On their second full-length, the French production duo incorporates the brash sounds of late-1970s progressive rock. The direction is precocious, brave, and surprising even if it amplifies their weak points.

Audio, Video, Disco

Let's get something out of the way: prog. As in, it's impossible to discuss Justice's sophomore album, Audio, Video, Disco without noting just how thoroughly the Parisian duo has adopted the brash sounds of late-1970s progressive rock. The referents-- Yes for turbulent guitar lines, Goblin for sly italo beats, Queen for unapologetic bombast-- jump off the plastic, announcing that Justice will not re-hash the ornery, clubby obelisks that defined †. Their new direction is precocious, brave, and surprising even if it damns them by placing emphasis on qualities-- arrangement, fidelity, patience-- that Justice lack.
Though it sparked a still-running debate about the duo's credentials, †, by accessing unexplored levels of sleaze and cheese, actually fit into dance music's long, proud tradition of not giving a fuck. That they did this in a rock context-- leather jackets; big live show; loud, terrible mastering-- seemed at the time reverent of peak-era Daft Punk but in retrospect appears prescient: Deadmau5 and Skrillex headline festivals, hellbent on teasing out the most seizure-inducing mix of lighting and music possible. In 2011 anyone looking to beef about "real" dance music stares into a smaller barrel filled with bigger fish.
In this way, AVD is a natural progression for Justice. Their M.O. is bold irreverence, and they've found multiple ways to express it. Still, it's hard not to admire their choice: It threatens to alienate their core audience while endearing them to a group of fans unlikely to take up their cause (or realize they exist). Prog-rock has long been championed by experimental music fans for its complexity and ambition-- it was outsider art that made the mistake of actually selling records.
Prog remains a mostly unclaimed orphan of rock history, and while certain corners of the indie establishment-- Fiery Furnaces, Sufjan Stevens, Dirty Projectors-- have adopted its structure and imagination, they've left the flute solos behind. (Dance acts like Aeroplane and Wolfram have mined this territory to mixed effect.) Justice take the opposite tack: AVD is composed of short, simple tracks stuffed with stairway-climbing solos, ascendant male vocalists, and starry-skied bridges. The duo has called AVD a "daylight" album, presumably in contrast with †'s nocturnal vibe. But just like a low-lit club can mask flaws, Justice's full-bore wall-of-dance bulldozed some of their compositional shortcomings. AVD is brighter and more diffuse (though, sadly, its recording style is no more dynamic), but the light shining through does Justice no favors.
It's easy to admire progressive rock for its immersion and commitment to concept, as well as its musical prowess and scope. These are, sadly, the elements Justice strip away. Instead, they employ prog's sounds in short, distracting bursts, filling AVD with melodies that are curious but difficult to remember or enjoy. They do this in the style they know how-- with hoary, space-eating electronics-- which suggests supreme digital craftsmanship but doesn't do the listener any favors. The guitars sounds are uniformly shrill, the bass flatulent, the rhythms rudimentary.
They employ singers more frequently than on †: male voices, pinched and bleating. I won't do you the disservice of examining their lyrics (they're hardly the point, for Justice or for us), but suffice to say they don't add much. AVD's finest moment is the title track, in which a voice is digitally manipulated into a current of high-strung, winsome tunefulness. "Helix", their most blatant disco move, is robotically funky, a reminder of what Justice are capable of when they commit fully to Daft pyrotechnics.
The majority of AVD, though, is cheese-rock signifiers dressed up as dance music. Once you get over the fact that the band got a little Cerrone in your "Kashmir" ("On'n'on") or spiked your Moroder with Toto ("Horsepower") there's little reason to come back to AVD. Immersing yourself in the record is an exercise in liking Justice as a concept more while liking their actual output less. There's too much space between AVD and actual prog to accept that Justice are committed to this direction. They spent all their daring on concept, with little to spare for execution. Even for a duo as image-conscious and savvy as these guys, there is little style in their reduction.


Sixth full-length is packed with some of the most ferocious moments in the Boston quartet's 15-plus-year history.

No Heroes

If LCD Soundsystem's 45:33 is good Nike-sponsored running music, No Heroes is what boot-wearing non-joggers use at a punk-slapped punching bag to reach fighting weight. It's pretty amazing to think Converge has been around almost as long as some of you have been alive, especially considering this sixth full-length is packed with some of the most ferocious moments in the Boston quartet's 15-plus year history.
These 14 right hooks are buff motherfuckers, rendered in various shades of blacks and blues and reds, but it's the opening tandem that really cooks. Shoving feedback and a heavy instrumental build out of the way, neck-tat sporting vocalist Jacob Bannon skewers a two-minute sermon on the opening track, "Heartache": "We are all falling down/ We are all falling/ Every word that you pray/ Makes another slave/ Every idol that you build/ Brings another plague." When the mathy mid-tempo returns, the song appropriately rams bass-first into "Hellhound", a one-minute rip-roar of in-the-red calisthenics. And then, well, it's gone, replaced by the equally taut "Sacrifice": "Hit the lights/ I've had enough/ Guilt to build a city/ Shame to fill a sea/ Reasons to give up and lose everything/ Regret to burn this body/ Filth to cut these hands/ Reasons to bury this and everything we have." Vengeance? It's only 58 seconds long. Its motto: "I'm built for war."
The blast radius of those first few pieces is brutal. The rest of the album slows down, but refuses to relent. Only doomy centerpiece "Grim Heart/Black Rose", with its melodic, anguished guest vocals by ex-Only Living Witness fellow Jonah Jenkins, offers a chance to catch your breath. The track's an epic (over nine minutes), its ending a long fade-out, turning down the volume in the room instead of cutting the power. Despite Sabbathian overtones, it manages to maintain the crushing equation when Bannon reemerges near the album's close: A few raps of the cymbal, heavier bass tones, guitar reps, drum hits, adequate build, and then his bloody voice: "Black rose/ Be my light/ In the darkness of nights/ Be my heart." You couldn't cut the tension with a Lifetime record.
There are Nation of Ulysses call-and-response hardcore anthems ("Trophy Scars", "Lonewolves") and lines that could inspire Blake Schwarzenbach to emo feats of strength: "Keep your scars on your sleeve/ And your heart in your hands." Fancy guitars are whittled into sharp-edged daggers. Nugget-sized explosions offer violently poetic sentiments: "I'll strike you down/ With rage and rapture." Eardrums and asses are kicked.
When You Fail Me was released two years ago, there was grumbling about its post-Jane Doe experimentation and misspelled love letters. Some sticking points were the "First Light" intro and the acoustically bent "In Her Shadow". Nowadays, instead of overstuffed, that older album sounds a bit thin. It's a comparative backward glance: Guitarist Kurt Ballou did an especially fine job recording No Heroes. It's huge. Musically, as if panning for gold, the band removed everything extraneous and came up with something richer.
Also surprising: No Heroes is the longer record of the two, even with fewer songs. But because the writing's strong, it speeds by. You see what I'm getting at? I'm a big fan of You Fail Me and the past work, but I'd venture to say this is the band's most fully realized, which (again) is amazing this far into their catalog. Score a victory for old guys with bad knees! Conceptually reminiscent of the way Orthrelm's OV rocked socks within a tight framework, No Heroes is one of the year's most musically cohesive ways to keep pulses beating rapidly.


The latest collection of sun-dappled pop songs Zooey Deschanel recorded with M. Ward under the name She & Him is the duo's most alluringly casual to date. The breezy, inviting, confidently arranged tunes may come as a surprise to those who've previously dismissed Deschanel on principle alone.

Volume 3

In a recent column at the Week, film critic Monika Bartyzel made a convincing argument that it's time to retire the term "Manic Pixie Dream Girl." Critiquing a particularly hollow and noxious stereotypical female character that was cropping up in films like Garden State and Elizabethtown, Nathin Rabin coined the popular term back in 2007. But awash in an endless stream of analysis, over-analysis, supercuts, and admittedly pretty hilarious parody Twitter accounts, Bartyzel now thinks the term has “outlived its usefulness and become a part of the very marginalizing trend that it was designed to rally against.”
Not convinced? Look no further than the common perception of Miss Polka-Dots-and-Cupcakes 2013 herself, Zooey Deschanel. The title star of Fox's sitcom “New Girl” and sundress-clad half of AM radio nostalgists She & Him, Deschanel has also become the English language’s most popular synonym for “Manic Pixie Dream Girl.” Her pretty-vacant role in (500) Days of Summer and the misleadingly “adorkable” marketing campaign behind “New Girl” notwithstanding, there’s more to Deschanel than the stereotype suggests. True, most musicians have to deal with misconceptions and pigeonholing in some form or another, but pop culture has caricatured Deschanel in a way that’s quietly denied her artistic agency. Need proof? Last week, I conducted a very unscientific experiment: I asked five people in casual conversation if they knew that Deschanel wrote all the original songs on She & Him's albums. All five of these admirably honest people gulped, looked down at their shoes and said no, they did not.
A big reason why it’s easy to underestimate Deschanel is that the actor-moonlighting-as-pop-musican is ripe for both parody and Dogstar jokes-- still, I'd bet the keys to my red Plymouth that most people wouldn't have a hard time believing that Jared Leto at least wrote all of the bloated-ego space-operas on the last 30 Seconds to Mars record. But like the unexpectedly complex character arc of her “New Girl” character Jess Day, Deschanel's breezy, inviting, confidently arranged tunes come as a pleasant surprise to those who've dismissed her on flimsy principle (or hypothetical twee allergy) alone. Volume 3-- the latest collection of sun-dappled pop songs she’s recorded with M. Ward under the name She & Him-- provides further proof. Pulling tricks from the songbook of 60s pop and country crooners like Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline, She & Him bask unabashedly in the glow of nostalgia, but Deschanel also finds a way to assert a unique personality within the pop idiom. “I’m stronger than the picture you took before you left,” she sings in her amiable, mid-morning yawn of an alto on “Turn to White”, one of Volume 3’s highlights. “In the light, it faded to white.”
Perhaps even moreso than the first two She & Him albums, Volume 3 has an an alluringly casual feel: Deschanel has a certain kind of charisma that allows a song to hang loosely but never fall apart. On a few occasions, things get a little too lax: she mumbles the verses of “Somebody Sweet to Talk To” like a person recovering from dental surgery, but she gets it together in time for a sprightly chorus that ends up being one of the album’s catchiest melodies. M. Ward’s production is at once detailed and featherlight. It sometimes recalls the gilded edges and baroque flourishes on his lush, self-produced 2009 record Hold Time, but the songs themselves aren’t as tight as, say, “Never Had Nobody Like You” (an M. Ward track on which Deschanel provides back-up vocals). Ward gives them enough room to sway leisurely, as though a warm breeze is rustling through.
Volume 3 is the first She & Him album since Deschanel’s divorce from Death Cab for Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard, but those scouring the lyrics for gossip might be a tad disappointed: unlike Ray J, Deschanel is tactfully tight-lipped about her personal business. The best songs here are the ones about heartbreak, but that’s been true on every She & Him album. Deschanel is not a confessional or even very specific lyricist, but she often gets mileage out of zinging, gently self-deprecating turns of phrase like the ones on the excellent opener “I’ve Got Your Number, Son”. “What’s a man without all the attention?/ Well he’s just a man,” she sings, “Who am I without all your affection?/ I’m a nobody, too.” She has a way with that kind of line that Jenny Lewis has perfected-- cutting in one breath and knowingly self-lacerating in the next.
But that’s precisely why Deschanel's music ultimately transcends the Manic Pixie Dream Girl tag: She spends the following 13 songs asserting that she’s not a nobody when she’s alone. It doesn’t shy away from sorrow, but as far as heartbreak albums go, Volume 3 is surprisingly resilient. When she’s wallowing-- as on the drizzly piano ballad “London”, one of the album’s more forgettable numbers-- Deschanel finds comfort in the fact that at least everybody else around her is wallowing, too. “We all go through it together, but we all go at it alone,” she sings on “Together”. The sentiment might be depressing if it weren’t tucked inside the most infectious melody on the whole record.


