The Birmingham duo’s 2001 debut introduced their nightmarish hybrid of black metal, grindcore, and electronic music. On a new reissue, it sounds as extreme and subversive as ever.

The Codex Necro

When you zoom out, the history of extreme metal looks like an arms race. Black Sabbath wrote the urtext, Motörhead made it rowdier, Metallica and Slayer made it faster, Death made it more brutal, Mayhem made it more sinister, and so on. Anaal Nathrakh, the Birmingham duo of vocalist V.I.T.R.I.O.L. (aka Dave Hunt) and multi-instrumentalist Irrumator (Mick Kenney), fit neatly into that arc, but they also sought to blow it up entirely. Their 2001 debut The Codex Necro, which has received a new 20th anniversary reissue, pushed sonic extremes in uncomfortable, provocative ways that had no clear antecedent. Their sound was a nightmarish hybrid of black metal, industrial music, grindcore, digital hardcore, and IDM.
Like punk before it, electronic music developed in uneasy parallel to metal during the ’80s and ’90s. Metal’s obsession with musical virtuosity and its tendency toward walled-off hermeticism meant that, as the electronic scene exploded with creativity, relatively few extreme metal bands embraced it as an influence. Anaal Nathrakh were an exception. Where many drummers take pride in playing with superhuman speed, Anaal Nathrakh reveled in writing parts that no human drummer could conceivably attempt. “There is nothing to say we could never have a drummer, should an appropriately necrotic and unspeakable individual become available,” Hunt told the Chronicles of Chaos zine in 2002, and it sounded like a challenge. (They have since welcomed a handful of drummers to the live lineup, though the drums on their records remain programmed.)
By liberating themselves from the limitations of flesh and blood, Anaal Nathrakh opened the door to a whole galaxy of possibilities. They weren’t the first metal band to utilize electronics—Fear Factory and Ministry were early innovators, and the lone album by Norwegian band Thorns from the same year as The Codex Necro is another powerful collision of black metal and industrial music. But few bands in the genre have so fully embraced the potential of computerized sounds, a sonic element that can push an already horrific song to more distressing places.
In both the maximalism of its ideas and the punishing, blown-out production, The Codex Necro is one of the 21st century’s most extreme-sounding metal albums. The drum machine, as promised, pummels with impossible intensity. Humans have imitated these parts onstage, but their live drums have never sounded this deliberately insane. Kenney’s guitars and synths are caked in distortion and merged in mechanized lockstep, at times becoming indistinguishable from one another. Hunt’s throat-ripping vocals are the epitome of anguish, and they’re run through so much processing that he sounds like a Cronenbergian cyborg, crying out for merciful death.
Anaal Nathrakh’s  reputation as a frightening band begins with The Codex Necro. The pushed-to-the-edge ethos of the album manifests in some legitimately unsettling moments: the first time Hunt’s strangled howl enters on album opener “The Supreme Necrotic Audnance,” the barked command of “Die on your knees!” from “Submission Is for the Weak,” the full minute of seasick electronics and Blair Witch-like field recordings that close the album. As far as they’ve strayed on subsequent albums from the sound of The Codex Necro, this aural terror remains the key to their work.
A lot of the thrill of The Codex Necro is witnessing Hunt and Kenney finding ways to make all that blood-curdling horror sound fun. The aforementioned “Submission Is for the Weak” is perversely motivating. For a track whose lyrics put the listener in the shoes of the victim, the music delivers some seriously empowering riffs. The most audacious song is “Paradigm Shift – Annihilation,” which starts in a swirling black metal vortex before moving to the dancefloor, with a breakbeat straight out of ’90s IDM. When you convincingly split the difference between Aphex Twin and Darkthrone, you’re operating in rarified air.
Along with the original album, Anaal Nathrakh have reissued Total Fucking Necro, a collection of chaotic, pre-LP demos. Taken as a whole, the music paints a picture of a band standing on the edge of a cliff, inventing themselves with reckless abandon. They don’t sound like a group who could settle into a long, steady career. But in the two decades since The Codex Necro, they have become precisely that. Hunt and Kenney have abandoned their pseudonyms, released 11 solid-to-very-good albums, and established themselves as a killer live act after an early-career aversion to stepping onstage. But The Codex Necro will forever live in a reality where none of that seems likely. It still feels as subversive, strange, and terrifying as ever.

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Emeralds leader gathers highlights from his small-run releases, offering explorations in minimalism, kosmische, and rock.

Mark McGuire: A Young Person's Guide to Mark McGuire

A Young Person's Guide to Mark McGuire

Last year, guitarist Mark McGuire stepped away from the busy production schedule of cosmic drone-rockers Emeralds to craft Living With Yourself, a fine and overlooked album that drew on autobiographical source material. It may have been the first time most people had considered McGuire in a solo context, but he'd actually been equally busy in that realm as well, issuing tracks on an assortment of limited CD-Rs, cassettes, and compilations. A Young Person's Guide gathers highlights from these small-run releases, offering a nice overview of what McGuire's solo work is all about.
Tracks here generally fall into one of a few different types. There are the spacey meditations where single notes are plucked to create a hypnotic effect that nods to minimalism and kosmische explorations that bring to mind in particular the landmark Inventions for Electric Guitar by Ash Ra Tempel's Manuel Göttsching. On tracks like "Radio Flyer", "Explosion Alarm", and "The Marfa Lights", McGuire uses bits of delay and overlapping patterns of cleanly picked tones to create music that feels weightless and airy and meditative.
Other tracks use harder strumming and looping chords and veer closer to the world of rock proper, and here the focal point is exploring the possibilities of a single chord progression. "Dream Team" has a steady pulse, harmonized leads bathed in distortion, and distant vocals, and the way it builds and gradually shifts creates a mood of uplift and even triumph. "The Path Lined With Colorful Stones" takes an even simpler strummed pattern as its base, which allows McGuire to spin out tendrils of melody on top that feel loose and ragged but without clear direction but that nonetheless manage to resonate. Here, McGuire's music feels partway between the thick, mantra-like approach of Roy Montgomery and the fluid melodicism of the Durutti Column's Vini Reilly. And then there are bright, pastoral instrumentals like "Icy Windows" and "Time Is Flying", which have a loose grounding in folk but take on a more mesmerizing quality through repetition.
Tracks vary in length from interludes that last barely over a minute to the 17-minute "Dream Team". Many of the pieces fall into spaces between these loose categories, but taken together, over the course of two packed CDs, they give a good idea of the range of McGuire's interests. It's not an especially wide range, but it is executed very well. He knows where he wants to go and what it takes to get there.
Is almost two and a half hours of guitar-based, mostly instrumental music overkill? It's really not. The way McGuire's music functions, I don't detect an upper limit for when it might grow tiresome. The longest tracks would also work fine even if they were longer; it's music that strives for endlessness in the best possible way. So this is the kind of record you can just put on at moderate volume when you are doing things and it fills a room nicely with warm, inviting sound. And then, when you're in the mood for more intense engagement, you can add another quarter-turn to the volume knob and take in the full force of McGuire's arrangements. The music shows remarkable flexibility.
Part of it is up to the fact that dynamic range is limited. There's little that is jarring or surprising. This is music that wants to wrap you in an affectionate embrace and serve as a companion, to either some other activity or to a more focused journey into of the further reaches of consciousness. And where the dream-driven music scenes that McGuire sometimes finds himself lumped in with can feel like a bummed-out retro hangover, this music is almost uniformly positive and optimistic, seeming to celebrate the restorative possibilities of elemental chord changes, repetition, and carefully sculpted textures. It's music that wants to find its way into your life and do some good, and I can't think of any good reason to resist it.


There are a few things in this world I'm pretty sure of. One of them is that,\n\ in ...

Rock Action

There are a few things in this world I'm pretty sure of. One of them is that, in a "Survivor"-like desert island competition between Mogwai and fellow crescendo-rockers Godspeed You Black Emperor!, Mogwai would be taking home the grand prize. While Godspeed's Efrim Menuck would spend his time trying desperately to craft cigarettes out of coconut shells, picking bugs out of his beard, and figuring out a way to fabricate cellophane in which to bury the dead, Mogwai's Stuart Braithwaite would be busy sabotaging the enemy camp, starting bonfires, and dancing naked under the light of the moon.
Alright, so maybe I'm exaggerating. But it can't be denied that of all the bands making epic, apocalyptic rock music these days, Mogwai seem to be the only ones who can sit back at the end of the day and have a good laugh. Sure, their music can be extremely serious and deeply affecting, but there's an element of adventurousness and willingness to fuck with your expectations that makes Mogwai less dire than their competitors.
This adventurousness is evidenced by the fact that Mogwai managed to craft a brilliant debut-- 1997's Young Team-- that achieved the sainted goal of balancing fragile beauty and overwhelming sonic terror. Young Team allowed Mogwai to perfectly encapsulate the essence of their namesake-- those crazy little critters from the movie Gremlins. I still remember the song of the Mogwai; it's a simple, beautiful melody sung in freakish la-la's, yet signifies imminent destruction and face-rippage. Such was the case with Young Team-- a beautifully orchestrated melodic passage could successfully lull you into submission. You pet it. You kiss it. You feed it after midnight... and boom! Layered feedback, crashing cymbals, vacuum cleaner noises, claws, teeth, and wanton destruction.
Sadly, the follow-up to Young Team, 1999's Come On Die Young, replaced the aural explosions of the debut with gradual burnouts. Songs that could potentially have been made great seemed to go absolutely nowhere, resulting in an album full of wasted promise-- a better soundtrack to an afternoon nap than a terrifyingly beautiful explosion.
So what did the boys in Mogwai do? Did they go home and whine to their mamas? Of course not. Mogwai isn't a band of words, they're a band of action-- in this case, Rock Action. As of late, the music press has been falling all over itself to point out that-- get this-- Rock Action is not actually full of action, nor does it rock. And while, yes, the album is, for the most part, a very deliberate, moderately paced album, it manages much like Young Team to pack a stellar amount of energy into a medium-tempo rock song.
Which is not to say that Rock Action is a carbon copy of Young Team. Far from it, in fact. Perhaps the greatest difference between this record and its predecessors is the expanded range of sounds incorporated. In the past, Mogwai have been largely guitar-driven, relying on plucked melodies coupled with soaring feedback crescendos to create their trademark sound. Here, such diverse elements as banjos, patterned static, and the Welsh (singer Gruff Rhys from Super Furry Animals) are incorporated, making Rock Action the most sonically dense release of Mogwai's career thus far.
This more complex sound has its ups and its downs. On the positive side, it makes Rock Action a really fun album to pick apart. Dave Fridmann's production is flawless, affording each instrument just the right mix of distinction and ambiguity to create an engaging, yet cohesive whole. Unfortunately, this expanded repertoire comes at a cost. One could say that Rock Action is more focused on sound and less so on melody and structure than the classic Young Team. As a result, the epic "You Don't Know Jesus," the album's standout track, never attains the level of jaw-dropping perfection that Young Team's "Like Herod" or "Mogwai Fear Satan" laid claim to.
Still, Rock Action certainly has its peak moments. Aside from "You Don't Know Jesus," two shorter tracks-- the opening "Dial: Revenge" and "Secret Pint"-- perfectly showcase the strengths of Mogwai's new direction. The former, which features the talents of the aforementioned Gruff, puts vocals to better effect than the band's previous singing excursions, creating a stunningly gorgeous orchestral rock track that seems to extend far beyond its 3\xBD-minute duration. The latter, the album's closer, puts to work sparse piano, huge-sounding drums, and mumbled vocals, giving a beautiful ending to a similarly beautiful record.
Despite the changes the band has been through on the road from Young Team to Rock Action, there are enough unifying elements to conclude that those of you who seriously dug the band's earlier work will find a lot to like about the record. Granted, it's not mind-blowing, and it's not nearly as masterfully executed and affecting as their earliest work. But there are only a handful of bands out there that can put out an album as well-constructed as Rock Action and still expect people to bitch and moan about it. The fact that Mogwai can laugh at their detractors could either lead to the band pursuing brave new directions in rock, or traveling down a path of smug self-satisfaction and stagnation. Either way, Rock Action suggests that it'll be worth sticking around to find out.


