Smart reissue of the enduring holiday classic includes alternate takes of several tracks and liner notes detailing the history of the project.

Vince Guaraldi: A Charlie Brown Christmas

A Charlie Brown Christmas

Taken like a spoonful of Nyquil just before you pass out from flu exhaustion, nostalgia is no harm at all. In fact, it’s positively uplifting, even if that lift up hampers your hipness standing to the point where you might as well be culturally asleep. Short trips to what was probably an imaginary past—immaculate family gatherings around the tree, perfect junior high summers with perfect junior high kisses—aren’t necessarily grounds for an inner guilt trip. But depending on your references, be prepared to defend your sleepy tastes to anyone who doesn't care for fuzzy focus warmth or the notion that fond reminisce amounts to anything more than premature senility. Enter Peanuts.
Best Buy racks full of oldie television DVDs and forgotten cartoons might otherwise testify to a healthy market for nostalgia, but Charles Schulz’s mini-verse—kids, a dog, unrequited love, and the complete and utter failure of the adult world to play a part in any of it—suggests that the glowing past wasn’t as warm as we remember. This was the genius of the strip: exposing small epiphanies and defeats as the content of real life, even if the lives involved were cartoons, and most (but not all) of the readers were too young to care about the accuracy of Schulz’s observations. Now enter San Francisco pianist Vince Guaraldi.
Playing a smooth brand of West Coast jazz comparable to Dave Brubeck or a very snappy Bill Evans, and having scored a modest pop hit with “Cast Your Fate to the Wind,” Guaraldi made an easy choice in 1963 for television producer Lee Mendelson as composer for a documentary on Schulz and Peanuts. The doc was made, but never aired; apparently, the networks didn’t want kids hearing any unnecessary “adult” thoughts about Peanuts. So when plans for A Charlie Brown Christmas came to fruition in 1965, Guaraldi’s music—including the classic “Linus and Lucy” theme—got its chance. The rest is history: The special has been rebroadcast every year since its premiere and, though Guaraldi’s death of a heart attack in 1976 (in between sets at a club no less) prevented him from seeing the full extent of his influence on popular culture, it would be hard to name a more recognizable cartoon theme, give or take a Danny Elfman piece.
But then the reissue of Guaraldi’s soundtrack for A Charlie Brown Christmas has a lot more going for it than “Linus and Lucy.” Melancholy covers of “O Tannenbaum,” “What Child Is This?,” “The Christmas Song,” and “Hark, the Herald Angels Sing”—and yes, it has the Peanuts kids singing “loo-loo-loo, l-loo-loo-loo-loo”—make for the perfect dysfunctional holiday music. Certainly, I will make a point this year to get too drunk, thereby spending the week after Christmas listening to this record and regretting telling off my grandma. However, it doesn’t have to be so bad; Guaraldi’s rolling, snow-mystic touches on “What Child Is This?” or his reconstruction of “Little Drummer Boy” as the minimalist bossa “My Little Drum” are hypnotic, faithful mappings of the rhythm of snow falling, or the reflections of people walking by store windows.
And “Linus and Lucy” is here in all its deceptively simple glory. In fact, the motive bass line and a perfect realization of the melody are patterns that should be taught to all beginning piano students as models of efficient finger technique. The closest parallel to this music is Philip Glass, and really, “Linus and Lucy” is a lot more interesting than anything Glass has done in years. Guaraldi’s “Christmas Is Coming” is similarly kinetic, shining with the kind of understated elation you’d expect for any music soundtracking the misadventures of kids always ready to celebrate while perpetually shown the downside of Christmas. If there’s a muted quality to a lot of this music, it’s smiling nonetheless.
The reissue includes alternate takes of several tracks, and great liner notes detailing the history of the project. Even the cover is cool, with an animation still and foldout, faux LP-style jacket. If all of this screams “stocking stuffer,” please don’t let me stop you. Nostalgic though it may be, anything that’s as full of introspection, empathy, disappointment, loneliness, and the perpetual hope of better things around the corner can’t be all bad. Like the strip, Guaraldi’s songs here are small, observant miracles.


The rapper’s latest album, a sleek modern update to a classic formula—helmed entirely by producer Futurewave—expresses a tenderness rarely seen in his catalog.

Razor’s Edge

Rome Streetz is used to having his back against the wall. Shortly after he was born, his mother moved the two from London to New York, an area where he’d absorb rap music and begin to fully embrace street life. By 14, he’d caused enough trouble for his mother to send him back to London to live with his aunt. Rome’s fascination with New York rap and London’s emerging grime scene in the early 2000s stoked a fire even the Atlantic Ocean couldn’t extinguish. While traveling between countries, he honed his skills, settling on a hard-nosed nasal delivery that nearly earned him a record deal. The deal fell through, he spent time in an American prison, and by the early 2010s, hip-hop had traded the steely-eyed boom-bap Rome had used to build his name for something glossier.
By the time Rome released his 2016 album I Been Thru Mad Shit, the lane he thought was closed forever had been reopened by neoclassicists like Roc Marciano and Griselda. Rome’s voice, high-pitched and nimble as a Gemstar, fit well within this new wave of rap, and he spent the next five years cutting his own path forward. On “Bible or the Rifle,” a song near the end of Razor’s Edge—the latest of at least 10 projects he’s released in the last half-decade—he sums up his ethos with a single line: “Always knew how to turn a lick into a Benjamin.” Never one to let a good opportunity go to waste, Rome reunites with producer Futurewave—who also crafted 2019’s Headcrack—to turn the line separating brash raps and stark intimacy into powder.
Razor’s Edge is the most recent in a long line of Rome projects helmed by one producer. Just this year, he tamed Cypress Hill member DJ Muggs’s grab bag of grimy breakbeats on the excellent Death & The Magician. Where Muggs’s sound is flashier and demands space next to the featured rapper, Futurewave’s style is more subdued, content to set a mood and keep the groove consistent. As an MC with a deceptively adaptable voice, Rome thrives in both scenarios. His performances are structured but elastic, conforming to the bedrock of beats instead of barreling through them.
He sounds as comfortable over the syncopated shuffle of “Same Way” as he does over the standard march of opening track “Mud Into Moet,” casually stretching rhyme schemes to their breaking point. “Moet” flows so effortlessly, it’s easy to miss the fact that Rome keeps the first rhyme scheme going for nearly a dozen bars: “The kicks I rock is made of snakeskin/from all the cobras that I killed on my lawn/They smile in your face, give you handshakes, but want you gone/Salty ’cause I’m far beyond all the shit they on/They washed up, lookin’ sick, and my whole fit Vuitton.” There’s a casualness to Rome’s ferocity, an unpredictable energy that pushes him past being the millionth copy of Nas or Dizzee Rascal.
Many songs on Razor’s Edge express a tenderness rarely seen in his catalog. The title track is an impassioned back-and-forth between Rome and an angel, portrayed by rapper Chyna Streetz; he laments New York’s poisonous street life and its gravitational pull while she reminds him how lucky he is to have survived at all. Both “Sage or Gunsmoke” and “Bible or the Rifle” play up this duality down to their titles, the struggle of having one foot in and one foot out in the world of organized crime. It doesn’t matter whether Rome is puffing his chest out or retreating inward; he’s stylized and grounded all at once, as rugged and colorful as a graffiti mural come to life.
Rome’s work had already been canonized within the modern hip-hop underground before Razor’s Edge. Guest spots on Westside Gunn songs and the aforementioned album with Muggs are their own seals of approval, enough to ensure that backpackers, old and young, will be buying whatever Rome sells for years to come. But even though this is his third album in eight months, he sounds no less hungry than he did crafting odes to Nautica windbreakers in 2019. Grit and all, Razor’s Edge is a sleek modern update to a classic formula.

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Full of Hell & Merzbow is a collaboration between Maryland grindcore band Full of Hell and Japanese noise legend Merzbow. Combining noise and metal is a worthwhile pursuit, giving groups the chance to synthesize noise’s freer destruction with metal’s more structured attack.

Merzbow / Full of Hell: Full of Hell & Merzbow

Full of Hell & Merzbow

It’s strange to think that the collaboration between Maryland grindcore band Full of Hell and Japanese noise legend Merzbow had its roots in a t-shirt. In the design, Full of Hell appropriated the album art of Merzbow’s 1996 album Pulse Demon, a pulsing visual that works as a testament to the hypnotic waves of that collection. Depending on your opinion of Full of Hell, you’d either call it a tribute or a ripoff. Either way, rarely do shirts lead to actual collaboration, something that came about here when the band met Balázs Pándi—who’s served as Merzbow’s drummer as of late—while on tour in Europe.
Combining noise and metal is a worthwhile pursuit, with groups like Portland’s Knelt Rote and Toronto’s Column of Heaven synthesizing noise’s freer destruction with metal’s more structured attack. In fact, both genres seems to be reversing roles—many of the more critically acclaimed noise records, like Wolf Eyes’ 2004 breakout Burned Mind and Pharmakon’s Bestial Burden, are praised for incorporating structure, while the more extreme ends of black and death metal are rapidly becoming looser and more feral. (Impetuous Ritual’s Unholy Congregation Of Hypocritical Ambivalence, from earlier in the year, is a prime example.) Merzbow is no stranger to metal, having released several albums with Boris, contributed to two songs on Sunn O)))’s Flight of the Behemoth, and has cited death metal as influence on 1994’s Venereology, released through the since-shuttered Relapse sub-label Release Entertainment. This collaboration, however, is frustrating because it falls short of its goals, in part due to Merzbow’s too-reduced role and that Full of Hell don’t make up for the missing space.
"Burst Synapse" begins with a quick rush of powerviolence, an even quicker patch of Merzbow’s static, then continues to be dominated by Full of Hell’s rote playing. "Gordian Knot" and "Humming Miter" offend more in this matter, where Merzbow feels squandered. He doesn’t get to show any of his strengths. Full of Hell are one of those bands that can get people moshing in clubs, but can’t capture that intensity in the studio, and it’s more than obvious here. Merzbow isn’t quite able to bolster their riffs, unlike in Rock Dream, where he helps make Boris’ riffs grand and ecstatic. For his reputation as the antithesis of music, Merzbow has a strong command of rhythm, and if Full of Hell are gonna use Demon's art to gas up their van, they should have embraced that record’s dynamics, not simply its textures.
Some potential arises toward the album’s conclusion, where Merzbow begins to sync with Full of Hell. The blastbeats of "Mute" feel more unhinged thanks to his noise, for once, overcoming the guitar. "High Fells" sees Full of Hell dooming out, and in the process, giving Merzbow more room to cast a wide shadow. There’s even saxophone on here, and in closer "Fawn Heads and Unjoy", which is not only a nod to Merzbow’s love of free jazz, but also lends unpredictability. Full of Hell restrain themselves even more on "Ludjet Av Gud", dominated by booming floor toms and drifting noise undercurrents. (Some editions of the album come with Sister Fawn, a bonus disc of outtakes. They’re long jams of noise and drums, and even if they don’t form a cohesive whole, they’re a much more satisfying listen than the actual record.)
In the end here, Merzbow feels more like a over-hyped, under-trotted guest. It doesn’t even have the muster to serve as a compelling entryway for hardcore kids to get into noise. (As great as Demon and Venereology are, they may be a bit overwhelming for novices; Merzbow’s collaborations with Boris would be smoother introductions.) In an interview with the Quietus last year, Merzbow mentioned a forthcoming, more grindcore-oriented record called Merzgrind. Maybe there, we’ll find the emancipating fury that's lacking in this Full of Hell collaboration.


