The techno DJ and leftfield beatmaker pivots to Balearic dream pop on her debut album. The tone is disarming and sweet, using nostalgia as a foil for spiritual fatigue.

& the Charm

Avalon Emerson, former software developer turned Berghain DJ and acclaimed techno producer, gives off the enviable aura of someone who’s good at everything. When she describes her musical database management in precise schematic detail, or excitedly reveals how much she’s learned about the septic system at her rural pandemic retreat, you can practically see the mental flowcharts unfurl. She’s admitted that she’s “not really a singer,” but for Emerson that’s just another in-game challenge to unlock. Her debut album is a self-described pop record credited to her new collaborative project Avalon Emerson & the Charm, and she sings almost the whole time.
The lucid dream-pop ditties of & the Charm take in the misty-eyed gaze of Japanese city pop, the slow-mo fireworks of shoegaze, the gentle sea spray of Balearic house, the jangly collage aesthetic of Saint Etienne. The other members of the Charm include wife Hunter Lombard and friend Keivon Hobeheidar, a lineup that recalls Marie Davidson’s partner-and-friend pop trio Marie Davidson & L’Œil Nu. It’s just my job to notice this stuff, but Emerson’s project shares a remarkably similar origin: An internationally successful DJ and producer, pummeled by jet lag and burnout, eventually takes refuge in a few close confidants and a new creative avenue that’s simultaneously more “pop” and more niche. In Emerson’s case, pandemic restrictions enforced a pre-planned break from touring and, perhaps, opened more time for home listening. “My idea of a perfect record is a Cocteau Twins record, things that are soft and beautiful,” she told Pitchfork. Daytime Avalon: Lightness for the summer, for a world that spent a year or two away from the club, for sunrise first thing in the morning instead of last thing at the end of the night.
So this is music that sounds familiar by design, songs that want you to feel like you’ve heard them before. Emerson aims directly at the idea of imitative music with “Karaoke Song,” actually a song about karaoke songs, co-produced with Nick Sylvester. In another sense, the idea for & the Charm came from a series of covers compilations that London songwriter and album executive producer Bullion produced for his Deek label, featuring stylized reconsiderations of pop and alternative classics: silver-voiced balladeer Westerman singing Simon & Garfunkel, a chanson version of Joe Jackson’s “Stepping Out,” that sort of thing. Emerson recorded a kind of shadow entry in this catalog, the cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “Long Forgotten Fairytale” that opens her 2020 DJ-Kicks mix. Its video features road trip footage Emerson and Lombard shot while driving from California to New York in summer 2020, as the pandemic settled in. Occasionally an image from the new album appears to evoke the scene through their windshield, or maybe a rear-view glance to Emerson’s childhood in Arizona: “Hot dunes, an oasis”; “This desert isn’t your friend.”
If Avalon Emerson seems like she knows everything, & the Charm wishes it could know less. The lyrics to “Sandrail Silhouette” or “Hot Evening” play out like someone reminiscing in the incandescent glow of vintage photographic slides, hinting at details just outside the frame. The music feels a little intentionally maladjusted, a little out of step, because instead of bending tempos or pitch in a DJ mix, Emerson is playing with the emotional timing mechanisms of nostalgia. Within the bittersweet isolation chamber of “Entombed in Ice” or the idyllic memory of air travel on “Dreamliner,” you might perceive something of the pandemic mood, a wistful spiritual fatigue combined with the faint glimmer of unrealized possibility. An album about memory is also an album about forgetting, about past futures forever unexplored.
The more reflective, inward-looking style of & the Charm misses some of what characterizes Emerson’s best club tracks: the confident fluidity and lively sociability of someone who DJ’d a lot of big parties before assembling beats at home. Within the conceit of the solo singer-songwriter album, under the circumstances of the pandemic, Emerson is stuck—“worse, California-pilled”—and we’re alongside her for the duration. Her not-really-a-singer voice gives the album its distinctive personality: sweet and disarming, hermetic and a little tentative, not really like Marie Davidson, who was effectively mean-mugging part of the time, but more like Arthur Russell in the way Emerson’s not-really-singing imparts a spontaneous sincerity.
Sincere, self-taught, conceived under the auspices of the crisis everybody wishes they could leave behind: No wonder Emerson herself expected this music to turn out a little cringe. But & the Charm is so tranquil and unconcerned with impressing you that it’s faintly disconcerting. “Hang the cowards, hang the DJs,” Emerson muses at one point, like a cheeky, self-deprecating nudge at people who’d rather not reveal their full, flawed selves in their art. Not everything feels effortless: The wubby synth bass licks on “A Vision” upset the balance of Emerson’s featherweight vocal, and the pretty but inert “The Stone” could have been an interlude. But it’s well placed to gather one’s breath before the exhilarating “Dreamliner,” one of my favorite songs this year. Not coincidentally that’s the track that lands closest to Nighttime Avalon, one of those satisfying four-on-the-floors that peel up at the edges to let their romantic psychedelic glow seep out. Who needs a chorus?
All this, of course, would have been far harder to pull off after the banger techno LP that Emerson surely still has stashed away in her brain. When you’re famous enough for a following and not so famous that you’re bound to disappoint the casuals is really the perfect moment for a record like this. And & the Charm feels right on time in general: for club culture going pop, for new albums from club-goes-pop progenitors Everything But the Girl and Alison Goldfrapp, for last year’s new project from Elizabeth Fraser of Cocteau Twins, for a new Rae Sremmurd song (and a semi-official Jason Derulo track) sampling Y2K soft-rock radio queen Dido, for Kim Petras and Nicki Minaj’s remake of Alice Deejay. The vibe is luminous pastels, elegant sway, adult-contemporary electro, and an uncombed, unselfconscious attitude that circles right back around to being cool, and Avalon Emerson’s got it.
Correction: Bullion is not credited on “Karaoke Song”; it was co-produced with Nick Sylvester.


Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound, a wild symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it.

Fetch the Bolt Cutters

It happens to most of us at an early age: the realization that life will not follow a straight line on the path towards fulfillment. Instead, life spirals. The game is rigged, power corrupts, and society is, in a word, bullshit. Art can expose the lies. The early music of Fiona Apple was so much about grand betrayals by inadequate men and the patriarchal world. Did it teach you to hate yourself? Did it teach you to bury your pain, to let it calcify, to build a gate around your heart that quiets the reaches of your one and only voice? Fetch the bolt cutters.
Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound. No music has ever sounded quite like it. Apple recorded Fetch the Bolt Cutters both in and with her Venice Beach home, banging on its walls, stomping on its ground. Self-reliance is its rule, curiosity is its key. Fetch the Bolt Cutters seems to almost completely turn the volume down on music history, while it cranks up raw, real life—handclaps, chants, and other makeshift percussion, in harmony with space, echoes, whispers, screams, breathing, jokes, so-called mistakes, and dog barks. (At least five dogs are credited: Mercy, Maddie, Leo, Little, and Alfie.) All of this debris orbits around the core of Apple’s music: her voice, her piano, and most of all her words, which have always been her primary instrument. It creates a wild symphony of the everyday.
In the past, Apple has said John Lennon was her god, and she wrote lyrics and melodies on par with the finest pop songs ever recorded. But Fetch the Bolt Cutters feels more conceptually akin to the revolutionary risk-taking of saint Yoko Ono—a woman who once wrote, “I like to fight the establishment by using methods that are so far removed from establishment-type thinking that the establishment doesn’t know how to fight back.” Fetch the Bolt Cutters does something similar. It contains practically no conventional pop forms. Taken together, the notes of its found percussion and rattling blues are liberationist.
Apple was moving towards all of this with 2012’s The Idler Wheel. Even after the fury and eloquence of her initial three-album run—manifestos from a voice of disenchantment who knew even as a teenager that she was “too smart” for the world—Idler Wheel still felt like a breakthrough. It was the first Apple record to realize the breadth of her potential in the ecstatic reach of the music itself. On the corporeal “Daredevil,” she sang of “gashes” that gave her “lift.” But on Fetch the Bolt Cutters she calls the gashes out by name: “bullies,” “it girls,” “wannabes,” and, above all, toxic masculinity.
Apple said, in a recent profile in The New Yorker, that she worried she’d constructed “a record that can’t be made into a record,” but that shakiness was merely a symptom of a feat of total abandon. The whole album flies. The opening song, “I Want You to Love Me” seems to offer a thesis for the meaning of life: to love, to connect, to get “back in the pulse.” She sings, scats, lightly raps—and proceeds to curl her voice into an extended-vocal contortion à la Yoko or Meredith Monk, over a Reichian piano loop, signaling an avant-garde inclination. Apple sings about time and meaninglessness, and how “while I’m in this body I want somebody to want.” She sings about knowing that one day she will die. The song echoes the beautiful open letter she wrote in 2012 about her dog, Janet, who was then dying: “I know that I will feel the most overwhelming knowledge of her [...] in the last moments.” Apple reportedly “tapped” on a box containing Janet’s bones during the recording of the album.
There is a tendency among songwriters, as they get older, to refine—to use fewer words to allow for easier melodies. But to refine is to reel back, to withdraw. Apple does the opposite, reimagining her music to accommodate even more words, more of herself: “You’ve got to get what you want/How you want it/But so do I,” she sings on “Drumset,” grasping at every self-determined syllable. A number of Fetch the Bolt Cutters’ rough-hewn tracks sound like they might collapse at any moment, only to pick themselves up with a smirk of cool relief. The incantatory “Relay” includes a fluttering ambient noise jam recalling no one so much as O.G. punk band the Slits. Across four distinct movements, the madcap “For Her” pivots from a cabaret tune to a march to a swooping blues ballad to a one-woman choir of antagonizing angels. It is the definition of uncompromising. Apple’s indictments of men are also cutting as ever—“Your face ignites a fuse to my patience,” goes “Cosmonauts”—but her vulnerabilities are more daring, too. In a single word, her voice can dive from a ragged scream to a whisper so intimate that it barely exists outside of her.
Fetch the Bolt Cutters can threaten the status quo and it can be outrageously funny, often at once. The long-reigning queen of self-isolation proclaims, “I told you I didn’t want to go to this dinner,” to open a song called “Under the Table,” as in: “Kick me under the table all you want/I won’t shut up.” “Rack of His” turns the experience of, well, getting played by a musician, into something hysterically subversive: “Check out that rack of his/Look at that row of guitar necks,” she daydreams, before cutting to the quick: “I thought you would wail on me like you wail on them.” And on “Relay,” after listing off a series of things she resents about an ex, she offers a critique of our hyper-socially-mediated world so savage it practically demands a standing ovation: “I resent you for presenting your life like a fucking propaganda brochure.” With her humor comes a playfulness that is still genuinely disarming to hear from a woman who wrote a song about herself and titled it “Sullen Girl.”
The title track, and the album’s peak, is a work of musical bildungsroman, like a teenage girl’s diary, detailing the futility of fighting your way through a friendship, crying, and the secret power of a Kate Bush song. Apple sings of how the cool girls in school damaged her self-esteem, how the strength of your mind does not guarantee the fortitude of your heart. The energy centers of the song are reversed—the verses slink with gravity, the choruses are steadied and light. “Fetch the bolt cutters,” Apple sings like a spell, “I’ve been in here too long.” She has always strung words together like armor, but “Fetch the Bolt Cutters” feels designed to protect us. However you interpret it, the line, the song, and the album speak the language of transcendence. In 1996, on “The Child Is Gone,” Apple alluded to how the world can disconnect us from ourselves: “I’m a stranger to myself.” On “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” Apple narrates this experience, reclaims it, and resists it—a revolt against the very idea of being controlled.
Fetch the Bolt Cutters includes Apple’s first songs discernibly addressed to other women. “Shameika” also chronicles her formative years by way of a pep talk to herself and an ode to the middle-school classmate who emboldened her with only a few fleeting words: “Shameika said I had potential.” The torchy barroom burner “Ladies” is an anti-jealousy anthem and it is pure comic genius. “Ladies! Ladies! Ladies! Ladies!” Apple toasts, imploring the new girlfriend of her ex-boyfriend to “please be my guest!” to whatever she may have left in the back of his kitchen cupboards and bathroom cabinets: “There’s a dress in the closet/Don’t get rid of it/You look good in it/I didn’t fit in it/It was never mine/It belonged to the ex-wife of another ex of mine.” Fetch the Bolt Cutters is full of audacious scenes like this, where Apple narrates, in vivid detail, experiences we just don’t typically hear in songs.
This is all in keeping with the feminist reckoning that has swept through culture in a post-#MeToo society. But Fetch the Bolt Cutters is never didactic, even on (the potentially triggering) “For Her,” which Apple wrote in the wake of the shameful Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings. For an artist whose early career existed under an all-seeing male eye, Apple wrote the song “Newspaper” from an unmistakable female gaze. In its lyrics, she feels “close” to another woman due to their shared past with an abusive man, as she observes his cruelty and lies from a distance. It’s a nuanced way of addressing a systemic problem. “It’s a shame because you and I didn’t get a witness,” she sings, but this song makes us all one, as do the brutal lyrics of “For Her.” “You know you should know but you don’t know what you did,” she sings, and later: “You raped me in the same bed your daughter was born in.” This is another side of Fiona Apple. It is not easy to sing along. But it demands that you listen.
She calls men out for refusing to show weakness, for treating their wives badly, for needing women to clean up their messes. Where The Idler Wheel explored a form of self-interrogation—“I’m too hard to know,” she crooned—on Fetch the Bolt Cutters, she unapologetically indicts the world around her. And she rejects its oppressive logic in every note. The very sound of Fetch the Bolt Cutters dismantles patriarchal ideas: professionalism, smoothness, competition, perfection—aesthetic standards that are tools of capitalism, used to warp our senses of self. Where someone else might erase a mistake—“Oh fuck it!” she chuckles on “On I Go”—she leaves it in. Where someone might put a bridge, she puts clatter. Where she once sang, “Hunger hurts but starving works,” here, in the devouring chorus of “Heavy Balloon,” she screams: “I spread like strawberries/I climb like peas and beans.” There is nothing top-down about the sound of Fetch the Bolt Cutters. “She wanted to start from the ground,” her guitarist David Garza told The New Yorker. “For her, the ground is rhythm.”
There’s considerable power in how Apple entertains so many of these wild, inexhaustible impulses. “Don’t you, don’t you, don’t you, don’t you shush me!” she chips back on “Under the Table.” She will not be silenced. That’s patently clear from the start of Fetch the Bolt Cutters. In gnarled breaths on its opening song—feet on the ground and mind as her might—Apple articulates exactly what she wants: “Blast the music! Bang it! Bite it! Bruise it!” It’s not pretty. It’s free.

