Caroline Polachek’s best album of her career is a transformative pop experience, a passionate, richly melodic odyssey into the darkest corners of love.

Caroline Polachek: Desire, I Want to Turn Into You

Desire, I Want to Turn Into You

Desire can be volatile, excruciating, wonderful, and cruel—but above all, it keeps us going. We want and want and want until we die, these small hopes urging us across the vast expanse of our lives. Caroline Polachek—pop auteur, emotional philosopher, hopeless romantic—makes a muse of this tangled, pervasive force on her virtuosic new album, Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. She knows too well that falling in love suffuses you with possibility, makes a boring world briefly beautiful. And so, as a nod to desire’s transformational power, her album’s cover displays her on all fours on the grimy subway, lunging forward with a ravenous look in her eyes. On one end of the car is the rat race; on the other end, sand—a mirage of paradise.
Polachek spent much of her career as one half of the indie-pop band Chairlift in the maddening, formative city of New York, and more recently has split her time between Los Angeles and London. In 2020, she decamped to the idylls of the Mediterranean—blaring ’70s and ’80s Italo-pop out of a beat-up station wagon with her boyfriend in Rome and staying at the base of Mount Etna in Sicily, marveling at the “faceless, tectonic, chaotic energy coming up from below.” Inspired by these excursions, the album takes us to breathtaking places, all palm trees and crystalline water, deep red sunsets and smoke-covered volcanoes. On the ecstatic “Welcome to My Island,” Polachek is Calypso greeting a shipwrecked Odysseus, waving us to her oasis. She channels a yearning as deep blue as the ocean and howls like a wolf to the moon.
While Polachek was constantly in transit on her 2019 album Pang—descending with a parachute, passing through a door to another door—Desire is grounded in a more real sense of place. Even on songs with few locational details, you can feel the climate: An elusive woman lives out an escapist fantasy on “Bunny Is a Rider,” not checking her email because she’s “AWOL on a Thursday.” Satellites can’t find her because she’s somewhere in the jungle: Hear the muggy, tropical bassline, the faint bird chirps, the static that resembles the rustle of fronds. “Crude Drawing of an Angel” is staged below the Earth’s surface amid dripping stalactites, with jagged breaths creeping up from behind. Polachek’s voice slices through the dank atmosphere like a blade: “Forsake me/Here on the ground/All or nothing,” she pleads, begging for mercy from a lover whom she knows will disappear.
Perhaps the “crude angel” is painter Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the “angel of history” who, in one famous account, looks with horror upon the cumulative wreckage of civilization, the damage wrought in the name of glory and beauty. Polachek is not just a swooning lover, but an aesthete and philosopher attuned to contemporary extremes, conceptualizing Desire during a period of grand instability. During the pandemic her father died of COVID-related complications, and she saw cruelty all around her as she contended with the cyclical nature of disease, the fragility of the supply chain, and the rancor of social media morality. “I started thinking about how to re-harmonize myself, and my music, with the reality that there is a destructive side to everything,” she said. On the flamenco-inspired “Sunset,” Polachek dramatizes the pressure of new love against the backdrop of a destitute society, a collapsed infrastructure of care: “So many stories we were told about a safety net/But when I look for it, it’s just a hand that’s holding mine.”
The love explored on Desire is not the result of a patient and sustainable partnership, but a violent, all-or-nothing immersion. Implicit in the wish in the album’s title, I Want to Turn Into You, is the prospect of losing one’s own selfhood. Across the album, Polachek indulges in the pleasure of obliteration and surrender: “You are melting everything about me,” she sings with her arms outstretched on “Smoke.” On “Blood and Butter,” her descriptions turn grotesque: She coos breathlessly about diving through her lover’s face and underneath his tattoos, longing to be sustained by nothing “but the sun that’s in our eyes.”
Sometimes Polachek seems so breathless with desire that she can only come up to its surface to gasp up a few intelligible lines at a time. Bristling at our culture’s obsession with literalism in art, she proffers, “I’m a deep believer in what lies behind.” So songs like “Pretty in Possible” dabble in Cocteau Twins-style abstraction, blotted narratives featuring mayflies and bloody noses. Sonically, the song is Frou Frou meets “Tom’s Diner” with its keychain-jangle beat, wordless a capella stretches, and corkscrewed melodies. Polachek and producer Danny L Harle started it as an exercise in pure flow, no explicit choruses or verses. Still, one sweet line wrestles itself from the stream: “I was born to get you home.”
The theme of mania is replicated in the songs’ twisted, irregular structures. “Blood and Butter” casts off its jacket and just to put it on again, staging a fickle transition between day and night and ending on an epic bagpipe climax lifted out of “The Sensual World.” “I Believe” is breakbeat pop fit for a Lizzie McGuire trip to Rome, punctured by glitchy, adrenal breaths that sound like a cyborg subjected to shock therapy. The album’s production veers from trip-hop to new wave, trance to flamenco, demonstrating an innate understanding of the pop archive in pursuit of a new personal style. Each creation seems marvelously its own: Who else would pay tribute to their mercurial father with petulant white-girl rapping and cheesy stadium-rock guitar, or use a 1970s young adult novel about an immortal family as fodder for a shimmering Enya ballad?
The cumulative effect is like staring up at a giant fresco, the detail so exquisite you can’t decide where to rest your eyes first. Flourishes appear in one place, then echo in a new location—wings flapping, whistles beckoning, blades slicing, bells chiming. She opens Desire with her father’s warning to “watch your head, girl” and concludes with the image of a decapitated angel. But what really binds the album is the dynamism of Polachek’s vocals, the culmination of years of bel canto operatic training and the hunger to get it right. There is so much conviction in her delivery that ceding space to anyone else, even guest spots from Grimes and Dido, feels like a disservice: Within the span of one song, Polachek’s voice will smear like paint, swoop like a crane, and bubble like lava.
All of the best attributes of Desire are reflected on its closer “Billions,” a humid tabla-pop song with medieval sound effects and an over-the-top drone squiggle. Polachek brings us into the throes of a shaky love affair, doling out details in succulent little morsels. “Salty flavor/Lies like a sailor/But he loves like a painter,” she sings, evoking the tangy taste of skin, the coarse vernacular of the seaman, the uncalloused touch of the artist. There’s something brilliant in how she drops down an octave between verses, going from the heady bliss of the evening to the sobriety of the morning after, and how she lends ordinary words their own strange mouthfeel—“zay-zay-zay-something to me” and “bill-lee-yaaans!” After running through scenes of seduction and anguish, the song appears to end on happy note: “I never felt so close to you,” Polachek confesses, echoed by the cherubic voices of the Trinity children’s choir. But being close to is still not the same as being subsumed by, having turned into. So we nudge and nudge and nudge, never quite reaching fulfillment, longing until the end.


Lament the demise of the rock juggernaut. In the 70s, there was Led Zeppelin's offering of a whole lotta ...

Bless You

Lament the demise of the rock juggernaut. In the 70s, there was Led Zeppelin's offering of a whole lotta love, a stairway to heaven, and a facile Kashmir eclecticism. In the 80s, there was cock rock, hair bands and countless groupies. One must hand it to University of Chicago's Allan Bloom, who in 1987 put forth an accurate, yet jaded, generalization on the role of popular music: "A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy."
While his statement is gargantuan in presumption, it could be said that the mainstream music of the time often bequeathed an overbalanced self-assuredness in the listener. But as my fourth grade teacher aptly stated: change is inevitable. When Kurt Cobain was thrown the reigns in 1991, the new hero wasn't sexual, clean, or a monster of rock. This demigod had feelings ranging from angst to alienation (okay, not that great a divide, admittedly) and rarely came across as completely sure of himself. And with the death of Cobain came the eulogy of genuine rock bombast.
Above ground lie a vast assortment of commercial-quality pop and trite modern rock radio, all sans ingenuity or sincere emotion. Underground, there are the emo kids, the shoegazers, the art dilettantes, anti-everything punks, and dozens of elitist music cliques. Where is one to belong? Perhaps the question is not where to belong but whether to belong at all.
Thus we have the nature of no depression, and its many bands who are routinely pigeonholed as country. And on initial exposure, such a classification is justified. But at the end of the day, no depression is not your uncle's John Michael Montgomery. Consider the description of San Francisco's the Court and Spark as found in the biography on their website: "The Court & Spark is a slow-fade, a slow-klang, a climb to the top of Portola Road to watch San Francisco on the longest day of the year." I may have never been to San Francisco, but this statement can not be denied.
In fact, the Court & Spark's sophomore collection, Bless You, introduces itself in a slow-klang. A simple bass snare pattern in two slowly ambles its way to the listener, accompanied by unorthodox percussion and a sound resembling the plucking and strumming of piano strings before the full band enters. The track, "To See the Fires," presents a comprehensive view of the Court & Spark's terrain: slide guitar (only sometimes lap-steel), the addition of Wendy Allen to sing harmony full-time, organ, piano, and southern tinged vocals. But don't be fooled. You are not listening to country.
Bless You's musical affect is akin to the feeling evoked by the ruddy sunset depicted on the back cover of the record: approaching peace and grasping utter beauty. The eight gorgeous minutes of the penultimate "Fade Out to Little Arrow" are augmented by very light horns that ring more like distant church bells on a Sunday evening. The upbeat tambourine shuffle of "Rooster Mountain" complements the most infectious yet bittersweet track. Such a feat is achieved by a very slamming snare sound, resembling a large crowd of impeccably synchronized handclaps, and droning horn leading the bridge back to the verse. What makes Bless You so intriguing is the effectiveness of such subtle ornaments.
Wendy Allen proves yet again, with her backing vocals on "National Lights," that sometimes the most subtle of performances can be the best. Here, she echoes the vocals of frontman M.C. Taylor and occasionally adds a light falsetto. The song is seemingly standard fare on the surface, but the Court & Spark have almost mastered their art. The burbling organs of "A.M. Radio" lie underneath the entire track, while it climbs between male and female vocals to cymbal crashes and a driving guitar line. "I have seen the driving rain," reflect Allen and Scott Hirsch. But they don't need to tell us; we can hear it ourselves.
The Court & Spark don't consider themselves country, so neither should we. Perhaps no depression is the best description: the melodies and performances are mostly plaintive while never being altogether downcast. Their last album, 2000's tUMULt-released Ventura Whites, documented a band gathering their bearings; Bless You presents a band that's almost settled into their identity. They have their tools and have realized the power of subtlety, something the gods of rock from yestercentury tended to completely disregard.


