There isn't much logic behind Quasi, the Portland-based band that Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss have occasionally returned to over the past 20 years. Mole City, a wayward, asymmetrical double album, finds their sound more turbulent than ever.

Mole City

There isn't much logic behind Quasi, the Portland-based band that Sam Coomes and Janet Weiss have occasionally returned to over the past 20 years. For instance: They produced a video for the song "See You on Mars" to herald the release of this record, a clip which consists of a blizzard of vintage clips all stuck together with scant regard for coherence. Coomes and Weiss don't deal in reason, at least not in this guise. Weiss' work with Sleater-Kinney, Wild Flag, and Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, plus their joint tenure as back-up band to Elliott Smith, provided a fairly comprehensible path to follow. Quasi are more turbulent in spirit, especially here on Mole City, a wayward, asymmetrical double album that sees them returning to the two-piece format after a period with Jicks bassist Joanna Bolme.
Something that remains from prior Quasi records is Coomes and Weiss' love of producing short, sweet pop songs smeared in lashings of distortion. Coomes sounds like he was born with a fuzz pedal permanently attached to his foot, ready to whitewash the world with it. That mode of operation is the core Quasi sound, the safe haven they build for themselves around all the idiosyncratic turns they take elsewhere. Coomes' familiar organ sound is often to the fore, sometimes leading him into barroom and honky-tonk directions. But they can just as easily dip into droney synth work ("Chrome Duck", "Loopy"), twee 90s indie on Weiss' vocal turn ("R.I.P."), or, on one of the most affecting songs here, skirt around the kind of twilight blues found on Chris Bell's I Am the Cosmos ("Chumps of Chance").
Quasi reek of the 70s, primarily through a love of power pop, Big Star, Todd Rundgren, and occasional moments of rock pomposity. The baroque beginnings of "Headshrinker" devolve into a burst of soloing of which Queen's Brian May would be proud. There's never an overall sense of direction, or a feel Coomes and Weiss are looking to stretch across this record as its primary arc. Instead, Mole City resembles a jumble of all the thoughts and inclinations they've had since their last album, 2010's American Gong. It's a mess, but Quasi find virtue in clutter, turning it into their primary motive for existence as a band. Still, it's hard to digest over the course of 24 tracks, including a limp "Tomorrow Never Knows" pastiche ("Gnot"), a moment where Coomes seems to be channeling his inner Wayne Coyne ("Geraldine"), and even a half-hearted found-sound collage on the title track.
The best song here is buried toward the end, at a point where the less patient listener may have given up altogether. "An Ice Cube in the Sun" radiates warmth and anger, with Coomes addressing "the misfits of the world," Weiss pounding away at her kit, and a point where the whole song arches into a delirious stretch of low-key pop. It's followed by a one-minute ramble into country titled "One & Done"—easily one of the most throwaway moments here—which serves to highlight just how frustrating Quasi can be at times. But it's hard to fault them when that's the whole point, when making music becomes akin to opening up a drawer full of old clothes and trying them on just because you can. The fact that there's a track here titled "Clap Trap" is both indicative of their humor and uncomfortably close to being a useful descriptor for their work.


With songs that travel great distances between the poles of ambient and noise music, Claude Speeed’s latest is a mercurial set, capturing with great skill a kind of restless, sourceless anxiety.

Infinity Ultra

When the Scottish electronic musician Claude Speeed remixed Kuedo’s “Work, Live & Sleep in Collapsing Space” in 2012, he wisely didn’t attempt to one-up the track’s maximalist energy. Instead, he went the opposite route, smearing Kuedo’s hyperactive arpeggios and tumbling hi-hats into something smooth and strangely featureless, like a shadow. But any suggestion that he was playing it safe disappeared once he showed his trump card in the final few minutes: a cascading drum solo whose wild fills, when combined with muted synth buzz, suggested John Bonham sitting in with Oneohtrix Point Never. It was the perfect foil for Kuedo’s streamlined pulses: an epic showdown between human and machine.
That 2012 remix brought Claude Speeed to Planet Mu’s attention; now, on his first full album for the label (after a five-track EP in 2015), the same contrasts still guide his work. Toggling between ambient and noise, the album covers a lot of ground. “BCCCC” opens the record with fluttering arpeggios and a regal synthesizer melody channeling Boards of Canada and Hudson Mohawke—a flashback, perhaps, to his time on the LuckyMe label. But then “Serra” whips to the opposite end of the spectrum with a freeform sprawl of coruscating feedback that plays out like a gentler, more dulcet version of Merzbow’s Rainbow Electronics.
The rest of the album follows a twisting series of switchbacks between those two poles. After a series of high-pitched glitches, “Windows 95” morphs into what can only be described as a weaponized start-up chime. “Ambien Rave” sounds pretty much exactly like the title promises: beatless trance, cushioned in reverb, and floating six feet off the ground; he returns to the idea on “Fifth Fortress,” whose springy melody carries welcome echoes of the Knife’s Silent Shout. Even his simplest ideas are often pulled in multiple directions at once: beneath the sketch-like “XY Autostream” and “VZJD,” both lyrical ambient etudes, an undercurrent of distortion threatens to drag them into far more sinister territory. At the other end of the spectrum, “Alternative Histories,” featuring Kuedo, splits the difference between doom metal’s rumbling ambience and the spectral spray of Ligeti or Xenakis, and “Super 800 NYC,” crackling like a burning amplifier, might as well be a full-scale tribute to Sunn O))).
Sometimes, Speeed’s wandering interests have the effect of throwing the listener off balance. “Entering the Zone,” for instance, puts his yen for rock drumming into the service of a John Carpenter-like prog jam—a jarring contrast with the album’s more streamlined surfaces. That clash raises an interesting point: Unlike a lot of ambient-leaning electronic music, this doesn’t necessarily work as background listening: Its moods are too mercurial, its changes too nuanced. You need to be paying attention to really appreciate the subtle mutations in his sound, yet there’s also something about his queasy tones and grizzled frequencies that keep the listener at arm’s length, emotionally speaking. It’s a record that dares you not to get too close.
But maybe that’s all part of Speeed’s plan. In the press release, he talks about his interest in creating “an abstract space to process the oppression, confusion, and insanity of the contemporary age.” That’s a tall order, but his unsettling instrumental sketches do a good job of capturing a kind of restless, sourceless anxiety. And with the album’s final four tracks, a warm sun rises over his virtual world, and some of the more alienating trappings fall away. The slow, resonant “Center Tech” sounds like some strange musical interface linking digitized tympani with ocean waves; the lyrical “Spirits” and “Contact” show off his synthesizers in all their quicksilver glory. And on the closing “DreamDream,” a voice singing, “Dream,” is looped over his most ebullient melody, evocative, in its own way, of the Field and M83. It’s not at all where you might have expected the record to end up, but it makes for an awfully satisfying finale. Just as he did on his Kuedo remix, he’s kept his best card up his sleeve all along.


The Oak Park rapper’s new album is one of his meanest and funniest, cementing him as a fresh voice in California rap.

Red Paint Reverend

To hear ShooterGang Kony tell it, he never thought about rapping until he was sitting in a jail cell. The 21-year-old native of Sacramento’s Oak Park was first sentenced to probation at 13 and began bouncing in and out of lockup a couple years later; his music, buoyant but threatening, sometimes recalls these jail cells as portals to hell, on other songs as minor inconveniences. On Red Paint Reverend, his excellent new album, Kony is meaner and funnier than ever, but also delves deeper into the psychic pain of those incarcerations, rapping evocatively about the way he would dial number after number on the jail phones that led him to his friends’ voicemails, as he imagined the fun they were having without him. That he does this without surrendering any of the freewheeling chaos of his early work makes Reverend a marked leap forward for one of California’s most exciting young rap artists.
The cliché goes that by the turn of the century, major-label rap albums were built by rubric: four songs for “the streets,” three for “the club,” two for “the girls,” and so on. Still today, many artist backload their albums with their more somber, most overtly personal songs, as a way to give the records a veneer of seriousness and a sense of emotional heft. Kony has always been a little more slippery in this regard. His album from last summer, Second Hand Smoke, opens with a strange two-step: first a minor-key elegy called “Off the Dribble,” which is followed by “Charlie,” a song that’s bright and breezy but still—to be absolutely clear—about weapons. The forward motion on Kony’s albums comes from variations in tone and execution rather than in subject matter. This means that the sober songs are injected with unsettling humor and the bouncy ones are girded by murder.
Kony doesn’t foreground the technical aspects of rapping, but he’s more than capable: see the way he finds the beat’s pocket on the intro as the drums fall in around the 80-second mark, then compare that to songs like “Veteran’s Day,” where he gestures toward the jagged flows that his contemporaries nearer the Bay and down in Los Angeles have been using, the ones that always teeter on the back edge of the measure, threatening to fall off.
While he never gets quite as unmoored from the beat as AzChike or the guys in SOB x RBE, Kony’s slightly muted version of the style puts his work in conversation with other California rappers––and in turn highlights the comparatively classicist streak to his writing. The most affecting song on Reverend is “A Sinner’s Story,” where he recalls those jail phones and talks about the rapid psychological shift that happens between pulling your first trigger and examining your first exit wound. It is also a shock to hear someone whose writing is so often qualified with winks and asides rap as naked a four-bar passage as:

Ever had your close friend put your name in the case?
Wanna kill him, but you can’t, ‘cause you loved him under the hate.
Ever had your close friend coil into a snake?
He was shedding in my house, it was right in front of my face.

Between “A Sinner’s Story” and “Dearly Departed,” a duet with Oak Park elder statesman Mozzy, Reverend showcases Kony’s ability to write straightforwardly about the grim realities of life in Sacramento. But as mentioned, he’s just as likely to cover the same subject matter with a smile on his face. At various points on the album Kony cracks jokes about industry people telling him to change his stage name (“But I still sleep with the thing”) and about someone who could end up snitching (“Cops had him singing and pointing like it’s the ‘70s”). And then there’s the delayed cause-and-effect of him rapping, on one song, “I prefer the Glock over the chopper, I like to know who I be shooting” and then, on the next track, “I hit his homie on a fluke––he was actually kind of cool,” shrugging off the latter murder like a cackling Oak Park Chekhov. By the time Reverend settles into its slick closer, “Street Talk,” Kony is cemented as a fresh voice for California: of his generation but informed by his elders, untangling the tragedies of his life when he isn’t too busy having fun.


