John Darnielle delves into the lore of 2002’s All Hail West Texas with a soft-rock opera that adds baroque arrangements to his brutal, tender storytelling.

Jenny From Thebes

Few working artists have accumulated a richer body of lore than the Mountain Goats. Across a vast catalog spanning more than 30 years, John Darnielle has developed a mythology with enough recurring characters and references to fill its own Wiki and support a number of dedicated blogs and podcasts. The Sophoclean title of new album Jenny From Thebes announces it as a continuation of the myth cycle. A sequel to Darnielle’s 2002 lo-fi masterpiece All Hail West Texas, his latest album revisits some of the most beloved characters and settings in the Mountain Goats universe.
That earlier album was a loose collection of story fragments about down-and-out people; making out the whole picture required some close reading. Jenny From Thebes doesn’t continue the story so much as fill out its absent center: Jenny, a recovering addict who runs a safehouse in a small West Texas town. When Jenny has appeared in other Mountain Goats songs, she has functioned as a vague emblem of freedom: riding in on her custom Kawasaki motorcycle, promising escape. These songs bring Jenny back down to the sordid everyday while also imbuing that desperate reality with the soft glow of magic.
Despite the thematic callback to Darnielle’s home-recorded early work, the Mountain Goats have never sounded so baroque. Working with producer Trina Shoemaker, the now-standard lineup of Darnielle, bassist Peter Hughes, drummer Jon Wurster, and multi-instrumentalist Matt Douglas gets a lift with expansive string and horn arrangements, and Bully’s Alicia Bognanno contributes icy stabs of echoing guitar. If this is a rock opera, it is a soft-rock opera. The plush arrangements insulate the often brutal scenes depicted in the lyrics. The jittery strums and surging backbeat on “Murder at the 18th St. Garage” make its titular crime—Jenny killing her scumbag landlord—feel like a victory. In the standout “Water Tower,” a forensic account of Jenny disposing of the body turns into a lullaby: “Float downstream,” Darnielle murmurs over a soft bed of guitars. It’s the sound of tragedy recollected from afar, not reported live from the scene.
In a way, Jenny From Thebes is precisely about the struggle to find the right distance: from the past, from other people, from ourselves. Darnielle is a master of the perspective shot; he is often at his most vivid when writing in the second person. The narrator of “Cleaning Crew,” a loping response song to West Texas’ “Source Decay,” imagines the pain of the addressee in medically precise detail, almost as if it were her own. The tenderness of these observations, together with the warmth of the vocal delivery, ensures that it takes a few verses to realize that the song is actually a farewell.
Early in the strings-driven “Same as Cash,” where the speaker tries to reconstruct Jenny’s inner life, this realization emerges: “I can only see the scene secondhand/I can only try to understand.” This statement underlines Jenny’s tragic flaw: a compulsion to take on others’ burdens until she breaks. It also happens to be a pretty good encapsulation of what the Mountain Goats do well. Darnielle has spent his career trying to get inside the heads of injured athletes, dead celebrities, pagan warriors, and struggling junkies, finding the humanity in their particular suffering. The acknowledgement that we can never have total access is far from damning—it’s what gives his songs their license to operate. Perhaps that’s why those lines about our flailing attempts to connect appear near the beginning of “Same as Cash” and not the end. Rather than cutting the story short, they clear the ground for it to continue.


The latest album from Stephan Jenkins’ alt-rock band is full of big swings and big misses, but its best songs elicit a modest, familiar sense of nostalgia.

Our Bande Apart

As tales of Stephan Jenkins’ overbearing demeanor, business chicanery, and outright creepiness have mounted, the Third Eye Blind mastermind has become something of a caricature: Who does this “semi-charmed” guy think he is? It’s easy to imagine the 57-year-old songwriter walled away in a fortress like Phil Spector, tinkering with bridges and chord progressions, scrawling four-syllable adjectives on scratch paper and hastily striking them out, smiling in recollection of adoring crowds from the 2009 homecoming show at Skidmore. Or was it ‘98? As weeks turn to months, he cycles through bandmates and session players, and the old howling question remains: How’s it gonna be when you don’t know me anymore?
The same grandiosity that always made Jenkins an easy target, however, is also what set Third Eye Blind apart. While their alt-rock peers hunched in the smirking self-deprecation of “Sex and Candy,” he crafted arena-sized records that owed as much to glam rock as to the post-grunge canon. The triptych of 1997’s Third Eye Blind, 1999’s Blue, and 2003’s Out of the Vein is packed with such melodrama and so many gutsy melodies that all the coke and blowjobs sound downright Shakespearean. If Jenkins really believed his cock-rock to be the scion of Renaissance poetry, it at least made 3EB a far more interesting band than Marcy Playground.
Their seventh full-length, Our Bande Apart, comes adorned with the usual trappings, and it often hinges on how much stomach you have for lyrics like “It’s just a demon road/But we have to go.” Jenkins is a man who sees constellations in the female anatomy; he also remains weirdly obsessed with nautical expeditions. But Our Bande Apart’s sporadic cheekiness feels like a minor accomplishment. “New order, shit won’t stop/We’ll never sing about tits and ass again,” he deadpans on “Goodbye to the Days of Ladies and Gentlemen.” This is an artist who either fears obsolescence or is in on the joke—perhaps a bit of both.
With his eye for sticky imagery and nose for narrative climaxes, Jenkins strikes gold at a reliable rate. When the rapturous chorus finally arrives on “Box of Bones,” you want to pump your fist in triumph. It’s the sort of gracefully delivered moment that helped 3EB transcend the frat-rock scene, and it’s remarkable that these visions of reckless infatuation continue to rattle around his head. And yet, it’s also his most understated single to date: no falsetto, no rapping, barely any percussion. The final chorus all but announces a soaring instrumental breakdown; instead, the song just ends.
The intimate arrangements of acoustic guitars and keyboard give Our Bande Apart something of a quarantine cabin vibe. Founding member Kevin Cadogan is long gone, as is his hard-rocking successor Tony Fredianelli. Their latest replacements—among them a multi-instrumentalist who goes by colin creeV, in tribute to the Harry Potter character—aren’t tasked with replicating their pulsing rhythms and theatrical solos. “Dust Storm (How We Hold Each Other Right Now)” is pleasantly jangly; “Funeral Singers” unfolds around a punchy riff. “To the Sea” and “Time in Berlin” recall the chamber-pop ponderousness of 2009’s Ursa Major.
There are still moments when you can’t help but laugh at the MFA-level indulgence: “He got you pregnant on the night you met,” Jenkins sings in “The Dying Blood.” “Full-year pandemic and you don’t regret it.” He is incapable of making a quiet pop record—his idealism manifests in big swings and big misses. Given the songs’ familiar structures, Our Bande Apart doesn’t always stand on its own: “Box of Bones” sounds a bit too much like “Wounded,” “Silverlake Neophyte” like “Motorcycle Drive-By.” Yet even these glimpses of surrender have their charms. For a quarter-century, Jenkins has tried to find language commensurate with his fathomless desire, but Our Bande Apart alights upon a more modest, delicate nostalgia—the kind that makes you want to call up an old friend you haven’t thought about in years.

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Reissue of the pioneering instrumental hip-hop album adds a bonus disc of remixes and singles.

DJ Shadow: Endtroducing... [Deluxe Edition]

Endtroducing... [Deluxe Edition]

Ask the NoCal turntable nerds, the trip-hoppers, the frat boys, the hippies or the ravers stoned on the beach at sunrise: Endtroducing... is deeply spiritual. Not in the conventional sense, but in the spirituality of the soul that lives in your chest and got there from the ether and returns to the collective unconscious-- the one you feel when you feel things. That's the spirit that saves us from being fleeting and disposable: If I necked with that one girl that one sunset, with Endtroducing on the car stereo, then no matter who else did the same thing, I'm me and that moment's still mine. Dig?
Endtroducing taps that inner-whatever better than most of the albums of its day, and it swims so easily that it established an entire genre of instrumental hip-hop-- count how many records come out every month and are dubbed "Shadowesque." Building the album from samples of lost funk classics and bad horror soundtracks, Shadow crossed the real with the ethereal, laying heavy, sure-handed beats under drifting, staticky textures, friendly ghost voices, and chords whose sustain evokes the vast hereafter. Even the "look at me" cuts like "The Number Song" didn't break the mood; the album was so perfect and the technique, so awesome that it's still definitive today, and Shadow has yet to top it. (Never mind that if Four Tet could swing a record as proficient as The Private Press, we would throw him a parade.)
For this Deluxe Edition, Endtroducing hasn't been enhanced or remastered, but it now comes with a bonus disc of remixes and singles, including Cut Chemist's fantastic "party mix" of "The Number Song" and Gift of Gab's rhymes on "Midnight in a Perfect World", as well as alternate versions that give a useful perspective on the album. For example, "Building Steam With a Grain of Salt" and "Mutual Slump" omit the overdubbed speech, and without it, the samples seem naked and duller-- which highlights one of the album's subtler strengths.
But Shadow can't avoid the irony that this is a revival of an album that revives other albums. We could be hearing this music, not for the second time around, but for the third and maybe the fourth. The buzz of these dug-up sounds infuses the texture of the album; focusing on it reminds me of the few times that I've heard an album by a deceased performer and actually realized he had passed-- like the time I listened to Kind of Blue the night that Miles Davis joined three of its personnel in the grave, and felt their absence, even while their solos hadn't lost a shred of vitality.
Shadow clearly gets that. In the documentary Scratch, Shadow takes us to the record store where he found most of the vinyl used on Endtroducing. Upstairs we see the regular shelves and bins, but downstairs, in the basement, are tens of thousands of old albums stacked or dumped all over the room, barely lit by a few light bulbs and littered with dust and dead bats. Shadow patronized the store for five years before they let him in this crypt, and as he says in the documentary, "Just being in here is a humbling experience for me, because you're looking through all these records and it's sort of like a big pile of broken dreams...Whether you want to admit it or not, 10 years down the line you'll be in here. So keep that in mind when you start thinking like, 'I'm invincible and I'm the world's best,' or whatever. Because that's what all these cats thought."
We usually dismiss reissues of CDs as the ultimate cash-in-- the most cynical way for artists like Elvis Costello to charge us again and again for the same album. We think this because we assume that once you commit music to a disc and put it in a store, it's immortal. But without new attention and rereleases, albums can drift off the radar. Today, Entroducing may be a legend of the 1990s, but the world of beat-driven music regularly throws away old milestones to make room for new ones. How do we know this album will impress-- let alone connect with-- anyone 10 or 20 years down the road?
So you could call this rerelease Shadow's first bid for a legacy, and his admission that no matter how many fans called Endtroducing a masterpiece, someone else needs to slap that word on the cover for the next batch of kids. Yet even more than the first time, this is also a meditation on mortality. Shadow knows what it's like to wander through that basement, find some buried treasure-- some sax riff like those immortal notes on "What Does Your Soul Look Like, (Pt. 1 - Blue Sky Revisit)"-- and resurrect it for millions of listeners, like an irrational God on beats 'n breaks Judgment Day. And he also knows how it feels to be in that bin, like all of us on the way to our own graves, where we'll be trapped with all the other goners-- hoping someone will see something a little different and special in us, that might pull us out of the pile.