A composer or a jokester? On his fourth album, Luke Wyatt's Torn Hawk project begins to emerge as the medium for a musician interested in pushing the limits of both.

Union and Return

While Luke Wyatt's Torn Hawk project didn't quite qualify as a member of the chill/vaporwave Class of 2010-11, his music shares much in common with them. He too is infatuated with VHS culture, infomercial soundtracks, primitive video games, bad TV cop shows and the distorting haze of memory. But while someone like James Ferraro or Oneohtrix Point Never would deploy samplers, synths, or computers to playfully deconstruct those memories, Torn Hawk’s weapon remains that other '80s artifact: the electric guitar.
Tape-chewed textures and digital glitches initially defined Wyatt’s first few releases, but there’s a remarkable clarity throughout Union and Return that belies the fact that for all the beauty of his fourth album, his inherent weirdness still squirms beneath the surface. “The Romantic” opens with a flutter of bowed cello, woodwinds, and a wordless female voice before Wyatt’s sparkling guitar and stutter-step drums come to the fore. It's anthemic, right down to the fanfare of brass and wordless choir that arises midway through, suggesting that Wyatt has cast off the trappings of his previous albums to embrace a minimal, classical sound palette. Whiffs of Meredith Monk, Glassworks, and Mark Isham abound. The sound is so clean and meticulous that it’s hard to reconcile with his fuzzier, lo-fi output.
Throughout, Wyatt’s guitar work brings to mind the legendary Manuel Göttsching, whose leads were crystalline and cosmic at once, suggesting New Age and progressive rock without settling into either camp. But the guitar here is a changeling, ringing like a bell and then dovetailing with piano, French horns, or swells of strings. One might think that Torn Hawk has evolved into a new music ensemble, but the melodic turns are so tight and precise that it’s hard to imagine them as the work of humans. Instead, Wyatt's guitar is played against a bevy of virtual instrumentation, multiple synthesizer layers stacked to dizzying heights. The drama of album highlight “With My Back to the Tower” stays just this side of bombast with its stacked brass and voices, while “Feeling is Law” continues that opulence: elegant and light on its feet. But for all of the song's brightness, darker tones seep out at the edges, casting doubt for brief moments before receding again.
It suggests a grandeur that begins to feel a bit like madness, the songs so filled with teeming details and turns that it’s easy to get lost in them. It can bring to mind car chases, the pomp of a Game of Thrones ceremony, and the music of a motivational speaker (something that Torn Hawk toys with in promo photos). Its clean fastidiousness becomes Union and Return’s weirdest attribute, akin to James Ferraro’s sleek pop polymer, Far Side Virtual. But while closer “Die Swimming in the Sea Here” retains the sonic attributes of the rest of the album, Wyatt emphasizes the gorgeous melody of the song, so straight and stirring so as to suggest end credits. How long until he moves beyond warping imaginary soundtracks and actually composing them himself?


The glitch pioneer’s new album takes his music to new levels of density and playfulness.

Scis

Markus Popp’s Oval revival has now outlasted his original mid-’90s run, when classics like 94 Diskont brought “glitch” into the electronic-music lexicon. Back in those days, Popp was hesitant to even identify himself as a musician, but when he returned in 2010, it was with a fresh interest in composition and performance, as well as a new perspective on his tendency to pulling music apart. Scis, his first release since 2016’s Popp, takes his second act to new levels of density and playfulness.
Popp’s recent discography has evolved like one of his famously skipping samples, doubling back and repeating in quick distortions. 2010’s gargantuan comeback O showed off the busiest Oval arrangements to date alongside 50 brief fragments worked into those preceding tracks. He then scrambled the O material (and its accompanying Oh EP) with earlier work for the unique OvalDNA compilation, before heading to Brazil to reinterpret all three releases with singers and jazz musicians as Calidostopia!. “Recycled” rarely sounds like a compliment in music, but Popp’s methods have produced undeniably rich compost.
Scis initially picks up where its relatively club-oriented 2016 predecessor left off, but gradually unspools into something new. Opener “Twirror” builds twisting piano lines and unruly synth bleats into a slightly conventional climax of crashing drums. It’s a trick Popp repeats, but also improves upon, on subsequent tracks. “Fluoresso” and “Impecco” navigate similar ascents more gracefully; they open with Popp’s familiar CD skips, but never rely on them, as new elements keep entering the frame. The result hits a sweet spot where Popp is essentially playing live alongside a “band” of classic Oval loops.
He mostly abandons the vocals that made Popp feel ready for a dancefloor, but they find new forms on tracks like “Pushhh,” as garbled voice loops compete with one another over twinkling percussion and strings. Prepared piano and a pitched-down vocal moan form the backbone of aggressive standout “Mikk.” “Improg” is built around eerily airless vocal snippets and prepared piano that recalls Oneohtrix Point Never’s Age Of. It’s a great example of Popp’s talent for making ambitious experiments sound both playful and coy.
In the 2010s, plenty of Oval’s ’90s contemporaries reasserted their place in different ways. Aphex Twin’s long, mysterious absence ended when he returned with material not too different from where he left off. Popp’s current course feels more akin to Autechre’s, though their current music couldn’t be more different. Since 2001’s Confield, released the same year Oval’s first iteration ended, Sean Booth and Rob Brown have pushed their own process with a tunnel vision that’s certainly had ups and downs, but led to transcendent contemporary work. Markus Popp isn’t quite there yet, but Scis proves that he’s still following his own path.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In 1995, Stephin Merritt released a major-label synth-pop LP as the 6ths. He wrote all the songs but enlisted others to sing them, including Lou Barlow, Dean Wareham, Georgia Hubley, and Mary Timony.

Wasps’ Nests

To the world at large, Stephin Merritt was born in 1999. It was in those waning days of the 20th century that his band the Magnetic Fields released 69 Love Songs, the 3xCD opus that delivered exactly what its title promised, and did so with such diversity and brilliance that it was deemed an instant classic. From that point, the audience for Merritt’s music grew and he was afforded the opportunities that budding songwriters can only dream of. (Interviews with Terry Gross! Volvo ads! A major label deal!) But Merritt’s template had already been in place for about a decade. His work up to that point—lush synthpop recorded for indie labels like Feel Good All Over and Merge—demonstrated his unparalleled ability to write devilishly catchy melodies and lyrics as cloudy and sweet as a Manhattan.
But even before his current deal with Nonesuch Records, Merritt spent some time with a major label. Wooed by A&R man and avowed fan Ken Friedman, the songwriter inked a one-off deal with the Polygram subsidiary London Records. True to his contrarian nature, he didn’t produce a new Magnetic Fields album. Instead, Merritt inaugurated the 6ths, a side project for which he writes all the songs but lets other folks handle the vocals.
The resulting album was Wasps’ Nests, released first in 1995 but now available as a single LP via Captured Tracks. It is a fine, quaintly flawed collection of bubblegummy synthpop that now feels like something of a blip among the more well-known projects he’s done since. But within his creative history, it represents a marker of Merritt’s time within the underground scene, a community that he happily moved past as quickly as he could (“I have no interest in remaining in the indie rock ghetto,” he told the Village Voice in late ’99).
That mainly has to do with the singers conscripted to participate in this first 6ths album (a follow-up called Hyacinths and Thistles came out in 2000). The roster reads like a lineup for a great ’90s music festival: Sebadoh’s Lou Barlow, Chris Knox of Tall Dwarfs, Barbara Manning, Anna Domino, and Yo La Tengo drummer/vocalist Georgia Hubley among them.
The supposition is that everyone involved was brought in on the strength or distinctiveness of their vocals, but by and large, Merritt tamps those qualities down. The record is mixed so that the singing is almost overtaken by the burbling synthesizers, reverb-charged guitar lines, and drum machines. Many of the guests also do their best to match the downcast tone of Merritt’s baritone vocals. Some make it work, like Barlow who brings a nice whispery croon to the ballad “In the City in the Rain.” Galaxie 500 leader Dean Wareham takes on the weathered tone of his idol Lou Reed on the swinging gem “Falling Out of Love (With You).” Others, though, including Superchunk’s Mac McCaughan, Knox, and Honeybunch member Jeffrey Underhill, feel like they’re straining to keep from soaring.
It’s the women on Wasps’ Nests that are given the real showcase. Unable to hit Merritt’s low notes, they stay true to their own vocal range and the songs delight as a result. Domino’s turn on “Here in My Heart” is a perfect compliment to the Moroder-meets-folk reel that swirls around her. Helium/Ex Hex head Mary Timony uses her bittersweet tone well to go along with the sad sentiments and chirpy music of “All Dressed Up in Dreams.”
Lyrically, Wasps’ Nests has all the highs and lows of Merritt’s non-conceptual work. The good outweighs the blunders here, but for every fine-tuned verse (“I was happy, which is not like me at all/For an hour I was feeling 10 feet tall”), there are others that stumble. Some are caught up in wordsmithery, or pith, or a tendency to just run through lists in place of sentiment—as with the array of possible lovers he spells out in “When I’m Out of Town” (“The butcher, the baker/The thin undertaker”).
At the time of its release, Wasps’ Nests felt like another victory for a songwriter already on one hell of a winning streak, a feeling only amplified by the release of Get Lost six months later. But listened to now, some two decades later, it’s clear that Merritt was gathering his strength as a songwriter and a producer, which he would soon turn into a full-on torrent of genius.


