On their vital, bristling third LP, the band is at their most concise and vitriolic. Their songwriting suggests the world is an increasingly terrible place and we should all be scared to death.

The World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die: Always Foreign

Always Foreign

Like most floridly-named, heavily populated post-rock acts before them, the World Is a Beautiful Place & I Am No Longer Afraid to Die are utopians. Their vision of Earth 2 was fully realized on 2015’s brilliant Harmlessness, a marquee indie event that celebrated feminist vigilante justice, made evil cower in its own shadow, and encouraged everyone to pursue self-care and self-actualization with wild abandon. Two years later, its opener “You Can’t Live There Forever” plays as a kind of cruel foreshadowing of a paradise lost.
For one thing, that song’s lead vocal came from D. Nicole Shanholtzer, dismissed from the band in 2016. And now, they’re maybe finally having second thoughts about their name. On TWIABP’s vital, bristling third LP Always Foreign, primary songwriter David Bello looks at his Puerto Rican and Lebanese heritage, his upbringing in West Virginia, and his status as an artist in a realm that fetishizes anxiety and comes the same conclusion as the rest of us: The world is an increasingly terrible place and we should all be scared to death.
“I’ll make everything look like it’s rad,” Bello sings early on. Everything really did appear to be rad on both Harmlessness and their 2013 debut Whenever, If Ever, albums that were almost mercilessly uplifting. They were cinematic rock music promising happy endings: “The world is a beautiful place/But we have to make it that way,” they sang on Whenever, If Ever’s eternal set-closer “Getting Sodas.”  The strain of that work is already apparent on Always Foreign’s opener “I’ll Make Everything”, wearily promising “a story of love,” and “The Future” stops short of delivering an unambiguous message of hope: “The future just got here again and again now/The present was awful but it’s all past now.” The best we can do, it seems, is just tell ourselves is that it can’t get any worse.
The shift from magical thinking to realism has made TWIABP a noticeably more pragmatic band. Musically, the first half of Always Foreign finds them arriving at familiar destinations but taking far less time to get there. “I’ll Make Everything” builds towards a regal procession, “The Future” hits a pop-punk sprint at a four-minute mile pace. These would be codas on previous albums but now they’re the songs in themselves. The concision creates an illusory effect, putting the focus on what’s not there: No more desolate stretches of exhausted ambience, off-kilter sequencing, or fan trolling during the album leadup, which were all the sort of things that were often associated with the band when Shanholtzer was still in it.
Her absence is even more glaring given that she’s in the crosshairs for most of Side A. TWIABP has never written anything as flat out nasty as “Hilltopper” (“I hope evil can see this and you get what you deserve”), but even as an immensely satisfying and even necessary release—accurately described by the band as “R.E.M. on Dischord Records”—it’s hard to read anyone else’s story into it. TWIABP ensure that’s not the case even as the animus lingers throughout. The writing of Always Foreign coincided with both the exit of Shanholtzer and the election of Donald Trump, and it manages the exceedingly tough task of bringing unrelated personal and political trauma into a cogent polemic. The two converge during Bello’s accusatory midsection of “Marine Tigers”: “Can you still call it a country if all the states are broken/Can you still call it a business if all you do is steal?” As it progresses, Always Foreign implicates not just a specific person, but an entire capitalist system predicated on parasitic greed; Bello sings, “Making money is a horrible and rotten institution,” and it might as well have been the album title.
“Marine Tigers” shares its name with a recent memoir written by Bello’s father José, recounting the racism and hatred he faced after his migration from Puerto Rico to New York City in the 1940s. “Color seemed to be the stronger divider of people. It still is. In my child’s eye, it became clear that if I was going to hate a race, it would have to be the human race,” reads José’s epigram in the video. His son taps into that disillusion nearly 70 years later and finds it just as toxic. “You walk around the new neighborhood, but your heart’s not in it/To learn any more about this country/The apartment you had to live in.” This cultural queasiness never relents once and the song doesn’t bloom like all of their previous epics, it implodes with an indiscriminate blare of horns and drum rolls, an outburst of decades worth of repressed self- and societal-recrimination. His disdain spills over into “Fuzz Minor” a song that doesn’t even crest or crescendo, it simply pulsates with pure hate. “Call me A-rab, call me a spic, I can’t wait until I see you die” barely makes it out of the din and while it’s a blunt insult at an obvious target, such a wish feels like the only acceptable outcome for the current administration.
The impulses of Always Foreign makes for a disorienting initial listen—TWIABP have never been more immediately accessible or lyrically dense and challenging. Though only eight minutes shorter than Harmlessness, Always Foreign feels twice as compact. They’ve never written better pure pop than “The Future,” or anything as bare and emotional as the conflicted funeral song “For Robin,” or anything as adult-indie as “Gram,” which has the burnished, brassy splendor of a National track. But Bello’s impassioned, impressionist tale of West Virginia’s opioid epidemic is the polar opposite of Matt Berninger’s measured take on jejune domestic dramas.
TWIABP’s records alone are enough to justify their status as one of indie rock’s most exemplary, consistently rewarding bands of the past decade. But from the moment anyone says their name aloud for the first time, TWIABP asks, “Are you in or are you out?” and rewards full immersion with a steady stream of singles, EPs, well-intentioned and ambitious flops, inside jokes, Easter eggs, covers, special-run T-shirts and endless Twitter gags. While Always Foreign is by no means a happy record, it’s still a joy to listen to, driven by the same belief in community, evolution, and possibility that earned their debut EP the title of Formlessness. But their “us against the world” M.O. isn’t theoretical on Always Foreign. By keeping their friends close and their enemies as far as away as possible, their heaven on earth is smaller, but just as welcoming.
Correction: An earlier version of this article included a lyric whose meaning could be misinterpreted.


Though it doesn't quite match College Dropout or Late Registration in pleasure-center overload, Kanye West's third album is both his most consistent and most enterprising yet, indicating that he might actually deserve the legendary status he constantly ascribes to himself.

Graduation

While rap music famously thrives on the kind of drama surrounding this week's 50 vs. Kanye record-sales standoff, even this showdown's closest followers would probably admit there's something faintly procedural about it. Maybe it's because album sales don't really work as a precise measure of absolute popularity anymore. Maybe it's because 50's a shadow of his former self and no longer considered among the best, biggest, or most anything. Or maybe it's because Universal labelmates 50 and West seem more like they're doing this for us than for themselves. This is a prize fight between two heavyweight boxers moving in polar-opposite directions; the former weakly flailing through a creative crisis and a serious absence of hunger, the latter trying to transcend America by setting his sights on nothing less than the entire world.
For all the pageantry, the most substantial takeaway from Kanye's new album is the realization that he might actually deserve the legendary status he constantly ascribes to himself. Though it doesn't quite match College Dropout or Late Registration in pleasure-center overload, West's third album in four years is both his most consistent and most enterprising yet. It also caps off an incredible (maybe even unprecedented) run: In terms of consistency, prolificness, and general all-around ability, it's hard to find anyone in mainstream rap who can touch what he's achieved within the same timeframe.
Where College Dropout and Late Registration mostly functioned as contagious nostaglia trips, Graduation finds him settling into the pocket; instead of looking inside for answers, he's looking out to the world. When he raps "I shop so much I can speak Italian" on "Champion", it's obvious he's holding up worldliness as a point of pride. His production choices reinforce that belief: Here, Kanye splices his well-articulated production style with a brand new set of influences-- most of them European. What he ends up with is a record that splits the difference between two distinctive styles: his familiar strings and brass, helium vocal samples, and warm soul samples on one side; corroded rave stabs, vinegary synth patches, and weirdly modulated electronic noises on the other. (Ironically, the latter all have roots in West's hometown of Chicago.)
While Graduation is far from the electro-house record some fans predicted when the Daft Punk-sampling "Stronger" first leaked, Kanye's interest in French house and rave extend beyond that one track. The stunning "I Wonder" combines a gentlemanly, piano-led sample (courtesy of 70s folk/jazz artist Labi Siffre) with a frizzy synth lead and alien-sounding keys, only to drown it all out with a massive swoop of strings; the weirdly dystopian club track "Drunk and Hot Girls" lurches along at a snail's pace, mixing Can's "Sing Swan Song" with a blend of gypsy music and detuned electronics for maximum queasiness; and the string-led "Flashing Lights" marries a Bond-worthy coda to staccato sounds and cut-up vocal samples. Where lesser producers have tried to bridge this gap only to wind up with beats that sound like bad mashups, West and co-producer DJ Toomp (T.I., "What You Know") make the juxapositions feel utterly natural. Combined with some other familiar source material ("Champion", for example, nicks from Steely Dan), that undercurrent of experimentation puts Kanye's talents to good use.
And that's barely scratching the surface. Aside from the patchy "Barry Bonds" (on which an inspired West confounds the odds by drastically outsmarting an uncharacteristically lazy Lil Wayne on the mic), nearly everything here feels tight and inventive. The aforementioned "I Wonder" and "Flashing Lights" are immediate highlights, as is the old-school gospel rave-up of "The Glory" and future smash "Good Life", which features T-Pain pitting his autotuned hooks against a bed of summery, squealing synths. Previous singles "Can't Tell Me Nothing" and "Stronger" somehow take on new life in context of the record, and even the Chris Martin-aided "Homecoming" feels like it hits the right notes.
Lyrically, West is magnanimous, corny, self-aggrandizing, and likeable in the all the usual ways. The difference here is that he's dialed down his inner conflict. The neurotic inner monologues of his most engaging verses are virtually absent here. If there's one criticism to be made of Graduation, it's that in striving for universality, he's sacrificed a more personal dimension of himself. The only time we even really get close to the mental hand-wringing of his early albums is on the closing "Big Brother", where he details his lifelong admiration for Jay-Z and hints at the post-Dropout turbulence between the two, before riffing on his own chorus to conclude: "My big brother was Big's brother/ So here's a few words from ya kid brother/ If you admire somebody you should go head and tell 'em/ People never get the flowers while they can still smell 'em".
Of course, West's true genius has always come out in his production work, and hearing him find natural ways of fitting these disparate elements together is worth the increased number of Louis Vee brags. While it might not be as substantial a record as we're used to hearing from him, it is his greatest leap forward, and further proof that few are as skilled at tracing out the complicated contours of pride, success and ambition as he is.


On his fifth album, Kendrick retreats from the limelight and turns to himself, highlighting his insecurities and beliefs. It’s ambitious, impressive, and a bit unwieldy.

