To the Ghosts

Joe Meek had an ear for greatness and a brain hellbent on destroying it. Often considered the British counterpart to American pop production legend Phil Spector, he composed most of his biggest hits holed up in a three-floor Islington flat above a leather goods store. He was fascinated with early electronic music and esoteric necromancy in equal measure; he famously dismissed the talents of a young Rod Stewart and called the Beatles “rubbish.” When he had enough of his landlady’s pestering about the ruckus he was making upstairs, he turned a shotgun on her, then himself. After his death, archivists found thousands of recordings he deemed unsuitable for public release, including songs he created for David Bowie. In his quest to create a sound bigger than himself, Meek sabotaged his success in the name of his own exacting standards.
When Brian Oblivion and Madeline Follin first formed Cults over a decade ago, the two bonded over a shared interest in Meek’s musicality and madness, the way the first begot the second. Since their 2011 debut, the New York City duo has channeled that influence into girl group gems with a sinister underbelly, writing songs about haunted houses that went down easy thanks to Oblivion’s twinkling piano and Follin’s helium-high vocal harmonies. On their latest album, To the Ghosts, Cults lean into the bleak beauty of Meek’s story, attempting to channel the darkness in his DayGlo melodies. Five albums in, Cults sound just as eerie and cheery as ever but struggle to transcend the fleeting pleasantries of paint-by-numbers pop.
Lest we forget their influences, the album opens with an echoing bell reminiscent of Spector’s biggest hits with the Ronettes. That song, “Crybaby,” does little to advance the band’s sound: From rhymes about an immature lover so facile they approach parody to synth melodies that feel recycled from previous albums, it sets the predictable tone of the record. When their songwriting does venture to new territory, it usually runs into an awkward metaphor, as when Follin waxes poetic about apoptosis on “Cells” or contemplates why onions make her cry on “Onions” (it’s the sulfur).
The repetitive palette highlights why Spector’s groups transcended the march of time while Cults sound dated on arrival: Follin’s voice simply doesn’t carry the texture or technique of singers like the Shangri-Las’ Mary Weiss or the Crystals’ Dolores “Dee Dee” Kenniebrew. Across the album’s 13 songs, her voice strains against the band’s layered production (helmed by Follin and Oblivion, along with producer Shane Stoneback), fighting a losing battle against a particularly dense guitar riff on “Leave Home” and rushing to keep up with the propulsive electronics of “Behave.” Layered vocal harmonies prevent her voice from falling into the background completely, but her parts often feel like an afterthought.
To the Ghosts is most promising when Cults veer from their girl group inspirations and experiment with dissonance on songs like “Eat It Cold,” with its descending minor scales, fluttering synths, low kick drums, and twisting vocal inflections. Ironically, the band constructs the most engaging potential future on a song that speaks literally of retreading one’s past. As a guitar plucks out a winding melody in its final third, the band recalls the spellbinding sounds that made Joe Meek’s productions so instantly memorable. But with too few new ideas, Cults risk simply embellishing on the well-trodden melodies of their inspirations, too consumed by creating an immortal pop song to let it live in the moment.


Mamiffer’s Faith Coloccia pressed her music—faintly liturgical songs and sound poems about self and motherhood—onto dubplates for turntablist Philip Jeck to smear and distort, to uncanny effect.

Stardust

As Mamiffer’s Faith Coloccia was raising her first child with her husband, left-field metal lifer Aaron Turner, she recorded a set of haunting, faintly liturgical songs and sound poems in the windows of time when the baby was sleeping and she could focus her attention on her work. These recordings first found their way onto Here Behold Your Own, her 2019 release as Mára, which played like a real-time audio diary of her experience of new motherhood. “A lot of the material that I used to make this record felt like the last glimpses of ‘me’ before I became another me,” Coloccia said of the music at the time.
That material has surfaced once again in the form of Stardust, an unorthodox collaboration with English turntablist Philip Jeck. The two artists didn’t work together in the same room; instead, Coloccia pressed the raw material for the album, much of which can be heard unadulterated on Here Behold Your Own, onto dubplates. Jeck then used pedals and electronics to smear and distort Coloccia’s recordings, as he’s done throughout his career with the old vinyl records he deploys on his vintage turntables. It’s a leap of faith to give music so personal to a sound artist whose work makes no effort to keep its source material recognizable. But despite Stardust being essentially a remix album, it maintains an uncanny synthesis between the two artists’ styles. It somehow sounds entirely like a Faith Coloccia album and entirely like a Philip Jeck album at once. It helps that both artists are drawn to sounds associated with the church: organs, bells, choirs, pianos.
Coloccia grew up in a Lutheran household, and Stardust shows a hint of Sunday-school irreverence—the puckish desire of many artists who were raised Christian to simultaneously borrow and subvert the sounds and imagery they grew up with. On “Acquire the Air,” a vast, shimmering organ struggles to maintain its dignity as it finds its way through a daisy chain of pitch-shifted effects. The second half of “Creosote” finds Coloccia singing solemnly over a reversed piano loop as Jeck lets an ugly swell of low-end noise sneak up on her from underneath; it’s easy to imagine Coloccia in church singing a hymn, eyes raised to heaven, distracted from the demonic presence stalking her from below. “Speaking Stone,” the only song where Coloccia’s voice penetrates the soup and comes to the fore, sounds like a Gregorian chant until Jeck starts to layer her voice, allowing a little bit of harmony to desecrate this fiercely monophonic tradition.
Jeck’s work is usually shadowed by an alluring pall of static and vinyl crackles. Perhaps because Coloccia’s dubplates were pressed more recently than his customary source material, that static is absent, replaced by an omnipresent swath of reverb. Stardust conjures a tremendous sense of space, as if it were being performed in a cathedral, and all the echo means the tracks blur together a little more easily on Stardust than they did on Here Behold Your Own. Stardust takes the listener on a journey, while the predecessor felt like a record of someone else’s quest. But it lacks the sense of clarity on Jeck’s best albums, like Stoke or 7, which balanced obfuscation with the revelatory feel of clouds lifting. Here Behold Your Own put the listener right beside Coloccia as she went through her time of transformation. On Stardust, seen through the fogged glass of Jeck’s production, her old life seems further away than ever.

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After two albums of insular restraint, the elegant R&B duo takes an expansive turn, embracing club sounds and multiple guest stars.

A Muse in Her Feelings

Daniel Daley has a voice so striking that it’s almost an affront he began his career as a rapper and songwriter; imagine having that gift and not feeling called to flex it. Nineteen85, Daley’s partner in the R&B duo dvsn and an exceptional pop producer in his own right, also had a musical entry point far from where he would end up: in punk bands with names like Coffee Double the Cream. The two eventually linked up in a grittier, pre-Drake Toronto. And after some years of quiet trial and error, they landed on a signature sound, a kind of red-blooded R&B that gave Daley the space to glide between his tenor and falsetto, and gave 85 occasion to focus his chameleonic style. A Muse in Her Feelings, dvsn’s third album on OVO Sound, honors the core of that alliance, but gazes past its perimeter.
A Muse in Her Feelings opener “No Good” is vintage dvsn: assuredly spare, with sparkling, Yamaha-style ’80s electric keys, unfussy drums, and coiled vocal melodies that recall Jagged Edge at their heartthrob best. But its austerity is a foil for much of the hour that follows. After two albums of insular restraint, Daley and 85 have pivoted towards expansiveness, inviting contributions from a surprising number of collaborators. There’s production from Drake and Travis Scott collaborator Allen Ritter, writing assists from James Fauntleroy, and multiple high-profile guest appearances. Future is in peak toxic mode on 2019 single “No Cryin”; Popcaan shines with a labyrinthine verse on “So What.” Buju Banton and Ty Dolla $ign form an inspired pair on “Dangerous City.” For the most part, the guests are wisely directed, buttressing Daley’s tenderness rather than muddying it. One low moment is “Courtside,” which features grating vocals from Jessie Reyez and a paternalistic concept that shares some spiritual DNA with that one City High song.
2017’s Morning After subtly hinted at an interest in the club, and the pair explores that instinct more fully on A Muse in Her Feelings. The album’s most interesting stretch is a risky three-track run that begins with the playful outro of “Outlandish,” builds into the Baltimore club-referencing “Keep It Going” and crests with the lusty “‘Flawless’ Do It Well, Pt. 3,” featuring Summer Walker in the role of an unflappable stripper. 85 wields his skill at turning vocal samples into lush but unlikely springboards for R&B—he repurposes a snippet of Daley’s voice for “Keep It Going,” and 702’s “Get It Together” adds emotional depth to “Flawless.” (The beat change on the latter could inspire a viral TikTok challenge.)
Unfortunately, Daley’s voice is infinitely more evocative than most of his lyrics. He finds inspiration in the slipstream of love lost, but chooses cursory remorse over introspection or profound revelations, and his songwriting largely lacks the specificity that makes a great song a transcendent one. Shallow writing turns “For Us” into a parody of an aching slow jam: “I don’t wanna/Waste a minute of my life without you in it/I don’t wanna/Act like you ain’t been the one from the beginning.” “Dangerous City,” a moody epic about love in the face of violence, features some of the album’s least convincing lyrics: “Baby, it’s safer here with me because they know me/The only crime you'll ever face is feelin’ lonely.”
What’s more, dvsn’s aesthetic choices—a corny album title, cliché visuals—chip away at their mystique. On the cover, Daley and 85 are perched at a pair of wooden easels, while a woman, nude and partially obscured, sits atop a pedestal in the foreground. There are no identifiable art supplies, presumably implying, to great secondhand embarrassment, that they are painting her with their music. Rather than subvert the concept of the muse, one of the most overused sexist tropes in modern art history, they are literally embodying the patriarchal male gaze. The image tracks with much of the album, which feels thin even when it’s skillful. On Twitter, they explained the title a little further: “A MUSE IN HER FEELINGS AMUSING HER FEELINGS I’M USING HER FEELINGS.” The triple entendre doesn’t have the depth dvsn was hoping for and even though there are songs with infinite replay value, the album doesn’t quite have the depth, either.


Recorded in the wake of the Ghost Ship fire and in a haze of psychedelics, these luminous pop songs articulate grief as a means of moving past it.