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 the cult-classic 1979 debut from the Roche sisters, a playful, poignant, and slyly subversive folk masterpiece.

The Roches

The Roches went down to Hammond, Louisiana, in 1975. Two of them: Maggie and Terre, who’d just released their first album, not yet joined by Suzzy, who would soon round out the trio. The elder two sisters had been performing for nearly a decade at that point, having first hit the road when both were fresh out of high school in Park Ridge, New Jersey, Maggie as a graduate and Terre as a senior-year dropout. Both had learned to play guitar from a public television program, quickly internalizing the dozen folk tunes the host had to offer. After that, rather than building up any standard repertoire or plugging away at fundamentals, they began focusing exclusively on developing Maggie’s original compositions, which flowed out quickly.
By the time Maggie and Terre met Paul Simon at an NYU songwriting workshop, they had an idiosyncratic sensibility as a duo, honed over years of small-time tours and local gigs at Greenwich Village folk clubs. Maggie’s songs mixed heartfelt sentiment and droll humor, plainspoken storytelling and poetic obfuscation, striking clarity of melody and knotty intricacy of form. Terre was ostensibly the lead vocalist, but in truth they were nearly always singing together, their voices entwined over their acoustic guitars. Simon, one of Maggie’s songwriting heroes, was impressed. He hired them to contribute backing vocals to his album There Goes Rhymin’ Simon, and got them a deal with Columbia, the same label that released his work.
Seductive Reasoning, released in 1975 and credited to Maggie & Terre Roche, didn’t receive much support from Columbia. The only feedback the label offered was that the sisters should wear hipper clothes. During the recording, as seasoned studio musicians played arrangements for Maggie’s songs from sheet music, “we realized that there was a whole thing that we had no idea about with music,” Terre put it to an interviewer later. They began to wonder whether their lack of musical education had left them unprepared for their fledgling new career. Two weeks after Seductive Reasoning came out, discouraged by meager sales and the label’s mishandling, Maggie and Terre resolved to quit performing entirely. They abandoned New York and its music industry for Hammond, a small college town of about 15,000 people.
“If you go down to Hammond,” all three Roches sing on their self-titled debut as a trio, released four years after that Southern sojourn, “You’ll never come back.” If you know “Hammond Song,” reading that line may be enough to conjure the miraculous sound of their harmonies in your mind. “Hammond Song” displaces the pressure Maggie and Terre felt not to leave New York, mapping it onto a family drama about a woman whose loved ones disapprove of her uprooting her life in pursuit of a man. Sometimes, the sisters inhabit different individual characters; at others, they come together in a shimmering Greek chorus.
Maggie’s lyric offers no answers about whether the woman is right or wrong to depart. The voices of her interlocutors radiate both loving concern and stifling control. You might sense, like them, that she’ll find only heartbreak in Hammond, or you might root for her leap into the unknown. The man, identified only with a dismissive “that fella,” is all but immaterial, just there to get the story moving. The heart of “Hammond Song” is the complex relationship between its protagonist and the women we can only assume are her sisters.
The arrangement illustrates those complexities as powerfully as the words do, with voices interweaving and dispersing, building chords that are first rich and sturdy, then fragile and uncertain. The writing is playful and poignant, often at the same time. “They say we meet again, on down the line,” offers Terre at one point, before a tower of voices upends the cliché: “Where is on down the line? How far away?” After the joke comes another blow to the heart. “Tell me I’m OK,” all three Roches sing together, their voices forming a delicate minor chord before spiraling downward.
While in Hammond, Maggie and Terre worked in restaurants and stayed at “a friend’s kung fu temple,” as their press coverage of the era uniformly put it, with understated puzzlement. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a bohemian martial arts institute in small-town Louisiana, it didn’t last forever. When the temple packed up six months later, the sisters did too, headed back to New York. Suzzy, their ebullient little sister, who had been 14 years old when they started performing, was now a college graduate living in the Village. She convinced her sisters to sing together again, and joined in herself, filling out the midrange between Maggie’s deep contralto and Terre’s crystalline soprano. They started by crafting elaborate vocal arrangements for Christmas carols and singing on the street. Soon, they were back in the folk clubs.
In their new trio formation, the Roches quickly caught on, eliciting a fervor that had previously eluded Maggie and Terre. Onstage, each took on a particular guise: Terre coolly charismatic; Suzzy the wild child, gyrating and pulling funny faces; Maggie the mysterious one, focused intently on the music. Maggie remained the primary songwriter, but the other two began composing as well. Along with their originals, they played a selection of covers ranging from Bob Dylan to George Frideric Handel. One newspaper reporter compared the flurry of positive press coverage to “the Bruce Springsteen hoopla in 1975.”
Mixed in with the rave notices was a sense of uncertainty of just what to do with these sisters singing painfully funny songs about workday commutes and affairs with married men in exquisite three-part harmony. Some writers insisted on reading deeply into their wardrobes—sneakers, thrift-store sweaters, peasant skirts, shorts and tights—construing these regular street clothes as evidence of coy affectation. Others sensed, in the Roches’ gleeful rejection of folk music’s po-faced past and utter indifference to prevailing trends, an affinity with the burgeoning rebellion of punk rock.
One early champion was New York Times pop critic John Rockwell, who introduced the Roches to Robert Fripp when the King Crimson guitarist asked him about bands he should see in New York. Both Fripp and the Roches had recently signed contracts with Warner Brothers, the former as a producer and the latter as an artist. After catching a performance in the Village, Fripp approached the band about working together. Both parties agreed that the goal of the sessions, in contrast to the full-band arrangements of Seductive Reasoning, should be to replicate the Roches’ stripped-down stage performance as closely as possible, with few extra elements accompanying their voices and guitars. With the exception of some well-placed washes of electronics, and an iridescent electric guitar solo on “Hammond Song,” Fripp produced the Roches in much the same way that Andy Warhol produced the Velvet Underground: by letting them be.
This fidelity to the Roches’ live setup included starting the album with “We,” their customary set opener, a disconcertingly jaunty number that introduced the band in deadpan biographical detail: “Guess which two of us made a record/Guess what the other one did instead/The two who made the record/Have been a singing group for 10 years,” and so on. In a perceptive Rolling Stone review, Ariel Swartley described the gambit of “We” as “part confrontation, part playing the klutz.” And it’s true: “We” is a sort of gauntlet, an upfront announcement that the Roches will not be bending to accommodate received notions of artistic seriousness: male notions of such seriousness, if you want to put a fine point on it. It also serves as a dare to any listener who might dismiss them as a cutesy novelty act before “Hammond Song” shows up as the second track and obliterates that possibility. It doesn’t sound remotely like punk, but it’s a punk rock move through and through.
“Hammond” wasn’t the only song on The Roches informed by Maggie and Terre’s Louisiana limbo period. There’s also “Mr. Sellack,” one of Terre’s two writing contributions, sung from the perspective of a waitress begging an old boss to rehire her at a dead-end job she left for a failed attempt at stardom. Listening to its jazzy chord changes and piquant lead guitar, it’s hard to believe that the band was ever worried about their informal musical training. (The Roches, among other things, is a top-notch guitar album, with instrumental lines that at first seem secondary but sparkle and surprise with sustained focus.) If anything, it seems that the sisters’ boldness as teenagers—their impulse to plow straight into their own material rather than spend time figuring out how other people put songs together—yielded something original and rare. Each composition on The Roches is shaped unusually, each transition from one section to the next perfectly strange.
One distinctive quality of their songs is the way a single line can shift the emotional polarity of everything in its orbit. In the case of “Mr. Sellack,” it’s the bridge, revealing the yearning beneath the greasy-spoon banality we’ve heard about so far: “Waiting tables ain’t that bad/Since I’ve seen you last/I’ve waited for some things that you would not believe/To come true.” The music bends and stretches around this admission: nudging toward a key change, picking up a couple of extra measures to accommodate all those syllables. The sisters’ phrasing and melodic lines are so graceful—shooting up to mimic the rising of the waitress’s dreams, then falling down dejected again—that the gesture sounds inevitable, almost easy, despite its irregularity. It’s as if the whole song were constructed outward from this one moment.
Lines like these abound in all three sisters’ songs, casting shadows across narratives that might otherwise seem purely whimsical. “The Troubles,” about a visit to Ireland, contrasts the sisters’ exaggeratedly petty concerns about the trip with the reality of a nation that was embroiled in brutal civil conflict. But you only hear about the second part once, and you might miss it if you’re not paying close attention. Suzzy’s “The Train” spends much of its time chronicling the unattractive excesses of an anonymous neighbor on the commuter rail: taking up two seats, drinking two beers, reading The New York Post. And then: “I want to ask him what’s his name/But I can’t because I’m so afraid.”
The Roches could be comically unsparing in their accounts of banality, another connection those early critics may have heard to the new wave of rock bands who yelped out their disenchantment with contemporary life. This was something other than folk music. There was nothing rustic about it. It was the folk music of kids who’d learned how to play guitar by watching TV. The band’s humor, and fondness for the quotidian, may have puzzled some listeners, but it was always in service of finding a deeper truth. “I think that’s kind of the nature of life, you know?” Terre told an interviewer earlier this year. “It’s not either/or it’s, and. Things are often heartbreaking and hysterically funny at the same time.”
“Damned Old Dog” is surely the saddest and sexiest song ever written with “bow wow” as a lyric. Maggie’s narrator wants to be a dog because it would make heartbreak simpler: Dogs don’t fall in love; they generally seem happy to mate with the nearest available candidate. The sisters enumerate this and various other advantages of canine life before realizing the transformation would be futile. “I don’t want to be a damned old dog,” they sing in descending harmony, sounding a bit like pre-Nashville country crooners. “I just want to lick your chin again.” At another point, their voices more closely resemble their subject’s: “Do I want to be a housebroken dog?” they ask, stretching the word “house” until it becomes the sound of three hounds howling at the moon. That’s not a metaphorical description: They literally start to sing like dogs. Somehow, it plays as much like tragedy as comedy.
If the songs of The Roches have a unifying theme, it is the idea of leaving home. Again and again, the women at their centers take courageous and possibly ill-advised plunges, sometimes landing on their feet and others on their knees, begging to be taken back. Is the message of “Hammond Song” really so ambiguous? Of course she has to go down there. If it turns out to be a mistake, it will be one that she’s made for herself.
It’s easy to see the reflections of the sisters’ own paths through life. Despite the hype around their debut, the Roches were never a huge commercial success: The Roches, their biggest-selling album, peaked at No. 58 on the Billboard albums chart. “We have a career, and that is a gift. I guess I want things to be easy, but that’s not the way it is,” Maggie told The Los Angeles Times in 1995. But you never get the sense that they regretted hitting the road as teenagers, or getting up and trying again after the record industry failed them the first time.
Terre’s song “Runs in the Family,” a devastating ballad, suggests that boldness is part of the Roche temperament, and that it isn’t always easy to live with:
One by one we left home
We went so far out there
Everybody got scared
My uncle did it; my daddy did it
I'm beginning to think that it runs in the family
She keeps saying that—“I’m beginning to think that it runs in the family”—without ever quite saying what it is. It echoes my favorite lyric in “Hammond Song,” another one of those lines that jumps out and rearranges your feelings about everything in the story. The protagonist addresses her sisters: “I ain’t the only one who’s got this disease.” What disease? Later in “Runs in the Family,” a fight between partners leads, with a chilling lack of explanation, to a pregnancy. Who knows what sort of passion erupted in that negative space? The Roches, singing as one, seem sure that the child will be afflicted too: “Oh no, kid/You’re gonna run in the family.”
Maybe the disease is simply the urge to take a stand for yourself, and it’s only pathological because it risks being rejected, or worse, misunderstood. “Pretty and High,” the album’s elliptical closer, concerns a circus performer whose adoring public becomes convinced that she’s hiding something after she rebuffs a powerful man’s advances. They call her a liar, and claim that “if she takes off her dress/The sky will fall down.” It certainly sounds like a parable about the dangers of making art as a woman, for an audience that may turn on you as soon as you confound their expectations about womanhood.
“Call the eccentricity something else—more calculated than real, with an ingenuousness that is less than genuine,” wrote Alexander Austin and Steve Erickson in an L.A. Weekly review of a 1979 Roches performance. Women being so bold, so free, so funny—surely, they are trying to pull one over on us. They must be hiding something under their dresses.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


