ended studio jams using a battery of vintage analog gear, which was both its biggest strength and weakness. The record sounded wonderful—a feast for the ears—but its cycling arpeggios and drifting pads occasionally lacked direction, often feeling less like the work of a single ensemble than a compilation by a number of artists who loved all things Can and kosmische.
On II, Plessow and Worgull are back behind iconic workhorses like the Moog Prodigy and Arp Odyssey, synthesizers renowned for their buttery tone. The results feel clearer this time; they’ve honed in on a narrower set of sounds across the length of the album, leading to a much more cohesive listen. Additionally, they’ve opted to go without any drums at all, and most tracks utilize just a three elements: bassline, midrange arpeggio, and contrapuntal leads weaving high overhead. Their spare arrangements and measured tempos allow each electronic voice to come into focus. While artfully layering simple lines and lavishing attention on timbre, panning, and legato, they stir up an enveloping sound that makes the most of its underlying waveforms.
Once again, krautrock’s ambient electronic strains remain their primary inspiration; the plucked guitar of “Norderney” invokes Manuel Göttsching’s Inventions for Electric Guitar; airy tracks like “Dschuna” and “Gebirge” draw inspiration from Cluster and Brian Eno. Looking further afield, the burnished, detuned tones of “Chemtrails” recall Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works, Vol. II. And in “Ki-Bou,” a riff inspired by Larry Heard’s bright, agile basslines amplifies the music’s field of vision. Mostly, though, these aren't stylistic exercises but carefully distilled mood pieces. In “Hallo von der Anderen Seite,” a rippling synthesizer melody wraps circles around a plucked mbira, and given the music’s fanciful qualities, it’s easy to imagine it as an animated still life, or a conversation between potted plants. “Wenik”—named after the birch rods that sauna-goers use to stimulate the circulation—suggests two colored liquids mixing together in slow motion.
Though the average track length hovers around the four-minute mark, many of these sequences could, like most ambient music, go on indefinitely. But Vermont have figured out how to make these comparatively short, sketch-like pieces work for them. They stretch out just long enough to draw you in and wrap you up in their atmospheres, but they never wear out their welcome. Like most kosmische musicians, Vermont dream big—but never at the expense of the small, tactile details at their fingertips.


Just out of her teens, promising UK songwriter starts to come into her own on her second album, a top five success in her home country.

I Speak Because I Can

Reviewing Laura Marling's Mercury Prize-nominated debut album, Alas, I Cannot Swim, in 2008, I worried that the then-18-year-old might too quickly shed the teenage guilelessness that contributed so greatly to the record's appeal. Marling possessed an undeniable knack for writing about young love with directness and authentic feeling, but at times her pseudo-profound poetics suggested the young folkie was in too much of a hurry to be a serious adult.
Clearly, I significantly underestimated Laura Marling's capabilities. Her sophomore effort, I Speak Because I Can, finds Marling, still only 20, shrugging off virtually all traces of girlishness and wide-eyed charm, instead delving into darkly elemental, frequently morbid folk. And yet, astonishingly, the expected growing pains never come. To say Marling evinces wisdom beyond her years on I Speak would be a criminal understatement, considering she's created a haunting, fully flowered gem of an album despite being younger than two-thirds of the Jonas Brothers.
These are folk-rock songs, but Marling doesn't lazily trade on it like so many other would-be old souls. Instead, like Fairport Convention or Nick Cave or Cat Power, she uses folk as an archetypal form to get at the essential realities of love, sex, heartbreak, and death. Sometimes she does it with heart-stopping quietness, her voice dropping to conversational tones on "Made by Maid" and "What He Wrote". Just as often, Marling sets her allegories to raucous musical accompaniment, an especially impressive feat considering the calm of her debut. The bluesy jig of opener and first single "Devil's Spoke" might elicit a few less-than-ideal comparisons with KT Tunstall, but Marling blows that kind of politely insistent stuff out of the water on the soaring, thunderous "Rambling Man" and the gypsy-ish breakdown of "Alpha Shallows" (which makes up for that song's momentary slip into sub-Dylan poetic doggerel).
It would have been all too easy for an album like this, so grimly fixated and coming from someone of such tender age, to be written off as the work of a morose young Romantic. However, Marling seems to have a great deal of self-awareness of her melancholic bent, lightly skewering herself on "Goodbye England (Covered in Snow)" for writing an "epic letter" to an estranged lover that's "22 pages front and back/ But it's too good to be used." And yet, she's not playing dress-up. She's a wholly developed artist in full command of gifts that may not yet be finished arriving.


Filled with delightful moments of sound-craft, the third solo album from the Spacebomb auteur places him at the center of a vast musical cosmology.

K Bay

Matthew E. White luxuriates in the sounds and styles of American popular music from the 1960s and ‘70s while lightly dodging over the pitfalls of pastiche: lifeless citations or scolding subtext. His leaping insight saves his music from the former, his embrace of modernity from the latter. (His exploratory jazz background helps, too.) His music invites scrutiny, but his treatment of his touchstones, which span Stax soul and Brill Building pop, is too motley for footnotes to contain. And anyway, that’s the sort of thing you do when you’re bored. White is never boring, and sooner than later, some moment of delightful sound-craft will make you give up the crate-digging and give in to the wild ride.
These moments come early and often on K Bay, White’s third album as a bandleader. Perhaps he’ll catch your attention when the peppy yeah-yeah-yeah sample drops into the thrumming monochrome rock of “Nested” with a kind of fated silliness. And then there’s the metrically mad transition that comes one minute into “Let’s Ball,” which is like a satin-lined late-‘90s rap beat infused with D.C. go-go and a soupçon of Out Hud. In the astonishing “Take Your Time (And Find That Orange to Squeeze),” after what sounds like James Blake twisting knobs behind a Burt Bacharach prelude, a hyperreal whorl of percussion opens a portal into a realm of heavy-lidded R&B. The song morphs so cunningly that it makes radio-station bumper music seem like a viable art form unto itself.
K Bay reunites White with many of the textures from his previous release, a collaboration with Lonnie Holley. A kaleidoscopic palette of strings, winds, harp, xylophone, electric piano, and analog synthesizer leaves no hue unshaded. White’s slightly louche vocal style resembles Matthew Dear, or even, when backed by the mottled cool jazz of “Fell Like an Ax,” of the usually incomparable King Krule. White’s newfound boldness as a singer is but one way that K Bay diverges from his prior records, where his reverence for his musical heroes was such that sometimes you could barely hear him. Compared to his lambent debut, Big Inner, which was softened by gospel and country strains, the grooves are heavy, decked out in deep-pocket basses and agile palm-muted guitars. They also pry White’s capacious purview even wider, making inroads into new-wave pop (The Cars loom especially large), no-wave dance-punk, and krautrock.
Though almost every song is captivating in its own way, one commands special attention. On a record otherwise pervaded by vague musings on personal matters, “Only in America/When the Curtains of the Night Are Peeled Back” is White’s attempt to address racial injustice. It’s a beautiful, complicated song that rotates on at least two axes, as chamber-pop melts into jazz and Randy Newman shades into Bon Iver. White’s perspective on the subject might evoke different responses in different listeners, or in the same listener at different times. For me, the bridge between his windy verses and the invocations of names like Philando Castile is too far to bear the moral weight. The song shows White to be a sensitive Virginian, but cropping up on this apolitical record, it comes across as thunder borrowed rather than earned.
“Only in America” arrives a little more than halfway through K Bay, and while the album swiftly corrects course, it never again quite reaches the heights of the first half. But even the slighter tracks would be standouts on a lesser record. If White’s gambits start to repeat, they do so in high style with “Never Had It Better,” a big-water wave of eddying piano and surging strings, and the drag-racing beach-jazz of “Judy.” The sound of K Bay is so good—so plump, so crisp, so tapered and whooshed—that White can seem like a studio hermit whose talent keeps thwarting his solitude. Spacebomb, the label and studio he operates with vintage gear and house musicians, became a lightning rod over the past decade, and eventually, he had to build a second studio to get away from it all. That home studio, Kensington Bay, has given both life and a name to this record: It illustrates how White thrives at the center of his own musical cosmology.

