The artist Terry Allen made outlaw country from the vantage of the art world. Paradise of Bachelors have lavishly reissued his 1979 double album, a dreamscape that sways between country and folk.

Lubbock (on everything)

Terry Allen released Lubbock (on everything) via the minuscule Fate Records in 1979, just as the outlaw country movement started to run out of gas. Allen never was an outlaw. He was an outsider, a visual artist who wrote songs on the side and played museums instead of honky-tonks. That calculated distance is evident on his 1975 debut Juarez, where he divides his time between recitations and skeletal arrangements that, at their fullest, featured guitar and piano.
The same can’t be said of Lubbock (on everything), just reissued in a lavish edition by Paradise of Bachelors, which also put Juarez back in circulation this year. Allen recorded the double album in his scorned West Texas hometown of Lubbock, a city he left as soon as he turned 17. Flipping a coin, he and his then-girlfriend—now wife of 55 years—Jo Harvey wound up choosing Los Angeles over New York City, so the two hightailed out to the West Coast, setting up shop and beginning to establish themselves within the art world. Allen’s songs gained some attention, including that of Little Feat leader Lowell George, who had hoped to record Allen’s song “New Delhi Freight Train” for his band’s 1971 debut. George decided to wait, though, until Allen left his bad record deal so that he could actually score some royalties.
Allen broke free from that contract around 1976 and Feat did cut the tune for 1977’s Time Loves a Hero. A year earlier, the country singer Bobby Bare recorded Allen’s song “Amarillo Highway” for his Cowboys and Daddys album. It was then that Allen decided to cut the songs he’d composed since the completion of Juarez—including “Amarillo Highway”—and cooked up the notion that George could produce part of the album, while none other than his art-world friend Laurie Anderson could handle the other. Instead, Allen headed back to Lubbock, the town he abandoned years ago, to record with locals Don Caldwell and Lloyd Maines.
Lubbock music was then in the throes of one its periodic hot spells, spearheaded by Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, and Jimmie Dale Gilmore—a trio who performed as the Flatlanders between 1972 and 1973. By the time Allen got to Lubbock in ’78, Ely was the king of the scene, earning attention for his recent Honky Tonk Masquerade. Ely’s band was pulled into the studio to support Allen.
Ely had been channeling some shit-kicking roadhouse boogie into the plaintive panhandle country of the Flatlanders. And while Allen never deigned to dabble in hardwood floor honky-tonk, Lubbock (on everything) does benefit from a band consciously withholding its full power. They turn Allen’s satirical sketches and odes to art into something robust, full-blooded rambles through the byways of the flatlands of West Texas. Sometimes, the music really does cook. “New Delhi Freight Train” moves along just like a locomotive, and the band works up a groove on “Amarillo Highway,” not coincidentally the album’s two most covered songs.
But usually the group allows Allen to indulge in his sly jokes. Witness the louche lounge sway of “Cocktails for Three,” the beer joint stomp of “Flatland Farmer,” or how “Truckload of Art” hinges on a piss-take on Slim Whitman’s “Cattle Call.” All this derives from Allen knowing West Texas so well he can’t help but snipe. Often, Allen doesn’t bother to hide his contempt at his former hometown, which does goose the performance: he seems to be gaining fuel from a band that allows him to sneer, but also to cloak his occasional tenderness in a woozy waltz.
Such a pointed sense of remove—Terry Allen isn’t a participant, he’s an observer—is one of the reasons Lubbock (on everything) is ungainly called an “urtext” of alt-country, with the other being the music’s rootless rootsiness. As it sways between country and folk, it feels thoroughly specific yet consciously ambiguous: music intended to stray from its home. Influential it may be, but that also seems beside the point. Like any enduring piece of art, Lubbock (on everything) embodies its moment while transcending it. Allen couldn’t have recorded this album at any other point than 1978, after the outlaws opened the door for genuine outsiders in country music, and after singer/songwriters like Randy Newman paved the way for barbed cynicism to be part of the pop vernacular. Decades after the Lubbock of Allen’s childhood has passed, this double-LP is still a powerful dreamscape, capturing a West Texas that may never have quite existed, but Lubbock (on everything) certainly makes it feel like it did.


The second album from the Michigan emo band feels like a product of another era: itching to cross over, but without anywhere to cross over to.

You’ll Be Fine

Hot Mulligan are on that emo bullshit. All of it: alternate tunings, capos, and twinkle riffs dangling like loose cardigan threads, but also pick slides and power chords as slick and shiny as a Drive Thru sampler CD. Painfully earnest lyrics about cars, funerals, faded pictures, and cigarettes, but also non-sequitur in-joke song titles. Shouting matches between the yelpy guy and the guy who can sorta sing for real. And that’s all just in the opener of you’ll be fine, the Michigan band’s second full-length. Across the album, they bear the most telling quality of people who’ve given their life to emo: they hate it a little, too. Their targets include the self-aggrandizing scene police, the clout chasers, and the abusers, but most importantly, themselves.
It’s a gift and a curse: Hot Mulligan have undeniable skills, but they lie in a style of music that is exceptionally well-suited to expressions of romantic failures, nonexistent job prospects, and the futility of self-medication. According to singer-guitarist Tades Sanville, he was inspired to write “Feal Like Crab” after taking stock of his career and realizing, “I have almost nothing worthwhile on my resume, and that’s not dope.” A few years ago, he might’ve just used that as a lyric, but Hot Mulligan may now aspire to something like thinking man’s pop-punk, as evinced by the unstoppable chorus: a life that ends “hiding deep in some depressing little hovel in the background of the show you’re watching,” a an exquisitely wrought passage that somehow manages to seem off-the-cuff. But “Feal Like Crab” isn’t going to serve as anyone’s anthem for rising above their station: when the band bursts into the bridge, their idea of orchestral uplift is a single dinky xylophone fighting for space with the saddest possible gang vocals.
“*Equip Sunglasses*” casts its aspersions indiscriminately in all directions, as the rhythm section works the sort of percolating groove that might soundtrack a boy band’s pivot to real rock. Judging from their deadpanning and flexing in the video, they’re aware of the dissonance here, as a bunch of Midwestern dudes beating the Jonas Brothers and 5 Seconds of Summer at their own game. It gives Hot Mulligan the sense of a band out of time: In 2004, this could’ve been their “All the Small Things,” but today, there’s no Warped Tour, no Fuse TV, and Vagrant was last seen putting out Janet Jackson albums five years ago.
You’ll be fine is a lot craftier than Hot Mulligan’s workmanlike debut Pilot, but its immediately pleasing familiarity can work against them. Sanville’s vocal range is almost identical to that of Jesse Lacey or Dan “Soupy” Campbell, with a resigned mutter on one end and a strangulated wail on the other. But Sanville uses the latter voice to begin most Hot Mulligan songs, and usually stays there. you’ll be fine leaves almost no room for ambiguity, and is likely to turn off anyone with even the slightest aversion to emo songwriting tropes.
Though flecked with signifiers of artistic growth—some drum machines here, a little more reverb there—you’ll be fine isn’t exactly a leveling up. It documents a band at a crossroads that could only come along in their early twenties. “Analog Fade (New Bule Sky)” isn’t just about watching the love of your life walk away, but about watching them figure out where they want to go to grad school. “SPS” isn’t just about sinking into alcoholic despair, but about the guilt over how your drinking makes you a bad roommate. “BCKYRD,” the album’s thesis statement, essentially equates adulthood to giving up on your actual interests. “Things don’t get better, just different,” Sanville screams. It’s the closest thing to hope Hot Mulligan can find at this point: they’re certainly a better band than they were, and they seem ready to write about something different next time around.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their fifth album, the Horrors retool their formula for retro-leaning, riff-laden arena rock in an attempt to reconnect with the “unsettling” spirit of their garage-rock roots.

V

Looking back on a decade of releases, the Horrors have mostly endured their name, rather than embodying it. A knowing nod to their favorite schlocky 1960s bands—the Monks, the Sonics, Screaming Lord Sutch—at first it suited them as back-combed, kohl-lined stickmen hailed by the British music press as saviors of garage rock. But when they returned with their second album, the shimmering, krautrock-tinged Primary Colours, the Horrors had become a very different band. Their sound has only grown more polished, euphoric, and populist since, on 2011’s Skying and its similarly glowing follow-up, Luminous, which cracked the UK top 10.
The band were barely college age at the time of their scratchy garage-rock debut album, 2007’s Strange House, and so obviously precocious—particularly bassist and keyboardist Rhys Webb, the mod and psych aficionado growing a collection of vintage synths, and guitarist Josh Hayward, the physics grad with a knack for homebrewed guitar pedals—that they were bound to move on to headier influences. My Bloody Valentine, Can, Tangerine Dream, Brian Eno, and the Cure all became touchstones for a studio-forged sound that has occasionally been criticized as “record collectors’ rock”—a tasteful blend of retro influences that hardly inspires much in the way of horror. So after three albums in that vein, perhaps it’s no surprise that the next stage in their evolution entails the familiar rock‘n’roll journey back to their roots. “We wanted to get nasty,” says Webb of the new record, “and make something that sounded quite horrible and quite unsettling again.”
Any band looking to do that within the parameters of soaring, arena-ready rock could do worse than look to Depeche Mode and the Cure for pointers, and the brooding grandeur of those alternative-pop godheads looms large over V. The band’s basic formula—simple, languid melodies, traditional verse-chorus structures interrupted by guitar and synth wig-outs—hasn’t changed, but the surfaces are grittier, the drums smack harder, and the vocals sit louder in the mix. It’s the first time since Primary Colours that they’ve enlisted an outside producer, handing the job to Paul Epworth, the British studio veteran who’s worked with Adele, Coldplay, and indie heavy hitters like Bloc Party and Florence and the Machine. As a band of accomplished studio nerds, they seem to have tapped Epworth not so much for his production skills as his ear for a huge hit, and on the album’s most anthemic tracks, it’s down to Faris Badwan—previously a slippery, mumbling presence both on- and off-stage—to carry it off. You can almost feel him squirming under Epworth’s gaze.
The opening “Hologram” apparently started out as a 25-minute ambient house track, and its transformation is indicative of the band’s new direction. Psychedelic yet immediate, “Hologram” swaggers forward in a blaze of strobing Tubeway Army synths and cavernous 1980s drums—a very different welcome statement from the three minutes of airy, Tangerine Dream-like noodling that opened Luminous. From there, “Press Enter to Exit” combines submerged dub rock with a feather-light vocal and lashings of post-production faff—haywire electronics, false endings, what sounds like a doorbell—and ends up sounding a bit like late-1990s Ian Brown. “Machine,” the first single, emerges from a tangle of knackered drum machines and white noise that threatens to get really weird, only to resolve into a throbbing S&M groove, a grungy rock moment that guyliner-era Dave Gahan would approve of. And on “Ghost,” a shuddering wall of sound almost recalls Mogwai at their most stately.
Halfway in, there’s no doubt that it all sounds great—but what’s it actually about? Badwan’s lyrics, though more audible than ever, remain frustratingly opaque. “There’s only so far that the eye can see,” he murmurs, as if reciting random scraps from his diary. “Are we hologram? Are we vision?” he ponders. “Breathe your blood diamonds, lifetime is drawing in.” Even with a sharpened focus on punchy hooks and melodies, the band’s potential is scuppered by a basic lack of content. Badwan’s voice is actually stronger than ever, if still a bit drippy and flat in that British art-rock way. But precious few of his lyrics really resonate—he never really exposes himself, never confides in us. As any mega-fan of Depeche Mode or the Cure could tell you, that can be the difference between a band you like and a band you love—a band you’d drive 500 miles to see live, a band whose lyrics you get tattooed on your shoulder. The darkness has to ring true.
The foot comes off the pedal for “Point of No Reply,” a coasting, deceptively chill groove which bemoans a mystery woman “with an eye for revenge.” “You tell your friends I hit you,” Badwan adds, one of the few lines that’s unsettling enough to be memorable. The album’s second half also contains its anthemic pinnacle, “Weighed Down” (“Don’t let love bring you down,” Badwan repeats, as freeways crumble apart and the earth splits in two behind him) and a pair of melodramatic ballads: “Gathering” bolsters its strummed guitars with sweeping strings in a ‘90s Britpop manner, while “It’s a Good Life” would be unremarkable without the knowledge that it’s written about the late Peaches Geldof, whom Badwan briefly dated. “She lay in the dark, but I don’t know who found her,” he sings, imagining the hours after her death, in a rare, unguarded moment.
V ends on a lighters-in-the-air moment with the pounding, sun-blinded euphoria of “Something to Remember Me By,” a finale that channels the saucer-eyed grandeur of main-stage New Order and confirms V as the Horrors’ most ambitious album to date. At the same time, it feels like a wasted arsenal of almost-brilliant songs, a record that lacks the essential quirk found in so many of the band’s touchstones. The Horrors sound more horrible than they have in a long time—but to send a shiver down our spines, they need to convince us it’s all real.