This box set of Bowie’s work in the 1990s—a period when he reasserted his role as the godfather of alternative music—houses the lost album Toy and makes a case for a bold, divisive era of experiments.

David Bowie: Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001)

Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001)

Brilliant Adventure (1992-2001), the latest edition of David Bowie’s ongoing series of box sets spanning each era of his career, is a defining document for fans of a certain stripe. Consensus prevails for the earlier decades: The 1970s were brilliant, the ’80s initially brilliant, then naff. By contrast, the ’90s continue to be a live issue, dividing fans as to whether Bowie was doing vital new work by engaging with prevailing trends or simply cosigning them in hopes their success would rub off. With each album it collects taking a bold left turn from the sound of its immediate predecessor, Brilliant Adventure makes an inarguable case for the former viewpoint: This Bowie took a lot of risks—and those risks largely paid off.
The centerpiece of the 18xLP box set, and its selling point, is Toy. One of Bowie’s proverbial lost albums, Toy was originally recorded in 2000 with members of his touring band playing fast and loose new versions of some of Bowie’s earliest songs, mostly predating his post-“Space Oddity” stardom. It speaks to both Bowie’s restlessness as an artist and willingness to risk embarrassment in service of that restlessness that he’d revisit his juvenilia at all, much less make a whole record out of the project.
The album was subsequently lost in the scheduling shuffle by Bowie’s then-label EMI/Virgin, before being shelved altogether. Rather than fixate on the cancellation, Bowie moved on to brand-new work, and Toy was relegated to the stuff of fan legend. Songs from the sessions dribbled out as B-sides, digital exclusives, and, in 2011, a full-fledged leak; Brilliant Adventure—and the forthcoming set Toy:Box—is the first time this material has been officially made available as a complete album.
The resultant record is a mixed bag. Bowie and his band gel well: “It’s the sound of people happy to be playing music,” as co-producer Mark Plati puts it. But these seasoned pros often fail the material, losing the ramshackle charm of the originals—turning the Swinging London, proto-reggae sound of “I Dig Everything” into a preening rocker, or smoothing out the rough edges of sexed-up, pill-popping mod tracks like “You’ve Got a Habit of Leaving” and “Baby Loves That Way.” In many cases, the original versions sound more avant-garde than the remakes, despite Bowie’s intervening decades in the art-rock trenches.
The strongest track from the set is “Shadow Man,” first recorded as a demo from the Ziggy Stardust sessions. In this version, Bowie’s rich croon is accompanied by a string section and Mike Garson’s piano, turning the song into a lovely, lyrical meditation on our secret selves; it benefits from the wisdom Bowie accrued with age. Elsewhere, rapturous backing vocals twin with the string section to give “Silly Boy Blue” a gorgeous outro, while “Toy (Your Turn to Drive),” the only song newly written for the collection, mines beauty and pathos from Garson’s rainfall piano and a blissful, wordless, two-note hook. Even if Toy mostly served as a template for the neoclassicist rock of Bowie’s subsequent albums, 2002’s Heathen and 2003’s Reality, these highlights make it worth your time.
The 1990s albums reissued here, however, tell the story best. After a period in the pop-music wilderness, this is the decade during which Bowie reasserted his role as the godfather of alternative music, in pretty much any form it took. (The missing link between this box set and its 1980s equivalent Loving the Alien are the two records he recorded with his unjustly reviled rock band Tin Machine; I’ll just say “Justice for ‘You Belong in Rock n’ Roll’” and leave it at that.) Accusations of trend-hopping dogged Bowie at the time, for reasons that now feel increasingly silly—who wouldn’t want to hear him take a stab at industrial or jungle? This is the kind of genre play that paid dividends with his avant-jazz inflected swan song Blackstar, two decades later.
Bowie’s dalliance with the era’s electronic and dance sounds began with 1993’s Black Tie White Noise, a reunion not only with Let’s Dance producer Nile Rodgers (who felt stymied by Bowie’s refusal to record hits), but also with his glam-era bandmates, guitarist Mick Ronson and pianist Mike Garson, the latter of whom continued to work with Bowie for years. (Sadly, Ronson died soon after recording the set’s somewhat anemic dance-beat cover of Cream’s “I Feel Free,” and the lost potential of their reunion is one of the great “what-if”s of Bowie’s career.)
Even when working with old collaborators, Bowie resists falling into old habits. On Black Tie, he meditates on his newlywed bliss with Iman—the opening instrumental “The Wedding” and its lyrical follow-up “The Wedding Song”—and the state of racial relations in America: a gospel-inflected cover of Morrissey’s Ziggy pastiche “I Know It’s Going to Happen Someday,” or the manic title-track duet with New Jack Swing vocalist Al B. Sure!. A bassline cribbed from Liquid Liquid’s “Cavern,” or perhaps from Grandmaster Melle Mel’s “White Lines,” drives both “Wedding” songs and the soaring cover of the Walker Brothers’ “Nite Flights,” the latter of which is as good a reason as any to dig into this record.
Things start getting interesting with 1993’s The Buddha of Suburbia. The most overlooked album in Bowie’s oeuvre, it began life as a soundtrack to BBC2’s film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Hanif Kureishi. Bowie took this remit and ran with it—ultimately only the title track made it into the film—working with longtime multi-instrumentalist collaborator Erdal Kızılçay on a suite of fascinatingly offbeat songs: the quasi-industrial “Bleed Like a Craze, Dad” with its punning reference to the English gangsters the Krays; the gorgeous ambient piece “The Mysteries”; the achingly romantic “Strangers When We Meet” (re-recorded for Bowie’s subsequent release 1. Outside) with its beautiful “heel head over” wordplay; the driving, bittersweet “Dead Against It.” Its instrumentals and experiments serve as a sonic bridge back to the Bowie of Low and “Heroes” while also pointing the way to the albums to come.
Bowie’s mid-to-late ’90s image as an “alternative music” noisemaker truly blossomed with 1995’s 1. Outside. A reunion with Berlin Trilogy collaborator Brian Eno, it’s also the record he toured alongside The Downward Spiral–era Nine Inch Nails—putting Bowie on the radar of any black-clad ’90s kid—and it shares Trent Reznor’s concurrent knack for melody and chaos. In between spoken-word tracks that spool out a Twin-Peaks-meets-Damien-Hirst murder mystery in the art world, this concept album features melodic wonders like “The Motel” and “Thru’ These Architects Eyes,” as well as pulsating bangers like “Hallo Spaceboy”—a live-set fixture for years to come—and the Lost Highway soundtrack highlight “I’m Deranged.” 1. Outside’s concept-album conceit has its detractors, particularly because the proposed second and third installments of a new Eno “trilogy” that would have completed the story never panned out. Besides, the Berlin Trilogy of Low, “Heroes,” and Lodger is a nearly impossible act to follow. But it’s the sound of Bowie at his hungriest, anxious to show the kids how it’s done.
Bowie’s culture-vulture tendencies and his ability to craft enduring portraits of a time and place reach their ’90s apotheosis in 1997’s Earthling. Featuring full-fledged jungle beats in several tracks, it’s also a showcase for Reeves Gabrels, the longest-tenured of Bowie’s showboat lead guitarists, whose squalls and soaring solos gave the album an anarchic energy that matched the return of Bowie’s flame-orange hair and his tattered Alexander McQueen Union Jack coat. Simply put, this is a record of nearly wall-to-wall bangers, from the drum-and-bass highlights “Little Wonder” and “Battle for Britain (The Letter)” to the pounding “Dead Man Walking” (a salute to Neil Young and Crazy Horse, of all things) and “The Last Thing You Should Do.”
Ironically, the record’s claim to pop-culture fame in the States is a version of the track “I’m Afraid of Americans” re-recorded by Nine Inch Nails that isn’t even present on the album proper. Regardless, Earthling is very much the Young Americans or Let’s Dance of its day, a muscular collection of contemporary club sounds remade in Bowie’s image. It deserves a place in the pantheon alongside its predecessors.
Then, rather suddenly, Bowie hit the brakes. He switched off the experiments and turned down the volume on ‘hours…’, his exceedingly gentle—genteel?—1999 effort. Though Gabrels shared a writing credit on every song, it’s easily Bowie’s mildest release of the decade, a break from the recent past marked by a somber, long-haired Bowie cradling his previous spiky-haired incarnation Pietà-style on the front cover. The lead track, “Thursday’s Child,” is a melodic highlight, and the closing “The Dreamers” is a full-throated meditation on aging featuring Bowie at his brassiest, but much of the interim—the drab “What’s Really Happening” and its thoughtless swipe of the vocal line from “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” the ghastly rocker “The Pretty Things Are Going to Hell” and its titular callback to the vastly superior “Oh! You Pretty Things” and the Bowie-produced Iggy and the Stooges slaughterfest “Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell”—rank among Bowie’s weakest work.
Brilliant Adventure is rounded out by a pair of sprawling collections. Re:Call 5 is a three-disc compilation of soundtrack contributions, B-sides, single edits, and remixes, heavy on perfunctory radio edits and light on remixes or new tracks of interest, Pet Shop Boys’ distinctive remix of “Hallo Spaceboy” excepted. (Seriously, where are the Ice Cube and Photek versions of “I’m Afraid of Americans”?) The superior BBC Radio Theatre, London, June 27, 2000 is a double-disc career retrospective by the same band that played with Bowie a few days earlier at Glastonbury and who would go on to work with him on Toy; the intimate setting works much better for the session-pro players than did the festival sprawl, tens of thousands of fans notwithstanding.
Could the crowd-pleasing Bowie who took the Glasto stage by storm ever have emerged without first amassing his itinerant ’90s catalog? I’d say the answer is no. For one thing, there’s a whole generation, myself included, who bought their first Bowie records in this period, specifically because of their engagement with the underground electronic-music scenes of the time; no doubt there were quite a few of us in that festival audience. But more importantly, Bowie became more comfortable in his own skin by, once again, trying on the skins of others. It’s how he put his ’80s pop-star period, one he largely lamented, to bed, renewing his confidence and enabling him to perform both new and old material with renewed vigor and swagger. As he always did at his best, the Bowie of Brilliant Adventure followed his bliss, wherever it took him.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Brooklyn's Sharon Van Etten displays the expressive voice and songwriting chops of peers such as Alela Diane, Marissa Nadler, and Jana Hunter.