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The Norwegian duo’s new EP chronicles the rise of a fictional 2000s pop star. It’s got all the glitz and glamour of that era, plus a little art-pop edge.

Allina EP

Scraped together from the dregs of the aughts and the higher end of fast fashion, Allina is the brainchild of French womenswear line All-in Studio (from which the character takes her name) and the Norwegian twosome Smerz. The fictional newcomer and her self-titled debut EP premiered together at the label’s SS24 Paris show last fall. Despite its billing as a collaboration, Allina is essentially a Smerz project; Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg share vocals and production like they do on any other Smerz release. But unlike the beguiling art pop the pair is known for, Allina is a welcome turn toward 2000s-era electroclash and the commercial pop/R&B of Cassie, Ashanti, and Blackout-era Britney. Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg pad the EP with short, spoken-word interludes meant to flesh out the protagonist’s narrative. With a characteristically minimalist approach, the duo pairs low-lit synths, sparse drums, and fuzzy guitars with knowing lyrics that bite with edgy self-awareness. It’s Smerz’s most unabashedly pop-oriented release yet.
The humor on this EP is so understated, if you blink, you might just miss it. On “The Stylist,” the voice of Allina proclaims, “A lot of boobs but I still look thin.” When she deadpans, “And when you came, I screamed so loud” on “New Shoes,” the word “came” does double duty, referencing both the arrival of the shoes in question and the act of ejaculation. In case the come-on wasn’t obvious enough, a quick synth blast punctuates the end of the phrase, as if to mimic an orgasm. Allina leans into this type of sardonic play, echoing the sarcastic takes on feminine ideals of romance from Smerz’s first two EPs.
Nothing is done without purpose on this economical studio offering. Where the “small songs” on the duo’s 2021 LP Believer intentionally threw off the album’s momentum and contributed to its enigmatic nature, the 30-second interludes across Allina serve as buffers in between the four songs, teasing ideas like dangling modifiers. But for what they lack in substance, they make up for in rhythmic pacing, with subtle cues propelling each song into the next like an assistant ushering Allina to her next gig. For one, there’s the synthline that opens both “Dangerous” and the title track; then there’s the sound of flashing cameras on “Paparazzi” and the first few seconds of the EP. With a tight runtime of around 12 minutes, Smerz make use of every spare moment. Across Allina, the pair’s roughest edges and pop-leaning predilections combine for a smooth joyride that tantalizes just enough to leave you wanting more.


During this whirlwind of dream pop, folk, and jubilant dance music rendered in Spanish and English, Luz Elena Mendoza steps forward as a singer and bandleader like never before.

Mujeres

In the 11 years that Luz Elena Mendoza has been making music as Y La Bamba, there have been a few constants. Spirituality, identity, and the blessings and burdens of familial legacy have always shaped her songs. And there are the breathtaking harmonies, which color the upper reaches of her music like starlings in the sky. But otherwise, Y La Bamba—sometimes a solo project, sometimes a group with shifting membership—has entailed a gradual process of reinvention. That evolution has taken her from the twee folk of her self-recorded 2008 debut, Alida St., through a trio of albums where stylistically omnivorous indie rock meets the music she absorbed from her parents, immigrants to the United States from Michoacan, Mexico.
Mujeres, Mendoza’s first album in three years, represents her most radical shift yet. Y La Bamba sound almost like a different band here, and Mendoza’s voice embodies a newfound confidence, embracing unexpected risks. Previous albums trailed in the shadows of her predecessors: Alida St. bore fingerprints of the era that birthed Joanna Newsom and CocoRosie, while 2016’s Ojos del Sol echoed the roots-conscious approach of artists like Angel Olsen. But it’s hard to think of anyone making music that sounds quite like this. In 14 songs, Mujeres traverses fulsome dream pop, jubilant indie dance, skeletal folk, and whispered spoken-word poetry.
This is Mendoza’s first self-produced Y La Bamba album, and the band’s personality has never shone through more clearly than it does here. Electric guitars played by Ryan Oxford and Deerhoof’s Ed Rodriguez flash a twangy tone reminiscent of 1950s Chicano rock, but they’re just as likely to take on the phased, flanged timbre of 1980s post-punk. Grace Bugbee’s agile electric bass destabilizes the music in fascinating ways, and drummer John Niekrasz responds with playful, muscular rhythms. Field recordings—songbirds, freight trains, church bells, and, most powerfully, a funeral mass for a cousin—provide a tangible sense of place.
Opener “My Death” feels like a way of wiping the slate clean. “Haven’t been feeling strong/It’s hard to explain,” Mendoza sings, her voice buoyed by wordless background vocals. There’s a viscous feeling to all those layered voices, woozy and psychedelic, that makes her own singing stand out. Where Mendoza once tended to sing from the back of her throat, as if swallowing her vowels, she steps forward here. On “Cuatro Crazy” and “Lightning Storms,” she even evokes the way that Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser could swoop and dart, almost avian in her pursuit of the melodic line.
Mendoza’s family and upbringing have always permeated her music—2010’s Lupon was named for her father, with whom she had a difficult relationship. Those themes come into sharper focus on Mujeres. The album reckons with the misogyny that she and other women in her family have experienced. The largely acoustic “Una Letra” derives solace and wisdom from her mother’s love, while “Mujeres” is a feminist anthem of empowerment and resistance. Made almost entirely with thrumming toms and contrapuntal chanting, the highlight feels a little like an unplugged response to Animal Collective’s “My Girls.” The album also attempts to grapple with the reality of being Latinx in contemporary America, a place where speaking Spanish is deemed probable cause for questioning by Customs and Border Patrol agents.
At its core, though, Mujeres is about empathy, love, and understanding—for one’s ancestors, one’s allies, and oneself. “Aren’t you listening?” she sings during the hushed “Real Talk.” “You’re probably hurting in almost the same way.” Then she flips that idea on its head: “Because you feel me/Doesn’t mean we relate/I know it’s hard to/Realize we are not the same.” It’s a provocative formulation, one that goes to the heart of her unusual approach.
Mendoza has often stressed the importance of the music’s expressive dimension, describing it in terms of catharsis and healing. “It’s less about the sounds and the style for me,” she told Westword last year. “I know that some people are going to be like, ‘Oh, this is such an interesting direction,’ when really the question is, ‘Hey, how are you? How’s your spirit?’” But that sells the music short: Its formal inventiveness reflects her resilient spirit, letting it permeate every bit of this striking, vibrant record.


