Produced entirely by PC Music's Sophie, Charli XCX's Vroom Vroom EP is pointedly uncommercial and abrasive.

Vroom Vroom EP

Charli XCX hasn’t quite enjoyed the mainstream crossover she’s obviously capable of, but her influence looms over pop as a songwriter and a test site for daring ideas. The Vroom Vroom EP is her latest experiment: Produced entirely by PC Music's Sophie, it finds Charli in her trademark middle-finger-flipped repose. But here, the 23-year-old Brit veers away from the marketable rebellion that underpins her poppier work: Vroom Vroom is pointedly uncommercial and abrasive. The title track  sounds like a rickety clown car whose horn toots Missy's "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)"—a blocky, disjointed paean to fast rides and good times. "Boom boom boom/ Hear me coming through the radio," she speak-sings with affected enunciation, referencing her hit song from The Fault in Our Stars soundtrack. "Watch me go zoom zoom zoom/ Try to catch me but you're too slow."
The lyrics to Vroom Vroom deal with being young, free, hedonistic, and ambitious in ferociously trite terms, and to a tinny soundtrack. "Cute, sexy, and my ride's sporty," Charli sing-songs on "Vroom Vroom." "Dance while we're young on top of the mountain," she trills on "Paradise," a Eurotrance duet with Hannah Diamond, one of PC Music's leading faces. Is she sending up pop’s shallow triumphalism? Or reinforcing it? As Charli sees it, audiences are smart enough to detect the artistic intent at the heart of this collaboration—to "be sharp, potent [and] deadly,"  as she said in a statement, and be "number one," as "Trophy" puts it. But few things are as wearying as pop culture that constantly congratulates you on how clever you are for "getting it," and Vroom Vroom is nothing if not exhausting. Spring Breakers is a good litmus test here: If you were a fan of Harmony Korine's 2012 exploitation flick, you'll probably love the intentional shallowness and plasticky transgression of Vroom Vroom. If (like me) you would have walked out had you not spent $18 on a ticket, you'll probably hate it.
Charli and Sophie do push each other here, though only one of them really benefits: Paired with an actual songwriter, Vroom Vroom is the closest Sophie's ever come to making viable pop songs. "Paradise" at least feels complete, a trance ballad indebted to East 17 and Avril Lavigne that continually peaks without offering much of a payoff, other than a horrible processed baby-voice refrain, and some brief, lovely harmonies between Charli and Hannah Diamond. Hooked around a sample from Pulp Fiction, "Trophy" pits Charli’s confrontational rap ("bitch I’m here to fuck you up") against a glitchy dancehall beat reminiscent of Major Lazer. It’s relentless and dispiriting, too shallow to pass as sincere, too obvious to work as satire—if that is the intention, then it comes off closer to a cheap "Weird Al" Yankovich pop rip than, say, the KLF or ZTT Records’ early output.
At times, Vroom Vroom recalls Britney Spears' Blackout, made in the wake of Spears’ public breakdown. Spears was always assumed to have little agency in her own work, and on that record she toyed brilliantly with ideas of autonomy and unwholesomeness, using sharp lyrics and sharper production to play with the idea of disintegrating identity. These same ideas underpin the PC Music project, and you can hear them at work on Vroom VroomEP. But no one is being done any favors reducing Charli XCX to a vapid cypher, particularly as it drains her vivid personality from the work. The EP bottoms out on the final track "Secret (Shh),” a grime-indebted ooze where she does a generic good-girl-gone-bad routine that yanks all the joy out of misbehaving. Sucker was thrilling because it felt like pop with a death wish, its creator giving her all in the name of sheer recklessness and pure kicks. Vroom Vroom just sounds dead behind the eyes.


On its second album of 2021, the London group fastidiously projects electronic music, pop, and jazz through the twin prisms of post-rock and classical minimalism.

Monument

Portico Quartet’s music should be easy to describe, but it turns out that it’s not, even for them. They often call it “widescreen,” which is the kind of cinematic metaphor that music reviewers resort to when they can’t think of anything else. They named themselves Portico Quartet because they first played under a portico as a quartet. When they released Terrain earlier this year, saxophonist and keyboardist Jack Wyllie explained, “The core of it is having a repeated pattern, around which other parts move in and out, and start to form a narrative.” But that is practically a textbook definition of music itself, and the vagueness of his description mirrors the faint sense of blankness that mysteriously blankets this group’s consistently fine work.
To be fair, Wyllie also said that Terrain was inspired by American minimalism, which is obvious, and the Japanese composer Midori Takada, which is a fresh surprise. Monument, Portico Quartet’s second album of 2021, really is a change of pace, in that the pieces are short instead of long and starched with electronic dance music instead of ambient. But the overall schematic seems largely the same, as it does across their albums. Their gifts for melodic immediacy, rhythmic precision, and supple finishing allow them to iterate on a slender template so pleasingly that you feel like Richie Rich whining if it gets predictable: Aw, Mom, filet mignon again?
The group, based in London, features Wyllie leading percussionist Duncan Bellamy, bassist Milo Fitzpatrick, and keyboardist Keir Vine. Everyone has at least a little something electronic in their setup, and the rhythm section prominently features the hang, a UFO-shaped steel drum that was invented about 20 years ago. They generally start a track by weaving a long, flashing pattern of interlocked ostinatos from the threads of the minimalist canon. After caressing and washing it with drums, they eventually drop a roomy beat, cueing the saxophone to lyricize freely. This is almost unvarying. Still, the musicians riff on their elected straits as adeptly as seasoned sonneteers.
Monument lies at some remote waystation between ECM and Ninja Tune (which actually did release Living Fields, an electronic pop album by three of the group’s members), with a coolly smoldering wind blowing in from somewhere in Scandinavia. “Opening” seems to suffuse the questing post-rock of Jaga Jazzist with the gradual glow of Jóhann Jóhannsson. The glassy club music of “Impressions” is fogged with solos that recall the gentler side of Arve Henriksen. “Ultraviolet” is Terry Riley trying drum’n’bass. Afterimages of Aphex Twin and Boards of Canada overlay those of Philip Glass and Ryuichi Sakamoto. The ratios change; the music somehow doesn’t. The ensemble fastidiously conjures shades of electronic music, pop, and jazz from the center of its comfort zone as an elegant post-rock band transfixed by Steve Reich.
It’s odd, then, that they’re usually reviewed and discussed as jazz, despite this being their haziest association. Yes, the hang plays a wafting, vibraphone-like role; the ensemble is more or less a rhythm section built around a soloist; and Art in the Age of Automation did reach No.1 on the UK jazz chart a few years ago (though, as Wyllie gamely conceded, that doesn’t take a lot of sales these days). But the pieces feel too tightly composed to have much room for meaningful improvisation, and it’s impossible to imagine Portico Quartet’s airlocked minimalism as an interpretative device.
Though the members have outside projects—such as Paradise Cinema, where Wyllie plays with percussionists in Dakar—they mainly collaborate with one another. They don’t seem to have much to do with the bustling London jazz scene in which they are ostensible veterans, 13 years after their Mercury Prize-nominated debut; their minimalist fixation is not really in step with the diasporic innovation happening there in recent years. The title track of Monument starts with a boom-bap swagger, but like most surges of inspiration here, it’s quickly tamed into a mild crescendo by the slow, simple intervals revolving through the saxophone. Without traditional training, the band has its origins in busking in front of London’s National Theatre rather than getting into Juilliard. I’ve hardly ever read them mention another jazz artist, outside of putting Pharoah Sanders on an XLR8R mix that botched the spelling of his name (which, to be fair again, probably wasn’t their fault). None of this is a knock; they simply demonstrate relatively few of jazz’ outward signs—least of all its mutating, evolving nature in the current century.
Portico Quartet are hard to define not because they defy external conventions, like jazz does now, but because they hew so closely to internal ones. While Monument is probably one of their best albums, the narrative beneath their deeply carved patterns remains as elusive as ever. In a way, the group is well symbolized by its lone distinguishing quirk, the hang: a mesmerizing instrument without a rich historical or cultural tradition, floating lightly, for better or worse, without that ballast.

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Darren Cunningham's fourth album as Actress is a record that takes his fascinations—Detroit techno, Chicago ghetto house, rap—and repeatedly kicks them in the ribs. After three collections that played Jenga with genre rules, Ghettoville is content to wallow in the ruins of the musics its predecessors so fascinatingly deconstructed.

Ghettoville

After nearly a decade of cryptic transmissions, Darren Cunningham, aka Actress, is packing it in. He's doing this both professionally—alluding to the "conclusion of the Actress image" as well as retirement—and artistically. Ghettoville, his fourth album, is a scorched hard drive, a dour drone record that takes his fascinations—Detroit techno, Chicago ghetto house, rap—and repeatedly kicks them in the ribs. This was a calculated move. The album arrived with a press release that sounded roughly like Sarah Connor's opening monologue from Terminator 2: "The machines have turned to stone, data reads like an obituary to its user." After three slew-footing albums that played Jenga with established genre rules, Ghettoville is content to wallow in the ruins of the musics its predecessors so fascinatingly deconstructed.
It's difficult to tell how much of Cunningham's end-times blather is bullshit. He's a savvy marketer—he famously referred to Splazsh as "R&B concrète"—and way funnier than his high-art-golden-boy reputation would lead you to believe. (A recent interview describes Cunningham as lifting up "a hefty glass of cognac and look[ing] through it at the flames"; let no one accuse this man of not knowing exactly what he's doing.) But if Cunningham is bluffing, the opener "Forgiven" is one hell of a poker face. Seven minutes of plodding, gray loops, "Forgiven" refuses to pick its feet off the ground, pouting like a child protesting bedtime by moving as slowly as possible. Lacking any hidden alleys or tricky variations, the track ensures that anyone who hears the remainder of Ghettoville really wants to hear it.
Ghettoville's darker, nastier tone is its defining trait, but the album's lack of dynamism is what's truly alarming. Never before has Cunningham built his tracks out of so few ideas, and never before have those ideas seemed so barefaced and plain. The lumpen funk bassline of "Rims" recalls Excepter's more staid moments. "Towers", featuring a slow, pulsing kick drum and a single, distorted tone played on-beat, is simple and inelegant. "Time" plays like a parody of experimental music: six minutes—and it feels like double that—of wintry stasis interrupted by a flat, lifeless voice repeating the track title. It's probably a joke, the type of musical prank Cunningham has laced his albums with in the past, but it's one performed at our expense.
Ghettoville frustrates most when Cunningham offers the type of transfixing delights he's known for. "Birdcage" is a taut piece that allows a flute-like melody to worm in and out of a baffling rhythmic stew. "Gaze" proves Cunningham hasn't lost touch with the dance floor, as a sweet, light synth pad ushers along a grimy piano riff and a pattering house rhythm. The deranged mumble that passes for a melody on "Contagious" is the one thing sickly enough to justify Cunningham's rhetoric. The spectacular closer "Rule" dices MC chatter into an undeniable earworm and places it on a bed of grubby organ chords; it stands as Cunningham's finest and most complete reworking of hip-hop.
Cunningham's work has always offered a crucial interactive component, giving listeners the opportunity to unpack the origins of his musical baubles. If you failed, or just weren't up for it, you were still left with something pleasantly cryptic. Ghettoville's leaden, idle tracks reject this interaction, so you're forced to take Cunningham at his word: we live in a brittle, addicted world, and this is what a brittle, addicted world sounds like. Ghettoville is a lecture, at least inasmuch as a largely beatless, voiceless work can be. Self-contained, Ghettoville refuses to commune with anything but itself, including the broken and disadvantaged world it purports to represent. Cunningham's perplexing persona has always been overshadowed by his ability to confound us with his records; Ghettoville, disappointingly, shifts that balance.