The half-baked 1999 release Born Again reeks of a posthumous cash-grab. We look back on its place in the Biggie canon on the 20th anniversary of Christopher Wallace's death.

Born Again

Born Again commences Biggie’s posthumous disemboweling. It’s the first project bearing his name that was conceived, produced, and completed after the Brooklyn icon had gasped his last breaths. By now, rap fans are deeply familiar with this baleful, unlovely creature—the posthumous collection of reworked demos, outtakes, and leftovers cobbled together by executives and hired guns, paired with a list of guest artists and of-the-moment producers. They reek of boardroom meetings. They usually fill you with a hollow, complicit feeling for even hitting “play.” It is hard to think of five such records in pop-music history that justify their existence after their first-week sales figures have posted.
In the two years since Biggie’s death, his mentor and corporate svengali Puff Daddy had already found several ingenious ways to siphon cash and attention from his dead protégé. Puffy's solo album, long in the works, was retitled No Way Out from working title Hell Up In Harlem and overhauled after Biggie’s death, emerging full of gothic dread and intimations of ready-to-die-ness. Its biggest single was his Police-sampling, “I’ll Fly Away”-interpolating “I’ll Be Missing You,” a maudlin tribute to The Notorious B.I.G. that spent 11 weeks at No. 1.
The following year, he released the debut album from The Lox, a hardheaded trio of Yonkers rappers with a deafening street buzz. Puff decked them in shiny suits and dropped them in front of Hype Williams’ fish-eye lens, where they looked about as comfortable as middle schoolers stranded at prom. The album included the less-heralded, equally maudlin tribute, “We’ll Always Love Big Poppa.” In the video, baby-faced Jadakiss, Sheek Louch, and Styles P poured their hearts out to their dead friend, while Puff Daddy stood behind them, pointing meaningfully at the camera. It was clear that whatever Puff thought of the grief process, he didn’t see much need to keep it behind closed doors.
Somewhere in there came the announcement for Born Again. Initial reports promised a sort of Biggie bildungsroman, pairing narration from Biggie’s mother Voletta Wallace with unheard demos and unreleased material. Rap listeners had been busily copping and sharing Biggie exclusives from a steady stream of mixtapes, freestyles and unfinished cuts dating back to 1993, but those traveled in rarefied circles, and the idea of a studio album bringing this stuff to the masses was enticing. But the story changed quickly, and often; a full-page ad in the September ‘99 issue of The Source promised some intrigue, including a track that would posthumously reunite Biggie and 2Pac and a new remix of “Party & Bullshit” that foretold an appearance from Will Smith. For better or for worse, this never came to pass, and what ended up being released was a jumble of some older, less well-known verses and some recycled material from already-available releases.
Born Again wasn’t Biggie’s story. Sure, it spawned one or two lasting cuts: the flashy, Duran Duran-sampling “Notorious B.I.G.” and the vicious early pre-Ready To Die demo “Dead Wrong.” But the real story it tells is about Puff Daddy—how he flailed into the spotlight after Big’s death, how he treated his protégé’s legacy. He immediately sought to cast himself as Biggie’s equal: You can see the video for “Victory” as a sort of prelude. Biggie’s verse play is just background music for shots of Puff Daddy running slow motion in front of explosions in the rain.
This is the kind of Biggie album Puff made without the stubborn, strong-willed Wallace present in the room to dig in his heels and say “no.” The production for the album makes no sense—it made no sense for a Biggie album in 1999, and it makes even less sense in 2017. The dank, chaotic original “Niggas” from 1993, produced by Mister Cee and gloriously scarred up with frenetic scratching, gets cleaned up and “updated” all the way to 1999, sounding tame and inert. The Timb-boot funk of that basement session evaporates completely, and the song loses all of its meaning transferred into major-label sunlight.
Similarly, it’s nice to think about Mannie Fresh and Biggie in the same room with Biggie alive—they were both inventive, antic minds that loved surprising word choices and unpredictable flows. But hearing Biggie’s second ferocious verse stripped from the original version of “Dead Wrong”—a song, remember, that appears elsewhere on this album—laid over Fresh’s bouncy instrumental “Hope You Niggas Sleep,” and followed by verses from all the members of Hot Boys and Big Tymers, only underscores how dead Wallace was.
His verse from “Dangerous MCs,” meanwhile, was meant to appear on a song from Busta Rhymes’ The Coming, produced by J Dilla. It was scrapped purportedly because of some veiled threats at 2Pac lurking in it and the album’s makers were leery of tossing any more powder into the keg. With them both dead, Big’s incendiary lines detonate harmlessly over an airless, functional beat from Nottz: “Catch my drift/Or catch my four-fifth lift/At least six inches above project fences/Turn meat to minces/Jumps turn to flinches/When I rain I drenches/Cleared your park benches.” Hearing one dead man launch subliminals at another dead one is perverse, particularly since the producers arranged some East Coast/West Coast unity kabuki elsewhere on the project, bringing Ice Cube to rap a verse on “If I Should Die Before I Wake” saluting Biggie as the “King of New York.”
Is any of it worth it? Tough to say. Without this album, you might have never heard “Relax and take notes while I take tokes of the marijuana smoke.” That’s a canonical line, and it introduces “Dead Wrong,” the only near-classic here. The original, produced by Easy Moe Bee, is a giggly and profane game of Dozens, Biggie indulging his filthy imagination for all its worth: broomsticks get used for unspeakable purposes and Lucifer is laughed out of the room. On the new version, the stakes are higher, and the music sharper, a sideways-jerking, always-falling-off-the-beat thing that samples the Rev. Al Green, of all people. He didn’t even fuck it up by including a new verse from a pissy white kid named Eminem on it, a rapper Big had never heard of who had mostly become famous at that point for making fun of his mom and boy bands. It all sounds a little tired in retrospect—“cannibals and exorcisms, animals havin' sex with 'em”—but at the time, it was a revelation.
The decision to bring Eminem in said a lot about Puffy’s shifting priorities. Mark Pitts, an executive producer on Born Again, likened the project to “building Frankenstein.” Even shortly after working on the project, he sounded queasy about it: “The only thing that bothered me was the [guests artists] on the album. He would’ve respected them all, but he wouldn’t have worked with them all. Just because they’re hot doesn’t mean they mesh.”
Soon, he would accompany artists he wouldn’t have even respected: Korn comes to mind. The trail of artists who can technically claim to have appeared alongside the Notorious B.I.G. has only grown more disheartening with time. “I did real songs with Big, no made-up shits,” Jadakiss sneered at 50 Cent in their 2006 battle. By then, having recorded a song next to Biggie Smalls was no longer rarefied air, and these were the first unreal songs with Big. In that sense, they inaugurated a long and sad tradition.
From Hendrix to Elvis to Nirvana, none of this death-industry stuff is new. But in hip-hop, a music tied so closely to the inhuman ravages of the drug war and the carceral state, the charge pulsed a little hotter. Nineties gangsta rap always smelled of sulfur, of various deals cut with sundry devils, and its most potent tracks gave those who confronted them a mortal thrill. Alive, Big could inhabit this archetype and artfully squirm out of it in the same line, and it only took his presence—no more, no less—to set this animation in motion. “Excuse me, flows just grow through me/Like trees to branches, cliffs to avalanches,” he deadpanned on a throwaway line from Ready To Die’s “The What.” You could lose an hour, or a year, thinking about the imagery there, plumbing the mind that casually bundled those two thoughts together. “We dress up like ladies and burn ‘em with dirty .380s,” he proposed on the Life After Death cut “Niggas Bleed.” These lines are well-worn by repetition that they should, by all rights, have lost their strangeness. And yet they have not: Imagine Big, all 300 pounds of him, packing heat, dressed in woman’s clothes; once your mind’s eye has seen that, you won’t ever lose it. It’s indelible.
On Born Again, he is immobilized, and can thus perform none of these tricks. You can feel the absence of his animating touch—his hot breath, his shrewd eye, his capacious ear. This is when the mortification of his body was complete, and he was rendered as just a voice that others could manipulate without his consent. He has nothing to do with the music and no way of playing against his environment. As a result, there’s no inner music at work, nothing much to listen harder for. A good artist leads you into their genre from some other, outside place, showing you the familiar shapes through the warping lens of their mind. Their individual predilections and quirks become elemental laws of physics, rules. Biggie’s voice is all over Born Again, but you feel the absence of his mind. Here, he is just a gangsta rapper, the nimblest one that ever lived.


Overdue reissue of the 1992 lo-fi classic, originally released in an edition of 500, uniquely packaged copies.

