Inspired by the rolling dunes of a Danish national park, the Copenhagen-based musician’s spare, drifting album peeks at unfathomable vastness.

Ode to Stone

Like a fistful of sand tossed to the wind, Ingri Høyland’s new album Ode to Stone sometimes threatens to disappear entirely. There are seldom more than a few tones playing at any given moment; with the exception of her collaborator Ida Urd’s electric bass, the provenance of her sounds is often unclear. Are they synthesizers? Feedback? Aural illusions caught on tape? They flicker like candlelight, tremble like the last leaves left on a barren branch. For long stretches, nothing happens, except for the decay of two or three notes fading to silence. But Ode to Stone is not minimalist, exactly. That term—any “-ism,” in fact—feels too structural, too knowing, for music this prone to drifting.
This organic, aleatory quality marks a significant shift from Høyland’s last album, There's a Girl Inside My Brain Who Wants to Die, where the Norwegian-born, Copenhagen-based musician grappled with anguish and vulnerability in stark, shadowy electronic pop. Where that album was deeply personal—the first track was called “Ego, Bitch”—Ode to Stone decenters the human. Working in collaboration with Urd, fellow ambient musician Sofie Birch, and visual artist Lea Dulditte Hestelund, Høyland created the album in response to an open call for work themed around Denmark’s national parks. She chose to focus on Husby Klitplantage, a rolling dune landscape fringed by pine forests on the country’s west coast.
Peruse photos of the place while listening to the album, and Ode to Stone’s abstraction snaps into focus. Høyland’s soft, rounded tones mimic the broad sweep of the dunes, the patterns of wind combing across seagrass, the silver of the winter sun on a flat, gray sea. She has spoken of her interest in capturing the “cohesive force” of that coastal wilderness: the interplay of the elements, and the interdependencies that have evolved over eons. To offer a glimpse of deep time in a half hour of music is no easy task, but Ode to Stone does an admirable job, despite its humble, understated materials.
“Forced by its very weight” opens the record with held tones and the faintest shimmer of melody; its languid pace and refusal of anything like a payoff feel like an invitation to slow down and clear one’s thoughts. “Memory in hand” dissolves further into the air, a soft explosion of electronic birdsong. Such forms are too indistinct to follow closely; the mind wanders, not unpleasantly. But should you refocus your attention on the music, you might be surprised at how much variety there is. The effect is akin to the way that a seemingly drab patch of beach, under close examination, begins to reveal a microscopic infinity.
In “Stream of light,” Urd drizzles stark high-necked glissandi into the inky blackness; it’s melancholy, sullen, a little goth—like someone practicing early Cure basslines alone in their bedroom. In “What pressure, what magnetism,” undulating drones hint at Sunn O)))’s seismic doom. But then, with “Our very own sun,” the skies briefly clear: Høyland’s soft, bright multi-tracked vocal harmonies are reminiscent of Ana Roxanne, Low, or even Grouper. Contrasting the chilly drones that have come before, it offers a fleeting glimpse of dream pop, her voice as smooth as driftwood and luminous as beach glass.
The song lasts only two minutes; it’s followed by a penultimate track of sorrowful abstractions and, finally, five minutes of rolling surf and wind scraping against the grill of the mic. But its sweetness and relative warmth are a welcome addition to the album. They are an indicator of human scale against unfathomable vastness: a small, red “You are here” dot on a sun-bleached and wind-battered map whose coordinates might otherwise defy deciphering.


The Bay Area noise-rock quartet's sophomore album shares similarities with the kind of "post-metal" that has often led to critical crossover success, but when they're at their best, Kowloon Walled City don't engage in the indulgences of the bigger names in that field.

Container Ships

Kowloon Walled City's Container Ships shares similarities with the kind of "post-metal" that has often led to critical crossover success, mainly recalling early Isis, but when they're at their best, the Bay Area unit don't engage in the indulgences of the bigger names in that field. Most of the songs on their 35-minute sophomore album are lean and compact: Like Canadian noise-rock contemporaries KEN Mode, KWC seem to realize muscular riffs and a little low-end can go a long way. Their straight-ahead character gives the shorter songs a sense of urgency and nervousness, resisting the temptation to meander. Standouts "50s Dad" and "Wrong Side of History", for instance, both show the band can crunch well. ("Dad"'s skronky leads also give it a Deftones-via-AmRep feel.) The more mid-tempo, at times doomy "Beef Cattle" flips the script, emphasizing clean sections amid Scott Evans' drill-sergeant shouts. “Cornerstone” slacks the pace and allows everything to breathe a little, but not with the sacrifice of tension.
These are all interesting variations on a basic template on an album that could've used more of those sorts of shifts. There's a fine line between an established atmosphere and the common complaint that "all the songs sound the same." For Kowloon Walled City, this problem shows up in Ships' two longer songs, the 7-minute title track and 9-minute closer "You Don't Have Cancer". The latter feels like a dragged out version of any given short song on the record-- there's nothing new, or at least fresh enough, to keep the atmosphere convincing. "Cancer", on the other hand, has moments of potential. At the 5:33 mark, for instance, a buildup collapses into a torrent of guitar and dual voices, but it doesn't surge with enough bombast to make it noteworthy. There's potential there, especially with the combatting high-low vocals, a tool that could have been even more of an onslaught then the guitars. In general, Container Ships is heavy, but often doesn't feel heavy enough. As these two longer songs highlight, they don't always make the most effective use of space, which for any band-- no matter how sprawling or how compact-- is crucial.
It's a bit frustrating. Kowloon Walled City are a band with the right stuff, and all the ingredients for a compelling album are present on Container Ships. It's just that they don't make everything come together in the most interesting ways. KWC have shown here and in the past that they've got the tools to be an above-average metal band; next time they need to make a piece of architecture we can all dance around, because considering the elevating demand for shriveling supplies of attention, "ok" is almost worse than "unlistenable."


On these solo piano performances, the musician known for his work with Justin Vernon, Hiss Golden Messenger, and more suggests that peaceful solitude can offer its own high.

All These Years

For a keyboardist who predominantly deals in stomping, heartland Americana, Phil Cook has a surprisingly extensive range. Since his early work in the Justin Vernon-helmed DeYarmond Edison and the influential psych-folk project Megafaun—which also featured his brother, the prolific indie producer Brad Cook—he has worked frequently alongside Vernon in bands like Gayngs and with MC Taylor in Hiss Golden Messenger. Beyond those projects, Cook served as musical director on a Blind Boys of Alabama record and even found his way onto a Kanye West album.
Cook’s latest solo album, All These Years, operates in familiar territory, blending elements of folk, gospel, jazz, and blues. This time, however, Cook presents these sounds in the context of intimate solo piano performances. Cook cites a conversation with musical hero Bruce Hornsby as inspiring him to dedicate his 40th year to “relearning” the piano, as Hornsby claims to have done at the same age. Already secluded due to the pandemic, he decided to take on Hornsby’s challenge and reflect on his first and primary musical instrument. He wrote the music during an artist retreat in the Blue Ridge Mountains and then recorded the songs in a church in his hometown of Durham, North Carolina.
The follow-up to 2019’s instrumental collection As Far As I Can See is refreshing in its simplicity and nonchalance. Though known to fans as a beacon of outspoken positivity, Cook seldom indulges in his more familiar roots-rock impulses here, focusing instead on the core of his musical and thematic ideologies. By quieting down and highlighting just one element of his sound, Cook draws us closer to the ecstatic love of music and life that drives his art.
Despite the cohesive sound of the record, Cook expresses his wide-ranging influences: a seamless mix of Appalachian folk, blues, ragtime, gospel, jazz, and modern classical minimalism. These styles cohere to suggest something like inner peace, or at least the quiet thrill of brushing shoulders with it. (Fittingly, distant bird chirps, falling rain, and room sounds find their way into the recordings.)
Though mostly untethered to metronomic rhythm, the album is divided between more composed songs and looser improvisations. The early standouts feel more premeditated, though the performances are still pleasantly unrehearsed. “Brothers” is a yearning downtempo jazz ballad with soft but weighty chords emphasizing a lilting melodic structure. “All These Years” is a concise requiem with bright, glinting melodies. Even in the most upbeat moments, like the ragtime runaway solo on “Bicycle Kids,” Cook demonstrates a methodic patience and restraint that feels new to his work.
The second half of the record is more meditative, striving for space and openness, at times recalling the tempered transcendence of Ethiopian jazz pianists such as Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou and Hailu Mergia. The centerpiece “Long Run” builds from a repeated, lone piano note that joins with increasingly emphatic chord changes. Its horizon widens as sustained notes linger and thicken the atmosphere. Similarly, the gorgeous “Alone” spills with nimble and steady trills, triads, and arpeggios gliding into one another with delightful ease.
Where Cook once chased the emotional peaks of Americana jam sessions and singalongs, he now rests in the suspended tension of an emotional film score. In the best of these compositions, he substitutes his potent enthusiasm with quiet joy. Instead of a rallying cry, All These Years  is a love letter to a life spent making music, arresting in its intimacy and immediacy. From an artist who once titled an album People Are My Drug, the music on All These Years suggests that peaceful solitude can offer its own high.

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On the duo’s debut full-length, DJ Haram’s East Coast club influences meet Moor Mother’s shape-shifting wordplay. It’s a noisy, thrillingly confrontational album.

