The Dap-Kings saxophonist assembles a sizeable, percussion-heavy ensemble on a set that draws inspiration from a search for his ancestral past.

All My Relations

Cochemea Gastelum had the idea to record All My Relations while the saxophone player was on tour with soul singer Sharon Jones, who passed away in 2016. In between shows, the 46-year-old Gastelum and the rest of Jones’ backing band, the Dap-Kings, would hit up local record stores and host impromptu listening parties around a turntable at the back of the tour bus. At one point, someone put on the Afro-Cuban jazz player Sabu Martinez’ Afro Temple, a 1973 album that combines rich layers of Latin percussion with wailing sax lines. After hearing the record, Gastelum—who grew up in California, lives in Woodstock, and claims Yaqui and Mescalero Apache Indian roots—felt he could express his own feelings about his ancestral background via a similar template of saxophone set to waves of percussion. This bewitching combination has forged All My Relations into a jazz album that’s equal parts spiritual journey and irrepressible funk.
The album’s 10 songs mix improvised percussion with impressionistic melodies. Gastelum called together a group of 10 musicians to engage in collective writing sessions at Daptone’s House of Soul studio in Brooklyn, where they’d jam until they hit on a groove and felt a song start to take shape. The core of the ensemble features a percussion section built around a spellbinding array of congas, bongos, tablas, dhols, and shekeres; this rhythmic foundation is embellished by Gastelum’s consummate saxophone playing, plus bass courtesy of Bosco Mann and clavinet and pianet from Victor Axelrod. The opening song, “Maso Ye’eme,” encapsulates the blend: Sinewy, smoldering melody lines play off smartly morphing percussion that builds to a frantic climax. Elsewhere, “Mitote” is spearheaded by a tight, upbeat horn riff that brings to mind James Brown’s band the J.B.’s; “Seyewailo” coasts with a breezy, blissful swing; and the title track is a defiant march that includes the communal chant, “Ain’t gonna build no wall.”
All My Relations boasts a syncopated charm that stems from the freedom of groove inherent in jam sessions. But the album’s spiritual elevation comes from Gastelum’s songwriting process. After taking time to consider his relationship to his ancestral roots, he attempted to transform the images in his head into melodic phrasings. “Sonora,” which is named for the homeland of Gastelum’s ancestors, was prompted by imagining a place that he’d never visited but felt an intense longing for. The track takes on a beautifully lonesome quality, with wistful sax backed by stripped-down, metronomic percussion that captures a feeling of wandering strange lands. These themes of ancestry and spiritual connection add narrative cohesion to the album: “Sonora” is followed by the ghostly-sounding interlude “Los Muertos,” which gives way to the Mexican rhythms of “Mescalero,” a song written in homage to Gastelum’s Mescalero Apache grandmother in which Gastelum deftly switches out his sax for flute.
Gastelum’s act of grappling with his heritage sometimes translates to a heavy listening experience, but the album ends on a tranquil note. Inspired by the Navajo song “Shí naashá,” the closing “Song of Happiness” combines lilting percussion with the sort of sweet soul refrain you’d happily believe was penned by Stevie Wonder. Following the gravitas of what’s come before, this finish ushers in a feeling of serenity. It’s as though Gastelum has discovered that at the end of a long journey into his past, a sense of hope for the future is its own reward.


The Detroit rapper broke out in 2021 with an unmistakably funky style and jokes for days. Now he has to do it again.

My Story Got Stories

In wrestling, one of the most euphoric moments is the debut of a new character with a cool-ass look and a devastating move—think of Brock Lesnar teleporting into the ring in 2002 with muscles grown on his muscles, leaving nothing but carnage. The hard part is getting beyond that initial awe and turning into a weekly personality, the type of character that you want to latch onto. That’s sort of what Bruiser Wolf is going through on his second album, My Stories Got Stories.
The Bruiser Brigade standout is one of those rappers that could make you pull over to the side of the road when you first hear them. Maybe for you it was one of his guest turns on early 2021 albums by fellow Bruiser Brigade MCs J.U.S or Fat Ray, where his flows sound like Bell from Willie Dynamite at 2x speed. Or maybe it was later that year, when he stole the limelight on the Detroit crew’s Alchemist-produced posse cut with a collage of doughboy memories and witty punchlines. Most likely it was his 2021 album Dope Game Stupid, where his conversational slick talk combined with Raphy beats that sounded like they should be blasting out of a Cadillac Eldorado. It holds up well over 13 joints. Now he has to do it again, and you can feel the pressure to adopt an incrementally more conventional style weighing on the album.
For one, the raps on My Stories Got Stories are less funky than they were on Dope Game Stupid. There’s nothing as out-there as him getting in his Curtis Mayfield bag for the bleak yet sticky hook of “Momma Was a Dopefiend” or the hyperactive and dark chants of “the dope fiend my best friend” on “Middle Men” that come directly after Fat Ray’s hearty reinterpretation of 50 Cent’s timeless chorus. The closest Bruiser Wolf gets on this album is the end of “Let the Young Boys Eat,” where he puts his spin on the breezy sung melodies you could find all over 1990s Bay Area rap albums. Even the beats—there’s still plenty of Raphy, but also others like Harry Fraud and Dag—bring to mind Griselda’s hard-nosed soul samples rather than, say, Cotton Comes to Harlem.
But he’s an eccentric enough rapper that even the streamlined version of his style is still a pretty fun ride. On “Looney Tunes,” he’s got his flow on a yo-yo as he changes speeds and stitches together details that add color to his dope-dealing flashbacks (“Just a Detroit hustler rocking the Fila brand”). His best bars are hilarious because of their specificity and randomness: “You sing like J.T. from The Five Heartbeats/My nigga, that’s a City Girl.” All of the dope analogies on “Holla at Ya Mans” are killer, including “had the white girl doing hot yoga” and “finessed the plug with Terms of Endearment.” Raphy’s beat on “G’z & Hustlaz” has that splash of opulence the others don’t and Wolf glides over it, though the flows could be quirkier. They are on “Crack Cocaine,” where he stretches his voice to a register higher than Chris Tucker’s in Money Talk.
I wish Bruiser Wolf bent his voice to those extremes even more often. My Stories Got Stories is pared down in a way that’s distracting, sacrificing a little bit of his individuality to make sure that as many people as possible recognize the depth beneath the jokes. So we have on-the-nose songs like “2 Bad,” in which he takes a crack at the sound of current Michigan street rap with Danny Brown and Zeelooperz, or his West Coast pimp-rap cut “I Was Taught To.” His music is already in conversation with those styles without having to make lesser versions of them. On “My $tory Got $tories,” he warmly reminisces on the grind that got him to this point, like your uncle off the yak on Thanksgiving, but with the repetition of the title phrase and a way-too-long Stephen A. Smith clip about the poor conditions of Detroit tacked on, the song does a lot of over-explaining. I understand why—underground rap is a tough business, and he’s trying hard to carve out a lane with longevity. But a rap album that has me thinking about the job of a rapper as much as the music is missing something.


With dusty, psychedelic production from Roc Marciano, Jay Worthy’s latest collaborative album is his grimiest to date.

Jay Worthy / Roc Marciano: Nothing Bigger Than the Program

Nothing Bigger Than the Program

Over the past decade, Jay Worthy has become one of the most dependable members of the West Coast underground. The Compton-by-way-of-Vancouver emcee is half of LNDN DRGS, the project he formed with producer Sean House in 2014. The late A$AP Yams was an early champion, and his mentorship opened the door to work with the likes of Curren$y, G Perico, and Larry June. As a solo artist, Worthy’s racked up solid albums with A-list producers like DJ Muggs, Harry Fraud, and the Alchemist. He’s also signed to Griselda Records, though his luxurious California sound doesn’t really align with the label’s typical warped-cassette grime. Worthy’s made his career by shrewdly choosing associates; though not the most technically skilled rapper, he’s a master of vibe. His true talent lies in finding fellow travelers who share his vision.
Worthy’s latest album, Nothing Bigger Than the Program, continues his streak of inspired collaborations, pairing him with underground legend Roc Marciano. Marci’s impeccable ear for dusty, psychedelic loops makes this Worthy’s grimiest album, the closest he’s come to embodying the Griselda ethos. It’s also one of his most feature-packed projects, as all but two songs (“How?” and “Players Only”) have guest verses. Nothing about this music feels tossed-off: Marci’s kush-scented production feels perfectly suited to Worthy’s gangster-next-door persona and the two, along with a committee of criminal-minded consiglieres, put together a carefully considered set of fun, sleazy rap songs.
Marci doesn’t always get his proper due as a producer. His solo records are self-contained worlds; the post-RZA sound he whittled to the bare essentials with 2010’s Marcberg laid the groundwork for much of today’s prestige rap landscape. When he produces for other artists, he tends to work with more polarizing rappers like Stove God Cooks or Flee Lord. Worthy has a more immediately agreeable charm, his most egregious offense being a slinky L.A. flow that might not always land right on East Coast ears. But Marci’s minimal, often drumless beats are the ideal backdrop for Worthy, whose push-pull delivery slips easily into each nook and cranny.
Take, for example, the title track, where Marci accents the descending wah-pedal guitar with a kick-cymbal combo but leaves the loop otherwise unadorned. Worthy raps as if he’s late for an appointment, rushing through the end of each bar nearly breathless. When the hook comes around, he crushes “Aw damn, they shooting” and “I swear to God I couldn’t make this shit up” into an urgent, wobbling run-on sentence. Even if Worthy isn’t dropping quotable lines, his delivery has a certain electricity to it, a crackling energy found throughout Nothing Bigger.
“Wake Up” is the strongest track, and it expertly distills the strengths of Worthy and Marci’s partnership. The soft-focus beat feels like a funk band warming up two bloody marys deep, unsure of where the groove will take them. Worthy spits a day-in-the-life verse that moves from nursing a hangover to riding to “Maryland in a Chevy coupe,” presumably dirty. Marci shows up in top form for an unannounced verse, dissecting and collaging multisyllabic rhyme schemes. The two sound completely natural together, and Marci’s appearance on the mic feels like a stamp of approval. Alongside stellar verses elsewhere on the record from veterans like Bun B and Kurupt, it’s a testament to the good will that Worthy has earned in the hip-hop community and another turning point in his evolution from sturdy to sought-after.


