Heems and Riz MC follow up last year’s politically charged Cashmere with an EP that shows off their range with a loose and playful energy.

Sufi La EP

On Swet Shop Boys’ debut LP, Cashmere, the duo of Heems (ex-Das Racist) and Riz MC (Rogue One, a couple episodes of “Girls”) broached issues affecting the South Asian diaspora. Suffused in their rhymes were passionate threads about racism that Heems and Riz tackled with nuance, empathy, and humor. Perhaps most importantly, they also wrote bangers in the process; cuts like “T5,” “No Fly List” and “Zayn Malik” were clearly built for car stereos more than dissertation workshops.
With the Sufi La EP, Heems and Riz have now turned their attention to lighter fare. They draw more inspiration from Kid ’n Play than Public Enemy across six tracks of mostly party-rap powered by Redinho’s South Asian sample flips. Riz and Heems still have dense, double-time bars and unhurried punch lines, respectively, though Riz hangs back a bit on these songs, while Heems ventures out on his own. The most noticeable difference, though, are the lower stakes—a loose, playful energy that treads a thin line between heartfelt camaraderie and just fucking around.
Despite these ambitions, Sufi La still has plenty of high points. The EP’s lead single, “Thas My Girl,” manages to stick the landing where the duo’s previous attempts at party anthems failed. The aptly-named opening number, “Anthem,” serves as a theme song of sorts, with Heems bragging about Riz’s successes (“He went from acting unruly, now he acting in movies”) and screaming “fuck the Pet Shop Boys” with all the swagger of a cartoon villain. Riz tries to match his bravado but toward the end of his verse, can’t help but dip into self-reflection, wondering if he’s been held back by his ethnicity or benefitted from its novelty (“I think, what if I was fairer skinned, had less of the melanin?/Would I get more work or would I not be worth anything?”). It’s a signature Swet Shop Boys move: a string of boasts followed by a contemplative sigh.
“Birding,” a solo Heems endeavor, is easily the goofiest song on the EP and one of its best, even without Riz to play foil. Inspired by the Mughal emperors’ pastime of birdwatching, the song’s minimal beat, built from little more than a bird call and shuffling drums, feels like an airy response to the current flute-rap zeitgeist. Heems ends nearly all of his couplets here with a species of bird, finding both obvious puns (“I’m on the block like I’m coke or heroin/Fit very colorful, tricolored heron”) and more tongue-in-cheek constructions (“She don’t like you, she said you was a peasant/She said I’m classy like a ring-necked pheasant”).
Not every track on Sufi La clicks. “Zombie” sounds like a sequel to the tabla-heavy “Half Moghul Half Mowgli,” though its central conceit—immigrant-hating nativists cast as the walking dead—feels a bit ham-fisted. Album closer “Need Moor” also falls a bit flat as the pair provide meta-commentary on their own lifestyle, weaving a cautionary tale about what unchecked greed and libido can do to a touring musician. It’s a fine rap song, but their observations on fame feel rather pat compared to, say, Vince Staples’ recent explorations of the topic.
Sufi La can’t help but feel a bit unrefined next to the group's more polished full-length. The rapping here is noticeably less sharp, so much so that it’s easy to imagine many of these songs didn’t make the cut for Cashmere. But Sufi La serves as a reminder that Heems and Riz MC have range—that neither fit neatly into a box as joke-rapper or conscious-rapper. But just like the rest of us, Swet Shop Boys sometimes need a break from politics.


On his debut LP ilp, producer/singer Kwes’ gentle songwriting sensibilities are unable to keep up with his exploratory beat making and the result is too often a mismatch.

ilp

For most of his career, the British producer and singer Kwes has done his work in the background. He mixed records for the xx in their early days and produced for his friend Mica Levi, Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard and Mercury award winner Speech Debelle. He was talented enough to catch Damon Albarn’s ear and was one of the musicians selected to travel to the Congo for the DRC Music project, comfortably collaborating without the pressure that comes with being center stage.
The spotlight shifted onto Kwes in 2012 when he released “B_shf_l”, a hyper-endearing R&B song that helped to break him as a solo artist in early 2012. But even after that, Kwes continued to focus on collaboration, working with Bobby Womack and the British songstress Eliza Doolittle as well as staging a series of operas in collaboration with Peroni brewery. Meanwhile, his music itself has ended up in some surprising places, most recently turning up as a sample on Pusha T’s "Who I Am".
Kwes, then, seems capable of working at a faster clip for and with others than he can as a solo artist. His debut album, ilp, has been about four years in the making, partly due to a six or seven month period of creative block. Records that take a long time to make often result in an enormous patchwork of influences and ilp is no exception: the record reflects a whole host of sensibilities, from the pastoral electronica of early Four Tet, to the traditional R&B of Jessie Ware and the delicate production sensibilities of someone like Sampha, as well as more recently absorbed ties to Oneohtrix Point Never and Brian Wilson. On ilp, Kwes is trying to solve a tough creative riddle:  How can an experimental producer with a love for so many different styles of music emphasize his earnest, understated songs while still allowing himself the freedom to explore?
One strategy that Kwes employs is the seemingly straightforward pop song, rebuilt from the ground up. This approach is epitomized by “B_shf_l", which appears again here to open the album. The song remains magnificent: its real accomplishment is using the experimental electronic music Kwes favors to recreate and recontextualize the feel of classicist pop. It’s only once you focus pretty closely that you realize “B_shf_l” is like nothing you’ve ever heard before.  “Flower” and “Rollerblades” are "B_shf_l"’s cousins, well-meaning pop songs that don’t quite have the snap of that first single.
Kwes combines his two very different skill sets most successfully on the album’s two longest songs, both of them anthemic, metaphysical explorations nestled in thorny, elaborate musical structures. “Cablecar” is an eight minute treatise of found sound and heartbreaking writing, a delicate, difficult song that slowly reveals itself over the course of multiple listens. And “Purplehands” takes its operative idea from the Brian Wilson influence that Kwes has been talking up recently, with an exploration of food and colors serving as an elegant way to talk about love.
But ilp falters on its shorter songs. Kwes frequently talks about the need for restraint and it’s clear that’s something that he struggles with in his own work. His songs have habit of getting mired, or lost entirely within the context of his ambient, occasionally overwrought music. A good example can be found in the transition between “Flower", and “Hives"; The former is a startlingly delicate love song, the latter a static-driven instrumental. Both tracks are worthwhile but they require wholly different modes of listening and the transition from one to the other is off-putting.
The problem with ilp then is that it's not sure what kind of experience it wants to give you, be it pop or ambient, easy or difficult listening. Kwes the singer is too often overwhelmed by Kwes the producer—he places his voice in the background much of the time, allowing instrumental techniques to obscure, rather than illuminate, the subject of his songs. “Broke” is devastating lyrically but while the music adds to the atmosphere at the beginning of the song, the two elements soon lose track of one another. The track loses momentum as a result, and ends up feeling incomplete.
It can feel difficult to criticize an artist as flagrantly sincere and musically talented as Kwes—this is a guy who caps off his debut album with song dedicated to the love between his grandparents, after all. But as it turns out, those two qualities, the earnestness of the lyrics and the shifting quality of the music, combine to eventually thwart ilp’s success*.* Kwes’s gentle songwriting sensibilities are unable to keep up with his exploratory beat making and the result is too often a mismatch that ends up leaving the listner at a loss.


After a raft of free mixtapes and years after “Teach Me How To Jerk” blew up on MySpace, Audio Push return with their first for-sale release.

The Stone Junction

Oktane and Price of Audio Push got their first taste of the music biz and misnomers back in the MySpace era when their dance-inspired song “Teach Me How To Jerk” blew up on the social networking site. Teenagers at the time, the two kids from Southern California’s Inland Empire region were swept up in a major label feeding frenzy and signed to Interscope in 2009. Articles popped up describing jerkin’—a descendant of clowning and krumping before it—as a “movement” and Audio Push (then known as “The P.U.S.H.”) also became reluctant representatives of the SoCal’s dance scene.
Dancing was a part of their lifestyle but not central to it. Like many other kids from their neighborhood, they jerked but they also skated and gangbanged and prayed and—most importantly—rapped. This multi-faceted, seemingly contradictory existence is the crux of their content. In the years since their debut single they’ve been dropped and re-signed (via Hit-Boy’s HS87 imprint), and released 11 free mixtapes and EPs that have showcased their versatility. They’ve shown they can do everything from romantic rap to grimy boom bap to turn-up anthems and have collaborated with a who’s-who of artists including Lil Wayne, Travis Scott, Wale, Joey Bada$$, and G-Eazy. What they’ve yet to do, however, is have breakout success. The Stone Junction EP, their very first for-sale project, is a declaration of their intention to change that without compromising their positive “good vibe” message.
Realizing that versatility can be a liability—especially in an industry that prefers its musicians to have easily identifiable sounds—Audio Push has enlisted some of Atlanta’s premier producers to complement their distinctively Californian approach to rhyming. The beats are high energy, juxtaposing the duo’s lyricism with 808s and synths. “They wanna put me in a box/ The industry, the enemies and the cops,” raps Price on the Slade Da Monsta-produced, “BBQ Spot.” The formula works throughout the EP—the music lending intensity and urgency to their assertions of MC supremacy and descriptions of the everyday struggle.
Beyond beats, they get assists from ATL on the mic too: Kap G joins in for some trap-inflected wordplay on the one the album’s standouts, “Vámonos,” and Two-9’s Jace helps to slam the door shut at the end of the seven-song EP on “Same.” Still in the midst of adrenaline-pumping songs like these it’s that second half of “Hard” that teases Audio Push’s potential to make even greater, emotive music. At the 2:34 mark, the ominous, unmistakably ATL thump of producer Ducko McFli’s beat gives way to glistening piano chords and swirling strings and things get emotional. What was an aggressive backdrop for bravado becomes a vulnerable, heartfelt verse from Price: “It’s hard to see you not be yourself/ It’s hard to see you with someone else/ Hard to know your heart was broken/ And you find it hard to grow/ Wth me, and it’s hard to cope,” he confesses to some unnamed ex-lover. A brief glimpse of what’s in store, tucked away in a brief project. A moment that shows just how tough being tender can be.


The Detroit rapper’s debut album aims for a mix of transparency and commercial ambition, but he struggles to hold his own amid so much high-stakes production.

