A new joint release from the Seoul artists feels like a true collaboration, fusing their distinct styles with shoegaze production and alt-rock guitars.

파란노을 (Parannoul) / Asian Glow: Paraglow EP

Paraglow EP

At the beginning of 2021, Parannoul was just an anonymous bedroom artist on Bandcamp. By the end of the year, they somehow became more difficult to define. While To See the Next Part of the Dream became one of the year’s true word-of-mouth successes, Parannoul rejected most requests for press. The few Q&As they accepted were published on message boards and personal blogs, occasionally providing tiny, confounding glimpses into their process: Turns out those lusciously textured guitars that critics swooned over weren’t actually guitars at all, but MIDI presets. But for the most part, what we knew about Parannoul was what came from the music of To See the Next Part of the Dream, a person racked with crippling insecurities and a profound fear of exposure. The only thing worse than the outside world reinforcing their low self-opinion would be having their praise retracted in an inevitable wave of backlash. So if we’re to take them at their word, the mere existence of Paraglow, a collaborative EP with fellow Seoul artist Asian Glow, is about the riskiest move they could make—one that requires relinquishing control of both their art and their narrative.
But Asian Glow—who also works in a melange of noise, bedsit indie, shoegaze, and dream-pop—is a great match for Parranoul. The two already shared a split with Brazilian screamo act sonhos tomam conta on Downfall of the Neon Youth, a work that quickly became a defining document of emo’s fifth wave. And Asian Glow just set a precedent for their Parranoul collaboration in March with Weatherglow, a joint work with another reclusive and cultishly beloved Bandcamp sensation. Left to their own devices, Parannoul usually tends towards mesmeric repetition and scorched-sugar melody, whereas Asian Glow puts a higher premium on abrasion and “ideas” than straightforward song structure. Paraglow is a 30-minute EP that tries to fuse these two modes together.
Uploaded without fanfare to a new joint Bandcamp page by someone who didn’t write a bio for the album because they “wen [sic] to king gizzard last night with the boys,” Paraglow is presented as a true collaboration—even if the shoegaze production and alt-rock guitars suggest a hypothetical “darker, more difficult follow-up” to To See the Next Part of the Dream rather than Asian Glow’s “most accessible work yet.” Parannoul revealed that their first bolt of artistic inspiration came after hearing a middle school teacher use a Doves song in an otherwise boring class presentation. Opener “Hand” shows how, say, “The Man Who Told Everything” inspired such an overwhelming feeling of awe and possibility while rendering the lyrics secondary. In short, cue the strings. As much as the strings on “Hand” provide textural and melodic counterpoint, they exist to supercharge the drama, rendering Parannoul’s typically despondent lyrics (“Whose contact information is in my heart/Whose gravestone is in my heart? “The devil whispers you are nothing”) as symphonic. To be clear, “Hand” does not sound like either of these two ponied up for a real string section, but as with their past work, the uncanny valley of high-quality, synthetic instrumentation is part of the charm.
While “Hand” is a glimpse of big-budget Parannoul, the remainder of Paraglow makes the give-and-take between its two creators more apparent. “The Light Side of the Eyes” begins as robotic cocktail jazz and does not stay that way for very long, punching in drum’n’bass breaks and non-quantized math-rock before Parannoul digs up their gnarliest screamo roots. “Swamp” subsequently toggles between twinkling piano-pop and blown-out sludge. No one has ever combined these genres within the span of four or so minutes before—no one’s really ever even tried. And even if the mix isn’t entirely coherent, it’s always compelling, lending an unstable, unpredictable edge to artists who prefer working within closed circuits.
But this is all prelude to “Wheel.” There’s martial snare rolls, saxophones, strings, an ambient coda, and none of them provide a way out from Parannoul’s intractable gloom. A rough Google translation of the lyrics describes them as “a soulless echo,” and “a shadow waiting for you to exit the long tunnel.” No matter how despairing Parannoul and Asian Glow are in their respective work, there’s an underlying sweetness to it all; both evoke the escapist idealism of early 2000s electronic shoegaze, where sheepish auteurs like Caribou, Ulrich Schnauss, and M83 found utopia in the infinite possibilities of digital home recording. To See the Next Part of the Dream and Cull Ficle both proved that Parannoul and Asian Glow could build skyward monumentals on a depressed foundation. The duo instead spend Paraglow seeing how far they can dig toward the center of the earth.


The first country record I ever bought was Merle Haggard's 16 Biggest Hits. Splattered into a harrowing dustbowl of ...

Bonnie “Prince” Billy: Greatest Palace Music

Greatest Palace Music

The first country record I ever bought was Merle Haggard's 16 Biggest Hits. Splattered into a harrowing dustbowl of depravity, deprivation, and deliverance, I quickly found myself placing it on that hallowed shelf of "My Ten Favorite Records." The following year, I played it for some country aficionados who proudly informed me that these were miserably smooth 1994 re-recordings of Haggard's work in the 60s. I sought out a different collection, realized my error, agreed that 16 Biggest Hits was indeed not far from a travesty, and learned that, though my country naiveté, I had deceived myself. I bring this up for a few reasons:

Because hopefully those who fell into Will Oldham's recordings solely through his indie rock connections may enjoy this album for its (seemingly) novel production; and perhaps, through it, find their way to someone like Chet Atkins, Faron Young, or Kris Kristofferson.
Despite Drag City's lofty press releases or Rolling Stone's perplexed reviews, everyone from Son House to Black Flag has covered themselves under the guise of fresh stylizations and trappings. It was not a crazy idea then, and it is not a crazy idea now. Just a bad one.
I wanted to bring some personal nostalgia into this review in order to quell my present discomfort with Greatest Palace Music.

Greatest Palace Music is the long-awaited album of sauntering, weightlifting, sugar-coated covers of Will Oldham's work as Palace. The tracklist was selected via fan poll. The cover is a bizarre, expressionist jumble of lakes and lacerated rainbows. The players include such legendary Nashville muscle as Hargus "Pig" Robbins and Eddie Bayers. Its renditions are often syrupy, bombastic, truckin'-through-McDonalds, barrel-hoppin' blitzes, delivered in a voice that creaks and secretes sincerity. And it does this even as it seems to revel in mocking, I-can't-believe-you-morons-are-actually-listening-to-this production that mechanically smoothes out any soulful, or even human, perturbations with the slightest chance of sneaking through the sheen.
I fancy myself of average intellect and, frankly, the album is entirely bewildering. It's perhaps the most entertaining and thought-provoking album released so far this year. And one of the worst. Thankfully, its allure is easily experienced without ever having to actually listen to it. It's as much of a concept album and process work as any German micro-improv-musique-concrete release in print these days, and it should simply be framed and given a state-sponsored museum tour. The enjoyment it doles out is entirely extramusical, deriving from its packaging, its contributors, Nashville history, Oldham's interviews pertaining to it, its place in his discography, and his intent, whatever that may have been. Greatest Palace Music is almost uniformly tedious, uneventful, dispassionate, and overambitious when it comes to multi-tracking, and underambitious when it comes to arrangements and instrumentation.
Except that, at the same time, it never feels anything but essential. Its paradox of earnestness and pranking is relentless, jarring, and (unintentionally?) amusing. And though none of us are in a position to guess Oldham's intent, one hypothesis might be that the album was intended to befuddle, muddle, and generally piss off listeners' expectations; and, therefore, if you indeed detest it (as you probably should), you're actually one of its biggest advocates. Maleficent and resentful hatred should greet this album, and if it does, well, we've got something of a classic on our hands.
Unfortunately, through some trick of fate, this mischievous and contradictory art took the form of music (at least superficially), and I am a music critic.
The standard procedure now would be to contrast these new versions with the original Palace hits, which might be impossible. Murmurs around my Internet database suggest that "now we can finally find out if Oldham's songwriting skills stand up without the stark atmospherics." Well, based on Greatest Palace Music, they absolutely collapse. "New Partner", probably the greatest moment on Viva Last Blues, and one of the best recordings of Oldham's career, is sieved through jingoistic guitar that veers to the brink of schmaltz and back again. Elated vocals bounce down a wedding-march keyboard. The background vocals are resigned and remote. And when Oldham sings, "You're always on my mind," his voice is so unconvincingly impermeable and tuneless that it lacks any of its previous resonance. Oldham's delivery doesn't imply his usual trepidation and reluctance before death or love, but rather echoes the way people sound when they're waiting in line.
Albums like Days in the Wake or I See a Darkness were propelled by hobbling, fitful marches, and smothered by brazen minor chord blasts. And there are moments on Greatest Palace Music ("You Will Miss Me When I Burn", "The Brute Choir") of stark emotion; gaps and holes occasionally filled with light; a fragmented voice grafted onto the back of Oldham's haggard head; where even the slide solo is condensed and whimpering. But, for the most part, the shambling, stately pallbearer pace is replaced with a bouncing, undeviating, and totally inappropriate luster.
"Gulf Shores" climbs toward a swarm of overlapping voices in perfect harmony, robotically in sync. On "Pushkin", Oldham preaches The Word with a shell-shocked, Appalachian puberty that caricatures itself, and holds its springing slow-jazz drabness in contempt. It's not just polished; it's fabricated, deceitful, condescending, belittling. It's a trick upon the audience and the band itself.
Why would anyone inflict these cruel shenanigans upon an unsuspecting audience? How could it possibly affect or motivate its listeners? By making this album, it feels as if Oldham is scorning me, a longtime fan, personally. It's ceaselessly mediocre, and it actually physically hurts me to know that Oldham has backpedaled, knowingly and irrationally, against his own genius. Yet, it's precisely in the listener's painful struggle-- the reaction to the artist's self-annihilation, devastating arrogance, and backstabbing repugnance-- that this record finds its wisdom and radiance.


This Portland songwriter’s second album is full of femme fatales and other clichés dredged from a half-century of classic rock.

