Across two studio albums and three discs of unreleased live material, the late-1960s Swedish free-music collective goes in hard on repetitive, mind-expanding psychedelic jams.

Remains

In the late 1960s, a pioneering Swedish collective made music so free and open-ended that even its identity fluctuated. Sprouting from the mid-’60s left-wing group Mecki Mark Men, they began in 1967 as Pärson Sound, rebranded a year later as International Harvester (soon trimmed to just Harvester), and finally landed on what would be their best-known moniker, Träd, Gräs och Stenar (Trees, Grass, and Stones). In each incarnation, this wildly creative gathering of musicians, poets, artists, and writers made mossy improvised jams that began simply—a few chords, a basic beat, some singing—then trekked into the stratosphere.
Since those heady times, the work of Pärson Sound and Träd, Gräs och Stenar has been collected into box sets, and now it’s International Harvester’s turn. Remains joins their two previously released albums with three discs of recently unearthed live material. Mapping the musical differences between the group’s iterations is somewhat futile, as they have many more commonalities than contrasts. This is especially true when comparing Pärson Sound to International Harvester, who shared the exact same six members. But the latter proved both a crucial fulcrum between past and future and a distinctive entity on its own.
Where Pärson Sound were more overtly experimental—inspired largely by Terry Riley’s minimalist trips and the corresponding experiments of co-founder Bo Anders Persson—International Harvester sometimes used traditional folk forms. They also were more political. In an interview in the notes of Remains, saxophonist Thomas Tidholm says their name was a critique of “Western profit-hungry engineering,” and some songs—such as “Ho Chi Minh,” which could’ve passed for a protest chant—were explicitly rooted in the events of the era. Their music was more timely too, dovetailing with hippified ’60s rock and hinting at the psychedelic strains that Träd, Gräs och Stenar would fully embrace.
On their two proper full-lengths—International Harvester’s 1968 album Sov Gott Rose-Marie and Harvester’s Hemåt, from 1969—the group’s melange of interests and influences creates music that continually grows despite rarely deviating from initial repetitive sounds. They rarely changed key, or even chords. “Everything was usually left to evolve by itself and from itself,” Tidholm says. “It was all about listening, answering, filling in.” It’s a trippy thrill to hear how far the group can go without making huge moves, as if they’re playing their single-minded jams while sitting on a flying carpet.
The most extreme example of this peculiar magic is “Harvest Times,” recorded in 1968 at the Nacka Aula auditorium in Stockholm. Clocking in at 25 minutes, it’s the longest piece on Remains, and it sure does take its time. A slow, lazy beat plods along for a good 10 minutes while small elements—vocal hums, horn bleats, stray guitar notes—wind around it. Eventually, the intensity increases, inch by inch, until the group generates a massive swirl of howling guitars and blasting horns. Despite its duration, the extended climax develops so gradually that it still sneaks up on you. The effect is similar to a drug high that doesn’t so much kick in as wash its way through you.
There are other long songs on Remains—six of the 33 tracks last over 10 minutes—but this group could build arcs in smaller spaces too. Side one of Sov Gott Rose-Marie offers 11 shorter pieces and hits many highs: the straight-up rock riffs of “There Is No Other Place,” the atmospheric balladry of “It’s Only Love,” the proto-metal lurch of “It’s Getting Late Now,” the orchestral swing of “The Summer Song.” On Hemåt, the group stretches further, riding their repetitions into mantras. They indulge their sense of humor more too, playfully grinding out the drunken carnival song “Cock Polksa” and the woozy “Everybody (Needs Somebody to Love),” which evokes the Rolling Stones traipsing through mud.
All these sides of International Harvester get play on Remains’ three live LPs, which are on a par with the band’s two official albums. They even stretch the band’s purview, adding styles like the rootsy blues of “Dada Babble Boogie” and the cinematic woodwind essay “Blowing the Wind.” The more epic tracks, like the aforementioned “Harvest Times” or the 19-minute tower of psychedelia that is “Streets of Stockholm,” are complete works that could’ve been albums themselves.
Throughout Remains, the group shows its jam-until-we-break-through approach to be so productive, it comes off less like jamming than spontaneous composition—perhaps even an eternal suite of variations on one vibrational theme. That may sound overly mystical, but it’s hard to listen to Remains and not believe that International Harvester tapped into something elemental.


Veering from claustrophobic sci-fi dioramas to meditative synth drones to nakedly expressive confessionals, Laurel Halo's Hyperdub debut is unified by an underlying perspective and personality that commands attention yet still leaves plenty to the imagination.

Quarantine

When an artist "finds her voice," it's meant as a figure of speech and signifies a certain kind of greedy perspective from our end that values neat narrative arcs and easily identifiable resolutions. It's typically reserved for someone like Laurel Halo, who's darted and dashed rather than having followed a simple trajectory over the past couple of years, recording a vast and diverse amount of material under her own name and as King Felix for six record labels (and counting). Her Hyperdub debut, Quarantine, appears to acknowledge the need for something definitive, and by intricately arranging and shrewdly sequencing her C.V. on a micro scale, it's her best and most cohesive work to date. And it's largely because Halo finds her voice in a literal sense. She foregrounds vocals to a far greater extent than on her previous material, and while Quarantine veers from claustrophobic sci-fi dioramas to meditative synth drones to nakedly expressive confessionals, it's unified by an underlying perspective and personality that commands attention yet still leaves plenty to the imagination.
You find out fairly quickly that Halo is setting all the rules of engagement on Quarantine.  Opener "Airsick" introduces many of the tricks Halo uses from there on out-- oddly stacked and constantly shifting harmonies, portamento pitch-bending, narcotic melodies, a prevailing sense of technological dread-- before the nearly a cappella "Years" leaves her completely exposed. Halo doesn't exactly yell or scream on "Years", it's something like a boundary-pushing exhalation after a long and self-imposed silence, sung in an uncomfortably loud and flat tone. Some will find it, to put it lightly, hard to deal with, and by most standard metrics of evaluation, it's not proper singing and borders on ugly. But consider the combative content of the lyrics: "I will never see you again/ You're mad 'cause I will not leave you alone." There's purpose to all of this, reminding me of Jeff Mangum's approach on the opening devotional from "King of Carrot Flowers, Pt. 2 & 3", where the volume signifies an artist pushing against internal and external repression with necessary, confrontational force.
Halo's vocals only occasionally go back into attack mode, but "Years" is indicative of Quarantine's prodding and provoking nature and how it subverts the typical ideas of how we brand aggressive and intense music. The instruments of war are almost completely absent here: The digital dissonance is rarely abrasive, there's nothing resembling a true bassline, nor is there anything that scans as a snare or kick drum perhaps outside of the almost tropical pitter-patter outlining "Airsick", or the jetstream whir of "Thaw". If anything, it resembles the beatless, zero-gravity voids created by Oneohtrix Point Never on Returnal, and similarly, the extraterrestrial quality of Quarantine's terrain heightens your senses and makes your nerves sit a little more on edge to counter the unfamiliarity.
Though often melodic, it doesn't really ever come off as pop. My experience with Quarantine feels more like an interactive, multimedia affair, as though I'm listening to a record while simultaneously trying to solve a puzzle or challenge the CPU in a video game. I don't hear verses and choruses so much as Q&A, stimuli, and open-ended responses, challenges presented, accepted, and accomplished. I can't really hum the melody of "MK Ultra"; the thrill is in finally being able to trace its strange, boomeranging path in real time. The tension created by the juddering undercurrent of low frequencies and Halo's octave-shifted vocals on "Carcass" is unnerving enough, and her use of the phrase "my carcass" rather than "my body" intends to provoke an entirely different and gnarlier set of emotional responses.
Indeed, while much of Quarantine's futuristic production and man-machine interface conjures science fiction, much of the lyrical approach reads like scientific or Socratic method. Beyond the blurry delineation between devotion and revenge on "Years", what to make of something like "Holoday"? Structurally, it feels like an interlude, a free-time juxtaposition of scrambled circuitry and a high-pitched sample of Halo singing, "just wanna be with you!" like an errant, synaptic trigger. Is it a love song or a neurological study of the feeling? Likewise, it certainly has to be intentional that the titles signifying expressions of rapture ("Wow", "Joy") are given to compositions in thrall to the dehumanization of Halo's voice. The most pointed example of Halo's painstaking production appears on "Tumor": The illuminant vocal processing accompanying the lyrics, "Caught behind the wall of tears/ Distorted liquid image of you/ The signal keeps cutting out but one thing is clear/ Nothing grows in my heart, there is no one here," evokes a radiant sadness. Seconds later, stripped of all effects and affects, Halo menacingly deadpans to the object of her desire, "you are my target."
There are plenty of disarmingly pretty moments too on Quarantine, yet even those strive for unsettling effect, finding beauty in uncertainty, confidence in the embrace of the unknown. There are already subtle hints at discord during the spacey lullaby of "Thaw", milky synths and samples beaming in and out of an odd time signature as Halo sings in a strangely conversational timbre, "Don't get addicted to anything/ Just keep on walking/ One foot in front of the other/ Forward motion's the only answer." The closing "Light + Space" is Quarantine's most conventionally performed keys-and-voice piece and also the most gorgeous, though a rare glimpse at Halo's more lush, jazzy phrasing is dedicated to the admission that "words are just words that you soon forget." Coming at the tail end of a diffuse, exploratory second half, it's a disquieting and ultimately weighty epigram for Quarantine, a record created in the image of its author in its ability to dodge easy explanations and comparisons. After all, the greatest pleasure of Quarantine lies in its being a world unto itself, a self-contained vortex where influence is nearly impossible to project or extract, leaving only the alternately frightening and reassuring state of solitude.


Throat-singer Tanya Tagaq could be Canada’s unlikeliest crossover act. At a time when Canada is reckoning with the historic mistreatment of its indigenous population, her new LP demands retribution.