The Brisbane trio immerses itself in cavernous, eerie post-punk to soundtrack the uncanny horror of young adulthood.

Mirror II

The horrors of life as a twenty-something: You’re having less sex, working constant overtime, and handing over most of your paycheck to a landlord who won’t bat an eyelid if the black mold in the ceiling gives you lung disease. Self-worth is a fleeting commodity, sanity even more so. The Goon Sax have always had the market cornered on tales of young-adult embarrassment—their songs cover scenarios like cutting your own hair and being left on read in the group chat. On Mirror II, the Brisbane trio’s third album and first for Matador, they dig deeper, cataloging embarrassment and every emotion in spitting distance: shame, disgust, malaise, anxiety, discomfort, disconnection, fear, and, above all, cringe. Far from a downer, the album is breathlessly chic, less chaos-for-chaos’-sake than their previous work but kookier where it counts. It’s shittier than ever to be young; Mirror II, like the best documents of youthful discontent, makes it sound gothic, glamorous, and fucking cool.
Shedding the bells and whistles of 2018’s We’re Not Talking, the Goon Sax reveal a penchant for glassy, unsettled post-punk. With production from John Parish, the band forgoes the horns, strings, and castanets in favor of glam guitars and crackling no-wave synths. It’s a metaphorical shift as much as a musical one, with the painfully romantic, Jens Lekman-y outlook of We’re Not Talking giving way to emotional abjection and outright cynicism. Most notably, the speak-singing that defined their past work is all but gone, or at least tempered with deft, ingratiating melody. Band members Riley Jones, Louis Forster, and James Harrison share vocal duties about equally, and their push towards singing rather than speak-singing allows each band member to carve out their own style, from Jones’ narcotized drawl to Forster’s petulant yelp to Harrison’s dazed, Felt-lite sighs.
The absence of sprechgesang serves more than just aesthetics. The Goon Sax view pop songs as gospel, and their devotion is evident in Mirror II’s tightly-wound song structures and tragic lyrics: “I tried to listen to a pop song to get through the day/But the only word I heard was you,” Jones sings on “Desire.” “Just let the music take your heart away.” Pop songs are meant to be heard, but they’re also meant to be sung along to, and on Mirror II, this interactive aspect is a form of immersive, emotional mimesis. If you were to sing along to opener “In the Stone,” for example, you’d have to pout and scowl to affect Forster’s vocal tics to mirror his disgust. The effect recurs on “Psychic,” where he spits the words with barely-concealed fury to a condescending partner, and again on “Bathwater,” where he repeats the word “blood” in a theatrical groan. This is show-don’t-tell singing, using pop as a demonstrative form.
In her book Sleeveless, critic Natasha Stagg writes about the increasing prevalence of the “internet as horror” metaphor—the way terms like “ghosting” and “trolling” translate our lives online into the language of the uncanny. The Goon Sax take a similar approach. “You called my number three times today/But I was busy on the other plane, so you called the pilot,” Jones sings on the shoegazey “Tag,” rendering the act of getting in touch as a never-ending goosechase sabotaged by a “demon of fate.” “Psychic” visualizes the ability to spot a partner’s lie as a dangerous psychic connection. And on “In the Stone,” Forster describes a relationship as haunted: “Are you the vampire? We take on so many forms,” he sings, stalked by spectres both real and imagined. The production choices add to the gloom: At the bridge, Forster sings through a distortion pedal, his words contorted and crushed beyond meaning. These gothic allusions fit well on an album that feels cavernous and eerie, tinny drum claps and overdriven guitars echoing as if from cathedral ceilings.
The relative darkness of these songs doesn’t prevent them from being among the most beautiful the Goon Sax have recorded. The propulsive rhythm and heartbroken lyrics of “In the Stone” hit the same pleasure centres as a pop-punk song; the static haze of “Desire” is almost ASMR-like in its directness. Jones’ lyrics about trying to assuage a crush by listening to pop music begin to feel almost like a running commentary on the record itself. Mirror II offers a sighing, spectral alternative to the mess of our world, if only for four minutes at a time.

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Solemn folkie follows her 2007 debut Hands Across the Void with a record that revels in absences, silences, distances, and negative space.

Life on Earth

Visual art has its negative space, psychology and philosophy speak of lack, science continues to grapple with the great mystery of dark matter, and organized religion would be at a total loss without its pantheon of all-powerful invisible über-beings (to say nothing of all those optical illusion blocks that spell JESUS). Point being: What's not there often counts for as much as, if not more than, what is. Music, too, of course has its share of sounds defined by the silences that surround them, and Seattle's Jesy Fortino is one of the finest purveyors of such sounds going. Hands Across the Void, her Sub Pop-stamped 2007 full-length debut as Tiny Vipers, felt strung together by the spaces between the notes as much as the singer's formidable voice, a wayworn and woebegone warble. Indeed, that record's title calls to mind the act of strumming across an acoustic guitar, the "void" in question being the empty space within the instrument's body-- the very non-thing that allows it to resonate.
This same sense of lack and loss, and of the power of all things absent and missing and distant, surges through Fortino's follow-up, Life on Earth. The title is ironic, taken as it is from a line on the record's 10-minute eponymous centerpiece. "Don't look back towards me/ I'm as empty as the sea/ Back before there was life on earth," Fortino advises there, decisively undermining any warm and fuzzy notions the words "life on earth" might give us with a staggering image of a vast ocean of nothing. The music on Life, centered on Fortino's stately strums, only bolsters this image. Even when new sounds surface, such as the foghorn-like bass drones that carry "Time Takes" into "Young God", the whistled passage at the end of "Development", or the phantom chimes that punctuate "Twilight Property", they don't so much fill the void as draw further attention to it. Fortino's lyrics play to the prevailing mood as well, eschewing proper nouns and direct allusions completely and abounding in unnamed "he"s and "you"s who seldom seem to exist in the record's present. Nearly every song makes mention of death, interment, or ghosts; summertime easy listening this ain't.
Taken as a whole, Life doesn't really depart from Hands Across the Void (itself not exactly a cheery record), but rather refines and builds upon it, besting the previous album's runtime by a factor of 1.5 and boasting, as a bonus, a number of melodies that stick like tar in spite of their spareness-- particularly on the title track, opener "Eyes Like Ours", and album highlight" Dreamer". At nearly 65 minutes, it's relentless and uncompromising in its vision. Yet despite the lyrical preoccupations and the unyielding sense of absence, that vision is not necessarily a bleak one. Solemn? Sure. Severe? At times. But Fortino remains a consistent and oddly reassuring presence throughout. She isn't lamenting her woes nor letting herself get swept up in them, but rather surveying and relating, almost always with a certain austerity and remove. Only very occasionally does she break form and let the emotion behind the words loose, and when she does, the intensity is chilling. By the final bars of closing track "Outside", she can no longer contain herself, honing in on one last sentiment and sharing it eight times over: "It will always be somebody else [outside]." You can almost feel her eyes ablaze as she repeats it; it's as though she's at last harnessed the power of absence and made it her own.