Utopia Teased

Stephen Steinbrink wrote and recorded his fourth record, Utopia Teased, inside a shipping container. It wasn’t a stunt; the East Bay singer/songwriter was seeking emotional refuge in the months after the tragic 2016 Ghost Ship fire. Consumed by grief, Steinbrink created Utopia Teased in this makeshift studio while sleep-deprived but stimulated by a daily diet of LSD. Bereavement, tight spaces, and a steady stream of hallucinogens sound like a recipe for disaster or, at the very least, music that reflects disquieting circumstances. But these dozen songs distill Steinbrink’s anguish into a luminous pop tonic—bitter, bright, and above all, restorative.
For the past 10 years, Steinbrink has made refined bedroom pop that emits an inviting glow. But where Steinbrink’s 2016 LP, Anagrams, flickered with twinkling strings and weightless arrangements, Utopia Teased is a steady shaft of laser light, not a series of sparkles. It can sear the retina as easily as it can light up the dark. Opener “Bad Love” epitomizes the gulf between sonics and subject matter; its lambent beams of synthesizer and electric guitar are seductive and beguiling, contradicting Steinbrink’s frank declaration that life is a series of illusions, with no one here to help you decode them. “In Another Kind of Dream” is similarly deceptive, bouncing on piano chords that sound plucked from a Harry Nilsson tune before disintegrating into a field recording of a violent conflagration. Steinbrink reads an excerpt from visual artist Paul Thek’s diary here, offering an explicit, verbose depiction of banal despair.
Thek’s writing feels unnecessary on a record so rich with beautifully realized turns of phrase. Steinbrink is gifted at the art of concision. His lyrics puncture the beatific patina of his songs, little daggers that stud the album and stab when you least expect it. Clipped verses suggest fully-fleshed character studies with just a line or two. He renders quarter-century nihilism (“You’re 31/You don’t believe in anything”), a despondent relationship (“You’re my keys when they’re lost in the couch”), and the mundane disputes we try to avoid in public places (“I can’t talk about Christmas plans at Starbucks”) with brevity and ease.
As skillful as Steinbrink is at identifying pain and its many culprits, he is also keen to move past it. Utopia Teased was created as a vehicle for overcoming grief, and though that process is rarely tidy or comprehensible, there is a wash of catharsis by the album’s end. “I’m Never Changing Who You Are” offers imperfect but effectual methods for soothing agony, based mostly in acceptance and remaining in the moment. “I only got the time I got,” Steinbrink sings, his voice glassy and trembling, “and I’m not spending it in pain.” The words tumble out softly, like towels on their last whirl in the dryer. But even Steinbrink’s sweet falsetto can’t prevent sharp little truths from poking through this plume of guitar pop. It isn’t long before he reminds us that this “cure could also be your poison… anything can be, anyway.” That pain is the catalyst for so much great art is one of the cruel tropes of creativity. In Steinbrink’s case, on his most beautiful record yet, the bedrock of his pain paves the road away from it.


DIIV's compelling debut album is a gorgeous and unusually melodic dream-pop record built around verses and choruses that are unusually fluid and intuitive.

Oshin

I don't think DIIV intend to be subversive; they're a traditionally structured indie rock band with lyrics that are mostly unintelligible if they're not in the song title. But Oshin isn't just a gorgeous and unusually melodic dream-pop record; it's an interesting experiment in whether a band based on voice/guitar/bass/drums can rely on the guitar to carry the song's meaning. DIIV's songs are built around verses and choruses but these are unusually fluid and intuitive, almost post-rock in miniature. And this album is more of a sensory experience than an emotional one. The original name of "Dive" was, according to leader Zachary Cole Smith, touring guitarist for Beach Fossils, a tribute to the Nirvana song and/or an acknowledgment of how each member has a "water" astrological sign. The instrumental tracks that bisect the record are titled "(Druun)", perhaps a flubbed portmanteau of "drone" and "drown." But all three invented words  convey the elemental*.* Whereas someone like Phil Elverum or Wolves in the Throne Room attempt to conjure nature's awesome unpredictability, DIIV capture the beauty and comfort of its foreseeable ebb and flow.
The pleasures of Oshin as a full-length are subtle. "Past Lives", "How Long Have You Known", and "Doused" aren't just the most striking individual tracks; their smart spacing at the beginning, middle and end of Oshin has a trickle-down effect. Were "Earthboy" and "Sometime" to pop up on shuffle, not much about their rhythms or melodies would stand out. But within the album's context, they become sensible interludes. On a smaller scale, Smith's vocals are positively tidal, rising in confident and comforting intervals and resolving every bit as smoothly. The guitars bring to mind things like coins in a fountain, pebbles skipping across a lake, and small fish evoking silvery ink. Even the slowly overwhelming distortion of "Wait" incrementally seeps through the mix like a wave of cold, muddy sand, the only interruption the paradoxically arid "Air Conditioning"-- the one track whose rigid, interlocking guitar patterns recall those of Beach Fossils.
The experience of Oshin is aqueous and amorphous in a way that makes using the term "rock" feel uncomfortable. The pliable yet sturdy intertwining of guitar and bass stretches across the songs like a hammock. And at its best, Oshin can feel like an ingenious distillation of the sonorous instrumental passages that took Disintegration's "Fascination Street" and "Pictures of You" toward arena-rock grandeur. The album is mostly parceled out in lines of three-to-five descending notes that become self-descriptive adjectives: "(Druun)" wordlessly projects resolution, confidence; "Past Lives", wistful acceptance; "Oshin (Subsume)", a kind of dead-eyed stoicism; "Doused", white-knuckle tension. Oshin gives you hints and direction, but never tells you exactly how to feel. It reminds me that one of Neil Young's most desolate and gripping records was called On the Beach.
Oshin is notable for what it leaves to the imagination; not just about its own communicative aims, but about DIIV as well. Barely year ago, it was Smith's solo project, a fairly standard dream-pop act. The impact of DIIV's vibrant and muscular rhythm section makes all the difference. They might not rock, but Oshin always offers tactile resistance. And after the second "(Druun)", Oshin starts to coil into a darker pose, emerging from the deep with the tension of early Interpol before turning post-Fugazi emo drunk on reverb.
"Doused" ends abruptly before the closing lullaby "Home", giving the impression that if DIIV recorded any further at this stage, they'd be too far off from where they started for Oshin to cohere as beautifully as it does. It's a snapshot and a potential pivot; DIIV appear to be at a place where bands like Real Estate and the War On Drugs were after their debut full-lengths; similarly good albums which blurred instrumentals and songcraft, evocation and statement. Of course, their next ones were great largely because they made you care about the people who created them. DIIV have made a compelling debut where what the band is actually about is fairly unimportant. But since Oshin deftly defines what they do, and what they do now, this mystery is likely a temporary state.


Sun Araw, M. Geddes, and the legendary roots reggae group the Congos follow the excellent Icon Give Thank with a recording of a live performance captured last June at the Village Underground in London. At times, it barely resembles their studio collaboration.

The Congos / Sun Araw / M. Geddes Gengras: Icon Give Life

Icon Give Life

Back in 2011 Cameron Stallones, a Los Angeles native who records glitchy psychedelia under the name Sun Araw, and the similarly inclined L.A. electronic musician M. Geddes Gengras decamped to Jamaica to record with the legendary roots reggae group the Congos, whose Lee "Scratch" Perry-produced 1977 debut Heart of the Congos was one of the best albums to come out of Jamaica at a time when the island was producing an unprecedented amount of incredible music. It was an odd team-up, a bunch of older, very serious musicians collaborating across stylistic and cultural gaps with a couple of punkish young noise dudes, but the resulting record, Icon Give Thank, is a surprisingly organic synthesis of traditional reggae and envelope-pushing electronic experimentation. Now, what was originally presented as a one-off partnership, has spawned a live sequel.
Considering the depth of Stallones and Gengras' electronically manipulated production and the improvisatory feel to the recording, it's unlikely the coalition could have reproduced it accurately live, and this performance captured last June at the Village Underground in London at times only barely resembles their studio collaboration. Which is actually fine-- worrying about making an exact recreation of Icon Give Thank would be antithetical to its free-flowing energy, and would be kind of pointless to boot.
Placed side by side the two recordings make interesting companions. It seems fair to call Icon Give Thank the music of the Congos filtered through their new partners' forward-looking sensibilities. Icon Give Life, on the other hand, sounds more like the Congos hauling Gengras and Stallones back to the late 70s and throwing them and their gear into the anarchic electronics assemblage that comprised Perry's Black Ark Studios.
Backed by a group advertised as the Raw Power Band, the Congos, Stallones, and Gengras make a respectable reggae outfit. The grooves are thick and dense, and frequently display the assertive muscularity that characterized the "rockers" reggae that captivated Jamaican audiences around the time that the Congos first formed. The electronic flourishes that gave Icon Give Thank such a unique sound are placed further back in the live mix where they play the same role that Perry's delay-soaked embellishments did in the dubby Heart of the Congos.
Like Icon Give Thank, Icon Give Life wavers between its two musical poles before finding the proper balance. The songs where the spotlight is more directly on the Congos are perfectly enjoyable-- the fine, high voices of founders Roydel "Ashanti" Johnson and Cedric Myton haven't aged too noticeably, and the rest of the group and the Raw Power Band cohere nicely, with the proper amount of looseness to feel more like an actual working band than a nostalgic reproduction of one. The parts that are heavier on the noise dudes are less successful. On the record-closing rendition of "Fisherman", one of the Congos' signature cuts, Stallones and Gengras' attempts to add dubby texture overwhelms the song itself, and for a minute the project does exactly the worst thing an unlikely collaboration like this can do, which is make the listener question what these musicians are doing together in the first place.
But the two sides meld most seamlessly on "Thanks and Praise", one of the songs that the Congos, Stallones, and Gengras composed together. The instrumentation is sparse, with synthesized beeps and whirs bouncing off of hand drums and psychedelically modulated guitar arpeggios. Above this nearly abstract instrumental bed the Congos layer droning vocal parts that are closer to incantation than singing. The song doesn't build any sort of dynamic, it just sort of drifts along, but after two or three of its seven minutes the disparate elements cohere into a vaguely mystical whole, the group onstage transformed suddenly into an unlikely band of shamanic spirit guides. It's a gorgeous moment that you might wish would never end.


Combining the sweetness of adult contemporary pop with a college rock sensibility, the Arizona songwriter presents the raw emotions of a breakup in a familiar, comforting package.