Full Circle Nightmare

Kyle Craft, it would seem, is someone to whom lyrics matter a great deal. “I hate the idea of conforming to shitty lyricism that happens nowadays,” the 29-year-old, Portland-based songwriter said in a recent interview. “It’s not everyone, but there is definitely a lower bar for what is considered good lyricism now.” Citing Bob Dylan as an influence, he also noted that his second studio LP, Full Circle Nightmare, is “a little less scatterbrained” than his 2016 debut, Dolls of Highland. “I think there’s a focal point to the lyricism,” he said, and about that, he’s right. Full Circle Nightmare fixates more or less entirely on one topic: women and their ability to ruin a man through their powers of seduction.
Femme fatales stalk every nook and cranny of this album, which takes the honky-tonk, classic rock sound of Craft’s previous LP and, with the help of the Decemberists’ Chris Funk on production, pushes it to a gleaming, saturated extreme. Pianos, drums and guitars all come crashing into the album like outlaws thrown through plate glass windows in an Old West town. At the center of the mayhem is Craft’s bugle-like voice, steering confidently around tricky melodic turns and full-lunged choruses. If he stuck to the shadows at points during Dolls of Highland, letting the listener catch their breath between bursts of fanfare, he clings to the spotlight here. Even the songs that start quietly, like the tortured love ballad “Bridge City Rose,” inevitably erupt into full-blown climaxes with confetti falling from the rafters.
Fair enough: If you’re going to cosplay the Rolling Stones as 19th-century saloon flies, you might as well commit to the bit. But where the Stones dragged humor and pathos into even their most inane ditties, Craft seems to stall out at reciting various colorful metaphors. The album’s opening track, “Fever Dream Girl,” plugs far-flung analogies into the same sentence construction over and over again. “Was she the train wreck?/Was she your last drag?/Was she the little piece of mind you thought you once had?” he asks in the song’s opening stanza. “Was she the cure-all/Or just the disease?/Was she the ransack gutter kid denim jeans?” Craft goes on, naming different opposing possibilities for what this woman may or may not be. Even if he hadn’t cribbed a binary from a 2002 Coldplay hit, the repetition would be exhausting. When the next song begins with an almost identical construction (“She was a ricochet/Headin’ back at me/She was the full circle nightmare/Weaved into the thick of my dreams”), it’s enough to make you check the tracklist to see if you’re hearing a coda to that last song or if he’s really firing the whole thing up a second time.
“Shes” and “to be” verbs swarm Full Circle Nightmare, which every so often sees Craft finding solace in the company of women, but more frequently shows him sneering at them. On “Belmont (One Trick Pony),” he breaks out a solid Jack White impression to make fun of a woman for living in the suburbs while he frolics in the city. On “Heartbreak Junky,” he seethes at a woman who had the audacity to fall in love with someone other than him. On “Fake Magic Angel,” he rips into a woman for wearing certain clothes and reading, I don’t know, Cosmo? “You flaunt yourself in that same dress/And talk how your magazines taught you,” he sings by way of an insult to her authenticity. To his credit, the same song boasts a self-own for the ages: “You suck life out of what’s around you/But you won’t be sucking nothing out of me.”
Occasionally, women appear on Full Circle Nightmare as characters, not merely temptresses to be derided for daring to be attractive. The comparatively gentle “Slick & Delta Queen” has Craft shacking up with an on-again, off-again girlfriend who’s as sick of it all as he is, though he still spends most of the song mourning her absence when she leaves him for someone else. The fur-clad seductress on “The Rager” seems to be nursing some heartbreak of her own, even if Craft does end up labeling her a “walking apocalypse.” On the whole, though, the women Craft expends so much breath obsessing over drift in and out of his songs like cardboard cutouts from a bygone era, there to be lusted after and then blamed when they don’t fit into his fantasy.


As the frontman for Iceage, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt has carried the Danish punks across three good-to-great albums. With this side project Marching Church, Rønnenfelt enlists members of Lower, Puce Mary, and others for an improvisational avant-garde LP that stretches the boundaries of the soul recordings that inspired it.

Marching Church: This World Is Not Enough

This World Is Not Enough

Describing the motivation for his project Marching Church, Elias Bender Rønnenfelt wrote, "I had a picture in my head of me in a comfortable chair, adorned in a golden robe, leading a band while a girl kept pouring me champagne. ‘What would this picture sound like?’ was the question." Judging from that image, you wouldn't be faulted for assuming the band's debut, This World Is Not Enough, may end up being the unintentional comedy album of the year, but looking at Rønnenfelt’s track record, it's worth indulging him for a quick minute.
As the frontman for Iceage, he’s carried the Danish punk firebrands across three good-to-great albums, from the wild-eyed pummel of New Brigade through last year’s curveball Plowing Into the Field of Love, which offered country-informed punk rave-ups as well as desperately drunken ballads, all with uncommonly successful results. Now with Marching Church, which has been around in some capacity since 2010, Rønnenfelt seems to be doubling down on Field of Love’s risk-taking, enlisting members of Lower, Puce Mary, and others for an improvisational avant-garde LP that stretches the boundaries of the soul recordings (James Brown, Sam Cooke) that inspired it.
How you approach This World Is Not Enough, and how patient a listener you consider yourself to be, will factor heavily in your enjoyment of it. "Well I’m still being convinced that I contain some kind of godlike charm," Rønnenfelt croaks over the rapture-heralding drums and slashing guitars of opener "Living In Doubt", and it's often hard to disagree with him. As on Field of Love, he cuts a striking figure, a confident but conflicted young man who rambles like a junior year philosophy major in the throes of a fever dream. And while his rakish sexuality and winking sense of humor are on display once again, this time he seems to have crawled a little too far into his own head.
He holds off for approximately two songs—including the great, sax-laden "King of Song", which kind of sounds like "Sympathy for the Devil" as performed by people who’ve never actually heard "Sympathy for the Devil"—before going off-the-rails. So, just as quickly as things seem to be shaping up for This World Is Not Enough, "Hungry for Love"—a seven minute panic attack of clattering cymbals, strained strings, and Rønnenfelt's trademark mad spouting—rears its head. It’s fascinating but also purposefully repellent, a moment when the idea of self-indulgence threatens to mutate into a wildly pretentious guilty pleasure. From here on, the record follows "Hungry for Love"’s lead, and it never quite finds its way back.
And yet, This World Is Not Enough displays little moments of greatness amid the chaos and confusion. You’ll have to wade through almost five soupy minutes of rusty bells, anguished moaning, and hovering guitars on "Your Father’s Eyes" before being rewarded with a soulful, horn-assisted death waltz, though it’s a nice reward anyway. But, all said, there’s just too much wide open space to fill here, and especially on the album’s draggy back half, it’s fairly clear that Rønnenfelt and company have absolutely no idea what to fill it with, but decide to try anyways.
This usually means more shapeless, frequently unpleasantly calamitous dicking around from the players, and more moaning from Rønnenfelt. (It can also mean a painfully dull cover of the eternal "The Dark End of the Street".) And while he is often quite good at conjuring up vividly disquieting imagery, it’s rarely enough to keep your attention. But somehow, This World Is Not Enough is too cluelessly conceived and sloppily executed to get very mad about it. What is frustrating are the infrequent but genuinely interesting moments of creativity and cohesion, which suggest that if Marching Church had taken their time and laid off the improv a little, there might have been something special here.


Raw Honey

In rock music, history isn't always written by the victors. Legacies are constantly reassessed; much modern criticism serves to elevate the underdogs of yesterday into the icons of now. By contrast, scan Billboard charts from the ’60s and ’70s and you’ll find countless chart-toppers who swiftly slid into obscurity, remembered only by the most dedicated golden-oldies station programmers and seasoned dollar-bin flippers. And yet these forgotten favorites can be more vividly evocative of a specific time and place than any so-called classics of a given era—and on his second album as Drugdealer, L.A.-based auteur Michael Collins crafts a pristine portrait of early-’70s AM radio by taking inspiration not only from the period’s definitive artists, but its discarded pop detritus, too.
Since Collins rebranded himself Drugdealer for 2016’s The End of Comedy (following loopy lo-fi solo adventures as Run-DMT and Salvia Plath), the project has existed somewhere between proper band and Brill Building song factory, with Collins recruiting guest vocalists to animate his tunes. Raw Honey assumes the same form and methodology as its predecessor, right down to the baroque instrumental (“You’ve Got to Be Kidding”) that introduces the record like a movie’s opening theme. (In true period detail, it goes on long enough to accommodate an entire credit roll.) But while Raw Honey’s cover art visually references the 1968 self-titled debut from avant-psych pioneers the United States of America, musically, it leans ever further to the right of the dial, venturing beyond The End of Comedy’s John-Lennon-via-John-Barry pop classicism to wade into the mellow-golden waters of post-hippie singer-songwriters and proto-yacht-rock.
On Drugdealer’s debut, Collins sang, “Were you saying something, or was it just ‘la la la la la’?”—which was pretty funny, given that it came right after the Ariel Pink-sung “la la la”s of “Easy to Forget.” But that joking line betrayed the serious anxiety of influence that can afflict artists enamored with recreating the sounds of the past. Collins’ songwriting is timeless in the truest sense of the term—he’s fond of upbeat songs about feeling down, and for the most part, avoids any temporal, geographic, or pop-cultural references that might tie a song to any particular date. Instead, he asserts himself most soundly through savvy casting. Fitting for an album that begins with the sound of someone starting their car, the rotating vocalists give Raw Honey the feel of a radio station keeping you company on a lonely drive.
As Collins admitted in a 2016 interview, he abandoned his previous solo set-up in favor of Drugdealer’s collaborative approach because his compositional aspirations had “outgrown my musical chops.” Likewise, his outsourcing of vocal duties presumably allows the songs to hit emotional grace notes his own modest voice can’t quite convey. A return appearance from Natalie Mering (a.k.a. Weyes Blood) on the sweet, slow-burning “Honey” deepens the sense of mystery in lines like, “you’ve got some things you can’t erase, and honey, I’ve got mine.” The cosmic country-rock of “Wild Motion,” meanwhile, gives Brooklyn cowboy Dougie Poole a vast desert landscape to fill with sad-eyed Elvis croon. But Collins’ peculiar personality is still audible in the voice of others: with the breezy “Lonely” (featuring a playfully forlorn lead from fellow ’70s-pop revivalist Harley Hill-Richmond of Harley and the Hummingbirds), he shows that, while anyone can rip off the Beatles, it takes an especially mad genius to produce a song in 2019 that’s a dead ringer for a Ringo Starr solo single.
Collins’ own voice is still tinged by a ’60s-psych aftertaste, which, when paired with the whimsical harmonies of bandmate Sasha Winn, recedes a little too easily into the retro milieu—the bright brass arrangement of “Lost in My Dream” makes a far stronger impression than the tune it’s meant to support. Fortunately, Collins leaves that affectation behind for Raw Honey’s sterling centerpiece, “Fools,” a cool, sax-smoothed cruiser that would’ve fit snugly between soft-rock relics like Ace’s “How Long” and Player’s “Baby Come Back” on the airwaves back in ’77. But while he embraces the previous generation’s coke-cutting soundtrack, Collins warns against the temptations of living in the past. “It’s not the same song you remember,” he sings. “You can try but it’s just plain wrong.” He might not be exactly following his own advice, but when the results are this charming, it's hard to hold it against him.


