Dan Lissvik's latest solo album echoes his past glory with the Swedish dance-rockers Studio, but teases when it could fulfill.

Midnight

With each passing summer, Studio’s lone studio album, West Coast, becomes more of a Dark Tower, an unobtainable beacon forever on the horizon, seemingly never to be reached or returned to. When the Swedish dance duo released that sprawling double album in the summer of 2007, it capped six years’ worth of singles and brought them a great deal of buzz and remix work. Dan Lissvik and Rasmus Hägg were suddenly cast to the front of Scandinavia’s nü-disco and/or nü-Balearic revival, easily lumped in with the likes of Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas, Todd Terje, the Tough Alliance, Air France, and more. It’s a landmark album in which previously demarcated indie rock and left-field dance culture hooked up, the darker and stranger kin of LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver from that same year. But after 2008’s Yearbook 2 culled their remix work for the likes of Shout Out Louds and Kylie Minogue, Hägg and Lissvik split.
Nine years on, West Coast still casts a shadow over Lissvik’s body of work as a solo artist, an expectation that Lissvik himself has nurtured. Even on his 2014 album with his project Atelje, he titled the lead track “Ode to Studio,” though its three minutes wouldn’t quite scratch that itch. At times, Lissvik’s old band seems like that old relationship that haunts him still, replaying those old fights in his head and reminiscing even as he moves on with his life.
Midnight is the result of Lissvik squeezing in recording time amidst the demands of being a new father, when the wee hours were the only time he could get to himself. He even names the eight tracks after each letter in the word. The first third is playful if not quite memorable: “M” utilizes the kind of lounge lilt that Terje dusted off on It’s Album Time, with a zippy organ line and Henry Mancini-like doot-doot-doots for good measure. But despite such lark, there’s a curlicue of guitar that pings like a steel drum and, as the perky bass falls away, a more melancholic plucked bass echoes underneath. “D” also looks back, the keys pneumatic like Gershon Kingsley’s early Moog classic “Popcorn,” while the sleek backdrop brings to mind “Blue Monday.”
But as “N” swoops down, with its slow, throbbing bassline, primitive drum machine pattern, echoing chimes, and flecks of flamenco guitar, you wonder if Lissvik might have pulled a fast one and gone back into an old hard drive to plunder some old Studio session, so dead-on is the sound. It’s one thing for Lissvik to mimic the sound palette of his old band, but what makes “N” stick is that it also conjures Studio’s telltale vibe, which was never so much ‘beach sunset’ as it was ‘darkness at noon.’ The tropes of Balearic–nylon string guitar, dub bass, analog synth, slow groove–give a more foreboding edge, a sunny shore occluded by storm clouds.
It carries on to the second “I,” which even more closely resembles a lost track from West Coast, winding like an island road at night. It carries over to “G,” the album track with the toughest nü-disco beat. Lissvik expertly brings in filigrees of hand percussion, stings of wah-wah guitar and those infinitely echoing wordless exhalations that haunted West Coast tracks like “Origin” and “West Side.” About the only thing they are missing is Lissvik’s insouciant, Robert Smith-like vocals. But then, just like that, Midnight returns to intriguing-but-not-vital terrain with “H,” a brief future-bass type of doodle, and “T,” another breezy nü-disco instrumental. The effect is such that it makes those three middle tracks seem like an aural mirage, West Coast still totemic and distant on the horizon after all this time.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article incorrectly attributed Studio vocals to Hagg, rather than Lissvik.


Phoenix are as decadent and beguiling as ever. Their sixth album is a romantic, glossy, soft-pop ode to sweet escapes and dance floors, though at times their pleasure-seeking falls flat.

Ti Amo

In April, Phoenix teased a bit of music from their new album in a lingerie commercial directed by Sofia Coppola, the wife of frontman Thomas Mars. Unknown at the time, the song turned out to be “Fior di Latte,” an appropriately gauzy synth-pop slow jam that insists, “We’re meant to get it on.” The title refers to the purest Italian gelato, nothing but sweetened cream, and musically, it’s almost as delicious as it is decadent. When Mars sighs, “Fior di latte/Don’t think about it, trigger me happy,” his private language somehow makes sense.
Gelato was reportedly a central inspiration for Ti Amo, the French quartet’s sixth album overall and their third since breaking out with 2009’s Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. Formed in Versailles in the late-’90s with close ties to their peers in Air and Daft Punk, the beguiling synth-rock act had long bucked conventions about what a band could be in a way that deserved a bigger audience. They finally got it thanks to the inimitable and, with apologies to Coppola, “lost in translation” feeling of festival anthems like “1901” and “Lisztomania.” The eventual follow-up, 2013’s Bankrupt!, was a fine excuse for Phoenix fans to celebrate their newfound Coachella-headliner status. Four years later, Ti Amo feels like a sugary treat that ought to hold us over for another festival season, though it hints at loftier ambitions.
At its heart, Ti Amo is another meticulously constructed 10-song set of glossy soft-pop romance. Whenever Phoenix get around to release what’s sure to be a stellar best-of comp, a few welcoming standouts from Ti Amo will belong on there. Alongside the overt come-ons of “Fior di Latte,” another highlight is the euphoric “J-Boy,” which packs sonic details as tightly as its airy “Just because of you” vocal hook. Mars’ scattered, dystopian lyrical imagery works almost like a backdrop for a sci-fi music video, while the real drama plays out in video-game burbles and exaggerated Auto-Tune-like vocal effects.
Not all songs on Ti Amo are this memorable, but others come close. “Fleur de Lys” flips a Fela Kuti sample for what might be their most Hall and Oates song yet, with its urgent “no rest ’till I get to you” falsetto. The ennui that often underlines Phoenix’s songs resurfaces on the charming “Lovelife,” whose lines of solitude and regret belie its title. The galloping bassline on “Tuttifrutti” is in the same lineage as peak New Order, though the lofty vocals about “trashing motels” are more in keeping with Phoenix’s earlier blue-eyed soul.
Along with pop’s ephemerality, the gelato on Ti Amo also plays into the what the band has called its “fantasized version of Italy,” a loose theme that carries over into the accompanying videos and the set pieces of their tour. Recorded in Paris against a backdrop of terrorism, ethnonationalism, and refugees in crisis, the sunny, upbeat Ti Amo is thus meant as a “safe haven” in dark times, Phoenix have said. Although Phoenix originally stood out in their native France for singing in English, deciphering lyrics has mattered less in the mélange of their music. Their effortless use here of not only English, Italian, and Spanish but also, yes, French, on an album concerned with the pure pleasure of a Roman holiday, scans as a bold defense of all that is modern, humanist, and cosmopolitan, akin to the optimism embodied by the exclamation point of recently elected French president Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche! movement.
Alas, these songs—sculpted from thousands of hours of recordings—are being asked to do too much to sustain a coherent geographical concept. On the churning title track, with its polyglot message of love, the narrator also riffs self-awarely about flipping between Buzzcocks and classic Italian crooners, between “unsophisticated soft rock” and Beethoven; other lyrics like “open up your legs” and “don’t tell me no” complicate matters discomfortingly. “Via Veneto” mentions a sonogram, but without the payoff in figurative meaning to be found on Wolfgang’s “Rome,” where a relationship crumbles like an empire. And the grim reality of the headlines does seep in, not always as cleverly as with the vanishing reefs and “Kamikaze in a hopeless world” of “J-Boy.” “Role Model” refers to riots outside and its central character is a Machiavellian chameleon at a podium, signing autographs and climbing up a hill. The overall effect is similar to one of those vacations so exhausting you need another vacation.
For all their complexities, Phoenix have typically sounded effortless. And from a stage or streaming playlist, these songs will gel with the music of their last two albums. But the work that went into them, apparently on a 9-to-5 schedule, is palpable. Another case in point is the finale, “Telefono.” There’s a slyly Strokes-like crunch. Mars is singing in Italian. He’s on the phone to a lover in Hollywood, reminiscing about a trip to Rome. He’s as we found him at the end of Bankrupt!—alone, “solo”—but his location is wildly specific: in a studio, in the Italian beach town of Passoscuro. Like the rest of Ti Amo, it’s impressively rococo, but perhaps easier to admire than to love. Don’t think about it, trigger us happy.


For their new album, Kingston, Penn.'s punk outfit Title Fight signed to Anti- and took an atmospheric turn. The effects-driven fretwork is the record's most distinguishing trait, especially given the absence of the double-time drumming and in-your-face bass parts that dominated the band’s preceding albums.