Kendrick Lamar: Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers

Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers

Kendrick Lamar is a giddy dramatist. He loves to pack his music with perspectives, personifying his many characters and muses with distinct voices, cadences, and beat switches that bring them to life. Those virtuosic tics have made him one of rap’s most celebrated storytellers and stylists; he is the first and only rapper to have won a Pulitzer Prize. For some, Kendrick’s elastic narration and indignant dispatches on Black life have made him a figure of supreme moral authority in hip-hop—a role he spurns on his fifth studio album. Kendrick spends Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers gleefully immolating his cherished reputation, swinging between caustic taunts and plaintive confessions over slick funk and soul production that gleams like shards of a mirror. The double album offers rap’s most jarring heel turn since Future cut loose on Monster, taking an unfocused but probing look at Kendrick’s most elusive character: himself.
Five years have passed since Kendrick released the punchy and vivid Damn. and curated the easygoing soundtrack for Black Panther—eons in the rap world, and quite a chunk of regular time too. Aside from the splashy launch of pgLang, his opaque media company with Dave Free, and a few scattered features, Kendrick has kept a low profile. His final album for his longtime label home Top Dawg Entertainment enters a world shaped by the pandemic, #MeToo, and the global protests against police brutality, events Kendrick comments on across the record while recounting how he’s spent his hiatus. His main priority, however, is clarifying who, exactly, Kendrick Lamar represents.
The short answer is his family and his homies. The search for the longer answer propels the album. Prompted by narrator Whitney Alford, his romantic partner since high school, Kendrick opens the record by framing his honesty as dangerous, the first of many disclosures to come. “I been goin’ through somethin’/Be afraid,” he says, a warning that is followed by frantic double-time verses that slink around oblique piano stabs and brisk drums. His rapping jerks and lurches as he reveals he’s going to therapy and wracked by grief and shame, feelings that he copes with through luxury purchases and infidelity. Even as he details a specific fling, his storytelling frays, held together by the repetition of his paramour’s eye color rather than mise-en-scène or dense rhyme.

Throughout Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers, Kendrick seems to actively reject the elegance and structure of past songs like “Duckworth.” and “Good Kid,” writing in quick strokes and sketches that channel his messy admissions. Ideas scamper around like field rabbits and he avoids clean hooks, denying the listener easy access to his thoughts. It verges on antipop. His flows streak across “Count Me Out,” bouncing off the kick drum, dancing with the chords. The “Kim”-inspired “We Cry Together” stages a noxious melodrama where Kendrick and Zola star Taylour Paige trade barbs that feel almost improvised despite being tightly rhymed and metered. Eminem can finally retire happy.

His commitment to untidiness extends to the production, which is smooth but askew, rhythms and chords stacked precariously. Many of the songs, most of which have at minimum three producers, seem to split at the seams. On “Rich (Interlude),” Duval Timothy’s piano lines drift apart and glom back together, rain into vapor into clouds. On “Purple Hearts,” the drums fall away for the entirety of Ghostface’s stellar verse, strings and splashes of piano shadowing the rapper’s meter. The performances don’t always tap into the lushness of the production, but the beats and occasional R&B sample here and there give the often rambling verses some much-needed shape.

Kendrick meanders to the album’s high points, stopping for strange and goofy hot takes on cancel culture, a neuron-melting non-issue that explains literally no rich and famous person’s actual life. His candor turns pugilistic on “N95” and “Worldwide Steppers,” tracks that find him praising Oprah’s moxie (“Say what I want about you niggas, I’m like Oprah, dawg”) and lamenting a time he paid for unhealthy catering. “I am not for the faint of heart,” he says after a preamble by Kodak Black, whose inclusion here and throughout the album brings to mind DaBaby and Marilyn Manson’s appearances on Donda. It’s unclear whether his presence is meant to make a case for redemption or musical kinship.
Kendrick’s verse, rapped in the tight pockets of a throbbing vamp, steamrolls into trolling lines that detail vengeful hookups with white women that might be described as Ice Cube’s “Cave Bitch” meets Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. The bars aren’t particularly inflammatory in the context of the song, which casts Kendrick’s Becky cravings as one fiber in the global tapestry of imperfect people who deny and sidestep their flaws. But Kendrick clearly gets a kick out of needling the listener, a current that runs through the album. As his ribbing starts to feel empty—“Hello, crackers!” (“Savior”); “A celebrity do not mean integrity, you fool” (“Rich Spirit”)—the stated purpose of his venting grows shaky. Is his goal to be honest or impish? Does he want to bare his soul or his fangs?

On “Auntie Diaries,” the tale of two relatives whose experiences with gender shaped his accountability to family, he attempts the former but fumbles into the latter. In trying to impart a lesson about how he learned then unlearned to say the f-slur, he makes himself the main character in his queer relatives’ stories and he uses the slur wantonly. Few rap listeners will be new to the word and his intentions are clear, but aren’t there other stories he can tell about the trans people in his life? Kendrick has never been a perfect character actor, but in the past he at least imbued roles with some mark of individuality. Compared to Jay-Z’s “Smile,” which manages to tell the story of Hov’s mom coming out of the closet and mixes flexes and intimacy, “Auntie Diaries” lacks depth.
On the penultimate track, “Mother I Sober,” Kendrick finally responds at length to Whitney’s initial assignment. Dropping his voice to a teary murmur, he relates a bleak tale of domestic and familial violence that ensnared himself, cousins, and his mother. Instead of lurid details, the story pivots on stony silences that exile everyone to the confines of their minds, where they bottle up pain instead of processing it. “I wish I was somebody/Anybody but myself,” Portishead’s Beth Gibbons murmurs for the hook, her ghostly timbre capturing the dissociation the violence has wrought. The song ends with singer Sam Dew crooning, “I bare my soul and now we’re free,” a tidy conclusion that provokes more questions than it answers. But the song at least has a mission and a through line, and Kendrick labors to probe his feelings and hangups, a sense of effort lacking elsewhere on the album.
Despite all its aggrieved poses and statements, the often astonishing rapping, the fastidious attention to detail, and its theme of self-affirmation, Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers ironically never settles on a portrait of Kendrick. Perhaps that slipperiness is the thrust of the album, which might be read as his answer to a question he asked a decade ago, before he was anointed as hip-hop’s conscience: “If I mentioned all my skeletons, would you jump in the seat?” That fear of being defined by trauma and shame resonates throughout, but Kendrick and his blemishes are so defined by negation—of white gazes, of Black Twitter, of weighty listener expectations—that by the time the record ends, Kendrick’s “me” is just as nebulous as the effigy he’s spent the album burning. Gods are born in vacuums.

pgLang / Top Dawg Entertainment / Aftermath / Interscope


SY’s ninth record marked a new era for the band. While they didn’t leave the freaky stuff behind entirely, they started serving it up with a spoonful of sugar.

Washing Machine

Sonic Youth’s superpower was always their ability to contain their experimental sprawl just enough. Formed as much as an art project as a musical one, they’ve always been a part of the fringe. But their place within experimentalism’s wild terrain was solidly centrist. Way weirder stuff sat to the left, like the no wave scene of musicians who pummeled their instruments more than they played them, and to the right, art nerds with milquetoast pock-rock groups who occasionally borrowed from the silvery shine Sonic Youth lacquered over most of their songs. Their fifth album, 1988’s Daydream Nation, was the bullseye in the center of the Venn diagram between in and out, a gleaming collection of anthems with guitar noise and beautiful riffs doled out in equal measure.
Perfection is a difficult thing to bounce back from, especially when it coincides with the end of the ’80s, a decade whose Reagan-era doom was hospitable to making a racket in protest.  In the years after Daydream Nation, they released a number of uneven albums, Goo, Dirty, and Experimental Jetset, Trash, and No Star. Within each, though, were a few perfect moments that pointed a way forward. Towards the end of 1992’s Dirty is “JC,” a song that, in hindsight, served as a blueprint for 1995’s Washing Machine. The fuzz is still present, but it’s paired with the engine of Steve Shelley’s steady hip-hop drumbeat. The song is sung by bass player Kim Gordon, who actually really speaks more than sings, each line like a challenge to the one before it. “You’re walking through my heart once more, don’t forget to close the door,” she sings as an elegy for a friend who was murdered. Despite its more traditional rock structure, the song is still decorated by the wide expanse of feedback by guitarist Thurston Moore. Arguably, it has quite an ugly final 30 seconds, perhaps unnecessary after a deeply moving three and a half minutes. That must have been an argument Sonic Youth heard enough, as come 1995’s Washing Machine, their squall had softened into sparkles.
At least sometimes. The album begins with “Becuz,” a nasty romp led by Gordon’s groovy bass playing and her whispered sneer. Like on “JC,” Shelley’s backbeat anchors the song as it begins to swell. After two minutes, the whole thing gathers into that typical Sonic Youth feedback tornado, this one fairly heavily resembling the sound of a dentist drill. But something different happens: The song’s basic structure reassembles and keeps going, like the melody wrestled control back from all the disharmony.
The tension created by that push and pull is the prevailing theme of the album, these longtime purveyors of scuzz finally taking a peek at the bright side. “Junkies Promise,” which follows “Becuz,” begins with a sharp snap of feedback, before falling into a cocky noise-rock song for three minutes, with Moore doing a strong Iggy Pop imitation with his vocals. And then, for whatever reason, the song totally pivots. Actually, it pivots twice: first into a rhythmic chug, the preamble for the more interesting, kind of funky coda. In structure, it’s not so different than “JC,” a feral moment at the end for a bit of punctuation, but instead of playing in the sandbox, the whole thing coagulates, Shelley switches to the toms, and the band gets its groove on. They seem about as surprised as we are, and the song drops out mid-riff.
It is a gorgeous ascent to new a plane for Sonic Youth. Not that they didn’t have pretty moments before—Daydream Nation is full of them—but they seem willing to give over entire tracks and their narratives to beauty, not just use a touch of gleaming guitar as an accent piece before returning to chaos. “Unwind” in particular is a revelation, even though it is also nothing new. The songwriting is typical Sonic Youth with the structure up front and the freedom in the back. But here everything is softened. Moore doesn’t bark as he sometimes does, instead he purrs. If he sometimes (literally) used a screwdriver on his guitar, here it sounds like he’s using a paintbrush. If they’re a New York band at heart, this song definitely took a Mediterranean vacation. “Love is out into the sundry light, you sing, unwind,” Moore sings to end the song’s first part before the freeform moment begins. There, something insane happens: Shelley breaks out a maraca. It’s deeply seductive and totally unexpected. The guitars and bass follow the loosened vibe and finally unwind.
The album’s middle section is hit and miss, though the same could likely be said for all alternative rock records made in the mid-’90s. The doo-wop influence of “Little Trouble Girl” is sweet, if more of a novelty, though the Kim Deal guest vocals are a welcome surprise, making the band sound surprisingly radio-friendly. “No Queen Blues” is serpentine in nature, adjacent to ’70s stoner rock. “Panty Lies” is the best of the trio, with Gordon illustrating the mental aspect of seduction, “Don’t just stare, ’cause she’s not wearing underwear/Oh how rude, at least she’s got your attention square/Don’t you realize, it’s just her disguise.” She also—and there’s not really another way to say this—scats, which is another bizarre and pleasing surprise.
The album’s final two songs could not be more different from each other. “Skip Tracer” is a showcase for Lee Ranaldo, the band’s second guitarist, who is given a spotlight or two as lead singer on most Sonic Youth albums. He’s something like the Kelly Rowland to Moore’s Beyoncé, beloved but in the background due to the band leader’s overwhelming star power. Taken together, Ranaldo’s Sonic Youth songs are consistent across eras and “Skip Tracer” is perhaps his finest moment. The song starts with one large strum, like a gong announcing the entrance of an emperor. Its echo hangs in the air for 20 seconds before the song resets to complete silence and begins in earnest: “None of us know where we’re trying to get to, what kind of life we’re trying to build;” “L.A. is more confusing now than anywhere I’ve ever been to/I’m from New York City, breathe it out and let it in;” “The guitar guy played real good feedback, and super sounding riffs/With his mild-mannered look on, yeah he was truly hip.” It’s a treatment for an indie film, a blues song, a memoir wrapped in one, a highwire act Ranaldo pulls off like he’s Bukowski doing an audiobook.
And then comes “The Diamond Sea” which is the most Sonic Youth song you can imagine, and not just because it’s 20 minutes long and mostly guitar noise. At the time of its release, the song received a radio edit, chopped down to 5:30, which does a pretty good job of replicating the original’s ups and down, but entirely misses the point. Most of the 15 minutes it discards are comprised of the band taking a long exhale, noise replaced with the suggestion of noise, the unstructured notes sounding as delicate as windchimes. Sour twangs and small pings of cymbal dash in and out, and occasionally there is a more aggressive guitar whir. And then actual noise returns. It sounds like machinery gone haywire and then eventually dying. It’s a calculated moment, though, this scuffed-up exclamation point on the end of a freeform poem. With a band like Sonic Youth, so concerned with tapping into outer realms, the pockmarks are necessary. Enjoying this bliss? We all know it’s not going to last.


