Like its 2018 predecessor, J Mascis’ fourth solo album plays a little like Dinosaur Jr. Jr., another softer guitar-focused outing with acoustic touches and electric sparks.

What Do We Do Now

These days, the most surprising thing about J Mascis’ solo albums is how regular they’ve become. When Mascis released Several Shades of Why in 2011, a quarter-century into his career, it was an anomaly—his first solo record of original material and an acoustic showcase for some of his most vulnerable songwriting. Ever since, he’s made it a regular habit, chasing each new Dinosaur Jr. album with a mellower, more leisurely solo record a couple of years later, as if part of some creative detox ritual.

Since the original Dino Jr. lineup launched its improbably long, drama-free reunion, they’ve committed to, if not a healthier diet of communication and compromise, at least a shared understanding of their strengths, with Mascis writing to the terse sensibilities of his bandmates Lou Barlow and Murph. That’s led to some excellent records—five of them in a row, an incredible streak—but it’s also limited most of the shaggy exploration that Mascis brought to the band when he ran it as a de facto solo project in the ’90s and freely granted himself the right to indulge in gaudy funk or throw in a trumpet.

Like 2018 predecessor Elastic Days, Mascis’ fourth solo album, What Do We Do Now, plays like a traditional band album, albeit in a decibel range considerably lower than Dinosaur Jr.’s skyscraper amp towers. Acoustic rhythm guitars ground the record with a bright shimmer, and Mascis accompanies them with a full drum kit, keyboards from Ken Maiuri (a fellow Massachusetts native and current member of the B-52’s), and, most unmistakably, the searing electric guitar solos that he pointedly left off of his first couple of solo records.

Those wailing, emotive guitars remain one of the most expressive instruments in indie rock, but their impact is dulled when they’re unrooted from Dinosaur Jr.’s default volume and propulsion. The first time they torpedo through opener “Can’t Believe We’re Here,” jolting the track to life, the effect is undeniable. When they repeat the maneuver on every song, almost always at the midway point, the thrill wears off. Mascis’ best solos exude spontaneity. These feel more like muscle memory.

To the extent What Do We Do Now is less satisfying than Mascis’ previous solo releases, it’s because it has less to reveal. Mascis has written so many songs about the same needs and frustrations—his failures to communicate, to be understood, and ultimately accepted—that they can’t help but bleed together. Still, the album’s light touch and content disposition make it a very easy listen, especially when Mascis leans into tenderness. On the title track, he sings about longing to kiss and squeeze you, a line that might scan as barbed amid the tension and murk of a Dinosaur Jr. song. Here it’s just another pleasant thought on an album whose instincts are always for familiar comforts.


The Nashville songwriter brings country back to the barroom on a vibrant set that pays tribute to ’90s stars like Brooks & Dunn and Garth Brooks.

Neon Blue

Call Neon Blue a throwback to the boot-scootin’ days of the 1990s, if you must. Certainly, Nashville-based country singer Joshua Hedley welcomes such comparisons, kicking off his second record with “Broke Again,” a breakneck boogie with a stuttering chorus that splits the difference between Brooks & Dunn and Garth Brooks—superstars who pushed country music into stadiums in the ’90s without entirely abandoning the hardscrabble spirit of honky tonk.
Hedley makes no bones about being well-versed in the genre’s history. In the second track on Neon Blue, he calls himself “a singing professor of country and western,” resuscitating a phrase that fell out of favor sometime in the late 1960s—a bygone era Hedley expertly evoked on his 2018 Third Man debut, Mr. Jukebox. That record positioned Hedley as an unabashed revivalist, crafting a meticulous, loving re-creation of the heyday of the Nashville Sound, layering supple strings and vocal harmonies over the steady clomp of tic-tac bass. It was the kind of exercise that proves the thesis he offers “Country & Western”: Hedley knows his chosen genre so well that he could construct an exact replica of a certain era if he so chooses.
This time around, Hedley cut a record built upon his belief that country music took a sharp left turn somewhere around 1997, abandoning fiddles and steel guitars for shinier electronic accouterments. (Not so coincidentally, this was also the time when the Telecommunications Act of 1996 took hold, governmental deregulation that wound up homogenizing mainstream American music of every genre.) Back in the 1990s, the arena rock moves of Garth Brooks camouflaged the deep, distinct roots in classic country, a lineage that seems more evident in hindsight. On Neon Blue, Hedley starts here in his effort to bring country music back to the barrooms.
Hedley isn’t chasing a sound so much as an aesthetic, distilling country music to its essence: joyous and mournful songs about broken hearts, dead-end jobs, boozing, and loving. He keeps his stakes and sounds modest. Where modern country music is designed to be pumped out of high-end systems at anonymous, brightly-lit sports bars, Hedley is making music for dives. No top shelf liquor or sleek product placements for Hedley: He’s down at the corner beer joint, drinking whatever’s on tap, in the can or in the bottle.
Neon Blue is steeped in the culture of saloons, with barrooms playing a prominent role in most of the record’s 12 songs. Hedley meets a cowgirl at the Broken Spoke; he surveys the crowd at the honky tonk and notes that “The Last Thing in the World” it needs is another broken heart; he asks to be buried underneath a barroom floor with his boots on. He may be drinking his sorrows away, but he also discovers love underneath the warm neon glow, pining for crushes and singing about an old couple who found love in a bar.
Hedley isn’t revealing himself in his lyrics so much as he’s acting as a conduit for the audience, channeling their dashed dreams and wistful hopes along with their desire to cut loose. Like so much great country music, Neon Blue feels like a party, a record so vibrant that it scares off any sadness. Here’s where Hedley’s old-fashioned instincts serve him well. His decision to cut the record the way they did in the old days—hire a couple of veteran producers (in this case, Jordan Lehning and Skylar Wilson) and round up a bunch of Nashville’s A-team to add flesh and muscle—lets the music breathe, with the backing band following Hedley as he sings sweetly or with a slight sneer. Neon Blue contains no flashy tricks, no excess, but plenty of flair; it’s a joy to hear these pros dig deep into Hedley’s songs (plus a lovely cover of Roger Miller’s “River in the Rain”), swinging hard and delivering their solos with precision.
Contemporary country this unadorned usually gets shuffled over to the Americana classification, a catch-all category containing anything from heartland rockers and sensitive troubadours to swaggering neo-outlaws. Hedley isn’t any of these things. He’s simply a country singer, one who would’ve sounded at home singing in dance halls, honky tonks, and dive bars at any point in the past 60 years. The pleasure of Neon Blue is how Hedley subtly twists country conventions, making retro-minded songs and sounds seem both familiar and fresh. This “professor of country and western” isn’t sharing a stuffy history lesson or reciting facts: He’s absorbed their meaning.


With Tommy Stinson producing, Denver trio the Yawpers mix a high-brow literary streak with messy rock’n’roll on their third album. They cherrypick from punk, rockabilly, and the blues in the process.

Boy in a Well

Taking their name from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, the Yawpers have a high-brow literary streak that’s often at odds with the lowbrow messiness of their rock’n’roll. Frontman Nate Cook devised the story of the Denver trio’s third album, Boy in a Well, while tripping on Dramamine during a long flight, and it has something to do with France in World War I and a woman abandoning her son in a well. Good luck following the plot. It’s really just a high-falutin’ structure for this album, each song relating a different chapter and corresponding with an accompanying graphic novel illustrated by JD Wilkes (who also did the cover art). But there’s something lofty and worthwhile in the lowly rock’n’roll mudpit they wallow in, something compelling in their mix of gutbucket rockabilly and psychotic blues, which allows them to transcend the practiced chaos of Deer Tick and O’Death and so many other bands who insist that they rock more than they actually rock.
Maybe it’s the line-up. The Yawpers deviate from the typical rock band arsenal; in particular, like the White Stripes, they jettison the bass guitar completely. Instead, they have a particular nimble drummer named Noah Shomberg, an electric guitar player schooled in blues and metal named Jesse Parmet, and finally Cook himself, who strums a guitar haphazardly and sings like Elvis by way of Lux Interior by way of Jack White. And while they don’t quite have the charisma of those acts, together they kick up a fuss on opener “Armistice Day,” which forestalls its big moment as long as they can hold out. When they finally let loose around the three-minute mark and Cook howls viciously, the result isn’t just visceral, but downright gory.
Boy in a Well was recorded in Chicago with Tommy Stinson producing, so the Yawpers obviously have a good mentor in making a hot mess. He provides what the liners call a “piano freakout” on “Face to Face to Face,” but really every song here contains some kind of freakout, as the trio have as much disregard for rock song structures as they have for rock line-ups. “The Awe and the Anguish” opens as a back-porch blues number, colored by Parmet’s scratchy slide guitar, a bit too earnest in its authenticity and audacity. Without warning, the song explodes into a furious Led Zeppelin stomp, loud and lurching. The Yawpers understand the need for dynamics, drawing you in on quiet songs like “Room With a View” just so they can better blast your eardrums on “A Decision Is Made.”
Theirs is an expansive vision of rock’n’roll, one that cherrypicks from various folk traditions: punk, rockabilly, blues, whatever they might have on hand or find in the trash. At times the project gets away from them, and the trio struggle to wrangle so many different sounds all at once without pushing too hard or yelling too precociously. “A Decision Is Made” sounds convincingly feral, but the Yawpers rage gratuitously, as though the ramshackle aesthetic of the song were an end in itself. Maybe that’s why they ratchet these songs to that cumbersome WWI narrative: to give direction and purpose to the din. More often than not, they make the whole big mess work, even if they can’t make you care whether or not that damn boy even makes it out of the well.