Hyperview

Baptized in Hot Water Music, schooled in bicoastal hardcore and post-punk, and supported by pizza-obsessed Tumblr kids and critics alike, Title Fight are living proof of the cherry-picking mores of modern punk bands and their audiences. The group’s formative years—namely, the period spanning from the early slew of EPs in the late aughts to their 2011 debut, Shed—painted a portrait of four working-class kids looking to start some skate-ready ruckus and slap some sense into the Warped Tour set. They proceeded to balance that might with melody on 2012’s excellent album Floral Green, and further refined the approach on 2013’s Spring Songs EP. A decade in, the labels aren’t sticking like they used to. For every "true pop punk" acolyte who groups them with Man Overboard and the Wonder Years, there’s a '90s-inclined listener who considers them the new Jawbreaker, or a former hardcore fan curious to see what’s coming next.
When labels become irrelevant, then so do the expectations associated with them, and it is from this precipice that Title Fight leap into Hyperview, propelled forwards by disarming self-awareness and generous, generous use of the whammy bar. Title Fight have referred explicitly to the album as a work of "guitar music," and the effects-driven fretwork is the record’s most distinguishing trait, especially given the absence of the double-time drumming and in-your-face bass parts that dominated the band’s preceding albums. The boards are again manned by Will Yip, the band’s longtime producer; making a significant departure for an aural engineer typically inclined towards robust, no-nonsense punk, he swathes the chiming guitars in warped, shoegaze-y tones and sticks them at the very front of the mix, optimizing their dissonant effects. The textures are tactile; the steeled, gnashing strumming that opens "Chlorine" feels sharp enough to slice, while the cavalcade of prickly, chiming chords that kicks off "Trace Me Onto You" rushes in from all sides, bristling against the ears like steel wool.
The relentless focus on guitar tone might be too strong, though: on songs like "Mrahc", and "Rose of Sharon", the bleached-out fretwork bleeds into the surrounding sonic space as to render Jamie Rhoden and Ned Russin’s vocals downright inaudible. It’s worth noting that in the case of the album’s delirious closer, "New Vision", the mistranslation actually adds to the experience. Rather, the seamless union of the singer's mumbles and the guitar’s moans constitutes a new language in itself, united in the gloaming. But without a strong vocal presence to bolster slow drifters like "Dizzy", the richness of the guitars steadily overwhelms until there’s nothing left.
That’s a shame, because from a narrative standpoint, Hyperview’s lyrical concerns prove compelling, if only because they’re so relatable. "Trace Me Onto You" approaches the rage-fueled rush of makeup sex as a desperate attempt to reconnect with some form of the "we," thereby legitimizing the "I," a false union whose collapse is chronicled on "Liar’s Love". "Your Pain Is Mine Now", by contrast, seeks resolution in the form of emotional warfare, all Gatling guns and wasted tears. “Burned alive" and "tangled in the dark" at the same time, Rhoden renders the sadness of subject, singer and listener obsolete. His muffled whines of "Cry/ Die/Boo-hoo" are all but engulfed by the flange, a pretty little nihilistic touch.
Some of the hardcore faithful criticize Hyperview as a naked stab at an "indie crossover"—a softer, watered-down version of Title Fight's melodic pop-punk peddled as transcendent, but hollow in character. To a large chunk of fans, the band's signing to Anti- (the Epitaph sister label behind releases from decidedly non-punk acts like Dr. Dog and Xavier Rudd) constitutes both a commercial cop-out and a slight against the kids who wanted to see one of the more promising pop-punk acts grow up into a moshpit machine rather than an underwater emo outfit. Title Fight may be young, muddy, and occasionally clunky with the wordplay, but they’re certainly not stupid: The proper assertion of one’s independence may very well lie in the subtle, steady subversion of genre rather than a grizzled scream or the crash of cymbals. As for the complicated equation balancing volume and dynamics with intent, it's safe to say that Hyperview packs just as much intensity as in past records, albeit with a cooler, softer flame; between "Rose of Sharon", "Mrahc", and "New Vision", even the most skeptical fan will be able to find a slow-burner that captures the thrill of any Shed song. Consistent, concise and stylistically compelling, Hyperview is a good set of tracks, and a worthy crossover attempt at that, provided you’re OK with consulting the lyrics booklet and willing to take a ride on the undertow.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a groundbreaking 1988 album, a crucial document in Black rock music with huge, brawny riffs and a complex socio-political message.

Vivid

On February 25, 1989, Living Colour’s Vivid entered the Top 20 on the Billboard 200 chart—an impressive feat for any debut album, but odd for a record that was already 10 months old. Released in May 1988, Vivid took nearly half a year to chart, entering at No. 194 before embarking upon a slow, steady climb that seemed to move one rung at a time. So, on the cusp of Vivid’s leap to No. 16, Living Colour took a well-deserved victory lap—literally.
Making their network television debut that week on The Arsenio Hall Show, the New York hard-rock band delivered the sort of performance that—even without easy YouTube recall—can still be mentally conjured frame-by-frame decades after the fact. Decked out in a matching orange tank top and spandex Body Glove shorts, singer Corey Glover looked less like the typical rock frontman than a guy on his way to the gym, and partway through the band’s electrifying rendition of Vivid’s lead-off crusher, “Cult of Personality,” he decided to get his steps in. After casually strolling off the stage during the second verse, Glover made a beeline for the audience and began running up and down the aisles with his mic like a Day-Glo Donahue, before returning to the stage for some synchronized dance moves and cyclonic hair-whipping as the song raced toward its furious double-time finale. (Arsenio was never known for subtle expressions of enthusiasm, but this might’ve been the first and only time he felt compelled to head-bang his appreciation.) Alas, for many viewers, Living Colour’s bright sartorial choices and mid-song calisthenics routines weren’t the most striking features of the band. Rather, it was the fact that this was all being done by four Black men—an anomaly that, by all historical precedents, really should’ve been the norm.
During the post-war 20th century, Black artists were the agents of rock‘n’roll innovation and subcultural mobilization, from the genre’s early-’50s infancy on through its subsequent mutations into garage, psych, proto-metal, arena rock, punk, and hardcore. But by the ‘80s, that legacy had been all but scrubbed from commercial rock radio and ignored by the nascent MTV. Sure, Michael Jackson could piggyback on Eddie Van Halen’s shoulders to land a Top 20 single on Billboard’s Mainstream Rock chart, and Prince could do the same whenever he revealed himself to be the new-wave Hendrix, but these were rare monocultural pop stars with the clout and promotional muscle to breach industry-mandated genre lines. For more unconventional Black artists—like dubwise hardcore pioneers Bad Brains or ska-punk eccentrics Fishbone—the walls were closing in from both sides, as they were shut out from both the white world of rock radio and the Black mainstream star-making apparatus that favored slick R&B balladeers, synth-funk loverboys, and fashionable rappers.
By 1985, Vernon Reid’s growing frustration with this Jim Crowing of the music industry had reached its breaking point. Born in London in 1958, but raised in Brooklyn from the age of 2, Reid was a musical omnivore who was schooled by his parents’ funk, soul, and rock records.  He came of age musically in the fabled early-‘80s New York underground, where post-punk, mutant disco, and experimental anti-pop scenes were separated by only a flight of stairs in multi-level clubs like Danceteria. As a studied guitarist, Reid landed his first pro gig playing with jazz drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson in the fusion ensemble Decoding Society, the sort of group that earned invites to prestigious international festivals like Montreux, but whose hard-charging rhythm-forward style allowed Reid to flex a fleet-fingered dexterity that would put most metal shredders to shame.
Eager to lead his own band, Reid formed Living Colour (its British spelling nodding to his birthplace) in 1983 as a revolving-door ensemble where he could push his avant-jazz proclivities into a more rock direction. Over the next three years, the group served as a sandbox for a host of players (drummer Pheeroan akLaff, keyboardist Geri Allen, and guitarist/bassist Jerome Harris among them) who would go on to populate the credits of countless notable jazz records in the decades to come. But if Reid had corralled a community, he struggled to find an audience beyond his peers—a circumstance that, in 1985, inspired him to form the Black Rock Coalition, a support system of like-minded Black artists who didn’t easily slot into industry-approved genre formats. In a manifesto penned by Reid and Village Voice music critic Greg Tate, the BRC declared: “Rock and roll, like practically every form of popular music across the globe, is Black music and we are its heirs. We, too, claim the right of creative freedom and access to American and International airwaves, audiences, markets, resources, and compensations, irrespective of genre.” Black artists were foundational to rock‘n’roll’s past; the BRC would ensure they’d be part of its future, too.
On a practical level, the BRC provided its members with industry guidance, creative direction, and opportunities to perform together at BRC-branded showcases. With some 20 bands and 60 people initially operating under its banner, it was by no means a given that its founder’s own band would eventually become the BRC’s most visible ambassador. But Living Colour’s trajectory would shift radically when, one evening in 1985, Reid was dragged by his sister to a birthday party in the Upper West Side for a woman who happened to be dating Corey Glover—whose show-stopping rendition that night of “Happy Birthday” to his girlfriend inspired Reid to exchange numbers.
A church-choir kid who found a new religion as a teen frequenting Bad Brains and Cro-Mags matinees, Glover had no prior professional singing experience; at the time he met Reid, he was a working actor, and had just landed his big break with a small role in Oliver Stone’s Vietnam epic Platoon. It would be months before Reid actually reached out to Glover to formally audition for Living Colour, and as the singer tells it, he was only invited to perform with the band several weeks later when another vocalist dropped out of the gig last minute. But whatever hesitation Reid might’ve had about Glover presumably melted away once the singer settled into his new role: Blessed with a commanding, gospel-powered voice that could level city blocks and the magnetic look-at-me charisma of an eager thespian, Glover was the vehicle through which Reid’s outré musical strategies and intellectual lyrical concepts could engage the masses.
If only it were that easy. With Glover on board, Reid locked in his rhythm section: Will Calhoun, a seasoned drummer who was once part of Harry Belafonte’s touring ensemble, and bassist Muzz Skillings, who was well on his way to becoming a firefighter before committing to the group. But while Living Colour’s combination of raw energy and blazing virtuosity made them a word-of-mouth sensation at local haunts like CBGB, the band were turned down by major labels like Elektra and Warner Brothers on account of being too Black for rock audiences and too rock for Black audiences. To break out of that purgatory, they would need nothing less than a co-sign from the most famous frontman in rock history.
Ever the trendspotter, Mick Jagger was hipped to Living Colour while he was in New York recording his second solo album, 1987’s Primitive Cool. Reid joined the sessions through an open audition for guitarists, which led to Jagger attending a Living Colour gig at CBGB. Duly impressed, the Rolling Stone offered to donate some of his spare studio time to the band and record a couple of demos with them. They proved to be the keys to securing a contract with Epic—and those Jagger-produced tracks, “Glamour Boys” and “Which Way to America?” became the first building blocks for Vivid.
While he was certainly appreciative of Jagger’s support, Reid nonetheless bristled at the idea a band as preternaturally talented as Living Colour needed it in the first place. “The fact is we shouldn’t have to have the No. 1 rock star in the world take an interest in us for us to even be signed,” he said. “It really took a lot for Vivid to exist.” But if the Living Colour story up to this point was a perpetual uphill struggle, the release of Vivid couldn’t have been better timed to coincide with a moment when conventional notions of mainstream rock and Black culture were both being overturned. Out west, similarly eclectic bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Jane’s Addiction, and Faith No More were starting to make the leap from college radio to the right end of the FM dial, portending the transformation of alternative rock into the new normal. At the same time, rap was outgrowing its block-party roots to become an outlet for Afrocentric education, documentarian street dispatches, and community activism, promoting a revitalized Black consciousness that was also filtering into the work of emergent filmmakers like Spike Lee. On Vivid, Living Colour bridged the worlds of primal rock and thought-provoking rap without actually making a pro-forma rap-rock album in the basic riffs-and-rhymes sense. Rather, they connected the brawn of Led Zeppelin with the brains of Public Enemy, producing their own vision of a Black CNN rebroadcasted via Headbangers Ball.
The first voice we hear on the album doesn’t even belong to Glover, but rather Malcolm X: “And during the few moments that we have left … we want to talk right down to Earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand.” The sample is taken from X’s famed 1963 address “Message to the Grass Roots,” his fiery rejection of peaceful protest in favor of more aggressive actions against white supremacy. For Living Colour, the quote functions as both a nod to a philosophical forefather and a mission statement for Vivid, where complex socio-political discussions were framed in a language that teens in 1988 could easily understand: anthemic, metal-tinged rock with heft and hooks to spare.
That Malcolm X quote tees up the immortal “Cult of Personality,” where Reid alternates between sledgehammered riffage, Rush-worthy arpeggios, and mind-melting Eddie Van Hazel fretboard acrobatics, while Glover namechecks a litany of political figures from history to illustrate the fine line between charisma and megalomania, and the slippery slope between putting our faith in leaders and being subservient to them. It’s one of rock’s greatest Side 1/Track 1 opening salvos. But given that rock radio was still pumping out pop-metal trifles like Winger’s “Seventeen” and Poison’s “Nothing But a Good Time” in 1988, it’s easy to understand why Vivid’s mainstream incursion moved in slow motion.
Certainly, no other major-label rock band in the late-’80s was chronicling the Reagan-era Black American experience in such, well, vivid detail. While Living Colour were hardly the only band of their era wielding Jimmy Page swagger and John Bonham thunder, no one else was applying them to songs as furious and frustrated as “Desperate People,” an unflinching portrait of addiction’s corrosive, deadening effects on the creative mind (inspired by the death of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat) or “Which Way to America?” a raging critique of the country’s impenetrable class and cultural divides. And where the likes of Guns N’ Roses painted the inner city as a seedy wasteland where innocence goes to die, Living Colour presented it as a place where people lived, worked, and dreamed. Co-written by Reid and poet Tracie Morris, “Open Letter (to a Landlord),” is an equally incensed and heart-rending response to the gentrification of working-class communities, functioning as both a seething indictment of predatory developers and an empowering prayer for the disenfranchised.
But for all its righteous indignation, Vivid can also be a fun, irreverent, at times proudly silly record, even when the messaging is serious. “Funny Vibe” is the oldest song in the Living Colour repertoire and is most reflective of the band’s improvisatory roots, delivering a mid-album jolt of Princely funk, proggy fretboard runs, and cameos from Chuck D and Flavor Flav. However, it responds to the scourge of racial profiling not with anger but incredulity. Inspired by Reid’s experience sharing an elevator with an old lady who conspicuously began clutching her purse tighter, the song remains an appropriately absurdist response to a country still reckoning with its ingrained racism. Less topical but equally upbeat, “Glamour Boys” was the rare rock song of its era to poke holes in the construct of masculinity, taking aim at night-club casanovas who are always dressed like a million bucks, but whose affluent image is really a product of smoke, mirrors, and overcharged credit cards.
It’s easy to see why Living Colour would be leery of such poseurs. There was no easy path to success for this band—everything they achieved came through hard work, dogged tenacity, and relentless self-belief in the face of industry indifference. (In this light, Vivid’s punchy cover of Talking Heads’ Fear of Music creeper “Memories Can’t Wait” feels less like a nod to Living Colour’s own Bowery roots than a reassertion of their guiding principle: “Other people can go home/Everybody else can split/I'll be here all the time/No, I can never quit.”) And that could be why Glover couldn’t confine himself to the Arsenio Hall soundstage that night in February 1989—he needed to deliver the band’s message directly to each audience member, converting them one at a time like a door-to-door preacher.
For a few years there, that persistence paid off: The Arsenio appearance was followed a few weeks later by the band’s SNL debut. In May 1989—a full year after its release—Vivid peaked at No. 6 on the Billboard 200, en route to double-platinum sales, and that summer, Living Colour’s old pal Mick invited them to open for the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels stadium tour. But even as they were being welcomed into the rock establishment, Living Colour were once again thrust into a position where their mettle was put to the test. Their co-openers for a handful of Stones dates were Guns N’ Roses, then embroiled in controversy surrounding their song “One in a Million” and its use of racist and homophobic epithets. During a pre-show radio interview, Reid and Calhoun expressed their discomfort with the song, leading to a backstage standoff with the GNR crew and a crudely defensive “I’m not a racist, but…” retort from Axl Rose onstage. At the following night’s show, Reid decisively shut down any further debate on the matter: “Look, if you don’t have a problem with gay people, then don’t call them ‘f*****s. If you don’t have a problem with Black people, then don’t call them ‘n******s.’ I never met a n*****r in my life. Peace.”
In the wake of the GNR showdown, Living Colour seemed to actively recede from the world of mainstream hard rock, perhaps to avoid a situation where they’d ever have to share a stage with someone like Axl Rose ever again. Vivid’s 1990 follow-up, Time’s Up, was a more confrontational collision of Bad Brains-schooled hardcore, doomsday metal, and sacred-cow slaughters that helped land Living Colour a slot among like-minded misfits on the inaugural Lollapalooza tour the next summer. But before long, alt-rock’s shift away from polyrhythmic punk-funk to the more monolithic sound of grunge cast Living Colour to the margins once again. Following 1993’s grimly intense, lukewarmly received Stain, the band split up (at least until 2003’s reunion effort Collideøscope ushered in an ongoing, if highly sporadic, second act).
Given that Living Colour made their greatest commercial and cultural impact with their first album, it’s tempting to confine their story to the turn of the ’90s. And the relatively brief timespan of their groundbreaking first run might explain why this band has yet to be properly canonized by rock’s remaining gatekeepers: The fact Reid was nowhere to be found on the 100 greatest guitarists lists published by Guitar World and Rolling Stone feels like an especially egregious injustice; ditto for Glover on the latter’s greatest singers list. You won’t find Vivid on any best debut albums lists from rock-centric publications of note. And an induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame—for which Living Colour have been eligible since 2013—seems less likely with each passing year.
But the legacy of Vivid has a very long tail, extending from Rage Against the Machine and Sevendust to Ben Harper and Gary Clark Jr. to TV on the Radio and Bartees Strange to Brittany Howard and Black Pumas to WILLOW and Soul-Glo. Not all of these artists are necessarily direct sonic descendants of Living Colour, but they’ve all flowed through the cracks in the industry barriers that Vivid breached, and, in their own unique ways, have each inherited the mission of reclaiming Black creators’ frontline position at rock’s vanguard, both under- and above-ground. Just last month, a DIY Black artist with the No. 1 single in America could be seen rocking a guitar on SNL while dressed as a Dead Kennedy—and in moments like these, the way to the America that Living Colour and the BRC envisioned back in the mid-’80s seems a little more clear.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan
Correction: A previous version of this review stated that Doug Wimbish invited Vernon Reid to the Primitive Cool sessions and that Muzz Skillings was a wedding bassist. These were incorrect and have been removed.