The New York producer tailors his overdriven techno epics to unusually introspective ends, sculpting stripped-down arrays of synth and drums into spare, expressive forms.

Existential

Over the last year, the New York producer AceMo has been prolific. Between his solo efforts and his gleaming jungle revisions with frequent collaborator MoMa Ready, he’s released four EPs in the last 12 months, each stuffed with his uniquely scuffed techno tracks, while maintaining an exceptionally busy calendar of live gigs.
AceMo is committed to the grind, but he’s never given the impression of putting out music just for the sake of it. Each of his releases feels purposeful and considered, and though he rarely gives interviews, he’s clearly in tune with the long history of dance music as a vehicle for messages that resonate beyond the club. His 2016 album Black Populous came with a poem that meditated on the energy, history, and resiliency of the people that gave the record its name, and his 2018 track “Where They At???”—a favorite of like-minded DJs—shouted out all the people who give the dancefloor life and vibrancy (“Where the black girls at?/Nomadic girls at?”).
Existential, which AceMo self-released in December, extends that tradition. “As agents of Earth, we must emphasize the existence of each other,” he wrote on Instagram, underscoring the philosophical and spiritual dimension of his music. “WE ARE ALL RAVE ANGELS.” There is a possibility, AceMo’s music suggests, that you can find something in dance music deeper than bass.
Accordingly, Existential’s eight tracks tend to operate at epic scale. They are towering pieces, with an average running time of nearly eight minutes, built around synthesizers that swirl in ways that feel both gaseous and enormous: Opener “Existential” sounds like a club floating in a distant nebula, daring you to stare upward in awe more than it begs you to dance.
As awe-inspiring as they can be, these tracks feel also more insular and meditative than much of what AceMo has released to date. The stark ambience that opens “Man From Water pt. 2” bubbles upward into a distinctly introverted take on dance music, wrapping overdriven drums in spare synth melodies. AceMo certainly isn’t the first to sand down the genre’s sharp edges to make something more approachable for home listening. You can hear spiritual similarities to contemporaries like Galcher Lustwerk and the Mood Hut label and historical antecedents like Drexciya; it’s not even that far from the dubby dance refractions that Slowdive tried out on some of their spacier work.
But AceMo sounds more at home than ever before in the low-lit glimmer of tracks like “Message to the Future (Waterfalls),” whose mantra-like qualities fit the austere simplicity of his production style. He’s rarely ever been the type of producer to layer more than a couple of different synth parts at once, but in these slow-moving pieces that restraint really shines. “Love Dimensions” shows it off best, as the chattering percussion and slowly unfolding basslines wrap around one another in shifting, amorphous ways. The intersections of these simple elements create surprising geometries and unexpected colors—leaving ample room to get lost in the spaces between the beats and find whatever truth lives there.


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 masterful, groundbreaking sound that laid the foundation for post-rock.

Spirit of Eden

The timbre, amplitude, frequency, and duration of every note on Spirit of Eden tell a great, sad story of pop music, a war of art and commerce that birthed a new genre in its wake. Its breadth and scope are intimidatingly large: Silence is as important as tone, stasis is as important as movement. Inky chord progressions resolve into mystery, and lyrics leave only afterimages. The emptiness of its first two minutes allows you to adjust to the dim light of an album recorded in almost complete darkness. Then it just glows.
Never once do these six songs reveal the thought or labor that went into them, never once is there too much or too little. One moment (a muted trumpet, for instance) is always placed exactly where it should be alongside another (feedback from a blues harmonica), thousands of hours of tape painstakingly laced together as part of the vision and spiritual largesse of its composers, singer-songwriter Mark Hollis and co-writer/producer Tim Friese-Greene. It is a deep blue book of sound, humid with melancholy. Rare is rock music this simple made with such toil and unbearable emotion that there’s no better way to classify Spirit of Eden than by the elemental virtue of its sound, the very first thing of all music.
If only Talk Talk’s record label felt the same way. What if the massive EMI corporation had known that when Talk Talk delivered the masters to Spirit of Eden in the spring of 1988, the record would be a once and future marvel of pop music, the nexus into which jazz and minimalism poured and out of which a new post-rock flowed. Legend holds that when the A&R man at EMI heard it, it brought him to tears—not just because of its tidal beauty, but because he knew it wasn’t going to sell. A hugely successful UK band turned their sound inside out and delivered this whisper of a record, some slow, faint echo of their former synth-pop heartbeat. Talk Talk’s six-year career as a commercially viable band was, at that very moment, dead in the water.
Which was odd, because Hollis and Friese-Greene were convinced Spirit of Eden was going to sell four million copies. When they finished the psychotic, 11-month recording process, they were sure this interior, fully realized album would go platinum just like their third album, 1986’s The Colour of Spring—a fragile, autumnal collection of synth-pop shaded with knotty impressionism. Led by its two charting singles, “Living in Another World” and “Life’s What You Make It,” Colour propelled Talk Talk’s rise, selling over two million copies. They were experimenting with more ambient textures than their first two records (1982’s The Party’s Over and 1984’s It’s My Life), which were heavy with synthetic drums and guitars and found the band struggling to break out of the New Romantic box their label had put them into.
Fame, doing press, being the least bit genial: All the trappings of the music industry never suited Hollis during those airbrushed synth-pop years. He was a university dropout and a former punk, gaunt in look and voice, and obsessed with the granular, metaphysical side of art. In interviews, he would point to Miles Davis and Gil Evans’ orchestral jazz masterpiece Sketches of Spain, or the zen experiments of John Cage, or Vittorio De Sica’s avant-garde film The Bicycle Thieves as touchpoints for his inspiration. He is given to speaking like a Buddhist in a cockney accent, sentences that seem born of some kind of guru algorithm (“I’ve always been of the belief that to play one note well is better than to play two notes badly.”) At once truculent and soft-spoken, Hollis once got into a fight with the guy from Spandau Ballet because Hollis referred to everyone in the room, including himself, as scum.
It was the grueling world tour behind Colour that sealed it for Hollis. After a show in Spain, on September 13, 1986, Hollis, then only 31 years old, said he was done playing live forever. He couldn’t get the intricacies of the songs from The Colour of Spring to sound right on stage, not to mention six shows a week and all the cliches of tour life that led to a blur of detachment. Besides, he (and everyone else in the band) had just become fathers. The bell of a quiet adulthood was sounding. He decamped to the country in Suffolk and surrounded himself with the idylls of his family and a large stable of domestic animals, “18 at the peak.”
It was with this energy—part exhaustion, part bucolic splendor, part restless creativity—that Talk Talk re-entered the studio in May 1987 to begin work on what would become Spirit of Eden. All the hit singles from the band’s early days were paying off, literally, as EMI gave Talk Talk carte blanche to make the pop magic happen again for the fourth time. The band turned Wessex Studios, a former church in London, into a cocoon of darkness save for a few desk lamps in the control room, a sound-triggered strobe light around Lee Harris’ drum set, and a 1960s oil-wheel projector that cast globules of color onto the ceiling where the band worked. The hours were 11 a.m. to midnight, five days a week, smoke from incense and hand-rolled cigarettes fogging the space. Soon the sense of time seemed to slip away from everyone.
For three months, the group recorded in their psychedelic burrow. Hollis, Friese-Greene, Harris, and bassist Paul Webb built the chilly framework for Spirit of Eden, layering deep pockets of rhythm that could grow from a breath to a howl at a moment’s notice. “Desire” seems oceanic and blissful, the kind of unhurried languor the album has offered for 17 minutes—until a damn cowbell comes raging in, and Hollis rips into a bluesy chorus as if to undermine the entire mood established until that point: “That ain’t me, babe.”
Once the band had the basic shape of the album, they invited a revolving door of musicians to audition their sound and ideas for a spot on Spirit of Eden. They ran tape and let a harmonica player or violinist improvise for up to three-and-a-half hours, only to use maybe one or two seconds of it. Without a set budget or time constraint, texturing these songs was purely about discovery and experimentation, splicing and editing little snippets of sound and lofting them into place within the song. It went on like this for months: One person coming in for an oboe part, another for a bit of trumpet. Hugh Davies—assistant to the avant-garde pioneer Karlheinz Stockhausen—even brought in his homemade theremin-like instrument the shozygs. “I know the album feels like seven guys playing live in a room,” said engineer Phill Brown, “but every note is ‘placed’ where it is. The album is an illusion.”
Hollis and Friese-Greene once brought in a 25-person choir to sing over “I Believe in You,” a brittle song touched with icy, crackling electric guitars that Hollis wrote in part about his older brother, the former punk rocker Ed Hollis, and his struggles with addiction. “I’ve seen heroin for myself,” Hollis sings, hugging the words, sounding like the vampiric inverse of Nina Simone. The anemic and honeyed quality of Hollis’ voice defines the sound of Talk Talk and Spirit of Eden, suspended in a fearful tenor octave like he’d drown if he sang any lower. On “I Believe In You,” when he lets the word “spirit” fall thinly out of his mouth, he defines the resonant frequency of a song that could never contain a 25-person choir. By all accounts, the chorus sounded incredible, moving the tea lady who worked at the studio to tears. The next morning, Hollis listened to the playback and told the engineer to erase the chorus completely. It was later replaced by the Choir of Chelmsford Cathedral, six cherubic boy sopranos.
To map this album, to find the provenance of each sound, would be an insane feat. You’d think Spirit of Eden had a score, a massive tome of reference that a conductor could glance at before signaling to the organist to come wafting in. But this vast mosaic of sound would just be window dressing if it weren’t for the dynamics Talk Talk include here, the rudiments of what would be used so effectively in the future by bands like Spiritualized or Radiohead or Explosions in the Sky. “Eden” shrinks and grows in macro and micro ways, using the felt march of a floor tom to build up the song and carve out an enormous space inside of which Hollis sings words that are biblically charged: “Rage on omnipotent.” His voice is frail, but the words could be carved into the side of a mountain.
Even as well-composed as these songs are, they have a feel to them, a swing, like a jazz combo locked into each other’s impulses. It is what makes Spirit of Eden a groundbreaking hybrid of style. How could something so meticulous feel so free, so cathartic, how could all this labor create this effortless space for the mind and soul to wander? It is the music of commercial liberation, the seeing of creative ideas to their unadulterated conclusion. The thrill of this music is the same thrill of listening to some of the great works of jazz, classical, and pop: the soul of Miles Davis’ In a Silent Way, the obtuse landscapes of Morton Feldman, the production and patience of Brian Eno. Today, this coming together of spirit and sound still feels like a radical and mysterious feat of popular music.
This was the feeling Hollis and Friese-Greene left the studio with, a wonderful sensation of doing something new, reaching to where, finally, their music wanted to get to for the better part of the decade. Of course it would sell four million copies. In the playback room, the label tried to figure out what to do with this band who would not go back to the studio to record a proper single and would definitely not tour their new album. As Friese-Greene once recalled, “I remember sitting in a pub down the road from Mark’s and [discussing how] we thought we’d broken the mold and could turn the tide of history by going back to a world where the single wasn’t king. How sadly mistaken we were.”
With no real marketing plan in place, Spirit of Eden faltered on release. Fans of their former sound were spurned by an album whose only constant rhythm was in the thick spine of Webb’s ambient-dub electric basslines. It was hardly singable, surely not danceable, and unlike anything that was happening on the charts at that time. With a lukewarm critical reception and a barely authorized three-minute re-cut of “I Believe In You” used as a single, the album hardly dented the charts. It ended up selling about 500,000 copies in total, a shrug for a then-major label, platinum-selling band.
Acrimony between the band and EMI festered into a court battle that ended with Talk Talk parting ways with the label and securing a contract with Polydor for what would end up being their final album, 1991’s Laughing Stock. That album took the post-rock aesthetic of Spirit of Eden in a more acoustic and wide-open setting—and ended up just as brilliant and luminously adorned. It was another hard-fought year in the studio, trudging to the completion of another commercially unsuccessful masterpiece. At their wit's end with each other and the music industry, Talk Talk soon disbanded.
“I like sound. And I also like silence. And, in some ways, I like silence more than I like sound.” It’s another Hollis zinger, but never was there a sentiment so apt for the man. Like a mute slowly placed into the bell of a trumpet, Talk Talk’s final albums gradually pulled focus away from the sound of pop music near the end of the century. Over here, in this pasture, was an untilled field of possibility to use with just some guitars and drums and bass. Spirit of Eden was the great inhale of religious feeling, one rock and pop music had been expelling for years and years. The thrill and stasis of a held breath carry the album from beginning to end. “Take my freedom,” Hollis sings on the closing hymn, as the band uses its last bit of thrust before drifting away.