John Mayer suffers simultaneously from an excess of taste and an oblivious lack of it. It makes his seventh studio album neither sensitive nor scuzzy, just pleasantly bland.

The Search for Everything

John Mayer has spent the past decade cultivating a dubious notoriety. In an era somehow populated with multiple David Duke gaffes, he’s the guy whose reputation was tangibly harmed by it.
He also makes music, which is perennially hampered by four problems. One: overcompensating with clever-clever lyrics and interview stunts because of a deep embarrassment at sharing a market segment with Shawn Mendes and Ed Sheeran. Two: a willingness to play PR ball and juice up otherwise bland singles with celebrity gossip, admitting to the New York Times that at the center of “Still Feel Like Your Man” was Katy Perry, a confession certain to please the tabloids. Three: a clockwork fascination with the trends of the times, which in 2017, means yacht-rock smarm with a pinch of Dave Longstreth and James Blake’s falsetto-processing trickery. And, most damningly: a fundamental boringness to his records designed to be offset by a winning personality. He writes musical nonentities that resemble entities when sung by a sensitive troubadour, except this troubadour is off spewing napalm through Playboy’s pages.
All of this would be best left in the past if The Search for Everything hadn’t dredged it up as part of a deliberate tour of contrition—his second. For the public, we get another round of apologies for the antics that supposedly torched his career. The industry gets a course-correction from the studied, Laurel Canyon-inflected folk that actually did torch his career (it’s telling that his last two actual hits were a Katy Perry duet and a Beyoncé cover) into slick soft-rock. It’s a strategy last used by Robin Thicke on Paula, another expensive plea of an album released by a media heel. Like Paula, Mayer’s seventh studio album backfires spectacularly. One never forgets how much and how blandly Mayer doth protest.
He’s undoubtedly a good curator of musicians, and his core trio—including longtime D’Angelo bassist Pino Palladino and veteran studio drummer Steve Jordan—lend the record an understated groove. There will likely be few albums this year so consistently pleasant. But even though The Search for Everything is his admitted attempt to produce megahits again, with a sound adjacent to the slick ’70s yacht rock that’s become an obsession of Max Martin among others, he’s reluctant to commit to anything more than pleasant. The closest is “In the Blood,” with stadium-ish percussion and sunny backing vocals from an uncredited Sheryl Crow, but even that only goes halfway: neither as undeniable as he’s aiming for nor as scuzzy as he probably wants.
Then there’s that old inescapable problem, the part where John Mayer says words. “Emoji of a Wave” is a perfectly fine ballad, with a perfectly fine Cat Stevens lilt and harmonies by the Beach Boys’ Al Jardine. But then there’s the title. Why? Nothing in the song suggests emoji, or anything past 1975. The only explanation is Mayer trying to spritz it up with cheap modernity, which is bad lol. The limply funky “Rosie” is an early-’00s throwback, in the sense that Mayer’s bit about learning (just for her!) the Spanish words for “excuse me” and “I’m sorry” is gratuitous Latin courting. “Roll It on Home” and “Love on the Weekend” are windswept country-pop songs of the kind the Nashville songwriting machine commissions by the dozens, but Nashville would never greenlight overwritten lyrics like “I’ll be dreamin’ of the next time we can go into another serotonin overflow.” (Even Róisín Murphy barely pulled that off, and at least she got the right bonding hormone.)
It’s progress, probably, that Mayer keeps the condescension to a dull sneer, but this also makes everything sound that much more anodyne. “Still Feel Like Your Man” asks how sympathetic can a narrator really be when he begins by bragging about how the prettiest girl in the room totally wants him? It also asks what if, instead of Justin Timberlake, Michael Jackson’s “Love Never Felt So Good” spliced in a frat boy? It’s a remarkable demonstration of Mayer’s fundamental problem: suffering simultaneously from an excess of taste and an oblivious lack of it, a Fleetwood Mac heart and a Jack Johnson brain. If only he could start recording separately from himself.


Latest from Pennsylvania scuzz-punk revivalists consolidates their strengths, harnessing their fire-extinguisher splatter into shake-appealing rock action.

King of Jeans

When Pennsylvania scuzz-punks Pissed Jeans released their Sub Pop debut, Hope for Men, two years ago, the album seemed to represent a noble if financially foolhardy way for the label to reinvest their Shins and Postal Service profits. Though Sub Pop, of course, first built its empire two decades ago on caustic, post-hardcore rock, the few signees to mine that tradition since the mid-1990s-- from godheadSilo to Murder City Devils to the Catheters-- tended to have tokenistic standing on an increasingly diversified and commercially viable roster. Pissed Jeans thus appeared to be the latest addition to this lunatic fringe: one that provided a spiritual link to the imprint's storied past, but-- given the limited crossover potential for caterwauling, guttural noise-core-- hardly a foundation for their future.
But two years later, our appetite for absurdist punk-rock seems to be on an uptick. The Jesus Lizard and Butthole Surfers are hitting the reunion-tour circuit, playing venues larger than the ones they filled in their heydays; Fucked Up have scored Fox News-pundit gigs and a nomination for Canada's Polaris Music Prize. Pissed Jeans, meanwhile, have answered this pigfuck-apoolaza with an album that could potentially elevate the band to Sub Pop franchise players. If Hope for Men was distinguished by the canyon-wide chasm between the band's ugly aggression and frontman Matt Korvette's seemingly frivolous lyrical concerns (the potential for a Whole Foods sponsorship remains sadly unrealized), King of Jeans successfully consolidates these two strengths, harnessing the earlier record's sometimes directionless fire-extinguisher splatter into shake-appealing rock action, and cohering Korvette's ramblings into a more complete picture of wage-slave misanthropy and alpha-male inadequacy.
On paper, that latter part might read like the makings of a mid-life crisis record (à la the Wrens' Meadowlands), but the difference is Korvette wears his failure like a badge of honor. And where Hope for Men's carpet-bomb onslaught sometimes obscured the relatable quality of Korvette's observations, on King of Jeans, they're organized into shout-back slogans cathartic enough to keep enraged 9-to-5ers from going postal: on opener "False Jesii Part 2", Korvette answers a litany of social pressures-- from going to the gym to wearing a "tight black shirt"-- with a boisterous holler of "I don't bother!" before celebrating his slothfulness with a playground-taunt chorus of "nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah," all to the steady beat of a tambourine, no less.
No one's going to confuse this with pop music, of course, but Pissed Jeans have certainly become more economical and precise in their attack-- gone are Hope for Men's extended exercises in textural noise terror ("People Person") and piano-blues concrète ("Scrapbooking"). In its place are two-minute Germs infections ("Human Upskirt"), Buttholes blurts ("Pleasure Race"), and crazed Nick Cave cattle calls ("Half Idiot"-- a soulmate to "Zoo-Music Girl"). And in "Request for Masseuse", we hear the closest Pissed Jeans will probably ever get to a slow-jam: over guitarist Bradley Fry and bassist Randy Huth's oozing Iommi/Butler riff, Korvette lists off a series of instructions for his personal-ad pleasure-giver; when drummer Sean McGuinness kicks into the lurching groove 90 seconds in, Korvette lets out the creepiest sigh ever, graphically confirming the ending was a happy one.
But if "Request for Masseuse" represents a rare expression of joy for Korvette, King of Jeans' centerpiece track, "Spent", underscores how fleeting such moments really are. At seven minutes, the song is about three times as long as the average track here, but rather than being the most elaborate piece, it's the most despairingly regressive. Where King of Jeans' more compact tracks provide us the opportunity to scream or laugh along with Korvette's complaints, "Spent" is a 16-rpm Melvins-grade sludge feast that slows down the self-loathing commentary to ensure we feel every second of his agony; after counting off the ways his life sucks ("I went and got my car back/ There's a new noise this time"), he finally loses it when he realizes that even a "cold glass of water... [doesn't] satisfy." Recent history tells us that angry, confrontational music tends to flourish during Republican administrations, but King of Jeans illuminates the problems that plague the working man-- receding hairlines, the inability to relate to girls, the transactional nature of romance, the impossibility of proper cuticle maintenance-- regardless of who's running the country or how the economy is doing. The bumper sticker may say "Yes we can," but the guy driving the leased Hyundai on which it's affixed is still left there staring at himself in the rearview mirror, thinking, "No, dude, I really can't."


