The pop star attempts to be all things to all people, offering an overstimulating mix of sounds and a message of self-flagellation disguised as empowerment.

Treat Myself

Meghan Trainor’s latest album, Treat Myself, includes the tapping sound of a coconut opener used as an instrument, the word “genetics” spelled out in a chant, and a children’s choir. It does not include the song “Treat Myself,” a jangly slew of saccharine self-indulgence released in a blitz of singles that preceded the album. For that, you’ll have to buy the extended version, available only at Target.
Treat Myself was originally scheduled for release back in August 2018, but Trainor pushed it back because she couldn’t stop writing songs, vowing not to release it “until I get everything out of my head and recorded in the studio.” The result is an album that tries to be all things to all people, a sonic overload that bludgeons the listener with bastardized “empowerment” for 15 songs. Treat Myself is clogged with oozing ballads, contaminated funk, and garish shudders of EDM. The closest thing to a mission statement is “Babygirl,” a glitchy, throbbing wail whose chorus goes “Love yourself! Love yourself! Love yourself! Love yourself! AHHH!”
If you ask Meghan Trainor, she might say she makes feel-good songs, anthems for boss-bitches-in-training who yearn to “have it all,” as she croons. But in Trainor’s world, having it all tends to center around male approval. She catapulted to fame in 2014 with “All About That Bass,” a catchy-enough jingle assuring the masses that men do, in fact, like butts. Feminists condemned the song for its not-so-subtle messaging (your body is acceptable, but only because men want to fuck it), and Trainor later announced that she didn’t consider herself a feminist—a sentiment she doubled down on with followup single “Dear Future Husband,” which painted a housewife fantasy in which marital happiness hinges on the wife buying groceries. (Two years later, with a new album to promote, she changed her mind.)
Much of Treat Myself relies on the idea of female duplicity; instead of dismantling the trope, Trainor’s lyrics capitulate to it. “I’m crazy but I’m sweet,” she warbles on “Blink.” “Evil Twin” is more explicit: an apology from Trainor for the “crazy bitch” side of her, which makes her “make my bad decisions, but I’m innocent.” Where Lizzo and other pop stars who capitalize on the commodification of female empowerment have embraced the unruly, unlikable woman—“100% that bitch, even when I’m crying, crazy”—Trainor is left constantly placating: for hesitating to take a compliment, for daring to get drunk, for being both too much and too little. This is self-flagellation disguised as motivation, a Peloton instructor prompting you to pedal faster until you hurl.
Confusing production choices make the album even more exhausting. “Nice to Meet Ya”, the most tolerable track, is engineered to be a banger, with tingling drums and a mediocre Nicki Minaj verse, but its whisper of a chorus is harsh and irritating. “Wave” starts off with panoramic piano and titanic vocals before a gaudy EDM pulse kicks in, turning it into something like a Cascada remix for a middle school dance in a sweaty gym. Trainor relies on ostentatious background vocals throughout, which oscillate between gospel-inflected harmonies and cartoonish carols. (She’s said they were inspired by visits to Kanye West’s Sunday Services.) Droning “dum dum dum”s grate against bass drops; choruses droop under the weight of so many voices. “I miss the way we used to funk,” Trainor chirps over “Disney on Ice”–meets–disco beats, in “Funk,” a song so charmed by its ability to substitute “fuck” for “funk” that it repeats the sentence six times in the first twenty seconds.
The oddest moment on the album is the song “Genetics,” which seems designed to provoke controversy. “How you get that bod? Is it from God?” Trainor trills alongside The Pussycat Dolls, then spells out the titular word like a cheerleader for eugenics. It’s especially jarring after a string of songs about how earnestly Trainor is working to improve herself (including “Workin’ on It,” a muted song that seems genuinely well-intentioned). You want to root for her throughout the record, hearing her croon about lost love and never being asked to dance; you want her to love herself for something other than the sake of attracting someone. Aiming to uplift women is an obvious good. But maybe true empowerment means we can demand more from those who claim to speak for us.


The Numero release includes some of Laraaji’s breathtaking, newly discovered zither and kalimba odysseys. It reaffirms his preeminent role in ambient history.

Segue to Infinity

Well before Brian Eno recruited Laraaji for the third installment of his epochal Ambient series, 1980’s Day of Radiance, the man born Edward Larry Gordon already had his own fully formed sound. Still, Laraaji’s origin story is often retold through his connection to the British musician. As the story goes, one day in 1978, Eno went walking in Washington Square Park and came upon a man strumming away on a zither. He dropped a note into his case, inviting him to a recording session, the fruit of which became Day of Radiance, his first album under the Laraaji alias. But before that fateful encounter, Gordon had already released Celestial Vibration earlier in the year, a record whose luminous, phaser-drenched sound and sprawling, side-long pieces shared a sensibility with the nascent ambient movement—right alongside contemporaneous releases like Harold Budd’s The Pavilion of Dreams and Eno’s own Ambient 1: Music for Airports. Numero Group’s four-LP box set Segue to Infinity essentially quadruples the length of Celestial Vibration with newly unearthed material from the era, somewhat incredibly discovered by a college student on eBay in 2021. It should definitively put a nail in the coffin of the narrative of Laraaji as a street busker who was simply “discovered” by Eno, instead cementing him as an preeminent figure in ambient and new-age music’s history.
The development of ambient seems inevitable given how much music in the ’60s and ’70s was unbounding itself from rhythm. Eno himself cites Miles Davis’ 32-minute dirge “He Loved Him Madly” as a proto-ambient text, and Ambient 2 collaborator Harold Budd was influenced by the post-Coltrane school of spiritual jazz. Laraaji, who studied at Howard University and immersed himself in the New York City folk scene after graduating, would’ve been fully conscious of the jazz and modern classical music that still form the backbone of ambient and new age. The latter is a term Laraaji embraces, unlike many other composers blending these influences into non-denominational spiritual music at the time. With some great guided meditation and reiki albums under his belt, the composer has never wavered in his faith in the healing power of music.
The eight pieces on Segue to Infinity embody this heritage, most explicitly the title track, which follows the custom of Coltrane’s later work, using a flute less as an instrument and more as a vessel for the power contained in the player’s breath. The 30-something Laraaji’s sound is rougher around the edges, less blissful than it would become on later works like Essence/Universe or Unicorns in Paradise. “Bethlehem,” one of the two Celestial Vibration tracks, starts by making the physical impact of Laraaji’s zither playing inescapably clear, eventually surrendering to a wash of distortion. Even more dramatic is “Koto,” whose scratchy first few minutes should pique the ear of fans of guitar destroyers like Tashi Dorji or Bill Orcutt. The tracks on Segue to Infinity, especially on the first two discs, toggle so dramatically between the harmonic and percussive extremes of Laraaji’s sound that in digital format, it’d be hard to tell where each track ended or began, if not for brief snippets of studio dialogue at the beginning of “Ocean” and “Koto.”
On vinyl, Segue to Infinity is one track per side over four LPs, yielding a total runtime of three hours. It’s a perfect fit for Laraaji’s music, once again displaying his tendency to stretch his compositions over individual sides of whichever format he’s using (for example, he explored the expansive possibilities of the cassette by releasing his excellent 1981 album Unicorns in Paradise as two tracks, each over 40 minutes long). According to the liner notes, Laraaji himself doesn’t seem entirely sure of the circumstances of these recordings—most likely, they’re outtakes from the Celestial Vibration sessions at ZBS Studios—but the fact that each track hovers between 18 and 25 minutes suggests his taste for side-long compositions had already developed. Segue is a fearsomely symmetrical and compact compilation, and despite its great length, the quality of the music never flags.
Of the newly discovered tracks, the most breathtaking are the three “Kalimba” performances, on which Laraaji loops simple arrangements on the titular electric thumb piano. Initially, these pieces seem like cousins of Steve Reich’s Marimba Phase, until the echoed layers and resonating kalimba keys create interlocking patterns that resemble chicken-scratch funk rhythm guitars. It’s astounding how much sound Laraaji creates with such a small instrument, and equally remarkable is how much musical history is folded into compositions that float by like a daydream. Like the rest of Segue to Infinity, it speaks to the fierceness of Laraaji’s vision even at this early stage in his career—and proves that the person Eno saw in Washington Square Park wasn’t just a potential co-conspirator, but also a kindred spirit.


Following the deaths of two core members, the pioneering Florida metal band searches for celestial answer to earthly woes. It’s as close to a return-to-form as they’ve ever made.