The London producer’s frosty new album is an enigmatic journey through windy ambient passages, glossy R&B melodies, and frenzied piano.

touched by an angel

Before she made her singular brand of beguiling, textured experimental music, Klein’s first love was filmmaking. In a 2018 interview, the South London composer and producer even joked that her music career is “a ploy to win an Oscar.” Her latest album, touched by an angel, gives credence to this ambition. It is a wintry odyssey that elides easy interpretation while offering fascinating glimpses into the life of its creator. At nearly 90 minutes, it has the immersive feel of a feature-length film.
touched achieves this placid, weightless ecstasy through unlikely vocal manipulation and warped instrumentation. The record is composed of windy ambient passages that threaten to swallow the listener, naked piano that flies up and down like a mad Tinkerbell, and glossy R&B melodies buried under static and distortion. Distant train whistles recur as motifs, transporting us to ambiguous planes of memory. Listening to the album can feel like skating on an icy pond until suddenly you’ve ascended, your feet barely skimming the ground.
Lyrics are few and far between, giving only hints into the inspiration behind the music. (The title, touched by an angel, allegedly comes from a Christian TV show that Klein watched with her mom.) On highlight “say black power and mean it,” metallic percussion ricochets before tempestuous static blankets the track in a layer of fuzz. On “storm,” synthetic strings beckon from the darkness, joined by recorder squeaks, burbles, and the sound of flapping wings. The 10-minute “no weapon shall form against me” crescendos into staticky yells that become more overwhelming as they repeat. Even when you hear human voices, they are often scrambled, unintelligible.
Mainstream pop culture has always existed on the outskirts of Klein’s music, and here she incorporates specific allusions to express feelings of alienation. On “black famous,” the album’s opener and most rousing song, Klein references Drake’s “Started From the Bottom,” flipping his flex to evoke a sense of loss without resolution. “Started from the bottom, man/She’s still in the bottom, man,” she says with a devotional quality. The music video for “DJ drop,” a hypnotic meditation built from train whistle and looped croons, focuses on a plastic bag’s journey on the sidewalk: It functions both as a tongue-in-cheek nod to Katy Perry and a somber visualization of feeling invisible as a person of color.
The eight-minute “street cred” exemplifies the entrancing idiosyncrasies of Klein’s music. Over a simple hum, she rewinds her voice again and again, creating alien melodies from repetitive snippets of unintelligible words. Her chirpy, pitch-shifted vocals sound hypnotizing but disorienting. It’s a dazzling performance that leaves you captivated, even as Klein slips away from our grasp once again.


This Sacramento rapper has had a busy couple of years, and though his latest often sounds rushed, he remains one of the foremost narrative stylists in hip-hop.

Mandatory Check

The 2002 2Pac documentary Thug Angel: The Life of an Outlaw contains footage of the rapper giving insight into his prolific recording process, an approach which would prove just as influential as his music. “We don’t have the time or the luxury to spend all this time doing one song,” he said. “I know it ain’t all that, but I did my whole album three songs a day... You can mix it later and have niggas that love being in the studio all night just adding the drum beat…after the rappers leave... For while we’re in here, and you’ve got eight rappers here, everybody drinking and smoking and shit? Man, get that beat popping, throw them niggas on the track, boom. The name of the song is whatever this nigga said, what his last word was.”
2Pac wasn’t suggesting he was too busy to work at his craft, but that for an oral art form like hip-hop, his relevance was an extension of his productivity. This was a timely and unmediated connection with his audience, suggesting to the next generation they had no need for major label budgets or months of careful revision and rehearsal to release urgent music. (If anything, he seems to imply it could stop up the creative process.) Building on that idea, Mozzy and other artists in this lineage don’t structure recording around carefully selected singles campaigns and yearly album releases. Instead, Mozzy has built his audience through 2014 and 2015 by keeping his signal-to-noise ratio high despite a prolific release schedule, flanking well-funded and better publicized stars.
Mandatory Check is his second solo release of 2016 after February’s Beautiful Struggle EP, and its inconsistency is an argument not that Mozzy has slipped—he remains one of the foremost narrative stylists in hip-hop—but that he’s yet to transition to a more mainstream distribution model. Indeed, in the last year he’s released a handful of collaborative records and appeared on a dozen more—records with Bay Area rapper Stevie Joe, with supergroup One Mob, crew album Hexa Hella Extra Head Shots 2, and albums from crew members Hus Mozzy, Celly Ru, and EMozzy. Not to mention his guest appearances with Nipsey Hussle, YG, Nef the Pharaoh, etc.
No matter how talented the artist, this level of prolificacy means his own album isn’t as potent as it could be. A record like his Stevie Joe collaboration “2 Bitches” would easily be top-tier single material if it appeared here, and his tormented verse on One Mob’s “Stranger to the Pain” sticks to the ribs in a way that makes much of Mandatory Check feel slight in comparison. Mandatory Check’s token R&B record “Like Me” is tossed off relative to 2015’s “Wat It Izzery Luv,” a song that used lived-in details to weave a relationship story with heart. And his own recent solo single “Killa City”—an attempt at peacekeeping in the midst of an internecine inter-city street beef—has an urgency that would stand out were it included on his latest release.
That said, close listening will reward the rapper’s fervent fanbase. Particular highlights include the aching “Love My N****z,” with sunset production courtesy longtime collaborator June Onna Beat, and the funky “Brought Up,” (“Don’t worry about the dreads bitch I like the shit matted up!”). Lead single “So 4Real,” though, may best capture the moral contradictions that permeate Mozzy’s music and life. It closes with a harrowing passage in which perverse bravado and violent shame collide, and the lines hint at this eye for storytelling detail: “Threw him in the back of the Audi and yanked off/Hit him with a FN bullet, he can’t walk/Fending for himself, his momma got laid off/She was smoking dope in the closet, young boy heartbroken when he opened the closet/Liability with all the damage we causin’, such a beautiful struggle, say it ain’t you jawsin’.”
Mandatory Check is an imperfect entry point, which is a disappointment only because for many, this will be their first exposure to the rapper’s catalog. It was clearly recorded in haste, a snapshot of a moment rather than the culmination of an aesthetic. (Though likely recorded under similarly hurried circumstances, newcomers may find 2015’s Gangland Landscape a more rewarding listen and a better overall summation of the rapper’s appeal.) But if the multitude of guest verses and songwriting or production whiffs undercut him, his verses remain the consistent core of his art.


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 debut album from a trio that split from the Specials to forge a mischievous and mysterious electro-pop sound haunted by the racist violence entrenched in British history.

