This big box set marks the first posthumous release from the Petty estate and finds new meaning both through songs we thought we knew and necessary obscurities.

An American Treasure

Tom Petty’s music has been obsessively compiled, assessed, and summarized. If you want the full story, there’s Peter Bogdanovich’s four-hour documentary, Runnin’ Down a Dream. If you’re interested in a grittier account, try Warren Zanes’ epic biography, Petty. Here for the music? In 1995, Petty mined his vaults with Playback, a comprehensive collection filled with singles, deep cuts, and outtakes. That set arrived just two years after his 12-times platinum Greatest Hits, expanded in 2000 for the immersive Anthology: Through the Years. And befitting a bandleader who many would argue lit up the stage more naturally than the studio, there’s 2009’s four-disc Live Anthology, collecting highlights from three decades on the road.
Petty’s legacy has been sustained through such retrospectives, arguably more than any other artist of the classic rock era. His output was so consistent for so long that no single studio record could accurately frame the breadth and depth of his catalog. Following his death last fall, it was both telling and touching to hear famous fans covering songs from across his career, whether it was the National dusting off a late-career weeper, Phoebe Bridgers meditating on a 1987 deep cut, Bob Dylan putting his spin on a singalong strummer, or Miley Cyrus closing her eyes and belting out a wistful lullaby. While compilations can feel like cash grabs or contractual obligations, Petty’s music invites this type of listening. His songs form their own universe, primed for diving in and finding your own little corner.
So An American Treasure—a new career-spanning collection and the first posthumous release from the Petty estate—is not without precedent, making its ability to say something new even more impressive. No Tom Petty collection has ever felt so thoughtful or complete. With a tracklist selected by those closest to him—his wife, Dana; daughter, Adria; two Heartbreakers bandmates, Mike Campbell and Benmont Tench; and his studio collaborator Ryan Ulyate—it’s the rare career survey that makes you reconsider the work it collects. It is filled with love, vulnerable in a way it might not have been had Petty himself overseen it.
Consider the inclusion of an alternate version of “Rebels,” a song with a troubled history. In the mid-1980s, Petty and his Heartbreakers toiled over the Southern Accents opener, culminating in Petty breaking his left hand after punching a wall in frustration. He felt that the studio rendition didn’t hold up to his original demo, and the Heartbreakers were losing valuable studio time worrying with it. Listening again, the problem seems obvious: Like a lot of Petty standards, “Rebels” is both anthem and elegy—the tale of a down-and-out Southerner confronting his limitations, dwelling in pain that was once pride. With a triumphant horn section and a “hey hey hey” refrain, the music works directly against the lyrics. On any given listen, you might hear one side winning over the other. It’s a fascinating battle for a listener but a frustrating one for an author trying to document a definitive take. With a slightly altered mix and more dynamic horns, this version feels more decisive.
The context helps, too. Petty’s growth as a songwriter is the focus of An American Treasure, which shades in the spaces between his radio staples and leaves room for his growing pains and left turns. There’s no “Free Fallin’” or “American Girl,” but four selections from 2002’s oft-derided The Last DJ make the cut. That album’s poor reputation is based in part on its bitter reflections on a changing music industry, but these highlights focus on the wild romance that brought Petty to the business in the first place. The gorgeous “Like a Diamond,” the swooning road song “You and Me,” and the sprawling “Have Love Will Travel” are all solid additions to his catalog of love songs. They shine brighter here, their happy endings left in place.
For the most part, Petty albums are focused and concise, sometimes to a fault. His compilations make room for all the detours he could have taken. As usual, the selected outtakes are as polished and enduring as the album cuts. “I Don’t Belong,” recorded for 1999’s dark Echo, merges post-grunge angst with power-pop sweetness. It presages Americana-based indie by the likes of Rilo Kiley and Bright Eyes that would help carry Petty’s influence into the next decade. More famous outtakes like “Keeping Me Alive” and “Surrender” (which previously appeared on Playback and Anthology, respectively) now seem as immortal as any of his hits, despite never making it onto a proper album.
Many of Petty’s best-loved songs find new resonance here. Stripped-back takes of “I Won’t Back Down,” “Insider,” and “Even the Losers” unveil the multiple perspectives locked within Petty’s most familiar tunes. He was not an autobiographical songwriter, but his character-based writing, so free of pretense, feels revealing. “Two Gunslingers,” an allegory that offers as much wisdom about senseless violence as it does a toxic relationship or a bad record deal, appears in a live acoustic rendition that is more baldly emotional than its studio counterpart. It is a showcase for the tenderness that allowed him to find success even as he mellowed out. “You’re a good man to ride the river with,” Johnny Cash once wrote to Petty, aptly capturing the comforting presence that shined through all his greatest songs. Working mostly chronologically, this set flows so that you feel you’re riding alongside him.
Both the condensed and deluxe editions of An American Treasure stretch from Petty’s early tracks with the Heartbreakers to his late work with Mudcrutch, the hometown band he reunited in 2007 and with whom he’d release his final music. “This town broke my heart/Then just carried on like nothing happened at all,” he sings in the closer, “Hungry No More.” It’s easy to imagine this being the fear that drove so much of his music: our stories and memories forgotten, leaving the world with us. There’s a distinct desire in Petty’s work to make an immortal connection, whether that means getting back in touch with his old Gainesville pals or writing hits that would echo in stadiums around the world. An American Treasure doesn’t prioritize one more than the other, because Petty never saw a distinction.


Garage-pop band from the fertile San Francisco scene works with producer Tim Green on its strongest material to date.

Play It Strange

Over the past few years, San Francisco has given rise to a new scene of garage-pop bands pushing the frustrated proto-punk sounds of the 1960s in different directions. Girls are indie-pop classicists who hit heartbreak even when they don't reach for it. Thee Oh Sees take the scrapiest, ugliest sounds on the Nuggets compilations and run with them. Sonny & the Sunsets play cartoonish games with the skewed innocence they hear in oldies-radio fare. And then there are the Fresh & Onlys, who seem in love with the era when garage-rock thud and folk-rock jangle first fell for each other. The guys in the band aren't revivalists, exactly, but they are pastiche artists. And in their florid, carefully orchestrated chug, we hear bits of any number of historical pop moments: starry-eyed Buddy Holly pep, Byrdsian guitar sprawl, willfully silly Donovan Mellotron idealism, scraggly Sebadoh sighs, bored Dandy Warhols stoner glamor.
Since forming a few years ago, the band has kept up a steady stream of 7" and cassette releases, and Play It Strange is their third LP in as many years. But this one finds them starting to pull all those ideas into something a little more focused, something easier to digest. For the first time, they've left the confines of their home studio, and now they're working with an actual producer-- former Fucking Champs guy Tim Green, who might not exactly be Daniel Lanois, but he's still a big step for this band. Their smart little melodic flourishes have always been there, but now you don't have to strain your ear to hear them.
Even at their most straightforward, the Fresh & Onlys still find plenty of room to play around in the margins of their songs. "I'm All Shook Up" is a relative rave-up, but organs blurt and bass murmurs deep in the mix, adding melodic accents to the pounding. "Who Needs a Man" is a swampy rush that ends before you know it, but the ghostly shades of surf-guitar exotica keep things restless. And then there's "Tropical Island Suite", this band's shot at eight-minute "Hellhole Ratrace" grandeur. A straight-ahead, simplistic bash dissolves into muffled feedbacky noise halfway through, then returns as a slower, strummier lope. It's as if the band couldn't decide which way to play the song, so they just went with both ideas.
Singer Tim Cohen has a flat, affectless voice, nowhere near as expressive as peers like Christopher Owens or even Sonny Smith. But that baritone works nicely in the middle of the mix, and it's fun to hear him sounding bored of being a player on "I'm a Thief" or trying to escape information-age overload on "Waterfall". My favorite line comes on "Be My Hooker": "I can hear the open sea calling me, but I don't know, I don't know"-- wanderlust and indecision rendered in one quick, direct stroke. He keeps things concise, and the whole album finishes up business well before the 40-minute mark. May this band continue to crank out inventive little nuggets like this long into the future.


The New York duo’s second album is tasteful to a fault, joining gentle electronics with polite indie rock and vaguely wistful lyrics. Despite the title, it’s a record that avoids discord at all cost.

Battle Lines

The band Bob Moses sounds remarkably like Coldplay on Battle Lines, from the soaring vocal melodies to the stately piano chords to the overall air of slightly apologetic celebration. Most of all, though, Bob Moses sound like Coldplay because singer Tom Howie sounds like Chris Martin. The resemblance is there in Howie’s hushed vocal tone, his tendency to reach for the falsetto and only just arrive, and the way he stretches out his words like a politely howling coyote, so that “insanity” becomes “insanity-y-y,” the last syllable tugged along by vast slabs of singalong phrasing.
Coldplay’s role as perpetual media whipping boy might make the comparison sound like an insult, but it’s not meant to be. Especially on their first two albums, Coldplay had a fantastic gift for melody that soundtracked more autumnal breakups than many people these days might care to admit, and Bob Moses share some of this melodic nous. At their best, the Vancouver band’s tunes are like seeds in the desert: imperishable hooks that lie dormant for months only to flower at the first sign of heartbreak. Album opener “Heaven Only Knows” has the same boisterous stadium melancholy that Chris Martin and co. might use to slay a boggy Glastonbury Festival, while “Listen to Me” is a wonderful earworm mix of fragility and defiance.
The problem lies in what Bob Moses do—or rather don’t do—with these melodies. For all that the band straddles the worlds of dance and guitars, the arrangements on Battle Lines are incredibly tame, as if the duo mistakenly joined the blandest of electronics with the politest of indie rock. The typical Battle Lines song starts with solemn piano chords and a mournful vocal refrain; a beat starts up, earnestly marking time; then guitar and synth join wearily in, a pattern so unbelievably muted it makes you wonder if electronic music could really have originated in the delirium of disco or was instead soldered together in a suburban laboratory with the express goal of putting drummers out of business. There are minor exceptions to this rule: “Listen to Me” introduces a weighty bass pulse, giving Battle Lines its first suggestion of grit eight tracks in, while “Don’t Hold Back” recalls the schaffel beat of the band’s Grammy-nominated hit “Tearing Me Up.” But these are isolated islands of change in a warm sea of drift.
Allied to this are lyrics so deeply ambiguous they make choose-your-own-adventure books seem dangerously decisive. “Sacrifice/Don’t think twice/Wear your faith as your only disguise/It’s justified, don’t ask why/’Cause heaven only knows,” runs the second verse of “Heaven Only Knows,” clearing up precisely nothing about what it is, exactly, that heaven only knows and why we should care.
What makes this drabness all the more galling is that Bob Moses should, on the face of it, be a pretty fascinating band. Jimmy Vallance, the other half of the duo, started his career making trance and progressive house, and Bob Moses are one of few acts to have played EDM wonderland EDC, the earthier Bonnaroo, and London underground clubbing institution Fabric. You can hear the subtle influence of trance on tracks like “Back Down,” where the slightest suggestion of fluoro folly in the interplay between synth and voice briefly raises hopes that the duo might leave the leaden comfort of beige for rampant electronic abandon. After all, even Coldplay went EDM on hands-in-the-air Avicii collaboration "A Sky Full of Stars.” But these hopes are soon dashed as Bob Moses chug back down through the gears, leaving their second album feeling less like Battle Lines drawn and more like the carefully negotiated de-escalation of a crisis—a situation that is great for international diplomacy but unlikely to set the heart on fire.


