The band’s third album is their most complex and compelling to date. Robin Pecknold’s songwriting retreats inward while around him dense folk compositions rise and fall on a massive scale.

Crack-Up

In the six years since Fleet Foxes’ last album, their former drummer has eclipsed them in the public eye by embracing a flamboyant persona fluent in sex, drugs, self-awareness, and sarcasm, like a not-so-subtle referendum on his previous gig. None of Josh Tillman’s jokes have been crueler than the unmistakable alliteration embedded in the title of the first Father John Misty album: Fear Fun. Considering the lengths folkies like Tillman, Justin Vernon, and Marcus Mumford have gone to ensure their beards no longer speak on their behalf, it’s all the more amazing that Robin Pecknold hasn’t tried to counteract the earnest, unglamorous perception of him and Fleet Foxes. He has actually embraced it.
While Fleet Foxes’ music has grown increasingly more complex and less crowd-pleasing, Pecknold’s personal trajectory has strangely aged in reverse—the old-soul serenity of Fleet Foxes gave way to the post-grad anxieties of Helplessness Blues, and now we have Crack-Up, which does not present recent Columbia enrollee Robin Pecknold in the most flattering light. But there’s a textured humanity in place of the assumed and implacable scare-quotes authenticity that served as Fleet Foxes’ personality prior. Crack-Up contains his most compelling writing to date because it’s so damn relatable in 2017—reacting and retreating inwards as people and institutions fail to meet the standards set in one’s head.
Columbia University has been an unexpectedly major influencer of indie aesthetics in the past decade due to its inextricable association with Vampire Weekend, whose self-titled debut serves as the most convincing collegiate promotional material ever constructed. Through the lens of Vampire Weekend, Columbia came off like a finishing school for the attractive, socially curious, and culturally omnivorous—laying out the unlimited possibilities and blindingly bright futures of an Ivy League education and New York City at the same time. Pecknold signed up for the exact opposite experience, “I Am a Rock” to Ezra Koenig’s Graceland, “sitting outside Dodge Hall, smoking, being mad,” and presumably glowering at the kids milling about with their polo shirts, pop songs, and crushes.
In an uncharacteristically low and atonal register, Pecknold mutters, “I’m all that I need and I’ll be till I’m through,” on Crack-Up’s opening suite. Even more so than Helplessness Blues, Crack-Up obliterates the superficially genial and harmless image so easily projected onto Fleet Foxes. At times, Pecknold threatens to be the most misanthropic, nontraditional student to wander an Ivy League quad since a bearded Rivers Cuomo hobbled through Harvard. Though Pecknold’s mood is startlingly desultory throughout most of the album, his view turns outward from the library stacks, adopting a dim outlook on the military police state (“Cassius, - ”), the trajectory of the nation (“Crack-Up,” “If You Need To, Keep Time on Me”), and his fellow man (“- Naiads, Cassadies”). On “Helplessness Blues,” Pecknold resigned to not being a special snowflake—a line that has gone from being precious to uncomfortably prescient—and Crack-Up likewise takes a condemnatory tone towards men who think they’re special enough to upset the designs of Mother Nature (“Fire can’t doubt its heat/Water can’t doubt its power/You’re not a gift… You’re not a flower”).
Helplessness Blues remains one of the decade’s most resonant expressions of millennial tension, years before “millennial” became an oppressive buzzword. But Pecknold’s anxieties were contrasted by music that signified the exact opposite of what it felt like to be financially insecure and technologically dominated in 2011. Likewise, Crack-Up supports the heft of Pecknold’s concerns by working on a massive scale that no band is really attempting in 2017, let alone able to accomplish. Fleet Foxes are still a folk act, though one that’s absorbed far-flung versions of the term. By the penultimate “I Should See Memphis,” it’s more than likely that Pecknold is referring to the one in Egypt rather than Tennessee, as Fleet Foxes integrate Gnawa music, chamber orchestration, pastoral psychedelia, and jazz modalities without ever exceeding their reach. On “Cassius, -” alone, they toggle between krautrock synthesizers, Middle Eastern string melodies, and Appalachian stomp-and-clap rhythms without making it obvious how this was a heretofore unfathomable triangulation.
And while there are enough Civil War and ancient Roman namedrops to rival The Monitor, these aren’t barriers set up by Pecknold, but entry points on an album that proudly flaunts its sonic and thematic solidarity. Though Crack-Up lacks a set-piece single like “White Winter Hymnal” or “Battery Kinzie,” I dare anyone to speak in non-illusory terms as to what those songs are actually about. The unfailing beauty and depth of Crack-Up ensure it’s always welcoming. Fleet Foxes have always been dense—“we have four people singing and five people playing instruments, and Skye [Skjelset] playing a bass pedal while he plays the guitar. That’s 10 things happening all at once,” Pecknold noted back in 2008. Nearly a decade later, Fleet Foxes have learned how to leverage that force into their album that can actually knock you on your ass. The explosive dynamic shifts of “I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar” and “Third of May / Odaigahara” lend the album’s longer suites a seismic force of a latter-day Swans record.
Put aside the inclination to strip it for singles, and Crack-Up’s generosity can feel bottomless. Rather than a show of contempt for the confines and craft of a three-minute pop song, Crack-Up is one of trust, applying its harmonic and textural gifts with the same free-flowing intuition as Joanna Newsom’s Ys or Grizzly Bear’s Yellow House. As with those—or any of the albums Pecknold and Dave Longstreth praised in a predictably misinterpreted Instagram conversation about indie rock’s “progressive” heyday—Crack-Up is music that requires an immense amount of skill and patience to make, and it can be off-putting particularly at a time when newer artists have simultaneously embraced chart pop and a return to the sonic and social values of the ’90s. As with Dirty Projectors’ “Keep Your Name,” Fleet Foxes sample their earlier selves on Crack-Up—“I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar” features a snippet of a high school a cappella group covering “White Winter Hymnal,” a move that could hit a sour note, a dismissal of one of Fleet Foxes’ best and most-beloved songs by saying, “Hey, a high schooler could play this.”
This is the easiest explanation, but it doesn’t feel like the correct one; given the subject matter of ““I Am All That I Need / Arroyo Seco / Thumbprint Scar,” this meta exercise becomes one of Crack-Up’s most legible and devastating emotional moments, demonstrating the chasmic difference between the wide-eyed optimism of a decade prior and Pecknold’s political and personal disillusion. This becomes more apparent on the album’s second half, particularly “Fool’s Errand” and the closing title track. Not only are they the most conventionally pleasant songs here, but they hint at Pecknold recognizing the futility of self-reliance and learning to once again embrace friendship and Fleet Foxes.
It’s incredibly tempting to compare Crack-Up and Pure Comedy, and almost unavoidable—both records are long and lack the pure pop moments of each artist’s past. They are almost excessively pretty in their orchestration, and follow a general narrative arc from total cynicism to the realization that each other is all we’ve really got. But Pure Comedy makes the game feel rigged to Tillman’s delight, a lecture where we’re all reliant on the professor for the answer key. Fittingly, Crack-Up takes the more rewarding perspective of the overwhelmed, but exhilarated student of the world—unsure about their place in the big picture, about the answers to life’s grand mysteries, but damn sure of their willingness to figure it out.


On their first album in 14 years, art-metal giants Maynard James Keenan and Billy Howerdel swerve unexpectedly toward gloomy adult-alternative.

Eat the Elephant

Maynard James Keenan knows he’s kept you waiting, and he’s not sorry in the slightest. The singer crafted Eat the Elephant, A Perfect Circle’s first record in 14 years, according to the same principles as his self-run winery and restaurant in rural Arizona: time, investment, focus, presence. In a recent Revolver interview, Keenan compared himself to an Italian mother cooking up family dinner slowly and painstakingly, hungry children be damned. “When I start to dig into the content, the melodies, the words,” he explained, his chief feeling is “Get the fuck out. Dinner’s not ready, get out. Need the kids out of the kitchen!” The man’s philosophy as a winemaker offers a similar insight: “Rather than making Metallica or Slayer wines, we’re making Pink Floyd wines. You’re not gonna get ’em in 15 seconds.” A decade and a half—now that’s more like it.
If Keenan is A Perfect Circle’s public face, Billy Howerdel—the group’s co-founder, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist—is its true puppetmaster, presiding over the drama from on high. A former guitar tech for David Bowie, Smashing Pumpkins, and Guns N’ Roses, Howerdel met Keenan when a then-unknown Tool opened for the iconic ska group Fishbone’s 1992 European tour, which he was working. He’s said that he originally conceived A Perfect Circle as a foray into female-fronted dream-pop, a pitch-black Cocteau Twins. The band took on a heavier shape once Keenan hopped aboard, but the old primordial opulence remained in Howerdel’s bombastic riffs, symphonic arrangements, and dread-laden atmospherics. A rotating cast of all-star session musicians (Smashing Pumpkins’ James Iha, Queens of the Stone Age’s Troy Van Leeuwen, Paz Lenchantin) further buttressed the grandeur, elevating a two-man operation to supergroup status almost instantly on 2000’s hit debut Mer De Noms, one of the most stirring, successful albums in modern hard-rock history. Their 2003 follow-up, The Thirteenth Step, was a psychedelic-leaning concept set about addiction that confirmed A Perfect Circle as both hitmakers and experimental heavyweights. (Their third album, Emotive, a collection of covers and reinterpreted material released in 2004, has more or less fallen by the wayside—which is unfortunate, since its lead single, “Passive,” is one of the finest crushers they’ve got on the books.)
With Eat the Elephant, Keenan and Howerdel have gone back to basics once more, though not in the way you might expect. As the first A Perfect Circle album recorded without special guests—save semi-anonymous major-label rock lifer Dave Sardy, who produced the set, and the mysterious “APC drum orchestra” credited with percussion—it re-establishes the co-founders’ chemistry as the band’s distinguishing trait. But where their previous three albums translated that dynamic into emotionally-charged metal, Eat the Elephant assumes the form of a gloomy adult-alternative record flush with grand pianos, classical strings, and slackened tempos. Were it not for Keenan’s crooned politicking and the odd outburst, one could easily mistake it for the work of the British piano-rock outfit Keane.
Eat the Elephant’s fatal flaws don’t take long to reveal themselves. The titular opening track more or less amounts to a hearty “fuck you” to the acolytes who’ve spent the past 14 years anticipating another powerhouse like 2000’s “Judith” or 2003’s “Weak and Powerless.” If the treacly pianos and plodding tempos don’t dampen diehards’ spirits, then the chorus certainly will. Keenan rattles off motivational cliches in an unintended, hilariously low-energy Shia LaBeouf impression: “Just take the stand,” he mewls, “Just take the swing/Just take the bite/Just go all in.” Previously-released singles “Disillusioned” and “TalkTalk” are similarly listless, relying on the driving verses for all momentum, only to undermine them with gratuitous, heavy-handed screeds against selfie culture (“We have been overrun by our animal desire/Addicts of the immediate keep us obedient and unaware/Feeding this mutation, this Pavlovian despair”) and that one holier-than-thou asshole glutting your Facebook feed (“Try braving the rain/Try lifting the stone/Try extending a hand/Try walkin’ your talk or GET THE FUCK OUT OF MY WAAAAY!”). That the band have framed Eat the Elephant as a reflection on the importance of being present only makes the songs’ execution more befuddling: if A Perfect Circle wants listeners to walk away from the album vowing to “put the silicon obsession down” and reconnect with the world around them, then why top-load it with bloated ballads that are more likely to put them to sleep?
Eat the Elephant’s extended “Old Man Yells at iCloud” bit, however grating, isn’t without its silver lining. A quarter-century into his career, Keenan has yet to falter where vocal technique is concerned: The guy could read the tax code in that honeyed falsetto and it’d still sound like a whispered revelation. Between the hairpin melodic turns, deep-throated runs, and silky melismas, his showing on mid-album cut “By and Down the River” is downright Olympian. The effortless choir-boy harmonies coursing through “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”—a sardonic, power-pop pep-rally heralding the coming apocalypse—supply a much-needed sugar spike. And while the piano-driven palette demotes Howerdel’s epic guitar solos to a supporting role throughout most of the album, “Feathers” and “Delicious” are pleasant exceptions. In a wasteland like this, you take what you can get.