Nothing to Declare

Some of the fiercest political art of the past year can be found in club music. Whether via Loraine James’ cerebral musings, aya’s chaotic outbursts, or Charlotte Adigéry and Bolis Pupul’s satirical takedowns, the dancefloor has pulled double weight as a platform to air grievances about governmental neglect, societal dysfunction, and police violence. 700 Bliss, the duo of Philadelphia experimental poet/rapper Moor Mother and New Jersey-born DJ Haram, join the fight on their debut album, marshaling twisted club sounds in a spirited counterattack on the patriarchal powers that be.
The pair’s debut EP, 2018’s Spa 700, stripped East Coast club music down to a gray husk perfectly suited for Moor Mother’s gloomy, off-kilter raps. On Nothing to Declare, DJ Haram challenges Moor Mother with more biting beats, and the rapper responds with a looseness that’s new to her music. Her prophetic delivery retains all its spoken-word eloquence, and she peppers her lyrics with incisive history lessons that highlight America and Europe’s historical pillaging of Black culture. The music is anchored by a mix of frenetic goblet drums and machine percussion, swollen bass, and gristly streaks of noise. There’s hardly a line on the album where the voice isn’t processed or re-pitched, and the result is a hall-of-mirrors twisting of the two musicians’ personalities.
The beginning of Nothing to Declare is the most accessible, if only because other genres are briefly welcomed to the table. They allude to R&B on “Nightflame,” sliding Orion Sun’s chorus in between fast-rolling kicks and Moor Mother’s casual wordplay (“Ima read, newsroom/Pussy good, perfume/Ima teach, classroom/Ima walk, ballroom”). Elsewhere, “Anthology” lays a tapestry of African and Caribbean dance over an aggro techno stomp, and pays tribute to pioneering figure Katherine Dunham, the choreographer and anthropologist who introduced Afro-diasporic influences to American dance.
Two skits section the album into thirds. “Easyjet” is a make-believe bitching session about 700 Bliss that drips with fake sarcasm (“Literally, who wants to hear that shit?”), while “Spirit Airlines” is a big-chested retort that speaks to a level of confrontation seen throughout the record. Throughout, Nothing to Declare hums with an electric paranoia that rustles under the covers like a bedroom monster. Do a double-take and you’ll see it everywhere—in the high-pitched keys of “Discipline” that mimic John Williams’ Jaws theme; the muffled drums of “Sixteen” that blast like gunfire; the slugged-out drum kicks that step like Godzilla over “Bless Grips.”
Over the course of the album, they gradually abandon rigid club beats in favor of noisy abstraction. “More Victories” opens with an abrasive bleating noise that turns the atmosphere claustrophobic, leaving only the tiniest pockets of air for barely decipherable lyrics, pin-prick clicks, and scratchy vocal manipulations. The song represents the album’s noisiest extreme, but other moments are more furious in their political expression. “Candace Parker,” named after the WNBA great and featuring Palestinian artist Muqata’a, is extremely timely, given a recent Supreme Court draft opinion suggesting that  Roe v. Wade might soon be overturned. “They rape our mothers while y’all just record,” Moor Mother grunts as grainy breakbeats swarm around her energizing scorn. Meanwhile, “Capitol” summons uneasy memories of the January 6th Capitol attack. Over a sparse barrage of sirens that keeps the listener in a perpetual state of alert, Moor Mother performs the last verse with a preacher’s cadence, recounting the event in the national context as “a call for arms against itself/In the selling of humanity, one war at a time.”
In order to fit her indignant raps into DJ Haram’s blasted, bass-heavy productions, Moor Mother has written with more impactful concision than ever. The best poetry on the record comes on “Crown,” in which one cutting line speaks to the damaging effect of political inaction: “A silence is killing us.” Perhaps this is where that air of paranoia comes from; their response is a chilling noise, a din meant to re-balance the current power dynamics of the world. Further in the same song, Moor Mother scratches off a hidden second part of the album’s title: “I have nothing to claim/But everything to break.” What’s left behind is a righteous wreckage, from which a new world is waiting to emerge.


Ishmael Butler assembles a crew of interstellar rap voyagers on a brief, echoey mixtape you might expect to find floating amid the space debris of an Afrofuturist universe.

Exotic Birds of Prey

As early as their self-titled 2009 EP, and plenty times since, Shabazz Palaces’ songs have orbited the voice of Ishmael Butler, a smooth, droning instrument in a sea of organic and digital rhythms. It doesn’t matter whether he’s delivering old-school flexes or embodying an astral traveler; Butler’s voice is Shabazz’s center of gravity. Starting from the Quazarz double album in 2017, his raps became more shamanistic, sinking deeper into increasingly airy and synthetic beats. On last year’s Robed in Rareness, reverb and creative mixing made it seem like Butler was phasing through dimensions any time he opened his mouth. His latest record, Exotic Birds of Prey, amplifies that feeling—it’s a mixtape you might expect to find floating amid the space debris of an Afrofuturist universe akin to Saul Williams’ sci-fi musical Neptune Frost.
Butler’s presence is still grounding, but on Exotic Birds of Prey his performances are noticeably more weightless. No longer tethered by the mbira and percussion of frequent collaborator Tendai Maraire—who left sometime around 2020’s The Don of Diamond Dreams—he sounds permanently disembodied. He’s whispering in your ear from another plane, when he’s speaking at all. On “Exotic BOP,” his verse and ad-libs waft like smoke around drums, synthetic chirps, and the more tactile melodies of guest Purple Tape Nate. Butler raps the least he ever has on a Shabazz project; he lets his electro-funk trips breathe, keeping the bars to a minimum and ceding space to guests.
The spacey vibe remains intact even as Butler drifts away. His only contribution to lead single “Angela” is its rolling drum break and skittering synth patterns, which back up Dust Moth singer Irene Barber and longtime collaborator Stas Thee Boss as they unspool thoughts on urgency and Black power, respectively. The only song that doesn’t achieve lift-off is “Well Known Nobody,” a one-minute burst of spiky electric guitar and distortion; it sticks out on a tape otherwise committed to seamless blending. Still, Birds is an elegant and subtle display of Shabazz’s increasingly interstellar range, Butler’s raps providing flavor and body to the rest of the ensemble.
Like its predecessor Robed in Rareness, Exotic Birds of Prey is a more free-wheeling offering from Shabazz. It feels more curatorial than any prior Shabazz project, too, a position seemingly confirmed by penultimate track “Synth Dirt.” Here, Butler—voice still reverberating from the shadows—casts himself as a DJ introducing a grip of artists on a broadcast that could be beaming from his home in Seattle, or from the Crab Nebula. As the geometric tones of closer “Take Me to Your Leader” blip and fold into themselves, it becomes clear that, short as it is, Exotic Birds of Prey still has the loose and expansive feel of a radio show. There’s no easier way to visit outer space.


"Shenzhou", aside from being the name of the Chinese manned-spaceflight vehicles, means "magic vessel", and I can't imagine a ...

Shenzhou

"Shenzhou", aside from being the name of the Chinese manned-spaceflight vehicles, means "magic vessel", and I can't imagine a more apt description for Geir Jenssen's latest excursion into ambient deep listening. After following an Aphexian trajectory with his releases on Apollo, the ambient sublabel of Belgium's R&S; Records, Jenssen veered from the padded sci-fi-inspired techno of Microgravity and Patashnik with 1997's Substrata, a genre-defining exploration of drifting soundscapes. Substrata remains for many the album that perfectly expresses the serenity and intensity of Arctic wildernesses, a landscape Jenssen knows intimately, having spent much of his life in the Norwegian Arctic Circle.
In 2000, Jenssen nearly eclipsed the success of Substrata with Cirque, a frequently frosty submerging of excerpted conversations and found environmental sounds that rivals Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project in its rumbling, gauzy beauty. Jenssen again relies on found sound as source material for Shenzhou, but this time, the found sound is old vinyl recordings of the orchestral works of French Impressionist composer and ambient precursor, Claude Debussy. Jenssen lifts fragments of these scratched records in a similar manner as he did for Cirque's "Black Lamb Grey Falcon" and "Iberia Eterea".
The ten tracks (out of the dozen on the album) that follow this model all begin as a barely audible hum, like a small electrical transformer, out of which the dust-dappled loops of Debussy's woodwind, brass, and strings emerge, condense, and fade out into pink noise rustles. Unlike Steve Reich's phase pieces or Brian Eno's Discreet Music, though, Jenssen doesn't set his loops against each other to produce juxtapositions and piquant dissonance; he uses them to describe imagined terrain, at first glance monotonously flat and barren, but on concentration, replete with minute detailing. The overall effect of these pieces is a sense of immensity. The orchestral loops sound distant, abandoned in a vast wilderness, and strenuously battling against Arctic winds. Jenssen sets the listener down in this wilderness as an aloof observer, a witness to the music's futile struggles against entropic forces.
The two tracks not derived from Debussy share the same hypnotic aesthetic. The brief interlude "Bose-Einstein Condension" is a loop of piano chords lolloping in search of coherence, while "Gravity Assist" is a longer voyage into woofer-quaking low-frequency manipulation, bell-like drones, and contrails of subdued noise. I can't help but feel that these tracks fit awkwardly and break up the conceptual flow of the album. This, however, is a minor quibble given the power of this music. Shenzhou is unquestionably a magic vessel, but one that reveals its enchantment only to those who pay close attention.


Even as she surveys heartbreak and self-doubt, Jenn Wasner’s second solo album sounds confident. Textural layers of guitar and synth offer depth, yet allow her voice to lead the way.

Head of Roses

At the start of the pandemic, Jenn Wasner found herself contending with a solitude she hadn’t expected. The self-described workaholic had long participated in the capitalistic churn that equates productivity with worth: In the years since her debut album as Flock of Dimes, 2016’s If You See Me, Say Yes, she’d recorded and released two albums with her band Wye Oak; toured as part of Bon Iver; and written a solo EP, 2020’s Like So Much Desire, among other pursuits.
Absent any tour or project to distract her, and still processing a recent heartbreak, her choices felt hollow. The end of her most recent relationship had set off questions she’d begun asking on Like So Much Desire, but in the solitary echo chamber of pandemic life, they infiltrated her larger sense of self. Doubts about who she’d let herself become, and the failure of that experiment, crowded the empty space.
But work, she knew; work, she could do. Wasner threw herself into writing, a process that came quickly over the spring months of 2020 and exposed her. Where once her ripping guitar solos signified her more vulnerable moments, her new album Head of Roses lets her voice lead the charge, each song refracting its light differently. Her vocals suffuse opening track “2 Heads,” a prismizer effect ballooning their resonance, while on “One More Hour,” she oscillates between reverb’d and dry vocals, claiming both spaces instead of relegating herself to just one.
Across the album, Wasner traces the uncertainty that results from letting someone else define you. “When you dressed me in a different skin/I forgot who I am,” she sings on the electric slow burn “Lightning.” However lost she may feel, her voice serves as a guide. Her vocal sustain resounds long and luxurious, while Adam Schatz’s (Landlady) sax conjures heat lightning. But that same anxiety—about the part she played in her own near-disintegration—returns on the bright, synth-pop track “Two,” turning almost caustic. “And we’re all just wearing bodies, like a costume, till we die,” she sings in her head voice.
What the relationship asked of her, and the ways in which she answered, comes across most clearly on the country-leaning “Awake for the Sunrise.” An acoustic guitar blends with the charred oak grain of her voice, opening stark space for the confession that follows: “I never thought I was a terrible liar/But I am when I need it most/Making a sorry attempt at compersion/With a hand halfway down my throat.” Wasner references the polyamorous trait of compersion, or the feeling of joy for a partner’s relationship with another—but admits it’s beyond her scope. As she sings on “Lightning,” though she envies the wild, dazzling freedom of electricity, it isn’t in her to live like that.
If Wasner needed to be on her own to make If You See Me, her new album benefits from conversation; she recorded it with Sylvan Esso’s Nick Sanborn at Betty’s in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, close to her Durham home. Sanborn’s production clears space for her voice, building each song around it rather than contorting it to fit. He makes Wasner sound fully at home.
Out of that ease, Wasner brings the guitar-centered indie rock of early Wye Oak alongside textural layers and deep synth bass reminiscent of Sylvan Esso; the electro-pop shine of her previous Flock of Dimes work alongside the bass- and synth-fueled sound that defined Wye Oak’s later music; and something new. “Hard Way” was meant to be a demo, something Wasner scaffolded with Sanborn before inviting more players to flesh it out, but the first version was so “perfectly odd” that they kept it. Against pacing synths, her voice fills the frame, searching and sorrowful, an instrument unto itself.

