The rapper’s second album of 2022 is a dark memoir about love, memory, and faith. With a meticulous but loose style, it amplifies his capacity for vulnerability.

Church

In 1947, the American minister William Marrion Branham claimed he was visited by an angel who bestowed him with the gift of curing the world of sickness and decay. It began Branham’s worldwide post-World War II healing revival, where he became a quintessential cult figure. News reporters and other ministers accused him of being a fraud, he launched and validated the violent ministries of Jim Jones and Paul Schäfer, and he spread a doctrine based on the restoration of archaic Christian values and doomsday predictions. Branham’s voice, ripped from a 1954 sermon in Washington, D.C., acts as a bridge between the second and third songs of billy woods’ newest album Church. It is measured, striking against the fading instrumental. “Let Him be first of all. Then, the hunger, deep. As David said, ‘When the deep calleth to the deep, at the noise of thy waterspouts,’” he barks. The line invokes Psalm 42:7, a lament that witnesses a call out to God, as the psalmist seeks confidence and hope in the face of trials and tribulations. The grainy recording feels as if it was buried deep in woods’ subconscious: Here, the lessons of faith burned into his memory are brought to the forefront, delivered through the voice of a false prophet.
Church arrives just a few months after woods’ stellar solo effort Aethiopes. With Church's short list of collaborators (Fat Ray, AKAI SOLO, Fielded, and Armand Hammer’s Elucid appear over 12 songs), his voice arrives in relative solitude. It grants him the space to unravel a dense memoir, musing about love, memory, and faith. There’s a heaviness that shrouds the album: Producer Messiah Muzik’s mutation of obscure crate gems like Roger Bellon’s 1977 “Blaknite” makes the entire project feel like a fever dream spiraling out of control. But that chaos and murkiness suits woods; with his uncanny ability to fuse raps to fractured beats, Church is a sprawling personal history, one that ensures that his status as a master of his craft remains unchanged.
woods has previously changed his writing perspective at the drop of a hat, treating his lyrics as puzzles that the listener has to piece together. This time, he writes from his own viewpoint, utilizing powerful imagery and nimble similes to narrate his experiences, often focusing on gloomy themes. On “Paraquat,” woods likens his relationship failures and lack of self-worth to James Harden’s stints on two different teams, then lambasts his brother’s spiritual and moral hypocrisy in the following four bars. In the next breath, as the beat switches to a trodding piano and straining saxophone seemingly lifted from a seedy Harlem jazz bar in the ‘50s, woods veers into political commentary: “Whitey hit Hiroshima, then he doubled back/Black rain baptized, black skies/I’m always waiting on the thunderclap,” he raps, chomping at the bit to put warmongers on trial with his words.
woods’ strength is in the details. He is meticulous and encyclopedic, holding his hat on the boast that his words “gon’ be here when all y’all is gone.” It is impossible not to picture his upbringing in Zimbabwe on “Fever Grass;” he paints scenes of an impolite cousin’s house and the religious sanctum his grandfather built in the jungle, where virulent sermons were doled out with reckless abandon. God and religion are intrinsic to his being, and he’s been grappling with the aftereffects ever since. Even as woods strays from material thoughts into existential ones, as on “Artichoke,” he remains poignant—each phrase opens a window into his psyche. “Hope is an assassin, fear fill up the casket,” he says, as an eerie sample wails above, making his words feel like a twisted campfire song.
Producer Messiah Muzik is familiar with woods, thanks to previous collaborations with Armand Hammer; the intimacy makes moments of instrumental cacophony feel more challenging than unpleasant. The crashing, ascending piano chords and saxophone blaring intermittently on “Frankie” intersect with woods’ delivery, and quick punch-ins and fragmented sentences allow him to find the pockets in the trudging beat. But sometimes, the dissonance can become distracting. The curtailed sample loop of “Fuschia & Green” quickly becomes a whirring, repetitive earworm, providing a frantic setting for woods and Elucid to rattle off biblical and Islamic references. There are moments of serenity, too: The peaceful arpeggios and Fielded’s angelic crooning at the end of “Classical Music” arrive like rewards for the listener’s patience and understanding.
Unlike Branham’s sermons, this record doesn’t offer a grand lesson that beats the listener over the head. Church isn’t a collection of parables: It holds the scraps of a diary with its pages stripped bare. Where Aethiopes could be considered a career peak, this album grounds him atop that summit, maintaining a level of quality, vulnerability, and precision that few could dream of recreating. He likens this stage of his career to the theatrical program Shakespeare in the Park on “Pollo Rico,” which is fitting—through masterful manipulations of language, he’s built a monument to his life and career in one fell swoop, meant to withstand the end times.


On the least dense and most inquisitive album of his career, the experimental musician creates a fascinating dialogue between his technology and some of the world’s most ancient instruments.

Konoyo

For the last decade, Tim Hecker has been on a quest to unite musician and machine, to blur the border between the sources of his sounds and the output he renders. During the two-part “Hatred of Music” suite from 2011’s Ravedeath, 1972, piano sparkled through a wall of noise and ran like water into the synthesizers beneath it. Two years later, Virgins made a pointillist chamber ensemble sound like Steve Reich trapped inside an electric storm. And on the exhilarating Love Streams, Hecker morphed loping woodwind lines and seraphic choirs arranged by Jóhann Jóhannsson into ad hoc beat machines and chord organs. Still, the source material from instrumentalists and singers felt like exactly that—fodder being fed into Hecker’s finished electronic product, data he mined for updated textures. The hierarchy between the composer and his components was clear.
At least until now: On the least dense and most inquisitive album of his career, Konoyo, Hecker puts his synthesizers, sequencers, and software on the same level as his source material, so that the original music he’s manipulating feels every bit as important as the music he is in turn creating. Encouraged by the late Jóhannsson to consider pulling back both volume and layers, Hecker creates a fascinating dialogue between his technology and some of the world’s most ancient instruments. Where one begins and the other ends often remains a mystery, as when a pair of Japanese flutes (the hichiriki and ryūteki) float into harmony with a soft keyboard line or a cello merges with a piercing ray of noise. In the tradition of Harold Budd’s piano-and-electronics daydreams, Christian Fennesz’s electroacoustic invocations, or frequent collaborator Kara-Lis Coverdale’s own choral wonders, Hecker stands at the center of two worlds and puts them in knowing conversation.
Late in 2017, Hecker enlisted Tokyo musician Motonori Miura to assemble a gagaku group whose members would improvise around nontraditional concepts. Gagaku is the imperial court soundtrack of Japan, a mesmerizing mix of curling flute melodies, drums, strings, and the spectacularly droning 17-pipe horn called the shō. They convened for several days in a Buddhist temple in Tokyo, built on the site of an ancient place of worship.
Rather than guide the gagaku ensemble, record their results, and simply return to a traditional studio to sculpt their sounds, Hecker became a de facto bandleader, offering thoughts about a mood and then joining the group as they improvised around the idea. He’d play back his results, and they’d respond in kind, building a sort of call-and-response repartee between their ritualistic instruments and his command center of synthesizers. During “A Sodium Codec Haze,” Hecker’s sequencers sing in harmony with gagaku flutes and percussion, a chorus of wonderment. For “In Death Valley,” those same instruments fall in and out of focus, moving through Hecker’s hum like a digital latticework.
At its best, Hecker’s radiant drone has been a nest of hidden feelings, with moods and emotions meant to be teased out after the music’s initial sense of unapologetic bluster has passed. But Konoyo is immediately vulnerable, its vacillation between the dense and diaphanous framing a sense of deep longing and worry. When these sessions began, Hecker’s equipment didn’t cooperate with the gagaku instruments, as they were designed with different standard pitches in mind (430 Hz, as opposed to 440). You can sense those traces of uncertainty and the quest to overcome that hesitation from start to finish here. In the literal sense, Konoyo sounds experimental, the stuff of trial and error.
“This Life,” for instance, is an endless cycle of baseline anxiety, where washes of worry and hints of relief are interwoven components along the same Mobius strip. Every time a melody starts to twinkle, Hecker undercuts it; just as the piece begins to grow into hellish miasma, Hecker backlights it with keyboards that beckon like shooting stars and safety beacons. It’s a seesaw of emotional unrest, never letting you land on just how you feel. “Keyed Out” is a score of quiet exasperation and creeping desperation, as a droning metallic tone slowly sloughs off its weight. Gagaku percussion clangs and patters in the distance, as if tracing the walls of some dark room in search of the way out. By using fewer strata of sound, Hecker leaves his impulses exposed, the skeleton now as prominent as the nervous system that operates it.
In the past, Hecker has tended to flood any space, to fill even a room’s hidden recesses with the glow of his sound. Harmony in Ultraviolet feels like some imposing orb, its transmission as inescapable as walking into La Monte Young’s magenta-bathed Dream House. Ravedeath, 1972 is a winter wind churning along some exposed ridgeline, whipping and subsiding only to return with increased conviction. But Konoyo is always mindful of the space it occupies. Hecker listens, responds, and keeps listening for the ways others respond to his actions—a cycle of dialogue that is, if not obsequious to the whims of the world, at least observant of his impacts on others.
This self-awareness is timely, of a piece with the social tides that rightfully demand the voices of white men need not be the only or loudest ones in the room. Konoyo’s other musicians are either Japanese gagaku experts or classically trained women with their own compelling experimental visions, Kara-Lis Coverdale and Mariel Roberts. If Konoyo is not a direct reflection of slowly shifting worldviews, it is at least a righteous affirmation of them, a pointed reflection on the value in listening to new perspectives. By stepping out of focus and receding into his assembled ranks, Hecker has found a renewed compositional approach. And on the most fascinating album of his career, he has, at last, expressed an idea he has pursued for a decade.