Ascension Codes

Cynic’s music has often been eclipsed by the band’s mythology. Half its members were also part of the Florida death metal legends Death, appearing on 1991’s classic Human just after finishing high school. While touring Europe with Death, authorities impounded their gear, and upon their return home, Hurricane Andrew razed their rehearsal space, further delaying Cynic’s debut album, 1993’s Focus: a perfect, iconoclastic slab of robotic-voiced jazzy death metal. They broke up almost immediately after its release, and when they returned with 2008’s follow-up Traced in Air, their  softer, proggier sound alienated some fans. In the 2010s, Cynic have been an ongoing question mark: Virtuosic bassist Sean Malone cycled in and out of the band, while drummer Sean Reinert departed in 2015, at which point he and singer-guitarist Paul Masvidal were in public disagreement over the group’s very existence.
In 2020, the tale turned tragic for the Miami metal band: Reinert died suddenly in January and Malone died by suicide in December. With two-thirds of the core group gone, a comeback album seemed unfathomable. But Masvidal’s mystical worldview led him to embark on a final trek to find closure. He reaches into the past to channel and honor his fallen co-creators with Ascension Codes, as close to a return-to-form as we’re going to get from Cynic.
It’s a big gamble after Cynic’s 2014’s album Kindly Bent to Free Us, a misstep in extricating the band’s remaining traces of death metal. That album was so listless—even with contributions from Reinert and Malone—that their once singular sound now felt more suited for a local Guitar Center. But on Ascension Codes, Masvidal makes a few mathematical re-calculations: It’s a respectable—if flawed and often inscrutable—entry in a catalog that was seemingly defunct.
Most prominently, Masvidal re-inserts the metal back into Cynic: double-bass-drum attacks, chuggy riffs, and growled background vocals fuse once more with the jazz-prog that began to stand alone on recent recordings. “Mythical Serpents” opens with a furious riff and an extended guttural scream, while the furious blast-beats that close “Elements and Their Inhabitants” feel, briefly, like a new dawn for Cynic. These vintage moments, however, are in short order, and they are often overshadowed by Masvidal’s reliance on metaphysical whimsy.
Masvidal uses discretion in filling out the remainder of the band. He doesn’t attempt to find a replacement for Malone, whose labyrinthine runs on the bass guitar and Chapman Stick chiefly characterized Cynic’s complex sound. Keyboardist Dave Mackay’s bass synth is a sufficient simulacrum on most songs, but on tracks like “The Winged Ones,” the absence of Malone’s low-end aches like a phantom limb. Reinert is also irreplaceable. Instead of doing Focus cosplay, Matt Lynch’s peculiar jazz-metal playing (listed as “drumscapes,” in the liner notes, naturally) is paramount here. His cymbal work is exceptional, evoking splashy waves on “Mythical Serpents” and blasting off quick drum-and-bass interludes on “Aurora” and “Diamond Light Body.” Elsewhere, Masvidal leans on collaborators with contributions like “holographic-reptilian-voices” and “crystal bowl attunements,” particularly on the numerous ambient interludes (referred to as “codes) throughout.
As a singer, Masvidal splits the difference between the robotic sound of Focus and the clean vocals of Kindly Bent to Free Us. On Ascension Codes, he sings as if he’s half-human and half-machine, a synthesis in keeping with the lyrical themes. “I am the veins of a human hand,” Masvidal declares on “Mythical Serpents” after painting a picture of a fractalized star birth, “pregnant by an Annunaki in a holographic field.” It’s not exactly new territory, but contextualized within the deaths of Reinert and Malone, his pain transforms from heady to visceral as he searches for a celestial answer to his earthly woes.
His quest comes to a head in the penultimate track, “Diamond Light Body.” The song showcases Cynic’s astonishing fluidity: There’s a proggy intro, multiple synth interludes that evoke the arcade classic Out Run, a guitar solo that almost careens off the road, a breakbeat section, and a thunderous doom metal finish. It’s enough to induce whiplash, and that’s before considering some of Masvidal’s lyrical acrobatics. For a band that has shrouded itself beneath an impenetrable cloak, however, what appears to be Masvidal’s final astral projection as Cynic has never felt more welcoming and human.

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On his fifth album, Ruban Nielson accompanies some of his strongest songwriting and performances to date with foggy production that makes the whole thing feel like a long, rummy sigh.

V

Ruban Nielson, a meticulous indie rock auteur, was born into a family of musicians. As a young boy, he would watch his parents play gigs at resorts all across the Pacific, at once aware of the grotesquery of the tourist industry and enjoying the pleasures of island life—especially its music. Following the exuberant vulnerability of 2015’s Multi-Love and 2018’s Sex & Food, V, which was partially recorded in Hilo, Hawaii, figures as Nielson’s return to his past, and to the gorgeous sonics and breezy sadness of a childhood spent in paradise. Accordingly, there are big, ripe melodies that burst with bittersweet juice and are arguably among the best Nielson has ever written. But so much of this double album is lost in the fog of his production style, which, in its attempts to avoid being excessive, comes off as evasive and overly fussy. It ultimately makes V feel like a long, rummy sigh.
Nielson’s songs have always been at odds with the way he chooses to record them. The faux-fi production he helped to forge—sweet vocals sung through grimy mic filters, songs squeezed with ear-popping compression—became one of the defining aesthetic markers of the indie rock of the last decade; the clipped and redlining drum sound of a UMO type beat will telegraph 2010s bedroom rock to future generations in the same way gated reverb connotes the megahits of the 1980s. Nielson’s best songs of the past few years, like Multi-Love’s title track, the flashing disco of “Can’t Keep Checking My Phone,” and even his cover of the Grateful Dead’s “Shakedown Street,” work with these restrictions by pressing beyond them, as if their funkiness and charisma couldn’t be confined to the basement in which they’d been recorded.
To maintain this balance, the songs themselves either have to be strong and cohesive, embodying some kind of emotional urgency, or else fully embrace their own peripatetic nature and pursue vibes at all costs. On V, Nielson often hits upon a great idea—the brilliantly constructed melody and pleasingly stupid lyrics of 9-to-5 jam “Weekend Run”—only to stall out or double down. The choppy bossa nova that kicks off “The Widow” seems to offer limitless possibilities, but the instrumental song doesn’t seem to know what to do with them and settles for a bland verse-chorus-verse arrangement, begging for a vocal track. The knotty melody of “Guilty Pleasures,” and the elegant way it resolves into a dusky chorus, is nearly blotted out because it sounds like it’s being played on a turntable with an unbalanced tonearm. It feels perverse, or at least very un-punk, to wish that the guy who made “Ffunny Ffrends” would clean up his new songs, but the patina of authenticity the production is meant to provide is wearing thin.
What makes V particularly frustrating is the knowledge of how good it could have been if Nielson had tightened the tracklist and given the remaining songs the sunlight they deserve. “Meshuggah” pits a slurping bassline against a bit of late-night tuxedo funk that lightly recalls Sam Sparro’s “Black and Gold,” while Nielson rips a sticky, questioning guitar solo through the middle of “The Garden,” a mid-’80s Don Henley pastiche that cooly shifts to absorb the outburst. The hapa-haole ballad “I Killed Captain Cook” winningly retells the story of the colonialist’s untimely end in Kealakekua Bay, and the playing is intricate and lovely, flecked with foam and softly swinging. Nielson’s vocals are stunning, full of brass and wavering like a muted trumpet. It’s startling to be reminded how good of a voice he has.
His strengths are even more evident on “That Life.” In the lyrics, he’s standing near the pool at a resort, just outside the scene, surveying the tourists sipping cocktails; jaguars lurk nearby; the next blow-up is just around the corner. For the duration of the song, though, things are at peace. The guitar makes it all work, the way it flicks between cheery and mournful, sometimes holding both at once and frequently spilling outside the meter like gin over the glass of a guy trying to carry three drinks back to the cabana. “That Life” is just a slice of something, barely even a moment, but it’s loaded with unspoken sadness. It’s among the very best songs Nielson has ever written.
Nielson’s gift for melody is undeniable, and many of the tracks here have a strange tendency to seem more interesting once the record’s over. Like humidity, the music can seep into your walls and soak them without your being aware of it. What this means is that V is often more affecting as a memory than it is as a present encounter, a notion that dovetails quite nicely with the nostalgia at the album’s core, sure, but also suggests that a bit more presence would’ve better served V’s songs. Whether intentional or not, Nielson’s characteristic haze makes the album comes across as self-conscious and blurry, as if he doesn’t want to align himself too closely with the glossy AM gold sounds that artists like the War on Drugs and Tame Impala have embraced more openly—and that the songs here so obviously draw from. Run through that obfuscatory filter, and absent the verve and pop of UMO’s previous work, V can feel remote and insular without the charm of being coy. There’s just enough shown here to leave you craving a more direct experience of the world Nielson is spinning.


Mississippi native's debut on Animal Collective's Paw Tracks imprint finds him working in the realm of schmaltzy barroom pop with a style that's sometimes evocative of Jens Lekman or Stephin Merritt.

Dent May & His Magnificent Ukulele: The Good Feeling Music of Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele

By now you may have heard that young throwback crooner Dent May was discovered by Animal Collective during the recording of Merriweather Post Pavilion in Oxford, Miss., and subsequently signed to the group's Paw Tracks imprint. That fact has a lot of folks excited about the newcomer, but May is not your typical A.C.-related artist. In fact, on the wide spectrum of musical styles he's probably as far away from labelmates Black Dice and Excepter as, um, David Banner or Taylor Swift.
The Mississippi native offers here a kind of modern-day lounge act-- approaching his material as part sentimentalist, part jokester-- and sings in a manner closely reminiscent of indie pop vocalists like Stephin Merritt and Jens Lekman. May shares those gents' strong grasp of melody (his songs are nothing if not hook-laden) but unlike them he is a strict genre specialist. For this record, at least (allegedly there's a dance project in the works under his Dent Sweat alter ego), he functions entirely within the boundaries of the schmaltzy barroom pop and suburbanized island music of the 1950s and 60s. ("Meet Me in the Garden", all tiki torches and umbrella drinks, might as well be the soundtrack to a backyard cookout thrown by Mad Men 's Betty Draper.) Combined with his tongue-in-cheek lyrics, it can be a lot of shtick to swallow at once.
Since it's inseparable from the album's content, one really has to buy into the persona May is selling in order to enjoy The Good Feeling Music of Dent May and His Magnificent Ukulele . That's much easier to do with a fellow like Jonathan Richman (with whom May shares an innocent-guy outlook and is often compared to), because his naiveté comes across as genuine and is leavened with humor. But May's attempts at winking cultural criticism often undercut his authenticity. On "College Town Boy", he awkwardly pokes fun at the academic set, singing, "Since graduation day he feels like a fraud, he still regrets he never studied abroad." Yikes. Prompting more winces on "You Can't Force a Dance Party", May revisits a hipster get-together gone awry: "All the way from Brooklyn, Sally came to see me", he says, but laments spoiling the fun by being "in the corner reading poetry and prose."
If you can look past these cringe-inducing moments, The Good Feeling Music occasionally lives up to its title. One of the record's most charming cuts is "Oh Paris!", which finds May doing his best Morrissey atop strumming ukulele (yes, it is omnipresent) and "shoo-be doo-be" backing vocals. Just as pleasant is his reverential take on the Four Preps' 1957 classic "26 Miles (Catalina)", a wise cover choice since it fits snugly within his aesthetic. Alongside "Meet Me in the Garden", these songs represent a sufficiently enjoyable portion of the record. But to compare May again to one of his peers, there's nothing on par with Lekman's "Black Cab" or "Maple Leaves" here. At this early point in his career, May's tunes, while positively catchy and at times a lot fun, just don't have that kind of depth. They also lack heart, and that seems harder to forgive.


Drawing on Mediterranean folk, Georgian laments, and the 12th century mystic Hildegard von Bingen, the Catalan duo’s debut album is musically unique yet emotionally familiar.

