On her third album, the Brooklyn musician scraps the synths and elaborate arrangements of her last LP, opting for a stripped-down combo and songs written as fast as the rush of feelings that inspired them.

Echo the Diamond

Margaret Glaspy had only a couple of EPs to her name when she told an interviewer that she wanted to approach songwriting “like a job.” Whatever the Brooklyn-based, Northern California-born artist’s creative process, it paid off on her debut album, 2016’s Emotions and Math, a spare and spiky set of broadly rooted songs that showed off her electric guitar, spellbinding voice, and conversational lyrics. On her synth-oriented follow-up, 2020’s Devotion, the songs felt labored, but for her third album, Echo the Diamond, Glaspy has trusted her strengths. It’s a commendable reset—and a reminder that making good art needn’t feel like a struggle.
Produced by Glaspy and her husband, the jazz-leaning guitarist and composer Julian Lage, Echo the Diamond features only one fleeting appearance by the synths so prevalent on its predecessor. Instead, the new album homes in on the vibrant instrumental interplay between Glaspy and an accomplished rhythm section of drummer Dave King, best known for his work with the Bad Plus, and bassist Chris Morrissey, who’s played with an eclectic array of artists such as Lucius and Andrew Bird. Glaspy wrote the songs fast, and the musicians made the record in the studio together in three days; some of the finished tracks were first takes, and some were rehearsals. “Climbing uphill doesn’t always equate to things being good,” Glaspy told Paste. “Actually, you can just pick up the things that are right next to you, you can reach inside your own heart and pull out something that’s worthy. You’re allowed to do that.”
The first chunk of Echo the Diamond establishes Glaspy’s return to prickly alt-pop. Opening track “Act Natural,” a playful account of feeling inadequate when meeting someone extraordinary (Glaspy sings, “Is this some kind of butterfly rebirth?/Are you even from this earth?”), brandishes a twisty, wonderfully catchy guitar riff reminiscent of Modest Mouse or MJ Lenderman. “Get Back,” which reclaims the Beatles’ famous dictum as an interior monologue of personal discovery, has a terrific moment where Glaspy holds the last note of the title phrase like Wile E. Coyote bounding over a cliff; she doesn’t look down. She can also be funny: “Don’t be a dick,” Glaspy sneers at the outset of “Female Brain,” which morphs from a litany of petty slights experienced by women to an energizing battle cry with such herky-jerky looseness that it feels like it’s being made up on the spot. What could’ve been heavy-handed instead seems like it could break apart at any moment.
The album’s brash opening turns out to be a Trojan horse for Glaspy’s warm, perceptive songwriting. Perhaps the best song is “Memories,” a waltzing ballad about a source of grief that the artist hasn’t specified in interviews; the ache is so palpable in her voice, creaking like Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker, she doesn’t have to. On “Irish Goodbye,” a midtempo smolderer built around a knotty riff, Glaspy weaves a compelling third-person narrative about a man who doubts himself after forming a connection with a woman who sneaks out of the bar. The song’s quintessential New York City setting has a neat bookend in the languid finale “People Who Talk,” which winds up somewhere with a lively backyard and an intriguing sense of ambivalence; the protagonist may have settled down, but this isn’t happily ever after.
Echo the Diamond can be remarkably inventive within the confines of its narrow lineup and spontaneous origins. The biggest outlier is “Hammer and the Nail,” the only co-write on the album (with contributions from Glaspy’s friend Ryan Lerman), which dips into a jazz standard’s seductive smokiness, albeit with Glaspy’s flickering guitar and sphinx-like ambiguity. There are still times when Glaspy’s lyrics feel effortful. A couplet like, “Oh every conversation between strangers or acquaintances/Only reminds me of how radiant your patience is,” from the successful Alanis Morissette homage “My Eyes,” may strike some listeners as cleverly inspired, and others as simply too clever. But the album resonates as the expression of an overachiever remembering the benefits of working within self-imposed constraints. In that sense, the most representative song might be “Turn the Engine,” a leisurely showcase for some of Glaspy’s most otherworldly, Joni Mitchell-via-Lucinda Williams vocal runs, which doubles as one of the most candid songs I have heard about crippling self-criticism. For anyone who enjoys a thoughtful singer-songwriter record with adept, minimalist instrumental backing and a powerhouse vocalist, Echo the Diamond is a worthy listen. For people who recognize themselves when Glaspy sings about being “back up in my head/Like a needle just passing thread,” it could become an essential companion.


The psychedelic mod band were only around for a few years, but as this Numero compilation overwhelmingly proves, they were as self-aware as the Move, as vicious as the Who, and as clever as the Kinks.

Action Painting

The Creation are the definition of a cult band. They only existed for a brief spell—formed in 1966, fell apart in 1968— but during those months, they bore a sound that could’ve made them stars. Adding to the Creation’s mystique is the fact that they weren’t widely heard at the time. In their native Britain, they eked out only one hit, “Painter Man,” which scraped the Top 40 at No. 36. But that’s better than they managed in the U.S., where they essentially didn't exist; their four singles stiffed and the haphazard 1967 LP We Are Paintermen never even materialized in America.
Eurodisco outfit Boney M took their cover “Painter Man” into the UK Top 10 in 1979, but that had little to do with the cult of the Creation that was already well underway. The first true flowering of Creation awareness arrived in 1978, when the Jam conspicuously framed a Creation 45—“Biff Bang Pow,” the flipside of “Painter Man”—in their collage of inspiration and self-celebration in the inner sleeve for All Mod Cons. By the early ’80s, Television Personalities were covering their songs and the band’s chief advocate Alan McGee formed a label called Creation and named his indie band after “Biff Bang Pow.” Fan devotion doesn’t come much clearer than that.
By that point, Edsel released How Does It Feel To Feel, the first in a series of Creation compilations created for British Invasion, freakbeat and psych collectors. Many similar collections have appeared over the last three decades, but Numero’s new double-disc Action Painting is the first Creation compilation designed to appeal to listeners who might not already know them. It’s for people who may be aware of the band through the indelible impression “Makin' Time” made in Wes Anderson’s 1998 film Rushmore, or perhaps Ride’s cover of “How Does It Feel To Feel” in 1994, or maybe they just trust Numero’s curation of the forgotten corners of our musical past.
Action Painting certainly contains its own collector bait—the first disc includes remasters of the band’s original mono mixes supervised by their producer Shel Talmy, while the second contains all the previously un-reissued early sides the group cut as the Mark Four along with new stereo mixes—but its value is in presenting the work of this extraordinary band in an easily digestible fashion. The sequencing of Action Painting gives their short, turbulent life some coherence, presenting a narrative where the group keeps kicking against the pricks of their time.
For outsiders, Shel Talmy may provide the best gateway to the Creation. Talmy produced the earliest hits of the Kinks and the Who (he’s responsible for the proto-metal blast of “You Really Got Me” and the sneering defiance of “My Generation”) and the Creation benefitted from his blunt touch. On his productions, Talmy ratcheted up the violent pop-art of the Who when they were at the peak of their mod swagger, a move that was only fitting for a band who seemed to exist in an eternal now, simultaneously hoovering up ideas from R&B-besotted mods and mind-bending psychedelia. In that sense, the Creation sometimes flirted with the subversion of the Move, but where Roy Wood often indulged in irony, the Creation were sincere, never raising an arched eyebrow when conjuring waves of noise and grounding their whimsy with truly nasty, gnarled guitar riffs.
The creation existed in a hot house between mod and psychedelia, ranging between the fevered stomp of the former and the mind-warping experimentation of the latter. Listen to “Sylvette,” one of their earliest numbers: it’s essentially a rewrite of Eddie Holland’s “Leaving Here”—notably covered by the Who on their 1965 debut My Generation—but the Creation feels coiled and lethal, as if they were deliberately keeping their full power in check. One of their chief attributes is that they sounded almost vicious.
Innovation never played into the Creation’s legacy. Guitarist Eddie Phillips sawed a violin bow across his six strings, a move Jimmy Page would steal, but the band embodied their time more than transcended it. The feeling that the band was always on the cusp of a breakthrough is what makes them exciting to this day. Particularly in the mono mixes that comprise disc one, they are vibrant and alive, sometimes hinting at the clean lines and big beat of mod, but usually sounding like the bold explosion of pop art. It doesn’t pull you into a cerebral undercurrent the way the best psychedelia does, it just detonates. “Biff Bang Pow” takes its name from comic art—the title suggests the hyper-stylized Batman series of 1966—and it rampages like the Who on a bender and it never makes a play for the head. Even “How Does It Feel To Feel”—a churning circle that suggests psychedelic obsession—pushes brawn over brain.
The Creation arrived just as the British Invasion shook off regimented R&B influences, then they departed just as rock started to get deeper and weirder. Certainly, a band that was pushing wailing organs and keening guitars could’ve survived the prog rock era, but that early lack of success pushed the band into a series of personnel upheavals, eventually dooming the band. Yet, their brief, blazing life is also why they remain captivating: they lived minute to minute, pushing out their best ideas because it was likely they’d never survive to another seven inch. Action Painting reflects this urgency, particularly as the singles pile up one after another on the first disc. Here, the Creation often recall their peers—they’re as vicious as the Who, clever as the Kinks, as self-aware as the Move—but they seem utterly original, a band with the ideas, sound and songs for the big time, but one that never caught the right break. They are blessed and cursed by existing for a flash.


Metronomy's latest record strips away any pretense that they are a band, focusing on its sole creator, Joe Mount. The album solidifies his own idiosyncratic brand of standoffish funk.

