The Ohio songwriter Spencer Radcliffe enlisted a seven-piece band for his latest album. The musicians give his doomy themes a billowing energy like a cloud of smoke.

Spencer Radcliffe & Everyone Else: Enjoy the Great Outdoors

Enjoy the Great Outdoors

Spencer Radcliffe has made most of his recorded music on his own and it shows. Both under his given name and with the dreary drone project Blithe Field, he’s made albums that feel vacant—soundtracks for late nights in empty rooms, when you’re probing big questions and finding no answers. But at some point in the couple years since he released his debut solo LP, Looking In—a bleary-eyed collection of slowly plotted songs that explored both existential and domestic anxieties—he decided he’d had enough of the loneliness.
“For now at least, the crest had been reached for the theme of [an] individual playing every instrument on a recording,” he told The Fader in March. So for his new album, he invited the band that he’d brought along on tour into the studio—alongside a few other friends—and called them “Everyone Else.” The resulting record, Enjoy the Great Outdoors, bears many of the same themes as his past recordings—smoke’s on the horizon, apocalypse is just a day away—but there’s an endearing looseness that he’s never achieved on his own.
On opener “Land & Sea,” his winding guitar lines creep around crawling, cymbal-heavy percussion. He dazedly describes a dream, but wakes up as the track takes shape. Elements steadily enter the frame—harrowed backing vocals, distant strings—and build towards a cacophonous conclusion. The song’s ebb and flow feels fitting of its title, but also represents Radcliffe’s subtle power as a bandleader—he mostly seems to stay out of the way.
As a result, the seven-piece band—which, on most songs, consists of drummer Jack Schemenauer, lead guitarist Grant Engstrom, cellist Ben Austin, bassist/keyboardist Nathan Dragon, singer Tina Scarpello, and Brennan Zwieg on Rhodes piano—has an energy that sort of billows. Lines loop around one another, intersecting occasionally, but mostly drifting in a slow-moving smoke cloud around Radcliffe’s muted pessimism. At the center of these are Radcliffe’s songs, which are as winningly downcast as anything in his catalog (or, for that matter, those of his young DIY rock peers like (Sandy) Alex G, Elvis Depressedly, and Girlpool). He’s always had a knack for writing soaring instrumentals with sinister undercurrents, but Enjoy the Great Outdoors has some of his most cleverly deceptive pieces yet.
“Slamming on the Brakes” begins with the opening couplet of The Sound of Music’s “Do-Re-Mi” (“Doe a deer/A female deer”), but something’s off. Radcliffe and his bandmates reduce the sprightly melody to a single note and turn it into body horror, as a mangled animal splatters across the hood of the narrator’s car. His talent as a songwriter is that it doesn’t just end there—he uses the accident to muse on the existential questions these sorts of songwriters are often mulling. He’s “praying for deliverance from a life of small mistakes,” but it never comes.
These songs hang heavy, as Radcliffe’s compositions often do, but his band keeps it from sinking too far into despair. “Wrong Turn”—the chorus of which gives the record its National Park Service slogan of a title—is another song that begins at the end of the world. Radcliffe’s narrator sees all-consuming fire in the distance and contemplates how nice it might be to drive his car right into the destruction. But the instrumental offers some ballast: Schemenauer’s percussion sets a cruise-control pace, Engstrom’s leads feel like a desert breeze, and drizzly strings lend a surprising coolness to the doomsday prophesying.
The chorus, then—“maybe we’d enjoy the great outdoors”—is winkingly undermined by the rest of the song, which is about driving to the ends of Earth to watch it all burn down. But the addition of Everyone Else makes it land a little differently. It’s not a solitary cruise into the sunset, but a road trip with a group of your best friends—even if the end result is still doom.


In a dramatic departure from their previous projects, the UK collective taps into the spirituality of choral music and contemporary classical in an uplifting, celebratory, utterly gorgeous album.

Air

SAULT’s aim, since its inception, is to twirl through every hue in the kaleidoscope of Black existence. The enigmatic UK collective—which, despite their aversion to the media, is agreed by most to be helmed by producer and songwriter Inflo, whose real name is Dean Josiah Cover—has run through a slew of musical styles and themes in service of that goal. They laid out their thesis with 2019’s 5 and 7, a fuzzed-out collection of minimalist funk songs about pride, the struggle, and everything in between. They sharpened their focus the following year with another pair of albums released while the Black Lives Matter movement was at a height of international attention—Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise)—putting a finer point on the particulars of protest and the importance of keeping the faith while swerving into Afrobeat-inspired territory. Their next album, NINE, dove into the murky depths of trauma and anger, juxtaposing those feelings against uneasy humor with nursery rhymes. It’s tempting to read their releases as a Kübler-Ross-esque model of intergenerational grief, but the Black experience is far too manifold to be so easily simplified. There’s always cause to mourn and reflect, but there’s just as much reason to celebrate and to uplift.
AIR—the group’s sixth album in only three years—tilts the balance back toward the positive. In a drastic turn from their previous output, SAULT have cast aside almost all of their identifiable hallmarks; gone are the funky rhythms, driving disco beats, and soulful crooning. As opener “Reality” begins with a crescendo of strings, horns, and a classical choir, your first thought might be that you’ve put on a record that should be filed closer to the choral works of György Ligeti. Sonically, there’s little anchoring AIR to the group’s previous output, but its themes still zero in on a critical element of the Black experience: the need for self-care and celebration of individual Blackness.
And as the group makes a sharp pivot to lush contemporary classical, they take the opportunity to remind us that even a style of music seen as traditionally European has been deeply influenced by Black innovators. “Luos Higher” makes plucked stringed instruments and chants its centerpiece, drawing influence from the music of the Luo people of Kenya for whom the track is named. The delicate string work of “Heart” conjures the specter of an Alice Coltrane spiritual journey, while the nearly 13-minute symphonic suite “Solar” calls back to the exuberance of Julius Eastman’s kinetic masterpiece Femenine with its twinkling pitched percussion. Every piece on AIR wears its heart on its sleeve, conveying an emotional urgency that makes the album feel like SAULT’s most personal body of work, despite being mostly wordless.
Unbound by the limitation of language to convey meaning, AIR leans into the spiritual effect sound has on the mind and body. As “June 55” ratchets up the intensity with dissonant flourishes and a tidal wave of vocals and horn blasts, the moment that tension releases feels like a relief—a weight has been lifted from your shoulders. When a harmonious roll of voice and brass moves in to fill the space left behind, there’s a sense of triumph. Without being told how to feel, one can simply feel; the music meets you where you are.
“Time Is Precious” offers a faint trace of the familiar SAULT of albums past, and the most direct acknowledgment of the significance of their genre metamorphosis. The track slowly builds itself up to the stratosphere, vocal harmonies and orchestral swells surging sky high as it speeds through several movements like a pocket-sized Philip Glass opera. Reaching its peak, the layers quickly fall away as an intelligible vocal appears for the first and only time, imploring the listener to use their precious time wisely. “Life will always bring its pressures,” the choir sings in a gospel-style vocal. “Use it wise and keep those treasures.” As the track winds down, the choir becomes muffled as if being heard through the doors of a church foyer. It serves as a comforting reminder: the refrain will play on whether you’re there or not, and you’re always welcome to return when you’re in need of reassurance.
Though Cover doesn’t give interviews, his short public statement in response to being named Producer of the Year by the BRIT Awards—the first time a Black artist has won the prestigious prize since its 1977 inception—is revealing. “All the Black producers before me, I’m in awe and have studied you,” he said. “I am you.” For him, digging deep into the history of great Black musicians wasn’t only an exercise in mastering a diverse range of genres; he wanted to understand their hardships, their triumphs, and how it informed the art they made. Music about the Black experience often feels timely, and it rarely matters if it was made for 1971 or 2022. As long as the cycle of hurt, the necessity for action, and the need for healing remains unbroken, music made for every point on the spectrum retains something that could be useful to another person down the line. With AIR, Cover intends to pass on an important message: love being Black, but don’t forget to love yourself.


Rapper's first solo album in almost three years is a small-globe statement that jumps stylistically across continents on a hip-hop goodwill-ambassador tour.