Fiat Lux

The first second of “Stabat mater,” track four on Catalan duo Tarta Relena’s Fiat Lux, is a moment of such elusive, illusory beauty that you wish it could go on forever. It’s not immediately obvious what the diaphanous, fluttering sound is, or if your headphones might be playing up. But when the sound is repeated after a brief flurry of vocals, Helena Ros and Marta Torrella’s voices united in immaculate harmony, the penny drops: Tarta Relena have made a feature out of their breathing, converting what most singers regard as a musical by-product into a captivating highlight of their highly rewarding debut album.
This attention to detail is typical of Tarta Relena, if we can say anything is typical of two musicians who once dubbed their music “progressive Gregorian” and who tackle everything from traditional Georgian song to a composition by 12th century Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen on Fiat Lux. Throughout their small but impeccable catalog, Tarta Relena have exercised exquisite control over their music, in both the refined telepathy of their vocal synthesis and the sparse musical touches that accompany it. Fiat Lux is an album where every breath counts and every note is precisely deployed, the duo’s voices supported by a fine-spun mesh of electronic touches and hairline effects from producers Juan Luis Batalla and Òscar Garrobé.
“El suïcidi i el cant” employs a cavernous electronic bass for exactly four notes at the song’s halfway mark, their perfectly weighted melodrama forewarning a turn in the song’s emotional heft, like dark clouds briefly blotting out the sun. The song’s second half sounds positively furious, Ros and Torrella’s vocals filled with the volcanic anger that the bass foretold. “Esta montanya d’enfrente,” similarly, uses the faintest puff of electronic sound, a ringing in the ears of the song’s background, to add texture to the duo’s gorgeous vocal coupling, edging this traditional Sephardic song into the 21st century on the finest of musical beds.
Tarta Relena’s arcane choice of material might make their music appear dry or academic, the work of librarians and archivists rather than poets and provocateurs. But a fast-beating heart runs through the record, and the ultimate payoff is a sly pop edge that is more evident on Fiat Lux than in the duo’s previous work. “Me yelassan,” the traditional Greek song that closes the record, edges its way into a hand-clapping beat that plays off swinging drums and bass like a Rosalía hit, or the Diwali riddim that dominated dancehall in the early 2000s. “El suïcidi i el cant” is an adaptation of traditional poetry by Pashtun women from Afghanistan and colored by the “terrible August” of 2021, when Taliban forces took control of the country. But the song’s wildly catchy melody is underpinned by a scuttling electronic beat that brings it to the edge of pop music, even as the song spins its searing musical tale. There is even a touch of self-effacing humor in the title of “Relatable content,” a wordless sonic interlude that leads into the record’s final stretch.
Perhaps Tarta Relena’s greatest achievement on this gripping album is that their work sounds both musically unique and emotionally familiar, reaching through centuries of tradition and geographical divide to connect on a human level, like an ancient Egyptian hangover cure or a crude Sumerian joke. Fiat Lux feels timeless, a finely detailed work of archeological adventure, where the emotions excavated run deep.

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I See You, the third album by the xx, attempts to incorporate everyone’s talents into a new version of their sound, one true to their roots but richer and more varied.

I See You

The xx’s self-titled debut remains one of the great sleeper hits of the last decade. No one—including, it’s fair to say, the xx themselves—expected that their murmuring blend of turn-of-the-millennium R&B and C86 indie pop would go on to sell a million copies and become hugely influential. But from the beginning, the London trio had a lot going for them. In Romy Madley Croft and Oliver Sim, they had two songwriters conversant in the primal language of heartbreak and loss, whose vocals, though limited, conveyed anguish. Madley Croft’s guitar lines did a great deal with very little, the single notes carving deep feeling out of broad subjects. And producer and programmer Jamie xx, with his unerring ability to find rhythms that fit with emotions, made sure each tune got its perfect beat.
Coexist from 2012 was a decent re-statement of the debut’s animating ideas, but the prevailing story of the xx in the years since that debut has been the rise of Jamie xx. The most exciting music coming out of their camp—from one-off singles like “Far Nearer” and “All Under One Roof Raving” to his 2015 breakthrough In Colour—belonged to him. The xx was all about working within limitations, with a prescribed set of sounds and themes; Jamie xx’s solo music was built around samples, and was, accordingly, wide open, bound only by his adventurous ear. I See You, the third album by the xx, sounds like an attempt to incorporate everyone’s talents into a new version of their sound, one true to their roots but richer and more varied.
On their first two albums, the xx limited their arrangements so that the songs could be performed live. But here, Jamie xx’s samples form the backbone of several songs, allowing them to move into territory that would be impossible with a guitar/bass/programmed-percussion set up. An early single, “On Hold,” even cops a mangled hook from a Hall and Oates song. It’s a quintessential Jamie xx sample, easily recognizable the moment you hear it but taking a moment to place, allowing your memory to fill in the blanks as the song moves and changes around it. Heard on its own late last year, “On Hold” sounded slightly forced, but it makes perfect sense as a brighter, poppier part of a record that takes the essential xx subject of uncertain love to near-concept album status.
As much as the expansive production helps move things forward, this is in many ways Madley Croft and Sim’s album. Both have grown as vocalists. Neither has tremendous range or depth, but they’re clever and resourceful singers, able to shape meaning through subtle inflections and shifts in phrasing. Sim’s approach is more face-to-face and straightforward—he seems like he’s holding up his end of a conversation—while Madley Croft seems like she’s talking to a mirror, trying to steel herself to share her feelings with the world. The delivery of every line is considered, as the pair tug at the edges of lines to get the expression just right. “I just don’t re-mem-ber,” Sim sings, drawing out the final syllable in “Say Something Loving,” imparting an additional touch of longing without overreaching; “Here come my insecurities/I almost expect you to leave,” Madley Croft sings in the same song, nearly summing up the record’s lyrical concerns in a single line.
The defining characteristics of these voices are helplessness, fear, and hurt; the xx sound quite far from the indie pop of their debut stylistically, but they retain their connection to that world because they still traffic in shy introspection and vulnerability. For the narrators of these songs, there’s a constant war between how the world sees them and how they feel inside, and self-love isn’t part of the equation. On “Performance,” Madley Croft sings about keeping up appearances, giving the illusion that everything is OK when she’s dying inside. “Brave for You” is a tribute to her deceased parents, but it could be about anyone who believes in you more than you believe in yourself. All the existential wrestling—interior vs. exterior, the promises and betrayals—happens in the closest of spaces; “My name on your lips/Your air in my lungs/Drowned in oxygen,” sings Madley Croft on “Lips,” sketching out just how close and intimate this world is.
“Performance” and “Brave for You” both feel like classic xx songs—they are naked and spare, with hints of strings and Madley Croft’s guitar and a whole lot of silence. About a third of the album works with stripped-down, open arrangements like this, while others make judicious use of samples and layers of synths and sequencers. “Dangerous” opens the album with a startling blast of a horns that returns on the chorus as a counterpoint melody. “A Violent Noise” has a winding and surging cluster of arpeggiating notes that explode at all the right moments—something of a Jamie xx trademark—and the production brilliantly traces the emotional arc of the song.
As an album, I See You has the eerily seamless wholeness of the self-titled debut, a smooth and polished object with no visible edges. If it came apart, you would almost certainly never be able to put it back together again. As such, each individual song seems most realized in the context of the album, as it builds on or tweaks or develops what came before and hints at something to come, and the closing “Test Me” ties it altogether. The song’s production is breathtaking, one of Jamie xx’s masterpieces, all Eno-like suggestion, and the words are both simple and move the record’s narrative forward. “Test me,” both Madley Croft and Sim sing, “see if I break,” suggesting an unspoken strength that might have been there all along.


A live recording from New York’s the Kitchen captures a rare kind of improv synergy between the versatile composer-percussionist and a pianist who rose to fame in Anthony Braxton’s quartet.

Tyshawn Sorey / Marilyn Crispell: The Adornment of Time

The Adornment of Time

The composer and multi-instrumentalist Tyshawn Sorey has been spoiling audiences in a variety of jazz and classical scenes over the last few years. It’s easy to assume that he’s always in a recording studio somewhere: documenting his excellent trio; working as a percussionist in bands led by colleagues like Vijay Iyer and Steve Lehman; producing expansive, multi-hour pieces that engage with drone-music mysticism. But that substantial discography is hardly the whole story.
His recent song cycle, “Cycles of My Being,” was written for the tenor Lawrence Brownlee (and has played at Carnegie Hall and Opera Philadelphia). A 2018 appearance at New York’s Jazz Gallery, during which Sorey performed on a modified piano alongside the saxophonist Hafez Modirzadeh, was a reminder that his work as a keyboardist has not been given enough attention. A few months later, a production of Sorey’s dramatic work inspired by Josephine Baker, with a text by Claudia Rankine, proved mesmerizing on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s grand staircase.
Yet even as his reach has broadened, Sorey has also kept working in more intimate formats. His latest record, a duo set with the veteran pianist Marilyn Crispell, is a freely improvised meeting recorded live at the Kitchen, a longtime New York experimental haven.
The album’s first act—particularly its first 20 minutes—is dominated by hushed and haunted timbres from both players. Approximately half an hour in, we get the first hint of tumult, a mood that develops, thrashes around, crests, and subsides over another quarter hour. An extended, closing coda brings to mind the beginning section while also highlighting the distance these performers have traveled.
On the surface, this might seem a standard free-improv sequence, and therefore less notable than Sorey’s hyper-conceptual projects. But this composer lives to mess with surface-level thinking. And thanks to his distaste for categorizing music—particularly when it comes to genre definitions—listeners should always be prepared for ambition and thoughtfulness, no matter the format.
Not surprisingly, across this unbroken 64-minute improvisation Crispell proves to be an ideal partner for such a non-hierarchical musical mind. Her own rise to prominence came, during the 1980s, as the pianist in saxophonist and composer Anthony Braxton’s “classic” quartet (a group whose recordings Sorey remembers admiring as a teen in the liner notes for this album).
During those vintage, marathon performances, preserved on albums like Quartet (Birmingham) 1985, Crispell often played one of Braxton’s notated solo-piano pieces while the band’s other members played parts from other Braxton works. The collage-style results tended to be bracing, but always in a musical fashion—in part due to Crispell’s keen ability for listening intently amid a whirlwind.
Crispell’s responsiveness is still in elite, extraordinary shape here. Her percussive, avant-jazz technique gets plenty of room to roam during a section of high-drama pummeling; check out the swinging density she produces 34 minutes into the set.
But her feel for momentum is also present during many of the performance's quieter passages, during which the pianist’s ideas clearly inspire choices made by the drummer. (It helps that Sorey’s kit is outfitted with gongs and other forms of pitched percussion, the better to merge with melodies coming from Crispell’s instrument.) In these moments, The Adornment of Time doesn’t merely present two talented musicians in a room, improvising at the same time. Instead, the album makes good on ideals at the heart of the free-improv tradition—including equality and adaptiveness—that are often paid lip service, if not always easily heard.


