Composed by Donnacha Dennehy and performed on viola by Nadia Sirota and viol de gamba by Liam Byrne, Tessellatum is an impressive, sweeping work whose 15 pieces seem to just peel off one another.

Tessellatum

Irish composer Donnacha Dennehy’s music is repetitive and minimalist, but he will never remind you of a bustling city street or a multi-lane highway like Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Dennehy’s repetition evokes a rushing river—everything flows endlessly around you, guided by patterns but interrupting itself everywhere you look. He doesn’t have one specific style: Some of his pieces are bright, hard, and brilliantine—like the “Bulb,” which sounds like a transcription of a heart arrhythmia. Others, like his totemic 2007 piece Grá agus Bás, gather tones into darkening clouds, like a massive storm front seen from a rooftop. But they all carry an elemental weight, suggesting creeping overgrowth and boundaries being slowly encroached.
Nadia Sirota heard Dennehy’s sprawling music and found herself drawn towards it. Over the past eight years, her own work has grown so sprawling that the honors hailing her achievements have gotten ludicrously specific: She hosts the world’s best contemporary classical music podcast and has contributed her music to over 60 albums from Björk to John Legend to Arcade Fire. Above all, she is a relentless commissioner and performer of music, and has brought forth an impressive thicket of it into existence. Her pursuit of new work is as admirable as her tenaciously good ear and her ability to throw herself bodily into the landscapes that composers bring to her.
Out of Dennehy’s and Sirota’s union arises Tessellatum, an album-length collaboration with accompanying animated visuals by Steven Mertens, an animator whose done darkly whimsical work for Regina Spektor and Dan Auerbach. Nadia Sirota plays the viola, Liam Byrne plays the viola da gamba, and between the two of them, they build up 15 tracks that swirl thickly around you. The music blends into a kind of tabula rasa, pulsing drone, a shifting mass that is meant to smudge the edges on your perception of passing time. It isn’t quite a drone, though: the 15 multi-tracks of strings played by Sirota and Byrne peel off from each other in long, moaning strands, like someone planing clean strips from a board of wood.
The album was produced by Sirota and mixed by Bedroom Community label co-founder Valgeir Sigurðsson, whose coursing music also whispers inside of this piece. Mertens’ accompanying animations focus on deep sea imagery, flashing on images of fish skeletons, fossils, floating scraps that suggest drifting phytoplankton. The viola da gamba and the viola themselves feel suspended in solution; they are both mid-range instruments, their husky timbres evocative of human voices, and hearing them twist and invert around each other, you can almost feel your feet leave the ground.
You don’t really isolate high points in a piece like this—like pointing out animal shapes in a cloud, it has changed by the time you revisit it. It also tends to lose its meaning when you don’t experience it in full. Instead, It creates one long, hypnotic moment, a fixed space for you to inhabit as variations emerge and disappear around you.


The Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter’s 12th album is a lucid, jazzy, and unique entry in her catalog. The complex, hypnotic arrangements belie the warm simplicity of her verse.

Music Life

Mia Doi Todd has an uncanny gift for music that glides and ascends and lands smoothly, always somewhere unexpected. Over the past two decades, this quality has made the Los Angeles native a favored collaborator for a wide range of artists looking to explode the boundaries of their music—from Dntel to Laraaji to Saul Williams—and it makes her an equally compelling artist when working alone. She is a singer-songwriter who views her work more like a landscape painter, patiently bringing a world to life across the canvas.
The lush and meditative Music Life marks Todd’s first collection of original songs in a decade, following a film score and two sets of covers: 2014’s Floresta, which featured interpretations of Brazilian music, and 2016’s Songbook, which took on influences like Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Elliott Smith. Both albums highlighted Todd’s signature qualities—a spectral, swooning sense of melody, her light and easygoing soprano—while showing how adept she is at working outside her comfort zone.
Music Life furthers this exploration while offering an inviting survey of her strengths as a songwriter. Several tracks are tender reflections on family and motherhood, like the lullaby “Wainiha Valley,” featuring zither accompaniment from Laraaji. Others tell more imagistic stories, like the lilting, mermaid fable of “My Fisherman.” While she accesses a wide range of characters and genres through these songs, Todd unifies the material with an instinctive sense of uplift and connectedness (“I think my worldview is full of pink glasses,” she told NPR last year), and her writing reveals this outlook with the plainspoken directness of aphorisms.
Todd contrasts the lucidity of her words with her complex, hypnotic arrangements. In “Take Me to the Mountain,” she describes a kind of vision quest while the music—featuring saxophone from Sam Gendel amid layers of violin and viola, clarinet and flute—conjures a similar journey, trudging then surging uphill. At the end of each verse, Todd plays a subtle trick with her phrasing, repeating the last syllables of a line: “Let’s go someplace where we can breathe/Where we can breathe/Where we can breathe.” Stretching the words into new shapes, her voice becomes part of the tapestry of instruments, her lyrics evoking a texture and rhythm all their own.
The merging of music and meaning also lies at the center of the title track, one of Todd’s most magical performances to date. Accompanied by guitarist Jeff Parker and keyboardist Money Mark, she leads a jam session that mirrors the increasingly dark turn of her lyrics. “If you give your life to music,” she sings, “It might not go quite like you thought.” It’s a simple premise, but as the mood shifts from excitement to exhaustion, hotels to hospital rooms, the music grows uncharacteristically urgent and intense. When she comes back down to earth in the closing lines, a gentle repetition of “I loved you” and “I love you,” the preceding images linger like a vivid dream.
The best songs on Music Life evolve with this subtle, intuitive sense of escalation. Take, for example, the centerpiece “Little Bird.” It’s the kind of thing another songwriter might fashion into a breezy interlude, a breather amid the heavier material. Duetting on nylon string guitar with Brazilian musician Fabiano do Nascimento, Todd sings a sweet, sad melody for someone who has never left L.A. and could use a little perspective. But as she starts making her case, her ideas begin to snowball: “Bali or Bangkok/Denver or Dallas/Maybe Atlanta... or Atlantis.” Soon, we are nearing the eight-minute mark, and she just seems to be ramping up. It’s a pleasant reminder that we are on Mia Doi Todd Time, only visitors, and the world has never seemed bigger or more full of possibility.

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The UK synth-pop duo’s 18th studio album attempts—but doesn’t quite attain—the electric thrill of the material that first made them pop sensations.

The Neon

Of the artists to emerge from the first big wave of UK synth-pop acts in the ’80s, Erasure is one of the few still standing. Along the way, singer Andy Bell and synth fanatic Vince Clarke have weathered all manner of highs and lows—from their commercial peak in the late ’80s and early ’90s, when they landed four consecutive albums at the top of the British charts, to Bell’s 2004 announcement that he had been diagnosed with HIV nearly seven years earlier.
Most impressive is the continued quality of their music. By mostly sticking to their chosen lane—Clarke’s glitzy, club-ready electronics as backdrop to Bell’s beguiling voice and lyrics of emotional enchantment and anguish—the duo amassed an impressive collection of good-to-great albums. Their streak was broken only in 2017 with World Be Gone, a dour record tainted by slower tempos and existential fears fueled by an ugly political present.
While it steers in the right direction, Erasure’s latest full-length The Neon doesn’t quite get the pair back on track. The album is a deliberate effort to return to the sounds and mood of the material that first made them pop sensations: Clarke reached for the analog synths he’s had since the duo’s earliest days, and Bell describes the new album as “going back to the beginning.” In its best moments, like the gooey, glammy “Nerves of Steel” and the disco blurt of “Diamond Lies,” The Neon provides a flicker of the same electric charge found in early hits like “Sometimes” and “Chains of Love.” But Erasure mostly don’t reach those same heights. Though it’s often frothy and fun, The Neon is really the sound of settling—into middle age, into committed relationships, and into their place in musical history.
Throughout, Bell takes on the tone of an elder statesman, offering pleas of care and caution either to the younger men in his orbit or to a younger version of himself. “There’s a sweetness in your eyes/You better take my good advice/You’d better keep away from them,” he sings over a blowsy Moog melody on lead single “Hey Now (Think I Got the Feeling).” On album closer “Kid You’re Not Alone,” Clarke’s mid-tempo pulses and quick-fading synth surges mirror a lyric that serves as warning on how indulgence in “earthly delights” can lead to shame and regret.
Bell has long distinguished himself from his dance-music peers by singing more of romance and lasting love than hedonism or easy thrills. On The Neon, that tender-hearted quality comes alive in tracks like “New Horizons,” a stirring torch song about weathering life’s storms beside a loved one, and “Careful What I Try to Do,” a bouncy, bubblegum tune that’s flush with the delight of new romance. But the album fails to truly surprise. Were it not for Bell’s thicker, throatier vocals, there would be little to distinguish tracks like “Shot a Satellite” and “Hey Now” from those on 1997’s Cowboy or 1994’s I Say I Say I Say.
Erasure clearly are open to updating their classic sound, as on 2014’s The Violet Flame, where co-producer Richard X helped add a sharp, icy sheen to their otherwise effervescent tunes. They even presented a different perspective on the bleak World Be Gone by re-recording the album with Belgian neo-classical ensemble Echo Collective for 2018’s World Beyond. And each man’s activities outside of Erasure—Bell’s theatrical work, and Clarke’s left-field collaborations with Orbital’s Paul Hartnoll and Heaven 17’s Martyn Ware—proves that they can push themselves beyond the tried-and-true. The Neon nestles the duo back into their musical comfort zone when they’re exceedingly capable of more.

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When reissues serve their highest calling, it's to shed light on voices neglected by history. These two reissues, from Recollections GRM, focus on two neglected voices in electronic composition from the '60s and '70s. While both albums oddly exist outside of time, they both feel at home in the modern electronic moment.

