Whilst recent Deerhoof albums have occasionally tilted toward sonic exhaustion, Breakup Song is a nice swing in the other direction. It's a quick, pithy album, with 11 songs lasting just 30 minutes.

Breakup Song

Deerhoof have put so much blood and sweat into not repeating themselves, it's become part of their DNA. They labor to sound fresh not just from album to album or track to track, but within songs, measures, and even from one note to another. When I first heard the title Breakup Song, I guessed that it might refer not to the end of a relationship, but to the band's relentless drive to fracture its tunes-- to chop hooks and split beats in hopes of dodging expectations.
It's a risky tactic, because when surprise is this constant, it can create its own predictability. And while the shock of the new is often exciting, the whiplash of endless novelty can also wear you down. For me, the last few Deerhoof albums have tilted toward sonic exhaustion. But Breakup Song is a nice swing in the other direction. It's a quick, pithy album, with 11 songs lasting just 30 minutes. There are patches of tedium, but the best moments are both surprising and engaging.
Many of those moments come in an opening four-song head-rush. There's a lot of nervy sound going on in these tunes, with chords, rhythms, and electronic blips and whirrs darting around the stereo space. But the tone is breezy and fun, with beats that are oddly danceable ("Now I am going dancing/ If you would care to join me," sings Satomi Matsuzaki at one point) and synths that hint at 1980s pop. On the bouncing "There's That Grin", Matsuzaki repeatedly begs, "Not all at once," and the band obeys for a bit. But they happily rebel on the next track, "Bad Kids to the Front", a mini-tornado of ping-pong bleeps and pop-up riffs.
When Deerhoof dip down from those peaks, it's usually due to lulls in energy. Songs that attempt longer grooves sometimes settle into them rather than pushing or pulling at them. Still, the music is rarely formulaic. The occasional flatness comes from Matsuzaki's singing style. Her tendency to stick to a narrow set of colors and patterns-- the same sunny notes, staccato breaths, and see-saw cadences-- can be perfect when the band is swirling frantically around her. But when the music needs a starker counterpoint, her consistency is a drawback. Take "Flower", in which her up-down chant of the empty "Let it go/ Leave it all behind" sounds stale. Or "The Trouble with Candyhands", where yet another up-down chant, "Then you bring me flowers," pales next to a marimba-like synth riding the same melodic line. It makes me wonder if someone with a looser, more impulsive style-- say the Fall's Mark E. Smith or Magik Markers' Elisa Ambrogio-- might fare better with Deerhoof's more repetitive jams.
Luckily, there are many times on Breakup Song where only Matsuzaki will do. My favorite is a three-minute sprint with the telling title "We Do Parties". Here, drummer Greg Saunier's spindly beat--always the spine of any Deerhoof tune-- weaves a breakneck hybrid of post-punk blast, off-kilter prog, and guitars that evoke the soundtrack of an old Nintendo game. In the middle of it all, Matsuzaki sings about jangletrons, love machines, and something called an "Autojubilator." It's fitting imagery for Breakup Song's charms: hard-working mechanics programmed to entertain.


Angel Olsen's latest is her best record yet, a bracing mix of sounds and styles congealing around songs of pain, sadness, and hope.

My Woman

In 2010, Angel Olsen was a folk singer. Her first great song, “If It’s Alive, It Will,” sounded radically spare, like it had been recorded inside of a closet, or perhaps in another world. It contained some three-dozen epiphanies—one for each line. “Know your own heart well/It’s the one that’s worth most of your time,” Olsen sang, a mantra so disarming and wise it could cut through the thickest lo-fi fog. “If It’s Alive, It Will” was pure empathy. You might implant it in your brain as a reminder of how to live. You could never forget, then, that solitude begets possibility, or that loving a person can transform your mind, or that someone in the universe is currently as lonely as you. “If It’s Alive, It Will” embodied the poised philosophy of Olsen’s songbook to come. Introverted dreamers—people who are quiet on the outside while the world rages so loudly within them—always live by this loner logic. Olsen gave it a melody.
Modern noises vanish when Olsen sings. From the bracing incantations of 2012’s Half Way Home to Olsen’s folk-rock opus, 2014’s *Burn Your Fire for No Witness**, *her name is now synonymous with a voice. Each note tells a story. Hers are tales of absolute yearning and resilience. They honor the romance of being alone in your head. Olsen has perfected the idea that it is still possible—if language is precise enough, if the truth of your music is as elemental as color or blood—to write oneself out of time. Her lyrics have the conviction of someone like Fiona Apple: a profoundly individual presence that centers, above all, on self-reliance, on searing autonomy, on the act of becoming.
My Woman does this more vividly and lucidly and daringly than before. If Burn Your Fire was Olsen’s poetic manifesto, then My Woman lives freely within its world. Together, the two albums remind me of something Patti Smith once said, in 1976, distinguishing the literary Horses from its follow-up, Radio Ethiopia, by calling the latter “total physical energy” and also more implicitly feminine. My Woman walks a tightrope of love to figure out what it is—how to find it, how to allow it in, how to feel it, how to fight for it, how to let it go—by a person who does not lose herself in the process.
The upbeat A-side ranges from the sun-kissed to the blindingly bright. In the final moments of Burn Your Fire, Olsen asked, “Won’t you open a window sometime/What’s so wrong with the light?” and here she responds. She offers witty and taunting rhinestone-cowgirl come-ons that would make Dolly and Loretta proud. She lets loose a piercing, guttural, King-sized *“Baby!” *that shoots fire into the red. She shrieks “I’m still yours!” with sublime vivacity. My Woman contains soda-pop rippers as pained and distraught and irreducible as any girl-group classic: “Heaven hits me when I see your face,” Olsen sings with wide-eyed optimism that wilts on arrival, “But you’ll never be mine.” So much of *My Woman *is rock‘n’roll in the traditional sense, from a ’50s or ’60s jukebox, and it is positively electric, a total blast.
“Intern,” the synth meditation of an opener, is all shivers, a borderless dream-pop song that never quite begins or ends. It’s about the inescapable necessity, for all people, of figuring out who you are: “Still gotta wake up and be someone.” The winding synth melody has a surreal, Lynchian, merry-go-round shine. “I just wanna be alive/Make something real,” Olsen sings, a surprisingly conversational and sensible proposition. “Shut Up Kiss Me” has all the rapture of a black-and-white stop-action movie, with slapstick country humor: “Stop pretending I’m not there/When it’s clear that I’m not going anywhere,” Olsen sings. “If I’m out of sight then take another look around!” In the videos for both songs, Olsen donned a synthetic silver wig, bringing to mind the makeup of her beloved Dolly Parton: “I look so totally artificial, but I’ve always been the simplest person in the world,” Dolly has said. “I knew that there was wisdom and naturalness in me. The way I looked so false and was so real made a nice combination. It’s my fun.”
But Olsen’s fun songs—bright and sweet as they are—are a bit deceiving. The arrangements carry the levity and mania of infatuation, the feeling of total flight, but even here, Olsen’s writing is heavy as ever. (The poet Frank O’Hara once wrote, “each time my heart is broken it makes me feel more adventurous,” which is a fine synopsis of My Woman and the glitter that tempers its aching.) “Never Be Mine” sounds like the ’60s in Caetano Veloso’s Brazil, or Spanish guitar music. “Give It Up” puts a pure “Cathy’s Clown” melody over open Nirvana strums. They’re love songs, but it can never last, and inside all of them, there seems to be a message about the impossibility of ownership, which “Not Gonna Kill You” sings: “A love that never seems to curse or to confine/Will be forever never lost or too defined... However painful let it break down all of me/’Til I am nothing else but the feeling.” Like all of My Woman, it’s tough and tender at once, a bold rumination on how love and autonomy require one another.
And then the record slows. As “Woman” and “Sister” sprawl defiantly towards their eight-minute marks, Olsen’s warble stretches into impressionistic waves. The command of Olsen’s vibrato is wild but controlled—which is to say anarchic—and as the songs get longer, they communicate molecularly, contain more feeling, a haunted drama. The twilight jazz of “Those Were the Days” sparkles like city lights in water at night. On the ecstatic and feverish rave-up “Sister,” the guitar arrangement is enthralling, putting the starry tone of Marquee Moon inside a scorched Crazy Horse jam. “I dare you to understand,” Olsen later boils, “What makes me a woman.” The answer is in the nonlinear alchemy of her corporeal song.
The closer is a raw piano ballad called “Pops.” It is impossibly stark. Olsen’s voice sounds like it is pressed up against glass. “If you want the rainbow,” Dolly Parton once philosophized, “you have to put up with the rain.” “Pops” is all blurred raindrops, recalling Cat Power on *You Are Free *with the wonder of Judy Garland. Olsen sounds like she’s just been emptied of every tear in her body. The salt makes “Pops” glisten. It’s so filmic and classic-sounding that you can practically see a sole red balloon floating against the grey of a cityscape. “Pops” is Olsen’s heaviest song; it’s exhausting. But if ever there were proof that it is possible for life to be gorgeous and fucked-up in equal measure, at the same time, this song is it.
Burn Your Fire was Olsen’s detailed film treatment, but My Woman goes big-screen; it’s Olsen as auteur. “Know your own heart well,” she sang in 2010, “You could be surprised at what you find.” But part of following your heart, of knowing yourself, is understanding that it’s not a fixed muscle. The heart changes; it grows. Its beat speeds and slows as a symptom of life. Here, on “Pops,” Olsen asks, “What is it a heart’s made of?” Maybe you never find out for sure; maybe it’s the unending search itself that becomes the compass of our being. Love is a maze with no way out. But My Woman suggests that the way in is through self-possession.


The lead singer for the barn-burning punk act Camp Cope shifts into synth-pop and romantic love for her solo debut.