On his Sub Pop debut, Seattle rapper Porter Ray unspools wordy verses that delve into personal tragedy, including his brother’s murder.

Watercolor

In 2009, Porter Ray Sullivan’s brother, Aaron, was shot and killed during an altercation he had no stake in; when the Seattle MC’s son was born a few years later, he named him after his late sibling. Much of Watercolor, Sullivan’s airy, classicist debut, pivots between these two Aarons—one a symbol of the graveyard’s call, the other of the future’s persistence.
Up until recently, the particulars of Sullivan’s personal life have been asides in the exaggerated, smoke-session retellings of old conquests, as on the jazzy 2015 EP Nightfall. But here, for the first time, he takes the time to evaluate the tragedies that have touched his life—in addition to his brother’s killing, his father died of multiple sclerosis when Sullivan was 16, and the mother of his son recently died in a car crash. His stacks of wordy reflections can be deeply affecting, though they’re also frequently muddled by ineffective execution. More often than not, Watercolor is colorless, a feeble rendering that obfuscates a harrowing coming-of-age tale with undercooked bruiser bars. Sullivan, who bubbled to the top of his city’s talent pool by making the mundane seem luxurious with careful word choices and an eye for detail, doesn’t do his own unimaginable story justice.
To be fair, the album is tasked with doing a lot at once: putting on for an unheralded Seattle rap scene, earning the expectations that come with being an unusual signee for indie rock stalwart Sub Pop, and compressing nearly a decade of grief and introspection into a handful of tracks. Still, Sullivan often has trouble finding the right words, which can be disastrous for a rapper known for piecing sentence fragments together like a puzzle. He talks with his dad in his dreams and remembers blunted backyard bare-knuckle boxing with his brother on songs like “Past Life” and “The Mirror Between Us,” but these stories get bogged down in moment-by-moment narration that lacks his signature ability to magnify and enhance.
When Sullivan locks in, he can be a force, effortlessly threading ideas. A song like “Navi Truck,” which uses cars as totems for cherished failed loves, showcases his best scene-setting. “My Mother’s Words” turns maternal advice into a new rapper checklist: be wary of drugs, envious friends, and poisonous relationships. It’s fitting that the strongest moments come on “East Seattle,” a song that relives his coldest nights on the city’s streets, including the one when his brother was murdered. “Just try and visualize losin’ your brother/Make you wonder how it feel inside/Hearing him suffer make me wonder how it feel to die/Seeing him sleeping in his coffin and he still inside,” he raps, remembering the 911 call he made from Aaron’s phone. It’s the most gut-wrenching moment on the album.
Unfortunately, Watercolor doesn’t piece together enough of these moments. And while the productions are animated and spacious, creating openings for his jam-packed phrases, the sound doesn’t take the full step forward that would help spotlight and redefine Seattle rap. For all its wrenching inspiration, Watercolor paints an incomplete portrait of the city and struggles that made Porter Ray one of its most vocal envoys.
Correction: After publication, a family member informed us that the mother of Sullivan's child had recently died in a car crash. The article has been updated to reflect this.


The electronic outfit’s exquisitely bleak new record, the first since bandmate Charlie Cooper passed away, often feels like the very stuff of music is being torn apart.

Dreams Are Not Enough

There was a time, not long ago, that Joshua Eustis doubted whether he would ever make another Telefon Tel Aviv record. Between 2001 and 2009, Eustis and his duo partner Charlie Cooper recorded three albums, establishing a singular fusion of maze-like circuitry and soulful melancholy that is part Autechre and part Depeche Mode. Then, the same week that their third album Immolate Yourself was released, Cooper disappeared and was found dead in his sleep. Shortly thereafter, Eustis’ father died, and then the film director John Hughes passed, whose son had put out Telefon Tel Aviv’s first album, and who Eustis said “was like a second father to me.” With a sizeable chunk of his world suddenly wiped out, Eustis faced the task of starting over.
Gradually, he did just that. In 2014, Eustis released a solo album of elegant synth pop as Sons of Magdalene.. He produced for Tropic of Cancer and Vatican Shadow. He played in Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan’s group Puscifer and the brooding synth-pop trio the Black Queen; he was a touring member of Nine Inch Nails. And with Belong’s Turk Dietrich, he recorded two albums of deeply experimental dance music as Second Woman. Now, a decade after Immolate Yourself, Eustis returns with Dreams Are Not Enough, his first solo album under the alias.
Telefon Tel Aviv were always downcast, but Dreams Are Not Enough sharpens and strengthens their most morose tendencies into a kind of probing and exquisite bleakness—what Eustis has described as “the rapture of despair.” The suffering is inseparable from the serotonin rush; it is storm-tossed sea and lifeboat all in one.
The album is formally inventive in a way we don’t often expect of music so firmly grounded in gloomy electronic pop. In the course of the record’s trim 50 minutes, it winds between sandblasted ambient and misty-eyed synth pop, industrial techno and chamber choir; there are echoes of Chicago acid and Arvo Pärt alongside apocalyptic sound design reminiscent of Ben Frost. The scale of the thing is enormous, suggesting cliffs cleaving into the sea.
Certain tropes recur throughout: Chief among these is a strange kind of zippering rhythm, speeding and slowing in cycles, like a stick being dragged along a metal grill. Second Woman made extensive use of the technique, but if there it could feel clinical, like an experiment in search of a real-world application, here it has a powerful emotional undertow. In the album’s opening track, it works like a bellows, stoking dull coals into full flame, and it’s put into similar service on nearly every song, wringing something wild and unpredictable out of what might otherwise have been merely politely forlorn. It often feels like the very stuff of the music is being torn apart.
This recurring arrhythmic energy helps bind the album; so do the ambient interludes that stitch together contrasting tracks. The whole album works as a suite, a deep dive into a dream state. Eustis says he has experienced both lucid dreaming and sleep paralysis, and the album’s song titles are drawn from one of his nighttime visions. When read down the tracklist, they constitute a brief poem:
I dream of it often:
a younger version of myself,
standing at the bottom of the ocean;
arms aloft,
mouth agape,
eyes glaring,
not seeing,
not breathing,
still as stone in a watery fane.
Fittingly, for such an expression of Romantic yearning, Eustis’ songs dwell mostly upon loss, regret, and the passage of time, though his words are frequently indecipherable, buried beneath layers of distortion. It seems likely that’s on purpose: The lyrics are right there on the sleeve of the record, but they are mostly expressions of the kind of hurt that is as private as it is universal. Eustis dances between revealing and concealing, admission and denial, and that tension animates the record from within: emotional whiplash as the engine of life. In this, the album plays out very  much like the sweep of grief itself.

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The queen of the coy R&B ballad returns for her first solo album in nearly a decade, making only a few concessions to contemporary trends.

Sex & Cigarettes

In the eight years since Toni Braxton released her last solo album, 2010’s Pulse, the orbit of her world has shifted dramatically. With her music career more or less sidelined as a result of a 2008 lupus diagnosis, the onetime queen of grown-and-sexy R&B has watched her genre tilt toward more expressly sinful subject matters. Where she excelled with emotional ballads and coy come-ons—on her 1996 hit “You’re Makin’ Me High,” she refers to her “private parts” instead of something more subtle and alluring—many of the artists who have followed have taken cues instead from the rap-influenced, sexually explicit style of Jodeci and, later, the Weeknd.
That’s not to say that Braxton has been out of the public eye. Since 2011, she’s starred in a hit reality show, “Braxton Family Values,” along with her four sisters, mother, and her two sons (whose father is her ex-husband, Keri Lewis of ’90s R&B group Mint Condition). As Toni has always been the family’s biggest name in the world outside the show, there is an undertone of benevolence implied in her decision to include her sisters on her journey. Braxton’s sister Tamar became the breakout star—she and her now-ex-husband, producer Vincent Herbert, even got a spin-off, “Tamar & Vince”—but themes of sibling rivalry and other familial turmoil, from DUI to divorce, ruled the show.
In the series’ second and third seasons, Braxton and longtime collaborator Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds began working on an album that became their 2014 duets set Love, Marriage, & Divorce. Rooted in soulful sounds and themes of triumphing over pain—the same ones they’ve been cultivating together since recording “Love Shoulda Brought You Home” for the Boomerang soundtrack in 1992—it won them a Grammy for Best R&B Album, and stands as some of the best work of her career. “I feel like I’ve been given a third chance,” Braxton told The Guardian around this time.
Perhaps Love, Marriage, & Divorce was more like one life in a cat’s nine. Braxton’s latest album, Sex & Cigarettes, comes on the heels of an even bigger twist in her life story: Earlier this year, she announced her engagement to Cash Money’s larger-than-life impresario, Birdman. Despite this high-profile relationship, you will not hear too many of-the-moment motifs on the album. (Or any cameos from Birdman’s roster: The only guest here is singer-songwriter Colbie Caillat.) The mildly risque title isn’t in reference to her own pursuits—it’s the name of a sparse piano ballad on which Braxton weeps about the stench of an unfaithful lover who stinks up their shared bed with evidence of his infidelities.
There is palpable anger in her voice on “Sex & Cigarettes,” but beneath it is a deep sea of tranquility, and it’s the latter tone that defines her performances on this album. While there are a few tracks that drift out of ballad territory, like the thick-with-bass “Long As I Live,” Sex & Cigarettes deals mostly in windswept textures—but without the high drama of some of her classic singles, like “Un-Break My Heart” or “Breathe Again.” Her performances are meditative, particularly on standout “FOH,” another piano ballad sung through clenched teeth.
It’s here where Braxton makes her grandest concession to contemporary trends: “FOH,” of course, is an internet abbreviation for “fuck outta here.” This isn’t a game that Braxton has to play, but the song’s fusion of an adult contemporary sound with more modern slang proves that she can hang in 2018 without compromising the qualities that made her famous. She is still innately part of R&B’s fabric, even now that her heyday has passed. “FOH” is not a powerhouse single like “He Wasn’t Man Enough,” but it’s confirmation that no matter which way pop’s tides turn, Braxton has a way to find her own voice and make it work.


By all accounts, Bob Mould is on a roll: the former Hüsker Dü frontman's 2011 autobiography and 2012 LP Silver Age were as much capitulations as they were triumphs. His latest solo LP feels like an extension of Silver Age's impassioned buzz and thrust, less a sequel to its counterpart than an appendix.