Will Oldham’s double-album tribute to Merle Haggard is an intimate and considered collection that pays homage to a legend while showcasing the steady growth of Oldham’s voice and career.

Best Troubador

Though his deep catalogue is as strange and bottomless as the American songbook that inspired him, Will Oldham has been more reflective in recent years. Following the release of 2011’s austere Wolfroy Goes to Town, he’s assumed the most old-school responsibilities of folk musicians: collaborating with friends, reimagining old songs, and quietly releasing new music. Best Troubador, his new 2xLP tribute to Merle Haggard, is not his first covers album. In 2013, he paid homage to the Everly Brothers with Dawn McCarthy on What the Brothers Sang, and just last year, he covered the Mekons with Angel Olsen on Fantastic Voyage. Of the three artists, Haggard seems like the best fit for present day Bonnie “Prince” Billy: a singular force who found a way to age gracefully by following his own path—refusing to be pinned down even as he slows down.
Best Troubador, despite taking source material from one of country music’s boldest voices,  does not end Oldham’s quiet streak. It’s a somber, contemplative record, less indicative of the bars and honky tonks associated with Haggard than the wine-stained carpets and dimly lit living rooms of Wolfroy. And while Haggard’s diverse body of work is filled with fight songs and jukebox singalongs, Oldham’s 17-song selection is tight-knit and intimate. The set opens with “The Fugitive,” previously a freewheeling acoustic number that played like a blueprint for the following year’s “Branded Man.” It’s one of the only compositions here that Oldham embellishes upon, introducing the record with snappy momentum. The instrumentation on the album—adorned with saxophones and flutes, pedal steel and fiddles—helps highlight the particular way Oldham’s voice has evolved. His pipes have grown deeper and reedier, but somehow—in an almost actorly way—he sounds youthful. During a loose, lo-fi rendition of “If I Could Only Fly” at the end of the record, you can hear the tender cracks in his voice that defined his early Palace Brothers records.
While the tracklist was thoughtfully considered—centered on Haggard’s themes of self-identification and contentment—the pacing sometimes drags a bit with a bevy of mid-tempo cuts. Oldham’s attempts to switch things up pay off well. Mary Feiock’s guest vocal on “Nobody’s Darling” is a highlight; her crystal clear falsetto reflects a tenderness that Haggard’s stoicism often belied. Oldham also succeeds by adjusting Haggard’s songs slightly, embedding them with the cryptic humor that dots his own catalogue. While retaining a nearly identical arrangement to the original, he twists Haggard’s late career anthem “I Am What I Am” with just his vocal performance, adding a slight stutter to subvert one of its more trad-country sentiments (“I believe Jesus is god/And the pig is just ham”). In “What I Hate (Excerpt),” Oldham refines Haggard’s laundry list of modern grievances to a single line about chemtrails—a surreal anachronism on an album that’s unabashedly old-fashioned.
The tribute album is a long-standing tradition of country music, one that was employed by Merle Haggard for his own heroes like Bob Wills and Elvis Presley. With Best Troubador, Oldham reflects the format’s most expressive tendencies—to filter an artist’s work through the lens of your fandom. Through these songs, Oldham’s appreciation for Haggard seems to stem less from his innovation within the genre than for his patient evolution and longevity. The sentiment is reflected by the song choice, which highlights obscure late-career numbers like the gorgeous “That’s the Way Love Goes” over more celebrated material like “Mama Tried” (relegated to a non-album single, with vocal duties handed off to a band member). And while all of Oldham’s work can be pilfered for meaning, Best Troubador is all the better for its simplicity: “The goal with this record is to highlight a life spent obsessed with songs and with singing them,” Oldham has said. It’s an obsession that’s defined both artists’ careers, and a sentiment reflected throughout these warm, lived-in performances.


While it carries the same flaws as his previous work, the latest album from the Baton Rouge rapper provides a clear portrait of a tragic figure who often blurs the lines between fact and fiction.

YoungBoy Never Broke Again: Sincerely, Kentrell

Sincerely, Kentrell

The inspirational Netflix documentary about YoungBoy Never Broke Again would probably go something like this: He was a teenager constantly getting screwed by the legal system and therefore made an outcast by the music industry, yet in spite of that he became one of the biggest rappers in the world; while that tale might be somewhat true, its simplicity smooths out all the rough edges. The bleak reality is that his popularity didn’t arise simply because the music is good, which it often is, but it was also fueled by fan obsession with authenticity and realism.
Earlier this March, the FBI swooped in on the 21-year-old Baton Rouge rap star and indicted him on weapons and drug charges. It may sound like nothing new, but it was, especially since his attorneys alleged this was a targeted message sent by the FBI, which doesn’t sound out of character for the infamous hip-hop cops. His first album in nearly a year, Sincerely, Kentrell, comes while he’s still in jail, arriving with minimal promotion (there were even rumors that YouTube, the platform where his music took off, refused to support his album). This all only intensifies a well crafted, but ethically questionable branding embraced by his team and Atlantic Records: He is a rebel who is scratching and clawing to have his voice heard while the powers that be try to silence him.
It’s hard to consider Kentrell without this baggage. He has blurred the lines between his rap persona and lived reality, which makes it an uncomfortable, but sometimes remarkable listen. He coldly raps about jail and violence as if it’s fate. On “Forgiato,” he aggressively says, “Since a kid, in and out the chains, swear they don’t know my pain/I don’t know who tryin’ to get me at work one night, I ain’t sleep with my shank.” Meanwhile, he’s constantly attempting to push those dark thoughts to the side, usually distracting himself with unhealthy relationships and drug abuse: “You don’t like all these different drugs I’m on,” he coos on “All I Need” to a girlfriend who is fed up with his unpredictable behavior. “But I won’t leave them alone if you leave me alone.” It’s desperate, manipulative, and chilling.
In a way though, Kentrell isn’t that much different from any other YoungBoy project. There’s a blueprint to this and he sticks with it, which also means that it carries the same flaws as his previous work. Once again, the occasionally forgettable production contains too many ’90s R&B ballad pianos and cheap acoustic guitars. It’s not as if these types of beats can’t be done well, but the ones he picks sound like familiar versions of instrumentals done better by other producers. Take “Life Support,” it’s essentially a Zaytoven beat but without any of the improvisation or personality that makes a mixtape like Beast Mode so distinct. The twinkling “Rich Shit” sounds like a Wheezy-type beat in the worst way, and “Level I Want to Reach”’s piano riff is so basic that it’s frustrating. Even if the beats on YoungBoy mixtapes are mostly an afterthought, is it really too much to wish for more inspired choices like “White Teeth,” which has a bounce to the drums that resembles early Mannie Fresh?
As a writer, he has a bad habit of telling us how to feel instead of making us feel it. His emotions come across more genuine through strains in his melody or sudden flurries of howling than when he just says the words “pain” or “hurt.” This occurs when he stops sweetly singing halfway through “My Killa” for a sudden hot-tempered flare up, or in the way he belts, “I’m not on no drugs right now, it’s the truth,” like he’s crying out for help on “Nevada.” These moments elevate his songwriting as well as distinguish him from the wave of Southern rappers sing-rapping about their pain, trauma, and struggle.
Nitpicking about spots where the production or songwriting could be punched up feels trivial when mulling over music this raw and intimate. He’s baring his soul again and again, and here I am, saying that the pianos should be more interesting. (They should be!) This conflict is what has made the popularity of YoungBoy’s music feel so confusing to those who don’t pay him much attention. Though the album’s quality may vary from song to song, it all adds up to a startling glimpse of a larger-than-life figure whose tragic shadow extends over everything he touches.

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California producer Jansport J makes instrumental hip-hop that summons J Dilla’s Donuts without falling in its shadow. p h a r a o h is his eighth and best album.

p h a r a o h

“I think a lot of us heard Donuts and made it our Bible.”
Talking about his excellent new album p h a r a o h in an interview with Bandcamp, the California producer Jansport J (aka Justin Williams) was blunt about the beat tape’s most obvious influence. Since Dilla’s Donuts came out, a little more than a decade ago, it has stood as both monolith and lodestar at the base camp of the beat scene. Few producers have been able to escape its shadow or avoid the microsample-strewn path it lays out. P h a r a o h does not seek to try.
But by ridding himself of the anxiety of influence, J has made the best of his eight records to date, and one of the more compelling offerings to emerge from the beat scene in recent years. He’s absorbed and built on the lessons to be found on *Donuts *and in the work of instrumental hip-hop’s other leading lights. P h a r a o h was originally conceived in the midst of a New York snowstorm, and the record jumps off with eight tracks worth of diamantine blizzard beats, many of them punctuated by or predicated on the human voice. Chants, shouts, whoops and screeches fill the record to great effect creating an atmosphere of engaged protest. J explained in the same interview that the track “RIP Harambe” speaks to more to than just an assassinated zoo animal; its sharply edited music is immediately followed by a 911 dispatcher, issuing yet another report of a suspicious male. That ominous audio attends the beginning of a track called “12,” a title barely more subtle than the one N.W.A. kicked off some shit with almost thirty years ago. P h a r a o h is remarkably effective as an explicit political document; no lyrics necessary.
Williams opens up and shows his range in the records latter two thirds, starting around the tributes to classic New York rap on “45 Joint” and “Set it Off.” Though Williams may mean it to signal otherwise—he’s remarked several times that this is his New York record—this section begins something of a national tour. While Williams continues to honor Gotham (check out the MC Lyte sampling on “BKNY”), he stretches beyond the city, from O.D.B.’s shouts to Miami on “The Dirt II” all the way to California on “Live From the Forum ’86” and “Crenshaw” near the album’s back half. In allowing his beats to criss-cross the country, choosing a diverse array of samples even as he cleaves to a classicist style, he retraces the original migration of hip-hop throughout the country.
Donuts was characterized by the Detroit producer’s rare mastery of sampling, both as technical skill and artistic expression, speaking his deathbed fears and desires through prerecorded voices. J shows a similar facility here, but this is not some covers record. On songs like “Crush” and “Crenshaw,” he takes a page out of the pop-loving programming of his contemporary Knxledge, essentially cross-wiring Michael Jackson’s “Rock With You” and Luther Vandross’ “Better Love.” Williams also has a knack for isolating intriguing spoken samples: one of the best tracks here is “IwasFeelinShortee,” which hands the mic over to Mos Def’s lovelorn monologue from “Ms. Fat Booty.” And he favors a diversity of approaches, as happy using a hyper-recognizable Bob James drum sample as he is veering toward the obscure.
A record like P h a r a o h makes a compelling case for Jansport J to be considered for a short list of names associated with transcendent instrumental hip-hop, a pantheon that, along with Dilla, would include Madlib, Knxledge and Oddisee, as well as pioneers like DJ Shadow and Blockhead. Though Donuts and Madlib’s Beat Konducta series continue to loom over the scene, making it difficult to expand the genre, these artists like have continued to add depth and breadth within the boundaries already set out. P h a r a o h hits upon a particularly deep wellspring, exploring it with curiosity and a coherent point of view that characterizes the instrumental hip hop’s best work. Though it barely features Williams’s own vocals, it speaks in a passionate, warm, consistently recognizable voice.