So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I ...

Neutral Milk Hotel: In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

So, then, seven years later Domino reissues In the Aeroplane Over the Sea and the arguments can begin anew. I've talked about this album with a lot of people, including Pitchfork readers and music writers, and while it is loved in the indie world like few others, a small but still significant number despise it. Aeroplane doesn't have the near-consensus of top-shelf 90s rock artifacts like, say, Loveless, OK Computer, or Slanted and Enchanted. These records are varied, of course, different in many ways. But in one key respect Aeroplane stands apart: This album is not cool.
Shortly after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, Puncture magazine had a cover story on Neutral Milk Hotel. In it Mangum told of the influence on the record of Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. He explained that shortly after releasing On Avery Island he read the book for the first time, and found himself completely overwhelmed with sadness and grief. Back in 1998 this admission made my jaw drop. What the hell? A guy in a rock band saying he was emotionally devastated by a book everyone else in America read for a middle-school assignment? I felt embarrassed for him at first, but then, the more I thought about it and the more I heard the record, I was awed. Mangum's honesty on this point, translated directly to his music, turned out to be a source of great power.
In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is a personal album but not in the way you expect. It's not biography. It's a record of images, associations, and threads; no single word describes it so well as the beautiful and overused "kaleidoscope." It has the cracked logic of a dream, beginning with "King of Carrot Flowers Part 1". The easiest song on the record to like on first listen, it quietly introduces the listener to the to the album's world, Mangum singing in a muted voice closer to where he left off with the more restrained On Avery Island (through most of Aeroplane he sounds like he's running out of time and struggling to get everything said). The first four words are so important: "When you were young..." Like every perceptive artist trafficking in memory, Mangum knows dark surrealism to be the language of childhood. At a certain age the leap from kitchen utensils jammed into dad's shoulder to feet encircled by holy rattlesnakes is nothing. A cock of the head; a squint, maybe.
Inside this dream it all begins in the body. Moments of trauma, joy, shame-- here they're all experienced first as physical sensation. A flash of awkward intimacy is recalled as "now how I remember you/ how I would push my fingers through your mouth/ to make those muscles move." Sometimes I hear this line and chuckle. I think of Steve Martin in The Jerk, licking Bernadette Peters' entire face as a sign of affection. Mangum here reflects the age when biological drives outpace the knowledge of what to do with them, a time you're seeing sex in everything ("semen stains the mountaintops") or that sex can be awkward and unintentionally painful ("fingers in the notches of your spine" is not what one usually hopes for in the dark). Obsessed as it is with the textures of the flesh and the physical self as an emotional antenna, listening to Aeroplane sometimes seems to involve more than just your ears.
Then there's the record's disorienting relationship to time. The instrumentation seems plucked randomly from different years in the 20th century: singing saws, Salvation Army horn arrangements, banjo, accordion, pipes. Lyrical references to technology are hard to fix. Anne Frank's lifespan from 1929 to 1945 is perhaps the record's historical center, but the perspective jumps back and forth over centuries, with images and figures sucked from their own age and squirted out somewhere else. When "The King of Carrot Flowers Part 3" mentions "a synthetic flying machine" our minds leap to something like Leonardo da Vinci's 15th Century drawings of his helicopter prototype. The image in "Two-Headed Boy" of a mutant child trapped in a jar of formaldehyde is pulled from Dr. Moreau's industrial age island. The radio play powered by pre-electric pulleys and weights, the nuclear holocaust in the title track. What's it all about? Mangum offers an explanation for these jarring leaps in a line about Anne Frank in "Oh Comely," where he sings, "I know they buried her body with others/ her sister and mother and 500 families/ and will she remember me 50 years later/ I wished I could save her in some sort of time machine." If you can move through time, see, nothing ever really dies.
Seven years it's been, and whether Mangum has had personal trouble or somehow lost his way with music, it's not unreasonable to think that we've heard the last from Neutral Milk Hotel. I hope he does, but he may never pick up the guitar he set down after "Two-Headed Boy Part Two." Even so, we have this album and another very good one, and that to me is serious riches. Amazing to think how it started, how at the core of it all was guts. I keep thinking of "It's Alright Ma, I'm Only Bleeding," and one of Dylan's truest lines: "If my thought-dreams could be seen/ They'd probably put my head in a guillotine." Aeroplane is what happens when you have that knowledge and still take the risk.


Hot Chip’s singer sounds caught in an irresistible haze on his latest solo LP, making music that’s more deluxe than usual but far scruffier than his main band.

Beautiful Thing

Alexis Taylor’s new album, Beautiful Thing, begins with a slightly muffled, boompty beat, part throbbing of the heart and part pounding of a speaker heard through a bathroom door. “I’m dreaming another life,” Taylor sings, his voice quavering sweetly. “Won’t you meet me out of your mind?”
Taylor has spent the last 15 years or so dreaming things up. As the lead singer of Hot Chip, he imagined working-class British versions of American R&B (their 2004 debut, Coming on Strong), disco abandon (2008’s “Ready for the Floor”), and ’90s diva house (2015’s “Need You Now”). Around and between those albums, Taylor formed the improvisatory trio About Group with members of This Heat and widescreen junglists Spring Heel Jack. As a solo artist, Taylor has variously fancied drones; amiable odes to old pros like Paul McCartney and Todd Rundgren; and most recently a collection of straightforward piano-man twinklers.
Snatches of his discography waft throughout “Dreaming Another Life,” the opener to Taylor’s fourth solo album, as if before this dream he’d fallen asleep counting sleeves of his old records. It’s hypnotic but unsettled, stumbling from a warm passage of ambient house to loops of squalling noise to a glittering sheet of treated guitar. “The changes are hard to hear,” he sings, “but I know they hide in here/I’ll pull them together soon/Somewhere out of this thick air.”
The title track arrives like a thunderstorm through billowing curtains. Created, along with most of the album, in concert with DFA co-founder Tim Goldsworthy, “Beautiful Thing” boasts a bed of acid supporting unfurling swaths of noise, little winces of keyboards, and warm fluffy clouds of piano. “I try to reach you/But our love is undefined,” Taylor sighs, his voice caught in reverb. As with “Dreaming Another Life,” the song again and again starts to congeal, yet can’t quite become tangible. It’s the sound of Taylor caught in an irresistible haze, failing to slough away the sleepiness.
Taylor picks up the kind of shrugging boogie Christine McVie once put down for mid-album highlight “Oh Baby,” a kind of anxious paean to cohabitation. “There is nothing greater than the sight of you just dreaming free,” he sings as the chorus rises and falls, “and if I close my eyes I know that I will lose you when I wake.”
And so, for the rest of the album, he sort of decides not to, tossing and turning in the throes of sadder songs. “Deep Cut” is a kind of “Nightshift” for the unemployed; “Roll on Blank Tapes” is something like if the On-U Sound System attempted a sea chanty; “I Feel You” approaches the grace of Antony and the Johnson’s “You Are My Sister” or “Thank You for Your Love,” without the aura of trauma.
The layers of sound Taylor presents are sumptuous, full of tossed-off licks of piano and guitar that gather into motifs more deluxe than his recent solo work but far scruffier than Hot Chip. Tucked into them, Taylor’s lyrics make strange but welcome bedfellows. Often, he uses the language of music-making as a metaphor for connection. In the stately vocal showcase “A Hit Song,” he sings, “I need a high note/A moment to clear throats/Of all who have lost hope/And need a response.../And I know there is something left to lose/And high notes don’t always reach the truth.” There’s a catch in his voice like a dull sun through the blinds, capturing the moment of waking up and reaching out to find the pillow’s vacant after all.


Four years after their debut, the D.C. band regroups as a duo for a more electronic guitar-pop album that keeps their preternatural sense of melody but sands down a few of their more unique touches.

Love Is Yours

The three original members of D.C. band Flasher were uniquely intertwined—subtract or swap a player, and you risk drastically altering or destroying what made them so special in the first place. Their acclaimed 2018 debut album, Constant Image, was marked by a spring-loaded post-punk exuberance, their shared lead vocals, and patchwork-style lyrics written collaboratively as a trio. A few years after the album was released, bassist Daniel Saperstein departed the band, leaving guitarist Taylor Mulitz (formerly of Priests) and drummer Emma Baker to reform as a duo on their second album, Love Is Yours. The first iteration of Flasher was such a democratic and balanced three-piece that this situation raises the question: How do you move forward when an integral piece of you is missing?
Love Is Yours arrives four years after Constant Image, but Mulitz and Baker aren’t trying to replicate the magic. Instead, they opt for a more contemplative sound. Their first LP was so springy that, at times, it sounded like the coil might break. But their deliberate pace this time around means there are no tracks that verge on self-destruction. Like its predecessor, they utilize a lot of strange guitar and synth textures, giving the record a bumpy, staticky feel. Mulitz and Baker’s oh-so-smooth vocal arrangements come to the front and are a big highlight, providing a gauziness that pairs well with their sawtooth guitar tones and clamorous background ambiance.
Their electronic experimentation is more prominent on Love Is Yours—the album opens with a series of percussive hisses, and muffled frequencies are peppered throughout the album. On the latter half of “Damage,” Flasher pivot towards dark, whooshing electro-pop, and the instrumental “Pink” is a hypnotic blitz of contorted synths. Baker also takes on more lead vocal duties than before, excelling especially on the tender, wistful refrain of album opener “I Saw You” and the tongue-in-cheek punk delivery of the verses on “I’m Better.”
While Constant Image grappled with coping mechanisms amid the pervasive, immaterial tension that nags at the human spirit, Love Is Yours is about how to nurture (or discard) relationships that keep you sane during rough times. “Damage” and “Tangerine” capture the act of untethering from manipulative people, the former seemingly with a more clear-cut postmortem and closure, the latter with deeper, more emotional wounds. The title track describes the life-affirming connection that can result from a long-term partnership (“You got me missing what I didn’t know I need”) but also the landmines that appear once you know someone so intimately (“I’m steps behind you, saying the wrong thing again”). It communicates the frustration of not being on the same page with other people, but for all the record’s melancholia, the album ultimately revolves around an admirable devotion to oneself. “Give yourself back/Self-respect is knowing the odds/And seeing the cause and effect/And how could it be,” Baker sings in the album’s opening lines.
What Love Is Yours lacks is the same level of potency and lyrical sharpness as their debut. Gone are the explosive climaxes, the exhilarating pace and buoyancy that made Constant Image feel like such a strangely joyful listen. The way Flasher perpetually added and subtracted sonic layers on their first album also feels more seamless and impactful than on Love Is Yours. Their new lyrics don’t possess the previous record’s humor or clever wordplay and although they gain warmth through direct, vulnerable writing, they lose the satisfying connection they once had between their anxious guitar lines and agitated lyrics. Ignoring the shadow of its predecessor may be difficult, but Love Is Yours is still a compelling album of off-center power pop and is proof that the long-held bonds of Baker and Mulitz remain just as strong.