With harmonized guitars, spring-loaded rhythms, and snotty hooks, the Louisville band’s major-label debut is a well-earned success that doesn’t quite feel like a triumph.

You Deserve Love

White Reaper weren’t lying on The World’s Best American Band, but they were joking. The shitkicking Kentucky quintet seemed to have enough self-awareness to recognize that their craft —we’re comin’ to your town, we’ll help you party down—was no longer understood as a form of populism, but something as archaic and artisanal as, say, scrimshaw. They might as well be the only American band. So they must’ve been as surprised as anyone when Elektra called their sorta-bluff and made them one of the first new signings in the venerated label’s ambitious relaunch, otherwise focused on reliably massive pop-punk, metal, and country acts. But White Reaper hardly sound intimidated by the fact that You Deserve Love now bears the same logo as their treasured Cars, Metallica, Queen, and AC/DC records. They just went ahead and made the next White Reaper album.
“If you hate the new record, then you hate us. The major label didn’t do anything. You should at least know that all the blame is on our shoulders,” keyboardist/hypeman Ryan Hater said earlier this year, perhaps assuming heated discussions about selling out to accompany his band’s throwback aesthetic. Rest assured, there are no quasi-trap beats or forced duets or empowerment anthems like those that typify the radio-friendly unit shifters and mono-genre pop acts now flanking White Reaper on the Elektra website. Singles “Real Long Time” and “Might Be Right” are prime reasons the band considered Music For People Who Like Us as an album title. But there’s also none of the indulgences one could reasonably expect from a band that prophesied their own pill-popping, hotel-demolishing rock stardom two years ago—no string sections, no acoustic ballads. It’s actually their shortest album.
White Reaper justify their anachronistic existence the same way they did on The World’s Best American Band: By proving that “rockism vs. poptimism” is a modern creation. Their harmonized guitars, spring-loaded rhythms, and snotty hooks are all referential of Van Halen and Cheap Trick, some of the most popular musicians going in the ’70s and ’80s. White Reaper’s desire to really get on that echelon rather than merely evoke its essence results in the one noticeable Elektra-funded upgrade: You Deserve Love is produced by Jay Joyce, a guy who’s worked with Eric Church, Thomas Rhett, and Little Big Town, but also Cage the Elephant and FIDLAR—straightforward guitar acts whose enduring popularity and total lack of critical favor confound assumptions about rock bands in the streaming era.
While You Deserve Love is certainly slicker and more reliant on synths, it’s to the same degree that The World’s Best American Band was slicker and more synth-y than White Reaper Does It Again. More importantly, Tony Esposito continues to successfully walk the tightrope between dirtbag and douchebag, a guy who could easily be cast as a Linklater good ol’ boy with his own band soundtracking the latest well-meaning debauch. “I’ve brought too many drinks with me and a 10-ton bucket of gasoline,” he jokes on the bubbly dub verse of “Saturday.” He’s drunk on nearly every song, either out of spite or feelings of inadequacy or just a desire to escape.
But the guys Esposito sings about would be better served by some audible evidence that they’re going against the grain. Whether sanding off the grit of The World’s Best American Band was Joyce or White Reaper or Elektra’s idea, it nonetheless makes You Deserve Love less worthy of Camaro-revving fantasies, even if these total non-gearheads lean into them on “1F.” Watch the videos for “Real Long Time” or “1F” and White Reaper are no longer a throwback to Thin Lizzy or Cheap Trick, but to another fertile era for pop-leaning guitar music: The one that bridged the gap between the New Rock Revolution and The O.C., when dudes in denim jackets with snappy songs about booze and girls were getting snapped up by majors by the dozens. Think of Elevator-era Hot Hot Heat, the Thrills, Tokyo Police Club, or Phantom Planet, bands who pumped out enjoyable singles to sizable fanbases without ever worrying what their success indicated about the future of rock. Pointing out the thematic similarity of “1F” to Rooney’s “I’m Shakin’” is only an issue if you deny that “I’m Shakin’” still slaps.
This is how You Deserve Love can be a well-earned success while not feeling like a triumph, the way a filler-free major label debut should be for the rare band that outwardly aspires to it. While the title track of The World’s Best American Band was its only overtly conceptual song, the title itself created an unexpected emotional undercurrent for a band that prefers to be taken at face value. A modestly successful indie band from Louisville declares themselves as The Greatest before they knew they were: It’s wish fulfillment as transportative as any of the prog fantasies White Reaper’s idols put to tape. On You Deserve Love, the risk and rewards are lower: White Reaper aspire to be a very good American band.

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Welsh band's mini-LP, out last year in the UK and now being issued in the States, demonstrates a flair for guitar anthems.

The Joy Formidable: A Balloon Called Moaning

A Balloon Called Moaning

For the Joy Formidable, bigger most certainly is better. The London-by-way-of-Wales outfit makes music that feels bred for the arena, packing each driving track with huge washes of guitar and giant swarms of buzzing bass. This despite the fact that half the band's debut mini-LP, A Balloon Called Moaning, was recorded in a bedroom. If nothing else, the album is proof that you don't need a ton of production gloss to create a sound that's this anthemic and emotive.
On almost every track here, you get that moment of boisterous clarity-- usually in the form of some skyward-shooting chorus-- that feels affirming and perfectly in-line with UK arena rock. But these fist-pumping jolts are mixed in with prickly goth textures and doses of melodic post-punk, which serve as a welcome contrast. And most of these big moments get over without the benefit of being outwardly catchy, which is both impressive and occasionally worrying. Opener "The Greatest Light Is the Greatest Shade" and stunning highlight "The Last Drop" are two exceptions, but elsewhere the band's emphasis is on making emotional contact rather than trying to wiggle a hook into your head.
And it's all good, just as long as the band cranks it. Guitarist and lead vocalist Ritzy Bryan's sprightly voice soars when hoisted up by the rousing buzz of the band, even in instances when they seem like they should drown her out. Bryan's energy delicately enhances and ekes feeling out of draggier numbers, especially relatively to occasional vocal contributor and bassist Rhydian Dafydd. On material that offers more of an edge, like the harder-charging "Whirring", Bryan stands out as more than just a sing-along leader, injecting a little bit of snarl into the proceedings.
A Balloon Called Moaning could actually stand for a bit more of that edge, and sometimes the material's boisterousness can seem a little hokey. But if enveloping and cleanly-stated material like "The Last Drop" or recent single "Popinjay" are any indication, there's real potential for the band's big songs to be as much about pop as they are about payoff.


The masterful R&B singer returns with more creative control on a project where her voice, style, and swagger are well preserved.

Spell My Name

Toni Braxton could have had more. That seems like a crazy assertion to make about an artist whose first two albums went 8x platinum in the U.S., but Braxton’s career has been marked with health issues, lawsuits, and industry setbacks—most famously, plans to release the 2pac-sampling “Me & My Boyfriend” as a single were scrapped when JAY-Z and Beyoncé put out “‘03 Bonnie & Clyde,” suppressing the reach of Braxton’s 2002 record More Than a Woman. On her new album, Spell My Name, the 52-year-old wants more; she wants her name carved in stone so her legacy is never in question. “I’ve been in this business for a long time and I’ve been blessed, so put some respect on my name a little bit,” Braxton told iHeartRadio last month.
With Spell My Name, Braxton upholds her position as an originator of the sound of 1990s R&B. Though long-time collaborators Babyface and Antonio Dixon once again assist in production, Braxton asserts more agency than her previous album, 2018’s Sex & Cigarettes, by writing and producing a significant amount of the record. It adds up to a short collection that shows the familiar voice, style, and swagger of Braxton to be well preserved, even though things get off to an inauspicious start with “Dance.” It’s a track that aspires to the great tradition of danceable hits about dancing—Jessie Ware made an album of these recently—as Braxton tries to groove the pain of a break-up away. On a record that trades in retro sounds, this gooey disco jam it’s one of the few moments that sounds dated and stale.
The album’s best moments move with a sleek sophistication that defines some of her greatest hits. On the excellent “Gotta Move On,” Braxton analyzes post-breakup life over an immaculately crafted musical backdrop and backing vocals courtesy of H.E.R. The title track features a back-and-forth between Braxton and an unbilled male vocalist in the role of a younger beau. “I’m a little older and I really kinda like it that way,” she declares. “I’ll get you straight up fiendin’,” he later retorts like a guy who has heard “He Wasn’t Man Enough” and is trying very hard. Braxton’s voice—with all its brilliant depth—suitably overpowers her co-stars' presence, hinting at the chasm in their maturity and experience.
Missy Elliott appears on and co-produces “Do It,” throwing back to her more understated work with the ’90s soul group 702 that ran counter to her more futurist solo catalogue. The best song, though, is “O.V.E.Rr.,” a tale of two lovers who keep coming back to each other. There have been a million songs that cover similar terrain but Braxton boasts not just the voice to carry the drama, but the specificity as a writer to depict the emotion. Over a swooning instrumental, her voice gasps and gyrates. When she hits that extra “r” in spelling out the title—the relationship is more “overer” than before—you want to believe her but can’t.
Less impressive are the ballads that appear down the stretch. There’s a touch of musical theatre to “Happy Without Me.” It’s alright, but it’s not exactly “Un-Break My Heart.” And the album is probably missing that one banger to put a button on the set that perhaps a Darkchild or Pharrell—two of Braxton’s iPhone contacts—could have helped provide. Still, Braxton has evoked the spirit of ’90s R&B without ever sounding like she’s simply throwing out nostalgia bait. Into her fourth decade as a recording artist, she’s refusing to accept that her best is in the rearview mirror.

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Featuring Samothrace bassist Dylan Desmond, the Seattle metal duo's spacious, somber debut is defined by inescapable haunting and loss, but they have a knack for turning maudlin doom into perverted praise music.

