Warp's Chris Clark infuses sonic streaks of contemporaries like Four Tet, Prefuse 73, and DJ Shadow into his repertoire, along with his usual Aphex and Boards of Canada tics, and in the process crafts his best album to date.

Body Riddle

In a recent post on his MySpace page, Warp artist Chris Clark claims "words are nothing but ineffectual in describing a body of music." Not the most encouraging sentiment for a music reviewer, though he's probably right. And when it comes to the dense, wordless electronic opuses that are Clark's specialty, the written word can be an especially awkward translator. But just as Clark is drawn to explaining his ephemeral consciousness through brash beats and intricate melody, the urge to understand and champion such a compelling struggle is strong. While this underrated Aphex Twin disciple produces stunning machinated symphonies that are daunting in their technical proficiency, his music maintains a breathing, spontaneous dexterity. Falling in line with its title, Body Riddle encapsulates the ever-changing human form, part inexplicable being and part steadfast hardware. The continuous fluidity between those two states bolsters this puzzle's severe magnetism.
What sets the album apart from Clark's other detail-oriented click-traps is its jacked-up confidence and stylistic diversity. While his most recent album, 2003's overlooked Empty the Bones of You, was a brilliant, bleak apocalyptic vision, it could easily be broken down into two categories: corrosive manic panic and somber piano elegy. Body Riddle's reach is grander and more assured with Clark now adding full flesh to the bone. The auspicious Brit infuses sonic streaks of contemporaries like Four Tet, Prefuse 73, and DJ Shadow into his repertoire, along with his usual Aphex and Boards of Canada tics. Significantly, these aren't thoughtless dilettante moves. The bright Four Tet-esque scutter of "Night Knuckles", for instance, is actually better than most of that artist's last LP. Similarly, the precision thump of "Ted" blows away anything Scott Herren's done in the last three years, and drum-programming clinic "Herr Bar" sounds like what Shadow should have done with his latest disc. This apprentice-master one-upmanship goes all the way to enigmatic godhead Richard D. James, who never seems to be far away from Clark's name on paper. Whereas James seems to be somewhat lost within his slippery mystique nowadays, Clark continues to mine his ominous perfectionism with increasingly spectacular ends.
Finely hewn and paced, Body Riddle ebbs and flows, following an internal logic that's condensed, myriad, and unpredictable. The album's convulsing dynamics are key to its humanity. Within a single track, drum patterns and tones slide in and out while melodies intermingle and seemingly incongruous noises blend into unannounced cameos only to slip away soon after. Take album-within-a-track spectacle "Matthew Unburdened", which kicks in touting glitch percussion and warbling piano. Then, the beat dismantles suddenly, coming back new and improved, now with strings that sear classical ache into the song's synthetic fabric. The old world instruments take center stage for a melodramatic aside, only to finally give way to a mannered hyper-jazz denouement. That's only one song. Simply, the amount of interlocking minutiae contained within the album's skin-tight 43 minutes is staggering.
The record's journey concludes with a eulogy, "The Autumnal Crush", which features Body Riddle's only line of intelligible language: "And I still miss you." Emanating from this website, the words mean little. But, within the context of this remarkably realized whole, they're completely devastating. The accompanying track fades the LP's linear life cycle with a haunting expansiveness of My Bloody Valentine drowning beneath its own distortions. Few have been able to extract sweeping emotion from such a modern sonic milieu as Clark does here. Fright, sorrow, joy, love, death-- they're all within Body Riddle's corporeal core, waiting to be whittled onto one's individual experience. It's a monumentally personal work that speaks universally; it's a glazed mirror that doesn't lie.


After the relatively buttoned-down Air Force, the latest from Xiu Xiu is frantic and wild, with swatches of noise and Jamie Stewart's voice often quivering on the edge of a panic attack.

Women as Lovers

Art-making involves getting what's inside on the outside, but usually it passes through a sterilizing filter first. But with Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart everything spills out unmediated and mucky. To put a fine point on it, on Women as Lovers' "Black Keyboard", over a serpentine acoustic guitar and synth dirge, Stewart sings, "Why would a mother say such things/ Why add tongue to a kiss goodnight?" That line is an attack against commonly held virtues of understatement and discretion, and Stewart's willingness to revolt audiences with squeamish personal details that make him seem more scarily fucked-up than sensitive or emotionally open is what makes his music unique. His art seems to be more about who he is than who he'd like to be, and it's the tension between the mores of taste and Stewart's honesty that brings us back, despite ourselves, time and again.
And, of course, the music itself, a nebulous but forceful concoction of sopping wet harpsichords, detonating percussion, submerged rock, atonal scaffolding, and unhinged electro-pop. Recent Xiu Xiu albums have been less likely to make me feel nauseous than Fabulous Muscles and its forebears, and I figured I'd just gotten acclimated to their approach. But the rawness of Women as Lovers indicates that maybe, for awhile, they'd gotten acclimated to it themselves. The Air Force found Xiu Xiu in full-bore confessional mode, yet it was so mannered that the confessionals lost their seamy edge and verged on pure aesthetics. "Buzz Saw" and "Boy Soprano", great songs both, were uncommonly buttoned-down for Xiu Xiu, and "Hello from Eau Claire" was almost a Moldy Peaches song. But where Air Force made venting seem rather academic, Women as Lovers is frantic and wild, with swatches of noise skidding around and Stewart's voice quivering on the edge of a panic attack-- even in the whispery sections.
In this light, "Under Pressure" is an apt cover choice, as the whole album conveys the sense of something about to boil over. With homely, impassioned vocals by Michael Gira, and the song's slick iconic bassline contrasted by a ragged interpretation of its arrangement, it takes on an air of desperation. Xiu Xiu's music is all about discomfort, but Stewart and co. have become quite comfortable in this conceptual space, and are able to inhabit it like painters making wild, broad smears that intuitively cohere into a look that is distinctly theirs.
On "I Do What I Want, When I Want", a pummeling post-punk groove dressed up with strident synth peals and pitched percussion, Stewart sounds direly imperiled, especially when the free-jazz horns start ripping through the already-claustrophobic mix. "In Lust You Can Hear the Axe Fall" is an apocalyptic atonal composition with a driving backbeat, and Stewart commands it masterfully, his voice sometimes climbing the slope of the wreckage, sometimes punching in abruptly at its screaming peaks. "No Friend Oh!" thrums like an engine, with anxious flurries of touch-tone synth and manic brass. The quieter compositions offer no relief from the mounting sense of impending catastrophe. "Guantanamo Canto" smears bending chimes, headachy percussion, loony-bin whistles, and allegorical sirens across a disorienting blankness, as Stewart says it plain: "My country needs its freedom/ To contradict your humanness." The Air Force gave us Xiu Xiu as a crystallized concept, but Women as Lovers sounds no more conceptual than a spurting artery. On "F.T.W.", a clicky acoustic ballad that eventually erupts into a squeaking-helium hell of noise, Stewart whimpers, "Am I all right? Do I look all right?" He doesn't, and one feels for him, although maybe there's some small solace in that fact that as a musician, not-all-right is his best look.


Hudson Mohawke embraces dystopian trash-pop imagery on his first album in seven years, maintaining his trademark clarity while bleeding and oozing over a larger canvas than ever.

Cry Sugar

Hudson Mohawke lives in L.A. now, and he’s fallen head over heels for the American tradition of dystopian trash-pop imagery. The video for a megamix of tracks he released in advance of his third album, Cry Sugar, shows us a CGI scene of a man cruising down the Pacific Coast Highway with an assortment of Mos Eisley-worthy weirdos and an animated woman so buxom she appears warped. It looks like Grand Theft Auto and Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” video at once, run through the brain-fried filter of Kuso, Tim & Eric, and Adult Swim’s Off the Air. The cover by Willehad Eilers features the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters horking down a hamburger. In a city whose hills host the Hollywood sign, the Griffith Observatory, and an alarming regularity of smoke-belching infernos, it’s hard not to find the humor—and the horror—in this aesthetic.
The Scottish producer born Ross Birchard cites “American decadence” and the “quintessential backdrop of late capitalism” as an inspiration for his first solo album in seven years. Cry Sugar isn’t a polemic or satire, but it strikes some of the same notes as Idiocracy or Robocop, in which everything is so big, garish, and dumb it’s almost psychedelic. It’s full of moments that seem distasteful at first until you realize that’s exactly the point. Clarence Coffee Jr.’s rasp initially seems at odds with the music’s polymer-like textures, but he strikes the right note on “Bow” with crass, unsubtle lines like, “Now you walk around all stank-face like you need some Febreze!” Gospel samples abound, and when the choir rises up and screams “Freedom!” on “Intentions,” you might wonder if Birchard knows how cheesy it sounds—until the rest of the album makes it abundantly clear that he does.
Birchard’s style has long lent itself to adjectives like “colorful” and “neon.” But while his sharp shares and tightly quantized beats usually bring a sense of order to the mayhem, Cry Sugar spills all over the place, and the time-stretching and pitch-shifting Birchard slathers on his samples make them sound like they’re melting under the pitiless Southern California sun. Tobacco and Neon Indian go for a similar effect in their work, but while those Day-Glo detritus-diggers tend to choke their tracks in thick production smog, Cry Sugar retains the clarity of Birchard’s earlier music, sometimes giving the impression of a sturdy steel skeleton whose flesh is melting off. “Intentions,” “Bicstan,” and “Dance Forever” are absolute monsters that approach the same almost ridiculous level of intensity as TNGHT’s definitive “Higher Ground” while clearly being born from a more expressionistic corner of Birchard’s brain.
Cry Sugar is Birchard’s longest album by some measure, with 19 tracks that bleed and ooze across 63 minutes. But it’s not long in the way of some bloated event-rap album, rather in the way of great electronic long-players like Since I Left You or Geogaddi, where so much awesome shit happens that you grow excited about what comes next even when the album starts to drag. Most of Cry Sugar’s tracks are around two or three minutes long, but Birchard judiciously breaks up the flow with lengthier cuts, and they’re doozies. “Is It Supposed” is either building towards nothing or climaxing for six minutes, its wistful rave melody sparkling like a firework that refuses to extinguish. “Rain Shadow” is so rhythmically tricky that it eventually stops sounding like a banger and takes on a sort of insectoid beauty. “Lonely Days” is all strings and Westian melodrama.
My personal favorite, though, is “Stump,” one of the first songs from Cry Sugar to see the light of day. It sounds like Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra*—*the tone poem used in 2001: A Space Odyssey to soundtrack mankind’s ascent into the higher realms of sentience—for about two seconds. Then Birchard plays a chord so dissonant the high drama immediately curdles into a joke, as if the starchild has missed its path back to Earth and gone plop into the surface of the sun. It’s exactly the kind of unexpected, pessimistic, profoundly ridiculous sound gag that Cry Sugar delivers one after another, adding up to the funniest, most mind-twisting album Birchard’s ever made.