CD/DVD set pairs dark and proggy new music from Plaid with videos from frequent collaborator Bob Jaroc.

Greedy Baby

It's a curious thing when electronic artists raised in 12-inch DJ culture opt for long-form composition. You can imagine, say, the force driving Goldie to create "Mother" had something to do with him wanting to be taken seriously as an artist and seeing how far the genre he was working with could be stretched. The same thoughts were surely running through Pete Townshend's head in the second half of the 60s. These impulses have led to some interesting music and boundaries being pushed a few feet; they've also led to large swaths of wasted time.
While Plaid's newest record Greedy Baby, a CD/DVD "AV Album" created in collaboration with video artist Bob Jaroc, isn't properly a single composition (there are gaps of silence between the nine tracks), it certainly feels like a long-form piece. It's partly how the music is presented and partly the uniform sound palette, but it has even more to do with tracks that don't want to stand on their own. All seem to exist in relation to one another, and nothing pops its head out to say, "I'm a single, listen to me first." This being the case, you have to judge Greedy Baby by how taking in its 51 minutes in a single sitting feels.
There's a marked prog vibe early on, evident on the second track "I Citizen the Loathesome". Twinkling synths that sound like a digital approximation of a harpsichord introduce a theme, which gradually builds in tempo until a faux-pipe organ and an actual chorus of wordless voices join in. The scales, chords, and tempo changes suggest widescreen pomp at every turn, building to a distorted guitar-like sound and the massed choir intoning apocalypse. Unfortunately, the grandiosity leads nowhere in particular, and when the music box intro of "The Launching of Big Face" comes next, we're back to the same low-level, vaguely anxious mood. That vibe continues with minor variations on "ZN Zero", which manages at least a neat Escheresqe trick whereby it seems to be constantly ascending.
"The Return of Super Barrio" is where the record finally takes off, as humor and playfulness seep in. Steel drums, a loping acoustic bass integrated with programmed beats, and a reasonably catchy tune combine to suggest a mariachi band performing on one of Jupiter's moons. From there we go to "E.M.R", which stretches on for 10 minutes but feels considerably longer, with its indistinct bells and electronic percussion echoing endlessly into space. It's here that you begin to suspect that that the music isn't necessarily meant to stand on its own, and that the video is an essential part of the work.
The visuals, then. "War Dialer" opens the DVD on a high note. The audio is a collage culled from a hacking program dialing random numbers in search of a vulnerable modem. As women answer and speak in puzzlement to the dialing machine, a circular array of graphics moves in time with the voices. There's nothing to it, really, but the piece is clever in its simplicity; same goes for the animated line drawing that accompanies "The Launching of Big Face", which dances and contorts itself into some beautiful shapes and makes the uninspired Philip Glassisms of the track seem worthwhile.
A couple uninspiring videos are little more than edited assemblages of cities at night, hoping to evoke a sense of dread in slow pans and quick montages among graffiti-covered alleys and traffic streaming beneath lit buildings. To sit through the entirely of "E.M.R.", a mostly dark screen with layers of dim light floating around, is to wish desperately for a temporary infusion of a heavily disorienting drug that might make it interesting.
So we're stuck with a few nice moments in a work that resists being pulled apart. The dull patches are particularly depressing when you realize how much work went into them for so little payoff. That's the risk with these big, long-form statements, with so much invested by both the artists and the audience. When you're sitting through them and they don't quite work, you become aware of how painfully short life really is.


Eno's new ambient piece readily slots along works like the dreamlike Thursday Afternoon and 2012’s stately Lux. It feels the most pensive of his ambient works, flowing across 54 unbroken minutes.

Reflection

Ambient music is a funny thing. As innocuous as it may seem on the surface, it can often be seen as an intrusion, an irritant. Muzak annoyed as many people as it mellowed, to the point where Ted Nugent tried to buy the company just to shutter it. When Brian Eno teamed with guitarist Robert Fripp (planting the seeds that would lead to his epochal Ambient series), the duo played a concert in Paris in May of 1975 that eschewed their Roxy Music and King Crimson fame and was subsequently met with catcalls, whistles, walkouts and a near-riot.
Forty years later, Eno’s ambient works have drifted from misunderstood bane to canonical works. Eno’s long career has taken him from glam-rock demiurge to the upper stratospheres of stadium rock, from the gutters of no wave to the unclassifiable terrains of Another Green World, but every few years he gets pulled back into ambient’s creative orbit. And while last year’s entry The Ship suggested a new wrinkle, wherein Eno’s art songs inhabited and wandered the space of his ambient work like a viewer in an art gallery, Reflection retreats from that hybrid and more readily slots along works like the dreamlike Thursday Afternoon and 2012’s stately Lux.
Like those aforementioned albums, Reflection is a generative piece. Eno approaches it less like an capital-A Artist, exerting his will and ego on the music, and more like a scientist conducting an experiment. He establishes a set of rules, puts a few variables into motion and then logs the results. Reflection opens with a brief melodic figure and slowly evolves from there over the course of one 54-minute piece. It’s not unlike the opening notes of Music for Airport’s “1/1,” with Robert Wyatt’s piano replaced by what might be a xylophone resonating from underwater. Each note acts like a pebble dropped into a pond, sending out ever widening ripples that slowly decay, but not before certain tones linger and swell until they more closely resemble drones. Listen closer and certain small frequencies emerge and flutter higher like down feathers in a draft.
Around the 18-minute mark, one of those wafting frequencies increases in mass and the piece turns shrill for an instant before re-settling. Another brief blip occurs a half-hour in, like a siren on a distant horizon. Between these moments, the interplay of tones is sublime, reminiscent at times of famous jazz vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson’s weightless solos, time-stretched until they seem to be emanating from the moon rather than the earth. As smooth and unperturbed as Eno’s ambient pieces tend to be, these small events feel seismic in scale, even if they are short-lived.
Scale becomes the operative word for Reflection. While the physical editions of the album last just under an hour, Eno conceived of the piece to be the most realized version of his ambient music yet, one without parameters or end. Around 51 minutes in, the music starts to slowly recede from our ears, gradually returning to silence. But there’s a version of the piece for Apple TV and iOS that presents a visual component as well as a sonic version of Reflection that’s ever-changing and endless. As the lengthy press release the accompanied the album noted: “This music would unfold differently all the time–‘like sitting by a river’: it’s always the same river, but it’s always changing.” In this instance, reviewing the actual album feels like taking measure of that river from a ship window; you can sense more changes occurring just beyond its borders.
Eno’s ambient albums have never seemed utilitarian in the way of many other ambient and new age works, but naming the album Reflection indicates that he sees this as a functional release, in some manner. Eno himself calls it an album that “seems to create a psychological space that encourages internal conversation.” It feels the most pensive of his ambient works, darker than Thursday Afternoon. Playing it back while on holiday, it seemed to add a bit more gray clouds to otherwise sunny days. Maybe that’s just an aftereffect of looking back on the previous calendar year and perceiving a great amount of darkness, or else looking forward to 2017 and feeling full of dread at what’s still to come.


Chaz Bundick reached into his archives for this collection of singles written around the time of his debut, Causers of This. It allows you to think "big picture" not only about Bundick, but the role of production and atmosphere in general.

