The Japanese-British pop singer’s debut is a Y2K flashback that’s as reverent of Evanescence and Korn as it is of Britney and Christina.

SAWAYAMA

The scene: TRL, 1999. The tweens: legion, transforming Times Square into a cheer section and breaking the dial-up internet voting for their video faves. Those videos: Backstreet Boys, Britney, and Korn’s “Freak on a Leash.” The nu-metal hit was No. 1 on TRL about 10 times—it probably would have topped the charts longer had MTV not pulled it after Columbine—and shared space with Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and other decidedly un-bubblegum bands. Of course, these days nu-metal is considered—to put it kindly—fairly uncool. But nobody relayed the genre’s future uncoolness to the tweenage millennials who imprinted on it: Grimes, Poppy, and now Japanese-British artist Rina Sawayama, who “kind of [likes] making really uncool things cool.”
SAWAYAMA, her debut album after years of retromaniac singles, does for Y2K pop what Hulu’s PEN15 did for Y2K middle school: recreates it to the tiniest detail. Many of us would like to escape to 2000 these days, and musicians more than anyone; in the span of a few months in 2018 we got songs called “1999” and “2002,” both of which interpolate the same Britney lyric, neither of which quite capture the year. But SAWAYAMA sounds like actual 1999 and 2002, when they had producers other than Max Martin, bands other than the boy variety, and arrangements so overproduced that now, in this time of endless chill, they’re almost refreshing. The album’s other big reference points are Timbaland and the Neptunes—particularly Exodus, the Timbaland-assisted album by J-pop star and Sawayama’s childhood idol Utada Hikaru—and “heavier Britney stuff.” Her audience is people who know exactly which songs she means.
The Korn-iest song on SAWAYAMA is lead single “STFU!”, in which Sawayama summons the genre’s aggression and redirects it against casual racists; in the video, they’re embodied by a composite of every white sadsack on Hinge, who serenades his date with actual shit Sawayama heard from label execs. But her take on nu-metal bypasses bros entirely, beginning with Garbage—at times Sawayama sounds eerily like Shirley Manson, or maybe Tori Amos if her Slayer cover was actual Slayer—and pivoting on the chorus to singsong bubblegum pop. So when she finally really lets loose, with a howling last note and roaring crescendo, the eruption’s been primed.
“STFU!” is also a bit of a red herring. Most of Sawayama’s nu-metal influence appears either in snippets, like the riffs that intermittently “flare up like an underlying zit” beneath “XS,” in translation, like the guitars that blend into new jack swing “Love Me 4 Me” by being so canned they’re shelf-stable, or in absence: the album’s gentlest, most contemplative song, which is called “Fuck This World.” Often, the artists to whom Sawayama pays homage are those who already blended the genres. “Dynasty” is an obvious take on Evanescence (“a little pocket of culture that people are maybe too scared [to reference],” she called the band) and is more like nu-melodrama: an intro with an airhorn but also strings, butt-rock but also church bells, a showy guitar solo but also a soprano vocal tracing it. “Who’s Gonna Save U Now?” is like the lost third sibling to Britney’s “Stronger” and Christina’s “Fighter,” and the song, complete with cheering fans and call-and-response, captures arena heroics in these arenaless times.
The production of SAWAYAMA is so immaculate that when she attempts to satirize pop music, she plays the part too well. “XS” (pronounced “excess”) matches style to subject, luxuriating in the rhymes of “Tesla Xs” with “Calabasas.” It could be a lost Cora Corman track from Music and Lyrics—which is to say, only satire in context. The slinky “Comme Des Garçons (Like the Boys)” mashes together “I Feel Love,” Christine and the Queens’ “Girlfriend,” a thwacking house beat, and Madonna-esque backing vocals into something supposedly about Beto O’Rourke. But even if you didn’t pick up on that, it still sounds like hitting yourself in the head with a silk scarf wrapped around your fist.
Most of the album, though, is absolutely irony-free, and better for it. The chorus of “Bad Friend,” the rare friend-breakup song by the guilty party, cloaks Sawayama’s voice in a thick cloak of vocoder that falls away at the last “friend”: a sudden pang of sincerity, when it’s too late. “Chosen Family” pairs a Nickelodeon-sweet melody with Danny L Harle production, and the sugar content would overwhelm almost any topic but this: the “chosen family” of LGBTQ friends, which hasn’t often received the specific affirmation of pop ballads. “Paradisin’” begins with a video-game blip like it’s zapping you back to teenagerdom and runs on the manic, buzzing-out-of-your skin energy of being 15 and damning all consequences.
Best of all, at the end, is “Snakeskin.” The track begins like a torch song or an aria, Sawayama’s voice heavy and ominous. She goes into a sinuous vocal coil—the corresponding “heavier Britney song” is probably “Over to You Now”—then lets it build to a hissing drop (maybe more 2013 than 2003, but who’s counting?). Even if it didn’t interpolate the Final Fantasy fanfare, it would still sound like defeating the world. That’s what sets Sawayama apart: A neural network could add Papa Roach to its aughties pastiche. What’s harder to fake is the desperate, pulsing emotion beneath the songs, the kind that demands listeners pour in their own emotion until the song overflows.


Embracing the Y2K R&B of her youth, Erika de Casier molds the silvery avant-gardism of artists like Aaliyah and Janet Jackson into an ultra-stylish throwback for the era of ASMR.

Still

The best era of pop music is the one that you grew up with—a truism that feels like fact if, like Erika de Casier and this writer, music television was your oxygen in the year 2000. Recently the conveyor belt of retromania has returned the sparkly, silvery aesthetic of Aaliyah, TLC, and Jennifer Lopez to relevancy, but Y2K revivalism finds its most meticulous acolyte in de Casier, whose third album is a faithful evocation of a very specific moment in Black American music—a time when pop domination and electronic avant-gardism were two sides of the same coin.
On her previous albums, the Copenhagen singer and producer combed through ’90s and ’00s UK garage and glimmers of IDM as well as the strain of juddering future-R&B separatism led by Timbaland, Missy Elliott, and Aaliyah. The turn-of-the-millennium styling of 2021’s Sensational elevated de Casier to critical darling, but her biggest commercial success has come through collaboration with the K-pop outfit NewJeans, translating Jersey club bounce into two stratospheric singles, “Super Shy” and “Cool With You.”
On Still—the title references both J.Lo and Dr. Dre—de Casier narrows her focus, sticking mostly to a palette of sweet, head-register vocals in the lineage of Janet, Mýa, and Ashanti; plucked strings and stuttering rhythms à la Darkchild and Timbaland; and an air of restraint that feels purposely adult, as outlined by Sade and Maxwell. The Proustian madeleine tastes good. Slippery, sensual “ooh” is a testament to Aaliyah and Tim’s greatest hits, a jerking boudoir grind that throws in a line from Ice Cube and Ms. Toi’s raunch anthem “You Can Do It.” There are fourth-wall-breaking ad-libs straight from the postmodern ’90s—some of them in Danish—like the “Stop!” that brings “Ice” to a halt. On that track, which grounds the album’s flawlessly catchy middle third, de Casier brings in Tampa rap duo They Hate Change for a sweet-and-sour duet like they used to do ’em—accusations are thrown, someone’s “on freezer mode” and Copenhagen’s giving the boys “frosty soles.”
The rise of Aaliyah in the middle of the ’90s called time on the big-haired belters of the previous generation and ushered in an intimate, heady style that remains the blueprint for countless young singers, including today’s close-mic stylists Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo. De Casier pushes this technique to fascinating extremes, her vocals set so far back in the mix they’re practically in reverse. Her performance on “The Princess,” a feminist reckoning with desire (“Is it wrong of me to want all the things I was shown all my life?”), is like sandpaper meeting velvet, showcasing her absolute control on a minute, ASMR-like scale.
De Casier’s subject matter is still mostly romantic, still riddled with modern problems—typically mediated through her phone. (The techno-pessimists of millennial R&B were some of the first to point out the romantic dangers of text and email.) Sometimes de Casier is the one making the booty call, like on “Home Alone,” where pillow talk is punctuated by sweat droplets and wisps of accordion. Other times she projects her tech anxieties onto an ex: “When your phone rings do you wish it was me? With my cute face that showed up on your screen?” On “My Day Off,” she draws her digital boundaries for the umpteenth time: “You can send me an email with all of your shit,” she sighs, “I need to do laundry, ’cause it doesn’t do itself.” Welcome to the boring dystopia.
From a wide angle it all adds up to a modern R&B version of “record collection rock”—in which the meticulous reproduction of vintage attributes becomes self-congratulatory catnip for the nerdiest listeners, and/or fans who remember it from the first time round. Indeed, I like it a lot. But the closer you get to Still, the more its anachronisms stand out. Most obvious from a production perspective are the languid, Afrobeats-shaped grooves of “Test It” and “Home Alone,” which hold up a mirror to the globalized pop world of the 2020s. For neophiles hungry for glimmers of the real future, not the old one, these slow-burners might be the most interesting ideas on the album, proposing de Casier as the princess of a new, borderless quiet storm. The present also bursts in on barely-there break-up ballad “Twice,” as pop traveler Blood Orange reminds us of his London accent in a wistful spoken verse: “You know my walls are tainted and nothing ever looks the same/I pass your flat on the night bus.”
De Casier, who turns 34 in March, has talked about being glued to MTV when she was a kid, finding solace in the visibility of Black pop icons as a mixed-race girl in a white country. But Aaliyah and Janet weren’t the only role models available on MTV Nordic—coincidentally, the same channel I was watching in those years. She might have idolized Mary J. Blige, Lauryn Hill, Toni Braxton. Why this sound, and not anything else from the riches of millennial R&B?
Maybe it’s about control, to borrow a term from Janet. With their silver suits and cutting-edge CGI, Tim and Missy offered an Afrofuturist vision of Blackness aligned with technology—and with it, perhaps, the opportunity to design yourself anew. De Casier’s songwriting often returns to demands for autonomy and order, whether chastising an “indecisive” lover or admitting she’s scared of showing her feelings. On “Busy,” from her last album, she lists off her morning routine—vitamins, meditation, skincare—in the impossible search for perfection. She even invented a raven-haired alter ego, Bianka, as a vessel to safely explore her diva-ish tendencies, though it seems Bianka is no longer necessary: On the cover of Still, encased in a black leather trench coat and bug-eye sunglasses, de Casier becomes the ice princess of her own dreams.
Like the superhero’s cape, costumes are powerful and pretend at the same time. Still imparts a similarly paradoxical thought. For all its finesse, it can obviously never replicate the futurism that defined its biggest inspirations; these classy reproductions only highlight the chasm between us and that halcyon moment. On the closing ballad “Someone,” de Casier inadvertently grapples with the same problem: “Someone once told me, ‘Just be yourself,’” she whispers—but as we all know, it’s not that easy. “Forgive me if I can’t do that, right now I’m just trying to be someone.”