Retribution

Before Tanya Tagaq is about to perform, she takes a few moments to speak to her audience. There’s the usual business of thanking everyone for coming out and introducing her band, though she also likes to talk about what’s on her mind—sometimes for a good 10 minutes before we hear a note of music. In the context of what follows, the preamble feels less like an introduction than a farewell, like the sort of address you hear from astronauts before they’re launched into space, or an escape artist who’s about to pull off an elaborate, death-defying stunt. That’s because Tagaq goes to places in her music that few others dare to tread. And when she’s in the throes of her violent, carnal, gesticulating concerts—which feel more like séances than performances—you’re not sure if that sweet, cheerful woman who was just bantering with the crowd will make it back alive.
Tagaq hails from the Arctic territory of Nunavut in northern Canada, raised in a remote island town called Cambridge Bay that’s inaccessible by road. Her Inuk mother introduced her to their culture’s tradition of throat-singing, which is less a musical artform than a community pastime where two women square off face-to-face in friendly competition, producing heaving, gnarled, guttural sounds in responsive rhythmic patterns. But through Tagaq, this interactive activity has become a vehicle for primal, personal, political expression. Onstage, Tagaq doesn’t so much sing as plug herself into the Earth, transforming herself into a mood-ring manifestation of a ravaged planet squealing in pain with each oil-drill jab and earth-scorching heat wave. Atop her band’s swelling, screeching soundscapes, Tagaq’s sleeping-giant purrs mutate into death metal-worthy growls—and when she snaps out of her trance an hour later, it feels like you’ve just borne witness to Godspeed You Black Exorcist.
Tagaq belongs to a lineage of iconoclastic vocalists that includes Yoko Ono and Diamanda Galás—artists notorious for pushing both musical and physical limits in their work. And her extreme approach has engendered collaborations with the likes of Björk, Kronos Quartet, Mike Patton, and Fucked Up. But Tagaq’s new album arrives at a moment when she’s on the verge of becoming Canada’s unlikeliest crossover act. Her previous record, Animism, won the Polaris Music Prize in 2014, leading to several high-profile festival appearances and TED Talks; she can even currently be heard on mainstream Canadian radio singing back-up on the latest single from Toronto alt-rockers July Talk. But most crucially, the restless, raging Retribution emerges at a time when Canada is reckoning with its historic, government-sanctioned mistreatment of the country’s indigenous population—a long-simmering, long-suppressed topic that’s now become an explosive flashpoint in the national conversation, much as systemic, anti-black racism has in the U.S.
In Canada, the operative word right now is “reconciliation,” the process by which the government hopes to make amends with the indigenous community for the awful legacy of Canada’s residential-school system. From the mid-19th century till 1996, the system separated indigenous children from their families and forced them into church-led classrooms as a means to assimilate them into white, Christian, Canadian society. And the coercion, sadly, went beyond the curriculum—students were subjected to horrific, unchecked abuse at the hands of their supposed educators, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 6,000 children over the years. For Tagaq—an alumnus of the system—reconciliation has been a slow, ineffective, bureaucratic process. As the title of her new record makes clear, she wants retribution. And not just for Canada’s under-the-rug history of cultural genocide, but for the current plights of her people: the epidemic number of indigenous women who are abducted, raped, and murdered in Canada each year, and the environmental havoc wreaked by the country’s tar sand-sucking oil industry.
As a singer who deals mostly in wordless expression, Tagaq’s most pointed political statements have been broadcast through extramusical means: her fearlessly profane interviews, her hyperactive Twitter feed, and her jaw-dropping Polaris-gala performance, where she used her national stage to project the names of 1,200 missing or murdered indigenous women. And to top it off, she used her acceptance speech to flip off PETA for its opposition to seal hunting, on which Tagaq’s isolated community depends for sustenance.
But on Retribution, the messaging is baked right into the music. Much like those aforementioned pre-show speeches, Retribution provides instant exposition in the form of its title track, where, over a panting vocal pulse, Tagaq offers a spoken-word treatise: “Our mother grows angry/Retribution will be swift/We squander her soil and suck out her sweet, black blood to burn it.” But Tagaq isn’t preaching to the choir. She’s stirring the beast, alternating her voice between a panicked yelp and an esophagus-shredding grunt, while piercing violins horsewhip the band into a furious gallop.
Like Animism, Tagaq recorded Retribution with the core duo of violinist Jesse Zubot and percussionist Jean Martin, whose free-form sound-scraping blurs the lines between folk, classical, klezmer, post-rock, musique concrete, and slasher-flick soundtrack. The new album trades in queasy atmospherics for a more robust rhythmic attack, with Tagaq feeding off the band’s energy as much as vice versa. “Aorta” explodes with a disorienting swirl of seagull squeals, foghorn-like drones, and vocals that sound like they’re being sung backwards. But the song’s brawny groove indulges the fantasy of hearing Tagaq unleash her gnashed-teeth roar in a hard-rock context. And there’s even a straight-up, boom-bap throwback in “Centre,” on which guest MC Shad’s circular rhymes ruminate on humanity’s infinitesimal place in the universe at large, while Tagaq’s melodic counter-vocal celebrates our own microscopic, menstrual origins by coining her own genre: “wombcore.”
By more readily embracing rock and rap forms, Retribution stands to lure a wider audience into Tagaq’s unsettled sound world—but only to ensnare it like prey as she goes in for the kill. “Cold” is the most harrowing science-class lecture you’ll ever hear: Tagaq recites the effects of global warming on the Arctic, before ominously declaring, “Human civilization as we know it will no longer exist… because Gaia likes it cold.” The song’s stalking groove then goads her into a symphony of screams that renders melting ice as burning flesh. And where Retribution’s more muscular moments are countered by amorphous, aggro-ambient pieces like “Nacreous” and “Sulfur,” the centerpiece track “Summoning” bridges the extremes. Over the course of nine tumultuous minutes, the song unfolds like a found-sound radio opera, with Toronto’s 50-strong Element Choir gradually taunting and prodding a terrified Tagaq as if she were being offered up for ceremonial sacrifice.
Retribution is very much a mirror image of Aninism: Where the latter record opened with a reverential, orchestro-folk cover of the Pixies’ “Caribou” and closed with the disturbing, nightmarish moans of “Fracking,” Retribution’s turbulent journey settles onto familiar turf with a cover of another alt-rock classic. Tagaq’s “Caribou” was a cheeky, celebratory act of cultural reclamation from someone raised hunting the namesake animal (not to mention someone who can out-scream Black Francis). Here, her eerily calm cover of Nirvana’s “Rape Me” transforms Kurt Cobain’s narrative role-play into unflinching autobiography, with its disturbing allusions to the multiple sexual assaults Tagaq was subjected to as a child.
But when Tagaq sings, “I’m not the only one,” she’s speaking for more than just fellow survivors. “Rape Me” marks the moment where the intersectional relationship among Retribution’s primary concerns—feminism, environmentalism, indigenous rights—is laid bare, with a hushed Tagaq staking out the liminal space between feeling defeated and feeling defiant. And by the end, the song’s incessant drum beat sounds more like a death rattle—a tick-tock reminder that retribution is not some distant prophecy, but a looming inevitability.


Jessica Pratt's gorgeous second record plays like acoustic dream-pop, with a warm, home-recorded atmosphere*—*finger-picked psychedelia, lucidly layered harmonies, hissy tape effects, an overcast haze—more dramatic and distinctive than her debut.

On Your Own Love Again

Jessica Pratt is only 27 years old, but still her music carries the footnote that it was ever-so-close to being lost in time forever. As modern rock tales ought to go, it was one of the San Francisco garage scene's leading local weirdos, Tim Presley, who saved her from relative obscurity. Though Pratt was born in Redding, Calif., her poised, homespun folk songs feel beamed from another time and place, specifically hippie-era Britain; as a teenager, Pratt says, she honed her craft by playing along with T. Rex's Electric Warrior glam riffs and singing early Marianne Faithfull melodies. When Presley stumbled upon a batch of her recordings from 2007, he allegedly dumped his life's savings into releasing them as her 2012 debut. And yet, it took something more for Pratt's spirit to truly be found.
Pratt's gorgeous Drag City debut quietly rejects tradition. For all its folk touchstones, Pratt is more an aesthete than a poet—she sings of bleeding watercolors, blue geraniums—and accordingly On Your Own Love Again plays like acoustic dream-pop. Its warm, home-recorded atmosphere is more dramatic and distinctive than Jessica Pratt: finger-picked psychedelia, lucidly layered harmonies, hissy tape effects, an overcast haze. But Pratt's songwriting is more cohesive and concise, her whispered secrets more alluring. The record's cyclical nature gives On Your Own more momentum, as she sings sticky rock'n'roll hooks learned from Brian Wilson or the Hollies. (Pratt says she listened to Van Dyke Parks' Song Cycle while at work on the album, like her Drag City labelmate Joanna Newsom did when making Ys). Her soprano is hard to pin in a folk context—it variously recalls the high-pitched eccentricities of Kate Bush, the grave depth of Nico—but she ultimately sounds like Vashti Bunyan or Nick Drake as found in the sleepy subconscious of Ariel Pink. "Sometimes I pray for the rain," Pratt repeats near the end of this wintry album, which feels designed to soundtrack the slow-falling snow or any steadied act of nature.
Much of what Pratt communicates is abstract, elliptical, or wordless. Sometimes her crystalline guitar strum sounds like a harp, each note falling quick and elegant like one of said snowflakes; sometimes the songs melt. On the astral "Moon Dude", Pratt makes chord changes evocative as neo-psych time-travel, like Tim Presley's own White Fence project. On Your Own Love Again was made in sunny West Coast terrain, but it captures the somber shades of isolated urban life. Pratt worked on the record in the wake of several difficult endings: a move from San Francisco to L.A., the end of a longterm relationship, and the death of her mother. Occasionally, it sounds like Pratt is plaintively, playfully singing stoned "da-da-da" tunes just to drown out the sorrow or numb the chaos. On "Game That I Play", for one, she imbues, "I often try to leave my thoughts of you behind," but her wish is left hanging; there is no resolve. And on "Jacquelyn in the Background", Pratt similarly drifts, struggling for the right words: "Deep inside my lonely room/ I cry the tears of never knowing you," she sings before a stream of vocalizations. On Your Own Love Again has more earnest moments, but its unadorned emotional uncertainty is profound and relatable.
Elsewhere, Pratt's austere meditations conjure confusion, wrongness, illusive realities. She sings of lonely outsiders and starry-eyed boys she wants to love but audibly cannot. Pratt understands her own flaws and so seems to better understand those of others; it's humanizing. She might call out a guy's disloyal tricks and lies, but she also points to her own: "I don't wanna be changing the game that I play," Pratt sings early on, "But I see that you're leaving, so what can I say." She doesn't airbrush her faults. The title track, a 95-second epilogue, appears last on the record, and it's the album's most confessional song—"I try to believe in you somehow/ But every time I do I get down and out"—as if, after working through her clouded thoughts, she's emerged from the fog to think clearly. The "love" in On Your Own Love Again could be a noun, pointing outward, or a verb, pointing in, but it regardless has a way of romanticizing aloneness, as the album does throughout in more impressionistic terms.
But there is a vessel to that clear-headed solitude: "Back, Baby" is the record's penultimate track, the brightened moment at which everything becomes focused, giving physicality to the record's wandering spirit. One would expect "Back, Baby" to come at the end of a film as the credits roll—closure at the end of an ill-fated romance. There is an understated power to it, not just because Pratt is cutting off a person who no longer serves her, but because she is staring at the open space to become someone new. Fifty years after Dylan sang pop's greatest "don't look back" moment, Jessica Pratt offers an even more emphatic "can't go back," but she belongs to no one. On Your Own Love Again spends its 31 minutes in dialogue with the past, but it plays in perpetual motion forward. As with all break-ups, its end is a beginning.