Lil Peep and iLoveMakonnen’s collaborative album reflects both the kinship they share as pop outsiders and queer rappers. It’s the rare posthumous rap album that actually honors an artist’s legacy.

DIAMONDS

Posthumous rap releases can sometimes leave a sour taste in the mouth. All too often, they are a last-ditch effort at cashing in on an artist's legacy. In the first two years after Lil Peep’s tragic death, his label released several collaborations that felt stitched-together, even designed for commercial appeal: “Falling Down,” a song Peep recorded before his passing, got an unfinished verse from XXXTentacion, recorded prior to his own death in 2018. Meanwhile, some try-hard bars from Fall Out Boy’s Patrick Stump were awkwardly inserted into “I’ve Been Waiting,” a previously unreleased iLoveMakonnen and Peep collaboration. Since then, Lil Peep’s estate has taken a more sensitive and legacy-minded approach. The focus is now on remastering Peep’s archives and clearing unlicensed samples in his work, instead of constructing new music from the incomplete remains of his recordings.
Both “Falling Down” and “I’ve Been Waiting” originated during Peep’s 2017 sessions in London with Makonnen, which have circulated for several years in bootleg form and now appear in full on the joint album DIAMONDS. According to Peep’s estate, DIAMONDS represents the last “cohesive full body of work” produced by the artist in his lifetime, but it’s also not entirely finished—while many of these songs might sound complete, it’s hard to know whether or not Peep would have kept tweaking with them had he lived, so Gothboiclique producers Fish Narc and Smokeasac, regular Peep collaborators, made a deliberate choice to simply remaster the project rather than add to it. DIAMONDS is not exactly a rough draft, but there’s a sense of looseness that suggests it hasn’t been aggressively curated. The 81-minute runtime is significantly longer than most projects Peep or Makonnen have ever released, resembling a folder of demos more than the tight pop album it might have been.
Makonnen facilitated and approved the tacked-on features from both XXXTentacion and Stump yet those guest appearances feel indicative of how the Atlanta rapper has too often been shut out of hip-hop’s mainstream, in part because of his queerness; it wasn’t enough for the music to stand on its own, there had to be a bigger name attached. DIAMONDS is lightly buffed but largely unpolished, a form that not only preserves the artistic kinship between Makonnen and Peep as pop outsiders, but the queer sensitivity that their work shares. Several months prior to his passing, Peep came out on social media as bisexual, and the pronouns that both he and Makonnen use to refer to their lovers vary throughout the album. Though the two may have inhabited slightly different lanes of rap, they both knew how it felt to be queer men in a frequently hostile industry, and that common experience of identity is part of what drew them together. In an interview with Grammy.com, Makonnen stated that Peep specifically wanted to team up because he felt that a collaborative album from two openly queer hip-hop artists could be a balm to listeners. “[Peep] said, ‘I feel like we can really make a change in the world by showing this because so many of us young fans and young people are dealing with all types of things,’” recalled Makonnen.
In a brief documentary about the LP, producer Fish Narc explains that there was a sense of “joy” that set DIAMONDS apart from previous sessions, with Makonnen’s infectious energy renewing Peep’s focus as an artist. What distinguishes DIAMONDS is that feeling of exuberance, the kind of outright pleasure that can only be generated by two artists joined in creative kismet. There’s a casual affection between Makonnen and Peep that stands in sharp relief to, well, pretty much almost any collaborative project between male rappers you could name. The chemistry is creative, and there’s even a sense of intimacy here. On “Smokin’,” Peep doesn’t show any insecurity about calling Makonnen “baby,” while on “Hocus Pocus,” he coyly thumbs his nose at the no-homo haters: “Want me out the way/Say I’m gay, but they really want me.” DIAMONDS marks an evolution for Peep: He exhibits a newfound vocal confidence, and a sense of freedom around publicly discussing his own identity.
The two artists often function as foils: Makonnen’s voice is bright and bubbly, while Peep’s has a harsher edge. As opposite as they might often sound, both are unafraid to go off-key and offbeat, completely blurring the line between singing and rapping. Tracks like “Nasty Names” and “Sidelines” feature the alt rock-tinged guitars and anguished flow that Peep became known for, but DIAMONDS frequently leaves depressive emo rap behind for up-tempo synth-pop. Mixed in with the trap snares and hi-hats are gentle keyboards, as on “Hypnotized,” or the glistening bells of “Favorite Drug.” Over a propulsive club beat, “November” is a romantic chiptune fantasy, while “Guiltiness” recalls a duo like Erasure or Pet Shop Boys more than any rap tag team. The 12-minute fly-on-the wall jam session “Diamonds Piano Freestyle” documents the pure friendship between Makonnen and Peep, but it also offers an apt metaphor for these once-obscured gems: “I’m a diamond/Just waiting to be found.”
Even on an early song like 2016’s “Beamer Boy,” Lil Peep vocally expressed frustration with the person that he felt fans expected him to be: “They don’t wanna hear that, they want that real shit/They want that drug talk, that ‘I can’t feel’ shit.” On DIAMONDS, Peep explores new sonic directions alongside Makonnen, embracing a sense of positivity that radiates from the project. Where so often Peep rapped about self-destruction, letting his listeners know that they weren’t alone in their emotional pain, DIAMONDS exudes a feeling of uplift, leaving the darkness behind in search of something brighter and more loving.


Nils Frahm released a record of solo piano music for free recently, and it is almost exactly what you might expect from a record like this one; it’s spare, it’s lyrical, it’s generally quiet, and it’s very pretty. During its best moments it brings to mind some of the work of Harold Budd, where melody and mood become two sides of the same coin.

Solo

For many music obsessives, a first close listen to Erik Satie’s Trois Gymnopédies changes everything. The French composer’s three 19th-century piano works serve as an introduction to one kind of minimalism—maximum emotion created with the fewest ingredients—and they show what can happen when you have the right note in the right place at the right time. The formal elegance of the pieces, along with the underlying sense of yearning and clear surface beauty, have made them a natural fit for advertising and film, and the Gymnopédies long ago became ubiquitous, their structure a sort of auditory cliché. But even with the overexposure, the power of Satie’s pieces are still there inside of us, guiding how we respond to simple piano music that leaves a lot of space. Whenever contemporary composers—from Chilly Gonzales to Eluvium to Jandek to Grouper to Aphex Twin—use a piano in this way, they tap into these buried associations.
German composer and producer Nils Frahm’s most recent full-length, his fine 2013 album Spaces, featured plenty of piano but found him putting the instrument into a number of different contexts and adding electronics (the set also included live tracks). But among the earliest works of his career were two albums of solo piano work, and he returns here with a third, an album he gave away free on Twitter two weeks ago. Solo is almost exactly what you might expect from a record like this one; it’s spare, it’s lyrical, it’s generally quiet, and it’s very pretty. Your mileage will vary based on whether that is enough.
Sometimes solo piano albums can get too sentimental, and can begin to sound like bad TV cues; sometimes they can be a little dry and academic, and can come over like an instrumental exercise. This one mostly fits into "just right" territory, balancing general loveliness with space and suggestion. Frahm's piano is creaky and there's a percussive tone coursing through some of these tracks, an extra "pling" that marks time with every keystroke. That extra texture gives a piece like "Merry" a tiny bit of grit to offset a gorgeous melody that might otherwise be overbearing, and gives the more downcast "Some" an extra ounce of dark weight. During its best moments Solo brings to mind some of the lower-stakes work of Harold Budd, where melody and mood become two sides of the same coin.
The album’s second half finds Frahm playing more with form, but oddly the variety, rather than being welcome, actually breaks the spell of the album’s first half. "Wall" is a loud, pulsing piece that is interesting enough on its own but derails the album’s gentle mood, while "Immerse!" leans toward meandering abstraction, foregoing melody and in no way justifying its almost 11-minute length. Still, for a free album that sounds very nice in a room, Solo mostly delivers, tapping into that very specific identification with the solo piano as an expression of wistful sadness.


The Body / Full of Hell: One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache

One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache

During a interview about another album his prolific and genre-flouting metal duo The Body had just released, drummer Lee Buford decided he needed to clarify something about the pervasive bleakness of his band’s work: it's "negative, but...a hopeful negative." Not that you'd be able to tell any of that uplift from the curdled sound of the record he was ostensibly there to talk about. Its title was No One Deserves Happiness and its sound matched the sentiment. But traditionally Buford and guitarist Chip King have used their many collaborations (in the past two years alone they've made full lengths with Thou, Krieg, Vampillia, and the Haxan Cloak) for something a little more fun, relatively speaking—a chance to at least stretch the boundaries of their slow, sickly grinding compositions into unfamiliar territory.
That was never really an option when making a record with the Maryland grindcore four-piece Full of Hell; the two groups share too much in common. The Body work in textured, patient torture, death by a thousand cuts, whereas Full of Hell operate more like a woodchipper—but they’re united in the all-consuming gloom that consumes all of their best work. Bearing a title culled from one of Courtney Love's most famously vindictive proclamations, One Day You Will Ache Like I Ache is a document of the overwhelming power of depression. It's not life-affirming, as Buford seems to argue, but the sheer force of the sound makes a compelling argument for diving into the black anyway.
And that’s sort of what they do. From the record’s opening moments, a subwoofer-rumbling kick drum and a snare trace the edges of an abyss before Full of Hell vocalist Dylan Walker’s steel-wool vocals give you a shove. The effect, especially as it bleeds into the sample-apocalypse of “Fleshworks” is something like standing uncomfortably close to a late-period Rothko canvas—the distressed blues and blacks expand to fill your whole field of vision and any shifts are more textural than tonal. It’s one-dimensional in the same sense that those final paintings were, fixated on the void in a way that’s emotionally affecting—monomania can be compelling, after all.
Throughout they’re taking risks, abandoning straightforward metal trappings to pile noxious noise blasts on shredded 808s (“Bottled Urn”) or turning Leonard Cohen ballads into doom-metal dystopias (though the hypodermic fantasies and Christian imagery on Songs for a Room’s “The Butcher” make that a pretty easy task). But even as they explore alien aesthetics, the Body and Full of Hell are constantly finding ways to uphold the spirit of each other's work. They’re united in their disposition, up until the record’s final moment, a sample of the HBO movie You Don’t Know Jack that seems to sum up what precedes it: “Loss, loss, loss, loss, loss.”