The electronic artist Arca's latest unclassifiable release is darker than his stunning 2015 LP Mutant; it’s heavier and more unrelenting.

Entrañas

Arca does not take many categories for granted. Alejandro Ghersi’s fondness for what he calls “in-between states” extends to gender, genre, emotion, and form itself. Mutability and ambivalence guide the sound of his music, the contours of which variously suggest globular, blown-glass shapes and the jagged shards of smashed windows, and his fondness for slipping between the cracks of well-worn molds even extends to his choice of musical formats. One of his very first releases, Baron Foyel, for DIS Magazine, was a mixtape consisting of all original productions, most of which never turned up anywhere else in his discography. In 2013, he followed the “official” records Stretch 1 and Stretch 2 with the free download &&&&&, an unbroken 25 minutes of music containing 14 different segments within its undulating folds. He did something similar with last year's Sheep, the soundtrack to a Hood By Air runway show at the Pitti Uomo menswear trade fair in Florence, Italy, which took the form of a 17-minute piece broken into 11 seamlessly interwoven parts. What do you call in-between items like these, which are neither albums, nor EPs, nor mixtapes, exactly? Given the way these recordings are simply flung into the cloud, like doves being loosed from cupped hands, perhaps the simplest term—“release”—is also the most accurate.
Entrañas follows in the vein of &&&&& and Sheep. It is 25 minutes long, and, for the moment, it exists only as a single audio file distributed via SoundCloud and Mediafire. According to the tracklisting, its switchbacking course consists of 14 individual segments. But good luck trying to figure out where “Culebra” ends and “Vicar” begins, say, or even which songs are collaborations with Mica Levi, Massacooramaan, and Total Freedom. As always, the method behind Arca’s morass is about as clear as snorkeling through motor oil.
But anyone who has spent any time listening to Arca will immediately recognize Entrañas as his work. All the hallmarks are here: abrasive percussive blasts, metal-shop whine, the screech of subway brakes, the whine of jet engines overheating. Anthropomorphic and animalistic sounds abound—mewling cats, mooing cows, anguished screams, the grunts and groans of orgasm. There are plangent synthesizers, too, and brittle harpsichord and noxious strings, bitter and dissonant. He stretches his sounds this way and that, backwards and forwards: distending, slowing, twisting, and mangling into a gummy ball of melted spacetime. Shuddering club beats collapse into white noise, never to be heard again; melodies flare up and fall silent just as abruptly. The whole thing crumples like a set of body armor being wadded up in the fist of an angry god. It is darker than Mutant; it’s heavier and more unrelenting. One of the ironies of the form is that it makes you listen more closely than you might to a full album. It’s short enough that you can focus all your attention on it, and with no gaps between songs, it affords little possibility to escape. It’s often damn-near claustrophobic.
Soaking up all manner of references, this might be the most porous that Arca’s work has ever been. In “Baby Doll,” he brandishes a sample of Cocteau Twins’ 1984 song “Beatrix” like a lit torch, and, intentionally or no, he recreates the eviscerating kick drums of Aphex Twin’s “Ventolin.” Further on, there’s a brief moment of gravelly crunch and cock-rock swagger that sounds a lot like Oneohtrix Point Never’s invented genre of hyper-grunge. And in a pointed comment on repressive sexual mores, he samples Charlotte Gainsbourg’s speech from the 1993 film The Cement Garden: “For a boy to look like a girl is degrading, because you think that being a girl is degrading. But secretly, you’d love to know what it’s like, wouldn’t you—what it feels like for a girl?” Sounding seductive, innocent, and furious all at once, the monologue goes to the heart of the contradictions that animate Arca’s music.
Entrañas’ title translates as “entrails”—a metaphor in keeping with Arca and his close collaborator Jesse Kanda’s shared interest in anatomy, disgust, and the idea of turning bodies inside out—and the image suits the music’s undulating form, which twists and turns in sticky knots. The set builds to a sour, soggy lament, “Sin Rumbo,” that sounds like Ghersi’s take on a torch song for a David Lynch film, something like Rebekah del Rio’s “Llorando.” It’s an unexpected way to close the set—elegant but also strangely listless, with a refrain that translates as “Aimlessly/I walk aimlessly.” The whole thing ends in a cavalcade of fireworks, yet it would be hard to call it celebratory, exactly; the mood throughout pulses, rather, with the hot blood of a cornered animal, though you can detect a certain sense of exhilaration beneath the cold sweat and shrapnel. It is, in other words, the quintessential Arca recording, commingling pleasure and terror and beauty and ugliness in the most thrilling ways possible. Sinking its claws deep into you, it affords the sweetest kind of release.


Blood Orange's Devonté Hynes provided the score to the debut film from director Gia Coppola, and he also appears on the film's original soundtrack alongside Tonsstartssbandht, Rooney lead singer Robert Schwartzman, and Jason Schwartzman's Coconut Records project.

Devonté Hynes: Palo Alto: Original Motion Picture Score / Palo Alto: Music from the Motion Picture

The biggest problem with the film Palo Alto: too much James Franco. In some ways, this was unavoidable—after all, it is a movie based on his collection of short stories, and out of all the unredeemable characters who aren't human beings so much as a bundle of oversold affectations, his manipulative, lecherous high school teacher “Mr. B” is the least redeemable. Consequently, the film suffers both from dilettantism and taking itself way too seriously, an immiscible mixture of Kids-style scared-straight sex romp and the beatific teen dream of T**he Virgin Suicides (helmed by director Gia Coppola’s aunt, Sofia).
But it'd be unfair to expect Blood Orange mastermind Dev Hynes' score to Palo Alto to replicate last year's Cupid Deluxe; the latter was Hynes’ portrayal of outcasts in a pop setting, the inverse of Palo Alto’s gauzily-shot coterie of mopey high school A-listers. I went into my viewing experience of Palo Alto having no idea Hynes was responsible for the score, which is barely noticable throughout the film. This means he did his job of being both hip and unobtrusive; the title track and “April’s Daydream” are the few vocal pieces that are at least reminders of the limber, lithe funk that got him here in the first place. Otherwise, the near entirety of the score does away with his requisite Hynes-ness and gives you about what you’d expect from an indie artist working on a well-financed indie film: minute-long asides consisting of the occasional well of strings, mallet percussion, and slow-moving synthesizer pads, almost none of it set to a beat.
The score is nice enough, if not necessarily evocative or distinct—the titles helpfully point out where each snippet appeared in the film, though it’s indicative of the score’s mundane cohesion that “Run to Graveyard”, “Skateboard Garage”, and “Teddy in the Library” somehow all sound pretty much the same. It leads to the same question asked of M83's Anthony Gonzalez upon his completion of the Oblivion soundtrack—why would you ask him to do this if it’s not going bear the artist’s signature? There’s an easy answer to that: as a means of branding, Palo Alto works splendidly, its musical component coming from someone who’s currently a hot item. Palo Alto may only be useful as background music, but as long as Hynes’ star continues to rise, it's hard not to see him potentially getting more work in this vein.
Pop music does plays a crucial role in establishing the film's narrative flow, as its most memorable scenes usually involved two people sitting uncomfortably close on a couch, accompanied by the overlay of a recognizable “indie” song. The most noteworthy example is when Die Antwoord’s “Enter the Ninja” makes it clear a house party has officially been upgraded to a raging kegger. It is not on the soundtrack, but Blood Orange’s “You’re Not Good Enough” and Mac DeMarco’s “Ode to Viceroy” are; they're two songs which already feel like standards, the latter in particular conveying the mix of easy, boyish charm and underlying seediness that the film's male characters are entirely unable to exude.
Instead, we’re given reminders of what protagonists Fred and Teddy are actually like in the movie. Nat Wolff’s Fred is presented as a magnetic misanthrope and comes across as a superhumanly annoying, sociopathic asshole who can only express his supposed complexities in the most comically blatant way; his meta-goof “Rock Star (Movie Version)” finds him banging on a piano in the middle of a party, which is supposed to indicate his ability to be charming before he gets too many drinks in him.  Meanwhile, Jack Kilmer’s Teddy is demonstrated as a soulful, artistic type caught up in incapacitating teen angst and peer pressure; while his estranged love interest (Emma Roberts’ April) has a good sulk in her bedroom, "T.M." is supposed to reveal Teddy's inner Cobain, and instead comes across like a poorly played instrumental from the first 3 Doors Down album.
Jack Kilmer is Val’s son, and portions of Palo Alto were filmed at his house in Southern California, which is indicative of the film's clumsy grasp on reality; if Palo Alto wasn’t the name of the movie, you’d have no idea where it actually took place, (save for the California license plates). This is troubling, since the Silicon Valley focal point and home of Stanford University and isn’t exactly Anytown U.S.A.; the soundtrack even suggests that Palo Alto is in Orange County, given the presence of contributions from Jason Schwartzman’s post-Phantom Planet concern Coconut Records, as well as Rooney lead singer Robert Schwartzman.
Palo Alto is as much an audition for Robert Schwartzman as it is for Dev Hynes; he’s given four tracks, half of which show a facility for rehashing interstitials from Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming. Otherwise, you get a couple of lo-fi electro-alt songs, and as far as lo-fi, electro-alt side projects featured in grim high school movies go, Robert Schwartzman's contributions don't exactly resemble the Folk Implosion: “So Bad” samples Billy Squier’s “The Big Beat”, i.e., the one from “99 Problems” and “Fix Up, Look Sharp”, meaning it was already getting played out when Rooney was still sh-sh-shakin.
Otherwise, Palo Alto is most notable for its clear outliers: “Champagne Coast”, the highlight from Blood Orange’s largely forgotten 2011 debut Coastal Grooves, and Tonsstartssbandht’s maddeningly catchy proto-witch house earworm “5FT7”. There’s also a century-old Italian aria from Senza Mamma, a melodramatic musical play written by Francesco Pennino and included in Frances Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II. Pennino is Coppola’s maternal grandfather, and the lead singer of Rooney also used to go by Robert Coppola Schwartzman, just two indicators of the enterprise of smug, well-connected, celebrity indulgence that is Palo Alto.