Listen to our Best New Music playlist on Spotify and Apple Music.


Producer Bryant Canelo’s latest album is filled with ambient memories, distorted house skeletons, and spoken-word rants. It’s not so much exhausting as it is exhaustive.

Loretta Aberdeen: PHONE PHREAKER$ PHREAK BACK

PHONE PHREAKER$ PHREAK BACK

Like anyone who spends quite a bit of time staring at inanimate objects attempting to figure them out, Loretta Aberdeen (aka Bryant Canelo) seems slightly suspicious of technology. As Lampgod, Canelo makes abstract, hip-hop productions, stitched together with played-to-death soul tapes and drum machine loops that seem to disintegrate as you listen to them. But under his Loretta Aberdeen alias, he makes work that is noisy and repetitious; he dares you turn it off, and freely admits that some songs “can also be too long for your enjoyment.” The terrain of his latest album, PHONE PHREAKER$ PHREAK BACK, is made up of ambient memories, distorted house skeletons, and spoken-word rants. It’s not so much exhausting as it is exhaustive, allowing Aberdeen to examine both his vulnerability and his distance from it.
Aberdeen obscures himself in clouds of beeps and minimal drum hits, clearing the air only to startle you with sudden declarations. Album opener “LUXCORE” is an icy landscape formed of otherworldly material; it’s digital firmament. As the song progresses, Aberdeen keeps hyping the track by saying, “Check it out, now.” It’s eerily disembodied, yet strangely immersive. His repetitions begin to have the effect of mantras, and the blistering, almost orchestral peals of distorted guitar that compete for your attention provide the track with a quasi-mystical character. It’s like looking at the human trapped in the machine.
Aberdeen ensconces you deep inside this sprawling consciousness-warping device, measuring your perception by messing with it. “MOLLYMAN” begins with Aberdeen humming, “Didn’t know I could love somebody/Didn’t know I could love someone like this” to a series of squeaks. This earnest proclamation leads into club-ready drum patterns, and the next set of lyrics fit this new setting: “You make me dance/Bring me up/Play it sweet/Make me move just like a freak/Mr. Mollyman, Mr. Mollyman hold up.” Here, dancing is only hinted at; it’s a track that feels closer to walking outside of a club than being inside one. Or to put it another way, it feels more like being in the head of someone preparing to meet a new lover at the club, the soundtrack to their imagined future made more abstract due to its distance from concrete reality. Like in “extra,” a song about fighting outside the club, Aberdeen is focused on manipulating the outside world’s sound so that it sounds both real and unreal, an inescapable hallucination. By bringing in the bass drum at odd intervals and looping together hollow-sounding reeds on “MOLLYMAN,” Aberdeen shows he is more interested in skewing with what you perceive than making you move.
This fixation with the mechanics of listening gives the album a hypnotic power. “BOOK,” flickers with electricity buffeted by static and scattered hi-hats. It sits somewhere on the scale between progressive electronic and noisy improv, and it evokes images of disintegrating cities with desolated architecture. The jittery “cinerama” feels playful and enervating in equal measure; it’s intriguing even if it never becomes immersive. The floating “STARR” sits right in the middle of that scale. At first, it’s easy to get lost in its warm, heady progressions, but the addition of a propulsive beat somehow turns what was once an engaging walk into an aimless hike.
In the liner notes for PHONE PHREAKER$ PHREAK BACK, Aberdeen says that when he was young, he got good at computer hacking, but what he was really interested was phone hacking or “phreaking.” He says that “a toy whistle that came in a captain crunch box” produced “a certain frequency that [could] be picked up by payphones to make free calls.” The founders of Apple were also avid phreakers, and received cash to create “blue boxes” that would allow the user to make free phone calls. Steve Jobs actually credits blue boxes for Apple’s existence. What was once a harmless bit of computer fun led to the creation of a multinational conglomerate that not only has the power to evade any sort of regulation, but also the ability to surveil many users of its products. Perhaps Aberdeen is right to distrust the digital. Technology manipulates memory the way it manipulates our data; we may think we are getting a deal because we can shitpost or send messages to faraway friends, but the forms we occupy are as limited as the protections we have over the content we send. Is there another way? Through his music, Aberdeen refuses to format himself in a way that can be easy to consume. If you hack his phone line, you’ll only hear static.

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Casey Veggies desperately wants to create some kind of narrative on his debut studio LP, Live & Grow. There are some catchy pop moments but the project feels weighted down by sampler-platter production and vague, trite lyrics.

Live & Grow

California rapper Casey Veggies desperately wants to create a storyline on his debut studio LP Live & Grow. His father—"Big Joe," a former Jay Z bodyguard—appears on the intro track, "I'm the King", praising his son's mixtape efforts and ability to balance school with his artistic ambitions. He closes out one of his monologues encouragingly stating, "Watch him work," and then Veggies hops in on his verse: "A lot on mind, and I try not to show/ Yeah, that's part of life, you live and you grow/ She suckin' me slow." The lines, among many others on Live & Grow, don't exactly broadcast personal progress, and the presence of Veggies' father only exaggerates the near-comical contrast between the title's stated thesis and the nature of the album.
Still only 22 years old, Veggies' career stretches back to high school when he founded Odd Future with Tyler, the Creator (who appears on and produced "R.I.P."). He's since moved on from OF, released five solo mixtapes, and launched the Peas & Carrots International clothing line. His biography alone demonstrates that Veggies has, in fact, lived and grown. Throughout the album, however, he often shies away from specific details, rendering the title more of a distraction than a mission statement. "New Face$", for example, is about Veggies' journey to fame—a road that inevitably includes many hiccups and fake friends—but he reveals very little about the trip. He offers possible insight ("New foreign chick and she famous/ She cashed me out and we dated"), but quickly abandons the thought in favor of played-out tough talk.
Veggies' vague lyrics are mirrored in the production, which flips between styles like a major label rap album of 10 years ago might. Tyler, DJ Mustard, Iamsu!, Hit-Boy, Top Dawg collaborator THC, and more contribute work, and there are genuine pop moments ("Tied Up", "Wonderful") alongside somber smooth cuts ("Sincerely Casey", "I'm Blessed"). There are even two takes on California's mainstream sounds: hi-hat-slappin' Northern California hyphy ("Backflip") and bassier L.A. post-g-funk ("Actin' Up"). It's a capable roster, but Live & Grow is more of a platter than a platform, and Veggies never gets to settle into a sound he can develop.
He is at his best on the more California cuts. "Backflip", for instance, is an instant earworm. Nonetheless he is still upstaged by YG, who delivers a more vulgar, memorable verse than Veggies by actually addressing the song's female subject. Veggies just speaks for her, and doesn't seem to see her as anything other than an object of his own success. This self-interest, instead of self-examination, comes through further on "Wonderful" and "Tied Up". On those tracks, as on many others, the respective hooks and verses don't relate very much at all. Flat lines like, "I spend every day like it's my birthday," fail to tell us about his lifestyle or to even communicate a mood.
Without any real lyrical flourishes to make his character interesting, the listener is left with Veggies' work at face value. He relies too heavily on end rhymes, doesn't vary his flow often enough, puns too obviously, and regularly leans on cliches. The lack of variation makes more sincere moments, like "Aw Man", difficult to wade through, as well. The song should be the center of his bildungsroman, but when each line is delivered with a near-identical cadence, hashtag lines sound as important as confessionals, minimizing the song's gravity. It's melodic and quite catchy at times, but Live & Grow is less than the sum of those parts. The album's title isn't misleading as much as it is as trite as the music it contains.