Named after her own mother, Ciara's sixth record Jackie doesn't shift Ciara's sound so much as frame it with a redemption narrative, through the lens of motherhood, centered around her breakup with rapper and erstwhile ex Future.

Jackie

Motherhood has often brought out the best in your fave pop stars. Mariah, M.I.A., Madonna, Kelis, Beyoncé: all have stellar postpartum releases to their names, with some explicitly riffing on the theme, and others signaling a shift—sometimes patronizingly referred to as more 'mature'—in sound. These albums all sound very different, but they form a sort of collective statement that motherhood isn't some aesthetic, thematic or musical purgatory for women. We are not content, these working women say, on being aged out, or matron-ized, by the youth-oriented trajectory of the industry.
"Man, I just delivered a nine-pound, 10-ounce baby. I'm a bad motherfucker," Ciara drawls on "Jackie (B.M.F.)", the explosive intro track on her sixth album, Jackie. Named after her own mother, Jackie doesn't necessarily shift Ciara's sound so much as a frame it with a faint redemption narrative, centered around the birth of her baby and her breakup with rapper and erstwhile ex Future. "You actin' like you upgrading me, I upgraded you/ You and me at Fashion Week in Paris, I put you onto that new," goes the album's first single, the breakup ballad "I Bet". But Ciara's never been much for album-length statements. Instead the ATL-reared R&B pop star, best known for her sensuous, studious approach to choreography, has created a career by rewiring the city's full throttle hip-hop motifs into club-friendly pop.
Jackie doesn't do much to allay the feeling, which has followed her for her whole career, that there's better R&B pop out there. But instead of positioning herself against Rihanna—who is only just starting to really find her vocal strength, and who is decidedly not a dancer—or Beyoncé (ha ha), Ciara is content to be a reliable mainstay, a translator of Atlanta's ever-shifting avant-garde and the constant bringer of high-energy dance anthems. She's innovative within her own framework: Before Beyoncé started dabbling with bars, Ciara was already rapping on 2013's "Super Turnt Up" and the album-less Mike WiLL Made It single, "Wake Up, No Make-Up".
The problems with Jackie, a serviceable record that gets better with multiple listens, is that unlike her previous releases it's more heavily focused on paint-by-numbers Dr. Luke electro. And, an even bigger problem—and this is where Ciara has always faltered—is that it hints at a storyline, but doesn't go deeper. Moms totally care about more than just being moms, but consider that Ciara's records are also too often about nothing at all, and it's hard not to wish she'd gone into more depth. It's an opportunity and, again, on Jackie, she doesn't take it. There's a song called "Lullaby" that's not about a baby but tucking a lover in for the evening. The actual lullaby comes toward the very end, with "I Got You"; she sings "Hush, Little Baby" while Future Zahir gurgles the outro.
There are interesting moments: the hesitant merging of post-ratchet trap and drum and bass on "B.M.F.", the Niles Rodgers-esque retro-soul bounce of "Kiss & Tell", and her beatific, waxy vocal performance on "That's How I'm Feelin'" and "Fly". Both are pillowy Polow Da Don electro-lite bangers—the former featuring Pitbull and Missy Elliott—referencing early Ciara, like the jock-jam energy of "1, 2 Step". For Jackie's deluxe edition, Ciara calls upon Joe Jonas to switch up the dewy, gloriously shady "I Bet", featuring imitation-Future yelps and adlibs. And second single "Dance Like We're Making Love", is a gorgeous, sleek midtempo track, similar to Frank Ocean's "Novocane" but with a bigger, airier hook.
She carried her last album cycle off a slow jam about a very public romance ("Body Party"), but "I Bet" just isn't as strong. Jackie's best moments come on those Polow power jams, when the music imitates the explosiveness of Ciara's movement. What would've made Jackie better than the last album—what would've given her the edge that her peers maintain—is some insight behind Ciara's redemption songs.


Canadian rave pioneer Tiga Sontag’s fidgety new album features three tracks co-produced by Matthew Dear and a collaboration with Hudson Mohawke.

No Fantasy Required

Canadian rave pioneer Tiga Sontag has a new album out, but he’s not sure that the world needs more albums.  Asked in a recent interview with Thump whether albums were still relevant, he replied, "They don’t even matter to me anymore." It could have been a tossed-off or ironic remark; it’s hard to tell. But it’s easy to trace a path between Sontag’s blasé attitude regarding the long play and the shortcomings of his new record, No Fantasy Required.
A veteran of a half-dozen different styles, Tiga has never shied away from trying new sounds. But here, it’s as if he’s can’t find anything that fits comfortably, and from track to track you can feel him rejecting any kind of consistency. As a result, a good portion of the tracks here fall short of the high standards he’s set for himself with his past work. In some ways, the new record is reminiscent of Sontag’s first solo album, Sexor, another fidgety collection of tracks that couldn’t sit still long enough to relax.
That’s not to say there are not some glorious productions on the album. "Having So Much Fun," one of the three terrific tracks here co-produced by Matthew Dear, is a strutting, vintage, electro banger, with steeplechase bass and whistles tailoring an immaculately structured, wryly romantic song. The first two songs on the album "No Fantasy Required" and "Make Me Fall In Love," are gorgeous R&B-tinged electropop, recalling the best work of Hot Chip.
Dear once described Sontag's style as more disciplined and scientific than his own. But their differences seem to help Tiga locate his own personality; as an accomplished remixer, he’s used to expressing himself through the work of others. On No Fantasy Required, he never seems more present than on the Dear co-production "3 Rules," where his love of bass thump and sly sense of humor shine most brightly, particularly during the track’s witty coda.
It’s on the back half that Tiga seems to withdraw from his own album, his sense of humor curdling. Three singles in a row, two of them previously released, weigh down the album, starting with the "Planet E" a much-anticipated collaboration with fellow club bombardier Hudson Mohawke that feels inexplicably tame. "Plush," a version of which was originally released in 2012, is a stylish production, but it sounds claustrophobic sandwiched between two bigger songs here. And there’s no bigger disappointment than the transformation of "Bugatti" (originally released as a single in 2014, featuring Pusha T). It’s elongated on the record, and without Pusha’s snarling ostentatiousness ("Tiga me amigo, we both follow that G code"), there’s no foil for Sontag’s chillier sneer.
That previously successful singles feel stale when forced into position on the album underscores the difficulty of pacing these things. Fifty minutes of music from the same producer is difficult to make interesting without a lot of thought given to pacing and cohesion. In the Thump interview, Tiga said that albums allow you to "release different styles of music" and provide "a nice platform for experimentation." Neither of those statements sounds like it comes from a producer who’s particularly interested in the elements that can make these collections special, nor does No Fantasy Required.


Fresh off Beyoncé’s co-sign, the house DJ and producer returns with a joyous, collaboration-filled LP that channels the buzzy, late-night feeling when affection and tenderness flow freely.

Black Girl Magic

Honey Dijon’s DJ sets are life-giving experiences, each head-turning beat and tempo shift primed for gathering on the dancefloor in communal euphoria. The Chicago-raised house producer has spent decades honing her style behind the decks, a fact Beyoncé duly noted when she recruited Dijon to contribute to this year’s club-ready Renaissance. The music on Dijon’s solo debut, 2017’s The Best of Both Worlds, reaffirmed her curatorial expertise, running from hypnotic deep house to swaggering ballroom with a bevy of guest artists in tow. Follow-up Black Girl Magic expands her vision of eclectic house music built for both the club and the afters. It’s Dijon’s most vivid release yet, jolting and joyous in equal measure as it offers up a passionate expression of Black queer joy.
Black Girl Magic has the good-natured feel of a family affair, filled out with a wide circle of new and familiar collaborators. On the standout “Work,” a strutting jazz-house cut, she recruits Los Angeles singer-songwriters Dave Giles II and Cor.Ece alongside Chicago hip-house legend Mike Dunn; its downpitched hook, decorated with rippling horns, is immediately irresistible. She teams up with longtime co-producer Luke Solomon on several songs, including the satiny “In the Club,” which recasts rap icon Eve in an inspired new role as a house diva over springing synths and a driving kick drum. The pace is often brisk and uptempo, a soundtrack to a decadent night out at a club of Dijon’s own making that weaves messages of community and resilience into each song. When Brazilian drag star Pabllo Vittar and singer Urias break into chants on the disco-laced “Everybody,” you can practically hear the glee and camaraderie radiating through their smiles.
The album’s buoyant music is tempered with lyrics that focus on finding love, whether for yourself or someone else. She lowers things to a simmer on “It’s Quiet Now,” where luminous synth pads cast an air of seduction as Toronto singer Dope Earth Alien summons the strength to break off a toxic relationship: “We try our best to love but all we do is fight,” she chants during the ascendant bridge. “Freedom has a space in the song that someday you and I will write.” Even when Dijon’s music reaches for a gooier sentiment of positivity, she charges it with deeper impact: “Love is a state of mind/It will bring us all together,” singer Ramona Renea preaches on “Love Is a State of Mind” against a spare stomp and sauntering synths. The rudimentary backdrop amplifies the unvarnished appeal of Renea’s affirming words.
Dijon is in her element here, eager to expand house music’s limits. For every pulse-racing dance breakdown, there’s a surprise: “Show Me Some Love” thumps with smoky energy, rooted by a heavy bassline, warped keys, and the mellow vocals of Channel Tres, who provides a laidback foil for Dijon’s punchy production. The song is another prismatic example of the way Dijon’s productions access the buzzy, late-night feeling when affection and tenderness flow as freely as the music pumping from the speakers. “DJ love helped me survive,” the spoken-word artist Kameelah Waheed says over sparse piano chords on the album’s intro, “Love Is.” With Black Girl Magic, Dijon confers the vibrancy of that love to everyone in the room.


The Sacramento rapper’s new release doesn’t compromise on his bleak worldview, but the music feels warmer and more accessible.