Because I Was in Love

Fans of acoustic guitar-playing female singer-songwriters are so flooded with options these days that they are in the position to be pretty discriminating. Artists such as Alela Diane, Marissa Nadler, Jana Hunter, and Mariee Sioux have issued a steady stream of quality music, and have collectively set a fairly high standard for newcomers to match. Yet on her debut full-length album, Because I Was in Love, Brooklyn's Sharon Van Etten proves that she has the expressive voice and the songwriting chops to ably hold her own in the company of her peers.
As with the aforementioned artists, Van Etten's work retains some echoes of folk tradition but generally operates in a more personal, introspective space. Following a number of hand-designed and self-released recordings, a 2008 tour with Meg Baird brought Van Etten into the orbit of Philadelphia's Espers, whose Greg Weeks recorded Because I Was in Love at Hexham Head studio. With Weeks' veteran assistance, Van Etten keeps the album's arrangements minimal and direct, augmenting her voice and guitar with only the occasional splash of organ, brushed cymbals, or multi-tracked vocal harmonies.
Though the arrangements are spare, the performances on Because I Was in Love are not skeletal-- these are full-bodied songs that sound finished, as though Van Etten had already lived with this material long enough to know intuitively how best to present it. In this regard Van Etten's work can resemble Chan Marshall's earliest Cat Power recordings, especially in the way that Van Etten's confident, nuanced soprano is able to help temper the emotional fragility of her material.
As the title suggests, Because I Was In Love spends most of its time chronicling the bittersweet ache and light-headed confusion that can only arise through the ebbs and flows of romance. Unlike some low-key vocalists who prefer to sing as if nobody were listening, Van Etten instead sings these songs as though she had an audience of one, with nearly every lyric directed straight to some unnamed "you." And, at the risk of conflating the performer with her performance, suffice to say that throughout the album Van Etten really nails it, sounding every bit like someone trying to get her head around a complex and evolving relationship.
On opener "I Wish I Knew" or the sumptuous "Much More Than That", Van Etten writes with such intimacy (her lyrics filled with direct lines like, "I wish I knew what to do with you," or "Please don't take me lightly") that the listener gets an almost disconcerting sense of eavesdropping on a private conversation. Elsewhere, as on "Tornado" or the captivating "Consolation Prize", Van Etten sounds more reflective, keeping a measured distance from her narratives, even if her songs' ultimate conclusions ("The moral of the story is don't lie to me again") recognize the impossibility of pat endings and easy solutions.
Most crucial to the album's success, however, is Van Etten's unerring sense for crafting memorable, seductive melodies. Here again she takes no shortcuts, as she largely forgoes standard verse-chorus repetition in favor of a more organic style, with wonderful songs like "For You" and "Holding Out" gently unwinding like the lines across a hand-drawn road map. Even in a folk scene that can sometimes feel over-crowded, Because I Was in Love positions Sharon Van Etten immediately towards the front of the pack.


The latest in the Suede reissue series show a band that remained creative and worthy in the wake of what could have been a fatal loss.

Suede: Coming Up [Deluxe Edition] / Head Music [Deluxe Edition] / A New Morning [Deluxe Edition]

The story of Suede splits well into two acts: the first version of the band, with guitarist Bernard Butler, and the second version of the band, with Butler gone and replaced by Richard Oakes, as well as keyboardist Neil Codling. The first version of the band released two albums, the crackling, sexually aggressive debut and the grotesque, brilliant, and dark follow-up, Dog Man Star, made as Butler and the rest of the band were pulling apart. The original version of the band fed on the tension between its two songwriters, Butler and vocalist Brett Anderson, and the records it made were harrowing and complex, both musically and lyrically.
When the band reconstituted after its messy split with its guitarist, Anderson was in no mood to make another Dog Man Star. It's a difficult kind of record to follow up-- to come back with something that aimed for the same epic sweep and catharsis of that album would have ensured failure. Instead, when Anderson began to write with his new partners, he sought to change almost everything. The new Suede would be a very different band from its predecessor, even though it had the same singer and rhythm section. The new pieces had a lot to say about that. Oakes and Codling immediately began writing new material for the band, and Anderson found that what they were writing fit well with the new direction he hoped to take the band in.
It wasn't a clean stylistic break, necessarily. Oakes had found his way into the band by sending a demo tape to the Suede fan club; when Anderson overheard drummer Simon Gilbert listening to it, he thought it was an old Butler demo, and the 17-year-old guitarist vaulted to front of the long line of people auditioning to be Suede's newest member. Codling came to the band more conventionally: He was Gilbert's cousin, and the new songs they'd been working on immediately after Oakes joined required keyboards, so he was hired. This new three-way creative partnership was considerably less volatile than the Anderson/Butler pair, and partly as a result, the music lost its dark edge.
Back in the band's early days, Suede were heralded as one of the banner acts of the UK music media's new Britpop obsession-- a fact that chagrined and even disgusted Anderson-- and Dog Man Star had in some respects been Anderson's attempt to show that Suede were something distinct from Britpop. The band's next album, Coming Up, released in 1996, feels somewhat like Suede jumping back on board the movement it helped launch. At the very least, it finds the band returning to its glam-rock roots, and it's about the most day-glo rock record this side of Ziggy Stardust, with an intentionally garish Peter Saville sleeve to match. It vaulted the band back to massive commercial success in the UK, selling over a million and a half copies and spawning five top 10 singles.
Listening today, the album's biggest shortcoming is its lack of low-end. Producer Ed Buller chose to highlight the vocals, guitar, and synths over the band's formidable rhythm section, a decision that unfortunately leaves the album's roughly 50/50 mix of bouncy pop songs and melancholy ballads sounding a little thin. Coming Up is still a very good album, though. Anderson's lyrics are considerably more superficial and humorous than they had been in the past; this would eventually become a problem, but on uptempo, fluorescent rock songs like "Beautiful Ones" and "Trash" it works because these songs are just so damned catchy. And there is a lot of depth in the ballads. "By the Sea", actually written by Anderson during the Butler years, is simply beautiful and heartbreaking, while "Saturday Night" works perfectly as a long exhalation at the end of the album's long and disorienting party.
The album is reissued with all of its contemporary B-sides, minus the Neil Codling demo "Digging a Hole", which is omitted without explanation. This is very important, because there's a whole second album on disc two that's easily as good as Coming Up itself. The epic slash of "Every Monday Morning Comes", the relentless dub stomp of "WSD", the grinding descent into debauchery of "Europe Is Our Playground", the exhilarating pop rush of "Sound of the Streets" and Anderson's baritone-voiced lead on the scuzzy, Dog Man Star-ish rock song "Have You Ever Been This Low?" are all essential to understanding just how versatile this band was at this point in its career, and that's just a sampling of the 19 B-sides included on this set. This is an important theme of this reissue campaign, and one that will become even more important later.
The huge success of Coming Up left Suede in a position to do basically anything they wanted with their next album, but it took three years for the band to put together the follow-up. Codling was at times bed-ridden with chronic fatigue syndrome after the grueling 18-month world tour in support of Coming Up, and Anderson had fallen deeper into drug addiction, especially crack. Bassist Mat Osman, who along with Simon Gilbert has always been a source of stability and reason for the band, recalls Anderson's drug buddies hanging around a lot during the sessions and generally ruining the atmosphere. The UK music press interpreted the long wait between albums as a sign that things were going wrong and that the next LP might be another Dog Man Star. When Head Music finally came out in 1999, anticipation was so high in Britain that Virgin Megastores all over the country changed their name to Head Music for a day on the release date.
The album wasn't another Dog Man Star, but it was considerably darker and thornier than Coming Up. The band worked with producer Steve Osbourne to get a much heavier, more groove-oriented sound, and Codling's synths moved to the center of the sound. Head Music is neon to Coming Up's day-glo, and it's aged well sonically-- it is easily the band's most underappreciated album. Part of the reason for that is Anderson's lyrics, which on certain songs were simply terrible. "Savoir Faire"'s notorious opening couplet, "She live in a house/ She stupid as a mouse," is the worst offender, but the slide toward superficiality that began on Coming Up accelerated here, with Anderson sounding more like a bored observer than participant in the nightlife he sings about.
Most of it sounds splendid, though. "She's in Fashion" is a simply effervescent and weightless pop song; the mysterious orchestral swirl of "Indian Strings" is captivating; "Hi-Fi" has a chunky electro bounce that still sounds modern; and the slinking pop noir of "Asbestos" easily forgives the sometimes clunky lyrics. The band's attempts at stomping, punky rock on "Can't Get Enough" and "Elephant Man" might have been better replaced by breezy fluid B-sides "Leaving" and "Let Go", though, and Anderson's solo acoustic stab at political commentary on "Crack in the Union Jack" is expendable. Perhaps reflecting the band's unsettled state at the time, the period B-sides overall aren't the world-beaters of the past, and they're spread across different producers (here again, a Codling-sung B-side, "Weight of the World", has been left off).
Suede's final album, A New Morning, is almost an afterthought in the context of the band's whole career. In his liner notes, Anderson wonders whether it even should have been made and imagines a much different tracklist from what actually went on the album. The disc of B-sides here is very important, because it's easily better than the proper LP-- it's the reason I'm rating this reissue higher than I did the album on its original release. The band was coming apart as it made the record. Codling had left due to his illness, though he still contributed some songwriting; he was replaced by Alex Lee, the former keyboardist for good-but-forgotten Britpoppers Strangelove. For his part, Anderson had kicked drugs and isolated himself to write songs.
The record that came of all this is Suede's sunniest and most organic, but also its least substantial. On "Lonely Girls", Anderson outright repeats himself-- the song is a list of girls, coupled briefly with something that each of them does, which makes it a virtual re-write of the old B-side "Young Men". His voice was also worn by years of abuse, and he sounded a little ragged singing the otherwise buoyant hooks of "Obsessions" and "Positivity", though it's hard to begrudge him the brighter outlook he displays on those songs. Listening to all the music here, though, it's easy to hear how, by bringing songs such as the stately ballad "Simon", the strangely haunting acoustic singalong "Campfire Song", and the unusual, slightly psychedelic "Instant Sunshine" out of B-side exile, they could have pieced together a better album from these sessions. Still, A New Morning is not a bad record, and it sent the band out on a hopeful note that was strikingly at odds with much of what had preceded it.
The five-piece Anderson/Codling/Gilbert/Oakes/Osman version of Suede has reunited and is touring, and a few years ago Anderson and Butler reconciled and made an album together as the Tears. Anderson has a budding solo career but has left the door open to a possible Suede album sometime in the future. If it never happens, so be it-- the band's legacy is already sealed. These three albums, and Coming Up in particular, show a band that picked itself up remained creative and worthy in the wake of what could have been a fatal loss. These releases give us that whole run in all its messy imperfection.