Beyoncé’s fifth album, surprise-released on iTunes in December, finds the singer hitting a new peak. Working with a large cast of collaborators, she shifts gears to pull off her most explicit and sonically experimental music to date, exploring sounds and ideas at the grittier margins of popular music.

Beyoncé

Should Beyoncé choose to settle in the world of Adult Contemporary one day, she’ll have most of the legwork already done. She’s spent the time since 4, an album that playfully extolled the virtues of marriage, crafting a role for herself in that sphere with the ambitious grace of a good politician. Imagine the fun she had requesting the big hair and bigger fur to help President Obama ring in his second term, or in gussying herself up like Marie Antoinette to promote an international arena tour called The Mrs. Carter Show. The hedge-betting deals with Pepsi and H&M, the (now-defunct) lifestyle blog/newsletter à la Gwyneth Paltrow's goop, the reunion with Destiny’s Child, the exquisitely dull autobiographical documentary—she's seemed entirely poised to join Jay Z on his cloud of moneyed middle-age.
In retrospect, the adult gloss feels like an elaborate foil to the trouble she’d been cooking up in private all along. Beyoncé, her fifth solo album, repositions the singer as the Houston-bred Yoncé, a woman lustier and surlier than B, more playful than Bey, fiercer than Sasha but softer and more natural than the lot. The album is brassy but elegant, its post-coital breath smelling faintly of cheap liquor sipped from a crystal flute. It finds Beyoncé shifting gears to pull off her most explicit and sonically experimental music to date, exploring sounds and ideas at the grittier margins of popular music.
It’s tempting to read Beyoncé’s hard edges as an attempt to ride the success of Rihanna or Miley Cyrus’ risqué agendas—but to do so would be to look past the album’s true provocations. Beyoncé pushes boundaries not because it sells sex at every turn, but because it treats a power-balanced marriage as a place where sexuality thrives. At a time when when young people are gripped by an ideological fear of monogamy’s advertised doldrums, Beyoncé boldly proposes the idea that a woman’s prime—personal, professional, and especially sexual—can occur within a stable romantic partnership. Monogamy has never sounded more seductive or less retrograde as when dictated on Beyoncé’s terms. The innuendo can be bawdy and overblown—“Can you lick my Skittles/That’s the sweetest in the middle” on “Blow”—but sincerely so. And who would allow Jay Z’s instantly infamous breasts/breakfast line anywhere near the stargazing boom of “Drunk in Love” but someone truly infatuated with him? What’s more is that the erotic themes don’t feel out-of-step with the album’s more decorous moments, like the stadium-filling “XO” or “Blue”, its requisite treatise on motherhood. In Beyoncé’s world, there are illicit doors to be unlocked in the halls of tradition and vice versa.
The record reverberates with the energy of a conservative pop star navigating trends without grasping for them. Its crew of 44 writers, producers, and directors skews heavily toward the hip-hop realm and incorporates niche talents, something Beyoncé tried on 4 when she teamed with artists like Switch and pulled visual ideas from little-known European choreographers discovered via YouTube. It’s the collective effort of an all-star team with a deep bench, with contributions from mainstays like Pharrell and The-Dream, to fresh faces like Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek, a creative director from streetwear brand Supreme, and a practically-unknown producer named Boots.
Beyoncé’s best songs often reject traditional pop structures in favor of atmosphere—she may have taken some cues from her sister Solange, who now leads a particular wave of collaborative, left-field R&B. The record, her darkest and lushest yet, has a tendency to echo, stop abruptly, or place two separate songs in the space of one. Its most bracing moments are also its toughest and weirdest, like “***Flawless,” a two-part growler that makes feminist TED Talk fodder sound legitimately menacing. Timbaland and Justin Timberlake join The-Dream on “Partition” in service of the mean-mugging Yoncé, who snarls and bares her teeth as though the most revered rapper of all time is nobody but her little husband. At the center lies Beyoncé’s practically unfair abilities as a performer—you get the sense that Lady Gaga or Ciara could no sooner pull off the scale or quality of Beyoncé than you or I could pull off a suitable rendition of any of its songs in a karaoke bar.
Beyoncé has loosened up her delivery, too, in a way that highlights her elasticity and shows her pop-cultural antennae tuned to the right channels. Who could’ve predicted that some of the most infectious snippets of pop music in 2013 would not arrive by way of anthemic chorus or assembly-line arrangement, but in Beyoncé’s ad-libbing? You already know the ones: Surfbort, she grunts on “Drunk in Love,” slinging a hashtag like it’s the name of a line of Ikea chairs, the single word serving as both shorthand for woman-on-top and a neat summation of an entire era of trends in rap cadence. You’d also be hard-pressed to find an internet-savvy person in America who hasn’t been possessed by the idea that he or she woke up like this, brain emblazoned with Beyoncé’s half-second I’m so flawless I gave myself a seizure dance. She's achieved the rare feat of validating meme culture by capturing its sneaky potency and delight rather than falling into its cheap, dehumanizing traps. This is a “visual album,” sure, but it’s also a package of modern codes and discreet campaigns, a field of meaningful virtual dioramas. In this sense Beyoncé has a newfound spiritual ally in Drake (Worst! YOLO!),—he shows up on Beyoncé on the bruised “Mine”— her only peer to successfully streamline an internet-rooted mindset into a large-scale pop arena and seek profundity in the process.
Which is all to say that Beyoncé has delivered on the promise she inadvertently made by dropping an album and its expansive visual counterpart late on a Thursday night in December on iTunes, free of traditional fanfare. Call it a coup or just another victory for her mammoth PR apparatus, but consider the alternatives: The strategy probably would have failed if the quality wasn’t there, and the album could not have achieved such an impact without its rogue—in spirit, at least—method of distribution. Beyoncé was unleashed upon the world in a way that could only succeed right now, with an aim to make the audience consume it the way it would have long ago. It’s a line that could be ripped straight from the mouth of an investment-drunk tech startup founder, but it’s true: Beyoncé seized the powers of a medium characterized by its short attention span to force the world to pay attention. Leave it to the posterchild of convention to brush convention aside and leave both sides feeling victorious.


I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and ...