Propeller

At this very moment, there is an original pressing of Propeller selling on eBay with a starting price of $850. In his new history of the band, Guided by Voices: 20 Years of Hunting Accidents in the Forests of Rock and Roll, James Greer tells of a copy that eventually sold for more than $6,000. It's not hard to see why these records are so costly and coveted: Only 500 were pressed in 1992, and band members and assorted hangers-on decorated each of them by hand, mimicking Robert Pollard's collage-style graphics, in the process making each one unique.
In its 13 years of existence, Propeller has been much more lovingly preserved on vinyl than on compact disc. For years, I only knew it as the other half of Vampire on Titus, which always made me recall Big Star's #1 Record and Radio City (both bound together on the same disc, still awaiting separate deluxe reissues). That's good company, and an appropriate connection, but for me, Propeller always suffered the proximity of the disinviting Vampire on Titus, as fanged an album as its title implies.
Now, with Scat Records reissuing Propeller, the emphasis is again squarely on vinyl. The CD version has nice new packaging featuring several of Pollard's collages, essentially enabling you to choose your own cover. But it pales in comparison to the LP itself, which includes an insert with 81 of the original collage covers and reproduces the #14 cover ("50 EGGS") and the boxing diagrams in their original 12"x12" dimensions. Despite its release during the heyday of the compact disc, Propeller seems to be an album primarily intended for vinyl and its enthusiasts; any other medium remains an afterthought.
The music that goes on vinyl also comes from vinyl: Propeller sounds like a sonic collage gathered from what would seem like an exhaustive collection of 70s rock LPs-- Cheap Trick, Kiss, Led Zeppelin, Todd Rundgren, John Lennon, maybe even some Wings. On Propeller these period-rock influences are closer to the surface than on subsequent GbV albums. It's Pollard's first big rock statement, from the crowd chants that open side one to the anthemic guitar chords that end side two. As such, it's a little rough here and there, its slight imperfections alternately amplified and pardoned by its lo-fi sound, but ultimately it remains insistent and compelling. Bee Thousand is written about more often and exalted more devotedly (and rightly so), but Propeller proves just as essential to the Guided by Voices mythos. More than that, it's just a solid rock album, one that gives you all the tools you need to understand and appreciate it. Enjoying it should be easy.
"G! B! V! G! B! V!" the crowd chants at the beginning of "Over the Neptune", and presumably it's Pollard who yells, "Are you ready to rock?" That's a bold, somewhat self-deprecating kick-off for a band whose audience at the time barely extended beyond Ohio and who were pressing only 500 copies of what they wanted to be their breakthrough album. But that introduction not only predicts the obsessive cult that would gradually surround Pollard, but it also prefaces a medley ("Over the Neptune" bleeds neatly and dramatically into "Mesh Gear Fox") that contains the whole of Pollard's large and complex philosophy about rock and roll and about the inspiration he derives from a live crowd ("It's the way you look it's the way you act when you're near me," he sings at the song's climactic push). Those chanting voices are the ones that guide him, and here they usher you into Pollard's world, where you learn to decipher his coded lyrics and speak his rock language.
Propeller achieves what Pollard calls on "Weedking" a "violent pace." That song picks up where "Over the Neptune/Mesh Gear Fox" leaves off-- in full rock anthem mode. It begins with the rallying cry, "Long live Rockathon", which is both a shout-out to the band's fledgling minilabel and a concise summation of a credo for long, beery live shows. With its affectionately re-created Beatles harmonies, the chorus of "Quality of Armor" reappears precipitously throughout the song, slyly inverting the come-on of "Drive My Car". "Metal Mothers" bleeds pop melancholia, and the popping guitar melody of "Unleashed! The Largehearted Boy" creates a bouncy momentum that carries into "Exit Flagger", with its unannounced and powerful racing=death metaphor.
After the perfect adolescent wistfulness of "14 Cheerleader Coldfront", Propeller trails off as it makes its way to the finish line. Still, after the odd collage "Ergo Space Pig", "Circus World" and "Some Drilling Implied" give the band a chance to run through more guitar solos, breakdowns, rock dramatics that you'd think lo-fi was capable of sustaining. But the sound preempts any chance of irony-- all those rock anthems, monumental choruses, and microphone windmills are completely from the boy's large heart. That's the key to the band's appeal, the factor often missed or simply left unstated: Pollard believes in rock and roll, and Propeller is his sacrifice on the altar. And that lo-fi sound is essential: it preserved the illusion of connection between performer and listener, hinting at an intimacy that Pollard knows doesn't exist, but damned if he isn't going to try.


Sordid family history has long been the source of the Houston rapper’s most resonant storytelling. His latest project is such a major leap in craft and style, it becomes a superpower.

Brandon Banks

In a cheeky promo video released on Father’s Day, Maxo Kream’s dad explains the origin of his moniker Brandon Banks. “People could not pronounce Emekwanem,” he says, “I spent 18 hours a day explaining my name...so I changed it to Brandon Banks.” In this telling, which Emekwanem delivers with a jolly charisma, the handle is born from a comedy of errors: his name was hard on American ears, so Emekwanem made it easier.
It turns out that’s the Disney version. In reality, Brandon Banks was Emekwanem’s criminal alias. Maxo knew Banks as the scammer whose grifts enriched and endangered his family in equal measure, and whose jail bids sowed the seeds for Maxo to later embrace street life. Sordid family history has long been the source of Maxo’s most resonant storytelling, and on Brandon Banks it becomes a superpower. As Maxo details the trials of his family, he’s energized by the parallels of their struggles, his bonds deepening as he claims his place within this complicated lineage.
Maxo’s father serves as both a muse and foil, popping up throughout the record as both a character and a presence. Mirroring the album cover, a collage of their faces, Maxo builds stories around their points of overlap and distinction. His father’s scams aren’t laid out in detail, but their effects are felt in Maxo’s ties to street and gang life. “Bissonnet” breaks down the relationship between Emekwanem’s capers and Maxo’s thugging into direct cause-and-effect: “Police kicking in my door/Threw my mama on the floor/HPD took my pops/I bought a heat, hit the block.” When Maxo later gets kicked out by his mom, it feels like he’s following his dad’s lead.
His dad shapes his thoughts in “Meet Again” as well. Written in the style of Nas’ “One Love” and interpolating Ice Cube’s “Steady Mobbin,’” the song is a letter to an imprisoned friend who has become a member of Maxo’s extended family in his father’s absence. Maxo addresses him as a brother: “Let me tell you ’bout your daughter/Yesterday she tried to walk/Everyday she getting smarter/Other day she tried to talk,” Maxo raps like a proud uncle. Because his dad and brother have been imprisoned before, he knows exactly what to write to keep his homie’s spirits up. As he moves from neighborhood gossip to personal news to lawyer updates, his casualness feels practiced. It’s touching and bleak.
What prevents the record from becoming weepy and drab is Maxo’s pervasive sense of pride in himself and in his rapping. He has a dark sense of humor and a wry charm that, combined with his choppy flow and gruff voice, give his music a buoyancy. “Drizzy Draco” is a showy fusillade of gun bars that's as much about wordplay as always standing his ground. “Spice Ln.,” named after a street in his hometown of Alief, details capers with various levels of success, from a burglary in which the victim texts the robbers that they missed the money in the attic to a drug boost in which the victim later buys the drugs back. There are deaths on all sides and the gains are always meager, yet Maxo cherishes his life in full, the ups and the downs, the danger and the absurdity.
On the record’s best songs, the action is the prelude to soul-searching. “8 Figures” is frank about the slipperiness of fast money, but then explodes into flexes. Maxo knows the smarter route, but he can’t deny that it just feels better to spend money than to save it. “Dairy Ashford Bastard,” another ode to an Alief street, is a tribute to and castigation of his dad. Pulling no punches, Maxo claims that Emekwanem was a cheater and domestic abuser in addition to being a convict. In the context of Emekwanem’s goofy interludes throughout the album, this revelation can feel like a reversal, but Maxo yokes these failures to his dad’s strengths, detailing his father’s overall commitment to his family and to Maxo. “I’m glad you spanked my ass/I’m glad that you my dad/And I’m thankful for yo ass,” he says with sincerity.
The forgiveness Maxo offers his dad might feel overly generous or one-sided, given the omission of his mom’s perspective, but Maxo preaches loyalty as the bedrock of all relationships, so loving his dad is a matter of principle. While that sentiment sinks the Tupac-inspired “Brenda,” which feels like a rap adaptation of the Moynihan Report, the larger takeaway is that Maxo sees himself in Emekwanem (who he’s actually named after) and in his many real and adopted brothers. Like Punken before it, Brandon Banks is a major leap in craft and style as well as refinement of his self-image. As Maxo takes stock of the varied fates of his extended family he sees his own life with greater clarity.


In an early-2000s Montreal music community renowned for heart-on-sleeve, shoot-for-the-moon rockestras, the Unicorns were the odd band out. Eleven years on, their messy and often brilliant full-length has been reissued with bonus tracks.

The Unicorns: Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?

Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?