No Place

Phoenix, Arizona songwriter Danielle Durack had written breakup songs before, but when she played “Eggshells” for her boyfriend of several years, “it started a conversation about everything.” They ended up splitting, and Durack’s third record, No Place, sorts through the decision to part. “Eggshells” is the culmination of a years-long shift in Durack’s music to something rawer and less polished: 2017’s Bonnie Rose was straightforward, cutesy piano pop, while 2019’s Bashful landed closer to slick adult contemporary. Expanding her band to include fellow Phoenix vocalist Sydney Sprague and Pedro the Lion drummer Sean Lane, Durack’s latest is a slow-burning breakup album that draws on myriad influences to eke out something fresh.
Durack thrives in the middle ground between lite FM and modern college rock, the space where Phoebe Bridgers makes a pop song or Sara Bareilles experiments with trip-hop. What her influences share is an emphasis on craft, clever wordplay, and storytelling. The chorus of “Billy” is worthy of one of Bareilles’ ballads, but the ambience and subject matter—watching a friend self-sabotage and end up behind bars—feels equally Bridgers-ian: “You say you can’t avoid it/Your pride is too important... I can’t afford to lose you over something stupid.” Durack’s sincerity makes these songs her own, with a sense of humor that feels friendly instead of ironic. “Broken Wings” is sneakily, genuinely funny: Durack’s intonations of “you’re a charming kind of manic/God, I find it so romantic” and the groaner line “I Cold Stone Gotta Have It” land because there’s real emotion behind the half-rhymes and ice cream puns.
That balance between adult contemporary pop sweetness and self-conscious indie rock whimsy makes the record especially endearing. Producer Sam Rosson, a longtime friend of Durack’s, mostly keeps things from going too far in one direction, adding folklore-esque electronics to ballads like “Now That I’m Alone” or roomy live drums on “Don’t Know If I’ll Stick Around.” The approach isn’t perfect: Leaving “There Goes My Heart” so bare makes the similarity to that one Twilight song a little too obvious. But Christina Perri would not be as precise as Durack is in her writing: “You’re calling me crying to tell me you’re sorry/To tug on my heart strings and call me your darling/And that’s what I wanted, but not what I asked for.” The emotions are raw, but the packaging feels familiar; ideal comfort after a breakup.
No Place doesn’t try to transcend its influences, but modesty can be a strength. It feels like a real person writing about a real breakup, and though the album is not as eccentric or theatrical as it could be, the restraint works. If there’s one song that does reach transcendence, it’s the one that kicked off the heartache to begin. “Eggshells” doesn’t sound like a breakup song at first: The oohs are lifted from early-2000s adult contemporary radio, and the arrangement wouldn’t sound out of place in a Jack Johnson song. Like most of the album, it’s warm, humble, and unsurprising. When Durack sings, “I can’t fight the feeling that we are slowly dying/Like those flowers you always bought me,” the feedback roars in, communicating her anger. It’s thrilling to hear a record so unassuming suddenly cut loose in its last moments, a sign that someone indebted to her influences is coming into her own.

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Over some dusty boom-bap, the undoubtedly talented Logic spends just way too much time trying to forcibly cement his place in hip-hop history.

Young Sinatra IV

In recent years, Logic has catapulted from an inspirational figure for misfits, into one of hip-hop’s most visible stars. He spends the final four minutes of “Thank You,” the long intro to his fourth studio album Young Sinatra IV, running through phone calls of young fans from damn near every continent thanking him for changing their lives. Logic reciprocates that same energy, showing his gratitude for all the fans who helped carry him to the finale of the Young Sinatra series—which he speaks about with the unearned reverence of Lil Wayne’s Carter series. He then brands Young Sinatra IV his serious album, determined to give the anthology the conclusion he seems to think it deserves: returning to the boom bap beats of his longtime in-house producer 6ix, getting back on his real rap shit, and forcibly trying to cement his place in hip-hop history. Welcome to the cult of Logic.
Here’s the thing about Logic: He can rap. He really can. He can flow over anything. But his obsession with his legacy causes him to violate a 2018 rap truism: no rap song should go beyond two verses. If it does, you better be spitting some mind-rattling shit, and he assuredly isn’t. Logic can start off fine but will often delve into tiresome three-, four-, and even five-verse tracks going off on incomplete, uplifting rambles.
The most memorable Young Sinatra IV moments come when Logic forgets the whole magnum opus thing and stops trying to be the rap Tony Robbins. The title track—Logic’s tribute to the late Mac Miller—samples Nas and AZ’s “Life’s A Bitch” and Logic just spits. It’s six minutes long but it feels weightless as a piano-laden beat change-up keeps it fresh while Logic is at home making his bold proclamations (“Respected by my peers from Drizzy to Cole to Kenny”). “Wu-Tang Forever” should’ve been the worst eight minutes of 2018. Logic dragging his fans into sitting through a bottom-rung flex like getting every living Wu-Tang member on a track isn’t how anyone, even the most diehard Logicians, should want to spend their time. Yet Logic is all in, dedicating himself to fitting in as the latest Wu-affiliate, which rubs off on the Wu who, for once, don’t take that cushiony Def Jam direct deposit for granted.
But most of the time, Logic is chasing his legacy-defining dreams. On the subtly titled “Legacy,” he uses a light five verses to clash with himself about whether becoming a rap legend is worth spending less time with his family. He later tries to convince everyone that something momentous is happening, holding up his 2018 Eminem co-sign as proof: “Shout out to that boy Slim Shady for all the love, yeah!” Then, he uses one of the few hard-hitting productions on the album on “Everybody Dies”—courtesy of Cubeatz and 6ix—to pack in insane hypotheticals: “Man I wish that I could be a dog in a rich family/Oh wow how nice that would be/My life a catastrophe;” all while hoping nobody realizes that behind his smooth flow is a rapper who is completely making it up as he goes.
Logic’s lyrical prowess continues to get in his way on songs like “The Return,” which sounds like a motivational song made for a late night Nike ad: “When shit get rough I get tough and when I’m beaten to the ground/I get up, I get up.” He then continues to appeal to his legion of loyal outsiders by proving he’s one of them in the most over-the-top way possible: “Called a faggot, a ni--er, a cracker who wish he was blacker.” And after it all, Logic still wants to make crystal clear that he just dropped his classic, remaking the finale of Kanye West’s College Dropout, “Last Call.” He takes more than 10 minutes to regurgitate some after-school-special bars (“This for anyone with ambition, calling anybody that’ll listen/I’m wishing all your dreams come true cause mine did”). He seems to see this as the final chapter of a coming-of-age saga that has earned a spot alongside the Kanye college trilogy, but that’s a tragic misreading of reality.
Logic’s music has had depth before, as with his suicide hotline awareness hit “1-800-273-8255,” though it’s arguable if it was any more salient than your average PSA. It wasn’t much catchier. But it touched his loyal fans and created millions more, and that song was likely the engine that caused them to phone in en masse for the album’s intro. He hasn’t come close to the power and pathos of that song since, but lucky for Logic, that emotional connection he made is so strong, people won’t care if he really doesn’t have shit to say this time around.


Rapper/singer Tory Lanez’s primary skill is mimicking others, and on a new pair of mixtapes, the rule seems to be: If it ain't broke, add new drums and put it out again.

Tory Lanez: Chixtape 4 / The New Toronto 2

Chixtape 4 / The New Toronto 2

The rapper/singer Tory Lanez’s primary skill is mimicking others. He greeted 2017 with two new mixtapes, and while some people use the New Year as an inflection point—time to slough off the old and commit to change—Chixtape 4 and The New Toronto 2 show an artist toasting to inertia.
Lanez is known for two singles, both of which rehash previous hits — “Say It” borrows from Brownstone’s “If You Love Me,” while “Luv” swipes Tanto Metro and Devonte’s “Everyone Falls in Love.” In pop, familiarity often breeds success, so it’s not surprising that this pair waltzed to No. 1 on Billboard’s Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart. Lanez’s major label debut album arrived last August—a month before “Luv” peaked—bearing a triumphant title: I Told You.
Exulting after those hits is like soaking up sartorial compliments while dressed in someone else’s suit. But Lanez is well-equipped for this sort of work: his filmy voice, blissfully unburdened by texture, allows him to live lightly in past smashes without dulling the pleasant narcotic effects of nostalgia. Lanez also has plenty of practice—songs on the previous volumes of Chixtape mostly pull from a jumbled collage of the last two decades of R&B and rap. This music exists in the same space as Natalie La Rose and Jeremih’s “Somebody,” Diplo and Sleepy Tom’s “Be Right There,” and Cheat Codes and Kriss Kross Amsterdam’s “Sex.” The aesthetic impulse, not far from Hollywood’s vogue for making sequels to movies twenty years old, seems to be: if it ain’t broke, add new drums and put it out again.
This is especially true for the music on Chixtape 4, where the references to golden oldies are as loud and pervasive as ever. The wall-to-wall blanket of homage extends even to a pair of skits, where venerable crowd-pleasers (Cam’ron’s “Hey Ma,” Usher’s “U Don’t Have To Call”) can be heard in the background. Elsewhere, Lanez drizzles come-ons willy-nilly atop of melodies recycled from P. Diddy, Chingy, Fat Joe, R. Kelly, and Aaliyah.
Of course, referentiality is part of pop: to underline this point, Lanez builds a track around the singer Mario’s “Just a Friend” from 2002, which in turn borrowed and revamped the famous melody from Biz Markie’s “Just A Friend” (1989), which is based on Freddie Scott’s “You Got What I Need” (1968). Lanez is part of a long and vital tradition, and he knows it. But he has little to add, and after you identify the radio-staple-core of his songs, listening to them has all the drama of watching a friend complete a paint-by-numbers kit. Confusingly, Lanez also tends to muddy and bury the superlative melodies from his source material, undercutting any help they might give him and leaving his beanpole voice to do the heavy lifting.
Lanez’s other new tape, The New Toronto 2, makes it clear why he likes to stay in the vicinity of a sure thing. Populated with battering hip-hop instead of songs cherrypicked from other artists, it’s more energetic than Chixtape 4, but hardly more distinct. Lanez fires off dismissive, unimaginative fusillades like, “I be up way in the clouds/A fuck nigga weighing me down.” The tracks creep and bulge, matching the temperament of your boilerplate radio beat but doing nothing more.
The exception is “Wraith Talk,” a flashy, horn-laden number produced by AraabMuzik; it’s a throwback to the early ’00s, but has more zing than anything else here. Perhaps worried that this song would interrupt the humdrum flow of the rest of the material, Lanez tucks it away at the very the end of New Toronto 2. New year be damned: Lanez’s latest tapes are the work of an artist in a holding pattern. And why would he shift course? With the right coaxing, one of these old hits might be his new No. 1.