The Miami duo’s new album builds on the strengths of their recent mixtape with speaker-rattling songs about pleasure, power, and strong women unapologetically getting their own way.

G I R L C O D E

City Girls’ G I R L C O D E replicates the winning formula of their mixtape Period: speaker-rattling Southern beats, how-to pointers for scheming on rich men, anthems for defying haters and broke boys. Post-Period, JT and Yung Miami secured a feature on a No. 1 hit, among other feats, making them the latest rap sensation from the Atlanta label Quality Control. But ahead of their first opus, like their labelmates Migos, they’ve been overcoming legal obstacles.
On “Intro (#FREEJT),” they address the situation in characteristically defiant terms. The track begins with an incoming call from JT, who is in federal prison for fraud. “Lord knows that I miss her,” admits Miami, “But I'ma hold this shit down for my sister.” Later, JT backs her up: “Get they asses, Miami, don’t let up on ’em hoes.” Their show of sisterhood against the odds is a rare glimpse of vulnerability on an ego-driven tale. G I R L C O D E has no time for feelings. Here, pleasure is non-negotiable, money is power, and being a woman in control is key for survival.
Miami and JT are upfront about sex but have different rules of engagement. Take “On the Low,” which could be a course on risky text messages. Miami wants sex in transit (“I need brain on the train/Let's leave stains on the plane”) while JT prefers nights in and no trace of her escapades on Instagram (“You ain’t on my page, but you in my guts”). When it comes to love, however, their guards are up. The moody “Give It a Try” features a sprung Jacquees, but they dismiss the singer’s begging. “I kinda wish I had time for it, but that love shit not important,” Miami raps, while JT is even more unforgiving: “All men the same, all they ass do is lie.”
It’s no wonder City Girls want men to pay up for their time. The mindset isn’t new. Gwen Guthrie sang, “No romance without finance,” on her 1986 dance-R&B hit “Aint Nothin’ Goin’ on But the Rent.” But City Girls are more savage, especially on “Season,” a schemers’ holiday featuring Lil Baby. “How you a boss and you don’t own shit?” he snaps, interrupting their celebration. The polarizing lyric puts “Season” in the family of notable male-versus-female rap tropes, like Gucci Mane’s “I Think I Love Her” featuring Ester Dean and Project Pat’s “Chickenhead” featuring La Chat.
The bulk of G I R L C O D E is a ready-to-queue party playlist, including “Season,” that’s top-40 friendly. “Twerk” samples the bounce-influenced classic “Choppa Style” and enlists rap princess Cardi B, conjuring a pregame gathering for a girls night out. “Broke Boy,” a warning for the guys “lying on they dick,” invokes an HBCU football halftime show where City Girls are the bandleaders. The trappy “Clout Chasin’” would be an on-the-mark critique of Internet trolls, were it not for a homophobic slur from JT (“I’m tired of you hoes and you niggas sittin’ ‘round, actin’ like dykes.”) Miami was also recently called out for homophobic remarks. These avoidable blemishes dampen the enjoyment of a satisfying project, especially for their black gay fanbase.
If Period was an introduction to the City Girls’ sumptuous lifestyle, then G I R L C O D E is the sequel that proves their mastery of its acquisition. A female rap duo with relatable come-up stories, spitting lyrics detailing women getting their way, is a novelty. The luxury they chase is an escape from poverty, a common theme in hip-hop. But women face more challenges in achieving prosperity—and for City Girls, finessing guys willing to trick is their cunning way of tipping the scales.


Floridian death metal veterans Obituary remain a beacon of consistency. This self-titled record is their most energetic effort since reforming in 2003, and it proves their vitality.

Obituary

Of the bands that define Florida death metal, which also strongly defines American Death Metal as a whole, Obituary remain a beacon of consistency. Beginning in 1984 under the Executioner moniker, Obituary built their sound around stripping the Gothic cobwebs off Celtic Frost’s mid-paced riffing. They let the guitars become a humid swamp, thick and airy. Singer John Tardy defined death metal vocals by getting as guttural as guitarist Trevor Peres’ rhythms, removing any last vestiges of thrashy snarling. Obituary have been held as models for keeping it simple, and for fans, the idea of a new album from them can seem predictable. But their self-titled 10th record proves Obituary don’t suffer for sticking to their identity.
Peres and drummer Donald Tardy remain at the heart of Obituary and feed off each other in a way few death metal bands do. Peres sounds more mangled when Donald speeds up, and already thick riffs feel impenetrable as his drumming slows. As such, Peres’ low, groveling guitar tone is more flexible than it seems. Obituary begins with two faster numbers, “Brave” and “Sentence Day”—affirmations that they’re not giving up anytime soon. Both are busy for a band who prefers to let a groovy riff sink in, and John in particular lunges with a youthfulness that rivals the band’s heyday in the late ’80s and early ’90s.
Some of Obituary’s best work has come from letting flashiness creep in. In 1990, for example, Cause of Death had its sludge punctured by James Murphy’s divebombs and neoclassically-influenced soloing. That album contained their most developed songwriting in terms of leads. Likewise, thanks to Ken Andrews’ lead work here, Obituary is their most energetic record since reforming in 2003 (they originally disbanded in ’97). On “shredder” records, the disconnect between the fireworks of the guitarist and the tepid rhythm section can be jarring. But Peres and Donald’s strong foundation keeps that from happening.
Andrews can also bow to death metal tradition, as he does with the spaced-out, Death-like leads in “Kneel Before Me.” Meanwhile, “Sentence” ends with a one-man guitar battle, as Andrews heralds not just the dueling harmonies of Judas Priest’s Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing but also Slayer’s chaotic interplay between Jeff Hanneman and Kerry King. He’s not just versatile; he sounds like he’s genuinely excited. And that exuberance doesn’t arise from nowhere—Donald and Andrews were once members of Andrew W.K.’s backing band.
This record honors all of Obituary’s history by not compromising. Its reliability is peppered with unrest. Obituary ends the opposite of how it began—slow and yet somehow impatient. “Straight to Hell” recalls the dim flickering-light riffs of 1992’s “The End Complete,” resulting in a seediness that’s constantly promised in death metal and rarely achieved. “Turned Into Stone” centers their Celtic Frost worship, a more gradual unsettling than some of the record’s faster pillages. With these contrasts, Obituary show they’re keenly aware of dynamics in a way most bands could stand to afford. In 2017, the challenge for a veteran metal act is to not relentlessly innovate, but to mine any small new parts of their sound. Kreator and Immolation have proved successful in this regard already, and Obituary, while sticking closer to their roots, have also proven their vitality here.


The debut solo album from Pavo Pavo’s Eliza Bagg, a collection of pop songs with subtle experimental undertones, is her most outré release to date.

Angels on the Slope

In her work with the band Pavo Pavo, and as a frequent collaborator of artists like Julianna Barwick and Tim Hecker, Eliza Bagg writes complicated arrangements and string parts masked by doe-like melodies. She exerts god-tier control over her soprano, approaching her work with the dogged precision of serious classical training. The Los Angeles-based polymath brings all this fussy expertise to her debut solo record, Angels on the Slope, under the moniker Lisel. A collection of pop songs with subtle experimental undertones, it’s Bagg’s most outré release to date, albeit one overcrowded by gaudy production effects.
On first listen, Angels on the Slope suggests a pop album seeped in the work of Björk and early Grimes. It’s hard not to notice the chintziness of the keyboards that serve as a backbone on “Hunker Down,” or the sweaty, mildly hypnotic drum machine loop. You could dance to it, or at least bop your head as it plays in the background of a fashionable loft party. Listen a few times more, and you’ll notice the frenetic bursts of saxophone and superfluous Auto-Tune accents. It’s certainly an interesting concept, to imbue straight-laced baroque pop with elements of dance music, but it makes for a convoluted way to bridge the world of freaky orchestral pop and the decidedly less freaky world of prefab synth music.
“Digital Light Field” centers on Bagg’s spectacular voice, spun through yet another layer of Auto-Tune and immersed in naïve pop textures, plus a couple of densely arpeggiated synths. The song is apparently about the light emitted by cell phones, but the lyrics are muddled by enough distortion that you can’t really tell. Angels on the Slope is not a lyrics record, and it doesn’t have to be. The intrigue lies in the mechanics of the arrangements, and in Bagg’s ability to keep you on your toes, never allowing the apparent sheen of seriousness to become too comfortable. That’s not to say there aren’t bland moments: “Hollowmaker” drags, and the overproduced “Mirage” leans a little too hard into self-consciously weird ’80s pastiche, leaving Bagg sounding lost.
Angels on the Slope can’t boast the kinds of surprises that make you jump out of your seat. It’s more about the joys of subtle dissonance, and the need to be unburdened by genre. On “Bloodletting,” the album’s centerpiece, Bagg allows herself to go entirely operatic. Her vocals are pristine, free of over-stylized production tricks. A piano opens like a Venus fly trap, while a saxophone’s upper registers flutter into its mouth; in the song’s soft corners, a synthesizer rotates with the precision of hands on an antique watch. On an otherwise flashy and cluttered record, “Bloodletting” is a moment of lucidity. Bagg has all of the skill and creativity to make beautiful music. It’s time for her to let go of the noise.


Working with producer Jay Joyce and Nashville session musicians, the masked cult figure adopts the widescreen scale of mainstream country while stretching his eccentricities to their limits.