On this sprawling new album, the Australian psych-rock band hoists its freak flag a few inches higher up the pole. It flutters in a more gentle breeze.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Flying Microtonal Banana

Flying Microtonal Banana

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard are a testament to the liberating power of giving yourself restrictions. Whether making every song on a record the exact same length (2015’s Quarters!), or constructing an entire album to connect into an infinite loop (last year’s Nonagon Infinity), the Aussie armada thrive on the symbiotic relationship between governing principles and disorder. The result is psychedelic rock that plays like a pinball game—the action may be confined to an enclosed playing field, but it’s always moving, ping-ponging in unexpected directions and encouraging synapse overload.
The band’s latest—reportedly, the first of five albums they’re planning to pump out this year—is likewise bound to a motif, though this one is as much sonic as structural. Flying Microtonal Banana was the product of Gizzard king Stu Mackenzie acquiring a custom-made guitar modified for microtonal tuning, which allows for intervals smaller than the semitones that govern Western music. And since the new guitar could only be played with similarly tuned instruments, he reportedly paid his bandmates $200 each to also get their gear tricked out with microtonal capabilities. Translation for those who don’t hold a degree in music theory: Australia’s wiggiest band has found a way to hoist its freak flag a few inches higher up the pole. But this time, it flutters in a more gentle breeze.
If the unrelenting Nonagon Infinity turned rock’n’roll into an Iron Man competition, Flying Microtonal Banana is that cool-down grace period your elliptical machine gives you after an hour’s workout. While opener “Rattlesnake” immediately reestablishes the preceding album’s motorik momentum, the pace is tempered—more late-night cruise than rocket to the moon. But even as it maintains a steadier course, the changes in scenery are more dramatic—in between Mackenzie’s chirpy verses about reptilian attacks, the song powers through a fog of stormy synths, staccato guitar pricks, and the brain-scrambling squawks of a Turkish horn-type instrument known as a zurna.
On Nonagon Infinity, the action moved so fast that Mackenzie’s words whizzed by like an out-of-control news ticker spitting out the haziest cosmic jive. He still drops randomly recurring melodies like a pull-string doll with a limited repertoire of phrasing, but Flying Microtonal Banana’s more relaxed vibe and greater sense of space bring his words into sharper focus. As per psych-rock tradition, Mackenzie deals in surrealist imagery, though in this case, those images aren’t the mere product of a chemically clouded mind. “Melting” combines rhythms from ’70s Nigeria with observations on the present-day Arctic (“Toxic air is/Here to scare us/Fatal fumes from/Melting ferrous”). “Open Water” channels anxieties over disappearing coastlines into a marauding, seafaring-fantasy epic, like an updated “Immigrant Song” for Vikings who drive their ships to new lands only discover they’ve been swallowed by rising ocean levels.
Flying Microtonal Banana peaks early with these extended odysseys, before giving way to more conventionally scaled rockers like “Sleep Drifter,” the rare Gizzard track that uses its melody as the foundation for a krautrockin’ jam, rather than the other way around. But as the record rolls on, it starts to resemble an FM dial spun awry. Flying Microtonal Banana serves up brief blasts of spaghetti-western balladry (“Billabong Valley”), acidic Southern blooze (“Anoxia”), and gritty Afro-funk (“Nuclear Fusion”) that are connected only by the chaotic harmonica and zurna bursts that punctuate Mackenzie’s musings. And it becomes increasingly clear that the only difference between a three-minute King Gizzard track and a seven-minute one is where they arbitrarily decide to fade out (sometimes mid-chorus). But if Flying Microtonal Banana’s randomized approach is ultimately less transfixing than Nonagon Infinity’s maniacal focus, it nonetheless shows that, after eight previous albums, this band’s creativity and curiosity knows no bounds, and their singular balance of anarchy and accessibility is still in check. So even if you don’t understand the first thing about microtonality, there’s still plenty of flying banana here to keep you amused.


Over the past few years, the Body have gone through several personnel changes, and moved from Providence, RI, to Portland, OR. The time spent in flux has only galvanized the now-duo's central focus: sounding completely terrifying, in an Armageddon-with-a-view, end-of-everything manner.

Master, We Perish

As the Body, thunderous drummer Lee Buford and murderous screamer and guitarist Chip King have been lashing at the foundation of doom metal for a decade. They’ve issued a steady stream of splits and collaborations, singles and short-run discs, but their most prominent public moment arrived in 2010 with the masterful All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood. With an all-female choir and sinister samples, the Body applied a seasick sense of motion to truly corrupted misanthropy, with impenetrable distortion piled onto the band’s lurching and jerking spans. In the interim, they’ve paired with post-metal troupe Braveyoung on the stage and in the studio, grown into a trio and occasionally a quartet, pared back to duo form, and moved from Providence, RI, to their current base of Portland, OR. The time spent in flux seems to have only galvanized the Body’s central focus-- that is, to sound completely terrifying, in an Armageddon-with-a-view, end-of-everything manner.
Master, We Perish is the new three-song, 18-minute EP from the Body. It lashes at perceived and much-debated divisions between metal and noise so hard and so fast that its tremendous squall and anthemic structures might actually be the sound of those fortified seams splintering. Master, We Perish not only finds the Body at its most punishing and paralyzing but also at its most diverse, a marvel considering the length. Opener “The Ebb and Flow of Tides in a Sea of Ash” does its monumental damage in less than three minutes, with air raid sirens invoking a tide of guitar static and cymbal smashes that make you consider finding shelter, even if you’re only wearing headphones.
In the song’s back half, King’s six-string upheaval shifts into piercing, sustained tones, while Buford now rumbles through the rest the kit, favoring body blows to eardrum lashes. But the Body somehow embeds a hook into all of this, meaning that you might want to throw up your fists and shout along with King about collapsing structures and forms. Be prepared to be blindsided by a wave of pain, though, like a quarterback being sacked from the back in one of those NFL Films slow-motion frames. It’s every bit as exhilarating and intimidating as you might hope, and shows the Body joining acts like WOLD, Sutekh Hexen, Locrian, and even Sunn O))) in the masterful art of merging blackened noise and damaged metal.
That’s not even the first three minutes. For “The Blessed Lay Down and Writhe in Agony”, the Body bleeds tension, with soprano vocals spiraling over cross-talking samples. A simple, slow riff and an indirect drum patter gather slowly, supporting King’s falsetto screech. The sound of a pump-action shotgun being slid into firing position serves as the valve’s release, opening a torrent of drone and rumble that funnels into a disastrous coda. King, Buford, the samples and, basically the whole world sound as though they’re being swallowed.
The finale, “Worship”, lacks the immediacy of its companion pieces, but its slow rise through martial drums and a scramble of found voices and manipulated notes suggests the Body’s developing ability to bait its audience with control and nuance. They micromanage the implied chaos until there is no more sonic space, no more spare slivers for sound. When the barrier finally breaks, the Body emerges with all of the atavistic doom force that initially made the band so compelling. Here, the sound is caked in static, a great grey noise worn like a badge of courage and a come-at-me middle finger. Feel free to tell these two they don’t belong in your clique, but I’m willing to admit I’m not that brave.


In execution, untitled unmastered. is the complete inverse of Kanye West's recent The Life of Pablo—it's a small and quiet statement from an artist with little to prove at this moment.

untitled unmastered.

"I made To Pimp a Butterfly for you," raps Kendrick Lamar on the opening cut from untitled unmastered. It's tempting to read a lot into those words; in fact, it's tempting to delve deeply into everything about his latest release. Because when the promotionally frugal, preeminent thinking-person's rapper of a generation lets forth a largely unexpected collection of demos into a click economy of hot takes and broadcasted enthusiasm, the friction of opposites is enough to spark the kind of hopes that see meaning in everything.
No other rapper has taken up so much real estate in the past 12 months while releasing so little music and sharing as little about themselves as Kendrick. TPAB—a Grammy-winning ride of densely knotted rhymes, tangled ideas, and deep sounds—positioned Kendrick Lamar as a reluctant messiah figure, and its dialogues with self and manifestations of God resisted quick-and-easy unpacking. Now, he’s released a handful-and-a-half of song sketches in a project that's neither album nor mixtape (or even EP or LP), and seem to have even less a chance of radio play than TPAB did upon its arrival. But it feels like an extension of that album's world—an asterisk, perhaps, or an extended coda.
There's little doubt that just about all of these songs are from TPAB sessions—"untitled 03," subtitled with a date of "05.28.2013," had already been performed four months before Butterfly's release, during the the long goodbye of "The Colbert Report" with help from Terrace Martin, Thundercat, Bilal, and Sonnymoon's Anna Wise. It's classic Kendrick—a reductive-yet-sprawling fever-chill of observations on race and the music industry that mixes stereotype with history and wisdom. It's insightful and uncomfortable, if not outright offensive: Asians are linked to Eastern philosophy, Native Americans to the land, Blacks to lust, whites to greed. It's also the collection's most fully-formed song; perhaps the only one that emerges as a finished thought here.
One of the most enchanting things about this project is hearing how Kendrick manipulates his own voice before the studio modulations kick in. His vocal tics and morphs have long been technologically-aided affairs, but on "untitled 02" he's full of elastic long tails—partially gleeful Lil Wayne, wholly sanctifying choir sinner. He's crying for his bosses—both Top Dawg and God—while lamenting urban addiction and dysfunction, and contemplating mortality. "World is going brazy/ Where did we go wrong?/ It's a tidal wave/ It's a thunderdome," he sing-raps, sounding half-possessed, half-saved. For the second half of the song, he includes the firestarter verse he performed in January on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon." But the scorching iteration of that live performance is nowhere here—he's laid-back and matter-of-fact, but his threat just as heavy: "I can put a rapper on life support/ Guarantee that's something none of you want."
At times Kendrick is joined by other voices—TDE's Jay Rock and Punch, and Wise (again) on "untitled 05," which sounds like a long jazz-groove session made just to find the best parts; Cee-Lo Green shows up over the bossa nova breeziness of Adrian Younge and Ali Shaheed Muhammed's "untitled 06"—but, much like TPAB, untitled unmastered. is unmistakably about Kendrick Lamar. The song he's jokingly creating on the back end of "untitled 07" shows up earlier as "untitled 04," and its refrain is "head is the answer/head is the future"—which may or may not be a multiple-entendre about sex, life and spirituality. Because Kendrick is so share-averse, goofy moments like these that would be filler on other projects have the revelatory power of a posthumous recording here. It's the kind of stuff you'd find out from other artists via their social media detritus—at the end of "untitled 02" he asks who's doing drums, sounding like a bona fide jazz cat complimenting Max Roach's stick work—but Kendrick has a verve for taking giant steps backwards into an era where masters let the music speak for itself. It all feels like a jazz project, but not just because he's using jazz music.
These numbers are packed with more information and moods than the 35-minute running time suggests. On "untitled 01" he dons his robes as God's servant, talking to the Supreme Being: "[You] told me to use my vocals to save mankind for you/ [Don't] say I didn't try for you, say I didn't ride for you, or tithe for you, or push the club to the side for you." (If the song's subtitles are indeed dates of conception, this one—"8.19.2014."—suggests that Kendrick was having conversations with God about the course of his album a full seven months before TPAB actually arrived.) In execution, untitled unmastered. is a complete inversion of Kanye West's recent The Life of Pablo—it's a small and quiet statement from an artist with little to prove at this moment. Its author tempts deeper reading, but his choices and the lack of entry points—no directional song titles, no grand proclamations, no promotion—leaving nothing to deal with but the music. As with TPAB, untitled unmastered. demands to be approached on its own terms, even when you don't know what those terms are. You can't say he didn't try for you, ride for you, or push the club to the side for you.