The latest batch of Mute's deluxe reissues shows that the 1990s were very good to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Let Love In / Murder Ballads / The Boatman's Call / No More Shall We Part

The 1990s were very good to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. Where the previous decade saw Cave successfully transition out of the Birthday Party's combustible punk toward a more urbane, theatrical brand of rock, the 90s elevated him to the realm of archetype and institution. He successfully party-crashed Hollywood and "Top of the Pops", all while the college-radio charts filled up with emergent artists-- PJ Harvey, Tindersticks, Afghan Whigs-- cut from the Bad Seeds' black-velvet cloth.
The Bad Seeds' mid-90s pinnacle forms the basis of the latest round of Mute's excellent reissue series, which include vividly remastered versions of the original albums, along with a 5.1 surround sound mix, B-sides, official videos, and the latest installments of Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard's illuminating fan-testimonial documentaries, Do You Love Me Like I Love You? The title of the film series is taken from the two-part song that opens and closes Let Love In, an authoritative show of force that was perfectly timed for the Bad Seeds' insurrectionary appearance on the 1994 Lollapalooza tour. The Bad Seeds had always traded in high drama and dissonance, but never before had they sounded this imposingly heavy-- the lecherous intimations of "Do You Love Me?" explode into a torrent of chain-gang vocals and drummer Thomas Wydler's machine-gunned snare rolls, while "Loverman" triggers its quiet-to-loud eruptions so masterfully, Metallica would later cover the song to the surprise of no one.
But amid Let Love In's ballast, you can hear Cave's increased adeptness at exploring his fascinations using sly, pitch-black humor instead of transgressive shock tactics. "Red Right Hand"-- the future theme song of the Scream film franchise-- sets its serial-killer narrative to a seductive swampy groove, and the beautiful piano ballad "Nobody's Baby Now" is a work of such wry, understated elegance, Cave originally thought of giving it to Johnny Cash.
As Let Love In's signature tracks proved, Cave's love songs could easily turn into death songs, so it was inevitable that he'd devote an entire album to exploring that symbiotic relationship. Murder Ballads has a title so obvious and self-defining, it's amazing that it took the Bad Seeds nine albums to use it. And the last thing you could accuse Cave of is false advertising: Dozens of characters lose their lives over the course of the album, which updates infamous folk tales like "Stagger Lee" with enough profanity and gratuitous violence to satisfy the bloodlusty standards of the post-gangsta rap/Quentin Tarantino era.
But the Bad Seeds' most lyrically depraved record is also their most musically ornate and accessible, with the band expanding to accommodate Dirty Three violinist Warren Ellis and former Cramps/Sonic Youth stickman Jim Sclavunos (as second percussionist), plus a pair of smoldering duets with PJ Harvey ("Henry Lee") and Kylie Minogue (the unlikely MTV hit "Where the Wild Roses Grow"). In fact, with its densely detailed storylines, heart-racing epics ("Song of Joy", "The Curse of Millhaven") and cheeky curtain-closing cover of Bob Dylan's born-again anthem "Death Is Not the End", it's hard not to imagine Murder Ballads as some perverse, alternate-universe West End musical production. But look past its comically over-the-top presentation and you realize Cave isn't simply indulging in some subversive genre exercise. He was examining the very idea of poetic license, pushing the limits of what an artist can get away with in a song when writing in character.
The Boatman's Call is Cave's plea for redemption, an album every bit as dignified as its predecessor is deranged. After spending much of his career spinning yarns out of other people's misery, Cave-- emerging from a divorce and a highly publicized but short-lived affair with PJ Harvey-- comes clean about his own. On the stirring piano-based hymns "Into My Arms" and "There Is a Kingdom", he looks to religion less as a convenient dramatic device and more as the genuine refuge for the lonely soul. Cave had flirted with tender balladry many times before, but whereas previous turns like "Straight to You" and "The Ship Song" were shot through the Bad Seeds' widescreen lens, here, the atmosphere is so spare and intimate, you feel like you're curled up inside Cave's piano. More than any other album in this batch of reissues, The Boatman's Call is greatly enriched by a remaster that amplifies the magnitude of Cave's loneliness, from the burning-ember ambience of "Lime Tree Arbour" to Ellis' trembling violin lines on the absolutely devastating "Far From Me". But even though The Boatman's Call is Cave's most confessional, open-hearted album, its sense of sorrow and catharsis transcends a strictly personal interpretation. It speak volumes about the album's universality that its songs have soundtracked everything from Michael Hutchence's funeral to Shrek 2.
Following that triumphant triptych, it would be another four years before Cave reemerged with a new album, during which he finally kicked his recurring, 15-year heroin addiction once and for all. Not surprisingly, No More Shall We Part carries the tentative air of an artist and band trying to reconnect with their muse, and with one another. No More feels more like a transitory album than a definitive statement, one that showcases the increasingly crucial role of Ellis' mournful violin-playing to the band's sound, but perhaps at the expense of founding members Blixa Bargeld (who would leave the band in 2003), and Mick Harvey (who would follow suit in 2009). Tellingly, Bargeld and Harvey are nowhere to be seen in the No More set's accompanying installment of Do You Love Me, after making prominent appearances in each of the series' previous episodes.
But amid its stately sprawl and gorgeous guest vocals from folk legends Kate and Anna McGarrigle, No More Shall We Part effectively points the way from the desolate, piano-bar introspection of The Boatman's Call toward the swagger, bombast, and cutting humor that would define the Bad Seeds' output throughout the rest of the coming decade. Following No More's release, Cave would switch labels to Anti- and, with 2003's Nocturama, ignite a more raucous, raw-powered phase of his career that's currently manifested itself in the Bad Seeds' hellacious alter-ego act, Grinderman. But if No More Shall We Part seems less distinguished next to Cave's mid-90s streak and his reinvigorated Anti- output, it represents an important turning point in the Bad Seeds discography. At the onset of the 2000s, Cave had essentially completed the transformation from being an artist who would soundtrack your funeral into one who could provide the first-dance song at your wedding; No More Shall We Part marks that pivotal moment where Cave regains the sensation in his red right hand.


The Berlin duo Amnesia Scanner make electronic music that feels both organic and alienatingly futuristic.  Even at its most mordant, AS somehow remains accessible and exciting, uncomfortable music you can dance to.

AS EP

The "mysterious European producer" gambit is a standard and well-rehearsed gimmick by now, with varying degrees of success: For every Burial you have 100 snide SOPHIEs. Berlin twosome Amnesia Scanner arrive in front of us with a terse press release, full of mystery. They are self-described "Xperienz Designers," but they refuse to give any "xplanations" for what that means. Instead, they provide the curious schmuck who’s opened their PR email with six unnamed hyperlinks. As you click along, a pitch of absurdity slowly builds, moving from reviews of their work in multiple languages (English, Japanese, German), to a suspicious zip file hosted on Mediafire, and finally the homepage for the Protein Data Bank, an archive for three-dimensional models of biological molecules (proteins, nucleic acids, and the like).
Amnesia Scanner's website, too, is a cacophonous visual medley. Their Twitter and Facebook pages don’t offer much. We know they are affiliated with Berlin’s Janus collective (Lotic, M.E.S.H., Kablam). They contributed to "An Exit" from Holly Herndon’s Platform, and they produced a very interesting Mykki Blanco track two years ago. So there it is, a skeleton of biography. Was the journey worth it? The music would have to be surpassingly vivid to stand out from its surrounding rhetoric. Luckly, the gumshoe Google chase matches the music, which feels like a puzzle that might kill you once you’ve solved it.
By the numbers, AS is misleadingly brief. The six tracks total to a slim 21 minutes, but as a whole the album feels much longer that that. Each of the songs is prefaced by "AS" ("AS Wood Gas," for example), which either signifies a contraction of the band’s name or one half of an unfinished metaphor. Titles like "AS Atlas" or "AS Chingy" just add another level of interpretative chaos. They beg the question of whether or not the song is supposed to embody the object it references. More likely than not, it’s another trap door. Is it possible that they sample late '90s pop-rap superstar Chingy in "AS Chingy"? That might have to be a mystery for another day.
Describing the music of AS is similarly difficult. "Electronic" only suffices if you paint with the widest brush. Sure, the music here was most likely made on a computer, but at its core it is deeply organic. You may never hear a pre-made synth on AS. You are more likely to hear your gurgling stomach or something tumbling down a flight of stairs. These tracks are overflowing, sloshing full of content, and impossibly dense. They can suddenly and brutally evaporate the comforts of time’s steady flow by queering what you think three or four minutes is supposed to feel like.
If there is a steady descriptor for AS, it's "unmooring." There's no way to know where they sourced a particular beat, chord, or vocal. This leaves a lot to imagination. The sounds of AS are primordial and alienatingly futuristic, recalling all the worst parts of the uncanny valley. If we can begin to imagine what a cyborg’s chaotic inner id might be like, you have to to listen to AS.
Intense as AS may be, it never becomes a slog or overly complex. The EP has an acute grasp on the rhythms and mood that make people dance. Even at its most mordant, AS somehow remains accessible and exciting, and prompts discovery by tricking you into dancing along to the strangest sonic triggers. It is a testament to the skill and inventiveness of these producers that they can make tracks like "AS Chingy" and "AS Crust" into implausible bangers. Both are nauseating, vertigo-inducing tracks, stitched together from pleading processed vocals, defiantly herky-jerky percussions, and cold greasy synths. It makes Amnesia Scanner utterly confounding. Even with biographical information in hand, several music videos, and art projects, you can't put your finger on Amnesia Scanner for one second. Music this uncomfortable is rarely so euphoric.


Mac DeMarco’s second full-length isn’t a departure from its predecessor so much as a richer, increasingly assured refinement. At its best, it’s an outstanding crystallization of his gifts, the real-talk advice of Jonathan Richman with a far more accessible poetic dreaminess.