Bronco

A gay cowboy with South African and Canadian roots who performs with his face hidden behind a fringed mask, Orville Peck seems like a figure destined to reside on the margins of pop culture. Somehow, this former punk—he guards his true identity but has acknowledged he played in a punk band prior to inventing the Peck persona—struck a nerve with his 2019 debut, Pony, as the novelty of his outlandish act gained audiences far beyond the indie-rock world where he got his start. Soon, Peck made the leap from curiosity to cult figure, climbing his way up the bill at festivals, hosting an episode of the Netflix documentary series This Is Pop, signing with Sony Music, and, to top it all off, convincing Shania Twain—the biggest singer ever to come out of Canada, where he got his start—to sing on Show Pony, the follow-up to his debut.
Bronco, the first full-length released under his new deal with Columbia, is the polar opposite of the spare, spooky Pony. Cut with Jay Joyce—the producer behind all of Eric Church’s albums, along with excellent records by Miranda Lambert, Brandy Clark, Brothers Osborne, and Ashley McBryde—Bronco is so bold and colorful, it’s as if it was written with the silver screen in mind. The escalation of scale feels less like an attempt to dive into the country mainstream than the sign of an idiosyncratic artist seizing all available opportunities to stretch his eccentricities to their limits.
Delivered with all the urgency of a CinemaScope potboiler, “Daytona Sand” gets Bronco off to a galloping start, establishing the album’s musical and emotional parameters: The sounds are overheated, the stories told in arid detail. Peck populates his songs with same-sex love, lust, and longing, never lingering on the fact that open homosexuality remains rare within country music. Then again, Bronco hardly sounds or feels like modern country. Peck weaves a tapestry of mid-century American music, grounding himself in the rock and country made somewhere between the emergence of Elvis Presley and the rise of the Beatles while dabbling in the sun-bleached hippie hangover of the early 1970s. Many of the best moments are nods to that progressive era, especially the shimmering “The Curse of the Blackened Eye” and the warm sighs of “Outta Time,” with references to the PCH and Malibu evoking the peak era of soft rock. “C’mon Baby, Cry” also feels quintessentially Californian, as its swelling chorus, deep reverb, and nimble melody conjure memories of AM golden oldies.
The effectiveness of these pastiches is a testament to Jay Joyce’s skill. Augmenting Peck’s touring band with a number of Nashville session musicians, Joyce helps Peck articulate his vision of an invented American past, giving these fantasias gritty gravitas while managing the trick of being self-aware but not camp. The instrumental details suggest a Nashville sound unmoored from commercial considerations, while the bottomless echo evokes the dusty landscapes created by Lee Hazlewood and Duane Eddy. As on Pony, the ghost of Roy Orbison lurks at the heart of the melodrama. Mostly, though, Bronco sounds like a gothic Elvis Presley, a connection Peck underscores with multiple winks at the King, such as the pointed joke in “Outta Time”: “I meet a girl who’s trying to shoot the breeze/She tells me she don’t like Elvis/I say I want a little less conversation please.”
The emphasis on the rhinestone icon inevitably highlights Bronco’s one failing: The album would be better if Peck could actually sing. Peck may be a master vocalizer capable of wringing maximum ardor out of a song, but he alternates between a portentous mumble and a throaty bellow, the kind of histrionics that were once the speciality of Elvis impersonators. When the production is as over the top as Peck himself, it can be easy to excuse—if not quite ignore—these affectations, but whenever he’s relatively unadorned, as on “Let Me Drown” and “City of Gold,” his unsteady, amelodic quaver is difficult to ignore. All these tics were on Pony, too, yet there they added to the charm. Here, as part of a grander spectacle, they become a distraction—a nagging element that keeps Bronco feeling earthbound.


Tom Krell follows 2010's terrific Love Remains with a low-key, four-song release that affirms there is something special about this project.

Just Once EP

Tom Krell's debut LP as How to Dress Well, last year's Love Remains, consisted mostly of songs gathered from numerous digital EPs he'd been posting on his blog. Love Remains picked the best of these tracks and arranged them into a set that felt like a coherent outline of the project: ethereal home recordings, more about mood and texture than lyrics or melody, that draw from mainstream pop and R&B but transform some of the formal qualities of those genres via a lo-fi, "feel"-oriented setting. Since then, critics have discussed Frank Ocean, the Weeknd, and other artists alongside How to Dress Well to define a loose trend of the young, urban hip embracing a version of R&B, but to me Krell's music has always sounded more like an art project and less like something that truly touches on what is, after all, a supremely populist (and popular) genre. Without the crackling digital distortion, words buried under a mountain of cheap reverb, and blurred visual imagery, How to Dress Well's songs are skeletal, to say the least.
As good as Love Remains was, there was a distinct feeling of "Where can this project go next?" It's a common question these days, when adopting a ready-made style is as easy as installing a new Tumblr theme and bands are sometimes more about abstract ideas than individual expression (which shouldn't be taken as a criticism). "How to Dress Well" is the "thing," in other words, not any individual song or record; the project itself is where the expressive possibility lies. So how has that project changed? And does it need to? To his credit, Krell took the right tack here by putting out a low-key, limited release built around a different concept, something that in no way feels like a follow-up. Just Once is a four-song EP that collects two previously released tracks bearing the name "Suicide Dream", adds a third with that title, and throws in a new version of "Decisions", what I would argue is Krell's best track to date. All four songs have been recorded with a string quartet, and the set was inspired by and is dedicated to a friend of Krell's who passed away.
There's something a little funny about the idea of going from blown-out lo-fi to a freaking string quartet in the space of a single release. But the truly weird thing about Just Once is how the songs once rendered by Krell's presumably cheap home production don't sound all that different given the conservatory approach here. His vocals are still coated in reverb, the intertwining harmonies still given the same arrangements, and it turns out that those elements are what make How to Dress Well's sound distinct. Just Once still feels slightly crude and handmade, despite the instrumentation involved, and there's no mistaking it for anyone else.
The old and new "Suicide Dream" tracks work well together to evoke a sense of yearning and loss. And "Decisions", with its waltz-time shuffle and signature pause every fourth measure, is still glorious, the sound of a song drawing fuzzy, abstracted versions of about five different emotions and swirling them together into one grand whole. Just Once also serves as a potential argument that How to Dress Well is best in short four- or five-song bursts, the way the first few EPs arrived-- you get the feeling Krell's songs evoke for 18 or 20 minutes, and then you move on. Sure, there's no avoiding the fact that some of these songs are appearing for the third time. The nagging "what now?" question isn't going away. But it can be filed away for later.


The 20-year-old singer-songwriter’s clear vocals and candid lyrics feel at home in the Philadelphia DIY scene that raised her.

Make Yourself at Home

Before Sofia Verbilla began making music as Harmony Woods, she was dragging friends to gigs around her native Philadelphia, introducing her peers to the city’s DIY scene and pining for a chance to meet her local rock heroes. Inspired by the same bands she moshed to, Verbilla finished writing her first song when she was 16. By 18, she was playing solo sets at the same house show space that members of Modern Baseball once called home. Some of the band even helped her record Harmony Woods’ debut, 2017’s Nothing Special. But there was surely something special about Verbilla; with crystal-clear vocals and evocative lyrics, she was primed to become a fixture of Philly’s underground.
The title of Harmony Woods’ follow-up LP, Make Yourself at Home, is less welcoming than it appears: “So make yourself at home, although you weren’t invited,” Verbilla offers on lead single “Best Laid Plans.” It’s the kind of passive-aggressive comment you might make to someone who’s crashed on your couch a few nights too many, but it’s also an apt summary of a record that examines self-sabotage. Verbilla sings about devoting too much emotional real estate to people who don’t necessarily deserve it, or—in her own meme-formatted words—romanticizing their toxic behaviors. She’s learning to prioritize her own well-being, and Make Yourself at Home unearths the ugly side of that maturation.
Verbilla is an affecting lyricist; her words are candid, unglamorous, and often graphic recollections of trauma. “I can’t feel safe around you/Not when you’re like this,” she laments in the jarring “Misled,” as if channeling pain directly from childhood. “When I was young/My mother’s lover acted the same exact way.” The album also describes the agonizing process of unpicking an abusive relationship, alluding to domestic violence and gaslighting. “You slam the car door shut accidentally/Profusely apologize/You say, ‘That’s not like me,’” she sings on “The City’s Our Song,” with enough hindsight to realize it was indeed characteristic of her subject. “Now all I want is the truth/But you’re frightening me instead/You say, ‘I think you’ve been misled,’” she sings in “Misled.” Verbilla regularly employs her villains’ dialogue, and Make Yourself at Home can feel as much about them as it is about her.
She’s also a fan of recycling lyrics: “Seasons change, people stay the same,” she muses in both “Best Laid Plans” and closer “Halt.” “One day we will die/And only ghosts will be our friends,” she sings in “The City’s Our Song,” only to reiterate the thought on “Ghosts.” On first pass, it can feel lazy—but repeated listens suggest that these are simply Verbilla’s mantras on humanity and mortality. The more hurt she reveals (“Another trauma I’ll have to unpack,” she wails in “Burden”), the more weight her duplicated words bear.
While Verbilla finds strength in this poetry, she’s yet to hit her stride as a musician. “Best Laid Plans” and “The City’s Our Song” boast her boldest, most dynamic choruses, but few moments are equal to them. Compositionally, Make Yourself at Home is rather simple: There are more power chords than intricate riffs, and most of the hooks are a little too banal to stick. It’s easy to wish there was something more complex in the music of Harmony Woods—but after you hear Verbilla’s narratives, it’s also pretty easy to forgive her.


The 78-year-old folk legend remains in a spirit full of joy, an embodiment of old-time string band chaos and a bastion of enthusiasm for the legacy of music as storytelling.