The singer-songwriter revisits highlights from her magnetic 2018 LP with the help of guests like Charlotte Gainsbourg, Courtney Barnett, and Julia Holter.

Hunted

In his paintings Peter Getting Out of Nick's Pool and Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), the British artist David Hockney used the pretext of private pools as scenes for voyeurism. At a time when homosexuality was still criminalized in his native UK, the artist's adopted home of Los Angeles provided a sanctuary where he could express his desires, which were fueled by post-war "beefcake" magazines and Hollywood films.
Anna Calvi has said Hockney's obsession with the pools he first noticed from his airplane window was a direct inspiration for the rippling guitars in “Swimming Pool,” a song from her 2018 record Hunter. On that album, she explored gender and sexuality and dove into her relationship to androgyny. Her swimming pool wasn’t vivid and clear like Hockney’s, but a shadowy and eerie space where desire could be contained.
18 months after its release, Calvi dug out her earliest recordings for Hunter, and saw that, in their rawest state, the tracks were a time capsule, vulnerable dispatches often whispered gingerly over her Telecaster. Resisting the impulse to remix or revisit the tracks herself, she sent four of them to artists she admires—Julia Holter, Courtney Barnett, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Joe Talbot—and has released their contributions, along with three tracks in their demo form, as the EP Hunted.
Calvi’s preoccupation with gender roles and fluidity imprints itself on her collaborators here, as Barnett's trademark laconic drawl joins her on “Don't Beat the Girl Out of My Boy.” The addition of Talbot on “Wish” transforms the song from a pulsing encouragement to indulge in fatalist desires into a tense and sorrowful elegy. The IDLES frontman uses his grief and loss to transform the band’s live shows into punk rallies campaigning for joy and hope, but he’s more melancholy here. His and Calvi’s dueling voices evoke a primal need, born from the fear of knowing time is running out.
At no point on the EP is Calvi's role in the proceedings made truly explicit: she is both the hunter and the prey, the quivering and the stalking. On the album cover, she appears drenched in sweat, her every pore and blood vessel visible. Tendrils of her dark hair are matted to her face in the aftermath of the ecstatic pose she assumed on Hunter's artwork. This is what comes after, she suggests: the steam from her exhaling nose distorts the mirror’s reflection of her smudged lipstick and running eyeliner. The makeup is a marker of traditional femininity, but there's something carnal and animalistic to her pose, a rejection of the ladylike and precious.
Across Hunted’s seven tracks, Calvi contorts her dance along the spectrum of gender and sexuality into something more of a march, stomping between tenderness and brutality. On “Eden”, Gainsbourg echoes Calvi’s story of a formative queer romance, while Holter's otherworldly vocals rise up from the depths on “Swimming Pool.” Calvi's intention to share the frame with other artists on Hunted feels like a way to relinquish control while maintaining power, allowing her work to be a mirror more than one person can stand before. But even when she's hidden from view, there's no one else who could possibly be in charge.

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These leftovers from the UK band’s 2017 reunion album successfully position them in a contemporary context alongside peers like Tame Impala and Caribou.

Tomorrow’s Shore EP

In a 1990 interview with the long-defunct UK music program Rapido, a very young Ride can be seen talking about what young indie bands tend to talk about: their favorite groups from their scene. It’s a typical list of anorak icons including My Bloody Valentine, the House of Love, and the Wedding Present. Bassist Steve Queralt, however, is wearing a Madonna t-shirt, which, while not exactly a radical act in a post-Ciccone Youth era, offers an early indication of Ride’s fondness for pop music—a tendency that would only grow more pronounced. Even Ride’s stormiest surges came with blissful harmonies, percolating electronics, and shuffling, almost-danceable grooves that cut through the shoegaze haze. By the 1996 rave-up “Black Nite Crash,” singer/guitarist Andy Bell was displaying a dark-sunglasses swagger on par with the much more famous band he would go on to join after Ride’s dissolution that year.
When Ride reconvened last year for Weather Diaries, their first new album in over two decades, singer/guitarist Mark Gardener affirmed the band’s desire to make “a record that sounded like it was released in 2017, not 1991.” And while seasoned shoegaze architect Alan Moulder returned to mix that LP, lead production duties were handed to DJ/electro-indie polymath Erol Alkan. Aside from a few flagrant modern-pop embellishments, though, Weather Diaries’ currency was more perceptible in its uncharacteristically topical, post-Brexit lyrics than in its languorous, meticulously textured stargazing lullabies. Ironically, this EP of four Weather Diaries castaways proves much more successful in positioning Ride in a contemporary context.
As the band observed during the Weather Diaries promo circuit, Ride’s first two albums (1990’s Nowhere and 1992’s Going Blank Again) boldly asserted an experimental ethos that their subsequent, Britpop-baiting releases (1994’s Carnival of Light and 1996’s Tarantula) more or less extinguished. Back then, you couldn’t really fault the band for shifting gears—shoegaze seemed pretty played out by the mid-’90s, and Oasis looked like they were having way more fun. What was less apparent at the time was that shoegaze’s future lay not in guitar rock, but in electronic exploration. In Ride’s absence, the band’s original mission to fuse splendorous melody and swirling noise was inherited by a number of artists—like Caribou, M83, MGMT, and Kevin Parker—who are very much studio savants first and bandleaders second.
As Tomorrow’s Shore illustrates, these are Ride’s true peers today, much more so than fellow resuscitated ’90s acts like Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine. In the pulsating pop of “Pulsar,” you’ve got the “Time to Pretend” sequel that MGMT have put off writing for the past 10 years, with Gardener’s dazed vocal melody coasting atop a robust, robotic backbeat. “Keep It Surreal” is a motorik power-pop knockout whose helium-spiked harmonies give way to an artfully sculpted fuzz solo, all while cruising down the Pacific Coast Autobahn like the open-sunroof soundtrack to a Dazed and Confused remake set in the year 2076. Even when Ride dip their toes back into Beatlesque psychedelia on “Cold Water People”—complete with a harpsichord-style synth solo—the result is less Magical Mystery Tour than Lonerism, with the song’s queasy textural backdrop mirroring the stewing existential despair chronicled within. “Tell me again about evolution/I’ll follow you back into the sea again,” Gardener and Bell sing with palpable resignation, as if they were administering last rites to humanity’s failed potential.
The EP’s closing track, “Catch You Dreaming,” ups the doomsday ante, chronicling the final moments of the last two people remaining on an imploding Earth. Despite the grave subtext, it’s actually the most inconsequential track here—while the song’s downtempo tropical-house throb and nakedly yearning vocals cast Ride farther away from their shoegaze roots than ever before, the inert, new-agey atmosphere leaves these distorto-rock titans sounding like a cut-rate Cut Copy. Still, it’s an encouraging sign that Ride aren’t about to rest on their post-reunion laurels. Even in its misguided moments, this leftovers EP offers more than mere vapor trails of what came before.


For his second Tri Angle LP, Bristol producer Sebastian Gainsborough's made a noise-specific techno record beholden to his remarkably generative skills with sound manipulation. His reliance on homespun methods of fabricating instruments gives Punish, Honey a distinctively raw and tactile identity.