Propelled by Valentina Magaletti’s masterful drumming and assisted by collaborators like Stereolab’s Laetitia Sadier, the London group ventures further into its utopian parallel universe.

Ookii Gekkou

Reverently synthesizing Can’s left-field funk, Piero Umiliani’s lush spectral pop, and the deep-space jazz of Sun Ra, Vanishing Twin transmit from a dimension where big-tent optimism is the law of the land. Released with eerie prescience less than a year before a pandemic catapulted both public health and public indifference into the global consciousness, the band’s last album, The Age of Immunology, painted the London collective as a troupe of psychedelic dreamers without a drop of cynicism between them. Though their wistful collages occasionally stray into darker territory—see the brooding ecological warning on The Age of Immunology standout “You Are Not an Island”—it’s buoyed by an unshakeable belief in a future just beginning to reveal itself. “The noise of hope is like a racket in my heart,” mused primary vocalist Cathy Lucas on “Magician’s Success,” breathing light and childlike wonder into what could have been a cloying new-age sermon.
On Ookii Gekkou, Vanishing Twin venture further into their utopian parallel universe, expanding their borderless domain by drawing on a deeper bench of collaborators to flesh out its edges. The band’s players are longtime members of the Haha Sounds Collective, a group of London vocalists and instrumentalists guided by the same jazz, soundtrack music, and experimental techniques that form the core of the Vanishing Twin sound; they make extensive use of their talents here, most notably in decorating the grooves of “In Cucina” with an inspired free-jazz racket. Avant-pop icon Laetitia Sadier, a collective member herself, appears almost anonymously with a meandering guitar part in “Wider Than Itself,” but her presence feels like a long-awaited homecoming, satisfyingly connecting the retro-futurist dots between Stereolab and their eager proteges. Flautist Elliott Arndt, who departed from the band as a full-time collaborator in 2020, returns to contribute percussion and a sublime flute coda to Ookii Gekkou centerpiece “The Organism.” Having assembled their multi-generational crew, Vanishing Twin solidify their knack for crafting luminous, uplifting soundscapes using fragments of the past’s imagined future.
Much the way The Age of Immunology did on its opener, “KRK (At Home in Strange Places),” the world of Ookii Gekkou—which translates to “Big Moonlight” in Japanese—slowly crawls into view on the title track. The warbling tremolo of the guitar hook, feather-light ride-cymbal pulse, and twinkling mixed-meter glockenspiel make for a sublime post-rock introduction, setting the stage for Lucas’ dreamy description of the moon lifting into view. From here, Ookii Gekkou breaks the delicate balance of brainy jams and hook-forward pop established on their last album, falling headfirst into extended instrumental workouts that hew closer to the sonic wormholes of Choose Your Own Adventure.
While the subsequent Magic & Machines EP suggested that this approach might lead to endless, spiraling drift, Vanishing Twin tame the sprawl, fastening it tightly to Valentina Magaletti’s masterful drumming. Her contributions on percussion give Ookii Gekkou its controlled, versatile drive, giving her bandmates enough rope to spacewalk into mesmerizing sonics with abandon. Susumu Mukai’s lilting bass synth on “Zuum” bobs and weaves around Magaletti’s free-flowing snare rolls, with the drummer pulling back almost entirely in the bridge, punching up a wild keyboard solo with laser-guided accents. When she supplies the woozy xylophone melody for “The Organism,” Magaletti’s focused timekeeping allows for the synths of Lucas and former Broadcast sound manipulator Phil MFU to blend, buzz, and dissolve into a satisfying cosmic soup without losing the plot. When Magaletti stretches her experimental legs, already well conditioned from her work in the duos TOMAGA and Holy Tongues, she gives the band its finest instrumental moment yet on “In Cucina,” an avalanche of percussive texture that slides effortlessly through the ensemble’s abrasive melodies.
Ookii Gekkou’s more exploratory angle does come with the unexpected tradeoff of leaving their growing acuity for pop by the wayside. For all its heady thrills, the album delivers neither the breezy directness nor the hushed romance of some of their previous songwriting. Though latecomer “Light Vessel” condenses their philosophy into vocoder-tinged crooning and “Phase One Million” tries to relax into a dub-influenced bassline, both fall victim to wonky instrumental breaks that overstay their welcome. More willing than ever to flex their jazz chops, the Vanishing Twin of Ookii Gekkou sound best when settling in for the long haul, exploring the nooks and crannies of their pluralist fantasia with a microscopic attention to detail.

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The long-running jam band’s ninth album centers on hard-earned optimism but smooths out much of what makes Dave Matthews’ music engaging.