Unlike fellow quirky UK songstresses La Roux and Little Boots, Florence Welch moves away from the Lily/Amy template by building her career from the bottom up.

Lungs

More than any of this year's Radio 1-approved UK pop ingenues-- including the likes of electro-bots Little Boots and La Roux-- Florence Welch marks a clear break from the contentious-yet-fruitful Lily vs. Amy era. And that's not only because this self-professed "real geek" is a redhead who'll take harps over horns. Whereas Lily Allen and Amy Winehouse worked their way through the tabloids while breaking down life's troublesome bits into startlingly candid profundity on record, Welch aims for little but the outer reaches on her debut LP, Lungs. Welch hovers high above her native London's seedy back alleys-- and she's looking skyward.
For this glittery free spirit, matters of the heart aren't simple, everyday occurrences-- they're as grand and mysterious as the big bang itself. "The stars, the moon, they have all been blown out/ You left me in the dark," wails Welch on the audaciously huge "Cosmic Love". Lungs is a cloud-headed introduction to Welch's world, where It Girl hype, coffins, violence, and ambition combust on impact; it's a platinum-shellacked demo reel drunk on its own hi-fi-ness.
Instead of giving this gothically pale 22-year-old with megaphone vox some classy pop-soul to work with à la Duffy or Adele, Lungs takes the smorgasbord approach. Welch bursts mouth-wide over garage rock, epic soul, pint-tipping Britbeat, and-- best of all-- a mystic brand of pop that's part Annie Lennox, Grace Slick, and Joanna Newsom. A lesser talent might fall prey to such veering stylistic change-ups (cough, Kate Nash, cough), but Welch powers through, her ear-snapping alarm call of a voice making Lungs sound like the work of a courageous artist rather than a group of well-paid producers. Of course, well-paid producers are still involved-- specifically, James Ford (Simian Mobile Disco, Arctic Monkeys), Paul Epworth (Bloc Party), and Stephen Mackey (Pulp).
Mackey is seemingly responsible for setting-up Welch's rock'n'roll bona fides, chalking up credits for the faux-shock White Stripes rip off "Kiss With a Fist" and the swinging and sinister "Girl With One Eye", which finds the singer in a gouging mood. Meanwhile, Ford and especially Epworth help their would-be star find a more unique sound that-- more often than not-- is overflowing with twinkling harps and breakup language writ large. Welch catapults off of Epworth's immense tribal drums on two of the record's finest, darkest opuses, "Cosmic Love" and the spooky stunner "Blinding". Ford's frothy, orchestrated style compliments Welch's theatrical bent on the swelling "I'm Not Calling You a Liar" and lilting single "Dog Days Are Over". Thanks to Welch's refreshingly immodest talent and vocal abilities, she not only conquers but thrives on the myriad bells and bobs pitched her way by her equally showy producers.
"Seems that I have been held in some dreaming state/ A tourist in the waking world, never quite awake," begins Welch on "Blinding". The song is about Welch's desire to put her girlish dreams away and face reality, but it conjures a place that's frightfully untouchable all the same. When notions of big-budget music become increasingly rare and name-brand artists are giving fans intimate concerts from their bedrooms via YouTube, Florence Welch's zeal for all things bright and/or shiny comes off as its own act of rebel defiance. Coming to her senses isn't an option.


On an adventurous new album, the guitarist blends improvised performance with quixotic touches of found sound.

Me Neither

James Elkington once confessed, “There’s a master plan somebody understands/And I wish that one was me.” And yet, the British-born, Chicago-based guitarist has always played like someone who knows exactly what he’s doing. His penchant for tasteful flourishes have led to collaborations with artists like Jeff Tweedy, Joan Shelley, and Richard Thompson, while his adventurous ear and graceful melodies have benefitted a diverse cast of experimental combos, including Eleventh Dream Day, Tortoise, and Brokeback. But on his solo albums, including 2017’s Wintres Woma and 2020’s Ever-Roving Eye, Elkington has presented himself as a songwriter rooted in the stately mold of classic British folk rock, filling each with songs you could slot alongside the autumnal gold of Pentangle and Fairport Convention.
After the release of Ever-Roving Eye, Elkington envisioned his next album as a collection of solo guitar instrumentals. But as work stretched out, he hit a wall. Narrowing in on his 50th birthday and unsatisfied with his labored over progress, he began to wonder what other territory he might explore, looking to, as he puts it in the biographical notes, “un-paint myself out of the corner I had painted myself into.” So Elkington abandoned the project and started each day by recording a new improvisational piece, letting go of formal composition in favor of looseness and unfiltered ideas drawn from his subconscious. The result is Me Neither, a record that augments Elkington’s winsome folk with quixotic touches of found sound.
Opener “No-Shows” sets the tone with a looping acoustic guitar melody set against chiming bells and resounding echoes that function like ersatz percussion. From there, Elkington layers on washes of fuzzed guitar and noise from a train roaring down the tracks. It’s a fitting welcome into this altered space, like Bert Jansch sitting in with Broadcast. Further surprises roll out in quick succession: the fluctuating waves of static distortion in “A Message for the Janesville Kings”; nearby chatter, gurgling water, and bird song in the jazzy “Look Spectral!”; something that sounds like whirling bicycle spokes on “Cup Cape.” These extra touches create an air of expansiveness, a sense of the world these songs inhabit. The outside finds its way in.
Elsewhere, Elkington employs the more pronounced songwriting that marks his first two solo albums, albeit sans lyrics. “The 100-Faced Magma” and “New Red Masterpiece” are delicate instrumental ballads, evoking the patience of Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, while the title track dips into ambient country expanses, conjuring lonely highways and vast desert expanses, Elkington’s arcing acoustic guitar strums beset by far-off electric guitars that land somewhere between Neil Young and Robert Fripp. Most captivating is a skeletal and spooky reading of ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All.” Sweeping aside the operatic grandeur of the original, Elkington communicates the heartbreak of the lyrics via a single austere guitar line, carefully plucked out and punctuated by breathy pauses. Like so much of Me Neither, it’s over before you expect, a brief but charming moment that vanishes just as you begin to recognize it. As a sideman, Elkington’s prowess has come from his ability to slide into a song and fill it out. With Me Neither, he gets a chance to pull compositions apart. From there, he arranges the fragments into a fascinating and gently kaleidoscopic whole. Following the master plan, it turns out, is overrated.


The Russian duo’s frenetic approach is more techno egg-and-spoon race than tech-house marathon, packed with improbable sounds, intriguing blind alleys, and eyebrow-raising quirks.

Am I Who I Am

The music of Russian producers PTU is a ragtag collage, the gleeful antidote to sensibly beige tech-house or the cynical opportunism of corporate EDM. Originally from the southwestern city of Kazan, the duo of Alina Izolenta and Kamil Ea found wider attention thanks to star DJ Nina Kraviz, who included their track “A Broken Clock Is Right Twice a Day” on her stellar fabric 91 mix. There, its tightly wound mixture of found sound, thumping drums, and kaleidoscopic IDM suggested a brilliantly overactive musical imagination. PTU take no great innovative leaps on Am I Who I Am, their debut album for Kraviz’s трип (Trip) label—rather, they ride roughshod over the usual boundaries. Their idea-rich sound is packed with details borrowed from four decades of electronic music: a breakbeat here, a rave squelch there, and a healthy sprinkling of oddball found sound and jacking-techno vigor.
PTU’s production largely relies on dancefloor fundamentals like galloping BPMs, distorted four-to-the-floor kick drums, and abrasive synths. But in a genre famed for repetition, their hyperactive tracks refuse to sit still. Ideas that would form the backbone of other producers’ EPs are tried, tested, and tossed aside as PTU scramble for new pastures. Their frenetic approach is more techno egg-and-spoon race than tech-house marathon, a crazed trolley dash to EDM’s efficient weekend shop.
The 12 tracks on Am I Who I Am slip by in 45 giddy minutes, with little opportunity for tail-chasing repetition. “I Heard You Breathe” teases a breakbeat that rings tantalisingly out of reach, like the bell of a sunken ship that can be heard only at low tide. “How Does It Feel” drops a jittery jazz sample that lasts just 20 seconds, but its use is telling; like jazz musicians, PTU are improvisers, and their music crackles with the unstable energy of spontaneity. As a result, they tend to move in zigzags. “Skyscript” lurches from straight-ahead four-four beats into a nightmarish coda where an organ drones in anguished stupefaction. “Over” begins with a bouncing Joey Beltram hoover riff, which is then abandoned in favor of moody bass surges and the tinkle of a triangle, before being overtaken by a strangulated vocal chorus. Not until a minute in does the track find its feet, kicking into propulsive techno.
But PTU don’t just have any old ideas. They have great ones, packing Am I Who I Am with improbable sounds, intriguing blind alleys, and eyebrow-raising quirks. The wandering bass line and “Star Trek” door swoosh on “The Pursuit of a Shadow,” the cutlery rattle and chipmunk vocal on “Former Me,” and the ghostly spectre of polyrhythmic rave on “After Cities” are the work of two people in love with electronic sound. And yet this music is the opposite of a functional DJ tool. There’s nothing practical or workman-like about songs like “Over” and “Skyscript”; they are awkward, spiky, and strange, oddities held together by the kinetic energy of imagination.


The electro-pop duo’s first album in five years muses on bodies, blood, and a girl’s coming of age; it benefits from the group’s newfound musical maturity and more exacting editorial eye.

