The Russian collective’s dance-pop protest mixtape arrives a decade after their guerrilla performances went viral across the globe. But its message is lackluster and belated, conforming to a shallow vision of feminist pop.

Matriarchy Now

Pussy Riot emerged in Moscow in 2011, a year in which the riot grrrl movement and third wave feminism were transitioning into the fourth wave’s digitally focused discourse across the Western world. That year, while cities like Toronto, London, and New York held SlutWalks to reclaim the misogynistic slur and raise awareness about sexual violence, members of the Russian collective began protesting with punk songs. Pussy Riot climbed atop subway cars and took the stage next to a prison, screaming against upcoming parliamentary elections and advocating for incarcerated activists. These displays succeeded in starting conversations, talk being a tenet of early 2010s pop feminism. Both the SlutWalks and the guerilla performances reached varying levels of virality, though it’s questionable what they delivered beyond internet chatter. In a 2012 interview, Pussy Riot compared themselves to Bikini Kill. “What we have in common is impudence, politically loaded lyrics, the importance of feminist discourse and a non-standard female image,” they said. “Discourse” is the operative word here.
The limits of this kind of discourse, and contemporary feminist music more broadly, are apparent on MATRIARCHY NOW, Pussy Riot’s new mixtape. It arrives a decade after founding members Nadya Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina were sentenced to two years in prison for performing in protest against the Russian Orthodox church’s support for Vladimir Putin. The mixtape doesn’t address the anniversary, aside from a line about turning “batons into tampons” and “prisons into clubs.” MATRIARCHY NOW doesn’t appear to address much of anything. It’s not just that the mixtape is a tepid act of defiance, it’s also a tepid pop album.
MATRIARCHY NOW feels about five years late. Songs bounce from sex positivity and equality to outdated feminine stereotypes and boss bitchery—topics the internet has drained of all their vitality. The mixtape is hyperpop-lite, with soft glitches and a giant eggplant emoji on the album cover. The release follows in the vein of last year’s Rage Remixes, in which the band recruited electronic artists like Boys Noize and HANA and shifted from punk to dance pop. The mixtape is a similar effort, a maneuver to make their message more accessible, but also a clear branding strategy.
The project begins with “Princess Charming,” a gender-flipped, fairy-tale subversion that includes a corny girlboss mantra: “Everything I start goes straight to IPO/Everywhere I go I become the CEO.” Lead single “Plastic” paints the perfect woman as a submissive doll over bumping bass and Auto-Tuned whispers, more Die Antwoord than riot grrrl. “Sugar Mommy” swirls around a wicked carnivalesque melody, dominatrix musings, and a Bernie Sanders name check. It’s not until “Hatefuck,” the penultimate track, that the mixtape starts to develop some depth. Deep bass and dubstep skitter and crash under erotic death threats: “Kinda would rather fuck your dad/Shove my panties in his mouth.” The emotional vacancy of the previous songs only further highlight this outburst of fury.
Tove Lo, the Swedish pop star and the mixtape’s executive producer, reveals herself as a curator who loves to, above all, play it safe. Features from left-of-center pop artists like iLoveMakonnen, Big Freedia, and Slayyyter carry the potential to imbue the tracklist with an experimental edge and some much-needed intensity, but instead, they’re juiced for their shticks: Freedia as the twerking cheerleader, Makonnen as the soft-spoken rapper.
Music was always secondary to Pussy Riot’s politics, until it led to coverage in the U.S. media. In 2013, some members even left the group because they found the idea of releasing music antithetical to the anti-capitalist ideals and “war on authoritarianism” that was once at the collective’s core. The new mixtape certainly doesn’t prioritize musical ingenuity, but seems preoccupied with Pussy Riot’s status as activist pop stars. There’s little that sets MATRIARCHY NOW apart from the current market of sex-positive, size-inclusive, pitched-up pop. These once-radical themes are now oversaturated, and the ideas are no longer subversive. When individual power supersedes collective justice, feminism is merely a feel-good anthem. Today’s pop feminism exists under a wide umbrella, from Lana Del Rey’s ultra-feminine vulnerability to Lizzo’s empowerment-themed Top 40 hits; from Charli XCX singing about cheating to Beyoncé sampling Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Pussy Riot just huddle up right beside everyone else.
In a recent interview about the mixtape, Tolokonnikova mentioned the importance of “magical thinking” and a “naive approach to life–to be able to fantasize about a better world because it’s something that unlocks your imagination and our collective imagination.” She continued, “Build a world where everyone’s free and there is no prisons, and money just fall from the tree and there is no police and celebrating your own power.” But the mentality of MATRIARCHY NOW doesn’t come across as progressive idealism or even escapism; its vision is blurry and out of touch.


It’s no return to form, but the alt-rock band’s sixth album taps into a well of quarantine-bound inspiration for some of their most varied and carefree songs in over a decade.

Physical Thrills

Ever since Silversun Pickups released Carnavas in 2006, its breakout single “Lazy Eye” has loomed over them like a dusty trophy. It vaulted the band to indie rock fame with massive opening gigs, coveted video game placements, and constant radio airplay. It’s a great song, no doubt—a sprawling alt-rock gem whose tense riffs and snarled lyrics were practically made for windows-down car rides with friends—but it shrouded the band in Smashing Pumpkins comparisons and, in the process, set the bar high for the rest of their career. Chasing a similar sound never resulted in an equal return; a pivot to mid-tempo pleasantries was boring at best. Now, more than 15 years later, Silversun Pickups may have found their next best evolution: a little bit of everything and no fucks to give.
When the pandemic hit, Silversun Pickups halted touring and guitarist Brian Aubert resumed full-time dad duties. As weeks turned into months, he began doodling song notes and recording demos, purging the melodies that accumulated in his head. He considered these creative exercises or maybe the beginnings of a musical—something far removed from the Silversun Pickups sound. But after tracking a handful with producer Butch Vig, Aubert showed them to bassist Nikki Monninger, drummer Christopher Guanlao, and keyboardist Joe Lester. Born in an environment free from pressure or expectations, the material would be reshaped in the hands of Silversun Pickups as a group, filtering pop hooks, horror-inspired sound effects, and self-described “dream shanties” through their brand of brooding alt-rock angst.
Physical Thrills presents Silversun Pickups as a band with a rejuvenated approach. At its peaks, the album channels the unfiltered enthusiasm and surplus energy of young adulthood into uptempo indie rock that flickers with unexpected embellishments. On standout “System Error,” Monninger tears through a burly bassline that’s rendered undeniably suave thanks to her effortless playing. Paired with Aubert’s sinister delivery and a warped, unsettling guitar slide in the bridge, the song maintains the unpredictable menace of a dog baring its teeth. The ample reverb and slow, romantic percussion of “We Won’t Come Out” lure you into a dream before snapping into a feverish breakdown, like Silversun Pickups’ take on Radiohead’s “We Suck Young Blood.” Arriving at these songs takes a while—the album’s tracklist feels bloated and most songs run a minute or two longer than necessary—but they serve as guideposts helping Physical Thrills’ adventurous paths to meet back in the middle.
Silversun Pickups have always excelled at tiny explosions: Aubert’s howl that ushers in those crashing guitars in “Lazy Eye,” the dueling guitar solos that blur into one in “Panic Switch,” or that twinkling riff cushioning the outro of “Three Seed.” While recent records stripped the color from the band’s potential fireworks, Physical Thrills lets them shine again, if only for a brief flash. Take the blown-out vocal harmonies that jolt into focus during opener “Stillness (Way Beyond)”; the 8-bit tone coating the guitar slides in “Empty Nest”; or the tropical drum break in “Hidden Moon” that lightens an otherwise heavy affair. While the album has its share of outright misses, like the sleepy unofficial suite of “Dream at Tempo 050,” “Dream at Tempo 310,” and “Dream at Tempo 150,” the bursts of passion sprinkled throughout make these letdowns more tolerable.
Regardless of when you last checked in on Silversun Pickups, Physical Thrills won’t sound like a return to form. No one song captures a sense of unbridled possibility quite like “Lazy Eye” did. That’s arguably for the best, though. Silversun Pickups tap into a well of quarantine-bound inspiration that results in some of their most varied and carefree songs in over a decade, even if the majority overstay their welcome. They’re trying something new while remaining indifferent towards its reception—a trope for good reason. The passionate debut that introduced this band to the world is long past. In its place, Silversun Pickups are finally offering music substantial enough to suit them in their modern-day iteration.


In standard and extended editions, Taylor Swift’s 11th studio album races to fill the gap between her intimate songwriting and her increasingly outsized persona. It’s unruly, unedited, and even a little tortured.