Salad Days

“Ode to Viceroy,” Mac DeMarco’s sun-dappled tribute to cheap cigs from his 2012 album 2, hasn’t lost its smolder. It’s probably the Brooklyn-via-Montreal singer and songwriter’s best-known tune—a laidback guitar-pop daydream, as wobbly and welcoming as a backyard hammock—and it captures a lot of his music’s appeal. “Viceroy” is about taking pleasure in something that could kill you, and the lethal paradox is part of the draw. Somewhere in retirement, Joe Camel must be kicking himself.
This alluring ambivalence is one of DeMarco’s defining traits. He’s the gap-toothed prankster who sings the sighing love ballad. He’s the guy everybody assumes is a stoner, though he claims he never, as they say, touches the stuff. You can’t read about him without seeing the word “slacker,” but in two short years, he’s gone from opening at New York’s 550-capacity Bowery Ballroom to headlining at the 1,500-capacity Webster Hall (could he have done better if he’d tried?). The fact DeMarco isn’t even his real name—he was born Vernor Winfield McBriare Smith IV—captures the duality almost too perfectly.
Whichever Mac is the better-behaved one has been taking over more and more, as the creepy detours of 2012’s Rock and Roll Night Club EP gave way to the more direct 2. His second full-length, Salad Days, isn’t a departure from its predecessor so much as a richer, increasingly assured refinement. For all its internal contradictions, Salad Days is no more or less than a great album in a tradition of no-big-deal great albums.
There’s little here to justify DeMarco’s reputation for divisiveness (“Detractors,” as Steven Hyden put it for Wondering Sound, “tend to regard him as some kind of bullshit artist, a quintessential hipster doofus slumming it under the ironic guise of a hippie dirtbag who gleefully covers Limp Bizkit in concert”). The loping “Blue Boy,” which shares its title with an indie-pop classic by Orange Juice, amiably advises against acting so tough and worrying so much about your haircut. The warm, watery groove of “Brother” recalls the Beatles’ “Don’t Let Me Down”, though its moony lyrical sentiment (“You’re no better off living your life than dreaming at night”) might be more “I’m Only Sleeping.” You’re unlikely to hear a supposedly hip album this year with so many mentions of people’s mothers.
As with Real Estate’s Atlas, DeMarco’s new album is also ostensibly one where the chill bro gets all mature and stuff, and here his inner conflicts return with a suitably nonchalant vengeance. The title track undercuts its narrator’s worries about aging by alluding to the inconvenient truth that the worrier is only 23—not exactly ready for that condo in Florida. Relatedly, anyone hoping for a pot anthem in organ-thick “Passing Out Pieces” will instead find a koan-like complaint about the artist life’s crummy trade-offs. Penultimate “Go Easy” suggests concern for the girlfriend left behind while on tour, but its lyrical non sequitur—“You built it up, just to knock it down”—is a common criticism of the music press that has received DeMarco so favorably and could speak to his uneasy relationship with success. Et tu, Vernor?
It’s telling that Salad Days’ most immediate song, the one with biggest chance of transcending DeMarco’s cult, is one he says he didn’t want to do. “Let Her Go” was apparently the answer to label Captured Tracks’ demands for “an upbeat single” suitable for late-night TV, and DeMarco is still upset about it. He shouldn’t be: It’s an outstanding crystallization of his gifts, the real-talk advice of Jonathan Richman with a far more accessible poetic dreaminess. Of course, even this reversal of the hoary “if you love her, let her go” chestnut undermines its own advice—“Or you can keep her, it’s OK, it’s up to you,” DeMarco counters in a speak-singing outro. It’s only fitting that stick-with-the-girl songs “Let My Baby Stay” and “Treat Her Better” are almost as tunefully plush.
In this context, DeMarco’s non-album antics start to look like another defense mechanism, another way of cutting himself off at the legs before someone else does it for him. That Limp Bizkit rendition showed up as part of a jokey 2013 live release; DeMarco has been vocal about how tiresome that novelty-cover setlist (Metallica, the Police, blah blah blah) became. And he previewed Salad Days with a video for a puckish perv-pop outtake centering on a refrain of “give me pussy.” So while his slack-not-slack aesthetic may point toward rising peers like Australia’s Courtney Barnett, there’s also ample reason Odd Future lightning rod Tyler, the Creator, who cited this album’s synth-dripping “Chamber of Reflections” as DeMarco’s best song, is a fan.
“Chamber of Reflections” is something like Beach House’s “Heart of Chambers,” but evoking a bare, cell-like apartment rather than a misty opium-den boudoir. It’s DeMarco’s most atmospherically exploratory track yet, and it’s also painfully lonely and quietly eloquent about the experience. So when, at the end of Salad Days’ airy instrumental finale, “Jonny’s Odyssey,” he remarks, “Thanks for joining me, see you again soon, buh-bye,” you don’t wonder if you’re missing some April Fool’s joke. You want to offer the guy a light, and then you realize he already has plenty.


The debut from Ivan Howard (Gayngs, Rosebuds) is a frivolous soufflé of soft-rock babymakers and disco deliria that could have been crafted any time in the last fifty years.

Blue Days, Black Nights

Now and then, a record comes along that cuts to the quick of our political and spiritual moment. Blue Days, Black Nights has zero pretenses about being one of those records. The debut by De La Noche, which is fronted by Rosebuds and Gayngs member Ivan Howard, is a frivolous soufflé of soft-rock baby-makers and disco deliria that could have been crafted any time in the last 50 years. The song titles are basically just search terms for moods and sounds: “Dreams,” “Blue,” “Lush,” “Stars,” “Spooky,” and “Champagne.” It’s music for lotion-y late nights and cocktails with activated charcoal, like if Rhye dropped his falsetto and made a ’70s Italian film score. It doesn’t cut to the quick of anything, but it’s a lot of silky fun.
If Blue Days, Black Nights is not thematically rich, it compensates with sonic decadence. The songs are drizzled with just enough truffle oil to elevate their essential sturdiness without obscuring it. As you might expect, based on Gayngs and The Rosebuds’ whole-album cover of Sade, the vibe is redolent of ’80s easy-listening and synth-funk from Peter Gabriel to Tears for Fears, but modernized with the refined pulses of contemporary electronic music.
After “Avenues” sets the scene—city at night, lights smeared in the rain—De La Noche gets down to it with “Dreams,” building fluorescent dream-pop over sinister bass lines and topping it with a memorable, heart-tugging chorus, kissed with one perfect pitched-up vocal sample that reminds you that Howard worked with Kanye West—speaking of which, “Blue” is a great “Flashing Lights” pastiche.
The record is so consistent with Howard’s other work that it’s surprising to learn that he came on board after it was written and recorded by his old college friends Robert Rogan and Brian Weeks. Rogan and Weeks recorded the De La Noche songs with scratch vocals and sent them to Howard in Portland to see what he thought. Apparently, everyone was so happy with the results that they wound up Postal Servicing the whole thing. With all the tracks already in place, down to Matt Douglas’s blue-steel sax, it’s surprising how organic and integrated it feels. The long friendship and prior collaboration (Weeks was a Rosebud) surely helped breathe life from afar into De La Noche’s sound, and its particular featherlight heft.


The latest collection from the Watts rapper is an essential piece of West Coast rap, at times pulsating and manic, born from a singular writer and chameleonic stylist.

The Wolf of Grape Street

03 Greedo has an artificially constructed eardrum, metal fused into his left leg, and clusters of grapes tattooed onto his skin. He spent his childhood in Sacramento, rural Kansas, Compton, and St. Louis, where he lived “in the basement in a house made of bricks.” At times he was, effectively, homeless. Around the turn of the century, he moved into Jordan Downs, a housing project off of Grape Street in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Watts. Barely a teenager, he fell in with the Grape Street Crips. His rap name is a paper-thin veil for those gang ties—he dropped a digit from 103, for 103rd St., and tweaked “Greedy”—and, in interviews, effectively shrugs at the obviousness. He has a popular mixtape trilogy called Purple Summer, he reasons, and there are those stenciled grapes. “How are they not gonna know?”
As a rapper, Greedo’s momentum in L.A. has been interrupted by jail stints and creative ebbs, but was accelerated in the last 20 months with a deluge of new music: nearly seven hours across the three Purple Summer tapes and Money Changes Everything, each of which is gripping and shockingly consistent. Because he moves so fluidly between styles, it’s difficult to point to a single Greedo song as a distillation of his sound or vision, but the best point of entry might be “Mafia Business,” the tribute to a friend who was murdered in the summer of 2016 that’s become his biggest hit. It sounds like a song you’ve heard before that’s being played in the distance, maybe underwater. Greedo bends his voice into something resembling a prayer for the dead to be allowed free passage; he raps, “I swear I haven’t cried in a hundred years/Last night a nigga cried about a hundred tears.” In the video, dozens of people, most draped in purple, hug, mourn, smile, dance, sometimes holding a two-dimensional cardboard cutout of the deceased with a real purple bandana tied around its neck. It is, to an extent, Greedo’s on-record identity in microcosm: familiar elements rearranged in ways that seem just a little bit foreign.
The lengths of those four breakthrough tapes we intimidating, but they served a welcome creative purpose for Greedo. When a project runs 30 or 40 songs, there’s less pressure on any individual track to carry the narrative or stylistic weight of the record writ large, and so songs are allowed to breathe as one-offs or asides or experiments. Greedo’s free to snap and cheese at the camera and dedicate full cuts to his love of Lil Boosie’s music.
On The Wolf of Grape Street, Greedo folds songs from his past work in with new records, too. But unlike Lil Boosie’s Bad Azz (Greedo cites it as his “Bible”), which roped in hits from his run as a cult mixtape star and was more or less a comprehensive survey of his styles, The Wolf of Grape Street is a careful act of editing, uniform in its urgency, with songs carefully chosen from Greedo’s massive vault and arranged to sound frantic and claustrophobic. It’s a pulsating, manic record from a singular writer and chameleonic stylist.
One of the things that makes Greedo’s music so compelling is the way he collapses the distance between one idea and the next. The ghosts that hang over his music—death, prison—are never too far away, and they color even the songs where they don’t swoop in. On Wolf, this means that a sex song on which Greedo worries his partner might set up him (“Beat That Thang Down”) dissolves into another (“Run For Yo Life) where he’s sleeping with a jailed man’s girlfriend into “Look At Me Now,” which he delivers mostly in a shout, and which starts with him flexing his record deal with the mogul Todd Moscowitz and ends with him repeating “same age that my daddy died.” It has the effect of placing his career as a performer on the same plane as the often unbelievable pain he expresses in his music: there’s no comfortable divide between what he sees in the boardroom and what he sees behind his eyelids.
The Wolf of Grape Street takes its name, obviously, from The Wolf of Wall Street, but where Scorsese imagined coiffed securities agents as the swirling vultures, Greedo was targeted by bounty hunters who shackled him in a van for nearly a week while they extradited him to the Texas panhandle. He’s facing 25-to-99 years on drug charges and 2-to-20 on gun charges. Jail has always figured prominently in Greedo’s writing, but the stakes here feel, understandably, far graver. That real-world legal peril is inextricable from the tortured “Paranoid Pt. 03” (“I think I need another lawyer”), and from the breathless pace of the album as a whole.
None of which to say Greedo’s music, or Wolf in particular, is humorless or oppressively heavy. “If I Wasn’t Rappin’” is bright and propulsive; he dives headlong into gleeful wordplay like, “Love my sisters on some black shit/White girl in my fucking baggage.” Even those men who descended on him from Texas are made to sound like a minor inconvenience: “Fuck the bounty, I’m just laughing.” The self-produced “Neva Bend,” another of his mixtape hits, broaches immense sorrow but is a little alien, drenched in synths and packed with melody and resolve: In the video, he raps, “My mama made me a star” while dragging a pistol across his face.
As a vocalist, Greedo sometimes channels contemporaries from Atlanta like Young Thug, breaking form in his verses to launch into song or hopping off the drums to rap more animatedly. But he’s also comfortable using more linear means to wring the emotion from his records. He’ll slip from pained yelps into crystal-clear diction, from venomous songs about kids getting jacked for their sneakers to sprawling lullabies about drug addiction, punctuated by the sound of seagulls. All of this makes him difficult to pin down in a rote lineage of Los Angeles rappers, but as Greedo will abruptly correct interviewers, he’s not from L.A.—he’s from Watts. The Wolf of Grape Street draws its power from that sort of specificity, but coheres into a broader rebuke of dread, panic, and walls closing in, wherever they might be.


