The Knife / Deep Cuts

In promotional photos, the Dreijer siblings appear in comically oversized crow's masks; when performing live, they obscure the stage with a gauzy mesh overhang and peer out impassively from behind bodysuits and balaclavas; on record, they delight in vocal distortions, each one emanating some inhuman grotesquerie. Theatre is the Knife's lifeblood. It's incorporated so completely and convincingly into their persona that, much like Pitchfork's Amanda Petrusich's conviction that Tom Waits "exists in a world populated only by freight trains and barmaids, rodeo clowns and shortwave radios," it's next to impossible to reconcile Karin and Olof with the banalities of day-to-day life.
That desire to transcend the mundane drives lots of art, but despite that they've been making music for the better part of the decade, it didn't really crystallize for The Knife until earlier this year. That moment came, of course, with the release of their third album, Silent Shout. More than just a great pop album, the record boasted a truck of exotic characters, textures, and ideas. In the sense that it etched out a world with a strange but identifiable internal logic, it felt a little bit like a fantasy writer's breakthrough novel, except with the Dreijers playacting their way through every goblin, ghost, and spook.
Not surprisingly, the relative success of Silent Shout has paved the way for a re-examination of the band's first two albums. Issued in America for the first time courtesy of Mute Records, neither 2001's eponymous debut nor 2004's Deep Cuts approach the feral highs of Silent Shout; but, taken in a lump, this streaky collection of buoyant pop, creepy denouements, ill-advised genre exercises, and flashes of brilliance spell out the Knife's journey from a sprightly, steel drum sampling, electropop outfit to something much darker and more refined.
Stacked side-by-side-by-side, the Knife's discography is pretty much a textbook example of increasing returns, which means 2001's The Knife is the weakest link in the chain. With the exception of the sproingy "Kino", the nasty guitar squalls of "I Take Time" and the retooled Celtic folkisms of "Parade" (all of which are great), everything else here feels a little limp and unsure; latter-half tracks like "Bird" and "A Lung" practically crumble to an end. Nonetheless, between Dreijer's voice (a thing of strange beauty, even in untouched form), the mutated vocals in "A Lung", and the gently percolating synths of opener "Neon", there are plenty of moments to suggest the Knife's future greatness.
Brandishing a bona fide calling card single (the superb "Heartbeats"), a toothier production approach, and an increasing debt to house music, 2004's Deep Cuts marked a double-step forward for the duo. If The Knife suffered from seeming a little too tentative and domesticized, Deep Cuts came across as brash and untamed, a streamroller that left overturned chunks of everything from steel drums ("Pass This On") and marimbas ("Rock Classics") to hi-NRG ("Listen Now") and slinky, Timbaland-inspired r&b ("You Make Me Like Charity") in its path. It wasn't always pretty, but the highs-- "Heartbeats", "One For You", "She's Having a Baby", "You Take My Breath Away"-- were more rewarding, and the sense of drama noticeably heightened.
Where The Knife comes reissued as-is, without extras, Deep Cuts arrives packaged with six bonus tracks and an additional DVD of videos. Between standout Deep Cuts-era remixes from Dahlback & Dahlback, Rex the Dog, and Mylo-- the likes of which would become standard practice for Silent Shout's singles-- and a DVD showing signs of the band's increasing attention to their visual aspect, the bulk of these bonuses have the effect of further bridging the gap between records two and three. Of course, whether you actually want to peek at the duo fumbling behind the curtain in the years before they hit their stride is another question altogether; at the least, any grousing over the unavailability of these records can end now.


Led by singer Frances Quinlan and her remarkable songcraft, the Philly band’s third album is warm and spacious, filled with rich stories rendered beautifully in the abstract.

Bark Your Head Off, Dog

If you listen to Frances Quinlan sing long enough, you will attempt to describe her voice. This is a trap, and you should not do this. The frontwoman for Philadelphia indie rock band Hop Along doesn’t have one voice—she might have 10. Listing them would yield no insight, only a deranged sommelier’s tasting notes: cat, bugle, Rod Stewart, roaring motorcycle.
Howling, hooting, crooning, cracking—the real intrigue behind these magnificent sounds isn’t how but why. Quinlan is one of rock’s great listeners, keen to the way people’s internal monologues fill a space like bad weather, and she seems to be trying to channel them all at once in her voice. She wields her empathy the way some rock singers brandish anger, and it’s a smarter tool; empathy cuts cleaner. Her singing is a reasonable response to an impossible task—you try being this many people and see how you sound.
Bark Your Head Off, Dog is only Hop Along’s third studio album, but they’ve assumed so many guises, and lit on so many moods, that they have the poise and gravitas of lifers. On 2015’s Painted Shut alone, we were given the unloved old man of “Texas Funeral,” angry at California, his own memories, his uncomprehending children; the waitress frozen by the appearance of a wronged woman at her restaurant; the forgotten jazz cornetist Charles “Buddy” Bolden, thrashing and foaming in the street in front of horrified crowds.
Bark Your Head Off, Dog adds new characters to this gallery, but now they are painted in abstractions. Some of them seem to be Quinlan, seen at an angle or from the third-person—“I was asleep with my mouth open the whole drive down,” she remembers on “The Fox in Motion.” Some of them are angry men, a headspace she occupies with disarming ease. Many of them are just blips of color, impossible to either discern or forget. On “Somewhere a Judge,” she sings, “There you have it, the beginning and the end/The intern’s shovel still covered in shit/Death, indiscriminate, drags off the newborn buck with the broken leg.” Like Elvis Costello, Quinlan subtracts time and place from an otherwise-specific scenario. You are left with the flavor of a story, maddening, on your tongue.
“How You Got Your Limp” feels like the album in miniature. Like Painted Shut’s “Waitress,” it’s set in the fraught arena of the service industry, where your thoughts remain your own but your time is not. The lyrics detail various indignities: A bar hop on probation shows up to work on time and is arrested anyway, while a drunken professor is escorted out of the bar, shouting at his students, safe in his power. “I can hear you, the whole bar can,” Quinlan observes acidly. On previous albums, this line would be an incitement to shouting. Here, the delivery is nearly tender, suggesting that scorn and contempt foster their own kind of intimacy.
The album as a whole feels warmer, more spacious. The songs on Painted Shut were doled out like 10 fist-shaped car door dents, but Bark Your Head Off, Dog moves at an agitated hum. The band softens its pugilist’s stance and pokes at some of the folk roots that showed through on Get Disowned, their first album. There are flecks of mandolin, saloon piano, and the dusty caw of some fiddles on “What the Writer Meant.” The string arrangement on “How You Got Your Limp” feels as unruly as their guitars used to.
The most revelatory moments on Bark Your Head Off, Dog open up onto calmer spaces: “Not Abel” plinks and bristles with harps and pizzicato. Quinlan’s lyrics, as ever, are densely wrought, but her voice knows how to loosen them up and make them flow over the music. (“In an open field, man is guilty always/Mud is yellow, and the ground is moving/Sun is yellow, and the ground is moving.” How would you sing these lines? Quinlan will show you why your way is wrong.)
Interestingly, the rockers feel a little staid this time around. The speckled rhythm guitar in “Somewhere a Judge” feels like a tentative nod towards Paramore territory, but Hop Along is a little too intense to really bounce. “How Simple” adopts a cheery lilt that feels too tucked-in, too starchy, for a heart as unruly as Quinlan’s. The thrill of this band often comes with the seething sense that they are pacing inside their own arrangements, yearning to burst free. The disappearing guitar scrapes and cymbal splashes introduce a slightly unwelcome tidiness.
When Quinlan applies her acoustic guitar like a Brillo pad and the arrangements sprout into new corners, you can hear Hop Along tracing lines that will carry them forward. The album’s final third, in particular, gleams with promise, a liquid, fleet-footed, and surprising suite of songs that contain some of Quinlan’s most devastating observations. On “Look of Love,” she remembers listening with relief as a dog she doesn’t like is run over, then reckons with her lingering shame. A dead dog—who has the nerve to kill off a pooch just for the discomfited laughs? She does, and she makes us stay with it until the laughter dies. This is Quinlan’s brand of empathy; it makes your eyes water, not from sadness but pain. The dog’s bark won’t leave her alone, not for a minute, nor does she want it to, and she intends to make you hear it.


A collection of the duo’s 12" singles from the past six years proves their dancefloor nous but lacks the playfully eclectic spirit of previous albums.

The Juan MacLean: The Brighter the Light

The Brighter the Light

Variety is the spice of the Juan MacLean. Like label co-founder James Murphy, this core DFA act—comprising frontwoman and LCD Soundsystem alum Nancy Whang and Six Finger Satellite guitarist turned synth wizard John MacLean—has historically taken a magpie approach to dance and electronic sounds. That’s how a Heaven 17 pastiche like The Future Will Come’s 2009 title track can accompany a piano-house banger like “Happy Home,” or how the New Order-esque “Love Stops Here” can share real estate on 2014’s In a Dream with “Charlotte,” a song that sounds more like Beaucoup Fish–era Underworld than anything Underworld have recorded since. Derivative? Pshaw: Whang and MacLean are so proficient and so soulful in their craft that TJM always feels like its own life-affirming entity.
So what to make of The Brighter the Light, an album assembled with sameness in mind? A collection of previously released 12" singles with fresh mastering and editing, along with a pair of new tracks (“Quiet Magician” and “Pressure Danger”), it is wall-to-wall four-on-the-floor. From the anthemic opener “What Do You Feel Free About?” to the closing title track (an instrumental, and the longest on the record), every song could be extracted from the record and inserted into a club night without missing a beat.
The problem is that you can take “without missing a beat” literally, as nearly every track on the album moves along at the same brisk pace. Which, granted, is the express purpose of the record: a home for all of the group’s recent club-ready 12"s, with no distractions and no need to deliver on any other vibe or mood. Minor details differentiate tracks that share the same basic template: “Zone Non Linear” has a repeated, chill-inducing  arpeggiated synth hook; the instrumental “Quiet Magician” has a dub vibe, which the following track, “Pressure Danger,” echoes with an even sparser soundscape. Leadoff track “What Do You Feel Free About?” has a distinctive whistle/tom break, albeit a lackluster one. There’s nothing wrong with creating a club LP, but when you stack it up against TJM’s other, more adventurous albums, the consistency can’t help but drag.
Much of the impetus to make individual tracks pop falls on Whang’s shoulders, and she more than holds up her end of the bargain. On “Zone Non Linear” she takes an appropriately non-linear approach to romance by singing about it before it occurs. “I wanna race to that moment when we meet,” she sings to a partner who’s not even in the picture just yet. That line, and the song’s repeated refrain of “I can’t wait to find out if I’m in love,” are reminiscent of similar sentiments in Björk’s “I Miss You” (as in “but I haven’t met you yet”); they present love as a thrilling discovery waiting to be made.
Whang can pack a lot of power into wordplay. She spends “Can You Ever Really Know Somebody” wondering aloud in slight variations of the titular phrase: “Do you ever really know somebody? … Can you ever really love somebody?” But when she switches to “Can you ever really know my body?”—well, that’s a very different question, and it hits like an adrenaline rush.
At times it’s less the phrasing of the lyrics than their delivery that stands out. “Feel Like Movin’” seems at first like a standard exhortation to shake your ass, but Whang chants the repeated hook of “Put your feet on the dance floor, show me what you’re made of” with the sing-song cadence of a schoolyard taunt, like she’s triple-dog-daring you to get down. Coupled with the peppiest production on the record—a bubbly bassline playing off spectral vocal snippets—it’s Brighter’s standout moment.
But words can only get you so far, and even they often fall short. You’ve heard the sentiments animating “What Do You Feel Free About?,” “You Are My Destiny,” “Get Down (With My Love),” and “Pressure Danger” before, and there’s nothing particularly special about the variations presented here, whether lyrically, vocally, or musically. That’s the danger of drawing from the same well nine times in a row, even for a band as generally brilliant as the Juan MacLean: Each effort just leaves you thirsting for something new.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


In 2014, noise maverick Spencer Clark recorded this psychedelic tribute to the visionary biomechanical designer. Its far-out electronic sketches are rich with visceral detail and dripping with horror.