Summer 08

Metronomy's public face has always been a front. Those beautiful bandmates in matching slacks, frolicking in a Michel Gondry video? They rarely appear on the records, which are solely the creations of Devonshire synth obsessive Joe Mount. Their—or, his—fifth album strips away any lingering pretense that this is a band deal. There are no cutesy press shots, and there will be no tour. It’s just Mount, reflecting on the hard-partying summer when his second album Nights Out positioned him on the vanguard of a wave of mostly now-defunct British electro bands. Apparently, it’s the record he's wanted to make for years, but ever-increasing levels of opportunity meant that he kept putting it off in favor of more opulent confections: 2011’s The English Riviera, an understated yacht-rocking record that recast his seaside hometown as a continental pleasure ground, followed by 2014’s analog Love Letters, where some striking singles bobbed among a weak stew of Motown and psych.
Mount cuts one of the most contrary figures in British indie, always pulling back at the moment when he could strike hot. “There’s still the potential to go mainstream coupled with the fact that we probably won’t,” he said recently, which seemed more like a comment on his unwillingness to do so than the basic implausibility of Metronomy unseating Drake from Number 1. The English Riviera was written to assuage Mount's fears that people thought they were “just a ‘modern band’, that anyone could make that kind of music.” The “willfully backward” Love Letters refused to uphold its predecessor's gilded choruses, and Summer 08 mostly eschews traditional songwriting conventions altogether. Instead it harks back to the juddering squelch of Nights Out, using post-acid house synths and rinky-dink drum machines to bridge the alt-pop DNA of Peter Gabriel’s II with classic dance cuts like Adamski’s “Killer.” Mount pens a love letter to his drum machine on the“Buffalo Stance”-indebted “16 Beat,” and he gets Beastie Boys’ turntablist Mix Master Mike in to scratch on “Old Skool,” whose chattering refrain echoes the Shamen’s “Move Any Mountain” and the Bangles’ “Walk Like an Egyptian.” Mount strips the fervor from these sounds, inflecting them with frenetic cool.
“Old Skool” in particular outlines Mount’s suspicion of prevailing trends. “Have a party/In the West End/Make some money/Make more money,” he sneers, reliving his jealous antipathy towards his cooler West London peers back in 2008. It fits *Summer 08’*s insular scheme, where Mount pulls away from convention once again, but pushes his voice to the center despite the fact that he's not a natural ringleader. Miles from the odd feebleness of Love Letters, he often sounds antagonistic on the record’s first half: anguished and overcooked on “Miami Logic,” and oozing disdain on opener “Back Together,” where he impersonates a scenester girl reserving them a table “some place really, really good.” His brashness is a tonic, giving his wayward beats a purposeful attitude.
Summer 08 isn’t a people-pleasing record, but if there’s a challenger here to singles like “Heartbreaker,” “The Bay,” and “Love Letters,” it's “Hang Me Out to Dry,” a collaboration with Robyn that’s survived from The English Riviera's cutting-room floor. The Swedish pop star’s carefree demands to be used contrast Mount’s sincerity about falling in love, the tension mounting as the rubbery doppler bass lurches ever closer. It’s the most traditional pop song here, and gives way to the record's softer second half, where Mount allows some of Metronomy’s tropes to ease back in: the syncopated, clacking bass of “My House,” and spacy, Daft Punk-indebted undulating synths on “Night Owl.”
Warmth creeps in on “Love's Not an Obstacle,” but dissipates again on closer “Summer Jam,” where synths loom like cold skyscrapers in a stylized dystopia. Mount repeats a forlorn devotion (“I’d do anything for your love, love”), and the song spends its final 45 seconds in an ambient haze punctured by a rudimentary drum machine echo. It’s a strange, bittersweet note to end on; maybe the memory he’s held onto from this decadent period in his life.
It feels like a good thing that Mount didn’t make this record straight after Nights Out. Back then, it would have seemed too much like another great entry in the annals of Rock Stars Complaining About Success. And in the interim eight years, he’s figured out how to evade pop without skimping on its sensibility, and created enough of a catalogue to solidify his own idiosyncratic brand of standoffish funk. In anyone else’s hands, Summer 08 might seem strange and cold. But from Mount, as ornery as it is, it feels like a gesture of trust.


Once you understand the 2 Chainz persona, there's no narrative, no room for introspection, no flexibility, nothing beyond the one-dimensional caricature he's crafted on countless other verses. Whether he succeeds or fails on his debut LP, then, relies heavily on how funny you think lines such as, "Go so hard, Viagra try to sign me," really are.

Based on a T.R.U. Story

At this point, the artist formerly known as Tity Boi's unlikely, winding career path has been discussed heavily. The quick rundown: He dropped several albums and one smash hit (which benefited heavily from a peak-era Lil' Wayne hook) as a member of Playaz Circle. He worked as Ludacris' understudy at DTP. He's had his fair share of great music scattered across a career that now touches three different decades of hip-hop history. After building a sudden, cult-like mixtape buzz across the country, his solo debut, Based on a T.R.U. Story, has moved an impressive 147,000 copies, a new industry benchmark of how to shift from mixtapes to sales, and a cynical example of the bare minimum of creativity required for that level of success.
He's released solo mixtapes for several years, but it wasn't until 2010's Me Against the World 2: Codeine Withdrawal and Trap-A-Velli 2: (The Residue) that the spark seemed to find a fuse. These tapes even pre-dated the mainstream-friendly 2 Chainz name transition, and indicated possible new momentum behind what had been an aging franchise; tracks like "Between Me and U" and "Up in Smoke" (a masterful, underrated fusion of Christión's "Full of Smoke" with Art of Noise's "Moments in Love") indicated the rapper had a gift for the hazy afterparty slow jam, in an era when most artists reaching for the brass ring of Atlanta's rap game had to knock out peak-time hits. It's easy to see Tity's presence in Gucci Mane's "Everybody Looking" video as a kind of Styrofoam baton pass; just as Gucci's popular appeal reached a fevered pitch, he returned to prison. He was joined by T.I., hamstrung by repeated probation violations, while Young Jeezy, ready to capitalize off a hot street single, languished in label purgatory. Atlanta and its major hip-hop infrastructure-- the strip clubs, mixtape trade, and tour circuit-- had a star machine to generate revenue with a vacuum in its center. Into the void gawkily sauntered a new hero, who took the path  pioneered by 50 Cent, adapted to the internet era by Lil Wayne, and fully fleshed out with three-dimensional songcraft by Gucci Mane.
It's hard to avoid the feeling, particularly on his debut LP, that 2 Chainz is only able to fill those shoes by sheer force of will, rather than anything resembling artistic inspiration. His verses these days consist of blue-collar hip-hop cultural touchpoints (True Religion jeans, eating at Waffle House and Benihana, a general lack of interest in the consumer choices made on Watch the Throne) spit with a few basic rhyme patterns. These are bundled together by punchlines that split the difference between Gucci's effortless nonchalance and Young Money's rib-jabbing hashtag joke style. The gulf between those approaches is deep, yet 2 Chainz manages the tough act of seeming simultaneously disinterested in what he's saying while underlining the joke in the most eyeroll-inducing manner possible. For a dash of character, he occasionally sounds like a true man-out-of-time, with a bit of anachronistic flair reminiscent of Guru from Gang Starr. (The latter once rapped, "like baggy slacks I'm crazy hip-hop"; the former mentions his "True Religion trousers.") But unlike Guru, there's nothing else there; once you understand the basic 2 Chainz persona, there's no narrative, no room for introspection, no flexibility, nothing beyond the one-dimensional caricature he's crafted on countless other verses. Whether he succeeds or fails, then, relies heavily on how funny you think lines such as, "Go so hard, Viagra try to sign me," really are, and ultimately, whether or not he can produce quality songs.
Unlike the rappers who paved the lane he's expanded to fill, 2 Chainz isn't quite as comfortable shifting through the song templates required of a flood-the-market street rapper in 2012. He can still manage the slow-burning afterparty anthem; as recently as last year, Codeine Cowboy's "Feeling You" captured the smoky backroom vibe he'd perfected. With 2011's "Spend It", he passed his most important test by generating a genuine peak-time club hit and even manufacturing one of the year's most incessantly memorable choruses. "Riot", that song's sequel, is included as a bonus track; it is a bit slight in comparison. There's a baseline of consistency to Based on a T.R.U. Story; some of the beats are clearly the best money can buy, from Drumma Boy's intricate "Money Machine" to Mike Will's frequency-filtering "No Lie", a major chart success that likely owes a bulk of its pop presence to Drake's guest verse. Drake and Kanye both seem to think the way to best fit in on 2 Chainz record is to be generally kind of shitty to the women they talk about, which makes each guest spot an obvious choice for their respective highlight reels.
Yet despite his chart success with Drake, many of 2 Chainz' pop maneuvers feel tone-deaf. Typically, The-Dream balances smooth seduction with a tackier lyrical approach by infusing it with an earnest generosity. 2 Chainz is too cynical to make it work: "Dinner dates I demonstrate how to penetrate/ If you ain't with it, it's elimidate." (Rimshot.) Similarly awkward attempts at stitching 2 Chainz to the pop world include Mike Posner collaboration "In Town" and "Countdown", a dubstep-ballad which contains the representative lyrical tangle, "If love is a drug I'm arrested for your possession." Perhaps the worst offender, though, is "Ghetto Dreams": John Legend's clenched-fist vocal performance and Scarface's gravitas serve only to make 2 Chainz' detached, detail-free drug raps seem all the more disconnected from anything resembling an emotional truth. The meat of Based on a T.R.U. Story, then, is songs like "I Luv Dem Strippers", "I'm Different", "Feel Good", and "Like Me" (which contains lyrical chestnut "titty-fuck, CHEST NUT!"). These songs don't seem like major hits per se, but they epitomize his satisfyingly quirky, juvenile triviality. It's a much needed reprieve from the album's other primary color of mild mediocrity.


The pop artist’s second record is a bold attempt at lightening up her sound, featuring a cyber-future narrative and three distinct personas.