Produced by Dirty Projectors leader Dave Longstreth, the virtuosic Saharan guitarist Bombino’s latest album features a sublime iteration of desert blues that’s both authentic and ambitious.

Azel

While interviewing Dirty Projectors for a profile in 2009—on the cusp of the release of Bitte Orca and their Malian guitar-meets-Mariah hit “Stillness Is the Move”—band leader Dave Longstreth enthused over a Saharan guitarist on the Sublime Frequencies label who went by the name Bombino. In the last six years, the Tuareg artist has continued to make inroads in the West, touring and recording Stateside, and his 2013 album Nomad found him in the studio with the Black Keys’ Dan Auerbach. And now, Longstreth’s early admiration has come full circle, as he was tapped to record Bombino’s latest, Azel, in upstate New York. The resulting record presents the guitarist in a lucid, unadorned light.
There’s no need to add too much to Bombino’s desert blues—his unassuming and astonishing playing speaks volumes on its own. Seeing him live, his left hand is deceptively fast, flicking off the strings and lighting upon extra notes that other players can’t quite hit. Much like fellow Tichumaren players Tinariwen, Bombino’s acumen blends techniques derived from ngoni (a traditional lute), the imzad (a one-stringed bow instrument), and the amplified guitar of Hendrix and Santana.
Azel isn’t so different from his unofficial first album for Sublime Frequencies, 2009’s Guitars From Agadez Vol. 2, which was recorded in his home country of Niger and intimate enough to capture the sounds of camels on one side and ragged stomping on the other. His gentleness comes through on “Igmayagh Dum (My Lover),” built from handclaps, thumped guitar body, and a nimble melody, with Bombino’s lines of love—sung in Tamasheq—delivered in a gentle purr. Meanwhile, his electric guitar prickles and the drums careen on “Timidiwa (Friendship).” There is one new wrinkle, though: a kind of fusion with reggae. That might sound corny on paper, but Bombino and his group keep it all low-key, and the sounds soon assimilate. Album centerpiece “Iyat Ninhay / Jaguar (A Great Desert I Saw)” is driven by a lilting bassline that leads into an incandescent solo from Bombino as trilling zaghrouta voices punctuate the ecstasy of the moment.
But for all the guitar pyrotechnics, Western production, and reggae infusions, Azel never sounds like anything other than a sublime iteration of desert blues. Bombino has not pivoted towards Western music, as he still sings about the issues of his homeland in his native tongue. Hushed closer “Naqqim Dagh Timshar (We Are Left in This Abandoned Place)” tells of the plight of his people with a lines that translate to: “We sit in an abandoned place/ Everyone has left us/ The world has evolved/ And we’ve been abandoned.” Even with Bombino increasingly gaining exposure in America, lyrics like those remind us that his music continually speaks for those that would otherwise be unheard back home.


The British-Chinese musician trades the club tropes of previous albums for unadorned guitars and surreal soundscaping. It’s some of his most emotionally nuanced work yet.

Organ Tapes: 唱着那无人问津的歌谣 / Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao

Tim Zha makes music that feels like having a psalm read to you through the iridescent glow of your laptop screen. “Music is pretty inseparably tied to spirituality for me,” the British-Chinese producer told AQNB in 2017. Discussing the influence of his Christian upbringing, he described his music as being “concerned with understanding the experience of subjectivity, the experience of being bodied, which to me is always dominated and defined by the condition of being ‘fallen’ in a biblical sense.” Zha’s music as Organ Tapes always seems to be reaching for some form of redemption—a whispered prayer to be born anew, assembled from the scattered debris of another night at the club.
This idea of rebirth has been a constant in Zha’s music, with Organ Tapes’ sound continually mutating and evolving into new shapes over the years. On releases like Words Fall to Ground and Into One Name, Zha concocted a lo-fi hybrid of Afrobeat and deconstructed club so delicate it felt like it could shatter in your hands. On 2019’s slowcore-driven Hunger in Me Living, Zha incorporated more straightforward guitar and drum patterns while keeping his unique taste for sweetly synthetic flute and harp sounds. Uniting it all has been Zha’s transformation of club-filling pop tropes into the foundation for his intimate bedroom ruminations (as well as his densely Auto-Tuned voice, which mysteriously winds its way through his songs like a wounded serpent searching for sanctuary).
His new release for DJ Python’s Worldwide Unlimited label, Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao (whose title roughly translates to “Sing the Song That No One Cares About”), represents yet another stylistic shift. Adopting a primarily acoustic approach, Zha becomes a kind of ghostly nomad, often abandoning drums entirely in favor of unadorned guitars and surreal soundscaping, ending up somewhere between Elliott Smith and Ecco2k. In some ways, the album mirrors the emo sensibilities that have overtaken the online musical landscape in the last few years. But where other young laptop artists like quinn or blackwinterwells might orient their songs around cathartic, earsplitting drops, Zha prefers to drift in a spectral quiet, emphasizing the tenderness of his fingerpicking and his uncannily disorienting samples. In its hushed sense of grace, Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao represents some of Organ Tapes’ most emotionally nuanced work yet—a blurry, half-remembered vision from one of the unsung prodigies of the modern electronic underground.
As with all Organ Tapes releases, Zha’s vocals on Chang Zhe Na Wu Ren Wen Jin De Ge Yao are obfuscated by an almost impenetrable digital haze, each word phasing in and out like a thought on the very edge of becoming. His lyrics are often indecipherable, but occasionally you can make out brief silhouettes of meaning in the fog. On “Submission”—a brightly strummed acoustic chant that feels like it came from the same shimmering world as yeule’s “Don’t Be So Hard on Your Own Beauty”—Zha softly declares,“I was young, and I said I would change as I lived and I listened,” seemingly reflecting on his own growth. Only later does he modify the line into a repentant confession: “I was young, and I said I would change, and I did, and I didn’t.” Elsewhere, Zha lets his samples speak for him; “Eventually He Will Come Into My Life” pulls a quote from the 2014 film Rich Hill, a documentary chronicling rural Missouri teens trying to find hope in the face of abject poverty. “I praise God and I worship him, and I pray to him every night,” a boy’s voice quivers against a glimmering, cybernetic drone. “Nothing’s came, but that ain’t gonna stop me.” Zha casts this moment as a solemn epigraph for the entire record—a portrait of private, mundane faith, pleading for some intangible salvation.
Lyrical moments like these may act as dowsing rods for Zha’s thematic intentions, but one of his greatest strengths is how much he’s able to convey through sound and inflection alone. On “Never Had,” Zha builds a withered R&B lament around a distant guitar sample cloaked in crinkling distortion, cutting the instruments in and out as he layers his sighing falsetto harmonies one on top of the other. “Heaven Can Wait” is even more stunning: After a beautifully sparse opening verse consisting entirely of Zha’s fragile voice and guitar, an otherworldly sound collage washes over the song, suggesting an iPhone recording of a street performer spliced with the tactile rubbing of fabric, with idle chatter from passerby swirling all around. In Zha’s hands, this moment comes off like a triumphant solo, its melody distilled into a pure texture, as cold and artificial as it is warmly human.
Even on his strangest stylistic detours, Zha manages to infuse these melancholy songs with an aching longing for something greater. Whether it’s in the chintzy karaoke horns that adorn “Acid & Wine” like provincial fanfare or the Dirty Beaches-esqe rockabilly strut he adopts on “Earned,” Zha turns these small absurdities into new refractions of his weary worldview, where anything can be the basis for a wistful lullaby. It’s as if his songs are pleading to mend the fractures and dissonance happening within them, each one a diffuse portrait of contemporary music at its most mournful. As with all of Organ Tapes’ work, that might seem out of reach if it weren’t so openly and deeply felt.


On the sequel to his breakout 2014 mixtape, the Washington, D.C. rapper Shy Glizzy is simply a joy to listen to, one of the most distinctive and technically adventurous rappers working today.

Young Jefe 2

The first thing Shy Glizzy says on Young Jefe 2, the sequel to his breakout 2014 mixtape, is “Rest in peace that nigga Soulja Slim, man...free C-Murder.” A little more than 20 minutes into the new tape, C-Murder himself checks in by phone from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, one of the country’s most notorious maximum-security prisons. (The one-time No Limit star—and brother to Silkk the Shocker and Master P—is serving a life sentence stemming from a 2009 murder conviction, but is appealing on the basis of juror misconduct.) In the phone message, called “OG Call (Skit),” C-Murder details the fake people he’s met on the inside, then turns his attention outward: “This world is full of chaos right now, bro.”
So on the next song, the sprawling “Rounds,” “Club pay me ten thou just to come stand on the couch” sounds particularly defiant. In fact, that’s the throughline of *Young Jefe 2—*material concerns as symbols for something bigger. In the first eight bars of opener “Let It Rain,” Glizzy’s mom swaps her Corolla for a Range Rover; later he sneers, “I seen a couple niggas in my same kicks/Tell them lame niggas, we ain’t got the same limp.”
Both times, Glizzy’s vocals are injected with such dread, such conviction, that they throw you into his psyche, where you stay for the rest of the tape’s brisk running time, save for that call from Angola. The Washington, D.C. native is simply a joy to listen to, one of the most distinctive and technically adventurous rappers working today. On the Zaytoven-produced “Bankroll,” the musical structure of each bar (half-sung, the intensity peaking at the end) serves as a writing constraint that brings out his sharpest work.
Speaking of “Bankroll,” the song nearly shares a name with the “Bank Rolls” remix that was a star-making turn for Tate Kobang. Hailing from just up the corridor in Baltimore, Kobang is also signed to the same label as Glizzy, the Lyor Cohen-headed 300 Entertainment. Each artist finds himself at a sort of commercial crossroads: uniquely of and for his region, but on the precipice of crossing over nationally. In Glizzy’s case, it can seem like he’s been stuck there for some time. While *Young Jefe 2 *is engrossing and, in some ways, a remarkable testament to his talent, there’s no breakout single, no “Awwsome” or “Funeral.” Either of the back-to-back “New Crack” and “Ride 4 U” could make it into radio rotation, but each is a slow burn and unlikely to expand the base.
So where does Shy Glizzy go from here? He’s already folded elements from other cities into his sound, usually to impressive effect: His ad-libs owe plenty to Atlanta, as does his affinity for rolling hi-hats. “Funeral” has cast him as joyous and lovable; the album cuts round out a more menacing persona. And while he’s a tremendous technician, he keeps gesturing at a fascinating internal life that hasn't been mined to full effect yet.
Barring a world-beating single from left field—like “Trap Queen,” which turned Fetty Wap into a goldmine for 300—the answer might be to double down on his hometown. The national discussion about D.C. rap has always been frustratingly reductive, treating the District’s love for go-go and other genres like a barrier (as if juke and footwork hampered young rappers in Chicago). But with Wale mostly relegated to lounge music and with Fat Trel having receded to the background, Glizzy might become the commercial counterpoint to Oddisee’s reliable underground stature. If the urgency from “Waiting on my Time,” one of *Jefe’*s most affecting cuts, is to be believed, he’ll make sure that moment comes before too long.


