The instrumental metal quartet’s first album in six years grapples directly with loss and grief, channeling dueling guitars and pummeling rhythms into a dire, haunted sound.

Nighttime Stories

Nighttime Stories is Pelican’s adult album, a direct confrontation with those existential milestones their music once merely suggested through its tension and scope. Family, grief, distance—all are now active components in their songs. The four members of the instrumental metal band are split between their native Chicago and Los Angeles, so they had to schedule blocks of time to hammer out new material together in person. Between sessions, they communicated through a Dropbox folder of fragments and jams and stray recordings from phones—the creative equivalent of a group text with old friends, where you reminisce and make plans that may never actually happen. It’s been six years since the band’s last album, Forever Becoming, and you sense that it’s all been something of a blur.
But if growing up is often a process of coming down, then Pelican are still focused on finding transcendence in subtle places. Their music has always thrived on patience—a virtue that makes aging gracefully feel like a seamless evolution. The benchmark of their current sound is the warring, restless interplay of guitarists Trevor Shelley de Brauw and Dallas Thomas, whose soaring fretwork conveys the emotional candor that most metal acts seek from their vocalists. On Nighttime Stories, they push each other toward aggressive textures they had abandoned after their earliest material. They’re accompanied by blast beats and pummeling rhythms, and they alternate between ragged solos and riffs that sound like they’ve been dragged from the lowest depths of sludge and doom metal. Through sheer volume or atmospheric intensity, it’s the sound of making up for lost time.
Other songs absorb the quiet into their songwriting, lending their music a depth that feels haunted but dire. After an initial burst of songs characterized by concise, melodic crescendos, “It Stared at Me” arrives as a tangled bed of mood music, its spacious arrangement like the scene setting to a violent Western. When a slide guitar winds through the song’s final minute, it ushers in the record’s adventurous second half. The title track staggers and lurches toward a mid-song breakdown that searches for stability but only slips into further chaos. And while the epic “Full Moon, Black Water” embodies the longform template of their previous centerpieces, its gentle finale feels uncommonly emotional.
Nighttime Stories plays like one seamless expression—its 50-minute runtime passes remarkably quickly—but it’s a statement heavy with meaning and memories. Jody Minnoch, a bandmate of Shelley de Brauw and drummer Larry Herweg in the band Tusk, died unexpectedly in 2014, and the album’s title was one of his last ideas. The low, mournful opening track, “WST,” features Thomas strumming an acoustic guitar that once belonged to his late father. These are specific tributes, but the whole record carries an unspoken aura of necessity. That their narratives proceed without lyrics only underpins the poignancy of their message—those implicit connections that go unspoken, the expressions that can be read only by people with an intimate understanding of one another. These relationships do not come easy and, if nurtured and maintained, will only intensify with time.


This focused and forceful 2013 live set showed the reunited grunge band looking to their future before the tragic death of lead singer Chris Cornell.

Live From the Artists Den

Soundgarden’s episode of Live From the Artists Den arrived just as the group was bringing the supporting tour for King Animal, their first album in sixteen years, to a close. They were roughly three years into their reunion, trading on ’90s nostalgia with an eye toward a sustainable future.
That future never materialized. Chris Cornell took his own life after a gig in Detroit in 2017, writing a sad final chapter to the band he fronted for more than three decades. Live From the Artists Den is the first posthumous Soundgarden release, a multimedia affair available as CD, LP, and BluRay, each presenting the entirety of the February 17, 2013 concert filmed at Los Angeles’ Wiltern Theater. The show was meant to celebrate the end of the King Animal tour, but six years later, its accompanying album serves as an accidental epitaph—a career retrospective given right when the group seemed resurgent.
Part of the reason Soundgarden’s comeback seemed secure is that they wore middle age handsomely. Their reunion seemed neither crass nor nostalgic, but a resuscitation of a connection they lost somewhere after Superunknown turned supernova in 1994. King Animal felt assured and confident, with Soundgarden navigating new material with grace, slowing down the tempos slightly while weaving in Cornell’s dextrous rhythm guitar.
Listening to Live From the Artists Den, it’s striking how seamlessly the King Animal material fits between hits and deep cuts. The songs play off of each other, the slow churn of “Blood on the Valley Floor” teeing up the coiled menace of “Rusty Cage.” Soundgarden didn’t mess with the arrangement of “Rusty Cage” or any of their other classics, but the distance of years changed their attack. They sound a trace slower here, which makes the music feel weightier and more measured.
Some of this deliberation may be a side effect of filming a concert. Guitarist Kim Thayil admitted as much when promoting Live From the Artists Den, saying the group may have “played a little bit more conservatively because of the cameras and the lights.” This might sound like a tame performance, but Live From the Artists Den is focused and forceful.
In the four years following this performance, Soundgarden toured regularly, playing Rockfest after Rockfest, selling out amphitheaters named after cellphone companies and headlining places with cumbersome names like Farm Bureau Insurance Lawn at White River State Park. They were riding the circuit afforded to any ’90s rock survivor, toiling away on new material when their individual schedules allowed. Enough demos reportedly exist to form a finished album, but disputes between the band and the Cornell estate may mean that they’ll never be completed, so that leaves Live From the Artists Den as an unintentional swan song. It’s one that suits the band, offering a deep dive into their catalog with no nostalgia. Like all final goodbyes, it’s a bit too sad if you look too closely.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Behind the elegant sounds of Laurel Canyon, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter’s vivid and knotty lyrics evoke half-imagined landscapes with startling clarity.

Eight Pointed Star

Marina Allen wields familiarity like a weapon. The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s clear, quietly powerful voice sometimes recalls Carole King, sometimes Julia Holter, sometimes Maggie Rogers; her lush, Laurel Canyon-referencing production fits squarely within the ’70s folk-rock revival that’s been going on in Los Angeles for the better part of the last decade, epitomized by artists like Weyes Blood, Hand Habits, and Sam Burton. But for all the softness telegraphed in her music, Allen’s third album Eight Pointed Star is spiky and hard to pin down, its familiar environment camouflaging lyrics that can be vivid and fantastical.
What other album uses the image of eating bones as a key metaphor on two separate tracks? “I eat the meat/I eat the bones,” on the rollicking country-rock song “Swinging Doors,” becomes a rousing cry of self-assuredness. On the airy, ambling “Red Cloud,” consumption becomes a way into Allen’s personal history; she makes “a stew with rain water and frozen meat, thick with pine needles, warm beer and baby teeth,” and wakes up “dizzy in Red Cloud,” the Nebraska town from which her family hails. The song’s lazy haze masks the intensity with which Allen tries to condense hundreds of years of history into a pop song, placing herself in the center of it: “I am tainted, I am taught, to be tough, to be raw, to be ruined, to be wrecked/Like the women whose aching backs and blistered skin make me coffee and burnt bread.” Beneath Allen’s laid-back compositions are lyrics that seem to scratch and claw at their seams in search of meaning.
Allen’s lyrics have always been wordy—even the most accessible songs on her underrated 2022 album Centrifics, like the earwormy piano-bar tune “Or Else,” were written in long, knotty run-on sentences that stood at odds with the straightforward production. But the songs on Eight Pointed Star are more oblique and mystifying: They often take place in half-imagined, half-remembered places like the titular town in “Red Cloud” or the stretches of farmland Allen conjures on the fable-like “Bad Eye Opal.” Much of the album is ostensibly about Allen finding a sense of confidence—in art, in relationships, or in herself—and that confidence, true to the adage that the more you learn the less you know, results in songs that plant themselves firmly in life’s gray areas.
Even so, Allen stumbles upon complex truths that she delivers with steely resolve. Opener “I’m the Same,” a piece of serene, spacious Americana, at first seems so placid that it’s unrecognizable as a breakup song. But that calmness feels in line with Allen’s rebukes to a partner, which are frank and cutting in their clarity: “Feeling wronged is not the same as proof,” she sings, delivering the line with the casualness of someone who knows they’re in the right. It’s a rare moment of certainty, and by the record’s last song, “Between Seasons,” all she’s sure of is that change can be a great thing. It feels like a mirror image of “I’m the Same”: Instead of chastising a partner for not seeing her fully, she revels in the feeling of growth. But the final line, once again, is a rug pull that suggests uncertainty can be one of life’s great joys, a quasi-mantra that reverberates through the rest of Eight Pointed Star: “Right on track, getting lost.”


Braids’ third album Deep in the Iris deals in the intangible memories that remain when a relationship ends. Vivid sensory images dance above the quicksilver music, illustrating that sometimes the clearest thing you can remember from a long-forgotten moment is the way the sun felt on your skin.

Deep in the Iris

What remains of a relationship after it ends? Pictures, text messages, mementos, sure, but the hardest things to hold onto are the fleeting sensations: the taste of a person’s mouth, the feeling of first standing naked in front of them, the dent in the pillow where a lover’s head once laid. Braids’ third album Deep in the Iris plays as a record of all these tiny memories, accrued in the aftermath of losing someone. The record is rich with startling little images: Stories of being pushed down the stairs, being confronted as a child for mistakes made, wanting to crack the eggs of a group of hatching pigeons flicker across the album’s lyrics. They dance above the quicksilver music, vivid and unreal, and illustrate that sometimes the clearest thing you can remember from a long-forgotten moment is the way the sun felt on your skin.
Sonically, Deep in the Iris is dramatically different than the band’s previous release Flourish//Perish. Whereas in the past the Montreal-based trio’s sound has been similar to their electronic contemporaries like Purity Ring and Majical Cloudz, here the band ditches anything stark and futuristic. Instead, they opt for fleet, skittering jazz percussion, crackling beats and stuttering cuts in vocals, while delicate, classical piano runs beneath the electronic instrumentals. The glitchy, warped surface is offset by the clarity and versatility of Standell-Preston’s narrative vocals, which pull everything into focus.
On "Taste", singer Raphaelle Standell-Preston describes how the taste and feeling of someone you love never really leaves you, even when they treated you abusively to begin with ("We experience the love that we think that we deserve/ And I guess I thought I didn't need much from this world," she muses). And sometimes the band examines that isolation in a larger, societal context. "It’s not like I’m feeling much different than a woman my age years ago," Standell-Preston begins on "Miniskirt", a song about rape culture and the cutting feeling of being objectified by men.  On "Sore Eyes" the synths rise, hinting at an actual dance track, before they fall back to the throbbing repetition of the song's bassline. The movement echoes the push and pull of the song’s message, as Standell-Preston breathily relays her dual desire and disgust in a song about watching porn on the Internet. Deep in the Iris never lets you get quite too familiar, or comfortable.
In the album’s track "Bunny Rose", Standell-Preston contemplates getting a dog to ail her loneliness, one which will always be waiting for her to come home. And it’s this sort of heartbreakingly simple desire, wanting to be unconditionally embraced by another when you come home, that pulls this album's messages about broken relationships to a universal plane. And while all those intensely specific sensations of an ended relationship do not get clearer with time, on Deep in the Iris it’s clear they are nevertheless always somewhere within you.