H.R. Giger’s Studiolo: H.R. Giger’s Studiolo Vol. 1 & Vol. 2

H.R. Giger’s Studiolo Vol. 1 & Vol. 2

“World-building” is too pat a phrase to describe what Spencer Clark does. Ever since the mulched hypnagogia of his duo the Skaters, with James Ferraro, the California native has been tearing open rifts to the kind of dimensions you usually only read about in pamphlets about lizard people, or find tucked away in the occult section of old VHS stores. Unlike the new-age music Clark’s albums sometimes invoke, his vision of utopia has more to do with Jon Hassell’s extraterrestrial landscapes than with crystals or incense. Like his old bandmate, Clark is entrenched in the psychedelia of plastic pop culture, but where Ferraro spent the ’10s diving deep into the emptiness of smartphone sterility, Clark took a more colorful path. Stitching together childhood memories of dozing off at the San Diego Zoo with half-remembered dreams of ’80s curio kitsch, Clark creates Frankenstein monsters of collagist, tropical synesthesia unlike anything else in noise music.
Though Clark has always toiled away more or less in obscurity (almost willfully so, as he adopts and discards aliases at the drop of a hat—Monopoly Child Star Searchers, Fourth World Magazine, Vodka Soap, and Typhonian Highlife only begin to scratch the surface), a handful of his records have stood out. Released in 2014, Pinhead in Fantasia brought an operatic grandiosity to his smeared keyboard hallucinations and became one of his most acclaimed releases. Around the same time as Pinhead in Fantasia, Clark utilized many of that album’s textures and samples in an even more baffling endeavor: a massive, four-disc behemoth titled H.R. Giger’s Studiolo, issued under the Typhonian Highlife moniker. Inspired by a trip to the H.R. Giger Museum shortly following the Swiss artist’s death, Clark left feeling disappointed by what he saw and decided to record his own exhibit of perverse, biomechanical sound objects to match the fantastical monstrosities he pictured in his head. The resulting album represents some of the deepest, most unwieldy music of Clark’s career. Remastered and condensed here into a friendlier 2xLP set, H.R. Giger’s Studiolo Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 offers a more welcoming peek into a freewheeling visionary of the DIY era working at his most far-fetched.
Clark’s palette throughout H.R. Giger’s Studiolo is rich with uncanny detail: bongo drums mapped to keyboard samplers in order to play at dizzyingly nimble speeds; pitch-shifted vocals looped and distorted until they sound like the echolalia of an amphibious alien species; dinky harpsichords dancing as if accompanying some loony royal procession. Befitting its industrial theme, however, H.R. Giger’s Studiolo drips with a dank, dungeon-dwelling horror. “Giger’s Bust of Mantegna” moves with the slithery menace of an anaconda, Clark’s clickety percussion drip-dropping all over his ballooning B-movie drones. On “Flesh Ribbons Streaming Water Spiders,” high-pitched wails materialize like imprisoned wraiths crying to be freed from their cages. It’d all seem macabre if it didn’t come across like the soundtrack to the most bugged-out haunted house you’ve ever set foot in. As tracks like “Aquatic Flush of Harpishord Vacui” swell with proggy keyboard solos and opulent timpani rolls, Clark’s mutilated world hums with energy both majestic and hilarious.
Clark’s a shredder at heart, never too shy to just let his gurgling rhythms sit back while he goes haywire on the keys. But the true magic is in how he wrangles all those oblique building blocks into place. See how the glimmering synths of “Grotesqueries Metallic Wallpaper” lurch their way into a tense, ribbiting drum pattern. Or how the brief, Theremin-esqe lead that appears halfway through “Giger’s Zodiac Fountains” casts a floating sense of whimsy over the track. Or how the gnome-like grunts of “Giger’s Balinese Green Vaults” slowly build into a chamber of ’80s sci-fi synths that practically radiate chromium light. Clark’s tape-hissy production gives his work the feel of an artifact rescued from oblivion; a similarly hermetic logic governs his loops, which interact like self-contained environments, miniature societies we weren’t meant to see.
Clark would go onto make much lighter, sillier albums than this, like the imaginary James Cameron scores of Avatar Blue, or the Darth Maul-inspired incantations of The World of Shells. But rarely has Clark’s music been this aesthetically rich, as cursed and profane as it is dazzling. In all its winding, nightmarish pathways, H.R. Giger’s Studiolo Vol. 1 & Vol. 2 probably doesn’t make for the ideal starting point for newcomers to Clark’s universe (that honor would go to his UFO-obsessed opus The Spectacle of Light Abductions). But accessibility is pretty antithetical to Clark’s outsider project to begin with. Like his best work, H.R. Giger’s Studiolo begs to be pored over like a harebrained conspiracy theory, something to sink into fully rather than listen to in passing. Eighty minutes is an ideal amount of time to spend in this delirium; the deeper one succumbs to Clark’s murky transmissions, the more his mutant language actually starts to make sense.


The prolific veteran producer Knxwledge enjoyed a national breakthrough when he was featured on Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly in 2015. His Wraptaypes series, which is anthologized here, is a good place to get a feel for his aesthetic: Basically, he strips original works of their elements, samples the remains he deems useful, and engraves them with his signature.

Wraptaypes

Despite having a Bandcamp page as thick as a double-stuffed booklet of CDs, Knxwledge's semi-breakthrough didn't arrive until he contributed to Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly last year. "Momma," equal parts slow-burning soul and dazed funk, is emblematic of the producer's style: You can hear conspicuous traces of Madlib and J Dilla, but an individual sound emanates through their influence. Knxwledge's ongoing Wraptaypes series is a good place to get a feel for his aesthetic: On these mixes, he layers a mixture of vocals and audio clips laid atop his production—vintage beat tapes with voices for added emphasis. The Wraptaypes anthology compiles 26 such productions created between 2011 and 2015 into a highlight reel. His sample selections are noteworthy, but his repurposing of them is the resonant accomplishment.
Wraptaypes involves Knxwledge stripping original works of their elements, taking the remains he deemed useful and engraving them with his signature. It's an aggressive, dissociative process, in which he basically decapitates source material like action figures and sews the heads onto music he's composed. The face (or, rather, the voice) is the same, but the limbs, extremities, and heart are all different. As a result, the ensemble of bit players Knxwledge weaves into each web becomes part of something original.
Knxwledge allows each track—no matter how short or unpolished it is—to stand as its own entity. In each instance, the outcome is rewardingly distinct. "Strtdfrmthebttm" slows Drake's "humble" recollections, trading urgency for a warm, mellow haze for the better part of two minutes. (Kudos to Knxwledge for reimagining a club anthem as a lush, scenic Urban Outfitters composition—that's a feat.) An Eazy-E verse from "Tha Muthaphukkin Real" contrasts the lazy strings and 808s on "Iwish" before Carl Thomas' voice literally chirps in, accelerated to Alvin and the Chipmunks speeds, Heatmakerz style. Inebriated keys turn Sheek Louch and Jadakiss into charming lounge singers on "Choosewun"; the first portion of "Choppas" does the same to Lil Wayne.
The anthology also showcases Knxwledge's perceptive grasp of how certain instruments drive songs, namely the unrestrained '80s sitcom sax on "21kwestions" and Ernie Isley's screaming guitar on "Allwegot." Details count, so artifacts like different parts of the same Boyz n the Hood scene used at the beginning of "Ignorntsht" and end of "Gotstaprove" are welcome pop culture Easter Eggs for the film enthusiasts. Anthologies have no hidden messages or intricate narrative structures; they're collections meant to be taken at face value. Wraptaypes, however, is as much a snapshot of Knxwledge's mind as it is an aggregate of music. Each component and pairing speaks to how he interprets music and assembles his own.


A year after headlining a night of the tragic Route 91 Harvest festival, the popular country renegade forgoes the obvious references on one of the most modest but poignant albums of his career.