Beauty & Ruin

This year has seen the 25th-anniversary reissue of Bob Mould’s solo debut, 1989’s Workbook, a release that helped put his alternatingly brilliant and muddled post-Hüsker Dü career in perspective. On the heels of the Workbook reissue comes Beauty & Ruin, Mould's eleventh solo album and his second with the monstrous rhythm section of bassist Jason Narducy and Superchunk/Mountain Goats drummer Jon Wurster. By all accounts, Mould is on a roll: His 2011 autobiography, See a Little Light, went past being an illuminating read to the point where it felt like a work of catharsis for its author. Mould spent so much of his adult life clashing with former bandmates, struggling with his homosexuality, and groping toward a musical identity distinct from Hüsker Dü without alienating the large percentage of his fanbase that will always prefer the Mould of days past: distorted, angst-ridden, and swinging sword-sized hooks.
Silver Age from 2012 was as much of a capitulation as a triumph; it gave long-tolerant Mould fans the rush of rock riffs and burst blood vessels that had been largely absent since the breakup of Mould’s '90s-alt-rock powerhouse Sugar, but it also came across as Mould taking the path of least resistance, since his time with Hüsker Dü will always press down on him. So Beauty & Ruin feels like an extension of Silver Age’s impassioned buzz and thrust; less fortunately, it’s more of an appendix than a sequel.
Still, an appendix to the vigorous Silver Age—or even to Mould’s career up to this point—isn’t anything to sneeze at. Accordingly, the trio punches the clock with a vengeance on the punky eruptions “Kid With Crooked Face” and “Hey Mr. Grey”, a pair of tracks that circle back to Hüsker Dü’s SST days. “Kid With Crooked Face”, corrosive and supersonic, could even pass as a long-lost Metal Circus outtake, only tightened and cleaned up considerably. And on “Hey Mr. Grey”, Mould goes so far as to echo Flip Your Wig’s “Hate Paper Doll”, even if it feels more like an unintentional lapse into familiar phrasing and melody than some kind of homage to his past.
That said, there’s no denying that “I Don’t Know Anymore” is cut from the same cloth as Hüsker Dü’s “I Apologize” and Sugar’s “If I Could Change Your Mind", and the similarity goes deeper than the song titles. For all of Mould’s experimentation over the past twenty years—a hit-or-miss penchant for reinvention that encompasses everything from chamber-folk to electronica—Beauty & Ruin sticks to just a handful of well-worn gears. On “I Don’t Know Anymore”, he hews to the sound he once tried so strenuously to outrun: the bittersweet, fuzz-fueled, pop-punk open letter to the object of his angst. This latest iteration of that formula ranks up there with his catchiest, but it also comes across like a numbingly comfortable rehash of Mould’s tuneful discomfort.
Nothing on Beauty & Ruin truly resembles experimentation, as Mould, unburdened of so much baggage of late, seems joyously unconcerned with proving anything to anyone other than the fact that he can still craft hook after hook. “Little Glass Pill” opens with a airy folk intro before plowing straight into a bleary-eyed, Sugar-style rager, while “Forgiveness” feels forced in both its ham-fisted jangle and its stiff attempt to add some small amount of textural dynamic to the album. Thankfully, "Forgiveness" is the only track here that feels disposable, although “Let the Beauty Be” and “Fix It” come close; the back-to-back songs usher out Beauty & Ruin on a sentimentally gooey note that finds Mould content to mouth banalities like “It won’t seem so bad” and “Time to fill your heart with love”.
Mould may have largely emptied himself of the venom that’s filled him for decades, but when needed, he still taps into enough of that old poison to infuse “Low Season” with a churning, Black Sheets of Rain moodiness and “Fire in the City” with some inspired chord changes and wrenching twists of power-pop desperation. On the rousing “The War”, he plies one of the most predictable riffs of his career while singing, “Listen to my voice/ It’s the only weapon I kept from the war.” Of course, that’s not true: after so many years of pummeling at everything and everyone, himself included, he’s found a measure of acceptance—but he’s also kept his brass knuckles on, just in case.


Animals as Leaders provide a dense and triumphant brand of instrumental metal that can be dazzling or exhausting, depending on your mood.

The Madness of Many

Ever since the cartoonish screaming face of In the Court of the Crimson King, progressive rock has often felt like a mirror to the mind at its most active and untamable, transmitting feelings of anxiety through complex, intricate compositions. The genre has also always been an outlet for some of rock’s most capable musicians to put their skills to good use, though sometimes (especially with the help of sterile modern-day studio production) to the point of impenetrability. After debuting in 2009 as the solo project of Nigerian-American eight-string guitar wizard Tosin Abasi, Animals as Leaders have walked the tightrope between sheer technical virtuosity and actual emotional resonance, occasionally with thrilling results. Each of their previous three records has presented a tighter and more focussed band, as Abasi’s introduced a wide range of styles, from jazz to djent, into his band’s arsenal. The resulting music—a dense and triumphant brand of instrumental metal, with Abasi’s arpeggiated soloing always at the center—rewards close listening. It can be dazzling or exhausting, depending on your mood.
Drummer Matt Garstka has called the band’s latest album, The Madness of Many, “the most natural-sounding Animals as Leaders album yet,” which seems like a bit like a paradox. There are a few moments on the record when you can see what he might have meant, like the intimate guitar solos that close out “Inner Assassins” or the (relatively) straightforward jazz fusion of “Private Visions of the World.” But, as always, the primary appeal of Animals as Leaders is just how unnatural they sound. Like any of their previous albums, Madness of Many includes no chaotic feedback squeals, no casual studio banter, no shouted count-offs to four (or to sixteen-and-three-eights, or what-have-you). The production is as clean and glossy as ever, and the band’s M.O. remains scoring dystopian cyborg fights on a burning planet as shooting stars explode in the background. Of course, they sound great doing it. More than any Animals as Leaders record yet, this one feels like the band settling into their skills, simply playing off each other as opposed to pushing themselves to new heights.
Rather than “natural,” a more apt descriptor for Madness of Many might be Animals as Leaders’ most comfortable sounding album yet. Madness is a spacious and satisfying record: what it lacks in standout moments, it makes up for in coherence. Its ten tracks, all hovering around the five-minute mark, mostly steer clear of the band’s patented everything-at-once assault, favoring a slower burn. Few of these tracks feel like entirely new territory for the band, with Abasi returning to familiar tones and patterns and each song skittering around similar tempos. The moments that do feel new, like the lurching electronic raga of album opener “Arithmophobia,” are a welcome introduction of new texture into the occasionally monotonous mix of guttural guitars and synth.
The album’s most daring section is its finale– the meditative sprawl of “The Brain Dance” and “Apeirophobia.” It’s not surprising to hear that Abasi is as inventive with acoustic guitar tones as he is with electric, but it’s a relief to hear him switch it up by the album’s end. “The Brain Dance” takes influence from both Latin guitar and Appalachian folk, with an ominous backdrop of reverb, while “Apeirophobia” is the album’s sparsest piece, layering guitars into a tranquil choir of strings. Both songs find Abasi stepping back from his frantic pace to take a breath, to maybe even enjoy himself. The title of Animals as Leaders’ previous album, The Joy of Motion, referred to Abasi, a practitioner of Transcendental Meditation, noticing how quickly his hands moved as he played guitar. On these two songs, he seems more content to let us bask in the joy of taking a break from all the noise.


Following last year’s thrilling Compro, the Ilian Tape label’s breakbeat-techno renegade returns with a three-track EP of club cuts that cleverly flip dancefloor expectations.

808BB EP

Bryan Müller is a drummer, and a damn good one. Percussion—marked by grace, power, and sheer inventiveness—is his calling card. His 2018 album Compro was one of the year's most celebrated techno long-players, and in his scant discography under the name Skee Mask, he’s breathed new life into that well-trodden electronic trope, the breakbeat. In that classic sound, he’s found a sense of wonder that that’s sometimes missing amid the starkness of much modern techno.
A certain whimsy defines his drum loops and percussive arrangements—one that feels both focused and mischievous in its chaotic pace. As Compro made clear, he finds real joy in his drums: In songs like “50 Euro to Break Boost” or the hilarious “Muk FM” he found elation and levity in the tumult of his beats. He also found a way to use drums to tell a story and build a world. Redolent of cyberpunk atmospheres and informed by techno’s most futurist impulses, Compro was interested in dancefloors a galaxy (or at least a century) away. His new EP, a three-track affair called 808BB, feels like a logical continuation of where he left off with Compro.
“Trackheadz” is a good illustration of how devilishly talented Müller is. In a 2016 interview with Resident Advisor, he explained that it’s hard for him to feel inspired by a “functional, single drum loop”; instead, his rhythmic constructions are modeled on the constant variations of live performance. With “Trackheadz” he turns this philosophy upside down. It’s a pounding, near-punishing onslaught of stomping, adrenaline-pumping beats; there’s a sense that the pummeling can’t be contained, that the machinery can’t handle the signal it’s being fed. Müller takes this to its logical end, and the track begins to glitch. The sounds clip and warp and as the song sputters, not once but twice, it knocks the listener off balance. It's striking how he has organized the heroics of his drumming around this riveting analog drama. Outside these digital hiccups, the song is almost perfect, driving dancefloor music. But in eluding club convention, he does something even more interesting: He harnesses the unexpected.
He’s just as good at more straightforward statements. “TH808” is dreamy, ambient techno for those who have daydreams of spacefaring. And “808AB” is a study in fusing moody, pastel-colored IDM with exacting techno precision. Everything is united by the genius of his beats, an elating thump that leaves an imprint on the mind. Even when the headphones come off, the energy of his rhythms will stick with you.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we explore the righteous anger of Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This.

