On R.A.P. Music, Killer Mike hooks up with El-P and Adult Swim subsidiary Williams Street for the 2012 equivalent to Ice Cube and the Bomb Squad's similarly inspired bicoastal union on AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted.

R.A.P. Music

Does a rapper need to make a truly great album before he's considered one of the best alive? It's a question with no objective answer. Some rappers are phenomenal with verses and punchlines but have no knack for hooks or song structure. Some can do all of those things but lack personality. Some never get the production budget they deserve; many do and just have the worst ear for beats. Some fail to capitalize on their buzz, and others are completely incapable of making themselves relevant. And yet, none of that explains why Killer Mike has been able to consistently make some of the most visceral and intellectually potent hip-hop of the past decade and a half without having a true classic under his belt.
On the unimpeachable R.A.P. Music, Mike hooks up with 2012 MVP frontrunner El-P and Adult Swim subsidiary Williams Street to create what's described on the title track as "what my people need and the opposite of bullshit." It's the 2012 equivalent to Ice Cube and the Bomb Squad's similarly inspired bicoastal union on AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted. Limiting himself to one producer, legends-only guest spots, and a real sense that he'd better make this one count, Killer Mike rises to the occasion.
But while this record is sure to please longtime fans, it also works as a compelling introduction. As in the past, R.A.P. Music takes a stand politically without going off the grid into conspiracy theorizing or sounding so circumspect that you'd think Mike himself was running for public office. On "Reagan", he calls out the government for spending billions of taxpayer dollars invading foreign land as "a hobby paid for by the oil lobby." To him, the "War on Drugs" is mostly an excuse for crooked cops to illegally search and seize young black men. But if you happen to be a phony rapper that's dumb enough to spit that "fiction sold by conglomerates" in Mike's neighborhood, you can expect to leave without your chain and dignity. None of this is contradictory to anyone with a lick of sense, but there's a tangible thrill in hearing someone tell it like it is with such conviction.
There was enough spleen vented on the Grind mixtapes to last until the next decade; on R.A.P., there's more heart and soul, both musically and spiritually. In a recent interview with Pitchfork.tv, Mike seemed particularly fond of the scene he sets during "Untitled", wherein the women closest to him in life are placed within an epic historical scale: "Will my woman be Corretta take my name and cherish it?/ Or will she Jackie O drop the Kennedy, remarry it/ My sister say it's necessary on some Cleopatra shit/ My grandmamma said 'no, never that, it's sacrilege.'" It's part of a deep respect for family that runs throughout R.A.P. Music, whether it's to his cop father during the "fuck the police" narrative "Don't Die", or his wife amidst astonishing Southernplayalistic pimp shit on "Southern Fried". He dedicates the last verse to her ("I married a Trina/ Pretty as a singer/ Fine as a stripper"), informing all other girls that if you want a piece of Killer Mike, you gotta service his woman too. It's actually kinda heartwarming.
Let's take a moment and talk about the actual rapping on R.A.P. Music. Dear lord, the rapping on this thing. When he first started appearing on dirtier OutKast tracks like "Snappin' & Trappin'", Mike might've been seen as the devil on Big Boi's shoulder opposite André. It's become clear since then he takes a backseat to no one in the Dungeon Family. Transcribing a jaw-dropping bout of dexterity like, "And what's happenin'/ Ménage-a-nage in my garage/ With these two young ladies is the reason I A.D.I.D.A.S./ That's all day I dream about that sex scene/ You textin' hopin' that they call you/ I just barbecue and call 'em up and say, 'hey fall through,'" feels about as effective as trying to explain Led Zeppelin IV with guitar tablature. Mike introduces himself on "Untitled", saying, "You are witnessing elegance/ In the form of a black elephant," and it's a perfect summation of Mike's muscular yet impossibly nimble vocals. There's no reason for him to make a two-minute, no-hook track like "Go!" other than to prove he can destroy anyone in terms of pure technique "even when I ain't sayin' sheeeit." The sheer sonic effect of the volley of words on R.A.P. could thrill a hip-hop fan who doesn't speak a word of English.
Not that you shouldn't be paying attention to what Killer Mike says throughout R.A.P. Music*.*  "Reagan" is the one that names names and cites facts to denigrate the presidency as little more than "telling lies on teleprompters" to serve the "country's real masters." But on "Anywhere But Here", the trickle-down effect of corruption is felt on a more local scale. After solemnly acknowledging the police brutality and economic stratification of New York, Mike takes a look at his home city of Atlanta, seemingly a "black male's heaven" as one the most racially progressive in the nation, "Even though it's blacktop from the mayors to the cops/ Black blood still gets spilled." "Don't Die" shows a vivid example of that: Cops break into Mike's house on a hunch and things inevitably get violent. Though the concept of their being there in the first place because "a nigga on this rap shit" might initially sound trite, if you don't believe the suspicion of being a part of that culture is enough to get you harassed and then killed, you might need to start watching the news. That's really why "Don't Die" can take its place alongside anti-authoritarian classics like "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos": The big picture is timeless; the news fills in the blanks to make it depressing in its timeliness.
There are plenty of hip-hop records with worthy causes but the good intentions don't always make your car stereo knock. That's not an issue here: I don't think we'll hear a better end-to-end production job on a rap record than we do on R.A.P. Music. El-P has managed to make strides in learning to give a rapper like Mike what he needs: on 2009's ATL RMX, he reconfigured Young Jeezy's "I Got This" with a punishing beat that somehow managed to overexert its will on the guy rapping. We get wheezing organs, incessantly ticking hi-hats, guitar skronk, and soul claps tamed to do Mike and El's evil bidding whether it's B-boy boom bap ("Jojo's Chillin'") or chain-swang braggadocio ("Butane (Champion's Anthem)"). I'm tempted to call it "warm," but so is nuclear radiation, and the bass most often sounds like a monstrous, gleefully evil sandworm that could guest star on "Aqua Teen Hunger Force".
On the closing title track, Mike equates R.A.P. Music to something holy, within the lineage of the most legendary black musicians: "That Miles Davis Bitches Brew, that 'beee-yatch' said by playboy Too [$hort]." More appropriate are the multiple lyrical nods to Public Enemy and N.W.A., even if R.A.P. Music doesn't break enough rules or have enough of a platform to reach the levels of Fear of a Black Planet or Straight Outta Compton or Death Certificate. But it does come off as the kind of powerful mid-career album those acts should've been able to make as hip-hop's elder spokesmen-- artists granted an evergreen relevance similar to Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young-- had it not been for their irreparable personnel issues: impervious to trends, passionate about politics and pleasure, something that a college professor could base a lecture on even as his students blast it at house parties later that night.


For the first Nine Inch Nails release since 2009, Trent Reznor has resorted to the most radical release strategy an independent-minded artist can employ in 2013: he’s re-signed to a major label. But unlike the themes of depression, madness, and addiction that defined his most enduring works, the skeletal Hesitation Marks chronicles a more existential crisis.

Hesitation Marks

In the past decade, Nine Inch Nails have earned more notice for how they release their records than the songs that are actually on them. In his attempts to reach audiences beyond his faithful base of goths and gamers, Trent Reznor has embraced both high concepts (2007’s interactive song-cycle Year Zero) and low overhead (2008’s self-released offerings Ghosts I-IV and The Slip); even a guy who got famous by screaming needed a good news hook to get himself heard over the incessant din of a quick-click online-music marketplace. For his latest Nine Inch Nails release, Reznor is resorting to the most radical release strategy an independent-minded artist can employ in 2013: he’s re-signed to a major label. Those e-commerce experiments proved NIN can remain a viable business in the absence of corporate-funded marketing campaigns, but he presumably wants something that not even 100 per cent royalty rates can buy you: to be a game-changing pop cultural force once again. And despite what tech-topian industry analysts would have us believe, for the time being at least, traditional tools like global major-label distribution and aggressive radio promotion still often mean the difference between an artist being a household name or a merely respected one.
That said, even as Reznor is rallying everyone from David Lynch to Downward Spiral cover artist Russell Mills to heighten the sense of occasion, he’s not giving his Columbia Records benefactors an easy sell: The aptly titled Hesitation Marks is a record that pokes and prods and teases instead of going in for the kill. It’s the first record to bear the Nine Inch Nails name since Reznor announced a hiatus in 2009 but the valorous comeback narrative is undermined by the fact that Reznor often took five years to release new NIN albums anyway. Not to mention the fact that he's remained highly active in the interim, releasing two albums with his trip-hoppy outfit How to destroy angels while embarking on a successful composing career that allowed us to see what he looks like in a suit. And yet Hesitation Marks is stuffed with more knowing resurrection references than Jay Z’s Kingdom Come-- for an artist whose every second lyric has begun with the word “I,” this could be Reznor’s most intensely self-reflexive work yet. But unlike the themes of depression, madness, and addiction that defined his most enduring music, Hesitation Marks chronicles a more existential crisis of relevance. Accordingly, its sound is skeletal and spare, as if picking up right where The Slip’s more subdued second act left off, with Reznor's usual adrenalized aggression replaced with jagged digital tics and queasy atmospheres.
And yet the more austere, minimalist approach allows Reznor to explore the outer limits of the Nine Inch Nails sound. Notwithstanding the ambient excursions of Ghosts I-IV, NIN’s song-based post-millennial discography has mostly functioned within the sonic parameters laid down by Reznor’s all-time favorites-- Depeche Mode, Berlin-era David Bowie, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Jane’s Addiction, and a pinch of Prince-- while seeming impervious to shifts in the contemporary dance-rock landscape. Hesitation Marks is much more in tune with the spartan grooves of the xx and the elastic electro of the Knife than his usual arena-rattling influences: “Copy of A” follows an uncannily similar trajectory as the latter duo’s “Full of Fire”, locking into a motorik beat that remains coolly resolute in the face of all the intensifying textural disorder mounting overtop of it. In a world where there are no more Stabbing Westwards to kick around, Reznor directs the song’s critique of conformity at himself: “I am just a copy of a copy of a copy/ Everything I say has come before.”
For a song that acknowledges the predictability of lapsing into old patterns, “Copy of A” ironically marks an intriguing change of pace for Nine Inch Nails, stripping down their metal machine music and rebuilding it with only the most integral scraps. The best songs here follow a similar process of gradually fleshing out a skeleton, from the fidgety funk of “Satellite” to the disquieting drive of “Disappointed”, where wondrous, Indian-inspired string swirls -- a la the Beatles’ “Within You, Without You”-- cut through the song’s claustrophobic clap-track. And even when the threadbare presentation casts a harsh light on the odd underwritten lyric (“Hey!/ Everything is not/ Okay!”), Reznor introduces new melodic changes to push a song in unexpected new directions: just when you think “All Time Low” can’t get any closer to “Closer”, the song detours into a kaleidoscopic coda that introduces a brief flash of radiant colour to Nine Inch Nails’ typically grim and grimy terrain.
But the danger of stretching your sound out to its extremities is that it will eventually snap back in your face, and the completely incongruous “Everything” overcompensates for Hesitation Marks’ ominous mood with a wincingly bright pop-punk chug-- and unflatteringly strained vocal from Reznor-- that sounds like a second-stage Warped Tour act trying to cover “Just Like Heaven”. And the album is ultimately lacking in the concision and sequential logic that made The Slip such an invigorating late-career triumph. For every circuit-overloading workout like “Copy of A” and “Disappointed”, there are a number of tracks where Reznor reverts to the teeth-gnashing angst of old without the pig-marching blitzkriegs to back it up, applying undue pressure on the the songs’ brittle structures. The all-too-aptly titled single “Came Back Haunted” is just that, a ghost of Nine Inch Nails’ more convincing ragers, while the album’s second half in particular is bogged down by dead-weight plodders (“Various Methods of Escape”, “I Would For You”, “In Two”) whose predictably amped-up choruses can’t enliven their sputtering tempos and flagging energy.
Alas, their presence mutes the impact of the strategically placed penultimate piece “While I’m Still Here”, which, with better lead-in tracks, could’ve served as a more dramatic comedown moment, but here feels like a pained stumble to the finish line; when Reznor says, “I’m still here”-- overtop a synth line that flickers like a dying fluorescent light tube-- it feels less like a statement of survival and defiance than the ennui-ridden admission of an office drone. But in the album’s dying moments, an encouraging sign of life emerges: a surprisingly playful series of saxophone blurts give way to the closing “Black Noise”, a slow-motion 90-second swell of grueling guitar noise that feels like all of this album’s simmering tension bubbling up to the surface and ready to erupt. Hopefully, next time, Reznor will unleash it without hesitation.