Beatriz Ferreyra / Michel Redolfi: GRM Works / Pacific Tubular Waves/Immersion

Reissue culture gets derided for many reasons—they comprise the majority of RSD chum; they can obscure newer artists; they make for long queues at record pressing plants. Some see them as a pernicious symptom of something deeper: Britt Brown of 100% Silk wrote that the proliferation of past musics "reveals a host of aesthetic anxieties, disappointments, and insecurities lurking beneath the surface of our 21st century music landscape." But when reissues serve their highest calling, they shed light on voices neglected by history, and were it not for reissues and rediscovery, a generation of vital female electronic composers might have been lost.
It was in the late '90s, near the end of her life, for example, that BBC Radiophonic Workshop member (and "Doctor Who" theme composer) Delia Derbyshire received some recognition for her electronic music, and it's only in this century that more notice has been paid to the likes of Laurie Spiegel and Suzanne Ciani. Argentinean composer Beatriz Ferreyra, an early colleague of musique concrète inventor Pierre Schaeffer who studied at the Paris Groupe de Recherches Musicales studios from 1963-70, only had her work issued (by the label) in 2012. The Recollection GRM label, which has done fine work reissuing epochal works from the likes of Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari and Bernard Parmegiani, two recent reissues investigate Ferreyra's overlooked work and a revered obscurity from Michel Redolfi.
Ferreyra's release pairs two shorter '60s works with two longer, more recent compositions, and there's a fluidity to her work that suggests her methodology remains unchanged. The 21st century pieces are crisper and clock in at over twice the length as the earlier ones, but they sound of a whole. The accompanying notes, referencing alchemy and the Qabalah, suggest that change and the mercurial state of the natural world is a crucial theme to Ferreyra.
"Demeures aquatiques", from 1967, manipulates the sounds of metal sheets and glass rods to explore what Ferreyra writes is "the flow constantly facing the ebb." In it, a nervous wobble of electromagnetic tape gets nearly submerged by a drone before high fluttering tones shoot up, those high frequencies themselves becoming a drone. "Médisances", from the next year, is a four-channel piece turning orchestral instruments and mouth harp into salt water taffy, twangs and bowed strings slowed to an exhilarating crawl, all leading up to an exclamatory yelp at the last moment. There's a similar sense of speed on "Un fil invisible", which warps its source sounds at a dizzying rate. At the same time, there's far more space and silence in the mix for the smaller sounds to move about, with strings zooming, tactile objects bursting into stardust, and small scurrying sounds suggesting mice aboard a space station.
Fans of the furthest fringes of electronic dance music might recognize Michel Redolfi’s name, as his music has appeared in mixes by Demdike Stare, Rene Hell and early on in Four Tet’s Fabriclive mix, leading into twisted UK garage. As the 3D graphics (like the original edition, this reissue includes a pair of 3D glasses in its gatefold sleeve) and title attests, Redolfi became enchanted with the Pacific Ocean during a seven-year period he spent in California "attempting to musically translate my discovery of the Pacific," as he puts it.
Having spent one season learning to surf in the Pacific Ocean—which more often than not meant learning to read its temperamental, ever-changing waves and not be overwhelmed by its powerful currents—Redolfi’s compositions are a remarkable ‘translation’ of that body of water. Deploying the then-newfangled Synclavier digital synthesizer (which around 1977-78 was used primarily by Frank Zappa and Wire producer Mike Thorne), "Pacific Tubular Waves" differs radically across its five movements. Redolfi conveys a wide emotional range on this side: giddiness, exhilaration, bewilderment, glee, panic, uncertainty, and both an eerie and sun-kissed state of calm.
While one side explores the surface of the Pacific, "Immersion" uses as its source sounds from hydrophones submerged into the ocean itself. The design of Redolfi’s compositions can feel macro and micro at once, where the sensation of the Pacific’s vastness as well as the way small droplets bead up on your skin are both tangible. One can visualize the tiny bubbles surrounding each sound event here and "Deep Immersion" in particular is mesmerizing.
There’s a peculiar contradiction at play when it comes to reassessing such obscure electronic compositions. On one hand, they are cloistered soundworlds, artifacts with no outside signifiers; on the other, they don’t sound dated. Despite the five decades separating some of Ferreyra’s works, one won’t find any correlation to the many changes that mainstream music underwent during that same time period. They both exist outside of time, yet now feel at home in the modern electronic moment, where it’s normal to have DJ sets in the footwork/Fade to Mind/Hudson Mohawke mode be quicksand-solid and quickly morphing. In an uncanny manner, both reissues anticipate an aesthetic that now lurks just beneath the surface of our 21st century music landscape.


The Phoenix psych-punk group Destruction Unit make a refreshing show of cross-genre camaraderie in a live setting and celebrated the release of their latest album with the pioneering prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance. But despite the commitment to activism and their exploding of aesthetic cliques, Negative Feedback Resistor sounds rather familiar.

Destruction Unit: Negative Feedback Resistor

Negative Feedback Resistor

No band makes a show of underground camaraderie like Destruction Unit. The group tends to invite friends on stage, uniting players from typically insular realms like hardcore, minimal synth, and metal in the service of further saturating its already dense, imposing performances. There’s a tagline for this, New American Heavy Underground, which you can find on t-shirts. And the catalog of Ascetic House—an art collective and tape label tied to Destruction Unit—likewise corrals sounds from the shadowy margins of accessibility. Eroding those superficial scene divisions dovetails with broader visions of liberation: Destruction Unit celebrated the release of its latest album, Negative Feedback Resistor, with the pioneering prison abolitionist group Critical Resistance, for instance. But for all of that refreshing commitment to activism and exploding aesthetic cliques, the album sounds rather familiar, an echo of its last full-length statement, Deep Trip, and the usual proto-punk touchstones.
Destruction Unit's current lineup solidified by 2013’s Void. Previously, the handle was a vessel for vocalist and guitarist Ryan Rousseau, a refugee from the Reatards. With a new lineup, the Arizonan outfit favored up-tempo, punchy beats inherited from hardcore; riffs pitched to near-total scree; and barren, windswept passages reminiscent of the group’s forbidding but awesome Sonoran Desert surroundings. It was an estranged sort of psychedelia, distinguished by what felt like elemental terror from the American southwest, but with Destruction Unit’s latest album the same approach risks exhaustion. Repeatedly evoking an arid landscape is perilous work; inspiration could evaporate.
That said, Negative Feedback Resistor is assaultive in a way that Void wasn’t. This is in no small part due to the rhythm section, which defaults to an up-tempo beat that lurches and bludgeons in the insistent style of Motörhead or even Discharge. With their reliance on halftime breakdowns and sharp drum patterns, Destruction Unit sound inspired by hardcore, but they leave out the concision. That’s too bad. The three-minute highlight "If Death Ever Slept" could lead a savage seven-inch. Instead, it’s easy to miss after the album’s midway slog through redundant nine- and seven-minute numbers.
This lack of dynamics works better in the band's cataclysmic live show, where the band has few peers. But Negative Feedback Resistor’s relentlessness made me pine for Void’s atmospheric excursions. There are a few hazy, impressionistic moments, notably the introduction to "Judgment Day", but they feel appended rather than interwoven. And, as with many traits of Negative Feedback Resistor, the same could be said for Deep Trip. Indeed, Destruction Unit’s prior album opened with a song that pivots abruptly from sprint to halftime in much the same way as "Disinfect".
Negative Feedback Resistor also harks to space-rock like Hawkwind, not to mention that the core riff for "Salvation" is essentially identical to the Stooges’ "I Feel Alright". Rousseau’s words are mostly inaudible, morphed into queasy, feverish missives, but the ongoing allusions to drugs and the bible indicated by song titles and lyrical snippets are frustratingly pat and disappointing. Off record, the band’s ideas about getting free are much more urgent, inventive, and contemporary than those psych clichés. Sadly, the band's stylistic conservatism has such a blurring effect on their records that any three tracks contain its total rewards.


Legacy reissues the first three albums from the legendary singer-songwriter, adding a few bonus cuts in the process.

Leonard Cohen: Songs of Leonard Cohen / Songs From a Room / Songs of Love and Hate

In his excellent 1997 biography of the Canadian poet, novelist, and singer/songwriter Leonard Cohen, Ira B. Nadel relates an anecdote that seems too perfectly symbolic to be true: A teenaged Cohen, after reading a book on hypnotism, successfully hypnotizes and undresses the family maid. This is the stuff of parable, presaging the hands-on mysticism, conflicted morality, and voracious lust that would come to define Cohen's art. The story also speaks to the peculiar effect of his music-- few singers leave us feeling so mesmerized and vulnerable.
On paper, Cohen's music is astoundingly simple. Because he became well-known as a poet and novelist in his 20s, there's a popular misconception that he didn't begin to play music until he started releasing albums in his 30s. But he became infatuated with the guitar at an early age, played in a country band called the Buckskin Boys at McGill University, and accompanied his poetry readings with live jazz, inspired by the Beat poets for whom he was a little too aristocratic to be taken seriously. He didn't become known as a musician until his 30s, but he was moving toward it his whole life, in an attempt to put his poetry where he thought it belonged-- with the people, not the academy.
Because of this long gestation period, Cohen's music seemed to emerge fully formed, and the qualities that dominate his first three, newly reissued albums can be succinctly cataloged. There's his reedy baritone-- a humble, melancholy instrument and an inviting source of warmth; there's his unique guitar style-- most of his songs are built from delicate webs of musky, finger-picked flamenco or broad, awkward chord progressions; and there are his lyrics, tracing out the hidden contours of love, lust, sex, religion, responsibility, and history through an inflexibly personal lens.
There's also the uncanny ambiance of the songs, the almost brutal frugality of which is offset by calliope, bells, keyboards, strings, horns, and Jew's harp. While Cohen was resistant to such embellishments and particularly displeased with John Simon's arrangements on his debut, they've worn into the songs' creases. These reissues do a good job of bringing out the instrumentation without crowding Cohen's voice or tainting the music's dark thrall, and an early version included on Songs from a Room reveals that "Bird on a Wire" isn't quite "Bird on a Wire" without those drafty keyboards pushing in under it.
This is enough to explain why these albums are good, but what makes them great is the ongoing search for personal truth and spiritual grace that they express, and how they manage to always embody both sides of their thematic coin. Everything is married to its dark twin: Freedom and shelter in "The Stranger Song", laughter and tears in "So Long, Marianne", salvation and destruction in "Joan of Arc", whom Cohen often used as a symbol for spiritual discipline and the power of womanhood.
We find this same dual nature in Cohen himself: Born to a stern religious father and a bohemian mother, Cohen's sensibility was forged in the tension between the liberal and the conservative. He's been a religious sensualist, a student of police work and law, bourgeois outsider poet, and disciplined dabbler in marijuana and LSD. While he emerged as a Dylan-inspired folkie, his music was anachronistic and only nominally political, less concerned with the timely issues of the day than the timeless issues of the spirit. Cohen was interested in "The Old Revolution", with its outmoded concepts of chivalry, and its religious (not secular) imperatives. The political ferment of the 60s manifests only obliquely, as in "Story of Isaac", which is as much about Cohen's awe of his father's stern religion as it is about the sacrifice of youths upon the altar of war.
It's appropriate then that Cohen's songs present him to us in far-flung locales. "Famous Blue Raincoat" finds him in a cold New York hotel, catching snippets of music wafting up from Clinton Street. In "So Long, Marianne", he's probably on Hydra, a pale spectre amid the Grecian island's greenery and whitewashed terraces. In "Suzanne", eating Chinese oranges on the St. Lawrence river in Montreal. In "Diamonds in the Mine", checking his empty mailbox on an isolated farm outside of Nashville.
All three of these albums, despite their musical simplicity, are leavened with the wisdom that comes from such a diverse existence. 1968's Songs of Leonard Cohen contains many of his most essential songs-- "Suzanne", "Master Song", "Stranger Song", "Sisters of Mercy", "So Long, Marianne"-- and establishes the themes and stylistic tics he would pursue relentlessly over the ensuing decades. John Hammond, the album's original producer, fell ill during the process and was replaced by John Simon; the two bonus cuts are from the Hammond sessions. "Store Room" emulates the restrained urgency of "Teachers" while "Blessed is the Memory" is more prayerful; both feature rather incongruous Ray Manzarek-style organs.
A long-time country music fan, Cohen would travel to Nashville to record his next two albums. 1969's Songs From a Room is similar to his debut: Just as Songs of Leonard Cohen replaced original producer John Hammond, who had signed Cohen to Columbia (as well as Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan) with John Simon (then just off the Band's Music From Big Pink and Simon and Garfunkel's Bookends), this album was started with the Byrds' David Crosby and finished with Dylan producer Bob Johnston. It also contains a number of Cohen's signature tunes, including "Story of Isaac", cover song "The Partisan", "Lady Midnight", and the seminal "Bird on a Wire", whose iconic opening lines ("Like a bird on a wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried, in my way, to be free") were cited by Kris Kristofferson as his desired epitaph. It seems a direct continuation of his debut, and in truth, the debut seems superior simply for having come first.
Of course, any seeker can become lost, and on 1971's Songs of Love and Hate, Cohen shows signs of disorientation. Though he's backed by a crew of ace musicians, including Charlie Daniels on fiddle, the record is thinner and less even than the first two. In contrast to his early precision, Cohen takes some wild swings that miss the mark, such as the weird Santa Claus imagery on "Dress Rehearsal Rag" and the uncomfortably strained singing style he adopts on "Diamonds in the Mine", which might be chalked up to an insecurity about his voice encouraged by his negative press. It's also a more blatantly depressive album than the first two, lacking hopeful equanimity, and does indeed reflect a period of great depression and uncertainty in Cohen's life.
But elsewhere on Love and Hate, he's in his finest, subtlest form-- "Avalanche", "Last Year's Man", and "Famous Blue Raincoat" alone justify the album's classic status. Despite its relative flaws, it's an indispensable document in the development of one of the 20th century's most enduring artists. Cohen potently captures the pull between safety and the unknown, love and freedom, spirituality and sensuality: a panoramic view of human experience, rendered through the work of one exceptional artist.