Live Through This

Try to imagine a famous woman who screams for a living today. Not alternative, punk-magazine famous, but American monoculture famous, platinum-selling-album famous, so famous her drug mishaps make headlines in Mexican newspapers, so famous rumors and conspiracies about her celebrity marriage hound her for decades. This woman doesn’t let out sing-screams or tinny emo yelps, but raw, diaphragmatic bellows—or, as David Fricke put it in his Rolling Stone review of Hole’s 1994 album, Live Through This, a “corrosive, lunatic wail.”
He was wrong on the second point: There’s no lunacy on Hole’s records. But there is anger, female anger, which, to a man’s ear, historically scans as madness. Lead singer Courtney Love often told reporters that she named her band after a line in Euripides’ Medea. “There’s a hole that pierces right through me,” it supposedly goes, though you won’t find it in any common translation of the ancient play. It’s apocryphal, or misremembered, or Love made it up to complicate the name’s obvious double entendre—either way, it makes a great myth. A band foregrounding female rage takes its name from the angriest woman in the Western canon, a woman so angry at her husband’s betrayal she kills their children just so he will feel her pain in his bones.
Like all female revenge fantasies written by men, Medea carries a grain of neurosis about how women might retaliate for their subjugation. It is easier, still, for men to express these anxieties by way of violent fantasy than it is for women to communicate their anger at all. In a 1996 New York magazine cover story on women alternative singers entitled “Feminism Rocks,” Kim France, the founding editor of Lucky who also worked as New York’s deputy editor, paraphrased feminist journalist and author Susan Faludi: “While our culture admires the angry young man, who is perceived as heroic and sexy, it can’t find anything but scorn for the angry young woman, who is seen as emasculating and bitter.” This was true for Love, who watched grunge break through to the mainstream only to find that the freedom and rebellion it promised was reserved for her male counterparts. In grunge, men could be scruffy and rude and defy gender norms—they could be rawer than the men modeled in synth-pop music videos or hair metal concerts a few years prior. Women, for all the space afforded them in the subculture’s spotlight moment, might as well have been Lilith.
Hole’s second album, Live Through This, famously came out four days after Love’s husband, Kurt Cobain, was found dead at their home in Seattle. The sudden tragedy threatened to swallow the music, to say nothing of the genre and social movement in which it was encased. Here was a dead rock god, and here was the woman who survived him. Even the album’s title alluded to Love’s endurance through a ground-shaking trauma, though of course she had written the title about surviving her fame, surviving her fraught association with the most beloved man in rock, surviving her pregnancy with their child, surviving the tabloid rumors that would—and still do—swarm her as a result.
“I sometimes feel that no one’s taken the time to write about certain things in rock, that there’s a certain female point of view that’s never been given space,” Love told Sidelines in 1991, the same year Hole released their first album, Pretty on the Inside. While there were plenty of rock songs written by men about hounding and abusing women, there were few about being hounded and abused. The rock canon, like all the others, fiercely guarded its male subjectivity, and Love wanted to break through its ranks.
She did so with violent contradictions. Love projected a high femme presence, all red lipstick and messy blonde hair like a bedraggled Marilyn Monroe, while commandeering her post at the microphone with masculine bravado. She wore baby-doll dresses and screamed at the coarse bottom-edge of her range. She was the first to admit the look was a compromise, a Trojan horse for her rage. “When women get angry, they are regarded as shrill or hysterical…. One way around that, for me, is bleaching my hair and looking good,” she told The New York Times in 1992. “It’s bad that I have to do that to get my anger accepted. But then I’m part of an evolutionary process. I’m not the fully evolved end.”
If Pretty on the Inside delivered fury on the backs of abject impressionism, then Live Through This crystallized the same impulse into pop songs you could holler along to. Its lyrics juxtaposed visceral imagery—milk and piss and blood—with catchy, vituperative sloganeering. Hole walked the same high wire Nirvana did on Nevermind and In Utero, between bone-deep rage and syrupy hooks, only Hole’s job was harder: The band had to sell that unstable boundary through a female lens.
They had to sell Love, too, who had already committed a host of cardinal sins in the public eye. She was a woman without a filter married to a pop idol, and she had carried his child without giving up her celebrity or her art, without retreating into the shadows to become an incubator. An infamous 1992 Vanity Fair profile probed the question of Love’s irreconcilable role of expectant mother and rock star. Such a simultaneity does not exist in the popular imagination. She was impossible, she could not be, and according to sources quoted in the story, she was using drugs while pregnant. The story prompted an investigation from the Department of Children and Family Services, and Love’s newborn daughter Frances Bean was temporarily taken from her parents.
“I want my baby/Who took my baby?” Love howls on “I Think That I Would Die,” and this time it’s not a metaphor; listeners could map that anguish onto events they’d seen unfold in real time. No one could accuse Love of lying, which didn’t stop rumors from bubbling up that her husband had written all the songs on Live Through This. Love carved an impossible space for herself in pop culture and was pilloried for it, and when she sang about the fallout, Nirvana fans cast her as a puppet for her husband’s genius just because the songs were good. It’s not like he could have written them, either; when Cobain wrote about rape, he wrote sardonically, and from the point of view of the rapist. The irony in his songs was apparently lost on some of his listeners. In that Vanity Fair profile, Love relayed a chilling anecdote she had heard about a girl who had been raped in Reno, whose rapists had been singing Nirvana’s song “Polly” while assaulting her. “These are the people who listen to him,” she said.
Love wrote about sexual violence with a snarl, too, but a heavier, more knowing one. “Was she asking for it?/Was she asking nice?” she poses on the seething “Asking for It.” “If she was asking for it/Did she ask you twice?” The song, she’s said, was inspired by a stage dive that took a wrong turn. She leapt into the audience to crowd-surf during a show, and found the crowd ready to devour her. “Suddenly, it was like my dress was being torn off me, my underwear was being torn off me, people were putting their fingers inside of me and grabbing my breasts really hard, screaming things in my ears like ‘pussy-whore-cunt,’” she said. Whatever covenant binds fan and artist, whatever gives the latter power over the former, didn’t apply to Hole—not in totality, at least; not to the extent that it would keep a singer who was also a woman from being molested by her audience in public.
Live Through This refers to autobiographical traumas, but it is not a confessional record. “The whole cliché of women being cathartic really pisses me off,” Love said in a 1994 Spin cover story. “You know, ‘Oh, this is therapy for me. I’d die if I didn’t write this.’ Eddie Vedder says shit like that. Fuck you.” Her lyrics don’t hit like spleen-venting. They’re analytical, no matter how viscerally she howls them, and their insight transcends their origins. Throughout the record, Love speaks to the atomization of the female form that takes place in the eye of the misogynist. To the ogler, a woman is never whole. She’s shards: lips, hair, tits, ass, whatever can be grabbed without consequence, whatever can be bought and sold. Love would know, having stripped for a living before the band broke big, having made a career of, among other things, being looked at. She sings of “pieces of Jennifer’s body.” On “Doll Parts,” against halting guitar chords, she sings about how she’s “doll eyes, doll mouth, doll legs.” Her multiplicity is underscored by backing harmonies from Hole bassist Kristen Pfaff and guest vocalist Dana Kletter, who chime in with the indelible line: “I want to be the girl with the most cake.”
As much as it concerns trauma and misogyny, Live Through This, like all great rock records, quakes with desire. Love deciphers what it means to be an object of desire, but she also plays a woman who wants ravenously. Her wanting, at the time, was a terror; she inspired so much vitriol in part because she refused to be passive, refused to accommodate a man’s hunger without indulging her own. She would not be a vessel or a muse. Her husband did not cast her in the drama of his life. She wanted him and chased him down, and then she wanted their child, and she believed that her desire mattered, that it had substance. “I went through all the shit and pain and inconvenience of being pregnant for nine whole fucking months because I wanted some of his beautiful genes in there, in that child,” Love told Melody Maker, in a profile that called her “a one-woman spite factory” in its tagline, in February of 1994. “I wanted his babies. I saw something I wanted, and I got it. What’s wrong with that?”
On “I Think That I Would Die,” Love calls after her baby in the melodically barren verse, and then the song inverts itself into the album’s greatest hook. Hole pull this trick often, switching gears between repulsion and attraction at a moment’s notice, bombarding the listener with noise and then sweetly luring them back in. There is violence and there is desire and the line between the two is never clear. The album’s pummeling opener “Violet” baits the ear with a jangling guitar tone cut from the same cloth as R.E.M., and then drummer Patty Schemel churns the song into a fury. “Go on, take everything/Take everything/I want you to,” howls Love, her bitterness oxidized into defiance.
In a second profile of Love, published in 1995, Vanity Fair conducted the first-ever interview with the singer’s mother, the therapist Linda Carroll. “Her fame is not about being beautiful and brilliant, which she is,” Carroll said. “It’s about speaking in the voice of the anguish of the world.” That the anguish of the world would have a female voice was an idea new to the music industry. It’s still new. Love makes a bid for universality on Live Through This in that it’s hard not to get swept up in her energy, but she also acknowledges that female pain is marked, that it is compartmentalized and dismissed because it is felt by women, not people. Though Hole screamed open a space for angry, pained women artists like Alanis Morissette to thrive in the mainstream, that space is still bounded by the dismissal of men who will not deign to empathize with them. I think of the letter Larry Nassar wrote when early this year he pled guilty to assaulting hundreds of women and girls, how it looped in a popular misquote from a 17th-century play: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
“Doll Parts” ends with a chilling, enigmatic hex: “Someday you will ache like I ache,” Love glowers, and maybe it’s a threat but it could also be an oracle. It could be the promise that no matter how much you hate her, no matter how much spite you send her way, the venom will find its way back to you. That those severed parts will one day congeal into a furious living whole.


This ambitious compilation features wild blends of electronics, jazz fusion, new age drifts, new-fangled digital drum machines, and traditional Brazilian percussion placed into new, curious sounds.