Eighteen musicians? In this economy? The Michigan post-minimalist recasts Steve Reich’s landmark composition as a solo project with a sleek, dark-hued electronic palette.

Music for 18 Musicians

When Erik Hall decided to record Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians by himself, he didn’t know he would be releasing it into a world where a traditional rehearsal of it, let alone a performance, would be illegal. (Technically, it should be called Music for at Least 18 Musicians.) And if it’s tempting to cast Hall as a prophet of social distancing, it’s even more tempting to cast him in terms of hubris: Here’s a young post-minimalist from Michigan who not only thinks he’s equal to the most influential American composer’s most iconic piece, but dares to recast it in a sleek, dark-hued electronic palette.
But unless you regard 18 Musicians as a sacred text—and maybe you do—there’s nothing that audacious about someone recording it layer by layer with electronic instruments. If Hall had strapped mallets all over his body and tried to play it in the usual way, that would have been hubris. Still, there were more ways for this to go wrong than right. The only prior solo recording of any note, by Rough Fields in 2014, fell prey to some of them, with a misconceived palette that emphasized blurting repetition. Hall’s version feels shiny, new, and self-contained, but its continuity with Reich is clear—both musically, in its close attention to the structure and spirit of the score, and culturally, in its repayment of electronic music’s debt to the minimalist composer.
Music for 18 Musicians premiered in 1976, a big year for a small genre, which also gave us Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach. The piece was a turning point for Reich, who flooded his severe, unpopular minimalism with 18 musicians (some of them playing two parts at once) and toothsome harmonic motion—more of it in the first five minutes than in the entirety of any one of his prior works, he said. You didn’t need to appreciate the mysteries of tape loops or unaccompanied clapping to get it. The piece solidified minimalism in the public consciousness and even pushed it to the edge of pop: Robert Christgau’s glowing review of the 1978 recording was reprinted in his guide to 1970s rock albums, an odd but telling context for a work without a single guitar, bass, drum, lead vocal, riff, verse, chorus, or lyric.
What it did have was melody and motion, and listening to it makes you feel immortal. At the outset, 11 chords are played through two breath cycles each. Then, each becomes a stage for a study in interlocking pulses that kaleidoscopically glimmer and whirl. The changes are marked by a rare non-repeating metallophone phrase (watch the tall man with glasses waiting so patiently in the terrific Eighth Blackbird performance). The metrical patterns don’t seem to respire, they do respire, measured by the players’ breath, the bass clarinet pumping away like a great lung.
It takes a certain kind of person to perform the repetitious underlying pulses on pieces like 18 Musicians and Terry Riley’s In C without going slack or mad. Reich assigned the task to pianos and mallet instruments, roles that Hall, a pianist and percussionist, was well-prepared to merge. Discarding the mallet instruments that make 18 Musicians hover, Hall instead makes it zoom. He rivets the core pulse to a muted piano, translates violin to electric guitar, and constructs the bass clarinet on a Moog synthesizer, sometimes swapping these voices around, as Reich does. It amounts to a series of shrewd tradeoffs: prismatic color for shapely contours, organic breath for mechanical power.
Yet the signature details and passages of the piece—which moves similar material through many moods, from sprightly to raucous to mystical—are all in place. Hall captures not just the layered clockwork motion, but also the specific loopy timbre of a clarinet here, the sudden appearance of a maraca there, and the character of a vocal phrase in a Moog sweep. Though his version clocks in just under the appointed 55 minutes, it feels fast, borne along by scudding bass lines, and its reference points are as modern as they are arch-minimalist. The opening piano pulse comes on with the scrambling urgency of LCD Soundsystem’s “All My Friends,” and Colin Stetson fans will appreciate the percolating urgency Hall wrenches from the score.
Removing the human breath that fundamentally governs Music for 18 Musicians required that Hall replace it with some other animating force. He found it by approaching the piece not as what it had been—the capstone and turning point of a musical era—but as what it had become: an idea that a broad spectrum of electronic musicians absorbed deeply into their hypnotic arpeggiations and busily interacting musical cells. His take is legible in history but assertive of the moment, propelled by its own vigor as much as anything else, and it makes a minimalist standard freshly thrilling to revisit.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


The German band’s first album since 2014 revives their introspective blend of indie rock and electronica, while simultaneously looking outward for new voices and perspectives.

Vertigo Days

Nearly two decades have passed since the release of the Notwist’s Neon Golden. An ingenious synthesis of indie rock and electronica, the album was a shining example of “plinkerpop,” Morr Music founder Thomas Morr’s term for a wave of delicate, humanistic electronic pop music that emerged around the turn of the millennium. The Notwist’s core duo of Markus and Micha Acher—two brothers from old-world Bavaria in the south of Germany—have at times tried to tweak their formula, with mixed success. Ricocheting between guitar rock, shoegaze, and downbeat ambience, 2014’s Close to the Glass felt somewhat jumbled and unfocused. But Vertigo Days, their first in seven years, uses a long period of absence and a rupture in the lineup as a route to reinvigoration. New to the fold is Cico Beck, who replaces Martin “Console” Gretschmann, the master programmer who aided the Notwist’s evolution from indie rockers to electronica mavens. On Vertigo Days, this introspective, somewhat hermetic band looks outwards and engages with new languages, perspectives, and voices.
Last year, Markus Acher joined forces with Saya, vocalist of the veteran Japanese pop group Tenniscoats, to curate Minna Miteru, a compilation of contemporary Japanese indie pop. It’s refreshing to hear Saya’s brass band Zayaendo appear on “Into Love Again,” and she even takes the mic for album standout “Ship,” a slinky, pulsating track that—like a few on this record—taps into the controlled, trance-like music that Can were making circa Ege Bamyasi.
Markus Acher’s voice remains one of the Notwist’s essential elements. Thin like tracing paper, with a tender emotional quality that borders on sentimentality, it might feel twee if it were placed over jangling guitars. But against the Notwist’s textured, electronic backdrops, Archer’s voice lands just right. “Where You Find Me” is a perfectly pitched take on what was once called emotronica, a patchwork of acoustic guitar, cascading synths, and live percussion with a sung chorus that provides a sense of gentle uplift. But Vertigo Days delights in taking moments of uncomplicated beauty and skewing them: Hear how “Into Love/Stars” commences as a gentle romantic homily for voice, guitar, and synth before a drum machine barges in like an unwelcome housemate and whisks the song off into the stratosphere.
Elsewhere, a selection of guests add welcome color, taking the Notwist’s core sound and patching it out to a variety of global scenes and sounds. Argentine vocalist and producer Juana Molina guests on “Al Sur,” her voice weaving in and out of hectic spasms of percussion. The jazz polyglot Angel Bat Dawid brings flurries of clarinet to “Into the Ice Age,” a foray into limber krautrock percussion. The loping groove of “Oh Sweet Fire” pairs Acher with an inspired vocal foil, jazz luminary Ben LaMar Gay. Written by LaMar Gay, the track’s lyric twines the personal and political, imagining two lovers taking part in a march or uprising: “The sound of drums reflecting off buildings/As high as the fist that has risen,” he sings. Their vocals share a melody and an intonation, but LaMar Gay’s voice is insistent and muscular whereas Acher is softer and more diffident. From this contrast springs nuance, the track jittering with a heady mix of fear, excitement, and righteous resolve.
Like its predecessor, Vertigo Days at times feels scattershot. Across 14 tracks, there is droning Silver Apples worship (“Exit Strategy to Myself”), haunted-house jazz (“Ghost”), and, on the closing “Into Love Again,” an extended coda that feels like it’s sobbed itself dry a couple of minutes before it finally throws in the towel. Markus Acher has talked about the sequencing of a Notwist album as being like a collage or mosaic, and there are places where Vertigo Days might benefit from a sterner edit. By and large, though, the guest spots and experimental excursions feel less contrived than the stylistic zig-zags of records past, and more the natural consequence of a band engaging with the world. After all this time, the Acher brothers are still digging into their sound, turning up moments of sweetness and pathos.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The Long Island quintet's debut LP is a crisp-sounding, nuanced album that highlights all the right things about the band, further proving there's more to the group than pretty bedroom pop. They run the gamut from Stereolab-like lounge-pop to R&B-flecked Young Marble Giants minimalism.