Come Tomorrow

Since forming in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the early ’90s, Dave Matthews and his band have excelled at making cargo-shorts party music, blending acoustic folk, jazz fusion, bluegrass, and funk. Songs like “Ants Marching” and “Crash Into Me” were streamlined and direct enough to become alternative rock radio staples and get airtime on MTV, but it was the band’s improvisation-heavy live shows—where songs routinely stretched into double-digit runtimes—that earned a devoted jam following. DMB songs weren’t as intricate as those of Phish, or as overtly southern as Widespread Panic, but they were sprawling and accessible. In a post-Dead world following the death of Jerry Garcia in 1995, people were eager for exploratory music with distinct pop leanings, and Dave fit the bill.
More than 25 years later, DMB still draws substantial crowds, and stands as one of the most service-driven bands in rock. Along the way, Matthews’ songs have become cultural shorthand for the rejection of irony and cynicism. On shows like “Futurama,” “Parks and Recreation,” “Community,” and “The Office,” the band is referenced lovingly via sly inside jokes. Greta Gerwig’s 2017 coming of age comedy Lady Bird goes even further, praising “Crash Into Me” in a pivotal scene, if not prompting a critical reevaluation of the band’s music—which was always more complex and compelling than the rock press gave it credit for—then at least suggesting the band earned points for having a lot of heart.
Of course, darker undercurrents also run through the DMB catalog. His father, John Matthews, died when he was only ten, and his sister Anne was murdered by her husband shortly before the release of the band’s major-label debut Under the Table and Dreaming in 1994. In 2008, saxophonist LeRoi Moore died following complications from an ATV accident. These deaths make their way into his songs. For all the sunny melodies, few pop songwriters sing as frequently and with as much clarity about death than Matthews.
The best Dave Matthews Band songs live in this tension, balancing loose-limbed jams with heavy concerns: from environmentalism to colonialism, apartheid  to capitalism not making space for human dignity. “I’ll write a funky song about lust and sex and it makes you want to dance,” Matthews told Vulture’s David Marchese in May. “I feel like that’s okay. But I also have to write songs about the dilemmas of being alive.”
Come Tomorrow aims to split the difference down the middle. DMB has been playing most of these songs for years, and a few—“Can't Stop” and “Idea of You”—have been featured in setlists for more than a decade. Though it features performances from all members of the classic lineup, including the late Moore and violinist Boyd Tinsley, who was dismissed from the band in May following sexual misconduct allegations, it augments the core group with a wide cast of players providing strings, synthesizers, and percussion.
More doesn’t always equal more. The band’s potent musical wanderlust is muted here. Opener “Samurai Cop (Oh Joy Begin)” dully borrows runs from the U2 arena rock playbook; “That Girl Is You” finds Matthews trying out an exaggerated falsetto over overly polite roots pop stomp; on “Here On Out,” a sticky sweet ballad, Matthews is joined by Disney-esque strings and horns. Dave Matthews Band sounds best when it’s weird; the bummer on these songs is how bored the band sounds.
But even as a cadre of producers smoothes out the band’s crunchiest tendencies, glimpses of the DMB’s ambitious musicianship shine through. These outliers aren’t always successful. The metal-tinged “She” sputters, and the absurd funk interlude “Bkdkdkdd” doesn’t fit right, but they do at least indicate the band’s musical restlessness. When things do click into place, on the doe-eyed “Idea of You,” the swelling  “Come On Come On” and the Rhodes-sprinkled ballad “Virginia in the Rain,” Matthews makes good in Bruce Hornsby or Sting fashion, playing intricate singer-songwriter songs with the added heft of his remarkable rhythm section, drummer Carter Beauford and bassist Stefan Lessard. The best songs here feel like they could have fit in nicely on Matthews’ lone solo album and his best work of the millennium, 2003’s Some Devil; they’re lyrically lightweight, but musically charged and gleaming.
Matthews says Come Tomorrow is an album about love of the future, hope, family, the planet, and lust. But in seeking transcendence—and opting out of explicit political themes—Matthews sometimes settles for pat answers. On “Come Tomorrow,” where he’s joined by guest vocalist Brandi Carlile, his hope for future generations comes dangerously close to sounding like “everything’ll be OK,” a curious message in a time when things clearly don’t feel that way:

All the girls and boys will sing
Come tomorrow we fix everything
So as long as we survive today
Come tomorrow we go and find a way

Matthews doesn’t hide entirely from worry on the record. “The odds are against us,” he sings on “Do You Remember,” admitting that headlines make him “crazy” on “Black and Blue Bird” and that “there’ll be dark, dark days” on closer “When I’m Weary,” but his nursery rhyme cadence on the title track feels phoned in, like he isn’t buying what he’s selling. It’s treacly enough to make you long for the relative sharpness of his tender eco-ballad “One Sweet World.”
On the band’s first few albums, Dave built song cycles around contrast. He wrote about navigating the world, evidencing his pacifist Quaker upbringing, and offsetting those songs with worshipful odes to sex, wine, dancing, and abandon. The blend was never entirely even—chances are more fans remember Judah Friedlander sweetly hugging strangers in the “Everyday” video than have dug into the song’s roots as an ode to the assassinated anti-apartheid activist Chris Hani—but when it worked, it suggested joy and struggle in a kind of conversation. On Come Tomorrow, Matthews manages to carve out a peaceful place that’ll certainly be conducive to balmy summer nights in arenas all around the country. But by extolling vague hopes for the future, he fails to account for the tumultuous present. “There’s gotta be a way to make it work,” he sings on “Black and Blue Bird.” The best Dave songs imagine how it might, and Come Tomorrow needs more of them.


Los Angeles musician Pascal Stevenson’s solo debut harkens to ’80s goth rock, but at the album’s core lies a righteous intellectual ennui.

Scrutiny

As post-punk band Moaning traversed Europe on tour in 2018, bassist Pascal Stevenson crafted electronic demos in the back of the van. Stevenson had tried several times to write her own songs, but until getting sober, she had trouble putting words to them. After the tour, as she pulled back what she dubs the “veil of intoxication,” she finally began to write lyrics that felt both introspective and outwardly political. Drawing from personal experience with newfound lucidity, she eventually constructed 10 songs set to soft synths. She then polished them with drummer Nik Soelter and fellow L.A. musician SASAMI, surrounding her lyrics with grandiose new wave production. After two years of delay, her debut album Scrutiny finally arrives from L.A. electronic label Felte. The music harkens to ’80s goth rock, but at the album’s core lies a righteous intellectual ennui.
Stevenson’s lyrics are direct and even accusatory, cutting through washes of gated drums and vocal delay to accost those who fail to live the values they preach. “Can you justify your cruelty to the world? Are you terrified of your own words?” she asks on the scathing chorus of opener “Pantomime.” There’s a long lineage of satirical songs poking fun at false activists, like Phil Ochs’ 1966 track “Love Me, I’m a Liberal,” but Stevenson confronts her subject with earnest despair. The sneakily upbeat “Chapel” zeroes in on the guilt and frustration of a failed confrontation that ends in a moment of acquiescence. As difficult as it can be to speak one’s truth, self-negation sounds even worse when she asks, “When it’s over, who will even know?”
Stevenson handles the album’s more personal themes with the same intensity and insight, applying that search for honesty in others to herself. “Are you listening?” she repeats on shoegaze-leaning lead single “Feign for Love,” while her voice dissolves into a deliberately smudgy mix. Singing over mixed-meter verses, she spends “Dependency” debating whether it’s worth “blaming bad thoughts on my dependency” or leaving behind the numbness of addiction. Instead of harrowing or self-serious, it scans as a candid internal dispute about whether self-expression is worth it or whether pain is better left repressed.
Scrutiny is a defiant act of self-expression, but musically, it still feels as though Stevenson is pulling punches. With the exception of closer “All in Time,” she sings in a dry baritone throughout, ironically obscuring the power of her lyrics. At times, her brooding melodies outright clash against the thin drum machines of “Phantom English” or bright guitars of “Failure.” And even though this album looks deeply within, there was one more layer to peel back: Long after the record was completed, Stevenson came to terms with her gender identity as a trans woman, lending further weight to the album’s themes of repression and self-deception. This personal revelation recontextualizes the frustration at the heart of Scrutiny: relentlessly searching for truth and only finding more to uncover.