Various Artists: Outro Tempo: Electronic and Contemporary Music From Brazil, 1978-1992

In 1985, Brazil’s repressive junta finally allowed for direct elections for a president for the first time since their military coup of 1964. For artists and musicians of all stripes, the censorship and repression experienced during that military reign came to be known as “vazio cultural” (cultural void). The most well-known example came with the 1968 arrest and subsequent exile of two stars of Tropicália, Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil. But for the artists who stayed in country, the regime’s censorship became increasingly Kafkaesque to navigate. Some artists resorted to recording without words so as to elude such censorship—see Milton Nascimento’s Milagre Dos Peixes—but it was only as the military’s stranglehold finally loosened that others began to rediscover their voices.
In the liner notes to Outro Tempo—a beguiling and dizzying assemblage of fourteen Brazilian experimental and fusion artists from around the time of that country’s thawing—producer John Gómez remembers happening upon Marco Bosco’s 1983 album Metalmadeira in a British thrift shop and finding a handwritten note within: “Dear Mr. Eno, I would like you to know about our work, we work with tapes and sounds of Nature.” Whether or not Mr. Eno ever happened upon this music, in the instance of taking over thirty years for this work to drift to ears, each track feels like a message in a bottle. As guitarist Nando Carneiro states in the notes, musicians during this time “had to stay caught in a cage.” Emanating from a country increasingly isolated from the rest of the world, these artists put wild blends of electronics, jazz fusion, new age drifts, new-fangled digital drum machines, and traditional Brazilian percussion into a new, curious sound.
A trace of Nascimento’s wordless music echoes through Anno Luz’s “Por Quê,” as pan flutes get stretched into a cloud and a bright, fingerpicked guitar figure moves in and out of an analog synth haze. Carneiro’s “G.R.E.S. Luxo Artesanal” also aims for a similar space, wedding his nimble samba phrases to a programmed rhythm and a synth line that slowly becomes unmoored from the beat. Some four minutes in, he splices the tape and the guitar drifts into “O Camponês,” with Carneiro’s non-verbal accompaniment capping the piece with a poignant coda.
One of the sets more thrilling juxtapositions is between the hand percussion that’s underpinned Brazilian music for centuries and these stiff new electronic components. Most of these devices had to be smuggled into the country through bribed officials. But even culturally, there was hesitation to have such computers make facsimiles of the lithe Brazilian rhythms. It’s the tangy interplay of hand drum patter and percolating electronics that gives Cinema’s “Sem Teto” a soda-pop fizz, suggestive of the similar samba hybrids envisioned a hemisphere away by bands like Antenna.
And as the military regime fell asunder and artists regained their voices, so did the music begin to expand and change. The other dialogue flowing through Outro Tempo is between Brazilian artists as they began to interact not just with one another, but with the indigenous tribes in Amazonia endangered by rampant deforestation going on during that decade. Some composers traveled to the jungle so as to better interact with these ancient sounds. Bené Fonteles’ haunted “O M M” chants that sacred Hindu syllable, strikes chimes, and shakes rattles until it resembles the clatter of the rainforest, while Maria Rita couples her powerful voice with tribal percussion and electric bass on “Cântico Brasileiro No.3.”
The most stunning compositions come from Priscilla Ermel, represented by the two longest cuts on the compilation. During the ’80s, Ermel traveled into the rainforest to immerse herself in study of these vanishing indigenous forms, seeking to fuse it with her own sensibilities as a musician and composer. But rather than just conduct a simple integration of ancient and modern, she also reaches outside of her country for other timbres, suggesting a “world music” more holistic than such a tag implies. Across the nine-minute “Gestos de Equilíbrio,” she interweaves guitar, synth, oboe and clay pot drums, but also makes foreign objects like the banjo, kalimba and Indian stringed-instrument the dilruba all sound right at home on her gently undulating ambient piece. Even more formidable is her 15-minute masterwork, “Corpo do Vento.” Across a thundering battery of bombo and cultrun, Ermel breathes through ocarina, Chilean chirimia and Nepalese flute, giving the epic a ritualistic vibration. She judiciously adds piano and viola caipira and the middle section drifts into new age territory before returning to the drum-driven mesmerism of the final passage.
“They are portals through which stories, people, and cultures can be revealed,” Ermel explains in the album’s liner notes about how she perceives her music. And almost every track here resonates like a secret kept silent for decades. Outro Tempo opens up a portal for us in the present moment back to a time and place where —under the suffocating weight of a totalitarian state—a few brave musicians nevertheless could hear the sounds of a brighter world.


This collection of new age, which gathers tracks from a series of tapes originally issued in the 1980s, shows how instrumental textures from around the globe met early electronics.

Tropisch Verlangen

New age music has recently experienced a surge in popularity, seemingly as the last bastion of untapped old music to be explored (or plundered) by record nerds. There are endless spiritual-sounding albums from the 1980s that leveraged then-emerging digital technologies to create inhuman drones or pompous soft synth riffs, the yoga lover’s version of a shredding guitar solo. Flute, digitized or otherwise, was often involved, sometimes for the worse. But occasionally these new age explorers got it right, finding a middle ground between the modern classical of the ’60s and ’70s, and the devotional music drawn from an array of religious practices. But where so many artists relied solely on the synthesizer for their sounds of soft ascension, Cybe, otherwise known as Siebe Baarda, got busy in the kitchen, throwing all the ingredients in the soup.
The record’s lore feels almost too good to be true: In the early-’80s, a dweeby Dutch guy travels to southeast Asia, comes home enamored with the region’s music, blends its dreamy percussion into his own early electronic music, which he then releases on obscure cassettes. Thirty years later, these cassettes are dredged out of obscurity, and they now sound oddly prescient. Tropisch Verlangen, the title of a compilation made of music from those tapes, literally translates as “Tropical Desire.” Is the desire his, for the tropics? Or is it the desire of the tropics, perhaps to be heard? Some of each, probably. But the album’s small-scale experimentation is more love than lust. You can feel his young mind playing around excitedly, and while the results are never huge breakthroughs for music, the earnestness of the compositions is palpable throughout.
The cover of Tropisch Verlangen pictures Baarda in a room with recording equipment: several keyboards, various pieces of wooden percussion, small bells and gongs. Dressed in a red sweater with collar peeking, stone white khakis (legs crossed), and huge glasses, he looks absolutely innocent and sweet. At its best, Tropisch Verlangen exudes this delighted curiosity. “Bali Pulau Bagus” features the trancelike rhythm of Indonesian gamelan accented by Blade Runner-style synths ping-ponging across the track. It’s fun, eager. The poetically-named “The Moon Is Shining Above the Ricefields” begins with the recording of frogs ribbiting, before a wooden xylophone plinks around, and low-key smooth jazz guitar (performed by his sister) takes over. The track is a bit haphazard, but that serves to increase its charm.
In some ways, the album recalls the more modern day music of Gang Gang Dance, a group whose work often sampled or referenced music from Asia and the Middle East. But that band benefited from advanced technologies Cybe didn’t, giving their songs subtlety. The borrowed sounds on Tropisch Verlangen serve as accents rather than as focal points, too unwieldy to be tamed. In some sense, Cybe was drastically ahead of his time, merging proggy electronics with non-Western sounds. Would the music be different if he had a studio to record in? Bandmates? A producer? A MacBook? Perhaps. But it wouldn’t be so fun.


The anonymous UK act construct a vast, vaporous tribute to the patron saint of love and heartbreak: Céline Dion.

Once Upon a Time

You can spend every day consuming songs and films and books about love and you still won’t be ready when its incomparable transformation arrives. The UK-based act Romance know how to bottle such ineffable feelings and channel them via ambience—think of their mood-elevating atmospheres as audible incense or, more pointedly, a reminder of the way love makes the day-to-day feel more magical. Without any disclosure of Romance’s identity (or identities—the number of members is unclear), their music centers on pure emotion. Every track becomes an altar to their namesake, invoking love’s defining qualities and magnetic pull, even its ability to leave you a tragic mess.
With their third album, Once Upon a Time, Romance root their gentle synths in something more concrete: Céline Dion. The Canadian diva is the perfect fount of inspiration for the project: Her monumental yet direct singing makes such emotions feel both attainable and like the stuff of legend—she’s sung of love as life-changing and a source of miracles, but also as something found on someone’s lips. When The New Rolling Stone Album Guide gave Dion’s albums a string of one-star ratings, the accompanying text offered a concession: She was emblematic of a certain kind of pop star, one who believes “bigger is better, too much is never enough, and the riper the emotion the more true.” Her words shoot straight from the heart and into your own.
Self-serious aesthetes may find Dion’s lyrics overly simple, but the title track that opens this album disrupts that perspective. Diaphanous synths set the scene, and then a voice emerges from the mist: “Have you ever been in love?” These words, which come from a 2002 Dion song, are isolated and only occasionally repeated, allowing ample time for rumination. So much sample-based music revels in the mutation of its source material—from Christian Marclay’s turntable experiments to John Oswald’s plunderphonics, DJ Screw’s chopped-and-screwed remixes to Daniel Lopatin’s eccojams—and any skips or collaging presents the results as entirely new creations. Romance’s music has a different effect: Their work points back to Dion, signaling her power ballads’ strengths, which are often hidden in plain sight. When Romance add another sample—“Have you ever walked on air?”—they’re drawing a line between these two questions to declare love a supernatural force. When they throw in another line—“When you find it, don’t let go”—any romantic losses one has previously endured feels all the more incalculable.
Romance transmit such messy, complex emotions in simple, affecting ways. On “Somewhere in the Silence,” a line from Dion’s “Tell Him” is looped: “Never let him go.” The first word is initially truncated, but the rest of the line—let him go—is bellowed. In the original song, Barbra Streisand tells Dion to fight for love, but here any uplift becomes anxiety. The reversed loops heighten the nervousness; it’s as if Dion were replaying different scenarios in her head, paralyzed by a relationship’s uncertain future. “Just a Moment” is even more evocative: The titular line from 2002’s “A New Day Has Come” arrives like a holy decree, echoing the unbridled joy Dion feels upon finding a lover. But “Just a Moment” takes its title from “I Will Be Stronger,” a track from nearly two decades later about surviving a loss. In Romance’s hands, “a new day has come” is a polysemic phrase: love from another and love of self are both crucial to moving forward.
For all the excitement in dissecting Romance’s samples, Once Upon a Time devotes its second half to more straightforward ambience. “Remember” is all ice-cold synths and wispy vocals, while “Crying Is the Only Thing That Gets Me Through” invokes cinematic drama with sustained strings. “I’ve Been Blown by the Wind” proves the star of this three-track run, with vocals on the precipice of coherency: The mere suggestion of a moving lyric is enough to summon bliss. Once Upon a Time lets you peer into all that love can do, encasing fairy-tale experiences and heart-stirring emotions in amber. Romance help you crave love as much as relive it, knowing full well—with help from Céline Dion—that such feelings can last a lifetime.


Though Rokia Traoré’s past albums established her as a fine singer, her new Beautiful Africa feels more accomplished than ever, her voice bending around her words (sung mostly in Bamana) with flourishes of subtle vibrato.