Longing

Take a look at the figure on the cover of Longing, the debut from Seattle doom duo Bell Witch. Its eerie presence is appropriate for a record defined by inescapable haunting and loss. On these six songs, bassist/vocalist Dylan Desmond and drummer/vocalist Adrian Guerra play patiently, and sparingly; they appear to be carefully purging themselves of an inexplicable force corrupting their bodies. Instead of going for a frontal assault, piling riffs upon riffs upon riffs, they opt for something subtler, a spacious approach that affects the entire nervous system.
The album opens with a 20 minute journey into despair, "Bails (of Flesh)", a track that will likely weed out those who can't handle the unrelentingly downcast feel of the record. The tracks get shorter from there, but they also get sparser. Of note is "Longing (the River of Ash)", which grows more drawn out as it progresses. In this music of solitude, it's the loneliest track by far. Metal's defined by exaggeration, but the title Longing is perfect here: Desmond and Guerra want to go back to where pain didn't consume their reality*.*
A duo's primary challenge is to find a way to fill up space with minimal equipment. Usually, when a doom band's a two-piece, the guitars are double-amped and so downtuned that a bassist becomes irrelevant. Bell Witch flip this convention, employing a six-string bass in place of a guitar. (Often, one can hardly tell it's a bass.) Even lacking guitar, Desmond constructs melodies reminiscent of funeral doom acts like Skepticism and Esoteric, adding a touch of American dirtiness from his experience as the bassist of Samothrace.
There is one exception where the bass doesn't masquerade as a guitar. "Beneath the Mask", save for a sample from the Edgar Allen Poe-inspired film The Masque of the Red Death, is a five-minute drumless drone piece, where notes fly off and subsequently wither like Icarus on 33 1/3 RPM. The clean bass is more lonesome and more eerie than the distorted bass that the album's built upon. "Mask" seems like the perfect track to incorporate a sudden blast of hisses, feedback, screams-- something to make the listener jolt. It doesn't, and that suspense, like walking over rows of false trap doors, adds to the creepy atmosphere.
Throughout, Guerra's growls are complementary of the genre, and he even throws in a few blackened shrieks on "Rows (of Endless Waves)". Desmond's clean vocals, however, are more compelling, taking different shapes throughout the record. His warm, forlorn style carries the latter half of "Bails (of Flesh)", turning maudlin doom into perverted praise music. It's not a far stretch to imagine this being played in some church that worships self-destruction, congregants raising their hands up high, arms bleeding from cutting themselves. Desmond gives hails and salutations to the misery, like Om learning of a terminal illness diagnosis.
The previously mentioned "Rows" sees Desmond's voice become more delicate, almost crushing under the weight of the music. Frailty is important to the variety of doom Bell Witch explores, but rarely does a vocal performance capture what it is to stand on the line between sanity and madness. Desmond will whisper certain lines in "Rows", adding emphasis without raising his voice. He channels dISEMBOWELMENT's Renato Gallina on "Longing" making that track a true successor to the Australian doom-death quartet's 1993 classic Transcendence into the Peripheral. Remember that editorial arguing that metal vocalists are irrelevant? It wasn't entirely without merit, but Desmond challenges that line of thinking. He's got a cleverness and sense of space most vocalists don't possess. His voice is much like the music itself: it reverberates around, as if wandering and looking for a way out of this despair. Open and wide-reaching as it may be, there's also a sense of weighty claustrophobia in his voice, as if it's carrying his burdens, and the burdens of others, too.


The New Zealand duo of Chris Knox and Alec Bathgate have influenced generations of lo-fi rockers. This 55-track box set reminds us why.

Unravelled: 1981-2002

The story of New Zealand rock music is a tale of isolation. For the young Kiwi musician, rock’n’roll was a familiar cultural language, but one separated by a whole lot of clear blue water. This distance engendered a degree of self-reliance, spawning bands, labels, and hyperlocal scenes, as well as a certain can-do sensibility. Thus was the case in 1981 when vocalist Chris Knox and guitarist Alec Bathgate—already veterans of two NZ bands, Dunedin punk upstarts the Enemy and the more polished, new-wave-inflected Toy Love—plugged in a TEAC 4-track reel-to-reel and started to record.
And record, and record. The level of fidelity would fluctuate over the years, but Tall Dwarfs—the absurdity of their chosen name characteristic of the duo’s artistic sensibility at large—never wholly lost their instinct for the homemade. The muse seemed to find them most naturally in bedrooms, front rooms, or the garden shed. Despite this, following their debut EP, Three Songs, they graduated to New Zealand’s trailblazing indie label Flying Nun, and the songs kept coming. They kept coming across seven EPs, six albums, and a couple of decades. Enough to fill Unravelled: 1981-2002, a 55-track box set that, despite its breadth, is relatively light on chaff.
It probably has a lot to do with the fact that Knox and Bathgate had bounced through a couple of groups already, but Tall Dwarfs fell out of the womb fully formed. The first track from Three Songs, “Nothing’s Going to Happen,” encapsulates a particularly Antipodean sense of ennui: a manic thrash of melodic guitar, smashed tambourines, and whacked xylophones, topped off with a lyric that wallows merrily in its own alienation. The means were rudimentary, but this did not imply a lack of ambition. Knox and Bathgate recorded its 12 layers by recording to their 4-track, bouncing out the tape, recording another four tracks on top, and repeating the process once more. The video—a stop-motion animation filmed in a grotty apartment that comes to life around the slovenly humans that call it home—showcases a similar sense of homemade ingenuity.
In the UK or U.S., you might find groups that made an entire career out of one corner of the Velvet Underground or Beatles catalog. Tall Dwarfs seem to ask: Why choose? Instead, their songs are crammed with styles and reference points, ricocheting between noise and melody, comedy and despair. “Crush” is powered by frayed guitar, pounding drums, and a wall of feedback, like the missing link between the Velvets’ “European Son” and Pavement’s Slay Tracks. But just as often the Dwarfs jury-rigged their rudimentary materials into works of peculiar beauty. Take “Carpetgrabber,” a hymn to hermetic living woven from piano, cymbal, triangle, and a drone of feedback; or “Paul’s Place,” a spry electronic shanty powered by bleepy synths and featuring a frantic percussion break which the credits reveal to have been played using a draining board, pan, and spoon.
Tall Dwarfs’ very existence felt like a conscious affront to the familiar rock-band format. Knox distilled the duo’s attitude in an interview with the New Zealand webzine Audioculture: “The bass player’s always the real muso of the group and thinks he knows everything, and the drummer is just a fuckwit, so it’s much easier to be without them.” In lieu of a rhythm section, Tall Dwarfs clapped their hands, stomped their feet, banged upon anything within reach. From 1983’s Canned Music EP on, their music was often underpinned by Knox’s tape loops, which accentuated their songs’ sense of cranky claustrophobia.
Unravelled is packaged with sleevenotes drawn in a comic-book style, detailing Tall Dwarfs’ history with a number of self-effacing asides. This playful presentation only slightly obscures the darkness in their music, which often grappled with small-town isolation and the feeling of being, if not quite a force of good in a world gone bad, at least shrewd enough to recognise one’s failings. “Life Is Strange,” from 1991’s Fork Songs, and “Entropy,” from 1994’s 3EPs, secrete a bleak nihilism within their breezy indie thrash. Elsewhere, tales of mundane existence are pockmarked by incidents of horror and the grotesque. On “Walking Home,” a drunken nighttime ramble is interrupted by an encounter with a man whose jaw has been sliced open. “Oatmeal,” meanwhile, is squalling freak-folk that revels in disgust: “The gulls above our heads are ill/They’ve eaten much more than their fill/Excreta plunges from the sky.”
Despite their music’s focus on a life of low horizons, Tall Dwarfs got a chance to see the world. In 1985 Bathgate went to live in London, before being driven home by the English weather. But as the 1990s dawned, Tall Dwarfs found their way to the United States, where they forged links with the incipient Stateside lo-fi movement. In 2009, after Knox was struck by a stroke that left him barely able to speak, artists including Will Oldham, Bill Callahan, Yo La Tengo, and Jeff Mangum came together to record a fundraising compilation, Stroke: Songs for Chris Knox.
Being an influence in this way is surely flattering, but it threatens to make you a footnote. Unravelled seeks to redress this imbalance, making the case for Tall Dwarfs as a group worthy of such a sprawling retrospective. There’s a lot of music here, maybe a little too much for the newcomer to digest, and it’s hard to deny their pretty, songwriterly moments have dated a touch better than their more raucous excursions. But when it works, Tall Dwarfs pull off a feat of alchemy. Around the back of the world, they took up makeshift instruments, wrote songs steeped in grit and gloom, and dropped something close to perfect pop straight onto a reel of magnetic tape.


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 look back at the UK band’s 1992 debut, a deceptively hazy pop record that showcases the complementary songwriting of Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi.