The Australian singer is a hedonistic pop hero on an album that pulls together club nights, tender moments, last-call horniness, and eclectic samples with remarkable finesse.

Troye Sivan: Something to Give Each Other

Something to Give Each Other

On his 2015 debut, Blue Neighbourhood, Troye Sivan pitched himself as a dreamy outsider torn from the pages of a YA novel, taking in the world with a wide-eyed gaze that saw far beyond small-town limits. But rather than settling for Lorde imitation or soundtracking John Green adaptations for the rest of his life, Sivan gradually shed his youthful preciousness and adopted a more adult perspective. 2018’s Bloom graduated out of the suburbs and into other peoples’ bedrooms, with anthemic pop songs about bottoming and hooking up with older men for the first time. The music was still booming and melodramatic, but its writing was distinctly more funny and lived-in, dispatches from an artist who’d matched observation to experience by actually fucking around and finding out.
Enter “Rush,” the electrifying, sex-addled lead single to his third album Something to Give Each Other. The song hit like a jolt of poppers and cut through any prior notion of who the singer might be. It immediately reintroduced Sivan as a libertine pop hero, combining hazy, impressionistic lyrics with a breakneck house beat and roaring, homoerotic football chants. Encouraged by his best friend and collaborator, Leland, to “go make a fucking hot video… [and come] out with your dick swinging,” Sivan decamped to Berlin with the filmmaker Gordon von Steiner for a week’s worth of shooting and partying. The final music video is a tableau of lockstep choreography, polymorphous perversity, and nightlife mischief in all of its dank glory. The placid, angel-faced expression that fronted the cover of his debut record had been wiped off and replaced with a lusty pout, with any trace of preciousness long since sweated off on the dancefloor.
Something to Give Each Other was conceived after a break-up during a period of extended singleness. Bloom’s starry-eyed expressions of love are replaced with a much more open conception of romance and sexuality, where intimate connection forms spontaneously. Long-distance yearning bleeds into last-call horniness on “What’s the Time Where You Are?” when Sivan rounds out the chorus by crooning “I’m right on top of this groove/but God, I wish it was you.” On “One of Your Girls” he serenades a straight guy into hooking up, riding a boy-band hook straight out of *NSYNC with a lascivious hot girl wink. And no amount of repeat listens will ever diminish the off-the-charts boldness of the heartfelt plea in “How to Stay with You” to: “Turn my bussy out.”
Something to Give Each Other is a showcase for some dazzling eclecticism. Ideas that couldn’t possibly work on paper are executed skillfully and to often gorgeous effect. Want to hear Jessica Pratt’s heartbreaking warble over a dance beat? Behold the achingly downcast “Can’t Go Back, Baby.” ¿Quieres Troye en español? See the sultry “In My Room.” “Got Me Started” bookends its propulsive two-step beat with a sample snatched from Bag Raiders’ “Shooting Stars,” aka from that years-old meme. Although initially grating, its wiggling synths build upon the song’s romantic pining in a way that feels funnily reminiscent of Overmono’s sample-heavy take on UK garage.
In recent interviews, Sivan has given off the impression of having settled gracefully into his celebrity, the kind of artist who’ll plainly state that since all their dreams of stardom came true early they now have little left to prove. It’s the kind of unburdened attitude that scans as glamorous rather than unambitious, an opportunity to leverage his secure footing at the heart of the mainstream to take on outré projects, flex his good taste, and otherwise let his freak flag fly. The whole project of Something to Give Each Other feels like a masterclass in curation, a melange of niche humor, arthouse references, and inspired experiments bound up in the freedom to be any kind of pop star he wants to be. From the samples to its reference-laden music videos—“Got Me Started” crams Wong Kar-wai allusions, Denis Lavant’s cathartic sprint from Mauvais Sang, and getting yeet’d into the space of three minutes! “One of Your Girls” is ’90s Calvin Klein by way of “Video Phone” and Xtina at her most nasty. Something to Give Each Other turns a buffet of references into easily digestible ear candy.
The record’s vibe is so cohesive that when the album dips, it’s noticeable. “Still Got It” tracks the smoldering longing after a hook-up with an ex but feels like an aesthetic hold-over from Bloom, with its mournful organ-drenched instrumental and extended outro sapping the pent-up energy and momentum from the brilliant four-song run that precedes it. By contrast “Can’t Go Back, Baby” covers similar emotional ground but wields its muted, minimal thump and brilliantly bizarre sample to telegraph permanently broken trust and the loss of a shared dream to much greater effect. Sivan matches its haunted ambiance with hushed vocals that pine and twist over a relationship, not belting but fully inhabiting every sensitive spot of the song’s bruised feeling.
Much of Something to Give Each Other scans as less of a reinvention than a gradual honing of Sivan’s craft. He’s slightly scaled down the soaring, anthemic volume for a sound that he can more fully command. Whether he’s falling in or out of love, going out, or reflecting on the night before, Sivan sounds more credible than ever, pairing a newfound swagger with a heady rush of emotion. He’s his own drug, and it’s such a hit.


Leaving behind the singer-songwriterly stylings of his previous project, Coldair, Tobiasz Biliński taps the pristine sonics of 1980s sophisti-pop, but it’s often too bloodless for its own good.

Cast

Tobiasz Biliński’s Perfect Son is a descendant of sophisti-pop, a British style from the 1980s that wielded the polished and pristine elements of jazz and soft rock as a reaction against punk. Though few people besides music critics actually use the term, sophisti-pop’s influence lingers: Last year marked the 30th anniversary of Talk Talk’s post-rock god particle Spirit of Eden, while the 1975’s “Love It if We Made It” was explicitly modeled upon the Blue Nile’s “The Downtown Lights.” The “sophisticated” part refers to the traits that elevate albums like Perfect Son’s Cast above the fray, regardless of trends: arch lyricism, fussy melodies, and unblemished musicianship on lavish equipment. Cast embodies all of these qualities perhaps too well—it’s surely a curious fit on a label like Sub Pop.
As Perfect Son’s debut, following a string of records Biliński released as Coldair, Cast stresses themes of self-discovery and transformation, and it does manage a more intense physical experience than it initially lets on. The full-band drop on “Reel Me” is a satisfying HD wallop, while “Promises” and “My Body Wants” are callbacks to the brief, pre-millennial merger of big beat and Britrock. There’s enough blunt-force low end and percussive jolt to give the impression of a much nastier and heavier album, if Cast wasn’t so beholden to production values that warrant a 70% marginal tax rate. But Biliński mostly nods to trip-hop without the drugs or industrial without the kink and abrasion. In that sense, Cast is also rooted in late-1990s singer-songwriter records where the flavors of edgier genres were simply misted on like essential oils.
I assume the point of it all is that Biliński’s blue-eyed soul vocals are in constant combat with his red-blooded desires—“Fill your lungs/Feel love and feel lust,” he sings over the mechanical shuffle of “It’s for Life.” His lyrics frequently scan as elemental and carnal: He admits to “murderous thoughts” on a saintly stretch of “So Divine” and is engulfed by a “wildfire I cannot tame” while he goes “off the rails” during the trans-European metronomy of “Promises.” But Biliński is can only tell rather than show: a song actually called “Lust” declares, “I am turned over/I parted with bad blood... I’m filling up with lust,” and something’s either lost in translation or just a misunderstanding of how desire really works.
If you’re going to use the word “perfect” in your band name, it helps to have a developed sense of irony. Despite their considerable differences, Perfect Pussy and A Perfect Circle do share a subversive streak. Perfect Son, not so much. Everything about Cast, from its high-end synths and imperious production to Biliński’s alabaster vocals, is superficially flawless and taken at face value; most of one’s time with the album is spent looking for cracks, hooks, or anything resembling a personality. The thing about perfection in art isn’t just that it’s unattainable—it’s also uninteresting.


Perennial Long Island noise-rockers return with their first album in 14 years, as detailed and cacophonous as they've always been.

Controlled Bleeding: Larva Lumps and Baby Bumps

Larva Lumps and Baby Bumps

Since their 1983 debut Knees and Bones, the Long Island-based Controlled Bleeding’s 30-plus albums have spanned a dizzying array of genres including noise, industrial, no wave, prog, psych, dub, and jazz (just to name a few). Likewise, Larva Lumps and Baby Bumps—the band’s first album since 2002, and also their first since the deaths of key members Chris Moriarty and Joe Papa—cuts a wide swath through musical styles. But at this stage of a four-decade career defined by relentless exploration, it would be too easy for Controlled Bleeding to rest on the audacity of its kitchen-sink mentality alone.
Bandleader Paul Lemos imagined the album's grotesque cover art (by musician/visual artist Gregory Jacobsen) would fit the music because he found it “simultaneously beautiful and revolting.” But even if *Larva Lumps *contains its fair share of sonic provocation, its deeper allure lies in the band’s ability to rein in and unify their musical appetites. For someone who appears to have first resorted to noise because of his limited musical skills, Lemos has grown into a seasoned bandleader who can extract near-miraculous levels of flexibility from his supporting cast while also keeping it raw, like a compromise between the trebly chicken-scratch sound of classic Chrome and the layering of modern Swans.
If you were to play this album on shuffle along with the band’s back-catalog, it would be difficult to distinguish the new material from the old. Larva Lumps’ gaunt, boxed-in production sounds mistakable for a low-budget indie-label recording from the late ’80s or early ’90s—the kind that just couldn’t be mastered to sound very “full” on CD. That said, the band is undeniably patient, even where latter-day members Chvad SB, Mike Bazini, and longtime drummer Anthony Meola’s programming lean more towards youthful passion than refinement.
The psych-rock of opener “Driving Through Darkness” sets the tone for the rest of the album. Over a hypnotic, uptempo groove, jousting organ and guitar lines recall ’60s garage stylings that Can would have bastardized decades ago, or Obits would have done this century. Lemos and company could easily have settled for a genre exercise. Instead, the song surpasses its own stylistic trappings as it ramps down towards its conclusion. When the drums drop out and Lemos drops twinkling harmonics over a gurgling bass line, it’s a rather convincing impression of Yes’ Steve Howe at the beginning of “Roundabout.”
That decision at the end of “Driving Through Darkness” underscores the subtlety and taste that Controlled Bleeding sustains throughout Lava Lumps' two-disc sprawl. (The first disc contains studio material recorded over a four-year stretch, while the second disc consists of live-in-the-studio recordings helmed by underground production icon Martin Bisi). On roughly a third of the album—“Carving Song,” “Swarm,” and the 23-minute noise opus “The Perks of Being a Perv”— the band uses high-pitched static as if it were a weapon. Light years away from the unbridled retching of Knees and Bones, however, these tunes actually hold together thanks to Lemos’ tight arrangements.
As a seasoned composer, Lemos never allows the songs to lose their pulse or their sense of space, and his affinity for both becomes even more apparent when you measure the noise- and rock-oriented tunes against the melodic ones. On “As Evening Fades,” for example, he laces a picturesque piano loop with clean-toned guitar work that verges on new-age jazz. A younger act with something to prove might not have been able to resist marring the song with uglier sounds. Larva Lumps has plenty of those, but Lemos clearly understands the value of not forcing them into the picture. It allows even the most caustic moments to reveal the beauty at its core.