Beyond Bulletproof

Just last year, the Sacramento rapper Mozzy released five projects. Alongside full-length collaborations with Bay Area cannabis tycoon Berner, former MMG foot soldier Gunplay, and Jersey battle rapper Tsu Surf, he also dropped a solo album called Internal Affairs. Few rappers work harder or give more of themselves, but he tends to make his most resonant music when he gives himself time to reflect. Case in point: His latest album, Beyond Bulletproof, comes after a six-month break, and while the lyrics represent another immersion into Mozzy’s seemingly endless loop of bloodthirsty reciprocity, the music feels warmer, less standoffish. This is the first Mozzy album that could feasibly crack the radio, and it does so without compromising the integrity of his storytelling.
The production adds a softer R&B sway to his usual West Coast bounce, with piano chords, lightly fingered guitar riffs, and samples of “Let Me Love You” and “Can’t Let You Go.”  The rasp in his voice eases into the occasional singsong, and as the songs grow smoother, Mozzy’s bleak worldview becomes less impenetrable. Here, he establishes himself as an unlikely role model and a champion for the lost and damned. Even his most hostile songs hide moments of tenderness: “Body Count” pads his rap sheet and offers prayers for loved ones in nearly the same breath. The hustle-hard anthem “Off the Muscle” uses brusque bars to impart simple, resonant messages. Through the huffed flows of “I Ain’t Perfect,” he ponders depression symptoms, shows compassion for the hopeless and the homeless, and describes vengeance as a flawed coping mechanism. “On Jesus Christ/Retaliation help me sleep at night,” he raps, but he still sounds weary and weighed down.
God is the only force Mozzy fully trusts in, the only one there for him consistently (“I pray in the mornin’, I go get the dough, then I thank Him at night”). But despite his trust issues, he can be empathetic. On more than one occasion, he sees his aunt’s amphetamine addiction for what it is: a means to numb the pain of abuse. Near the end of “Unethical & Deceitful,” Mozzy lays down his personal code: “I was taught provide for your people/Life without parole, he’d rather die in search of freedom.”
Despite the violence and mayhem depicted in his lyrics, Mozzy is clear-eyed, and at no point do the words feel gratuitously violent or like misery porn. They simply are haunting in their fidelity. If he terrifies you occasionally, that is a testament to his writing. At the end of “So Lonely,” he eulogizes seven fallen friends, and there’s suffering in his voice whenever he raps about responding in kind. Handcuffs rob boys of their innocence, painkillers fail to dull pain, and bodies keep piling up: In his songs, there are no safeguards.
Beyond Bulletproof is the closest Mozzy has come to making his songs accessible. It’s hard to play the victim and the perpetrator all at once, but it’s remarkable how well he manages, and while his evolution into a hood benefactor is ongoing, his songs are already benefiting from the widened scope. It doesn’t have the immediacy of 2015’s Bladadah or the gravity of 2017’s 1 Up Top Akh, but Beyond Bulletproof is a better entry point into his massive catalog, a way to ease into his cruel reality without being overwhelmed by its darkness.


On the Chicago rapper’s latest album, it’s hard to tell whether he is a talented guy who’s just not working hard or a hack with an extraordinary work ethic.

Rick Rubin is music royalty, but his name hasn’t always been a watchword for groundbreaking taste. For every Run-D.M.C. or Beastie Boys, there’s been an Ed Sheeran, a Linkin Park, an Avett Brothers and now, a Towkio. The Chicago rapper, a close friend of Chance and Vic Mensa, released his debut studio album, WWW. on Rubin’s American Recordings label last week, and if the record is any indication, he’s destined to become the latest exhibit in the Rubin wing of commercially successful but artistically dubious enterprises.
WWW. stands for World Wide .Wav, a sequel to Towkio’s 2015 release, .Wav Theory. That record laid out the rapper’s philosophy of life, essentially, the butterfly effect theory: everything is connected to everything else. It’s a bit of a funny sentiment coming from Towkio because if there’s one thing that defines the record, it’s his clear disconnect with the gang of skilled artists brought on to assist him. With his feints at wisdom and his strange self-absorption, Towkio can feel a little bit like a friend who shows up to hang out after having eaten an eighth of mushrooms. Maybe he is having a transcendent experience but everyone else is checking the time every ten minutes, wondering when he’ll stop explaining the secrets of the tides and want to just, like, watch a movie.
It can be hard to tell whether Towkio is a talented guy who’s just not working hard or a hack with an extraordinary work ethic. He pays little attention to the excellent production he’s gifted throughout WWW., and his lyrics are, for the most part, a deck of platitudes, punctuated by sub-par punchlines and a pettiness that goes poorly with his enlightened posturing. On “Loose,” a tremulous, bouncy little beat from Louis the Child, he ignores the pockets created by the bass, rapping in an inexplicably aggressive tone about how he’s changed, but still breathes the same air as he used to, and is “lookin’ at the game like a daycare.” (Yeah, I don’t know either.) Then, when the beat accommodates his aggression, he can’t keep up and resorts to doing his best imitation of Pharrell on “Lapdance.”
But Towkio has a gift for choosing collaborators and the record is partially saved by danceable beats from Lido, Louis, Knox Fortune, and others, as well as some excellent hooks. Any song with a feature becomes something of a competition between Towkio and his peers: can he ruin the track before they have a chance to redeem it? It’s unclear whether SZA’s performance justifies “Morning View,” a ballad whose meditative opening moment is swiftly punctured by a misplaced falsetto. But she does get a chance to assert herself, using her verse to transport us back into the narrative tangle of Ctrl.
Towkio occasionally flips the script. His first verse on “Forever,” makes the song seem like it’s going to be one of the strongest on the record before his buddy Mensa struts in and sprays crude stick figures over his friend’s lovingly crafted wildstyle. And while the back half of the album is less memorable, that modesty gives Towkio a moment to stop trying to make something epic and simply make something solid. His opening verse on the standout “Hate to Love” is sung, which helps him avoid issues with the beat. He uses it to paint a rough but compelling picture of how a failed relationship pushes a person away from other people and toward drugs.
But the most notable thing about WWW. is how Towkio promoted it. Two days before its release, he “dropped” the record from space, meaning that he rode a helium balloon 19 miles into the stratosphere, listened to his own record, and then parachuted back down to earth. He seemed genuinely worried that he might die during his trip, but that kind of bravery, the brashness of a bold decision and the commitment to carry it out, makes sense for the artist born Preston Oshita, who often seems like he’s looking for shortcuts: to wisdom, to superstardom, to artistic transcendence. On WWW., it feels as if he had no interest in a less flashy but more consistent sort of commitment, the kind it takes simply to make a good record.


The Irish singer's first full-length album since 2007’s Overpowered is wildly unpredictable, moving from torch songs to extended disco bangers, and the variety suits her.

Hairless Toys

"I didn’t become a pop star, and nobody knows exactly why," said Róisín Murphy of her last full-length album, 2007’s Overpowered. In retrospect, it’s shocking everyone didn’t immediately grasp exactly why. Never mind the talk of career repositioning and the Super Glue-sticky singles and the high-fashion diva-ing—Overpowered may not have been immediate, but it was classic in its own way, and prescient. There’s no shortage of people dissecting her influence on other artists’ gonzo fashion, and many artists are now making dancefloor tracks that embrace house piano and disco tropes, even if they’d fizzle and die if held up next to "Let Me Know". But given the modern dance revival’s rigid stratification of artists into shrugged-away female vocalists and celebrated male producer-celebrities, perhaps it’s for the best that Murphy has shied away from trends, and with a few exceptions, mostly foregone guest spots.
Indeed, Murphy’s output over the past near-decade has been wildly unpredictable, ranging from dance bangers with porno guitars ("Orally Fixated") to an Édith Piaf-inspired EP of Italian art songs not to mention two remix EPs that might have stirred the highest of emotions on the dancefloor, if only people heard them. And Hairless Toys continues this trend. It’s the most cerebral work of Murphy’s decades-long career, and arguably the one with her most creative control yet, letting listeners closer into her head than ever yet keeping them at a distance even there.
The album comes with a few preconceptions. "Gone Fishing" was inspired by the New York ball scene, which, coming from a white Irish woman well after ball culture returned to the mainstream, has the potential to get dicey fast. And Murphy’s rationale for the record—"I envisioned ‘Gone Fishing’ almost as a song from a Broadway musical version of [iconic documentary Paris Is Burning]"—is not so far from Madonna co-opting vogueing into a machine to make herself endless context-free royalties. But "Gone Fishing" is less sonic homage, more earnest expression of empathy. And if Hairless Toys takes anything from that world it’s the subtext: it’s largely an album about confronting one’s failures and anxieties and outsider feelings and mythologizing them.
Sometimes others are invited in. "Exploitation" is nine-and-a-half minutes of circling closer and closer around one obsessive question: "Who’s exploiting who?" The sexual overtones are there if you’re looking for them, the sociological analogies almost make themselves: artists exploiting subjects, or vice versa. But that’s all overly serious for a track this deliberately whimsical: polyrhythms, a cartoon cliff-dive of a guitar riff after the lyric "the depths that they will go," fax-machine noises—all fascinating sounds, manipulated one after the other to make you think they mean something.
"Exploitation" is also the most traditional single on an album mostly concerned with inner pain. "Uninvited Guest" is more typical, describing a quite specific emotional state: the near-agoraphobic inertia—total inactivity from the outside, a deafening restless twitch on the inside—that comes of anxiety and having enough money to stay there forever: "I could get out of my head/ Even all the money I have left, I could buy another day of nothing." The music’s somewhere between synesthesia of the mood and a dark joke at its own expense: hi-hat tremors, backing vocals elbowing through the mix, a bridge to lose time in, a helpless shrug of a whistling line. (Murphy, like just about everyone who shares a genre and gender, has fought off Kate Bush comparisons, and continues to do so; but "Guest", in topic and particularly in its wry gallows humor, is much like an introvert’s "Sat in Your Lap".)
"Exile" is a torch song delivered in a wearied whisper, every note heard through smoke, evoking less the dance floor than a bar that’s 2 a.m. empty. "Unputdownable" is a traditional Murphy extended metaphor—lover as page-turning book—with a mid-track swerve that reveals it not as a love song but something less requited, more unknowable: "I’d open up the book and climb right up out of the town...if you’d allow me to read your mind." (Like much of Hairless Toys, it almost seems like a comment on the record as well.)
It’s heady stuff, but the album’s emotional landscape is sketched so distinctly there’s ample reason to stick with it. There’s also, three-fourths through, a musical payoff. "House of Glass" delivers grand statements, often set stark against the music as if underlined in fire: "We were glass house girls in our plastic wigs and pearls"; "People like us from broken homes never throw stones"; "Little pieces of a broken dream"; "Built a house of glass out of fragments from the blast." Fittingly, it also builds up to the album’s centerpiece: the chords from "Exploitation", the ascending peals from "Gone Fishing", disco guitar licks and swarming background vocals assembled into a fragile yet stunning climax. It’s all gleaming and immaculate from a distance, sharp and shattered if you get too close.