The reissue of his 1989 collaboration with Elvis Costello reveals the art underneath its schlocky gloss. It is also the rarest of things: a McCartney record where you can sense his need to be loved.

Paul McCartney: Flowers in the Dirt [Deluxe Edition]

Flowers in the Dirt [Deluxe Edition]

Paul McCartney wasn’t exactly in the commercial doldrums in 1989, but he certainly understood ignominy was within his grasp. Press to Play, his 1986 album, generated no real hits to speak of. George Harrison—the young kid he brought into the Beatles back in 1958—bested Paul in 1987 with Cloud Nine, an album that contained the number one smash “Got My Mind Set on You” and a lesser hit called “When We Was Fab,” an affectionate nod to his time as a Moptop that played right into the lingering nostalgia from the 20th anniversary of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band* *in ’87.
Savvy as ever, McCartney decided it was time to strengthen his ties to his Beatles past on Flowers in the Dirt, the 1989 record that effectively opens the third act in his monumental career. McCartney designed Flowers in the Dirt to be taken out on the road in his first international tour in over a decade and while that in itself would’ve been a noteworthy event, he realized he should have a record to peddle as well. He’d been working on new songs but the project came into focus when his management suggested it might be a good idea to team with Elvis Costello, the former punk who had been a card-carrying member of the Beatles fan club since he was a kid.
Most of the contemporary press regarding Flowers in the Dirt highlighted the collaboration between Paul McCartney and Elvis Costello, positioning Costello as the salt to McCartney’s sugar. Comparisons to John Lennon were encouraged, as the publicity team pushed the idea that the songwriters composed “eyeball to eyeball,” just like the two Beatles did at the start of their career. Costello encouraged McCartney to dig out his iconic Höfner bass—he hadn’t used it since the Beatles—and the two wrote enough material to constitute a full record. But after initial sessions with Costello as a producer didn’t go as expected, Paul sought out other options, bringing in a bevy of producers (Micthell Froom, David Foster, Steve Lipson, and Trevor Horn) to help cast as wide of a net as possible with these songs. With McCartney also behind the boards, there was no shortage of cooks in the kitchen.
So it’s no wonder that things rarely cohere. “My Brave Face,” one of the four McCartney/Costello compositions (“Où Est le Soleil?,” originally a bonus track on the cassette and CD versions, is now officially canon), opens the album with a melodic punch. Any momentum it provides is crushed by the stiff synth-funk of “Rough Ride,” a Lipson/Horn production that should’ve been relegated to a B-side but instead exists as the worst second track ever released on an album. From there, Flowers in the Dirt proceeds in fits and starts, sometimes achieving a small measure of grace. McCartney always excelled in familial love, so “We Got Married” and the valentine to his son “Put It There” pull on the heartstrings. But the deliberate proto-digital gloss flattens the album, softening the edges of the Costello collaborations and disguising the loveliness of such sweet miniatures as “Distractions.”
It is the rarest of things: a Paul McCartney record where you can sense his need to be loved. Maybe if McCartney’s confidence hadn’t been shaken by Press to Play’s commercial underperformance—and if his competitiveness hadn’t been stoked by Harrison’s success—he would’ve settled on a single collaborator. But the parade of producers on Flowers in the Dirt suggests he’s trying every style in hopes of a hit. Maybe the hit could arrive on adult contemporary radio, so he has David Foster—the architect of Chicago’s ’80s comeback—polish “We Got Married.” Maybe he could squeak out an MTV hit with the help of Trevor Horn, or perhaps Costello could give him an assist on college radio, or maybe stoke some memories of the Beatles. McCartney decided to cover his bets, and he wound up with a record that feels constrained and insecure.
All of this calculation makes the Archive Collection—both in the slim double-disc and the absurdly overstuffed box—so revelatory. Both variations are built upon the demos McCartney recorded with Costello, both containing the spare guitar-and-voice renditions that recall the Everly Brothers more than Lennon/McCartney. These nine songs were recorded in the autumn of 1987 and they crackle with energy. They’re ragged and right, feeling more alive and cohesive than the album that came later. Some of the songs would show up on later records by both—“So Like Candy” is a centerpiece on Mighty Like a Rose and “The Lovers That Never Were” performed a similar role on Off the Ground—but the songs are best heard as a piece. Costello was too verbose and florid to be Lennon, but his melodic gifts and sarcasm challenged McCartney, who never relied on easy turns of phrase here. That’s why it’s better to have the songs heard as a collective: They’re stronger when played together.
The recently released Super Deluxe Edition contains full-band demos from 1988, which may have been the full-band renditions that McCartney decided were unsatisfactory. They’re livelier than Flowers in the Dirt, with “The Lovers That Never Were” suggesting the intricate melodicism of Costello’s Burt Bacharach collaboration Painted From Memory and “Playboy To a Man” riding an organ groove straight out of the Attractions. While some of the B-sides and mixes are entertaining—“Back on My Feet,” the flip of the UK-only hit “Once Upon A Long Ago” is an amiably anonymous ’80s adult contemporary cut and the highlight of the bunch—they wind up bolstering the slightly desperate nature of McCartney in 1989. The demos, however, offer a different story. Here, McCartney isn’t concerned with commerce, he’s just thrilled to be working with a musician who could be his equal as a writer and a performer. That’s the divide between the initial release of Flowers in the Dirt and the reissue: the 1989 LP is made for a mass audience, while the reissue reveals the art lurking underneath the gloss.


The Denver death-metal quartet’s wordless, old-school, analog synth music flips the genre’s atmospheric interstitials into towering showstoppers that invite deep concentration.

Timewave Zero

Last weekend, the members of Blood Incantation performed at Denver’s Gothic Theater, where they stood motionless behind racks of synthesizers on a stage lit by candles and decorated with a few carefully placed orbs and obelisks. The only guitar in sight was an acoustic, tucked away in the corner. The very setup meant that, even if they wanted to (say, for a surprise encore), the Colorado death-metal quartet would not be performing any recognizable version of the music that first won them an audience—initially in the metal underground, and then, with 2019’s breakthrough sophomore album Hidden History of the Human Race, far beyond its borders.
In place of those explosive, riff-heavy epics, Blood Incantation used this one-off show to debut Timewave Zero, a stormy and muted new ambient project. The way that guitarist and vocalist Paul Riedl describes it, he and his bandmates charted this trajectory as early as their first rehearsal. Back then, they decided their signature sound would be a cosmic blend of death metal chestnuts (Death, Morbid Angel, Gorguts); their sophomore album would veer toward psychedelic, neon green landscapes; and their third would consist entirely of ambient music, focusing on a single element of their work.
In the context of their discography, Timewave Zero isn’t exactly a radical shift. More than the soothing, mystical new age they shout out in interviews (Reidl remains death metal’s most dedicated Enya fan), the atmosphere recalls a period in the early 1970s when progressive rock bands started incorporating synthesizers, using the era’s state-of-the-art equipment to push beyond the standard textures of rock music. These artists, who aspired toward the intricate compositions and sweeping movements of classical music, had high ambitions, and so do Blood Incantation, even if, half a century later, those same sounds might scan as more vintage than visionary.
It will likely only take a few minutes into Timewave Zero before you decide whether or not you need it in your collection. To some, these longform compositions might feel interesting only in theory: a cerebral exercise to cross off the to-do list before pure inspiration strikes again. And yet, like all of their music, Timewave Zero rewards an open mind and close listening, rising above gearhead hero worship into daring, unexpected places. “To contact Blood Incantation, CONCENTRATE,” reads a message included with each of their albums. More than anything they’ve attempted before, this wordless, old-school, analog synth music recasts that instruction as an open invitation.
The most immediate aspects of Timewave Zero are the groovy, pulsing melodies lurking in the depths of both compositions—the first titled “Io,” the second “Ea.” Both pieces take a similar journey through four movements and roughly 20 minutes. They both begin with a low, wind-chiming rumble, which evolves into a laser-show crescendo before hushing back to a burbling roar. At their peak in the second movements, both songs spotlight a cycle of notes on the synthesizer—motifs that, if transposed for a down-tuned electric guitar, you might call “riffs”—that make Timewave Zero more distinctive and intense than the planetarium mood music Reidl has occasionally described it as.
In both compositions, the most compelling parts are the in-between phases, which just so happen to be in the third movements. This is when Morris Kolontyrsky enters with acoustic guitar, a pacifying texture amid the dark swirl of synths. The third movement of “Ea,” in particular, makes brilliant use of these dynamics. Kolontyrsky fingerpicks a minor chord over what sounds like a Mellotron, building to a mournful swell that suggests the shadow of a string section. It comprises the most beautiful five minutes on any Blood Incantation record and recalls the pastoral opulence of early King Crimson—the quiet moments that helped amplify the devilish outbursts surrounding them.
Building from those early prog records, the use of momentary ambience as the calm before the storm has long been foundational in metal. From Tony Iommi’s classical guitar pieces in Black Sabbath to Chuck Schuldiner’s spacey interludes in Death, it’s a way of snapping the audience back to attention, making the hard stuff hit harder and shading in the spooky outskirts of a band’s sound. In some ways, Timewave Zero is a loving tribute to this particular aspect of metal, repositioning those ominous, interstitial pieces as towering showstoppers and highlighting innovators like Tangerine Dream as crucial influences as opposed to outlying figureheads.
At the same time, the record itself can feel like a kind of interlude: a well-earned breather before the next full-on attack. Reidl has confirmed the band’s follow-up will be a return to metal, more subtly incorporating these songs’ lessons in composition and restraint (as well as those learned from Reidl’s ambient solo albums, both under his own name and as Hoverkraft). Listening to Timewave Zero, you can sense the band proudly embracing its transitional nature, rarely attempting to push beyond its self-imposed boundaries—a triumph by existence alone, an itch they had to scratch. And if it’s not necessarily the music that Blood Incantation will be remembered for, it is precisely the kind of risk that shows why they’ll be remembered.


The Sydney punks comb through society’s sludge on a deadpan collection of mosh pit anthems and glistening new wave synthesizers.