Garage-rock wunderkind Ty Segall's collaborative album with Tim Presley of White Fence is an absorbing maze of detours. They're the sort of people who seemingly enjoy pulling support beams out of songs to see how they hop along without them.

Hair

Garage-rock's secret recipe has always been one part loving memory to two parts imperfect recall. The best stuff misremembers what it enshrines, producing a jarring little chamber of echoes that plays upon beloved memories while confusing them-- I love this song/wait, is this how this song goes? Ty Segall and White Fence's Tim Presley are masters of garage-rock's indirection game; their collaborative album, Hair, is an absorbing, bleary maze of detours and red herrings. To hear them steer their demented little dune buggy through rock history is not unlike partaking in the American history lessons that Abe Simpson pieced together "mostly through sugar packets": All the familiar players are here, but they're acting funny.
The songs they write together -- Segall on drums and rhythm guitar, Presley on bass and lead-- are not anthems. They are puzzles built from rock-music parts, and you don't pump your fist to a puzzle. But they are peculiarly absorbing, and they only grow more so with repeated listening. In every song, there's a jump, an oomph, a missing-reel moment, in which a sudden left turn devours a song whole or a stray thread bumps everything off the designed course. The opener, "Time", eases its way into a sweetly evocative folk-rock strum, pitched so accurately you get instantly lost trying to track it: something from George Harrison's All Things Must Pass, maybe? But then, in its last minute, the song drops into a forceful blurt of fuzz guitars so abruptly that its tendons nearly snap. It's a bracing reminder that you are not, in fact, listening to George Harrison.
Segall and Presley are both tinkerers like this, the sort of people who seemingly enjoy pulling support beams out of their songs to see how well they hop along without them. Songs start somewhere rote and then slowly topple over before they end. "Easy Ryder" begins in a place so familiar that your ears dilate: a straight-ahead Ventures surf lick, a lazy drum shuffle, and lyrics intoning the title. But when the halfway-point guitar solo pop ups, on cue, it noodles away past its designated end, pecking determinedly away at the song until the relationship between the two begins to resemble this dynamic. "Scissor People" starts with a Yardbirds-style riff, but when it breaks down to a one-chord vamp, it keeps breaking down into smaller and blurrier parts, interrupting itself until it just bangs its head against a  corner repeatedly. It's a quizzical chaos, a cocktail of adrenaline and neurosis.
Some of this schizophrenia stems from Segall and Presley's differing temperaments. As White Fence, Presley tends to be sleepier and more abstracted; Segall's music is wilder and unconstrained. Their union feels intriguingly unstable: You can almost pinpoint the moment on the narcotized psych-folk ballad "The Black Glove/Rag" where Segall grows restless with the song's tempo and wrests control of it, steering it into a field of tires. They are interesting enough together that the stuff that sounds like it took 20 total minutes to cook up and record (the hiccuping rockabilly of "Crybaby") glows with their singular weirdness. At eight songs and under half an hour, Hair is short, but full of enough odd little fillips-- the creepy whispers that open "The Black Glove/Rag", the stumbling, quasi-solemn "1-2-3-4" countdown that opens "Time"-- that it feels like a world. Given the incestuous, collaborative nature of the San Francisco psych-rock playground, it's likely that these two will make more music together. I hope they never figure each other out completely.


After two attempts on his life in seven months, the rapper Young Dolph has simply gotten back to work. His latest is a brisk, blunt album with tremendous features from Gucci Mane and 2 Chainz.

Thinking Out Loud

It’s a wonder Young Dolph made it out of Charlotte. On the night of February 25, Dolph was sitting in an SUV on the 600 block of North Caldwell Street, in the city’s First Ward. At about 6:30 p.m., shots rang out: dozens and dozens, hitting cars and buildings and pavement and metal. Dolph was the target. He walked away unscathed; authorities eventually recovered as many as 100 bullet casings from the scene. Five weeks later, an album, Bulletproof, was out. The tracklist spelled out a response: “100 Shots in Charlotte, But I’m Bulletproof So Fuk’em, That’s How I Feel, All of Them, I’m So Real I Pray for My Enemies, I’m Everything You Wanna Be. SMH.”
Bulletproof was not the best piece of Dolph’s catalog—this critic would argue for the similarly brief King of Memphis, from 2016—but it was close. And it was certainly his most vicious release, from Zaytoven and Cassius Jay’s preposterous drums on “I Pray for My Enemies” to the chillingly concise biography on “I’m Everything You Wanna Be.” Not all of it was overtly about the North Carolina shooting, but the parts that were looked at death and cackled: “How the fuck you miss a whole hundred shots?” At one point, he mentions that since the shooting, he’d been listening to nothing but Pac.
Last month, gunmen targeted Dolph again. This time, they didn’t miss. After a scuffle outside a Hollywood hotel, he was shot multiple times in the torso; he was taken to the hospital, initially in critical condition, but he survived and recovered. It’s hard to extricate these incidents from Dolph’s musical career. Both of the shootings were later connected to fellow rappers: a friend of sworn enemy Yo Gotti was charged with attempted murder in the Hollywood shooting, and another Memphis rapper, Blac Youngsta, turned himself in in connection to Charlotte.
Dolph’s status as a still-living human being is remarkable, but for the most part, Thinking Out Loud doesn’t treat it as such. It’s tantalizingly tunnel-visioned. In fact, the new album recalls a line from early on King of Memphis: “Since I was 17, I ain’t been able to get no rest.” After two attempts on his life in seven months, Dolph has one-upped his would-be assailants by simply getting back to work.
The album hits its stride in its middle section: the Mike WiLL Made-It- and 30 Roc-produced “Drippy” is thick with paranoia, and when Dolph raps “You a peasant, you cannot come near me,” he hits “peasant” so ferociously that it sounds like a real threat. That song, paired with “Believe Me,” makes for a two-track suite that feels less like the middle of a rap album than a conflicted fever dream. Dolph is a blunt writer and a uniformly direct vocalist; he can be laugh-out-loud funny, but he undersells nearly everything. He tends to organize his songs around an easily reducible thought or topic, but the verses themselves lurch from thought to thought. Beats like the ones he receives here are the ideal setting for Dolph’s plaintive style.
Thinking Out Loud is mostly a solo affair, but the guest turns are tremendous. On “Go Get Sum Mo,” Gucci Mane sounds fascinatingly like he did in the early Obama years, as if molasses is dripping from his mouth and he were carrying and extra 70 pounds. And even from his laconic pocket, he’s in turn outrapped by 2 Chainz, who compares himself to a sea creature and wears Dolce & Gabbana to bed.
There’s no question, though, that the album’s crown jewel is its closing song, “While U Here.” Instead of meditating on his own mortality, Dolph turns the focus outward, fretting about his parents, his incarcerated little brother, the cancer that’s overtaking his best friend’s mom. He visits his grandmother’s grave and mulls over what kind of example he can set for his son; he asks himself, “Do I think too hard, or do I think enough?” It’s the kind of personal inventory you take when you come face-to-face with death. But instead of retreating into personal myth-making, it’s made Dolph even more empathetic for those around him. Thinking Out Loud is a brisk, rewarding listen—it’s the psychological heft that sneaks up on you at the end.


Teen Daze's earliest work was lumped in with chillwave, but through releases like All of Us Together, the rhythms started to become the focal point of his productions. Frontman Jamison's singing is the center point of Morning World, and it sounds like nothing else in his catalog.