The Norwegian producer invents a Vocaloid-inspired feline character and retreats from the spotlit pop of his last album, returning to the introspective hush of his earlier work.

Princess Catgirl

After all these years, Cashmere Cat is still shy. The musician born Magnus August Høiberg has nearly a decade of prismatic productions under his belt, which has led to appearances on the big stages at EDM festivals, collaborations with childhood heroes, and studio time with the biggest pop stars in the world. On some level, Høiberg has had to adjust to the practicalities that this success requires. He once wouldn’t even do in-person interviews, but a few years ago he finally decided to open up about his life story in a music video. One would imagine he’s no longer hiding in a bathroom, as a friend of his once described, when DJ Khaled unexpectedly turns up at the studio.
But as he’s explained in the press materials for his new solo album, Princess Catgirl, he’s been unable to fully shake his reserved nature. To deal with all the attention, he decided to enlist some help from a cartoon cat: Princess Catgirl, the “face” of his music. “She makes me feel safe,” he says. That’s why the last couple of Cashmere Cat music videos have featured an animated cat with a shock of blue hair and traditional Norwegian dress, dancing in desolate locales. She’s the voice, Høiberg implies, behind the chipmunked vocal mutations that are all over this record.
The idea that Høiberg has taken to collaborating with a Catsune Miku of sorts may seem like a silly concept, but it’s telling of where his head is these days. On 9, his debut full-length, he capitalized on his reputation for futuristic pop music. He called up famous friends like Ariana Grande and Camila Cabello to make a brash, extroverted version of his pillowy, reverberant beats. On Princess Catgirl, he’s largely backed off from that approach. There are collaborators here—Benny Blanco, Tory Lanez, SOPHIE, and Francis Starlite, among others, make appearances. But it’s Høiberg and Catgirl that take top billing, an indication that things are more personal and introspective this time around, which has always been his sweet spot.
When the excesses of the EDM boom were at their garish peak, Cashmere Cat’s productions were soft and intimate. Even if they were playful enough to allow him access to that scene, he wasn’t making music for the ragers. “When I was making that music I was thinking more of a girl or a boy alone in their bedroom listening to it than a crowd full of people going insane,” he said in 2017. The seven songs on Princess Catgirl are a return to that fantasy. He favors comfy stuff, textures that you can luxuriate in and use to shut out the outside world. You can hear it in the way the gentle chimes of “EMOTIONS” swell into cloudy, shoegaze-y squalls that sound a little like Slowdive’s electronic experiments or the digital gusts of M83’s early works. “WITHOUT YOU” has a more standard pop structure, but it too is muted and diffuse—a low-lit reimagining of the neon sounds Høiberg might use on his higher-profile collaborations.
The contributions that Høiberg would presumably ascribe to Catgirl herself are minimal but still important to the overall feeling of the record. Throughout there are digital voices that sound conscripted both from twisted samples of pop hits and Vocaloid-like software. Their messages are often limited to just a word or two, but they feel forlorn and weighty nonetheless. The vocals on “FOR YOUR EYES ONLY” and “WITHOUT YOU” resonate with a gravity and tenderness that Høiberg doesn’t always squeeze out of his human collaborators. Even if she’s not real, the feelings “she” expresses definitely are. And if Høiberg needs to pretend that he’s collaborating with an animated cat to access them, then long live the Princess.


On their absorbing and endearing new double album, John Dwyer's long-running psych-rock institution verges on self-indulgence for the first time.

Face Stabber

At their best, Oh Sees songs evoke matter in flux. Their music hints at lurking violence, a lazy simmer always threatening to boil over. They’ve honed this sound for about 15 years under a series of similar monikers—as OCS, The Ohsees, and Thee Oh Sees, among others—with about an album a year since 2006’s Grave Blockers. Despite dabbling in krautrock, psychedelia, and punk, they’ve remained remarkably consistent. This is to say: They sound unfailingly like themselves, and Face Stabber further solidifies their identity—raucous, driving, and atmospheric, a heady brew of weeded-out insouciance and wah pedals.
Songs like “Gholü” and album opener “The Daily Heavy” capture their molten, nervous fury. “Psy-Ops Dispatch” is somehow manic and low-key, an explosion trapped in slo-mo. The cheery mocking vocals recall earlier hits like 2013’s “Toe Cutter - Thumb Buster” and 2011’s “Contraption/Soul Desert,” a pair of righteous anthems that coupled Iron Maiden-style shredding with the sun-bleached ethos of four dudes taking mushrooms in a California garage.
Some tracks sound as if they could’ve been grafted on or Frankensteined together from any Oh Sees record of the past 10 years: see “The Experimenter,” a paint-by-numbers pastiche of riffs and noodly tangents—it feels much longer than its 5:22—and “Henchlock,” the record’s dawdling 21-minute closer. This is one of the first times the band has seemed self-indulgent; Face Stabber runs 20-40 minutes longer than the last three records they released, and this expansion sometimes diminishes its fervor. Whereas Floating Coffin was a clenched fist, Face Stabber can feel like someone flexing in front of a mirror.
The record’s bright spots are dazzling, though. “Scutum & Scorpius,” despite its length, is a cryogenic chamber of spooky synth that rivals a Yes song in its ability to run the tonal and emotional gamut. “Poisoned Stones” dispatches with any throat-clearing and launches immediately into a dystopian, post-apocalyptic banger. The lyrics’ pervasive sense of doom give the album a cohesive, sci-fi appeal, all the creepier for its plausibility. “Baking in the wasteland every night/It really suits you in my eyes,” John Dwyer yelps on “Poisoned Stones.” The imagery—wastelands, surveillance, beasts—cements the tone set by the album art, a ghoulish air-brushed hulk that’s part Dungeons & Dragons, part Disney on too many tabs of acid.
Face Stabber’s menace varies in its conviction. That’s part of its charm—how seriously can a record take itself when its opening track sounds like a choir of rubber ducks? Spontaneity is a live band’s great asset, and that’s hard to convey in a recording studio, but the record is endearing and absorbing even when it stumbles. How do you bottle energy, commit it to a vinyl groove? (Thee) Oh Sees haven’t perfected the art, but they’re never going to stop trying.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Faith No More are back with their first album in 18 years, and two decades away haven't softened Mike Patton’s coal-black heart. He’s pissed off and proud of it, picking fights with just about anyone and anything.

Sol Invictus

"There’s a lot of stupid things that happen in the world that you can’t control,” Faith No More bassist Billy Gould told Pitchfork. "It’s funny, but it’s not funny. It’s there. But it’s great to have enough of a connection with that mentality where you can interact with it and poke your finger in it a little." That joker’s soul, that urge to poke, can be traced through all of Faith No More's biggest moments, from their stunning hit "Epic" to their genre-defying, commercially unsuccessful (and critically acclaimed) 1992 opus Angel Dust. From the early 1980s through 1997, Faith No More were the reputable carneys, sporting an array of influences and oddities: everything from Madame Butterfly and Nirvana, to Nietzsche and Miles Davis, and even a not-yet-dead fish. And then they went away.
For the past 18 years, fans have waited patiently for Faith No More to wrap up a disappearing act that was the inevitable result of exhaustion, creative differences, and branching paths. Since that time, frontman Mike Patton started his Ipecac label and pursued numerous solo projects, from the poppy Peeping Tom to the experimental supergroup Fantômas to the style-swapping Tomahawk. Keyboardist Roddy Bottum, the group's musical brain, started the bubblegum band Imperial Teen, scored films, and penned an opera about Bigfoot; meanwhile, bassist Billy Gould started Koolarrow Records, and drummer Mike Bordin manned the kit for Ozzy Osbourne. In 2009, the group stirred from its slumber and began performing again. And now, at long last, we’ve arrived at the confrontational Sol Invictus, the follow-up to 1997’s Album of the Year.
Distance and time do not make the heart grow fonder, and two decades haven't softened Patton’s coal-black heart. He’s pissed off and proud of it, picking fights with just about anyone and anything. "Superhero" sees him spewing taunts at beloved authority figures, each syllable hitting with the percussive force of a slug to the jaw. "Leader of man, get back in your cage," he sneers from atop Bottum’s majestic piano strata, a fool cracking his whip at a lowered God. The humiliations continue with "Cone of Shame", which imagines a wrongful lover in a state of depersonalization and animality, while "Black Friday" mocks anyone who’s set foot in a Target at 4 a.m. This commentary is far from subtle, but the ridiculousness is part of the experience, and you can’t help but smile at the return of one of rock’s great contrarians.
The success of Faith No More’s theatrical approach depends on their ability to organize motifs, riffs, shouts, and whimpers into cathartic musical structures. Most of the album’s songs follow a similar dramatic pattern, with the band bookending their frantic (and typically brief) climaxes with unsettlingly calm passages and plodding tempos. The unassumingly simple melodies in "Sunny Side Up" and "Rise of the Fall" are set-ups for the carefully-orchestrated rage that lay in wait, and when it hits right the contrast makes for a fascinating listen, especially on the venomous "Cone of Shame". But over the course of the album, especially during later songs like "Black Friday", "Motherfucker", and "Matador", the recycled dynamics begin to lose their force.
Set aside the negligible opening and closing tracks, and Sol Invictus has just eight tracks spanning 34 minutes, an underwhelming running time considering how long Faith No More have been away. Such brevity could be overlooked if Sol Invictus was accompanied by a significant shift in the band’s sound, but many of these songs feel like retreads. "Superhero" and "Separation Anxiety", while enjoyable, bear the signatures of "Epic" and "Midlife Crisis", with their loping piano lines and bloodthirsty rap incantations. Meanwhile, "Black Friday" and "Sunny Side Up" conjure up déjà vu of Patton’s side projects; "Motherfucker" could be a pumped up version of Tomahawk’s "I.O.U".
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a band repeating itself. But because Faith No More have such a long history, and their members are responsible for music in a staggering array of styles, it's hard not to expect more, to wish that they might in some way top themselves, or at least change direction. Towards the end of "Cone of Shame", Patton admits, "I’m only happy when I’m pissing you off." Considering Faith No More’s history of confounding and confronting the listening public and the systems of order which influence it, such a statement could serve as the band’s motto. In that sense, maybe holding something back was the plan all along, and a future Faith No More record (one is said to be on the way) will have something more.


Three of the five members of Pennsylvania indie rockers Tigers Jaw quit the band before their latest album was recorded, but they stayed on to finish Charmer; as a result, the album comes off like a smooth segue into a new incarnation of the band rather than a sudden, painful break or an awkward growth spurt.