Kid A

I had never even seen a shooting star before. 25 years of rotations, passes through comets' paths, and travel, and to my memory I had never witnessed burning debris scratch across the night sky. Radiohead were hunched over their instruments. Thom Yorke slowly beat on a grand piano, singing, eyes closed, into his microphone like he was trying to kiss around a big nose. Colin Greenwood tapped patiently on a double bass, waiting for his cue. White pearls of arena light swam over their faces. A lazy disco light spilled artificial constellations inside the aluminum cove of the makeshift stage. The metal skeleton of the stage ate one end of Florence's Piazza Santa Croce, on the steps of the Santa Croce Cathedral. Michelangelo's bones and cobblestone laid beneath. I stared entranced, soaking in Radiohead's new material, chiseling each sound into the best functioning parts of my brain which would be the only sound system for the material for months.
The butterscotch lamps along the walls of the tight city square bled upward into the cobalt sky, which seemed as strikingly artificial and perfect as a wizard's cap. The staccato piano chords ascended repeatedly. "Black eyed angels swam at me," Yorke sang like his dying words. "There was nothing to fear, nothing to hide." The trained critical part of me marked the similarity to Coltrane's "Ole." The human part of me wept in awe.
The Italians surrounding me held their breath in communion (save for the drunken few shouting "Criep!"). Suddenly, a rise of whistles and orgasmic cries swept unfittingly through the crowd. The song, "Egyptian Song," was certainly momentous, but wasn't the response more apt for, well, "Creep?" I looked up. I thought it was fireworks. A teardrop of fire shot from space and disappeared behind the church where the syrupy River Arno crawled. Radiohead had the heavens on their side.
For further testament, Chip Chanko and I both suffered auto-debilitating accidents in the same week, in different parts of the country, while blasting "Airbag" in our respective Japanese imports. For months, I feared playing the song about car crashes in my car, just as I'd feared passing 18- wheelers after nearly being crushed by one in 1990. With good reason, I suspect Radiohead to possess incomprehensible powers. The evidence is only compounded with Kid A-- the rubber match in the band's legacy-- an album which completely obliterates how albums, and Radiohead themselves, will be considered.
Even the heralded OK Computer has been nudged down one spot in Valhalla. Kid A makes rock and roll childish. Considerations on its merits as "rock" (i.e. its radio fodder potential, its guitar riffs, and its hooks) are pointless. Comparing this to other albums is like comparing an aquarium to blue construction paper. And not because it's jazz or fusion or ambient or electronic. Classifications don't come to mind once deep inside this expansive, hypnotic world. Ransom, the philologist hero of C.S. Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet who is kidnapped and taken to another planet, initially finds his scholarship useless in his new surroundings, and just tries to survive the beautiful new world.
This is an emotional, psychological experience. Kid A sounds like a clouded brain trying to recall an alien abduction. It's the sound of a band, and its leader, losing faith in themselves, destroying themselves, and subsequently rebuilding a perfect entity. In other words, Radiohead hated being Radiohead, but ended up with the most ideal, natural Radiohead record yet.
"Everything in Its Right Place" opens like Close Encounters spaceships communicating with pipe organs. As your ears decide whether the tones are coming or going, Thom Yorke's Cuisinarted voice struggles for its tongue. "Everything," Yorke belts in uplifting sighs. The first-person mantra of "There are two colors in my head" is repeated until the line between Yorke's mind and the listener's mind is erased.
Skittering toy boxes open the album's title song, which, like the track "Idioteque," shows a heavy Warp Records influence. The vocoder lullaby lulls you deceivingly before the riotous "National Anthem." Mean, fuzzy bass shapes the spine as unnerving theremin choirs limn. Brash brass bursts from above like Terry Gilliam's animated foot. The horns swarm as Yorke screams, begs, "Turn it off!" It's the album's shrill peak, but just one of the incessant goosebumps raisers.
After the rockets exhaust, Radiohead float in their lone orbit. "How to Disappear Completely" boils down "Let Down" and "Karma Police" to their spectral essence. The string-laden ballad comes closest to bridging Yorke's lyrical sentiment to the instrumental effect. "I float down the Liffey/ I'm not here/ This isn't happening," he sings in his trademark falsetto. The strings melt and weep as the album shifts into its underwater mode. "Treefingers," an ambient soundscape similar in sound and intent to Side B of Bowie and Eno's Low, calms after the record's emotionally strenuous first half.
The primal, brooding guitar attack of "Optimistic" stomps like mating Tyrannosaurs. The lyrics seemingly taunt, "Try the best you can/ Try the best you can," before revealing the more resigned sentiment, "The best you can is good enough." For an album reportedly "lacking" in traditional Radiohead moments, this is the best summation of their former strengths. The track erodes into a light jam before morphing into "In Limbo." "I'm lost at sea," Yorke cries over clean, uneasy arpeggios. The ending flares with tractor beams as Yorke is vacuumed into nothingness. The aforementioned "Idioteque" clicks and thuds like Aphex Twin and Bjork's Homogenic, revealing brilliant new frontiers for the "band." For all the noise to this point, it's uncertain entirely who or what has created the music. There are rarely traditional arrangements in the ambiguous origin. This is part of the unique thrill of experiencing Kid A.
Pulsing organs and a stuttering snare delicately propel "Morning Bell." Yorke's breath can be heard frosting over the rainy, gray jam. Words accumulate and stick in his mouth like eye crust. "Walking walking walking walking," he mumbles while Jonny Greenwood squirts whale-chant feedback from his guitar. The closing "Motion Picture Soundtrack" brings to mind The White Album, as it somehow combines the sentiment of Lennon's LP1 closer-- the ode to his dead mother, "Julia"-- with Ringo and Paul’s maudlin, yet sincere LP2 finale, "Goodnight." Pump organ and harp flutter as Yorke condones with affection, "I think you're crazy." To further emphasize your feeling at that moment and the album's overall theme, Yorke bows out with "I will see you in the next life." If you're not already there with him.
The experience and emotions tied to listening to Kid A are like witnessing the stillborn birth of a child while simultaneously having the opportunity to see her play in the afterlife on Imax. It's an album of sparking paradox. It's cacophonous yet tranquil, experimental yet familiar, foreign yet womb-like, spacious yet visceral, textured yet vaporous, awakening yet dreamlike, infinite yet 48 minutes. It will cleanse your brain of those little crustaceans of worries and inferior albums clinging inside the fold of your gray matter. The harrowing sounds hit from unseen angles and emanate with inhuman genesis. When the headphones peel off, and it occurs that six men (Nigel Godrich included) created this, it's clear that Radiohead must be the greatest band alive, if not the best since you know who. Breathing people made this record! And you can't wait to dive back in and try to prove that wrong over and over.


Sonic Highways is the name of both the Foo Fighters' eighth record and an accompanying HBO series documenting its cross-country production process, wherein the band recorded each of its eight songs in a different city. The regional essence of a given song is barely perceptible without the exposition.

Sonic Highways

Foo Fighters have now been Dave Grohl’s chief concern for 20 years. The first 10 were spent minting the band’s platinum-plated modern-rock sound, and the subsequent decade was spent trying to remold it… only to have it settle back into its predictable color and shape. Indeed, it’s hard to distinguish one Foo Fighters album from another, since they all draw from the same well of arena-punk fist-pumpers, gentle comedown ballads, and arm-swaying sing-alongs that fall somewhere in between; as their Greatest Hits compilation made all too clear, a Foos song from 2007 sounds an awful lot like one from 1997. To his credit, Grohl seems well aware of the fine line between being unerringly consistent and relentlessly formulaic, and has tried to provide each new record with a fresh narrative. But these strategies have essentially amounted to hanging different frames around an unchanging picture—like a double-album opus that simply segregated the Foos’ habitual whispers and screams, or a back-to-the-garage throwback seemingly designed for garages big enough to house private jets.
That said, Grohl's latest plan to drum up interest for a new record could be his most ingenious: make the most elaborate, expensive EPK in music history and have HBO distribute it. Sonic Highways is the name of both the Foos’ eighth record and an accompanying, eight-part TV series documenting its ambitious, cross-country production process, with the band (alongside Butch Vig) recording each of its eight songs in a different city. It effectively blows up the concept of Grohl’s 2013 film, Sound City, to a national scale: visit a renowned musical mecca, speak to the legends that put it on the map, and hope some of their mojo rubs off onto new recordings.
As a documentary, the Sonic Highways series takes full advantage of Grohl’s unique status as a punk-spawned celebrity to deftly intertwine mainstream and underground rock histories. For instance, so far we've seen how Chicago-blues icons like Buddy Guy and noisy nihilists like Big Black were both fueled by the same impoverished necessity, or how hardcore pioneers Minor Threat and go-go greats Trouble Funk shone a light on the Washington that lurks in the shadow of Capitol Hill. As a promotional film for a new Foo Fighters album, however, it makes you wonder why its trailblazing subjects’ transgressive influence didn’t seep into the sound of final product.
Though it's all relative, Sonic Highways is the most adventurous Foo Fighters album to date, but it bends their trusty template in ways that bear little relation to the project’s underlying musical-history-tour gambit. (It’s not like hanging out with Bad Brains inspired a sharp left turn into light-speed D.C. hardcore, or digging up Roky Erickson’s roots in Austin has introduced sunbaked psychedelia into the mix.) Rather, at eight tracks and 42 minutes, Sonic Highways is paradoxically the Foos’ leanest record while boasting their most sprawling compositions, taking a more scenic route to their usual destinations.
Where most Foo Fighters songs have shown their hand by the first chorus, the highlights here gradually build up in step-like fashion: “Something From Nothing” may boast a typically teeth-clenching Foos climax, but it rides a surprisingly funky (if uncannily Dio-esque) organ groove to get there; “What Did I Do?/God As My Witness” stays well within Grohl’s power-pop pocket, but its stop-start/two-part structure suggests Big Star’s “Back of a Car” given a musical-theater makeover. And even songs that travel a straight-and-narrow path have a welcome sense of patience about them, revealing new melodic nuances along the way (like on the dreamy jangle-pop of “Subterranean”) or, in the case of "Congregation", unexpected dynamic shifts: what starts off as a standard-issue, cruise-controlled rocker in the “Learn to Fly”/“Times Like These” mold acquires a more intense energy, thanks to an extended soul-stomping breakdown buoyed by Zac Brown’s finger-picking.
But given the great logistical effort that went into the album’s creation—and the fanboy reverence Grohl exhibits toward his interview subjects on each "Sonic Highways" episode—it’s unfortunate that the regional essence of a given a song is barely perceptible without the televised exposition. Beyond illustrating that upbeat pop-punk is an odd forum for a discussion of the '68 D.C. race riots (see: “The Feast and the Famine"), the album boasts a bounty of special-guest ambassadors who are given little room to assert their personalities amid the Foos’ chromatic crunch: the New Orleans Preservation Jazz Band doesn’t have much to do on “In the Clear” but chirp up its mid-tempo riff; Joe Walsh’s bluesy fills get lost in the fast lane of “Outside”; and good luck parsing out the presence of Joan Jett on “I Am a River”, a gaudy Macy’s Day Parade of a power ballad that, just when you think can’t get any more overblown, piles on a false ending and string-section finale. The composite cityscape seen on Sonic Highways’ front cover proves to be all-too emblematic of the album’s overall sound: a hodgepodge of aesthetic signifiers that get swallowed up into a monolithic whole.
Watching "Sonic Highways", you get the sense that the real purpose of the whole endeavor wasn’t so much to reinterpret the musical traditions of a given city as simply broaden Grohl’s lyrical perspective beyond his usual relationship-focussed ruminations and self-help affirmations. In some of the episodes that have aired so far, we see a shot of Grohl sitting down after completing his interviews to write a song based on all the local lore he’s absorbed; the episodes then conclude with the Foos performing the resultant track, as the lyrics—loaded with knowing references to “muddy water,” “the 13th floor,” and “bluebirds”—are splashed across the screen practically begging for I-see-what-you-did-there acknowledgement. Ironically, in trying to tap into the mystique of America’s most storied cities, Foo Fighters completely demystify their own creative process, effectively turning the Sonic Highways project into a glorified homework assignment—educational, perhaps, but laboriously procedural.