Sigh. For obscure acts of the 90s finally sucking some surface air, subpar is the new par. Those of us ...

The Mountain Goats: We Shall All Be Healed

We Shall All Be Healed

Sigh. For obscure acts of the 90s finally sucking some surface air, subpar is the new par. Those of us who have long pursued John Darnielle's bronze crumbs will head down to our record stores today in our scarves and messenger bags, expecting an opus, but we will leave nonplussed. We Shall All Be Healed is like an ugly, hollow sports victory for a team anticipated to blow away the opposition. If this had been our first game, we would never have become such huge tailgating losers.
And we are full-on fans. We cling to Darnielle's early cassette-only releases for reasons, we are starting to think, more biographical than qualitative. We mail-ordered, awaited, and then owned everything listed on his Internet discography (except the annoyingly "never released" projects), but were reduced to eBaying most of our archives to pay for our divorces. We started bands that ripped off the "Going To __________" titling habit he kicked long ago, and many of our sophomore efforts contain a song called "FM", embarrassingly attributed to Darnielle due to our ignorance that he was covering Steely Dan. We are thankful for how Darnielle expanded our definition of "punk" to contain acoustic odes to cartographers and unsexy species. We gather Darnielle's bootlegged covers (most recently of Suede and Neutral Milk Hotel) to survive the winter. Though Darnielle now maintains a degree of prodigality, we no longer view the fattening of his man-and-machine "production" as an evil on par with Converse's selling out to Nike, even if we're still unsteady about its political ramifications.
We always love to hear Darnielle again, though he never stays gone for long. On this album, he still decrees (rather than "sings") his lyrics with the adamancy of the virgin, as if he'd been a preoccupied town crier in a past life. Producer and friend John Vanderslice may lower the vocals and distort them, but Darnielle thankfully still sounds as if he's reporting from some Protestant, pre-compromise utopia under siege. But the only surprises Healed holds is that Darnielle has nothing new to teach us, and that the album triggers our memory of Donald Gibb's character Ogre, from that movie about the misfits with the same goals as the meatheads, rumbling "Nnnerrrds!"
Healed begins passionately enough, but by now we have a right to take Darnielle's consistency for granted: He has become that boring but dedicated partner whom we must leave because we can hear the club down the street, and we fear that we're missing some of the too-much that is going on. "Slow West Vultures" is an indictment of unsustainability that establishes the album's pace, tone and scope, but I don't buy any of it, with its "urgency" (the full-band Mountain Goats attempt rock to the extent that The View attempts in-depth current-events analysis), and its lyrics that go down like Maoist slogans with a sense of privation (except for "get in the goddamn car"), and its Aguilera-caliber vocal shudders, and its timid impression of a big finish.
"Palmcorder Yajna" manages more intensity, and a great image, though Darnielle will recycle it: "Reflective tape on our sweatpants." But the song's unjangly R.E.M.-ness never changes, sending the hungry collector back into his/her (okay, his) archives of Midnight Oil. "Linda Blair Was Born Innocent" proves to be a tease of a title, and fails to analyze how her most famous film was about the church's demonization of female sexuality; it's a ho-hum ching-a-linger about being "hungry for love" and "going downtown." Nora Danielson (who also played with Darnielle on 2001's Devil in the Shortwave) acquits herself on this song, and throughout the album, with her violinistry, but not distinctively: Except for the few seconds when she apes The Dirty Three, she evokes Alastair Gailbraith's earlier Goat complements.
"Letter from Belgium" and "Your Belgian Things" constitute the most prominent examples of Darnielle's trademark globalization, and they're limited to the land that hilariously tricked all of us into watching Marxist fantasia The Smurfs during the commie-blasting 80s. The second of these songs is the more effective, but Darnielle's nasal-Donahue emerges intermittently, and is less digestible than in previous years.
The rest of the album wallows in similar okayness (I am forgetting the name of the critic who wrote, in Full of Secrets: Critical Approaches to Twin Peaks, that television's success rests in its ability to provide 24-hour partial satisfaction). "Mole" is a cousin of Guided by Voices' "I Am a Tree", and it breaks from its Hill Street Blues-theme homage for a climax that has nothing to do with the rest of the song. "The Young Thousands" is, you know, rousing (dig that wall of Darnielles!), and boasts one of the album's few soul-rending lyrics, but we fans have heard this kind of heralder before.
So "Cotton" features a decent bebop breakdown, and we hangers-on can't complain about "Home Again Garden Grove"'s patented hyperharmonizing, anxious chords, and war/suicide/jellyfish imagery. As much as we may be proud that Darnielle has graduated from the Crayola artwork of Shrimper to 4AD's hegemonic cursive, as much as we may internalize his shoulders' evocation of our mother's osteoporosis, as much as we respect the Vanderslicing that coheres "Against Pollution", We Shall All Be Healed is complacent, formulaic for a trailblazer, lapped by Destroyer, optimistic-but-joyless in that it is pessimistic-but-punchy, and gooped with the silly putty of vagueness and cliché. Aw hell, this feels like narcking on a chum, but Darnielle has perhaps been made ironically complacent by his suspicions that humans are getting the world that they deserve. Either that, or his folk has outmatured us.


They would go onto greater fame with Velvet Crush, but the duo of Ric Menck and Paul Chastain first reached indie pop perfection with the Springfields.

Singles 1986-1991

If the name The Springfields doesn’t mean much to you, you’re probably not alone. One of three different bands Ric Menck and Paul Chastain had going in the ’80s (the others being Choo Choo Train and Bag O’ Shells), it was their only collaboration with Menck center stage and singing. They only released five singles before the project ended—a quiet life for a small indie pop band.
Yet here they stand, with Slumberland Records lovingly collecting their scant but glorious discography. Singles 1986-1991 fully frames the Springfields; two earnest dorks from Champaign, Illinois offering a loving and deeply earnest tribute to shiny jangle pop both of the ’60s variety (their name was curbed from an early Dusty Springfield band), and their fellow power-pop revivalists of the late ’80s. “Sunflower,” the opening cut from their debut single and many people’s first introduction to the band, is sublime, from the earworm opening riff and shuffling drum beat to the layered melodies that were uncommonly advanced for the DIY records of the time. It’s immediately evident why the band would go on to release singles on the indie pop titan Sarah Records.
Their output is slim, but every song is this good. On “Wonder,” Menck sings with childlike astonishment at the betrayal of a lover; “Reachin’ For The Stars” effortlessly shifts from power pop to a psychedelic outro that also doubles as a sly demonstration of the serious chops underneath these three-chord songs. “Scatter Good Friends,” the last song recorded under the Springfields name, is the only deviation, a melancholic meditation on past mistakes performed entirely on acoustic guitar. But even here Menck’s knack for bittersweet melody shines through.
Of the 12 songs that make up The Springfield’s discography, nearly half of them are covers, from the obvious choices like the Hollies’ “Clown” to covers of contemporaries like Primal Scream and The Clouds. But Menck and Chastain were so attuned to melody that less knowledgeable listeners would be forgiven for thinking they were all originals. The uncharitable read would be to suggest The Springfields were nothing but the sum of their influences. But they infuse Matthew Sweet’s “Are We Gonna Be Alright?” with quiet ache that only comes from having lived through what you’re singing about.
Menck and Chastain would still collaborate after finishing the Springfields. They became bigger and louder under the name Velvet Crush, a project that would do well and would even get signed to the home of several of their influences, Creation. Yet The Springfields remains maybe their most treasured work, and for good reason. Indie pop, as maligned as it is for its simplicity, is at its most glorious when artists make something that sounds both timeless and sincere. The Springfields, over a few brief years and with only a few people noticing, pulled it off.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Burn Your Fire for No Witness finds the singer-songwriter inhabiting a fuller, louder sound and embracing punchier song structures. The blown-out, full-band energy enlivens Olsen, kindling an intensity that’s always been present in her songs and fanning the flames even higher.