Charmer

Tigers Jaw claim to be “equal parts Fleetwood Mac and Brand New”, and what’s surprising is that the claim's true on multiple levels. To a certain extent, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham are raging inside of Charmer, the Scranton band’s fourth album—Adam McIlwee, Brianna Collins and Ben Walsh’s harmonies have a glassy, disengaged quality and they’re situated amidst turbulent emotions and turbid guitars. But “equal parts Fleetwood Mac and Brand New” is even more accurate in describing what it was like to be in Tigers Jaw during its recording—like the latter, they're transitioning out of pop-punk and emo into straight-up indie rock, and the entire band was split into Rumours-esque factions while they made the album.
But while three of the five members decided to quit before Charmer was recorded, they did everyone a solid by finishing the album as a parting gift—which possibly explains how Charmer still comes off like a smooth segue into a new incarnation of the band rather than a sudden, painful break or an awkward growth spurt. Though Tigers Jaw have been around for nearly a decade, remaining members Collins and Walsh just recently graduated college, the standard forum where pop-punk kids are not only expected to discover more “mature” and credible sources of independent rock music, but to completely sever themselves from their past. Fortunately, as with their Keystone State neighbors in Beach Slang, Balance and Composure, and Title Fight, Tigers Jaw are beating indie rock lifers at their own game by maintaining the appealing structural songwriting aspects of their roots—melodic quality control, instrumental economy, and the belief this stuff should be MTV-friendly even if that forum isn’t going anywhere near bands like them.
True, you’ve probably heard the descending jangle progression of “Cool” and the minor key power chord riff of “Nervous Kids” hundreds of times in the past year alone, but rarely presented in a manner where the vocals are put so clearly to the fore, presented as a lead instrument rather than something custodially glommed onto fuzzy guitars. Beyond that, Tigers Jaw use sneaky ways to exhibit their pop smarts. Many of Charmer’s songs work the same riff throughout their entirety, with only small variations throughout, maybe a slight chord inversion or a harmonized lead riff or Collins’ pencil-thin synth colorings. But that one riff is usually so sturdy and easy to build off of, the end result is a song with all hook; while the glowing chorus of “Hum” only appears once, it’s more of a resolution than a climax.
Those are the aspects of the album that take after the positive connotations of “charmer”: subtly ingratiating, enjoyable in a low-key kind of way. But Tigers Jaw turn Charmer into something more resonant by teasing out the negative connotations of its title: manipulative, emotionally callow, inauthentic. To put it bluntly, there isn’t a single nice person populating Tigers Jaw’s lyrics, and their varying exhibitions of misanthropic behavior are explained in the opener’s chorus: “It’s a cruel world, but it’s cool.”
It could be read two ways; McIlwee is either conceding to cynicism as a natural state or reveling in it. My guess is the latter, judging from his deadpan disdain when delivering lines like “Don’t you wanna be my perfect bae instead?” and ”I’m out in California now/ And Ari gave me his new car/ And all the girls are so champagne.” Of course, none of Charmer should be taken as an endorsementof that kind of attitude, just a depiction of it. People primarily motivated by their sexual desires and loneliness can be self-absorbed and not all that concerned with their effects on other people. It happens, and it’s not like anyone onCharmer seems happy about it, as its dreary emotional state can be too convincingly mirrored by the music at times. However, those lulls end up creating the simmering tension that gets relieved on “Slow Come On” by a flurry of drum rolls and McIlwee’s vocals just nearing a scream. It’s a chilling example of an asshole revealing his true colors, telling someone who doesn’t turn him on about the kind of person who does—“I don’t even care how mean they are/ So I don't ever take your calls.”
When McIlwee yells, “Why am I so cruel?” towards the end, it’s about as close as he gets to a confession or culpability, acknowledging himself as a man who wants the ones he can’t have, rejects the ones he can and internalizes the resulting loneliness as some kind of perverse pleasure. When his affections are returned, the other is seen as compromised for having sunk to his level. Closer “What Would You Do” is a total outlier, detailing a sad, codependent hookup over lumbering funk like a vintage Afghan Whigs track, while “Frame You” is just as candid—“You couldn’t leave me alone/ Because I was a wreck and you were the savior type.”
All of which makes lead single “Hum” very misleading in retrospect. For one thing, it’s the sole track where Collins takes the lead. Also, when she sings, “You left a permanent scar”, the unforgettable reminiscences of basement shows and long walks home sound like positive nostalgia, or at least a romantic thought amidst the absorbing and near-constant anti-romanticism. Though it’s laced with "Twin Peaks" references, Charmer ends up sounding more influenced by another example of uber-90s television—the one where people stop being polite and start getting real.


Dream a Garden represents a dramatic break for Jam City's Jack Latham, whose 2012 album Classical Curves helped define the concussive Night Slugs sound. Here, jangly guitar licks and reverberant synthesizer predominate, and half the tracks feature Latham's high-pitched vocals.

Dream a Garden

When Jam City's Jack Latham debuted his Dream a Garden material at Krakow's Unsound festival last fall, he scattered an armload of roses across the stage before strapping on a guitar and stepping behind a laptop and microphone. It was a dramatic way of wiping the slate clean, of marking a line between "then" and "now." Previously, he had been known as one of the standard-bearers for the Night Slugs label and its concussive club sound, and his 2012 album Classical Curves is widely regarded as one of the label's high points.
The songs he performed at Unsound bore little in common with his previous material, though, and neither does Dream a Garden, where jangly guitar licks and reverberant synthesizer predominate, and where half the tracks feature Latham's own earnest, high-pitched vocals. The album swims in reverb, phaser, tremolo, panning, and distortion. Where Classical Curves was slick and brittle, equal parts techno and grime, Dream a Garden is sticky and humid; where Classical Curves seemed streaked with graphite, Dream a Garden buckles like moldy carpet.
Latham assembles this sound from a mossy patchwork that proves hard to source: The watery keyboards often recall Cocteau Twins, or a more moth-eaten M83. The guitars—notes bent, signal clean—often evoke funk, or at least an idea of it. In "Proud", the wah-wah hints at Hot Buttered Soul; in "The Garden Thrives", the tone and strumming style recalls Prince's "Sexy Dancer".
Ultimately, though, this sound is all him. To Latham's credit, there's really nothing else out there that sounds like it. The newness of it is exciting, and so is the fullness of his vision; between the narcotic mood and the omnipresent murk, Dream a Garden suggests a maze-like expanse within its borders, perfect for getting lost in. Unfortunately, the album only partly lives up to those promises. The songwriting isn't quite there, for one thing. Chord changes meander, or get tripped up on a single leaden pedal tone. The same elements crop up again and again, and the layers of effects and detuned keyboards eventually turn oppressive; the album isn't much more than a half-hour long, but by the end it feels like chugging eggnog on a summer's day.
And Latham's voice frequently sounds thin and strained, perpetually aiming for notes that are just beyond his reach. He tends to bury it deep in the mix, too, so that it's almost impossible to decipher what he's actually singing. (The lone line I could pick out, from "Today": "And not so long ago/ I was a child with a computer.") "This is a record about love and resistance," declared the press release for the album, and in interviews he has stressed the necessity of finding "different emotional avenues of political expression." Those might be his goals, but sometimes it's not enough to just dream a garden; to get it to actually bear fruit takes planning and hard work, and to have planted in more fertile soil than he has chosen here.


Emily Haines spends much of Metric's fifth album pondering the way the human mind is transformed by artificial versions of natural experiences. She also duets with Lou Reed.

Synthetica

Emily Haines announced the arrival of Metric's fifth studio album Synthetica with a letter to fans that deliberately spelled out the record's lyrical themes. "Synthetica is about staying home and wanting to crawl out of your skin from the lack of external stimulation," she wrote. "It's about what is real versus what is artificial." This binary is common in contemporary art, to the point that it can seem a little trite, but Haines is too clever to settle into a simplistic "technology is bad" argument. Instead, she spends much of Synthetica pondering the way the human mind is transformed by artificial versions of natural experiences and wondering how to feel fully alive and present in a time of constant distraction.
Haines shares some of her themes with fellow Canadian artist Grimes, but the difference in their style and approach highlights a generation gap between the women. Grimes' Visions is typically described as "post-internet," a term that doesn't quite address Claire Boucher's lyrics as much as her aesthetic, which comes across as the product of a mind that has been immersed in the web since childhood. Her multi-tracked vocals cross and tangle like thoughts that are going in different directions and only take shape in aggregate, with strong emotions scattering rather than spiking at moments of catharsis. Synthetica, on the other hand, comes from the perspective of a singer who can vividly recall her life before laptops and smart phones, and has some frame of reference for how these things have changed the substance of her mind. The music forces itself into rigid shapes; the lyrics are boldly declarative. While Grimes evokes a fragmented, freeform mental state, Haines and her bandmates are constantly seeking definition. Their record is rebellious, vigilant, and a bit uptight.
Metric's music has always been about as precise as their name would imply. Guitarist and producer Jimmy Shaw favors guitar and keyboard hooks that snap into tight, rhythmic grids and tones that add vibrant color while staying within the proverbial lines. The approach has yielded mixed results-- their best material ends up seeming glossy and stylish, while the so-so tunes come out sounding overworked or bland. This is still the case on Synthetica, though the material is more consistently strong this time around. "Youth Without Youth" makes the most of their mechanical tightness by emulating the schaffel stomp of Goldfrapp and Gary Glitter, while "The Void" and the excellent ballad "Clone" successfully contrast cold tones and rhythmic stiffness with particularly vulnerable vocal performances by Haines. "Breathing Underwater" and "Speed the Collapse" may border on generic, but the group steps out of its comfort zone on the opener "Artificial Nocturne", which approaches the motorik bliss of Stereolab songs like "Jenny Ondioline" but frustratingly cuts out before they can fully crest out on the groove.
Haines is a vocalist with limited range, but she's good at conveying character and nuance in her phrasing even when working within her default position of earnest defiance. She switches up her style a bit here and there on Synthetica, putting on a faux-girlish tone on "Lost Kitten", and bringing out a seldom utilized sweetness to balance out the sourness of duet partner Lou Reed on "The Wanderlust". (Yes, somehow Lou Reed is on this record.) Her position is always clear on a lyrical level, but her voice lends a touch of depth and ambiguity to the music, which opens up her "artificial vs. natural" thesis to debate. Synthetica is something of a polemic, but Haines' moments of ambivalence are what make the record compelling. At their best, Metric resist making statements about how technology is changing our minds and culture, and simply ask thoughtful questions about it with the awareness that there are no easy answers.


Following the addition of a second guitarist and a move to an actual studio, the Austin band's fourth album is its best-sounding yet, all groovy Texas psych.