Spooky

For a too-brief moment, Lush were the platonic ideal of an underground college band turning their dreams into a career. Emma Anderson and Miki Berenyi had channeled their careers as teen fanzine publishers and avid showgoers into singing and guitar-playing frontwomen, recruiting bassist Steve Rippon and drummer Chris Acland after meeting them at North London Polytechnic University. Anderson and Berenyi wrote all the songs, mostly individually but sometimes together, drawing on influences as wide as ABBA, the Shangri-La’s, and Siouxsie Sioux. They spent their early gigs opening for bands like My Bloody Valentine and the Pastels and, according to Berenyi’s crucial 2022 memoir, Fingers Crossed: How Music Saved Me From Success, fending off snide dismissals from asshole band guys.
On their first two releases, the six-track EP Scar and compilation album Gala, Lush drew on their love of post-punk and riot grrrl, sometimes spangled and ramshackle on songs like “Bitter” and “Sweetness and Light.” The latter song, an early fan favorite, exemplified their sense of elegance, laying down a bed of flange for Berenyi and Anderson’s high-pitched harmonies to float through, a blueprint for the sound they’d carry through their 1992 debut, Spooky. In retrospect, it was probably not the most auspicious time for an opaque British rock band known for beautiful harmonies to release their first proper album. Grunge was exploding around the world, and disaffected men from San Diego to Australia were being stalked by besuited label thirst-buckets looking to hit post-Nirvana paydirt. A band fronted by two women from the London underground whose guitar sound conveyed sangfroid rather than ennui was decidedly not that, and the UK was going in a more man-heavy direction, too, with the massive success of Primal Scream’s house-oriented psychedelia and the louche Britpop lads priming for a takeover.
As signees of the eclectic 4AD, Lush initially fit better alongside the label’s arty, college-radio roster—like Throwing Muses and the Pixies—and by 1989, Lush were near-instant heroes of the British press. “We are racking up write-ups on a weekly basis and score a full-page Melody Maker interview barely after our first rehearsals with Steve,” Berenyi writes in Fingers Crossed. “While the plaudits are flattering, they were worryingly premature and punters expecting to witness the Next Big Thing are disappointed to find that Lush are a stumbling band fronted by a painfully shy and barely audible vocalist.”
By the time Lush started recording Spooky, they had already been through the British press’s love-hate wringer a couple of times, and they’d also already been categorized into a scene that would become known as shoegaze—as in self-absorbed guitar nerds all staring at their shoes—a derisive term in the UK that, incidentally, scanned as “cool as hell” in the U.S. They’d recorded a few songs for Scar and Gala with Robin Guthrie, co-founder of the Cocteau Twins, and Berenyi and Anderson were directing their music in a more textural direction, with massive, staticky guitars acting as a scrim before their angel harmonies.
While Guthrie was alternately credited and blamed for Spooky’s ethereality, Berenyi writes that he was often not even in the studio, off nursing his “notorious cocaine habit.” Besides, a lot of the ethereality came from Berenyi’s voice itself, which was high and throaty, the kind of head voice that a voice teacher might scold for not coming from the diaphragm. Anderson’s higher register was much clearer, but her harmonies often floated in minor keys and weird thirds that made their songs sound as though the band was high upon a cliff, majestic but at risk of teetering off.
The album that resulted was deceptively hazy, its guitar effects coalescing into the women’s voices, giving the iridescent effect of oil circling in a whirlpool. “Stray” opens with Berenyi taking the high notes and Anderson providing the lower harmonies, in a statement about troubled wandering that sounds almost Gregorian in tone: hymnal, somehow above the earth. It bleeds into “Nothing Natural,” an Anderson-written track that follows the ascent and disappointment of a relationship, Rippon’s bass rolling like the wheel rod on a steam engine to ground the women’s rotor of guitars. Berenyi and Anderson’s writing styles were complementary: The latter’s hooks were stormy and heavier on the low end, while the former’s had a dreamier quality, letting each idea unfurl at its own pace. By drenching their songs in reverb and flange, their poppiness was almost subliminal. “Tiny Smiles” is practically a lullaby, their voices hinged in harmony and “mmm-mmms” wafting down like celestial detritus, while “Superblast!” roils at a speedy punk pace, a thrash song that confuses the prospect with the bait and switch of Anderson and Berenyi belting patiently about abandonment. The shoegaze label had missed the point: Lush were not their effects pedals, but a pop-punk band with a heightened sense of aesthetics.
”Untogether” and “For Love,” two Berenyi-written tracks, are as Beatlesian in spirit as any of the Britpop boys who came before or after, two bop-along songs telling vivid stories about other peoples’ relationships and one complicated breakup. The latter track got a video, too, which focused primarily on Berenyi’s soft-lit visage with a handful of pink roses and white daffodils, intercut with scenes of the band playing. The “Nothing Natural” video was also mostly close-ups of Berenyi singing next to Anderson, a quiet angel with bangs. Lush’s visuals were clean, high-contrast, and full of color, with the women making deliberate eye contact with the camera more frequently than looking down at their feet. They may have sounded impressionistic—their words weren’t super easy to discern without a lyric sheet—but their approach was unflinching and direct. Lush, at heart, had more in common with Nirvana: the way they could sneak pop melodies into the messy overdrive of guitar pedals, the way Berenyi’s voice, in particular, had a sort of eely characteristic, like it would disappear just as you were about to get your arms around it.
Spooky came at a precocious time, when Berenyi and Anderson were approaching their mid-twenties, and beginning to molt into their more adult selves. It was partly a vessel for building something powerful and beautiful atop the painful memories Berenyi writes about in her memoir, coming to terms with her grandmother’s horrific abuse and her divorced parents’ messiness in general. Where Anderson could be more pointed in her lyricism, Berenyi tended towards the dreaminess (”Stray,” “Ocean”) of organisms, using the blue tide and green fields as imagery. “For Love,” one of Lush’s most popular songs, is not about a whirlwind romance as its enthusiastic tempo might imply, but about her relationship to her parents in light of their broken marriage.
The titans of shoegaze were always presented—whether via their conceptually far-flung, wall-of-sound guitars or the diaphanous photographs that depicted the band members—as serious bands purveying serious music. (Perhaps it was the correct term after all.) “There’s some heavy class snobbery. Middle-class is a dirty word at the moment,” Berenyi told the Glasgow Herald’s Peter Easton upon the release of Spooky. “They think that bands like us and Ride and Slowdive are rich kids whose parents bought all their instruments. Just spoilt brats. A bit of a misconception.” And apart from the occasional key figures—My Bloody Valentine’s Bilinda Butcher and Debbie Googe, Cocteau Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser, Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell, all of whom defined their bands’ sound—there were few women to take the mantle in a scene where genius was measured by the overdrive of a guitar pedal.
After Spooky’s release and constant stateside touring, Lush were truly welcome figures in the U.S. Not only were they a pair of women leading a band, Berenyi was the rare woman of color in the alt-rock scene of any subgenre—her mother was Japanese—and she became a de facto frontwoman thanks mostly to her fire-engine-red dye job, which translated into a kind of charisma. (She also wore really cute minidresses with rugby stripes and black tights with cutoff jorts, a true 1990s style idol.) This wasn’t the easiest position in an era overrun with male shitheads—Berenyi’s former boyfriend, the ’80s punk figure Billy Childish, once wrote a poem about her entitled “Someone Else’s Little Jap,” for one, plus Berenyi and Anderson were constantly asked to wear sexualized outfits in photo shoots, which they refused. They were feminist and plucky despite certain condescending perceptions of women who harmonize in high keys. “People suggest we don’t say anything with our music, that we’re apolitical, but some of the subjects we deal with are really quite disturbing. Because we’re not shouting and screaming, people don’t register that,” Anderson told The Observer’s Simon Reynolds, in February 1992. Their love songs could pine, but mostly they were about female desire and willful rejection of their own lovers; “Laura,” a bass-driven rollicker, was about a general world-weariness and finding comfort in the music of Laura Nyro.
Still, Spooky got a slight drubbing here and there, the British press’ fickleness haunting Lush again, even as the album hit No. 7 on the UK charts. The U.S. wasn’t always kind, either. “British band gets sidetracked by its avant-garde leanings. As a result, baby-voiced singing drowns in a midtempo wash of atmospheric guitar noise,” went Billboard’s review, which was not bylined but it’s giving Man. Perry Farrell liked them, though, and Lush (with new bassist Phil King) were booked for 1992’s Lollapalooza festival. They were the only women playing on the main stage, which Berenyi says in her memoir could be pretty dreadful, be it their tour manager taking bets on which of the men could fuck her and Anderson or truly gross sexual harassment from, Berenyi writes, Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Anthony Kiedis and Butthole Surfers’ Gibby Haynes.
But their opening slot helped Lush’s popularity in the U.S., and soon they’d be touring the states constantly, albeit on some weird bills. After the release of their second album, Split, I saw them headline Denver’s Ogden Theater on August 4, 1994, when they played with this new rock band from L.A. called Weezer. That lineup wasn’t nearly as ill-fitting as their tour a couple of years later with the Goo Goo Dolls and the Gin Blossoms, those post-grunge, alt-adult-contemporary superstars that cursed mainstream rock in 1996. Lush released one final album, Lovelife, that same year, but as Britpop took over and management and label situations in both the U.S. and the UK soured, their fate was in question. When Chris Acland, Lush’s drummer and close friend, died of suicide in the fall of ’96, the band was done for 20 years, up until one brief reunion and EP in 2016.
Thirty years later, Spooky stands out more for what it wasn’t than what it was: it wasn’t a by-the-numbers shoegaze album, nor was it comfortably situated in shoegaze’s sister genre, dream pop. The album is an example of how labels tend to pigeonhole a sound and cloud it for what it was; easy consumption is not close listening. Lush were first and foremost a DIY punk band who were witness to and part of the mainstreaming of the underground, a pop band with a love of loud-ass guitars, and an important band that made alternative rock music massively more interesting in a time of recovering male metalheads. Mostly, though, they left a lasting document of determination and beauty, two teen fanzine publishers made good.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan.


After a five-year absence-- in part due to being hospitalized with double pneumonia-- Jason Pierce returns with another LP of love songs, drug songs, and God songs, producing his best record in a decade.

Songs in A&E

I'm loathe to call any album a summation of an artist's career-- that reeks of lazy criticism-- but Songs in A&E is certainly Spiritualized's best work in 10 years. All of Jason Pierce's fascinations of the past 20-plus years appear here-- we'll get to 'em soon enough-- in a truly syncretic, muted, and beautiful way. And there's something rooted and grounded about Songs in A&E. Ladies and gentlemen, we are floating in place.
This is Pierce's first record in five years-- the delay was, in part, due to him being hospitalized with double pneumonia, i.e. he was really fucked-up and tethered to machines to keep him alive. (In the UK, the ER is called the Accident & Emergency ward-- hence the title.) Not surprisingly, Pierce's ordeal colors the sound and tone of the record-- "Death Take Your Fiddle", essentially another update of the traditional "O Death", seems to sample the sound of a respirator-- although Pierce has stated in interviews that the album was already more than half-finished when he took ill.
Lyrically, as Pierce as wont to do, there are love songs, drug songs, and God songs-- typically, they're all those things at once at times. Pierce's protagonist on these tunes is world-weary ("So hard to fight when you're losing/ I got a little fire in my soul," he says on "I Gotta Fire") and sounds all the more so in Pierce's lovely croaking/cracking vocals. What saves the songs from woe-is-me solipsism and overarching sentimentality is a well-hidden but ironic sense of humor. Well, that and the fact that the music itself is awesome. The key song is "Borrowed Your Gun", which begins like a typical junkie lament with "Daddy I'm sorry" but continues into murder ballad territory with "I borrowed your gun again/ Shot up your family."
A few songs on Songs in A&E run on a bit too long-- this is a Spiritualized record, after all-- and from some angles a few arrangements can sound hokey. The big rocker "I Gotta Fire" is like the Stone Roses covering Sonic Youth's "Bull in the Heather", but even on lesser tracks, a delightful oboe or a crazy lyric or a swelling gospel chorus swoops in and gives you a reason to replay the track. Pierce is again walking mopey, orchestral, minimalist rock out to the margins of taste and messing with your head all over the place. And this time he does it with a shit-ton of sonic subtlety. (Take those earbuds out and pop this one on the stereo.)
Pierce has never seemed so in control of his aesthetic, rather than controlled by it like some sort of drone-rock fetishist. The props dropped here are super obvious, and meant to be so, whether to Daniel Johnston with the "Funeral Home" refrain or to Kris Kristofferson with a quotation from "Me & Bobby McGee". Prior releases each had enjoyable but indulgent bliss-out tracks that went on a long time, but on A&E the out sounds are distilled into six miniature numbered tracks each called "Harmony". These serve as a glue holding the album together, and while they're "spacey," their brevity keeps the record on solid terrestrial ground. The other songs are vessels for contrasting ideas: la-la melodies vs. wah-wah guitar, strings vs. brass, country licks vs. Free Design-style vocals, and simple structures vs. lush arrangements. These oppositional concepts overlap more than ever on A&E, but the album only sounds muddled or muddied during a few clunky transitions. And weirdly, those serve to make you more aware than ever of the greatness of what he's doing the rest of the time.