Almost three years since his last solo project, the 26-year-old rapper continues to reimagine and reinterpret his influences, which is part of what makes his new music feel so alive.

4Nem

For a while, Chief Keef has been the antithesis of the modern rap superstar who coasts on musical trends and collaborations. Finally Rich, released almost a decade ago, was a decent enough swing at the prototypical major label debut. But since then, the Chicagoan’s mixtapes have materialized so specifically out of his own interests that they seem to ignore just about everything happening in rap. If album drop dates weren’t visible on streaming services, it would be nearly impossible to tell if a Keef tape was from 2013, 2017, or 2021. His apparent rejection of the game left a certain corner of fans disappointed that he wasn’t the hitmaker they imagined he could be and left others thrilled that he chose to instead churn out weird, often erratic trips into his psyche.
I tend to side with the latter, which isn’t to say the music is always good. But when it clicks, you get a tape as singular and creative as Almighty So, GloToven, or his latest project 4NEM. If you were to tell me that Keef spent the past year recording this album unplugged with access to nothing but a USB of Gucci Mane and Three 6 Mafia mixtapes and Lex Luger and Zaytoven instrumentals, I would believe you. I suppose that’s nothing new—since Keef was a teenager, he’s been infatuated with ATL trap and Memphis street rap. But the way he continues to reimagine and reinterpret those influences is part of what makes 4NEM feel so alive.
Similar to Keef’s most noteworthy albums, 4NEM is driven by the beat selection. “Bitch Where,” produced by Akachi and Sonickaboom, might be the coolest. For the first minute, Keef’s triumphant raps (“Made it out the Chi’/If I didn’t, wouldn’t see today”) are backdropped by a drumless instrumental and horns that blare louder than a fire alarm. Once you’ve given up the hope of percussion, the drums suddenly begin to thud and the moment is euphoric. “Tuxedo” is similarly led by horns that bring back memories of the Flockaveli era, but this time the hi-hats rattle throughout and clash with Keef as he shifts between chants and growls.
Production may be the catalyst of 4NEM, but his commitment on the rapping end separates it from more minor tapes in his catalog. “See Through” is a trip. Over intermittent drums and bells that ring like a gong being hit with a mallet, Keef puts his vocals through filters that sound like he’s rapping behind a hollow wall and packs the verse with twisted jokes that are unclear if they’re intended to be jokes or not: “You don’t smoke or drink, boy, your fuckin’ pee see-through/My piss need goggles and telescopes to see through.” Both verses on “Picking Big Sean Up” are on the shortlist of the tape’s best, but the second sticks out as he jumps from chilling one-line reflections to freestyled gibberish delivered with croaky vocals, as if he hadn’t taken a sip of water in days.
For all his artistic ingenuity, Keef uncharacteristically puts the bottom line over the art for a moment. (It’s hard to ignore that the album is packaged with an NFT of the artwork, a deflating trend he’s embraced.) But even 4NEM’s throwaway tracks have high points: the interpolation of Three 6 Mafia’s “Slob on My Knob” on “Like It’s Yo Job” is played out but worth it for the chaotic ad libs, and the “Ice Cream Man” beat is flat yet saved by weirdly robotic AutoTune croons. That’s the level Keef is at here, though 4NEM shouldn’t be considered a renaissance or a return to his glory days. Every now and then, he digs further into his brain and tweaks his sound while still pulling from the same foundation, and born is a gem like 4NEM.

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Backed by veteran jazz musicians and newer players, the Trinidad-born, London-based poet summons spirits of the Caribbean diaspora to ask what it might take to build a better world.

Anthony Joseph: The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives

Anthony Joseph can halt your breath with intonation alone. The Rich Are Only Defeated When Running for Their Lives is a work of historical interrogation that is as searing as it is sentimental, in which Joseph details his own struggles along with the tribulations of poets who came before him. These remembrances are the forceful evidence in his call for change, and they are also the material he is made of. It’s a wildly tricky proposition, but throughout the album Joseph attempts to summon spirits of the diaspora to make his case for a novel way of remaking society, if not creating a new society altogether. This might seem like a mighty, almost impossible task; regardless, this is one of the most cohesive, forward-looking jazz albums in recent memory. Backed up by old hands and newer players, Joseph recites poetry with verve, pushing himself and the band to relay both crushing oppression and real hope for change.
Nowhere is this clearer than on the second track, “Calling England Home.” Over a sinuous groove, Joseph recounts different stories of immigrants who arrived in England at different times. Each person, he says, had a difficult relationship with the idea that England was their home. The haunting instrumentation reflects this ambivalence: Unison horns begin to drift apart once Joseph begins to speak, while the rhythm section maintains forward momentum, merging stories that are unified in their sense of isolation. Joseph manipulates his voice as he tells his tales, proffering quiet statements of fact (“Black and been here since 1949”), muttered musings (“I’ve lived here longer than home”), and shouted questions (“How long do you have to live in a place/Before you can call it ‘home’?”). As a means of representing the violence of the diaspora, the physicality of their approach is revelatory.
Just as crucial is Joseph’s reverence for those who have contended with these ideas before. Take the opener “Kamau,” which is dedicated to the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, who died last year. Joseph begins with a simple ode to the powers of that “sonic sage,” praising the “trumpet in his throat.” He launches into a whirl of associative poetry, asking the poet to play every musical style of the Carribean diaspora and detailing his own devotion to another Black Carribean author during a time of duress. The music shifts under him as he performs these acrobatics, and what starts as a bandstand melody then becomes a dirge, only to finally explode into peals of improvised noise. Joseph and the band have such a tight relationship that even the way they lose control is highly calibrated: The original melody never stops (though improvisation occurs around it) and his voice always guides the sound forward. After a year of hearing protest music that has proposed liberation, it’s refreshing to hear a song that actually sounds like freedom.
This freedom emanates from Joseph’s clear yet subtle lyricism and the band’s dynamic virtuosity. Both elements are present on “Swing Praxis,” a call to evaluate the tactics of liberation struggles past and also to examine our methods of working for change in the present. Saxophonists Jason Yarde, Colin Webster, and Shabaka Hutchings play in unison and are backed up by bassist Andrew John, guitarist Thibaut Remy, and drummer Rod Youngs. Youngs provides the backbeat here (and throughout the album), and Remy adds color at opportune moments. When Joseph engages in a thoughtful critique of our current predicament (“Either we vote or protest or tremble or march or fight/But either way it will soon be hard to be ‘cool’ and black at the same time”), his cadence is almost Heron-esque. That poet’s influence can also be felt on the Rhodes-featuring “The Gift,” which brings to mind the collaborations between Heron and Brian Jackson in the late 1970s. In fact, Youngs, the drummer who gives this song its structure, collaborated with Heron in the 1990s, and his versatility provides Joseph with a solid foundation as he gets personal. Right as Joseph recounts the sound of dirt hitting his father’s casket, Youngs bangs down on his set, providing a marching percussion for the funeral. As Joseph talks about what his father has left behind, and what his community gave to them both, he leaves it up to you to decide what the titular gift actually is. Is it the inherited jewel bag he must split with his brother, the prayers of his community, or the mere ability to keep existing? With these questions surrounding you, the horn section plays and the piano slowly plinks away as the song comes to a definite end.
Joseph makes protest music that is heavily rooted in what has come before. The texture he achieves and the insights he finds are hard won; he’s not tossing out what feels good as much as underlining what matters. “The rich are only defeated when running for their lives” is a line taken from the Trinadian theorist C.L.R. James’ The Black Jacobins, a book that analyzed the Haitian Revolution. It’s the type of statement that one can read either as a provocation or a prompt to envision a future that is very different from the one we inhabit. The music Joseph makes seems to waver between these two possibilities. Joseph wants change now, and because of that he’s deeply invested in looking at the ambiguities that we carry with us. It’s through his recognition of those ambiguities that he can declaim so forcefully against a country that refuses to accept those who have supplied it with wealth and labor, while praising poets that have made their adopted countries’ language sing. His declarations aren’t supposed to be persuasive; his gravitas comes from his contemplation. With the backing of an energetic set of players, he testifies with a stony resolve. It must be witnessed to be believed.

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The London singer’s sophomore album is a bracing, darkly funny blend of folk and Britpop. Her tactile lyrics keep the songs melodically strong and full of surprises.