The Berlin-based musician reworks audio from vintage pornography into unrecognizable forms, queering the lineage of ambient music and subverting stereotypical representations of gay sex.

Bathhouse Blues

Gay cruising is 90 percent patience. In bathhouses, clubs, parks, lavatories, and subway tunnels, the promiscuous loiter longer than they fuck. People swarm when activity breaks out; sometimes erotic energy spreads through these tenebrous spaces. But after a few minutes, everyone wanders around or waits, posting up against the walls while they stare at each other with an obscure mixture of indifference and excitement.
The music of this ritual, heartbeat kick drums and climactic synths, is commonly associated with copulation, not minutes or hours of longing and boredom. Jake Muir captures the latter, slower reality by removing electronic music’s thumping pulse altogether. An ambient artist and field recorder, Muir grew up in Los Angeles and established his music practice in Seattle, and the sounds of water and nature that predominate in his work feel inspired by the Pacific coast and its lush, pleasant environs. Since he moved to frigid Berlin—surely a world capital of public sex—human life began to leave footprints in his glacially shifting soundscapes. His 2020 album the hum of your veiled voice delved into a night-lit queer demimonde, albeit one in which everything lascivious happens off camera. The LP animates the contemplation, shared silences, and quiet walks from DJ set to backroom bar that punctuate wee hours out on the town.
Muir’s new album, Bathhouse Blues, incorporates highly processed audio clips from vintage gay pornography. This raw material offers tremendous potential for sexual explicitness. Yet Bathhouse Blues is powerful because it immerses us further in yearning and ennui, not consummation. Voices appear like the ghosts of past hookup scene habitués—a sinister image considering the title of the first track, “Cruisin’ 87,” which takes up a whole vinyl side and evokes AIDS’ deadliest years. These voices feel overheard, reverberating from across a room. Muir disfigures his audio enough that it sounds at once empty and existential, like lurking in a gay club’s maze just before sunrise, hoping for some ideal partner to round the corner.
The introspective public-sex enthusiast is an underexposed cultural archetype, and Muir draws us with a librarian’s soft touch into queer history, showing how pensive figures have always flitted along the crowd’s fringes. His project focuses on a particular period, the 1970s and ’80s, in which gay directors were largely barred from telling stories about their sexual orientation in both mainstream and arthouse fare, and used the funding of the adult movie industry to bankroll cinema that was both titillating and moving, even profound. A number of the era’s gay skin flicks are considered classics today, including Arthur Bressan Jr.’s Passing Strangers (1974), much of the corpus of Wakefield Poole, and Dietrich de Velsa and Frantz Salieri’s Equation to an Unknown (1980). Others have achieved cult status among porn enthusiasts, or have yet to be uncovered in the VHS bins of the past.
Muir pulls from a wide assortment of videos, but about half of his samples are from two surreal, ambitious works by Michael Zen, Falconhead (1976) and Falconhead Part II: The Maneaters (1984). These movies fetishize leather, rubber, and a mysterious central figure who wears a gigantic falcon mask, yet they lavish as much attention on radiant lighting schemes and pitch-perfect musical cues as they do on bodies; the result is dreamy and languorous, not unlike Muir’s compositions. The soundtracks of both films are astonishingly deep, framing gay sex with a pioneering meld of jazz fusion, classical, electronic, and new age: Herbie Hancock, Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream, Vangelis, Iannis Xenakis, Bela Bartók, and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra all make appearances. Such an eclectic blend anticipates the broad and stylistically agnostic ambient genre that flourishes today.
We sense that Muir is trying to place himself as a heady, technically brilliant sound artist in a queer lineage, while looking back at a time when gay males were pigeonholed as cold, superficial lovers of robotic music—how detractors described disco. Gay men, according to this homophobic logic, were always sniffing drugs and having thoughtless sex. Yet the porn actors who Muir samples are having thoughtful sex: “C’mon, I’m tired of this bar,” one says at the end of “Cruisin’ 87,” after a 20-minute drift from a fleeting, optimistic overture through the damp echoes of Muir’s stacked samples, “Let’s go to my place.”
Muir culled this album from a mix he assembled for the San Francisco label Honey Soundsystem and a sequel he put together a couple of years later. Those sets were full of clarity, knitting together occasionally audible coitus with cuts by more contemporary producers. But everything on Bathhouse Blues comes from vintage porn—the music, too. Muir layers, screws down, and loops internet rips of VHS tapes and studio recordings of his soundtrack selections until they're all but unrecognizable.
The result can feel like a dub of his two original mixes, but instead of twisting the bass knobs, Muir mucks up the atmosphere. He muddles Tangerine Dream and Vangelis into somber ambience. The disc’s B-side, “Pipe Dream,” rumbles and whooshes while crickets chirp in the background. Close listening reveals a few grunts at the song’s end, perhaps from a sex scene, but these connective utterances are buried and denatured. Bathhouse Blues has already hypnotized us with an exploration of how lust can be solitary, even in a place full of people.
Muir constructed his teeming 2018 collection Lady’s Mantle from samples of surf rock records. The subject was clear: his birthplace of L.A. and its coastal mythos. But as every Angeleno knows, the beach’s flipside is the valley, and the valley is the cradle of America’s porn industry. Bathhouse Blues slyly tells us a new tale about Muir’s hometown, like a hookup who can’t help but divulge flashes of his life story. We see our own sense of caution reflected in his air of circumspection; when he offers up an intimate fact about himself, we trust his honest intentions. Muir understands a world in which men draw you in close but keep you at arm’s length emotionally. Bathhouse Blues seems to mimic this ambivalent behavior—and then we find the warmth beneath its layers.


The long-running Oregon doom metal trio opens its third act with a sensuous, aggressive, and jubilant album inspired by singer-guitarist Mike Scheidt's recent brush with death.

Our Raw Heart

Mike Scheidt, the vocalist and guitar player for Oregon doom metal trio YOB, was hospitalized with diverticulitis early last year. In a recent Decibel cover story, he made the ailment sound pretty metal, likening it to a Chestburster wallowing inside him. But the experience—which nearly killed him—left Scheidt so changed that he wasn’t sure, at first, if the band would continue.
YOB’s eighth record, Our Raw Heart, was born out of Scheidt’s health scare—and, given the circumstances, the fact that it even sounds like a YOB record is a triumph. While 2011’s Atma was all aggression and 2014’s Clearing the Path to Ascend delved into their psychedelic side, Heart unites those two sounds in service of a new theme. The band has spun joy out of its frontman’s gnarliest experience, making metal that sounds sensuous, bellicose, and jubilant at once.
Despite everything Scheidt has been through, YOB never come off as angry on Heart; the rage in these songs is actually an affirmation of life and emotion. “The Screen” takes the mystic pummel of death-doom act Cathedral’s Forest of Equilibrium—one of Scheidt’s biggest influences—and translates that downward crush into something more uplifting. YOB are still adept at playing slowly to bend time: Scheidt’s guitar chug fragments into an arsenal of time bombs, each one cycling from countdown to detonation. “In Reverie” constantly builds momentum and knocks it down again, but this isn’t an abusive back-and-forth so much as the sonic version of proper pit etiquette. Intimidating as it can sound, YOB’s music is some of the most inviting in contemporary metal. Scheidt can make the most grinding riff feel soothing, like a vision quest that comforts and imbues purpose even as it tests the listener.
Clocking in at over 16 minutes, “Beauty in Falling Leaves” is Heart’s centerpiece, melding all the heft and tenderness that define YOB into one sermon. The track places Scheidt on a path of elevation and love, spilling ferocious goodwill with flangers and Sabbath on max. It makes sense that the album is called Our Raw Heart: The band is bringing the audience into their world, laying its soul bare, and refusing to let metal purity get in the way of total communion. Recounting his experience with diverticulitis, Scheidt described himself as both “a sensitive, effeminate man” and “an old-world macho moron, especially when it comes to outwardly showing physical pain.” Self-deprecation aside, that’s an apt description of this song: YOB wield unbridled metal muscle and disarming openness as if they were an obvious combination.
Bliss overflows into the following track, “Original Face,” a doom song spiked with crossover verve. This fusion isn’t unusual for Scheidt, who started out in punk bands and has revisited those roots singing in the punk-influenced metal supergroup VHÖL, yet those styles have never sounded so integrated before. Situated between “Beauty in Falling Leaves” and the title track, which closes out the album on a serene, psychedelic journey to nowhere, “Original Face” doesn’t feel abrupt amid their epic slowness. Metal is endlessly segmented, but YOB understand it as an ever-mutating, cross-pollinating form. With Scheidt back on his feet, they’re free to go wherever.
Scheidt had to reconsider his approach to vocals following his diverticulitis surgery: “I couldn’t bear down on my diaphragm too hard or else I could herniate my incisions, so I started sending air to these different places in my body,” he told Decibel. Like the music of Heart, his voice is familiar, yet fundamentally changed. The Super-Ozzy wail that carried him through Atma is still intact on “Ablaze,” but his vocal is noticeably quieter and rawer on “Beauty in Falling Leaves.” This is not the sound of a man weakened—it’s the sound of a man who wrestled with his mortality and now feels more alive than ever.
This is not the first time upheaval has led to renewal for YOB; Heart is, in fact, the beginning of their third act. Scheidt dissolved the band in 2006, then reformed it following the collapse of another band, Middian, due to legal issues two years later. That period yielded some of YOB’s best work, starting with 2009’s The Great Cessation and continuing with Atma and Ascend. At the darkest point of this latest cataclysm, Scheidt did not almost die for metal; he’d surely reject a narrative that cartoonishly macho. Instead, metal helped him preserve and, later, process life. Our Raw Heart is about how much more he has to give—to YOB, to the world, and to himself.


After working for a decade as the Preston School of Industry, Pavement founder Scott Kannberg releases his first album as Spiral Stairs.