Holiday for Strings

Communicating unbridled enthusiasm the same way Johnny Rotten once vocalized a sneer, Peter Stampfel’s singing is the type that might either drive people from rooms or pull them closer. An underground musician in the early 1960s and an underground musician now, the fiddler-banjoist’s gleeful howl has always framed his music as belonging to some faction of the other, as symbolic as a fuzzed-out guitar once seemed to be. Except in the 21st century, with the out-of-control charge of the Stooges’ “Search and Destroy” most lately heard in an Audi ad campaign, Stampfel’s voice continues to be exactly as untamable as it was in the ’60s, an aural pointer to a wild bohemia.
On Holiday For Strings, the 78-year-old Stampfel remains in a spirit of full folky joy, an embodiment of old-time string band chaos before its somber post-O Brother, Where Art Thou reconstruction. An early convert to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music and its vision of an “old, weird America” (in Greil Marcus’ term), Stampfel took more to the weird than the old. But having hung on to his weird for three-quarters of a century, he now gets to be both, and his personable croak finds unlikely entrance points to unlikely songs.
Recording with an ensemble dubbed the Brooklyn & Lower Manhattan Fiddle/Mandolin Swarm (for its buzzing three-fiddle-minimum arrangements), the result is actually a chaotic big band that gives Stampfel a sympathetic and ever-changing bed for his singing. It is the sound of people making music together, pianos and steel guitars appearing alongside other vibrations as needed, playing songs entirely dictated by what might be called “the folk process.” With only two of the songs credited fully to Stampfel (the instrumentals “Lily” and “Lonely Goth Girl”), the rest are modified traditional or contemporary numbers or songs with blurrier origins (like a version of the fiddle instrumental “Blackberry Blossom” with lyrics by Michelle Shocked).
As co-founder of the ’60s/’70s folk-imploding Holy Modal Rounders, Stampfel was the first to use the word “psychedelic” in a recorded song on “Hesitation Blues” in 1964 and going semi-electric with everybody else a few years later. But Stampfel has remained a fully committed folkie through decades of bands and creative partnerships, most lately with New York songwriter Jeffrey Lewis. It is here that Stampfel’s very vocal enthusiasm generates meaning within his music, providing a source for his long-term creative energy as much as his in-the-moment expression. On Holiday For Strings, Stampfel takes hold of traditional tunes like “Johnny Get Your Gun” and “Yankee Doodle,” turning the latter into a topical stomp on gun nuts, “Honky Doody.” But the album finds its heart in less-traditional borrowings, like introducing Joe Meek’s 1962 space-age instrumental “Telstar” into the folk canon.
While there’s fun to be had, the album’s best performances come on a trio of tender pop songs, each sounding like a more unhinged version of the recent albums of standards arranged for string bands by Stampfel’s former jamming buddy and one-time roommate, Bob Dylan. Just as with Dylan’s Shadows in the Night, it might be easy enough to giggle while Stampfel’s voice warbles and breaks through “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” Ray Charles’ countrypolitan hit written by Don Gibson. But, as with Dylan, that would be to miss Stampfel’s deeply human and well-read performance, as cracked as Gibson’s original is smooth. The same holds true of the album’s two most devastating moments, a nearly straight cover of Lou Reed’s “Cremation,” from 1992’s Magic and Loss, rewritten lightly as “Cold Black Sea,” and “Star in the Wind,” written with Stampfel’s former girlfriend/collaborator, the one-named Antonia. Sounding like something Dylan might get to yet, the words come sourced from a mid-’50s installment of Walt Kelly’s comic strip, Pogo, a poem by the artist about a daughter who died in infancy.
There is a modesty to Stampfel’s half-century of small-scale folk detonations, but also an earnest and inviting curiosity. His verve spills into textual form via grammar-busting liner notes (though Stampfel is also a professional copyeditor), like a musical equivalent of a Facebook wall crammed with annotated YouTube clips. As filled with excitement to be playing and sharing music in his 70s as he was as a teen, Holiday for Strings works just as well as a recruiting poster for the future folkies of America. Like punk, the anarchic arrangements contain the message that anybody can do this, but Stampfel also makes a pretty excellent argument for why it’s still worth doing.


Featuring Agalloch's Aesop Dekker on drums, this Bay Area band moves between doom metal and gentler 4AD-adherent epics on its sophomore LP.

Come the Thaw

Worm Ouroboros is a hit-and-miss name: The handle sounds frightening, of course, with its image of an annelid stretching into a circle to engulf its own tail. It's the sort of moniker that suggests a gang of crusty punks or a band of black metal bros, all loud and mean and vile. But Worm Ouroboros is actually guitarist/singer Jessica Way and bassist/keyboardist Lorranie Rath, accompanied on each of their two albums by a different drummer. The Bay Area group plays as softly as the two sing, their ethereal harmonies luxuriating above musical atmospheres that shift shapes like thick white clouds. Wading between waters of doom metal and gossamer atmospherics, Way and Rath's music moves with a wonderfully graceful menace that's far less terrifying than the name might indicate. But as "Worm Ouroboros" rightly suggests, the eight-minute drifts and builds that this band makes are borne of persistence, diligence, and care. Their sense of restraint turns the rare trick of making 4AD-adherent epics stop just short of maudlin.
The band's second album Come the Thaw sharpens the focus of their 2010 self-titled debut by giving each instrumental part what essentially amounts to more respect. Like recent records by the blues-crawling Earth, Worm Ouroboros makes layered music that doesn't sound overly dense or distracted, so that each player is able not only to convey shades of meaning but also to push each song along in unexpected ways. Though never very loud, Rath's remarkable bass playing shakes the frame. On "Further Out", her thick lines dart beneath Way's languid guitar, not only shouldering the melody but also serving as the tonal anchor. Way's playing during "Withered" is marvel of dynamics, each steely note refracted as if through a crystal. She finally climbs into a riff, though, and like a spartan Crazy Horse, the rest of the band follows, lashing hard against its back. Its hard-won redemption, the sort of coda that feels deserved.
Drummer Aesop Dekker proves Worm Ouroboros' perfect complementary third. If you've heard his 1990s punk bands or his current black-metal benders Agalloch and Ludicra, you know playing heavy isn't a worry for him. Last year, he wrote about his favorite jazz albums for NPR. By splitting the meter during "Withered" and darting (slowly) around the beat of "Further Out", he proves that such talk isn't a feint, but is instead a tool. Here, he's constantly on the boundary of heavy-- insistent but not impatient, always present but never upstaging. He breaks through only when necessary, adding dimension and weight to the nebulous movement. All the space on Come the Thaw simply galvanizes those bigger moments, affording simple rock-trio-taking-a-solo moments a rare kind of majesty and power. That feeling is appropriate, too, since Come the Thaw lyrically focuses on processes that take months, years or lifetimes to reach-- birth, blossoming, death, discovering-- but only an instant to fulfill. "We feed our days on measured hours," Rath reassures at one point, singing with such softness and slowness that it feels as if these units of time are only foreign abstractions.
During "When We Are Gold", Rath opens with a question. "What have we won/ when all is won?" she sings, pulling at each syllable like strips of gauze as feather-light guitar, bass, and drums wind through each other. This track is not only the album's best but its loudest, pushing from a place close to stillness and silence into, after nine minutes, the sort of near-roar that might fit between two Agalloch bursts or on any record that attempts to truss post and hard rock. But the climax matters here less than that opening credo; in the context of Come the Thaw, an album that's very much concerned with the slow cycles of nature and life, it seems a subtle indictment of music that mistakes volume and motion for emotion and substance. Worm Ouroboros are more concerned with the core of their music than the crescendos that that might propel. It's a good thing, too, because these songs-- however quiet or calm they become-- bear a great weight with remarkable elegance.


The new Xiu Xiu LP consolidates several of the band’s strengths—mixing hooks, cacophony, and stellar production. Individual moments shine, but the album can lull you into a state of absentmindedness.

FORGET

Xiu Xiu has always been a polarizing act, though some observations about the band are commonly accepted. Jamie Stewart’s tremulous vocals can feel vulnerable and threatening at once. He likes concept albums. And he is a fan of lots of kinds of music—gamelan, noise, dance, folk, punk—which makes his arrangements wondrously varied. Xiu Xiu has managed the feat of combining hooks and cacophony without spoiling either ingredient. They can offer a good time under the art-rock tent.
They can also be exasperating. As a lyricist, Stewart’s penchant for disturbing themes has become predictable over the last 16 years. No matter how far afield Xiu Xiu travels sonically, the emotional landscape is fixed. That trend continues on their latest album’s opener, “The Call.” The song starts with rapid-fire, nearly rapped lines about a “bitch,” and closes with a coda that goes: “Clap bitches/Why why why bitch/Why why cunt why/...Clap bitches.” At a level of vocal texture, these lines don’t sound like they’re sung by Stewart. (Credits list Enyce Smith as a guest vocalist on the track.) But in conceptual terms, the words definitely sound like they come from the guy who once sang “I Luv Abortion.” The verses and choruses shed little contextual light, and the final effect of “The Call” is one of disorientation—a familiar Xiu Xiu tactic.
By now, a choice like this doesn’t seem all that risky, or even commendably ugly. When he crafts a line like this, is Stewart just ticking boxes on the Xiu Xiu style-bingo sheet? Only he knows for sure. But both the pleasures and discomforts of FORGET involve the way the album invites that question. The set consolidates several of the band’s strengths: The production is stellar, with plenty of room for noise-damage as well as melodies (which are numerous). Xiu Xiu has fielded a wide array of intriguing experimental records in the last couple years, but they haven’t turned in pop-adjacent songs this memorable since 2012’s Always.
On “Wondering,” group backing vocals and distortion squall create a chorus of wild power. The otherwise self-pitying “Get Up” launches an ascending arpeggio at its conclusion, and it’s catchy and startling. Even the songs that don’t register as strongly have winning quirks—as with the timorous breakdown that leads to a screaming climax on “Jenny GoGo.”
But as a collection, FORGET doesn’t cohere in the same way that their best recent projects have. Plays the Music of Twin Peaks allowed the band to show an interpretive wisdom regarding another artist’s aesthetic, while remaining identifiable as Xiu Xiu. A recent collaboration with the contemporary classical group Mantra Percussion showed that Stewart can compose long-form works just as well as some of his ambitious experimental peers, like Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier. (Saunier appears on “Petite,” and also co-produced FORGET, alongside John Congleton and band-member Angela Seo.) Those albums had a point of view, and made sustained stylistic arguments. But according to Stewart, the organizing conceit of FORGET has to do with the “duality of human frailty.” On the idea of forgetting, he says: “It is a rebirth in blanked out renewal but it also drowns and mutilates our attempt to hold on to what is dear.”
That’s all true enough (if a bit overwrought). But it’s also thin: a simple observation about a human trait having benefits and drawbacks. Nor is there much evidence of this concept operating inside the record itself. Stewart’s lines are filled with the expected references to “the rape of everything decent” and the like—but not much that’s direct regarding the problems of a solipsism, or a selective memory.
The guests all seem a bit stranded, too. On the album finale, “Faith, Torn Apart,” the carillon tones of New York minimalist legend Charlemagne Palestine sound grafted onto the mix. And while a closing soliloquy voiced by legendary drag artist Vaginal Davis is arresting, it doesn’t connect with anything that’s come before. (In interviews, Stewart has detailed the inspiration behind what Davis says, but its presentation on the album remains vague.) Individual moments shine throughout FORGET: a stunning chorus here, a stirring lick of pitched percussion there. But the album’s strangest attribute is the way it can lull you into a state of absentmindedness regarding those same charms.


The Migos members’ new collaboration is longer than it needs to be, but Quavo and Takeoff can make most scenarios sound exciting, whether life-changing or mundane.