Taylor Swift: The Tortured Poets Department / The Anthology

Taylor Swift’s music was once much bigger than her. A born storyteller, she gathered up the emotional ephemera of her life and molded it into indelible songs about herself, but also about young women—about their sorrow, their desire, their wit and will. She was the girl next door with the platinum pen, her feelings worth hearing about not simply because they existed but because she turned them into art.
Those days are gone. Swift, pumped up to mythical proportions by discursive oxygen, is bigger than her body of work—no knock against her body of work. She is her own pantheon: a tragic hero and a vindicated villain; an inadvertent antitrust crusader and a one-woman stimulus package; an alleged climate criminal and fixer; The Person of the Year of the Girl. Over the past 13 months, she’s strapped on her spangled bodysuit and performed a Herculean feat three nights a week on the highest-grossing tour of all time, earning her vaunted billion-dollar valuation. Her musical achievements are remarkable. But nobody makes a billion dollars from music alone.
The Tortured Poets Department, Swift’s 11th studio album, senses that widening gap between Taylor Swift the artist and Taylor Swift the phenomenon, and wants to fill it with a firehose of material. The burden of expectation is substantial: This is Swift’s first body of new work since the end of a years-long relationship and a pair of high-profile, whirlwind romances—one of which, with the 1975’s Matty Healy, appears to have provided much of the inspiration here. Fans came to Tortured Poets seeking emotional catharsis, or at least the salacious details. Swift, it seems, wanted the comfort of familiarity. Returning to Jack Antonoff and the National’s Aaron Dessner, her primary songwriting and producing partners of the last several years, Swift picks up threads from Folk-more and Midnights without quite pulling anything loose.
Tortured Poets’ extended Anthology edition runs over two hours, and even in the abridged version, its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level, where Swift’s writing is, at best, playfully unbridled and, at worst, conspicuously wanting for an editor. The winking title track—a joke about its subjects’ self-seriousness—makes fun of the performance of creative labor, which is funny, given the show that Swift is putting on herself. She piles the metaphors on thick, throws stuff at the wall even after something has stuck, picks up the things that didn’t stick and uses them anyway.
That’s why we end up in “Florida!!!” for no apparent reason; why the dirge “So Long, London” names five different causes of death; why “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” is allowed to work a schoolyard premise until it cracks. But unruliness also produces the wild wonder of “But Daddy I Love Him,” a spiritual descendent of “Love Story” where the protagonists are knocking down castle walls instead of stealing glances in the ballroom. Dessner’s propulsive string arrangement and Swift’s narrative marks keep the song moving even as it stretches towards six minutes, reaching flights of fantasy unlike anything else on this album. Swift is nimble here, heel-turning and cackling through the chorus (“I’m having his baby/No I’m not, but you should see your faces”).
Perhaps she’s after a sort of text painting—an effort to reflect the all-consuming, uncontainable nature of her sordid affair in the shape of the music itself. Perhaps she is playing with scale, drawing a contrast between a relationship’s brevity and its broad impact. “Fortnight,” a lethargic, druggy opener with an oozing Post Malone feature, sets up both the timeline and the stakes: “I love you/It’s ruining my life/I touched you for only a fortnight.” From there, Swift assembles, song by song, an exquisite corpse of a love interest, a “tattooed Golden Retriever” who smokes like a chimney and plays with guns and makes her feel like a kid again and could maybe, possibly, father kids of her own. He is alluring and unreliable. He has a terrible reputation. He is the conduit through which Swift returns to many of the themes that have defined her 2020s output: marriage and commitment; the currency of youth; the cruelty of public opinion.
There is a clear emphasis here on vulnerability; it’s an effort to rub some of the varnish off of Taylor Swift the commercial product and focus on Taylor Swift the tender, unlucky romantic with whom we fell in love so many years ago. No matter her stature, Swift can still reach the everywoman. She is versed in memespeak: “Down Bad” works because of the juxtaposition between its banal hook and its description of “cosmic love”; the corporate girlies will go feral for “I cry a lot but I am so productive” (“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart”). I can even get on board with the outlaw machinations of “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” if mostly for the lyrical backflip of its chorus: “They shook their heads saying, ‘God help her’ when I told ’em he’s my man/But your good Lord didn’t need to lift a finger/I can fix him, no really I can.”
Swift would have us believe that this album represents an unprecedented level of access to her inner life—an exorcism of her true feelings about a relationship whose general outline is widely recognizable. “I’ve never had an album where I needed songwriting more than I needed it on Tortured Poets,” she told an audience in Melbourne ahead of the release. Remember, though, that she has been using songs to litigate her private affairs with public figures since her breakup with Joe Jonas in 2008. What’s changed is not the intimate writing; it’s the appetite for the minutiae of Swift’s life, and the sheer quantity of material she’s feeding it with. Clues and keywords that might once have been left for the liner notes are littered throughout the lyrics. If you know, you know; if you don’t, please choose from any of the hundreds of explainers.
It’s not Swift’s fault that we’re so obsessed with her, but this album gives the impression that she can’t quite hear herself over the roar of the crowd. Tearjerkers like “So Long, London” and “loml” fall short when every lyric carries equal weight. There’s no hierarchy of tragic detail; these songs fail to distill an overarching emotional truth, tending to smother rather than sting. It would help if Swift were exploring new musical ideas, but she is largely retreading old territory—unsurprising, perhaps, given that the last three years of her life have been consumed by re-recording her old albums and touring her past selves. The new music is colored in familiar shades of Antonoff (sparse drum programming, twinkly synths) and Dessner (suppler, more strings). Songs sound like other songs—“I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” like Midnights’ “Mastermind”; the intro of “So Long, London” like that of Folklore’s “My Tears Ricochet.” Her melodies feel staid, like they are made to fit the music, rather than the other way around.
Also familiar are Swift’s tortured ideas about her own public image. The morbidly sexy Antonoff joint “Guilty as Sin?” has her “drowning in the Blue Nile,” borrowing the backbeat of “The Downtown Lights,” and comparing herself to Jesus, crucified for her trysts. On “Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?”, the imagery is convoluted: Swift is both a defanged circus animal and a witch who “put narcotics into all of [her] songs.” The Swift of “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart” is more fun but still creepy—a glittering zombie under stage lights, smiling as she rots away inside.
Swift the workhorse, Swift the beacon of capitalism, Swift on a never-ending conveyor belt between the stage and the studio. This is the Swift that brings us The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, maximally bloated with 15 (15!) additional songs. Those that stand out mostly do so for the wrong reasons: There’s the one that borrows its premise from Olivia Rodrigo, but executes it less skillfully; the one where Swift dwells on her resentment toward Kim Kardashian; the one with that weird lyric about racism in the 1830s. This data-dump release strategy is not at all unique to Swift; it’s a concession to the modern music economy, which incentivizes artists to batch as many songs as possible, in as many packages as possible, to juice streams and sales. I look back fondly on the more modest tactics of “Our Song,” the last track on Swift’s debut, where she literally sang “play it again” in the final chorus.
If Swift believes that output for its own sake is what she has to offer, she underestimates her gift. Listeners who believe that her every ounce of experience is inherently interesting—because she was the one to have it—misunderstand her as well. Taylor Swift doesn’t need a whole album to tell the story of a relationship; she only needs one song, sometimes even one line. She almost has it in Tortured Poets’ title track, with the tossed-off brilliance of “We’re modern idiots.” She’s nearly there with the vignette, which needs a bit more burnishing, about her man slipping a ring from her middle to her eager left ring finger at dinner. You can see what she’s chasing here: the moment in time that triggers a flash of feeling that lasts forever—the sort of thing people call Swiftian. We’ve been students of Swift’s poetry for years. The lesson of The Tortured Poets Department is not to push through the pain—it’s to take the time to process it.


Watching Movies With the Sound Off is a quantum leap in artistry from Mac Miller’s 2011 debut, Blue Slide Park. Featuring production from Flying Lotus, the Alchemist, Clams Casino, Pharrell Williams, and Earl Sweatshirt, and a rare Jay Electronica verse, it’s the wide-eyed kid brother of Blue Slide Park home from college extolling the virtues of meditation and salvia.

Mac Miller: Watching Movies With the Sound Off

Watching Movies With the Sound Off

Mac Miller skated into rap with all the bottomless happy-go-lucky charm of a best friend’s insouciant little brother. The documents of his early career are the works of a kid very much in love with hip-hop but frustratingly ill-equipped to translate his verve into compelling music. His songs didn’t feel lived in; their observations were as slight as their lyrics were clunky. Even so, Miller proved a hit on the underaged weekend warrior circuit, and despite a withering critical reception, his 2011 debut album, Blue Slide Park, became the first independent hip-hop album to top the Billboard charts in nearly 20 years.
Things got knotty for Mac just as quickly as he took off, though. Beset by detractors and disillusioned with his career path (and the ever-present “frat-rap” association), he turned to promethazine to cope during 2012’s rigorous Macadelic Tour. Miller also ran into threats of litigation from hip-hop producer Lord Finesse, who says his production was used without permission on a popular mixtape cut, and Donald Trump, who came calling after a 2011 single named after him racked up millions of views on YouTube. Miller kicked the promethazine habit, settled with Finesse out of court (although Trump still taunts him), and then summarily ditched his native Pittsburgh for Los Angeles, where he’s been palling around with members of Odd Future and Kendrick Lamar’s Top Dawg Entertainment collective ever since. Watching Movies With the Sound Off is steeped in the pathos of Mac’s bad year and the musical influence, both direct and indirect, of his new rap friends. It’s the wide-eyed kid brother of Blue Slide Park home from college extolling the virtues of meditation and salvia.
Watching Movies With the Sound Off reintroduces Mac Miller as a druggy philosopher on the mic and a left field talent behind the boards. Gone are the undercooked shaggy dog stories of Blue Slide Park and mixtapes like Best Day Ever. In their place we get a batch of songs that break the surface with snarling, self-deprecating wit (“I don’t act hard/Still read Babar” from opener “The Star Room”) and musings on mortality (“Probably be dead soon inhaling cigarette fumes” on “Avian”) and drugs (“That fetanyl, it numbs me/...Turns you into a junkie” on “Someone Like You”). There’s still a lemon here and there (“I spit the shit that leave a diaper brown” on the otherwise promising lead single “S.D.S.” and “Gees,” with its chorus of “Suck my dick before I slap you with it”), but the Mac Miller of Watching Movies, who feels comfortable trading verses with rap nerd favorites like Jay Electronica and Action Bronson, largely succeeds in distancing himself from the guy peddling kiddie-pool deep rhymes about drinking 40s in front of the police just two years prior.
Miller’s Doom-esque witticisms are dispensed here over production that matches Wiz Khalifa’s 2012 cloud rap gambit O.N.I.F.C. for sheer druggy majesty. Miller handles a good portion of it himself, turning in loping circus music on “Avian” and eerie descending mellotron melodies on the absurdly titled “Suplexes Inside of Complexes and Duplexes.” “Aquarium” stir fries Tune-Yards’ “Powa,” churning out a slow-building and hypnotic barn-burner replete with massive drums and tasteful strings. The rest of Watching Movies’ production is farmed out to blunted Cali hip-hop luminaries like Flying Lotus and the Alchemist as well as emerging production talents like Clams Casino and Odd Future’s Earl Sweatshirt. Lengthy passages of stately, ephemeral soundscapes give Watching Movies the feel of a quixotic vision quest with Miller playing the role of the wizened sherpa.
The hazy sprawl of Watching Movies also gives Mac a chance to dart outside the boundaries of hip-hop a little. He ditches rapping on a few cuts, exposing a singing voice in line with the Mark Everett school of coarse-throated, disembodied vocalisms on the oceanic Clams Casino assisted “Youforia” and Pharrell’s gossamer “Objects in the Mirror.” Both are lightweight love songs that make up for what they occasionally lack in lyrical profundity with an open armed earnestness. He one-ups both with “REMember,” a letter to a fallen friend full of heartsick what-if scenarios (“You had a girl, I kinda wish you knocked her up/So I could meet your son and talk you up”) and frank talk about the therapeutic power of crying. All three are instances of Miller imparting stories that dig deeper than the bedroom boasts and quests for weed that made up the bulk of his songwriting up to this point.
Watching Movies With the Sound Off is a quantum leap in artistry, but it’s not without faults; the album’s about three songs too long, and a couple of the tracks in the back end just plain run together. Also, while all of the guest spots here are welcome deviations from Miller’s adroit Stones Throw homage, they routinely punctuate how much room he’s got left to grow as a writer. It’s highlighted most poignantly on “Suplexes Inside of Complexes and Duplexes”, where Jay Electronica shows up unannounced to kick a nonsensical verse, his first in years, and blows the whole album sky high just recounting the story of The Wizard of Oz, and also in the spoken word interlude after “Red Dot Music,” which features breakout battle rap star Loaded Lux lampooning “Easy Mac with the cheesy raps,” ruthlessly snarling “Who the fuck is Mac Miller?” Watching Movies With the Sound Off begins to broach the subject, but the question still stands.


