The Richmond doom-metal quartet strips away the excess, honing in on a grunge and psych-rock core and letting Dorthia Cottrell shine as an extraordinarily compelling singer and bandleader.

Eternal Return

Windhand do not do fancy. During their productive first decade, the Richmond quartet burrowed fully into the doom-metal form, mining its long riffs and splintering rhythms for a steel-clad series of three albums and two excellent splits. Their specialties have forever been their subgenre’s staples—lumbering anthems with hypnotic hooks, pummeling jams with spooky underpinnings, haunting acoustic beauties with defiant melodies. Aside from the crisscrossing harmonies of rugged guitars, flirtations with field-recorded preambles, and one half-hour epic best dismissed as a rite of passage, Windhand have kept their sound streamlined. No electronic abstraction or multi-tracked drum militias, no ostentatious guests or audacious operatic themes: Windhand have never taken the bait of experimentalism or willful eccentricity. At their best, as with 2015’s Grief’s Infernal Flower, they have simply been the powerful platform for the soul blues of Dorthia Cottrell, one of the most persuasive metal singers to emerge this decade.
On the unrepentant Eternal Return, Windhand peel away even more layers and complications, getting closer to a core of grunge and psych rock than their doom orthodoxy has ever allowed. Their fourth album, Eternal Return is Windhand’s first full-length since splitting with cofounding guitarist Asechiah Bogdan. The personnel change appears not in the way these songs sound, per se. The guitars are again omnipresent and enormous, with Garrett Morris doubling his parts, taking lengthy solos over his own riffs, and giving bassist Parker Chandler more melodic space in the mix. The rhythm section remains righteously heavy, dueling with the density overhead. And Cottrell is still the star, as convincing inside the bleary drift of “Grey Garden” as she is above the sermon-sized zeal of “Eyeshine.”
The songs themselves, though, suggest a Windhand more comfortable with itself, unashamed to show the frame beneath that lingering doom bulwark. Both “Red Cloud” and “Halcyon” sound like Nirvana and Dinosaur Jr. slowed by viscosity, the band’s weight pushing back against Cottrell’s voice with a Sisyphean relentlessness. There’s a new openness and sense of exploration here, too, as evident on the spellbinding psych exit of “Halcyon” as on the brief but terrific “Light Into the Dark,” where Windhand pursue the instrumental heights of Earthless. “Pilgrim’s Rest” is the best and most developed ballad of Windhand’s career. Supported by a sympathetic pulse and shrouded by fluorescent electric hum, the song benefits from the full-band treatment, becoming more than the afterthought or interlude between heavyweight bouts its predecessors have been. Backed by her own harmonies, Cottrell ponders the ways innocence can curdle into ugliness, how even our children are destined to submit to or stare down the world’s cruelties. Cottrell’s often been great on Windhand’s quiet songs, but she’s never sounded like such a convincing rock bandleader.
All these threads—the psych, the grunge, the doom, the ballads—converge for the finale, “Feather.” Windhand begin with four minutes of strummed chords and plaintive vocals, framing a feeling of suppressed grievance and conjuring the same potency as Nirvana or Stone Temple Pilots while saddled onto MTV’s “Unplugged” stage. It’s not hard to imagine this as a potential hit of that era, either. But the song steps decisively into a span of monolithic doom, all marching drums and arching guitar. Cottrell moves in and out of the fray, the ghost-story narrator temporarily lighting the dark. The song triples in length, making this Windhand’s real moment of excess on Eternal Return and a telling reminder of how elemental and concise they otherwise are. End to end, it is riveting.
Windhand wrote Eternal Return after a close friend died and after Morris became a new father. (Speaking of field-recorded preambles, that’s his son’s prenatal heartbeat at the record’s start.) That cyclical nature and the polarity of our experience shape the line that secretly winds through Cottrell’s lyrics here, whether she is mapping the route between purity and pain on “Pilgrim’s Rest” or setting the price tag of life as death on “First to Die.” And during “Grey Garden,” arguably the masterpiece of the band’s four albums, she pushes past the enormous guitars to capture the razor-edge essence of existence. She’s waiting for a pot of flowers to bloom in the spring before deciding how to handle them: “If they’re going to die, I won’t do anything.” The same tension between ends and beginnings that animates so much of Eternal Return also propels Windhand. They took their most significant lineup shift ever as an invitation to turn not outward, for new influences and sounds, but inward, exploring their own four-part interplay and their doom fundamentals—nothing fancier, then, than another Windhand benchmark.


On its fourth album, the Philadelphia band lets it rip behind Sadie Dupuis’ knotty, mischievous songwriting.

