On Donald Glover’s latest project as Childish Gambino, he ditches rap for lovingly produced funk worship, resulting in his most enjoyable project yet.

“Awaken, My Love!”

By now, the world knows who Donald Glover is. From Community to the sharp and universally beloved Atlanta to his forthcoming Star Wars role, he’s carved out his persona; he’s likable, sensitive, and observant, the self-aware everyman. But Childish Gambino has always been harder to pin down. Since emerging with throwaway mixtapes under that alias, Glover has released two highly self-reflexive rap full-lengths, a Southern rap EP and a straight pop EP, and hosted a mysterious, cell phone-free festival. The unifying thread connecting all of this has sometimes been hard to spot. His recently released “Awaken, My Love!” is his hardest left turn yet, ditching rap wholesale in favor of funk worship, and the result is his most enjoyable project to date. In paying homage to heroes, he even hits upon some of the genuine emotional connection that has often been missing from his music.
The album’s production is majestic, aiming squarely for the cosmos depicted on its striking cover artwork. Like the cosmic soul it emulates, the atmosphere is lush, full of period ambiance worthy of a high-end television set. The album’s first track and lead single, “Me and Your Mama,” is a satisfying slow burn that shows off Glover’s impressive falsetto. Its imagery (“This is the end of us/Sleeping with the moon and the stars”) might be vapid, but the intensity of Glover’s singing compensates, as does the ripping electric guitar.
The tracks are embellished with intricate details throughout, like the delicate xylophone on “Terrified.” “Redbone” builds from a slow jam into a peak of futuristic guitar and forceful staccato piano chords. It’s a love song, which has always been Glover’s forte, whether on Because the Internet’s “3005,” “Telegraph Ave.,” or Camp’s “L.E.S.” The same goes for the open-hearted “Baby Boy,” possibly inspired by the birth of his son. These songs dig into something that feels unique to Glover’s heart, not just his record collection.
Too much of the rest, though, simply nods to sentiment without producing any. On “Have Some Love,” he limply advises the audience to “really love one another.” The song called “Riot” isn’t exactly riotous: He screams a little, but only for the sake of fulfilling a pre-ordained funk yelp quota—nothing in the song seems to have moved him to shrieking. There are also a few indistinguishable tracks that feel like funk retreads; “Have Some Love” sounds uncomfortably close to “Can You Get to That” from Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain. “California,” a cringey tropical parody complete with fake patois, sticks out for the wrong reasons. It sounds like “Kokomo” for the “Hotline Bling” era, or maybe Ween covering Sublime’s “Caress Me Down,” and its inclusion is entirely baffling, considering the sonic cohesion of the rest of the project.
Donald Glover’s greatest talents remain his tragicomic touch as a screenwriter and his ease with performance. He’s skilled enough to figure out how to excel at something, and, for the most part, look like he knows what he’s doing. As a rapper, he almost sounded the part: Take a step back, and there he was, rapping fast, switching up flows, delivering (too many) punchlines. But zoom in, and it didn’t really click. Rarely did he make a song about anything, and those zingers were plain obnoxious. (“Fandango my mandingo, we should do a movie” from a 2012 track with Danny Brown, for example.)
That same on-paper ability is what makes “Awaken, My Love!” a well-executed project: He has clearly absorbed a great deal of musical history, as the album nods to Parliament-Funkadelic, Sly and the Family Stone, Rick James, Prince, and more. There are times, however, when that nodding feels more like mimicry than anything else. Maybe he’ll figure out how to smuggle Donald Glover’s heart into Childish Gambino’s brain eventually, but if he hasn’t figured out what he wants out of Childish Gambino yet, it’s increasingly rewarding watching him try.


Mysterious L.A. producer Benedek draws on obscure boogie, funk, freestyle, house music, modern soul, and lost R&B to create a strange yet danceable new world of sound on his new Untitled EP.

Untitled EP

At the very end of 2013, a white label 12” with only the name “Benedek” written on it came through the mail, bereft of any other information whatsoever. And when the full-length album began arriving in shops last month, it had about the same amount of info on it. There are eight tracks in total, all of them untitled, released by the Washington, D.C. imprint Peoples Potential Unlimited.
For the PPU label, this is par for the course. Since 2008, PPU’s catalog makes for strange, eclectic listening, primarily reissuing demo recordings from the early 80s of African-American acts hoping to be the next Earth Wind and Fire or Marvin Gaye. The bizarro world of boogie and R&B that PPU unearths—far from the upper echelons of kings like Michael Jackson and Prince— is fascinating stuff and almost any toe dip into the PPU catalog will reward listeners. But the label also releases music from acts similarly informed by such lost musics, be it Tom Noble, Psychic Mirrors or Benedek.
A bit of research revealed that Nicholas Benedek hails from Los Angeles and while he’s had a few cassette-only comp appearances, his only other release available to date is a collaboration with Dâm-Funk. Much like his peer Ariel Pink and how his hypnagogic pop vision influenced an entire generation of indie-rockers, Dâm-Funk’s aesthetic seems to have had a similar effect on a new generation of post-Dilla producers, drawing on obscure boogie, funk, freestyle, house music, modern soul and lost R&B to create a strange yet danceable new world of sound.
There’s something uncanny and familiar about Benedek’s sound palette across these eight instrumentals: the bubbly synths, the popping basslines, the crisp drum machine hits, the canned handclaps, all of which evoke the production tropes of a bygone era. The first track has this sliver of sound that makes me think of Mr. Mister’s “Broken Wings", which may just be a trick of the mind akin to Ariel Pink’s, in that it attaches itself to what you have stored in your own musical memory banks. Another section has the warm pads and chopped-up hand percussion reminiscent of a proto-house track, interspersed with chimes. There are sounds that might bring to mind a workout video from the 80s, unless you weren’t born in that decade, in which case the bassline might instead sound like something from the early 90s. The third track features the sort of harmonica preset of an old synth and Jacuzzi-warm keyboard chords, all set against the kind of boom-tick that my girlfriend would call “grown and sexy.”
The fourth untitled track sticks out for me, laced with the kind of hook that could either be from an obscure lite jazz album, a rare modern soul 12,” or some sort of boogie track that might have gotten aired one night at the Paradise Garage, full of airy guitar upstrokes. But perhaps it’s not a sample at all, but rather from the mind and fingers of Benedek himself. His evocative debut, while scrubbed of track titles, vocals and eschewing easy genre categories from the past thirty years, nevertheless makes such blurred lines be part of its listening pleasure.


Synth-pop legends' first album in four years aims to match the mood and quality of their Violator-era sound.

Playing the Angel

First things first: You can count me among that class of people who haven't paid the closest attention to Depeche Mode over the past, umm, decade. I don't imagine this is all that unusual. Sure, the music they've released seems fine enough. But laying claim to our brainspace takes more than that, and each album these guys produced seemed to be slotting them further and further into that place where groups just naturally wind up after a couple decades as a going concern-- the band version of adulthood. Band adulthood is where you've settled into enough of a groove that your core fans know who they are, and everyone else happily ignores your continued existence. Band adulthood is where you make perfectly fine and increasingly subtle and sophisticated new albums, and your members embark on highly touted Significant Solo Projects-- neither of which anyone can really work up any enthusiasm about.
Band adulthood means reviews that are a big swirl of stock phrases like "return to form" and "just may be their best since [insert classic here]"; it's a world of die-hard fans politely trying to convince everyone that actually, this new album, it's interesting, you should give it a listen. Band adulthood is a city where R.E.M. and Elvis Costello have offices downtown, and the Cure and New Order keep stopping by open houses in the suburbs. No mistake: people of all sorts still love their Depeche Mode; last year I even got to watch a 19-year-old metalhead dig back and convert. But people want their prime-era DM, not a paler adulthood. Even the titles of the band's last couple releases seemed to know it: after Ultra (!) and Exciter (!), I'm half-surprised they didn't manage to call one No Really, We're Still Worth It.
If you've caught any advance word on Playing the Angel, you'll probably have heard the same rumors that swirl around all band-adulthood records: That this is the one, the "return to form." That this isn't just the "best since Violator," but maybe even just as good. That they're about to pull off the same trick Morrissey did-- following the same path as always, and yet somehow getting everyone to sit up again and take notice. (Publicists help.) And while I wish I could take some bold, controversial true/false stance on that one, this album just won't let me. If you really are the sort of person who's been waiting with bated breath for a new Depeche Mode release, then don't worry: You'll love this. Dear everyone else: It's pretty okay.
It certainly sounds as good as anything they've done in a while-- and isn't that always the key with these things? Band-adulthood records leave everyone in fear of limp retreads, embarrassingly bombastic attempts to capturing former glory, ill-advised experiments, laughable bandwagon-jumping, or that ultimate horror of classic acts trying to ape the bands they're meant to have influenced. Depeche Mode have long managed to avoid those traps (say, "showing Linkin Park how it's really done"), and on this record they've done even better, hitting on something that feels solid and relevant and natural: a dense, buzzy web of sound that folds in the old arena anthems, the camp noir-gospel of the early 90s, and the polished micro-production of Exciter.
The whole problem of the "new" DM has always been the gap between the clean-lined synth clang of their prime era and the lush, fussy computer-assisted electronics of today; the most surprising tracks here shoot past that issue entirely. "Precious", the first single, works some slow-rolling "Enjoy the Silence" beauty-- but the whole thing's riding on burbling acid-synth lines, retro-classic and up-to-the-minute at the same time. "John the Revelator" does up-tempo "Master and Servant" pulse and "Condemnation" choir calls over ultra-modern bleep and click, "A Pain That I'm Used To" does slow industrialist grind, and some other tracks pull off something like Depeche Mode torch songs. Yes, they've got their style working, their production mostly down, and Dave Gahan's singing gets richer and better with each passing record.
Only here's the thing: Surely a pop album lives or dies by its songs. And while the sounds here, apart from some sterile "modern" clicks and flourishes, climb their way past the pitfalls of the 25-year-old band, the songs here can't. Give any songwriter a couple decades, and the same things will happen-- the writing gets progressively more subtle, more sophisticated, until eventually it's curiously free of spark, always skirting the obvious old hooks in favor of something too professional to even notice. It's all here: the arch, wandering melodies; the methodically constructed key changes; the weirdly formless slow-and-quiet epics; the standard lyrical stew of religion and lust and fragile, innocent, faithful things in a dark, dark world. Yes, this group has spent the past 15 years trading in mood and atmosphere-- much more so than the relentlessly tight pop of their 1980s arena days. Yes, given enough time, they'll gather up into something passably engaging. No, no one's asking for karaoke classics. But none of the moods and atmospheres and slow-growers here stand much of a chance of reaching out and drawing you in-- or of making a believer out of anyone who didn't believe already.
The end product, then, is one of those signature artifacts of the Adult Band: an album we hardly even need to review. Depeche Mode's core fans will flip for it; it's the best thing they've released in a long while. Everyone else? It's pretty okay. And these days, over a decade since Songs of Faith and Devotion, well, you already know which of those two camps you fall into.