After the sprawling Rifts, one of drone's top new artists returns with a more focused yet more complex album.

Returnal

For fans of drone-heavy psychedelia, these are bountiful times. Emeralds, Tim Hecker, Kevin Drumm, Gavin Russom, Ben Frost, Black to Comm, and Oneohtrix Point Never are among a current wave of artists synthesizing their way to a kind of liquid nirvana, sculpting music into impossible shapes right there in the air between your speakers. Oneohtrix Point Never is the alias of Daniel Lopatin, a Brooklyn musician whose tarnished sci-fi yearnings are evident in his titles-- "Betrayed in the Octagon", "Transmat Memories", "Laser to Laser", "Hyperdawn"-- and in his penchant for sad, sourly tuned analog synthesizers. Oneohtrix Point Never's music is in love with technology but finds it nevertheless a source of sadness, anxiety, and gleaming fatigue, as well as redemption.
Last year, his album Rifts collected two and a half hours of previously released material-- the albums Betrayed in the Octagon, Zones Without People, and Russian Mind, plus selections from various CD-R and cassette releases-- that added up to a remarkably singular vision. Returnal is much more compact, only eight tracks in 40 minutes; by design, it's more focused, sounding mostly like a set of music created with a specific set of instruments in a concentrated span. But it goes further than Rifts. It's denser and more complex. The clear 16th-note arpeggios that drive so many Oneohtrix Point Never tracks, when they appear at all, have been layered and blurred to the point of losing their definition. There's plenty in the swarming sound to compare to Emeralds' recent album Does It Look Like I'm Here?, which was also released by Peter Rehberg's Editions Mego label.
The album begins with a chaos that's uncharacteristic for Oneohtrix Point Never-- a wailing voice, feedback squeal, synthesizer drones, and overdriven drum blasts combust like a rocket on its launch pad. The track, "Nil Admirari", is an unexpected invocation of noise music, and also the only cut of its kind on the album. (It's not hard to see Rehberg's confrontational touch behind its sequencing.) In contrast, "Describing Bodies" is comparable to the ethereal shimmer of Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project. It emerges into earshot like a shape in the fog: A densely layered bed of strings supports a meandering synthesizer melody, but whatever motion is in the notes is all but swallowed up by the mass. "Stress Waves" is caught somewhere between the pulsing cycles of 60s minimalism and the untethered drift of Berlin's Chain Reaction label. It's gorgeous, heartbreaking even, but abstracted in a way that keeps it from tipping into the maudlin.
Elsewhere, the arpeggios familiar from Rifts and Zones Without People return on the title track. It's a nostalgic sound, drenched in retro-futurist melancholy, conjuring a nightclub of the near future as it might have been imagined by some straight-to-VHS movie from the early 1980s. After the agonized atomic blast of "Nil Admirari", this is the record's other big surprise. Electronically processed and harmonized vocals lend it a palpably pop touch; throw a kinetic minimal techno rhythm underneath it, and it might be the Knife. "Ouroboros" is Lopatin at his sweetest, with keening synthesizer melodies not so far removed from something Boards of Canada might make; beatless, it moves with a rare, stately grace.
And then "Preyouandi", the closing track, takes the album subtly somewhere else. The slow, blurred synthesizers are of a piece with most of the album; muted, incidental vocals feature the same processing as the voice on "Returnal". But the soundfield rattles with percussion and delay, a glitchy rumble reminiscent of Vladislav Delay at his most dissipated. Paired with the opening "Nil Admirari" it bookends the record in percussion, something not often heard in Oneohtrix Point Never records-- and rarely heard quite this way.
You could call this ambient music, or Kosmische; it's certainly indebted to Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. But it also sounds unusually original, which is a word you don't get to use so often. I'm tempted to say that it's an unusually tactile music, as though you could hear Lopatin feeling his way across the surfaces of his machines. (It is, without a doubt, incredibly sensuous music.) But I'm not sure that that's true, either, given the way the sounds so often seem to materialize out of thin air. Having softened his attacks and smeared his notes into indefinite shapes, he seems to sever the music from any kind of causality, so that it simply floats freely, morphing, rippling in a dance of infinite regeneration, like some perfect lifeform.


The artist formerly known as Makeout Videotape releases an EP of unsettling soft rock that mixes freaky sleaze with a surprising dose of swooning sensitivity.

Mac DeMarco: Rock and Roll Night Club EP

Rock and Roll Night Club EP

Before signing to Captured Tracks, Montreal's Mac DeMarco made fuzz pop records with Makeout Videotape, who, based on their album art alone, had strange leanings. On Rock and Roll Night Club, he gets weirder and churns out an unsettling brand of soft rock. Take the album's second track: "You're rockin' straight through midnight with me, Dojo Daniel, on 96.7: The Pipe. Up next, we've got a triple shot of Mac DeMarco comin' at ya, stuffin' it down the chute." That skit is delivered by an unsettling, near-demonic voice. It's a jokey moment, but it plays an unexpectedly crucial role for the rest of the EP: It makes the rest of the songs sound comparatively not-creepy. With vaguely grimy imagery like "standing on the corner/ Tryin' to keep it clean," delivered in his deep, breathy, sleazy voice, it's easy to get weirded out by the album's focal point, which is DeMarco. But stacked against a fictional DJ saying "stuffin' it down the chute" in an even deeper, even sleazier voice? DeMarco goes from being the sleaziest guy in the room to an outright Lothario.
Obviously, the tone here is both goofy and surreal if Night Club can support a creepy DJ skit near the beginning of the album. That weirdness also spills over into his lyrics. "Baby's Wearin' Blue Jeans" has DeMarco fixated on a woman specifically because of her pants, namedropping both Wrangler and Lee in the process. "Straight leg or a boot cut/ I'm begging darling please/ Stay with me forever/ And don't take off those jeans." His smoky voice and denim infatuation is complemented by an echoing, light guitar, which throws in a surprisingly welcome yacht rock aesthetic.
Sometimes, it's difficult to parse his irony from his sincerity, especially in "She's Really All I Need", which mixes Partridge Family optimism with harsh realities. ("I feel like I'm dying" and "Don't bring me down man/ Wearin' that frown man.") It's probably safe to assume that at least 80% of Night Club is laced with a meta joke that nobody's in on except DeMarco. It's usually still pretty funny, or in the very least, intriguingly odd.
He's got a good ear for hooks, too. Behind the hazy, warbling sound quality of the title track, "Blue Jeans", and "European Vegas", there are some excellent, albeit simplistic, guitar hooks. For songs with a fairly limited set of instrumentation-- one guitar, minimal percussion, a quiet undercurrent of bass, the occasional second guitar-- he pulls out some lovely, shimmering melodies. On the same coin, every now and then, he pushes one hook way too far. "Moving Like Mike" is the worst offender, and not only for its Lil' Bow Wow-reminiscent title. The song just repeats the same three phrases over an uninspired Jimmy Buffett acoustic guitar riff.
The biggest surprise comes at the end of the album with "Only You" (which is lifted from Makeout Videotape's Ying Yang) and "Me & Mine", the pair presenting an entirely different aesthetic than the sleazefest that dominates the record's first half. They introduce a jangling, breezy assertiveness that's normally reserved for Real Estate songs. Gone is the deep voiced, jean-focused weirdo from 20 minutes earlier. Here's a guy who's singing in a sincere-sounding pained falsetto over sunny guitars. One song earlier in "I'm a Man", he sang, "I've been creepin' around" in his go-to lower register. On "Only You", he asserts, "Here I am, brand new day," and he sounds like a new man.
It's tough to say which DeMarco is preferable: the swooning clear-eyed baritone of the last two songs or the unsettling deep-voiced emoter of the first eight. Really, I'm a fan of both versions-- the goofy creep and the straightforward crooner. Ultimately, even if one side's more of a caricature, it's a relatively short jump between the DeMarco who sings that "the boogie woogie woman keeps lookin' my way" and the DeMarco who sings, "I'm done crying over her."


Nic Offer, now focused solely on this band after the unfortunate dismantling of Out Hud, hones in on what !!! do best-- create incendiary disco-punk raveups.