Parkay Quarts is Parquet Courts’ two frontmen and principal songwriters, Austin Brown and Andrew Savage, filled out with help from assorted friends, including Jackie-O Motherfucker’s Jef Brown. Content Nausea is brimming with smart, funny, punk-informed rock.

Content Nausea

Pop history is full of instances of bands creating new identities to free themselves from the imagined strictures of their old ones. The Beatles had Sgt. Pepper’s; Prince had Camille; Beyoncé had Sasha Fierce; Garth Brooks had Chris Gaines. Parkay Quarts have been billed as an “alter-ego” of the smart, scrappy punk band Parquet Courts, but the term seems off: While “alter-ego” implies a different side of the same person—Superman to Clark Kent—Parkay Quarts are effectively Parquet Courts’ two frontmen and principal songwriters, Austin Brown and Andrew Savage, filled out with help from assorted friends, including Jackie-O Motherfucker’s Jef Brown and Bob Jones, from the band Eaters. Alongside PCPC—Parquet Courts’ collaboration with the muddy psychedelic band PC Worship—Parkay Quarts seems less like an attempt to devise a new identity than to blur the edges of the one they already have.
Content Nausea was proudly recorded on four-track cassette, that old saw of indie cred and self-reliance in the pre-digital era. The recording is humid and a little sloppy; the songs are occasionally in rough shape, with scaffolding showing. Both Austin and Savage are expert mimics—the kind of songwriters who suggest a rich and variegated past without ever seeming like slaves to it. Listen to Content Nausea—as with Parquet Courts’ great Sunbathing Animal, which came out only six months ago—and you’ll hear Richard Hell, the Minutemen, the B-52s, the Raincoats, Pavement, Talking Heads, and an entire history of bands who took the nervous energy of early rock'n'roll and launched it into more oblique orbits. But people said the same thing about the Strokes almost 15 years ago, you might be thinking. They did, and they were right then too. Such is the great wheel of time. (Not that Parquet Courts are all that much like the Strokes—they are brainier, funnier, more severe and less likely to go over at barbeques.) And so we arrive once again at the indie-rock analog to a bistro burger: Something simple and familiar made with enough invention to make you feel like the tradition still has room to grow.
Content Nausea—what a title! Song after song, Savage and Brown bark their anxieties about modern life with enough wit to suggest that they’re aware of the convention and enough passion to suggest that they feel those anxieties anyhow. “This year it became harder to be tender/ Harder and harder to remember/ Meeting a friend/ Writing a letter/ Being lost/ Antique ritual/ All lost to the ceremony of progress,” Savage says on the title track, his voice flat and intense, the beat poet unspooling his revelations over free jazz. And then comes the caveat: “Ignore this part, it’s an advertisement/ These people are famous, I’d trust 'em!”
Are any of these lyrics specifically about 2014, a year in which you can walk into a bar and see someone wearing glasses connected to the Internet? Not really. Like Sunbathing Animal, Content Nausea keeps its symbols flexible and vague. Sometimes the vagueness seems a little lazy, sometimes just ironic—rather than preoccupying itself with the actual stuff of modern life, Nausea is preoccupied with albums preoccupied with the stuff of modern life. But like all traditionalists, closeted or out, Parquet Courts seem of the mind that these changes—dial-up to smartphones, missile launchers to drone strikes—are superficial. The only difference between now and then is the shape of the toy, not how we use it or what it does to our brains.
Nausea is easier to listen to than Sunbathing Animal in part because it seems less ambitious. Four of its tracks are around a minute long; one is a so-so cover of "These Boots are Made For Walkin’" (itself a punk staple as ubiquitous as the safety pin); one is basically spoken word over noise—a reminder that for all the band’s nervous intensity, they’re basically bookworms. If they belong in a tradition of New York punk—an ambition Savage has talked cannily about in interviews—it’s the tradition of people like Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell and Patti Smith, stalking moonlit streets in ripped jeans with Rimbaud and Baudelaire tucked into their unwashed armpits, less concerned with smashing the state than with cutting through the red tape that holds them back from the wilderness within, romantics who tried to forge ahead by clawing back to the source.


The Montreal producer pays tribute to the classic sound of two bygone Canadian techno labels, yielding some of the liveliest music in his catalog yet.

Inside Unsolved EP

More than engineered emotion or physical release, producer Patrick Holland’s hazy, unhurried house music tends to evoke a sense of place. The reference points, particularly under his Project Pablo project, are often autobiographical: earworm melodies and jazzy grooves that reflect his native Vancouver, where he grew up listening to live bands and breezy, West Coast house; wandering basslines and fuzzy textures that soundtrack urban Montreal, where he’s lived and deejayed since 2014; and the sleepy, pastoral expanse that exists between the two (his mellow 2018 album, Come to Canada You Will Like It, was a tribute to rural chill).
Most of these productions, while imaginative and inviting, aren’t engrossing enough to send you rushing across the border. But Inside Unsolved, Holland’s new EP for Spectral Sound, offers a refreshingly edgy and stirring glimpse at Canada’s eccentric underground. This time, he reaches outside of his own narrative and revisits the country’s musical past—specifically the mid 1990s to early 2000s, when experimental, minimalist house and techno thrived in once-bustling steel towns. The resulting EP—part tribute, part reinterpretation—hat-tips a few of the influences that made Montreal the dance-music hotbed it is today.
The project unfolds in four distinct tracks, each with its own vibe, like rooms in a labyrinthine warehouse party. You begin in the middle of the action. “The Solution,” a hypnotic, acid-laced techno groove, is about as big a dancefloor moment as we’ve seen from Holland—bouncy, structured, immediate—and drizzles woozy melodies over concrete, shuffling rhythms. Fluttering whistles and billowing synths make it feel alive and oddly pretty, like smokestack clouds floating over an industrial skyline. For an artist who occasionally veers from low-key to soporific, the song feels like an awakening.
Elsewhere, the mood is more far out. “Pill” and “Big Room Delusion” rattle with dizzying, mechanical polyrhythms, like wandering around a factory floor. The beats are somewhat secondary, overpowered by the synthesizers’ twinkling arpeggios, scurrying scales, and dissipating echoes. The sensation is busy but emotionless, like the unconscious energy of an ambling machine. Both songs carry on a little too long, until the activity begins to feel slightly claustrophobic. But perhaps that’s a part of being in a place, too. Sometimes, you overstay your welcome and find yourself scanning for the exits.
Holland said that he was specifically inspired by two Canadian labels: Steel City Records, a mid-’90s techno outlet from Hamilton, Ontario, that took cues from nearby Detroit, and Vancouver’s Map Music, home to off-kilter, adventurous productions that delighted in chaos. Both of these labels have been defunct for years, but in the scenes and cities that fostered them, their presence can still be felt. By paying homage to the past, Holland also manages to bring the labels’ visions back to life, funnelling their outsider, industrial energy into loopy, danceable new songs to be spread through clubs and warehouses around the world. On the buoyant and glistening “Pressure No Impact,” a daydream of a track, the mood is at once nostalgic and hopeful: Are the pitter-pattering chimes and pipes echoes of a bygone era, or perhaps, a pulse?


Twenty years on, the album that changed the course of popular music is reissued in two deluxe versions. The enduring brilliance of the original is at this point beyond dispute, but the value of the demos, alternate mixes, and live cuts included on two new sets is debatable.

Nirvana: Nevermind [20th Anniversary Edition]

Nevermind [20th Anniversary Edition]