TK

Lost Girls: Selvutsletter

Lost Girls’ second album Selvutsletter opens with Jenny Hval waiting for a rental car at an airport. Planes take off and land. A bell chimes in the distance, like the ringing of a railroad crossing. Amid this buzz of transportation, Hval is sitting still, thinking. Waiting is something she’s “very good at.” A bloom of synths summons both the calm, antiseptic environment of an airport and the feeling of being trapped. Every now and then Hval lets loose an astonishing high note, flaying her voice bare with vocal fry, as if rebelling against the bloodlessness of her surroundings. But the car never comes. She vaguely resolves to cure her fear of flying, but the song ends with the singer in the same place she began, bemused by the “choreography of living.”
The pleasures of the Norwegian duo’s style are all there on “Timed Intervals,” not least the thrill of hearing Hval disappear into her own mind, coming up with connections that make surreal sense (she compares the planes ascending and descending to a “creature inhaling and exhaling”). But while the 10-minute-plus epics that until now have been a hallmark of the Lost Girls project moved linearly, the songs on Selvutsletter feel circular. The nearly 14-minute “Drive,” from Lost Girls’ debut EP Feeling, also involved a rental car, but that car was actually moving down the highway, mirroring the singer’s journey into her own head. Here, one of Hval’s most memorable lyrics from “Drive” comes to mind: “I rage without moving.”
On Selvutsletter, Hval and multi-instrumentalist Håvard Volden limit themselves to pop-song lengths, with only two tracks exceeding five minutes. The expansive vistas of earlier songs like “Drive” and the title track of 2021’s Menneskekollektivet have shrunk slightly, but within these relatively brief runtimes there’s a wealth of creativity. “Sea White” and “World on Fire” indulge in vast washes of cathedral organs, the latter toggling playfully between drawbars to end on an effect almost like a skipping CD. “Re-entering the City” opens caverns of space between skeletal drums and eventually dissolves into a wash of ambient sound. Lost Girls love scratchy drum machines, scratchier guitars, and huge billowing house chords that seep into songs like ominous industrial fumes.
With less time per song for guided tours of her mind, Hval instead focuses on remembering or imagining how something felt a long, long time ago. She skips around in time, speaking directly to the listener, letting them know it’s 1996 or 1998—the years when Hval got her start as a performer singing with the goth-metal band Shellyz Raven. “With the Other Hand” takes us into the kind of dimly lit dive bar where Hval undoubtedly played dozens of shows early in her career, while “June 1996” plunges headlong into the era, adroitly replicating the kind of sincere and faintly grungy pop song a lot of people were making at that time. On “Re-entering the City,” she goes further back, visiting a park and “smelling” years of history. “People demonstrated here in the ’50s,” she whispers, like the kid from The Sixth Sense.
Hval consistently sings throughout Selvutsletter, only intermittently veering into the spoken word that’s long been a hallmark of her work. Sometimes, her English words slip into Norwegian, or even into glossolalia. As with previous Lost Girls releases, Hval has made the deliberate decision not to include a lyric sheet. It might have been superfluous with Feeling or Menneskekollektivet, on which Hval enunciated her lyrics with the precision of a nature-documentary narrator. But on Selvutsletter the words are often challenging to make out. What, exactly, is in ruins? Did she say “gardening dog?”
This blurriness makes it difficult to follow the narrative threads from the beginning of one song to the end, but certain lyrics stick out as sharply as a hypnotist’s suggestion. “You step out of the car,” Hval says at the beginning of first single “With the Other Hand,” leading us across the street, into a bar, and up onto the stage, where she is already performing. To anyone who’s spent enough time in small venues, a rush of tactile associations floods in: the tenebrous light, the stench of beer and cigarettes, the boisterous chatter drowning out the music on the jukebox.
It seems significant that “Timed Intervals” ends with Hval waiting for a car and “With the Other Hand,” the very next song, begins with a command to step out of one. Hval has long since graduated from playing in bars like the one she describes. Are we stepping out of the car and into the past, perhaps the mythical late ’90s to which Hval returns again and again? Lost Girls is named for a graphic novel by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie in which three great heroines of fantasy literature—Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Wendy from Peter Pan, and Alice of Wonderland—meet as adults and share their most disturbing and erotic memories. On Selvutsletter, Hval slips into rabbit hole after rabbit hole, and all we can do is follow her down.


The rapper’s latest is a cosmic synthesis of EDM, emo rap, and cutesy pop refrains that echoes the rave fantasies of Drain Gang.

Saturn Child

Over the years, Jazz Butler has reset his career numerous times: In 2016, when he changed his professional moniker from Yung Bruh to Lil Tracy, but also more existentially following the tragic loss of his right-hand collaborator Lil Peep in 2017. At times, he’s drifted toward a more mainstream rap career—2020’s Designer Talk 2 featured the likes of Pi’erre Bourne, Chief Keef, and the late Lil Keed, and 2018’s country-tinged “Like a Farmer” had viral novelty potential a few months before “Old Town Road” eclipsed it entirely. But whenever the road seems clear and charted, Lil Tracy seems to swerve unexpectedly left. 2019’s Anarchy was on-the-nose pop-punk pastiche that could have been ghost-produced by Travis Barker; Designer Talk 2 demonstrated how well Tracy’s sensitive falsetto can blend with a more straightforward trap sound. His new album Saturn Child is comparatively much harder to classify, and more singular—a cosmic synthesis of EDM, emo rap, and cutesy pop refrains that’s maybe the closest an American rapper has come to replicating the rave fantasies and euphoria of Drain Gang.
Regardless of his sonic evolutions, Tracy’s soul is still the same: an aching romantic with a perpetually broken heart and a penchant for toxic love affairs. He’s largely been defined by his relationships with other people; it’s almost impossible to find a review or profile that doesn’t mention his close artistic kinship with Lil Peep, or his notable parents, Ishmael Butler of Shabazz Palaces and Digable Planets and Cheryl Gamble of SWV. Because Tracy is so often viewed through his external relationships, the fact that Saturn Child has no features demonstrates an artist asserting his voice on its own terms. Tracy’s early delivery was often abrasive and buried in Auto-Tune but he’s become a more confident vocalist, with a sing-song flow that feels effortless, even soothing. At times his voice tilts toward the cartoonish, but his delivery is grounded by the catchiness of his choruses—he invokes the nasal whine of Blink-182, the sultry falsetto of The Weeknd, and the cartoonishness of iLoveMakonnen. Though not quite on the full-blown Jaden Smith indigo child tip, Tracy weaves a loose aesthetic of astrological and intergalactic imagery into his tales of material gain and emotional loss: “I feel like Saturn/I got rings,” he raps on “Touche.”
Recurring members of the Gothboiclique universe like Smokeasac, Bighead, and BetterOffDead all turn in production work, but Tracy also recruits a number of younger and lesser-known beatmakers, particularly for drill-flavored tracks like “Location” and “Roadrage”—evidence of an artist with his ear to the underground. On Saturn Child, Tracy’s alt-influenced sound is reconfigured and retrofitted, creating a sound that’s on a more astronomical wavelength. Tracks like “It Is What It Is” have the heavily synthesized, sci-fi flavor of Pi’erre Bourne and Working on Dying. On “Heavenly,” Tracy abandons the direct rock signifiers but keeps the pop-punk flow, going in over a wonky dubstep beat. “Roadrage” updates the Gothboiclique sound, marrying an emo-tinged guitar line to a bassy Brooklyn drill beat. “Knight in Shining Armor” and “Heavenly” each briefly break into a heavy kicking beat that splits the difference between synth-pop and hardstyle rave.
Within a single song, Lil Tracy changes his skin and shifts into unpredictable shapes. On “Knight in Shining Armor” as Tracy croons about broken hearts and fake friends, the beat mutates beyond his control. An opening crest of synths gives way to dubstep bass, which is soon overtaken by a stomping rave four-on-the-floor, but all the while, Tracy’s angelic delivery remains a guiding star. It’s impossible to call Saturn Child Lil Tracy’s final form, given his many reinventions, but it’s a variant that sounds more comfortable and confident than ever before.


The renaissance of Richard D. James continues with his latest EP, a knotty, meticulous, and joyous collection that ranks among his best late-career albums.