D

White Denim telegraphed their entire new album via "Regina Holding Hands", from 2009's Fits. "Regina" sounded nothing like the skronky, speed-addled garage that had earned the Austin band a deal with RCRD LBL, and a lot more like a leftfield take on airy jazz rock. "Breezy" was the last adjective anyone was expecting to use for this band at that point, and the prospect of an full album of such tentative sap would've been enough to trigger the release of the dreaded "cheese" descriptor. Yet with their fourth album, D, White Denim double down on this very approach, and manage to make a pretty good LP out of it. How'd they do it?
By expanding. First, they grew to a quartet, adding second guitarist Austin Jenkins to their lineup. Second, they dropped some coin on better recording equipment, moving from a trailer to an actual studio. And D is easily White Denim's best-sounding effort yet: The band's trademark shape-shifting compositions now feature clean, interlocking guitar lines, and singer James Petralli's voice has smoothed out into a raspy howl. It's also their most consistent album: Rollicking opener "It's Him!" sets the groovy Texas psych template to which the rest of the record hews closely. Along the way, White Denim are able to stir in a new set of psychedelic flourishes-- see the flutes and hippie lyrical mysticism of "River to Consider"-- with the verve of a Fillmore West opening band. Even the post-Maharishi Beatles vibe of closer "Keys"-- complete with strings!-- feels like a perfect extension of a confident band willing to stretch a bit. Who knows: Maybe it's a teaser for the next album?
Personally, I'd prefer White Denim add a bit more choogle to their groove-- more oomph, a bit more low end to complement D's fresh focus on detail and lateral movement. They certainly have the rhythm section for it, and how great would it be for the album's opening triptych to stir in a little "Ramble Tamble"? For now though, this LP's more than good enough. White Denim's inherent restlessness means that all the band's releases feel transitional to a degree, but D's measured restraint points toward the best possible direction for them.


Shrewd beat choices (and Killer Mike) liven up a lopsided collaboration between two longtime Dungeon Family members who still share undeniable chemistry.

Big Sleepover

Big Boi and Sleepy Brown set the stakes of their joint album early. “We have nothing else to prove,” Sleepy sings with calm assurance on the title track. The line nods to the pair’s extensive list of collaborations as members of the Dungeon Family, and Big Boi and Sleepy Brown’s particular recording history. It’s impossible to see their names together and not think of “The Way You Move,” the seismic 2003 hit that ironically both declared “OutKast is everlasting” and reintroduced Big and Sleepy as dynamic standalone performers. Big Sleepover smartly doesn’t try to recapture that lightning or peddle nostalgia. But it’s built on the conviction that when Big Boi and Sleepy Brown come together, magic happens, a premise that unravels as they struggle to find a groove.
Teased since 2019, the album grew out of frequent touring. “Just being on the tour bus, we were like, hey … why don’t we do some new songs, you know, some brand-new songs, just me and you, a whole album?” Big Boi told NPR last month. That easygoing, open-ended approach characterizes the record, which feels like an extended hangout, the two artists casually trading ideas as friends and family drift in and out the room.
Their chemistry is undeniable. No song feels strained or overloaded, and both artists pull back or step up as needed, be it Big Boi supplying a fleet bridge on electro-funk track “Animalz,” or Sleepy adopting a choppy growl to fit into Big and Killer Mike’s bar clinic on “Lower Case (no cap).” The Dungeon Family emphasis on coherence and harmony is deeply ingrained in both of them.
But instinct hinders them as much as it helps. There’s no particular mission or purpose guiding these songs, leading Big and Sleepy to fall back on limp sex romps and dull player tales that grow increasingly impersonal and perfunctory. “Can’t Sleep” laments the thirst of women who make booty calls, a goofy and undercooked conceit. “Last night, can’t sleep/Girls keep calling me/This girl keep calling me/She keep on partying,” Sleepy sings mechanically on the hook. Is he annoyed? Is he tempted? Does his phone not have a “do not disturb” setting? There’s no drama or tension in Sleepy’s crooning, or in Big’s bitter verse, just old men finger-wagging. “Intentions,” a loungey cut produced by Organized Noize, is just as stifled. After Big Boi’s colorful sex raps, the song flatlines as Sleepy and guest Cee-Lo blandly recite their designs for a potential lover. For a song about lust, it’s weirdly chaste.
Sleepy frequently disappoints in this way, his melodies serving as placeholders and timekeepers. He’s never been the type of performer to steal the spotlight, but he could be counted on for style and flavor. From the pimp strut of “So Fresh, So Clean” to the smooth yearning of “I Can’t Wait” to the icy cool of OutKast deep cut “Spaghetti Junction,” Sleepy has long been a shapeshifter. But here he is often muted and one-note, his waning presence accented by Big Boi’s eternally spry rapping.
The pair’s shrewd beat choices keep the record lively despite its lopsided performances. There’s no outright jams, but funky keys, bass, and guitar pop up throughout, keeping the mood buoyant and loose. The fizzy synths on “Return of the Dope Boi” evoke a robot doing a Doug E. Fresh impression. And the bright, choppy keys on “Doin’ It” have a spirited, almost ragtime sway. The album’s true secret weapon is Killer Mike, whose guest verses light up four songs with verve and humor. Sleepy Brown and Big Boi rarely spark anything as engaging by themselves, but there’s something charming about them still creating spaces for other artists to shine.

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Swedish folk-pop duo First Aid Kit's third LP and first for Columbia is their grandest and arguably their most consistent release to date, featuring weary songs about transience that approach their conflicts with wiseness and maturity.

Stay Gold

Outside of high school curricula and motivational posters, Robert Frost is not an especially popular literary influences these days. Two roads diverged in the woods and most people could give a shit. When sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg named both a song and their third album together as First Aid Kit after Frost’s poem “Nothing Gold Can Stay”, from his Pulitzer-winning 1923 collection New Hampshire, the choice seemed to reflect their youth: The sisters signed their first record contract in 2008 when Johanna was 17 and Klara 14, both around the age when most readers have Frost thrust upon them. On the other hand, the Söderbergs are Swedish, not American. And instead of stopping by woods on a snowy evening, they’ve chosen Frost’s elegy to the natural state of entropy. “Nature’s first green is gold, her hardest hue to hold,” he writes. “So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.”
It’s a darker and more fatalistic sentiment than we typically expect from Frost, a sunny reminder than nothing continues in its ideal state. Everything fades. We all die. First Aid Kit understand this inevitability, yet they have the tenacity and optimism to fight against that falling apart. “What if our hard work ends in despair?” the sisters ask on “Stay Gold”, as a guitar plucks out a stoic theme and the percussion echoes against canyon walls. “What if the road won’t take me there?” They’re not jaded—at least not yet. The Söderbergs remain romantics in an unromantic world, not only writing lyrics about fighting the good fight but making the kind of wide-eyed, ‘70s-tinged folk-rock that thrives on soaring vocals, warm harmonies, big choruses, and heart-on-sleeve lyrics.
There’s plenty of each on Stay Gold, their first record for Columbia. It’s certainly their grandest and arguably their most consistent release to date, even if there’s nothing here as undeniable as “Emmylou”,  from 2012’s The Lion’s Roar. With its affectionate hook, that song was both a paean to country music romance and a mission statement; ostensibly the lyrics were directed toward a male counterpart, but it sounded more like the sisters were inviting each other to sing along. Stay Gold similarly conveys the joys of musical collaboration—their voices always sound good together—yet they’re not quite so convinced of the merits of the music industry. These are weary songs about transience: touring constantly, missing home, losing friends and lovers. It’s darker than Roar, but also wiser, more mature in its conflicts. First Aid Kit still can’t sell a line like, “Shit gets fucked up and people just disappear,” but they convey the dusty self-assertion of “The Bell” like it’s gospel.
“I’d rather be moving than static,” they sing together on a song called “Shattered and Hollow”, before promising each other, “We are gonna get out of here.” Touring life is a tricky theme for any artist to address, as it potentially alienates an audience that has never hired a booking agent, never had to worry about label contracts, and never had to deal with prying journalists. What’s bracing about Stay Gold, then, is how universal the Söderberg sisters make that life sound. Rather than dwell on the particulars of long days on the road, they pare their experiences down to sentiments that sound more relatable and identifiable, whether it’s leaving home, discovering new places, or defining your own destiny before the gold fades. In a sense, First Aid Kit have managed to establish a touring diary as a metaphor for young womanhood, which makes the music more powerful. “Girls they just want to have fun,” they sing on “Waitress Song”, “and the rest of us hardly know who we are.” The song gallops at a dramatic pace, with that insistent acoustic guitar and ornate filigrees of pedal steel instilling the chorus with a sense of immense yearning.
To record Stay Gold, the Söderberg sisters again flew to Omaha to work with Mike Mogis, who produced The Lion’s Roar. Naturally, the folk-rock reference points remain, even if the duo paint with a broader palette. There’s more color here, like the sympathetic flute on “Fleeting One” and the hoedown momentum of “Heaven Knows”. Mogis’ production sounds shinier, however, more elaborate and dense, with a vague shimmer pervading every note. While it broadcasts a kind of coming-of-age melodrama, this fuller, more self-consciously produced sound undercuts the immediacy of the sisters’ songwriting, such that songs like "Cedar Lane" and "The Bell" seem to be less about working through thorny issues and more about recalling confusions tucked away safely in the past. The music threatens to rob them of their youth, but these two women have the poise and presence to sing like they're still in the yellow woods pondering which path they should take.


Delfonics founding member and lead vocalist William Hart teams up with Adrian Younge for a surprisingly radical late-career record: Younge places Hart in a stylized version of the past that works as a tribute, deconstruction, and revamp of his band's once-vanguard Philly sound template.