The Real Feel

It's not mandatory for great bands to balance a dominant vocal personality with a foil, but it makes sense that it happens so often. A good No. 2 doesn't need to be less interesting than the star-- Flavor Flav is surely a more magnetic figure than Chuck D, for example-- but at best, they establish a necessary contrast that casts the lead in sharper relief. The star shines brighter, the subtext runs deeper, and the emotional range gets broader. In indie rock terms, think of how Kim Deal's easy-going stoner femininity emphasizes Black Francis' tightly-wound nerd masculinity, or the way Lee Renaldo's hipster everyman style offsets the larger-than-life personae of Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon.
Pavement may not have had a vocal dynamic as profound as Public Enemy, the Pixies, or Sonic Youth, but Stephen Malkmus had his appropriate foil in the form of Scott "Spiral Stairs" Kannberg. Spiral was no less shambling and inscrutable, but he was very good at playing the self-effacing underdog to Malkmus' nonchalant indie alpha male. It would be an error to label his songs as more "sincere"-- he was consistently a far more cryptic and opaque lyricist than SM-- but he was capable of projecting a nervous vulnerability that destabilized the freakishly self-assured vibe of Pavement's first four albums in a way that was positive and necessary. Even if Spiral Stairs was not crucial to either Pavement's appeal or Malkmus' success, his presence offered a subtle balance and contrast, and yielded at least a few classics: "Kennel District" from Wowee Zowee; "Date With Ikea" from Brighten the Corners.
In the time since Pavement's dissolution in 1999, Kannberg has stepped into the role of the frontman with mixed results. Despite the nod to George Harrison's All Things Must Pass in its title, his debut as the leader of the Preston School of Industry did not reveal him to be an extraordinary songwriter obscured by the flash of his former partner, but rather just a serviceable author of amiable but not especially interesting indie rock. He pushed himself further by embracing alt-country on the follow-up, Monsoon, but the record was a tuneless, dreary mess, and it is undoubtedly the worst release ever to be associated with anyone having to do with Pavement. The central problem with the Preston School of Industry albums is that the very things that made Kannberg an effective foil for Malkmus also made him exhausting and dull as the focal point of a band. Whereas he was once the Milhouse Van Houten to Malkmus' Bart Simpson, he had devolved into being an incoherent indie equivalent of Milhouse's dad mewling "Can I Borrow a Feeling?"
After a five-year hiatus from recording, Kannberg has dissolved the Preston School of Industry, or perhaps more accurately, rebranded the project as Spiral Stairs. This is a sensible decision. Preston School of Industry was a terrible name for a band, and Spiral Stairs was always one of the better stage names in alt-rock. The reversion to the Stairs moniker could be taken as a signal that Kannberg has returned to form, but anyone expecting anything along the lines of his Pavement tunes will be let down by the contents of The Real Feel, his first record under the name.
Kannberg's new music mostly takes its cues from Neil Young and mid-period Bob Dylan, and to a certain extent, the ragged yet expansive sound suits his strengths as a guitarist and his weaknesses as an often aggravatingly nasal vocalist. "True Love", the album opener, is confident and sharp despite feeling more than a bit generic, and tracks like "Maltese T" and "Cold Change" are minor works, yet successful on their own terms. Even the weakest cuts on The Real Feel are at least passable genre exercises, but at a point it becomes difficult to tell whether they are actually good faux-Neil Young songs, or if these tunes would have any appeal at all to listeners who were not hardcore Pavement fans with an unusually large amount of goodwill for the band's less famous founding member.
Though he is still prone to writing nonsense lyrics nearly devoid of resonance, Kannberg has opened up significantly as a lyricist, though his most emotional and unguarded moments on "Call the Ceasefire" and "Blood Money" are mostly quite banal. Unlike many of his previous works, he seems far more interested in revealing himself and connecting with an audience, but even though his voice has grown stronger, he still sings everything as if he can't stand to make eye contact with you. The music is a clear step up from his nadir on Monsoon, but it's only a lateral move in terms of quality compared to the first two Preston School releases. His style may shift, but Kannberg remains an unambitious songwriter and underwhelming frontman. It could just be that he's the type of person who best thrives as a second banana. Then again, maybe all he needs is a foil of his own.


Diplo and Switch supplement their 2009 dancehall record with this EP, a summertime's worth of originals and reinterpretations. Thom Yorke and M.I.A. appear.

Lazers Never Die EP

If there's one complaint you can lobby against Lazers Never Die-- the new EP from Diplo and Switch's global party project Major Lazer-- is that we're only now getting our hands on it, a month or so into summer. A minor qualm, but it's a shame to think about how many Fourth of July barbecues could've benefitted from this batch of originals and reinterpretations from the duo's hybridized dancehall debut, Guns Don't Kill People-- Lazers Do. To paraphrase Scott Plagenhoef's review of that album last year, this is clearly music that works best in the heat, but it still has the dexterity to stick around once the flip-flops have been tucked away. On this concise and surprisingly fresh sounding EP, Major Lazer retain the sweat-soaked club feel that's curried them so much favor but also appeals to their perennial accessibility.
It's no secret that Major Lazer have racked up some serious frequent flyer miles this year. And in between the daggering instructional videos and recording at the legendary Tuff Gong Studios in Kingston, Jamaica (where much of Lazers Never Die was created), it's surprising to find that these guys have had the time to get any kind of work done at all. Last month, they released a remix record with La Roux, a somewhat mismatched pairing but one that proved fruitful and thoughtful. And even if the brunt of the work here has been shouldered by the remixes of tracks found on Guns Don't Kill People, you can tell that the EP is no toss-off.
Among the new songs is the mp3 blog favorite "Sound of Siren", which features Lazer's most familiar affiliate, M.I.A., and Jamaica's Busy Signal. With its rigid snare-snappings and militant, sing-songy hook, it's a clever entry point given the Major Lazer mythology. Dancehall heavy-hitter Busy Signal swoops in and does his thing effortlessly, snarling and flailing all over the otherwise uncluttered, straightforward lurch. Somewhat overlooked when it wound up online at the beginning of this year, it's nice to see "Siren" getting its proper shine here, with both M.I.A. and Busy making their stop snitchin' talk convincing. Better still is the Collie Buddz- and Lindi Ortega-assisted "Good Enough", a pretty down-the-line island-riddim affair that employs great melody and some aqueous synth accents that help lodge this one right into your brain. Ortega-- an under-the-radar Canadian singer-songwriter-- somehow walks away with it, deliciously channeling a rocksteady-pumped Gwen Stefani.
But the remixes feel equally vital to the EP, because after all, the great appeal of Major Lazer is watching these dancehall concoctions transform, as elements of dub and hip-hop and reggae are also smashed into one freaky, juiced up mutant (kinda like the fictional Major Lazer himself). Buraka Som Sistema do a house-y two-step all over "Bruk Out", giving it the extra 10% of oomph that Einstein's gleefully whacked-out feature always deserved. And even if the K.L.A.M. remix of "Can't Stop Now" doesn't break much new ground, guest rapper Miss Banks brings enough clever, dirty sass that it's hard to pass up. Even the big name-drop moment doesn't disappoint: Thom Yorke laces "Jump Up" with queasy, slow-burn dubstep moves, providing an unexpected amount of movement with some simple, sandpapery claps. And it might go without saying, but everyone gets a bonus points for knowing to leave "Keep It Goin' Louder" well enough alone.


After singing with Solange, Drake, Kanye, and Frank, Sampha releases his debut LP. It’s a remarkable, meditative work, as he processes grief and navigates self-discovery.

Process

When Sampha Sisay was three years old, his father brought a piano into the family’s Morden, England home. It wasn’t a grand gesture—just a way to get his sons away from the TV. Yet for Sampha, the youngest of five siblings, the instrument became a vessel for his personal growth. It helped enlighten the young boy, offering solace and purpose, commencing a spiritual journey that he’s still navigating. In Sampha’s world, the piano is one of the few things that’s always been there. It’s never gotten sick or faded away from disease. “You would show me I had something some people call a soul,” he sings on “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano,” a gorgeous ballad and one of many standouts from Process, Sampha’s remarkable debut album.
The song—much like the LP—comes from a deeply meditative place, reflecting the innermost thoughts of a man still coping with heavy loss. His father, Joe, passed away from lung cancer in 1998. His mother, Binty Sisay, died of cancer in September 2015. Throughout the spare electro-soul of Process, you feel his mom’s spirit in the stillness, pushing her son in his quest for understanding. Sampha’s endured his own health struggles as well. He once discovered a lump in his throat while on tour; despite an endoscopy, doctors couldn’t determine a cause. It became a catalyst for the singer to assess his own mortality here. “Sleeping with my worries,” goes the opener “Plastic 100ºC,” “I didn’t really know what that lump was.”
Sampha’s career dates back to 2010 and the release of Sundanza, his first EP. In 2011, Sampha was featured heavily on producer SBTRKT’s debut album; his second EP, Dual, followed in 2013. Sampha played the background from there, turning up on tracks with Drake (“Too Much,” “The Motion”), Kanye West (“Saint Pablo”), Frank Ocean (“Alabama”), and Solange (“Don’t Touch My Hair”). His presence was strong, even if his voice—a gentle, shimmering falsetto—added light touches to the scenery. Despite its delicate texture, Sampha’s inflection hovers perfectly above the music, cracking at certain pitches to convey grief.
In a way, Process feels like a concept album on which Sampha rediscovers himself. The musician’s mother was diagnosed with cancer the same year Sundaza came out, and as her primary caregiver, he naturally focused his attention on her well-being. Now, he’s attempting to reconnect with his core while coping with despair. In the past, he’d mix his voice to fit within the instrumental; on Process, he makes it the focal point. Co-produced with Rodaidh McDonald, *Process *brings to mind James Blake while nodding to mainstream hip-hop. On “Under,” in particular, Sampha utilizes a sleek trap beat.
Even the album’s most upbeat tracks are shaded with tension. “You’ve been with me since the cradle,” Sampha recalls on “Kora Sings,” presumably referring to his mom. “You’ve been with me, you’re my angel, please don’t you disappear.” With “Blood on Me,” the album’s second single, the vocalist sings through heavy breaths, seemingly haunted by his own insecurities. It addresses the fear of moving forward after personal trauma, and for a quiet soul like Sampha, it also speaks to the panic of navigating the world by himself. “I’m on this road now,” he exclaims. “I’m so alone now/Swerving out of control now.”
On album closer “What Shouldn’t I Be?,” you feel Sampha’s air of prolonged detachment. It catches the singer at his most vulnerable, trying to remember the sketches of his childhood. Close your eyes, and you can almost see Sampha’s family—happy, affectionate, and together. “I should visit my brother,” he ponders, “but I haven’t been there in months.” His self-imposed isolation doesn’t outweigh the song’s overall premise: “You can always come home.”