Despite its tremendous influence on the mainstream rock that followed, it's hard to think of another album that sounds much like Nirvana's Nevermind, a record with so much more pop and punk punch than any music it inspired. Of course, no diamond-certified, canonical treasure hitting the two-decade mark can be left well enough alone in 2011-- especially one that changed the lives of a lot people now approaching middle age, with the discretionary income to prove it. After all, "super deluxe" reissues of classic albums don't even have to be tied to an anniversary these days. But Nevermind is 20 this week, still a pretty respectable number in a world where any milestone marks an excuse to shift a few more units. The only question is whether these reissues-- a single-disc remaster, a 2xCD "deluxe" version, and a 4xCD+DVD "super-deluxe" edition-- are that rare essential repurchase that makes you hear an album you've possibly exhausted in new ways, or if it's just another mediocre jumble of odds and ends that inadvertently reveals the flaws and blemishes carefully excised from the original 12-song set.
Sadly, both expanded versions fall into the latter category, with material ranging from "interesting" to "historical curiosity" to "of zero value to even superfans." But this mish-mash of sketches, practice-space woodshedding, and alternate-but-not-very mixes does help explain what makes Nevermind so unique. Nirvana certainly never made another album like it. The precocious Bleach still has its partisans, folks who think its primal bash-and-howl is the be-all-end-all of rock, while In Utero stands as the band's most harrowing statement, where it's a toss-up as to whether the riffs or the lyrics hurt more. But Nevermind was and remains an unrepeatable object. It retains the gleeful pummel of the first album while hinting at the bleakness of the third. Yet there's also a concision and clarity that Nirvana hadn't quite mastered on the gnarly-by-necessity Bleach and wouldn't allow themselves on the stark and caustic In Utero.
Nirvana began their career with no illusions about their chances for mass success and ended it by seeing just how abrasive a platinum-selling band could get away with being. But when they got their chance at the brass ring, they went at it with a bubblegum band's canniness, however much Cobain shit on the shiny final product after the fact. Andy Wallace's radio-ready mix certainly helped sharpen this potentially no-concessions, indie-to-major leap into an obvious commercial proposition. But even if they'd settled on producer Butch Vig's slightly less slick mixes-- made as a reference for the band and identified on the super deluxe edition's third disc as the "Devonshire mixes"-- Nevermind would likely have fared well in the charts, since these early passes aren't far from Wallace's infamous high-gloss version. Listening in hindsight, though, they have the woozy effect of feeling just slightly off, leaving you to focus only on what's missing.
The box set does make clear that Nirvana honed these songs over a long period. Listening to the various sessions leading up to the one that gave us the album we know-- especially the nearly unlistenable "boombox" mixes of early demos-- you learn very quickly that these songs didn't arrive perfectly formed in one sustained burst of inspiration. The hours of rehearsals and the expensive time spent tinkering in the studio shaped them into classics. It helped that there are songs on Nevermind that might appeal to people who've never heard a hardcore album in their lives, who might have even (gasp!) kinda liked the glossier hard-rock bands whose era largely ended with the rise of grunge. Moving away from the heavy-at-all-costs sound he'd always been both enamored with and suspicious of, Cobain worked diligently on his big hooks and decided to stop smothering his natural melodic gifts under so much self-conscious sludge.
The key was that Nirvana, unlike many of their indie peers, didn't assume that intensity was incompatible with polish. Cobain's discomfort could be unnerving because it sounded as unmediated as anything allowed on the radio could get. There was too much pop-rock study involved to claim Nevermind as some kind of art brut document of one dude's unraveling. Confronted with something like "Polly", Cobain's distress was obvious in 1991, long before his shotgun-assisted exit. But it wasn't the way Nevermind exposed Cobain's psychic wounds that provided support for those who related to him. It was the fact that, fucked up as he was, Cobain still found pleasure in rock's most emphatic clichés and bent them to his own never-quite-smirking ends. He snuck into the spotlight while remaining an alienated weirdo, but for a while there, you suspected he was enjoying the attention, even if he knew that it was all a joke to be taken about as seriously as high school cliquishness. "Territorial Pissings" is as raw as any punk song I know, but it actually found its way into the hands of suburban tweens. How good must that have felt, to be responsible for such a thing?
Even as they moved toward the mainstream, Nirvana were trying shit that no one would have called an easy route to success. Nevermind is drenched in the filthy Pacific Northwest roar that slapped Cobain into action as a teen, but it's as catchy as any of the radio giants that caught his ear as a kid. It's driven by pain as naked and personal as the riot grrrl bands whose company he kept and as fuck-around goofy as the Seattle contemporaries who both reveled in and mercilessly parodied machismo. And despite the fact that none of those modes would seem to fit together on the same album, let alone all of them, it's all hammered into a still-disarming whole, a collection of anthems that retain the idiosyncrasies of the very weird band that made them. It helped that Cobain had yet to be disabused of the idea that you could be an idiosyncratic indie kid and a rock star without compromising on either front.
That's probably why the bonus material here feels less like a revelation and more like the kind of peek-behind-the-curtain that you wind up regretting. Nevermind is basically a great fake-out. It presents itself as an off-the-cuff explosion, a from-the-gut expression of realness and energy in the grand punk tradition, but it was actually the product of a shit ton of hard work. If you don't hold with the first-take-is-the-best-take philosophy, your respect for Cobain may actually increase when you realize how dedicated he was to getting every element right. Listening to him fumbling his way toward greatness on the "boombox" mixes of songs like "Come as You Are" and "Something in the Way" or hearing a newly cemented group working out the kinks in their interplay in the studio, you may also realize that you don't want to hear the missteps and rewrites and second guessing that went into the perfect-as-is final product. The "boombox" mixes, Devonshire mixes, and Smart Sessions (early Vig-produced takes recorded with drummer Chad Channing that were initially intended for release on a second album for Sub Pop) are largely work tapes. Listening to them feels like studying every unused scrap of a film classic that someone managed to sneak out of the editing room, which is about as fun as that description makes them sound. If you've always been suspicious of the album's production sheen, there's no Holy Grail here that's going to give you the raw take you're looking for.
For all its finessing and tweaking, though, Nevermind is still a thousand times closer to the unpremeditated intensity of Cobain's D.I.Y. days than any of the post-grunge rockers who claimed it as an influence. I defy you to listen to any of the live performances on this edition-- the only essential extras, though less uncomfortably intense than 1994's MTV Unplugged set and less definitive and uniformly powerful than 2009's release of their king-making set at the 1992 Reading Festival-- and not hear a ragged, joyful, charismatic band that makes those inert, angst-ridden followers sound like they come from another aesthetic universe.
That charisma is a big reason why Nevermind remains a 10. But in-concert takes on "Sliver" and "Been a Son" that are the third most thrilling live versions officially available on CD? It's not as if all this "exclusive" dreck-- most of which has been floating around on bootlegs and .zip files and YouTube for eons-- will permanently dull the excitement of the Nevermind, but trying to swallow it all might put you off the album itself for a long while. If you're truly interested in hearing this stuff, the two-disc deluxe set is easily the better deal, giving you a little hint of the various stages of Nevermind's construction without wearing you out the way the four-disc set will. But if you really want to celebrate the 20th, you'll be better off just giving the original album a few spins. Despite how much better-left-forgotten material is being offered up here as essential, there's still more life in the real Nevermind than anything that's attempted to replicate its attack since.


Unraveling from the pressure of success and celebrity, the Band moved to a new studio in Woodstock and made their fourth album, a stiff and scattershot record that is somewhat enlivened by a new reissue.

The Band: Cahoots (50th Anniversary Edition)

Cahoots (50th Anniversary Edition)

The Band knew they’d made a dud. Richard Manuel was in the throes of addiction and had stopped writing altogether. Robbie Robertson—who, by 1971, was tasked with churning out all of the Band’s material—found himself battling an intense bout of writer’s block, which sapped his passion for the project. So the Band didn’t have any completed songs to take into the studio with them, which was fine because the studio itself was barely finished. Their manager, Albert Grossman, had built Bearsville Recording Studio in Woodstock, New York, with the idea that his clients could use it as a clubhouse—most of them lived less than 10 minutes away. They would have a place to experiment, as they planned to do on their fourth album. “We are not traditional studio musicians where we go to a studio for a particular sound,” Robertson comments in the liner notes to this 50th-anniversary reissue. “This studio had no sound. We were trying to find its sound.”
More dire than any of that, however, was the state of the Band, which was unraveling from the pressure of success and celebrity. Following their turn as Bob Dylan’s touring band in the months after he went electric, they’d made two albums—Music from Big Pink in ’68 and The Band in ’69—that took an irreverent approach to American traditional music, mixing old, weird folk with rock and whatever mad scientist Garth Hudson was doing. It was revolutionary, and half a century later those two albums form the bedrock of what we call roots music. It wasn’t a matter of how to follow them up: They’d already released the very-good-but-not-similarly-perfect Stage Fright in 1970, and there was enough ego among them to believe they could scale those heights once more. It was more a matter of rising tension within the Band, which either forced Robertson into a leadership role or allowed him to make a power play, depending on who’s telling the story. Whereas they once shared songwriting credit, by 1971, Robertson was getting the lion’s share. Most of the Band were off getting high and carousing around Woodstock.
So those sessions at Bearsville were fraught, to say the least. Robertson had powered through his writer’s block, but the songs were assuredly not among his best. He’d always rummaged through American history to find his subjects, but these new songs had all the passion and mystery of a book report. By his own admission, he was more interested in film and literature than in music at this moment, but these songs sound like they’re about movies and books rather than actual human beings. Each one has a critical thesis, a clearly stated reason for being written, which makes them sound self-conscious, stiff, oppressively literal. Robertson based “Shootout in Chinatown” on Herbert Asbury’s 1933 book The Barbary Coast: An Informal History of the San Francisco Underworld, yet he presents the material matter-of-factly, without the lens of character to bring that milieu to life or reveal any stakes whatsoever.
According to Hudson, Robertson’s songs were difficult and made it hard for him or anyone to find a place within them to experiment. Not that the others were trying: They quickly discovered that they could just pop in at Bearsville whenever they needed to track their parts; suddenly recording a new album became just another errand in the day. So the music turned out as stiff as the songs, not completely lifeless but never quite engaged. The most substantial contributions are made by people outside the Band. Van Morrison barrels through “4% Pantomime” with such lusty exuberance that he inspires an equally rambunctious performance out of Manuel. Robertson also had the good sense to ask Allen Toussaint to write horn charts for “Life Is a Carnival,” which provides the album’s wildest moments. He also asked Dylan if he had any songs for them. He gave them the humorous and inventive “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” perhaps the truest classic on the album, featuring one of Helm’s most animated vocal performances.
Cahoots is about the past giving way to the future and what gets lost in the process. That theme is written on the surface of every song, too calculated in its persuasion and too superficial in its stakes. “How’re you gonna replace human hands?” Manuel sings on “Last of the Blacksmiths.” “Found guilty, said the judge, for not being in demand.” And there’s actually a song called “Where Do We Go From Here,” which ponders the fate of railroads and buffalo in the modern world. The Band once seemed to locate aspects of the past still embedded in the present, but here they sound like they’re stranded in 1971, eulogizing what’s gone and fearing what’s coming. It curdles into an easy, vague nostalgia resembling—horrifically—that of Nixon’s Silent Majority, hungry for the certainty of some mythic American past. For the first time, the Band sound like scolds wagging a finger at the whippersnappers who don’t appreciate the “eagle of distinction.”
Not only did they realize Cahoots was a flop at the time, but they never forgot it. Helm barely mentions it in his memoir, This Wheel’s on Fire, and Robertson also dismisses it succinctly in his memoir, Testimony. But there’s an upside: Because it’s not a sacred text like Big Pink and The Band, this box set can take a few liberties with the recordings and even revive that sense of experimentation that was supposed to animate the original sessions. Whereas the first installments in this reissue series took pains in their remastering, Robertson and Bob Clearmountain cut loose. They take out instruments in order to declutter the arrangements and let the songs breathe a little more, bringing out the lovely sustain of the piano on “Last of the Blacksmiths” and highlighting Helm’s tom-tom rhythm to make “Life Is a Carnival” just a little funkier. They even add a few new parts, such as the new outro on “Where Do We Go From Here” and a reworked intro to “Shootout in Chinatown.”
This kind of thing can raise some alarms, especially when the original mix is not included in the box set, but really, what’s the harm? These changes nudge the album in the direction of Big Pink and The Band and undercut some of its sappy nostalgia. This version sounds much livelier, putting more emphasis on Hudson’s contributions. While he did have trouble finding space in these songs, he was as keenly imaginative as ever, and his sax solo on “Volcano” and his parlor piano on sentimental closer “The River Hymn” sound even more vivid for being more prominent in the mix.
The Band could still kick up a fuss, made evident by the live set included on this box set. These versions of “Rag Mama Rag” and “Slippin’ and Slidin’” barely hold together, but that ragged volatility makes them even more exciting, as though we’re watching a trapeze artist fly through the air. The tracks were recorded in Paris in May 1971, just after the sessions but before the album’s release. That tour—their first in Europe since they backed Dylan five years before—was rocky, and slow ticket sales exacerbated an already-simmering tension between the members. By the time they returned to the States, something had changed between them. It would be four years—an eternity in pop music—before they would release an album of new material. Would things have been different had the 2021 remaster been released instead of the 1971 mix? Probably not. It’s still a fundamentally flawed album, and those flaws were symptoms of a larger ailment within the Band. Perhaps that explains the overriding nostalgia on these songs, that sense of having something beautiful and essential. Cahoots is a eulogy for a Band that was already in the past tense.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With incomparable flair, the pop diva returns to her dance-pop days with a fabulously fun and deeply personal album that is at turns bizarre, theatrical, and ambitious.

