The third album from Detroit post-punk outfit Protomartyr ups the ante considerably from the first two. Their grim but compelling songs highlight a place where violence hovers constantly at the periphery, where peace and hope gradually curdle and turn ugly, and the desperate people who once clung to them eventually fall prey to their worst impulses.

The Agent Intellect

In what feels like an odd moment of prescience, roughly halfway through The Agent Intellect, the harrowing third album from the Detroit band Protomartyr, the Pope pays a visit. It’s 1987 in Pontiac, Mich., and Pope John Paul II is visiting the Silverdome, delivering Mass to the 100,000 faithful who’d come to hear him speak. Among them was a young Joe Casey who, 25 years later, would grow up to become Protomartyr’s frontman. The event was historic—it set an attendance record at the arena—but what Casey remembers about it in "Pontiac 87" isn’t the beauty of the sermon or the spectacle in the ceremony, but the ugliness boiling just beneath the surface. On his way into the arena, he sees "money changing between hands," and on his way out, a riot, where "Old folks turn brutish/ Trampling their way out the gates towards heaven."
This is the universe Protomartyr inhabits, one where violence hovers constantly at the periphery, where peace and hope gradually curdle and turn ugly, and the desperate people who once clung to them eventually fall prey to their worst impulses. The emotionally brutal Under Color of Official Right from 2014 took place against the crumbling skyline of Detroit, where deadbeat fathers disappeared into bars while their children planned revenge at home and politicians made backwards deals that benefited no one but themselves. On Intellect, Casey’s got bigger matters on his mind. The first character we meet on the record is, literally, the Devil, but he doesn’t have red horns and a trident, and he’s not cackling in a smoldering cavern. He’s a teenager in his bedroom at home, full of promise and almost dewy-eyed naiveté until his peers shun him and all of his grand plans fail, and he’s left at the end of the song vowing, "I will make them feel the way I do/ I’ll corrupt them ‘til they think the way I do." If Right was about the evil that men do, Intellect goes one bigger and asks why they do it. The answer, again and again, is rooted in hurt, pain, neglect, and disappointment.
Intellect draws its energy from the panic of mortality. Casey lost his father to a heart attack and his mother to Alzheimer’s disease as he was writing the record, and their presence on Intellect provides some of its most wrenching emotional moments. His mother arrives strong and determined on the grim, booming "Why Does It Shake?", swearing, "Lithe in thought and pumping blood…I’m never gonna lose it," but suddenly the song collapses and decays. It concludes with the chilling appearance of "the stranger" who, in Casey’s words, always wins—"He enters the temple/ It falls/ It always falls." The song’s title comes from something Casey’s mother said, noticing the tremors of old age in her hands. That sound of the ticking clock makes all of the violence and drunkenness on Intellect seem that much more desperate, that much more futile.
Throughout the album, the band rises to meet the weighty subject matter. On Right, songs arrived in brute slashes, but on Intellect they’re textured and spacious. Guitarist Greg Ahee cloaks "Cowards Starve" in a Morricone-like cowboy flange, gradually gathering tension until the song detonates in the chorus. "Dope Cloud" rides a razor-wire post-punk guitar line as its protagonists accumulate treasure only to be met with Casey’s bleak reminder, "That’s not gonna save you, man." And in "Ellen", a love song written from the perspective of Casey’s father to his mother, they beautifully underplay, supporting the song’s sweet sentiment in feathery chords.
But it is Casey who has undergone the greatest evolution. Casey has described his stage demeanor as "30 minutes of a fat guy yelling at you," but on Intellect, he’s more measured, and his writing has developed an almost Joycean grasp of detail and narrative. The second verse of "Pontiac 87" feels like something that could have turned up in "The Dead": a crowd of regulars pile into the Detroit bar Jumbo’s (familiar to Protomartyr fans from its appearance on No Passion All Technique) the day after Christmas. Casey describes the scene with such stunning narrative economy you can almost see the lines on their faces: "Remembering a Jumbo’s night, December 26th/ Weird faces filled up the bar, half sober/ Outside, a steady snow—all new white." He’s also become a powerful, passionate singer. His delivery throughout Intellect has gravity and nuance; he’s able to make a sing-along out of the line "Social pressures exist/ And if you think about them all of the time/ You’re gonna find that your head’s been kicked in." He goes from baleful and bereft to nasty and snarling, commanding “Destroy the gateway, bind them up, break the circuit, cast them out.”
And what he’s driving at, again and again, is that we do all of those things when we feel like trapped animals, when we’ve thrown our full bodies into life and it’s given us nothing back but loneliness and poverty and emptiness, and each advancing year is less time we have to do something of substance. It’s a profound and uncomfortable truth, and it’s one that The Agent Intellect unflinchingly stares down.
All of this is highlighted to shattering effect in "Uncle Mother’s". At first, it seems like another in a long line of Protomartyr bar tableaus, the battered working class piling into a dive to suck down Old Styles until the world seems bearable again. The revelation of the song’s true meaning comes in what at first feels like a throwaway detail. At the start of the song, Casey advises, "Welcome to Uncle Mother’s/ Leave your children in the car." From there the carousing begins, and the usual boxes are checked: there’s a drug deal in the kitchen and bad doings in the back corner. But at the end of the song, Casey repeats himself, and turns a declarative into a question: "Welcome to Uncle Mother’s/ Are your children still in the car?" In that moment it becomes clear that the subject of the song isn’t the drunks—it’s the children. That subtle shift is what gives the record its almost palpable sense of humanity, of sorrow, of compassion. On The Agent Intellect, we are all the children, shivering alone in an empty station wagon in a bitter Detroit night, waiting in vain for someone to come and take us home.


With his scrappy indie rock project Turtlenecked, Harrison Smith pens witty lyrics that riff on social media and scene politics. But his second album is often insufferable.

Vulture

Minutes into his second album as Turtlenecked in as many years, Harrison Smith puts his audience on notice: “Reality TV!/I’m not here to make friends!” Do not misinterpret this as Smith saying that he doesn’t care what you think about him or his scrappy indie rock project. At 20 years old, Smith has come of age at a time where it’s completely normal to use every moment as an opportunity to publicly manipulate your personality. “I don’t need no goddamn life/When I’ve got 100 likes” isn’t an original sentiment, but like every lyric on Vulture, it’s striving for the validation of any response, whether it’s smashing that like, RT, or the mute button. While Smith is capable of penning witty, voice-of-a-generation quotables, he’s just as enamored with Tumblr snark. It’s as if Vulture was put on earth at this very moment for people who just can’t bring themselves to pick sides in the very particular Car Seat Headrest/Ricky Eat Acid beef.
In fact, Smith’s entire M.O. is playing both sides—it’s unclear whether he’s mocking the actions of his peers, the Twitter and scene politics that dictate those actions, or just mocking those who do the mocking. That’s where Vulture’s problems start. In its very first lines, Smith shouts and shudders like Ian Curtis resurrected as a woke male feminist: “Someone tell these boys that I’m a feminist!/Someone tell these girls that I’m effeminate!” This is a song called “Boys Club,” and one would assume he’s presenting himself as an outspoken ally. But his heel turn happens less than two minutes into Vulture: The most genuine emotion of “Boys Club” is an all-consuming cynicism rather than indignation for the patriarchal power structure. Even if Smith calls his scene a “pale indie bro trash pile,” he then boasts that he’s going to be the king of that hill.
Vulture does occasionally back up that bluster, particularly when it’s perfumed by the beery piss and vinegar of Archers of Loaf circa Vee Vee on “Pangloss.” Yet for the most part, even though Turtlenecked’s verbal dialect is very 2017, the sound is mostly 2006-style blog-rock. Divorced from its unfortunate historical baggage, there was something to that style, which bridged the gap between the early 2000s post-punk revival and the Urban Outfitters takeover of the late 2000s. And these tics—jittery vocals, fractured rhythms, oddly shaped song structures—lend themselves well to Smith’s antic mind.
But when the choruses aren’t there, Vulture recalls those “Simpsons” Hullabalooza punks, who couldn’t even tell if they were being sarcastic anymore. “Human Veal” muddles the neurotic neediness of Xiu Xiu, Drake, and Taking Back Sunday into a toxic Long Island cocktail of emo self-awareness: “I’ve said LOL in every sentence/I want to show I meant it as a self-aware, half-ironic deprecating empty vessel for the remnants of my heart.” As someone who’s absorbed the near entirety of Saddle Creek’s output, I’ll admit this is the kind of thing that can feel revelatory and even empowering to hear within the context of a snappy indie rock song rather than an inner monologue.
Other times, this kind of mental jousting is just as exhausting to hear as it is to experience. On “Meeting You in the Hospital,” Smith boasts that he wants a romance like one from a movie or a novel, not some “patriarchal white male bullshit” or “pixie dream to save my life.” The effect of this lyric is entirely predicated on listener projection. If you assume Smith realizes all four things are basically the same—and that’s a big assumption—then it’s a clever lyric. If not, it’s just as insufferable as anyone else trying their damnedest to sound virtuous. Vulture occasionally hints at what Smith could accomplish as a writer if his scope matched his ambition. But for now, it’s a lesson that if you keep your head up your ass long enough, of course the world looks like it’s full of shit.


Daniel Lopatin accentuates the Safdie Brothers’ character studies with his hyper-real music. Instead of pursuing moments of trance-like calm or humor, here he metes out anxiety measure by measure.