June 2009

Chaz Bundick spent 2011 enduring a barrage of subliminal criticism, but other than that, he had a pretty good year. It just wasn't one that gave him much incentive to get retrospective: Whenever his excellent sophomore LP Underneath the Pine and the subsequent Freaking Out EP were deemed "progressions," it felt like backhanded praise for the artistic distance he was creating from Causers of This, an album that's become weirdly underrated as its chillaxed aesthetic is seemingly blamed for everything from the death of indie rock to LeBron James' laissez-faire attitude in crunch time. So, at the very least, you have to admire the audacity of Bundick dipping into his personal stash for June 2009, a collection of singles written around the same time as Causers of This.
While they're not the proverbial naked baby pictures, June 2009 doesn't dispute the idea of Bundick as someone who ultimately profited from our collective deadbeat summer at the outset. You sense that Bundick had a clear idea of the kind of songs he wanted to write, but there's also the enormous strides he was yet to make as a producer, as an arranger, as a full-blown artist. It's not too hard to view the propulsive, clean melodic lines of "Dead Pontoon" (his strongest early single) as a preview for Underneath the Pine rid of that record's newfound Eurocentric influences. But early on, Bundick used his immediate surroundings as topical inspiration for mundane songs: vehicles, geographic proper names, "Girl Problems". Considering the self-consciousness that's crept into his artistic process, it's impossible to imagine him ever being in a mindset where he'd write something like "Ektelon", an incredibly literal recollection of a river tubing expedition.
As expected, Ariel Pink is namedropped as the major influence, but when Bundick fails to hit some hilariously amateur falsetto notes on "Best Around" or "Take the L to Leave", it's more reminiscent of Rivers Cuomo's strangely fearless Alone tapes-- this isn't the work of a visionary weirdo but rather a guy who sees benefits in the mere archival and procedural aspects of creation. The immediacy and economy of Bundick's songwriting extended to his recording at the time as well. The songs are very short and structurally unfussy, while production values are basically nil, relying on the kinds of tricks familiar to anyone fucking around with their first four-track: doubling vocals in octaves, letting the entire mix submerge under the bass, the R&B and pop of one's youth channeled through Casio presets.
With that in mind, June 2009 almost has to be chronologically sequenced in light of just how jarring "Sad Sams" turns out to be. Up to that point, it's mostly hummable, punchy guitar music with some bubble-funk affectations, pleasant if not particularly unique amongst the scores of lo-fi artists doing the same thing. The roller-rink pop of "Drive South" hints at Bundick starting to get a grasp for rhythm and texture but "Sad Sams" sounds like the first clean break-- the drum machines are still crudely recorded and might be overcompensating in terms of volume, but you can hear in the slick harmonies and wobbly arrangement that it's where Toro Y Moi really started to take shape. Immediately thereafter, "Talamak" offers a means of direct comparison: Both the "First Version" and the one that appeared on Causers of This were subject to Dilla-esque warping and tape degradation, but the latter showed evidence of Bundick's incredible progress as a sound crafter. The pops and hisses sounded very intentional and smartly deployed, whereas here, "Talamak" just sounds like it was dubbed to an old cassette.
Still, there's no getting around the fact that June 2009 acquires most of its value, if not all of it, in context with Causers of This and Underneath the Pine. But it allows you to think "big picture" not only about Bundick, but the role of production and atmosphere in general. The most common criticism of Toro Y Moi is that it's more "vibes" than "songs," which assumes a false binary. Don't get me wrong, I love me a raw and dead-sober Steve Albini production, but it would completely negate the effect of "Blessa", where Bundick's woozy, almost drunken ambience coincided with that song's bittersweet resignation-- you could easily envision someone in a humid South Carolina apartment, beer in hand, shirt untucked, at the end of a long day in the office. By the same token, I wouldn't want to hear a Toro Y Moi remix of a Bill Callahan song. The bustling anti-chillwave cottage industry could certainly look at June 2009 as a "gotcha" moment for Bundick-- as far as typical "songwriting" metrics go, it's pretty thin.  But I say that's bullshit, and June 2009 in its own way makes an even better case for Toro Y Moi as a band that may have initially benefited from good timing, but also has the ambition and learning curve to keep improving on an already impressive catalog.


The disco-punk trio’s new record leans more heavily on synthesizers and drum pads, but stops just shy of redefining the group as a synth-pop band.

All or Nothing

The members of Shopping would be ideal candidates for fitness instructors. On their three albums to date, the U.K. disco-punk trio have proven themselves more than qualified for the job: Their music is all sweat and swagger, a breathless regimen of pulse-pounding rhythm and hectoring directives that both berate you into thinking you’re not doing enough while inspiring you to do better. And after subtly upgrading their scrappy sound on 2018’s The Official Body—and graduating from the DIY circuit to international festival stages—Shopping are more vigorously shaking up their program. But while the group’s fourth album, All of Nothing, bears all the surface sparkle and smooth contours of a brand new elliptical apparatus, the workout is every bit as demanding as before.
Shopping have reached the same crossroads many of their post-punk forbears hit around the mid-’80s—i.e., the choice between wrapping their polemical discourse in more pop-friendly packaging to win over the masses, or resigning themselves to a life on the fringes spent preaching to the choir. All or Nothing attempts to have it both ways, amplifying and revelling in the perennial tension between escapist pleasure and anti-capitalist critique at the core of so much classic post-punk. The new record leans more heavily on synthesizers and drum pads than any previous Shopping album, but stops just shy of redefining them as a synth-pop band. After all, this group has always functioned as a pure musical democracy, its constituent parts—Andrew Milk’s piston-like drumming, Billy Easter’s deep, juddering bass, Rachel Aggs’ wonderfully squiggly guitar—locking together like a jigsaw puzzle, with no single component overwhelming the others. But the added textures invest the group’s invectives with heightened drama. When Aggs demands, “Why don’t you show some initiative?” on the prickly “Initiative,” she seems to implicate herself—so the group puts her words into action and redirects the song skyward on a synth-powered motorik thrust.
A big reason why Shopping adapt so easily to their new surroundings is that they’ve never been an angry, confrontational sort of post-punk band. For all their wiry energy and staccato sloganeering, Shopping have always embraced pop melody and absurdist humor, and All or Nothing’s more polished production pushes those qualities to the fore: On “Follow Me,” Aggs combats surveillance culture by cheekily seducing a CCTV camera (“Follow me/I’ll make it worth it!”), while the consumerist blues of “For Your Pleasure” imagines an alternate ’80s where the B-52’s steered clear of the Love Shack. But even in the absence of electronic embellishments, Shopping remain a marvel of human technology: Layering no fewer than three different competing chorus lines atop its hand-clapped punk-funk beat, “Expert Advice” is both an emblem of information-overload culture and a model of spartan efficiency. And on the equally lean and propulsive “Body Clock,” the band approach peak intensity while addressing the sheer exhaustion of staying alive in 2020: “I need something to calm my nerves,” Aggs sings, “I’ve just got to keep up the pace.” It’s the sort of admission that suggests the onset of a panic attack, or a full-on nervous breakdown. But as the song’s incessant rhythm affirms, relief is just a dancefloor away.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Bob Mould was an angry young man in Hüsker Dü, and anger abounds on the empty spaces and meandering melodies of his 1989 solo LP Workbook. This expanded reissue includes a live set recorded in Chicago in 1989.

Workbook 25

“Sunspots”—the gentle, two-minute instrumental that opens Bob Mould’s 1989 solo debut Workbook—may be the softest, saddest “fuck you” in recorded history. Still stinging from the acrimonious breakup Hüsker Dü in 1988, the singer/guitarist formed a new trio to replace the old, this one with bassist Tony Maimone and drummer Anton Fier (who, among other accomplishments, served together briefly in Pere Ubu). That caliber of rhythm section had the potential to be at least as loud as Hüsker Dü’s. Instead, Mould turned down and turn his back on punk. “I sensed there was a part of the punk audience that would feel betrayed,” Mould writes unapologetically in his autobiography See a Little Light, “but it was important to move beyond the sound of the past eight years.” At the time, Mould was living in rural Minnesota, not far from an Amish settlement. Workbook isn’t exactly a work of entrenched technophobia—come the new millennium, Mould would even go so far as to dabble in electronica—but its hushed tone and introspective air reflects a sense of isolation that’s bucolic if not exactly idyllic.
Mould was an angry young man in Hüsker Dü, and anger abounds on Workbook (which is getting an expanded reissue in honor of its 25th anniversary, Workbook 25). Here, though, it’s dispersed among empty spaces and meandering melodies. There’s a honeycombed hollowness to tracks like “Heartbreak a Stranger” and “Sinners and Their Repentances", both of them overlaid with languid jangle and Mould’s newly naked moan. After years of straining to be heard over Hüsker’s din, he sounds almost startled by the potency and range of his own voice; the same goes for the themes of his lyrics, which don’t shy away from an encroaching spirituality that would eventuality lead to Mould’s religious awakening years later. But for every folky, free-flowing rumination is a song such as “Dreaming, I Am", which veers between a driving beat, delicate guitar, and a deceptively corrosive mood.
“See a Little Light,” the song after which Mould named his book, was Workbook’s lead single. Accordingly, it’s the album’s brimming cup of pop hooks. Still, it’s far more drifting and complex than it seems at first, pivoting around tangles of chords while gliding frictionlessly across the glassy playing of cellist Jane Scarpantoni (who’d appeared on R.E.M.’s Green and would go on to play with everyone from Nirvana to Bruce Springsteen to Swans). The widespread use of cello throughout Workbook is one of its more striking tonal choices; Mould originally wrote those parts for synthesizer, and their translation into chamber instrument threads the album with a haunting, melancholy warmth—especially on “Sinners", where Scarpantoni duels with Mould like a demonic temptation.
Hüsker Dü was, in many ways, a massively distorted folk band—but Workbook isn’t just acoustic Mould like “Too Far Down”, Candy Apple Grey with the gunk scraped off. “Brasilia Crossed with Trenton”, which Mould says came to him one morning as a “full realized dreamsong," is seven minutes of imagistic, shanty-like folk-rock, but it’s hard to imagine its soul-spilling excess and sprawl ever fitting onto a Hüsker album, even one as ambitious as Zen Arcade. The problem is, Mould takes catharsis to a new dimension on Workbook, but that leaves subtle cuts like “Brasilia” and “Lonely Afternoon” undefended by Mould’s most formidable weapon: a walloping chorus. He still wields them on “See a Little Light”—which boasts one of most searing choruses of his career—as well as on “Poison Years”, which crams tender twang, roiling angst, anthemic stamina, and squealing showmanship into a single song. All the elements of Mould’s songwriting are on parade on “Poison Years”, but they’re lumped together in odd, lopsided combinations.
“Poison Years” also shows that Mould wasn’t entirely ready to strum gentle into that good night. Along with Workbook’s darkest track, the venom-dripping “Wishing Well”, it vengefully kicks on the distortion pedal as if it were an old toy that triggered memories of a troubled childhood. The shift is more than simply sonic, as Mould himself seems equally electrified when he lets his amps to scream. One of the bonus tracks of Workbook 25 is the bouncy, catchy “All Those People Know,” the B-side of the “See a Little Light Single”—and it makes perfect sense that it was omitted from the original album release, seeing as how it could easily pass for latter-day Hüsker Dü.
The rest of Workbook 25’s bonus tracks comprise a live set recorded at the Metro in Chicago in 1989. The live version of “Sunspots” is echoing and effected, sounding in that regard almost like a John Martyn song. Mould’s affinity for vintage English folk-rock is also evident in his faithful yet fiery rendition of Richard and Linda Thompson’s “Shoot Out the Lights.” (He would eventually record Richard Thompson’s “Turning of the Tide” for the 1994 tribute album Beat the Retreat). But it’s “If You’re True” that’s the hidden gem of Workbook 25. A song that Mould has admitted to being a swipe at his former Hüsker Dü bandmates Grant Hart and Greg Norton—“No more friends that lie and hide / No more games to play to get to know the answer,” he rages—the Metro version of “If You’re True” is unleashed with riotous righteousness plus a clutch of country-rock licks that come together to sound uncannily like the formula Uncle Tupelo was about to make famous. It’s far more spirited than the drum-machine-backed 1988 demo version, but Mould’s grudges didn’t fully carry over to his previous group’s music. He opens those fresh wounds long to encore with three Hüsker Dü songs: “Hardly Getting Over It”, “Celebrated Summer”, and “Makes No Sense at All”. As Mould states in See a Little Light, when Workbook came out “there was a concerted effort not only to divorce myself from my past, but also not to live off of my past accomplishments”. Yet he performs his Hüsker set reverently, intimately, almost in awe of the life they’ve taken on.
While Mould seems liberated by his newfound quietude, he also strains at it. In the video for “See a Little Light” he thrashes and hammers at his strings; at one point, spit flies from his lips. It’s as though he alone can hear the noise behind his clean-toned, cello-swaddled songs, that theoretical roar that his old group would have brought to them. The pent-up force finally breaks free on Workbook’s final track, “Whichever Way the Wind Blows", a lurching, churning, borderline grungy rager full of haywire guitar and Mould’s most unhinged vocal performance since his SST days. Sure enough, Mould, Maimone, and Fier would quickly crank themselves up to paint-peeling levels on Black Sheets of Rain, their 1990 follow-up to Workbook; from there, Mould’s 90s group Sugar would return Mould triumphantly to his punchy, distorted roots. But the urgency and vigor he packs into the unplugged punk of Workbook—the frequent knuckle-scraping attack of his strumming, his refusal to whisper or withhold—are what make the album a testament to tension rather than hesitance.