Fun Boy Three

The Specials were unlikely pop stars. In 1981, the Coventry ska band, fronted by young misfit Terry Hall but led by keyboardist Jerry Dammers, hit No. 1 with “Ghost Town,” a haunted state-of-the-nation address that painted an image of a country beset by economic decay and racist violence. It was a surprising capstone to a three-year period in which they had come to define two-tone, a working-class, multi-racial subculture, and channeled the downcast, nihilistic mood of Thatcherite Britain. “Ghost Town” perfectly captured the Specials’ ethos and aesthetic, laying bare the contempt the British state had for disenfranchised young people while retaining the wit and candor that reflected their humble origins.
The Specials were at their critical and commercial peak, yet relationships within the band were rotten. Hall, along with Lynval Golding and Neville Staple, felt constricted and underappreciated by Dammers, despite the songwriter’s messages of unity and social justice. “Equality and democracy were what we preached. That’s how it was when we started, but it didn’t last,” said Golding at the time. “When we started making $2,000 a night instead of $200, we weren’t equal anymore; we were working for Jerry Dammers.”
At the height of their popularity, Golding, Hall, and Staple walked away and started a band where they had everything they claimed Dammers had withheld from them: total creative freedom. Fun Boy Three drew from the same well as the Specials, combining elements of punk with the Jamaican styles that were rattling sound systems across the country. But they gave themselves the liberty to be as wild, weird, and flexible as they wanted. No more suits, no more monochrome, and no more checkered 2 Tone Records stripe on the sleeve. On the cover of their self-titled debut album, the band appeared in front of a giant red spot, dressed down in singlets and t-shirts. The three musicians were already celebrities in the UK, but here they were presented as a band casting off the codes of the two-tone subculture they had helped define.
Any sane A&R might have thought twice about betting big on a record like Fun Boy Three, but Chrysalis, the parent company of 2 Tone, rightly decided that the trio was, as Hall put it, “too big to be dropped.” Regardless, any concerns around commercial appeal were moot: The band didn’t demo their songs, so there was nothing for Chrysalis to object to. Working with Specials producer Dave Jordan, the band commuted between Coventry and London every day, improvising songs based on mambo, cha-cha, and reggae rhythms until they hit upon a sound that was spooky and sexy in equal measure, like exotica played by the most maladjusted person you know.
The band’s first single—the eerie, thundering “The Lunatics (Have Taken Over the Asylum)”—was like a Specials song on the point of combustion. It’s ostensibly about the abjectly depressing Thatcher and Reagan era, but at times it seems to double as FB3’s rebuke to Dammers. When the Specials reformed in 2009, Hall told The Guardian that Fun Boy Three was “the sound of three people sent mental by being in the Specials,” and his lyrics toward the end of “Lunatics” seem to nod to his time under the thumb of his former bandmate: “Take away my right to choose/Take away my point of view/Take away my dignity/Take these things away from me.”
“Lunatics” was—somewhat improbably, given its loose structure and avant-garde palette—the first of seven UK Top 40 hits that Fun Boy Three netted in a little under two years. It began the history of one of UK pop’s greatest curios: a hugely successful band that, despite great commercial impact, left little lasting trace on the world. Fun Boy Three released two Top 20-charting albums in two years (the latter, Waiting, produced by David Byrne) and launched the career of Bananarama, who performed on their debut. But they were such a cultural anomaly—their roots too obscure to legibly scan for a general listening public, their hits too strange to find an afterlife on golden oldies stations—that their impact now, 40 years after their debut, seems remarkably small. When Hall died of cancer last year, at the age of 63, obituaries and tributes treated Fun Boy Three as a footnote in his career, if at all; Staple’s memoir, Original Rude Boy, rarely touches on the group.
It’s a shame, given that Fun Boy Three still sounds as mischievous and enigmatic as it likely did upon release. Its status as a relatively forgotten cultural artifact only adds to its mystique: This album of Gregorian-style chants and absurdist one-liners made for an entirely unexpected entrant to the UK Top 10. At the time, Golding called Fun Boy Three an “extension” of the Specials, but Fun Boy Three might be more accurately described as a distillation of “Ghost Town”—bleak and cavernous, politically and spiritually dejected, haunted by the darkness of modern-day Britain and the racist violence entrenched in its history.
One of the band’s goals, according to Golding and Hall, was to convey a sense of subtlety that the clear-cut, ultra-political Specials never possessed. At the time, Hall described the Specials’ lyrics, many of which were written by Dammers, as “too blatant,” saying that he was “embarrassed singing them sometimes.” Disavowing his past work was a favorite pastime of the 23-year-old, a self-described “old punk” with the cynicism to prove it, and he wouldn’t stop with the Specials: By the time the band released Waiting a year later, he had been slagging off Fun Boy Three in the press for a good few months.
Nevertheless, you can hear Hall, Golding, and Staple working hard across Fun Boy Three to find new modes of songwriting that were far removed from their previous project. These songs are made largely from looping phrases and chants, heavy on deadpan spoken word and only occasionally spotlighting Hall’s distinctive whine. Their circular structures seem to have been influenced by the drum machine at the root of the songs; as with each production element, the singing on Fun Boy Three contributes more to a given song’s groove than its meaning. There are few lead vocal lines, and when there are, they’re almost always offset by chants or proto-raps from the entire band.
Like the high-gloss pop bands Soft Cell and the Human League, Fun Boy Three embraced the newish technologies that had become widely available in the early ’80s. They just used them to make music that sounded nothing like what was on the charts. “Funrama 2” is the closest thing Fun Boy Three has to a ska song, but it could hardly be confused for anything the Specials ever produced: Filled with sounds of soccer whistles and jungle animals, using Bananarama’s voices as percussive elements, it has more in common with jazz than Jamaica. Sometimes, Fun Boy Three hit upon a sound that was uncharacteristically current, but even then, they did it in their own wonky way: “Faith, Hope and Charity,” with its metallic drum-machine chug and discordant guitar line—the only one on the record—sounds like Afrika Bambaataa filtered through the confrontational spirit of no wave, inadvertently hybridizing the sound of New York’s two most fertile creative scenes.
They often came across like crate-diggers trying to weave together sounds from pop’s past. Even in the Specials, Hall had been interested in classic pop music, and here he flexed his wide-ranging taste in impish, anarchic ways. “It Ain’t What You Do It’s The Way That You Do It,” Fun Boy Three’s biggest hit, was a remake of a 1930s jazz standard, featuring Bananarama singing lead and Hall playing piano. They had discovered the London trio during their tenure with the Specials, though the details are fuzzy; sometimes they claimed to have seen a photo of them in The Face, and at others they said they saw them performing at a London club. Impressed by their singing ability, and seeing them as a female mirror of Fun Boy Three, they recruited them to sing across the entirety of Fun Boy Three.
“It Ain’t What You Do” was a huge hit in the UK, reaching No. 4 on the singles chart and propelling Bananarama to national fame. Their cameos were so sparkling and magnetic that they earned them a “co-starring” credit on the back of the album. Although they rarely sang anything other than backing vocals, Bananarama were an essential part of Fun Boy Three, turning a weird, sometimes painfully misanthropic record into something softer and prettier. They served as the lawful good counterpoint to FB3’s chaotic evil: When the three women left the studio one day after tracking vocals for “Funrama 2,” Hall, Golding, and Staple recorded percussion by throwing ashtrays and drum cases around the studio. “It was the same at school,” Hall said of recording with Bananarama: “The girls used to work hard and the boys used to mess about.”
Fun Boy Three is as political as any Specials record, but, true to their word, Hall, Golding, and Staple most often hid their politics beneath a glaze of impressionism. “Best of Luck Mate” is built around the kind of slinking piano line that you’d expect to hear in a dinky 1960s spy show, Staple toasting cryptically about frittering his scant income away on gambling. It’s a wryly mundane vision of British disillusionment in the ’70s and ’80s, still deeply tapped into their social milieu but less polemical than the songs Dammers had written.
The exception is “I Don’t Believe It,” a reggae song in which Golding sings about the constant surveillance that Black Brits were, and still are, subject to. It plays with the cadence and tone of a nursery rhyme, but has a Stepford-esque eeriness to it. Golding delivers his lyrics with equal parts discontent and paranoia: “Man call around to make a few inquiries/He tell me what I smoke before I even smoke it/Everything is written in the neighbor’s diary.” Golding was a pacifist and a strong advocate for racial harmony; “Why,” the B-side to “Ghost Town,” was written and performed by Golding about being a victim of a racially motivated attack. Where that song is pleading and confused, the overwhelming tone of “I Don’t Believe It” is one of exhaustion created by the sheer drudgery of having to wake up and contend with a deeply racist society day in and day out.
By the time Fun Boy Three was released, “I Don’t Believe It” had already taken on new layers. The day the band finished recording the album, they returned to Coventry. They played “It Ain’t What You Do” at a local radio station, and afterwards went to Shades, a nightclub near the city center, to hang out with two of Staple’s friends. There, the group was jumped by a gang of white youths; Golding’s throat was slashed, and he nearly lost an eye. While in intensive care, his house was robbed.
Just as quickly as they began, Hall disbanded Fun Boy Three in 1983, shortly after the release of “Our Lips Are Sealed,” their take on the Go-Go’s hit Hall had co-written with Jane Wiedlin, and FB3’s final hit. It’s possible that, to Hall, commercial viability was antithetical to his art; he once said that he was “uncomfortable” with the success of “Ghost Town,” and started Fun Boy Three because any attempt to find a midpoint between pure radicalism and pure pop was a fool’s errand. To his credit, Fun Boy Three was a chart success in spite of its craziness—the sound of three people driven mad and coming out on top.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


Behind its carefree title, Miley Cyrus’ eighth album is an edgeless and synthetic collection of disco-pop bummer jams.

Endless Summer Vacation

For years, each new album signaled the pronouncement of a new, more mature Miley Cyrus, and a host of new visual metaphors for said maturity: an asymmetrical haircut, an acoustic guitar, a branded condom, another asymmetrical haircut. But she has remained one of pop’s most endearingly guileless songwriters. On songs like “Malibu” and “High” she sings about true love with total innocence; on 2020’s “Bad Karma” and “Night Crawling,” collaborations with Joan Jett and Billy Idol, respectively, she took on the guise of rock stardom, affecting a swagger with the enthusiasm of a superfan. Taylor Swift shed her wide-eyed sense of wonderment somewhere around Reputation; Cyrus never did, giving her music a curious, appealing openness that stands out in the contemporary pop landscape.
On Endless Summer Vacation, Cyrus’ eighth album, that changes. Its airy, mostly unfussy pop-rock production is streaked with the pink and red of a summer sunset; emotionally, it carries the mottled purple tint of a bruise. Early on she howls a backhanded apology to an ex: “I’m sorry that you’re jaded.” By the time the record’s played through—after she sings about her own callousness and her inability to settle down, and wonders “Am I stranded on an island/Or have I landed in paradise?”—it seems like she might be singing to herself. Cyrus is only 30, but Endless Summer Vacation is marked by a blunt cynicism that seems like a product of both a recent divorce and a lifetime seeing her own image warped and criticized by the media.
Led by the hammy self-love anthem “Flowers”—a chugging daytime disco song that aims for “I Will Survive” but lands more like “I Will Survive?”—Endless Summer Vacation has been sold as Cyrus’ stylish moving-on record, an unbothered counterpart to its snarky predecessor Plastic Hearts. But it is more interesting than a simple statement of self-confidence. On most of these songs, Cyrus is regretful, even mournful: “Rose Colored Lenses,” seemingly about a moment of post-coital bliss, wallows in the realization that such peace can never really last. “You,” a gorgeous soul ballad that captures all the grit and tension from Cyrus’ ragged voice, counters devotional lyrics with a chorus that laments a breakup as a foregone conclusion: “I am not made for no horsey and carriage/You know I’m savage.” On streaming, Endless Summer Vacation is packaged with a demo version of “Flowers,” and although it is a demo in name only—it is as taut and shellacked as the final version, just quieter—it’s actually a neat bookend, making Cyrus’ lyrics sound yearning and contrite.
Cyrus has never really made a great front-to-back album—2013’s Bangerz, weirdly, is probably most listenable the whole way through—and, with Endless Summer Vacation, “no skips” remains out of reach. A run of understated early tracks, largely produced by Harry’s House collaborators Kid Harpoon and Tyler Johnson, is interrupted by the interminable Harmony Korine co-write “Handstand,” the kind of grooveless synth dirge that helped 2015’s Flaming Lips collaboration Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz sink like a stone. “Handstand” is built around a heavy-handed boat metaphor that never seems to go anywhere, and confoundingly introduces a character called Big Twitchy, a constant presence in Korine’s paintings. It feels as if, after exercising the kind of restraint that’s rare across her catalog, Cyrus finally let herself slip back into mindless excess.
Cyrus has said Endless Summer Vacation is loosely divided into “AM” and “PM” sections, and it’s the nighttime songs, roughly beginning with “Handstand,” that grate. “Wildcard” unsuccessfully retreads the “I’m damaged” regretfulness of “You” with less panache; “Muddy Feet,” a leaden collaboration with Sia, aims for tough talk and mostly lands at awkward. A decade on, Cyrus has still not found an appealing way to sing the word “I’ma,” and the song describes a cheating partner with a maddening combination of vagueness and ultra-specificity.
Indeed, a search for any of these songs brings up dozens of tabloid articles purporting to explain how they relate to Cyrus’ personal life. Thankfully, most of the album doesn’t fuel the impulse to speculate. On its best songs, such as the vampy and lascivious “River,” Cyrus effectively showcases who she is at this point in her career: Mature but still messy, not above a theatrical turn of phrase (“You’re pourin’ down, baby, drown me out”) and, very occasionally, still in tune with the big-hearted optimism that characterized her earlier music. “You could be the one, have the honor of my babies,” she sings. “Hope they have your eyes and that crooked smile.” Thrown into the middle of a horned-up dance jam, it comes as a surprise. A little like Endless Summer Vacation—which is not the sundazed party record that was promised but an exploration of how it feels when the party’s over.