Oneohtrix Point Never: Good Time (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

The Safdie Brothers’ crime drama Good Time opens with a helicopter shot of New York City, a gamble for any film but especially one this strange, cloistered, and intimate. It’s one of the most photographed places in the world, an easy harbor for cliché and forced sentiment, and yet in the brothers’ lens, the setting looks novel and uneasy, like a threatening frontier you’re staring down for the very first time. That effect—of seeing one of the most recognizable places on earth as though it’s brand new—is cemented by the music permeating the shot, an anxious drone perforated by synthesizer arpeggios that sound both retro and bizarrely out of time.
As Oneohtrix Point Never, New York-based electronic composer Daniel Lopatin has often focused on the grotesque and unplaceable. He’s mined vintage advertising, TV documentaries, and corny ’80s pop hits for his alien environments, often juxtaposing barely recognizable melodies with obliterative walls of static. From the ambient waves of Russian Mind to the hard rock-adjacent Garden of Delete, Lopatin’s work has a tendency to displace the listener—to envelop them in a world that looks a lot like the one they’re used to, but threatens to fall apart at the slightest touch.
Lopatin’s body of work makes him uniquely suited to the Safdie Brothers’ filmmaking style, which opts for a deep pathos and an intense humanization of its characters over flashy action sequences. Good Time is ostensibly a crime movie, but it’s full of close-ups on characters’ faces shot with handheld cameras. Its characters aren’t hard-talking badasses, but flawed, pained people scrambling for survival the only way they know how. The story centers on Connie, played by Robert Pattinson, who’s trying to get his brother Nicky, played by director Benny Safdie, out of Rikers Island after a bank robbery goes south. Nicky has unspecified disabilities—he wears hearing aids, and the first time we see him, he’s struggling to complete some kind of psychiatric evaluation—so Connie’s especially protective of him despite leading him directly into danger. The film’s narrative rests on this contradiction. Connie wants nothing more than for his brother to have a good life, even if it means ruining everything on his path to get there.
Lopatin accentuates the Safdie Brothers’ character studies with a palette that will sound familiar to anyone who’s followed the Oneohtrix Point Never discography so far. But the score moves differently from his album work; instead of pursuing moments of trance-like calm or humor, he metes out anxiety measure by measure. Until the final scene, the film is all anxiety—the characters are always in situations where everything could go wrong, and the score teeters on a parallel brink.
Arpeggios run over peals of white noise on “Good Time” and “Hospital Escape/Access-A-Ride”; drum sounds echo into an elevator shaft on “6th Floor” and “Ray Wakes Up.” “The Acid Hits” runs on slippery percussion that echoes the sound of bloodied fists breaking skin. Lopatin weaves dialogue from the movie into the score, creating an effect that’s disarming even before you see the scenes it’s sourced from. Jennifer Jason Leigh screams into the music on “Bail Bonds,” a piece accompanying a scene where her character—an ad hoc girlfriend that Connie manipulates for her family’s money—tries to put a $10,000 charge on her mother’s credit card. “Ray Wakes Up” samples a conversation between a teenage girl and her grandmother that takes place while Connie’s on their couch plotting his next move. Connie’s voice rarely appears in the score; Lopatin instead focuses on the characters that he tricks, coerces, and actively harms on his quest to post bail for his brother.
The score ends with “The Pure and the Damned,” a ballad featuring Iggy Pop that’s unlike anything Lopatin’s produced before (save for an alternate take of the 2010 track “Returnal” with Anohni and Fennesz). In the film, the song plays during the closing credits, which roll not over a black screen but over the story’s ambiguous epilogue. Pop’s lyrics paint a strange heaven, a place where the skies are frozen blue and you can “pet the crocodiles.” “I ain’t going to get there, but it’s a nice dream,” he says between verses. “It’s a nice dream.” He’s accompanied by little more than a piano, a few distant beats, and some muted synth pads. Singing in an alien setting, he sounds like he’s struggling to get the notes out. His vibrato snags here and there, his tone eroded by time. A broken song closes a broken story. Like the best of OPN’s work—and the best soundtrack work in general—the track is heavy with affect without ever telling its listeners exactly how to feel. Good Time invites emotional confusion along multiple vectors. Lopatin’s score opens fissures that let its beauty and ambivalences burrow deep under your skin.


Who remembers blog rock? Well, the long-time-coming debut from Ra Ra Riot is the sort of album that got people excited about the stuff in the first place.

The Rhumb Line

It's hard to believe that, up until now, Ra Ra Riot had only one EP to their name. The Syracuse-based chamber pop crew has garnered plenty of attention over its two-year existence, despite a limited recorded output. Such attention came, at first, in the form of breathless reviews of early festival appearances and accounts of their tireless slogs across the country, but most of the headlines since have focused on the inter-band tribulations: losing their frontman during their first year of existence and then suffering an even bigger setback when drummer/co-founder John Ryan Pike was found dead early last summer after a show in Providence, Rhode Island. But finally, with the release of their full-length debut, Ra Ra Riot are placing the emphasis firmly back on musical matters.
Nautically named and themed, The Rhumb Line reminds us why we cared about this band in the first place. Its mournful cellos and haunting violins are dissonantly (if pleasingly) matched with triumphant rhythms and exultant melodies, resulting in a record that is at once grand and intimate. With moments of pop savvy reminiscent of their pals in Vampire Weekend and the emotional subtlety of the Shins, Ra Ra Riot's songs inhabit a space that is both bubbly and bittersweet. To wit, swirling album opener "Ghost Under Rocks" blooms from a melancholic cello line into skittering, propulsive post-punk percussion. And their excellent cover of Kate Bush's "Suspended in Gaffa" finds the appropriate whimsy in the bounce of the melody, but makes the song safe for those who are uncomfortable with Bush's theatrical trilling.
But Ra Ra Riot, as their name implies, are not only capable of autumnal, Arcade Fire hymns. "St. Peter's Day Festival" and "Can You Tell" represent the breezier, brighter side of the band, taking perky melodies and swelling them with luscious string arrangements. Those strings prove to be the secret to Ra Ra Riot's success; "Too Too Too Fast", on which they lean on synths rather than the organic warmth of a cello or violin, is the flattest of the bunch.
Much of The Rhumb Line sounds like an elegy-- though Pike co-wrote roughly half of this album's songs before his passing. "Dying Is Fine", with its ee cummings-borrowed lyrics ("Death, oh baby/ You know that dying is fine/ But maybe/ I wouldn't like death, if death was good") is sadly apropos, but it eventually explodes into an anthemic, cheery chorus. "Winter '05", set before Pike's death, is more mournful: You can hear the band's loss in the elegant, weeping strings, the descriptions of lonely cemeteries, and Wesley Miles' vocals as he sings, "If you were here/ Winter wouldn't pass quite so slow." It's rare for a band to survive the death of a key member, but Ra Ra Riot are actually thriving, turning The Rhumb Line from a potential "what could've been" record into a rousing, poignant testament to Pike's life and his former bandmates' resilience.


The rap duo’s latest project fits neatly into the stately traditionalism currently dominating the independent scene.

Bronze Nazareth / Roc Marciano: Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis

There is a long history of rappers and producers treating their work like fine art, investments in pop culture set to appreciate in value. This fascination goes beyond simply describing a Basquiat painting sitting on a wall or claiming the paper you wrote your verse on belongs in the Louvre. It manifests in different ways, like New Jersey rapper Mach-Hommy selling physical albums for thousands of dollars; or rappers like A$AP Rocky curating their own art exhibits; or artists removing their discographies from major streaming services to funnel access (and profits) directly to the supplier. Fine art and rap music have been intertwined since the genre’s inception, but the modern era has seen an influx of talent claiming the title of high art the genre is continuously denied.
Michigan rapper-producer Bronze Nazareth has long seen himself within this lineage. A Wu-Tang Clan affiliate and RZA mentee, Nazareth got his start producing for RZA and other Wu members before releasing his debut solo album The Great Migration in 2006. Over the last 15 years, Nazareth formed his own group called the Wisemen, contributed beats to Samsung commercials, and worked to refine the painterly details of his raps and production. He’s seen his share of independent and mainstream success, but his latest album Ekphrasis—produced mainly by similarly art-minded rapper-producer Roc Marciano—is Nazareth’s attempt to slot himself into a world newly interested in the traditionalist East Coast sound he’s favored for nearly two decades.
Ekphrasis isn’t the first time the duo have worked together. Marciano once rapped over a Nazareth beat on 2005’s Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture, where then-prominent indie rappers took a crack at unused songs from the Wu archives. In the years since, Marciano has been at the forefront of the neoclassical boom-bap revival of the 2010s and has taken to producing full-lengths for other rappers, from Queens rapper Flee Lord to Syracuse’s Stove God Cooks. Marciano producing for Nazareth is a full-circle moment, and though the production on Ekphrasis is split evenly—Marciano and Nazareth each handle six of the beats—the sound remains holistic and fluid. They both favor bare-bones loops; sometimes grounded by psychedelic guitars (“The Precipice”); sometimes by a stray synth (“Brass Jehova”) or a ghostly choir (“Survivor’s Vow”). It’s par for the course without any real innovations and occasionally so uniform it becomes indistinct, but Nazareth is clearly relishing the chance to flex for a new audience.
As a rapper, Nazareth’s flows are rigid, but his words are measured and descriptive, as if they were recited from stone tablets. There are plenty of references to artists like Marcelo Gandhi and sticky images of his own in his writing (“Chandeliers dancing on my ceiling, rich as Lionel,” from “Crazy Horse”), and Ekphrasis is content to stew in this brand of wordplay for its own sake. He’s so accurate with his gun that he can “write [his] name in cursive” and just wants some “space like Bezos” while planning out his next conquests. As fun as the word games are, Nazareth’s raps are most intriguing when their stakes match the vivid melodrama of the beats. Hearing a rap veteran talk about climbing even higher over the dramatic strings of “Kettle Black” and wax poetic about early days chopping loops and remembering his late brother on “Survivor’s Vow” are thrilling bits of personal memory that paint a fuller picture of the man behind the mic. It’s the kind of selective soul-bearing Marciano dots across his projects often, and Ekphrasis would have benefitted from a slightly more personal touch.
Most rappers in Nazareth’s position—a 20-year veteran co-signed by the founder of one of the most important rap groups of all time virtually from the jump—would use an album helmed by one of the modern underground’s premier rapper-producers to project their worth from the mountaintops. But outside of a handful of explicit mentions, Nazareth prefers to let his art speak for itself. For better or worse, Ekphrasis fits neatly into the stately traditionalism currently dominating the independent scene, another chance for a legend to further refine their art.

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The debut album from the Pacific Northwest country songwriter showcases her distinct personality with vivid lyrics and lovely, thoughtful arrangements.