The agile singer-songwriter smoothly transitions from the effortlessness of his 2017 debut to a sophomore record rich with complexities.

Stock Child Wonder

There’s an opacity baked into the technicolor fever dreams of Knox Fortune’s solo work, euphoric washes of largely synthetic instrumentation—all of which begs to be played outdoors. His vocal inflection, usually multi-tracked in fuzzy layers, is at once ageless and genderless; his arrangements embrace industrialism (the featured instrument on “Strange Days,” the mesmeric standout from 2017’s Paradise, is a clattering spray can) as often as they hearken upon well-worn new wave acts. His music is so enveloping and bright that at times it leaves you waiting for the other shoe to drop—for the warm hooks to swerve offkey and for Fortune’s flower-child bliss to turn sour.
That moment never arrives on his sophomore effort Stock Child Wonder, a record so expansive that its high isn’t dulled by mood stabilizers. Fortune’s absorbing melodies are subtler than they first appear: he rarely employs the same verse structure twice, and he frequently places instrumental breaks where you expect a chorus to be. The drum-based tracks “Static” and “Shirtless” are embellished with double-time vocal passages; and the offbeat synth on “Sincerity” allows Fortune to play loose with the time signature. If Paradise’s seeming effortlessness was its most charming quality, Stock Child Wonder’s unassuming formal complexities are an even greater testament to Fortune’s strength as a songwriter.
Yet the melodies are only half the equation—as a producer, Fortune is equally devoted to presentation. The gauzy engineering, which might have been used as a crutch, instead provides leeway for his more eccentric impulses. “Shirtless” kicks off with a campfire guitar and closes with a delicate violin arrangement, whereas “Gemini” juxtaposes disco strings with Caribbean-sounding drums. The Elliott Skinner duet “Morning Light” is sequenced as the album’s centerpiece, a nearly six-minute percussion-less suite highlighted by an austere trumpet solo. Its sincerity isn’t entirely discordant, but it’s enough of an anomaly to seem slightly out of place on Stock Child Wonder, its ponderousness never revisited.
Fortune got in on the ground floor of Chicago’s 2010s rap renaissance, producing for Joey Purp and Vic Mensa (who bestowed Fortune with his stage name) and notching a Grammy for his work on Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book. Although Fortune’s solo records are more reminiscent of Beck than Do or Die, there are intuitive callbacks to Chance and the Social Experiment’s creative milestones and the frenzied idealism with which they stare down addiction and trauma. Given the overtly Christian tones of Chance’s subsequent music, Stock Child Wonder offers welcome reminders of the low-stakes innocence and exuberant spontaneity that made Acid Rap and Surf irresistible. On the energetic “Hideout,” Fortune sings, “We used to hide out in back of our house/Lay in the garden and cover our mouths.” It’s the same brand of first-person-plural snapshot found in Chance’s coming-of-age diaries and roller-rink reminiscences, but where Chance hinted at the despair lurking behind his drugs and faith, Fortune mostly eschews remorse: on “Come Over,” getting high and growing up are just things to do, preferably with a nice woman at your side.
Stock Child Wonder pulls from a broader sonic palette than Paradise, yet feels surefooted even at its most discursive. Its disparate threads are held together by Fortune himself, who, for all his restraint as a performer, is at once earnest and undramatic. While his unvarnished lyricism yields a few bricks (“I couldn’t run unless I ran with you,” he croons on “Morning Light”), his best writing bears a visual alacrity, which brings to mind Evan Dando’s moony nostalgia. “Shirtless” finds its narrator and a companion riding around aimlessly in a sticky-seated Volvo. The narrative doesn’t really go anywhere, which is beside the point; in the final verse, Fortune sets the scene: “My skin stuck to the leather, on the couch in your apartment/In a heatwave in October, back when phones were Motorolas.” Even the ostensible breakup songs, “Change Up” and “Sincerity,” are so unflaggingly optimistic as to feel aspirational. Fortune doesn’t radiate naivete so much as he does unflappability.
The final track, “Always,” a rapturous love song, breaks through Stock Child Wonder’s pleasant haze. The three-chord piano melody is the simplest on the album, and while its placement doesn’t undermine the rest of the record (as a finale, it recalls Mac Miller’s “Youforia,” the uncharacteristically ardent windup of Watching Movies with the Sound Off), it’s the only song that might accurately be labeled a ballad. Fortune stretches his vocal range, straddling countertenor and falsetto, and belts the swelling chorus. As a coda, it’s a tantalizing suggestion that he’s still only providing us with a glimpse.

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The nominally bicoastal pop trio’s fourth album is musically complacent and emotionally lifeless.

gg bb xx

If you haven’t heard LANY’s music yet, you’ve heard a dozen variations of the same thing: syrupy synths and watered-down beats, electropop shuffles and lyrics culled from Instagram captions. This is the sound slumping across Spotify, playlist-friendly and palatable enough to put on shuffle; this is music that can never disappoint you, because you’ve been conditioned to expect nothing from it. Lauv, a reigning sadboi of streaming, sounds like this, all smeared vocals and finger snaps; so do, at times, Tove Styrke, who rasps quasi-confessional electropop, and Dixie D’Amelio, the TikTok star turned singer who cycles through market-tested genres. It’s the limp, flat soundtrack of Ubers and malls everywhere.
LANY stands for “Los Angeles New York,” but realistically, it means nothing—the group was desperate for an available four-letter word for “design and aesthetic purposes.” Their latest album chases that vague desire for a vibe. Every synth sounds like it’s swaddled in cotton batting, every drum pattern sounds like a shadow. LANY don’t pretend to cobble together some deeper meaning; the vacuum is the point. gg bb xx is their second album within a year, and even the title is just a random batch of letters: “I wanted a title that had no pretense, no preconceived notion,” one band member is quoted in the retail copy. “Whatever the song feels like to you, that’s what the title means.” Track after track, LANY ask us to invest in unconvincing emotion while outright denying that their music signifies anything at all.
You can assign the band some influences, if you’re feeling generous: the xx by way of OneRepublic, or an ultra-diluted strain of Glass Animals mixed with Ed Sheeran. But more acutely, this is the sound of infinite scroll. There is no introduction to who LANY are or claim to be, and for all the local name-checks they drag into their lyrics—L.A. freeways and Brooklyn rooftops, Monday night drinks and the Chateau Marmont—these are muddy songs with generic ideas about breakups and flirting. It’s tough to take LANY at their word when they swivel between irony and earnestness without committing to either. A beat drop underscores an exclamation of “Damn!” as they marvel at a woman who studied abroad in Japan. There are flecks of trop-house, an acoustic-adjacent ballad, and faintly propulsive pop tracks, but too many of these songs sound interchangeable.
The blandness might be more forgivable if these guys didn’t seem so insufferable. To hear LANY tell it, the world is against them because they’re too nice to women, too sensitive and long-suffering. Their incessant gripes are a feat of passive aggression: “Sorry I call again when you don’t pick up/And tell you you’re beautiful but probably too much,” they sing on “dna,” sounding astoundingly unselfconscious. “I stopped working late and I stopped getting high,” they moan on “never mind, let’s break up,” as if this were a great sacrifice. Their love songs can be equally grating, platitudes mashed into nonsensical turns of phrase. “People make rockets that go to the moon/People make mistakes too,” they yowl on “live it down,” with the earnestness of an elementary school choir. “You’re more Paris, Texas than Paris, France,” they coo on “get away,” which is, supposedly, a compliment.
LANY is less of a band, more of a Shutterstock image of what a band nowadays might be. Have you ever quickly needed a band for something, doesn’t really matter what they sound like as long as they play music? Try LANY. Their infatuations feel dubious, their sadness deeply petty. Their songs are translucent and transactional, absent of the basic ingredients that make music interesting. You can press skip the next time a LANY song shows up on your company-authored playlist of choice, but chances are good that the next track will sound just like it.

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Beach House's newest album, Depression Cherry, might have the silliest, or at least the most inexplicable, title in their catalog, but in every other sense it’s another impeccably measured step forward. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have grown so adept at spinning dreams that they can turn all the lights on the set and still dazzle us.

