New Zealand singer/songwriter Nadia Reid's debut album dissects a relationship whose end illuminates new layers of failure and hidden motives with each re-examination. Reid's outlook on love may be hopeless, but her blunt words are cocooned by the warmth and unusual hookiness of the varied arrangements.

Nadia Reid: Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs

Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs

New Zealand songwriter Nadia Reid's debut album begins with the kind of Zen-like certainty that only comes after taking stock. "When I hit the ground in all my glory/ I will know where I have come from," she sings on "Runway", its opening track. Listen to Formation, Look for the Signs finds the 24-year-old Aucklander dissecting a relationship whose end illuminates new layers of failure and hidden motives with each re-examination. Reid's outlook on love may be hopeless, but her blunt words are cocooned by the warmth and unusual hookiness of the varied arrangements.
Listen is a soothing, folky Americana album that recalls the work of Laura Marling, Gillian Welch, Hope Sandoval, and Nina Nastasia. Reid isn't reinventing anything, in other words, though Listen is itself more inventive than many records of its ilk. Its main mode is a kind of glowering hush made up of gentle acoustic guitar, glints of pedal steel from Sam Taylor, and Richie Pickard's glacial double bass, very occasionally chased by Joe McCallum's spindly drums. The band changes the pace with waltzing rhythms that evoke rural dance halls ("Just to Feel Alive"), or pare back the already-ghostly instrumentation to let Reid's nimble voice come to the fore ("Ruby").
There are a few electric moments that evoke the leap Sharon Van Etten took between Because I Was in Love and Tramp. The stormy weather of "Reaching Through" is broken up with sparkling, ascendent layers of Reid's voice and strings; the bowed guitars and clanking metallic chords of "Seasons Change" bring to mind the National. The gorgeous "Call the Days" marries the poppier sensibility of Reid's heavy songs with the grave palette of her more candlelit numbers. Throughout, she shapes her words into characterful, sticky hooks, which feels rare for this genre of music.
Not to underestimate the experiences behind Reid's lyrics, but the loss of faith that unravels throughout the record comes off a little grave, reminiscent of those fogged post-heartbreak moments where it's impossible to believe you'll ever be happy again—the kind you look back on and laugh. And some of these songs are seven years old, written in her teens, which may explain why love is a "fiery black disease" and delusion, marriage is a convenience, and she can't even believe other people's happiness. "Bittersweet I am when it comes to young love," Reid sings on "Ruby", exposing her occasional tendency for Folk Yoda-style inversions.
But there are also beautiful, revealing turns of phrase: on "Reaching Through" Reid admits, "If I am bound for something, honey won't you know, that I always take the shortest fucking road." "Seasons Change" sneaks a crushing truth into the lifespan of a relationship: "It's good to love a heart who surely understands/ The coming of the day/ The beauty of the land/ The act of being sorry/ The breaking of a man." "Call the Days" feels like the resolution to all the heartache and anger, Reid declaring, "I threw out my winter coat/ I cut the sleeves off all I'd known." Although by no means the finished article, Reid's acute understanding of where she's been sets her up nicely for what happens next.


Meredith Monk's influence as a singer and composer extends through Björk, Joanna Newsom and beyond. On Behalf of Nature is a plea for ecological awareness with no lectures, just beauty and empathy.

On Behalf of Nature

Over her half-century career as a composer and singer, Meredith Monk has refreshed the language of vocal music. She has cultivated steely modes of expression in her top register, and gravely dramatic timbres in the low end. In between those extremes, she possesses a library of stunning, diverse effects that come across as intensely physical. On a recording, Monk’s voice doesn’t enter the listener’s consciousness from some disembodied ether. The music sails directly from the discrete figure at its center.
The pressed-lip vibrations, throat clicks and beaming yowls of childhood play are celebrated in her singing. And these tricks are also put to use for emotionally varied ends. A tender lullaby might veer into a cathartic silliness. A pulse-driven group chant can collapse into solemn observance. Patterns are present, though mostly for the purpose of being challenged by an unlikely development.
Occasionally she uses short English phrases to anchor a theme. More often, the vocal production is wordless—though it is no less communicative for that fact. The influence of this style is felt both inside and outside the academy. When listening to Björk, Joanna Newsom, or Kate Soper, you’re dealing with a tradition that stretches back through Monk, who has studied classical and folk forms and found luminous ways to channel them.
On Behalf of Nature is titled after one of Monk’s recent, wordless stage shows: a meditation on ecological themes, including climate change. Despite that impassioned editorial focus, her resulting suite of songs and motifs avoids coming across like a lecture. And because she always revises the music from a dramatic piece before creating an album, Nature sounds purposeful and complete throughout its hourlong running time. Aside from her vocal troupe, the instrumental forces include ace percussionist John Hollenbeck, harpist Laura Sherman, and the reed-instrument player Bohdan Hilash. (One current singer in Monk’s group, Allison Sniffin, also doubles on piano, violin and French horn.)
With a spare introductory theme voiced on a Burmese piccolo, opening track “Dark/Light 1” evokes a pre-dawn zone of austere beauty. Later, a brooding bass clarinet is stalked calmly by a vibraphone tones. Then Monk’s voice enters, creating a sense of shamanistic ritual. Her notes could be talismans against danger, or the first melody after a cataclysmic event. Gradually, her sound gives way to that of a male voice, for a short stretch, before the the full vocal ensemble enters with gleaming new harmonies. In moving from a vulnerable, solo state to a zone of greater security and community, the music etches its broad narrative.
Throughout Nature, the composer’s graceful use of diverse sonic phenomena amounts to a plea for biodiversity. This argument works via metaphor, instead of through the language of the stump speech. Rich rounds of vocal writing suggest organic growth processes, on “Fractal Activity.” The murmurs of “Environs 1” sound like the byproduct of a busy hive. Then there are the serene glances at beauty, as in the clarinet, vibraphone and French horn feature “Eon.” And you can understand why Monk rejects the “minimalist” label during a movement like “Duet with Shifting Ground”—where blocks of seemingly stable harmony are interrupted by prickly parts for violin and percussion.
Surprises keep coming, without ruining the charming underlying vibe. Strange string lines sneak up on the vocalists, during the otherwise imperturbable “Evolution.” Unexpected rhythmic stresses make “Pavement Steps” into an unlikely dance number. Occasionally, Monk’s hooks seem to be present merely so that they can be upended. But thanks to the palindrome-like “arch form” of the piece, all these feints and stylistic burrows eventually feel unified, when early motifs reappear in slightly adapted form, toward the close of the piece.
At 74, Monk’s voice doesn’t have quite the otherworldly pliability captured on vintage recordings like Do You Be. Yet she is utterly commanding during this album’s centerpiece, “Water/Sky Rant.” Here, Monk inhabits the role of a woman petitioning the heavens for a downpour. Harp arpeggios support the initial entreaties; an optimistic clarinet tries to help make the sale. Then, a shift in the harmony shows us that the sky is still parched. Monk’s voice momentarily sounds defeated, tinny. Then she unleashes a show-stopping “rant,” full of the desperate, throaty extended-techniques that this singer has been pioneering ever since Julius Eastman was a member of her vocal ensemble.
Of late, Monk has started receiving more invitations to write for orchestras and string quartets. In her liner notes to Nature, it is acknowledged that “the voices and instruments have equal weight” this time—a state of play that might startle those who think of her talent in narrower terms. Still, she’s always been more than one of the world’s great singers. Some of Monk’s best pieces, like the 1991 opera Atlas, have also boasted dazzling instrumental writing. Her vocal instrument remains the envy of singers fifty years her junior. But on Nature, the uniqueness of her compositional vision is just as impressive.


Bryndon Cook is a hired gun for Solange, Chairlift, and Blood Orange; his debut album is a slick, colorful foray into retro-futurist funk that’s fueled by his keen sense of style.

Language

It often gets lost in the sauce, but the key to great style has very little to do with designers or fashion—style comes from synthesizing various influences to create an aesthetic unique to the individual. Bryndon Cook has always understood this. From his first gig as a wide-eyed college kid on the road with Solange to his work on Blood Orange’s Freetown Sound, he’s fit right in with his contemporaries on the bleeding edge where style rises above the runway. And with Starchild & the New Romantic, we’re finally getting to see his own vision take center stage.
Cook—a graduate of SUNY Purchase’s renowned acting conservatory and a former intern at Pitchfork—looks most comfortable performing, and when he’s under the big lights, it shows. It’s why Dev Hynes asks him to dance in his videos and lay down tracks for his Blood Orange project, and why Solange and Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly trust him to bring their music to life on stage.
But while he’s been in high demand as a hired gun in the studio and on the road, it’s been a bigger challenge to refine his own voice. Cook has been releasing music as Starchild since at least 2012, but Language is his first LP. A slick, colorful foray into ’80s-influenced funk, it’s the most forceful expression of his identity on record to date, the reflection of an artist of immense talent and a strong command of musical history. Cook’s bona fides are not in question. His burden is to find himself among the genius he surrounds himself with, to communicate something original with the tools left to him by his forebears.
It’s a story as old as black music in the Americas: the blues bars injected with the energy that birthed rock and roll, the mining of old records for the samples and breaks that became hip-hop. Cook’s Language speaks to that history, both musically and spiritually. Much of Starchild’s outward expression—from the P-Funk-inspired name down to the MJ dance moves—feels like a nod to the greats. As a producer, he wields nimble guitar licks, bouncy brass, and bleating organs with equal aplomb, and appears to share Prince and Sheila E’s affection for the LinnDrum. It’s the aesthetic of someone who knows his history and aims to be included among his heroes.
On Starchild & the New Romantic’s 2016 EP Crucial, Cook departed from the synthed-out rap&B vibe of 2012’s Night Music EP, offering a glimpse of the universe he was building. Language feels even more grown, relating political struggles to his own hopes and dreams. “Hangin On” reads like a letter to the late Medgar Evers, the civil rights leader assassinated on his own driveway in front of his family. “Saw you in my sleep/Chased you ’til morning came/My mama said ‘Follow your dreams’/Well I guess you were my warning,” he sings, weighing hope against the reality of what happens to black people who stir the pot. The song’s video elicits specific images of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, itself created to bridge the generation gap between Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the young students who represented the future of the civil rights movement.
Much of Language is written with one person in mind, a relationship strained—and ultimately ended—by the distance that comes with the life of a touring artist. This narrative is evident if you’re looking for it, but taken as a whole the lyrics read as those of an author working out his own emotional vocabulary, a young lover learning how to love and put those feelings into words.
The project’s visuals carry a stylish retro-futurist vibe (old landline phones, ’80s street-style chic) that reflects Cook’s attempt to straddle multiple generations, connecting past and present with an eye towards the future. The title track distills the concept succinctly, with a bouncy guitar riff, soulful harmonies, and an electric wail on the bridge that Cook says he imagined as Morris Day doing “Uptown Funk.” He’s an equally skilled singer and MC—his closest rapping analogue is the smooth swagger of Theophilus London—as evidenced by the blistering bars of “Some People I Know”: “Been up in the gazebo, building up my machismo/Stick me out in the doghouse, couldn’t even speak to the people.”
For an artist so adept at incorporating his influences, it’s appropriate that the song on Language that makes Cook’s gifts most evident was actually written by someone else. “Mood” is ostensibly a cover of the Porches song, but it completely reimagines the composition with a smoldering bass-driven atmosphere that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on Freetown Sound. It’s instructive to hear the two versions played back-to-back; Greta Kline’s bass gives the original some bounce, but in Cook’s hands, the sketch is fully fleshed out, injected with a funky, soulful energy that completely transforms the song.
It’s often through their dialogue with standards that the most distinguished artists are able to find themselves, filtering the things they love through their own unique perspective. The language Starchild uses to express his point of view is still evolving. But with each new entry into his catalog, streaks of brilliance shine through, illuminating a portrait of an artist who deserves a seat at the table.