Desperate Man

Three days after the mass shooting at the Route 91 Harvest festival last year in Las Vegas, Eric Church debuted “Why Not Me.” He wrote the song in tribute to Sonny Melton, one of the 58 people murdered that October night. Melton had gone to Route 91 to see Church, something the singer learned when he saw Sonny’s widow, Heather, speaking on CNN. Eric Church wasn’t the only country artist to write about Route 91—Maren Morris also released “Dear Hate”—but Church’s news bulletin of a song speaks to his unique place in the modern country firmament. He is a self-styled maverick who named an album The Outsiders, but his numbers dwarf those of an alt-country renegade like Sturgill Simpson. And he isn’t a purist, instead embracing everything that comes with arena rock, from the volume to the crowds. Church has the artistic and popular credibility, then, to write compassionately about an event that ripped through the country and country music.
Which is why it’s odd that “Why Not Me” isn’t on Desperate Man, the album Church delivered a year after Route 91. The shooting isn’t mentioned even in passing during these swift 36 minutes, nor is the illness of his brother, Brandon, who died just after the album was finished. But Church doesn’t dodge emotions on Desperate Man. He grapples with existential threats on “Monsters,” admitting that true devils lurk inside the head. He swaps confessions for universal feelings, a trick he works with politics, too. Church doesn’t turn a blind eye to the problems plaguing the nation, even if the narrator of “Drowning Man” doesn’t want to think about Lady Liberty turning her back while “Uncle Sam just turns around.” During “The Snake,” the United States’ bitter partisanship is framed as a whataboutism fable; it doesn’t matter which species a copperhead or rattlesnake is, as they all prey on the weak.
“The Snake” is rightly positioned as Desperate Man’s opening track not for its clever extended metaphor or theme but for its swampy aesthetic. Church doesn’t stray far from its thick, steamy vibe throughout these 11 songs, bending other styles to suit this sound instead of vice versa. “Solid” starts as a slice of trippy arena rock, its spacey organ and phased guitars offering a sly nod to Dark Side of the Moon. Church soon steers it back to soul, confirming that the heady prog days of the burly The Outsiders are long gone. Church burrows instead into the Southern funk of 2015’s Mr. Misunderstood, keeping things so lean and spare that it can first seem slight.
Desperate Man doesn’t offer a grand statement of purpose along the lines of Mr. Misunderstood, which gained its power from Church’s ability to self-mythologize as a rebel existing on Nashville’s fringes. This is the sound of a renegade settling into his mature period. He’s trimming away excesses that were once endearing but are now extraneous. Whenever Church wants to rock hard here, he ramps up the rhythms more than he cranks the amps, making music that begs the audience to dance. His ballads are stripped so bare he seems like he’s singing alone. Other elements would distract from his nuanced vocal performances; everything that needs to be here is here.
The songs themselves are strikingly uncluttered, too, containing just enough emotion to give them considerable resonance. Though Church isn’t working through his grief in public, he’s not stoic. The mismatched lovers of “Heart Like a Wheel” make for perhaps the most tender song he’s ever written, while his paean to the connective power of “Hippie Radio” is cut by a bittersweet melodic undercurrent. The deliberate decision not to indulge in a grand gesture—combined with the consciously compact scale of Desperate Man—means this album seems smaller than every record he’s made since 2011’s Chief. That modesty is the key to its very appeal: This is an album designed not for the moment but the long haul.


Dolls of Highland melds the voodoo-infused mythology of the South with rambunctious glam rock, and Kyle Craft summons you into its world like a carnival barker wooing customers into a funhouse.

Dolls of Highland

True to its penchant for lipstick and lingerie, glam rock has proven to be the most promiscuous of musical genres. Its sneering, transgressive attitude and electric-warmongering paved the way for punk, but its theatrical flair also connects it to the caped crusaders of prog. And since its early ’70s heyday, glam rock’s aesthetics have been revamped by everyone from synth-pop androgynes to hair-metal shriekers to 21st-century boys and toys alike. But this looseness has its limits—Elton John’s Honky Château residency notwithstanding, the world is still waiting for its first true glitter-speckled, roots-rock renegade. And though Portland (via Shreveport, Louisiana) maverick Kyle Craft doesn’t really tart himself up beyond the occasional silver-hair dye job, his frisky, fantastical debut album, Dolls of Highland, proves the gig is his for the taking.
Dolls of Highland is reportedly a break-up album, cobbled from the ashes of a flamed-out eight-year relationship and recorded in a makeshift home studio set up in a friend’s laundry room. But you’d never know about that heart-rending inspiration from the stage-crashing gusto on display here. If Dolls of Highland has a basis in autobiography—the title references the Shreveport neighborhood where it was made—Craft spends the album imagining himself as Ziggy Sawdust, a flamboyant fop working the barrelhouse piano in the front room of the seediest bayou bordello. His songs illustrate how the intense religiosity and voodoo-infused mythology of the South make it fertile turf for the sort of colorful characterization and freak-scenery on which glam rock was founded. This is an album populated by burlesque dancers, bloodsuckers, lonely nightclub singers, goth girls, one-night stands, suicide victims, and otherwise innocent folk going crazy from the heat. Craft summons you into their world like a carnival barker wooing unsuspecting customers into a funhouse attraction.
Like all good Southern boys, Craft grew up in the church before discovering the devil’s music, and he’s prone to casting his songs’ female protagonists as temptresses who can corrupt the most pious of choir boys. There’s the undead damsel of “Eye of a Hurricane” who lures oblivious paramours to their demise with a “kiss down in the catacombs,” and the pole-dancing star of “Berlin” (the stripper’s stage name, not the German city) who renders her most loyal customer a blubbering, blue-balled mess hiding in a rear corner booth. But Craft transcends witchy-woman cliches through both self-deprecating humor and surprisingly sympathetic portrayals—like the vampiric hero of “Jane Beat the Reaper” who wears “medallions on a string, she said they warded off the boredom/ Of life alone and the constant sting of what she was before them.” The further you venture into Dolls of Highland, the more its laundry-room recording locale makes sense: This is an album where dirty souls can go to be cleansed.
Craft is one of those singers who is always on, with a moonstruck howl of a voice that seizes you by the lapels. Its audacity is only amplified by the relatively rustic environs: the beautiful barstool serenade “Balmorhea” could pass for a Bat Out of Hell ballad if Meat Loaf was backed by The Band, while the vivacious countrified romp “Future Midcity Massacre” sounds like a Styx from the sticks. His performances are extravagant, but never excessive, using a folk singer’s sepia-toned palette—acoustic guitars, piano, harmonica—to make radiant, rambunctious rock ‘n’ roll, while subtly bending time and space with electrified guitar slides that hearken back to the heartland psychedelia of early-'90s Flaming Lips.
But Craft’s outsized personality is matched by less flashy, more fundamental skills: vivid, immersive storytelling and sharply focused, fat-free songs that have the lived-in feel of 40-year-old FM-radio favorites. And he can dial down the irreverence and deliver the drama on more sobering turns like “Trinidad Beach (Before I Ride)” (where Craft forges a spiritual kinship with another southern Anglophilic misfit, the late Chris Bell of Big Star), and the astounding “Lady of the Ark,” a strummed-out song for a silenced siren that’s launched heavenward atop Spectorized drum crashes and sleigh-bell rattles. “Swing low, sweet heathen/ Swing for the wretch and the rock ‘n’ roll kid,” Craft belts out in the song’s dying moments. “Roam this earth, repeat it/ All this sin until this wicked world makes sense.” Kyle Craft may no longer go to church, but he nonetheless commands a congregation, united in ostracization and a fundamental belief in blasphemy.


There's a scene in The Graduate where Benjamin Braddock is relaxing in the pool, directly after the montage that ...

Aix Em Klemm

There's a scene in The Graduate where Benjamin Braddock is relaxing in the pool, directly after the montage that follows his first sexual encounter with Mrs. Robinson. His father asks him what he's doing, and Benjamin says, "Well, I would say that I'm just drifting here in the pool." His father wants to know why, and Ben answers, "Well, it's very comfortable just to drift here." Adam Wiltzie of Stars of the Lid and Bobby Donne of Labradford are two men who understand such comforts. And together, as Aix Em Klemm, they've created a very pleasant place to drift.
It's fun to hear a collaborative record like this, where every note can easily be traced to its creator. I imagine Wiltzie to be responsible for the gorgeous guitar drones that pulsate through "Prue Lewarne" and "The Girl with the Flesh Colored Crayon." Both tracks feature the delicate, low-level hum that his full-time band perfected on The Ballasted Orchestra. Wiltzie also vocalizes on both these tracks (calling it singing isn't quite right) in hushed, reverberating tones. His vocals are just another shading, really, the melody flowing with the current instead of paddling anywhere on its own. The voice is effective, adding a welcome layer of gloomy ambience.
Labradford's brand of quiet music has always been too ordered and precise for my taste, somehow lacking a vital emotional component. But on Aix Em Klemm, Bobby Donne's contributions seem the perfect counterpoint to Wiltzie's organic guitar sculpture. On "3x2 (exit)," I'm guessing that Donne contributes the high-pitched buzz that burrows between the sheets of feedback, as I remember something similar from E Luxo So. And the otherwise respectful "Sophteonal," which consists mostly of slowly repeated electric guitar picking and delicate piano, gains much from a disorienting layer of computer manipulation. I'm reminded of Markus Popp's contributions to Gastr del Sol's Camoufleur, the way he ran the acoustic information through his notebook computer and returned a digital ghost to the mix. These high-tech embellishments add textures that the lo-fi Stars of the Lid would be unlikely to attempt, and are a large part of what makes this collaboration unusual.
The final track, "Twentyone," is a theft of Angelo Badalamenti's "Twin Peaks" theme, with its dreamy piano chords and too-pure bassline, but it's so pretty we can forgive the transgression. This is a lovely piece of ambient drone rock, and fans of either band will not be disappointed.


Cellars is the synth-pop project of Allene Norton. Her second album, produced by Ariel Pink, sounds zapped straight from the sepia-toned dance floor of a long-forgotten high school prom.

Phases

In a bar in L.A.'s Echo Park, Ariel Pink met Allene Norton, a twenty-something Seattle transplant with a good ear for the '80s. She had been hard at work on Cellars, her unabashedly vintage synth pop project since she moved to L.A., with one LP already under her belt. With her second album, Phases, a Pink-produced project of sparkling electro ballads, it looks like the '80s revival Simon Reynolds foresaw at its end in 2010 keeps on pushing forward. And in the 16th year of our 21st century, a question needs to be asked: Does it matter if the revival ever ends?  Should we just stop calling it revival, and just settle for the plasticity of reinvention?
The first quarter  of 2016 has been kind to someone particularly dedicated to such tropes, with Kristin Kontrol's impressively glacial "X-Communicate" and Jessy Lanza’s minimalist pop experiments. But unlike either of those, the music of Phases sounds, even if not intentionally, zapped straight from an anachronistic radio transmission, or the sepia-toned dance floor of a long-forgotten high school prom. Norton, from what we can hear in Phases, has committed herself to digging around in the archive, perfecting a photocopy of not just sounds, but affects and emotions that don't feel of this time.__
__
A lot of this power comes from an intelligent reliance on a form of  schmaltz that is virtually missing from even the most heated and heavy of contemporary pop music. Things aren't as wilfully corny, campy, or self effacingly sentimental anymore. Even the most melodramatic music can feel cool to the touch, over-processed to a fault.  Etymologically one of the roots of schmaltz is the old German word smelzan, a verb that literally signifies to melt. One of its other roots is chicken fat, a high cholesterol substance that makes you feel bad in the long run, yet so good at the moment you consume it. Phases perfectly internalizes these two ways of being, excess and constant evaporation. You feel the overload in the album’s selection of palatial synths, bubbling percussion, sugary bass lines. And the threat of melt is in Norton’s voice and drawn out intonation, which hangs like a diffuse cloud of dry ice around the soupy mixture of sounds.
This effect is best achieved in songs like "Real Good Day" and the album’s centerpiece, "Still in Love." In "Real Good Day" twinkling arpeggios and a cooing chorus carry Norton’s voice down the PCH like a convertible driving towards the sunset.  Even if never stated explicitly, the album as a whole is rather optimistic. It comes from what is at times a goofy erotic sheen, indebted to Giorgio Moroder or YMO.  *Phases *might be the only the album this year to capture camp in all its classic glory: Even the missed beats have a kernel of fun and whimsy, like a teen movie montage. The sounds they have made and the emotions they've referenced here are always in the back of your mind, on the tip of your tongue, never new or old, just pure plastic.