North Carolina neo-bluegrass outfit write uncommonly affecting songs as they stumble through country, bluegrass, orchestral pop, and early Beatles-style pop-rock.

Emotionalism

The Avett Brothers' Emotionalism is the most contrived record I've heard this year. It's also one that, like my kitchen table, I've returned to, compulsively and without expectation, for comfort and familiarity. My stupid little bromide, maybe. And what the band-- two brothers and a friend from Concord, North Carolina-- lacks in subtlety, they make up for with embarrassing persistence: Song after song, stumbling through country, bluegrass, orchestral pop, and early Beatles-style pop-rock, they never waste a chance to harmonize or wail, to loose one beat-down sentiment after another, to back-pat or console.
In a world so full of cynicism that it's invisible-- and one in which anti-cynics invariably look like thorough dopes-- it's hard to talk about Emotionalism, their fifth studio album, in a way that isn't hyperbolic. It could stand to be 15 or 20 minutes shorter. Some of the songs, like "The Ballad of Love and Hate", are ham-handed without sounding humble, allegories stuffed with pulpit wisdom and so bent on supplying a moral that the characters become abstractions. The Avett's heroes, like the Replacements', aren't clever or nuanced-- they're most instructive when puking, bawling, or both. Or, like the narrator in "Will You Return?", an unwitting bubba to whom shit just happens: "I open my eyes/ And here's what occurs/ A pretty little girl/ With pretty little curls/ Leans on my mind/ Leans to the side."
When Emotionalism is good, it's intrusively good, a kind of stop-and-pause experience that will probably inspire inscrutable phone calls to people you care about-- "I just wanted you know how blessed I am," and so on-- which, in turn, will inspire concerned questions from said loved ones about alcohol intake (blame the last thirty years, which made a cultural victim of earnestness). And drunk it is, most of the time-- messy in sentiment, swooning, impulsive. It's that spirit that offsets the album's contrivances. It's not grisly-- some of Emotionalism shows off how irritatingly middlebrow and non-committal alt-country can be-- but it's not too mannered, either. And the Avetts probably get shot by both sides as a result.
So play the perfunctory cynic through the opening ruminations of "Die Die Die", come to flinch at the aw-shucksisms of "Paranoia in B-Flat Major" ten minutes later, cry like a bruised teenager by the time you hit "Salina", and then find the wherewithal to glorify your bad decisions by "Pretty Girl from San Diego". Emotionalism is the analyst who probes the reluctant patient until he splits like a melon.


Blue Broderick’s new power pop record sets her gentle thoughts against the most immediate rock Diners has ever attempted.

Domino

Across Domino’s twenty-five minutes, Blue Broderick wanders through a Los Angeles beach, makes a plan to address the leaks in her bedroom ceiling, and idly waves a pen over an empty notebook. It’s her sixth album as Diners, and her first in power pop mode. Through it all, she avoids any trace of the style’s two most combustive emotional fuels: self-pity and spite. The chief thrill of Domino is in Broderick setting her probing interiority against the most immediate rock Diners has ever attempted.
Over the last few years, Broderick has shown adeptness at filtering the mellower sounds of the ‘70s—jaunty Nilssonian electric piano, West Coast AM Gold smoothness—through earnest bedroom pop. On Diners’ previous album, 2022’s Four Wheels and the Truth, she dipped a toe into the rowdy waters of power pop. Here she dives in, skinny tie and all—and with a checkered cover that echoes a cult classic. Joining her on this excursion is Portland-based producer/multi-instrumentalist Mo Troper, who has become something of a power pop ombudsman, interrogating the genre and its fastidious proponents in print and on record.
The two are great company on Domino. The songs are lean but fully developed; Jack Shirley’s mix is as crisp as Diners’ beloved sodas. The details on opener “Working on My Dreams” are typically sharp: the counterpoint riff that foreshadows the chorus, the four-on-the-floor snare thwack, the glammy strut on the two distinct bridges. The subsequent title track crosses ‘65 Beatles with Big Star at their most magisterial. The guitar moments have particular resonance, whether they are the valedictory, Southern-rock smear on the ballad “I Don’t Think About You the Way I Used To” or the drawling handoffs on the slow-strutting “Painted Pictures”.
None of this comes across as mere stylistic exercise. Broderick borrows from the playbook but isn’t buried in it: The snap and drive of these songs serve as edges against which she can hone her thoughts. The meaning of success is a recurring theme: opportunities both missed and misdirected. “Even now I can forget that I’m not here for competition,” the recent L.A. transplant sings on “Domino.” On the blithely skippy “So What,” Broderick refers to golden tickets and winning numbers, only to tear them up on the chorus: “So what would I want it for? So what would it do?”
But she sings it with more rumination than rue. Working in a style that’s consumed with unrequited longing—for a crush, for the perfect riff, for a mythical time when jangle and chime ruled the charts—she finds profound comfort. On “Someday I’ll Go Surfing,” Domino’s emotional center, she considers taking up a new hobby. “I’d have to find a board, and I’d have to find a shore,” she muses, “Without many locals ‘round who’d rather I’d have just stayed at home.” The guitars peal; the backing vocals swoop down in a plaintive warble. Not for a second does Broderick sound out of place.


A sort of sequel to 2000's The Covers Record, Cat Power's Jukebox reaffirms what Chan Marshall has gained during her 21st century musical growth spurt, and what she's lost. Among the artists she tackles: Hank Williams, James Brown, and Billie Holiday.

Jukebox

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since Cat Power's last covers record in 2000. In the intervening eight years, she has undergone a musical and characteristic evolution that's as surprising as it may have been necessary. Following her 2004 album You Are Free, which perfected her music's transformation to scrawled blues folk, she appeared on Handsome Boy Modeling School's otherwise vanilla White People. Her track, "I've Been Thinking", was a risky gambit that moved beyond the introverted waif persona of previous albums and revealed a new facet of Cat Power: credible soul singer. The point of "I've Been Thinking", which still holds up, is its sultriness; it's a striptease on a dare, complete with smoky ambience, a halting chorus, and an unbelievable spoken-word passage. Speed it up, add a flashier beat, and the song could be a Beyoncé hit.
That track signaled a newly emboldened Marshall, as she began to refine her emotionally precarious live shows. For her next album, The Greatest, she would return to Memphis, the birthplace of her 1996 Matador debut What Would the Community Think, to fully embrace soul music, recording with members of Al Green's Hi Records band. Her trajectory is familiar, but the unspectacular Jukebox, a sort of sequel to The Covers Record, reaffirms what she's gained during this musical growth spurt, and what she's lost.
Marshall has become a confident and charismatic vocalist, with subtle nuances and deft combinations of phrasing styles. She's no powerhouse like Aretha Franklin or Irma Thomas, but she sings well in a low, smoky croon, just a notch above conversational. I would have loved to see Marshall wander a few blocks south of Hi and end up at Stax, either recording with the MGs (how natural she would sound with Steve Cropper) or maybe with Isaac Hayes circa Hot Buttered Soul (who could do orchestral wonders with her songs). Instead, Marshall has moved a few decades forward, assembling a band of 1990s contemporaries for Jukebox. Jim White, the Dirty Three drummer who backed her on Moon Pix, and Judah Bauer, late of the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, pound out dramatic accompaniment, but are never quite as smooth, as supple, or as inventive as her Greatest band.
Marshall uses these covers albums not so much as a personal mixtape but as a state-of-the-career address. Like The Covers Record, a more self-critical work that traced her own influences through rock and folk, Jukebox exposes the roots of her newfound soulfulness. At a time when genres seem discouragingly fragmented and crossovers few and far between, Jukebox is admirably diverse, straddling country, blues, R&B, folk, and showtunes. Few other albums, at least in the indie realm, will skip so effortlessly from Hank Williams to James Brown, from Billie Holiday to Janis Joplin, from Jessie Mae Hemphill to the Highwaymen.
Marshall sounds most comfortable with the country songs. Changing the pronouns in Williams' "Ramblin' (Wo)Man", she instills the song with a bluesy drama that's all grit and wanderlust. Similarly, she plays up the erotic twang in the Highwaymen's "Silver Stallion", stripping the song it to its barest acoustic accompaniment. I doubt Merle Haggard or Johnny Cash considered the sexual implications of a line like, "Just a touch of sadness in his fingers/ Thunder and lightning in his thighs"; they were talking about a horse, but Marshall gamely emphasizes the entendre*.* Marshall even covers herself again, as she did on The Covers Record: Her new band generates some bluster on the Jukebox reworking of "Metal Heart", originally a standout track on 1998's Moon Pix, but never exhibits the dynamic and control of the original.
Aside from the supremely awkward reinterpretation of "New York New York", the soul covers are the least impressive here. Marshall's pleading doesn't sound credible or committed on James Brown's "Lost Someone" or George Jackson's "Aretha, Sing One for Me". She doesn't savor these songs the way she savored "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" and "Sea of Love" on The Covers Record. The woman who got such an obvious kick out of doing her best Bob Dylan on "Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again" on the I'm Not There soundtrack is largely absent here, even on the sluggish cover of Bob's Christian-era "I Believe in You".
It's worth noting that Jukebox's best moment comes not with a cover, but with a Cat Power original-- and fitting, too, that it's a mash note to Dylan. On the epistolary "Song for Bobby" she recounts in conversational lyrics her youthful infatuation with Dylan and how her professional love for him blurred into something like romantic affection. The song is funny, endearing, and even revealing. Still, a covers album like Jukebox should reveal new facets of a performer in its selection and interpretation of favorite songs. That's how (and why) The Covers Record worked. But eight years later, only "Song for Bobby" tells us anything new about Chan Marshall. The rest of Jukebox doesn't even say much about Cat Power.