The seventh album from one of America's few major-label metal acts feels like the unedited, overly long collection of a younger band trying to make its mark.

Resolution

If you heard Resolution before knowing anything about the band who made it, you'd be forgiven for mistaking Lamb of God's latest as the high-production, major-label debut of an energetic, upstart crew. At 14 songs and 57 minutes, Resolution feels like the sort of unedited, exhaustively long collection a label might get behind to see if at least one of the songs lands with a wide audience.
Such signs are everywhere on Resolution: Each of the choruses in these rigid Pantera-cum-Slayer recasts are aggressively emphasized, with thickets of backing vocals and rhythms and structures that slow or shift so as to beg you to swallow the hook. Lyrically, Lamb of God certainly write like a young band of heshers out for an angry good time-- Metallica quotes, subverted clichés, and diary-entry misanthropy laced with high-school vocabulary words and winking glimpses of profanity, drugs, and religion. And though the band is not only at its best but its most comfortable with four-minute formulaic tracks-- burst open, barrel ahead, shift at the bridge, regain momentum, and implode at the exit-- they take care to show that, even if young, they're versatile, too, the sort of band that boasts the promise of a varied future. There's the convincingly sludgy opener, the ghostly acoustic moments that serve as intros and interludes, and the creepy spoken-word surge of a closer. And it's all captured with big, bright production by Josh Wilbur, a major-label stable member who has worked with everyone from Steve Earle and Faith Hill to Pink and Limp Bizkit.
But Resolution is Lamb of God's seventh album and their fourth for Epic Records, making them one of the few current American metal bands to sign with and stay on a major label. They've done well there, too, peaking with a chart position of No. 2 for their most recent record, 2009's Wrath, which earned two Grammy nominations and sold a few hundred thousand copies. Those past stats and the Virginia band's status as relative metal statesmen for the mainstream make Resolution that much more disappointing in context.
Despite the handful of hooks that do stick and those big "risks," like the acoustic blues strums at the start of single "Ghost Walking" or the belligerent boogie that opens the much better "Invictus", Lamb of God's general lack of adventurousness makes them mostly indistinguishable from their heroes and, budget excepted, the bulk of their contemporaries. After a decade of becoming arguably the biggest American metal band that either didn't exist when George H. W. Bush was president or didn't come from a cartoon, you would hope that Lamb of God had earned the right to be adventurous, to try and stretch their legacy wider than that of a band subservient to its predecessors. Resolution simply sounds like a refinement of their past, with their unquestionable technical prowess (especially impressive is the occasional interplay between guitarists Mark Morton and Willie Adler and drummer Chris Adler) funneled again into songs that would lose any distinction in a mixtape of their peers.
On "Invictus", this record's most structurally and lyrically compelling track, Randy Blythe roars the album's least instant but most interesting hook: "You brand it a crisis/ I name it an honor/ To face what arises/ To remain unconquered." That ethos reappears throughout Resolution, an album that, despite all this talk of bravery, lacks the resolve to sound anything but normal and predictable. With so much history and more than a million album sold, you'd think sounding mistakably young would be a compliment. But on Resolution, it doesn't equal a band bursting forth with ideas or burning with ambition; it means that, apart from the number of records they've sold, Lamb of God still need to find a way to make an impression last longer than an album cycle.


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 Craig David’s debut, a UK garage hit parade which became a poisoned chalice for its creator.