Pleaser

Not long after recording Camp Cope’s 2018 barn-burning second album How to Socialise and Make Friends, lead singer Georgia McDonald decided to stop screaming. Her rousing delivery elevated the Melbourne band’s songs to fevered peaks; on tracks like “The Opener,” McDonald bemoaned the misogynist music industry with irony and venom dripping from her voice. Before recording her solo debut, the singer took voice lessons to soften her singing and sound more like she’d always wanted to sound. “Instead of just yelling, I’m trying to actually make something that sounds beautiful to me,” she said in a recent interview. “There’s no angry screaming about anything anymore.”
Pleaser, the first record McDonald has released on her own as Georgia Maq, strays far from Camp Cope. She places her voice in an almost entirely synthesized milieu, a dramatic shift facilitated by producers Katie Dey and Darcy Baylis. The album’s subject matter suits its new dressings: Instead of singing about politics or family, or the complex and sometimes destructive bonds between friends, McDonald focuses on romantic love and self-love, romance’s quiet counterpart. She aims for pop bliss, but her melodies, which tend to be simple and reiterative, don’t let her lift off.
Most of the production fine-tunes ’80s pop techniques to 21st-century ends. The pearly leads and bright, expressive snare on “Driving Blind” sound siphoned from Body Talk-era Robyn, while “You’ll Be Singing My Name,” one of the record’s livelier cuts, adopts a bouncy piano backdrop that echoes the instrumentation on Lorde’s “Green Light.” With its binaural synth strobe and melancholy vocal lines, “Like a Shadow” could be mistaken at first listen for one of the moodier tracks off Caroline Polachek’s recent solo debut. McDonald has no regrets about leaving her punk roots in the dust, but her voice can sound slack against its newly airless environment. She’s ironed out the particulars of the singular and commanding voice she cultivated with Camp Cope and hasn’t tailored herself a new set of idiosyncrasies, leaving a blankness at the center of her singing.
Many of the best pop songs begin with a familiar backdrop and then electrify it with a surprising twist, eliciting joy from the shock of the unexpected. Robyn’s chorus melodies begin simply and then surge away from their starting points; Lorde’s Melodrama lives and dies on its often jarring chord progressions; and Carly Rae Jepsen sings herself into a breathless frenzy by the end of every track. McDonald’s first foray into synth-pop sets its sights on similar highs, but rarely takes the risks needed to achieve them. Compositionally, there’s more setup than payoff; choruses tend to consist of just a few notes, with little development and even less surprise.
Camp Cope’s albums established McDonald as a powerful frontperson and lyricist, and while her presence does often feel blunted on Pleaser, her knack for clever lines still surfaces. “At least I built the hill on which I’ll die,” she sings on “Away From Love.” On the scuttling closer “Big Embarrassing Heart,” she overturns a romantic cliche: “I will run to you with open arms and only hold myself.” She belts the line with enough conviction to make it sound like a happy ending, a testament to self-sufficiency. In moments like these, where McDonald loosens her reservations and surrenders to the full impact of her voice, the spark she’s always nurtured shines through.


A collaboration between Bay Area rapper/producer Droop-E and L.A. songwriter Nite Jewel, Euphoria revels in the distance between two musicians and styles.

Euphoria EP

While the boundary between hip-hop and electronic music has always been permeable, in recent years it’s begun to show signs of dissolving completely. Trap-influenced drum patterns dominate electro-pop, spaced-out synths are de rigueur in rap, and hybrid producers have become some of electronic music's biggest stars. As what’s left of the wall crumbles, we’re seeing more extended collaborations between rappers and electro-pop artists, like Danny Brown’s work with Purity Ring or Big Boi and Phantogram’s Big Grams.
AMTHST is the latest partnership in this mold. It finds Bay Area rapper and producer Droop-E teaming up with Ramona Gonzalez, the singer/songwriter behind L.A. synth-pop act Nite Jewel. This isn’t the first time the pair have linked up--Droop-E’s 2013 song "N the Traffic" featured Gonzales on the hook—though this time around, they’re working together more closely, collaborating on the production as well as the songwriting. Euphoria, their debut EP under the name AMTHST, is a record that revels in distance: the distance between hip-hop and electro-pop, the distance between men and women, the distance between L.A. and the Bay.
Droop-E and Gonzales do have plenty in common musically, though, and they quickly find a sonic middle ground on Euphoria, marrying the laid-back bounce of Bay-Area rap to the gauzy atmospherics of Nite Jewel’s early work. This is nocturnal music, built from layers of synths, wet snare hits, and plenty of echo. The songs unfurl at a languid, practically chopped-and-screwed pace, and both Droop-E and Gonzalez luxuriate in the production, trading off verses and choruses with an easy cadence.
While Droop-E and Gonzalez are a natural fit as musicians, Euphoria’s most compelling moments leverage their divergent vocal approaches. "Thug Passion," a smoldering trip-hop number, casts the pair as two lovers talking past one another. "You don’t call me back," Gonzales sighs. "You don’t know me." Droop-E, meanwhile, mutters noncomittally in the background, suggesting, "We can just chill out, relax." "I Wonder" flips this script: Droop-E is in full pursuit, thirstily spitting game, while Gonzales eludes his advances. "You tell me lots of things/ What do they really mean?/ The more I wonder," she chirps back. Both of these songs feel like nuanced counterpoints to the one-sided narratives that drive most hip-hop and pop songs—they’re conversations, not accusations.
"Over Zone," a meditation on intoxication and its consequences, goes further yet, digging into the ways that gender mediates our pursuit of euphoria. On first listen, the song recalls a similar anthem—its pitched-down call-and-reponse refrain is pretty similar to that of Kendrick Lamar’s "Swimming Pools (Drank)"—but merits a closer reading. During a set piece in the song’s midsection, Gonzales drunkenly attempts to leave a club—when she’s stopped, she insists that she just needs some fresh air. "Nah, I saw you stumbling out there, you’re not fooling anyone," a sinister voice responds, as water-logged synths close in around the track. The scene then switches to Droop-E, who finds himself in a similar predicament, careening down a hallway in search of a place to vomit. "Give me some bread and some spring water and I’ll be cool, shit," he raps—a bit of bravado, perhaps, but also a tacit acknowledgement that his safety isn’t in question despite his drunkenness.
For a five-song EP, Euphoria packs quite a bit of depth. Both Droop-E and Gonzalez have managed to preserve what makes them distinctive while working in tandem; the reward here lies in examining the seams where two very different approaches collide. Admittedly, there is a background music quality to these songs—the consistently drowsy pace holds the EP back from fully engaging the listener at times—though that slow simmer suits the subject matter well. Nonetheless, Euphoria’s five songs effectively evoke the distance of a strained conversation, even if they are clearly the product of a deep mutual understanding.


Three shows recorded at Minneapolis club Jay’s Longhorn between 1979 and 1980 capture a raw snapshot of a young band in flux, brimming with confidence and hopped up on speed.

Tonite Longhorn

By the end of the 1970s, disco was dying, and the Twin Cities were at the dawn of a renaissance. Freeform radio had given way to commercial programming, but in Minneapolis and St. Paul, a punk and new wave scene was taking shape, growing by word of mouth and metastasizing in record shops like Oar Folkjokeopus and clubs like Jay’s Longhorn. When the young trio of Bob Mould, Grant Hart, and Greg Norton played there for the first time, the scene was nascent—First Avenue’s hallowed 7th Street Entry was still the coat closet for the disco club Uncle Sam’s. But those early Hüsker Dü sets at the Longhorn revealed a group quickly becoming fluent in punk and hardcore, foreshadowing a future in which their mastery of hooks and harmonies would transcend genre. It was the first time they’d felt like the real thing.
Tonite Longhorn collects three of those early shows recorded between July 1979 and September 1980, as the band immersed itself in the breakneck thrash that would become the foundation of its sound. They were recorded by engineer and archivist Terry Katzman, who co-founded Reflex Records with Hüsker Dü after their first single was rejected by Jay’s Longhorn DJ Peter Jesperson’s label Twin/Tone. Katzman’s massive trove of Hüsker Dü recordings made up the bulk of the 2017 box set Savage Young Dü, a 69-track collection of mostly live and previously unreleased music from ’79-’82. Alternate versions of most of the songs on Tonite Longhorn can also be found on Savage Young Dü, rendering this collection largely inessential for all but the most obsessive fans. But while the 2017 set serves as a completist’s document of their early years, Tonite Longhorn is more focused, an even rawer snapshot of the young band in flux, brimming with confidence and hopped up on speed.
Much like the Savage Young Dü recordings, the tapes are a bit rough; Norton’s bass often gets lost in the mix, and the vocals sound very much like they were recorded in a makeshift rock club in the ’70s. But the drums and cymbals cut through like gunshots and lightning, and the deeper you get the more the lo-fi analog aesthetic becomes transportive, making it easier to picture a 20-year-old Mould spewing vitriol into a mic from the stage of a former steakhouse that once hosted progressive jazz. The only exact duplicate that Norton—who produced Tonite Longhorn—included from Savage Young Dü is the opener “Insects Rule the World,” the first song from their first set at the Longhorn, and arguably the moment that defines their POV in this era. “We’re not the most professional band in the Twin Cities,” Hart admits as the song comes to a close, before Mould chimes in: “...but we have fun though.”
And for the most part, these shows do sound like fun, whether they’re taking potshots at Reagan (“Uncle Ron”) or getting drugs from the professor and fucking Ginger “underneath a big palm tree” on “Gilligan’s Island.” They’re spraying jet fuel on sounds they had already heard (their amped-up cover of Dee Dee Ramone’s ode to heroin “Chinese Rocks” offers a clue to their proclivities), but they flash glimpses of how they would later transform those sounds, like when Mould turbocharges the MC5’s proto-punk fuzz box on “Sexual Economics.” This is clearly not the same band that moved to California and cut the double LP concept album Zen Arcade—but these shows offer the first part to the roadmap of how they got there.
With the exception of the prescient improvisation “Ode to Bode,” which Hart would later rework for Zen Arcade’s “Hare Krsna,” all of the songs on Tonite Longhorn appear elsewhere. But despite the redundancy, the record is an important piece of the Twin Cities’ musical archive, a rare slice of life from a short-lived heyday that fizzled out by the end of the ’80s. The Jay’s Longhorn era was brief but influential—some called it the Minneapolis CBGB—and it was one of the few places in the Midwest booking punk and new wave acts. When doors opened in summer 1977, most clubs in town booked cover bands. The Longhorn played host to the likes of Elvis Costello, Talking Heads, Blondie, the Police, and the B-52’s well before they became household names. The Ramones, the Buzzcocks, Iggy Pop, and Gang of Four played there; after the Replacements played an early show at the club in July 1980, Jesperson promptly signed them. By the time the venue closed in the spring of ’82, the Mats and Hüsker Dü were stalwart members of a thriving scene, and the crowd had moved downtown to 7th Street Entry. But much of it started at the Longhorn.
The recordings of the shows on Tonite Longhorn capture Hüsker Dü as they merge punk and hardcore, but before they moved out west and eclipsed it with a stunning run of albums—Zen Arcade (1984), New Day Rising (1985), Flip Your Wig (1985), and Candy Apple Grey (1986)—that rewrote the rules of what a hardcore punk band could be. For Mould, at least, that July 6, 1979 show marked the band’s true beginning: “Hüsker Dü was now an actual band, and we’d played a show at the Longhorn," he recounted in his 2011 autobiography. This particular moment of the band’s infancy is unlikely to mint many new fans, but as a document of perhaps the most fertile period in Twin Cities music history, its significance is undeniable. These shows were foundational to the band’s view of its own legitimacy, a statement of arrival from a bunch of kids with a lot more to say.