I’m Not Your Man

Over the past 14 months, three very different LGBTQ acts have each released a brilliantly subversive song titled “Boyfriend.” Last April, Tegan and Sara made a synth-pop plea for a straight girl to stop playing around and commit. In September, Against Me!’s Laura Jane Grace raged at a flaky partner who treated her like “some dumb fucking boyfriend.” Then in February came Marika Hackman’s contribution, a sly Britpop power-play about stealing a man’s girlfriend from under his nose because the poor dolt believes “a woman really needs a man to make her scream.” It’s one of the year’s sharpest singles: a funny, sexy rebuke to ignorant blokes, and an excellently produced throwback. Its boldness erases any lingering sense of Hackman as some fey folkie, a fairly unjust reputation that stuck to the 25-year-old Londoner’s debut, 2015’s unsettling We Slept at Last.
London four-piece the Big Moon back Hackman on her follow-up I’m Not Your Man, and producer Charlie Andrew has balanced the sound of five women playing in a room with details that enhance the record’s sense of menace. Whether boisterous or seething, the guitar tones owe a debt to ’80s U2 and grunge, but the scale is more claustrophobic than stadium. Quiet feedback-hums will suddenly squawk and lurch like a constricting noose, and the group regularly breaks into marauding vocal chants that are impeccably arranged but full of feral energy. Without any explicit tricks, “Round We Go,” a song about “rolling ’round my skull like a flesh-colored marble,” seems to close in on itself, suffocating slowly. There are a few overdone bits—the orchestral outro of “Blahblahblah” is a bit on the nose, and the cavernous “So Long” is more obvious than the rest of the record—but otherwise it’s melodically strong and full of surprises, which is more than you can say for most young British indie-rock albums of the last few years.
Most of those records lack killer hooks; Hackman has many. There’s “Boyfriend,” where she roars, “It’s fine ‘cause I am just a girl/It doesn’t count,” simultaneously mocking the guy and airing her frustrations with perceptions of lesbian relationships as somehow “lesser.” “Time’s Been Reckless” feels like one of Blur’s early singles then breaks into a raucous chorus that pits the Big Moon’s chants against Hackman’s emotional frostiness. It’s similar in theme to “My Lover Cindy,” where idle twang undercuts Hackman’s image of a mutually beneficial hook-up and her tendency to ghost lovers. The music dips out for the chorus, leaving her voice center stage: “‘Cause I’m a greedy pig/I’m gonna get my fill/I’m gonna keep my eyes on the prize and I’ll suck you dry, I will,” she sings, sounding innocent and depraved, pirouetting on each word while licking her lips.
Against more trad backing, Hackman can sound like any English rose, as on the rolling, slightly Medieval “Apple Tree.” But in darker surroundings, she sings at a dispassionate remove that gives her excellent, carnal lyrics an extra kick. She paints the emptiness of a past relationship and the fullness of her current one with sensuality and mordant humor. The breakup in “Cigarette” becomes even more brutal thanks to Hackman’s economical writing, quickly distilling a fight in a car park after a dismal night out. “When did it get so forced? Drunk by the second course,” she rues over fluttery fingerpicking. “I tried to hold my tongue/But you, you yanked it from my grip/Bathed it in petroleum/Lit a cigarette and gave it a kiss.” “I’d Rather Be With Them” could come from the end of the same night, drunk and aching. “I’m so fucking heartless/I can’t even cry,” Hackman sings, sounding full of self-loathing.
There’s one love song here, “Violet,” a luxurious, sinister come-on akin to the space westerns of Torres’ Sprinter. “I’d like to roll around your tongue/Caught like a bicycle spoke,” Hackman sings. “You eat, I’ll grow and grow/Swelling up until you choke.” She savors each word, her seductive delivery driving home the violence. Hackman’s tactile lyricism reinforces a portrait of a numb woman desperate for sensation by any means possible. It’s not hedonistic thrill-seeking, but rings true in a world where numbness can be a survival technique—and pleasure and sensation are equally at a premium. As a writer, Hackman may owe a bit to PJ Harvey, but I’m Not Your Man is the proper arrival of a bold young British force.


After fumbling slightly on their last record, the doom apostles recover their grave, soaring majesty on an album that find a new way forward by refining their past.

Forgotten Days

Doom metal creeps. Half a century since Black Sabbath released Paranoid, arguably the form’s ark of the covenant, most doom bands still sound somewhat like the original, each with assorted refinements. Yes, doom has occasionally splintered into smaller and slower sects, like the lugubrious “funeral doom” and glacial “drone metal.” But consider the progress of hip-hop in roughly the same time frame: While hip-hop has created its own global ecosystem, teeming forever with wild new mutations, doom is a solitary old oak, steadily growing at its own oblivious clip.
A decade ago, Pallbearer emerged from Arkansas as promising apostles of doom and purveyors of this stubborn beauty. On their first two LPs, especially 2014’s magisterial Foundations of Burden, they paired the kind of compulsory hooks that made Sabbath stars with the seeming belief that every song could be a 10-minute hypnotic wash. Pallbearer synthesized doom’s best elements into a refulgent melancholy, sparkling as it sulked. They wobbled, though, on Heartless, their 2017 parting shot for longtime label Profound Lore. As though trying to prove how much they’d grown during their tenure there, Pallbearer did too much too fast, flitting from would-be hits that missed to panoramic psych-rock that bored.
But on their international debut for Nuclear Blast, a fabled clearinghouse for some of the world’s most popular metal bands, Pallbearer—smarter, sharper, and ostensibly sadder now—again plod doom’s time-worn grooves. Their fourth album, Forgotten Days, is both a return to mighty form and a new way forward for a band perpetually poised at the edge of wider success.
Forgotten Days hinges on “Silver Wings,” the 12-minute saga at its center. A quintessential throwback, it is an encapsulation of most everything Pallbearer have done well, like the tangled solos that animate the middle or the crawling tempos that thrill as they build. During the song’s back half, Pallbearer harmonize over kaleidoscopic synthesizers, perfectly fusing their love of Pink Floyd with the intricate singalongs of AOR. “Silver Wings” ponders human frailty and impermanence—or how time grinds “even the greatest of triumphs/To nothing,” as they sing in unison during the last verse—by creating a formidable monument to that very notion.
More important than this epic, though, are its bookends. Aside from a twinkling curio on Foundations of Burden, “Stasis” and “The Quicksand of Existence” are the two shortest songs in Pallbearer’s catalogue, clocking in at four minutes each. It’s as if producer Randall Dunn challenged them to squeeze their grandeur onto a seven-inch single. The brevity works. Pallbearer fit a magnetic riff, a compelling hook, and at least one curious instrumental section into each song. Nothing is missing; instead, you gain a sense of how catchy and immediate Pallbearer have always hoped to be, beneath the monolithic solos and militant repetition. How would an entire Pallbearer album so pithy work?
The rest of Forgotten Days actually trends that way. Pallbearer never allow indulgence to stand in the way of a song’s urgency here, digging into these grooves without getting stuck there. The title track moves like a mudslide, viscous at the core but relentless as it plows downhill. Brett Campbell’s refrain about the instability of self-doubt—“Is this insanity? Will they come to take me?”—clings to the riff as though it were the only solid ground in sight. The irrepressible “Vengeance & Ruination” is a reminder that the Allman Brothers’ Georgia and Eyehategod’s New Orleans are only a day’s drive from Pallbearer’s home of Little Rock. Finale “Caledonia,” a farewell to youth’s innocence, is a languorous beauty, with keyboards seeping from the cracks between the pensive guitars. When Pallbearer lift into the chorus, you picture them grinning despite the song’s emotional weight, marveling at how good it can feel to share these blues.
Campbell and Joseph Rowland wrote Forgotten Days about family loss. Rowland is finally reckoning with the death of his mother nearly a decade ago, just before Pallbearer became a breakthrough band, and the self-medication that followed. Campbell has recently watched his grandmother succumb to the cruelty of Alzheimer’s. These eight songs grapple candidly with these woes, but, like the music itself, the words don’t wallow. Instead, Pallbearer use these tragedies to revel in being alive, or to answer the “gnawing doubts that I ever learned to live.” That is a longtime hallmark of the best doom, too, from Sabbath through Candlemass and now to Pallbearer—staring directly into the dark and squinting to find the light. Forgotten Days convinces you to do the same.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Years of online myth-making have culminated with Lil B’s masterpiece Black Ken, 27 tracks of deep funk and hyphy that finally defines the mercurial Based God.

Black Ken

Seven years ago, Lil B announced a mixtape called Black Ken, just a blip amid the 13 other projects he released that year. Since then, it’s been hard to judge the size of the gap between the Berkeley rapper’s pious legion of disciples and those who would dismiss his based freestyles as the death of rap. But time has clearly validated his path, arcane as it may have once appeared; and while the average 2017 rap fan might be more familiar with the Based God’s Curse than Evil Red Flame deep cuts, Lil B’s impact on the way rap sounds and how it’s distributed is beyond doubt. In the past few years, that influence has been celebrated by his peers, unprompted, from Kendrick to Metro Boomin to Danny Brown. Even a cursory scan of underground (and occasionally mainstream) rap movements of the 2010s reveals traces of B’s DNA at every turn: Odd Future, Raider Klan, Yung Lean, Makonnen, and perhaps most visibly, this year’s bumper crop of SoundCloud rap stars, from South Florida’s glitchy underbelly to GothBoiClique’s face-tat emo. Put simply: Based God was right.
None of this, however, brings the world closer to articulating what exactly sets Lil B’s body of work apart, even from those in his creative debt. His free-verse mindspray has nudged rappers away from more structured lyricism, and his tear-soaked Imogen Heap-core beats have spawned micro-genres of their own, but a purely stylistic reading of Lil B feels insufficient. His benevolent cult-leader persona—a Zenned-out internet addict in tiny pants with a direct line to the wise and mysterious Based God—has certainly laid the groundwork for a generation of social media myth-builders. But an oversimplified focus on B as “historical online figure,” emphasizing his impact in terms of sheer virality, paints him foremost as a digital marketing mastermind—accurate, maybe, but a bit outside the point. How could the guy who wrote the social media era’s “What’s Going On” be understood as a living meme?
Since the Myspace days, which he spent uploading countless based freestyles to his 100-plus pages, some have argued for Lil B as a rapper whose appeal lies in his subversion of rap conventions: his unedited stream of consciousness, his wide-eyed mysticism, his insistence on his visual similarity to J.K. Rowling, his occasional doubt as to whether he’s even a rapper at all. Black Ken—released nearly two years after his last project—offers a striking argument to the contrary. Lil B is great, Black Ken affirms, not because he disrupts hip-hop but because he embodies it so completely—an endlessly curious student of rap, enamored of the form enough to spend a decade thoroughly deconstructing it, asking what it all means, then putting it back together again. And more than any other release in his immense catalog, Black Ken draws direct and persuasive lines between his own music and that of his Bay Area forebearers—from ’80s pimp wisdom all the way to hyphy—presenting B as a rapper born and raised not on the internet, but in Berkeley, California.
I’ve started to think of Black Ken as a metaphysical He’s the DJ, I’m the Rapper situation. Over its 27 tracks, Lil B raps over entirely self-produced beats with occasional narration from the omniscient DJ BasedGod. And its first eight tracks represent his most purposeful block of music since his 2009 opus 6 Kiss—raw, squelching loops of murderous funk and 808s that land like uppercuts, stuff that sounds like you could’ve bought it on cassette out of a trunk in ’88. The first we hear of B’s voice on “Still Run It”—measured, resolute, completely unlike his liquid freestyles—he is channeling a Tupac flow, a reminder of the icon’s claim to Oakland as the city that put him on game in his Digital Underground days. “Hip-hop is back!” B crows, and if you didn’t believe him the first time, three tracks later is “Hip Hop,” unquestionably the dopest song this side of the Reagan (or Dregan) administration with a “Hip! Hop! Hip! Hop!” chorus. “Remember I was younger, I always loved music/So now it’s an honor to write and produce it,” he raps; it all could’ve easily read as kitsch if the beat didn’t knock so hard, or if he didn’t so plainly believe it.
Black Ken channels the sound of Lil B’s hometown in the years just before his birth—an era in which Bay Area rap stood uncompromisingly apart from the industry out of both necessity and pride. The result is an outsider artist’s take on old Too $hort or Kool Rock Jay tapes: plain-spoken neighborhood tours that impart real-life lessons in self-reliance over booming, brittle 808s and P-Funk tracks stripped for parts. “Bad MF,” on which B tells a snitch to kick rocks (“Catch the bus, motherfucker!”), has the kind of roughneck piano beat that evokes a virtuoso who plays only with his elbows, with funk licks that make me want to stomp down an alley kicking over trash cans. And when on “Free Life” he wonders how to exist happily in an exhausting world, his reminder that “the best things in life are free” is not a cliché, but a distillation of based philosophy in the style of Too $hort’s “It’s Your Life,” a 1990 lesson in imposing the positive. The album’s mid-way hyphy section is a less successful revival, but it’s worth it for B snarling, “Gentrify me? I beg your pardon!” in his best Keak Da Sneak voice on “Getting Hot.”
Such is the duality of Lil B: One minute he’s a Zen monk, floating high above the trappings of society, and the next he’s a red-eyed, surrealist gangster, one funny look away from tearing the club up. And there are occasionally confounding, mostly delightful sonic outliers throughout Black Ken’s back half: “Ride (Hold Up),” like a Clara Rockmore theremin performance interrupted by sepia-toned zaps of Detroit techno, feels at once bound inextricably to history and hovering extra-terrestrially above it. On “Turn Up (Till You Can’t)”, B applies his T-t-t-totally dude “California Boy” sing-song to Gothenburg-style Balearic pop, and “Zam Bose (In San Jose)” resists explanation entirely. But what ties Black Ken together, and what makes it not just a palatable but completely thrilling listen, like stumbling unwittingly into the best block party ever, is Lil B’s production throughout—a wild but controlled stylistic breakthrough.
Late last year, Lil B made some headlines when he announced on Twitter that Black Ken would be dedicated to a seemingly bizarre selection of honorees—from Jadakiss and the Lox, to Charles Hamilton and Iggy Azalea, to the state of Rhode Island. In retrospect, though, the most knowing shout-out dedicated the tape “to everyone who makes music.” Typed out, it’s perhaps a simple sentiment. But it also gets to the heart of Black Ken, and to the core of what continues to set the most influential rapper of the past decade completely apart from his peers. More than anything, Black Ken feels like a testament, seven years in the making, to music as a lifelong process of discovery—an affirmation of art-making as not a means to an end, but a reason for being. In that sense, the best thing about Black Ken is that it is not an endpoint in itself, but a mile-marker along Lil B’s journey; it just so happens, after a decade as rap’s most devoted scholar, to also be a masterpiece.