Activated

As in the church, hip-hop’s most arresting moments lie in the testimonial. Almost hookless, they’re explosively delivered biographies charged with a palpable sincerity. Cardi B’s confessional on Invasion of Privacy opener “Get Up 10” lends the project its urgency, and Meek Mill’s story on “Dreams and Nightmares (Intro)” is synonymous with Philadelphia’s. Detroit’s Tee Grizzley borrowed heavily from the latter on his breakthrough, “First Day Out,” even using that midway turn from awe to brutalism.
While all three rappers may argue for capitalism as a salve for trauma, Grizzley stands out for the way the specificity of his verses pushes a sense of empathy to the forefront. Even his severe flexes (“Hit the Rollie store with the Rollie on”) are built on memories and personal shorthand for around-the-way friends. Activated, his debut album, starts just as intimately. We voyeuristically listen to a haunted Grizzley in mid-conversation: “Look at the bottom, I had to make it/I had to.” It augurs a hard-won truth.
Grizzley has spent his time in the spotlight trying to perfect a mix of transparency and commercial ambition. He was mostly successful in his prior solo outing, My Moment. On Activated, he further commits to the radio campaign, even going so far as to place Chris Brown on two songs, apparently buying into the myth that a feature from the singer guarantees a hit. On “Fuck It Off,” Brown delivers an aggressively by-the-numbers I’m-living-my-best-life hook that concludes, “You think I work this hard to fuck it off?” It’s clean and impersonal—Grizzley’s antithesis.
But Activated’s radio sensibility often dilutes his rawness and technical gifts rather than amplifying them. Grizzley’s plain-spoken delivery tends to convey a sense of catharsis when he decides to sprint off-beat. But here he’s cumbersome running into the high-stakes soundscapes, quickening to a halt with clunkers like, “While you niggas talking down, I’m up bitch,” on “Too Lit.” On “2 Vaults”: “Stacks big and green I call my pockets the new Hulk.” Grizzley isn’t completely out of his league within Activated’s cinematic scope—the staccato he uses to deliver “Think shit/Sweet/You gon’/Bleed” punctuates a should-be banger in “Don’t Even Trip”—but he’s shooting at a lower percentage here.
The high-stakes production—a mix of melancholic piano loops, brooding synths, and aggressive bass—undoes Grizzley, too. Save for the occasional exception, like the G-funk-infused “Low,” a lot of the palette here is, well, Meek Mill type beats. It doesn’t help his case that a lot of the hooks are barely above-competent half-mantras. “Bag” is well-intentioned, but the inspiration is lost within Grizzley’s synthetic singing voice. The same’s the case for the contemplative “I Remember,” where Grizzley can’t quite emote despite relaying his very real experiences with poverty. (It’s featured rapper YFN Lucci who delivers the poignancy: “I wonder why the real don’t live long”).
But Activated mainly suffers because too much of it lacks Grizzley’s photographic vision. That gift does pop up on the autobiographical album closer “On My Own,” where Grizzley walks us through stealing from his own friend, now deceased, to whom he can only offer, “Rest in peace.” Poverty is a cycle that robs its victims of absolution. But Grizzley still finds a glimmer of solace by the end: “When I finally get married, can’t no other bitch fuck me,” he swears with an impish laugh. It’s a childish ending line, but a sincere one. If the trauma can be vivid, so can the joy.


Shugo Tokumaru’s songs barrel towards joyous cacophony at full tilt. On his latest LP, he expands his one-man chamber-pop sound with drum tracks from Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier.

TOSS

Japan’s Shugo Tokumaru has always been a maximalist working on a miniature scale; he constructed his early albums using over 100 different instruments. His recent TOSS single “Lita-Ruta” is composed with a similar logic. Its makeup includes xylophone, ukulele, sax skronk, handclaps, drumsticks tapping on a desk, harmonies evoking the Beach Boys, a possibly broken jack-in-the-box, and a spiraling harpsichord melody recalling Mark Mothersbaugh’s arrangements for the Rushmore soundtrack. If it all sounds a little overwhelming, that is very likely the point.
For TOSS, Tokumaru switched up his usual one-man chamber-pop formation. He’s made recordings of other musicians, cut them up, manipulated them, and sequenced the results throughout his compositions. Aside from his own playing, Tokumaru’s primary materials on TOSS are drum tracks contributed by Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier. In using these snippets, Tokumaru has infused many of TOSS’ songs with a bit of Deerhoof’s rhythmic DNA, which is immediately apparent in the restless, twitchy energy of songs like “Lita-Ruta.”
TOSS boasts plenty of songs like this, where Tokumaru barrels toward joyous cacophony at full tilt. “Lift” opens like a child-sized spaceship taking off, before introducing pitched-up, Dan Deacon-like chipmunk vocals. “Vektor” is a classic Tokumaru anthem, in that it finds his fingers flying up and down the fretboard with various percussive sounds in hot pursuit. “Bricolage Music” lives up to its name, assembling a beat from droplets of water and the clatter of silverware. The opening of “Taxi” sounds like Tom chasing Jerry across a xylophone, while the curiously-titled “Cheese Eye” pushes the cartoon metaphor further, laying out the soundtrack for an entire imagined “Looney Tunes” episode.
It would be exhausting to maintain this frantic pace for 11 straight tracks. Instead, Tokumaru fills the album’s midsection with placid ballads like “Route” and “Hikageno.” Like all Tokumaru songs, they are meticulously arranged and recorded, but they are also a bit sluggish. More successful are pared-down tracks like “Dody,” which veers toward Fahey-like American primitive guitar technique, and “Migiri,” a moment of somber beauty.
Despite the nuance behind all of these songs, it’s hard to call most of them catchy or even memorable. The fidgety songwriting is part of the problem; many melodies only get a few moments of airtime before being supplanted. The sonic world of TOSS also lacks any kind of meaningful tension. Its cover art—a cartoon of a humanoid figure holding a hammer, tears streaming out of its smashed glass face—hints at a more complex idea, a guro-kawaii intermingling of the cute and the grotesque. That’s the sort of line Deerhoof used to skirt so well, writing a whole record about a bloody “Milk Man” who kidnaps children and hides them in the clouds. Earlier Tokumaru albums like Night Piece and L.S.T. employed bent tones and dissonance to similar effect, complicating his almost oppressive cheerfulness.
TOSS, however, like all of his recent work, mostly sticks to just two gears: jubilant and hushed. There’s a long line of Japanese pop artists working in a variety of mediums—Yoshitomo Nara, Takashi Murakami, Kyary Pamyu Pamyu—who blur the divide between art and commercial product by surfacing the undercurrents of sadness and fear in cartoons. Shugo Tokumaru, a fellow traveller, increasingly seems content to trawl the surface.


When the world comes to whatever ignominious end we choose, Happy Songs for Happy People will be playing somewhere. It ...

Happy Songs for Happy People

When the world comes to whatever ignominious end we choose, Happy Songs for Happy People will be playing somewhere. It'll be the instrumental soundtrack to everyone's collective thoughts of anger, resentment, acceptance, and then, ultimately-- after everyone's had time to reflect and make peace with whatever the hell it is they're trying to reconcile at that particular moment-- it'll also be the soundtrack to great big letdown of, y'know, the world ending. Tidal static washes will engulf the land; thunderous guitar peals will split the sky. As the Four Horseman gallop by, blasting this album at ear-splitting levels from their totally sweet sound systems, everyone will brace themselves for the dénouement; folks will all be waiting for that final burst of insight to make sense out of everything, and then guess what? Nothing. It's all over, just like that. Get your coats and go. All that storm and stress, and for what? Bummer, dude. At least it was exciting here and then.
Still, what a gyp. For the amount of energy Mogwai spend painstakingly carving out wrenching emotional turmoil, lush interludes, and haunting Slint impressions, they've had no idea where to take it since the sensory overload of 1997's Young Team. More intrinsically left-brained types might have used all that overpowering intensity of purpose to cure cancer, or debt, or Staind; Mogwai, on the other hand, have a languishing surplus of potential. On their debut, they did the only thing they knew how: buried the listener deep under cascading avalanches of sound, using immersion to distract them from anything as trivial as a lack of direction. Following the praise heaped on Young Team, though, they seem to have found an unhealthy amount of restraint; subsequent albums (Come On Die Young, Rock Action) fell into a disconcerting pattern of majestic swells and faint departures. Hell, Rock Action barely even swells.
\t Some would say they "tightened up"; I'd say "stiffened." No matter how it's described, tighten something enough (any old thing, really) and common sense tells you it'll break. The good news is Mogwai may have learned that lesson just in time for Happy Songs for Happy People, but don't break out the earplugs just yet: if Rock Action put you to sleep, don't rely on Happy Songs... to get you up in time for a morning meeting. In many ways, this album is even more reserved than past efforts; at no point does anything surpass even the mild-mannered blast of "You Don't Know Jesus". The difference is that much of the extraneous instrumentation that sandbagged Rock Action is left behind, which means the measure of the meticulous craftsmanship that was beginning to hamper Mogwai is gone as well .
A lone organ or piano often carries the melody through the album's quiet stretches, and the percussion is usually barely audible; for the first time, Mogwai have the delicacy necessary to stir without resorting to violent upheaval, as well as the added power of a lighter touch. It's a subtle distinction, maybe, but with every album, Mogwai is more and more about the details: the organic rise and fall of "Moses, I Amn't" is a cathedral dirge simplified to an unprecedented degree (by Mogwai's standards). Sparsely layered organs, strings, and exceedingly sparse, hollowed-out drumstick hits rise in waves that never quite crest, for once in perfect harmony with Mogwai's mournful undertones. It bleeds quietly into "Kids Will Be Skeletons", which in turn transitions into the brief crescendo of "Killing All Flies"; the sweep is almost effortlessly natural.
The song titles should give away what the wryly ironic album title doesn't. Surprise!-- this is a pretty goddamned grim album. Every time I hear Mogwai, I'm struck by what a miserable portrait they paint of Scotland, full of skeletonized children, dead flies and such; as usual, Mogwai's Happy Music... evokes similar imagery. The problem is that, in spite of much of the album's comfortable ease, the quieter tone and brooding atmosphere are burdened with even less interest in taking these songs somewhere, anywhere. We're left lost, mired in Mogwai's omnipresent gloom.
Only the closing duo of "I Know You Are, But What Am I?" and "Stop Coming to My House" mercifully (and critically) avoid this. From "I Know You Are...", it's a steady progression through to the gradual dissolve of the final track's epic finish, offering closure (finally) with a sample of some very happy children (its emotional weight is adequately deflated by the carefree kids). I guess that's the joke, really: these so-called "happy people" must like uninterrupted spans of soul-crushing gloom in between rounds of concentration camp footage. Honestly, though, it's a rare, honest-to-god conclusion from these guys, and it at least punctuates the album in a clever manner if the rest of the songs don't fare as well. Mogwai still can't seem to figure out where they're going, but that problem is only extended over these tracks, as whole songs build on one another. The Stephen Kings of menacing post-rock, it seems that in absence of Young Team's glorious cacophany their tremendous build-up often comes to nothing. And it sounds as though they've come to terms with that.