On its first album in 30 years, the Boston shoegaze band looks back with tenderness.

Hard Light

Drop Nineteens were five private-college kids in Boston, equally enthralled by arena-scale post-punk and the new sounds of shoegaze. Though surrounded by a thriving underground scene and no shortage of venues, they were more interested in recording than gigging. In dorms and basements all over Boston University, they poured rough dream-pop into a rented eight-track console, mailing the resulting demo to the only place that made sense: England. The gambit succeeded. Melody Maker awarded them Single of the Week, and labels started phoning. By the time 1992’s Delaware was released, Drop Nineteens still hadn’t played a hometown show, an order of operations that rankled their peers. (A contemporary zine featured the band on the cover with the headline “Sick of Them Yet?”)
No matter: The UK music press loved these American kids punching holes in shoegaze’s narcotic cocoon. They opened for Blur. Radiohead opened for them. But the tour life was rough on a group so young (“We’re sort of the Kris Kross of indie rock,” lead singer Greg Ackell quipped at the time), and Drop Nineteens lost three members before starting work on the next album. Ackell and bassist Steve Zimmerman found replacements for 1993’s shoegaze-free, crisply acidic National Coma, which had its moments but nothing as autumnally assured as Delaware’s single “Winona.” By 1995, the band was done.
Thirty years after their unintended swan song, Drop Nineteens return with Hard Light. Ackell and Zimmerman are rejoined by founding guitarist/singer Paula Kelley and lead guitarist Motohiro Yasue; National Coma-era drummer Pete Koeplin rounds out the quintet. With so much time gone, it would have been no surprise if Drop Nineteens had rehashed musical glories, or settled old scores. But when Hard Light does look backwards, it does so without triumph or disillusion, only tenderness.
Ackell turns a telescope on the distant glow of youth—in all its peacocking, dumbass splendor—and finds warmth. Everywhere you look, there’s an escapade: driving to a gig in a snowstorm, strutting your new boots into the club, skidding out on a stick shift. “Stepped into a cage/Woke up in Berlin,” Ackell marvels on “Gal,” as the reverb burns off like fog. The icy, Kelley-led “The Price Was High” reads like a cryptic retelling of their transatlantic breakout: “The nights from days/Ferried east and ended with no one/Getting wise.” Guitars howl over a high-stepping rhythm section, like a blizzard barreling into a Soviet disco.
The germ of this reunion was Ackell’s curiosity about what a modern Drop Nineteens song would sound like. Not an uncommon question for any artist considering a comeback, but Ackell—the band’s primary songwriter—had barely strummed a guitar in decades. From the beginning, he wanted to “follow the ethos” of Delaware, which offered the ‘Teens any number of paths to wander. The anguished “Reberrymemberer” sounded like Kevin Shields producing Heroin; their cover of Madonna’s “Angel” had a heady stupor and scalar guitar hook that anticipated Deftones at their wooziest. Or they could get dreamy: “Kick the Tragedy”—the epic-length jangle-gaze cut that crests on a spoken-word meditation from Kelley about being 19—has become a zoomer touchstone and, by some measures, Drop Nineteens’ biggest song.
While Hard Light doesn’t copy the structure of “Tragedy,” it does tap into the raw material: gentle glide guitar and an inquest into youthful energy. Here, that material stays in exquisite tension, as all these memory fragments threaten to gash Hard Light’s dream-pop reverie. “Shallow wreck from the bottom/Better left than picked up/And remembered,” Ackell sings on the valedictory “Scapa Flow,” “but I remember.” On Hard Light, time is often a hydrological function, as looming as the Nowhere wave. “Cut to the chase, my brother,” Ackell cautions, “There’s been weather and weather and weather and weather.” The past was “oceans ago” on “A Hitch,” which sends a sullen chime and Koeplin’s toms into a psychedelically panned splice of guitar and vocal from Kelley.
For the third straight album, Drop Nineteens are loath to repeat themselves. Even on their debut, they opted to record a fresh set of songs rather than rework any of the demos that brought them so much attention. And though that set has become a shoegaze landmark (and a coveted shirt drop), the follow-up offers saxophone rather than screaming; instead of alloying their sound with a pop icon’s, they faithfully and delicately cover a Clientele song (“Policeman Getting Lost”). The urgent, guitar-dense “Tarantula” suggests a timeline in which the band hung on until the post-punk revival, and its soaring chorus (“And we feel like we’re after school/In the afternoon/In the afterlife”) is the purest pop move they’ve ever made. While the textures of shoegaze are everywhere, the closest thing to a shoegaze song is “Rose With Smoke,” a spare, guitar-only instrumental that acts as an intermission.
Everywhere else, the band sounds locked in and linked together—if you want to catch the sense of play, just focus on Zimmerman’s giddy basslines—and the result is the kind of slow-release euphoria you get from an afternoon catching up with old friends. On the seven-minute closing ballad “T,” Drop Nineteens settle in after an album spent in constant motion. Ackell sings about inviting some folks over and putting on a Mickey Rourke movie. (They’re watching on a plasma screen, so God knows what year it is.) Koeplin paddles at half-speed; guitars scream just outside the window. For the moment, they’re weathering the storm.


The London group’s opulent debut album channels baroque pop and prog of yore, yet for all its high drama, the results sometimes sound too carefully plotted and curiously professional.