WOMB

Purity Ring have always been obsessed with bodily viscera, with blood and guts and bone. Vocalist Megan James sings of love as a kind of vivisection, pleading with her partner to cut her open, to make a protective cradle of her skeleton. WOMB does not break this pattern, but it narrows the band’s focus to the eponymous organ. The blood they’ve always sung about is now a more specific kind: On “i like the devil,” it stains bedsheets; on “femia,” the narrator wakes “in a sea of dark liquid.” There is a sexual awakening afoot here, but equally, a reckoning with existence in a brand new sort of body. Over the course of these 10 glittering pieces of synth pop, Purity Ring experiment with a conceptual coming-of-age narrative. In each song we meet a young woman, feel her nascent passion and holy shame, and cast our eyes to the horizon as clouds gather, spitting lightning. We fear for her. We wonder if she’ll quell the storm or find herself swept away in it.
By pure coincidence, I’d recently picked up Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex as a quarantine project. It can be a jarring read; for every piece of timeless insight, there is some startling mid-century slap in the face, something like, “Some women become homosexual after the trauma of abortion.” But listening to WOMB, I could think of nothing but de Beauvoir’s portrait of a young girl on the cusp of her first period, who feels “danger in her insides” and struggles to imagine herself the equal of the coming crisis. “She is surprised,” writes Beauvoir, “to be both that heroine and that flesh.” WOMB’s protagonists are bleeding, yes, but they are growing powerful, too: wreaking carnage, learning to fly.
Taken together, WOMB’s songs begin to suggest the outline of a singular character: a girl coming to see herself as heroic, capable of rising to the challenges of her new body and her new role in the world, and subsumed by the weight of what that entails. Violence is abundant in these lyrics: cannibalism, death by drowning, blood coursing Shining-like through hallways. Corin Roddick’s production is no longer crystalline and clear, as it was on another eternity, but grittier and stormier, synths surging like the sea. The sleigh bells of “peacefall” become funereal, tolling as James sings of someone who rode a “bicycle into the light.” (She delivers the line so prettily you’d be forgiven for fondly imagining a scene from E.T. before the more tragic, literal interpretation arrives.) A gasp like an iron lung opens “vehemence,” foreboding bass bellows across “i like the devil,” and minor-key arrangements abound. If Purity Ring ever decide to launch a second career scoring horror films, WOMB would make for a compelling resumé.
WOMB is some of Purity Ring’s strongest work, a confident and singular statement from a band often imitated over the past decade. James’ voice often sounds high and fluty, like a girl’s, save for a single verse, on “pink lightning,” where it is manipulated in the opposite direction—belly-deep, guttural, for once the monster instead of the damsel. It is a provocative moment on a record that imagines a young girl in flux, a heroine coming to grips with flesh.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this review inaccurately suggested that James’ voice had been digitally manipulated to sound higher. In fact, it was only pitch-shifted to a lower register.


Assisted by Steve Albini, the Australian-born, Iceland-based electronic musician summons a gargantuan, apocalyptic din—one that is occasionally tripped up by its own bombast.

Threshold of Faith

Threshold of Faith, the new EP from the Australian-born, Iceland-based composer Ben Frost, opens with a cheeky bit of studio debris. Before slamming you with exquisitely rendered kick drums and buzzing, synthetic avalanches, we hear something more quotidian: an engineer (presumably Steve Albini, who recorded Threshold), letting Frost know that “we’re rolling.” Like the four clicks from the drummer or a count-in caught on a room mic, this bit of ephemera is the type of thing one encounters on countless rock records, often left in as a point of scrappy pride. One does not expect it from Frost, though, an artist whose reputation rests on his immaculate, austere touch.
It’s an interesting moment—you might not assume this music was even recorded in a studio, much less with microphones. Frost’s textures live on the cutting edge of the digital, often overlapping with the gargantuan palettes so popular in our post-Michael Bay Hollywood. Taken at face value, Threshold sounds like it could exist entirely in the computer, an object expertly constructed in the endless world of software automation. But when you consider his obsession with the physicality of sound, its presence, depth, and force, the pairing with Albini makes sense. Both as an engineer and a musician, Albini is an icon for a type of inscrutable purity, as arresting as it is emotionally cooled. Ben Frost fans here may nod their heads in recognition.
Once the music begins, though, it’s impossible to discern, or even care, how it was made. Frost has a knack for grabbing attention, and you can’t ignore the lurching assault of the opening title track, which heaves, crumbles, and explodes with enough bravado to soundtrack the apocalypse. I couldn’t help but be reminded of [this infamous Godzilla trailer recut with a Wolf Eyes song; Frost would sound great in a monster movie. But as the piece unfolds, new layers emerge. Over six-and-a-half minutes, “Threshold of Faith” descends into its own storm, moving from heroic vistas into a garbled, snow-blinded melee. Distant choral pads, a glistening upper-register sheen, submerged piano, and groaning harmonies all stack up into a geologic crescendo that extends into infinity. “Eurydice’s Heel” continues this mood by trimming some layers and opening up space. The recurring bass dives call back to Jóhann Jóhannsson’s soundtrack for Sicario, while the cavernous drones on top could have been made in collaboration with Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
Both that group and that soundtrack share with Frost a tendency for bombast, however: a humorless view of the world that risks veering into deflating self-seriousness. Throughout Threshold, Frost continually brushes against this barrier. Whether scrambled or restrained, there’s a preciousness and an egoism here that’s difficult to shake. As impressive as Frost’s music is, he seems always a bit too eager to impress, a sure turn-off. It’s less a matter of the parts Frost writes, which are often lovely and/or awesomely grand, and more in the way he frames them. The atmosphere that this music breathes feels finessed to the point of airlessness: The dulcimer plucks of “Threshold of Faith (Your Own Blood)” merge into a sustained mass that practically insists on awe, while “All That You Love Will Be Eviscerated - Albini Swing Version” bathes in high-end reverb trails and pregnant pauses which feel strangely unearned (the titles don’t help). We hear exactly who Ben Frost wants us to think he is but get precious little view of the man behind the persona.
This doesn’t mean it’s all for naught—“The Beat Don’t Die in Bingo Town” is a tasty 2:36 of fluttering exhaust, the kind of beauty-in-decay detritus that Arca expertly wove on Mutant. “Mere Anarchy” uses wounded pitch bending and rich, simple chords to close things out on a more open-ended tone. Nonetheless, for all its hubbub, Threshold of Faith feels oddly hollow, a work by hemmed in by its own presumptions of importance.


The Oakland rapper’s new EP slows her throwback 1990s jams to a leisurely West Coast pace.

Keep It Lit EP

Almost two decades into their career, an artist might get the itch to reinvent themselves with an alter ego, a genre left turn, or a drastic makeover. Not Kamaiyah. On her second EP this year, the Oakland rapper cruises on the synthy ’90s R&B sound she’s fine-tuned from the tender age of 9. Why mess with a classic recipe? “This some real Maxwell Park, uptown Bay boy Bay girl shit,” she announces in the opener. Kamaiyah has flirted with mainstream status in recent years, ultimately opting for timeless old-school production over the latest stylistic craze. Thematically Keep It Lit is reminiscent of her 2016 debut, the dynamic hometown tribute A Good Night in the Ghetto, if it were edited to fit a Sunday morning radio hour.
As if reclining in a drop-top with velvet seats, Keep It Lit moves at a West Coast pace. Aware of adversaries who “run their mouths like water,” she flicks them away like flies descending on her lobster plate—fighting back a chuckle in her charming Oakland drawl. Beyoncé proclaimed “best revenge is your paper”; Kamaiyah makes a case for blissful leisure as a contender. The laidback tone induces a highway hypnosis effect that threatens to make the EP’s first half sound like a single nine-minute song. Instead of captivating wordplay, she repeats “keep it litty litty” throughout as a sort of failed incantation. Just as the hazy pianos and 808s start to feel lethargic, Mistah F.A.B.’s antique slang and comical intonation jolts you awake: “Gee willikers, jiminy crickets, and them shenanigans.”
Though the EP often feels like producer Blakkat searched up “1990s backyard barbeque type beat,” Kamaiyah’s percussive vocals add texture and bounce. She strikes gold when she melds her Too $hort-like bars with melody-driven R&B croons. A devout fan of the S.O.S. Band, TLC, and the Temptations, her smooth vocals offset lackluster lyrics. In Kamaiyah’s throat, even a simple “mhm” morphs from a filler word to a soulful affirmation. “I’m young, Black, fine, and wealthy,” she attests on “Know the Vibes.” You truly will be tempted to roll your window down and scream it during rush hour. The EP’s catchiest refrain, however, belongs to Mac Dre’s 2002 track “Dollalalala Lotsa Paypa,” which Kamaiyah interpolates on “The Mac.” Slowing the frenetic chorus makes the song sound like a slow + reverbed cover, but her silky voice redeems the track.
“I don’t feel like I learn from the new people. I feel like the old people, if you study them, you’re legendary,” Kamaiyah told Los Angeles’ Power 106 in 2019. This resistance to changing with the times manifests in the stagnancy of this record: Even when the instrumental is original, it feels borrowed. Supremely influenced by the ’90s, even calling 2Pac her father, Kamaiyah is well aware of her debt to the aesthetic that helped her earn prominence in her early 20s. Trapped in its amber, her own ideas are engulfed in homage.


Cardi B’s remarkable debut places her, without a doubt, in the pantheon of great rappers. It is both brazen and vulnerable, filled with wild amounts of personality, style, and craft.