Timothy Showalter's fourth album as Strand of Oaks and first for Dead Oceans is an album as memoir: stark and at times emotionally harrowing as it recounts with bracing candor the artist’s struggles with friends, family, and most of all himself.

HEAL

“I was just an Indiana kid, getting no one in my bed,” sings Timothy Showalter, a.k.a. Strand of Oaks, “but I had your sweet tunes to play.” That song, mysteriously titled “JM”, recounts long afternoons spent rebelling against his parents, smoking in his car, hating all his friends, and playing JM’s sweet tunes at presumably high volume. The guitars swell and crash around him, then lumber into the kind of crunchy jam that once upon a time had teenage misfits pumping fists or raising lighters in unison. Given that the song is set in Indiana, JM could conceivably be John Mellencamp, the Hoosier rocker laureate who used to sing about such kids, but in fact Showalter has disclosed the song’s true subject: Jason Molina. “JM” is a moving tale of extreme adolescent alienation, alleviated only by the narrator’s identification with a rock hero, in this case one whose locality as a Midwesterner—and sometime Indianan—makes him all the more relatable, more approachable, more real.
“JM” is the lynchpin on Strand of Oaks’ fourth album, HEAL, in that it shows two different versions of Showalter: the angry, potentially violent teen blasting Songs: Ohia and the adult who now knows Molina’s fate. The song’s power lies not only in its barrage of guitars, but in the sad wisdom gleaned from fallen heroes. On all of these songs, Showalter comes across as the kind of character Molina certainly identified with and occasionally wrote about: a blue-collar, dead-end kid with an uncertain future and some darkness in him. HEAL is an album as memoir: stark and at times emotionally harrowing as it recounts with bracing candor the artist’s struggles with friends, family, and most of all himself. The choruses may swoop and soar, the guitars may churn valiantly, but Showalter’s nostalgia for his own past is never rosy. There are still hints of shame and self-loathing in his voice, as though he is still very much the kid he sings about.
“Shame” and “self-loathing” are not words often used to describe great rock records—at least not those made outside the 1990s, when personal darkness became rock’s eventually tiresome subject matter. The songs on HEAL, however, are more than just therapy sessions; in fact, they reveal an idiosyncratic artist rummaging through his memories to find the source of his art. Opener “Goshen '97”, named after Showalter’s hometown in the northern part of the state, describes his first stabs at making music, buying beat-up Casios, “singing Pumpkins in the mirror” and finding his dad’s tape machine. The details are so vivid you hardly mind that he tries to sneak the line, “That’s where the magic began,” by you. The song describes a lonely kid finding some comfort in music and some camaraderie in his musical idols, so it’s perfectly apt that guitar hero J Mascis (another JM) shreds his way through “Goshen '97”.
HEAL follows the young Showalter through his teenage years and into his twenties, as he becomes, in his own words, “fat, drunk, and mean.” Showalter’s self-assessment can certainly be grizzly (“I was an abomination”), but he couches everything in vivid scenes: stashing porn under the bed, listening to Sharon Van Etten on his headphones, drinking a jug of wine to summon the courage to ask a girl home. This autobiographical mode is unusual for Showalter, who as Strand of Oaks has not mined his own life for material—at least, not to the extent he does here. Rather than rely on the typical confessional models that inform so much indie-rock and -folk songwriting, his earlier songs addressed subjects that rarely, if ever, get sung about. This is a man who penned a revenge fantasy of Dan Ackroyd torturing John Belushi’s dealer. It’s not that those songs were impersonal; rather, they portrayed him as an artist trying to find his reflection in the mirror of the world.
On HEAL, it’s not just the lyrics that are memoiristic, but the music as well. These songs draw on the pop songs of Showalter’s youth—not just Molina’s epic Americana, but also postpunk synth pop and heavy metal. If Strand of Oaks started as a primarily acoustic folk act, it has morphed into something very different. There is lots of pre-grunge guitar on here: some actual shredding and soloing, albeit no showboating. Synths play a much larger role on HEAL, especially on the neon-lit title track and on “Same Emotions”, with its video-game solo on the coda. It’s a way for Showalter to map his own past musically, to fit his memories with a soundtrack based on what might have been playing when he bought that first keyboard or asked that girl out.
There’s a rawness to HEAL, a damaged quality to the music, as though Showalter—who played almost all of the instruments—recorded everything in the old Goshen basement with his first rickety keyboards. The title track burbles with beats and synths that might be described “postpunk” or “motorik”, but really they just sound like a guy fucking around with a Casio. That only makes the whoa-oa-oa’s on “Woke Up to the Light” and closer “Wait for Love” sound too easy, an obvious means of conveying gravity and implying transcendence. Such moments are too similar to the wordless anthemizing of Coldplay, which makes them too public and too current; they break the spell. As a result, the album loses some of its urgency, its specificity, and its narrative thrust as it progresses. But that won’t matter to the angry kid who discovers HEAL and blasts it in his own car.


The Violet Hour

Half-formed thoughts, departed lovers, music on the gramophone, the sun's last rays. These images from the "The Fire Sermon" section of T.S. Eliot's examination of spiritual isolation, The Waste Land, could easily have been lifted from the expressive lyrics of The Clientele's Alasdair MacLean. It's no wonder the English band have taken the title of their long-awaited debut album from Eliot's masterpiece. In Eliot's tome, the violet hour is "When the eyes and back turn upward from the desk/ When the human engine waits/ Like a taxi throbbing waiting." It's a time of transition from the shackles of the day to the potential vibrancy of the early evening, when-- after the drain of work, desperate for rewarding social connections-- we are able to seek emotional nourishment. Much of The Violet Hour is concerned with this quest, and seems haunted by the spirits of lost opportunities to experience rich, honest humanity.
The album is also haunted by the sound of the band's string of evocative singles and EPs-- most of which were previously collected on Suburban Light and the U.S.-only A Fading Summer-- and many of the band's familiar traits thankfully return here: Alasdair MacLean's languid, almost resigned whisper, his eloquent lyrics, a slightly out-of-tune guitar, and all of that reverb. But The Clientele add some new instrumentation as well-- steel and Spanish guitar, field recordings, violin, chimes-- to create a lush tapestry of hazy pop, like Felt at their most impressionistic.
The band is given the opportunity to explore the scope and expanse of the album format for the first time here, and it embraces it, erecting vivid song cycles and mood pieces. Just as surrealist Joseph Cornell (a Clientele favorite) frequently updated his boxes of found objects by adding items, so does the band, adding layers to the ephemeral template established by its earlier work. Out of character for the Clientele, "Lamplight" and "The House Alw [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/<script type=]|||||| js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js" type="text/javascript"> ays Wins" even stretch to upwards of six-and-a-half and eight minutes respectively, drifting beyond the band's typical hazy psych-folk and unfolding tighter arrangements and heavier guitar work than ever before. Also like Cornell, The Clientele dabble in a sort of light surrealism, the arrangement and cherishing of mismatched images and scattered snapshots. Their songs are sentimental collections of memories and moments, some treasured and some lamented, frequently filtered through odd shades of light and the often-unreliable hazes of memory and nostalgia. MacLean's delicate, sometimes poignant, sometimes mordant words of loss and love unfold like a soft-focus slideshow over the band's swirling, reverb-drenched tones.
A sense of time has always been indicative in much of The Clientele's work, and it continues here. Check the titles of songs past and present: "An Hour Before the Light", "As Night Is Falling", "Lamplight", and, of course, each of their long-playing titles: Suburban Light and now The Violet Hour. Stepping into the unreal light of The Clientele's violet hour is like looking at faded photos or grainy film stock, emerging into the daylight following a matinee, trying to peer through the London fog, or walking into dusk after a day inside artificial light. It almost sounds the way different shades of light alter otherwise familiar objects, or the way the experiences of the past, which always seem extraordinary in hindsight, loom over the present, at which they almost always seem trite. As a result, there's a lot of longing here: "Missing", "Everybody's Gone", "When You and I Were Young".
Just as Eliot's The Waste Land is credited with helping to define modernism, The Clientele are marking slight shifts in time, mood and atmosphere. In combination with their faraway, almost Francophile sound, it's a poignant noise. They're capturing moments of transition, loss, or ones that magnify the banality of the everyday: "So that summer came and went as I became cold." "I picked her up at half past four and felt the evening come in her tired eyes." "The first time I saw you, I couldn't say a thing." "I took one step back, and I returned to evening." "The southbound train through Battersea in glowing rain I ride." "I see your face each time I close my eyes."
So does this record demonstrate growth? Maybe not. The Clientele aren't necessarily expanding their sound, just perfecting it. Like Cornell, they're collating their collective past, arranging experiences into tight little boxes to cherish their memories and make sense of them. They're drifting through the London streets collecting ephemera, flutters of the heart, and snapshots of dying days. Like the modernists, they aren't building a linear timeline but seeking to grapple with more universal conditions. Is that hopelessly retrofit? Some might say so. Me? I'm not sure that combating spiritual isolation or seeking emotional nourishment will ever go out of style.