The full-length debut from the shapeshifting UK duo is a virtuosic display of theatrical mayhem, dazzling production, and surprisingly lustrous pop music.

I Love You Jennifer B

The obsessed performing arts student is one of Hollywood’s favorite clichés. Movies like Whiplash, The Perfection, and Nocturne verge on melodrama, detailing the oppressive confines of classical training to varying degrees of absurdity. Their tortured protagonists meet one of two fates: triumph or crack-up. UK duo Jockstrap sound like they are flailing toward both. Graduates of London’s prestigious Guildhall School of Music & Drama, Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye have made a career of tearing down the academy walls. Their early revolt was scrappy and hardheaded; 2020’s Wicked City EP sounded like two star pupils lashing out, constructing jagged sculptures of string instruments and synthesizers. On their long-awaited debut album, I Love You Jennifer B, they refine their plan of attack. With the help of an 18-piece orchestra, Jockstrap stage elaborate, theatrical scenes atop the conservatory rubble.
Jockstrap’s earliest music was clever but disjointed. Ellery, who studied jazz violin at Guildhall, is the duo’s principal songwriter, and since the release of their first EP, 2018’s Love Is the Key to the City, it’s been clear that she has an advanced ear for pop structure of a certain vintage. In the opening minutes of “Joy,” she invoked the orchestral balladry of Van Dyke Parks and Harry Nilsson before Skye hijacked the song. He stripped it down to a few programmed bleeps and pitched up Ellery’s voice until she wheezed like a helium huffer: “Kiss me, fuck me, make much of me!” On Wicked City, Jockstrap plunged deeper into identity crisis; the songs were more intricate, lurching from gnarly EDM beats to impressionist piano sketches.
The band is still rummaging through a trunk of masks, but the characters in I Love You Jennifer B’s vaudevillian drama have better lines. Ellery stands downstage, discreetly changing costumes as a backdrop rolls in for the next scene. On the medieval dirge “Lancaster Court,” she plays the chamber-bound maiden plotting her escape. Plasticky rattles and whomped war drums jostle a plucked guitar phrase, as Ellery tiptoes from whisper to chapel soprano. On highlight “Greatest Hits,” she reigns as Disco Queen, dripping in sequins and rotating on a motorized bed. As Ellery does Donna Summer-at-La Scala, Skye slips in raygun synths, salt-shaker snares, and piano pulses straight from Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You.” It’s a pop soap opera shot with a smear of Vaseline on the lens. In a pivotal scene, Ellery spoofs celebrity:

Imagine I’m Madonna
Imagine I’m Thee Madonna
Dressed in blue
No—dressed in pink!
Gabbana,
Feather boa,
Marie Antoinette,
You wanna know her

“Greatest Hits” is a sublime model of Jockstrap’s future-retroism. It feels opulent but easy to slip into, like a beaded Halston unearthed at a roadside thrift store. It may be draped in cinema strings, but the song is far from stuffy. Ellery and Skye are playing dress-up, nodding to Old Hollywood glamour and discotheque pomp. Their manner of digesting these references makes “Greatest Hits” feel fresh; it winks at the ’70s by way of the ’90s, and it mashes up biblical imagery with 20th-century pop stars and a certain queen of Versailles. The song title scans as wry self-commentary, while Jockstrap’s detailed production adds a contemporary edge and a flash of humor (especially with an incessant chirp that sounds like “baby daddy”). After releasing a pair of somewhat exhausting remix EPs and being diagnosed as “ironic” by a former teacher, Ellery and Skye now prove that they are fully capable of writing lustrous pop music: Even the abstract expressionist can paint photoreal portraits if the mood strikes.
“Glasgow” is actually Jennifer B’s greatest hit. It’s a thumping road ballad driven by acoustic thrums and Ellery’s violin, which arches like a comet. Sweet and rapturous, it is primed for a singalong—the track that could land them a slot at Glastonbury. Even if they are hacking a trail to the festival tents, Ellery and Skye remain freaky. Jennifer B’s best tracks thrust open-hearted melodies to the fringes of madness. “Concrete Over Water,” the album’s high-drama centerpiece, morphs from bedroom confessional to souped-up circus theme. Eerie vocal stabs pierce the song’s perimeter, giving the whole thing a whiff of satanic ritual. On “Debra,” Skye lays down a colossal Bollywood riff, technicolor streamers that sound like they’re shooting from a parade float. With its wavering, distorted mix and scrapbook construction, “Debra” shares DNA with Jai Paul’s glorious “Str8 Outta Mumbai.” The song also contains Ellery’s most concise and poignant lyric to date: “Grief is just love with nowhere to go.”
The album is teeming with sharp turns and fakeouts, but instead of abandoning them as on earlier recordings, Jockstrap loop around to complete each theme. The title track kicks off with clinical key jabs and bizarre spoken interludes (one line, “Shifting about in her goddamn crochet pants staring at God knows what,” is seemingly uttered by a robotic Hank Hill). But the duo build on this creaky foundation, layering processed vocals and a synthesized horn melody. By the song’s end, the landscape looks different, but we can trace the path that led there. On Jennifer B, plot twists play out like a delicious art school scandal. Just when you think these orchestra enfant terribles will stick to their notation books, Jockstrap scurry to the bridge and chuck every page into the Thames.


Lorely Rodriguez returns with a short collection of disco- and house-inflected pop songs about tormented emotions and burning desire.

Save Me EP

After three albums about unstable, intense relationships, Empress Of’s Lorely Rodriguez closed her 2020 record I’m Your Empress Of with some distressed revelations: “I get off on being awful to myself/I need some help, I need help/I need myself.” Upon that record’s release, Rodriguez took a pandemic-induced break from her own music, composing for the Amazon show The Wilds and contributing a song to an Ad Council campaign bringing music to struggling middle schoolers. A year and a half later, she’s reunited with producer BJ Burton for the new Save Me EP, a transitional moment for an artist who’s continually shifted between straightforward pop and more experimental music. Released on her own label Major Arcana, Save Me represents an opportunity to consolidate her sound while exploring less intense territory.
Several songs here are outright disco-inspired, a new sound for Empress Of. At first, the title track’s wistful intro sounds like it could slot unnoticed onto a Banks record, but when the beat properly kicks in, there’s a more interesting desperation simmering underneath. The sensuality never reaches a full boil, save for a moment when Rodriguez breathlessly exclaims, “If you need me, baby, take me/In the back of the room for the night.” She doesn’t go into more detail than that, but the maniacal string stabs and a garbled call-and-response vocal convey the emotion when the clipped mix falls short. “Turn the Table,” produced by Jim-E Stack, is a straightforward foray into house, with dramatic dynamic shifts serving a narrative about an imbalanced relationship: “I feel my body/On a pedestal/I want to tell you/But now I don’t know why.”
The frustration comes when, even as an EP, Save Me becomes repetitive. It’s one thing to write songs about desire and another to lean on nearly identical choruses in “I want you to save me” and “I want you to keep me up.” Almost every song climaxes with a section alternating between a synth riff and a title drop—each effective on their own, but noticeable when clumped together. When Rodriguez breaks from that formula, it’s rewarding: The 909s-heavy “Dance for You,” a post-breakup recovery song with the urgency of her weirder material, is the EP’s most accomplished composition. Closer “Cry for Help” returns to the lyrical explorations of fear and insecurity that closed I’m Your Empress Of: “You don’t have to see tears to hear a cry for help/You don’t have to be near to know I’m not myself.” Yet it’s one of Rodriguez’s most aggressive songs in years, the woozy melody sliding in and out of sync with the thudding beat. There’s more than one form of confidence.


The second album from these New Jersey-based Grateful Dead devotees is still indebted to familiar reference points, but finds the band pushing to expand.

Natural Facts

You won’t get far with New Jersey quartet Garcia Peoples before noticing the unambiguous Grateful Dead associations. For a lot of bands, Grateful Dead worship stops at a reverent cover or a t-shirt design; Garcia Peoples commit. This begins with the band’s name (inspired by just being really, really into the Dead) and continues in slippery guitar leads, dusty vocal harmonies, and elongated song suites connected by untethered jams. On their 2018 debut Cosmic Cash, they looked not just to Jerry and co. but to a range of psychedelic masters: high-energy shredding channeled a lineage of nerdy technicality from Zappa to NRBQ to Phish, while gentler moments hinted at time spent studying private-press acid-folk records. The influences could be glaring at times, but substantial songwriting and a sense of giddy euphoria helped the album to transcend.
Arriving just seven months later, second album Natural Facts is still indebted to familiar reference points, but finds the band pushing to expand. The tandem guitar work of founding members Danny Arakaki and Tom Malach guides most songs, providing as much narration as their woozy vocal harmonies. Daydreamy and swaying, “High Noon Violence” constructs an intricate patchwork of acoustic and overdriven guitar tones before liquefying into a puddle of wailing dual leads. “Weathered Mountains” taps into the noodly pseudo-prog of the Dead’s studio output circa Blues for Allah, transposing that energy to a higher pitch and reimagining glassy-eyed Weir/Garcia lead lines as played by Television. Though it’s impressive to hear a young group fly so close to their key inspirations, some moments verge on psychedelic cosplay, teetering between devout admiration for iconic jam bands and too many hours spent comparing audience recordings of the 9/19/70 “Dark Star.”
As they move away from one-dimensionality, Garcia Peoples trace a line between ’60s West Coast psych and Jersey indie roots. Natural Facts explores this intersection, volleying between considered songwriting and ideas that sound born of all-night jam sessions. The lazy amble of “Rolling Tides” draws on meandering guitar figures, but tucks them into the background of a less elaborate structure. As the song moves through traditional soft verses and loud choruses, Arakaki’s sheepish vocals sound descended from the warm mumble of Yo La Tengo’s Ira Kaplan. Garcia Peoples’ less jammy material can be as straightforward as the bounding feel-good melodicism of “Break Me Down” or as jagged as the thunderous, off-time riffing of album opener “Feel So Great.” Where the breezy Cosmic Cash found Garcia Peoples on a stoned countryside drive, here they sound trapped in stop-start city gridlock. Engineer Jeff Zeigler’s modernized production amplifies the contrast, with sharper mixes and enormous drums adding newfound nerviness even to even the most subdued tracks.
When the blissed-out perma-grin gives way to frustration, Natural Facts takes on more depth. “Patient World” slogs through themes of stress and defeat, but its smoky grunge vibe feels confrontational by comparison to other songs’ contented drift. When the band ventures into this less comfortable territory, they display an individuality sometimes buried beneath the tripped-out reverie. Already in possession of telekinetic players and a distinctive fusion of indie-rock hooks and jam-band dexterity, Garcia Peoples grow more intriguing as they step out of the shadows of their inspirations.