Angel Olsen: Burn Your Fire for No Witness

Burn Your Fire for No Witness

“Hi-Five”, the third song on Angel Olsen’s second album, Burn Your Fire for No Witness, has got to be one of the most cheerful songs ever written about being lonely. A twangy electric folk tune that begins with an invocation of its muse, Hank Williams, the song is all stomp-and-rollick until it stops to catch its breath for a moment in the bridge. “Are you lonely too?” Olsen warbles. A beat later, her band’s back in full Technicolor, and the next line hits like a title card in an old “Batman” episode: “HI-FIVE!/ SO AM I!”
Olsen’s voice is enchanting; it sounds like the result of a spell that called for Leonard Cohen’s blood, Buffy Sainte-Marie’s larynx, and a still-operational old-timey microphone emblazoned with radio call letters. Her songs are powered by a strange, anarchic electricity, always flickering on the edge of blowing out. By the laws of the unique universe she creates on her records, Wanting, Waiting, and (probably the most popular pastime in her songs) Thinking are not passive stances but active ways of being in the world; unruly emotion is a virtue. “You don’t sing so high and wild,” she sneers at one point to a detached lover, and in an Angel Olsen song this is an insult so harsh it’s almost obscene. This guy may as well be dead.
Olsen first gained notice as the stand-out eccentric in Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s mysterious band the Babblers (given that all six of them were known to perform in hooded pajamas and sunglasses, this is saying something). In 2010, she released an arresting tape on Bathetic called Strange Cacti, which gave off the impression that she’d recorded it after falling down a well, trying to sing loudly and cavernously and urgently enough to be found. And she was, more or less—her cult following multiplied with the release of 2012’s excellent Half Way Home, a surreal and lyrical collection of folk songs that sounded a bit like Vashti Bunyan playing a midnight game of Ouija. Most of the songs on Half Way Home were driven by Olsen’s hushed acoustic guitar, so her 2013 single “Sweet Dreams” was a thrilling left turn—a swirling, psych-pop reverie. To overpower the percussion and charred electric guitars, she sang even wilder.
Burn Your Fire for No Witness picks up where “Sweet Dreams” left off, blossoming into a fuller, louder sound and embracing punchier song structures. It’s not as weird or raw a record as Half Way Home, but producer John Congleton manages to sand the rough edges off Olsen’s music without quite taming it. She and her band (Joshua Jaeger on drums and Stewart Bronaugh on bass and guitar) talk to each other effortlessly: On the great lead-off single “Fogiven/Forgotten”, the kick drum accents her open-hearted declarations like expertly placed exclamation points (“I don’t know anything!/ But I love you!”), and as the energy of “Lights Out” mounts, she passes the baton to Bronaugh for a perfectly timed solo. The blown-out, full-band energy enlivens Olsen, kindling an intensity that’s always been present in her songs and fanning the flames even higher.
On repeated listens, subtler highlights emerge. "Enemy" hangs like a spiderweb in the album's quietest corridor—an intricate wisp of a song that she patiently spins into something hallowed and heartbreaking. Then there’s “White Fire”, a sparse, nearly seven-minute incantation that sounds like a lost Songs of Leonard Cohen cut but gradually accumulates an atmosphere of its own. When Olsen switches into ballad mode, she fares best with hushed, minimal arrangements. The echoing percussion and shimmering chords of “Dance Slow Decades” cloak the song in a relatively ill-fitting grandeur; the demo is probably more of a gut-punch. Same goes for the indistinct closer “Window”, which sounds a bit too much like someone trying to write a Feist song. Still, that last one feels like such an anomaly that it only underscores how distinct Olsen’s songwriting is across the rest of the record. Burn Your Fire for No Witness conjures the past without ever imitating it, swirling its influences into something intimate, impressionistic and new.
“I wish it were the same as it is in my mind,” Olsen laments in “Enemy”; this is pretty much the central conflict in every Angel Olsen song. The people she writes about daydream vividly, mumble reassuring mantras to themselves ("Some days all you need is one good thought strong in your mind"), and get so caught up in the songs stuck in their heads that they accidentally walk past their own houses. And yet, even as she longs for deep connections and hi-fives from strangers, Olsen knows too well that dreamers are usually loners. Not that she really minds. If she seems unafraid of—even superhumanly amped about—loneliness, it’s because her songs find an almost beatific peace in solitude. “If you can’t be psyched about your own thoughts,” she said in an interview a few years ago, “Then how are you supposed to have a meaningful interaction with anyone?” It’s a point she’s carried over into her music, honed in seclusion but now ready for more people to bear witness to its peculiar charms.


Newly signed to Temporary Residence, Guillermo Scott Herren reboots the Prefuse 73 name with a series of EPs which constitute his best work in well over a decade. They prove exactly how well he fits alongside his new labelmates, old friends The Books' Zammuto and Paul De Jong, William Basinski, Grails and Rachel Grimes and others.

Prefuse 73: Rivington Não Rio / Forsyth Gardens EP

Rivington Não Rio / Forsyth Gardens EP

The beats Guillermo Scott Herren has been constructing as Prefuse 73 for 15 years resemble the work of a master graphic designer. The way a skilled Adobe Creative Suite architect takes old, obscure fonts and images and re-appropriates them against a backdrop of razor-sharp typesetting and wide-open white space is retro-futurist art of the highest order, and it is similar to the way the Miami-born, Atlanta-bred producer builds his beats from fragments of voices, instruments and found sounds reprocessed through his MPC. And while he got his start in the experimental/post-rock realm under his Delarosa and Asora and Savath y Savalas monikers, it was Prefuse 73 that exhibited Herren's true skill set as a producer and composer. His grooves were not so much chopped up and flipped, in the DJ Premier sense, as they were shattered like an antique plate, only to be reassembled with the delicacy of a day-camp craft project.
His debut under the Prefuse handle, 2001's Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives, harnessed the energy of Radiohead's Kid A and planted its formula smack in the middle of a white-hot hip-hop New York City underground, in the midst of Def Jux's heyday. It also gave Herren's label at the time, Warp Records, the credibility it so desperately sought out upon moving their offices to New York City: In the years that followed, Warp would come to depend on Herren's uncanny knowledge and talent as a de facto A&R guy to help the label transcend its rep as a purely IDM imprint by introducing them to some of their most popular acts, including Anti-Pop Consortium, Battles, and a young DJ out of Los Angeles by the name Flying Lotus.
Here in 2015, FlyLo is one of the biggest names in abstract hip-hop. Meanwhile, the man born Steven Ellison and the curated roster of acolytes on his own boutique label—Brainfeeder Records—are inspiring a whole new generation of DJs and beat junkies to smash their preconceptions of rhythm and piece it back together as they like. For Warp, Flying Lotus has become an event artist on par with Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin. Meanwhile, the man who brought the kid to the party found himself dropped from his longtime label.
In 2013, he launched his own micro imprint Yellow Year, yet couldn't sustain the funding to keep the hustle going. Now, fully empowered by a new deal with Temporary Residence, Ltd., who picked him up on the good word of pals Kieran Hebden and Nigel Godrich, Herren reboots the Prefuse brand for the first time since 2011's dicey The Only She Chapters with not one but three new titles. Some have criticized Herren in recent years for falling too deep into the chasm of his own wild ambitions, exploring his Catalina heritage with Savath and losing the plot of Prefuse on such lackluster fare as 2007's Preparations and 2009's Everything She Touched Turned Ampexian. With this past April's Forsyth Gardens and new full-length Rivington Não Rio, Herren returns to the essence of what made works like Uprock, The 92 vs. 02 Collection and One Word Extinguisher such essential sonic backdrops for walks along the chain-linked fences of shady, grass-patched lots in pre-"Girls" Williamsburg.
Following the meh response to his Warp swan song, it seems like Herren has reckoned that the human voice works best for his beats when it is diced into a million fragments, and he juggles the oohs and aahs of random vocalists on Forsyth highlights like "Genderations", "Still Pretending" and "Sará Teflón" with the same deftness he showed to Erykah Badu back on Uprock in 2001. Elsewhere, his ties to the old Chicago indie Hefty Records can be heard in the Tortoise-esque sway of such heady LP jams from as "Applauded Assumptions" and "Jacinto Lyric Range". "Mojav Mating Call" is the closest you will ever hear to an aesthetic compound of Prefuse, Delarosa, and Savath yet, as if he is utilizing Rivington's penultimate track to fuse them all together permanently.
Meanwhile, Herren's multi-dimensional ear remains firmly affixed to what's hot with the limited guest list space made available for these works, Rivington in particular. "Infared" is featured on both Forsyth and Rivington, and is enhanced by the stoned soul wobble of Sam Dew, formerly of the severely slept-on Atlanta art-rock outfit Cloudeater. Former Savath associate Roberto Carlos Lange of Helado Negro fame helps Herren dive back into the science of their old outfit's sole Stones Throw LP, 2009's La Llama on "See More Than Just Stars", and flexes his newfound affiliation with Temporary Residence by recruiting Rob Crow on "Quiet One", a mellow synthpop gem that's more Pet Shop Boys than Pinback. The supreme assist happens on "140 Jabs Interlude", which features the criminally, perennially overlooked Busdriver and his longtime associate Milo, who uses his "middle finger to smear shit on far-fetched idols."
The relationship between Prefuse 73 and Temporary Residence has certainly inspired the producer to peel off his best work in well over a decade, while proving exactly how well he will fit beside the likes of old pals from the Books Zammuto and Paul de Jong, William Basinski, Grails, and Rachel Grimes on one of the best label stables going right now. But ultimately, what Forsyth Gardens, Rivington Não Rio and the upcoming trilogy finale, the more ominously hued Every Color of Darkness EP, accomplish is to provide a memento on where all the long division that factors into today's beloved L.A. beat science originates. And not to take anything away from FlyLo, the Brainfeeder squad, or their advances in bringing the fusion of jazz and hip-hop to its most progressive and organic period in years, but it is rewarding to have Herren's voice at the table again, to remind the world where a sizeable chunk of this sound derived.


The latest album from Carey Mercer's frenetic and prolific project came with the news that the singer-songwriter has throat cancer and the album is haunted by that initial revelation. It's probably the most straightforward album Frog Eyes have ever released, with shorter songs and less tangled verbiage.