Producer and DJ Collin Strange draws inspiration from Chicago acid house and New York hardcore in equal measure, but his new EP exists in its own moment.

How I Creep

Collin Strange is a fount of history from the rougher edges of downtown New York dance music in the 1990s. Now based in Seattle, the DJ and producer ran a record store in the East Village called Strange?, which found its footing somewhere between punk and the evolving strains of techno being imported from the UK. Before landing in New York, Strange was in Chicago, where he overlapped—however incidentally—with the heyday of acid house there. In a recent interview, he discusses this all with a casual record collector’s enthusiasm, noting, too, that he first got into electronic music through a relative deeper in its academic side, grounding his interest in a more learned approach than his druggier anecdotes might imply.
This history is embedded somewhere in Strange’s productions, industrial-leaning acid techno built from Roland’s 909 drum machine and 303 synth (the same building blocks that defined the sound of early acid). But, ultimately, his tracks are too straightforward to accommodate much in the way of nostalgia. The four tracks that make up How I Creep exist in their own moment, one that’s frenetic enough to override the listener’s sense of a past or future.
The EP opens on an unforgiving note and somewhat relentlessly carries on from there. “No Remorse” is steady—only around 120 BPM, which in a few tracks’ time will come to seem laid back—but still blisters, its driving beat fanned by drawn-out gusts of texture. Strange builds out from the thunderous, bristling textures of his tools, leading to a sound that’s both elemental and asphyxiatingly outsized. (In terms of contemporary analogs, I think of a severely less playful Container.) In that same interview, after playing a song by New York hardcore band Born Against, he notes, “I don’t want to make techno that sounds like a Labworks record from ’92, I don’t care about that… I want to sound like that Born Against 45. I want to sound like the first Crucifix album.” Indeed, while How I Creep and, say, Cellblock-X’s The Trip share certain aesthetic signifiers, Strange seems uninterested here in the liquid capabilities of acid, prizing instead a pummeling quality.
Though this sort of uncompromising intensity is more or less the draw here, it can be a lot when it runs on unchanging and unchecked. “Unemployed” luxuriates a bit more in its resonant squelches before settling into a grim, industrial march. The hyperactive “It’s a Dog’s World” makes use of an ominous synthesizer melody, which reiterates over barely-modulating drum machines for nearly the entirety of the track.
“More Alive Than You Will Ever Be,” a 16-minute live acid workout, is both the release’s most exciting and most exhausting offering. Once one assimilates to its forceful ground, it becomes trancelike, its incremental shifts and flourishes subtly engaging the mind while its fixed rhythm engages the body. As electronic music goes, it’s not particularly fashionable or innovative, but there’s still something absorbing in the non-referential way Strange distills his reverent listening habits.


The dyed-in-the-wool psych-rock band returns with some of their most accessible songs to date, full of fuzz-pedal jams that capture moments of fleeting happiness in dark days.

V.

The cover of Wooden Shjips’ fifth album centers around a visual pun—a hand making a peace sign that doubles as the record’s Roman-numeral title, V. On paper, it sounds like a perfectly on-brand gesture from a band of West Coast psychedelic jammers who, even at their noisiest, always seems to be striving for tranquility through rhythmic hypnosis. But while the cover’s backdrop presents a splendorous tropical utopia straight out of an “H.R. Pufnstuf” episode, the peace sign itself is rendered as cold, cracked concrete.
Perhaps it’s intended as a decaying monument to the death of ‘60s idealism, or a comment on how that era’s most incendiary protest music has fossilized into summer-barbecue soundtracks. Or perhaps it’s mourning the very notion of non-violent protest at a time when it’s become a fireable offense. Wooden Shjips have never been ones for overtly political statements; 90 percent of the time, you can barely tell what lead singer/guitarist Ripley Johnson is talking about in his smeared murmur. But if V. doesn’t exactly represent a shift toward newsticker topicality, its overall vibe—chill, yet resolute—suggests a desire to take that crumbling grey peace sign and rehabilitate it with some Poly-Fil and Day-Glo paint.
Johnson has said that his goal for V. was to make a summer album—but in his case, he started writing it last year during a summer where the sun was being obscured by black clouds both figurative (the Trump administration) and literal (the fiery ash that was raining down on his home city of Portland due to the inferno consuming the nearby Columbia River Gorge). Instead, he came up with a record that’s all about savoring those fleeting moments of happiness when you can find them. Which is not to say V. is a record of passive escapism—the opening “Eclipse” marches in on a fuzz groove that suggests Suicide gone Motown, while a saxocalypse threatens to erupt from below. But Johnson’s liquid guitar fills serve as the emergency sprinkler system that keeps the blaze in check, gradually tilting the track from sinister to serene.
In the past, listening to a Wooden Shjips record felt a lot like lane-merging onto an endless freeway where everyone’s going 100mph—your only option was to go with the flow and get lost in the blur. But if “Eclipse” assumes a familiar motorik motion, the rest of V. opens up a series of off-ramps. “Red Line” has all the hallmarks of a typical Wooden Shjips jam—rhythmic repetition, droning keyboards, backward-swirled guitar solos—but molds them into pop-song proportions and infuses them with an uncharacteristic bonhomie, yielding the most upbeat, immediately engaging tune in the band’s repertoire. And even when the band threatens to drift into a classic-rock cul-de-sac, they correct course with some inspired embellishments, like the woozy synths that permeate the Stonesy country rock of “Already Gone” or the keyboard clusters that brighten up the bluesy lurch of “In the Fall” like slow-motion shooting stars.
But even as he’s singing his most accessible songs to date, Johnson’s voice remains a highly impressionistic instrument, his words wafting through like smoke rings, disappearing just as they seem to be acquiring definition. The grungy gospel ballad “Ride on” is Wooden Shjips’ bid for “Knocking on Heaven’s Door”-level gravitas, but in lieu of a proper, belt-it-out chorus, Johnson just lets the song’s church-organ tones and fuzz-pedal flourishes fulfill his mission to “head to higher ground.” Ironically, V.’s greatest moment of clarity comes from the song about gazing upon the city you love through a smoky haze. “Staring at the Sun” is at once V.’s most earthbound and interstellar track, and, fitting for a song that sounds just like Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” reinterpreted by Spacemen 3, it finds Ripley coolly mediating between outer turmoil and inner peace. “I was feeling low, staring at the sun,” he sings calmly from his Portland perch, before revisiting last summer’s scenes of “ashes falling ‘round the town.” But in Johnson’s hands, the apocalyptic destruction is rendered as a wondrous hallucination, with each mercurial guitar line glimmering like an ember floating in the sky. Because in this day and age, no summer album is complete without a laid-back, feel-good anthem for watching the world burn.


Britta Phillips' first solo album, post-Luna and post-Dean & Britta, relies heavily on covers, including one of Stevie Nicks' "Landslide."

Luck or Magic

Britta Phillips' first solo album, Luck or Magic, is an attempt  to leave the drowsy, Belle and Sebastian-y sound of Dean & Britta—the band she formed with husband Dean Wareham when Luna originally broke up—behind. Unfortunately, she couldn't shake the couple's penchant for covers. Luck or Magic totals 10 tracks and half are Phillips' interpretations of other people's work. This move winds up feeling like album filler, despite the offbeat quirkiness of her picks. (A cover of Agnetha Fältskog's "Wrap Your Arms Around Me" is a highlight. When's the last time you listened to that song and remembered how great it is?) Ultimately, the covers feel more like a security blanket than a homage, as if Phillips couldn't quite trust her own work to make the cut.
Truly, it's her sweet voice that suffers the consequences. She has a honeyed touch that can be as soothing as it is airy and bright, even when the songs are tinged with tragedy—think "The Sun Is Still Sunny." Now, her vocals have been run through the same flat, echo effect that Lana Del Rey seems to live inside. Nowhere is this comparison more apparent than on the album's opener "Daydream." It becomes quite easy to swap out Phillips for Del Rey in your mind, minus Del Rey's pouty affect. Similar vocal effects are applied to the cover of "Fallin' In Love," written by Dennis Wilson and originally titled "Lady." Phillips plays it safe and willfully changes the song's subject by replacing "lady" with "baby," which comes off as cutesy and trite, negating her ability to take a deep dive into the Beach Boys' catalog and make an offbeat selection.
Sadly, that's not the album's worst transgression when it comes to tapering with originals. She opens her cover of "Landslide" with a cheerful, bubbly synth line, dubs in a child's voice right before the line "Can the child in my heart rise above?," and adds electric guitar solos so out of place they're just downright bizarre. If you're going to tackle Stevie Nicks, it's best not to rob her work of its emotional power by pummeling the song with unnecessary flourishes. Not to mention, the world needs another "Landslide" cover like it needs another version of Cohen's "Hallelujah."
It's not as if the album is devoid of its bright spots. "Do It Last" is pleasant enough to listen to. "Million Dollar Doll" is catchy. The cover of "One Fine Summer Morning" is perfectly lovely because Phillips sticks close to the original, which is a relief. The slowed-down version of "Drive" is also well-suited to the tone of her voice and worth a listen. But all in all, the sparks are overshadowed by poor choices and general lack of direction. Phillips recently told The Wall Street Journal that producer Erik Broucek kept the album from "sound[ing] like a random playlist," when in fact that's exactly how it ends up sounding.
It would be nice to see her trust herself more and cut down on the plethora of embellishments. Phillips can stand on her own, her talent will support her. (She was Jem for God's sake!) But the ability to make decent music doesn't need to rely on a rabbit's foot, or a stroke of good fortune, or mimicry. It does, however, tend to require a belief in oneself. A continued search for Luck or Magic probably isn't going to be very fruitful when what you really need is confidence.


On her fourth album Cocksure, Laura Stevenson disguises depressive sentiments in plain sight by pairing them with chiming guitars and tuneful fuzz. It's her most disaffected record yet, but it's so spirited you could easily mistake it for her happiest.