Myth Takes

With his midriff-baring t-shirts and loose-limbed dance moves, !!!'s Nic Offer is a total goofball in the unselfconscious way that only really cool guys can get away with being. If you've ever attended a performance by !!! or Offer's former band, Out Hud, then you're familiar with his repertoire: the Christ-like wingspan, overhead clapping, shimmying hips, gangly duck-walking, dervish spins, scissor kicks, and humpy pelvic thrusts. It's like the mutant spawn of step aerobics, Flashdance, and Electric Boogaloo in an arena-ready package: ridiculous, extravagant, and completely awesome. Offer's stage presence isn't just deeply entertaining; it's an ice-breaker that gives us permission, by example, to forget ourselves and celebrate with abandon. You can tell he's having a hell of a time, and his enthusiasm is infectious.
This wanton enthusiasm permeates Myth Takes, !!!'s most consistent album to date. They've always been polyrhythmic pop experimenters in the vein of Talking Heads or Arthur Russell, leavening guitar-and-horn driven disco-punk with adventurous dashes of trance, funk, soul, krautrock, and points beyond. Given this aesthetic dilettantism-- plus !!!'s supple rhythm section and knack for explosive hooks-- the band, on paper, seems to have developed a template that should turn out smart bangers every time. But in practice, !!!'s songwriting has sometimes struggled to keep up with their prodigious ideas. For every pitch-perfect dancefloor meltdown like "Me and Giuliani Down By the School Yard (A True Story)" or their take on the Magnetic Fields' "Take Ecstasy with Me", the band's previous albums often squandered their momentum with boggy, static grooves and bizarre tangents. I'm not one to chastise bands for ambition, even when it leads them astray, but there's something to be said for zeroing in on what you do best. What !!! does best are the incendiary disco-punk raveups that, happily, take up most of the space on Myth Takes.
Any tentative or half-baked delivery is all but absent from Myth Takes, which rampages through the annals of kinetic music without letting genre tropes override or diffuse the songs' impact. The cerebral always takes a backseat to the visceral, and the album, while varied, is united by relentless propulsion. The title track's elastic bass and spaghetti-western guitar licks are a tense backdrop for Offer's smarmy scatting-- not to mention an effective foil to the ominous funk-laden following track, "All My Heroes Are Weirdoes". Mobile bass and telegraphic synths dominate the sex-jam "Must Be the Moon", a sort of pimp-strutting nursery rhyme for the 21+ set ("One drink, two drinks, three drinks, four!"). "A New Name" holds two contrasting modes in balance: earthy funk verses and a spacey soul-noir chorus that sloughs off tiny ice-chip tones, testifying to the importance of bassist and sound engineer Justin Vandervolgen's subtle tweaks. No longer experimenting for experimentation's sake, every beat-breaking decision on Myth Takes serves to reinforce the monumental rhythms.
When the album is at its less-than-best, it's because the band is playing against its strengths. From a technical standpoint, Offer's not an amazing singer. He's terrific at sultry murmurs, yelps, and chants, and luckily, he stays in these modes for most of the album. He doesn't fare as well when he just sings, as we discover on "Sweet Life". For one thing, he sounds hesitant, and his outsized party-starter persona slips a bit. For another, his lyrics tend toward the absurd, and you can only get away with lines like "sleeping underneath the blanket of dread" if you deliver them with serious bluster. But middling memories of "Sweet Life" are quickly obliterated by the impossibly funky squelch of "Yadnus", which is also a turning point-- the album's final third sinks into relative abstraction. The last three tracks' murky digressions bring the album to a brainy close that's satisfying after the brawny pageantry of its front end. By sequestering the cerebral stuff that erratically peppered their prior albums to a closing come-down*, Myth Takes*, presents !!! as a band that's figured out exactly what it's good at. If they stay the course, continuing to streamline and focus, we can expect many fine albums to come.


This Young Thug protégé’s latest mixtape locks in on a vibe and rolls wherever it goes. Usually it doesn’t go too far.

Drip Season 3

Gunna’s first major feature appearance came early in his career, when Young Thug plucked the Atlanta rapper out of relative obscurity and placed him on “Floyd Mayweather,” a highlight of  his 2016 event album JEFFERY. Memorable as that song was, though, it was easy to miss Gunna’s contributions, and not only because it cast him against Gucci Mane and Travis Scott. Many casual listeners initially assumed his performance was part of Thug’s, since their voices, flows, and styles overlapped so seamlessly that fairly close attention was required to tell where one ended and the other began. It’s no mystery what Thug, who signed Gunna to his YSL label, heard in the young rapper: himself.
These days, there’s no mistaking the two. While Young Thug’s voice has continued to evolve into ever wilder forms over the last two years, Gunna still sounds more or less like the same subdued echo of his boss that he did in 2016. Where Thug thrives on constant invention, pushing against even the currents that he helped create, Gunna is a weather vane content to ride the wind—a perfectly proficient rapper with a fairly conservative variation of the singy murmur that’s proliferated in Atlanta rap since Future’s ascent. On Drip Season 3, the latest installment of Gunna’s flagship mixtape series, he locks in on a vibe and rolls with it wherever it goes. Usually it doesn’t go too far.
Young Thug shows up twice, and in those two appearances he shows nearly as much range as Gunna does on the entire tape, applying his tactile rasp to “King Kong” and yelping out an R.I.P. to Hugh Hefner (“He like my daddy!”) on “Oh Okay.” Welcome as his contributions are, the title of that last track inadvertently sums up the muted response almost every song on Drip Season 3 provokes, these two included. Given Thug’s track record with songs about legendary primates, “King Kong” in particular feels like a missed opportunity. The title promises a tower-scaling beast of a song, but instead the beat is glum and the performances are weary. It should be so much more fun than this.
Drip Season 3 is filled with moments like that, finished tracks that fail to make good on the promise of their ingredients. For his part, Gunna is a capable rapper, and he peppers his free-associative lyrics with enough flashes of wit and randomness to suggest maybe he could grow into something more. “Working like Gotti, my crew almighty/No TGI Fridays, eat five-star, we dining,” he raps on “Almighty.” He’s got top-tier producers in his corner, too, including Metro Boomin, Turbo, and Wheezy. But there’s no spark in many of these songs, and Gunna isn’t a dynamic enough rapper to anchor a 52-minute project. By the time the tape reaches its nadir on “Mistress,” a romanceless “Penthouse Forum” boast with a numbing chorus (“Baby got big titties/...Squirt a lot of water out her kitty”), he feels like a pitching prospect trying to fake his way through the order a second time with just one pitch.
We’ve already seen proof that Gunna can make his modest range work for him. With last year’s unusually serene Drip Season 2, he created an aching, emotive mood piece that was genuinely moving at times. A talented rapper could build on that sound.  But Drip Season 3 is a reversion toward anonymity, toughing up its presentation just enough to destroy the allure of its predecessor, but not so much that it actually bangs. It’d be unfair to expect Gunna to keep pace with his mentor’s iconoclastic drive, but you’d think that a guy who came up under Young Thug would understand the last place you ever want to position yourself is in the middle of the road.


On her debut album, the young viral star moves beyond the lo-fi bedroom-pop of her early recordings and into a restrained, detailed style of songwriting all her own.

Immunity

Clairo’s breakout single “Pretty Girl” went extremely viral: a lo-fi video shot webcam-style amid dorm-room decor, and a sardonic popular-feminist message (“I could be a pretty girl, shut up when you want me to”) that was an easy in even for those who didn’t normally scour the online lands for bedroom pop. But preceding that chorus was a verse with a precisely observed snapshot of the moment one notices there’s nothing anymore where heartbreak used to be: “Polaroid of you dancing in my room… I think it was about noon/It’s getting hard to understand how you felt in my hands.” It’s a careful bit of writing belied by its hype, and an early indicator that Claire Cottrill’s heart lay in songwriting, not content production. And with a new EP soon after, Cottrill had already moved past it: “I’m hoping [Diary 001] can close off the bedroom-pop era of Clairo, and I can move on to some other things.” On her debut album Immunity, she proves this decisively.
Immunity brings in new personnel—produced by Rostam Batmanglij, mixed by Dave Fridmann, assisted on drums by Danielle Haim—for a new direction. Clairo’s often compared to one of her teenage idols Frankie Cosmos, both for making lo-fi pop and for becoming entangled in some exhausting discourse about her father’s bankroll and industry ties. But where Frankie Cosmos’ spiritual precursor is college rock, Clairo’s, at least on Immunity, is soft rock. The uptempo tracks are breezy and chill; the ballads are lush and deeply felt. Reverb’d keyboards abound. Several tracks have children’s choirs, but—if such a thing is possible—subtle ones. The fit is surprisingly natural; she certainly sounds much more at ease here than on the likes of an earlier collaboration like “B.O.M.D.,” where Danny L Harle’s trop-pop fripperies sound in retrospect at odds with Cottrill’s plainspoken voice.
Perils do lie this way; much of Immunity approaches the very sad, very posh, and very produced ballads of adult-contemporary drears like London Grammar or Låpsley. (“Feel Something” comes closest to this sound; not coincidentally, it’s the weakest cut.) But, crucially, the album only tiptoes up to the edge of huge production and no further. It’s truly remarkable how many of these tracks, if they were produced even one iota larger, would collapse into mush, and how much restraint it must have taken not to blow them up that big. Opener “Alewife” builds, but modestly: a recorder counterpoint, a little drum fill, some light guitar fuzz, less of a breakdown than a heart skip. “Closer to You” could have been easily overpowered either by the 808s and Heartbreak-style AutoTune on the verses or the power-ballad guitar on the chorus; it isn’t. The children's choirs and vocal processing on “I Wouldn’t Ask You” aren’t there to make the song swell but to dissolve away, leaving a sparse, almost hymn-like arrangement of piano, Cottrill’s un-vocoded melody, and nothing else. “Sofia” is powered by a “Dancing on My Own” synth chug—about the most surefire banger fodder there is—but one that remains in the background beneath crackly, distorted guitar (a late addition). The closest thing to trend-chasing is “Softly,” a Y2K pop-R&B ballad like something TLC or Mya might have recorded as an album track—which is far from bad.
The restraint isn’t just there to be tasteful, but to keep the focus on Cottrill’s voice and words, which have become touchstones for what seems like a full generation of listeners. “You can barely hear what I’m saying on all of my demos on Soundcloud. Maybe that was a style thing or an insecurity thing. Maybe it’s both,” she told Vice of her old music. That’s standard interview stuff, the lorem ipsum of the lo-fi artist who’s graduated to hi-fi. But it’s also true: up front and clear, Cottrill’s voice exudes a quiet warmth and intimacy, whether confessing a personal crisis on “Alewife” (named for the Boston T stop) or realizing she’s fallen for a girl friend in “Sofia"—going from “I think we could do it if we tried” to “Oh my god, I think I’m in love with you" in two verses’ span, as if she’s only just realized it mid-track, in real time.
Last year, Clairo came out as bisexual, and she’s said much of Immunity is about the accompanying experience: crushing on friends, looking for unspoken signs, generally dealing with feelings that one’s still grappling with being possible, let alone reciprocated. For every outright love song there’s one, like breakthrough single “Bags,” that dwells in the everyday and the liminal spaces therein. What Clairo sings about is mundane but charged—watching TV, “wasting time on the couch,” but also dropping hints (like a subtle Call Me By Your Name reference in the verse) and tentatively offering that if the song’s subject were to make a move she wouldn’t mind, really. The melody of the chorus is morose, a flattened affect and a resigned shrug: “I guess this could be worse/Walking out the door with your bags” All the feeling is in the instrumental, chiming above, quietly gorgeous. “Can you see me using everything to hold back?” Clairo sings, and though she’s referring to her crush, she could just as well be singing about Immunity. The effort sounds effortless.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With a shift in tone and tempo, Katie Crutchfield creates a vivid modern classic of folk and Americana. It’s the sound of a cherished songwriter thawing out under the sun.