Collapse EP

Just four years into Aphex Twin’s post-comeback career, Richard D. James is making some of the best music of his life. Maybe that sounds like hyperbole or provocation. He’s got a formidable track record, after all: Between 1991 and 2001, he turned electronic music on its ear more than once, giving the world a number of classics in the process. But since 2014’s Syro, James’ music has been marked by the kind of freedom you don’t often get from an artist who’s been making records for 27 years.
Every album he’s put out since he returned from a 13-year hiatus as Aphex Twin has sounded unmistakably like his own inimitable self while at the same time breaking new ground. The wide-ranging Syro, his reintroduction to the world, was a kind of stylistic clearing-house—that much was apparent from the wide-ranging BPMs he listed in brackets in the track titles. The tropes were familiar but the sounds, flickering like holograms, were a touch more vivid than before. With Computer Controlled Acoustic Instruments pt2 EP, he ditched the synths and let a robot combo loose on acoustic drums and prepared piano; what could have been abstruse instead radiated a quiet magnetism. Orphaned Deejay Selek (2006-2008) rescued some rave bangers from the archive, while the Cheetah EP, in 2016, was a lark, basically: seven low-key doses of low-slung funk banged out on an obscure, infamously difficult-to-program synth from the 1990s. Nerd manna, sure, but also irresistibly groovy and surprisingly unencumbered—just straight-up fun, really.
With the Collapse EP, he doubles down on those pleasure principles, even as he returns to some of the knottiest programming he’s tackled since the mid-’90s and songs like “Flim.” All five tracks are descendants of the manic style once called “drill ‘n’ bass”: The drums skip and stutter, bouncing like ball bearings in an earthquake. It’s a safe bet that no two bars are alike, though it would take a forensic analyst to map the minuscule variations of his splintered rimshots and blood-spatter drum drip. His rhythms have never been more dynamic: He’s taken the slow-fast lurch of classic drum ‘n’ bass and fractured it into ever tinier shards, with kicks and snares setting off percussive chain reactions and elastic triplet patterns being pulled taut into zippers of pure buzz.
As usual, he applies wistful synth melodies to smooth over those jagged edges. The melodies are, by and large, the least surprising things here, though they are also among the most satisfying. Until the drums kick in, “pthex” starts out sounding like an outtake from Selected Ambient Works Volume II, its elongated steel-pan synths suggesting intonation systems not quite of this earth, while detuned harp plucks add extra kinks to his funhouse-mirror surfaces. In “MT1 t29r2” and “T69 collapse,” the tuning feels even screwier, casting an eerie glow over the rhythmic wreckage.
What feels new to this release is way the music moves on a wider scale. James’ arrangements thrash spasmodically like beasts unwilling to succumb to the tranquilizer dart. There’s a real sense of violence underpinning these tracks: “T69 collapse” breaks down, halfway through, into a heaving mess of drum fills and haywire-robot pummeling—wild, senseless aggression, bewildering in its kinetic energy. “abundance10edit[2R8’s, FZ20m & a 909]” is less brutalizing but it still lurches like a machine run amok. You’d think that would be a bad thing, but no—those white-knuckled moments are an essential part of the record’s fucked-up beauty, just like all those queasy, quicksilver tones. It’s not quite wrong but definitely not right, either. The thrill lies in James’ ability to juggle precision and chaos—it’s part laser-guidance system, part demolition derby—and somehow come out of it relatively unscathed.
That said, “1st 44,” by far the best thing here, is also the simplest. It’s a straight-up drum track, practically a DJ tool stripped back to jackhammering sequences of claps and snares and some of the biggest, boomiest bass drums ever heard on an Aphex Twin record. It’s a virtuosic display of programming and sound design alike, the kind of tune that could plaster a shit-eating grin on any raver’s face—outdoor, basement, or armchair. Then, for good measure, he goes and slaps the time-stretched bark of a reggae deejay over the top of it, as though it already weren’t hype enough. There have been times in James’ career when his knowing smirk threatened to eclipse the music. But here he’s obviously having a genuine blast, and his joy is infectious.


Thanks to Martin Shkreli, Wu-Tang is worth millions again. But is their new album even worth your time?

The Saga Continues

The uproar surrounding pharma bro Martin Shkreli’s Once Upon A Time in Shaolin, a Wu-Tang Clan album pressed in an edition of one in 2014 and stored in a safe at a Moroccan hotel, was illuminating. Barely a year after A Better Tomorrow, the Clan’s first wide release album in seven years, went largely ignored, Shkreli bought the only pressing of Shaolin for $2 million at auction. As the latter was certified the most valuable album in existence, the former struggled to sell 50,000 copies. While listeners complained about not being able to hear the mythic Wu-Tang Clan album Shkreli dangled over their heads like a carrot for years, they largely rejected the Wu-Tang album that was already easily accessible, which was telling: With Wu-Tang Clan, now, it’s more about the idea, the legacy than the actual music.
Wu-Tang Clan lore has long been so significant that a prospective juror in Shkreli’s fraud case admitted they couldn’t be objective because of it—sure, Shkreli’s bad business denied access to medicine to many but he’d also tarnished the sacred Wu emblem with his petty posturing. “It’s my attitude toward his entire demeanor, what he has done to people,” a transcript of the jury selection process revealed. “And he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan.” They’ve become a symbol, a “Chappelle’s Show” skit. Recently, Bloomberg reported that Shkreli himself may even have been seduced by the Wu-Tang Clan mythos; the very rare Wu-Tang artifact he thought he paid millions for could just be an unauthorized side project later repackaged and marketed as a crafted and prized collectible (Shkreli admitted in the album’s eBay listing that he never really listened to it), which led to an argument about what the working definition of a “Wu-Tang Clan album” even is. The status of that exclusive, and the crew’s new release, The Saga Continues, begs the question: What even makes a Wu-Tang album these days?
Before even releasing The Saga Continues, the project’s architects made clear that it isn’t a canonical Wu-Tang Clan album; RZA has pegged the offering as a curated collection of treasures from the Wu collective, and the project is billed to “Wu-Tang” and not “Wu-Tang Clan,” which is apparently an important distinction. So what is The Saga Continues? It can firstly be classified as a compilation, and secondly as a showcase for longtime Wu-Tang producer Mathematics. RZA executive produced the project, but Mathematics “crafted” it. (At the end of “Lesson Learn’d,” Redman, who is not a member of the Clan but gets more airtime than six living members, intimates as much, introducing Math as the show’s star.) The project has all the moving parts of a Wu-Tang album, but the gaps in posse cuts are filled by affiliates like Killah Priest and Streetlife. On average there’s one official Clan member per song, almost as if sharing space is a chore. Where Wu-Tang Clan once felt like a cohesive unit made up of diverse voices and personas, the group now seems like a dysfunctional family begrudgingly reconvening for reunions.
No matter how this is billed—group or collective, album or anthology—the project is a self-fulfilling prophesy: The Saga Continues feels like an unnecessary continuation of a Wu-Tang adventure growing more and more tedious, only persisting out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to the brand. They’re still trading on the name, yet they don’t even want to commit to making music en masse. The Wu-Tang group efforts are largely unimaginative affairs now. They’re mostly rapping in circles. They ignore the conditions that forged some recent solo work worth visiting. There’s none of the panel-by-panel storytelling of Ghostface’s Twelve Reasons to Die series, or the dramatic flair of the last few Raekwon albums. Ghostface is the least illustrative he’s been in some time. And Raekwon sounds flat-out disengaged. The project is packed with extremely dated references, and outdated rhetoric. On “Why Why Why,” RZA chastises strippers dancing for rich showmen like Floyd Mayweather, Jr. (“And she wonders why, why, why she can’t keep her husband?”) but doesn’t condemn or even mention the boxer’s history of domestic violence. In a guest spot, the late Sean Price proudly pronounces “I don’t weirdo with queer clothes.” Later on the same song, RZA raps, “Bobby Dig convert Lady Gaga/Back to heterosexual,” which aside from being problematic, misunderstands both Gaga and how sexuality works. Everything about this feels dusty, suspect, and archaic.
Anyone who comes in expecting a throwback is rewarded with a workable period piece: This is a spin-off in every sense. The Saga Continues is full of competent if forgettable rapping straight out of the Wu-Tang manuscripts, and each Wu rapper does a serviceable job mustering up shades of their primes, in function. The verses don’t do what they used to, but at a distance they move in the same ways. Songs are sketches using old Clan templates. There are skits. Mathematics knows the Wu-Tang blueprint well and is more than capable of executing; he supplies their staples: sample-heavy soul, knocking drums, and the usual snippets from martial arts cinema. But nothing notable or consequential happens inside. And worse still: nothing unpredictable happens. Why listen to a bargain bin Wu joint when 36 Chambers is readily available? Outside of servicing the most diehard Wu-Tang fans, this album has little to no utility.
As pointless as the project is, The Saga Continues isn’t a complete drag. Method Man and Redman, longtime partners in crime, come away as the standouts. They’re consistent, delivering the best verses on “People Say” and reuniting as a tag-team for the loud-mouthed “Hood Go Bang!” But early on, Redman all but provides the compilation’s thesis: “At my age it’s all about bread/Tryna be nice at 40, you can have it all shawty/I’m tryna make history, and history say: ‘Fuck rap,’ I divorced her, the bitch bore me.” More than anything, The Saga Continues seems like a lazy way to cash in on Wu-Tang cachet. This wouldn’t be the first time.


Much as he did on last year’s remix of Spoon’s Lucifer on the Sofa, the storied dub producer uncovers a universe of detail lurking in the folds of the duo’s 2022 album Reset.

Panda Bear / Sonic Boom / Adrian Sherwood: Reset in Dub

Reset in Dub

From the first crash and gurgle of Reset in Dub, it’s clear that Adrian Sherwood’s extensive reworking of Panda Bear and Sonic Boom’s 2022 album offers a new perspective on the original—a reset of Reset, if you will. The Eddie Cochran guitar riff deployed on the album version of “Gettin’ to the Point” is gone, the verses have transformed into horn lines, and the chorus echoes over sirens, flutes, a thick wall of bass and drum, and classic dub effects.
A sunny, trippy, Beach Boys-esque throwback and pastiche, Reset used bits and pieces of late-’50s and early-’60s pop to pay tribute to what had come before. In its unyielding optimism, the record demonstrated a fervent belief in the power of the hook. Panda Bear and Sonic Boom’s creative trip to the past dug up bygone melodies and motifs, a modus operandi shared with the Jamaican studio method of musical excavation pioneered in the late ’60s by legends like King Tubby and Lee “Scratch” Perry. That makes dub a fitting choice to further unlock the secrets of Reset, which had already spun off an instrumental version and a smattering of remixes.
Sherwood has a long history as one of dub’s most prolific crossover figures; in addition to many Jamaican reggae musicians, the British artist has produced or remixed Depeche Mode, the Fall, Mark Stewart, Nine Inch Nails, and scores more. In ranging so widely, he frequently departs from dub’s emphasis on manipulating the existing elements of a given song: When Sherwood revisited Spoon’s 2022 album Lucifer on the Sofa to create Lucifer on the Moon, his intricate reworks were billed as “reconstructions.” Here, he breaks open Reset’s songs and packs in as much extra sound as possible. On this record, more is more: more bass, more percussion, more melody, more everything.
On Reset in Dub, Sherwood continues to move past dub’s conventional methods of manipulation, opting for a whole new studio treatment. As he did with Spoon, he has added plenty: extra strings and piano, additional drums and percussion, and horns arranged by Little Axe, a former member of Sugarhill Records’ house band who played on Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s “The Message” and “White Lines,” among others, before eventually joining Sherwood’s On-U sound crew. He also enlisted former Sugarhill Gang and Living Colour bassist Doug Wimbish, whose weighty low end anchors the flyaway vocal harmonies on “Go On Dub,” while on “Everyday Dub,” he breaks out of dub’s confines with a slinky disco-funk bassline. The brass and winds propel the melodies forward, countering the drag of the dub delay and providing an extra measure of dynamism.
Leaning into the vintage samples and rocksteady influence that informed the original Reset, Sherwood digs into each track to find pre-existing potential. The reverberant vocals and diffuse percussion of “Whirlpool” were already swirling toward dub, but Sherwood amps up the echo, emphasizing the pulse with Wimbish’s bass while Ivan “Celloman” Hussey adds extra depth and richness. The cello’s vibrant tone appears most effectively on “Living in the After Dub” and “Everything’s Been Leading to This Dub,” and each time it is as surprising as it is satisfying. “In My Body Dub” is perhaps the simplest treatment of the set. Whereas the original pushed the vocals to the fore, here Panda Bear’s voice floats gently over saxophone, chimes, and delicate piano stabs. The song seems to have expanded its dimensions, sprawling like a galaxy.
Reset was supersaturated with color to begin with, but Sherwood has succeeded in finding still more shades within its nooks and crannies while simultaneously drawing fresh textures from its folds. The effect is to highlight a wide range of emotion lying beneath the duo’s candied hooks. If Reset channeled the uplift inherent in teeny-bopper tunes from half a century ago, Sherwood’s dub pulls the ethereal happiness warmly down to earth.