Morning World

Teen Daze has an on-and-off relationship with the dancefloor. It makes sense: the artist known otherwise as Jamison (he uses only his first name professionally) lives in the Fraser Valley, an exurb of Vancouver that isn't exactly known for a clubbing scene, and it's far enough away from its larger neighbor that you'd probably need a hotel room to bother going out. His earliest work was lumped in with chillwave, but through releases like All of Us, Together, the rhythms started to become the focal point of his productions, leading him to play club sets and even DJ occasionally. But melody has always been Jamison's strong suit, which has lent his dance-oriented work a heart-on-sleeve quality that's more Tycho than techno. It also means that his time spent away from the drum machines—like 2013's delicate Glacier—have been the best showcases for his songwriting. And now, with Morning World, Jamison finds his voice. Picking up a guitar (and a studio full of other instruments), he plays, plucks, and sings his heart out for his best record yet.
Following a number of turbulent life changes, Jamison travelled down to San Francisco to work with John Vanderslice, who helps imbue Morning World with indie rock's warm, analog glow. It sounds almost nothing like previous Teen Daze material. Only Jamison's fluttery songwriting remains, and the new style puts his pleasant idiosyncrasies into sharper focus. Instead of pirouetting synths and daydream melodies, Jamison's singing is the center point of Morning World. His voice is wonderfully meek and boyish, with shades of Ben Gibbard and Doug Martsch in his soft, clearly enunciated delivery. It's a great match for the baroque sound he's built with Vanderslice, which feels ornate and well-appointed without reaching for the ostentatious.
While the meat of Morning World is largely string instruments and drums, Jamison's nostalgic synths play an important part, always lurking in the background. Synths swirl underneath the title track, giving it the childlike lilt of hauntology practitioners like the Advisory Circle, and add vivid color between the lines on upbeat highlight "Life in the Sea". The latter is an ode to swimming that underlines the album's core theme: an appreciation of the simple things around you. Two of the album's tracks, including opener "Valley of Gardens", paint verdant pictures: "I've come to watch the flowers as they grow/ Another chance to feel how little I know/ And another morning spent no feeling alone."
Those lyrics highlight a naïveté that's been core to Teen Daze since Jamison was young, which makes his romantic songwriting feel as earnest as a Postal Service song. It comes to a head on the LP's climax, "Infinity", which is one of his most touching songs yet, breaking out into a soaring coda where he repeats "Let me stay a little longer/ I can find my way back home." In the wake of the breakup of a long-term relationship that preceded Morning World, it's an elegant refrain that packs an adolescent's world of emotion into one loaded phrase.
When Jamison isn't being so direct, the album falters: "You Said" is a blandly casual instrumental that feels like treading water (think "Flying" from Magical Mystery Tour), while "Post Storm" goes for epic but ends up dawdling through its hefty six minutes. Those signs suggest that Jamison might still be working to reconcile his singer-songwriter direction with his many past selves, but he sounds remarkably assured for the rest of it. More importantly, he sounds like himself more than ever—which makes Morning World Jamison's most captivating and personal album yet.


The band’s eighth full-length is undoubtedly their strongest since Writer’s Block, with a renewed focus on eclecticism and sweet melodies.

Darker Days

There’s a bitter irony that Peter Bjorn and John’s legacy, as it stands, orbits around one song—particularly since the album that song came from 2006’s stellar Writer’s Block, found the Swedish trio proving they were capable of so much more. Writer’s Block comprised the sort of try-anything-once abandon that indie rock often exhibited throughout the 2000s, and treated various sounds within the sub-genre like a wardrobe stuffed with costumes, nimbly hopping from shoegaze-y guitars and wistful expansiveness to spare, narcotized pop and handclap-dotted strum-alongs without so much as batting an eyelash. It showcased a greater range than suggested by their previous efforts—the band’s self-titled debut from 2002 and 2004’s Falling Out, two equally solid guitar-pop albums—and the adventurousness stuck with them, at least for a little while.
Their immediate follow-up, Seaside Rock, was comprised entirely of shifting, slight instrumentals, and 2009’s Living Thing found the band’s sound taking on a slightly darker shape with clattering percussion, dirty guitar lines, and creaking atmospherics. These stylistic left-turns were more interesting than they were enjoyable, and in the long run, they’ve proved slightly more memorable than the band’s last two albums, 2011’s back-to-basics attempt Gimme Some and the collab-loaded Breakin’ Point from 2016. Despite contributions from pop power players like Greg Kurstin and Emile Haynie, Breakin’ Point represented an indistinct low point in Peter Bjorn and John’s catalogue— which is precisely why Darker Days is such a nice surprise. The band’s eighth full-length is undoubtedly their strongest since Writer’s Block, with a renewed focus on eclecticism and a handful of melodies just sweet enough without necessitating an emergency dentist appointment.
Curiously, the dusky melodies and off-kilter arrangements of Darker Days most closely recall Living Thing, a moody record that practically radiated the tension that accompanies following up a zeitgeist-grabbing moment. But Darker Days undoubtedly benefits from being free of such pressures; following the five-year period of creative gestation that was Breakin’ Point, the trio wrote, recorded, and self-produced this record in relatively quick fashion—a low-stakes approach that pays off dividends. The record’s highlights are steeped in the sounds of Swedish indie-pop that dominated indie in the late 2000s; the rubbery bassline of “Gut Feeling” pleasingly smacks of defunct Swedes Love Is All’s indelible “Felt Tip,” while the chunky guitars and soft vocals of “Every Other Night” sounds like the type of cloudy confection the Drums’ Jonny Pierce—another practical disciple of storied labels like Labrador and Sincerely Yours—writes in his sleep.
The stylistic left-turns taken on Darker Days are more hit-or-miss than the songs that explicitly recall the band’s native origins. “Dark Ages” cuts a striking figure with a level of swagger not unlike a James Bond theme, while the nearly nine-minute closer “Heaven and Hell” quietly radiates its own beauty via John Eriksson’s lovely vocal delivery and patient percussive build; but single “Wrapped Around the Axle” aims for a shimmying, mid-tempo groove and instead goes limp, and the turgid “Silicon Valley Blues” finds Peter Morén taking lead vocal duties to bemoan the digital intrusions of modern life. Like so many technophobic rock and pop songs over the last few years, it’s a little cringe-worthy to hear him namecheck George Orwell and rail against data-collecting nemeses over a pitter-patter beat and washes of guitar— but it’s also surprising, and indicative of the fact that even Darker Days’ most glaring missteps go a long way towards renewing interest in what Peter Bjorn and John are up to these days.


The hyper-prolific rapper with an endless number of YouTube freestyles finds a new focus and crafts his most accessible album.

I'm Gay (I'm Happy)

It's possible not even Lil B knows how much music he's released in the past four years. Spend 15 minutes trying to sort out how much he's made in the past four months and you'll feel in your stomach just how deep the Internet goes. More than any other musician, the Bay Area rapper has adapted his creative behavior to resemble the rippling action of your RSS feed-- an unceasing, pellet-dispenser flow of new content.
It's a self-contained musical universe, located at the vanishing point on the "all-or-nothing" spectrum, and its cult of faithful has been steadily building to the point where the mainstream rap industry has been forced to contend with him. The result was a hip-hop comedy of manners: as XXL included him on their Freshmen 2011 list alongside industry non-entities like Mac Miller and Lil Twist and Lupe Fiasco publicly congratulated himself for "getting it," B basically continued whistling his tune, collaborating with Lil Wayne and Jean Grae and Tony Yayo and rapping over How to Dress Well instrumentals. And then he announced at Coachella he was going to name his next album I'm Gay.
With this single statement, Lil B calmly detonated a flower-power land mine in the center of what is arguably rap's most tortured, combustible political arena. Whatever his motivations (it probably had something to do with his philosophy of universal acceptance and self-love, but his manifestos don't survive close analysis), he guaranteed that the album's audience would be exponentially larger than anything he'd done before.
I'm Gay appeared on iTunes last week, and by convenience or design, it's his most coherent, cohesive, and accessible single release to date. His followers may debate whether Rain in England or 6 Kiss or Illusions of Grandeur or Bitch Mob: Respect Da Bitch is better (Lil B has a flair for titles), but for the uninitiated, I'm Gay does a great job of articulating his ethos and appeal in the space of one album. If you're intrigued by Lil B but shrink from the commitment of keeping pace with a human data stream, it might be the only record you'll ever need.
That's not to say that I'm Gay contains all of Lil B's personae. The album finds him securely in his dazed, child-like observer mode, where he peers at the world as if for the first time and wonders aloud. He has many other faces-- occasional boom-bap traditionalist, tweaker of boom-bap traditionalism, uncomfortably personal YouTube diarist-- but this side is easily B's most relatable and endearing. The production, by frequent collaborators Clams Casino, 9th Wonder, and others, reinforces the mood of naive reverie: "Gon Be Okay" samples an orchestral flourish from the soundtrack to Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, while "Unchain Me" is built on a loop of "Cry Little Sister" from The Lost Boys soundtrack. "I Hate Myself" is a woozy, pitched-down loop of Goo Goo Doll's "Iris" in which the drums hit like down pillows. You're unlikely to find a more guileless or gentle hip-hop record this year.
Lil B's stream-of-consciousness lyrical approach remains uniquely suited to this sort of cosmic contemplation. Composing your thoughts on the fly has obvious downsides, and Lil B's YouTube channel is littered with examples of times he hit "record" and the muse failed to follow. But here, he's consistently focused and has a knack for articulating universal sentiments in seemingly artless wording: I can't think of anyone else who could say things like, "The people die for a piece of paper, it's so stupid" or "If God's real, then why'd my friend have to die?" or "Don't wanna go to school because the teacher's too simple/ I just wanna know where I come from, just tell me," and prompt contemplation instead of laughs.
But then, reproducing lines like these in print doesn't do them justice. Lil B's music draws on spontaneity as its wellspring; you hear him stumble, pause for breath, abandon a line of thought and start over. So when he happens across a searing image like "Mental slavery/ Niggas hangin off trees in the woods," and roams his way to "I'm nicer than Grandma with a cup of iced tea" a few lines later, there's a charge of discovery in the air-- the conviction that you're hearing music and expression being born raw.
"I'm ready to give up/My old thoughts...Everything I seen was a lie/I'm not ready to die/I love myself" he declares on "I Hate Myself," a vague but powerful manifesto that suggests why Lil B has inspired such fervent devotion. He projects fearlessness, which can take many forms: it can mean deciding to name your rap album "I'm Gay" out of thin air. (The subtitled "I'm Happy" was a deflating backward step, it's true, but it was hard to get riled considering how little motivation he had to choose the name I'm Gay in the first place). It can also mean posting the album for free to your quarter-million Twitter followers hours after it was made available for purchase. It can mean sharing every half-baked scrap and warty throwaway you record, trusting your fans to decide what's worth keeping. So while I'm Gay isn't a definitive statement, it is an especially compelling point on a bizarre trajectory, one that feels worth keeping around.


DRINKS is the project of Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon and White Fence's Tim Presley. Rather than merge their respective psych sensibilities, they've stripped away the pop fabric to muck around in primitive territory, recasting themselves as outsiders. Hermits on Holiday is spontaneous and free-form, but it rarely lapses into the stuff of jam-band nightmares.