Rabbit Rabbit

The steady churn of the average Speedy Ortiz album complements singer-songwriter Sadie Dupuis’ vocal approach; she sounds as if she’s thinking through the scrupulously worded one-liners, bits of fridge door poetry, gnomic confessions, and tart toss-offs beneath which guitar riffs yowl with impressive volume. Recorded with her touring band’s rhythm section, Rabbit Rabbit, their first album in five years, doesn’t unfold much differently from its three predecessors, but that’s cool: Speedy Ortiz are good at what they do.
Rabbit Rabbit borrows its name from an incantation that Dupuis, as a child with OCD, changed for reassurance. Dupuis loves words because she loves her subjects; she’s after new ways of seeing the reassuringly strange. In “You S02” Dupuis falls in love with the city where cars cut you off from the right lane (this’ll get ya killed in Florida), a “helltrap,” but the glee with which she repeats “no escape” while her and Andy Molholt’s guitars growl their approval is a tonic (when Randy Newman wrote “I Love L.A.,” he had to ironize his affection). Dupuis gets away with it because unlike influences like Elvis Costello and Veruca Salt she doesn’t demand to be heard. She prefers squeezing her high-and-dry vocals between the instruments, a strategy that forces concentration on the band’s instrumental finesse: Joey Doubek’s hi-hats on “Kitty,” for example. On occasion, those filigrees prove so fetching—say, the wobbly synth line on “Who’s Afraid of the Bath”—that Dupuis can’t sustain equal interest in her obscurantist narrative. Elvis Costello can relate.
Happily, Rabbit Rabbit offers pleasures chewy and crunchy. Eschewing climaxes and long solos allows this Philadelphia quartet to preen in the best sense: Speedy Ortiz project confidence in their clatter, in the eel-like slitheriness of their tempos. If a previous generation’s wordsmith once offered the fabulous line, “I’ve got style/Miles and miles/So much style that it’s wasting,” Dupuis ripostes with “Rather than hocking I was spitting taste,” on “Ranch vs. Ranch.” The final track, “Ghostwriter,” with Moholt and Dupuis in Mick Ronson mode, shows they can rock in a straight line.
When Rabbit Rabbit stumbles, blame clumsily applied instrumental novelties and lyrics that insist on being congratulated for their bat-shit inscrutability. “Plus One” begins smashingly with cowbell and programmed handclaps but forgets they exist. Hobbled by a line like “a cactus, bristling, inflexible through lifetime specials,” “Cry Cry Cry” limps from its opening notes. But the smarts and spritz of Dupuis’ writing, and the way her mates fuss up the arrangements, make Rabbit Rabbit one of those albums whose complications provide as much pleasure as hooks-hooks-hooks. Speedy Ortiz regard their audiences as good friends with whom they can share inside jokes—knee-slappers and groaners alike. That’s rare.


Shackleton's 137-minute-long, 2xCD offering proves anything but bloated; instead, the double release is the British producer's strongest yet, immersive and shining with deliriousness, while continuing his nation's weird and wonderful relationship with dub.

Shackleton: Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs

Shackleton is incredibly prolific. He follows last fall's surprising dubstep throwback collaboration with Pinch with a massive offering on his own Woe to the Septic Heart label. Available either as an impressive (and pricey) vinyl box set or as 2xCD compilation, Music for the Quiet Hour / The Drawbar Organ EPs sees Shackleton sink even further into grotesque dub madness. It's the work of an experimental composer more so than a dance producer, as this release (especially the macabre pit that is Music for the Quiet Hour) shares headspace with British masters of spleen like Nurse With Wound and Coil.
The volume of material here, clocking in at an intimidating 137 minutes, isn't problematic: Shackleton neatly separates (relatively) shorter rhythmic pieces (The Drawbar Organ EPs) and epic apocalyptic screeds (Quiet Hour). He's said it can take months to properly layer his complex rhythmic patterns, and his trademark drum programming is on display on The Drawbar Organ. He's still mining drum sounds from Asia and Africa, so his pinging, pointillist attacks contain a harmonic complexity unavailable to gated snares and wump-wump kickdrums. On tracks like "Test Tubes" and "Wish You Better", this creates a crawling, organic sense of motion not unlike watching beetles scurry over one another. And like an insect colony, Drawbar Organ feels governed by maths that we're not privy to but are nonetheless fascinating to behold.
Melodically, Drawbar Organ is Shackleton's strongest work. Throughout he borrows more than dub reggae's ghostly reverb; he also nabs its dark spirituality and the soft, reedy tones of the melodica. Cut-up choirs speckle the record, and electric pianos and (duh) organs also feature heavily. They turn "Katyusha" into a roiling, acid-damaged burner. "Seven Present Tenses" is unholy worship, while "(For the) Love of Weeping" is quick and lucid. Syncopated basslines stalk the tracks like housecats.
Drawbar Organ is a welcome expansion of the gray, minimal Three EPs (Shackleton's last solo full-length release), but it's Music for the Quiet Hour where his delirium shines. Just five tracks-- two of which are seven-minute bookends-- Quiet Hour welcomes back estranged collaborator Vengeance Tenfold, a spoken-word artist who who helps strangle Shackleton's most distended productions to date. (Tenfold is less laughably predictable than Kode9's partner-in-misanthropy, Spaceape, but your enjoyment will correlate strongly with your fondness for garden-variety Revelations-style soothsayin'.) The queasy, unnerving passages are stitched together like an 18th-century surgery victim, surpassing last month's Congos/Sun Araw collaboration as the most avant-garde dub expedition this year. The 21-minute centerpiece, "Music for the Quiet Hour Part 4", patters indecisively before a long vocal passage-- a grandfather dictating a letter to his grandson, Shackleton's most alluring spoken-word choice yet-- ushers the track into extended ambience, finding the midway point between Robert Ashley and Digital Mystikz.
Quiet Hour is the immersion experience that Shackleton has been building toward for years, an album that isn't just "not really dance music"-- like many of his productions-- but one that aligns him with avant-garde composers as well as other, less-mannered freakniks. Shackleton lives in Berlin, now, but he's a UK transplant, one that obviously still shares that country's long-held fascination with dub. Drawbar Organ / Quiet Hour takes that fascination and grinds it in the back molars, spitting out something lumpy, infirm, and wonderfully transformed.


The Brooklyn post-punk trio’s debut full-length reveals an instinct for scrappy, empathetic songwriting.