Pohorylle

On the very first line of the first song of her first album, Oregon singer-songwriter Margo Cilker describes a frozen and treacherous patch of ice. “That river in the winter, it could fuck me up,” she sings on “That River,” drawing out that f-bomb until it sounds like a bruise. “Crack my ribs, bust my lips, it could do enough.” It’s a vivid introduction to this country artist, who pushes against conventions of the genre that don’t fit her perspective. Simply describing a river as malevolent contradicts depictions of those winding bodies of water as sites for baptism and rebirth or as vehicles for escape from the hardships of the world. Cilker sounds like she’s thinking hard about what it means to express herself in this particular musical form, and as a result, Pohorylle conveys a distinct and lively personality.
Cilker recorded these songs far from the country mainstream, which allows her to put her own stamp on the music. Instead of traipsing down to Nashville, she stayed put in the Pacific Northwest, seeking out as a mentor Sera Cahoone, a veteran of that region’s indie scene both as part of the autocorrect-challenging band Carissa’s Wierd and as a solo artist. With a small band of Portland indie lifers, including Jenny Conlee-Drizos (Decemberists) on keys and Rebecca Young (Jesse Sykes) on bass, Cilker and Cahoone create a palette that’s both austere and weirdly lush, thoughtful and easygoing, full of lovely, subtle flourishes like the start-stop rhythms of “Brother, Taxman, Preacher” and the sympathetic New Orleans horns that light up “Tehachapi” like a strand of Christmas lights at a backyard party.
Folding in enough places, names, and plainspoken observations to warrant comparisons to Lucinda Williams, Cilker is a sly presence on Pohorylle (whose title refers to both a backpack company and a photojournalist who died during the Spanish Civil War). She can break a syllable to break your heart, as she does on “Flood Plain,” stretching out a sad ultimatum during the chorus. But she can also bring home the reality of what the world withholds from women, whether it’s the benefit of the doubt or basic security. On “Broken Arm in Oregon,” she sings about a woman recovering from an assault, painting the scene with a directness that underscores her trauma: “Now every room she sleeps in, she’s gotta map out her escape plan,” Cilker explains matter-of-factly. But she grows more animated when she tells you what that experience took from her: “Imagine all those hours devoted to bigger things.”
There’s also a little humor in Cilker’s voice, and she delivers some lines with an arched eyebrow—like she knows some secret that lies just beyond the lyrics. “Will you think of me on your way back to Tehachapi?,” she asks a departing lover, turning a simple goodbye into a kiss-off. She delivers the question like a taunt because she’s happy where she is: struggling but struggling toward something. Yearning is the album’s animating theme, and what Cilker yearns for most, even more than somebody who’ll stick around, is a few more hours in the day, a few more chances for happiness. “It’s my life,” she sings on closer “Wine in the World.” “I just wish I had more time.” It’s a little unsettling to hear an artist so fixated with death on her debut, but on Pohorylle, such gravity feels earned, even natural.

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Matt Berninger and co. follow their 2005 grower Alligator-- an excellent album that we initially underrated-- with another patient record full of clever turns of phrase and dramatic intensity, here even more restrained and controlled.

Boxer

Among critics and fans, the National's third album Alligator has become synonymous with the term grower. Released to minor acclaim early in 2005, the album has since quietly and steadily built up a large, avid listenership. Matt Berninger's lyrics-- initially off-putting and seemingly obtuse in their non sequiturs and stray details-- proved unpretentiously poetic over time. His sober baritone and dogged repetition of phrases and passages made it sound like he was trying to figure the songs out in tandem with the listener. The band, meanwhile, played around the hooks instead of hard-selling them, so that in a sense, despite two previous albums and a killer EP, we all pretty much learned how to listen to the National on Alligator, eventually finding deeper shades of meanings in the words, sympathizing with Berninger's anxieties, laughing at his grim jokes, and tapping out the band's complex rhythms on desktops and steering wheels.
It's a testament to the good will engendered by Alligator that fans are now likewise calling the National's follow-up, Boxer, a grower. Despite the scrutiny greeting its release (brought on by the inevitable leaks), many listeners seem to be approaching these songs patiently, giving Boxer the space and time to reveal its dark, asymmetrical passageways. In a sense, the album demands it. The same elements that kept listeners returning to Alligator (Berninger's clever turns of phrase, the band's dramatic intensity) are present on Boxer, but are now more restrained and controlled.
From the first piano chords on opener "Fake Empire", the National create a late-night, empty-city-street mood, slightly menacing but mostly isolated. The 10 tracks that follow sustain and even amplify that feeling, revealing the band's range as they play close to the vest. Aaron and Bryce Dessner's twin guitars don't so much battle one another as create a unified layer that acts as a full backdrop for the other instruments, while touring member Padma Newsome's string and horn arrangements infuse songs like "Mistaken for Strangers" and the stand-out "Ada" (featuring Sufjan Stevens on piano) with subtle drama. But Boxer is a drummer's album: Bryan Devendorf becomes a main player here, never merely keeping time but actively pushing the songs around. With machine precision, his fluttering tom rhythms add a heartbeat to "Squalor Victoria" and give "Brainy" its stalker tension. In fact, the title Boxer could conceivably be a reference to the way his rhythms casually spar with Berninger's vocal melodies, jabbing and swinging at the singer's empathies and emotions.
Despite this implied violence, Boxer doesn't have the same aggressive self-reckoning and psychological damage assessment of Alligator. Here, Berninger sounds like he's able to look outward from that mental space instead of further inward. He observes the people around him-- friends, lovers, passersby-- alternately addressing them directly and imagining himself in their minds. Or, as he sings on "Green Gloves", "Get inside their clothes with my green gloves/ Watch their videos, in their chairs." He sounds more genuinely empathetic than previously (the accusatory you from the first two albums is thankfully absent), toying with ambiguity and backing away from outright satire. Certain themes continue to prevail: He maintains a fear of white-collar assimilation, addressing "Squalor Victoria" and "Racing Like a Pro" to upwardly mobile hipster-yuppies ("Underline everything/ I'm a professional/ In my beloved white shirt"), and clings to his American angst ("We're half awake in a fake empire"), as though recognizing the world's craziness makes him more sane.
Better even than these songs are the three mid-album tracks that toy with a love = war metaphor that miraculously avoids the obviousness that implies. On "Slow Show", over background guitar drones and a piano theme that echoes U2's "New Year's Day", he daydreams, "I want to hurry home to you/ Put on a slow dumb show for you/ Crack you up." But the capper is in the coda: "You know I dreamed about you for 29 years before I saw you." That hard-won contentment begins to crumble in "Apartment Story", in which the world invades the couple's shared space, and in "Start a War", where the possibility of loss looms threateningly. "Walk away now and you're gonna start a war," Berninger sings against the band's simple, uncomfortably insistent rhythm, his concrete fears giving the song the extra heft of the personal.
Obviously, it's pretty easy to read a lot into the National's music and especially into Berninger's lyrics, but that shouldn't imply that Boxer is a willfully difficult or overly academic work. Like those on their last album, these songs reveal themselves gradually but surely, building to the inevitable moment when they hit you in the gut. It's the rare album that gives back whatever you put into it.


Calling back to the insurgent sociopolitical jazz from another era of national unrest, these ecstatic instrumentals are urgent and purposeful.

Illegal Moves

Before digging into Illegal Moves, the third LP from explosive New York quartet Sunwatchers, you first have to deal with its cover. The image is so bracing, it will probably stay with you the entire time you listen to Illegal Moves. In Scott Lenhardt’s garish, Mad Magazine-style drawing, a demented Kool-Aid Man stands over the bloodied body of Uncle Sam. A crowd of characters—from Margaret Thatcher and Ronald McDonald to Sunwatchers themselves—looks on in horror or glee.
But what does a brash political cartoon have to do with Sunwatchers’ boisterous instrumental meld of jazz, psych, and prog? The connection is partly visceral: Like the cover, Sunwatchers songs are loud and bold, spilling their ecstatic sounds into a euphoric blare. Take the winding “Psychic Driving,” which warms up noisily before exploding into a delirious swirl of riffs and honks. Though not devoid of subtlety, Illegal Moves is mostly about that kind of collective energy and momentum. But Sunwatchers have always had strong political stances, too. Their albums usually include a manifesto—“Sunwatchers stand in solidarity with the dispossessed, impoverished, and embattled people of the world”—and their proceeds benefit prison abolition. As guitarist Jim McHugh once put it, “...to actually become the hammer that falls on capitalism is our goal.”
In that sense, Illegal Moves recalls a cultural heyday in the 1960s and 1970s, when raucous instrumental sounds, particularly the free jazz that Archie Shepp called “Fire Music,” were key to a sociopolitical groundswell that sought uprising through artistic engagement. (Sunwatchers took their name from a song by one of the most boundary-pushing artists of the time, Albert Ayler.) But Sunwatchers’ music isn’t exactly a treatise; it’s as rough and primal as it is aware. Still, a historical strain of rebellion radiates through Illegal Moves’ best moments, and they’re hell-bent on carrying it forward. That goal now feels more urgent and purposeful than ever before.
Sunwatchers’ compositional approach is pretty simple: Pick a melodic figure to repeat, then surround it with a fervent swirl of sound. On catchy jams like the triumphant “New Dad Blues” and the high-velocity “Beautiful Crystals,” the quartet picks out a hummable hook and blasts it with rising rhythm, sprinting guitars, and the triumphant urgency of Jeff Tobias’ horns and keyboards. In the process, basic songs become hectic sprints, with dizzying amounts of sound splattered along the way. During a cover of Alice Coltrane’s “Ptah, the El Daoud,” Sunwatchers honor the original’s thoughtfulness while giving it a delirious sensibility.
Honoring musical ancestors is a Sunwatchers specialty. Last year, in perhaps the most straightforward example of their political leanings yet, they teamed with Eugene Chadbourne for an album featuring covers of the politically charged trio Minutemen. But Illegal Moves is just as powerful a statement about the urgency of the times and the reactions we should all be having, because being entertained doesn’t have to mean being disengaged. That Sunwatchers make their calls to arms sound so fun doesn’t diminish that power—in fact, it just might be the most important part.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the legendary singer’s 1963 debut, whose career-making collaborations with Burt Bacharach and Hal David transformed pop music into something more symphonic, boundless, and idiosyncratic.