Carey's Cold Spring

One of the greatest favors and greatest injuries an artist can give his music is to give it a story before releasing it. It's a habit employed frequently these days, when setting up and talking up context has become increasingly easier to amplify: The secluded cabin. The intense personal trauma. The soul-searching sailboat adventure. On one hand, these narratives create a world around the music, painting a lush backdrop. But sometimes the backstory can be deceiving, a crutch that distorts a work's value. Considering how often we impart our own meanings on the music we love, should it matter at all?
In the case of Carey Mercer's Carey's Cold Spring, the latest album from his frenetic, prolific project Frog Eyes, it's hard to know how his own heartbreaking preview affects how it's heard. Last month, the Victoria, B.C., native announced the record with a letter explaining that (a) this, unlike many of his previous releases, would not be a concept album; (b) his father recently died and he played the record's final track "Claxxon's Lament" for him in hospice as "the last song that went into his ears," subsequently adding the song to the album at the last minute; and (c) no sooner had Mercer finished the record than he was diagnosed with throat cancer, prompting him to self-release the album and postpone touring indefinitely. A few weeks later, the record was dropped on Bandcamp, along with a FAQ. It was an intimate and honest introduction that is now nearly impossible to separate from Cold Spring itself, regardless of how incidental the tragedies might have been to the actual record-making process.
Without those words to contextualize the record, Carey's Cold Spring is probably the most straightforward album Frog Eyes have ever released. Excepting a typically long-winded opener in "The Road Is Long", the album's tracks have settled into surprisingly consistent, manageable lengths. Melanie Campbell's idiosyncratic drumming is absent, replaced by more traditional percussion; songs have recognizable bridges, even lines that pass for choruses. The music is still rife with the imagery and thick, twisty metaphors that have endeared Mercer to critics. Themes like the evils of materialism and war power it; women pepper its landscape like wispy, mythological creatures. (Either he has revived one of the supporting characters from Paul's Tomb: A Triumph opener "A Flower in a Glove", or he knows multiple skittish women named Judith.) "Don't Give Up Your Dreams" is the saccharine ballad; its beginning is its most gripping moment, its closer the most important.
But on Cold Spring, Frog Eyes' carefully crafted fever dreams have been replaced by orderly instrumentals and disordered almost-thoughts. Without Frog Eyes' conceptual concentration, it all becomes slack and rambling, its mumbled poetry less crucial to grasp. It's less inventive, less urgent, almost incidental; Mercer's wild-eyed, commanding sermons have softened, and the only true bombast lies in the album's first 60 seconds. It's an awfully quiet album, especially for one "made over a period of three years" with a mind on "riots, occupy, revolutions, storms, floods, melodramatic gestures, leftist factions, mass marches in the streets, the sheer and shocking crookedness of our political and economic system, fear of the right, fear of torture, of murder, of future firing squads, of the consequences of idealism, of the consequences of having no ideals or ideas."
If you refuse to separate Mercer's life from his art, the record's discontent is eerily weighted by events that came to pass after its recording. On "The Road Is Long," when he sings, "Evil, I want you to know that I know that you have no plans," it feels like a new challenge. And on "Claxxon's Lament", the song that now belongs to the late Mr. Mercer, he repeats "nobody shall die" and it's crushing; even if he wrote it long before he lost him, the heartbreak is fresh and palpable. In his FAQ, Mercer writes that he is "supposed to get better," and has "the kind of cancer you fight." When he returns, Carey's Cold Spring, an album that gazes uncertainly toward an uncertain future, should serve as an appropriate turning point.


The Canadian folk duo partners with the New Zealand singer-songwriter; together, they mix blues, murder ballads, and Indigenous lore, updating traditional forms in unexpected ways.

Kacy & Clayton / Marlon Williams: Plastic Bouquet

Plastic Bouquet

The North and South have a storied history in Americana, but unfurl the map and that dividing line tells a different tale across continents. Canadian folk duo Kacy & Clayton (second cousins Kacy Anderson and Clayton Linthicum) and New Zealand singer-songwriter Marlon Williams crossed hemispheres to work together, guided by a compass that pointed to the diverse traditions that have informed their respective work.
Both acts have shown an abiding interest in traditional, character-driven and confessional folk narratives, though they’ve branched out in recent years. Kacy & Clayton stretched their sound on 2017’s The Siren’s Song, which Jeff Tweedy produced, adding a 1950s rock twang, and Williams looked to baroque pop on 2018’s Make Way for Love. Now they have combined what they learned on those sojourns to create Plastic Bouquet.
After meeting on tour in 2017, Anderson and Williams began trading songs they’d written individually, eventually gathering in Kacy & Clayton’s native Saskatchewan to record with a full band. Plastic Bouquet marries their remarkably timeworn voices, entwining threads from country-folk, 1960s British pop, and even rockabilly to stitch a retro flare into their modern lore.
“Isn’t It” harkens back to blues traditionals about cheating and how all that sneaking around eventually eviscerates a person. “You took my shadow, wiped it right off the floor,” Anderson sings in a high, mournful register. Linthicum’s guitar backs her, metallic and sharply rendered, before Williams joins her on the chorus. At times their harmonies fit hand in glove; at others, they stand at arresting odds, their voices weaving together different textures that suit their ominous tales.
The title song updates the murder-ballad tradition, with a reckless driver playing the central villain. Done as a morbid waltz turned warning, “Plastic Bouquet” recounts the dangerous crossroads where a young driver killed three girls in a tragic accident that also claimed his life. On “Arahura,” the trio look to New Zealand’s past and the Ngāti Toa warrior Te Rauparaha, who was said to plunder the Arahura, a river on the country’s west coast, for greenstone. The song’s narrator hovers like a ghostly presence solidified only by the environment. “I know I am bound/To the river I love/And in a million years/I’ll be a rock on that hill,” Williams sings, his voice becoming more reverent against hazy pedal steel in the background. The bounty of New Zealand’s lush geography has limits, however: “But in a million more/I don’t know that I will.”
The album favors solemn matters, but the playful arrangements and Linthicum’s whimsical organ prevent it from slipping into a dour retreading of the past. “Devil’s Daughter,” arguably the most doleful song, opens with Anderson offering a very Canadian “sorry” for laughing before an acoustic guitar scaffolds a stage for her rich voice to mingle with Williams’.
Both vocally and narratively, Anderson and Williams have found a songwriting partner to push them in unconventional directions. Plastic Bouquet feels like the kismet of finding a kindred spirit halfway across the world.

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Arthur Lee's paranoia-soaked 1967 masterpiece is again reissued and expanded-- just seven years after its previous rollout.

Love: Forever Changes [Collector's Edition]

Forever Changes [Collector's Edition]

If I were reviewing only the original material that forms the basis of this Collector's Edition of Love's Forever Changes, I'd certainly give it a 10.0 and praise it in the most glowing terms possible. Such as: Fuck the Doors. This is the truer sound of late-1960s Los Angeles, which was neither a trippy paradise nor a Lizard Kingdom, but a purgatory characterized by paranoia and grievance. Already veterans of the local scene when they released their third and best album, Love captured the city in all its grizzled glory on Forever Changes-- or, rather, Arthur Lee did. A charismatic black singer/songwriter in a mixed-race band but a generally white scene, he had soured on the hippies and sunshine mentality, and instead saw the Vietnam War, his friends' drug addictions, and the end of the world. Sequestered in a house high in the Hollywood hills, he could look down at the city below and nurse a curious dread. Eventually, he became convinced that his death was looming and that Forever Changes would be his final statement to the world. So he became a rank perfectionist, expressing all his unhappiness, fear, blame, and hope not only in his dark, discomfiting lyrics, but in the music itself, which draws from rock, pyschedelia, folk, pop, classical, and even mariachi. Ultimately, the album belongs to none of those genres.
That's certainly a compelling story, but it also points to a larger anti-story, one specifically bound to Los Angeles during the late 1960s. In her essay "The White Album", Joan Didion experienced a similar detachment from the world around her, piecing together fragments of scenes with the Doors, an interview with Manson girl Linda Kasabian, transcripts from the Ferguson brothers murder trial, and vivid descriptions of her own brittle mental state. *"*I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it," she writes. "I was supposed to hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but all I knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence, images with no 'meaning' beyond their temporary arrangement, not a movie but a cutting-room experience." Forever Changes is similarly a thicket of tangled story threads, which of course shows in Lee's lyrics. Has rock music produced a stranger, more alarming cry for help than "Sitting on a hillside, watching all the people die/ I'll feel much better on the other side"? Lee sings those lyrics on "The Red Telephone", and the calm in his voice, the matter-of-factness with which he delivers those lines, makes them the more worrisome.
Lee's faltering grasp on any overriding narrative, however, comes through more strongly in the shape of the music, which is diverse and logical, but tricky-- full of feints, blind alleys, unusual passages. The traditional structures that served the band so well on its two previous albums (Love even covered Bacharach-David) are jettisoned in favor of more circuitous arrangements like "A House Is Not a Motel", which moves linearly, but repeats almost nothing. Even the most direct, lucid songs convey a sense of vague menace, the first sight of the storm out to sea. "Maybe the People Would Be the Times or Between Clark and Hilldale", perhaps the catchiest song here, surveys Los Angeles' music scene from Lee's perspective as he seems to bid conspicuous farewells to the venues and audiences. There's an acceptance and perhaps even a relief in his resignation: Listen to Lee sing along with the trumpet solo, his excitement driving and driven by the music.
Forever Changes is both context and text, but none of it is academic. It's a rock album and, despite its tangles of meaning, a surprisingly accessible and enduring one. Nevertheless, as amazing as these songs are, this particular edition of Forever Changes is definitive only by default. Its similarities to the 2001 edition suggest an obligatory undertaking, offering few revelations about the album or the musicians who made it. The new liner notes were written by Andrew Sandoval, who produced the previous edition and contributed a short introduction. His access to the band members is valuable (he interviewed Lee many times before the singer's death in 2006), but he seems more interested in detailing the creation of the record than in exploring what it means or why it persists. The bulk of the bonus material consists of an alternate mix of the album, which pushes Lee's vocals to the forefront, deviates occasionally from the well-known stereo version, and generally recalls those Elektra anniversary editions of Love's previous albums. Otherwise, six of the 10 new bonus tracks appear on the original reissue, while one track is noticeably absent. Several are tracking sessions, full of count offs, false starts, and abrupt stops. This is by definition for-fans-only material. The only real discovery is their lackadaisical take on "Wooly Bully", which begins and ends so unceremoniously that it sounds wholly improvised, the byproduct of too much downtime in the studio.
Of the two, this new edition is superior to the 2001 one if only because it relegates all the bonus material to a separate disc and presents the full album by itself on the first disc. The well-earned valedictory "You Set the Scene" closes Forever Changes as intended instead of leading into outtakes. On the other hand, this Collector's Edition lacks the impact of the 2001 version, which rescued the then out-of-print album and introduced it to new legions of listeners. In retrospect, however, timing may have been the most crucial aspect of that release, considering the events of 2001 and the outrage that has simmered since then. Inspired by the 1960s, Forever Changes may actually be the perfect soundtrack to the 2000s, when the stories we tell ourselves in order to live began to make even less sense. To say that Love's music has lost none of its power is beside the point: It has actually gained new gravity, as Lee's paranoia, far from unwarranted, has become frighteningly easy to identify with.