Essentials

In 2014, Patio was the fictitious brainchild of Loren DiBlasi, then a music journalist who fancied bass guitar but had yet to pick one up. Linking with guitarist friend Lindsey-Paige McCloy, DiBlasi learned bass by replicating Pavement and Blink-182 licks. College friend Alice Suh, who’d just taken up drum lessons, completed the trio. Mitski accepted an invitation to their first show, and nearly five years later, Patio are a frequent opening act on the Brooklyn DIY scene, sharing bills with the likes of Deeper and Les Savy Fav. Their debut full-length, Essentials, reveals an instinct for scrappy, empathetic songwriting that was just waiting to be borne out.
The sprightly post-punk of Essentials commands attention, not because it’s overzealous or hyperbolic, but because of the vigor Patio bring to their songs. Their attitude recalls predecessors like Dig Me Out-era Sleater-Kinney, but Patio inject the final product with enough modern indie-pop influence to clear them of imitator status. They show off a knack for writing unconventional chord progressions in songs like “Endgame” and “Scum,” where Suh’s drum patterns become an unexpected focal point over zippy guitar melodies.
When DiBlasi’s deadpan alternates with McCloy’s croons, the result is a testament to the band’s sharp wit. Backed by buoyant riffs, the women trade lines on “Boy Scout,” McCloy gliding along the verses until DiBlasi interjects with a bleakly conversational chorus: “I went shopping the other day/This week I can afford to feel better.” Later, “Boy Scout” name-drops one of Patio’s New York City indie-rock peers—“I think I’m gonna go home and listen to Washer instead of spending any more time with you”—a celebration of introversion for those in the know.
With just 10 tracks that run under half an hour, Essentials can feel rushed. Raucous opener “Split,” soaring sing-along “New Reality,” and the feisty but fleeting “Boy Scout” would all benefit from more space to sprawl. At almost six minutes, “Open” is an anomaly: It’s by far the band’s most evocative and moving song to date, evidence of the potential Patio have when they allot more time to their songwriting. Hypnotic and morose, the song splices a heavy therapy session into tender hush and flashes of rugged noise. DiBlasi’s drone is especially haunting here, with some of Patio’s most poignant and enigmatic lyricism: “I only have one body to give, and you took it.” The song reads more like an intimate stream of consciousness than a rehearsed composition. “Sometimes I cry when I listen to classical music/...It’s so sad to think I’ll never create something so beautiful,” DiBlasi admits. Maybe she’s right, but Patio’s unyielding nerve on Essentials is a firm start to their own musical history.


Regina Spektor’s first album in six years is weighty and ambitious, full of sweeping string arrangements and cosmic ruminations on love and loss.

Home, before and after

A great Regina Spektor song unfurls like a short story with the boring parts excised. Like “Chemo Limo,” “Samson,” and other iPod-era bangers, “Becoming All Alone” fits the bill. It’s a wry ballad that imagines what it might be like to grab a beer with God, and its lonesome chorus has that Spektorian quality of making sincerity seem like a superpower. Watching Spektor, alone at the piano, debut the song at a benefit concert back in 2014, I remember feeling like I was being let in on a secret. Someone uploaded an amateur recording to YouTube, and fans passed it around like a treasure, wondering when she might record the song.
Now, nearly eight years later, that wish has been granted. “Becoming All Alone” is the opening song on Spektor’s eighth album, Home, before and after. But the track’s quiet vulnerability has been lost. The studio version is ornamented with vast, Technicolor strings and a beefy, “Torn”-adjacent drum loop that has the odd task of imposing a funky backbeat onto a track that isn’t particularly funky at all. There’s a great song hiding there, but the arrangement is so slick it makes “Fidelity” sound like a demo.
I know, I know: Don’t get too attached to the early live version. It’s an unspoken rule of pop fandom. Yet the song’s evolution reflects the guiding impulse on Spektor’s first album since 2016. Working remotely for the first time, Spektor recorded her parts in a converted church in upstate New York, while John Congleton produced the record from California. The songs are among her most memorable since the Begin to Hope/Far era, yet there’s an occasional disconnect between the songwriting and the arrangements, which are pitched towards bombastic, widescreen gestures.
Take “What Might Have Been,” which begins as a whimsical recounting of contrasts (“Sickness and flowers go together/Bombing and shelters go together”) before swelling into a windswept chorus caked in Broadway glitter. It sounds majestic, and certainly expensive, but the production flattens the songwriter’s nervy eccentricities.
Spektor’s childlike whimsy is still intact—“Loveology” culminates with her taking the guise of a schoolteacher, listing made-up words ending in “-ology”—but it’s set against a certain solemnity, a heaviness. The record is full of cosmic ruminations; nearly every tune builds to some grand, italicized proclamation about love or loss or dislocation: “Love is enough of a reason to stay” (“Coin”), “Home is where the light’s on!” (“Through a Door”), and so on. Weightiest of all is “Spacetime Fairytale,” a nine-minute epic that flits between grave orchestral brooding and playful piano interludes. Its ambition is staggering and its subject, the immensity of time, compelling, but it’s undermined by a gather-round-m’child tone, replete with hokey rhymes like “The story must go on/So keep listening, my son.”
Spektor’s best work evokes great fiction not just because of its imaginative sense of character (refreshing at a time when sensitive songwriters are sometimes presumed to deliver uncut dispatches of their own trauma), but also in the mood twists and surprise endings she deploys. “One Man’s Prayer” is an instantly great example. It’s written as a plea from a lonely, incel-type guy—“If I won’t get to meet God/And I won’t get to be a God/Then at least God let me get looked at by a girl”—rendered sympathetic until the last verse, when it suddenly shifts into a dissection of power and misogyny. It’s compelling writing, emblematic of Spektor’s empathy and curiosity, and the song pulls off its glossy soft-rock leanings.
Spektor has always been a jumble of contradictions: a classically trained, Russian-born pianist who toured with the Strokes, won over the Meet Me in the Bathroom crowd, turned a multisyllabic pronunciation of the word “heart” into an unlikely chart hit, and charmed everyone from Chance the Rapper to Bill de Blasio, who fêted her at Gracie Mansion in 2019. Her songs have sometimes been unfairly dismissed as precious or twee, but there has always been that undercurrent of dark humor (who else could pull off a rousing singalong about carbon monoxide poisoning?) coursing through their veins.
Now, two decades removed from her debut, Spektor is modernizing her sound and harking back to her early years all at once. The prominent use of programmed beats—an experiment that pays off on the dizzying, feverish “Up the Mountain,” which evokes Post-era Björk and ancient folktales all at once—reflects the former impulse. Yet her decision to finally record old fan favorites like “Loveology” and “Raindrops,” both of which she debuted at concerts in the early 2000s, reflects that sense of time collapsing, as “Spacetime Fairytale” portends, within her own discography.
Despite those songs’ faraway origins, you won’t mistake Home, before and after for an early Spektor recording. Vocally, this record is more accessible than anything she’s done. There are no throaty gasps, no out-of-nowhere falsetto squeals, no on-off Bronx accent. Her voice has deepened; her range is immense.
In a recent Guardian interview, Spektor reflected on that early-career outpouring of songs that generated “Loveology” and “Raindrops.” “I didn’t have any responsibilities,” Spektor recalled. “I would read a book; I would write a song.”
On those early records, like Soviet Kitsch, there was a bracing sense of raw possibility. Songs could swing from kooky anti-folk to cabaret to punk outbursts on a whim. Home, before and after, by contrast, sounds like the work of a seasoned professional. Every note is meticulous; every orchestral swell magnificently labored over. Back then, Spektor could captivate audiences with nothing but a piano (and maybe a single drumstick slamming against a chair). She still can, of course, when cornball production flourishes aren’t getting in her way.