The Brooklyn drill stars show they’re the best the scene has to offer on a debut mixtape with some distracting extras.

41 World: Not the Album

In early 2022, the Brownsville trio 41—rappers Kyle Richh, Jenn Carter, and TaTa, all just a couple years removed from high school—relaunched a Brooklyn drill scene that had been decimated by jail and death. It’s hard to point to one specific breakout moment, but it’s probably their first On the Radar cypher from May 2022, which had a volcanic, anything-could-happen energy not far off from old DJ Clue radio freestyles. No surprise that it’s the most watched episode of the series, beating out viral sessions by the likes of Ice Spice and Drake.
Their profile rose in the fall after they released “Notti Bop,” a low, attention-seeking song and dance mocking the death of Harlem rapper Notti Osama, the 14-year-old younger brother of DD Osama. As if it never happened, they then made a sharp pivot to party anthems, infusing the no-holds barred spirit of drill with the breakneck rhythms of Jersey club. Others in New York had tried to do this, but none leaned as far as 41, and new doors opened up to them: They’ve started to play local shows (a rarity for drill stars, given the intensity of police surveillance), and broken through to gatekeepers like Funk Flex and Angie Martinez at a time when corporatized NYC radio has kept its distance from the subgenre.
Now they’ve got their first project, 41 World: Not the Album. (For some reason, they decided not to just call it 41 World: The Mixtape). It’s a formal introduction to the crew, complete with all the expected extras—solo tracks, singing, a major name remix of their biggest hit—none of which are necessary, because they sound the best when it’s just the three of them going at full speed. Like on “Run That!,” which gives M.O.P.’s buckwild classic “Ante Up” the club treatment with throbbing drums and gun clicks. It’s a real headbanger: Jenn delivers the hook with the intensity of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, TaTa chants “Go get that nigga” like he’s in a football huddle, and KR screams “Brownsville, we got the motion” like he’s about to combust into flames. Another highlight is “Stomp Stomp,” the trio’s drill spin on “Crank That.” Yeah, I know. Get your eyerolls out of the way now. But from KR’s rowdy opening bars (“In the party I’m not havin’ fun/Like, thinkin’ ’bout usin’ my gun”) they breathe new life into what could have easily been nothing but nostalgia bait.
At times, they take the well-traveled route of drill stars trying to shed the “drill” label by breaking out the melodies and just throwing some AutoTune on their voice. I understand why—opportunities for drill rappers are slim—but they have been doing just fine. It wouldn’t be that much of a problem if the singing was any good, though, which it’s not. Like on Jenn Carter’s lovey-dovey solo track “Problems,” the verses are OK, but the sung hook is brutal—it belongs on a bad J.I the Prince of NY album. TaTa’s swings are similarly a tough listen; whatever XXX or Juice WRLD inspiration he’s absorbed on “Too Far Gone” doesn’t cut it. Actually, of the three solo songs, Kyle Richh’s “Goodbye” is the only noteworthy one, a dreamy therapy session that adds some depth without making him seem like an entirely different rapper.
But there’s nothing on 41 World comparable to lead single “Bent,” one of the best New York rap songs of the year. Co-produced by L.A. journeyman Synthetic and MCVertt, one of the architects of the club rap revival in Newark, it has the contagious, house party-ready bounce and homegrown soul missing from so many trend-chasing club and drill fusions. Throughout the nearly three-minute track, 41 are connected at the hip, and the energy never lets up. And, of course, at the end of the tape there’s a remix with Sexyy Red tacked on that I’ll probably never listen to again willingly. It gets in the way of the best thing Brooklyn drill has to offer right now: Kyle Richh, Jenn Carter, and TaTa just hot potatoing the mic around.


On their second album as a duo, Madlib and Freddie Gibbs pull themselves deeper into one another’s worlds.

Bandana

On paper, Freddie Gibbs, a straight-shooting street rapper, and Madlib, an eccentric tinkerer, are as mouth-watering a combo as licorice and pickle juice. But their collaborative 2014 album Piñata succeeded because the two are equally uncompromising: Madlib tailors beats to his eclectic ears alone, while Gibbs insists that he can rap over anything. Kindred spirits, the pair bonded through mutual gumption.
On follow-up Bandana, the bond deepens. Madlib’s beats remain off-kilter, and Gibbs remains gangster, but there’s a looser feel to this record, a spirit of intuition and intimacy. Their overall recording process didn’t change much: Madlib sent beats and Gibbs rapped over them as is—samples, pauses, breaks, and all. This time, though, they made the effort to meet in the studio and review different mixes and edits, to calibrate. The result is a keener sense of each other’s presence. Moving in lockstep, Gibbs and Madlib pull themselves deeper into one another’s worlds, forging a new one in the process.
On Piñata, the duo bridged Gibbs’ street sense and Madlib’s throwback flair by embracing the sounds and attitudes of blaxploitation. Smoky soul drifted out of every crevice, drugs flooded the streets, and middle fingers never came down. The general vibe was defiant, gritty, and nostalgic, fitting the back-to-basics spirit of a proud lyricist linking with an inveterate crate-digger. Bandana is palpably more unhinged, less rooted in a particular time or style or mood.
The through line is black freedom. Across the record Gibbs mentions various black figures and tragedies, from the transatlantic slave trade (“Flat Tummy Tea”) to Baltimore drug kingpin Melvin Williams (“Education”) to basketball star Allen Iverson (“Practice”) to the death by police bombing of mass shooter Micah Johnson (“Soul Right”) to Tupac’s assault on the Hughes Brothers (“Massage Seats”), weaving a grand, ambiguous tapestry. Gibbs has been talking black power in various forms since his early mixtapes, but here he’s less certain about what it looks like, who embodies it, how to secure it. As he takes a fuller view of his life and the fates of his idols, he grows more cautious. “I can’t move the same/I gotta readjust how I maneuver,” he insists on “Gat Damn.”
He’s kept on his toes by Madlib’s strikingly robust production, which is maximal compared to his revered lo-fi sound. “Half Manne Half Cocaine” begins with ticking hi-hats and bass kicks topped by twinkly bells, then spazzes into a torrent of cymbals and sampled shouts—trap by way of EPMD. The scuzzy riff on “Flat Tummy Tea” is stretched, distorted, and splashed with atonal effects that evaporate into a breakbeat. Madlib has always been an unsparing producer, but this is one of the few times he’s allowed himself to be baroque.
Gibbs’ rapping is just as fitful. Jerky yet nimble, he regularly drops in and out of cadence, throttling and braking his flows to accent key images. On “Situations,” he mentions surviving a shooting that claimed his cousin, sprinting through the memory like he’s felt a sudden jolt of pain. “Cousin took two to the brain/Bullets missed me it’s a blessing/I could see the day like it was yesterday I’ll never forget it,” he says, cramming the last line into one bar. On “Gat Damn,” he recalls fasting in an Austrian prison that didn’t provide Muslim-friendly meals. “Say my prayers, Alhamduillah/No bacon, ham, bacon, ham/And cold salami/That’s all they serving,” he sings, evoking the strain of the experience by spacing out his words. Gibbs boasts often of his versatility, but here his movement is dictated by purpose rather than reflex.
A current of self-discovery bubbles beneath all this motion. Madlib emerges as less subdued, more emboldened to challenge his collaborator (and the listener) rather than shroud his ideas in fog. His catalog is full of gems, but not since Georgia Anne Muldrow’s Seeds, and Madvillainy before that, has the Beat Konducta felt like, well, a conductor, actively dictating the path the music takes. You can feel Gibbs’ ideas being guided by the dreamy loops on “Crime Pays” and the humid sway of “Cataracts.”
The album’s few misfires occur when guests misread the room. Continuing his one-man nostalgia show, Anderson .Paak’s bloodless crooning on “Giannis” is pure pastiche. “Power, love, and loyalty,” he reads from a movie poster. Pusha T and Killer Mike’s appearances on “Palmolive” are stiff compared to Gibbs’ constant action. They treat the song’s beautiful main loop like a fossil in a museum, admiring it from afar. Black Thought and Yasiin Bey are the only ones who seem to share Gibbs’ hunger here.
Overcoming the constraints on black freedom was always the underlying mission of Madlib’s beloved jazz and soul artists, as well as Gibbs’ prized black rebels. For Bandana, the pair taps into that heritage and allow themselves to be shaped by its highs and lows, its heroes and villains. Finding themselves within that slipstream of black thought and life, they plot their course on their terms. Bandana is tradition and transgression: one rapper, one producer, no limitations.