The UK dance star downshifts on her first new collection in five years, embracing smoky, understated R&B with moody arrangements and a flirty touch.

Peace and Offerings EP

Katy B has spent over 10 years as the Cinderella of UK dance: a winsome anti-diva upon whom listeners project all their clubbing thrills and dreams. But her music was never just about the club. Just as often, she sang about the liminal spaces between those nights: between one weekend and the next, between sudden spark and future disaster, between dancing past the pain and feeling it full force. So when Katy returns after a five-year break to barren nightlife and a musical world that’s nothing but liminal space, the transition’s remarkably smooth.
Peace and Offerings’ generous eight tracks contain no explosive bangers or erupting drops but build upon her introspective deep cuts—touchpoints include “Disappear” and “Play,” undersung highlights of 2011’s On a Mission and 2014’s Little Red, respectively. They also take Katy further into quiet, smoky R&B than ever before. It’s a far better fit than the adult-contemporary ballads Little Red nudged her toward; she’s steeped in the R&B genre, and lucky that its going sound plays to her strengths: not diva melisma, but subtle interpretation. But that’s the thing: R&B is a crowded space, particularly as a crossover act. The same low-key likability that got Katy B anointed the face of UK dance makes her, in R&B, one among many.
Fortunately, little can suppress her charm on record, even when she doesn’t totally sound like herself. Lead singles “Under My Skin” and “Lay Low”—the former beat by Nigerian British producer P2J, the latter a sun-dappled production by Mike Brainchild—are midtempo Afrobeats cuts that one could imagine as radio hits from any point in the past few years, by Katy or anybody else. “Open Wound,” a duet with fellow BRIT School alum Jaz Karis, isn’t the torch song the title suggests but something subtler and more quietly devastating. The wistful chord progression, yearning melody, and understated vocals suggest the kind of heartbreak that drains the color from months or years to follow. But Katy and Jaz are so similar in timbre and delivery that you’d need the credits to know it’s a duet; while they sell the track, they never quite own it.
Peace and Offerings is strongest when it indulges its moods, no matter what length or structure. “Aftermath” is Katy B’s “History of Touches”: a woozy and unmoored arrangement that seems to warp time around it, with measured lyrics that stretch into slo-mo. Katy delivers her words tentatively, with a buried sigh, as if she’s only now realizing just how many emotions are bubbling up from some self-loathing place. It’s almost a shame when the mood is broken by a ballad chorus and the track is over in less than three minutes. The EP closes with Katy B’s best track in years: “Daydreaming on a Tuesday,” produced by longtime collaborator and UK dance veteran Geeneus. Atop a breakbeat that sounds like twitterpated feels and a chromatic string arrangement full of knowing melodrama, Katy crushes unabashedly. She skips along the melody with a light, flirty touch, rehearses conversations, imagines herself as Marilyn alongside Marlon. The swooning sounds very little like anything she’s released before—and, probably, to come. “I don’t see myself just making really chilled music for the rest of my life,” she told DIY earlier this year. The best moments of Peace and Offerings, though, suggest she could linger there indefinitely.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the peak of Marc Bolan’s career, the extravagant and near-perfect The Slider.

The Slider

In 1969, Marc Bolan published a folio of poetry titled The Warlock of Love. By that point, the man born Mark Feld had already been the guitarist of mod-rock band John’s Children (for all of four months) before turning his attention to folk-rock duo Tyrannosaurus Rex. Together with bongo player Steve Peregrin Took, the group released albums with titles like My People Were Fair and Had Sky in Their Hair... But Now They’re Content to Wear Stars on Their Brows and Unicorn. Bolan mostly sat cross-legged style on stage, strumming an acoustic guitar, singing with such heavy affect that his future producer Tony Visconti was certain he was French, not English. None of these endeavors turned him into a star. But the last line of that folio portended what was to come: “And now where once stood solid water/Stood the reptile king, Tyrannosaurus Rex, reborn and bopping.”
The very next year, Tyrannosaurus Rex was reborn. Bolan stood up, plugged in a Gibson Les Paul, replaced Took with Mickey Finn, and began to enunciate each syllable with lip-smacking aplomb on the band’s first single as T. Rex. Propelled by handclaps and a strutting gamecock of a guitar lick, “Ride a White Swan” climbed up the UK charts to No. 2. T. Rex was bopping. So much so that The Warlock of Love sold over 40,000 copies, making Bolan a best-selling poet.
When T. Rex’s second single “Hot Love” shot straight to #1, Bolan dabbed some glitter on his cheekbones before a “Top of the Pops” performance. As Simon Reynolds recalled in Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, that performance was “the spark that ignited the glam explosion,” confessing himself to “being shaken by the sight and sound of Marc Bolan...that electric frizz of hair, the glitter-speckled cheeks...Marc seemed like a warlord from outer space.” With 1971’s Electric Warrior, T. Rex topped the charts and was poised to break in the U.S., where “Bang a Gong (Get It On)” reached the top 10. For a glorious, nearly two-year reign, England was caught up in what the music mags would call “T. Rextasy.”
What magic ingredients led to this transformation? Theories range, but this band pic offers a clue. Bolan wears a Chuck Berry tee, while Finn’s shirt proudly proclaims: “Enjoy Cocaine.” Stripping their sound back to the giddy early days of rock’n’roll while indulging in coke’s nervy stimulation, T. Rex very suddenly manifested the biggest screamfest since Beatlemania. Visconti deemed Bolan’s genius be in skipping over the Beatles’ influence entirely, instead reaching back to the ’50s: “[He] emulated Elvis, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, that was his little trick. It was ingenious.”
Recorded in March and released in July of 1972, The Slider marked both the zenith and imminent approach of the cliff’s edge for T. Rextasy. Recorded in a dilapidated castle in France, it captured Marc Bolan as the King of Glam at the absolute height of his powers. Think Nadia Comăneci in 1976, Prince in the ’80s, or Ronnie O’Sullivan running the snooker table. T. Rex could do no wrong during that span.
As such, every wrist flick and downstroke on The Slider rings out like an act of god. Each cast-off line from Bolan’s notebook transforms into a profound edict from on high. And every cut—be it pop perfection or half-sketched—gets spun into cotton candy by Visconti and the backing vocals of Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan (better known as Flo & Eddie), harmonizing their nasal voices towards new adenoidal highs. The Slider exudes confidence to the point of becoming delirious and drunk on Bolan’s own self-regard, careening between bawdy, brash Little Richard lop-bam-booms, weirdo machismo rock, and ethereal acoustic ballads, while line by line Bolan toggles between profundity and inanity, melancholia and nonsense.
“Metal Guru” opens the album with a gush of guitar and Bolan’s mawkish cry, “Mwah-ahah-yeeeah.” It’s a victory lap as introduction and celebratory whoop-along. At least until each verse detours into stranger terrain: surrealistic upholstery (“armour-plated chair”), rock’n’roll cliché (“you're gonna bring my baby to me”), tongue-twisting meter-buster (“just like a silver-studded sabre-tooth dream”). It’s a glorious amount of gobbledygook.
From his earliest days, Bolan knew his way with the juxtapose of strange, slippery words, drawing inspiration from the poetry of fellow countrymen like John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as the fantastical realms of J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll. As Bolan pivoted from hippie-folk underground obscurity to mainstream pop star, discarding elves for automobiles, he kept the mood of his words intact. At the start of a new decade, when the gap between rock and pop was beginning to widen, Bolan was content to blur the lines between genres. No longer happy with those weedy full-lengths and favoring instead the concision of a 45, T. Rex’s greatest songs hit like hard candy: crunchy, mouth-tingling sweet, and a little unreal.
He kept remnants of his folksy roots, though. “Mystic Lady” is a keenly sweet and fragile acoustic number, an ode to a sorceress in dungarees set adrift by strummed acoustic guitar and Visconti’s Romantic strings. In one couplet, cliché and stunning surrealism are wed: “Fills my heart with pain/Fills my toes with rain,” Bolan’s clenched-jaw jitter eliciting that visceral sensation.
Visconti would go on to produce iconic albums for the likes of Bowie and Thin Lizzy later in the decade, but you can hear his golden touch across the album. On the three-minute romp of “Rock On,” he weaves together boogie-woogie piano, overdriven guitar, a prancing snare drum, Flo & Eddie’s glorious and grotesque harmonies, and a sax phased and flanged until it’s a streak of stardust.
Even The Slider’s lesser songs—“Baby Boomerang” and “Baby Strange” are as puerile as their titles suggest—are elevated by Visconti’s touch. The string sections of “Rabbit Fighter” form a sweeping anthem from so much hot air. Just as impressive is how a throwaway like “Spaceball Ricochet” can become wholly evocative. “Ah ah ah/Do the spaceball” doesn’t do a damned thing when written out, but with the bowed cello and Flo & Eddie’s uncanny accompaniment of Bolan’s gasps, this trifle transforms into one of the album’s most ethereal moments.
“Chariot Choogle” (like “Buick Mackane” on the A side) is a polymer of heavy guitars and giddiness. Amid some footballer barks lies a sweetheart of a line: “Girl you are groove/You're like the planets when you move.” It reveals just how T. Rex took the onerousness weight of hypermasculine blues-based rock and replaced it with something featherlight and androgynous, the moment where Reynolds said, “cock rock became coquette rock.” On the 12-bar blues title track, Bolan’s admission that “and when I’m sad, I slide” induces a sense of vertigo with phased strings and voices, the shaker and fricative hiss close in the mix anticipating ASMR. Elsewhere, Bolan sings that the slider is “a sexual glider” while promo for the album asked: “To be or not to be, that is The Slider.” Thousands of spins later, I confess I’m no closer to understanding just what the titular proper noun or verb might mean.
In hindsight, it’s hard to imagine Bolan being that cocksure, but there was a moment in time in the UK when you could utter T. Rex in the same breath as the Beatles and the Stones and not be wrong. Who else would call Bob Dylan “Bobby” and mention him multiple times over the course of the album, even though they never met in real life? Who else was a big enough star to get a Beatle to shoot Born to Boogie, a vanity film about him? Who else but Marc Bolan could out-glam Elton John on the same stage? And when his frenemy David Bowie finally broke onto the charts with the release of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, Bolan had three other albums in the Top 30 to keep him company.
Bowie, though, would have the last laugh. While wars were waged for or against Bolan in the letters section of Melody Maker and New Musical Express, The Slider topped out at #4 and marked the end of his reign. He’d have two more hits, but neither would reach the #1 slot. The year 1973 marked the last time Bolan placed a song in the top 10 during his lifetime, a precipitous plunge worthy of Icarus.
“He had the biggest ego of any rock star,” his bandmate Volman said. “No one in his own mind was greater than Marc Bolan.” It doesn’t seem like a coincidence that when Flo & Eddie’s manic falsettos first harmonized with him on “Hot Love,” it gave Bolan the first taste of success. But Flo & Eddie were also the first to get fed up with Bolan’s narcissism and left before T. Rex’s next album Tanx. Drummer Bill Legend left after, and Visconti would be unceremoniously relieved of production duties after 1974’s Zinc Alloy and the Hidden Riders of Tomorrow. Mickey Finn was gone by the end of that year. By the time Marc Bolan died in a car crash in 1977, he was already being eclipsed by Bowie.
But just a glance at The Slider’s cover reveals that Bolan’s legacy is still with us. One instantly sees the father of Slash’s own iconic look. Watch the diminutive Bolan stalk the stage like an androgynous elf in his shimmering high-heeled boots and you see where another diminutive yet larger-than-life rock star like Prince took his cues. In the 21st century, as rock bands peeled away excess, Bolan’s DNA readily sprung forth from the likes of the White Stripes and Black Keys. Even without a guitar, dance producers in the new millennium sought the same, with the likes of Superpitcher, Michael Mayer, and Matthew Dear stripping everything back and cranking up the glitter and glam.
While responsible for the birth of glam in the UK, Reynolds argues that T. Rex “was too quicksilver” for a rock legacy. So while Ziggy Stardust tells a fairly coherent story and ascended into “classic album” status, The Slider forever eludes our grasp. By keeping their mystery intact, Bolan’s songs emulate his forebears best, whether it’s wondering where the wang dang doodle is at or what a Jabberwocky is. In that riddling way, Bolan is always reborn to boogie.