Today on Pitchfork, we are taking a critical look at Steely Dan—from their early classic rock staples to their latter-day studio sleaze—with new reviews of five of their most influential records.

Aja

For much of my youth and young adulthood, I listened to music for cheap emotional catharsis, and so I preferred songs that were feral, tenuous, unstudied, and impolite—anything that sounded as mixed-up and precarious as I usually felt. I equated wildness with authenticity, and wanted only to be reminded, again and again, that I wasn’t alone or unique in my feelings. This isn’t a particularly unusual way to commune with records, though it is, perhaps, the easiest way. I eventually came to understand that over-valuing anguish and ecstasy—conflating theatrics with feeling, and feeling with Art—was limiting and naïve. Things like pleasure, contentedness, a solid laugh—any good, ordinary moment—are just as evanescent, and certainly just as formidable (and important) to capture.
Beginning in the early 1970s, Steely Dan—the duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen—made cerebral, clever, formally sophisticated music that resisted any autobiographical extrapolating. Even in the context of the era—the late 1960s had seen the development and rise of both jazz-fusion and prog-rock, two of the brainiest, chops-iest genres going—their work was shrouded in irony and a distancing intellect. There was no pretense of dissolution or even emotion. Listening to their records felt like running my hands along a slab of polished marble—there were no craggy bits to grab on to, no easy way to find purchase—and so for years, I believed that Steely Dan’s seeming aversion to sincerity meant that they were cold and dorky. Did they not just make inert, polished music for men with meticulously groomed facial hair?
Then Aja—Steely Dan’s sixth album, from 1977—turned everything around for me: It’s a thoroughly convincing argument against my notion that aggressive or discordant music was inherently real and rebellious, whereas virtuosic or studied songs were always limp and bloodless. Aja is as bold as records get. It’s full of strange, unprecedented, disorienting moves. It is braver, more idiosyncratic, and more personal, in some ways, than any other record I own.
Aja is as much a jazz record as a pop one, though in its best moments, it’s both and neither. Steely Dan were so expert at fusing genres it’s often hard to say what bit came from where, or exactly which tradition (fusion, R&B, soul, disco, classical) was being mined or reimagined. Because these songs were rendered so seamlessly, it’s easy to overlook how brazen they were. Aja is like driving down a treacherous, cliff-side road in the most luxurious car ever made: If you sink deep enough into that supple leather seat, it is possible to forget entirely about the twists and turns, the threat of looming destruction. It’s possible to forget about gravity entirely.
Steely Dan is generally associated with Los Angeles, where they made most of their records, but Becker and Fagen are both New Yorkers (Becker was born in Queens; Fagen was born in suburban Passaic, New Jersey), and their sensibilities were plainly shaped by a kind of wry, East Coast cynicism. It manifests most palpably in Aja’s lyrics, which are funny, surreal, and, for the most part, narratively ambiguous. On a song like “Deacon Blues,” which they co-wrote, it’s impossible to deny the precision of their phrasing, and the unexpected depth of the song’s sentiment:

Learn to work the saxophone
I play just what I feel
Drink Scotch whiskey all night long
And die behind the wheel
They got a name for the winners in the world
I want a name when I lose
They call Alabama the Crimson Tide
Call me Deacon Blues

Becker later said the song was about the “mythic loserdom” of being a professional musician—how glorious it might look from the outside, how grueling it is in practice. “Deacon Blues” is a fantasy of art-making, spun by someone who has never had to do the work, and therefore requires a funny sort of narrative distance: Becker and Fagen were looking at their own lives from the perspective of someone who wants what they’ve got, but also someone who fundamentally misunderstands the costs.
Aja produced three excellent singles (“Peg,” “Josie,” and “Deacon Blues”) and sold millions of copies, becoming the group’s most commercially successful release. But it was a perplexing bestseller. Steely Dan spent the 1970s getting progressively more esoteric: jazzier, groovier, weirder. Even now, mapping the album’s melodic and harmonic shifts is impossible to do with confidence. Its songs are sprawling and fussy, populated by oddball characters with inscrutable backstories, like “Josie,” from the song of the same name (“She’s the raw flame, the live wire/She prays like a Roman with her eyes on fire”) or “Peg,” an aspiring actress headed who-knows-where, who’s “done up in blueprint blue.” “Blueprint blue”! It’s the kind of simple, perfect description prose writers pinch themselves over.
Outside of the studio, Becker and Fagen reveled in being a little rascally. They took long breaks from touring, and when they conceded to an interview, they often appeared self-satisfied, if not antagonistic. Their disdain for the record business occasionally bled into a disdain for their fans, itself a kind of merciless, punk-rock pose. When they did tour—like, say, in 1993, when, after a decade-long hiatus, they booked a few weeks of U.S. dates—they did not pretend to enjoy it. That year, when a reporter from The Los Angeles Times asked Becker how the tour was going, he said, “Well, not too good. It turns out that show business isn’t really in my blood anyway, and I’m looking forward to getting back to working on my car.”
Because the production on Aja is so expert—whole stretches are perfect, impenetrable, like the first 31 seconds of “Black Cow,” when that creeping bass line cedes passage to guitar and electric piano, and the backing vocals pipe up for “You were high!”—it’s easy to ignore the sophistication of its architecture. Becker and Fagen used obscure chords (like the mu major, a major triad with an added 2 or 9) and custom-built their own equipment (for 1980’s Gaucho, they paid $150,000 to build a bespoke drum machine). What they were doing was so particular and new, it was often difficult for critics to even find a vocabulary to describe it. On the title track, the verse shifts and dissolves as Fagen croons, “I run to you.” His voice thins as he finishes the line, a little gasp of tenderness. The minute-long drum solo that closes “Aja,” performed by the virtuosic session man Steve Gadd, is dressed with horns and synthesizers, and makes a person briefly feel as if they are being transported to a different dimension. Steely Dan reveled in making technical choices that would have hobbled a less ambitious outfit. That they succeeded still feels like some kind of black magic.
By 1977, it is possible that some corners of the culture had become desperate for music that was intellectually challenging but not exactly arduous to consume—something less predictable than Top 40, but not quite as hyperbolic or gnashing as punk. By the end of the 1960s, rock had been relentlessly and breathlessly defined as a frantic, bloody, all-consuming practice, for both performers and fans. Aja, though, doesn’t necessarily require any sort of deep emotional entanglement or vulnerability from its listeners. In that way, the record works as an unexpected balm, a break—a little bit of pleasure just for pleasure’s sake.
In 1977, on the day Aja was released, Cameron Crowe interviewed Becker and Fagan for Rolling Stone. Predictably, they were bemused by his questions. Becker told Crowe that they spent most of their time writing, recording, and obsessively tinkering. “We overdubbed a lot of the overdubs over,” he said. By then, whenever Steely Dan decamped to the studio, they hired a cabal of professional musicians—more than 40 are listed in the credits to Aja—and ran the sessions themselves, with militaristic precision. Becker and Fagen seemed to savor the idea that Steely Dan might be mischaracterized, in print, as something as pedestrian and ordinary as a band. “You can get studio musicians to sound exactly like a rock and roll band,” Fagen said. It’s obvious what he meant. They’d pulled one over on us, again.


The landmark album gets a remaster and a reissue, complete with a sadly inessential bonus disc of remixes and B-sides.

Beastie Boys: Check Your Head: Deluxe Edition

Check Your Head: Deluxe Edition

Critical hindsight's declared Licensed to Ill their fun, guilty-pleasure introduction and Paul's Boutique their visionary artistic statement, but as history tells things it was Check Your Head that made sure the Beastie Boys were sticking around. It was their return to the Top 10 of Billboard's album chart, it reinvented them as a new mutation of the West Coast punk rocker via NYC, and it paved the way for their 1990s-hipster Grand Royal empire. Most of all, it reintroduced the Beastie Boys to a demographic that, three years after their previous album, was now said to listen to "alternative rock"-- and at a time when being deep into hip-hop was still considered a sort of weird trait for a white teenager to have, that proved to be a canny lateral move.
Nobody really knew at the time that numerous other, stupider, more aggro bands would take the punk-rap structure of Check Your Head and warp it into the testosterone-poisoned mookery of the Woodstock-torching late 90s. Nobody could predict that its meat-and-potatoes approach to live-band rap would soon be shown up spectacularly by the far tighter Roots. And nobody foresaw that the appeal of its loose, garage-funk instrumentals would begin to fade once Bosco Mann started Daptone rolling and showed people what the pros sounded like. So looking at Check Your Head in hindsight and saying it's aged poorly is largely an issue of unfortunate circumstance; I certainly remember it being fairly invigorating at the time (the time, in this case, being high school). So how's it hold up as its own thing, without the weight of 17 years of inferior imitations and superior refinements upon it?
Well, if you look at it in terms of what they lost from their previous two albums, the biggest thing going against Check Your Head is its strange lack of the smart-assed, literate, quick-witted playfulness that had previously informed their lyrics. Never mind its most infamously-quotable lyric, from "Pass the Mic"-- "Everybody's rappin' like it's a commercial/ Actin' like life is a big commercial," which was supposed to rhyme "rehearsal" instead and got left in as a joke at Mike D's expense. Aside from the nimble "Finger Lickin' Good", the real issue is that most of the lyrics focus on sledgehammer impact at the expense of the high concepts and slippery wordplay they'd exhibited on Paul's Boutique. "Jimmy James" is still the jam, but it's surprising just how sketched-out and simple those otherwise vibrant-seeming lyrics are, and while the Rollins-grunt platitudes in "Gratitude" might sound energizing with those heavy-stomping Sabbath-funk riffs underneath, it's missing that spark of trickster glee that first made them great.
If you didn't know better, you might think the lyrics on Check Your Head were an afterthought-- and, well, they kind of were. The album originally started out as a jam-heavy instrumental work, where the Beasties refamiliarized themselves with their instruments-- MCA on bass, Ad-Rock on guitar and Mike D on drums, with an odd assortment of session hands including carpenter/keyboardist "Money Mark" Nishita and percussionist Juanito Vazquez. Most of the album was built with an then-unconventional self-sampling approach, where live instruments were cut-up and reassembled from numerous takes, arising from ideas that spontaneously transmogrified and shot into different directions. In combining that approach with the overdriven, semi-lo-fi, blown-out production, it proved that the Beasties could find a new tack on their sonic workmanship without needing a Rick Rubin or some Dust Brothers to guide them (though co-producer Mario Caldato, Jr. proved a good partner). Still, it's a bit of a mishmash: sublime moments like the hallucinogenic peace-and-love dub of "Something's Got to Give" and the inspired weirdness of Sly & the Family Stone's "Time for Livin'" gone near-unrecognizable as hardcore punk have to share room with tracks that either sound a little too sloppily anything-goes (the rattletrap fuzz-rock "Stand Together") or come across like half-formed funk jams with great percussion, slinky Hammonds, not much else ("Funky Boss" and "Pow").
Lest you think the score's a bit uncharitable towards what many fans think is the Beasties' second-best album, it's factoring in this deluxe edition's bonus disc and warning you off buying this particular package. Yes, you get "The Skills to Pay the Bills", a shoulda-made-the-album B-side if there ever was one, but it also includes some of the least essential B-sides ever-- dick-around jokes like Mike D's yowling lounge act "Netty's Girl", the RZA-sniffing-paint kung-fu-funk goof "Drunken Praying Mantis Style", the unremitting horror of "Boomin' Granny"-- as well as some completists-only live tracks and more versions of "So What Cha Want" than you will likely ever need (feel free to draw the line after the classic Soul Assassin remix). Plus you get "Drinkin' Wine", in case you ever wanted evidence that the Beasties had a Side 6 of Sandinista! moment.
Maybe Check Your Head doesn't hit the same rap-geek nerves that Licensed to Ill or Paul's Boutique did, but let's look at it this way: It was a worthwhile experiment that resulted in some vital music. The Beastie Boys knew that Paul's was finding appreciation as a cult album, but they couldn't recapture its feeling, not after its commercial failure left them practically forced to take a new tack. Making that approach a smaller-budget, DIY/punk mutation of everything they'd  tried along the way and starting from the ground up as a band rather than a crew of MCs was an inspired idea. Going back to the studio to polish that approach up resulted in their second #1 album, 1994's Ill Communication, which does most of what Check Your Head does just a little better and funnier. But if time has diluted the impact of Check Your Head, clamping on some ear goggles and turning the EQ to its most bass-expanding level is compensation enough.