The experimental trumpeter Nate Wooley is known for disassembling his instrument and making music from its various parts. Here, he pays homage to one of his mentors with epic, rock-infused tumult.

Argonautica

After learning that Nate Wooley is a trumpeter-composer given to disassembling his horn and then blowing through its various parts, you might peg him as an avant-garde jazz instrumentalist with a fondness for John Cage. But charting his influences doesn’t pin down Wooley’s sound—or, rather, his collection of sounds. Wooley’s toolkit includes a raging, pitch-free thrum that has an ambient quality, even as his instrument is vibrating madly. Sometimes the music is driven by the clanking of his trumpet’s valves, which creates a percussive quality. And he also strings together “regular” notes with authority; recent albums of original tunes and mainstream jazz covers have found the musician merging conceptual experiments with more traditional forms. In the space of the same song, he can provide memorable lines of melody over a swinging beat, then charge off into innovations that expand your understanding of his instrument.
Argonautica capitalizes on both these strengths. Its format–a single track that plays out over 43 minutes—allows Wooley to indulge his many influences within a compositional structure that feels expertly designed. Here, after a brief intro, we find a freewheeling opening section, followed by a meditative middle portion that toys with drone, balladry, and stray interjections of electronic noise. An energetic group finale adds psych-rock tumult. Each major subsection lasts about 15 minutes, and the overall fast/slow/fast construction flows like a more traditional three-movement piece.
Inside each movement, Wooley’s potent group splits into duos and trios, teasing out new dynamics. The band he’s brought together is stacked with proven names from the contemporary scene: Devin Gray and Rudy Royston share drum duties; Cory Smythe handles piano while Jozef Dumoulin works the Fender Rhodes. (Smythe and Wooley have worked together previously as part of an orchestra led by Anthony Braxton.)
One measure of Wooley’s confidence in his writing is that he doesn’t insist on being the first brass player heard on the album. That would be veteran cornet player Ron Miles, a mentor of Wooley’s. (This piece is also dedicated to him.) Miles favors a more consistently lyrical sound than Wooley, but he also serves up some high-intensity exclamations during Argonautica’s opening. Wooley’s first feature on trumpet climaxes during the album’s 10th minute, in gales of howling, scraping tones that overtake the ensemble’s sound. The contrast between the keyboardists is consistently inspired, with Smythe’s acoustic piano often pounding like a third drum. During the closing section, Wooley’s trumpet and Miles’ cornet fuse in harmonies that soar over the minimalist groove of the drummers.
Wooley swiped his album title from the ancient Greek poem of the same name. And while the trumpeter doesn’t state an explicit narrative to go along with the music, it’s easy to think of the Argonauts sailing off course, buffeted by the final section’s dreamy melodic drift and harsh rhythmic thrust. Argonautica covers an epic amount of ground without seeming to labor too hard, with an impressive amount of abandon and plenty of poise.


On Snoop Dogg’s 14th studio album Coolaid, he returns to hip-hop as both a resident and a tourist.

Coolaid

Over the decades, we’ve watched Snoop Dogg go through nearly as many costume changes as Madonna. Gangbanger Snoop, No Limit Southern-rap Snoop, pop star Snoop, “Drop It Like It’s Hot” Snoop, “Sensual Seduction” Snoop, “Snoop Lion”—sometimes those sonic and aesthetic remixes have worked, other times not so much. With Coolaid, arguably Snoop’s first *real *hip-hop album in half a decade, we find his reinvention back into “Rapper Snoop” to be a bit wobbly.
On 2011’s Doggumentary, it sounded like Snoop was losing steam; much of it felt like a rehashing of previous bad ideas. “Snoop Lion” emerged shortly thereafter. By 2014, he reverted back from “Lion” to “Dogg” and dropped the plush party-funk of Bush, which toed the line of hip-hop without actually crossing it. Here on *Coolaid *we return to the Snoop D-O-Double-G, the hard, cold rhymer we met on “Deep Cover.” He hinted at this return to ferocity on the track “One Shot One Kill” with Jon Connor, from Dr. Dre’s 2015 Compton project.  That song was like a turning point-turned-duel between the old Snoop and the new Snoop, and thankfully the old Snoop won.
With Coolaid, though, we reach another crossroads. A lot has changed since Rapper Snoop was at the forefront, so there is much more for him to prove here. Before he can let his skills speak for themselves, he has to first declare his status on the aptly titled opener “Legend.” Producer Bongo brings a trappish sort of beat, the kind of thing might have served another current rapper better; it’s perfect to recite three or four garbled words over. But Snoop opts instead to recite a very clear and dull laundry list of ways he's legendary. He shows us rather than tells us that on “Ten Toes Down,” where we get classic Snoop in rare form over a West Coast-leaning beat by Los. Just Blaze makes some odd production choices on “Super Crip,” which sounds like Iggy Azalea’s “Fancy” at the top before erupting into quintessential Blaze by the middle. Snoop rides those waves fairly adeptly.
Pseudo title track “Coolaid Man” targets all the neophyte soundalike rappers, and at certain points you can almost hear the greys growing in Snoop’s goatee. It’s not that he’s *lying *about the extent of his influence, but for a legend who is so technically capable at seamlessly switching styles, the finger-wagging isn’t necessary. Junior partner Wiz Khalifa pops up twice: on the lukewarm “Oh Na Na” and the marginally better “Kush Ups,” where the two play perfectly well off each other’s energy. “Double Tap” carries a classic tune with E-40 and Jazze Pha, but lines like “slide off in yo DMs” make it the dadbod anthem of the year. “What If” saves the #TBT day, as fellow elder Suga Free and Snoop both bless the track with immaculate convertible-ride music.
Then, when you least expect it, “Revolution” comes, and it's almost as if the rest of the 19 indifferent tracks on the excessively long Coolaid don’t even matter. Just Blaze brings a soaring, immaculate beat (on par with Beyoncé’s “Freedom”) and lo and behold, fiery Snoop arrives. The lyrics, the cadence, the anger, the pure and convincing “fuck you I'm a legend” energy. It all sounds so believable, so why did it take so long for Coolaid to get there? An entire project full of Snoop chanting that he's the greatest, and all it took was one isolated track to prove it.


Two archival releases highlight the range of John Coltrane’s late-period drummer: one a fiery free jazz duo album, the other a newly unearthed concert recording that captures him in a more relaxed mode.

Rashied Ali / Frank Lowe / Rashied Ali Quintet: Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions / First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967

First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967 / Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions

When Elvin Jones left the John Coltrane Quartet in March 1966, signaling the end of the postwar era’s most formidable jazz band, Rashied Ali found himself in an enviable position, as Coltrane’s sole drummer. Ali was a 32-year-old with strong avant-garde credentials but little mainstream name recognition when Coltrane brought him into the fold for the Meditations sessions the year prior, as a second drummer to deepen the foundation for the saxophone titan’s late-career explorations in free rhythm and tonality. “I can really choose just about any direction at just about any time in the confidence that it will be compatible with what he’s doing,” Coltrane said of the young drummer, who favored a non-linear approach to time-keeping. If Jones was as dynamic and powerful as a freight train, Ali roved at will like a forcefield, protean and ever-shifting.
One day in February 1967, just 5 months before Coltrane’s death, the saxophonist took Ali to New Jersey’s storied Van Gelder Studio to record, without any other members of the band. The stark horn-and-drums-only format was all but unimaginable at the time, and the resulting album, Interstellar Space, sat on the shelf for seven years before its first release in 1974. But the dizzying and intense music the duo recorded that day would prove highly influential in the decades to come, inspiring the next generation of free jazz musicians to turn the duo into a sort of standard format for the genre. When the New York Times’ Ben Ratliff asked free jazz pianist Borah Bergman why this duo format became so prevalent over the years, he deliberated over his answer for days, then responded via fax with one word: “economics.”
The economics of jazz shifted as the ‘60s neared its end, as the music was beset on all sides by popular genres like rock and soul, and a club culture that didn’t always support musically progressive artists. Ali saw the tide turning, understanding that jazz artists would need to be self-reliant if they were to survive. He established his own infrastructure for the lean years to come, including a venue, Ali’s Alley in New York, and a label, tellingly called Survival Records. The imprint’s first release was Duo Exchange, an incandescent session between Ali and tenor saxophonist Frank Lowe, recorded after Interstellar Space but released a year before. After shuttering in 2009 and relaunching last year, Survival is reissuing Duo Exchange with an hour of additional material from the original session, and a heretofore unknown recording of Ali performing live with an ad hoc group in 1967.
Duo Exchange’s status as one of the most caustic free jazz albums was assured well before Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore put it in his personal top ten for Grand Royal magazine in 1996. Lowe might have been new on the scene in the early ‘70s, but his afterburner of a horn on recording sessions for Alice Coltrane and Don Cherry showed he was a formidable sparring partner. For long stretches of the set, Ali and Lowe burn like a dragon dueling with a flamethrower. When Lowe’s needling high frequencies strafe across an alternate take of “Movement III,” it suggests a durational outpouring of fury. But the reissue also reveals moments of quiet and nuance from the sessions, presented here in their entirety.
Amid his piercing overtones, Lowe’s reed playing sometimes brings to mind Coltrane’s famous “sheets of sound,” working to exhaust every possibility in his cascading runs. He seems to reach for a pure sound beyond notes per se, reflecting the squalor of early-‘70s New York through his horn. His tone is piercing, jarring, wearying, like the brakes on a train, an overheated tea kettle, a feverish baby. Ali is there with Lowe’s every breath, shattering the rhythm around him and propelling him to even greater extremes.
Work your way past the shrieks and squeals and other qualities come to the fore—like Lowe’s hushed, vibrato-heavy tone midway through “Movement I,” or his fluttering against Ali’s shaken bells on the tranquil “Movement IV,” an oasis from the onslaught. Lowe even does his best ballad playing on the subtle “Movement V,” with Ali slipping in and around him, elbowing the drum skin to elicit strange new tones. After all the searing music that has come before, it makes for a sweet finale.
Ali worked at the physical boundaries of the music, as he once told the Jazz Times: “Say we play a standard...we try to exhaust the tune. It's like all of a sudden gravity don't work no more.” Duo Exchange is a study in exhaustion, of that last two miles of the New York marathon, the 12th round of a heavyweight fight. It’s intense and cathartic, with little to diminish its harshness some forty years on. But it also has a sense of reverence: the sound of two men fighting against the city around them and pushing toward something new.
The exhaustive quality of Duo Exchange also comes into play with First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967. Found on two 7” reels of tape in Ali’s archive, it’s the lone evidence of a May 1967 performance at a notorious downtown Manhattan jazz dive. The liner notes suggest it was a last-minute booking, perhaps even unrehearsed. There’s no photo of the quintet that convened that night, and nothing to suggest they ever played together again. Live at Slugs is only the third known recording of Dewey Johnson, who played trumpet, in existence anywhere. Saxophonist Ramon Morris would later record a jazz-funk album, but here he is in Coltrane mode, taking long, winding solos.
If you’re familiar with Ali in the context of iconoclastic giants like Coltrane or Keiji Haino, hearing him in a more relaxed and supportive role on Live at Slugs is startling. His cymbal work skitters and creates waves around the tunes, and he lays back frequently. Rather than the breathless sprints of Duo, the group exhausts each tune at a flâneur’s pace, offering only brief glimpses of the incandescence of Duo Sessions. The drunken meander of “Ballade” would remain in Ali’s repertoire for decades to come, while “Study For As-Salaam Alikum” would reappear in a tighter, transfigured form on another Ali album from the early ‘70s. But most of the other music would not be heard again. The tapes suggest that the recorder was set near Ali’s kit, as there’s times when the pianist Stanley Cowell and bassist Reggie Johnson can scarcely be made out.
Murkiness aside, Live at Slugs is a fascinating snapshot of what turned out to be an idyllic moment in jazz history. The brutal race riots of Newark and Detroit and the “Long, Hot Summer” were still two months away, a string of cataclysmic events in urban epicenters that would undermine black communities and hasten “white flight.” Coltrane was still alive, as was his fellow free jazz firebrand Albert Ayler. It would be another 5 years before Lee Morgan was shot to death inside of Slugs’ Saloon. These two reissues capture that hard shift in economics: a quintet in the summer of ‘67 exploring at its own pace and a lean, snarling jazz duo just five years on, fighting for survival.

Buy: First Time Out: Live at Slugs 1967 - Rough Trade, Duo Exchange: Complete Sessions - Rough Trade
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The Chicago band motors through big emotions with clear-eyed sincerity, bubblegum hooks, and mellow arrangements that feel like a warm embrace.

Yard

Slow Pulp know how to ground extreme emotion. Their shoegaze-tinged country rock can transform euphoria into a mellow CBD gummy high, anchor combustible bursts of rage, and buoy depression. Their self-produced 2020 debut, Moveys, was a knot of self-deprecating lyricism beneath a weighted blanket of droopy guitars and shiny glimmers of violin and piano. When they weren’t questioning the point of it all, it seemed the Chicago-based quartet—Emily Massey, Henry Stoehr, Alex Leeds, and Teddy Mathews—was just trying to get by. On their follow-up, Yard, Slow Pulp still cozy up to the introspective, sometimes dark, side of life. But instead of succumbing to the depressive haze, they find the momentum to move forward.
With Yard, Slow Pulp solidify their laid-back sound. It’s a fine balance of ’90s alt-rock grit and melody, with the introspective, detail-driven storytelling of folk music. As on Moveys, doubt still creeps in. But this time, the sensation gets its own bubblegum pop song: “Take me out/Put me down,” Massey sings on the chorus of “Doubt,” turning the title into a stuttering, one-word refrain. On the combustible “Cramps,” Massey longs to inhabit someone else’s personality. The most captivating moment is when her vocals begin to split apart, like the force of her desire could consume her whole.
On the album’s anchor “Yard,” Massey swings at a punching bag dressed in her own image: “I’m a bitch/I’ve been a bitch,” she sighs. It’s Yard’s sparsest and most compelling track, as Massey takes us on a time-traveling tour of her past and present mistakes. “The neighbors hear my singing/I don’t care cause I’m much too baked/Their dogs are barking at the water/I yelled they messed up my take,” she sings over a sparse piano melody. These lighthearted reflections on the creative process eventually spiral into thorny self-realizations as she comes to terms with saying goodbye to her childhood home: “Didn’t know that I cared that much,” she says upon noticing the “for sale” sign. Often, Slow Pulp pair these diaristic reflections with lush arrangements, but here the thought is laid bare.
Thematically, Yard is concerned with the way people can drift into each other’s lives, for better or worse; sometimes they’re a one-hit wonder arriving unannounced, and sometimes they’re the classic we turn to at our lowest. “What if I tell you that/You keep playing in my head/Cause you’re a summer hit,” Massey muses on the candy-sweet love song “Slugs.” The softness of the arrangements—a patchwork of fuzzy power chords, perky piano keys, and easygoing drums—is like a breeze through the car window in mid-June. “Carina Phone 1000” describes the serendipitous magic of a long-lost friend who reaches out at just the right moment. Slow Pulp excel in this pared-back country-folk mode, with a sigh of pedal steel or a hug of harmonica, and vocals that feel like a secure embrace rather than a distant cry. When the pressure of life threatens to pop you like a tire, their clear-eyed sincerity keeps on rolling.


The synth-pop act’s third album, a rumination on loneliness in L.A., is its cleanest and most melodic, uncovering a previously obscured accessibility.

Bigger Than Life

The synth-pop grammar that dictates Black Marble’s music is strict and specific. The project formed as a duo in 2012 but eventually pared down to lone member Chris Stewart; throughout, its output has been uniformly composed of the same carefully curated elements. The instruments are hulking hardware synths and drum machines that hum when they power up. Fluid, melodic bass lines immediately recall New Order, but only the dour churn of Movement, and nothing as bouncy as Power, Corruption and Lies or later albums. Hints of the Cure are limited to the floating whispers of Seventeen Seconds. The crumbling production values are inspired by obscure ’80s minimal-wave artists like Iron Curtain; a detached romanticism can be traced from choice moments in the early OMD catalog. Applying this rigid aesthetic to Stewart’s pop-minded songwriting makes Black Marble one of the more disarmingly catchy bands to bear the coldwave tag.
Each subsequent release has gradually stripped away a layer of lo-fi filth, and Bigger Than Life, Black Marble’s third album, is easily the cleanest, uncovering a previously buried accessibility. The understated percussion, plucked guitar leads, and bright chorus of “Grey Eyeliner” are given room to interact dynamically, while the anxiously buzzing arrangement of “One Eye Open” makes space for layers of twitchy hooks. Most strikingly, Stewart’s deadpan vocals rise out of their normally garbled catacombs, making for discernibly pretty harmonies and intelligible lyrics. Where earlier albums waded in ugly murk and occasionally broke out in tantrums of noise, Bigger Than Life sounds composed, almost polite in contrast.
Ascending from dungeon-grade fidelity doesn’t always work. The reverb coating 2016’s excellent It’s Immaterial submerged detail but also flattened potentially clashing countermelodies and curbed tangential ideas. Without tape hiss to hide behind, the competing synths of “Never Tell” feel cluttered, and meandering intros drag on. And while Stewart has a gift for crafting obtuse melodies, he also has a tendency to recycle bits of his best tracks. “Private Show” calls on variants of the insistent bass progression and elementary drum fills that drove It’s Immaterial high point “Iron Lung,” and familiar rudiments reappear throughout. The sound is less broken and several shades lighter, but the demo-like quality of earlier albums smoothed over crowded arrangements and forgave repetition.
The newly audible vocals also offer a better view of Stewart’s ambiguous, impressionistic lyrics. Inspired during the writing process by a car-less existence in his high-traffic home of Los Angeles, Stewart positions many of his characters as passengers observing the city from the window of a crosstown bus, freaky classmates keeping bones under their bed, or lonely introverts looking for salvation in consumerism.
The album’s strongest song, “Feels,” marks its most human moment. Hesitantly optimistic synth tones support a wash of memories from an imagined past: volunteering at a blood drive, waiting for summer to bring happier days,  a late-night slot at a college radio station. Though vague, “Feels” succinctly communicates the soft isolation that the rest of the album reaches for but only delivers in fragments. Its friendly melancholy zeroes in on an unremarkable everyday loneliness, the kind felt by introverted DJs in stuffy basements and glimpsed on the silent faces of strangers on the bus.
Dialing down the gloom and upping production values is a logical step forward, and when these changes gel, Stewart’s studied goth-pop evolves. Bigger Than Life takes Black Marble aboveground, where some songs bloom, while others struggle to adjust to the daylight after so long in the shadows.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A new mixtape from Wyclef Jean finds him reinterpreting the sound of 2017, track by track. There are endearing bits of serendipity here, but the project’s purpose is unclear.