The Nashville-based hardcore punk band’s exhilarating debut is a call-to-arms that could inspire even the most acquiescent to take action.

Do It With a Smile

Though hardcore loves to pretend it’s averse to deifying its individual participants, the genre’s history proves that’s a good dose of bullshit. Entire careers were built on the backs of unpredictably energetic singers and guitar players’ distinct, thundering riffs (or lack thereof). Thirdface aren’t interested in continuing that tradition. On their debut album, Do It With a Smile, the Nashville-based hardcore punk band—comprised of vocalist Kathryn Edwards, bassist Maddy Madeira, guitarist David Reichley, and drummer Shibby Poole—refocus on hardcore as a collective action, bringing it from the idealized cultural imagination into the tangible present. The result is an intense, rapid-fire call to arms that inspires even the most acquiescent listeners to take action.
Thirdface prioritize melodic clarity in their songs in a way that brings to mind the creative fury of Los Angeles hardcore group Dangers or the exhilarating build-ups of Modern Life Is War, but whereas those peers do so in a way that embraces hooks, Thirdface opt for shape-shifting guitar passages more akin to Converge or Drowningman. In 22 minutes, they use this sound to tackle covert racism and clout-chasing men while invoking cultural touchstones like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Black westerns, and Fist of the North Star. On “Ally,” Edwards mocks those who misunderstand the point of racial support (“I read all the books/Where is my medal?”) and on “Chosen,” calls out institutionalized practices that uphold misogyny.
These themes aren't just armchair criticisms. Outside of the band, Edwards strives to bring her ethical beliefs to life through Drkmttr, an all-ages music venue she co-founded in East Nashville. Dubbed “the center of the city’s growing indie, punk, and hardcore scenes” by Rolling Stone, Drkmttr transformed over the past year from a DIY club into a community hub championed by the likes of Soccer Mommy and Hayley Williams for its involvement in grassroots activism, mutual aid work, and voter education. When Edwards screams about frail allyship and wage suppression in Thirdface, she’s doing so with the type of well-versed speech that comes from someone who does the work and then questions how to improve upon it. In a way, it’s like a modern-day version of The Lumpen, the funk band started by the Black Panthers after realizing that youth meal programs, community health clinics, and police accountability wouldn’t revolutionize the fight for racial equality without simultaneously spreading the word.
If Thirdface use music to advocate for change, then “Villains!” is undoubtedly their opus. Clocking in at three minutes, it’s a lengthy screed compared to the rest of Do It With a Smile’s songs, and Thirdface wisely divide it into sections: an introduction guided by Madeira’s guttural bass, a punk speedrun dominated by Poole’s maniacal drumming, and a metalcore-tinged breakdown that alternates between head-banging riffs and dexterous triplets. Throughout, Edwards rails against the exploitation of low-wage slavery with vein-bursting barks meant to provoke a communal uprising. “We could put their backs against the wall/Keep us all divided, fighting over pennies,” she screams. “Back into it now/You have no choice/Do it with a smile.” It’s a rousing poem set to an inspired blend of subgenres, and the combination epitomizes hardcore punk at its best.
Do It With a Smile captures the feeling of a live band battling for the audience’s attention. Thirdface forgo screeching feedback or the crackling hum of an amp to instead employ graceful transitions between songs, like using bass drum kicks to segue from a claustrophobic burst of power violence in “Legendary Suffering” into the open-air breakdowns of “No Requiem For The Wicked.” With the exception of a lone ambient interlude, it’s an unrelenting album meant to purge listeners of their indifference towards the struggles occurring around them. As with all great orators, Edwards knows that making a lasting impression comes down to what you say and how you say it. On Do It With a Smile, she handles both with the ease of a veteran speaker helming a rally. “Blood/On our children/Blood/On my people,” she shouts on “Buck” before her bandmates join in a communal warning cry: “Tonight we ride the fuck out.”

Buy: Rough Trade
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Following on the success of the novelty song "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell", Das Racist return with a smart, funny, and engaging mixtape.

Shut Up, Dude

When you first heard "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell", did you wonder what a full-length Das Racist album would sound like? Did you even think they were capable of an album at all? Maybe you expected a whole mixtape filled with bewildered yelling about name brands on some postmodern Fatboy Slim shit, or one of those hipster-rap records filled with a bunch of half-serious post-crunk/booty bass homages. But if you were a bit more curious, maybe you went to their MySpace page and heard the elaborate reference-fest "Rainbow in the Dark" and a deconstruction of co-opted dancehall dialect called "Fake Patois" and caught on to something deeper. Maybe you started wondering if they were a bit less trivial than you suspected.
As it turns out, "Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell" has as much to do with the whole of Shut Up, Dude as the Beastie Boys' "Cooky Puss" does to the referential overload of Paul's Boutique. Das Racist's Brooklyn-buzz affiliations and humorous bent might mislead you into thinking it's an exercise in cheap laffs for people who don't take rap seriously, but this album feels a lot more like the irreverent hip-hop fanboy mania of ego trip magazine than smarmy genre tourism.
Himanshu Kumar Suri aka "Heems" and Victor Vazquez have something elaborate going on, toying with and subverting the rules of hip-hop lyricism even as they pay them respect. "Who's That? Brooown!" uses A Tribe Called Quest's well-worn "Scenario" as a reference point, but Heems mutters his callbacks to Busta Rhymes' verse in a sleepily cocky voice that sounds like the exact opposite of Busta's off-the-charts energy. The repetition and recursiveness that made "Combination" so polarizing crop up in odd places; one otherwise-complex line in "Ek Shaneesh" simply ends "drinkin' beer, drinkin' beer/ prolly drinkin' some more beer" before teasing an obvious Tears for Fears-referencing internal rhyme that never actually comes. Familiar hit-sourced hooks are self-sabotaged with trailed-off mumbling (the Juelz Santana-sourced, Billy Joel-jacking "You Oughta Know"), the spiritual presence of Bob Marley is called into the not-so-lofty service of soundtracking their tribute to dollar cans of iced tea, and they actually named one of their tracks "Deep Ass Shit (You'll Get It When You're High)" as a rib-jabbing mission statement. (No points in guessing which prolific Oxnard-based underground producer gets his beat used for that one.)
If they were just fucking around, those gags would wear off and leave you with nothing but a series of smug hey-get-it? nudges. But Heems and Victor are serious enough about coming up with memorable lines that they come across like some kind of lyrical stealth operatives. The fact that they often go from water-treading repetition to intricately built phraseology mid-verse is a great riff in itself. One of the shortest and simplest lines on the album is one of the cleverest-- "W.E.B. DuBois/ We be da boys," from "Hugo Chavez"-- but there are also moments where you're left wondering how they could make so many unexpected linguistic connections look so easy. Their go-hard rampage on "Nutmeg" is 1990s-reared, cipher-honed style gone berserk, turning a funhouse mirror on Ghostface's finest moment of abstract pyrotechnics, as it starts with the unlikely couplet "Queens Boulevard/ Kierkegaard" and gets even more dizzyingly ridiculous from there.
Granted, there's a certain information-overload college-student bent to their humor, evident in cross-genre namedrops like "Richard Hell Rell" or the mentions of Tao Lin and "and Dinesh DiSouza. But Das Racist push past mere signifying to come across as straight-up literates with a way of making cultural studies out of entertainment and vice-versa. Several lyrics take offhand references to Bollywood stars and Cuban sandwiches and extrapolate stream-of-consciousness ethnographies out of them, while "Shorty Said (Gordon Voidwell Remix)" draws out punchlines and commentary about identification by listing all the racially divergent celebrities that women supposedly claim Victor and Heems resemble (Egyptian Lover; Amitabh Bachchan; Slash without his hat). Das Racist approach this idea of otherness in a way that feels both playful and provocative, asserting their identities in a way that both reinforces their individuality and goofs on their stereotypes. And if it hits a certain nerve, it's probably the same one that got tweaked by the sociological b-boy stoner comedy precedent of "Chappelle's Show". Fast-food hipster-rap, my ass-- these dudes are the truth.


While indie rock icons Guided by Voices' recent albums—five in two years—have by no means tarnished their legacy, they haven’t exactly expanded upon it either. So it goes with Motivational Jumpsuit, though it's the shortest and strongest of the recent batch.