Like Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, this album features an elder rock statesman making an effective protest record thanks to a raucously communal approach.

Living With War

Four dead in O-hi-o. Southern man, when will you pay them back? A kinder, gentler machine gun hand. Like many musicians of his generation, Neil Young has never shied away from political statements. However, his views haven't always been easy to pigeonhole as left-leaning, complicated as they are by Nixon-empathy ("Campaigner"), his early-80s support for Reagan, and most recently, his ill-advised United 93 quickie tribute "Let's Roll" (not as lingeringly embarrassing as Paul McCartney's "Freedom", but a stumble nonetheless).
These mercurial politics have a lot to do with Young's impulsive nature; as his manager Elliot Roberts put it in Jimmy McDonough's biography Shakey, "If he watches TV on the road and there's a CNN special on Bosnia, Neil wants do a record and a benefit within two days." With his attention now directed toward the current Bush administration and Iraq war, that M.O. hasn't changed; in fact, the internet's greased distribution wheels have fueled it, allowing Living With War to travel from studio to stream to stores in roughly a month's time.
This fast-track approach has both advantages and drawbacks. Lyrically, Living With War captures all the indignant ferocity and off-the-cuff logic of a blog-post screed: calls for impeachment, "Mission Accomplished" mockery, etc. Obviously, Young's not dishing out well-measured, footnoted policy analysis here, but neither is he bothering with metaphor or subtlety-- it's all direct, literal, and viscerally emotional. It's a bold move: Shooting from the hip opens Young up to a whole list of easy talking-point criticisms ("oh my god, he was born in Canada!"), and the proper-name references almost guarantee a brief shelf life.
But from a musical perspective, Living With War's short gestation benefits Young's performance, inspiring him to make his loudest, rawest release of new material since at least Ragged Glory, maybe even Rust Never Sleeps. With his guitar re-tuned to its characteristic distorted snarl, and the clearly live mix preserving bum notes and sloppy harmonica or trumpet solos, Young returns to the spontaneous recording style of albums like Tonight's the Night that best suits his talents. Coming hot on the heels of the contemplative Prairie Wind, the serrated guitar of "After the Garden" and "Restless Consumer" quickly puts to rest any notion that post-aneurysm, sixty-something Neil was going to slip quietly into retirement.
The album's most effective political statement-- the decision to use a 100-strong choir for backing vocals-- has little to do with the lyrics. As unrehearsed as the main instruments, the choir is used not for pretentious ends, but as a way to turn every song into a mass protest, with Young's distinctive howl falling back into the mix behind the wall of voices on the title track or the centerpiece "Let's Impeach the President". Ironically, preaching to the choir with a choir saves Young's complaints about cable news, photo-ops, and pharmaceutical ads from succumbing to faded-hippie fogeyism.
Alongside Bruce Springsteen's We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions, Living With War is the second album this spring on which an elder rock statesman makes an effective protest record with a raucously communal approach, reverently covering historically heavy anthems along the way ("America the Beautiful", in this case). As a political statement, however, Young's record may be more fleeting, with its topical references to steroids and New Orleans. But despite the press releases, the impulsive politics of Living With War are almost incidental to its success, mere fuel for Neil Young to return to the vicious sound he's neglected in recent times.


In a departure from the airier meditations of 2017’s Brønshøj (Puncak), the Indonesian duo’s Sublime Frequencies debut explores an earthy fusion of doom and folk metal.