Born To Do It

It took 15 years to clear his name. Sweet boyish Craig, good as gold, bullied out of his dream. How had it come to this? A star birthed from UK garage yet regarded as a footnote within it. Born To Do It, a multi-platinum hit parade that codified the wider world’s perception of what UKG was all about, reduced to the fine nub of a joke. For as long as there was a stigma attached to the sound, there was a stigma attached to its pin-up.
UK garage originally incubated in South London pubs, as DJs pitched up slabs of American garage house for buzzy ravers looking to push the feeling on to Sunday afternoon. A cut like Mood II Swing’s “Closer (Swing to Mood Dub)” was dynamite, sauntering about with a jazzy flair, but anchored by tough and unyielding drums. In Todd Edwards, the scene had an early unifier, a squeaky-clean sample wizard from New Jersey who gave himself to God first, garage second. His “Saved My Life” was released in 1995 but stayed in rotation for years as UKG developed, a benchmark for how creative the format could become in due course. Edwards showed you didn’t necessarily have to be a renegade club kid to cut it in this new world.
British producers upped the ante, making the basslines chunkier and altering the straight-ahead flow of garage house, so that MCs crossing over from hardcore and jungle raves could find moments within DJ sets to command and conquer the dance. In 1997, Kelly G’s wailing remix of Tina Moore’s minor R&B hit “Never Gonna Let You Go” was a radio smash, breaking the door down for the popularization of 2-step. This variant took the lightly swung drums of UKG and made them outright skippy. Even if this initially caught the unaware flat-footed in an attempt to follow the groove, dominant female voices filled the space left open once the consistent pulse of a four-to-the-floor kick was subtracted. Homegrown singers like Shola Ama, Kele Le Roc, and Anita Kelsey gave listeners something alluring to latch onto, as well as balancing the rowdiness of geezers on the mic.
By 1999, UK garage had gone national. No matter if you repped speed or soul or skip, the mood of the moment was intoxicating. Whenever the sun was out—far from a given in the UK, so appearances are celebrated with gusto––UKG blasted out of cars, ricocheted across council terraces, and accompanied grill smoke on its twist upward to the sky. People got dressed up to go out dancing: no hats, no hoods, no trainers; all smiles, everything nice ’n’ ripe. Champagne replaced H2O in the bloodstream. Times were as good as could be.
As Great Britain blearily swept the kitchen on the first day of the new millennium, a song called “Re-Rewind” was boinging around the top of the charts. Its opening three seconds are an effective elevator pitch to everything attractive about garage: a woofer-vibrating rumble, head turning SFX (in this case, shattering glass), an Anglicized "selec-tah," then a snare which springs us forward into major-key chords—and, invariably, a cork being popped.
“Re-Rewind” was the first of seven UK top 10 hits in 2000 shared between Craig David and his producer Mark Hill, one-half of DJ duo Artful Dodger. April’s racy follow-up “Fill Me In,” billed this time as David’s solo debut, shot to No.1, making him the youngest artist in British chart history to open their account at the top. The great misremembering about Born To Do It is that the garage ends there. “Re-Rewind” and “Fill Me In” form the double helix of commercial UKG’s DNA, staples of every themed throwback party, brunch, cruise, and symphony ever since—but the rest of the album is barely a garage record at all. Though the lingo and affectations remain, its heart wasn’t in soundsystem culture: David longed to be an R&B star, and an American one at that.
A chance meeting between David and Hill had led to an invite in 1998 for the singer to make use of Hill’s rudimentary studio and develop material of his own. Outside of its singles, which received extra polish once management entered the fray, most of the songs on Born to Do It are demos from those sessions that never required a further mixdown. Very little of the album’s beats can lay claim to originality: the pizzicato string plucks, synth bass, and Darkchild-style harp ripples all derive from sample packs, dutifully assembled as if by manual. Hill knew how to mask deficiencies in his setup, including using the smack of a bouncing basketball from the BBC Sound Effect Library to give the bass on some songs extra weight. (“Re-Rewind”’s glass shatter was at least done live in the studio, for that authentic breaking-and-entering feel.)
The production might be standard fare in places, but that’s fine, because David is the star of this show, crooning his way to a world where he is the alpha shagger. Having grown up with the music of Terence Trent D’Arby and Michael Jackson, he understood how confidence could be distilled into a formula and bottled for mass consumption. All over Born To Do It are spirited imitations of silky-smooth loverman jams that made their way over the ocean in the late ’90s. A hat-tip to Usher’s “Nice & Slow” here, a little pre-chorus mention of “Gettin’ Jiggy With It” there, a few seconds of Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See” spliced into “Time to Party”—and why not? His performance was brazen but no one told him to stop.
With "Booty Man," David interpolates the nursery rhyme “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe” and Willy Wonka's “Candy Man,” then spells out the URL to his homepage as if he were advertising a web 1.0 furniture sale. As “7 Days” slides into its final calendar-counting chorus, a warbling syllable soup pours forth, almost certainly recorded with the singer’s eyes closed and one hand tracing the notes through the air. And on “Can’t Be Messin’ Around,” a counterpart to Hill’s own hit “Please Don’t Turn Me On,” David remains chivalrous as he declines the advances of would-be suitors. Maneuvering around the dancefloor with his girlfriend on his mind, David still manages to drop a pick-up atom bomb: “Girl I must admit/You’re looking real fit”—the kind of line Mike Skinner would later latch onto with boozy glee as the Streets, delivered here with the fedora-doffing manners of a gentleman.
Born To Do It is a binary-busting mesh of good and bad, corny to the point of inanity but with charisma to pull it off. At every turn, the Brit in him couldn’t help but leap out: an archetypal kind of chirpy student who cribs chat-up lines from lads mags and can do a wicked a cappella rendition of Soul II Soul’s “Back To Life” on cue; king of small and perhaps medium talk, but one who flounders when swimming out into deeper waters than that. Even while having a jacuzzi-and-wine tryst with the girl next door, he wonders if her parents “one day might approve?” People went wild.
By 2001, with his home territory licked, it was time to crack North America. “7 Days” was an especial success, its PG-rated lyrics and clammy Latin flair perfect for a market still fat on the material gains of hits like Montell Jordan’s “Get It On Tonite” and Santana’s “Maria Maria.” The press were unconvinced, but he left a mark: Cup your ear to Drake’s 2007 mixtape cut “Closer” and hear him shout summers spent “Racin’ through the back streets/On my Craig David shit/The Artful Dodger, Shola Ama.” David was even invited by the Bush administration to perform at a White House concert. Glass eternally half-full, he accepted, though it never panned out. “I don’t know why it didn’t happen,” he later reflected. “I was doing something, I guess, and he was having a war.”
While on this charm offensive, a dark cloud had rolled in over the sunny domain of UK garage. Rougher kids had entered the fray, typified by the sprawling collective So Solid Crew and associated bad-boy duo Oxide & Neutrino, bringing with them a genuine edge of danger. Committees—formal, mob-style sit-downs—had been set up as early as 1999 by older heads to settle disputes between rival promoters and feuding DJs. This time, their attempt to maintain stability failed. Paranoia took hold, shootings spiked, and the police rolled in heavy to stamp out the whole scene, treating UKG as a node of gangland activity.
On the face of it, the pop phenom in a cream rollneck had nothing to do with any of this. If So Solid Crew were treated by the press as a local answer to NWA, then Craig David was MC Hammer. In an astonishingly patronizing skim-read of urban culture, members of the Labour government started parroting the term “gold chain and no brain” as they demonized UKG, which by this point was metamorphosing into grime anyway. David, never ashamed of an upbringing split between his Jewish-Anglo mother on the weekdays and his Grenadian father on the weekend, was being reduced to a set of faux-street catchphrases.
The warning signs had been there: In late 2000, fading rockist rag Melody Maker published a cover declaring “UK Garage My Arse!”, calling for the sound to be outlawed and extending Born To Do It’s artwork to show a light-skinned black man who looked nothing like Craig David sitting on the toilet. The racial overtones weren’t exactly subtle. David led the field at the BRIT Awards in 2001, but he missed out on all six of his nominations, a failing greeted with barely suppressed mirth. Dane Bowers, one of commercial UKG’s other prominent faces, somehow managed to get changed into a T-shirt declaring “Craig Woz Robbed” in time for the afterparty.
In 2002, an absurdist comedy called Bo Selecta! debuted on British television, its title taken from the call-and-response of “Re-Rewind.” This was the killer blow. At the show’s center lay a masked, mishap-prone version of Craig David featuring a doodled-on goatee and a hammed-up Northern English brogue that would be equivalent to giving Jerry Seinfeld a Down South drawl. The caricature was nothing like its target, yet withering all the same. His manager would explode in vein-popping rage any time it was invoked as an excuse for swooning sales. No matter how hard he had fought to escape the orbit of the garage world that had launched him, Bo Selecta! pulled David right back.
David attempted to stare down the critics on the opener to his second album, 2002’s Slicker Than Your Average. He jettisoned any remnants of Hill’s 2-step signature, bragged about seven million records sold, and nabbed the standing-up gag from “The Real Slim Shady”—just two and a half years late. It was the outlier on an otherwise anodyne album, a gloop of Sting duets, club scenarios where the girls “bang like Dre instrumentals,” and, lessons unlearned, another nursery rhyme. Just one year after the U.S. release of Born To Do It, Slicker slunk in at No.32; the third LP was never released Stateside at all. The dream was over. To David’s credit, he at least managed to make his wilderness years memorable: He moved to Miami, got ripped, donned a watch whose face displayed only the word “NOW,” and spouted silly things in pursuit of profundity that kept him ticking over as a He Said What?! paragon of washed-up celeb.
In the mid-2010s, another satirical show trained its lens on UK garage. People Just Do Nothing was centered around Kurupt FM, a bunch of pirate-radio wannabes in the armpit of suburban London, clinging to a faded blueprint for success. This time the series’ creators were genuine UKG diehards who wanted to bring it back as much as send it up. The show’s parodies were so acute, it provoked many to confront a dormant question: So what if the culture around garage can be daft? This was a national heritage too pure to be smuggled away as a guilty pleasure; UK garage should make us proud to be British.
Come September 2015, a Kurupt FM-fronted radio takeover on BBC 1Xtra secured a major coup: Craig David would drop in for a live PA. In a clearly unrehearsed moment, you can barely hear “Fill Me In” above screams of joy as the show’s cast breaks character and mobs the returning prodigal son. David then glides into a freestyle over Jack Ü’s “Where Are Ü Now” with some typically wink-nudge lyrics—“Packin’ on muscle like bars of protein/Melodies for days, you know what I mean?”—but for once, people were laughing with him. The clip went supernova online. David had a simple message on social media: “This is what I live for.”
Suddenly, impossibly, unstoppably, everything was coming up Craig. A record deal was inked off the back of the impromptu performance. Diplo ceded the stage at Major Lazer’s arena show in London toward the end of the year, letting David supplant Bieber and steal the thunder during his megasmash. By 2016, David was selling out arenas for his own comeback tour. Following My Intuition gave him his first No. 1 album since Born To Do It. The smirk on people’s faces had been replaced with an unforced smile.
Watching Craig David at Glastonbury Festival 2017 was like witnessing a young Lionel Richie crossed with a high-rolling televangelist. Decked all in white, he sprinted across the stage with teenage vim, grinning wildly. After 20 minutes of armor-plated anthems, he announced he would give a little flava of his DJ origins—something no one was asking for. He wheeled out a stage riser with a laptop and a pair of decks, scatted over the Fugees, Eve, and House of Pain, and ended the set not with a hit, but with “16”: a recreation of that redemptive viral moment on the radio, freestyle and all, in case people had forgotten that he played the long game and won.
No matter how close he danced to the edge of awfulness, how hard he tried to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, how much he willed us to walk away, the audience was there for him again. The anticipation when he took to the stage was choking. The assembled lunchtime crowd was larger than that for Radiohead the previous night: the size of a small city, stretching up and over the horizon. He took a breath and got straight into it. There was a lot to fill in.


Working remotely in Los Angeles and Brisbane, these two ambient mainstays toe the line for an album that exists in a perpetual state of becoming something else.

William Basinski / Lawrence English: Selva Oscura

Selva Oscura

In the ongoing experiment of defining ambient music, Australian composer Lawrence English and his Room40 label are the control group. In the music he releases and creates (start with The Peregrine, if you’re not familiar), he is an ambient classicist, rigorously grooming abstract pitches and timbres as they traverse vast spans of time via moments of deceptive stillness. If there were ever any doubts that English is a staunch defender of the form from bells and whistles (ambient people love bells and whistles, but you know what I mean), he dispelled them earlier this year in an essay for FACT. Part ambient-history precis, part ambient-future manifesto, it commemorated the 40th anniversary of Brian Eno’s Ambient 1: Music for Airports—which is to say, the 40th birthday of what we consider ambient. If there were such a thing as the Ambient Preservation Society, English would be its president, and this would be his state of the union.
English frames the milestone as ambient entering middle age, an anthropomorphic device that falls apart if you apply it too broadly. (Is jazz geriatric?) Still, the analogy feels apt when considering English’s music within the state of the art. His latest release, a collaboration with William Basinski of The Disintegration Loops fame, has a 40-year-old feeling of competence and caution, of being lived in, of knowing what it is. Its title a reference to the dark forest of Dante’s Inferno, Selva Oscura is a reverent and ordinary tribute to ambient filmmaker Paul Clipson, a mutual friend who died this year. It is not new age or chill-out or IDM. It does not have beats, melodies, or any other bricolage to bind it to any other musical tradition. It does not feign acoustic instruments or choirs. It is ambient music, or it is nothing. Or, to infer from English’s account, it is ambient music, so it is nothing.
Of the pair, English, like a composer, has the steadier idiom and the more cerebral air. Basinski, ever melancholic, is more inclined to let the medium do the talking, in the rustle of the tape loops, the babble of found sounds, and the hush of shortwave radio static. The two 20-minute pieces here hew closer to English’s clean, burnished style than Basinski’s looser, danker one, with more smoothly layered hums than creepy decay. Working remotely in Los Angeles and Brisbane, the creators avoided jammy gestures, kneeling chastely before the form. Instead of moving through a landscape, the record evokes standing still for eons as a landscape moves around you. No rhythms, only ripples; no moments, only motion. High and low, thick and thin, drift and shine—these are the most concrete properties haloing the sound, which exists in a perpetual state of becoming something else.
In that FACT essay, English walks us through the golden age of ambient purity, the wanton diversifying of the 1990s, and the welter of the now. His conclusion, at its core, is plain: Ambient’s future lies in its past. To English, the commandments Eno brought down from the mountain, inscribed in tablets of cloud, are perpetually contemporary. After all, ambient’s defining claim is that it responds to any experience, space, and time. It lives in an eternally renewing present. You don’t have to join the APS, with its implicit mandate to keep circling and circling the airport instead of landing, to admire the clarity of English’s convictions, and he isn’t bothered by people making ambient into pop. He just wants to know what it really is and make sure it gets done. This is a kind of service, one that Selva Oscura fastidiously performs. Someone has to hold down the bedrock of a form so that others may elaborate, fussing about orthodoxy so we don’t have to.


Mike Hadreas’ fourth record is pure decadence. It’s his most realized album yet, a tender and transcendental protest record of love and devotion.