PLAYGIRL

Lolo Zouaï’s viral hit “Desert Rose” was a lament for her family, framed in the cultures that raised her. Born to an Algerian father and French mother, the San Francisco-raised singer used English, French, and Arabic to cover the spectrum of emotions that arose when she was banned from attending a family wedding in Algeria. The most subdued track from her laid-back, confident debut, 2019’s High Highs to Low Lows, “Desert Rose” was not just a plaintive cry but also a gentle nudge to reclaim a more assertive and freeing narrative of her life. “Everyday I’m still having to push my boundaries,” she said in an interview earlier this year. “I still feel like a prude sometimes… All of it has just made me want to make happier music now.”
Zouaï’s second album, PLAYGIRL, is a bold attempt at lightening up, centering her dominance and playful swagger even in its weaker moments. Whereas on High Highs to Low Lows she seemed contained to brief, controlled passions, PLAYGIRL flirts openly with relinquishing command: “There’s something about me falling apart/That makes it so easy to sleep in your arms,” she coos in the sinister bounce of “Give Me a Kiss.” With producer Stelios Phili, Zouaï elevates her debut’s screwy trap-pop sound into glitchy hyperpop. On “pl4yg1rl,” she pitches up and interpolates her Bay Area rap idol Too $hort’s “pimpandho.com,” flipping his description of the “dot com whore” into a cyber-dominatrix ruling the metaverse. “You deserve some fun,” she sings, swinging from a coquettish purr to an authoritative demand: “Get your headphones/Lock up the bedroom door/Log on.” Zouaï’s delicate, airy vocals frequently appear in layers of harmony and vocal processors, reverberating within a digital playground that whirls with synths and crackling drum machines. With Phili’s production, they add to a crowded, disorienting state of unreality.
PLAYGIRL is branded as a concept album set in the far off cyber-future, with the music divided into three distinct personas: the flirtatious “Playgirl,” the softer “Dreamgirl,” and the darker “Partygirl.” The album shines when Zouaï is playing and partying, like in the funky, whimsical, “Picking Berries,” a romp in “the south of France” that moves as an extended, breathy sigh. The intoxicating, candy-coated “Gummy Bear” is another highlight, juxtaposing Zouaï’s honeyed speaking voice with floating melodic runs that echo the free-flowing improvisation found in Algerian raï, the anti-fundamentalist and often overtly sexual popular music that formed under French colonial rule.
It’s unclear, however, where exactly each alter-ego falls in the tracklist. PLAYGIRL isn’t as dynamic as it needs to be to make those distinctions clear. The back half in particular, with its slew of reductive acoustic ballads and bland R&B crooners, can feel like abruptly taking off your VR headset. These are welcome breathers amid PLAYGIRL’s hyper-digital overload, but Zouaï isn’t comfortable when she tries to add more power to her voice, making tracks like “Open the Door” sound more like throwaway Kehlani demos.
When Zouaï takes the edge off her vocals, the music eases up with her. The slow-building “Skin & Bones” acts like a successor to “High Highs to Low Lows”—the single that kick-started her career—with its frank discussion of depression and the downsides of the industry success she sought for so long. “Holding back tears during my shows,” she reflects with a softness that situates those struggles firmly in the past. “I’m done living in my head,” she sings in the bridge, repeating the phrase through drifting echoes, then centering her voice in vocal runs that crescendo with ease. These feathery touches are Zouaï at her best. When she’s able to riff and improvise, she sounds as though her voice is fluttering toward happier moments, spiraling upward and evaporating into a whisper.


A 10-minute EP presents an ambitious solo exploration of hocketing, a musical technique with a long and curious history.

Meara O’Reilly: Hockets for Two Voices EP

Hockets for Two Voices EP

In the 14th century, Pope John XXII weighed in on music. In his Docta sanctorum patrum of 1324-25, he declared that notes of “small values” disturbed the recitation of prayers and distracted worshippers from true devotion. The target of his disdain was hocketing, a musical technique that involves splitting a single melody into brief phrases and dividing each phrase between several voices or instruments. As each part alternates, the rapid back-and-forth exchange creates a complete melody. Nearly 700 years later, Hockets for Two Voices, a 10-minute, seven-movement EP by Los Angeles composer, artist, and instrument designer Meara O’Reilly, suggests there’s still something mystical about hockets.
Hocketing’s name comes from the French word “hoquet,” or “hiccup.” Though it’s frequently associated with sacred songs of the European Middle Ages, the rhythmic practice originated in African vocal and instrumental traditions. Today, hocketing remains a popular—though ambitious—vocal or instrumental approach. This sustained, carefully rehearsed game of musical ping-pong can be found across contemporary genres, from modern classical to funk to indie rock. Meredith Monk has used the technique to create a complex vocal balancing act; Dirty Projectors’ David Longstreth is an exceptionally passionate fan of hockets and frequently employs chirping, call-and-response vocal arrangements. The proliferation of hocketing across time and culture, from Balinese gamelan to Ghanian flutes to medieval motets, illustrates its universal appeal.
O’Reilly’s interest in hockets began with a fascination with auditory perception. Drawing on her experience co-creating an app that uses 2-D geometry to generate rhythm patterns and designing visuals for Björk’s Biophilia tour based on the songs’ basslines, she considered the historical use of hocketing and decided to push the format further. O’Reilly was particularly captivated by the work of psychoacoustic researcher Albert Bregman, who studied how people perceive sound. Though Hockets for Two Voices has no production and never more than two notes at a time, the precise arrangement of O’Reilly’s compositions creates the illusion of a wide, vibrant palette, a trompe-l’oreille known as pseudo-polyphony. The separation of her voice in stereo also establishes a spatial relationship, shifting the experience depending where you place your attention.
But Hockets for Two Voices is also an experiment in performance. Hockets are intended to be produced by two or more individuals or instruments. O’Reilly’s decision to record Hockets for Two Voices alone turns it into an endurance piece. Over the course of a year, she painstakingly trained her vocal cords to jump to sharp new heights, then carefully cobbled each part together. The result is so exact in tone and pitch that it initially comes off as artificial. But as your ears adjust to the pattern, the swift popping of O’Reilly’s voice becomes more intricate and organic, like a cluster of bursting bubbles. Though Hockets for Two Voices is a small record, it invites us to investigate the endless potential of our individual perception.


Tamara Lindeman’s songwriting has reached stunning new heights. With a full band supporting her, her new album draws upon the natural world to create unforgettable moments of calm and beauty.

Ignorance

Because her lyrics are often the focus, and because the accompanying music could most succinctly be described as “folk,” Tamara Lindeman has a singing voice that is easy to overlook. But it is where much of her power lies. The 36-year-old songwriter and former child actress from Toronto is not the kind of singer who demands your attention but the type who doesn’t seem to care whether you’re listening at all: Dipping between her hushed lower register and a breezy falsetto, her delivery flows as an internal monologue. By listening closely, you are sharing her headspace, invited into a private world. Her songs are anthems for those of us accustomed to spending long stretches of time in silence, or being asked repeatedly “What are you thinking about?”
This introverted style has suited Lindeman’s work as the Weather Station, a project that has evolved over the past decade from sparse solo recordings into an ambitious full band with frequent string accompaniment. In a pivotal song called “Thirty” from 2017’s self-titled album, Lindeman fully assumed the role of bandleader. Without sacrificing the acute, observational detail of her early work, it felt like a breakthrough. Her voice became impossible to ignore. “I noticed fucking everything—the light, the reflections, different languages, your expressions,” she sang with desperate anxiety, as if speeding through her usual landmarks to set a foothold somewhere new.
On Ignorance, the Weather Station’s dazzling fifth album, Lindeman arrives. The sound of her band—which now includes two drummers, a saxophonist, and a watercolor smear of synth, strings, flute, bass, and electric guitar—has never felt more versatile or distinctive, like an array of set pieces she rearranges to accompany each individual story. She sets the scene with “Robber,” the creeping, jazzy opener whose lyrics unveil a stirring metaphor about the failures of capitalism. As the band leans in conspiratorially, responding to each subtle shift in her delivery, Lindeman shapeshifts from consoler (“No, the robber don’t hate you”) to confessor (“When I was young, I learned how to make love to the robber”) to a strange kind of preacher (“Hold open the gates for the want of lust”). It is a whirlwind performance. As the music skitters and bursts in every direction, she never loses her cool.
Co-produced with Marcus Paquin, Ignorance reimagines Lindeman’s place within her own music and the scope of her project as a whole. Every moment feels lush and welcoming, designed to reach as many people as possible. Ironically, Lindeman wrote many of the songs alone with just an old keyboard, playing along to its rudimentary drum loops. In some songs, like “Separated,” you can hear their humble beginnings: the deft, ambling rhythm of her fingerpicking is replaced with pulsing major chords; her lyrics, which once spilled into the margins with asides and scene directions, arrive in pared-down cycles of verse, swapping a few words while maintaining the general structure: “Separated by the relief you want to feel,” she sings, shortly followed by, “Separated by the belief this cut would heal.”
Lindeman has hinted at these pop ambitions before—her 2017 single “Kept It All to Myself” felt like a first step in this direction—but she has never embraced the sound so fully. After operating within the ’70s idiom of singer-songwriter music, she now looks to the carefully constructed art-pop of the ’80s for inspiration, finding a balance that feels both intuitive and daring. In a late-album highlight called “Heart,” she sings over an aerodynamic rhythm, her falsetto swooping between each substratum of percussion like a small bird navigating the floors of a mansion. It is a rare moment in her songbook where you can tune out the lyrics and just get lost in the music. In fact, Lindeman herself does precisely that in the final moments, humming a wordless refrain as her band glides along.
This is a new trick at Lindeman’s disposal—these appeals to the instant pleasure centers of rhythm and melody—and she can break the spell just as effectively as she casts it. “I tried to wear the world like some kind of garment,” she sings starkly in “Wear,” the first moment on the album where her voice sounds truly unaccompanied, with a ticking drumbeat and high, dissonant piano chord dissolving beneath it. In songs like these, she accesses the same vulnerability that coursed through early albums like Loyalty. Only now, the quiet arrives more sporadically: dusky, old hiding places she leads us through on an otherwise colorful journey.
In the time since the Weather Station’s last album, Lindeman devoted herself to studying the climate crisis, attending town halls and leading panel discussions with fellow musicians and activists in Toronto. In a 2019 interview, she explained the similarities between these conversations and her work as a songwriter: The same way she noticed how her subtle, uncluttered music about intimate subjects could have a therapeutic effect on listeners, she sought to address what’s known as “climate grief” with a sense of compassion, discussing the severity of the facts without ignoring the emotional weight.
Throughout Ignorance, she suggests the first step is rejecting cynicism. It is a goal she shares with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering, whose 2019 album Titanic Rising found beauty in similarly heavy subject matter. But where Mering’s approach involved zooming out to address our problems on a cosmic scale, Lindeman takes the opposite perspective, burrowing into quiet scenes and passing feelings until they seem to hold universal significance. Plenty of us, for example, may have thoughts like the ones in “Atlantic” (“I should get all this dying off of my mind/I should know better than to read the headlines”). But generational exhaustion is not the point. Instead, Lindeman paints an idyllic portrait, full of wonder, with a glass of wine in her hand: “My god,” go the opening lines. “I thought, ‘What a sunset.’”
As if leading a guided meditation, Lindeman continually turns our focus to the natural world—but her findings aren’t always so picturesque. She has referred to “Parking Lot” as a “love song for a bird,” and, for the most part, that’s what it is. Standing outside a venue before a show, and on the verge of what sounds like a minor breakdown, she notices a small bird flying around the parking lot. And so she stops to admire it. “Is it alright if I don’t want to sing tonight?” she asks, as if sensing an omen. There’s a metaphor here: the helplessness, the aimlessness, the clash between subject and setting, the quiet singing against the droning traffic. Lindeman has spent her career pondering these connections, pausing in the moments when other people are restlessly pushing forward. Her writing throughout Ignorance can feel like the collected epiphanies from a lifetime of observing.
And sometimes, language fails her. In the last 90 seconds of the song, she gets hung up on the opening words of a sentence: “It kills me when I....” The band anticipates a climax: A string section summons a “Cloudbusting” sense of drama; a disco beat dances from hi-hat to snare with increasing intensity. I swear I hear a choir buried in the mix. Meanwhile, Lindeman takes another stab at the thought: “You know it just kills me when I…” Eventually, she finishes the sentence. Her mind returns to the bird, the band settles down, and life, as we know it, goes on: its constant hum of worry, a sea of cars, another show to play. But for that moment, it was all up in the air.