Alternately slick and herky-jerky in its delivery, Field Music's sixth full-length plays like post-punk Steely Dan—jazzy, elegant, and ultimately satisfying, but not always in the ways you expect or necessarily want.

Commontime

Comprised of brothers Peter and David Brewis and abetted by a revolving cast of supporting players, Field Music have released five studio albums over the past decade, each of them distinguished by a kind of erudite pop sensibility that is largely kept at arm's length. Their last record wasn't a proper album at all, but rather a collection of covers imbued with their inimitable wiry energy. Listening to them reconfigure tracks by Roxy Music and the Pet Shop Boys—and somehow making an overly covered song like Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" sound weirdly alien—only proved how much Field Music operate on their own strange frequency. At their best, the experience of listening to Field Music is akin to moving into a beautifully designed house in which there are no right angles—everything just slightly and perfectly off.
Alternately slick and herky jerky in its delivery, Commontime, the band's sixth full-length*,* plays like post-punk Steely Dan—jazzy, elegant, and ultimately satisfying, but not always in the ways you expect or necessarily want. It opens with "The Noisy Days Are Over"—a slyly funky missive that both acknowledges and rejects the pains of growing older. "The noisy days are over/ And here we are instead," harmonize the brothers. "Why don't you go to bed like everybody else? Why don't you grow old like everybody else?" It's hard to know to whom exactly the two are singing—or if the song is somehow self-directed—but it introduces a sentiment that flourishes throughout Commontime. The album's 14 tracks function like bits of shared conversation, the brothers' interweaving voices shedding some of the obtuseness of earlier releases in favor of songs that openly address the perils of the everyday—the often mundane nature of relationships, the gravitational pull of childhood memories, and accepting one's own shortcomings.
Commontime is brimming with ideas, splitting the difference between the artful leanings of 2010's Measure and the more conventional post-punk pop immediacy of their 2005 debut. "Disappointed" ranks among the catchiest and most jubilant pop songs the band has ever recorded, even if the track itself is about managing one's expectations: "If you want this to be more/ Then you've got to let me know/ But if you want me to be right every time/ You're gonna be disappointed." The best songs here—"Don't You Know What's Wrong?," "The Morning Is Waiting," "How Should I Know If You've Changed?"—are both clever and refreshingly earnest, unafraid of shedding some of the band's now trademark ambiguity in favor of relatable feelings. It's surely not a coincidence that one of the record's best songs includes the lyric, "This is as close to perfect as we were wishing for."
Even though it is generously filled with orchestral flourishes and a kaleidoscope of synths and nimble guitar lines, Commontime rarely feels overstuffed or, as was often the case on previous Field Music releases, busy to the point of sounding incoherent. Instead, the album balances the Brewis brothers' predilection for unusual song structures and unconventional instrumentation with a decidedly grown up narrative. It's a kind of album-length conversation best summed up in the record's final track, "Stay Awake," which could appropriately read like a dialogue between the band and their listeners, a lover, or maybe even with each other--"I might seem a little reticent / Sometimes I can be miles away, days away / And I'm sorry if I'm ever short with you / I don't mean it / It's a good job that you know me so well."


Given his own studio, his own canvas, and his own space, George Harrison did what no other solo Beatle did on All Things Must Pass: He changed the terms of what an album could be.

All Things Must Pass

In 1970, the year the Beatles officially called it quits, divorce was on the American mind. One year earlier, California then-Governor Ronald Reagan had signed the nation’s first no-fault divorce law, freeing couples from the burden of having to produce evidence of wrongdoing in order to legalize their separation. From 1965 to 1970, the number of divorce filings nearly doubled, and in the wake of similar laws pending in other states, the rate would surge through the beginning of the next decade. By the time Kramer Vs. Kramer won Best Picture in 1980, the number of divorces had nearly doubled again. But 1970 remains a mysterious fulcrum point: Whenever a new study is issued on separation rates, our progress or regression is always measured “since 1970.”
Like everything else the Beatles did, their dissolution in that year invented a new way for a band to be—in this case, painfully and publicly splintered. In their death throes, the group would become rock music’s proxy divorcees for the ensuing decade. Just as there had been a Fab Four Beatle for every adolescent discovering the giddy thrills of rock and roll in the ‘60s, there was a divorced Beatle for every teenager caught between screaming parents in the ‘70s. The solo albums appeared immediately, like bruises on a wound, and each had the quality of argument brought to a deposition, a side of a story argued. Paul hightailed it off into new love and a second round at domesticity; John gazed into the ugliest parts of himself and wailed; Ringo retreated into the schmaltzy pre-rock ’n’ roll standards of his youth.
And then there was George, who exhaled deeply, stretched, and flourished. “I had such a lot of songs mounting up that I really wanted to do, but I only got my quota of one or two tunes per album,” he said mildly on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971, referring to the increasingly tense time, from The White Album through the troubled Let It Be and Abbey Road, when each of the three main songwriters in the band had grown so attached to their individual visions that they began to see others in the room as obstacles. “Over the last year or so, we worked something out which was still a joke, really,” he told Howard Smith a year before. “Three songs for me; three songs for Paul; three songs for John, and two for Ringo!” The last official Beatles recording sessions, for the album Let It Be, were on January 3rd and 4th of 1970; John was not even present, vacationing with Yoko Ono in Denmark. Fittingly for a band that had become so consumed by conflict, the last Beatles song committed to tape was “I, Me, Mine”; even more fittingly, it was a George Harrison song.
Given his own studio, his own canvas, and his own space, Harrison did what no other solo Beatle did: He changed the terms of what an album could be. Rock historians mark All Things Must Pass as the first “true” triple album in rock history, meaning three LPs of original, unreleased material; the Woodstock concert LP, released six months before, is its only only spoiler antecedent. But in the cultural imagination, it is the first triple album, the first one released as a pointed statement. With its grave, formidable spine, it’s symbolically freighted photo of Harrison in the country, pointedly surrounded by three toppled garden gnomes, it still sits like a leather-bound book, a pop-music King James Bible on any shelf of records it occupies. It is one of the first such objects in pop music history, the unwieldy triple album that spilled out oceans of black vinyl, printed thousands of sheets of lyrics, traversed multiple sides and made you get up and sit back down again five times, walking half a mile between your couch and your stereo to experience it all. It was the heaviest and the most consequential Beatles solo album, the first object from the Beatles fallout to plummet from the sky and land with a clunk in a generation of living rooms. It is a paean to having too much ambition, too much to say, to fit into a confined space, and for this reason alone it remains one of the most important capital-A Albums of all time.
It was also massively popular, despite its hefty retail tag; All Things Must Pass spent seven weeks at No. 1, and its’ lead single, “My Sweet Lord,” occupied the same slot on the singles chart, marking the first time a solo Beatle had occupied both spots. The success was sweet vindication for Harrison; his triumph was so resounding that his former partners could not pretend to ignore it. “Every time I turn on the radio, it’s ‘Oh my lord,’” John Lennon joked dryly to Rolling Stone. Rumors have it that John and Paul reacted with chagrin at hearing the bounty of material spilling forth on the album, finally grasping the depth of talent they had been slow to recognize. Their solo albums would be considered successes to various degrees, in their own ways, but only George had the wind of true surprise at his back.
All Things Must Pass had the quality of a broken-off conversation picked up years later; there were gorgeous songs here that Harrison had brought to the group, only to be met with to varying degrees of indifference. “Isn’t It a Pity” had been rejected from Revolver, while “All Things Must Pass” was passed over for Abbey Road. In hindsight, it is impossible to imagine these songs having half the impact if they had appeared sandwiched between, say, “Don’t Pass Me By” and “Why Don’t We Do It in the Road.” Taken together, they have their own cumulative weight and depth; you can even imagine their demos perhaps sounding too patient or too plodding to the other three. Reviewing it in Rolling Stone at the time, Ben Gerson compared it to the Germanic Romanticism of Bruckner or Wagner, composers who were unafraid of risking a little ponderousness to reach grandiose heights. Harrison might have been nursing resentments, but his former bandmates did him a perverse favor by leaving him with this material: This is music of contented solitude, and it only makes sense by itself.
Besides John, George was the only Beatle unafraid of writing from anger or negativity—his early Beatles tunes, like “Think For Yourself” and “Taxman” are almost startling in their bile. But where John thrashed and sometimes wallowed, George gently explored; when John Lennon pounded his fist, hollering that he was “sick and tired of hearing things from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocrites,” George simply noted it was a “pity” that “not too many people/ Can see we’re all the same.” The biting “Wah-Wah,” produced by Phil Spector and layered with so many different guitar tracks it feels like three guitar rock songs fighting each other, is possibly Harrison’s most pointed missive as a solo artist, addressed to his increasingly alienated former bandmates. But even here he seems more bemused than pissed-off; the swoop and dip of the melodies and antic main riff resemble chuckling rather than shouting, and the most resonant lyric (“And I know how sweet life can be/ If I keep myself free”) is the sound of a tentative soul allowing himself a measured yawp of freedom, however provisional and careful.
Harrison’s music from this era embraced the Eastern philosophy that he had discovered studying with the Maharishi and would diligently follow throughout the ‘70s. When asked about these ideas in interviews, he could come off in print like a somewhat-tiresome scold, and his Beatles-era explorations in mysticism sometimes had a student’s overcompensating sternness. But All Things Must Pass, though it is easily the most spiritual statement by any Beatle, is a wiser work, made by someone whose hard ideas have been softened and tenderized by a series of salutary body blows. There’s a song called “Let It Down” and a song subtitled “(Let It Roll)”—simple expressions of surrender from someone who’s learned exactly what they do and don’t control. The title track turned on a phrase that sounded as much like “It’s not always gonna be this grey” as it did “it’s not always gonna be this great”; both interpretations are equally valid (even though the actual lyric is “grey”). “It’s time to start smiling/What else should we do?” he inquired on the shimmering country-rock of “Behind That Locked Door.”
And, of course, there was “My Sweet Lord,” the song that, purposefully or not, followed directly in the footsteps of The Chiffon’s “He’s So Fine.” Harrison was eventually sued for what a judge called “unconscious plagiarism,” which could be a good euphemism for “pop songwriting.” The situation was doubly ironic considering Harrison’s intrinsic generosity as an artist. The album was a collaborative party in itself, a gathering in which Eric Clapton, Ringo, Billy Preston, future Yes drummer Alan White, and even a young Phil Collins, playing bongos on “Art of Dying,” were given space. Having been elbowed out of a room too many times before, it seemed, he was staunchly unwilling to do the same to others.
John and Paul were their songs, and you couldn’t cover them without invoking some sort of impression of them. George’s songs had room for others—other interpretations, other viewpoints, other voices. It’s fitting that he invokes Dylan twice on All Things Must Pass—first on “I’d Have You Anytime,” co-written with Dylan, and “If Not For You,”  which Dylan himself included on New Morning. Like Dylan, Harrison saw songs like common goods, favors to be traded or plates to be shared. You could always visit George’s songbook, like a village well, and bend it towards whatever personal ends you needed. He’d have you anytime.
Several generations  have taken him up on his implicit invitation, as his best songs go from artist to artist—Britt Daniel and Jim James; David Bowie and Dave Davies. Elliott Smith would arguably never have written a single song on Either/Or or XO without this music. The Beatles obsession of late-‘90s indie rock—the Elephant 6 bands, Guided by Voices—and the Britpop bands Oasis and Blur were channeling George as often as anything. Soul and jazz artists were drawn by the clean profundity of his simple lyrics and his languorous melodies; Nina Simone’s 11-minute version of “Isn’t It a Pity” turns the song into a small dead planet with herself as the only inhabitant, and she brought “My Sweet Lord” into the black church; James Brown’s “Something” drenches the humble love note in anguished sweat. Ella Fitzgerald took the tricky rhythms of “Savoy Truffle” for a jazzy spin.
As for the third disc, called Apple Jam; it doesn’t exactly yield new revelations with time. No one’s ever listened to the stuff clogging up the back half of the last side, just like no one remembers what they said at last call and wishes they'd left the bar an hour earlier the next day—“Plug Me In” and “I Remember Jeep” and “Thanks for the Pepperoni” are the sound of a contented artist happily forgetting you are there. Harrison arguably knew exactly what he was doing with this last slab of vinyl; there has to be a reason you don’t encounter “Thanks For the Pepperoni” sandwiched in between “Isn’t It a Pity” and “What Is Life.” If you stick around for this party, it’s because you know exactly what you’re getting; they are the deluxe cuts and alternate takes of their day.  Even those little pieces and scraps have a role to play in All Things’ inheritance to future generations, for better and for worse: When The Clash filled up the third LP of Sandinista! with children’s versions of their best-known songs, there was only one precedent to reach for.
Sometimes, it seems as if the Beatles invented everything worth knowing about pop recordings. The process of making them, the process of venerating them, the idea that albums could be Ahab-like pursuits swallowing their creators nearly whole: We carry these notions in our heads because the Beatles put them there. With its sheer size and heft and gravitational pull, All Things Must Pass reinforced that the album could be an epic novel for a different sort of age. Today, “albums” exist largely as ideas rather than objects, shadow puppets we throw up against the wall to remind ourselves of the forms they represent. The language of physical media still haunts our vocabulary. Streaming services debut playlists that get dubbed “mixtapes”; we pull music from the available air and pipe them through our phones like water from a tap, and we still call use quaint words like “LP” and “EP” to describe them. For that legacy, we have artifacts like All Things Must Pass to thank. Today, albums like this are a bit like old ruins: They are important to keep around, even if they mostly remind us of what has changed. This dichotomy is the kind of thing that Harrison, who exited the earth in 2001, would probably have appreciated. All Things Must Pass is a monument to impermanence that has never once, even for a moment, left us.