Six months after their debut album, Julien Baker, Phoebe Bridgers, and Lucy Dacus return with a self-mythological companion EP aglow with the sense of triumph from their imperial year.

The Rest EP

For years, Phoebe Bridgers has been on an odyssey to the moon. She yearned for a spaceship to carry her away from a strained relationship on Boygenius’ 2018 self-titled EP; the trio’s full-length debut ends with Bridgers gazing at the full moon as she pulls away from her tormentor. On “Voyager,” the third song on Boygenius’ new EP, The Rest, Bridgers has finally landed. “Walking alone in the city/Makes me feel like a man on the moon,” she sings, taking stock of the journey. Her bandmates Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus are there with her, swaddling each lyric, cushioning each step, with hummed harmony. These are friends—the ones you tell your stories to, again and again, who stick around for every revision and new installment.
Friendship, famously, is Boygenius’ raison d’être and a key part of its value proposition. Kindred spirits who first met while making the rounds with their respective solo projects, Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus were eventually booked on a joint tour, precipitating their first EP together. Almost immediately, their union accumulated extramusical significance. Initially, it felt like wish fulfillment for those eager to pass off women playing rock as a newsworthy event; ultimately, it settled into an extended counterpoint to heteropatriarchal ideas about feminine friendship and cooperation, and to the notion of genius as an attribute of erratic (male) individualists. (When a prominent contemporary embodiment of that idea recently used Boygenius as the setup for a cheap joke, Dacus minced no words.)
Over the pandemic, seeking companionship and a creative outlet, the band got back together to write and record a proper debut—The Record, released this March. Six months later, they’re following it with The Rest, a four-song companion EP aglow with the sense of triumph that has haloed the group’s recent history. Boygenius are about as big as a rock band can be in 2023: They’ve landed an album in Billboard’s Top 10, received second-line billing at Coachella (“I’ve never played a festival when the sun was down,” Baker quipped), and, earlier this month, sold out Madison Square Garden. Their shows incite rapture; all three women are queer, a clear subtext and surtext of their performances, which has solidified their tour’s reputation as a welcoming space for sapphic expression.
With Boygenius’ tour wrapping at the end of the month, The Rest bookends this period of transcendence, its title containing a note of finality as well as of respite. The songs feel unwound; on the cover, the boys are faceless figures before a misty sea, soaking in the sublime, like in a Caspar David Friedrich painting. Unlike many post-album clearing-house EPs, this material is brand new, produced in May with returning collaborators (Tony Berg, Ethan Gruska, Collin Pastore) along with affiliates of the members’ solo projects. The songs revisit old themes, like Bridgers’ lunar voyage, with clear eyes and renewed spirits. Baker reconsiders the black hole that appeared on The Record’s “Not Strong Enough”—there, a symbol of domestic unrest; here, one of unexpected potential. “You can see the stars/The ones the headlines said this morning/Were being spat out /By what we thought was just/Destroying everything for good,” she sings over a steady pedal point, referencing a recently discovered supermassive black hole that mysteriously produces new stars instead of obliterating old ones. This cosmic twist on the notion that destructive forces can be generative calls to mind another lyric from The Record. To quote Dacus quoting Leonard Cohen: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”
The Rest closes its fist around the ideas that Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus have been reaching toward—that values are more worth living than dying for, that our feelings of difference and dysfunction can be fonts of power. When an idealogue with a death drive appeals to Dacus’ narrator on “Afraid of Heights,” she voices her skepticism: “Not everybody gets the chance to live a life that isn’t dangerous.” As usual, the members take turns up front, each leading songs that bear the hallmarks of their own writing, and “Afraid of Heights” is classic Dacus—a writer first and musician second, by her own estimation. In her hands, steady, soft acoustic strums and pedal steel are like pale blue lines on loose leaf, waiting to be filled. She spreads her ideas across pages rich with dialogue and imagery, including the tidy, perfect couplet, “The black water ate you up/Like a sugarcube in a teacup.” It’s part of a parable about hope: “Oh, it hurts to hope the future/Will be better than before,” she sings. Expect nothing and the worst you’ll get is validation; expect more, and you’ll be crushed.
Boygenius is sometimes billed as “sad girl” music, a dubious classification born of Spotify playlists and social media’s bad habit of aestheticizing mental illness. It’s only marketing, but it still threatens to sand down the contours of the band’s music, which is full of emotions not so easily parceled and labeled (nor managed) as “sadness”—and, often, not so sad after all. As Bridgers has observed, this reductive interpretation involves a certain amount of projection on the part of fans. Such is the nature of producing art for public consumption: Songs are made, released, and then made into something else in the ears of their listeners.
The band’s relationship to its ballooning audience is not uncomplicated, but certainly Boygenius respect the power of their platform. Anyone in their position would be grappling with the question of what they mean, to whom—a line of inquiry that can give way to self-mythologizing. This instinct has always been present in a band that’s styled itself as both Crosby, Stills & Nash and Nirvana, but in these songs, it starts to feel less self-conscious, more sincere. It’s in the internal references, the leitmotifs—an emergent iconography of Boygenius. It’s definitely in The Rest’s closer, “powers,” a Baker-led superhero origin story set to sonorous brass and ambient texture. She sings about crawling out of a nuclear reactor, about supercolliders and fission, invoking the invisible, unknowable forces that govern our universe as a metaphor for profound transformation. “The hum of our contact,” she concludes, summarizing the Boygenius ethos, “The sound of our collision.” Her words suggest preciousness, but also ephemerality: When particles collide in an accelerator, they erupt into ultra-rare bits of matter that linger for only a split second before breaking down. We are called to look closely while they last.


The Toronto indie pop veterans follow their theatrical, big-room work with a more muted, grayer record.

The Five Ghosts

Stars have never done "small" very well-- hell, I don't think they've ever done it at all. The Toronto act, now entering their second decade, have built a reputation on filtering tragedies of the heart through a widescreen lens, most excellently on 2004's Set Yourself on Fire. Even 2007's theatrical In Our Bedroom After the War exquisitely mired itself in misery, sounding more like 13 takes on the Smiths' "Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me" than the original cast recording of Gypsy.
Simply put, then: They know bombast and melodrama, which makes a decent amount of their latest effort, The Five Ghosts, all the more off-putting. For the first time in the band's career, they sound defeated. There's not much urgency, or even a range of emotion, for that matter; rather, much of the record blurs together, forming a single streak of gray. Telling, too, that the more upbeat cuts are the highlights. "I Died So I Could Haunt You" and "How Much More" both deserve a place among Stars' best work, with the latter working itself into a serene build that sounds like a thousand rockets taking off all at once.
Otherwise, this is a sluggish record, and a good deal of the blame rests on the production. The mix seems so muddy and poorly executed that you have to wonder who signed off on this stuff. "Fixed" may sound like it's intended to be this album's "Ageless Beauty", but where that song's shoegazed guitars burned brightly, here the buzzy melody ends up sounding as neutered as the song title suggests. The more dynamic instrumental lines are frequently buried in the mix at the expense of bringing out Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan's voices. Campbell aims for an overdue cathartic wail near the end of "He Dreams He's Awake" but slams into a mess of tangled vocals and drums. At his best, Campbell's always been a charmingly corny vocalist; not allowing him his hammy release here takes away his greatest strength as a performer.
Surprisingly, though, the middling sound ends up benefitting Millan's vocal performances greatly, affording her breathy coo the bright glow that it's been missing throughout the band's career. On previous releases, her voice has acted as not much more than a pretty-sounding foil for Campbell's, but on this record's best cuts, she sounds like a true frontwoman. She hugs the mid-tempo melodies of "Wasted Daylight" and "How Much More" tightly. Millan also is featured on the album's finest moment, "Changes". Her voice burns with patient regret, as the rest of the band finds their shimmering sweet spot and turns what, in another act's hands, could've been a dull, drum-machined shuffler into the Canadian indie-pop equivalent of Fleetwood Mac's "Storms". Stars may spend most of The Five Ghosts resembling sonic equivalents of the album title, but "Changes" is all flesh and blood, as well as a suggestion that, even after 10 years, this band ain't quite dead yet.


One-third of Peter Bjorn and John follows his group's breakthrough with a folk-pop solo album loosely inspired by the final, unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a sad tale of a workaholic, studio-era Hollywood mogul.