It’s a bit misleading to say the Unicorns have reunited after a 10-year absence, because they always seemed like they were barely holding it together in the first place. It wasn’t just that the band was built precariously upon the complementary-but-combative songwriting partnership between Nick “Diamonds” Thorburn and Alden “Ginger” Penner, or that their infamous live shows were liable to degenerate into a chaotic clusterfuck of broken gear and profanity-laden tantrums. For the Unicorns, this instability was embedded into their music’s root DNA; they took the term “pop music” at face-value and left us with a gooey, messy, combustible splatter. But with 2003’s Who Will Cut Our Hair When We’re Gone—their first and, to date, final widely released recording—Thorburn and Penner effectively got their shit together just long enough to herald their band’s demise.
In an early-2000s Montreal music community renowned for heart-on-sleeve, shoot-for-the-moon rockestras (see: the Dears, Stars, and, of course, scene lynchpins Godspeed You! Black Emperor), the Unicorns were the odd band out. From the color-coordinated white-on-pink stage attire to their bottomless well of theme songs for imaginary cartoon characters (“Jellybones”, “Sea Ghost”) to the vintage synthesizers set on “fart,” the Unicorns seemed to be the antithesis of their more openly impassioned, stern-faced peers. And the one emergent local band with whom they initially shared a predilection for gimmicky onstage attire, vocal hysterics, and volatile performances—the Arcade Fire—would soon solidify into a model of poise and professionalism, something the Unicorns could never hope to become. Sadly, they didn’t survive long enough to divest their almost-anthem “Let’s Get Known” of its aspirational irony: After touring themselves into the ground over the course of 2004, the Unicorns would unceremoniously disband just as south-of-the-border publications like the New York Times and Spin were flying reporters up to Montreal to soak up the city’s je ne sais quoi.
Eleven years may strike some as a premature anniversary for a reissue, but the Unicorns’ moment feels so much deeper in the past when you consider how slick and streamlined popular indie-rock has since become, and how few records have matched the scatterbrained unpredictability, frayed-nerve unease, and tooth-rotting tunefulness of Who Will Cut Our Hair. Throughout its 13 tracks (many of which are re-recordings of songs from two limited-run self-released discs), the Unicorns gleefully defy easy categorization as if they were a group of sneaky seventh-graders playing dodgeball: Too complex to be classified as garage-rock, too unsettled to be psychedelic, too hooky to be described as art-damaged, and too fiercely funky to lapse into twee solipsism. (The latter quality came courtesy of secret-weapon drummer Jamie Thompson, who only appears on a handful of tracks here, but who became a full-fledged member after the album’s release.) Each song seems to undergo a diagnostics check—squelching synth test patterns, random rimshots, documentary snippets about Satanism—before it’s set loose, eventually traversing enough twists and turns to rival the Who’s epic “A Quick One, While He’s Away” in half the time. And even after living with this album for over a decade, you’re still never quite sure where it’s going to take you.
Unlike many songwriting foils, Thorburn and Penner have similarly peculiar voices, giving their melodic interplay a finish-each-other’s-sentences sense of intuition while lending their moments of playful in-song sparring a discomfiting tension. When the two start trading “No you’re not”/ “Yes I am” schoolyard-grade taunts on “Child Star”, it’s not unlike watching Siamese twins head-butting one another. But if that song—reportedly inspired by an unpleasant encounter with a past-his-prime Corey Haim—sees the two engaged in obvious role-play, other tracks blur the line between pretend-jousting and actual acrimony.
True to their capricious nature, the band’s would-be theme-song celebration, “I Was Born (A Unicorn)”, devolves into a custody battle between Thorburn and Penner for control of the band: “I write the songs” / “I write the songs!”/ “You say I’m doing it wrong”/ “You are doing it wrong!” But while the Unicorns may act childish, their sense of nostalgia flies in the face of today’s Instagram-filtered, #tbt sentimentalism; instead, Who Will Cut Our Hair transports you back to that pivotal moment in childhood when you first realize the meaning of death, and one’s sense of naïveté and frivolity give way to confusion and terror. For all their surface silliness—this is a band whose idea of sensitivity is serenading lines like “Somewhere in the asshole of my eye/ There’s a muscle which relaxes when you cry”—the Unicorns were motivated by a genuine desire to comfort, using fantastical images of ghosts and haunted houses to temper real-life fears and anxieties. After all, an album that begins with the flustered “I Don’t Wanna Die” ends with the peaceful “Ready to Die”, suggesting that acceptance of death is the first step to truly living.
That certainly seems to be the case for Thorburn, whose ambitions have since shifted into overdrive, with forays into hip-hop (Th’ Corn Gangg), Everly Brothers-style harmony-folk (Human Highway), 1950s doo-wop (Mister Heavenly), and cinemascopic art-rock (Islands). Penner, by contrast, has resurfaced only sporadically, taking a rough-hewn, deconstructionist tack with his short-lived band Clues and his recently released solo album. But the duo’s divergent post-Unicorns trajectories ultimately reemphasize the perfect, delicate balance the duo achieved together.
While it remains to be seen if their recent reconciliation will yield any new material, for now, the four rarities included on this reissue function as fresh flowers at an old gravesite, offering affectionate reminders of a legacy cut short prematurely. These include two intricate-yet-immediate songs (“Evacuate the Vacuous” and “Let Me Sleep”) that fit snugly within Who Will Cut Our Hair’s prog-pop parameters, and a live recording of the never-released “Haunted House” that provides a glimpse of the Unicorns’ notoriously off-the-cuff performances and Thorburn’s cheeky banter.
But perhaps the best exemplar of The Unicorns ethos can be heard in their excellent cover of “Rocket Ship” by Daniel Johnston, the Texan pop savant who first formulated the uncanny mix of innocence and horror that informs every song in the Unicorn canon. That Johnston nod further positions the Unicorns’ modest modus operandi in stark contrast to that of their world-beating Montreal-scene mates. The reformed Unicorns will be opening some amphitheater dates for their old pals the Arcade Fire next month, but this reissue serves as a warm reminder that, once upon a time, the idea of the opposite scenario happening in 2014 wouldn’t have seemed so ridiculous.


The Swedish EDM superstar’s posthumous final album purports to reveal Tim Bergling as he’s never been seen, but the scrum of co-writers and guest singers leaves more questions than answers.

TIM

What will Tim Bergling’s legacy be? At his commercial peak, the late dance producer, best known as Avicii, was reliable for field-sweeping big-tent anthems explicitly designed for mass uplift. There’s a scene of magical realism in the recent Elton John biopic Rocketman where, during the piano rocker’s legendary residency at Los Angeles venue the Troubadour, the entire audience literally levitates during an electrifying performance of “Crocodile Rock,” and it’s not hard to imagine something similar taking place in a raver-packed field, a collective festival throng floating on air to the cascading synth chorus of 2011’s EDM totem “Levels.”
Despite counting a number of real-deal stars in its confines, EDM itself—a subgenre of electronic music in strict economic terms, less definable by its toplines than its bottom line—has rarely made much hay of those stars’ actual personalities, to the point where some of them rarely (if ever) reveal their faces to the general public. But as his career as Avicii rocketed upwards, Bergling’s personal problems became an inescapable part of his narrative. A warts-and-all 2013 GQ profile chronicled his struggle with alcohol abuse, and he was eventually diagnosed with acute pancreatitis—the symptoms of which include “severe, constant” abdominal pain.
Touring took a well-documented toll on Bergling’s health, and his tendency to overwork himself extended to the studio as well. The 2017 documentary Avicii: True Stories depicted marathon recording sessions in which he’d willfully skip meals, while multiple reports on the making of his final and posthumously released album, TIM, have accentuated Bergling’s capacity to push himself to the point of total burnout. For all the jabs that were thrown at EDM’s practitioners during its height, it’s unquestionable that its biggest stars were on a constant grind in a cultural environment that granted easy access to hedonism.
Two years after retiring from touring in 2016, Bergling, 28, died by alleged suicide last year in Muscat, Oman. As one of EDM’s most recognizable faces (he even notched a Ralph Lauren campaign the same year as the GQ profile), Bergling has come to represent the EDM era—a musical trend that rippled through popular culture as a whole—in a different light than when he was alive. It’s sadly ironic that, despite Bergling’s fastidiousness, TIM was unfinished at the time of his death; after being approached by Bergling’s father Klas, his friends Carl Falk, Vincent Pontare, and Salem Al Fakir stepped in to help finish TIM, proceeds of which go toward the Tim Bergling Foundation, established by his family to benefit mental-health and suicide-prevention charities. The album’s 12 tracks feature some familiar collaborators from Avicii’s world—Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, who enlisted Bergling to produce their Ghost Stories cut “A Sky Full of Stars,” and R&B singer Aloe Blacc, of “Wake Me Up” fame—as well as Las Vegas pop-rockers Imagine Dragons and singer Noonie Bao.
EDM’s big names work in sound and style foremost, and perhaps the biggest takeaway from TIM is that, similar to many of his peers, Bergling saw EDM’s drop-reliant trend crashing and had his sights set on mass-market pop as a whole. The finger-snapping “Bad Reputation” smacks of the sanded-down, adult-contemporary electronic sound the Chainsmokers made their names on, while the closest thing the record possesses to a drop—the bassy “Hold the Line"—is less of the buzzsaw variety and more the soft, cushiony blow that Diplo has embedded into his pop productions. Most curiously, the soothed-out opener “Peace of Mind” is strongly reminiscent of Spanish producer John Talabot’s 2012 single “Destiny,” while Martin and Imagine Dragons’ respective contributions ("Heaven,” “Heart on My Sleeve”) don’t stray too far from the CGI emotionalism that’s come to be expected from both entities.
On a purely sonic level, TIM is an easy listen to a fault, but taking in this final artistic statement is more difficult when focusing on the lyrics. For the most part, Bergling’s past discography as Avicii—the 2013 debut True and 2015’s follow-up Stories—kept the mood as light and starry-eyed as EDM gets, the closest thing to pure melancholia being a surprisingly dour cover of Antony and the Johnsons’ “Hope There’s Someone,” on True. But the lyrics on TIM—which Bergling had a hand in penning—explicitly evoke the personal struggles that have since come to light after his death. “We don’t have to die young,” Zachary Charles of A R I Z O N A sings on “Hold the Line”; over the gently pulsing trop-house of “Freak,” vocalist BONN claims, “I don’t want you to see how depressed I’ve been/You were never the high one, never wanted to die young.”
Elsewhere, Chris Martin sounds characteristically filled with wonder (and characteristically hammy) on “Heaven,” singing, “I think I just died/And went to heaven.” Such grim lyrical prescience is reminiscent of Lil Peep’s “Life Is Beautiful” from last year’s posthumously released Come Over When You’re Sober, Pt. 2, on which the late emo-rap icon admits, "I think I’m-a die alone inside my room." Such a statement coming directly from Peep himself packs an undeniable amount of emotional power—but the overall impact of TIM’s lyrical parallels feels different, almost anti-cathartic.
EDM typically relies on guest vocalists to do the lyrical heavy lifting, but hearing TIM’s coterie of voices singing such loaded lyrics seemingly (or at least plausibly) representative of Bergling’s perspective produces an unsettling sensation of remove. The effect of these contributors effectively recasting his personal sentiments over once-unfinished music is haunting in all the wrong ways. It is a sobering reminder that we’re no closer to understanding the roots of his pain now than when he was alive.


The South Central rapper Cozz emerged fully formed two years ago with his street singles "Dreams" and "I Need That," quickly signing with J. Cole's Dreamville imprint and releasing his first mixtape Cozz & Effect. On his latest mixtape, Nothin Personal, his writing keeps a sense of forward motion, where each high school liquor store excursion or bus ride from Manhattan Beach back to 65th and Western is as sleek and economical as a film script.