Another Day on Earth

In my mind Brian Eno's ambient music is completely separate from his vocal work-- so much so that I can in hazier moments forget that one man was responsible for both "Lantern Marsh" and "Third Uncle". It's not difficult to hear how Eno's ideas find their way into whatever he's working on, but when you're debating what to play it's always either "I'm in the mood for vocal Eno" or "I'm in the mood for ambient Eno." The twin box sets he released in the early 90s were split along the same line, so obviously the man himself draws a similar distinction.
Though he's steadily produced instrumental music over the past 20 years, Eno's only pop release during this time has been the 1990 collaboration with John Cale, Wrong Way Up. Good album, and it was particularly fun to hear him apply to his own music all the production tricks (bass guitar high in the mix, doubled, tripled, and quadrupled vocals, etc.) he'd been using with other bands over the previous decade. Now, 15 years and a clutch of instrumental albums later, Eno returns to songs with Another Day on Earth. The record starts beautifully with "This", a mantra-like melody with a vaguely West African rhythm that sounds very much along the lines of Wrong Way Up's "Spinning Away". It's an ideal first song-- catchy, relaxed, and expansive-- with Eno in fine voice and multi-tracked to the point where it seems almost rude not to sing along. It's not a stage-setting opener, however, and as the album wears on it becomes clear that "This" is by far the best track.
One problem is that the sound on Another Day on Earth is lush to the point of distraction. It's almost as though Eno is hampered by his undeniable studio mastery -- he knows how to make so many beautiful sounds it would be a shame not to include them. Though he has in the past relied on chance operations to give his music an unpredictable and organic quality ("Honor thy mistake as a hidden intention," reads one of his Oblique Strategy cards) Another Day on Earth is produced to within an inch of its life, with layers of intricate detail and the most ethereal synth washes imaginable.
Still, overproduced or not, there is pleasure in sitting back and letting Eno's sound wash over you. One highlight is "How Many Worlds", which begins and with a simple acoustic guitar strum that Eno sings over and then adds is a plaintive string arrangement that weaves around wafts of electronic drone and builds to a powerful climax. The chord stabs on "Going Unconscious" (which is essentially instrumental, with bits of female vocals vaguely reminiscent of Laurie Anderson) remind me a lot of the palette from Thursday Afternoon, and the bells that tinkle throughout add an effective tension.
The melodies throughout Another Day on Earth are simple, which only occasionally works to the record's advantage. "And Then So Clear" is basic but true, though it will alienate some because Eno pitches his voice up an octave with what may be the same robotic AutoTune Cher used on "Believe". Leaving aside for a moment my affection for Cher's biggest hit, Eno's choice of processing suits both his voice and the song, turning what could have been nothing more than new age drift into a moving and fragile robotic lullaby. As if to illustrate the point about the vocal processing, the later song "Under" has the exact same melody as "And Then So Clear", this time sung by a small multracked chorus of Enos, and it's not nearly as powerful.
"This" is the album's only track that isn't either a ballad or an amorphous moodscape that happens to have vocals. In terms of overall feel Another Day on Earth sounds like Eno's 90s ambient work bent slightly to fit into a song-oriented format. The dualistic vocal/ambient Eno filing scheme doesn't work with this one, which is refreshing in its way. But unfortunately Another Day on Earth is a decent album at best.


Brian Wilson has spoken bluntly about his retirement, which means his new solo album No Pier Pressure may be his last. It largely cedes the floor to duets with young singers like Kacey Musgraves, Nate Ruess of fun., and Zooey Deschanel, a foreign and not entirely flattering experiment for Wilson.

No Pier Pressure

It’s very possible that we’ve heard the last of Brian Wilson. Not because the opulent pop of the Beach Boys, or his rich and tortured personal mythology, are showing any fade in ubiquity—a movie about both, with Paul Dano and John Cusack playing younger and current-day versions of him, respectively, comes out this summer—but because the man himself is speaking bluntly of his possible retirement from music this year.
So for anyone who grew up with a reverence for Wilson’s brilliant work—which, especially if you’re from California, can veer into a fanatic sort of transposed paternal empathy—his new and eleventh solo album No Pier Pressure carries the burden of serving as his gold watch. Yet the record largely cedes the floor to duets with trendy young singers (Kacey Musgraves, Nate Ruess of fun., Zooey Deschanel, all audibly rhapsodic), a foreign and not entirely flattering experiment for Wilson. The album’s clearest predecessor is Santana’s Supernatural (1999), from which sprang the malevolent radio hydra "Smooth", and other forays into May-September duet hinterland. (There’s been an upswing of the latter in the past year, from Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga fluttering their jazz hands all hither and thither to Barry Manilow’s gauche, grave-digging extreme of shoving his voice into dusty audio of Whitney Houston and Marilyn Monroe.)
Unlike Carlos Santana, though, who could just wedge in a noodling guitar break and shuffle back to his inexplicable stiletto empire, Wilson’s chipper duets never reach equilibrium. Either his presence feels underutilized—the syrupy "On the Island" with She & Him, in which his vocals are scant—or the guests feel shoehorned into musty production that undermines their own charisma. It’s apparent throughout that this album was originally intended as a reunited Beach Boys effort, as their songwriting staples are faithfully represented: the orchestrations are lush and swooning, the lyrics set in beatific seaside tableaus and brimming with sepia wistfulness. Wilson sounds most confident with his former band cohorts; several tracks feature amiable turns from Al Jardine and David Marks. Of the whippersnapper duets, Wilson’s coziest harmonizing with Ruess, whose high, earnest keening could’ve been plucked from the Beach Boys’ Sunflower era.
In listening to No Pier Pressure, uneasy questions rise about base motives. Wilson freely admits that he doesn’t listen to modern music, and was so surprised to hear Frank Ocean rap that he dismissed him from the album. That likely means that these duet artists were pitched to him for the project, with the hopes that some of those younger fanbases would follow along. It’s a pretty farfetched expectation: are Zooey Deschanel’s fans now really going to stampede en masse to the nearest Urban Outfitters and demand Orange Crate Art?
But to speculate this project was foisted whole on Wilson would infantilize him, a casual disservice done all too readily in the press (what other 72-year-old Grammy winner’s collaborations would prompt the caveat "whether he’s aware of it or not," despite his ability to still deliver an incisive interview?). And there’s a warm timbre to all these artists’ voices that could surely appeal to Wilson. Whatever the cause, this is new territory for him: He’s sat in with young bucks here and there (Mini Mansions, Emile Haynie, the adulatory Brian Fest concert last month in Los Angeles) but he’s never been gregarious with his own material. His most recent album collaborators have been old friends returned to the fold, from a reunion with Smile lyricist Van Dyke Parks to the global Beach Boys reunion of 2012.
There’s a happy accident in disunion, though: the closing track "The Last Song", which was originally intended for Lana Del Rey before she sulked off into the sunset. It’s the autonomous note Wilson deserves to end on, a lovely, bittersweet swath of the elegiac strings and gilded harmonies he perfected in his youth with "The Warmth of the Sun" and "Caroline, No". Wilson sighs, "Don’t be sad/ There was a time and place for what we had/ If there was just another chance for me to sing to you." It’s a worthy, prideful summation of a gorgeous life’s work, both innocent and wizened at once. And he didn’t need any young blood to get there.


On its most cohesive album to date, the improvisatory jazz trio finds new power in silence and restraint.

Earth Patterns

On the search for transcendence, Szun Waves are perfectly content traveling without a map. The London-formed trio—comprising electronic producer Luke Abbott, saxophonist Jack Wyllie, and drummer Laurence Pike—has performed improvisational jazz with a shared reverence for the vast possibilities of winging it. Ecstatic and off-the-cuff, their performances often sound like three virtuosos pushing each other to outrun their individual musical wanderlust. But on their third album, Earth Patterns—a seven-song set with additional production by David Pye and James Holden—the group slows its heady pursuits to a near halt, discovering new power in restraint.
From the beginning, Szun Waves have resisted being boxed in. Taking inspiration from free jazz as well as avant-garde rock bands like Can, their 2016 debut, At Sacred Walls, was culled from six hours of freeform exploration. Recorded without any edits, 2018’s New Hymn to Freedom evolved their process, filtering ambient and electronic music through the lens of spiritual jazz. Earth Patterns, the result of three days of recording at the end of a 2019 European tour, deliberately takes several steps back from those all-in experiences. It’s their most cohesive record to date, exploring a still, prayerful tone.
On Earth Patterns, Szun Waves foreground their subtle, intuitive approach by dialing down the tension of their debut and the more utopian tone of New Hymn to Freedom. Near silence is prized, and each member holds space for the faintest motifs to emerge. A newfound sense of discipline guides the pining melodies and Pike’s downy rhythms. Evoking Floating Points and Pharoah Sanders’ Promises, “Exploding Upwards” weaves slo-mo sorcery via simmering soprano saxophone lines and a synth with the honeyed lower registers of a pipe organ. On “Garden,” the group takes a less discrete approach and the shiny whiplash of Abbot’s modular arpeggios hit like solar flares.
Compared to the galactic forays of New Hymn to Freedom, the searching but sedate performances on Earth Patterns feel much more grounded. (Abbot himself has said he views it as “a journey from the outer reaches of the universe down onto the earth.”) Ushered in with a gossamer web of shakers, chimes, and faint bird calls, “In the Moon House” offers a Talk Talk-like sanctuary, finding inspiration in the precious nature of the moment. “New Universe” spotlights Pike’s tumbling grooves before folding feverish saxophone into swelling synths, like the opening sequence of an ’80s thriller. Throughout Earth Patterns, these disparate touchstones feel like the result of each member’s career-long exercise in making room—for closer collaboration, deeper concentration, and greater space between every note.