Keep Cool / RCA / Madlib Invazion / ESGN


One of the most underappreciated bands in American rock’n’roll returns after 14 years, still playing as raw, fast, and loud as ever.

Hellbender

Seattle’s Zeke have long operated on what you could call the Motörhead Principle: They only play raw, fast, and loud. Subtlety is something they steamrolled over a long time ago, and far from limiting them, it’s made them one of America’s great underappreciated rock acts. While they tore through the ’90s in a way that paralleled brash punk’n’rollers like the Dwarves and Turbonegro, Zeke have always relied less than those acts on lyrical shock value, putting all their energy instead into sounding as nasty and speedy as possible. Hellbender is their first album in 14 years, and it fits right into their unabashedly rude catalog alongside 1994’s Super Sound Racing and 1998’s Kicked in the Teeth.
Most of Zeke’s songs follow a simple formula: Blind Marky Felchtone, the group’s sole consistent member, scrapes throat and strings as he’s been doing for over two decades, making rock swing into a glass-spiked blur. It’s usually all over in about a minute or so. Sometimes, there will be a Kiss-via-Skynyrd lick thrown in, squealing in fast and exiting even sooner. Taken as a single 20-minute chunk, Hellbender feels like mainlining adrenaline. It doesn’t have a proper introduction or conclusion; songs barrel in and out, and you’re left to process what happened afterwards. Were 20-minute sets to become mandatory, Zeke wouldn’t just be compliant, they would thrive.
Their last full-length album, Til The Living End, was brusque compared to a lot of punk and metal that came out in 2004, yet it featured a couple songs that were slightly more laid-back, like the single “Dolphenwulf.” Hellbender does not have any such detours. With original bassist Kurt Colfelt back in the fold for his first appearance since 1996’s Flat Tracker, it’s a full commitment to their slash-and-burn ’90s tactics, all lightning-fast, bare-bones riffs and sour defiance.
The elemental rock fury of Hellbender often feels like it comes from a time before punk. Motörhead, after all, started off many shows saying “We’re Motörhead, and we play rock’n’roll,” resisting the urge to put themselves squarely in either the punk or metal camps. Zeke play with a similar philosophy, and as far as philosophies go, bashing and bashing again and again works a lot better than misguided ambition. In the same sense, Hellbender recalls the Stooges in their prime, stoking and embracing chaos on the rawest level. This is a joyous album that needs no affirmation other than its own speed.
The cynical way to look at Hellbender is that Zeke are stuck doing the same style after a 14-year break, that they’re not tapped into what’s going on right now. But the truth is, there’s always room to rub the basics down to their most exposed. Zeke are the dive bar that’s survived onslaughts of gentrification, knowing that the charm of lawless riffing and broken bottles never fades.


Featuring instrumental renditions of many of the Beach Boys’ greatest hits, this collection of solo piano performances feels disappointingly bare and anonymous.

At My Piano

Brian Wilson has never been averse to revisiting the past. He has written two autobiographies and been the subject of two documentaries, plus a major motion picture. But there’s a twist on the 79-year-old songwriter’s latest album, At My Piano: It consists of nothing but instrumental renditions of the best-known tunes from his songbook. Plenty of Wilson’s peers have had fruitful strolls through their back pages, such as Randy Newman’s ongoing Songbook series, and the opportunity to hear Wilson without studio wizardry is intriguing. While candied vocal harmonies are an integral part of the original Beach Boys records, the compositions hold their own, stripped of vocals and lyrics. The instrumental approach is also a clever way to deemphasize Wilson’s diminished voice: the limited range and raspiness that have become evident in concert and such latter-day records as 2015’s No Pier Pressure.
Conception and execution, however, are two very different things. At My Piano is as simple as its title, containing nothing but Wilson alone at the keyboard, augmented only with  the occasional piano overdub. Because so many Wilson projects are proudly ornate, the spare setting initially seems like a dramatic shift, as if the songs have been reduced to their base elements. But soon, it becomes evident that the stripped-down arrangements tend to be a bit too bare, leaving Wilson’s flaws exposed alongside his gifts.
Those compositional strengths are evident, as Wilson sticks to a songbook that’s endured for half a century. Apart from “Love and Mercy,” a 1988 solo track that’s become his unofficial anthem, At My Piano contains material written for and performed by the Beach Boys during the 1960s and early 1970s. Roughly half of the repertoire dates from 1966 and earlier, a period covering both sunny surf-rock hits and the sophisticated symphonic Pet Sounds, with the remainder of the record devoted to material Wilson composed in the aftermath of Smile, the album he abandoned in 1967. At My Piano contains a medley of Smile material, a showcase for how Wilson layers chords and countermelodies, a talent that reaches its pinnacle on “Surf’s Up,” whose loveliness shimmers in this relaxed, gentle setting.
Often, the mellow nature of At My Piano works against it. Wilson shows no desire to improvise or rearrange his warhorses. He plays with a lack of flair that accentuates the melody at the expense of texture or vibe: He literally is sitting at the piano playing familiar tunes. With the earliest songs, this approach amounts to little more than tinkling the melody as his left hand plonks out accompanying chords. There is a modicum of homespun charm, but the simplicity is also a bit stultifying.
More than anything, At My Piano resembles an old-fashioned easy listening record, the kind of music from the mid-20th century that sanded away the rough edges of pop or rock to make the melodies pretty and palatable for older audiences. Wilson grew up on these softer sounds, taking inspiration from the barbershop harmonies of the Four Freshmen, so an exercise like At My Piano isn’t quite unexpected—nor could it be called uncommercial, especially considering how Decca announced Richard Carpenter’s Piano Songbook, a nearly identical effort from the Carpenters songwriter, within a month of Wilson’s collection. What is unexpected is how Wilson sounds almost anonymous here. As he drifts through his greatest hits and personal favorites, he doesn’t invest his playing with much personality, so these smooth sounds are about as memorable as a piano twinkling away in the background of a department store.

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The New Jersey trio’s latest consists of five formless, comforting drones, recorded with a single microphone placed in the middle of their Hoboken practice space.

We Have Amnesia Sometimes

“We didn’t really set out to make a soothing, relaxing album for sleep time.” That’s Yo La Tengo bassist James McNew reflecting on the process behind their 2018 album There’s a Riot Going On. Intentional or not, it was probably the band’s most consistently tranquil LP in 15 years— even its charged-up song sounded like it was generating electricity for fairy lights. The New Jersey trio often cope with life’s harder moments by turning down and turning inward—it’s a huge part of what makes them so meaningful to so many. McNew might have also been a bit frazzled from having to learn a new software interface to engineer the layered, loop-dense album; remembering what the multi-track to “Above the Sound” looked like, he said, was enough to make him dizzy.
He won’t have that problem when he thinks back on We Have Amnesia Sometimes, which was recorded with a single microphone placed in the middle of the band’s Hoboken practice space. As Ira Kaplan explains, in late April, “with the outside world weighing on everybody,” the band figured out how to safely convene and resume “playing formlessly.” This is how many of their songs have begun over the years, but here, they’ve released the raw material. It’s new territory for them: The key difference between these five gentle drones and the band’s abundant film-scoring or ambient-leaning work, technically speaking, is that those pieces almost always had some lead melody or some syncopated rhythm, however subtle. Here, there are hints of the former on the third and fourth tracks, and the fourth does have the latter, but otherwise, nobody steps out in front or distinguishes themselves clearly.
And that is, generally speaking, the beautiful part of this project. What better time to submit to an exercise in committee and unity than now, when we are quite literally as distanced as ever? On We Have Amnesia Sometimes, Kaplan, McNew, and Georgia Hubley blend into each other and seem to form one big animal. On “James and Ira demonstrate mysticism and some confusion holds (Monday),” the three wade into a shimmering pond of synths and ponder their reflections. On “Georgia thinks it's probably okay (Tuesday),” a storm of feedback rolls in, and by the end there’s a distant pulse, like a washing machine. “Ira searches for the slide, sort of (Friday)” meditates around what sounds like the same organ from “Sudden Organ,” and the light ticking of some down-strumming that the mic picks up becomes its percussion track.
To complement the album’s release, the band performed two ticketed live-stream sets from their practice space, with proceeds going to the Brennan Center for Justice. For a little over half an hour each, they let themselves be filmed while immersed in the process, zoned in on their instruments, pedals, amps, and most of all each other. At one point early in the first set, Hubley leans over in her chair to adjust something, guitar in hand, and on the way up accidentally taps the underside of the crash cymbal next to her with the guitar head. She cracks a smile at the surprise percussion, but it sort of works, so she waits a moment and does it again. It’s indicative of the incredible level of trust and telepathy in that room, which is plenty audible on We Have Amnesia Sometimes. However, the album doesn’t have enough blemishes, stumbles, or flourishes like this to give it extra excitement and curiosity. The risk level stays relatively comfortable; the payoff never really shoots up.
Now in their 29th year with this lineup, ever since McNew stopped a revolving door of some 16 bassists before him, Yo La Tengo are still coming up with new ways to connect with themselves and with their listeners. They picked an appropriate moment for one of their most intimate ideas yet. There is something undeniably comforting, if low-stakes, about hearing them play around with noise, up-close, in the middle of a quarantine-induced drought of human interaction.