Nothin Personal

Completists have it easy with Cozz. Where most rappers have their growing pains scattered around Soundcloud or on shoddy tape dubs, the South Central rapper emerged fully-formed, all grit, learned distrust, and half-full/half-empty 40s. Two years ago, his pair of debut singles, "Dreams" and "I Need That," shook the Los Angeles street-rap community to its core; by the fall of 2014, the ink was dry on his deal with Interscope and Dreamville Records, the imprint run by J. Cole. News of the signing was followed in quick order by Cozz & Effect, an excellent mixtape that paired his forceful, sandpapered voice with spare beats.
Cozz’s breakout comes in the midst of a renaissance for L.A.: Kendrick Lamar and YG with their variations on the familiar Compton myths; Open Mike Eagle and Busdriver with their looking-glass art rap; Earl Sweatshirt with his white-knuckled self-improvement; and excellent, often daring music from the likes of Cam & China, Skeme, Speak, Nocando, and more. (Vince Staples and Boogie are lurking down the 710 in Long Beach.) But what makes him stand out in the crowded field is his restlessness. Cozz’s writing keeps a sense of forward motion, where each high school liquor store excursion or bus ride from Manhattan Beach back to 65th and Western is as sleek and economical as a film script.
His new offering, Nothin Personal, is a low-concept stroll through the Crip-controlled blocks of Cozz’s youth. On the somber, reflective "Grow," he remembers accounting for the $10 his father used to leave him for lunch money: "I used to spend five dollars on the weed/ A 40 ounce with the other half—every day/ Starving myself for the hunger of a buzz." In other hands, "Choice Today" might come off as dull moralizing; here, it’s the eerie, slinking voice in your head that tries, often successfully, to drag you off track. That song is also vocally experimental in a way he hasn't tried yet: he mostly abandons his staccato cadences for a slow warble, something he also trots out for "Grey Goose" and on the latter half of "Tell Me." Unfortunately, the latter is also the clumsiest moment on the record, a song about sex that’s really a song about control in the least interesting way possible.
The tape’s high-water mark is "City of God," which pairs him with Boogie for a slow creep that darts from battered Ford Explorers to boardrooms and back again. One one level, it’s two of Southern California’s finest trading cracks about piety and iPhone read receipts; on another, it finds them in awe of the fact that things are finally, mercifully panning out. But each rapper is inherently skeptical of what’s laid out before them—so it’s back to speeding through Florence, eyes on the road.


Laura Jane Grace leads her Florida punk band into uncharted waters with a densely packed, vicious, and heartbreaking album about sublimation and transformation.

Shape Shift With Me

Shape Shift With Me is, according to Against Me! singer and guitarist Laura Jane Grace, an album about relationships from a trans perspective. “Trans people should be able to fall in love and sing love songs too, and have that be just as valid,” she said in a recent interview with EW. In some ways it is more precisely a breakup record; the relationships described in the songs seem to radiate from a locus of rupture. “All I can see is the space in between/The space where you’re missing,” she sings on “Haunting, Haunted, Haunts.” Even the song about casual sex, “Rebecca,” sits in the trembling fermata between a breakup and new love.
The previous Against Me! record, Transgender Dysphoria Blues, depicted the total shattering and rebuilding of one’s sense of self. Shape Shift occurs more externally, is more focused on other people, although the perspective still flows seamlessly between introspection and description. The opener “Provision L-3” is named after an airport body scanner that organizes the body into discrete silver polygons. Unlike other forms of x-ray, the images produced by the scanner are less blurred haloes of flesh and bone and instead look like naked tin people. Grace approaches the subject of the scanner politically at first, but her perspective soon telescopes into the personal and physical. “Hands in the air, assume the position,” she sings. “What can you see inside of me?”
The album then shifts into its depictions of love, which Grace illustrates as a democracy of sensations, a constant shape-shifting in and of itself. In “333,” vivid descriptions of body horror (“studying sophisticated nuances of putting holes in your lungs”) collapse into a plea for intimacy: “All the devils that you don’t know/Can all come along for the ride.” “12:03” is about waiting for a phone call, and the shapeless anxieties that sprout wildly out of an otherwise relatively mundane situation. “Maybe we get where we want to go,” Grace sings. “I don’t know/Fuck it/Maybe the earth opens up and swallows us whole.”
Other songs are about loving an absence. It manifests in the album art: A disintegrating figure, reduced almost to pure noise, licks the boot of someone who’s resting a riding crop against their head. Inside the booklet, the booted form disappears and the submissive figure wags their tongue to a gray and wavering emptiness. “All of the places that we never went before/All of the times that we’ve never had/They’re dead in the past,” Grace sings in “Delicate, Petite, and Other Things I’ll Never Be,” a lyric that’s an inverted echo of another, later in the record. In the dense monologue on “Norse Truth,” she sings, “All the places that we never went, all the time we never had/What about now?/What about that?” Both songs are about the way in which we see people we love, and the ways in which they see us, a flexible interpretive lens that never stops changing or revealing new angles. “I want to be more real than all the others” on “Delicate” turns into “I wanted you to be more real than all the others” on “Norse Truth.”
The band’s music on Shape Shift is less straightforward than Transgender Dysphoria Blues. As a noisy, digressive follow-up to an anthemic rock record, it’s more a parallel to their audacious sophomore album As the Eternal Cowboy, and its relationship to their rumbling folk-punk debut Reinventing Axl Rose. Beyond this, it doesn’t resemble any other Against Me! album. The way it’s produced, they sound less like a band playing together than a band layered on top each other, giving Shape Shift the hollow throb of post-punk or new wave, a space deliberately maintained between the instruments so dread can build inside of it. On “Crash” and “Rebecca,” the band sound as clean and separated as Blondie on Parallel Lines, another album where alienation and absence establish both content and surface.
Of course, Transgender Dysphoria Blues was only straightforward musically. The story it told was a woman realizing that she’s a woman and rerouting her experience of the world through that. Shape Shift is a story about what happens afterward, what it means to interact with and fall in love with others after you’ve finally arrived at a solid idea of yourself, and how this solidity is challenged and reshaped through these interactions. It’s an album about sublimation, about transformation. “I want to be as close as I can get to you,” Grace sings in “333,” describing an intimacy so intense, so close, that it’s like exploding your own shape, so you can flow into someone else’s.


Over the course of 26 years, Green Day have gone from pop punks to rock stars. Their latest, however, has little effect on their legacy and lapses into pandering, embarrassing lyrical misfires.

Revolution Radio

Green Day are victims of accidental evolution. Between Dookie and American Idiot, they shifted just enough in texture and composition that the modest, Bay Area-pop-punk trio eventually generated the aura of an imperial rock band. They managed this without ever directly shedding their pop or punk sensibilities, even as their ambitions slipped into the hysterical space of musical theater. Revolution Radio, their first album in four years, following up the miscalculated trilogy ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, ¡TRÉ!, seems a deliberate reduction in scale. ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, ¡TRÉ! documented a band without any ideas; it’s an oddly empty, back-to-basics rock album unreasonably contorted over three records. Revolution Radio documents a band with one idea, which is, as far as one can tell, to make a Green Day record, one with fewer indulgences and overarching concepts and more capital-R Rock.
The opener, “Somewhere Now,” has brief flashes of invention; it’s their first opener on any album to evolve from gentle acoustic filigrees into stomping dinosaur rock. It’s designed to resemble the Who’s unhinged compression of styles, but it’s oddly weighted, so that the classic rock schematic is undermined in its execution. “I shop online so I can vote/At the speed of life,” Billie Joe Armstrong sings. His voice has lost some of its body and occupies an insecure, nasal frequency throughout the record, and it’s in this hollow timbre that he delivers most of the album’s lyrical misfires, which are mostly unrelated ideas juxtaposed to sound important or dangerous. “We all die in threes,” he sings, less like a natural end to the song’s chorus and more of a dead end that the melody struggles to recover from. The clichés fail to resolve into a song, and what’s left is a plastic tray littered with “important” rock gestures.
In “Bang Bang,” the first single, Armstrong tries to assume the perspective of a mass shooter who is eager to see their image preserved and multiplied on social media. For the most part, this approach produces incoherent combinations of social media jargon and historical violence. “I got my photobomb,” Armstrong sings. “I got my Vietnam.” The character study, a hypercompressed and retrofitted Natural Born Killers, is neither interesting nor illuminating. The title track is inspired by a Black Lives Matter protest in New York that Armstrong abandoned his car to join. None of the details or the specificities of the protest or its parent movement enter the song; the lyrics instead are generic kodachromes of activism (“Give me cherry bombs and gasoline,” and, “Legalize the truth!”)
There are some signs of animation and ambition: “Outlaws” embeds nostalgia in more nostalgia, shifting between major and minor chords as Armstrong recalls his youth as a “criminal in bloom.” It also moves through its chord changes so inevitably it almost sounds generated by a Green Day ballad algorithm. “Still Breathing” is the most successful melody on the record; the shift from verse to chorus is thrilling, though restricted to the traditional designs of pop-punk, and, as a kind of vague description of survival, it’s Armstrong’s most convincing lyrics on the record.
But Revolution Radio otherwise rarely escapes the Green Day archetype, an established language that, here, feels inelastic and calcified. It misses the living superstructures on American Idiot, the craft-based, Kinks-esque storytelling approach of Warning:, or even the accelerating entropy of ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, and ¡TRÉ!, which at least tried to shape a collective shrug into something unusual. Revolution Radio feels like the product of three people committed to making the idea of a Green Day record in 2016, but with reduced abilities and without direction. The album cover depicts a portable stereo on fire, which feels like an unintended analogy for the form the band takes on record: burned out, crumbled, warped into an inanimate husk of itself.


*Undertow *finds Detroit noise trio Wolf Eyes a bit tamer than usual, as they apply a wrecking ball to the spacious frameworks of world music, ambient, and even reggae.