Punish, Honey

Everyone enjoys their own noise, and we're all curious to hear how, when given the opportunity, our natural ability to create noise might sound as it rings in our ears. Often this innate form of expression can materialize into learning an instrument or honing a vocal skill, but not so for Sebastian Gainsborough. The Bristol native's Vessel project remains fixated on the possibilities of making and arranging his own noise, using the forms of dub and techno like a means to his esoteric ends instead of the impetus itself.
Released in 2012 through the increasingly experimental Tri Angle label, Gainsborough's debut album was conspicuously titled Order of Noise. But referring to him as a "noise artist" or calling his music "noise-techno" wouldn't be entirely accurate, even if he does paint with many of the same grim colors. Order of Noise was more gauzy and mystical as it took on the producer's hometown sounds, as trip-hop, dubstep, and industrial were dissected and used as decorative references in its treacherous, fog-choked landscape. Ultimately, this worked best when Gainsborough was simply showing off his handiwork in well-crafted environments; any notion of moving through the space felt faint and illusory. For his second Tri Angle LP, Gainsborough's made another noise-specific techno record beholden to his remarkably generative skills with sound manipulation. His reliance on homespun methods of fabricating instruments gives Punish, Honey a distinctively raw and tactile identity.
The 2013 EP Misery Is a Communicable Disease provides a better entry point to Punish, Honey than the cabalistic Order of Noise. The first full-blown iteration of stark, mechanically inclined techno that Gainsborough put to his name, the EP's three tracks accosted the listener with an unforgiving clamor, entirely unexpected from the Bristolian at the time. Punish, Honey comes across like that, too, and in much the same way. Gainsborough's source materials sound crude and primitive, like the din of reverb around each knotty crack of percussion is drawn from the cold, dry cave dwelling it was recorded in. He distills those prehistoric qualities into a fuel for the stone-grinding engine inside each incessant bassline and crushing stomp of a kick drum. Occasionally, Gainsborough takes a break from the machinery and tosses a few handfuls of granite dust into the air so we can watch it sparkle. Punish, Honey may not be the most hospitable of environments, but there's always a fascinating display working in its shadows.
The album is best taken as a document of unparalleled noise creation, an inconceivable world made from the everyday objects around us; Gainsborough has outdone himself here in terms of mastering this predominate craft. In this context, however, noise isn't everything, and structural refinement doesn't seem to be a priority for Gainsborough. Most of Punish, Honey pushes a sense of melody that—whether due to the instruments making the sounds, or the outsider mentality of the producer himself—is inherently off. The nauseous moans of "Red Sex" and "Euoi"'s whiny racket become less palatable with each turn on the carousel that makes up Gainsborough's debased techno. This infatuation with musical "wrong"-ness is a defining characteristic across the nine-track LP, so it's unfortunate that necessary counterbalances (compelling arrangement, emotional arc, memorable hooks) aren't consistently utilized.
Perhaps such criticisms are of no concern to Gainsborough, though, because his approach does work staggeringly well when each disheveled factor is in alignment. "Drowned in Water and Light" recalls the full-moon majesty that made Order of Noise so alluring, rendering that haunted splendor aside lumbering rhythms and seismic heaves. The centerpiece of Punish, Honey, "Anima", sets a Suicide-sourced synth pattern against swarms of ghostly detritus, rolling drums, and omnipresent organ chords, a claustrophobic production that works because you feel it shift and expand while it churns. "Kin to Coal" operates on similar gears, but is fashioned in a lean, sinewy way with jackhammers and hacksaws. Unquestionably, Gainsborough's sonic ingenuity continues to be his greatest asset; his growth as an artist hinges on accepting that others can't always enjoy his noise as much as he does.


It's easy to scoff at juvenile humor. You hear a single utterance of "fuck" or "pussy," and you turn ...

God Ween Satan: The Oneness

It's easy to scoff at juvenile humor. You hear a single utterance of "fuck" or "pussy," and you turn your nose up at the lack of sophistication. No laughter escapes your tightly pursed lips. You fume with rage, images of smug, pathetic 13-year-olds spending daddy's cash on the newest Adam Sandler record cascading through your highly evolved brain.
But those tightly pursed lips are trembling. Somewhere deep inside you, buried beneath back issues of The New Yorker and piles of free jazz CDs, something is happening. Almost like a little 13-year-old boy kicking you in the nuts from the inside and saying, "Dude! Holy shit! That is fucking funny!" Sure, you can deny this reaction. But the fact remains that, when executed properly, juvenile humor can be absolutely hilarious. If the timing's right, the phrasing's right, and the context's right, a well-placed "fuck!" can translate into unquestioned excellence.
Of course, establishing the correct context, timing, and phrasing is not at all easy. And establishing it in such a way that it will entertain upon repeated listening is practically impossible. Ween's debut album, God Ween Satan: The Oneness, is a massive, near-overwhelming bombardment of profanity, hard rock riffing, and goofy genre parody. But no matter how absurd Ween are being, they always manage to accomplish a seemingly contradictory task: sounding exactly like every band operating within the genres they attack while sounding only like themselves.
"You Fucked Up" is a perfect mission statement for Ween-- a sloppy, furious faux-metal number with recklessly shrieked, flat-out hilarious vocals. Granted, there's nothing particularly funny about the lyric, "You fucked up/ You fucking Nazi whore!" But in the context of a psychotic hard rock song, it's difficult to miss the humor. "Tick" couples the overblown rage of "You Fucked Up" with a unique brand of twisted, gleeful pop, while "Don't Laugh (I Love You)" distills this warped glee to its purest, most cloyingly twee essence.
Songs like "Tick" and "You Fucked Up" succeed largely because they tap into that most primal, basic urge to rock out. Sure, there's an undeniable element of parody to these songs. But the parody is backed up by the fact that the songs themselves are actually really, really good.
Fortunately, God Ween Satan isn't all crunchy riffs and barely contained screams. Stylistically, the album is absolutely all over the place. "L.M.L.Y.P.," a longtime fan favorite and live staple, takes on the obscure Prince b-side "Shockadelica," adding a distinctively Ween twist. Cheesy talk box guitars and slapbass provide perfect backing for a hilarious take on Prince's over-the-top sexuality, with Gene Ween's effects-laden vocals intoning in a high-pitched warble, "Let me lick your pussy/ Let me lick your cunt." At over eight minutes, "L.M.L.Y.P." does come awfully close to outstaying its welcome. But let's not forget that "Purple Rain" clocks in at an eternal 8:40.
"Squelch the Weasel" is the closest thing to a folk song to be found on God Ween Satan. Unlike the straight-up lyrical imitation of "Cold Blows the Wind" from The Mollusk, "Squelch the Weasel" is a folk song about... weasels. Lyrical and musical elements from traditional folk music, or at least the commonly held notion of what traditional folk music should sound like, permeate the song, but there's no question that this is pure Ween.
The same can be said for "Up on the Hill," a gospel-styled number about the demon god Boognish that is perhaps the closest thing to a theme song the brothers Ween have recorded. A dramatic, multitracked Gene Weens croons, "When I was younger/ My momma told me/ She said, 'Gener, I wanna smell it'/ And then she smelled it/ And it was smelly/ And I said, 'Lordy lordy lord, I'm coming home." It's gospel, but it's totally fucked. And yet it's pulled off convincingly enough that it can be enjoyed just as much outside of the context of a parody as inside.
Like any 29-song schizophrenic freakout, God Ween Satan is not without its highly questionable moments. "Common Bitch" is a weaker version of "You Fucked Up." "Mushroom Festival in Hell" gets points for sounding exactly like its name, but also loses points for sounding exactly like its name. The aforementioned "Don't Laugh (I Love You)" closes with a frightful swirl of toneless vocals that, though annoying, seems to be in keeping with the pure dementia of this album.
But this, the "25th Anniversary Edition" of God Ween Satan, finally fixes the one biggest problem that confronted the original: undeniably shitty production. The whole album played at what seemed like a good 10 decibels below most other CDs, and the sound quality in general was aggravatingly muddled. Finally, thanks to the magic of technology, God Ween Satan can be heard in all its crisp, pure glory, without the loss of the rough-edged sound that's been a major element of the album.
And it's a good thing, too, as this is one of the most wonderfully twisted albums ever to be released upon the unsuspecting masses. Unafraid to say "fuck" for no apparent reason, unafraid to rock out on cheesy metal riffs, and unafraid to pick to pieces just about every variety of music, Ween managed to capture the essence of their sound on their debut as well, if not better than, on any later album. And as a result, God Ween Satan isn't just good. It's fucking good.


Naturally, The Best of the Howling Hex isn't a greatest hits collection; as if Neil Hagerty would ever be so straightforward. Instead, it's the Howling Hex's first album in six years to feature drums, which form the backbone for a record that endlessly repeats and refines its fusion of reggae, polka, acid rock, and cowpunk dust-ups.