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The Brooklyn synth-pop trio expands its signature sound on its surprisingly idiosyncratic third album.

Strange Disciple

Nation of Language made their first two albums in the confines of the pandemic, and their lean and understated synth-pop was hewn from varying degrees of convenience. Keyboardist Aidan Noell, who is married to vocalist Ian Devaney, learned to play MicroKORG and Moog Sub Phatty Analog synths to help realize their vision. At their wedding, Devaney and Noell skipped a traditional gift registry and instead fundraised for their 2020 debut Introduction, Presence. Strange Disciple, their first project freed from the confines of lockdown and in the tour van, is still another achievement in economy, a project that looks to the sound of new wave as a springboard, not a textbook, and lets small touches shine.
With LCD Soundsystem’s Nick Millhiser producing the album, the group incorporates new sounds into their typically minimalist compositions. More live drums and more live guitar mean these songs fill larger spaces. The raw material doesn’t hurt either: Noell’s increasingly intuitive synth lines provide a handy pathway toward a rousing indie-rock sound that harkens back to Devaney’s origins in 2010s punk outfit the Static Jacks. (He first landed on synth-pop after a pivotal encounter with Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s 1979 single “Electricity.”) Bassist Alex MacKay’s melodic dexterity also tightens the screws on a signature sound beyond their formative influences.
Still, there’s no listening to Nation of Language without hearing the 1980s: icy lighting, rigid hip movements, starched collars. And yet pure nostalgia doesn’t fuel the project. Nation of Language are as quick to evoke millennial forebears like the Postal Service or Bloc Party as icons like the Smiths and Human League, and Strange Disciple’s songs are mostly happening right now, awash in lust or confusion. The band communicates these messy emotions with small idiosyncrasies that go a long way toward evolving their sound: See the soft synth collapses at the end of “Stumbling Still” and “A New Goodbye,” or the clanging chimes of “Sightseer.”
Across the album, Devaney sings in a downcast timbre that recalls Majical Cloudz’s Devon Welsh squared at festivals instead of DIY venues. He sounds most gripping when he uses it to curl his way around unfussy statements, as in opener “Weak in Your Light.” When he glides into his upper register on the line “I’m in love,” he hits the same sweet spot as in the group’s career-best songs: moments when he soars on one hypnotic syllable, his voice becoming indistinguishable from the synths around it. The best songs on Strange Disciple transform into more than the sum of their parts. When the synths and live instrumentation and hooks all coalesce, as on standout “Spare Me the Decision,” it is clear that Millhiser is the group’s secret weapon. He accompanies them with cascading layers of analog synths that still highlight the staples of their identity: the influences, the chemistry, the songcraft. By now, Nation of Language are well-versed in the ways of “less is more.” On Strange Disciple, they’re also learning what it means to get bigger and better.


On her first major solo release in eight years, Jesy Fortino buries her voice—once her most recognized instrument—in dark, ambient chambers of synths.

Laughter

Laughter is a mysterious record—both a comeback for Tiny Vipers’ Jesy Fortino and a disappearing act. It marks her first major solo release since 2009’s Life on Earth, but it bears few familiar traits. On first listen, its six sprawling compositions seem to be built entirely of atmosphere: Only one piece prominently features vocals, and few approach anything that could reasonably be considered a melody. But in some ways, the album is a natural progression from its predecessor. While Life on Earth was folk music in theory—featuring little more than Fortino’s acoustic guitar and vocals—its most memorable moments were more elusive: the way her voice breaks during the coda of “Dreamer,” or the bluesy pauses between guitar licks in the ten-minute title track. Fortino’s music has always unfolded with a feeling of spontaneity; her performances felt in-the-moment, her songs like living, growing things.
In the time since Life on Earth, Fortino has slowly shifted her interests. She studied at the University of Washington to become a civil engineer, leaving her little time to focus on music. The work she did release over the last five years has reflected a streamlining of her process. In 2012, she collaborated with Grouper’s Liz Harris to form Mirrorring. Their debut record, Foreign Body, closed the gap between Fortino’s acoustic songs and the electronic work to come. “In the end, I was fighting a war,” she sang during one of its highlights, “I’d say it out loud, but my words were fighting me.” She discarded words entirely on 2015’s Ambience 3, a limited edition release that harkened back to her pre-Hands Across the Void material.
On Laughter, Fortino strips back her music even further, and it feels like a breakthrough. In “K.I.S.S.,” she sings about someone whose naivety gets broken by a cruel, careless universe. Her words, however, are impossible to discern without a lyric sheet. Fortino’s voice—once the core of her work, conveying loss and desperation with the subtlest inflections—is buried under a warped, thunderous synth. As she sings, it sounds almost like an accident, like a scratch vocal that was meant to be removed—a private incantation running parallel to the music. That raw feeling spans the record, depleting it of the lushness usually associated with ambient music. Like Fortino’s more traditional compositions, these songs demand your attention and take you to haunted, uneasy places.
Fortino plays synth with equal parts delicacy and harshness. Her guitar work was always an intimate thing: centered on as few notes as possible, occasionally striking the lower strings to create a drone beneath her fingerpicking. Here, she aims for less soothing textures. In “Living on a Curve,” a simple, low-end motif repeats as retro keyboards soar around it, scraping against each other in a strange kind of harmony. The album’s most propulsive composition is “The Summing of Moments,” a burbling mantra that comes closest to locking into a groove. But just as she begins to find stability, the music fades away, leaving just the low, lonely hum of a synth.
Laughter is built out of these dramatic changes. There’s an unsettling shift around the five-minute mark of “Crossing the River of Yourself,” as a dissonant minor chord swerves into the mix and snuffs out the gentle chimes that preceded it. It’s a moment that feels like nerves setting in, ushering in a darkness that seems inescapable, with no lantern to guide you out. In an interview about Laughter, Fortino discussed the transitional period that inspired the record: a time that found her doubting her abilities and growing unsure of her future. “Laughter came out of this awkward place of losing myself,” she explains. The record reflects that feeling, as she searches for preverbal wisdom with music that feels overwhelming, unpredictable, and immersive.


The New York rapper Junglepussy works within a lineage of comedic rappers, from Biz Markie to Ghostface Killah to Cam'ron and Action Bronson, rappers who elevate the muck and mundanity of life with zany non-sequiturs, ad libs, and references. On P**regnant With Success, Junglepussy talks shit and pulls apart the patriarchy as she experiences it.

Pregnant With Success

Junglepussy is working within a lineage of comedic rappers, from Biz Markie to Ghostface Killah to Cam'ron and Action Bronson, rappers who elevate the muck and mundanity of life with zany non-sequiturs, ad libs, and references. In terms of sharp-witted artists who led to the increasingly rare seismic belly laughs on the subway this year, she's up there with novelist Paul Beatty, whose 2015 book The Sellout sent up American politics and culture in a way that proves good satire can change your truth. Junglepussy's Pregnant With Success is another reminder of how humor can bring the audience closer and form an emotional connection. It's as bright as Beatty's novel is dark, but they're both charmingly demented, sharp-witted, and necessary social critiques. They remind me how humor can transform literature and music, forms that often aren't as empirically funny as film and television, bringing the audience closer and forming an emotional connection.
She has a rare confidence that's rooted in playfulness: "This pussy don't pop for you," she gloats on "Pop For You", a song with watery snares and a glitchy melody. The hook feels like she's playing a character, a parody of contemporary male rappers, but it's more of a roast that has its roots on the surreal experience of being a woman in 2015. It also riffs on the language of the oppressor, so to speak. Junglepussy spits: "You look up to these dudes to tell you who to screw/ What she'll look like if she your type/ Compliment her if she's light/ If she's black don't get her hype." The joke comes at the end, when she compares a guy who takes her to the zoo versus one who buys her leopard print lingerie: "I got niggas taking me to see live animals and you're pulling up with animal prints?"
It's her perspective as a black woman, a regular woman, from New York City that makes this album transgressive. She raps as much about her voracious appetite as she does about fashion and sex. She references Money and Violence and haute Japanese eatery Nobu over a series of glossy melodies and booming bass courtesy of producer Shy Guy. She swiftly cycles through cadences that approximate the balloon-lunged bellowing of Ludacris and a spiky Da Brat flow. On "Country Boy", a song that feels like a nod to her Trinidadian and Jamaican roots, she channels Lady Saw's squawk and the grim commands of Buju Banton before issuing a whimsical sign-off: "I be dutty winin' down the Yellow Brick Road!" The beat on "Get to Steppin'" is the album's most aggressive: a synthetic Orientalist synth loop fights with battering bass and Junglepussy is in your face, exhorting you to step off whilst bigging herself up ("I was fuckin' with me when you wasn't"). It ends with a hilarious outro, a dorky jingle about online shopping and a rush of true swagger: "When your Fendi boots come in the mail, time to front on everyone in here."
But mostly Junglepussy is pure idiosyncratic id; she is unapologetically crass ("If your face ain't a sitting place, fuck up out my face") and freewheeling. Pregnant With Success*'* appeal lies largely in hearing Junglepussy talk shit like one of the girls, with the aim of pulling apart the patriarchy as she experiences it. She uses humor, the voice curling with every joke, to replicate the situations and street corners of her own life. And when you're listening and laughing out loud on the subway, that's Junglepussy's smart truth-telling finding its way into yours.