The Montreal producer sounds liberated on his latest EP, an idealized evocation of the club made up of fleeting breakbeats and ribbony synths.

Fantasy

On 2019’s Dawn Chorus, Montreal producer Jacques Greene preached salvation on the dancefloor. Murmuring over a pulse-raising backdrop of classic acid, featured vocalist Cadence Weapon likened a night at the club to a church service, sketching out a familiar trope in vivid terms: outstretched hands, primal chants, beams of light illuminating the faithful. “At night service/Saturday mass,” the Toronto rapper intoned, seeing a vision of eternity in a 4/4 beat: “All the nights with stained glass/In the future, see the past.” It made for a stirring encapsulation of what draws people to seek ecstatic communion before the DJ’s pulpit, weekend after weekend. The future that the two musicians didn’t see coming, of course, was the plague on the horizon, one that promised to leave no place of worship—whether temple or discotheque—untouched.
The sudden loss of one’s congregation can occasion a crisis of faith. Greene’s Fantasy EP, his first significant body of new work since that 2019 album, is pitched as his attempt to seek solace in the spiritual wilderness. In a note accompanying the record, he writes of anxiety and loneliness; of wrestling with the restlessness he experienced in the unexpected quiet, “willing a form of peace and inspiration into my surroundings.” In practical terms, you might expect his search to have led him far from his habitual stomping grounds. In fact, these five tracks aren’t all that different from what we’re used to from the veteran bass musician: They’re grounded in breakbeats and rumbling low end, garlanded with ribbony synths and vocal samples. But the new material also feels strangely unburdened, as though perhaps, newly freed from the pressure of satisfying the dancefloor’s needs—Is this kick drum punchy enough? Is this synth hook sharp enough?—he was liberated to simply follow his instincts.
The opening “Taurus” is representative of this newfound lightness of spirit. Dawn Chorus could occasionally feel heavy-handed, weighed down by its own desire for transcendence. But this song’s groove positively glides, chopped and reversed breakbeats carving shapes like a skater on a frozen lake. Suffused in wordless vocals and shimmering pads, the whole thing radiates a rosy glow. None of it is particularly new; in both tone and technique, it’s strongly reminiscent of Aphex Twin’s classic “Xtal.” But it’s immaculately produced and mixed, and profoundly effective—both for the pleasure centers it fires, and also for the associations it triggers. It feels like a genetic memory passed down across generations of ravers, encoded in their very DNA. Whether or not you’ve ever waded across a muddy field at dawn while jungle breaks test the limits of a towering soundsystem, Greene’s idealized evocation of the scene feels intimately familiar.
“Memory Screen + Fantasy” takes a more sedate tack, smearing shoegaze chords over a slow, shuddering house beat, and running coos through an effect like a busted guitar amp. Toward the end, the tempo kicks up a gear or two; even in the absence of drums, syncopated chords pulse in anticipation—a crescendo in search of a climax that never comes. The pastoral “Relay” might be the simplest and sweetest of the bunch: Arraying layers of shimmering synth pads atop a snapping electro groove, it’s another pitch-perfect homage to early Aphex. “Sky River,” on the other hand, conjures images of apocalyptic grandeur, like a leather-clad Imperator Furiosa striding out of a cloud of crimson smoke on a quaking desert plain, even as guest singer Satomimagae’s ethereal Japanese-language vocals lend an airy touch of grace.
Even in good times, Greene’s style of bass music has always had a melancholy tinge to it, and the closing “Leave Here” feels particularly bittersweet. Like the best of his output, it’s marked by strong contrasts—between the forceful, almost sludgy bass, nimble percussion, and airy vocal loop fluttering above. Evoking Burial, it feels like an attempt to recall a fading memory of raving, to capture a sensory epiphany in the fleeting interplay of breakdowns and bass drops. As fantasies of the club go, it’s as vivid as they get; all that’s missing is the bodies and the room.
Buy: Rough Trade
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The funky retro-soul band aims to set itself apart from leader Anderson .Paak on a solo debut packed with guests, including Syd, Kali Uchi, and the late Mac Miller.

Free Nationals

In less than a year, the Free Nationals went from playing weddings to performing on “Ellen,” opening for Beyoncé, and amping up Coachella crowds. As Anderson .Paak’s live band, they’ve been fundamental in establishing his retro sound. (As influences, they cite Snoop Dogg, Stevie Wonder, and Erykah Badu.) Now, after nearly two years of pump-faking, the band—comprised of guitarist Jose Rios, keyboardist Ron “T.Nava” Avant, bassist Kelsey Gonzales, and drummer Callum Connor— has set off on its own with a 40-minute self-titled debut. Rios has compared their new feature-heavy album to Santana’s 1999 smash hit Supernatural, and while Free Nationals isn’t as universally appealing, it shares that album’s same problems: namely, a lack of cohesion and direction.
The members of the band consider themselves “indigenous to the funk,” and they’ve gotten pretty good at  mimicking the pure sound of their chosen era: They ran the album’s music through a cassette machine to add the warmth and distortion of analog compression, hoping to bake nostalgia directly into their songs. While they are all skilled players with a clear familiarity with classic grooves, their music is hampered by a lack of imagination. “I think this is the record AP [Anderson .Paak] wanted to make, but didn’t, after Malibu,” Rios told High Snobiety. But the Free Nationals debut isn’t even in the same stratosphere as .Paak’s breakthrough. The rangy soul of that album came from his distinctive storytelling and point of view, not to mention his raspy voice. Free Nationals just feels like a second-rate compilation of soul covers, a jukebox musical without a plot.
Occasionally, one of their guests catches a spark.  T.I. sounds revitalized over the funk-rock riffs of “Cut Met a Break,” boosting his own legend as trap pioneer: “Number one, running up the millions/Show you how to flip a brick and buy a building.” “Oslo” adds a touch of Vocoder to what could pass for a Doobie Brothers song rewritten for Roger Troutman. Anderson .Paak makes a single appearance on the butter-smooth “Gidget,” turning an in-studio phone squabble between Rios and an ex into a story of forgotten love; it is the one song on which they feel whole.
There are plenty of collaborations here that make sense on paper, but Free Nationals doesn’t always know how to integrate the talents of its guests. Daniel Caesar (“Beauty & Essex”), Syd (“Shibuya”), Kali Uchis, and the late Mac Miller (“Time”) have all produced at least one R&B-focused opus in the last few years: the gospel-tinged Freudian, the seamlessly soulful Hive Mind, the genre-bending Isolation, or the funky Divine Feminine, respectively. But this album never manages to do more than use them as pegs on its mood board. There are isolated moments here and there, but even when when they strike an appealing note or two, the Free Nationals never come across as more than a backing band missing its leader.


Brooklyn’s Real Life Buildings have become an indie supergroup of sorts, counting Vagabon’s Lætitia Tamko and Crying’s Elaiza Santos as members. Their new album carries a smart, raggedy charm.

Real Life Buildings: Significant Weather

Significant Weather

Before it was known as a Brooklyn indie supergroup, Real Life Buildings was the house Matthew Van Asselt built. A creative jack-of-all-trades, he splits his time as a musician, visual artist, and publisher/labelhead with Mt. Home Arts. He may have conceived Real Life Buildings earlier in the decade as a solo project, but ever since 2014’s debut LP It Snowed, his performances under that moniker have prominently featured his NYC peers—such as Gabrielle Smith (fka Eskimeaux, now Ó) and Felix Walworth, aka Told Slant. In time, Real Life Buildings blossomed into a full band, better suited for the basement than the bedroom.
The current, five-person configuration includes several recent Brooklyn-based notables, like Lætitia Tamko, the auteur known to most as Vagabon—who plays guitar and contributes some vocals here—as well as Elaiza Santos, Crying’s prog-loving bandleader. Together with bassist Griffin Irvine and drummer/backing vocalist Jon Appel, the group churn out a smart, wiry form of indie rock. Real Life Buildings’ sound finds common ground in its members’ respective backgrounds, while retaining its own raggedy charm.
Van Asselt does most of the singing on Significant Weather, and while he’s not exactly a vocal powerhouse, he is a dead ringer for David Berman. However cozy its rumbling timbre, his adenoidal croon lacks the melodic range and tonal nuance of the limber arrangements surrounding it. There’s plenty of nervous energy lurking in the margins of the album’s endearingly grungy siblings “Understanding Gravity” and “Ground Cover,” and in the queasy, Midwestern lurch powering “Thaw.” But Van Asselt’s koans are so high in the mix, it’s difficult to make out the fireworks, much less appreciate them.
That numbness, that disconnect between kinetic force and emo-inspired stasis, has informed many of Van Asselt’s projects, but especially Real Life Buildings. His lyrics frequently explore themes of mental illness, existential malaise, and romantic despair. His personal revelations are framed conversationally and matter-of-factly. With “Other Windows,” Van Asselt laments over only seeing the sun on Instagram. “No News” finds him looking at the enraged post-election narrative with tired eyes, sketching an all-too-relatable still-life: “In my bedroom, I don’t read the paper, I don’t click the links/I just scroll past them through an endless feed of headlines/Each one is worse than the last one,” he deadpans. On “Understanding Gravity,” he tries to stay optimistic about a dead-end job and an aging childhood cat, proffering up the following wisdom on the former subject: “And if it’s less than minimum wage, at least you have a purpose/You’re not sleeping in until two, having lunch, but calling it breakfast.”
Van Asselt lampshades his self-pity with a volley of self-assured quips. “Seeking comfort is not radical for someone like me,” he sings on “No News,” and later “Like any other person, I desire relevance/But hope that I can achieve it just by sitting at my desk.” Real Life Buildings, though, are most appealing when the band’s members are in clear dialogue. Significant Weather is a testament to their smartness and sincerity, reiterated by the sunny setting: Tamko and Santos’ dulcet harmonies and hopscotching fretwork, Appel and Irvine’s straight-shooting percussion, and above all else, a sense of community.