Sujud

Senyawa’s music rises from the belly of the beast and crawls out of its gaping maw. Each wail, drone, and plucked guitar string from the experimental Indonesian duo evokes the feeling of deep-set hunger; every sound contributes to the tension. Instrumentalist Wukir Suryadi and vocalist Rully Shabara delight in exploiting this powerful sense of yearning,  employing a spectrum of emotional registers—in one moment hushed despondence and in another punishing solemnity. When the spell finally breaks, what follows is all the more compelling because of the delayed release.
Senyawa’s Sujud, their first album for the Sublime Frequencies label, is an ode to terra firma; it takes its unifying theme from the Bahasa Indonesian word “tanah,” which translates as “soil,” “ground,” “land,” and “earth.” The theme is reflected across many of the record’s song titles: “Tanggalkan Di Dunia (Undo the World),” “Terbertaktilah Tanah Ini (Blessed Is This Land),” “Kebaikan Tumbuh Dari Tanah (Goodness Grows Off Soil),” and “Kembali Ke Dunia (Return to the World).” The duo’s work seems like a reaction to the current environmental crisis: Suryadi builds many of his own instruments out of natural materials, including the electric guitar on the album, and Shabara’s resonant baritone shapeshifts into feral growls and yelps, lending an organic cast to the music. It often sounds as if Senyawa are summoning the deities of nature, undeterred by the wrath that would inevitably follow. Where 2017’s Brønshøj (Puncak) favored airier meditations in which Suryadi’s homemade string instrument, the bamboo wukir, undulated like thick plumes of smoke above Shabara’s throaty incantations, Sujud spasms into offense mode. Now, Senyawa assert their darkness and eventual redemption with newfound temerity.
Sujud begins with an exorcism. Over the course of “Tanggalkan Di Dunia (Undo the World),” both Shabara’s exalted plainsong and Suryadi’s erratic electric guitar fuse, gradually becoming increasingly distorted. Suryadi throws conventional strumming out the window, instead scratching at the strings with frenetic energy. Together, the two sound as though they’re trying to break apart the earth to expose its ravaged interior. The dust eventually settles on “Penjuru Menyatu (Unified Counters),” the turning point of the album, where Shabara’s vocals shed their formerly atmospheric form and take shape as an almost punk-rock shout, lyrics fully enunciated. The song’s gauzy opening melodies breathe in deeply before the thunderous riffs go chugging uphill, Shabara’s wails accelerating, pedal to the floor.
There is no obvious path to deliverance, but Senyawa reach a final state of peace by the album’s conclusion. Shabara’s grainy ASMR vocalizing turns the high-pitched cooing and shoegaze haziness of “Kebaikan Tumbuh Dari Tanah (Goodness Grows Off Soil)” into a tingly, full-bodied listening experience.  The album’s impact lingers in these serene interludes; songs like the closing “Kembali Ke Dunia (Return to the World)” would lose their warlord intensity without the dynamic contrast. Those slivers of light only accentuate the stretches of unrelenting darkness. By the end of Sujud, it’s clear whatever folkloric spirits were previously conjured must return to the tanah, and the only way to achieve this is for Shabara to vocally divide himself into a 10-man chanting circle over Suryadi’s frayed guitar until we’re suddenly left with deafening silence.
It’s not so much that Senyawa are unlike anything you’ve ever heard but the way they unify disparate genres under a single umbrella that makes the band’s approach so striking. Sometimes breaking boundaries doesn’t mean creating an altogether unfamiliar sound—rather reworking a bricolage of already existing elements. On Sujud, Senyawa nearly sink to their knees under the heaviness of doom, folk metal, and noise, all the while proclaiming their humble fealty to the earth.


Listening to Stefan Kozalla’s latest is an essential experience. He finds the moments that express wistful longing, burrows into them, and then blows it all up to color-saturated widescreen.

Knock Knock

Far away from mundane reality lies the music of DJ Koze. The German producer builds a fantasy world where aesthetic beauty soaked in memory can hold life at bay for an hour or two at a time. Given his dreamy predilections, his music never strives for relevance and it doesn’t care about the shifting fashion of the moment. He’s only competing with himself. Across a handful of albums, not to mention many dozens of remixes and a few full-length DJ mixes, he combines the crunchy propulsion of French touch, the liquid warmth of ’70s soul, the precise structure of Kompakt-style minimal techno, the head-nodding funk of boom-bap, and the nameless desire of dream pop. The thread through it all is a very specific emotional state: Sifting through his library of samples and pieces of original music, he finds the moments that express wistful longing, burrows into them, and then blows it all up to color-saturated widescreen.
Knock Knock, Koze’s new full-length LP, is his first since 2013’s Amygdala, though in 2015 he released a mix for the DJ-Kicks series, and the label he founded, Pampa, put out a sampler in 2016. For listeners, the lines between a new Koze album, a new Koze mix, and a label sampler he’s curated are blurry. Koze bends the rules of each form so that they come close to meeting in the middle. The mix and compilation included many tracks with Koze’s careful and effective edits, and his tweaks made each production sound more like his own. On his albums, he chooses an array of vocalists and essentially creates a sort of “mixtape” with all new music, where individual tracks are heavy with samples and feel as referential as a DJ set.
Knock Knock has a few familiar names among its cast of vocalists: Róisín Murphy, José González, Kurt Wagner of Lambchop, and, a name we haven’t heard in a while, the rapper Speech from ’90s hip-hop outfit Arrested Development. The guests are generally used in ways that fit within the context of their own work—Wagner’s contribution finds him soaked in Auto-Tune, as on the last Lambchop album, for example—but Koze has a way of making the contributors seem like they were born to sing over one of his tracks. And if Knock Knock is a more conventional album than the more psychedelic and twisted Amygdala, it’s also a more affecting one. The fact that some of the guests appear more than once (Murphy gets two turns, as does Sophia Kennedy, the vocalist who released her strong debut album on Pampa last year) lends cohesion, and the production is extra lush.
Some of these collaborations help to situate Koze’s music more broadly as far as genre and scene. “Bonfire” features the sampled voice of Justin Vernon, from the Bon Iver song “Calgary,” and it illustrates something essential about Koze. He may be an in-demand DJ who works the big-room European dance circuit, but he’s also a records-obsessed indie head finding connections between Arthur Russell, krautrock, shoegaze, and disco. Koze’s melodic accessibility differentiates him from his beat-focused DJ peers, and explains why he has many fans who don’t follow the political and aesthetic conversations happening on the global dance floor.
That said, Róisín Murphy’s feature on “Illumination” shows his deep facility with groove, as long stretches of rhythmic tension are gloriously released in short bursts. “Pick Up,” with a swoop of strings and guitar reminiscent of Stardust’s “Music Sounds Better With You,” prominently features a sample of soul legend Gladys Knight, showing how a vocal lead can come from a contemporary singer or someone from Koze’s record collection and the differences between the two can feel irrelevant.
But more atmospheric moments are just as revealing. The gorgeous “Music on My Teeth,” featuring José González, brings to mind the decayed film-strip warble of Boards of Canada or the Avalanches, and its arrival on the album feels like a forgotten dream slowly drifting into a consciousness. Even the one stumble on the record, on “Colors of Autumn,” the track with Speech, captures something important about Koze’s music. Voices for him carry information through phrasing, inflection, tone, and grain; the “meaning” of the lyrics is secondary, which explains why he can use vocalists using different languages so effectively. Speech’s contribution is mired in specificity, with an offhand reference to Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It. Still, it’s far from a fatal turn, and the song’s viscous production is warm and inviting. While the function of each track on Knock Knock is different, Koze finds the connections between them and stitches it all together into a coherent whole.
To get back to the feeling I mentioned earlier, that sense of longing and the power of fantasy: Koze’s music can be melodic and funky and playful, but it’s not often dark or mysterious. It’s a balm, a way to patch yourself up after experiencing the trauma of the world. And there’s something uncanny about the way Koze evokes something so hard to pin down. The best way I can think to describe it is to say that Koze’s music twinkles, and in that gesture, we feel both comfort and yearning. Some of that is his fondness for swooping romantic Disney-style strings (see Knock Knock’s lavish opener, “Club der Ewigkeiten”) and lo-fi filters that impart a feeling of nostalgia, bleaching the colors and upping the contrast like an Instagram filter. And some of that is his general mischievousness—when eyes twinkle, it’s a sign of a connection, signifying both warmth and humor.
But Koze’s twinkle ultimately feels more existential. An object that twinkles moves between bright and dark, representing the beauty of what is in the present moment, but also its fragility and impermanence. You know that in a flicker, it could be gone. The impossibly moving instrumental coda at the end of Knock Knock’s closing track, “Drone Me Up, Flashy,” brings the album’s deep sense of wonder home. Its delicate, high-pitched drone brings to mind Brian Eno’s “An Ending (Ascent)” from Apollo: Atmospheres & Soundtracks; now we’re thinking of space, contemplating it, feeling small and empowered simultaneously. The twinkle also suggests an illusion of scale, and how something so distant and vast can feel so close. A star is among the most massive bodies in the universe and it sits an incomprehensible distance away, but when we see it from Earth, it’s tiny, it’s ours, and we give it a name.


Gap Dream's morose new record documents a music nerd's midlife meltdown, over junk-littered garage rock, rudimentary synth-pop, and no-budget prog flourishes.

This Is Gap Dream

Credit *This Is Gap Dream for truth in advertising: it never lets you forget that Gap Dream is a one-man-band in his mid-30s living in a vinyl warehouse. 2013’s Shine Your Light *didn’t either, although it documented Gabe Fulvimar uprooting his life in Ohio to move into Fullerton’s Burger Records. Three years later, *This Is Gap Dream *has an understandably more morose tone; “fuck it” has become “what the fuck have I done?” There might not be as much tolerance for this specific kind of existential crisis in 2016, but it can still result in compelling art—*This Is Gap Dream *might strive to be considered with *The Meadowlands, *Local H’s As Good As Dead, or Fred Thomas’ *All Are Saved, *where the depiction of music nerds and their midlife meltdowns can be perversely cathartic and universal due to their unflinching honesty. But *This Is Gap Dream *ends up being *too *truthful, as there’s rarely any indication Fulvimar intended for this to reach an audience far beyond himself.
Though he hits most of the “guy who lives in Burger Records” touchstones—junk-littered garage rock, rudimentary synth-pop, no-budget prog flourishes—the core of most Gap Dream songs is mid-tempo, palm-muted guitar chug. Fulvimar plays every instrument himself, most of which are typically found on demos meant to be fleshed out by an actual band or at least equipment of higher quality—rickety drum machines, guitars textured with granulated distortion, Nintendo samples, his own mutter of a voice. Despite living in a stronghold for rip-roaring rock, Fulvimar appears to be a conscientious neighbor above all.
Then again, *This Is Gap Dream *has an overt hostility towards most forms of *loud *guitar music. “Rock and Roll” quotes Led Zeppelin while imitating the disquieting synth-bounce of later Suicide, while Fulvimar whispers “death rock” repeatedly during the end of “153,” itself trying to one-up the leanness of Wire’s *154**. *He doesn’t have much patience for “artier” indie rock either, as “College Music” moans of “too many soft machines” and snipes at them to “get off your brainwashed ass.”
Fulvimar doesn’t get much relief from lashing out, which is probably the whole point: Shine Your* Light *was borne of his many disappointments with human interaction, but now he can’t even take solace in music. This abject cynicism inevitably becomes suffocating rather than illuminating; despite Fulvimar only having to answer to himself, *This Is Gap Dream *trudges along questioning its own necessity to exist. Are the off-key harmonies meant to *mock *the idea of professionally composed rock music or was there just no motivation for an additional take? These are full-band arrangements, yet the bass often has only a vague familiarity with the prevailing rhythm, so does he really mean for this to sound like a band? Other times the bass completely overwhelms Fulvimar’s vocals; does he believe he has nothing worth hearing or does he believe it really wouldn’t matter anyway? Are the aimless instrumentals included because Fulvimar believes they speak for themselves, or did he just not feel like putting a melody over them?
There might be an answer to all of the above during “24 Hour Token": “This is for the world that I can’t ignore,” Fulvimar sighs, “the one that screams for more.” Once again, maybe the codependency between the low stakes and Fulvimar’s lack of ambition is the whole point of This Is Gap Dream: it’s pretty convincing if the dominant feeling of an existential crisis is wanting nothing more than to just not be bothered.