The Ecstatic

People looking for offhanded symbolism can feel free to try tracking Mos Def's career trajectory as an MC through his album covers. Iconic solo debut Black on Both Sides: a stark, immediately-striking photo portrait that renders the attribution of his name unnecessary. Aggro experimental follow-up The New Danger: that same face now obscured by a stick-up man's mask, his bright red, bloody-looking index fingertip pointing to his own head on some Taxi Driver shit. Contractual obligation mishap True Magic: no actual album art whatsoever, with a blank-looking Mos staring into space off the surface of the disc itself. And now The Ecstatic, which depicts not Mos Def himself but a red-tinted shot from Charles Burnett's classic 1977 film Killer of Sheep. You might go so far as to say this indicates that the best way for Mos Def to reassert what he really means as an artist would be to take his as-seen-in-Hollywood face out of the equation entirely, replacing it with a shot from an entirely different strain of independent, neorealist cinema that more clearly gets at what he represents as a lyricist. Maybe it's a stretch, but what the hell.
And while Burnett's Watts isn't quite the same place as Mos Def's Bed-Stuy, it does exist as one of many geographical reference points in The Ecstatic's international style. This is Mos Def's small-globe statement, an album that comfortably jumps stylistically across continents on a hip-hop goodwill-ambassador tour, prefaced by a statement from Malcolm X during his 1964 appearance at Oxford: "I, for one, will join in with anyone, I don't care what color you are, as long as you want to change this miserable condition that exists on this earth." It's a high-minded intro for an album that most people will hear first and foremost as the comeback bid of a rapper-turned-actor, but it also serves as an important indication that Mos actually gives a shit here, and that he has a stake in something greater than just one corner of the rap world.
It starts with the production, which originates from assorted French touch cats (Mr. Flash) and Stones Throw siblings (Oh No; Madlib) and the producer from True Magic who actually contributed a couple decentish beats (Preservation). Oh No usefully repurposes some of the Turkish psych from his album Dr. No's Oxperiment, particularly the massive Selda-sampling acid-rock monster "Heavy" for lead track "Supermagic". Madlib contributes a couple tracks from his Beat Konducta in India series, diverting in their original form but done real justice by Mos' rhythm-sparring flow (and, in the case of "Auditorium", Slick Rick's). Ed Banger alum Mr. Flash covers the Caribbean ("Worker's Comp"), the Middle East ("Embassy"), and neon Euro-American club-kid slickness ("Life in Marvelous Times"). And Mos' own co-production touches in conjunction with Preservation's beats drive it all home: "Quiet Dog" opens with a defiant Fela Kuti soundbite, "Casa Bey" is built off Banda Black Rio's samba-funk number "Casa Forte", and Mos spends the entirety of "No Hay Nada Mas" rapping and singing in Spanish. There's a good chance you've heard some of this before-- aside from the aforementioned Oh No and Madlib contributions, "Life in Marvelous Times" recycles Mr. Flash's beat for "Champions", his collaboration with French rappers TTC-- but it's not a stale familiarity, at least in the context of The Ecstatic's ambitious B-boy diaspora.
But it wouldn't mean shit if it felt like the itinerary of a jet-set movie star showing everyone his vacation slides. Fortunately, the good thing about Mos Def not having brought his A Game in a while is that, like many rappers whose reputations have slipped, he was due for a something-to-prove moment. The Ecstatic has a bunch of those, smuggled inside the usual big-up Brooklyn and hip-hop preservationist lyricism and welded-to-the-beat flow that made him shine in '99, and his better turns of phrase have a way of sneaking up on you and smacking you in the back of the head. "Soul is the lion's roar, voice is the siren/ I swing 'round, wring out and bring down the tyrant/ Chop a small axe and knock a giant lopsided," he proclaims on "Auditorium" with the kind of delivery that makes the complex and convoluted sound natural. His anti-wack-MC diatribes on "Quiet Dog", the gunfight-love narrative of "Pistola" and the tone of sardonic but sincere Afrocentrism on "Revelations" reveal the versatility he still maintains in his repertoire. And even when he's just rattling off ego-trip riffs, the way he locks into a beat is scary; it's kind of hard to notice or care that he mostly keeps repeating the same Mary Poppins-derived hook on "Supermagic" when every syllable is like another percussion instrument boosting that head-nod factor by ten.
There are still some moments of weird, dope-hazy fuck-around on Mos' part, and while they don't really distract to the point where they test your patience, the frequent times when he drops into quasi-aimless sing-song vamping-- or straight-up attempted singing-- give The Ecstatic the feeling of a weeded-out jam session that didn't always go entirely according to plan and somehow fell together anyways. Still, it's the kind of fucking around that's clearly coming from a dude who sounds liberated, and a lot of it-- like the outro in "Pistola" where he interpolates the Intruders' "Cowboys to Girls" over some Madlib-provided vibes and King Tubby cookie-sheet-smacking percussion, or the casually amped don't stop the rock/can't keep me down declarations of closing track "Casa Bey"-- is too damn joyous to feel over-indulgent. Even absurd stuff like the Spanish track and his cod-reggae delivery on "Workers Comp" (try not to crack up the first time you hear the way he sings "fie-yerd" in the chorus) are more eccentric than bad. And anyone who wants to complain about those, well, go enjoy "History" instead: It's a Black Star reunion over a Dilla beat. Looks like we finally got the Mos Def we were waiting for.


The new Feelies album is both mellow and intense in ways only the New Jersey band can pull off. With the increased use of acoustic guitar, it feels like a spiritual sequel to 1986’s The Good Earth.

In Between

In 2011, when the Feelies released their first album in 20 years, it came with hints of indecision. It was called Here Before—possibly as in “been there, done that”—and began with the lyric “Is it too late to do it again?/Or should we wait another 10?” The music certainly sounded confident, in the breezy but determined style that the New Jersey quintet patented around the time of their second album, 1986’s The Good Earth. But you could forgive diehards for wanting clearer signs that the Feelies were back to stay.
With this new Feelies album, there remains no explicitly outlined future for the band. But the record is called In Between—presumably there’s more to come—and it offers hope in titles such as “Stay the Course” and “Time Will Tell,” and in lines like, “Take your time, not going anywhere.” Beyond these small signs, there are increased levels of musical commitment and design. The record is more purposefully-sequenced than its predecessor, with tracks that build on each other through subtle motifs. In press materials, guitarist and singer Glenn Mercer describes the record as “laid back,” and he’s right. But it’s as precise and efficient as it is casual and comfortable.
In its best moments, In Between sounds both mellow and intense in ways only the Feelies can pull off. That’s helped along by the increased prominence of acoustic guitar compared to Here Before (making the album a kind of spiritual sequel to The Good Earth). Acoustic guitars naturally exude calm, but Mercer and Bill Million imbue them with a sharpness. The quick strums in the pithy “Turn Back Time” and aforementioned swayer “Stay the Course” both soothe and energize. Acoustics even tighten the otherwise placid ballad “Make It Clear.”
Still, the Feelies remain a democratic machine, with each sound snugly complementing the other. They’re masters at weaving their moving parts into a kinetic whole: Take “Gone Gone Gone,” an insta-classic that escalates simple chords into a cycle of tension and release. While Mercer intones open-ended lyrics (“What do you want to know?/What do you want to do?”), the tune peaks when bassist Brenda Sauter redirects the band’s momentum like a ship’s rudder.
All the instrumental symbiosis on In Between connects its songs into an arc. That’s emphasized by how the album begins and ends. On previous records, the Feelies liked to conclude with a cover: the Velvet Underground’s “What Goes On” on 1988’s Only Life, the Stooges’ “Real Cool Time” on 1991’s Time for a Witness. Here, they cover themselves, reprising the sparse opening title track as a long, dense closing jam. Explicitly framing the album as a cycle is a typically Zen move, suggesting that this evergreen band plans on more trips around the sun.


The Quin twins follow their career peak The Con with another eclectic and personal record. Death Cab's Chris Walla produces.

Sainthood

Carefully selected case studies could convince you anyone can be a star with a well-timed leak, blog post, or P2P push, but there are still few substitutes for good ol' fashioned hard work. Case in point: Tegan and Sara, who have worked their way up from cult status to wider prominence through a steady regimen of touring and a gradual musical evolution and maturation that's made it harder to ignore their increasingly impressive achievements.
Those achievements peaked to date with 2007's The Con, but that shouldn't negate the merits of the Canadian Quin sisters' somewhat likeminded follow-up, Sainthood. The Con, sympathetically produced by Chris Walla, found Tegan and Sara trading the occasional preciousness and banal power-pop tropes of their earlier work for something more eclectic and personal, and Sainthood, which once again enlists Walla, continues to showcase the pair's confidence and peculiarities.
What's different is that the Quins have closed the aperture ever so slightly, retaining some of the character of the album's predecessor while applying a slightly sharper focus to the songs and their musical scope. In theory, tracks like "Don't Rush", "Hell", "The Cure", and "The Ocean" count as power-pop, but tightly wound as they are, they're closer to high-strung 1980s new wave (think: Missing Persons), albeit thankfully short on the attendant affectations and coursing with subtly dark undercurrents. "I've got the cure for you," sings Tegan in "The Cure", and in fact, given the enigmatic lyrics, it's unclear if the object of her attention should accept or refuse the help. Or whether they even have a choice.
Those aforementioned songs, incidentally, are Tegan's-- the more pop-oriented of the pair. But to set up such a dialectic does a disservice to sister Sara, whose own pop instincts clear the quirkier hurdles of songs like "Arrow" or "Red Belt". Certainly, "On Directing" or "Alligator"-- two obvious album highlights, the latter playing like a late-night backroom flip of Madonna's "Holiday"-- don't lack in hooks, but they're developed with a welcome austerity and Sara's disinclination for easy "big moment" build up and release.
Sara's "Sentimental Tune" is no less restrained; it could easily go for Kelly Clarkson bombast, and maybe would even be better for it, but kept in check, that song-- like Sainthood as a whole-- achieves a less immediate but perhaps more gratifying impact. The album's infectious, but with enough edge to temper its undeniable desire to connect. Which it does, just on its own terms, a broadcast from two idiosyncratic musical minds whose biggest talent may be in making their most eccentric traits sound downright normal. After all, from the Quin twins' perspective it's the audience that's accessible, and they know just how to reach them.


The California producer’s next-gen dubstep rolls shards of digicore, hyperpop, shoegaze, and ASMR into elaborately pixelated clouds of chaos.

The weight of the world

For a moment in the early 2010s, dubstep was the delirious new sound of the electronic world. The laser-bright synths and vomity wubs of sub-scenes like brostep and riddim took over from the stark, murky UK style of the aughts and set the festival circuit ablaze. We all know how that ended, but the style never really died, and now the kids who grew up mainlining music from Monstercat and Trap Nation are throwing up their own futuristic insanity and calling it dubstep. Perhaps the most thrilling new-gen producer is Syzy—a virtuosic sound designer whose new album, The weight of the world, is the genre’s most intoxicating debut in years.
The California producer has worked in the shadows for a while now, dropping a couple of ear-lacerating dubstep EPs and experimenting with madcap side quests in the SoundCloud underworld. They made dariacore mashup weirdness and internet-fried Jersey club as a member of the anarchic collective TwerkNation28; cult streamer iShowSpeed hijacked one of their beats for an infectious viral hit. The weight of the world combines these zany impulses with pristine technical know-how. It’s an artful take on a genre often reviled as mindless carnage.
These songs feel like gazing at pixelated constellations where synth shards glisten between dark clouds of bass fog. Syzy stacks the songs’ sumptuous intros and outros with vocal slivers, infernal burbles, and ASMR-soft twinkles. Ornate drops feel less suited for raving than paying close attention. “HEART123” sparkles madly, as if a glacier could be stretched like an accordion. The ecstatic climax of “Caught up (in circles)” is like seeing color after a life of monochrome. “Get a grip!” deftly ratchets up the tension, then pops two drops in quick succession: The first is gnarly but it’s a pump fake compared to the fantastically feculent second, which resembles a robot-monster puking a torrent of neon-green bile.
The weight of the world feels so immersive partly because Syzy didn’t intend it to be purely functional. Rather than macho bass or daredevil drops, the artist cites hyperpop and homespun alt-rock (like twikipedia’s “seams”) as primary influences on this record’s emotionally vertiginous sound palette. The eruption of chattering noise on the intro smacks of Jane Remover’s “kodak moment.” The kitschy “Eureka!” sample motif is redolent of something off an Underscores tape. “In your face!” shivers with Rustie-shiny synths, as if bass wizard G Jones took a course in PC Musicology. The five-minute outro to “Experience (HIGHER)” is so packed with blurred bleeps and pixelated mist it’s like shoegaze for cyborgs.
The few audible lyrics—sampled refrains and digicore singer kmoe’s windswept feature—don’t paint a coherent narrative, but a sensitive vulnerability comes across in dreamy, minimal passages and songs like “Dancing on my own,” a possible tribute to Robyn’s similarly bittersweet anthem. Several track titles read like urgent imperatives, perhaps directed at Syzy themselves, as if each soaring keyboard squiggle and bass blow-up were a plot point in a poignant internal conflict.
By the end, the constant build-drop flow starts to get constrictive. Predictable rise-and-falls have long been a liability in dubstep, and here, they feel at odds with textures and sounds as layered and hyperreal as 3D models. You long for Syzy to shatter the structure and inject some surprises from their SoundCloud toolkit, like unhinged nightcore vocals or deliciously organic ambient tones. On highlight “DOPE1!” a new idea warps in every second: dariacore’s pulverized vocal gibberish, brostep’s cheeky taunts, the quivery electricity of color bass, even an amped-up Dragon Ball Z sound effect. That might sound excruciatingly dense, but Syzy and featured guest Olswel weave it perfectly. The weight of the world sounds simultaneously similar to and absolutely nothing like the juddering mayhem of EDM dubstep’s golden age: powered by festival-sized energy yet sculpted for meditative headphone listening. It’s the frenetic, heartfelt work of a young production obsessive honoring a genre but tearing it up at the same time.