Thirty years after stepping into the spotlight, the Portishead singer reintroduces herself with her debut solo album. History weighs heavy on her songs, but she takes pains to avoid her musical past.

Lives Outgrown

Beth Gibbons has made inactivity into an art form. In Portishead she sang as if hanging onto the microphone for dear life, her voice the embodiment of languorous misery. Her recorded output since then has arrived at a snail’s pace and her reputation has grown with each fallow year. Following the release of Portishead’s Third, in 2008, Gibbons has performed Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 with the Polish National Radio Symphony, featured on Kendrick Lamar’s “Mother I Sober,” and done precious little else in public. Gibbons does nothing that she doesn't have to and she does it in her own sweet time, which makes the arrival of Lives Outgrown feel like a revelatory occasion.
So why did Lives Outgrown bring Gibbons out of her shell? And why now? “People started dying,” she said. Three full decades after Portishead first appeared on the scene, she reintroduces herself with an album inspired by goodbyes, informed by the kind of perspective that’s only possible by looking backward. She added, “When you’re young, you never know the endings, you don’t know how it’s going to pan out.” At the heart of Lives Outgrown is a push and pull between past, present, and future, with Gibbons delving into her personal history for inspiration, while studiously avoiding the palette that made Portishead so beloved.
Stylistically, Lives Outgrown approaches folk music, thanks to its acoustic guitars and strings; but it feels denser, louder, and more exploratory, like stumbling across a junkyard deep in the forest. Unusual textures abound: In “Tell Me Who You Are Today,” producer James Ford (of Simian Mobile Disco) strikes piano strings with metal spoons; for another track, he and Gibbons spin whirly tubes over their heads, in search of the perfect creepy tone.
Melodies of endless melancholy and lyrics of pointed depth, reminiscent of Gibbons’ work with Portishead and (briefly) Rustin Man, her duo with Talk Talk’s Paul Webb, reflect the singer’s period of self-reflection. Lives Outgrown has moments of crushing relatability, as she tackles subjects like motherhood, anxiety, and menopause, her unvarnished humanity a world away from the otherworldly rage she inhabited on Third. “Without control/I’m heading toward a boundary/That divides us/Reminds us,” she sings on “Floating on a Moment,” striking a beautifully sparse rhythm and tone, while the opening couplet of “Ocean” (“I fake in the morning, a stake to relieve/I never noticed the pain I proceed”) distills years of dull suffering into two elegant lines. Her melodies are strong as iron: The elegantly inevitable “Floating on a Moment” and cathartic album closer “Whispering Love” are among the best songs that Gibbons has put her name to.
Gibbons’ voice makes comparisons to Portishead inevitable—and there is, perhaps, a tang of Adrian Utley’s spaghetti western guitar in the opening bars of “Floating on a Moment.” Occasionally, she makes veiled references to her past, with phrases that seem to mirror lines from elsewhere in her catalog. On the whole, though, the singer makes a concerted effort to outrun her musical history. Gibbons said that she wanted to get away from snare drums and breakbeats—both key elements of the Portishead sound—while recording Lives Outgrown, with the drum lines of collaborator Lee Harris (formerly of Talk Talk and a contributor to Gibbons and Rustin Man’s Out of Season) instead hammered out on toms and bass.
This percussive roll is complemented by an inconspicuously cosmopolitan mixture of sounds. Unusual groupings of instruments are packed into devious musical layers, like the viscid concoction of bass clarinet, bass, cello, Farfisa, harmonium, recorders, “fuzz flute,” violin, singing tubes, and bowed saw that is daubed over “Beyond the Sun”. This darkly sylvan stew has little of Portishead's cinematic high drama; its abstruse angles and woodland heavy metal are closer to Tom Waits’ discordant masterpiece Swordfishtrombones than the clean guitar lines of Out of Season. Gibbons also employs backing vocals for the first time, their sparing use bolstering, rather than radically altering, the album’s makeup, although the children’s choir and wobbly recorder on “Floating on a Moment” and “Beyond the Sun” give the two songs an unsettling air of innocence lost.
The arrangements, largely by Gibbons and Ford, luxuriate in the slightly unreal edge of music once removed. Much of the instrumentation (for example, the sweeping, almost Middle Eastern string lines on “For Sale”) could have been written at any point in the last century, although the rejection of the snare drum’s rebellious crack nudges Lives Outgrown into a parallel universe where rock’n’roll never really took root. Verses are punctuated by wild brass skronk (“Beyond the Sun”) and violins scrape across the percussive surface like nails on a blackboard (“Burden of Life”). These leftfield choices underscore the courageous and subtly unusual nature of Gibbons’ album, which hides its eccentricity behind her deathless voice and sympathetic lyrical insight. Lives Outgrown may have taken agonizingly long to arrive, but it bears the mark of more than a decade well spent, a singular talent reborn in surprisingly spiky glory.


The Virginia producer lays out chopped loops for the surrealistic rapper Koncept Jack$on, whose narrow-eyed presence plays off the rest of the Mutant Academy crew.

Emergency Raps, Vol. 3

Mutant Academy is built on the sort of hip-hop that emphasizes precise lyricism wrapped in crime mythology.  For the Richmond, Virginia collective, making a song a song is an afterthought—hooks arrive as more of an exit route than the centerpiece. Slang talk might come too rapidly to decipher in real time, and that exclusivity becomes a shared source of pride for enthusiasts—in Pusha-T’s words, if you know you know. Emergency Raps, Vol. 3 is so real that a durag packet, the biggest hallmark of black men’s hair care behind a brush, serves as the project’s cover.
Helmed by the collective’s producer Tuamie, the Emergency Raps series stars each of Mutant Academy’s four core rappers. Following efforts from laidback straight-talker Henny L.O. and flow-focused Big Kahuna Og, Vol. 3 centers on the group’s most impressionistic member, Koncept Jack$on. Though his reference points are well within concrete-jungle street rap’s ethos, but his eccentric touch and the speed with which he tosses images at you press into surrealist territory. The album’s most potent example is the hallucinatory second track, “Plant Based.” Koncept takes us through a series of disjointed scenes in a brisk two minutes; he’s first forced to kill a clerk to avoid being identified, and, without giving much more context, makes his way through boasting about how his “mind’s eye can fry your whole genes” and triumphs with “complimentary alkaline water we find through concubine daughters.” He’s James Joyce in a wave cap.
Many of Koncept’s verses unfurl like a set of mini-anthologies. Their sense of continuity lies in his narrow-eyed presence and tangly internal rhyme schemes. “The Bitch in U” paints himself as a cozy boy and enforcer with that technical ability as his throughway (“Fuck your ego bro I’mma beat your ass in front these people/Hold the reefer while doing so”) Even familiar tropes feel renovated through Jack$on’s tongue-twisting phrasing, like on the casual boast “Fellows drink Amaretto with scotch, yo/Stilettos my hoes rock” on “Lost Cause Bros.” Though he’s exceptional on his own, Koncept performances tend to work better as songs when he’s bouncing off of a collaborator. Emergency Raps’ most dynamic moments occur when he’s sparring with groupmate Fly Anakin’s shrill shit-talk (“It’s My Life”) or weaving as Nickelus F bullies his way through punchlines (“Wet Ear Yungin’”).
Save for the cloudy “Plant Based,” Vol. 3 features Tuamie quieting his psychedelic urges for mainly sepia-toned two-bar loops. The tighter approach works in a way that feels very specific to Koncept, tethering his knotty tales to familiar grounds as well as doing most of the emotional heavy-lifting. The standout example is Emergency Raps opener “Stokley Wit Me,” where Tuamie’s simple but sultry vocal loop gives Jack$on’s hard-living missives a luscious mood. Tuamie’s soulful quality also links Koncept and Mutant Academy to the sound of East Coast hip-hop’s lineage.
Speaking of whom, Koncept Jack$on brings to mind fellow stream-of-conscious stylist Ghostface Killah. Even as the lines flew over the head, Ghostface’s verses were compelling because he sounded as bugged out as the bugged-out shit he was saying. Koncept’s furious monotone doesn’t carry that color, and his pace combined with Emergency Raps’ 27-minute timespan hardly give his ideas room to breath even as Tuamie’s production lets him be the star. A better entry point to Koncept’s hood funhouse is last year’s looser, 18-track Panama Plus, another collaboration with Tuamie and Fly Anakin. Emergency Raps is the digestible, Coogi’d-up supplement.


World-building takes precedence over the music on this Melbourne producer’s concept album, a nuanced retelling of the 1850s Victoria gold rush made up of MIDI banjos and artificial sounds.

Old Gold

Andrew Wilson is like the friend who’s always blasting you with obscure Wikipedia articles, each one more baffling than the last. He brings a propulsive yet ambiguous energy to his new-age releases as A.r.t. Wilson and his catchy ringtone-funk jams as Andras Fox, lending these records a mysterious air through cryptic titles and vibe-heavy instrumentation. Of particular fascination to Wilson is the baggage that comes with his hometown of Melbourne: “I like teasing out small contradictions in how Australians record and present music,” he told DJ Mag in 2020. “For example, why use the call of the common Eurasian loon bird within studio tracks, when we have the greatest diversity of songbirds anywhere on Earth here in Australia? Why call our music Balearic when we have over 50,000 kilometers of unique coastline of our own?”
To this end, his latest release as A.R. Wilson, Old Gold, takes a deep dive into a specific quadrant of Australian history: The Victorian gold rush of the 1850s. For Australia, this period is generally attributed with placing Melbourne on the global stage; the colony’s exploding economy brought roughly 90,000 new immigrants each year at the boom’s beginning, and confirmed Australia as the gold-producing juggernaut that it remains today. In Wilson’s hands, the gold rush is not a simple tale of colonial prosperity; he shifts the focus to the starvation of the panhandlers on the plains and the wrongful displacement of Aboriginal groups. He spins this yarn using the most barebones palette imaginable, all lonesome MIDI banjos and artificial crickets chirping, plinking his way through a history lesson one Casio vignette at a time. It might not be Wilson’s most developed music, but it makes up for it in sheer imagination.
Above all, Old Gold is an exercise in world-building, a task Wilson takes to like a LARPer to a foam sword. “Moonlight Flat” canters along on a metallic, twangy stomp that conjures up images of Final Fantasy coal mining towns, while tracks like “Raisins” and “A Long Day In The Saddle” could’ve come straight off the Oregon Trail with their comically fabricated acoustic guitars and Spaghetti Western castanets. There’s an undeniable kinship between Old Gold and recent online micro-genres like comfy synth, especially in the way that they both use cheap bedroom instruments to sketch out playfully juvenile scenes. Like much of the work that comes out of the comfy synth/dungeon synth communities, Wilson’s songs have a goofily medieval flair to them, as on “Metal, Want, Die,” which starts out as a sad ragtime piano roll before shifting into a weeping Renaissance-Faire-ready guitar lament. Rather than building into any kind of climax, Wilson simply lets his melodies waver in their lo-fi languor, like a digital music box caught on a twinkling loop.
Clearly, Old Gold is not for everyone. It wouldn’t have hurt for Wilson to vary his palette a bit (even if only to add detail to this miniature picture of 19th-century Australia), and there’s an inescapable sense that you probably could have made this music yourself. Depending on your point of view, that simplicity could either be a turn off or a refreshing embrace of DIY pluck. Either way, it’s hard not to be charmed by the silliness of Wilson’s vision, as well as the nuanced approach he takes to understanding this period rather than purely romanticizing it. If nothing else, the record is certainly a whimsical addition to Andrew Wilson’s eccentric world.