The nu-metal heir apparent's latest album is a tremendous step forward while still remaining an acquired, uncompromising taste.

ANTI-ICON

Rap and rock may have become increasingly intertwined bedfellows over the last decade, but it’s still somewhat rare for fusions of the two genres to feel truly organic and authentic. For every Lil Peep, there are a thousand knockoffs for whom guitar riffs and emo flows are never anything more than a novelty, an easy trend to ride, and a ready-made aesthetic to bite until the next one comes along. Eric Whitney, the Florida-born musician known as Ghostemane, is something different, an all-too-rare artist whose synthesis of rap and metal moves beyond pastiche or pure reference to achieve something aggressively new.
Produced and engineered in part by the legendary Ross Robinson and Arthur Rizk (who has worked with Power Trip and Code Orange), Ghostemane's latest album ANTI-ICON sees him truly claiming his throne as the heir apparent to nu-metal. It’s what you would expect from an artist’s proper introduction to the mainstream, a much bigger-budgeted sound than his previous work. The production is unrelenting and heavy, chugging guitars and pounding trap drums, but there’s an expansiveness to the album, eerie moments of ethereality up against scenes from a horror movie. It’s a tremendous step forward, while still remaining an acquired, uncompromising taste.
Ghostemane emerged as part of the sprawling online rap collective Schemaposse, a group headed by former Raider Klan member JGRXXN that also included Lil Peep. Though his work overlaps with the emo-rap of GothBoiClique, Ghostemane has forged his own path, amassing a devoted underground following largely outside of the music industry’s machine, and also outside of the United States—as with so many rappers identified with the “SoundCloud Rap” set, a substantial portion of Ghostemane’s fanbase is located in Eastern Europe.
Most so-called SoundCloud Rap is just as much YouTube Rap—Ghostemane’s cult has grown in large part thanks to his often viral music videos, miniature horror movies that form a nightmarish collage of corpse paint, plague masks, and toxic chemicals (Whitney’s recent videos for “Lazaretto” and “Hydrochloride” were directed by his fiancé, the equally online performance artist and musician Poppy). He’s an artist who seemed to emerge from the ether with fully-formed mythology and aesthetic sensibility. The dark energy that he channels, however, is somewhat removed from your conventional occult metal imagery—unlike so many rappers influenced by the harder shades of rock, Ghostemane is drawn not necessarily to the Satanic but to a kind of grab-bag spiritualism, informed by astrology, witchcraft, New Age symbology, and other dark arts and mystical practices.
As the title of this album proclaims in all caps, Ghostemane’s music resists celebrity culture and the iconography of viral stardom. As Ghostemane raps himself on “AI,” “If you don’t know me by now, I don’t want you to.” The album is covered not with his face or even his name, but a spiked steel helmet, perhaps a visual synonym for existence in the public eye, as much a crown as it is a cage. It’s fitting that ANTI-ICON is an all-out assault on the fame machine because the album was intended to be Ghostemane’s major-label debut; as a recent Rolling Stone profile documents, the deal fell through because Whitney wanted more autonomy and control than the unnamed label was willing to afford. But independence suits an artist who isn’t just disinterested in celebrity but antagonistic toward it—Ghostemane owes an audible and visible debt to Marilyn Manson, but he is even more a creature of the shadows than the self-described Antichrist Superstar.
Tracks like “Sacrilege” and “Hydrochloride” owe an obvious sonic debt to Nine Inch Nails and ‘90s industrial, while other stretches of the album slide away from cyberpunk blasts into black metal (“Intro.Destitute”) or hardcore punk (the first half of “Calamity”). There are more “real” instruments than ever before, full-bodied guitar shreds and pounding blast beats swirling in the same dark cauldron as shards of harsh noise and trap hi-hats. Whitney’s lyrics consistently reflect on anxiety, insecurity, and mental illness, but he simultaneously exudes brash confidence. His voice shape-shifts just as easily, a high-pitched and highly precise chopper rap flow one moment, deep-throated screams and guttural snarls the next. There are inhuman noises of unidentifiable origin like the nauseating gurgles and drips of “Anti-Social Masochistic Rage [ASMR].” He mutates from the pure embodiment of menace, a sleep paralysis demon summoned from Slipknot album covers and Rob Zombie movies to an unguarded, sensitive human being. Album closer “Falling Down” strips it all back to a simple series of chords and Whitney’s voice softening into a hushed, despairing whine.
The most literal representation of Ghostemane’s music appears not in Whitney’s music, but in another avenue of creative expression. In addition to his main, sporadically-updated Instagram, Whitney maintains another account, where he shares his original metalwork. In his visual art, human wreckage and industrial remains—chains, gears, bones cast in iron—melt together into a sharp cyborg whole, a fitting summation for his work’s smelting of disparate styles. Though on its surface his music might be a hybrid form, the unholy soul is pure metal.

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When Terry Riley turned 80 last year, a number of commemorative concerts were played. A couple of the most interesting took place at London’s Barbican Centre and Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw where James Holden and Luke Abbott were invited to compose live improvisational electronic pieces influenced by Riley’s work. The recordings on Outdoor Museum of Fractals / 555Hz are taken from their rehearsals prior to the concerts.

James Holden / Luke Abbott: Outdoor Museum of Fractals / 555Hz

Outdoor Museum of Fractals / 555Hz

When Terry Riley turned 80 last year, the requisite ink was spilled, commemorative concerts played, parties thrown. The byproducts of the ongoing retrospective are still spilling into 2016 as he nears 81, and it makes sense, because it’s hard not to think and talk in gushing platitudes when looking at what Riley wrought in the last half century. Even if you don’t know his name, you’ve felt his influence via "Baba O'Riley," Pete Townsend’s tribute to Riley’s modal improvisation and Meher Baba’s spiritual teachings. You could even credit him with one of the earliest remixes, in 1967, with his tape loop manipulations of the Harvey Averne Dozen's "You're No Good." And of course, there’s In C, which in countless performances has become a living, breathing, and self-generating monument to the minimalist floodgate Riley helped open in 1964.
One of the most interesting homages to Riley took place at London’s Barbican Centre and Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw during April of last year, at a pair of events called Hello Terry Riley. British musicians James Holden and Luke Abbott were invited to compose live improvisational electronic pieces influenced by engagement with Riley’s work. The recordings on Outdoor Museum Of Fractals / 555Hz are taken from their rehearsals prior to the Barbican and Muziekgebouw concerts. In a little over an hour of continuous improvisational performance, Holden and Abbott showcase how making music in the style of Terry Riley could still produce something startlingly new and mesmerizing.
To compose "Outdoor Museum of Fractals" James Holden designed a special sequencer for his modular synthesizer, which works on a perpetually repetitive and purposefully chaotic set of rules, generating a wide range of melodic patterns from even the slightest change in initial input. He claims that the inputs in his system, if mapped in mathematical space, could give you the picture of a fractal—that ubiquitous and eternally mysterious geometrical pattern that naturally occurs in the shape of DNA, snowflakes, ocean waves, the drawings of M. C. Escher, and in the novels of Vladimir Nabokov and David Foster Wallace.
To Holden, the 46 minutes of "Outdoor Museum of Fractals" is a "a very slow tour of some landmarks in this fractal" he created with his co-pilot Camilo Tirado, a tabla player trained in the classical Indian traditions, which Riley drew heavily from in his work. Their two instruments are in constant conversation, as Tirado’s drumming triggers James' arpeggiations. Holden’s use of a sequencer also helps generate more notes and melodies than he could physically play, extending the limitations of his keyboard skills. And if you’ve ever seen videos of Riley playing, Holden’s experiment makes sense, because you quickly realize that very few people have the dexterity and focus to dance between the notes of a keyboard like Riley.
Similar to the best Riley compositions, "Outdoor Museum of Fractals" resembles an exquisitely and almost incomprehensibly detailed model train set, its slow-moving progression unfolding with more and more information and narrative. It’s hard to believe Holden and Tirado’s improvisation sounds as smooth and pleasurable as it does, because Holden’s system is constantly inviting chaos. He described learning how to control his rig as a "blind man feeling around in one small corner with some vague memory of what's nearby."
Abbott’s contribution, "555Hz," is inspired by the numerological and mythological qualities of the number five and an interest in new age theories about the healing properties of specific sonic frequencies. His interest was stoked by Thomas Browne’s The Garden of Cyrus, a Renaissance-era manifesto on intelligent design that attributes fractal-like vastness to the number five’s relation to the organization of natural life, from the structure of honeycombs to the leaves of artichokes. "555Hz" is centered around a sine-wave drone tuned to 555Hz and a modified 26'' gong that echoes and resonate in response to slight shifts in the drone.
"555Hz" veers farther from signature Riley sounds, and more closely mirrors La Monte Young’s exploration of drone, specifically in works like Drift Study. This piece is more caustic and less relaxing, but it’s also lighter and more ambient. In that way it is far more meditative than Holden’s, because the ongoing drone never forces the listener to descend into the music, but rather effortlessly float on its surface. Abbott’s piece is also less steady, its pitches shift more wildly, and the sounds climb up and down more athletically throughout. And similar to Holden’s improvisation, it’s hard not to be impressed by the smooth progression of Abbott's performance. There are many moments where the drone unravels, but Abbott’s ability to paint through the chaos of his sounds with perfectly timed gong echoes and slight shifts in the drone’s tone pulls it all together. I’m reminded of Brian Eno’s description of Philip Glass’ music "as a viscous bath of pure, thick energy" when listening to the two companion pieces back to back. In Outdoor Museum of Fractals / 555Hz, Abbott and Holden have demonstrated quite effectively that electronic musicians don’t have to be just guys pressing play on their computers, but very serious and cognitively engaged composers.