On his fifth solo album, Fuck Buttons’ Benjamin John Power channels industrial menace and ambient dread to ask a timely question: What is real life, and will life ever feel real again?

In Ferneaux

For the past decade, Blanck Mass has used the hallmarks of ambient electronic music to create albums that refuse to be relegated to the background. The solo project of Fuck Buttons member Benjamin John Power often alternates between dreamlike soundscapes and punishing, high-octane electro-industrial that evokes an early-’80s cyberpunk vision of our present. Blanck Mass thrives within that contrast: waves of near-bliss crashing against the jet-black jetty before ebbing gently back to the ocean.
On In Ferneaux, his fifth album, Power smashes Blanck Mass’ two selves together so that they are indistinguishable from each other. Equally attracted to the tranquil idyll of kosmische stalwarts Ashra and the crumbling brutality of noise artist Prurient, Power stretches his arms to both these extremes, often in quick succession and sometimes simultaneously, for a stunning, often challenging effect.
The album plays out across two suites, each about 20 minutes long. “Phase I” begins as if Tangerine Dream’s “Choronzon” were played at 45 RPM, morphing into a stretch of familiar hard techno and back in the span of a couple minutes. From there, Blanck Mass layers field recordings made across the last decade—left intentionally vague, but perhaps: cicadas, doors slamming shut, quarters dropping into arcade machines—over long passages of drone synthesizer. The result is one long, menacing autobiographical collage that acknowledges our bleak present and overflows with nostalgia for everything that came before.
It’s impossible to divorce new artworks from our little historic sliver of agony, specifically the unending isolation. In Ferneaux is no different. Even though many of the sounds are archival, they become new as they are heavily processed to convey Power’s detachment from the world in which they originated. Rain or hail clinks on metal grates, sounding like a city-sized broken xylophone. Screams echo, manipulated to feel like a demonic chorus singing from another planet. Three quarters through “Phase I,” warblers trill in a rainforest—or a Rainforest Café, perhaps, as human-esque voices emerge in the collage—sounding alternately real and synthesized. It’s unclear if the birds come from a field recording, were created on Power’s synthesizer, or both. In Ferneaux intentionally blurs the line between the organic and the invented, imbuing naturally occurring ephemera with uncanny musicality.
If this sounds like the audio equivalent of the “beauty in all things” floating plastic bag scene from American Beauty, thankfully In Ferneaux’s delivery is more oblique, and thus palatable. But it’s not an easy listen. The conclusion of “Phase I” is pure noise, a notion Blanck Mass has only teased or layered amid its more dancefloor-ready tracks. The drumbeat glitches and slows to an unholy crawl, the cymbals grating like they’re being fed to a table saw. The first minute of “Phase II” is even harsher, especially for listeners who may know Wolf Eyes solely as an Instagram meme account. But bliss is coming. What follows is In Ferneaux’s central thesis in the form of a field recording made at a San Francisco bar. As the noise recedes, a stranger speaks over a celestial ambient passage: “Do you recognize the misery and blessings go together?” A period of headphone-rattling static ensues, eventually fusing with the ambient soundscape.
The last few Blanck Mass albums have functioned as social commentary steeped in existential dread. The title World Eater, an album that emerged in the wake of Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump, was meant to be taken literally; a cannibalistic human race was devouring itself. Animated Violence Mild evoked the paranoiac unease of the surveillance state. In Ferneaux drills down to the root and questions existence as a concept: What is real life, and will life ever feel real again? The pain of reality is perhaps never knowing exactly what is going on.
Sounds fun, right? As the headiest entry in the Blanck Mass catalogue, In Ferneaux is more edifying than satisfying; abandon all hope for bangers, ye who enter here. But taken holistically—and repeatedly—In Ferneaux reveals the intellectual and emotional journey as the reward. As the mysterious prophet on “Phase II” asserts: It’s all in how you handle the misery on the way to the blessings.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


On a tape label with links to Hamburg’s Golden Pudel club, the German curator delivers a deep-diving, pitch-shifting DJ mix traversing Alice Coltrane, desert blues, and cacophonous synths and drums.

V I S C 0 9

The Berlin-based producer and DJ Çaykh, born Nicolas Sheikholeslami, is a shadow on the wall of the internet, mentioned in passing by those who've admired his remarkable mixes but with almost no presence beyond his SoundCloud. That account reveals that he runs a cassette label dedicated to Somali music; he has released two (excellent) compilations to this effect in recent years, and also co-curated another small collection of Somali music, which was nominated for an unlikely Grammy. His label’s address is listed as “Berlin, in front of BND building, Germany.” And that’s about it. Sheikholeslami is clearly the sort to let his music speak for itself—and happily, it speaks eloquently. This is the second mixtape he’s produced for Hamburg’s V I S label, and like the first, it’s a strikingly original piece of curation.
As with all the other releases in the series, this release comes on cassette, a format that also fits the label’s barely online aesthetic. While this is a DJ mix, it’s certainly not focused on the dancefloor. Instead, if the strange and wonderful sounds arrayed here share anything, it’s a sort of worldly psychedelia. The tracks traverse genre and nationality, but they’re united by their mood: spaced out, atmospheric, portentous. Much of it is generated by echo. This mix feels like it’s somehow distant from you, especially when listening with headphones, and yet also seems completely immersive.
The selection is, as ever, impressively esoteric: If anyone apart from Sheikholeslami himself can name all these songs upon hearing them, I’ll be mightily impressed. (The lack of a tracklisting only adds to the mystery.) Several tracks are noticeably chopped and screwed, which, according to Germany’s Groove magazine, is characteristic of the “sutsche” style (which among other things, involves playing 45s at 33rpm) in vogue at Hamburg’s Golden Pudel club, whose resident DJs Nina and Good News run V I S, and where Sheikholeslami has also performed.
Radically slowed down 45s are hardly a revolutionary idea—Southern hip-hop DJs have been employing similar techniques for years—but they work a treat in the context of this tape. Instead of hip-hop beats, it’s recordings from much further afield that are stretched and distorted into new forms, then smeared across the mix to create sounds that are at times beautiful and immersive, and at others harsh and abrasive. The set starts with a sparse, pitched-down recitation of Dylan’s “Masters of War,” which dissolves into a cathedral-sized cacophony of synths and drums, and ends 90 minutes later as a barrage of discordant noise recedes into an ancient recording of Swedish singer (and Nazi favorite) Zarah Leander singing “Stein-Lied (Ein schwarzer Stein ein weißer Stein).” In between, it traverses Alice Coltrane, desert blues, tabla-and-dhol rhythms, accordion-led Eastern European foot-stompers, and a crackly hold-music version of Beethoven’s “Für Elise.”
Throughout, Sheikholeslami seems to delight in creating dramatic contrasts, both in his layering of sounds and in his transitions between tracks. Metaphorically, it feels like wandering through a strange landscape, never entirely sure what you’re going to encounter. One minute you’re stumbling through a firelit haze of distant drums and echoing calls; the next, you’ve emerged into the midst of a sax solo that sounds disconcertingly like a dog in pain. It’s quite a ride.
The result is that rare mix that works on both a visceral level and a cerebral one. Willful obscurantism has fueled DJs’ games of one-upmanship for years,  but Çaykh doesn’t just seem to be demonstrating the extent of his formidable record collection here. Instead, he’s deploying a fascinating selection of sounds to create a mix that genuinely resembles nothing else.


Laying bare the strangeness of their repertoire while connecting centuries-old songs to modern struggles, the London collective approaches folk song as a living tradition, not a museum piece.

Shovel Dance Collective: The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore

The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore

“The Grey Cock,” an English folk ballad whose origin lies sometime in the 17th century or earlier, concerns a pair of lovers who reunite late one night after a long time apart. When a crowing rooster interrupts their rendezvous, the woman sends her lover away, thinking morning has come. By the time she realizes that the bird has marked the day too early, and there is still an hour of night’s cover remaining, it’s too late: He’s already gone. There is some debate among scholars over whether the young man—sometimes called Johnny, others Willie—was still in possession of his mortal soul when he showed up at his girlfriend’s door. In a transcription of the ballad’s text collected in the 19th century, the reason for his predawn departure is left unspoken. But in one of the earliest known audio recordings, from the early 1950s, the singer says it outright: “O Mary dear, the cold clay has changed me/I am but the ghost of your Willie O.”
In one interpretation, the explicitly supernatural character of “The Grey Cock” is a comparatively recent addition, imported from an unrelated Irish ballad; in another, it is a remnant of the song’s original form, scrubbed from the official record to avoid the appearance of superstition and reintroduced via oral tradition sometime later. Shovel Dance Collective, on their remarkable new album The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore, go with the ghost story. Nick Granata, one of multiple vocalists in the London ensemble, delivers “The Grey Cock” with controlled vibrato, lingering on certain syllables and letting others rush by, sounding at times as if they've seen a spirit themselves. There are no instruments behind them; only the sound of softly rushing water. As for whether this is some exalted true and original version of “The Grey Cock” or a newer amalgamation, I suspect that Shovel Dance Collective don’t particularly care. For them, folk song is a living tradition, not a museum piece.
Some of Shovel Dance Collective’s nine members grew up playing folk music, and others started as indie rock or experimental musicians and came to it later. They’re part of a loose-knit London scene whose participants have a similarly varied relationship to strict tradition: bands like caroline, whose post-rock instrumentals draw upon English folk as one of many influences, and the Broadside Hacks, who perform centuries-old songs in communal and improvisatory new arrangements. Compared to those two, Shovel Dance Collective are spartan and rigorous in their approach. There is not so much as an acoustic guitar in the credits of The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore, which instead favors instruments that conjure a deeper and stranger antiquity: hammered dulcimer, bowed cittern, mountain banjo, pump organ. And though Shovel Dance Collective’s full ensemble playing is lushly beautiful, they mostly withhold it, focusing on the quiet intensity of two or three voices interacting at a time.
The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore contains four roughly 15-minute pieces, each a medley of folk songs—drawn from the histories of England, Ireland, Scotland, and Guyana—interspersed with field recordings of lapping riverbanks and bustling dockyards. Where a previous generation of young Britons sought to revitalize folk music by fusing it with the cutting-edge sounds of their era—Fairport Convention with rangy rock’n’roll, Pentangle with candlelit modal jazz—Shovel Dance Collective emphasize the essential strangeness of the music not by gussying it up but by laying it bare. Though the album’s collage-like presentation is resolutely contemporary, its component pieces are largely faithful to the source material. The sternly declarative vocal delivery of Mataio Austin Dean—one of the collective’s two most prominent singing voices, along with the more dramatically expressive Granata—brings to mind some grizzled old sailor or fisherman entertaining his fellow laborers over a pint after a long day. There are glimpses of the uncanny at the edges, like the instrumental “Waves on the Shore,” whose bowed string lines stretch and flicker as if refracted through a hall of mirrors. The cumulative effect is like that of the films of Robert Eggers, whose thoroughly researched and densely packed period details serve to render both the crushing grind of our ancestors’ daily lives and the figments and phantoms that may have haunted their imaginations.
In interviews, and in an essay that accompanies The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore, Shovel Dance Collective’s members argue persuasively for the present-day power of traditional song: as a vessel for the voices of the racially and sexually marginalized, a corrective for historical narratives that serve the rich and powerful, a tool for solidarity among the working class, and a means of communion with the dead. At concerts, they distribute pamphlets of lyrics and historical information, with the intent of bringing audiences closer to their own impassioned understanding of the material. They operate non-hierarchically, with no fixed leader. Even the aforementioned essay they penned together as a collective.
This context is admirable, and knowledge of the history can certainly heighten the experience of the music. Such is the case of the album-closing “Ova Canje Water,” a traditional Guyanese song delivered from the perspective of a formerly enslaved person who is urging his comrades to join him in escape and freedom. Dean, whose mother hails from the Caribbean nation and former British colony, explained the song’s significance in an interview with The Quietus: “Actual stories of people liberating themselves from that are quite rare, and you need to cling onto those. They should be a part of our history that we talk about and understand, because that is how we learn to liberate ourselves.”
But you needn’t be a scholarly folklorist to appreciate The Water Is the Shovel of the Shore. The music speaks for itself, if you let it. Hammered dulcimer curlicues, entwined singing voices, trombone echoing across the gentle roar of the Thames—with close attention, all of it has the capacity to make your hair stand on end, no pamphlets required.


Everything on the surface of A Giant Dog's Merge debut screams beware. From the violent lyrics to the grotesque cover art to the very name of the band, the message is clear.

Pile

Some of the best hard rock songs give little glimpses of a soft, damaged heart beating beneath all the rage. Think about that little bit of major chord respite offered by the "when you're high, you never ever wanna come down" part of "Welcome to the Jungle" or the "I've been to the edge, and there I stood and looked down" monologue of "Ain't Talkin' 'Bout Love." These gentle flashes invite you into dangerous orbits, despite their narrators' warnings, with an illusion of safety that makes you overlook the whole "and you're gonna diiiiiiie" part. On Pile, which is A Giant Dog's third official full-length, the Austin band mix moments of sweetness with a whole lot of "and you're gonna diiiiiiie."
The first refrain we hear from singers Sabrina Ellis and Andrew Cashen says it all: "But I love you, honey/Stay away from me/Tenderness is not for me/I could watch you die and not feel a thing." Every track is a similar mix of certain danger and uncertain asylum. Five of the album's 15 tracks deal explicitly with death, mostly with a nonchalance that has been a hallmark of rock ‘n’ roll since Bo Diddley bragged that he was just 22 and didn’t mind dying. In the catchy chorus of the first single, "Sex & Drugs," Ellis and Cashen sing, "I’m too old to die young," their voices stuck together in honeyed harmony against distorted guitars, a swinging rhythm section, and plinking "Crocodile Rock" piano boogie. Later in that song, they rattle off a list of the self-imposed harm they have survived, including "all the people we fucked, and all the hippies who sucked, and all the hearts that we broke, and all the liquor and coke."
That the songs dwell so much on mortality feels like a way of acknowledging grief rather than ignoring it, even if they're dealing with it in a depraved way, using juvenile humor to process fear. (At one point in "Too Much Makeup," they suggest that you "get reborn as a tampon when you die.") Many of the songs on Pile might feel more offensive if the hooks weren't so strong, and if Ellis didn't have amazing pipes. But the combination of pretty melodies and the ugliest of realities is what drives Pile: it feels like the playlist for a rock-bottom party, made by people who are in a bad place, taking the opportunity to celebrate it before rising above it. They sing and play with the enthusiasm of a last hurrah. It's a rare cocktail that mixes sloppy punk passion with precision, but A Giant Dog have both working for them.
Mike McCarthy, who has produced albums for Spoon, in addition to A Giant Dog's less adventurous 2013 LP, Bone, helps make the morbid mood festive, capturing the band's blend of punk rock and glam, and bringing out a performance from the two singers whose energy betrays the jaundiced lyrics. Yes, it's often nasty, but it's also funny. When Ellis sings about a friend who’s an undertaker, who comes home smelling of "formaldehy-eeee-iiiiide," it's clear that she's having fun. Ellis and Cashen also play together in a poppier band called Sweet Spirit, which is also true to its name, and not as dangerous or dirty as A Giant Dog. It’s like with A Giant Dog they've found an outlet to unload all of their basest instincts, so Sweet Spirit can stay sweet.
In "Get With You and Get High," the band are joined by fellow Austin musician and unlikely bedfellow Britt Daniel. Aside from his past collaborations with producer McCarthy, Daniel is also responsible for bringing A Giant Dog to the attention of Merge Records: the label that released much of Spoon’s most celebrated work. His croaky hangover baritone meshes well with Ellis and Cashen, and the track would be A Giant Dog at their most vulnerable, were the desire for personal intimacy not masked by the desire to get wasted. But beneath all of this nihilism is some real skilled songwriting that includes complex rhyme schemes, swaggering rhythms, and stunning harmonies. These qualities are perhaps strongest on Pile's final track, "Failing in Love," where Ramones guitars buzz and lock in with the drum stops and an improbable sax. The words, which seem to detail a divorce, are perhaps the clearest reason for the obsession with death, danger, and keeping affection at bay. "I've tried and grown tired of failing in love," sing Ellis and Cashen, and it’s so simple and honest that you just want to get close to them, despite the band's countless cautions against doing so.


Heady, funny, and fearless, the Dublin band’s second album is a maudlin and manic triumph, a horror movie shot as comedy, equal parts future-shocked and handcuffed to history.

A Hero’s Death

The Horsemen of the Apocalypse do not thunder and gallop. They lurch and stagger, weighed down by the grim burden of their brief. Slowly, they stalk humanity with an Amazon Prime package of grief, war, and pestilence, their approach suggested only by the mechanized drone of social media and cable news. When the end finally comes, it’s all so quotidian and tedious; a whimper, not a bang. All around us, the party is ending, and Fontaines D.C. are the final house band. The setlist is A Hero’s Death.
Slinking seeming fully-formed from Dublin’s working-class neighborhood The Liberties, the five-piece established themselves as bona fide inheritors of a centuries-long socialist-bohemian tradition on 2019’s post-post-punk document Dogrel, an album that weaved together the enduring groove of Gang of Four and the psychically dislocating poetry of Allen Ginsberg with unnervingly precocious aplomb. Dogrel was a shouty revelation—part early Mekons, part cider-addled James Brown & the JB’s—all of it suggestive of a crucial talent abuzz with live-wire intensity.
The jet-black comedy of their follow-up A Hero’s Death does nothing to detract from this view, instead geometrically expanding their cantankerous field of vision. Heady, funny, and fearless, A Hero’s Death is a maudlin and manic triumph, a horror movie shot as comedy, equal parts future-shocked and handcuffed to history. Memorable tunes and unforgettable phrases erupt like brush fire over the course of 47 minutes, the mood migrating at a moment’s notice from insouciant nihilism to full-blown rage to radical empathy. As one does these days.
“I Don’t Belong” is all lurking Daydream Nation-menace and nightmare groove, with lead singer Grian Chatten’s haunted incantation, “I don’t belong to anyone,” taking on multiple possible meanings over the song’s slow burn. “A Lucid Dream” steams by like a demented locomotive driven by punk-blues of the Gun Club, while “Televised Mind” turns the Stooges’ “TV Eye” inward, making manifest PiL’s prophecy of a narcotized zombie culture, too dazed and confused by the endless wave of corporate-tech idiotica to raise its voice above a monotone.
As a band, Fontaines D.C. are as forceful as they are versatile, with drummer Tom Coll proving equally adept at holding down the esoteric art-rock feel “Love Is the Main Thing” and the straight-as-string Velvet Underground homage of “I Was Not Born.” Guitarists Conor Curley and Carlos O’Connell harmonize and deconstruct in a more than credible echo of Television’s Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine. On the terrific, bummer-hang ballad “Oh Such a Spring,” which crops up halfway through the record, the group arrives at a state of beautiful brokenness.
But the heart of A Hero’s Death lies in stiff-upper-lip rockers like the title track, whose unnervingly catchy funeral-glam is rendered all the more frightening for its sprightliness, sounding a bit like “Ballroom Blitz” following the aversion therapy from A Clockwork Orange. “Life ain’t always empty!” Chatten stipulates with a clergy-barker certitude, and proceeds along with catchy-sounding corporate affirmations like, “Sit beneath a light that suits ya/And look forward to a better future.” It’s the Stones’ “Satisfaction” in reverse. No longer is the consumer unhappy with the product. It’s the product that is dissatisfied with you.
And then there is the final track, “No,” a big ballad, a perfect culminating statement, a pensive progression, when the Fontaines backburner their well-honed bitterness in the service of a larger question: Is a fight we’ve probably already lost still worth the fighting? When Chatten sings: “Please don’t lock yourself away/Just appreciate the grey,” the group’s half-measures optimism feels like a benediction. We get knocked down and then maybe, just maybe, we get up again.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


After four good-to-fantastic records, the Hold Steady returned in 2010 with Heaven Is Whenever, a too-sleek, cliche-mottled shrug of a record. From its opening line on, the band's sixth album, Teeth Dreams, tries to position itself as a return to form.