The Delfonics: Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics

Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics

It's almost 20 years since Rick Rubin successfully repositioned Johnny Cash from a fading star in a terminally uncool genre into the walking embodiment of cool with American Recordings. In the interim, the late-career Rubin-style makeover has become just as much of a cliche as the album of standards from the American songbook. A release about a new collaboration between the Delfonics' William Hart, and Adrian Younge, a producer several decades his junior, said that the resulting album was going to be "what the kids call 'hip-hop'"-- which sounds a lot like an unappealing welcome to the rap game Rubin-Cash formula.
Fortunately, it turns out that Younge's approach towards working with an older artist is less like Rubin's and more like Quentin Tarantino's: Instead of aiming for gravitas and youth culture appeal, he's placed Hart in his own stylized and slightly warped vision of the past that's both a tribute to the Delfonics' heyday, a radical deconstruction of it, and something altogether original.
Younge and Hart's album doesn't actuallly sound much like a Delfonics record. In the group's late 1960s and early 70s prime, they were at the vanguard of the Philly sound that replaced the hard-edged funk that girded the popular black music of the time with a slick breeziness that could occasionally border on easy listening. Delfonics records were gorgeously produced, with Hart and his rotating cast of support singers floating layers of vocal harmonies over lush beds of strings and horns.
Younge-- who produced the album, co-wrote all of its 13 songs with Hart, and played a couple of dozen instruments on it-- exchanges all that for a sonic aesthetic that has more in common with the more eccentric strain of soul and R&B records that are so beloved by hardcore crate diggers and producers like J Dilla and Madlib. Instead of the luxe orchestration that was a trademark of peak-period Delfonics, Younge has given Hart idiosyncratic arrangements full of harpsichord, glockenspiel, and the electric sitar, which impart an element of campy psychedelia, but thankfully avoid crossing fully over into kitsch. With a mix that leans heavily on analog grit and high midrange tones, it sounds like the test pressing of a long-lost psych soul record rescued from a storage unit, and achieves a similar kind of retro accuracy that Younge gave to his soundtrack for the 2009 faux-vintage blaxploitation flick Black Dynamite.
For much of the album Hart sings solo, another departure from the Delfonics sound that we're used to. Purists might be consider the move tantamount to sacrilege, but it suits the material. Hart treats Younge's arrangements like an obstacle course, slipping nimbly through them with an agility that belies his age. His falsetto is still as crystal clear as it ever was, even if he has to bend the occasional high note in order to find the right pitch.
There are a number of potential issues with calling this record Adrian Younge Presents the Delfonics: Crediting what's essentially a William Hart solo album to the group could be considered questionable, and Younge taking top billing on the record's title and artist credit is either audacious or presumptuous. And anyone expecting a revival of the Delfonics sound we all know and love very well may walk away disappointed.
Taken on its own terms, though, the record works. And if Adrian Younge's approach to the project becomes the new formula for older artists, then all the better. A musician demanding the respect they're due is understandable, but one taking their reputation and using it to crack open new artistic territory is much more interesting.


Second Toughest in the Infants is Underworld's second, spectacular attempt at making big, important rave music. It marked the last time their blend of ferocity, earnestness, and expanse felt transcendent.

Underworld: Second Toughest in the Infants

Second Toughest in the Infants

At this point it seems that Underworld are remembered, at least by casual observers, as the rave act most like a rock band. There's nothing really harmful about this interpretation, but acting like a rock band—a euphemism for "had a frontman"—isn't really what separated Underworld from their peers. After all, the Prodigy and the Chemical Brothers both worked in the album format to great effect, and, like Underworld, their live shows and general demeanor had more in common with Oasis than with, say, Spiral Tribe. In fact, what truly makes Underworld unique, and what coincidentally most closely aligns them with rock bands, is that they took themselves really seriously; their ambitions leaned to the serious and important. Unlike most people—lots of ravers included—they thought these things could be achieved using the rave template.
Second Toughest in the Infants is the band's second, spectacular attempt at making big, important rave music, and their second with young fusionist DJ Darren Emerson helping steer the ship (frontman Karl Hyde and Rick Smith had been making music, in one style or another, since the early '80s). It was reissued for its 20th anniversary this November, in both two- and four-CD editions, remastered and bundled with exclusive and/or unreleased extras. You can see the band posing in the album title, a funny little comment made by Smith's nephew that conveniently reads like poetic word soup. You see this, probably, before you realize the album opens with a 16-minute, three-part suite entitled "Juanita : Kiteless : To Dream of Love" and follows that with a 15-minute, two-part suite entitled "Banstyle/Sappys Curry". There it is, comrades: a heaping helping of Big, Important Music. If you want funny voices and funny haircuts, the Prodigy are in the tent to the left.
The great thing about mid-'90s Underworld is they made this beat-poetry-cum-rave-anthem splice work against the odds. Their secret was to act as if Hyde was not a vocalist at all but rather a particularly charismatic sampler: spitting out short, repetitive phrases that were afforded little more purchase on a track's mix than any other melodic curlicue. As an album, and as disc one of this reissue, Second Toughest holds up marvelously, dominated by the shapeshifting opening tracks but also featuring fan-favorite "Confusion the Waitress" and the stupefying "Pearl's Girl", perhaps the fist-pumping-est epic in a discography chockablock with them. "Stagger", the tormented kosmische saga that closes the affair, betrays the band's album-centric aspirations and beats Thom Yorke to the meandering electro-ballad by a decade.
The band's profile raised considerably with Second Toughest, which roughly coincided with the release of Trainspotting, the film making prominent use of non-album track "Born Slippy.NUXX". The track's popularity, and its association with the movie, perhaps unfairly tethers the band's sound to the '90s, though there's some comfort in remembering a time when music this loopy and progressive could dominate (European) airwaves.
Disc two reproduces all of the exclusive material from the absurdly good Pearl's Girl EP—five long pieces over 35 minutes that would stand as most band's best work even before adding the worthy reworks of the title track—and adds "Born Slippy (Instrumental Version)", which functionally has almost nothing to do with the more famous NUXX version, as well as "Born Slippy.Nuxx (Deep Pan)", an intriguing but ultimately boring remix.
Disc three offers a full slate of unreleased material, some of which ("D+B Thing", "Techno Thang", "D'Arbly St") gives away its throwaway nature by its title. "D'Arbly", meanwhile is seven minutes of downtempo lounge noodling. Only an extra version of "Pearl's" and "Bloody 1", yet another loopy 16-minute epic (Underworld could do no wrong in this format in the mid '90s), rescue this disc. Disc four offers seven (!) different versions of "Born Slippy.NUXX" (often simply titled "Nuxx"), several of them live. The main takeaway here is that you do not, in fact, want Hyde's scintillating vocal melody to continue for the entire runtime, no matter how much you think you love the opening minutes. But the disc also illustrates how much Underworld has in common with a jam band, iterating over long passages, massaging a track into form.
Second Toughest marks the last time Underworld's blend of ferocity, earnestness, and expanse felt transcendent. By the time they returned with Beaucoup Fish in 1998 they seemed more like an institution than a contender. But there's an absolute trove of potent material associated with Second Toughest; lesser bands might've mined this period for two or even three albums. The remasters sound great, and the two-disc version makes exploration reasonable for the unfamiliar, though both the original album and the essential Pearl's Girl EP can be had for a song in your local used bin. For the fanatic, the four-disc version offers a couple of gems and a thorough examination of the genesis of the band's most famous track, i.e. exactly the type of thing you might hope for from a not-explicitly-necessary reissue. Underworld made a point of going deeper, and carrying on for longer, than most bands would dare; they're worthy of a reissue that does the same.


Anchored by muted samples and soul-baring soliloquies, the New York rapper’s new album is an impressive, winding meditation on survival.

Spirit Roaming

“Mob Psycho 100,” the second song on AKAI SOLO’s Spirit Roaming, begins with a sample from an interview with the late Toni Morrison: “How do you get through? Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt; it’s not about that solution.” As the song unfolds, this wisdom spills into the deep cauldron of AKAI’s emotions and thoughts on resilience. The chopped vocal loop transforms into a tortured chant, as his cathartic, stream-of-consciousness bars trickle out of him. The raps feel almost strained, as if to ensure that the lessons he’s collected on his search for universal truth arrive clearly above the instrumental chaos. “Mob Psycho 100” feels like a portal to the rest of Spirit Roaming: a fractured realm that contains the winding routes of AKAI’s life. Inside, he leads us with impassioned soliloquies and elaborate sample arrangements, rendered with impressive precision.
The beauty of joining AKAI on this spiritual journey is its unpredictability. There’s a pleasant, meandering rhythm to the way the 28-year-old moves through musings on the futility of rap game politics (“For a Few”), the paralyzing nature of existential anxiety (“Demonslayer”), and the balance between protecting his heart and sharing his emotions (“Driftman”). With every topic on the table, AKAI’s ideas can feel daunting and opaque. He’s not completely forthright with the roots of his pain or the ways he’s forged his path. Instead, he chops his worldview into bite-sized morsels to allow for easier comprehension and consumption. He burns through couplets with a nimble, purposeful flow, each line revealing a flash of his hard-won insight: “Not being done in by this vital shit/Dread is not all there is,” he raps over the trudging drum loop of “Demonslayer,” before skirting off to the next idea, forcing you to scroll back to make sure you caught the knowledge he dropped.
AKAI’s consistency here is a blessing and a curse. He settles into a groove among murky samples and esoteric jazz elements, a style that has come to characterize a certain vein of underground New York rap, and the combination makes Spirit Roaming a more uniform project than 2021’s True Sky. Tracks like “Red Butterfly” and “S.O.M.” might appear on a compilation of greatest hits from his label Backwoodz Studioz. On the latter, AKAI’s abrasive rapping slices through the dense production, like an adventurer cutting through jungle vines with a machete. But at times, the beat feels too commanding, and he periodically loses the battle against the cacophonous production. Take the back half of “The Weakest Crest,” which leaves some of his words drowned out by what sounds like a kazoo. Spirit Roaming works best when it strikes a balance between AKAI’s in-your-face rapping, the grating rhythms, and sampled melodies.
Fourteen different producers appear on the album, including his long-time collaborator iblss, D.C.’s WiFiGawd, and the Moreno Valley-based JUNIE. The varied source material that these producers draw on feels like a personal challenge for AKAI, whose subtle tempo manipulations help him find natural chemistry within a wide range of styles. He elongates his words as the beat of “Heart Weary!” awakens, then deploys a staccato flow as the chaotic, truncated piano loop kicks into gear. On “Red Butterfly,” he raps at an unrelenting pace, his lines blurring over a serene beat that feels as if it belongs in a Hayao Miyazaki film.
The closer “Upper Room,” with its sample’s haunting wails, is a fitting denouement. Calling upon Backwoodz duo Armand Hammer and producer Messiah Musik to assist, Armand Hammer’s billy woods and Elucid spit about the loss of loved ones and dealing with regret. In his final speech, AKAI alludes to his mother’s guidance and offers veiled threats of violence against those trying to knock him off his path. It’s as if the trio descended upon the track to arm each other with pearls of wisdom and cautionary tales before they head their separate ways. Spirit Roaming builds toward a seemingly impossible question to answer: How does one trudge through life in the face of mounting external pressure? That query grounds this album, driving AKAI’s ongoing search for the fundamental theories that help him stay alive. The result is a thrilling scavenger hunt, one that reminds us of the small miracle that is survival.