Chromatica

Lady Gaga has canceled Earth. She lives on planet Chromatica now. Yes, this is Stefani Germanotta’s return to all that is Lady Gaga: bizarre and theatrical and ambitious, swathed in electrodes, operating with a ga-ga-galaxy brain, delivering dance bangers for us canceled Earthlings. Chromatica is her first pop-pop album since 2011; unlike the non-“Why Did You Do That?” parts of the A Star is Born soundtrack and the beige acoustica of 2016’s Joanne, there’s not a ballad to be found. Specifically, according to Gaga lore, “Chromatica” is some kind of far-flung pink-prism Mad Max planet where “ballads are illegal.” Who doesn’t love world-building?
But while Chromatica is a return to Gaga’s dance-pop days, that doesn’t mean quite the same thing now. It’s been 12 years since her debut album The Fame, released when “EDM” was just corporate jargon and “dance” meant stompy electroclash. In 2020, a Lady Gaga dance album comes out as an unabashed revival of ’90s house music. But if anyone’s earned a trip to the house, it’s Lady Gaga, who is among the few big pop stars today who can legitimately be called a diva. When Gaga sings, she sings out: not chill, not Idol-pretty, but unafraid to go there, whether there be throaty rasps or sotto-voice commands or feral desperation. It’s why her hard-rock dalliances largely worked, and why Chromatica feels more substantial than other artists’ throwaway dance turns. So much nu-house is producer-driven, its vocalists reduced to decorations if even credited; there is no risk of this with Gaga. Everything here would be unmistakably her even if self-reference didn’t abound. Lead single “Stupid Love” salvages the juddering sequencer of “Do What U Want,” kicks up the speed, and weaves Gaga’s past lead singles around it like Maypole streamers: the oncoming-juggernaut heft of “Bad Romance,” the melodic contour of “Born This Way,” the conceit of “Applause.”
The other line about Chromatica is that it’s Gaga’s most personal album. You may recall that Joanne was also called Gaga’s “most personal album.” That time, it was “personal” in the same way all pop stars’ unplugged albums get called that: the arrangements had acoustic guitar, and the AutoTune was kept to a tasteful touch-up. Chromatica loses the guitars but certainly handles heavy subject matter: PTSD triggers, antipsychotic meds, sexual assault. In fact, most of Lady Gaga’s music since The Fame has been very personal. For every shiny, poppy song like “Telephone” or “Hair,” Gaga’s recorded three more with wounds at the core: the personified fears of The Fame, the parts of Born This Way that are more darkwave or Warcraft than bubblegum; the bitter mess of 2013’s Artpop. Themes recur: fragmented identity, soldiers to emptiness, drinking tears, dying a little when being touched. The art is often messy, the specific mess of art written from trauma. Even when Gaga dons freaky costumes or writes high-concept songs about Judas or swine, the artifice cracks. It’s why her albums hold up surprisingly well. It’s telling which Gaga moments have resurfaced from the early 2010s into current cultural memory: the deadpan, panting intro to “Monster,” or the sludgy-gothy “Bloody Mary,” which TikTok made even sludgier and gothier.
Chromatica reverses this effect. This is house music at its most shiny and immaculate, a genre made from ache and escapism, high strings and numbing throbs. But Gaga’s lyrics are plainspoken, mostly free of religious metaphors and pretense; of the two high-concept songs on Chromatica, one is deliberately silly (“Babylon”) and the other (“Alice”) immediately yanks the metaphor back into reality: The first words are “my name isn’t Alice” and the song is inhabited not with white rabbits but the more terrifying creatures inside one’s mind. The emergency in “911” refers to olanzapine, a fast-acting antipsychotic that Gaga says saved her life. The track begins with a cold, stark beat, her vocals affectless and vocoded. The whole thing sounds off, and when the sweet, singsong chorus arrives, it just sounds off even more. The counterpoint never quite resolves with the melody, and the most painful lines (“Wish I laughed and kept the good friendships”) are tossed off, almost missable. But these are wonderful details, ones you can dance through now, then catch later.
For all Gaga’s emphasis on Chromatica being an album meant to be heard start-to-finish with no skips, the sequencing is a bit off. The string interludes, composed with Morgan Kibby (M83, White Sea), separate the albums into three acts, each with its own filler. The climactic redemption of Ariana Grande collab “Rain On Me” comes about ten tracks too early, and “Free Woman” and “Fun Tonight” lose energy so close together. In act two, “Plastic Doll”—the basic idea of which you can guess just by reading the title—would have been too on-the-nose on The Fame. “Sour Candy,” the break-the-internet collaboration with K-pop superstars BLACKPINK, is sassy enough, but on a Lady Gaga album, and particularly this album, it feels out of place. That’s partly because there’s no Gaga until over a minute in, partly because we’ve literally heard it before: “Sour Candy” is at least the fourth pop song built on a sample of Maya Jane Coles’ “What They Say.” Then there’s the unavoidable fact that Chromatica is an album explicitly made for big communal dancefloors, released just before Pride month, a big celebratory mood, in a year when none of those things quite exist like they used to.
Chromatica’s two strongest tracks are near-total opposites. Imagine an axis from bizarro transcendence to pure transcendence; “Sine From Above” is all the way at the left. Each individual part of it makes sense, kind of. Lady Gaga and Elton John? Sure; they’re godfamily, after all, and he’s a livelier duet partner than Tony Bennett or Bradley Cooper. Elton John with two-thirds of Swedish House Mafia? That was the idea, back in 2013. An ode to a literal sine wave, dropping decibels from the heavens? If anyone would write that, it’d be Gaga. Attacking that theme with zero-irony gusto that Eurovision would co-sign, going for it and never looking back? Chopping everything up for a drum-and-bass tangent at the end? To borrow the theater-kid saying, it’s big and wrong—yet so big, it’s hard to call it wrong at all.
If “Sine From Above” runs on WTF, “Enigma” runs on familiarity: Every musical and emotional beat arrives precisely on cue, as if the club had muscle memory. It’s massive, it has a gravitational pull. Uncoincidentally, the chorus recalls a certain other song about being heroic lovers, just for one night. It slots right into Gaga canon: Enigma is the name of her recent Vegas residency, and the snippets of sax that crest above the choruses recall the late E Street Band member Clarence Clemons on Born This Way. And, crucially, it nails the desire of meeting someone in all its urgency. On planet Chromatica, “Enigma” is otherworldly: the atmospheres light up violet, dragon’s eyes and phantoms abounding. It’s the same drive that’s powered dance music, from disco to house to Gaga—turning a moment heightened, more fantastic, and, even at its most strobe-lit and artificial, somehow entirely human.


Dirty Sprite 2 brushes aside the pop overtures of Future's sophomore album Honest. Building off a powerful three-mixtape comeback run, DS2 is bleak and unforgiving, a redemption story for a man who is certain it’s too late for his soul to be redeemed; instead of a triumphal arc, we burrow deeper and deeper into Future’s dystopian universe.