After three albums in which he used his songwriting gifts to examine himself, John Darnielle again turns his eye outward, here penning tunes about hopeless urchins, spies from China, a girl in a Marduk t-shirt, a young father, a kid in a Marcus Allen jersey, H.P. Lovecraft in Brooklyn, and a reggae singer with a bullet hole in his chest.

Heretic Pride

The Mountain Goats' John Darnielle has written songs about speed-freaks, drug-dealing high school running backs, short-time jail inmates, big rabbits, debt collectors, garden-seed salesmen, bootleggers, alcoholics, and attic-dwellers. In the whole lot, the only honest man Darnielle ever bothered writing about was himself. We Shall All Be Healed, The Sunset Tree, and Get Lonely-- his last three albums-- were the autobiographical invocations he'd staved off for over a decade and some 400 songs. Since 2004, he's been his own only subject, after 12 years of avoiding a biography full of sharp objects. "As you all know," Darnielle used to say from stage, "I don't write songs about myself."
On Heretic Pride, his newest, the "I" is once again someone else: hopeless urchins, spies from China, a girl in a Marduk t-shirt, a young father, a kid in a Marcus Allen jersey, H.P. Lovecraft in Brooklyn, a reggae singer with a bullet hole in his chest. The antic, hammering thrum of the Mountain Goats' tape-grind era-- before the finer arrangements, the ornamentation, the orchestration of the band's first four 4AD releases-- returns. As before, John Vanderslice and Scott Solter produce. Old usual suspects Peter Hughes, Franklin Bruno, and the Bright Mountain Choir are re-enlisted. St. Vincent's Annie Clark, Erik Friedlander, and Superchunk's Jon Wurster are sworn in. Darnielle wrote songs in Fairbanks, Seattle, San Franscisco, and Durham; their subjects stray as far as the Xinjiang Province, Spanish Town, East Berlin.
Darnielle's characters are back where they know best. They join cults ("New Zion"), huddle together in cars ("So Desperate") or gather in smoke-filled rooms ("In the Craters of the Moon"). Many do not survive. "Spoiler Alert!" reads the characteristically bombastic liner note to "Heretic Pride": "The main character here will not live long after he gets done lauding his imminent demise."
What a difference two years makes. Get Lonely (2006) was a agonizingly introspective dissection of a dissolving relationship, the logical finale to Darnielle's trilogy of self-revelation, the final unburdening. The Mountain Goats-- champions of the low-fi, singer-songwriter-subverters-- had become scrupulously hi-fi, confessional. Gone was the guitar that played its own drums, gone was the tape-hiss, gone were the doctrinaire fans. Only you and Darnielle remained. "When the villagers come to my door," he sang on Get Lonely's "If You See Light", "I will hide underneath the table in the dining room, knees drawn up to my chest." On Heretic Pride, the villagers return to find their victim no longer afraid.
"They come and pull me from my house, and they drag my body through the streets" declares Darnielle on "Heretic Pride": "I will feel so proud when the reckoning arrives." Of all the musicians that have come and gone in the 4AD era, Superchunk's Jon Wurster is-- Peter Hughes aside-- the first to hear, and replicate, the precise, surging, and teeth-chattering headlong rhythm that is Darnielle's stock-in-trade. Behind Wurster's "high-spirits-on-fire" (Darnielle's phrase) four-four, "Heretic Pride" is the most immediate thing the Mountain Goats have done since "The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton". Elsewhere, "Sax Rohmer #1", "In the Craters of the Moon", and "Lovecraft in Brooklyn" are seething throwbacks-- taut, propulsive, paranoid, furious. "Lovecraft" imagines the writer come to Red Hook, xenophobic, terrified, filled with hate, switchblade in hand. "Someday, something's coming from way out beyond the stars," snarls Darnielle. "To kill us while we stand here."
"San Bernadino": the paranoia relents, the sun rises over the mountains, a young couple with a son on the way checks into a motel; the father runs a bath, scatters rose petals into the water. Composer Erik Friedlander provides the sole instrumentation, a humming cello pluck and a smeared, gorgeous chord progression. Heretic Pride is the first since The Coroner's Gambit to lack a unifying concept, but it has balance: For every furious declaration, there's a moment of uncertainty-- the unresolved lovers and muted chords of "How to Embrace a Swamp Creature", the neutral meeting place the two estranged people pick to reconcile in "So Desperate".
As in most of the post-Tallahassee Mountain Goats material, Darnielle's Heretic Pride writing tends towards themes rather than details, movements rather than moments. But human beings stride through his songs once again; for every broad-stroke metaphor-- "Autoclave" heart-as-surgical-purifier, "Tianchi Lake" swamp-monster-- there's a "Marduk Men's Room Incident" disco-refugee, her head against the sink, trying to cool down.
Heretic Pride's title is lifted from an Aura Noir's "Black Deluge Night"-- "Soaring demons now swarm the skies/ In awe and heretic pride," goes the couplet-- but Darnielle's got his own invasion stories. Sunset Tree outtake "The Day the Aliens Came" imagined a smoldering planet, rooftops and sidewalks "melted like plastic," one man still standing: There's Darnielle, wearing Italian shoes and a white tuxedo jacket, a survivor explaining himself for the sake of the rest of us.


Travis Scott’s third album is inarguably his strongest to date. His skill as a curator helps sculpt a sticky, humid, psychedelic world with dazzling production and odd pleasures at every turn.

Astroworld

“Who put this shit together? I’m the glue” declares Travis Scott on Astroworld, and it’s hard to think of a more accurate summation of his aesthetic approach. The 26-year-old is an avatar for a generation of playlist-making curators who have positively embraced “creative” as a job title. He’s risen to mainstream rap prominence by way of pure tastemaking, exerting the au courant currency of borrowing exactly the right talent at exactly the right time since the hybrid hip-hop of his 2015 debut, Rodeo. Depending on a variety of factors—age, genre predilections, level of active investment in the myriad intersections between popular culture and social media—Scott’s artistic approach can come across as inspiring or infuriating, but it’s also proved undoubtedly successful.
He’s wielded his own influence over areas of pop culture—Drake’s 2017 “playlist” More Life was arguably as influenced by Scott’s revolving-door A&R approach as it was by the evolving fluidity of the album format—even as he remains indebted to mentor Kanye West, whose titanic 2013 album Yeezus (to which Scott contributed) was its own ultra-collaborative, cut-and-paste monster. If Yeezus embraced by-committee creativity as a means to an end, Scott has taken it several steps further by allowing such an ethos to define his very artistic being. This has, of course, made him a divisive figure in hip-hop circles and elsewhere. A 2015 Deadspin post titled “Travis Scott Is Worse Than Iggy Azalea” made the case for Scott as a canny cultural plagiarist—a notion that became somewhat more fortified the following year, when he was accused of essentially stealing the framework for the Young Thug and Quavo collaboration “Pick Up the Phone” from Thug himself.
The album that song appeared on, 2016’s Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight, captured Scott in the process of refining the rougher edges of his sound, with bolder hooks and a slow tilt towards streamlined song structures. But last year’s full-length collab with Migos member Quavo, Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho, felt driftless and tossed-off by comparison, suggesting a weird paradox embedded in his career thus far: For someone so reliant on others to properly perfume his own work, Scott seems to be most engaged when he’s able to solely take credit for it.
Such is the case with Astroworld, unquestionably his strongest release to date. The album takes its name from a since-shuttered amusement park in his hometown of Houston and often resembles a humid day spent at a carnival: sticky, sweet, bustling with activity, and packed with cheap thrills that still feel a tad overpriced. As far as trippy-sounding hip-hop goes, Scott is operating at something of a gold standard here, out-hallucinating fellow stylist A$AP Rocky’s own recent blotter-blotted efforts. “Psychedelics got me goin’ crazy,” he lolls over the spooky and beautiful “Stargazing,” his voice sounding like a sentient iTunes visualizer as he nods to Houston legend Big Moe and shouts out Ellen DeGeneres. It's the epitome of the Travis Scott experience.
Featuring a coterie of guest stars representing pop’s upper echelon (Drake, the Weeknd, Frank Ocean), big-ticket indie’s creative brain trust (Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker, James Blake), and newest-wave rappers (Gunna, Sheck Wes, Juice WRLD), Astroworld also boasts the most potent production of Scott’s musical life so far. “Astrothunder” ripples with contributions from Thundercat and John Mayer, the former dialing back his frenetic jazz-funk to a percolating crawl, while “Stop Trying to Be God” plays host to the record’s most involved vocal take from Scott, with wistful harmonica lines (courtesy of Stevie Wonder) and swirling keys surrounding his voice. The album is dotted with sonic intricacies throughout—fluttering guitar lines, showy samples (the deathless hook of Uncle Luke’s “I Wanna Rock (Doo Doo Brown)” on “Sicko Mode”), enough gooey synths to fill a share-sized Milky Way—providing a Magic Eye-level of texture: It might all seem the same from afar, but blur your perspective just enough and the details reveal themselves.
The lovely “R.I.P. Screw” and the haunted-house dirge “5% Tint” were both handled by frequent Scott collaborator FKi 1st, who is also known for his work alongside pop’s unlikely megastar-of-the-moment, Post Malone. It’s tempting to draw parallels between Malone and Scott: Both are hotly contested figures in or adjacent to rap who possess massive young audiences and occasionally dabble in sounds associated with nascent early-2010s indie trends like witch house and chillwave.
But regardless of how you feel about him, Malone is an unmistakable presence on his songs, his otherworldly croon an essential element to his genre-hopping sound. Despite the considerable leaps in quality taken on Astroworld, it still doesn’t feel like Scott can muster that level of individuality. The fact that Drake’s verse on “Sicko Mode” (leagues better than most of his own turgid recent album Scorpion) has proved the most meme-able and headline-grabbing Astroworld moment speaks volumes about Drake’s too-big-to-fail pop dominance and Scott’s ability to get overshadowed on even his strongest tracks.
Elsewhere, the blurred line between drawing from influence and straight-up facsimile continues to nip at Scott’s heels, as he borrows from Kanye’s worst lyrical impulses throughout, at one point positing over the toy-piano kaleidoscope-pop of “Skeletons”: “If you take your girl out, do you expect sex?/If she take her titties out, do you expect checks?” Kanye’s influence carries through to the very end of Astroworld with closing track “Coffee Bean,” a rumination with dusty production courtesy of Nineteen85 that strongly mirrors the sound and flow of The Life of Pablo’s similarly downbeat, soul-searching “30 Hours.” (Placing this uncharacteristically personal track at the album’s very end also yet again elicits visions of Drake, who’s often saved the most diaristic moments for his projects’ final moments.)
It’s on “Coffee Bean” that Scott reflects on his recent and seemingly unexpected parenthood with Kylie Jenner, obliquely addressing his complicated feelings on the matter: “Your family told you I’m a bad move/Plus, I’m already a black dude.” It’s a fascinating, somewhat jarring moment of introspection on an album where Scott is otherwise content—intentionally or not—to play ringmaster to his neon-decayed circus of sound rather than become the main attraction.