Undertow

“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” So declared sci-fi grand poo-bah Ray Cummings in his 1921 short story “The Time Professor,” 76 years before the inception of Wolf Eyes, his theorem’s greatest challengers in music. The clock has long since become subservient to the Detroit trio, at least aesthetically. However prominent a role it may appear to play—monumental song lengths, alternating moments of eerie calm and explosive fury that seem to stretch on for eternity—time’s ultimately rendered obsolete under Wolf Eyes’ crushing gravity. The ever-shifting darkness is all that remains, devoid of any logical metric for measuring the band’s 20-year reign of terror—which, naturally, means everything’s going according to plan.
Or is it? Just over a minute into Wolf Eyes’ new album Undertow, vocalist Nate Young takes the mic for a groggy dispatch from his personal hell, deep beneath the rubble of Motor City. “I spent too much time outside, but it never seemed the same,” he moans on the titular opener, later conceding: “I spent too much time on an answer/Wanting to see if I’d ever grow old.” Permanence, it seems, has become a bit of a chore for him and his pals–and how couldn’t it, considering our ironclad perception of the group as monstrous, restless shape-shifters? Still, Wolf Eyes aren’t about to soften, or worse, surrender to Father Time. With this record, they’re just giving him a little room to breathe. It’s a small gesture that goes a long way.
Like the band’s last long player, 2015’s I Am a Problem: Mind in Pieces, *Undertow *finds Wolf Eyes a bit tamer than usual, shoehorning their concrète-tinged racket to more conventional melodic paradigms. They’ve mostly done away with the bluesy flirtations this time around, instead applying a wrecking ball to the spacious, lush frameworks of world music, ambient, and even reggae. “Texas” plays out like a new age nightmare, as John Olson’s saxophone stabs into the smoke-shrouded void with skronk after agonizing skronk, electrifying otherwise sedate woodwinds into instruments of war. “Empty Island,” on the other hand, is Wolf Eyes’ dip into dub, presided over by an acrid, guillotine-like *riddim *(which is also present on the title track, albeit to a slightly lesser extent) and Jim Baljo’s hazy noodling.
Wolf Eyes save their biggest, weirdest statement on Undertow for last with “Thirteen,” a primal epic whose nearly 14-minute runtime comprises more than half of this five-track project. The monolith derives its frisson–or rather, its malaise–from a long, tortuous tug-of-war between Baljo’s guitars and Olsen’s synths, which fall upon the ears with all the grace of a Biblical swarm of cicadas. Young’s protracted moans, meanwhile, accumulate and linger, eventually bleeding into the surrounding soundscape. By the 10-minute mark, the acid trip’s reached its hemorrhaging apex and the trio amble off into the murk, hands clutching tambourines and maracas, wild hearts satiated by maniacally-enabled catharsis.


Primarily showcasing its three core members, the YBN Collective’s first full-length captures the rough-around-the-edges charm of a group still figuring out exactly who and what it wants to be.

YBN Nahmir  / Cordae / YBN Almighty Jay: YBN: The Mixtape

YBN: The Mixtape

The formation and rise of the YBN Collective is reminiscent of that of another rap group of young URL-to-IRL friends, Odd Future. The latter spawned from MySpace in the late 2000s, while YBN connected on XBox Live four years ago as a gaming collective. Each broke through thanks to standout singles by their de facto frontmen (“Yonkers” by Tyler, the Creator and “Rubbin Off the Paint” by YBN Nahmir) that grabbed our attention with their abrasive lyrics and catchy songwriting. Both collectives started out the gate extremely young—the oldest member of YBN is still barely of drinking age—meaning that they were (and in the case of YBN, still are) loud, brash and susceptible to obnoxious behavior. Still, as was the case with the adolescent Tyler, Earl, and Hodgy, the YBN crew’s mixture of talent and recklessness gives their art an irresistibly dangerous feel. The question now is whether they can funnel that appeal into consistently good music.
Which brings us to YBN: The Mixtape, their first compilation as a collective. Though YBN consists of 10 members spanning four different states, The Mixtape is wisely credited to its three best-known talents: Nahmir, YBN Almighty Jay, and YBN Cordae. Cordae stands out as the most gifted with the pen (if we’re still drawing from the Odd Future comparison, he’s Earl), while Nahmir and Jay are more in line with the trap stylings that currently dominate hip-hop. The songs on YBN that highlight Cordae’s lyrical ability are the most interesting, pairing his straightforward introspective delivery with heavy, 808-driven production. But he’s featured here the least, which is indicative of the project’s weaknesses. There’s plenty to like on YBN that illustrates the group’s star potential, but it’s also bloated from unnecessary guest appearances and filler. It earns its mixtape title.
The intro, which begins with Nahmir checking in on Jay, harks back to their gaming days, when they’d discuss life through their headsets as they looted and blew up cars on “Grand Theft Auto V.” Dramatic piano chords and a pulsing synth line seep in as both rappers reminisce about their humble beginnings on the street, with Nahmir offering the most poignant line (“I used to be broke and I ain’t know the feelin’/The storm hit my house and I ain’t had no ceilin’”) in his carbonated growl. Though Cordae is the most prolific punch-line dropper of the gang (“Old Niggas,” his viral response to J. Cole’s steady shaming of younger rappers, is full of them), Nahmir has a knack for sprinkling in nuggets of profundity that manage to paint vivid pictures of his upbringing in only a few strokes. And he excels at crafting earworm hooks, like on the solo track “Feel Like,” which is clumsy and off kilter until his sing-songy chorus—“2-4, bitch I feel like Kobe”—snaps everything into place.
Almighty Jay, meanwhile, is boisterous and sloppy in his delivery, which makes him the polar opposite of Cordae, whose flow is polished and calculated. On “Target,” one of his three solo songs on the project (he’s only featured on two of the other 20 tracks), he uses it to spin a tale of getting pulled over by a “redneck-ass cop,” who discovers he’s intoxicated. “He said, ‘What in tarnation,’ hit the gas, I’m car racing,” he raps in a twang. It’s cheeky storytelling that serves as a nice change of pace to the album's braggadocio. Later, on the melodic “Pain Away,” the project’s only true soft moment, Cordae and Nahmir lament about the innocence they lost on way to stardom. Nahmir blends his introspection with boasts of women and jewelry, while Cordae paints a full picture with his pain: “I witnessed my mother she crying/And that fucked my mental, feeling revengeful.”
Even here the production is erected on thudding kicks and a monstrous low end. Hardly ever do the songs on The Mixtape not slap, a fact that’s wildy satisfying at times—like on the springy hustler anthem “2 Tone Drip” or the moody opener “Porsches in the Rain”—but also gets tiring toward the album’s back half, when the stuttering hi-hats start to taste sickly. For whatever reason, the most generic beats tend to serve as the backdrops of the songs with features, like the boilerplate keyboard melody on the Wiz Khalifa-assisted “Cake” or the overblown bass on “Man Down,” a messy misstep with a Chris Brown hook that sounds like it was held over from 2013. The Gucci Mane-featuring “New Drip” fares better at first, with candy Casio chords that recall the playful refrains of Atlanta snap group D4L. But a vintage Guwop verse is nearly wasted by the fact that the instrumental never changes and becomes tiresome by the time he drops his first brick reference.
A lack of finesse can be expected from such a fresh-faced group. But by the final three songs, which are the ones that racked up millions of views on YouTube and put YBN on the map, you’re convinced of the group’s ability to craft hits. Strangely enough, it’s “Chopsticks” by Almighty Jay, the YBN member roughest around the edges, that still sounds most convincing. “YBN, bitch, come get with the movement,” he raps in a slurry drone over bright synth chords. If YBN can tighten up the quality control, the rest of the industry will do well to heed his advice.


On a set of ominous club tracks billed as a dystopian concept record, the Bristol native brings an industrial edge to that city’s deeply ingrained soundsystem sensibilities.

Pulling Teeth EP

Pulling Teeth, LCY’s second solo EP for their own SZNS7N imprint, is pitched as a concept record. The EP, we’re told, follows its central character Ériu—part dog, part human, part robot—on a journey through a dystopian, post-human world. As is often the case with these things, the extent to which all of this comes across during the EP’s six tracks depends on how invested the listener is in the concept. In this particular instance, it matters little either way: with or without a post-human dystopia, these are rich compositions, reverent in their admiration for UK club music and successful in their efforts to push it forward.
Last February, L U C Y changed their artist name to LCY and, with an unfortunate sense of timing, dropped the face mask that had previously been a feature of press shots and live appearances. The Bristol native has always infused their music with that city’s deep-rooted soundsystem culture; now based in London—and a former member of the fiercely dancefloor-oriented 6 Figure Gang collective, alongside FAUZIA, Dobby, Sherelle, Jossy Mitsu, and Yazzus—LCY updates that same soundsystem sensibility with a more distinctly industrial edge. These elements are most evident in the EP’s tumultuous and exciting mid stages: In the alien breakbeat of “shhh,” or the clatter of claps and pulsing grime kicks on “slutty siri.”
The EP’s structure follows a loose narrative. Opener “teeth,” with its build of strings, acid bass, and probing drums, offers a sort of birth sequence. This is followed by a short series of dramatic crescendos over subsequent tracks before the EP ultimately withers into a pulpy, organic decay at its close. Sometimes the pull of the conceptual is too much. “bite off the hand that feeds you” fizzes with nervous energy but ultimately drowns in its own deadening loop of cyborg synths. As a transitional moment between the groovy breaks of “shhh” and the grandeur of “decay”—which opens with a wash of strings before, yes, decaying into a well of disembodied voices and guttural bass rumbles—it has its place, but it’s a little overindulgent. LCY has explored the characters and conjured environs of Pulling Teeth in a longer audio treatment for Peckham-based Balamii radio, as well as a series of grotesque clay model figurines, but what binds the record together most is the friction it generates between human and android sounds.
LCY’s voice appears, disembodied, throughout—mostly as wheezy, rhythmic samples, but occasionally in the form of shapeless words and half-strung sentences. It’s just about possible to make out the odd snatch of lyrics here or there, but the effect is boldest in the way it toys with the uncanny valley. It’s reminiscent of the 2010s indie video games LIMBO and INSIDE, which thrilled players by simultaneously conjuring horror and pricking their imaginations, the action unfolding onscreen at once fascinating and unsettling, familiar yet unwelcoming. On the standout dub-techno roller “garden of e10,” industrial crackle and clanks bounce between breathy vocal clips; the track’s title is a pun on the London postcode that encapsulates both the dense urban sprawl of Upper Clapton and the wet greenery of Hackney Marshes, whose not exactly Edenic waters are themselves pumped with sewage and human waste.
The EP’s title speaks to its visceral, sinewy nature: staked on taut exchanges of attack and release, and full of hardened percussion and fleshy basslines. Outside of the dentist’s chair, “pulling teeth” refers to a task that’s difficult, tedious, and tiresome. LCY makes it look easy.

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The TDE rapper returns with newfound poise and even joy, taking R&B, Southern rap, and his inimitable lyrical style and casting it into a sophisticated collage.