Teeth Dreams

"I heard the Cityscape Skins are kinda kicking it again," Craig Finn blurts out at the beginning of Teeth Dreams, the sixth LP from the Hold Steady. Over the years, the Cityscape Skins—a fictional coterie of tattoo-emblazoned Twin Cities street toughs—have darkened the doorways of many a Hold Steady song. But, beyond a fleeting reference to a Skins-stocked Youth of Today show on "Barely Breathing"—from the faintly disastrous Heaven Is Whenever—it's been some time since Finn got the gang together. Teeth Dreams' opening line is a callback, a homing beacon to wayward fans left cold by the overblown, undercooked Heaven. That beautiful shit Finn used to talk? Those beer-battered barroom floors and sloppy upper-Midwestern hagiographies? That neurons-blazing, every line-better-than-the-last Minneapolis mythos? The gang's all here.
After four good-to-fantastic records in five short years, the Hold Steady took their sweet time and returned with 2010's Heaven, a too-sleek, saccharine, cliché-mottled shrug of a record. Heaven's music felt bland and tentative, but its real crimes were strictly lyrical: Finn swapped out the character-defining specifics for faceless generalities and an all-too-sweet sincerity that effectively transplanted his lived-in Minneapolis-St. Paul mythologies to Anyplace USA. At his best, Finn wouldn't just set a scene, he'd introduce you around to the regulars. Those first few Hold Steady records still feel like a gathering of familiars, speaking a shared language. Heaven, then, was clearly the Hold Steady's attempt to cram a few more people into to the party. But, by swinging for the back rows, they seemed to neglect all those weird kids up front, the very ones who'd helped make their singalong songs into scriptures.
From its opening line on, Teeth Dreams announces itself as a return to form, a righting of Heaven Is Whenever's manifold wrongs from the cold comfort of the upper Midwest. Squint a little, and the familiar scenery starts to take shape: the nitrous tanks under the overpasses, the Michelin in Bay City where Gideon's been working. "I Hope This Whole Thing Didn't Frighten You" finds Finn offering a new love a guided tour of some old haunts; "The Ambassador" swings around a chorus of "you came back to us/ South Minneapolis." Even when they're not ticking off the hours in 3.2 bars, the people of Teeth Dreams are very recognizably denizens of the Hold Steady universe: "I'm pretty sure you recognize these guys," Finn shares on "The Ambassador". They're a little older now, but wiser? Well, they're still sorta working on that. They have their good days, their bad months, their off years. Oh, and they drink. Just maybe not quite so much as they used to.
Produced by Nick Raskulinecz (Rush, Evanescence), Teeth Dreams is handily the Hold Steady's worst-sounding album. The muddy, hyperbolically compressed mix dies a thousand deaths through a couple of halfway decent speakers; it opens up a smidge in headphones, but it strangles most of Finn's exhortations and grounds Tad Kubler's skyscraping solos, casting everything in an ugly, nuance-deadening grey. Musically, Teeth Dreams is pretty much your standard-issue late-era Hold Steady LP: a post-Replacements hard-charger here, a swaying, Schlitzed-up ballad there, all of it sturdy, none of it remotely surprising. The hard edges of Separation Sunday have been sanded down; the soaring expanses of Boys & Girls in America have been dulled under Raskulinecz's heavy hand. Finn's delivery, in particular, gets swallowed up here: Raskulinecz buried his way back in the mix, forcing him to fight his way out of Kubler and new axeman Steve Selvidge's six-string entanglements. With so much of the music taking the path of least resistance—and without Finn up front, cracking wise to the clever kids—Raskulinecz's bizarre production seems hellbent on downplaying exactly what makes the Hold Steady the Hold Steady. Coming off a four-LP hot streak, Heaven Is Whenever was a tough record to hear. But Teeth Dreams, with its dishwater-dull, Finn-diminishing sonics, might be the harder album to actually listen to.
The collection does find Finn back among the third-shifters and the bartender's friends he spent so much time with on those first few Hold Steady LPs. But things, as they'll do, have changed. For starters, he's no longer into naming names: Gideon and Holly—whose addled ambling make up most of the first three Hold Steady LPs—have quickly become "he" and "she," just a couple more pronouns in the crowd. Finn may not be writing about Holly and Gideon anymore, but he's clearly writing about people like them; they live in the same places, know the same people, favor some of the same streetcorners. Having an overarching plot to hinge these episodes around gave a record like Separation Sunday its novelistic depth; Teeth Dreams, comparatively, feels muddled, 10 thumbnail sketches of the down-and-out rather than one long, hard-fought journey towards redemption.
Still, Teeth Dreams isn't meant as a redemption story; instead, it's a record about perseverance. Nameless or not, these people have clearly been through something; for the time being, they're trying to get over it without falling back under it. They find themselves in codependent relationships with complicated backstories, they take—and then try to shake—dope, and they're all stricken by what Finn, on "On With the Business," dubs "that American sadness." These are people who've been seriously rocked by life, but they're mostly past that now; they're taking it one day at a time, with a friendly assist from the "salted rims and frosted mugs."
"Spinners" finds him advising a recent divorcee to get back out there; "it's a big city," he insists, and "there's a lot of love." But his sympathies get the better of him on the the faintly Dylanesque "Wait a While"; different woman, similar situation, yet—in an unchracteristically regressive turn—he's taken to calling this one "little girl" and reminding her "there's other words than yes." On "Big Cig," Finn conjures a pill-popping, mind-changing, value-minded chain-smoker of his recent acquaintence: it's an easy highlight, the kind of impossibly clever, unusually tender character study Finn's always excelled at.
But for every "Big Cig", there's a "Runner's High",a half-told, half-remembered California-by-way-of-Texas dope deal gone horribly awry. Time was, you could hardly get through a Hold Steady song without an intimate knowledge of everybody's sister's names and what high school they dropped out of. But "High," like a lot of Teeth, plays things a little close to the chest; you don't have to guess at anybody's motivations, but you never quite get to know the people in these songs the way you did all those would-be DJs at the Swish and all their little hoodrat friends.
Dreams about teeth are typically interpreted as stemming "from a fear of rejection, sexual impotence or the consequences of getting old." We're probably better off ignoring those first two, but for a band like the Hold Steady—who've seen their share of divorce, disease, and abrupt departures over the years—time's inexorable march can't ever be too far from their minds. The people in Craig Finn's songs have gone through plenty themselves: from the poppers, pills and Pepsi of the early days to the post-breakup malaise and routine regret that hangs over Teeth Dreams like a fog. You can't say they've aged gracefully, exactly, but they've done the best they could, and things do seem to be looking up.
The best thing about Teeth Dreams is seeing these people succeed, even in the smallest of ways. But it's those same small, steady steps that hold Teeth Dreams back. There are triumphs here, but they're modest; there is, after all, little fanfare to be found in just getting up and on with it day in and day out. Consequently, Teeth Dreams—even more than the flavorless Heaven Is Whenever—occasionally feels like the first Hold Steady record that's just going through the motions: introducing a few punchy chords to a few wayward souls and letting them get on with it. All that desperation, redemption, and triumphalism you'll still find on the Hold Steady's first few albums has become a kind of everyday pragmatism here: not every night, he seems to be saying, needs to be so massive.
It's this, I think, that keeps Teeth Dreams from being a true return to form: these people don't especially seem all that keen on going back to their old ways, even when they're not exactly sure how to make those changes stick. Teeth Dreams goes out on a high: "Oaks," a sweeping, epic-length chest-clutcher, depicts two star-crossed addicts who may not even make it down the block without copping something they know they shouldn't. Like the Hold Steady themselves, they don't always get things right, but it's hard not to root for 'em anyway.


A new reissue of the Roxy Music frontman’s 1994 album fleshes out its opulent funk with a wealth of unreleased material that pulls back the curtain on his insular creative process.

Mamouna (Deluxe)