The pairing of the Walkmen's Hamilton Leithauser and former Vampire Weekend producer/instrumentalist Rostam Batmanglij turns out to be an inspired one.

Hamilton Leithauser / Rostam: I Had a Dream That You Were Mine

I Had a Dream That You Were Mine

“I retired from my fight,” Hamilton Leithauser crooned with a smirk on his first great solo tune. “I Retired”’s very existence confirms that the singer didn’t actually give up, but Leithauser’s point about getting older and figuring out how to keep creating felt like a painfully self-aware revelation upon arrival, six months after his longtime band the Walkmen announced an indefinite hiatus. “All the fire in your heart won’t help/All the smoke up in your head,” he continued, figuring that “as long as [he] can keep the train rolling, then all [his] friends will always know they’ll never be alone.” Consider it a self-fulfilling prophecy tucked inside a nugget of irony: A song called “I Retired” directly spawned Leithauser’s next musical direction.
“I Retired” was one of two songs from Leithauser’s 2014 solo debut, Black Hours, that he worked on with Rostam Batmanglij. Leithauser and the former Vampire Weekend multi-instrumentalist/producer apparently bonded over shooby doo wops, their deadpan version of which sounds like the Flamingos came down with a case of urban malaise. That vocal technique is all over “I Retired” and again on I Had a Dream That You Were Mine, emblematic of what makes Leithauser and Batmanglij’s first collaborative full-length the rare release that looks backwards without falling victim to retro pastiche.
With Batmanglij’s piano and Leithauser’s voice as their guiding forces, the duo answer a question that has eluded many a musician before: How do you incorporate the music of the past without losing yourself in what’s already been done? Even those beloved harmonies represent just one tool in a deep kit, right alongside Spanish guitar, Disney strings, bawdy horns, tender banjo, airy vocal loops, and cinematic reverb. Together, Leithauser and Batmanglij work their way through nearly seven decades of musical history—from doo-wop and country-rock to Leonard Cohen-style torch songs and the George Martin-indebted baroque-pop Rostam often used to make VW twinkle—but they also don’t forget who they are in the process: one of ’00s indie rock’s most charismatic singers, alongside one of its most creative songwriter-producers.
If there was any lingering doubt that Rostam was Vampire Weekend’s special sauce (before his departure earlier this year), look to I Had a Dream That You Were Mine. The convincing ease with which the duo weaves disparate musical styles together seems distinctly Rostam—the work of someone who made Afropop, calypso, ’80s synth-pop, samples from M.I.A. to Toots and the Maytals, and a half-dozen other global styles fit together within music that often was held up as the indie rock zeitgeist. Here on “You Ain’t That Young Kid,” a spirited Dylan-on-piano-and-harmonica act turns towards pleading slide guitar, then an echo chamber of angel voices, then a slow dance of ’60s organ and steel drum, then a tidy harpsichord minuet—then, impossibly, all at once. The five-minute standout ends as a gilded acoustic singalong, the overwhelming sentimentality of which is amplified by an Instagram-filter of a synth line growing underneath. Rostam’s production is highly visual, and listening to this record, you get a sense of all the colors he must see when he’s behind the boards.
But RostHam is an equal partnership, and Leithauser reminds you why you were drawn to the Walkmen in the first place. He gives what has to be his strongest and most wide-ranging collection of vocal performances on record to date, spanning from talk-crooning to punkish howling to folk-balladeering to heavenly harmonizing to raspily brooding about as he first perfected on “The Rat.”
Black Hours’ primary flaw was that it alternated sharply between Leithauser going Bublé in his own way and simply channeling his old band. I Had a Dream That You Were Mine manages to incorporate these two modes in the larger context of its 20th-century-pop scrapbook—on songs about longing and looking back, no less. And it’s the songs where Leithauser loses himself in what was and what could be that his voice sounds best. On “Rough Going (I Won’t Let Up),” atop a creaking piano line and a spiraling sax solo, Leithauser screams like a man possessed that he won’t let up, but he holds it together, and the song never lets its barroom singalong quality devolve into total shambles.
This is a slightly more mature Leithauser, but that life experience can also be a curse. Over the course of the album, the streets of downtown New York become littered with memories, and even the good ones hurt a little because they’re faded now. The album is drenched in this wistful feeling, the crowning achievement of which is “When the Truth Is…” There are many moving parts that go into making this song work, from the echoing swirl of percussion and piano to the snippet of film dialogue at the end, but they’re rendered so perfectly, all you hear by the end is straight swoon. The main thing Rostam and Hamilton get right about doo-wop is that it often makes romantic yearning shimmer like a slow-moving disco ball.
Towards the beginning of the album—on “Sick as a Dog,” the song that sounds the most modern (and a little like Spoon)—Leithauser harmonizes with himself, “I use the same voice I always had.” Indeed, it’s not that Leithauser has dramatically changed since his days in the Walkmen; rather, pairing with Rostam has brought out the best in him. It’s rare for collaborative albums between known entities to feel like equal reflections of both parties, but RostHam find a middle-ground in mutual longing for the past. It’s the kind of album Leithauser can be proud of—you know, once he’s old enough to actually retire.


On his first album in four years, the Swedish house producer strips away the hiss to zero in on floor-filling club tracks and big, universal emotions.

Mirrors

“She loves me” are the first words heard on Mirrors, DJ Seinfeld’s first album in four years. It’s a simple yet personal statement, in keeping with the Swedish producer’s love of vocal samples that cut to the quick. But it’s also a little jarring to hear something that sweet on one of his records. Armand Jakobsson launched the project as a means of processing a breakup; his early singles and debut album were murky, melancholic house, filled with euphoria but also imbued with an inescapable sense of longing and sadness. That sample is a hint that something important has changed.
Gone are the clunky snare beats and muffled hi-hats that were everywhere on his debut, along with the saturated tape effect that coated everything else. Instead, thick and at times almost groovy basslines are everywhere, and soaring Day-Glo synths have taken center stage. Jakobsson has always had a strained relationship to the “lo-fi” tag that attached itself to his productions early on, and here he seems to revel in making music that feels nothing like his old stuff. “Walking With Your Smile” has a garage shuffle that suggests a sunnier Burial, until a gloriously cheesy processed piano reminds you who is actually making this. Closer “Song for the Lonely” feels like Jakobsson trying to prove he can make a proper club banger, with its relentless energy, constantly shape-shifting melody, and pounding kick drum. Everywhere on Mirrors the production has become crisp, smooth, and polished until it shines. Only “These Things Will Come to Be” feels like something out of the old playbook. The song’s syncopated chords build for two minutes, then fade out behind a wistful voicemail from a woman longing for days gone by. But even this moment takes an unexpected turn: The message ends on a note of acceptance and hope, and the music builds back up to transmit a sense of catharsis.
Jakobsson has always been adamant that, despite the goofy name, DJ Seinfeld was never meant as a joke or a one-trick pony. Indeed, he has hinted at a shift in his music for a while, namely on the four EPs he released on his own Young Ethics label over the past two years: All have stretched and pulled his sound, testing out variations of everything from Italo-house to large-scale trance. Making good on the sense of bliss that he has been striving to capture in his music for years, Mirrors is a culmination of these experiments—a way for DJ Seinfeld to show exactly how far he has come.
Die-hard fans might be disappointed that Jakobsson appears to have shed nearly all of the outward trappings that made his music so distinctive in the first place, trading the intimacy and mystery of his early work for something more refined and crowd-pleasing. With Mirrors, Jakobsson is making his ambition clear: He’s trying to go as big as Jamie xx did on In Colour. It’s easy to imagine many of these songs soundtracking humongous outdoor festivals, perfectly synchronized with the setting sun. Yet even in his earliest days, what made Seinfeld’s music special were the melodies hidden below the surface. Mirrors brings them into the light, in all their glory. What Jakobsson has always tried to accomplish with DJ Seinfeld was to try to tap into some grand universal emotion, a sense of want inside us all. This time, he finds it in joy instead of grief.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Spirit of the Beehive members Zack Schwartz and Corey Wichlin shift styles on a collection of warped, dissonant pop with hairpin turns and an underlying unease.