Hermits on Holiday

Cate Le Bon has cut an imperious figure across her three solo albums. Her strong Welsh accent puts her at a curious remove, and she allows the guitars and organs that shape her songs to thrash, but only within strictly drawn boundaries, like Television riffs remade as repeating patterns. Her music has the sense of being just so, which seems to be in her nature: 2013's Mug Museum governed memory as a clearly labeled archive.
Le Bon moved to L.A. to make that album, enlisting White Fence touring member Nick Murray on drums. Two years later, she's teamed up with his bandmate Tim Presley as DRINKS, a collaboration (that they'd rather bill as a four-legged solo project) born of a lot of time spent "playing guitar and laughing manically at each other." Rather than merge their respective psych sensibilities, they've stripped away the pop fabric—White Fence's dusky harmonies, Le Bon's delicate organ refrains—to muck around in primitive territory, recasting themselves as outsiders.
As consummate musicians and students of pop, Le Bon and Presley aren't able to revert to Shaggs-like naivete, but they're able to suspend their aesthetes' sensibility in order to embrace chaos, even silliness. There's unmistakable precedent to the sound where they meet, the dub inflections and buzzing guitar welts. Hermits evokes the captivating disconnect of a late-'70s John Peel show, where the Slits and Delta 5 segued into Strictly Personal-era Beefheart's blues-pop abstractions—you half expect to hear Ivor Cutler pop up to recite a poem in between tracks.
Opener "Laying Down the Rock" is a bit of a red herring. It's the most formed song here, a shaggy but highly strung garage plodder that doesn't shine with the wonder of discovery. “Focus on the Street”, though, begins a process of stretching rock's fabric loose. The verse runs on an insistent buzzsaw riff and clipped vocal incantations, the picture of no-wave austerity. Where the duo should break into some kind of lambasting, art-damaged chorus, they drift into hairy freeform guitar, like hippies pranking a White Columns crowd. "Cannon Mouth" sounds like Le Bon impersonating Nico through a snorkel; "She Walks So Fast" remakes Faust's "Picnic on a Frozen River, Deuxième Tableaux" as splayed British post-punk, Presley yelping "rock'n'roll!" amidst the burly twang.
True to its creation, humor courses through Hermits, and rescues a few outlandish moments. "Tim, Do I Like That Dog" is almost seven minutes of Le Bon repeatedly asking Presley just that, bringing levity to the frankly hard-going music: strangled guitar scribble that thins to a single piercing note. The few audible lyrics that leap out elsewhere are funny, too, if completely inscrutable. The title track sounds like a reedy cuckoo clock, and marks times such as "Six past the eight—copulate." A glance at the muddled liner notes makes it seem like "Cannon Mouth" could be a song about austerity politics, privilege, and protest ("If you don't know what I'm on about/ Then you'll never want to scream and shout"), but Le Bon and Presley never make anything obvious. Only "Cheerio" veers too far into the unknown, stranding the listener among shrill proto-synth explorations.
Most of Hermits on Holiday is pretty spontaneous and free-form, but it rarely lapses into the stuff of jam-band nightmares. An interviewer recently asked Le Bon and Presley whether they intended Hermits to be a psych album. "I don't even know what those words mean anymore," Le Bon replied. Instead, the pair play like kids trying to light a fire with sticks and flint: there's a distant possibility something might take, but really it's all about the thrill of scrubbing around in the dirt.


Following the recent rediscovery of his 1975 album Valley of Search, the saxophonist releases a quintet set of all-new compositions that nod to jazz history while rocketing off to points unknown.

The Fire Still Burns

For crate-digging devotees of underground jazz, the 2018 rediscovery of saxophonist Alan Braufman’s 1975 album Valley of Search was an exciting development. Sparked by Braufman’s nephew (and Pitchfork contributor) Nabil Ayers, the reissue—originally recorded in the Tribeca loft Braufman shared with other musicians—added a small but vital piece to the puzzle of ’70s New York jazz. Braufman’s energetic quartet, including pianist and loftmate Gene Ashton, now known as Cooper-Moore, produced high-octane music, firing out each track in a single take.
But it turns out the Valley of Search reissue wasn’t the most exciting result of Ayers’ uncle-prodding. Not long after its release, Braufman, who moved to Utah in the ’90s, played with Cooper-Moore for the first time in decades, and Ayers suggested they make a new album. Braufman had spent the intervening years touring with other groups (including stints with Philip Glass and Psychedelic Furs) and recording as Alan Michael, but this would be just his second record under his own name. Brainstorming during commutes to his teaching gig at Utah State University, he quickly concocted a set of songs and assembled a quintet with Cooper-Moore’s help. They recorded The Fire Still Burns in a single day last September, at an upstate New York studio owned by the National.
As good as Valley of Search is, The Fire Still Burns is bigger and better. While Braufman and Cooper-Moore’s first album hinted at different modes, it dealt mostly in outward-bound free jazz. But here they weave many stylistic strands into a whirlwind performance. Brain-sticking hooks skid into impulsive sprints; moments of abandon build to straight-up swing. At times the group rockets away completely, only to hurtle back into grounded rhythms and repetitive vamps. The result is a sturdy suite that nods vigorously toward jazz history while sounding as fresh and immediate as a concert happening right in front of you.
That combination is captured best in “Home,” which Braufman wrote on a piano in just 20 minutes. It’s an instant classic centered on a huge hook that feels ripped from a lost ’60’s Impulse or Blue Note long-player. Opening with that riff over bassist Ken Filiano’s bowed strings, Braufman and tenor saxophonist James Brandon Lewis quickly ignite; when Andrew Drury’s insistent drumming lifts it, the group takes full flight. Along the way, Cooper-Moore’s piano chords flit around the rising horn figure, making “Home” feel both dizzyingly overwhelming and fundamentally reassuring. It blows you away, then catches your fall.
“Home” would be a big achievement on its own, but on The Fire Still Burns, no single tune exists in its own vacuum. Impeccably sequenced, with subtle fade-outs and hardly any pause between tracks, it plays like an eight-part suite (an effect inspired by Brafuman’s favorite Don Cherry albums, which he notes featured “tunes [that] didn’t stop, they evolve”). The thematic consistency comes mostly from group’s enthusiastic energy, allowing them to flow from the ceremonial piano strains of “Morning Bazaar” into the Ornette Coleman-like twists of “No Floor No Ceiling,” and from the loose, wandering title track into the syncopated funk of “City Nights.” Their vigor is so strong, it even turns the nearly saccharine ballad “Alone Again” into a sort of howling prayer, due purely to the collective heat of their tireless playing.
Perhaps that heat is what Braufman means when he says The Fire Still Burns. If so, it’s a convincing claim: He and Cooper-Moore haven’t lost any intensity in five decades, and their quintet sparks from the first note and never dampens. As flames engulf America in many ways, the title has added significance; like the ’60s jazz it echoes, Braufman’s music reflects turbulent times and impassioned resistance. But even with its many reference points, The Fire Still Burns shines a light all its own, fueled by unbowed creative minds.

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Teens of Style is the Matador debut of Will Toledo, a young songwriter who blends the cracked pop oddity of Guided by Voices with the emotional directness of Belle and Sebastian. His lyrics are rapaciously intelligent and self-aware, but he never lets his prodigious literary intelligence get in the way of crafting enjoyably off-kilter, anthemic rock songs.

Teens of Style

Will Toledo isn't old, but he's feeling his age. He's in debt; his friends are getting married; his hands are frozen; he's stuck in the city; and worst of all, his songs are starting to sound the same. The world is moving past him, blurring into formlessness, and his music as Car Seat Headrest is an attempt to slow down and make sense of the rush.
Teens of Style is technically a compilation, comprising songs dating back to 2011 that were re-recorded for his Matador debut. (Teens of Denial, a planned 2016 release, will be his first Matador album of entirely new material.) You can hear the revised sound as a composite of the label's history: Guided by Voices' ear for cracked pop oddities, Belle and Sebastian's emotional directness, Yo La Tengo's intimate approach to jamming, Stephen Malkmus' ability to get wordy without forgetting to rock out. As a songwriter, Toledo is both present and detached, capable of living in a moment while floating above it. A self-summarization comes on the brawny "Strangers", when he deadpans a series of autobiographical quips: "Car seat is a menace to the public," "Car seat is a genetic stop sign," "Car seat's nervous and the lights are bright."
On that song, we find out the young Toledo fell in love with Michael Stipe: "I took lyrics out of context and thought, 'he must be speaking to me.'" His confusion over purposefully abstract lyrics may have turned him into a literalist, someone endeavoring to explain every twist and turn of his interior state. His lyrics are rapaciously intelligent, with a knack for wry humor. Take a lyrical adjustment on the new recordings, for example, that reflects the shift in his life status: "Times to Die" swaps a couplet about sneaking his way to musical success into a meditation on the existence of a higher power, like God or (even better) Matador founder Chris Lombardi ("Got to have faith in the one above me/ Got to believe that Lombardi loves me"), who will help decide whether or not Toledo is destined to be a cult hero.
Teens of Style has a noticeably jagged quality; unbelievably, it used to sound even DIY-ier. (The original versions can be found on Car Seat's Bandcamp.) The new recordings retain their rough edge, but there's luminescence in the production—the percussion is crisper, the guitars are brighter, and Toledo's singing is a lot more pronounced. The effect is an album that's bookish, but not sedentary. He sells abstruse metaphors and lyrical concepts with every ounce of himself, like failing to do so would mean the end of the world. In this way, he's a cousin of artists like Joanna Newsom, Bright Eyes, or Okkervil River, who never let their prodigious literary intelligence get in the way of crafting something you might actually enjoy listening to.
To (sort of) quote Brandon Flowers: He's human and rocker. The existential despair of "Something Soon" is crystallized in a blown-out chorus, while he uses a hypnotic keyboard line to make the haunting "Maud, You're Gone" a prom song for moody kids. A spectral choir comes through a radio at the start of "Sunburned Shirts" before breaking into a scratchy pop gem, like George Harrison on anti-depressants ("I haven't looked at the sun for so long/ I forgot how much it hurt to"). Toledo's voice is weary, and carries a shred of desperation—he sounds like a third-generation cassette tape recording of Julian Casablancas (who, otherwise, is his complete opposite as a frontman).
Earlier this month, I went to a Car Seat Headrest show held as part of the annual CMJ Music Marathon, where dozens of bands go to make their reputations. But Toledo began the set lying on the floor, with his microphone angled toward the ground, as the band launched into "The Ending of Dramamine", a 14-minute epic where he references Modest Mouse and sings about only thinking about himself. If you weren't standing right at the stage, you couldn't see him. The words flowed from the void, sung by someone so overwhelmed by the moment he would rather disappear. I couldn't absorb them all at once but what I remember is the crowd standing on their toes, edging their way forward, hoping to catch a glimpse. Then, he stood up.