Beyoncé’s seventh album is not just a pop star’s immaculate dance record, but a rich celebration of club music and its sweaty, emancipatory spirit.

Renaissance

Over the last decade, every Beyoncé project has become an integral part of a larger Beyoncé Project. Though she hasn’t released a proper studio album since 2016’s sprawling visual statement Lemonade, she’s made a film (Black Is King), released a collaborative record with her husband Jay-Z (Everything Is Love), lent her voice to a Disney film (The Lion King), dropped a series of singles, and masterminded her sportswear line Ivy Park—all while making clear that she’s intensely focused on celebrating the long legacy of Black musicians and artists, of which she is a part and beacon. Her global reach is a reminder that Beyoncé, the billionaire pop icon, does not and could not exist in a vacuum.
Recall 2019’s Homecoming, the live album and concert movie documenting her vaunted “Beychella” festival set, in which she indelibly framed her entire discography within the larger history of contemporary Black American performance. By centering her music within the context of HBCU culture, incorporating a massive marching band, a step show, and J-setting choreography, she delivered a tectonic performance that also ensured all her fans would see the lineage of Black art receive the credit it’s due.
And when the pandemic hit, Beyoncé caught on to what her fans missed most: the unfettered joy of gathering together in the club, rolling face and sweating as a collective body. As our biggest pop stars increasingly turn to dance music for inspiration, Beyoncé focused her famous work ethic on the nuances of club culture for a challenging, densely-referenced album that runs circles around her similarly minded, Billboard-charting peers. For nearly a decade she has made pop music on her own terms, uninterested in the dusty edicts of the music industry and pointed about her intended audience; now pop fans bend to Beyoncé, not the other way around.
Beyoncé is hooked on the feeling of self-expression. In the liner notes posted on her website, she writes that Renaissance, her seventh solo album and “Act I” of a mysterious trilogy, is a “safe place, a place without judgment… a place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking.” In turn she pays homage to the true safe places for many of her fans, celebrating the clubs made by and for Black women and queer people, Black Chicagoans and Detroiters and New Yorkers who created house and techno, Black and Latinx ball and kiki houses. Inside Renaissance’s vast tent, there’s a safe place at the roller rink (“Virgo’s Groove”), at the disco (“Summer Renaissance”), at the subwoofer contest (“America Has a Problem”), at Freaknik (“Thique”), in church, at the NOLA hole-in-the-wall hosting the bounce party after church, at the ball in the Harlem community center, right underneath the basketball hoops. She’s under a strobe, flipping her hair, twirling that ass like she came up out the South, as she raps on the ebullient “Church Girl,” praying to god over a Clark Sisters sample and then squaring the propriety on a Trigger Man beat, bussing it with the godly state of being “born free.”
Renaissance is a feat of imagination, daydreaming about partying in the pandemic, capturing the feeling of thinking about all the places you wish you could have gone when you were just stuck in the crib. Unlike Lemonade or 2013’s Beyoncé, Renaissance sticks to the dancefloor—no ballads or breakup paeans, just pure energy, propulsive BPMs, and fuck-’em-all strut. The love songs are almost entirely aimed inward, to the self and her crew, and the songs about a “boy” are underpinned with a libidinous frankness. (Beyoncé has never been this horny in public.) Release your job, sure—if you can afford it; Beyoncé is her own boss, after all—but most importantly, revel in who you are. She dedicates the album to her “godmother,” Uncle Jonny, who died of complications stemming from HIV, and to the “pioneers who originate culture… the fallen angels whose contributions have gone unrecognized for far too long.” She enlists Grace Jones, Sheila E., Nile Rodgers; samples Teena Marie, Chicago house artist Lidell Townsell, and Atlanta rapper Kilo Ali; belts with abandon and fealty to styles from the 1970s through the 1990s that signify a loose writing process, implying the notorious perfectionist meant what she said.
Maybe Beyoncé and her extensive array of producers and co-writers, which includes mainstream names like Raphael Saadiq and The-Dream as well as more underground artists like the Black trans DJ/producer Honey Dijon and the Dominican musician and visual artist Kelman Duran, spent the last two years digging in the crates. It’s hard to imagine that Beyoncé’s been able to go to the kinds of clubs celebrated on Renaissance since, say, 1999. Maybe she joined one of the copious DJ sets streamed on Zoom and Twitch in 2020 with a burner account, as many of us were dreaming of people outlined by wisps of a fog machine, craving sound-system affirmations that we were still corporeal entities too.
Renaissance is inherently about bodies undulating in the dark, under strobes; sexual agency; and the Black queer and trans women who are both politicized and the most endangered people among us. As physical movement was necessarily constrained during pandemic isolation, the dissociative effects of being unseen became both detrimental and liberating. Renaissance is a commanding prescription to be perceived again, without judgment. Listening to the album, you can feel the synapses coming back together one by one, basking in the unfamiliar sensation of feeling good, if only for its hour-long duration.
Dance music necessarily centers on the immediate present—the seconds ticking along during the transcendent act of unleashing on a dancefloor—but it thrives on the fluidity of sampling, of elder respect, and of reimagining classic sounds to invent the new. (Renaissance has approximately 100,000 credits thanks to all the samples and many tiny contributions from artists and friends.) This is how we get PC Music proprietor A. G. Cook and Lady Gaga’s go-to producer BloodPop on a low-key love song deconstructing techno (“All Up in My Mind”), and how Skrillex ended up doing Afrobeats through a ketamine filter (“Energy”) with Bey drawling lyrics so minimal and onomatopoeic they exist mostly in service to the vibe, a melodic extension of percussion. This approach is perhaps better than in other places, where the lyrics are jarring enough to disrupt the ambiance, like when she raps, “You said you outside but you ain’t that outside” in the middle of the house single “Break My Soul.” But in general, she adheres to the sweaty demands of club music, singing and rapping to the carnal id. In contrast to past albums, her emotion here is devoted to looking good, dancing good, and fucking good. (Though her propensity for sexual detail à la “Drunk in Love” continues apace; call me if you can figure out how to get over “Motorboat, baby, spin around” on “Virgo’s Groove.”)
Beyoncé’s focus on dance music extends to Renaissance’s samples, where she lets her intent speak through the art of her predecessors. The stunning “Pure/Honey” alone braids together decades of ballroom, taking samples from ’90s club hits by drag icons: Kevin Aviance’s hit “Cunty,” from 1996, and Moi Renee’s “Miss Honey,” from 1992. It also nabs a bit from “Feels Like,” a 2012 track by MikeQ, legendary ball DJ and DJ for HBO’s Legendary, and Kevin Jz Prodigy, the ball commentator and musician whose vocals—“cunt to the feminine what”—lead the song. The production on “Feels Like” builds on the work of Vjuan Allure, who passed in 2021, and who pioneered the sound of contemporary vogue fem ballroom by reworking what’s known as the “Ha” from Masters at Work’s seminal “The Ha Dance,” from 1991, which has long been a voguing staple, but was originally meant for b-boys in Latin clubs. That’s years of history in just one song, and just one magnifying-glass example of the ways Beyoncé uses Renaissance to put some respect on these club legends’ names.
But it’s also part of Beyoncé’s deep appreciation for the sprawling tapestry of Black music and culture throughout pop history. She is positioning herself as an archivist, and also just flexing her true music-nerd passions with more disregard for preconceived notions of marketability—and label returns—since the indubitable B’Day. On “I’m That Girl,” Tommy Wright III and Princess Loko’s “Still Pimpin” are placed upon the ghost of a dembow riddim, threading Shabba Ranks to Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic via Kelman Duran. The deep house track “Cozy” features two Black trans women—Honey Dijon and actor Ts Madison—and seems to be a dedication to trans self-determination (“Might I suggest you don’t fuck with my sis”). “Alien Superstar” channels Vanity 6 as an old-way house anthem. The end of “Heated,” a pulsing Afrobeats track with some of her silkiest vocals on the album, finds her commentating in a vocal register that, at points, barely scans as Beyoncé, embodying the growl and propulsion of the runway.
In the 2018 book Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric, professor and musician Madison Moore captures the innovation of certain queer aesthetics: “The fact that beautiful eccentrics put themselves on the line every day despite the odds shows how important they are not only as aesthetic geniuses but political activists too.” Beyoncé, of course, has a gigantic bank account and a team of people to help her look extravagant—“It should cost a billion to look that good/But she make it look easy ’cause she got it,” as she vamps on “Pure/Honey”—and to make the kind of fantasy she’s crafted on Renaissance plausible, from the Swarovski-encrusted imagery to the refinement of the album’s song choices. But using her global proscenium to showcase the work of marginalized people, as the political and legal scapegoating of their existences ramps up to a terrifying degree—including draconian legislation in her home state of Texas—is important, even a rejoinder to 2014’s big FEMINIST sign moment, a subtle kiss-off to people who’ve made vilifying trans women a cornerstone of their feminism by making space for all sorts of femme expression.
Renaissance reinvents Beyoncé again, and she trusts that her fans will be up for the challenge. She is 40 years old, the age society at large tends to start writing women artists (and women in general) off as creatives who still have something to offer, but she refuses to submit to that bullshit, making herself impossible to ignore. “I’ve been up, I’ve been down,” she sings on “Church Girl,” “Felt like I move mountains/Got friends that cried fountains.” It’s the most plaintive moment on the album, and then, in full Beyoncé fashion, she comes back more determinedly: “I’m gonna love on me. Nobody can judge me but me.” It’s a transcendent, beautiful, deceptively simple moment. She extends a diamond-encrusted, gloved hand—an invitation to a better kind of party.