No Shape

From ancient Lesbos to ’60s SoHo, drag balls to Paradise Garage, queer havens aren’t just shelters created in opposition to the wider world, but hives of imagination and creativity where alternate realities reign, even if they sometimes dissolve at dawn. Perfume Genius’ fourth album, No Shape, is one of them. On 2014’s Too Bright, Mike Hadreas laid down the law when he commanded, “No family is safe when I sashay,” on the iconic “Queen.” But this time, he’s scarcely interested in using his steely blue gaze to challenge bigots. Instead, he preserves it to revere Alan Wyffels, his long-term boyfriend and musical collaborator, and to elevate their love to a heavenly plane. He and Wyffels met as recovering addicts—on No Shape, hard-won stability is a sacrament.
If Hadreas’ theme is insular, the mood on No Shape’s first half is ecstatic. These songs swoop and chatter like flocks of mad starlings, light up like religious paintings, flounce like all the pink frills in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, make the cosmos explode inside your ribs. If that sounds like too much, that’s the point. No Shape rebukes tasteful minimalism and embraces beauty at its most transgressive, harking back to the aestheticism and decadence movements of the 19th century, as well as Kate Bush and Prince’s most lurid extroversions. This inflated yet elegant dynamic sustains Hadreas’ own private joy: “If you never see them coming/You never have to hide,” he sings on “Slip Away,” a song that sounds perpetually under siege in a majestic fantasy battle. A few lines later, he insists, “If we only got a moment/Give it to me now,” and holds up his end of the bargain by giving literally everything he’s got.
Even if it’s a feint, Hadreas’ confidence is brazen and contagious. He subverts religious devotion on “Just Like Love,” admiring a young queer in an outlandish outfit. They’re “christening the shape,” and “cultivating grace,” and they walk “just like love.” It’s the kind of song that makes rags feel like ball gowns, and should probably have been playing when Botticelli painted The Birth of Venus. A prowling bass adds lust to Hadreas’ admiration, his crooned vocal styling referencing the period in the 1920s when intimate, amplified male voices were vilified for challenging ideas about how real men should sing. Using that register to exalt another man’s appearance is even more radical, and Hadreas knows it as he instructs the object of his affection to stand tall in the face of opposition: “When it happens again/Baby, hold on and stare them down.”
On Too Bright, bodies were “cracked, peeling, riddled with disease,” rotting fruit, sources of shame and revulsion that recalled Francis Bacon’s contorted 1970s portraits. Here, they’re as divine as the same-sex lovers depicted in trailblazing fin de siècle artist Simeon Solomon’s paintings. Hadreas lets himself be beautiful on “Go Ahead,” where he shuts down gawking onlookers with a withering retort. “What you think?/I don’t remember asking,” he tuts. He humors them for a moment—“You can even say a little prayer for me/Baby, I’m already walking in the light”—before throwing in a musical punchline at their expense, too, a moment of ambient reflection dismissed by a tart, cartoonish chime that he deploys like a sprinkle of Himalayan salt. The final part of the song whirrs and glitters, propelling Hadreas towards the heavens as he urges once more, “Go ahead—go ahead and try,” knowing nothing can touch him.
Transcendence is key to No Shape, and at its most explicit on “Wreath,” which references Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” both in its lyrics and breathless spirit. Like “Slip Away,” it’s a race to outrun the inevitable—in this case, Hadreas’ own physical form and identity, the prejudice projected onto it and the Crohn's disease within it. “I’m gonna peel off every weight/Until my body gives way/And shuts up,” he swears. Post-Trump, the Jenny Holzer Truism, “THE IDEA OF TRANSCENDENCE IS USED TO OBSCURE OPPRESSION” has regathered its power, as if urging vigilance against fantastical ideas. But for marginalized artists, that escape offers a short reprieve from psychological and physical persecution. To demand that Hadreas and his kin exist only in opposition to the political abyss is its own form of constriction. No Shape is a transcendental protest record and the divide between its two halves makes patently clear the challenge of staying present, staying alive, and staying in love as a queer person in 2017. “How long must we live right/Before we don’t even have to try?” Hadreas cries on “Valley General,” a graceful, pulsing tribute to another lost soul.
Most of No Shape’s first half finds Hadreas holding a pose in the outside world, refusing to conform. But it's hard to convince yourself of your own power, and on album’s second half, he struggles to break free. The blossom falls from the trees, leaving a claustrophobic atmosphere that recalls Mary Margaret O’Hara’s Miss America, David Bowie’s Low, and Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack From Twin Peaks. Each song creaks eerily, indicating a lingering but unseen presence: a ghost on the queasy “Every Night”; threatening voices that haunt Hadreas’ sleepless nights on frenzied violin freakout “Choir”; a lover on “Sides,” a gorgeous duet with Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering. Hadreas wanders through this ruined palace of a song, searching for his absent love: “Where do you go sometimes/Idle and empty-eyed?” The song shifts gears from searching to spectral, and Mering trills in response, “Don’t want to watch the world we made break/And it’s never too late to stay.”
Rather than an entreaty from one lover to another, it seems to be a duet between Hadreas’ dueling impulses—the one that wants to dissolve, and the one adjusting to the realization that this is what the long haul looks like, as close to contentment as it gets. It’s not possible to transform into air, but love and sex may offer the closest analog to that weightless freedom he dreams of. His voice is ecstatic and disembodied on “Die 4 You,” which uses erotic asphyxiation as a metaphor for total commitment, a mellow trip-hop beat evoking the supposedly blissful sensation of suffocation. “Run Me Through” is glimmering doom jazz, a twisted cabaret where Hadreas urges, “Wear me like a leather/Just for you,” lingering over each word of his intimate, unsettling proposition.
For all the overwhelming physical sensations on No Shape, nothing is as flooring as “Alan,” the album’s concluding devotional, which echoes the beautiful decay of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops. “Thought I’d hide,” Hadreas mumbles in an unusually low voice. “Maybe leave something secret behind/Never thought I’d sing outside.” Love saved Hadreas from abjection and gave him his voice when the odds were stacked against his survival. “I’m here,” he marvels. “How weeeeeeiiiiiiiird.” He belts the word like he’s pouring it into the Grand Canyon, his astonished gratitude more than justifying No Shape’s audacious and spectacular high stakes. Being present and being loved is the best anyone can hope for. For some people, it’s so much more than they could ever have expected. What sounds like heaven to Hadreas may seem commonplace to others, but No Shape makes you understand how it looks from his rapturous vantage point.


Malcom Lacey’s long-running electro-acoustic project feels like a window into someone’s private world.

Blood Dust

Malcom Lacey, a Florida native who now lives near Portland, has been quietly releasing albums as Arrange for ten years. “Quietly” defines both his approach to promotion and the enticing murmur of his music; “washes over you” would be the operative cliché. It’s tempting to call his fluid electro-acoustic pop confessional, but a better word might be confiding.
Arrange has always felt like a genuine window into the depths of someone’s private world—someone intense but sweet, someone with whom you feel safe. This is odd, as the music courses with danger: Lacey sings as if he’s voicing scarily vulnerable things with his eyes covered, then peeking out between his fingers to see if the world is still there. Every time it is, he gets a little stronger.
Lacey began the project when he was only 17, and it has the air of a long-term therapeutic exercise, or exorcism. Growth isn’t just his process, but his subject, which he pursues with tender, dogged persistence. Lacey’s latest, Blood Dust, stops short of housing an easy epiphany; that would be a very un-Arrange, as he always traffics in more alloyed emotions and muted climaxes. But it does feel like the end of an arc, a survival and a summation—if a characteristically modest one—of a decade.
As ever, Lacey’s lyrics are concerned with mental health and family relationships. Throughout the album, blood is wiped from faces, blood is stolen, blood is transmuted from water. Allusive images of generational trauma accrue, abstract but vivid: There is a mercurial lover, a looming father. The album closes, after the glistening folk tune “Never Is,” with answering-machine messages from Lacey’s grandmother. You might feel moved without knowing why—something to do with home and how it moves around.
On Blood Dust, 16 songs flow by in barely 45 minutes, but none of them feel incomplete or incidental. Their brevity only accentuates their intimacy, humility, and rich interior detail. Though virtual synths are present, there’s more live instrumentation—keyboards, piano, and especially guitar—than ever before. Arrange emerged from an era of early-’00s laptop loners like Elite Gymnastics, whose quietude was a shadow of sunny chillwave, but it still reminds me most of early Bright Eyes, especially in the low, choked tone of Lacey’s voice.
Lacey moves around in time to take the measure of his perspective at various ages, some of them predating Arrange, some plucked blindfolded from the distant future. The album begins with the knocking, drifting dream-pop of “The Lone Ranger,” where Lacey, now almost 27, remembers feeling “the same hate” at 21 that he did at 15. Much later, on “All the Trouble,” he wonders, “When I’m rotten at 83, do you think I’ll be the same boy? When I’m cold at 92, will you tell just who I am?”
Much of this language, not to mention the sound, is consistent with what he was doing back on Plantation. But it feels different, more mature and self-defined. Lacey’s music has modeled growth not in the incandescent spurts of much pop, but in the way it actually happens: by degrees so fine as to be almost invisible, with plenty of backsliding and false starts. Instead of someone heroically becoming someone else, it represents someone, even more heroically, learning to be who he is.


An intriguing release from the Broken Social Scene/Do Make Say Think member finds ordinary speech transformed into strange but affecting music.

The Happiness Project

People throw the term "concept album" around indiscriminately, but the new solo record by Broken Social Scene/Do Make Say Think multi-instrumentalist Charles Spearin truly earns that distinction. Part spoken-word collection, part sociological experiment, The Happiness Project is the result of Spearin's interviews with his neighbors in downtown Toronto about the idea of happiness-- recorded responses that he then turned into music. What's fascinating about this collection is not only what the interviewees have to say-- Marisa thinks that being "a good people-person" is what's important, Vittoria likes school on Valentine's Day when they just get to make art instead of work-- but also the way that Spearin spins the cadence of their voices into tunes. Childish temper tantrum "Ondine" ("Not almond butter, Mama. I just want butter") turns an irritatingly high-pitched kid's whine into a sliding violin melody bolstered by a delicate harp-and-piano foundation. And "Mrs. Morris"'s proclamation that "happiness is love" is rendered as a be-bop saxophone ditty that matches the alto tones of her speaking voice with the sax's own cool, deep timbre.
The tunes on the collection appear as if by magic. You hear people talking, and then their speech is transformed into honeyed horn patter (as on "Anna") or galloping guitar arpeggios (as on "Marisa"). "Vittoria", for example, spins a young girl's lazy "like"s and "um"s into percussive, brass- and reed-inflected bachelor-pad music perfect for a late-1960s James Bond chase scene. But the most moving of the collection's eight tracks is "Vanessa", which grows from a spare, reedy dirge into a celebration of twinkling pianos, sweeping strings, and sunburst guitars that mimic the vocal cadence of a deaf woman as she recounts the story of her cochlear implant surgery and its subsequent effect on her hearing and her life. "People often asked me, over the years, 'What do you hear?'" she says at the beginning of the track matter-of-factly with no music in the background to illustrate the silence in her head. "I couldn't really answer because I didn't know what it was like to hear, so how could I compare?" But by the end of the track, as she talks about the implant being turned on after the mandatory four-week waiting period, the instruments come alive beneath her voice, just like the sound that bloomed for her for the first time. The piano line is poignant and giddy as it imitates the mellifluence of her voice. "All of a sudden I felt my body moving inside," she says, describing the feeling of her brain taking in aural information for the first time ever. The track then shrinks back to silence as Vanessa explains that her implant only has a limited battery, and so when it shuts off she actually experiences that lack of sound. "Now," she says, after the last lingering piano note has stopped resonating," I understand the term 'dead silence.'" "Vanessa" may be too fractured to be a pop song, but you'll be hard-pressed to find another recorded track this viscerally affecting.
The stories told on The Happiness Project are moving and ordinary and strange, and the way Spearin makes you hear the music of spoken language by translating speech patterns into notes is truly thrilling. But some of these tracks are better as stories than songs (namely, the noodly guitars of "Mr. Gowrie", which is a nostalgic tale from an immigrant far from his homeland where life was difficult but perhaps richer with family). And even the most moving tracks are still not quite songs. Spearin's experiment is fruitful, nonetheless, helping listeners hear the beauty of everyday speech and appreciate the happiness that comes from life's most commonplace moments.