This expansive double LP from Los Angeles producer M. Geddes Gengras collects four modular synth compositions with a lush, liquid sound. They are rewarding in their instability.

M. Geddes Gengras: Interior Architecture

Interior Architecture

The work of prolific Los Angeles producer M. Geddes Gengras is often discussed in terms of “vibes.” This is fair enough, given the wandering modular synth experiments for which he’s known (not to mention his warmer forays into dub alongside Sun Araw, and his stated late-blooming appreciation for the Dead). Lest such language imply a relaxed sort of grooviness, however, his latest full-length—a double LP comprising four barely-discrete compositions, each around 18 minutes—extends into more anxious territory.
Composed and recorded over the last six years, Interior Architecture is so expansive that it can be hard for the listener to find her footing. What’s rewarding, in addition to the lush and liquid sound of Gengras’ indulgent approach, is that very experience of instability. It’s more pronounced than in his previous releases, and here takes on a psychological dimension.
“Wings_Carroms_Fountain_Worm Suite Pt. 1” opens with a foreboding tone, ringing out and slowly layered. Its effect is almost orchestral, with tinny scrawls of metallic textures. The sounds stretch and groan, eventually receding and leaving us with a tumbling rhythm that approximates water dripping in a cave, earthly and unsettling. Those contradictory sounds accumulate, and that’s where unease creeps in. This buildup process reiterates throughout, though there are moments of reprieve: the second track, “Staircase_Pressure Reverie_Structure_Worm Suite Pt 2.,” begins with a forgiving exhale, nodding back to the New Age calm of Gengras’ last proper full-length, 2014’s Ishi. Even still, about four minutes in, a cozy ambient patch is met with discordant piano and mechanical shuffling.
Taking his time to build and disassemble each passage, Gengras seems to work without many constraints. As his compositions develop out, there’s an experiential and pleasure-taking quality to his application of new progressions, even when they’re wholly dissonant. Outside of this project, he collaborates with a number of Los Angeles musicians, but here he’s very much working alone, a fact that underscores the interiority audible throughout. This is briefly disrupted by the introduction of Seth Kasselman on clarinet on “Extension_Breath_Worm Suite Pt. 3,” an element that, though it enters and exits in appropriately abstract squelches, contrasts somewhat curiously with the album’s vocabulary. Gengras otherwise comfortably and loosely fills out space, lost in what he’s making.
It’s a bit funny that he’s used the term “architecture” to title this album, which might imply a tangible presence of organizing systems. Such systems—though they’re floating around somewhere, built into the synthesizers he uses to compose these tracks—are here elusive. That groundlessness and the patience it requires can be frustrating, especially spread across nearly 80 minutes of music; the record is not always as engaging for the listener as it might like to be. Gengras emphasizes the experience of sound over the process of constructing it. With that, the brainy nature of his instrument (something he expressed better on this year’s more restrained Two Variations) is superseded by intuition, by feeling his way through sound—by vibes, you could say, albeit distinctively thorny ones.


Heavy on vocal processing and maximalist A. G. Cook production, the PC Music star’s first full-length can’t help feeling a little anticlimactic.

Reflections

Hannah Diamond’s “Pink and Blue” still sounds bizarre and striking: like a record Hey Arnold!’s Helga Pataki would make with chintzy synth plugins and one day of voice lessons. The track helped catapult PC Music, the collective Diamond and producers A. G. Cook and Danny L Harle belonged to, from SoundCloud oddity to sonic architects for the mainstream: Carly Rae Jepsen, David Guetta, Madonna. But while the producers have become big names (by producer standards), besides early collaborator SOPHIE the vocalists largely have not. Part of that’s how you define success; Diamond’s had her own breakthrough as a visual designer, collaborating with artists like Offset and Years & Years’ Olly Alexander. Part of it’s that PC Music’s vocalists present themselves less as singer-songwriters—as real people—than high concepts. (An early headline: “Hannah Diamond Is Real.”)
More simply, “Pink and Blue” came out in 2013 and now it is 2019. And while Diamond’s cohort have expanded their sound—to the apocalyptic scope of OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES, the New Age soaring of Caroline Polachek’s Pang, or Charli XCX’s bangers-as-an-ethos Pop 2—Diamond’s new album Reflections pretty much still sounds like 2013. That’s because it’s not far removed: Reflections was meant to be a 2016 EP, and over the past decade, most of the tracks have been released piecemeal via mixes and one-offs. If you hate PC Music, you will continue to; if you love them, Reflections will not change that.
But producer A. G. Cook’s done a lot since 2013, so inevitably, these tracks register less as individual Cook songs than as types of Cook song. There are the ones derived from trance, like “True,” which is like trying to recreate a Sash! song in a MIDI sequencer stuck on a slow BPM. There are the ones that emulate video games, like “Fade Away,” which might as well be an arrangement of the star maze music from Super Mario Land 2. There are the ones, like “Shy,” that sound like the Jock Jams that sound like “Party Rock Anthem.” “Never Again” sounds as if Cook, who recently became Charli XCX’s creative director, were so inspired by her True Romance song “Take My Hand” that he decided to remake it on a music box. (It also has vinyl crackles, which on a Hannah Diamond record are like taking a face-bedazzling app and making the icon a skeuomorphistic wardrobe.)
Throughout, Diamond sings largely in straight-tone chorister voice, free of vibrato or aggression —all the better to rush it through AutoTune glissandos, or singe it with electricity, or let it ping away like a metronome. Her lyrics detail love and heartbreak through affectless matter-of-fact recollections like, “I kissed his face in a different place”—a new hookup recalled with all the pulsing romantic immediacy of an Achewood punchline. If there’s an overarching mood, it’s subversiveness: little nihilistic or dissociated asides, the hints of lowered expectations on “Fade Away” (“I always thought I’d be the picture saved on your screen”) or “Make Believe,” a love song delivered less to a person than to an idealized concept. This kind of cleverness has arguably become the going mode for pop; Sofi Tukker essentially rewrote “Make Believe” this year on “Fantasy,” and Diamond’s general shtick has been adopted by LIZ and Poppy. But that doesn’t mean Diamond was first, either. The joke of “Shy” is that you’re too shy to confess your feelings but not too shy to belt about them loudly—the same joke as another “Shy,” from the fairytale musical Once Upon a Mattress.
Diamond’s said in interviews that Reflections comes from real emotional experience, but it’s hard to imagine a listener using these songs for actual crushes, or breakups, or parties, or anything outside one’s own head. It’s all very conceptual; this isn’t “pop music is deep actually,” or even “pop music is fun”; it’s “pop music is shallow as hell, and by the way, isn’t shallow uncanny?” Teen pop does not sound like this. EDM, trance, J-pop, any stated inspiration: none totally sound like this. Really, very little in pop has sounded like this at any point, at least not before the PC Music crew started producing it themselves. There’s a certain freedom there. “No one’s going to be as freaked out by [my music] now,” Diamond told Vice, with some relief.
And it’s true; not only will no one be freaked out, Diamond and company have rearranged collective musical tastes around themselves. But it also makes Reflections a little anticlimactic. Tellingly, the most striking track is a cover: “Concrete Angel,” which isn’t the Martina McBride song (though that would be something) but the Gareth Emery/Christina Novelli trance hit. From the first notes, it’s from a different, less online world: a bassline with sinew and sweat, a lyric and melody that yearn and swoon with minimal AutoTune futzing (for Diamond, at least). Then, the track polymorphs. First comes a snap track and “Popcorn” synths. Then, a Dannii Minogue-y spoken-word interlude. Then, a happy hardcore remix. Then a fidgety, snippetized double-time track. Then something approaching breakcore. More happens in these four minutes than the rest of the album combined; it’s exhilarating, and the visceral emotion of the beginning makes the re-re-remixing feel like a release, rather than a gimmick. “Concrete Angel” isn’t new either—it provided the title of Diamond’s 2017 mix Soon I won’t see you at all—but it’s a reminder of when PC Music sounded like the future, rather than just sounding like themselves.


Tomorrow's Hits is the first record the Men put together in a high-end studio, but a year after New Moon, the message is the same: they’re a rock band and the roll continues.