Elbow slides from engaging to naval-gazing on their third full-length.

Leaders of the Free World

Guy Garvey name-drops his mum on two of Leaders of the Free World's 11 tracks-- first time she makes an appearance is on the title track ("Your mum don't sleep!/ The friends you keep!/ I didn't raise a thief!"), and the second comes into play when "The streets are full of Goths and Greeks" and Garvey hasn't "seen [his] mum for weeks." Manchester-according-to-Elbow is the creepiest of locales-- take Asleep in the Back's "Any Day Now" and its broken record mantra: "Any day now, how's about getting out of this place?"-- so yearnings to crawl back to mummy or hit the road or, well, both, are understandable. Trademark Elbow is the languorous, brooding sort typified in 2001's Asleep in the Back and 2004's Cast of Thousands, but the band's third LP, Leaders of the Free World, leaves dankly gorgeous torpor mostly behind.
George W. Bush is at least partially to blame, if only for the title track, which references him near-explicitly: "Passing the gun from father to feckless son/ We're climbing a landslide where only the good die young." The song's primary gripe is fair enough: "The leaders of the free world/ Are just little boys throwing stones/ And its easy to ignore 'til they're knocking on the door of your homes." The idea that America's president is "spoilt, nasty, selfish little shit for brains" (says Garvey to the BBC) is nothing new, but Elbow's take is problematic: World affairs are easiest to tune out when said affairs don't directly concern themselves; by confessing so, Elbow inadvertently declare accusatory kinship to "little boys throwing stones."
The rest of the album flounders apolitically, as well. It's dull, for one thing. Why, pray tell, did Elbow decide to start sounding less like Radiohead rip-offs and more like midlife-crisis Travis? Leaders still intimates "Creep" in places, but it also garners new Brit bloke alignments: Past comparisons to Coldplay were probably undeserved, but present ones make sense. These guys are flirting with the seductively pointy fingernails of adult contemporary's harmless-but-gooey clutches.
Gone is the charming fog of Elbow-rock, replaced by cheery caveats against partying too hard ("Picky Bugger"). Brevity has never been their strong suit, but this is Elbow at their dullest shoe-cum-navel gazing. Complaints that tempos never changed on previous albums were valid circa Asleep in the Back, but irrelevant now: Speeding up hardly helps captivate. If the plan was to bait with catchier hooks, and exhume sentiment with slower, choir-backed ones, it flops ponderously. Fast song/slow song switch-offs seem contrived and go to show: Elbow do best when going with their (preferably gloomy) gut.


Bjarki is a closely watched new techno producer from Iceland with a deft touch for big, dumb ragers. On the first of 3 new releases this year, he treats old-school techno with classic-rock reverence.

b

Bjarki, a producer from Iceland about which little else is known, is precocious even by the standards of European techno, in which new phenoms emerge before most Americans start driving. He has appeared early and often on Nina Kraviz’s burgeoning Trip label, and she has thrown her considerable taste-making weight behind him, featuring him prominently in mixes. Last year’s “I Wanna Go Bang” was a smash, the kind of “duh, of course”-techno track that immediately had everyone wondering how, in more than 30 years of making kick drums go “bum-bum-bum-bum,” no one had arrived at this particular combination of “bum bum” and hook (a sample from a mid-90s DJ Deeon intro): “Sometimes I feel like/I wanna go bang.” Bum-bum-bum-bum.
It seemed for a moment like Bjarki would be the hero European techno needs, making the kind of stoopid ragers that his peers were either too proud or too ambitious to regularly produce. Some tracks just need to exist, even if sampling a Chicago institution like Deeon is ballsy. But his entry in Resident Advisor's closely watched podcast series was an hour of his own unreleased tracks, an act of DJ solipsism usually reserved for more established and/or idiosyncratic artists. This year brought the announcement of three separate full-length releases on Trip—not albums, Bjarki maintains—an expunging of his archives that begins with Б (a cyrillic letter “romanized using the Latin letter B”), 13 rave tracks that have been making their way into Kraviz’s sets.
In its breadth and manner Б reveals something about Bjarki that a clutch of early tracks could not: he’s a staunch classicist, tidily moving through techno’s paradigms. Bjarki transitions easily between low culture—hoover bass, squiggly acid—and high—moony synth pads, sci-fi escapism, fussy IDM—resulting in something like a Noah’s Ark of tropes. Б is an oddly conservative collection, suggesting not a desire to bang the box but to make sure the box is neatly packed and properly labeled (witness the following track titles: “Here It Comes Can You Feel It 92 Hoover 2,” “Opalocka Acid Groove 12 Bit Mix,” the blatant Aphex-ism that is “Midi 14-Aug-2”). Bjarki finds a middle ground in which his music seems neither dated nor current; listening to Б is a little like watching a decade-old action movie with a sky-high budget.
There’s plenty of talent on display here, as Bjarki proves himself adept at all of these different styles. There's the ominous percussion of “Bbbbbbbbbbb render 2”; the grimy, erotic bassline of “It’s My Thing,” the easy way “The Lover That You Are” shimmies between bleary-eyed post-rave comedown and nervous tics. He’s naughtiest, and most potent, when incorporating short little vocal loops, which seem to bring out his most aggressive, percussive moments. But there's also too much limp mid-tempo breakbeat (“Son of a Son,” “Can a Man”) and silly mimicry, like the faux drama and cockpit ephemera of “As You Remember.”
You might alternately call Bjarki’s sound “timeless,” but I wonder about the value of timelessness in track-y techno. Great DJs can re-contextualize the old tracks, make us hear them anew; plenty of others can make us go bang by weaving together the current, however marginally different that current might sound at any given moment. This is how techno works, and even if you think it all kind of sounds the same, it tends to sound the same in clusters. Techno could use a lot of things—more diversity and more humor chief among them—but it probably doesn’t need the kind of overt classic rock gestures Bjarki is making here. Bjarki has two more collections coming this year, and has already proven himself a prolific producer with real talent, but Б doesn't take him, or us, anywhere.


Gucci's record released while incarcerated; despite the name-- the sequel to his best 2009 tape-- it's being treated as much as an LP as a mixtape.

The Burrrprint (2)

"My jewelry game is at an all-time high right now," says Gucci Mane, over the phone from prison, on the intro to The Burrrprint (2). I'm sorry, but that's frankly hard to believe: The only jewelry he's wearing on the mixtape cover is a pair of handcuffs. Still, if that cover is to be believed, he has no trouble getting access to lobster, cell phones, and pink bottles of champagne while in prison. At no point do we learn how he opens bottles of pink champagne while he's got handcuffs on. It can't be easy.
The Burrrprint (2) is the latest example of a long tradition: A rap album that comes out while the guy who made it is in jail. (And in this case, it really is an album rather than a mixtape, at least in the sense that his label is trying to rack up at least a couple of bucks by selling the damn thing in actual stores.) And while the bulk of the mixtape consists of tracks that Gucci recorded before starting his year-long parole-violation prison sentence, we still hear a whole lot of phoned-in missives from the imprisoned Gucci. He even recorded one song, "Intro (Live From Fulton County Jail)", from an actual prison phone. It's still very much a Gucci Mane song, not concerned with anything much deeper than his yellow Lamborghini with the butter rims. Even locked up, Gucci refuses to turn introspective. No matter what, he's determined to give us more cheap synthetic beats, more loopy word choices, more big choruses, more dizzy celebrations of materialistic pleasures. In other words, he's doing exactly the same shit he did before he went to prison. He's not even working out! "No push-ups, but I'm still looking good as a motherfucker," he tells us.
As a straight-up Gucci mixtape, The Burrrprint (2) comes nowhere near the panache of its predecessor. The original Burrrprint, itself a sequel of Gucci's The Movie mixtape, was pretty much straight murder from end to end. On this one, though, filler abounds. Gucci's memorable punchlines come less often, and his choruses don't stick quite so easily. Gucci's cadences are less inventive, wheezier, more tired. Gucci's guest rappers are bigger stars than usual-- Ludacris, Rick Ross, Trey Songz-- but they add less than longtime collaborators like energetic mushmouth Wacka Flocka, who gets a couple of good moments. Considering the insane volume of material Gucci recorded before going to prison, it's pretty amazing that he wasn't on autopilot earlier, but it's still disappointing to hear him at something less than full speed.
But even when not at his best, Gucci continues to fascinate, partly because his voice has rap's best flattened-out party-dude bounce, and partly because you never know what kind of absurd word combinations he'll come up with next. (Some of my favorites from this one: "Your girlfriend says my earrings are erotic," "to a hood chick, Gucci's voice is euphoric," "I got so much jewelry on that I think I need a clone.") "Shining for No Apparent Reason" has maybe the best Gucci song title ever. And some complete tracks are worthy entries in the Gucci canon, like the rumbling Ludacris collab "Atlanta Zoo" or the spare synth-whistle showcase "Boy From the Block". Best of all is the nine-minute posse cut "Coca Coca", on which Gucci rounds up six of his frequent collaborators (OJ Da Juiceman, Yo Gotti, Nicki Minaj, etc.) and takes every last one of them to school.
But the real takeaway from The Burrrprint (2) is that Gucci is going to continue to make these ecstatically ignorant bangers just as soon as he's able. "Worst Enemy", the closing track from Gucci's The State Vs. Radric Davis album, hinted at a more thoughtful and introspective Gucci, and that Gucci never returns here. Instead, any moments of reflection come almost by accident, as when he interrupts the brag-fest "Do This Shit Again": "I got acquitted for murder, it was purely self-defense/ I hope they don't try to do that to me no more, don't wanna do that again/ Walking out my jail cell, don't wanna go through that shit again/ Thirty K at King of Diamonds, watch me throw that in the wind." And still the image of bills floating through the air is what lingers. When Gucci gets back out of prison and returns to crafting images like that, it'll be a good day.


The Houston singer’s debut blends pop, alt-R&B, and soul into a polished and pensive account of growing into young adulthood.