Beautiful Africa

The first thing you hear on Rokia Traoré's Beautiful Africa is a drum beat, unadorned. It only lasts a few seconds before the guitars wrap around it like a veil, but it still feels revealing, as though we opened the door on the music just a few seconds before it was ready for us. That thump and tap, in a rhythm a bit like Radiohead’s “Idioteque,” tells us a lot about the album that follows: This is a record that grooves but also invites the listener to come closer, to step into its space, be still and listen. Traoré and producer John Parish have captured this music in all its rhythmic grace with great intimacy, capturing each slide up the bass or thrum of the n’goni with direct clarity.
For music with such rhythmic body, precision in capturing the singular character of each sound is often beside the point. But Traoré’s music benefits immensely from it-- you can hear the way the her guitar twists around the other guitars and Mamah Diabaté’s dusty n’goni, and the sound sets this thicket of repeated, interlocking phrases inside the full-bodied rhythm section. The effect is of music that lives two rhythmic lives in tandem, and each one pushes the other, leaving her voice free to glide loosely over the top. Traoré’s past albums established her as a fine singer, but here, she feels more accomplished than ever, her voice bending around her words (sung mostly in Bamana) with flourishes of subtle vibrato.
Moreover, she’s developed the dynamic range of her singing and writing. “Sikey” and “Lalla” both offer slippery funk, but with two completely different feels, while “N’Téri” travels in time over its nine and a half minutes, from hushed and skeletal n’goni topped by some of Traoré’s most incredible, full-throated singing to a whirling, driving electric song. The final couple of minutes surge on a bed of beatboxing and roiling guitar. It’s an amazing performance, and a good contrast to the more concise and straightforwardly funky songs.
Traoré is from Mali, and her music carries many signatures of her homeland, from the n’goni to the language to the circular guitar figures, but her sound is fundamentally international, swallowing tradition and modernity whole to create a pop sound she can quite easily call her own. Being from her country means contending with the legacies of some of West Africa’s most internationally successful artists; at this point, I’d say Traoré fits comfortably alongside her forbears.


Throwing open his studio doors, the pianist aims for a loose, mixtape-like vibe, but the stacked guest list yields a scattershot party that only ends up overstaying its own welcome.

Fuck Yo Feelings

In the mini-documentary that accompanies Robert Glasper’s Fuck Yo Feelings, the Grammy-winning pianist and composer explains, “I want this whole thing to be mixtape vibe, so when we put it together it’s like a beat here, might be a song here, then we fuck around talking here.” To achieve this sort of free-form setup, Glasper welcomed a guest list of MCs, singers, and musicians—including Yasiin Bey, Herbie Hancock, YBN Cordae, Denzel Curry, and Audra Day—to pass through a studio in New York City and jam. The goal was to allow the artists to form organic bonds and strike up creative collaborations on the fly. But despite the accomplished cast, there’s little spark about the fruits of those sessions: Fuck Yo Feelings is a 71-minute melange of tepid sonic backdrops that lacks the vital momentum and progression inherent in any effective mixtape.
Fuck Yo Feelings begins with an almighty misstep in the shape of the nearly five-minute “Intro,” hosted by comedian and actor Affion Crockett. The premise has Crockett roasting various band members and riffing on the no-fucks-given album title over a growling bass line. It’s a cringe fest. After encouraging the listener to tell the person nearest to them, “Fuck yo feelings,” Crockett breaks into a rant: “You are welcome to fuck they feelings with my dick, disease-free fucking, yeah, fuck they feelings, nasty porno style with some cream on they god damn back.” The barbs are neither shocking or amusing—and the “Intro” completely jars against the prevailing mellow tone of the next 18 songs that follow.
The core sound of Fuck Yo Feelings brings to mind the dusky, keys-laced mid-tempo beats that the Ummah trio of Q-Tip, J Dilla, and Ali Shaheed Muhammad mined during the 1990s. Only here the loops are replaced by drummer Chris Dave’s clipped snares, bassist Derrick Hodge’s warm low-end patterns, and Glasper’s feathery keys. The players’ chops are undisputed, but the relaxed, easygoing nature of the grooves they slip into sap the MCs’ bars of energy. Sometimes this happens quite literally, like when the usually erudite Chicago rapper Mick Jenkins gets pushed out of “Let Me In” early, departing the track and letting the song amble along for another three minutes of spacey keys and tippy-tappy drums.
When Glasper ushers singers to the forefront, this style of low-key neo-soul production works. During the album’s midsection, the sultry, hushed vocals of Yebba, Audra Day, Baby Rose, and SiR seem to sink into the tracks they sing on. For a moment, there’s a seamless blend between vocal tone and musical backing. But the spell doesn’t last. Instead, the last third of the album becomes a meandering slog that takes in a four-minute shout-out track featuring Glasper’s slurry, pitched-down vocals, plus a series of free-associative musings courtesy of Yasiin Bey that, clocking in at seven minutes, sound like their own self-contained project.
The sprawling structure of Fuck Yo Feelings suffers from the same excess that blighted the hip-hop mixtape market during the 2000s, when shunting 20 or 30 tracks onto a project was erroneously seen as a smart hustle rather than something likely to exhaust a listener. Towards the end of Glasper’s mixtape, he names a track after GZA’s crime-rhyme classic Liquid Swords. This is the same learned MC who also once advocated, “Make it brief, son, half short and twice strong”—advice that would have served Fuck Yo Feelings well.


Mouse on Mars’ latest is a 43-minute suite broken up by short movements featuring a wide array of guests. The duo’s try-anything spirit remains embedded in every note.

Dimensional People

Across the last quarter-century, Jan St. Werner and Andi Toma have moved from dense noise to sleek electro-pop to carefully arranged post-rock, equally comfortable with wispy ambient tracks and banging dance tunes. While certain threads run through the German duo’s work—playful humor, an off-kilter rhythmic sensibility, an ear for colorful electronic texture—they never codified their quirks and sensibilities into a single identifiable aesthetic. There is no one sound of Mouse on Mars. For devoted fans, that’s a good thing, because you never know exactly what their next album is going to sound like. But their eclecticism has also confined them to a certain cult status. Their latest, Dimensional People, once again sounds unlike anything else they’ve made, the try-anything spirit of Mouse on Mars remains embedded in every note.
This appears at first glance to be a genre of album with a long history: DJ + All-Star Guests. From the Chemical Brothers to Daft Punk to UNKLE, electronic producers have created album-length statements by working with rappers and indie rock artists of various stripes. This sort of record has had a checkered history, yielding some great singles and its share of duds. But while contributions here from Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon, Beirut’s Zach Condon, Spank Rock, the National’s Aaron and Bryce Dessner, and more slot it within this shaky tradition, Dimensional People is far more coherent as a single statement than that might suggest. Mouse on Mars integrate their guests into the larger project, rather than giving them space to shine on their own. The contributors become building blocks in service of arrangement, which mostly works to the record’s advantage.
Dimensional People emerged out of a heady multimedia installation involving robots, live musicians, specialized software, and an immersive speaker setup. The essence of the project was its modular nature—by recording the base material in the same key and tempo, the various parts could be shuffled, shifted, and folded together so it would still make sense as a single piece.Those established rules shape the feel of Dimensional People in album format, as well. Instead of individual songs, it’s more of a 43-minute suite broken up by movements.
The opening rattle of a woodblock—that’s a robotic instrument “playing” it—carries through the first four tracks. It’s a twitchy pulse that undergirds the music, as horns and strings and slide guitar move in and out. In some ways, this first section calls back to another period of Mouse on Mars’ history, the post-rock of the mid and late ’90s, where familiar instruments from the rock-band set-up were being used in ways that defied genre categorization. When the vocals enter, they are, appropriately enough, those of Justin Vernon, at whose Wisconsin studio a chunk of the album was recorded. As on much of the last Bon Iver album, 22, A Million, Vernon’s voice is used as a sound rather than a vehicle for transmitting lyrics. His yelps and coos and wails are clipped and layered back upon themselves, and the words are both difficult to make out and beside the point.
Vernon’s contributions to the early passages (he also adds guitar) reflect the album at its best, when guests retain hints of their musical personality but are subsumed within the larger structure. Stemming from that are “Foul Mouth” and “Aviation,” which feature vocals from Amanda Blank and Spank Rock, respectively. These tracks are deeply weird and wonderful, mixing a profanity-laced rap, harmonized vocals that sound like the Beach Boys in a blender, and gorgeous swells of pedal steel guitar. It’s nothing you’ve heard but it’s also intensely musical, an affecting masterpiece of arranged parts.
As the album moves on, the flow becomes oblong and harder to parse. Sam Amidon brings his Appalachian folk obsessions to “Parliament of Aliens Part I,” where his vocals are mixed with a sawing violin and a swell of voices that sound as if they’re being processed through a Buchla synth. Where the old world/new world mashup of the record’s first half comes off like an effortless hybrid, the Amidon track feels like a fragment. But the handful of skippable sections aren’t really an issue on an album that moves along so briskly. In the back half, “Resumé,” featuring septuagenarian R&B eccentric Swamp Dogg, brings to mind Daft Punk’s “Giorgio by Moroder,” as the vocalist offers observations on his past over music that is constantly building and falling apart. By the time the record winds down it reveals itself to be a kind of meditation on American music, with pronounced elements of rock, jazz, folk, blues, rap, and minimalism all tied together with a Van Dyke Parks-like flair. But it arrives at this whole in a sneaky way, and it manages to avoid feeling like a concept album, or like anything else Mouse on Mars, or anyone, have done.


Underneath the Pine finds Chaz Bundick largely shedding his synth-pop roots in favor of a vastly expanded instrumental palette.