This eight-track stopgap EP-- which doubles as a bonus disc on the obligatory Viva fourth-quarter deluxe edition-- allows for an assessment of Coldplay's 2008 "We Are Edgy" campaign. Jay-Z guests.

Prospekt’s March EP

With this year's Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends, Coldplay tried to be cool. They brought in Brian Eno to refine their bombast. They tried Bowie-style funk and shoegaze. They wore military duds that made them look like Arcade Fire. Everything seemed to be in place. But there was a problem: Coldplay's idea of cool and the cultural reality are two different things. This eight-track stopgap EP-- which doubles as a bonus disc on the obligatory Viva fourth-quarter deluxe edition-- allows for an assessment of Coldplay's 2008 "We Are Edgy" campaign. Can one daffy Brit and his personality-averse band bring the notion of cool closer to them?
Ostensibly, Coldplay know cool when they see it. They tapped operatic indie-rockers Shearwater and L.E.S. revivalist Santogold to open their world tour this year. Chris Martin is friends with Kanye West and Jay-Z, who contributes a verse on the Prospekt's March remix, "Lost +". Still, they lack the spontaneity, innovation, and effortlessness that usually accompanies edge-cutting phenomena. Take their recent performance on "Saturday Night Live": For a guy who's played to millions of fans at shows, festivals, and on TV, Martin came off like a clutzy ham not unlike former "SNL" mainstay Mary Katherine Gallagher. He was startlingly out of breath and made an effort to act out each of his simple couplets, all while yipping and hooting like a man poking fun at Tourette's syndrome. It was awkward, but kinda endearing. (Defamer: Coldplay's 'SNL' Freak-Out: Easy-Listening Performance Art, Awful, Or Both?)
So when calm and collected artists like Jay-Z cite Coldplay as their favorite band, they're subconsciously subverting the same untouchable aura that bolsters their own coolness. It makes little sense, but it's worked for them thus far. On the overall hipness scale, Coldplay isn't close to, say, TV on the Radio, but in a weird way they're bringing a bumbling DIY aesthetic to emotional arena rock. And, just as Viva did an admirable job of troubleshooting the band's lazy weaknesses while expanding their sound, Prospekt's March offers a truncated version of their svelte and marginally progressive new formula. If this is the best Big Rock has to offer this year, we're doing okay.
As far as money-making mini-releases go, Prospekt's March is relatively noble, i.e., no quickie dance remixes, only one "single edit" ("Lovers in Japan") and one piddly 48-second instrumental ("Postcards from Far Away"). All in all, half the EP is made up of completely new material that could've easily made the original Viva. Talking about the EP a couple months ago, Martin quipped that the new songs "might be considered too catchy or too heavy for Coldplay songs." The heavy Coldplay song may seem like an oxymoronic concept, but "Glass of Water" makes a good case for the band turning up the volume more often. Granted, the whole thing centers around one of the very few Meaning of Life clichés Martin has yet to utilize (bet you can't guess exactly how much water is in that glass!), but the hook's brash guitars render his words unintelligible anyway.
With Eno behind the knobs, everything sounds pristine, impeccable. "Prospekt's March/Poppyfields" could pass for a latter-day Radiohead ballad (except Martin replaces Thom Yorke's doom with hopeful pleads of "I don't wanna die"). With its micro-funk verse and symphony chorus, "Rainy Day" feels stiched together, but it's uniquely humble. "I love it when you come over to my house," sings Martin, taking a break from explaining death and all his friends for a moment. Mostly instrumental Viva intro "Life in Technicolor" is morphed into a full-fledged song here-- and it in turn exposes the main obstacle in the way of Coldplay's desire to replicate U2 at their height.
Simply: Chris Martin needs to consider his lyrics more. He's smart; he can do better than "don't you wish your life could be as simple as fish swimmin' 'round in a barrel when you've got the gun." While Bono hasn't written an astounding lyric in ages, there was a time when his universal maxims rang true and felt close. Martin has shown flashes of this type of talent, but his consistency isn't where it needs to be in order for Coldplay to elevate to the supreme stadium-filling, critic-salivating level they so desire. With their revised sound and twitching energy, these sensitive lads are primed for something even bigger than their current little-kid-in-a-big-arena shenanigans. A few elegant, cringe-proof words couldn't hurt.


Like Olivia Rodrigo if she were raised on P!nk, 26-year-old singer Arabella Latham writes shiny, uncynical pop songs full of sarcasm, screw-ups, and young-adult heartache.

Quarter Life Crisis

Arabella Latham has the resume of someone who’s had an awesome start to her 20s. The South African singer-songwriter, who records as Baby Queen, made the BBC Sound of 2022 shortlist, then followed up by hosting a video-game music show for the Beeb with, it must be said, some pretty deep cuts. She was crowned the sound of the Netflix young-adult series Heartstopper, appearing first on the soundtrack, then in a cameo. She’s toured with pop’s reigning It Girl, labelmate Olivia Rodrigo. Courtney Love called her music “immaculate.” These are the sorts of successes one might expect from an artist who stormed the music industry with an Excel spreadsheet of every music blog going. On record, however, Baby Queen is a scrappy outsider, singing about how she alienates her friends, can’t get her shit together, and makes “art-pop music about the drugs I’m using.”
Baby Queen is, in short, having a quarter-life crisis, a phrase Latham hadn’t encountered until she was midway through making her album and well into one of her own. The reason we have a phrase for this particular stasis, of course, is because lots of twentysomethings experience it—including those who write songs. And Quarter Life Crisis has plenty of millennial counterparts, like Colleen Green’s burnout anxiety on I Want to Grow Up, the bitter stoner teen-pop of short-lived aughts band Shut Up Stella, or P!nk’s second album Missundaztood—an album that is to Baby Queen and her peers what Britney is to the bubblegum-bling girlies.
In interviews, Latham has mentioned the “parameters” of the Baby Queen project, and the sorts of songs that do and don’t fit them: “I could sit down at a piano and write a song that’s not hyper-satirical and cynical, but would it feel like it’s quintessentially Baby Queen?” Yet she and longtime producer King Ed are clearly drawn to shiny, uncynical pop, and out of the dozens of songs Latham recorded for Quarter Life Crisis, that’s largely what made the cut. The first sounds on the album—the choral pings of “We Can Be Anything”—suggest that Latham’s logged some serious hours with the least cynical song ever: “Don’t Stop Believin’,” as performed on Glee. The single builds into an anti-nihilistic fantasy of the best possible outcome of crying at a party (“Which is not unusual of me”), receiving and then spreading the epiphany that your whole life is ahead of you: Think Girls via Zombo.com. The onslaught of optimism is undeniable—even if you can imagine the saccharine commercial it might soundtrack.
Quarter Life Crisis is full of such exuberance. “Dream Girl” is a surging bisexual “Jesse’s Girl” in which Latham pulls both sides of her personal love triangle into one commingled crush. “Love Killer” has a sassy flow and campy one-liners (“The only man I find attractive is the Grim Reaper!”) that aren’t TikTok but “TiK ToK”—isn’t it beautiful to reach a point in pop music nostalgia where one can acknowledge “clear Kesha influence”? This kind of post-teenage songwriting, by nature, risks straying into the realm of “I am 14 and this is deep.” Latham mostly avoids this, but not always. “Kid Genius” has huge hooks, but its shallow satire—social media bad, school uncool—doesn’t totally work as irony, and definitely not as sincerity. “Die Alone,” a resigned ballad delivered in an introvert’s whisper, is a dead-even mix. Great lines, such as a chorus where Latham manages to wring pathos out of the words “Mario and Princess Peach,” coexist with Hot Topic-isms like “everybody’s got somebody, I’ve got ADD.”
Crucially, Quarter Life Crisis never feels insincere, because as a songwriter, Latham appears able to pull from genuine self-loathing. Sometimes all it takes is piercing the arrangement with a quick “fuck,” a trick she does twice on the sparkling, ABBA-esque “Grow Up” and radio-ready waltz “Quarter Life Crisis.” Latham has a talent—best heard on The Yearbook cut “Raw Thoughts”—for recreating with startling accuracy the kind of internal monologues that arise when you’re so catastrophically wasted that your thoughts take on the rhythm of the music around you. On “23,” she ricochets between berating herself and daring the party to get on her level; between the kind of flirting that’s really just propositioning a rando, and the kind of thoughts a more sober-minded song would probably not admit, like how that rando sort of looks like her. And on “Obvious” and “A Letter to Myself at 17,” both power ballads, Latham lets the years catch up to her to devastating effect, extending compassion to her past self even if she can’t quite extend it to herself in the present.


Released for free on Twitter, the fourth Passion Pit album is a different kind of confessional for Michael Angelakos, who's rediscovering the joy of process rather than the satisfaction of product.