Never before issued on CD, Rhino expands Talking Heads' classic 1982 live document to two discs-- the second of which captures the 1980-81 Remain in Light tour, which saw the band fleshed out to 10 members.

Talking Heads: The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads

The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads

The liner notes to the long-awaited CD debut of Talking Heads' 1982 live release, The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads, recommends other albums by the New York four-piece. The list includes each of the band's studio albums, plus Rhino's four-disc box set Once in a Lifetime; perhaps conspicuous in its absence is that other live Talking Heads album, the far more popular and legendary Stop Making Sense.
It may not have been a confrontational omission, but the soundtrack to Jonathan Demme's Talking Heads concert film has long overshadowed The Name of This Band-- so much so that fans have long doubted that this earlier (and superior) live album would ever make it to compact disc. Thankfully, however, Rhino has now not only reissued The Name of This Band, but has also taken a cue from the recent "Special Edition" of Stop Making Sense by adding 13 tracks which weren't on the original version.
Part of the charm and power of Stop Making Sense the film is that it almost purely translates the live experience of a rock show audience rather than the experience of a touring band. There is no backstage fly-on-the-wall stuff, no dressing room preparations, on-the-bus interviews, caterers, hotel clerks or road managers. Rather, it's the snapshot of one live document with the camera playing the role of a punter, trained completely on the band in an attempt to recreate the experience of attending the show. It works so well that it's almost jarring when the camera finally closes in on audience members dancing in the aisles during the show's finale.
Musically, this approach is a bit limiting. As powerful as Talking Heads were at the time, Stop Making Sense still functions as a live document of one band at one moment in time (well, not technically-- the film was actually recorded over three nights). For a group such as this, who paid attention to the musical world around them, deftly and quickly folding outside influences as seemingly disparate as disco, afrobeat, funk and new wave into their already unique sound, The Name of This Band's approach-- collecting various live performances over a four-year period-- is more revelatory and rewarding. It functions as both a timeline in which a listener can trace the band's development and definitive proof that some of their supposed great departures-- particularly an accomplished and complex rhythm section-- were there from the onset.
The result is both the best career-spanning snapshot of and single-purchase introduction to Talking Heads-- odd accolades for a live record-- and a treat for longtime fans. The record's title refers to band leader David Byrne's dry, cheeky, no-nonsense stage patter in the band's early days, the years documented on the set's first disc. "This song is called 'New Feeling' and that's what it's about," Byrne begins, leading the four-piece group with both his animated, acrobatic vocal tics and affectations and the band's nervous, twitchy music.
All bugged eyes and neurosis, Byrne spits and churns his way through the best tracks from the band's first three albums. His oft-criticized, stream-of-consciousness language (best illustrated by the "Busy Doin' Nothin'"-like driving directions and matter-of-fact descriptions of the benefits of his apartment building and favorite federal laws in "Don't Worry About the Government") ground the band's more aggressive, robust playing music. At times, Byrne gets a little punchy as well, injecting anger and bemusement into "I'm Not in Love" and adding a bitter tone to "The Big Country", transforming it from the hazy thoughts of an airplane traveler to a more combative rumination on the urban/rural divide. It would be a candidate for the official anthem of the mythical Blue States if the so-called culture wars and other right-wing chicanery continue to drive their regrettable wedge into the country.
When required, however, Byrne can craft an expressive lyrics, as indicated by the literate detail of tracks such as "Psycho Killer", "Life During Wartime" and "Found a Job". And on an early version of "Electricity (Drugs)"-- one of three tracks first released on a rare Warner promo release-- the band is sleepy and drony, countering the lyrical claims that "I'm charged up." That track is also one of only three that is repeated on both discs, although on Disc 2, it's in as the more familiar "Drugs (Electricity)".
The second disc borrows a page from Stop Making Sense's playbook and recreates the entire set from stops along the band's Remain in Light tour, including a handful of tracks from the much-bootlegged February 1981 performance at Tokyo's Nakano Sun Palace. Expanded to a 10-piece band that included Adrian Belew on guitar and Bernie Worrell on keyboards, the bulk of Disc 2's material gives its studio versions a run for the money. Belew's nuanced guitar work, more confident contributions from the core members, and the added rhythmic dimension and heft are frequently jawdropping, but the loose beats and a playful Byrne keep claims of muso nonsense at arm's length.
The set itself is ordered nearly chronologically, which neatly and accidentally conforms to the logic of the album's running order. Within the set, the band builds the rhythmic density of their tracks, kicking off with a quartet of songs from their first two albums (including second appearances by "Psycho Killer" and "Stay Hungry"), before the funk-influenced "Cities" and African rhythms of "I Zimbra". Those two fractured, beat-heavy and offbeat tracks guide the audience into the final two-thirds of the set, which is mostly built from the polyrhythmic Remain in Light. Along the way, a melodic "Animals"-- perhaps the set's weakest track in its studio version-- easily surpasses the original, led by a gorgeous harmonic middle section.
Last week, Rhino also released an 18-track Best of Talking Heads set. Spanning the band's entire 11-year career, it's well-selected considering its considerable limitations and is arguably more inclusive than The Name of This Band, but it is also unnecessary as anything other than a grab bag of familiar radio hits. This live album, on the other hand, is not simply a fans-only document or a curio or a means of padding the discography or exploiting fans. In many ways, it's the best one-stop document of what made Talking Heads one of the post-punk era's most dynamic and urgent bands, and a succinct argument for the merits of synthesizing rock with emerging, potentially oppositional sounds. The latter is a lesson that will hopefully be learned by today's rock artists.


The second album from guitarist Betsy Wright and drummer Laura King revels in a good time, backing up their bite with instrumental brawn.

Queen of My World

There is something sublime about a monster truck flying through the air. Behemoth vehicles outfitted with intimidating paint jobs and names to match—Bigfoot, Grave Digger, Monster Mutt—launching themselves from tall dirt plateaus, a nose thumbed at God and gravity and any other challengers as they become airborne. Queen of My World, the second album from the East Coast duo Bat Fangs, arrives with the same power and pomp, bearing a flamboyant edge all their own. Guitarist Betsy Wright and drummer Laura King form a sleek, rip-roaring unit that revels in a good time, backing up their bite with instrumental brawn.
Bat Fangs draw gleefully from the biggest excesses of rock‘n’roll, delivering the postures of hair metal and late-’80s rock without any of the lechery, heroin, or sticky dessert metaphors. Where blowhard ego ruled the arena-glam heyday, the pair instead manage an air of cool that seems effortless. As the bassist for Ex Hex, Wright oversaw their strongest numbers like “Radio On” and “How You Got That Girl”; in Bat Fangs, her capacity as a hook-minded lead guitarist is front-and-center. King and her rhythmic sensibilities have long tended toward the hard, fast, and loud (with the snarling trio Flesh Wounds, the double-drum outfit Speed Stick, and in Mac McCaughan’s backing band), and they add muscle to the songs in tandem with Wright’s ferocious riffs.
The pair’s songs tend toward supernatural associations—mentions of spells cast, creatures in the shadows, cosmic forces—which serve more as a thematic springboard than a goofy gimmick. In contrast to the direct shots of the band’s self-titled debut (“Wolf Bite,” “Rock the Reaper”), the more prismatic Queen of My World feels beamed in from an alternate universe where Lisa Frank made her fortune designing airbrushed-wizard panel vans. Wright matches her lines about far-out curiosities with shredded guitar, her shout-along yeahs, whoas, and ohs soaring around solos that feel directly aimed at serotonin centers.
For all the big thrills, Bat Fangs keep Queen running lean under 35 minutes, and from the opening strut of “Action,” not one of their songs ever has the opportunity to sour. “Psychic Eye” is its own rollercoaster at the middle of the record, cooling with a slithering melody before Wright rips a note that crackles like lightning over King’s thunderclouds. Building from a tumble of light, knotty guitar, the instrumental closer “Into the Weave” shifts from a springy, borderline psychedelic number into a fuzzy, scorching climax before wafting away.
Though subtlety is not the ruling order of Bat Fangs, their wholehearted approach to everything gives Queen a sanguine undercurrent. “I act like I don’t care but/I don’t wanna dance alone,” Wright admits on the punchy “Talk Tough.” The record’s title track is an admiring recollection of youthful friendship with a strong spiritual affinity to Bikini Kill’s “Rebel Girl.” Bat Fangs’ vibrancy would make for a good time even if Wright were singing a technical manual, but the top-down, unabashed enthusiasm of their material makes it shine. The heavy expectations of Serious Rock Music and mortal existence turn featherweight in their hands, a neon-tinged shift in perspective that leaves a glowing halo behind.
Bat Fangs are light on their feet while sticking the landing on songs that could fill football stadiums. A single, angelic “aah” ends the album, another good-natured wink that lasts just long enough to ring with sincerity. Bat Fangs offer a mix of high spirits, gut-rattling guitar jams, and escapism, a combination best captured in one of the holiest two-word phrases in the English language: hell yeah.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Singer-songwriter Josh Tillman reaches far, far back to the golden age of Hollywood for a dreamy, lushly orchestrated, wryly comic collection of vignettes that all depend upon the timelessness of a love song.