Quavo / Takeoff: Only Built for Infinity Links

Only Built for Infinity Links

In 2018, Quavo, Offset, and Takeoff reached the point where the only thing more impressive than succeeding together would be dominating apart. Eager to divide and conquer, each member of the Migos released a solo album. Every record had its moments, but none—not Quavo’s QUAVO HUNCHO or Takeoff’s The Last Rocket from 2018, nor Offset’s Father of 4 from 2019—came close to the best Migos material, if only because the trio work so much better as a unit. Takeoff benefited most from charting his own path outside the group’s gravitational pull. Beyond the flexes, it was the little anecdotes that beefed up The Last Rocket: being forced to move drugs during the winter, grappling with stage fright as a superstar. Quavo’s solo outing did the opposite, indulging his worst habits. “If I went a little personal,” he later admitted to GQ, “I think my album would’ve been a little bit better.”
Only Built for Infinity Links, the new collaboration from Quavo and Takeoff sans Offset, functions like a Migos album with lower stakes and without a consistent third voice. It succumbs to the same monotony and bloat that plagued the last two Migos albums, yet stands as proof that young rich niggas bring out the best in each other. Allegedly approved by Raekwon and named after his 1995 mafioso-rap epic Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, Infinity Links’ similarities to the Wu-Tang classic don’t stop at the title. Both albums are steeped in the paranoia and excess of the drug trade, using it to emphasize the platonic bonds at their centers: friends Raekwon and Ghostface on Cuban Linx and uncle Quavo and nephew Takeoff on Infinity Links. But the mood on Infinity Links is less insular and more celebratory. After its hokey intro, opener “Two Infinity Links” turns into an intense baton-passing session over producer Buddah Bless’ rousing 808s. It’s exhilarating to hear the duo switch flows and drop ad-libs as they recall their early days; “Two Infinity Links” deserves to demolish car subwoofers and concert venue floors the same way “T-Shirt” and “What the Price” did back in 2017.
As a pair, Quavo and Takeoff follow one another’s lead. If one comes to the track with malleable flows, the other holds it down with something sturdier. Sometimes, they take the same approach but play with syllable count and timing. On “See Bout It,” Quavo’s strip club-ready rhymes sputter and stop unexpectedly while Takeoff’s verse anchors the song. On “To the Bone,” they trade roles: Takeoff bends time and crams syllables into tight spaces, while Quavo’s sing-songy raps adhere to the rhythm like a roller coaster car to the track.
Their reliable but unpredictable dynamic does as much heavy lifting as their actual bars. Most of the subject matter is one-note by design—these are rappers who made their name off tracks with repetitious hooks about designer clothing and moving cocaine. But they’ve always diversified with splashes of color, which continue to keep Infinity Links interesting: Take the way “Integration” plays on the idea of Quavo and Takeoff’s blindingly white jewelry mixing with their Black skin, or the way Takeoff compares his former lean habit to a discontinued Rolex on “Messy.” And while neither are open books, their writing shines when it leans into the personal touch that QUAVO HUNCHO withheld. Quavo, in particular, drops a handful of details that reinforce the drama of his early 2010s come-up, like the time Quality Control co-founder Pierre Thomas offered him a garbage bag full of money (“Bars Into Captions”). It’s the closest he comes to sounding tender or wistful, and Infinity Links could’ve used more such reflection.
Colorful descriptions can only take this album so far, though. At 18 tracks, Infinity Links is just one song shorter than 2021’s overlong Culture III, and as fun as its best songs are, a quarter of the album registers as either chintzy or superfluous. “Bars Into Captions” represents the latest attempt to flip a sample of a classic rap song—in this case, OutKast’s “So Fresh, So Clean”—for a new generation, but the beat is uninspired and the constant allusions to the sampled song (including an homage to a bar about Anne Frank’s attic) detract from Quavo and Takeoff’s easy chemistry. “Mixy,” “Big Stunna,” and “Hell Yeah” are as generic as their titles, with the flavor and presence of packing peanuts. Bloat is par for the course on albums like these, which doesn’t make the experience any less exhausting.
Though they haven’t solved all their curation and sequencing issues, Quavo and Takeoff’s compatibility grants Infinity Links an easygoing energy that’s hard to resist. Their uncle-nephew relationship isn’t just a bit of fascinating rap trivia: You can hear their bond in their back-and-forths, the way their mutating styles make slight tweaks to an already solid formula. The best songs on Infinity Links blow the entirety of Huncho Jack, Jack Huncho*—*Quavo’s indistinct and meandering 2017 collab with Travis Scott—out of the water. The future of the Migos as a unit remains uncertain, but this album represents as natural an evolution as any.


Working as a true ensemble player, Conor Oberst here cedes songwriting and vocal duties to others on a sizable portion of his new LP.

Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band: Outer South

Outer South

Of all the good and not-so-good qualities you can ascribe to Conor Oberst, "ensemble player" isn't one of them. It's not just that his work as Bright Eyes has essentially always been a solo vision, but that he felt the need to name it "Bright Eyes" in the first place, using a collective nom de plume, in the process adding an extra level of presumptive self-sustaining wholeness. More to the point, there's Oberst's artistic persona itself-- his aggrieved yelp, his poetic bloodletting, his political hectoring, and his perpetual navel gaze, which have combined to attract admirers and detractors with equal fervency.
To date, there's not been a whole lot of room for anyone else in Bright Eyes' music, both in the way Oberst sang and in the first-person singular pronouns that so automatically rolled off his tongue. Then came last year's eponymous release under Oberst's actual legal name, and irony of ironies, it turned out to be the most self-effacing, song-driven work of his entire career. Oberst made the album with a newly assembled cadre of players dubbed the Mystic Valley Band, yet it was still solely his name and mug on the cover and almost exclusively his voice and songs on the CD. Which is why it's still hard not to do a double-take upon viewing the credits for Outer South, already tellingly released under the banner of Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band, and seeing that a full seven of the album's 16 songs aren't sung by indie-rock's former enfant terrible, and that six of those seven weren't penned by him either.
However, Oberst hasn't displayed any modesty within the songs he did write and sing. A full subsuming of Oberst's personality would severely dilute his music's power, but Outer South seems to actually undo many of the beneficially humbling gains made by his last record. Unquestionably, there are dazzlers here, foremost the ripping power-popper "Cabbage Town" and the equally pleasing, jangly "Spoiled", which cannily evokes the ramshackle charm of 1980s R.E.M. and the Cure. Another plus, "To All the Lights in the Windows" gets over on a facile, open-hearted refrain in spite of Oberst's lyrical attempts to bite off more history and myth than he can chew.
Unfortunately, that last qualifier also applies to a few of Oberst's other efforts on Outer South. First single "Nikorette" finds him engaged in one of his regrettably favorite sports-- passing self-satisfied judgments on his fellow man, pronouncing, "There's nothing sadder than a lynching mob/ Full of rational men who believe in God." "Ten Women" and "White Shoes" are stultifyingly ponderous, and of Oberst's songs of sober fervor only "Roosevelt Room" hits its mark, with Oberst remembering his great Desaparecidos trick of replacing Deep Thoughts with pure bile, flashing admirable oppositional rancor at a time when lots of his left-leaning friends are lining up to kiss Obama's hem. Of course, then "I Found a Reason #2" arrives and we have to deal with Oberst eating up the old 60s tropes all over again, from evoking Rolling Stone to nakedly aspiring to be the next Dylan, pealing organs and all.
And remember, these things are taking place on an album that features songwriting and singing contributions from people not named Conor Oberst. As you might expect, Oberst's reversion to logorrhea and emotional extremism here effectively eliminates the possibility that Outer South will possess any ensemble cohesion. There aren't too many personalities with the panache to butt into Oberst's spotlight, and yet his co-conspirators here seem inherently milquetoast-y regardless of context. Jason Boesel ("Difference Is Time", "Eagle on a Pole") does boast a pleasantly dusky, Matt Berninger-ish croon, but Nik Freitas and especially Taylor Hollingsworth only have reedy nice-boy whines to lend to their tunes. Perhaps it's partly a factor of Oberst's essential attention-grabbing nature, but none of these gentlemen offers up a composition that snags the ear better than the most mundane effort from their fearless leader. Perhaps it's simply the case that Oberst is on a busman's holiday here, but either he failed to get the memo to keep things light, or else he should have recruited some more substantial Wilburys.


Statik Selektah, a hip-hop mainstay, brings Action Bronson, Joey Bada$$, Raekwon, Prodigy and more for a boppy, East Coast delight that doesn't make the best use of the producer’s intuition.

8

There’s a story Questlove has told about J Dilla over the years that helps reveal the depths of the beatnik producer’s genius. As the legend goes, the pair were killing hours one night back in 1999 when Dilla started playing around with Roy Ayers’ righteous jazz number “Ain’t Got Time.” With no obvious point of the song to snatch, he instead took fragments of audio—a second here, a half-second there—and glued together a cohesive eight-bar loop. From that, Jay forged the beat that would later become Black Star’s classic joint “Little Brother.”
That’s the kind of intuition all the great crate-digging beatmakers have: a superhuman ear for harnessing a sample. Statik Selektah is from the DJ Premier, Pete Rock, Madlib, Kanye West, J Dilla lineage—a chop-up-the-soul virtuoso of dusty samples, snappy drums, and quick-hand record scratches. When everything comes together, Statik is capable of slicing off cool cuts of vintage golden age East Coast-style hip-hop. But sometimes he lacks that crucial Dilla-esque clairvoyance for spotting a great sample, and it hurts his batting average. Over 18 tracks, new album 8—because it’s his eighth LP, you see—encapsulates the Massachusetts native at his very best and worst.
One thing you can never argue about is the talent in Statik’s contacts list. Rolling back on previous assertions that 2015’s Lucky 7 would be his last album, 8 resurrects the format all his solo full-lengths have taken: a huge assemblage of rap stars are gathered—from frequent NYC collaborators like Action Bronson and Joey Bada$$, to veterans like Raekwon, Juelz Santana, and the Lox—who are seemingly shuffled up and dealt out over Statik’s beats in a manner that sometimes feels random and ramshackle. There’s also a couple posthumous verses from Sean Price and Prodigy, and no album with assists from those two will ever be totally without worth.
8 does have some sizzling highlights. The rumbling bassline and rat-tat-tat drums of “Watching Myself” is a complex soundscape, but Bronson, as loose and funky as ever, successfully rides the beat with swagger. Featuring Prodigy and co-produced by the Alchemist, “Disrespekt” is street rap in-line with the rugged, brass-knuckle psychedelica of Alc and P’s excellent previous collaborations. The best song is probably “No. 8,” featuring Griselda Gang siblings Westside Gunn and Conway, as well as Massachusetts rapper Termanology.
Too many tracks, though, don’t flow with the same elegant groove. Basslines awkwardly bump into samples, the drums can be unnecessarily abrasive, and some of the cut-up loops are grating on the ear. Take “Put the Jewels on It,” a huge coup for Statik producing a song for Run the Jewels, but El-P and Killer Mike are wasted on an instrumental built around harsh, screechy orchestral notes. Similarly, B-Real and Everlast are overwhelmed by the shrill horn stabs of “Shakem Up.”
Elsewhere, the rattling percussion, uplifting piano chords, and neatly plucked bassline of the Wale-featuring “Get Down” fail to mesh together with any kind of cohesion. On “Man of the Hour,” Statik drops the kind of shimmering, indulgent beat that JAY-Z gravitated towards in the early 2000s, but 2 Chainz and Wiz Khalifa lack chemistry with the music and each other, like their verses had been lifted from different tracks entirely.
A lot of the on-mic talent are game. Ex-Clipse star No Malice sounds lively on the choir samples of “Pull the Curtain Back,” while Joyner Lucas dexterously shows his full range of flows on “Don’t Run.” But their efforts are too rarely treated with the kind of care necessary to funnel them into great tracks. Statik is not without gifts and there will hopefully be a demand for producers of his acumen as long as there’s a New York skyscraper left standing. But this choppy solo album format feels less instinctual for the producer and fails to make the best use of his talent.