Vampire Weekend return with a shaggy, sprawling double album all about rebirth, contentment, and the reclamation of light.

Father of the Bride

From the beginning, Vampire Weekend were winners: charming, relatively lighthearted; Columbia students one year, festival headliners the next. They had cute sweaters and smart jokes; they wrote with wit and curiosity about the tapestry of privileged life; they carried themselves with an almost infuriating sparkle. But they were also manic, weird, and provocatively cross-cultural, mixing up digital dancehall and string sections, Latin punk and raga in ways that didn’t quite fit. And despite their superficial politeness, there was something deeply antagonistic about them, the vestigial bite of suburban kids who grew up loving punk and hardcore but never quite felt entitled to its anger, the indie-rock band bent on breaking up the monopoly rock held over guitar-based music.
In time, they grew bigger, denser, more serious. Their third and last album, 2013’s Modern Vampires of the City, felt almost haunted, every line crammed with allusion, every space stuffed with weird, processed sounds. Even the silences crackled with old life, a poster on a city street stripped away to reveal the fragment of poster underneath. It felt, appropriately, like the band’s then-home of New York, a place where you can’t take a walk around the block without feeling like you’re bothering the dead.
Frontman Ezra Koenig relocated to Los Angeles, made an animated series for Netflix (Neo Yokio) and became a parent; Rostam Batmanglij—the band’s Swiss Army knife and in-house producer—worked with Carly Rae Jepsen and Charli XCX, leaving Vampire Weekend in 2016 to work on solo music; the band has lived inside a pregnant pause. Now we have Father of the Bride—a looser, broader album than Modern Vampires, the great sigh after a long holding of breath. There are still moments of conflict, but in general, you get the sense the band is just relieved to have run the gauntlet of their existential doubts and come out relatively unscathed, grateful to be here. A glass of wine? Why not. Make it white, and if you’ve got it, a little ice.
The music (produced again in part by Modern Vampires collaborator Ariel Rechtshaid, with a few cameos by Batmanglij) is accordingly sunny, celebratory, redolent at times of country, ABBA, lounge music (“My Mistake”) and Brazilian jazz (“Flower Moon”) and the barefoot exultations of Van Morrison (“This Life”). Just as indie bands like Pavement cautiously resuscitated the ’70s rock that came before them, Vampire Weekend have resuscitated—or recolonized, you could say—the multicultural boomer sounds of the ’90s, when bands like the Gipsy Kings and the Chieftains moved into the American market, when the Indigo Girls and Rusted Root helped constellate a folksy alternative to the punk-derived sound of “alternative music.”
In the past, the band tended to rely on unusual juxtapositions; here they present their sound more like a compilation, a set of cultural presets calibrated to induce nostalgia, revulsion, historical reconsideration. (Hey, you, remember Tevas? Peace Frogs? Papyrus?) The message is sincere, but the sound bristles with intellectual awareness, the protection you wear when wading into bad taste. “There’s always been that part of me [where] I see people beating up on something and I just wanna be like, ‘What’s really going on here?’” Koenig said on a recent episode of his online radio show, Time Crisis. For years, Vampire Weekend have implicitly threatened—in their perverse, contrarian, head-of-the-class way—to sound like Phish; Father marks the moment the threat becomes a promise.
For a band historically obsessed by the manmade world, its technology, its culture, and its flood of proper nouns, Father is relatively naturalistic, less reference-heavy and confined to its head. Several of the songs (“Hold You Now,” “Married in a Gold Rush,” “We Belong Together”) are literal duets between Koenig and Haim’s Danielle Haim—the sound not of one person thinking it through but two people hashing it out, of yin slowly reconciling itself to yang. Themes include spring, rebirth, a shedding of old skin, and reclamation of light; at one point, we return to the garden (“Sunflower”); at another, we hear the lullaby of crickets (“Big Blue”).
Of course, the garden—that fertile, innocent place we dwelled before civilization led us astray—is and has always been a fantasy, and home is never home again after one leaves. There are times when the universality of Father of the Bride feels forced, the sound of a restless mind repeatedly telling itself to relax, the paradoxical effort people make in the name of loosening up. Koenig said he wanted to try to write songs where a listener didn’t have to do too much legwork to figure out who might be singing them; to be clear, immediate, to conjure the myth of Ordinary People—you know, like country music.
But Vampire Weekend have never been that legible, nor is being legible any better than being a little obscure. More than anything, Father makes me think of something like Bob Dylan circa Self Portrait and New Morning: The sound of an artist trying to backpedal, in a fascinating, sometimes antagonistic way, on the gravity they had worked so hard to cultivate. “I think I take myself too serious,” guest guitarist Steve Lacy mutters at the beginning of “Sympathy.” “It’s not that serious.” Fair enough, but you can’t say a precedent wasn’t set. Nor could you deny that the song that follows—a violent, gothy piece of flamenco that features a club-jazz breakdown and ends in a hail of heavy-metal drums—is the most absurdly serious piece of music here, and incidentally, one of the best.
Father is the first time they’ve sounded overlong, the first time they haven’t sounded almost incandescently vital, but that doesn’t mean they’ve stopped moving; if anything, with the exception of “Rich Man”—a lilting nursery rhyme that mixes a Celtic reel with a sample of the amazing Sierra Leonean palm-wine singer S.E. Rogie—the music here is as big of a step away from Modern Vampires as Modern Vampires was from Contra. In tow come the Grateful Dead–style guitar solos (“Harmony Hall”), the summer-camp singalongs (“We Belong Together”), the Beatles-y meditations on cosmic insignificance (“Big Blue”). Exhausted by big questions, they’ve consigned themselves to tiny reminders; once almost comically buttoned up, they have ventured, conditionally, to let it all hang out—a gesture as proportionally life-giving, indulgent, and periodically goofy as you’d expect.
Generally speaking, happiness doesn’t make for great art; at the very least, it isn’t as combustible as misery, desire, or any other feeling rooted in what we lack rather than what we have. Listening to Father of the Bride, I hear songs of contentment sung by people who have tended to feel agitated, songs of belonging by people who have tended to feel as though they don’t belong. I miss the restlessness of Contra, the grandeur of Modern Vampires, the way the band used to sound anxious and self-examining about their privilege but now seem oblivious. Still, it takes a certain kind of bravery to feel the weight of lightness, to admit that things are okay. “I used to freeze on the dancefloor, I watched the icebergs from the shore,” Koenig sings on “Stranger,” “But you got the heat on, kettle screaming/Don’t need to freeze anymore.” Corny, but that’s life sometimes. And with that, the wallflower peels away from the wall and starts to dance.


A traditional, once-suppressed style from La Réunion, a small island off the coast of Madagascar, meets the electronic music of the 21st century.

Various Artists: Digital Kabar: Electronic Maloya From La Réunion Since 1980

Digital Kabar

Emanating from the tiny French island La Réunion, nestled some 500 miles off the coast of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, maloya dates back to the 17th century. Made by the slaves working the island’s sugar plantations, the music only began to be recognized by Réunionese society in the 20th century. But in the 1960s, a turn towards pro-independence and communist lyrics—not to mention its use in trance-inducing servis kabaré ceremonies, which the Catholic Church disapproved of—led to the prohibition of the style. When it emerged again in the 1980s, acts like Ziskanan and Ti Fock presented a more digestible iteration of that sound, which got picked up by western labels. But in the 21st century, artists like Christine Salem and Danyèl Waro have broadened the appeal of maloya, while Jako Maron has used modular synths and drum machines to both modernize and scuff up the form, stripping it back to its spiky, percussive essence. Maron’s 2018 tape for Uganda’s Nyege Nyege label helped spread greater awareness of maloya far from the island.
Maron appears three times on Digital Kabar: Electronic Maloya From La Réunion Since 1980, a wide-ranging 18-track set of older material and exclusive tracks that shows just how technology has altered the traditional sound of the island. Previously released on The Electro Maloya Experiments of Jako Maron, “Batbaté Maloya” strikes a midway point between Pan Sonic and charming drum-machine sputters, the ancillary buzz slowly throwing a pall over the entire track. As a producer for the hip-hop group Force Indigène, Maron blends together twanging strings and squalls of feedback. And his remix of drummer Patrick Manent’s “Kabaré Atèr” is as spare as can be. Rooting the mix  in vocal chants and relentless drums, he brusquely chops and loops the vocals into a jostling call-and-response, with a menacing dose of acid bass infiltrating the threshing rhythms of the hand percussion. Rather than intensify and add layers, at the midway point, Maron cuts the electronics out, leaving the drums and voice to tussle, a rare instance of a remixer extracting themselves from the music.
Elsewhere, the set shows a plethora of artists moving away from the template, showing how the music naturally mutates the further it roams. In Berlin, the shakers and synth bass underpinning Alex Barck’s rework of Christine Salem’s “Oh Africa” percolate and carefully build to sweet dancefloor dopamine release. Barck, a member of Germany’s Sonar Kollektiv, is wise to foreground the evocative grain of Salem’s voice rather than overpower it with his own programming. Same with the stirring remix of Maya Kamaty’s “Pandiyé,” adding tumbling hand drums and her layered vocals until it achieves liftoff.
Such reworkings of maloya don’t always fare so well. Do Moon’s update of Ti Fock’s 1985 track “Kom Lé Long” veers dangerously close to breezy house tropes, mixing marimba and kick drum until the vocals feel like an afterthought. The loungey downtempo dub of “Mahavel” comes across as velvety wallpaper, while Boogzbrown & Cubenx’s hectic “Butcha” gets shot through with a ludicrous array of laser effects, as if hunting for the birds chirping throughout the track. La Réunion’s indigenous feathered species are better served on L’abuse’s “Ré-Union.” The expansive centerpiece of the set, it’s a gently cresting slice of 124-bpm ambient house, the bird calls and handclaps judiciously mixed with wordless vocals and piano. Fragrant as it is, the track unceremoniously cuts out after 13 minutes.
In the clash of traditional and futuristic, ancestral and electronic, Kabar brings to mind heady fusions like Shangaan electro, gqom, and batida that are sprouting up across the African continent and diaspora. Too often on this compilation, though, the remixers risk drowning out maloya’s  fiery, vital message. As the singer Firmin Viry once said, “It is the cry of the people.”