Father John Misty: Chloë and the Next 20th Century

Chloë and the Next 20th Century

Two things recur with peculiar frequency around Father John Misty: films and dreams. You’ve heard his wife Emma is a filmmaker; or you might recall that wild story he made up about the time Lou Reed appeared to him in a dream; or you’ll remember his songs, the way the Warner Bros. logo looms over “Leaving LA.” Like David Lynch, Josh Tillman dreams in absurdity, a glamorously mundane world populated by seedy characters hidden beneath the surface. This is the Misty land, the dreamscape, and everyone who encounters his work crosses into it, consciously or not. He’s the folk singer for these times because the aura of unreality follows him around like a stench.
Anyway, here we have Chloë and the Next 20th Century, from the mind of an auteur who specializes in oneiric theory and mid-century film scores. His latest album is another collection of story-song vignettes arrayed in loose opposition to the pointless absurdity of modern society; or it’s an elaborate study in the life of a sad sack helplessly ensnared in doomed romances with a whole series of women, starting with Chloë, an unfeeling socialite whose previous boyfriend met a mysterious end in the first of, by my count, six tragic deaths in 51 minutes; or it was a dream all along.
What Chloë looks like, though, is a film. The old-timey opening credits roll for five minutes in the “Q4” video, but the action never begins. There are uncredited cameos: You can read “Funny Girl” like a blind item about Drew Barrymore from the perspective of a delusional fan, and in my mind the umlaut hovers over the image of another generationally famous Chloë, Sevigny. From the first sour trumpet, Misty is working overtime to entertain, tapping into a strain of golden age Hollywood jazz and swing that feels at first like a ludicrous posture for a folk-rock star. Few in our present era of obsessively nostalgic pop have dug all the way back to mid-century big band orchestration and jazz crooners like Johnny Mathis and Chet Baker. Misty looks here because it represents the period when movies were the most advanced and important popular multimedia form—easier than writing for the metaverse, in any case, and just as transportive.
Still, it’s a record, so you’ll have to watch in the dim theater of your own mind. The new album shares a number of themes with 2017’s Pure Comedy, Misty’s last great throwing-up-of-hands, but instead of manifestos and literalism, Chloë has the amnesiac effect of a film without phones or calendars. It feels designed to age well because it sounds a bit ageless, trimming back the earlier album’s instrumental interludes and replacing its curdled, Trump-scented atmosphere with melodies and stories of no era in particular. From this point, things get slippery: There’s no clear narrative, and the stories are riddled with innuendo and unanswered questions. In place of Pure Comedy’s logorrhea, Chloë suggests the framework of an ambitious novel: Perhaps the story begins with the wedding band of wooly closer “The Next 20th Century,” and ends, 11 songs earlier, as poor Chloë leaps off a balcony.
But Chloë is ultimately a background character, more like a concept, a sometime foil and frequent obsession for our determinedly dislikeable leading man. The narrator never gives a name, though he shares a few habits with someone we’ve met before, such as a tendency to save the big reveal for the final stanza, or to express some genuinely affecting sentiment like, “Love’s much less a mystery/Than who you give it to,” and subsequently make a pass at a celebrity. In “Funny Girl,” he falls for a comedian: She’s barely over five feet tall, a vivacious interviewee who once “charmed the pants off Letterman.” Convinced she returns his affections, he asks her to meet and arrives at the appointed time, but she’s nowhere to be found; it’s not clear she ever knew he existed.
Most songs share a similar tenor: pompous and sordid and really terrifically campy. If you subscribe to the narrator’s continuity, you’ll also have to accept that the guy who’s filching Chloë’s pills and stalking talk show guests is the same one singing “Kiss Me (I Loved You)” and cradling his dying cat in “Goodbye Mr. Blue,” easily the saddest death of them all. The pleasure of making his acquaintance is a sensation between schadenfreude and pity, and Misty knows it, because he writes the “Glory Days” scene right in, on a bitter dive bar weeper called “Buddy’s Rendezvous,” as in, “I’m at Buddy's Rendezvous/Telling the losers and old timers/How good I did with you/They almost believe me, too.”
Look closer: Nothing about the Chloë story adds up. The album is full of unfinished arcs, open questions that could turn the ship in an entirely new direction if only someone were steering. On “Olvidado (Otro Momento),” when Misty starts singing bossa nova in Spanish and not Portuguese—where are we? The unhappy couple killed en route to a one-night stand on “We Could Be Strangers”—who were they? And what did he say happened to Chloë’s last boyfriend—were we ever sure? Give the record half an ear and the stories are a little too clever and intricate to register; devote full attention and their meanings start to evaporate because there’s nothing solid there either. This isn’t the structure of a script but the logic of a dream.
Except for “Q4,” when we briefly wake up to reality, maybe. It’s the album’s most self-contained episode, the only one you couldn’t call a love song: a scandalous story of an author who steals the life story of her late sister as fodder for her own new “semi-memoir.” If the peacocking instrumental is a little over the top, it’s befitting of these characters’ preening attitudes. “It was just the thing for their Q4/‘Deeply funny’ was the rave refrain,” Misty crows, a fictional plagiarized bestseller standing in for a whole history of tension between art and commerce. “What’s ‘deeply funny’ mean anyhow?” he asks the next time the chorus comes around, and then, later, tosses out another of those lines that threaten to give up the whole charade: “The film adaptation was a total mess.”
It can feel like Misty is in danger of spinning out, but for most of the album, what’s so impressive is the subtlety of his control. The band—including frequent collaborators Drew Erickson and Jonathan Wilson, plus a string quartet and eleven orchestra members—play with silvery poise and high drama. The characters may be odious and dissolute, but the way Misty sings about them is delightful, from the debonair delivery of “Chloë” to the little retro-microphone vibrato that creeps into “Kiss Me.” “Only a Fool” plays like an aspiring songbook standard, its timeless romantic premise flirting with the sly, overeducated Tillman setup: “The wisdom of the ages/From Gita to Abraham/Was written by smitten, lonely sages/Too wise to ever take a chance.” He’s no longer the oldest man in folk rock but the youngest lounge singer in 1950s California.
But like a big Hollywood production, what’s sparkle and pizazz on camera is pain and doubt behind the scenes. The playfulness dissolves with album closer “The Next 20th Century,” a moody, hallucinatory dirge that slinks through the shadow of Leonard Cohen’s “Death of a Ladies’ Man” with the gimlet eye of Howard Hughes in an empty theater. We’ve finally reached the perspective of the viewer and it’s not looking good: Oppression looms like original sin and love pays “for like a thousand different wars.” “And now things keep getting worse while staying so eerily the same,” Misty croons, spinning a karmic wheel and landing on the creeping suspicion that the next 20th century is this one. He’s come, jeembles and all, to ask if entertainment is the best sustenance we have left, and for the first time, he says yes. “I’ll take the love songs/And give you the future in exchange,” he offers, not too generously. It’s a familiar idea from Misty’s past songs, that in the last analysis we have only each other, and perhaps music, but it feels more hopeless somehow, here at the end of this modern relic of an album with no happy love songs at all. The past is irretrievable, the present wasted, the future doesn’t exist: onward to the dreamland.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Teena Marie’s third album, an essential document of R&B that shined a new light on her voice and artistry.

Irons in the Fire

The year is 1980, and Teena Marie is breaking a sweat on national television. It’s the singer’s second appearance on Soul Train, and she’s well-versed in the show’s electric, stylish theater, wearing a belted yellow turtleneck and high-waisted bell-bottoms. A corona of curly hair bounces along as she gyrates across the stage, performing the slinky R&B hit “I Need Your Lovin’,” the opening track from that year’s Irons in the Fire. She resembles an infinitely cooler version of Jennifer Grey in Dirty Dancing: Marie is always on the move, two-stepping across the stage between verses before hitting the sustained, sky-high note at song’s end with the gusto of an opera queen. When she bounces over to chat with Don Cornelius afterward, he chuckles, obviously impressed.
“You tired?”
“No,” she answers. “Want me to do it again?”
That performance—plus the next “nine, ten, eleven” times she appeared on Soul Train over the course of her career, as she remembered it—is testament to many facts about Teena Marie: her tireless brio onstage; her robust and layered vocal talents; her infectious, easygoing personality. Marie’s music was steeped in the gospel, R&B, and soul traditions she heard growing up in “Venice Harlem,” a melting-pot, working-class neighborhood in west Los Angeles. It was a street cred she carried through her entire life, even name-checking the locale by name on the title track to Irons in the Fire. By the time she made the album, her third, and the first over which she had full creative control, the singer had secured a rarified place that no white entertainer in R&B had ever reached, before or since. “My skin is white, but I’m not looked at like that,” she said in a posthumous 2012 documentary on her life. “I’m a Black entertainer, and I always have been.”
Before all of the success that led to Soul Train, however, Teena Marie was simply Mary Christine Brockert. At 8, she began singing in church and at local functions, growing up with parents who played jazz staples like Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughan at home. They encouraged her hobby early on, and as a youth in Venice her love for soul and R&B ran deep. She would haul her battery-powered turntable and Smokey Robinson 45s outside to play and sing along while she and her friends ran track, earning her the nickname Lil’ Smokey for how closely she could mimic the timbre of his voice.
Marie knew even then that she wanted to write love songs modeled after her favorites from Smokey, the Dells, and Al Green, whose lush, heartbroken “Tired of Being Alone” stopped her in her tracks as a sophomore in high school. You can hear the seeds of Marie’s swooning music in Green’s vocals especially, the way he holds his breath for a beat before letting loose a maelstrom of emotion.
Marie attended Santa Monica College and wrote music on the side with friends, eventually landing her first break with Motown, which had expanded from Detroit to Hollywood. Despite earning Berry Gordy's approval, she worked with an assortment of songwriters over nearly three years with no luck. While rehearsing at the label’s L.A. studio one day, Marie finally got the right person’s attention: Rick James, fresh off 1978’s Come Get It!, his debut Top-10 R&B album that would launch his outrageous, sequin-studded “Super Freak” era. The funk-rock svengali took an instant shine to Marie. “I expected to see a writer-producer," James told People years later. “And instead I found this short, tiny white body sitting at the piano, singing like the gods had come into her spirit.”
Marie wasn’t Motown’s only white artist, but she was the first at the label to write music that was undeniably made for Black listeners, especially once James stepped in. He produced her debut, 1979’s Wild & Peaceful, a set of silky R&B punctuated with James’ signature horns and percussive guitars. The album art featured a drippy, pastel painting of the sea, a marketing bet by Motown brass to mask Marie’s race that paid off: the album netted her first top-ten R&B hit, the buoyant, call-and-response James duet “I’m a Sucker for Your Love.”
On Lady T, her follow-up a year later, Richard Rudolph stepped in on production duty. Marie dedicated it to Rudolph’s late wife Minnie Riperton, one of her idols, and the album resembles some of Riperton’s most nimble music as driven by a disco polish and Marie’s vibrant enthusiasm. Released on Valentine’s Day 1980 and emblazoned with regal cover art that put Marie’s face front and center, Lady T was the first time many people had seen the woman behind the music. “I tell them I’m white but they think I’m Black and I’m trying to pass for white,” she said in an interview that year. “This is white skin. I’m not trying to fool anybody.”
Lady T’s swinging glamor set the stage for the passionate Irons in the Fire, recorded immediately afterward and released within the year. Having closely studied both James and Rudolph at work, Marie was now prepared to take total control over hiring, arrangements, and production, with the full support of Gordy and Motown label head Hal Davis behind her (“Mr. Gordy just gave me a shot at producing and turned me loose,” she said). She recruited fellow Motown groups Ozone and Rick James’ Stone City Band to provide the rhythm and horn section, allowing for her sturdy, bottom-heavy arrangements to flourish. Marie played keyboards and recorded most of the album’s backing vocals herself. “Being a woman or being a young woman doesn’t matter if you can do the job,” she told The Los Angeles Times around the album’s release, her confidence on full, fabulous display. “People ask me, ‘How do you handle men in the studio and tell them what to do?’ That’s not a problem. Being in charge is natural for me and I do it well.”
The proof is spread all across the album. Irons in the Fire is an exercise in sleek early-’80s excess, but it feels completely natural in Marie’s hands. The album’s come-ons and recriminations are bound in synthy R&B songs (“First Class Love”) that sit comfortably beside straight jazz standards (“Tune in Tomorrow”). On the irrepressible “I Need Your Lovin’,” small details come together like a tapestry: the rubbery bassline guides Marie’s ascending backing vocals, which melt into a robust, double-tracked chorus as Ray Woodard’s saxophone flit in and out for solos. The effusive “whoo!” that opens the song became something like her equivalent of a producer tag, reoccurring most famously on her successful 1981 rap single “Square Biz.”
Every bespoke choice turns Irons in the Fire into a decadent listening experience, but the smoldering title track, with plucked harp and gentle percussion, is Marie’s most moving performance. Where “I Need Your Lovin’” and the bounding “You Make Love Like Springtime” rely on over-the-top exuberance, here she sounds utterly relaxed, tearing through high vocal runs and then back down with olympic agility. The song presages some of her stormier ballads and collaborations, especially “Fire & Desire,” her 1981 Rick James duet that stands as one of the most heart-rending, soulful collaborations of all time.
Irons in the Fire was Marie’s first record to break into the R&B Top 10, which is inextricable from her involvement with every aspect of the record. Her production and songwriting prowess has been instructive for generations of musicians Marie has influenced over the years: Faith Evans, who collaborated with Marie on her 2009 album Congo Square, recalled admiring seeing her name listed as a producer and writer in the liner notes when she would look through her mother’s LPs as a child. Marie’s reach extended to hip-hop, too: Missy Elliott adopted Marie’s “Square Biz” flow for her guest feature on Ciara’s “1,2 Step,” and the Fugees sampled 1988’s “Ooo La La La” for The Score’s “Fu-Gee-La,” the group’s highest-selling single. Mary J. Blige, another powerhouse of R&B, cites her as a formative influence constantly. “It bugs me out that only 1 out of 20 people knows about Teena Marie,” she protested to Entertainment Weekly in 2004.
After one more album for Motown, 1981’s It Must Be Magic, Marie split from the label, disclosing that they were holding her to her contract while simultaneously withholding her from releasing music. When she signed with Epic, Motown sued, so her legal team countersued citing a state law that required record companies to pay their artists a $6,000 minimum per year. She won the case, resulting in a legal statute that gave artists more power when negotiating contracts with labels known as “the Brockert Initiative.” Artists like Luther Vandross and Mary Jane Girls cited the statute to get out of their contracts afterward; by standing up for herself, Marie had changed the entire landscape for recording artists going forward.
Marie’s career places a singular emphasis on authenticity that fortified her both personally and with audiences. She earned respect because of her pure dedication and respect for the craft, which simply can’t be faked. Irons in the Fire captured the singer at a moment that still feels rare and unprecedented today: a woman in her early 20s taking full control in the studio to establish her personal vision of soul and R&B music. “I think people have embraced me because they really can feel that I’m real,” she said in an interview in 2004. “And that I’m who I am and I play the music that I love.”