Tremendous Sea of Love

Michael Angelakos is one of the last guys who needed to do a Reddit AMA. The Passion Pit mastermind has voluntarily shared more intimate parts of his life with the casual music news reader than most people do with their closest friends. He’s spoken with candor about his battles with bipolar disorder and comment section trolls, publicly announced both his divorce and came out as gay in a single podcast with Bret Easton Ellis, and handed over the Passion Pit Twitter account in the name of scientific advocacy. If you smashed that RT, Tremendous Sea of Love showed up in your inbox. If you didn't, it's currently easier to find video of Angelakos receiving an electromagnetic current to his brain than official audio of Passion Pit’s fourth album, one completely divorced from the vestigial “album cycle” that Angelakos has no use for in 2017.
“You’re over the money but under the gun/You came in the front door so where can you run?” he sings to himself on “I’m Perfect,” one of the nine tracks Angelakos pumped onto YouTube under the Wishart Group banner before they disappeared. In both subject matter and execution, Tremendous Sea of Love is Angelakos trying to rediscover the joy of process rather than the satisfaction of product. He said many of these songs were written and uploaded within a day, as if to let us all know that whether he took three years or three hours, it all ends up as data anyways.
As it was in Angelakos’ Boston dorm room, Passion Pit is still a project defined by synaptic synthesizers, blaring falsetto, and relentless major-key melodies. He has never been one to hunch over an acoustic guitar; there are no false starts or tape hiss to signify a more DIY approach. But when he sings about a complicated relationship with his mother over a minimal, staccato string figure on the closing “For Sondra (It Means the World to Me),” he sounds both terrified and freed, finally able to face the kind of raw and confessional songwriting he previously avoided out of instinctual fear.
Raw and confessional are relative for Passion Pit, of course. The extreme dissonance between the hyperglycemic sound of Passion Pit songs and their bitter emotional content should be a starting point, not a revelation. Angelakos said “Take a Walk” is his least favorite song, but it’s still a definitive work in an illustrative way—come for the Doritos Locos commercial, stay for a devastating recount of how the promises of capitalism brought the Angelakos family to America and poisoned its next three generations of men. The full disclosure of Gossamer caused Angelakos to aspire for a well-earned positivity and universality on Kindred, but taking cues from professional, suit-and-tie songwriters like Cole Porter and Irving Berlin (“Holy shit, no one gets to the chorus faster than they do”) led to an album where the stereotype of Angelakos as a jingle writer could’ve stuck.
Meanwhile, no Passion Pit song has ever taken longer to get to the chorus than “Somewhere Up There.” There isn’t a chorus at all, but like Angelakos’ best hooks, the first three minutes can feel frightening and giddy, either a free-fall or a sudden uplift. It’s his idea of a classical suite, stopping mid-air to meditate on Bowlby’s Attachment Theory and ending with a banal phone message from his mother about gardening. No song has done a more convincing job of transposing Angelakos’ centrifugal brain into music and “Somewhere Up There” validates the process of making Tremendous Sea of Love: a stunning artistic achievement and something that would be totally useless to ad execs.
If not a rejection of its predecessor, Tremendous Sea of Love is a reaction to it—while just as streamlined and compact, it lacks the hermetic seal that defined Kindred. When “Inner Dialogue” and “I’m Perfect” abruptly shut down at two-and-a-half minutes, they’re over but not necessarily finished; it’s conceivable that Angelakos could get The Life of Pablo with these songs and add another bridge or pitch-shifted choir. “Hey K” and “You Have the Right” are first-take sequels to the exquisite and ornate “Constant Conversations,” addressing the same person (ex-wife Kristy Mucci), the subject of Angelakos’ crippling remorse and shame, but from a healthier place. “To the Otherside” and “The Undertow” don’t fuss much over their metaphors or really create them at all, but the listener is probably aware that Angelakos is now heading up a potentially game-changing artist’s services group with $250 million worth of funding. Would “I made it to the other side” be any more powerful if it was phrased differently or would it just be more clever?
Whether or not Tremendous Sea of Love actually exists without the legitimizing vestiges of the music business, it relieves Angelakos from the burdens of having to reestablish the Passion Pit brand in the way that peers such as MGMT and Phoenix will once they return. It’s presented as a gift—free of charge, with a targeted audience, but not necessarily an altruistic act. “I wrote this album to tell myself and to tell you that you were always good enough,” Angelakos wrote via a typed, smudged letter that serves currently as his pinned Tweet. “I do not need your money. I just want you, I just NEED you, to listen to me.” On “I’m Perfect,” Angelakos is honest about the coexistence of neediness and grandiosity in his superego: “Tell me I’m so damn perfect/Tell me it all of the time.” But even if you did, Angelakos doesn't sound like he'd believe it anyway. Tremendous Sea of Love isn't perfect, nor is it meant to be; under the weight of the world, we should just aspire to be good enough from now on.


The Byrds frontman’s deliriously opulent solo work was misunderstood upon release, but this lavish repackaging restores a spiritual singer-songwriter classic.

No Other

For those that knew him, there seemed to be two Harold Eugene “Gene” Clarks, each contradicting the other. There was Gene Clark the country boy from Tipton, Missouri and Gene Clark the mid-’60s L.A. rock star and frontman for the Byrds. He had the chiseled looks to earn the nickname “Prince Valiant” and looked every bit the ideal frontman, yet suffered crippling stage fright. While his band took sterling Bob Dylan covers to the top of the charts, Clark penned songs that earned the admiration of Dylan himself. He was humble and quiet, yet since he wrote all the Byrds’ early songs, his first royalty check allowed him to wheel around town in a maroon Ferrari while the rest of the band was still broke. His last songwriting credit for the band during their heyday was “Eight Miles High,” and he departed soon after due to a “fear of flying.” Even with his posthumous cult fandom, Clark’s visionary composite of country and rock doesn’t command the same reverence as erstwhile fellow-Byrd Gram Parsons.
His solo career always seemed snakebit; his albums under-performed while covers of his songs sent the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt towards superstardom. Yes, the Byrds’s 1973 reunion album on David Geffen’s Asylum Records was an all-out critical and commercial disaster, but it was Gene who emerged from the wreckage with the album’s strongest songs and performances, to the point where Geffen gave him a recording budget of $100,000 to realize his masterpiece in 1974.** For one glorious moment, it seemed that Clark’s solo fortunes had finally turned, and you can hear almost every single one of those dollars poured into No Other, a deliriously opulent, rococo work in a decade filled with them. But when it was time to play the album for Geffen, he took one look at the eight songs on the vinyl and yelled at Clark: “Make a proper fucking album!”, throwing the test pressing in the garbage without even listening to it. No money would go to promote the album and No Other tanked, all but ending Clark’s career. One of the most exquisite spiritual seekers in song, Clark was dead by the age of 46, ravaged by alcohol and heroin.
Misunderstood for decades, No Other’s audience slowly emerged. 4AD founder Ivo Watts-Russell revered the album, and supergroup This Mortal Coil (featuring members of Cocteau Twins and Dead Can Dance) covered two Clark songs in the ’80s. In 2014, Beach House, Fleet Foxes, the Walkmen, Grizzly Bear, and Wye Oak convened to perform the album in full. While on the surface it seemed like a curious tribute –those bands’ collective discography has less ornamentation than one song on No Other– the emotional weight of it has resonated with a new generation. “Some of the lyrics [...] just destroy you,” Beach House’s Alex Scally told The New York Times. “There’s something really touching about it.” So it makes sense that this gorgeous and profound reissue of No Other now comes in a lavishly detailed and loving box set on 4AD (Geffen never even bothered to release the album on CD), featuring an 80-page hardbound book, extra sessions, a 5.1 surround mix of the album, and a documentary by Paul Kendall.
Perceived at the time as an example of cocaine-fueled excess, No Other was actually written during a reflective, sober, family-oriented time in Clark’s life. Holed up in Mendocino, Clark slowly pieced the songs together while gazing out at the Pacific Ocean then took the songs to L.A. producer Thomas Jefferson Kaye. While his previous album, 1971’s White Light, was a spare and sublime acoustic set, this album featured seemingly infinite layers. By the time you’ve reached the end of the first song, “Life’s Greatest Fool,” you’ve already been walloped by a galloping backbeat, pedal steel, big gospel choirs, and Clark’s voice hitting a previously unheard high register against the backdrop of 16 supporting players. Every moment on the album finds Clark reaching higher and digging deeper, Kaye’s arrangements goading and challenging him at every turn.
Clark took cues from the spiritual uplift of Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and the moral squalor of Rolling Stones’s Goat Head’s Soup; fittingly, No Other explores the dichotomy of mankind’s potential for higher consciousness and the luridness of its lower half. Clark hinted that the foreboding slink of “Silver Raven” was about aliens and flying saucers, while the book reveals it was Gene’s nickname for his wife Carlie’s dancing shoes. The delirious “Strength of Strings” is a tug of war between euphoric highs and crippling depressive states, with Clark and backing choir oscillating between the two extremes “on the cosmic range.” Clark was notorious for never picking up a book, and his ideas of the cosmos and Zen philosophy mostly arose in conversation with friends and filtered down into his songs, but they were profound and deeply felt nonetheless.
Throughout, Gene details his struggle to pierce the smog of ‘70s SoCal decadence. The breezy country rock of “The True One” explores the precarity of delusion: “Just walk upstairs and ask/ You’ll be likely directed down/Into the reality/Of what you are doing,” Clark sings, adding: “Sometimes it’s so hard to see/ Which one is the true one.” On the heartbreaking “From A Silver Phial,” his subject is a woman who puts “her faith into the moon and stars” yet finds herself imprisoned in a toxic relationship. By song’s end, her sole means of survival comes from making her master’s “lower self worth while.”
Even soul-seeking has its own perils, as on the album’s eight-minute brooding centerpiece, “Some Misunderstanding.” The lyrics stem from a dream that roused Clark in the middle of the night, meditating on interconnectedness and the dual vision of “every expectation/And...what I realize.” As Kaye erects a mountain of keyboards, acoustic guitars, piano, steel guitar, fiddle, and choir, Clark reaches the summit only to come to the understanding: “If you sell your soul/To brighten your role/You might be disappointed/In the lights.”
The album ends with “Lady of the North,” a sublime ode to Clark’s wife propelled by piano, pedal steel, and an electronically phased violin line that drifts away like a pink cloud at album’s end. But even amid the joyful sounds, there’s a sorrowful undertone, as if Clark himself doesn’t quite believe in the happiness he’s found. When No Other suffered its ignoble fate, Clark never quite recovered; both his career and marriage crumbled soon after. It’s easy to draw a comparison to frustrated country-rock saints like Parsons or Townes Van Zandt. But as Alex Abramovich wrote in London Review of Books about Clark, these songs “carve their own, canyon-sized niche.”
The adoring repackaging covers every facet of the album. No aspect of it goes unexplored, from details on every player to the reason Greta Garbo owned a copy of the album. There are pages devoted to the mansion where the album photo shoot took place, as well as a story explaining how the ruggedly handsome Gene Clark wound up on his own album cover in drag. There are outtakes of all the songs (including a few passes at Clark’s “Train Leaves Here This Morning” that the Eagles had tackled on their first album), but after hundreds of spins of the original, it feels odd to hear these lavish songs strippeddown, like glimpsing the Sistine Chapel through scaffolding or seeing Prince in a pair of sweatpants. The cumulative effect both demystifies No Other while exalting it. Tragically ignored during its time, the album takes its rightful place it alongside Love’s Forever Changes, Judee Sill’s Heart Food, or Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, bringing together the conflicted, clashing aspects of Gene Clark’s art into a cohesive whole.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Featuring Key Glock and newcomers Snupe Bandz and Joddy, this compilation from the Memphis rapper and his associates feels like the culmination of a thoroughly unique career.