The feeling of danger from King Khan's best work never comes into play on this Scion EP. Worse, despite a moving cover of Jay Reatard's "Hammer I Miss You" (in German!), Khan sounds tired.

The King Khan Experience: Scion A/V Presents: The King Khan Experience

Last year, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson asked the King Khan & BBQ Show to join their curated Vivid Live festival in Sydney alongside Tuvan throat singers, Reed's Metal Machine Trio, and the Blind Boys of Alabama. According to Khan, Reed and Anderson wanted the duo to "put back the danger into the devil's music." His antics at the event, which ultimately led to his breakup with Mark Sultan, proved that assessment accurate. His live shows are unpredictable and wild. His music with BBQ, Tandoori Knights, and the Shrines is driven by an energetic, fiery soul that jumps straight out of the 1950s and 1960s-- a time when several of pop music's central characters were handsome, wild-eyed men screaming and pushing that "devil’s music" to America's children. King Khan is the same sort of dangerous and then some: He's usually shirtless (in the very least) and he unleashes Wilson Pickett shrieks, exudes grease and sex, and has a knack for being gratuitously crass.
That's why this Scion EP by "the King Khan Experience" is so disappointing. The palpable feeling of danger from Khan's work never comes into play. Where his material with the Shrines felt like a sharp rock and soul review, the Experience comparatively sags. The Shrines' What Is?! was backed by a tight horn section and some on-point melody-accenting guitars. Meanwhile, the Experience features organ and poorly utilized horns. Many of the reference points seem to come less from the 60s and more from the indulgent, jammy 70s-- the wandering organ and the loose blues guitar solo of "Knock Me Off My Feet" feel sloppy in comparision to past material. What's worse, Khan sounds tired. His vocals frequently drag, and even his "OWW"'s come off less wild than usual.
A few songs hint at the electrifying promise he made with the Shrines, but they ultimately slip up somewhere. The opening guitar and percussion drive of "Come Levitate With Me" sound like they're about to build into a party song, but then the song just slows down with a Herbie Mann-ish flute solo and Khan's monotonous, dragging vocals. "I Got Love" is the song that begs for horns and speed, but neither happen. The only track that truly hits is his tribute to Jay Reatard: "Hammer Ich Vermisse Dich", a German cover of Reatard's "Hammer I Miss You". It’s unclear why the song is in German, but through the language barrier, you can hear Khan's passionate delivery. He's backed on the chorus by what sounds like German schoolgirls, and there's glitchy percussion driving the whole thing. It’s a touching tribute to his friend, if only from the titular message: "I miss you."
Maybe the EP was a place to put out some odds and ends that don't have a clear place with any of his other bands-- it really does sound like a hodgepodge. We get "Are You Serious?", a lo-fi goof on Jimi Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary" and Are You Experienced. (The song might explain the new band name.) He also offers "Keep It Simple Stupid", a bit of clichéd Eastern psych with a too-long whine. There is "Bob Log Stomp", a track that would fit tidily with BBQ or the Shrines, but it's basically a "somebody pooped in my scotch" joke, and it's not even as funny as "Tastebuds".
Throughout, we get a shadow of Khan as "wild man" as joker as rocker. His best work comes from a place that's unhinged. This material's too toned-down and wandering. In "I Got Love", he sings: "It's a question of soul/ Some people got it and some people don't." This turns out to be a supremely a misplaced lyric on an EP where the man's delivery is so flat.


Wild Nothing's achingly beautiful reflection of 80s dream-pop carves a tunnel from Ibiza's beaches to Manchester's rain-soaked fairgrounds.