Navigating the divide between club culture and conceptual art, the UK producer repurposes the momentum-based language of dance music into a hauntingly frozen inversion.

Mnestic Pressure

In the closing chapter of Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 sci-fi psychodrama Solaris, the protagonist, Kris Kelvin, finally ventures out from his space station to explore the titular ocean planet—a sentient organism which seems to be testing its human visitors by mimicking their most powerful memories. He sets his course for one of the many “mimoids” the planet creates, towering constructions that rise from its depths before dissolving back into the sea. Upon examination, the structure feels oddly familiar, like an ancient city in ruins—a “twisting labyrinth of streets partially blocked by rubble: their steep winding descent toward a shore washed by clammy foam.”
This image of a funhouse reflection of life on earth, drawn out from the deepest layers of the subconscious and molded in a porous alien substance, kept coming to mind as I listened to Lee Gamble’s new album, Mnestic Pressure. Starting with the title (“mnestic” means “pertaining to memory”), the album casts an eye toward the past, which looms as imposingly as Solaris’ empty cityscape. Gamble drags a wide net across three decades of UK dance music’s hardcore continuum—acid house, rave, jungle, 2-step, and IDM—and wrests its raw materials into rugged, austere formations. The 13 tracks on Mnestic are like sculptures built from the fragments of a life lived in club culture. Isolating his peak experiences and liminal impressions in time, the album repurposes the momentum-based language of dance music to construct a shimmering, hauntingly frozen inversion.
This shouldn’t be news for Gamble’s followers. His 2012 LP Diversions 1994-1996 sampled breakdowns from jungle mixtapes, and since then he’s often approached techno with a conceptual, anti-club swagger. But Mnestic Pressure works more convincingly than much of his output up to this point. On 2014’s Koch, Gamble juxtaposed 4x4 kick workouts with gurgling synths and static bursts that seemed to creep invasively from a primordial swamp. On Mnestic, many of those same textures are present, but the album breathes and gels, opening up easily even at some of its strangest moments.
With many of the tracks hovering around three minutes or less, and often bleeding into each other, the sequencing suggests the ghost of a DJ mix. Like this piece made by “salvaging the sounds and images lost to compression via the MP3 and MP4 codecs” of Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner,” Gamble creates his eerie atmosphere by omitting most of the expected dynamics. Sounds layer without necessarily interacting, or push hard against the grain. “Istian” tumbles into a funky, swung groove but quickly deconstructs itself with a glitching, off-time melodic arpeggio, heaving chords, and collapsed drum programming. The whole thing lurches to a close, refusing to play anything straight for its entire two-and-a-half-minute runtime. It gives way to “East Sedducke,” which strobes and stutters in place, unable to decide if it wants to sink into the couch or leap into hyperdrive.
If anyone’s discography looms particularly large over Mnestic, it’s Autechre’s. The duo’s pioneering work integrated hip-hop, techno, dub, and breaks into an avant-garde opus that’s both icy and playful, opaque yet streetwise. Their spirit is palpable in the pulsating glassiness of “Swerva,” with its ping-ponging percussion, dissonant flickers of melody, and lone minor chord floating like mist, and in the zigzagging groove disruptions of “Ignition Lockoff.” Gamble’s palette, both chewed up and crystalline, directly echoes albums like Confield.
Not everything works. Often Gamble creates luscious atmospheres only to toss them quickly aside, or approaches a stunning melody and then veers away. That may be the point, but it would help, rather than hurt, his cause if his own motifs had a little more space. “UE8” drags at the album’s midpoint, its caveman drums neither flattering the intellect nor seducing the senses. Still, there are many moments of beauty amid the deluge of twisting and disjointed synthesis.
In Solaris, the characters grapple with apparitions of their lost loved ones, which the planet has created for reasons unknown. Meanwhile, out on the ocean, the mimoids riff on larger concepts, studying our earthly experience without context or apparent purpose. They are as spasmodic and emotionless as solar flares. So it is with Mnestic Pressure. Gamble’s world redraws dance music through a coldly exacting yet highly intuitive lens. It’s as if, long after the club has shuttered, the producers have moved on and started families, and the technology has slipped into obsolescence, these sounds still sputter, writhe, and skitter of their own accord, freed from any human agenda, compulsively enacting their own natural state of grace and decay.


A significant step forward from her debut, Natasha Khan's Two Suns is home to some of the year's most thrilling music so far.

Two Suns

Natasha Khan likes pretty things: fur, gold, melody, the moon, feathers, things that sparkle, chords that resolve. Since she began recording and performing as Bat For Lashes a few years back, the Brighton native has loosely assembled those things around her person like so many thrift store trinkets. Were it not for "What's a Girl to Do?", the lone song from her otherwise-too-precious 2006 debut to suggest that she might have the chilly songwriting charisma to match her outward appearance, it could have been easy to write Khan off as nothing more than an over-reaching asthete.
Actually, to be honest, that temptation remains. Khan's aesthetic is such a perfectly struck balancing act between earth mother hippie mystic and post-modern Gen Y art student (see: the cover for her latest single "Daniel", which depicts her on a beach, shivery and windswept, with a painting of The Karate Kid's Daniel LaRusso adorning her entire naked back) that it's difficult to forget about the sheer workaday craft that must go into constantly seeming so effortlessly, artfully rumpled. Nonetheless, as of Two Suns, her second full-length album, all of that takes a backseat. A significant step forward from her debut, Two Suns is home to some of the year's most thrilling music so far.
Khan's real breakthrough might simply be her willingness to wear her influences more brazenly. One needn't have any more than a basic working knowledge of female innovators from the past few decades to be able to spot the ghosts lurking around this stage. The strident piano chords and lone snare of "Traveling Woman" echoes PJ Harvey's desolate roadsongs, while "Moon and Moon"'s delicate piano playing and cabinet-reverbed backing vocals evoke early Tori Amos. Elsewhere, with its pummeling rhythms, double-timed handclaps, glass harmonica trills and vocal histrionics, the moonstruck rave-up "Two Planets" owes its entire existence to Björk. But even in the moments where those influences risk running on the wrong side of overt, they never feel stolen or unearned. Just as Khan seems most comfortable when she's adorned in a patchwork of styles, eras, and ideologies, this record feels more satisfying and fully formed for its overt cutting and pasting of those different sensibilities.
What's more heartening, though, is that during Two Suns' highlights, Khan has few peers. I could probably fill this entire space just writing about "Glass", the album's aggressively propulsive opener, and about how its strange mix of elements (chamber pop, prog metal, new age-- what?) magically coalesced into some entirely new genre that I wish existed and yet still can't quite wrap my brain around. Then there's the booming "Sleep Alone", which, with its rusty guitar licks, Knife-inspired synths, buzzing basslines and floorboard percussions, feels kind of like a sea shanty circa 2074. Or the aforementioned "Daniel", the album's first single, which marries brittle, 80s-influenced electro and an inspired viola arrangement with what has to be, hands down, one of the most insidious choruses of the year.
For all that, though, the album's most vindicating moment comes at the end. Clocking in at just under three minutes long, closer "The Big Sleep" consists of a swoonsome duet between Khan and a suitably broody Scott Walker. Accompanied by nothing more than a stormy piano coda, the pair dip and dive around each other, stringing out syllables, dancing around each others' voices and generally soaking in the drama. Not only does Khan hold her own, there are moments when she holds his, too. That she's capable of doing so is evidence enough that we should be paying attention.


With production by Peter Kember and an added gospel choir, the Danish band’s fifth album completes their transformation from grim-faced nihilists to wearied soothsayers.

Seek Shelter

Iceage barrelled into the pit on their 2011 debut, New Brigade, like a band disgusted with the idea of creation itself, as embodied by a death-staring frontman—Elias Rønnenfelt—who delivered his manifestos as if spitting out the last remnants of puke in his mouth. In the decade since, they’ve undergone a metamorphosis even more surprising than their fellow gutter-dwellers the Men (who turned into Wilco) or the Horrors (who became Simple Minds): They’ve embraced the light, one creeping step at a time, and on Seek Shelter, they complete their transformation from grim-faced nihilists to wearied soothsayers, gospel choirs and all.
Tapping the production expertise of fuzz guru Peter Kember (Spacemen 3, Sonic Boom) and bolstering their lineup with an additional guitarist (Casper Morilla Fernandez), Iceage stretch out in ways that would’ve been nigh unimaginable for this band three years ago, let alone 10. Even as Plowing Into the Field of Love and Beyondless embellished Iceage’s attack with brass and strings, Rønnenfelt still embraced the role of bedraggled punk raconteur, with the ravaged voice of someone who’d been to the dark side and barely lived to tell. The singer who greets us on Seek Shelter’s rousing opener, “Shelter Song,” is practically unrecognizable by comparison, displaying newfound melodic grace as he offers words of comfort for the downtrodden. When the Lisboa Gospel Collective joins him on the exhausted, triumphant chorus (“Come lay here right beside me/They kick you when you’re up, they knock you when you’re down”), the song soars into a Glastonbury-sized anthem.
But as much as it draws on familiar influences of classic rock and Britpop, Seek Shelter is hardly the sound of a band settling into their Jools Holland years. The strobe-lit shuffle of “Vendetta” drops them in the middle of Madchester circa 1989, but the song is less an invitation to get lost on the Hacienda dancefloor than an account of the shady dealings going down in the back alley. By contrast, the spectacular “Gold City” imagines Nick Cave hanging out on E Street, outfitting its piano-powered “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out” strut with impressionistic lyrics that, depending on your vantage, scan as either heartland reveries and apocalyptic premonitions.
For Iceage, Cave is not only the ideal model of a former punk nihilist turned dignified elder rock statesman, but also a useful guide in matters of faith. Beyond the gospel choir, Seek Shelter is awash in religious symbolism, which isn’t an entirely new look for a group led by a lapsed Bible student, but here the band seems more interested in veneration than subversion. As Rønnenfelt recently explained to Pitchfork, “Whether it’s religion or any kind of thinking that wants to make sense of things in a way that’s beyond the laws of the concrete—that’s a very basic human need, and I don’t think it is to be shunned.” And so “High & Hurt” stages a battle between the dirty and divine, answering gritty verses with a cloud-parting chorus that quotes the traditional hymn “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?” (which was, perhaps not coincidentally, also once half-covered by Kember’s old band). “Dear Saint Cecilia” salutes the patron saint of music through another act of worship—a reverential, open-road rocker that sounds like Definitely Maybe-era Oasis jamming on the riff to Booker T. & the MGs’ “Time Is Tight.”
Seek Shelter also reaffirms Rønnenfelt’s transformation into a true romantic, one who can convey the hot-blooded rush of desire without succumbing to the sentimental aftertaste. He pirouettes through the precarious chamber pop of “Love Kills Slowly” with the confidence of a red-wine drinker dancing on white carpet and channels the 1930s jazz standard “All of Me” on “Drink Rain,” delivering its grey-skied salutations (“I drink rain/To get closer to you!”) like a goth Ray Davies. For many once-unruly rock’n’roll bands, the shift to writing love songs is a tell-tale sign of maturation (if not outright stagnation), but even at its most sophisticated, Seek Shelter retains Iceage’s restless spirit. The album closer, “The Holding Hand,” is at once its slowest and most agitated track, a seasick spiritual whose crashing riffs and sinister orchestration hit like slow-motion tidal waves. “And we row, on we go, through these murky water bodies,” Rønnenfelt sings, “Little known, little shown, just a distant call of sound.” The future is uncertain; the beyondless beckons once again.