Lord of the Shithouse

At first blush, it’s hard to make sense of exactly what’s happening in Draag Me’s lord of the shithouse. The tracks here are dense, dissonant DAW symphonies, full of sharp textures and brightly colored elements that burst apart like a crystal shattering on a concrete floor. Compositions settle into a groove only to suddenly about-face, as if trying to stave off an existential crisis through constant movement. It’s music for the endless TikTok scroll, the hollow feeling that remains after long hours of consuming heaping helpings of infinite nothing.
Draag Me started as the solo project of Zack Schwartz, one of the driving forces behind Philadelphia psych band Spirit of the Beehive. His first record under the Draag Me moniker, i am gambling with my life, was a collection of warm, hazy electro-pop with an undercurrent of anxiety. With idle time during the pandemic, Schwartz started emailing scraps of songs to his Beehive bandmate Corey Wichlin, including some taken from Beehive’s ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH sessions. The two passed files back and forth, arranging and mangling them until full compositions emerged, ones more metallic and jittery than their predecessors.
On the album, the duo’s warp-speed compositional style is thoroughly captivating. They’re clearly proficient in various strains of electronic music: “death cult” moves nimbly from Detroit techno to Chicago footwork, throwing in dashes of hair metal guitar and vaporwave bass. The glitching disco of “like a nuisance” morphs into a booming rap song, with Chicago emcee CRASHprez rhyming over a beat that sounds like it’s being stripped for parts. These whiplash stylistic changes can feel distressing. There’s a cloud of malaise that hovers over the record, no matter how much the music zigs and zags beneath it.
Schwartz tends to bury his vocals under layers of processing, but when his lyrics do peek out of the cacophony, they emphasize the general sense of unease. “When you came around, you fucked up my whole life,” he coos against the tender witch house of “faces of vultures.” Amidst the decaying synth stabs and pounding drums of “wax figures in the rain,” he whisper-raps “Just put me in a casket, nothing comes after.” If gambling was a manifestation of anxiety, lord of the shithouse is a record about the destructiveness of depression.
The ever-shifting movements of “throwing rocks” spotlight the album’s key strengths. The track begins with chugging noise pop that disappears within 30 seconds, shifting into an early-aughts R&B jam and then shadowy dubstep that evokes early Burial; it gets increasingly scrambled as quavering organs and clicking percussion enter the mix. It’s a sensory whirlwind that leaves you processing at the end; though you’ve taken all it in, you’re still unsettled.


The expanded 20th anniversary edition of the Breeders' breakthrough affirms its status as an alt-rock classic. The set includes a 1994 live show and a disc of rarities and demos that put the finished product in context. Meanwhile, the EPs from the period show off the wide stylistic range of everything the Breeders could do well.

LSXX

Before they could legally drink, the Deal twins, armed with one guitar and two mics, were fixtures in the scuzziest bars of Dayton, Ohio, where legend has it their salty-sweet harmonies could make even the motorcycle dudes cry. The year was 1978, maybe 79. Like the bikers, Kim and Kelley listened to Hank Williams and the Everly Brothers; when Kelley was 16 she watched The Song Remains the Same on acid and the souvenir she kept from her trip was this dead-serious conviction that she wanted to be Jimmy Page. Other people's songs were too hard to figure out, so they made up their own. Nobody else would play with them (Kim: "This is Dayton, Ohio. You know the NGA kids: No Girls Allowed. Motherfuckers."), so they played with themselves. The angel-voiced twins kept booking scuzzy bar gigs and kept writing songs with no greater ambition than staving off boredom. "There was no scene," Kelley recalled years later, "You made up your own fun."
Kim considered herself a guitarist first and foremost. She'd been playing since she was 11, but shortly after she moved to Boston in her mid-20s, she tried out for a band called Pixies whose two current members suggested she learn bass. All the better that she'd never played one before; the Boston Phoenix classified ad she'd answered had said, "Please, no chops." They asked Kelley to be the drummer but she didn't feel like leaving Dayton, so she said no. For the next seven years, Kim sang backup and played bass in the Pixies, but mostly she was cool for a living. The kind of cool that people mythologize in songs years later. The kind of cool that dominoes immeasurably: in the same way that we'll never know exactly how many babies are on this earth because of Sade, we will never know how many girls picked up bass guitars and started bands because of Kim Deal's grinning, invitingly normal, yes-even-you-can-do-this-too charm. It was the kind of cool that irrevocably scrambles people's ideas of what cool actually is. "Kim would come straight from work, so she had skirt-suits and office pumps on a lot," recalled Tanya Donelly, then of Throwing Muses, who accompanied Pixies on their first European tour. "So many people in [the Boston scene were] trying to look cool, and meanwhile the coolest person there is dressed like a secretary. I have to say, in a day it changed my perception of what was cool."
As the Pixies' cult fanbase grew throughout late 80s and early 90s, Kim's artistic contributions diminished with each record. Depending on who you ask, she was either almost kicked out of or almost quit the famously tumultuous band a few different times before Frank Black sent out indie rock's most notorious fax in the summer of 1992, letting everyone know that the Pixies were through. In the liner notes to the 20th anniversary reissue of Last Splash, the phenomenal second album from her other band the Breeders, Kim sums up the Pixies' explosive seven-year run in a single, tellingly faceless sentence: "[W]e started by driving ourselves in a van with no record contract, went on to appear on front covers of the English music press (while still largely unknown in the States) and ended when the lead singer quit the band to pursue a solo career."
The Breeders began in earnest when Pixies and Throwing Muses came off that first European tour, at some point during which Kim and Donelly decided they wanted to make a record together. They recruited a British bassist they'd met on the road, Josephine Wiggs, and their Boston friend Carrie Bradley would play violin. In 1990, they released the great, eerily primal Pod, which Kurt Cobain loved, cited as an inspiration on Nirvana, and later dubbed, "an epic that will never let you forget your ex-girlfriend." After that, Donelly left to form Belly, Dayton's Jim Macpherson became their permanent drummer, and the Breeders found themselves in search of a new guitarist so they could go back into the studio with the bouncy, grungy demos they'd been writing in 1992. Kim knew somebody back in Dayton. Could she play well? Well, the thing was that she couldn't play at all. But she figured she could teach her pretty quickly, because she was her twin.
That's some of the psychic energy fueling one of alternative rock's most unlikely platinum records and most enduring masterpieces, the Breeders' Last Splash: an indie-famous frontwoman who'd spent the last couple of years feeling increasingly fed up and creatively muzzled at her high-profile day job; an untrained lead guitarist joyriding up and down the fretboard and riding high on the freedom of please, no chops; and maybe above all else a decade-delayed bar band family reunion. It's no wonder that 20 years later, Last Splash still sounds as sloppy and beguiling and warm as the day it was pressed. Although the songs were meticulously crafted and revised, and although the post-Nevermind boom had made the audience for a record this singularly weird suddenly visible, in the end the Breeders sound like a couple of kids from Dayton (and one like-minded Brit) making up their own fun.
Last Splash is a noise-pop record in the fullest sense of both of those words: It is a symphony of feedback but the melodies holding it all together are sweet enough to rot your teeth. From the squalling, rhythmic dissonance of "Roi" to the melodic Lynchian lullaby "Mad Lucas", the record is full of warm, damaged beauty. Fresh off a tour with Nirvana, the Breeders drove to San Francisco in a blizzard to record Last Splash with veteran producer Mark Freegard in the winter of 1993, and the reissue’s liner notes describe the process as a series of sonic experiments. What's that corrosive whir that opens "S.O.S."? It's Kelley's sewing machine fed directly through a Marshall amp, because why not. The distorted vocal on "Cannonball" happened because Kim (who shares a producer’s credit with Freegard) wondered what it'd sound like to sing through a harmonica mic and when they play the song live, they still get that particular tone of the iconic opening vocal ("Ahhhhhoooo-oooh/Ahhhhhoooo-oooh") not through some custom pedal, but by putting a styrofoam cup over the mic. At times they resorted to measures even more DIY than that. The best take of Bradley's warbling strings on "Mad Lucas" was the one where, by her account, "Kim and Kelley grabbed me on each side and shook me and quaked me while I played."
All of which might make Last Splash sound like a haphazard and amateurish affair, but the collection of demos and the 1992 live show included in the extensive LSXX reissue tell a more complex story. Unlike their Dayton buddies Guided by Voices (the Breeders' own cover of "Shocker in Gloomtown" made the reissue, along with the rest of 1994’s excellent Head to Toe EP), the Breeders crafted, road tested, and revised their tunes. Check, for one example, the completely reworked demo of "No Aloha" against the one that made the album. As all the extras on the reissue attest, the genius of the Breeders lies in the balance between being tirelessly tinkering perfectionists who still understand how to embrace creative serendipity. So Last Splash is a tight record that's also alive with happy accidents. Perhaps the most famous example: the bassline's hesitant entrance on "Cannonball"-- and we're talking about one of the most iconic basslines of the 90s-- was actually the product of a fortunate mistake. In a rehearsal, Wiggs played the last note of the riff flat (twice in a row) but everybody thought it sounded cool, so it became a part of the song.
Wiggs and Macpherson are the unsung heroes of Last Splash; a driving-but-just-loose-enough rhythm section, they gave the sprawl a backbone. But the Deals are the record’s charismatic center. It’s hard to imagine a frontwoman more perfect for a record so fixated on the tension between distressed textures and gleefully hooky melody. From her mirror-fogging enunciation of “No bye/No/A-lo-ha” to the way she delivers the title syllable of “Hag” like a cutting sidelong glance, each note comes out of her mouth affixed with a halo of cartoon dirt, like the one that hovers over Pigpen. Expressive yet enigmatic enough to cover a whole range of emotions, Kim’s voice embodies that dirty-prettiness that makes Last Splash’s appeal so complex and hard to pin down. In a 1995 issue of Spin, Charles Aaron called Last Splash "the rare album that had all the I-need-you and you-gross-me-out emotions seamlessly bound together." It can be mean one second ("You’re a nuisance, and I don't like dirt") and then deliver something as vulnerable and classically tender as "Do You Love Me Now?" the next. That it doesn’t always want to admit that it’s a romantic record only makes it more of a romantic record. The point is that it's sweet and gross and guarded and needy and cutting and gleeful because love can be all of those things too.
The reissue is available either as a three-CD package or a vivid, electric-brite vinyl box set, though either prompts a fair question: “Why should I spring for a special edition of an album I can probably still find in the dollar bin?” For any Breeders fan, though, the extras make a convincing case. The live album (recorded in Stockholm in 1994) and disc of rarities and demos put the finished product in context, while the array of EPs show off the wide stylistic range of everything the Breeders could do well. They’re all worth a listen, though the wooly pop of Safari (Donnelly’s last recording with the band) and the later, comparatively aggro Head to Toe (featuring the great, Wiggs-penned title track-- a fan favorite) are the best of the bunch. The less essential Divine Hammer EP is notable for featuring “Do You Love Me Now Jr”-- a fittingly titled duet that features J Mascis, who recalls his amusingly ill-fated attempt to produce some Breeders tracks in the liner notes. “I was not the best producer. I only wanted to work until 7 p.m. Kim got up about 3 p.m., so that didn’t leave much time before I would bail.” And as the duet proves, their voices are about as compatible as their working hours.
Still, it was Mascis who once succinctly summed up the irony of Deal’s two great bands: “The Breeders seemed bigger than the Pixies, and now the Pixies are way bigger than the Breeders.” In both instances, it was a matter of being at the right place at the right time. With Last Splash, the Breeders were poised to ride the cresting alt-rock wave that the Pixies had inspired but just missed out on, and when the Pixies reunited in 2004, the mounting nostalgia for late 80s/early 90s indie rock made it the perfect time for a long-delayed victory lap. But now it’s the Breeders’ turn to bask in a little bit of that nostalgic glory. LSXX is proof of an enduring benefit of sounding like nobody else: 20 years later, these songs still sound fresh. The undeniable “Cannonball” may have made Last Splash an unlikely mainstream hit, but as Kim reminds us in the liner notes, “This is an indie record. Put out by 4AD.” She says “indie” proudly-- like it means something personal. And Last Splash proves it still can. As big as it made the Breeders, it has a scrappy intimacy that captures what those early, unrecorded, make-your-own-fun Deal sister bar gigs must have sounded like. A million alt rock fans and all the bikers in Dayton, Ohio can't be wrong.