The Bay Area rock band refines its chaotic energy on its concise, catchy, and semi-ridiculous debut.

Spiritual Cramp

Spiritual Cramp have their very own Bez. Jose-Luna Gonzalez is the Bay Area band’s tambourine-playing mascot, popping up at their shows to provide auxiliary percussion and an extra sense of chaos to a group, usually outfitted in Fred Perry, who look like they could beat the shit out of you. Spiritual Cramp haven’t entirely carried this anarchic energy to their self-titled debut. Clear-cut and wound tight, there’s nothing here that could be considered auxiliary or chaotic. Across 10 tracks, the band packs in precise, hook-centered anthems with inspiring choruses: music made for people with a tried-and-tested vinegar solution for wiping the blood off their Brentham bombers.
Taking their name from a Christian Death song, Spiritual Cramp are among a wave of bands, including MSPAINT, Militarie Gun and Turnstile, who emerged from hardcore backgrounds and broadened their palettes to include softer, artsier flourishes. While those bands take their primary influences from the East Coast, Spiritual Cramp are proud anglophiles. Spiritual Cramp plays like a callback to 1977, when the Clash realized the natural alliances between punk and reggae, filtered through a hard-sashwaying garage rock lens. Spiritual Cramp integrate dub, spiky guitars, and oi-like crowd-starters, all with a kitschy wink rather than flatly imitating their predecessors. The music is ecstatic rather than enraged, semi-ridiculous rather than self-serious.
As a frontman, Michael Bingham sounds like the kind of guy who insists on snuffing out a candle with his fingers. You can practically hear the pressure of his clenched-fists in the steady burble of his rabble-rousing voice. Across Spiritual Cramp, he switches between hubristic pomposity and a less mannered call for help. The album’s sequencing is buttressed on this swing: the pendulum ride between the imperious coke come-up and the humbling consequences of the come-down. “I wanna fly everywhere and put the miles on my credit card,” Bingham sings on “Slick Rick” like Iggy Pop at his puffed-up peak, before beginning the next song, “Talkin’ on the Internet,” with his tail between his legs: “Another day/Another credit card declined,” he whines.
Bingham connects the political with the personal in the most on-the-nose way possible. “There’s a war on the TV and a war in my head,” he sings on “City on Fire” over a prickly guitar line. Bingham makes no attempt to be coy or subversive. His antiauthoritarianism scans gleefully teenage, his gestures deliberately vague. This isn’t to the band’s discredit: They’re striving for London Calling universality while knowing that cultural commentary isn’t their strong suit. Luckily, the songs are catchy enough to get away with it.
What Spiritual Cramp might lack in blood, it makes up for with zippy efficiency. The band pulls the focus away from its propensity for carnage and toward their instinctive sense of melody, trading disorder for a methodicalness that galvanizes rather than placates. It’s a smart move, and one that plays surprisingly well to their anthemic tendencies. Slick and indelible, Spiritual Cramp inspires the same kind of fist-pumping and pogo-ing as the band’s unhinged live shows.


Recorded in 2000 and newly reissued, the sprawling title track and its B-side are a defining precursor to the contemplative works Jason Molina would soon create and release under his own name.

Travels in Constants EP

Jason Molina’s prolificacy is at once extraordinary and anxiety-inducing. The leader of Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Co. created an immense and unexampled body of work in his 39 years, teeming with an assemblage of images drawn from nature, travel, his relationships, and his experiences as a boy on the banks of Lake Erie—the moons, magnolias, owls, and big cats he so deftly positioned as a reflections of his heart and psyche, over autodidactic acoustic guitar meditations and explosive electric roots rock. In the ’90s and early ’00s, Molina’s sensibility and pace were unrivaled, and today he stands among the greatest songwriters of the era.
For newcomers, finding an entry point into his massive catalog can feel intimidating. For fans, the exercise of knowing Molina through his work becomes a labor of love, an act of hard work that the singer-songwriter, who religiously punched his personal songwriting clock like a 9-to-5 job, would have no doubt appreciated. It’s especially true because he almost never explained himself, or his songs. It’s an elusive quality I’ve become intimately familiar with as his biographer. Almost five years after his untimely death related to alcohol abuse, new work from Molina’s busy mind and dedicated output continues to emerge, and it’s an exhilarating thing when the songs recall a period of Molina that is particularly precious to fans, and can stand on their own as fully realized reflections of Molina’s style. Such is the case with a pair of tunes now available through the Temporary Residence label.
With the turn of the new millennium emerged two distinct sides of Jason Molina. In 2000, he recorded and released the contemplative and meandering meditations of Ghost Tropic, written and performed largely off the cuff with friend and collaborator Alasdair Roberts in Lincoln, Neb. The following year, Molina drove a rented jet-black Crown Victoria to Philadelphia to record Didn’t It Rain, an earthy song-set rooted in the ethos of blue-collar workers in the industrial landscapes of Chicagoland. Sonically disparate as they seem, the recordings endure as the earliest representations of each side of Molina’s coin, a binary quality that became increasingly acute through his solo works and collaborations with his band Magnolia Electric Co.
Between those two albums, Molina created a handful of lesser-known works in the apartment he rented in Chicago, a space adorned with only a 4-track recorder, a vocal mic recommended by Steve Albini, a collection of vintage guitars, and some auxiliary keyboards and percussion. Among the songs he wrote there was a one-off single for the Temporary Residence label. At the time, the 18-minute untitled track Molina submitted was his entry into the label’s Travels in Constants series, where artists would record an EP that centered on the theme of distance. Newly reissued, the sprawling track is a defining precursor to the contemplative works Molina would soon create and release under his own name. For the purposes of the reissue, the label christened the formerly untitled track “Travels in Constants,” and included as a B-side the song “Howler,” a lyrical theme not unfamiliar among the many metaphorical wolves Molina sang of in his short life.
There’s a classical flare in the acoustic guitar picking of the title track, reminiscent of “The Body Burned Away” from Ghost Tropic. The quality is so similar that it’s plausible that the riff was either intended for, or inspired by, the session. But like so much with the elusive late songwriter, he never explained the work. “We were talking a lot back then and he used to joke that the ‘Travels in Constants’ track was ‘probably too out-there’ for his proper albums,” Temporary Residence’s Jeremy DeVine explains via email. But that’s the extent of the exposition Molina provided.
The track is canonical in its use of time-honored Molina imagery, including the moon, the owl, and the black versions of those two things, holding fort beside them. “The moon’s above like a sickle,” Molina insists, as if any moment it’ll drop and reap harvest. Its palpable intimacy and hushed posture peel back the curtain on Molina’s home studio, the sacred space that served as an incubator for his most beloved works, including Didn’t It Rain and what is widely considered his opus, 2003’s The Magnolia Electric Co. It’s as if he’s inviting the listener to spy on him.
”Howler” has an intro that’s similarly pensive, filling the recesses of Molina’s music room and 4-track with guitar reverb and programming from a primitive keyboard, a lower fidelity take on the driving line behind “Being in Love” from The Lioness. Molina sings in his stirring tenor that he’ll write his shadows and his echoes out in blood, presumably a pact with his muses. That if there is nothing else there is a being, a howler, that will both drive and haunt him.
Both sides of the “Travels in Constants” single foreshadow 2004’s Pyramid Electric Co. and other future solo works. While perhaps not the easiest entry point for the uninitiated, for Molina fans, the two songs are an invaluable glance into his divine spaces. The single’s cover, too, is personal—one in an endless string of abstract drawings Molina created throughout his life, traced from a credit card and filled with oil crayon gestures. It’s a profound chance to know him, without explanation.


Elvis Costello and the Roots' collaborative album, Wise Up Ghost, is one of the most densely referential works in Costello's catalogue. The grooves, from the Roots, are loose, muted, and murky, but the music glows with an attention to detail and sense of history.

Elvis Costello / The Roots: Wise Up Ghost

Wise Up Ghost

A small outburst of tie-loosening sounds scurry across the opening seconds of "Walk Us Uptown", the first song on Elvis Costello and the Roots' Wise Up Ghost: We hear a few warm-up blurts, studio cross-chatter, and someone bringing up the volume on a laptop. When artists with historical baggage collaborate, sometimes these little expectation-defusing gestures pop up, a way to subtly prod reverent audiences into listening with new ears. Bear with us, we're just putting this together on the fly, they say.
For Wise Up Ghost, it's a bit of a feint. Elvis Costello and the Roots are known for many things, but neither are noted for "relaxing." And Wise Up Ghost, the more you poke at it, turns out to be one of the densely referential works in Costello's catalogue, its lyrics a series of nested self-quotes that build a Chinese box out of his old records. The grooves, from the Roots, are loose, muted, and murky, but the music glows with the unmistakable attention to detail and sense of history that the group can't help but bring to everything they touch. This isn't the sound of old masters getting loose, in other words, as much as lifelong A-students coasting a bit.
Although the name on the sleeve is "Elvis Costello and The Roots",  Blackthought doesn't show up to rap, even on the lean, snapping "Come the Meantimes". No one raps at any point, in fact, which seems like a missed opportunity to make something unusual happen. The only real link to hip-hop comes from Costello's reflexive, self-quoting urge: "Wake Me Up" and "(She Might Be A) Grenade" both reset lyrics from his 2004 album The Delivery Man, while echoes of Punch the Clock's "Pills & Soap" flicker across "Stick Out Your Tongue". On the title track, Costello's backup vocals call back to the earlier track "Grenade", effectively creating an Escher staircase of himself. For Costello diehards, the multiple callbacks trigger the same "wait, how many places do I know this lyric from?" half-déjà vu that has always been one of hip-hop's deepest pleasures.
At the record's low points, though, the "legends spitballing" vibe works against the material. Some of the songs are undercooked, or at least they begin to feel that way as the grooves stretch out past five minutes. "Stick Out Your Tongue", "Come the Meantimes", and "Wake Me Up" linger longer than their thematic materials deserve, and "Can You Hear Me" meanders through six minutes but feels nearly twice that length, a collection of slapdash ideas with no audible commitment behind them.
At their best, both artists are great listeners, capable of soaking up something they can use from new collaborators. On the slower, quieter tracks, you can hear Wise Up Ghost shade into something that sounds genuinely like a product of both sensibilities: "Tripwire" is a delicate 6/8 shuffle that Costello sings in his lovely high head voice, the only time his voice sounds conventionally beautiful. "If I Could Believe" is one of those stunning, rafter-reaching ballads Costello unfurls out of his dry, unsentimental soul every few albums, to remind us he can. On the left-field "Cinco Minutos Con Vos", a series of disparate parts click together: Questlove's patient, freakishly exact snare snaps, horns punch soft notes, strings churn, Costello trades vocals with La Marisoul of  La Santa Cecilia, and boom-- Elvis Costello and the Roots. It's not the kind of moment that will knock the long-since-formed careers of either out their deep, geologic grooves, but it's a minor revelation nonetheless.