This collab between the fun-loving Boston rapper Michael Christmas and the fractious IDM producer Prefuse 73 has flashes of fun and brilliance, but their styles are often incompatible.

Lady Parts

Michael Christmas and Prefuse 73 are both fringe rap in different senses. The Boston rapper Christmas took an unconventional path to niche web stardom bottling Superbad awkwardness on “Michael Cera,” which prefaced a breakout mixtape cheekily titled Is This Art?. As Prefuse 73, Guillermo Scott Herren has spent much of the last 15 years making IDM out of rap fragments, living at the edge of both genres. (Herren once had a day job making what he’s called “prehistoric trap beats,” which he hated.) His best rap artifact remains his Warp debut, Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives, a constantly breaking record that took swatches of sound from songs by Nas and ODB and let them glitch, like trying to tune an FM radio to a late ’90s rap station during a hurricane.
Christmas and Prefuse aren’t a match most would peg as a dream collaboration. Prefuse’s fractured style is more fit for off-beat swaggering of MF DOOM or the cranny-filling wordplay of Aesop Rock, both of whom were guests on Vocal Studies. And Christmas’ relatable stand-up act is better suited for warmer productions. He didn’t even know who Prefuse 73 was before they were put in a room together. But Prefuse’s more traditional flirtations with rap suggested that the pairing could not only work but even be engaging. At the behest of Christmas’ label, Lex Records, the two joined forces as Fudge for Lady Parts, a collaborative record that attempts to find common ground and marry their sounds somewhere at their outer limits. But despite a valiant effort from both, it’s a record that sounds better in theory than in practice.
Lady Parts isn’t an ideal entry point for either, nor is it their best work; they contort themselves into odd shapes trying to fit each other’s tendencies. There’s always a feeling-out process with collaborations like this one, but this never actually finds the sweet spot. Sonically, it is a variety pack from Herren, a sampler that scans much of his discography seeking out good fits for Christmas. The cuts all burst, and many are even mildly thrilling, but nothing here is nearly as off-kilter or kinetic as anything from his last release,* Rivington Nao Rio*. Conversely, Christmas occasionally steps outside himself trying to do too much in response, especially on songs like “These Saturdays” and “Japanese Mall,” which take him way out of his comfort zone, asking him to create chemistry where there isn’t any.
Christmas is best at commanding center stage, using his wit, presence, and comedic eye to control a setting and win over an audience, but Prefuse’s work is designed to stand alone, to create and sustain its own energy by constantly moving and adjusting. Both can’t happen here. This unintentional tug of war mires even their greatest experiments, which at their peak are both fun and frenetic. Sometimes Christmas gets lost in waves of sound (“Showstopper,” “I Got the Good”) or thrown off by a quick beat shift. He likes to build to his strongest punchlines; Prefuse, on the other hand, likes to jump-cut swiftly through ideas. Their styles just aren’t quite compatible.
But that doesn’t mean they come up empty on Lady Parts. Even without great chemistry, they make a handful of entertaining songs that thrive on sheer amusement. On “Young Vet,” Christmas ad-libs train sounds and car skids over a backflipping vocal loop, rapping about Scooby Doo and slut-shaming in the same breath. With five songs clocking in at under two minutes, Lady Parts often benefits from brevity. The punches come in flurries, and on “Crash” and “Circuit Breaker,” Christmas does some of his jolliest rapping. “Circuit Breaker” is where everything clicks, with Herren looping up a steady pulse that Christmas finally settles into.
Herren is an exceptional talent who is perhaps just better suited to solo work, but these sounds still carry his signature traits as Prefuse 73, zigzagging, rupturing, and splintering in weird places. Christmas is a fun-loving rapper with an infectious personality, filling the productions with references to Nerf guns, Grand Theft Auto strip clubs, and Twix commercials. He has bars like “Girls used to think my dad was Ma$e/Money make me do the Harlem Shake” and “Girls smell amazing like a Glade Plugin.” He doesn’t take himself too seriously and it’s a strength. In fact, Lady Parts as a whole is made in his image, and that may be its redeeming quality in the end. Despite its faults and flaws, it mostly scans as two talented musicians just having a good time.


The first release on experimental electronic producer Jan Jelinek's label Faitiche, the homemade recordings of the late Ursula Bogner might never have been heard outside her immediate family had Jelinek not discovered them, or recorded them and conceived the entire backstory himself, depending on who you ask.

Recordings 1969-1988

According to German electronic musician Jan Jelinek, the homemade recordings of the late Ursula Bogner might never have been heard outside her immediate family had Jelinek not discovered them through a random encounter with Bogner's son. I say "according to" because rumors that Bogner's story is a hoax-- a cover for music Jelinek made himself-- have already circulated. Some cite the recordings' rather clean fidelity, odd for music purported to be this old and inexpensively produced; others claim to hear Jelenik's minimal style in Bogner's simple compositions. Then there's the fact that Recordings 1969-1988 is the first release on Jelinek's label, Faitiche-- a name the label's own website claims is a French/German hybrid meaning "factish," or "a combination of facts and fetishes [that] makes it obvious that the two have a common element of fabrication."
Barring any denials or confirmations from Jelinek, that's probably all we'll ever know. His entertaining liner notes make Bogner's story seem plausible. Born in Germany in 1946, she became a pharmacist, wife, and mother by her early twenties, but still found spare time to study painting, printing, and electronic music. The latter interest led her to record her own synthesizer-based compositions on reel-to-reel tapes in a studio she built herself. Some songs survived intact, while others had to be assembled by Jelinek from individual, unmixed tracks.
The truth of this tale is ultimately a minor concern, because as intriguing as the story is, the songs on Recordings 1969-1988 are much more interesting. Bogner's work fits squarely in the world of early electronic music-- the period from the late 1950s to the early 70s, when synthesizers were so new that using them to craft melodic songs and create abstract sound were both considered "experimental" pursuits. The king of this era was Raymond Scott, whose whimsical jazz was adopted for cartoon soundtracks, and whose electronic inventions resulted in radio commercials, Jim Henson film scores, and unique curios like Soothing Sounds for Baby, a series intended to help parents pacify their infants. Bogner's music bears much of Scott's playful spirit, finding common ground between nursery-rhyme simplicity and the absurd humor of abstract art. Some of these songs are practically direct Scott rip-offs, but you can also hear echoes of Scott contemporaries and descendants: the radio concoctions of Daphne Oram, the comic pop of Perry and Kingsley, the conceptual art of the Residents, even the post-rock repetition of Black Dice.
Most of Recordings 1969-1988 sounds simultaneously like pop and art. Bogner's M.O. is to take a few simple loops-- rumbling bass, water-y plops, chirping squalls, laser-like blasts-- and overlap them, producing songs so sweet they'll make you laugh (the elephant-march opener "Begleitung für Tuba"), so repetitive they'll hypnotize you (the swinging "Inversion"), and so inventive they sound alien (the robotic "2 Ton"). At best, like on the jazzy "Punkte" and the cresting "Expansion", she crafts pulsing, organic melodies that burrow into memory like tree roots gripping the ground.
I've often wondered why the music of Raymond Scott, as catchy as it could be, is frequently relegated to the status of odd curiosity or gear-geek niche. The same will certainly happen with Bogner, whoever she "really" was/is. And sure, the songs on Recordings 1969-1988 (as well as the included shot of her with big glasses and floppy bowl cut) have a tech-y, art-nerd sheen. But give these tunes time, and you may find yourself humming them randomly, much the way a 60s housewife might have unwittingly memorized Scott tunes via the background noise of his sneaky radio jingles.


Twins is Segall's third LP of 2012, and stands at a crossroads somewhere between all his records to date. There are ballads, searing garage punk, sentimental love songs, two-minute bursts rubbing up next to longer cuts; all executed with faster tempos, thicker fuzz, and more power. Twins makes a great case for naming Segall as San Francisco's garage laureate.