Wyclef Jean Inspired By...

Wyclef Jean has never lacked for confidence, having evolved from “one of the guys in Fugees” to legitimate household name out of sheer will—a producer, singer, rapper, cultural ambassador, and probably the best rapper-guitarist of all-time. But his hits were the result of a pop enthusiasm that often gleefully veered towards the heretical; stupendously overexposed freshman dorm staples like “Staying Alive,” “Wish You Were Here,” and “No Woman No Cry” were all fair game as source material.
Early on his new mixtape, Inspired By—in which Jean attempts to reinterpret the sound of 2017, track by track—he takes on a more volatile sacred text: Kendrick Lamar’s “DNA.” While pondering the challenge, Clef explained, “[Kendrick’s] gonna want to hear that 1996 Wyclef. He's going to want to hear that mind, that ‘Ready or Not,’ that guy.” Jean does his damnedest to honor Kendrick’s flow over the instrumental and he’s actually not half bad at it. And when he’s done, he plays a guitar solo.
A good portion of Inspired By is in the “DNA.” model of having Jean rap over familiar contemporary beats (Giggs’ “Ultimate Gangsta,” A$AP Ferg’s “Plain Jane”). This approach has fallen out of favor in recent years, but it served as the ultimate heat check a decade ago for guys like Jadakiss, Lil Wayne, and Clipse in Best Rapper Alive mode. Conversely, Jean is out here trying to reiterate that he’s a rapper and currently alive. “Inspired by” mostly means Jean is jackin’ for flows, letting the teens who might otherwise be listening to Lil Pump or “Wild Thoughts” know that he can kinda-sorta rap like Future. He also does a passable imitation of Young Thug—yes, he does indeed rap over a Thugger song named “Wyclef Jean”; yes, the first line is indeed, “I was the grand marshall at the NASCAR race.”
When taken in small doses, Inspired By can provide goofy and endearing bits of serendipity like these, and reminders of why Jean is an interesting human being in 2017. He did run for president of Haiti, after all, and his experience growing up as an immigrant in the slums of New Jersey serves as the emotional anchor of Inspired By. Still, a track like “Inspired by DJ Khaled and Carlos Santana” exists primarily for Clef to remind people that he’s done songs with Rihanna and Shakira, and that those two names can rhyme if you try hard enough. “Inspired by Whitney Houston” exists to remind people he did a song with Houston. “Inspired by Drake” exists to prove he can pronounce “controlla” in patois with more authenticity than Drake and that he can play Guitar Center blues riffs guitar like John Mayer while doing so.
And so, like watching an actor’s sizzle reel or reading a journalist’s sample clips for an hour straight, Inspired By is nearly impossible to complete in one sitting. He doesn’t embarrass himself because it’s kind of impossible: despite his intentions to “bar up” and bring it back to his days of battle rapping, stringing together pop culture namedrops in a self-deprecating sing-rap cadence is a de facto style for MCs, and one that he pioneered long before Kanye or Drake. And despite the family-friendly image Clef has cultivated for himself, the bulk of the production on 1996’s The Score and even 1997’s The Carnival was dark and muggy, with grit. Even if typical Clef-isms still pop up and clash badly with the domineering synth production (“J. Edgar Hoover hit me with a tranquilizer,” “She call me a black belt in the evening/Sexual kung fu fighting”), it’s at least a reminder of who you’re listening to.
But what exactly is the endgame of Inspired By? Could anyone listen to perfectly competent and anonymous trap-rap like “Camel to Ferraris” and think this is the best use of Jean’s skills? Why hear Jean rap like Young Thug when only the most dedicated listeners have consumed the entirety of Thugger’s own output? The irony here is that Jean’s older work has granted him more recent relevancy than any rapper pushing 50 could hope to have. “Gone Till November” is immortalized as long as people rap about drug dealing. Jean also served as a spiritual guide and guest spitter on Young Thug’s JEFFERY. And one of 2017’s biggest hits is built on “Maria Maria,” his collaboration with Santana, i.e., the thinking person’s “Smooth.”
One can imagine how frustrating it must have felt when The Carnival III dropped about three months ago and did little other than let the public know there was actually a Carnival II at some point. (It really had Paul Simon, Shakira, Serj Tankian, and Chamillionaire on it, albeit in 2007.) Of all the Fugees, Wyclef’s had the most commercially prolific 21st century, but perhaps the least dignified, and Inspired By ultimately feels like a desperate measure in a desperate time. While it’s not Jean’s first attempt to flex as someone nearly half his age, it’s certainly not his most embarrassing.


At his best—as on this third installment of his Slimeball series—Nudy can distill the influence of Atlanta’s integral artists into his a world of his own.

Slimeball 3

Nudy’s career thus far has been an elegant re-hashing of traditional Atlanta rap tropes. His strongest release to date, last year’s Nudy Land, slowly moved away from this comfort zone and into something more original, a concept he’s built upon with Slimeball 3. It’s the most confident iteration of the three installments, and when Nudy’s at his best, he can distill the influence of Atlanta’s integral artists into a world of his own, infusing the fairly limited tapestry of his lyrical territory with an expansive range of delivery styles.
Comparing Nudy to a set of rappers from his hometown may seem reductive, but the similarities have more to do with the unrelenting influence of the Young Thug-Gucci Mane-Future triumvirate than any lack of originality on Nudy’s part. Thinking about or listening to Nudy’s work outside of this context strips the artist of his place within rap’s current power structure, and over the course of two Slimeball mixtapes and one LP, Nudy’s hinted at being worthy of a seat at the next table over; or, at least, on the waitlist in case of any cancellations.
On Slimeball 3, Young Nudy’s expressly interested in anointing his voice as a definitive, weighty addition to Atlanta’s already-dense scene. He’s deeply feeling himself on the record, putting up zero features over the course of its 14 tracks. After a sluggish opening two songs, this feels like a grave miscalculation of skills, but by "Middle Fingers," he’s returned to his role as the sort of effortlessly engaging regional stylist he fully rounded out on Nudy Land.
The color palette on Slimeball 3 has shifted dramatically from the first two editions, with Nudy’s deadpan dialect giving way to a more confident drawl, one that recalls the Auto-Tune blues rap of Los Angeles hero 03 Greedo as much as it does any Atlanta stars. "Middle Fingers" is a swaggering ode to Nudy’s hood, a half-sung lull of a rap that woozily narcotizes the emcee’s sentiments towards his haters. While Nudy never has much of an interest in existing outside of the money, fame, drugs paradigm, his voice imbues these songs with enough of an emotional impact that tones and quirks pack as much of a punch as words do.
Album highlight "InDaStreet" finds Nudy employing a yearning, almost desperate flow, an exasperation in his voice that lends a great assist to his rapid-fire, breathy lines dissecting the softness of today’s hustlers (“And I ain’t no fuckin’ wannabe/All you pussy niggas wanna be”). “Do That” takes an otherworldly synth—floating delicately above the thick slap of the snare drum—highlighting the rhythm section while Nudy works the triplet-style flow pioneered by fellow ATLiens Migos.
Young Nudy’s ability to be a synthesis of his city’s scene is the greatest advantage he holds, and one that’s improved and sharpened over the course of his career. While Nudy Land may edge out Slimeball 3 in terms of cohesion, the new mixtape is a significant leap forward in terms of songwriting skill when compared with the first two editions of the Slimeball series. Nudy’s ability to land earworm hooks comes with great ease here, and, in retrospect, he was wise to lay off the big name collaborators in favor of a more personal and identifiable sound. Young Nudy continues to force his name into the Atlanta rap conversation.


Assisted by pianist Craig Taborn, the New York saxophonist’s longstanding trio balances minimalist stillness with post-bop freneticism, and covers Autechre and Jeff “Tain” Watts along the way.

The People I Love

When the saxophonist and composer Steve Lehman posted a list of his favorite MCs on Twitter this summer, he wasn’t just playing along with a popular social-media pastime. He was also expressing something about his own history. In citing Ka and Buckshot, Lehman produced a list deep with New York underground talent—fitting for a player who has worked in the city’s most adventurous jazz clubs alongside names like Vijay Iyer and Tyshawn Sorey. And by including Antipop Consortium and the Senegalese rapper Gaston Bandimic, the saxophonist was shouting out his sometime collaborators (most notably, on 2016’s Sélébéyone).
Lehman’s new album, The People I Love, offers a further glimpse of his listening habits, without anything approaching caginess or irony. The covers here include tunes from Autechre and onetime Wynton Marsalis drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts as well as new versions of a couple of Lehman’s own compositions, previously recorded with other groups. The songs from his own back pages don’t seem like a form of self-love, though. Instead, they suggest an air of reinvestigation. They raise questions. As in: What made those bands—full of collaborators that Lehman clearly admires—click? And how might those effects be reproduced by other hands?
Some of those other hands belong to the pianist Craig Taborn—another New York heavyweight, but one who hasn’t appeared on a Lehman recording before. Here, he joins Lehman’s longstanding trio (including bassist Matt Brewer and drummer Damion Reid) to tackle a few new compositions, plus those covers.
It makes for a stirring set, if not a full-throttle mind-meld between two of the best player-composers on the contemporary jazz scene. Lehman and Taborn share joint writing credits on three tracks: the “Prelude,” “Interlude,” and a “Postlude.” They’re well-wrought miniatures, but not the main event. It’s in the other songs where you get a sense of two individualists getting to know one another better. “Ih Calam and Ynnus,” a Lehman original, ably showcases both artists’ respective aesthetics. The performance starts out with some of the minimalist stillness of Taborn’s own compositions, while Lehman’s entrance introduces some of the updated post-bop freneticism for which he is justly admired.
There’s a tension building here: Taborn keeps laboring over a few chords while Lehman crafts increasingly heated figures—until the pianist breaks his form open. Or does he? When Taborn’s solo turn comes, he matches Lehman for burning energy in the higher register of his instrument. But check out his other hand; it is still obsessing over some of the same droning chords from earlier in his performance.
Instead of picking one mode, Taborn’s doing two things at once—slyly, and without any evidence of strain. This is a trait common to some of his own bands, in which an Olympian dexterity winds up feeling like the output of someone playing casually, on the corner. While it’s no surprise that Taborn can make himself at home in Lehman’s complex, fiery music, it’s still thrilling to hear. (“Ynnus” is worth the price of admission, all on its own.)
Elsewhere, Taborn reimagines some of the sound of the saxophonist’s past groups—most memorably in his work on a tune like “Beyond All Limits,” where his vaulting intervals stand in for some of the more thickly orchestrated material from Lehman’s octet. And he also knows when to pull back, as on “qPlay,” the Autechre cover. After establishing some of the harmony from the original track, the pianist hangs in the background, allowing the song to become a feature for Brewer and Reid, who jointly adapt Autechre’s unpredictably pulsing electronic sound for jazz-quartet context.
All that’s missing here is a sense of Lehman’s immersion into Taborn’s compositional mold. It would be fascinating to hear the saxophonist’s sound lingering inside the slow-boil style of the pianist’s working groups. Happily, the results of this first recorded meeting make an ample case for future encounters.