Saint Cloud

With Katie Crutchfield’s fifth solo album comes the spring, its essence bottled so powerfully you could name a perfume after it: Saint Cloud, by Waxahatchee. Its sensory trigger has the power to replace the memory of whatever you call this atrophic season happening around us. Instead, Saint Cloud is all lilacs and creek beds, Memphis skylines and Manhattan subways, love and sobriety, the sound of a cherished songwriter thawing out under the sun.
This transformative effect was absent on Crutchfield’s previous solo work. Don’t take that as a knock on her intimate, lo-fi 2012 debut American Weekend or 2013’s remarkable follow-up Cerulean Salt, whose songs of love and harm still land like a hundred little knicks to the flesh. Even as Crutchfield revved up the sound and the stakes on 2017’s searing Out in the Storm, finding darkness deep within her psyche, her songwriting remained bound up in grungy distortion, spare arrangements, and blocky rhythms. Three chords and the truth was always her credo, but Crutchfield needed more room for that credo to thrive.
And so Crutchfield decided to build songs that she could stroll right into. Twirl, even. She resides inside a world that drapes over her like the sky-blue dress she wears on the album’s cover. If that sleeved dress and the old pickup truck didn’t clue you in, Saint Cloud is an album in the thrall of Americana and the country music of her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama: Loretta Lynn, Tammy Wynette, George Jones. Produced with a warm and deft touch by Brad Cook (Bon Iver, Hiss Golden Messenger), the album never chugs or lurches into a rock groove. It’s made of simple blues patterns, nothing-fancy chords, and the steady backbeat of a band working only for the song. Every note rings and chimes: a light organ here, the slight twang of a Telecaster there, gently plucked leads on an acoustic back there, all perfectly appointed for Crutchfield’s songwriting. It feels like you’re in possession of a family heirloom.
That ease comes in part because this is the first album Crutchfield wrote after getting sober in 2018. On the outstanding “Fire,” she sings that she’s “wiser, slower, and attuned,” words that also serve as the mood throughout Saint Cloud. Her lyrics wind around and corkscrew a bit more on this record than previous ones, but it’s a feat that Crutchfield pulls off with a daredevil command of verse. “Fire” rings of desperation and conquest, a promise to make oneself meek, small as a bird, even turn into liquid, just to live inside someone: “And when I turn back around/Will you drain me back out/Will you let me believe that I broke through?” Crutchfield told Rolling Stone that she had difficulty writing while sober, but these are some of the most careful and evocative lyrics she’s ever composed.
There’s a subtle difference between writing that digs and writing that discovers. If her older records did the former—peeling back layers of innocence and isolation to get to the nerve-endings—Crutchfield is now a discoverer who sees the world anew. Much of Saint Cloud is wide-eyed and detailed; she sings as if amazed at what she feels. “The Eye” is all about being levitated in those dizzy moments of love. Crutchfield lets the lyrics tumble out of her in a litany, absolutely goofy that her partner will give her something “to think and sing and follow.” The song peaks as Crutchfield builds vocal harmonies that gather behind this image: “A scientific cryptogram lit up behind a jet stream,” and for just a second, as if to highlight the ear-to-ear grin behind the song, a bluegrass chorus of Crutchfields all pile into the words “lit up.”
Because Saint Cloud is so fresh and budding on the outside, Crutchfield can hide her anger and fear inside it. This new contrast gives great dimension to her storytelling, allowing all the sourness and rot at the fringes of her songs to come and go at will. “War” takes on a rambling ’60s Dylan feel, that lets her talk about how she’s prone to “come in hot” and “fill up the room,” but she’s quick to add—as we all do in heated moments—that it has “nothing to do with you.” The trauma buried at the heart of “Arkadelphia” is so palpable that the slow-burn tempo makes it glow white. She sings softly, “If we make pleasant conversation/I hope you can’t see what’s burning in me.” Crutchfield is still the patron saint of emotional chaos, but her songs suggest that she’s becoming more of a protector, a homebody, looking to take everything out of storage and either throw it away or keep it safe in a home.
The climax of the record, “Ruby Falls,” is where all of the ambition and aesthetics come together. As she walks down 7th Street in Manhattan, Crutchfield’s wisdom collects into buckets: “Real love don’t follow a straight line/It breaks your neck, it builds you a delicate shrine,” and, “You might mourn all that you wasted/That’s just part of the haul.” Her pen moves ornately across the page, the aperture of her songwriting flies open. The unsparing indie style of Chan Marshall or Liz Phair remains, but Saint Cloud is something far bigger. It isn’t just talking to Lucinda Williams’ 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, it pulls up right beside it, a vivid modern classic of folk and Americana. It’s a record that suggests maybe if you slow down, life slows down with you, and everything is in bloom.


The hip-hop/nu-soul producer who played a large role in recent albums by Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse enlists some famous friends for a covers album that includes takes on songs by Radiohead, the Smiths, and Coldplay, among others.

Version

I'm sure Mark Ronson's a real talented DJ, a kickass producer, and a formidable music connoisseur, with or without the rock'n'roll silver spoon inherited from his step-daddy, Foreigner co-founder Mick Jones. Hell, even his block party of a debut, 2003's star-studded Here Comes the Fuzz, had its share of interesting musical ideas. However, it's hard to look at Version-- a guest artist-boosted showcase that comes on the heels of Ronson's production work for Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse-- as anything but a cash-grab. Not that cover albums can't be eclectic, but there's little-to-no coherence between the songs chosen here except for the fact that the artists who wrote them are UK chart mainstays.
While song selection seems suspect on Version, it's not the deal-breaker. Ronson is a phenomenal multi-instrumentalist, but someone's gotta cut him off at a certain number of horn and string sections. For example, hearing a moody, standoffish anthem like the Smiths' "Stop Me If You Think You've Heard This One Before" (its presence here a cheeky nod to critics who'd call this entire album superfluous) get dusted off and given the Pygmalion treatment smacks of indie blasphemy, the canned strings and Daniel Merriweather's schmaltzy croon clumsily converting Morrissey into a blaxploitation theme.
To Ronson's credit, what should be the most egregious track on the album, a cover of Radiohead's "Just", is actually a standout. Nicked from last year's abysmal Radiohead tribute album Exit Music: Songs With Radio Heads [review], the track finds Phantom Planet's Alex Greenwald adding a playful dose of white-boy funk, and is one of the few instances where Ronson's hip-hop proclivities come in handy. Still, slapping a brand new bag on these pasty-white-dude tunes more often bombs than not. Maxïmo Park's "Apply Some Pressure"-- re-interpreted here with help from MP singer Paul Smith-- loses its jagged post-punk edge amidst the lush horns and thin symphonic outro, and the Zutons' "Valerie" gets mauled by Amy Winehouse, bent and twisted until it sounds like a spare part of "Rehab".
What this all boils down to is that Ronson probably would've been better off remixing these songs than dolling them up with droves of big-name mercenaries and genre-fucking. Most of Version's tracks have little replay value, shaking your attention before you can say, "So that's what 'God Put a Smile Upon Your Face' would sound like played by a high school marching band." And of course, a handful of the originals just weren't that great to begin with. Maybe I'm giving Ronson more credit than he deserves, but the guy's too talented to smash square pegs into readymade round holes and abet the ongoing implosion of pop music as we know it.


Layering disaffected vocals over glitchy beats, the duo’s second LP is a deadpan testament of the terminally online. It’s both mundane and disorienting, irritating and soothing.

Rapstar*

New York are masters of anhedonic pop. The drolly named duo—26-year-old Estonian performance artist Gretchen Lawrence and 24-year-old Senegalese-American visual artist and model Coumba Samba—ostensibly draw from club music and hip-hop, but you can’t imagine their second album, Rapstar*, giving anyone the energy to lift their feet from the ground. It’s remarkably dead-eyed music, characterized by Samba’s sardonic deadpan and chilly minimalist glitches that sound like the Sheffield experimental duo snd as covered by the girls from Gossip Girl. The most excitable that the two musicians sound on Rapstar*—which is not very excitable at all—is when they splice their voices together on the title track to deliver a terse, twisted assessment of modern life: “The government will fuck you/And claim you deserve it.”
Where so much prototypical “Gen Z music” uses maximalism to capture a sense of overwhelmed disaffectedness—think Babyxsosa beginning a song by yelling and ending it as if she’s been distracted by her phone—New York take a different tack. Rapstar* is both mundane and disorienting, down to its format: On Bandcamp and streaming services, it’s been inexplicably split into two volumes, subtitled Side A and Side B, meaning that you’ll have to make a playlist of all the tracks to listen in one go, or otherwise fiddle with Spotify halfway through, as if you’re flipping a record. On “bronx,” Samba repeats the phrase “In the Bronx I walk” until it takes on the character of Sisyphean struggle; on “no bra,” New York–based performance artist No Bra mutters about “Making out with no dress” over a subliminal, mutant footwork beat and improvised piano, making for an unpleasant but resolute answer to the question, “What does a sex jam sound like for a generation that reportedly hates sex?” It is frequently irritating music, but if you’re someone who’s frequently irritated by the world around you—who, for example, wants to scream about the fact that there are two Blank Street Coffees within 100 feet of Tottenham Court Road station—it can feel kind of soothing, a representation of modernity that depicts life as neither distorted and maximalist nor gloomily dystopic, but somewhere in the middle.
New York’s debut, 2022’s darkly funny No Sleep Till N.Y., leaned enough into electroclash and ’00s signifiers—skinny jeans, the aforementioned Gossip Girl lilt of Samba’s voice—that it could broadly be tied into a broader reappraisal of “indie sleaze” and blog house, an idea furthered by last year’s “night n day,” on which they flipped the hook of Ladytron’s “Seventeen” into something even creepier and more depressing than the original. Rapstar* still kind of sounds like “Shoes,” particularly on “kicks,” on which Samba recites lyrics about shoe addiction over an IDM hum, but it also feels less indebted to the past than previous New York music.
Perhaps that’s due to the fact that Rapstar* is being released on Relaxin Records, which is run by Alina Astrova (aka Lolina, fka Inga Copeland), whose music, like New York’s, seems interested in contrasting deconstructed musical forms with the straightforward immediacy of pop music. New York’s music doesn’t necessarily scan as pop, but it does perfect a vernacular that speaks to the overly detached, ironically branded way people talk online. On “low,” Rapstar*’s final song, Lawrence whispers lyrics that sound like bargain-bin affirmations designed to narrativize an otherwise dull existence: “Zone out when you talk/Indie girl on the go/Lazy for attention/Hearteyes for the dough.” It’s the kind of cruelly ironic, halfheartedly you-go-girl sentiment you might sing to yourself before clocking on and zoning out.