Motivational Jumpsuit

From the Pixies to Pavement to Neutral Milk Hotel, the most notable indie-rock reunions have transformed merely influential bands into actually successful ones who can headline large theatres and festivals for audiences five times the size of the ones they entertained in their former lives. But the success of the rebooted “classic” Guided by Voices line-up of 1992-96 can be measured not by ticket sales (they’re pretty much playing the same sized venues Robert Pollard frequented before he first deep-sixed GBV in 2004) but stamina. Not only have they channelled their 2011-tour momentum into making new records, their current rate of production makes their industrious 90s incarnation seem lazy, as if Pollard needed to maintain his reputation for being crazy-prolific even by the standards of our current, hyper-accelerated musical culture. And now that the initial reunion buzz has subsided, Guided by Voices essentially find themselves in the same position they were in 20 years ago, before 1994’s Bee Thousand turned them into national authorities on Tascams and tape hiss. Long removed from their moment as a major-label-courted leading light on the Matador Records roster, Guided by Voices once again resemble a Dayton secret society that self-releases records how they want and when they want, impervious to prevailing trends, industry promotional timetables, and concerns over whether a song comprising just a single verse and half a chorus is a song at all.
Of course, the big difference this time out is that the classic GBV line-up has several classic albums under their belts to live up to, and though their recent albums have by no means tarnished their legacy, they haven’t exactly expanded upon it either. And so it goes with Motivational Jumpsuit, which, for those keeping score, is the band’s sixth release in two years. While each of the post-reunion records may lean more heavily on a specific aspect of GBV’s psychedelic/pop/prog/post-punk amalgam (Let’s Eat the Factory is the weirdest of the bunch; English Little League is the one overstuffed with ballads; and so forth), they’ve all yielded a killer-to-filler ratio that’s respectfully above average but not exceptional enough to truly distinguish them amid the band’s sprawling discography. But while the “classic line-up” billing technically no longer applies from hereon out, the shake-up suggests that GBV will remain a going concern for the foreseeable future, reinforcing the idea that Guided by Voices is not a particular group of players, but whoever the hell Bob Pollard says it is.
As much as Pollard’s songbook has historically drawn from the former school teacher’s daydream fantasia of elves, demons, and robots, many of his signature tracks also function as the allegorical, self-aware musings of an accidental rock star cast out of the garage and onto the treacherous terrain of the music industry—the lost soul who shoots himself on rock ‘n’ roll trying to navigate a game of pricks. And so it’s safe to assume that Motivational Jumpsuit’s excitable opener—“Littlest League Possible"—isn’t about baseball at all, but rather the cheeky musings of a former major-label contender who’s happy to be back among his cult. (“To be the biggest fish in the smallest pond/ On the littlest island where I shall reside.”) That enthusiasm proves infectious—packing 20 songs into 37 minutes, Motivational Jumpsuit is the shortest LP amid GBV’s recent avalanche of albums. But, most importantly, it’s also the most briskly paced of the bunch, reaching Alien Lanes-levels of expediency in its peaks: “Planet Score” replays “Game of Pricks”; “Difficult Outburst and Breakthroughs” gets close to “Closer You Are”; and the charming “Vote for Me Dummy” cruises down the same open interstate as “Motor Away.” And where most GBV records don’t so much stage grand finales as simply peter out once the song tap is turned off, “Alex and the Omegas” is the rare exception that feels like it was designed as both a record and show closer, an amplified-to-rock charge that doubles as a victory lap.
But even as Motivational Jumpsuit faithfully approximates the grainy fidelity and 60-second dosages of Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes, it can’t maintain the same dizzying standards of pop euphoria throughout. Those records may have had their share of tossed-off tracks, but they were usually deployed as brief, absurdist interludes connecting key songs. On Motivational Jumpsuit, however, the most undercooked songs are often the longest, with the keyboard-jabbed psychedelic sludge of “I Am Columbus” and the jack-hammered meta-jokes of “Writer’s Bloc (Psycho All the Time)” encroaching on the three-minute mark without really earning the right to stick around that long. And though Pollard’s long-time foil Tobin Sprout dutifully turns up to provide his George Harrison/John Entwistle-scaled songwriting rations, his contributions are inconsistent, ranging from the radiant, Clean-style motorik jangle of “Record Level Love” to the workmanlike T. Rex-ian rumble of “Jupiter Spin” to the overwrought balladry of “Some Things Are Big and Some Things Are Small,” whose melodramatic chorus delivery feels at odds with the matter-of-fact titular lyric. Of course, by this point in the current campaign, GBV fans know that finding the gold will take a little more digging than before. Motivational Jumpsuit does have this going for it: If there is to ever be a greatest-hits compilation culled from this modern GBV era—and I’m willing to bet a fervent rockologist like Pollard has already thought up the name and cut up some old Sears catalogue images for the cover art—Motivational Jumpsuit is the frontrunner to have the greatest representation.
[Editor's note: This original version of this review incorrectly stated that Kevin March played drums.]


Chief Keef's Nobody, his long-awaited sophomore album, finds him experimenting and steering clear from his conventional hits.

Nobody

The anthropomorphic cartoon moon is in the seventh house, and Glo Gang has entered its Age of Aquarius. The evidence is all there on Chief Keef’s Instagram which, in recent months, has been filled with dozens of commissioned and original works of art. They’re mostly portraits of himself and his friends, in varying degrees of trippiness. Often, they’re depicted (by what seems to be Glo Gang’s in-house artist, a silver-bearded Angeleno called Bill Da Butcher) as members of a cheery cartoon solar system; Blood Money, Keef’s cousin and the Gang’s eldest member, who was shot and killed in Chicago last spring, is memorialized as a tattooed moon with angel wings. There’s a collage of Keef as a Viking skeleton holding America in a cage (he calls it "Americun Shakedown"); a sketch of a dread-headed Mount Rushmore; a triptych depicting a G-rated Keef engaging in water sports. Last month, Keef helped curate a gallery show in collaboration with media company FRANK151, to which he also contributed original artwork. He’s turned his Los Angeles home into his own private museum, obsessing over the minutia of presentation ("Trying to see if I should keep what’s up up?")—this from the guy whose preferred mode of self-expression, not so long ago, was "Emojis".
Then again, Keef’s thorough immersion in his own universe of aesthetics echoes his musical agenda since the release of his divisive major label debut two years ago. Since then, the Chicago ex-pat has refused to be understood on any terms other than his own, rejecting anything remotely resembling his 2012 crossover hits in favor of abstraction and obscurity. He drowned the crowd-pleasing hooks of Finally Rich in Auto-Tune and promethazine (he’s blamed critically panned 2013 mixtapes Bang 2 and Almighty So on the latter) and probed the outer limits of vocal performance. Yips, skrrrrts, and gurgles took the place of coherent language. He became obsessed with making beats, an entirely non-verbal mode of expression; on October's brooding, distorted Back From the Dead 2 tape, released a week after the announcement that Keef was dropped from Interscope, he produced 16 of its 20 tracks. Nobody, his long-awaited sophomore album, released suddenly and without much fanfare, is similarly experimental, and equally devoid of any conventional hits. But where Keef’s spent the last two years attempting to hide in plain sight, stubbornly obfuscating his own thoughts to compensate for his discomfort in the spotlight, Nobody is, at its best, strikingly lucid. Maybe his recent passion for visual art has rekindled an interest in direct expression. Maybe he’s just growing up.
Finally Rich, as an album title, was aspirational as much as it was declarative, harnessing the laws of attraction to will fortune into existence. Nobody is a similar statement of purpose, but this time, the goal is to disappear. It’s not hard to understand Keef’s preoccupation with obscurity. Thrust into the public eye in 2012, he became a stand-in for Chicago’s ills more than an artist in his own right. His music had always been characterized by themes of loyalty and betrayal (trust only your inner circle—the rest are dangerous); hysterical media attention only reinforced that. If you’re going to be misunderstood anyway, why not ensure it? Equal parts knee-jerk trolling (he’s still a teenager) and defense mechanism, he hurtled towards oblivion, in what looked a lot like a downward spiral.
Nobody, much like BFTD2, is a dispatch from this void. But BFTD2 functioned as a submersion into his new aesthetic, more concerned with style than meaning; it narrowed in on weird grooves, unorthodox rhyme patterns, mood over everything. Almost in spite of its mission statement, Nobody is sharper, clearer, and more purposeful. It’s a neat 12 tracks, some of them less than two minutes long, executive produced by Glo Gang’s 12 Million. A handful feel more like sketches than completed works. But its high points have a clarity unmatched within Keef’s last two years of work; at times, he’s straight up vulnerable. He may not be coming back to earth any time soon, but he’s looking his audience in the eyes.
Keef’s lyricism has gotten slyer. His wit seems sharper; sometimes he cracks subtle jokes at his own expense. On "Pit Stop", an album cut on par with any of Finally Rich’s, he quips, "Watch out, I’m 18 and I’m driving fast!" In the context of his public traffic arrests (in 2013, pulled over for driving 110 in a 55, he told police, "Well, it’s a fast car, that’s why I bought it"), it’s the equivalent of Taylor Swift winkingly acknowledging her reputation as a crazy girlfriend on "Blank Space". "Twelve Bars"—a hypnotic burst of chimes that, like much of Nobody, is a closer descendent of cloudy cult favorite "Citgo" than anything else on Finally Rich—is a play on the drill canon as much as it is an exercise in wordplay. It nods to the drill canon, only to subvert it with novelty bars like, "Driving 12 cars at one time!"
But on "Hard", one of the album’s two emotional cornerstones, Keef goes beyond crafty in-jokes and bares his soul. Over a beat somewhere between 40’s sulky symphonics circa Nothing Was the Same and the wispy New Age chirps of Lil B’s Rain in England, Keef delivers two of his most vulnerable verses to date (along with some pretty impressive bar-for-bar lyricism). "She don’t accept me, but she speak to my watch/ She won’t look at me, but she see I go hard," he sings, honing in on the romantic insecurities that have emerged in Keef’s work for years now, from 2012’s "Save That Shit" to 2014’s "No". He shrugs at his success, recognizing it as more of a burden than a blessing—everything’s pointless anyway. "Money ain’t that much, I’ll give it up... Life ain’t that much, I’ll live it up." He’s at once proud of his ability to support his people and wary of being used: "Everybody eat, I’ll bill it up/ Baby I’ll keep my mouth closed, I’ll seal it up." Even its title references the unflinching ubermasculinity that characterizes drill and its proponents, and beyond that, the temperament expected of black men from a young age. In early interviews, Keef claimed to be 16 going on 300; he’d long since been a man, but in many ways remained immature. These days, he’s just a world-weary 19.
It’s Nobody’s title track, though, that gives the sharpest insights as to where Keef’s at these days. Initially teased on Instagram last summer, with its Kanye West feature and threadbare Willie Hutch sample, "Nobody" hinted at a return to the old, coherent Keef. Instead, it’s as sonically inscrutable as ever. The snares are decidedly off. Kanye’s contributions don’t go too far beyond that 15-second clip. Listeners wondered if there’d been some mistake, if the track was unfinished, if Kanye had signed off on this at all. It doesn’t matter: "Nobody" isn’t about Kanye, it’s about Keef at his rawest and most honest. "They thought I was a joke," he burbles with a melancholy that suggests he reads the comments. It’s Keef’s most clear-eyed dispatch yet from the void into which he’s hurtled himself. "I can’t fear nobody… I can’t hear nobody… I can’t see nobody," he mewls, almost giddy with loneliness as he watches his surroundings fade to black, romancing the abyss. Things aren’t perfect, but they’re better than the alternative. It was awfully dreary, anyway—being Somebody.


Former Harry Pussy guitarist returns from a decade-long hiatus with a set of acoustic improvisations that recalls the best of his electric guitar work.