The Howling Hex: The Best of the Howling Hex

The Best of the Howling Hex

Neil Hagerty has been doing a bang-up job of ensuring Royal Trux remain the one 1990s indie-rock institution that never reforms. He's reportedly turned down multiple reunion tour offers, opted out of participating in Drag City's recent Trux reissue campaign, and declared his utter disinterest in the prospect whenever the question pops up in interviews. His recent choice of homes-- New Mexico and, currently, Colorado-- keep him well insulated from music-industry machinations; Rather than stage, say, a Royal Trux comeback at an ATP festival, Hagerty would sooner play sparsely attended weekly residencies in Denver dives. All the while, he's been pushing his post-Trux outfit the Howling Hex further and further away from his previous band's bell-bottomed boogie, favouring a scrappy, norteño-spiced tack that, since the release of 2007's XI, has done away with drums altogether.
Given his strident don't-look-back ethos, it was something of a shock when, last December, Hagerty announced he would be performing Royal Trux's 1990 mind-fucking masterwork Twin Infinitives in its entirety at a New York City show, albeit with an unknown female vocalist filling the high-heeled cowboy boots of Hagerty's former foil and flame, Jennifer Herrema (currently of Black Bananas). This news was soon followed by the announcement of a new Howling Hex album that, for the first time in six years, would employ the services of a drummer. Taken together, these developments prompted speculative hints that Hagerty was more eager this time out to, if not outright retrace his Trux tracks, at least recapture some of his old band's mystique and muscle.
But listening to The Best of the Howling Hex, you're reminded not so much of Royal Trux's music as their second-most viewed YouTube video. In the infamous bootlegged clip, the band -- fresh off from signing an ill-fated deal with Virgin Records in 1995-- are being subjected to one of the least glamorous aspects of major-label patronage: having to record a soul-destroying succession of station IDs for generically named local music video shows. But a funny thing happens on the way to Alternavision: while Herrema's disdain for the process intensifies with each cigarette puff, Hagerty gets really into it, and becomes increasingly obsessed with getting each take just right, giving his partner instructions with the fussy impatience of a movie director running over-budget. You get the same sense listening to The Best of the Howling Hex: the album is maddeningly repetitive to the point of seeming like some cruel joke, but there's something admirable and charming about Hagerty's determination to make it work.
The most hilarious thing about The Best of the Howling Hex isn't the faux greatest hits title-- the album features all new material, natch-- but the fact that Hagerty recruited a new drummer only to have him play the exact same beats throughout the entire record, as if he were a human Casio preset. The album cover may list eight tracks, but there are really only two songs here: The slow ones play out like some bizarro reggae/polka/acid rock fusion scraped from Ween's old four-track; the fast ones keep double-time pace with cowpunk dust-ups of yore, like the Meat Puppets' "Lost" or the Minutemen's "Corona." Atop both are Hagerty's circular, repetitive melodies and his furious fretwork, which can dazzle in any context. But rather than provide points of distinction, his brain-scrambling, six-string swirls are consistently mixed so low as to be overshadowed by the chintzy, clipped, one-note rhythm guitar accents. "Variations on a theme" is an understatement for what transpires here; choruses mostly follow the same patterns as the verses, time changes are practically non-existent.
But the album's title starts to make a little more sense if you view The Best of the Howling Hex as an ongoing process through which Hagerty is trying to refine and perfect a particular song form. As wearing as it is to hear the same arrangements over and over again, the songs do get better and more engaging as the album chugs along: In this unwavering setting, the subtle, soothing synth line that buttresses the congenial melody of "The General Prologue" hits with all the splendour of a meteor shower, and heralds the album's most ebullient guitar hook; by the time we reach "Green Limousine", the Hex's default oompa-oompa gait has acquired a more frantic energy and, in the process, goads Hagerty into his most urgent and spirited vocal performance. And if the closing "Trashcan Bahamas" starts out like yet another trip to the bionic hee-haw, it suddenly detours into an ascendant, arpeggiated grand finale that sees Hagerty achieve his own version of "Beck's Bolero". But that sense of triumph is as much as ours as it is his-- a parting reward for those of us who manage to stay sane while the songs remain the same.


After two EPs and a big single, this young English electronic producer steps out with his debut full-length on Night Slugs, an album that feels more like one long, continuous idea than a series of discrete tracks.

Classical Curves

Classical Curves is the first full-length album by Jack Latham, a young English electronic producer who goes by the name Jam City. Some claimed influences for the album are marble, trenchcoats, and "oily black Jeep windows." These are opaque things, hard things, things that reflect and conceal. The music isn't much different. Latham's previous releases for the Night Slugs label-- two EPs and the one-off "Arpjam"-- were flat, glaring, and high-tech. Classical Curves isn't much different, only more distilled. Some electronic musicians strive to make their sound as humanistic as possible; Classical Curves is basically disinfectant set to a beat. It borrows its jazz chords from artists like Prince and the 1980s electro-soul group Zapp-- artists who found glamor in the cleanliness of machines. It's an album of bangers, though less in the vernacular sense than in the sense that it often sounds like stuff banging together.
About a minute into the album's intro, we hear the sound of breaking glass. Then more glass. Then a little more. Then, as it transitions into "Her", a drum machine that sounds like a jackhammer and a flurry of camera shutters. "The Courts"-- a single Latham released in advance of the album-- is built on a web of what sounds like new sneakers being streaked across freshly waxed wood. Later on, dogs bark over some more broken glass. In all likelihood you'll know whether this album will repulse you within about two minutes. There's a good chance it may. Latham's single-mindedness, though, is a rare and admirable quality-- a quality that makes Classical Curves sound more like one long, continuous idea than a series of discrete tracks.
As with all Night Slugs' best releases, Classical Curves creates a world that belongs to the music-- a visual world, a world of ideas. The album's cover is a slick little motorbike lying on its side in a marble atrium in front of a huge fern, with a silky yellow piece of fabric draped over a wall behind the bike. It's a seductive image, an image of perfect objects in an imperfect, disarrayed scene. During a recent email exchange, Latham didn't share with me exactly where the shot-- or some accompanying videos-- were taken, but he mentioned that a year ago he worked for a company "stealing and selling information about their rivals," a job that forced him to spend a lot of time hanging out in similar kinds of lobbies, spaces he calls "glamorous looking in a kind of... corporate, rich-people way, I suppose... but pretty lonely and alienating and not the safest career option." At another point in his career, he produced chrome prostheses for fashion shows. One track here is called "How We Relate to the Body." Latham's answer, I imagine, is "with ambivalence and heavy machinery."
Beauty, bodies, science fiction, ideas of cleanliness and perfection-- it's all suggested here in sound. In a lot of ways, this album is more conceptually in touch with prime-era Kraftwerk or, as previously mentioned, early industrial music: music that highlights its own sense of soul by being as comprehensively soulless as possible. This is music that achieves as much of its effect through silence as through sound: Between every beat, the space is so absolute and empty that getting to the next piece of solid ground is a kind of perpetual thrill. Not a warm one, not a nice one, just a perpetual one, one that mechanically follows the one before it, no variation, no room for error.


On her third album for Hyperdub, Laurel Halo continues to resist classification and deflect interpretation by treating the human voice like a synthetic material to be molded and shattered.

Dust

Laurel Halo has taken a winding, unpredictable route to her third album for Hyperdub, and once again, her new record feels like a reaction against the last. The American-born, Berlin-based musician has consistently deflected interpretations of her music’s meaning, eluding attempts to classify her by genre, gender, or otherwise. While her club-focused EPs have been influenced by various foundational elements of Detroit techno, those same elements—jazz, funk, a certain sci-fi sensibility—have fused in entirely unexpected ways on her full-lengths.
On her Hyperdub debut, Quarantine, her untreated vocals and intimate lyrics told a story which, though perhaps not entirely literal, seemed deeply personal. Yet on Chance of Rain, its 2013 follow-up, she abandoned vocals in favour of flickering, jazzy keys and iridescent synth baths—perhaps an escape route from being bracketed by gender. “People tend to heavily focus on female artists’ voices and define their work by it,” she argued in an interview with Truants last year, noting that her instrumental work had been interpreted as having “an ‘absence of authentic human presence’.”
On the ferociously ambitious Dust, an album that feels like it was constructed in zero-gravity conditions, Halo has reached a kind of synthesis of all that came before. If, as she reminds us, her instrumental music is no less “authentically human” than her vocal music, then Dust sets out to show that the human voice is not much guarantee of authentic humanity either.
The album opens with Halo’s voice on “Sun to Solar.” Over slippery rhythms and topsy-turvy keys (provided throughout by Shit and Shine’s Craig Clouse) she half-sings an adaptation of “Servidão de Passagem,” a 1962 work by Brazilian concrete poet Haroldo de Campos: “Stacked man, sacked man/Served and swallowed/Sun to salt, island man/Socko sick, who's hangman.” Halo processes her words beyond recognition, blurring them with the hyper-melismatic vocals of British singer and collage-pop artist Klein, one of the many guests on Dust. It’s a disorienting starting point on an album that revels in indeterminacy.
The album’s graspable melodic moments come between longer expanses of confusing and chaotic sound; on “Nicht Ohne Risiko” and “Like an L,” instruments arrange themselves in abstract patterns, orbiting loosely like weightless space debris. “Arschkriecher” drifts toward mysticism as dissonant gong strikes are drowned in dub effects and ribbons of tenor saxophone float by. On “Koinos,” the gravitational pull is barely strong enough to hold the song together; a flurry of found sound is warped by transmission errors and Halo’s voice fades into a crackle, lost beneath percussion and glockenspiel from composer Eli Keszler, who contributes throughout the album.
Concrete poets like de Campos were preoccupied with fusing text and image, often in purely visual or spatial ways, and their influence is tangible here. Halo treats her words in a similarly plastic fashion: dividing them between voices, breaking sentences into cryptic fragments, and using vocals to texture a broader lattice of bass, percussion, and keys. Rhythm, alliteration, and an ASMR-like sensitivity to mouth-made sounds seem to drive the lyrical content as much as any urge to tell a story: “Cancerous secrets like trails from Panama/Their thirst was once a mellow fantasma.”
On the phenomenal “Jelly,” a surreal narrative is traced between Halo, Klein, and a third guest vocalist, the Warp-signed fantasy-pop artist Lafawndah. Their words seem snatched from the air, like an argument overheard accidentally: “You don't meet my ideal standards for a friend/And you are a thief,/And you drink too much!” Underneath, an oozing bassline recalls the hazy techno grooves of Theo Parrish, interrupted by tactile bursts of acoustic percussion from Keszler and cowbell from dreamy house producer Max D.
“Moontalk” is the next most songlike track, fusing Latin percussion with highlife guitar and blinding synth bursts to build the album’s most addictive groove. Halo switches to Japanese for the chorus and heightens the mood of uncanny intrigue with lyrics served straight from the subconscious: “What if you slept/And what if in your sleep you dreamed/And what if in your dream/You went to heaven/And there thumbed a glasslit flower?” On “Who Won?,” she enlists artist and writer Michael Salu to deliver affectless phrasebook sentences like a gloomy male cyborg: “I'll call back later/I don't know/I'm single/No, this is the first time.” With this constant slippage between voices, Halo scuppers any attempt to read her lyrics as directly autobiographical—another way of wriggling free of “female songwriter” stereotypes.
Far beyond a cut-and-paste collage of genres and moods, Dust is a thrilling attempt to escape all the usual points of classification, to collapse the primacy of the human voice, and to obscure and reveal at unexpected moments. It’s easy to feel a little lost in these conditions—Dust is a dense and heady record, and from certain angles can seem intimidating, even impenetrable. But between the clever track sequencing and a handful of irresistible outcrops of groove and melody, Halo provides plenty of footholds to cling onto while you acclimatise to her lawless universe.