Say what you will about Pavement's noncommittal live performances; they always brought great opening acts\n\ with them. Before ...

Moth

Say what you will about Pavement's noncommittal live performances; they always brought great opening acts with them. Before Malky's alkies semi-rocked the joint, concertgoers were treated to such stimuli as Rollerskate Skinny, Shudder to Think, David Kilgour, David Lowery's oompah outfit FSK, and-- prior to the release of the Australian band's debut-- Dirty Three. Warren Ellis would saw at his violin, gazing into his amp as if it were a mirror he was trying to smash with telekinesis. Jim White's drums served as a texture rather than a timekeeper, swishy and shimmying one minute, then pronouncing an on-guard pomp the next. I've watched the man drop a stick and continue unfazed, staring ahead like a piece of David Lynchian atmosphurniture listed in the end-credits as Weird Glaring Man. Guitarist Mick Turner, a beanstalky James Dean who appeared to be petting his hollow-bodied Gretsch, conveyed the band's blue cool. After Dirty Three's raw outpouring, Pavement's profile was reduced to that of the smirking DJs they once were.
Over several albums Dirty Three perfected their style, which was to lilt a bit, only to erupt into violent über-crescendos that called to mind an Itzhak Perlman score for Spielberg's holocaust vigilante epic Schindler's Pissed. Members of the band became a kind of Funk Brothers for indie rock's dark horsepeople, backing such nihiluminaries as Nick Cave, Cat Power, Will Oldham and (Smog). On Dirty Three records, Ellis was always the madman scampering around Turner's garden. When that garden is undisturbed, though, it's a beautiful thing, as Turner has proven on releases with White as Tren Brothers, with Oldham (reciting excerpts from Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali) as Marquis de Tren, with an all-star cast as Boxhead Ensemble, and on three solo full-lengths, the newest of which is Moth.
If Moth's nineteen untitled parts comprise a sequel to Marlan Rosa, that album's cresting ship is marooned somewhere, and its captain has carved himself out a domicile; barking dogs on "Part 1" help to ground the album. Rosa's violins and drums must have never washed ashore, but the island's other inhabitant, multi-instrumentalist (and Simon Joyner/Edith Frost/Pinetop Seven sideman) Mike Krassner, more than makes up for their absence with plaintive piano tones that would melt even David Grubbs' icy fingers. And how to describe Turner's playing? I don't know, "heroin-flamenco?"
He strikes chords with a kind of rolling, prophetic brush. He plucks strings as if he's confidently repairing or cleaning them with nervous tools. Yet there's something "organic" about his leapfrogging tranquilly up the fretboard's stream. His arpeggios sound like they're stumbling home from ex-lovers' porches. Middle Eastern influences are detectable, but clouded with purposeful imprecisions. Here and there the songs seem composed, but Turner's apparently reading from Polaroids instead of sheet music. The pieces' only flaw is that they're often abbreviated, as if Turner fliply stopped the tape (though the same technique wasn't so problematic on Turner's more wholly fragmented solo debut Tren Phantasma).
Moth is meditative, in a trance sense-- you can't concentrate to it, since its odd timing sidesteps willfulness, and its organs may leave you humming along like some guru's brain-spanked disciple. (Turner's word "Tren" might even be a shorthand for Zen trance, since "Zance" sounds stupid.) This album's baroque implosions prefigure what would happen if someone let the hot air out of Sigur Rós, and its dilapidated majesty suggests that it'd have made a fine soundtrack for the earthier moments in that popular, unflinchingly homoerotic trilogy about the gay wizard and the elves fighting to keep jewelry out of the penis-towers. (One of the Latin words for "ring," after all, is rectum.)
The listener won't mind Moth's retreads of other Turner progressions. The listener will be treated to un-pedaled acoustic pieces as well as backward loops and dubs as fragile as a tapestry of overlaid spiderwebs. The listener will envision Nick Drake warming up for "Black Eyed Dog." The listener will feel like the dentist's assistant just adjusted the sweet nitrous knob. The listener will think a bunch of abstract hokum-- gag, I seriously wrote in my notes that "Part 12 traces the savage architecture of the snot-trails generated by a weeping deadbeat dad." The listener will forget how funny it is that web searches for Mick Turner result in lists of sites that reference Mick Jagger and Tina Turner (and that Bill "Smog" Callahan's web-presence is outsized by that of Bill Callahan the Oakland Raiders coach). The listener will be reminded, even by Moth's nineteen exhalations, of how Dirty Three flies in the face of all the instrumental trignometrists: Their emotiveness makes them a rock band.


More muted indie pop from the Brooklyn band, and this time they've teamed with kindred spirit Jack Tatum of Wild Nothing for a track.