A New Way to Pay Old Debts

It's always impressive when artists make radical shifts without losing any of the intangible qualities that make their approach recognizable. What's more remarkable about Bill Orcutt's stylistic transformation is that it comes after a decade of dormancy. His inimitable electric guitar sound-- a brittle howl akin to knives breaking glass-- was silenced by the late-1990s demise of his notorious noise trio, Harry Pussy. But in 2009, after starting a family and a career, he picked up an old acoustic he's owned since college and channeled his muse into raw improvisations equally indebted to blues legends like Lightnin' Hopkins and abstract experimenters like Derek Bailey.
Those might not be the first names that come to mind when you hear the word "noise." But on two self-released 2009 records-- a two-song 7" and a six-song LP, both packaged here by Editions Mego with four unreleased tracks-- Orcutt uses such inspirations to create acoustic cacophony that retains all the trademark rattles and blasts of his electric playing. That's partially due to his instrument, a vintage acoustic so fragile that its four strings have to be wound loose or the neck will break. This gives the guitar a brittle, steely quality that Orcutt mines for all kinds of racket.
But there's also noise inherent in his methods-- his way of attacking and diving into his ideas-- which has been there since he first started playing. As he told me in a recent "Out Door" interview, "Once I actually have a guitar in my hands, I think I disappear into the same black hole that I was disappearing into when I was 15." On A New Way to Pay Old Debts, he rips out sharp plucks, strums in blurry bursts, and strangles his strings as if they were a threat. His playing is so urgent and exhaustive, you get the sense that he could coax blare from a feather.
Not that everything here is noise. Orcutt mixes in minimalist repetitions and quieter passages, owing as much to pianists Glenn Gould and Cecil Taylor as to his guitar forefathers. He also adds atmospheric textures (you can hear a phone ring on opener "Lip Rich") and wordless singing, similar to Loren Connors' hums and moans on his early acoustic records. When Orcutt barks in time to his buzzing chops on "My Reckless Parts" or melds his shriek into "High Waisted", he sounds roughly like Connors sped up and set on fire.
Which means this album is a challenging listen, even when it's not noisy. If you're not inclined toward acoustic improvisation or unstructured abstraction, Orcutt won't change your mind. But anyone can admire the raw soul of his playing and the way he shoots out ideas in real-time, reacting so quickly it's as if he's creating a new language as he speaks it. Either way, it's impossible to listen to A New Way to Pay Old Debts without being affected by it.


Youth Lagoon follows his heartfelt 2011 debut The Year of Hibernation with an album that is bigger, bolder, and more emotionally resonant, thanks to production from Ben Allen. Trevor Powers' project is firmly in the lineage of bands like Mercury Rev, Sparklehorse, and Modest Mouse.

Wondrous Bughouse

Trevor Powers doesn't come off as older and wiser than his 23 years: just look at any picture of him, with his slight build and cherubic mop of curls, or take one listen to his nasal, keening voice. Likewise, his heartfelt 2011 debut The Year of Hibernation dealt more in truth and honesty than profundity or authority, skirting cliché while affecting people in meaningful ways. These qualities are about the only things that haven't changed for Youth Lagoon on Wondrous Bughouse. This record broadens Powers' musical and lyrical scope into something universal in a literal and figurative sense, evoking the cosmos, heaven, and hell. But Powers sounds curious and awestruck rather than naïve, someone who explores this lush and frightening soundworld instead of explaining it.
The cosmetic changes are obvious. If you've been paying attention to sonics over the past couple of years, you'll recognize the saturated, bottom-heavy production as that of Ben H. Allen. After hearing Allen give a subwoofer shape-up to previously brittle bands like Deerhunter, Animal Collective, and Washed Out, the pairing seems almost inevitable. But while the production is an upgrade, the real growth is thematic. Hibernation obsessed over escape and became defined by its limitations, whether it was its meager recording budget or just the sense that Powers felt trapped by his surroundings in Boise. But Bughouse looks inward and discovers the endless possibilities of imagination and introspection.
Youth Lagoon is still very much an internally-focused project and, with its abundance of effect pedals and stereo panning tricks, Wondrous Bughouse will likely be branded as a headphones album. Don't believe it. As with Hibernation, this is a record that's meant to be cranked as loud as possible; for one, volume decompresses these thick songs, amplifying the crucial addition of live drums on "Raspberry Cane" and "Mute". More importantly, Wondrous Bughouse needs room to breathe from a songwriting standpoint. With Powers' lyrics and Allen's production striving to create a celestial whole, Bughouse is meant to conjure infinite space.
This much is conveyed by the sonar blips that take up the three-minute opener "Through Mind and Back" before fading into the spellbinding "Mute". Nearly every song on Hibernation began quietly, so it's jarring to hear Youth Lagoon take a more widescreen turn-- echoing drums, gleaming peals of delayed guitar, all washed by ocean spray reverb. This lasts for one minute before a detuned loop of bells recasts "Mute" as a juggernaut, a steady, booming drum beat framing a strident vocal performance from Powers, a guitar solo that recalls Doug Martsch's expressive, longing leads, a minor-key piano loop that appears ready to take the song to a completely different plateau before cruelly cutting out.
These songs are all bigger and bolder without being unnecessarily complicated. While Powers' melodies are simple and immediately memorable like nursery rhymes, everything surrounding him is in flux. The songs on Wondrous Bughouse are continually subjected to flange and phase effects, and it's not the gentle, headswimming "whoosh" that typified recent records such as Lonerism or mbv. The cranked oscillation gives these songs a proper sense of danger and hyper-alertness. The combination of the processing and Powers' devious lyrics ("'I won't die easily'/ That's what they say when I erupt into laughter") gives the calliope-like melody of "Attic Doctor" a fitting, monstrous overtone. The synth progression that emerges during the anthropomorphic grotesquerie "Pelican Man" would be a perfect evocation of Elephant 6's Beatles obsession, but the pulsing modulations turn into something closer to slasher-flick fare.
It's often scary stuff, more reminiscent of Syd Barrett's bad-trip fairy tales. Though Powers isn't dealing with death in a manner that conveys gravitas or experience, Wondrous Bughouse is very much about mortality, albeit filtered through surrealism, parable, and metaphor. Rather than a simple longing for the past, Powers feels obsessed with human frailty and decay. Similarly, the songs of Bughouse aren't subject to tangents so much as following a dream logic working where any thought, regardless of how awesome or fearsome it is, doesn't end until it reaches a conclusion it sees fit.
Powers' choice to write most of these fanciful flights in waltz time gives everything a properly anachronistic feel. The hopscotch melody on "Dropla" makes it sound like a playground chant and the lyrics see its narrator dealing with death in a selfish, forgivably childlike way, hanging on to faint hope ("you'll never die, you'll never die") and lashing out when the prayers go unanswered ("you weren't there when I needed"). Between the threatening taunts of "Attic Doctor", we hear vast stretches of music for the Peanuts gang to ice skate to: "Third Dystopia" refracts a sea shanty through multiple funhouse mirrors; the submerged second half of "The Bath" places Powers somewhere between a baptism and a drowning. On "Raspberry Cane", Powers sees himself as irredeemable ("I'm polluted by my blood/ So help me cut it out and rinse it down the drain") and while closer "Daisyphobia" views humanity as "mortals on the run" from an all-seeing God, Wondrous Bughouse slinks towards an disturbing and unresolved conclusion, a slow fade of distant synth whinnies and stumbling, inexact beats.
Though unnerving, it is familiar, albeit in a style of indie rock that was prominent when Powers was, by his own admission, listening to Bad Boy records Allen might've played a part in. Think of the Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev, Grandaddy, Sparklehorse, Modest Mouse, Built To Spill, all bands who in some way combined a projected naivety with grand designs: adolescent vocals picking at metaphysical mysteries, an insatiable curiosity with the capabilities of the studio. But Youth Lagoon is also a spiritual progeny in terms of geography. All these bands emerged far from media centers-- Oklahoma City, upstate New York, Modesto, central Virginia, Issaquah, Wash., and of course, Powers' own Boise. Listeners often try to discern something special about creating art in places like these, whether the scarcity of live shows and bands makes music more important or a lack of urban stimuli allows for deeper meditation on the big picture. Though the songs themselves are wonderful, that's the powerful source Powers taps into here: if you feel like the dark center of the universe or simply need a little space, Wondrous Bughouse obliges.


One of indie pop's most promising bands navigates the tension between its populist and insular tendencies on its sure-to-break-out LP.

The Drums

As the Drums' recent appearance on Friday Night With Jonathan Ross suggests, frontman Jonathan Pierce is not a man who is concerned with looking cool. Bearing a passing resemblance to Ralph Macchio's Karate Kid nemesis William Zabka, Pierce prances and preens through a performance of recent single "Best Friend" in a series of stilted robot dance moves, sweeping game-show-host hand gestures, and bug-eyed facial expressions, while delivering the arch, Morrissey-worthy lyrics ("You were my best friend/ But then you died") in a hammy, lounge-singer baritone. But then, given Pierce's track record, it's not surprising he has a healthy appreciation for the absurd; this is a man, after all, who called his old band Goat Explosion.
In 2005, Goat Explosion-- also featuring future Drums co-founder Jacob Graham-- changed its name to the somewhat less ridiculous Elkland and were snapped up by Columbia Records during the post-Franz Ferdinand/Killers major-label rush to sign any new wave-inspired band with swooping-fringe haircuts. However, the failure of Elkland's glossy, stadium-sized synth-pop to connect with the masses would seemingly account for the Drums' more modest, minimalist reinterpretation-- and reinvigoration-- of the same 80s mope-pop inspirations (New Order, the Cure, the Smiths, Orange Juice), one that's more likely to ingratiate itself to fans of the Labrador and Sincerely Yours rosters than KROQ programmers.
It says a lot about the Drums' confidence that they've left two of their best (and best-loved) early songs, "I Felt Stupid" and "Submarine", off of their full-length debut-- and they're not entirely missed either. (The band did retain its biggest blog hit-- "Let's Go Surfing", a cheeky retort to the recent blissed-out, beach-crazy strain in indie pop.) However, other songs that try to build upon the "Stupid" template-- accelerated click-track drum beats, one-string Barney Sumner guitar riffs, and woe-is-me verses that lead to cloud-parting choruses-- don't always improve on it, with the cutting observations of "Me and the Moon" ("you still sleep with your back to me") overshadowed by the annoying shout of "eeyoh!" that punctuates each chorus run. And there are times when Pierce's outsized persona meshes awkwardly with his band's understated approach, like when he uses the stark arrangement of 50s-throwback ballad "Down By the Water" as an excuse to test out his back-of-the-arena wail.
More so than their well-curated influences, it's this tension-- between the band's populist and insular tendencies-- that most defines the Drums at this point in their career. Conventional wisdom dictates that the Drums will simply follow the New Order evolutionary path toward writing big-tent festival anthems (a future prophesied by the anthemic, widescreen synth-pop of "Forever and Ever Amen"). But there is just as much evidence to suggest-- particularly in the album's less exuberant but more revelatory second half-- that the band this band truly excels in more intimate spaces, like the affectingly desolate motorik pop of "I Need Fun in My Life" and the wonderful "I'll Never Drop My Sword", a winsome, jangly ode to perseverance featuring an appealingly effete vocal that Pierce should adopt more often. No surprise then that the suggestively titled closer "The Future" provides little indication of what it holds for the Drums: Pierce's chesty bellow sees him prepping himself for a lifetime of camera-mugging late-night talk-show appearances, but the symphony of glockenspiels ringing throughout the song projects an air of snow-globe serenity, and of a band that's eager to insulate itself from external hype and pressures.
Like the Strokes, another fast-rising band of pretty-boy New Yorkers, the Drums have successfully answered the challenge of parlaying buzz-generating singles into an album that's well stocked with instantly appealing pop songs. Unlike the Strokes, however, the Drums lack a certain element of surprise-- they so faithfully adhere to 80s post-punk and new pop influences even after a decade where those sources have been thoroughly milked. But then that could ultimately be to the Drums' benefit-- in that they're so behind the curve, they're practically ahead of a new one.