Tomorrow's Hits

A few minutes into the Men’s previous album, New Moon, Nick Chiericozzi whooped “I got a rock band now and I’m on a roll!” It was a boast that would be out-of-character for this otherwise earnest group if it wasn’t utterly true on both counts. New Moon was the Men’s third winning record in as many years, and after years of sonic and personal instability, the quintet pooled their energy into being a rock band—one that liked their Neil Young loud, their beer plentiful, and their guitars in threes. A year later, the message on Tomorrow’s Hits is about the same for people who preferred to see them as they were on 2011’s Leave Home, revivalists of nearly every iteration of ugly and abrasive NYC guitar perversion, or as the comprehensive indie-rawkers of Open Your Heart: they’re a rock band and the roll continues.
As with New Moon and Open Your Heart, the Men’s accruing success lends to a welcome, optimistic outlook. There is an element of wishful thinking to Tomorrow’s Hits, from its self-deprecating title to the supposedly unintentional Big Star homage of the cover. This is the first Men record put together in a high-end studio, though we’re not talking about Capitol Studios; Bob Dylan and D’Angelo have walked through the doors of Brooklyn’s Strange Weather and so have DIIV and Total Slacker and O.A.R.. The horns that lace the shitkicking Stones rave-up “Another Night” are supposed to sound like luxuries, though Tomorrow’s Hits only sounds more polished compared to the rustic, cabin-tested New Moon. For all of their abrasive tendencies, Leave Home and Open Your Heart were loud and forthright and never sounded lo-fi.
Regardless of the slight upgrade in fidelity, Tomorrow’s Hits is much like what preceded it, with “the Men” serving as a fantasy camp construct for the record collectors making this record collector rock. “Get What You Give” has absolutely nothing to do with the New Radicals song, although it does share a taste for bubblegummy riffs and enthusiasm for music making: Chiericozzi literally gets out of bed only to chase the songwriting muse (on several other songs, they sleep in or don’t sleep at all). Even if the songs aren’t necessarily about them, the Men like to play up the transformative power of rock'n'roll, as “Dark Waltz” kicks off Tomorrow’s Hits with a litany of classic archetypes: a drummer with a badass, weed-dealing brother and mom buying your first guitar. This story begins in 1974, meaning that Chiericozzi would have to be nearly 50 for this song to be autobiographical.
If you caught them live in 2013, most of these songs should be familiar, since they were all finished and tracked before New Moon was even released. But they’re also familiar in the more general sense, wherein the influences are recognizable to both you, your cooler older sibling, and your dad. New Moon was defined by frayed acoustics and raw soloing, very much in the lineage of Meat Puppets and Dinosaur, Jr., bands that were descendents of Crazy Horse, but unquestionably indie rock. This is the real-deal stuff, BTO boogie, Skynyrd, and according to the band, a hell of a lot of Ted Nugent.
Say what you will about the Nuge and Grand Funk, they wrote some catchy riffs and the Men are still working their way towards their “Stranglehold”, their “We’re An American Band”. Which is to say that Tomorrow’s Hits hints at what New Moon also did—that the Men are great sonic emulators and merely good songwriters. And so, the highlights on Tomorrow’s Hits are the ones that recall the velocity of their early work. It’s easy to get caught up in the breakneck pace of “Pearly Gates” and “Different Days” and think “I bet they kick ass live,” but knowing how the Men operate, there’s a good chance that opportunity has already passed you by. Also, some of these sound too familiar in the sense that they’re kinda like older Men songs: “Dark Waltz” is a continuation of Open Your Heart’s barstool-bound “Candy” (really the song that’s determined their path ever since) and “Sleepless” is barely distinguishable from New Moon’s “Bird Song”, whereas closer “Going Down” sounds like “Half Angel Half Light” being workshopped before they found its bracing chorus.
There’s one lyric that sticks out amongst all of this whiskey-slugging and road-dogging, as Ben Greenberg sings on “Different Days”, “I hate being young.” It’s hard to sense much depression or even anger in that line, and not just because it’s surrounded by Tomorrow’s Hits’ most revved up performance. It just seems like the Men might hate being young in 2014, as opposed to 1978 or 1969, a time when doing this meant being centrist rather than on the indie rock fringe and having to explain yourself. Even before Open Your Heart dropped, the Men wanted to stress that Leave Home wasn't "them." But the greatness of those two records lay in how it was impossible to tell who the Men really were; they sounded capable of doing anything. And hell, being a solid rock band doing yeoman’s work year after year suits them, even if it results in very good records that get them right back out on the road rather than great ones. Who knows if the Men would be energized or completely lost if they took more time next time out, but Tomorrow’s Hits for now mostly succeeds in toeing the line between being on a roll and being in a rut.


Led by drummer and lead singer Kylee Kimbrough, the noise-punk outfit Dasher deliver a murderous mix of garage-rock grime, fuzz-punk overdrive, and black-metal-schooled howls.

Sodium

Punk rock has long been an outlet for both physical and emotional release—and few people exploit the full limits of its cathartic potential like Kylee Kimbrough. As both the lead singer and drummer for Atlanta-bred noise-punk outfit Dasher, she gets to have it both ways: she can imagine her enemies’ faces on the skins that she’s bashing, while finishing them off with a fire-breathing scream. She performs with the sort of intensity that makes you check your hands for phantom splinters and blood blisters, while instinctively rubbing your throat to soothe your vicarious laryngitis. But on Dasher’s debut album, the most lasting wounds aren’t so much physical as psychological.
Sodium is a brief, blunt album with a long, tumultuous history. It was first previewed with a couple of singles back in 2014, and momentum was building toward the album’s seemingly imminent release. But then Dasher suddenly fell apart, the recordings were scrapped, and, following a series of personal setbacks, Kimbrough relocated to Bloomington to decompress and be closer to her label, Jagjaguwar. After acclimatizing herself to the local scene, Kimbrough gradually rebuilt her band from scratch, trading up from a power trio to a fearsome foursome. So naturally, on Sodium, Dasher go back on the attack like a feral, foamy-mouthed dog with an empty stomach and a full bladder after being cooped up in a kennel all day.
With opening salvo “We Know So,” Dasher instantly establish Sodium’s murderous mix of garage-rock grime, fuzz-punk overdrive, and black-metal-schooled howls—the same sort of volatile chemistry that powered the earliest assaults of a pre-1979 Death From Above, or the primordial, phlegm-balled blasts of the Men circa Leave Home. And like those bands, Dasher also manage to carve out space for melody amid the melee—you may not always understand what Kimbrough is shouting about in her verses, but she makes sure to broadcast her choruses loud and clear for maximum fist-pump potential. In a 2016 interview, Kimbrough admitted that lyrics are a secondary concern for her, and that she chooses words for their percussive effect as much as their meaning. Certainly, one shouldn’t try to parse any socio-political commentary about the current state of America in righteous ragers like “Soviet” or “Go Rambo” (both of which date back to 2014). And Sodium’s sludgy title track is about friendship and the perils of adding too much salt to one’s diet. (“Totino’s!/Potatoes!/Ramen noodles!/Sodium! Sodium!”)
But on “Teeth,” Kimbrough uses the album’s most serene soundscape—a woozy, discordant psychedelia that imagines a blackgaze Pixies—to deliver her harshest words: “You! Can’t! Save! Me!” It’s the most telling indicator of the deeper distress fueling Dasher’s circle-pit hysterics, and by the time we reach the album’s second side, the emotional bloodletting has become as overwhelming as the band’s jet-turbine roar. The Texan-hardcore stomper “Eye See” is a post-breakup lament drunk on self-loathing that soon curdles into desperation: “Don’t you! Know how! Much I! Miss You!/I feel! Sick when! I can’t! Touch you!” And the harrowing “Trespass” applies a term for breaching property lines to the violation of physical ones: “My body is not yours!” Kimbrough roars, before rendering the exchange in more explicit terms: “Hey, you fucking piece of shit/My blood is all over your dick/You put the knife up to my wrist.”
In its wake, “No Guilt” functions as an exorcism of sorts, as Kimbrough unleashes her demons through overlapping, strangulated vocal parts overtop a queasy, sandblasted groove. “No guilt! No shame!,” she shrieks in the song’s dying seconds, as if using up the very last ounce of muscle strength in her larynx. Sodium is liable to leave you just as drained as its creator, but it’s the sort of exhaustion that feels valorous and victorious. After all, losing your voice is a small price to pay for saving your sanity.


This foursome's first full-length is a mix of over-the-top whimsy, extreme rhythms, vise-tight musicianship, and a 21st century man-machine interface between live and laptop. And although it may not mark the introduction of the world's first bionic rock group, Battles have done more to extend the idea of a flesh-and-blood band enhanced by computer technology than anyone since the late, lamented Disco Inferno.

Mirrored

Marc Bolan may be dead, but Battles can rebuild him. They have the technology. On "Atlas", the second track on the band's debut album, drummer John Stanier's pistons pump out a steroidal version of Bolan's trademark shuffling stomp-beat. His three bandmates-- Ian Williams, Dave Konopka, and Tyondai Braxton-- constrict their two-note keyboards and one-note guitars until the song coalesces into a stiff, slick, swinging robot rock. It's like a skills-exchange workshop where mechanically minded krautrockers are encouraged to share their knowledge with remedial class glam bands only interested in big beat thrills. And as the almost-club-friendly single, it's the perfect introduction to the rest of Mirrored, easing you into the album's mix of over-the-top whimsy, extreme analogue rhythms that are often as much jazz-fusion as IDM as tech-metal, vocals that would do Roger Troutman proud, and vise-tight, "live or laptop?" musicianship connected as much by USB ports and Firewire cables as the improvisatory interplay of four dudes just jamming.
In fact, Battles may be the first band to really play with the way that 21st century software can extend and distend the sound of a rock band in real time; Mirrored moves in ways that Battles' first two instrumental EPs--post-rock played with the locked-down seriousness of modern techno--only suggested. Early Battles shows could sound like a metal band performing Steve Reich's Music for 18 Musicians, and Mirrored spurns solos, favoring a caffeinated maximalism where compositions are built out of 100 microscopic parts. The guitarist/keyboardists string together tracks out of riffs that crisscross with the careful preplanning of a subway system. Each instrument on opening track "Race In"-- Stanier's military-precise massed snares, the guitars tensely climbing up and down a few notes, what sound like synthetic tubular bells-- is added with the deliberate patience of a Terry Riley composition. The song feels nervously repetitive, like it's suffering from OCD.
If you've seen Battles live, you've probably seen the phrase "ex-members of" written on the flyer, and so maybe none of this surprises you. Save Stanier, everyone in Battles is a multi-instrumentalist, playing a prog album's worth of guitars, electronics, and/or keyboards. Braxton's put in time splitting the difference between IDM and avant-garde electronics; Konopka played with underrated indie instrumentalists Lynx, Stanier drummed for scholastic-metal pioneers Helmet; Williams finger-tapped for Don Caballero. But while there's certainly more than a shade of math rock's intricacy on Mirrored, tracks like the terse, tambourine-rattling quasi-funk of "Tonto" or Stanier's time-signature and tempo fuckery on the crescendo-crazed "Tij", the stern stuff is continually undercut by a vibe that's more romper room than po-faced. The "hook" on "Race In" is a whistle-while-you-work chant that they're probably humming down at Fraggle Rock. The astounding "Rainbow" spins into dizzying Rube Goldberg corkscrews of keyboard, xylophone, and giddily speed-attenuated symphonic metal drums. It sounds like the band is trying to recreate the Looney Tunes cartoon where Bugs and Daffy are dueling orchestra conductors, each driving their ensembles to crazier and crazier call-and-response peaks.
And what makes Mirrored's merry melodies really stand out isn't the crazy quilt structures or needlepoint precision of the playing. It's the frenzied gibberish of Braxton's pitch-shifted and electronically processed vocals-- a kind of ecstatic robot that's speaking in cartoon tongues. When "Atlas" dropped a few months back, those vocals were a squeaky line in the sand for old fans, and across the internet, everyone had the same thought: "Why are Battles suddenly aping the Animal Collective?" But Avey Tare and company hardly invented high-pitched sing-song vocals-- just ask David Seville. On "Leyendecker", Braxton croons in a falsetto that's been whipped up by technology until it sounds like a neutered D'Angelo. Combined with the music, a low-res quasi-R&B beat as grainy as a glitch track, Braxton's circuitry pushes "Leyendecker" into far stranger places than any the Collective has wandered into. Throughout Mirrored he shreds his vocals with the post-human glee of Warp labelmate Jackson and His Computer Band, whether it's the joyful opening burst of voice on "Ddiamondd" that spits pitch-bent consonants, or "Tij", where Braxton pants and wheezes in a creeped-out asthmatic lower-register. You couldn't even approximate "Leyendecker", or any of Mirrored's 11 tracks, with just acoustic guitars and voices.
At the same time, listen closely to the intro to "Atlas" and you'll hear the pedal on Stanier's kit hitting the kickdrum in the physical world of the studio, pushing air as the hammer connects with the skin. Even when reminiscent of the unfeasible programming of post-drill'n'bass electronica, Battles' spastic drums are being played in real time, with the brute force and metronome-focus of a guy with a background in heavy rock. But its avant-pop hooks and ultrabrite melodies are being dissembled and reassembled by pitiless CPUs in equally real time. It's thrilling and disorienting because the virtuosity of both man and machine means that, unlike earlier rock/techno hybrids hampered by both technically unskilled players and crude technology, Battles sound is indivisible. Battles may not be the world's first bionic rock group, but they've done more to extend the idea of a flesh-and-blood band enhanced by computer technology than anyone since the late, lamented Disco Inferno. Mirrored is a breathtaking aesthetic left-turn that sounds less like rock circa 2007 than rock circa 2097, a world where Marshall stacks and micro-processing go hand in hand.