A landmark anthology originally released in 2001 documents how James “Plunky Nkabinde” Branch and his groups connected jazz, R&B, and funk through Afrocentric rhythms and spirituality.

Oneness of Juju: African Rhythms 1970-1982

African Rhythms 1970-1982

For much of the COVID-19 quarantine, James “Plunky Nkabinde” Branch—the saxophone- and flute-playing founder/leader of the Oneness of Juju, and through line of the recordings featured on African Rhythms 1970-1982—has been performing 10-minute concerts every evening from the front porch of his Richmond, Virginia home. What started as a familiar salute to essential workers of Plunky’s hometown has become a nightly meditation on global kinship. As the Black Lives Matter protests began to be felt especially strongly in Richmond, with its avenue of Confederate monuments, Plunky’s nightly repertoire has come to feature Oneness funk originals such as 1980’s “Make a Change,” which resonates acutely in a year when radical reconsideration has become central to public discourse.
Plunky Branch’s career as a social sage and connector of Black American music is one of the subtexts of African Rhythms 1970-1982, a reissue of the classic Strut compilation. It originally dropped in 2001, as Oneness of Juju and Plunky’s other groups were being “rediscovered” by Afrobeat DJs and hip-hop beatmakers. (Dilla covered the comp’s title cut the same year.) But it feels newly relevant, given Plunky’s role in many of the ongoing, fruitful discussions of our moment: about African roots and American lives; the interlocked musical traditions sometimes known as “jazz” and “funk”; and Black culture’s economic self-sufficiency and capitalism’s voracious need for content. With the flames of “spiritual jazz” rising higher on multiple continents, its reappearance is right on time.
African Rhythms 1970-1982 documents a crucial chapter in the history of Black American music and the movements it soundtracked. There are links to the era’s anti-war and anti-colonialist political activism (Plunky had an FBI file), South African musical exiles (members of Juju played on Ndikho Xaba and the Natives’ 1971 Afro-jazz-funk masterpiece), and post-Black Arts Movement New York loft scene (Juju lived in Ornette Coleman’s rent-free). The DIY spirit of Black independent music labels and distributors—particularly trumpeter Charles Tolliver and pianist Stanley Cowell’s legendary Strata-East, which released Juju albums, and D.C.’s Black Fire, which Plunky helped found (and which is the subject of its own upcoming release)—was a major influence. The continuity and interconnectedness of the diaspora’s localized rhythmic intricacies captured here are shown to be as fluid as night turning into day. And the presence of fabled figures such as Sun Ra, Pharoah Sanders, Gil-Scott Heron, and Hugh Masekela can be spotted just off stage, whether in the liner notes (by Chris Menist) or via one degree of separation through the players involved.
The early selections on African Rhythms focus more on the drumming foundations of Plunky’s groups than on their deep free improvisations of the period. The compilation forgoes chronology in favor of vibe and flow, while at the same time sketching a cultural timeline of the era’s evolving styles. A 1971 triptych of sexually and spiritually hungry feminist spoken word by Bay Area poet Roach OM, read over the Natives’ Afro-Cuban groove (the oldest recording on the compilation), offers a glimpse of the lyrical and musical longings of youthful, budding revolutionaries. On the New York (1972-73) and Richmond (1974) recordings of Plunky’s first band, Juju, featuring the ex-Natives vibraphonist Lon Moshe and drummer/percussionist Babatunde Michael Lea, that formula pairing spoken word with rhythm comes into sharper focus. Percussive layers (up to five instruments at once) are supple and unrelenting, and Plunky’s sheets of sound are also in service of the beat. Yet they could also touch transcendence: On the epic “End of the Butterfly King,” which features Ngoma Ya Uhura reading verses of a hopeful poem called “Things Comin’ Along” (“There is no time—only rhythm and change”) Juju fly in breathtaking angles behind him, Plunky’s thorny soprano lines rising and Al-Hammel Rasul pounding his piano, McCoy Tyner-style, through a simple and gorgeous melody. It’s free jazz as dance music.
Oneness of Juju made their debut in 1975, building on that dance while taking it in the direction of Afrocentric R&B, as played by a percussion-heavy jazz group—one that now featured a female vocalist (Eka-Ete Jackie Lewis) and a more funk-minded bassist (Plunky’s younger brother, Muzi Branch). The “African Rhythms” single was Black Fire’s first release, and the shift in musical strategy proved a commercially prudent one, just as the group’s audience evolved from art spaces of New York to the clubs of the Mid-Atlantic; yet the group’s musical and cultural message, that African rhythms equated to “the truth,” remained steadfast. Here too, Branch and band demonstrated how global Black rhythms represented continuity between the past and the future. Much of Oneness and Branch’s later ’70s contributions slot perfectly between Manu Dibango and Parliament tracks, tailor-made for the disco of Larry Levan and David Mancuso. There’s a full-on house music-meets-Egypt 70 vibe on 1982’s “Black Fire Mix” reimagining of famed Ghanaian percussionist Okyerema Asante’s “Sabi,” originally recorded in 1976-77 as a pure Afro-disco groove (sample lyric: “Get up on your feet and boogie”). Meanwhile, Oneness also fed a distinct environmental consciousness—1977’s “Be About the Future,” a percussion-driven funk number, featured Muzi-penned lyrics that presented ecological needs (clean water, saving resources) well ahead of the headlines.
By the time of 1982’s “Every Way But Loose,” built around Muzi’s lightly bumping bassline and another lyrical riff on the epistemology of rhythm (“Ain’t nothing but the truth gonna turn you loose”), had finally scored the group an actual hit (#62 on Billboard’s Dance Club Songs), Plunky & Oneness were also seeing D.C.’s go-go pick up their percussive mantle. (In 1977, Black Fire had released Experience Unlimited’s Free Yourself, among the first go-go recordings.) Eventually, “rhythm and change” caught up with him, as hip-hop and house—a machine-driven bridge too far for Plunky to cross—took up the beats of their elders. Not that Plunky ever stopped—his N.A.M.E. Brand label continued reissuing older recordings, while Plunky & Oneness still drop new ones.
African Rhythms 1970-82 wonderfully sums the sound James Branch and his colleagues plugged into in the late ’60s, which harkens to the one that poet/critic LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) predicted as “Unity Music” in his 1966 essay “The Changing Same”: a “Black Music which is religious and secular.” Jones foresaw …“a social spiritualism” that would resolve all the “artificial oppositions” in Black music, and include “all the rhythms, all the yells and cries, all that information about the world, the Black ommmmmmmmmmmmmmmm, opening and entering.” Plunky’s still playing it on his Richmond front porch. Go check him out.

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Tragically Hip singer Gord Downie, diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor, offers an affecting album with Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew about the plight of Canada's indigenous population.