In Heaven

When Long Island's Twin Sister put a picture of a shabbily decorated dollhouse on the cover of their 2010 Color Your Life EP, it seemed like a mission statement: Here is small, intimate music meant to feel comfy and lived-in. And from the pillowy indie-pop numbers to the more stretched-out, soft drone pieces, it was the kind of record that just felt nice to hear. You wanted to cuddle up with it. But then there was "All Around and Away We Go", the slice-of-genius, introverted disco gem that suggested there was more to these guys than just pretty bedroom pop. In Heaven, their debut LP, very much supports that idea. It's a crisp-sounding, nuanced album that highlights all the right things about the band.
The most obvious difference between In Heaven and Twin Sister's two previous EPs is that they've cleaned up their sound and tightened their arrangements considerably. Where individual sounds sometimes used to get swallowed in an underlying hiss, instruments now have room to breathe. Guitars sparkle, synthetic drumbeats strike with purpose, and singer Andrea Estella's charming vocal squeak is closer to the fore. Increasing the production value is more than just a technical upgrade-- it lets the band open up creatively and try different kinds of new sounds. And they do that with grace. From Stereolab-like lounge-pop to R&B-flecked Young Marble Giants minimalism, these guys run the gamut.
While the sonic palette is definitely a lot wider, Twin Sister still keep the songwriting focus small and detailed. More interested in documenting life's minor moments than the big, transformative ones, they sing about things like recommending movies to friends or having an awkward crush go unspoken. Little stuff, but meaningful in its way. Take "Stop", for example, a track breathily sung by guitarist Eric Cardona and featuring a sultry R&B thump. It reads heavy romance on first listen, but that's actually not the case. "I keep telling myself to stop, to feel if I like it," Cardona sings, describing a new relationship he's trying to be responsible about. It seems he doesn't want to rush into sleeping with this person-- someone's feelings could get hurt that way.
This type of narrative might skew a little twee for some (and there is an element of that here, for sure) but it's one of the things that gives the band a sense of identity. Also, it's important to point out that they buoy these bashful sentiments with some really outward, bouncy music. "Bad Street" is set over choppy 1980s electro-funk, "Daniel" takes its cues from zoned-out space disco-- the songs have legitimate grooves. In the end, what's really impressive is that the mousey quality of their music doesn't work against these nimble, cosmopolitan arrangements. If anything, it makes the songs richer, gives them more of a backstory. Because Twin Sister operate with a good amount of subtlety, it can take some time to absorb all that, but give yourself over to this record, and it gives back.


With production from Blake Mills, the Mumford & Sons frontman goes solo with a hushed, searching record anchored in trauma.

(Self-Titled)

Nobody can blame Marcus Mumford for stepping away from Mumford & Sons, the blockbuster folk act that bears his name. By 2018’s Delta, they seemed weary of their own bag of tricks, looking beyond the confines of old-timey string-band revival by hiring producer Paul Epworth to process their acoustic instruments so they sounded electronic. The musical restlessness was compounded by banjoist and guitarist Winston Marshall’s increasing embrace of right-wing cultural commentators, an interest that first surfaced when he invited controversial Canadian professor Jordan Peterson to hang with the band in the studio. The group withstood the furor when Peterson posted a picture of the rendezvous on social media, but when Marshall took to Twitter to praise a book by alt-right author Andy Ngo, the band decided to part ways with him.
All this public controversy disguised how Mumford spent the years since Delta wrestling with his own demons. Persistent issues with drinking and binge eating led him to therapy, where he finally came to terms with the sexual abuse he experienced as a child—a situation he chronicles on “Cannibal,” the first cut on his solo debut, (self-titled). The hushed, searching set functions as an exorcism while gently suggesting the singer-songwriter may be poised to leave Mumford & Sons behind.
If gentle seems a curious word to describe an album anchored in trauma, it’s also fitting. Mumford’s defining musical gift is his soft touch: Even when Mumford & Sons's signature hit “I Will Wait” ascends to its urgent ending, he’s the earnest, empathetic rock at its center. (self-titled) places these characteristics at the forefront. By choosing to open with the quiet creep of “Cannibal,” a song where Mumford directly addresses his abuser (“I can still taste you and I hate it/That wasn’t a choice in the mind of a child and you knew it/You took the first slice of me and you ate it raw”), he draws a distinct line between the gregarious stomp of Mumford & Sons and his solo work. The atmosphere feels different, too. The lyrics are murmured slowly, deliberately, forcing the listener to lean into the speaker to comprehend the horror unfurling, at which point the tension breaks with a surging, echoing gale of guitars.
“Grace” carries over that sense of urgency with another cascade of strums, and we hear the adult Mumford begin to processes the trauma he’s kept so hidden that his own mother wound up learning about the abuse by listening to “Cannibal.” Mumford sums up this situation by singing “I coulda sworn I dropped that bomb on you already,” a graceless lyric that speaks to the blunt and specific approach throughout (self-titled), a noted change from the broad strokes of the tunes he wrote for his band. This emotional directness cries out for some texture and shade, which is what producer Blake Mills provides. Like his work with Jack Johnson on Meet the Moonlight earlier this year, Mills accents Mumford’s earnestness with flair, relying on pros like bassist Pino Palladino and drummer Jim Keltner for color while inviting a host of duet partners to give the singer-songwriter needed foils.
All these duets appear on the second half of (self-titled), the portion of the record where the arrangements teem with detail and drama, coalescing around some of the boldest melodies Mumford has written to date. “Better Angels” simmers to an insistent pulse that conjures new wave ghosts. On “Dangerous Game,” Clairo offers soft support, helping to undercut its sense of dread, while former PHOX member Monica Martin provides harmonies on “Go in Light,” a cut where Mumford comes across like a Justin Vernon eager to be loved. Phoebe Bridgers lends “Stonecatcher” spectral grace, and Brandi Carlile grounds the hushed “How” with tenderness, her harmonies underscoring Mumford’s quest to forgive his abuser. Each of the guest vocalists opens up the inward (self-titled), providing grace notes to his melodies while accentuating the warmer aspects of his voice.
On “Cannibal” and “How,” the bookends that are also the quietest moments on the record, the open emotions are impossible to avoid, whereas it takes effort—or at least a lyric sheet—to realize that the rest of (self-titled) chronicles the aftermath of processing trauma as an adult. That’s the confounding thing about (self-titled): Its strongest qualities as a record occasionally contradict the emotional thrust of the songs. Mills’ production gives the recordings dimension and depth, inevitably tempering the pain at the heart of the songs. The sumptuous, cinematic sound is almost soothing. While that’s more appealing than the buttoned-up folk of Mumford & Sons, it also undercuts the rawer journey that (self-titled) could have been.


The Marshall Mathers LP 2, featuring Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar, and executive producers Dr. Dre and Rick Rubin, offers a second helping of the celeb-hating, self-deprecating juvenalia of Eminem’s beloved third album peppered with samples of and references to the source material. It also revels in its predecessor’s worst behaviors.

The Marshall Mathers LP 2

The more the triumphs of Eminem’s world beating Slim Shady/Marshall Mathers/Eminem Show trilogy recede into memory, the more each subsequent release struggles to strike a tone that leverages an audience raised on the crass iconoclasm of “My Name Is” and “Kill You” with the aging, now sober father of three behind the music. As such, Em’s last decade worth of albums has suffered under jarring shifts in tone. After showing his first signs of wear with 2004’s patchy Encore, Eminem rebounded with 2009’s Dre-beats-and-horrorcore-rhymes retrenchment Relapse. Relapse sold well but its serial killer shtick was uninspired, as Eminem openly admitted on the next year’s “Not Afraid” (“That last Relapse CD was ‘enh’”). 2010’s Recovery maneuvered out of Relapse and Encore’s chum bucket humor by detailing the artist’s struggle to overcome a long-simmering prescription drug dependency. Serious Eminem proved a drag despite Recovery couching its penitent 12-step dispatches in rivulets of the usual Slim Shady chicanery, so here we are staring down a once-more radioactive blonde Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP 2.
The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is an album-length bout of moral recidivism, Recovery’s motivational rehab narrative ditched wholesale for a second helping of the celeb-hating, self-deprecating juvenalia of Eminem’s beloved third album peppered with samples of and references to the source material. Opener “Bad Guy” is a sprawling epic that finds the brother of “Stan”’s titular obsessed fan hatching an elaborate revenge plot, and “Parking Lot” inexplicably revisits the heist in the middle of “Criminal” to inform us that the getaway driver split, and the shooter died. “Rap God” revisits a crass joke about the 1999 Columbine school shooting initially censored on the first LP’s “I’m Back”. Old nemeses like Insane Clown Posse, Everlast, and the Backstreet Boys are lampooned as well. But MMLP2 revisits more than just the characters and stories of the first installment. It also revels in its predecessor’s worst behaviors, bandying about misogyny and gay slurs as if Eminem’s conciliatory 2001 Grammys performance with a pink polka dot suited Elton John never happened.
“Rap God” is a gobstopping display of Eminem’s champion technical prowess that’s waylaid in every verse by brazen homophobia. “Love Game”, the hotly anticipated team up with Kendrick Lamar, is similarly assailed by lunkheaded chauvinism, both in Eminem’s gross rendition of a woman giving him oral sex and Kendrick’s barbs about a guy who “drowned like an abortion” and a clingy ex for whom “chlamydia couldn’t even get rid of her.” Elsewhere two songs are dedicated to crucifying the mother of his children and anyone else foolhardy enough to get involved with him. (“Bitch, you complain when you listen to this/ But you throw yourself at me/ That’s what I call pitching a bitch.”) Earlier in his career, Eminem delivered similarly gutbucket content with the shock of incredulity that anyone would find it offensive. It was an error of youthful carelessness. But in 2013, in the wake of the message of redemption he feverishly pitched us just an album ago, Eminem’s return to ruffling feathers carries the stink of desperation.
The only salvation for a lot of these songs is Eminem’s alchemical control of rhyme and diction, but even that can be a liability. Thirteen years after the original Marshall Mathers LP, the grating cadence-over-substance ethos of “The Way I Am”, once a stilted outlier on an album packed with otherwise limber wordplay, has now become the rule. “Legacy” pulls all manner of cockamamie pronunciation gymnastics just so Eminem can end every line with the same rhyming syllables, and the song’s decision to dispense with proper word accents and splay sentences haphazardly across the middle of lines makes for a flow that comes across overwrought and labored even as it plays Frankenstein with conventional word choice and rhyme patterns. Filler words frequently clutter lines just to make the rhymes look more dazzling, and in the process we end up with well-executed but empty lines like “I been driving around your side of this town like nine frickin’ hours and forty five minutes now” from “Bad Guy” and “The day you beat me pigs’ll fly out of my ass in a saucer full of Italian sausages” on “Legacy”. Play half of these songs alongside even the clunkiest Marshall Mathers LP cut, and the god of rap’s powers appear noticeably diminished.
MMLP2 does step out from under the shadow of its predecessor in its choice of collaborators. Dr. Dre sits this one out, appearing as an executive producer but steering clear of any actual grunt work. In his place we get a spate of productions from Eminem himself (often aided by pop heavyweights like Alex da Kid and Emile) alongside a newly in-demand Rick Rubin. MMLP2’s production mostly hews toward the expected stadium rap sounds, but the Rubin cuts award the album a measure of old school rap-rock flair. Unfortunately what sounded like invention for the 1986 Beastie Boys often plays like butt rock in the hands of 2013 Eminem. “Berzerk” turns Billy Squier’s “The Stroke” into questionable back-to-basics posturing, and “So Far…” grinds Joe Walsh’s winding 1978 epic “Life’s Been Good” and Schoolly D’s “P.S.K. (What Does It Mean?)” into fodder for Eminem’s middle-aged finger-waving. (“Fuck I gotta do to hear this new song from Luda, be an expert at computers?”) “Rhyme or Reason” cleverly flips the “What’s your name?/ Who’s your daddy?” refrain from the Zombies’ “Time of the Season” into a tongue-lashing for an absentee father, and “Love Game” makes good use of Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders’ “The Game of Love”, sexist lyrical putrefaction aside, but by and large, Eminem and Rubin are not a match.
Eminem is a titan with wordplay, but MMLP2 once again finds him at a loss for how to apply his talents. For three albums in the early aughts he devilishly rewrote the rules of pop music to shoehorn hip-hop into the national spotlight, but here he’s winded, struggling to keep up with modern pop conventions, genuflecting to trap on “Rap God” and EDM on “The Monster”, dragging his biggest competitor Kendrick into one of the worst songs of his young career, and soldering on hooks from singers of varying anonymity wherever applicable to ensure this patchwork monstrosity is too big to fail, all of this under the guise of a return to form, his second in three albums. Eminem’s too talented a rapper with too good a Rolodex for this to flop, but damned if Marshall Mathers LP 2 doesn’t give it a go. The lesson here, if there’s one to be gleaned from this 80 minutes of cold, clinical lyrical acrobatics, is that rap sequels are a lot like trying on old prom clothes: chance one if you dare, but the only thing you’re liable to display is how much you’ve let yourself go since your glory days.