Invasion of Privacy

Cardi B is the new American Dream. Her rags-to-riches story is a product of living life out in the open, the answer to the question of how to be famous in the modern age. The Bronx-born MC parlayed a stripping residency into a social media empire before landing on reality TV, where she soaked up the spotlight as an aspiring artist making the most of her face time. After taking her official rapper turn with a pair of mixtapes, she broke out with the world-conquering “Bodak Yellow.” It’s an open secret that strip clubs are a cultural hub in rap, and that strippers are often among the best rap A&Rs, and Cardi pairs that same intuition with punchy barbs. And yet there are still those who deny her obvious talent, who regard her success so far as a fluke—led by the close-minded few who still refuse to give a woman her due in rap.
Invasion of Privacy is an emphatic response to those skeptics. The album is showy and upfront, at once brazen and vulnerable. On her assured and outspoken debut, Cardi shuffles from pop-rap to designer trap to sing-song ballads and strutting promenades. She is rap’s answer to Tiffany Haddish: funny, curious, and absorbing. Cardi’s rants can be as biting as they are mesmerizing, as much an invasion of your space as they are an immersion into her world.
Forged in the same fires that wrought Meek Mill’s “Dreams and Nightmares” intro, the explosive “Get Up 10” sets the tone. The take-no-prisoners screed is an opening salvo of epic proportions, lining up foes to drop them, digging a stiletto heel into the throats of her challengers. Cardi raps with fire and force, a born star who's grown accustomed to being told to dim her light for the sake of others. Each new triumph rejects such a ridiculous premise, and each naysayer has seemingly only granted her more power.
Cardi is a great talker, but her voice itself is its own instrument. It wraps around each word; her accent and inflections forge each syllable into a snap, making every utterance feel novel. She wields her voice like a weapon, and she can make even the mundane seem glamorous with a particularly choice phrasing. This specific economy of language is the core of her appeal, and every verse is imbued with its impact. Some punchlines are laugh-out-loud funny, others are immensely clever. A few are both. “Write a verse while I twerk, I wear Off-White at church/Prolly make the preacher sweat/Read the Bible, Jesus wept,” she raps on “She Bad.” Cardi finds the soft center of a complex idea and then presents it in the most direct way possible.
Her writing is often convincingly diametrical: She is one thing and her beau/hater/adversary is another, but it’s the relationship between those two things that conjures the imagery: “This that collard greens, cornbread, neck bone, back fat/Get it from my mama, and you don’t know where your daddy at.” Her practiced abrasiveness is a defense mechanism constructed over time, so when she raps things like, “’Fore I fixed my teeth, man, those comments used to kill me/But never did I change, never been ashamed,” she’s showing you the inside of her armor.
In addition to honing her natural tendency toward pithiness, Cardi is becoming a complete MC. She plays clever word association games like mixtape Lil Wayne (“I came here to ball, is you nuts?”) and finds her place among New York’s more dynamic and prolific punchers like Cam’ron and Jadakiss. Cardi is quickly improving as a technician, closing the gaps in her writing and tightening up her flows. Even more impressive than her sharpened rap skills, though, is her rapidly expanding range.
On Invasion of Privacy, Cardi emerges as a first-rate song-maker, crafting mousy indictments and cautionary tales as easily as club gyrators and flex anthems. She effortlessly covers quite a bit of ground, dressing down no-good boyfriends, considering her come-up from pissy elevators to walking red carpets in tailored gowns, or rallying twerkers everywhere to spontaneously pussy pop for guap. She raps with the transparency of someone who has shared the ugliest aspects of her life with strangers online, but her songs now have the curatorial instincts of a specialized Instagram feed. The Chance the Rapper-assisted “Best Life” rehashes early career controversies and remixes an iconic Tupac poem into an origin story. “Be Careful” fires warning shots for a cheating boyfriend. Amid the larger-than-life showboating on “Money Bag”—where she, among many other things, parks a Bentley truck in a Versace driveway—Cardi lets slip the lingering effects of poverty: “I been broke my whole life, I have no clue what to do with these racks.” Everyone dreams of a life on top, but there’s no guidebook for how to handle it when you get there.
If there was ever any pressure to live up to “Bodak,” though, Cardi never shows it. Instead, she takes every opportunity to force-feed her doubters crow. “I like proving niggas wrong, I do what they say I can’t,” she raps gleefully on “I Like It,” as she flips boogaloo into Latin trap. Cardi’s raps have always exuded confidence and charm, but with Invasion of Privacy she seizes her seat on the rap throne through punishing, unrelenting taunts. She’s fully self-aware and seemingly unstoppable. “The coupe is roofless, but I get top in it/I’m provocative, it’s my prerogative/80K just to know what time is it/Cardi rockin’ it, go buy stock in it,” she proposes on “I Do,” a freeing Murda Beatz-produced closer with SZA that champions independence. She exceeds her hype and does so casually.
The production on the album is sumptuous and varying. A record daring enough to produce the buzzing “Bartier Cardi,” the R&B-infused “Ring,” and the quiet prowler “Thru Your Phone,” Invasion of Privacy never shrinks away from a potential risk, delivering hugely satisfying payoffs. With Latin trap sensation Bad Bunny and reggaeton star J Balvin in tow on “I Like It,” Cardi reworks Pete Rodriguez’s classic into a cross-cultural block party, bilingual and welcoming. Similarly, the Project Pat-sampling “Bickenhead” reimagines the original as a get-money anthem, leaning into the same inflections and cadences, but with a female-focused Cardi spin.
“I started winning when the whole world was doubting on me! Think imma lose with my little baby counting on me?” she tweeted after she revealed she was pregnant on last week’s “Saturday Night Live.” It’s a bar that could’ve easily found a home on this album. Invasion of Privacy embodies that tenacity and that relentlessness; plainspoken and raw, with just enough polish. Such a fighter’s spirit is endearing, and, to a certain extent, galvanizing. She took an unconventional path to get here, and yet everything seems to be going according to plan. Cardi never had any interest in converting her haters to fans; she’d rather just show them all up, and her debut is her greatest and grandest kiss-off yet. Bet against her at your own peril.


After snagging everyone’s ear on Kendrick’s “LOVE.,” the 22-year-old TDE signee Zacari struggles to hold our attention.

Run Wild Run Free

Before 22-year-old singer/songwriter/saxophonist Zacari Pacaldo was a Kendrick Lamar collaborator and Top Dawg Entertainment signee, he was a fishing guide. Right after graduating high school, the California native started working summers at Alaska’s Katmai National Park so he could afford to attend Musicians Institute’s certificate program in Los Angeles, eventually becoming a fly-fishing, bear-tracking outdoorsman. But back in L.A., Zacari’s music career was popping off, and by 2016, he was already contributing vocals on tracks for TDE heavies like Isaiah Rashad, Kendrick Lamar, and Ab-Soul. The following year, when Zacari ended up on Kendrick’s heartfelt DAMN. track, “LOVE.,” his tender falsetto brightening up the otherwise grim album, people were clamoring to find out more about the relatively unknown artist.
Now two years after his DAMN. breakout, Zacari has finally unveiled his debut Run Wild Run Free EP, a project he says is indebted to his time spent in nature. “A lot of the sounds and tones are drawn from my experiences in Alaska,” he explained. “I want the project to feel like a breath of fresh air.” It’s a concept that’s already been broached in the pop sphere by Pharrell protégée Maggie Rogers, whose viral hit “Alaska” is buoyed by lilting drums and carefully placed samples collected during her own cathartic visit to the state. Throughout Run Wild Run Free, Zacari tries to establish the same feeling of clarity and weightlessness. But ultimately, Zacari’s EP is too burdened with clumsy songwriting and bad advice.
Zacari’s songs are riddled with the kind of empty platitudes that would be posted up on a “inspirational” Pinterest board. On “Lone Wolf,” Zacari repeats the provocative line, “If I didn’t know myself, I’d be alone,” over and over again, but fails to explore the idea in depth and instead boasts about owning Gucci loafers. On the title track, his voice wavers like he’s trying to emulate the vulnerability of “Rich & Sad” king Post Malone: “Yeah, I'm an animal, yeah, I'm radical/Yeah, sign of the horns up, I'm radical.” Zacari just ends up sounding like a floundering rapper who can’t think of a different word to rhyme with in a freestyle.
“Young and Invincible,” featuring Lil Yachty, is equally cringe-worthy. Zacari offers a Nickelodeon-dad vision of rebellious young people: “Riding around the town, bumping our music loud/Emptying bank accounts.” As if the song couldn’t get more anti-establishmentarian-lite, a voice that sounds like it’s yelling over the intercom announces, “Will Lil Yachty please come to the principal’s office.” This gag might have worked when Yachty was still the king of teens (he turned 21 in August), and if he sounded like he had an ounce of commitment to his goofball class clown character. “Don’t listen to the rules,” he sings in a dour, Eeyore-ish voice. And then when he finally gets to the mic-drop moment, he sheepishly offers “Fuck Trump, get rich,” his words trailing off like he couldn’t wait two more seconds to run out of the recording booth.
Zacari’s songwriting has occasional bright moments. He’s most successful when he intentionally employs repetition. On “Don’t Trip,” the hook quite simply goes: “Whatchu trippin’ on, trippin’ on, trippin’ on me for?” But the chugging hook mimics the rhythm of cyclical arguments he describes, while the hazy groove soothes the friction generated by his lyrics. It’s a respite.
The closest that Zacari gets to recreating the magic of Kendrick’s “LOVE.” is on “Ten Out of Ten.” His agile, sentimental falsetto is heartfelt, the tender background vocals pooling up against rugged drums and intermittent found samples. But Zacari kills the romance with clunky lines like, “Top of the morning/She gives me top in the morning,” immediately followed by a incongruously gorgeous vocal run. It’s a common failing of “sad” pop stars like Khalid and Billie Eilish, prioritizing a captivating mood ahead of the lyrics. On “LOVE.,” Zacari proved that he could establish a vibe. With his debut EP, he’s yet to show that he’s capable of much more.


On his 12th studio album, Steve Earle bids a final farewell to Guitar Town-- his nickname for Nashville and the title of his infamous 1986 debut-- and celebrates his move to the decidedly un-country town of New York City.

Washington Square Serenade

On his 12th studio album, Steve Earle bids a final farewell to Guitar Town-- his nickname for Nashville and the title of his infamous 1986 debut. Very literally bids farewell: On the opening track, "Tennessee Blues", Earle sings, "Won't be back no more, boss, you won't see me around. Goodbye, Guitar Town." The song chronicles his move from Nashville, where he launched, wrecked, and rebuilt his career, to the decidedly un-country town of New York City, a change that surely would wreck most careers in a business that equates the rural with roots and the urban with uppitiness. But Earle long ago shed any concern for Guitar Town's unwritten rules and continues to define himself as everything the establishment is not: He's a singer and a songwriter, an avowed liberal who plays prison shows and campaigned heartily against Bush, and-- perhaps most impressively-- a rehabbed artist who wrote himself a second career chapter that was even stronger than the first.
So his move to Clinton Country doesn't seem too far-fetched. Hell, it almost seems inevitable. Besides, he really, really likes New York. Washington Square Serenade, in addition to taking its title from a Greenwich Village park, contains not one but two paeans to the Big Apple and its people: "Down Here Below", about the divide between the haves in their skyscrapers and the have-nots on the subway, and "City of Immigrants", which features local Brazilian group Forro in the Dark. On every song the city's influence can be heard, whether in a stanza about Joe Mitchell or in the clangorous percussion that mimics the sound of a busy street.
But does New York City love Steve Earle back? His municipal muse seems to have led him into downtown traffic: Despite his transparent inspiration, Washington Square Serenade turns out to be his weakest collection of the 00s, which is saying a lot considering his last two lackluster albums. Those two odes to the local underclass are two of the worst offenders. On "Down Here Below" Earle speaks the verses like he's at an East Village open-mic night, and the effect is so grating it makes the sung chorus seem like an oasis, even if it does sound like it's been sutured in from another song. Earle takes a different tack on "City of Immigrants", inviting Forro in the Dark to provide backing vocals over vaguely ethnic city rhythms. With ludicrous lyrics like "City of bone/ City of skin/ City of pain/ City of immigrants", the song presents a redundantly romanticized view of the city and its multicultural communities. When Forro in the Dark start singing "We are all immigrants" over Earle's vocal countermelody, the song transcends the self-righteous and achieves the ridiculous.
The rest of Washington Square Serenade ranges from good ("Days Aren't Long Enough", a duet with wife Allison Moorer) to merely serviceable ("Red Is the Color"). Disappointingly, the closing cover of Tom Waits's "Way Down in the Hole" (better known as the theme to The Wire, which features Earle in a small recurring role) sounds slick rather than haunted, especially compared to versions by the Blind Boys of Alabama (Season 1), Waits himself (Season 2), and the Neville Brothers (Season 3). Listen for Earle's version on Season 5.
Earle gives a decent performance on "Way Down in the Hole", but what makes his version nearly unlistenable-- and what ultimately sinks this album-- is the production by John King. The former Dust Brother fits most of these songs with a matte surface and programmed beats that sound instantly dated (in fact, they keep reminding me of Billy Bob Thornton's atrocious cover of "Ring of Fire", a comparison no artist should ever court). On softer songs like "Come Home to Me", these beats distract from Earle's simple sentiments, and on faster songs like "Down Here Below", the banjo-and-beats breakdowns can be laughable. Worse, they clash against Earle's rough-edged voice and the mostly acoustic instruments and live drums on "Jericho Road" and "Steve's Hammer (For Pete)", two of the album's best tracks. Ultimately, these beats are a very obvious means of evoking an urban hubbub, as stale as calling New York "the city that never sleeps"-- which he actually does. It's just another wrong turn that gets Earle even more lost in the big city.