Cocksure

Though it wasn't as heavy as the brooding grunge it shared Modern Rock airwaves with at the time, the peppier alterna-pop of the '90s often cut just as deep. Acts like the Lemonheads, Juliana Hatfield, and Matthew Sweet disguised depressive sentiments in plain sight by pairing them with chiming guitars and tuneful fuzz—you could sing along to some of their songs for weeks before even noticing they might be a cry for help. So it's easy to see why Laura Stevenson looked to power pop's flannelled era for her fourth album, Cocksure. The New York singer-songwriter has never shied from self-effacing thoughts, and by dialing up the pop she gives herself even more cover to let her antipathy run wild. It's her most disaffected record yet, but it's so spirited you could easily mistake it for her happiest.
Stevenson's '90s makeover represents a sharp course correction from her sleeper 2013 album Wheel. That record was a true singer-songwriter affair, rooted in folk-rock and country and highlighted by ornate ballads flushed with tasteful strings and horns. She clearly poured a lot of time into it. Cocksure, on the other hand, is as assured and impulsive as its title. Though it's bookended by two big, showy numbers that would have would have slotted seamlessly onto Wheel— "Out With a Whimper", a Rilo Kiley-sized emotional wallop, and the regal grand finale "Tom Sawyer / You Know Where You Can Find Me"—the rest is driven by swift riffs and bubblegum hooks. Listeners who thought Stevenson's former Don Giovanni labelmate Waxahatchee might have done well to lighten Ivy Tripp with another "Coast to Coast" or two will find plenty of instant gratification on this one.
Stevenson's old Bomb the Music Industry! bandmate Jeff Rosenstock rejoins her here in a producer role, which might partially account for some of Cocksure's punk moxie, but underneath the speedy tempos Stevenson is consumed by the same delicate subjects that have driven all of her solo records: emotional retreat, the nagging fear that she's squandered her youth, and the irrational disdain she feels for those who care enough to try to lift her from her funk. "I'm fucking hideous and spiteful when I'm left to my devices," she lashes out on "Jellyfish", which juxtaposes the album's sweetest hook with its sourest image: Stevenson as a gelatinous blob sprawled flat on the couch, motionless and essentially dead to the world but with a stinger pointed at anybody who might dare to poke her. She doesn't need to be told it's an awful way to live; she knows. "I'm wasting away my life and gifts on being a piece of shit," she concedes, if only so she doesn't have to hear somebody else say it.
That all might make the album seem like a buzzkill, but it never is. One of the joys of the album is simply hearing her cycle through so many slight variations of '90s alternative, and how she always manages to find the right shade to counter her dour mood. "Happier, Etc." matches another plea to be left alone to slaphappy pop-punk. The exuberant guitars on "Claustrophobe" blast out of the same Kitty Pryde-postered garage as the Blue Album, while the jangly "Life Is Long" channels the great, underrated heroes of sad-sack '90s guitar-pop: the Gin Blossoms. That band may not be the hippest touchstone for a millennial songwriter, yet perhaps more than any other they embodied the same mantra that Stevenson wears so well on Cocksure: When life gives you lemons, sugar the fuck out of them.


On the follow-up to her 2020 debut, the Tunisian producer flips trap samples and lounge jazz into idiosyncratic, blissed-out footwork and club music.

Slime Patrol 2

“Hammam Lif Footwork,” reads an underlined message on the back flap of Slime Patrol, Khadija Al Hanafi’s 2020 debut cassette release. The tagline refers to one of the northernmost towns in the producer’s native Tunisia, named for its historic baths and hot springs. The geotag is important. Though footwork and juke are intrinsically linked to their Chicago roots—even as the genres have spawned regional movements in Tokyo, Poland, and the United States’ coastal metropolitan areas—Al Hanafi belongs to a more recent wave of practitioners, like Pennsylvania’s Nondi_, who approach the genre from a headphone-oriented, autobiographical perspective.
Bolstered by a collaborative cut with Teklife’s DJ Earl, the inaugural Slime Patrol tape was as relaxing and steamy as a sauna session, maintaining footwork’s bass-driven pulse while placing heightened importance on melody and texture. Tracks like “Mnaïch’alik” and “Moulaga” wove field recordings and trap a cappellas into dusty jazz chops that would feel at home on a Madlib beat tape, percolating for just over a minute before transitioning into the next cut for a continuous mix-like experience. Over its brief 20-minute runtime, the album established Al Hanafi’s uniquely poetic voice as a producer. Each song was as intimate and ephemeral as memory itself.
Slime Patrol’s sequel, which arrived on January 1, 2024, is also a bricolage of cozy lounge loops, but its inspirations are more varied, and Al Hanfi has nixed the seamless segues in favor of quick fadeouts, allowing her to expand her rhythmic palette. She molds Jersey club in her own image on “Rounia,” stretching out a dreamy canvas of saxophone and electric keys that tastefully muffles her choice of percussion. The genre’s typical gun-cocking samples are pitched up and layered into flurries of cochlea-tickling clicks that sound excerpted from an Alva Noto record, and soft tufts of 808 bass create the sensation of floating. You can dance to the beat, but the song’s nebulous shape is even more conducive to blissful dissociation. Listening feels like being suspended in jelly, unsure which way is up. “Throwsom$,” on the other hand, is a study in footwork’s ghetto-house roots, emulating its gritty hedonism beneath impressionist piano glissando. Even at its rawest, Slime Patrol 2 is still dripping in elegance.
The most thrilling moments of the first Slime Patrol stemmed from Al Hanafi’s extensive sampling of 2010s rap, particularly on “&iLovemyloot,” which fused Playboi Carti’s chorus from “Shoota” with a twangy standup bass riff and warped the final product into a psychedelic haze. The same is true for Slime Patrol 2, which opens with a celebration of Waka Flocka Flame’s trademark ad-libs. Though pairing Flocka’s manic imitations of gunfire with dainty jazz flute risks sounding gimmicky, Al Hanafi rearranges her source material so self-assuredly that it transcends novelty. Flocka’s voice flickers in and out of the mix, sometimes shuffled with a short, nicely contrasting R&B vocal run. “2TwinDracos” fast-forwards an excerpt from Lil Keed’s “Anybody” into near unintelligibility over skittering jungle breaks and what sounds like a vintage city-pop sample. It’s a pure sugar rush, punctuated by breakneck detours into trap production.
While Slime Patrol 2 isn’t a radical departure from its predecessor, Al Hanafi’s modest updates serve to highlight the qualities that make her one of footwork’s freshest, most unpredictable new voices. Whether she’s chopping it up over traditional 160-BPM drum patterns or bending club music’s conventions to her own will, she flips unexpected sounds and obscure samples into music that sounds like nothing else out there.


Three players with deep roots in Chicago’s contemporary jazz scene come together in an unusually empathetic exchange of ideas, where the gap between listening and reacting is practically nonexistent.

Dave Rempis / Tomeka Reid / Joshua Abrams: Ithra

Ithra

If you wanted to distill the last three decades of Chicago jazz down to a single disc, you could do worse than Ithra, a meeting of three formidable players on the scene: saxophonist Dave Rempis, cellist Tomeka Reid, and bassist Joshua Abrams. The tendons that connect the city’s jazz community to post-rock, folk, electronic music, and the avant-garde can be readily gleaned from their work. Of the three, Abrams might be the best known outside of the Windy City’s jazz circle: The tireless composer/improviser bridges numerous worlds, his churning bass work propelling everyone from the Roots and Tortoise in the 1990s to Godspeed You! Black Emperor and Bitchin Bajas in the 21st century. Reid, now based in New York City, has accompanied legends like Anthony Braxton and Roscoe Mitchell as well as thrilling new voices in jazz like flutist Nicole Mitchell and trumpeter Jaimie Branch.
Rempis may not be as well known outside Chicago, but he has long served as a nexus for the city’s influx of creative players. From his days on the frontline alongside Ken Vandermark’s feted Vandermark Five at the end of the ’90s to his long-running weekly improvised-music series, Rempis has nurtured and strengthened the bonds between players—both out-of-towners and locals—keeping the scene’s culture and community intact. Five years ago, he established the Aerophonic imprint in order to document his spontaneous encounters with any number of musicians, primarily at the Elastic Arts Foundation. As one fellow player has noted, Rempis’ work is part of a vital Chicago tradition of community-building: “He has become part of the continuum of self-starting musicians, and does it with lots of integrity and respect,” says the D.C. bassist Luke Stewart.
While the players had previously performed together in different iterations on Rempis’ label, this 53-minute set from December 2017 documents them as a trio. The eight pieces blend together so that it’s almost impossible to separate them, not unlike the empathetic interplay between Rempis’ horn, Reid’s cello, and Abrams’ bass. Unlike some improv dates involving a new configuration of players, there’s no sense of feeling one another out: Right from the start, on “Lerna,” they are already in dialogue, bow scrapes and pizzicato strings chasing after Rempis’ fluttering reeds. The gap between listening and reacting is so small so as to seem instantaneous. It also means that the mood can turn from wistful to bristling, melancholic to apprehensive.
As in her work with other ensembles, Reid’s cello serves as a fulcrum, able to provide rhythmic patterns as well as harmonize with the reeds, and she toggles between the two roles with aplomb. Try to track her movements and you’ll soon lose her in the crisscrossing lines. One moment she’s bowing in synchronization with Abrams, and the next she’s shadowing Rempis’ sax. Abrams is just as spry, replacing the pulsing, mesmerizing cyclical vamps of his Natural Information Society project with mercurial figures that pulse along with Reid’s cello on “Many Labors” and crackle with Rempis’ clacking keys elsewhere.
Whether the somber bowing that opens “Morphallaxis”—the longest piece here, and a highlight—comes from Abrams or Reid is hard to determine, but as the piece moves along, the strings quiver and cry. Rempis’ horn at first bobs along before prodding them into more pointillistic territory. In spontaneous composition, attuned improvisation, and extended technique explorations, Rempis, Reid and Abrams are all formidable players. But the trio also moves with ease, and while Ithra isn’t exactly playful, at times the musicians resemble children in a garden, focusing on one small aspect of the sound before drifting apart, making new discoveries, and then reconvening elsewhere. Pick virtually any point on the album and you’ll find them wholly immersed in the beauty of the moment.


The singer-songwriter’s third album since returning from his decades-long obscurity is his sparest and most tender.