Depression Cherry

If you view a band as a long-term artistic project, then Beach House have always been perfect. Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally have done everything right: They’ve found the ideal balance of dim, lush tones; their sound progresses at a graceful, even clip; they leave just the right amount of time between albums. Even their name is perfect: Beach houses are rickety, inviting spaces that, by nature of their existence, live outside of time. If a beach house were to change noticeably—if that paperback you left there last May isn’t still sitting upside-down and open to the same page, gathering dust on the same shelf you left it—you'd be upset.
Part of the joy of yielding to their luxuriant music, then, comes from sensing the comfort of these solid borders framing it. Their music explores the sadness of pleasure, and the pleasure of sadness, and with each record they deepen this inquiry a little more. Their newest, Depression Cherry, might have the silliest, or at least the most inexplicable, title in their catalog (compare it with the euphonious clarity of Teen Dream, or Bloom, or Devotion), but in every other sense it’s another impeccably measured step forward. Their albums might be an ideal soundtrack for daydreaming, but Scally and Legrand seem remarkably clear-headed about their work.
The most noticeable changes they make here are adjustments to lighting and angles. They’ve stripped back the booming drums of Bloom and boosted the synth and guitars, giving a new physicality to ethereal sounds. On "Sparks", Scally’s vintage-organ keyboard patch is dissonant, mixed right up front, and a little uncomfortable, like a crick in the song’s neck. The slide guitars have a brittle edge, suggesting the involvement of actual human fingers. The backing vocals are mixed a few inches closer, so they sound less like a celestial choir than an earthbound crew of worried voices whispering secrets.
These minor tweaks result in a sound that retains the band’s grand theatricality, but also lets you smell the grease paint a little more, feel the itch of the Victorian-era fabrics on your skin. When Legrand sings "Tender is the night for a broken heart/ Who will dry your eyes when it falls apart?" on the sweeping mid-album highlight "Space Song", it registers as exactly the sort of high-flown Romantic soliloquy she’s always preferred. But then a buzzing, dinky-sounding synthesizer burbles up into the track, wandering onstage like a comic foil. Like the old drum machines they prefer, touches like these give the music an air of innocence, evoking silent films, community theater productions, puppet shows. Legrand and Scally have grown so adept at spinning dreams that they can turn all the lights on the set and still dazzle us.
"Trance is a big part of our thing," Scally said in their recent Pitchfork interview. "We'll repeat a part for three hours while we wait for the next piece to fall into place." On Depression Cherry, you can almost hear these dawning moments as they happen, with a palpable click. The bone structures of these songs are closer to dance tracks—with builds, drops, peaks, and switch-ups—than the flourishes of traditional pop songwriting, and this frame allows Beach House to stretch out and telescope their songs without getting lost. On "PPP", Legrand alternates between a pinwheeling melody and a more open-ended, spoken-word performance, with Scally’s arpeggiated guitar stitching a visible, silvery thread through both.
Underpinning everything, as always, is the drone. Legrand’s finger almost never lets up on a chord’s root or fifth note in a Beach House song. You can see her live, doing this—she keeps one hand pressed on the keyboard at all times, grounding the song even as her vocal soars and Scally’s guitar glitters. On Depression Cherry’s opening track "Levitation", a lovely saturated D chord opens slowly out of a faint high-F# drone, which never disappears from the song’s edges. The omnipresence of these drones in their songs suggests that their fantasies have a fatalistic tint: The drone is always there, the hum of the air conditioner that’s too loud in your vacation condo, the fly that won’t stop buzzing. That buzzing note is as legible on Bloom’s "Irene" as it is on many of the songs here, and it’s why we feel our gut tugged to Earth and our skulls lifted skyward when Legrand’s voice reaches for her highest notes.
One of the first lines Legrand sings on the album, from "Levitation", is "There’s a place I want to take you." Isolated, it’s an emblematic Beach House lyric—a promise of transportation that leaves the destination unspecified. In fact, it doesn’t even promise arrival: she just wants to take you there. It is this melancholia, the exquisite ache of being nearly aloft, that Beach House has perfected. With every album, someone observes—rightly—that the band has never sounded exactly this full and soaring before. From their muted first two records, into their Sub Pop debut Teen Dream and then Bloom, Beach House always seem to be just leaving the ground as we catch them. It’s a trick of the light, and it speaks to the sadness that makes their music linger: Transporting experiences, they gently remind us, are always round-trip tickets back to everyday life.


Michael Gira reunites his epochal band, retaining its bleakness and melodrama but presenting it now via his love for apocalyptic country blues.

Swans: My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky

Swans debuted in the early 1980s with the starkest and ugliest music imaginable: Nerve-shreddingly slow and plug-your-ears loud, somewhere between no wave and doom metal, with lyrics that viewed humanity as a sheep-like mass that deserved whatever horror came its way. Melody, nuance, and gentleness came later, but by then it was too late. Swans' rep as unrepentant industrial brutalists had stuck. Sure, it was unfair, but that's what happens when you introduce yourself with a sound that singular and abrasive.
Swans frontman/mastermind Michael Gira was notoriously unhappy about that rep. His early records made their point-- music can sometimes hurt, and sometimes that hurt is weirdly pleasurable-- and by the late 80s his interests lay elsewhere. Sure his lyrics remained oppressive, abject, and generally icky, but his bellowing and moaning became a mournful croon. Humanity and beauty kept leaking in, almost despite the band's best intentions. As the 90s went on, Swans albums became as much about exploring gorgeous (if disquieting) ambient texture as crushing heads. Gira's songs blossomed from skeletal rhythmic sketches into lush epics that predicted a lot of post-rock.
But Swans' music, whatever the period, was driven by a philosophy of no compromises. Gira wanted the freedom to change direction whenever he wished. Swans fans and critics refused to shut up about his earlier, more brutal records, as if Gira were Woody Allen raised on Marquis de Sade. So he did the only reasonable thing an intractable man could do: He killed the band in 1997, dumped its historical baggage, and tried to enjoy the freedom of no expectations in a new project, Angels of Light.
Perhaps 13 years was enough time to put Swans into perspective, though, because here's My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky. Its existence is surprising to say the least, especially considering Gira's sneering dismissal of the whole idea of bands reuniting. What's less surprising is that Gira's shifted musical directions yet again, though his voice and the inimitable end-times vibe make My Father instantly recognizable as a Swans album.
I understand why Swans' music, even the later and more melodic period, can be off-putting to those who prefer their music more humane and humorous. Gira can be a blackly funny fucker, but to truly enjoy Swans, it does help to have some affection for music that's, well, bleak. Really bleak. Theatrically bleak. Because however funny or lovely or melodramatically stirring he can be, there's always going to be a core of desolation to Gira's songwriting.
My Father reinforces that fact, but it does so with a stomping, swinging, snarling live-band urgency that sounds little like Swans' last album, 1996's Soundtracks for the Blind, which leaned heavily on the band's love for tape loops and ambient soundscapes. My Father is less about the Eno-esque sonic tapestries and more about Gira's love for apocalyptic country blues. The musicians sound go-for-the-throat savage after their long absence, as if Gira presented them with a batch of blackened lyrics and they couldn't wait to pound the songs into shape.
In other words, My Father grooves, and grooves hard. "Eden Prison" features one of Gira's most menacing performances in recent years, but really his snarling contempt is a bonus given the intensity the band brings to the galloping rhythm. Unlike the keyboard-driven Soundtracks material, which often had to be radically reconstructed for the band's final tour (as heard on 1998's posthumous live album, Swans are Dead), you can imagine the reconstituted Swans taking these new songs to the stage and kicking them out as-is.
Gira's new songs are obviously far more refined than band's bash-and-groan 80s material. (Just about every song ever written is more refined than something like 1984's "Raping a Slave".) There are still touches of the Soundtracks era and its atmospherics, though it's usually restricted to intros and outros. But this is the closest Gira's come in decades to the band's old immediacy, intensity, and brute force. "My Birth" is traditional hard rock filtered through Swans' drone-happy sensibility, the one to play for Queens of the Stone Age fans. And while "No Words/No Thoughts" opens the album with a moody wash of church bells, it immediately drops into the kind of swampy lurch that once made Swans heroes in the sludge metal community.
But if Gira got his Swans groove back, he also got his Swans bile back. This album is the antithesis of 2010's gooey let's-all-be-friends chillwave fun. The only way My Father would make sense on a beach is if nuclear winter had broken out. After all, there's a song here called "You Fucking People Make Me Sick", which sets a new standard for Gira's spit-in-your-eye venom. It is also sung, in part, by Gira's three-year-old daughter (she duets with Devendra Banhart) and opens with what sounds like a didgeridoo. That's Gira's kind of comedy. He always seems to having the most fun when he's at his most sardonic, and when he's at his most sardonic, he's also at his most memorable.
A lot of people have died in Swans songs over the years. (They've also been abused, degraded, violated, and made to wish they were dead.) On My Father, there's "Reeling the Liars In", a full-scale moral cleansing where E**very Liar on Earth, or at least as many as Gira can get his hands on, is loaded onto a pyre and set ablaze. It's the slightest song on the album, and the most vicious, and also the catchiest. I only mention it here at the end only to let new listeners know what they're in for when Gira's in a good mood. Longtime Swans fans are, I'm sure, already smiling.


The debut LP from this Copenhagen band arrives via the same label that introduced Iceage. But First Hate make bright pop music—yearning melodies, sparkling Euro trance keyboards, padding club beats.

A Prayer for the Unemployed

First Hate’s A Prayer for the Unemployed finds its way into the world on Escho, the Copenhagen independent label that first released—and whose owners continue to manage—Iceage. And while perhaps it’s a little unfair to hold up a debut album as emblematic of anything, it does seem to neatly encapsulate how the city’s underground scene has changed over the last half-decade. Back in 2011, Copenhagen was all angry young men making visceral punk and industrial music that spoke its intent through cryptic lyrics and heathen runes. But that period lasted for barely a blink of an eye. Before long, Iceage’s singer Elias-Bender Rønnenfelt was exploring plaintive synth music in Vår, and Hannes Norrvide had embarked on the long road to transforming his former solo project Lust for Youth from misanthropic noise into a sort of romantic Balearic boyband.
And now there is First Hate. A Prayer for the Unemployed finds Anton Falck Gansted and Joakim Nørgaard building bright, synthetic pop music from yearning melodies, sparkling Euro trance keyboards, and padding club beats. One obvious touchstone is the Pet Shop Boys, with whom First Hate share a taste for smartly observed vignettes of complicated love and metropolitan living (and you sense Neil Tennant might see an album title like A Prayer for the Unemployed and happily claim it as his own). But they still have the sense of a band who rehearse in Copenhagen’s graffiti-plastered practice space Mayhem, and part of the appeal of this record is in the tension it draws between DIY practice and pop sensibility, juxtaposing underground temperament with choruses that soar.
There are echoes throughout of the scene that spawned them. Gansted has a voice that’s a close ringer for Rønnenfelt’s—proud and surly and a little bit sensual, as if just roused from sleep. Songs like “Bullets of Dust” and “Supernumerary,” so pretty and urbane on the surface, seethe with undercurrents of lust, confusion, and teenage melodrama. Perhaps their defining moment so far is “The One,” a sashaying piano house track with notes of New Order’s “Temptation,” in which Gansted picks over a relationship that has lapsed into stares and silence. The early verses find him trapped in a cage of indecision. But as the song winds towards its climax on peals of harmonica, a female voice enters the frame: “If I’m not the right one/Tell me what you’re waiting for…” Suddenly the clouds part, and Gansted closes the song with a brief spoken word segment that is decisive and without mercy. “Life is not always about keeping your promises,” he intones. “Life is about following your heart.”
There is a recurrent caddishness to First Hate, the sense that these boys would break your heart and dash off without a moment’s hesitation. But alongside arrogance there is empathy, and the feeling that First Hate want their music to reach out and actually mean something to people. “Copenhagen MMXIV” is an immaculate ballad directed towards a heartbroken girl as she takes a nighttime passage through the city, drawing comfort from the lights of distant windows. Meanwhile, the title track brings to mind another, rather more high-profile Dane, MØ. A song about hope and self-care for a generation overlooked, its breathy synths and clarion-call melody lines recall one of Diplo’s more gently euphoric productions, and its chorus shuns any hint of cynicism or subversion as it pirouettes off towards the clouds.
Moments like this raise questions. Like: will First Hate end up a DIY pop band, or an actual pop band—and does anything, beyond a fanbase, really separate the two? A Prayer for the Unemployed doesn’t quite feel like the finished article. Slightly front-loaded, its boldest moments are dispatched early. Still, there is something potent in First Hate’s mix of innocence and ambition. Too savvy to be naïve, but too wide-eyed to feel fully mature, right now their youth is the source of their power.