Fusing early music, ambient, and folk, the Czech couple’s work has entranced fans like Sufjan Stevens and Bryce Dessner for decades. This collection is an enchanting portal into their furtive soundworld.

Irena and Vojtěch Havlovi: Melodies in the Sand

Melodies in the Sand

From the 16th through the 18th century, the viol, or viola da gamba, was so common that many affluent homes kept multiple specimens in varying sizes in a dedicated chest. The viol was eventually supplanted by other members of the violin family, although in the past half century, early-music specialists like Jordi Savall have contributed to a revival of the instrument. And in the 1980s, Czechoslovakian couple Irena Havlová and Vojtěch Havel also dusted off the viol to reconsider its long history within a modern context.
The Havlovis were members of the Capella Antiqua e Moderna collective, itself a curious ensemble seemingly situated outside of time. Under communism, Western sounds were being smuggled into the country, yet the group’s repertoire drew from the Renaissance, along with their own minimal compositions. The couple’s work spans decades, and while they are beloved in their own country, their music has slowly seeped toward the West. La Blogothèque director Vincent Moon tracked down the pair for his 2009 film Little Blue Nothing. Sufjan Stevens is an avowed fan, as is the National’s Bryce Dessner, who composed a piece for the Kronos Quartet based on their music. Now ambient musician Jonny Nash compiles Melodies in the Sand, an immaculate, enchanting portal into the couple’s furtive soundworld. Not as sprawling as their out-of-print 2005 compilation Světelné kruhy, Melodies in the Sand emphasizes shorter works rather than their longform compositions.
“It took us years to realize we arrived on earth with a serene mind,” Havlová murmurs in Moon’s film. That might sound hokey if overheard at a yoga retreat. But seeing as the two grew up under totalitarianism in Czechoslovakia, it sounds like a coping mechanism—a way to find inner peace inside music, against a backdrop of repression. You can hear that sense of serenity in 1990’s Háta H., their first release as a duo. “She Is Dissolving” is an étude derived from the Harold Budd school of sustain-pedal piano: gentle, unhurried, yet also melodic and memorable in under three minutes. “That Which Glitters” keeps those shimmering keyboard figures intact, but gently layers Havlová’s whispered exhalations atop it. Even when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, paving the way for Czechoslovakia’s Velvet Revolution, followed by the flood of Western capitalism, the couple remained steadfast in their musical approach, as if outside the flow of time.
Braiding strands of ambient, experimental folk, early music, and modern classical, the couple’s compositions are resonant and deeply stirring. The instrumentation is primarily limited to piano and viol, but it all sounds so delicate that you could be forgiven for thinking the Havlovis work instead with 19th century lace, hoarfrost, and sighs. “Velvet Wings of Serenity” pairs an undulating piano with shadowy accompaniment from the viol, its hushed bow strokes revealed only amid the piano’s decay. “Light Circles” dates from their time in Capella Antiqua e Moderna in the late ’80s, striking a careful balance between minimalist restraint and dramatic release. Curlicues of woodwind garland the piece, and the coiled piano lines move in ever-widening circles until it reaches its zenith, buoyed by orchestral brass.
“Our desire to play is a desire of freedom,” says Havel in Little Blue Nothing. Across their discography, Havlová and Havel share an attuned and almost enviable telepathy, no matter their chosen instrumentation, which can feel spare and luxurious. But their viol duets—deep, empathetic, and also toe-curling—stand apart. The two race as one luxury sedan through the contours of “In the Garden” and “Vanity of Wings.” At times, you might wonder if their music emanates from yellowed sheet music or perhaps some distant point in the 21st century, before shrugging and letting it just fill the room. That curious feeling of suspended time arises throughout Melodies in the Sand, in which three serene minutes can bring the entire modern world to a standstill.

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With an unpredictable, amorphous shoegaze sound, the Indigenous Canadian musician crafts their most opaque and open-hearted work.

Bekka Ma’iingan

In their brief yet prolific tenure as Zoon, the Toronto-based composer Daniel Monkman has reoriented shoegaze away from an insular, obfuscating aesthetic into a modern form of folk music—a vehicle through which they can tell their story, commune with friends, and catalog the human condition. It’s just that instead of gathering everyone around the campfire, Monkman invites you to float away with them up in the clouds. Raised on the Brokenhead Ojibway Nation reservation near Winnipeg, Manitoba, Monkman made his initial Beck-inspired forays into music with stoner-folk act the Blisters, before falling into the vicious cycle of poverty, transience, and addiction that entraps so many young Indigenous people in Canada. After getting sober, they reemerged with a bolder musical vision, fueled by a newfound pride in their heritage.
Adopting the name Zoon—short for “zoongide’ewin,” an Ojibway term signifying bravery—Monkman made their proper debut in 2020 with Bleached Wavves, showcasing a revamped sound that they cheekily dubbed “moccassin-gaze.” On that record, Monkman augmented the trippy textures and dazed melodies of My Bloody Valentine and the Brian Jonestown Massacre with traditional Ojibway percussion and spiritual chants. But Bleached Wavves was more than a novel cross-genre fusion: Its rupture of splendor and sorrow allowed Monkman to soothe emotional wounds and preserve a cultural history imperiled by Canada’s legacy of colonization.
Those same themes have found a more vocal, visceral outlet in Monkman’s concurrent project Ombiigizi, the punchier outfit they co-founded with fellow Indigenous indie-rocker Adam Sturgeon (a.k.a. Status/Not Status). Meanwhile, a pair of Zoon EPs released last year confirmed what Bleached Wavves only hinted at—buried beneath the sonic overload were the sort of candid addresses that easily translated to acoustic guitar. However, on Zoon’s exquisite second album, Bekka Ma’iingan, Monkman frequently sidesteps conventional songcraft altogether and surrenders to the impressionistic power of sound. Bekka Ma’iingan is at once his most opaque and most open-hearted work, less interested in explicit storytelling than in making you feel the deep-seated ache and hard-won euphoria coursing through Monkman’s veins.
On the surface, Bekka Ma’iingan is Monkman’s pandemic record—the words in the title translate to “slow down” and “wolf,” a reference to both the unhurried pace of lockdown living and the recent revelation that Monkman’s deceased father was a member of his nation’s wolf clan. At the outset, the album seems content to marinate in a beatific stasis, oblivious to the laws of time and space: The opening “All Around You” instantly submerges us in aqueous, Animal Collective-styled psychedelia, with Monkman’s one-note acoustic strums chiming like an alarm clock. And while an encroaching rumble of drums braces us for lift-off, they ultimately recede into the track’s infinity-pool ripples, introducing the record’s unpredictable, amorphous essence. Even when Monkman attempts something resembling a proper, guitar-driven rock song, they’re just as liable to zone out into a daydream: “Care” lays its misty melodies atop a slow-motion grungy grind that’s more m b v than Loveless, but partway through, an electronic beat pokes through the mix and redirects us toward the light, transforming the song from a doomy dirge into an expansive, liberating dronescape.
Structurally speaking, Bekka Ma’iingan is like an old building where you have to chisel away at layers of fading façade to expose the pristine brick preserved underneath—and the divine “Dodem” marks the moment when the true riches are revealed. The song’s elegiac space-rock sway ushers in a mesmerizing mid-album stretch where Owen Pallett’s regal string arrangements assume a central role, harnessing Monkman’s mercurial sound design into high-definition dream-pop symphonettes. Bekka Ma’iingan hits its emotional peaks with  “Awesiinh (A-Way-See)” and “Manitou,” back-to-back acoustic-based ballads that nonetheless acquire a staggering sense of grandeur through their dramatic surges of strings and harmonies. The latter song in particular—a requiem for lost youth and the friends who didn’t make out alive—is as unsettling as it is breathtaking, like a Ditch Trilogy-era Neil Young eulogy adapted by Sigur Rós.
Unlike Bleached Wavves, Bekka Ma’iingan doesn’t attempt any overt fusions of shoegaze and Ojibway motifs; rather, at this point, Monkman’s two worlds are thoroughly enmeshed on both a musical and ideological level. On “A Language Disappears,” Monkman and regular collaborator Andrew McLeod (a.k.a. Sunnsetter) lay down a hazy-headed shuffle that nods firmly in the direction of My Bloody Valentine’s dance-rock dalliances, while shrewdly using shoegaze’s penchant for vaporous vocals as a sonic metaphor for the colonial erasure of Indigenous oral traditions. But Bekka Ma’iingan finds its clearest articulation of identity in its most abstract track. Featuring guest sound-sculpting from Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo, “Niizh Manidoowig (2 Spirit)” pits flutes and horn melodies against sunrise-summoning electric-guitar drones to produce an exultant, wordless expression of Monkman’s gender nonconformity. Here Monkman reminds us of the implicit radicalism of shoegaze: After all, more than any other subgenre, it has always been about blurring binaries, by dissolving the distinctions between the male and female voice, between rock formalism and avant-garde experimentation, between noise and tranquility.


With an emphasis on the sublime, the Nashville funeral doom band Loss have made one of the year’s most beautiful metal records.