What a Pleasure EP

If Beach Fossils' eponymous debut was the quintessential Brooklyn rooftop party soundtrack for last year, What a Pleasure is what happens when the party gets rained out. The band may not venture into genuinely depressing territory, but there's a wistful feeling that courses through it. On "Out in the Way", head Fossil Dustin Payseur and Wild Nothing's Jack Tatum sing in unison, "Everything feels different now here without you." The EP's final track is titled "Adversity". Clearly, this is a different look from the band who made being carefree sound so alluring on "Lazy Day".
Even though the song is about the moments that make you overwhelmed with happiness, "Fall Right In" sounds anxious and contemplative, like it's a referencing a love long since passed. The pensive guitar lines have something to do with the feeling, but it's mostly because Payseur's detached vocals are too plaintive to display the exuberance of romance. There's a similar disposition on "Face It", where he pledges to "give up the city life" for his paramour. These tunes create an interesting dichotomy-- joyous lyrics delivered solemnly.
The other tunes on What a Pleasure sound like scaled-back variations of themes explored to their fullest potential on the band's debut, which is odd considering how much more collaborative this record is. One of the biggest drawing points on Beach Fossils-- which Payseur wrote and recorded by himself-- was the way every instrument was written directly in relation to everything going on around it. It was carefully arranged in the way a jazz or classical piece might be. Here, Payseur wrote the songs along with bassist John Peña, and it shows. On certain songs, the bassline provides much of the instrumental melody during the verses, which spreads things out a little, but oses some of Payseur's compositional flair in the process. The aforementioned "Out in the Way" sounds like the exact midpoint between Beach Fossils [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| and Wild Nothing, which is very pretty but also a little superfluous.
This is rectified on "Calyer", where a sun shower of guitar work provides what is probably the EP's best moment. It's a tune that won't catch you as remarkable on the first few listens, until you start to notice all of the counter-melody blooming between the guitars. But this moment is fleeting, and a few short minutes later, the ending of "Adversity" is meant to sync right back into opener "Moments". It's one of the times where it seems like the songs on What a Pleasure bleed into each other, with the really bright ideas coming in small batches. It'll be interesting to see where Beach Fossils go from here, because What a Pleasure is the type of release that shows they're talented, but still have a little work to do fully capitalize on it.


The experimental artist’s fifth solo album is among her best, a beautiful collection of minimalist ambient compositions in which no line extends for long without dissolving into an inky blot.

Atlas

“Atlas” is a weighty term for a weighty tome—hardbacked, oversized, cutting the whole world down into perfect-bound pages. To the mythologically inclined, it has other associations, too—namely, the weight of the world itself, resting heavily on a Greek Titan’s brawny shoulders. But whatever Laurel Halo may have been thinking when she hit upon the title, this strange, beguiling record has little in common with either reference. It offers neither the certainties of cartography nor the force required to sustain such an oppressive planetary burden. To the contrary: Halo’s fifth solo album maps a diaphanous universe in which no line extends for long without dissolving into an inky blot, and even the densest, most massive shapes might disintegrate beneath a puff of breath.
Halo—an American electronic musician, DJ, and composer who made her name in New York and Berlin, and recently relocated to Los Angeles, where she teaches at Cal Arts—has had a singular career, with no two records alike. Her earliest releases danced on the fringes of the nascent vaporwave movement; she has since explored avant-pop, splintered techno, and alien, biomorphic vocal treatments. In recent years, she has increasingly foregrounded abstraction and dissonance, and her new album is clearly an extension of the lines of inquiry behind 2018’s Raw Silk Uncut Wood and 2020’s Possessed soundtrack. Here as there, atmosphere and texture take precedence over rhythm or melody. But where Raw Silk Uncut Wood could meander, sometimes privileging process over outcome, Atlas—for all its seeming difficulty—is exponentially more invested in the experience of pleasure. Even its most impenetrable passages morph into gorgeous, sweeping strings or bittersweet piano cadenzas. It might be the most moving record of Halo’s career.
Atlas came together in 2020 and 2021, a period Halo has called “a disquieting and sleepy moment in all our lives.” For inspiration, she looked to things she was selecting for Awe, her monthly show on London online radio NTS: ambient music, electroacoustic composition, minimalism, and jazz piano. Another influence was the “slow-cinema” auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, whose films she has praised for their “humor, hidden detail, and dream logic”—all qualities that animate Atlas. (The humor may be harder to pick out, but it’s there, I think, in the sheer bewilderingness of the record’s dissonance; its opacity, at points, verges on absurdism, like an existentialist joke.) A residency at Paris’ historic ina-GRM studios gave Halo the opportunity to run keyboard sketches through arcane electronic gizmos, producing an otherworldly palette that is neither strictly acoustic nor obviously digital. She also relied on a few close collaborators (saxophonist Bendik Giske, cellist Lucy Railton, violinist James Underwood, and, singing on “Belleville,” Coby Sey), yet their contributions tend to be routed back into the album’s murky matrix. Everything—even Halo’s own wordless, stacked vocal harmonies—is subservient to the foggy totality. Nothing survives vaporization; nothing remains whole.
The album begins conventionally enough, with a dusky swirl of strings that might belong to the familiar terrain of an act like Stars of the Lid. But as the sound expands, it becomes stranger. Its dimensions turn amorphous. Across the stereo spectrum, competing string passages swell and bleed into one another. Deep in the murk, piano chords chime as arrhythmically as church bells. Bows saw away at strings, but it is impossible to say how many players there might be, or even how many ensembles; it feels like standing in the hallway between two different orchestras as they tune up.
Soupy chaos defines the album. Again and again, Halo returns to those themes of density, clashing frequencies, and overcast colors. But submerged in the ambiguous gloom are melodies that occasionally rear their head, stealthy and triumphant, before plunging back down into the depths, never to be heard from again. In “Naked to the Light,” Halo plays a brief, searching refrain on the piano, repeating it with slight variation a handful of times, as though striving to frame an elusive question. In “Late Night Drive,” an echo of dub techno pulses faintly before a languid phrase bubbles up like the memory of a Hollywood musical, capturing all the tragic romance of Julia Holter’s Aviary or Lucrecia Dalt’s ¡Ay!. In “Sick Eros,” a fleeting orchestral flourish summons memories of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s unabashedly sentimental soundtrack to The Sheltering Sky.
Trying to make sense of Atlas can sometimes feel like searching for Rorschach blots in a Rothko. The tone is largely uniform, yet the mood is mercurial. Alluring and radiant yet perpetually slipping from your grasp, the music plays with disappearance the way most contemporary music uses repetition. The album’s simplest and sweetest track is “Belleville,” its centerpiece. For a minute and a half, Halo plays a gentle piano ballad before the piece blossoms into a mournfully ecstatic passage of strings and wordless singing. The passage lasts just six or seven seconds before falling silent, leaving only the piano in its wake. A less daring composer might have built upon the refrain, expanded it into a dramatic climax. Yet Halo seems to realize that to let it go on any longer would be overkill. Atlas derives its power from the tension between broad expanses of formlessness and sudden eruptions of destabilizing beauty. To me, this tender, elegiac album sounds like deathbed music—a flash of rapture while everything fades to black.


N.Y. electronic duo Gatekeeper first released their extravagant, operatic new EP as a free torrent on Pirate Bay. The material is tighter and more expansive than what came before it, with their sense of absurdity deliriously heightened.

Young Chronos EP

Matthew Arkell and Aaron David Ross, the New York duo who record as Gatekeeper, produce planet-sized electronic works. At present their audience is relatively small, setting up a marked contrast between where they find themselves and where they'd seemingly like to be heading. Their last LP, the Hippos in Tanks release Exo, wilted under the strain of ideas at times, ultimately forging an uncertain path between acid house-inspired club jams and a fondness for the bombast of rock. On the Young Chronos EP, a free Pirate Bay torrent that's also available for 300 USB tokens from the Italian label Presto!?, they've kept the central tenets of their sound intact while solidifying their overall vision. This material is tighter and more expansive than what came before, with the sense of absurdity deliriously heightened.
If you've ever wondered what Montserrat Caballé would sound like if she necked a fistful of pills and teamed up with A Guy Called Gerald, this is as close as you'll ever get. Operatic vocals are threaded in and out of the EP, along with enough dramatic élan for Hollywood to finally consider giving up on "The Ride of The Valkyries". Essentially this is the sound of Gatekeeper capitalizing on the closing track of Exo, "Encarta", where they blew everything wide open via imposing choirs, a healthy sense of pretense, and beats that sounded like they were storming the palace at Versailles. One of the tracks on Young Chronos, the fantastically titled "Sword of the Gathering Clouds of Heaven", begins with the kind of vigorous chanting that Exo closed out with, setting up a neat loop between one work and the other.
Another tie that binds this with prior Gatekeeper output is the feeling of high concept pranksters at work, albeit ones with a meagre budget compared to artists they’re obviously indebted to, such as the KLF and Malcolm McLaren. McLaren even tried his hand at opera fusion on the 1984 record Fans, to uneven effect. The tracks here are anything but backward looking, instead taking elements of dance music's past (knotty twists of acid, thundering jungle-inspired drum programing) and spewing them out in an unholy mangle that's uniquely theirs. It works better as a representation of Gatekeeper's vision than Exo, partly because it's a quickie EP with half the tracks under the three-minute mark. But it's also because the pomposity is so well executed. There are grand plans here, hatched with a sense of ridiculous self importance, and humor.
The different shades of Young Chronos include patient builds ("Imperatix"), wonderfully ludicrous slow-burn tracks ("Flame of Displeasure"), and something that resembles incidental music from a lost arthouse feature ("The Soil Has Soured"). The highs and lows come rattling so fast that it's frequently disorienting, with "Harvest" and "Hanseatic" both dipping into disappointingly straight acid grooves just when they appeared to be leaning further into eccentricity. Fortunately, Arkell and Ross keep acting on extravagant ideas throughout, upping the sense of scale and ambition from Exo to a point where it's difficult to imagine how loud and wide they could go next time out. At the very least this is a strong step in the right direction. A search for the Pirate Bay torrent at the time of writing indicates Young Chronos has 11 seeds and one leecher. Such grandiose dreams need a far bigger stage than that.


Sarah Beth Tomberlin’s debut album traces the hole left by the loss of her faith, filling it in with wave-like acoustic phrases and a sharp-eyed attention to everyday details.