Various Artists: Young Dolph Presents Paper Route Illuminati

Where Memphis rap was once defined by 8Ball & MJG’s somber drug-dealing rhymes and Three 6 Mafia’s dystopic horrorcore, Young Dolph chose a different lane: He fought the stress of being a dealer who was also a user by making crude jokes. Take “I’m Everything You Wanna Be,’’ a standout from 2017’s Bulletproof. The album’s genesis was an attempt on his life, yet on that song, he riffed on everything from selling drugs to family members to dancing like Puffy in Times Square. He brings that same vital balance of levity and darkness to his latest album, Paper Route Illuminati, a collaborative effort with the Paper Route Empire. Although it is a chance to show the talent of his homies, Dolph is still a presence on the record. He is on ten songs out of 13, and the first three, providing both his star aura and his talent for street tales.
This new album feels like a culmination of this career. Yes, the 78-minute runtime is intimidating, but it means we get to spend more time with Dolph and his compelling roster of personalities. On opener “Talking to My Scale,” Dolph starts with a motivated Tupac-on-lean monologue about the fakeness of your enemies and “running it up to the motherfuckin’ ceiling,” then asks an earnest question: “If I sacrifice myself, will I go to jail?’’ It’s Dolph’s gift to casually let you into his life like this, using first-person anecdotes that detail his rise to the top. Key Glock, his most direct descendant, has a similar knack for storytelling, and he displays it on “Mister Glock 2.’’ In a monotone flow, he recounts the things he did to survive his difficult teenage years: “Fourteen, smoking dope, shooting guns/Yeah, fifteen, flipping Os or onions/Sixteen, taking niggas’ money/Seventeen, had juggers jumping/Eighteen, got locked up for hustling.’’ Glock speaks like a kid who has seen it all, and, to some extent, he has; his mom was in prison, and his father came in and out of his life.
The Paper Route team injects their narratives with smooth threats. On “Remember,’’ Snupe Bandz, who might have the thickest Southern accent since Daniel Craig in Knives Out, draws a precise, terrorizing picture of the days when he was on the street: “You gotta die if you play with my pesos/You got to go if you reach for my ice/Play with the mob and we taking your life/I got hitters creeping out through the night/Get caught out of bounds and you know it’s on sight.” On “Trust Nobody,’’ Dolph and PaperRoute Woo, whose voice has more of a formal enunciation, both hand out threats; one dips and the other dives. The album’s most impressive performance comes from Brooklyn rapper Joddy, who dismisses competitors with the biting humor of Lil’ Kim: “All these bird bitches getting pissed off, steady writing diss bars/Worried ’bout me? Sis, worry ’bout your discharge,” she raps, sounding like Regina George. The addition of Joddy to the Paper Route roster is testament to Dolph’s A&R skills; most Southern groups aren’t mixing the car-trunk trapping swagger of Memphis with Brooklyn bullying.
A few days after releasing this March’s Dum and Dummer 2, Young Dolph flirted with retirement. “I hope y’all enjoying the new mixtape. It’s my last project that I am putting out,’’ he said at the time. Thankfully he hasn’t hung up the microphone yet; if he does, his influence will continue to be felt in Memphis rap. He understands that if a community has to share its pain, then its success must be shared as well.
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Eaters are a collaboration between two young men from Brooklyn, including an engineer who's worked with Parquet Courts and Frankie Rose. Their self-titled LP could be called a rock album, though it features few obviously discernible guitars, and most of its songs are shaped less like songs than like quasi-ambient miniatures.

Eaters

Eaters are a collaboration between two young men from Brooklyn, one named Jonny and one named Bob. Their music is dark without feeling oppressive and modern without ever feeling too slick. Most of their self-titled debut sounds like something that could’ve come out in the late 1970s or early ’80s, a period when bands nominally classified as post-punk started messing around with synthesizers, and peacocks like Brian Eno and David Bowie realized you could make rock that sounded cerebral and far-out without becoming Yes. The palette is gray, the vocals are real Teutonic. Think of it as pocket goth: A sullen, hooded tempest made at manageable scale.
Jonny, who in the interest of being official is named Jonathan Schenke, is an engineer with credits on albums by Liturgy, Frankie Rose, and most recently, Parquet Courts—all young rock bands that approach the idiom of rock music from very different perspectives. (Eaters has also been co-released on Dull Tools, a label run in part by Parquet Courts singer and guitarist Andrew Savage.)
Eaters, too, could be called a rock album, though with the exception of “Through All” and “The Way” it features few obviously discernible guitars, and most of its songs are shaped less like songs than like quasi-ambient miniatures that use the signposts of vocal melodies and propulsive drums to cover up for the fact that all Bob and Jonny really want to do is play with texture. And the textures on Eaters are beautiful: Grim and subdued but so rich you could raise tomatoes in them. More than any melody or song, it’s the sound of the album that keeps me interested. So while I recognize that “Bury the Lines” and “Through All” feel calibrated to be singles, they also feel beholden to convention in ways that weirder, looser experiments like “Icarish” and “This Is Round” don’t.
Along with bands like Merchandise and Total Control, Eaters seem like part of a microshift in indie music away from color and variegation to something comparatively austere. Call it a momentary juke back into modernism as we crest the Aquarian age. Maybe it’s just the comfort of the past—that almost quaint way young bands mine old sounds the way people down in Williamsburg, Virginia keep making candles just like they did in the bloodletting days. The quiet irony of Eaters is that it feels like a period piece for a time in music when so many things felt new.


The invaluable Sundazed label reissues this 1968 psych-pop masterpiece, adding 10 tracks worth of audition tapes, B-sides, and alternate takes.

United States of America: United States of America

United States of America

The United States of America was never immortalized by Pepsi commercials or Time-Life 20-disc retrospectives: The band barely lasted two years, released only one album (which Columbia's marketing department sat on its hands to promote), and ended up a cult favorite that would later be speculated as a phantom influence for the Krautrock sound. But 36 years after its release, USA's self-titled album still stands above the work of most of their Monterey-era, psych-rock peers, and this long-awaited reissue tacks on 10 tracks' worth of audition tapes, B-sides, and alternate takes.
The band's deft addition of electronic noise and modulation into what would otherwise be soundtracks for the Beach Boys' California or ham 'n' eggs Anglo-rock was several years ahead of its time. Former UCLA ethnomusicology instructor Joseph Byrd concocted miracles with musique concrete-style tape collages and white noise blurts that veered in and out of the songs like uninvited but still welcome guests. He also tackled a dub-like mixology of tape delays and ring-modulated fade-outs and, best of all, distorted and punch-drunk synthesizers that sound indistinguishable from electric guitars. This was a fresh approach to rock from a unique group of musicians: UCLA students who had studied Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen but, as Byrd's liner notes claim, were "ignorant" of rock roots. And, although the band does indulge a few moments of awestruck discovery of their instruments' capabilities, the noise generally works with the music rather than simply being fodder from badge-wearing freaks tying to spook the Organization Man.
If USA had an anthem, it was "The American Metaphysical Circus". The track opens with a pleasantly disorienting hodgepodge of sampled John Philip Souza marches and Byrd's faithful kiddie-baiting Ringling Bros. calliope melodies before chanteuse Dorothy Moskowitz arrives with her herbal tea-watered croon, carefully enunciating like a three-nights-of-sleep-deprived mother's lullaby. Meanwhile, electric violinist/ring modulator foreman Gordon Marron emits aurora borealis streaks of police siren wails and bassist Rand Forbes keeps the music resting its head on a bar table all night long.
Byrd's free-association lyrics throughout the album are generally LSD journal entries (e.g. "Lemonous petals, dissident play/ Tasting of ergot/ Dancing by night, dying by day"), satirical toasts to the Good Life ("I got a split level house with a wonderful view, sugar"), or phonetics intended for a jigsaw fit into the music (the Latin choral chant that opens "Where Is Yesterday"). "Hard Coming Love" is a conventional rave-up that would've faded into background at an all-night, acid test show were it not for the UFO-like synth that mysteriously flies through the song's intermissions.
That said, some of the album's synthesizer works haven't aged well and are stigmatized by the "B-flick sound effects" tag that magnifies the wrinkles on so many electro-acoustic pieces from the analog years. The tribal drum whomp that opens the go-go trance number "The Garden of Earthly Delights" is pockmarked by a laser-gun misfire that might've cued a Playboy bunny in Pocahontas drag to jump through a paper wall and shake it for the camera after Hugh Hefner announced his solidarity with the American Indian Movement on The Mike Douglas Show. The patchouli-sprayed ballads "Cloud Song" and "Love Song for the Dead Che" both bloom with rich, East Indian-inspired piano and string melodies, and still breathe without any electronic fingerprints. On the other hand, the pots 'n' pans-banging hootenanny "I Won't Leave My Wooden Wife for You, Sugar" is relieved by its jump-edit to a New Orleans slapstick jazz coda.
The bonus tracks included on this reissue indicate that USA may have aspired to gain prominence in both the mainstream and the avant-garde. "Osamu"-- with its drone-minimalism rooted in composer La Monte Young's Theater of Eternal Music and sparse, dribbling kabuki rhythms-- is the band's most abstract, non-commercial moment. In stark contrast are the Fillmore East-goes-"American Bandstand" pop tune "No Love to Give" and the AOR-ready, organ-pop of "Perry Pier". These songs exhibit one of the reasons why USA broke up so quickly: Byrd wrote that he wanted the band to go "harder," while Moskowitz preferred the "softer" route. That yin and yang is uncannily blended in the band's magnum opus, "The American Way of Love". The three-part medley first thrashes out dirty psych-blues with Byrd advertising the wonders of being a John for cross-dressing prostitutes. Then the music bleeds into a radio station playing escapist Bacharach-pop or "California good-time music," before brilliantly concluding with a sputtering music machine randomly firing samples of the album's previous melodies and utterances. Sadly, too few heard this music when it was first released.


Collecting both hits and tangents, this double-disc anthology of Paul Weller’s post-Jam project has a concise narrative punch lacking in 1998’s more thorough box set.