Downer Edn

Sydney’s Mitch Tolman might not be a fan of the meathead bros he grew up around, but they’re clearly his muse. It was evident on Low Life’s debut 2014 album Dogging—the lyrics from the band’s burly and brooding post-punk songs owe quite a bit to Australian lad culture. Tolman’s got a gift for turning entitled toxic masculine bullshit into absurdist satire. “Tryin’ to be a good man, to be a good bloke/But I love gettin’ off and I’m fuckin’ stoked,” he deadpanned on Dogging ripper “DNA.” In the field of recent post-punk bands, Low Life occupy a deeply specific zone. They make muscular pit music that glistens with new wave synthesizers, and meanwhile, a dispassionate Australian voice is up front taking the piss out of sexist and homophobic dinguses. It’s a riveting mixture.
On their second album Downer Edn (pronounced “Downer Edition”), Low Life continue to comb through society’s sludge. Tolman still puts together elaborate depictions of dirtbags, like his portrait of the titular “Warrior”—a “golden orange tan” dude who eats KFC while watching UFC. Those kinds of details are good for a laugh or two, but Tolman’s stiff delivery and his bandmates’ brusque gang vocals highlight the darkness behind this caricature of strongman politics and domestic violence. Their song “92,” which alludes to child abuse, peers even further into the void. “Small boys grow into bad men, battered boys become very bad men” is the song’s horrific mantra.
While Downer Edn bursts with punk vitality—fuzz, volume, speed, a bunch of dudes shouting in unison—it’s their work with feedback and texture that makes it special. Beyond the clipped churn of power chords on “Lad Life,” a shimmering, gauzy guitar tone presides. It’s a sweet-and-salty combination that’s been in place since Dogging, but the new album finds the band sounding more streamlined and sophisticated than ever. It’s tempting to credit their new collaborators for the upgrade, namely co-producer Mickey Grossman and new guitarist and synth player Dizzy Daldal. Daldal is also a member of Orion, a Sydney band whose overlooked self-titled 2017 album was a sparkling document of Factory Records-indebted post-punk.
It’s not just dreamy guitars or bleak humor that elevate Downer Edn: They’ve also got a bona fide anthem in “RBB.” The title is an abbreviation for the Red and Black Bloc, the official fan group for the Western Sydney Wanderers Football Club. (Tolman is an outspoken soccer fan.) Drummer Greg Alfaro builds momentum for their mission statement: “You know who the fuck we are/We are Western Sydney,” they chant. It doesn’t matter where in the world you are—if Low Life are in your town, you’re probably going to scream the band’s Sydney soccer anthem back at them. Hell, it even happened at a recent Melbourne show.
In an interview, Low Life discussed the guiding question behind their creative process: “What can we do easiest that can work the best?” Downer Edn is an album-length expression of that philosophy,  with an emphasis on repetition and subdued vocals. Sometimes it works and they pull off a major coup (“RBB”), and elsewhere, songs are prone to going stale or petering out (“Rave Slave”). They’ve put together a record that’s consistently captivating. There’s darkness and there are laughs, scream-along anthems for shoving and dreamy near-ballads. The first and last song on the album are variations on the same melody, so as album closer “Crash” ends, it feels effortless to flip the record and revisit “The Pitts.” It’s a tongue-in-cheek song where they essentially declare that you, the listener, are now their disciple. It’s a self-aware joke, but maybe wait to laugh until you’ve stopped running the album back.


Vivifying scenes from her debut novel, the Inuk experimentalist and throat-singer marries fiery condemnations of oppression with tender words of protection for future generations.

Tongues

In Tanya Tagaq’s 2018 book Split Tooth, she describes a girl, perhaps herself, who leaves her body. From the remove of a dark, blank space, this girl watches a house party unfurl—and senses the presence of another being there, with her, watching. “It was a human once,” she writes. “It is huge and sinuous, a jumble of muscle and gristle.” It is ravenous; it wants to kill. And if the girl doesn’t make it back to her own body in time, this thing will take it from her by force.
On Tongues, Tagaq’s fifth studio album, which borrows many of its lyrics from Split Tooth, the line between woman and monster is gossamer-thin. Tagaq is a maestro of Inuit throat-singing. To outside listeners, the guttural tone of throat-singing can sound otherworldly. In Denis Villeneuve’s 2021 film Dune, the director cast a throat singer to preside over a grisly bloodletting and prepare an army for extraterrestrial slaughter. This is a far cry from traditional Inuit throat-singing, which is usually performed in friendly competition by two women, each trying to outlast the other. On Tongues, Tagaq is her own duet partner, by turns warm and wrathful. Her low growl holds the power to terrify, but often, it is her pronouncements in plain, spoken English that most chill the blood.
Last year, Canadian authorities discovered the unmarked mass graves of nearly 1,400 Indigenous children on the grounds of five former residential schools. Tagaq, now 46, recalls leaving home at 15 to attend one such school. Throughout her career, and long before last year’s reckoning, she has advocated for herself and other victims of the system. “You can’t take our tongues,” she says, on the album’s title track. “You can’t take our blood.” And then, dipping into her guttural register, she sings, “Inuuvunga/Tukisivunga”—I am an Inuk; I understand. She soothes her sisters, then turns, once more, to condemn the complicit.
The latter category includes this critic, along with many of the parties who have acclaimed Tagaq and awarded her some of Canada’s highest honors. A recipient of the Polaris Prize, multiple Juno Awards, and the Order of Canada, Tagaq boldly uses her place in the country’s cultural firmament to challenge its very foundation. When she vocalizes in English, she speaks and sings with open hostility to her audience. “Colonizer” emerges from her throat as an epithet, in a rasp, deep and low and sibilant. She cries, “You’re guilty,” and repeats the line, again and again, a broad indictment, a blunt instrument.
Yet her songs also point at very specific targets. Opening track “In Me” is a celebration of Indigenous hunting practices, and a middle finger to “moralizing” white vegans. “I Forgive Me” takes aim at rapists, promising swift justice: “I do not forgive and forget/I protect and prevent/Make them eat shame and repent.” The album’s best track, “Teeth Agape,” is also its vividly bloodiest, a dual condemnation of residential schools and modern foster care. Over a menacing industrial swirl, Tagaq speaks of sharpening her claws and baring her fangs. “Touch my children,” she says, “and my teeth welcome your windpipe.”
In these songs, that ravenous, sinuous jumble of muscle and gristle swells within Tagaq’s body. It is a fearful presence, but a righteous one. It speaks with a strength that the young girl at that long-ago house party did not yet know how to wield. The violence this being threatens is the protective kind.
But there is room, too, for tenderness. In the latter half of Tongues, Tagaq turns to her Indigenous listeners, especially women and girls, and faces them the way an Inuk throat-singer faces her partner. “Do Not Fear Love” originated as free verse in the pages of Split Tooth. It is reformed on Tongues as a meditation, replete with instructions to inhale, exhale, and observe one’s anxious thoughts. “Thank them for trying to protect you,” Tagaq says, of such “small fears,” reciting the words above low synths, steady drums, and the hollow swell of an organ. She wrote the album’s closing track, “Earth Monster,” for her daughter, Naia, on the child’s sixth birthday. Reveling in Naia’s breath, her smile, “her voice, her earnest voice,” she rotates between pet names: “my small one,” “my truly mine,” “my earth monster.” Here, “monster” is as delivered as sweetly as any other nothing a mother might murmur to a beloved daughter. It is an encouragement of anger, of tears, of sharp teeth and glittering claws.
Both girl and monster, Tagaq seems to say, can share the same body. They can nurture one another. They can make the world safer for the next girl born into it.

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Sun Araw's muggy psych-trance is given space and time to stretch out, simmer, deepen, and the results move from mesmeric to narcotic.

On Patrol

Sun Araw sound a bit like a lava lamp. Or like minute 45 of "Dark Star". Or maybe Fela Kuti slowed down to a crawl, rolled out, and spread into infinity. Cameron Stallones-- also of Magic Lantern-- has been tinkering with his amniotic dub for a few albums now, but nothing he's done yet has quite matched the inward-gazing expanse of On Patrol. Here, Stallones' muggy psych-trance is given space and time-- almost 75 minutes-- to stretch out, simmer, deepen. The results are panoramic, dizzyingly huge.
Most of Stallones' compositions consist of a circular, undulating guitar line, repeated over a sweltering backdrop, with the occasional chanty, muffled vocal rising out of the ether. A Californian himself, Stallones' music is heavily informed by music from warm climes-- dub, desert rock of both the African and SoCal varietals, raga, the aforementioned Afrobeat. As the name Sun Araw suggests, free jazz plays a role too, although Stallones' elastic tunes are more collective consciousness than collective improvisation. These songs, long as they get, never feel less than carefully considered, even as they round the bend on minute 15. And On Patrol is truly psychedelic, an otherwordly, bleary around the edges, unusually transfixing at its core, journey-through-the-self kind of deal. It's never jarring, but it sure does get heavy.
On Patrol is better the deeper it gets, its rippling, gurgling landscapes and Stallones' snaky guitar intertwining over as many minutes as it takes: with time it grows more vivid, moving from mesmeric to narcotic. Textures change, but tempos rarely do; you don't so much listen to On Patrol as get ensconced in it, and while it does sit nicely in the background, its chemtrail churn is difficult to ignore for too long. 75 minutes of cascading ambient psych is a commitment, to be sure, but despite its length and leisurely pace, On Patrol manages to keep shapeshifting, from the bleeding synths of "Deep Cover" to the k-hole Hendrix of "Dimension Alley" and the Godzilla ripple of "The Stakeout". Stallones continues to prove himself an unusually gifted sonic architect, and the songs that comprise On Patrol are his most evocative, elaborate structures yet.


Emily Sprague’s folk music turns solitude into an evocation of spirits. Her latest album as Florist grapples with change, death, and uncertainty with some of the most arresting songwriting of the year.