Dirty Sprite 2

The same week Future announced the release date for Dirty Sprite 2, his third official retail release, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft completed the first-ever flyby of Pluto. Its data has been revealing the dwarf planet as an icy, complicated world, still in geological flux, marked by a bright, heart-shaped feature in the center of much darker terrain. It’s not just an apt parallel for the rapper, who named his expectation-defying debut after the misunderstood planet: it’s the ultimate symbol for the latest and most relevant phase of Future’s career. The stars have never been more uncannily aligned for the man born Nayvadius Wilburn, the reigning king of Atlanta who’s deployed a trilogy of album-quality mixtapes since last October to recapture some of the goodwill lost as he’s figured out what kind of artist he wanted to be over the past three years.
There’s been a backlash against sophomore album Honest in the past year—even Future has distanced himself from the project, which he released before the ugly demise of his relationship with ex-fiancée Ciara. But Honest wasn’t a bad album by any means; it was just confused. It was obvious Future was being tugged in too many directions at once: the sledgehammer street bangers, the poignant lone ranger ballads, the big-name collabs with Kanye and Pharrell. The album’s emotional nucleus was "I Be U", the ex-romantic’s most stunning love song to date. But it was no coincidence that it saw Future learning to empathize with his partner by literally becoming her, projecting himself onto her being (compare it to the similarly-titled but far less resonant bonus track "I’ll Be Yours"). He was caught between dissonant identities: the wide-screen romantic who made songs with Miley Cyrus, and the hustler from Little Mexico, Zone 6, who flirted with death on record. "I think I lost my heartbeat for a second and a half," he chanted dispassionately on the title track of Dirty Sprite, the 2011 mixtape to which DS2 nods with its title.
"Tried to make me a pop star, and they made a monster," Future snarls on "I Serve the Base", a skuzzy, fiendish track that busts down DS2’s doors early, its Metro Boomin beat built around what sounds like a sacrificial lamb’s last minutes of life. That pivot from hero to villain is the album’s central conceit, the culmination of the journey from Monster’s wounded hedonism to the numb howl of 56 Nights. The cruel irony is that Future was great at being a pop star, at least in a mercenary sense; Pluto, with its glossy ballads about looking for love with a flashlight, remains one of the best major label rap debuts of the last five years. But he remained visibly uncomfortable in the spotlight, stepping out in matching designer with Ciara like Atlanta’s begrudging Montague.
There is no such self-consciousness on DS2. Its universe is bleak and unforgiving, a redemption story for a man who is certain it’s too late for his soul to be redeemed; instead of a triumphal arc, we burrow deeper and deeper into Future’s dystopia. Before we hear his voice at all, on intro track "Thought It Was a Drought", we hear the slosh of codeine stirred into soda, the dull snap of ice cubes crackling in styrofoam. The only songs that resemble anything like radio hits are mostly pre-released and relegated to the bonus tracks ("Fuck Up Some Commas", "Trap Niggas"), and the only feature is Drake, who does a commendably bitter Future impression on "Where Ya At". There is no room for misinterpretation: Future does not want to be your role model. This is music for nihilists, for the reckless, for those who embrace darkness because they don’t see another option.
With his run of post-Honest releases, Future has made it clear who he would like to speak for, and who he is no longer interested in courting, and his recent work is an obvious gesture towards his day-one fanbase who supported him pre-Pluto. Most of the production is handled by Metro Boomin and 808 Mafia’s Southside, with a few appearances from Zaytoven and a small handful of Atlanta trap mainstays. All these guys have an obvious synergy with Future, with whom they’ve worked for years, and their chemistry provides a cohesiveness and clarity of vision missing from his previous two albums.
But as a stylist and a technical rapper, Future’s operating on a level unmatched in his five-year discography, early mixtapes and all. As a storyteller, he’s evolved considerably, his lyrics crystallizing into a specific poetry. "A product of them roaches in them ashtrays/ I inhale the love on a bad day/ Baptized inside purple actavis," he raps on "I Serve the Base". Miniscule yet significant details come into crisp focus, like a series of tightly framed, disorienting closeups. On "Kno the Meaning", which doubles as an oral history of the Beast Mode and 56 Nights tapes, we meet his Uncle Ronnie who washed cars and Uncle Don who robbed banks, snapshots of the men he once looked up to. Future was always straightforward, never ashamed to confess his depression or infatuation, but the narratives never felt so focused, nuanced, or vulnerable than here.
Lucidity is a poignant theme in his recent work, since he seems to be constantly seeking to escape it. For Future, razor-sharp memory is a curse, one that even month-long benders cannot break. (He spells this out on "Hardly", one of Monster’s more underrated tracks; "Hardly, hardly, hardly forget anything," he croaks, obsessing over moments with a deceased friend.) Thus is the strange and singular beauty of DS2, as ugly as its themes may be: it is at once detail-oriented and hazy, painfully coherent while advocating against coherence, creating an atmosphere like club spotlights piercing through fog machine and blunt smoke, or the beam of a lighthouse searching in the dark for a shipwreck.
This dissonance creates the album’s essential tension between what Future literally describes and what he truly feels. "I pour two zips/ I’m feeling way better," he crows on swirling, melodramatic "Slave Master". "Way better," here, is fraught with subtext—the transcendent but fleeting relief of giving in to temptation. This isn’t an album that giddily champions substance abuse as a rock star trait, as his Future Hendrix persona once may have. Reckless drug talk and boilerplate trap themes are undercut by incessant bitterness, loathing, and nausea. "God blessing all the trap niggas" is more than just a shout-out to people who grew up like he did, it’s a sincere plea. "I know the devil is real," he promises on "Blood on the Money", one of the album’s most stunning productions, somehow austere and baroque at the same damn time. Future thumbs through blood-stained bills, reminded of the life from which he ascended but can’t ever really escape, as much as he may have tried.


The legendary rapper formally ends his retirement with a record that attempts to negotiate what the world's biggest and best hip-hop star is supposed to do on the mic as he approaches 40.

Kingdom Come

Jay-Z is bigger than this. He doesn't leak singles to the street; he launches them on Budweiser commercials during the World Series. He doesn't blog on Myspace; he flogs for Hewlett-Packard. He doesn't beg for time at MTV; he owns the billboards above it. To most of the world, he's not just a rapper, he is the rapper. When he calls himself the "Mike Jordan of recordin'," he's not talking about being the greatest player the game has ever known, he's talking about being the game itself.
But, like athletes, we expect rappers to disappear when they turn 30. We have no use for them as they become older and more comfortable with themselves-- even if their minds are as sharp as ever. We don't want to see them smiling on the cover of Life or hear about their hopes for the future. In hip-hop, there is no future. Everything is now because, presumably, it could all end brutally tomorrow. Jay's two biggest rivals are dead, and we canonized them partly because they were murdered in their mid-20s, most likely because of each other. Jay-Z didn't die young, though. He dubbed himself Jay-Hova and lived beyond any of our imaginations, and now he's left to figure out what the biggest rapper in the world is supposed to do when he gets old.
The early consensus on Kingdom Come is that it's one of Jay-Z's worst albums. He's still more charismatic and intelligent than nearly any other rapper, but for every vintage run like the one on "Trouble" ("Y'all viewing y'all's version of the Lord God/ MC, little nigga, applaud, or/ Forever burn in the fire that I spit at y'all/ I rebuke you little nigga/ The meek shall perish/ I'll roof you, little nigga/ I'm a project terrorist"), there are dozens of uninspired stretches and a few horribly misguided rants like "30 Something", on which Jay unleashes his new catchphrase "30's the new 20," and boasts of leaving rap as if he were ashamed of his past. His nose in the air, he spits the most ridiculous fiscal rap this side of Bloomberg, saying in the chorus, "now I got black cards, good credit and such, baby boy, I'm all grown up."
He's grown up, alright. With the energy Jay brings to most of these tracks, you'd think 30 was the new 60. His patented whispery change-up is used more than ever before, and often makes him sound like Dr. Moreau-era Marlon Brando when all we needed was a little Apocalypse Now. We didn't expect the young, brash Jigga, but we never thought Jay would be flashing AARP brochures in our faces and dropping Gwyneth Paltrow's name in a rap song. Twice he addresses his recent heavily publicized boycott of Cristal champagne which even he acknowledges is unimportant. But that's Kingdom Come: Jay boringly rapping about boring stuff and being totally comfortable with it
The production doesn't help, either. Jay-Z's name on an album used to be a guarantee of at least a few certified anthems, but Kingdom Come is mostly certified anesthesia. Just Blaze's flip of the Allman Brothers' "Whipping Post" on "Oh My God" is a pretty good example of his new stadium rap sound, and his "Kingdom Come" take on Rick James is pretty clever. But the latter has been sitting on the internet for a long time which means Jay-Z now gets Just sorta Blaze instead full-on Blaze. The Neptunes' contribution on "Anything" has been accurately compared to the The Legend of Zelda theme, and Swizz Beats' "Dig a Hole" might be the worst beat to ever appear on a Jay-Z record. It's never a good sign when Chris Martin of Coldplay makes the best track on your record, but that may be the case with Kingdom Come. It is the first album in Jay-Z's career that doesn't sound like he got first choice from his producers, and one has to wonder where the much-talked-about Timbaland songs went (FutureSex/LoveSound, perhaps?).
Still, despite the rampant mediocrity, there's an interesting theme of spirituality and Jay's own messianic tendencies running through this album, hence the title. When Jay-Hova has an identity crisis, the proportions are biblical. He believes he's hip-hop's savior, and Kingdom Come, at times, sounds like his Passion Play. From "The Prelude"'s genesis story to the title track's sermon on the mount to the Kanye West-produced synth-hymn "Do U Wanna Ride?"-- on which Hov introduces his "beach" meme-- the narrative arc of the album loosely resembles that of the Bible's Gospels, ending with Jay's ascension on "Beach Chair". The Beach Chair, of course, is not a beach chair; it is a metaphor for the hip-hop afterlife where all is happiness and one can wriggle his bare toes in the sand if one is not afraid to remove one's sneakers. (Jay was emasculated last summer by former Rocafella artist Cam'Ron for wearing sandals on the beach; Jay responds on "Dig a Hole" with, "It's like the disciples dissin' Jesus, becoming his rivals.")
It's on the final song, the Chris Martin production, that Jay's insecurities about getting old-- or worse, irrelevant-- are most naked. Over Martin's surprisingly decent-- if unsurprisingly epic, rock-ish beat-- Jay muses, "If the prophecy's correct, then the child should have to pay/ For the sins of the father/ So I bartered my tomorrow's against my yesterdays…/ I'm both saint and sinner…/ I'm on permanent vacay/ Life is but a beach chair/ This song's like a Hallmark card until you reach here." Instead of just making a song about how nice it is to be able to sit on the beach, Jay defensively blows a ridiculous image up into a meditation on life. It's strange to the point of discomfort at first, but it becomes oddly compelling.
But we don't want oddities and bizarre narrative arcs from a Jay-Z album. We want unadulterated bangers and innovative hustler imagery, and we want the Jay that's invincible and funny and venomous. And that's probably the Jay that Jay wants too, but that's not who he is anymore. He thinks he's going to save hip-hop and New York City with his triumphant return, and maybe he might. But it won't be because he shouldered their burdens; it'll be because he shrugged and someone else carried the weight. If he wants to remain relevant, it's likely with songs like "Minority Report", on which he speaks honestly about his response to Hurricane Katrina, saying, "Sure I ponied up a mil/ But I didn't give my time/ So, in reality, I didn't give a dime/ Or a damn/ I just put my money in the hands/ Of the same people who left my people stranded." It's the only song on Kingdom Come that offers any real insight into the unique position Jay-Z is in, and possibly the only one that anyone will care to remember.