The Last Dinner Party: Prelude to Ecstasy

Prelude to Ecstasy

The Last Dinner Party is a good band name. Biblical, ravenous, damned; fantastical, formal, mysteriously ill-fated. It’s a real grande bouffe, and the gothic London five-piece has at all of it on their first album. Prelude to Ecstasy spills over with baroque flourishes, ribboning woodwinds, hairpin turns—throwing their waltzing shoes in a lake one minute and yanking on swashbuckling pirate boots the next—and massive guitar solos, not to mention all the blood, sin, and suffering. These 12 songs are richly upholstered in velvet and primed to soundtrack Emerald Fennell bacchanals. The indulgence is the point, they’ve said, an “unapologetic” strike against contemporary music that holds back “for fear of not being cool or for looking like you’re trying too hard,” as bassist Georgia Davies told Rolling Stone: the glam ethos reborn in plissé and corsetry. Yet despite these raging appetites, the tablecloth at their boundless banquet remains curiously unstained.
Now in their mid-twenties, TLDP met as students and swore in the smoking areas of South London post-punk gigs that they could conjure a more brilliant offering than the dour bands on stage. Sleek footage from their third show, filmed by a DIY guy with precedent for talent-spotting, sparked a label bidding war won by Island. They’ve started 2024 on the front foot, as winners of the BBC Sound Of… poll and the Brits Rising Star award. Throw in fancy management and an early Rolling Stones support slot (albeit first on at a stacked day festival) and you have a textbook “industry plant” furor, which they have rubbished and refashioned as a compliment: “If people think it’s too good to be true, then all we can say is thank you,” said Davies. (Is it too cynical to wonder if industry-plant allegations are now a perversely useful marketing tool, allowing an act to define itself in opposition to sexist low expectations? Probably.) While Prelude to Ecstasy is surely testament to their own distinct vision—Regency Fiona, Taylor’s “The Man” but make it Emily Dickinson—it’s also staunchly professional, of a piece with much major-label British indie of the early 2010s.
For songs that deal with the emotional violence meted out to women and queer people, there’s not much mess in TLDP’s proggy proficiency, the kind that glam originally stubbed its cigs out on. The album starts with a rococo orchestral prelude complete with harp, church bells, and a muted take on the “dun dun duuun!” stinger that signals shock horror, written by keys player and composer Aurora Nishevci. It works as a draped-curtain reveal onto the album’s decadent world, but like what follows, it’s thick with polish and intent. James Ford’s production is clean, opulent, and thundering, and evokes the crack session personnel of musical theater: the Peaky Blinders twang of “The Feminine Urge,” the martial “Running up That Hill” pummeling of “Burn Alive” as their voices careen unto the breach, the burnished spaciousness of lounge lizard-era Arctic Monkeys on “On Your Side.” Vocalist Abigail Morris is ostentatiously mannered, pirouetting through scales and moods with a sneer familiar from Marina and the Diamonds’ first album. Before the band took off, guitarist Emily Roberts played Brian May in a Queen tribute band, and the heavy winks to Freddie & co. in the staccato piano and brawny riffage of “Sinner” and “Portrait of a Dead Girl” both eject you from TLDP’s reverie and tease flights of fancy not taken; similarly, while the band is often compared to Sparks, their nailed-on, festival-ready choruses lack the vibrating lunatic fervor that makes Ron and Russell Mael so thrilling.
It’s all very Florence and the Rube Goldberg Machine, and depending on your taste for ripeness, your mileage may vary. At any rate, this tidiness needlessly buffs the unpredictability of their best songs, which should sound as reckless as their scene changes. “Nothing Matters” leaps from a sardonic, courtly swoon to a chant of bitter self-debasement, admirably churning up bile in the process. “Caesar on a TV Screen” is a mini rock opera, vaulting from seething torch song to preening indie-disco chorus to full-blown Wagnerian triumph: an account of feeling monstrous and repressed that swaggers with uncontainable desire, Morris’s scathing vocals a defiantly buoyant shipwreck. There is by now a fairly mainstream line of thought about the radicalism of women and gender non-conformists (guitarist Lizzie Maynard is non-binary) taking up space or subverting rock (and there are, indeed, many lusty guitar solos here); the recent success of Poor Things reflects the cultural appetite for a woman’s shameless decadence. It would be too easy to slot TLDP into that mentality; although they lunge hungrily between styles, their expansiveness comes off less like showy conquest than a reflection of the conflict in Morris’s lyrics, which seethe with disgust at how it feels to realize you’re the main course.
When Morris chants, over the doomy thrust of proper opener “Burn Alive,” “I am not the girl I set out to be/Let me make my grief a commodity,” it suggests a smart wink at a culture prone to valuing a woman’s art by the depth of her suffering. But what follows really is quite a lot of willful suffering in destructive situations: “There is candle wax melting in my veins/So I keep myself standing in your flames,” the song continues. Elsewhere there is much bloody supplication and biting, and it might get a bit Twilight were it not for some sharp writing about this rum bind. Rather than subversion, they go full immersion: “Here comes the feminine urge, I know it so well/To nurture the wounds my mother held,” they sing with a joyous eye-roll at the rigmarole. The (otherwise slightly sickly) ren-faire balladry of “Beautiful Boy” asks, “What good are red lips when you’re faced with something sharp?,” clocking the rigged game of beauty-as-power.
What could seem a bit passive and in thrall to pain deepens thanks to a few songs wise to the ways that love and pain got entwined in the first place. On “Sinner,” Maynard bares their teeth at the homophobic smallmindedness that compromised their desires and stole their innocence; the ecstatic thrash of “My Lady of Mercy” fantasizes about the Virgin Mary, Morris stealing her back from Catholic censure as the band sounds ready to take off. These are well-worn archetypes, but the Last Dinner Party, attacking them for the first time at an age where life’s color is still hypersaturated, make them newly vivid. You crave a little more wreckage in their wake—a more wanton relinquishing of control, perhaps—but their abundant debut more or less lets them have their cake and eat it.


The collective’s new album is their most focused yet, possessing the soul of a beat tape and the larger-than-life feel of big band jazz.

Butcher Brown: Butcher Brown Presents Triple Trey

Butcher Brown Presents Triple Trey

Since their inception in 2013, Butcher Brown have used jazz as a framework for experimentation, transforming it into any sonic hybrid their collective mind can dream up. Their grandiose instrumentations are constructed with enough clarity to hear how each of their five members’ individual genius contributes to the sum’s deconstruction of soul and funk, providing the foundation for outside artists like Pink Siifu and Alex Isley to hop onto. Their latest album, Butcher Brown Presents: Triple Trey is a continuation of their ongoing pursuit of genre’s dismantling, finding a natural home within the comfortable confines of hip-hop and big-band jazz.
It makes sense: Butcher Brown was forged in a cultural drainage basin, with its members attending VCU’s jazz program and congregating at Harrison’s home studio Jellowstone. Their return to hip-hop-leaning compositions feels preordained, considering that they formed their group while religiously listening to Ohbliv beat tapes during countless smoking sessions. And while their albums in between explored new territory—dabbling in Afrobeats, or playing with a messy conglomerate of P-funk, bossa nova, and rap—Triple Trey exists as a direct connection to their roots. It’s their most focused project yet, possessing the soul of a beat tape but with a larger-than-life feel.
Warmth and balance are the keys to their songs: Vocalist Marcus “Tennishu” Tenney’s baritone voice acts like an accompanying instrument, nestling into the pockets surrounded by driving percussion and an inviting chorus of brass. His words beget a rousing crescendo on “Liquid Light,” granting room for shouted choruses and solos in the outro, skillfully adhering to the tenets of big band song structure by giving all his accompaniments a feeling of elevated importance. On “Git Along,” his voice sneaks into the foreground behind blaring trumpets and saxophones, which hold the structure as his raps spiral off into an improvisational whirlpool. Meanwhile, on “777,” little more than a drumbeat and brass section are present while he raps, reminiscent of a throwaway from Kendrick Lamar’s Untitled Unmastered. Once he stops, Harrison’s keyboard and Burrs’ guitar kick in, allowing each member to get their moment in the sun.
Butcher Brown’s urge to establish Triple Trey as a jazz/hip-hop album causes a few moments to register as derivative. “Breevin,” with its lengthy percussive breakdowns and Tennishu’s throwback cadence, feels as though it belongs in the lazy middle of a Roots set. They set an impossible bar for themselves to meet with a cover of Notorious B.I.G.’s “Unbelievable,” inherently making you long for the original version’s rap prowess. Still, the infusion of saxophones swirling in the background makes the production feel imaginative, not just a retread.
Where their previous albums were marked by freeform and borderline psychedelic compositions that had the tendency to veer off into the abstract, Triple Trey is primarily about the execution of a plan. Randazzo has said before that their soulful elements were always present, that “everything about this band has become more refined in nature.” Butcher Brown’s latest adventure in genre sampling feels concentrated, as if it's the manifestation of the group figuring out how to make individual jazz elements combine into something bigger and grander.