Underneath the Pine

When Chaz Bundick sang, "I found a job I do it fine/ Not what I want but still I try," on "Blessa", it became Causers of This' most-quoted lyric for obvious reasons. Not only can all of us relate to that sentiment at some point in our lives, but it also drew a direct line between the escapism of home-made electro-pop and the lives of most of the people creating it. Talk about Hipstamatic prints, Ariel Pink, and surfing all you want, but y'know, it's also the economy, stupid. Now, I've never shared a cubicle with Bundick, but that kind of resignation is completely at odds with his work ethic as Toro Y Moi, given the steady stream of remixes and side projects he's released in the time since. Just over a year later, he's already the first of the A-listers from this scene to release a follow-up. But if he was feeling any pressure to validate himself and his peers, Underneath the Pine doesn't show it. The album may be too lyrically opaque to have a line as bloggable as "Blessa"'s, but it's a far richer and more accomplished whole, and it makes a strong case for Bundick as an artist with scope, ambition, and a firm grasp of how to balance the two.
Underneath the Pine begins a little like the last album, with a wobbly, splayed-out chord backing Bundick's cooed vocal salutation. But where "Blessa"'s murky, aquamarine production set the tone for most of Causers, this album's "Intro/Chi Chi" is a textured instrumental that trigger memories of Air's "La Femme D'Argent" and underscores one of Bundick's most overlooked assets: his ability to create an appealingly lush ambiance. That mood plays a central role in Underneath the Pine, as much of the album sheds Bunwick's synth-pop roots in favor of a vastly expanded instrumental palette that includes organ, pianos, chimes, and plenty of live drumming. Bundick's skill as an arranger is especially evident in Pine's midsection: though casually paced and humid as his native South Carolina, it pulls from the French pop and krautrock obsessions of Broadcast and Stereolab, imbuing pastoral, acoustic plucks and synth drones with rhythmic purpose, and making retro chic somehow still sound futuristic.
All of this sonic exploration is in service to Bundick's growth as a songwriter. Big choruses like the one on "How I Know" come unexpectedly during what at first appear to be endless motorik grooves, as plainspoken vocal melodies give way to double-helix harmonies. Even the tracks that keep a lower profile maintain enough ballast to prevent the zone-outs that pockmarked Causers. They also serve to set off the big singles, "New Beat" and "Still Sound". Heard individually, those songs' straight-up funk delivery mostly sounded like twists on a successful formula, but in context on Underneath the Pine, they underscore how Bundick's knack for analog warmth always comes in the name of physicality and groove. You may want to try and peg where the drum sounds come from-- maybe Innervisions, maybe even Midnite Vultures-- but rhythmic interplay this addictive has to be felt, not simply conjured from memory.
Because Toro Y Moi is so closely linked with the likes of Neon Indian, Washed Out, and Memory Tapes, it's tempting to read into the success of Underneath the Pine as some predictor of those bands' collective staying power, or a direction others might take. But Bundick seems to be following nothing but his own internal compass. Late in the album, "Good Hold" comes off like an Eno tribute of detuned piano dissonance, and then morphs into the blissful glide of album closer, "Elise". It's a fitting send-off to Underneath the Pine, suggesting that Toro Y Moi's first great album probably won't be his last, or his best.


The L.A. producer's second LP dredges up a jaggedly delicate sound that merges gently wafting electronic tones with intricately decaying rhythmic atmosphere.

Bad Vibes

Establishing a sonic personality without lyrical assistance or some unique personal backstory can be tricky, especially when you're in the middle of a room crowded with your peers. The space in question is the one with a "for fans of Flying Lotus" sign posted over the door, and there hasn't been a ton of vacancy in there lately. Those who've broken out have done so by tweaking the sonic imprint of decaying beats and melting analog chords until they come across as distinctly tactile things, humid and slippery, blown-out and elastic.
Reaching out to clutch the music on Shlohmo's Bad Vibes might cause it to crumble in your grasp-- and then cut the hell out of your fingers. The L.A. producer's sophomore full-length comes after a handful of singles, EPs, remixes, and compilation appearances, as well as last year's disorienting debut, Shlomoshun Deluxe. And in that short yet busy time, Shlohmo has dredged up something strange: an aesthetic that's jaggedly delicate, filled with melodic beauty but jostled by abrasive percussive hitches, undercut with sandpapery patches of ambient fuzz. It's a deft merging of gentle, wafting electronic tones and intricately beat-to-shit rhythmic atmosphere, the sounds of old technology trying to reconcile its former gloss with its fading functionality.
The cynical ears that still can't get past the nostalgic surface of chillwave might have their own bone to pick with the cassette-deck/VHS fidelity of Bad Vibes, which stands out pretty prominently in hissy tracks like "Same Time" and "Parties". But instead of celebrating corroded, neon-pastel magnetic-tape detritus for its own sake, the music on this album leans closer to an appreciation of the actual rhythmic counterpoints, quirks, and resonant qualities of white noise. Alongside the moments that seem to revel in the flutter and crackle of old equipment are stretches that draw similar vibes from the sound of literal rainfall ("Seriously") or birdcall-strewn field recordings ("Big Feelings")-- not to mention the texture you can get from good old-fashioned feedback, like the keyboard squall of "Trapped in a Burning House".
The beats themselves are striking enough, whether they're the distant trickling clicks of "Sink" or the sharp, crisp snap-thump grooves that push along cuts like "Places" or "Same Time". Yet even the moments where the beat feels secondary to the other instrumentation have a pulse to them, run through floaty guitars or humming synthesizers that converse with the ambient hiss in compelling ways. Still, neither the melody nor the ambience overwhelms the other. It's easy to hear the silky, billowy tones through the dying-battery distortion, but hard to picture what they'd sound like without it.


Trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell follows his own dream logic on this 1981 LP, which synthesized his hybrid of jazz and minimalism, ambient and exotica, ancient ethnic music and glitchy electronics.

Jon Hassell: Dream Theory in Malaya: Fourth World Volume Two

In the 1930s, the Mormon missionary-turned-novice anthropologist Kilton Stewart happened upon an indigenous tribe in the Central Mountain Range of Southeast Asia’s Malay Peninsula. After his time spent among the Senoi, Stewart was struck by what he deemed the tribe’s close proximity to dream worlds. “The Senoi believes that any human being, with the aid of his fellows, can outface, master, and actually utilize all beings and forces in the dream universe,” Stewart wrote in his 1954 book Pygmies and Dream Giants. The notion of such dream interpretation slowly moved westward; dream discussion groups have proliferated into the present day.
The trumpeter and composer Jon Hassell may have titled his fourth album, Dream Theory in Malaya, after Stewart’s paper. But in the notes that accompany this reissue, he finds himself taken less by Stewart and more by “the cinematic sound of the word ‘Malay’” and “a little romance with an exotically-tuned woman from Kuala Lumpur.” Such transubstantiation lies at the heart of Hassell’s music, wherein jazz fusion and minimalist composition, ambient and exotica, ancient ethnic music and glitchy electronics all jostle for headspace. This 1981 album fully synthesized such a hybrid for Hassell’s decade ahead, when his influence would snake through the work of his closest collaborator Brian Eno as well as the likes of David Sylvian, Peter Gabriel, and Tears for Fears. While Eno coined the concept of Another Green World, it was Hassell who imagined the indigenous sounds of this planet, a notion that came to be known as Fourth World music. Now into the 21st century, new producers are still grappling with its possibilities.
To find Hassell’s trumpet here is to be spun into a hall of mirrors, the timbre of his horn stretched, chopped, twisted, and processed beyond recognition. Take the maddening glitches of “Chor Moiré.” Thanks to an early use of digital delay effects, it reimagines Hassell and the horn as a skipping CD—as malfunctioning birdcall, as fingernail on sandpaper—anticipating the sounds of late 1990s clicks’n’cuts and the Mille Plateux roster in just over two minutes. Thanks to the harmonizer effect deployed by Hassell, the trumpet’s timbre on “Dream Theory” can sound like an amplified sigh, like a divine choir, and then like a telephone wire of cawing crows at sundown.
As readily as Hassell warps his instrument into strange new shapes, he also finds accomplices from all corners. Dream Theory receives input not just from Eno (in hindsight, Hassell admits to “under-crediting” him) but also from famed land artist Walter De Maria. There are contributions from a bog of frogs, some exotic birds, and a few seconds from a field recording of Proto-Malay kids splashing in some water and giggling at the sound it makes. All such elements toggle between melody, texture, and rhythm in Hassell’s matrix, almost any one of them liable to shape-shift over the duration of a piece. So when the thundering drums of “Courage” enter, they suggest a furious propulsive movement. But as Hassell smears his trumpet across their polyrhythms, they instead turn atmospheric, hanging in place. The breathy ambience of “Gift of Fire” soon grows dense and dizzying with its loops and layers.
Dream Theory’s compositions act as aural illusions, seemingly static and inert, though they deposit you on another shore by the time you reach the other side of a longer piece like “Malay.” Hassell anticipates the looped angelic vocals of Juliana Barwick with his horn during its opening section, before it fans out to sound like his own impression of a pygmy tribe’s vocal trills, mingling with those aforementioned kids and their splashed rhythms. That water sample continues to slosh around and widen until it becomes an ocean, with Hassell hovering over its surface like an alien craft. While Dream Theory’s roots touch on minimal composition, jazz, raga, and ambient, Hassell ultimately follows his own dream logic, conjuring not just another world but also its own atmosphere.


The French artist’s music absorbs and unsettles, juxtaposing whispers, wisps of atmospheric noise, and digitally rendered instruments that float around the auditory field in uncanny ways.

Image Langage

Even the smallest sound is overflowing with information. Birdsong can give clues as to when and where it was recorded; the grain of someone’s voice can reveal their emotional state. The quieter it is, the deeper we listen. French musician and writer Félicia Atkinson harnesses and subverts this process of interpreting our perceptions, creating surreal sound environments that sit right next to the ear but stretch towards a distant horizon. Her music resists the brain’s desire for spatial continuity and shatters its expectations for a unified perspective, juxtaposing whispers, wisps of atmospheric noise, and digitally rendered instruments that float around the auditory field in uncanny ways.
“Music is about mystery and reconciliation,” Atkinson said in a recent interview. “Music can transform things into a kind of a code. If you take language, you can find this in poetry—the idea that sometimes meaning is not enough. You have to step back and look further than meaning to be in the experience.” Atkinson’s work frequently references a complex web of concepts, histories and philosophies, but the most satisfying way to listen is to let go of any preconceptions and engage with it second by second, taking it in as you might a landscape or a particularly vivid dream.
This peculiar immediacy is a defining feature of Atkinson’s Image Langage. The music unfolds slowly, drifting from one point to another, but it never quite settles into a state of tranquility. Despite surface-level similarities to the type of ambient music spoon-fed to acolytes of wellness programs and chill-out playlists, there are frequent wrinkles that resist easy listening: her voice recorded as such close range it encroaches on our sense of personal space; shimmers of tense static; irregular pulses panning back and forth. For each plaintive melody there’s a hidden detail, like a field recording that only reveals itself upon close inspection, or a camouflaged synth tone lurking near the bottom of the mix. Presented with extreme intimacy, the disquieting elements of Image Langage are as absorbing as its pastoral expanse. Unsettling details render the texture of sound tangible.
Much of Atkinson’s music revolves around slow, deliberate passages of spoken text recorded at extremely close range, where the tone of her voice is caught in a state between urgency and detachment. This is still a major element of Image Langage, but she supplements it with an increasingly diverse array of instrumentation. Fluttering organ drones swaddle her voice on the title track, and on opener “La Brume,” a reverb-soaked saxophone straight out of Angelo Badalamenti’s soundtracks emerges from a layer of drifting synthesizer. (Like Badalamenti, Atkinson is also fixated on creating the impression of something hidden just beneath the surface of her music.) Rich extended tones form the backbone of most tracks, but they sometimes provide a sense of foreboding, as on “Pieces of Sylvia,” where a single note opens up into the quivering dissonance of a semitone, tenaciously held.
Ambiguity reigns on Image Langage, especially in moments like the opening of “The Lake Is Speaking,” where Atkinson overlays the sounds of birds singing and objects rustling with a flickering digital chime. The line between synthesized elements and field recording becomes blurred, complicating our mental image of the scene. Passages of tension evolve out of the album’s most placid tones, and she often lets transitional moments linger, emphasizing the power of in-betweenness. Sitting with that ambiguity creates a sensation of groundlessness, allowing the listener to question their own habits of making meaning. Like a dense morning fog, this music obscures the expected vistas while offering a stranger, less clearly defined type of beauty.