Twins

Ty Segall is in an odd position. The San Francisco garage-rocker has always been prolific, but after four years of albums, collaborations, singles, and covers, his discography has become particularly unwieldy. His output from the past year alone has been diverse. On Slaughterhouse (and on stage), he's an impish, thrashing apostle of hardcore and 1970s hard rock. With Hair, his collaborative album with White Fence, he angled for jam-heavy, psych-leaning rock'n'roll. Only a year ago, he delivered his "serious" album Goodbye Bread, where he both cooed calmly and screamed about an exploding head. Impressively, all three of those albums are really good. It's a testament to Segall as a restless songwriter who can adapt to, and successfully execute, several different styles. So here we are with Twins, his third LP of 2012, which stands at the intersection of all of his recent interests.
In the tradition of Lemons and Melted, which each had ballads alongside searing garage punk, the new album doesn't have a unified focus. With the exception of frenzied, shredding highlight "You're the Doctor", there's nothing especially aggressive. "Gold on the Shore" is his acoustic-driven, folky, sentimental love song. Then there's "The Hill", the bleary psych track where Segall's voice recalls John Lennon's on "Tomorrow Never Knows". (The track also features some beautiful vocals from Thee Oh Sees' Brigid Dawson.) There are familiar elements from Segall's backlog in play, like that specific fuzz guitar tone, which is something like his trademark at this point, and some two-minute songs-- a number that's especially apparent on his recent Singles collection. Those bite-sized singles pop next to lengthier tracks like "Ghost", the slower stoned jam, or the romantic and apocalyptic closer "There Is No Tomorrow". With each new song, hook, idea, and tone, it's increasingly clear that Twins doesn't fit in any one box.
It's a grab bag, and it's easy to view it as a disappointment-- to look at Segall's disparities in 2012 and want him to pick a sound and follow it for 12 tracks. But alongside his engineer partner Eric Bauer (often credited as "King Riff"), he delivers a series of songs that, despite their aesthetic differences, flow very well. Even when he makes a significant jump, like from the giddy rampage of "You're the Doctor" to the paranoid stoicism of "Inside Your Heart", there's usually an easy thematic or sonic transition that keeps the album from sounding like a compilation. In that way, it's close in format to Goodbye Bread, which maintained cohesion despite several shifts in delivery and tone. Twins' offerings, however, are far more sugary and immediate: faster tempos, thicker fuzz, more power.
Lyrically, Segall thrives in two modes: songs about love with very straightforward wording ("Love Fuzz" is a falsetto stab at seduction; the content of "Would You Be My Love" is pretty much stated right there in the title), and stories with a more fantastical bent. The latter approach was prevalent on Slaughterhouse and especially "I Bought My Eyes", and it comes into play here with the darkly abstract "Handglams" and the creepy "is it living inside of me" tale of "Inside Your Heart".
In the liner notes, Segall writes two things that feel fitting for Twins. "This record is for San Francisco." That makes sense-- the man's a frontrunner to become San Francisco's garage laureate. But he's also talking about his friends and inspirations-- he mentions White Fence's Tim Presley, Thee Oh Sees' John Dwyer, and the rest of the Ty Segall Band by name. It's easy to hear how the album fits tidily in San Francisco's bigger picture-- to hear Dwyer's "falsetto-as-primary-vocal" on "Love Fuzz" and "Handglams", to hear Sic Alps' elegant minimalism on "Gold on the Shore", to hear the whole town's penchant for mysterious and druggy storytelling, etc.
His final "thank you" in the liner notes goes to Neil Young, an artist who, as soon as the masses pegged him with a genre, did whatever the fuck he wanted to do and didn't look back; who never compromised on his vision, even when it meant making a bizarre, shitty rockabilly album in 1983; who famously "headed for the ditch" when he felt his radio hits were "middle of the road." Twins doesn't stick to the middle or even pick a lane. It swerves, visiting territory well-tread with a perspective that feels new, and knowing Segall, he probably won't make another album that sounds like it any time soon.


Inspired by his mother’s Alzheimer’s, the German ambient-dub musician crafts a masterfully melancholy lament that takes his signature crackle and pop into unsettling new terrain.

Fading

In his shattering memoir Stammered Songbook: A Mother’s Book of Hours, Erwin Mortier charts his family’s struggles to care for his mother (and each other, and themselves) as Alzheimer’s takes her from them. “I can no longer hear the music of her soul,” he writes, “that whole vibrating fabric of symbols with which she wove herself into the world—or conversely, the world into her.”
Over the last few years, a number of electronic musicians have tried to hear that music—and begun making it themselves. In 2016, Hannah Peel made a glittering electro-pop album, Awake but Always Dreaming, as a way to cope with her grandmother’s Alzheimer’s. That same year, Leyland James Kirby announced that his long-running ambient project the Caretaker would itself contract (metaphorical) dementia, resulting in a series of harrowing invocations of neurological decline that terminated in the epic decay of 2019’s Everywhere at the End of Time; enduring its six-plus hours has recently become a TikTok fad.
According to the World Health Organization, some 10 million people in Europe have dementia. Tragically, one of them was Stefan Betke’s mother. Betke, who as Pole redefined ambient dub for a generation over the course of three classic albums (recently reissued by Mute in an essential box), has followed up 2015’s crisp Wald with an album inspired by his mother’s memory loss, and his loss of her. It is masterfully melancholy, full of extended autumnal sighs like “Erinnerung” (the German word for memory) in which bright melodies stay on the tip of the tongue, never quite congealing into patterns.
Fading is also unsettling, and anxious. “Drifting” welcomes listeners with a beatific cloudbank that shadows a landscape of rustles and scrapes; it burns off with pained breath. “Tangente” swings without swagger, the skittering beat as indebted to the click of knitting needles as to boom-bap. You might expect a track named for the glossy, gothy carrion crow would make the heart flutter, and “Nebelkrähe” does, but it’s more arrhythmia than heartbreak, a murder of blasted-out hiss and brittle kicks. Hovering doom.
“Töpel” has a lighter touch, replicating the awkward shuffle of the sea birds it takes its name from—but then crashes set in, a reminder that, in German, the word is also slang for a fool. Dementia has a way of tricking everyone in its orbit: It makes the familiar foreign, the habitual impossible, until all must be forgiven for bumbling around as they just do their best. In the dream landscape of “Traum,” Betke builds a tottering structure, with shrill flares in tangles above gurgling bass; to me, it sounds like self-recrimination, but we’ve all got our baggage.
There are moments of reprieve: “Röschen” is a bit fiddly, but eventually blooms as spatters of high-end fall upon deep furrows of funk. And closer “Fading” is positively baptismal, with pads like viaducts funneling Betke’s warm dub to wash away the sorrow.
Throughout, Betke employs his own version of Mortier’s “vibrating fabric of symbols.” The signature pops of static still crackle; his bass remains vertiginous. Over 20 years spent cutting discs at his scape mastering studio, he’s honed a tonal expertise that allows him to create uncanny dimensions, dropping delays in stereo fields that feel impossibly wide. His foreground sometimes seems to slide under your skin, and the horizon can appear infinite. Reticence does sometimes get the best of him: Fading feints from Hannah Peel’s empathy and refuses to devastate (or stunt) like the Caretaker. Yet it’s full of Betke’s own version of love. If older Pole was a weighted blanket, these are throws to toss and turn under, offering temporary comfort but no escape.

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Despite living in an era when almost all music is available on tap, the Raincoats' 1981 post-punk classic still feels like a self-contained secret. It's telling that Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon was brought in to provide sleeve notes but doesn't say a single word about the record, and no demos, outtakes, or other ephemera are included.

Odyshape

It's well documented that plenty of oddities were snapped up and issued by major labels during the grunge era, but the fact that DGC released four albums by post-punk artists the Raincoats (including re-releases of their first three records and the then-new Looking in the Shadows) remains a confounding footnote of that time. David Geffen clearly didn't swell his already sizable bank balance by reissuing the band's second album Odyshape, as it quickly became as hard to find as the original 1981 Rough Trade version. It must be frustrating for the group to have their music fading in and out of time like this-- the preceding The Raincoats and the following Moving have been treated in the same manner-- but it helped cultivate a mystique around Odyshape. That feeling is partially shaped by the distinctly un-rock approach, with the core trio of the band (Ana Da Silva, Gina Birch, and Vicky Aspinall) occasionally utilizing African instruments including a balophone and a kalimba to get the job done.
A big part of Odyshape's charm is derived from its backwards construction, with the band leaning away from the spikiness that made The Raincoats such an inviting listen, and writing many of the songs without percussion. The tribal drumming of original member Palmolive was forcibly removed from the mix-- she quit the band by the time of this record, causing percussion to be added after the fact by a variety of guest players including Robert Wyatt and This Heat's Charles Hayward. Coloring in the songs in that manner might sound like the band were shoving a square peg in a round hole, but it undoubtedly contributed to the uniquely disorienting air that Odyshape thrives on. It's from a place where the Raincoats' best ideas stem-- throwing orthodoxy out of the window, playing on instruments with which they weren't familiar, assembling all the parts back to front because the standard way of doing things held little or no interest.
As such, it fits into that basic post-punk tenet of rejecting everything that came before to test out new ways of doing things. This album has little in common with anything else around at the time, other than the feeling that you're hurtling relentlessly forward into a previously unmapped musical space. There may be a little Scritti-esque hue to the guitar scratch on the pushy "Only Loves at Night", but much of Odyshape is positioned in a peculiar place somewhere between the earth and the sky. Sometimes a discordant violin howl is pitted against dreamy vocal pining ("Dancing in My Head"), at others the relationship is reversed and the singing takes on an earthy tone while the instrumentation is positively otherworldly ("Shouting Out Loud"). Occasionally those two impulses are conjoined, such as on the title track, where Birch delves into body dysmorphia over stop-start rhythms that feel like two different songs colliding.
That schizoid shift can partly be explained by all the instrument swapping going on in the band, but it's also an escape and an embrace of the circumstances in which the band found themselves. Holed up in a squat in London, which Birch admitted (in Simon Reynolds' Rip It Up and Start Again) had mushrooms growing out of the toilet wall, they found a release in Ornette Coleman and Miles Davis albums, and the transformative tones of the unconventional instruments that ended up being scattered all over this record. England wasn't a peaceful place during 1981; riots prevailed, the economy was in dire shape, and the rise of Thatcherism gained a stranglehold on the country. Fast-forward 30 years later and Odyshape is being released again, in much the same climate, acting like an acute reflection of all that hurt and the contrasting desire to block it out for a while.
That divide between the oblique and the real is what separates Odyshape from the ideas the Raincoats' post-punk peers were pushing toward, many of whom went one way or the other but rarely met in the middle. It's a very intimate recording, full of sounds they wisely never tried to recreate again, and vocal takes that are often inflected with a heart-crushing vulnerability. There's no easy category for this record to slip into; sure, you can sometimes hear hints of reggae, and at times there's a folky tinge to a few of the songs. The latter is particularly unusual in the post-punk scene, but makes sense here when you consider how these tracks were initially conceived, and the fact that Robert Wyatt (also a keen jazz fan and with a distinctly English folk-iness all of his own) was drafted in as a collaborator. It's telling that Kim Gordon was brought in to provide sleeve notes but doesn't say a single word about the album, and no demos, outtakes, or other ephemera are included. Despite living in an era where almost all music is available on tap, Odyshape still feels like a self-contained secret floating out there waiting to be uncovered.