Mild High Club is the solo act of Alex Brettin, a tourmate and disciple of Mac DeMarco’s sunny sound. On his sophomore album, Brettin finds a voice more distinctly his own.

Skiptracing

It seems reasonable now to look back on late 2012 as the Time of Mac. That fall, independent music fans en masse embraced the twinkly delights of scrub hero Mac DeMarco’s 2, opening the door for legions of low-key fiends ready to peddle their slinky, ’70s AM radio-inspired songs. Folks like Travis Bretzer, Alex Calder, and Connan Mockasin have all owed some debt to DeMarco for his role in making their music more visible and palatable. (Godfather credit goes to Ariel Pink as well.) And they won’t be the last to fall under the banner of “Brought to you by Mac.” Up next are his tourmates Mild High Club, the solo act of Alex Brettin, who is already following up last fall’s pleasant but slight debut Timeline with the significantly improved sophomore LP, Skiptracing.
Timeline saw a technically-gifted artist trying his hand at new spins on various staples of the late ’60s and early ’70s: Todd Rundgren, the Zombies, Jim Croce, T. Rex. But while Brettin’s ability to imitate was impressive, his vocals and personality felt muted. The results were more derivative than exciting. On the surface, Skiptracing treads much of the same nostalgic ground, with a specific focus on the tropes of sunny “Lost Weekend” era L.A. But while Brettin’s first record seemed to run through depictions of those influences like cards in a rolodex, he’s now synthesizing them together into an identity more uniquely his own. On Skiptracing, a more confident artist emerges with a fuller vision and voice.
The album frontloads Brettin’s best results: the first three tracks function as a heavenly, psychedelic triptych. The eponymous opener has a slinky beat and bass line that sets the chill tone nicely. It’s embellished by periodic cowbell percussion that feels cheesy and lovely at once, and a beautiful slide guitar solo that George Harrison would appreciate. “Skiptracing” slides directly into “Homage,” which begins with some plinky DeMarco-style guitar and a baroque harpsichord before a lush, sunburst chorus emerges. “Homage” tumbles into “Cary Me Back,” which uses a circulating melody and cymbal hits to summon a bit of the “‘Til I Die” ache from the Beach Boys’ own early ’70s L.A. masterpiece, Surf’s Up.
The overflowing musicality of these three tracks highlights an important point: while Mild High Club and Mac DeMarco share warm aesthetics and shit-eating “What Me Worry” grins, one place where the comparisons fall flat is the former’s interest in sound and production. This suite of tunes plays like a mini trashcan pop symphony; Brettin does an interesting job crafting elaborately layered songs that still have a sort of four-track sound. When Brettin reaches in this way, his tunes leave DeMarco at the door and instead seek the territory explored by bands like under-appreciated ’90s Brian Wilson worshippers the High Llamas.
Skiptracing also draws on early ’70s jazz-rock and funk much more than its predecessor. “Tesselation” recalls Bill Withers with a slacker bent. “Kokopelli” channels ’70s jazzbos like Steve Kuhn as well as ’90s tricksters like Ween, with a guitar solo that would sound at home on that band’s classic Chocolate and Cheese. Still, while Brettin’s singing is greatly improved—lazy but more present and self-assured—his lyrics are at best inscrutable and in general lacking in substance. The album’s story apparently is meant to track some kind of mystery, but other than the instrumental track explicitly labeled “¿Whodunit?,” you’d never know from the words.
More problematic is the fact that the album loses steam in its second half, with an aimless instrumental and two 30 second interludes bookending the two most forgettable tunes, “Chasing My Tail” and “Chapel Perilous.” The effect, unfortunately, is that the album just kind of drifts away, belying the strength and substance of the record’s first half. *Skiptracing *is a great step forward for Brettin, though, as he elevates Mild High Club from nifty disciples of DeMarco and Ariel Pink to sneaky-good purveyors of sunshine pop.


With the crackling sounds of “lo-fi house” achieving autoplay ubiquity in the dance music corners of YouTube, one of the micro-genre’s progenitors runs up against the style’s limits.

The Outsiders EP

There’s a good chance if you leave YouTube on in the background—especially if you’re listening to house music—Ross From Friends’ 2015 song “Talk to Me You’ll Understand” will eventually surface in autoplay. This makes some users pretty happy (“Thank you YouTube for showing me this song!” reads a typical comment), and others less so (“I hate this fucking song. It always ends up in automatic play”). Whatever your reaction to it, the track was one of the first salvos in a new micro-genre that some have taken to calling lo-fi house. The style clusters together a growing roster of internet-literate, hyper-ironic, 1990s-nostalgic producers with names like DJ Seinfeld, DJ Boring, and of course Ross From Friends.
Their songs are tape-hiss-filled affairs replete with cheap drum machines and sitcom-synth grooves, and they’ve angered some portion of the internet to no end, raising questions of authenticity, intention, and seriousness. Ross From Friends, aka the London producer Felix Weatherall, is one of the few who actively embraces the category and all its implications. “I’ve been trying to keep up this persona of being goofy, and people have really reacted to that,” he said in an interview last year.
The Outsiders is Weatherall’s most serious and tightly produced record to date; at the same time, it demonstrates the creative limitations of lo-fi house. Opener “Crimson” is like a leaner and meaner version of his initial hit: The analog crackle, the tactile rhythm, and the overall fake-vintage sound are of a higher class than they were before. On songs like “D1RT BOX” and “Romeo, Romeo” he even highlights the idea of decaying technology that is so central to the genre by having the tracks stall out and stutter, like a VCR player that’s about gobble up an unspooled tape. And a guitar riff on “D1RT BOX” that approximates the glitchy joy of Jai Paul is a moment of small glory. But these are exceptions to the law of diminishing returns that governs the release.
The problem Weatherall runs into on The Outsiders is that after showcasing how good he’s gotten, he uses up his bag of tricks. It can be painful, like the 10-minute-plus title track, a grating drum loop that spins out of control, or just plain annoying, like on “Suzinak,” where his use of Eastern-inspired strings is worthy of an eye-roll. He can’t resist the temptation of slathering on thick globs of static, and the drum programing is uninspired and wooden. These knee-jerk failings render his more sober-minded decisions in a harsher light.
Listening to The Outsiders, and to lots of Weatherall’s peers, it’s easy to see what there is to hate about these guys. They are close kin to, if not the direct product of, the meme accounts, shitposting, and garbled ‘90s nostalgia that permeate the internet. Without even asking for it, Twitter stars like Seinfeld2000 now have a soundtrack perfectly suited for them: The millennial ennui that infuses this faux-vintage house is perfect background music for the mindless infinite scroll. If anything, what is most revealing about the success and failures of lo-fi house is how it shows the ongoing homogenization of digital culture.
In an essay for The Verge, the writer Kyle Chayka talks about a phenomenon called “AirSpace,” which describes how glossy internet photos on Airbnb, Instagram, Pinterest, etc., have helped disseminate a certain kind aesthetic—lots of chrome and distressed wood—that’s made cafes in Bucharest indistinguishable from those in Williamsburg. Digitally rendered vinyl crackle, chintzy synths, tape warp, and the like are the musical equivalent of exposed brick. Just as our residential and public spaces can be subject to homogenization, so can our digital and musical ones. In some way, the anger the lo-fi housers have elicited in the last two years might have less to do with their alleged inauthenticity than with the anxiety that wherever you turn, the same images and sounds keep popping up. As hard as Weatherall tries on The Outsiders to take the movement (if you can call it that) seriously, he runs into a wall with his hyper-stylized effects and reference-laden tunes. Fun as it can be, it all starts to sound the same.


Matt Ward is no longer at the point in his career where you devote an entire album to the memory of an obscure folk guitar hero. The Portland-based singer, songwriter, and accomplished guitar player is enjoying his highest level of mainstream recognition yet, thanks in no small part to a fine, comfortingly nostalgic collaboration with actress Zooey Deschanel last year as She & Him. He has shared stages with Norah Jones, Jenny Lewis, Bright Eyes, and My Morning Jacket. During the presidential primary season, he played a benefit show for Barack Obama.

On *Hold Time*, Ward loses himself to find himself.