Horizonless

Judas Priests’ 1978 take of “Better by You, Better Than Me” landed them in court on allegations that it caused two young men to shoot themselves. But the album it came from, Stained Class, also had “Beyond the Realms of Death”—a song that actually dealt with suicide. There, death was a cosmic journey, as Rob Halford, a jaded but wise psychedelic sage, guided us through a process of mental anguish and eventual peace. Nashville’s Loss don’t sound anything like Priest, but they similarly dedicate their music to death’s journey and the ways suicide occupies our brains—in a way no other metal band has since “Realms.”
Loss are on the bleaker end of funeral doom, already the most grief-stricken form of doom metal with nearly nonexistent tempos and depressing lyrics. Few bands have recorded songs that defined their own aesthetic as well as Loss did with “Cut Up, Depressed, and Alone,” from their 2011 debut LP Despond. On their follow-up, Horizonless, Loss move beyond suicide (though it’s still a prominent theme) and broaden not only their approach to discussing death but their sound in general. The result is one of the year’s most beautiful metal records.
Across Horizonless, Loss distinguish themselves from other funeral doom bands by cutting back on gothic trappings, leaving a death metal husk to fill with despair. There is an emphasis on the sublime that Despond lacked. A brief moment of radiance opens “All Grows on Tears,” and when vocalist and guitarist Mike Meacham comes slamming in, the riff grows to superhuman strength, growing brighter amid the overwhelming darkness. That is just one of the many flourishes in Loss’ most moving song yet.
They’ve taken the bleak harmonies of melodic death metal bands—in particular, the Maiden-gone-gloom of early At the Gates and Dissection’s more black metal side—and brought them to their absolute slowest. Those particular influences are all over Horizonless. As “When Death Is All” concludes, a lead spirals towards the end, withering without losing poignancy. Horizonless is a record that romanticizes death, where thorns are petals, and it couldn’t have ended more appropriately.
Meacham is still the main presence on this record, and his subterranean growling itself seems to move in and out of life and death. His voice has a gravity that plunges riffs lower, no matter how drenched in melody they may be. Even so, Horizonless is a more collaborative album. Bassist John Anderson contributes piano to “Naught,” and he is also the sole performer on “The End Steps Forth,” a short piano, organ, and drum piece that deconstructs the gothic doom of My Dying Bride. In both, he brings the band closer to funeral doom’s more conventional archaic beauty while abstracting it. Guitarist Tim Lewis wrote and performed “Banishment,” Loss’ most death metal-leaning track yet. “The Joy of All Who Sorrow” is the first Loss song to feature vocals from all four of its members. Funeral doom is characterized by its lethargic pace; in that context, “Sorrow” has bountiful dynamics. It feels much faster than it actually is, with progressive death metal stylings chained to their doom anchor.
Horizonless is a study of how great modern metal records have all gone beyond genre exercises. Metal’s various styles have long been codified, and strident worship is now rarely enough of a statement. Despond contained songs from Loss’ demo and previous splits, but the band began anew with Horizonless, and it shows. If most doom is death closing in, this is opening a coffin and conversing with death head on. There’s an openness to *Horizonless—*even as Meacham sings about wanting the earth to consume him, about not just facing death but becoming it, about how death robs us. Through it all, Horizonless evokes metal’s most important message: in confronting death, we are freer in life.


It’s been a sad year for these early-2000s indie-rock heroes, but this reissue of their cult-classic 1997 debut is a reminder that Grandaddy was a special band from the start.

Under the Western Freeway

2017 was supposed to be a year of celebration for Modesto, California indie rockers Grandaddy. After breaking up in 2006 and reuniting for a few shows in 2012, the group was preparing to mount a full-fledged comeback with their first new LP in 11 years, Last Place. But just two months after that album’s release this spring, bassist and founding member Kevin Garcia died following a massive stroke. All tour dates were scrapped, and the future of the band was suddenly back in flux.
These circumstances make a deluxe reissue of Grandaddy’s cult-classic 1997 debut, Under the Western Freeway, feel bittersweet. Then again, that’s not an unusual mood for this band of underdogs. The history of Grandaddy, who were once hailed as an American answer to Radiohead, is a story of almosts and what-could-have-beens. When they split for the first time, it seemed that the business of being a band was the main factor that sank a group of friends who excelled at most aspects except the financial.
From the start, Under the Western Freeway established Grandaddy’s deft ability to intertwine warm melodies and wry insights, opening a curtain on their corner of the world. Modesto is known as much for its high pollution levels as it is for its proximity to the dramatic natural beauty of the Sierras, and that contrast makes its way into Grandaddy’s music. Songwriter Jason Lytle sings about drinking beer and playing his guitar out in the country on the serene “Collective Dreamwish of Upperclass Elegance,” and moments later, laments the changing environment around him: “They paint the moon today/Some brand-new future color,” he sings on the elegiac “Go Progress Chrome.” Viewing a sunset past the smokestacks might make for a vibrant view, but Lytle’s delivery underlines the point that it’s also a troubling one.
The band wore their working-class roots as a badge of honor, finding beauty in the everyday experiences they wrote about on songs like the album’s aptly titled opener, “Nonphenomenal Lineage.” A questionable dining experience provides the narrative of “Poisoned at Hartsy Thai Food"; on “A.M. 180,” romance comes from from something as simple as “just doing nothing” together. Beyond these mundane details, Under the Western Freeway suggests a fully-formed worldview that combined low-key technological angst with an appreciation for the ever-shrinking wild, all served up through a filter that sounds like it was purchased from the Radio Shack sale rack. There isn’t a shred of cosmopolitan cool on this album—particularly when they close it out with five solid minutes of chirping crickets.
One of the things that makes this album special is how well that sound matches Lytle’s lyrical insights. Grandaddy aren’t just talking about looking out from a back porch and seeing city lights glow bright on the horizon, they’re showing you how it feels. By combining cheap electronic instruments with an organic rock band setup, Under the Western Freeway feels futuristic in a quaint way, like a space shuttle stitched together from dumpster diving and junkyards. It’s not long into the opening notes of “Nonphenomenal Lineage” before the low-frequency hisses and hums of the studio become as recognizable as Lytle’s hard-fought falsetto and drummer Aaron Burtch’s garbage-can percussion. You can almost hear the sparks shooting off the exposed wiring.
The disc of extras that come with this reissue are mostly of interest to Grandaddy obsessives. Demos of songs that would appear on this album or on later ones—including rough sketches of highwater marks “Dying Brains” and “Bjork ELO Xanadu and The Birth of Chartsengrafs”—offer only the basic DNA patterns for the greatness that would follow. Often the effect is to underscore Lytle’s meticulous studio-rat capabilities: Hearing the off-key vocals and tempo struggles of an early “Summer Here Kids” demo, you get a sense of his commitment to fulfilling a vision, even if the recording itself pales in comparison to the final product. The shiniest treasure comes in the form of the never-before-released “Hawaiian Island Wranglers,” whose tone shifts on a dime from ferocious yelping to peaceful meditation—it’s a song that soars even without any studio polish.
If this reissue arrives at a time of sadness for Grandaddy and their fans, the music within is a lasting source of comfort. Under the Western Freeway is a melancholy album that doesn’t mope; it’s rooted in the kind of gradual losses that fade into the fabric of a life. Lytle’s reassuring melodies take influence from Jeff Lynne and Neil Young, for a style that still feels wiser than most indie-rock debuts. And the contradictions at this band’s heart—nature vs. technology, electronic vs. organic—have hardly become obsolete over the last 20 years, even if it has arguably become harder to make a career singing about them. On “A.M. 180,” which would become one of the band’s best-known songs a few years later thanks to a sync in the Danny Boyle zombie film 28 Days Later, Lytle sums up the large and the small of it all: “We’ll defuse bombs, walk marathons, and take on whatever together.” When those last couple words—“whatever, together”—are repeated over an explosion of guitars and keys near the track’s end, they ring out like an understated mantra.


On her second album, Valerie Teicher explores the nuances of her voice, luxuriating in the comedown of emotional excess over spacious, immaculately produced R&B.

La Linda

Valerie Teicher’s debut full-length as Tei Shi, 2017’s Crawl Space, was an album of transformation, of surmounting fears. The record rested on a base of ’80s-inspired synth pop and the natural flexibility of Teicher’s voice, setting a course away from the indie pop of her first EPs. La Linda is also a record of change, the product of a move to Los Angeles from New York, where she was troubled by stifling relationships and her guarded state of mind. The album’s pared-down R&B matches Teicher’s newfound clarity and further centers her voice. “I wanted this whole project to reflect the feeling of stepping into another world that’s almost surreal or fantastical in its beauty,” she says. But the beauty she discovers is almost claustrophobic, simmering in romantic pain more often than it embraces the freedom that exists beyond it.
Appearing last year on Blood Orange’s “Hope,” on Negro Swan, she sang from the perspective of someone continually let down by their lover, and she slips into the same mode of disappointment for the majority of La Linda, luxuriating in the comedown of emotional excess. Blood Orange’s Devonté Hynes returns on “Even If It Hurts,” in which Teicher begs for honesty from her partner, admitting that she doesn’t want to “feel crazy” anymore. The Spanish-language “Matando” also addresses the relationship between love and emotional wear. But if before she was willing to wait for her partner to change, here Teicher is about to walk away. “Mi amor, tu amor me está matando” (“My love, your love is killing me”) she sings; “Está llegando el fin” (“The end is coming”). The album often feels like her last look back—a drawn-out kiss goodbye—before she moves on to something better.
On her earlier records, Teicher occasionally strained with the effort of expressing herself, her voice breaking into a yell. But La Linda exchanges that roughness for immaculate ballads performed in Teicher’s high, whispery register. The album operates largely in the same style of sultry pop that Ariana Grande has perfected: The languid beat and bouncing chorus of “Red Light,” a track about time wasted on a dead relationship, are cut from similar cloth as thank u, next, and on “Alone in the Universe,” when Teicher confesses, “I don’t know if there is a god/But if she is a woman/I would say that she’s dropping the ball,” it’s difficult not to hear an echo of Grande’s “God is a woman,” from last year’s Sweetener. The album’s more subdued cuts, like “Thief” and closer “We,” counter that high gloss, pointing back to a time when Teicher’s music consisted of little more than her voice looped over a bassline.
When Teicher gives herself over entirely to the wreckage of heartache, her songwriting floods the album’s lean production with its emotional force. Two tracks offer contrasting takes on obsession’s ruin, with Teicher brandishing her feelings like offerings to be burned and discarded. The country-tinged “When He’s Done” sounds like someone who knows they’re going to crash but still pumps the pedal because acceleration feels good. Teicher lengthens each word, helpless in the face of a love that she knows is destined to hurt her: “I believe whatever, I guess.” It’s a heartbreaking account of placing someone else before your own well-being. And on “No Juegues,” she commands, “Don’t play with my love,” but her confidence falters by the end, as she repeats, “Mi amor no vale nada” (“My love is worth nothing”). They’re songs that self-destructively consume pain in order to transcend it, leaving Teicher to rebuild herself from the debris.