On their first official duo project, longtime collaborators Kedr Livanskiy and Flaty trade their customary dance influences for atmospheric dream pop steeped in folk, goth, and trip-hop.

Kosaya Gora / Kedr Livanskiy / Flaty: Kosogor

Kosogor

Across nearly a decade under the alias Kedr Livanskiy, Moscow’s Yana Kedrina developed a dark, ethereal style of techno and electro pop on records like Ariadna and Your Need. With 2021’s minimalist Liminal Soul, her music turned colder, further whetting the hard edges of her outsider house. But Kosaya Gora, Kedrina’s new duo project with longtime collaborator Flaty—an IDM-inspired beatmaker and member of the GOST ZVUK crew who contributed mixing and production to Your Need and Liminal Soul—marks a sharp break from either artist’s previous work. Kosogor delves into haunting guitar-driven dream pop, at once dreamily distant and deeply intimate. Kedrina transitions seamlessly from dance music, setting her voice against a gloomy, atmospheric backdrop.
Recorded on a mobile setup in remote Russian villages, Kosogor’s moody soundscapes are simple and soaked in reverb, evoking an imagistic, Dean Blunt-like. Elements of trip-hop and goth, and even hints of their techno backgrounds, flesh out a sound steeped in dark folk. Kedrina conjures hazy images of motorcycles and demigods and baptism in the forest; she croons across the ambient pop of “Empty Realm” in an invented elvish dialect, and on “Dorogi Freestyle,” she sings from the perspective of a god-like figure “come down to earth from high.” Her rural fantasies play out like modern-day myths whose subjects feel just out of focus.
The album shines when it focuses on Kedrina’s voice, no longer an accessory to a beat but an essential part of the storytelling itself. “V Pole Na Vole” is Kosogor’s highlight; Kedrina’s voice is powerful yet at times vulnerably imperfect, ringing wistfully over a beat that calls back to her electronic roots. The music exists in a liminal space, playing with immateriality in both form and lyrics. “We forgot those words/That we wrote on the sand/They were carried away by a wave a long time ago,” Kedrina sings on “Muzika Yoln.” Some songs, like “Empty Realm” feel deliberately thin and incomplete; the simple “Voy Veter” sounds like something heard in a dream and forgotten upon waking. This haunting atmosphere generally works in Kosogor’s favor, but not always—the grinding trip-hop of “Motorcyclists Die” feels more directionless than psychedelic, and lo-fi closer “Milly” is pretty, but peters out without a sense of conclusion.
Kosaya Gora doesn’t mark a complete break with Kedrina’s previous work; it maintains the same dreamy repetition, hypnagogic pop influences, and reverent loneliness, but Kosogor’s sparseness feels like she’s zeroing in on something more personal, however blurrily.


The synth-pop soloist recaptures the moody appeal of his earliest releases on this low-stakes collection of covers.

I Must Be Living Twice EP

Black Marble has flourished by returning repeatedly to the sacred well of synth-pop. It’s Immaterial, the 2016 second album from Chris Stewart’s duo-turned-solo-project, drank deep from all-timers like New Order and footnotes like Iron Curtain, securing a place in the canon by excelling within established standards: vintage synths, melodic basslines, liberal reverb, melancholic undertones. Last year’s Bigger Than Life, though, did little to advance on that template except by cleaning it up, rendering Stewart’s music sparkly and bright without developing his songwriting accordingly.
Seeming to sense that something went awry, Stewart attempts a reset with I Must Be Living Twice, a new all-covers EP. Some of the covers, which include songs by Wire, Grouper, and Lives of Angels, are Black Marble live staples, and Stewart has said that the EP exists mainly to get his versions onto tape. Despite the low stakes, or perhaps because of them, I Must Be Living Twice sounds like Black Marble rewiring itself back to what worked in the middle of the decade. Its lo-fi approach infuses the covers with the familiar charm of his early albums, making the EP a satisfying release, if a minor one.
Most of the tracks fit neatly within the Black Marble sound. Stewart adds fluttering arpeggiated synths to “Johnny and Mary,” Robert Palmer’s 1980 synth-pop classic, but largely echoes Palmer’s plaintive vocal performance. His approach is less distinct than that of Todd Terje and Bryan Ferry, who put their sublime twist on “Johnny and Mary” six years ago, slowing the tempo to a crawl, with Ferry’s decadent rasp making Palmer sound upbeat by comparison. Still, there’s room for all three versions: Palmer’s original is for the club, Terje and Ferry’s cover is for the bedroom, and Black Marble’s take is for the wistful loner, staring out the window at sheets of rain.
Other choices are more questionable. It’s a fool’s errand to cover “Emma’s House,” The Field Mice’s debut single, an already-perfect twee-pop anthem. Stewart, with a toylike synth patch subbing in for the original’s acoustic guitar, creates an even quainter version of a song that embodies the bookish introspection of the Sarah Records and C86 sound. A softer, twinklier take on “Emma’s House” seems beyond parody; it already requires a knitted sweater and a piping hot cup of Earl Grey for full enjoyment.
The first few years of Black Marble were special thanks to Stewart’s ability to transcend artifice and goth posturing with fantastic hooks and inventive arrangements. Though he’s not working with original compositions here, he does seem to have regained his sense of the sonics that complement his music best. There’s nothing revolutionary or essential about this collection of mostly safe crowd-pleasers. But as Stewart reloads before the next album cycle, those enraptured by Black Marble’s moody soundscapes will enjoy his return to form.

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Tough, upfront, and often bruisingly physical, Fog FM is the New York producer’s most substantial piece of work by a considerable margin.

Fog FM

American house and techno are in a remarkably good place right now. The underground is thriving, bolstered by a network of labels, club nights, warehouse parties, and off-the-beaten-path festivals, all with a staunchly independent spirit that’s a world away from the high-flying, big-ticket milieu of commercial dance music. It’s an especially welcome development given that house and techno’s well-defined parameters, combined with a retro-fetishizing reverence for the past, have sometimes left the music feeling cautious and conservative. But a new generation of artists is finding ways to tweak familiar templates, carving a zig-zag path between respect for their predecessors and a determination to do things their own way.
Within this cohort, Anthony Naples is becoming something like an elder statesman (in relative terms, anyway). The New York electronic musician broke through in 2012, at just 21 years old, on the strength of “Mad Disrespect,” his debut single—in fact, the very first production he ever completed. The resulting flurry of interest yielded a remix for Four Tet and EPs on European labels like The Trilogy Tapes and Rubadub before culminating in a debut LP, in 2015, for Four Tet’s Text imprint. Over the years, Naples has continued to build out his rough-around-the-edges approach, balancing unvarnished sonics with canny dancefloor instincts. Resident Advisor’s Jordan Rothlein called Naples’ debut “not revolutionary so much as perfectly suited for its context,” which could also describe his approach in general. He’s primarily a craftsman, rather than a shredder of rule books. And on his third album, both his instincts and his technique are in top form.
Naples’ albums have largely skirted club fare: Body Pill balanced its dancefloor cuts with slow-motion studies for scratchy samples and overdriven machines; last year’s Take Me With You, for the psychedelically inclined Good Morning Tapes label, was an expression of honeyed ambient bliss. But Fog FM is techno through and through. Contrary to the album’s name, virtually everything here, save for two beatless palette cleansers, is tough, upfront, and often bruisingly physical. Burly sub-bass tugs at the lower limits of your perception; intricate drum patterns are carved out of compressed white noise. Naples layers competing rhythms in ways that create friction and throw off sparks; the atmosphere is frequently nervous, turbulent, suffused with clattering sounds that are all the more menacing for the fact that you can’t quite make out what they are or where they come from.
Fog FM goes plenty deep, too. That’s immediately apparent on songs like the title track and “Lucy’s,” which avail themselves of the resonant chords of dub techno, one of dance music’s most inviting forms. Intimations of depth also play out in less obvious ways; there is always more here than meets the ear. In “Unhygenix,” a highlight of the album’s back half, a skipping, hissing groove reminiscent of Thomas Melchior’s blissed-out minimal house bounces away against a shimmering backdrop. Even the heaviest tracks have an unusually enveloping quality. “Benefit” is caressed by dissonant squeals that twist like tendrils of guitar feedback, until, two-thirds of the way through its eight-minute run, a cooling synthesizer progression is applied like a balm, taking the edge off.
At more than an hour long, Fog FM is Naples’ most substantial piece of work by a considerable margin, but his insistence on wringing his grooves for all they’re worth keeps the album engaging as a front-to-back listen in a way that isn’t true of most techno long-players. In fact, the slipperiness of his arrangements plays out across the album itself: It’s the rare dance full-length that foregrounds its heaviest cuts and then gradually leans back and loosens up.

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Promising Brit-folk singer/songwriter finally has her Mercury Prize-nominated Alas, I Cannot Swim-- recorded when she was just 17-- issued in the U.S.