Dionne Warwick: Presenting Dionne Warwick

Presenting Dionne Warwick

Warwick. It was a misprint on the label of her first single. In 1962, the 22-year-old Dionne Warrick was on her way to becoming one of the greatest singers in American history. But her record label was treating her as another cog in the machine, just as the industry treated most artists, especially those who were Black. Scepter Records promised they’d correct the error for her next single, but that one said Warwick, too. Perhaps it was because “Don’t Make Me Over,” the single’s B-side, had been a breakout hit. Listeners now recognized that second w, which meant there was money riding on it. Dionne Warwick she remained.
Burt Bacharach’s name was also misspelled on that first single. It said Bert, which was his father’s name. (His mother gave him the u because she felt, for reasons lost to time, that it would protect him from the teasing his dad had apparently endured as a child.) By that point, the songwriter and his lyricist partner, Hal David, had a track record as hitmakers, which gave Bacharach a certain sway among executive types. Also, he was white. The e never showed up on a label again.
At first blush, “Don’t Make Me Over” may seem typical of the girl-group sound that was all the rage in the early ’60s, with a swooning string section and a chorus of female background singers punctuating Warwick’s lines. But its musical underpinnings are idiosyncratic: The verses pivot on a chord that most songwriters wouldn’t go near, and the vocal phrases are five bars long rather than the standard four, with a time signature change thrown in for good measure. Warwick makes an extraordinarily difficult melody sound intuitive and relaxed, a trick that could only come through her combination of innate talent and rigorous discipline. The arrangement is ornate but not stuffy, revealing a delightful new instrumental voice with practically every bar. Bacharach’s contemporary Phil Spector liked to compare his productions to little symphonies, but this was a lot closer to the real deal. Spector draped simple pop compositions in lushly symphonic instrumentation; Bacharach’s songs are ingenious in their bones, whether performed by an orchestra or a soloist.
Coincidentally, “Don’t Make Me Over” arrived in stores a few months before the publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique helped to kickstart feminism’s second wave. David’s lyrics, written at a time when pop songs were far more likely to uphold gender hierarchies than upend them, were a plea from a woman to a man to stop trying to control her. In the bridge, it becomes more like a demand: “Accept me for what I am!/Accept me for the things that I do!” The rhythm and harmony simplify, and Warwick starts to really belt, moving from her restrained early delivery into one more clearly inflected with her lifelong background as a gospel singer. It was the world’s introduction to her one-of-a-kind voice, with a dynamic range encompassing utmost delicacy on one end and walloping force on the other, her deep sensitivity to a song’s emotional contour matched by her virtuosic technical control. The song is a lesson in music theory and performance as well as a shot straight to the heart. When the intricacy of the verses gives way to the feeling of the bridge, it’s like exiting a series of switchbacks and taking in the view from the mountaintop.
Presenting Dionne Warwick, her first album, released the following year, is an imperfect lens through which to examine her artistry. But then so is her second album, and her third, and any other album after that. No one album tells the story in full, in part because Warwick’s career has been so long and fruitful—56 singles in the Billboard Hot 100 across three decades, with dozens more on the R&B and adult contemporary charts—and in part because she rose to fame just before the album took its place as pop’s dominant format in the commercial market and the popular imagination.
Like most pop and R&B labels operating at the time, Scepter was primarily concerned with hit singles. The album was an ancillary product, a different format for selling songs that had already proven themselves as hits. 1963 was the twilight of the Brill Building era, a sort of nether zone in pop history, bookended roughly on one side by the drafting of Elvis Presley into the U.S. Army in 1958 and on the other by the arrival of the Beatles in America in 1964. As Ken Emerson puts it in Always Magic in the Air, his indispensable history of the era, it was a time when the industry “routinized the creation and production of rock’n’roll,” with the help of professional songwriters like Bacharach and David, many of whom had offices in the midtown Manhattan building that gives the period its name.
Rock’s first boom, in the mid-’50s, had dramatically expanded the market for recorded music, but it hadn’t been planned from the top down, having arisen from upstart labels like Memphis’ Sun Records rather than corporate offices in New York or Los Angeles. Its early stars were unpredictable and sometimes unruly personalities. By the decade’s end, Elvis was serving in Germany, and other key performers were either dead (Buddy Holly) or embroiled in controversy (Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis). The industry, in order to control the money pouring in from the newfound teen market, established a model in which performers were relatively interchangeable, bound by contracts that enforced the label’s authority over their output. One particularly egregious case involved the pioneering Black vocal group the Drifters, whose members were swapped in and out at will by a manager who owned the rights to the group’s name, and who paid them in an arrangement that the Brill Building songwriter Mike Stoller, in There’s Always Magic in the Air, likened to slave labor.
Warwick and Bacharach were odd fits for the rock’n’roll assembly line. Both were conservatory-trained: she a young gospel devotee who could sing opera, jazz, or any other style if she wanted; he a 30-something aesthete and tinkerer who spent his adolescence sneaking into Manhattan bebop clubs and once wrote that he might enjoy Bill Haley and His Comets more if they used a few major-seventh chords. The music they made together with David sounds only occasionally like R&B, and almost never like rock. Suffused with jazz and classical harmony, set to rhythms influenced by the Brazilian music that Bacharach encountered in his years as a touring conductor, and with Warwick’s vocals emphasizing clarity and precision as much as fervor and abandon, it’s not the first thing a DJ might reach for to set the sock hop on fire. It is adult music, barely masquerading as kid stuff. These three were not the only people making personal and unconventional music within the strictures of the Brill Building model, which encouraged frivolity and homogeneity, but theirs went the furthest out from the expected forms.
The brass at Scepter apparently had their doubts that the singles the trio created had any potential as hits, and it’s hard to blame them for that. “This Empty Place,” Presenting Dionne Warwick’s opener and Warwick’s second single, spends its verses flipping between minor and major versions of the same chord, a strange move in rock’n’roll or any other genre. But its complexity, like that of “Don’t Make Me Over,” is never ostentatious. Unusual harmonies and meters are a means to an end: heightening the feeling in a particular lyric, giving a melody more space to breathe, bringing the phrasing of a vocal line more closely to the natural patterns of speech. The music, despite its difficulty to perform, is unfailingly inviting and emotionally present. Warwick and her collaborators used their extraordinary skills to better reach listeners, not to talk past them or show off.
As the chords ascend through the chorus of “This Empty Place,” so does the searing heat of Warwick’s vocal, delivering a David lyric about the aftermath of a breakup. Then, suddenly, the backing singers drop out, the rhythm section cools off, and she’s all alone to sing the kicker: “Now there’s not a star left in the sky/And if you don’t come back to me I’ll die,” with a flippant melodic curlicue on the last word. Another singer might read that couplet as if it were a literal matter of life and death. From Warwick, it comes across more like a taunt. Her breakneck shift between emotional registers provides a thrill that no amount of tinkering with harmonies could approach on its own.
Given the realities of the era’s music industry, it is understandable that Warwick approached her early dealings with Scepter and Bacharach-David with some caution. In her telling, “Don’t Make Me Over” is a direct result of that tension. Bacharach, after encountering Warwick as a background singer on a session for the Drifters, first hired her to provide vocals on the demo recordings he made to shop his songs around to labels. Impressed by her musical ability and easy charisma, he and David soon encouraged her to pursue a solo career, with the two of them writing and producing. She was still a conservatory student, commuting to New York from her Connecticut campus for session work. In order to convince her mother that the shot at stardom wouldn’t interfere with her studies, she told the songwriters that she could only record on weekends.
Warwick claims that Bacharach and David had promised her “Make It Easy on Yourself,” a song that she particularly loved and had recorded as a demo for her first single. She was on her way to a session with the pair when she heard another singer’s rendition of “Make It Easy on Yourself” on the radio. When she arrived, she says, she admonished them not to go behind her back, or tamper with her vision of herself as an artist. “I felt Burt and Hal had given my songs away and they felt they hadn’t and that maybe I was being a bit unreasonable,” she said in 1997. “Well, one word led to another… and I finally said, ‘Don’t make me over, man!’ and I walked out.”
In Bacharach’s version, he and David came up with “Don’t Make Me Over” without that bit of verbal inspiration from Warwick. There was never any promise about “Make It Easy on Yourself,” he claims in his 2013 memoir, and the subsequent shouting match never happened. His insistence on writing Warwick out of the song’s creation, given its content and the historical context, is ironic.
Also ironic: On Presenting Dionne Warwick’s tracklist, alongside “Don’t Make Me Over,” a song with a message of women’s strength and agency rarely heard in pop music at the time, sits “Wishin’ and Hopin’” a sweet little ditty about how women can only find real love through subservience to their men. Musically, it is among the album’s most distinctive tracks, with a melody like a multicolored bouncy ball. But the words: “Show him that you care just for him/Do the things he likes to do/Wear your hair just for him,” and so on.
It’s possible that the lyric of “Wishin’ and Hopin’” had less to do with David’s latent misogyny (and, for that matter, “Don’t Make Me Over” with his feminist streak) than with the mechanics of the Brill Building model, in which songs were not expected to be expressions of deeply held individual sentiment so much as practical attempts to resonate with the attitudes and desires of the listening public. Women’s independence was in the air in 1963, and so was the reaction against it. David wrote songs about both. “Wishin’ and Hopin’” didn’t gain any chart foothold when it was released as the B-side to “This Empty Place,” but a nearly identical cover version by Dusty Springfield hit the Top 10 when it came out a year later. (Incidentally, the detachment from the personal perspective—along with the fact that the Brill Building was full of men writing for women performers and vice versa—also meant that their lyrics were broadly interpretable. There are many versions of Bacharach-David songs that have been gender-flipped from their original recordings, including a charming rendition of “Wishin’” by British Invasion also-rans the Merseybeats, in which frontman Billy Kinsley advises his fellow guys to wear their hair in just the way their girls like.)
Outside of the singles, much of the material on Presenting consists of Bacharach-David songs that Warwick had previously cut as demo recordings for other artists. Why spend time and money on making new album tracks when they could just repurpose these recordings they already had sitting around, tack on the hits, and call it a day? But the ghostly minimalism of the demos doesn’t take much away from Presenting as a listening experience. Often, it enhances it, providing contrast to the grandeur of the singles and reflecting the often lovelorn mood of David’s lyrics. Bacharach was meticulous even with these preliminary takes, a habit he picked up in hopes of conveying ideas about instrumentation to a producer when he was greener in the industry and did not yet have license to oversee the recording sessions for his songs. Though the arrangements lack the elaborate orchestration of his final versions, they make up for it in small-scale ingenuity. A backing singer might deliver a wordless countermelody that Bacharach intended ultimately for a string section. Because the studio where he made demos had a good-sounding reverb unit, he slathered everything in lonely, atmospheric echo.
In most cases, Warwick’s performances are superior to those of the artists for whom she was ostensibly providing a throwaway guide vocal. Take “Make It Easy on Yourself,” the song whose release ignited the argument that led to “Don’t Make Me Over.” With the nuanced view of relationships that characterizes David’s best work, its narrator addresses a lover who has begun to stray, imploring them to make a clean break so that they can at least enjoy their own life while the narrator deals with the heartbreak. The first publicly released version, the one that Warwick heard on the radio that day, was performed by Jerry Butler, whose reading is expressive bordering on maudlin, flattening the layered sentiment of the words until self-pity is the only legible feeling. Warwick’s original demo, which appears near the end of Presenting, holds back from emoting, drawing out a certain matter-of-factness in the melody and lyric, and preserving the protagonist’s dignity in the process.
Three newly recorded songs by writers other than Bacharach-David round out the tracklist. The most powerful of these, by far, is Warwick’s rendition of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah.” There’s no record I can find of whose decision it was to include it on the album, or of Warwick’s feelings about having recorded it. I imagine they are complicated. Taken from the soundtrack to a Disney film about the Reconstruction-era South so prejudiced and ahistorical it was the target of picketing even upon its release in 1946, and based on a 19th-century minstrel song whose lyrics mocked the freedom of formerly enslaved Black people, its very existence as a piece of music is inextricable from abject racism. And yet Warwick’s delivery is joyful, electrifying, proud, alternating stylish insouciance with unbridled exuberance. Whether or not she intended it as such, it takes on the character of sly rebellion, of using the oppressor’s own clumsy weapons against him. When she sings “Plenty of sunshine coming my way,” you can practically hear the smile on her face. It sounds like protest music.
When “This Empty Place” was issued as a single in Europe, it featured an image of a white woman on the cover. “Wishin’ and Hopin’” is one of multiple songs first recorded by Warwick and later released in a near-identical cover version by a white artist that charted higher than her original. On her first tour, which took her through the American South, she faced racial harassment the likes of which she had never imagined as a kid in New Jersey, growing up on a block she likes to compare to the United Nations for all its commingled ethnicities. The backing band was used to playing straight R&B, and had difficulty performing the complicated changes in Warwick’s music. Southern Black audiences didn’t always like it at first either. She took to opening her sets with Ray Charles’s “What’d I Say,” which helped to win them over. Sometimes, she changed one of Charles’ lyrics to “Tell your mama, tell your pa/We’re gonna integrate Arkansas.” Audiences liked that, but the cops didn’t.
Warwick was not the first Black artist whose music was played on both Black and white radio stations, but she found a level of success among pop audiences that was still rare in the ’60s. As her star grew, she began appearing on television programs like Dick Clark’s American Bandstand, which, she writes in her memoir, “let everybody across America know that I was African American.” “Ironically,” she continues, “my crossover success in pop prompted something that came as a big surprise: the decline of airplay for my records on African American radio. In fact, when I asked one of New York’s premier jocks, Rocky G…why he was not playing my records on his show, he told me I was ‘too white.’” The racial dynamics at play in that sentiment are almost too complicated to untangle, especially considering that the radical intricacy of Warwick’s music—the element that most obviously set it apart from the more straightforward R&B records Rocky G would have been playing—was drawn in large part from Bacharach’s love of Black music like bebop.
For nearly a decade after Presenting, Warwick was Bacharach and David’s premiere artist, to whom they gave their most exciting material; and they were her exclusive producers and primary writers. There was still tension between them: In the early 1970s, when Bacharach and David broke up their professional partnership and ceased working with Warwick, she sued them for breach of contract, launching a legal battle that itself lasted for nearly a decade. In the various accounts of their history, there are stories of Bacharach asking Warwick to record dozens of takes, and then deciding that the second one had been perfect all along; or of him pushing her to record a song she didn’t like (the spectacular “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?”), and her crying “all the way to the bank” when it became a hit. In Warwick’s memoir, she refers to David as “the levelheaded one of the trio,” without elaborating on what about Bacharach’s or her own behavior would earn the lyricist that title by comparison.
On the whole, it seems that they loved each other. Bacharach credits Warwick with showing him, through her boundless vocal ability, how much more was possible in songwriting than he’d understood before he met her: “She can go that high, and she can sing that low. She is that flexible. She can sing that strong and that loud, and be delicate and soft too…The more I was exposed to that musically, the more chances, the more risks, I could take.” Warwick writes effusively in her memoir about the beauty and challenge of Bacharach’s compositions, and about Bacharach the man. It’s easy to see why all three collaborators bonded, and why they clashed. David would spend hours agonizing over the placement of a single syllable, Bacharach would wake in the middle of the night in a panic about the mic placement at that day’s session, Warwick would show up at concerts by artists she admired (Ella Fitzgerald, Lena Horne, Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra), sit in the back, and take notes on their performances. All three were nearly fanatical in their pursuit of excellence, and all three had their own ideas about how it might be achieved.
Warwick worked with other writers, and Bacharach-David with other performers, but their collaboration brought out the best in all of them. Bacharach and David supplied Warwick with material worthy of her ability as a singer, and Warwick gave that material humor, style, and human stakes through her performances, elevating it beyond pure elegance of craft into a deeper and more mysterious realm. They may have seen each other as equals, but the industry didn’t, at least not at the time of Presenting: Bacharach got to keep his name, and Warwick got stuck with the w. Inevitably, the friction of these racial, gender, and professional hierarchies left its imprint on the album. It’s there in the spectral quality of those demo recordings, in the tracklist’s inclusion of songs whose lyrics seem to actively belittle Warwick as a woman and a Black person, and maybe even in the way she delivers the bridge of “Don’t Make Me Over,” directing some of her electric defiance at the two men who wrote it for her.
Fortunately for us, Warwick was too big a talent and a personality for the pop music machine to repress. In a recent documentary on Warwick, Bacharach laughs as he recalls a time when, after he’d badgered her to stop smoking cigarettes in the studio, she showed up to a session in a T-shirt with the words “Don’t tell me to stop smoking” printed on it. No one could make her over.