After surviving his runaway viral hit "Harlem Shake," Baauer returns with a full-length on which appearances by Future, Pusha T, M.I.A. and others function like power-ups, allowing the album to ratchet up in excitement.

Aa

The path is so well charted that it's practically a ritual. Young artist creates track; track becomes hit; hit becomes phenomenon, artist becomes famous. The track is undeniable and thus, ubiquitous. Your parents are aware of it. Fans start to hate it, though nowhere close to as much as the artist does. And then, when the artist goes ahead and decides to make new music, everything he does, from the promotion to the concerts, looks like a Sisyphean attempt to escape its shadow.
The Brooklyn producer Baauer is observing the rites. He has called his Billboard-topping, YouTube-dominating 2013 craze "Harlem Shake" "corny and annoying as fuck" and his new album Aa represents his "defiant" new beginning. For Baauer, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that he had less to do with his own song's rise than strangers on the Internet. They were the ones who performed the alchemy that changed it from a jam, to an Essential Mix standout to a viral soundtrack. "I birthed it, it was raised by others, and now it's like my weird, fucked-up adopted teenage kid coming back to me," he said at the time.
Sometimes, talented career artists become one-hit wonders (Carly Rae Jepsen) and sometimes, clowns who have stumbled upon, or stolen, something infectious do the same (Vanilla Ice.) The experience can be particularly difficult for an artist like Baauer, a raw, young musician with interesting ideas who has yet to fully develop. Following "Harlem Shake," Aa might feel to some like an undercooked, scattershot album, experimental to its own detriment. But if Baauer were an unknown musician —which, artistically speaking, he still essentially is — it'd be a rimshot of a debut, crackling with energy and humor, well-paced, with no dud tracks and more than a few infectious ones.
Aa is devoted to the block-party spirit of hip-hop, in keeping with most of Baauer's work, and at a time when various genres of electronic music are downplaying the black sources of their sound, it's refreshingly willing to share both its influences and the limelight. Many of the tracks in its adrenaline-spiked back half are dominated by other artists, as Baauer took advantage of the connections afforded him by "Harlem Shake" to collaborate with M.I.A., Pusha T, Future and Rustie. Their appearances aren't wasted. Features function like power-ups on Aa, allowing the album to ascend in excitement, leveling up to an almighty peak. (Baauer's clear love of collaboration and respect for the sounds he incorporates might also serve as a balm to those who were irritated by the way that the mainstream "Harlem Shake" dance craze completely ignored the original, Cam'ron-approved dance.)
The album's melting pot feel is consistent with that of Baauer's less-famous releases, the EPs Dum Dum (2012) and ß (2014). His methodology is consistent: He excavates the undergirdings of genres like hip-hop, R&B and dancehall, and swaps in a new foundation, often composed of wobbling, thundering bass. After a couple of exploratory warning shots at the outset of Aa — the Rustie-inspired opener, "Church," the drum n' bass n' trap banger "GoGo!" — the album settles into a groove on the explosive R&B of "Body," its first inescapable track, which splits the difference between the producer's past work with AlunaGeorge and the soiled romanticism of electronic artists like Giraffage.
From there, it's a steady climb with stops along the way in Discovery-era Daft Punk soundalike ("Pinku") and peace councils between back-alley grime and Bonecrusher-style mob music. ("Day Ones.") On songs like these, Baauer demonstrates his ability to identify and recontextualize bite-size melodic candy, and "Harlem Shake's" rise starts to look less like an Internet accident and more like inevitability. Check out the way he plays the Tetris theme song into the back end of "Sow." It's a goofy, addictive gimmick that loses none of its melodic power for being so.
In the tradition of many of the best electronic releases of the decade, Aa is a collage. But its patchwork of influences isn't a way for the producer to avoid pressure. Instead, Baauer and the other artists meet the heavyweight expectations head-on. "Temple," the M.I.A. feature here, is vintage Mathangi: She sounds as fresh and London-cocky as she did on Arular. And "Kung Fu" doesn't dare to waste Pusha T or Future. Pusha and Future have two of the most iconic voices in contemporary hip-hop, and Baauer clearly understands the appeal of placing them as foils on the same track, the brick-hard snarl and the ecstatic lament.
If you want a file to show up at the top of an alphabetically-organized folder, you can throw a bunch of A's at the front of its name, and ensure that it will be there. But as much as Baauer may want Aa to define a new beginning, to crowd out everything else he's done so far, there's no easy way for him to erase "Harlem Shake." He's doomed to be evaluated in the context of what will likely represent the peak of a certain kind of career success. The best he can do is what he's done here: rectify the wrongs of the craze that the track spawned while building on what it did right. Take advantage of the opportunities it's granted, throw an album-length party and encourage the dancers to come correct.


Read Philip Sherburne’s review of the album.

Because of a Flower

When the California ambient musician Ana Roxanne reinterpreted “I’m Every Woman”—a Chaka Khan disco classic famously covered by Whitney Houston in 1992—as “I’m Every Sparkly Woman” on her debut EP in 2015, there were multiple levels of meaning nestled inside its rippling oscillations. Most immediately, the song nodded to the ’90s R&B that Roxanne’s mother and aunts sang at family karaoke sessions after moving from the Philippines to the U.S. Her selection also suggested something about the way Roxanne hears the world: The swirling textures of Roxanne’s song echoed the atmospheric introduction to Houston’s version, as though Roxanne were finding commonalities between genres seldom mentioned in the same breath. Roxanne had more personal motives, too. When she was writing “I’m Every Sparkly Woman,” she told Bandcamp Daily, “I saw [it] as a testament to my femininity and empowerment as a woman.” But a few years later, after coming out as intersex, the meaning changed for her. “Now, I am not sure how I identify, but at least now I feel confident in that unknown,” she admitted. “When I perform that song now, it feels as though I am calling upon the confidence and beauty of the divas, and exclaiming that I love myself, whatever gender I may be.”
Questions of gender, identity, and self-love frame Roxanne’s Because of a Flower, the follow-up to her debut. On a short, untitled spoken-word piece that opens the album, she envisions transcending binaries: “Yin, the female principle, and yang, the male principle… have joined, and out of their junction has come a third: harmony.” Her multi-tracked voice is split and processed into higher and lower registers, and she layers overlapping phrases as though reciting a round. Against this kaleidoscopic backdrop, she offers an elemental truth: “The spirit of harmony, as it condenses, produces all beings.” Drawing upon ambient, new age, dream pop, Medieval European choral music, and Hindustani singing, the album that follows feels like an emanation of that same spirit.
As on her debut, Roxanne’s cool, clear soprano provides the centerpiece of most of these songs. Where “I’m Every Sparkly Woman” sketched lines between ambient and R&B, “A Study in Vastness” draws out the ambient quality inherent in choral music. The song is composed entirely of layers of her own voice; over a looping pedal tone that extends from start to finish, she wordlessly sings a descending figure in a minor key, adding soft microtonal counterpoints that slip between the lines of the stave. The resulting drone sounds faintly like the ethereal airs of the 12-century mystic Hildegard von Bingen; it feels like bathing in moonlight.
Even when Roxanne adds more elements to her music, it sounds just as pure. In “Suite Pour L’invisible,” she sings wistful, wordless tones over patiently braided guitars before returning to the idea of duality: “Endless sorrow, endless joy, endless sorrow/I’ll hold your joy/I’ll hold your pain.” But lyrics are rarely the focus here; her singing is so slow, the patient arrangement so hypnotic, it’s easy to be swept away by the sound of her voice alone. Her music’s plaintive qualities often evoke Grouper (“Suite Pour L’invisible” sounds like a hi-def cousin to Ruins’ “Holding” or “Call Across Rooms”), and her billowing textures often recall Julianna Barwick. There are also affinities with the goth-adjacent dream pop of Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, and Dead Can Dance, refracted through a new-age lens. “Venus,” a quietly ecstatic hymn to the constancy of the self, pairs radiant vocal harmonies with splashing waves and a reading from an astrological text; it sounds like vintage 4AD reimagined for sound-healing therapy.
Roxanne changes gears with “Camille,” whose muted vocal tone and pitter-pat drum machine are reminiscent of Portishead and Everything But the Girl, while the instrumental “- - -,” a sparkling assemblage of DX7 chimes, shows that Roxanne doesn’t need her voice to enchant. She closes the album with another wordless piece, “Take the Thorn, Leave the Rose,” where her voice is close to a sigh. The album’s darkest song, built around brooding electric bass and guitar, it nods both to classic slowcore and also doom metal, while sounding not quite like either—evidence of a remarkable ability to fuse disparate influences into a unique form.
Halfway through the song’s six-minute run time, it shifts: The guitars fade out, and in their place we hear Bach’s Prelude in C Major, BWV 846, from the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier, joined by Roxanne’s voice, sounding ghostly and far away. Swathed in hiss, the piano comes from a slowed-down recording of Alessandro Moreschi—one of the last of the castrati, and the only one known to have been captured on wax—singing Charles Gounod’s “Ave Maria” early in the 20th century, more than 100 years ago. In his day, Moreschi’s heavenly voice supposedly inspired audiences to shout, “Long live the knife!”—a cry of adulation shot through with an intimation of violence. Today, threats of violence are familiar to many intersex people, and Roxanne has spoken of her determination to be an advocate for intersex kids and teens, many of them subject to nonconsensual surgeries in childhood. Inspired by both the trauma of the castrati and the transcendent beauty of their singing, “Take the Thorn, Leave the Rose” ends the album on a note both melancholy and tender—a gorgeous distillation of the empathy that guides Roxanne’s music.

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Vulnicura Strings is a remake of Björk's album from earlier this year that uses only strings as accompaniment, jettisoning the electronic elements. Even without the jagged beats, it isn't an easier listen.