Countless Branches

After his first two albums sold next to nothing and his music career sputtered out in the early 1970s, Bill Fay settled into what you might call a normal life. He worked as a groundskeeper for a London park, then as a fish packer in a supermarket, all the while raising his children. He never tried to launch a comeback, but he did keep writing and recording songs with a keyboard and a small 8-track. Between Tomorrow Tomorrow and Tomorrow, his unreleased studio album from the late ’70s, and Life Is People, his comeback album in 2012, Fay wrote hundreds if not thousands of spare hymns about the world around him and his place in it, with no other audience in mind beyond himself. “I’m thankful that side of my life has continued for all my life,” he told the New York Times recently, “finding songs in the corner of the room.”
Countless Branches, his third album since being coaxed back into releasing music, hints at what those unreleased recordings might sound like. Compared to Life Is People and 2015’s Who Is the Sender?, both of which fleshed out his songs with folk-rock accompaniment, this album adds so little that when a simple timekeeping beat arrives on “Your Little Face,” it feels almost deafening. The palette recalls Nick Cave’s The Boatman’s Call, another album whose austerity makes the songs sound louder, their sentiments thornier, their melodies more elegant. Producer Joshua Henry, who brought Fay out of obscurity nearly 10 years ago, keeps the focus squarely on the singer-songwriter himself and his troubled relationship with the world. His time-tempered voice may have lost the accusatory power it had on 1971’s Time of Last Persecution, but it has gained a tenderness that imbues even the smallest moments with immense gravity.
The spare palette also heightens the conflicts Fay addresses in his lyrics. They’re essentially the same ones he’s been singing about his entire life, at least on the songs that he has released: the individual versus the community, the draw of other people versus the need to escape in nature and solitude, and his own wavering faith in humanity. “Yeah, everyone knows it, it’s self-evident,” he sings on opener “In Human Hands,” “this world ain’t safe in human hands.” And when he’s overcome with awe on “Filled with Wonder Once Again,” it’s accompanied by the horror of “how this world sure can keep a man in chains.”
The album is beautifully and judiciously arranged, but a collection of bonus tracks on the expanded edition show how Countless Branches might have sounded with more instruments and more people. The music is lovely and lush, but these band versions of “How Long, How Long” and “Love Will Remain” point more to Henry as a producer than to Fay as an artist. They’re a useful point of comparison, showing just how complex this album is, how tender and forgiving and wonderstruck. That quiet corner of the room affords him an inspiring view of the world.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Led by Nicolás Jaar and featuring Angel Bat Dawid, Aho Ssan, Oren Ambarchi, and more, this 2021 performance of collective improvisation is by turns brooding, ecstatic, and surreal.

Weavings 2

Back in the thick of the pandemic’s first year, with concerts definitively off the table for the foreseeable future, Nicolás Jaar created Weavings as a way of fostering a sense of virtual togetherness. The piece brought together 13 artists from around the world to play together over the internet in real time. Commissioned by Krakow’s Unsound festival, Jaar’s collective improvisation took the form of a round-robin in which successive pairings of players performed overlapping duets. At the end of each segment, one player fell silent while another took their place until the next cue, when a new player joined and another dropped out, etc. Thus they went about “weaving” together their parts in an unbroken exchange of ideas that touched on drone, spiritual jazz, noise, and ambient. For technical reasons, the piece wasn’t streamed as it was played; Jaar recorded each track to disc on separate channels, then spent a feverish 24 hours mixing it down before the 92-minute set was broadcast from the Unsound website.
One year later, with concerts back in action, Jaar brought an updated version of the piece to the stage at the 2021 Krakow edition of the festival, recruiting 11 artists—noise musician Aho Ssan, jazz polymath Angel Bat Dawid, experimental vocalist Antonina Nowacka, oud player Khyam Allami, guitarists Oren Ambarchi and Raphael Rogiński, multi-instrumentalist Pak Yan Lau, clarinetist Paweł Szamburski, cellist Resina, hydrophonist Tomoko Sauvage, and drummer Valentina Magaletti—to cycle through a series of seven-minute pairings, with Jaar mixing and dubbing their output while they played. Weavings 2 collects the entirety of that performance in an 84-minute recording that sprawls through a host of different modes and moods, by turns brooding, ecstatic, and surreal.
Per its title, the piece unspools like a bolt of cloth being slowly unrolled. Tone is generally secondary to texture: On the rare occasion that melody makes a fleeting appearance, it’s swiftly swallowed by churning waves of rustle and drone. The players favor long sustained tones and slippery harmonizing; percussion, electronics, and noise are primarily vehicles for friction, like fabrics chosen less for their color or heft than for the ways in which they rub together. Even during the busiest moments—like the collective fanfare of the introduction, where five artists play off each other at once—they seem at pains to fuse their voices as one. There’s no showboating.
The most exciting passages are those where contrast comes to the fore. In “Pt. 3,” Szamburski teases repeated riffs on his bass clarinet while Dawid sings a wordless, supplicating melody before mashing out dissonant, fist-and-forearm chords on her keyboard. In “Pt. 4,” Dawid alternates between short, tangled bursts of clarinet and vocals that sound like she’s speaking in tongues while Rogiński slashes sideways at his strings. Magaletti and Ambarchi perform an eerie pas de deux, Magaletti’s extended drum rolls and hammered cymbals mirrored in Ambarchi’s trembling streaks of feedback. The album’s most spellbinding moment comes toward the end, as Nowacka’s ghostly vibrato floats mournfully over the patient, melancholy tones of Allami’s oud.
One striking thing about experiencing Weavings 2 in person was looking at the stage and seeing so many musicians sitting silently, listening, just like the rest of us in the audience. Each one was allotted a relatively short amount of time in the spotlight; they spent the majority of their time on stage patiently waiting. Given the context of the piece, as a composition that had been written in the pandemic’s early days, it felt like an echo of the waiting that we’d all been forced to endure during lockdown. Now that life had returned to the public sphere, Jaar seemed to say, we would do well to remember the altruism inherent in acts of patience. At the recording’s rumbling, creaking climax, in the final minutes of the piece, a sense of focused collective effort is palpable; even at this moment of wooly discord, the players shoulder their burden with grace.


The New York saxophonist’s breakup album subverts what we’ve come to expect from the genre. Covering songs by Ornette Coleman, Sun Ra, and others, he finds new emotions in familiar songs.

Darius Jones: Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation)

Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation)

In an era when avant-garde jazz increasingly incorporates speech samples, rapping, and spoken word, Darius Jones stands out for his narrative sensibility. Granted, his music is abstract, even when it occasionally includes vocals. Yet we intuit a story, in part because the alto saxophonist tells us one exists. Jones’ first two trio albums, 2009’s reputation-making Man’ish Boy (A Raw & Beautiful Thing) and 2011’s giant step Big Gurl (Smell My Dream), documented his Virginian beginnings, and he accompanied later releases with philosophical texts about language’s obsolescence. Jones makes his point by showing, not just telling. His compositions are so intensely honed and performed they seem to talk, moan, and cry about intimate experience in ways we might expect to find in novels, not instrumental records.
The 43-year-old’s latest, the live recording Raw Demoon Alchemy (A Lone Operation), isn’t necessarily his best—many of his releases vie for that title—yet its document of personal flux is more convincing than ever. Playing alone for the first time on a full-length, Jones communes with his influences, responding to the dissolution of his marriage by tackling the classics. His versions stray far from the source material; it never feels as though he’s seeking stability in the tunes of others. With wild shifts of energy and plenty of silence, Raw Demoon Alchemy reminds us that the sorrow of splitting up can’t be defined by one emotion: Rather, its components are diffuse, disorienting, and sometimes contradictory.
The album begins where most romances end—with the blues. The doleful opener, a cover of Georgia Anne Muldrow’s previously unreleased “Figure No. 2,” consists of an ostinato he subtly transforms by varying tempo, volume, and emphasis. Jones chews on sullenness, sees how it sounds—but never succumbs. Ornette Coleman’s deep cut “Sadness” keeps us mostly in the comfort of the blues, but its flashes of giddiness both undermine the titular sentiment and reveal the terror of its extremes, as Jones’ sax screeches with reverb and murmurs at its low end. The original arrangement of Victor Young’s “Beautiful Love,” from 1931, merged jazz and classical orchestration on turf wide enough for both genres—a film score. Jones repaves the piece with an intentionally cracked and uneven cover: He repeats four ascending, half-jeering notes, as though he wants to mock love itself, before his angst resolves in a few fluid melodies. The record rejiggers our own hearing, and we wonder: Must the blues, with its familiar comforts, be a sign of heartbreak? Might the dissonant stretches, with their spirit of restless reinvention, signal both searing pain and the resourcefulness of the newly single moving on?
When we expect his sax to wallow in gloom, Jones offers sudden mood swings. He plays ambiguous music that lacks any prescription of glumness. His take on Roscoe Mitchell’s “Nonaah” begins with a sputtering deconstruction of the original’s eight-note refrain. Playing live in Brooklyn this October, Jones discussed his admiration for Mitchell’s courage: Audiences booed the elder saxophonist, a founding member of the legendary Art Ensemble of Chicago, when he first performed “Nonaah” in the 1970s, before they found themselves moved by his persistence. Jones’ relatively sparse version keeps accumulating notes like a snowball rolling down a hill, until it arrives at a faithful rendition of the original. He summons his bravery in front of us, letting conventional expressions of heartbreak eat his dust.
By the last track, Sun Ra’s “Love In Outer Space,” we’re unmoored entirely from jazz orthodoxy, blasted off to a distant planet where prettiness has little currency. Without mutes or pedals, Jones imbues his sax with timbres that approximate those of a jackhammer, then a teakettle. Yet his horn does something even more unusual—it offers a sense of beginning, middle, and end, without resorting to the often powerful verbal directness that bolsters the jazz of so many of his contemporaries. Using a drastically limited palette, Raw Demoon Alchemy makes us question why we associate certain musical styles and scales with particular sentiments. Isn’t emotion, after all, in the ear of the beholder? And doesn’t the music Jones interprets contain shades of many feelings—loss and love, confusion and serenity—all of which can be drawn out, sometimes simultaneously, by a masterful player? I was hurt, but I’m healing, we expect Darius Jones to tell us on his breakup record. Instead, we learn that while he may never recover completely, he’s expanding nonetheless.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The 23-year-old vibraphonist shines on his debut album with an approach that feels sly and mysterious; he also proves himself a sharp bandleader attuned to the importance of group dynamics.