Secret Path

In 2014, Kevin Drew of Broken Social Scene approached Tragically Hip singer Gord Downie about recording an album. Downie said he didn’t think he had any songs. “But,” he said, “I have been writing about Charlie.”
“Charlie” is Chanie Wenjack, a boy who, in the 1960s, was separated from his family and placed in the Cecelia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario. His name was warped into the misnomer “Charlie” by his teachers. One day he escaped the school and tried to walk home. His family lived 400 miles away. He never made it. The album that Drew and Downie made, Secret Path, is, in Downie’s words, “an attempt to capture the feeling, somehow, of trying to get home.”
The first residential schools appeared in Canada in the late 1800s, and the system survived until the mid-1990s; children were removed from their families and placed in distant boarding schools administered by local churches and funded by the federal government. The schools were developed to “take the Indian out of the child”; teachers forbid the students from speaking or writing in their native language and educated them exclusively in white culture and Christianity. The students suffered physical and sexual abuse; many died from disease, which spread recklessly through the schools. Others committed suicide. The Canadian government stopped recording the deaths of children in residential schools in 1920, and many of the original records have been lost or destroyed. A recent commission estimated that up to 6,000 children may have died while living in residential schools, and earlier this year a state of emergency was declared in the indigenous community of Attawapiskat after 11 people attempted suicide on the same day; one of the cited reasons for the suicide attempts is the lingering, cross-generational trauma of residential schools.
Downie tells Chanie’s particular version of this story by developing its sense of place. The compositions on Secret Path feel more like haunted environments than songs; it sounds as if Downie, Drew, and the Stills’ Dave Hamelin—all of whom supply most of the instrumentation—are all wandering through these spaces with Chanie. (This quality might’ve been transferred to the recordings by Drew, whose albums with Broken Social Scene have such a strongly defined sense of place that listening to them feels like visiting individual cities.) The instruments, mostly acoustic guitar and piano, are recorded in such a way that they produce atmospheres out of minimal playing. Piano chords drone and occasionally sound as if they’d been reduced to their own echo, wrapping the songs in a kind of musical shadow.
This is the most severe and spartan context that Downie’s sang in since his solo debut, 2001’s Coke Machine Glow, and his words for the most part land in the scenery as haunted, disconnected fragments. Downie, as a lyricist, is traditionally remarkable for his density. Unlike fellow Canadian poet Leonard Cohen, he is not particularly interested in space, and unlike fellow Canadian lyricist Joni Mitchell, his songs aren’t delivered by or assembled around characters. His work is rarely about himself, and in fact seems to flow from a composite perspective, a sensibility that shifts so often that it resists characterization or stability. He takes literature, history, and geography, and compresses them into living, shapeshifting jigsaw puzzles. A lyric from “Christmastime in Toronto,” from his 2003 solo album Battle of the Nudes: “With your dark epiphanies/Your true lines of smoke/Your glistening rails and streetcars all aglow/Always the wind and the persistent snow/Gets into your eyes and your mouth and every fold of your coat.” At least half of that line is from Chekhov, and the other half is a mundane image of winter in Toronto ascending into a realm of magic realism.
On Secret Path, Downie’s words have a sudden respect for space; they never veer from Chanie’s story. In the first song, “The Stranger,” Downie resists projecting onto Chanie, and the lyric produces an ambiguity and anxiety that feels true to the theoretical feelings of a lost 12-year-old: “And what I’m feeling is anyone’s guess/What is in my head?/And what's in my chest?.” But Downie is also capable of reducing the narrative to a single heartbreaking detail, as in the title track, where Chanie seems to wrestle with the definition of the word “windbreaker” as he’s assaulted by wind and frozen rain (“Doesn’t do what they said it’d do/It’s just a jacket”).
Downie’s more direct lyricism may also respond to how Secret Path itself a story of space—of the distance between Chanie and his family, of the yawning space between his footsteps as he walks over a seemingly infinite stretch of train tracks. The image of the train tracks is provided by artist Jeff Lemire, who illustrated a graphic novel around the album; Lemire wordlessly depicts Chanie’s life before and after escaping the residential school in elliptical, repeating images and rhythms: one Chanie and two other students on a swing set, just before they escape the school; one of a raven, which may or may not be Chanie’s hallucination, drifting in and out of the minimal, monochrome landscape, sometimes carrying a pair of articulated eyes in its beak; and one of Chanie’s father, who is a hallucination, and who materializes out of the only soft petals of color in the book. There’s an uncanny loneliness in Lemire’s pictures and in Downie’s words. “I can see my father’s face/Warming his feet by the stove,” Downie sings in “I Will Not Be Struck.” “We used to have each other/Now we only have ourselves.” He’s describing a kind of distance, a kind of space that can’t be filled or healed.
In August of this year, the Tragically Hip played what is potentially their final show, which took place in their hometown of Kingston, Ontario. Downie had been diagnosed a few months earlier with glioblastoma multiforme, a terminal brain tumor characterized by necrotizing tissue forming around aggressive, undifferentiated cells, and which in x-rays appears as a shadow swimming through fluorescent regions of the brain. Downie’s memory was compromised; he remembered his lyrics through teleprompters that were arranged around the stage. In between songs, with 11.7 million Canadians watching the concert through the CBC broadcast and its attendant stream, he started to improvise; Downie identified Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in the audience, and admonished him to start repairing Canada’s relationship with its indigenous population. “It’s going to take us 100 years to figure out what the hell went on up there,” Downie said. “But it isn’t cool and everybody knows that. It's really, really bad, but we're going to figure it out. You're going to figure it out." Secret Path, it seems, is Downie’s own way of figuring it out.


On her brutally honest debut album, the Chicago singer-songwriter takes folk music and bends it to her will, exploring agony and adoration in equal measure.

Kara Jackson: Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love?

Kara Jackson doesn’t just wear her heart on her sleeve, she offers it to you in her palms after cutting it from her chest. In the music video for “no fun/party,” the lead single to her debut record, Why Does the Earth Give Us People To Love?, the 23-year-old Chicago native and former National Youth Poet Laureate straddles a double of herself and pulls the organ from the doppelganger’s body. “Isn’t that just love?” she sings ironically, placing her heart, still slick with blood, delicately on a table of makeshift wires. It’s a striking visual that speaks to Jackson’s commitment to painful vulnerability, her recognition that agony and adoration must stem from the same source.
That love and suffering often go hand in hand is conventional wisdom by now, and one that Jackson herself tackled in her 2019 EP, A Song for Every Chamber of the Heart. On her latest record, the singer-songwriter has both refined her musical capabilities and pushed her existential questions into rockier terrain. Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? is an album about love, certainly, but none of its tracks are love songs. The music is neither sweet nor loving; many of the songs are harsh and disorienting, probing and uncomfortable. Where others might posit that it’s better to have loved and lost, Jackson argues that love is loss.
Her storytelling is masterful, filled with earnest lyricism and a knack for arresting imagery. On “no fun/party,” she describes the banality and repetition of finding the one: “It’s hard to have patience when you’re waiting on luck, like a postal truck, like a postal truck…” Jackson also flexes her wide vocal range to drive home the emotions behind her words. “Don’t you bother me,” she warns her ex-lover on the meditative, breakup ballad “Free,” the deep rumbling of her voice adding a menacing edge. On the title track, Jackson pitches her voice high and childlike, almost as though her philosophical questioning—“Why does the earth give us people to love then take them away from our reach?”—soars toward the heavens.
Jackson is a guitarist whose instrument functions not as an appendage to her words, but the very skin that holds her music together. On “no fun/party,” she rarely deviates from a five-note lick which cradles her lyrics and maintains the song’s pensive undertones. These songs introduce lusher arrangements—piano, banjo, xylophone—and a few hometown guests—KAINA, NNAMDÏ, Sen Morimoto—into her repertoire, which let her melodies shift and meander; just when you think you’ve grasped one, it wiggles out of your fist. On the outstanding “Dickhead Blues,” her lackadaisical guitar changes shape when layered with frenetic drums and then disappears altogether, drowned by the layered voices of a choir.
In the title song, Jackson mourns her friend Maya, who died from cancer in 2016. Over the most ominous arrangement on the record, she asks why she was gifted a beautiful friendship if it was only meant to be taken from her. “We’re only waiting our turn, call that living,” she laments. Death is a constant specter in Jackson’s work—“lotta people gonna die,” she bellows on “recognized” and its reprise—but her grief is not only for the loss of life. She is also mourning relationships that died mid-course, or perhaps killed her spirit. She sings of a lover who forced her to be their therapist, of someone who made her feel cheap and used, of an ex who was generally just kind of a dick.
The cost of love comes up repeatedly on Why Does the Earth, and it’s never clear if it’s one Jackson feels is worth paying. “Have you thought about the price of my mouth?” she asks her lover cheekily on “Free.” On “Rat,” Jackson sings of a man who “couldn’t buy compassion cause it’d cost him 40 dollars.” “Price,” “cost,” “bargain,” “pay”; her frustration with transactional relationships is palpable, as is her desire to devote herself to someone without giving away parts of herself. The record captures the dangers of living with an open heart at a time of diminished personal connection, massive overwork, incessant productivity, and constant grief: To prioritize love one must give up something else.
But real love is never free. bell hooks said it best in her landmark 1999 text, All About Love: “To be loving is to be open to grief. To be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. The way we grieve is informed by whether we know love.” Throughout these 13 songs, Jackson never answers the question she poses in the album’s title. But she does have some breakthroughs. At the end of “Dickhead Blues,” as she finishes recounting her tumultuous love affair, she affirms the value in herself in a way her partner never could. “I am pretty top notch, I’m useful!” Jackson cries, her layered falsetto drifting into the ether. Though much of the loss that accompanies love is outside of our control, there is one thing Jackson’s certain of: She will not lose herself.


Inspired by the great outdoors, the latest album from the Colorado musician and ambient artist is a gently psychedelic ode to all that is wild and wandering.