The singer-songwriter’s debut expands beyond bedroom R&B to traverse genres with dimension and control. He can shift from wizened soul belter to ’90s boy band innocence in a heartbeat.

Ivory

On paper, Omar Apollo’s journey to the release of Ivory, his first official album, has been rockier than most. As a teenager in Indiana, he’d first garnered buzz with languid, homemade R&B songs uploaded to streaming platforms from his bedroom. He followed up with a string of singles and EPs, including 2018’s brief but impactful Stereo, whose gently plucked electric guitar solos, expert falsetto, and lyrics about love and yearning made him a poster child for atmospheric, lo-fi R&B. The path ahead seemed clear. But in 2020, Apollo scrapped an earlier version of Ivory that he felt didn’t do his vision justice, replacing it with the nine-song Apolonio. Nearly a year later, with the album still unfinished, he postponed a 2021 U.S. tour to finally have the time to put Ivory to bed.
If Apollo were any up-and-coming SoundCloud artist, perhaps none of these delays would have been remarkable. But though early in his career, he’s already racked up collaborations with peers like Kali Uchis and Joji, as well as legends like Bootsy Collins. His own early music sometimes contributed to a sense of unrealized potential: Those mini-releases retained an adolescent uncertainty that prohibited him from reaching new heights. Now that Ivory has finally arrived, Apollo can put any decision he made (or didn’t make) regarding his career behind him. With its deep dives into multiple genres and studied vocal stylings, his debut full-length sounds like a deliberate effort to reach those uncharted peaks.
Within seconds, Ivory slices through preconceptions about the woozy electric guitars and reverb-drenched vocal runs that have been emblematic of bedroom R&B for over a decade. “Talk” is built around a scuzzy, loosely strummed guitar melody and rollicking drum machine. It sounds like nothing Apollo has released thus far, yet the style fits his vocals and aesthetic to a T. Some of his less arresting songs have a tendency to blur together into an indistinguishable streak of teary-eyed bedroom soul. “Talk” is a new beast entirely, down to its final acetone guitar solo, which could have been cribbed from a Room on Fire-era Strokes session (Albert Hammond Jr. being yet another of Apollo’s past collaborators).
Conspicuous genre-hopping can sometimes veer into gimmickry, but Apollo has such a firm grasp on his creative identity that these complementary flavors blend effortlessly. Ten years ago, the wobbly synths and bouncy basslines of “Go Away” might’ve been tagged as chillwave. Elsewhere, on the Neptunes-produced “Tamagotchi,” Apollo takes on Latin-infused trap, with Spanish guitars and skittering beats enveloping a tongue-in-cheek, hypersexual posturing that feels more fun than fiery. His raw talent and expansive storytelling allow him to glide easily through a plethora of moods and atmospheres.
While the musicianship on Ivory remains lush and intricate throughout, Apollo’s voice has always been his ace in the hole. He can shift from wizened soul belter to ’90s boy band innocence in a heartbeat, and nowhere is his range on better display than “Evergreen,” a Motown tribute with the same germ of old-school know-how that marked Amy Winehouse as a legend in the making. Apollo bares his heart, then rips it off his sleeve and throws it at his lover’s feet: “Was there something wrong with my body? Am I not what you wanted, babe?” he pleads. The object of the lyrics’ address is a man who is in love with a woman, and Apollo taps into the kind of indulgent queer tragi-fantasy that only those who have experienced rejection-by-circumstance can truly understand. “She could never love you more than me,” Apollo croons, and whether he really believes that or not, you feel the pain.
Unsurprisingly, Apollo has been dodging Frank Ocean comparisons from the jump, and while it’s sometimes warranted (the elusive paramour on “Mr. Neighbor” could be a spiritual cousin to Ocean’s “Forrest Gump”), Apollo isn’t trying to emulate anyone but himself. As Ivory reaches its close, it gives you “Bad Life,” a bittersweet duet with Uchis and a full-circle moment that harks back to Apollo’s downbeat early output. But whereas tracks like his 2017 breakout “Ugotme” are content to keep it simple, “Bad Life” expands into widescreen technicolor against rich string production and a last-minute beat drop that bring a new dimension to Apollo’s work. While he’s never outright fumbled, it’s clear now that Apollo’s sheer talent has strained against the limits of the micro-genre he came up in. With its amalgam of genres, tones, and tastes, Ivory goes beyond thinking outside the box: It’s as if the box were never even there to begin with.


Aphex Twin: Selected Ambient Works 85-92

Selected Ambient Works 85-92

Stop me if this gets sappy. And it might. Because Selected Ambient Works 85-92—recently reissued by PIAS America—was the very first electronic music I ever bought, and certainly the first I ever heard over and over again. Long ago, before I was old enough to drive, I would sit in a small, cluttered bedroom in my parents’ suburban ranch house, absorbed for hours by the sounds contained on this disc. The creeping basslines, the constantly mutating drum patterns, the synth tones which moved with all the grace and fluidity of a professional dancer, the strange noises that I’d be unable to identify even if I tried. Back then, Aphex Twin was making music like nothing I’d ever heard before.
What’s become apparent since is that I probably wasn’t the only one affected. After last year's disappointing Drukqs, it’s easy to forget that, back in the Warp Records heyday, Richard D. James was to this new breed of ambient and electronic music what Babe Ruth was to baseball. Sure, there were upstarts; µ-Ziq, Squarepusher, and Autechre were all on the scene by the time this collection hit shelves. But James was still the poster boy, the presumed ringmaster, single-handedly defining a style of music in the minds of many. Now, as a new wave of mostly twentysomethings step to the forefront of IDM, redefining electronic music for the third time in a decade, it becomes more and more obvious just how far reaching James’ influence was.
There’s nothing new about this re-release, aside from improved availability and decreased cost. But then, improving on this package would be near impossible. Sure, the music on Selected Ambient Works 85-92 may sound a bit dated (as does, to be fair, most electronic music more than a few years old), but there’s no denying it was the defining statement of Warp’s early years, and the foundation for the careers of bands like Boards of Canada and Plaid.
The songs here are not ambient in the same way as those on this disc’s sequel. Technically, most fall into Brian Eno’s broad definition of the style—it can be appreciated in small segments just as much as in its entirety. The music develops slowly, unafraid to linger on a particularly effective sound for as long as necessary—the creeping keyboard loop of “Schottkey 7th Path,” for example, is continually modified throughout the course of the song, but never once eliminated from the mix—but James would never be content as a mere follower in anyone’s footsteps. His work here serves a model for what would come to be known as traditional IDM. A simpler version of the style we’ve grown accustomed to, certainly, but IDM nonetheless.
James’ early work is heavily indebted to early dance music, filled with beats so eminently danceable as to confuse those who only know him from the spastic drum patterns that came later. There’s little of that here, though. Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is, rather, an album stretching back to the days before software allowed for heavy sampling or glitch technology. Drum machines serve as its backbone and synthesized bass and keyboard sounds provide the meat. Most of the songs follow a relatively basic formula as well. One element—say, a synth melody—is introduced and repeated, and as new elements are added with each go round, the song gradually builds to a dense, multi-layered swirl. This Ravel-esque approach flavors much of James’ older material, and yet, despite the simplicity of his equipment and approach, the songs here are both interesting and varied, ranging from the dancefloor-friendly beats of “Pulsewidth” to the industrial clanks and whirs of “Green Calx.”
Indeed, these early works do a fine job of showcasing James’ ability to transform even the most seemingly mundane patterns into something unique and interesting. “Hedphelym,” for instance, is built around a relentless headache-throb cliché of a house beat. But James surrounds the pulsation with an ethereal feedback that bleeds all over the track, leaving the percussion awash in a murky solution of synth tones, pairing dance music with ambience in ways the Orb never dreamed possible.
Slightly more structured (and equally enjoyable) is “We are the Music Makers,” a track which follows a drumbeat and a bassline past a pair of intertwined synth loops and a repeated Willy Wonka vocal sample as simple keyboard melodies pour down from overhead. But the aforementioned “Green Calx” is the closest Selected Ambient Works 85-92 comes to the spastic trickery of which James would become such a pioneer. It matches pitchshifted tones and drum machines with a burbling bassline, assorted machine-gun synth interjections, the slightly effected tones of various pistons, motors, and machines, and even the occasional cartoon spring noise. Moments like these serve to foreshadow both James’ later work, as well as the infinitely more complex twists and turns that IDM would make in the years that would follow.
They say next to no one heard the Velvet Underground’s first album when it was released, but everyone who did went on to start a band. Listening to Selected Ambient Works 85-92, one can’t help but imagine the seeds being planted in the imaginations of the lucky few who were there when it all began. Nestled in these simple, undeniably danceable tracks are the roots of contemporary IDM. And despite its somewhat primitive origins, the final product remains among the most interesting ever created with a keyboard and a computer.