Gemini

Though some of indie's brightest leading men have come through Virginia's halls of higher education (Steve Malkmus, David Berman, Travis Morrison), your average college rock band in the Old Dominion area probably sounds more like Agents of Good Roots. So if you live in a place like Blacksburg, Va., home of the Virginia Tech campus and not much else, and you want to be in a tropical punk act (Facepaint), an introspective singer-songwriter project (Jack & the Whale), or a band that covers Kate Bush instead of Dave Matthews (Wild Nothing's breakthrough rendition of "Cloudbusting"), you'll probably have to do what Jack Tatum did and start them yourself.
Gemini finds Tatum constructing a striking, solitary monument to just about anyone who moped, sulked, or bedsat their way through the 1980s. His love of dreamy, fuzzy, handcrafted guitar-pop isn't far removed from the Radio Dept. or the Pains of Being Pure at Heart, but he displays a more comprehensive and widespread commitment to classic indie pop sounds. Revivalism notwithstanding, his craftsmanship is undeniable and the details are spot-on: Check the reflective bell tone in "Live in Dreams", the Cocteau Twins-like, artificial synth tom in "Drifter", and the Johnny Marr homage in the twinkly guitar fade-in that begins "Our Composition Book".
While Tatum plays hopscotch with his collection of 4AD, Factory, and Slumberland records, Gemini has plenty more to offer than sonic verisimilitude. On album opener "Live in Dreams," he sings, "Our lips won't last forever and that's exactly why/ I'd rather live in dreams and I'd rather die," and the lyric plays out like Gemini in miniature: While Tatum's words can edge on maudlin, his delivery is more romantic than dreary, and there's a sly, understated, and subtly addictive melody that gorgeously frames his sentiments. And melodies like that one, which the album features in spades, are ultimately what make Gemini more than just another indie pop record, and often more than the sum of its parts. Of course, that's not to say that each of them connects instantly. Though a handful of immediate standouts reward first listens, the record's debt-to-influence ratio may initially seem to overshadow the strength of the music. However, repeat spins reveal Tatum's strikingly innate sense of songcraft, as these tracks gradually earworm their way into daily life.
Similar to Bradford Cox's early work as Atlas Sound or the more similarly indebted Nick Harte of Shocking Pinks, Wild Nothing doesn't feel like a facile genre exercise so much as honest personal expression borne of intense musical fanhood. And in a strange way, it becomes something of a deceptively joyous affair, a reminder of why so many songwriters retreat to bedrooms or garages to lose themselves in the music-making process. Gemini is grand when it sulks, and even better when it's in motion-- check the falsetto hooks of "Confirmation" and "Summer Holidays", or the clattering, kinetic "Chinatown". Tatum carves a tunnel from Ibiza's beaches to Manchester's rain-soaked fairgrounds, and in the process, captures a lot of what is exciting about underground music's current classic indie-pop fixation.


Capturing the sound and spirit of its time, this compilation of demos and home recordings showcases the mellow, genre-blurring taste of ’70s record man Earl McGrath.