Five pleasantly familiar outtakes from 2022’s Once Twice Melody extend that album’s dream-pop sparkle and festival-headliner sheen.

Become EP

Beach House’s very first non-album single, released in the wake of Devotion in 2008, with the “Apple Orchard” demo on the flip, was a scruffy early take on “Used to Be,” a song that eventually appeared in finished, thrilling form on 2010’s Teen Dream. The single version recalled their previous music while hinting at the towering run to come, asking, “Are you not the same as you used to be?” The band’s new Become EP doesn’t pull the same trick, and in fairness Beach House said it wouldn’t. “It’s not really where we are currently going, but it’s definitely somewhere we have been,” they’ve written. Become, originally released for Record Store Day, consists of five songs that Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally didn’t think fit on their most recent album, 2022’s Once Twice Melody. Don’t expect anything radically different, though.
Become is sumptuous and starry enough to play alongside Once Twice Melody without dampening the mood; creating a playlist with these songs tacked on at the end makes for a fine DIY deluxe edition. Its shortcomings also shine a light on the merits of the 18 tracks that ultimately did make it onto the album. Once Twice Melody was distinguished by its double-disc sprawl, its festival-headliner sheen, and, here and there, some uncharacteristically clunky lyrics. Become keeps some of that sparkle but also the occasional awkwardness. It’s pleasant but still feels like an afterthought.
The strengths and weaknesses are most apparent on “Devil’s Pool.” The tinny, Casio-style beats draped with velvety organ will provoke visceral sense memories in longtime listeners. Add Legrand’s breathy purr, Scally’s Twin Peaks guitar twinkles, and a smattering of live percussion, and Beach House are in their ethereal, slow-motion comfort zone. A curious, cicada-like buzzing adds a little variety, and the song’s reassurances to a loved one who’s medicated beyond reach have some promise. But rhyming “in a devil’s pool” with “you don’t know the rules” and “you’re just somebody’s fool” is rote and distracts from the dreaminess.
The other four songs on the EP also have the feel of second-tier material from a first-tier group. With crystalline guitar arpeggios and a propulsive rhythm section, “American Daughter” is cut from the same stadium-size cloth as Once Twice Melody, more School of Seven Bells than Mazzy Star, but “to know her is to love her” is an old cliché—and a reverie about an American daughter is anticlimactic in the year of Lana Del Rey’s “American whore.” The floaty synths and airy, wordless refrains of “Holiday House” achieve the expected Beach House mood, but it’s easy to see why a song that mentions a “sweet little runaway” might’ve been out of place on an album that already has a song called “Runaway.” The title track is more of the same: their characteristic thrum and smolder with lyrics that feel like placeholders, plus a bit of “Fake Plastic Trees” in the strummed guitar.
From a band that continues to give new meaning to “always different, always the same,” more of the same is not always unwelcome. If you’re unfamiliar, Become might even be a decent place to start, but like much else in Beach House’s deep catalog of odds and ends, it’s a reminder that the band’s spellbinding studio albums are not so effortless as they may sound.


Last year's Blondes, a collection of singles, found the Brooklyn-based duo offering up tech house at its most unabashedly pretty. Follow-up Swisher builds from that release, establishing the ultimate core of their aesthetic somewhere deeper and altogether more mysterious.

Swisher

Techno’s narrative of robot soul is music-mythologising at its most seductive and I suspect Brooklyn duo Blondes think about this myth. Last year’s self-titled collection of singles offered up tech-house (with the emphasis on the “house”) at its most unabashedly pretty, all glittering chime loops and warm basslines, and sometimes even the gentle nourishment of a piano vamp. Blondes ploughed this furrow so intently that it felt like a cohesive statement, and one that it was difficult to imagine the duo adjusting it-- let alone surpassing it-- any time soon.
Follow-up Swisher doesn’t abandon the beauty of the duo’s earlier work (“Andrew” and “Rei” could easily be lifted from last year’s album) but it uses it more judiciously. This shift makes Swisher less immediately captivating but somehow more involving than its predecessor, establishing the ultimate core of the duo’s aesthetic somewhere deeper and altogether more mysterious. How to reconcile the gentle machine-clanking of opener “Aeon”-- like a lost treasure from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works 85-92-- with the frozen expanses of the appropriately-titled “Poland”, or that with the urgent stop-start stalk of “Clasp”, which harkens back to Dettinger at his most ambitious? These tunes are less distant from one another in strict stylistic terms than in function and intention: The underlying dynamic feels slippery and difficult to pin down, but united in its sense of purpose. This shift in tone coincides so closely with the move away from house and towards techno proper that it’s probably pointless to detangle them.
What carries over from the debut to these undeniably colder, more shadowed arrangements is the naturalism of Blondes’ production, pointillist in precision but still organic in feel. At its most steely and forbidding, Swisher aspires to the kind of warmth-in-coldness of Basic Channel, the percussion like tiny blades gently scraping at the surface of your ears, and urgent low drones like locust clouds hovering below eyeshot. “Bora Bora” builds to a torrent of feedback before relaxing into an outro of unexpectedly Latin-infused percussion, and it’s a mark of just how good Blondes are that they can execute transmutations like this so effortlessly and near-imperceptibly. Similarly, the title track creates an entire gas-planet ecosystem of scratching snare patterns, sighing new age synth rushes, and disorienting, bubbling churns, through which a restless Carl Craig arpeggio coalesces like a nascent life form attempting to will itself into existence.
Rounding out Swisher is “Elise”, which threatens to overshadow all that has preceded in its singularity and directness. The kind of winsome, heart-in-mouth epic for which Jürgen Paape or Superpitcher were once beloved, its nagging chime melody, swishing house percussion, and hesitantly flirty bass pulses evoke the human where elsewhere there is only the sentient. If it wasn’t so lovely, it would seem like a cop-out. Instead, it’s a gift, and a reminder of how the familiar emerges out of the foreign, interpersonal meaning out of seemingly meaningless biological process. As myth-making goes, it’s hard to fault.


The North Carolina band's second album marks their Merge debut, where Heather McEntire sings of a life yoked to the tides of a town ruled by college seasons. She's country to the core, a quality the rest of the band emphasize by knowing how to hang back.

Miracle Temple

Mount Moriah is a real college town band-- though not in the pejorative sense. The band formed from a record counter friendship between singer Heather McEntire and guitarist Jenks Miller at the since-shuttered Schoolkids Records, on the University of North Carolina campus. On the band's rootsy, countrified second album (and Merge debut) Miracle Temple, McEntire sings of a life in a town ruled by student seasons, where you stay after everyone goes, leaving summer wide open. Album opener "Younger Days" ends on a question: "August is over so when are you coming back?" McEntire sings it with resigned hope: when they're gone, they're gone.
The album is nostalgic for people and times that can't be had again, no matter what magic you attempt. "You know I really tried, girl/ To lift your small town summer malaise," she sings, in ode to a wild girl who just couldn't hang. "How I tried for years to return there," goes "Union Street Bridge", recalling misspent youth. Most of the songs are in the past tense and measure the chasm between the innocent spoils of then and the sadness of now by what's been lost in the interim: fearlessness, blind love, the ability to make someone weak in the knees. "Go on, disappear," she sings on "I Built a Town", casting out this awful ghost of the perfect past. Miracle Temple orients itself from the knowledge that there is no being restored.
McEntire grew up on Southern Baptist hymns and Springsteen; the influence of both are evident here. The plaintive appeals in her lyrics and the soulful burr in her voice are church skills since refined for secular use. There is some Darkness on the Edge of Town within Miracle Temple; dreams too big for a small town, highways beckoning getaway from all that conspires to keep you there. In lieu of Jersey, high school sweethearts, and Carter-era gloom, it's the Outer Banks, straight girls' drunken flirting, and cruel summers.
But McEntire could be singing about anything with lyrics deep or dumb, and it would hardly matter-- there is that voice of hers. The comparison to young Dolly Parton is not undue; the quiver as she gets to the song's emotional center, the way she reigns herself in right before you expect her to belt it. Like Parton, she reserves her big voice for when she needs to bring out the drama. McEntire often gets pegged as post-punk, due to her proximity to the DIY scene she came up in, but on "White Sands", she stretches "kids" to nearly four syllables (something like "key-yuh-hid-s" with a little hiccup in the middle)-- conclusive proof that girl is country.
Alas, the rest of the band is not. They are very much Southern, but that is not that same thing. They lay in and drift a bit between punctuating, shuffling rhythms-- their loose hooks mimicking a drawl. Jenks Miller, a guitarist with enough confidence to occasionally venture solo as Horseback, keeps his accompaniment spare; his long single note runs to accent McEntire's melody lines fill in the excited silence.
The album's stand out track is "I Built a Town", which is the sort of Muscle Shoals throwback many attempt and few land. The strings swell, the organ whirrs, and you imagine a bouffanted McEntire, a la Dusty in Memphis, wiping her tears away as the back-up girls coo. She gave it all, and now, now there's nothing. It's easy to imagine that doing an entire record that straight would just be a showy genre exercise for them, but that can't keep a girl from wishing for more. The rest of the band obviously knows that McEntire is the showpiece-- songs like "Those Girls" show that they do, setting up her big moments with subtlety and understatement-- reminding us that the real power is in restraint.