Paradise Crick

The hills of the Front Range cast long shadows over M. Sage’s music. Reared in Fort Collins, Colorado—an unassuming mid-sized city tucked into the northern foothills of the state—Sage grew up riding boats with his family in mountain reservoirs, taking in the sun, the bug bites, the adventure. In his music, trees flicker supernaturally in the morning light, the sky takes on impossible hues of amber and green, and time seems to expand and contract with liquid ease. His ambient work is often preoccupied with a sense of place, but in its many digitally processed effects and minute edits, it ends up feeling like the product of another dimension entirely.
When Sage moved to Chicago in the mid-2010s, he brought that same sense of expanse to his now-retired Patient Sounds label and his own shapeshifting work, which has grown from glacial slabs of environmental tape hiss to glitchy experiments in plunderphonics. Across his releases for Orange Milk, Geographic North, Noumenal Loom, and about a dozen other tentpole labels of the American electronic underground, Sage has quietly flowered, never pausing to engage in self-mythology. Paradise Crick, his latest release (and first for RVNG Intl.), was conceived as a kind of fictional soundtrack for Sage’s Midwestern camping trips. Taking notes from Richard Brautigan’s dissonant hippie-era staple Trout Fishing in America, the album doesn’t so much contrast electronic with acoustic elements as fuse them in often seamless ways—a sonic embodiment of venturing into nature to clear one’s mind before returning home to city life to make sense of it all. Bringing the many shades of Sage’s output together into one unfurling panorama, its psychedelic scenery is an ode to all that is wild and wandering.
Maybe you’ve seen a UFO while staked out on an empty plain in the middle of the night, and maybe it sounded something like the modulating laser-beam synths that materialize in the album’s opening seconds. From the start, Paradise Crick is hardly just pastoral nostalgia: There’s an alien undercurrent to these tracks that consistently leads Sage down strange and unexpected roads. When “Bendin’ In” begins to swell with yawning, earthy guitar chords, his strumming is slowly encased in electronic chimes that shimmer like rock candy. The jazzy piano that sets off “Crick Dynamo” appears at first to pull the track into a chasm of aquatic folktronica, but then everything glitches out, and we’re left with short-circuiting signals echoing into the ether.
Though Sage has recently begun to embrace a more acoustic sound—whether as a member of the Fuubutsushi jazz quartet or collaborating with a cadre of flutists, slide guitarists, and harmonium players on 2021’s The Wind of Things—here he honors the spirit of the outdoors using the most computerized sounds imaginable. “Map to Here” deploys a high-pitched buzzing tone to create a singing bed of crickets, while “Backdrif” is filled with synthetic, skipping keyboard loops that tumble over themselves as smoothly as pebbles being drawn down a riverbed. Even the music’s busiest textures are peaceful.
As amorphous as it sometimes seems, Paradise Crick contains Sage’s most songlike creations yet. Rhythm seems to be of particular interest: In between passages of scattershot electronics that vibrate in all directions, Sage occasionally pulls a full-fledged beat from the churn. On “Mercy Lowlands,” it comes in the form of a hi-hat that weaves its way around a serpentine melody and playfully bouncing synth notes. “Evenin’ Out” brings the beat back in a steady handclap, this time as the bedrock for a whinnying breeze of campfire harmonica. Best of all is “River Turns Woodley (for Frogman),” where Sage plays a soft penny-whistle melody as if gazing out upon a new-agey vista, until his flute leaps into the air, and a reverberating drum stomp carries the song up and away.
Paradise Crick probably doesn’t resemble any campsite you’ve ever stayed at before, but in its artificial glow, it transcends the bucolic clichés so common in music inspired by the outdoors. “I’m always interested in how instrumental music is this form of communication,” Sage said in a 2021 interview. “It’s like, ‘Here’s three and a half minutes of wiggling air. Maybe it’ll tell you a story.’” Since finishing Paradise Crick, he has returned to Colorado to be among the mountains that raised him. Listening to the album, you can hear the upheavals of technology and the gentle permanence of the wider world, and the ways in which each might resemble the other more than we realize. In negotiating these tensions, Sage breathes life into an ecosystem that’s all his own.


Inspired by traditional music and an ancient mystery, French producer Julien Hairon creates buzzing, digitized dance beats that iterate endlessly on themselves.

Sator Arepo

Producer and ethnomusicologist Julien Hairon has spent the past decade wandering the Eastern Hemisphere, collecting field recordings from indigenous groups. In Cambodia, he witnessed the Kreung community play a polyrhythmic gong piece during a harvest ritual that involves feasting on a sacrificial cow. In Tanzania, he lived among the Maasai, who invited him to record the traditional music of a circumcision ceremony. Hairon releases these recordings via his Les Cartes Postales Sonores label, and reissues other CDs and tapes found during his travels—to Indonesia, Australia, China, Bangladesh—on the PetPets’ Tapes imprint.
But for Sator Arepo, Hairon’s debut as Judgitzu, he found inspiration closer to home. He became intrigued by the Sator Square, a five-word Latin palindrome. Versions of the puzzle, which dates back to ancient Rome, have been found in Europe, Asia, and North Africa. Its exact meaning is unknown, but from the middle ages into the 19th century, such squares were believed to have magical properties. The acrostic—which includes some formation of the Latin words Sator, Arepo, Tenet, Opera, and Rotas—was chiseled into stone to ward off illness, evil, and even raging flames. On Sator Arepo, Hairon reinterprets the circularity of palindromes, crafting digitized, rapid-fire dance beats that circle and distort.
With a modest arsenal—an Elektron Digitakt sampler and sequencer, a Yamaha PSS-50 keyboard, a Critter & Guitari Organelle, and a Microkorg—Hairon recycles song structures and hints back at his own beats and synth sequences. He reconfigures frenetic digital drum patterns and stretches out drones summoned from the Organelle. The basslines cooked up on his Microkorg throb like a jugular vein pumping blood. This self-referential closed loop mimics the limited set of letters contained in a palindrome, seeding each new song with a trace of the previous one. Hairon mutates the sounds slightly with each rotation, but the whole of Sator Arepo plays like a cohesive barrage of rhythms meant to induce trance-like state.
Tactile details make the tracks more distinct, even when they appear to have been erected from similar blueprints. On “Sylphe” and the title track, Hairon seems to coat the drums in lacquer, giving them a plasticky clack. The percussion on “L’Or des Fous” (“Fool’s Gold”) feels both plastic and metallic—like a ping-pong ball ricocheting off pots and pans. Hairon manipulates non-rhythmic elements with the same precision; “L’Or des Fous” is threaded with foghorn-like synth pusles and a gnawing buzz that evokes a giant fluorescent tube. The dark, mechanical “Vitalimetre” is powered by shrill synths that sound like a souped-up dental instrument.
Hairon’s debut is clearly inspired by singeli, the jet-propelled dance music that has been pumping out of Dar es Salaam for over a decade. The producer was, as he put it, “contaminated” by the genre when he lived in the coastal Tanzanian city, and he became transfixed with its breakneck speed, which can reach 300 BPM. Watching Hairon’s footage of the Cambodian Kreung community reveals another structural influence for Sator Arepo: The ceremonial performers play three separate songs simultaneously on five staggered gongs, allowing the tones to overlap and intertwine. Hairon’s take on these influences is icy and harsh, more mechanical than the warm acoustic pieces he heard during his travels. On Sator Arepo, the specter of what’s come before echoes through every song with a chilly sheen that feels inherently foreboding.


The Virginia crooner and sometime rapper is back with his old name and his new sensibilities—a re-re-introduction that solidifies his love for all things smooth and sappy.

What Had Happened Was

DRAM has never been afraid to be silly. Whether he’s belting about getting money, finding love, or smoking debilitating amounts of weed, he’s always performing for the cheap seats, his powerful vocal range lampshaded with a goofy exuberance. His guilelessness has mutated slightly across his first two albums. His debut full-length, 2016’s Big Baby D.R.A.M., had more than its fair share of crowd-pleasers, but smoky, intimate outliers like “WiFi” and “Monticello Ave” proved he didn’t always feel the need to swing for crossover hits. By 2021’s Shelley FKA DRAM, the Virginia crooner and sometime rapper had gone through a name change and fully committed himself to adult contemporary R&B and soul. It was the most mature he’d ever sounded on record, but not mature enough to forgo a light dusting of shenanigans, whether cheeky interludes or the occasional groaner (“Let me touch your soul before I touch your skin”). On What Had Happened Was…, DRAM is back with his old name and his new sensibilities, a re-re-introduction that solidifies his love for all things smooth and sappy.
As a singer, DRAM flows between a velvety tenor and a piercing falsetto that recalls Ronald Isley if he mainlined nothing but trap-soul playlists. His vocals simmer and rise on the hooks for “Ride or Die” and “Let Me See Your Phone,” the warble of his upper register selling reassuring coos to one lover and threats of invading another’s privacy with equal charisma. Vibrato has always been a secret weapon in the best DRAM songs, but his application is more nuanced now, letting it seep into the cracks of the music instead of drilling it through the foundation—the purring throughout tracks like “Best That I Got” and “Reflections” is smooth and inviting. He’s a more seasoned vocalist than before who’s eager to flesh out core elements of his technique. The stacked vocal harmonies on “3’s Company” and “Can’t Hold You Down” have the texture of Voodoo-era D’Angelo, and his voice generally has a richer, more confident tone.
What Had Happened Was… aims to refine the formula DRAM first established on Shelley FKA DRAM. Each song is a loose narrative about different stages and forms of love: one-night stands and brushes with the One; break-ups and makeups; affairs behind closed doors and JumboTron-worthy proclamations. He’s been through it all, and he approaches each scenario with playboy confidence and loverboy earnestness. “3’s Company” is a funk ballad in whic DRAM succumbs to his partner’s request for a threesome; it plays out with just enough melodrama to not read like a soap opera (“Even though I’d rather it be you and me/But I don’t really mind because it’s not new to me/It’s just that it reminds me who I used to be”). The laidback silly charm manifests in interludes dotted with Super Saiyan sound effects and Spongebob jokes, and brief lapses into rapping (“Soul to Take,” “Big Baby DRAM”). For all his growth, DRAM is still a kid at heart.
Occasionally, he leans a little too hard into goofball territory (“Wham you out your jammies, wham you out your panties/That’s a double whammy”; “Your baby mama says I taste scrumdiddlyumptious”), but the emotional balance between songs is getting stronger. The fading romance of “Let Me See Your Phone” lands with the same verve as the lothario tales on Big Baby D.R.A.M. The album’s emotional centerpiece is a three-song stretch dedicated to his mother, who passed away in November 2020. “Angry” deals with the immediate harshness of her passing (“What do you mean I can’t see you?”) while “A Mother’s Love” unpacks as many of his feelings as possible before he breaks down into tears on the song’s bridge. The moment is personal and gutting without becoming dour or depressing, more kindling for the fires of DRAM’s performance.
It also helps that the music is as fluid as DRAM’s vocals. A gang of producers, from New Orleans multi-instrumentalist Spiff Sinatra to bassist extraordinaire Alissia Benveniste, work together to match DRAM’s syrupy voice with hefty slices of funk and soul and a little trap&B thrown in for good measure. Benveniste wraps distorted bass and light synths around “3’s Company” to provide the steamy ambience it requires and gives “PPL” a warmly elegant shuffle that plays against the “hurt people hurt people” narrative at its center. On “WHAM,” Sinatra and producer HERO blend 808s kicks and hi-hats with digitized vocals that complement DRAM’s horny-in-the-backseat come-ons. It’s one of several moments where the modern but vintage feel of the music syncs with the mushy but still attractive aspects of DRAM’s songwriting.
Back-half highlight “Reflections” is one of the album’s few instances of self-love. Here, the rigors of fame catch up to DRAM as he fights depression and fatigue (“laying in bed ain’t gon’ pay my rent”) while lamenting the old him, a man not above locking his girlfriend out for questioning whether or not he cheated on her. “Reflections” is emblematic of a struggle between the old DRAM and the new one that takes place across What Had Happened Was…: the happy-go-lucky womanizing rap-singer that Drake bit off in 2016 (and randomly dissed earlier this year) and the modern mellow crooner, unlucky in love but always trying. He’s lived many lives, but the DRAM who emerges from the rubble is the most well-rounded of the bunch, blending love, lust, and wide-eyed charm into a funky cocktail all his own.