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Harrison Patrick Smith is the poster boy for a small New York club scene, but his sleazy, party-hard songwriting is not as transgressive as he would like you to believe.

The Sex EP

Maybe the reason that indie sleaze is back is that it allows you to be really, unashamedly horny. It makes sense that following the prudish detente of the 2010s, there is nostalgia for the era of Terry Richardson sexploitation, smoking a cigarette in your G-Star Raws next to a dumpster, Uffie rapping about popping the glock in a British accent. Indie sleaze brings us full circle to decadence, to licentiousness, to the come-hither gaze of American Apparel ads of yore that seems to say: Let’s fuck.
It is not back for those who were into it the first time, but instead for young people in their twenties—a generation of people who are not really millennials but also not really zoomers, who remember 9/11, just barely, were preteens for the recession, grew up reblogging nose-bleed photos on Tumblr and smoking weed to Odd Future, and then graduated from college between the caution-filled eras of #MeToo and the pandemic. Some of them now party in a crook between East Broadway and Canal, a slice of Chinatown called Dimes Square, a scene that is exhaustingly compared to the Williamsburg of the early aughts, despite the lack of any sort of legitimately serious musical output. It is full of kids cosplaying as pre-existing archetypes from a sexier and simpler time, who wish they were in TV on the Radio but are not. Kids like Harrison Patrick Smith, a 27-year-old musician who fashions himself as indie sleaze incarnate and performs incredibly horny electronic pop as the Dare.
He’s become very popular, very quickly. A few years ago, he was at the helm of the winsome indie rock band Turtlenecked. In the past year, following the release of his debut single “Girls,” he’s quickly ascended to the ranks of guy who DJs Hedi Slimane’s parties, sits front row at Gucci, eats at “every single Keith McNally restaurant, twice,” and after a major bidding war ends up on Republic (home of the Weeknd and Taylor Swift). You cannot read a profile of him that does not compare him to someone like James Murphy or the members of the Rapture. When Smith screams over a drum machine and tells you that he likes “girls who like to fuck” and “girls who got so much hair on they ass, it clogs the drain,” he is doing LCD Soundsystem doing Justice doing Peaches doing Liquid Liquid doing Lizzy Mercier Descloux. All of it is an ouroboros, all of it is connected.
But Smith is not quite the provocateur that the hype would lead you to believe. His debut EP Sex is not a particularly erotic collection of songs, nor is it very cool; it would even be generous to call the four tracks “silly.” It’s less indebted to the DFA maxi single than to the early-2010s megahits that came out when Smith was a teen, like uncle-nephew duo LMFAO’s “Party Rock Anthem,” or like Macklemore’s “Thrift Shop,” which opens with “What up? I got a big cock.” Indeed, the title track, “Sex,” which is, of course, about sex, features Smith saying things like “Sex! I think I had it once/I think I had a bunch,” over the strident electrical charge of a synthesized click track. The song moves at a breakneck pace, kind of alluring the first time you play it: You might imagine a strobe light chopping up your face as you straddle a stranger in a nightclub bathroom. But play it again, and again, and again, and it kind of sounds like the Right Said Fred song, “I’m Too Sexy,” or maybe an Italian guy from Rimini writing about fornication with Google Translate. In other words: You would not want to have sex to this.
“Good Time” has Smith doing his best “Losing My Edge” impression. The synthesizers sound like someone revving the engine of a motorcycle and blowing through a red light as he yelps, screams, throttles his voice into a falsetto. It all hinges on Smith saying things like, “I’m in the city while you’re online!” and “Hope my set sounds good outside,” feigning some kind of exclusivity. The lyrics seem to suggest: If you listen to this song by the Dare, you will be cool, like me—unlike people who do not listen to the Dare, who are uncool. It is a formulation that looks better on a T-shirt than in a song, where its snarkiness is a little exhausting. It’s trying so hard to not try hard.
Then there is “Girls,” which is offensive, parodically and purposefully misogynistic, but also funny and good. “I like girls with no buns/Girls that’s mean just for fun,” Smith almost-rhymes. It’s an earworm, something to shout at someone when they shove a key under your nose or while you push your tiny sunglasses into your face. But it is not, as some people will lead you to believe, a song that will save rock music in New York. Because Harrison Patrick Smith’s ridiculous horny music is not genius or innovative like James Murphy’s early interventions as LCD Soundsystem. Instead, Smith is only prodigious at one thing, something that took Murphy years to figure out: churning subcultural credo into mainstream publicity, which if you think about it, is not very sexy.


After more than a decade's worth of critical and public relations missteps, the world's biggest-- and at one time, best-- metal band tries to recapture its former glory on this Rick Rubin-produced album. In the real world, it's called a midlife crisis.

Death Magnetic

Metallica became the world's biggest metal band by doing everything right. Then they went and did everything wrong. Their first four records were classic permutations of 1980s thrash: The ferociously raw Kill 'Em All, the increasingly epic Ride the Lightning and Master of Puppets, and the toweringly technical ...And Justice for All. Until the latter, Metallica refused to make an MTV video. Self-dubbed "Alcoholica", the band cultivated a blue-collar image. However, on 1991's eponymous album (aka "The Black Album"), they went mainstream with radio-friendly ballads, losing old fans but gaining millions of new ones.

Since then, Metallica have been a comedy of errors. Load and ReLoad wallowed in hard rock dreck. The front of Garage Inc., a covers collection, found Metallica awkwardly costumed as auto mechanics to appear as the everymen they once were. S&M was an overwrought collaboration with a symphony. The band sued Napster, earning the scorn of fans. 2003's St. Anger was laughably bad. The documentary film Some Kind of Monster luridly aired the band's dirty laundry. Singer/guitarist James Hetfield and bassist Robert Trujillo were recently photographed shopping at Armani. Such antics have kept Metallica in the headlines, and not necessarily to their benefit. The anticipation for Death Magnetic has split along two lines: hope for a return to form, and schadenfreude.

The album fulfills neither expectation. It tries mightily to recapture Metallica's former glory, but only does so partially. Producer Rick Rubin told the band to write the unwritten half of Master of Puppets, a ludicrous proposition. But his intent was well-meaning: get rich, fortysomething rockers to recall themselves as hungry, twentysomething metallers. In the real world, this is called a midlife crisis. One can emulate one's younger self, but one can't unlearn one's years.

So it is with Death Magnetic. Self-plagiarization abounds. "That Was Just Your Life" and "Cyanide" harken back to "Blackened" from ...And Justice for All. "The Day That Never Comes" has the clean tones of "Fade to Black" and the machine gun riff from "One". In the 1980s, Metallica wrote hundreds of riffs without repeating themselves. To hear them so bereft of new ideas is disheartening. So is the fact that Load, ReLoad, and St. Anger are indelibly part of their bloodstream. "The End of the Line" and "The Judas Kiss" have bland hard rock riffs à la Load and ReLoad. Like most sequels, the turgid "The Unforgiven III" need not have been made. "Cyanide" tapes a Stone Temple Pilots riff to a disastrous stop-start section straight out of St. Anger. Metallica aren't good at being bluesy or unpredictable. They're best at heavy metal thunder, and they've forgotten that.

Rubin's bone-dry production negates this thunder, but it evokes Metallica's garage band days. These are their most energetic performances in ages. Guitarist Kirk Hammett hasn't ever sounded this vital. While he languished solo-less in St. Anger, he's all over Death Magnetic with fiery leads. They often reprise his old ones, but their wah-fueled intensity is a welcome antidote to their underlying riffs. Hetfield has mostly dropped his bluesy yowl in favor of singing in tune. Trujillo adds solid, supportive low end. Drummer Lars Ulrich is the one weak link. He often resorts to simple oompah beats when complementary or counter-rhythms are necessary. But despite his lack of creativity, he plays the hell out of his drums, aided by a harsh, crunchy sound that renders his cymbals incredibly sibilant.

All the energy in the world can't save these songs, however. They're each about two minutes too long. Most top seven minutes in length; the instrumental "Suicide & Redemption" lasts 10 minutes but feels interminable. Prime Metallica had long songs, but they ebbed and flowed, skillfully playing with layers. These songs, in contrast, merely string together riffs. Clean tones invade "The End of the Line" without warning; many songs have intros that are apropos of nothing. Death Magnetic is essentially St. Anger with better riffs.

The band may be more mentally stable now, but it's irreparably damaged. Years of simplistic hard rock have destroyed its sense of speed. Even the thrashy "My Apocalypse" feels clunky. Hetfield's lyrics are toilet-grade; his younger self, while brash, would never have written tripe like "Mangled flesh, snapping spines/ Dripping bloody valentine/ Shattered face, spitting glass." Ever since The Black Album, his lyrics have been embarrassingly personal. Once Metallica became vulnerable, they never recovered. Death Magnetic is a meditation on death-- but so is every other Metallica record. The best ones spit in the face of death; this album instead finds aging men trying to reclaim their youth.