The Style Council: Long Hot Summers: The Story of The Style Council

Think of the Style Council’s career as the pop equivalent of a semester abroad: Paul Weller embarked on this journey with the explicit intent of broadening his horizons. He had grown tired of the Jam, the trio that he had led since he was 14, ushering them through the frenzied days of punk and leading them to the top of the UK charts. The Gift, the trio’s last album, was sitting at No. 1 when he decided to pull the plug in 1982, believing there was nothing left for them to conquer. He chose to put childish things away and act like an adult for the Style Council.
Weller enlisted Mick Talbot, a keyboardist who previously played with Jam disciples the Merton Parkas, as his lieutenant, but it was clear from the outset who was in charge. In the video for 1983’s “Long Hot Summer”—their third single and the song that lends its title to this new anthology—Talbot spends his time rowing a bare-chested Weller to a riverside picnic; later, Tabot would literally carry Weller’s bags in the clip for “Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Absurd as the images may be, there’s an endearing playfulness to the videos that’s telling. Weller scowled through most of the Jam, adopting the look intense young men wear when they’re seriously making serious music. Here, he’s cavorting shirtless, so carefree he’s nearly camp, embracing the hint of sexual ambiguity with the same gusto with which he has a beatnik bongo player join their party.
Signifiers were a big deal for the Style Council. The group’s first single, “Speak Like a Child,” shared a title with a 1968 Blue Note LP by Herbie Hancock; they designed the album cover of 1985’s Our Favourite Shop so that it spilled over with the books, fashion, music, and film they cherished most. They swapped punk and mod for jazz and soul as musical touchstones, and the group expanded this obsession through the ’80s, incorporating house and garage to an extent that their record label rejected their final album for veering too far into the dance-music realm. The mysterious, uncredited Cappuccino Kid—widely believed to be Paolo Hewitt, a confidant and biographer of Weller’s until they had a falling out in the 2000s—penned righteous manifestos for the band’s liner notes. They embraced political activism, fighting against prime minister Margaret Thatcher with such enthusiasm it nearly consumed them.
Members of the Style Council—Weller and Talbot officially constituted the group’s lineup, but they retained a fairly stable set of players through the years—later blamed the band’s prominent position on the anti-Thatcher Red Wedge tour in 1986 as halting their momentum. But Long Hot Summers: The Story of the Style Council underscores that they were a band born of the moment who lived for the moment, and that moment had passed by the time the ’80s were half finished. Long Hot Summers differs from the many, many Style Council compilations released over the years by being co-compiled by Weller as part of a Style Council reclamation project that also includes a documentary film for Sky Arts (the movie is rumored to be headed Stateside sometime next year).
In one sense, assembling a Style Council collection isn’t all that hard, since the high points often occurred on singles. During their peak early years, the band gravitated toward singles and EPs over LPs, so their most vibrant music happened here, while the scattershot later albums usually are well represented by their hits. What happens in the margins of Long Hot Summers makes a difference, though. At two CDs (or two LPs), it has room to cover adventures a single-disc hits collection doesn’t, and it has a concise narrative punch lacking in the thorough 1998 box The Complete Adventures Of The Style Council. The extra space here affords the opportunity to underscore how the band directly tackled big societal and political issues: They wrote a swinging jazz number called “Dropping Bombs on the Whitehouse” and delicately urged that the “Ghosts of Dachau” not be forgotten, a sentiment that may hit harder in the authoritarian climate of 2020 than it did in 1985. Unlike so many of their British post-punk peers, the group also didn’t hesitate to absorb the changes brought by ’80s R&B, adapting elastic synth bass and drum machines for their own ends and gamely covering Joe Smooth’s house classic “Promised Land."
At this generous length, the inherent earnest gangliness of the Style Council is readily apparent. Often, the band came across like they had raided their big brother’s closet, trying on suits that didn’t quite fit their frame. Their funk can be stiff, the jazz drifts toward cocktail hour, and they dive into dance without quite knowing whether they can pull off the new sounds. But all this awkwardness is endearing, not alienating. It’s done in the service of self-edification, for one and for another. Weller really did learn several new tricks during this period. He wound up absorbing the impassioned smooth soul of Curtis Mayfield, a progression evident on “Walls Come Tumbling Down!” and “Shout to the Top!”; he learned how to write with a lyrical lightness, a quality that still makes “Long Hot Summer” and “My Ever-Changing Moods” incandescent. He’d retain this nuance as he headed out on his solo career, but the Style Council stands as its own distinctive thing, the crystallization of a moment when the possibilities pop culture offered to a curious and attentive artist seemed endless.

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The daring Chicago pop artist explores resilience and hard-won triumphs against a backdrop of hatred and brutality.

Next to the Sun

On Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks west of the Capitol building, the Newseum hosts a permanent exhibit of five hundred years of front pages, from a 1603 broadsheet commemorating the coronation of James I to the present day’s headlines. Some weeks ago after the election of Donald Trump, a devastated friend and I made our way through that cavernous, low-lit corridor, our fingers tracing centuries of calamity pressed into newsprint and shielded behind glass. At the end of our walk, after all that disease and death and disaster, I felt a burden lift. There was something perversely soothing in this irrefutable reminder that the road behind us had been no less difficult than the road ahead of us would surely be.
The rising Chicago pop artist KAINA writes with this notion in mind, placing her day-to-day struggles in a long tradition of lamentation, bigger than today and bigger, even, than Trump. Her striking lyrics take aim at present-day bigots who clamor for closed borders—“Look how these brown hands cook all your meals/But mama says you want us all to disappear”—but she’s more concerned with the persistence of this foundational hatred, and with the people she loves, who have thrived “through so many moons” and continue to thrive in spite of racist brutality.
The album’s title—along with the sugary expanse of cotton-candy clouds on its cover—makes for a clever bit of misdirection. KAINA spends the better part of “Next to the Sun” interrogating hollow maxims of self-care and searching, instead, for the roots of her community’s resilience. Often, this means flipping an oft-used lyrical symbol into something surprising, even shocking. The sun of the title track is a stand-in for a self-destructive impulse, and KAINA casts herself as Icarus: “Wanna feel it all/The burn and the lesson, the fall.” When she sings the word “bed,” on “Ghost” and “Could Be A Curse,” she calls to mind Tracey Emin’s depressive episodes and disheveled sheets, the furthest thing from standard pop eroticism.
“What’s a Girl” is an even more impressive feat, with KAINA flipping empty, you-go-girl affirmation into a scathing indictment of the impossible expectations to which women of color are held. “What is a girl without ambition? ...What is a soul without the fight?” she sings, even after wearily lamenting that “the fight… never stops.” When the personal is political, it is all too easy for one’s very being to become a battleground. KAINA insists that her strength shouldn’t be measured by her capacity to suffer without flinching, but in her ability to heal, assisted by the people she loves.
It is KAINA’s new understanding of the deep reserves of love within her and in the people around her that closes the record, on the joyous, gorgeous “Green.” Here, she understands love as something irreducible, irrefutable: “Sky could be blue as can be/Grass could be green, green, too/And my love the same, same as them/They’re facts, it’s true.” After an album’s worth of ruminating on isolation, fatigue, and disconnection, “Green” arrives as a hard-won and genuine celebration. KAINA is helped to this realization by a couple of supportive guests: an adorable young relative, on “Joei’s Secret,” who urges her to ignore fuckboys and focus instead on “drawing, or education,” and close collaborator Sen Morimoto, who reaches through the fog on “Could Be A Curse” and comforts her: “You are not the sum of your fears… Just try to sleep.”
This lyrical journey finds a sophisticated mirror in the music. On opening track “House,” the arrangement isn’t so much deconstructed as destroyed; strings and synths ring out in soft, distorted loops, a scrap of a horn riff shatters before it’s even begun, and KAINA’s voice reaches unsteadily through the wreckage. Over the course of the album, sounds slowly cohere until “Green” arrives, an intricate, indomitable piece of Latin jazz. The early songs are no less beautiful for their brokenness, but KAINA’s mission is to reach for more sound, more color, more people to hold in one’s heart. “You like to keep this place empty,” she sings, on “House,” against a spare soundscape. “There’s room for plenty.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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On his third album in seven months, Morrison teams up with jazz musician Joey DeFrancesco for a collection of originals and standards that captures the joy of making music.

Van Morrison / Joey DeFrancesco: You’re Driving Me Crazy

You’re Driving Me Crazy

For those keeping score, yes, You’re Driving Me Crazy is the third album Van Morrison has released since September of 2017, when he delivered the hard-charging blues of Roll With the Punches. In December, he put out Versatile, an amiable collection grounded by standards that found him moving toward jazz. Morrison’s newest release delves even deeper into the genre, pairing the 1960s legend with jazz organist, composer, and bandleader Joey DeFrancesco.
The swift pace Morrison is keeping at age 72 may have as much to do with licensing as it does with inspiration. You’re Driving Me Crazy is the first Van Morrison album to be released on Sony subsidiaries throughout the world (a fact obscured slightly by Versatile, which inaugurated his domestic deal with the label in the U.S. but was licensed to Caroline elsewhere). So, maybe Morrison was running out a contract. But that doesn’t mean he was scrambling to record a bunch of gibberish, the way he did in 1967, so he could leave Bang Records and make Astral Weeks for Warner Bros. Five decades later, he doesn’t seem to be in a rush to get anywhere; judging by Roll With the Punches and Versatile, two pleasurable albums of familiar tunes performed by a crew composed largely of longtime Van veterans, he’s happy right where he is.
You’re Driving Me Crazy adjusts that formula, with Morrison swapping out his usual suspects for Joey DeFrancesco’s hard-driving soul-jazz combo of guitarist Dan Wilson, tenor saxophonist Troy Roberts, and drummer Michael Ode. Joined on occasion by Van’s vocalist daughter, Shana, the quintet knocked out the album in a couple of days, just like acts used to do in the mid-20th-century heyday of Blue Note and Prestige.
Apart from his enduring (and endearing) dedication to making albums that test the limits of how much music can fit on a compact disc, Morrison never pretends to engage with the modern world on You’re Driving Me Crazy. He’s not a throwback, though; he’s carrying on a tradition, and that may be why he sees a kindred spirit in 47-year-old DeFrancesco, who has spent his career extending the legacy of music made before his birth. DeFrancesco started out as a wunderkind, signing to Columbia Records as a teenager in the late 1980s and becoming one of the youngest musicians ever to tour with Miles Davis. Eventually, he settled into a groove as a savvy traditionalist: He’d record a tribute to hard-bop pioneer Horace Silver but had enough of a sense of humor to title a 1999 album Goodfellas and pose as a mafia don on its cover.
This approach makes DeFrancesco an ideal foil for Morrison. Respectful but impish, the organist jabs new retorts into tunes the two know by heart. For his part, Morrison seems inspired by the band, playing with his phrasing so that his vocals mimic a saxophone on a lazy rendition of “Miss Otis Regrets”—whose final stretch finds him elongating his notes, then launching into a string of staccato growls—and happily riding a fevered groove on “Close Enough for Jazz.” The latter is one of several original compositions Morrison dug up from his catalog to sit alongside such warhorses as Eddie Jones’ “The Things I Used to Do” and B.B. King’s “Everyday I Have the Blues”—tunes that have been reliable crowd-pleasers for bar bands since they were hits in the ’50s. Morrison and DeFrancesco don’t reinvent these classics so much as they inhabit them, the sheer verve of the group rendering each one vivid and alive.
On You’re Driving Me Crazy, the songs are essentially conduits for the creation of music. Morrison doesn’t disregard the lyrics; his interpretations are always grounded in the spirit of the original. But he’s clearly thrilled to play with a band as lively and dextrous as DeFrancesco’s, so he positions his voice as another boisterous instrument within the group. There’s a palpable joy to these performances that distinguishes this album from its two immediate predecessors, even as its kinship with Roll With the Punches and Versatile underscores how Van Morrison’s latter-day music is all about the present moment. Early in his career, he searched for truth within his own songwriting. Now, he finds meaning in simply playing music—an act that is by its nature transient but also, sometimes, transcendent.