The Last Tycoon

It took more than a year, but Peter Bjorn & John's "Young Folks" finally turned into the kind of honest-to-goodness worldwide sleeper hit the mainstream U.S. music business hardly knows what to do with anymore. Not only did the single from the Swedish indie-pop trio's 2006 album Writer's Block hit #13 in the UK and crack the Top 40 in Germany and the Netherlands. Not only was it sampled by Kanye West and covered by everyone from the Kooks, James Blunt, and Pete Yorn to "99 Luftballons" singer Nena and Japanese folk-popper Shugo Tokumaru. Not only has it appeared on TV shows like "Grey's Anatomy" and "How I Met Your Mother", in commercials for Budweiser and AT&T. Why, the catchy little thing even charted in the U.S.-- where Writer's Block has sold roughly 160,000 copies.
None of which quite explains why the guy who sings male lead on "Young Folks", Peter Morén, has chosen to follow his group's breakthrough with, umm, a meandering folk-pop solo album loosely inspired by the sad tale of a studio-era Hollywood mogul whose passion for his work causes him to miss out on life. The Last Tycoon, now known as The Love of the Last Tycoon, was the final, unfinished novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald. The 1973 film adaptation, starring Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson, was the final (finished) movie by On the Waterfront director Elia Kazan. And Morén? Presumably, he's just getting started. And it shows, in a set of slow, plaintive love songs that flash occasional glimmers of his band's charms, but too often fail to even stand out over their stripped-down arrangements.
It's not Morén's indulging his self-professed "Dylanhead" status that hobbles The Last Tycoon. Folk-flecked acoustic guitar underpins some of the better songs here, stretching out beneath the caustic rasp of the handclap- and piano-splashed digital single "Social Competence" or dancing beneath harmonica on casual, intimate finale "I Don't Gaze at the Sky for Long", which alludes to filmmaker François Truffaut. "Le Petit Coeur", the track Morén tells Billboard gave him the idea for this project, adds strings and rumbling piano for an ominous, bilingual song about nighttime skulking, tribal conflict, and relationship brinksmanship: "If you lock me out again, I may not come back to seek you," Morén sings.
The album's vague concept can't be blamed for the disappointment, either. Sure, loping opener "Reel Too Real"-- with its synths, tubular bells, and knee-slaps-- examines the difference between images and reality. And Bert Jansch-esque six-minute epic "This Is What I Came For" is a cinematic character portrait: "You're the spoiled white kid with clenched white teeth." But it'll take way better Fitzgerald scholars than me to find other potential connections.
See, this points to the album's main problem: a failure to communicate. Fellow Swedish singer/songwriter José González keeps his lyrics elemental and his playing atmospheric, but neither Morén's voice nor the samey folkie backing here are strong enough to add interest to the clumsy rhymes and lackluster tunes of songs like "Tell Me in Time". Same goes for the sparsely orchestrated "Missing Link": "I've found the missing link, the missing link/ No longer do I have to think, have to think." Morén's words and melodies were as big a part of the appeal of his songs on Writer's Block as was Björn Yttling's reverby production, so again, it's not as if Morén hasn't done stuff like this well before.
In fact, he even does it here. Only once, on the electric guitar-based "My Match". With a spaciousness that's the closest The Last Tycoon comes, sonically, to Writer's Block, Morén delivers the album's deftest hook-- "I can't say that I plead guilty of theft/ But I agree I've done you wrong"-- and backs it up with a plea to "trust me, I trust you", mirrored by weeping lead guitar. On the Cat Stevens-like piano confessional "Twisted", spiced up by Spanish guitar and güiro, Morén sings, "Don't overrate yourself/ It could have been someone else." I wouldn't go that far. But The Last Tycoon shows that although Morén may not suffer from writer's block, he'd be smart to withhold some of his output. A lot like the rest of us.


Sky Ferreira's new EP veers from effervescent synth pop to sleepy acoustic ballads and features songwriting and production collaborations with Shirley Manson, Cass McCombs, Jon Brion, and Dev Hynes.

Ghost EP

Sky Ferreira's rise has been just short of meteoric: She teamed up with Miike Snow's Bloodshy & Avant after their brief window of crossover fame at the age of 15 and commissioned a track or so each from professionals like Swedish indie popper Marit Bergman and serial songwriter Ryan Tedder. There was some music shelved and some routine image trouble, but she scrabbled her way back to square two with the help of more professionals: Dev Hynes of Blood Orange and Shirley Manson of recently revived Garbage. Now her protostar is brighter than ever and she's earned one of the biggest cult hits of the year. On her new EP, Ghost, she's settled into several mutually exclusive styles of music. It's official: she's the year's next big latent potential.
None of this is entirely fair to Ferreira. It says a lot about both her talent and tenacity that she's even managed this much of a comeback when every major label and producer has a basement cluttered with the discarded half-debuts and dozens of demos that never even made it that far. It helps that she's got connections from before and during her industry time, and that they're easily spun into anecdotes (her mentor, Michael Jackson! Her partner in vodka-bottle scandal, Katy Perry!). It helps that all those singles, hits or not, gave her residual name recognition. It helps that she shows candor about it, on Twitter and to tastemakers. It helps that she's got her alt-fashion and modeling gigs-- ever more necessary as industry demands layer multi-platform experience and brand support on artists like tiered skirts. And it helps most of all that Ferreira's spent the years since her debut cultivating an impeccable, or at least impeccably marketable, sense of taste. She's called her upcoming album more of a collection of that taste than a statement of an album. And though she's spoken elsewhere about how developing artists aren't encouraged to curate those collections as often as inherit them from someone else's drawer, everything on Ghost sounds like something Ferreira does genuinely like.
What Ferreira likes, it seems, adds up to a veritable nostalgia feed. "Lost in My Bedroom" burbles over with details, sounding as if Ferreira's actually lost in about 10 synthpop songs playing at once, three of which came from John Hughes movies and two of which are "Dancing on My Own". Her voice disappears into the mix as if she's disappearing into a one-girl, mattress-jumping dance party, and as soundtracks to those go, this is as gleeful as any. Earlier on, Jon Brion assists with "Sad Dream", which flitters from the mundane ("I hear your call and I let my phone ring.../ I listen to the stereo play") to the mythologizing ("I live by my own laws, I stick to my guns"), from calypso to folk, from the warbled vocals of certain Brion acolytes to the more petulant, wailing sort. It never quite lands on a chorus, but it never quite needs to; the hesitation fits the subject matter. The same can't be said, alas, of "Ghost", Ferreira's alt-country track. The songwriting's evocative enough, and Ferreira emotes with enough stirrings of yearnings, but they sound more aspirational than heartbroken. She's crying out for someone, but not as loudly as the track cries out for its Emmylou Harris.
Nobody's asking Ferreira to be an alt-country singer, though. She fares better and sounds far more comfortable on tracks like the Manson-penned "Red Lips". It's essentially a Garbage B-side shorn of a pre-chorus, and it wears its concept as brightly as its colors, but Ferreira sells it with a distant, almost tossed-off vocal. There's distance in Hynes' "Everything Is Embarrassing", too, but a different sort. Where "Red Lips" is haughty, this is sullen; where Ferreira snarls out the former's chorus, "Embarrassing" sees her really dancing on her own, her melody too plaintive, her vocals too understated, and the beats too hazy to register much beyond resignation. It's not a come-on, as some have written, nor is it the anthem it's clearly trying to become (and that the inexplicable overproduction on the Ghost re-recording seems to try to make it). It's a gift to everyone more apt to mumble "I wouldn't bother" than attempt a diva kiss-off, and it oozes relatability, which may be her greatest strength.
Ghost demonstrates well enough Ferreira's versatility, certainly her stylishness, but even more than those, it shows her empathy. At this point, she could probably carry an album on any one of those three, but it's probably not a coincidence that of her myriad, varied singles, she was granted her first true breakout from the latter, from a human-sized dance song. It probably won't be a coincidence either if that's the trait to grant her staying power.


Guitar/drums band from Vancouver makes terminally catchy music played with punk's enthusiasm and velocity that makes you feel like joining in to bash along.

Post-Nothing

Disliking teen-pop gets you cast as some sort of rockist Luddite these days, but beyond the fact that most of it doesn't sound like stuff I'd have wanted to hear as a high schooler, it doesn't feel like music for teens either. (Hell, it's more tween-pop than teen-pop anyway.) But what about the kind of stuff that, say, the "1979" video lionized-- breaking into your folks' liquor cabinet, obliterating the speed limit despite just getting your learner's permit, leaving your hometown for the first time and discovering how small it feels. What about jamming out with your best bud and deciding to call it a band?
These are the kind of gut-level concerns Post-Nothing trades in, and I know, on paper it describes an itch that a late-1990s Vagrant record could scratch. And combined with the fact that the band is called freakin' Japandroids, it's easy to not take it seriously. Which is fine, since Japandroids do not make particularly complex music: Brian King plays broad chords stewed in mid-90s fuzz (think Superchunk) while David Prowse splays spastic but never showy drum fills that beg to be pounded out on your steering wheel. There's maybe one overdub on the whole thing and occasionally, both of them yell at the same time. Several songs have less than five lines. And while they've been known to cover Mclusky's "To Hell With Good Intentions" live, what makes Post-Nothing such a blast is how Japandroids tend to embody the opposite sentiment of that song title. This is terminally catchy music played with punk's enthusiasm and velocity, and maybe it's the fact that there's only two dudes in this band that makes you feel like joining in to bash along. It's as fun as an ill-gotten sixpack and there really aren't too many bands doing stuff like this well anymore.
Recent trends, however, might make you think otherwise: Due to their two-man setup and no-frills recording, Japandroids risk being lumped into the increasingly tiresome no-fi/noise-pop scene that finds bands using distortion to tear through the fabric of the medium and, in some cases, drown out weak songs. Either way, there's some form of obfuscation, but what makes Post-Nothing such a thrill is the manner in which Japandroids hold absolutely nothing back. As contagious as any of the lyrics, melodies, riffs, or drum fills are, their energy and lack of self-consciousness is every bit as equally lovable. Opening mission statement "The Boys Are Leaving Town" could be seen as a goof on Thin Lizzy, but the response, "Will we find our way back home?", is delivered with such conviction that between those two lines, "Boys" displays a palpable desperation. Six tracks later, the question is still unresolved-- amidst the cyclical thrum of "Sovereignty", they observe: "It's raining, OH-OH! in Vancouver/ But I don't give a fuck/ 'Cause I'm far from home tonight."
So yeah, it's a record about distance. For the most part it's a record about the distance between themselves and girls. Too often, similar records find themselves lapsing into easy misogyny, and while "Heart Sweats" skirts the issue, the in-jokes are kinda duds. Nonetheless, its thick riff is a good introduction to the less excitable but still very exciting side B. "Crazy/Forever" is heaving stoner rock (think Black Mountain with hooks), and closer "I Quit Girls" is about as close to a power ballad as Japandroids will allow themselves. It's full of musical drama-- King reaches for falsetto amidst almost-synthetic guitar EQ'ing and it's the longest stretch of time with no drumming, but the whole thing is leavened by a tongue-in-cheek pledge of devotion from Rowse: "After her, I quit girls."
The distance is emotional as well as physical on "Wet Hair", and I'll be surprised if I play another song in 2009 as much as this one. Its structure is almost comically linear-- there's three lines in the whole thing, and the most ridiculous one gets repeated for nearly half of its three minutes, something about going to France to French kiss some French girls. There's hardly even a verse-chorus structure, just a single melody that repeats itself faster after the drums drop out. But it's one hell of a melody, and it's lyric, like much of Post-Nothing, doesn't need to be analyzed or even understood to be felt.
Where it all comes together best is "Young Hearts Spark Fire". Almost a flipside to LCD Soundsystem's "All My Friends", it's thematically similar, trading wistful reminiscence for drunken defiance and pulsing electro for chaotic garage rock. The five minutes go by in a blur, and amidst the guitar heroics and cymbal-bashing, King lets his guard down on Post-Nothing's key line-- "We used to dream/ Now we worry about dying/ I don't want to worry about dying." It would be so easy to view this sort of musical and lyrical directness with suspicion, but "Young Hearts" is life-affirming stuff-- if only it affirms that, even in these times, life doesn't need to be as complicated as we tend to make it.