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Ishmael Butler’s free-form hip-hop project continues to defy convention with a pair of companion albums that view contemporary America as though it were a strange and hostile planet.

Shabazz Palaces: Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star / Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines

Ishmael Butler’s Shabazz Palaces project has always occupied another plane, his discordant sounds and bizarro abstract lyrics just close enough to the familiar to spur intense cognitive dissonance. The music Butler makes with Tendai Maraire is avant-garde but undeniably focused: free-jazz rap made with samplers, sequencers, and drum machines. Distinctly informed by blackness and the black experience, it nonetheless has defied any previously constructed conventions, an awkward fit for any box you might try to squeeze it into.
Their latest records, the simultaneously released Quazarz vs. The Jealous Machines and Quazarz: Born on a Gangster Star, are their most direct attempt at universe-building, with Butler playing the part of the protagonist Quazarz, a “sent sentient from some elsewhere” who navigates “Amurderca” on the “Gangster Star”—dystopian parallel versions of the country and the planet that feel as familiar as they are terrifying (“We post-language, baby, we talk with guns,” he raps on “Welcome to Quazarz”). More than ever, signifiers of the “real” world serve to ground both records in a baseline reality, like the Central Area Youth Association rec center Butler once frequented (“Since C.A.Y.A.”) or the Xanax glow of “your favorite rapper” (“30 Clip Extension”).
Jealous Machines and Gangster Star feel even more connected than the last double release—the debut EPs Of Light and Shabazz Palaces—but they represent different modes of creation. Butler honed Jealous Machines with the producer Sunny Levine over periodic trips to Southern California stretched out over months; Gangster Star was banged out back home in Seattle with Erik Blood over two weeks in 2016, when intended bonus tracks evolved into a complete album.
When Butler first introduced himself as the Palaceer Lazaro, his collaborators were obfuscated and shrouded in mystery; as his star has risen, those collaborations have become more visible. Butler is still the heart of Shabazz Palaces, but their aesthetic is heavily influenced by the Black Constellation, a multi-disciplinary art collective of like-minded astral travelers. From the guest appearances to the videos—even the clothes they wear when they perform—the current iteration of Shabazz Palaces is clearly informed by this collection of stars.
Gangster Star reads like Butler’s version of a memoir: his experience as an extraterrestrial being deposited on a hostile planet. Jealous Machines nods to the symbiotic relationships we develop with the various black mirrors in our lives. They’re extensions of ourselves, and when we’re not on one, we’re often thinking about it, the machine calling out to us in its absence, like a needy lover that wants your attention and isn’t getting it. With Jealous Machines, Butler and Maraire reject both the device “and the guilds that proliferate them,” corporations that feed on the life force we pour into the machines that we’ve assimilated into our bodies. Less Luddite screed than cautionary tale, Jealous Machines resists the human detachment we so often correlated with our digital connections.
Part of what makes Shabazz Palaces so compelling has been their refusal to assign too much meaning to their work, preferring instead to invite their audience to make its own connections and draw its own conclusions. That proves more difficult with the often quite specific prog-rock space-opera narrative of these two albums, but the free-jazz vibe still makes for a visceral experience, regardless of whether not you can actually follow Quazarz’ path. They continue to eschew standard song structures in favor of free-flowing compositions whose direction is guided by instinct.
Butler once admitted to NPR that when he’s writing and recording, he’s not wholly concerned with the specifics of his intention: A line will come to him, he’ll record it, and later, when he listens back, he’ll have no clue where it came from. Improvisation is crucial to their process; they capture impulse on record, and crucially, have the confidence to let that raw expression stand. They strike a dichotomous balance of opposing feelings: joy and pain, relaxation and tension, staring at the stars with two feet planted firmly on the ground.
After four records, it would be foolish to expect any sort of formula from Shabazz Palaces. The closest analogue to the off-kilter rhythms and shifting time signatures might be El-P’s hallucinogenic panic-attack production, or the cosmic vibes of the Brainfeeder label, but Butler’s group has always felt shockingly unique. This time around, the edges of the Quazarz universe feel smoother, the ride less jarring. The low end is still intense, but it feels more like a deep tissue massage than a trunk-rattling rumble. They’re still manipulating vocal samples into space-age instruments (“Parallax”) but you won’t hear much of Maraire’s mbira, and even the syncopated rhythms feel staid and conventional. It’s quite possibly the most accessible and coherent music in the group’s catalog, but somehow the toned-down levels of weird feel disappointing.
Still, Gangster Star and Jealous Machines are essential counter-programming against the indoctrination of the screen-based economy—and a refreshing example of art and expression wholly unconcerned with convention. Butler has always attacked lesser rappers, daring them to elevate their art; his forceful confidence is meant to challenge “your favorite rapper” to push their own boundaries, to re-think just why they do things the way they’ve been done. Because to follow the path most traveled is to maintain the status quo, one both regressive and actively oppressive. And if you’re comfortable with the status quo of “Amurderca,” what exactly does that say about you?


On an adventurous new album, the New York hardcore band populates a swamp of chugs with weird creatures of electronica and sudden clearings of melodic, galloping punk.

Trouble the Water

I saw Corpus, the label formed around New York hardcore punk band Show Me the Body, participate in the Red Bull Culture Clash in Brooklyn earlier this year. It’s a corporate event modeled on dancehall soundclash culture, where crews of musicians face off on opposing stages. From one corner of the Greenpoint venue Warsaw, one of Corpus’ opponents, the DJ collective Half Moon, proclaimed that they “represent Brooklyn. The real Brooklyn.” Taunts are part of the sportsmanship of a soundclash, but this one struck a nerve—on Corpus’ next turn, one of the label’s crew responded with an emphatic “Suck my dick!” This is an old problem for Corpus, Show Me the Body, and a lot of artists in New York: How weird can they get before they’re no longer “real”? How close to dance music will Show Me the Body be allowed to come before Redditors curl their lips?
On Trouble the Water, Show Me the Body’s third full-length album, their experimentations often strike gold. The band’s daring pays off when vocalist Julian Cashwan Pratt breaks his voice wide open on tracks that dig into sounds that are firsts for the band, and consummate what were previously flirtations with dance music. On “Radiator,” a single chanted refrain of “Don’t it make you wanna go home?” with double-tracked vocals calls up the Ramones. The band pairs the look at punk’s past with one from its future, overlaying the whole track with an incessant synthesizer belch. Whereas on their previous full-length, 2019’s Dog Whistle, they leaned primarily on their proficiency for creating menacing atmosphere, throughout Trouble the Water, the band populates what might otherwise be a swamp of chugs with weird creatures of electronica and sudden clearings of melodic, galloping punk. On “Demeanor” and “Using It,” they switch between hardcore and noise, sometimes fluidly, sometimes abruptly; press materials attribute the glitchy textures to bassist Harlan Steed. “I wanna feel what I’ve never felt before,” Pratt growls over “Demeanor.” Yes!
Trouble the Water is also a showcase for Pratt’s expanding talents as a vocalist and a lyricist. He roars, shrieks, leers: On “Food From Plate,” he breaks suddenly from a credible death-metal bark to a light chuckle. Right after “They think it’s sweet” in his trademark snarl on “War Not Beef” comes “They think it’s e-e-easy” in a mocking falsetto, before the tempo hikes and the track tumbles forward in double time. He is a shapeshifter, becoming a different entity nearly every second. The first half of “WW4” is melancholy, and by the end, the very same lyrics are a martial chant.
The waging of war is a consistent concern on Trouble the Water. “They don’t belong here!” Pratt spits on the chorus of lead single “We Came to Play,” and “I don’t regret violence” on opening track “Loose Talk.” Gentrification and a fierce hostility to the changing New York remain a lyrical focus. I think this disposition reveals why Show Me the Body find it more difficult to shake off sneers like the ones thrown at them at Warsaw, aimed at their authenticity. When you wield the double-edged sword of Not Fucking With Certain Shit, you can get cut: laughed at for cringey interviews or called assholes for swatting phones out of the hands of the audience. Show Me the Body are in the arena, where they choose to be, where they belong. Here, you can’t get by being a guy who everyone likes. You have to be really fucking good.


The Swedish electronic artist Vanbot and two collaborators made this new album while journeying along the Trans-Siberian Railway—but they can’t quite sustain its immersive mood.