Alas, I Cannot Swim

The fact that bracing Brit-folk singer/songwriter Laura Marling was just 17 when she recorded the Mercury Prize-nominated Alas, I Cannot Swim has become every much the bit of biographical shorthand as mentioning Lily Allen's famous dad or Robyn's late-90s U.S. stardom. It may seem at first unfair given how many pubescent rockers come down the pike, but artists who mine a folkier, more personal vein, like Marling or Conor Oberst or Patrick Wolf, do tend to open themselves up to greater scrutiny-- yet are also more readily rewarded with touts of prodigal genius. Such clearly heard, lyric-driven music almost can't help but assume an aim towards profundity regardless of its actual goals. When such striving stumbles, we call it "precociousness" and assume the neophyte will continue to hone his or her introspective powers with each passing year. But is this always a good thing, to encourage a young artist of deep feeling to continue burrowing more deeply?
The thing I worry about with Marling is that she's already being heralded for evincing wisdom beyond her years-- what happens when the years catch up? Will she feel compelled to keep turning more and more starkly inward, and sacrifice her charm in the process? Lyrically, Alas is a sober document, but its best songs don't demand an abundance of explication or poetics to work their sad-eyed magic. Liking Marling best when she keeps things at the level of teenage romance may sound reductive, but young love is one of pop's bedrocks, and clearly the young songstress can tap into reservoirs of immediacy that a team of balding middle-aged guys crafting expert teen-pop chart-toppers can't as easily manage.
As a vocalist Marling may evoke the grown-up weariness of Beth Orton, but the superior first half of Alas is consumed with depictions of decidedly youthful ardor, whether it's the young man in "Ghosts" who "went crazy at 19" from his inability to escape the memory of past loves, or the general teenage fatalism conveyed in "Old Stone" and its refrain, "10,000 years and you're still on your own." Marling flashes wit in "Failure" in her realization that a once-worshipped rock singer's "songs were pathetic," and the accompanying music of the album's first act admirably matches her heart's cynical but still intense effusions, whether it be the tense gallop of "Ghosts", the swelling melancholy strings of "Tap at My Window" or the genuine electric momentum of "You're No God".
Almost perceptibly "maturing" before our ears, however, Marling spends much of the record's second half mired in vague symbolism and unfortunate logorrhea, with her music frequently seeming to grind to a halt from the strain. That's not to say Marling lacks the facility to put across complex thoughts and feelings, only that she needn't confuse wordiness with depth, which is just the sort of thinking that leads to groaners like "the gods that he believes never fail to amaze me" or "the sky and I, we've had our fights, and I'm coming 'round to rain," which damn near ruins the otherwise lovely and gripping "The Captain and the Hourglass".
It was a mistake for Marling not to find a place on Alas for "New Romantic", a song from an earlier EP that ended up lending two thoroughly inferior tracks to her debut long-player. Instead of the gothic stiltedness of "Night Terror" (which has nothing to do with cobras, sorry), "New Romantic" finds Marling bemoaning her "lonesome gait," but also worrying about things like being thin and turning into her mother in far more pragmatic terms while reminding us (and herself) that "I'm still pretty young." Hopefully, 90s baby Marling will remember there's nothing wrong with this assertion for at least a good little while.


On the group’s fourth album, carefully controlled minimalism gives way to a playful expressionistic streak, suggesting a utopian balance between social harmony and personal freedom.

Comradely Objects

It makes a certain sense that three of Horse Lords’ four members would decamp from Baltimore to Germany. Their relentlessly repetitive instrumentals owe an obvious debt to the West German art-rock bands of the 1970s, especially Neu! Beyond that surface-level similarity, they have a predilection for the formalized systems and brute functionality that govern all sorts of 20th century-German art: from the serialism of composers like Anton Webern, who ordered his seemingly chaotic miniatures according to extraordinarily precise rules, to the minimalism of designers like Walter Gropius, who taught a generation of followers that form should always follow function. Horse Lords, whose albums are filled with joyous and hypnotic grooves, aren’t nearly as difficult as Webern, or quite as spartan as Gropius. But like those two, they make art in which things happen for a reason. When they shift from one polyrhythm to another, it’s clear that some logic is at work, even if you can’t always apprehend its mechanics.
Yet they have a playful expressionistic streak as well, which has never been more pronounced than on Comradely Objects, their fourth album, recorded just before the transcontinental move. Take “May Brigade,” which begins in typical Horse Lords fashion. The bass, drums, guitar, and saxophone all sound like they could be playing in different meters, each offering a different short and simple ostinato. Somehow, the disarray coheres. You can marvel at the ingenious ways in which the lines bolster and accent each other, fitting like boards in an elaborate parquet floor. Or you can simply coast along on the rhythm they create together. This is what Horse Lords’ music does; the system is working as it should.
Then comes the rupture. Andrew Bernstein’s sax gets caught in a stuttering fit, breaking away from the rigid rhythmic grid. Soon he is full-on wailing, in free-jazz mode, conveying feral individual abandon instead of precise communitarian discipline. Owen Gardner follows suit, his guitar going from choked post-punk staccato to full-throated Pete Cosey psychedelia. Through these outbursts, the rhythm section keeps its cool, dutifully engineering modifications to the same restrained groove that opened the piece. On The Common Task, their previous album, Horse Lords began more overtly hinting at these tensions: between chaos and control, the expression of the individual and the community of the ensemble. They come to an apex on Comradely Objects. The effect is like a paint splatter across a sheet of graph paper.
The presence of a bona fide instrumental solo is an admittedly minor variation of the Horse Lords approach, but their music is all about minor variation, from measure to measure and album to album. Listeners who have struggled to appreciate previous releases will hear more of the same in Comradely Objects. Those who are attuned, who find that the band’s smallest pivots can induce a feeling approaching euphoria, will encounter the album as a carnival of delights. With guitar bouncing antically from one stereo channel to the other and an acid-house synth bassline that threatens to swallow the other instrumental tracks whole, “Mess Mend” would murder the right dancefloor, perhaps the first track of its kind for a band more likely to induce thinking about moving your body than actually doing it. “Zero Degree Machine” likewise indulges heartily in visceral pleasure, culminating with a guitar riff that’s like Mdou Moctar and Thin Lizzy meeting on the surface of a scratched and skipping CD.
Like the original krautrock bands, who often positioned their music as a liberation from the previous generation’s fascism, or a model for a utopian future, Horse Lords present theirs in expressly political terms. For a sympathetic listener, it’s possible to hear Comradely Objects as a catalog of ideal societies in miniature, with each voice working to support the others without losing the freedom of its own idiosyncrasy. Freedom only strengthens solidarity, and vice versa; neither ideal can exist without the other. Even “Plain Hunt on Four,” the Comradely Objects track that swings furthest toward rigorous collectivism, maintains this delicate harmony. Each instrument toils at two or three notes, offering fragments that would have little meaning on their own. Together, they form a tapestry of tiny changes. Appreciating it requires focused work from you as a listener, too: This is not a groove you can coast on. Zoom in and it flickers with activity; zoom out and it is austere to the point of bareness. For eight minutes, save for the nearly imperceptible shifts in each voice’s rhythmic relationship to the others, almost nothing happens.
Almost nothing. Every so often, a bit of white noise rises softly through “Plain Hunt on Four,” sounding like wind on leaves. This gesture has no easily articulable relationship to the rest of the music, otherwise so meticulously arranged. But it is beautiful in its way, and even more so for being essentially gratuitous: an offer of generosity and respite where neither was strictly required. Why is it happening? Surely those are reasons enough.


The Glasgow sextet brings a healthy dose of dub to its spiky punk-acid-disco fusion, to party-starting (and occasionally political) effect.

No Luscious Life

Since 2013, Glasgow’s Golden Teacher have released a string of singles and EPs courtesy of the city’s unofficial patriarchs of underground music, Optimo. The sextet fits squarely into the aesthetics of label head JD Twitch, which means basically anything that makes the body whip: disco, industrial, EBM, Afrobeat, post-punk, and dancehall, with a touch of Arthur Russell and Cabaret Voltaire for good measure. It made perfect sense when Twitch matched them with dub-punk legend Dennis Bovell for the unhinged 2015 12” Golden Teacher Meets Dennis Bovell at the Green Door. Bovell’s credits run from the Slits and the Raincoats to Linton Kwesi Johnson, and he was adept at twisting the band’s spiky punk-acid-disco inside out, with results that evoked the lysergic connotations of the band’s name.
But as the group’s debut album proves, they can warp, distend, and freak every single component of their sound all by themselves. The seven extended tracks here are as disorienting and as exhausting as a half-marathon through a funhouse of mirrors. Named for a popular strip of clubs and restaurants in their hometown, “Sauchiehall Withdrawal” touches so many bases that it might just approximate what it’s like to walk down the street on a Saturday night with a dozen clubs all blaring different types of music: cosmic disco, acid, punk, and dub, all grafted to a tireless Fela beat. But the political lingers just beneath the surface of this dance party, in lines like singer Cassie Ojay’s question, “I’m always working so hard, and for what?” She’s not always so pointed; in the title track, she manifests and dissolves back into the extraterrestrial dub, her voice rendered just another sound to stretch and manipulate, along with horns, chimes, and hand drums. Even when Ojay’s delivery doesn’t quite make sense, as on the queasily downtempo “The Kazimier,” she conveys a heavy atmosphere.
Ojay shares vocal duties with Charles Lavenac, and while her tracks are the most enchanting, Lavenac’s flat, half-spat, half-whispered delivery has its own appeal; he often sounds like !!!’s Nic Offer buzzed on Buckfast. On “Spiritron,” he mewls an interstellar love story in earthy tones, singing for spare change and praising his beloved’s ripped jeans, all against a shimmering curtain of blips, acid squelches, disembodied coos, and restless punk energy.
As distinctive as Golden Teacher’s dual vocalists can be, too often the group lets the grooves do all the talking for them. “Diop” offers the freshest wrinkle to the post-punk template, paying tribute to the bewildering mbalax of the Senegalese griot Aby Ngana Diop. These Scots may not have the chops to turn out the kinds of rapid-fire polyrhythms that Diop’s band can hammer out, but they manage a dizzying three minutes by tweaking their electronics. They contort almost every element of “What Fresh Hell Is This?,” but the effect feels a bit more familiar, not too far from the kind of dub alchemy that Holger Czukay achieved as a producer in the late ’70s with tracks like Can’s “A Spectacle” and “How Much Are They?” (from his trio with Jah Wobble and Jaki Liebezeit). Head-spinning as such songs can be, they also reveal the band’s limits. As much as Golden Teacher absorb the adventurous dub sounds of the past, their exuberance can’t quite make up for the fact that sometimes they still sound like students.