KingMaker

The list of notable jazz vibraphonists is a short one. The instrument is about as unwieldy as the double bass but not nearly as practical for the purposes of getting regular gigs, and it doesn’t have the sex appeal of, say, the tenor saxophone. So when a promising young vibraphonist like Joel Ross comes along, your ears perk up. Ross is 23 and an in-demand presence in the New York club scene. In 2018, he appeared as a sideman on some of the most exciting records in jazz, including the drummer Makaya McCraven’s Universal Beings and the pianist James Francies’ Flight. Ross’ Blue Note debut, KingMaker, is his first as a leader, and it is a marvel.
Blue Note has a robust history when it comes to documenting vibraphonists, having recorded the likes of Milt Jackson, Bobby Hutcherson, and Stefon Harris. Ross, whose bell-like tone occasionally evokes the sound of a wind chime, is indebted to all three musicians. But he puts his own stamp on things with KingMaker, which features his cleverly named working quintet, Good Vibes, including Immanuel Wilkins on alto saxophone, Jeremy Corren on piano, Benjamin Tiberio on bass, and Jeremy Dutton on drums. (The vocalist Gretchen Parlato makes a guest appearance on one tune, “Freda’s Disposition.”) At 12 tracks—11 of which are Ross originals, sly and satisfyingly mysterious—the album is capacious but never feels overstuffed or drawn out.
Though KingMaker is in Ross’ name, he is already mature enough as a leader to know that jazz albums work best when the band operates as a single organism. The group interplay here is the key to the record’s success. It’s clear that he is a maestro at the vibraphone, malleting out repeated patterns and complex phrases that work as melodic statements as well as percussive shapes. You can practically visualize the sound emanating from his instrument as he works his way through shifting harmonies, as on the opening track, “Touched by an Angel,” which begins with an airy solo vibraphone introduction full of shimmering chords. But for the most part, Ross isn’t trying to show off; his solos are often short and suggestive, breaking off at their peak and producing further tension. Every note counts.
Ross scrambles the dynamic typical of so many jazz records, in which a soloist emerges and then bows out until the end of the song. Instead, he creates ample space for call and response, particularly with Wilkins, whose sweet and occasionally earthy tone complements the ethereal quality of the vibraphone. On “Ill Relations,” Ross and Wilkins state the theme in unison and then break off, alternating on a series of short, declarative passages that build in intensity as the rhythm section heats up.
Such exchanges give the music a cyclical quality, an ebb and flow that keeps things floating just above the surface. Dutton’s loose, gnashing funk beats over complex time signatures play no small part in this high-wire act, while Tiberio’s resonant bass lines and Corren’s gospel-inflected vamps—he sounds like a cross between John Lewis and Sonny Clark, with a dash of Cecil Taylor thrown in for good measure—act as thickening agents.
In spite of this refreshing approach, at points throughout KingMaker, you may find yourself yearning for more Ross. “It Is Love That Inspires You,” featuring just vibraphone, bass, and drums, shows Ross unburdened of his role as accompanist, and his sound is so appealingly crisp and bright that you get the sense he could produce an hour’s worth of solo material that would hold your attention. KingMaker is one of the most promising albums to have emerged from the jazz world this year, but it’s clear that Ross is just getting started.


The Brighton producer works with a light touch, resulting in subtle, pliant songs that evolve in sneaky ways.

Swells

Eliza Rose’s 2022 single “B.O.T.A. (Baddest of Them All)” was a serious contender for last year’s song of the summer: a throwback house banger made for boisterous crowd sing-alongs, with generations of rave nostalgia baked into its Korg M1 organ bass. It was a genuine crossover smash, hitting No. 1 in the UK and yielding more than a quarter of a billion plays on Spotify. Rose is the lone featured vocalist on UK producer K-Lone’s new album Swells, but even her biggest fans might not recognize her here: On “With U,” a slow drip of woozy, after-hours mood music, the London singer’s sandy voice is smeared with echo and rendered largely indecipherable. K-Lone clearly isn’t cashing in on his guest’s clout; it’s as though he read the KLF’s hit-making handbook The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) and decided to do exactly the opposite of what its authors prescribe.
But for K-Lone, aka Wisdom Teeth label co-founder Josiah Gladwell, making an anti-pop song with a rising pop star seems perfectly in character. It’s not that he’s averse to busting loose—his EPs for the Sweet ’n’ Tasty label have trafficked in bubbly UK garage and rambunctious footwork and jungle—but the Brighton producer has historically favored subtler modes. His early EPs struck a ruminative balance between post-dubstep and dub techno; his debut album, 2020’s Cape Cira, was cool, brittle, and colorfully percussive, as though it had been performed on an array of pastel-hued icicles. Swells is more forceful than Cape Cira, with more prominent drums and two skippy, ebullient house jams. Still, its uptempo cuts are distinguished by their lightness of touch; the more laid-back ones ripple like reflecting pools, exquisitely rendered studies in purple, silver, and aquamarine.
Swells boasts a broader mix of moods and styles, but it’s held together by a palette that’s been carefully pared back to essentials. For drums, K-Lone defaults to trim, understated sounds—lumpy toms, hissing hi-hats, sandpapery snares—reminiscent of early analog drum machines like the Korg Mini Pops and Univox SR-55. His synths are warm and pliant, worlds away from the ruthlessly efficient sound design of contemporary club orthodoxy. The bleepy tones and major-key intervals of the opening “Saws” evoke the eerie glow of computer-music pioneer Laurie Spiegel’s 1980 album The Expanding Universe; the wheezy chords and pitch-bent G-funk leads of “Oddball” recall early James Blake EPs.
Two songs swing for the fences—at least, within the confines of the album’s verdant, well-tended landscaping. “Love Me a Little” deploys a springy, irrepressible bass melody over a bouncy house groove crafted from the same diminutive drum sounds as the rest of the album, with a few lilting bars of dancehall a cappella billowing above. The bassline is unusually buoyant—throw in reggae-inspired synth pings on the upbeats, and everything feels designed to go soaring upward as effortlessly as the balloon house in Pixar’s Up. “Gel,” the other relatively peak-time track, moves with similar dexterity. The drums are ever so slightly heftier, the bassline punchier; it comes across as a response to Floating Points’ early stabs at vintage boogie.
Some of the album’s best songs are its most idiosyncratic. In “Volcane,” contrapuntal synth arpeggios spin round and round over pattering, dubbed-out drums, gently tangling and drifting free once again; the syncopated groove is weirdly hard to parse—one moment it feels like a dembow cadence, the next it scans as triplets. It’s a nice example of just how heady even K-Lone simplest constructions can get. And “Strings,” the record’s melodic high point, arranges what sounds like backmasked electric guitar into a winsome little motorik jam, innocent as a children’s song. Even at their most easygoing, Swells’ songs evolve in sneaky, unpredictable ways. Just when you think you’ve got them figured out, they turn out to be something else entirely: turbulence in the guise of tranquility, bangers masquerading as lullabies. With some deft sleight-of-hand, K-Lone makes even the trickiest transmogrifications look like child’s play.


The 28-year-old makes Addis producer makes what he and his peers call "Ethiopiyawi Electronic," which crosses Ethiopian folk and religious traditions with electronica. His latest album collapses not only the past and the present, but also different sacred and secular music forms, and, importantly, the artist’s inner and outer worlds.

Zelalem

"The people instinctively love freedom," Kwame Ture once declared. In his speech, "Converting the Unconscious to the Conscious," the radical civil rights leader otherwise known as Stokely Carmichael goes on to say that, "You can only win freedom on reason. Therefore […] The job of the conscious"—those who react on reason—"is to make the unconscious conscious." These are also the opening remarks of Mikael Seifu’s latest EP, Zelalem, which is itself a quest for enlightenment and freedom.
"Zelalem" translates to "eternity" in Amharic, and the cover of the EP depicts an infinity sign overlapping with a pair of eyes digitally rendered in the style of old Ethiopian Orthodox Church paintings. It’s also an accurate description of the Addis producer’s musical ethos. The 28-year-old makes what he and his peers call "Ethiopiyawi Electronic," which crosses Ethiopian folk and religious traditions with electronica. Seifu’s particular take recalls something of the experimental ingenuity of Mexico City collective NAAFI, with a profound respect for his own city’s historic and sonic pulse. In the past, Seifu has often used UK garage as a rhythmic template (see: "Tuff Ruff," 2015’s The Lost Drum Beat, parts of 2014’s Yarada Lij EP), but Zelalem moves more freely, untethered to any one temporal structure. It collapses not only the past and the present, but also different sacred and secular music forms, and, importantly, the artist’s inner and outer worlds.
In the first half of the five-track EP, we literally hear Seifu's focus shift from the physical world around him to the murkier one inside. "The Solipsist" opens with anonymous, monochromatic cafe chatter: "En'ne'NE'ga'ger, En'ne'NE'ga'ger, En'ne'NE'ga'ger"—"Let’s talk, let’s talk, let’s talk." A bass player warms up nearby, and street sounds tumble in whenever the door swishes open. Slowly, in a sort of drawn-out Proustian moment, the artist’s past rises to meet him: a low liturgical drone emerges as if from thin air; a krar (lyre) melody bubbles to the surface; his reverie thickens; and the listener sinks in deeper with him.
So it comes as something of a shock when Seifu breaks the mood on "Soul Manifest (ft. L.A.)" with a dramatized soliloquy: "It was all a dream/ It was all a dream," he intones. "Released from the wonders of strife/ I wander through your might/ Beginning to see the light/ I stop to wonder…" These musings help give listeners a narrative to latch on to, but Seifu already does such a vivid job of creating this dream state, that the speechifying instead comes off as heavy-handed. Luckily, the moment itself becomes a distant memory in the wake of the tizita that follows, which is as tender as it is ardent. A tizita is a song of love, longing, and nostalgia, and Seifu’s reimagining of the popular song form acts like a portal that opens up yet another emotional dimension for him.
That sense of illumination is the focus of the EP’s front half, but it is on the back half that these various spaces and memories reach critical mass, imploding and consequently expanding the scope of Seifu’s musical universe. On "How to Save a Life (Vector of Eternity)," a bowed one-string mesenqo saws through a wall of kebero drumming and rattling shakers. Flecks of washint flute catch light among colorful washes of synth. On title track and closer "ዘላለም (Vector of Light)," everything comes to a head. Voices chant and exalt in wide sweeping arcs punctuated by sharp hiccuping breaths, marked by insistent repetition. At the very end, the mesenqo from earlier returns, careening into a clanging pile-up that sounds not unlike an accordion being exorcized—in the best way. The whole track, like the EP, feels like a rite of passage. But rather than landing upright, transformed yet somehow unscathed, its architect disappears into the ether, already off through the next portal to another dimension somewhere closer to freedom.


After two singles comps, the Memphis punk makes his Matador studio LP debut and continues to embrace infectious Kiwi pop as well as 60s garage rock.