Emily Alone

On her third album, Emily Sprague is sitting by the ocean, taking walks, tending to her plants, daydreaming. She’s feeling peaceful and existential and acutely aware of every source of light in the house. The previous two albums from her indie-pop outfit Florist were full-band affairs, but in these 12 songs, Sprague steps away from her collaborators for a spell, tasked with filling time alone. It’s a familiar reprieve for the Los Angeles–based artist, who has also released several excellent ambient collections under her own name. But while those long-form compositions have evoked solitude and the natural world using modular synthesizers, Emily Alone is built from simpler tools: double-tracked vocals, acoustic guitar, and the occasional birdsong leaking in from an open window.
If Sprague’s ambient compositions are a wash of concrete images and color, then folk music is where she grapples with uncertainty. Her cool, sighing voice lends itself to repeated motifs, rising at the end of each line like a question, even during two interstitial passages of spoken-word poetry. Her guitar playing is similarly inquisitive. Most of her songs alternate between just two chords: bittersweet pivots that draw your attention less to a melody than to the motion, a gentle tide beneath her words. Sprague plays folk music in the traditional sense, but the atmosphere she creates is more like new age—practiced as a meditation, leading toward small breakthroughs.
With such simple arrangements, Sprague’s writing can sound like an intimate conversation, with larger context left unsaid. A recurring, fragmented lyric throughout the album, “I could have the reasons why,” alludes to several major changes in her life—particularly, a move across the country and the death of her mother in 2017. As with recent albums by Jeff Tweedy and Bill Callahan, Sprague considers the loss of a parent from an almost cosmic perspective: “Some things last a hundred lives,” she sings, her voice dewy. “You were not your final form.” In “Shadow Bloom,” she imagines how she’d spend her days if she knew precisely how it would all end; in her vision, she lies down for a minute, makes some tea, and eats a tangerine. Her point: Life goes on and then it doesn’t. The reasons why are none of our business.
A word that pops up over and over again in these songs is “now.” Repetition of the word is Sprague’s quiet way of addressing the suddenness of life, the abrupt shifts and lost connections that mark time. Her songwriting on Emily Alone exists as a document of all her passing nows: a slow rainy season where her mind remains in constant flux. This dissonance between herself and her surroundings becomes the record’s primary tension. “I believe in things we cannot see,” she sings in “M.” She accompanies herself softly on piano, flickering like dim candlelight: deeply felt but only half-understood, the sound of un-transcribable emotions dissolving in warm air.
The more directly she composes her thoughts, the fuller the music becomes. “Time Is a Dark Feeling” might be a cathartic singalong if adapted by a full band, with a climactic second verse that seems to gesture over the whole record. “Silence never did it for me,” she sings before letting her words avalanche and fill the room with light. In “Today I’ll Have You Around,” she swerves between call-and-response verses and a simple, persistent chorus. It’s a reminder of how we carry other people with us; by the time it fades out, you can actually sense their presence. Emily Alone proceeds this way—a strangely uplifting summoning of ghosts. Sprague makes her point most plainly in the opening song: “Emily, just know that you’re not as alone as you feel in the dark,” she sings. Then, she repeats those last six words a few more times, ensuring that each syllable is accepted and understood before she continues with her wandering thoughts, talking to herself but singing for many.


While peers like DJ Rashad have gotten wider audiences, RP Boo remains one of Chicago footwork's pioneers. His tracks have a weightless, labyrinthine feel, and his productions seem largely driven by the desire to continually impress footwork dancers that, at this point, think they've heard it all.

RP Boo: Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints

Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints

If RP Boo, Traxman, and DJ Rashad constitute the John Coltrane (father), Pharoah Sanders (son), and Albert Ayler (holy ghost) of Chicago footwork, then Boo, aka Kavain Space, probably gets to be Trane. Others might have traveled further, but he was, arguably, the first. The son of a former Prince bassist, Space's work has a deferential sense of groove; while his peers Rashad, Jlin, and DJ Spinn take footwork outside of itself and draw in outside inspirations, Space seems largely driven by the desire to inspire footwork dancers. His productions lack the polish and lushness of Rashad's later work, which flourished and matured as influences like J Dilla were subsumed—it's no surprise that Rashad's work found a wider audience. But RP Boo's provincialism and focus have resulted in the kind of cleverness needed to continually impress dancers that, at this point, probably think they've heard it all.
Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints, like 2013's incredible Legacy, comprises a mix of new productions and selections from his 15-year-plus production history. Space relies heavily on interwoven vocal samples and, relative to his peers, less on rattling percussion. This gives his tracks a weightless, labyrinthine feel, as exultations for the dancers hold conversations with wailing soul samples and various grunts and shouts. On the manic opener "1-2D-20'2" all of this happens over a tangled electro sequence as an unnamed barker shouts out names of locals and...venues? Moves? Crews? You could probably unwind some of the references with Internet searches and a helpful Chicagoan, but I find it equally exciting to just let the syllables pile up into little structures, and revel in how strange and consonant the phrase "Crackaplaya Boo" sounds amidst the bustle.
"Freezaburn" is similarly satisfying, as samples unspool over snares that arrive at odd intervals; I wouldn't recommend trying to nod along, but the sense that Space remains in control of all this provides comfort. Regardless of the lip service paid to making this music strictly for the dancers, there are moments of strangeness and oddity strewn throughout Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints, and they serve to remind how an artist like Space can end up on a label, Planet Mu, still largely associated with IDM and outre electronics. I would like to hear Space explain what utility the chirping, alien voices that underpin the entirety of "Heat From Us" provide a battling footworker.
It's easier to follow the contortions of "Finish Line D'jayz", whose refrain—"Mothafuck your favorite DJ"—hands the battle DJs a weapon to toss back at the dancers, or to trace the street names called out during "Bang'n On King Dr.", easily the most conventional rhythm on the album. The horrorshow samples that drive "I'm Laughing"—a detuned Tony Sunshine repeating "I'm laughing at you now," a villainous cackle, and a lot of whistles—are easy to understand in the context of competition, but it's still strange, uncomfortable music seemingly incongruous with a bunch of people partying.
Footwork's sound has expanded, from the fevered soul of Rashad and Spinn to Jlin's noisy, coal-black intensity. Space's work is fairly traditional in comparison—its stitches-showing madness feels, at this point, somewhat familiar—so Fingers, Bank Pads & Shoe Prints is a nice reminder that footwork's version of classic rock still overflows with bizarre juxtapositions and high-wire pileups. That anyone wants to dance to this music provides an architecture for all this peculiarity, and Space is no less adventurous or inventive for clinging to it.


We hoped Bloc Party's last record, A Weekend in the City, would be the group's version of U2's October-- an endearingly awkward transition between a bracing debut and a masterpiece every bit as outsized as the ambitions of its creators. Sadly, album number three is less War than Evil Urges.

Intimacy

If it wasn't the name of this record, there's almost no way I'd use the word "intimacy" in relation to Bloc Party. Producers Paul Epworth and Jackknife Lee put their own distinctive sonic marks on the band's first two studio albums, but both made big, universal sounds rather than personal ones: Epworth's work on Silent Alarm introduced the group as cold and harsh, while Lee's A Weekend in the City was brash and flourescent-- a better fit for the band, even as singer Kele Okereke's increased candor has saddled his songs with clumsy, self-pitying lyrics. Still, thanks to the enduring goodwill they earned with that first album and their super-serious attention to craft, it wasn't unthinkable to view Weekend as their October, an endearingly awkward transition between a bracing debut and a masterpiece every bit as outsized as the ambitions of its creators. Sadly, album number three is less War than Evil Urges.
In a recent interview with Pitchfork, bassist Gordon Moakes admitted that Bloc Party haven't toured much of the album yet, and as a result, much of Intimacy feels overthought and underwritten, its jack-in-the-box studio effects attempting to cover for a lack of substance. Where "Like Eating Glass" and "Pioneers" steadily built towards barely controlled chaos with unpredictability and positive tension, "Ares" engages in all-out sonic warfare: Russell Lissack's guitar blares like a air raid siren, Okereke's vocals gets processed into Cheez Whiz, and if the rhythm section was in the studio at any point during the recording, you'd need surveillance videos to prove it. The same goes for the garish lead single "Mercury", which at least sticks due to the nagging repetition of its pie-eyed hook.
Though Lee and Epworth share production credits, it's obvious who Bloc Party is casting their lot with; maybe it's the quick turnaround or a desire to see Intimacy in a better light, but it's easy to judge this as Another Weekend in the City: The B-Sides. With its lulling arpeggios and hushed chorus, "Biko" (not a Peter Gabriel cover) feels like an unfinished demo of the band's own "Uniform"-- precisely the point where their last record went south. Where Lissack and Okereke's guitars once pierced with precision, the riffs of "Halo" and "One Month Off" haphazardly stack sixteenth-notes in search of the right angle. And while Okereke isn't as stuck on the minutiae of his hangovers, his romanticism still often results in clunky poetry-- the live-wire fritz of "Trojan Horse" is immediately short-circuited by bad Robert Smith karaoke ("You used to take your watch off before we made love/ You didn't want to share our time with anyone").
Another issue lies in the sequencing, as the record's second half shows more promise: "Better Than Heaven" hurtles through a steely echo chamber into Intimacy's only satisfying rockout, while the endless headrush of "Ion Sphere" proves the band can be epic without dozens of guitar overdubs-- a lesson lost on "Zephyrus", which hides Bloc Party's weakest tune yet under drum machine clatter. And like some sort of fever dream from 2005, "Signs" dreamily offers sweet nothings over a combination of Illinois interstitials and an ebullient synth pulse. It's gorgeous, but with all those bells and chimes, how could it not be? Even as the highlight of Intimacy, it's still evidence of an overarching problem plaguing the band, going from the implied, tightly coiled menace of the prophetically titled Silent Alarm to Protected-by-Viper obviousness.
While Okereke has described Intimacy as a break-up album, it feels like more of a document of a band disconnected from itself. Bloc Party's area of expertise as of late seems to be gloopy love songs, and their increased willingness to leave behind the spiky post-punk of Silent Alarm should conceivably only help them. But it's almost like they're embarrassed about it, or at least regretful that they've paved a path that can only allow them to get bigger. Rather than exploring depth, detail, and texture, the band puts their willingness to experiment in the hands of Lee, a rock producer, and like his charges of the past (Snow Patrol, R.E.M., U2), Bloc Party is encouraged to delve into electronic music in only the most arena-ready terms possible. Credit the band with being too restless to just rewrite "Price of Gas" 12 times-- we're just hoping they're bold enough to realize that songs like "Ion Sphere" and "Signs" prove they're now closer to next making Adore than War.


Four albums into their career, the Finnish quintet Oranssi Pazuzu may have at last sidestepped the confines of the tag “black metal." Their latest 69-minute opus folds in Krautrock, electric Miles Davs, stoner, thrash and more, finding the band lost—wonderfully, strangely—somewhere between heaven and hell.