The Louvin Brothers' powerful 1959 album has been reissued, and the CD version comes with a disc of the duo's songs, selected by artists like Devendra Banhart, Beck, and Jim James.

The Louvin Brothers: Satan Is Real / Handpicked Songs 1955-1962

Even if you've never heard a single note from the Louvin Brothers, odds are good that you've at least seen the cover of their 1959 album, Satan Is Real. The discrepancy between that emphatic title and that plywood demon landed it on countless lists of worst or weirdest album covers, usually alongside Paddy Roberts' Songs for Gay Dogs and Orleans' Waking and Dreaming. Charlie and Ira Louvin devised the concept for the artwork themselves and set everything up in an old quarry, cutting Satan from Charlie's son's miniature train table and filling old tires with kerosene to simulate Hell. Then, as if on some Biblical cue, it began to rain, so their poses were hurried and awkward so their white suits wouldn't get drenched. Still, as silly as it may be, there's something curious about that image, especially that folk art figure looming in the background, bucktoothed and cross-eyed. It doesn't look professional or polished, which fits the music: The Louvin Brothers may have been signed to Capitol, but like so many other rural artists who never settled comfortably into either secular or gospel, they still sound both compellingly raw and incredibly sophisticated.
Satan Is Real is the duo's best-known record, not only for its cover but for songs like "The Christian Life" and "The Kneeling Drunkard's Plea", famously covered by the Byrds and Johnny Cash, respectively. Will Ferrell even incorporated the title track into his one-man show, You're Welcome, America: A Final Night with George W. Bush. The album represents a shift from secular to religious music after several years away, and yet the Louvin Brothers weren't necessarily trading one for the other. Like Johnny Cash or even Elvis Presley, they blended popular and church music to amplify the qualities of the other. "There's a Higher Power" snaps back and forth in a spirited call and response, but it's the shuffling snare that drive those exultant shouts of "Amen!" Similarly, the piano that pushes "The River of Jordan" along its freighted path belongs more to the barrelhouse than the revival tent.
The Louvin Brothers, despite being brothers and such naturalistic harmonizers, were spiritually and temperamentally mismatched, which may explain the equal emphasis they placed on darkness and light. Charlie adhered strictly to the message of these songs and was likely the guiding force behind Satan Is Real, but Ira was an angry drunk who routinely smashed mandolins on stage and showed up late to concerts. He was shot twice by a wife who claimed he beat her, and he allegedly tried to strangle Presley, whose big beat Ira saw as an affront to country music. Those extremes reflected in their music, at least until Charlie broke up the act and, in a grim irony, Ira was killed by a drunk driver in 1965.
Their entire catalog devises a seemingly contradictory mix of the holy and the worldly, the sacred and the profane. How could an act that revels in "The Christian Life" turn around and sing a dire murder ballad like "Knoxville Girl", whose grisly details still provoke winces even half a century after they sang it? To the Louvins' understanding, man's boundless capacity for sin matched his boundless capacity for salvation, so they weren't simply going to nudge you along the righteous path; they were going to run you off the highway to hell. "Satan Is Real" sets the tone and the churchly tableau, as the brothers harmonize on a hymnal chorus before Charlie interrupts with a monologue reminiscent of Hank Williams' Luke the Drifter homilies. "You can hear him in the songs that give praise to idols and sinful things of this world," he declares of the devil. "You can see him in the destruction of homes torn apart." It's a scare tactic, yet the brothers' precise vocals and Ira's always agile picking lends the song an urgency and gravity, as though they might be that deeply invested in their listeners' faith.
These songs may kill off dear mothers, struggling drunkards, debased sinners, and even innocent little babies, but Satan Is Real somehow conveys jubilation rather than penance, which is likely what inspired 60s country rockers like the Byrds and the Dillards and continues to bear on so many artists today. To that end, Light in the Attic is jointly issuing Handpicked Songs 1955-1962, a compilation of Louvin Brothers songs chosen by musicians representing several generations: Dolly Parton, Chris Hillman, and Kris Kristofferson, as well as Beck, Jim James, and M. Ward, among others. On CD, the sets are packaged together; on vinyl, they're available separately (there's also a vinyl-only reissue of their 1956 LP Tragic Songs of Life).
Sonically, vinyl is the better option, but musically, the 2xCD edition provides a better introduction to the Louvin Brothers. Perhaps because it's set so irremovably in the church, Satan Is Real may not be their most accessible album, which means Handpicked Songs makes for a livelier complement than outtakes or live performances and allows for a secular counterpart to the sacred music. It reaches beyond their hits to unearth some deeper catalog cuts like the spry "Low and Lonely" (chosen by Jim James) and the loping "Scared of the Blues" (chosen by Devendra Banhart), which reveal the scope of their songwriting, the agility of Ira's mandolin playing, and the exuberance of their keening harmonies. Especially for an album produced by committee, Handpicked argues persuasively for the Louvins' relevance long after rock'n'roll supposedly rendered their music obsolete. Even at a time when so many church-bred artists were exploring more worldly markets, the struggle between salvation and damnation has rarely sounded so lively or so gloriously conflicted.


It's been a while since anyone's heard from Everything But the Girl's Tracey Thorn. In fact, it's been nearly a decade since Everything But the Girl's 1999 *Temperamental*, after which the duo went on extended hiatus and, perhaps more accurately, singer Thorn went on extended maternity leave. Sure, there was an EBTG best-of, and Thorn (with her longtime partner Ben Watt) curated a *Back to Mine* comp. But no one had heard a freshly recorded peep from Thorn until she resurfaced singing with Tiefschwarz on their 2006 Fabric mix. Still, that's nothing compared to the wait to hear from Tracey

Out of the Woods

It's been a while since anyone's heard from Everything But the Girl's Tracey Thorn. In fact, it's been nearly a decade since Everything But the Girl's 1999 Temperamental, after which the duo went on extended hiatus and, perhaps more accurately, singer Thorn went on extended maternity leave. Sure, there was an EBTG best-of, and Thorn (with her longtime partner Ben Watt) curated a Back to Mine comp. But no one had heard a freshly recorded peep from Thorn until she resurfaced singing with Tiefschwarz on their 2006 Fabric mix. Still, that's nothing compared to the wait to hear from Tracey Thorn, solo artist. No one's heard from Tracey Thorn, solo artist, since her barely-there 1982 debut A Distant Shore, after which she teamed with Watt to form Everything But the Girl and moved on to bigger, better, and altogether more fleshed-out things. But with Watt off gallivanting around the globe as an in-demand DJ and the kids apparently okay to go, Thorn has finally returned to the studio for another stab at flying solo.
Needless to say, much has changed since 1982, both in Thorn's life as well as in Thorn's music, with the biggest difference between then and now probably Everything But the Girl's unlikely flirtation and ultimate intersection with house music. The merger transformed the group from sophisti-pop cult act to clubland favorites, not only earning the duo its biggest success to date but ensuring its perennial spot on countless dance comps.
No surprise, then, that many of those dance elements have returned along with Thorn on Out of the Woods. But this is no club record; instead it nicely encapsulates Thorn's best quality-- the unlikely diva and cosmo chanteuse, wrapped up in one-- while doing its darndest to prove as unchallenging as possible. It's a disc better suited to a relaxing afternoon shopping for jeans than a sweaty night out.
In a sense Thorn was fortunate that few outside the rabidly faithful were clamoring for a comeback, as the greatest advantage of making an album no one expected is that you're able to make an album free from expectations. That's a benefit most veterans would kill for, and at least initially Thorn takes advantage of the clean slate. The opener "Here It Comes Again" is a gorgeously pastoral piece of chamber folk that does justice to Thorn's evocative lyrics. "The sun coming through the rain is more precious than God," she sings, and if you close your eyes and sit still for a bit, that image comes across perfectly clear through the mix of English countryside melancholy and heavenly beauty.
Sticking to such a subdued internalized mood would have taken some courage, especially for a comeback record, so maybe it's not as surprising as it is a little disappointing that Thorn chooses to play it safe, taking much of the rest of the record indoors for a series of mostly standard-issue dance tracks that range from good to fine to perfunctory but never quite achieve the tacit goal of most club music: euphoria.
The downtempo schoolyard taunt chronicle "A-Z" starts things out on a strong note, the pointed lyrics of "small town hell" compensating for Ewan Pearson's 1980s-meets-90s production (it's like Bronski Beat's "Smalltown Boy" at half speed). The actually pretty excellent "It's All True" continues on the decidedly retro track, with self-consciously dated squiggling synth squiggles and percussion flourishes as timeless as they are anonymous. With "Get Around to It" the album gets a bit of second hand inspiration from Arthur Russell, whose track gets remade as a funky disco rave-up that features the Rapture's saxophonist Gabe Andruzzi squonking away.
But after that early (musical) peak, "Hands Up to the Ceiling" brings it back down again, or at last back inward, and Thorn's suddenly warm glimmer of heart and directly personal sentiment fulfills the promise of "Here It Comes Again", the mellow trip down memory lane name checking "Siouxsie Sioux and Edwyn, too," while incorporating the requisite references to rain coming down "on a cold grey town." It's like a UK indie "In My Room" (Beach Boys or Weezer, take your pick).
"Easy" marks the shift back to downtempo dance, all space swooshes and low squelches, but it's hard to imagine this is the music the (we assume) teenage Thorn of "Hands Up to the Ceiling" turns to when it's time to escape. It's solidly constructed, but at the same time the song's almost oppressively generic. The same could be said for "Falling Off a Log", whose spooky Omnichord chimes are all that sets it apart from what could be a slick, safe, boutique friendly remix. The throbbing "Grand Canyon" makes Thorn sound like a guest on her own album.
Thus the pretty "By Piccadilly Station I Sat Down and Wept" again interrupts to underscore what the rest of the album has already evinced. Here Thorn's at her best, and her barest, both musically and emotionally, allowing her voice to take precedent over the beats rather than serve as a mere supporting player. Were the rest of the album this consistently mellow, the concluding "Raise the Roof" might have had a greater effect, a glimmer of optimism that washes away the gloom. Instead it's just another upswing of the album's back-and-forth cover the bases pace.
The difference is that on this final track, you can practically hear Thorn smiling as she allows herself to cautiously warm up, leaving behind the restrictions of chill out music for something a little more fun and loose. In context it sounds like nothing so much as the kind of soundtrack fodder that plays as the credits roll. A chick flick, no less, after the personal touches of the screenplay have been market tested and twisted through numerous permutations until what's left is perfectly serviceable and never less than pleasant, but still suspiciously closer to product than what the writer might have originally intended. At this point in her career, Thorn shouldn't be courting the middle, and considering the best moments on Out of the Woods, she didn't have to, either.