The legendary modern jazz composer and multi-instrumentalist Anthony Braxton has released more than one hundred albums in his career. For those looking for an entry point, he recently released several box sets highlighting his charming, insightful approach to the avant-garde.

Anthony Braxton: 3 Compositions (EEMHM) 2011/Trillium J: The Non-Unconfessionables No. 380/Quintet (Tristano) 2014

Anthony Braxton contains multitudes—perhaps to a greater extent than any other composer alive today. The saxophonist hasn’t demonstrated this merely by playing with a diverse range of icons that includes Dave Brubeck, Max Roach, and Cecil Taylor. Nor has he done so solely by serving as a teacher and mentor to younger talents like Mary Halvorson and Steve Lehman. Instead,Braxton’s hybrid-sound identity is due to the staggering variety of projects he has undertaken as a bandleader.
In the 1970s, while recording for the major label-funded Arista imprint, Braxton signaled an intention to play in multiple creative arenas, sequencing his madly accelerated bebop compositions alongside electronic-music explorations. He composed music for multiple piano virtuosos. He produced one of the great post-Ellington big band albums, with Creative Orchestra Music 1976. Toward the end of his Arista contract, Braxton submitted a triple-LP recording of a modern classical piece "for four orchestras." (His major label deal was not renewed.)
When Braxton lost corporate support, he reacted by expanding his ambition. He began composing a twelve-opera cycle, titled Trillium. Though each one sounds like nothing else in the classical catalog, works in this series do bear traces of European modernists like Iannis Xenakis and Karlheinz Stockhausen. At other points, Braxton has interpreted early-jazz standards (sometimes furrowing the brows of period specialists). And he’s fielded a succession of smaller ensembles focused on his original music and growing catalog of "systems"—which often bear mystic monikers like "Ghost Trance Music" or "Diamond Curtain Wall Music." Some of his most recent concepts require collaborators to handle the intercession of electronics, or to navigate scores that look like paintings.
For those who are interested, this all begs the question: Where to start? Picking up the box set that collects all the famous Arista projects remains a solid bet. Those looking for a less-expensive opening gambit can opt to sample the winning run of albums Braxton recorded for the Black Saint label, in the 1980s. The Complete Braxton 1971 is another comparatively bite-sized, double-album look at the madcap idea factory. Though there is also now a new contender on the scene for the curious-but-uninitiated. (Or, as Braxton prefers to call such listeners, "friendly experiencers.") And this record hails from a much more recent concept.
3 Compositions (EEMHM) 2011 is a triple-CD/download release that includes the first studio realization of Braxton’s "Echo Echo Mirror House Music." Here, Braxton and six bandmates play their usual instruments, while also "wielding" iPods that contain the bulk of Braxton’s discography. Each musician uses their hardware to pipe selections of old recordings into the live-performance mix. Over time, the resulting blend of improvisation, score-reading and fragmentary drops from past albums has a compelling, hypnotic effect. Prior live-concert recordings of the "Echo Echo" concept have sounded comparatively tinny. But the studio where this was recorded, which also doubles as an intimate venue, affords Braxton a well-separated stereo mix that rewards listener exploration. (There’s also a "pure audio" Blu-ray version of the album available.)
The hour-long performances on each disc often suggest installation art soundscapes more than they recall past composed-and-improvised landmarks like the Free Jazz LP led by Ornette Coleman—a saxophone mentor who gave Braxton housing, early on, in New York. And unlike the environment-heavy sound works you’ll find in some contemporary museum exhibits, Braxton’s miasma is built from a rich variety of source materials that can make misty experimentalism feel fully active and alive. Chalk it up as a side benefit of 50 years spent in the avant-trenches, working to discover new sounds.
On an initial listen to the first disc—aka "Composition No. 372"— I started out by trying to keep track of all the old-school inserts. I noticed a piquant ensemble march that sounded like recent "Ghost Trance Music,"as well as the more clearly identifiable, hard-riffing lines of "Composition No. 40M" (as played on the album Five Pieces 1975).This endeavor soon started to seem like a point-missing exercise, and after letting go of the effort to distinguish past from present, the overall wash of the experience quickly seemed like the best possible way to experience this setting.
Braxton suggests as much in the section of his liner notes that bears the heading "How To Listen to This Music," where he writes: "Don’t worry about it - have a fun listening experience in a music that more and more is like life itself. Suddenly something will emerge that was composed 40 years ago, and that something will be placed next to something composed last year. It’s OK, just let it happen. This is a ‘dream state’ sonic environment that is constantly changing. I find myself thinking of the movie Prometheus where the cyber hero has discovered an image projection hologram that he can walk inside of and manipulate, or play with." (Braxton’s liner notes, like his music, can turn sharply from academic phraseology to colloquial joking and vernacular references.) So, with the composer’s blessing, you’re invited to tune in and out at will. Put on 10 minutes from a set while getting ready to leave the house. Let a different section score a subway ride. Or clear an evening and sink into the aggregate experience.
Throughout, tricky chorus-writing from Braxton operas like Trillium E dances with classic solo-saxophone explorations as well as live-guitar work by Braxton bandmates like Mary Halvorson. Sometimes you get a group of vintage Braxtons, wailing on different saxophones at once, that is interrupted by the in-studio vibraphone playing of Aaron Siegel. By braiding together the artist’s music dramas, large-ensemble jazz opuses, and freer group-improvisations, 3 Compositions (EEMHM) 2011 ultimately achieves something that no "Braxton Sampler" album has ever quite managed to pull off. By giving us an aerial survey of a large and varied sonic landscape, it cuts down on the cognitive stress that can result from trying to "process" such a defiantly diverse career. It’s such an elegant solution to the contemporary anxiety about information overload that it might have made John Cage crack a Zen smile.
And if you find yourself wanting more, you can definitely get more. With some artists, 16 CDs and two Blu-ray discs would be sufficient for capturing a career—though that’s merely the physical-media tally required to hold Braxton’s early-2016 releases. Two other box sets, released simultaneously with (EEMHM) 2011, appear on the composer’s own New Braxton House label. The more noteworthy effort is Trillium J, the composer’s most recently performed four-act music drama. The librettos of Braxton’s operas blend his philosophical analysis of culture-at-large with absurdist comedic setups that often refuse to resolve. That postmodern dramaturgy fits with the orchestral language, which can lean heavily on thick, atonal cadences, before sliding into a square dance without warning. (Seriously, that happens in Act I.)
Braxton’s ability to independently field an orchestra that can produce compelling performances of complex, multi-hour works for the stage is a testament to his impresario’s pluck. Fittingly, Braxton cites a range of dramatic influences that includes Wagner, Stockhausen and Walt Disney. (So Kanye West has company, on that last one.) This recording of Trillium J benefits from a Blu-ray supplement that presents a full live-performance version from the Brooklyn venue Roulette, as well. In general, the CDs in the box offer crisper performances—with the orchestra in particular savoring details in the studio that were missed in the live moment. But since opera is also a visual medium, and because it has so occupied this composer for decades, the Blu-ray version offers a rare chance to fully appreciate the seriously oddball aesthetic of his ongoing Trillium project.
Switching lanes again, it’s the legacy of swing—specifically, the music composed by midcentury pianist Lennie Tristano and his associates—that anchors another 7xCD box, titled Quintet (Tristano) 2014. This is the release that is most explicitly for the Braxton-diehards who have kept track of his prior "jazz standards" projects. Though for those listeners, there is idiosyncratic value here, too. In contrast with an earlier investigation of this composer’s work (the much easier-to-digest Eight (+3) Tristano Compositions 1989), here Braxton plays not a lick of saxophone, instead holding down the piano chair in the group. In conversation, he’s straightforward about his limitations on the instrument. (“I don’t kid myself!" he recently told The New York Times. "I’m a self-taught piano player who tries to continue learning more.") But he is capable of bringing a blocky, Sun Ra-derived touch to Tristano compositions like "Lennie’s Pennies."
If you’re wondering whether Braxton still reserves any time for shredding on his main axe—the answer is yes. It’s just that he’s not currently using his own distribution channels to feature an aspect of his art that’s already been documented on the hundreds of recordings that fill his Echo Echo Mirror House Music iPods. So it’s up to a small Brazilian label, Selo SESC, to bring us a notable recent live performance from São Paulo.
Generically titled Ao Vivo Jazz Na Fábrica (Google Translate renders this "Live Jazz at Work") the album features Braxton on multiple saxophones—alto, soprano, and sopranino—as well as his regular guitarist Halvorson, trumpeter Taylor Ho Bynum, and another saxophonist, Ingrid Laubrock (who often focuses on tenor playing). This group navigates the painting-scores and electronics of Braxton’s "Diamond Curtain Wall" music with the assurance of seasoned collaborators. (A consistent highlight of the first set is Braxton’s interaction with Halvorson’s rock-ish guitar progressions.) While his solos can careen with rapid groupings of notes and harsh rhythmic patterns, the tone of Braxton’s playing sometimes feels feather-soft. The disparity between the aggression of the melodic line and the lilt of its execution makes for a frequently thrilling experience.
Even more impressive than this protean output is the way these aesthetically diverged aspects of Braxton’s art all seem to converge on a central, spiritual impulse—one that he outlined in the liner notes of his 1968 debut, 3 Compositions of New Jazz: "You are your music. … If you try to vibrate toward the good, that’s where your music will come from." It's a simple sounding idea. Though because the world is more complex than inspirational koans commonly allow, realizing the objective can require multiple modes of effort. Contemplative sound-installations, humorously experimental operas, reinterpretations of classic swing, and serene, small-group free-jazz with electronics: the common thread here is Braxton’s curious and warm-hearted openness, perceptible even when his music verges on extreme cacophony. It’s a charming, insightful approach for an avant-garde sound artist to pursue. And it can prove addictive for "friendly experiencers," too.