The soundtrack to this largely incoherent film achieves a shaky sense of grace thanks to the dusty music from Neil Young and his backing band, Promise of the Real.

Neil Young / Promise of the Real: Paradox (Original Music From the Film)

Paradox (Original Music From the Film)

Neil Young earned the right to pursue filmmaking as a hobby back in the early 1970s. At the time, he was flush with commercial success, and movie studios didn’t balk at the idea of financing a half-baked flick considering they could probably recoup their investment through years of midnight showings. After 1974’s Journey Through the Past and 1979’s Rust Never Sleeps, Young kept making concert movies long after such peers as Jerry Garcia and Pink Floyd got bored, taking a stab at a narrative with 1982’s Human Highway and once again dabbling with the form as late as 2003, when he turned his rock opera Greendale into a feature-length drama. He’s still at it in 2018, starring in Paradox, an ambling, plotless film directed by his romantic partner, Daryl Hannah.
Paradox isn’t much more than a glorified home movie tracing the imagined adventures of Neil Young & Promise of the Real as they adjust to the altitude of Colorado. Armed with some vague ideas but no actual script, the band and crew whiled away the hours horsing around in cowboy outfits, cracking crude jokes, and picking guitars after the sun went down. When all these antics didn’t amount to enough footage for a feature-length movie, Hannah added a midsection of live performances anchored by Young & Promise of the Real tearing it up at the 2016 superstar festival Desert Trip, aka Oldchella, and a solo Neil performance of his ’70s classic “Pocahontas.” This outlier is included presumably because the song loosely adheres to the film’s Old West themes. Or maybe simply because it was kicking around Young’s vaults, waiting to be used.
It’s hard to discern the internal logic that fuels Paradox on screen, but its amiable incoherence achieves a shaky sense of grace on record. Drifting between spooky guitar solos, sweet strums, and half-remembered choruses, this soundtrack occasionally stops for a full-fledged song, but these complete moments feel accidental, as if the fog lifts just long enough to reveal a full landscape. When a finished song does appear, it has the odd effect of grinding proceedings to a halt. That grandiose rendition of “Pocahontas,” recorded sometime in 2005, is by some measure the best individual track here—Young conjures a towering sense of melancholy as he pumps away on an organ—but it’s too weighty for an album that is determined to blow away on the wind. Instead, the song that sums up the album’s charms is an airy version of Willie Nelson’s “Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground” sung by Nelson’s son Lukas. Never intended for camera, the film crew captured the group killing time between camera setups by playing the tune: It is a fleeting moment that just happened to be preserved.
Such transience is at the core of Paradox. During the movie, the prominence of Promise of the Real feels overwhelming, as they prance, crack wise in an outhouse, and discover new ways to mug for the camera. On the soundtrack, their equal footing feels necessary, since they not only invigorate Young—just listen to the spry, winding 10-minute “Cowgirl Jam,” where it’s clear Neil gets a thrill playing with a unit far more nimble than Crazy Horse—but are sympathetic to his old hippie pipe dreams, as they ramble on their acoustic guitars and pluck out dusty blues. Paradox exists as a conduit between a dreamed history and a fantasized future, a place formed of nothing more than fragments that evoke a past that seems more mysterious than the present. If the end result is as light as a feather or as memorable as a breeze, that’s also the point.


Reworking improv sessions featuring frequent collaborators like Sam Gendel, Jamael Dean, and Laraaji, the L.A. bandleader and percussionist shows his contemplative side.

Carlos Niño & Friends: More Energy Fields, Current

More Energy Fields, Current

The isolation of the last 15 months must have been hard on Carlos Niño. For years, the L.A. percussionist, DJ, and arranger has gathered together a rotating cast of pals to create a series of records under the name Carlos Niño & Friends. The loose, improvisatory structures of their playing, and Niño’s ingenious ability to stitch the best ideas together into blankets of comforting sounds, give these albums a charisma that smooths over the often difficult nature of the music, which borrows in equal measure from free jazz, new age, and hip-hop. In the same way that you’re able to follow your closest buds to conversational places you wouldn’t dream of approaching with your coworkers, the warmth that permeates Niño’s music disguises just how challenging some of it can be.
More Energy Fields, Current feels colored by recent circumstances. It is more muted and less jumpy than a typical Carlos Niño & Friends record. And while it abides by his typically kinetic production ethos, the spaces through which it wanders are emptier and less populous than ever before. It’s fascinating to hear Niño working in such a blue mode—this is a guy who made a record called Bliss On Dear Oneness, after all. While the music here can sometimes sound unsure of itself, More Energy Fields, Current shows a new side of Niño, and it proves that his abilities as a producer can move beyond the wide-eyed good vibes that have always shined within his work. Pieced together in a time of great distance, More Energy Fields, Current is the sound of Carlos Niño finding—or maybe creating—solace.
As usual, Niño is working with material sourced from an enviably talented group of friends. Frequent collaborators Sam Gendel, Nate Mercereau, Jamael Dean, Jamire Williams, and Laraaji all return, while Shabaka Hutchings is welcomed into the fold for the first time. Most of the material here was recorded in 2018 and 2019 in long improv sessions that Niño edited together over the last year, shuffling and layering with a collagist’s mindset and a pilgrim’s faith in the journey. Hutchings and Dean duet in opener “Pleasewakeupalittlefaster, please…,” the former’s rapidly cycling sax pitched quietly in the mix in a way that makes it feel like steam rising from the clean, clear chords of Dean’s piano. Dean’s playing is nearly funereal, momentarily rimmed with nostalgia’s warmth before going cold again; it feels like he and Hutchings are asking questions they know can’t be answered.
This sense of uncertainty hangs over many of these songs. Gendel always processes his sax through pedals in a way that makes it sound like the notes are being swallowed by the bell of the instrument as he voices them; it’s insular by design. But in the context of “ The World Stage, 4321 Degnan Boulevard, Los Angeles, California 90008,” he, Dean, Niño, and drummer Randy Gloss are like people at the last table on a wedding seating chart: They make tentative conversation without quite falling into a natural rhythm, but the sense of occasion keeps things from feeling tense. Aaron Shaw’s tenor sax on “Now the background is the foreground.” blows from deep down an alleyway, straight from a noir fantasy of a rainy New York night, while the underlit mood of “Nightswimming”’s early moments share something of the sadness of the R.E.M. song of the same name; its synths shimmer like the reflection of water on a tunnel ceiling. While Niño is a master of 3D audio space, his willingness to leave so much blank gives his partners enough room to throw shadows. It can be incredibly moving.
Which is perhaps why the album’s least compelling moments come when it is most tightly composed. “Nightswimming” is shaken from its reverie by a beat from Dean, with the synths whirring like a rotary dial in response; suddenly, we’re in a chillwave song. Everything feels recognizable and all too familiar, as if the dream logic the album has conjured to this point has been banished by the harsh realities of a new day. The album’s players are at their most unified here, but the track paradoxically seems incomplete; the structure is so perfectly built, the lack of vocals gives it the air of an empty house. The opposite happens in “Salon Winds,” where Williams sets his drums on a skipping break and Shaw’s flute chases; the players leave one another too much space and struggle to figure out where to go. The music doesn’t need to cohere particularly well—normalizing the incoherent is one of Niño’s greatest strengths—but the group never produces any interesting points of departure, either.
These are unusual moments for Carlos Niño, when bringing the people he loves together doesn’t result in some kind of magic, and on More Energy Fields, Current, they’re rare. He, Dean, and Laraaji create slow swells of sound in “Ripples, Reflection, Loop,” their tidal energy moving through the fibers of Sharada Shashidhar’s voice even after the playing recedes and her wordless singing takes over. It’s clear that Niño is deeply affected by the waves he makes with his friends; his ability to remember the emotional arc of improv sessions from years ago testifies to how deeply he was listening in the moment. His connection with his fellow players goes beyond the rational, beyond the linguistic. Still, having assembled these songs in the midst of a year of profound isolation, he allowed two clearly spoken utterances to emerge from the mix with no digital manipulation: “please,” in “Iasos 79 ’til Infinity,” and “thank you,” in “Ripples, Reflection, Loop.” Both imply interdependence, mercy, and gratitude, the interaction of two people facing each other, one in need and the other willing to provide. They’re what passes between friends.

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After nearly 20 years of playing against their strengths, the Get Up Kids jump on the “adult emo” bandwagon and recapture the punk immediacy of their late-’90s heyday.

Kicker EP

In the second half of the 1990s, the Get Up Kids fostered a thriving DIY punk scene in a landlocked college town, knocked out their debut in a weekend with Bob Weston of Shellac, and turned down major-label offers. Put aside the love songs, and their classic Something to Write Home About can be read as a concept album about the pressure of seeing then-fledgling indie label Vagrant literally bet the farm on their success. But they also wrote concisely and passionately about girls, heartbreak, and trouble with authority, thus setting the norms for 21st-century emo: While the band’s presentation and ethics were overtly punk, their songs harkened back to early rock’n’roll records that functioned as teen pop.
The seven years since the Get Up Kids released their first reunion album, 2011’s There Are Rules, however, have seen the rise of the apparently oxymoronic subgenre “adult emo.” Now in their late 30s and early 40s, bands like Braid, American Football, Brand New, Jimmy Eat World, and Taking Back Sunday are maturing, often with vital results. And that same “adult emo” outlook makes Kicker the most satisfying Get Up Kids release in nearly 20 years.
“We’ve been playing with this idea about how you can translate the ‘emo themes’... into feelings that are relevant to being an adult,” frontman Matt Pryor recently explained. This wasn’t always an option: Many emo acts were brutalized by the early 2000s. The commercial breakthroughs of Jimmy Eat World and Dashboard Confessional, as well as their own drive to transcend their genre tag, led bands drastically change their sounds. Maybe because their name included the word “kids,” the Get Up Kids had it the worst. Produced by R.E.M. mainstay Scott Litt, their 2002 album On a Wire rebranded the band with acoustic ballads and mid-tempo moodiness. Scorned by fans for not sounding enough like “Coming Clean,” the record was mocked by critics because it still sounded like the Get Up Kids. 2004’s similarly mellow Guilt Show failed to change that narrative. Seven years later, after breaking up and reuniting, they released There Are Rules, a competent indie-rock record made in relative anonymity.
While the motivations behind the Get Up Kids’ stylistic swerves are understandable, those three albums add up to nearly 20 years of the band playing against their strengths. Kicker negates that history in about 14 minutes. The four songs on the EP are all uptempo, in major keys, and nearly the same length. The frilliest instrumental touch is a tambourine. In their original incarnation, on tracks as different as “Holiday” and “Overdue,” the Get Up Kids used melody, velocity, and urgency to signify investment and interpersonal unity. Maybe they were having fun on There Are Rules, but on Kicker they effortlessly recapture that old energy. Built on the simple sentiments of their titles, the hooks on “I’m Sorry,” “Maybe,” and “Better This Way” are memorable at first listen. This is how the Get Up Kids flex craft.
Immediacy can have its drawbacks, though, and “I’m Sorry” also shows the other side of the coin. Its verses find guitarist and co-songwriter Jim Suptic promising not to be an asshole, but the imagery he relies on (burning bridges, building walls) is too simple and impersonal to have much of an impact. Luckily, the chorus is enough to sell the song—a rougher, rawer take on the Get Up Kids’ version of anthemic punk. Close your eyes, and it doesn’t sound so far off from their new Polyvinyl labelmates Beach Slang or recent Superchunk.
The EP format has always served the Get Up Kids well—and if Kicker doesn’t prove to be as essential or experimental as Woodson, Simple Science, or Red Letter Day, maybe that’s by design. The band is set to record a new LP for release in 2019, a year that will mark the 20th anniversary of Something to Write Home About. They must sense the nostalgia coming: In the video for Suptic’s triumphant “Better This Way,” an extra is wearing the same T-shirt drummer Ryan Pope sported in the clip for “Action & Action,” a beloved Something single that epitomizes the emo sound and style of 1999. And the hook on the EP’s lead single, “Maybe,” echoes the melody of “My Apology,” another track from that classic album. These small acknowledgments of past triumphs reverberate throughout Kicker: The Get Up Kids have finally reopened a dialogue with their younger selves.