The House Is Burning

It seems as if Isaiah Rashad only makes comeback albums. His last record—2016’s patient, engrossing The Sun’s Tirade, released two and a half years after the debut mixtape that marked him as a star in waiting—opened with a voicemail from the exasperated president of Rashad’s record label, Top Dawg Entertainment: “The fact that I still don’t have your goddamn album… you don’t care that they wanna hear your next shit? You just that good, huh?” At the time, the Chattanooga native cited addictions to alcohol and Xanax for his disappearance from public life and his decision not to capitalize on Cilvia Demo’s momentum; he swore he’d be more prolific going forward. That was five years ago.
Rashad’s new LP, The House Is Burning, comes after a period that included stints in near-poverty and in an Orange County rehab facility; it opens with the rapper noting, slyly, that he “just came back/See, I done been dead for real.” But Rashad is not given to the sort of longform, linear autobiography that would yield a narrative album about his experience. Instead, Burning projects newfound poise and even joy through a sophisticated collage. Rashad’s collection of references and phrases plays like the inside of a jumbled but vibrant brain.
Dating back to Cilvia Demo, Rashad’s music has been full of tributes to older, mostly Southern musicians who came before him. (That record includes songs named after the Baton Rouge rapper Webbie and Master P’s late brother, Kevin Miller; The Sun’s Tirade has “Silkk da Shocka,” to say nothing of the innumerable interpolations of lyrics and melody that dot Rashad’s music.) This has very occasionally given his work an artificial aftertaste, the musical equivalent of a friendship built on shared interest alone. But more often than not, Rashad has been able to render these elements in his music the way they appear in one’s life: as important touchstones but warped by our own experience of them.
To this point, Burning not only makes shrewd use of sampled songs by Project Pat (“RIP Young”) and Three 6 Mafia (the irresistible, Duke Deuce-featuring “Lay Wit Ya”), but in some ways climaxes with “Chad,” which is named after the late Pimp C and builds its chorus around a line from his “Big Pimpin’” verse. “Chad” does not sound like a UGK song per se—the cascading vocal run Rashad uses to open the final verse is his alone—but rather like one made by a tortured kid who grew up with that group’s music, pained but still posturing.
At times, Rashad sticks to the sort of clipped staccato flows that were en vogue when he debuted back in 2014 (see especially the Lil Uzi Vert collaboration “From the Garden”). But more reflective of the album’s mood are the songs that flirt with or fully embrace R&B. The most explicit example of this is the slinking “Score,” which pairs him with 6LACK and his second-wave TDE compatriot SZA, but there is also “Claymore,” which features the St. Louis rapper Smino and sounds as if it might fit even better on one of his albums. Rashad is a very effective writer in this mode. He has a gift for writing in aphorisms that he twists and pinches just enough to sound foreign—the verses are legible enough for listeners to project themselves onto, but specific enough to be Rashad’s own.
That Trojan Horsing of vivid detail into recognizable templates is the crux of Rashad’s music. Whether he is borrowing from his old iPods or from contemporary radio, many of his songs sound as if they began as demos of Rashad trying out someone else’s style. But the blueprints are quickly filled in with new variations, old plans crossed out, notes crowding the margins. If you heard “Don’t Shoot” from a distance it might sound as if Rashad had simply settled into a pleasant autopilot; on closer inspection, the writing is airtight in its economy, acrobatic in its most technical moments. That is Isaiah Rashad in microcosm: someone whose unassuming affect obscures ghastly scars—someone who’s walked through hell and returned with a shrug.

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Compared to the first Gangin, the Bay Area foursome is now more patient and ruminative. They tap deeper into a give-and-take dynamic that makes them one of rap’s most exciting groups.

Gangin II

Nine days before the release of Gangin II, SOB X RBE’s caramel-voiced singer Yhung T.O. made a shocking announcement on his Instagram: “Gangin 2 Will Be My Last Album With SOB Me And [DaBoii] Got sum shit still in tha cut fa y’all tho.” In the caption, he elaborated, “No We Not Fonkin We just on different Terms, Crazy How You make money and Create a New Life wit Niggas you call brother and in the End they still disloyal [...] Sumtimes No matter how hard you try to keep shit together sometimes shit just be destined.” Then, three days later, T.O. and the apparent object of his ire, Slimmy B, posted the same photo with similar captions, asserting that they were “4L [for life].”
The departure of T.O. would have been calamitous. At a time when the line between rap and R&B is all but gone, T.O. is an obvious star. His lyrics have the blistering anxiety and animosity of a 19-year-old snakebitten by violence, but his delivery is measured and melodic beyond his years. (He and Quando Rondo, the natural-born successor to Rich Homie Quan, duet splendidly on “Times Get Hard.”) In a group with three propulsive, adrenal rappers, T.O.’s dulcet tones act as an essential counterbalance—he’s the calming pitter-patter of raindrops to the rolling thunder of Slimmy B, Lul G, and DaBoii.
This dynamic—T.O. cool as the river Styx; his cohorts as rabid as Cerberus—is unchanged from their self-titled mixtape and the first iteration of Gangin. At their best, as they are on “North Vallejo,” “Uber Wit a Dub,” and “Let Em Have It” (with Fenix Flexin and Rob Vicious of Los Angeles arch-knuckleheads Shoreline Mafia), SOB X RBE have the white-orange burn of a meteor in the sky. They’re thrilling in the way precocious gangster rappers tend to be thrilling: everything is intoxicating and acrobatic and, though it can’t be the case, the menace contained herein feels free of consequence.
But youth has its limitations: It’s difficult to contextualize adolescence when not only is it in progress, but it has the added vectors of sudden fame and wealth. And, though T.O. and Slimmy B’s solo projects showed moments of heart-wrenching loss and sadness, their autobiographical instincts have been subsumed in a group setting. This is beginning to change. Compared to the first Gangin—a bug-eyed and breathless gun-fu sprint through a maelstrom of bullets—the second is patient and ruminative. Their incipient political awareness (“Fuck About Us”) and the already-scintillating DaBoii’s increased candor (”Peek A Boo”) can make for a less dynamic listen, but their maturation augurs well for the future of the group.
I suspect that, had T.O.’s fit of pique led to him permanently quitting SOB X RBE, I might feel differently about Gangin II. The album—imperfect, if still very good—would be an ill-fitting and premature final chapter for one of rap’s most exciting groups. Gangin II is the second panel in a triptych or the second act of a novel. It demands a third which is, if not conclusive and definitive, something that builds on their blossoming artistic ambitions.


Ten years after “Go Outside,” the New York duo find solipsistic charm in revisiting their past, bolstering their classic sound with the tactile verve of live instruments.

Host

The indie-pop world has completed several rotations around the sun since Cults first released their Day-Glo earworm “Go Outside.” The New York duo’s synthesis of girl-group harmonies and Jonestown imagery was praised, at the time, for Trojan horsing a conceptual record about anxiety into soundbites ready for an iTunes commercial. Along with Sleigh Bells’ menacing cheerleader blasts and Foster the People’s bluesy hooks about Columbine, they unwittingly became part of a small trend that took the tragedies of American nihilism and washed them out in comparatively mellow, 1960s-inspired tones.
But while the axis of small indie labels has tilted towards synth pop and simplicity in the intervening decade, Cults’ very darkness has been mainstreamed: Billie Eilish’s horrorcore music videos and Lorde’s bummer ballads all embody a “doomer” mentality that set in from the very first notes of Cults’ MIDI glockenspiel. The major-label shift to melancholia offers plenty of room for overt displays of depression and high-concept music videos set in psych wards, but it left Cults’ cheeky creepiness out of step. On 2017’s Offering, they attempted to carve out a lighter sound with breezy guitars and wispy falsettos, displaying a carefree attitude that felt immediately dated. On Host, Cults find solipsistic charm in retreading the shadowy pastures of their past, bolstering the dream pop of their earlier work with the tactile verve of live instruments.
The cymbal crashes, horn blasts, and piano strokes of “8th Avenue” feel like hearing Cults in Technicolor after years of black-and-white, digitally rendered instrumentation. Working with classically trained violinist Tess Scott-Suhrstedt, along with a rotating cast of cellists, percussionists, and a trombonist, core duo Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin dig deeper into the roots of their sound. The strings and drum blasts that open “Trials” recall the lush retro flourishes of Phil Spector’s work with groups like the Ronettes and the Crystals; the thin, plucky acoustic guitar on “Shoulders to My Feet” conjures the slanted folk of George Harrison’s self-titled record. Even when Cults reach for synths, as on “Like I Do,” the snap of live drums lends weight and permanence to Follin’s cool croon, which too often faded into Offering’s layers of artifice.
Host also marks the first time Follin brought her own music and lyrics to the recording studio, and her vocals, occasionally cloying and strained on their previous record, feel appropriately at home in the mix. Her two main modes, a sugary falsetto and a sharp deadpan, work best when they provide texture to the surrounding instrumentation, rather than attempting to overpower it. The simple repetitions of “A Low” and “Like I Do” exemplify this: Her voice echoes the former’s sliding strings and highlights the low bass of the latter’s synth line. The simplicity also faithfully renders the album’s concept, which loosely tracks the toxicity of a parasitic romantic relationship on its “host.” With few details about the emotional leech, “Trials” fills in the gaps: “I know you,” Follin intones, her minor triplets suggesting wariness rather than familiarity. But the relative verbosity of “Working It Over” loses its footing as Follin competes for airtime, the reverberating piano lost behind awkward rhyming structures and crowded verses.
Ten years in, Cults find their power in returning to their origins, if somewhat reluctantly. “We can’t escape ourselves!” Oblivion bemoaned in a recent interview. Host proves the duo can reinvent themselves within a static framework; by revisiting the sounds of their ambitious, albeit thinly produced debut with bigger and bolder instrumentation, they’ve emerged from the afterglow of 2010s virality as a more robust and rooted ensemble. The mainstream pop industry has come to inhabit the darkness they pioneered, but Cults finally feel above the fray.

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A new-classical sextet known for pop-adjacent collaborations tackles a set of pieces that highlight its mission to convert new listeners to contemporary composition.