The first four full-lengths from the hugely influential noise-rock band have been remastered by Steve Albini and Bob Weston and reissued.

The Jesus Lizard: Head [Deluxe Edition] / Goat [Deluxe Edition] / Liar [Deluxe Edition] / Down [Deluxe Edition]

While not unwelcome, this batch of Jesus Lizard reissues come as a surprise. After all, these albums were still available and in print. In terms of needing remastering, the CD wasn't exactly a young or uncharted medium at the time, and the guy recording them, Steve Albini, is generally regarded to know what he's doing behind the boards. I'm starting to think that the reissue craze is less about keeping music on the shelves (which is arguably not an issue these days) and more about reminding overwhelmed listeners that records even exist. If someone were to tell me something sounded wrong with the old versions, I would have recommended that the listener locate their volume knob and turn it clockwise.
But then again...the new digipacs and their fold-out inserts for these records look great, and the remastering job was done by Bob Weston (Shellac) and Albini himself. The bonus tracks included are sparse, but are carefully chosen from singles, soundtracks, and live performances. They're separated by a track of silence from the rest of the record, but their additions make sense in the context of each album. Without analyzing each song's waveform, the drums seem a little louder now (rarely if ever a bad thing), and certain moments may pop out a little more, like the atonal feedback in "Seasick" that sounds like it may swallow your whole head when heard through headphones. If these reissues needed to be done, then they did them right, and if people really need reminding, so be it: At their best, the Jesus Lizard created some of the best rock records of the 1990s.
Head lacks some the high points of later records, save for the essential "Killer McHann", but it shows the pieces in place from the beginning-- especially the fearsome rhythm section that asserts itself from the opening moments of "One Evening" and throughout. "If You Had Lips" also marks the beginning of the satanic rodeo rhythm that would suit them so well throughout their career, often shaking up the second sides of their later albums (see Goat's "South Mouth" or Liar’s "Rope"). The CD reissue includes the Pure EP (as the 1992 CD did), as well as the "Chrome" single and live versions of "Bloody Mary" and "Killer McHann". Guitarist Duane Denison himself calls the album transitional in the new liner notes, and while he's being a little modest, Head can't help but sound a bit thin compared to what would come afterward.
Enter Goat, at a lean and ferocious nine tracks. Singer David Yow is his usually expressive self here: His vocals are tense, funny, and occasionally terrifying, from bullhorn-ready hollering to howls of anguish if the song calls for it. Sometimes he's just making muffled slurping noises, often multi-tracked and through both ears, like some supernatural character in a David Lynch film. Yet it's funny to think that despite how depraved the lyrics may have been (see "Lady Shoes" from this album, among many, many others), Yow's most enduring epithet may be calling someone a "mouth breather." It might have something to do with the track itself, with its elastic, repetitive riff snapping back and forth under Yow's wails and backhanded insults. The appended live version of "Seasick" from 1992 has crowd members audibly calling out for the song moments before it's played, showing how their reputation had been solidified-- and while one song here is called "Seasick", the whole record is unpredictable and queasy. Yow and Denison steal the show here somewhat, but the vicious bob of the rhythm section on "Monkey Trick" goes way beyond a memorable moment; it's a reason to get up in the morning.
Goat and Liar show the band at the obvious peak of their powers. It's splitting hairs to call one record that much better than the other, though Liar's second half is a little slower and moodier than the tour-de-force of the first side. (In fairness, what record wouldn't start to go downhill after something like "Puss"?) The start of "Boilermaker" is like coming out of a blackout to find yourself in the middle of a bar fight. It's weird to hear a moment of nothing but the rhythm section for even a few seconds on the track's bridge-- for most of side one, the band are become one singular, heaving thing; the band is completely in step with one another as Yow is free to bellow, wail and hiss over it all.
You can't overestimate Duane Denison's contribution to these records. Few guitarists in rock this side of Thurston Moore or Gang of Four's Andy Gill did as much to tear down and reimagine the form. His sound on these records is jagged, minimal, and instantly recognizable. It's hard to pick just one example, but listen to "Puss" from Liar, as he uses a wah pedal to make the guitar sound like a hive of angry wasps, and then finds a glassy, piano-like tone in the bridge to let out arpeggios over a rhythm ready for a strip club. Even outside of his tone and feel, the balance he struck between blues-inspired riffs, punk catharsis, and general dissonance is nearly without peer.
Down is a little less celebrated than the earlier records-- I don't know how many fans were looking to the Jesus Lizard for subtlety and nuance, but Down shows they were ready for it as musicians. Not to say it isn't heavy, from the swaggering descending riff of "Fly on the Wall" to oddly melodic bruisers like "Destroy Before Reading" and "American BB". But if the jazzy leanings of tracks like "The Associate" don't throw you, then Yow's earnest croon on "Elegy" indicates they were ready to mature-- and honestly, as they lost very little of their tempo or edge, they were doing it in all the right ways here.
When people continue to mention Chicago in the early 90s or Touch and Go Records as a brand, they often start with these records. It's worth noting band members hail from Texas-- once home to Roky Erickson, Willie Nelson, and Butthole Surfers-- and Austin is a great place to nurture an individualist streak. Moreover, by the time the Jesus Lizard would release Down, their fourth album, Touch and Go and its subsidiaries were already becoming too diverse a label to be summed up by a handle like "pigfuck" or any other name lobbed by journalists at bands like the Jesus Lizard, Shellac, Killdozer, or the many others from that decade. And yet, whenever I try to think of one representative sound for that small pocket of gnashing geniuses, it's the sound of drummer Mac McNeilly and bassist David Sims locking in on the band's heavy, inimitable groove that they perfected over these four records.
For all the breathless praise, the Jesus Lizard weren't necessarily the loudest or the most twisted band out there, or had the singer that exposed himself the most often. (Well, maybe the last one is true.) And that's not why we still talk about these records. Their aggression was taut, minimal, and artful. Even amidst the controlled chaos of "Boilermaker", they hold back for a delicious blink-and-you'll-miss-it full-band rest in the song's final moments, one of countless examples where they asserted themselves as musicians-- not a sideshow-- in all these tracks.
The band thrived in the underground of the 90s, and from the freedom of Touch and Go in particular; under pressure from no one but themselves, the Jesus Lizard raised a bar that few bands have reached since (and, for whatever reason, one they struggled to reach themselves after migrating to Capitol Records after Down). They were raucous and heavy without the rigidity of later hardcore or the meat-headedness of metal; they played art-rock that actually rocked. There's no shortage of good stories about David Yow's stage behavior, which you can swap with those who were really there or just read them from the new liner notes. But there are so many more reasons to pick up these records-- including Yow's talent as a singer and lyricist. Rarely does a band have each member adding something essential to such a united, ferocious whole. (Zeppelin gets mentioned more than once in the new liners; it's not much of a stretch.) It's why after a decade, they're welcome back.


The Dominican producer pulls inspiration from a South Dakota Indian Reservation.

13th Month

The first time the Dominican producer Kelman Duran was asked to DJ a party, he opened his set with “Suicidal Thoughts,” the harrowing closer from Notorious B.I.G.’s Ready to Die wherein Biggie rhymes about wanting “to just slit my wrists and end this bullshit,” then ends the song with a loud gunshot. As an integral part of Los Angeles’ renowned Rail Up parties, Duran’s sets have turned decidedly more festive, drawing from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, while making those riddims push through a haze of reverb and delay. With his 2017 debut, 1804 Kids, Duran showed a knack for low-slung reggaetón, with “6 De La Mañana” becoming a party anthem of sorts. But with his follow-up, 13th Month, Duran forgoes crowd-pleasers for the most part. You can still hear dembow, hip-hop and dancehall—even bits of South African gqom and Lisbon’s batida—but now Duran shoves them far away from the sunshine and good times to the most bone-chilling and emotionally overwhelming space he can find, namely a South Dakota Indian Reservation.
13th Month draws on time Duran spent on the Pine Ridge Reservation amid the Lakota Tribe making a long-form video piece about the lives of the Native Americans trapped on the reservations. While the Dakota Access Pipeline protests at Standing Rock made the national news, life on other reservations was just as grim and impoverished. That Duran is no longer concerned with the dancefloor is evident from the opening moments of “13th Month in 3 Movements.” With a title that nods to both the lunar calendar of the Sioux and a classical composition, the song ranges over 10 minutes, setting an Auto-Tuned voice crying out: “Man solid as a rock/You cyaan move me” atop minor key washes, submerged bass throbs, and an ambient backdrop that seems to be crumbling beneath it all. It takes nearly seven minutes for a dembow riddim (slowed down to a sluggish thud) to emerge out of the haze. Rather than suggest a party in the wee hours, Duran now turns his attention to the desolate dream-states of that time, “13th Month” as likely to bring to mind the likes of William Basinski and Burial.
Burial might be the first name that springs to mind on these sprawling tracks, in that he too daubs disembodied voices across a widescreen soundscape, cloaking everything in reverb and crackle, weaving together such disparate rhythmic elements to create an evocative whole. Even when the rhythms become more pronounced on the 14-minute “CLUB 664B” Duran keeps the uneasiness intact. That telltale dembow riddim flickers in and out of the mix, never quite bringing the beat back, but instead becoming another ambient texture along with pedal steel, sampled strings, and snatches of everything from baile funk to key disseminator of reggaetón DJ Playero. Duran toggles between Puerto Rican reggaetón singer Yandel’s chorus of “Agárrame fuerte y no me sueltes” (Hold me tight and don't let me go) and an echoing of “dura” (harder) before it fades away entirely into a passage of birds and Auto-Tuned voice. Divorced from reggaetón’s libidinous desires and instead slotted into this eerie space, these voices turn into a desperate plea, increasingly isolated and estranged.
The tracks that follow these two grand statements hew closer to the template Duran used on 1804 Kids, speeding up or screwing down reggaeton, gqom, kuduro, hip-hop and the like, offering up more DJ-friendly tracks. There’s the drilling beats of “TU MUERE AQUI (Intro),” but they scan less as sweaty come-on than robotic barks stripped of all their warmth. On “lento x katana 1,” Duran distorts vocal chants until they are as flinty as the beat itself, making it into another percussive element grappling with the contorted dembow riddim writhing under it.
On the penultimate track, “gravity waves II,” Duran puts down a minor key melody that verges on the queasy, adding Biggie’s vocal from “Suicidal Thoughts” to it. It soon gives way to a Lakota Elder talking about tribal suicide rates and the voice of Attawapiskat First Nation Elder Jocelyn Wabano-Iahtail, who since went viral for telling off a journalist. It’s not an flourish of juxtaposition so much as it is Duran’s attempt to draw a parallel between the wretched conditions in inner-city ghettos and life on Indian reservations. It leads into the album’s sorrowful closer, “13th MONTH II In 3 Movements,” weighing down an uplifting reggae lyric until it turns into a plaint: “Sad to see the old slave mill/Is grinding slow, but grinding still.” Wordless hums, sped-up chirps, and choirs all bubble up across the piece, finally landing on a voice quivering at the words “to cry” as it all fades away. Despite the gains made in our society and attempts for equality and inclusiveness, Duran lays bare the social plagues still haunting us. The party is still there, but Duran also keeps close those dark feelings that we also seek release from on the dancefloor.