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On Doug Paisley's third album Strong Feelings, featuring guest vocals from Mary Margaret O’Hara, the Toronto alt-country artist seeks refuge in the beauty of the romantic lyrical metaphors that have populated the country genre since at least the heyday of Hank Williams.

Strong Feelings

For Doug Paisley, a tender-hearted stoic from Toronto whose songs land on the sweet spot between Kris Kristofferson and Gordon Lightfoot, the language of country music puts poetry into the mundane heartbreaks and setbacks of daily existence. On his third album Strong Feelings, Paisley seeks refuge in the beauty of the romantic lyrical metaphors that have populated the genre since at least the heyday of Hank Williams. “The ice it breaks the midday sun / in springtime when the river runs,” he sings in “My Love”, one of the album’s most bracingly pretty numbers. Essentially, Paisley is saying, “Nature tends to stay in motion, so no matter how hard or deeply you love something it’s going to leave you eventually.” But it sounds so much sweeter the way he says it.
Mortality is Paisley’s central theme; every life is overshadowed by the omnipresence of death, every romantic relationship dimmed by the inevitability of eventual separation. This is the subject matter of a zillion country songs, of course, but unlike that other, more famous country singer named Paisley (whose song “This is Country Music” extols the virtues of songwriting limned with the tangible directness of everyday language), Doug Paisley hears a song on the radio and feels suddenly lifted toward transcendence. “I turned the radio on 25 years ago/ And they were playing your song/ I looked for you on the town, thought I was tracking you down/ But you were there all along,” he croons on the gently chugging “Radio Girl”, and he’s either addressing an actual woman or equating what he’s just heard grace the airwaves with a long-lost love. In Doug Paisley’s songs, distinguishing between what’s “real” and what’s felt scarcely matters.
After a dues-paying tenure as a classic country covers act and the release of his understated self-titled 2008 debut, Paisley broke through in 2010 with his sophomore effort, Constant Companion, which was helped along by high-profile co-stars like Leslie Feist and the Band’s Garth Hudson. For Feelings, Paisley retains producer Stew Crookes and Hudson, who contributes crisp and cozy organ lines to five of the album’s 10 tracks that are so warm you want to rub your hands over them. (His playing on “Song My Love Can Sing” is by itself the worth the price of admission.) Subbing in for Feist on harmony vocals is legendary Canadian singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O’Hara, who adds another layer of winsome melancholy to “It’s Not Too Late (To Say Goodbye)”. The album’s main musical ingredients—finger-picked guitar, lightly brushed drums, relaxed though subtly emotive vocals—knowingly recall the quietest, most pained cuts on 70s outlaw country records and the twangiest numbers on that era’s rock-leaning singer-songwriter LPs.
Musically, Strong Feelings reiterates Constant Companion, which is fine, because it’s a good formula and Paisley’s songs are stronger this time. (He even musters up something resembling swagger on the steadily rocking “To and Fro”.) It’s a sound that comes wrapped in a warm glow of nostalgia that’s undercut by lyrics revealing the slow poison of lingering too long on your memories. “I turned the ground and found the roots still burning/ A night moon that lingers in a blue sky brings a yearning/ If it takes a waterfall to drown all my doubts/ Sometimes it takes a lie to let me know what it’s all about,” Paisley says in “Old Times”. Sometimes a song on the radio can feel like self-delusion in the cold, hard light of experience. No matter the short-term pleasure it provides, life marches inexorably toward an uncertain destination. But Paisley seems content to turn it up anyway and let the music carry him away to a better place.


Emeralds' Steve Hauschlidt's new compilation S/H features rare and unreleased tracks, much like his Emeralds companion Mark McGuire's 2011 odds-and-ends collection. Its tones and moods are devoutly consistent, yet it’s richly engaging throughout.

S/H

Did Steve Hauschildt consider naming this 2CD set A Young Person’s Guide to Steve Hauschildt? I ask because there are lots of similarities between S/H and his Emeralds colleague Mark McGuire’s 2011 double-disc A Young Person’s Guide to Mark McGuire. Both are compilations of rare and unreleased tracks; both offer everything from short vignettes to fleshed-out, 10-minute-plus journeys; and both paint a pretty comprehensive picture of the ideas and skills each artist brought to their work in now-defunct Emeralds. Both even use a fluorescent blue color palette on their covers.
This isn’t to say that Hauschildt ripped McGuire off—tons of artists have put out similar compilations—nor that his work should automatically be judged next to that of former comrades. But the two share a musical method that remains fascinating. As noted in Pitchfork's review of the McGuire set, the guitarist finds “remarkable flexibility” in a narrow stylistic range. The same goes for Hauschildt’s synth-based work on S/H. Its tones and moods are devoutly consistent, yet it’s richly engaging throughout.
Part of that is due, somewhat paradoxically, to the lower-stakes nature of S/H. Many of its pieces have a work-in-progress feel, moreso than the developed, honed material on Hauschildt’s previous albums. There was a lot to like on those—especially 2011’s Tragedy & Geometry—but I prefer him in this kind of lab-rat, see-what-sticks mode. Nothing here sounds tossed off, but Hauschildt doesn't always feel obligated to stretch each idea into an ebb-and-flow song. He’s happy to focus on a single sonic concept, then pursue another one on the next track rather than forcing them to work together. This tack has the added effect of making Hauschildt’s wallpaper-y pieces, which can sometimes feel like filler, more integral, serving as transitions and pace-changers between more gripping tracks.
The draft-ish quality of S/H also makes it more personal than Hauschildt’s previous releases. These are instrumental, sometimes abstract pieces in which the human action that created each sound isn’t always obvious. Yet I often feel I’m getting a glimpse at the machinations of Hauschildt’s mind. His particular way of toying with ideas and sketching patterns is probing without sounding rushed. Ripples, squiggles, waves, beats, and rising chords all unfurl with the patience of a meditation. But I don’t picture Hauschildt reclined behind his instruments when I listen. Instead I imagine him leaned over his tools, pushing them to replicate the sounds in his head.
That image is most vivid on disc one, comprising 21 previously-unreleased tracks recorded between 2010 and 2012. Everything Hauschildt is good at gets covered here, especially his way of generating emotion and tension with ostensibly mellow tones. Sprinkled throughout are some more outward-bound pieces, like the field-recording-like “Flyswatter” and the sci-fi stunner “Flatbed Scanner”, that extend Hauschildt’s reach without diminishing his grasp. Disc two generally feels more settled. Drones and longer tones are more frequent in these pieces made between 2005 and 2009. There’s still some forward-moving stuff to dig into, and lots of ways to become transfixed by Hauschildt’s extended sounds. But anyone inclined toward his pulse-heavy side will likely set disc one on repeat before drifting into disc two.
It seems just as likely that any Emeralds followers underwhelmed by their 2012 swan song, Just to Feel Anything, will find reasons in S/H to renew their optimism about Hauschildt's musical future. I imagine he would welcome that response, since, as with McGuire’s solo work, S/H is music designed for positivity, even when it sounds solemn or melancholy. By the end of its two and a half hours, negativity is about the farthest thing from my mind.