The Texas experimentalists set aside their drone and ASMR proclivities in favor of Auto-Tuned riffs on hyperpop, indulging in plenty of deadpan jokes and self-deprecating swagger along the way.

claire rousay / more eaze: never stop texting me

Never Stop Texting Me

Over the past few years, the San Antonio-based composer and sound collagist claire rousay has ascended through avant-garde music circles with a wide-ranging spectrum of work. There are somewhat trite text-to-speech ruminations on big concepts, fit to be enjoyed with microscopic hors d’oeuvres at gallery spaces. There are pleasant ambient albums filled with tactile clatter and long, silvery tones. rousay has also put out a number of collaborations with her best friend and fellow Texas experimentalist mari maurice (more eaze) that rove into more whimsical pop territory, incorporating arcade bleeps, slimy burbles, and fragile emo wailing. Together, they let loose; the pair have titled projects after Jimmy Eat World lyrics and songs after a TikTok series in which absolutely plastered young women do dumb shit like tumble off of mechanical bulls.
For their latest project, Never Stop Texting Me, rousay and maurice take a good-humored stab at hyperpop. Though they are primarily known as “drone superstars,” in the words of one critic, their change in palette isn’t ultimately that jarring; they have played with Auto-Tune before, like on their 2020 emo-pop album </3. While the new record primarily pulls from 2000s pop-punk, emo rap, and chiptune, it doesn’t completely discard the field recordings and atmospherics the two have been known for. There are warm, enveloping washes of synths on “arm” and the crinkle of what sound like wrappers on “camille.”
Opener “same” begins with trickling water and rumbling static, like what you’d hear if you were at a spa, until the transcendental headspace fades away. Then a frail, robotic warble: “Do you think of me every time we’re apart? Do you feel my name inside your heart?” the voice asks, and the digital plinks in the background recreate the trepidation of chatting with your crush on AIM. As is typical with hyperpop releases, it’s sometimes hard to discern what rousay and maurice are singing on Never Stop Texting Me because of the vocal treatment—rousay typically bleats like a Minion, and maurice adopts a feathery falsetto—but the songs tend to reflect frustrated attempts at connection. “iphone2” stages a funny and sweet dialogue between two people who live in separate castes of phone ownership. “Can’t even pay for my one phone,” one says, dreaming of the day that they make the big bucks. The other expresses insecurity about their shiny new device, because “you’re still rocking the iPhone 2/And all I want is to get close to you.”
One of the most amusing songs on the album is “art,” which is like a Lonely Island parody for ambient hotshots, full of self-deprecating swagger. “We’re on that Kali Malone shit,” rousay and maurice sing in unison, citing a beloved but relatively niche organist as a way of expressing triumph at their creative process. Heightening the levity is the track’s overly sentimental production, which is built on fingerpicked guitar and whistling flutes. Being a smaller artist is pretty unglamorous, but rousay and maurice flaunt their lifestyle like they’re Megan Thee Stallion big: “Cashing out PayPal because we just got paid/Ordering UberEats with cash from Bandcamp Day.”
In profile last year, rousay playfully self-identified as a “millennial sun, zoomer rising,” and Never Stop Texting Me does feel designed more for the former demographic than the latter—or at least for hyperpop newcomers, and not those already entrenched in its communities. (One bridge between generations is Bloodz Boi, a Drain Gang-loving, Rate Your Music-posting rapper from Beijing who broods about feeling isolated on “missed.”) The album’s production is stiff and blocky, due in large part to the militant percussion, and while the music’s rough-hewn quality is part of its appeal, the songs can lack a sense of audaciousness and velocity. Still, as a lighthearted entry within rousay and maurice’s ever-expanding discography, Never Stop Texting Me has an indisputable charm. And even if you aren’t quite convinced, there will be plenty more music to come.


1999 is the greatest album ever made about partying as a way of staring down oblivion. At the height of the Cold War, suddenly the world felt a little warmer.

1999

For all the hot-pink light bathing 30-years-on memories of the '80s, that decade was full of dread—bad guys lurked around corners, and the threat of nuclear war hovered over the world’s geopolitik. 1999, Prince’s fifth album, opens with reassurance: “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt U,” a mushily robotic voice announces. “I only want U to have some fun.” The song that follows is the record’s title track, and with its lyrical laser focus on the world possibly ending, if not imminently then eventually, it fulfills that promise. Prince realizes the power of saying “Fuck it, let’s party” in the face of near-assured annihilation, a gesture that foments an effervescent, uncontrollable glee. (Which, here, is depicted by mashed-on keyboards and a joyously wailed policy of ejecting anyone who might be in a less-than-celebratory mood.)
But we all die eventually, right? That’s the attitude that runs through much of 1999, which powers itself with machines like the Oberheim OB-SX and the Linn LM–1 while taking a slightly more sober view of the pleasures that dominated so much of Prince’s earlier work. Dangers—the bomb, “brand new laws,” sneering critics—get their airing, and time might be running out (Party over, oops!). Best, then, to get in all the good stuff while one still can, whether those feelings come from extended make-out sessions in the back of a slick car (the simmering “Little Red Corvette,” which emerges from a plume of smoke to become one of Prince’s most potent fusions of funk’s swing and rock’s swagger), late-night secrets about love and lust told among icy synthscapes (the stretched-out seduction “Automatic”), or Prince’s Holy Quadrality of Dance, Music, Sex, and Romance (the jittery “D.M.S.R.”).
1999 is a sprawling double album (“D.M.S.R.” was cut from initial CD pressings to make it fit on a single disc) on which Prince indulged his curiosity in new technology, but what’s remarkable about it is how tightly-wound it feels, even on the more far-flung jams. “Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)” is claustrophobic and tense, Prince’s pleas to a lover who’s left him behind made even more frantic by the cacophony of digital sounds ricocheting around the mix. (It’s the song that probably brings Prince’s admitted influence of Blade Runner to mind the most.) “Lady Cab Driver” unfolds like a movie playing on fast-forward in Prince’s dirty mind, with a request for a “ride” turning into a bit of slap-and-tickle play before fading back to reality—as evidenced by scritching guitars and the reprise of the song’s feather-light hook.
Then there’s “Delirious,” one of Prince’s most unbridled offerings, its wheezing keyboards sounding like a mind left alone to whirl, propelled by a dizzyingly upbeat drum track and Prince’s half-sneeze vocals. The one-two punch of that track and the Erotic City staycation “Let’s Pretend We’re Married” is enough to drive even the most buttoned-up listener to their own personal brink—one that arrives even before Prince murmurs, “I’m not sayin’ this just 2 be nasty/I sincerely wanna fuck the taste out of your mouth/Can U relate?” Well. When U put it like that…
It’s not all fun and sex games, of course; even though “1999” makes the idea of impending apocalypse alluring, the planet still goes kablooey when all is said and done. The piano ballad “Free” presents Prince in tender mode, smearing the personal and political together as he sings “Be glad that u r free/Free 2 change your mind.” The music grows increasingly stirring, with militaristic drums and fiercely slapped bass fighting for supremacy as Prince sings of creeping clamp-downs. And “All the Critics Love U in New York” takes the self-regard exhibited by the city and its more pretentious inhabitants and mashes it into a ball. But those forays into the wider world only give the more pleasure-minded tracks on 1999 more urgency and lightness.
Prince played with different toys on 1999—new synths, new sexual frontiers, new paranoias. He bent them to his will, though, and this 11-song opus was the result. Balancing synth-funk explorations that would reverberate through radio playlists’ ensuing years, taut pop construction, genre-bending, and the proto-nuclear fallout of lust, 1999 still sounds like a landmark release in 2016; Prince’s singular vision and willingness to indulge his curiosities just enough created an apocalypse-anticipating album that, perhaps paradoxically, was built to last for decades and even centuries to come.