Tim Cohen's band has taken a melodic and jangly turn on a collection of songs that deals mainly in expressions of love at its most immediate and pleasurable.

Long Slow Dance

Romance in contemporary popular music, as it is in life, is hard to come by. Songs of love and lust are commonplace, but romance? It seems to be a luxury we can no longer afford, which is a shame. Romance might only be artifice, but sometimes it's a necessary artifice, presenting an elusive vision that exists in our hearts and can only be made tangible in art. Even if Long Slow Dance, the fourth full-length album by San Francisco psych-pop group the Fresh & Onlys, were not loaded with excellent songs, it would be worthy of affection because it is so unabashedly imbued with this lost sense of romanticism. The band's principal songwriter, Tim Cohen, is pictured on the back cover as a typical po-faced indie rock dude with the de rigueur bushy beard and scraggly, mussed-up 'do. But on the record, he's a tuxedoed Fred Astaire doing a soft-shoe with Ginger Rogers through a wondrous black-and-white world. Lush and love struck, with a light-as-air melodicism that blesses the songs like sprinkles of pixie dust, Long Slow Dance dares to revel in that magical moment between a first kiss and the walk back to the car, and stretch it out to the length of a lifetime memory.
The Fresh & Onlys pointed in this direction on 2010's great Play It Strange, which was kicked off by the band's two best-ever songs, "Summer of Love" and "Waterfall". With its Beach Boys harmonies, gently rolling surf guitar, and Cohen's dreamy, reverb-heavy vocal, "Summer of Love" suggested a mood of escape that the more propulsive "Waterfall" explicitly spelled out in the lyrics. Frequently classified as revivalists, the Fresh & Onlys were actually evolving into sensualists, and that process comes to a head on Long Slow Dance, which deals mainly in expressions of love at its most immediate and pleasurable.
Cohen is never more charming on Long Slow Dance than he is on the title track, a jangly strummer that supplements the Fresh & Onlys' usual 1960s rock touchstones with nods to the Cure and the Church. "You supply the innocent mind/ And I'll bring the guilty heart/ And borne together, we'll make the perfect romance," Cohen sings, his flat baritone cracking just enough to indicate a thawing of his previously cool façade. It's not clear whether the person he's singing to truly exists, nor does it matter; what's important is that Cohen's yearning is relatable even as the evocative music elevates it to poetic heights. Unlike many similar-minded groups that merely allude to prior examples of classic songwriting rather than carry on the tradition, "Long Slow Dance" is a genuinely fantastic example of the form, with Cohen following through a list of "you're wonderful and I'm scum" metaphors as the impossibly comely music conjures a quick tango underneath a starry sky.
The rest of Long Slow Dance nearly matches that high level of swoony wonder. "Dream Girls" is a twangy lament in the vein of Chris Isaak, and "Presence of Mind" sounds custom-made for movie montages, with its giddy marimba flourishes and squiggly dream-sequence guitar riff from Wymond Miles. (It also carries the album's nut graph: "Here lies a man with stars in his eyes/ What does he care if the future is bright?/ The future is bright, after tonight.")
Easily the slickest album the Fresh & Onlys have made yet, Long Slow Dance subtly expands the band's sonic palette without overwhelming the band's appealing simplicity. The sweeping "20 Days and 20 Nights" takes a melancholic turn via a wistful piano solo, while the moody folk-pop tune "Executioner's Song" culminates with a surprisingly expressive horn section. The sinister lo-fi side of the group's personality displayed on its 7"s and 2009's spooky Grey-Eyed Girls has been sublimated. For now, Cohen is playing up the poppiest aspects of his band's sound, occupying the space once owned by the Shins on Oh, Inverted World and Chutes Too Narrow. With Long Slow Dance, he's made a record for blissfully happy nights.


On their third album, Brooklyn’s Landlady perfect their quizzical prog-pop. The album is best when it's most vexing, while frontman Adam Schatz explores basic human sensation with a Cheshire Cat wit.

The World Is a Loud Place

Certain political travesties of the last few months have promoted a hands-over-ears response from even the most optimistic citizens, with logic drowned out by alternative facts and social media bloviations. Suddenly it feels much more difficult just to be in the world, which is the animating idea behind the third album by the Brooklyn collective Landlady. The World Is a Loud Place is one of those works of art that was made in one era but released in another, darker one. It’s an album that perhaps wasn’t intended to be political, but in 2017 it’s inescapably politicized. Frontman and chief songwriter Adam Schatz isn’t trying to topple regimes or even speak truth to errant power; rather, he’s just trying to evoke the sensation of being in a human body at this point in time.
“Feel your heart beat once, there it goes again,” Schatz sings on “Electric Abdomen,” the album’s opener, as though the continuity of consciousness was a surprise. The song itself spools out in zig zags, changing direction and tempo abruptly and without warning. From their previous record to this one, the band have mastered a kind of lenticular prog-pop, defined by busybody arrangements and winding structures that form a fitting musical approximation of that .gif album cover: always in motion, always jumping from one idea to the next. “Rest in Place” snakes around into a big brass fanfare, although it fades out before you can discern the motive: Is it triumphant or cautionary? Do those horns constitute a happy ending or is the killer still alive, ready to pounce at us once more?
Schatz presides over these songs with a mischievous glint in his eye—half wiseacre Virgil leading us through a new American hellscape, part grinning Cheshire Cat sitting in inscrutable judgment. His lyrics recall the fragmented domestic scenery of recent Wilco tunes: trapped in first person, always trying to make sense of another person. “Teach me how you’re organized,” he sings on “Cadaver,” and it sounds like the most existential pick-up line imaginable. “Just be happy with the guts that we’ve got” is his warped version of a kitten-poster platitude. It’s a harsh world, but certainly not unpleasant to visit, thanks to Schatz’s gnomic charisma.
Has anyone ever enunciated the word “California” with as much loopy precision as he does on “Driving in California”? Schatz savors every consonant and vowel, then tosses the word out the car window with a distracted “-yeah.” The song is almost purposefully annoying, like a parody of tour songs or Golden State paeans: “Driving in Californ-yeah makes me forget everywhere that’s not Californ-yeah.” Then Schatz moves eastward, first to Colorado and then to Niagara, picking up in cleverness along the way. It’s the only track on The World Is a Loud Place where Schatz’s lyrics are superficially sensical, where the lyrical conceit is too unwieldy for him and the agile band to handle.
The album is best when it’s most vexing, when its puzzle-piece arrangements demand you put everything together. Part of the fun is following the circuitous routes these compositions take and hearing the oddball flourishes Landlady insert into the arrangements. Landlady craft a cacophony, but Schatz won’t put his hands over his ears: There’s some beauty in the noise that’s worth going deaf to hear.


The London-based singer-songwriter takes a leap forward with a nuanced and meticulous set of electro-pop.