Värähtelijä

Four albums into their career, the Finnish quintet Oranssi Pazuzu may have at last sidestepped the confines of the tag "black metal." During the last decade, the adventurous band has explored the astral infinity of extreme psychedelia and the grim oblivion of extreme metal. As the name Oranssi Pazuzu (essentially "orange demon") suggests, the band’s sound was often an even split, with the two pieces of their musical personality meant to fit like complementary puzzle pieces. Even so, they were often referred to as a metal band, albeit one with some extracurricular interests, Värähtelijä, a 69-minute escapist escapade, should finally, fundamentally correct that misperception.
Heavy metal hasn’t disappeared from their sound. "Havuluu," for instance, folds great, big, back-of-the-throat yells into its fuzz and, about halfway in, pivots on a blast beat and a ghastly scream that suggest Darkthrone. "Lahja" is powered by a Deep Purple proto-metal riff, and "Hypnotisoitu Viharukous" somehow fits stoner and thrash nods into the same five-minute span. More than ever, though, those roots lurk beneath the surface, acting as the foundation for a much more open-ended approach. Tilt your ears slightly, and the title track’s gray glow seems less like funeral doom with an accelerated pulse and more like narcotized Krautrock; imagine Harmonia succumbing to seasonal affective disorder. "Lahja" suggests a snippet of a grueling Swans marathon, with barked imprecations and martial drums pitted against sparkling vibraphone and guitars so free and bright they recall Sonny Sharrock. With Värähtelijä, Oranssi Pazuzu’s music has become a refraction of sorts, so that what you hear depends on your perspective—how you listen, what you bring to it, what you expect from it.
On 2013’s very good Valonielu, Oranssi Pazuzu seemed to strive to orchestrate its opposing impulses, to make them work together through relatively concise songs with discrete structures. You could almost imagine those tunes coming through the speakers of some large outdoor festival, like the aggressive Finnish answer to Sweden’s Dungen. Here, though, Oranssi Pazuzu show no such concern for restraint or expectation. The 17-minute "Vasemman Käden Hierarkia" feels like an album unto itself, brilliantly twisting between noise-rock outbursts and electric Miles allusions, distorted doom passages and sinister soundtrack references.
Typically, when bands dig themselves out of black metal pigeonholes (or, really, metal pigeonholes at large) and fold their ideas inside other, more accessible styles, worlds of possibility and popularity can open up. See, for instance, Tribulation’s own turn out of death metal basics during the last two years or Deafheaven’s climb toward the light across its own half-decade. Oranssi Pazuza’s step out of metal, though, finds them burrowing deeper into a world of their own creation. Värähtelijä is a weird, grotesque record, where genres are superimposed on one another and where eccentric choices are the rule and not the exception. Yes, Oranssi Pazuzu is out of the old black metal box and lost—wonderfully, strangely—somewhere between heaven and hell.


Following last year’s duo album with trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, pianist Vijay Iyer debuts a powerhouse sextet lineup to tackle some of his strongest, most varied writing yet.

Far From Over

Listeners are often introduced to Vijay Iyer through his acoustic jazz trio, a powerful and innovative group that can cover pop artists and progressive jazz icons with equal aplomb. But since the pianist rarely tills the same ground two releases in a row, new fans are soon invited to grapple with wider-reaching projects like Iyer’s string quartet writing, an oratorio about veterans of color from recent American wars, or swinging ensembles that incorporate elements of Indian classical music. When you zoom out, the diversity of his catalog is undeniable. Still, several of his albums have tended to pick one organizing principle and stick closely to it, delving deeply into the expressive possibilities offered by a given theme or a particular set of collaborators.
Iyer’s duo album with veteran trumpeter Wadada Leo Smith, released on ECM in 2016, had that grandly unified feel. On Far From Over, he’s debuting yet another lineup: a sextet populated by contemporary-jazz all-stars like alto saxophonist Steve Lehman and drummer Tyshawn Sorey. But Iyer’s compositional range here is even more notable than this latest permutation of personnel. The 10-track, nearly hour-long album offers one of the bandleader’s strongest and most varied programs—one in which feverish ensemble writing hangs together with groove-oriented tracks and sparer experimental textures.
The chill, minimalist hook that introduces “Poles” recalls some of Iyer’s suave writing for his trio. One minute later, quickly shifting figures for the brass and reeds lend a nervy feel while Iyer’s piano syncopates and gathers steam. After a burning solo from alto saxophonist Steve Lehman, Iyer switches from acoustic piano to a Fender Rhodes keyboard, touching on some of the fusion jazz tapestries first fashioned by Miles Davis. These changes all occur in a five-minute span. But since the switches in the composition flow just as easily as the band plays, none of it feels forced.
The album is also paced to thrill. The celebratory energy of the title track leads into the head-nodding opus “Nope,” which shows off Sorey as a virtuoso of funk and hip-hop-influenced jazz rhythm. Then Iyer slots in “End of the Tunnel,” an electro-acoustic piece. At first, it sounds like another Miles tribute, until it slides into the realm of chamber-music experimentalism.
Hard-driving, post-bop energy and a stirring Sorey solo fuel “Down to the Wire.” “For Amiri Baraka” twists from its somber, elegiac opening into something more forceful—a tribute to the late writer’s polemical style. “Good on the Ground” presents a thrashing profile, while “Threnody” gives Lehman the opportunity to close the album with some stirring alto sax cries. All of the soloists can blow your hair back, but they also work together with grace. (Listen for the elegant sense of balance the two sax players foster when sharing the stage on “Nope.”)
Along with bassist Stephan Crump, both Lehman and Sorey have worked extensively in some of Iyer's previous groups. It makes sense that they'd sound comfortable in the composer's dense and memorable pieces, though this ensemble's compatibility isn't an end in itself. The union of players and material inspires a new synthesis: the sound of Iyer consolidating strengths and discovering some new ones as he settles into the vibe created by his most potent band yet.


The Friedberger sibs consolidate some of their strengths on a record placed firmly in the 1970s, one that finds them veering between ramming through ersatz Led Zeppelin riffs on bass and keyboards and coaxing soft-rock and soul arrangements out of a wheezy Chamberlin organ.

Widow City

First things first: No radical shifts on this new Fiery Furnaces album. After a few years of watching the band veer off through fascinating tangents and "difficult" tactical shifts, I'm guessing most people will tell you this record feels like the one where they've rounded all the bases and go coasting in toward home-- melding together all their established habits and slamming through them with extra vigor, more weight, fuller body. Which either raises or answers a strange question: Why is it that some of the biggest Furnace-lovers I know are telling me that they're...not so much feeling this one?
I mean, the Friedberger siblings are both in decent form here. In between playing fun production tricks with their live drummer (cool stereo imaging!), Matthew spends his time melding opposite ends of the 1970s, this album's mental home: One minute he's ramming through ersatz Led Zeppelin riffs on bass and keyboards; the next he's coaxing soft-rock and soul arrangements out of the string and woodwind settings on a wheezy Chamberlin organ, a terrific addition to their sound. And Eleanor still acts the part of a paranoid conspiracy theorist with an unhappy marriage, a fixation on 20th-century American history, and a lot of miles on her car, lurking outside the nearest museum with some crazy letters and a skewed impression of the judicial powers of a grand jury. The best song here has a middle-aged woman posting arcane Xeroxes around the University of Chicago campus-- as Fiery Furnace-like a place as you can imagine-- while consulting a 6,000-page book of hieroglyphs.
It all sounds cleaner and more accessible than anything they've done in the past, but that might actually be part of the problem. These two are notorious for their tangents-- tearing through disjointed medleys, changing gears at the slightest provocation-- but on their previous records, that habit still sounded charged and chaotic: They felt genuinely unpredictable, crashing from one place to another like they were discovering ground along the way. The full, clean sound of Widow City tends to break the spell, and a lot of the spliced-together song structures just sound mannered, dutiful, and perfunctory, like bad habits or busy work. The seven-minute opener might spend half its running time slinking and strutting through a great pop tune, but the back end just reiterates its few melodies in various arrangements-- Chamberlin flute, hard rock, prog-bass tick-tock-- that offer seriously diminishing returns, if not visions of Matthew holding up Wile E. Coyote signs: "HOLD ON, I'M THINKING UP THE POINT."
Those obligatory splices are frustrating, surrounded as they are by evidence that this band probably doesn't need them. The most endlessly replayable thing on here turns out not to be some knotty, jigsaw-puzzled epic, but a song called "My Egyptian Grammar", which lets its slow groove breathe in fresh air for a good three-and-a-half minutes-- a steady bass stroll shot through with harp filigrees and canned Romantic strings. Yes, it sounds a lot like this band's own "Evergreen", but there are songs both good and interesting buried throughout Widow City; what's odd is that the Fiery Furnaces have reached the point where their signature scattershot pacing clutters up those gems as often as it gives them spark.
Not that Furnace-lovers won't still get plenty of worthwhile jigsaw puzzles to play with-- or flashbacks to the hearty, more traditional pop of their early days. The lyrics here are a little less opaque than they've been in the past, grounding themselves in a world of edge-city duplexes, rotten old husbands, and self-help seminars. During the second half, Matthew drops the full-bodied pop of the opening and gets raucous: Following some serious riffs on "Navy Nurse", the songs offer tightly scripted collages that cop sounds from scattershot prog and free-jazz, in and around funk interludes, flute-y soft-rock idylls, jacked-up percussion fills, and patchworks of sampled noises.
And they get back some of that old, rambling energy-- but is that even what you want anymore? Widow City offers the biggest peek yet into how well these two could operate-- and how fascinating and idiosycratic they'd still sound-- if they followed their sounds through, creating breathing, full-bodied human beings with stories to tell, as opposed to lurching, half-animate, ADHD Frankensteins that speak in ransom-note cut-ups. It's a strange thing to criticize, but the goodness of that stuff is actually beginning to make their old fun tricks seem like something to outgrow-- and suggests their compromises between arch pop and dutiful rambling are far from the most interesting places they could wind up.


Led by the charismatic Dave Le’aupepe, the stadium rock quintet’s wildly ambitious third album is intimate in its details but rarely anything other than IMAX-sized in its proportions.