Jason Killinger of the Philadelphia lo-fi rock'n'roll band Birds of Maya, the group that also birthed Purling Hiss, delivers a compulsively listenable, spaced-out set.

Deep Thuds

There's a Philadelphia band called Birds of Maya, who released two must-listen albums of extremely lo-fi rock'n'roll with plentiful shredding: 2008's Vol. 1 and 2010's Ready to Howl offered up guitar riffs that could've been lifted from 1970s hard-rock radio, but they sounded smothered, and, in the case of Ready to Howl, were stretched out over 20-minute songs. Both Birds of Maya albums rule, but more importantly, they offer essential context for the band's two offshoots: Mike Polizze's Purling Hiss, and most recently, Jason Killinger's Spacin'.
Spacin' is Killinger, Sean Hamilton on bass, Paul Sukeena on lead guitar, and Killinger's wife Eva on drums. While Purling Hiss' sound doesn't stray far from the aesthetic presented on the Birds of Maya albums (except for more direct hooks and warblier production), the debut Spacin' album, Deep Thuds, offers two distinct sounds: extremely direct rock'n'roll with muddy production and spacier tracks that stretch out for several minutes. Killinger's implementation of both techniques makes Deep Thuds compulsively listenable. "Chest of Steel", for example, is driven by a sunny, catchy, triumphant guitar solo, so even while the lyrics are semi-unintelligible, the hook dominates. Compare that to the second track on the album, "Some Future (Burger)"-- over five minutes of quiet, meditative, melody-free atmosphere, which is satisfying in its subtlety.
Impressively, the album never sounds stilted or uneven. The moment "Some Future" ends, we get "Wrong Street", which features a thudding bassline and a ripping, psychedelic guitar solo (and a brief, two-bar guest appearance from Polizze). Then there's the quiet jungle groove of "Oh, Man", which features intricate, subtle guitar tinges over its almost seven minutes. The album has seven tracks; each one offers a different soundscape, and somehow, the songs never clash with one another or sound out of place. That's a testament to how beautifully arranged Deep Thuds is.
Here's the other thing about this album: When Killinger delivers a song that's led by a dominant hook, it hits every time. Sometimes, it comes from a bare bones three- or four-chord melody, like the driving power chords of "Chest of Steel" and "Empty Mind". And sometimes, it's from a central guitar solo that pulls an entire song's weight. "Ego-go", for example, rides a hypnotic riff that creates an atmosphere akin to the Stooges' "Gimme Danger", and similarly, the song culminates in a huge guitar solo. "Sunshine, No Shoes" offers a breezy melody, crunching guitar, and verse to match the track title. And because those songs are bookended by some palate-cleansing atmospheric tracks, stuff like that riff from "Chest of Steel" get a much deserved spotlight.
But honestly, how can an album called Deep Thuds by a band called Spacin' with a drippy Rolling Stones logo on its cover not be remotely funny? Everything about the band's presentation says the album should be frontloaded with irony or snotty humor, but there's nothing like that here. Instead, it's a record that's patient, flows beautifully, offers sludgy production, and is packed with killer hooks. It's an album that uses fuzzed-out guitar for bursts of gutter shredding ferocity. It's a record that sounds like it could owe as much to Grouper as it does to the Velvet Underground or Hawkwind or the Stooges. No, it's not a nonstop shredfest like Birds of Maya's albums, but each deep thud rules.


The rap iconoclast returns with his best album since Barter 6, daring and chameleonic, filled with hooks about identity, love, and that undefinable future swag.

JEFFERY

As an artist, Young Thug thrives in between spaces. His chic, fresh-off-the-runway looks flirt with androgyny. Entire sequences of his raps unspool as nonsequiturs forcing listeners to extract meaning from bars of source code. Even the assorted ad-libs in his songs maximize the slightest pocket of air, exploding and retracting back through crevices in his unpredictable flows. He is constantly balancing opposing forces: masculine and feminine, light and dark, playful and humorless, pirouetting on a razor’s edge at all times. Modeling alongside Frank Ocean for Calvin Klein in July, he was as plainspoken about fluidity as he’s ever been. “In my world, of course, it don’t matter: You could be a gangster with a dress or you could be a gangster with baggy pants,” he said in his campaign video. “I feel like there’s no such thing as gender.” It’s this freedom, this refusal to define or label himself, and this progressive spirit that makes everything he does so daring and so mystifying. When industry mogul Lyor Cohen argued with Thug about being more accessible to listeners and more purposeful in thought and action on CNBC’s “Follow the Leader,” his response was simple: “I don’t want everybody just to know, like, ‘Oh, we know.’” The remove is everything to him. When he says or does something, he’s usually daring you to figure out why.
Existing on incomprehensible terms has made Thug recherché to the casual rap fan, which is why his debut album turned retail mixtape, Barter 6, remains his greatest pivot of all. It’s cohesive, understated, and about as accessible as Thug gets, an ingenious turn from oddball rap archetype to intuitive master craftsman. Every release after it lives in its shadow: aimless hard drive dumps attempting to combat a massive data breach that leaked hundreds of Thug songs online last May.
In the months since he eulogized his Slime Season trilogy (“All good things must come to an end, this is the birth of something new”), Thug teased snippets of new songs with captions that just read “JEFFERY.” Not long after, Cohen announced an official name change: No, My Name is Jeffery. A trailer for the mixtape found Thug in an interrogation room explaining to cops who he was. He wasn’t a young thug anymore. “I feel like I had a long-term relationship with Young Thug, and I’m kind of picky, so I felt like I didn’t want to be in front of a Bill Gates or Oprah Winfrey,” he explained at the Jeffery listening party. “I didn’t want my kids to grow up and call me Thug because in real-life terms Thug is thug.” It’s impossible not to interpret that as some sort of response to the current racial climate, where the word “thug” is used as a racist dog whistle; it’s his most obvious statement in ages. Jeffery is the first Young Thug release that considers identity. But the rapper is rarely ever literal in verse; he always opts to show, not tell.
Though just as carefully sequenced and well-executed, Jeffery isn’t as tranquil, distant, or harmonious as Barter 6, which had cleansing, almost spiritual properties. Young Thug doesn’t often attempt the same thing twice, but this is perhaps his most chameleonic outing to date. The songs here are all named for his “idols”: Kanye West, former Fugee Wyclef Jean, pound-for-pound boxing king Floyd Mayweather, producer Swizz Beatz, Future, Rihanna, Gucci Mane, Webbie (of “Independent” fame), and Harambe. A careless listener might mistake them for actual song subjects. But these are all just misdirections. Outside of revealing small context clues about his origins as a stylist, and sometimes hinting at his mode or setting (like on “Future Swag”), this isn’t actually about any of those people. “Jeffery is all about Jeffery,” he explained at the listening party. “It ain’t even about Young Thug. Ain’t no Young Thug songs on there.” These are Jeffery songs, and from the sound of things, Jeffery’s greatest influence is his fiancé, Jerrika.
The songs on Jeffery are brimming with romantic subtext—Skyping a lover while she’s overseas, doing things together (“bae drink your lean with me, bae fall asleep with me”), and simply being head over heels for her (“she know she got a nigga bad”). In the opening verse of “Guwop,” he digs everything she says, everything she does, and even the way she looks at him. At one point on “Harambe,” he straight up belts out, “I just want to have a baby by you, girl!” The mixtape swoons and swells, heart fluttering, as Thug waxes poetic about his baby. This is the primary thread woven through the tape, which isn’t so much a love story as a sex tape with loving inscriptions.
Romance is at Jeffery’s core, but it’s driven by dynamic vocal performances others wouldn’t dare attempt—the pleading, bloodhound-ish yowl on “RiRi,” the breathless sprinter’s wheeze on “Harambe,” which explodes into a full-bodied Louis Armstrong impression, and the slinky yips on “Swizz Beatz.” The raps are delivered as mutters, shouts, and gasps, and flows are administered decisively and effectively. His wordplay is nimble and sharp, often using clever associations to create vivid imagery (“I picked my diamonds out a honey tree,” on “RiRi”; “I just got a family pack of Jimmy Choos” and “I got six brand new foreigns on my wrist/I got six Forgiatos on my fist,” on “Floyd Mayweather”). He has longstanding working relationships with every guest but one, and that repetition-built muscle memory shows in the results. He effortlessly passes the baton back and forth with Gunna and mentor Gucci Mane on “Floyd Mayweather,” picking up wherever the last trailed off. Duke, a standout guest on the Barter 6 cut “Dome,” smartly follows Thug’s lead on “Webbie.” The sole newcomer, Wyclef Jean, soothingly coos “Jeffery” over Thug’s shoulder on “Kanye West,” and it’s the optimal complement. There isn’t a word or note out of place.
Despite his growing reputation as a flamboyant eccentric who lives outside the boundaries of traditional songcraft making quirky “post-verbal” rap defying convention, Thug understands the modern pop song construction better than anyone: anything and everything can be a hook. Finding hooks keeps the mind stimulated and euphoric, creating something John Seabrook calls the “bliss point” in his book, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. What separates Young Thug songs at their peak from other pop confections is how seamlessly the transitions occur, where they materialize, and what he’s using them to do. He doesn’t want to numb the brain; He wants to super-charge its synapses. Changes happen every few bars, they turn sharply, and they make big dramatic gestures. Take “Future Swag,” which uses repetition, rapidly alternating rhythms, and ad-libs to remain constantly mobile, shifting and morphing six times in the first minute. Or “Swizz Beatz,” where he creates his own echo, repeating phrases within verses (“with me, with me”; “‘bout it, ‘bout it”; “turn up for the”) and within the chorus itself (“love”) while creating alternate hooks with melody. Micro-hooks are hidden inside of hooks and it’s all brain candy.
For nearly 42 minutes, Jeffery explores spacing, lines, form, texture, and beauty—all of which are exhibited in the mixtape’s mesmerizing artwork. The Atlanta rapper seemed to breathe life into the ideas first articulated at the Calvin Klein shoot with the cover, posed in a ruffling dress styled by Alessandro Trincone. While some people’s brains shut down at simply the sight of a man in a dress, the cover exhibits some of Thug’s strongest artistic traits: His eye for composition and stylishness, and his knack for testing limits and hurdling norms. Jeffery embodies these attributes in essence and detail. It’s rangy and stunning, an exciting new curve in the fascinating Young Thug arc.