When Bryan Ferry lamented, in 1973’s “Mother of Pearl,” “If you’re looking for love in a looking glass world/It’s pretty hard to find,” he had not reckoned with how easy the looking would become. Twenty years later, on the cusp of his fifties, the former Roxy Music singer-songwriter released the most insular solo album of his career. He had already exhausted the patience of some reviewers. “Ferry seems increasingly like Narcissus, enraptured by his own reflection in the pond—and the bottomless depth below,” Rolling Stone’s Anthony DeCurtis hissed about 1987’s Bête Noire.
Yet to gaze so intently at oneself bespeaks not just narcissism but also confidence. Ferry had spectacular hair and he knew it. Teased and moistened by expert hands, Mamouna is the album equivalent of Ferry’s bangs: singular, an occasion for envy and amusement, an essential component of his mythos—and often genuinely beautiful. This three-disc set includes that 1994 album; previously unreleased tracks Ferry had recorded for a project called Horoscope; and demos, some of which date back to 1989. “The demos I do tend to become the masters,” he explained to Creem in 1993. “They’re on the same tape, and more foliage just grows around them.” Of course the package is excessive—do Ferry fans expect minimalism? He’s a foliage guy.
Horoscope was meant to be Ferry’s new album. He fucked up: He should’ve known not to release the title before the product. That old devil, writer’s block, paralyzed him; the lyrics, which he’d spent years paring down to pointillist suggestion, were a problem. He had no manager and no producer. For a hoarder confronted by the possibilities of 56-track recording, it must’ve been like Narcissus walking into a funhouse. Flailing, he resorted to a tested strategy: He and new producer Robin Trower, of Procol Harum, knocked out a covers album called Taxi, notable for a shivery essential version of “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and an “All Tomorrow’s Parties” whose lounge-pop vibes might’ve birthed Air. Rejuvenated, he returned to his original material, now called Mamouna, Arabic for good luck, of which he’d been in short supply.
There is nothing remotely Arabic or Middle Eastern about Mamouna; there is nothing remotely human about Bryan Ferry, this Holy Spirit of Divine Melancholy. But hiring Trower made an important difference. Mamouna has a crispness. The guitars and keyboards don’t flicker and dissolve, as on Boys and Girls, or clang and chime, as on Bête Noire—Trower centers them in the mix. Most importantly, Ferry doesn’t peek from behind the beats like he had done to coquettish effect since 1982: He’s upfront and declarative, taking advantage of his upper register before rust enfeebled it. Consonants matter again. “I wanna be just everything/More than you need/I wanna hear you call’/Nothin’ but me,” he declares on opener “Don’t Want to Know” over David Williams’ Chic-indebted riffing, and he doesn’t let up.
Unencumbered by generic sessioneers who might play “better,” Mamouna makes a strong case for Ferry as a musician. “Don’t Want to Know” begins with what sounds like sonar and what the credits cutely call “sonic emphasis,” provided by Brian Eno. Reuniting in the studio after bumping into each other on holiday (“very Somerset Maugham,” Ferry quipped), he and his erstwhile bandmate compete to come up with the coolest keyboard parts: Ferry’s synth-oboe, plus a piano hook conjuring The Exorcist theme (Ferry as an amour-obsessed Pazuzu?), versus Eno’s sampled film dialogue on “Your Painted Smile” (Ferry wins). “I could never be the one,” he moans, without irony, on the title track, a worried mid-tempo shuffle with Shaft rhythm guitar, synthesized choirs, and lovingly drawn-out syllables attempting to summon The Beloved by sheer force of ardor. It fades into the ether as buoyantly as “Over You,” with a piano coda of beguiling concision.
One way to listen to Mamouna is to consider the songs as structures around which “foliage” gathers. Another way is to read them as palimpsests on which Ferry rewrites his evocations of reckless but never quite hysterical desires. The “chained and bound” line from 1985’s “Slave to Love” floats into “Mamouna.” The “Live to Tell” chug (courtesy of Madonna co-producer Patrick Leonard) of Bête Noire’s “The Name of the Game” gets repurposed as “Which Way to Turn.” The acoustic and synth basses on “The 39 Steps” recall “The Chosen One,” also from Boys and Girls. But “The 39 Steps” is the superior take: Ferry sings through gritted teeth as the track accumulates momentum while Eno’s gahoozits flicker like porch lights in fog. Trower and Neil Hubbard’s guitars sound aggrieved. There’s an extraordinary moment where Ferry swaps his anguished flutter for a growl at the end of the line, “Let’s make a move!” Some fragments (like an early version of “Your Painted Smile” with guide vocal) suggest that Ferry could’ve eked out a sideline as a film composer.
Unfazed by developments outside itself, Mamouna plays like a speech by a cult leader. It has incoherences, like “N.Y.C.” (called “Desdemona” on Horoscope), a garbled take on Tutu-era Miles Davis, or an amelodic nothing called “Gemini Moon.” The sight of guitarist Phil Manzanera and reedman Andy Mackay in the credits should quicken no pulses; Ferry’s practices reduce them to contributors as interchangeable as Nile Rodgers and “syn-sax,” respectively. Eno does co-write the anguished shimmy of “Wildcat Days” (Eno’s instrumental credit: “sonic distress”), a wee thing, but if it led to the far better “I Thought” on 2002’s Frantic, then it was worth it. Other ideas, like a nine-minute re-make/re-model of Roxy’s “Mother of Pearl” recorded for Horoscope, make me wonder why Trower didn’t walk.
A middling critical response and okay sales did little to advance Ferry’s reputation as rival David Bowie was finding a new audience in Nirvana fans and Britpoppers. The Horoscope tracks, at least three of which are earlier drafts of finished Mamouna material, went on ice until 2015’s Avonmore, when “Loop de Li” made an appearance with a vocal that sounds like it was grafted from an early-’90s recording. There he was again, 21 years later, chipping away at new structures based on older ones.
There’s a special thrill when an artist whose catalog you’ve gorged on springs a new album on you, and I took to Mamouna hard. On his spring 1995 tour, he sported a fabulous poofy white shirt and, of course, a keytar—the only performer I’ve seen take the instrument seriously. His band played a double-digit-length version of “The 39 Steps” that teased out its white funk possibilities. Three years away from realizing in which direction my lusts pointed, I studied Bryan Ferry because his vision of romance lacked corporeality; his hesitations and shudders corresponded to desires I had no wish to see gratified, much less defined. A manifesto, a last will and testament, Mamouna delineates a worldview that turns loucheness into a singular kind of self-help. If Ferry’s sighs and chord changes made him a better boyfriend or husband, then the obscenity of the album’s budget was pocket change. But then he never has seemed to need other people much.


Mike and the Melvins is an unearthed collaboration from 1999 between the Melvins and godheadSilo bassist and vocalist Mike Kunka. The overall sensation it gives is of a bunch of guys engaging in playful, sophomoric misanthropy.

Mike and the Melvins: Three Men and a Baby

Three Men and a Baby

Over the last 10 years or so, the Melvins have alternated between a quartet lineup that includes the rhythm section of Big Business and a series of trio iterations with various bass players including Trevor Dunn of Mr. Bungle, Fantômas and others. These days, the band name functions as a chimera-like host for these somewhat distinct entities, with mainstays Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover expressing a desire to introduce even more lineups over time. Their stated plan to add Dunn to the quartet hasn't materialized yet, but—case in point—the band is currently touring with Redd Kross' Steve McDonald on bass as a lead-up to a new album, out in June, that features an assorted cast of guest bassists.
In light of all that personnel shuffling, it makes sense that a newly unearthed collaboration with godheadSilo bassist/vocalist Mike Kunka would surface now, even if it's 17 years old. In 1998, Kunka found himself without a band following godheadSilo drummer Dan Haugh's hand injury that basically put the duo on permanent hiatus. Kunka accompanied the Melvins on tour, recorded the bulk of Three Men and a Baby with them in '99, and the tapes sat unfinished until last year. Upon hitting play, however, you might wonder whether you're listening to a lost album from '89 instead, an era when heavy albums on independent labels came across in muted, almost two-dimensional tones, thanks to production values that verged on demo-level quality.
This is a surprise considering that one-time Big Business guitarist Toshi Kasai, the Melvins' latter-day engineer of choice, recorded the remainder of the parts and also mixed the album. But the dated production works as an asset, distinguishing Three Men and a Baby from the increasingly prolific Melvins' recent output. Even though Osborne, Crover, and co. haven't lost much in terms of vitality, several of the riffs here hearken back to a time when the band was a little more content to just pummel away. Nowadays, if Osborne wants to dial-in a high-fidelity version of the guitar tone on KISS' 1974 album Hotter than Hell (as he did on the 2006 track "Civilized Worm"), he has the resources to do it. And, these days, whenever the Melvins fall back on the distinct brand of sludge that made them proto-grunge poster children, by default they sound like they're referencing themselves.
But there's nothing like stumbling across a 17-year-old musical snapshot to remind audiences of the fact that inspiration just pours from bands like sweat during the intermediate stage of their career arc. Once a band turns the corner on maturity, the ideas may get more sophisticated or adventurous—as in the Melvins' case—yet there's just no substitute for the intangible magic of a band growing into its strengths while still brimming with youthful passion. The main recording for Three Men and a Baby took place between the albums Honky (1997) and The Maggot (1999), which places this dalliance with Kunka close to the beginning of the Melvins' head-first plunge into experimentation, a voraciously creative streak that includes collaborations with Lustmord, Jello Biafra, and Fantômas.
The first four songs on Three Men and a Baby showcase the straightforward side of the bulldozer-riffing vocabulary the Melvins helped create. The testosterone strut of "Bummer Conversation," for example, reminds us how huge of a debt the likes of Mother Love Bone, Alice In Chains, and Gruntruck owed these guys. The rest of the album reminds us that the Melvins wanted nothing to do with those bands, and Kunka turns out to be the perfect partner for crossing the bridge between what the Melvins were and what they were about to become. In godheadSilo, he had shown that the bass guitar can function as a kind of orchestral noise instrument. Here, other than on the moody, spare, sea shanty-esque "A Dead Pile of Worthless Junk," most of what Kunka plays on the bass actually sounds like a guitar, while  then-Melvins bassist Kevin Rutmanis occupies a more traditional bassist's role (but gives it personality with his bright, clanging tone).
Kunka also brings some dimension to Osborne's snarling vocals, which all too often reduce the Melvins' music to an affectation. Of course, Three Men and a Baby traffics in the same snide attitude that the Melvins are known and loved for, and if they're presenting us with any actual insight on these songs, they certainly don't show it much. The album doesn't come with a lyric sheet, the oblique song titles obscure the subject matter anyway, and the overall sensation one gets on hearing this music is of a bunch of guys engaging in playful, sophomoric misanthropy.
Nevertheless, while Kunka doesn't exactly sing "straight" either, his comparatively broad melodic range adds a layer of emotional agitation that the Melvins typically lack, even on the albums where Big Business bassist Jared Warren shrieks along with Osborne. This time Osborne, Kunka, Rutmanis and Crover all sing leads in various spots, which gives Three Men and a Baby a loose, freewheeling vibe, especially when coupled with the variety in the music. On "Lifestyle Hammer," for example, Crover's falsetto sounds almost soulful. On "Dead Canaries," a guitar figure that clucks like the palm-in-the-armpit noise provides the main rhythmic punctuation. But when the groove slows down to halftime, the effect is no longer jokey-but genuinely sinister as Osborne goes a few shades darker than Les Claypool as a narrator whose intentions you might not trust.
On "Gravel," Kunka kicks up a dust storm of distortion that both encapsulates and marries the essence of both bands. "Gravel" carries over into the album's closing track, a pulsing, faux-grindcore tunnel of noise, appropriately enough titled "Art School Fight Song." The throbbing sound of Rutmanis' bass falling off a chair channels the recently sidelined godheadSilo on Kunka's behalf—a gesture that heralds the avalanche of creative freedom that this band is still heaping upon its audience to this very day.


Okay, show of hands: how many of you people have listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot recently? Yeah, that's about ...