Angel in Realtime

Gang of Youths’ best songs are odes to life itself: its irrepressibility, its weird flaws and unpredictable contours. Formed in Sydney and now based in London, the five-piece rock band broke out in Australia with “Magnolia,” an unlikely rabble-rouser about the night frontman Dave Le’aupepe survived a suicide attempt. Their second album, 2017’s Go Farther in Lightness, landed somewhere between Japandroids-style festival punk and the National-adjacent indie rock, chronicling both Le’aupepe’s persistent self-laceration and his dogged attempts to find hope. Even the titles of its most resonant songs—“Do Not Let Your Spirit Wane” and “Say Yes to Life”—served as affirmations in themselves. And whenever Le’aupepe’s whole “secular preacher” thing threatened to get a little too Bono, he slipped in a pearler of a gag, like the punchline at the crescendo of the earnest, effusive “Let Me Down Easy”: “If it’s late, you’re drunk, and you want a reason/Some reason to live/I always say just put on some Whitesnake.”
That song, which went double-platinum and cemented their status as a stadium act in Australia, tells you a lot about Gang of Youths. The band—composed of Le’aupepe, bassist Max Dunn, drummer Donnie Borzestowski, guitarist and keyboardist Jung Kim, and multi-instrumentalist Tom Hobden—are often far smarter, weirder, and more compelling than the Funeral tribute act they might seem like on paper. They can get a little cartoonish—see Le’aupepe flexing his bicep when performing a song called “The Heart Is a Muscle”—but that’s part of the fun. As with the 1975, another self-referential, deeply earnest band with a charismatic, self-mythologizing frontperson, Gang of Youths can be a perplexing mix of incredibly cerebral and incredibly dumb, totally ridiculous in one moment and devastatingly serious in the next. Initial skepticism is warranted; all the better to win you over.
Their third record, angel in realtime., is typically overstuffed, crushingly intimate in its details but rarely anything other than IMAX-sized in its proportions. And while that might sound exhausting, it’s actually pretty endearing, all written and performed with such vigor and charm that it’s hard not to get swept up in it. Inspired by the illness and death of Le’aupepe’s father, and the family secrets unearthed in the wake of his passing, the music attempts to honor the complexity of his life while making sense of the confusion he left behind. It’s rendered with a care that sometimes verges on fussiness—the mark of someone trying to create a perfect tribute to a complicated person.
Le’aupepe has spoken often about his father in interviews, noting how he passed down a love of classical music that inspired the band’s frequent use of string arrangements. According to Le’aupepe, his father lived for beauty, and the palette of angel in realtime. is lush and rich. Each song introduces some dazzling new sound, like the showtune-style cheers on “returner” or the samples of traditional Cook Islander hymns that appear on “the man himself.” These experiments build toward “brothers,” a staggeringly raw highlight where the band strips everything away, leaving just Le’aupepe and a piano. With piercing clarity, he recounts the secrets that his late father never revealed to him, among them the fact that Le’aupepe has two brothers in New Zealand who believed their father to be already dead. It’s a devastating, knotty moment, and it feels like the raison d’être for the entire album: a way for Le’aupepe to reckon with his father’s legacy without getting lost in either idolatry or vilification.
When Le’aupepe attempts to make sense not only of his father’s passing but also of his life, he hits his stride. On “tend the garden,” he inhabits his father’s perspective as he moved from Samoa to New Zealand to Australia. “I hope that one day if they find my sons/They’ll tell ’em everything that I’ve become,” he sings, underscored with soulful, Avalanches-style electronic pop. It’s a successful experiment and a rare display of restraint: Unlike some songs, which feel like overstuffed suitcases waiting to burst the minute they hit the baggage carousel, there’s an ease and spaciousness here. Go Farther in Lightness often sounded like a melange of influences done well, but the highlights on angel in realtime. zero in on Gang of Youths’ own territory. That so many songs reference electronic music is smart: Le’aupepe has always moved like a dancer on stage, and he imbues many of his performances here with that graceful quality.
As on Go Farther in Lightness, the sound is occasionally so dense that it’s hard to listen to, with layers of interesting ideas compounded to something impenetrable. Although angel in realtime. is 10 minutes shorter than its predecessor, it’s still 67 minutes long, and it can be hard to take in one sitting. Many of the songs are interconnected and self-referential, an experience not unlike hearing a Broadway soundtrack without having seen the production. But whenever the music threatens to overwhelm, Le’aupepe offers a lifeline. No longer bearing the punky growl of Go Farther in Lightness, he stretches his voice to gorgeous new places, extending the word “truth” into soulful melisma on “goal of the century” and jumping into a falsetto as he exclaims, “Lord, I pray!” on “tend the garden.” His lyrics, too, are as sharp and weird as ever, often at their best at their most outrageous. (Hear him swerve from the hubris of footballers to the struggles of capitalism to the admittedly wobbly hit-or-miss ratio of his own output in “returner.”) For every drum’n’bass beat and skronking horn, he writes a lyric that’s equally ostentatious, and often he seems game for the challenge of matching the high stakes of the music. At its best, angel in realtime. so convincingly sells his grand vision of the world that it’s easy to accept the grandiose production, too. The whole gambit is so outsized that, even when it only kind of works, it feels like a victory.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Reuniting after a decade, ex-Abe Vigoda members Michael Vidal and Juan Velasquez make a welcome return to sighing, swirling guitar and dusky post-punk ambiance.

Romantic Music

In 2010, the scrappy Chino punks in Abe Vigoda shared a producer with Beach House, tour dates with Vampire Weekend, and a cinematic ’80s revivalism with the year’s buzziest bands. With its hyperkinetic “tropical punk” draped in Pretty in Pink pastels, Crush was the most commercially appealing album to emerge from Los Angeles DIY venue the Smell and, therefore, the biggest challenge to its egalitarian philosophy. But whether Abe Vigoda were truly going for the gold was a moot point: They quietly disbanded a year later and Crush remained a hidden gem that sounded like nothing else. At least until now, as Michael Vidal and Juan Velasquez reunite as Cupid & Psyche on the alluring Romantic Music, sounding like “the next Abe Vigoda album” but with a sober, measured perspective that required another decade to access.
While Vidal and Velasquez are still mining the more populist sounds of Thatcher-era post-punk, Romantic Music isn’t going to be confused for “sophisti-pop.” The duo’s musical complexity feels born more of intuition than finicky craft, one sighing guitar line weaving into another, leaving just enough space for Vidal’s unorthodox, diffuse vocal melodies to braid through. With the exception of the engrossing chorus of lead single “Angels on the Phone,” the hooks don’t arrive through seismic dynamics or a belted melody, but rather slight nudges that lift the curtain on the uniformly dusky mood; witness the piquant chord changes in “Anxiety’s Rainbow,” or a slight shuffle in the rhythms of “Datura Sketch.” Romantic Music is at its best when its core sound inches into the ’90s and decks itself out in greyscale paisley, as if the Cure revisited their Faith-era gloom while trying to reckon with the melon-twisting rhythms of Madchester.
The reliance on drum machines lends Romantic Music a more era-specific sound than Crush, though also one that’s less distinctive. Whether it’s the nature of the project as a pandemic-born jam session or the just the inevitable result of starting over without a rhythm section, Romantic Music lacks the feverish momentum of infatuation or devastation, too often locked into a muted, narrow range of timbre and tempo.
While Abe Vigoda’s tropical punk roots invigorated this often ossified aesthetic, Cupid & Psyche do so from a more subtle and lyrical standpoint. Vidal’s actual vocal range is somewhat limited, but his voice is an emotionally expressive instrument: Every longing note carries a yearning for a new world and the promise of a glimpse of it, the very dynamic that has drawn American audiences to this style of music for the past 40 years. Yet Romantic Music has practical aspirations for tangible and spiritual connection in the present. The somber production underpins the foundational contrast of light and dark energies—anxiety is a rainbow, serenity a pit—though the synths and reverb tend to gloss over Vidal’s more touching turns of phrase, scrutinizing the false allure of the internet or empty nostalgia. On the opening title track, some of that scrutiny appears directed at Abe Vigoda itself. “It takes time but you’ll get over/Reasons why we won’t make it,” Vidal croons, perhaps skewering a past version of himself, one that truly believed “I’m gonna change your life with my music.” Instead, from its word and deed, Romantic Music is the exact thing its humble origins promised, a labor of true love.


Part of the Beatle’s charm lies in his vacillation between the banal and the profound, sometimes within a single song. Despite its dark moments, his 17th solo album is firmly within this tradition.

Egypt Station

Facades are second nature to Paul McCartney. A superstar since age 21, McCartney perfected the art of affectation while the Beatles were still touring the globe, and decades of public controversies and tragedies have only hardened his shell.
McCartney’s gift of glib is so deeply ingrained in his persona that it’s disarming to hear him sing “I got crows at my windows/Dogs at my door/I don’t think I can take anymore” at the outset of Egypt Station, his 17th solo studio album. Paul’s candid admission of fear and depression would be startling in any context, but what stings most is the tacit acknowledgment that 76-year-old McCartney realizes he’s nearing the end of his long, winding road.
Nostalgia is catnip to McCartney—as it has been for all of his fellow Beatles, each of whom wrote songs about how great it was to be in the Beatles—but his fondness for the past is countered by a gnawing sense that he should participate in the current pop conversation. If anything has driven him throughout his career, it’s the idea that his next Top 10 hit is just around the corner. This certainty served him well back in the ’70s, when he slyly dusted the propulsive “Jet” in layers of glitter, and as late as the dawn of MTV, when he (with the assistance of George Martin could create a facsimile of Michael Jackson’s Thriller that sounded as if Quincy Jones produced it himself.)
Paul’s golden touch tarnished as he settled into his 40s, leading him to collaborate with any star who would have him—which is to say, just about all of them. Yet hit singles remained elusive. In 1989, his Elvis Costello collaboration “My Brave Face” went to 25 on the Billboard charts, but it took another quarter-century for McCartney to break into the Top 10, with 2015’s “FourFiveSeconds.” Caught between 2013's splashy, Giles Martin-produced New and Egypt Station, the single is an outlier in every regard: A collaboration between McCartney, Rihanna, and Kanye West, it rode the younger artists’ coattails up the charts, not his. His very appearance on the track made him seem thirsty in a way that is unbecoming of a Beatle.
“Fuh You,” the second single from Egypt Station, trumps “FourFiveSeconds” by making McCartney seem full-on desperate—for either a hit or a fuck, but preferably both. Where “FourFiveSeconds” benefitted from minimalism, “Fuh You” is a maximalist jumble of modernist nonsense in which producer Ryan Tedder forces Paul to follow his playbook. McCartney admitted to Mojo that he was so irritated by Tedder’s method, he decided to rewrite the lyric “I'm a lover for you” as “I just wanna fuh you.” Perhaps that was a nifty way to twist the knife in the producer, but it also represents a bit of self-sabotage that is entirely in character for McCartney.
“I’ve got a career where I’ve been involved with songs that have meaning, and this doesn't amount to anything,” he apparently told Tedder. “Y'know—I wrote ‘Eleanor Rigby’!” Which is true! But McCartney also wrote “Bip Bop,” “Move Over Busker,” “Biker Like an Icon,” and many other flights of fancy that are either cute or irritating depending on your mood or tolerance for fluff. A large part of his charm lies in the way he vacillates between the banal and the profound, sometimes within the course of a single song.
Egypt Station is firmly within this tradition. “Fuh You” aside, the album is fairly handsome, if not quite restrained. Credit for its modulated modern sheen goes to Greg Kurstin, one producer behind Adele’s Grammy-winning 25, along with recent records by Sia, Beck, and Chvrches. Kurstin is a clever producer who knows how to spin retro sounds so they feel fresh, even if the record’s structure is classically McCartney. All of the Beatle’s signatures are here: the silly love songs, to be sure, but also mini-suites (“Hunt You Down/Naked/C-Link”), polite political protests (“People Want Peace”), and old-fashioned rockers (“Who Cares”). These familiar constructions make the moments where Paul attempts something slightly new seem all the more apparent.
Such is the case with the moody “I Don’t Know,” which opens the album (after the brief instrumental intro “Opening Station”) with those foreboding images of crows, dogs, and rain. Though its bleakness is almost unprecedented in McCartney’s catalog, the song has companions throughout Egypt Station, like the wistful “Confidante” (another in the long line of songs that can be read as tributes to John Lennon,  and “Happy With You,” whose very title captures how Paul still feels compelled to pull his punches. At first, it appears as if he’s finally letting himself be seen unguarded, offering confessions of overindulgence and bad behavior. But, ultimately, all of these apparent regrets are justified by the redemptive power of love.
The album as a whole plays out in a similar fashion, offering peeks of an unvarnished McCartney before retreating to familiar territory. Once the initial shock of its melancholy moments—not to mention “Fuh You”—subsides, Egypt Station reveals itself to be another well-crafted collection of confections, reminiscent of nothing so much as McCartney’s oft-maligned 1986 release Press to Play, another burnished recording pitched between modern and retro, where Paul couldn’t resist indulging in shiny new sounds or dirty jokes.