St. Vincent’s sleek, streamlined production stands out from the rest of the band’s catalog, but all of the elements you first fell in love with are still here.

The Center Won’t Hold

The Center Won’t Hold, Sleater-Kinney’s ninth album, is about ambition, desire, and fear. Their alliance with St. Vincent has resulted in sleek, streamlined, capital-P Production that stands out from the unadorned directness of the rest of their catalog. But it is bold and loud in the same way we expect from Sleater-Kinney; the tight economies of their previous work are still present, just manifesting themselves differently. The lyrics, too, remain direct and immediate, yet elegant and precise. None of these are new descriptors for Sleater-Kinney. The three women who recorded this album are products of modern society, and they know the rules: Women aren’t allowed to age in public. They’re supposed to camouflage their bodies; they aren’t supposed to still want anything, whether intellectual, artistic, or carnal. All of those hungers are present on The Center Won’t Hold.
The title track opens the record, a statement of intent that segues from distorted industrial to electrical mayhem. The songs on The Center Won’t Hold are about the here and now and how Sleater-Kinney see themselves within it, so it is sad and sardonic, but not mournful. The daily conditions that torment us are described and shared, without conclusion: “Sell our rage, buy and trade/But we still cry for free every day,” sings Corin Tucker in “Can I Go On?” The quasi-robotic dirge “The Future Is Here” opens with, “I start my day on a tiny screen,” before keening: “Never have I felt so goddamned lost and alone.” It isn’t inspiring, but there is something intensely comforting in these public admissions.
The album is political the way the band’s very existence is political, with references both direct and oblique. “She stood up for us/When she testified,” from closer “Broken,” is a reference to Christine Blasey Ford. But it’s an earlier lyric that’s closer to bone: “I really can’t fall apart right now/I really can’t touch that place.” The high tension from the first note of “Bad Dance” feels like the danse macabre portrayed in the lyrics: “If the world is ending now/Then let’s dance,” Carrie Brownstein purrs, ending the hoedown with the line that best sums up the record’s pulsing undercurrent: “And if we’re all going down in flames/Then let’s scream the bloody scream/We’ve been rehearsing our whole lives.” Women who say these words share a solidarity.
There are also bonafide hits on this record, melodies that Velcro themselves to your brain. The aforementioned “The Future Is Here” bubbles seductively, na na na na na choruses and all. “Hurry on Home,” the first single, finds Brownstein channeling the vocal tone and affirmative attitude of the B-52’s’ Kate Pierson. With a silky chorus to smooth everything out, it’s a deliberately sexy foil to the opening track. “LOVE,” a breathless celebration of the band’s history—“Call the doctor, dig me out of this mess”—falls into the grand tradition of songs about being in a band, alongside the Who’s “Long Live Rock,” Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Travelin’ Band,” or the Ramones’ “Danny Says.” You can imagine the anarchist cheerleaders from the “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video chanting, “We can be young/We can be old/As long as we have/Each other to hold.”
Even if tracks like “Can I Go On” or “RUINS” don’t manifest themselves as solidly as some of the others, they’re still interesting, well-constructed, complete thoughts. The Center Won’t Hold is a Sleater-Kinney record not only because their name is on the cover, but because all of the elements you first fell in love with are still here: brutal and unyielding lyrics, Tucker’s superhuman vocals, the solar flares that emit from Brownstein’s guitar, the way Janet Weiss’ authority shapes both the beats and the space between them. Weiss’ statement that she was leaving the band came just days after this album was formally announced; her departure is unfortunate, not just because it is the end of a chapter, but because we won’t get the chance to see the musicians who recorded these songs work them out in public.
The challenge of contextualizing The Center Won’t Hold is that there isn’t much to compare it to. There are no other all-women musical groups of Sleater-Kinney’s longevity, stature, and influence. It matters that there are women in their 40s and 50s singing about the radical topic of… being women in their 40s and 50s, because they have few peers in their realm. It’s impossible to talk about this album without invoking the enormous line that ends “LOVE”: “There’s nothing more frightening and nothin’ more obscene/Than a well-worn body demanding to be seen/Fuck!” It’s no accident that Sleater-Kinney deliver this message within a song that will make you want to pogo around the living room, or that Brownstein’s bare butt adorns the cover of the first single. The personal is political, always.

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On Be and Finding Forever, Common struck a winning, humanizing balance between moralism and hedonism, proving that the two needn't be mutually exclusive. On Universal Mind Control, he-- and the Neptunes-- split his personalities into what seem like two wildly different EPs.

Universal Mind Control

On a song called "Announcement" from his eighth LP, Universal Mind Control, Common raps, "I still love H.E.R., she be needin' the dick/ When it comes to hip-hop, it's just me and my bitch." He's referring to his 1994 song "I Used to Love H.E.R.", where he began to seriously define himself as a moralistic foil to the gangster rap phenomenon. The reference seems ironic on an album this vacuous and amoral.
Then again, the song has been ironic from the start. In conflating hip-hop's downfall with that of a loose woman, Common succumbed to a definitive moral hazard-- misogyny-- of the gangster rap he railed against. During the last faint reverberations of hip-hop's so-called golden age, this odd blend of puritanical defiance and doomed acquiescence wasn't unusual. Notice how, on A Tribe Called Quest's "Check the Rhime", Phife goes from "have all my hos in check" to "my aura's positive, I don't promote no junk" in three seconds flat.
Common emerged (as Common Sense) at the tail end of Afrocentric rap's heyday, which helped him escape obsolescence as his peers fell by the wayside. Treading the precarious line between positive maverick and mainstream star has defined him for his entire career. On Be and Finding Forever, with assistance from Kanye West, he struck a winning, humanizing balance between moralism and hedonism, proving that the two needn't be mutually exclusive. But on Universal Mind Control, his personalities split off into what seem like two wildly different EPs, one awful and one tepid.
The awful half is the first one, a bizarre concoction of featherweight electro, sex raps à la LL Cool J, "Sir Psycho Sexy"-era Red Hot Chili Peppers, party-starting clichés, and interminable A-A-A-A rhyme patterns that were fresh circa "Rapper's Delight". Putting aside the obvious laziness of Common's lyrics and the Neptunes' production, it seems more than anything like a profound failure of self-awareness. On the title track, Pharrell informs us that "This is that new shit and it don't feel the same," which Common contradicts with an almost satirically old-school "dang diggy dang da-dang da-dang dang."
"Punch Drunk Love (The Eye)" is just cynical, with its throwaway Kanye hook (gotta get him in the credits somehow) and buried Auto-Tuned singing by Pharrell. "Make My Day" benefits from a jovial Cee-Lo cameo and a spry jackhammer beat by Mr. DJ that a harder rapper would eat up, but Common needs warm, soulful beats to thrive, and he mostly sounds lost here. At least the inane lyrics ("Baby girl I'm a man/ And we can do this my way/ Take a ride on the highway/ And pretend that it's Friday... and it is!") gain some incidental surging effects from Mr. DJ's efforts. The ugly, blocky nadir "Sex 4 Suga" sounds like an Andy Samberg parody. Things settle down a little with "Announcement", but you know you've got a problem when a Pharrell verse actually livens up your song.
The tepid second half is oddly something of a relief. Common shows signs of life on "Gladiator", surging powerfully over noir strings and jittery piano, but comparing yourself to Nelson Mandela-- not to mention "a radical" who "don't fit the game"-- is a tough sell on this record. At least Common sounds comfortable amid the breezy chimes and canned platitudes. A perfunctory Obama shout-out on "Changes" finds Common taking a rare glimpse outside of himself, but it's too little, too late. Universal Mind Control is a painful misstep from a talented rapper who's decided to be as nasty as he wants to be-- which turns out to be much, much nastier than we'd like.


The Southern rock band culls through its recent archives and compiles a dozen rarities on this odds'n'sods collection.

Drive-By Truckers: The Fine Print (A Collection Of Oddities and Rarities 2003-2008)

In March 1999, George Jones slammed his SUV into a bridge abutment, and Drive-By Truckers got a song out of it. Jones wasn't reeling from alcohol, nor was he being chased by an angry ex, nor did any of the hard-living country tropes play into the crash. Instead, he was simply talking on his cell phone to his daughter. He was in critical condition but recovered eventually. Which is fortunate, because a legend like Jones shouldn't go out that way. Part joking and part shaming, the Truckers' "George Jones Talkin' Cell Phone Blues" acts as a biopic of sorts, framing a consideration of his life and legacy with details from the crash. "He almost stopped loving her today," Hood sings, before admonishing the legend: "Better leave that cell phone alone."
That song kicks off The Fine Print, a collection of "oddities and rarities" that closes out a particularly productive decade for Drive-By Truckers. They were bound to get around to this kind of release sooner or later: At any given time they've had three and sometimes four songwriters in the band at once, so the backlog of unused songs was sure to back up the drains and overflow into a catchall like this one. As a retrospective, The Fine Print is incomplete, covering only 2003 onward (save a recent version of a Pizza Deliverance song). There's no Rob Malone, who left the band following Southern Rock Opera; Shonna Tucker sings only a verse of their redundant cover of "Like a Rolling Stone"; but there are two new Jason Isbell tracks, which reminds you how naturally he fit into the group and how dynamically the band performed his songs. "When the Well Runs Dry" is a tense assessment of romantic and creative desiccation, and you can almost hear the mosquitoes buzzing around the languid "TVA", a shaggy dog story told by a backwoods lifer and interrupted by a simple, graceful guitar solo.
The Truckers don't skimp on the elements that have made them stand out among the southern-rock upstarts: These songs are populated with realistic characters in hard-luck situations, soundtracked with gnarly guitars and gritty vocals. "The Great Car Dealer War" and this version of "Goode's Field Road" (from Brighter Than Creation's Dark) are two more entries into Hood's Southern crime syndicate series. Recorded for The Dirty South, "The Great Car Dealer War" is told from the point of view of an arsonist who burns down car lots, and Hood balances the gravity of his testimony with bits of grim humor. Mike Cooley's "Uncle Frank" may not have quite as strong an impact, but this alternate version of an early song does include a grim coda not included in the original, which gives the song even higher stakes.
Their take on Tom Petty's "Rebels", recorded for "King of the Hill", fits so perfectly among the Truckers' original that I forgot it was a cover, and Hood updates Tom T. Hall's Vietnam-era "Mama Bake a Pie (Daddy Kill a Chicken)" to Iraq, fitting it nicely among the veteran songs on Brighter Than Creation's Dark. But the real story here is their version of "Play It All Night Long", which Warren Zevon wrote as a response to Lynyrd Skynyrd's response to Neil Young's "Southern Man". The Truckers wrote about Skynyrd and Young on 2001's Southern Rock Opera, so this cover acts as a sort of epilogue to that album. Plus, they fold in a few bars from "Ain't That Pretty at All" before throwing the song against a wall and beating it senseless with their guitars.
Unsurprisingly, the rarities on The Fine Print could make a good album, but the oddities are often distracting. Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone", which they covered for Uncut magazine, is pretty much uncoverable, but the Truckers do as good a job as anyone else. The noir blues "Mrs. Claus' Kimono" is about unrest among the elves and reindeer, who plot to off Santa. Hood's conspiratorial tone sounds as out of place here as the song's cartoonish concept, but at least they can poke a little fun at themselves. More crucially, it adds another facet to The Fine Print, which recalls the Truckers' studio albums in its range of distinct tones and subjects: Filled with ups and downs, this collection of toss-offs and also-rans portrays the Truckers as a band that finds inspiration in the unlikeliest places.