For their latest “mixtape” release, Baltimore band Horse Lords honor composer Julius Eastman, covering his early 1970s disco-meets-minimalist piece “Stay On It.” The rapper Abdu Ali contributes.

Mixtape IV

As the work of composer Julius Eastman continues to gain its belated and rightful due, musicians who are inspired by his example struggle with the fact that he didn’t leave behind much written material. Jazz-informed improvisation, minimalist pulses, disco, and post-Cagean “chance” music could swirl about during an Eastman-led performance. But the composer often transmitted ideas to his collaborators orally, while providing only a few notated phrases on paper.
Regarding “Stay On It”—an early 1970s composition famous for its embrace of pop harmony—onetime Eastman saxophonist Jon Gibson told the musicologist Matthew Mendez, “that piece does not exist without Julius.” In his lifetime, the composer would play piano or vibraphone during the piece, and offer stray vocalizations; he also presented a related poem in the concert’s program notes. Still, it has been seen as too fine a piece not to play, even without him. (A 2005 archival release devoted to Eastman’s music had to rely on a 1973 performance of “Stay on It” that didn’t include the composer’s participation.)
Now Baltimore’s Horse Lords have taken up the challenge of recreating the disco-meets-minimalist “Stay on It” on the first side of their latest “mixtape.” They invite local emcee Abdu Ali to recite Eastman’s poem; he succeeds at giving the text a contemporary, rap-influenced cadence, just before the full group launches into the opening riff.
By allowing a thumping percussive groove to take greater prominence, compared with the 1973 take, this 20-minute arrangement successfully calls to mind Eastman’s appreciation for dance music. Though because Horse Lords elect to do without a consistent vocalization of the title (as heard on the ’73 recording), they lose out on some of the piece’s seductive pop sheen. For the first few minutes, the beat is so insistent that this vision of “Stay on It” seems born from a stuck vinyl groove. Though over time, as guitarist and clavinet player Owen Gardner’s lines snake around drummer Sam Haberman’s playing, there’s an occasional rhythmic ambiguity that channels the fluid Eastman aesthetic.
Gradually, members of the ensemble venture short solos over the continued vamp. In the fourth minute, a keyboard line steps out in front—insisting on a single note for a bit, before withdrawing back into the aggregate sound. A more audacious solo comes in minute eight, when Andrew Bernstein contributes arcing lines of saxophone squall. (The densest parts of this performance can make “Stay on It” sound like a precursor to New York’s No Wave era.) The take closes poetically, as softly strummed guitar and electronics move in and out of sync. The harmony is familiar, but the expression has changed—and it makes for a fitting realization of some of Eastman’s compositional concerns.
Mixtape IV’s second half is devoted to a side-length studio collage, “Remember the Future.” Incorporated within are live performance clips, shards of unfamiliar tunes, as well as spoken parts contributed by fans (who called in to a hotline that the band advertised on Twitter). It seems minor by design—and listeners who are new to Horse Lords might consider proceeding directly to the more traditionally impressive jams on 2016’s excellent Interventions. But since a willingness to play around is part of this group’s regular practice, even their intentional ephemera can carry unexpected jolts of excitement.


Carefully parsing the nuances of shoegaze, dream pop, and alt rock, the Chicago quintet’s second album amounts to a rigorous study of 1990s guitar sounds.