The second album from Corin Tucker and Peter Buck’s alt-rock supergroup can’t match the urgency of pre-apocalyptic protest.

Emerald Valley

Along with Wild Flag and the Good, the Bad & the Queen, Filthy Friends is one of a roster of supergroups assembled this decade from the scattered members of ’90s alternative rock bands. Founded in 2016, just before the latest presidential election, the group formed around Corin Tucker of Sleater-Kinney and Peter Buck of R.E.M., splicing together two of the college-radio era’s most inventive and energetic acts. Their music sounds like you’d expect, given its genealogy: crisp, guitar-driven indie rock with blues bones, adorned by sunny vocal harmonies. Filthy Friends’ first album, 2017’s Invitation, was a pleasant affair, a document of rock’n’roll veterans enjoying each other’s company. Follow-up Emerald Valley continues the camaraderie of seasoned pros: the current lineup includes Kurt Bloch of Fastbacks, Scott McCaughey of the Minus 5, and Linda Pitmon of Steve Wynn & the Miracle 3.
The new album sharpens the group’s political fangs, letting shiny happy instrumentation serve as a backdrop for protest songs about the pre-apocalypse. Given the heavy subject matter, the band’s delivery feels startlingly light. Tucker sings of exploited migrant workers, of Native activists protesting pipeline construction, of climate change and corruption, all in a placid and occasionally somber tone. Little of the belly-shaking rage that animated her with Sleater-Kinney surfaces here. “Enough, enough/The land is giving up,” she sings on “The Elliott,” a song about the destruction of Oregon's old-growth forests. On “Pipeline,” she ruminates on oil spills (and general white American disregard for the environment) with the understatement of the millennium: “Can't afford to blow it this time.” “Angels,” meanwhile, couches the horrors of the southern border in language so sentimental as to feel mealy: “Suffering of angels/They are torn apart by fools.” There are stronger words for people who steal children from their parents and cram them in cages; even the “devil” Tucker deploys at the end of the chorus hardly seems to suffice.
Some fire does light up behind the coarse and sour guitars of “November Man,” which joins the National's “Turtleneck” in a growing catalog of songs inspired by President Trump’s ridiculous public presence. “Long skinny tie/And hair of gold,” Tucker bellows, creating an “SNL” caricature of the president in case the song’s title didn't make its target clear. The instrumental squall spurs her to some of the album’s most compelling vocal moments, but the song mostly misses its mark, much as the 2014 Against Me! track “Osama Bin Laden as the Crucified Christ” mixed so many political symbols that it became incomprehensible. “You sip White Russians/Or a Moscow mule/The ice in your glass/Tastes like power to you,” Tucker seethes, falling well short of a sick burn.
“Last Chance County” introduces some riot grrrl sprechstimme in between earnestly screamed choruses, which makes it one of the album’s strongest cuts: full of despair, frustration, and fury. But much of Emerald Valley holds distance from its subjects, mourning them gently. In James Joyce’s Ulysses, there’s a scene where a group of men see a child’s coffin in a horse-drawn carriage, and the strongest reaction any of them can muster is, “Sad.” The moment stands in contrast to the Irish tradition of funeral keening, already on its way out by the time Joyce published his book about modernity in Dublin, wherein women would wail horrifically to mourn the dead. Keening was not a pleasant sound of dutiful acceptance. It confronted the full terror of loss, the vast unknowable vertigo of death.
The United States is in the grips of a death cult, and many musicians are opting to issue a prompt and polite “sad” rather than cut open the depths of their grief and wail. It feels so inadequate to listen to rock songs this polished and competent about the gut-churning state of the country. Tucker and Buck remain an electric match, and minus the lyrics, their songs knit together well. They are great and talented musicians. But the subjects they tackle demand more raw nerve than Filthy Friends seem willing to put to tape.


Michigan noise trio keeps plugging along, crafting massive textures, severe sonics, and daunting tension from all kinds of sources.

Always Wrong

If you're wondering whether record labels still matter, consider the case of Wolf Eyes. Their last two widely distributed albums, 2004's Burned Mind and 2006's Human Animal, came out on Sub Pop and got lots of media attention, even landing the band on the cover of The Wire. Three years later, Wolf Eyes return with Always Wron**g, a follow-up of sorts after reams of smaller-run releases. It came out on Hospital in May, and I can't find a single review beyond a few blog entries and tweets. Even The Wire hasn't mentioned it.
This probably doesn't matter much to John Olson, Nate Young, and Mike Connelly, and it shouldn't. The workman-like Michigan trio keeps plugging along, crafting massive textures, severe sonics, and daunting tension from all kinds of sources. They must be happier back among their brethren (Hospital is run by their comrade Dominick Fernow of Prurient) than on Sub Pop, but ultimately they must not care much about who pays attention. If they did, they'd smooth out their aggressive, uncompromising noise.
As Always Wrong shows, such change is not an option. Wolf Eyes long ago internalized buzzing static, piercing screams, and crashing cacophony-- basic elements as essential to the band's vocabulary as finger picking is to John Fahey's, or violin drone is to Tony Conrad's. In fact, the most impressive thing about the band at this point in their career is how instantly identifiable their unruly noise is. Reference points remain, such as the industrial bombast of Throbbing Gristle, the gothic dirge of Swans, and the sheer extremity of Whitehouse. But Wolf Eyes now speak their own language exclusively.
On Always Wrong, that language is more literal, at least verbally. Young's vocals are less buried in the mix than before, and his lyrics are not only discernible, they're even printed in the CD booklet. This gives the band the feel of a post-apocalyptic jazz trio, with Young playing snarling bandleader to Olson and Connelly's destructive anti-rhythm section. "All I want is what I see," he moans with a Johnny Rotten-like sneer on opener "Cellar", spitting into the surrounding noise until it rises up and drowns him. On "Living Stone", he slobbers like a stunned David Yow over a mesh of screech and rattle, while the subtly-titled "We All Hate You" is practically a voice-percussion duet between Young and a construction-site beat.
The increased clarity of Young's vocals accompanies a shift in the band's flow. Where Burned Mind and Human Animal relied on cycles of tension and release, alternating sparse lurch with slamming bombast, Always Wrong is more interested in constant build. You won't find many fist-pump moments here, but that doesn't mean the band has abandoned crescendos-- more that the album itself is one elongated climax.
Such descriptions may make the album seem musical, and in relative terms it is. But Wolf Eyes remain as confrontational and forbidding as ever. Take the title track, which bears the rhythmic remnants of a demolished hardcore jam, but to the uninitiated will sound more like a broken hearing test than a song. Yet for anyone attuned to the subtle differences between each overloaded whine, harrowing clang, and psychotic drone, Always Wrong offers a lot to lose your mind in.


Teaming up with Pale Blue singer Elizabeth Wight, the Brooklyn producer explores love and heartbreak in moody tracks that pair back-room house grooves with bedroom introspection.

Liz & Lauren EP

For Detroit-born, Brooklyn-based producer Lauren Flax, the dancefloor is a space to work through trauma and experience joyful catharsis. This philosophy crystallizes in dazzling shape on the Liz & Lauren EP, recorded with Elizabeth Wight of 2MR labelmate Pale Blue on vocals. Flax channels her “sad, horny ‘’90s teenage raver” self into four songs (and one remix) that explore love, infatuation, and the dire state of the world today in improbably anthemic fashion.
Flax and Wight first appeared together in 2020, when Flax remixed Pale Blue’s “Breathe,” the title track of an EP that used tough-edged acid-house production and Wight’s hushed tones to explore the impact of domestic abuse. Inspired by her remix’s melodic, surreal, and rather unsettling style, Flax shifted away from the robust Detroit acid of her earlier releases to deliver 2021’s Out of Reality EP, a record that reflected her disappointment at humanity’s lack of progress in a gothic house style.
The Liz & Lauren EP is cut from the same cloth. Desolate chord sequences meet acidic scraps to create contemplative electronic moods that exist somewhere between the dancefloor and the after party. The BPMs, busy bass drums, and clattering breaks incite bodily motion; but the bone-weary vocal delivery makes the listener want to slip back into the comfort of a warm armchair. “Fix Everything” is a reaction to critical issues from the rise of religious extremism to global warming, and a sense of fatigue is audible in the song’s call for change.
There’s nothing here that would have felt out of place among the softer side of Detroit techno or the early-’90s progressive house it later inspired. The breakbeats and blue-note chord changes of “Fix Everything” and “I’d Risk It All to Be With You” are reminiscent of Future Sound of London’s progressive rave heartbreaker “Papua New Guinea” or onetime Andrew Weatherall proteges One Dove. The chugging bass drum and synth riffs of “I Don’t Want to Hurt You” call back to Spooky, a London duo whose early releases helped establish progressive house’s signature mixture of melody, atmosphere, and rhythm.
But thematically—and in terms of overall feel—the Liz & Lauren EP is very much in its own field. Contrasting with the upbeat drive of much club music, the dark subject matter and Wight’s pained-to-the-point-of-tears delivery are reminiscent of the emo rap of Lil Peep et al., albeit rendered far more tenderly. Wight is capable of expressing subtle emotional shifts with the slightest crack of her voice, and her delivery dances an unlikely pas de deux with Flax’s beats, landing halfway between ASMR and the rave. (The “MASC Remix” of “I’d Risk It All to Be With You,” which does away with most of Wight’s vocals, is a far more conventional and less rewarding club number.)
The production is polished to perfection, a notable step up in quality from Flax’s Out of Reality in its ability to communicate complex emotion. “I Don’t Want to Hurt You” manages to convey the pain and guilt of romantic ambivalence in desolate chords, tinkling synth,and a sprinkling of 303, the lyrics topped off with a desperate, addictive chorus. As the song charges toward its climax, Wight repeats, “even if I’m not in love,” and the synths explode in a bittersweet rush of heartbreak; it’s a towering moment of emotional release, like ABBA’s “The Winner Takes It All” filtered through a sobering personal revelation.
Flax says she wouldn’t expect to hear these songs on the dancefloor, and they certainly wouldn’t fit in with the flow of a typical big-room DJ set. But for any and all of us who still feel that sad, horny teenage raver stirring in our DNA from time to time, Liz & Lauren is essential: four sorry anthems for anyone who has danced their way through their pain and insecurity, lost in the anonymity and forgiveness of a sympathetic club crowd.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Leonard Cohen at the end of history, wielding the darkest, glossiest, most bizarrely righteous songs of his career.