PSA

Peyton Booker’s songs burst with youth. As Peyton, the Houston singer moves through the world with starry-eyed wonder, wringing joy and novelty from mundane experiences. A trained vocalist and violinist with a choir background and deep ties to Houston’s music scene, she takes a refined yet playful approach. Her debut PSA is a pensive and lighthearted account of the trials and delights of young adulthood, its sunny, carefree music harkening to the days of R&B as the soundtrack of coming of age.
Peyton has been surrounded by music her whole life: Her grandmother Theola Booker was a Grammy-nominated gospel singer who once gave childhood piano lessons to Beyoncé. Peyton herself is a former member of Milky Wayv, a since-disbanded collective of Houston producers, keyboardists, and singers. Her work harnesses this lifetime proximity to music, straddling genres and styles with cool fluency. PSA melds dream pop, alt-R&B, and soul, a blend that manifests the album’s themes of change and becoming.
The production varies between lush and neat, the arrangements rich but never overshadowing Peyton’s shimmering harmonies. The colorful synths and celestial imagery bring to mind the fantasia of Prince and the futurism of Erykah Badu (the album cover evokes that of New Amerykah Part One), but the only time Peyton makes a direct nod to her influences is when she covers “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory—which actually is weirder than it might sound. Peyton’s version is more quiet storm than show tune, her breathy whispered harmonies wafting through an abyss of acoustic guitar and dulled percussion.
Like “Pure Imagination,” many of PSA’s songs meditate on a single emotion. “IRLMB” is pure infatuation, relishing the rush of fresh romance. “I really love my baby,” Peyton sings with possessive delight, elongating the syllables in “baby.” For “Perfect Peach,” a candied funk track, she’s sweetly yearning, comparing a paramour to ripened fruit. “Every night I see you/In my wettest dreams,” she coos, sounding more happy than horny. It’s as if the idea of this person is as appetizing as their actual presence.
Peyton’s ruminations are sometimes uninspired. Her vanilla references to Picasso and Civil Rights figures on “Ppl Say” underscore the vagueness of the gossip the song cites. “They say you’re just a dreamer, but did Martin lose hope?” she sings, going full Hallmark card. Picking through the pieces of a breakup on “What Did I Do,” she’s just as cliché. “Don’t make me a villain/I’m your superwoman,” she pleads. In moments like these, Peyton’s embrace of youth feels like a lack of perspective more than one still taking shape.
Highlight “It’s Been So Long” is more grounded. Over a bed of twinkly synths and soft keys, Peyton sings of death as if experiencing it for the first time. “How could you go to heaven/Without telling me goodbye?” she asks, her voice cherubic and plaintive. The shock is only temporary, the grief turning into acceptance as the song builds, but Peyton doesn’t make the shift feel inevitable. Throughout PSA, she channels the insurgency of growing up without exalting it. Her music is the rare agnostic document of youth, presenting it as neither tragedy nor primacy. One day you’re young, and then you’re not.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Captured during a festival set inside a 13th-century church in the Netherlands, this live album of songs about death allows listeners to revisit their private grief.

(after)

Death is real. That is the invocation of Mount Eerie’s A Crow Looked at Me and the new (after), a live recording that captures songs from Crow and the subsequent Now Only, the exquisite LPs on which Phil Elverum documented his candid thoughts after the 2016 death of his wife, Geneviève Castrée. A crew member surreptitiously recorded Elverum’s set at the 2017 Le Guess Who? festival in the Netherlands, prompting Elverum to consider, in a new way, the mutual contemplation of solitary grief with people outside of the concert hall. A live album consisting entirely of songs about death, (after) in turn invites listeners to consider our own stories and how they might feel to a room full of strangers.
Though not religious, Elverum often plays venues that underscore his music’s spiritual imagery, which positions nature as a sort of secular take on the sublime. He even served as the recording engineer at The Unknown, a Catholic church converted into a Washington state studio. (after) finds Elverum again in a place of worship, the 13th-century gothic church, Jacobikerk, in Utrecht. With its late Medieval grandeur, the venue becomes another instrument for Elverum, his words and acoustic chords reverberating from stone walls and rib-vaulted ceilings. Though Crow and Now Only are spare records, Jacobikerk makes the versions on (after) sound hollow but full. Elverum’s voice, impossibly soft, fills the space with solemn clarity.
But the most striking thing about (after) is that, even after so many performances, these songs sound as raw as they did when Elverum first committed them to paper and tape. As on A Crow Looked at Me, “Ravens” unspools nakedly before us, elegant and heartbreaking. His uneasy phrasing transports us to the mossy place where he once grieved for Geneviève. When the song ends, you hear a pregnant pause in the room, the audience hesitating before it claps. Do you applaud someone else’s confessional grief? As the show continues, the concertgoers trade solemnity for enthusiasm, recognizing that, for tonight, they’re all in this together.
The songs of Now Only, written shortly after the release of Crow but largely unheard at the time of this November 2017 show, are particularly affecting here. They tend to be more overtly self-aware than the songs on Crow, the music more expansive. (after)’s version of “Distortion” omits the initial roar of electric guitar from Now Only, but the the song’s core is elevated. Elverum sings about how his life and travels had informed his feelings for Geneviève. “My complex intentions and aspirations do not matter at all/In the face of the crushing flow of actual time,” he sings, putting both Geneviève’s death and this strange endeavor of performing songs about her into perspective. “Now Only” itself stands out here, too, because it’s Elverum’s funniest song and the one that directly addresses his experience playing live. He takes stock of his own feelings, first questioning how anyone could experience tragedy so acute and, then, at his most darkly comedic, lists ways that people die every day—being hit by trucks, getting cancer, for no obvious reason at all. “And some people have to survive,” he reminds us. “And find a way to feel lucky to still be alive.” Otherwise sealed in wax, these songs, now living, form a new dialogue between performer and fan.
This exact dynamic is what I pondered when I saw Mount Eerie play a similar set last year in a Brooklyn synagogue. What did we hope to gain from watching Elverum play these songs? Elverum himself has asked these questions: “What is this? Is it entertainment? What is applause for? What kind of ritual is this?” he wrote about (after). When I was in college, my dad died after two years of chemotherapy and radiation. In Elverum’s performance,  I heard thoughts from that experience articulated better than I’d ever managed, with an agonizing weight I’d felt but never quite put into words. His experience as he watched Geneviève “turn from alive to dead right here in our house” echoed my own. The empty rooms and fading sunsets of their home in Anacortes, Wash. afforded me a new vocabulary for considering my own grief. The effect recalled mourning at a funeral, where emotions become waves that expand and contract communally. Sobs and sniffles echoed through the room that night. As with any funeral, there was laughter, too.
Not everyone heard such concerts—or will hear (after)—the same way. I overheard conversations between concertgoers who seemed baffled by Elverum’s choice to tour these songs at all. Why would anyone choose to do this, someone asked. Others used words like “heavy” and “brutal,” as if they were at a black metal show. Even Elverum has marveled at the absurdity of it all, the choice to relive the most horrible moments of his life so many times. But listening to (after), I began to wonder about the motives of the audience: Did the individual tragedies of the attendees collectively legitimize our presence? And if so, what must one endure to pass muster?
To answer that concert-goer: Who knows, really, why Elverum decided to share these songs with us? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that there was an audience to bear witness. When that crowd claps on (after), there’s a tenderness to the applause, a gratitude you can hear coming back at Elverum as he finishes each song.  You can hear it even if you didn’t see the tour, even if you’re just listening to (after) on headphones as you walk in the rain. It’s the sound of hundreds of people thanking this man for sharing his story, because in it they see parts of their own. Or they know that his grief may someday become a blueprint for navigating theirs.


Tara Jane O'Neil's first solo LP in five years finds the ex-Rodan bassist, painter, constant collaborator, and tireless solo experimenter carving scenery out of sound. It's quite possibly the finest merging of the chameleonic O'Neil's song-based work and her more experimental side.

Tara Jane O’Neil: Where Shine New Lights

Where Shine New Lights

"What you love is made of wind," Tara Jane O'Neil muses a little more than halfway through Where Shine New Lights, her first solo LP in five years. The deeply naturalistic Lights finds O'Neil—ex-Rodan bassist, painter, constant collaborator, and tireless solo experimenter—carving scenery out of sound. Yet it's the record's very next line that really gets to the heart of Lights: "you will not be this shape again." Lights, her first LP for Kranky, is quite possibly the finest merging of the chameleonic O'Neil's song-based work and her more experimental side. But combing through the catalog for comparison-points doesn't quite get at what makes Lights so striking. Lights is a peculiar thing: impeccably designed, with every thrum positioned just so, yet entirely malleable, different every time you come across it.
Lights, like much of O'Neil's solo work, occupies a space between traditional songcraft and more experimental fare, weaving ghostly drones and incidental noises through hushed, unhurried post-folk. Throughout Lights, O'Neil brings the two sides as close as they've ever come before, meticulously plotting out every earthy strum and faraway clatter. Swirling opener "Welcome" bleeds a increasingly ominous whoosh into the heavy-lidded, borderline groovy "Wordless in Woods", which makes its way into the slowpoke folk-pop of "This Morning Glory". Each move is unhurried, each note is placed just so. But, for all the precision of the arrangements, Lights is the farthest thing from rigid. O'Neil's been careful to leave space in these songs, to let them unfurl at a ruminative pace, to burrow secrets way down in the mix. It leaves Lights feeling practically habitable, a good place to get some thinking done.
O'Neil casts an optimstic glow over much of Lights, but its tone is always in flux. "Bellow Below as Above" is an ominous, shapeshifting, just-before-sunrise dirge that slowly climbs its way into a gnarled sort of beauty. Little instrumental exhalations complicate the haunting Brit-folk of "Elemental Finding", while the oblong near-slowcore of "The Signal, Lift" unwinds over a bed of whispering cymbals, growing more intense by the minute. O'Neil's a fine lyricist—look no further than "Elemental Finding"—but much of Lights' vocalizing is wordless, evoking feelings rather than spelling them out. Lights is rarely less than beautiful, but between the often-sparse arrangements and impressionistic singing, these abstractions require patience on the listener's part. Give Lights your total concentration, and it opens up completely; start flipping through your phone, and it vanishes into the air. But it's that very pliancy that makes the album so easy to return to; it's harmoniously balanced, yet as liable to change along with the quality of the light, a distressed folk record on one listen, and a sumptuous, swirling exploratory drone record the next. O'Neil's certainly made her share of enrapturing, enveloping music. But I'm not sure she's ever made one quite as transportive—or, for that matter, as alive—as Where Shine New Lights.