With David Fridmann producing, the latest Mogwai album contains the same bratty conviction that defined their greatest records, like there’s something truly at stake.

Every Country’s Sun

Over the last decade-plus, Mogwai’s album-length scores and soundtracks have threatened to overshadow their official studio releases. The former—particularly Mogwai’s haunting contributions to both the BBC documentary “Atomic: Living in Dread and Promise” and the spooky French television drama “Les Revenants”—have managed to distill the Scottish band’s brute sonic force with surprising subtlety and grace. Increasingly, writing music as part of a collaborative project seems to suit these guys: Freed from the pressure to make big stand-alone album statements, Mogwai are able to relax and let over 20 years of post-rocking naturally guide their hand in the studio.
With the exception of 2011’s excellent, exploratory Hardcore Will Never Die, but You Will, Mogwai’s proper albums of late have lacked this deftness of touch. Spinning from the loud-quite-loud dirges of their early days to krautrock histrionics and brittle, analog electronics—missing the mark nearly as often as they hit it—the band has struggled to find a steady path forward. On Every Country’s Sun, their ninth LP, Mogwai find their center of gravity. Finally, these Glaswegians are having fun again, loosening up and dirtying up, but with purpose and fire.
You wouldn’t know this from the record’s lead singles. “Coolverine” and the rare vocal track “Party in the Dark” reprise many of the same themes from Mogwai’s recent records: chilly, midtempo electronics and New Order art-rock, respectively. “Party in the Dark,” however, is a raging success—an indie pop gem that fulfills the promise of the similarly shoegazey “Teenage Exorcists,” from the 2014 EP Music Industry 3. Fitness Industry 1. Guitarist Stuart Braithwaite’s vocals have never sounded more nakedly melodic.
But ultimately these tracks are textbook late-period Mogwai: distant, pensive, electro-curious but noncommittal. And this is true of much of the album’s first third. “Brain Sweeties” plods ambivalently through waves of scorched-earth synths and pounding drums, while “aka 47” bleeps and bloops its way into dystopian oblivion. Elsewhere, however, Mogwai sound like a new band, and in a sense they are: Now a quartet after the 2015 departure of longtime guitarist John Cummings, the band is leaner and meaner. “Battered at a Scramble” devolves into a pitched dogfight between a screeching organ, a fuzzed-out bass, and a rambling guitar solo, everything shoved far into the red—Mogwai’s version of the Velvet’s “Sister Ray.” “Old Poisons,” meanwhile, is a white-hot slab of pummeling noise-rock that recalls Mogwai at their most youthful and insouciant.
It’s tempting to chalk up this newfound band-in-the-room energy to the return of an old friend behind the boards. Dave Fridmann produced and mixed Every Country’s Sun, the first time he’s worked with Mogwai since 2001’s Rock Action. And like that record, Sun is rich and warm and huge. “20 Size” is a single, shimmering hunk of resonant sound: Its electric guitars are close and real enough to touch, and the drums, too, are massive (this is a Fridmann record after all). Drummer Martin Bulloch is a guiding force throughout, pushing the pulsing title track to one of the most toweringly mournful conclusions in Mogwai’s recorded career.
Over the last decade, Mogwai have been dogged by the same essential questions: Have they managed, in any meaningful way, to move beyond the genre-defining guitarmageddons that defined their first records? And if so, have they said anything genuinely interesting? The answers are yes and yes, generally speaking. But the real question for any band two decades into their career—certainly one so closely associated with a singular sound—isn’t what they play but how they play it. And for at least half of their new record, Mogwai play—for the first time in years—with the same bratty conviction that defined their greatest records, like there’s something truly at stake. At its best, Every Country’s Sun is brash, gritty, unpretentious, and thrillingly claustrophobic—a work of volume and violence in tight spaces.


Liz Harris (Grouper) and Jesy Fortino (Tiny Vipers) collaborated on this collection that effectively and purposefully combines their respective sounds.

Foreign Body

At what point do we distinguish sound art from song? Liz Harris and Jesy Fortino are musicians based in the Pacific Northwest who have each spent several records exploring this question. Harris, who records as Grouper, crafts ambient works that range from muted, narcotic guitar pop to more characteristic drone pieces, all haunted by vocals that can be alien or angelic. Fortino, meanwhile, leans toward black-hearted folk in her work as Tiny Vipers. Using primitively spare guitar lines, she etches full-bodied and evocative works characterized by silence and space, with expressive lyrics that convey feelings of isolation through form more than storytelling. In at least one interview, Fortino referenced the mystic, orchestral minimalism of Arvo Pärt's sacred music, and recently in conversation with Pitchfork, she noted her and Harris' shared roots in metal. Fortino almost certainly alluded to the similarly brutal Swans on her 2009 track "Young God". These are imaginative parameters, and both artists have been individually responsible for albums that provide consistently therapeutic listening.
Foreign Body is the pair's collaborative record as Mirrorring, and it effectively and purposefully combines their respective sounds. Tension is the driving force for these six compositions, as each builds from electro-acoustic whispers to landscapes that range from paralyzing paranoia to a glistening sense of subliminal bliss. The recordings feel realized and complete, but never too dense, and while listening I feel placed distinctly between either musician, their sounds tearing from various angles.
Some of these works would make sense on a Grouper or Tiny Vipers record, marked foremost by the aesthetic of the track's leader, but the foil Fortino and Harris offer one another is crucial. The trudging opener "Fell Sound" is reminiscent of Grouper's album Way Their Crept with an eerie and overwhelming sense of drowning in lightness. But Fortino's subtle, suspended guitar work begins to pull from an elevated place, and you never fall too far. The sheer immensity of Grouper's drones on "Fell Sound" makes Fortino's following "Silent From Above" all the more stark, crushing, and cathartic. It's the record's most tuneful and formally structured song, and an immediate highlight, led by acoustic fingerpicks that sound nearly identical to "Development" from her 2009 album Life on Earth. And "Drowning the Call" is a nuanced and idyllic drone-scape centered on the sunlit side of Grouper's aesthetic, but radiating with a new, mood-altering clarity that brings to mind a kind of healing, utopian dream state.
The most affecting tracks on Foreign Body achieve something transcendent, making use of the full range of the duo's instrumental toolbox as well as Fortino's deep warble. At the center is "Cliffs", a nearly 10-minute track that begins with slow and artfully minimal guitar notes, reminiscent of a downcast and zoned-out remake of Nick Drake's "Horn". Acoustic notes crawl and unfurl in a hypnotic, circular fashion, using broad strokes to foreshadow an undercurrent of anxiousness. Listening, for me, evokes the feeling of climbing a cliff and facing the absolute terror of an ocean, past its mist and dew. The piece eventually towers over into a collage of dissolving weather sounds, with Fortino's earthy guitar tones and Harris' oceanic electronics expanding a pronounced, pastoral picture. It's an experiment in the emotional possibilities of space, and seemingly designed to make you feel very small.
"Mine" grows to a similar climax, but instead ends with the noisiest and most expansive drone sounds on the record, with skull-mining capabilities that leave a rattling sense of dread. Whether intentional or not, the song's title reminds me that Foreign Body, and indeed the whole of both artists' catalogs, makes the most sense when heard in solitude. I have gravitated toward albums by Harris and Fortino during the most difficult points of my life, and, despite its high-floating potential to incite escapism, I imagine Foreign Body will likewise help bring many a lost listener down to earth.
"Meditative" is one of a handful of the most common terms pinned to Grouper and Tiny Vipers, but with these tracks it's worth pausing to consider why it is so important to engage with things like repetition and drone. The sound of "Drowning the Call", and much of Foreign Body, offers a sense of hyper-presence; of being acutely aware of yourself as the music's recipient, which counters our disengaged, techno-distracted worlds of Elsewhere and offers a moment of mindfulness.
There is a tendency among music critics to create sub-stories with records and impose narratives. We might identify with a hardcore punk group this year because we are a restless generation, or with a work of hyperactive pop because the internet has made us incapable of concentrating, and so on. But sometimes we take a record for what it is: a resistant piece of art, existing as a singular entity. In a world that is newly full of "content" at every turn, it can be refreshing to find an uncompromising record that exists so honestly on its own.


The Australian folk-turned-pop singer revisits her eccentric, romantically unfulfilled teen years on an album that reaches for the coming-of-age immediacy of artists like Lorde and Taylor Swift.