The Brooklyn-based, Barcelona-born musician’s debut album is a dense but cohesive statement on duality, equally shaped by Catalan identity and future-leaning cosmic pop.

gisela

“I sing in Catalan in some of my songs because it’s my most private language and I want to keep it alive,” says Gisela Fullà-Silvestre, aka NOIA. The Brooklyn-based Barcelona native is the daughter of activist parents (her father was the member of a Communist party who fought against the Francoist dictatorship), and her work as NOIA comes at a time where Catalan musicians and singers such as Rosalía and Maria Arnal i Marcel Bagés are at the forefront of an internationally recognized cultural moment. On her audacious full-length debut, gisela, NOIA builds her own private universe by melding rich Catalan and Spanish folkloric musical traditions with buoyant electronics.
While similar Auto-Tune flutters and gurgling synths adorned 2019’s dancier Crisàlida EP, NOIA shifts into opulent art-pop eclecticism on gisela. On “didn’t know,” an undaunted, Don Draperesque femme spotlights middling hookups with insufferable fuckboys over a drum-machine beat. Caricaturing the song’s shallow, frivolous subjects in Pedro Almodovar levels of Technicolor, she admits, “Quisiera ser como tú/Liviana y ligera,” adding, “Dime como lo haces tú sin deep feelings en la vena,” (“I wanted to be like you/Light and lithe/Tell me how you do it without deep feelings in your veins”). It’s a riff on an infamous “post-coital pillowtalk” scene in Mad Men, but the focus shifts to camaraderie between a close-knit circle of friends as they laugh off the mishaps that come with dating in a swipe-left dominant landscape, steadfast in their refusal to submit to basic men.
NOIA summons up the extraterrestrial dynamics of Björk’s “Hyperballad” on “reveal yourself,” layering airy falsettos and distorted, pitched-up vocals over a shuffling four-on-the-floor pulse. On the moonlit “otra vida por vivir,” featuring Maria Arnal, she weaves in and out of Catalan beside stuttering circuitry and a gentle but rapturous house-like beat.
On “canço del bes sense port” (Catalan for “song of the kiss without a harbor”), NOIA interpolates fragments of a poem written by Catalan feminist, essayist, and poet Maria Mercè Marçal—who similarly strove to preserve the suppressed language—into a folkloric interlude. “L'aigua roba gessamins/Al cor de la nit morena” (“The water steals jasmines/From the heart of the dark night”), she coos, building on the enigmatic energy of the origina beside Spanish avant-garde jazz musician Agustí Fernández. “La tristesa dins la mar/La mar dins la lluna cega/I la lluna al grat del vent com una trena negra (“The sadness in the sea/The sea in the blind moon/And the moon at the mercy of the wind/Like a black braid”). A tender reprieve following the all-consuming (and slightly toxic) entanglement in “eclipse de amor,” the Barcelona singer’s reworking of the poem further underscores gisela’s meticulous sequencing and greater vision of centering Catalan culture.
“verano adentro,” a glowing standout, is one of the album’s rare peeks into quietude. Beneath the spacey synth lines and deliberately choppy refrains lies a beautifully simple ode to basking in the sun on Barcelona’s rooftops, but it stands as one of the most candid and straightforward pop songs NOIA has yet written.
It’s easy, at first, to get lost in gisela’s many points of reference. Just 30 minutes long, it’s novella-short, but the record traverses numerous genres and forms: acidic glitch pop, pummeling dembow rhythms, and abrasive industrial textures. It’s steeped in the graceful laments and improvised intensity of flamenco, from the reinterpretation of a traditional vidalita sung by fellow Barcelonesa Mayte Martín on “anoche” to the channeling of Estrella Morente on the oceanic “glitter blanca.”
When Fullà-Silvestre first adopted the pseudonym NOIA (Catalan for “girl”), it was to distinguish her electro-experimental solo productions from her work as a designer, mixer, and composer for film and television. While there are moments where the footnotes and sound-collagist maximalism obscure her own perspective as a songwriter, the record never feels labored or overembellished. It’s a dense but cohesive statement on duality, equally shaped by Catalan identity and future-leaning cosmic pop.


On the Streets’ first album in nine years, the UK rapper returns to the simple snark of his early music, but his youthful misadventures have been replaced by the jaded pronouncements of middle age.