Following the dissolution of the White Stripes and his marriage to model/singer Karen Elson, Jack White releases his first solo LP. Rife with songs about fear and loss, Blunderbuss feels unusually personal.

Blunderbuss

The sleeve of Jack White's recent single "Sixteen Saltines" shows the man in a mirror, a straight razor near his neck. Two signs sandwich his reflected face. They read: "IF YOU TALK TOO MUCH... THIS MAN MAY DIE!" The image references an actual WWII poster from 1943 that encouraged soldiers to be mindful of giving up important information. And, for White's first proper solo endeavor, the image couldn't be more suiting and cleverly self-aware; will his entrance into the typically-confessional solo realm effectively kill the mythical Jack White, the red, white, and black virtuoso who's captured our imagination more than any other rock star over the last 10 years?
Fittingly, the answer isn't short. The fascination with White has endured partly thanks to his mastery of traditional rock'n'roll skills: power, volume, dexterity, charisma. But his talent for untangling and confusing those same tried-and-true ideas is just as vital. He's playing a frightfully sincere take on the blues wearing frightfully silly outfits. He's singing truth and authenticity while fibbing about his backstory. He increasingly seems like a legacy-minded, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame buff, and yet is prone to whimsical novelty like releasing a single via balloons and working with Insane Clown Posse (on a profane Mozart redux, no less). He's famously tough to pin down and, at a time when more people are going out of their way to define themselves on a minute-to-minute basis, this slipperiness holds a heightened currency.
So while Blunderbuss is the first album with the words "Jack White" on the spine, it's not exactly a great unveiling. After all, Jack White was born John Anthony Gillis; White's idol and friend (and fellow confuser) Bob Dylan was born Robert Allan Zimmerman. Talking about reading Dylan's memoir to The Guardian, White said, "It was painful-- it would bring me to tears or it was like looking in the mirror. It was like a son that had never met his dad." Considering the kinship, an old Dylan quote from 1978 seems particularly relevant; when he was asked about his "purpose," Bob quoted Henry Miller: "The role of an artist is to inoculate the world with disillusionment." And indeed, Blunderbuss is filled with White's own disenchantment. He's loathe to talk about the personal-life specifics behind his songs, of course, but it's hard to ignore two major events that occurred in the months leading up to the album's creation last year: the dissolution of the White Stripes as well as his marriage to model and singer Karen Elson. As White skips eclectic through early rock, folk, and country styles in a casual and capable fashion reminiscent of The White Album, he moans of voids and angst and violence. Just as we're sucked in by his unknowableness, this meticulous artist is drawn to the things he can't quite get his head around, too.
In Josh Eells' brilliant recent New York Times Magazine profile, White opened up about the inner workings of his old band. "Meg completely controlled the White Stripes," he said. "She's the most stubborn person I've ever met, and you don't even get to know the reasons. [...] That band is the most challenging, important, fulfilling thing ever to happen to me. It's something I really, really miss." That kind of poignant frustration can be heard throughout Blunderbuss, though, true to form, White often masks these crushed feelings with bouncy instrumentation and arrangements. This juxtaposition is most pronounced on the album's most hummable track, "Hip (Eponymous) Poor Boy", a self-deprecating juke-joint number in which he manages to kiss off himself and, quite possibly, his former bandmate/sister/wife. Along with mentions of "using your name" (Jack got his surname from Meg), he sings, "And you'll be watching me, girl/ Taking over the world/ Let the stripes unfurl/ Gettin' rich, singin' poor boy." Only a few people know precisely how cutting the song is, but its playful defensiveness carries an undeniable sting. It also features the best and simplest explanation for White's extreme work ethic thus far: "But I can't sit still/ Because I know that I will."
More often, though, White sings about a vaguer, deeper emptiness. "But sometimes these feelings can be so misleading," he admitted on "Fell in Love With a Girl". Now, he sounds like he's through being misled-- he's more fallen than fell. On the simmering, slyly threatening "Love Interruption", he's fed up: "I want love to grab my fingers gently/ Slam them in a doorway/ And put my face into the ground." It isn't some masochistic fantasy as much as a form of self discipline. "I won't let love disrupt, corrupt, or interrupt me anymore," he concludes. The sentiment dovetails with another quote from the Times piece. "I've always felt it's ridiculous to say, of any of the females in my life: You're my friend, you're my wife, you're my girlfriend, you're my co-worker," he said. "This is your box, and you're not allowed to stray outside of it." But this post-love ideal sounds like wishful thinking in the context of Blunderbuss-- not to mention White's well-noted affection for hard structure and self-limitation-- which uses the breakup emotions of hurt and fear to get its best points across.
Opener "Missing Pieces" has White bleeding and losing appendages after an unwanted departure, all while a Rhodes skips along without a care. He's beaten up and forced to walk on salt with bottomless feet by what seems like the entire iPhone generation on the rumbling "Freedom at 21", a song that perfectly fits the video for "Sixteen Saltines", which has him consumed by a chaotic world filled with kids. At 36, this is Jack White battling with his encroaching elder-statesman role, knowing the odds aren't in his favor. He's trembling in front of an almighty Delilah on a cover of the Little Willie John track "I'm Shakin'", a song that-- like much of the album-- finds White backed by a group of highly qualified women (including Elson). Though the high-wire element that fueled the White Stripes is absent here, the female accompaniment suggests White knows what brings out the best in him-- even when he's pleading about the infinite pain brought upon him by the opposite sex. He might be vengeful but he's not dumb.
Within White's oeuvre, Blunderbuss hangs in a kind of limbo-- it's closer to earth than his fantastic White Stripes yet further away than the sometimes-pedestrian Raconteurs or Dead Weather. It's got some of his best pure songwriting yet, but no earth-cracking riffs. Still, as a treatise on loss and its schizophrenic aftermath, Blunderbuss is a purposeful success. The eloquent title track dreams up a love affair where White, finally, gets the girl. But there are complications-- she already happens to be spoken for. Slide guitar smudges the picture as White wishes for a world based on desire instead of consequence. Throwing his hands up, he finishes the song: "Doing what two people need is never on the menu." The veracity of the tale is anybody's guess. Its disillusionment, though, is real.


Each song on Ty Segall's eighth album seems to be an oblique short story about cheap thrills. The album's populated with addicts—people engineered to come back for more despite how shitty it may ultimately make them feel. Segall seems less focused on hitting the exact right notes and more concerned with establishing a strange, offbeat vibe, a match for the disembodied menace of the smiling doll heads on the sleeve.

Emotional Mugger

Whether under his own name or from various side projects, Ty Segall has kept new music waiting around the corner for years. Over a mountain of releases, he's proven that he can shred multiple times over, and that he can match that intensity in his acoustic singer/songwriter mode. It's fair to ask what else he can do at this point. With Emotional Mugger, we've arrived at a turning point for Segall: After inundating us for years, what can he do to keep people listening?
Emotional Mugger needed to be special to stand apart—a shock to the Segall system—and he hints at a new aesthetic direction from the outset. Where his last album Manipulator opened with stately organ, the synthesizers on Mugger are abrasive and off-kilter. Throughout the album, he is less focused on hitting the exact right notes and more concerned with establishing an offbeat vibe, one matching the cheerful menace of the smiling doll heads on the sleeve. The pace and structure of "California Hills" is briefly upended a few times for short bursts of frantic guitar work, and throughout the album, he switches between his traditional singing voice and a throaty, affected mystic dirtbag caricature.
There's also an underlying narrative, although it would be a reach to call it a full-on "concept album." Each song seems to be an oblique short story about cheap thrills, and throughout, his metaphor of choice is candy. The album's populated with addicts—people engineered to come back for more despite how shitty it may ultimately make them feel. Sub out the word "candy" for pretty much any other vapid, hollow pleasure in the world (and sometimes you wish he would—I respect his wish to keep his metaphors consistent, but occasionally his repetition of the same words leads the songs to blur together).
Since it's an album sending up society's constant demand for instant gratification, it feels petty and impatient to occupy its world thinking, "This hook was cool at first, but it's losing my attention." But that's the truth of Emotional Mugger—a few songs just churn over the same hook, and ultimately, there's just not enough happening to hold interest. Despite an assist from Mikal Cronin and Melvins' Dale Crover, Segall's take on Eddy Grant's Equals song "Diversion" is repetitive, unvarying, and notably less interesting than the source material.
Thankfully, it's a Segall album, which means his missteps are tempered by a few phenomenal performances. "Candy Sam" features one of his best big-tent guitar solos on record, though the album's best song is "Mandy Cream"—there's not much else that sounds like it in Segall's discography. The drums root the song in funk (courtesy of Segall's frequent collaborator Charles Moothart) while a droning synthesizer and his guitar solo bring both percussive supplements and weird punk hooks into the fold. Also worth noting: There are vocals from King Tuff.
That's another major departure for Segall on Emotional Mugger—his team. In addition to his usual co-conspirators Cronin and Moothart, he's surrounded himself by heavy-hitters like Kyle Thomas, producer F. Bermudez (who helmed recent records by Gun Outfit and No Age), Wand's Cory Hanson and Evan Burrows, and the Cairo Gang's Emmett Kelly. And with his collaborators (dubbed "the Muggers") at his side, he's done an excellent job of establishing an unsettling tone across the album—one where cooing moans of pleasure on "Baby Big Man (I Want a Mommy)" are bulldozed by him grunting the words "BIG MAN."
When Segall rolled out the album by mailing VHS copies to writers, he shared a clinical definition of "emotional mugging," explaining, "The over-communication relayed in cell based technology and content driven media further detaches passengers of our modern society from deep emotional understanding." Put more simply: The Internet makes everything and anything immediately available, and that's probably fucking up how people interact and have their desires addressed. It's a relevant subject without question—one he addresses on the album with varying degrees of success. Maybe its diciest moments can be chalked up to the album's inherent feeling of uneasiness, but Emotional Mugger still feels transitional—either the moment before he tucks in and gets way weirder or another stepping stone before he switches gears all over again.