The legendary no wave band honors late drummer Dee Pop on a mournful album of sludgy post-punk.

They Live in My Head

Like Mission of Burma or Minor Threat, Bush Tetras are a band whose influence vastly exceeds the quantity of their initial output. They shaped the no wave scene of the early 1980s, made Thurston Moore envious, and scored an unlikely underground hit with a twitchy and radical panic attack called “Too Many Creeps.” Yet they never released a proper album until 1997’s Beauty Lies. Such a late-blooming trajectory instills each successive album with unusual weight: They’re not making music out of any sense of obligation, but because they still have something to say.
Even in 2023—as their influence reaches a new generation of talky post-punk upstarts—Bush Tetras are still writing their legacy. The underground New York band was fêted with a career-spanning box set in 2021, but a month before its release, longtime drummer Dee Pop died at 65. Eventually, the surviving musicians recruited former Pogues bassist Cait O’Riordan and ex-Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley to flesh out the lineup. Aiming to honor Pop’s memory, they completed They Live in My Head, their first album in over a decade, with Shelley also serving as producer.
The mood is somber yet defiant. Stormy waves of distortion bring a spectral air to “Ghosts of People,” a brooding reflection on the band’s early days in downtown New York. Lead singer Cynthia Sley summons “Ghosts of people/I used to know/Hairdos made at home,” but these fragmented glimpses of youth don’t stave off mortality: “Crave more time/Get nothing done!” Sley repeats at the climax, aware that punk survival is inextricably linked with grief.
“Tout Est Meilleur” goes for careening, blues-addled punk, with Sley yearning in French for community and connection amid lockdown. The other standout, “Things I Put Together,” makes cryptic reference to some crisis or health scare. “They said I wasn’t worthy/Ever, no never,” Sley wails as Pat Place’s wandering guitar squalls push toward redemption. The track resembles a soulful spin on late-era Sonic Youth.
Inspired as they were by Bush Tetras, Sonic Youth were not a particularly groove-driven band, and They Live in My Head does not attempt to replicate the spiky funk backbeat of Bush Tetras’s ’80s classics. The sound is thicker, heavier; a sludgy post-punk roar consumes tracks like “I Am Not a Member” and “Bird on a Wire” (not the Leonard Cohen one). Sley sings where she once chanted and yelped, her lyrics more reflective than surreal. “Rest assured, there will be no peace/Until I render myself complete,” she declares during the roiling closer, “The End.”
If They Live in My Head lacks the woozy danceability of vintage Tetras, it doesn’t skimp on the political bite. But the most topical song, “2020 Vision,” doesn’t quite transcend the corniness of its title, hinging on vague platitudes (“Looking back on 2020/All I know it’s been a journey”) and references to mansplaining. On songs like this, these punk legends could easily be mistaken for some buzzy new group of no wave-inspired 27-year-olds. That doesn’t mean that Bush Tetras have fallen behind—just that the rest of the punk scene is finally starting to catch up.


Bruce Springsteen: Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Edition

Born to Run: 30th Anniversary Edition

Try to picture the rock scene in 1974, when Bruce Springsteen started writing and recording the album that would thrust him into the national consciousness. Elvis had hit merely 18 years prior; Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, and the Beatles had died or called it quits only three or four years earlier. Bob Dylan had been at it for a while and potentially seemed dated, though he was still only 33. The weight of pop music history was something that could be shrugged off, and with so much unexplored territory, bands felt an obligation to see where rock music might yet go.
In this environment Springsteen was just 24, still a kid; he'd been hailed as the New Dylan and had recorded two quirky albums but he wasn't a star. He had talent and ambition in equal measure but the thing that would put him over was his vision. Springsteen believed like no one else in the power and possibility of rock, which led him to places that seem strange and maybe even awkward to those who grew up with MTV and everything punk came to symbolize. His naïve but inspiring outlook found its purist expression in Born to Run, which Columbia has now reissued in a deluxe 30th Anniversary Edition packaged with two feature films-- one documentary and one concert-- on DVD.
Born to Run is a distinctive record, even in the Springsteen canon. Its world is one of impossibly romantic hyperrealism, where the mundane easily becomes fantastic, and it all happens line by line. Picture the depressed state of the Jersey Shore in the early 70s, the dull sense of an era gone, and then check Springsteen's description in the title track: "The amusement park rises bold and stark and kids are huddled on the beach in the mist." This could have been a couple of bored teenagers sitting on a bench bullshitting, but with Springsteen's imagery, some glockenspiel, and a deep sax drone, it's transformed into filmic splendor. The next phrase ups the ante: "I want to die with you, Wendy, on the streets tonight in an everlasting kiss." From one angle it's the kind of line that can make you wince, at best a silly emo cliché. The way Springsteen sang it in 1974, it wasn't a dorky diary confessional; it was unhinged expressionism, Kerouac with a bottle of red wine in his stomach. While everyone was zoning out in front of the TV this scruffy dude saw an opera out on the turnpike and a ballet being fought in the alley.
He wants to know if love is wild and real, he says, but reality isn't a particularly useful concept in the context of this record. A masterpiece Born to Run may be, but only on its own terms. Springsteen at this point didn't know much about women or relationships ("She's the One" is powerful and catchy but fails as a portrait of an actual person) but he had an instinct for drama, and his stories focus on plot and circumstance rather than character. Nearly every song touches on the central mythical image of the rock'n'roll era, the ideas of escape and abandon. The protagonist in "Thunder Road" thinks everything will change if he can make it out of town. The workers in "Night" suppress their daily rage by disappearing into a dark theater of sex after the whistle blows. Conflicts are all man vs. environment and man vs. society; Springsteen would get around to man vs. himself later, after he'd settled down and lived a little more.
The size extends to the sound, greatly improved on this reissue with the first wholesale remastering since it was first released on CD. Phil Spector was a well-known obsession of Springsteen's at the time, a logical complement to the room-sized thematic canvas he'd stretched. "Jungleland" and "Backstreets" are famously epic, but shorter songs like "Thunder Road" and "She's the One" seem constructed as mini-suites, with tinkly intros building to immense climaxes. The title track was Springsteen's "Good Vibrations", toiled over endlessly in the studio and smothered with endless layers of god knows what before finally being abandoned, flawed and perfect, to the loving arms of radio. His voice would never sound quite this strong again-- perhaps he never pushed it as hard-- and the slap-echo trailing a split second behind adds to the effect.
The first DVD, a complete 1975 show from the Hammersmith Odeon, is a major find. For someone like me who never got over the disappointment of only one song from 1975 on the Live 1975-85 box, this film is a revelation. The opening piano and harmonica version of "Thunder Road" is the scene setter, with a dim spotlight on Springsteen alone on a darkened stage and Roy Bittan playing somewhere behind. When the rest of the band joins him they have a ball, with a performance in turns earnest, theatrical, melodramatic, and clowning. It's an absolutely essential item in the Springsteen discography.
Wings for Wheels, the VH-1-ish documentary on the making of the record, is a third too long and will be of only marginal interest for anyone other than committed fans, but there's still something important here. If you can get past the repetitive and fawning testimonials from the band, producers, manager, etc., there's a wealth of information about the technical process of the album, with demonstrations of how songs evolved over time. Hearing the various parts of the dense "Born to Run" picked apart, for example, just the acoustic guitar or saxophone isolated, is like a mini course on how songs are mixed.
There's also Springsteen's own commentary on the songs-- what they mean and how he wrote them-- which is interesting if not always consistent with how I hear the record. When he says toward the end of the film that Born to Run was "the album where I left behind my adolescent definitions of love and freedom-- it was the dividing line," it seems to me he's exactly wrong. A dividing line may be visible, but Born to Run lies entirely on the dreamy and reckless side of maturity and is all the better for it. Every young person should be so lucky, to have a time in his or her life when the inflated romanticism of Born to Run makes perfect sense.


The charismatic 20-year-old Bay Area rapper Nef the Pharaoh gained momentum mostly through creatively covering classic beats and delivering crisp neighborhood pride anthems. This six-song EP showcases his pop prowess and adaptability, offering stabs in a variety of promising directions.