Soul Jazz’s Punk 45 series has made it its mission to chart the forgotten corners of punk rock, and the latest version explores what happened when punk landed in mainland Europe.

Various Artists: Punk45: Les Punks: The French Connection (The First Wave of French Punk 1977-80)

Soul Jazz’s Punk 45 series has made it its mission to chart the forgotten corners of punk rock, one seven-inch record at a time, training its magnifying glass on the obscure groups or regional scenes that familiar histories overlook. In particular, its more localized iterations suggest that how punk sounded depended very much on where its seeds fell. A Los Angeles installment turned up the decadent nihilism of the Germs and the snotty proto-hardcore of the Middle Class, while last year’s Akron, Ohio disc focused on the likes of Devo and the Rubber City Rebels, freak prophets of a curdled futurism that echoed industrial America’s decline. Now, Les Punks takes Punk 45 back across the Atlantic to chart what happened when punk landed in mainland Europe.
Punk rock was born in New York and London, but France provided much of the genre’s intellectual and aesthetic grounding. Les Punks’ sleeve notes trace punk’s currents back to a number of sources in France’s rich countercultural history: to writers like Rimbaud and Voltaire, the vanguard art movements of Dada and surrealism, the erotic provocations of Serge Gainsbourg, and the leftist sedition of chief Situationist Guy Debord, whose Society of the Spectacle provided intellectual ballast for the student riots of 1968, and from there found its way to the Sex Pistols via manager Malcolm McLaren and designer Jamie Reid. Unquestionably too, the French have always had an ear for the cool shit. Les Punks also spotlights the role of figures like Paris-based Marc Zermati, whose label Skydog fostered early links with New York and London scenes, and even released a seminal punk-before-punk document in the shape of Iggy and the Stooges’ chaotic live album Metallic KO.
But in 1976, France had no pioneering rock‘n’roll tradition of its own, and a fair bit of Les Punks veers towards the imitative. The French groups clearly adored the dandyish side of New York punk—and man, did they dig Iggy. Angel Face’s “Wolf City Blues” is pure Stooges yowl and growl, with lashings of Ron Asheton-style wah-wah, while Fantomes’ cover of “I Wanna Be Your Dog” is too straight—a slavish, puppy-dog take on the original rather than a rabid leg-humper in its own right. Meanwhile, Dogs’ “Here Comes My Baby” and a couple of singles by Marie Et Les Garçons ably channel the more rocking NYC groups—the New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, the Modern Lovers—with lots of enthusiasm but not much in the way of innovation.
Elsewhere, though, there’s evidence of young French groups carving out a distinctive local sound. Perhaps the quintessential French punk group is Métal Urbain, who made the bold move of swapping out live bass and drums for a synthesizer and drum machine. 1977’s “Paris Maquis” —which holds the honor of being the very first single ever to be released on Rough Trade Records—is a blast of caustic guitar and teeth-grinding rhythm box clatter that set a blueprint for future synth-punk groups (notably, Steve Albini’s Big Black). Unlike many of their peers, Métal Urbain sang in French—“So the Americans can’t understand us,” they told Search and Destroy in 1977. But even without much of a grasp of the language, you can get the gist of “Paris Maquis,” a tribute to the French Resistance fighters of World War 2: “La ville resiste terroriste… Fasciste!”
Indeed, there’s an argument to be made that French punk was post-punk at its inception—modish, intellectual, already finding ways to rewire punk’s familiar formulas. Charles De Goal, the solo project of one Patrick Blaine, contributes “Dance Le Labyrinthe,” an early example of the emergent cold wave sound powered by clip-clopping drum machines, spasms of electronic noise and vocals pitched at the brink of hysteria. “Mind,” by Nancy duo KaS Product, is turbulent electro-punk with a bravura performance from vocalist Mona Soyoc. Its take on mental instability and stifling social conformity may have been inspired by synth player Spatsz’s day job as a psychiatric nurse. And there’s a curiosity in the shape of the torrid, sexual “Sally,” by Gazoline—a band fronted by one Alain Kan, an androgynous, outwardly queer artist and addict who performed alongside Gainsbourg at the Alcazar Club before turning to punk rock. An enigma, he was last seen in 1990, taking a ride on the Paris Metro. His fate is unknown.
It’s worth giving another shout to Les Punks’ sleeve notes, a fat 50 pages of essays and interviews that supply precious context, plus extensive illustration from Bazooka—a “graphic commando” cell of radical French illustrators who, if you believe the rumors, boasted ties to the Baader-Meinhof gang. Track for track, there are compilations that cover French punk and post-punk with a better hit rate. The two volumes of Born Bad’s Des Jeunes Gens Mödernes lean further into the France’s homegrown coldwave and synthwave sound, and are better for it. But a snapshot of French punk’s first flush, Les Punks stands up. It’s the sort of time capsule that’s not quite ready to become a museum piece: loud and arrogant and ready to create a spectacle.


For a rock band who excels at high-intensity drama, their latest is set of mid-tempo snoozers that are over-refined, hermetically sealed, and safe.

Widow’s Weeds

Silversun Pickups’ greatest strength has always been turning crippling anxiety into consumable, cathartic alternative rock. Forged at the turn of the millennium in Los Angeles’ Silver Lake scene—a subculture commonly tossed aside as hipster runoff despite giving us Beck, Rilo Kiley, and Elliott Smith—the band successfully recast “California cool” as a kind of shoegaze-tinged sun poisoning. Their songs were just subversive enough to net them indie appeal, but also mainstream recognition.
Their two best-known tracks, “Lazy Eye” (from 2006’s Carnavas) and “Panic Switch” (from 2009’s Swoon) split the difference between understated seething and incendiary angst, sometimes within the span of a single verse, for a listening experience that makes panic attacks sound thrilling. Were these two firestarters sufficient to stave off their career-long Smashing Pumpkins comparisons, or their frequent write-offs as a garden-variety ’90s throwback band? Probably not—but over a decade later, the staying-power of those two songs has yet to be depleted, thanks to their legendary histrionics.
No such luck on Widows Weeds, a set of mid-tempo snoozers Silversun Pickups may well have penned after a long nap. Rather than reprise synths and sparseness, the band, together with producer Butch Vig, have catapulted themselves “into the deep end of all things warm and wooden,” or so frontman Brian Aubert says. His description dissolves into a disappointing half-truth. Several arrangements skew earthy, yes. The violin-spiked “Simpatico” weaves a bit of bluegrass into their bar-rock balladry, and lead single “It Doesn't Matter Why” fills out a minimal post-punk stomper—propelled by a hummable, sticky-fingered arpeggio from bassist Nikki Monninger—with orchestral sighs and steady woodblock plunks. But they're also over-refined, hermetically sealed, and worst of all, safe.
That album opener “Neon Wound” lacks even a microgram of the menace implied by its title is partially due to its lack of dynamic friction and wasted sonic space, but mostly because it could pass for a track off Neck of the Woods, 2012's half-baked dalliance into Metric-style electro-pop. Songs like “Songbirds” and “Straw Man” aren’t all that different from the plastic-packed fruit one finds at the grocery store; the sticker might say “organic,” but the telegraphed melodic arcs, vacuum-sealed pianos, and predictably-polished drumming suggest the opposite.
Their penchant for melodrama, too, remains well-intact on Widows Weeds. Most of it comes through in the aforementioned string sections strewn across the record, superfluous strands of tinsel, masquerading as expansive textural accoutrements. Consider the epically awkward chorus of “Freakazoid,” which pairs earnestly sung elementary prose from Aubert (”I believe you’re trying/To keep us all from dying/I believe you’re crying/To keep this whole thing flying”) with a self-serious orchestral motif made all the more stagy by the plaintive piano plinks. Or “Straw Man,” a would-be “Tonight, Tonight” weighed down by needlessly-overcrowded hooks and uninspired simpering.
Accordingly, the album’s best moments are those where Silversun Pickups shake off their malaise, drop the Grand Guignol act, and get real. After spending so much of the record banging out anonymous motoriks (“Doesn’t Matter Why”), slackened snare taps (“Simpatico”), and standard 4/4 patterns performed as if on autopilot (“Bag of Bones”) drummer Christopher Guanlao—whose frenetic, deliriously out-of-pocket fills made him the band’s secret weapon on Carnavas and Swoon—brings some much-needed chaos to the forefront on closer “We Are Chameleons”; his staccato bursts perforate the surrounding, warped grungescape like vampire fangs, giddily feeding off his bandmates’ energy so as to sublimate it into something bigger. “Don’t Know Yet” abandons its warbling electronics partway through to make way for arena-sized choruses, wailing guitars, and a serviceable guitar solo redolent of Third Eye Blind’s “Jumper,” the album’s sole believable feint.
“Being open and vulnerable is something I’ll always have to struggle with,” Aubert admitted recently, likening his songwriting process to the classic board game Operation: “You’re just completely naked, and at any moment, something will zap.” But Widows’ Weeds contains little in the way of electrifying suspense or carefully-hidden, internalized trinkets—only empty gestures and lazy execution. Nearly 20 years into Silversun Pickups’ existence, we see them for what they are: a little big, a little brooding, but mostly boring. “You think about us all the time—don't,” Aubert instructs us on “Doesn’t Matter Why.” Sound advice, if you ask me.


Dialing the music back and the intensity down, the Hold Steady frontman's first solo album feels like the culmination of the softened edges and blunted urgency of his band's more recent trajectory.