Member of Black Moth Super Rainbow makes his full-length debut, displaying a knack for forceful beat-driven arrangements while hewing closely to his main gig's sound. Aesop Rock guests.

Fucked Up Friends

Tobacco is the pseudonym of Tom Fec, architect of the reclusive (and frequently masked) Pittsburgh psychedelic pop outfit Black Moth Super Rainbow. Known for a tendency towards the peculiar (he recently made a mix for XLR8R.com entitled Songs To Get Killed in the Woods To and is rumored to produce tracks somewhere deep in the Pennsylvania forest), Tobacco employs old-fashioned electronic instrumentation such as analog synths and tape machines to create the hallucinatory sounds behind BMSR and his eponymous solo recordings. On Fucked Up Friends, his first companionless LP, Fec puts those toys to use for an effort that veers from his fulltime group's sunny-but-warped electronica and creeps towards a darker brand of instrumental hip-hop.
Displaying a knack for forceful beat-driven arrangements that were absent on BMSR's accomplished Dandelion Gum, Tobacco shows here that he can pull off capable leftfield hip-hop, but as an album, Fucked Up Friends lacks focus and variety. On a large majority of the record's 16 tracks (roughly five too many), Tobacco offers only slight variations on the same formula: bend analog synths into twisted melodies and set those atop puddles of tape hiss and clattering, lo-fi boombox beats. It's an intriguing approach that yields a few great songs, but because of the glut of similar material, these standout tracks tend to get lost in a neutralizing fog of sameyness.
Fucked Up Friends is at its best when Tobacco lets his beats thump hard, like on mechanical opener "Street Trash", which combines gritty ghettoblaster thuds with an industrial, engine-revving groove. Halfway-point overachiever "Berries That Burn"-- a track that starts on a stolen Boards of Canada astral hum before blasting off with aggressive drum patterns and pitchy siren synths-- also succeeds because of its beat-centric methodology. Friends' lone collaborative contribution comes courtesy of Definitive Jux rapper Aesop Rock-- as always, he's equal parts cleverness and eccentricity-- who lends rhymes to "Dirt", another strong cut. While the duet show offs each musician's singular talents, "Dirt" also brings into question the album's dearth of guest lyricists elsewhere ("Hawker Boat" is one of several tracks begging for an MC).
Most frustrating, though, is Friends' excess weight; Tobacco seems unwilling to excise material that doesn't contribute to the record's overall vision. "Hairy Candy", for instance, is a perfectly decent track, but despite a finger-snapping rhythm, it's virtually identical to the psychedelic stuff on Dandelion Gum-- down to the vocoder-ed chorus. Meandering late-album tracks "Little Pink Riding Hood" and "Tape Eater" siphon energy away from earlier, stronger material and test the listener's patience with lazy Air-like lunar synths. Utterly pointless "Get My Nails Did" and "--", meanwhile, comprise just 16 seconds of total album time and seem to exist only for their kooky track names.
Ironically, these lackluster songs help to conjure an image of what a better Friends could have been-- namely a shorter LP or a potent EP keeping only the good bits. It's also surprising that Tobacco didn't consider a full-album collaboration with Aesop Rock or invite an assortment of visiting rappers to try on his beats as a traditional hip-hop producer might. Any of those records would have likely garnered more fan interest and provided a more compelling bridge to the next BMSR full-length.


Swedish has-been self-finances her comeback album and winds up making one of the year's finest, smartest, and most engaging pop records.

Robyn

Can you resist a girl who calls you a bum before offering to knit you mittens and make you pie? Who sings like a Pound Puppy while agreeing to push your bail bonds when cash was tight? Who compresses the entirety of this year's Fannypack record into one 2:35 track? Who exudes so much offhand sass she might strip the chrome off your bumper if she parked her "gifted, all-natural, and bursting the seams" keester on it?
Robyn Carlsson gets confused with Robin S of "Show Me Love" fame. (Not helped by the fact that she also had a U.S. top 10 called "Show Me Love.") But she's best known for "Do You Know (What It Takes)", which also went top 10 over here in that late-90s moment when anything with a fake r&b; beat and a sunshine attitude charted as a welcome relief from, like, the Toadies and stuff. She's disappeared from our radar for the past eight years-- as Euro pop stars tend to do-- but Robyn is as stupidly ebullient as any record released this year. "You wanna rumble in my jungle?/ I'll take you on/ You wanna rumble in space/ I'll put my laser on stun/ And on the North Pole/ I'll ice you, son." Uh-oh!
Over canned synbeats and zaps, she struts her stuff, castigating silly boys who think they're playing in her weight class and generally acting like the shit. "Who's That Girl" sez "no, no, no" like Destiny's Child to institutionalized sexism-- or something. "Handle Me" tells bar star douchebags with flipped polo shirt collars that she's too much. Okay, so "Robot Boy" is pretty much insufferable, a swerve too sickly for Radio Disney and kinda creepy when you factor in the songs about coming on tongues. (Those nails she's sporting on the cover don't look designed for wiping tears and mending broken hearts.) But "Be Mine", which I blathered on about in the tracks section a few weeks ago, is a disarming heartbreaker perfectly poised between twee and tuff, like if Pete Wiggs and Bob Stanley and the Neptunes got trapped in Jeff Goldblum's Fly pods.
"Crash and Burn Girl" is kiddie disco (I like to imagine the party wreck she's addressing is Lindsay Lohan, but yr mileage may vary) with added early Madonna quotes. "Konichiwa Bitches" suffers from a bad Dave Chappelle joke title (not that it'll matter in 10 years), but redeemed by the fact that it's 2:35 of boasting so compressed you'll rewind it three or four times in a row. "Bum Like You" isn't a ballad, really, but it is slow and acoustic guitar driven. It's also nice to know that someone out there was willing to rewrite "No Scrubs" with a modicum of humanity granted to the scrubs in question.
Robyn is already being called "this year's Annie," which is horseshit because she actually emotes. And unlike the aforementioned Fannypack, she's got a range beyond "ripping off L'Trimm." Her pop fun is a bit knowing-- she's 26 after all. But trust the Swedes. They know what they're doing with this sort of thing. Plus it's all over in 35 minutes. If you think people should be fined for albums over 60 minutes-- is that ballad really worth it?-- you'll appreciate this.


Matmos’ Drew Daniel extends the collaborative thrust of his solo project, imbuing dynamic, shape-shifting disco and deep-house tracks with a warm sense of community.

The Soft Pink Truth: Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?

Matmos’ Drew Daniel and MC Schmidt have recounted how they originally met on Halloween, and musically, they still resemble the couple that goes all-in on a haunted house every year—across more than a dozen albums and countless side projects, they’ve maintained their kooky charm, commitment to DIY craft, and eerie tastes. They could mic a bowl of peeled grapes and convince you that they’re witch eyeballs. Daniel’s dance music project the Soft Pink Truth has carried the same mischievous spirit, flipping covers of black metal, hardcore, and crust-punk classics into glitzy disco and house.
While the Soft Pink Truth has often felt like Daniel trying on different ingenious costumes, 2020’s Shall We Go On Sinning So That Grace May Increase? was framed not around genre but instead around a thought-provoking question. Released at the isolating peak of the early pandemic, and framed as a response to the global rise of fascism, it took the form of a soft blur of ambient, house, jazz, and chamber music—a somber salve against darkness. Daniel created the record by collaborating virtually with friends, imbuing the dynamic musical interplay with an inspiring sense of community. Now, with the effervescent follow-up Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?, Daniel successfully recaptures the lightning-in-a-bottle spirit of those sessions while boldly moving the Soft Pink Truth in a new direction, shaping kinetic performances into joyous disco marathons.
Where the preceding album took its title from a quote by Paul the Apostle, Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This? is indebted to the philosophical wisdom of a random clubgoer. Years ago, Daniel heard a woman ask the question while watching his friend DJ, and the funny, elusive phrase lived on as a kind of mantra. True to form, the new album is brighter and lighter than its predecessor, each sprawling disco and deep-house epic introducing its own special lineup and trajectory. Once again, Schmidt is joined by pianist Koye Berry, singer Angel Deradoorian, and saxophonists Andrew Bernstein (Horse Lords) and John Berndt, while longtime Matmos collaborators including guitarist Mark Lightcap and bassist Jason Willett add to the fine-tuned band. Ulaş Kurugüllü’s glitzy string arrangements hang off tracks like streamers; Obadias Guerra brings a dreamy harp to the joyful closing cover of Willie Hutch’s “Now That It’s All Over”; and noise artist John Wiese shows up with a well-timed crash of broken glass. Meanwhile, Xiu Xiu’s Jamie Stewart and Wye Oak’s Jenn Wasner star on the excellent one-two punch of “La Joie Devant La Mort” and “Wanna Know,” each getting a disco-diva spotlight that completely transforms their distinct voices.
While this summer’s preceding mini-album Was It Ever Real? introduced this new direction (along with a scintillating cover of Coil’s “The Anal Staircase”), Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This? sidesteps that record’s careful sequencing in favor of dramatic highs and lows in nearly every track. Lush standouts like the 11-minute opener “Deeper” or the propulsive “Trocadero” feel like a dive into a luxurious pool, offering submerged contemplation before rising back up for air. “Moodswing” kicks off the album’s middle section with a popping champagne cork as its peak-time disco gradually loses bubbles and drifts towards the hypnotic arpeggiated synths of “Sunwash.” This leads to the album’s softest and perhaps most striking moment—“Joybreath,” a sensual mood piece carried by tender piano and Rose E. Kross’ delicate vocalizations.
For all the brilliant playing of Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This?, one of its surprises is that the album was largely constructed remotely. This album’s ability to make you forget all the work involved speaks to Daniel’s skill as an editor but also to the passion and precision of its wide community of contributors as they nail every take. More than a side project or a solo moniker now, Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This? joyfully cements the Soft Pink Truth’s era as a band—and one that throws a hell of a party.