Siberia

You can make music anywhere these days. Laptops can pack in all the audio-processing power of a high-end studio. Singers can roll over in bed, reach for their smartphone, and record a fleeting melody before the cobwebs have cleared; techno producers can bang out a beat on their tablet while they’re sitting on the can. Electronic music’s mobile recording methods have spawned an entire mini-genre of photographs depicting EDM producers peering purposefully at Ableton while in transit. But why stop there? For musicians of a more bohemian stripe, why not get off the grid entirely?
That’s the premise of the Swedish electronic musician Vanbot’s third album, Siberia. Gripped by the desire to break out of her routine, Vanbot—born Ester Ideskog—and two collaborators boarded the Trans-Siberian Railway in Moscow. Seventeen days later, they disembarked in Beijing with a bunch of dirty socks in their suitcases and a newly completed album on their hard drives. Everything that we hear on Siberia was written and recorded in their train compartment and at various stops along the way; to preserve the integrity of the project’s constraints, they opted not to do any additional recording upon their return to Sweden.
It must have been a hell of a trip. A short video documents the blurry romance of the 4,735-mile journey: lonely birch forests glimpsed through rain-streaked windows; waves lapping against Lake Baikal’s stony shore; horseback riding on the Mongolian steppes. Little of that actually comes through in the music, however. With the exception of the occasional moment of muted train noise snaking through the background, there are few clues to the context of the album’s creation aside from the place names used as subtitles: “On the Fly (Omsk),” “Collide (Krasnoyarsk),” etc.
Still, that’s logical—after all, a Matthew Herbert-style audio collage patched together out of clattering rails and shrieking train whistles could have been unbearably ponderous. And the record, which strikes a balance between electro-pop and more abstracted soundscapes, begins promisingly enough; “Not That Kind (Moscow)” weaves an appealingly mysterious spell, rocking and swaying with a gentle, hypnotic motion. The syncopated beat recalls Apparat’s crunchy machine percussion, and suggestive little details—a burst of clarinet, a squiggle of analog noise—break briefly through the echo-soaked haze and disappear just as swiftly, like flashes of human life glimpsed in the passing taiga.
But Ideskog and her collaborators can’t quite sustain that immersive mood. Perhaps that’s because they’re trying too hard to capture rail travel’s extended sensation of suspended reality, all those fleeting emotions of days and nights in constant motion. Tempos across the album tend to linger somewhere between andante and plodding; everything, from the synths to the electronic drums to Ideskog’s own breathy soprano, swims in a fog of echo and distortion. There are moments of interest along the way. The instrumental “Yekaterinburg” is intriguingly dreamlike, its wheezing organs evocative of a faded carousel. “Louder (Ulan-Ude)” is an appealingly wistful take on dream-pop power balladry, part M83 and part “Take My Breath Away.” But the album’s omnipresent haze of yearning never gives way to any more specific emotions, and Ideskog’s vague lyrical conceits—“Stay with me”; “Get lost and found/To float not drown”; “I didn’t mean to hurt you, no”—never quite measure up to the magnitude of the scenery around her.
As it happens, Vanbot’s isn’t the first album made along the same route. The French musician Thylacine undertook a remarkably similar project on his 2016 album Transsiberian, and his album is, if anything, even more unfocused. He goes to more effort to weave field recordings into his compositions, but there’s a fundamental disconnect between his melodic progressive house and the folk music he captures along the way. Vanbot, at least, stay true to their own muddled mood, and on “Close Enough (Ulan Bator),” samples of an encounter with Mongolian musicians are left as fuzzy as the remnants of the previous night’s dream. Throughout the album, Ideskog’s lyrics are preoccupied with ideas of distance and separation; at the album’s climax she sings, over and over, “I can’t get close enough,” as though all too aware of the gulf between her and the world whipping past the window. In his 1978 novel Picture Palace, Paul Theroux observes, “Travel is the saddest of pleasures,” adding, “It gave me eyes.” *Siberia *faithfully captures the wistfulness of the pilgrim’s journey—but it also suggests that the ears may be fickle traveling companions.


A live recording from 2016 captures the avant-rock titans jamming on the edge of oblivion.

Keiji Haino / Charles Hayward: A Loss Permitted...

A Loss Permitted

Keiji Haino and Charles Hayward have spent decades twisting through rock’s byways, slipping between the cracks of punk, noise, free improv, prog, music concrete, and on and on. If the rock pantheon’s ur-texts valorize righteous authenticity, Dyonisian sexual liberation, and noodly virtuosity, these two are undaunted inversions, Jungian shadows to that mainstream triumphant myth. You can identify either of them in an instant. In the case of Hayward, a founding member of This Heat, it’s that deep, British melancholy that floats somewhere between the looming apocalypse and something unknowably personal. For Haino, it doesn’t matter what instrument he finds himself on—guitar, vocals, hurdy-gurdy—everything comes out blazing with a stark, quasi-demonic spiritual force. In their hands, the basic tenets of rock music become a vessel for something more tectonic.
A Loss Permitted, recorded live in 2016, finds the two jamming on the edge of oblivion. From the go, the session is defined by a whisper/roar contrast, with Haino’s guitar slicing near total silence with darting serrations. Caked in reverb, his initial volleys feel like decayed transmissions from a distant realm, both urgent and remote. Without wasting any time, he stretches far out to one edge of the spectrum, as if to alert you to the violence which looms behind every moment of restraint.
The duo then quickly starts messing with understated atonal gestures, which initially come off a touch rote. These function as a kind of window dressing for the more shattering forays to come, as if Haino and Hayward want to sketch some mountains in the background of their otherwise starkly contrasting landscape. The interplay is loose but confident, using some of the 20th century’s most well-worn avant cliches to help them along.
Haino spends a not insignificant portion of the session on the mic—singing, wailing, and convulsing in Japanese. His yowl at the opening of track 10 lands somewhere between Iggy’s feral bellows on Fun House and the more guttural invocations of death metal. Set against a backdrop of the lightest feedback and some very occasional punctuations from Hayward, it makes for one of the more unsettling and riveting passages, especially when he descends into a hissing whisper. There’s something inhuman about Haino’s throat-shredding cries, something beyond emotion. They don’t translate to anything as pedestrian as anger, anxiety, or pain so much as their own sonic necessity. Performers often describe themselves as channels for some greater force; listening to Haino draw out a piercingly high octave and then descend into writhing death throes might be as direct an expression of this idea as you could hope to find.
They aren’t on fire the whole time. There are sloppy passages and moments when they’re caught rummaging around just long enough for momentum to flag. The piano that winds through the set feels, at times, like a warmed-up leftover from the early-1970s European improv scene. But they always seem to pull it through, often led by Haino’s unabashed theartrics. His seething incantations, accompanied by otherworldly feedback groans, usher in a vital final run somewhere around the 30 minute mark. You can feel the energy coalesce, the players suddenly coursing with energy, like a pair of large cats prowling the stage.
The album closes with ethereal upper-register drones and a last dash of piano. Haino has stepped away from the microphone, but we can hear his cries in the distance, like a hermit wandering into the woods. A lonesome motif is sketched out on the keys, Haino lets out one last wail, and suddenly, mid-moment, the music evaporates. The last 20 seconds of the album are silent. You might expect applause, a “thank you” from Hayward, one last crescendo—anything, really, to let you know it was over. This moment may be the most affecting on the LP, the moment of uncertain dangling on the edge of a void. That’s where they took you, and that’s where they leave you.


On Strange Mercy, Annie Clark ditches Marry Me's naivety and Actor's ostentatious arrangements, boosts the inventive guitar playing, and ends up with her most potent and cathartic release yet.

Strange Mercy

Directed by French New Wave great Éric Rohmer, 1972's Chloe in the Afternoon tells of a man caught between fidelity and a stylish old friend named Chloe, who usually pops up at his office after lunch. But just when it looks like the two are going to consummate their affair, the husband is struck with a crisis of conscience and runs back home to his wife. The opening track on Annie Clark's third album as St. Vincent is also called "Chloe in the Afternoon", and while Clark has acknowledged the influence of Rohmer's film on the song, she takes the story to a darker, more dominatrix-y place. In her telling, Chloe carries a "black lacquered horse-hair whip," and, presumably, is paid to use it on white-collar exhibitionists looking for a sadistic tea-time fix. Clark's monstrously corroded guitar riff stands in for the bruised skin and wincing faces; it's hard to tell if she's singing as the person wearing heels or the person being stepped on with them, and that's most definitely the point.
Across three albums, the Dallas native has become a master of subverting her picture-perfectness with violence, rage, and mystery-- "I'll make you sorry," sang Clark in creepy lullaby tones on the very first song on her debut album. The juxtaposition is naturally intriguing, a sophisticated twist on finding out that the horror-movie killer was actually the girl next door all along. "Physically, I'm a very demure-looking person," Clark said in a recent Pitchfork interview, "but I certainly have as much aggression or anger as the next person, and that's got to come out somehow." On her fine, art-rocking debut, Marry Me, those feelings of hurt, loss, and bloodlust could translate a tad cutesy. (On new track "Cheerleader", the lines, "I've played dumb when I knew better/ Tried too hard just to be clever," sound more self-consciously frank than usual.) Follow-up Actor found Clark over-embellishing at times, adding superfluous strings and flutes that often muddied her message.
But Clark's recent live Big Black covers saw her taking the pretty/ugly contrast to raw new levels: "I think I fucked your girlfriend once, maybe twice," she sang, fervently, on "Bad Penny", "I fucked all your friends' girlfriends-- now they hate you!" And anyone who's seen the Berklee dropout do her seizured duckwalk in concert while soloing on unhinged tracks like "Your Lips Are Red" knows her not-so-secret weapon is a lurching guitar style somewhere between Robert Fripp's sheet-metal prog and Tom Morello's 10-ton riffage. On Strange Mercy, she ditches Marry Me's naivety and Actor's ostentatious arrangements, boosts the inventive guitar playing, and ends up with her most potent and cathartic release yet.
Some tracks build like a hot kettle, puffing out ragged smoke in the form of instrumental curlicues. "Surgeon" finds Clark zonked, despondent, paralyzed. "Turn off the TV, wade in bed, a blue and a red, a little something to get along," she sings, "best, finest surgeon, come cut me open." And soon enough, the song revives itself with a bursting synth freak-out courtesy of gospel keyboardist Bobby Sparks. "Cheerleader" breaks on its enormous hook, with Clark singing, "I, I, I, I, I don't wanna be a cheerleader no more," each "I" pounding down hard, emphatically stating its independence. And it's Clark's manic guitar-- sounding like exploding radio static-- that cuts through a relationship's indecisive fickleness on "Northern Lights". On that song, she sings, "Gotta get young fast gotta get young quick/ Gotta make this last if it makes me sick," and the topic of aging and lost youth is brought up several times on the album.
At 28, Clark seems to be sorting through her own existential artistic dilemmas. A champagne year is supposed to be celebrated when you turn the same age as the day you were born, but "Champagne Year" finds the singer-- born September 28, 1982-- in a decidedly non-bottle-popping mood. Her voice takes on a gorgeous creak on the nebulous ballad, as she sings, "I make a living telling people what they wanna hear/ It's not a killing but it's enough to keep the cobwebs clear." An almost-30 indie musician's lament? Perhaps. Meanwhile, the galloping "Hysterical Strength" employs some magical thinking while dealing with death. When Clark isn't bulldozing through time and space with her fretwork, she's contemplating her place with care. The balance is something to behold.
While Strange Mercy's more propulsive workouts-- including the single "Cruel", Clark's purest pop song to date-- are quick to snag attention, the slow burners hit just as heavily. The playful "Dilettante" combines the mutant funk of David Bowie's "Fashion" with the understated genius of D'Angelo's Voodoo, and has Clark possibly propositioning a prophet: "Oh, Elijah, don't make me wait/ What is so pressing that you can't undress me, anyway?" Closer "Year of the Tiger" is a stark summation of end-times capitalism in a recession-stuck United States. Sounding like a Wall Street swindler, she slithers, "Italian shoes like these rubes know the difference/ Suitcase of cash in the back of my stick-shift... Oh America, can I owe you one?" And the delicate title track involves a child, a father stuck behind prison glass, and a breaking point in the form of a refrain: "If I ever meet the dirty policeman who roughed you up, no I don't know what." Her threat here is not a gimmick or a subversion; it's irrational, confused, and real.
Specific names (Chloe, Elijah) and times ("Year of the Tiger", "Champagne Year") give the sense that Strange Mercy exists in its own universe. As does its music, which skips through art-rock touchstones from Talking Heads to Kate Bush to Peter Gabriel without relinquishing a bit of its originality. After all, those artists were trying to create new sounds, an ever-more-difficult task in a culture steeped in its own detritus. Here, Clark's role-playing is grounded in emotions that are as cryptic as they are genuine and affecting. And when her voice can't bear it, her guitar does the screaming.