Various Artists: Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980

Earl McGrath can’t be called a household name. Even among music aficionados, he’s a bit of an obscure figure. A close friend of Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, McGrath ran two subsidiaries of the label: Ertegun gave his pal Clean Records in 1970, then McGrath parlayed a friendship with Mick Jagger into a position at the head of Rolling Stones Records in 1977. McGrath departed Rolling Stones Records in 1980 and left behind the music industry, returning to what he did best—cultivating friendships and facilitating ideas among the elite. Maybe the public at large wouldn’t have recognized McGrath. Still, he along with his wife Camilla Pecci-Blunt—an Italian countess who was a descendent of Pope Leo XIII, the head of the Catholic church at the dawn of the 1900s—were linchpins of high society in New York and Los Angeles, calling everyone from Harrison Ford to Joan Didion lifelong friends.
McGrath died in 2016, nearly a decade after Camilla. After his passing, journalist Joe Hagan received an invitation from his estate to peruse pictures Camilla photographed for possible inclusion in his biography of Rolling Stone founder Jann Wenner. While he was there, he stumbled upon a cache of reel-to-reel tapes squirreled away in a closet. Within the roughly 200 tapes were unheard documents of McGrath’s time as a record man, a period that spanned the entire 1970s. Among those tapes were some Rolling Stones rarities—outtakes from Emotional Rescue and live recordings of the New Barbarians, the short-lived busman’s holiday from Keith Richards and Ron Wood—along with the master tape to Peter Tosh’s “(You Gotta Walk) Don’t Look Back,” but this wasn’t just a stash of Rolling Stones Records artifacts. There was a wealth of recordings from earlier in the ’70s, notably some of the first work from Daryl Hall and John Oates, as well as tapes from the tail end of the decade, including material from punk poet Jim Carroll.
Hagan spent a year cataloging the closet, whittling down the tapes into Earl’s Closet: The Lost Archive of Earl McGrath, 1970-1980, a Light in the Attic compilation produced with the assistance of Pat Thomas. Don’t expect any Rolling Stones-related relics here. Earl’s Closet showcases 22 demos and home recordings McGrath collected over the course of the ’70s. Sometimes these recordings were demos sent directly to McGrath and sometimes he had a hand in their creation, but there’s no one thing tying together the music outside of his own tastes—tastes that reflected the era as much as they shaped it.
Earl’s Closet suggests McGrath gravitated toward country-rock made either by Hollywood cowboys or Texan weirdos while also finding sustenance in mellow folk-rock and distillations of ’60s pop. Other sounds crossed his radar, notably soul and a bit of harder rock’n’roll, but sun-bleached troubadours provide the spine of Earl’s Closet, while Daryl Hall and John Oates serve as its fulcrum. McGrath’s first and greatest discovery, Hall and Oates were swiftly poached by Ertegun for Atlantic, a label that would prove to be a creatively fruitful but commercially frustrating period for the duo. Veterans of Philadelphia’s soul scene—they rejected an offer to become house songwriters for Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff at Philadelphia International—they refashioned themselves as folkies and couldn’t resist threading artier elements of rock and pop, as evidenced by “Baby Come Closer” and “Dry in the Sun,” two Hall originals that are surprisingly funky even when they’re rooted in folk.
Such casual blurring of genres suggests the journey charted on Earl’s Closet. The first part of the voyage centers on California, with Delbert McClinton and Terry Allen both writing tales of how they moved from Texas to California (“Two More Bottles of Wine” and “Gonna California,” respectively). McGrath signed McClinton and his partner Glen Clark to Clean, where they’d issue two albums as Delbert & Glen, while Allen never quite managed to break into the big leagues. Allen eventually carved out a niche as a Southern-fried outsider artist—his 1979 double album Lubbock (on everything) is an Americana classic and he’d collaborate with David Byrne on 1986’s Sounds From True Stories—but not everybody went onto such success. Hagan couldn’t identify three of the artists here—the bittersweet winds of “Only Yourself to Lose” is credited to the absurd moniker Kazoo Singers—while many other acts operated on the margins of the mainstream: ’60s veterans struggling to find their way forward in a new decade. Andy Warhol associate Ultra Violet fades into the dawn on the languid “How Do You Do (Children of the Most High),” old folkie Paul Potash takes stock of the hippie hangover on “Holy Commotion,” and there is space for not one but two members of Detroit rebels the Amboy Dukes, a band that also counted Ted Nugent as a member: Dave Gilbert is in Shadow, who deliver the sugary pop rush of “Oh La La,” while Johnny Angel sounds like an endearingly cut-rate Rod Stewart on “Invisible Lady.”
Naturally, there are some sons of Hollywood in Earl’s Closet as well. Michael McCarty, the stepson of the notorious B-movie director Ed Wood, is represented by “Christopher,” a piece of dense, crystallized power-pop reminiscent of early Emitt Rhodes. (Fittingly, McCarty spent some time in the L.A. pop band the Palace Guard after Rhodes departed the group.) Mark Rodney, son of Red Rodney—a jazz trumpeter in Charlie Parker’s quintet between 1949 and 1951—is here with “California,” whose smooth groove is much funkier than the records the singer/songwriter cut with John Batdorf in the early ’70s. Batdorf & Rodney were kindred spirits with artists like Country, the first band McGrath signed to Clean, in that they were heavily influenced by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young; “Killer,” the contribution from Country here, distills the essence of CSNY in a way that recalls America’s “A Horse With No Name.”
All these mellow vibes mean that the final stretch of Earl’s Closet—the five songs that comprise Side D in its double-LP incarnation—sounds particularly bracing. David Johansen works out an early, ragged version of “Funky But Chic,” Detroit soul belter Norma Jean Bell tears through “Just Look-ah What You’ll Be Missing” and the Jim Carroll Band is a coiled nerve on “Tension,” a song he’d later turn into “Voices” for the soundtrack for the 1985 James Spader film Tuff Turf. All three tunes capture the late-’70s NYC renaissance, a happening that extended from punk clubs to the dance floor, and they also function as the closing chapter for McGrath's time as a record man. He wasn’t alienated from the new wave—he would remain close with Carroll over the years—but he was a man who got bored easily: The music industry followed a spell in the film business. (He maintained that he was the one who created The Monkees, only to have his agent steal it from him.) He had other adventures to pursue, so he left behind his time as a record man in his closet, waiting to be excavated by future generations who would marvel at how vividly these unheard documents capture the sound and spirit of their time.


Anyone ever stumble across *Struwwelpeter*, the 19th century German children's book by Heinrich Hoffmann? Mark Twain himself translated it to English, although I doubt it made it to the bedside of too many American kids. This illustrated book is comprised of short lyrics describing the horrific things that happen to naughty children: Cruel Frederick is attacked by his own maltreated dog; Pauline plays with matches and burns to death while her cats watch; Conrad the thumbsucker winds up with his thumbs cut off by the red-legged scissor-man. I don't need to go on. There's something so downright un-American about the