A remastered double-LP compilation of the D.C. art-punks’ early 2000s material showcases their atmospheric, Wurtlitzer-haloed approach to indie rock.

Blue Period

Last summer, Chad Clark got a third heart. The electric one he’d received in 2008, after a viral infection, had been recalled, and this time doctors were able to secure an organ transplant. Severely immunocompromised, Clark hasn’t performed live much in recent years, but on those rare occasions, his lineup-shifting project, Beauty Pill, has shared stages with avant-garde icons from Laurie Anderson to Arto Lindsay. Open and humble on social media and in interviews, Clark has aged gracefully and miraculously into a role as an art-punk elder. “I’m not a rock star,” he recently told Washington City Paper. “But I don’t really feel like the world has mistreated me the way I felt when I was younger.”
At the turn of the millennium, Clark’s path might have seemed very different. The former frontman for Smart Went Crazy, a bleak and brainy, Washington, D.C.-based post-hardcore band, he was also a studio whiz who’d worked on local indie-rock heroes the Dismemberment Plan’s breakthrough album, Emergency & I. Beauty Pill bowed in October 2001 with a promising debut EP, The Cigarette Girl From the Future, that embraced psych-pop lushness. Then, a couple of years before Clark’s heart problems started, came the tumultuous era documented on Beauty Pill’s new archival release, Blue Period.
The double-LP compilation acts as a deluxe reissue of Beauty Pill’s ambitious but mostly overlooked debut album, 2004’s The Unsustainable Lifestyle, followed in the track listing by the rougher-hewn 2003 EP, You Are Right to Be Afraid. Both are newly remastered, giving the old recordings fresh heft, and making their first appearance on vinyl. Rounding out the set is a side’s worth of previously unreleased material. While not quite a trove of lost classics, Blue Period swells with intelligence and musical inquisitiveness. It’s a snapshot of a fertile moment, and a signpost for the restless avant-rock perfectionist that Clark has survived to become.
In the early 2000s, plenty of bands were blurring post-hardcore, emo, and indie rock toward unknown vistas, and The Unsustainable Lifestyle would sit comfortably in a Case Logic with contemporaneous releases from Jets to Brazil, the Promise Ring, Rainer Maria, Pretty Girls Make Graves, or even Death Cab for Cutie. The band takes an atmospheric, Wurtlitzer-haloed approach to indie rock, with vocal duties shared between Clark and two former members, Rachel Burke and Jean Cook. Clark’s nuanced and meticulous production stands out: Notice how the throbbing drums pan from left to right on ethereal opener “Goodnight for Real,” or the blissful tremolo guitar of Burke-led “Such Large Portions!”
On Smart Went Crazy’s swan song, 1997’s Con Art, Clark sang about a reckless driver who, we soon learn, has his dead wife’s body in the trunk. As lovely as the textured productions can be, such unwieldy lyrical conceits also limit The Unsustainable Lifestyle. “The Mule on the Plane” is a noise-rock drug-courier narrative that sounds like a surf-ier Sonic Youth after watching the 2000 film Traffic; “Quote Devout Unquote” muses on dog spit, Santa Claus, and courtroom jargon before reaching its skyscraping art-rock climax. As with Con Art’s “Good Day,” the biggest conceptual swing from The Unsustainable Lifestyle is an exploration of race and hip-hop led by Clark, who is Black. “Won’t You Be Mine” flips a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood sample to ask “Are you my nigga?,” making a pointed critique of mainstream rap’s materialism that went unexamined by white critics 20 years ago. Today, Clark shares a mutual appreciation with Bartees Strange, a successor who’s repeatedly cited Clark as an inspiration for genre-roving Black artists in the D.C. scene.
The rest of Blue Period is a similarly of-its-time assortment of sonic kicks and lyrical clunkers. From the You Are Right to Be Afraid EP, the winding guitar and lilting falsetto of “Copyists” show Clark moving appealingly toward Stephen Malkmus territory, while the title track brings a Hüsker Dü-like rock frenzy that’s bracing regardless of your investment in the D.C. hardcore aesthetic. Of the previously unreleased material, a deconstructed take on Jimi Hendrix’s wah-wah workout “I Don’t Live Today” is pleasant enough, but “Fugue State Companion” is a circa-2004 indie rock song based on an extended metaphor about The Empire Strikes Back.
Happily, Clark is still active and, scary hospital visits aside, apparently thriving. Beauty Pill’s most recent full-length, 2015’s kaleidoscopic Describes Things As They Are, was the band’s first since The Unsustainable Lifestyle. Two equally distinguished EPs, 2020’s Please Advise and 2021’s Instant Night, also make fine entry points to Clark’s catalog. Beauty Pill’s fate in the mid-2000s was all too nearly a tragedy, but they’re still here to be discovered. “There’s only so much oxygen/Left in the room,” Clark insists on “Goodnight for Real,” but the song’s focus on bands and scene politics seems small and parochial today: There’s air to go around. Here’s to second chances—and third hearts.


A 4xLP box set pays tribute to the influential Athens band, who in the early ’80s pioneered a stripped-down post-punk sound that was raw, minimalist, brainy, and danceable.

Pylon: Pylon Box

Pylon didn’t really want to be a rock band. When art-school classmates Michael Lachowski and Randy Bewley started banging on cheap instruments in their Athens, Georgia, apartment in the late 1970s, they were more into performance art than music. “We are not musicians, we do not like to ‘jam’ or even practice,” Lachowski wrote to his art professor at the University of Georgia. “We only want to perform—we only care about the product, not the process.” Adding fellow UGA alum Vanessa Briscoe Hay on vocals and drummer Curtis Crowe (their landlord and neighbor, who heard their noise from a floor above), they called themselves Pylon and stuck to their art attack. They had one explicit goal: play a single show in New York, get written up in New York Rocker, and then immediately break up.
The first two goals were achieved so quickly that Pylon delayed the final one. But they only lasted five years, releasing just a handful of singles and two albums before dissolving. Pylon Box, a new 4xLP collection of those recordings and previously unreleased material, shows that their influence has survived much longer. In an accompanying book, musicians from all over testify to the example they set, while a biographical essay by Pitchfork contributor Stephen Deusner details the local remifications of their legacy. Though the B-52’s put Athens on the map (their success in NYC made Pylon want to play there), it was Pylon who built the town’s music community, through parties, concerts, and their own still-surviving show space, the 40 Watt. “If the B-52’s proved that good, original, compelling music could be made in Athens,” writes Deusner, “then Pylon proved that the town could sustain a scene.”
That wouldn’t have happened if Pylon’s music wasn’t so original. “We’d never learned how to play music,” said Crowe. “That was the secret to whatever success we had—the fact that we never had any idea what we were not supposed to do.” Bewley developed his own guitar language by starting with an alternate tuning, simply because he didn’t know any standard ones. He and Lachowski took turns playing repetitive grooves and unfettered improvisations; as Grace Elizabeth Hale points out in her recent history of Athens, Cool Town, this “gave birth to a remarkable independence between the bass and the guitar parts.” That became a chemical reaction once Crowe added nimble drumming and Briscoe Hay provided yelps, growls, and chants, taking her cues from Yoko Ono and Patti Smith. It all added up to something raw but sharp, minimal but unrestrained, brainy but swinging—a sound that was hard to predict but easy to dance to.
Their sound gelled with lightning speed. In the summer of 1979, just months after they began, Pylon got their dreamed-of New York gig—opening for Gang of Four—and a rave in Interview magazine from tastemaker Glenn O’Brien. That fall, they made their first recordings in Lachowski and Bewley’s apartment, taped by local record-store owner Chris Razz. As heard in Pylon Box, on an LP dubbed Razz Tape, this session spills out energy, with complex songs that slam hard and flow with ease. Take “Functionality,” a marvel of clipped angles, racing rhythm, and Briscoe Hay’s sneaky voice darting through criss-crossing lines. As the band whips up an evolving, syncopated loop, it seems they could giddily grind out variations on this jerky groove forever.
Razz Tape also includes the first recorded versions of two iconic Pylon songs: the rushing “Cool,” marked by an urgent Briscoe Hay slogan (“Everything is cool!”), and the contorted howler “Dub.” In his review of their NYC show, O’Brien guessed that “these kids eat dub for breakfast.” In reality, the quartet had never even heard of dub, but they were happy to use O’Brien’s claim as material. “I don't know what you're talking about,” snarls Briscoe Hay before chanting, “We eat dub for breakfast!” This kind of pop-art repurposing typified Pylon’s aesthetics, which were more down to earth than ivory towered. Some of the members had jobs at a local factory, where ubiquitous safety cones inspired their band name and a pragmatic work atmosphere spurred their straightforward approach. They called their music “feasible rock,” espoused ideas like “form follows function,” and favored one-word song titles and taut lyrics. Sometimes they took this brutalist minimalism to extremes: One early flyer showed just a picture of the band and the letters “FRI,” barely enough information to indicate their next show was happening on Friday.
As Pylon played, wrote, and recorded more, their functional minimalism persisted, keeping their music both accessible and exciting. In many songs, you can hear the building blocks come together as they play, while more complex tunes eventually reveal their sturdy structures with subsequent listens. Pylon’s first full-length album, Gyrate, was recorded in 1980 in three days, and the mix of elementary hooks and dizzying figures remains exhilarating. The third track, “Precaution,” has a clean punk beat but Bewley’s spiraling guitar line immediately turns hectic. The instrumental “Weather Radio” boasts a clucking swing, quickly rushes into a rave-up chorus, then settles back into a mesmerizing stomp.
Recorded in a professional studio, Gyrate doesn’t sound primitive, but it sticks pretty closely to what you might hear at a sweaty, dance-filled Pylon show. Three years later, after a few singles—compiled here on an LP called Extra—Pylon sought to use the studio more like a tool, and they ventured to North Carolina to record with Mitch Easter, who had recently produced Chronic Town, the debut EP by Athens comrades R.E.M. On the resulting second album, Chomp, the songs sparkle a bit more as the band mold their shapes to wider sonic dimensions. This helps their energy shine even brighter, from the ESG-style punk/funk of “Yo-Yo” to the shimmering guitars of “No Clocks” to the gothic jangle of “Crazy” (later covered by R.E.M. on their outtakes collection Dead Letter Office).
Not long after Chomp came out in 1983, Pylon were offered gigs with an up-and-coming band called U2. Dreading the drudgery of a long tour, they broke up instead. “I never planned on being a musician,” said Briscoe Hay in the 1987 documentary Athens GA Inside/Out, “so it’s not like any big loss in my life that I’m not in a band anymore.” A few short reunions came later; Bewley passed away in 2009. But Pylon’s legacy survives, through musician namechecks, archival releases (their final 1983 show came out a few years ago as Pylon Live), and Briscoe Hay’s semi-tribute act Pylon Reenactment Society. Their lasting influence comes from a simple idea: Anyone can make music—and maybe, in passing, start a scene, or even become a legend. “You don’t need training or authority or legitimacy,” Lachowski said. “Just figure it out.”