Songbook EP

Seven years ago, the London-based Anna Ottridge could be found on YouTube performing acoustic versions of Amy Winehouse and English folk trio Daughter. Her voice—agile and slightly smoky—was already refined, but the music was not her own, and the coffeehouse-cover-singer archetype was well-worn. In the years since, Ottridge has developed her own distinctive songcraft. These days, Anna Ottridge is otta, and her new EP Songbook (released on producer Kwes’ BOKKLE imprint)  is a promising collection of meticulous electro-pop tempered by her dusky vocals. Songbook is Ottridge’s second release under her new moniker, following her 2020 debut EP after it all blew over, and it stands apart from her prior work; across eight tracks, she details her bedroom-pop compositions with a lush palette of synthesizers, saxophone, organ, and midi strings, bringing her closer to an avant pop group like Field Music than the cafe singer-songwriter she used to be.
Songbook is bookended by its two strongest tracks: “never see” and “just like the rain,” which are also the EP’s most uptempo and danceable moments. The former maximizes three main elements: canned percussion, a crawling bassline, and otta’s layered vocals, stacked like a sheaf of crisp paper. “never see” is a promise that there is someone out there who is made to love you—who “wants to know the smell of your soap.” But the song is as much of a warning as it is a pledge: you might be standing in your own way of  that love. When a tangle of grim synthesizers swarm the song’s final moments, it’s difficult to tell if the story ends in love or loss—a marker of otta’s nuanced approach.
“just like the rain” is similarly bittersweet, bobbing between a disco beat and thumping bass as otta turns phrases that sound wiser than her 23 years. “Nothing can keep you from yourself if you don’t let yourself out,” she sings, before the song is washed away in a synthesized downpour, groaning saxophone, and swipes of piano. otta’s manipulation of her vocal tracks is particularly interesting here—she braids them into strange, eerie howls. It’s a welcome subversion of her otherwise-sweet melodies.
otta’s skills as a producer (and engineer and mixer) are evident throughout Songbook, and they set her apart from countless young artists coming up in the South London scene. Musical interlude “suihku” is particularly compelling—a slaw of vocal samples and synthesizer fragments chopped at a frantic pace. There are hints of anxious electronica buried throughout the EP, but “suihku” reveals them in their bare and bracing form.
If Songbook has one major flaw, it’s the late-album ballad “no more tears.” Here, otta’s vocals are glossed over with AutoTune, compressing her unique and vulnerable voice and making it sound like everybody else’s. The song falls prey to a recent trend that seemingly requires fledgling artists to use Vocoder on a minimum of one song per album (see: Porridge Radio’s “(Something),” Becky and the Birds’ “Do U Miss Me,” and ALASKALASKA’s “Arrows,” to start). It’s as if otta is ticking a box labeled “Contemporary Music Trend,” an understandable urge for a young artist, but unnecessary for someone with such a developed style. Anna Ottridge may still be finding her voice as otta, but Songbook makes an exciting case for the search itself.

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A decade after his wildly successful rework of the Baroque giant’s ubiquitous string concerti, the London composer revisits the material yet again, but the differences can be hard to pick out.

Max Richter: The New Four Seasons - Vivaldi Recomposed

Nearly two hundred years after the death of Antonio Vivaldi in 1741, he was a name known only to scholars of Bach and the Baroque, a ghost who haunted Western music from a small cemetery outside the city walls of Vienna. But the Italian composer’s resurrection in the years before World War II was dramatic. In the 1930s, Vivaldi’s greatest cheerleader, Ezra Pound, helped usher him into the canon through a series of performances in Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera. By the 1950s, students all over the globe were beginning to learn the Venetian’s compositions, but four violin concerti, rightly or wrongly, stand above the rest.
The Four Seasons is among the most famous pieces of music in the history of Western culture, beloved and derided in equal measure—like any omnipresent work of pop. As Alex Ross argued in The New Yorker, we now think of Vivaldi as “the Muzak of the middle classes, the backbeat of the bourgeois bustle.” This reputation mostly stems from The Four Seasons, which is ubiquitous beyond belief: The opening notes of “Spring” float above wedding processions, year after year; the swells of “Summer” and the tumult of “Winter” have been perennial favorites of ad breaks and movie soundtracks for nearly a century. Diddy apparently has called “Spring” his theme music.
The Four Seasons has been recorded hundreds if not thousands of times, and a 2012 “recomposition” by Max Richter is among the most widespread. His “Spring 1” is frequently synced on television: It has appeared as a wonderfully deployed leitmotif in the HBO adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend; soundtracking the horny, Regency-era melodramas of Bridgerton; and loop-de-looping around shots of avant-garde meals in Chef’s Table. Richter’s version of The Four Seasons bears the mark of much of the London composer’s work, which brings certain postmodern values to the canon. Framing his project as a “conversation” with Vivaldi rather than another re-recording, he threw out three quarters of the original material, kept what he liked best, rewrote the score, and used looping techniques to make these staid sounds seem unfamiliar and new again.
“We hear [The Four Seasons] everywhere—when you’re on hold, you hear it in the shopping center, in advertising; it’s everywhere,” Richter told NPR. “For me, the record and the project are trying to reclaim the piece, to fall in love with it again.” A decade later, he has returned to The Four Seasons with the hopes of making it anew one more time. Working with the violinist Elena Urioste and the musicians of Chineke! Orchestra, Richter’s The New Four Seasons uses period instruments, gut strings, and vintage analog synthesizers to achieve what he hopes is a “grittier, more punk rock sound.”
Rather than grittier, though, the surface of The New Four Seasons seems even shinier, encasing each movement in chrome and stardust: The opening seconds of “Spring 0” are melodramatic, the celestial synths seemingly designed to give the song a second life as material for PBS documentaries on the cosmos. The creepy artificial glow of “Autumn 2” might be meant to evoke a mix of dread and longing in an indie drama. The frothy rush of “Summer 3” will surely be used in a luxury electric car commercial someday soon. Yet discerning the differences between the decade-old version and this new one is tricky: Neither rougher in texture nor wildly different in its structure, The New Four Seasons sounds a lot like the old one.
If Richter’s 2012 recomposition was about bringing the past into the present, there is a sense that on The New Four Seasons Richter is applying a software update, one that hums in the background, adding features you are told are essential, but that otherwise are frictionless and out of sight. The 2012 recomposition reimagined what was once familiar, but without going back to the drawing board, The New Four Seasons merely returns to the familiar. Worse, it risks becoming forgettable.
Still, there are moments when Richter delivers on his goal of transforming what might once have registered as “smooth, pleasant, and slightly nauseating,” as Alex Ross wrote of the classic concertos broadcast on American drive-time classical radio, into objects of the future, flexible and fluid enough to be whatever we want them to be in whatever moments they are needed.
This is truest of his “Spring 1,” which carries with it shape-shifting powers, capable of evoking joy and pain in equal measure. Heard side by side, his decade-old recording and the new one carry minor but perceptible differences; the newer version is more action-oriented, faster paced and less serene. Here, we see the grittier Vivaldi Richter hoped to discover, reminding us of the earth and soil, wind and rain, the very weather The Four Seasons was meant to mimic and honor.


__NOTE: Record and track reviews return next week. In the meantime, t____his space highlights our most recent Best New Music selections. Enjoy!
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See Mystery Lights

Jona Bechtolt-- founding member of YACHT, former member of the Blow-- is a huge talent, something that may not have been readily apparent on any of his three previous LPs. Those albums, created largely as solo endeavors, will not have prepared listeners for See Mystery Lights. Now an official partnership between Bechtolt and Claire L. Evans, who performed on several songs on 2007's I Believe In You, Your Magic Is Real, YACHT finally feel like a full-fledged band with direction and vision, particularly given the added weight (or rather, levity) of Evans' influence.
The songs on See Mystery Lights-- from the bouncy, burbling you-can't-take-it-with-you screed "The Afterlife" (which plays like a less spastic companion piece to the Mae Shi's "Run to Your Grave") to the roller rink-ready vocoder vocals of "I'm In Love With a Ripper"-- represent YACHT at their most poppy. It's a collection of stone jams that finds the band finally as hellbent on experimenting and expanding the boundaries of its sonic scope as it is on having fun. Built on electronic foundations-- laser effects, skittering computerized beats, and spacey synth lines (or guitar riffs that have been tuned or distorted to sound like synths)-- these new songs are giddy with creative freedom while remaining tethered in service of their melodies. The vocal melodies are bright and buoyant, but delivered (by either band member, or in unison) in a chanted, oftentimes detached monotone that plays up the repetitive lyrics' mantra-like feel and adds a welcome undercurrent of slacker cool to their otherwise sugary optimism.
See Mystery Lights also marks the first time that YACHT are recording for DFA. Normally a label-change wouldn't be notable, as it is usually less an indicator of artistic choices than it is of financial or business ones, but moving to a label with such a distinctive aesthetic may be enough for many to reconsider their work. YACHT themselves created the track "Summer Song" as an homage to LCD Soundsystem, and LCD/DFA leader James Murphy liked it enough to release it on his label. It's no wonder that Murphy was smitten; the track, which also appears on the full-length, echoes the deadpan vocal delivery and burbling 80s krautrock synths of his own band, as well as cowbell-and-handclap percussion ripped from the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers", one of DFA's biggest singles. Even other tracks on the collection-- ones that weren't written specifically in homage to Murphy-- can't help but sound influenced by him. Case in point: "We Have All We've Ever Wanted", with its minimalist dance beat, heavy bass, and Bechtolt's dry, talky delivery, recalls "Losing My Edge", albeit with a lighthearted, anthemic chorus.
Still, while YACHT clearly share influences with Murphy's gang (Eno, Ferry, Neu!, ESG, etc.), their positive, futuristic jams actually sound most closely related to Tom Tom Club. Perhaps that's because, like Tom Tom Club's first self-titled album, which was recorded in Barbados, See Mystery Lights was recorded in a sunny, faraway locale-- in this case, far from the band's native rainy Portland, Oregon, in Marfa, Texas. The vibe of the album is relaxed and sun-soaked-- especially "Psychic City (Voodoo City)", which features an elastic groove built on a dubby, reggae-ish keyboard melody inspired by the bassline of Althea and Donna's "Uptown Top Ranking".
Regardless of influence or intent, however, See Mystery Lights is a triumph. It's a feel-good album for an era that could use a little happiness, a sweaty collection of heady, hedonistic tunes just in time for the hottest days of the year. And the best part is that one spin of this wily, sunny disc will be able to transport you back to summer vacation any day of the year.