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An expanded reissue of the Band’s charming, loose-limbed album from 1970 reveals its relatively small stakes are inextricable from its charm.

The Band: Stage Fright (50th Anniversary Edition)

Stage Fright (50th Anniversary Edition)

After many tours of duty backing the rockabilly legend Ronnie Hawkins and providing the muscle behind Bob Dylan’s move towards electric rock, the four Canadians and one Arkansan comprising the Band were pedigreed to a legendary extent even before making their first album. By the time they issued the twinned masterpieces Music From Big Pink in 1968 and The Band in 1969, their polymathic command of multiple genres, and self-conscious embrace of traditional American folk, country, bluegrass, and zydeco had established them as the thinking fan’s alternative to the diminishing returns of psychedelia and the counterculture. On tracks like “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” principal songwriter Robbie Robertson alchemized the group’s hard-won experience into songs whose subject matter was the grand mosaic of human comedy and endless suffering, with an emphasis on those who survive and persevere. For critics, audiences and no-lesser peers than the Beatles, they had come to represent authenticity personified. So. How do you follow that up?
The answer came in the form of Stage Fright, a charming, loose-limbed collection that elides the chore of living up to the previous records by basically not even trying. If their first two LPs inspired the Beatles and Stones to return to basics, Stage Fright connotes an entirely different sphere of influence: it’s a nonpareil boogie album, whose in-the-pocket playing establishes the Band as the equal of groovemaster peers like Booker T. and the Meters and sets a predicate for followers like Little Feat and NRBQ. The Band’s signature was always the telepathic interplay between bassist Rick Danko, guitarist Robbie Robertson, drummer Levon Helm, pianist Richard Manuel and multi-instrumentalist-shaman Garth Hudson. This is Stage Fright’s great selling point. The group never sounded more effervescent or imaginative than on tracks like the strutting “Strawberry Wine” or the layabout-anthem “Time to Kill,” a rollicking tribute to a week off the road that serves as a subtext to the punishing touring schedule that would eventually become the Band’s undoing. What Stage Fright lacks in history lessons it makes up for in palpable joy. They would never seem so happy again.
The new 50th-anniversary reissue restores the album to its ostensible original running order, appends a typically epochal live concert from the following year, and retrieves an intimate set of early demos recorded on a long night in a Calgary hotel. None of this is uninteresting and some of it is indispensable, but it’s ultimately a long way around towards building up the reputation of an LP that never really needed defending. Like Dylan’s New Morning from the same year, the relatively small stakes of Stage Fright are inextricable from its charm. Sometimes music needs to carry the weight, and other times it needs to feel weightless.
Revising the tracklist of a record on its 50th anniversary is a dubious enterprise, but the updated running order is a compelling thought experiment. New opener “The W.S. Walcott Medicine Show” is among the Band’s most sterling jams, led by a buckshot guitar riff that anticipates Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” by two years. “The Shape I’m In,” now batting second, is an ebullient tribute to volitional desiccation that bears the imprint of emergent weirdo-genius Todd Rundgren, Stage Fright’s surprising choice for a sound engineer. Rundgren and the Band are a strange admixture, but somehow the Badfinger-meets-Bakersfield vibe brilliantly coheres. The supercharged hooks of the title track trade in the slow-rock of the first two LPs for something approaching power-pop: an urtext for Big Star and Wilco.
The Band had greater records to come and many rivers to ford. 1975’s wonderful Northern Lights-Southern Cross returned them to deeper historical considerations and 1978’s concert film and album The Last Waltz effectively sealed their legend and put a pin in both the Band and the era they’d reigned over. In the fractious aftermath of all that occurred—the endless days on the road, the fights over publishing rights, the impossible way of life—tragedies kept mounting. Manuel’s suicide in 1986, Danko’s slow decline and death by heart failure in 1999, and Helm’s passing away in 2012 from throat cancer. Oh, you don’t know the shape I’m in.
Fifty years on Stage Fright is an oasis, an exhalation, a genial respite from the ongoing crucible of the Band’s accumulating days. The final moment when the music came easy, before the weight became unmanageable.

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Producer Stuart Li has been a source for left-of-center techno and house for years, for a variety of dance labels. Under the Same Sky is his second album as Basic Soul Unit, with walloping techno drums, old school breakbeats, and industrial percussion that replicates the grind of machinery and the scraping of metal on metal.

Under the Same Sky

Anyone with an interest in left-of-center house or techno can find something impressive in the catalog of Stuart Li, aka Basic Soul Unit. It's a testament to Li's chameleonic nature that he has proven a seamless fit with the cult Japanese deep house imprint Mule Musiq; the UK bass driven techno label Nonplus Records; Berlin behemoth Ostgut Ton; and Jamal Moss' purposefully abstract Mathematics Recordings. Each of these labels has successfully staked out a patch of deep and slightly weird dance music territory, and Li's edgy-yet-accessible style has endeared him to the DJs who also reside there; he appeals to selectors of many stripes, as his productions consistently come to life when thundering down towards darkened dancefloors.
It is Li's professionalism that ends up being the slight undoing of Under the Same Sky, his second artist album and debut release for Amsterdam tastemakers Dekmantel. This is the toughest-sounding version of Basic Soul Unit thus far, with walloping techno drums, old school breakbeats, and industrial percussion that replicates the grind of machinery and the scraping of metal on metal. However, he ends up drawing unwelcome attention to the downside of his talents. Li's sound is so tailored to the blast of monitor speakers and big club rigs that it bogs down under closer inspection, revealing pixelated weaknesses in the bigger picture.
There are some exceptions where Li seems prepared to throw some dirt and grit into the mix, and it's always for the greater good. The slowly menacing "Until the End Comes" very suddenly inhabits all three dimensions, cleverly allowing a 90-second introduction of measured static and pillowy bass drum to then click into a full-bodied and richly textured version of itself. In a similar way, "Restless in Thoughts" works to makes disorientation seem balanced and appealing, circling around lopsided dubby loops and itchy percussive accents, and it glows with warmth. While lacking the qualities of those two tracks, "Temptress" and "Without Fears" will appeal to fans of Skudge and Levon Vincent, who aren't at all concerned with separating the swing of house from the gruff ruggedness of techno.
Elsewhere on the album, Li is to be found mostly returning to the same sound palette. "The Rift Between", "Unwavered", and "Landlocked" may look to broken beats, classic techno, and electro, but they're all a little too bleak, too clean and undynamic. "Fate in Hand" may well be an attempt to alleviate some of the grayness toward the album's end, but its overbearing drums are too present to be enjoyable, and not textured enough to provide a good counterweight to the track's delicate and Detroit-indebted melody.
Each track of Under the Same Sky will undoubtedly find a home in a record bag or set list somewhere, and rightly so, as there's really nothing fundamentally wrong with any of them. As an album, though, Under the Same Sky leaves you wanting more of a moody, immersive experience, and less of its clean surfaces and precise negative spaces.


Mercury Rev's influential orchestral rock landmark from 1998 has been reissued in 2xCD form, with an extra disc of demos and rarities.

Mercury Rev: Deserter's Songs [Deluxe Edition]

Deserter's Songs [Deluxe Edition]