With understated production and forceful vocal performances, the Los Angeles songwriter crafts a heartbroken road-trip record that feels like a breakthrough.

Time Ain’t Accidental

Time Ain’t Accidental is a road-trip record full of open space and vivid detail. Listening to its 11 radiant country songs, you’ll encounter a singalong to Townes Van Zandt, “cigarettes and cheap incense,” and a poolside rendezvous at a Marfa hotel. The scenery is placid, but Los Angeles-based songwriter Jess Williamson is restless, eyes always trained on the horizon. She’s the one in the driver’s seat, but she’s also the one asking Are we there yet? As the world hums along behind her, she’s in the foreground dancing like a pop star: the impatient, impulsive center of an agonizingly slow-moving universe.
It’s been three years since Williamson’s last album, 2020’s arid, windswept Sorceress, and you can hear, from the opening moments of Time Ain’t Accidental, how her approach has changed. Her breathy, cool-girl intonation has been replaced by a voice that’s clarion and rich with emotion. The native Texan twang she showed off on I Walked With You a Ways, her 2022 collaboration with Waxahatchee as Plains, is on full display. Williamson’s wayward sense of articulation allows for some unexpected rhymes; the more outré pairs—“Raymond Carver” and “pool bar,” “ate me raw” and “Shangri-La”—give her writing a sense of unpredictability that’s mirrored in the album’s unusual arrangements.
Produced by indie go-to Brad Cook, Time Ain’t Accidental doesn’t sound like many recent indie-country records. The warm woodwinds that served as gilding on Sorceress are this record’s foundation, along with the click of an iPhone drum machine. It’s an open, breezy record, often pared back to just saxophone, a nonchalant beat, and Williamson’s voice. It’s a surprisingly versatile palette, allowing for tense, heartbroken anger (“Something’s in the Way”) as well as blushing romantic reveries such as the title track and “Topanga Two Step.” Williamson, singing with a new strength and soulfulness, is a magnetic presence. On “A Few Seasons,” she wonders how she learned to “accommodate and get so small,” and the way she sings—forcefully, suffused with an earnest, beseeching quality—feels like a counter to that realization.
Time Ain’t Accidental is a breakup record, but its observations are far removed from the immediate heat of a breakup. Instead, Williamson vacillates between wry analysis and guileless curiosity. Some lines are steeped in bitter irony—“I was admired for my patience and my strength/I am well known for being so okay,” she sings on “A Few Seasons,” dredging up the platitudes friends offer after a split—while others treat everyday life with wide-eyed excitement. On “Hunter,” she writes about the perils of app-based dating and turns mundane swipes into an odyssey: “I want a mirror not a piece of glass/We went a hundred down the highway/I’ve been known to move a little fast/I’m a hunter for the real thing.” Love is a life-or-death matter in Williamson’s world, even if modern romance can feel bureaucratic and kind of bullshit.
Even though many of the characters are heartbroken or wracked with anxiety, Williamson navigates modern life using timeless tropes that lend Time Ain’t Accidental an immense, gratifying confidence. She sings lucidly about the agony of being in someone else’s gravitational pull, and for every new age-y pearl of insight (“Shatter the lamp/The light remains”), there’s another that sounds like it was gleaned from the depths of a dive bar jukebox. On the tense “Something’s in the Way,” a desolate ballad that swells into frantic ragtime, she slips easily into one of country’s most enduring archetypes, the dutiful woman holding out for a fickle lover: “A man like you knows how to make me wait.”
Heartbreak isn’t Williamson’s only mode. She has a way of turning quick flirtations and flashes of new romance into low-key love songs that sound casual but burn bright. On “Topanga Two Step,” a delicate pop song with transportive imagery and needling hooks, Williamson teases a mercurial love interest, daring him to make a move. The production is understated, but Williamson’s presence is like a hurricane: “Baby, god damn,” she exclaims, stretching the words out into a rich, euphoric hook. Coming from her, it sounds monumental—an expression of frustration and ecstasy in one. It may not be the “radical kind of love” that Williamson seeks throughout the record, but it’s enough fuel to keep her on the road.


Continuing the beat-oriented experiments of their 12” club tunes, the electronic duo Demdike Stare blend their doomy aesthetic with dancehall cadences for their most compelling full-length.

Wonderland

For the first few years of their career, Demdike Stare narrowed in on their chosen aesthetic with unswerving focus. They took their name from a 17th-century witch; they favored titles like “Suspicious Drone” and “All Hallows Eve” and “Forest of Evil (Dusk).” Drawing from horror soundtracks, Italian library music, African percussion records, and industrial acts like Nurse With Wound, they boiled down the mixture until it resembled the sticky black substance scraped from the bottom of an iron cauldron. At the same time, the proportions of their music sprawled, and they turned to increasingly ambitious formats—triple CDs, quadruple LPs—to suit their meandering, multi-part ambient suites.
In 2013, the duo turned from their habitual style to indulge themselves with a pair of gut-punching club tunes. Called simply Testpressing #001, the record was named in homage to the white-label platters used to check for errors in the vinyl manufacturing process, but the title also spoke to the tracks’ exploratory purpose: What would happen if they applied their doomy aesthetic to classic jungle and techno? (Total dancefloor mayhem, as it turned out.) Pursuing a grab-bag approach and pairing radically different tracks on each successive 12”, they kept the Testpressing series going for six more installments—only Demdike Stare would approach even one-offs in serial fashion—and although the music varied widely, from UK garage to chopped-and-screwed breakbeat hardcore, the records all shared the same questing nature.
Their new album, Wonderland, keeps up those beat-oriented experiments. Nearly all of its tracks are built around muscular rhythms: hardcore breaks, lurching dancehall cadences, overdriven techno. And despite the omnipresent shadowy hues and sandblasted textures, no two tunes sound alike; the eight full-length tracks here (the ninth is a minute-long ambient sketch) could easily have served as the next four records in the Testpressing series. That’s not to say that Wonderland sounds disjointed. Quite to the contrary: As wonderfully immersive as their first couple of albums could be, the new one makes for a far more engaging listening experience, one that shakes you forcefully by the lapels at regular intervals.
Where the Testpressing records were noxious and smoggy, so thick with static you could barely breathe, the new album frequently takes inspiration from dancehall reggae’s use of empty space. “Animal Style” loops breakbeats into a snapping groove that feels like a reggae 45 spun at 33, and “FullEdge (eMpTy-40 Mix)” goes so far as to sample “Now Thing,” a 1998 Sly & Lenky riddim that became the centerpiece of an eponymous Mo Wax compilation of dancehall instrumentals. (It’s clearly a sound close to their hearts: Earlier this year, Demdike Stare’s DDS label released Equiknoxx’s Bird Sound Power, an album by a group of Jamaican producers deeply inspired by the kind of digital dancehall that Now Thing spotlighted.)
There are moments of real beauty, like the flickering loop of tone that sends the final track, “Overstaying,” soaring toward its 808-driven climax. But the musicians aren’t afraid to get messy, either. In “Sourcer,” a ragged ragga-jungle anthem, dubbed-out synths bob like fat globules in soapy water; “Hardnoise” delivers exactly what the title promises, at least until a trim 808 pattern ushers its metal-shop squeals toward a comparatively dulcet ambient close.
Something that elevates *Wonderland *above reams of color-by-numbers “dark” techno is Demdike Stare’s judicious sense of dynamics; the duo also clearly have a wicked sense of humor. They’re fond of fake-out beats that hiccup, stumble, and flip into totally different time signatures, and the switchbacking changes of “FullEdge (eMpTy-40 Mix)” suggest a preference for hands-on recording and white-knuckled mixdowns, as opposed to meticulous, on-screen composition. The end of the song dissolves into a monstrous bit of noise, followed by a sharp guffaw from one of the musicians; suddenly, we’re eavesdropping on the duo in their studio. “Amazing,” says the other, clearly pleased with the madness they’ve cooked up.
My favorite moment on the album might be the spoken-word snippet that closes out the woozy synth sketch “Fridge Challenge.” It’s just a loudspeaker announcement inside an airport terminal—“TAP Flight 3814 to Brasilia now boarding gate 28”—but the announcer’s voice is so full of character, her diction so alien, that within the context of the album, it takes on a weird, almost paranormal resonance. You can imagine the two musicians staring slack-jawed at each other as they pulled out their phones to record the sound, marveling at what they’d stumbled upon. To make mood music out of already gloomy materials is easy; on Wonderland, Demdike Stare spin the most unexpected stuff into music for haunted dancehalls, and the results are wickedly compelling.


On his first album in six years, the UK producer spins freeform modular-synth improvisations into shaggily hypnotic psychedelia.