Nef the Pharaoh EP

The odds tend to permanently be stacked against San Francisco-area rap artists, exportability-wise. Even the undisputed legends of the area have never become true household names outside of their home state—Too $hort, E-40, and Mac Dre. It’s a disheartening trend, but it’s easy to theorize about why the pattern has continued for decades. In general, Bay artists tend to like staying independent and favoring sometimes-indigestible levels of prolificacy over carefully curated releases. They also build off of their region’s existing musical traditions — sticking to their corner rather than trying to reinvent the sound of the genre. There always seems to be a gold standard of slapper already in mind—for well over a decade, it’s hinged on a handclap snare, a thin kick beating out Morse code, and a foghorn bass lick—and targeted at all times.
Charismatic 20-year-old Vallejo up-and-comer Nef the Pharaoh also holds these truths to be self-evident, and basically fits the usual bill of a regional Bay star. The young rapper gained momentum mostly through creatively covering classic beats—a swaggy flip of Nas’ "Oochie Wally"—and delivering crisp neighborhood pride anthems: Last year’s muted "Bitch I’m From Vallejo" turned the heads of local hero Cousin Fik and his mentor and labelhead E-40.
Nef’s first release for 40’s Sick Wid It Records is also full of stylistic references and hat-tips, though—perhaps surprisingly for a Bay MC—mostly to idols from far outside San Francisco. Quotes from classic '90s Cash Money Records singles structured his January single "Big Tymin’", and the influence of this kind of music weighs heavily on the entire EP. "Boss Me" is based around a sing-songy bounce cadence, and Nef recycles Juvenile’s "Ha" line construction on his Auto-Tune-riddled twerking ode "Meantime". Nef is contributing to what seems to be a mini-trend in post-hyphy rap toward turn-of-the-millenium Southern music these days: His tourmate, collaborator, and Heartbreak Gang sideman Kool John regularly bites Hot Boys flows (his most recent single with Joe Moses interpolates 2002 Big Tymers hit "Get Your Roll On"), L.A. affiliate Problem notably interpolated Master P and Young Bleed, and Juvenile himself hopped on the popular remix to fellow HBKer Iamsu!’s strip club anthem "100 Grand".
If Kool John likes to play the Juve or Mannie role, the less laconic Nef favors Wayne. Just when the likeness starts to become eerie, Nef backs off and switches hats, always with an overtly comic, lightly ironic timing, like he’s carrying off an elaborately plotted series of pranks. His verses pit in-and-out-of-phase, cartoonish rambling (à la his mentor and labelhead E-40) against lilting but controlled double-time. Snap-jumps between simpering bad boy posturing in his high range ("Trips to Rome, shrimps and calzones/ I’m always outta range, I’ma text you when I get home"), a more intimidating low purr, and a diplomatic, Drake-ian midrange (see introspective closer "Come Pick Me Up") give his verses a character-driven quality that's almost Jim Carrey-esque. Luckily, this isn't a When Nature Calls scenario; Nef’s sensibility isn't exhausting. The rapper can embody the obnoxious neighborhood bully, the smoothest game-spitter in school, and a conscientious father in one song all without spoiling the mood, or upstaging the beat.
The flow and intonation shifts as Nef pans between scenes: after-shift rendezvous with strippers, hustling rituals encrypted in dense slang, and more bald-faced, confessional anecdotes. He tends to pick simple governing metaphors and pushes them to logical but satisfying conclusions—in the marimba-studded nu-G-funk strut "Michael Jackson", most effectively, he uses an extended King of Pop metaphor to forge an elaborate tribute to designer shoe shopping.
This six-song EP does not provide a definitive answer on whether Nef is just an effective conduit for great party songs, or if he’s got a voice that’s resonant enough for a full career of albums and features. It’s a bunch of stabs in promising directions—a more ambitious extension of his earlier YouTube drops and his #RichBy25 mixtape. Success is ensured on the EP by the neighborhood heroes he’s got supporting him: rising talent June on Da Beat, G-Funk wizard and indispensible area talent scout DJ Fresh, and P-Lo, HBK’s more baroque answer to DJ Mustard.
Even in the Bay—which, from Mac Dre to Shady Nate to Husalah, has birthed an untold amount of slickness—charm as strong and effortless as Nef’s doesn’t come along everyday. He may slide into other people’s flows so well that you lose track of him for a moment, but the style and grace with which he ducks and weaves between them imbues everything he does with personality. His brand of unfailingly zany energy has characterized the best hip-hop of his region for decades, and Nef’s never been ashamed to acknowledge it ("Mac motherfucking Dre lives in me," he claims at the beginning of last year’s "M.A.C."). He’s pretty good at making anything sound cool, and maybe even cleverer than it is. See his song-stealing verse on DJ Mustard's "You Know It" from earlier this year, which closes out with: "Money on my mind like a headband/ Fucking with my ‘fetti, you a dead man/ Shoot him in his chest, watch his head split/ Every day I make a band and never play the instrument."
What he has that many of his local peers don’t is a consistent ear for hooks, a willingness to play the field stylistically without outpacing himself, and a precision of purpose. "In the land of the lost, I’m the nigga to win," he claims on "Mobbin". With industry cosigns, a "Big Tymin’" remix from Cali-stars-turned-national-influencers Ty Dolla $ign and YG (included here) and a national tour with the latter under his belt, Nef has a rare entry point for success beyond Solano County. If this EP is any indication, he may also have the pop prowess and adaptability to make the most of it.


The Cairo electronic linchpin at last combines his kinetic production and hip-hop acumen in quick blasts that delightfully warp the words of some of Egypt’s best rappers.

Terminal

In 2015, Cairo producer Ahmed El Ghazoly unapologetically summarized the false binary of his city’s club scene: “DJ culture is synonymous with, you know, bad artists,” he told Resident Advisor. “They don’t get that dance music can be art.” El Ghazoly is a vital part of crucial Egyptian club nights like VENT and JellyZone, but his own productions straddle different worlds. Under the handle of Swag Lee, he has provided an array of Jeep-quaking beats for Arabic MCs. And as ZULI, he makes the type of frenzied techno that has wormed its way into the audacious sets of Lee Gamble, Machine Woman, and Aphex Twin.
With Terminal, his debut full-length as ZULI for Gamble’s UIQ imprint, he finally brings together his dizzying electronic productions and hip-hop acumen, creating two- to four-minute blasts that constantly challenge, overwhelm, and confound. See, for instance, “Nari,” a wicked posse cut full of tectonic bass and haboob-level noise. If you can’t parse Arabic, no worries: By design, ZULI renders it as indecipherable, anyway, scrambling the signals of the acclaimed MC Abyusif and up-and-coming cyphers like Mado $am, Abanob, and R-Rhyme into a blur of garbled words and trap snares. When they reconvene for the Auto-Tuned R&B of “Ana Ghayeb,” they come through clearly, each verse addressing heartbreak against a cresting synth backdrop.
One of Egypt’s more prominent hip-hop artists, Abyusif graces five of Terminal’s tracks. While he’s rendered into noise on the opener, he cuts through the din and the lackadaisical beat of “Archimedes,” his flow conversational and peppered with staccato accents, a little like MF DOOM’s abstraction. He sounds similarly surefooted amid the stop-and-start hi-hats, motorbike noise, and alien throbs of “Akhtuboot.” As he references designer Roberto Cavalli, Pinocchio, and multiple synonyms for “confusion,” his voice moves through all manner of processors.
Even without a rapper on the track, ZULI’s fractured production style mimics their flows. During “Bump,” El Ghazoly matches the speedy flow of a grime MC, juggling and slurring beats and buzzing bass while mincing a voice that croaks “rude boy.” He strews the IDM-esque “Wreck” with all sorts of aural shrapnel, as Uzi bass and disembodied voices whiplash in and out of earshot. But starting with the haunting swells of centerpiece “Kollu l-Joloud,” the album starts to open up and allow for more space. Across the album’s back half, the pyrotechnics even give way to nuanced etudes full of enticing sound design and melting structures. He smears voices and strings across “Follow Your Breath,” while “In Your Head” mixes piano with vespers. Terminal’s dense beat tracks suggest the manic streets of Cairo, but tracks like these reveal ZULI’s interiority.
ZULI juggles techno, garage, grime, modern R&B, noise, and future bass throughout Terminal,each element soon dissolving into the whole. Not once does this feel like flashy grandstanding or forced eclecticism. If anything, it feels like his attempt to make these many fractured subgenres and scenes cohere. “In a world that feels like it’s regressing into tribalism,” he has said, “many of us who don’t fit into any one specific group identity feel sidelined at best.” Whether you hear this as a statement album from a bright new electronic producer or a showcase for Egypt’s risk-taking rap scene, it’s a head-nodding and brain-boggling work of art.


A collaboration between Will Oldham and his longtime pal, former Chavez and Zwan guitarist Matt Sweeney.

Bonnie “Prince” Billy / Matt Sweeney: Superwolf

Superwolf

In "My Home Is the Sea", Bonnie "Prince" Billy, voice thin and impossibly brittle, conveys proud love for his bulbous tummy, gleefully declaring it "round and firm and funny"-- just like him! Sardonic or not, this kind of belly-speak marks a rare moment of self-revelation for Will Oldham, who skewers accepted notions of static identity nearly every time he lowers his big, bearded jaw. Still, Oldham (appearing here as contemporary alter-ego Bonnie "Prince" Billy) is, ultimately, exactly what he says he is-- smart and tough and weird, an awkward, oddly charismatic songwriter just as well-suited to coughing up death-ballads as he is to giggling out ditties about his penis. Witness, again, the bitter joy of loyal Oldham-hood: He is simultaneously quiet and loud, both crushing and absurd, and filed in seven different places at the record store.
Superwolf, a new collaboration with guitar freelancer Matt Sweeney, sees Oldham at his squirrely best, squeaking out his finest songs since 1999's I See a Darkness. Superwolf marks Oldham's first official partnership with Sweeney, whose credits include a predictably brief stint axe-grinding in Billy Corgan's Zwan (alongside longtime Oldham buddy and Slint-forefather Dave Pajo), occasionally playing guitar in Guided by Voices, and fronting the long-departed Chavez (who released two revered full-lengths on Matador in the mid-90s).
Sweeney's participation in Superwolf was supposedly a response to a songwriting "challenge" from Oldham, and in addition to songwriting, Sweeney contributes backing vocals and guitar figures that echo Oldham's own blows, sometimes with eerie accuracy. But despite all that buddying up, Superwolf is still at times unnervingly spare-- Oldham and Sweeney's pauses can be devastating, and some of Superwolf's most powerfully convincing bits pop up between notes.
Opener "My Home Is the Sea" may sound an awful lot like late Grateful Dead (or, perhaps more specifically, like a slightly less raucous version of brother Ned Oldham's Anomoanon, who regularly employ Garcia-brand noodling and wild, space-rock somersaults), but most of Superwolf is quiet and intensely meditative, despite Sweeney's significant rock-inflections. Still, Oldham has always had a funny habit of inserting perverse, quasi-sexual shouts into otherwise-staid songs (see brutally confessional couplets rubbing up against phrases like "my horny horn"), and at least thematically, Superwolf's eleven tracks are predictably shifty-- "My Home Is the Sea" is rife with snarky lyric tricks (watch Oldham follow the momentarily devastating "I have often said/ That I would like to be dead" with a tiny pause and silent giggle, finally finishing with: "In a shark's mouth").
No matter who or what he calls himself, Will Oldham has always been uniquely capable of making colossal leaps in tone between breaths, and from track to track Superwolf nobly maintains that practice, drifting gracefully from classic-rock stomps to whispery dirges. Consequently, Oldham followers may recognize Superwolf as a welcome midway point between Oldham's past aliases, as it hops from shambling, Viva Last Blues-ish, Palace Music-era shakes to dark, Master and Everyone haunts. "Beast for Thee" matches a gorgeous, barely-there melody with self-deflating lyrics ("Why are you kind to me?/ You could so easily take me in your arms and see/ A donkey"), Oldham's quivering pipes and Sweeney's fragile guitar coalescing into a soft, droning, and tremendously pretty whole. The equally excellent "Blood Embrace" features some of Oldham's heartiest vocals, each word strong and full, floating above dark electric guitar swirls, dodging film samples of a faithless woman whispering to an unnamed lover, crafting an atmosphere so tense and ominous that you almost can't help twisting your face around to peep over your shoulder.
Soft and subtle, Superwolf is the kind of record that unwinds slowly, and is best enjoyed over multiple listens and, unsurprisingly, many glasses of wine. Oldham and Sweeney mew coquettishly, stroking their guitars, cawing bizarre stories about love, death, and body parts: theirs is a rancid and beautiful landscape.