A warm and even-keeled collection of ballads, this is James Blake’s most traditional album, but it offers little in the way of emotional insight.

James Blake: Friends That Break Your Heart

Friends That Break Your Heart

James Blake’s songs were once so fragmentary, so structurally disrupted, that when he even gestured at conventional song structure, it was show-stopping. This was the trick of his early records: lulling a listener through a rush of clicks, whirrs, and sub-bass before going in for the kill with a gut punch like “Limit to Your Love” or “Meet You in the Maze.” It’s this tension that brought him renown, notably among artists like Beyoncé and Frank Ocean, pop stars seeking to invert Blake’s formula by suffusing their own music with his atmospheric touch. It has also brought its fair share of criticism from detractors who equate his dogged evocation of a single mood with monotony.
Blake’s last record, 2019’s Assume Form, was all fragments, no show-stoppers: Working with vibe-first artists like Travis Scott and Metro Boomin, and trimming back the jagged spontaneity that brought electricity to his earlier records, the album tended to get lost in itself. Its moments of ingenuity were overshadowed by monochromatic production and occasionally platitudinal lyrics that suggested a kind of self-interrogation: “I will assume form/I’ll leave the ether,” he sang on the title track, “I will be reachable.”
Friends That Break Your Heart, Blake’s follow-up, seems to apply that vow from “Assume Form.” Lighter and more straightforward, it feels like Blake’s most traditional album: a collection of ultra-linear, lyrics-first ballads that are plaintive and softly beautiful. Seemingly drawing inspiration from the folk songwriters who influence the edges of his work—the early songs of his friend and past collaborator Moses Sumney come to mind—it brings warmth and texture to music previously slicked with a cool varnish. It’s touchable, reachable, and even kind of relatable, its lyrics now doing as much emotional heavy lifting as Blake’s reedy falsetto.
Coming from Blake, a collection of songs that travel from point A to point B without detours is actually something of a departure. On the title track, he sings without vocal processing over gently-picked acoustic guitar and Mellotron whirr. The sparse arrangement makes room for a mournful vocal performance that carries none of his usual warble. As is the case for many of these songs, he’s singing about losing friends with a twinge of bitterness in every word. “As many loves that have crossed my path,” he sings, “In the end it was friends/It was friends who broke my heart.” He sounds exhausted but resigned to his fate; although there’s a simplicity to these lyrics, their directness is stark in comparison to the rest of Blake’s catalog.
The new straightforwardness, though, exposes a weakness in Blake’s lyrics: a tendency toward emotional neutrality, no matter the context. On “Friends That Break Your Heart,” he sings with the remove of hindsight; his venting in “Foot Forward,” is couched by admitting, “But it’s not that bad.” The closing “If I’m Insecure” opens on a note of uncertainty—“If this is what we always wanted, how’s the signal so weak?”—but true love saves the day in the end. Even if these are some of Blake’s prettiest, most direct songs, they offer little in the way of emotional insight.
While the lyrics lack tension, there is new warmth and levity to the music. “Coming Back,” a collaboration with SZA, opens with bright piano chords that flutter like butterfly wings; a looped piano sample on “Foot Forward,” co-produced with Metro Boomin and Frank Dukes, creates a mid-tempo groove that Blake rides playfully. His use of repetition is in service of rhythm and forward motion, not to create an atmosphere of anxiety. Over these backdrops, Blake sounds so plainly at ease that you’re inclined to take him at his word in moments like “Say What You Will,” the most arresting song here, when he writes about his growing distant from pop’s center: “I’m OK with the life of the sunflower,” he sings. “And I’m OK with the life of a meteor shower.”
These even-keeled observations mark a noted improvement on the self-seriousness of Assume Form, even if it causes the record to fade from memory in a way that his more resonant work never did. Still, this breezy quality is partially by design: “I do genuinely want to make music for people who are just sitting by the swimming pool,” he recently confessed. Even if the music remains more ambitious than that aspiration, perhaps the most groundbreaking thing about Friends That Break Your Heart is that James Blake has never sounded so safe.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we revisit the Ohio new wave band’s 1982 debut, an arch yet sincere sendup of humdrum modern life.

The Waitresses: Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful?

Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful?

Chris Butler hadn’t actually formed the Waitresses when Village Voice columnist Robert Christgau came to watch them play a showcase of local bands in Akron, Ohio. It was 1978, and Butler had been mailing Christgau every issue of his self-published art zine Blank purely out of admiration. Within a month, he got a call from the New York rock critic, who was eager to report on the Akron scene chronicled in its pages. Butler scampered around, secured dingy dive bar JB’s as a venue, enlisted the Bizarros, Chi Pig, and Tin Huey to pad out the lineup, and “spent a feverish two weeks trying to locate every piece of PA in the area,” as he recalled in Sounds magazine a few years later.
The Waitresses were also on the bill at JB’s, even though they weren’t much more than an elaborate practical joke. The bit dated back to 1977, when one night Butler and his friend Liam Sternberg, a songwriter and producer, were kvetching about commercial pop over diner coffee and pineapple upside-down cake. At the time, Devo were the reigning artistic force in Akron, attracting curious, twitching eyes to a city best known for rubber and tire production. Butler, who was playing in experimental blues outfit the Numbers Band and had attended Kent State University around the same time as Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale, was feeling the pangs of DIY ambition. As the cartoonish local legend goes, he looked around the restaurant and declared that he should just start a band called… the Waitresses.
Butler put the Waitresses’ name to wax for the first time some point between ’77 and ’78, when he cut the In “Short Stack” 7" for Akron indie label Clone. Side A was “Slide,” a jangly bit of blues rock reminiscent of Lou Reed and T. Rex. Side B was stamped with a Devo knockoff called “Clones,” complete with warbling robot vocals and lyrics like, “We are not men/We’re just clones.” On the record’s back sleeve, an androgynous figure sports a T-shirt emblazoned with Butler’s prank promotional slogan: “Waitresses Unite.” The schtick was slowly becoming a reality.
In the summer of ’78, the UK pub-rock imprint Stiff released a sampler called The Akron Compilation, which originated when Mothersbaugh dragged label co-founder Dave Robinson into a basement to pitch him on some homegrown bands. The 14-track LP included cuts by bands like Tin Huey, the Bizarros, Rubber City Rebels, Sniper, Idiots Convention, and Chi Pig; the insert was printed with images of local factories, and topped with a scratch-and-sniff sticker that smelled like a tire. Robinson thought he’d discovered the Liverpool of the late ’70s.
Butler offered up “Slide” and “Clones” for the Akron Compilation tracklist, but it was “The Comb,” a strutting rock track about ditching guys who won’t dance, that solidified the Waitresses’ sound. Relinquishing the microphone, Butler enlisted singer Patty Donahue, a Kent State student and an actual waitress; in a span of six years, she’d worked at joints like the Colosseum, Parasson’s, and the Brown Derby. Butler too had paid his dues waiting tables, once joking on daytime television that his foray into music was merely a ploy to “get out of the restaurant business.”
As he recalled in the 1990 liner notes to The Best of the Waitresses, Butler met Donahue in a bar when he was scouting someone to track vocals. “I stand on a chair and bang a beer bottle for attention and declare: ‘I need a chanteuse to coo a tune,’” he wrote.” When he asked the packed room of “liquid lunchers” if anyone was interested in the job, a voice in the back let out a deadpan “uh-huh.” It was Donahue—the lanky, blasé, chain-smoking leading lady who would act out Butler’s mundane vignettes for the next six years.
While frantically planning the concert at JB’s, Butler had also managed to learn most of Tin Huey’s repertoire, kicking off his brief tenure in the group. Toward the end of Tin Huey’s set, Butler—wearing his “Waitresses Unite” T-shirt—called Donahue to the stage to sing “The Comb,” marking the Waitresses’ semi-official live debut. For most of the audience, this group of new wave art punks seemingly sprouted onstage. But the band wouldn’t really congeal until 1979, when Tin Huey rejected Butler’s idea for a new song called “I Know What Boys Like.” Instead, he brought the tart and sadistic bubblegum tease to Donahue, who played the part expertly, whining and taunting in a vocal style that seemed to predict riot grrrl’s conversational rage. Tin Huey’s loss was the Waitresses’ gain; by spring 1982, “I Know What Boys Like” had climbed to No. 62 on the Billboard Hot 100, the band’s only single ever to crack the chart.
The modest success of “I Know What Boys Like” eventually got the Waitresses signed to Polydor and it undoubtedly propelled sales of their 1982 debut, Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? By that point Butler had joined the wave of Midwesterners—like the Contortions frontman James Chance and saxophonist Ralph Carney—who’d carved a niche in New York’s underground arts scene. To complete the Waitresses, he rounded up keyboardist Dan Klayman, ex-Television drummer Billy Ficca, saxophonist Mars Williams, and bassist Tracy Wormworth. Donahue, who was finishing her degree at Kent State, still lived in Ohio. After she graduated, Butler mailed her 50 bucks for an eastbound bus. By January 1981, the Waitresses were playing at Manhattan’s famed Peppermint Lounge.
Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? is a study in post-punk “hypernormalism,” as Butler put it in an interview with Rolling Stone at the time of its release. “It’s like a photorealistic painting of the reflection of a street in a hubcap,” he said. Reporter David Fricke wrote that Butler “positively reeks of normal,” and that Donahue “is so normal, she recently opened a bank account in New York and is still waiting for her free electric percolator.” Butler’s songwriting wasn’t interested in abstract pretensions either. Rather than writing a breakup song bloated with metaphor, he’d sketch scenes of a couple having a front seat spat over driving directions. Sometimes, he blamed this chronic relatability on being Midwestern.
Each song on Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? is a miniature diorama of daily life, rendered in the highly saturated palette of pop art. Butler, the band’s core songwriter and lyricist, made a spectacle of the ordinary, satirizing office drudgery and detailing the minutiae of romantic squabbles. The gingham tablecloth on the album cover, overlaid with a photo from Donahue’s high school graduation, suggests generic, middle-class America. This checkered, laminated fabric could be at any restaurant, on any street, in any town. It is ubiquitous and unspecial, like so many situations on Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful?
Opener “No Guilt” is a litany of tedious chores elevated to grand achievements: paying the phone bill, fixing the toilet, washing a sweater. The song is set in the wake of a breakup, and Donahue’s shrugged-off delivery sounds like someone who’s hiding from heartache by deep-cleaning their oven. But the bouncing ska arrangement frames each task as a triumph of perseverance. “Every day at seven, I’ve been watching Walter/I’ve been reading more and looking up the hard words,” Donahue recites over skanking guitar and bulbous sax blurts. Her character privately refuses to feel helpless, congratulating herself on escaping “a vicious cycle” with her dignity intact, but Butler’s Ohioan expression of that subtext can be summed up thusly: “I feel better if my laundry’s done.”
The pithy jazz-punk track “Wise Up” swaps the suburban apartment for a drab and purposeless office. The saxophone is sharper, the drums crisper as Donahue relays montages of cubicle life, recites minutes from a business meeting, and acts out scenes from a job interview. It’s a spoof of bureaucratic banality on par with Office Space; no one knows what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, or who’s really in charge. There are looming threats (“We are listening for slip-ups”) and feigned compassion (“We’re concerned about our members”), but the company motto is a command: “There must be order!” A fed-up employee, voiced by Butler, bashes his head against the wall until he reaches a state of Bartleby-like enlightenment: “I know better now,” he sings in chorus with his bandmates. “Won’t do it again.”
As a lyricist, Butler swerved between satire and sincerity. Donahue communicated that paradox brilliantly, sounding at once like your high school best friend and the bratty cheerleader who put a wad of gum in your hair during chemistry class. Some of the Waitresses’ best songs morph from absurdist “hypernormalism” into simple tenets of positivity. If you removed a few key lines, Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? might read like a dystopian critique of yuppie aspiration. But Butler knew that real life is a tad more complex—you do what you can to get by, and relish small moments of contentment. The verses on the closing cut “Jimmy Tomorrow” are spare and bleak, with Donahue griping over muffled voices, brittle guitar, and Wormworth’s rubbery, dextrous bassline. In its initial three-and-a-half minutes, Donahue plays a cynic clinging to a scrap of hope:

There’s nothing left wrong with me
That money can’t cure
But I don’t want to be somebody else’s
Learning experience
Some rich kid’s way to spend his allowance
I want magic in my real world

In the song’s final third, the other Waitresses chime in with a series of existential dilemmas; ever the pragmatist, Donahue offers humble solutions. “Found a cure for daylight yet?” the band goads the frontwoman. “Tom Tomorrow and sermonette,” she quips, referring to the comic strip author and religious broadcasts on late-night TV. Gravity, Donahue proposes, can be cured by an affinity for roofs and jets. And what about hunger? “Black coffee, cigarettes,” she deadpans. Every one of Donahue’s words is somehow sharp and weary at the same time, making her the ideal interpreter of Butler’s covert optimism.
Donahue’s bristly, dour-yet-glamorous affectation defines the Waitresses’ sound—so learning that she didn’t write the lyrics can come as a surprise. “I felt like someone had pulled a rug out from under me,” critic Lindsay Zoladz wrote in a 2013 essay about the band for Pitchfork. “This album that my friends and I thought spoke so meaningfully to ‘the female experience’ was written not by Donahue, but by the guitarist, Chris Butler. A dude.” Publications in the early ’80s often mentioned the supposed discrepancy; others merely lumped the Waitresses in with the Go-Gos and other “women-dominated bands,” as Vogue phrased it around the release of Wasn’t Tomorrow Wonderful? “The band has six members, of whom only two are women and whose songwriter, Chris Butler, is a man,” David Sargent wrote for the magazine. “But the lead singer, Patty Donahue, is a woman, and the songs are written from a woman’s perspective.”
But Donahue hardly saw herself as a puppet for Butler’s male projections. “I’m relating my experiences, too,” she told Fricke in the band’s ’82 Rolling Stone interview. “[Butler] wrote the songs, but I’m not just singing what he feels. It’s like, ‘I feel this way, don’t you feel this way, too?’” Butler didn’t pretend he had some magical insight into the private lives of women: He’d ask them. The songwriter, who was working as a freelance reporter in the early ’80s, interviewed several of his female friends while working on lyrics. “I have pages of explanations of the songs, giving the backgrounds, the nuance,” he told Creem at the time. “I sit down and ask my lady friends and men friends, ‘If you were in this situation, would you react this way? What about this reaction?’” Many of the songs, he felt, could work from any perspective.
Rather than functioning as songwriter and mouthpiece, Butler and Donahue’s relationship was more similar to that of an auteur and an actor—Butler may have written and directed the material, but Donahue wrangled the character off the page. The irony of the hit single “I Know What Boys Like” was not lost on Donahue, who didn’t see the song as a reprimand of modern temptresses, but as a sendup of the dating ritual, with its exhausting predator-and-prey dynamics. Jagged funk cut “Pussy Strut” is a bit more frank, as Butler contrasts meaningless physics jargon with catcalls. “Sideways is called horizontal/Up and down, vertical… This is very scientific,” Donahue sings, playing a pedantic dick. The following couplet shreds that thin scholarly veil: “Look at the butt/Pussy strut.” You get the sense that Butler is mocking men for their brutish sexism as much as their need to mask emotional depletion with empirical certainty.
A wildly underappreciated singer, Donahue was a frequent target of critical reviews penned by predominantly male writers. Jim Sullivan of The Boston Globe once wrote of Donahue: “Her voice lacks range; her tone is limited by irony; her stage presence—fussing with her hair, pointing her finger and pouting—is dominated by an overuse of artifice.” But Donahue was a calculated performer whose gestures and props animated her jaded character. She’d twitch her head to the side, shimmy her hips robotically, and drag on cigs like a Marlowe dame (the cigarettes weren’t just a prop—Donahue sadly died of lung cancer in 1996). The press might have overlooked her theatrical talents, but Alice Cooper took note, tapping her to sing on his 1982 track “I Like Girls.” Her deliciously sneering performance was credited as “vocals and sarcasm.”
Donahue’s nonchalant sass has echoed for decades—in the ’90s with Elastica, Daria, and Bikini Kill; today in Olivia Rodrigo’s casual angst. She viewed her character in the Waitresses as an autonomous woman navigating mid-century expectations. “She’s trying to land on her feet,” Donahue once said, coolly adding: “Her desires clash with society sometimes.” Like Donahue, the Waitresses found purpose in the jagged, grimy cracks that cut beneath a polished surface.
Additional research by Deirdre McCabe Nolan


Under the influence of French philosopher Simone Weil, the Oakland quartet Acephalix offer the immediate hook of classic death metal on their third full-length.

Decreation

By the time the Oakland death metal quartet Acephalix released 2012’s Deathless Master, they had already moved on to exploring their chosen sound in other ways. Vocalist Daniel Butler and bassist Luca Indrio focused on Vastum, which honed in on slower tempos and themes of sexual depravity, and Indrio also formed Necrot, influenced by the dingy, sewer-like filth of their Bay Area forefathers Autopsy. Acephalix insist they didn’t disband per se, but it did feel as though they went on hiatus at the height of their powers.
Death metal is as much about mental fortitude as it is physical. On Master, Acephalix embodied that with a fusion of the Sunlight Studios guitar tone—used by Swedish bands like Entombed and Dismember, and razor-sharp in its brightness—with American aggression. Their lyrics were influenced by Georges Bataille as much as tropes like death and dismemberment. In that way, they were and still are ahead of much of this decade’s American death metal revival. Five years after Master, their third album Decreation brings back some of their old crust sound while feeling like they never took a break in the first place.
On Master, drummer Dave Benson cut back on his punky d-beat attack—the snare-and-kick pattern pioneered by Discharge, like a polka beat’s trance infused with hardcore jitters. But shortly into Decreation’s “Upon This Altar,” he’s ripping into the d-beat again, five years of inactivity finally cracking. As much as it’s a punk staple, that break feels fresh and liberating, like hearing Discharge for the first time. While Decreation is still a death metal record at heart, much more so than their debut Aporia and their demo tapes, it’s got a looser feel thanks to Benson’s drumming. He gives space for guitarist Kyle House to express a wider range of death metal influences. The album also evolves by looking back, striking a balance between their punk origins and Butler’s growls, which have gone up an edge. House is a riff chameleon, never quite shaking off his crust grime.
Acephalix are still indebted to Swedish sounds, though Decreation also pays more heed to their American influences. “Excremental Offerings” recalls the Chicago band Cianide’s lineage from Celtic Frost’s mid-paced stomp. In fact, “Offerings” might be Acephalix’s slowest song ever, a rare moment when they’re not at your throat constantly. House can conjure Cianide as well as he can the meaty riffing of Swedish bands like Entombed and Grave, showing versatility that isn’t flashy. The track “Egoic Skin” invokes Obituary’s subterranean yet nimble grooves as much as Motörhead-like directness.
The title track of Decreation was inspired by the French philosopher Simone Weil’s concept of the same name, which Butler summarized as “the power in surrendering yourself to spiritual dismemberment.” And while Acephalix’s influences might be heady—they’ve mentioned Artaud and surrealism as well—they still consider themselves “a primitive death metal band.” In a genre like death metal, which has its own distinct word salad, there is a value in simplicity, in getting your message across as clearly as your deeply growled vocals will enable. And Acephalix’s simplicity is a deliberate choice, with Butler articulating it as “letting my body do my thinking for me.” It’s served them well, as Decreation has an immediate hook of classic death metal that offers a lot more than many traditionalists can muster.