Translate

If the Ramones had grown up on Tangerine Dream and modular synthesis rather than classic rock and bubblegum, they might have produced something like Translate, the first solo album in six years from Norfolk, England producer Luke Abbott. That’s not to say that Translate shares the Ramones’ brevity, aggression, or wit—quite the opposite, in fact; here, glorious long-windedness is the order of the day. But Abbott shares with the New York punks a singular devotion to a narrowly defined sound, and on Translate he offers 11 versions on the theme of slowly mutating synth lines.
Great sweeps of analog synth give Translate its shape, breaking across the spectrum like tentacles of somber-colored paint or waves on a chilly autumn sea. Abbott’s recent work in the  jazz trio Szun Waves has bled into the new album, which he recorded as a series of improvised live performances. Spontaneity and freedom of spirit fuel the album’s 11 tracks, where sounds twist at turn at will, untethered from the functional four-bar grid of much modern electronic music. On “Flux” the synths constantly promise to resolve into elegant melody, only to deviate at the last moment, sending the song lurching off into another slightly queasy left turn. “Ames Window” sounds like mice scurrying round an electronic maze—a scuttling frenzy of semi-irregular movement that seems to make sense only when viewed from a distance.
There is something primal about Translate’s rather grubby kinetic repetition. To record the album, Abbott positioned speakers around Border Community label boss James Holden’s London studio in a configuration he compared to the standing slabs of Stonehenge. “Our Scene” is the perfect song for such a setup: Its driving rhythm, climbing walls of synth, and cycling melody trigger a response that feels buried deep in the mammalian brain, suggesting prehistoric humans dancing in circles after a hefty dose of local mushrooms.
In the right frame of mind Translate can be highly immersive, as undulating synth patterns and analog sounds choreograph our neural oscillations into a foxtrot of flux. But a sense of sameness soon sets in. Abbott described “Ames Window” as “an indulgent improvised modular synth track,” and that characterization could comfortably fit the majority of the work here; the most immediately apparent difference between most of these songs is their length. Even that distinction feels largely arbitrary: “Kagen Sound” could happily extend to nine minutes and “Ames Window” could easily reduce to three, with no real changes to the album’s vital signs.
The problem may be that the Norfolk producer is all alone on Translate. Szun Waves operate as a trio, each member bringing sounds for the others to bounce off. Translate is the work of a one-man band, and the same arpeggiated synth lines and drum-machine rhythms return again and again, with the admirable exception of “Feed Me Shapes,” which brings an unlikely blues guitar to the equation. The Ramones got away with their relentlessly reduced toolkit by writing brilliantly vital pop songs. But the melodies on Translate are rarely more than respectable.
As a soundtrack to the listener’s own personal trip into the eye of the almighty—or, more prosaically, a film—Translate might work brilliantly, with the music’s cumulative effect more important than its individual details. As a sit-down listening experience, the album frequently feels too repetitive to remain consistently engaging. Still, taken as a microdosed jolt of electronic psychedelia, a song or two at a time, Translate has the potential to lift you up, out, and beyond, to a better, stranger place.


Quelle Chris examines how words, fear, and skin color are weaponized, and how one’s community can dictate their relationship to firearms.

Guns

Near the end of Quelle Chris’ new album, Guns, singer/producer Bilal Salaam ticks off some of the recent mass shootings in United States history: Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where Nikolas Cruz gunned down 17; First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where Devin Patrick Kelley murdered 26; and the carnage at a country music festival in Las Vegas, where Stephen Paddock killed 58 concertgoers. Salaam’s voice is pitched down, modulated to a near robotic tone, conjuring pre-2000 Busta Rhymes when “there was only one year left.” In a flash, everything before Salaam’s verse—on an interlude called “Sunday Mass”—is briefly forgotten; all the lo-fi drum loops give way to the album’s most sobering moment.
Chris’ first solo album since 2017’s introspective Being You Is Great, I Wish I Could Be You More Often is full of dire implications, and employs the same mix of serious reflection and satire that made Everything’s Fine—his 2018 LP with rapper/producer Jean Grae—such a resonant piece of cultural criticism. Chris and Grae examined America’s dying spirit, pointing the finger at The White House and racist police officers as reasons for the country’s never-ending malaise. Chris’ new record continues that theme, probing the nuances of American gun culture and its clichés. With each mass shooting, legislators “pray for the fallen” but fail to impose stricter gun laws. They say things like “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” to explain why shooters can buy rifles at the local Walmart.
On Guns, Chris doesn’t just explore gun usage, he examines how words, fear and skin color are weaponized, and how one’s community can dictate their relationship to firearms. He does this by putting himself in their shoes, and on “Spray and Pray” and “Mind Ya Bidness,” Chris becomes the tough-talking street dude with gun culture in his blood. On the former, he sounds like a West Indian from Crown Heights, Brooklyn; the latter, a Crip or Piru from South Central, Los Angeles. There’s a prevalent sadness to “Spray and Pray,” as if the protagonist is trapped in the lifestyle and death by a bullet is the only way out. “Been packin’ since a yute,” Chris grumbles through a faux-Caribbean accent, “studied gun slangin’ from ‘89 to new thousand two, prayed if I paid my dues I’d grow big to be just like you.”  The “you” is up for interpretation here; given the scope of the song and album, he might be talking to a big brother or Big Brother. On “Mind Ya Bidness,” Chris pokes out his chest to rap from the perspective of a brash O.G. The beat—produced by Chris himself—is a direct ode to mid-’80s West Coast rap, with the kind of deep bass and dark synths on which Too Short would feel comfortable. Chris sounds just as natural here; across this album and others, he’s shown that he’s not only a skilled lyricist, but an expert producer who pulls from various regions and subgenres to craft a universal aesthetic untethered to a specific place or category.
Chris hits a stride toward the middle of Guns, when a short run of songs—“It’s The Law,” “Wild Minks,” “Box of Wheaties” and “PSA Drugfest 2003/Sleeveless Minks”—lock into a magnetic groove of idiosyncratic funk and Wu-Tang-inspired grit. Chris evokes the production style of early-’90s RZA with unconventional vocal samples, foggy drums and off-center piano chords. Chris’ tracks have the same cassette hiss, and coupled with standout features from lyricists Ugly Boy Modeling (“It’s The Law”), Mach-Hommy (“Wild Minks”) and Denmark Vessey (“Box of Wheaties”), the LP recalls old New York street rap while avoiding the familiar tropes that came along with that era. On “It’s The Law,” Chris chides tiki-torch alt-righters who use religion as a shield to spew animosity.
The artist turns his lens inward on the back half of Guns, resulting in some of his ferocious music yet. Critics have called his music “weird” and “goofy,” and Chris fires back at those descriptions on “Straight Shot” and “Obamacare.” “I’m okay,” Chris assures us at the beginning of “Straight Shot” before launching into this clapback: “Y’all ain’t gotta make my day, I’mma always make the shit I like.” “Obamacare,” by contrast, might be the hardest track of Chris’ career. Dark chimes, undulating bass and stomping drums set a thunderous backdrop as Chris declares “I was never weirdo, they just had to acclimate.” In the end, Guns isn’t just about the devastation we see with our eyes—the mass shootings and the obligatory prayers that follow. It’s also about the journey to reconcile internal havoc and re-emerge with a stronger sense of self.


The Hot Chip frontman's third solo record is his most straightforward and surprisingly personal effort, a collection of songs for just piano and voice.

Piano

On his third proper solo album, Alexis Taylor puts aside all semblance of pop affectations in favor of something totally sparse and infinitely more vulnerable: a record composed entirely of piano and voice. Recorded at Hackney Road Studios, the aptly-named Piano is not only the most straightforward thing the usually cheeky Hot Chip frontman has ever released, it’s also the most surprisingly personal. Taylor has always had a knack for embedding wistfulness and bittersweet melancholia into pristinely rendered pop songs. With Piano Taylor peels back any kind of artifice, offering a collection of songs that examine mortality, religion, and the creative impulse itself.
The album opens with “I’m Ready”—a song that correlates the creative process with a kind of expansive emotional openness. “Don’t you know I’m ready?” sings Taylor. “Don’t you know I’m healthy? Nowhere else I’d rather be/Nothing to protect me/No one to defend me.” The song, which is carried aloft by Taylor’s lovely but unfussy piano playing, speaks to vulnerability at the core of the record. The idea of emotional nakedness as reflected by this sort of stripped back, bare-bones performance style is certainly nothing new, but it’s a conceit that works nicely here, showcasing just how genuinely sweet Taylor’s voice actually is. This is particularly true on the record’s two standout covers—a take on Artie Glenn’s “Crying in the Chapel” (a song made famous by Elvis in 1965) and, even more odd and sublime, a gorgeous version of Crystal Gayle’s 1977 hit, “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.” Stripped of its more obvious gospel tropes, the former plays like a love song to serenity, a paean for the peace that comes with surrendering to a higher power or some great love. With his quietly non-ironic dissection of the latter, Taylor gets to the sticky emotional core of Gayle’s song—i.e. the pain of being tossed aside for someone else—and delivers it with devastating ease: “Tell me you love me and don’t let me cry/Say anything but don’t say goodbye.”
Of the original songs on Piano, the most interesting of the lot are oblique examinations of spirituality, all rendered from the stance of the unbeliever. “In the Light of the Room” and “I Never Lock That Door” each unspool with the rhythms of an old country song or a hymn, the divinity at their centers less about any specific god but rather sourced from a sense of love, goodness, and wholeness that exists only in the abstract. (“There’s one place that’s always open/And you’ll find me if you’re hoping/to be mine for all of time/I never lock that door.”) In the liner notes for Piano Taylor admits that many of these songs are meant to “celebrate lives of friends now passed, as well as love for those closest to us, and music itself.” On the elegiac “So Much Further to Go” Taylor balances the urge to bring something new into the world against the crushing brevity of human experience, describing life itself as “a miracle that's hard to bear,” while on album-closing “Don’t Worry” he intones, “If I’m gone away, don’t worry/It is only forever” as if to remind us that life is short, but also sometimes unbearably and stupidly long.
It would be easy to dismiss Piano as a slight addition to Taylor’s discography, but that would be wrong. The quiet humanity in these songs is disarmingly simple at first, but these sentiments creep up on you, giving credence to the notion that it’s in these private moments of contemplation where the narratives of our lives are ultimately assembled. “In the light of the room/Through a window dappled/I was dreaming of you/And of all that’s happened,” Taylor sings on “In the Light of the Room.” It’s the kind of simple moment of observation that Piano is full of. Taylor is no stranger to wearing his heart on his sleeve, Piano takes that notion one step further— it’s as if Taylor is taking his heart out for everyone to see, then discreetly leaving it on your coffee table.


Somersault is a huge leap for Beach Fossils and includes some of Dustin Payseur’s most nuanced songs to date, with features from Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell and Cities Aviv.