Early promo copies of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs were mailed out to press in a cardboard-replica postal packet, complete with a stamp and a postmark advertising its release date. This was no random act: In 1998, a new Mercury Rev album could have felt like a postcard from a long-lost, old friend. Unlikely beneficiaries of the post-Nirvana major-label cattle call, Mercury Rev initially overcame the inter-band acrimony that fueled their first two brilliantly frazzled albums (1991's Yerself Is Steam and 1993's Boces), only to slip further into oblivion with the more refined but commercially ignored 1995 release, See You on the Other Side. A subsequent improvised recording released under the name Harmony Rockets (1995's Paralyzed Mind of the Archangel Void) suggested the band was forsaking populist ambition to delve deeper into the psych-noise underground. Aside from a songwriting credit for Rev ringleader Jonathan Donahue on the Chemical Brothers' Dig Your Own Hole, by 1997, Mercury Rev had effectively vanished.
The arrival of Deserter's Songs on the nascent V2 label was a brow-raiser in and of itself; but that sense of pleasant surprise turned to dumbstruck disbelief once the CD was dropped in the player. Mercury Rev had flirted with symphonic flourishes and sentimental balladry before, but usually delivered them in a haze of distortion (Boces' "Something For Joey") or cheeky, irreverent arrangements (See You on the Other Side's "Everlasting Arm"). Deserter's Songs' opening track, "Holes", however, was something else entirely: Never before had Donahue left his helium-high croon so vulnerable and exposed, and never before had the band's densely textured arrangements been deployed to such moving emotional effect, with the song's eye-welling surge of orchestration and weepy bowed-saw lines perfectly complementing Donahue's crestfallen lyrics.
And while there were always themes of New York state iconography running through the band's disjointed discography-- the Coney Island Cyclone, the Rockettes, Bronx cheers-- Deserter's Songs projected an especially vivid sense of place, casting a set of intimate, romantic narratives against the staggering natural beauty of the band's upstate New York surroundings. Credit producer/bassist Dave Fridmann for foregrounding certain agrarian classic-rock influences-- namely, Jack Nitzsche-era Neil Young, the Band, and Brian Wilson-- that were heretofore buried behind the band's wall of squall; Mercury Rev even went so far as to solicit guest contributions from Levon Helm and Garth Hudson for some authentic Big Pink flavor.
In a sense, Deserter's Songs practically functions as a tourist brochure for the Empire State, with the stirring centerpiece track "Opus 40" referencing both the titular stone-sculpture garden in Saugerties and the looming Catskill mountains, while "Hudson Line" pays tribute to the train route that provides an upstate escape from New York City. I had always written off the latter track as Deserter's Songs' most frivolous-- owing to Hudson's supper-club-smooth sax line and the meek vocal courtesy of guitarist Grasshopper-- but in it, we hear the album's guiding philosophy: "Gonna leave the city, gonna catch the Hudson Line/ You know I love the city, but I haven't got the time."
Deserter's Songs was likewise a necessary act of retreat for a band that had long been defined by chaos and turmoil, and its peaceful, back-to-nature ethos felt all the more radical at a time when the harsh, mechanized sounds of big-beat electronica and nu-metal dominated the airwaves. The album's considerable critical success practically spawned a sub-genre of its own, with subsequent releases by the Flaming Lips (The Soft Bulletin, also recorded by Fridmann at his Tarbox Studios), the Delgados (The Great Eastern; Fridmann again), and Grandaddy (The Sophtware Slump) all hewing to a similar balance of lyrical intimacy and orchestral expanse. And while Mercury Rev's spotty track record since Deserter's Songs has currently driven the band into the same sort of limbo in which they found themselves prior to recording the album, you can still hear a distinctly Deserter's mix of the rustic and the epic in contemporaries like Fleet Foxes, My Morning Jacket, and Arcade Fire.
Hopefully, this 2xCD reissue will serve to raise the band's stock once again, and that could very well be the true impetus behind this package; tellingly, Mercury Rev have chosen to mark their 20th anniversary not by re-releasing their 1991 debut, but rather the record that has effectively allowed them to survive for two decades. Collectors of Deserter's Songs' singles will know that, for B-sides, the band often resorted to its deep arsenal of covers, but none of these is represented on this issue's bonus disc (presumably because many of them were already compiled on the 2006 best-of collection, Stillness Breathes). But we do get a batch of rough yet illuminating demos that help connect the dots between Mercury Rev's experimental roots and Deserter's Songs' immaculate conception. The Tascam takes on "Endlessly" and "Tonite It Shows" sound closer to early-70s Lennon than their more Disneyfied final versions, and the sax-less "Hudson Line" feels much less anomalous in this setting.
Most remarkable of all is an embryonic version of "Goddess on a Hiway", both for its crude, tape-decayed presentation and its original recording date: 1989. That Donahue was sitting on Deserter's Songs' lead single for almost 10 years could be seen as proof of the early Mercury Rev's preference for the anarchic over the affecting. Or maybe he just needed to wait for his band's darkest, most uncertain hour to sing that chorus-- "I know... it ain't gonna last"-- with the conviction and desperation it demands.


The Alchemist and Dilated Peoples' Evidence bring their shared understanding of the history and context of rap (and a guest list that includes Domo Genesis, Action Bronson, Styles P, and Blu) to their new project Lord Steppington, a welcome addition to the collection of solid boom-bap rap albums that Alchemist has helmed over the last few years.

Lord Steppington

The Alchemist and Evidence are old friends—they’ve known each other since the early 90s.  Each is a rapper and a producer, and both are dedicated students of the rap game with a preternatural awareness of the history and context of their art that endows the music they create together with additional meaning. The pair bring that shared understanding to their new project Lord Steppington, a welcome addition to the collection of solid boom-bap rap albums that Alchemist has helmed over the last few years.
Alchemist has been a prolific producer for more than a decade, but as the gangster-rap complex he was once a cog in has evaporated, he's emerged a key player, uniting a host of veterans and young rap nerds alike to create classicist rap music. Starting with Return of the Mac, a 2007 collaboration with Prodigy of Mobb Deep, Alchemist has released a string of solid projects with rappers like Action Bronson, Boldy James, Curren$y, and Domo Genesis. What unites these rappers is a reverence for the art form of 90s rap, combined with a welcome dedication to not taking themselves too seriously. Jokes and skits that reek of weed abound on these albums, which add to the sense that you’re listening to a collection of above-average rappers who feel supremely comfortable making music with one another.
That sense is heightened given the relationship between Alchemist and Evidence. The two share an outsider’s take on rap music (which may have something to do with being two of the only non-black kids in their neighborhood). Since their early days of working together, when Alchemist used to craft beats for Evidence’s group Dilated Peoples, there’s been a sense within their music of striving for credibility. And the way they’ve achieved that credibility is by building an insular world of musical references that’s both dense and possibly invisible to those who haven’t been listening to rap’s odds and ends for the last 10 odd years. Lord Steppington is an album that clowns on Theophilus London’s lips, and Bubba Sparxxx’s country-rap opus Deliverance. It’s an album that refashions the old New Orleans song “Iko Iko” as a mantra full of gangster menace. It is filled to the brim with insider references, so casually delivered in such a non sequitur fashion, that the uninitiated might not even know what was going on.
Not surprising then to hear that this sort of music will work best for those denizens of the rap universe who are well positioned to understand its in-jokes. But Alchemists’ style doesn't rely on stacks of signifiers—he's got that postmodern ability to mine new meaning from old forms and the musicality of L**ord Steppington should recommend it to those who might be put off by its rap-nerd bona fides. Alchemist’s beats on the album (Evidence only has one producing credit, on “Byron G”) fuse the iron underpinnings of New York boom-bap with either expansive soul or psychedelic edge, or both. The first track here, “More Wins”, may sound like a simple looped sample, but right before the two-minute mark, the full force of the original song comes in and the track shifts on its axis. Elsewhere, “Banging Sound” (more harmless than the name suggests), combines disparate elements: a trippy childlike sing-song for a chorus that contrasts nicely with the descending bassline and minimalist snare on the verses.
The raps often sound equally pieced together but their hip-hop-almanac quality makes them feel familiar, comfortable as worn-out clothing. “Step Masters”, for example, feels like something the Beasties would have made during the Hot Sauce Committee Pt. 2 sessions, Ricky Bobby references nestling nicely besides Evidence’s improvised aphorisms (“I ain’t the mover, I’m the man that you hand the cream.”).  The guest apperances contribute to the album’s happy mixing pot; on “Byron G” (which starts and ends with a sample of Kanye at the 2008 Brit awards), Domo Genesis spits one of the more tightly wound verses of his still-young career, only to hand the mic off to Scott Caan, who rapped with Alchemist in the Whooliganz  before Varsity Blues jump-started his acting career. Action Bronson, Styles P, and Fashawn all make appearances, and each sounds relaxed, flowing naturally. Even the easily-agitated Blu sounds at home on the album, keeping Evidence and his fellow Dilated Person, Rakaa, company on the mellow track "Tomorrow".
These sorts of fun surprises can make Lord Steppington feel like a Saturday morning cartoon, the kind where a lack of depth doesn't matter because the colors are so bright, the action is so fast, and the jokes are funny. But the album, like so much of Alchemists' recent work, occasionally unleashes a Rembrandt. There are two songs here that astound. The first, “Swimteam Rastas”, is a memoir-esque take on the rap life from a dialed-in Evidence elevated by heavenly chipmunk soul in its middle third. “See the Rich Man Play” is even stronger, with an on-point Roc Marciano character sketch about a mescaline-addled gambler with the fix in contributing to a three-part meditation on risk.
Songs like these don't diminish the fun collection that they reside in. But they're so head and shoulders above, so exquisitely crafted, that it makes the rockist in me wish we could hear a full album’s worth, something that Alchemist has yet to do with any single collaborator other than Prodigy. (Rap nerds I know have taken to editing together songs from different albums to achieve these results.) Lord Steppington is just the latest remarkably solid offering from Alchemist and co. and the artists involved clearly think of the endeavors as fun and games. Of course, the fun that the artists are having is what makes albums like Lord Steppington work. Still, I’d love to see the Alchemist take a risk and hear the results when things get more serious.


The Chilean band journeys through icy, alien frontiers on their mesmerizing new album.

V

Föllakzoid’s V begins like an incoming transmission from a distressed spaceship. The barbed remnants of a synth tone modulate and wriggle; low-slung bass notes throb with menace; a kick lumbers into the mix as spiky harmonics jut against it in a syncopated rhythm. After swirling around each other for nearly two minutes, the elements click into place, the groove snapping into focus. But instead of moving in any clear direction, we’re ushered further into the void, staring wide-eyed at the vast expanse the band conjures.
Over the past 14 years, the Chilean band, led by guitarist and filmmaker Domingæ Garcia-Huidobro, has set out to explore psychedelia’s outermost reaches. While they made their name referencing the scorched riffs and repetitive chug of bands like Hawkwind and Loop, on 2015’s III, they shifted toward the insistent pulse of dance music, assisted by German producer Atom™ (née Uwe Schmidt). They pushed further into electronic territory on 2019’s I, foregoing in-person jam sessions and instead handing Schmidt 60 independently recorded parts to arrange as he saw fit. This time on V, they compiled more than 70 stems and relinquished any control over the music’s structure.
The result is the group’s most pupil-dilating record, straddling the line between vicious minimal techno and heady space rock. Whereas previous Föllakzoid records topped out around 120 bpm, Schmidt sets V’s tracks to about 130, what some consider the sweet spot for techno and trance music. His arrangements are more dynamic and detailed than ever, the standard four-four thump of the kick drums augmented with tom fills and splashy cymbals. The music is often brutal enough to soundtrack a blood rave, but has gentler moments, resembling the verdant synthesized ecosystems of Voices from the Lake or Segue.
Each piece contains tiny, spellbinding moments of beauty amid the echoing din. Guitars, mostly relegated to single note accents or pick scrapes, ring into infinity through trembling delay. There aren’t really melodies or chord progressions to speak of, but synth notes sometimes cluster around each other, momentarily coalescing and fading away. In the final minutes of “V - III” the bass pokes out from behind a screen of shimmering noise and plays an almost optimistic-sounding figure that never repeats again, like a fleeting gasp of oxygen in an endless vacuum.
Though Föllakzoid has traded some of their initial accessibility for intricacy, the result is ultimately mesmerizing. The album’s chilliest and best song is “V - II,” which white-knuckles through serrated distortion and uneasy drones. Galloping noise anxiously lopes just ahead of the beat, giving way to a latticework of shuddering, colorless guitar. About midway through, the drums expand into a rollicking pattern, collapsing into massive EDM-like bass wubs. Suddenly, everything cuts out, leaving you blinking. V is relentless in its intensity, but allow yourself to be swept into its icy, alien atmosphere you’ll be utterly awestruck.