Devotion

Laura Jean opens her fifth album, Devotion, with a spectacular orchestral flourish—the kind that might signal the beginning of a dream sequence in an old movie musical. She sings as if in a daze about stolen glances and trepid desire, her words lifted skyward by synthetic strings and weightless, arpeggiating piano. The transportive song, “Press Play,” signals that listeners should rid themselves of any assumptions regarding the record’s grounding in Jean’s current reality.
The 36-year-old Australian folk-turned-pop singer long ago reached an age at which the episodes recounted in “Press Play,” involving “popular girls” and watching crushes stare out of school bus windows, faded from her day-to-day life. But Jean wrote Devotion as a tribute to her teenage years, a time when she was, by her own description, “eccentric” and “romantically-unfulfilled.” Throughout the album, she revisits her nascent sexuality and formative obsessions without glossing over her younger self’s complex emotional life, the way adult artists often do when depicting teens. Devotion is nostalgic by its very nature—yet, at its best, the album captures the experiences of first love and lust with remarkable immediacy, rather than the fuzzed-out romanticism of hindsight.
Jean’s retrospective gaze is especially sharp on “Girls on the TV,” which narrates a childhood friendship with a girl she calls “Ricky.” In adolescence, Ricky weathered her share of storms—bullying, drugs, sexual harassment—and Jean recounts them with both anguish and fierce optimism. Other songs on the album lack such robust narratives, but the vibrance of Jean’s storytelling is consistent; she has a way of surfacing small, unexpected details that often say more about a moment than endless exposition can. It’s a skill she shares with some of the best chroniclers of teen romance. When she sings, “I smell the humidity of the concrete,” while describing a budding dalliance on “Northerly,” she taps into the same sensory bliss that makes the opening lines of Taylor Swift’s “Fearless” so captivating. Lorde has praised Devotion’s lead single, “Touchstone,” for its eloquent “communication of the spooky, all-consuming nature of feminine love”—a subject the track shares with some of Lorde’s own songs, like “Writer in the Dark.”
Swift and Lorde documented their respective comings-of-age from different corners of the youth-obsessed pop space, and it’s fitting that Jean’s embrace of this same subject matter finds her straying from her folk roots, in favor of more pop-oriented sounds. When it comes to instrumentation, the transition feels natural: Jean’s voice is light enough to blend in with the pillowy synths she introduces and nimble enough to keep pace with upshifted percussion.
There are moments, however, when pop magic proves elusive. The success of songs like the ones on Devotion (and Fearless, and Melodrama) is often determined by the strength of their hooks. Pushed to write slicker, stickier tracks than ever before, Jean sometimes comes up short. At times, her attempts at lyrical simplicity yield extreme reductiveness: On “Which One Are You?,” she splits humanity into a series of binaries, then dreamily wonders which group her paramour falls into. Reaching for universal resonance, she grasps clichéd language instead.
In chronicling teen romance, Jean has taken on one of pop culture’s most commodified, trope-laden subjects. But it’s only when she leans into specificity and idiosyncrasy, rather than single-mindedly courting wide appeal, that she captures the spectacular novelty that makes young love worth revisiting in the first place.


After four Barsuk albums of often stately, melodic indie pop, Death Cab for Cutie become the first of the "O.C."-boosted indie bands to make the leap to the majors.

Plans

Death Cab for Cutie once released an EP called Stability, the irony being that it was one of their few releases that branches away from their core sound. That's fine, to a point. Their stately, melodic indie pop gives them a big enough palette with which to paint albums that don't lose their flavor on the bedpost overnight, but it also means that their records can feel interchangeable.
On Plans, the band's fifth album, Death Cab made the jump from the friendly confines of Barsuk Records to the storied halls of Atlantic, a move that makes a lot of sense. The band is ready for the large, diverse audience a major can provide, and they make the transition seamlessly, in large part due to the underrated production of guitarist Chris Walla, who has a way of making even the weirder flourishes (and the band tries a few to mixed success here) feel totally natural.
Despite Walla's consistently cozy production, Ben Gibbard's lyrics continue to move from critiques of middle-class life to tackling Big Themes, here the relationship between death and love. On "What Sarah Said" he claims, "Love is watching someone die." On "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" it's the title sentiment, and on "Soul Meets Body" he says, "If the silence takes you, then I hope it takes me too."
"I Will Follow You..." is the album's quiet centerpiece, just Gibbard on acoustic guitar, his fragile, almost falsetto tenor, simple delivery, and unexpected turns of phrase turning an well-worn lyrical road, the fear of losing a lover, into something affecting. The way he personalizes the afterlife and draws in childhood Catholic school experiences is impressive, to say the least. All this and it's sequenced directly after the album's most musically ambitious track, "Different Names for the Same Thing", an overly melodramatic track that heads off on a ponderous, M83-aping electronic odyssey.
The band's other, better experiment is lead single "Soul Meets Body", a sleek pop track that excels except for when the drums drop dead, the textures get all smooshy, and Gibbard goes up the scale to sing the title-- it's such a weird blunder that it's hard to tell at first if it derails the song or just nudges it a bit. Several listens in, the song works on the strength of its catchy "ba da ba da ba ba" passages and the incredible verse melody, but that one little passage is awkward, like the song has something stuck in its teeth. Death Cab opens the album strongly with "Marching Bands of Manhattan", a song that feels like it's constantly in the process of taking off, with pensive drumming and big, sweeping vocals singing about sorrow seeping into your heart as if through a pin-hole.
For its peaks, the album also has its share of valleys, like "Summer Skin", notable mostly for its nifty bassline, and "Your Heart Is an Empty Room", a song that never breaks out of its musical holding pattern. The band suffers from the infliction: Death Cab still sounds basically the same as ever in the post-"O.C." world. In a way, it's comforting to know what you're getting: Four or five songs you'll treasure, four or five you'll tolerate, and a pretty good band sticking to their guns. In another sense, it would be nice if a band reaching for a larger audience had a sound that matched that sense of ambition.


The second installation of this Light in the Attic-compiled collection features tracks from Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, JJ Cale, and others. If Vol. 1 was about mapping the country funk trend via trucker GPS to show how widespread these sounds were, Vol. 2 is more about showing just how high up the ladder these ideas went.

Various Artists: Country Funk Volume II 1967-1974

Country Funk Volume II 1967-1974

The term “country” was first applied to music in the 1940s as a substitute for the pejorative label “hillbilly,” and it has since been used to describe everything from the Carter Family’s mountain hymnal to Florida Georgia Line’s hip-hop-inflected radio hits. “Funk” has a similarly long history in pop music—a piece of Jazz Age slang that would eventually describe Parliament/Funkadelic’s mothership jams, Death Grips’ industrial beats, and nearly everything in between. Even among broad genre tags, both “country” and “funk” are incredibly elastic terms. Put them together and somehow they stretch even further. Never a set scene and not quite a movement, country funk was just something in the air during the late '60s and early '70s, when the give and take between what is generally considered “white” music and what is generally deemed “black” music was at its most open and open-minded.
That unlikely marriage inspired Light in the Attic’s first Country Funk collection in 2012, which sounded revelatory because it reveled in the slippery quality of its own premise. In 16 songs, the comp showed how artists from different locations, backgrounds, and genres combined these two seemingly disparate traditions in new and often surprising ways, as though there were infinite variations of country funk. So it’s startling—and even a bit dismaying—that the label’s second volume stretches those two terms until they almost snap. Most everything on Country Funk Vol. 2 is self-evidently funky, although a few songs sound more like country tunes with a prominent drum track. When it’s Jackie DeShannon butchering “The Weight”, it’s a problem. But when Dillard & Clark covers the Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down” or JJ Cale waxes romantic about the “Cajun Moon”, who’s complaining about semantics?
If Vol. 1 was about mapping the country funk trend via trucker GPS to show how widespread these sounds were, Vol. 2 is more about showing just how high up the ladder these ideas went. The new tracklist is peppered with familiar names, like Townes Van Zandt and Kenny Rogers. Dolly Parton’s “Getting Happy” boasts a ridiculously effervescent chorus and a runaway snare drum that flirts with country disco, and she sells the tune by virtue of her light vocal touch. When she recorded it in 1974, Parton had recently ended her long partnership with Porter Wagoner and had barely established herself as a solo artist. Released the same year as “Jolene” and “I Will Always Love You”, “Getting Happy” reveals just how musically omnivorous Parton was at this point in her career.
At times Vol. 2 is driven as much by its performers’ personalities as by the songs’ syncopated backbeats. Just a few years before Red-Headed Stranger and Wanted! The Outlaws made him the most popular man in country music, Willie Nelson was still tinkering with his redneck-hippie sound on “Shotgun Willie”, the title track to his 1973 album. It’s a trip hearing Nelson in this setting: As the rhythm section struts and the Memphis Horns punctuate the groove, his nylon-string guitar zigs and zags effortlessly around the beat, as though taunting his band. In his signature stoned cadence, Nelson sings about the misperceptions of country life, and you can hear both the mischievous humor and cold derision in his voice when he gets to the verse about the KKK wizard selling sheets on the family plan.
Funk, it turns out, was a way to loosen country up a bit, to move it away from its stodgy conservatism. “Shotgun Willie” is only one of several songs on Vol. 2 that confronts and sometimes satirizes the cultural divide between the establishment and the counterculture. Bob Darin’s “Me and Mr. Hohner” describes a hippie’s run-in with cops in South Philly, and the relentless harmonica stomps evokes the danger of the situation. (He’s the unlikely hero of both volumes, and hopefully it’s only a matter of time before Light in the Attic reissues his 1969 album Commitment.)
Kenny Rogers’ encounter with the law is much less fraught on the First Edition’s “Tulsa Turnaround”, which may be the highlight of Vol. 2. Opening with the narrator on the run after getting the mayor’s daughter stoned, the song was widely covered in the early '70s, with recordings by Three Dog Night, Goose Creek Symphony, and weirdly enough Helen “I Am Woman Hear Me Roar” Reddy. But this may be the ultimate version of the song, thanks to the rhythm section’s narcotized groove and the gritty chagrin in Rogers’ voice as he dispenses outlaw wisdom: “If a man’s gonna eat fried chicken, he’s gotta get greasy.”
Vol. 2 may lack the sense of purpose and discovery that defined Vol. 1, which remains one of the best reissue comps of the 2010s. But credit Light in the Attic for digging deep, for avoiding the obvious, and for rescuing obscurities like Jim Ford’s bizarre b-side “Rising Sign” and Willis Alan Ramsey’s “Northeast Texas Women”, a wry dose of back-porch funk that closes the album. Similar series, including Country Got Soul and Dirty Laundry: The Soul of Black Country, stopped after just two volumes, but the label’s adventurous approach may give Country Funk a much longer life. Vol. 2 proves there’s more than enough country funk out there to fill a good Vol. 3.