At Weddings

On her debut album, Sarah Beth Tomberlin occasionally reaches for the profound. “To be a woman is to be in pain,” the Louisville-based singer-songwriter contends on “I’m Not Scared,” one of several songs on At Weddings that are, by and large, about feeling alone and scared. One track later, on “Seventeen,” she sings, “Love is mostly war/And war, what is it for?” Sweeping statements like these would risk feeling overblown if Tomberlin—who records and performs under her last name—didn’t seem so unimpressed by them. The line about womanhood is delivered with about the same gravity as her cataloging, later in the same song, of baseline needs like food and cash. As she ruminates on the question of love and war, Tomberlin asks, “What is up with that?” with the low-stakes curiosity of someone griping about bad weather.
Considering Tomberlin’s background, it’s unsurprising that she would be wary of profundity. After being raised and homeschooled in a strict Baptist household and briefly enrolling at a private Christian college when she was 16, Tomberlin felt her faith dissolving, and she turned to music to fill in the empty spaces it left behind. Reckoning with her religion meant reckoning with one of the great touchstones of her musical life: the hymns that she sang in church, once-familiar songs that grew strange as their fire-and-brimstone rhetoric felt increasingly problematic. While unmistakable traces of reverence spill from these hymns into Tomberlin’s secular music, radiating through her hushed, tender vocals, her songs forgo the ethereal realm and turn their attention to the quotidian.
You might say that At Weddings is a testament to the sanctity of the everyday. On it, Tomberlin memorializes the overcoming of obstacles—like having to get out of bed, or do homework when your heart is hurting—that could be passed off as trivial, but, compounded, make surviving each day feel like a small miracle. No incident is too minor to be picked up by her perceptive pen. Tomberlin zeroes in on feeling remorse for taking God’s name in vain, hunting for meaning in the way a partner says her name—the way the tiniest of remarks can destabilize you. The album’s overall aversion to melodrama crystallizes in a set of uneventful yet heart-wrenching lines that open “A Video Game”: “The day you fell out of love/Began like other days/…The edge that put you over/You can’t even recall.”
Again and again, subtlety proves potent. Tomberlin favors simple, undular musical phrases whose crests and troughs arrive with comforting regularity. “Any Other Way” hones in on a single melodic idea—it’s all Tomberlin needs to carry her as she chews over growing up and feeling awkward, guilty, and a little out of control. The album’s instrumentation is similarly understated, relying mostly on broken piano chords and fingerpicked guitars. All of it is drenched in so much reverb that notes hang in the air long after they’re played, like humidity after rainfall. On the whole, the simplicity of Tomberlin’s writing feels like a kindness to the listener—these songs don’t demand rigorous attention, or catch you off guard. Life is taxing enough as it is, they seem to say.
The singles released ahead of At Weddings were heralded by a bevy of flattering comparisons. For her pensiveness, she has been held up to For Emma-era Bon Iver—though, truth be told, that likeness manifests before you press play on either album, as both are handed down with origin stories so captivating that it’s hard not to read them in to every lyric and melody. For her spacious, ambient production, Tomberlin gets compared to Grouper. To my mind, early Sharon Van Etten is another fitting analog—confessional tone, close harmonies, pared-down guitar, and a calm approach to personal chaos (“I am a tornado,” they both admit on their respective songs titled after the natural disaster) define both women’s debuts.
Van Etten changed course after her first album, following it up with Epic, on which she is fiercer and nervier. If Tomberlin charts a similar path, it will have been foreshadowed by one particular song on At Weddings. Arriving toward the end of the album, “Self-Help” cuts deeper than anything preceding it, from its visceral opening lines—“Electrocuted in the bathtub/Yellow-black my bruises become”—to the jolting drone that splits the track down the middle. Here, some of the album’s darkest sentiments bare their fangs. Regardless of what this may or may not indicate about Tomberlin’s future musical endeavors, At Weddings remains remarkable for its grace, candor, and composure. For now, with or without religion, Tomberlin seems equipped to keep her demons at bay.


The quietly virtuosic Parisian producer STWO worked on Drake’s “Weston Road Flows” from VIEWS, and his debut EP is chock-full of impressive guest vocalists, testifying to his ear for talent.

D.T.S.N.T.

In the final minute of Drake’s “Weston Road Flows,” the drums fade out and Aubrey goes in, multiplying the intensity of his bars. It’s the most potent section of a deeply nostalgic song on a deeply nostalgic album; as if to acknowledge that, the production contracts and chords blur together in a clear evocation of the production on the Toronto rapper’s early projects.
The deft effect was contributed by the 24-year-old producer STWO (pronounced Stu), a Parisian who moved to Drake’s hometown in early 2015. STWO, whose real name is Steven Vidal, is worth seeking out if, like Drake, you’re a vocalist looking to flex your abilities. On his new EP, D.T.S.N.T., he makes room for a globally sourced array of collaborators, giving Rotterdam’s Sevdaliza, Sydney’s MK Grands and the Peruvian-born A. Chal, among many others, a chance to show off their voices.
These names may not be familiar to you—they certainly weren’t to me before D.T.S.N.T. But all of them represent the aesthetic offspring of artists like the Weeknd and James Blake. STWO’s collaborators thrive over the kinds of beats that producers like Noah “40” Shebib, Clams Casino, and Shlohmo mastered long ago. The drums are programmed and flat, the mix is smoky and these beautiful voices float atop it all, creating a drugged-out haze that will be exhaustingly familiar to anyone who’s kept an eye on the colliding continents of R&B and (so-called) alt-R&B in the last five years.
The E.P. is almost long enough to be considered an album, as Vidal acknowledged shortly before finishing it up in March, and is chock-full of impressive vocal takes, testifying to the young producer’s ear for talent. The L.A.-based singer Brent Faiyaz dominates one of the stronger offerings, “Insecure,” showcasing range and power as he sings about his trust issues. Daniel Caesar, a Toronto vocalist who at times sounds a little like Frank Ocean and Amir Obe, a Detroit native whose flow is reminiscent of Drake’s, perform their respective impressions to great effect on “Fill the Void.”
STWO shares a manager with the Montreal-based producer Kaytranada, whose collaborator-filled debut LP from earlier this year shares some qualities with D.T.S.N.T. But Vidal’s approach is significantly different from that of his friend: Where Kaytranada’s beats bear a clear signature, it’s difficult to pick out a calling card that distinguishes Vidal from the producers who have influenced him. His immaculately produced soundscapes do a great service to his vocalists, and Vidal has talked about how it’s a priority for him to make them sound their best. But he’s lowered his own voice to a whisper.
This disappearing act is evident on the record’s strongest songs. The appropriately-named single “Haunted,” owes much of its character to Sevdaliza, her torrid alto atop synth and bass, condensing the potential energy of the beat into a full-on quiet storm. The beat on “Angeles,” another standout, starts with an explosion of synths accompanying MK Grand’s falsetto. But the production attends the needs of the vocals too closely to make any mark at all.
The record also suffers from a lack of lyrical focus, an element that Vidal has explicitly admitted that he is not interested in (which is fair, given that he only started speaking English fluently within the last several years). That inattention robs D.T.S.N.T. of any kind of narrative build. One song flows smoothly into the next with few surprises and no developments, save for an abrupt change in sound on the last track, “Blue Sky.” STWO told The Fader that the record’s title stands for “Down To Say Nice Things,” though when the project was first announced it was called Distant. Both names are apt: they communicate the blandness that plagues an otherwise solid project.
STWO wasn’t credited for his work on “Weston Road Flows” when VIEWS came out. Drake was so convinced that 40 had made the final part of the beat that the rapper was able to convince his faithful producer that the work was his own. That’s indicative of just how voiceless STWO’s production has been to this point. The overriding skill he demonstrates on D.T.S.N.T. is an ability to reflect his collaborators’ shine back onto them. That’s an enviable talent for a background player. But if STWO aspires to stardom, he’ll need to be a little more selfish.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly identified singer Brent Faiyaz as being from Charlotte. He lives in L.A.


Famed producer (U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel) releases his latest set of low-key singer-songwriter music.

Belladonna

Daniel Lanois is primarily a producer, but what he's always wanted to do is perform. Known for twiddling nobs for U2, Bob Dylan, Peter Gabriel, Emmylou Harris, and even Willie Nelson, Lanois has always appeared to want out of the constricted control room and onto the open stage, and over the past two decades, he has made a handful of albums full of low-key singer-songwriter fare as well as numerous ambient-oriented collaborations with Brain Eno. Needless to say, these records sound great, but they don't always hold up extremely well. Like Quentin Tarantino delivering a dramatic line reading, Lanois's considerable talents are weakest when it comes to composition. Inspired by a trip to Mexico, Belladonna sounds technically flawless-- every marimba strike and fret run has a specific texture that's almost miniaturist in its realistic detail-- but it's all in service to vocal-less songs that are ponderous and dull, whose strict adherence to an overriding motif hems them in.
Belladonna refers to the herb Atropa belladonna, or deadly nightshade, whose poison results in, among other symptoms, total loss of voice-- which makes it a particularly apt title for an album of instrumentals. The overall scheme is almost soundtrack-like in nature, or rather like a nature soundtrack. Rumbling feedback on opener "Two Worlds" suggests storms on the horizon, time-delay shots of clouds morphing rapidly past-- New Agey mood scenes conveying the passage of time or the amorality of an arid desert floor. The songs that follow take a similar tack, and song titles refer to south-of-the-border locales or fauna -- "Oaxaca", "Agave", "Desert Rose", "Todos Santos" -- giving specificity to the vague evocations of the music. For better or worse, such earthly signposts work to ground the music's spacey ambience.
Lanois communicates this ethereality mostly through his pedal steel, which recalls Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, his 1983 collaboration with Eno. Lanois manages to coax some lovely textures and melodies out of the instrument, as on the florid notes of "Desert Rose" and "Carla", but typically it gets lost among the other elements, proving the least compelling element on the album. As a result, the songs often fold into one another, distinguishable only by inspired flourishes like the reggae rhythms of "Frozen", the Mariachi horns on "Agave" and Brad Mehldau's sparkling keyboard melodies on "Sketches". Lanois is aiming for a kind of ascetic aesthetic, with each song a sort of musical haiku: concise, disciplined, sublime. But on Belladonna less is not more, but merely much less. The album is so stuffy and self-serious that it practically demands your respect and admiration. However, it rarely commands your attention, so it doesn't reward much of anything.