Animal Collective: Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished

Anyone ever stumble across Struwwelpeter, the 19th century German children's book by Heinrich Hoffmann? Mark Twain himself translated it to English, although I doubt it made it to the bedside of too many American kids. This illustrated book is comprised of short lyrics describing the horrific things that happen to naughty children: Cruel Frederick is attacked by his own maltreated dog; Pauline plays with matches and burns to death while her cats watch; Conrad the thumbsucker winds up with his thumbs cut off by the red-legged scissor-man. I don't need to go on. There's something so downright un-American about the whole grisly affair, something alien about the gleeful proximity of children to violence and mutilation. Fortunately, I was a college German student when I encountered Struwwelpeter, and it freaked me out even then. Yet Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished, the incredible but bizarre release by Avey Tare and Panda Bear brings the fates of those luckless kraut kinder back to mind.
The marriage of psychedelia and fairy-tale imagery goes back at least to "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds"; Pink Floyd's Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the Dead's Aoxomoxoa: the first flowering of psychedelia was joyously regressive, celebrating juvenilia as the antidote to modern rationality. Yet what was indelibly excised was menace-- what the gnomes and newspaper taxis conceal. Remember the boat ride through the tunnel in the movie Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? In the middle of this sucrose wonderland, there's something fucking awful.
Don't choke on the references. Forget them. Avey Tare and Panda Bear's Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished is a masterful piece of electro-acoustic fairy-tale music; yet its squealing electronics, and vitrified rhythms suggest something darker. Like a Snickers bar with a razorblade in it.
Spirit They're Gone is Avey Tare's album; he sings, and plays guitars, pianos, and electronics. Panda Bear, meanwhile, mans the crumpled percussion. The album opens with the high-frequency squall and delicate vocals of "Spirit They've Vanished," offering little clue about future directions. However, the second track, "April and the Phantom" is crystallizing: expert acoustic guitars, fierce drumming and Daltrey-esque screams resemble the Who resurrected as the seventh member of the Elephant 6. Tinkling toy pianos, organs and exclamations of digital noise round out the track, while Tare perilously insists, "She ran out of nature," again and again.
The wistful "Penny Dreadfuls" lays simple piano over needled electronics reminiscent of Pita or Christian Fennesz in a kind of lysergic dirge on the end of childhood. "Chocolate Girl" is dubbed-out calliope music, swirling and swirling: a strange meditation seemingly on sexual awakening, awkward but erotic in the midst of an enchanted forest of an album. The interstellar Nintendo drone of "Everyone Whistling" is irresistible space-pop, backed by some incredibly nimble jazz drumming. The twelve-minute "Alvin Row" is an epic closer, emerging from free-noise clatter, insect electronics and demented piano into sunny Beatlesque psych-pop. "Can you hear me, troubadour?" Tare asks before the eruption of furious ivories. Schlock horror organs abound and the cymbals crash like storms. The album collapses into the crackly sample of a child (Alfalfa from the Little Rascals?) saying, "My singing voice is gone... My singing voice is gone... My singing voice is gone..."
Spirit They're Gone, Spirit They've Vanished is not only outstanding, but one of the most original sounding albums out there. This record, as I've said, marries the pleasant and the violent and is not for timid ears: the sparkling pop never strays far from the lacerating noise. The lyrics are largely indecipherable but occasional gems and wonderful turns of phrase emerge from the bright din. Two mysterious fellow travelers (one-half of the four-man Animal collective) seem to have stumbled upon each other and created something truly beautiful. The only question is: which one of them is the walrus?


With a delivery as authentically conversational as her songwriting, the Toronto-based musician treats even the broadest themes on a person-to-person scale.

Charlotte Cornfield: The Shape of Your Name

The Shape of Your Name

Across three albums, the Canadian songwriter and musician Charlotte Cornfield has crafted refreshingly levelheaded music. Rather than indulging dramatic flourishes, Cornfield is concerned with the search for comfort and health, and though her lyrics may seem slight, they are deeply felt. As a session drummer and a booker for Toronto’s Burdock Music Hall, her work requires personability, and personability is Cornfield’s defining trait as a songwriter. She also contributes the bulk of instrumentation to her new album The Shape of Your Name, and plays drums on every song but two.
The Shape of Your Name holds its own against some of the better singer-songwriter records of the last few years: Short Movie, but less existential; No Dogs Allowed, but defying the digital world rather than embracing it; Hell-On, but grounded on Earth, without Neko Case’s restlessness. While all these albums engage in varying degrees of introspection, Cornfield focuses less on her relationship with herself than on the patience and reflection required for relationships with others. Treating even the broadest themes of love and loss on a person-to-person scale, she refuses to succumb to saccharine platitudes. Musical details, like the time signature jumps on the deceptively uplifting “Andrew” and the synth pad that opens “Storm Clouds,” will catch the uninvested off guard.
Even when her songs aren’t actually joyful, Cornfield takes palpable pleasure in crafting a witty lyric. “You make me sad/Like an undergrad with a guitar,” she sings on “Andrew”—followed, of course, by a brief electric guitar solo. She can bring the pathos as well: Opener “June” ambles along with couplets like, “Your lips are loose and full of ego/And still I come here just to see you,” feeding into an outro most songwriters would use as a chorus: "I don’t know if it’s you or just the shape of your name on my page/That gets me every time.” Her delivery is as authentically conversational as her songwriting, lending weight to even banal sentiments like “all I really wanted was you.”
Cornfield has made a patient record, trusting her listeners to follow her through slower passages. “Silver Civic” boasts a chorus worthy of a Kacey Musgraves ballad (“When every silver Civic was your car/And I was gonna be a star/And you were gonna be mine”), but doesn’t deploy that chorus until almost halfway through. “Wheels” depicts an emotional reaction to the death of Degrassi High star Neil Hope without a trace of self-consciousness about the specificity of its subject matter. Even the confident, upbeat “Up the Hill” buries guitar squalls and manic drum fills beneath confessional lyrics. Yet that relative immediacy makes it the strongest song on a consistently solid record, not to mention one that actually grooves.
There’s less playfulness on Shape than Cornfield’s previous albums, though humor still pops up unexpectedly, as with the non-sequitur ad-lib that closes “Up the Hill”: “I lay down, and beside my head there was a dead fly,” she announces, as the guitars ring out. More such moments of spontaneity and risk-taking could entice listeners turned off by the abundance of mid-tempo ballads, but this record benefits from not trying to be a masterpiece. Instead, it stays small and approachable, a reward reserved for those paying attention.


The debut collaboration between the Native American group and guitarist Yonatan Gat offers vivid new context for the sound of the powwow drum.