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The brothers’ ninth studio album marks their second comeback; there are glimmers of their crowd-pleasing, mind-expanding rave heyday, but too often the material lacks a sense of purpose.

Monsters Exist

Take a second to reflect on how remarkable Orbital’s initial run was. Since the British duo of Phil and Paul Hartnoll first put the eternal “Chime” to tape using their father’s cassette deck in 1988, the brothers spent the 1990s establishing themselves as one of the rave era’s most masterful dance teams, casually crafting side-long moments of bliss while pushing their sound forward in subtle, complex ways. They survived the commercialization of rave, released a series of strong albums within a genre that’s never had much use for the format, and, despite their involvement in electronica-era zeitgeist moments like the soundtrack to 1997’s Val Kilmer vehicle The Saint, managed to make it through the decade without too many embarrassing decisions to their name. Suffice to say, Norman Cook could never.
Their decision to say goodbye, in the early years of the new millennium, was impressive at the time—a rarity among dance artists, who often continue on well past their creative prime for the sake of the always bountiful dance-festival dollar—and 2004’s swan song The Blue Album was as glimmering a final gesture as any. Of course, nothing is “final” these days, and Orbital eventually reunited for a spate of live shows from 2008 on; the reunion album that followed, 2012’s Wonky, was a high-risk return that nonetheless found the Hartnolls evoking their glory days more often than not. Close your eyes while listening to that album’s “Stringy Acid,” and it sounds no different from the heady, trance-inducing glories that made up their initial run.
Two years after Wonky, Orbital decided—again—that their rave days were over, making it the second time in their career that the duo would be going out on a relative high note. This latest declaration of finality was even less definitive than the one previous; last year, the Hartnolls started playing live again, and now we have Monsters Exist, their ninth studio album over a nearly 30-year career. The title and overall thematic bent of the album is decidedly political, because what isn’t these days; in the accompanying press bio, Phil states that the titular bogeymen “can mean anything from bankers and The Man or your own demons and fears,” while the album’s closing track, “There Will Come a Time,” features a lecture of sorts courtesy of English physicist Brian Cox.
Luckily, you don’t need to be aware of these resistance-rave talking points to enjoy Monsters Exist’s highlights. There’s nothing here that touches the band’s creative peak—and, honestly, even the best of these nine songs falter next to Wonky’s highs—but there’s just enough pleasure to be gained on Monsters Exist to justify the album as a worthwhile endeavor. “Hoo Hoo Ha Ha” and “P.H.U.K” are indicative of the Orbital sound its fans have come to love, the former arriving at a winding horn line and the latter making capable hay out of a punchy bassline and futuristic synths; “Tiny Foldable Cities” weebles and wobbles with a mid-tempo gait to resemble Orbital’s take on Daft Punk’s “Something About Us,” while “Vision OnE” takes a few pleasurable melodic twists and turns, showcasing Orbital’s still-potent talent for crafting patient and expansive rave music.
Elsewhere, the album occasionally dips into moodier, soundtrack-like stasis, recalling the darkly colored cuts on their creative low point, 2001’s Tool-sampling The Altogether. These unfortunate callbacks to gloomier days aren’t the only instance of Orbital getting explicitly nostalgic on Monsters Exist, intentional or otherwise; the album’s strange, vaguely shroom-y artwork was designed by John Greenwood, who also crafted the images that adorned 1994’s Snivilisation and its follow-up, 1996’s In Sides. All these evocations of the past only trigger questions about Orbital’s future, having broken up twice in the 15 years only to stage two consecutive comebacks that were, respectively, impressive and not totally embarrassing. They’ve already had the chance to leave it all on the mat twice, and doing so for a third time following what is arguably the weakest of their post-reunion albums would be less than ideal. The final track on Wonky was titled “Where Is It Going?,” and by the time Monsters Exist draws to a dull, didactic close, you might find yourself asking the same thing about Orbital themselves.


Two celebrated jazz pianists bring contrasting, complementary approaches to a set of improvised pieces that pay tribute to Cecil Taylor, Geri Allen, and other titans of the instrument.

Vijay Iyer / Craig Taborn: The Transitory Poems

The Transitory Poems

The jazz pianists Vijay Iyer and Craig Taborn have a lot in common, at least on the surface. They’re in their late 40s. They’ve played with many of the same people, including Roscoe Mitchell, Steve Coleman, and Wadada Leo Smith. In the past decade or so, they’ve each released piano trio albums that have helped reinvigorate the tradition. They both operate in what might be described as the avant-garde. But they’re also different musicians. Iyer is mathematical at the keyboard, with a precise, percussive touch, while Taborn, who is more of a figurative thinker, gets by on suggestion and metaphor. His sound is ruminative and spacious.
The qualities that set them apart aren’t in opposition on their first, aptly titled album together, The Transitory Poems, an improvised duo recording that documents a live performance from last March at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. Their styles mesh so well that it can be difficult to distinguish one set of hands from the other, as though a four-armed being had taken a seat at the piano and decided to play for an hour and a quarter.
Of the eight tracks, half are homages. Three are dedicated, respectively, to the pianists Muhal Richard Abrams, Geri Allen, and Cecil Taylor, all of whom died within the past couple of years. (The record takes its name from a typically philosophical Taylor quotation.) These tracks are appropriately elegiac. “Luminous Brew,” the Taylor tribute, rumbles mournfully like a quiet storm, while “Clear Monolith,” which is dedicated to Abrams, ends with a series of lush, tender chords that emanate peacefully into the concert hall.
But the album isn’t a serene listening experience by any measure—and that’s for the best. This is raw, gestural stuff. Though there are some ponderous moments in which Iyer and Taborn appear to be feeling each other out in the moment, pecking out tentative lines here and there, the pianists always maintain a sense of forward motion, even if it occasionally seems spasmic, like a cell mutating under a microscope. The most engaging tracks are those that have a sense of narrative, such as “Kairòs,” which builds to a forceful climax in which a dissonant, high-register chord is pounded out repeatedly. It sounds kind of like Jerry Lee Lewis, if he’d been schooled by Arnold Schoenberg.
The other homage on the album is “Sensorium,” clocking in at about four minutes, the shortest track by far. It’s a nod to the visual artist Jack Whitten, who died in 2018 and claimed to have been influenced by John Coltrane. The tune, an abstract portrait of an abstract painter, is full of slithering, contrapuntal passages that bring to mind Whitten’s collage-like approach, in which he layered dried pieces of acrylic paint onto a canvas to create a kind of rough mosaic.
In a way, all of the songs on The Transitory Poems are mosaics of a sort. Iyer and Taborn layer their ideas methodically, dexterously building and expanding on different chords and phrases. The album opener, “Life Line (Seven Tensions),” is the best example of this textured approach, featuring a series of tortuous solos over stop-and-start chordal patterns. Incidentally or not, the track sounds a bit like “Turkish Mambo,” a tune by the great pianist Lennie Tristano, who overdubbed his lines to create a sense of mesmerizing density.
And while this performance would probably have been best experienced live—what jazz isn’t?—it’s still mesmerizing to hear these two gifted pianists improvising together, in real time, to create a fresh and singular new sound. Although Taborn released a fine piano duo album, Octopus, with Kris Davis last year, the two-piano tradition in jazz has a relatively scant recorded history. There have, of course, been memorable contributions—Mary Lou Williams and Cecil Taylor, Jaki Byard and Tommy Flanagan, Marian McPartland and any number of important players. But the Iyer-Taborn mind meld sets a high standard for future entries in the canon.


At once familiar and disorienting, the Australian-born, Berlin-based artist’s new album challenges any fixed ideas of what “guitar music” can be.

Trances

Jules Reidy’s music feels like a private language. Its carefully voiced chords and patiently arranged forms imply an underlying structure, a kind of musical grammar. Its fingerpicking suggests a common lineage with the American primitive guitar tradition of John Fahey, as if both were branches of the same tree. Yet something about Reidy’s music remains untranslatable. Its richly unconventional tunings, according to the system known as just intonation, slip the bounds of ordinary 12-tone intervals. Its nagging repetition thwarts standard melodic forms. And the Australian-born, Berlin-based artist’s Auto-Tuned vocals, submerged low in the mix, are all but indecipherable. Their work is too rigorously structured to be called “abstract”; even at its most cryptic, it’s clearly expressing something. But what? You grasp for names that might fit Reidy’s elusive emotional register, searching in vain for an affective Rosetta Stone. The music feels both warmly familiar and uncomfortably alien; therein lies its power.
Over time, their music has steadily expanded, growing outward from a busy amalgam of strumming and picking. It took on new textures, elements, and forms, challenging what “guitar music” could be. Auto-Tune came to the fore; their playing sprawled across side-long suites. On last year’s World in World, they explored shorter, more sketch-like pieces that placed the focus back on their guitar playing. But on their new album Trances, they reverse course, distilling all their ideas into their most potent composition yet. As a single piece of music divided into two parts on vinyl and Bandcamp (despite the 12 track markers noted on Spotify and Apple Music), there is only a single break in the music, halfway through the album’s 44-minute run. It is immersive and overwhelming, a bewitching synthesis of folk and ambient drone that is both beautiful and unsettling.
Trances opens with a tentative strum—four notes in quick succession, bristling like the hairs on a dog’s back—wreathed in a broad, shimmering haze. New chords periodically blossom across the stereo field, branching outward like frost crystals filmed in stop motion. Their harmonies are not dissonant, exactly; “dissonance” implies an unwanted clash of sounds, whereas these are sleek and glassy and weirdly pleasing to the ear. But they are unusual in the extreme, and in that peculiarity opens up a vast expanse of possibility. Just as the theory of dark matter posits a hitherto unknown something lurking in plain sight, Reidy’s nitid tone clusters indicate hidden dimensions layered in between everyday, shopworn harmonies. Rushing white noise, like the roar of surf, occasionally surges underneath, suggesting a fantastical landscape bathed in palladous light.
“I like the idea of creating the feeling of moving without being told exactly where you need to go,” Reidy once said. True to that impulse, their music treats directionlessness as a form of freedom. Trances is rarely at rest: It glides ceaselessly forward, changing shape all the while. Reidy’s Auto-Tuned voice beams in from afar, offering a sticky-sweet counterpoint to their prickly fretwork; they chop blinding electric feedback into rhythmic bursts; bell tones suggest softly tinkling wind chimes. The music’s enduring drone folds countless minuscule variations into a plateau extending in all directions; I’m reminded of Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes, with their infinity of silver and shadow. The effect is hypnotic and genuinely trance-inducing.
It’s a great moment for adventurous guitar music, with no shortage of artists reimagining the tradition in new ways—like Bill Orcutt, Raphael Rogiński, and Daniel Bachman, to name just three diverse players who put out strong and surprising albums this year. Reidy has been part of this group for at least half a decade, and with Trances, they reassert their position as one of their instrument’s most restlessly inventive interpreters. Within every one of their uncanny chords lies a secret universe where the usual laws do not apply.