The duo of 9T Antiope smashes together sounds from antiquity—singing reminiscent of medieval European folk, lyrics full of chariot and faeries—with hurtling production from the digital future.

9T Antiope: Of Murk and Shallow Water EP

Of Murk and Shallow Water EP

9T Antiope, the duo of Nima Aghiani and Sara Bigdeli Shamloo, hail from Tehran and live in Paris, and from the sound of this self-released EP, they may as well be time travelers, for all we know. Part of their sound is very old: Shamloo’s singing bears traces of medieval European folk music, and her lyrics often resemble scraps of heroic verse, full of chariots and faeries and peppered with literary allusions. But Aghiani’s electronic production hurtles back at us from a distant future: digital static, dissonant chirps, the incomprehensible crackle of an AI crunching numbers. The results are eerie and enrapturing, like an itinerant bard warming her hands over a pile of burning dot-matrix printers.
Even though she never sings unaccompanied, the majority of the four-track EP scans, functionally, as a cappella music. Shamloo’s voice not only carries the melody; her singing is virtually the only tonal element here, and the occasional harmonies that she produces in combination with the flickering background buzz resemble someone singing over the drone of a walk-in cooler.
Meanwhile, Aghiani’s electronics balance the flat, affectless grey of a dead television with piercing sine waves and pinprick bursts of color. “Den” begins with two minutes of clanking metal, electrical hum, and panning static; in the background, a crow caws once and falls silent. In these long moments, his ambient industrial soundscapes have the vivid, mimetic feel of a radio play. The gurgling oscillators of “Brute” resemble Bebe and Louis Barron’s Forbidden Planet score. The four tracks work together like the movements of a suite, sharing a single mood and a single palette, and the whole thing comes to a head with the concluding “Edax,” the most melodic song of the bunch, which builds to a dramatic climax of long held syllables and heart-in-mouth glissando.
Shamloo’s lyrics are cryptic by design, which only adds to the music’s mystery; she describes her writing process as a kind of world-building exercise, sketching out elaborate narratives and characters and then boiling them down to a single salient detail. She favors assonant rhymes and slippery syntax, which makes the rare plainspoken phrases all the more powerful. “Men burn the chariots down,” she sings, mantra-like, in “Den,” before slipping into a speaking voice—“The lake is frozen/The lake is frozen”—accompanied by charcoal-colored static and a dull, desolate whine. Whatever it might mean, it is absolutely gripping, immersive and surrealistic, cinema without sight.


The London-based producer’s nostalgic, two-track EP is a love letter to classic house and the tender, unspoken, human connection found on a dance floor.

Both of Us / Are U Down

Jayda Guy makes intimate club music that asks big questions. Her 2019 debut album, Significant Changes–a product of the years she spent earning her graduate degree in environmental toxicology while establishing herself as a sought-after DJ in Berlin–explored the ways that humans interact with the world around them. Through delightfully peculiar field recordings (crying orca whales, a lecturing biologist) and heady incantations (“This floor is for grooving!” she howled at clubgoers caught scrolling Instagram), the Canadian-born, London-based producer called on us to view both the earth and the club as sacred spaces worthy of preserving.
Her sensual follow-up EP, the two-track Both of Us/Are U Down, is a more emotional inquiry, and one that seems less interested in real answers. Instead, each track simply considers a state of mind––one is yearning and romantic, the other anxious and contemplative––and studies them in the context of blissed-out house. Both songs are steeped in uncertainty; on “Both f Us,” she wonders out loud if she has enough love to compensate for all that’s missing in her life, and on “Are U Down,” she gets stuck in a spiral of doubt and indecision. There is something about the fragility of each of these narratives––their unreliable structures, irresolution, and nagging loops of logic (“I can/I can/I can’t,” she sings)–that feels refreshingly human. If dance floors are sanctums for self-acceptance, shouldn’t our imperfections come with us, too?
Guy turned to early Chicago house records for inspiration, and you can hear the soulful, jazzy touch of producers like Mr. Fingers and Marshall Jefferson, two of the scene’s forebears who used the voice as a textural instrument to bridge the gap between gospel and disco. By chopping it up and weaving it alongside hissing hi-hats, synth vamps, kick drums, and uplifting piano––the bedrock of many classic house tunes––they discovered that vocals could sound at once orgasmic and spiritual. (Here, halfway through Guy’s nostalgic “Sunset Bliss” remix, she cues a joyful, euphoric breakdown in which she sends her voice soaring into a flurry of sky-high howls and sighs.) The sound from this particular era has recently made its way back into mainstream popularity, with mega-club DJs like Calvin Harris, Kygo, and Martin Solveig releasing their own glossy takes. But there is a tenderness and intimacy to Guy’s approach that sets her apart. She sounds shy, bashful, and way up close, like you’re eavesdropping on a personal phone call. At certain moments, it sounds like she’s breathing right into your ear.
That sense of immediate proximity is present all over Guy’s work, but in the context of the current moment it feels like a plea for human connection–that implicit, physical bond that can only be found on a dance floor. Imagine how a sea of sweating bodies would react to the dramatic third act of “Both of Us,” when the beat slows down and the drums drop out leaving just her, hand claps, and piano. It’s a pause that feels custom-made for when the DJ suddenly hits the floodlights and encourages you to take in everyone who’s been dancing alongside you in the dark. For now, it’s a spirited reminder of how precious and fleeting those moments can be.

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A decade into a career that found him perfecting an immediately recognizable approach to dark ambience, Tim Hecker makes what could be his best record.

Ravedeath, 1972

There are plenty of synth and drone artists that make epic, transportive music, but one of the unique things about Tim Hecker is his conceptual ability. Each of his records, from the cinematic rush of Harmony in Ultraviolet to the dreamed-up cartography of An Imaginary Country, explores a specific theme, often in great detail. When he talked to us last month about the artwork for his latest LP, Ravedeath, 1972, Hecker mentioned that he'd been consumed with the idea of sonic decay. "I became obsessed with digital garbage," he said. "Like when the Kazakstan government cracks down on piracy and there's pictures of 10 million DVDs and CDRs being pushed by bulldozers."
That idea, the notion of music as a cheapened, battered object, touches nearly every aspect of Ravedeath, 1972, a dark and often claustrophobic record that is arguably Hecker's finest work to date. The album is based on a single day's worth of recordings in a church in Reykjavik, Iceland, where Hecker used a groaning pipe organ to lay down the foundation for its tracks. (Throughout, you can hear the vastness of this place, as sounds ricochet around, bounce off the rafters.) With help from Iceland-based producer Ben Frost-- whose ominous By the Throat is a touchstone here-- Hecker then finished the record in studio, digitally adding synth wash and wailing shoegaze crunch to his live recordings.
The result is a strange hybrid that lives somewhere between the digital and material realms, and it's remarkable how seamlessly the two are combined. For example, in a track like "In the Fog II", it's difficult to distinguish between the organic church sounds and the processed ones that came after. But while there is harmony between the source material, Ravedeath, 1972 is by no means about prettiness or tranquility. Hecker pits noises against one another in such a way that creates a constant push and pull between discord and beauty. It's a bit like William Basinski's Disintegration Loops, but instead of music aging over time, this is far more combative-- like these songs are being attacked from the inside out.
It's an unusual concept but relevant given the rate at which music is consumed and discarded these days. More important than the record's ideology, though, is what Hecker does with it-- the weight, atmosphere, and contrast he builds into these songs. Take for example the "In the Fog" suite, where over three tracks, Hecker lets dissonant squall threaten an undulating organ drone until it's taken over by wailing guitar noise in third passage. Or the two-part "Hatred of Music", which recalls an Oneohtrix Point Never synth shimmer before it disintegrates into distant industrial creaks. In each case it's not just about the wild, unearthly sounds he creates but the force with which they move around the mix.
Hecker is also smart with pacing and knows when to dial things back or add in softer, interstitial numbers when things start to become overwhelming. That's the case in the record's back half where he uses open-ended pieces to achieve the same foreboding effect. "Studio Suicide, 1980" is almost dreamy but has a sinister undercurrent, sounding something like the more punishing moments of My Bloody Valentine's "Only Shallow" heard through the walls of a neighbor's apartment. I wouldn't go so far as to call songs like this and "Analog Paralysis, 1978", which has a similar celestial vibe, "ambient," but they are subtler than those in the first half and give the album a sense of balance and a natural arc.
If you buy into the concept of Ravedeath, 1972 as an examination of music threatened by technology, there are pretty clear threads that pop up over the course of the record to support that. For one, it seems that the organ sounds Hecker captured back in that Rejkjavik church represent a certain purity of sound and that the digital noise battering it throughout act as the enemy, the corrosive effect. There's an ongoing struggle between the two that's mirrored in the menacing song titles and gripping cover art. It's important, then, that the album closes with "In the Air III", a track that features almost no interference whatsoever, just the plinking organ by itself. If I'm reading it right, it feels like Hecker's point is that music, in its purest form, survives no matter what you throw at it.