Hold Time

Matt Ward is no longer at the point in his career where you devote an entire album to the memory of an obscure folk guitar hero. The Portland-based singer, songwriter, and accomplished guitar player is enjoying his highest level of mainstream recognition yet, thanks in no small part to a fine, comfortingly nostalgic collaboration with actress Zooey Deschanel last year as She & Him. He has shared stages with Norah Jones, Jenny Lewis, Bright Eyes, and My Morning Jacket. During the presidential primary season, he played a benefit show for Barack Obama.
On Hold Time, Ward loses himself to find himself. With increasingly expansive production and broader lyrical themes, Ward's sixth studio album polishes away a little bit more of the individual character that makes his best recordings so human and rewarding. Paradoxically, that mostly just reinforces Ward's defining trait: a conviction that simple songs can transcend time, and that categorizing music by era can be just as artificial as categorizing music by genre. Ward argues his case pretty convincingly for much of the album, if not quite as eloquently as he has in the past.
Hold Time is not an album-length diatribe about your cable company's understaffed customer-service call centers. "If only I could hold time," Ward's winningly cracked voice sighs wistfully on the title track, a strings-and-piano ballad that sounds like "The Long and Winding Road" and name-checks the Beach Boys compilation Endless Summer. Where 2003's Transfiguration of Vincent was inspired by a memorial service for folk legend John Fahey, 2005's Transistor Radio had the golden age of radio, and 2006's Post-War had wars, Hold Time is conceptually similar to Ward's underrated sophomore album, 2001's End of Amnesia. Back then Ward was helping us remember. Now he's making time stand still, with old sounds, a few old songs, and age-old subjects: love, god, old songs. He also has some indie-famous guest stars.
Bigger arrangements; same folk, rock'n'roll, and Americana roots. With mixing and assistance from Saddle Creek mainstay Mike Mogis, plus strings by Peter Broderick (Horse Feathers, Efterklang), Ward keeps his voice sounding lo-fi even when the production is Phil Spector-sized. "Never Had Nobody Like You" alludes to The Dark Side of the Moon while basically rewriting The Music Man's "Till There Was You" as a stomping glam-rock duet with Deschanel. Ward could've stopped writing "Stars of Leo" early and called it "I Get So High", but to his credit he keeps going; the cascading guitars, vivid verses, and multi-layered percussion make it one of the album's best tracks (though it's not actually "above" the name-checked "Sea of Love"). However, orchestration and vocal overdubs aren't enough to save acoustic strummer "Jailbird" from dying in its cage, despite some twangy, lyrical lead guitar work.
God is the perfect subject for a songwriter of Ward's aspirations toward timelessness. Shuffling guitar hoedown "Fisher of Men" extends one of Jesus' favorite metaphors, while the organ-kissed surfer-folk wisdom of stripped-down "Blake's View" is touching and beautifully phrased, its potentially grating reference to Blake perhaps a way for Ward to distance himself from the song's reassuring sentiments even while offering us comfort in them (pretty close to Transfiguration's "Dead Man", though). "If you're trying to sing an old song/ You're getting all the words wrong," he sings, crediting Paul, whether the Apostle or the Beatle, on strings plus banjo acid-rocker "Epistemology". Grandaddy's Jason Lytle fits well enough into the Wall of Sound on bouncy, clever "To Save Me". Suggested alternate title: "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands (So Would It Kill the Motherfucker to Answer a Guy's Prayers?)".
Covers are another way Ward sets Hold Time out of time. One of them sure goes on forever, anyway: a ponderous rendition of country classic "Oh Lonesome Me" with awkward call and response vocals featuring an out-of-place Lucinda Williams. Buddy Holly's "Rave On" matches up nicely with Ward's simple-is-good philosophy, and this laid-back remake is sonically detailed enough (another Deschanel guest spot) to justify itself-- it has nothing on Transfiguration's irony-free cover of David Bowie's "Let's Dance", though. Meanwhile, Ward's instrumental take on Billie Holiday-sung jazz standard "I'm a Fool to Want You" is a smoldering guitar showcase recalling Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack work or the solos of Giant Sand's Howe Gelb, who released Ward's debut a decade ago.
Memory is the world's greatest liar. So it's possible that Ward's past albums seem a cut or two above Hold Time only through the rose-tinted lens of hindsight-- sort of like how we've come to romanticize the Old West, say, or previous eras of rock'n'roll. But the new one, although steeped in American music tradition, could use some more of the pioneering spirit that got us here. Hold Time is an enjoyable, well-constructed album, and as good a place as any for newcomers to start-- it just doesn't hold many surprises. If it all seems too familiar to you, too impersonal, try the back catalog. As memory turns to myth, some myths are worth remembering. Not only John Henry, but Prometheus, too.


The Scottish trio's frigid, militant, rhythmic Andrew Weatherall-produced third LP is more about obsession than release.

No One Can Ever Know

Here's an incomplete recap of the Twilight Sad's self-reported listening syllabus leading up to their third album, No One Can Ever Know: Cabaret Voltaire, Magazine, Autechre, Public Image Ltd., Nine Inch Nails. In other words, a group that has to this point been either compared to shoegazers or other Scottish acts (Aereogramme, Mogwai) was looking to completely overhaul its sound. That's a good thing-- while their debut Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters was the work of a powerful and fully realized band, its follow-up Forget the Night Ahead suggested it wasn't a particularly versatile one. Whether it was a result of familiarity or just its suffocated production, the torrential downpour of Andy MacFarlane's guitars and James Graham's heavily accented howl didn't have the same impact.
Now here's a nearly complete list of who No One Can Ever Know actually sounds like: The Twilight Sad. That's also a good thing. No One Can Ever Know is kind of a failure as a total sonic rebranding, but it's a strong transition for the band into something a little more form-fitting while carrying over their commitment to morose atmosphere and Graham's handsome vocals, deeply entrenched characteristics that just so happen to be their strengths.
Still, that they brought in Andrew Weatherall to produce is proof enough that they meant business. The mention of Weatherall's name most instantly brings to mind his work on Primal Scream's Screamadelica and Fuck Buttons' Tarot Sport, two records whose wildly bright timbres and celebratory attitudes exist somewhere way the fuck on the other side of the world from where the Twilight Sad set up shop. That's still the case if song titles like "Kill It in the Morning" and "Dead City" are any indication of what's to come, and they sure are. It's tough to pinpoint the exact contributions, but whether Weatherall was meant as a spiritual adviser or a contributor is a moot point-- the Twilight Sad intended for this to be a frigid, militant, and rhythmic record, and they got it.
The main difference is the shape these songs allow themselves to take: "Cold Days From the Birdhouse" and "I Became a Prostitute" achieved weapons-grade catharsis by cresting and crashing unexpectedly, visually represented by right-angle dynamics. No longer able to fall back on volcanic distortion to bring the big moments, the Twilight Sad have more curvature and forward motion, something closer to the color-drained gothic clangor of *Pornography-*era Cure ("Don't Look at Me") or "Street Spirit"/"Knives Out" Radiohead (particularly "Sick") than any of the post-punk firebrands they namechecked. Accordions (or approximations thereof) wheeze, artificial strings moan, and guitars are thick with distortion, yet everything feels of a single piece, and at first it makes No One feel a bit limited dynamically compared to its predecessors. But it's a record more about obsession than release, and the mesmerizing, cyclical guitar figures of "Sick" and the throttle-down locomotion of "Don't Move" make the best use of repetition as a conveyance of passion.
Easy as it is to dwell on the instrumental changes, No One focuses on what might not be Graham's rangiest performance, but certainly his most absorbing. His vocals have always been too prominent to make the shoegaze comparisons stick, and he's just less of a competitor for sonic space this time around, which is key to understanding No One's appeal. Though an undoubtedly emotive singer, Graham isn't much of a details guy-- there was something post-traumatic about Fourteen and Forget, the sudden rupturing of the music acting as a counterbalance to Graham's lyrics, which were evocative in a general sense and every bit as repressed in a literal one. The emotions were identifiable, the events not so much. There was no real way to determine what they were "about" specifically, which is true of No One Can Ever Know as well, but there's a crucial role reversal for both Graham and the listener, in that the former is an aggressor rather than a victim and the latter is assumed to actually be in on the conversation rather than being a therapeutic sounding board. Or maybe we're in on a confession-- Graham's words are carefully chosen and ominous, something like an urgent call on a tapped phone. Something has clearly gone wrong, possibly a murder but definitely a love crime.
Throughout, Graham does little to distinguish between the two, he and an unnamed other "paired off in the violence." The chorus of subtly dramatic opener "Alphabet" contains the Twilight Sad's most surefooted melody and Graham's most legible declaration: "So sick to death of the sight of you now/ Safe to say I've never wanted you more." Likewise, on "Don't Move", Graham's brogue smears the album's two parallel, primal instincts ("I want you more than you will ever know" and "I'll hurt you more than you will ever know"), his dead-eyed recitation of those words betraying that he's hanging on for dear life to any kind of sanity. It's not really accurate to call "Kill It in the Morning" delayed gratification-- not when No One is actually the most sedate and evil Twilight Sad album-- but after five minutes of spiky industrial grind, the music drops out for an exasperated Graham to yell, "What more do you need to know?/ It's staying here well down below."
It gives the feeling of a story completed, and while the wholeness of No One is absorbing to those in tune with the Twilight Sad's relentlessly downbeat demeanor, it's easy to see it as forbidding or impenetrable. Multiple listens reveal layers instead of peaks, and that's to be expected from a band for whom volume and texture meant more than melody: While the greyscale atmopsherics of "Nil" and "Not Sleeping" contribute to No One's sonic consistency, if you don't immediately take a shine to Graham's mantric vocals, there aren't a lot of thrills to find in the cushy synth pads behind him. But even if No One Can Ever Know is more of a way to please those already down for the cause than a means of bringing new listeners into the fold, the attempts to push the boundaries of sound and setting result in the least-insular Twilight Sad album to date-- the kids are still on fire, they've just left the bedroom.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit PJ Harvey’s searing and monumental album from 1993.