The minimal techno legend brings his first solo album in five years: four long tracks aimed squarely at the dancefloor, perforated by needle-tipped hi-hats and sharp, serrated claps.

Empirical House

Minimal techno doesn’t enjoy the critical acclaim or the popularity that it once did, but that hasn’t sent Ricardo Villalobos in search of greener pastures. Active since the mid-1990s, Villalobos broke through with 2003’s Alcachofa, but it was with 2004’s cryptic Thé Au Harem D’Archimède that he really hit upon his sound. Since then, across projects big and small, he has doggedly pursued the same twisted muse. He continues to tend the same spongy patch of ground that he always has to eke out squiggly forms part Dr. Seuss, part H.R. Giger—weird, biomorphic shapes that pop like suction cups and ripple like seaweed. His last few years’ worth of work has been fairly scattershot—mainly a mixed bag of collaborations and remixes, plus odd gambits like his 27-minute reworking of Oren Ambarchi’s Hubris. His last solo album, Dependent and Happy, was five years ago.
As his most extensive solo undertaking in years—four tracks, four sides of vinyl, nearly an hour’s total running time—*Empirical House *feels like his most substantial release in some time. It’s also a good read on his twin obsessions: otherworldly sound and unwavering groove. Quite unlike the wormy undulations of Safe in Harbour, a 2015 collaboration with his psychedelic fellow-traveler Max Loderbauer, these four tracks aim squarely at the dancefloor, perforated by needle-tipped hi-hats and sharp, serrated claps.
“Widodo,” formerly known to fans as “Rari Lim,” has been floating in sets for a few years now. Like previous hits “Fizheuer Zieheuer” and “Enfants (Chants),” it’s essentially an edit, pairing Villalobos’ crisp drum programming with a long strip of vibraphone solo presumably sampled from a jazz recording. Unlike most samples, this one doesn’t loop; it just floats behind the groove, like a reflection in a puddle. An almost inaudible hint of speech is left running deep in the mix, which makes for a mildly disorienting experience: If you’re listening on your computer, you may find yourself checking for open browser tabs. What makes it a potentially divisive track is the jazzy walking bassline that hurtles through the first two-thirds of the song. It doesn’t quite work; its eighth-note cadence is too straight, its notes too unvarying. It feels like something you'd encounter blaring from an animatronic jazz band at Disneyland.
“Bakasecc” is better. For those who prefer Villalobos when he goes furthest off-piste, this will be the highlight. Save for a muted kick, there are no drums here at all, just a blurry shower of plucked, kalimba-like sounds held together by clicks and pops and squishy burbles. It is a fine encapsulation of a kind of repetitive music that never actually repeats—that is, music in which every bar is as unique as a snowflake, yet when you zoom out, comes to seem hypnotically undifferentiated. It is a mountain stream set to a 4/4 beat.
“Subpad” and “Empirical House,” which both put their focus on sharp, snapping grooves, initially feel more straightforward, but there are strange energies at work. In the former, bright, choppy chords faintly echo “808 the Bassqueen,” a crowd-pleasing classic from 1999, but the real action is way beneath the surface, where faint synthesizer pads, stray piano notes, clinking cutlery, and another low speaking voice pool like water in a leaky basement. Again, you go searching for that renegade browser tab; you might even wonder if Villalobos recorded the whole thing with a YouTube window open on *his *computer and just left it that way. The title track, meanwhile, pairs a restless groove, bouncy as a teenaged boy’s knee, with limpid swirls of Rhodes keyboard; the background is aswarm with hot breath, gravelly hiccups, and indistinct muttering.
Villalobos’ music is druggy, but these two tracks are really druggy. Setting up an irreconcilable tension between foreground and background, they feel like two realities colliding, or maybe one reality being peeled into two parallel strips, trapping listeners in the dissonance like flies in stickum. Both tracks are upwards of 12 minutes, and, from a purely structural point of view, they don’t really do anything in all that time, but that’s the point. Villalobos doesn’t edit or arrange because he doesn’t have to. Like so much of his work, each of these is merely a fragment of a much longer continuum.


The Austin band’s knowing, sharply rendered indie rock filters life on the road into songs about interpersonal angst and heartland unease.

Lived Here for a While

It’s rough out there for lots of indie rock bands, but Austin’s Good Looks have really been through the shit. The day after they released their 2022 debut, Bummer Year, guitarist Jake Ames was nearly killed in a hit-and-run. The band put off touring while he slowly recovered, and when they did finally hit the road, their van caught fire and they lost everything: gear, instruments, laptops, merch, personal effects, everything. A less committed group might have taken either of these tragedies as a sign from the universe, but to their credit Good Looks are a foolhardy lot. While they don’t address those trials on their follow-up, Lived Here for a While, they play like their lives depend on it.
Lived Here for a While views the world from a blazing tour van. These songs aren’t just about what they see out on the road, but what they leave behind. Lovers grow distant, friends fade away, cities expand beyond recognition. “This used to be a Black neighborhood,” frontman Tyler Jordan exclaims on “White Out”, and few songwriters could make gentrification sound so deftly (or wittily: “Look out! They’re jogging! and they’re bringing their dogs with ’em!”). Whenever they tour, they never return to exactly where they left, which churns up a sense of unease in these songs: The tempos are just a little too fast; the guitars bypass jangle and head straight for the jitters.
Too often, indie self-awareness can come across as self-regarding and off-putting, like a novel about how hard it is to be a novelist. How many listeners can relate to tales of long hauls and empty venues? To their credit, Good Looks never whine about their fortunes, nor do they sound like they’re playing exclusively to other touring indie rock bands. Jordan makes it all relatable, as though touring were no different than any other low-paying gig in late-capitalist America. And he knows that lovers and spouses typically take the brunt of any artist’s frustrations. Jordan is an ambitious songwriter—and occasionally a messy one, as on “Self-destructor,” which lapses into condescension—but songs like “If It’s Gone” and especially “Desert” are distinguished by their generosity toward their subjects. Jordan apologizes rather than throws blame, and hopes it’ll make him a better man. As he sings on “Vaughn,” “Not every single lover has gotta be a sad song.”
Jordan was singing about these subjects on Bummer Year, but these new songs are more acute in their angst, more vivid in their arrangements, more volatile in their performances. As resourceful a songwriter as Jordan may be—with a casual lyricism that can turn a plainspoken phrase into a lighter-raising chorus—Good Looks were never merely his backing band. Racing through “Self-destructor” and churning up drama in “Why Don’t You Believe Me?,” they take the curves a little too fast, but the rhythm section’s taut krautrock beats keep all tires on the pavement. And Ames always has a punchy riff on hard, or a trenchant guitar tone, or a blast of feedback to bolster Jordan’s vocals or wryly undercut him. Self-referential yet also self-critical, they play every song like it’s an argument for why they’re playing that song.
There’s a sharp desperation to Good Looks’ headlong heartland rock, as though they might be trying to outrun something. “I keep driving around, to try to make some strangers love me,” Jordan sings on “Can You See Me Tonight?,” and the line perfectly sums up the Sisyphean life of a touring band. Then he adds the kicker: “By the end of tonight, I’ll sing myself hoarse and I’ll still feel empty.” Without romanticizing their lives, they do manage to find something meaningful in that pursuit, even if it’s just another song to stave off the darkness.
Correction: A previous version of this review included a line about the song “Self-destructor” that could be misinterpreted. This has been amended.


Not only does The Wailing Wailers highlight the first major recordings of Bob Marley, but the happy, bouncy, optimistic sound is also the sound of post-independence Jamaica.