The Oakland singer-songwriter looks to experimental synth and new age music on her self-produced fourth LP, a serene and reflective take on the breakup album.

A New Reality Mind

Madeline Kenney sings like she has a lump in her throat: Every time you think she might be on the cusp of sliding into a note that’s soaring and clarion, she hovers for a moment, then falters and drops down into a mumble. The Oakland singer-songwriter’s fourth album, A New Reality Mind, is a lucid exploration of self-doubt and insecurity, inspired by a sudden breakup that left Kenney reeling. Its lyrics hew toward the obliquely analytical—this is an internally focused post-mortem, not an airing out of dirty laundry. It’s a uniquely placid breakup record, but Kenney’s vocal tell says as much as her lyrics ever could.
On Sucker’s Lunch, Kenney’s prior album, co-producers Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack of Wye Oak built a bed of plush, winsome indie rock beneath Kenney’s honey-smooth voice. The sound of that record put Kenney in conversation with a generation of young indie musicians—Faye Webster, Barrie, Helena Deland—writing plainspoken lyrics and placing them against loose, lazing arrangements. A New Reality Mind is self-produced, and it sounds vastly different to Kenney’s previous work, drawing clear inspiration from contemporary new-age musicians like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and the skew-wiff synth experiments of Arthur Russell.
This kind of synth music has long been associated with meditation and higher consciousness, and it’s a conceptual match for Kenney’s lyrics, which are self-interrogative but kind. “When will I see myself again? In what direction, and with what friends?” she wonders on “The Same Again.” But as a producer, Kenney is prone to throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, making her quest for clarity seem, ironically, cluttered. On “HFAM” and “Superficial Conversation,” fussy polyrhythms overwhelm Kenney’s relatively sparse lyrics. The acerbic, achingly bitter one-liner that caps “HFAM”—“I’m not a fool, and never was/But I refuse to be the one/Who writes the play around the gun”—should read as a moment of hard-won defiance, and instead feels overwhelmed by a bombastic arrangement. Wasner and Stack’s production, even at its busiest, smartly let Kenney’s hiccuping vocal lines breathe, adding a sense of direction and flow to intentionally meandering melodies. Here, she’s often competing against herself.
Occasionally, Kenney’s controlled, expressive vocals salvage otherwise unmoored songs. On “I Drew a Line,” a heady throwback to Angel-and-Amber-era Dirty Projectors, Kenney’s multi-tracked chorus (“I had a vision I would die!”) injects a jolt of panic into diffuse jazz-pop. When, on “The Same Again,” she sings, “Move slow when you speak, so you really get to say what you’re meaning,” sounding as if her face is scrunched into a grimace, she turns a fairly oblique phrase into a razor-sharp barb. These moments, although far between, suggest that A New Reality Mind could have been a more dynamic record if it had zeroed in on Kenney’s intentional, suggestive performances. Kenney’s greatest talents lie in her songwriting and vocals—not all the bells and whistles that surround them.


Burial's new EP, Rival Dealer, arrives almost exactly a year after the release of Truant/Rough Sleeper, but the stylistic leaps made on this release are wider, more jarring and revelatory, than anything in Burial's catalog. It's unquestionably the strongest release of his since 2012's Kindred, and his most satisfying statement of purpose since 2007's Untrue.

Rival Dealer EP

Few electronic artists from the last decade have been pigeonholed like William Bevan. Since the London producer behind Burial gained widespread attention with 2007's epochal second album, Untrue, listeners and critics alike have spoken of "the Burial sound"—pitched-down vocal samples, rustling noise, blocky garage rhythms in perpetual decay—as if it were straight gospel. This is partially Bevan's fault: four years passed before any new solo material saw release, which allowed plenty of time for Untrue's singular aura to seep into the collective consciousness. As imitators big and small have lined up to pay respect, the phrase "sounds like Burial" escaped the connotation of wishful thinking and started sounding almost like, well, an insult.
Insulting because, as this decade so far has proven, one person who doesn't sound like Burial anymore is Burial himself. 2011's Street Halo EP, which followed a 12" collaboration with Four Tet, offered a few engaging structural tweaks to Untrue's formula, but it was the collab EP with Massive Attack that followed later in the year, "Four Walls" b/w "Paradise Circus", that hinted Bevan was ready to explore truly new territory. Essentially a pair of Burial edits of songs from Massive Attack's 2010 LP Heligoland, each cut pushed past the 11-minute mark and embraced a proggy, amorphous structure that was worlds away from the contained environments of previous Burial releases. If the Massive Attack edits suggested a shift away from the past, 2012's astounding pair of EPs, Kindred and Truant/Rough Sleeper, broke free of any previously set constraints, as Bevan wielded his newfound appreciation for side-long track lengths and added splashes of sonic color—arpeggiated synths, chunky house motifs, rickety windchimes, bursts of beatific melody—to his established palette of blues and grays.
Over the last few years, the only consistent aspect of Burial's music is the frequency of when it's been released—typically and almost too fittingly, in the dead of winter—so the excitement that arrives with the announcement a new Burial release in 2013 is no longer "It exists!," but "What is this going to sound like?" Rival Dealer arrives almost exactly a year after Truant/Rough Sleeper, but the stylistic leaps made on this new release are more jarring and revelatory than anything in Burial's catalog. It's unquestionably his strongest release since Kindred, and his most satisfying statement of purpose since Untrue.
The seismic stylistic shift that Bevan's made on these three tracks—two of which, true to recent form, run well over the 10-minute mark—is immediately apparent on the opening minutes of Rival Dealer's title track, when a distorted vocal sample of adult-contemporary cheeseball Gavin DeGraw's "More Than Anyone" (yes, really) gives way to a furious drum break, making for Burial's most straightforwardly uptempo move to date. The rhythm simultaneously sounds crisp and hissing, eventually disintegrating in a blare of police-scanner noise before everything goes truly pear-shaped with a monstrous, buzzing bassline, as a woodblock rhythm from the Untrue days clicks and clacks below the chaos. In the few interviews that Bevan has given throughout his career, he's outlined Burial's conceptual aims as a tribute to the rave music he didn't get a chance to grow up with but experienced second-hand; the unbridled intensity of "Rival Dealer" is arguably his most explicitly rave-y move yet.
"Rival Dealer"'s final, impressionistic third is the one section on Rival Dealer that dips into familiar Burial territory, with meditative synths and stray vocal samples briefly interrupted by a radiant saxophone line. It's a necessary comedown after all the preceding intensity, as well as a teaser for what follows: "Hiders" and "Come Down to Us", the EP's following two cuts, are the source of Rival Dealer's most mind-blowing moments, as well as being the closest that Bevan's come to total accessibility since Untrue's earwormy lead single "Archangel". The EP's other side-long epic, "Come Down to Us", takes cues from the crawling sense of pacing established on the Massive Attack edits, with a rhythm so slow it barely registers on the BPM scale stretched across 13 minutes, as a slinky sitar-like figure and piping synths give way to a sparkly, unnervingly sentimental soft-rock melody, the sounds of drizzling rain coating the whole thing.
If "Come Down to Us" is Bevan laying out conventional melodic forms across his template of psychedelic sprawl, "Hiders" is 2010s-Burial in miniature form, his only sub-five-minute solo cut of the decade thus far and one of the only true standalone tracks in his catalog (not an insult—he's a deep-listening artist at this point). It opens with an anthemic synth figure that starts and stops several times, returning each time with varying fidelity, before a splashy arena-rock drumbeat crashes through the ambience, stepping in time with the cascading synth figure and a vocal sample that seems to hover just slightly above everything else. The beatific, neon "Hiders" is Bevan's take on the more loved-up element of rave music—if "Rival Dealer" is a tip to the days of Kool FM, then this is more along the lines of the stuff spun by DJs like Scott Hardkiss and Danny Rampling—but even those without a lick of dance history know-how will be wowed by "Hiders"' magnificent aura, a down-to-the-buzzer entry as one of 2013's most surprising musical moments.
Rival Dealer has some of the most immediate music from the Burial project, but it's worth noting that this is also a noisy, dissonant work. Tape hiss and static smother large sections of the EP, and Bevan seriously tips the scales when it comes to one of the staples of Burial's style, as well as rave music at large—the vocal sample. He liberally applies voices all over the three tracks, both as a structural anchor and to create a pleasing cacophony; during "Rival Dealer"'s coruscating midsection, he throws in a sample of New York rapper Lord Finesse's "You Know What I'm About" in a showoff-y, very un-Burial fashion. Burial has often been praised for restraint; the wild-eyed, play-anything nature of Rival Dealer shatters that notion for the better.
Speaking of vocal samples: a theme that runs through Rival Dealer, upheld by the many voices that dot its landscape, is self-acceptance. Phrases concerning sexuality and personal reflection abound—"This is the moment when you see who you are," "It's about sexuality, it's about showing a person who you are—to me, this is who I'm about," "This is who I am," "Who are you?". "Come Down to Us", in particular, ends with an extended lift of a passage from transgender filmmaker Lana Wachowski's painfully moving speech while receiving the Human Rights Campaign Visibility Award last year.
Some have already speculated that Bevan's framing here is intentional, possibly speaking to his own personal experiences. Whatever the case, "Come Down to Us" is Rival Dealer's nucleus, as its titular vocal sample appears throughout the EP. The fact that such guesswork takes place to begin with is evidence of how, after nearly a decade of making music, William Bevan continues to fascinate and create intrigue. Here, he provides plenty of exciting material to pore over until he returns, further changing our perspective on an artist we're still just starting to understand.