The new album from multi-instrumentalist Jay Watson (Tame Impala, POND) is his most ambitious to date, imbuing his mad-scientist home-recording project with some fleeting glimpses into his life beyond the console.

Out in the World

Jay Watson was supposed to spend his summer touring arenas and amphitheaters with Tame Impala, resuming his role as Kevin Parker’s multi-instrumentalist sidekick that he’s held down for over a decade. Meanwhile, the fifth album from his solo outlet, GUM, arrived on the same day last week that Tame Impala would’ve wrapped up a string of North American dates at the Amway Center in Orlando, a circumstance that epitomizes the stark contrast between Watson’s high-profile touring gig and his passion project. Now that the promotional juggernaut for The Slow Rush has stalled and much of the world has become acquainted with the self-isolating lifestyle of a home-recording hermit, the conditions are ripe to better appreciate GUM on its own peculiar terms—and fortuitously, Watson has stepped up with his most ambitious GUM album to date.
While both groups function as one-man bands in the studio and share a fondness for synthetic psychedelia, their results couldn’t feel more different. If Tame Impala makes Parker’s solitary operation sound like stadium rock, GUM exudes a claustrophobic, mad-scientist energy that lends even the most grandiose gestures a DIY charm. This time around, he offers some fleeting glimpses into his life behind the recording console. Written after a brief six-month stint living in the Golden State, the opening “Weightless in L.A.” is a Syd Barrett-like serenade carried away on a parade of drum machines, yacht-rock sax, and digital noise, rendering the song less an ode to California dreaming than an attempt to shatter the idyllic facade. And while the title track may not be about explicitly about Los Angeles, the music suggests a blend of Laurel Canyon bliss and Ariel Pink paranoia, perhaps inspired by Watson’s recent entry into fatherhood—surely, every new parent can relate to the anxiety of a line like “It’s morning again/I’m sensing a trend/I don’t know how it takes so long to get to sunset.”
By Watson’s own admission, GUM records are more a catalog of moods than a collection of profound statements, and he’s become more adept at adding just the right details to expedite that immersion. Sampled strings add a sinister edge to the street-funk strut of “Airwalkin,’” while the heavenly chorus hook on the wistful “Many Tears to Cry” suggests Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight” given a Moon Safari makeover. Though Out in the World is rooted in the same self-deprecating, existential introspection as 2018’s The Underdog, Watson has discovered more colorful ways to express it: “So I go low to low,” he sings on “Low to Low,” as the track’s seductive bossa-nova beat scales from high to high. And with the closing “You Make Your Own Luck,” Watson effectively distills GUM’s whole essence into a two-part mini-suite: one half nocturnal cosmic ballad, one half sunrise-summoning soul-jazz groove, the song reaffirms Watson’s ongoing mission to find the elation in isolation.

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A member of Trouble Books, Aqueduct Ensemble, and Lemon Quartet, Akron’s Keith Freund combines found sounds, acoustic instruments, and wonky electronics into evocative ambient miniatures.

Hunter on the Wing

For Keith Freund, even the most cerebral compositions sound humble, heartfelt, and homemade. As part of the Ohio indie-pop duo Trouble Books, Freund paired stories of domestic life (with his bandmate and partner Linda Lejsovka) with clean tones, muffled field recordings, and warbling electronics that felt delightfully subversive against the backdrop of the early-2010s twee explosion. As bands like A Sunny Day in Glasgow and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart found massive acclaim recreating underappreciated sounds from the past, Trouble Books took a sharp left turn, combining noise music, ambient experiments, and musique concrète with charming lyrics about stray cats, washing dishes, and houseplants. Just as Microphones songwriter Phil Eleverum started his career using unorthodox studio techniques to convey his love for the recording process, Freund and Lejsovka took comfort in wide-eyed eccentricity, building a sprawling universe out of their native Akron, Ohio—both with Trouble Books and as part of the regional community of acts like Talons’, G.S. Schray, and others on Freund and Lejsovka’s label Bark and Hiss Records.
In recent years, Freund has expanded his focus to explore other styles and genres with a growing number of projects: the self-professed “DIY shitty classical” of Lejsovka + Freund, the moody, ECM-adjacent jazz of Aqueduct Ensemble, and the smoldering solitude of Lemon Quartet, always finding the same warmth and delight as in his time with Trouble Books. On his second solo album (following 2011’s Constant Comments), Freund continues to explore new terrain within noise, jazz, and musique concrète, with an enthusiasm for the soundscapes of the American Midwest that feels wholly his own.
Billed as a collection of nine “sound objects” in the rich tradition of electroacoustic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, the album combines tape loops, field recordings, and instrumental improvisation into a brisk assemblage of gently moving parts. “Aire 3” opens with a shuffle of incidental noise as a fluttering synth enters and the piece builds around sparse notes from a cello and upright piano. Though ostensibly in the same key, each part feels conspicuously designed to act independently; amateurish keyboard flourishes sound more like ringtones than jazz or classical music. Other pieces like “Nothing, I’m Just Listening to the Moon” and “Hunter on the Wing” orbit around small bits of looped tape, as melody and harmony slowly emerge from the background. The former track calls to mind the somber, cinematic compositions of Bing & Ruth and Harold Budd, while the latter leans more heavily on collected audio snippets and saxophone overdubs to flesh out an otherwise minimal track.
While Freund is certainly a capable performer, it’s his ear for arrangement and astute use of found sounds that really shines through. From his early days with Trouble Books, when crackling recordings of wind chimes complemented Rhodes chords, synth arpeggios, and introspective lyrics, Freund has routinely asked the question: What would the experimental music of Emeralds, Black Dice, and early Oneohtrix Point Never sound like if imbued with the self-reflection of the Microphones? In his departure from narrative songwriting, Freund has captured a similar intimacy in delicate sound collages. Tracks like “Aire 2” and “Wet Flag” derive their warmth from projector reels, thunderstorm recordings, and circuit-bent electronics.
The album isn’t completely instrumental. Two compositions include short spoken-word poems that find beauty in the Midwestern landscape. “Glimmering runnel over frost-wedged shale/Pulls a pop can tumbling,” Lejsovka intones on “Therm 2.” While her deadpan delivery calls to mind the dystopian satire of Holly Herndon’s “Locker Leak,” the poem offers something altogether separate from social critique. By contrast, it’s striking in the way it uses a small piece of Midwestern vernacular to new percussive ends, punctuating a natural scene with a strange regional inflection. On “Therm 5,” Lejsovka recites, “Hunter on the wing, walker at the key/I could’ve seen a stone dissolve in the wind and disappear, and it would not have surprised me.” Paired with steadily pulsing keyboards and swelling string loops that fall in and out of sync, the words feel like a defense of the subtle charms of small-town living, with a wide-eyed naturalism—or perhaps a magical realism—in place of provincial sloganeering.
For all of its romantic, secluded imagery, Hunter on the Wing feels broadly in tune with a recent impulse in ambient music that aims to capture the uncanny, sublime feeling of living through a moment of immense socio-cultural upheaval. Roughly two years since the COVID-19 pandemic first shut down restaurants, live music, and urban noise generally, our global acoustic ecology feels vastly different than in the days before the crisis. Armed with a Zoom H5 microphone or the iPhone’s default Voice Memos app, artists like claire rousay, Eli Keszler, M. Sage, and Andrew C.S. have used electroacoustic composition to address themes of politics, ecology, technological intimacy, and pandemic life in their work, enlivened by the changing soundscapes around them. Where artists like rousay and Sage may have once been drawn to the novelty of a digitally mediated, yet phenomenological trend like ASMR, these ideas have ultimately inspired a greater return to the world, one in which frog croaks and bird songs can feel as astonishing as the wonky synthesizers slathered throughout Freund’s work. These are strange times for ambient music, and Hunter on the Wing offers just about the furthest thing from a didactic explanation. But when Freund and his collaborators deliver yet another moment of bliss from a well-placed sample, it’s hard not to feel slightly more at ease.


With an elliptical and bewitching new album, Taja Cheek turns her expansive, introspective compositions toward surreal humor and playfulness.

I Killed Your Dog

On the title track of her third album as L’Rain, Taja Cheek chants, “I killed your dog.” The repetition of the four words sounds dissociative at first; as Cheek croons through a scrim of vocal processing, a tinge of regret seems to enter her voice. But her unsettling lyrics and eerily overdubbed vocals hint at a stranger picture. “I felt the blood drip from my teeth,” Cheek’s narrator says. “I felt the waves hitting my face.” Eventually, Cheek twists the proverbial knife: “It made me happy,” the killer confesses, the disclosure followed by sinister laughs that float through an abyss of languid synths and sax. And she’s not done yet. In the closing seconds, Cheek gets surreal, singing “I am your dog.”