Rid of Me

On September 24, 1993, Polly Jean Harvey made her “Tonight Show” debut with a peculiar solo performance of the title track from her second album, Rid of Me. Her black hair looked crunchy and wet, so shellacked with product it gleamed. Sloppy streaks of raspberry lip liner ringed her mouth, and thick brows framed eyes that radiated mischief. In a dramatic departure from the androgynous black uniform she’d adopted in advance of her debut, 1992’s Dry, she wore a gold, sequined cocktail dress that sparkled in the light. Her self-presentation screamed femininity—but the form that femininity took was so performative, so purposefully imperfect, it confronted you with the arbitrary strangeness of gender itself, the visual equivalent of repeating the word “woman” over and over until it sounded like a foreign utterance.
After the tense summer tour that had followed Rid of Me’s spring release, she had split with her bandmates, drummer Rob Ellis and bassist Steve Vaughan, in the trio they’d called PJ Harvey. So Polly appeared on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” accompanied only by her guitar. From a technical standpoint, it wasn’t a stellar performance. On the album and in concert, Ellis had taken over the haunting falsetto backing vocals: “Lick my legs, I’m on fire/Lick my legs of desire.” Even the demo was mixed to layer Harvey’s throaty, menacing leads over her high-pitched chant.
But on Leno’s stage, she played both overlapping parts at once, and the effect was hair-raising. Her falsetto sounded involuntary and unnaturally girlish, a genderless being’s impression of women, as though the song of violent obsession had awakened some histrionic alternate personality within Harvey. She closed by taking her hand off the strings, repeating the “Lick my legs” chant a cappella smiling more to herself than to the audience.
Leno pronounced her performance “very nice,” with all the forced enthusiasm of a high-school English teacher who’d asked the quiet girl to read her poem aloud. In the short interview that followed, he raised what must have seemed like an innocuous topic: Harvey’s rural roots on a sheep farm in Dorset. “So you still go back and do the chores?” Leno wanted to know. She responded with a list of tasks that included castrating sheep. “For the male lambs that you don’t want to become rams, you have to ring their testicles with a rubber band,” Harvey explained, as frank as any lifelong farmer would be. “And after about two weeks, they drop off.” The crowd roared as though she’d made a joke.
If he’d been following her career in the UK music press over the past two years, Leno might have asked Polly about the controversy that had dogged her in her home country, where Rid of Me had reached No. 3 on the pop charts. The British weeklies lost their minds about every new song her band put out—and more so about every image of Harvey that accompanied them. She had appeared naked from the waist up, her back to the camera, on the cover of NME in 1992, offending the delicate (and hypocritical) sensibilities of Melody Maker. Even the cover of Rid of Me, Maria Mochnacz’s photo of the artist in the bath, which exposed only her head, shoulders, and a shock of wet hair in whip-like motion, caused an outcry.
By fall of 1993, rubberneckers had moved on to rumors that she’d had a nervous breakdown while writing Rid of Me. A SKY magazine profile from that period followed a typical formula: Reporter Simon Witter contrasted Harvey’s “suave, demure, elegant, womanly” mien with her “howling banshee music” and recounted confronting her with his insight that “while her ensemble says ‘Look at me!,’ its [all-black] color scheme [was] the classic camouflage of fatties and fence-sitters.” Then he shifted into sympathetic mode, asking about the rough patch she preferred not to call a breakdown, which took her from London to the seaside room in her home county where she recorded the Rid of Me demos. She attributed the dark period to the end of her first real romance, an unpleasant experience at the Reading Festival, and the constant flood of feedback from the industry, fans, and—in a hint Witter must have politely ignored—the media.
Her Leno appearance feels like a truer representation of who she was at the time than any contemporaneous profile. Certain young musicians—mostly innovators with strong points of view who don’t check all the straight, white, male boxes—have the misfortune of entering the public sphere as society-wide Rorschach tests; critics on both sides of the Atlantic just couldn’t resist projecting on Polly.
Leno’s viewers, by contrast, met neither a righteous feminist (Harvey notoriously distanced herself from the term) nor a shrewish hysteric, but an earthy farm girl with an impish streak. Not making an overt political statement so much as she was experimenting with her persona, the Harvey of Rid of Me inhabited outlandish new looks and perspectives, seemingly as a way of dividing her newly public identity from her more vulnerable private self. From the ashes of PJ Harvey the band, she was constructing the first iteration of PJ Harvey the solo artist.
Singer-songwriters whose music is intensely emotional, violent, or sexually explicit often have to contend with the assumption that their lyrics are autobiographical. Particularly with female musicians, the word “confessional” tends to come up. In Harvey’s case, her words and the volume at which she delivered them defined her: a “screeching harridan,” a “castrating bitch-queen,” and, in one Rid of Me review that has aged terribly, the “PC” perpetrator of “one of those angry-woman-spews-sexual-politics records.” Listeners weren’t wrong to infer that she wrote from life; she acknowledged that her breakup, as well as the despair she’d felt after moving to London from the country, had influenced the album. Yet it’s her artistic influences, her gender-dysphoric childhood and her sheep-farm upbringing, more than her politics or even her personality, that are most evident on it.
You can almost hear Harvey’s work boots squish through the moorland muck in the burbling bass tones that tie most of the songs together, simmering under the surface of “Rub ’Till It Bleeds,” twitching through the intro to “Yuri-G,” building tension in the hushed interlude a minute before “Dry” launches its final attack. She also imported these sounds from an agricultural region thousands of miles from Dorset: the Mississippi Delta. Rid of Me was neither the first nor the last PJ Harvey album that, unlike the punk-derived rock so many of her white contemporaries were making at the time, felt grounded in the blues. 1995’s To Bring You My Love, her masterpiece of dark sensuality, drew even more heavily on the structures and tropes of American roots music. But Rid of Me is still the PJ Harvey release that succeeds most spectacularly in evoking the unvarnished emotional intensity of the blues without ever resorting to mimicry.
Some of that immediacy came thanks to producer Steve Albini, whom Harvey hired in spite of acquaintances’ warnings about “what he’s like with women.” Just before he’d help Nirvana restore the raw edges of their pre-Nevermind recordings on In Utero, Albini performed his minimalist magic on Rid of Me, capturing the depth of the band’s live sound by working quickly and recording the full trio at once. “I can get precious about things, and Albini doesn’t allow you to do that,” Harvey said in one interview. The band spent barely two weeks in the studio, mixing included. Though Albini’s warts-and-all method was a product of the punk tradition he treasured, its messiness proved equally well-suited to a blues aesthetic; an audible cough at the beginning of “Rub ’Till It Bleeds” suggests the homespun intimacy of a hastily recorded 78.
Like the music of Pixies, whose 1988 debut Surfer Rosa Albini had produced, the album thrives on sudden shifts in volume and tone. It opens, on “Rid of Me,” at a whisper. Even the drums sound like echoes from a mile away until, midway through the track, every instrument shifts to a scream and Harvey spits out the chorus—“Don’t you wish you never, never met her?”—her voice coated in venom. The abruptness only magnifies the impact. Each song is a different scary pop-up book: Turn any page and a three-dimensional monster could leap out at you.
At other moments on the album, it’s the sparseness of the instrumentals that throws Harvey’s words into relief: “I might as well be dead,” she bellows, amid the droning guitars and clanking percussion of “Legs.” Then, suddenly, the song is ending, and only the ghost of a strum accompanies the chilling final line, “But I could kill you instead.” On “Dry,” written for the album of the same name but saved for Rid of Me, a similar quiet sets in the first time Harvey utters the defining kiss-off of her early career: “You leave me dry.”
To overstate the power of Albini’s recordings, however, is to undervalue the versatility of Harvey’s songwriting. “Man-Size,” which appears in two very different versions, makes for a cathartic shout-along rocker; as a poem recited over a haunted string sextet, it’s unsettling enough to soundtrack a Hitchcock thriller. Amid the campy, sci-fi/rockabilly sprint of fan-favorite single “50 Ft. Queenie” and brutal verbal assaults like “Snake,” “Missed” is the most conventionally pretty song. In a chorus that escalates as she repeats “No, I missed him,” Harvey could be baring her lonely soul. But the verses channel that quotidian heartbreak through a more vivid and specific story that some have interpreted as alluding to the gruesome tragedy of Mary, Queen of Scots.
You wouldn’t have known it from the way Rid of Me was psychoanalyzed, but most—possibly all—of its songs contain or are written in the voices of characters who are not literally Polly Jean Harvey and the men who crossed her path. She has called “Highway 61 Revisited”—the raucous Bob Dylan rag that she covers here as a frantic invocation of Patti Smith—a formative influence on her songwriting. Beginning with a dust-up between God and Abraham, before flashing forward to the 20th century the blues-rock classic really does fit seamlessly with her original compositions. Her stories, from the possibly abusive relationship detailed in “Hook” to the Miltonian encounter between Eve and the serpent that comprises “Snake,” often take the form of dialogues, with Harvey giving voice to women, men, and various other animals.
Many of these narratives are grounded in history, religion, or the arts: “Me-Jane” is, as the title suggests, a lament from Tarzan’s long-suffering civilized partner. Attack of the 50 Foot Woman inspired “50 Ft Queenie.” Mythology was an obsession of her mother’s, and Harvey’s language on Rid of Me subtly reflects that. “Yuri-G” is a sort of pagan love spell addressed to the moon goddess Luna. “I’ll make you lick my injuries/I’m going to twist your head off, see,” from the title track, is supposed to be one of the album’s most fearsome images. Yet that “see” changes everything, transforming a lurid threat into the goofy taunt of a movie gangster or a fairy-tale giant. Even as she was singing from her soul, Harvey was acting.
Of course, the part every person plays from childhood to death—whether we embrace it, subvert it, change it, or some combination of the three—is our gender role, which may not look quite the same in the city as it does on the farm. Women who inhabit non-traditional gender roles, as Harvey certainly has throughout her career, are often presumed to be speaking as feminists. But, as gratifying as it would have been to hear her proclaim allyship with fans who believed in the equality of the sexes, you can see why she tried to prevent Rid of Me from being viewed through that lens.
As a child, Harvey expressed her desire to be a boy by sitting backwards on toilet seats in an imitation of the way her older brother peed and demanding to be called Paul. When she drawls “Got my leather boots on/Got my girl and she’s a wow” on “Man-Size,” a song widely interpreted as an indictment of masculinity, you can hear her imagining what it would be like to inhabit a typical male body. It is as much a fantasy, and a dark joke, as the B-movie rampage of “50 Ft Queenie.”
Beyond their smattering of angry-woman signifiers, Harvey’s songs are literal performances of gender; they shed light on, poke fun at, and rail against the misery of being trapped by the expectations of femaleness or maleness for one’s entire life. “I never think of myself separately as ‘a woman’—I’m always a musician first,” she told The Guardian in 1993. This is what’s so frustrating about making art as a member of the second sex: You identify as an artist, and trace your lineage to Dylan or Willie Dixon, only to watch helplessly as you’re shunted into the role of “woman artist” the minute your work attracts any attention. If women identify most intensely with PJ Harvey’s music, maybe that has less to do with a set of body parts or political aims than with the unconscious sensitivity we’re forced to develop to the species-wide tragicomedy of gender.
The brilliance of Rid of Me is in the vividness and detail with which it captures that Boschian panorama using only blues rhythms, loud-quiet-loud dynamics, Harvey’s voice (and sometimes that of Ellis, whose falsetto and status as a backup singer constitute additional instances of gender subversion), and an arsenal of extreme characters and loaded allusions. It was that rich, strange, deliberately alienating picture that Harvey attempted to reproduce, not flawlessly but unforgettably, alone on Jay Leno’s stage with her dress and her guitar and her conspicuous lip liner and her startling second voice.
She would investigate feminine archetypes in greater detail on 1995’s To Bring You My Love, naming her sexy alter ego Vamp, clothing the character in a hot-pink catsuit, and slathering her face in gobs of blue eyeshadow and red lipstick. But even then she was exploring gender from the distant perspective of someone who realized that sex was a shared delusion, an arbitrary binary, a sick joke. The one constant in PJ Harvey’s long discography is the mosaic of voices. Listen only to the female ones on Rid of Me, and you’ll only hear one side of the conversation.