The New York hyperpop duo’s True Panther debut is crammed full of ideas but feels creatively vacant: the soundtrack to a party where everyone’s pretending to have fun.

SPEED RUN

Hyperpop has entered an awkward stage. As the once-meteoric genre has trailed off into a number of micro-scenes that can’t agree on whether they’re dead or not, questions that plagued the music since its genesis have finally come home to roost. How do artists maintain an edge once the majors get involved? Where does the line between shock value and substance lie? And at what point is it brave to continually resuscitate abandoned genres—be it blog house, dubstep, nu-metal, or whatever Blood on the Dance Floor was—until the reflexive nostalgia itself becomes tired and predictable?
Frost Children aren’t here to answer any of those questions. The New York duo, consisting of siblings Angel and Lulu Prost, has taken the throw-everything-at-the-wall approach to its logical extreme and demonstrated its limits in the process. Like their forbears Dorian Electra and 100 gecs, Frost Children are vocal advocates of living on the cheesier side of life. They’ve spoken about “the zen of cringe,” and their handful of self-released albums over the last few years have felt like an exercise in seeing how cartoonishly stupid a project can get while still clinging onto its veneer of cool. As producers, the Prosts are undeniably clever, and their lack of self-restraint has resulted in flashes of inspiration. But for every sugar-coated, so-bad-it’s-good happy hardcore remix, there’s a brutally unfunny Spongebob-rap themed side project to match, and their best ideas can’t keep up with their grating, worst ones. So it goes with their True Panther debut SPEED RUN, whose over-the-top emo-club theatrics are crammed full of ideas but still come off creatively vacant.
To classify Frost Children under the hyperpop banner doesn’t fully capture the roots of the Prosts’ music, which is just as much a product of New York’s fledgling indie-sleaze revival. As with their frequent bill-mate the Dare, Frost Children’s influences date a couple years past Y2K and into the trashy mid-’00s (think Cobra Starship and LMFAO). It’s a savvy, if somewhat unsurprising move to mine this era of party music, particularly as the larger club circuit’s ongoing ’90s obsession seems to be finally wearing out its welcome. Unfortunately the duo doesn’t make a good case for bringing any of these sounds back, stirring one flimsy mashup after another into a McFlurry of cliches.
The problems start with the Prosts’ migraine-inducing vocals. Their nasally enunciation begs for the bombast of Panic! at the Disco, yet Frost Children rarely land on hooks juicy enough to even qualify as guilty pleasure material. “COUP” tees off the album with the Prosts singing, “Like, oh my god, what the fuck, who are you?” in their cattiest voices, their posturing playing like a flimsy attempt at camp. SPEED RUN’s saving grace in these moments lies in the duo’s production, which favors a dry, buzzy bass tone reminiscent of Ed Banger’s raucous glory days. This raw treatment lends tracks like “FLATLINE” a punchy danceability; the song’s dial-tone feedback and tick-tocking cowbells add a deliriously playful, PC Music-ish touch that significantly jacks up the energy. But this momentum leads into a brick wall during the bridge, as the Prosts unleash their worst 3OH!3 impression: “Cut the shit/Are you fucking with me?” they shout snottily in unison, the soundtrack to a party where everybody is pretending to have fun.
This tension between inventive electronic styling and gimmicky genre-mixing is SPEED RUN’s driving force; the Prosts seem unable to fully embrace cringy vulnerability while maintaining their sleek, clubby exterior. It induces a special kind of nausea to hear the duo punctuate the house stomp of “SICK TRIP” by breathily whispering “awesome sauce, for the win,” then turning around and bragging about how their guestlist is full. Do Frost Children want us to see them as nerdy shut-ins or as untouchable club kids? SPEED RUN repeatedly attempts to thread these two needles at once, but the results rarely become more than shallow, winking shout-outs. Look, there’s Death From Above 1979 on the electro-clashy “OBSESSED”; there’s Muse on the Super Smash Bros.-interpolating “SERPENT”; there’s Hellogoodbye, by way of lo-fi hip-hop radio, on “WONDERLAND.” Normally the issue with biting influences too hard is that it makes you wonder why you wouldn’t just listen to the original instead. In Frost Children’s case, it asks whether any of this is worth reclaiming at all.
The Prosts are becoming more polished as dancefloor producers, and they’d be wise to lean further into those talents. Even their worst tracks are littered with sweet little sonic details, like the blown-out synth line that kicks in halfway through “HI 5,” or the rubbery arpeggio that bounces about the Eurodancey “ALL I GOT.” A more developed, less annoying set of tracks might’ve made the path forward for hyperpop seem less uncertain, but ultimately SPEED RUN’s flat songwriting and clumsy aesthetic gestures just seem like a dead end.


Channeling squalls of feedback and waves of downtuned guitars, Montreal’s BIG|BRAVE represent the raw unconscious turned up as loud as their amps will go.

Ardor

BIG|BRAVE sound like no other band signed to Southern Lord, but they somehow fit right in. On paper, at least, their sound—a churning, slo-mo experimental metal that revolves around squalling feedback and the dynamics of tension and release—lies smack in the comfort zone of the label that has brought us SunnO))), Earth, Boris, et al. But this Montreal trio is rich with idiosyncrasies. They’ve got no bass guitar, to begin with; those downtuned waves of sludge typically stream from a pair of six-strings. There’s that sense of spaciousness and pause—the chasms of silence that open up as riffs crumble and fall away, leaving listeners gasping and spinning their arms at the edge of a sheer face. And then there are frontwoman Robin Wattie’s clear, piercing vocals, which occupy an emotional zone right at the point between ecstasy and abject despair.
BIG|BRAVE might be a metal band, but perhaps they are better understood as a Montreal band. Their second album, 2015’s Au De La—the one picked up for release by Southern Lord after they mailed it, unsolicited, to label boss Greg Anderson—was recorded in the city’s analog recording studio Hotel2Tango by Efrim Menuck, of Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and this, their third long-player, was produced in the same location by another Constellation mainstay, Radwan Ghazi Moumneh, of Jerusalem in My Heart.
These relationships feel key; the Constellation bands’ characteristic doomed grace runs throughout Ardor. The opening “Sound” commences as a trudging march, with overdriven guitars howling their protest to an uncaring sky, and violin (courtesy of Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra’s Jessica Moss) sawing out keening tones somewhere at the heart of the clamour. Another Montreal mainstay, GY!BE founder and Hotel2Tango co-owner Thierry Amar, adds contrabass to two of the album’s three tracks. BIG|BRAVE’s sense of ebb and flow has clear parallels with Godspeed’s apocalyptic post-rock. With each of the album’s songs stretching to over 10 minutes in length, there is plenty of time for motifs to be established, abandoned to wither and die, and then revived and reprised with terrific force.
In places, Ardor is an album of quiet restraint. The second of the three tracks, “Lull,” gives most of its running time to moody slowcore rumination, with peals of guitar feedback snaking in gradually as the track gains weight. Other moments suggest an affinity for the brutal excesses of noise rock and no wave. There are echoes of Swans in the mantra-like repetitions of “Sound” and “Borer,” their clanging riffs cast out in the direction of the horizon. Meanwhile, Wattie’s siren-like vocals vacillate between imploring sensuality, raw self-flagellation, and blank affect in a way that’s reminiscent of Lydia Lunch. Lunch’s music was often jagged like razorblades, though, while BIG|BRAVE are big and oceanic, their music flowing and crashing like waves.
For all these points of comparison, Ardor feels like an album primarily powered by the instincts of its players. BIG|BRAVE started out as a duo playing minimalist folk music and gradually got louder as they learned to play their amplifiers, harnessing the chaotic possibilities of feedback to sculpt and shape their sound. Their lyrics—like a chant on “Borer,” “I am immune/And I am protected”—have an abstract quality, as if dredged up from some half-remembered dream. “A lot of unexplainable feeling goes into our songwriting and live performance,” guitarist Mathieu Bernard Ball told The Quietus. “And I believe that that's what people connect with. All truth, no lies.” Perhaps that’s why Ardor ultimately feels emotionally coherent but tricky to categorize. BIG|BRAVE are the sound of the raw unconscious, turned up loud.


Jack White's Third Man Records has started a program reissuing selections from the vault of Document Records, beginning with Charlie Patton, Blind Willie McTell, and the Mississippi Sheiks. While all are filled with excellent music, the reissues also afford an opporunity to discuss how and why reissue programs exist.

The Mississippi Sheiks / Blind Willie McTell / Charley Patton: The Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order Volume 1