Steered by his nasally voice and laid-back delivery, one of the original members of Team Eastside delivers a no-frills, 25-track Detroit rap album.

The Umbrella Again

If someone wanted to get the gist of Detroit rap, a link to Damedot’s YouTube channel would do the job. He was one of the original members of Team Eastside (which also included Peezy and Babyface Ray), an influential Detroit crew formed more than a decade ago that, along with Doughboyz Cashout and more, helped pave the way for the city’s current wave. Growing up, Damedot, with his mom, listened to the generation of Detroit rap that came before his; names like Street Lord Juan, Blade Icewood, Tone Tone, the Eastside Chedda Boyz, and more. It’s a musical foundation that comes up again and again during online interviews with the city’s biggest names, the lack of influence from outside trends and movements has kept the scene’s sound so singular.
Damedot’s newest tape The Umbrella Again is no-frills Detroit rap. Steered by his nasally voice, a delivery laid back like a consigliere in a tailored suit, and the repeated use of a Meadow Soprano clip, he raps almost exclusively about getting money, expensive fashion, sleeping around, and slinging dope up and down the Midwest, over pounding 808s, ominous piano melodies, and a splash of Motown soul. At 25 tracks, it’s a lot—but only four songs run over three minutes, most hover around two, and the hooks bleed right into the verses. You can breeze through it like a beach read.
There’s no clear standout track or moment on the album, but there are little things that make the best songs click. Usually, it’s when the lyrics are detailed enough that they create a scenario so implausible that it’s hilarious. On “Cocomelon,” he bonds with his toddler son as they watch nursery rhymes and count up 100 racks. His Balenciaga boots are so impractical he can barely walk in them on “Cold Shoulder.” He claims to order lamb chops without even looking at the menu (chaotic behavior) on “Lemme See.” “Dior” fires on all cylinders; from the sputtering drums to Damedot seemingly listing every purchase on his bank statement down to the $60 Uber ride. “Chrome Hearts,” with its dramatic thunderstorm intro, doomsday pianos, and Dame’s menacing punchlines, sounds like it could backdrop the final fight in a gloomy martial arts movie.
Damedot’s more romantic side, if you can call it that, is mostly him ogling at asses and hitting on bottle girls. The beats are still steady, but he writes like he’s auditioning to be the next C-plot on Love & Hip Hop; lots of talk about Casamigos, Fashion Nova, and even a track titled “Likes on Instagram.” The worst is when he starts to play around with AutoTune, his use of it on “Funny” is unimaginative like a lifeless Money Man. His voice sounds cool and distinct without it; luckily, it’s only a couple of songs.
But for the most part, there are no twists or surprises on The Umbrella Again, and while that won’t make anyone scramble for their phone to give it a spin, that’s not a bad thing. It’s rap completely in its own bubble, made specifically to appeal to anyone with the slightest interest in Detroit or mafioso rap, and done well at that.

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Instead of focusing on the micro, painstakingly stitching together each track second-by-second, Autechre's latest album grew out of jamming, with Sean Booth and Rob Brown reconfiguring and "versioning" elements of their formidable live show into new tunes.

Quaristice

There was a time in the late 1990s when Autechre embodied one way of thinking about music's future. Producers exploring the infinite possibilities of increasingly complex software were creating new sounds on an almost weekly basis. Autechre were recognized as the leading edge of this clan. Their music, while not always alien in terms of texture-- they've often favored timbres that reference electro and early techno in one way or another-- was difficult to get a handle on; the beats were hard to follow; the spaces in which the music breathed impossible to define. Music this strange was only possibly through accelerating technology, and you got the idea that Autechre's music would continue to accelerate in parallel. They were pioneers.
One of the ironies of Autechre a decade on is that they still more or less occupy the same position, while trends in experimental music have drifted elsewhere. While some laptop producers began to think about songs again-- working with vocalists, putting their own spin on krautrock, or seeing how shoegaze might sound coming through a computer-- a younger generation came at abstraction in an analog frame of mind. They began with crude electronics, incorporated tribal metaphors, and forewent the beautiful pure math of the circuit board for the messy concerns of the body; instead of shaved heads, they sported wild hair and beards and maybe a bit of face paint.
I thought of these contrasts with regard to Quaristice, Autechre's first new album in three years, when listening to "The Plc", the album's second track, which follows the ghostly synth-drone opener "Altibzz". "The Plc"'s reference point is electro-- the stiff and mannered snare drum, seemingly fashioned from tin, marks every measure robotically. But swirling around the steady-state beat are a number of odd sounds that lend a decidedly psychedelic cast. In purely sonic terms, it's not all that far from something like Excepter in their more beat-oriented mode, but Autechre's way of getting there couldn't be more different, and process is in part what defines them.
Autechre's research-and-development-style approach to music making is one of the things they're known for, but Quaristice is said to be special in that regard. Instead of focusing on the micro, painstakingly stitching together each track second-by-second, this album grew out of jamming, with Sean Booth and Rob Brown reconfiguring and "versioning" elements of their by all accounts formidable live show into new tunes. It's hard to tell exactly how that plays out, but one thing about this record is very different from anything else Autechre has done this decade: The tracks are short (most around three or four minutes) and there are lots of them (20).
While it's tempting to think of this collection of sonic miniatures as a set of "singles," Quaristice winds up working in almost the opposite way. Since the bulk of these pieces each explores one focused idea without a lot of variation, they don't make a whole lot of sense when removed from the album. Autechre have always made music of changes, where part of the interest was in hearing the gears of the music slipping as rhythms fell in and our of sync with each other and wound up somewhere different from where they began; development within most of the tracks on Quaristice is smaller and less noticeable, and many are over before you know it. So it might be more useful to think of the short tracks as sort of miniature movements within the album's suite-like whole.
Which is another way of saying that I've most enjoyed this record when I've had the time and focus to allow me to listen to the entire thing straight through. It's then I can follow the arc of the record as it moves from the billowy opening of "Altibzz" past the menacing, high-speed future-shock fuckery of "IO", to the nervous ghost-in-the-machine drone of "SonDEremawe", on through the positively AFX-ian "Simmm"-- with its wired gamelan percussion hits and too-bright melody that makes you think of an artificial sun-- stopping along the way for the towering beat and acid riff of "Rale", the disorienting implosion of "Fol3", and the double-speed Detroit assembly line of "bnc Castl".
As they move from ambient washes to classic-sounding IDM to their usual variations on techno and electro, I'm hearing more overt referencing of sounds of the past on Quaristice, like Autechre are more readily glancing and poking at genre, perhaps in an attempt to escape the oppression of so much focus on detail. So Quaristice also feels a bit like a survey, an esoteric and abstracted summary of electronic music's past that also glances toward what might come. After the hyper techno of "chenc9", the album folds back in on itself in the final two tracks, allowing space for contemplation of where the music has been. "Notwo" is so moody it almost sounds like Angelo Badalamenti; with its a dubby underwater drone and clipped upper range, it wouldn't sound out of place on Amber. And then lengthy "Outh9X" finishes the album on a more neutral note, as a steady electronic pulse is stalked by bassy tones that eventually trail off into mist in an extended ambient coda.
It's been some time since we've heard Autechre sounding as purely beautiful as the opening and two closing tracks on Quaristice, but these moments aren't indicative of the record as a whole. Even while *Quaristice * is in some ways the most listenable album they've created in a decade, it's ultimately no easier to parse, and can be very rough going indeed if you're not in the mood for their peculiar world. Ultimately, this is still the same Autechre, remaining apart from trends as the rest of electronic music world goes on its way, their steadfast commitment to their vision being both their greatest strength and most confounding obstacle.


On-U Sound legend Adrian Sherwood gives Spoon’s latest album a surprisingly sprightly and occasionally awkward dub reconstruction.