The Strokes frontman is back with a new band and a new sound. Tyranny is overloaded with ideas, a palette of vibrant colors swirled together until there’s nothing left but brown; it’s as adventurous as it is unlistenable, a spectacular failure.

Tyranny

Mystique has always been a key part of rock iconography, which might explain why Julian Casablancas has remained at arms’ length for so long. At his main act’s creative peak, the Strokes frontman had a confounding, emotionally distant aura. A notorious Rolling Stone profile from 2003—right around the time of the excellent, second-verse-same-as-the-first sophomore effort Room on Fire—portrayed him as a contradictory, besotted rascal, as he unleashed invectives against Pringles, haggled with a bootleg CD vendor over a Radiohead album, and repeatedly kissed journalist Neil Strauss on the neck before drunkenly commandeering an abandoned wheelchair.
“I just don’t have anything deep to say...I’ve got nothing to hide,” he claimed in what Strauss referred to as “the worst interview ever,” and by the time the Strokes put out the career-deflating 2006 record First Impressions of Earth, he was committing the sentiment to tape. In the years that followed, Casablancas sobered up and more or less faded out of view. Near the end of the '00s, he popped up with a solo album of sugary power-pop in the form of the better-than-you-remember Phrazes for the Young, citing the Choose Your Own Adventure books as sonic inspiration; 2011 brought the Strokes’ fourth album, the curiously flat Angles, which was written and recorded without Casablancas entering the same room as his bandmates. By the time last year’s aptly named Comedown Machine saw release, the Strokes—Casablancas, especially—sounded exhausted, as mediocrity came to define the band’s second decade of existence. Instead of failing outright, the Strokes simply became boring.
Regardless of their place in the rock landscape, Casablancas and the Strokes still represent a certain level of aesthetic “cool,” at home and beyond. Many acts from the early-'00s new-rock explosion have retained a considerable level of popularity in Europe, and the Strokes themselves have a distinctly French appeal. Casablancas himself reached his own Gallic pièce de résistance by appearing on Daft Punk’s year-flattening musical odyssey Random Access Memories, lending a soft-focus vocal to the metronomic, neon-melancholy single “Instant Crush”.
His latest musical venture, Julian Casablancas + the Voidz, is a group comprised of session musicians and alt-rock barnacles—guitarist Jeramy Gritter was a member of the mercifully defunct, reality-show-reject outfit Whitestarr—plucked from Casablancas’ current home base of Los Angeles. The best you can say about the band’s debut, Tyranny, is that it's the most interesting thing Casablancas has done since facing off against Guided by Voices on “Family Feud”; it’s a record that's as adventurous as it is unlistenable, a spectacular failure that smacks of both fellow L.A. denizen and gonzo-pop misfit Ariel Pink’s AM-radio abstractions and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” ne’er-do-well Charlie’s warped musical efforts. If Angles and Comedown Machine sounded like the work of a group that was running out of steam, Tyranny is a record overloaded with ideas, a palette of vibrant colors swirled together until there’s nothing left but brown.
Casablancas recently told GQ that he’s optimistic about Tyranny’s commercial prospects, which is hilarious if you've actually heard the album. Clocking in at an endless 62 minutes—10 more than bloated First Impressions of Earth—with six of its 12 songs stretching well over the five-minute mark, Tyranny is designed to be impenetrable, a blaring monolith of excess. There are a few ideas buried in the unending screech, suggesting that Casablancas has a raw and unique creative mind, if not the compositional smarts to pull off something this dense. “Take Me in Your Army” and “Nintendo Blood” begin with gorgeous, digitized sighs, 8-bit renderings of the Strokes’ finest, most subtle melancholic moments, but the latter dissolves in an acid bath of guitar squeals and off-beat drum machines, while the former meanders towards a slow-hand guitar solo that smacks of a “shredding” YouTube video made specifically to mock the work of John Carpenter. “M.utally A.ssured D.estruction” packs thrash metal figures and horror movie synths into an energizing two-and-a-half minutes, while the seven-minute-plus “Father Electricity” offers a kalimba-like rhythmic backbone and, after several minutes of useless dithering, a sprightly Afro-pop melody that doubles as the record’s most pleasant surprise.
On the other end of the spectrum is “Human Sadness”, the nearly 11-minute cut released as the album’s first single, ostensibly to confound the expectations of anyone who hadn’t caught Casablancas + the Voidz’s run of incompetent festival performances over the past year. The song is essentially a modern “Bohemian Rhapsody”, if Queen’s pomp-rock classic was twice as long and had only two or three distinct musical movements. After a brief bit of twinkling ambience and a vocal sample referencing the album’s vague theme of capitalistic pitfalls, Disney strings enter alongside an ambling bass line that sounds like a Strokes song played at half-tempo. Then, the song pretty much stays there, Casablancas alternating between a bedside mumble and glass-shattering vocal histrionics as a parade of sounds—a cackling, distorted laugh, ear-bleeding guitars, video game sounds, crashing drums—piles on top of the song’s dirge-like rhythm. Intentionally or not, it plays like “The Story of Everest” in musical form.
“I love being weird/ It’s so weird,” Casablancas tosses off underneath the grating motifs of “Business Dog”, and this particular line speaks volumes on Tyranny’s try-hard stab at eccentricity. (Good luck hearing it without a lyric sheet, though: the words here are the most endearingly bonkers rantings Casablancas has ever put to tape and the album’s execrable production largely buries his vocals to the point where you can barely hear him.) “He must be on drugs” is a typical invective thrown at artists who flirt with career suicide in the way that Casablancas is doing here, but Tyranny is too willfully weird, too labored-sounding, too beholden to its melted-frequency artifice to be merely the product of a substance-addled mind.
As that GQ article highlighted, the common assumption is that Casablancas wrote the first two Strokes albums, a rock lore factoid that suggests prodigiousness from a guy who’s spent the last 15 years looking like he’s never worked a day in his life; on Tyranny, that guy has simply worked too hard, and that sense of needless toil bleeds through in every bum lick, brick-walled sound, and garbled burst of noise shoved onto the record. Maybe Tyranny will one day have a second life as a misunderstood cult record, but in the here and now, it sounds terrible and beyond redemption.


On his third album, the former Vine star grows into a persona that’s playful, gently libidinous, and safely menace-free, but his music too often falls on the wrong side of beige.

Shawn Mendes

If Shawn Mendes wasn’t born and raised in the Toronto suburbs, he might’ve been tank-grown in an underground lab at a major label’s behest. He’s a genial, grounded young performer with a body “somewhere between fitness model and party trick”—John Mayer’s words, not mine—and a deep passion for adult contemporary pop-rock. He takes hundreds of pictures with fans in a single sitting without batting an eye. And when you hear hit singles like “Stitches” and “There’s Nothing Holdin’ Me Back,” it’s like you’re watching the cutest counsellor at your summer camp grab an acoustic guitar and surprise a horde of pre-teens with his heavenly pipes.
Mendes’ path to upper-echelon stardom began with jaunty covers of mid-’10s hits on Vine, and his first two albums—2015’s boyish Handwritten and a more muscular 2016 follow-up, Illuminate—channeled inoffensive, mercenary songwriters working in the same vein: Mayer, Ed Sheeran, Jason Mraz. Shawn Mendes, his third and most ambitious full-length, breaks the mold by suggesting alternative paths Mendes might walk. The guitar is still the focal point of his attack, whether it’s vigorously strummed (anthemic lead single “In My Blood”) or ever-so-gently picked. But he dips a toe into modern pop with help from expert collaborators like Julia Michaels and Ryan Tedder on “Nervous” and “Particular Taste,” and he dirties up his goody-two-shoes with a handful of smoldering, grown-and-sexy dalliances.
The songs in the latter category capture Mendes at his most engaging and mature; you hear them and understand why Mayer told Zane Lowe that Mendes is “John Mayer 2.0, without the weird software viruses.” Sublime single “Lost in Japan” is air-fried pop-funk, light and crispy with just a whisper of grease. It uses Mendes’ youth and fame to his advantage: It’s not hard to imagine him—rich, horny, and unoccupied—chartering a jet into Tokyo for a quick hookup and a stroll through the cherry blossoms.
The bleary-eyed “Where Were You in the Morning?” works the same way. He’s old enough for someone to stay the night, but naïve enough to feel crushed when he wakes up alone. “And I thought you really felt this/When we were talking about breakfast,” he sings, sitting up in bed and scratching his head. “You made it seem like we connected/I guess I just didn’t expect this.” He can put together a winning ballad in the same style: “Why” is a bruised ode to a lover (whose identity is a hot topic among fans) that coasts on sandpapered vocal texture and a lovely, unexpected vocoder bloom.
There’s a compelling young adult behind this music, someone who’s playful and libidinous without projecting any menace. It’s too bad that this depth of character is absent from the rest of Shawn Mendes. Meeting these songs head-on and digesting them is less fulfilling than sniffing out hat-tips and moves cribbed from other artists. There’s little distinguishing the gasping, conversational “Nervous” from recent Selena Gomez hits like “Hands to Myself” and “Bad Liar,” all of which were co-written by Michaels. You wouldn’t need credits to guess that “Fallin’ All in You” came from Sheeran, in part because Mendes so closely mimics his vocal style. “Because I Had You” knocks its soft, muted guitar and chorus melody from Justin Bieber’s repellent “Love Yourself,” another Sheeran product. (The highlights aren’t immune, either: I caught myself singing Christina Aguilera’s “Beautiful” over the chords underpinning “Why.”)
This looming sense of familiarity extends past the album’s musical elements and into its writing. Shawn Mendes is populated with stock characters: the girl who’s a little too high on her own supply, the girl worth waiting forever for, the girl who got away. “Particular Taste” draws up a free spirit who answers phone calls with questions and “only dances when it’s Kanye.” (Anyone who refuses to get up for anything other than “Lift Yourself” must be truly eccentric.) Nothing about these songs belongs uniquely to Mendes, and you can imagine them being recorded by anyone: Nick Jonas, Charlie Puth, a random choice from the One Direction diaspora. These are exactly the kind of B- and C-list contemporaries on whom Mendes is supposed to have a head start.
Transforming average material into compelling, distinctive pop is a tall order for any would-be star, let alone one who’s been asked to undergo all of their artistic development in a viral-fame Instant Pot and doesn’t turn 20 until August. It takes more than sheer talent and good will; you need personality and perspective, the kind of intangibles that develop with time. Mendes deserves credit for recognizing the limits of youthful exuberance and proactively broadening his approach. But Shawn Mendes leaves a key question unanswered: What makes this guy different?