The Future

In the early 1990s, Leonard Cohen occupied a quantum state in popular culture, a sort of Schrodinger’s singer-songwriter: simultaneously legendary and forgotten. There was no knowing on which of the two he might ultimately land. Twenty-five years earlier, the Montreal-born poet and novelist’s sensual yet unsentimental folk music had made him the urbane wallflower at psychedelic rock’s sweaty be-in, and an intimate of brilliant women from Judy Collins to Joni Mitchell to Janis Joplin. By the early ’80s, he was such a relic that the album containing what has become his most famous song was not initially issued in the United States. His 1988 comeback, I’m Your Man, a masterpiece of cinematic synths and bleakly comedic foreboding, was crucial to what Cohen liked to call his “resurrection.” But the status he achieved by the time of his actual death, in 2016, as a songwriting guru of incantatory power, was far from secure.
Released in late November 1992 as the follow-up to I’m Your Man, The Future was a quest for lasting truth in what he perceived as the schlocky, dehumanized ruins of late capitalism. When Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and Michael Bolton’s Timeless: The Classics stood atop the U.S. charts, the 58-year-old Cohen’s ninth studio album offered an equally extravagant but more ambiguous soundtrack to post-Cold War triumphalism: lacquered keyboard-rock with strings, a choir, several producers, and hordes of session musicians, recorded in a dozen studios. Cohen’s husky voice sits at the center, growling lyrics that don’t so much blur the sacred and profane as dispassionately report their coexistence. Heaven is in the gutter, and vice versa—hallelujah, what’s it to ya? Its nine-song, hour-long runtime juxtaposes some of Cohen’s finest originals with two unlikely covers and an instrumental. I’m Your Man brought Cohen back to life. The Future showed he would continue to capture life, in all of its messy contradictions, prismatic with meaning.
After a sellout world tour behind I’m Your Man, Cohen initially planned to reunite with the crew behind that album in Montreal. Instead he went to sunny Los Angeles to enlist longtime backup singer Jennifer Warnes, and basically didn’t leave. He swapped blasts of spiritual lyricism with Sonny Rollins on late-night TV. He basked in the glow of a new tribute album, 1991’s I’m Your Fan, which featured R.E.M., the Pixies, Nick Cave, and, fatefully, John Cale’s influential version of “Hallelujah.” He dated and was briefly engaged to Rebecca De Mornay, the Risky Business and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle actress, whom he accompanied to the Oscars.
But songwriting was an agonizing, nonstop process for Cohen, leaving him “wrecked” and darkening thousands of notebook pages with revisions. He struggled with depression. He saw fires blaze through his neighborhood in the uprising after the Rodney King verdict. For four months, he paused all work while his son, the elder of two children from a previous relationship, recovered from a near-fatal car accident. The crash was the rare subject that Cohen found too painful to discuss on the promotional circuit. “If you’re a parent, you don’t have to explain these things,” he reasoned.
For Cohen, songs were living, breathing entities, open to almost Talmudic reinterpretation, all the way through his 2008 farewell tour. Many of the themes on The Future were already percolating on I’m Your Man: Both albums established Cohen as a gallows-humor prophet able to condense the sweep of sex, religion, and social ills into wry synth-rock, willing to write and sing from perspectives that reflect the worst of human nature. The two albums were also proof of concept for Cohen’s dawning conviction that his bitter, mordantly funny proclamations were best served with a syncopated backbeat—or, as he preferred to say, “a hot little dance track.” While The Future hasn’t been the consensus favorite, it’s the zaniest, the most overstuffed, and the most clairvoyant.
One of The Future’s breakthroughs was bringing Cohen’s apocalyptic stand-up routine into the sharper context afforded by the fall, in 1989, of the Berlin Wall. “It was a universal event, like David and Goliath, like the Crucifixion,” Cohen explained. The collapse of the Iron Curtain and the breakup of the Soviet Union were cause for celebration among most liberal Western observers. Not so much for Cohen, who foresaw a “tremendous” cost in human suffering that would come with the shifting political tides.
The Future’s lithely funky, album-opening title song was originally titled “If You Could See What’s Coming Next,” but Cohen ended up dropping the safe distance of the conditional for a grimly hilarious first-person view. The track stands as a gruff, deadpan rejoinder to what political scientist Francis Fukuyama had dubbed The End of History: “Give me crack and anal sex,” Cohen demands in the record’s first minute. “Take the only tree that’s left/And stuff it up the hole/In your culture.” It’s a rich, multivalent song, encompassing references to Stalin, Jesus Christ, abortion, Charles Manson, and Hiroshima, clamoring for repentance like a sidewalk preacher only to fold back around and question the entire concept. Cohen’s narrator calls himself “the little Jew/Who wrote the Bible.” In the so-chilling-it’s-absurd refrain, he announces that he’s “seen the future, baby/It is murder,” and angelic backing vocalists answer him with a wordless melody.
Cohen’s societal diagnosis is grim: “The blizzard of the world/Has crossed the threshold/And it’s overturned/The order of the soul,” he sings, suggesting that the chaotic pace of contemporary life has toppled humanist ideals about the sanctity of the individual. “We’re already in the flood, just the flood is interior,” he told interviewers. “What is it that people can’t take? They can’t take the reality they’re living in.”
The uncanny-valley yacht rock of “Democracy,” with its Chevrolet motorik pulse and military-march trappings, offered another enigmatic retort to Pax Americana smugness. Between pattering snares and a suspiciously soulful harmonica riff, Cohen rasps the refrain that “democracy is coming to the USA,” but leaves open the question of what system of government has been in place for more than two centuries. Rather than redwood forests or purple mountain majesties, Cohen’s imagined land of the free emerges “from the fires of the homeless/From the ashes of the gay”—the latter line a grisly allusion to the hundreds of thousands of people who died during the HIV/AIDS crisis. He leaves room for optimism, nodding to “the holy places where the races meet,” but he ends with a prescient and depressing image: His narrator, who’s “neither left nor right,” sits at home, “getting lost in that hopeless little screen,” “stubborn as those garbage bags/That time cannot decay.” As the song glides off into the star-spangled night, Cohen continues, “I’m junk but I’m still holding up this little wild bouquet.”
Democracy, Cohen suggested in interviews, won’t live up to the old Enlightenment goal of a less stratified, more egalitarian culture where everyday people learn to “love Shakespeare and Beethoven.” He said, “It’s going to come up in unexpected ways from the stuff that we think is junk: the people we think are junk, the ideas we think are junk, the television we think is junk.” It’s a testament to the song’s artistry that “Democracy” can be heard both as a dire prediction of a vulgar reality-show U.S. presidency and as a Tocqueville-esque cosmopolitan observer’s stirring celebration of the huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
When Cohen’s ominous outlook creeps over into the personal realm, The Future really cooks. In the eerie smolder of “Waiting for the Miracle,” with arrangements by his partner De Mornay (who as a teenager had written the title song for a Bruce Lee film), the miracle in question could be a visit by a lover, a muse, or both—hell, maybe it’s democracy. Cohen’s rhetoric reaches across epochs. “I haven’t been this happy/Since the end of World War II,” he observes. And evoking junk again: “The Maestro says it’s Mozart/But it sounds like bubblegum.” His wide-angle lens on the world encompasses the geopolitical and the private both: In the same song, he also proposes marriage.
The Future’s liner notes begin with a quote from the book of Genesis, in dedication to De Mornay, and there are moments across the album when Cohen’s familiar lust hints at something more lasting. The achy-breaky fiddle-country of “Closing Time,” every bit as flush with significance as The Future’s more topical songs, paints an uproarious scene of boozy barroom hookups—someone’s “rubbing half the world against her thigh,” the drinks are spiked with LSD, and the Holy Spirit wonders, “Where’s the beef?”—but a confession of love lies at its heart. The musical-chairs moment when last call ends and single bar patrons couple up acts as a nifty metaphor for how anyone finds a meaningful connection with anybody. Cohen, of course, states his intentions more existentially: “I loved you for your body/There’s a voice that sounds like God to me/Declaring that your body’s really you.”
Elsewhere, Cohen’s tormented search for transcendence leads him in a more self-consciously meta direction. The results can be confounding but also profound. His games with high-gloss production begin to drag on “Light as the Breeze,” a schmaltzy ode to oral sex (“So I knelt there at the delta/At the alpha, and the omega/At the cradle of the river and the seas…”). But the song is most fascinating for how it doubles, once again, as a paean to inspiration itself. Cohen sings about “sleeping in your harness,” a phrase he also used in an interview to describe his all-consuming life’s work: The songwriter as a dog forever tied to his sled, disciplined and attentive even when he’s at rest.
The two covers—a straightforward rendition of Freddie Knight’s obscure ’70s R&B nugget “Be for Real,” which at one point was intended to be the album title, and a bonkers eight-minute bump-and-grind through Irving Berlin’s chivalrous 10-line standard “Always”—aren’t merely ironic. They complement The Future’s other attempts to express endless love in a postmodern world that rejects eternal certainties. If the flood is here, then Cohen is shoring up all of his fragments against the tide. A virtuoso of meanings is saying, in every way he can: He means it, baby. When Cohen at last falls silent, on finale “Tacoma Trailer”—a woozy and lovely drift of Synclavier and upright bass, originally composed for a play, that could float over the titles to Twin Peaks—the decision to remove his voice from the conversation feels portentous and inscrutable, as if he’s declaring, “You’re on your own.”
Like “Tower of Song” on I’m Your Man, The Future also has a song that helps unlock Cohen’s sense of himself as an artist. “Anthem,” a waltzing, gospel-tinged hymn, co-produced by De Mornay, centers on a quatrain influenced by the Jewish mystic tradition of Kabbalah: “Ring the bells that still can ring/Forget your perfect offering/There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.” If the album has a philosophical underpinning, Cohen told one interviewer, it’s in those words. The Future often exposes human failings; “Anthem” is a recognition that these failings make us human. It’s also an apotheosis: In the brokenness of the human condition, Cohen glimpses something divine, and you can hear it, too. Not that he was so forgiving of perceived imperfections in his own efforts. Cohen said that “Anthem” took a decade to write, and he tried recording it three times. The “crack in everything” line came to him before 1982, and goes far beyond The Future: “That has been the background of much of my work,” Cohen said. On his final tour, it was the last song he played before skipping offstage for intermission.
Three weeks prior to The Future’s release, President Bill Clinton reclaimed the White House for the Democratic Party. The marketing honchos at Columbia, citing the song’s “obvious tie-in to the election,” rush-released the six-minute “Democracy” as a radio single. In an astounding series of events at the MTV Inaugural Ball in January 1993, comedian Dennis Miller introduced the Eagles’ Don Henley, who performed a ludicrously reverent “Democracy” cover while wearing sunglasses at night. And yet Cohen’s cantankerous vision refuses to be reduced to bland pieties. He wished only the best for Bubba—“especially for his wife, whom I find immensely attractive”—and he wasn’t opposed to saving the rainforests or protecting the ozone layer. But he believed such problems were symptoms of broader malaise: “It’s like trying to tidy up on the Titanic,” he said. Describing “The Future,” Cohen could seem tragically prescient about events like the genocide in the former Yugoslavia and ongoing bloodshed in the former Soviet republics, as well as the sectarian divisions that continue to plague the United States. “When it’s every man for himself, the identification of race arises,” he said. “I think those are very dangerous times. And that is the time we are in.” This was not exactly a mainstream opinion in 1992: Millions of others were watching Aladdin, buying the first Pentium computers, or visiting the newly opened Mall of America.
The Future enjoyed glowing reviews, decent sales, and prominent film soundtrack appearances, particularly in Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. A name-check by Nirvana followed a year later on “Pennyroyal Tea,” from In Utero. But in 1994, after another grueling world tour, Cohen’s depression deepened, and he disappeared to a Zen Buddhist retreat outside L.A. Nine years passed between studio albums. He never married. The Future, like all of Cohen’s work, can be heavy—wags at the time variously dubbed Cohen “the prince of bummers,” “pop music’s monarch of bad moods,” and “the Lord Byron of rock’n’roll” (not the bishop of tissues? The rabbi of sad eyes?)—but it endures because of an exquisite balance between hate and love, the worst of humanity and the best, the crack in everything and the light that gets in. “Our real appetite is not for the victory of the white race,” Cohen once said, speaking generally for those who might be drawn to reactionary politics, and countering his own apocalyptic forecasts. “Our real victory isn’t Judaism over Islam, not conservatism over liberalism. There is another appetite that doesn’t involve victory but involves a reconciliation, and that’s where we really long to be.”
When Cohen died, at age 82, though still not a household name, he was roundly recognized as one of the great songwriters, his work admired across the globe. “He said in his last interview that he was ready to die, and he said in his last public outing that he would live forever. Both are true,” De Mornay, then 57, told the press in a statement. “There was no one like him, and there never will be.” The Future is murder, and it’s reconciliation, resurrection, endless love; it’s Mozart and it’s bubblegum. Both are true.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