The Wailing Wailers

Legendary records are legendary for different reasons—some for the music and some for the musicians. In terms of The Wailing Wailers, it would be tough to locate folks who don’t know the song “One Love” or the name of the fellow singing this song. Bob Marley is enough of a worldwide superstar that his face and his later lyrics are as familiar to American college students as they are to Ethiopian teenagers.
The Wailing Wailers is not, by strict definition, an album—it wasn't recorded or sequenced as a whole. The Jamaican music industry has traditionally been shaped by singles, so this is effectively a singles bundle that was gathered up and released in late 1965. Not only does this highlight the first major recordings of Bob Marley (and it should be noted that most of the songs have Marley writing credits), but the happy, bouncy, optimistic sound of *The Wailing Wailers *is also the sound of post-independence Jamaica. It is the sound of a music that would soon reach out beyond the island and internationally through the remarkable voices of Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, and, most of all, Bob Marley.
In addition, *The Wailing Wailers *emerged from Clement “Coxsone” Dodd’s Studio One, one of the foundational, pioneering recording studios where Jamaican music is concerned. Operative from the 1950s through to the early 1980s, Studio One released ska, rocksteady, reggae, and dancehall over the years. The history of Studio One is key to the history of music in Jamaica and the rise of both reggae and Bob Marley.
Revisiting it now, you can also clearly hear the ways that popular music circulates and crosses borders. The influence of American R&B and pop is evident—there’s a version of “What’s New Pussycat?” here—but also a specificity that places the record smack in the middle of the ska and rocksteady period, a precursor to the reggae that propelled Marley into the stratosphere of fame he found himself in the 1970s. Patwa, the Jamaican language, is a Creole that brings together various linguistic elements and structures stemming from West African languages, such as Twi and Yoruba, English, Spanish, Dutch, and Native American sources. A Creole language brings together all of these elements. Similarly, the musical genres of Jamaica are creolized forms. As case in point, *The Wailing Wailers *brings together multiple influences, at times sounding like 1960s croony R&B as on “I Need You,” skank-ready ska on “One Love” and “Simmer Down,” and then Patwa-inflected proto-reggae on the slightly slower “Rude Boy.”
This past year novelist Marlon James became the first Jamaican to win the Man Booker prize for his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings. The book takes the attempted assassination of Bob Marley as its starting point and zooms out from there, taking in the scope of '70s Jamaica, extending forward to the 1990s. The panoramic scope of James’ book is a demonstration of Jamaica’s international reach and influence. *The Wailing Wailers *is another key piece of the artistic and creative juggernaut that is Jamaica, helping to demonstrate the narrative of reggae and of Bob Marley. With Jamaican creativity in the spotlight, it’s a perfect time to provide access to Studio One again.
*The Wailing Wailers *is the first reissue from Yep Roc Music Group, who have access to the Studio One catalogue, thanks to an agreement with Coxsone’s daughter Carol Dodd, and they are starting as they plan to continue—with reissues of foundational albums (some quite rare) provided in the form of their original release. *The Wailing Wailers *is one that has been available since its original 1966 release, specifically by New England’s Heartbeat Records. Heartbeat lovingly reissued a good number of Studio One releases from 1983 through to the mid-'00s, but changes in the music industry meant that Heartbeat petered out. Yep Roc appears to be ably picking up the trail and providing high-quality LP, CD and digital access as well as involving Jamaican native Chris Wilson, the former A&R manager for Heartbeat. The care that has been put into this reissue is obvious. It’s meant to provide a historical touchpoint by utilizing all original album art and providing the same track listing as the first time around, and now a legendary album will be consistently available to whole new audiences.


Constructed largely out of cut-up and processed samples of their previous recordings, the noise-metal iconoclasts’ latest album takes the listener on journey through a hell of the Body’s careful making.

The Body: I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer.

The Body have never thought of themselves as a metal band. Their last full-length, 2016’s No One Deserves Happiness, was the Portland duo’s version of a pop album, influenced by Taylor Swift, the Weeknd, Russian poet Anna Akhmatova, and various suicide novels, as well as their collaborators on the project, Thou and the Haxan Cloak. “We always saw ourselves as more of a noise band than anything else,” drummer Lee Buford told Thump in 2016.
Constructed largely out of cut-up and processed samples of their previous recordings, the Body’s new album, I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer, combines noise with electronic music. The result falls somewhere between the harsh-noise body horror of Pharmakon’s Bestial Burden and the way Shlohmo turns his emotive synths and beatwork toward grief and loss on Dark Red. True to form, the record hides moments of grace within an impenetrably violent landscape, capturing a rupture at the boundary of what is bearable.
The songs gain intensity as the album progresses, leading the listener deep into a hell of the Body’s careful making. Opening track “The Last Form of Loving” builds from a slow, melancholy prologue—violins to drums to heavy breathing—into a sort of hymn. Chrissy Wolpert, from the Body’s frequent collaborators Assembly of Light Choir, sings of “the light that survives us,” pausing on a moment of peace before “Can Carry No Weight” drops in with a thick drum beat, high-pitched chirp, and singer/guitarist Chip King’s disintegrated screams. The strings that accompany Wolpert’s gothic vocals feel ceremonial and portentous, evoking a ritual before sacrifice or the approach of a monster ready to devour the whole village. On “Partly Alive,” as rolling drums, horns, and layers of King’s blood-curdling shrieks coalesce into a cinematic wave, the thing arrives. Attacks. Spares no one.
The rest of the album roils in a terrifying yet mesmerizing darkness. On “The West Has Failed,” King’s screams are distorted beyond the human, absorbed into similarly mechanized drums—like when the bear in Annihilation screams with a human voice, but over an IDM groove. “An Urn” is the most straightforward dance track on the album, generously deploying three distinct breakdowns, each more brutal and gratifying than the last. It’s cathartic and destructive, like a rave in a collapsing building.
The single “Nothing Stirs” is the album’s massive, chilling apex, pulling together all the sounds that came before it. Built on industrial drums and ambient horror sounds, the track wouldn’t feel out of place as a Tri Angle Records release. Lyrics are important to the Body, but since King’s voice is used mostly as a sonic motif, they rely on guest vocalists to give their words life. On “Nothing Stirs,” Kristin Hayter (aka Lingua Ignota) delivers the lines, “When your love is gone/What is left/At night a prayer for death,” with a distinct bite. The closing refrain, “March on,” soars, breaks, and shatters, as though she is trying to launch the words into the atmosphere with a force they cannot withstand.
The Body have long been obsessed with suicide. I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer is, in fact, a line pulled from Virginia Woolf’s suicide note—and a quote that took on a particular resonance for me when, as I was living with the album, a friend finally succumbed to a debilitating illness.
The album is still a little bit metal in that it is still a little bit campy. But the struggle the Body relate on I Have Fought Against It is largely a prologue to the ultimate resignation, which manifests on the somber closing track, “Ten Times a Day, Every Day, a Stranger,” as engineer and drummer Seth Manchester’s father reads from Czech author Bohumil Hrabal’s novel Too Loud a Solitude. The song is a narrative of chronic pain and emptiness that resolves in sparse piano and silence.
Thinking of my friend, I found myself stopping short of “Ten Times a Day” to avoid its stark implications. It felt easier to stop one track earlier, with “Sickly Heart of Sand”—where Hayter howls Woolf’s words, “I have fought against it but I can’t any longer,” but embedded in the kinetic brutality of her voice is the certainty that one is still fighting.


The Atlanta rapper’s latest LP is an ambitious and overwhelming experience, a bridge between his upbringing and his place within hip-hop canon and Black history at large.

The Forever Story

JID has always been deceptively difficult to pin down; the Atlanta spitter’s reputation as a capital-L Lyricist with a Gatling gun flow often overshadows the rubbery and referential shapes his music takes. Pass him a beat like the slinky “D/vision” and he’ll stagger-step his way around drums while dropping James Harden and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles references; give him room to vamp over the string licks and bubbly snaps of Spillage Village’s “Ea’alah (Family)” and he’ll coo about family barbecues and endless summer violence like a long-lost Dungeon Family affiliate.
On “Raydar,” the second track on his new album The Forever Story, JID explicitly calls attention to his range for the first time in his career: “I got the shit you could play for your mama/I got the shit you could play for the hoes/I got the shit you could sell to the trappers/In Decatur with the ’K and the Colt.” It’s been nearly four years since JID’s last solo project, 2018’s DiCaprio 2, and five since his 2017 breakout The Never Story; the time away has him aching to display tricks old and new. There are verses performed in multiple voices; there are heartfelt ballads; he flexes, digs further into his family history, and shares scattered thoughts on the modern Black experience over songs with multiple beat changes. Forever is an ambitious and overwhelming album, a sprawling and sometimes frustrating bridge between JID’s upbringing and his place within hip-hop canon and Black history at large.
That’s a lot to cover in any context, but it isn’t his first time piecing this together. Forever is a literal and thematic sequel to The Never Story, providing what JID recently described to Complex as “a good piece of [my] origin story.” He’s spoken about his family before, but never with the verve he brings to a story about him and his six siblings fighting a small army outside a New Orleans bar on “Crack Sandwich,” or a dissection of the way his success strains his relationship with one of his sisters on “Sistanem.” Like The Never Story, some tracks are bookended with recordings of family and friends that range from candid conversations to demands for him to drop the album. The scope of the project makes it easy to occasionally lose the plot, but the raps and production are strong enough to draw focus away from its awkward sequencing.
When it comes to pure performance, JID’s voice has rarely been more elastic. He uses the same half-step flow at different BPMs on “Can’t Punk Me” and “Stars,” burrowing through both beats to create exciting vocal pockets in their shuffling beats. He’s also singing more, and his light melodies make for good hooks (“Dance Now,” “Bruddanem”) and full-throated balladry on the heartrending “Kody Blu 31.” One big difference from past records is the number of sly musical references baked into songs. Some are fairly overt—JID mentions looking up to JAY-Z, Kanye West, and Lil Wayne on “Stars”—but others are fainter to the naked ear. “Raydar” begins with a short sample from the Last Poets’ “Mean Machine” that contrasts JID’s war-ready posturing throughout the song. Michael Jackson’s infamous scatting hook from “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is interpolated on “Dance Now”; the “mommies, daughters, martyrs, callers” hook from “Sistanem” bears a striking resemblance to the opening of OutKast’s “Rosa Parks.”
By creating a new trail using the breadcrumbs of the past, JID and his producers are doing what many of the greats do best. And the beats across Forever are almost uniformly impressive, as executive producer Christo and a handful of others offer up a variety pack of slappers and pretty orchestral arrangements. “Surround Sound” flips the same Aretha Franklin sample used on Yasiin Bey’s “Ms. Fat Booty” with harder drums that pulse like subwoofers in a trunk. Nervy footwork-inspired beats from Kaytranada (“Can’t Punk Me”) share space with melancholic live-band instrumentation from Canadian jazz outfit BADBADNOTGOOD (“Stars”) and Justus League member Khrysis (“Money”).
Forever’s maximalism creates some unfortunate bloat. Third verses whiff about as often as they land; songs like “Surround Sound” and “Can’t Make U Change” turn into endurance tests when their switch-ups don’t justify their length. This also extends to the album’s guest list. Most of the guests slot themselves in nicely, particularly fellow Dreamvillites EarthGang on “Can’t Punk Me” and an in-form Lil Wayne on “Just in Time.” But Lil Durk’s choppy melodies don’t belong over the string arrangement on “Bruddanem,” and the decision to put Yasiin Bey’s otherwise solid verse over a staid beat on the back half of “Stars” instead of the beautiful flutes and clap drums on the front half was a mistake.
Much of this excess clearly stems from JID feeling he has something to prove after four years away. The skits poking fun at impatient fans and his quips about song leaks don’t fully conceal that Forever is JID’s attempt to be a hip-hop ringmaster playing every role in the circus. Even so, his expanded ambition is impressive. JID remains a talented and engaging presence who’s becoming better and better at exposing his heart for anyone willing to touch it.