This is the theatrical, elliptical, and bewitching mood of I Killed Your Dog, which revamps L’Rain’s typically introspective music into baroque dreamscapes. After exploring the peculiar weight of grief and the weary labor of self-improvement on her first two albums, the singer and multi-instrumentalist turns her attention to another kind of interiority: passion. The intense emotion adds flair and drama to her layered songs, centering the playfulness once pushed to the margins of her music. Only one fictional pet gets snuffed, but the whole album is bolder and brasher than previous L’Rain records, every harmony, loop, and skit engorged with verve. Cheek has figured out how to maintain her slippery, impressionistic style while also letting it be known she’s got that dog in her.
Cheek and her cadre of session musicians establish the album’s beguiling mode early. “Our Funeral” head-fakes as a torch song, floating Cheek’s rich lower register over plaintive keys and flickering synths. But Cheek’s lament to a doomed relationship is curiously eager. “End of days/Are you ready?” she repeats as if calling forth a vengeful god, a cauldron of snaps, melodies, and drums burbling beneath her. This breakup doesn’t just feel like the end of the world; it beckons it. Single “Pet Rock” is outwardly flip, offering wry metacommentary on the erasure of Black people in rock over nimble, Strokes-style guitar melodies. “You know/I’m invisible/Cut the bullshit/And make me into/Something else,” Cheek sings. The fact that she’s the guitarist heightens the irony.
Humor, explicit and subtle, functions as the album’s Rosetta Stone. In the brief skit “What’s That Song?,” someone asks for help figuring a jazz song. “I know it sounds like all of them,” they say after crudely mimicking the melody. Seconds later, a full band blips in to actually play the song, their rich tones snapping the imitation to life and underscoring the condescension of the question. The bit, reminiscent of Adult Swim commercial bumps, is extremely funny—especially if you’ve ever been the goof mangling a half-remembered tune. Cheek has said she set out to make the “exact opposite” of experimental music that is heady and untouchable, and the immediacy of comedy suits that mission.
The record isn’t all arch jokes and inanimate pets. Cheek is foremost a collagist who can wrest surprising textures and overtones from sounds found and played, and these songs boast her most pleasing arrangements. The oddly timed claps and staggered vocal loops of “Sometimes” evoke the unpolished warmth of church hymns. “5 to 8 Hours (WWwaG),” a highlight, whips an already lively folk tune into a whirl of hums, ticking percussion, and guitar and trumpet melodies that ripples over a lengthy spoken-word verse. The words are barely legible over the maelstrom, but Cheek’s confidence seeps through. “I want to try to fill myself with the things I’ve lost, the things I wanted, the things I love,” she says, yearning for satiation.
That appetite for fullness underlies the record’s restless motion. The prominent seams of instrumentation that course through these songs accent Cheek’s uppercase emotions, which span from resentment (“I Hate My Best Friends”) to loneliness (“New Year’s UnResolution”) to wonder (“Oh Wow, a Bird!”). The arrangements and mixing foreground the abundance of sounds being produced and manipulated, the emphasis underscoring both Cheek’s many collaborators and her multiplicity. Where past L’Rain music channeled the woozy fog of memory and the daunting haziness of the future, these songs take place in the chaos of real time.

“Uncertainty Principle,” which deftly shifts from noise rock to angelic R&B, distills the record’s ethos and Cheek’s M.O. “You’re convinced that in the dark there will be nothing/But for me, a little nothing’s got some something,” she sings. She’s a tinkerer enchanted by the musical potential of every little experience and sound, a passion manifest in I Killed Your Dog. It is an odd koan of a record: stuffed to the gills with rhythms and images and feelings, yet loose and dreamlike; replete with despair and loneliness, yet hopeful and communal. Cheek presents herself and experimental music as prisms through which anything—Brandy-like harmonies, silly commercials, and homicidal urges—can flow. Darkness, in her skillful and curious hands, is possibility.


Ambitious post-rock band further embraces strings by teaming with Wordless Music Orchestra on this live album.

Mono: Holy Ground: NYC Live with the Wordless Music Orchestra

Having established themselves as one of the most distinctive-- and difficult to categorize-- bands of the 21st century, post-rock group Mono have more or less been following their own muse for a number of years. On Holy Ground: NYC Live with the Wordless Music Orchestra, it takes them away from their usual home-away-from-home of Chicago (and the ministrations of their favorite producer, Steve Albini), and to New York for a lengthy and elaborately constructed live performance with the redundantly named Wordless Music Orchestra. This time out, the job of recording falls to Matt Bayles, who brings to his duties here the same meticulous determination to give every sound its own space, the way he did on Oceanic and Celestial for the late, lamented Isis. The album sounds fantastic, filling up all the room it's given; even the crowd noise comes through with a bright clarity that matches the emotional resonance of Mono's work.
The music itself-- mostly drawn from last year's Hymn to the Immortal Wind-- very much follows the stream Mono have been navigating since their inception. As early as 2001, they were incorporating strings into their sound, and their previous two albums featured, respectively, a string quartet and a chamber orchestra, so working with a full-fledged, complete orchestral arrangement must have seemed like a natural progression. The arrangements, mostly done by Wordless Music Orchestra conductor Jeffrey Milarsky and Mono guitarist Takaakira Goto, are written to take full advantage of the new range of instruments at the group's disposal. The treatment of the songs never seems tacked on, and Mono never makes the mistake of wasting orchestral resources on tacky string stings and other cheap flourishes.
Yet while Mono avoid the pomposity that often goes along with orchestral collaborations, Holy Ground is most effective when the arrangements are written to take full advantage of both the depth of the orchestra and the power of the rock band they surround. The first two tracks illustrate how good the pairing can be, as does the electrifying treatment of "Halcyon (Beautiful Days)"; all three maximize the potential of the concept by bringing Goto and Yoda's guitars and especially Yasunori Takada's increasingly underutilized drums to the fore and letting the orchestra support them. On other tracks, though, the cart is put so fully before the horse that it's difficult to distinguish what's happening from a manipulative film score. Mono have always been susceptible to overwrought emotion, but by bringing in so many instruments that are inextricably linked in our cultural receptors to specific feelings and moods, they risk becoming an unusually refined melancholy-moods outfit.
Holy Ground is also an extremely intense listening experience; at its end, the listener is, by design, emotionally drained. It's hard to imagine listening to it more than once in anything like a casual way. It comes with a DVD of the original live performance which is much more effective, since it conveys the entire work with the singular experiential power it was intended to have. They may shed some listeners as they define themselves down to an ever-purer expression, but there's no question that Mono is doing exactly what they want to do at this point in their career.


With a setlist structured like a party, this new concert film and live album from a charity gig at Madison Square Garden showcase Bruce and the band at full roar.

Bruce Springsteen / The E Street Band: The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts

The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts

The word “legendary” might seem too weighty for a performance given at a charity gig that was quintessentially of its time. Unlike the Concert for Bangladesh or Live Aid, the No Nukes benefit concerts didn’t leave a lasting cultural footprint—yet the two Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band shows at Madison Square Garden, now consolidated on a new concert film and live album, The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts, do flesh out a pivotal moment in Springsteen’s rise to superstardom, providing the first professionally recorded and filmed glimpse of the E Street Band at full roar. The performance also represents the first time Springsteen dipped his toe into political activism, an element that would eventually become a signature part of his public persona.
Springsteen wasn’t one of the founders of Musicians United for Safe Energy, the organization that launched the No Nukes concerts in the fall of 1979. Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Bonnie Raitt, and John Hall (a member of the soft-rock outfit Orleans, best known for their 1976 hit “Still the One,” who would later be elected to the House of Representatives) formed MUSE in the wake of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, a disaster that had consumed headlines that spring. The Three Mile Island tragedy inspired Springsteen’s “Roulette,” a cathartic shot of dread that was the first song cut during the sessions for his 1980 album The River but lay dormant until it was released as a B-side in 1988.
Springsteen wrote “Roulette” in the first person, concentrating on the human toll of the nuclear power plant meltdown instead of its politics and, in effect, that’s how he approached the No Nukes concerts, too. He avoided the spotlight in the promotional events leading up to the September shows, and he didn’t do much in the way of actual activism during his association with MUSE. He attended the photo shoot that resulted in a 1979 Rolling Stone cover touting the concerts, but he didn’t attend the accompanying press conference or issue a statement about nuclear energy. He simply joined the bill, consented to be filmed and recorded for the subsequent benefit album and documentary, and that was more than enough: The tickets to his two headlining shows sold out in an hour.
Those swift sales show how Springsteen was already a beloved figure in the New York area, and The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts teems with the exhilaration of the mutual adoration of artist and audience. The E Street Band seem as thrilled to play the gig as the crowd is to see it: They’d spent the better part of the year cooped up in the studio sweating over an album called The Ties That Bind, and in September 1979, its completion seemed imminent, though Springsteen later pulled it in favor of the eventual double album The River. The studio fog lifted as they finally hit the stage on September 21, 1979, just before Springsteen’s 30 birthday.
Bruce alludes to his advancing age during the No Nukes shows, saying that he “can't go on like this, I’m 30 years old! My heart’s about to go on me!” And yet he appears impossibly youthful and muscular as he leads the E Street Band through a marathon taken at the speed of a sprint. As seen in the film, Springsteen is restless—jumping, dancing, and prowling—and his passion translates on record. It helps that the setlist is structured as a party, opening with an intense blast of Darkness on the Edge of Town material before the stark ballad “The River” receives its stage debut. The concert’s quietest moment, “The River” drew upon the story of his sister’s teenage pregnancy and pointed toward a deepening sense of songwriting craft, one he’d develop further on the haunted, folky Nebraska. Here, it’s accompanied by another new tune called “Sherry Darling,” a boisterous, funny rocker which sends frat-party rhythms down to the Jersey Shore. “Sherry Darling” leads a steady escalation in energy and vigor, paved by a pair of Born to Run songs about escape (“Thunder Road,” “Jungleland”) and followed by a joyous “Rosalita” and a rapturous “Born to Run.”
From there, Springsteen finds deliverance in a set of rock’n’roll oldies, inviting Jackson Browne and Tom Petty for a version of Maurice Williams & the Zodiacs’ “Stay”—a song Browne rewrote into a medley with “The Load Out” on Running on Empty. The E Street Band then crash into a breathless 25-minute run through “Detroit Medley,” Gary U.S. Bonds’ “Quarter to Three,” and Buddy Holly’s “Rave On!” Propelled by Max Weinberg’s hard swing, they take the time to showcase Clarence Clemons’ R&B sax and the careening keys of Danny Federici and Roy Bittan, elements that evoke memories of golden oldies but are transformed by the group’s intensity. Springsteen would refine this aesthetic on The River, leading to his first smash hit with “Hungry Heart,” but The Legendary 1979 No Nukes Concerts offers an uncut dose of pure rock’n’roll. Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band were by then amassing a deep catalog, but they remained connected with their audience through the common vernacular of old hits. Those familiar choruses and hooks are warhorses, but the E Street Band uses them as a vehicle for transcendence. Years of similar performances haven’t diminished the power of this one: It has a distinctive blend of magic and might, the sound of a band who knows they’ve hit their stride and still gets giddy at the noise they make. It’s a bar band delivering communion.

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