Across three blissfully spaced-out tracks, the New York producer continues to explore the fusion of left-field dance music and reggaetón.

DJ Python : Club Sentimientos, Vol. 2 EP

Club Sentimientos, Vol. 2 EP

Few in the left-field dance circuit have brought reggaetón into the conversation quite the way Brian Piñeyro has. In a field full of DJs making updates to historically American dance genres like house and techno, Piñeyro has used his DJ Python alias to explore the possibilities of reggaetón’s dembow beat, translating its relentless thump into something heady and hypnotizing. Where dancehall and reggaetón are typically high-energy genres made for igniting crowds and rattling trunks, Piñeyro takes a dubbier approach, emphasizing the atmospheric elements that hang between the rhythms and tunneling into them to see how far down he can go. After a strong run of releases that have balanced the project’s crystalline tranquility with a sinuous sensuality, DJ Python’s latest EP, Club Sentimientos, Vol. 2, is an exercise in ethereal bliss, amplifying all the most heavenly elements of Piñeyro’s music without losing its elastic bounce.
Some of Piñeyro’s strongest tracks so far have been his more extended workouts, where he’s allowed his shuffling beats to spill out into a blurry cloud of psychedelic movement. His last album, Mas Amable, was essentially one continuous 48-minute track, with Piñeyro journeying between pure ambience and sinister illbient while finding new ways to subtly tweak his constant, ever-looping dembow riddim. On “Angel,” the 11-minute centerpiece of Club Sentimientos, Vol. 2, DJ Python applies this tactic to some of his most new-agey sounds yet, carrying the track along on a soothing wave of cresting chords and shimmering synths. After introducing a crisp, handclap-driven groove, Piñeyro launches into an extended mallet percussion solo that breezily drifts in and out, never drawing too much attention to itself while fostering a playful sense of discovery. The track feels closer in spirit to the dreamy output of mid-2010s house labels like 100% Silk, with Piñeyro leaning deeper into sounds that work best on a pair of headphones as opposed to a club soundsystem. In its gentle swell, “Angel” is one of DJ Python’s purest, most satisfying tracks to date.
The other two tracks return to the bassy, reggaetón-inflected riddims Piñeyro is best known for. “TMMD (IMMMD)” revolves around a few sparse elements, just a chopped vocal sample and a couple glassy synths that weave around a tumbling dembow stomp. With no central chord progression grounding the song, Piñeyro lets his samples float freely in empty space, bouncing off one another like bubbles fizzing in an Erlenmeyer flask. Meanwhile, the closing “Club Sentimiental Vol Three” finds DJ Python at his most relaxed; opening on a drowsy, soft-as-clouds synth progression, the track hovers in place for about a minute and a half until, sure enough, Piñeyro’s trusty dembow riddim kicks back in, bringing the whole song to life like a dancehall remix of Selected Ambient Works 85-92. Despite its relative brevity, Club Sentimientos, Vol. 2 shows Piñeyro growing and discovering new depths to his enchanting take on dance music. Rather than accentuating dembow’s powerful, constant lurch, here Piñeyro gives himself room to indulge his more textural impulses, creating a meditative, airy paradise of sound that glides high above the rhythms below. It’s a pleasure to watch him soar.


The New York rappers team up with the legendary producer for their first full-length collaboration. Over his thick, sample-heavy beats, MIKE and Wiki brandish a natural chemistry that feels like it’s existed for decades.

MIKE / Wiki / The Alchemist: Faith Is a Rock

Faith Is a Rock

The Alchemist is not an unrealistic man; he understands that even his powers have limits. In an interview with Tidal in late 2022, the legendary beatmaker admitted that a full-length collaboration with two artists presents unique challenges. “It’s always a little different when you’re working with two people,” he said. “The result is just so much more unpredictable.” When he and New York rappers MIKE and Wiki announced that they were teaming up for Faith Is a Rock, it was logical to question how the trio would work together on an album. Fortunately, on “Bless” and “Sentry,” two of MIKE’s recent collabs with the Alchemist, his relaxed, almost lethargic raps sounded right at home.
But introducing Wiki’s winding, introspective monologues into the fold created the potential for an overcrowded landscape. Faith Is a Rock soothes any potential fears; MIKE and Wiki navigate the Alchemist’s warped terrain as equals. They achieve a balance similar to Freddie Gibbs and Curren$y on 2018’s Fetti, delivering biting quotables and meandering soliloquies that reveal the full breadth of their powers. Over the 32-minute runtime, their raps never recede into the all-consuming mass of the Alchemist’s thick sample loops.
This year has been prolific for the Alchemist: He executive produced three records (and one deluxe version), including Voir Dire, his most recent joint album with Earl Sweatshirt. But making that much music in succession could deplete anyone’s creativity: At some point, the boom-bap beats might start to resemble each other. Faith Is a Rock avoids that trap, introducing enough mood changes to keep things dynamic, all without sacrificing the overall tenor of the album. There are small but striking details scattered throughout, like the ghostly wails and sci-fi sound effects that adorn “Odd Ways,” the cartoonish chorus that carries the bare-bones background of “Bledsoe,” and the sound of pencil scratching on paper on “Scribble Jam.” The 45-year-old producer also incorporates vignettes, sprinkling in Gil Scott-Heron vocals, Bob Dylan recordings, and narrations from classic Western films as short intros. The focus here isn’t necessarily pushing the envelope, but crafting an environment that’s comfortable for both MIKE and Wiki.
That approach ensures that the spotlight remains on the raps. When MIKE and Wiki on are on the same track, they are like two savvy veterans on the court working in lockstep with each other, expertly assessing their next moves. They grant each other space from the outset; on the opener “Stargate,” which boasts a string sample that sounds like it was ripped from a ’70s Blaxploitation film, is a prime example. Wiki drifts through autobiographical details, reminiscing about “sippin’ 40s at the 40th Pier,” and his words bleed fluidly into MIKE’s bars without losing momentum. Only two tracks here are solo efforts, a welcome homeostasis that allows each rapper to flex their gifts. Whether they’re trading truncated stanzas or spreading their legs out, neither feels rushed. There’s an intrinsic ease that rests in this relationship, a natural chemistry that feels like it’s existed for decades.
That balance is paramount, because MIKE and Wiki have a lot to say. Their knack for lucid self-awareness and radical honesty is only matched by their sharp social commentary. On the standout “Mayors a Cop,” Wiki breaks down his city’s failures with a quiet fury: “The block is hot, shit, this how they chose to use the guap/With this amount of human laws/Could’ve been for schools or parks,” he raps. You can feel the exasperation swelling with every syllable; he sounds like someone sitting on the stoop airing his frustrations to anyone on the street who’s willing to listen. On “Stargate,” MIKE takes aim at the external pressures that caused strife in his upbringing. “And where do pity belong and will the harm fade?/Product of them immigrant laws, infinite heartache,” he raps, recalling how he was separated from his mother for several years after he moved back to the U.S. from England.
Faith Is a Rock’s tracks feel familiar and warm, but never register as retreads of old territory. MIKE and Wiki aren’t swept away in Alchemist’s endless sea of serene, sample-laden beats; they establish themselves as careful explorers, claiming their rightful place in the upper echelon of Alchemist collaborators. On the album’s finale (and lead single) “One More,” triumphant strings and a stirring soul vocal feel like the fanfare of a coronation. Here, two worthy champions sit on a throne crafted from their own excellence.