The Streets: None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive

In 2011, after nearly a decade of attempted reinventions, Mike Skinner walked away from the Streets. His debut, Original Pirate Material, was a landmark for UK rap, and its follow-up, the concept LP A Grand Don’t Come for Free, was an even more ambitious and experimental storytelling experience, but subsequent albums brought diminishing returns. He’d already revealed he was “fucking sick” of the name and its implications, and he was exhausted and running out of ideas. “I think it would devalue it to say that it was cynical but I know what I’m doing with the Streets—I’ve been doing it for too long,” he told The Guardian. “I don’t want to do the Streets anymore. I should have moved on a long time ago.” In 2009, he told NME he wouldn’t revisit it unless he was 40 and broke. He stayed busy after 2011’s supposed swan song, Computers and Blues, starting a new project with the Music’s Rob Harvey, restarting his indie label, and even DJing. In 2017, Skinner announced a Streets greatest-hits tour, then formally resurrected the project. He says he isn’t broke but there are other reasons to be pessimistic about this revival: “The reason I finished the Streets was to make a film,” he told Mr. Porter, “and the reason I started the Streets up again was to make a film.” This new album is, in part, a marketing campaign to produce a movie.
None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive is his first album in nine years; Skinner also happens to be 40 now. It’s that kind of funny coincidence that seems fit for a candid Streets lyric, but he doesn’t mine his departure or return, or the reasoning behind either, for material. Dubbing this a “mixtape” instead of a proper album implies a clear effort to take some of the pressure off, especially from an artist so serious about craft and process, but the distinction does feel apt: Every single song has a feature, following a format similar to his only other mixtape, 2011’s Cyberspace and Reds. That record showed a curiosity for British rap that was missing on Computers and Blues and is rekindled here. A cadre of young rhymers appear across the tape eager to make the most out of the opportunity. But in doing so they make Skinner feel archaic.
He returns to the simple snark of his early music, only the cheeky misadventures of his youth have been replaced by jaded pronouncements from middle-aged life, where dating is an ordeal and the hangovers are longer. The mixtape is better produced than his last few outings, with slicker songs where he once again futzes with dance music, rap beats, and UK garage rhythms, as well as sampling UK funky and drum’n’bass. He told Apple Music his focus was to avoid getting bogged down by concepts and just say “some cool shit,” and there are flashes of that irreverent charm. On “Same Direction,” his raps embody the awkwardness, hilarity, and thrill of a tryst gone awry. Unfortunately, most songs on the tape fail to harness that same sense of in-the-moment acuteness.
Much of None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive is fixated on smartphones—specifically, using them to ignore people. Phones can be an excellent talisman for examining our deteriorating interpersonality; take, for example, the photobook Screen Time, or another mixtape, Erykah Badu’s But You Caint Use My Phone. Yet these songs have about as much insight into our pocket screens as Quibi execs. On more than one occasion, Skinner cringes at the state of women’s DMs, weighing unsolicited come-ons with the insight of someone who was hipped to this by the short story Cat Person. (Seriously.) There’s the super literal song “Phone Is Always in My Hand,” which is lazy and obvious in its depictions of avoidance (“You’re ignoring me, but you’re watching my stories”). There’s even a flatness to his quips about the primacy we place on always being on: “You know I’d give you my kidney/Just don’t take my charger,” he raps on opener “Call My Phone Thinking I’m Doing Nothing Better.”
His sense of humor remains intact (“Plans always become dead/I told you I’d come for the jokes/But that was two hours ago, I was younger back then/I was full of hope”), but the bits land with far less frequency and force. In the early ’00s, he introduced what felt like a novel and necessary perspective to rap, stumbling between clubs and pubs, flitting aimlessly between rap and garage, bringing to light the nuances of lad culture, its gags and slang and monotony. He was an observer rapper surveying his insular world with a wink and a shrug. On this tape, his scrutiny mostly feels pointless. “Man, God has it backward, God has seen it all/But if God had dropped acid, would God see people?” he asks clumsily, barely rhyming his inane attempt at stoner profundity.
The main knock on Skinner throughout his career has been that his spoken-word flows can be clunky and out of pocket. There can be a disarming and charming quality to his rapping when his wit is sharpest, and the phonetics of the title track’s last verse distract from its frivolousness, but in the moments where his raps are edgeless and obtuse they can really grate, and it has only gotten worse with age. His rapping on None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive often lacks any sense of rhythm or finesse. This problem is only exacerbated in the company of nimbler peers, especially Ms. Banks, Jesse James Solomon, and Oscar #Worldpeace. His rhymes don’t always catch the beat, and, when running side by side with a new crop of MCs, he is usually outpaced. Reading his explanations for choosing the guest rappers, it’s clear they moved him, but he might’ve been better off simply ceding them the space and stepping away. With this new tape, the Streets are officially back, but Skinner never convinces us why they should stay.

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Bursting forth with some of the most pungent yarns, potent barbs, and peerless production of the Wu member's remarkably consistent career, Fishscale is the choice outcome of an endlessly creative mind using experience as a compass en route to triumph.

Fishscale

More than 12 years after he emoted all over the first verse on the first track on the first Wu-Tang Clan album, the now 35-year-old Ghostface Killah is still starving for respect, understanding, and acceptance. Hypnotically restless, the East Coast purist has homed in on a rap palette full of vivid hurt and strafing alarm-- and bursting forth with some of the most potent yarns, barbs, and production of his remarkably consistent career, Fishscale is the choice outcome of a creative mind using experience as a compass en route to triumph.
Though Ghostface's veteran status informs much of his fifth solo album, his father-knows-best pose is led by breathless rhymes, not nostalgia. To wit, "Whip You With a Strap" rails against the lack of consequences brought upon today's youth with a smooth cleverness, while "Big Girl" moans about three fast-living women wasting their potential on cocaine mounds. Tellingly, it's Ghost's own coke the girls can't stop sniffing. Such ambiguities eschew didacticism for a lived-in wisdom that's as wicked as it is worthwhile.
Ghost's godfather-cause is most noticeably directed at ostentatious modern-day rap hustlers who largely cook up tales with broad lines and no consequences, as he devotes several of Fishscale's 18 songs to the booming drug-rap subgenre he helped launch in 1995 with Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx.... On both "R.A.G.U." and "Kilo", Rae turns up to assist his close friend, describing the perils of the drug trade. Hardly akin to the dealer-as-infallible-ghetto-champion guise currently purported by the likes of Young Jeezy, Fishscale's dope peddlers are harried and frayed. Between broken wrists, familial strife, and self-inflicted gunshots to the groin, "R.A.G.U." is anything but glorifying toward its stressed-out, drug-running protagonists.
But the album's most vivid illicit spectacle belongs to Ghost alone; "Shakey Dog" takes the rapper's penchant for eye-popping lyrical imagery to its extreme, offering a twisty Mamet-style narrative about a botched two-man robbery attempt. "Fasten your seatbelts," warns the Staten Island son before unraveling a scene so perfectly lucid that an accompanying video would be redundant. Whether describing the alluring smells coming from his victim's apartment or the ruthless history of an ancillary old lady ("She paid her dues when she smoked her brother-in-law at her boss' wedding") he passes on his way up to the place, Ghost touches on myriad senses and memories-- it's the kind of song that requires several close listens to understand at all. It also strongly suggests that, if Ghost ever loses his appetite for rap, he might find success as a screenwriter.
As the album's other specific tragedies-- shitty haircuts, bus stop infatuation gone awry-- fly by with deft everyman flourishes, it's the surreal "Underwater", with its strange spirituality, that proves most trenchant. The dreamy account finds our hero playing out a possible afterlife allegory while swimming at the bottom of the ocean. "I'm not on my turf," he confesses as mermaids "with Halle Berry haircuts" offer guidance along the way. In the tourist role, Ghost is as compelling as when he's recounting pavement-bred stories of his familiar youth. Sometimes on "Underwater", the two come together brilliantly like when he notices "SpongeBob in a Bentely coup, bangin' the Isleys." Eventually arriving at the "world's banginest mosque," Ghost finds comfort in Muslim chants; the rapper's rare moment of peace is well-deserved amidst Fishscale's enthralling agony. Aiding in the track's calming vibes is a mysterious, flute-laden beat courtesy of MF Doom, who's responsible for four beats on the record. The masked supervillain is in the company of a reputable bevy of soul-stacked sample-masters on Fishscale and their musical backdrops match Ghost's focus and vision.
In an interview with RZA last year, he told me, "Listen to how Ghost sounds rappin' over one of my beats and then over another beat... he sounds like a grown man [on my beat] and he sound younger on [other] producers' beats because they don't know the frequency." But, as the first solo Ghost disc without a RZA production, Fishscale attests he was wrong. Whether it's the late Dilla providing his off-kilter vinyl-hiss haze for "Strap", Pete Rock cutting up Sly Stone's "Family Affair" on the hollow funk of posse cut "Dogs of War", or Just Blaze doing his Banger 101 thing on "The Champ" (which, stripped of its bootleg Rocky samples at the last minute thanks to copyright issues, still packs heat), each producer takes his opportunity to envelop today's most soulful rapper with deep swaths of vintage samples and deep drums. The RZA's sonic influence remains strong-- and he even shows up briefly on the excellent Wu reunion cut "9 Milli Bros"-- but his absence behind the Fishscale boards is largely inconsequential.
Considering Ghost's continued status as one of hip-hop's most revered, relevant elder statesmen, it seems odd that his name was seldom bandied about in most of the last decade's King of New York debates. Fishscale reiterates with cinematic verve that the most vital current Wu Tang Clan member's storytelling can match Biggie's in both excitement and humor. Yet Ghost's songs are unrelenting in their slavishness to density and credibility, and that can turn off casual listeners even as it intoxicates hip-hop purists. "My arts is crafty darts, why y'all stuck with 'Laffy Taffy'?" he asks with utter sincerity on "The Champ". As long as inevitable questions like that continually re-up this heavyweight's unswerving drive, they're probably better left unanswered.


The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer returns with a wild and free-ranging collection of chamber pieces.