With his vulnerable, keening voice as the primary emotional vessel, the New York-based songwriter reckons with his break from evangelical Christianity.

Youth Pastoral

Breakup albums leave their creator in the awkward, ironic position of putting the source of their pain on a pedestal. The greater the heartbreak, the greater the catharsis, and all of it—the self-examination, the inventory of shortcomings, the mourning, the acceptance, the hope—is contingent on understanding why someone willingly invested so much in a relationship in the first place. There’s a fairly traditional story of codependence couched within Youth Pastoral, but it’s secondary to Ben Seretan’s larger reckoning of his break from evangelical Christianity, a lifestyle that guides every moment of a person’s life and leaves a gaping void when it’s gone. More than a simple breakup album, Youth Pastoral fits into a small ex-religious subgenre typified by the Heathen podcast, Jamie Lee Finch’s book You Are Your Own, and David Bazan’s Strange Negotiations documentary. You can’t just go on Tinder and find a rebound spirituality.
A traditional, solo-credited singer-songwriter album wasn’t necessarily a given for Seretan. After years of personal upheaval following the release of 2016’s Bowl of Plums, Seretan bounced back with My Life’s Work, a 24-hour, 48-track collection of vividly titled ambient pieces (“Stoned and Slackjawed Under the Ferris Wheel,” “I Want to Taste the Pondwater on You”). His writing on Youth Pastoral doesn’t mimic the breathless essays that accompanied My Life’s Work, which captured a man trying to make up for an entire circumspect youth in a couple of years. But he does capture the spirit of self-rediscovery: “Filled to the brim with something fine, one spark and I’ll explode,” he coos in the first line.
Throughout Youth Pastoral, Seretan recognizes the conflation of profane and sacred desires that turned lovers into gods and vice versa. His confessions (“I remade myself to your taste,” “I’m your good boy, am I your good boy?”) are intentionally open-ended, speaking in overtly religious terms of surrender and supplication. No longer willing to make a single entity his higher power, Seretan finds salvation in community and earthly, platonic friendship. His vulnerable, keening voice is the primary emotional vessel on Youth Pastoral, but not its only one: Devra Freelander, a multimedia artist who was tragically killed before the album’s release, provides harmony vocals throughout.
The core of the new album is similar to that of Bowl of Plums or Seretan’s self-titled debut: full of variously wooly and weary songs with freak-folk melodies vining over gnarled, knuckled guitar, as if Devendra Banhart and Mark Kozelek had become drinking buddies for a spell in 2003. Abetted by more than a dozen contributors adding heraldic horns, trilling flutes, and theater-troupe harmonies, Youth Pastoral hews towards the potluck folk of the mid-’00s, dabbling in stoned soft-rock, Laurel Canyon revivalism, and an avowed psychic connection to Phantom Planet.
Seretan doesn’t set out to completely negate his evangelical upbringing; in Youth Pastoral’s most captivating moments, he seems to honor it. In the album’s pivotal scene, he’s baptized in the Pacific Ocean as a teen, and much of the record sounds as if it’s been exfoliated by a sea salt bath. The insistent ticking of cymbals on “1 Of” and “Holding Up the Sun” evoke a state of weightlessness, as if anticipating the same release from inhibitions typically associated with religious transformation. “Everything’s gonna be alright/You shine a little light for me… Shine a light!” Seretan screams towards the end of “Holding Up the Sun,” and whether the mimicry of a praise chorus is meant as homage or sarcasm, it doesn’t really matter. Seretan once found purpose in fundamentalism. Now he’s found freedom in the realization that heaven is what you make it.


On this guest-crowded remix album, the duo continues its wild, swerving path through memes, genres, and decades, making some of its originals sound like demos in the process.

1000 gecs & The Tree of Clues

The American woodcock—colloquially referred to as a “timberdoodle” or “hokumpoke” in some areas—is a chubby, exhibitionist shorebird with stout legs and a long beak. When it scouts for worms, it rocks its body and stomps its feet in a funky little dance-walk; ditto when wooing potential mates. In April, Laura Les and Dylan Brady of the avant-garde pop duo 100 gecs posted a TikTok of three woodcocks—one adult, two babies—doing this strut, soundtracked to an array of beeps, honks, xylophone hits, and squeaks. (They made the audio.) Depending on your imagination, the final product looks like a bird family humping invisible Bop Its or competing in an intense round of Dance Dance Revolution. All of it is quintessentially gecs—the “beep boop” cacophony; the playful iteration on a meme; the subtle sweetness. Most of all: It’s weird. It’s fun. Don’t think too hard about it.
According to one oft-told account, the name “100 gecs” originates from an accident in which an online lizard retailer shipped Les too many live geckos, leaving her with 100 instead of one; in the vast constellation of memes, “100 gecs” feels like an intellectual predecessor to “30-50 feral hogs.” On their 2019 studio debut, 1000 gecs, the duo’s arch, impish humor popped up in aggro copypasta-style taunts (“Hey, you little piss baby/You think you’re so fucking cool?”) and tragicomic tales of betting on a “stupid horse.” They specialize in hyperactive collisions of “uncool” genres: ska, dubstep, and ’00s metalcore, not to mention the sort of witless EDM that convinced you “I’m a vegetarian and I ain’t fucking scared of him” was the sickest diss ever. Writers often compare listening to their music to the whiplash of thumbing through digital feeds, but 100 gecs resist the cultivated eccentricity common on Twitter or TikTok, eliciting instead the spontaneous freedom of riffing in a group chat. Listening to 100 gecs is like watching your buds test out tricks at the skatepark: it’s less about precision and polish than the act of being together and having a good time.
For their remix album, 1000 gecs and the Tree of Clues, Les and Brady have assembled a rowdy crew of friends, including expected PC Music affiliates like Charli XCX and A.G. Cook and new faces like Fall Out Boy, Rico Nasty, and alt-rap group Injury Reserve. 100 gecs’ music already sounds reconfigured; a remix album just pushes their techniques of extraction, warping, and recombining further, lending Tree of Clues the novelty and depth of an original. While the original “xXXi_wud_nvrstøp_ÜXXx” already interpolates Soulja Boy’s long-distance classic “Kiss Me Thru the Phone”—released a year after the invention of the first iPhone—the Eurodance-inspired remix digs deeper into the exultant rush of the late ’00s. Estonian rapper Tommy Cash hams it up with a Soviet Pitbull impression: “Mr. Worldwide … International killa!” Meanwhile, Hannah Diamond and Dylan Brady pine over untouchable lovers. Its chorus of entering and disappearing voices evokes DJ Earworm’s 2009 “United States of Pop” mashup; both reassemble the shiny debris of the ’00s into new shapes, eulogizing bygone optimism. “Let’s go all the way,” Brady trills, the same giddy, romantic dare from Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” a decade ago.
The guests skillfully mold the originals into creations of their own, while still preserving some of the songs’ initial ideas. Dylan Brady was already channeling Fall Out Boy on the original “hand crushed by a mallet,” so hearing Patrick Stump bellow on the remix alongside Craig Owens of post-hardcore band Chiodos and Canadian singer-songwriter Nicole Dollanganger makes the original feel like a demo. Noise-pop duo Black Dresses’ thrashing interpretation of “745 sticky” magnifies the chaos and hedonism documented on the track. Unfortunately, Injury Reserve’s attempt with the same song is less successful. Their version of “745 sticky” is buried under extraneous car honks and clown squeaks, but the growling, voracious “GODDAMN” in the second chorus almost rescues it. Peculiarities like these keep things lively. “Please hold while I connect you to a rock hard wet gec,” Dylan Brady purrs in a sweaty phone sex monologue on the Dorian Electra-assisted “gec 2 Ü.” GFOTY and Count Baldour’s “stupid horse” remix kicks off with an actual whinney.
Perhaps the biggest transformation occurs on “gecgecggec.” The original is a whimsical assembly of crime-scene music, game-show-style sound effects, and more, with incessant “gec gec gec gec”-s that sound croaked by brainless seagulls. The remix is a gummy pop-rap song. Those “gec” sounds are looped into a beat over which Lil West raps about bitches, racks, and convertibles. “If she wanna fuck, she call me,” he brags, adopting a DaBaby flow. But this cold, cocky front slowly crumbles, as Atlanta rapper-singer Tony Velour ends his melodic verse on the concession, “You got my strongest love.” By the time Laura Les appears, the mood is of complete and utter vulnerability: “Baby, I’m not stronger than you,” she wails. Online, skeptics wonder if fans only like 100 gecs as a meme; and yet, their sincerity hides in plain sight. The sad “gec 2 Ü” becomes sadder when Danny L Harle emulates Owl City’s burbling, saccharine production. Its wide-eyed innocence only underscores the tragedy of the premise: two people failing to meet each other’s needs, thunderous bass pounding like chunks of hail to emphasize the force of their agony.
In a recent interview, Les confronted a sore spot in the coverage of 100 gecs. “We’re having fun,” she clarified, “we’re not fucking being ironic.” The duo began seriously working together after being invited to perform at Minecraft festivals, where artists attempt things “too stupid or too funny” for Spotify release, like cramming 30-40 songs into a 20-minute set. 100 gecs’ music feels tailor-made for a world like Minecraft, full of childlike pixelated figures wandering free in a vast, lonely landscape. On “came to my show,” one of two original songs on the album, a high-pitched voice whimpers, “I can’t believe you came to my show/It hurts when you don’t.” It’s a pure, wrenching distillation of the simple desire for someone to be there for you. While swerving through memes, genre pile-ups, and decades, 100 gecs crash into one idea over and over: There are always missed connections.