Scottish composer Anna Meredith adds real clarinets, glockenspiels, drums, cello, and even singing to the virtual instruments on her new EP, but otherwise picks up in the same retro-flavored, high-spirited, questing mood of last year's Black Prince Fury.

Jet Black Raider EP

The contemporary composer's life is a complicated thing. Not only are there commissions to be written and personal works to be performed, but there are musicians, academic directors, tony labels, demanding benefactors, and gala-happy chamber arts societies to be placated. Not only is there the classical canon and instrumentation to be managed; there are also all kinds of electronic devices and experiments to be integrated, not infrequently amid multidisciplinary performance settings. And if navigating this demanding new music world isn't enough, there's the indie one it increasingly mingles with, sending you scampering between campus auditoriums and nightclub stages.
Scottish composer Anna Meredith knows what it's like to keep such a complex machine of prestige and exigency humming along. She has been a composer-in-residence at the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra. She's made classically trained young people perform something like a goofy symphonic version of Steve Reich’s Clapping Music at Royal Albert Hall. She's padded her income with commercial work including, reportedly, music for MRI scanners. That's a terrifying prospect if you consider it through the lens of her solo style, which is shaping up-- understandably, given the aforementioned context-- as a pressure vent for overwhelming, spontaneous, brazen grandeur. Would you want to hear Death Star explosion music while getting your brain scanned in a metal pod?
Meredith unveiled her smart, intrepid electronic music last year on the Black Prince Fury EP, which was steeped in a sense of adventure associated with the fantasy video games and fantasy metal of the 1980s, when Meredith was a child. The EP was spearheaded by "Nautilus", a sentient tidal wave of synthetic brass pulses more gloriously malevolent than anything cooked up by TNGHT or ripped off the Godzilla soundtrack by Pharoahe Monch. "I came up with a bit of it, and thought, 'Well, that's a bit ridiculous, but let's just roll with it!'" Meredith told Pitchfork. On the new Jet Black Raider EP, she adds some real clarinets, glockenspiels, drums, cello, and even singing to her virtual instruments, but otherwise, she picks up in the same retro-flavored, high-spirited, questing mood where she left off.
The 8-bit video game scores of the 80s were influenced by medieval music-- its limited polyphony suited the handful of channels you could get on a chip-- and by hair metal guitar solos, for their built-in adrenaline. Video game composers used these channels as maximally as possible, stuffing them with ghoulish chromatic bass lines, runaway arpeggios, and memorably brave or haunting melodic themes. Meredith's solo work feels couched in this dated techno-cultural moment. Her song titles sound like Zelda monsters; her EP names like Final Fantasy summon spells. With the short hair and puffy shirt she wears in promo photos, she would make a great bard at a LARP session. "Orlok", which fills the monstrous-banger slot established by "Nautilus", begins with a fast sinister progression that makes you feel like you've booted up Wizards & Warriors, then rampages through seven minutes of explosive final-boss music, but with contemplative respites and beats nudged around in time.
As on Black Prince Fury, the new EP's initial shock-and-awe campaign is rounded out by three shorter, lighter pieces, though the mercurial "Unicron"-- imagine if there was such a thing as a pipe organ with a built-in digital sequencer, and it was totally haunted-- nears "Orlok" in groaning weight and playful menace, and often feels, as do many of Meredith's tracks, like the brief moment when an orchestra scrambles for a tempo change protracted for a breathlessly long time. The sparse "Bubble Gun" is as quirkily schematic as its name, with effervescent arpeggios for bubbles, a bass and some brass chords for the gun. Most surprising is "ALR", where Meredith sings ingenuous lyrics in a clear, humble voice over molten electro-pop, melding the breezniess of Au Revoir Simone with the wide-open thrusters of M83.
Certainly, Meredith must share Anthony Gonzalez's love of 80s synth-pop; this is someone who twisted apart "The Power of Love" on her last EP. But rather than a nostalgic embalming of old feelings, this is rough and ready music that bursts with contemporary inspiration, aiming to flood the synapses and master the senses. Though musical subtleties naturally emerge from Meredith's training and practice, the extroverted impact and unserious charisma of Jet Black Raider is even more admirable and rare.


Montreal producer/composer Mike Silver's new EP, a companion to last year's Exercises, was inspired by unspectacular everyday objects, as well as Wim Wenders' 1989 documentary Notebook on Cities and Clothes. On it, he uses saxophone, piano, marimba, and other instruments to deepen his electronic palette.

Music for Objects EP

For Mike Silver, the Montreal producer who records as CFCF, inspiration comes from simple sources. First garnering attention with his balmy take on beat-driven electronics on 2009's still great Continent, Silver's pushed himself out of his comfort zone with nearly every subsequent release, and in the process reshaping what his music is capable of doing. Just as Continent was influenced by Silver's interest in film, his 2010 EP The River provided a patient, yet somewhat warmed-over alternate universe soundtrack to Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo. But with last year's Exercises EP, Silver hit a stride that now continues with Music for Objects, a companion to the exploratory, piano-anchored pieces found on Exercises.
The last EP was inspired by the music of Philip Glass and Yellow Magic Orchestra's Ryuichi Sakamoto, and more amorphously, from the brutalist architecture of the 1960s. Music for Objects, as the Eno-esque title would suggest, subscribes to a similar kind of intellectual curiosity that informed the previous release (this record aims to depict normal, unimpressive things Silver encounters every day), but it isn't a purely eggheaded endeavor. Instead, Silver is able to evoke wide arrays of emotion with mere keystrokes. And while Music for Objects doesn't strictly adhere to "sounding" like the objects examined here-- "Keys", "Lamp", "Bowl"-- he brings things to life in ways that wouldn't feel unfamiliar to OCD sufferers quick to anthropomorphize objects lying around the apartment. But with CFCF, the less literal the better, as the real payoff is experiencing these things from Silver's point of view, with surprisingly moving results.
Despite recently taking cues from tangible items, CFCF's music has always seemed informed by the seasons, like the bone-cold late winter feel of Exercises, which in some ways gives way to the new growth of springtime that Music for Objects inhabits. From the dewy serenity of "Bowl", with its pan flutes and sparse keys, to the shyly sexy saxophone and drain spout plunks of "Camera", to "Glass"'s nimbleness and shimmer, all of it suggests something of a rebirth. The same could be said for Silver, who has found new but sure footing with these complimentary EPs. Just as with Exercises, Music for Objects finds CFCF becoming less of a producer and more of a composer, using more traditional instruments (sax, piano, marimba) to delicately layer and build with. These works are far less busy than the neon-streaked, movement-minded tracks that described his earlier work, but are just as capable of soundtracking some pretty impressive eyelid movies.
Music for Objects came to life after Silver watched 1989's Notebook on Cities and Clothes, a documentary by Wim Wenders on fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto. Silver was particularly struck by the challenge faced by Laurent Petitgand, the film's composer, regarding having to construct a piece of music that expressed something about a piece of clothing. Following in Petitgand's footsteps, Silver has uncovered a good deal more than a project of this nature might reveal, as viewing Music for Objects as merely a functional piece of work is to ignore how emotionally impacting it truly is, no matter what is being depicted. In reinterpreting Petitgand's task, Silver is often able to get a decent amount of mileage out of more concrete depictions of his objects.
It's hard not to hear the romance in something like "Perfume" or "Ring", the closing piano suite that feels eternal in its simplicity. "Turnstile" is even more effective, with its bright pastels and bell tones suggesting a time-lapse video of a Tokyo street during rush hour. The rest of these tracks require a little more effort to unpack-- it's not hard to conjure images of light being refracted off of "Glass", or feel the rounded edges of "Bowl", but they don't come as quickly or easily. But Music for Objects is, above all else, a record about perspective, one that requires you to look at the familiar from a different angle, and in doing so do the most impressive illuminations take place. The playful tug of war on display on "Lamp" doesn't trace a common shape, but sharing a corner of Silver's headspace for a little while is more than half the fun.
But the finest moment on Music for Objects has to be "Keys", which is strange because it's probably the least indicative of the EP as a whole. Carrying the saxophone over from "Camera", it's a humid, almost danceable track that jams in classic house-y pianos, chirping cicadas, and a dizzying little free jazz coda. It ends up sounding like Bruce Hornsby melting into a swamp. But while "Keys" may not be the clearest statement of purpose here, it says something larger about CFCF, offering a condensation of the best bits of Silver's personality, a measured mix of the old and the new all wrapped up into one beatific little four minute segment. It also hints at even greater potential: While it's obvious that Silver isn't the least bit interested in following any set of prescribed rules, the vision of a more complete, multi-faceted CFCF becomes easier to make out. But it's obvious that these smaller steps have all been necessary ones, and wherever he takes his music in the future, there will be plenty to be excited about. But on the subject of Music for Objects alone, it's another excellent chapter in CFCF's story, a strong case for how much unexpected magic can be found in the ordinary and, more importantly, in CFCF's ever-mutating discography.