More Like the Moon EP

Okay, show of hands: how many of you people have listened to Yankee Hotel Foxtrot recently? Yeah, that's about what I expected, 'cause you know, I haven't pulled it out much lately myself. That kind of bothers me. YHF did, after all, cling battered and bruised to the top spot on my list for the Palindromic Year, and one would expect it would have a better shelf-life, even though it's been wink-wink-available for nigh on two years.
Now, before you start sharpening your Outlook, know that this is not an official Pitchfork backlash war cry, but a mere personal assessment. I was, you should know, the staff's staunchest defender of YHF's canonization, enduring countless hipster rants about its dad-rock/easy-listening nature and the impressionability of the nation's boomer crits. For a period of about nine months, anyone so unlucky as to be around me after three or four beers got to hear my pulpit speech about the horizon-widening effect that Jeff Tweedy & Co.'s masterwork could have on the general populace.
Maybe it's because of this intense love affair that I don't reach for YHF so much anymore, in favor of albums that slipped through my fingers while I proselytized about the genius last two minutes of "Reservations". Surely, then, this miniature collectible e-EP-- originally released as a deal-sweetener for YHF-buyers down under, and now streaming and/or downloadable (if you're an honorable sort) from the Wilco website-- would rekindle some of the romance? Packaging two of the better YHF outtakes with four more recent songs, More Like the Moon is timed like a snack to tide us over while the band gallivants around the U.S. with Sonic Youth and R.E.M. instead of RECORDING A NEW ALBUM DAMMIT WHY WON'T YOU FINISH ITTTTTT!
But for those of us pulling for Tweedy to keep the laptop plugged in, More Like the Moon will stream a bit hollow due to its focus on that old humdrum, outdated tool, the guitar. Two tracks-- the unfamiliar "Woodgrain" and solo-show mainstay "Bob Dylan's 49th Beard"-- are little more than street-corner-strumming Tweedy, "Kamera" resurfaces in grungier form as "Camera", and the title track and "Handshake Drugs" feature extended soloing twixt the verses.
Your enjoyment of those last two tracks will probably determine your final score, as they stretch out over more than half of the EP's twenty minutes and change. "Handshake Drugs" comes off the better of the pair, employing a reclined groove and muffled "Only a Northern Song" noise breaks. "More Like the Moon", on the other hand, is an extremely straightforward purty ballad, with extended near-Flamenco picking lending the track a Chi-Chi's-style ambience. Yeah, it's somewhat moving and hardly faultable, but the bar is set too high now for Wilco to coast like they do here, restricting drummer Glenn Kotche to a first-day-of-drum-school beat and key-man Leroy Bach to gentle organ fills.
The only other misfire of the six tracks is "Camera", a bassy, fuzzed-out version that tramples over the delightfully subtle progression from folk-rock to laser guns in the original. But an arena-size "A Magazine Called Sunset" comes out better than expected, given the several lackluster Springsteen-esque demo versions floating about-- even if it sounds more like a Summerteeth outtake than a Yankee cut (count 1, 2, 3 keyboards in the first thirty seconds and know that Jay Bennett is in the hizzouse). The two folky tracks squeak by on lyrical grins, with Tweedy going meta on "Woodgrain" (break out your touchdown bandaids for the self-ref "Sometimes I rhyme/ Sometimes I don't") and making a defense mechanism out of Dylan's facial hair on "Beard".
If you find the whole effort a tad bit underwhelming, there may be good reasons why; to connect the dots with the stopgap from the other 10.0 hate-mail-inducer of last year, Trail of Dead's The Secret of Elena's Tomb EP seems like a dressing room for the band to try on possible future directions, while More Like the Moon sounds like Wilco cleaning out their fridge, even though it's only 33% leftovers. It's not that the sextet of material here plants any seeds of doubt about the band's future trajectory-- road-tested tracks like "Spiders (Kidsmoke)" indicate there's plenty o' future to be excited about-- it's just that this release is less a tease for what lies ahead than an audit of last year's receipts.
But you can easily forgive More Like the Moon for being a bit of a dry-hump, due to its free and easy distribution on Wilco's website. This gracious move is a reminder of what might have been the real epi-musical "Meaning of YHF": the digital-utopia-hinting fact that it was streamed on the band's own site and easy to find on file-sharing bazaars, yet still became Wilco's biggest unit-shifter by a mile, very likely due to (really, could it have been?!?) its Internet leakage.
All the same, my drunken YHF ramblings stay retired, replaced by an even more ludicrous sermon about how The Rapture are going to reinvent indie music based around the mere two songs I've heard from their upcoming full-length. Don't get me wrong, I still stand convinced that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot opened up a lot of aunts' and uncles' ears to new sounds, and assuming Loose Fur didn't shut all of them back up, it's a spell that's still working. Still, More Like the Moon is far too safe a play to keep that momentum rolling between full-lengths, and fails to rise above the fan-club gift bonus it is.


John Dwyer leads an instrumental jazz-garage chimera that’s far-out enough to escape predictability and ghoulish enough to go bump in the night.

Witch Egg

Osees’ John Dwyer, a musical polymath adept at everything from prog-psych to the anthemic garage rock that soundtracked “Breaking Bad,” reconfigures sounds and lineups faster than a vaudeville star doing a quick-change. But he’s more savant than dabbler, and the albums keep coming, as frequent as they are diverse, a hit parade completed most recently by Witch Egg, an instrumental jazz-garage chimera peopled by Dwyer; drummer Nick Murray, a former Osees member; keyboardist Tom Dolas, a collaborator on last year’s Bent Arcana; saxophonist Brad Caulkins; and double bassist Greg Coates.
A lean collection of eight tracks under seven minutes, the group’s debut EP straddles dichotomies without losing itself to extremes: freewheeling and contained, exploratory but concise, easy to engage but far-out enough to escape predictability. Opener “Greener Pools” evokes Swedish psych rockers Dungen, a tangle of guitars and cymbals that cede to hypnotic saxophone riffs. From there, a few pinging notes that sound like a dial tone segue into screechy woodwinds on “City Maggot,” embellishing Dwyer’s synth and Murray’s steady drums in a marriage of chaos and order.
Though there are no lyrics, the names of these songs hint at a world akin to Osees’ 2019 album Face Stabber: a ghoulish vision full of Dark Crystal puppets, desolate as Escape From New York. There’s the titular “Witch Egg,” a funereal dirge that could just as easily soundtrack the dead rising from their graves, followed in close succession by “Baphomet,” “Arse,” and “On Your Own Now.” “Sekhu” might be a reference to a “biblical hill or watch-tower,” or—just as likely—it might mean nothing at all, no more or less real than a cast spell.
This holistic union of sound, atmosphere, and imagery propels the record. Listening to the wobbly, otherworldly drone of “Baphomet” after everyone else has gone to bed makes a dark room less trustworthy; the twitchy sax stalks disquietingly through its second half. The apotheosis of this heady vibe is “Sekhu,” where the throb of synth, the whine of saxophone, and the susurrus of cymbals sound like the last thing you hear before you find the skull on the album cover, an egg in its mouth.
Closer “On Your Own Now” eases up on the dread and the tempo, bringing in a bright saxophone and unhurried snares with a few sparkling keys that might even be considered hopeful. Is it alone like abandonment, or alone like one freed of a ghost? The last few seconds, when everything drops out but the reverberating drum beat, are less a definitive answer and more an ellipsis.
“This one is a burner designed optimally for your eco-pod sound system,” writes Dwyer in the band’s terse, inscrutable press release. “When you’ve left the world behind, you will need a soundtrack while you lay in dream stasis.” The best albums are prescient enough to predict the future, or precise enough to document the present. Slick as a ’70s horror film and dense and shrouded as a forest, Witch Egg’s improvisations feel like omens of future dystopia.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Three years after making an ostensible but half-hearted return to his roots, the grime icon more convincingly reconciles underground instincts with pop ambitions.

E3 AF

Three years ago, Dizzee Rascal announced he was going back to his roots. While he’d been chasing pop hits in L.A. and Miami with will.i.am and Robbie Williams, the sound he’d birthed at the turn of the millennium had found a new elder statesman in Skepta, a crown prince in Stormzy, and a more lucrative benchmark for success. Grime was not only cool, it was charting. Politicians shamelessly cashed in cultural capital with claims that this fine British export was soundtracking their ministerial drives. So Dizzee revived his teenage nickname and came to collect his dues from the scene. The resulting album, 2017’s Raskit, was well timed and had its moments; critics, seduced by its familiarity, lapped it up. But Dizzee, sounding tired and frustrated, was mostly phoning it in: He rose to the Wiley bait, recounted old pirate-radio tales, protested too much. By contrast, E3 AF sounds like Dizzee making the album he wants to make, rather than the one he thinks people want to hear.
The album’s name nods to Dizzee’s status as a born-and-raised Londoner and grime original (E3 being the east London postcode that both he and grime grew up in), as well as his Ghanaian and Nigerian heritage—“Aff” is an archaic slur that Dizzee has reclaimed, proudly referring to himself as the “E3 African.” And while the acronymic “as fuck” of the title will no doubt stir a well-worn row—that he’s far from “E3 as fuck” and more like “far from E3” most of the time—it’s not one that Dizzee entertains here. Recorded entirely in London over the last three years, the album is grounded in the capital’s rich Black musical history. “God Knows” is Dizzee at his abrasive, urgent best: a rattle of jungle snares, skittish drill hats, ten-ton kicks, and rudeboy basslines. He spars on the track with P Money—a bullish South London MC defined by his steadfast dedication to the grime sound—and distances himself from his more persistent critics with bars like “Trying hard but you ain’t maintaining/Everybody, bar you, that you’re blaming.” As if buffing his credentials, he continues to trade verses with grime Hall of Famers throughout the album: A first studio-minted collaboration with Kano and Ghetts may have been long overdue, but it immediately sounds crisp on “Eastside”; Boy Better Know member Frisco, steadfast as his unwavering hairline, is yet to deliver a bad verse and continues that run on “That’s Too Much” (with D Double E throwing in a few of his iconic ad-libs for good measure).
Brief and assured at 10 tracks, E3 AF is the first time since 2007’s Maths + English that Dizzee has managed to tread the extremes of both his underground and mainstream iterations convincingly on a single album—helped, of course, by the interim injection of grime, garage, and drum’n’bass into the pop canon. He’s able to eschew hit-factory producers for scene insiders, as well as getting back behind the boards himself for a number of tracks. Deekline adds impeccable 2-step swing and euphoric yearning to “You Don’t Know”; proto-grime pioneer Platinum 45 provides “Eastside” with its menacing bassline and whip-snap snares; Splurgeboys employ the kind of throwback sampling that’s catnip to old-school ravers on “Body Loose.” When the veteran grime MC wants to try his hand at UK drill, on “Act Like You Know,” he brings in the Brigade’s MK the Plug and Vader. Within these familiar environs, Dizzee’s performances soar. If he takes a breath on the rapid-fire rap confessional “Energies + Powers,” you wouldn’t know it; his effortless garage flow on “You Don’t Know” adds panache to shallow boasts about bottles, cars, and Instagram clout.
The album isn’t without its dull moments. Forced choruses remain a habit that Dizzee finds hard to throw off: “Love Life Live Large” is about as stirring as the “Live Love Laugh” decor that litters the homes of middle England; the nauseating, Chris Martin-esque hook of “Be Incredible”—with its inspiro-quote reel of “The time is now to make it right, and be incredible” (etc. ad nauseam)—does nothing but puncture what might otherwise have been the album’s introspective “Stay Positive” moment.
It may have taken him another three years to get there, but Dizzee has finally bedded down at home again, rediscovering himself in the process. E3 AF caps a period in which he’s seen more mainstream success than he could have imagined, all while being harried by a grime scene with abandonment issues. This could be the album that pleases both sides equally—no small feat in such fractious times.