Chicago’s least-relaxed band doubles their personnel and scales up their sound for a set of unnerving new wave.

My Star

Since they began in 2012, the Hecks have sounded like Chicago’s least-relaxed band. They approach melody not as a sequence of notes, but jabs. On their 2016 self-titled debut, recorded when the band was still a duo of singer-guitarist Andy Mosiman and drummer Zack Hebert, Mosiman sounded like he was strenuously aiming his guitar, playing either unnervingly on-beat or nowhere near it. His jagged interplay with Hebert recalled the late Women guitarist Chris Reimer, or Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis bashing holes through the solid walls of Lee Harris’s drumming. Mosiman committed to maintaining this angularity in ways beyond his guitar playing, too, whether by singing in a grating monotone or by holding a stoic stage face only slightly less intense than that of the sudden-realization meme guy.
Since then, the Hecks added their producer, Dave Vettraino, as a third official member on guitar, followed by a full-time synth player in Jeff Graupner, thereby doubling their personnel. They sound like a completely different band on their sophomore album, My Star, for two main reasons. The first and most obvious is that the grainy recording quality of their debut is out the window; everything on My Star has been recast in sparkling high-definition. The album’s low end is satisfyingly full. Second, and more surprisingly, not a single sound on My Star is out of place; there no “off” notes, no stray threads. Postures are straight, clothes are ironed, and nobody stumbles.
As a result, the bizarro world of the Hecks is an entirely different place to spend time; it sounds like it belongs somewhere around the Carter presidency and the start of the jogging craze. “Zipper” sounds like they stayed up for three straight days watching Elvis Costello’s “Pump It Up” music video, then only remembered how to play one repeating measure. “Heat Wave” reimagines the Police’s “Every Breath You Take” as a blank motorik pulse playing in an empty airplane hangar.
Mosiman uses his voice primarily for instrumental effect on My Star, more so than on the debut. His lyrics are usually obscured by the band, except for when serving as boilerplate to complete a hook: “It’s tearing me apart” on “Heat Wave,” or “I only wanted to be with you” on the otherwise-fantastic Prince nod “So 4 Real.” The automated quality can be a little suffocating: At one point, he chants the alphabet to the beat, and at another, he counts up to and backwards from eight the same way. Live, the band dances together with stiff, synchronized choreography. That means these songs wind up making a little more sense onstage than they do on record. Nonetheless, there is something poignant in their mathematical rigor; they may treat songs like spreadsheets, but they fill the cells with neon.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their second album, the Brooklyn quartet sinks deeper into their dread-filled chill-out sound, but they become sharper and more focused in the process.

Ice Melt

On their 2019 debut, Jinx, Crumb slowly lowered dazed psych-rock into a loungey abyss, evoking the feeling of one long summer day spent entirely inside the endless buzz of an anxious mind. It was unnerving and terrific. Before forming at college in Boston, the Brooklyn-based quartet honed their chops in low-profile jazz, soul, and rock groups. After a couple EPs, they flourished in the softly lit chasm of their debut—now Ice Melt captures a band breaking free of the trance for a little more clarity.

Even at its most blasé, Crumb’s music can sometimes feel, well, dreadful. “Trophy” calls to mind sudden vertigo that won’t shift. “Ice Melt” captures the singular unease of coming up in a bad frame of mind. Crumb have distanced themselves from being a band that makes music that simply wafts in and out of the room on a lazy afternoon (“I wouldn't want to chill to our music,” singer-guitarist Lila Ramani told Pitchfork in 2019). Highlights here like “Up and Down,” a helter-skelter of slinking arpeggios with hat-tips to the golden era of trip-hop, support the position. Beyond a general air of cosmic longing, aided by violinist Maeve Feinberg on songs including “Gone,” Crumb zone in on the low-key doom they have always dabbled in.

With Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado co-producing, Ice Melt pushes the band forward with more lucidity and more manipulated space. While the thrashing, high-gain climax of “Tunnel” sounds like a band briefly weary of nuance, the empty drift between “Seeds” and “L.A.” feels like forever. Speaking to Rolling Stone, bassist Jesse Brotter revealed one of the more curious advances: “We’d take a microphone, put a condom on it, put that in a bucket filled with water, and then play a sound source at the water, so you would get a slight underwater effect that you could merge it with the original sound source.” The punch-drunk panning of Bri Aronow’s synth work on “Gone” and “Up & Down” sounds like an obvious success story here. Paired with Ramani’s phaser-doused shapes, they sit like swells of seafoam in the mix.
As the band’s main songwriter, Ramani has always threaded Crumb’s songs with oblique impressions akin to an interior monologue when people-watching. On Ice Melt, whether loosely riffing on belonging (“Retreat!”) or characterizing strawberry seeds as shoes on her feet (“BNR”), she continues to grasp the power of ambiguity, while offering a reminder that simply being a human in the world can feel just as unknowable. Occasionally, though, outliers such as “Gone” buck the trend: “Ma rolls in the waves/She wants someone to save her/Says she used to be a beauty/Then they took her soul/So far away from here.” She cryptically referred to her family on Jinx highlight “Faces” (“All of my heroes are people I know”), but by directly evoking her artist mother, Ramani pushes biographical detail through a haze of sleepy non-sequiturs.

According to Brotter, the hallucinatory scenes that made up Jinx stemmed from a collective exploration of “loss and fate and some other myth around the band.” Even at its most hope-sapped, Ice Melt sounds like four old college friends brightening the corners of their twilit sound. By refining their reality, and allowing themselves to be a little more seen, they feel more reachable than ever.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The second album from the Michigan rock trio is alternately brutal and transcendent, like heavy machinery coming up against the stubbornness of nature.

New Hell

Dixieland was only a somewhat misleading title for Greet Death’s 2017 debut—the Flint, Michigan trio wasn’t pulling a Kid Rock, but paying tribute to a hometown flea market while they gleefully rummaged through used Midwestern relics. They incorporated the Smashing Pumpkins, Mark Kozelek, and Jason Molina at their most uncomfortably numb, broad-shouldered heavy acts like Cloakroom and Pelican, and even pulled some old Bob Seger records off the shelf. Even when songs were built on lyrics like, “Waking up dead on sheets of white,” or, “I’m going down,” Dixieland was oddly uplifting, three guys finding their purpose by reclaiming some of the bleakest music of their lifetimes. The reference points haven’t changed on their second LP, but Greet Death sound like they’ve actually lived them this time around, enough to justify making an album called New Hell on a label called Deathwish.
More than a realization of Dixieland’s promise, New Hell can be seen as the culmination of a decade where a wave of like-minded bands were lumped into shoegaze despite seemingly inverting its entire aesthetic of cocooned bliss. Instead of soft-focus vocals wrapped in sheets of trebly, white noise, acts like Greet Death bludgeoned with bottom-heavy production and guitars that sound forged from molten steel, only sharing shoegaze’s aim for sensory domination. Pedalboard gawkers might show up to a Greet Death gig a half-hour earlier to get a look at their distortion rig, but New Hell isn’t dirty or grimy itself, more comparable to heavy machinery coming up against the stubbornness of nature. The instrumentation of “Circles of Hell” variously resembles a bulldozer stalling against a massive pile of rubble or a power drill hitting impenetrable bedrock. The earth is a cold dead place on the frostbitten dirge “Entertainment,” as Sam Boyhtari’s guitar thuds like a shovel against solid dirt. The hyperbolically spiteful “Do You Feel Nothing” is the end result of all this digging, New Hell’s one moment of release that comes off like an extended, three-minute mudslide in the “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” video.
But the success of New Hell is mostly attributable to Greet Death’s newfound ability to synthesize Boyhtari and Logan Gaval’s distinct head voices—Boyhtari sings directly through his nasal passage, while Gaval moans in a DayQuil haze. On Dixieland, they did the logical thing and separated the two almost completely. Here, both make the most of their unique tones to represent the opposing forces of abject depression: Gaval is the voice of dejection, the one best suited for lyrics like, “I would kill myself completely out of spite,” or, “I sit around and I wait to get high,” as what comes across in his lethargic, drawn-out sighs is the inability to immediately access those maladaptive forms of relief and the impotent longing to speed up the process.
Meanwhile, Boyhtari is the sound of rejection, why the caged rat sings. Unlike Gaval, he relishes the idea of wasting all of his days as revenge against everyone who cares about him: “I hate my friends ’cause they don’t hate themselves,” he snarls on “Do You Feel Nothing?” justifying getting fucked up because he’s young, it still works, and it’s pretty much all he’s got going right now.
Impressive and imposing as Greet Death are in teardown mode, all the above serves as the foundation for “You’re Gonna Hate What You’ve Done” and the closing title track—towering, nine-minute monuments to self-pity. Both are structured similarly and depending on your mood, they’re either offering ascendance one layer of fuzz at a time or boring deeper into the earth’s core. Either way, it’s an escape from the limbo that’s so painfully and accurately captured throughout New Hell. Having someone to help out is the one thing that keeps you rolling that boulder up that hill despite every temptation to just let it roll over you.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This 5xLP set documents LCD Soundsystem's final show. It's a largely unedited document of everything this band had to offer: the laughs, the tears, the disco, the rock, the cowbell, the deep cuts—a set for completists, by completists.