Clear Heart Full Eyes

"Good ol' Freddie Mercury is the only guy that advises me," Craig Finn sings on "No Future", from his first solo album, Clear Heart Full Eyes. Later in the same song, he calls out another 1970s rock icon: "The best advice I've ever gotten was from good ol' Johnny Rotten," he confesses, before launching into a few lines from "God Save the Queen". As rock touchstones go, Queen and the Sex Pistols aren't too far off the beaten path; he could have quoted Alex Chilton or Damo Suzuki or even Elvis Costello, but that would miss the point. Finn is after the artists and music that try to make rock a communal rather than a private experience. So he's an unlikely hero for the cloistered and segmented indie rock crowd, which we're told prizes obscurity over accessibility. Ironically for a band whose lyrics depicted geographically specific subsubcultures, Finn's day-job group the Hold Steady brought a bar-band approach back into the indie rock world. They strove for broad appeal, which circa 2005's Separation Sunday sharpened their guitar attack and made them sound almost dangerous.
Over time, however, that same populism softened the Hold Steady's edges and blunted their urgency, and Finn's solo album, whose title is cribbed and scrambled from "Friday Night Lights", may be the culmination of that particular trajectory. If most solo albums at least make an effort to distinguish themselves from the artist's main outlet-- to justify their very existence-- Finn's chief tactic on these songs is to play everything close to the chest, to dial the music back and the intensity down. That's fine for songs such as "Western Pier" and closer "Not Much Left of Us", but deadly for "When No One's Watching" and "Honolulu Blues", which sound like he's consciously trying to avoid sounding like his main band. The guitars rarely venture toward riff or melody; instead, they provide atmosphere and mood. But so much of Clear Heart Full Eyes cries out for louder guitars, Springsteen-like drama, and the kind of precise sloppiness the Hold Steady did so well in the late 2000s.
The album works best when it sounds freshest and furthest away from the music we typically associate with Finn. "Terrified Eyes" shuffles around on a laidback beat and a rangy, almost alt-country guitar, as he takes the conspiratorial tone of a tour guide pointing out the sites of crimes and scandals. "New Friend Jesus" rambles acoustically, although Finn makes the title character sound like a punchline. That's odd considering how much of the album is given over to some of his most blatantly Catholic (or is that catholic?) lyrics. If Separation Sunday rewrote the rules and rituals of religion as street-level spirituality, Clear Heart Full Eyes mostly plays it straight.
Like some of the best Hold Steady albums, these songs are all interconnected, full of recurring characters and settings, so that even when the tempos lag and the guitars noodle, Clear Heart is pulled along by pure narrative momentum, giving it an immersive power that it doesn't necessarily earn. But that's Finn's main appeal: He's a born storyteller who's chosen rock as his medium. On Clear Heart he creates a new world with unique characters and rules, which are concrete, specific, and evocative. While it pales alongside some of the Hold Steady's best albums, these songs are so entangled with those people and places-- with those Holly and Charlemagne mythologies-- that they never grow tedious or ignorable. So perhaps Finn is turning into someone like Mercury or Rotten, acting as adviser to a new generation of listeners. Like them, he came on like a man on a mission, but now that it's been accomplished, he sounds like a man trying to figure out what comes next. Clear Heart is just good enough to keep us listening.


It’s a good effort to try and retrieve Future from the Pluto of his own imagination, but too often his collaboration with the 19-year-old Chicago rapper plays to neither of their strengths.

WRLD on Drugs

Future plays a narcissist who wants nothing more than to be hypnotized by the hues of his iridescent scumbaggery. This seems less a journey of self-discovery than a drugged state in which loved ones, lurking at the hazy edges of his consciousness, beg him to return from his benzodiazepine space station. It’s the depths of his inner outer-space that make him so fascinating on his own, and also why he’s never made a great album with another rapper. Free Bricks with Gucci Mane is a minor entry in their respective canons; Drake briefly co-opted him for the forgettable What a Time to Be Alive, and Super Slimey with Young Thug failed to fulfill the promise of their scintillating collab on “Relationship.” With WRLD on Drugs, Juice WRLD is attempting what only Zaytoven has consistently managed to do: retrieve Future from the Pluto of his own imagination.
The logic underpinning each of Future’s collaborative albums is absent on WRLD on Drugs. Beyond their affinity for prescription drugs and joyless sexual conquest, Juice WRLD and Future don’t appear to have much in common. (If anhedonia and substance abuse were enough to form strong artistic bonds, there’d be more than one classic Flying Burrito Brothers album.) Their voices tell the story: Future, the elder by 15 years, has a tectonic voice, gutbucket rumble that belongs in a barrelhouse; Juice WRLD, a 19-year old Chicagoan whose delivery is borrowed in equal parts from Chief Keef and Blink 182’s Mark Hoppus, has a voice that belongs in a schoolhouse. Future sounds like the final, desperate sips of a bacchanal; Juice WRLD sounds like an over-enthusiastic early-arriver.
There are moments where the contrast between sodden and sprightly lands nicely. Future and Juice WRLD are acutely melodic and instinctive hook writers and, when they evenly divide the labors of songcraft, the results are pretty damn good. But balanced duets like “Jet Lag,” “Realer N Realer,” “Hard Work Pays Off,” and the titular “WRLD on Drugs” are too rare. Rather than performing in sync, the duo frequently sounds like in they’re standing in line, waiting for their turns to rap bromides about casual drug use and sex. When, on “7 A.M. Freestyle,” Juice WRLD listlessly mumbles, “I’m getting money, power, hoes, clothes, nigga, et cetera,” he sounds like he’d rather be getting a good night’s sleep.
Too often, WRLD on Drugs caters to neither Future nor Juice WRLD’s strengths. The teenager became a star not with gnashing street rap but earnestly sung (if naively written) anthems about rejection and endlessly malicious women. These lightweight pop-punk sensibilities are muted in service of his collaborator’s preferred grim, dark palette. Juice WRLD’s a game understudy but, when paired with experienced hedonists like Future, Lil Wayne (“Oxy”), and Young Thug (“Red Bentley”), he’s cowed and timid like a teen at his first strip club.
For Future, the issue is a matter of focus. He can record an album’s worth of druggy trap raps without once emerging from a chemically-induced fugue. But the work is inessential. What makes him a fascinating artist is the depth of depravity and self-loathing he’s capable of mining. Only when the facade of sex and drugs is removed can he kneel before his reflection and see how truly bloodshot his eyeballs have become.


On their third album as a group, country singer-songwriters Miranda Lambert, Ashley Monroe, and Angaleena Presley offer full-blooded portraits of women who struggle, get revenge, and soldier on.

Interstate Gospel

Whenever I think about Pistol Annies, I think, invariably, of something Ashley Monroe told an interviewer shortly after the trio formed in 2011. Talking about her nickname within the group—“Hippie Annie”—Monroe explained, “I always said I was a hillbilly hippie. I want everybody to be fine; I want everybody to be calm and love each other, and the world to be bright and pretty. But I’ll do yoga while I’m watching ‘Cops,’ because I’m a redneck, too.”
Like the band’s music, the quote is funny, honest, and liable to give you just a little bit of whiplash; “Cops”—not squirrel gravy or making your own clothes or some other rural fetish on which one could hang a medal of authenticity, but a reality TV show about trashy people in the heat of some really bad luck.
Though often framed as a rebuttal to the polish of modern country, the band never seemed like they were trying to stop time or return to an imaginary place of roots. If anything, what makes them stand out is the suggestion that these old, unvarnished sounds—honky-tonk, southern rock, tinges of bluegrass—are compatible not only with modern attitudes but with the concision of pop. In the world of Pistol Annies, “daddy” is less the weatherworn figure of self-sacrifice than the guy talking conspiracy theories over Christmas turkey, and the proverbial bottle—country’s totem of personal decline—isn’t filled with whiskey, but prescription pills. Their songs’ protagonists—women, always women—are either sacking up or breaking down, “third-generation bartenders” with bumper stickers that read Honk If You’re Horny limping toward the next car payment. For them, the good old days is just a corny idea you might use to sell country music.
Plenty has happened in the five years since their last album, Annie Up. Monroe and Angaleena Presley, both of whom were primarily songwriters-for-hire when the band began, have become successful solo artists, releasing some of the better country-adjacent albums of the decade (Monroe’s Like a Rose and Presley’s Wrangled, among others). Miranda Lambert, already a platinum-selling artist when the Annies started out, solidified herself as the most visible—and bankable—feminist in country, and one of the sharper living songwriters in general. As for their personal lives, I defer to Lambert, who in a recent interview described the passage from Annie Up to Interstate Gospel by saying, “We have stats. We have two ex-husbands [Presley, Lambert], two husbands [Presley, Monroe], two kids [Presley, Monroe], one on the way [Presley], and 25 animals.” In a video of the interview, you can see Lambert ticking these markers off with her finger like battle scars, then turning to the DJ and smiling—with full teeth—a tight smile that seems to say that that’s the last any of them have to say about that.
Co-produced by longtime collaborator Frank Liddell, Interstate Gospel is earthier than Annie Up, and a little more poised than their 2011 debut, Hell on Heels. There are flashes of bluegrass (“Interstate Gospel”) and New Orleans funk (“Sugar Daddy”) and big-sky psychedelic rock (“Commissary”)—sounds that frame the band not as industry veterans but as outlaws and mountain mamas. The album’s cover pictures them barefoot, and the sound follows.
Like a lot of great country music, the songs here are staked not on novelty but on convention, on familiar stereotypes captured in unfamiliar depth. Take “Cheyenne,” the bad girl with the trashy tattoos set in motion by sadness so powerful it almost looks like freedom. Or the small-town housewife of “Milkman,” who passes into old age satisfied with the delusion that she kept her regrets a secret. Or the new divorcee of “Got My Name Changed Back,” who comes on like a paradigm of self-sufficiency before confessing—with a bitterness I have almost never heard outside a rap record—that at least she got the fucker’s money. As always, the premium remains on real talk, which the band dispenses with the unsparing resolve of someone who’s been listening the whole time but has not been paid attention to until now.
These are attractive characters, and repellent ones; women you either want to be or talk shit about. The most nuanced of them—on “Best Years of My Life,” “Milkman,” and the haunting “Commissary”—seem animated not by anger but by guilt so deep-seated it has become chromosomal. Like the polar bear sent into an existential tailspin because he feels cold, the women on Interstate Gospel seem not at odds with themselves so much as the roles to which they’ve been assigned.
Listening to Interstate Gospel, I felt a reservoir of sympathy for my mother. Thrice married and thrice divorced, survivor of domestic abuse, holder of a dozen careers, well-educated but as foolish as any of us, nobody has taught me more about the transformational power of loss. And still, I have watched her laugh and watched her be happy; watched her, hours after signing the papers on her second divorce, standing at the blender with a margarita in hand telling my kid brother to tell his teachers she couldn’t help him with his homework because, in her words, “Mom got drunk.” (He did; the school called.) Stubborn, funny, occasionally regretful, and proudly proud, she soldiers on.
These songs—the hot mess of “Stop Drop and Roll One,” the numbed reckoning of “Best Years of My Life,” the regrets of “Milkman” and the redemption of “Interstate Gospel”: These are my mother; these are what I know of mothers; these are what I think of when I think of strong women. And yes, women, and not men, who mask their pettiness with justification and their regret with self-pity. I remember the day when my mother called me from the steps of the courthouse, happy as could be that she had once again reclaimed the name with which she was born. Hopped-up, bittersweet, twice bitten, and unshy, it sounded a little like this.