Resurrecting a strand of mid-2000s New York hip-hop built on tightly wound samples and a reduced emphasis on bass, Purple Haze 2 is forged in the spirit of the original.

Purple Haze 2

Cam’ron’s career hit its zenith with Purple Haze. Take it from the man himself, who regularly calls it his greatest album. And with good reason: Purple Haze fully realized the joy of Cam’s idiosyncratic humor, dadaist impulses, and high-fashion fantasies. A decade and a half on from its release, it remains the purest distillation of the rapper’s polychromatic vision of Harlem.
Can Cam’ron can still cut it at that level? His output has slowed, and his last major outing was on 2018’s dismal Dipset record Diplomatic Ties. Sure, Cam has talked up a Purple Haze sequel for years, but it’s not unreasonable to wonder if the 43-year-old just stamped the title onto these 16 tracks to puff up interest in his new music. Fear not—Purple Haze 2 is very much forged in the spirit of the original. Resurrecting a strand of mid-2000s New York hip-hop built on tightly wound samples and a reduced emphasis on bass, the record has little interest in chasing modern rap trends. And while it doesn’t take a laryngologist to tell that Cam’s voice has thickened over the years, his flow finds a smooth pocket and his writing is as solid as it’s been in ages.
Cam works hard to evoke the spirit of his opus from the opening bell. Long-time collaborators the Heatmakerz build “Toast to Me” around a vocal loop and crashing drums as the star allows his knotty writing style and boundless references to run wild. Here, Cam pays homage to Harlem hoodlum Rich Porter, compares his driveway to the Golden State Warriors’ championship run because his cars sit “back-to-back,” and criticizes the American healthcare system (“Doctors, insurance, nah, they can’t afford all that/One day you’ll be coughin’, next week you in a coffin, Jack”). If nothing else, Purple Haze 2 proves Cam’ron’s brain still doesn’t operate like that of any other rapper.
As has often been the case in recent years, Cam’s lyrics skew more towards the autobiographical than the surreal. It’s fun hearing him reminisce about his 2003 appearance on The O’Reilly Factor and gleeful “I got dirt on you doggy” taunts of its host. But more revealing are his ruminations on his early life. Over the nostalgic piano chords of “Losin’ Weight 3,” Cam revisits himself as a 14-year-old determined to buy his grandmother a washing machine. When local drug dealers who admire his basketball skills refuse to recruit him into their operation, Cam and a friend instead rob a couple at gunpoint and lie to his grandmother that the new appliance came from money won on the court. It’s classic Cam—flooded with rich detail and three-dimensional characters. When he recalls growing up alongside the late Big L and “the dude supposedly killed him” on “This Is My City,” his famously strict rules on snitching force him to concede, “When the time’s right I will tell you about these villains.” It’s a reminder that, even after all these years, there’s still so much of the Cam’ron story we don’t know.
Yet if the original Purple Haze is the creative spirit powering this record, it’s also the standard to which it will inevitably be compared. The gulf between the two is apparent: Instead of “The Dope Man,” Cam’s brilliant East Coast re-imagination of NWA’s ode to a drug dealer, we get him unimaginatively rapping over the familiar sounds of Mary Jane Girls’ “All Night Long” on “Keep Rising.” There’s no potential single here to match “Down and Out,” the best 2004 Kanye West beat that Ye didn’t put on The College Dropout. Guest spots from Dipset are missed, with only Jim Jones making a late appearance on closer “Straight Harlem,” and strangely for one of the funniest skit-makers of all time, there are zero skits. But never mind these gripes. While it’s no match for the original, Purple Haze 2 still gifts us Cam’ron at his most natural and approachable, rapping for the joy of the form.


The sole LP from short-lived Hamburg garage band the Monks now ranks in the upper echelon of 1960s gems. This new set pulls together 15 minutes’ worth of odds and ends recorded during their final year.

Hamburg Recordings 1967

The Monks’ tenure as Hamburg’s premier tonsure-coiffed proto-punks lasted barely two years—they released their Black Monk Time LP in 1966 and, following a few more singles, disbanded by 1967. While playing clubs in the same seedy Reeperbahn district that the Beatles had lit up only a few years earlier, the American G.I. soldiers in the Monks followed their own path. Filled with manic, rhythm-focused arrangements that employed Dave Day’s banjo as an auxiliary percussive layer, Black Monk Time ranks in the upper echelon of obscure ’60s gems with its own voice, not trying to imitate contemporary chart-toppers. Like Silver Apples’ self-titled 1968 debut and few others, it still sounds new in the 21st century.
Following a 2009 collection of early demos, Hamburg Recordings 1967 pulls together what is posited as the last unreleased Monks material, 15 minutes worth of odds and ends recorded during the band’s final year. But, fun as it is, it’s mostly ends. While Monks fans will surely be glad to have any more examples of the band at work, only one of the songs feels as developed as anything on Black Monk Time or their subsequent singles. Recorded during February 1967 sessions for the band’s final 7” “Love Can Tame the Wild,” the disc-opening “I’m Watching You” taps into the quintet’s tightly-wound art-rock menace with an apparent effortlessness, guitar and organ riffs spiraling into a nearly cymbal-less slash. It was a sound the band spent much of the previous years refining, a rhythmic muse that had drummer Roger Johnston removing extraneous percussion, much like his contemporary Moe Tucker across the Atlantic in the Velvet Underground.
Though each song is charming and Monk-like in its own ways, pointing in a few otherwise undocumented directions, the remaining four tracks of Hamburg Recordings 1967 serve to highlight what was so remarkable about the Monks’ earlier work. Recorded onstage after-hours at the Top Ten Club—where the Beatles lived in the attic six years previous—the remaining songs reveal a still-developing band, seemingly moving away from the darker vibes for which they would be remembered. Just as the nearly harsh grooves and blunt lyrics of Black Monk Time sometimes parallel the Velvet Underground, the vaudevillian lilt of “Julia” seems to predict the music hall tendencies of Sgt. Pepper, or merely echoes the electrified jug bandisms of the Lovin’ Spoonful.
Like the Beatles before them, the Monks churned out music for six hours a night (eight or more on weekends), covering the hits of the day, including Chuck Berry, British Invasion singles, and surf tunes. But the originals sounded little like that, and—in the band’s accounts—they kept hammering away until they sounded even more original. With a number of previously unseen candid photos reproduced in the packaging, the Monks (or just “Monks” as their business cards and stylized organ cabinet read) look as if they are from a time of their own. They stare down future listeners with a severe post-Beatnik/pre-psychedelic vibe from an alternate time-track, each band member sporting the literal and ominous opposite of a moptop, shaving the domes of their heads.
But little of the unheard Monks on Hamburg Recordings 1967 communicates quite the same worked-over attention to detail emitted by Blank Monk Time, nor the blunt anti-war sentiments. On “P.O. Box 3291,” they sound more like a standard-issue garage band. Across the disc’s final two tracks, an uncredited trumpet player doubles Larry Clark’s organ in places to create an imitation horn section, pointing the way towards yet another future the Monks didn’t have.
With a trumpet part that recalls Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Turn on Your Love Light,” the disc-closing instrumental “Yellow Grass” maybe sounds more like their Hamburg contemporaries, and less like the weirdos that record collectors would revere decades later. But with no vintage live Monks reels yet discovered in a German attic, Hamburg Recordings 1967 is the last sound of a band still being born.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit an art-rock masterpiece, a thrilling synthesis of artifice and Afrobeat.