After years of Drake-wave and clones like Bryson Tiller and PARTYNEXTDOOR beating the sound into the ground, it’s hard to have patience for another moody, emotionally distant piece of one-note R&B dystopia. Canadian rapper/singer Tory Lanez, who scored a bit hit last year with "Say It," continues in this vein and shows flashes of promise when he leans on his singing.

Tory Lanez: The New Toronto / Chixtape 3

The New Toronto / Chixtape 3

Somewhere inside of Tory Lanez’ identity crisis, a good artist waits to emerge.Born Daystar Peterson, the Canadian-born rapper/singer released his first mixtape in 2009 but only recently gained visibility with his current single "Say It," the Brownstone-sampling single that has rounded the corner on 35 million YouTube views. In the same vein as "Say It," his new mixtapes Chixtape 3 and The New Toronto offer a combination of R&B’s current, dreary "New Jack Sleaze" sound (of which Ty Dolla $ign is the current mayor) and obvious nostalgia bait (particularly of the '90s). In both, you can hear the wheels and gears of a talented individual trying to shape himself into something more consumable and familiar to general audiences as though he’s simply another manifestation of a record company business meeting.
Chixtape 3 loosely acts as a concept tape about Lanez’ girlfriend, Jalissa, and his newfound infatuation with her best friend Keisha. It’s a showcase for Tory Lanez the singer, something he’s very good at doing. The problem is he doesn’t actually have anything to say. After years of Drake-wave and clones like Bryson Tiller and PARTYNEXTDOOR beating the sound into the ground, it’s hard to have patience for another moody, emotionally distant piece of one-note R&B dystopia. The brightest moment on Chixtape is "Juvenile (Freestyle)," in which Lanez rap-sings over Juvenile’s "Slow Motion." Nothing particularly interesting is being said, ("Shorty when we meet, gotta fuck for real/ Took the TTC just to get the whole meal/ And we used to fuck, girl it was so trill/ You remind me of Monica, you was so real") but he sells you on it anyways, riding the instrumental with a quivering, confident sing-song. It’s infectious, even as you become aware of the dullness and grossness of the lyrics.
About those lyrics: Lanez has a disturbing tendency to conflate lines that surpass aggression and tip into assault  ("Now shawty I'mma take it, if you don’t give it to me," from "Juvenile (Freestyle)") with "swagger." Aggressively dehumanizing women even while serenading them is nothing new in rap or R&B: The Weeknd and Ty Dolla $ign, arguably the new gold standards in the current sound Tory Lanez is chasing, have been just as crude and disrespectful. But Lanez doesn’t have half their talent to make you forgive him. His star power, such as it is, shines in sparks that can barely carry your typical mixtape, much less one with such uncomfortable lyrics.
The best moments on either tape come when he chooses to sing: He seems the most comfortable on songs like "Them Days," off New Toronto, when he kicks back into crooning about sex with ex-girls rather than the damaged-puppy rapping he spends so much of the tape committed to. It makes you wonder why he doesn’t just commit to that aspect fully. Also, for a Gangsta Grillz tape, DJ Drama makes no impression. Most of the time, you completely forget that he’s there; none of his usual overbearing bombast and record rewinds show up over the tracks, making you wonder whether the fanfare is an extra fee rappers need to pay for.
Despite all this, Tory Lanez does have a buzz going, and it feels like a missed opportunity that neither of these tapes offer anything more than reconstructed pieces of what’s already popular. Lanez has a great voice that appears in glimmers; on "Say It," his voice is full of vulnerability and a confidence that allows him to stay afloat the easily-recognizable Brownstone sample instead of drowning in it. The New Toronto closer "Letter to the City" is stripped of the theatrics and eager need to impress radio, and exhibits a competent rapper trying to be heard living in a city increasingly being crafted into a hub of Drake impersonators. Competency may seem like a low bar, but for now, it’s the best thing going for an artist with a lovely voice and absolutely nothing to say.


The debut from versatile Compton rapper offers a perspective that is close enough to suffer turbulence but removed enough to avoid succumbing to it.

Harlan & Alondra

When Buddy first moved out of his parents’ house in Compton, he landed at an apartment in Santa Monica at the corner of Ocean and Montana. The intersection inspired the title of the collaborative EP he released with producer Kaytranada last year—five tracks as warm and breezy as their beachside namesake. For some, that was their introduction to the singer-rapper, but it was picking up in medias res. Buddy’s story really begins at Harlan and Alondra, the cross streets of his childhood home and, now, his debut album.
Harlan & Alondra positions Buddy as a tour guide whose depiction of Los Angeles is as much marked by the city’s rich political and musical history as it is his own personal experiences. We learn of his triumphs and his losses, his ambitions and his politics. (It takes less than three minutes for him to hurl his own “fuck Donald Trump.”) But unlike many of his more prominent regional peers, he’s no street rapper; his perspective is largely that of a bystander, close enough to suffer the turbulence but removed enough to avoid succumbing to it.
On the charged lead single “Black,” he comes alive, replacing his normally laid-back glide with a blistering flow. It’s one of the few songs where he seems truly fired up. More often though, listening to Buddy is like hearing an old soul trapped in a young body. There’s wisdom underscoring his lyrics and classic elements in his production choices. He summons the ghost of Nate Dogg on the hydraulic “Trouble on Central,” exaggerating the contrast between the easygoing rhythm of G-funk and the suffocating reality of poverty. Elsewhere, the funky bass groove of “The Blue” draws to mind old heads in roller skating rinks, a love song hidden among Buddy’s ambitions. Snoop Dogg’s apt but brief appearance bridges the gap between the way the elder rapper smoothed the edges of West Coast hip-hop nearly three decades ago and the way younger continues that tradition. “Speechless,” which immediately follows, is a fitting counterpart. Buddy blends seductive soul with raunchy rap come-ons.
At a time when such an attribute almost seems like a requirement that’s overdone, seamlessly slipping between singing and rapping is still one of Buddy’s strongest assets. His good vibe music is rooted in a deeper and more spiritual place, so when he does break out his silken vocals or dip in and out of melody, it sticks just a little more. Even sharing a track with current it-man Ty Dolla $ign on the mellow celebration of “Hey Up There,” he’s able to hold his own. Conversely, when he leans into rapping, he achieves an emotive style of delivery that injects his words with extra resonance.
Still, Buddy is at his best when he lets himself be carefree. The Khalid-assisted “Trippin” allows a slippery sort of levity much like the drug-induced highs it portrays. The 2016 earworm “Shine” also makes an appearance at the end of the album, all lighthearted aspiration and resilient optimism. But “Find Me 2” settles in like the album’s true closing piece. Over the haze of minimalist production and blunt smoke, he reminisces about how far he’s come—a journey that started with him signing a largely fruitless deal with Pharrell in 2011—and looks towards a hopeful future. In these final moments, a sense of gratitude relieves the album of its own tension. Pensive but at peace, Buddy offers an exhale: “Lord willin’ we won’t die tonight/We gon’ fly tonight,” he croons, concluding to walk by faith and not by sight.
As the West Coast continues its rap renaissance—led by the likes of rap prophet Kendrick Lamar, energetic quartet SOB x RBE, gritty rhymer Mozzy and the tragic darling 03 Greedo—Buddy emerges as one of the region’s most versatile artists. Like a bluesman who still believes things get better, he offsets their often weighty revelations masked in revelry with something that feels more soothing. Part conversation and part confessional, Harlan & Alondra is an alternative take on one of pop culture’s most fabled cities. Buddy drops the top and extends an invitation to ride with him, reminding us along the way that though it may not always be sunny by the beach, it’s always worthwhile.


With pedal steel, synthesizer, and a whisper of voice, Marielle Jakobsons and Chuck Johnson create rippling soundscapes as soothing and engulfing as a warm bath.

The Ground Our Sky

From the mystic power of a sound bath to the biological comfort of a cat’s purr, humans have long recognized that sound affects the entire body. The late composer Pauline Oliveros called it deep listening: a practice in which listeners to engage with sound by surrendering to it completely. Among her students were Oakland’s Chuck Johnson and Marielle Jakobsons. Johnson issued Balsams, an ambient pedal-steel album inspired by his own deep-listening practices, in 2017; Jakobsons co-founded California instrumental duo Date Palms, whose 2013 album The Dusted Sessions was a masterwork of hazy desert psychedelia. As Saariselka, the pair create rippling soundscapes as soothing and engulfing as a warm bath.
Though the duo’s stated intention for The Ground Our Sky was to encourage a return to the earth, Jakobson’s sparkly keys and Johnson’s honeyed pedal steel sound as though they’re meeting in mid-air. From shared low-end foundations, they gently peel off and curve around one another. “Horizons” opens the album on a bed of fuzzy keys and synths, gradually stretching outward as Johnson’s steel-string tendrils curl around Jakobsons’ melody. Johnson carries the beginning of “Into the Wind” with a three-note repetition that rolls with the asymmetry of an unhurried tumbleweed. Jakobsons’ voice arrives somewhere between a hum and a whisper, fluttering like a transmission from beyond.
In the modern era, “frictionless” is often a euphemism for wringing humanity out of everyday interactions—an autoplay function instead of a live DJ, or an online food order instead of a phone call with a stranger. But Jakobsons and Johnson use their lithe maneuvers to build a space that feels restorative. Their compositions are without both friction and the uncanny-valley gloss that can accompany its absence.
Saariselka’s most gorgeous composition is the resonant “Neochrome,” which best demonstrates how Johnson and Jakobsons mutually amplify each other’s talents. Jakobsons initiates the piece with the cool vibrance of a Rhodes keyboard, and the song builds slowly from there, overlapping layers appearing and dissolving seamlessly. Their tonal kinship sometimes makes it difficult to find where her contributions end and his begin. “Neochrome” stretches for nearly eight minutes, and yet it fades too fast.
Saariselka’s entry into the canon of music geared toward deep listening is modest, barely eclipsing the 40-minute mark. But their careful pace and refusal to succumb to instant gratification is a tonic against chaos, a reminder that otherworldly idylls exist within terrestrial grasp. The Ground Our Sky encourages sensuality in the most literal sense: an awareness of one’s senses and taking deliberate pleasure in them.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Their latest album aims for life-or-death melodrama, but amid the layered arrangements and slick songwriting, Ra Ra Riot seem to once again have lost their sense of identity.