Rather than repeat the 80s indie pop they'd so expertly nailed, Pains trade up to 90s-style alt-rock-- a potentially risky gamble-- and nail that too.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart: Belong

Belong

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart landed with a bookish and fuzzy aesthetic, the sound of ace indie pop students mimicking their heroes. Yet the band has been forthcoming in their love of crossover alternative rock, and on their second LP, Belong, Pains link up with Flood and Alan Moulder, the superproducers who manned the boards for a number of 90s titans-- Smashing Pumpkins, Nine Inch Nails, U2, Depeche Mode, and PJ Harvey just to name a few. Coming after a scrappy, low-profile debut, this is the sort of power move that used to have cred-conscious listeners crying "sell-out!" (remember that word?), but fortunately, Belong is a bigger, bolder, and brighter follow-up that adds new dimensions to the Pains' sound while nearly equaling the songwriting of their debut.
The first three tracks on Belong-- the title track, "Heaven's Gonna Happen Now", and "Heart in Your Heartbreak"-- make up the strongest run the Pains have put together. That's in large part because, while they feature the seamless verse-chorus-bridge transitions the debut had in spades, they sound like actual 90s alt-rock radio hits. The Pains of Being Pure at Heart wasn't as lo-fi as it was often made out to be, but it didn't allow for the thrilling deluges of fuzz or the punchy clarity on this opening trio of tracks. Later, Pains nudge themselves slightly out of their comfort zone, replicating the motorbike roar of JAMC on "Girl of 1,000 Dreams" or the bliss of My Bloody Valentine on "Strange".
Even with their shiny makeover, the most noticeable alteration is that Kip Berman is no longer just a lead singer-- he's a frontman as well. While maintaining his soft, lisping lilt, he's now much higher in the mix, giving the singalong hooks of "Heart in Your Heartbreak" and "Too Tough" an underlined emphasis. His lyrics are also more inclusive; he's dropping the puns and arch prose of its predecessor for magnanimous songs about you, we, and us. But this newfound stress on speaking directly to the listener doesn't come without its awkward growth spurts: It's worth questioning whether striving for the perfect chorus at times comes at the cost of fully thought-out verses. The group's momentum also gets occasionally jarred by a stray lyric that can be overreaching or undercooked.
And yet, even the dodgiest lyrics on Belong don't really come off as pandering to me so much as a reminder of the margin for error inherent in a move this brave and necessary. Having dabbled in brighter production and a Saint Etienne remix on their Higher Than the Stars EP, it was evident that the Pains were trying to figure an exit strategy from a narrow, reverent sound they utterly nailed the first time around. And considering the game plans of recent New York bands that faced the same struggle-- either buy time by repeating themselves (like the Strokes or Interpol) or screw the pooch with a charmless, big-budget disaster (like the Strokes or Interpol)-- it's no small achievement that Belong transcends its time-coded sound as expertly as their self-titled did.


The first three records from the R&B group that came out of “Soul Train” show their evolution from a schmaltzy cash-grab to a bona fide bringer of disco joy.

Shalamar: Uptown Festival / Disco Gardens / Big Fun

The constant churn of an underground sound leads to mainstream success leads to brazen attempts to cash out. For every genre-shattering release, there are thousands of way-more-terrible versions of that release, all blatantly attempting to strike gold. In the late ’70s, disco’s made the ascent from the R&B-meets-psychedelic sound found in black, Italian, Latino and gay nightclubs and house parties to the schmaltz born in the wake of Saturday Night Fever’s massive global success. In Los Angeles, “Soul Train”—the influential syndicated dance television program that was revolutionary in its depictions of black American music—was undergoing a shift. Creator and host Don Cornelius bristled at the advent of disco music, but his show was a national phenomenon and set so many trends that he didn’t want to miss out on a chance to leverage his platform to dip a toe onto the dancefloor under the mirror ball.
Cornelius partnered with “Soul Train” talent coordinator Dick Griffey to launch Soul Train Records and for their first act, created a packaged pop-disco group they called Shalamar. This somewhat crass marketing tactic led to the Shalamar experiment’s first release, 1977’s Uptown Festival. Using session singers to get the album out quickly, Festival is a naked cash grab posing as a fully-formed concept. Save for the title track—a medley of familiar Motown standards laid over a disco beat—the record is completely forgettable unless used as a marketing case study and doesn’t have a ton of replayability.
However, just because the album wasn’t good doesn’t mean that album wasn’t successful. The record charted thanks to the promotional powerhouse of “Soul Train” backing it. After the first album proved successful, the follow-up would take a big step in associating Shalamar with “Train” forever.
Enter Jody Watley and Jeffrey Daniel—two “Soul Train” dancers and members of a makeshift crew of “Soul Train” personalities known as the Waack Dancers (the name, per a 1978 Ebony profile, was just randomly made up). Like the dance legend Fred “Rerun” Berry, the duo was immensely popular on the program as visionaries of style and moves that were never before seen on such a wide platform. Watley was the always-smiling female lead who set style trends with her unique fashion sense and model-level good looks. Daniel—the man who debuted the Moonwalk on national television, which led to his recruitment by Michael Jackson as unofficial muse and official dance coordinator—was the innovator, capturing attention via his unique moves. In a Los Angeles Times interview from the late ’80s, Cornelius was blunt about how Shalamar came to be. “The group’s lead singer, Gary Mumford was excellent. I decided to replace the background people, however, with two ‘Soul Train’ dancers who would work behind Gary. Since Jody and Jeffrey were the most recognizable dancers on the show, then, I said, ‘Let’s use them. My partner said, ‘Jody Watley can’t sing.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t matter, only the look matters.’”
To compensate for the lack of vocal talent, Griffey recruited Gerald Brown and producer Leon Sylvers III and the new incarnation of Shalamar debuted on 1978’s Disco Gardens. The album was released on Griffey’s SOLAR (Sounds of Los Angeles Records) instead of Soul Train, as Cornelius moved on from the nascent label to focus on expanding the Soul Train brand via national syndication. SOLAR would later find larger success as a home of R&B by applying the Motown formula of record creation to black radio so effectively that The New York Times saw fit to run a profile of Griffey in 1980 with the not-at-all-subtle headline “Solar Records could be the Motown of the 80s.”
As an album, Garden serves as a great relic of disco’s waning influence on pop and R&B. Shalamar’s Disco Gardens could be slid into any contemporary disco mix without blinking an eye, but the novelty of the album blunts its impact a bit. In a nod towards the future, Leon Sylvers III pivoted the album’s sound from all-disco towards more traditional R&B ballads (“Lovely Lady”) and the black adult contemporary pop sound that would come to be known as the SOLAR sound in the ’80s.
After Gardens, Gerald Brown’s tenure as Shalamar’s male lead lasted only one album, as disputes about appropriate payment (an all-too-familiar refrain for those studying the history of black music in America) led to his departure from the group. Griffey’s replacement was Howard Hewett, an immensely talented singer from Akron, Ohio who also spent time dancing on “Soul Train” before being added to the group for the next Shalamar album, 1979’s appropriately-titled Big Fun.
Big Fun is the textbook for what made disco, well, fun (please just look at its cover). A thumping four-on-the-floor drum rhythm with plenty of identifiable hi-hat and basslines (the latter of which were laid down by Sylvers himself) incorporated into lasagna-thick layers of instrumentalization all come to a head on this album, specifically standout tracks “Let’s Find the Time for Love,” “I Owe You One,” and “Right in the Socket.” Fun also features the biggest single in the group's history, “The Second Time Around” which showcases Hewett’s apple-butter-smooth vocal stylings over a beat built for two-stepping. Good disco music should make you feel like you have an uncontrollable urge to throw your ass around and whether that’s on the dance floor or in the bedroom is your call. Big Fun is good disco music.
After the success of Fun (it hit at No. 4 on the R&B chart and No. 23 on the Billboard 200), the Hewett/Watley/Daniel/Sylvers lineup worked together for four more albums until Daniel and Watley left the group in 1983 due in equal parts to dissatisfaction with SOLAR and Watley’s solo career taking off. Shalamar’s legacy lives through those who grew up in black households in the UK and America. While the group started as a formulaic product trying to glom on disco’s popularity, they found their voice over the years by focusing on one goal: making people dance. It’s hard to have multiple hits as it is, but to grow and develop as artists while giving you solid tunes to dance to on every album? Give your long-overdue flowers to Shalamar.


Two veteran German producers come together for an outstanding album that, despite its lengthy tracks, remains oddly accessible. Here they draw on all the styles they've touched on in the past, from dubby minimal techno to house to ambient.

Move D / Benjamin Brunn: Songs from the Beehive

Songs from the Beehive

Move D and Benjamin Brunn's Songs from the Beehive counts as one of the year's most idiosyncratic electronic releases. A collaboration between Germans David Moufang (Move D) and Brunn, Songs overlaps little with signpost trends of the past few years, instead grasping for the type of been-there thwump-and-click so familiar you'll struggle to find a buzz-word buzzier than "techno." Drawing on almost all of its creators' past dalliances-- trip-hop, trance, minimal, dub, ambient-- Songs is an album that constantly whispers in your year, sometimes literally, and builds damp, murky headspaces out of its elliptical grooves.
That Songs trends towards the classic techno sounds shouldn't come as a huge surprise: Moufang has been an underground favorite since the early 1990s and Brunn has been releasing singles since 1999. And while this review is a little late on the come-up, make no mistake: Songs marks something of a breakthrough for Brunn and especially Moufang, the type of album that makes even electronic junkies-- those who have long praised Moufang's catalogue-- sit up and notice.
Songs consists of seven long-form tracks, most of which aim to soundtrack the soft-palate dancefloor in the back of your head. "Love the One You're With" encapsulates this cloistered clubby-ness, opening Songs with a chopped vocal sample and slow-change synth notes. A rhythmic chirp, stunted bass sequence, and spacey, panning notes are introduced slowly, like how an innertube sits motionless for a few moments as the motorboat tenses the line. The ingredients undoubtedly sound familiar, but Brunn and Moufang make subtle upgrades: The high-pitched chirp that anchors the track sounds like an insect, while the clipped vocals are indecipherable speech, not song.
"Love the One You're With" is the first of three long tracks to open Songs, which gives the opening 40 minutes of the album a hazy, marathon feel. "Honey" ramps up the fastest, beginning with skittish bass notes before Moufang and Brunn coax out a quick 4/4 kick. The track is an exercise in tempo: Long ambient drones contrast with flurries of rainbow notes and taut rhythms. "Velvet Paws" searches purposefully without ever wandering, as Moufang and Brunn tend to the track's early morning orbits with patient, veteran fingers.
The prize at the end of the three-headed marathon is Songs' most singular track, "Like a Restless Sea", which loops a whispered refrain-- "The wind that moves the trees like a restless sea"-- over distended, subtly rhythmic keyboard noise. Indeed, most of the motion in the track is provided by its hushed voice-- a stressed syllable on "rest" serves as the track's tether-- and the result sounds like Moufang and Brunn singing a lullaby to house music.
Album closer "Radar", clocking in at nearly 21 minutes, sounds forward and flirtatious, a bulbous, trance-y floor-filler that dissipates into murky, rhythmic clatter and one miniature, exhilarated voice. Moufang and Brunn have long proved themselves bright, dedicated composers, but Songs represents a new high for both: a careful, vibrant long-player from two unheralded 12" warriors that should make thoughts and soles move with equal grace.