The fourth full-length from the hermetic UK electronic wizard is his most confident in ages, a fully-formed showcase for his singular ear and audacious production.

Ultra

The lead single to Zomby’s first album in more than three years was not terribly auspicious. Sure, in the run-up to its release, the prospect sounded almost too good to be true: Zomby and Burial together at last—bass music’s two most notoriously hermetic producers emerging from their studio lairs bearing, one could only assume, fistfuls of charcoal and lightning. But their collaboration “Sweetz” sounded half-assed: desultory in spirit, scattered in form, and overlaid with an insistent vocal loop insisting, “Get me fucked up/Get me fucked up/Get me fucked up,” over and over, like the inner monologue of a user whose serotonin receptors have long since scabbed over. Heard on its own, it didn't sound like much. But “Sweetz” turns out to make a strange kind of sense in the context of the album. Its weird twists and turns draw you in; its lysergic extremes fuck you up. In its dead-eyed way, it comes alive.
Zomby has never played to expectations. From his early, squirrelly dubstep singles and the full-bore breakbeat hardcore of his debut album, 2008’s Where Were U in ’92?—an album that helped set up a broad wave of British rave revivalism from artists like Lone, Special Request, and even Jamie xx—he veered into unexpectedly sentimental territory with 2011’s expansive Dedication, his first album for 4AD. It was a promising turn of affairs, the famously cagey artist finally wearing his heart on his Balmain sleeve. But 2013’s With Love tested even his most stalwart fans’ patience. Its grim mood hung like a pall, and many of its 33 tracks felt like unfinished sketches; some of them, like “Digital Smoke” and “Entropy Sketch,” were merely variants of each other, separated by inelegant fadeouts.
But Ultra is the most self-assured Zomby record in ages, and a huge step forward from the slightly pro-forma DJ tools of last year’s Let's Jam!! EPs. Even at its darkest—which is to say, most of it—he sounds like he’s enjoying himself, from the triumphant fanfare of the opening “Reflection” to the regal tones of the closing “Thaw.” Sometimes, he’s in and out in two minutes, just to see what kind of sparks fly when one sound rubs up against another. Elsewhere, he lets loops tumble on as long as he likes. That strategy doesn’t always work: the cycling synths and voices of “Fly 2” abruptly drop in tempo some two-and-a-half minutes into the tune and then continue spinning away for three more minutes, slow and stuporous, like a battery-operated toy running low on charge. “Her,” on the other hand, is perfect—just a four-bar chord progression made of bright, gleaming synths and booming, Phil Collins-grade toms. It’s so hopeful it makes you a little nervous, because nothing in life works out as well as the utopia it promises.
Ultra is also Zomby’s most experimental record in ages. That might sound strange, given how many of his usual tropes come into play: video-game bleeps, laser blasts, gun-cock samples, and all the other accouterments of grime. But, particularly after the polished sonics of With Love, he’s letting himself get weird again. “Burst” may employ the same arcade chirps that he’s used forever, but the way the stuttering synth riff seems to slow down in mid-tumble is unusual, like grime turned gelatinous. “Quandary,” a co-production with Darkstar, pairs the pinging of tilting pinball machines with a bouncy lead that's almost Caribbean in feel. It’s a disorienting listening experience, especially the drums' mismatched, tangled reverb tails. You feel torn different ways at once—which, given the title, might be the point.
It’s not all so successful. The drab, bitcrushed “E.S.P.,” reminiscent of Actress’ desiccated atmospheres, feels longer than its three minutes; “Yeti,” an icy grime tune in the mold of Wiley’s “Eskimo” or “Igloo” is rather superfluous coming right after “Freeze,” another bright, brittle grime track that sounds absolutely fantastic. (Zomby presumably thought that placing such similar tunes together would be illuminating, and it is: He still hasn’t perfected the art of editing down his tracklists.) And some of his choices, like the gunshots and “Twin Peaks” monologue of “Reflection,” feel slightly uninspired for an artist whose public persona puts such a premium on audacity.
But those are minor quibbles, because when he's on, he’s on. The sparkling “Glass,” the sorrowful “I,” the rough-cut jungle of “S.D.Y.F.” (“So Dance You Fuckers”), a collaboration with The Trilogy Tapes’ Rezzett—all of it finds Zomby sounding refreshed and invigorated. On the closing “Thaw,” he even sets the drums aside, lavishing all his attention on an absolutely gorgeous set of chords played on an absolutely gorgeous set of synthesizer patches. You can hear his passion for fashion coming to the surface here: It resembles draping; it sounds expensive, and it suggests that he’s still got a few tricks up his sleeve.


After 24 years, the electronic pop duo returns with a moving, handsome album that tells a sophisticated story about recapturing innocence.

Fuse

When Ben Watt was diagnosed with a rare, life-threatening autoimmune disease, he made two albums with his wife, Tracey Thorn, that wore the couple’s trauma on their sleeves: Amplified Heart arrived in 1994 and Walking Wounded two years later. The last album that Everything But the Girl wrote together was equally transparent, although it spoke to a different strain of dissociation. Temperamental, released in 1999, came after the unassuming British indie duo had balked at the fame sprung on them by Todd Terry’s remix of their 1994 track “Missing,” which went on to define the club-spiked sound of the late-’90s and led to them declining an invitation to open for a U2 stadium tour. Its pessimistic lyrics spoke of alienation not just from other people, but from any sense of the past or the future. “And you say, ‘Think of the old days,’” Thorn sang on “The Future of the Future (Stay Gold),” the swirling house collaboration with Deep Dish that closed the album. “‘We could have them back again’/Well I thought about the old days/They’ll go bad like they did then.”
The band called it quits and dedicated themselves to home life, raising three kids. Watt founded the dance label Buzzin’ Fly and released solo music; Thorn also made albums and wrote several brilliant books on her life in music and its inspirations. While they offered each other practical creative assistance, their core collaboration was over. Curiously, it returned during another period of alienation. After the pair lived through an extreme version of the pandemic that required them to stringently self-isolate owing to Watt’s illness, Thorn proposed a reboot of EBTG, worried that they might one day realize they had left it too late. Once she persuaded Watt, they approached the project so tentatively that they hesitated to call it EBTG, crediting the song files to TREN—Tracey and Ben. They announced the finished album in similarly low-key fashion: “Just thought you’d like to know that Ben and I have made a new Everything But the Girl album,” Thorn tweeted. “It’ll be out next spring.” She went out for dinner and returned to thousands of retweets.
Considering the circumstances of its creation, it’s not surprising that Fuse is an album that craves connection. It’s as fearful as Temperamental, but harbors none of its cynicism. “Kiss me while the world decays,” Thorn sings on the dubstep-haunted opener “Nothing Left to Lose,” and no other voice could brim so affectingly with anguish and urgency. A deep, desperate bond with someone else, she stresses on “Forever,” might be the only bulwark against the “cruelty” and “scheming” of our mendacious times. The warmth of her vocals and the relative chilliness of the glitchy, cavernous production suggest the scope of the distance they need to breach. But unlike the year-zero mentality of its predecessor, Watt and Thorn also urge maintaining ties to the past, drawing on nostalgic vignettes from their clubbing days at the blissfully ignorant end of the ’90s, as well as the wisdom afforded them by the subsequent decades.
EBTG has never been burdened by its history; they’re more inclined to ditch it from album to album, jumping between bossa nova and lite jazz to jangly indie, rousing ’60s orchestrations, soul, and drum’n’bass. But on Fuse, the duo pick up at least in the spirit of where they left off, keeping their connection to contemporary club culture alive. While the stories of Croydon boys, “girls and night-off waiters” on “No One Knows We’re Dancing” hark back to a Sunday daytime club that Watt ran in 1999, its wistful euphoria and sense of starry-eyed sanctuary dovetail with today’s dancefloors. The serrated “Nothing Left to Lose” evokes “Katy on a Mission” for a corporate London now hollowed of promise; “Caution to the Wind” is an anxious but devotional sad banger with a chorus that feels as if it’s existed forever (European listeners, however, may be distracted by a synth refrain that sounds annoyingly like the announcement chime in Paris train stations); “Forever” is a gamelan-dappled Balearic sunset, albeit one viewed with a giant lump in the throat.
Although the tone can get a little one-note, this personal and cultural lineage deepens the poignancy of Fuse, in which Thorn and Watt broadly consider what we lose and hold on to over the course of a lifetime. There are the clear griefs—“Lost,” a resting heartbeat of a song that flares with glass-rim glimmer, touches on the death of Thorn’s mother, and with her the dissolution of a worldview—but also more existential ones, often conveyed by messing with the fabric of Thorn’s fabled voice. Buried deep in the backdrop of that song, she becomes a barely audible processed burble, a shadow self urging: “Stop hiding after all these years/That front you put on isn’t fooling anyone.” She considers other ways one’s sense of self might be stolen: The alien “Interior Space” seems to touch on going through menopause—“And no I don’t bleed/And yes I am freed/But what is that worth?/Are we all about birth?”—and Thorn’s voice is pitched to sound distorted, desiccated, masculine even. On “When You Mess Up,” a gorgeous, spare piano devotional, a lavishly tender Thorn urges someone to stop giving themselves such a hard time but not to make light of their pain. Then, her voice becomes robotic as she sings, “In a world of micro-aggressions/Little human transgressions/Forgive yourself,” embodying, perhaps, how dehumanizing contemporary discourse can be.
As with EBTG’s original pivot, the appeal of dance music is the vast amount of space it leaves for Thorn’s voice, an instrument that’s only grown more magnetic with age. If everything is already in tatters, rather than second-guess yourself, she dares us to take a chance: the lovers in “Run a Red Light,” elbowing their way into the in-crowd by possibly nefarious means, seem high on hubris, but Thorn sings it with such seduction that you understand why they’re chancing it. “Time and Time Again” chronicles a woman finally leaving a cheating ex and taking her chance with a lover (though the somewhat drab melody undersells it).
The album ends with “Karaoke,” a contemplation by famous non-performer Thorn on what it means to sing, to take a risk at connection. It’s a glowing slow dance with herself, a call and response between an angelic chorus asking whether she sings to “heal the brokenhearted” or “get the party started,” and Thorn’s fulsome responses: “Oh you know I do … And I love that too.” Perhaps that’s what EBTG’s perspective has afforded them—to recognize how easily we can get in the way of life’s moments of innocence. Like Fuse, they’re rare.