Remain in Light

The German playwright Bertolt Brecht is credited with the aphorism “a theater without beer is just a museum.” No one can point to where he actually said it, but let us indulge a system of attribution where publication and page are less important than what we feel like Brecht would say. The idea is appealing: that art without a visceral element—without something that hits your gut and intoxicates you—is dead. As much as we like to think about art, art is not for our brains. At nearly every turn, Remain in Light thwarts cognitive sense to appeal to the gut. Or maybe the limbic system? I’m not a doctor—whatever part of human physiology is responsible for getting funky.
By 1980, the conflict in music between what was thought and what was felt was in full cry. As disco continued to monopolize music you could dance to, rock reached a point of maximum theoretical sincerity. Pink Floyd’s The Wall, possibly the least ironic recording of all time, was the No. 1 album in America for 15 weeks. It was finally unseated by Bob Seger’s Against the Wind, which was knocked out of the top spot by Billy Joel’s Glass Houses. Ostensibly, these were works of deep sentiment. To a generation of punks, though, they were rock at its most bloodless and calculating.
Although they were a new wave band, Talking Heads operated within New York’s larger punk scene, which was predicated on rejecting the artifice of late-’70s rock. Punk sought a music that was felt and not just performed. And yet, Talking Heads were conspicuously artificial. David Byrne made his approach to both songwriting and performance as unnatural as possible. He wrote Dada lyrics about parking lots and fire. His vocals were marred by cracks and unnatural modulations that thwarted melody. Onstage, his movements gave the impression of nervousness but, like, a performed nervousness: When he danced, he seemed to be making fun of dancing.
In short, he acted fake. But his fakery was so consistent, its logic so continuously evident, that it became a convincing public identity. In performance and on record, there was no part of Byrne that was not himself. As a result, his artifice seemed more honest than Seger’s verge-of-tears yarling or Pink Floyd’s proggy self-pity. The central insight of Talking Heads—what made them not just weird but exciting and relevant—was that their art-house affectation felt more sincere than a lot of American culture.
The band’s progression can be understood as a continual overlaying of artifices. While other punk acts pursued authenticity by stripping down, Talking Heads built up. They first performed as Talking Heads in 1975, opening for the Ramones at CBGB as a trio, with Byrne on vocals and guitar, Tina Weymouth on bass, and Chris Frantz on drums. Shortly before releasing their first studio album, Talking Heads: 77, they added keyboardist and guitarist Jerry Harrison. They began collaborating with producer Brian Eno for More Songs About Buildings and Food in 1978, followed by Fear of Music in 1979. Eno kept pushing the band toward new sounds and instruments until the Remain in Light tour was traveling with 10 musicians in the band.
This mass created the impression that Talking Heads was a collective—one that might embark on a familiar song only to arrive somewhere wild and strange. “There is something essential about losing control over what you do,” Weymouth told the Canadian zine Pig Paper in 1977. This would also turn out to be a central insight, as the band increasingly coupled its conceptual experiments with rhythm arrangements designed to make its core members—and its audience—lose control.
Talking Heads’ belief that artifice could feel more real than fake sincerity paved the way for future art rock acts, but Remain in Light differs from successors like Laurie Anderson or Life Without Buildings in that you can dance to it. The rhythm arrangements on this album are irresistible. They are the visceral complement to Byrne’s conceptual lyrics about air conditioning and his face. This combination of gutsy rhythms and heady words elevates songs like “Crosseyed and Painless” from nonsense to dream logic. What begins as an idea becomes, in its fullest expression, a feeling.
The synthesis succeeds due to Byrne and Eno’s incorporation of a third, unfamiliar element: Afrobeat, a style of music that became popular in Ghana and Nigeria during the 1970s. The pioneering artist of Afrobeat was Fela Kuti, whose 1973 album Afrodisiac Eno played for Byrne the night they met in 1977. According to Eno, Afrodisiac would become the template for Remain in Light.
Afrobeat combined American funk and jazz influences with West-African polyrhythms, a term drummers use to stop people from talking to them at parties. Essentially, a polyrhythm superimposes beats in different time signatures over one another. You can hear this technique in isolation during the opening bars of Kuti’s “Why Black Man Dey Suffer,” which puts three sets of triplets over cut time before building to a complete rhythm. Whole dissertations are written about this branch of music theory. Even the simple explanations are impenetrable to people without percussion backgrounds, but the head will bob independently of the twitching feet, and there you have in dancing what the brain refuses to grasp.
Talking Heads experimented with polyrhythms on 1979’s Fear of Music with “I, Zimbra,” speeding them up and maintaining an overarching 4/4 beat. The opening track of Remain in Light, “Born Under Punches,” preserves the frenetic speed but dispenses with beat in favor of rhythm. It bursts into a multilayered guitar, bass, and drum pattern that resists counting but demands dancing, yanking the listener into a cloud of short, sharp noises with only involuntary movements to guide us through.
Over this background, Byrne bellows: “Take a look at these hands/The hand speaks/The hand of a government man.” Later he adds, “I’m so thin.” These words do not make sense. They mimic the condition of the listener amid the swirl of polyrhythms, though, caught in a moment of reflection that yields no insight but only feelings. It is the sound of stage-two cocaine addiction, when you are always doing something but never know what to do. The hand speaks: We lose control of ourselves, and what we have done becomes our new identity. The elliptical lyrics at the beginning of Remain in Light can be read as an artist’s statement: Taking their music in an unpredictable new direction, Talking Heads have found their essence by losing control over what they do.
And then there’s “Once in a Lifetime,” which remains enjoyable precisely because it resists interpretation. Its “You may find yourself/You may ask yourself” motif makes it clear that it is about experiencing a moment of alienation from your own life and taking stock—but to conclude what? The chorus is about where water is located. Byrne sings it in a call-and-response style with the rest of the band (also a signature feature of Afrobeat) and the ecstatic, congregational atmosphere makes it feel like an answer to the existential questions of the verses. But you cannot say what any of it means. This ineffable quality is what makes “Once in a Lifetime” feel like a moving song about the scope of your whole life no matter how many times you hear it.
Although Remain in Light has become an acknowledged classic, it retains a feeling of unfamiliarity. It is tempting to attribute this quality to Byrne’s obtuse lyrics, but the album’s instrumental arrangements also constitute a break with rock’s conventional forms. Weymouth’s bassline on “Crosseyed and Painless” crowds staccato bursts of notes into the first half of each measure, leaving the second half empty in a way that defines the percussion pattern. This technique, essential to funk, diverges from rock’s standard practice of using the bass to keep time. Perhaps the album’s greatest heresy, though, is its total absence of guitar riffs. Like Weymouth, Harrison prefers to use his instrument as a noisemaker. His howling fills on “Listening Wind” lend a foreboding, unpredictable atmosphere to lyrics that are as close as Byrne gets to conventional narrative. These tracks do not hew as strictly to Afrobeat forms as “Once in a Lifetime” or “Born Under Punches (The Heat Goes On),” but they still manage to introduce a coherent sound that is alien to mainstream rock.
Without Afrobeat, though, there is no Remain in Light. The central role of West-African polyrhythms in the album’s sound draws attention to a curious aspect of its longevity. Could a group of white musicians playing Afrobeat be taken sincerely in 2018? Virtually every genre of American music, including punk and especially rock, is taken from black forms. Afrobeat is not African-American, though; it’s straight-up African. The 21st-century sensibility finds something problematic in a band of white art-school types playing West African music. Earlier this year, the Beninese musician Angelique Kidjo released her own version of Remain in Light, which NPR described as “an authentic Afrobeat record” compared to the original. Given how closely Kidjo followed the Talking Heads’ arrangements, this description raises questions about what we mean when we say “authentic.”
The success of Remain in Light—undeniable regardless of our ideas about the degree to which artists should respect historically ethnic divisions between musical forms—forces us to reckon with the album’s contradictions. Rock is a more welcoming genre today than it was in 1980, and punk has never seemed closer to the perennial danger that it will become a parody of itself. Still, it is hard to imagine a current underground rock band like Joyce Manor taking a turn toward the music of the Nigerian Afropop star Davido without getting laughed into oblivion. The fact that Talking Heads pulled it off so spectacularly, even 38 years ago, is a tribute to their aptitude as students of music.
There is something motivational about Remain in Light, not just as dance music but as expression. On “Seen and Not Seen,” Byrne speculates that a man might change his appearance “by keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in the back of his mind.” It’s an absurd commentary on the nature of vanity, but it also declares a touching faith in artistic willpower—a faith Remain in Light rewards. The album presents such a strange artistic vision, foreign to what came before but operating as though it were the culmination of a long tradition, that it seems to declare the power of weirdness itself. To be not just strange but singular, to reinvent a form in a way that you can dance to, to smuggle beer into the museum: This is the visceral thrill of art. We want to deny it on theoretical grounds, but we can’t. So we must revise our theories.


Seven years after his breakout hit, the UK house producer’s debut album aims to bridge generation-defining dance sounds with more emotive electronic fare, but mostly struggles to find its way.

Duality

Duke Dumont rode the mid-2010s wave of radio-friendly deep house into superstardom. Alongside contemporaries like Disclosure, he blended classic house tropes with the punchy clarity of modern EDM pop. In two years, Dumont topped the singles chart in his native United Kingdom twice and hit No. 1 on the U.S. Dance Club chart five times. Now, seven years after his breakout single, “Need U (100%),” Dumont’s debut LP only highlights how far dance music has moved on from the era when his soulful vocal chops and frictionless beats felt like a breath of fresh air.
Duality takes its title from what Dumont claims are the two sides of his artistic self: consummate hitmaker and bold experimentalist. (“NO GENRE, NO BOUNDARIES, NO RESTRAINTS AND NO FEAR,” he asserted when he announced the album.) This split plays out, unsubtly, in the sequencing of the LP, with its dancier A-side and more introspective, freewheeling B-side. But it’s nearly impossible, on either front, to get a sense of anything that informs Dumont’s vision beyond unobjectionable studio chops and a residual penchant for clichéd EDM builds. The productions’ defining quality is that they are sufficiently devoid of idiosyncrasies to serve as adequate vehicles for guest vocalists.
This approach didn’t always result in mediocrity. Dumont’s 2012 single “The Giver” spun a passing phrase from the late Chicago diva Kim English into an addictive groove, while “Need U (100%)” was a thunderous piece of UKG-inflected house, even without A*M*E’s entrancing vocals. But the songs on Duality rarely approach the vitality of those tracks. Lead single “Therapy,” with a forceful performance from Yola, ought to be a knockout, but a clumsy jumble of breaks and piano house keeps it from greatness. Other features are more criminally misused; on “Obey,” rudimentary techno stabs and stale acid breakdowns neuter an anti-establishment oration from legendary house vocalist Roland Clark. (It’s a shame, because Clark’s spoken-word efforts, as another one of his recent collaborations reveals, can be effective when they’re paired with less cluttered productions.)
On the second half of the album, How to Dress Well is recognizable on the vocoder-heavy endeavor “Together,” if only in timbre. This superficial ode to unity largely falls flat, but that’s not all Tom Krell’s fault. At the emotional apex, when the track swells into syncopated blasts of synth and crash cymbal, Dumont makes a brazen attempt at triggering the intoxicating main-stage euphoria of one-time rave wunderkinds like Porter Robinson or Madeon. Then the overblown arena-rock drum fill kicks in, and the whole thing ends up sounding like a facsimile of other, more emotionally affecting songs—a cheap play to the rafters. It’s a staggering disappointment, especially from a producer who once touted his hitmaking foresight when it came to the electronic music zeitgeist. “This will sound arrogant, but before ‘Need U (100%),’ there were no house records that got to No.1 in the charts,” Dumont said back in 2016, proudly proclaiming that his single “Ocean Drive” would “spawn copycat records, which will inevitably be commercially more successful”—apparently having his sour-grapes cake and eating it too.
Fitting, then, that a reprised version of that last song sits in the middle of his debut album’s tracklist, half a decade removed from its original release. The lush synth pop of “Ocean Drive” has retained much of its charm, and it’s the still best moment on the record, far more memorable than its closest counterpart (the Say Lou Lou collaboration “Nightcrawler”) or album closer “Let Me Go,” featuring Ry X, which begins as a Sam Smithian ballad before inflating itself with middling trance arpeggios. Duality wants to be the moment that Duke Dumont re-introduces himself as a producer who’s capable of both generation-defining dance records and more emotive electronic work. Instead, you’re left with the sense that in a post-EDM world, he doesn’t know where to go next.


Experimental label mappa editions’ elegiac collection of avian electronics is full of deliberately laid textures and out-there approaches to composition.