Somersault

After it launched in 2008, it didn’t take long for Brooklyn label Captured Tracks to define its sound. Founder Mike Sniper had grown tired of the power-pop and punk albums he was reissuing on Radio Heartbeat Records, and he sold off most of his personal collection to fund Captured Tracks’ first two releases: the sophomore Dum Dum Girls EP and his own band Blank Dogs’ Seconds EP. By the end of its first full year in 2009, the label had more than 30 releases to its name, and within a few years, it had launched the careers of Wild Nothing, DIIV, Mac DeMarco, and Beach Fossils. There was a through-line within the Captured Tracks sound: fidelity was often low, the songwriting was pointedly nostalgic, and the overall aesthetic skewed atmospheric and dreamy. For several years, Captured Tracks held a moment in its hand. And then its bands had to grow up.
In 2017, the artists involved with the label’s rise are surviving on their own accord. DeMarco and DIIV have certainly fared best, with the former ascending from slacker icon to maturing troubadour, while DIIV’s leader Zachary Cole Smith hasn’t let personal demons stand in the way of creating a catalog of hypnotic guitar pop. Wild Nothing hasn’t quite recaptured the heights of debut LP Gemini, but that hasn’t slowed down the project’s offerings, either. And then there’s Beach Fossils, whose leader Dustin Payseur helped set the groundwork at Captured Tracks for his higher-profiled peers to takeoff, before remaining quiet for the last few years. On his third LP, the four-years-in-the-making Somersault, Payseur doesn’t shy from the fact that he’s reaching for something more both lyrically and musically. Somersault is an acrobatic leap for Beach Fossils.
Released on Payseur’s own Bayonet Records (which he co-founded with Secretly Label Group A&R rep Katie Garcia), the sleepy-eyed longing of the band’s breakthrough self-titled debut are a distant memory. In its stead are frequent surprises. The confident lead track and first single “This Year” recalls Real Estate’s jangle and infuses it with a driving rhythm section, and when the strings cue to punctuate its outro, Payseur’s vision sounds more ambitious than ever. The orchestration is a recurring feature on the record, accentuating the backing vocals of Slowdive’s Rachel Goswell on “Tangerine” and turning the mid-tempo “Saint Ivy” into the most nuanced composition that Payseur has ever recorded. Its coda marries a weepy George Harrison-like guitar solo with string swells, as Beach Fossils traverse the chasm between its previous brand of dream pop and the retro AM radio vibes that Jonathan Rado, one of the record’s engineers, is known for producing.
“Wanna believe in America, but it’s somewhere I can’t find,” Payseur sings on “Saint Ivy,” which is as directly political as the record gets. But reality bubbles up subtly as Payseur casually mines his personal life and relationships for stories. There’s something real in how the country’s hardships are inescapable in 2017: Even when Payseur wants to focus on friendships or temporary escapism, he looks down at the concrete to see “A.C.A.B” (All Cops Are Bastards) in the song “Down the Line.” The encroaching claustrophobia of the world is reflected in the record’s more unusual moments, like a Cities Aviv-led spoken-word diversion on the introspective “Rise” or the rudderless harpsichord of “Closer Everywhere.”
Still, Payseur has written some of his best songs to date here. When Somersault reaches its unfettered climax, the five-minute-plus tension-releasing eruption of “Be Nothing,” it’s clear that the project has overcome its greatest burden. Like DeMarco and DIIV before it, Beach Fossils emerged from Captured Tracks haze and established its own identity on the other side.


Will Toledo takes Car Seat Headrest out of the bedroom and into a 1000-seat theater near you on the band’s first major live album.

Car Seat Headrest: Commit Yourself Completely

Commit Yourself Completely

Commit Yourself Completely is billed as a Car Seat Headrest live album, but it’s not all that conceptually different than Will Toledo’s studio releases. By collecting and reconfiguring previously available Car Seat Headrest songs, Commit Yourself Completely joins Teens of Style, a “Greatest Hits”-style sampler of his wildly prolific early years on Bandcamp, and last year’s Twin Fantasy (Face to Face), an upgraded recording of Toledo’s 2011 cult classic. Even Teens of Denial was subject to 2016’s most costly ex post facto tinkering this side of The Life of Pablo, and its outtakes were made available two years prior on How to Leave Town. But if Toledo has mostly used Matador’s reputation and reach to refurbish his catalog for a larger audience, Commit Yourself Completely aims to present Car Seat Headrest not as “Will Toledo,” but a mighty seven-piece filling a 1000-seat theater near you.
Commit Yourself Completely was culled from about 50 shows on their 2018 tour and makes no attempt to imply otherwise—each of its nine tracks mentions the venue in which it was recorded. After finishing off a chiseled “Fill in the Blank,” Toledo asks “How many of you guys are in college?” to a crowd in Columbus, Ohio. The reaction is accordingly raucous for the home of the fourth-largest university in the United States. It’s his segue to a performance of “Drugs With Friends” in Amiens, France, which was likely the smallest gig they played on that tour.
“I...feel like a lot of bands these days don’t have a particularly compelling live act,” Toledo said in a 2016 interview. But it’s also worth pointing out that most of the ’90s legends Car Seat Headrest are compared to were notorious for their non-committal stage presence, and Commit Yourself Completely has no qualms about a classic rawk heft that, say, Pavement or Guided By Voices could only embrace with irony or heroic beer consumption.
CSH have the makings of a durable live institution. Toledo’s catalog spans over a dozen albums with songs that push past 10 minutes or more, and he’s clearly not against toying with them, live and in the studio. But Commit Yourself Completely offers the exact setlist one might expect from an hourlong set at Coachella or opening for Interpol or Death Cab for Cutie: eight of its nine tracks are culled from Teens of Denial and Twin Fantasy, and none would be considered a “deep cut.” There are no new verses, no extended solos, no unexpected covers or interpolations, no clues into what Toledo says he learned from studying James Brown and Swans’ Michael Gira as bandleaders. “Fill in the Blank” imagines Toledo in a muscle T rather than an oversized suit; “Drunk Drivers/Killer Whales” is strangely sluggish for what was intended to be a compilation of the tour’s most “fun” performances, and neither illuminates the studio original.
The only outlier is a cover of Frank Ocean’s “Ivy” that’s popped up on setlists since 2016, treated with the deference one would expect after Toledo yearns to have the guy’s voice earlier on “Bodys.” While Toledo wisely avoids trying to emulate Frank Ocean’s vocals, there is an authorial voice shared between these two—a modern way with confessional tropes, a fondness for clever diversions and meta-commentary, informed by social media’s seemingly divergent aims of oversharing and content curation. Considering how Twin Fantasy and Monomania were Toledo’s longform conceptual explorations of queer sexual awakening and unrequited love, it’s possible he’s been trying to write his own “Ivy” for years; it’s also not impossible to think of the influence Toledo might’ve had on Ocean, a guy who’s shown a clear affinity for indie rock oddballs. For all of Commit Yourself Completely's intentions to recast Car Seat Headrest as a live juggernaut, the only essential cut finds Toledo at his most familiar: a solo performer giving the listener unfiltered access to his creative process.


In the early days of what would become grunge, Soundgarden had the catchiest songs, the sexiest frontman, and the most conventional approach to making music. Twenty-five years later, Sub Pop has reissued their 1987 debut EP, Screaming Life, along with its 1988 follow-up, the Fopp EP, this time with a Jack Endino remastering job and bonus track.

Screaming Life / Fopp

When Soundgarden released Screaming Life, their 1987 debut EP, grunge was not a thing. There were a few other bands slinging the sludgy sound that would soon be known to the world at large as grunge, but those groups—chief among them Soundgarden’s Washington State neighbors Green River, Malfunkshun, and the Melvins—barely shared characteristics. (Nirvana and Alice in Chains, meanwhile, were just finding their feet at the time.) The most striking element that set Soundgarden apart was their commercial viability: Of their peers, Soundgarden had the catchiest songs, the sexiest frontman in Chris Cornell, and the most conventional approach to making music. Catchiness, sexiness, and conventionality were all things grunge would eventually, if briefly, pretend to refute. From the start, though, Soundgarden’s music envisioned—if not promised—a nation of arenas full of flannel.
Screaming Life is proof. Along with its 1988 follow-up, the Fopp EP, it’s being reissued by Sub Pop—only this time with a needed Jack Endino remastering job and one bonus track, the jokey throwaway jam “Sub Pop Rock City”, drawn from 1988’s Sub Pop 200 compilation. The latter is sheer filler, as is the six-minute dub version of Fopp’s title track and the passable, unremarkable cover of Green River’s seminal “Swallow My Pride”. That leaves eight songs out of 11 worth listening to on the reissue—some more than others. Revisionists tend to gauge Soundgarden solely in the context of grunge, but Screaming Life—and the two songs on Fopp worth listening to, “Fopp” and “Kingdom of Come”—have more in common with what was truly going on in alternative metal circa 1987 and 88: Jane’s Addiction, the Cult, and even Living Colour, each of whom sought to expand the tropes of metal by cross-pollinating it with other styles—not to mention weaving a shroud of alluring otherness in the face of bad-boys-next-door like Mötley Crüe or Poison. The fact that “Fopp” is a thickened cover of the Ohio Players’ 70s funk classic shows that, in a parallel universe, Soundgarden could just have easily turned into Faith No More.
But they didn’t. Soundgarden wound up drawing from a broad palette while avoiding the funk-metal trap that so many of their contemporaries succumbed to. Even their breakthrough albums—1991’s Badmotorfinger and 1994’s Superunknown—owe more to progressive rock and psychedelia, respectively, than to grunge. Some of that structural oddness and swirling murk can be heard on Screaming Life, albeit sporadically. If anything, Screaming Life comes on like gothic Led Zeppelin. “Hunted Down” is cavernous and “Immigrant Song”-like in its pseudo-mythic chug, while “Tears to Forget” echoes the metallic gallop of “Communication Breakdown”. Cornell’s voice veers from Robert Plant majesty—steeped, though, in deeper shadows—to a scalding screech that he’d soon ditch in favor of a more melodic wail. “Entering” starts out with a drumbeat that resembles, of all things, Bauhaus’s “Bela Lugosi’s Dead” before morphing into lesser groove-rock aerobics. Finally tapping into the Black Sabbath wellspring that came to be a grunge stereotype, Soundgarden turns “Nothing to Say” into a ringing, doom-laden drone. “Little Joe” is Screaming Life’s lone disposable track, another foray into stiff-necked quasi-funk that feels squishy and unformed, as do Cornell’s monotone histrionics.
He’d get better from there, as would all of Soundgarden. Not that you’d know it listening to “Kingdom of Come”—a would-be party anthem complete with douchey double entendre that wastes the talent of Kim Thayil, turning one of the most subtly inventive guitarists of his generation into a vending machine for riffs. It in no way predicts what the band was about to accomplish on its brooding, full-length debut for SST, 1988’s Ultramega OK, let alone during its stunning major-label years. Soundgarden would go on to become the most challenging of the mainstream grunge titans; 1996’s Down on the Upside is every inch as dense and harrowing as In Utero. But in 1987, Soundgarden had no way of knowing that rock as they knew it was about to radically change around them. Grunge has long been touted as the revolutionary insurrection that rendered hair-metal obsolete. But Screaming Life/Fopp is music that seemed to want to save hair-metal, not do away with it. And in that sense, it’s a halting, hesitant half-triumph.