Ecstatic Science

The yMusic ensemble has a long track record of reaching out to new audiences for contemporary classical music, collaborating with pop stars like Paul Simon and playing pieces written by artists such as Son Lux. Yet the group’s appeal is not limited to its crossover cachet. The sextet—for string trio, flute, clarinet, and trumpet—has also shown excellent taste in collaborating with composers known primarily to classical specialists.
They’re adept at playing to both sides of the aisle. On its debut album, the ensemble balanced work by Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) with that of the New Amsterdam label co-founder Judd Greenstein. The follow-up included pieces by Sufjan Stevens as well as Andrew Norman (whose major work “Sustain” recently helped the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel pick up a Grammy).
For its fourth full-length recording, the band’s contributor list is less pop-adjacent than it’s ever been, though it’s no less compelling for that fact. The 40-minute program begins and ends with pieces by the young composer Gabriella Smith—a smart programming move, as Smith’s pieces help define the album’s overall sense of serene locomotion.
Her opener, “Tessellations,” boasts a jaunty percussive pattern tapped out on the cello during its early going. Subsequent, soaring lines for flutist and occasional singer Alex Sopp provide a feeling of liftoff. At other points, the trumpet and clarinet collaborate on nimble staccato patterns, creating a regal quality that also seems casually assured.
At the piece’s close, the reappearance of the cello beat underlines the significant round-trip distance traveled, with a minimum of turbulence. That smooth-flight sensibility is a reliable constant on the album, even during pieces that have more dissonant harmonies, like Paul Wiancko’s richly textured “Thous&ths.”
Ecstatic Science wasn’t entirely written by up-and-comers. Missy Mazzoli has broken ground with her upcoming Metropolitan Opera commission; she is also an expert with shorter forms. On this album, her title track suits the group’s expressive range of performance styles. After initially toggling between blitzing melody and languid droning, Mazzoli’s composition bridges these divergent states without any hint of rough edges.
Perhaps the best known artist on this set is Caroline Shaw, a Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who has collaborated with Kanye West, but whose reputation has been primarily built on the basis of her own warmly experimental compositions. Her three-movement work “Draft of a High Rise” begins with hooky melodic fragments that feel as though they’re begging to be sung (perhaps by the vocal group Roomful of Teeth, which Shaw often works with).
This gift for melody is rarely the only winning element of her music; surprising pivots of harmony and new rhythmic patterns keep coming with a steadiness that might throw unseasoned interpreters. Thankfully, yMusic know this terrain so well that their performances have an untroubled gait—one that reflects their commitment to making new-classical music accessible to varied audiences. Programs of music that are this fluidly engaging aren’t in much need of pop-world assistance.


A Love Supreme is John Coltrane's defining album. Structured as a suite and delivered in praise of God, everything about it is designed for maximum emotional impact. This exhaustive 3xCD set gathers every scrap of material recorded during the Love Supreme sessions as well as a live performance of the suite from later the same year.

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters

A Love Supreme: The Complete Masters

John Coltrane was a late bloomer. Born in 1926, the same year as Miles Davis, he spent his twenties in and out of small-time bands, a promising journeyman moving between playing jazz and the more bar-friendly music that was starting to be called R&B. During these early years he had problems with narcotics and alcohol, alternating stretches of heroin use with periods of binge drinking. Charlie Parker—every sax player's hero when Coltrane was coming up in the 1940s and '50s—had given the junkie life a romantic aura for some naive souls, connecting drug use with creativity. But the underachieving Coltrane was a run-of-the-mill addict, someone broke and in ill health whose habit clearly kept him stuck in place. He was fired from Miles Davis' band in 1957 for showing up on the bandstand dressed in shabby clothes and visibly drunk—by some accounts he took a punch from the trumpeter before being given his walking papers. And if Coltrane had spiraled and his career had ended there, he'd be remembered now as a musician who flamed out just as he was discovering his voice.
But that's not what happened. Everything changed for Coltrane in 1957 when, as he wrote in the liner notes to his defining album, A Love Supreme, he "experienced, by the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life." During that year, Coltrane stopped drinking and kicked heroin, and from that point forward, his career would unfold with an almost frightening amount of focus and intensity. These final 10 years are when Coltrane made his mark on the world of jazz as a leader, and he was then seemingly always on the move, in transition, each moment glimpsed as a blur on a continuum rather than a fixed point in space. He wasn't just covering ground, he was accelerating, and every phase of his later career has the attendant feeling of stomach-dropping free-fall, of being pushed forcefully into new places.
A Love Supreme, recorded with what was later called his classic quartet, is Coltrane's musical expression of his 1957 epiphany. It's the sound of a man laying his soul bare. Structured as a suite and delivered in praise of God, everything about the record is designed for maximum emotional impact, from Elvin Jones' opening gong crash to the soft rain of McCoy Tyner's piano clusters to Coltrane's stately fanfare to Jimmy Garrison's iconic four-note bassline to the spoken chant by Coltrane—"a-LOVE-su-PREME, a-LOVE-su-PREME"—that carries out the opening movement, "Acknowledgement". By the time the record gets to the closing "Psalm", which finds Coltrane interpreting on his saxophone the syllables of a poem he'd written to the Creator, A Love Supreme has wrung its concept dry, extracting every drop of feeling from Coltrane's initial vision. It's as complete a statement as exists in recorded jazz. Hearing it now as part of this exhaustive 3xCD set, which gathers every scrap of material recorded during the sessions as well as a live performance of the suite from later the same year, you get a clearer sense than ever before of the different forms A Love Supreme might have taken, and how Coltrane's desire to communicate something specific and profound led to its final shape.
A Love Supreme is also one of the most popular albums in the last 60 years of jazz, selling the kind of numbers usually reserved for pop (it quickly sold more than 100,000 copies, and has almost certainly sold more than a million since). If Miles Davis' Kind of Blue is the most frequently bought first jazz album for those curious about the genre, A Love Supreme is easily number two. But though they were released just seven years apart, there's a world of difference between the two records, and the success of A Love Supreme is trickier to explain. For all its structural daring, Kind of Blue also functions as an ambient record, with slower tempos and a late-night vibe. A Love Supreme is harder to get a handle on. If you can think of Coltrane's work on a continuum, from the gorgeous melodicism of "My Favorite Things" or Ballads or his album with Duke Ellington on one end and the brutal noise assault of the 1966 concerts collected on Concert in Japan on the other, A Love Supreme sits perfectly at the fulcrum, challenging enough to continually reveal new aspects but accessible enough to inspire newcomers.
Coltrane may have structured the record for just this effect. He had already been further "out" than the music heard on A Love Supreme, including some of the knotty extended jams like "Chasin' the Trane" recorded at his 1961 sessions at the Village Vanguard. He was fascinated with the innovations of Ornette Coleman from the minute he heard them in the late '50s, and though he never completely abandoned chord changes, he regularly flirted with atonality, improvising outside of a fixed key. With A Love Supreme, it was almost as though Coltrane knew he had to dial things back a little in order to share his message of spiritual rebirth with a wider audience. Though conventionally beautiful in many ways, A Love Supreme is, for many, the exact point beyond which jazz becomes too experimental.
It's possible to hear on this set how the album might have gone even further. At a time when a single track might have a dozen collaborators working on it over the course of weeks, it's a little mind-boggling to consider that the music on A Love Supreme was recorded on a single day, December 9, 1964. This wasn't uncommon for jazz records of the time. But though they had the music in the can from that first day, Coltrane wanted to try something else. So on December 10, he called the young tenor saxophonist Archie Shepp, and a second bassist, Art Davis to play with his quartet. The six musicians then ran through two versions of A Love Supreme's opening "Acknowledgment", so that Coltrane could explore what the music might sound like with another horn and additional low-end rhythm. Shepp was an up-and-comer deeply influenced by Coltrane; the two takes of "Acknowledgment" featuring Shepp find him serving as a kind of textural counterpoint, his more brittle and biting tone commenting on the melody from an oblique angle and hinting at possibilities existing outside of the version recorded the day before. You sense a more abrasive road not taken, one that almost certainly would have found a smaller audience.
We hear a different perspective on the fantastic live version of the suite recorded in France five months after the album's release. Five months in '60s Coltrane time was like a decade in the career of other jazz musicians, and he was already imbuing the A Love Supreme material with an extra intensity. Tyner's clanging chords on "Resolution" have a harsher edge, and Coltrane's attendant soloing is much rougher and more pointed, his notes seeming to attack the structure of the composition from several directions rather than floating along above it. This is the hard-blowing sound that Coltrane would show on Meditations, another spiritually focused album-length suite recorded later in 1965 that never had a chance at A Love Supreme's level of mainstream acceptance.
In the same year, Coltrane would also record Om and Ascension, two harsh and challenging pieces of music that strain against the boundaries of what most people would even consider music. Given what surrounds it, and how sweet and gentle it so often is, A Love Supreme was an expression of a very specific time and place, a conscious attempt by Coltrane to communicate something to his audience that was broad enough to be understood but rich and complex enough to honor both where he was as a musician and the depth of the subject matter. A Love Supreme sounds like nothing else in John Coltrane's discography, and indeed like little else in recorded jazz, sitting at the nexus of so many competing musical ideas.
The final piece of the A Love Supreme equation concerns the civil rights movement and black liberation, and how those swirling ideas were inextricably tangled up with the jazz avant-garde.  Coltrane was never overtly political, but he did allow his thoughts and feelings to bleed into his music. Coltrane met Malcolm X, wrote a piece for Martin Luther King Jr., and his 1963 dirge "Alabama", a piece with a close tonal connection to A Love Supreme's "Psalm", was written to commemorate the four girls killed in the Birmingham church bombing that year. As the '60s wore on, politically conscious "fire jazz" grew in currency, much of it directly inspired by Coltrane's music, but during his life he never quite felt the need to connect his music to specific social currents, even as others drew inspiration from it in that context. Coltrane was seeking something broader, communing with God as he understood it.
For Coltrane, that spiritual journey led him to A Love Supreme, which became the base he'd explore from during his short time left on Earth. Coltrane occupies a unique position in jazz history. He was famous, especially in the jazz world, but he wasn't really a personality. He was not inclined toward interviews and he wasn't very good at them, preferring to let the music speak for itself. He didn't have the mystery of a Thelonious Monk, the tragic genius of a Charlie Parker, the cool comfort with celebrity or flamboyance of a Miles Davis, the combative verbal dexterity of Charles Mingus, the theoretical underpinnings of Ornette Coleman, the comfort with the mainstream of Louis Armstrong, or the symbolic stature of Duke Ellington. He led a quiet life, putting everything into his music.
His chaotic years mostly came when he was an unknown; by the time he was a major jazz figure, almost his entire life was music. If he wasn't on stage or in a recording studio, he was practicing or studying records. Seemingly every other story of an encounter with Coltrane in the 1960s involved him in a room with a saxophone in his hand, playing scales. In his mind, God had saved him, and he was going to give back. A Love Supreme was his expression of gratitude, a hopeful prayer for a better world.