Orange

Orange is Caroline Shaw’s first full release since she won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for her Partita for 8 Voices in 2013, becoming the youngest recipient of the award at age 30. In the time since her Pulitzer, Shaw’s profile has soared dramatically, thanks to her work with Kanye West: She performed with West at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in 2015, reworked his 808s & Heartbreak cut “Say You Will,” and contributed to The Life of Pablo and ye. With West, Shaw emphasized her singing, allowing her glassy voice to ring out with stark clarity and strength, echoing the exactitude and control of the Partita. The works on Orange, performed by Attacca Quartet, don’t adhere to the same engulfing claustrophobia of Shaw’s vocal compositions. They’re not confined to a room. They’re of the earth.
In press materials, Caroline Shaw calls Orange “a garden that she and Attacca Quartet are tending.” Even the expert gardener, however, cannot anticipate her results with certainty, and the pieces on Orange shoot off in thrilling and unpredictable directions. “Entr’acte,” the first piece, ranges in open space. The Attacca Quartet (violinists Amy Schroeder and Keiko Tokunaga, violist Nathan Schram, and cellist Andrew Yee) begin as if surprised, playing the core motif vigorously and in unison. It’s a small and satisfying pattern, but they quickly abandon it, and the piece turns into a series of lively detours that add texture. They return to its central melody in full only once.
The individually titled movements of “Plan and Elevation” don’t suggest variations on a common set of themes so much as five disparate approaches. The first movement, “The Ellipse” begins with grandiose violin swells before shrinking into jittery plucks. On the fourth movement, “The Orangery,” violinist Keiko Tokunaga plays Glassian arpeggios while the rest of the quartet shifts restlessly behind her. It’s an array of mood and tones that does not cohere to a bigger conclusion. The details are the meaning.
The music of Orange exudes joy and a sense of wildness. The second piece, “Valencia,” is bright and quick. The longest, “Ritornello 2.sq.2.j.a,” unfurls itself in many directions, unconfined by a motif or pattern. Taken together, the works of Orange share a curiosity to explore the crevices of a composition, highlighting textures and pacing, like the high-pitched stutters of “Punctum.” Often, as on “Entr’acte,” it feels like the performers are not looking toward an end but giddily chasing each other up the same hill, detouring where they see fit and perhaps stepping on each other’s feet as they climb.


The Los Angeles producer's first Stones Throw release takes the bolero, the valse, and other traditional Latin forms and plays them on a solitary Oberheim synthesizer.

Boleros Valses y Mas

Gabriel Reyes-Whittaker is a career experimentalist. For more than a decade the Los Angeles producer has made various forms of electronic music, frequently separating his endeavors through specific aliases. His most prominent work is as Gifted And Blessed, or GB, but his side-projects have often left the dance floor in favor of ambient experimentation, explorations into world music, and deep dives into heady electronica.
Reyes-Whittaker’s latest record, Boleros Valses Y Mas, revisits ideas that the beatmaker has explored previously and finds him revisiting the name Frankie Reyes for his first Stones Throw release. Like other Frankie Reyes projects, *Boleros Valses Y Mas *is a forwardly Latin release that mines the producer’s “techno-indigenous studies” concept, in which he embraces ancestral sounds and influences through contemporary technologies. On *Boleros Valses Y Mas, *Reyes plays a solitary Oberheim synthesizer, repositioning ubiquitous Latin American standards into wonky modernism though an unexpected switch in instrument. The release also dovetails with the producer’s sporadic affection for solo instrumental albums, a form he slipped into earlier this year on a spacey ambient record called Emotional Topography.
Boleros are songs most closely associated with Cuba and Puerto Rico but are ubiquitous throughout Latin America. Defined technically by their rhythm—a Cuban 2/4 adjustment to Spanish boleros’ 3/4 count—boleros can be informally rounded up as a specific type of ballad, frequently dramatic and sentimental. Acts like Los Panchos, a Mexican and Puerto Rican trio who began recording in the 1940s, exemplified the sound: fluttering requinto guitar, almost theatrical singing, calculated pace. Instead of the sharpness of the guitar or voices, Reyes’ boleros are channelled through a soft, warm analog synth, a purposefully awkward juxtaposition that can make for an occasionally tedious listen.
There isn’t much character in Reyes’ synth playing—he’s frequently leaned on exacting transcription methods that allow for almost no riffing—and there’s a correspondingly programmed quality to the simplicity. While the track list explores a few different styles, both boleros and otherwise, it’s easy to feel a false mastery of the material because of the transplanted single voice. But the potentially boring sameness of the album’s solitary timbre amplifies the core compositions themselves. On “Alma, Corazón y Vida” Reyes’ pace-setting left hand jumps around but is obscured by the shifty and busy right; it’s a complex rhythmic interplay that is easy to overlook in the busier, guitar-driven original. “La Bikina,” a boisterous mariachi classic, loses its symphonic energy in Reyes’ twinkling adaptation, but the core remains intact, as if the heart of the material has been transplanted into a display case with a weird glass tint.
In some cases, like “Espinita,” Reyes translates tense drama into whimsical bounciness, a simple artifact of the Oberheim’s silly-in-an-unexpected-context sound. (Some of Reyes’ taut translations might go unnoticed on the soundtrack to a Super Nintendo video game, for example.) “La Comparsa,” a piece written by the Cuban pianist and composer Ernesto Lecuona Casado, is one of the album’s most natural and pleasing translations given its origins as a piano adaptation of a ballet's central theme. Reyes’ “La Comparsa” shows off the chunkiness of the Oberheim’s deep end and the synth’s awkward and abrupt mood setting.
Because Reyes engages a solitary idea throughout he forces the listener to dwell on the album’s minimalism, an experiment that magnifies every note and makes for a productive exploration of rhythm. The payoff of Boleros Valses Y Mas is more often intellectual than aesthetic. Instead of producing beautiful cover versions, Reyes has driven at the heart of what makes a bolero a bolero and so on, boiling down the song styles into a weird but sound study in Latin American music, unexpectedly unravelling traditions as he updates them.


The London guitar band’s debut is twitchy, hair-raising, always on the move. They harken back to a more esoteric era of indie with a magnetic and dazzling style.

Schlagenheim

In January, KEXP uploaded a 26-minute video of four British kids positioned in a homey Icelandic hostel, stepping loosely and methodically through a handful of songs that now appear on black midi’s debut album, Schlagenheim. Two things are immediately apparent while watching: Everyone in black midi looks approximately 8 years old and their drummer is an absolute legend. The performance is hypnotic, hair-raising, maybe a little irritating, and definitely out of time—a bunch of schoolboys producing something so staunchly learned, freeform, and anti-pop in an age when pop reigns supreme.
Before black midi had even announced their album, the video was passed around like samizdat by people who watch drum tutorials online; older dudes who long for the days when prog bands like King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer ruled British rock; weirder sects who love the chaotic grooves of no wave bands like DNA or Mars; younger fans who glommed onto the post-punk sound of Preoccupations or Girl Band; guys who own Butthole Surfers records and sometimes play a Fantômas song when no one’s looking. The 323,000 views for this video comprise an underclass of music nerds who worship all things mathy, noisy, wiry, and aberrant. By the end, when we see guitarist Matt Kwasniewski-Kelvin put his cell phone up to his guitar pickups and play a recording of a woman ranting ad nauseam, black midi have shown themselves a band so full of glorious potential (and pretension), the only thing people were left wondering was: What do they sound like in an actual studio? If the KEXP performance was the grabby cold open, six months later, Schlagenheim is the first act of a band that teeters on brilliance—a restless, nerve-wracking high wire act that could easily fall off at any moment.
Schlagenheim offers prime counter-programming for our current rich, harmonic, verse-chorus-verse era of indie music. With a froggy-voiced singer and an armful of guitar pedals, black midi sprint in the opposite direction. They are a band for whom references become the main talking point—a chilling thought for anyone who prefers not to think about music through the lens of dudes prattling on about other dudes in older bands. All the indie rock tropes of old are summoned: exclusion, referentiality, insularity, recalling a time in the ’80s and ’90s when the underground just covered each other all the time.
Forget about trying to reach out with a poppy lead single, black midi don’t seem to be trying to reach anyone at all. It’s ego and oddity reclassified as a human stand against the computable nature of pop in the streaming age—prog as proof of life. Or maybe they’re just young and operating without any stakes. Whatever the case, it’s black midi’s ability to write songs that screw in deep and rewire the synapses that make Schlagenheim come alive and burst apart. They play passionately and unselfconsciously, drawing upon their youth, imagination, and what sounds like hours upon hours in a practice room.
Above all, black midi swings. They are an interlocking unit, yet have a recklessness of someone who likes to close their eyes and take their hands off the wheel. This is best captured by the opener, “953,” where you are introduced to drummer Morgan Simpson’s tender and indestructible relationship to the downbeat. You are also introduced to singer Geordie Greep’s divisive, dynamic voice: Imagine someone with the name “Geordie Greep” and that’s essentially who he sounds like (or, Mark E. Smith if he were a Bond villain). Together, with bassist Cameron Picton and guitarist Kwasniewski-Kelvin, black midi shrink and grow, speed up, slow down, get loud, get quiet, find a groove, destroy the groove, find a better groove, and then move on. This music is dense and well-composed, propelled by the adolescent impulses of a band eager to never be bored again.
Part of Schlagenheim’s wonder comes from just how unformed it is. At their best, black midi sound like the first days of Earth: atonal, unstable, a land mass roaring to life before the laws of harmony or rhythm are in place. The thrill of listening to a short burst of gibberish-core on a song like “Years Ago” makes you wonder if they know literally everything or literally nothing about how songs work. On “Western,” they trot through different sections of an eight-minute suite, as Greep channels his inner Lewis Carrol (“a pink caterpillar with six anorexic children”) along his journey to the fictional town of Schlagenheim. At all times, their fellowship of chaos is moored to Simpson’s drumming—shadowy, melodic, crucial to the success of every moment on the album. It is Simpson who elevates these songs from heady improv experiments to a new, exciting language of music.
Though Greep’s subject matter and eccentric delivery are a little too affected, there are a few lyrics that pop out amid all the abstract brain doodles. Picton sings a more straightforward lead on “Near DT, MI,” which alludes to the ongoing Flint water crisis in Michigan: When his voice tears apart the words “dead in the water,” it’s the closest black midi come to evoking righteous anger, or any real ideology or emotion you could put a name to. More to their squirrelly nature is “bmbmbm,” a song made up of one note and one circular thought. Greep sings, “She moves with a purpose/What a magnificent purpose/And they find different ways to suck themselves off, but she does not care at all…” with increasing intensity as if trying to win an argument with a mirror.
It feels like “bmbmbm” is the band’s anthem, not simply because it’s self-involved or because it’s the best song on Schlagenheim or because they’ve been closing their much-lauded live shows with it, but because it’s a blank slate onto which black midi project their truest selves. Greep plays with the lyrics like a cat toying with a dead mouse, really enunciating “suck” as if he’s realizing all the contours of his lips and teeth and throat in real time. The band keeps a no-wave stomp going, with Simpson interrupting occasionally with precision fills that frustrate the rhythm but never lets it fall out of time. It is primordial and juvenile, dumb and clever, arch and true, and captures a band at that rare time before any self-conscious tones creep into their music. All the while, black midi discover what has been pioneered by countless bands before, and still present it as something entirely new.