How the Light Felt

Smut releases are so few and far between that each new entry in the Chicago quintet’s discography feels like an informal re-introduction. If you were familiar with them in their embryonic stage in their native Cincinnati, you might associate Smut with the dense sludginess of their early demos: gothic garage rock interred under a thick layer of fast-setting distortion, à la Perfect Pussy. Arriving three years later, their proper debut, End of Sam-soon, preserved the band’s gravelly timbre but molded it into explosive choruses and searing riffs: a brief checkpoint in their oeuvre that hinted at broader ambitions. After another three years, which included a move to Chicago, Smut debuted on Bayonet Records in 2020 with a bite-sized EP that once again captured the band in a liminal stage, peeling off exterior fuzz to make room for trip-hop breaks and 4AD-esque gothic intrigue. The band’s sophomore album, How the Light Felt, is the first Smut release to end with a period rather than a comma. Building around Power Fantasy’s college-rock scaffolding, the LP is a rigorous, decade-spanning study of the band’s favorite 1990s guitar tones—derivative, but cleverly arranged to avoid rote nostalgia.
The rough-and-ready edge of Smut’s earlier work makes it tempting to draw comparisons to jangle-pop touchstones of the earlier half of the decade—bands like Blake Babies, Teenage Fanclub, or the Ocean Blue—but on How the Light Felt, they eagerly borrow from the sleek, commercially viable wave of shimmery guitar pop that flourished soon after Velocity Girl and Radiohead shared space on the Clueless soundtrack. The difference is subtle, but a song like “Person of Interest,” for instance, takes more aesthetic cues from the Sundays’ third and final album, Static & Silence, than their better-known debut. Though the song juxtaposes twee romance with the grisly details of a murder investigation, its polish allows subtle quirks to surface. A slightly sour keyboard arpeggio imbues folksy acoustic chords with an air of mystery as Bell Cenower’s basslines wriggle anxiously.
The band enlisted Stephen Street, best known for producing for the Cranberries and Blur, to mix “Let Me Hate,” a tribute to frontwoman Tay Roebuck’s late sister that channels nebulous chord changes reminiscent of Slowdive’s “Alison” into the anthemic structure of Street’s best work. Opening with airy arpeggios and the fleeting recollection of a dream, the song builds from uncertainty to an assertive coda in which Roebuck repeats the titular phrase, letting syllables lilt and contort like Dolores O'Riordan before her. Though one of the more musically straightforward tracks on How the Light Felt, it’s perfectly sequenced for emotional impact.
The band sounds the most assured, however, when it fully embraces the sleek studio panache of Y2K alt-rock. How the Light Felt’s first and best track, “Soft Engine,” opens with a barrage of tremolo effects that is oddly reminiscent of Jakalope’s Degrassi: The Next Generation theme song, riding kitschy breakbeats, carefully deployed feedback squalls, and woozy dream-pop chord changes. The other bookend, “Unbroken Thought,” uses a cozy bit of Sixpence None the Richer-esque folk as a test subject on which to experiment with trip-hop scratching and intense EQ filters.
Smut have developed two distinct and satisfying sounds in tandem: a well-oiled spin on late-’80s guitar pop and a more laid-back riff on the adult-contemporary trends of their childhoods. Though they have the chops to convincingly recreate classic sounds without making them seem like cheap imitations, a lot of the appeal on How the Light Felt lies in its unabashed fan service. Initial listens can feel like leafing through an aural I Spy book, searching for the winking trope or nod that confirms your own historical savvy. It’s a fun concept, albeit one that occasionally works too well for its own good: Tunes like the title track may remind you so much of Mazzy Star that you’re unconsciously reaching for So Tonight That I Might See before Smut’s song fades out.
On the record’s penultimate track, “Morningstar,” Smut land on a combination of ideas that elicit a hazy sense of nostalgia, but one that feels less explicit than the retromania that pervades the rest of the band’s work. Blending industrial drum fills, knotty guitar riffs, and blurred synths, the song stands out for good reason: It eludes comparison to anyone else. Though it warps and crackles like a degraded VHS tape, the track points to a possible future for Smut that integrates their vintage rock preferences into a more electronic context. For now, How the Light Felt takes a successful swing at shoegaze-y alt-rock revivalism. The hooks hit hard, the mix is immersive, and, most importantly, their arsenal of late-20th-century references is too deep to run dry just yet.


The Feelies' first LP in 20 years finds them with nothing to prove as they mine the pastoral power-pop of their post-Crazy Rhythms career.

Here Before

Whenever a groundbreaking post-punk band reforms to release new material, there's the inevitable tendency to compare it to their earliest, trailblazing efforts. In the best-case scenario-- say, Mission of Burma or Wire-- we may marvel that artists in their fifties muster the same intensity as their twentysomething selves. But for the recently reunited Feelies, such considerations don't apply. The Feelies' 1980 debut, Crazy Rhythms, is undoubtedly their most revered record, but it's also the outlier in their discography, a singular and still exhilarating blur of minimalist guitar jabbing and percussive propulsion that the band would never try to recapture again. When Crazy Rhythms' follow-up, The Good Earth, appeared six long years later, the Feelies were a very different band both in terms of personnel and purpose. By then, they'd swapped out their rhythm section and tempered their debut's hypno-rock clatter into a more relaxed, jangly groove that they would ride out for two more albums before disbanding in 1991.
It's this second-wave iteration of the Feelies that resurfaced in 2008. And though the band acknowledged Crazy Rhythms' 30th anniversary by reissuing the album and performing it in its entirety at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival, the experience has had little rub-off effect on Here Before. Rather than try to reconnect with their formative inspirations, the Feelies sound remarkably comfortable in the middle-aged skin on Here Before, which exudes the casual grace of old friends who greatly enjoy playing together and have long stopped caring about proving themselves to anyone. Here, the Feelies simply dig up The Good Earth's pastoral, post-Velvets power-pop-- a sound that ruled college radio airwaves in the mid-80s but which boasts few notable contemporary adherents-- and blissfully strum away as if they were performing in hammocks. And there's good reason to believe that, if we were to pay them a visit in another 20 years, they'd still be doing the exact same thing.
Despite the myriad, knowing references to "start[ing] again" and "do[ing] it some more," there's little sense of a band striving to make the most of a new opportunity to be heard, or trying to prove their relevance to a younger generation. The nerviest track here, "Time Is Right", seems to mock this very idea, with Glenn Mercer sardonically declaring, "Gotta do something/ Get in with the crowd." But even if the Feelies aren't exactly challenging themselves on Here Before, they still prove themselves masters of arrangement, strategically positioning key elements to give these seemingly simple songs a greater dynamic impact. Examples include the glorious guitar solo that pushes the accelerator on "Should Be Gone", the stop/start snare-drum triggers on "Later On", or the strange, swirling static in "When You Know" that marks a rare moment of discord in these otherwise serene surroundings. Perhaps the most sublime turn on the entire album comes deep into the deceptively downcast title track, which blossoms suddenly into a swooning chorus at the 2:40 mark and venerates the moment by featuring it only once. And in that instance you realize why the Feelies are still necessary in totally wired 2011: to reassert the virtue of patience.


Aarhus punks Yung take the austere vibe of their big-brother bands like Iceage and shoot it through with some old-fashioned American-fuck-up energy, a la Paul Westerberg and Jay Reatard.

A Youthful Dream

At the turn of the decade, the youthful dream of Copenhagen’s punk scene probably scared the shit out of most adults. Iceage, Lust For Youth, VÅR and Lower were barely out of their teens and gaining international attention with abrasive, often violent music and bloody shows that were a throwback to a time before punk broke (right down to the unfortunate taste in iconography). Five years later, those bands have become elder statesmen, playing festivals, starting experimental side projects and shifting towards more refined sounds. Hailing from Denmark’s “second city” of Aarhus, the appropriately named Yung aspires to lead the new brigade. However, their youthful dream is more sonically and emotionally conventional: they want to love and to be loved.
*A Youthful Dream is literal post-punk for Mikkel Holm Silkjær. He spent his teen years in hardcore bands with names like Urban Achievers, in part to piss off his father, who also happened to be a musician. In the short time since their 2015 Alter and These Thoughts are Like Mandatory Chores EPs, Yung have added pianos and horns and harmonies, the sort of thing most of their peers needed two albums to start embracing: the droning, metronomic “A Black Incident” could pass for a Lost in the Dream *cover, while Yung tap into shuffling Britpop for “Morning View.” These moments add dimension and depth to the frigid, metallic production, which makes Yung often sound like they’re trying to generate warmth in a meat locker.
At least sonically, Yung has embraced beer-fueled, sanctified American fuck-ups like Paul Westerberg and Jay Reatard. Silkjær’s anti-authoritative streak isn’t quite as nihilistic and self-centered, however. Mostly, *A Youthful Dream *rails against the way “they” prevent “you” from getting what you need to get by. Silkjær longs to help a depressed friend on early highlight “Uncombed Hair,” but sees this situation as indicative of societal ills; he offers the kids a “stiff upper lip” pep talk on “A Black Incident” (“don’t cry out for help, they’ll say you’re weak”), worries they will get stuck in arrested development (“The Child”) with pharmaceutical control the only hope (“Pills”). So, maybe America and Denmark aren't all that different.
Yung’s passion is never in question throughout A Youthful Dream; but at times, it’s all they’ve got. When Silkjær traces his vocals over the lead guitars, it’s enough to make “Uncombed Hair” and “Pills” stick. Otherwise, *A Youthful Dream *can only push through its weaker melodies and reverb through self-will. Taken together, Yung’s expanse and Silkjær’s yearning, belting vocals can actually evoke the early version of U2 that was considered post-punk. There *is *a messianic streak in Silkjær’s quest to save the youth from themselves and his distrust of whatever constitutes selling out (“Commercial”). Perhaps he’s only beginning to realize it: “I’m not quite sure if I am blessed,” he belts on “Mortal Sin”, and the important part is that he’s not *quite *sure. (Maybe he's somewhat sure.) And you can sense his increased willingness to dream big when he later sees himself as part of, “Two precious souls leaning against the idea of being in love”. For an anti-romantic punk band, it might as well be “two hearts beat as one!!!”


On her sophomore album, the singer examines good and evil through a series of spare, cryptic parables.