Various Artists: Synthetic Bird Music

The trees are disappearing, and so are their inhabitants. In the past 20 years, global forest coverage has dropped by roughly 10 percent, and one-third of bird species are expected to go extinct by the end of this century. Jakub Juhás, head of Slovakian label mappa editions, is surely aware of this. Over the years, the label has built a hall of mirrors from environmental recordings and experimental compositions; a look into its catalog reveals haunted cave dives, explorations of rust, and snowed-in a capella. It is a body of work interested in solitude, intimacy, and hushed electronics. Mappa’s latest release, Synthetic Bird Music, compiles 32 electronic and experimental music pieces inextricably bound up with nature. The works range from years old to brand new, but they are joined by a shared interest in organic and electronic synthesis. It is the sound of musicians the world over reckoning with an ongoing climate catastrophe.
As early as the 17th century, professional whistlers—siffleurs—worked the vaudeville circuit and ventured into the woods, mocking mockingbirds and playing alongside nightingales. Synthetic Bird Music picks up this torch with a newfound urgency, conjuring birdsong that doesn’t exist and engineering accompaniment for birds that do. It is dominated by slow pieces and brain-bending synth work, with elegiac keyboards echoing the thinning populations they’re meant to emulate. On “La guardian de las ondas radiales 1” (“The Guardian of the Radio Waves”), Makakinho del Amor (aka Tomás Tello) wraps bird calls in a blanket of static and high-pitched keyboards. Hmot’s “Irekle Qoştar” takes a few bits of birdsong and cranks up the distortion until they sound like a transmission from a dying ham radio. Much of the compilation works like this: It is a swan dive into the uncanny valley, sitting somewhere between real and imagined, playful and unsettling.
Synthetic Bird Music outlines a world of approaches to birdsong and its accompaniment: Found-sound industrial techno (Native Instrument’s “Vögel Unserer Heimat”), wigged-out Fourth-World ambience (Tomutonttu’s “Harpusta / Tarjous”), avian post-rock (Baldruin’s “Sonderbare Ereignisse am Lake Hillier”), and haunted-house synth workouts (Mike Cooper’s “The Wild Birds of Bluesealand”). The record brings together artists from umpteen scenes—Bratislava and Berkshire, San Francisco and Sydney—but each work feels like part of an unspoken narrative, an atlas stuffed with imagined landscapes. (It helps that the record is arranged chronologically, moving from pre-dawn birdsong to late-night ambience.) Synthetic Bird Music functions as a survey of contemporary electronic-music experimentation, looking across the globe for deliberately laid textures and out-there approaches to composition.
On a record filled with scraggly noise and electroacoustic trickery, Øyvind Torvund’s standout “Wind Up Paradise Birds” comes as a bit of a shock. The composition, pulled from 2019’s The Exotica Album, imagines flutes, saxophones, and a chamber orchestra in the center of an aviary. In context, it’s disorienting: a baroque celebration of nature situated early in a record concerned with its erosion. Even there, though, its instrumentation looks at the natural world through a technological lens—its birds sound suspiciously similar to short-wave radio. Again and again, the artists featured on Synthetic Bird Music turn their ears towards thinning skies and the shudder of falling trees, constructing a memorial for an ecosystem that is quietly disappearing in a celebration of modern avant-garde electronics.


Nick Drake's original producer Joe Boyd organized a series of tribute concerts around the world to celebrate the British folk legend. Way to Blue is a companion compilation featuring Robyn Hitchcock, Vashti Bunyan, Scritti Politti's Green Gartside, Lisa Hannigan, and others.

Various Artists: Way to Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake

Way to Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake

In 2010 and 2011, producer Joe Boyd spearheaded a series of live shows in tribute to  Nick Drake, hand-picking performers to cover Drake’s songs. Boyd was not only a central figure in the 1960s folk revival on both sides of the Atlantic, but he produced Drake’s first two albums, Five Leaves Left in 1969 and Bryter Layter in 1970. Few knew Drake quite so well as Boyd, so few are so qualified to re-stage these songs in an affectionate tribute. The mood on Way to Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake, which collects highlights from the concerts, is reverent and dignified, occasionally rethinking arrangements but mostly adhering to the familiar orchestral swells, piano runs, and jazzy guitar licks.
Perhaps that’s the problem. Especially in 2013, 14 years after the VW ad that turned every car buyer into a Pink Moon fan, Way to Blue is too rigid in its approach and too timid in its interpretations to challenge or enlarge our perception of Drake. The tracklist includes several generations of artists, from Vashti Bunyan to Luluc, but with precious few exceptions, they turn Drake’s songs into mumbly folk-pop-- aggressively decorous and strangely passive. In fact, aside from the atrocious backing vocals on Shane Nicholson’s version of “Poor Boy”, the performances are perfectly adequate, but who wants adequate when you can easily pull up the originals, which still sound lovely and intense and devastating.
Despite Green Gartside’s noble yet safe reading of “Fruit Tree”, the only artist who truly gets under the skin of Drake’s music is his contemporary Vashti Bunyan. She manages to overcome the spectacle of the historical venue and deliver a truly meaningful and disarming reinterpretation of “Which Will”, savoring certain syllables and twisting the words into new and strange shapes. By comparison, Lisa Hannigan’s cover of “Black Eyed Dog” sounds self-consciously eccentric, her warbles and coos too practiced, but that’s preferable to Teddy Thompson’s colorless take on “River Man”.
Is it their fault for sounding so passive in their performances, or is it Boyd’s fault for restricting the possibilities and keeping the project so beholden to Drake’s legacy? Most likely the blame rests with everyone, but in truth the very concept of Way to Blue seems flawed: The setting is far too public for Drake’s private ruminations, which reinforces the idea that he lived his pain for public consumption. Boyd and his cohorts aren’t inviting you to sympathize with that pain, but to experience it voyeuristically. Or, to borrow some insight from Boyd’s book White Bicycles, in which he discusses a recent concert by Aretha Franklin: “Waves of self-congratulatory affection passed back and forth between [Franklin and the audience]: she claiming credit for recognizing what they wanted to hear; the audience adoring themselves for being so hip as to want the ‘real thing.’ The music was caught in the middle, lifeless and predictable.”
(Editor's note: This album was reviewed from an advance copy that contained applause between the songs. The applause was later removed from the final release. The original review had references to the applause that have been deleted.)


On her fourth album, Mitski makes a resounding personal statement and stakes out her territory as one of the most compelling voices in the sphere of indie rock.

Puberty 2

Depression and fits of anxiety have inspired plenty of great music, but there is something else taking shape in Mitski Miyawaki’s tense fourth album, Puberty 2: a detailed chronicling of the day-to-day interior struggle to be happy. The 25-year-old Brooklyn singer-songwriter is engaged in a larger struggle to pin down what, exactly, happiness is—at least for now, at that point in life when true adulthood starts to meet reality. Sometimes Mitski looks for contentedness in simple routine, like jogging or wearing a clean, white button-down. These small acts of control help stave off the larger dread, like not knowing how to pay rent or crawling out of her skin with wanderlust, feelings she addresses with incandescent punk rage on “My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars.”
Other times, Mitski wonders if lovers might ease some of this anxiety, mostly finding that they just add to it. She begins Puberty 2 with a clever song-length metaphor about the fleeting nature of happiness, likening it to the boy who comes over with cookies, comes in her, and leaves while she’s in the bathroom. On “A Loving Feeling,” she laments a lust that leaves her feeling lonely, via men who “only love [her] when they're all alone.” Songs like this and “Once More to See You” are as much homages to ’60s girl-group romance as they are send-ups of the submission and loneliness underlying many of the original hits. But placed in the present, these songs seem to tap into the frustration of love at a time when there are myriad ways to be with someone, many of them willfully undefined.
Puberty 2 is grounded in Mitski’s distorted guitar, and at times feels like it’s in direct conversation with the very notion of the indie rock canon. This makes the album sound simultaneously familiar and challenging, never more so than on lead single “Your Best American Girl,” where she taps directly into what made people love early Weezer and other ’90s bands favoring a catchy/fuzzy dichotomy. What a satisfying twist, this half-Japanese transplant taking the specific sounds that once served to lust over her very existence and using them to not only reclaim her identity, but also to ache after heartbreak. At first the chorus goes, “Your mother wouldn't approve of how my mother raised me/But I do, I think I do,” but by the song’s conclusion, Mitski has grown more certain, shifting crucially to, “But I do, I finally do.”
Though its appeal is immediate, a song like “Your Best American Girl” is not knocked off quickly—there are layers and layers of sound here, generated by just Mitski and her producer Patrick Hyland. She has a knack for mixing dynamics and errant noises like some people mix patterns in their wardrobe: It shouldn’t make sense, but it does. Consider the album’s climax, “Crack Baby,” where a chintzy-on-purpose beat meets eerily precise vocal phrasing recalling Annie Clark, falsetto “ooohs,” smoldering waves of spaghetti western guitar, and a full minute of wind rustling on a cliffside. As Mitski likens her yearning for now-distant memories of happiness to the pull of inadvertent addiction, she sets the scene with a curious lyrical juxtaposition between man-made bleakness and natural beauty: “Down empty streets sniffing glue, me and you/Blank open eyes watch the moon flower bloom.”
This is the experience of listening to Mitski: When you look closely, everything is a little trickier than it had once seemed. Puberty 2 plumbs second-wave emo in the storytelling, wistful dream-pop to blunt the pain, slow-simmering electronics, brusquely strummed folk-punk, bits of surf guitar, and plenty of ’60s pop hooks; none of them show up just once, though, so they all end up feeling incorporated into the album’s overall sound. Her editing eye is impeccable, which it needs to be when mixing this many patterns.
There is, of course, a very simple rule for pattern-mixing: there must be unity in the color palette. Mitski’s very Mitski-ness is what holds Puberty 2 together. This quality is not relegated simply to her wry and articulate lyrics, staggering and sharp as many of them are. I can’t imagine mistaking a Mitski song for another’s, and it’s in large part because of her voice, which stretches through different modes—deadpan disenfranchisement, smooth R&B, dream-pop croon, gasping-for-breath pleas, wall of harmonies (with herself). Yet she fully harnesses every voice on the album, guiding us through emotional terrain only she knows by heart.
Mitski honed this versatility on three previous LPs of distinct material, from the unsettling and arch piano fare of her 2012 debut Lush to 2014’s scrappy Bury Me at Makeout Creek, her breakthrough and first “rock” album. On Puberty 2, every note she’s played comes together. It’s a resounding personal statement and the clearest sign that while she might be an “indie rock” artist, she currently stands apart from—and above—much of the genre. She tackles bigger themes, gambles with higher musical stakes, and digs deeper into herself.
Ultimately, Puberty 2 is for anyone who knows the power struggle between what we feel and what we want to feel. Mitski plays it like she’s losing this game for much of the album, but she knows better than to leave us so low. By the stunning dénouement “A Burning Hill,” she calls a truce with herself: “I’m tired of wanting more, I think I’m finally worn.” “I’ll love some littler things,” she sighs, knowing that for someone so complicated, it’s probably impossible.