Vulnicura Strings

As a remix evangelist, Björk has always celebrated the mutable quality of her work. "To me it goes all the way back to being in the Sugarcubes and Kukl before," she told Britain's Independent. She described how Iceland's half-arsed indie scene was suddenly electrified by the arrival of acid house: "Going to all those first raves, it was really obvious that there wasn't really one correct way of doing a song." That notion reached a peak on 2011's Biophilia, where, if the mood struck, Björk could have dispatched endless revisions of the record to the corresponding app (which always sounded more like a Synecdoche, New York-style nightmare than a healthy creative impulse). At home, her audience could tinker with the music at will.
Even though its predecessor was rooted in ideas around organic matter and mutation, this year's Vulnicura felt more like a living process than any of Björk's previous records. The tracklist was a linear path through the collapse of her 13-year relationship, and its devastating fallout. The liner notes dated the songs according to their distance from the emotional chasm at its center, embodied by the 10-minute "Black Lake". Its length reflected the difficult process of trying to articulate and move on from abstract, muddled pain, she explained, and her elongated vowels seemed to massage out that meaning.
Vulnicura Strings takes the record back to the very beginning of the process, where Björk threw herself into writing complex arrangements for strings as a way of coping after the split. The addition of subtly powerful beats added to the record's sense of rupture, evoking an arrhythmic heart and blowing circuits that left darkness in their sputtering wake. Removing them should result in a rawer incarnation of Vulnicura, but this sounds more like a suturing. The original's broken-ness is gone, in its place an undisturbed tragic whole.
Although some listeners may have found the electronic instrumentation distracting, *Vulnicura Strings—*a remake of the album using only strings, and jettisoning electronics—isn't necessarily an easier listen. It's more intense for the sense of space, which enhances Björk's cavernous, anguished vowels and sometimes accusatory tone. The ensemble's queasy, acidic qualities also stand out. These aren't always the original recordings, but closer mic'd takes, a subtle difference that gives the record a slightly uncanny quality, aided by the rearranged tracklist. The vast, trembling edifice of "Atom Dance" is stunning in isolation, while the spaces in "Black Lake" seem to linger even longer, with a kind of awkward tranquility. The lyrics are stripped out of "Family" in favor of highlighting its two piercing, frantic crescendos.
A lot of these songs didn't have hooks, per se, to start with. They expanded and contracted with a kind of cosmic swarm, the percussion providing a delicate skeleton. Loose as it was, without that punctuation, Vulnicura Strings can feel a little formless. A second version of "Black Lake" was performed in Krakow, Poland, on the world's only viola organista, an instrument designed by Leonardo da Vinci but not built until after his death. On a technical level, it's intriguing: a friction belt vibrates individual strings, which are selected by pressing keys on a keyboard. But as a listening experience, it's a bit arduous. The instrument has a rasping, atonal quality, and the spaces in the song drone on forever without offering much.
It's unlikely that Vulnicura Strings will replace anyone's original copy of the record—its existence feels more symbolic than anything else. Last week, NASA observed the supermassive black hole Markarian 335 emitting energy for the first time. "This will help us understand how supermassive black holes power some of the brightest objects in the universe," said astrophysicist Dan Wilkins. For Björk to return to the disintegration of her family once again and make something new from it, however successful it is, is further proof of the life that can be found in destruction.


On her new album, the Texas rapper ditches ready-made strip-club anthems for no-hook freestyles that flaunt her verbal dexterity.

I Can’t Help It

The finer points of regional rap geography are sometimes lost on listeners outside those places. Due to their tight affiliation with the Screwed-Up Click, UGK became honorary Houston heroes, but the duo was actually from Port Arthur, a coastal city over an hour away. Similarly, Big Jade has worked closely with Houston legends like BeatKing and DJ Michael Watts, but she’s a genuine product of the Third Coast; her hometown of Beaumont is technically closer to the Louisiana border than it is to Houston. Over time, the Texas rapper has carved her own place outside the currents of the industry, no longer content to be overpowered by the bright lights of the Houston metropolis.
While Big Jade’s early freestyles were lightning-fast sparring sessions that flaunted her verbal dexterity, her major label debut, Pressure, often felt more like a BeatKing project than one of her own. The self-styled “Club God” is a lynchpin of contemporary Texas rap, but the assembly-line rate at which he churns out bouncy, bass-heavy beats resulted in ready-made strip club rhythms. Jade’s 2021 EP, Jade Wins, was a soft reboot. It relied on uncleared samples of established classics—Crime Mob’s “Knuck If You Buck,” Z-Ro’s “Mo City Don”—the familiar instrumentals putting more emphasis on her voice. It was as much of a throwback to woozy Screwed Up-Click cyphers as to DatPiff-era mixtapes like Nicki Minaj’s Playtime Is Over. Now, instead of succumbing to the Hot Girl Industrial Complex’s demand for TikTok-ready viral hits, Jade operates more like NBA YoungBoy, favoring no-hook freestyles and breakneck flows over shiny pop choruses.
From the opening shots of her new album, I Can’t Help It, Jade hardly stops to take a breath. On “Gangsta Activity,” she describes her attitude as “militant,” and it’s a fitting word for her rapping itself: dominant and unrelenting, never betraying a sign of weakness. Across the album, there are bills to pay, children to raise, and hair to braid, but there’s plenty of pleasure to be had too. Jade finds time amidst the grind for a much-needed dick appointment on the gleefully raunchy “Lick.” It opens with a sample of Sharon Stone in Paul Verhoeven’s infamous Basic Instinct—“Have you ever fucked on cocaine?”—positioning Jade as the cunning and cutting femme fatale in her own erotic thriller.
Even if Jade’s production has its roots in Houston, you can feel the in-betweenness of Beaumont in her flow; her accelerated delivery recalls the out-of-this-world intensity of Louisiana rappers from the heyday of Cash Money and No Limit, as opposed to the slowed-down, melodic drawl often associated with Texas rap. There’s even a little Louisiana flavor to the production, like in the light bounce of “Real Street'” and “Lick,” and the triumphant MIDI horns on “Reloaded.” Despite her kinship with rappers over the state line, the project’s only appearance from a Louisiana rapper, Baton Rouge’s Fredo Bang, on “Soulmate,” is one of the few tracks that feel a little forced. It’s a rare slow number that trades exuberant eroticism for excessively Auto-Tuned wooing.
Jade finds a much more evenly-matched duet partner in Detroit’s Sada Baby on “What She Said,” and her tip-toeing flow feels right at home in the fast and furious Michigan style. Like Detroit rappers from Babyface Ray to 42 Dugg, Jade showcases an enterprising hustle and sly humor, informed by an environment that demands you fight to survive. Swishahouse-affiliated producer DJ Chose compliments Sada Baby’s raspy voice with a menacing synthesizer line straight out of an Icewear Vezzo track.
On “Dollas,” Jade pays tribute to the late Gangsta Boo with a sample of 1998’s “Where Dem Dollas At.” Instead of merely recreating the original, the flip is more of a shout-out; where Gangsta Boo’s track is laid-back and funky, Jade’s interpretation is up-tempo and in your face, rapping like she’s still got something to prove. Much like her idol, Big Jade is a furious tongue-twister who can scrap and spit with the boys but still have a good time with her girls—not quite a pop rapper, but not a strict lyricist either. She has the same unapologetic spirit, crafting a flow all her own regardless of expectations for who she is or where she’s from.


On their sophomore album, the Los Angeles rock trio fronted by Clementine Creevy have offered their fiercest recordings yet, full of shredding jams, furious howls, and self-aware swagger.

Apocalipstick

Four years ago, Los Angeles rock outfit Cherry Glazerr began with then-15-year-old singer/guitarist Clementine Creevy recording bedroom demos under the name Clembutt. These tracks were soon discovered on Soundcloud by Burger Records co-founder Sean Bohrman, who released them as a tape titled Papa Cremp in 2013. Cherry Glazerr’s lineup soon solidified with the addition of bassist Sean Redman and drummer Hannah Uribe. Around this time, Cherry Glazerr caught the eye of Saint Laurent’s ex-creative director Hedi Slimane, who embraced Creevy as a model and muse, and enlisted the band to soundtrack his debut film and a Fall 2014 Ready-to-Wear show. Then there’s Creevy’s work in the Amazon series “Transparent,” in which she performs in a band called Glitterish (and later Fussy Puss). By the time Cherry Glazerr released their debut LP, 2014’s Haxel Princess, Creevy’s reputation preceded them. All of this was done while she was in high school.
But Creevy has been clear that Cherry Glazerr is her primary passion and the group’s sophomore record (and Secretly Canadian debut), Apocalipstick, confirms this more fiercely than ever. While Haxel Princess was full of goofy and relatable teenage dispatches, Apocalipstick shoots daggers. Now 19, Creevy sounds wizened and ready for battle—and it’s not just because she recorded “Giving Bad People Good Ideas” for Death Grips’ Bottomless Pit. Thanks in part to the production of Joe Chiccarelli (the Strokes) and Carlos De La Garza (Bleached), Creevy and new bandmates Sasami Ashworth (keys/guitar) and Tabor Allen (drums) are a powerful rock trio. But for all this swagger, there’s still the acknowledgement that Cherry Glazerr are “Acting professional/When I’m nothing but a self-conscious child.”
Opener “Told You I’d Be With the Guys” recounts Creevy’s shift from lone wolf to supportive sister, but rather than being an anthem of empowerment, the track feels mournful as it recounts lost time. “I told you, I told you I’d be with the guys,” she howls before doubling back into murmured regret, “But I know better now/Than to be with the guys.” Cherry Glazerr tend to see-saw between extremes of expression: Moments of softness quickly give way to fiery yowls, and one can imagine a packed house of beer-swigging fans losing their minds to it. “Sip O’ Poison” has all the furious drums of No Age. Creevy’s voice, combined with Ashworth’s keys, create a piercing effect like Avey Tare’s clipped yelps on Animal Collective’s “Grass.”
Even the lighter tracks remain rollicking. The re-recorded “Nurse Ratched” offers a brief respite after “Sip O’ Poison” with a steady, shredding jam. “Trash People” and “Moon Dust” are all bubbly synths and incessant drumming, presenting an idea of what the Go-Go’s could have sounded like if Kim Gordon joined their ranks. “Nuclear Bomb” is perhaps Apocalipstick’s mellowest track (you might expect it to be the more appropriately titled “Lucid Dreams”). Creevy takes the sadness from “Told You I’d...” and opens the wound even deeper, digging into the pain of loss with a scalpel and a smile.
It’s been over 30 years since Cherie Currie of the Runaways boasted, “Hello, world! I’m your wild girl/I’m your ch-ch-ch-cherry bomb!,” giving young women control of a provocative firecracker: themselves. All fruit-related similarities aside, Cherry Glazerr are here to offer a 2017 version of the same energy, one that is sexy, juvenile, catchy, and above all, simply great rock’n’roll. While some argue that guitar music is passé, Cherry Glazerr promise to make you remember how awesome a sick riff can be, how nostalgia can be captured in a single shred, and how anyone can start a band. Always.