Shabrang

Sevdaliza approaches her sophomore album Shabrang like a lounge singer fresh off a marathon reading of Paradise Lost, the complexities of a fallen state of grace heavy on her mind. The record’s title comes from a mythical Persian horse, Shabrang Behzād, the “night-colored purebred” of the hero Siyâvash, and its project is in part a reflex to the impossibility of translation. To demonstrate the depth of meaning contained in the Farsi phrase “shabrang,” Sevdaliza names as many shades of night that she can. What results is a work of emotional maximalism, an album that grades exclusively from dark to darker through parable-like songs populated with devils and tangerine-selling women, whose opening word “evil” proves to be not only a condemnation but the concept at its heart.
As with her 2018 debut Ison and her most recent EP The Calling, Sevdaliza co-produced Shabrang with Netherlands-based Mucky and enlisted Mihai Puscoiu to construct the album’s spine of film noir strings. The album maintains the spare economy of its predecessors. Apart from the strings (a dulcimer melody on opener “Joanna” starts the album off on an epic course), each track consists mostly of music box piano riffs, gothic synths, and the rogue leaden beat. Trip-hop, the label used to classify her music in the past, feels less than helpful now. The straightforward Farsi ballad “Gole Bi Goldoon,” apocalyptic club track “Darkest Hour,” and cyborgian grunge “Rhode,” all linked by Sevdaliza’s dextrous voice, feel essential over the course of the record. Her carnivorous approach bears resemblance to that of another album based around the concept of darkness: Grimes’ Miss Anthropocene, whose songs were held together less by genre than the strength of a singular creative vision.
Shabrang’s fifteen tracks are preoccupied with emotional extremes and the prospect of self-understanding gained through testing those extremes, territory not new to Sevdaliza’s writing. The possibilities and limitations of self-construction loosely framed Ison. On “Human,” she dissected herself over little more than a skittish beat, turning her humanity into a list of essential parts: skin, bones, veins, sweat, scars, and soul. On Shabrang, Sevdaliza aims to identify exactly where she ends and everything else begins; to do so, she refracts herself through pain like white light through quartz, separating out knots of dependency and power. Despite its runtime of over an hour, the album feels lithe in a way Ison does not.
Seductive evil requires an opposite state like purity or goodness, a definite binary suggested in the pleading “Joanna.” But Sevdaliza quickly proves herself more interested in the inseparability of evil from good. On the title track, she allows herself the melodrama of divinity to speak to someone who’s harmed her: “I refer to you as my holy suffering.” Throughout the album, love and hate are one, with pain showing itself to be preordained and innocence shading quickly into culpability. Sevdaliza’s incisive use of Auto-Tune helps her straddle those emotional and moral divides. On “Habibi” (the Arabic word for “my love”), she achieves a startling bleakness by warping the question “is there anyone out there to get me out of my head?”; this skillful manipulation transforms a request into a moment of surrender and makes the song’s sampled crack of thunder seem understated.
Even the album’s lightest moments position themselves as opportunities for existential meditation. “All Rivers At Once” is a song like a slow walk, underpinned by reverbed acoustic guitar. A mundane image of romance beside a river expands into an address to “children of the light” and the desperate refrain “I don’t want to feel pain” over rolling drums and probing synths. At its best, Sevdaliza’s all-in commitment to philosophical musing lends a parable-like quality to her writing, with essential questions of being and form couched in spare images. Other tracks, like “Wallflower,” with its spoken word chorus about whispered melodies and the promise that “all is meant to be,” don’t quite escape the feeling of smoked-out corniness.
The racing “Eden” folds Sevdaliza’s interest in subjugation as it relates to self-formation into one phrase. “I want to be your secret, or at least its keeper,” she sings, then repeats herself, replacing the central word pairing each time. Secret and keeper become pearl and shell, army and trojan horse, well and source, muse and mistress, bible and witness. Selfhood, the song implies, is a process based at its core on capitulation, so long as it means getting closer to your object of desire. The song also holds one of the album’s most memorable hooks. “If I can’t be the song/At least have mercy/Let me hear her.” Self-referential, it refocuses Shabrang’s mission. The album is not solely about darkness, but also what we’re willing to give up trying to escape it.

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Kurt Wagner's shapeshifting group offers its 10th album, this one featuring the contributions and influence of Nashville-based laptop group Hands Off Cuba.

Damaged

Lambchop seem to roll around the Middle Tennessee countryside like a giant blob, absorbing every musician in their path. Their line-up regularly tops double digits, and on 10th album Damaged, the total comes to 14, including Ryan Norris and Scott Martin of Nashville-based laptop group Hands Off Cuba, who hooked up with the band for last year's CoLab EP. Just as gospel singers gave Nixon its trippy joyousness in 2000, and Tony Crow's elegant piano lent 2004's Is a Woman its studied grace, Hands Off Cuba's contributions, while limited, seem to have determined the shape of this album.
The duo stand out most on the opening track, "Paperback Bible", which was inspired by Swap Shop, an East Tennessee radio program where people can sell anything from tractors to appliances to farmland-- sort of like an Appalachian eBay. Commissioned by Long Haul Productions for a short documentary segment broadcast on Chicago Public Radio, Lambchop's head songwriter Kurt Wagner took the lyrics directly from the show, and the opportunity allows him to consider pie safes and prom dresses as if they're poor Yorick's skull. Hands Off Cuba provide the shimmering intro and coda, a patient fade-in and unraveling fade-out that mimic radio waves but evoke rural dusks.
Unfortunately, the band's work with Hands Off Cuba is limited to just a few songs, defusing the promising potential of combining Lambchop's organic sound with Norris and Martin's synthetic aesthetic. The duo is largely absent from the nine songs that follow "Paperback Bible", aside from one or two brief, superfluous interludes. However, Lambchop does absorb a lesson from Hands Off Cuba: Damaged emphasizes ambience above all else, setting a mood redolent of empty rooms and dusty sills on "Prepared [2]" and rarely deviating from that space. It's a nice setting for Wagner's household poetry, which explores the mundane vagaries of family life. These songs generally depict the everyday tensions that pervade a home following a disagreement or argument, although he rarely specifies the event that inspires each track. Instead he focuses on the fallouts and the small epiphanies that follow, which range from the mundane ("It's been a lousy day," he concludes on "I Would Have Waited All Day") to the apologetically oddball ("I am the most undisciplined of man," he acknowledges ambiguously on "Prepared [2]").
But Wagner is a very disciplined songwriter, and Lambchop are a very disciplined blob, which makes Damaged sound repressed. The music is all pristine veneer, stripped of any trace of the country or soul that marked their earlier material and made them sound like the most involved pick-up band ever. So Damaged is lovely but dull in spots, lacking the fuck-all adventurousness of previous albums. It's not until the final song that Wagner and Lambchop really cut loose. "The Decline of Country & Western Civilization" is a fire-and-brimstone rant against contemporary music that makes Dylan seem like a regular pop enthusiast. Wagner name-checks Nathan Bedford Forrest in the first line (perhaps as a condemnation of Southern rock?), laments that people still think Lambchop peaked with How I Quit Smoking, and remarks that he prefers Jim Nabors to anything this site covers. Lyrically and musically, the song is thunderous and over the top, but after so much restraint, such spirited hostility is a salve.


On his third mixtape this year, the young Baton Rouge rapper continues to upend the fear and survivalism that he carries with him.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again: Ain’t Too Long

Ain’t Too Long

Just after he turned 17, the Baton Rouge emcee YoungBoy Never Broke Again put out 38 Baby, a breakout mixtape that featured direct and local influences Kevin Gates and Boosie BadAzz but set him apart as his own star. He’s spent the last year elegantly traversing this new spotlight—releasing an even more formidable mixtape in August after signing to Atlantic—and living in the aftermath of pleading guilty for aggravated assault earlier this year, a diminished charge from the attempted murder charges initially on his plate.
Released a couple weeks before his 18th birthday, Ain’t Too Long is YoungBoy’s latest mixtape, an eight-track YouTube playlist that continues to upend the fear and survivalism that he carries with him. Despite the occasion to bask in his new stardom, YoungBoy’s legal troubles and his constant anxiety of his hometown’s violence continues to drench his music—the threat of gunfire in both directions seems to dominate his every moment. Even an outright love song like “You the One” has a tinge of paranoia: teenage romance as radical escapism. Of course, sometimes he sounds like a brash instigator himself, shouting out promissory threats on thumping songs like “Red Rum” and “War With Us.” Still, he’s never cold-hearted or detached. YoungBoy runs hot with revenge and remains obsessed with safeguarding his family at home and in the streets.
His music remains a vital coping mechanism in his life. YoungBoy’s raps run the gamut from fast-paced and percussive shouts to an almost metallic croon when the rasp of his voice is touched by AutoTune. He rarely stretches in either direction past his nasal midrange, but Ain’t Too Long finds him a better singer and songwriter than ever before, putting all of this over the bluesy palette of trap beats YoungBoy’s familiar collaborator Dubba-AA has whipped up for him.
The electric guitar and choral “ahhs” of “Pour One” sound dramatically wistful and YoungBoy raps a gutting confessional about his friend-turned-rival and fellow Baton Rouge rapper Gee Money, who was shot and killed last month. Filtered through the recent beef, his nostalgia rots into resentment as he lays out a years-long friendship drama in a few cutting  lines: “You did some foul shit and had sex with my sister/Then threw it in my face in front the people on Insta/I ain’t gon’ speak on that disease that y’all gave to each other.” The verse tumbles forward through YoungBoy’s time behind bars, where he hears about his cousin’s death over the phone and is spurred into “getting out”—of jail, of the violence that landed him there—before his street pragmatism sinks him back to earth. It’s a startlingly crystal story of his angst.
“Thug Alibi” is the bookend sitting opposite the blood-curdling opener “Red Rum.” YoungBoy’s final statement takes a reflective turn, floating over a jumpy harpsichord loop slinking into the woozy backdrop of snares and guitar. It’s an apology without remorse. “Mama I’m sorry from the way that I live/Gotta go hard, yeah you know how it is,” he wails on the chorus. Later, he doesn’t shrug off her concern so much as tersely cast it aside. “They steppin’ ma, we steppin’ too.”
There’s a more powerful apology earlier on the mixtape, and it’s not in a chorus or in a verse: “Lord, please forgive me, for all the thing things that I done did.” YoungBoy recites this atonement at the end of “Pour One,” after airing out dirty laundry with as much vulnerability as icy spite. And then he offers a jolting reminder of his age, his voice almost sheepish for the first and last time on the tape. “Mom, I’m sorry for being a bad kid,” he says. When you consider just how much he’s lived and accomplished as a kid, it makes the elegance of his music and survivalism all the more dire and tragic. In a now-deleted post, YoungBoy recently tweeted about his upcoming birthday, writing, “I’m not turning #18 I’m forever #17.” Up to this point in his life, his pain and deaths and fears have been doled out over days and weeks and sustained for all his years. Even at this pivotal, accelerated moment in his career, it makes sense he’d want time to stand still for a little while.