The debut LP from singer Perera Elsewhere has the kind of breathy, sighing tone that complements trip-hoppy electronic music—the kind you'd expect to hear in the background at a public place. But laid naked on Everlast, the effect is beguiling and spooky.

Everlast

LA label Friends Of Friends continues its crusade into Berlin with another signing, this time singer-songwriter Perera Elsewhere. She's easily the label's most surprising addition yet, though her smoky atmospherics are of the mood music variety preferred by many of the crew. A member of downtempo trio Jahcoozi (alongside producers Robot Koch and Oren Gerlitz), you might otherwise recognize her sultry tones from Modeselektor's "Silikon," back when she went by given name Sasha Perera. But on Everlast, her solo debut, she mostly abandons the smooth electronica of her past in favour of a gothic atmosphere that actually kind of sounds like it was recorded in a frigid castle, her vocals echoing through chambers of cold stone.
Perera has the kind of breathy, sighing tone that complements well-groomed, trip-hoppy electronic music—the kind you'd expect to hear in the background at a public place, unobtrusive and pleasing to the ear. But laid naked on Everlast, there's a spooky and beguiling quality to it. The album opens with the bluesy strum of "Drunk Man", where her vocals are appropriately slurred so you can just barely make out the words. Her quiet voice is accompanied by steady drums and a distinctly wooden thump of a bassline—earthy sounds with sanguine accents that feel like a deliberate reaction to the perfect production of her other work. It's not very often you hear of an expat in Berlin who tries so hard to sound acoustic.
Not that the production is an afterthought; every element is touched with some level of reverb and so neatly placed that you'll wonder which are judiciously-chosen samples, and which were actually played by hand. Hard-panned multitracking and other stereo spectrum tricks makes the Gonjasufi duet "Giddy" captivating in spite of its stupor, and pitch-shifting on "Shady" lends it an ethereal feel underpinned by implacable noises that sound like guitar strings being melted and stretched like taffy. She even plays off a  ghostly, masculine version of herself on "Carousel," whose simple chorus echoes the bare desperation of Neil Young's Ditch Trilogy—it's amazing the amount of emotional mileage she can get out of merely repeating and enunciating a single word, especially when she's doing it over guitar chords that drip with anguish.
Indeed, as thoughtful as the production on Everlast might be, it's simplicity that's key. Album highlight "Dreamt That Dream" isn't much more than a few mantra-like phrases stuck together and rolled off Perera's tongue almost carelessly, but it proves intoxicating in the album's walk-in freezer of an echo chamber. It works the same magic on the heavy-handed political didactic (and first single) "Bizarre". Her lyrics ("money's running everything/ the same ten families that run the show/ friends with the president and friends with the Pope") amount to high-school-level social commentary, but set against a distant synth whine and decisive acoustic guitar, it's like a 60s protest song dressed up in modern clothes.
Most of all, Perera Elsewhere’s debut is a defiantly quiet record in a scene of maximalism; compare it to the oversaturated landscapes of her labelmates Shlohmo or Groundislava, or the rhythmic attack of Salva, and she's an obvious outlier. But not that much of an outlier; Friends Of Friends has always had a knack for finding artists whose sense of pathos borders on maudlin but usually end up on the right side of the divide. The same goes for Everlast, where even the most earnest moments, like the baroque "Light Bulb" or the self-consciously trippy "Bongoloid", become captivating thanks to her unforgettable voice and cultivated ethereality. It’s a short but penetrating record of far-away, foggy reveries that’ll burrow its way into your consciousness until it haunts you, one breath after another.


Now expanded in a deluxe edition, the Memphis rapper’s blues-inflected third album keeps a tight focus while alluding to the painful loss of mentor Young Dolph.

Glockoma 2 (Deluxe)

With the tragic death of Young Dolph in 2021, the Memphis rapper Key Glock lost not only a close artistic collaborator, but a beloved family member and the single-most influential figure in his career. But instead of constructing a hagiography to his mentor, he has paid tribute by carrying on, a consummate workaholic who tunes out pain by clocking in. This year’s Glockoma 2, now expanded in a deluxe edition, maintains the laser-sharp focus of his previous Southern hustle music while showing a deepening sense of maturity and resolve. As usual, there are no bonus guests or radio-baiting remixes, just straight-up bars.
Glock’s self-reliance is squarely in the tradition of Memphis rap, a scene that has often worked on its own terms. But Glock embodies his hometown not just in business philosophy but in production. While producer Bandplay sticks to a classic Memphis underground sound, all bass kicks and thick claps, he uses samples that add new flair to Glock’s established style. There’s a vintage warmth to Glockoma 2 that recalls the city’s history as a vibrant Mecca of rhythm and blues, from the glistening strings on “2 for 1” or the bluesy guitar of “From Nothing.” Glock is frequently at his most nimble on these throwback numbers, like the turntablist-inflected “In & Outta Town,” which Bandplay constructs from the foundation of a beeping alarm.
Across the album, Glock’s tight flow draws you inward, like he’s rapping in stealth mode. He isn’t laugh-out-loud funny, but there’s a sly wit to his imaginative bars, like when he compares the drip on his neck and wrist to the Nile River on “Ratchet.” You get the sense that Glock is protecting his heart, but gloom and pain lurk around every corner: “Still hanging with the reapers/Hanging with the demons,” as he says on “Sucker Free,” the opener to the deluxe edition. He lets ghostly samples articulate what he himself cannot: On “No Hook,” a pitch-shifted voice repeats the refrain “I hear voices,” a menacing counterpoint to Glock’s usual swagger. On tracks like “Let’s Go” and “Lean Habits,” Glock is backed up by chopped-up choirs, while distorted vocal flips lend a cloudy flavor to “Work” and “Fuck Dat Shit” that evokes Clams Casino beats.
On their Dum and Dummer tapes, Glock and Dolph made for effortless tag team partners; the void of voices on Glockoma 2, save for Glock’s own, only magnifies how unique their chemistry was. But Glock is more than capable of standing on his own; as he puts it bluntly on the closing track, which outlines his continued indifference to co-signs, “Fuck the rap game, just pay myself for a feature.” For Glock, that independence is a principle he inherited from his mentor, who bucked the majors with his Paper Route Empire label. By continuing to put his ideals into action, Glock keeps Dolph’s legacy alive.


Early in their career, Modest Mouse accomplished what may be the ultimate goal of any band: to forge a...

Modest Mouse: Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Good News for People Who Love Bad News

Early in their career, Modest Mouse accomplished what may be the ultimate goal of any band: to forge a unique and recognizable sound from the most basic elements of rock music. By the time they'd released their second album, The Lonesome Crowded West, the band was working with a distinct but manipulable set of characteristic traits-- Isaac Brock's throaty, lisping vocals, Eric Judy's rolling, fluid basslines, and the rigid, muscular drumming of Jeremiah Green. 2000's The Moon & Antarctica crafted these traits into an epic studio masterpiece-- an ambitious, affecting, moody album that built upon the band's musical strengths rather than obfuscating them. But in the wake of that record, the band's future seemed dubious. Under the pressure of following their defining LP, the band lost their drummer and regained original guitarist Dan Gallucci, a substantial lineup shift that seemed to constitute a threat to the very core of Modest Mouse's characteristic sound.
In the wake of all this uncertainty, it comes as no small relief that Good News for People Who Love Bad News is just the kind of Modest Mouse record we've come to expect from the band. As suggested by the familiar starburst pattern on the CD, now stained a pharmaceutical pink, Good News is less a product of the ambitious experimentation of The Moon & Antarctica than it is the young, violent Modest Mouse on anti-depressants. Opener "The World at Large" is classic Modest Mouse in composition-- Isaac Brock singing a melody of thirds over subtle chord changes and clean, delay-soaked electric guitar. But the overall tone of the song is disarmingly anesthetic: The jabbing guitars and insistent drumming of early Modest Mouse are ostensibly absent, replaced with subtle e-bowed guitars and distant "bop bop bop's." Certainly, "The World at Large" is more resigned in tone and content than any Modest Mouse song to date, but what makes it truly striking is that its resignation never seems fully convincing -- the frantic anxiety of early Modest Mouse still lurks just below the surface.
"The World at Large" is followed by the first single from Good News, the awe-inspiring "Float On". Like The Moon & Antarctica's "Paper Thin Walls", this song seems fundamentally different from almost everything Modest Mouse has released to date. In the past, even the band's upbeat songs have essentially been sped-up dirges, due in no small part to former drummer Jeremiah Green's restless, serpentine drum patterns. On "Float On", new drummer Benjamin Weikel more than pulls his weight, his simple but inventive playing affording the song an anthemic character never before realized by the band. This anthemic side of "Float On" reaches its apex in the song's fist-pumping finale, as numerous voices join in to sing/speak the chorus.
Like every other Modest Mouse full-length, Good News remains tremendously strong for its first five or six tracks. "Ocean Breathes Salty" is slightly darker than "Float On", but remains uncharacteristically upbeat. Here, Weikel's drumming proves particularly indispensable, his tight, regular playing adding extra emphasis to the song's powerful dynamics changes. Lyrically, as with most resignation-themed albums by philosophically minded bands, Good News concerns itself largely with death and the afterlife. At times, Brock's lyrics threaten to approach cliché, but "Ocean Breathes Salty" redeems itself with its strong vocal melodies and convincing delivery. "Bury Me With It", the record's most blistering, forceful track, is an energetic high point, putting Brock's signature sing-screaming to great use.
With "Dance Hall", however, Good News begins to slip. Along with "The Devil's Workday" and a few others, the song comes across as half-hearted Tom Waits pastiche, overlooking all of the band's strengths and ultimately undermining the album's cohesiveness. It's a shame that so many of the album's darker tracks, which could have provided a poignant emotional counterpart to the more resigned and optimistic tone of the record as a whole, come across as so overdetermined and musically lacking.
Fortunately, Good News bounces back fast with the laidback, literate "Bukowski". Here, as with "The World at Large", Brock steps out of his well-cultivated gas station savant pose to prove that, yes, he can read. Indeed, Good News is a much more lyrically casual and upfront album than any past Modest Mouse record, substituting more conversational and direct observations for Brock's usual wide-eyed, poetic revelations. Similarly, songs like "Bukowski" are much more musically unassuming, relying upon simple but well-structured banjo figures and rhythmic vocal patterns.
The latter part of Good News is host to some remarkable moments, as well. "Blame It on the Tetons" splits the difference between "Bukowski" and "The World at Large", offering one of the album's most memorable melodies. On "Black Cadillacs", Modest Mouse wind up sounding uncannily like The Clash, Brock's chorus of "we were done, done, done with all the fuck, fuck, fucking around" echoed by angular stabs of guitar, bass, and drums.
Yet, for all its transcendent moments, Good News ultimately fails to hold together all that well as an album. The middle sections of The Moon & Antarctica, often criticized for being aimless and overproduced, worked tremendously well towards reinforcing the desolate, paranoid tone of the record as a whole. Indeed, The Moon & Antarctica was an album where moment-to-moment action was often, and wisely, sacrificed for album-unifying ambience. On Good News, however, the lulls are simply lulls.
Still, it's remarkable that, after four long full-lengths, an album's worth of singles, and a couple of EPs, Modest Mouse are still finding ways to invigorate their sound while retaining a sense of definiteness and sincerity. While Good News is neither a unilateral return to the scruffier Modest Mouse of yore, or an even more experimental expansion of The Moon & Antarctica, it is host to more than its share of great-- and, perhaps more importantly, distinctively great-- moments. In spite of a substantial line-up change and the daunting spectre of their previous full-length, Modest Mouse have issued yet another record that uniquely explores what the band does best; being Modest Mouse.