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With virtuosic arrangements and cavernous production flourishes, the Brooklyn songwriter’s second full-length is an ambitious record that miraculously does not feel like it’s taking on too much.

Consummation

Katie Von Schleicher, a Brooklyn-based musician who also plays in the Americana outfit Wilder Maker, makes psych rock that belongs on empty, scorching interstates. Her decadent and intricate retro-revivalism feels synonymous with chrome finishes, the smell of leather interiors, and endless lonely stretches. Loosely inspired by an alternative reading of Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological masterpiece Vertigo, Von Schleicher’s second full-length album, Consummation, attempts to work through the quiet and often unnoticed struggles that come with feeling invisible in a romantic relationship. It is some of her strongest songwriting to date, complemented by virtuosic arrangements and cavernous production flourishes.
Consummation is a major step forward for Von Schleicher. The jangly glam rock of 2017’s delightfully scrappy Shitty Hits, recorded directly to tape in her childhood home, left plenty of room to grow. Consummation sounds huge. Its arrangements are overstuffed and pristine, indebted to what feels like every subgenre of ’70s rock without ever devolving into outright pastiche. The distorted guitars and painstaking vocal harmonies of “Messenger” scan as both mutant glam rock and sun-drenched AM gold. All lo-fi proclivities are gone—Von Schleicher isn’t hiding behind anything.
“Caged Sleep,” the album’s biggest track, is towering and massive, with urgent pacing and sharp turns. Von Schleicher describes watching herself as though in a dream and questioning her own existence. “The wall was full of green/No one looked at me/How strange/Am I free?” she sings, as her surroundings strobe in the background. Flickering with organs and finger-picked classical guitars, “Gross” verges on Renn Faire at its outset. “If you make honest work you believe it then/Unless no one’s home,” she sings, continually questioning herself and her process. The song maintains its slow, careful pacing until the last minute, when it transforms into a voluminous orchestral pop ballad. Von Schleicher’s best songs never quite go where you might think would make sense.
Musically, Consummation is an ambitious record that miraculously does not feel like it’s taking on too much. Its concept is more elusive. Von Schleicher reveals quiet flickers of pain, hinting at feelings of isolation and smallness with occasionally muddled results. But on “Nowhere,” she is at her most candid. She watches her past slip out of focus from the side mirror of a car, surveying the road behind and ahead. “I’ll buy my childhood home/All comfort in the end/And when it fills me up/I’ll be alone again,” she sings soberly as the roofline slips past the horizon. A synthesizer unspools beneath her words like a thread in an ancient sweater.
Von Schleicher doesn’t necessarily need to be transparent; more often than not, teasing out the hidden messages that lie beneath her impressionistic songwriting is genuinely enjoyable. Calling one’s pain by name can be terrifying, and she has a great talent for subtlety. Still, Consummation is at its most transfixing when it is at its most legible.


The Australian producer and vocalist tells stories of anguished romance over crisp drums and crystalline melodies. When she’s not dragged down by bland hooks and generic beats, she glitters.

Can You Hear Me Dreaming?

As KUČKA, Laura Jane Lowther makes moody electronic music that flickers with angst and glee. After breaking through as a background vocalist on LongLiveA$AP and cutting her teeth on the Perth, Australia live circuit, she made her name as a singer for club-ready rap and dance tracks. Her diaphanous voice can slink through or float over a mix, a quality that has landed Lowther placements on madcap beats by SOPHIE and Flume, and on mellower arrangements by Mount Kimbie and Andrei Eremin. On features, many of which are uncredited, KUČKA’s singing tends to function more as a texture than as a centerpiece—but in her solo work, she pushes against that reputation.

“Absolutely no vocal features,” she declared as she prepared Wrestling, her 2021 debut album. The mostly self-produced record showcased the anguished romantic beneath the ethereal voice, its misty and brooding beats bringing out a sensuality and tension often muted in KUČKA’s guest spots. She sounded less like a manic pixie dream girl—or an “alien, sexy space lady” as regular collaborator Flume once more colorfully described her timbre—and more like a person navigating life’s ups and downs. Follow-up Can You Hear Me Dreaming? has a similarly corrective mission, showcasing KUČKA’s takes on synth-pop, R&B, and dance while emphasizing narrative. If Wrestling was a waking dream, this album is a lucid one.
KUČKA again handles most of the production, assisted by Flume, sauna6, and pnkblnkt. The beats vary in style but generally feature crisp drums, crystalline melodies, and lots of negative space. The minimalism somewhat recalls Jessy Lanza and early SBTRKT, but KUČKA’s low ends aren’t as deep, nor are her synth melodies as syncopated. As an arranger, she’s more concerned with clarity than propulsion. Even the brisker songs feel inviting, their breezy arrangements as beckoning as a body pillow.
Leaning into this cozy mode, KUČKA structures these songs around stories of intimacy and romance. Opener “Wasting Time (til the end of the world)” centers on a fault that emerges in a relationship as a pair tries to outrun the apocalypse. “We got the music blasting along the motorway/But nowhere left to go/Why can’t you understand?/Look at me I’m serious,” KUČKA sings with irritation. The shuffling garage beat ups the tension; the couple might bottom out before the world does. Other lovers mentioned across the album fare better. The earnest narrator of chippy single “Cry Cry Cry” is brought to tears by the accepting gaze of her partner. And “Heaven,” a minimal R&B track flecked with icy synth melodies and chimes, turns vacation planning into seduction. “Nothing but our sweat and our own skin/We don’t need a week on an island,” KUČKA sings, her voice both pleading and affirmative.
She’s not a theatrical singer or a powerhouse, but she understands the inherent drama of a voice stretching or warbling even slightly, and uses such flourishes to make her characters personable. On “Wedding,” a song about being a witness to a shitty marriage, her smug delivery doubles as homegirl intimacy. “Every time he lets you down/On your face I know,” she laments in solidarity with her miserable bestie. Highlight “Not There,” an ode to an absent paramour, offers pure longing. “There’s a craving/In my bones/Subtle aching/When you’re not there,” she sings, stretching “bones” into four wounded syllables.
A few concepts don’t congeal. “Can’t Help It” attempts a sarcastic takedown of control freaks (or is it insecure men?), but is tanked by a bland hook and a generic beat that sounds like a throwaway from AlunaGeorge’s Body Music. Flume team-up “One More Night” also stumbles, its mix of heavy bass and airy vocals a retread of their past work. The obvious lyrics don’t help, either: “I’m your addiction now/You can’t resist when I’m around,” KUČKA sings, overexplaining an already cliché metaphor. Both songs sound like the kind of plug-and-play fare she’s trying to distance herself from.
“Communal Reverie” and “Gross Body,” tracks featuring her new band PESH, point in more promising directions. For both, KUČKA cedes the mic to her bandmate and wife Dillon Howl, who performs charged spoken word. The buzzy, growling beats practically crackle with energy, the chaos barely tamed by Howl’s witchy and tender verses. Though the songs slot into the overall vision of Can You Hear Me Dreaming?, there is a feral quality to them that could further complicate the image of KUČKA as a twee singer. Imagine it: KUČKA making rage beats for rap sparkplugs Cochise and OsamaSon, or droning trap for Kim Gordon and Fever Ray, or angry industrial for herself. Sounds far-fetched, but there’s a craving.