Lucifer on the Moon

Twenty years ago, in an essay in The Village Voice, the writer Frank Kogan noticed two divergent trends in contemporary popular music. Heading in one direction were rock bands pulling wildly various styles like trance and New Age into an otherwise unified “rock” sound; and in the other camp were pop artists he classified as “Recombinant Dub,” which “take out the ‘lead’ instrument—the singer, the melody, the lead guitar,” and in its absence offer manifold possibilities for what aspects of a song to emphasize or cut back. The first classification is a near-spot-on description of Spoon, whose nerviness and boxed-in swagger belie their quirky musical choices, at times incorporating vibraphones, saz, and beatboxing. And the second could be retroactively applied to Adrian Sherwood, a prolific producer and soundboard mixer whose dub treatments of everything from Lee “Scratch” Perry to Depeche Mode bear a distinctly punky and industrial edge.
On Lucifer on the Moon, these two pathways converge—sort of. Spoon asked Sherwood to remix a few tracks from their most recent album, this year’s Lucifer on the Sofa, and the band enjoyed his takes so much they requested he tackle the whole thing. What emerges isn’t Lucifer on the Sofa with different mixes; Sherwood recorded new parts from other musicians for his “reconstructions,” most notably drummer Keith LeBlanc and bassist Doug Wimbish, often regarded as the in-house rhythm section for his On-U Sound label. Lucifer on the Moon is rather a radical reworking, exhibiting a level of commitment rarely taken by other artists on remix compilations.
And it certainly doesn’t resemble much of anything else made by either artist. Spoon has never sounded as relaxed or as spacy, and Sherwood hasn’t produced anything quite this sunny or shimmering. Such a direction is unusual considering the source material. For all its sly humor, Sofa alternates between music that’s either sleazy and sinister (“The Hardest Cut,” “Feels Alright”) or druggy and reflective (“My Babe,” “Astral Jacket”). The expectation is Sherwood would foreground these aspects of Sofa, evoking the murk and spookiness of his On-U Sound releases from the 1980s, but Moon is uncharacteristically sprightly, even when the tempos slow down. Sherwood’s reconstruction of “My Babe” could be the soundtrack for a Balearic sundown or a Screamadelica B-side. His upset of “On the Radio” excavates dubby, spliffed-out undertones that weren’t present on the original version.
Yet more often than not, the results are awkward. This is particularly true on the remakes of Sofa’s energetic, rock-oriented songs. The reconstructions of “Feels Alright” and “Wild” don’t veer too far from the originals outside of a lot more phasing. And Sherwood maintains the same pulse on the downcast title track, but with his beachier mix it starts to recall early-2000s chillout lounge music, a period that doesn’t need a revival. Part of the problem is Britt Daniel, whose scratchy voice and quasi-sneering delivery suit Spoon’s suit-and-tie rock but bristle against a lusher backdrop.
It’s natural to compare Moon to other dub-meets-indie-rock forays like Bill Callahan’s Have Fun With God or even Sherwood’s Echo Dek, his similar overhaul of Primal Scream’s 1997 album Vanishing Point. But a better analogy might be the Fireman, Paul McCartney and Youth’s ambient-house renovations of the former’s studio-pop LPs. Moon also showcases an unlikely collaboration that pushes both sides in new directions. But in trying to break new creative ground, these inventive musicians end up sounding stuck somewhere in the middle.


Though his international esteem is virtually nonexistent, this Japanese polymath pioneered a musical ethic of open borders and freewheeling hybridity, epitomized by five new reissues.

Haruomi Hosono: Hosono House/ Paraiso / Cochin Moon / Philharmony / omni Sight Seeing

In the early 1980s, the Japanese singer, bassist, and producer Haruomi Hosono created an idea he called “sightseeing music.” It is a mode of making and listening that asks both creators and consumers to think of themselves as musical tourists, soaking up the sights and sounds of foreign cultures with an open mind and documenting them through personal translations. This peripatetic strategy ignored walls between genres and operated with an ethos of open borders and freewheeling hybridity. This concept powered a catalog of near-encyclopedic breadth. New Orleans funk, Okinawan folk, big-band swing, Bollywood bop, jazz fusion, acid-house chaos: A true musical polymath, Hosono has explored it all.
Hosono, now in his 70s, remains a titan in his country’s musical history, but he does not strike such a towering figure abroad. Still, the impact of his vision has rippled across vast musical distances, making him perhaps the only artist whose sphere of tangible influence includes Derrick May, Afrika Bambaataa, Duran Duran, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith, and Mac DeMarco. With his techno-pop group Yellow Magic Orchestra, Hosono helped pioneer sounds that shaped modern techno, hip-hop, and synth-pop. While Yellow Magic’s influence is unimpeachable (if underrated), Hosono’s role before and after the band’s pioneering run lingers in the margins. That’s partially because the bulk of his solo work has never been available in the United States, so his brilliance felt like a secret for record collectors and YouTube spelunkers. But a series of long-awaited reissues from Light in the Attic documents a five-album stretch from 1973 to 1989 that offers a revelatory glimpse at a mere sliver of his dizzying discography. At last, Hosono can step toward deserved international attention.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hosono helped foster a local folk music scene in Tokyo’s Shibuya coffee shops. One of his bands at the time, Happy End, became the first Japanese rock group to sing exclusively in the native tongue, teasing out how to bend the idiosyncrasies of the language around Western rhythms. This alone is a career-defining achievement, but Hosono was rapaciously creative. After the band broke up in 1973, he and a group of musicians called Tin Pan Alley (a kind of Japanese answer to Phil Spector’s “Wrecking Crew” of ace session players) rented a pad an hour from Tokyo.
While there, they recorded Hosono House, an album of what Hosono called “virtual American country”—a sort of Japanese emulation of Americana. In the chunky rhythms of “Bara to Yaju” and the honky-tonk swing of “Fuyu Goe,” you can hear how careful and considerate he was of the musical vernaculars he sourced. Hosono House instantly establishes a thread through this line of reissues: Hosono had a concrete belief in the plasticity of genre. In his singular focus on the mutable, he was able not only to inhabit different genres but bend them to his will.
Hosono’s albums suppose you can travel entire musical worlds in a single sitting, or you can at least take a trip somewhere you’ve never been. On 1978’s Paraiso, he brings you on a tour of the world’s tropics, crafting lounge pop songs so elegant and languorous they should be heard with a fruity drink in hand. The album is the first to feature his Yellow Magic bandmates—Ryuichi Sakamoto and Yukihiro Takahashi. On their “Femme Fatale” (unrelated to the Velvet Underground), the caws of tropical birds, Sakamoto’s lush Rhodes chords, and Takahashi’s paradisical acoustic drums coalesce into a rich oceanside scene. Yellow Magic, which emerged soon after Paraiso, was intended as a one-off critique of the exocticism and Orientalism of Western visions of Asian music. (Their loving target was Martin Denny’s “Firecracker,” which led to a cover more famous than the original.) The beginnings of that intellectual engagement become clear here.
The same year, Hosono released a radically different record, Cochin Moon, a synth-and-sequencer fantasia that recreated the uneasy feeling of his month-long trip to India alongside legendary Japanese visual artist Tadanori Yokoo. Hosono hoped for the album to be an ethnographic work of field recordings, like the flutes of snakecharmers or the recitations of the religious. But two unforeseen events waylaid him: First, Yokoo introduced Hosono to Kraftwerk, a central influence on the electronic backbone of this record and Yellow Magic’s subsequent debut. Hosono also contracted a stomach illness, the diarrhea producing a delirium so intense he felt he was near death.
Cochin Moon is a hallucinatory listen. Though the music is informed by Bollywood soundtracks and traditional Indian touches, the clear disorientation of his sickness is embodied in each synth pulse and distended vocal. On “Hepatitis,” the synths sound simultaneously like bubbling cauldrons, malfunctioning zippers, and manic music boxes, an overload meant to make you woozy. That unfiltered mood gives the record an almost-shocking quality.
Those first synth explorations would flower with Yellow Magic Orchestra. In 1982, during one of the band’s hiatuses, Hosono took it a step further with Philharmony. It elevated the rudimentary technology of sampling into avant-garde expression. Listing a Prophet-5 synth, LinnDrum drum machine, MC-4 sequencer, and the early Emulator sampler as his “guest performers,” Hosono used Philharmony as an opportunity to test the limits of recording technology. He described the process of sampling, looping, and rewiring his breaths, vocals, and instruments into what feel like cubist shapes as improvisatory painting. Listening means surfing a circuit board one moment and spending an evening at a robot-run opera the next. Alongside all this cybertronic experimentation were funny 16-bit funk songs (on “Living-Dining-Kitchen,” he sings about his love of junk food) and straight-up synth-pop killers like the wonderful “Sports Men.” It still feels groundbreaking.
After the Yellow Magic Orchestra broke up for the first time some seven years later, Hosono fully established his theory of “sightseeing music” on omni Sight Seeing, a clear refutation of the homenogizing phenomenon of “world music.” His inveterate genre-hopping takes us between the acid-house epic “Laugh-Gas” and the Steve Reich-inspired keyboard exploration “Orgone Box,” between the ambient experiment “Korendor” and the bizarro pop of “Pleocene.” Other songs reference Algerian raï and American swing. A winking eccentricity flows through it all, as if Hosono saw each trope he encountered as another card in a deck, ready to be shuffled and made into the stuff of magic tricks.
This unabashed love of trying new things without fear of failure is what makes Hosono’s catalog so delightful even now. In these five albums, we’re only given a snapshot of his 21 solo records, but the wizard-like inventiveness displayed here spotlights why Hosono should be considered a major figure. Taken together, these reissues represent a partial shadow history for the slow breakdown of genre boundaries. Nearly half a century after Hosono House, it’s easy to take for granted how permeable once-distinct zones have become. But rule breakers like Hosono, however overlooked they became, had to first do the hard work that’s so lovingly documented here.


This guitar-based ambient project from Will Wiesenfeld of Baths demonstrates the range of his interests and skill in a very different sphere.

Mend

It's becoming common for hazy electro-pop artists to have an ambient side project (see Evan Abeele's work away from Memoryhouse, and the Teen Daze offshoot Two Bicycles), which makes sense. The music is about vibe and feel, after all, so it has to be tempting to ditch the songs altogether and dive all the way into atmosphere. But while there's a lot of music in this vein being made, much of it seems interchangeable. So it's natural to approach Geotic, a side project of Will Wiesenfeld from Baths, with a certain amount of skepticism. But there's more going on here than just a break from songwriting.
Mend is Wiesenfeld's fifth album as Geotic, a project he's been returning to since 2008. There are a few non-musical elements that might make it seem tossed-off-- its unveiling via an Angelfire page, the fact that it was recorded in four days total, just after this past Christmas. But the record itself is more than just half-formed ephemera. Most of Mend was recorded on electric guitar, an instrument that didn't feature heavily on Baths' breakout debut LP, last year's Cerulean. Wiesenfeld's recent Daytrotter session demonstrated his skill on piano and his ear for deconstructing his own material, and Mend offers further revelations in the form of his guitar playing. Throughout, gently picked patterns skip across webs of static tone, all of which is swathed in amniotic fuzz. There's a bit of sleepiness here and there, particularly on the loping "Beaming Husband", but this is otherwise quite physical music for an ambient album. You can hear the bent notes and fingers sliding along the fretboard on opener "Unwind", and there is real movement on the lightly galloping highlight "And Upon Awakening". Mend ultimately feels organic and human, more about people than machines.
Which makes sense, since the bloops and warped samples of Cerulean were always in service of exploring emotion (the guy titled a song "♥"). A quick scan through Mend's tracklist ("Find Your Peace", "Sleep and We'll Transition", "I'll Have Come and Gone With You") reveals that those preoccupations are still very much present. There are no lofty themes or overwrought sentiments here, though. Instead, Mend's melodies are gently simple, carrying enough heft to stick to your brain without becoming syrupy. For most bedroom artists, that'd be a triumph; for Wiesenfeld, it's something he did over the holidays, another bend in an increasingly compelling career path.