From a critical perch, reissues (especially of widely available material) are tricky fodder. Glibly re-assessing the work of Charley Patton-- one of the most exhilarating and unknowable figures in the American canon, an ur-influence on the whole of popular music-- feels ridiculous in 2013. Patton's work is inarguable, established. The best reissues should proffer some kind of revelation: either by gathering unreleased or under-heralded material, or by the imposition of a compelling rubric (in the spirit of Harry Smith), or by making something sound extraordinary.
Since 1986, Document Records has been engaged in a vigorous hustle to reissue every pre-war blues song ever commercially recorded, while periodically doling out other forms of rural American music (gospel, old-time, country) recorded between 1900 and 1943. Many of Document's old LP pressings are expensive if not backbreaking to procure, but for anyone who discovered the country-blues that way, they represent a kind of sacred gateway-- those stark white covers, that black block type, a grainy photograph, some mystifying voice eeking out from the grooves. Still, Document's engineers are notorious for their overuse of noise reduction filters, which impose a shrill flatness on performances sourced from decaying 78rpm records, and in the 78 re-mastering community-- a terrifying micro-universe presided over by Yazoo Records' Richard Nevins-- Document remains a source of moderate derision.
Which is why Jack White's decision to reissue selections from the Document vault (beginning with Patton, Blind Willie McTell, and the Mississippi Sheiks) on his Third Man label can feel like the apotheosis of a very specific kind of fetishization. The blues, maybe more than any other American genre, is subject to endless mythologizing-- it is famously apocryphal, shrouded in crossroads-at-midnight mystery. Those romantic notions are, as In Search of the Blues author Marybeth Hamilton points out, "enormously seductive." It feels good to position the blues as a singularly raw, marginalized expression, to champion its so-called strangeness; the magnetism of those narratives can blind a listener to everything else. For White, those Document LPs led him directly to a well of source material that later fed an entire body of work (if not an identity), and these reissues feel like an expression of earnest gratitude to the label. What they don't always feel like is an appropriate paean to the music.
Charley Patton's Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order, Vol. 1 collects all the sides from Patton's 1929 sessions for the Grafton, Wisc.-based Paramount Records. A Delta-born guitarist and singer, and widely considered the finest practitioner of pre-war, acoustic country-blues, Patton possesses a throaty, lawless voice, which he employs to staggering ends. Blues music can be spiritually crushing, but it can also be caddish, if not obscene: On "Pony Blues", listen to Patton's raunchy, snarled delivery of a line like "Baby, saddle my pony, saddle up my black mare/ I'm gonna find a rider, baby, in the world somewhere." Bluesmen knew torment, but they also knew the solace of sin.
The songs included here-- some of Patton's best-- are above reproach, and unsurprisingly, this material is not currently under-represented in record shops. If you're after an artifact, Revenant's comprehensive Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues: The Worlds of Charley Patton, was a more deserving indulgence, containing seven CDs housed in reproductions of Paramount sleeves (there's also a gold-embossed box, pages of notes and annotations, and a short paperback book by John Fahey), though that is now out of print and terrifyingly expensive. If you're more compelled by fidelity (itself a dicey quantifier as it relates to gouged 78s), Yazoo's Charlie Patton: Founder of the Delta Blues 1929-34 is peerless, sourced from the cleanest discs and artfully re-mastered by Richard Nevins. If you're immovably devoted to long-playing vinyl, there are the gray-market European releases, including five (note- and source-less) LPs by the Italian label Monk, and the scads of reissues cooked up and released by various imprints since Patton was first deified by collectors in the 1940s. If you're less concerned with the material world, most of these songs are now instantaneously accessible via Spotify and iTunes. In 2013, there are many roads to 1929-- which makes the basic utility of White's mission dubious.
And at the risk of assuming the persnickety, exacting voice of a 78 collector-- that high, lonesome sound!-- the package itself is underwhelming. Patton's name is spelled both Charley and Charlie, depending on where you look (for whatever it's worth, it appears on the original Paramount 78s as "Charley," although many believe Patton himself preferred "Charlie"), and the accompanying essay, by the British critic Mick Middles, is not without grammatical blunders (Middles also quantifies Patton's influence by noting that he's been name-checked in song titles by Bob Dylan and the "British indie band Gomez," which seems like a deeply preposterous way to compute his legacy). There's also a mistake in the track-listing on my copy: "Screamin' and Hollerin' the Blues" is the second song on Side B, not Side A, where it's been swapped with "Shake It and Break It (But Don't Let It Fall Mama)". (I will now attempt-- and fail-- to resist pointing out that the “But” should also be out of the parenthesis in the title of that track). In White's curated universe-- where the idiosyncratic and the analog are prized, aesthetics are multi-dimensional, and the presentation of art is as essential as the art itself-- it seems like a more exacting approach should have been applied. Or: if you’re gonna be precious about your shit, be precious about your shit.
The other two records in the bundle fare better. Blind Willie McTell, a Piedmont-style fingerpicker from Georgia, came up as a street performer before he was recruited to record for Victor in 1927, and he enjoyed a relatively prolific career before his death in 1959. The tremble in his voice is echoed, often, in White's own vocals-- it's a stunning little wobble, an undulating admission of total vulnerability. White, like McTell, knows how effective it can be; it's nearly impossible to dislike McTell, even when he's opining the various women he's already bedded today ("One for in the morning, one for late at night/ I got one for noontime, to treat your old daddy right," he warbles in "Three Women Blues"). Although McTell's work has been reissued before, his records aren't as rare as Patton's, and were rendered in better studios (ergo: they sound better), so the question of what gets obscured or highlighted in the re-mastering is less pressing. And while Middles could stand to stop using Bob Dylan as justification for liking blues music (he invokes Dylan's 1983 track, "Blind Willie McTell", in his opening line), the reissue feels more benign than egregious. Same goes for the Mississippi Sheiks, a guitar-and-fiddle family band from Bolton, Mississippi whose "Sitting on Top of the World", first recorded for Okeh in 1930, has since been covered by Bob Wills, Cream, the Grateful Dead, Frank Sinatra, Bill Monroe, Howlin' Wolf, and Jack White (on the Cold Mountain soundtrack). For a Sheiks fan anxious to hear these songs on vinyl-- and who can't find the Monk records, or the Matchbox Records releases from the mid-1980s-- whatever new re-mastering current Document owner Gary Atkinson performed yielded worthwhile results: the singer Walter Vinson, performing "Driving That Thing", sounds close, clear.
In the spirit of the Folkways archive, White has pledged to keep these records in print (on vinyl) "as long as Third Man Records exists." His intentions seem pure, and any gesture that makes these songs more available to listeners should be appreciated, if not applauded (although in this particular case, White may have flubbed an opportunity to champion a more obscure artist, like Big Bill Broonzy or Johnnie Temple). But it's still imperative to remember that blues music-- its nuances and devastations, its cadences and riddles-- should be heard and appreciated beyond whatever personal or cultural subtexts we might choose to apply to it; that the sound is the thing. There are good reasons to reissue extant material, but it's hard to recognize any here.


Kieran Hebden's conceptually tight Fabriclive 59 mix is built upon the restless UK garage scene, which from the late 1990s to the early 2000s mutated from a simultaneously roughed-up and opulent take on house music to the fierce and rap-derived clang-and-bang of grime.

Fabriclive 59

Kieran Hebden has always been singled out for his adventurous tastes and the way his disparate obsessions have been seamlessly melded into his own stylistically restless music. Hebden listened without prejudice, a value prized by both the post-rock and DJ communities he came out of at the tail end of the 1990s. Even as eclecticism took a beating in the early 2000s, with mash-up acts and bedroom DJs turning the whole idea into a one-note joke or a cheap way to get noticed, Hebden never shied away from mixing it all up, provided the whole felt greater than the trick of joining seemingly incompatible parts.
Fabric has made a point of flagging Hebden's new mix for its sonic and conceptual unity. Certainly it does feel all of a piece compared to his last commercially released mix, a 2006 installment for the DJ-Kicks series that swerved from Akufen to Animal Collective. By contrast, Fabriclive 59 sticks pretty consistently to one scene. But it's a restless scene built on a premise of constant reinvention: UK garage, which from the late 1990s to the early 2000s mutated from a simultaneously roughed-up and opulent take on house music to the fierce and rap-derived clang-and-bang of grime.
So already we've got the promise and surprise inherent in a famously eclectic selector bringing a freshness and fearlessness to music usually only spun by purist DJs sticking to music from within the scene. On that level, Hebden doesn't disappoint. For one thing, he includes ringers from way outside late-90s London, like Ricardo Villalobos. And despite their modern, weirdo-techno palette of sounds, these left-field inclusions fit perfectly with the vibe of the old-school tunes, especially the way someone like Villalobos treats his own heavily syncopated drums. As usual, it's to Hebden's credit as a DJ that he hears ways to join old and new that others might not.
But this is also a pretty unexpected and exciting way to tackle a big-time commission from Fabric, especially considering the Fabriclive series tends to focus on up-to-the-minute dance sounds rather than the archival impulse. UK garage as an inventive and real-time underground phenomenon already seems a distant part of dance history, despite being only about a decade gone. So for longtime garage heads, Hebden's obsessive crate-digging will provide them with lots of unfamiliar and almost lost-to-history moments of genius. I've spent more time tracking this stuff down than I care to admit, and I recognize only a couple of the vintage tunes here. But Fabriclive 59 will also expose Four Tet fans who come from entirely different worlds (indie, IDM) to some truly luscious and forward-thinking dance music that's otherwise available only on out-of-print vinyl singles and even-more-out-of-print CD comps.
Despite his rep as a boundary-crosser not beholden to any one scene, Hebden has deep roots here as an engaged fan. The B-side to one of his first Four Tet singles, "Calamine", was an avant take on UK garage when almost no one in the rock or electronic worlds seemed to be paying attention. It's easy to see what appealed to him. UKG fulfilled dance music's no. 1 rule (keep it funky) while also sticking to a less-often-followed guideline (make that funk feel new again). Few producers at the time were doing as much to reinvent the art of beatmaking without trying for something expressly "experimental" and alienating clubbers along the way.
So if you're a fan of those moments in rap or dance when baffling syncopations become an art in themselves, when drum patterns feel like they couldn't possibly be played by a human with just two arms, you'll find a lot to love here. And if you like your mixes to have the smooth bump and ingratiating warmness of house, amazingly, this music also fits the bill. After all, the earliest UK garage cuts, like Persian's "Feel da Vibe", weren't so far from house's more steady sense of groove. It just had a lot more swing. Making broken-sounding rhythms swing was actually the primary goal of the best garage DJs, and Hebden proves himself very attuned to making all these not always mix-friendly rhythms flow together. So much so that, when he drops Musical Mob's "Pulse X"-- the stomping and snarling and totally blunt track that announced grime as a new thing-- it seems to fit naturally with all these super-subtle syncopations.
But true to Hebden's status-- insider fan trying to rekindle the UKG vibe and outsider after-the-fact archivist not beholden to the scene's rules-- Fabriclive 59 doesn't really play out like a true vintage garage mix would have. For one thing, our DJ has some formalist fun with the disc's structure. After building a stretch of groove, he lets things simmer down, bridging the sections with sampled crowd noise from the Fabric club itself, less breaking the mix's momentum than allowing a breather before things bubble back to life. The effect is like catching a pirate radio DJ in the mix, only to dial across the airwaves and find another just-as-good set on a different station. Keeping listeners on their toes while also mimicking the way this music was often heard by fans-- it's an odd but effective approach, especially considering the usual keep-the-party-going Fabriclive style. Fabriclive 59 feels more like a mixtape in the handcrafted sense, one friend making another a tape of special moments they may have missed. But of course few of us have a friend with the mixing skills or deep record collection of Kieran Hebden.


Following an all-too-brief turn on Drake’s More Life, one of Nigeria’s preeminent musical ambassadors shares his own hybrid vision, drawing on Afrobeats, dancehall, and road rap.