LCD Soundsystem: The Long Goodbye: LCD Soundsystem Live at Madison Square Garden

On a spitting grey evening last week, I went to Rough Trade's new record store in Williamsburg to see what's being called an "interactive gallery exhibition" in honor of LCD Soundsystem. It showcased a small shrine to the band—replete with candles, flowers, and an empty bottle of Jameson—alongside some framed photos, a flat screen TV playing the 2012 documentary Shut Up and Play the Hits on mute, and a glitchy projection of random home-movie style footage of the group. There were also five portable Numark turntables set up, each spinning one of the discs from the box-set chronicle of their 2011 finale, The Long Goodbye: LCD Soundsystem Live at Madison Square Garden. The whole white-walled room felt like a well-intentioned relic—a cheap museum piece that barely hinted at the too-recent memories it was designed to revive. The same could be said of the entire Rough Trade store, which has all of the hallmarks of Tower Records of yore—plenty of space, high retail prices, huge promo posters—but now with an added level of desperate nostalgia. The visit left me a bit dulled—experiencing the halfhearted fossilization of your youth will do that. But something less soul-shattering stuck with me, too.
Stamped onto the wall above the LCD shrine were little hand-written love notes to the band by fans who had previously stopped by the space. Some were weird ("James, I once rubbed your back at a ramen restaurant, it was so creepy and so awesome"), some gushed ("James Murphy is my David Bowie"), and some were all too real ("Thanks for making me realize that it was OK that I hadn't achieved my goals by the age of 25"). More than anything else in the room, those scrawled bits of Sharpie resonated, and they reminded me of the crowd noise that hums underneath much of The Long Goodbye's 187 minutes. That last LCD show was as much of a party as a concert, an extended celebration of goodwill, good taste, and the fact that something so relentlessly sharp and gracious could reach such a rarified place within the culture. It was also really long. Which made sense. LCD Soundsystem were not a greatest hits band. They were band for completists, by completists. This is one reason why The Long Goodbye is such an apt punctuation. It is a largely unedited document of everything this band had to offer: the laughs, the tears, the disco, the rock, the cowbell, the deep cuts. And if you were to listen to this five-disc set front-to-back on a turntable, you'd need to flip or change the record a total of nine times—a very serious commitment in today's stream of endless one-click playlists.
Speaking of vinyl, it is no coincidence that this item is originally seeing life as one of those Record Store Day specials. Along with its superfan collectibility, the box's presentation is spare, monochrome, and elegant, and Murphy tweaked the audio with needles and grooves in mind. "We're totally not making a CD of this or anything, because it's not 1997," he quips on a tiny square download card. And while The Long Goodbye will get a digital release next month, he stresses that "it's really mixed for vinyl." Having heard both the WAV files and LPs, I can report that the overall experience is indeed different. While the computer version retains more clarity, the sound on the records gives into the live-wire atmosphere of the actual show—the low tones in particular are noticeably fatter, gloriously smudging into everything else. Along with Pat Mahoney's tireless drumming, Tyler Pope's bass provides a rubbery rhythmic backbone from which the rest of the band is allowed to explode. Murphy was smart to highlight this controlled chaos in this mix, because it offers a distinct, refreshing contrast to LCD's studio records, which are often marked by deadpan dryness along with a watchmaker's attention to detail. Live, though, Murphy and his crew are more excitable and woolier—it's where the frontman can get out of his own self-conscious mind for few hours and get lost in the beats and emotions around him. This feeling is contagious.
And it's found all across The Long Goodbye. Song of the Century contender "All My Friends" benefits from edging perilously close to breaking apart at the seams, its smile-to-cry ratio more perfect than ever; "Time to Get Away" speeds up and morphs from something slinky into a monolith of funk; "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House" turns into a giddy rush of imagined robots and punk rock synths; Murphy ditches his early stuffed-nose Mark E. Smith affectations as "Movement" reminds you that LCD Soundsystem are a better straight-up punk band than almost any other straight-up punk band; 45:33's "You Can't Hide (Shame on You)", with singer/comedian Reggie Watts on pitch-perfect guest vocals, lives out its disco-ball dreams with a newfound vividness. Watts' brief spotlight reminded me of his production work on the funk-soul theme song for Louie C.K.'s "Louie", a TV show that could easily be subtitled "New York, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down". C.K. and Murphy are both in their mid-40s, both late bloomers, both hyper real and surreal at once, and in many ways "Louie" has taken on the affably-fucked-white-guy baton Murphy left behind more than any band. And just as "Louie" can hit deep emotional chords within an unlikely milieu of strange sex, stranger doctor's visits, and fart jokes, LCD did the same with dance music, trying to make the beats pump harder because they're always one step closer to the big goodbye. This set highlights that fleeting fleshiness—the paradox of creating something timeless while thousands of people run out of time together.
That headlong rush makes The Long Goodbye more than a cash grab, more than a chintzy white room in a big, overpriced record store with two customers in it. The music is undeniably alive, even though—or perhaps because—the band that made it is all over. Of course, Murphy has always left the door open for an LCD reunion, and the possibility will forever be on the table because the band left at the height of their powers (and because basically every other band has already gotten back together). Talking to Rolling Stone about reunion offers last year, the frontman said, "They get shot down before it ever gets to me." At a time when the nostalgia circuit is on a even-more-depressing downswing, that answer feels right. Even though his recent output—including a stunning David Bowie remix, an elite coffee blend, and a 50,000-watt custom sound system—hasn't tried to match the impact of LCD in any sense, it's managed to stay true to the LCD ethos by remaining singular and impassioned; while you or I may not get the same high from sipping a perfect cup of coffee as we do from listening to "All My Friends" for the thousandth time, it's where James Murphy is at now. And if the band ever steps onstage together again, it'll have to be for a damn good reason. Until then, though, we can still come home to this.


Recorded in 2001, this previously unreleased LP from Young and his most recognizable accompanists is a surprisingly slick, fans-only affair.

Toast

Among Neil Young’s one-off genre-experiment albums, 2002’s Are You Passionate? enjoys neither the adoring cult of his foray into synth-pop sci-fi nor the infamy of the rockabilly revival act that got him sued for not sounding enough like himself. Perhaps that’s because Are You Passionate?’s animating conceit—a tracklist heavy on slow-burning ballads that nod in the direction of 1960s R&B, backed by the veteran soul men of Booker T. and the M.G.’s—seems like the sort of thing any number of Young’s boomer contemporaries might have attempted a few decades into their respective careers. It isn’t as outwardly experimental as the others, but it has its charms. One of Young’s many personae is the songwriter who can churn out a beautiful melody without much apparent effort, and the classic-soul trappings of Are You Passionate? seemed to bring that side out of him, with several unusually sumptuous tunes to distinguish it from his other efforts of the same era.
Not a bad record, but hardly anyone’s favorite Neil Young album, either. Which makes Toast, a previously unreleased seven-song collection recorded in 2001, over half of which eventually made its way to Are You Passionate? in marginally revised form, a decidedly fans-only affair. The hook: Before bringing the M.G.’s into the studio, Young recorded these songs with Crazy Horse, the band of brilliant rock primitivists who have backed him on many of his best-loved albums over the years. You might think, given that premise, that Toast would replace the in-the-pocket smokiness of Are You Passionate? highlights like “Quit” and “Mr. Disappointment” (retitled “How Ya Doin’” here) with Crazy Horse’s familiar unrefined squall. Instead, the alternate versions demonstrate that Young had the understated R&B of Are You Passionate? in mind before he ever hired the M.G.s to play it, and that Crazy Horse was better than anyone could have reasonably expected at delivering the sorts of grooves he was after.
The Crazy Horse rendition of “Quit” that opens Toast, for instance, is hardly distinguishable from the one the M.G.s laid down the following year, other than by its slightly darker recording fidelity. That isn’t exactly a mark against it. It’s a good song, with a lilting melody and a tear-jerking premise: Young spends the verses trying in vain to convince a partner not to leave, despite the pain he’s caused her, before a chorus that consists only of her stone-faced response: “Don’t say you love me.” The band is more than capable of conjuring the right atmosphere, which is something like a corner bar after the revelers have filed out and only the regulars remain. The rhythm section is appropriately laid-back; even the call-and-response backing vocal arrangement, the final version’s most overt homage to Stax-era soul, is already in place. As on Are You Passionate?, Young's scorched guitar tone and pleasantly meandering leads provide a welcome contrast, elevating “Quit” beyond pastiche and toward something more idiosyncratic.
“Goin’ Home” and “How Ya Doin’” are similarly of a piece with their final forms. The former, the only track on the original album to feature Crazy Horse instead of the M.G.s, sounds, predictably, like the same band playing the same song. The latter becomes slightly less interesting in its Toast incarnation, replacing the Tom Waits-like gravelly low register Young tried out on the Are You Passionate? version with his usual clear-throated tenor. It’s impressive that Crazy Horse were able to pull off the style of Are You Passionate? so well, but their adeptness raises an issue. Some roughness around the edges might have made these previously released tracks a little more distinctive; their surprising slickness means there’s little compelling reason to put them on over the better-known versions.
Three songs from the Toast sessions didn’t make the cut for Are You Passionate?, and they appear as studio versions for the first time here. “Standing in the Light” sounds like cheap beer and fast cars, with a dumb-fun fuzztone riff and not much going on songwriting-wise beyond that. “Timberline” is in a similar hard-rocking lane, but with more interesting lyrics, sung from the perspective of a logger who loses his job, and consequently, his faith in God. “Gateway of Love” is the best of the unreleased tracks, a 10-minute guitar workout that differentiates itself from the many similar odysseys in the Horse catalog with a Latin-feeling polyrhythm instead of their standard four-four stomp. It’s easy to understand why Young felt these songs didn’t fit in with the lovelorn mood of Are You Passionate?, but they’re all worth hearing at least once.
The most compelling reason to give Toast a spin is “Boom Boom Boom,” its 13-minute closer. Structurally, it isn’t much different from “She’s a Healer,” the nine-minute version on Are You Passionate?, which is among the jazziest tunes in Young’s canon, cycling between a menacing one-chord vamp and a more harmonically elaborate instrumental refrain, with plenty of group improvisation throughout. But its arrangement on Toast is richer and stranger, piling on layers of seasick piano and trumpet. And in contrast to the rest of the Are You Passionate? tracks on Toast, Crazy Horse’s playing is noticeably rawer and more exploratory than the M.G.s’ later take, always on the verge of falling apart, without the glue of Booker T’s organ holding everything in place. The precarity of the performance is suited to Young’s songwriting, which addresses his attachment to a woman who may or may not be ready to dump him. “There ain’t no way I’m gonna let the good times go,” he sings repeatedly, a line that might strike an inattentive listener to Are You Passionate? as a straightforward call for celebration. On Toast, there’s no mistaking it for anything other than the desperate plea it is.