The Madison, Wisconsin band’s second album melds 1960s pop melodies and ’90s indie rock distortion into feel-good tunes rich in existential angst.

Disq: Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet

Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet

Since 2014, Disq have been a vessel of familiar, feel-good tunes, tactile guitars and young adult woes. Their sweetly sung songs use ’60s pop melodies and ’90s indie rock distortion, resulting in hooks that might sound cloying if they weren’t so instantly catchy. The Wisconsin five-piece’s recordings contain the energizing thrust of a live performance—in large part due to their uncluttered arrangements and their three guitarists. Their 2020 debut Collector evoked that one local band that’s a step above the rest, while their second full-length, Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet, offers newfound lyrical depth, democratizes the songwriting and lead vocal duties, and introduces new sounds.
Though packed with sunny melodies, Collector was filled with dread—at the thought of breaking one’s negative patterns, confiding in other people, or just being alive for another day. On Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet, dread is less about day-to-day struggles than a shape-shifting uneasiness that’s harder to pinpoint. Disq are searching for something sturdy to latch onto—whether it be a lover (“This Time”), a sustainable frame of mind (“The Curtain”), or a more evolved society (“Civilization Four”). In each of these scenes, it feels like an ideal life is slipping away, as on “Tightrope,” when one’s own mirror reflection begins to disappear. They touch on the apocalypse and artificial intelligence to capture a lingering fear that seeps into daily life. Feelings of mundane longing are placed next to disorienting and existential anguish.
Bassist Raina Bock makes her singing debut on the psychedelic Crumb-like “Cujo Kiddies,” cooing with impressive dimension, at once capturing an unfazed cool, youthful innocence and bubbly magnetism, and on “Civilization Four,” she adds silvery droning, which compliments guitarist Shannon Connor’s unkempt voice. Having four lead singers only adds to the impression that you’re hearing the exasperations of several distinct individuals. It widens the scope of the album, but keeps it grounded in specificity.
Disq bring new accents to the fore on this album—like the cartoonish boings and distorted saxophone on “Civilization Four” or the askew synths and sinister effects on “Hitting a Nail With a BB Gun” that recall labelmates Spirit of the Beehive—and most of them add intrigue or dynamism. Even guitarist Isaac deBroux-Slone’s cuts, which sound more akin to the effortless pop songs that they’ve released before, have a few curveballs—like the winsome fiddle solo on “If Only” and the tornado of guitar static on “This Time.”
Desperately Imagining Someplace Quiet adds a few unnecessary details and contains brief lapses of focus—particularly with the not-quite-catchy-enough “Tightrope” and the sleepy daze of “Charley Chimp.” But the album possesses strong songwriting fundamentals, and its high points suggest a band that’s taking more risks. Highlights like “(With Respect to) Loyal Serfs” and “The Hardest Part” have harder-edged guitars that evoke Unwound and Silkworm and “The Curtain” has a beaming, Go-Betweens-esque charm. Overall, it’s a small glimpse into the brains of five emotionally unsettled, twentysomething Wisconsinites who’ve got hooks (and issues) for days.


Songwriter Andy Shauf puts his solo success on hold for an atmospheric rock record with his friends—appropriate for these tunes about seeking solace in a lonely world.

Foxwarren

For Canadian singer/songwriter Andy Shauf, solo success meant putting band life on a brief hold. Whether narrating the macabre end to an unfaithful relationship or house-party antics gone horribly wrong, Shauf has diligently refined his storytelling during the last decade on a series of albums under his own name. All the while, he’s also performed alongside hometown pals Dallas Bryson and brothers Darryl and Avery Kissick as Foxwarren. After releasing 2016’s self-produced, self-arranged The Party on Anti-, Shauf has pulled the band along for the record deal via Foxwarren’s self-titled debut. From the music’s mild temperament to its orchestral flourishes, there are similarities to Shauf’s solo work. But Foxwarren invest more in lyrical ambiguity than storyboard form, a sense they match with wondrously spacious sounds. These songs reflect the band’s familial bond, radiating warmth like a campfire.
Foxwarren’s 10 tracks range in tone from brooding Elliott Smith-like ballads to Paul McCartney ditties. As a whole, though, they fixate on the dream realm, with the shimmer of warped synths and eerie vocals suggesting a distant surrealism. Sturdy numbers like “Everything Apart” and “Lost on You” support low-ringing strings and wistful steel guitar that afford a luminescent touch, like noticing the glittering grain of concrete beneath streetlights.
“Oh patient day, bring the idle night/Do we live with it if we close our eyes,” Shauf sings during “Lost on You,” his voice a cushioning croon, as he wonders if a piece of his broken heart still remains with a past lover. This poignant bit of dream-like escapism ends with a hollow, reverberating synth, encapsulating the feeling of being lost in a tenebrous space. The album’s centerpiece, it exemplifies the conflicting interpretations of dreams, captured elsewhere by the glum minor chords of “Lost in a Dream” and the finger-plucked sunniness of “Fall Into a Dream.” One suggests a doomed consciousness, the other whimsical spontaneity. Both entail a sense of self-erasure, whether it means asking to be forgotten or accepting a helpless state.
Loss permeates Foxwarren, actively and passively. On “Sunset Canyon,” Shauf’s gentle vocals give day drinking and a “sunset cigarette” a haunting languor. He searches for answers (“Could I find myself on the other end/Of my cigarette half-lit?”) but falls back into hopelessness: “See it flicker ’til it falls apart.” On the standout “Everything Apart,” Shauf looks for “someone who can keep it all away.” Avery Kissick’s tightly kept drums, which kick with the persistence of a long-distance runner, lead the search, while Darryl Kissick’s bass urgently ticks away the time. Shauf’s friends help him investigate his darkest emotional corners.
Even though Foxwarren come from a place of companionship, their debut navigates isolation and escape. There’s always a pull away from the physical world here, away from company and toward deterrence. Still, these songs suggest the continuous struggle to be comforted, and Shauf finds himself stronger in the company of others. Even in the detail of lonesome battles, Foxwarren’s kinship and warmth persist.