Outside

Burna Boy was supposed to get the coveted crossover cosign from Drake. The two had first linked up in London, where the rapper reportedly shared his vision for a “playlist” collecting sounds from around the world. The Afropop-dancehall hybridist ended up submitting five tracks for the project. Ultimately, though, only one, a song titled “More Life,” made the cut—and even then, it was relegated to a reverb-soaked outro to “Get It Together,” itself a rework of South African singer Bucie’s “Superman” featuring Durban house pioneer Black Coffee and Midlands R&B upstart Jorja Smith. With Outside, the Nigerian musician finally gets a chance to show off his song in full—it’s the first track on the album—and to flaunt his own skill at musical synthesis.
Some of that facility probably has something to do with his musical background. Burna Boy, born Damini Ebunoluwa Ogalu, started making beats on FruityLoops when he was 10. His father played dancehall records in their home; his grandfather was once Fela Kuti’s manager. These influences, alongside his own interest in American rap music—“I just wanted to listen to DMX,” he told The FADER in 2016—form the elements of bricolage that Burna Boy calls “afrofusion” and is fine-tuned on Outside. Songs like “Giddem” and “Ye,” which interpolates Fela’s “Sorrow, Tears, and Blood,” take the playfulness of 2000s pop-rap and shroud it in guitar; “Sekkle Down” is a romantic take on dancehall that features UK rapper and fellow diasporic hybridist J Hus. With Lily Allen on “Heaven’s Gate,” hints of highlife guitar and road rap merge into something new, but just as vibrant as its sources.
He is most confident on “Ph City Vibration.” It doubles as a mini-biography (“I was born inna the teaching hospital/The 2nd of July of 1991”) and an ode to his hometown, Port Harcourt, in Nigeria’s River States, replete with references to roasted plantains and fish and the city’s soccer stadium, Yakubu Gowon Stadium—which he still calls by its old name, Liberation, much as a lifelong Mets fan might reflexively refer to Shea. But not all of the album’s influences are as sturdy. The title track, which features UK pop singer Mabel, is laced with EDM and while it is fun, it doesn’t have the same life as the rest of the album. Burna Boy says that the track was recorded on Pete Townshend’s studio boat, though, and that added mythos gives it a little bit more juice.
This versatility is one of the reasons that, alongside WizKid and Davido, Burna Boy is one Nigeria’s preeminent musical ambassadors. Where WizKid softens some of the edges of Afrobeats, making the genre more familiar to newcomers, Burna’s output is more kaleidoscopic. It makes Outside a fine lesson in mixing genres without making mud.


Livity Sound displays past and present iterations of its elliptical sound on this anniversary compilation, a low-key affair that serves as a testament to the focus and consistency of the Bristol label’s approach to dance music.

Molten Mirrors

Bristol’s Livity Sound was founded in 2011, a year in which it was not at all clear where UK dance music might go next. The last big upstart style, dubstep, was almost a decade old, and long since old hat. Yet nothing had come along to replace it. The predominant sound, known simply as “bass music,” drew from three decades of dance music, amorphously amalgamating bits of dubstep, grime, garage, drum’n’bass, jungle, IDM, techno, and house. Sometimes, the friction from all this recombinant activity threw off exciting sparks, but the pull of retro was getting stronger; electronic music’s habitual forward march was turning recursive, a MIDI cable in the shape of an Ouroboros. By turns fertile, uncertain, and aesthetically conservative, club culture stewed in an amoebic interzone.
Livity co-founders Peverelist, Kowton, and Asusu had all been active in Bristol for a few years, and they stepped into this gulf without any grand designs. “It was one record at a time, just some friends doing music,” Peverelist told DJ Mag. “The plan was to have no plan, just see how things developed.” But the label quickly developed a signature sensibility, if not exactly a clearly delineated sound. Early Livity releases, along with those on sister label Dnuos Ytivil, shared certain hallmarks: charcoal streaks of sub-bass; staccato tones and syncopated rhythms; textures of desiccated wood and dented metal. Above all, Livity records emphasized the space of the mix, arranging glinting drum hits against a black velvet backdrop of silence.
All those hallmarks are still in play on Molten Mirrors, a compilation marking the label’s 10th anniversary. In typical Livity fashion, it’s a low-key affair; there are no big statements or overt themes, and while many of the label’s longtime affiliates are present—Hodge, Forest Drive West, Simo Cell—a number of artists here have only a single prior release for the imprint under their belts. But the compilation shows how focused Livity’s approach has remained over the past decade, even as the label has broadened its horizons beyond the broken techno and post-dubstep of its early years.
All 18 songs could be classified as dance music, loosely speaking, though some tracks have a more tenuous relationship to club conventions than others. Azu Tiwaline’s “Nissa,” which opens the album, boasts a low end as substantial as the heaviest dubstep, but instead of percussive force, the French-Tunisian producer opts for porous, almost powdery sound design; her swirls of brushed cymbals, iron qraqebs, and triplet toms move like dust devils through the desert. Forest Drive West has long been known for his minimalist take on UK techno, but his track here forsakes straight-ahead beats in favor of an implied 4/4 pulse; by leaving a hole where the kick drum should be, the rest of the percussive elements seem to float several feet off the ground. Other tracks throw weight into the drums while simultaneously leaning on the brakes: London producer Kouslin’s “Racket” dips into swaggering, industrial-strength dancehall, while Lebanese Australian producer DJ Plead’s wildly inventive “Glebe!” flips tightly rolling snare and tom samples into a seasick fusion of fast and slow, like a speedball of caffeine and Dramamine.
The standard account of the label’s development often describes a brightening of the palette that accompanied the arrival of Tess Redburn as art director, back around the label’s fourth year, when black-and-white designs gave way to Redburn’s whimsical, richly hued abstract imagery. I’m not sure you can hear much of that color in the compilation; most of these tracks are largely monochromatic, with little in the way of melodic hooks or even hummable basslines. The big, floor-filling tracks here—the brooding techno of Batu’s “Melts Into Air,” the lumbering UK funky of Bakongo’s “Ashy”—are drums-first affairs; they lavish most of their energy on carefully carved hits and keenly balanced frequencies. (The shimmering, Detroit-inspired chords of Facta’s lush “FM Gamma” and Hodge’s even more vibrant “Do What You Need to Do” are welcome exceptions.) Even garage producer Al Wootton skips that genre’s customarily bubbly riffs on “Sancode,” a sullen callback to the dubby 2-step of ’00s acts like Horsepower Productions.
But despite the consistency of its palette, Molten Mirrors ably demonstrates the ways that Livity continues to push forward, carving out space for music that doesn’t abide by stylistic formula. Arraying ominous bass throbs and unexpected doorbell chimes around a lurching hi-hat pattern, Simo Cell’s “El Gato Loco” is a master class in stoking tension: Bar by bar, it builds, morphs, and falls away again, teasing clubbers with a climax that never comes. Bruce’s ominous, otherworldly “Just Getting on With It” takes a similar approach, pouring its percussion into a bobbing current that feels perpetually on the verge of overflowing its banks, yet never does. (The track’s mix of voluminous bass and skittish Latin rhythms sounds exactly like what I wish Ricardo Villalobos was making these days.) Ido Plumes is responsible for another of the record’s most captivating selections: “Albeit,” a dusty riot of lawn sprinklers, broken radios, and whirly tubes. Slotted in penultimate place here, it’s a testament to the thought put into Molten Mirrors as a listening experience. And coming from one of the label’s relative newcomers, it’s also a testament to the health of Livity Sound’s vision: Ten years in, a new generation seems ready to put a fresh spin on the label’s elliptical, impossible-to-pin-down sound.
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Paperwork is T.I's ninth album as well as the first installment of a promised "trilogy," an imposing prospect for a rapper whose career peak is eight years in his rearview. But the album, featuring Pharrell, Usher, Iggy Azalea, Chris Brown, and others, feels fired up instead of tired and muddled.

Paperwork

Paperwork isn't just T.I's ninth studio album; it's also the first installment of what will lead to his tenth and eleventh. Paperwork will be a "trilogy," T.I. has promised, an imposing prospect for a rapper whose career peak is 8 years in his rearview. He has a habit of "returning," whenever coming off of a break (voluntary or involuntary), with a torrential, unmanageable flood of new material. He did it with 2010's No Mercy, a bone-tired and dogged-sounding effort that felt like clockwork from someone determined not to disappear but lacking a larger reason to be recording.
On the surface, Paperwork appears like it come from this same place; it arrives at what looks like the beginning of T.I.'s post-gangsta rap "suburban dad" phase, when his most visible recent contributions to pop culture are his "Blurred Lines" verse and the ascendency of Iggy Azalea. The album feels fired up, though, instead of muddled and tired. His last record boasted that he was the Trouble Man, but with a clear mind and fewer visible burdens, Clifford Harris has produced his most thoughtful and substantive record in years.
It is also the most excited he's sounded to be rapping since Paper Trail. His voice and flow patterns are so inimitable they run the risk of becoming sound effects, but he's pushing himself out of familiar cadences and revisiting some of the demented, spitfire youthful energy that used to make him unpredictable. You can also hear subliminal Jay-style flow-patterning at work, an old trick you'd hear whenever Jay Z appeared next to a truly great rapper. It's usually a sign that a rapper is engaging with his guests instead of just pasting their emailed verses into sound files, and Tip is flaunting it here: He sounds vaguely Boosie-esque on the Boosie-guested "Jet Fuel", and on the Young Thug-featuring "About That Money" he takes a few tentative hops into Thugga's stratosphere, pinching his throat and rapping in a near-insectoid voice.
Perhaps not-incidentally, Paperwork is also T.I.'s first record since his contract with the infamously risk-averse Atlantic Records ended. Now he's signed his Grand Hustle imprint to Columbia and is acting more and more like a label mogul, and Paperwork bears the marks of an artist grateful for stretching room. There is, to be sure, a fair amount of commercial-rap-record box-checking: He still does DJ Mustard, who produces the Iggy Azalea-assisted "No Mediocre"; a Chris Brown-featured sex jam (for "Private Show") and another Usher collaboration ("At Ya Own Risk"). But he finds ways to enliven even these pro forma moves: "At Ya Own Risk" is a novelty—a  menacing, even murderous-sounding bedroom song. The Skylar Grey power ballad ("New National Anthem") is an indignant and incisive commentary on America's gun culture.
There are a lot of intriguing "off" notes like this that make Paperwork feel like T.I.'s passion project, cleverly disguised as a superstar's contractual-obligation release. (That album title doesn't help.) The four songs co-produced by Pharrell—"G Shit", "Oh Yeah," "Paperwork", and "Light Em Up"—are rough, sharp-edged, and unique compositions, somewhere between current trap and early N.E.R.D. His rapping consistently fires off sparklers—"suicide, you should commit it, save a G a life sentence," he leers on "Oh Yeah". "If only the masses could see your ass when it's in action," he says, sliding into all the "sss"s, on the otherwise-rote "Private Show". On "Light Em Up", a song that deliberately recalls the vivid murkiness of classic Dungeon Family, he pays powerful tribute to his friend and labelmat Doe B, who was shot and killed in 2013. "At your video, I could feel it then," he raps. The hook is simple and bleak: "You were supposed to make it." It's quietly powerful, which is something Tip hasn't been in a long time.