The third album from the UK singer-songwriter is unerringly compassionate. Her brooding post-punk is an unsettling backdrop for songs about the refugee crisis, Islamophobia, and poisonous politicians.

Holiday Destination

Nadine Shah’s third album surveys the refugee crisis, Syrian families, gentrification, “a fascist in the White House,” Islamophobia, and politicians’ demonization of the north of England. She does a lot of work in ten songs, but it rarely feels like it. On her first two albums, her theatrical voice oozed blood through fairly traditional guitar-band arrangements. But on Holiday Destination, the setting is brittle, brooding post-punk, her singing lowered to a glowering monotone that makes more subtle use of her vocal power. It sustains an unsettling mood rather than a series of bold-type headlines.
As a British Muslim woman with Norwegian and Pakistani heritage, Shah is all too familiar with the exclusionary rhetoric around concepts of ‘home.’ “Where would you have me go? I’m second generation don’t you know,” she levels at racists who tell her to go back to where she came from on the intimidating “Out the Way.” Her jagged saxophone and guitar rattle like old machinery, evoking a knackered suspension unit—her bold North-Eastern accent and the smokestack aesthetic only deepening her connection with her industrial hometown. But as righteous and exhilarating as Shah’s protests are, she knows they’re futile. “How can I compete with an ingrained thought?” she asks on the bittersweet “Evil.”
In an unerringly compassionate record, Shah focuses on the scurrilous leaders and toxic groupthink behind these prejudices rather than those who parrot them. She’s well versed in how elite charlatans deploy their poison. Later in “Evil,” she advises an opportunist hatemonger to “Tell your followers that I’m crazy if it stops them questioning anymore.” The corroded title track underpins a scene of refugees arriving to shores of angry tourists, their indignation stoked by “speakers grinning in their address to the crowd, how capacities are brimming, but empty buildings all around.” Coming from a personal angle, the clipped “2016” finds Shah alienated by her own body, invaded by broodiness and anxiety. “Now my friends are all detoxing,” she rues, a funny jibe at the cult of wellness and its inability to eradicate darker psychological toxins.
The sound of Holiday Destination mirrors that sense of being overtaken by insidious forces. These are long songs that lull listeners into Shah’s bleak world before delivering a jolt—a guitar solo or tempo hairpin—that makes you reconsider your surroundings. Only one track, “Yes Men,” lacks intrigue: a sodden torch song where her voice carries all the weight, though her accent lends distinction. “No way, man, you’re surrounded by yes men,” she sings, sounding dismissive and forlorn. As she finds her world looking less familiar, the music also becomes more surreal. Monstrous backing vocals and playful percussion enliven the uncanny domestic setting of “Ordinary,” and on “Relief,” creepy, Stereolab-indebted cabaret soundtracks the mundane becoming manic.
In the past, Shah has been compared to PJ Harvey, mostly for the bloodlust in her voice. But Holiday Destination has a fair amount in common with Harvey’s last album, 2016’s The Hope Six Demolition Project—they’re similar in tone and ambition, though Shah’s personal investment in her themes gives her record an immediacy that was lacking in Harvey’s dispassionate project. Holiday Destination is always deeply felt, and no more so than on its last song, “Jolly Sailor,” named for a pub in her hometown. Wobbling bass and dreamy synths channel the drunken wooziness of Shah’s lyrics, as she watches fathers and sons sing karaoke together, “toast to battles lost,” “speak of holidays of work that pays.” It’s a tender portrait of the kind of working-class community that politicians goad into fearing the other and voting against their best interests, only to be characterized as feckless drains on the economy themselves. Holiday Destination is compellingly bleak, but Shah’s defiance and willingness connect the dots to make it hopeful.


The expansive companion album to last year’s A Crow Looked At Me is no less a marvel. Phil Elverum’s latest is part memoir and part magnum opus, sung softly and with wonder.

Now Only

Phil Elverum’s music feels like a conversation. His songs move at a relaxed pace, quiet and hypnotic, sung in a boyish voice amid passages of near-silence, as if to induce private reflection from both artist and listener. But Elverum also makes records that are in conversation with each other: Lyric sheets come with annotations, songs beget sequels, album titles become band names. It’s a literary tendency that’s made his large body of work, from his lo-fi recordings as the Microphones through his later work as Mount Eerie, a deep and rewarding refuge that he’s perpetuated by occasionally breaking the fourth wall. In his self-published diary he released in 2008, he introduced himself, “Hello. I am a self-mythologizer.”
This mythology—which involves his hometown of Anacortes, Washington; the shape of the universe; the wisdom of the natural world; and Elverum’s (and, by extension, everyone’s) place in it all—came to an abrupt end last year. He composed his 13th album, A Crow Looked at Me, in a dark fog after the death of his wife, Geneviève, with whom he had a daughter. It wasn’t the first time Elverum’s work had been starkly autobiographical, but it was the first time that it didn’t seem to be in service of a larger poetic vision. “There is nothing to learn,” he sang in a pivotal moment. “Her absence is a scream/Saying nothing.”
Almost exactly one year after that release comes Now Only, an expansive and embattled companion album. The songs on Crow were defined by solitude—thoughts spiraling in the absence of somebody to receive them. By comparison, Now Only is downright crowded with ideas, even if one person remains at the center of everything. Its six tracks are long and knotty, comprising multiple movements and following non-linear narratives. In the title track, Elverum reflects on touring his most vulnerable work, faced with live audiences and other acts on the road. Released back into society, he lets his mind return to the hospital waiting rooms where he sat waiting for his wife and considers the other people who quietly accompanied him there with their own stories of loss. Elsewhere, he looks at Norwegian art, listens to the black metal band Wolves in the Throne Room, runs into Father John Misty, and watches the news. The world opens up. Sometimes reluctantly and sometimes with new serenity, he finds his footing in it again.
With that shift, images that felt blurred and distant in Crow’s lingering heatwave come into focus. In crucial moments, we learn about Geneviève prior to her cancer diagnosis. “Tintin in Tibet” depicts her as Elverum’s 22-year-old soulmate—the couple living blissfully as vagabonds, playing shows around the country. Opening with a simple declaration—“I sing to you”—and exploring the implications of each of those simple words, his lyrics sink deeper and deeper into his memory, like water through soil. Where Elverum once sought Geneviève in abstract forms, she appears to him as herself here. When Elverum turns to these thoughts, the music finds balance and momentum.
Another comforting reappearance on Now Only is the analog sprawl of earlier Mount Eerie records. While the music on Crow was built from skeletal, often dissonant acoustic guitar progressions, Now Only recalls his previous, more atmospheric work. The ringing drones throughout “Distortion” sound like fallout from his ambient black metal experiments; “Earth” stomps with a grungy drawl that recalls the garage-folk bluster of 2008’s Black Wooden Ceiling Opening. The climactic “Two Paintings by Nikolai Astrup” even begins with a direct lyrical callback to an earlier song. “I know no one,” he sings, repeating the title of a 2005 track and assessing how that mantra applies to his life now.
These references beckon to a younger, simpler version of Mount Eerie, but they also become a grounding force for the record. Now Only feels as much like an epilogue to Crow as it does a dark forest road back to the wide-open landscapes of his earlier records—a search for meaning, for permanence and continuity. For a collection of such complex songs, it flows with seamless intricacy, one thought leading into the next, even when they seem at war with each other. At times, it suggests a dismissal of Crow’s magical nihilism for something more earthbound, demanding logic in the face of destruction. “I sing to you,” Elverum concludes one song. In the opening lines of the next, he clarifies, “But I don’t believe in ghosts or anything.”
The tension in Elverum’s songwriting lives in the space between those ideas. His questions are plentiful (“Who am I talking to?” “What am I saying?”), and the ground he covers to answer them is vast. While Crow moved chronologically through a brief but intense period of time, Now Only tells a longer story, stretching back to his childhood. During “Distortion,” one of Elverum’s most ambitious compositions to date, he describes an early encounter with death, reciting a passage from the Bible at a funeral but finding more resonance in the open casket. In “Earth,” he lets a rare, friendly euphemism slip into his writing: “You’re sleeping out in the yard now,” he sings. Then, as a means of self-correction, he describes what is actually happening to her body, bone by bone, in the yard where she’s buried.
Despite that verse—his most harrowing and physical description of decay—Now Only isn’t as easily categorized as its predecessor. These songs arrive with such urgency, such purpose, that it feels all-encompassing: part-memoir, part magnum opus. His songs play like they’re being conjured in real time, surging with a driving intensity that feels more like post-rock than folk and puts his work at odds with similarly diaristic epics from peers like Mark Kozelek or Sufjan Stevens. In “Distortion,” Elverum finds a foil in late-in-life Jack Kerouac. Accompanying himself with persistent, low harmonies, he sings about the aging writer “taking cowardly refuge in his self-mythology” as an excuse to shirk his responsibilities as a parent and an artist. Elverum allows himself no such escape, even if he’s increasingly aware of the limitations of his project.
“These waves hit less frequently/They thin and then they are gone,” he sings in “Now Only.” Elverum is not describing an end to mourning—a flat, constant thing. Instead, he’s addressing the inevitable side effect of writing these first-hand accounts, stories that can only be repeated so many times before they lead to a different kind of death. The record closes with its bleakest, barest track, “Crow Pt. 2.” After listing a series of symbolic incarnations of Geneviève, Elverum admits in a broken sigh, “I don’t see you anywhere.” The song doesn’t stop there, though—it echoes beyond. Death is real, but it isn’t necessarily the end.