Superbloom

Ra Ra Riot are perhaps doomed to permanent association with a certain crop of verbose, precocious pop-rock acts, dating to around the time of their unofficial debut at the 2006 CMJ festival. But few of their peers have had Ra Ra Riot’s longevity—last year, the band toured in honor of the 10th anniversary of their debut LP—and over the past decade, they’ve explored electronic sounds and more ambitious production techniques, to mixed results. On 2016’s Need Your Light, they seemed to finally strike a balance between Beta Love’s outlandish synth pop and The Orchard’s overwrought orchestration. The band enlisted a litany of producers and writing collaborators for their latest album, Superbloom, but amid the layered arrangements and slick songwriting, Ra Ra Riot seem to once again have lost their sense of identity.
Named for a botanical phenomenon that produces an abundance of wildflowers, Superbloom is awash in bright excess. Heavily reverbed backing vocals and larger-than-life synth lines provide enough flourishes to drown out any attempt at restraint. “Belladonna” begins innocently enough, with Rebecca Zeller’s staccato strings and a buzz of handclaps and kick drums. But the chorus drops any pretense of subtlety, introducing a rollicking bassline, a stack of backing synths, and a chorale of “ohs” befitting of a “We Are the World” cover. It feels unwarranted, even before the Japanese spoken-word interlude. “Bitter Conversation,” the first side’s other biggest attraction, opens with a faux radio-dial effect and crashes into a chorus of DayGlo synths. In a song already crammed with ornamentation, even a little extra Auto-Tune is enough to be exhausting.
But Ra Ra Riot can’t commit to their dance-pop tendencies, either. The band recorded Superbloom in multiple sessions on opposite coasts, and the record struggles to bridge the differences. Songs recorded in Los Angeles with frequent collaborator Rostam Batmanglij tend towards a kind of weightless decadence. But tracks recorded in frontman Wes Miles’ childhood home in New Jersey take on an almost self-consciously gritty streak. “Endless Pain/Endless Joy,” a claustrophobic punk number that morbidly puts Miles “at the Sandman’s door,” is full of crunchy riffs and screams. After three tracks that rival the Cinematic Orchestra in their instrumental overload, it feels like whiplash.
According to Miles, Superbloom represents an East Coast band’s vision of California. Its lyrics, crafted with a legion of co-writers boasting impressive pop CVs, are starry-eyed Hollywood clichés: beautiful women on Italian motorcycles, working-class love affairs, dramatic scenes of lovers driving off into the night. They aim for the life-or-death melodrama of Lana Del Rey (Superbloom co-writer Dean Reid worked on several songs on Lust for Life), then collapse into platitudes (“love is blind”) or pleas to “make love.” Even Miles’ lithe falsetto cannot conjure the necessary theatrics.
Despite—or perhaps because of—its tightly wound riffs and booming drumline, closer “A Check for Daniel” finally finds a comfortable fit. Driven by distorted guitar and a frantic vocal, it recalls the eagerness and excitement that distinguished Ra Ra Riot when they first appeared. It’s a welcome jolt of anxious energy, evidence that the band need not sacrifice authenticity for enthusiasm.

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This revelatory and confrontational live album centers around Angel Bat Dawid’s prowess as a bandleader. With her eclectic band, it is a brilliant document of how free jazz functions as both exploration and exorcism.

LIVE

It first sounds like a straightforward request for the soundman, but soon becomes more like a plea for salvation. “Turn brother Julian up. That bass gotta hit,” urges Angel Bat Dawid early in her new album LIVE, a document of a concert she and her band Tha Brothahood gave during JazzFest Berlin in November 2019. “Turn it up! Turn that shit up!” she continues, her voice quickly reaching the edge of frenzy, as if she is a wanderer in the desert and the prospect of more low end is an oasis on the horizon.
Her cries join the rhythmic stream of syllables she’s been using to introduce the tune, a radical reimagining of “Black Family,” from her 2019 debut album The Oracle. “Black, Black,” she repeats, sometimes truncating the word to emphasize its percussive quality, sometimes letting it flow like palilalia, sometimes adding a long rolled “r,” like a rapper imitating the sound of automatic gunfire. When she begins adding “Up, up,”—as in “Turn up the bass,” and maybe also “up with Black families”—her apparent outburst takes on a different color, as another element in a melange that posits togetherness and music as salves for Black pain. You might wonder: was the mix really off, or was the whole episode intentional, somehow a part of the composition? Could both things be true?
A clarinetist, vocalist, composer, and keyboardist rooted in Chicago’s jazz scene, Dawid introduced herself on The Oracle as an idiosyncratic auteur. She composed, performed, recorded, and mixed the album almost entirely by herself, layering instruments and voices on a multitracking smartphone app. The Oracle’s hermetic quality was a part of its appeal, but Dawid’s vision was always more communal and participatory. In a 2019 interview with the Chicago Reader, she said she’d originally considered the solo tracks to be something like demos for the Brothahood to learn and perform with her, “But the recordings actually sounded kinda good,” so she released them that way.
LIVE is something like a manifestation of that initial vision, using her compositions as vehicles for ecstatic group improvisation, featuring a sundry ensemble of multi-instrumentalists and singers. It features plenty of the bracing instrumental work you might expect from a free jazz album, but also seems intent on capturing the full expressive range of the human voice. Dawid and Brothahood members Deacon Otis Cooke and Viktor Le Givens deliver gorgeous and fractured singing, chilly sci-fi vocoder chants, impassioned monologues, playful free associations. Often, a tune begins with a phrase repeated like a mantra, which they gradually break down and rebuild into dazzling new rhythms, the way an instrumentalist might construct a solo by twisting and reshaping small fragments of the written melody. On “The Wicked Shall Not Prevail,” all three improvise vocals in tandem across a polyrhythmic bed of percussion and electronics, which Dawid occasionally augments with pointillistic clarinet melody and shards of dissonant electric piano. It is an overwhelming display of musical and verbal invention.
Across LIVE, Dawid explodes the boundaries of her role as jazz bandleader, turning it into a suggestive and multivalent kind of performance art. She frequently implicates her audience along the way—sometimes as co-conspirators, other times as antagonists. The studio version of “Black Family” is almost mechanistic, with looped drums and throbbing sub-bass; on LIVE, it is lithe and funky, with exuberant soloing over an ominous two-chord vamp. In its stunning final minutes, Dawid entreats her listeners to join her in delivering the refrain: “The Black family is the strongest institution in the world.” The rhythm section gathers force, but the German crowd evidently declines to oblige Dawid. Again, a cliche of live concerts and recordings—the cathartic audience singalong—is suddenly fraught with racial and political implication, conflicts Dawid makes inextricable from the music itself. She shouts, admonishes, demands, preaches, begs, even seems to weep: “It will really help my people. It’s so simple, y’all. Can you just say it with me?” Two minutes later, she sounds drained of all energy as the band churns on behind her: “What’s wrong with me? You don’t love me. You don’t love my family. We need you to affirm us.”
At moments like these, Dawid seems to take the unchained improvisation of free jazz as a guide for all aspects of her performance, turning seemingly extraneous details—like stage banter, or instructions for the soundman—into vital components of her art. (One thing LIVE doesn’t capture is the visual element: witness an incendiary early 2020 performance of “Black Family,” captured on video, in which Dawid slams her electric piano keyboard with open palms, gets up and headbangs, and crouches on the floor in front of audience members, clarinet held high in her raised fist.)
In her conception of a jazz concert as a vividly multisensory experience, her ensemble’s ragtag instrumental eclecticism, her defiance of stylistic orthodoxies, and her emphasis on the group dynamic over individual solos, Dawid is clearly in the lineage of Sun Ra, as well as the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, the seminal out-jazz organization formed in her hometown in the 1960s. (She pays tribute to both with “We Hearby Declare The African Look,” an Afrofuturstic mashup of quotes from Ra and AACM affiliate Phil Cohran; Adam Zanolini, who plays bass and several other instruments in the Brothahood, is the AACM’s current treasurer.) Her multi-instrumental excursions and streams of dialogue with the audience can recall Rashaan Roland Kirk, and her use of her voice as a free improvisational instrument sometimes reminds me of Linda Sharrock. But her particular alchemy of these elements, and her ability to transmute everything that happens onstage into music, are blazingly original.
Dawid frames LIVE with two arresting field recordings taken in Berlin before the concert. The intro documents a confrontation between the artist and a hotel employee who’d told her to stop playing a piano that was on display in the lobby. The final track is a collage of remarks Dawid made on a JazzFest panel on the afternoon of the concert, in which she expounds on anti-Black racism in the world of European jazz festivals and more generally. In a note accompanying the album on Bandcamp, Dawid writes of several racist incidents she experienced while in the city, and the pain and exhaustion in her voice in these recordings are viscerally palpable.
She has said that she was “protesting” the festival and the audience during the concert, and the music of LIVE is often densely confrontational. But it is also tender, and full of solidarity. A 14-minute rendition of the Oracle highlight “We Are Starzz” accompanies its elegiac melody with sampled birdsong and exploratory leads from Dawid’s clarinet and Xristian Espinoza’s tenor sax. As it winds down, Dawid again addresses the crowd, sounding more conciliatory than she did during “Black Family,” but no less urgent: “Hold on to this memory right now. Seal it in your heart. We have an agreement, alright? This is called unity. This is what it feels like to be unified.”
“I’m a black woman—there’s no turning that off,” Dawid told a Guardian interviewer last year. “I look at the totality of the black experience. I don’t see my sister who has a crack addiction for 40 years as not being successful. Because of the lineage she’s coming from, this is the best she can do. When you’re black, being alive is a success.” Dawid’s use of the stage as a pulpit on LIVE makes it difficult by design for a white listener to simply lose themselves in the music, forcing us to confront racism and its effects in every note. To Black listeners, perhaps, Dawid offers another message, embedded in the title, not as a descriptor but an imperative: live.

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