Watch Me Fall

Growing up is always a bitch, but maybe more so for a musician who grew up playing punk rock. There's still no right or easy way to mature-- do you stick with what works, playing the music that brought you all your fans, but never getting out from under those initial successes? Or do you slow down, stretch out, and risk sounding nothing like yourself, growing away from the sound that brought in your fans in the first place? This is a conundrum Jay Reatard's facing now, but it isn't the only one: After a successful run of singles on Matador that was compiled last year, Watch Me Fall is the first official full-length since being signed to the label. You can't blame the guy for feeling some pressure, and from the title to the lyrics and even its brooding cover, it's safe to say he might be.
That doesn't mean he hasn't risen to the challenge, however. Opening track and leadoff single "It Ain't Gonna Save Me" is ample proof that Jay Reatard can mature without the dull connotation the word carries, being as relentlessly catchy as it is careful in its arrangement. His seemingly tossed-off, self-hating lyrics may be even more potent over the irrepressibly cheery jangle of the track, especially in its brief, unexpected bridge. The track sets a tall bar for the record, but "Before I Was Caught" comes close, with more tortured lyrics and windmill guitar chords. However, Reatard's factory-like sewing together of hooks begins to overwhelm "Man of Steel", with an urgent ascending melody that leads to an uncertain breakdown that could belong to another song entirely. No doubt that Jay Reatard is a song machine, but some of the earlier album tracks sound assembled from parts lying around.
While the record peaks early, the rest of Watch Me Fall has a welcome diversity in melody and arrangements, and several late-album growers worth returning to-- the kind of thing that makes this an album, and not a singles compilation. "Faking It" gets plenty of mileage out of rapid, clean strumming and a fake British accent, then leads into a re-recorded version of "I'm Watching You", which made an appearance on last year's singles compilation, fleshing out its rough charm with warmer organ and putting Reatard's sweetened vocal up front. And he digs even deeper into New Zealand pop with the delirious "Wounded", cruising by entirely on acoustic guitars and the surprising flexibility of his voice: disarming falsetto, nasal demands, and impatient bark.
A lyric from "Rotten Mind" is where the album gets its title, and where Reatard sings paranoid fantasies in a near-whine in its verses, but is tempered by more of Reatard's falsetto and a rapid drum part that sounds like sneakers in a washing machine. The introversion of "Nothing Now" skirts indulgence through its buoyant Beatles-esque march before each verse returns. The last few tracks are the largest stretches for Reatard, leaving his screaming young self behind almost entirely: "My Reality" builds from more acoustic strumming, but has a sparse, echoing riff winding through it, and leads to a floating, disembodied chorus. "Hang Them All" ends on walls of harmony and a violin-laden outro in waltz time, while "There Is No Sun" has a gentle, natural flow, disturbed only by a hint of feedback in its final moments.
Watch Me Fall is neither a reinvention nor a holding pattern for Reatard-- walking the line between them is tricky, but he continues to make doing so look easy. From his many earlier, artier side projects, to his recent fascination with Kiwi pop, to impromptu covers of tracks like Deerhunter's "Fluorescent Gray", listeners are often discovering music along with Reatard, watching him learn and adapt as he goes-- he's in step with listeners rather than one step ahead, and that makes already wildly accessible tunes even more approachable. Self-exploration may carry a little more pressure with it for Jay Reatard these days, but that joy of discovery-- plus the tunes, of course-- is what will keep listeners tuning in, whether he's freaking out over success or getting ready to conquer the world.


Short and fleeting yet bound by a shared aesthetic vision, these 20 songs capture in-between feelings—anticipation, longing, eagerness, hesitation, indecision—with sensitivity and specificity.

Couldn’t Wait to Tell You

Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, the debut album from vocalist Liv.e, is like a series of thought bubbles you can hear. This raw, loose, and sometimes shapeless exploration of the R&B form feels like it’s mapping the mind, but instead of diagramming a brain under love’s thrall, it traces the idle musings in the margins. It understands that romance isn’t all dialogue, overtures, and sex; a lot of it is waiting, awkward silences, and deciding what to text back and when. Sung, spoken, and rapped, these delightful songs exude personality. They explore anticipation, longing, eagerness, hesitation, indecision—the in-between moments, when love is passive, when you’re making up your mind, when you’re ready or anxious. Liv.e performs each state of being with skill, sounding more and more confident in her voice.
The Dallas-raised, Los Angeles-based singer-songwriter, rapper, and producer has eclectic taste. She started her career as a DJ at Dolfin Records, and early mixes on her SoundCloud demonstrate a fascination with the alt rap underground (Knxwledge, Mndsgn, etc.). The turntablist impulse to create something new using familiar components also informs the music she makes as Liv.e, pulling from classic soul, neo soul, jazz, and hip-hop. Her breakout project, the 10.4 ROG-produced ::hoopdreams::, earned her a few famous fans (Erykah Badu and Earl Sweatshirt), but Couldn’t Wait to Tell You is far more evolved. She wrote and recorded it in a month while staying with her mother in St. Louis, and she describes its songs as pages out of a diary representing the perspectives of different characters she made up.
But the 20 tracks feel less like diary entries and more like snippets from an anthology. Their episodic structure resembles the prismatic Whack World; even when the songs sound unrelated, they are still bound by a shared aesthetic vision. Fleeting and intense yet somehow interconnected, they share a sort of dream logic. Several are under 90 seconds; some play with mantra, others with structure. The whimsical elevator Muzak of “Lessons From My Mistakes...but I Lost Your Number” eventually transforms into a groovy upright bass riff as Liv.e explains the concept of entropy. Many songs do not have hooks; they just settle until they dissolve. “About Love at 21” bleeds seamlessly into “She’s My Brand New Crush.” The fluidity of her mindset mirrors the fluidity with which she transitions between rich soul soundscapes.
Many songs are co-produced by experimental jazz looper mejiwahn and multi-instrumentalist Daoud Anthony, producer on Saba’s CARE FOR ME and composer of music for the New York Times’ Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project. The music fits somewhere on the spectrum with Nick Hakim’s smelting psychedelic soul, SAULT’s revolutionary synth-funk, and KeiyaA’s third-eye R&B reflections. Liv.e’s sound is unique in its adherence to lo-fi beatmaker aesthetics and reimagining of throwback R&B vibes. The songs on ::hoopdreams:: seemed to smudge together into a continuous 16-minute track, but Couldn’t Wait to Tell You is full of distinctive moments that form a whole. And Liv.e is much surer of herself as a performer, centering her ideas as much as her taste.
Her writing is casual, sometimes bearing the informal tone of an internal monologue, sometimes conversational and curious. Her songs peer into specific scenarios, capturing feelings the way emojis do—with hyper-specific gestures and expressions. There’s the novelty of a crush; the empowering freedom of finally moving on; the certainty that someone is The One (“I want this to last forever more!” she sings on “You the One Fish in the Sea”); the ambivalence of not wanting to pursue a lover, but remaining hopeful that they care enough to close the distance themselves. “I stopped calling, you was acting kinda funny/You expected me to act all types of bubbly,” she sings on “LazyEaterBetsOnHerLikeness.” “I can’t play myself because I’m not over you/I’ma choose myself, I hope that you choose me too.” What might initially scan as a scatterbrained or unrefined approach to songwriting is actually a subtle consideration of several interlinked headspaces.
The storytelling comes into sharper focus than on Liv.e’s previous projects, but the greatest developments on Couldn’t Wait to Tell You are her execution and vocal technique. She has spoken in the past about warping her vocals as if they were a beat in Ableton and getting real “sciencey” with effects, and here it is as if she knows just what is required at a given time. The raw harmonies of “I Been Livin” spill out over the quiet knock of the beat, the reverb echoing across the distorted piano. The spoken-word flows unravel into the spacey production during “Cut to the Chase.” On “How She Stay Conflicted...i Hope He Understands,” she duets with the sample. Her singing has garnered comparisons to Badu and Tweet, but throughout Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, Liv.e is becoming an unmistakable and singular artist. Even when it feels like we’re merely privy to what’s inside her head, her thoughts resonate outward.

Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


The bi-coastal quartet fleshes out classic elements of hardcore and metal with industrial, shoegaze, and noise. Even their love songs feel extreme.

Heaven Is Here

Crammed between the jagged peaks of Candy’s new album Heaven Is Here is a strange, disguised tenderness. The shapeshifting hardcore band tends to all of the mandatory themes of heavy music on its sophomore LP: It paints humanity as a colony of parasites, skewers piety, and takes aim at the rich. But the group’s most interesting songs are the ones that deviate from the sonic and thematic tropes of the genre. With the help of co-producer Arthur Rizk, who has honed records by Power Trip and Pissed Jeans, Candy defile hardcore’s typical structures with elements of industrial techno and noise. While their spewed condemnations of society feel expected, Candy occasionally wade into the muck of lust. It is their love songs that feel the most extreme.
The band formed in early 2017, issuing its debut full-length, Good to Feel, the following year. The group’s members—vocalist Zak Quiram, guitarists Michael Quick and Andrew Stark, bassist Kaleb Perdue, and drummer Steve DiGenio—are scattered along the East and West coasts. Candy seem deeply uninterested in being confined, whether to a single coordinate on a map or to a standardized sound. “I want to play music that’s interesting to people who might love Youth of Today and might also love My Bloody Valentine or the Stone Roses,” Quiram said in an interview following the release of Good to Feel, an album that ended with a surprising bit of shoegaze bubblegum.
Candy fancy themselves genre agnostics. Heaven Is Here still leans on quintessential elements of metal and hardcore—big, ripping guitar and bludgeoned drums—but exciting things happen when they contaminate the Petri dish. “Human Condition Above Human Opinion” crackles awake with static and robotic sputtering before Stark tears through with an assault on his floor tom. On “Mutilation,” Quiram’s raw, gristly scream morphs into a breathy echo. Beneath slabs of distortion, a high-pitched, pinpoint guitar solo squirms like an insect trapped under a glass. These details add texture and a bizarre delicacy to otherwise straightforward hardcore tracks.
Candy thrive in this jumble of gothic industrial and digitized metal. The standout, 10-minute closer “Perverse” is a snarl of processed racket: squealing feedback, jackhammer percussion, a bright cluster of notes that sound like the organ jingles that blare from baseball bleachers. It’s the album’s only instrumental, and in lieu of lyrics, Quiram’s delayed bursts of breath have a psychoacoustic effect—is he whispering “kill, kill, kill,” or are the dispatches you hear mere hallucinations? These amorphous vocalizations are often more interesting than his actual words.
The band designed the album to combat anxiety by mimicking it sonically. The dense, clamorous “Perverse” is oddly pacifying—like finding serenity in a circle pit, battered by flailing limbs. Throughout the record, Candy remind us of the physicality required to commune with hardcore music. Playing it can seem like a high-endurance sport, with effort measured in ounces of sweat. Its volume reverberates in the chest. The crowds heave and churn. But Candy take an additional interest in the human form on Heaven Is Here. Buried in the album’s superior second half are two love songs, “Transcend to Wet” and “Kinesthesia.”
Candy write love songs the way David Cronenberg might direct a romantic comedy. Both tracks exalt the sticky mechanics of sex, and the body is discussed in almost alien terms. On “Kinesthesia,” Quiram reveres the “ecstasy of flesh.” On “Transcend to Wet,” he reaches this state deep within a “wet warm hole.” Body parts are reduced to their most basic, animalistic functions on the latter: Nails scratch, teeth bite, lips spit. It is sex at its most elemental—deconstructed fucking. This approach could easily feel clinical, yet Candy’s blistering beats and Quiram’s tortured growl make their subjects feel warm and writhing. When Quiram screams “Cherish touch/Only kiss,” you can almost feel the blood percolating from his shredded vocal cords. It is sensual and radical all at once.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article contained errors regarding the band’s lineup. Kaleb Perdue plays bass, not Cody Mollen. Steve DiGenio plays drums, while Andrew Stark plays guitar. And DiGenio’s name was misspelled as “De Genco.”