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In his latest reinvention, the Smashing Pumpkins frontman hires Rick Rubin to deliver a prestige comeback album in the producer’s usual stripped-down and soul-baring mode—but Corgan is no Johnny Cash.

Ogilala

Billy Corgan has good reason to doubt his impulses. “I’ve been wrong about every record I’ve made since Mellon Collie,” the famously ornery musician recently told Spin, and while he qualified that statement with his usual defensiveness, the assertion holds. From his instant punchline of a supergroup, Zwan, to his listless synth-pop album TheFutureEmbrace and, most unforgivably, Zeitgeist, the shrill, quasi-metal Smashing Pumpkins reunion record that chased fans away from the perfectly decent ones that followed, Corgan has either misread the public or misplayed his hand at every turn.
Some artists delight in sabotaging their careers. Although Corgan has at times tried to pass himself off as one of them, he’s not. He’s one of the most transparently approval-craving artists of his era, and lately he hasn’t found much of it. So for his latest solo album, he’s done what so many artists before him have done after admitting they’re in a slump: turn to Rick Rubin, who gives him the same stripped-down makeover the producer has made his signature since pioneering this model of prestige comeback album with Johnny Cash’s American Recordings. Ogilala, Corgan’s first album as William Patrick Corgan—a billing meant to signal candor and reinvention—is so no-frills, so predictably Rick Rubin, that it’s easy to overlook what a radical concession it must have been for one of alt-rock’s most notorious control freaks to outsource its vision to somebody else.
It’s a credit to Corgan’s light touch and his unforced melodic instincts that the album works as well as it does, given how fundamentally ill-conceived it is. Rubin’s back-to-basics approach functions by grounding artists who have somehow strayed from their essence, doing away with any superfluous trappings to remind the world of their indelible talent. That focus can be a revelation for an iconic presence like Cash or Neil Diamond, but Corgan’s presence has never been his draw. Smashing Pumpkins’ hook was the spectacle—the guitars, the fury, the sensory wonder—not the adenoidal outcast at the center of it all. Records like Mellon Collie showed that if you bake a sour apple with enough sugar, cinnamon, and butter, you can create something truly succulent. Rubin, bizarrely, seems to believe fans only want the apple, not the crumble.
And so Ogilala holes up listeners for 40 drumless minutes in close proximity to a voice that even diehards can only tolerate so much of. “Take me as I am,” Corgan sings over strummed guitars and faint washes of synths on “The Spaniards,” one of the record’s many confessional songs that doesn’t actually confess anything. His lyrics are rarely flattered by the scrutiny Rubin’s bare-bones presentation invites. A pun like “Cain isn’t able to build a superstar,” from the album’s opening Bowie tribute, “Zowie,” might have slid mercifully under the radar surrounded by the kerosene-lit Stratocasters of yore. Here it just makes you wonder how many groaners lay hidden on his old records.
The album really should be more interesting than this, because Billy Corgan, for better or worse, is more interesting than this. He’s probably the only person on earth who has owned both a professional wrestling league and a tea shop. And, just days after releasing Ogilala, he casually dropped this nugget on Howard Stern’s show: He swears he witnessed a shapeshifter in his store. “It’s up there with one of the most intense things I’ve ever been through,” he said. Why isn’t that on the album? Some of Corgan’s conspiracy theories, as voiced on “Infowars,” are appalling, but if ever there were a healthy outlet for that kind of runaway imagination, it’s music. Ogilala begs for a little of that weirdness.
Instead Corgan settles for an album that’s tastefully cordial but about as suspenseful as a round of bumper bowling. There are a few moments when everything clicks, when the passive pleasantness gives way to active pleasure, most of them involving a smartly deployed string quartet. Two string tracks at the album’s halfway point, “The Long Goodbye” and “Half-Life of an Autodidact,” hint at the quixotic, Automatic for the People-shaded mood piece Ogilala could have been. Of course, unlike Ogilala, Automatic for the People was an actual gamble. R.E.M. had to piece together that vision themselves; there was no precedent for a Southern alternative band recruiting Led Zeppelin’s bassist to score a symphonic grunge opus. There’s nothing but precedent, though, for a musician of a certain age tossing the keys to Rick Rubin and hoping for the best.


The final two Led Zeppelin LPs, Presence and In Through The Out Door, have been reissued, along with 1982's posthumous odds-and-ends comp Coda.  While easily their weakest albums, they are redeemed by the fact that they are also easily their strangest.

Led Zeppelin: Presence / In Through the Out Door / Coda

In the first six years of Led Zeppelin's existence, they released seven albums' worth of music, and nearly all of it was brilliant. During that time, everything seemed to go their way: they had a bottomless well of songs built on the blues, early rock, British and American folk, psychedelia, and R&B; they had the greatest riff machine the world had ever known in Jimmy Page, and they had hard rock's quintessential drummer in John Bonham. But given their penchant for excess and the hyper-intense life they lived as the world's biggest rock band in the '70s, there was no way it could last. They were getting older and growing tired; they did too many drugs; they were too isolated. In the five-and-a-half years between the February 1975 release of Physical Graffiti and the death of drummer John Bonham that ended the band in September 1980, they released just two albums—Presence in March '76 and In Through the Out Door in August '79. The two LPs, newly reissued (along with 1982's posthumous odds-and-ends comp Coda) to round out what will almost certainly be the last large-scale catalog effort in the lifetime of the band members, were easily their weakest. But both are redeemed by the fact that they are also easily their two strangest.
Presence and In Through the Out Door are opposites. The former was very much driven by Jimmy Page, who wanted badly to keep the band busy during a time of retrenchment following the serious car accident that injured Robert Plant in August 1975. The recording is ultra dry and the simple guitar/amp interface is front-and-center; just one song features an acoustic instrument, and the album has barely any keyboards. Page's strong hand led to an album that puts the focus on the playing and makes the fewest concessions to pop music. It has also developed a cult following in a way that no other single Zeppelin album has. ("Presence is just perfection," Jim O'Rourke told Time Out Tokyo, and given his preference for clean and crisp engineering and arrangements, his admiration makes perfect sense.) It's the Zeppelin album that was least embraced by the radio, with its lengthy songs and general aversion to hooks. But the hard and brittle sound of Presence (at points, it sounds like a Shellac album) has much to admire, not least because you can hear the contributions of each band member so clearly. There are moments of space and silence and very little standing in between the instrument and the listener.
Throughout the album, bassist John Paul Jones and John Bonham are so perfectly in tune they seem like a single organism. Listen to how Jones' bass syncs with Bonham's kick drum on the tumbling stop/start masterpiece "Nobody's Fault But Mine", which certainly ranks with either's greatest moments, or the loping "Hots on for Nowhere", where the pauses serve as a third rhythm instrument. Page keeps his parts unusually lean, emphasizing percussive force over atmosphere. Distortion is used sparingly, as is reverb; though the songs contain many layers of guitars, the focus is on overlapping lines and counterpoint, even at the expense of riffs.
One thing Presence most certainly is not is Plant's album; he sang these songs from a wheelchair, still recovering from a car wreck, and his voice sounds pinched and thin on the group's least inspired tunes. Indeed, the overall lack of melody on Presence shows you just how underrated Zeppelin were in that department (as does the previously unreleased bonus track "10 Ribs & All/Carrot Pod Pod (Pod)", a blandly pretty piano-led instrumental with a chiming acoustic guitar that's the closest Zep ever got to yacht rock). It might be their weakest album, but Presence is among the most special; none of these songs sound like they could have come from another record.
It's hard to believe that In Through the Out Door was the work of the same band. By this point, Page, deep in the throes of heroin addiction, had mostly checked out, and Bonham's chronic alcoholism was reaching a terrifying end stage. Robert Plant's five-year-old son died unexpectedly in 1977 and his grief almost caused his exit from the band. Out of this turmoil came Zeppelin's most singular record, if far from their best.
With Page out of commission, Plant teamed with Jones, always the group's steadying force, and they wrote colorful songs that heavily featured synthesizers. Most of the '60s and '70s veterans who made a synth-heavy album in the '80s were responding to broader trends in pop, but In Through the Out Door doesn't sound like a reaction to anything, least of all new wave. The general mood is dark and inward; Plant's words are often hard to make out, and when you do catch lyrics they are especially cryptic. But there's something restless and experimental about it too, a feeling of open-ended structures being explored.
Out Door is defined by its production sheen; even the most famous guitar part on the album, Page's beautifully broken solo on "In the Evening", sounds like it's been run through a dozen pedals and filters. The dirge "I'm Gonna Crawl" is utterly shapeless, not a ballad so much as a drawn-out moan; "South Bound Suarez" comes at country-tonk from bizarre angles. Where Zep once had direct homages to the music of their youth, now they were creating weirdly synthetic mutant versions of them. Sometimes, as with the Sun-era Elvis trifle, "Hot Dog", they didn't quite work, but the Latin-inspired "Fool in the Rain" is a unique creation that still sounds fresh. The piano is used as a looping rhythmic instrument in the Cuban tradition—there aren't chord changes, exactly—and the feel of the whole is circular and strange. John Bonham, whose nervous system was ravaged by a daily vodka intake that would stop most people's hearts, somehow managed one last burst of genius and created his most memorable and lasting drum line (hear it in isolation and marvel at just how deeply in the pocket he could still play, the utter mastery of his feel). "Carouselambra", a bizarre proggy rave-up that stretches for more than 10 minutes, is impossible to compare to another song.
Coda, collecting outtakes (of which Led Zeppelin did not have many), followed in 1982. The big story on this reissue is the release of tracks recorded by Page and Plant in what in the early '70s was still called Bombay. The tabla and strings certainly bring to mind the flavor of some of their experiments in global music around the time, but truthfully there is nothing particularly noteworthy about the "Bombay Orchestra" tracks. Beyond the new curiosities, Coda's offerings range from one of the band's best single songs ("Hey Hey, What Can I Do"), which was originally relegated to a B-side, to a fantastic III outtake ("Poor Tom"), to a couple of essential live cuts, to a skippable drum solo ("Bonzo's Montreaux") and an exhausted rocker that truly feels like the end ("Darlene"). "Ozone Baby", recorded during the In Through the Out Door sessions, would have easily been that record's catchiest and most accessible song. Coda is a great listen with a skip button close at hand.
Revisiting their final records, it's clear that Zeppelin didn't exactly go out on a high note. But they didn't exactly fade away, either. True to their model, they did something no other rock band of their stature has before: They took a couple of wrong turns and changed into something else rapidly before vanishing. These sets will always leave a peculiar taste in the mouth of Zeppelin fans, but they affirm they were the rock band of the '70s, the decade when rock music ruled the world. Even in their exit, they carried themselves with a majesty and strangeness that simply couldn't be replicated.