Over the years, as I've become more and more adept at picking out which CDs from my collection to ...

Sewn to the Sky

Over the years, as I've become more and more adept at picking out which CDs from my collection to inflict on my friends, they've become more and more adept at finding swift, comical ways to write them off as crap. Most of them revolve around the central phrase, "You spent money on this?" But a few specific releases have given birth to fun, pointed catchphrases. Gamelan music has been christened "Thai pot-banging music," and any mention of Will Oldham prompts my friends to deadpan something about bleeding mules.
My friends react similarly to the works of Smog, donning a laidback expression and muttering about death and sex in a baritone. But I've only ventured to expose them to his more recent, cleanly produced records. I do this because I realize that the early efforts of Smog will earn the harshest indictment my friends can cast upon an album: a resounding "Fozz!"
"Fozz," a dramatized version of "fuzz" (best said in a heavy Eastern European accent), is serious business. So far, only a few select recordings have elicited the angry retort. The first, and the one responsible for originating the term, was the lo-fi classic Bee Thousand. Since then, the term has been applied mainly to such diverse albums as Pavement's Slanted and Enchanted, Boredoms' Super Are, and any record with Steve Albini on guitar.
Whenever I play these guys a "fozzy" record, I'm confronted with the question of how I can like something so badly recorded. It seems obvious to me: it's the songs! Of course, different production techniques are highly effective in subtly altering perceptions. Crystal-clear, wide-open production can leave you feeling larger than your body; lo-fi fozz, when used properly, can make you shrink into your own mind, and leave you feeling trapped and claustrophobic.
Such is the case with Sewn to the Sky, Bill Callahan's 1990 debut full-length, freshly reissued by Drag City. The album presents Callahan as equal parts singer/songwriter and grating noise generator. Using little more than a guitar, a "dumpster portastudio," and his own shaky voice, Callahan constructs what could best be described as a "wall of fozz," a dense amalgamation of brutally strummed acoustic guitar, various types of analog hiss, and ambiguous junkyard percussion.
Sewn to the Sky captures Callahan at a pivotal moment in his career, experimenting with the textural explorations that define his early instrumental work, and the compelling songwriting that would go on to become the focus of his recording career. The record's 20 tracks run the gamut from pure guitar noise experimentation on tracks like "Souped Up II", to fairly structured songs like "The Weightlifter". But even the most structured tracks here are decidedly scrappy-- guitars are slightly out of tune, blasts of hiss come from nowhere, and Callahan's voice wavers in and out of key.
Though none of Sewn to the Sky is as refined as any of Callahan's later recordings, there are hints at the kind of oddly humorous, well-constructed songs that have now become the hallmark of Callahan's work. On "I Want to Tell You About a Man", Callahan sings, "I want to tell you about a man/ You won't see him on the MTV.../ His name is Jesus Christ/ Don't make me say it twice."
Sewn to the Sky is by no means an easy listen; there's very little that warrants the term "melody." At times, the album is just plain jarring. But while not always pleasant, its strength lies in the fact that it is deeply mood-altering. Sewn to the Sky doesn't end with your speakers-- the dirt, the claustrophobia, the awkwardness, and the unsettling terror of the record seem to seep out into your surroundings, leaving you shaken, disturbed, and insecure.
The fact that Bill Callahan managed to construct such a deeply affecting record out of chaos and noise is impressive enough, but the fact that he did so one year before Slanted and Enchanted, and three years prior to Bee Thousand, is nothing short of prescient. By reissuing Sewn to the Sky, an album that can no doubt be considered a lo-fi landmark, Drag City has proven that Bill Callahan is not only one of America's most talented songwriters; he is also the godfather of fozz.


Active Child's Mercy feels like the soundtrack to a beach that is never too far away, so the taste of salt is still on your tongue. It is studiously lovely, like a brochure for paradise, and over its course it begins to feels like a sunset in Grand Theft Auto V: beautiful, but a replica.

Mercy

There's an unmistakeable vibe on Active Child's Mercy -- insouciant and imperious, with Pat Grossi singing in a rich Michael McDonald-esque upper register over shimmering plastic guitars.  The group began as a solemn project, a choirboy playing harp and singing in a feather-delicate voice over clicks, but as the project has drifted, Grossi has explored more escapist sounds. Mercy, surprisingly, feels like the soundtrack to a beach that is never too far away, so the taste of salt is still on your tongue.  It sounds like...yacht rock.
"Yacht rock" probably isn't a tag any musician seeks out, since it carries more weight as parody or flat-out insult than genre descriptor. But there's something loose and happy to the energy, particularly on the album's first half: "1999" is built around mid-temp pianos and the soft clicking of unobtrusive percussion.  "These Arms" boasts a slinking, slow-dancing drum line, as does "Never Far Away", where it pulses behind rounded, coke-straw guitars. The fried electronics of "Mercy" add a jolt to the slightly sleepy, all-around lushness.  All of these sounds are secondary to Grossi's voice, which does not sacrifice body for altitude; operating in and around the falsetto, Grossi less resembles the fragility of How To Dress Well than the aforementioned McDonald. He has a strange way of condensing out of his chest voice into his head voice, like a rising updraft, and the split between the two is astonishing.
"Midnight Swim" marks the beginning of Mercy*'*s more active second suite; weird and crystalline, the song conjures an alien beauty—like jellyfish in underwater caverns—and rides a thin line of eeriness and pulchritude. From here Mercy takes a decidedly more dance-y turn, maintaining the relaxed vibe while amping up the tempo. "Temptation" is sexy, carried on the strains of organs in lieu of harps, one hagiographic instrument swapped for another. It's a stronger sound, yet still casual; like the album itself, it seems just shallow enough to wade into and just deep enough to linger awhile.  Mercy is studiously lovely, like a brochure for paradise, and over its course it begins to feels like a sunset in Grand Theft Auto V: beautiful, but a replica.


Katy Perry’s bubbly, cliché-ridden pop feels especially unsuited for life in a pandemic. But despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing chart-topping formulas.

Smile

Between rows of Spandex at Forever 21, in the back of a cab coming home from the bar, after losing your headphones at the gym—in a pandemic, all the ideal templates for listening to Katy Perry have disappeared. No more can the pop star’s songs seep into the background of a normal social life, clunking around in your head before you even know their titles; you have to actively opt into her new album and launch yourself willingly into its suffocating glitz. Smile is meant to be a “picture of RESILIENCE & GRATITUDE,” Perry writes in the liner notes. Those capital letters—the sense that someone is shouting at you—come through in the music. “Yeah, I’m thankful/Scratch that, baby, I’m graaateful,” she croons in the title song. “I am resilient!” she belts on another, six times in two minutes. “It’s not the end of the world!” she promises over a flailing disco beat, before launching into a pseudo-rap about a fortune teller and “flipping off the flop,” whatever that means.
These songs wink at global devastation the same way commercials for online car dealerships and door-delivered Chick-fil-A do—in these challenging times, convenience and the power of positivity will get us through. Pop music, and Katy Perry in particular, have used this tactic before. “Put your rose-colored glasses on, and party on,” she cooed on 2017’s Witness, an album of what she called “purposeful pop,” designed to yank the listener into a newfound social consciousness. She performed the lead single at the Grammys wearing a pink rhinestone PERSIST armband as an image of the Constitution rose behind her. She jammed the album with whomping bass and assertions that a woman could be both “feminine and soft,” “a babydoll with a briefcase,” and promoted it with a 72-hour livestream, therapy session and all, staking her activism on the idea that all vulnerability is radical. In one clip, she sat cross-legged on an immaculate white couch and apologized for her history of cultural appropriation. The camera panned to a flickering display of the album cover. “I’ll never understand, because of who I am,” she murmured. We were meant to connect the dots between parceled honesty and political stances, between an oddball “diss track” against Taylor Swift and a broad stance on female empowerment.
Smile asks less of us. The confessions on this album feel like calculated dodges, every tepid disclosure immediately followed by triumph. “They tell me that I’m crazy, but I’ll never let them change me!” she sing-shouts on “Daisies,” as limp EDM beats fill the background. The relentless spangle on Smile can seem jarring as Perry attempts to both nod to and avoid the pandemic-shaped elephant in the room. “It’s no funeral we’re attending,” she scoffs on “Not the End of the World.” There’s a song about postponing crying to go out and dance; there’s a separate track about dancing while crying. These are big-production tracks primed for maximum drama—shrieking electro violins, skittering beats, flecks of dubstep and disco—but the clumsy lyrics hamper any emotional payoff.
Clichés are practically baked into Perry’s brand, but when she deploys them as cutesy callbacks to her past songs, they present more evidence that she hasn’t really grown. “Have you ever lost, lost the light in your life?” she asks over “Teary Eyes”’s twinkling opening chords, a dumbed-down take on her infamous, “Do you ever feel like a plastic bag.” “Took those sticks and stones, showed ’em I could build a house,” she sings on “Daisies,” echoing the chorus of her 2012 hit “Part of Me.” The production strips down on “What Makes a Woman,” with soft electric guitar and light organ notes, but the lyrics feel snatched from the Witness era. “Could spend your whole life but you couldn’t/Describe what makes a woman, and that’s what makes a woman to me,” she croons in the chorus, an update but not necessarily an improvement on One Direction’s “You don’t know you’re beautiful/That’s what makes you beautiful.”
Despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing proven chart-topping formulas. The Charlie Puth co-write “Harleys in Hawaii” is standard, breezy pop: a gently writhing beat, the word “baby” breathed over synths, vowels contorted so that “hula” rhymes with “jeweler.” “Tucked” is an understated highlight, a bass-blasted track about summoning the memory of a lover whenever she wants. Katy Perry has always excelled at packaging small moments of intimacy; it’s what animates the fleeting moments of post-party panic in hits like “Last Friday Night” and makes “Teenage Dream” one of the best songs of the last decade.
And then there’s “Never Really Over,” which accomplishes maybe what Perry wanted for the whole album: the glistening machinery of a big-budget pop song, calibrated for catharsis. Zedd’s production sounds a whole lot like “Closer”-era Chainsmokers, but his titanic drumlines build toward release as Perry hurls confessions over blooming synths. “Thought we kissed goodbye/Thought we meant this time was the last,” she sings, an ode to a relationship that refuses to wither. This is the version of Katy Perry pop can hold space for—one where her packaged self-probing leads somewhere and amounts to something. In spite of, or maybe because of, her promotional spectacles—Left Shark, the whipped cream bra, teasing her baby’s name with a single release—she’s long been able to comfortably assume legions of people will listen to her music, without even asking themselves why. The unspoken question of Smile is: Why now?

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