On Fiona Apple's first album in seven years, her sharp songwriting and vivid imagery have lost none of their power.

Fiona Apple: The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do

In March, a 12-year-old letter Fiona Apple once wrote to a young gay fan named Bill surfaced online. "A person who loves is a righteous person," read the supportive note, "and if someone has the ability and desire to show love to another-- to someone willing to receive it, then for goodness' sake, let them do it." The message was warm, thoughtful, sincere. But its presentation was just as important. It was written-out by hand, on lined paper. And there were Apple's pen marks-- a distinctive blend of print and cursive-- legible yet casual, perfect in its imperfections. The letter provided an instant reminder of the singer-songwriter's lasting appeal, why she can take six or seven years between albums and return to even-more-rabid followers. Unguarded honesty doesn't go out of style.
This is especially true in 2012, when major artists can get so caught up in "brand management" and web-based "social engagement" that the core of their art-- emotion, intelligence, meaningful connectivity-- is sometimes lost amidst bottomless scrolls. Being able to slice through the bullshit is arguably more coveted now than when Apple did just that during her ferocious acceptance speech at the 1997 VMAs. Another famed modern truth-teller and award-show crasher (and noted Fiona fan), Kanye West, has been able to harness technology, the media, and his own public projection by constantly negotiating with all things fresh and new. Apple doesn't really care about all that. In interviews from both 2000 and 2012, she claimed to not listen to any new music whatsoever, and when she recently sat down with Carrie Battan for a Pitchfork interview, she referred to Google as "this whole Google thing," like an overwhelmed grandmother. On her entirely acoustic fourth album, The Idler Wheel Is Wiser Than the Driver of the Screw and Whipping Cords Will Serve You More Than Ropes Will Ever Do, the 34-year-old makes herself heard with her voice, her words, her piano, and not much else.
This is the most distilled Fiona Apple album yet. While her celebrated previous work was marked by eclectic musical flourishes courtesy of producers including Jon Brion and Mike Elizondo, The Idler Wheel is fearlessly austere in comparison. She worked with touring drummer Charley Drayton on the album, and his touches are light and incisive. Speaking of the record's signature clattering percussion-- including thigh slaps, truck stomps, and "pillow," according to the credits-- Apple associated the homemade sounds with an increased freedom: "I just like that feeling of: 'I'm in charge, I can do whatever I want.'" And this musique concrète approach is not random. Every single waveform is pierced with purpose, from the muted heartbeat thumping through "Valentine" to the childlike plinks popping around the uncharacteristically optimistic "Anything We Want" to the chugging factory sounds that give "Jonathan" its uneasy rhythm. On the oddly life-affirming "Werewolf", a banjo shows up, plucks exactly four notes, and then dips out, never to return. "You made an island of me," she belts on that song, and The Idler Wheel's spareness does lend it an insular loneliness, one that's divorced from the outside world while also being intimately in-tune with its basic realities. As Fiona's self-drawn album cover suggests, the inner workings of her mind can be scary, ugly, and head-splinteringly vivid.
"Werewolf" also features the album's most jarring and powerful found-sound moment: just as the self-conscious ballad climaxes, the roar of children screaming on a playground enters, adding an uncanny mix of dread and wistfulness. The fact that Apple was inspired to insert the yells by a classic-movie battle scene that was running when she first played the song only adds to the sample's ambiguity as well as its spontaneity. Much of the album involves Apple's constant struggle between naivety and cynicism; on opener "Every Single Night", she sings, "I just wanna feel everything" and "every single night's a fight with my brain." The saga can turn into lacerating theater, as on "Regret", which, with its mechanical beat and ominous, monk-like ambience, could nearly pass for a track on Nine Inch Nails' The Downward Spiral. The song also features the most brutal hook of Apple's career: "I ran out of white doves' feathers to soak up the hot piss that comes from your mouth every time you address me," she bellows, tearing her throat apart in the name of pure vengeance. And while she's undoubtedly one of our foremost talents at the art of the kiss-off, the blame for Apple's woes is a bit more spread out now. "How can I ask anyone to love me," she offers, "when all I do is beg to be left alone."
"Left Alone" is nothing short of a vocal masterclass. It has the singer going from the verses' rap-like cadence to the hook's curlicue jazz stylings to the operatic long notes of the bridge-- notes that slowly curdle underneath their own exasperated weariness. This makes sense considering Apple is a child of Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, and hip-hop, a songwriter who's spiking the Great American Songbook with today's mirror-upon-mirror confessionalism. She's able to convey more with a quick, original turn of phrase-- "my woes are granular," for one-- or an in-the-moment scrunch of the face than many pop stars are able to muster with 100-foot screens and volcano pyrotechnics.
It's an old-school approach, though it rises well above mere sepia Instagrams. Instead of being far-off and dreamy, her throwback moves are the opposite-- intrusive, corporeal. This is not background music. It demands attention. "Look at! Look at! Look at! Look at me!" she pleads on "Daredevil", a knowing admission of her self-destructive tendencies. But even after being thrown into the media spotlight at a young age, and having to deal with crippling doubt, Fiona Apple didn't go boom. She's still here, brave enough to indulge in raw emotion and smart enough to make those feelings carry.


The Chicago band grapples with impermanence and loss on their memorable indie rock debut.

You Can Do It All

For a while, any band with a Big Muff pedal and a tower of stacked Marshalls was stamped as a Dinosaur Jr. understudy, and some of them courted the comparison firsthand. But lately, the tides have shifted. A new generation of musicians are idolizing Steve Hartlett over J Mascis, naming Connecticut fuzz-rockers Ovlov as their inspiration for noisy rock with a melodic underbelly. “Ovlov is the band that made me want to BE a band,” Chicago group Cusp once tweeted; their live sets make that obvious.
On their debut full-length You Can Do It All, Cusp tap into the same attributes that make Ovlov so beloved: deafening riffs that turn into singalong earworms, weighty power chords that feel like thick wool, an opening lick that you never get tired of hearing. Singer Jen Bender and guitarist Gaelen Bates both share strumming duties while bassist Matt Manes anchors the deep end, resulting in lush, dizzying tracks like “Win” or “Limited Edition” that dip into the warm tones of shoegaze.
But You Can Do It All isn’t straightforward fuzz idolization. Cusp pull their indie rock in weirder directions, reveling in intentional subversion: minor-key solos instead of major-key niceties, bridges that opt for unconventional chord progressions. Bender puts a conversational twist on her pop vocals, as seen in the lilting, sugary vocal slides of “Dead Things Talk” and the punchy power-pop harmonies of “Inside Out.” You’d be forgiven for thinking Speedy Ortiz came on shuffle. Despite having moved to the Windy City only a year ago, Cusp are already a snug fit in Chicago’s music scene, resting between the unpredictable thrashing of Melkbelly and the nimble dexterity of Floatie, the local art freaks of their respective subgenres.
Though Cusp are the band at the house show that has you digging into your pockets to fish for earplugs, their most striking songs on You Can Do It All are unexpectedly quiet confessionals. The album grapples with impermanence and loss; Bender expresses her alienation through simple phrasing. On “You Can’t Do It All,” a wash of guitar and bass bleeds into white noise as she emphasizes the paralyzing feeling of having not accomplished enough: “You can do anything you want, but you can’t do it all,” she repeats numbly. On the album opener, Bender whispers “it will never be okay” during a midnight breakdown while viola and an electric guitar riff creep beneath her. Despite the song’s brevity, it highlights Bender’s skill at conveying the world’s coldness and unpredictability.
Ultimately, it’s the unassuming “It’s Not My Job” that steals the show. Bender addresses an old relationship, wishing to shield a loved one from all harm: “I thought of your parents looking to me/We’re all here to help you/We’re all on your team.” But as the song progresses, she works past the guilt of setting boundaries: “It’s someone’s job, but it’s not mine.” Her guitar rolls through dreamy keyboard notes while Terrin Munawet’s steady, minimalist drumming keeps her grounded. It’s this bittersweetness, this balance of discord and pleasantry, that makes You Can Do It All a memorable first impression.