This 1977 album was obscure in its day, but it spawned a fervent cult among fans of spiritual jazz, for good reason: The no-frills recording captures a feeling of unearthly magic.

Pharoah

Lavish reissues of a single album usually signify the record’s general sense of importance: We need to gather all that’s known about this work, they suggest, every note and outtake, in order to more completely understand its historical moment. The new edition of Pharoah Sanders’ 1977 album Pharoah, which comes in a beautiful box with an expansive booklet filled with essays and interviews, a companion live disc, sheet music, photographs, and more, is trying to correct the record rather than expand upon it.
In the grand scheme of jazz history, Pharoah is merely one LP among the dozens the saxophonist issued between the blistering far-out free jazz of his 1965 debut and Promises, the album he made with Floating Points that was issued in 2021, about 18 months before his death. Pharoah was cut for India Navigation, a small imprint that specialized in the jazz avant-garde, and it sold poorly and was not regarded highly by its maker. Though it made little impact at the time, Pharoah spawned a fervent cult among spiritual-jazz fans, particularly those who enjoy the chase for rare LPs. This reissue, while not cheap, is a bargain compared to the hundreds of dollars one might spend for a beat-up original. And the music itself, which is identifiably the work of its creator but has a highly unusual atmosphere all its own, easily justifies the effort and care that went into the set.
The secret appeal of Pharoah is the quality that ultimately gave Sanders pause when the album was first coming together: As a recording, it sounds crude and homemade, which it was. It was cut in a former factory in upstate New York where India Navigation founder Bob Cummins, an attorney and jazz obsessive, lived with his family. Cummins would put out records by important jazz figures, including saxophonist David Murray and bassist Cecil McBee. But he typically issued live albums and was not an engineer by trade. He and Sanders had trouble agreeing on the details of this project, and in the end, neither man was happy with how it turned out. But the modest recording is perfect for the music, framing a peculiar mood and atmosphere that’s lusty and joyous one moment and haunting and meditative the next.
The side-long “Harvest Time” opens the record with guitarist Tisziji Muñoz and bassist Steve Neil sketching out a two-chord vamp. When Sanders enters, his tone is smoky and relaxed, perfect for a late-night seance. He darts across the melody and fixates on his lower range, where the resonance of his instrument’s reed makes you think of a rumbly congested breath more than a melodic voice. Sanders jumps an octave for some trills and Muñoz joins him, breaking out of his two-chord reverie, and then percussion enters—bowls, bells; you can smell the burning sandalwood—followed by droning harmonium from Sanders’ then-wife Bedria. After 20 minutes that seem to race by, the piece drifts away, as if dispersed by the wind.
“Harvest Time” is so powerful because it contains at least a half-dozen distinct and possibly contradictory feelings at the same time. It’s peaceful but with an undercurrent of unease; it’s warm and welcoming, yet it makes most sense in darkness; it sounds folky and ancient, yet could only be fully rendered following the structural earthquakes of modernism; it comes across as simple and approachable while it’s overlaid with a blurring film of strangeness. The bonus disc that comes with this set contains two live versions of “Harvest Time” recorded when Sanders toured Europe shortly after the record’s release. In some respects, the existence of these live versions, both of which are great, reinforces just how special the initial recordings are. The live takes are much “better” recordings—clearer, less muffled, with a more distinct balance of instruments—and they are well worth hearing. But in emotional terms, they can’t come close to the unrepeatable moments that Cummins captured in the studio.
The second track on the album proper, “Love Will Find a Way,” is another example of the original sessions’ unearthly magic. It would have a long life outside of this recording, even if it never again sounded quite like it does here. At least since his collaborations with singer Leon Thomas starting at the end of the ’60s, Sanders had indulged his love of gospel and R&B, sometimes, as he does here, taking to the microphone himself. His singing voice is untrained and sounds as if he delivered this song off the cuff, but his enthusiasm is infectious, and his voice fits the album’s casual emotions-first mission.
Drums appear for the first time on the record on “Love Will Find a Way,” and the mix is wild and disorienting, with percussion clattering away in the background while Sanders’ singing is way out front. He rips an intense tenor solo over the two-chord vamp, slipping into the reed-splitting overblowing that marked his earlier work. And then, a little over six minutes in, comes the only notable non-Sanders solo on the record, a corker by Muñoz that recalls the color-saturated fractal patterns of an early Santana lead.
“Love Will Find a Way” is 14 minutes of pure jubilation, the sound of a band riffing on a feeling rather than chord changes. The song would reappear as the instrumental title track on Sanders’ next album, a lush excursion into quiet-storm territory featuring vocalist Phyllis Hyman, and Philip Bailey would make it the title track for his 2019 solo album. These later versions confirm that its structure and melody invite a feeling of elegance and smoldering beauty, which makes the festive chaos of the original even more striking.
The final track on Pharoah is the gospel slow-burner “Memories of Edith Johnson,” which features a thick organ, crashing drums, and distant bells and chimes. Slowly unfolding like a time-lapse film of an opening flower, its form reminds me a bit of John Coltrane’s “Welcome,” channeling a related sense of serenity. Sanders wrote the piece thinking of his aunt, whose name is in the title. In an interview included in this set’s book, he talks about the awesome power of her singing, which he heard in church while growing up in Arkansas, comparing her voice to that of Patti LaBelle. Sanders’ own wordless vocalizations on the song, a series of spectral oohs and aahs that convey both innocence and ecstasy, evoke the process of memory itself, how the mind gathers fragments of an event which it then assembles into a coherent whole.
Sanders was very near the end of his life when he sat for the interview where he mentions Edith Johnson, and he lingers on his description of his aunt while his other recollections about the music and recording sessions are relatively brief. His general point is that for certain people and certain cultures—the Black church community he grew up with being a prominent example—music is an integral part of everyday life, something you experience in the moment without necessarily analyzing it after the fact. The homespun Pharoah reflects such a practice. After these sessions finished, he was onto the next gig and back in another studio. To him, this was not a date of particular note. The saxophonist had by this time enjoyed a long life as a performer and bandleader, playing with some of the most important figures in the history of jazz. But gathering people in a room to make raucous and sublime music was his ultimate mission. Few heard Pharoah then and we are very lucky to hear it now, in all its glorious imperfection.


The psych-soul singer summons the confidence and exuberance of childhood on an immersive sophomore album.

Childqueen

Childhood used to be a phase. Now, it’s a lifestyle. Whether your inner child seeks coloring books, Capri Suns, or gourmet PB&J, those urges can easily be satiated. This surplus of nostalgia has become so normalized that we have a term for when responsibilities disrupt the sugar rush: adulting. You can only say it with a sigh.
There’s an undercurrent of deep dissatisfaction with adulthood in all this childhood worship, but you won’t find it in Kadhja Bonet’s Childqueen. The psych-soul singer envisions childhood as a becoming rather than a refuge. To be a childqueen is to unearth the pneuma buried beneath adult insecurities and anxieties and self-effacement. The childqueen is not longed for or lost to time; always near, she is summoned. And it isn’t a coincidence that she’s a queen. “We have to be brave enough to bend or break our social inheritance. We have to teach our girls confidence. We have to teach our girls that it’s OK to be seen, to take up space, to use our voices and make mistakes,” Bonet told DIY in 2016, alluding to the gendered undertones of her own struggles with confidence.
Shedding the self-conscious shell of her ornate but bashful 2016 debut, The Visitor, Bonet finds a voice that is expansive and engulfing on Childqueen. It swells, it ascends, it cuts, it carries. Lead single “Mother Maybe” casually sways between warm, balmy coos and surging, sustained shrieks. It is neither an ode to her own mother nor a song of herself, but in it Bonet treats motherhood with wide-eyed wonder, cherishing the mere capacity to produce life. Her voice curls deftly around the shared consonants in “mother” and “maybe,” blurring the words while dwelling on their differences. “Mother maybe/I may be mother,” she chants in the final bridge, scaling her vocal range as she appraises her innate power. The intimacy and joy of her self-recognition feel like a reversal of the movie trope of women looking in mirrors and crying.
Arranged, performed, produced, and mixed by Bonet alone, Childqueen is a labor of willful independence. “Joy” takes full advantage of this autonomy, spinning chunks of frenzied violin, peppy flute, and guitar plucks into a yawning expanse. Even as she sings of lost joy, Bonet’s voice feels unyoked, floating in and out of the foreground. “...,” another near-instrumental, uses flute trills and stabs of bright synths to build to a blissful flicker. “La-lala-la-la,” Bonet sings absentmindedly. Shrouded in her own sounds, she luxuriates in quiet contentment.
By themselves, these flights of indulgence might suggest a narcissistic wunderkind throwing jam sessions in her bedroom, but Childqueen often uses characters’ senses of self to explore relationships and the wider world. “Delphine,” sung from the perspective of an obsessive lover, uses the narrator’s fixation to expose the selfishness that can fuel desire. Bonet pronounces “Delphine” with a skillful, cloying tenderness that becomes sickening as the narrator loses sight of Delphine as a person. “I found your favorite ring/Behind the bed/What’s the matter?/Sweet sweet Delphine,” Bonet sings as Delphine drifts away.
“Thoughts Around Tea” tells the story of a courtship that never progresses due to declined invitations and deferred meetups. As the story briskly unfolds, Bonet focuses on how the main characters, a worker from a city and a farmer from the countryside, are too afraid to leave their respective milieus. “And they would never meet again,” she snaps after their final missed connection. This is the thrill of Childqueen: Bonet lets her imaginative, polymath inner child run free—but she never loses sight of adult reality.