Banjo player Nathan Bowles, double bassist Casey Toll, and drummer Rex McMurray reunite for a spacious jam session informed by Appalachian folk and modern minimalism.

Are Possible

What constitutes a jam band? Do you need guitar solos that last the length of an Adult Swim show? Do you need concert attendees huffing balloons and taking LSD? Do you need to hire a lighting designer so sick that Justin Bieber steals him? Not to sound like the old hippie approaching hour five of the campfire lecture, but it’s all about the groove, man. The Nathan Bowles Trio’s Are Possible renders these questions moot by stripping this music of all frills and signifiers. This is three people in a room, conversing through instrumental mastery.
Bowles, who plays banjo, doesn’t need squawking solos or balloons or drugs or a light show. He doesn’t need vocals—hell, he doesn’t even need a guitarist, though sometimes the instrument adds a nice flavor. On Are Possible, Bowles reunites with double bassist Casey Toll and drummer Rex McMurry (of CAVE) for the first time since 2018’s Plainly Mistaken, and though the sound is more direct now, the message remains the same. Plainly Mistaken foregrounded experimentation, pushing further into free improvisation. Here, the group digs deeper into the core melodies from which the songs are built. Great jams need not be heady or flashy: These exercises are live-time encapsulations of the awe invoked when one idea perfectly informs the next.
Despite the spontaneity that exists between Bowles and his bandmates, the trio relies on a few tricks to move its songs from one section to the next. Opener “Dappled” immediately sets Appalachian folk music in conversation with jazz and modern minimalism. The song’s groove is contoured by Toll’s dexterous bass. Throughout the album, Toll, who plays with Jake Xerxes Fussell and Mount Moriah, serves as a counterpoint to the music’s mesmerizing repetitions. He provides the rhythmic and melodic tension, as he does on “Dappled,” where he riffs off Bowles’ banjo progression and dips between the pockets of McMurry’s groove.
This practice is best illustrated on the album’s emotional centerpiece, “Gimme My Shit,” which stands out thanks to the joyous nature of the hook. A bouncing banjo riff contrasts with the comforting warmth of snare drum clicks; rhythmic chords occasionally give way to a shining melody, like sun slowly emerging from clouds. As the song marches along in 6/8 time, Toll provides the steady anchor, allowing Bowles to hint at the main refrain before finally landing on it. The eventual release is all the more powerful, as the duo engage in a descending phrase highlighted by a cymbal crash that creates the album’s most powerful musical motif.
Banjo-led instrumentals that pay homage to Appalachian folk music is a hyper-specific niche, but Bowles and his band never allow their preferred sounds to hem in their experiments. This music leads in all directions, unfurling with patience and reserve to reveal the balance between repetition and deviation. Are Possible shows that rural folk, cosmic new age music, and hard-charging rock aren’t only relatable, but can be inextricably linked. The jam is only the beginning.


The Toronto indie rock quartet Weaves' self-titled debut is an impressive album about incapacitating infatuation.

Weaves

Any new rock band that’s being honest with themselves about their place in the current musical landscape probably comes to the same conclusion as Weaves guitarist Morgan Waters: “Sometimes it feels like bands aren’t necessary, like they’re not the ones pushing music forward.” For many, it’s an excuse for retrenchment, whereas Weaves' self-titled debut is driven by a palpable ambition to make a guitar/bass/drum set up sound as fluid and inventive as anything else out there. And yet, for all of Weaves’ admirable attempts to poke and prod indie rock towards progress, the irony is that they still sound like a throwback.
To wit: Just about every relevant and accurate comparison for the Toronto quartet released an album to critical acclaim around 2009. This was probably the last time you could piece together a discernible, popular vanguard of guitar-based indie rock. It all could be grouped into “art rock,” a self-evident term indicative of acts going to great lengths to deconstruct the form while elevating it.
Weaves would likely have been overshadowed at the time, though—they don’t boast the conservatorial chops of Dirty Projectors or St. Vincent, the inventiveness of tUnE-yArDs or Micachu and the Shapes, the splatter-paint approach of Deerhoof or the magnetism of *truly *post-punk Yeah Yeah Yeahs. But like most promising artists of any stripe, they’ve internalized their influences and present them in a novel context. In Weaves’ case, it’s art-rock that is played like actual rock: big riffs, big drums and loud vocals. The riffs are full of wide fretboard leaps, flatted fifths and pedal warping that makes everything sound slightly sharp and very frayed. Meanwhile, Jasmyn Burke’s vocals are confidently projected and erratically enunciated, the rhythms stretching into oblong forms. On singles like “Tick,” the effect is similar to gourmet ice creams that incorporate fish sauce or miso—the atypical flavoring is the immediate draw for adventurous tastes, yet there’s still the expectation of being sweet and conventionally satisfying.
This is not a cerebral record—*Weaves *was mixed by a guy who’s worked with Melvins and At the Drive-In, so for all of its high-minded reference points, it hits like wallop upside your head. As with their equally referential citymates Dilly Dally, Weaves' foremost quality is creating music that pulsates with desire, and Burke is damn-near hedonistic about her own: "I just want your biological clock,” Burke brays on “Tick,” one of her many hot blooded come-ons: “I’ll dream of the birds and the bees/And get til I’m good and I'm clean,” “I’m gonna get you to the sugar-coated land.” Or most succinctly: “Feel my needs.”
*Weaves *is most compelling when it’s thrashing right along with Burke, giving into the urgent hunger for connection. It grates when the band is more intent on pleasing itself with quirk for quirk’s sake—the chintzy breakdowns of “Candy,” try-hard juxtaposition of vulgarity and twee (“You’re looking sweet with your slices of pizza and your fucking”), and melodies that evoke the “limbs flailing, arms akimbo” image of Elaine Benes.
“Coo Coo” shows all of the pros and cons to Weaves’ approach at once: It’s a song meant to probe the inscrutability of being blindsided by love, yet it smacks of effort, of trying to will that feeling into existence. The frictional polyrhythms are enough to signify a body at war with its own impulses, but Burke’s breathless hiccupping and finicky internal rhyming feel like affectations. While *Weaves *is an impressive album about incapacitating infatuation, it’s not always served by giving its ADD and OCD impulses equal say—after all, no one will ever write a song called “Clever in Love.”


Jamming and overdubbing on top of band member Holger Zapf’s experiments with self-constructed drum machines, Cavern of Anti-Matter deliver their most rhythmically intensive record yet.

Hormone Lemonade

After 19 years in Stereolab, it is understandable if Tim Gane views the process of releasing new music with a certain reluctance. Blood-Drums, the 2013 debut album from his band Cavern of Anti-Matter, was written and recorded in a month at the behest of Berlin label Grautag and originally limited to 500 copies; Hormone Lemonade, the band’s third long player, was born of band member Holger Zapf tinkering with self-constructed rhythm machines—the kind of origin story that does little to suggest Gane is ready to unleash his eternal masterpiece.
In a way, you can understand Gane’s reticence to blow the doors off. Stereolab’s reputation has only grown since they split in 2009—they’ve been referenced by everyone from Tyler, the Creator to Pharrell—and Gane has spoken of his desire to escape from the shadows of his illustrious past. That might be impossible, but on Hormone Lemonade, Gane and his bandmates try something new: They composed the music from the beats up, fleshing out Zapf’s work on synths, sequencers, drums, and guitar to produce music whose intensive rhythmic focus stands at some remove from Stereolab’s melodic signature.
The most distinctive moments on the album come when rhythm takes a leading role. “Solarised Sound” is not so much a song as a percussive maze, the chord sequence a relish to the rhythmic dish. The basic elements are straightforward enough—a mechanical bass-drum thump, layers of circular synth, and a simple guitar and drum pattern—but everything sounds as if it has been bathed in reverb, creating a disorienting effect where the notes seem to double back upon themselves like a sonic trompe-l’œil. “Motion Flow” is similarly hypnotic, unfurling mesmeric percussive layers that bring to mind rhythmically focused My Bloody Valentine tracks like “If I Am”.
However, even within the depths of such exploration, Gane’s compositional gifts keep drifting to the fore. The former Stereolab man is such a brilliant melodicist, and his loungey, jazz-influenced chord sequences so distinctive, that you half expect Stereolab singer Laetitia Sadier to turn up and start crooning about Marxism, even as Cavern of Anti-Matter float off into the musical ether. On the one hand, this means Hormone Lemonade will attract the kind of Stereolab comparisons Gane would doubtlessly rather avoid. On the other, the music’s weightless melodic rush frequently elevates the band’s shifting and often rather obtuse constructions into something altogether more palatable.
The brilliant mid-album pairing of “Automatic Morning” and “Feed Me Magnetic Rain” best illustrate this dichotomy. “Automatic Morning” is a movement in three parts: A motorik synth lead gives way to a mid section whose clipped bass riff and tight live drums nod to Dr. Dre circa The Chronic, and the closing three minutes take an improbable turn into Detroit techno, riding a synth riff that bobbles like a paper boat on a ruffled pond.
“Feed Me Magnetic Rain,” meanwhile, is an excursion into the glassy electronica that Autechre perfected on their earlier records, pairing a haunting keyboard melody with a pattering electro beat. This is not quite virgin territory for Cavern of Anti-Matter—“Pantechnicon,” on the band’s second album, Void Beats / Invocation Trex, hinted at electro influences—but “Feed Me Magnetic Rain” sees the band edge further down the electronic rabbit hole than ever before. On paper, neither song should be a particularly easy listen, but the group’s lilting chord sequences and melodic grace transform these adventures in sonic bricolage into something that sails deliciously close to pop music, much like Stereolab’s own fusion of avant-garde and easy listening.
Tim Gane may not appreciate the comparison, but he shouldn’t be dismayed. Hormone Lemonade is the work of a band who couldn’t write a bad chord sequence if they tried, allying rare melodic nous to dazzling rhythmic instincts. Rather than being trapped by his past, on Hormone Lemonade Gane draws upon it in brilliant new ways.