Medicine Singers

During the Eastern Medicine Singers’ appearance at South by Southwest in 2017, Daryl Black Eagle Jamieson kept noticing someone watching in the distance. That fan turned out to be Israeli guitarist Yonatan Gat, known for his work in the frenzied garage rock band Monotonix. Gat wanted to know if the Medicine Singers would perform with him during the festival, and the East Algonquin powwow group agreed. That spark initiated a full-length collaboration on Medicine Singers, their debut studio album, which extends their communal spirit to a varied group of collaborators. Among them are trumpeter jaimie branch, DNA’s Ikue Mori, and Swans members Thor Harris and Christopher Pravdica, along with Minneapolis indie rock staple Ryan Olson (Gayngs, Poliça) and new age legend Laraaji.
Medicine Singers gives ample space to bursts of rock music, swirling electronics, and touches of jazz: branch’s trumpet in particular is a highlight on two of the album’s lengthier, magisterial tracks, “Sanctuary” and “Sunset.” But the balance is always tilted toward the powwow drum and the voices of the Eastern Medicine Singers. “Sanctuary” gives free rein to their pop influences for half of its six minutes, but the steady presence of the powwow drum grounds the track. Equally important are the vocals, which are delivered in the Massachusett dialect of the Algonquin language, along with Lakota, Ojibwe, and Wapishana, performed by Jamieson and the Eastern Medicine Singers alongside featured vocalists Joe Rainey and Ian Wapichana.
Even when drum kits and electronic percussion sizzle, as they do in “Shapeshifter” and “Sanctuary,” the presence of the powwow drum and the vocalists always makes Medicine Singers feel not like the sound of pop music creeping in but of powwow spreading out. One of the record’s most beguiling juxtapositions arrives in “Sunrise (Rumble),” when a round of singing is interrupted by Gat’s interpolation of Link Wray’s foundational 1958 single “Rumble” (Wray claimed Shawnee ancestry, by his mother). The familiar melody blends seamlessly into the song, suggesting how its shuffling, heartbeat-like rhythm already shared similarities with powwow music and highlighting the debt that rock music owes to Native American music.
The monumental effect of the powwow drum, a consistent motif throughout the record, can create an atmosphere that crests into solemnity. Despite the virtuosic range of the artists, there is a distinct lack of lightness or play, and the narrow band of moods sometimes runs the risk of feeling stolid and distant. Two short tracks, the upbeat “My Brother” and the Rainey-sung “Shootingstar Press,” point to the artists’ capacity to be extend beyond this template, and both feel like they could have run much longer. The strongest moments on the record feel transformative. In “Sunset,” sung by Artie Red Medicine, Gat plays a sinuous guitar solo as the percussion quiets and a noodly synth rises in the mix. Once the drum comes back in with the vocals, the sound feels less like rhythmic accompaniment and more like a storm rolling through, alerting the senses and picking up speed.


The 1974 photo of Andy Warhol superstar Candy Darling on the cover of Antony and the Johnsons' second full length, *I Am a Bird Now*, is the perfect complement to the ghostly hymnals that flit and sigh behind its black and white shadows. A melancholy but arrestingly beautiful image, it depicts Darling on her deathbed; bright flowers float behind her upturned arm like a cluster of soft, pale moons radiating light onto the bleached sea of sheets in which she's drowning.

Besides being a tight aesthetic move, the image also links Antony to the early fabulousness of downtown New York, reminding

Antony and the Johnsons: I Am a Bird Now

I Am a Bird Now

The 1974 photo of Andy Warhol superstar Candy Darling on the cover of Antony and the Johnsons' second full length, I Am a Bird Now, is the perfect complement to the ghostly hymnals that flit and sigh behind its black and white shadows. A melancholy but arrestingly beautiful image, it depicts Darling on her deathbed; bright flowers float behind her upturned arm like a cluster of soft, pale moons radiating light onto the bleached sea of sheets in which she's drowning.
Besides being a tight aesthetic move, the image also links Antony to the early fabulousness of downtown New York, reminding the informed viewer not only of Darling's too-early death from leukemia, but the AIDS-related passing of the photographer himself, Peter Hujar in 1987 (the same year Warhol died, following routine gall bladder surgery). Klaus Nomi was already buried by then, and the Downtown scene was getting too close to saying goodbye to Cookie Mueller, Keith Haring, David Wojnarowicz, and Antony's sometime doppelganger Leigh Bowery (the subject of Boy George's musical Taboo), among others-- all victims of the AIDS virus.
This visual meditation on death and radical history smoothly conjures the family tree upon which pale, angelic Antony perches. The vocalist/pianist moved from California to NYC after seeing the documentary Mondo New York, lured by the 1980s cabaret scene it depicted. Quite fittingly, his first performance came with a musical troupe called Blacklips at the famed Downtown venue, the Pyramid. Jump now to 2003, when Antony opened for Lou Reed and sang the Velvet Underground classic "Candy Says" (yes, for Candy Darling) as an encore after most performances. Knowing all of this-- the very important history in that cover-- helps to understand the melancholy, sense of loss, and rapturous joy in these 10 tracks.
But however aesthetically intriguing and complex that history may be, the ultimate draw is Antony's voice, and within the first two seconds of the album, it should be very clear to even the most unaware newbies that Antony has an amazing Nina Simone/Brian Ferry/Jimmy Scott vibrato, a multi-octave siren that would sound painfully lovely no matter what he was saying. Lucky for us, he fills that promise with worthy syllables. The greatness of this downcast crooner is the melding of that otherworldly trill with a dark, powerful aesthetic. Looking past his sad eye make-up and kewpie-doll features are these mesmerizing songs about loving dead boys, plaintive letters from hermaphroditic children, the fear of dark lonesome purgatories, breast amputation, the fluidity of gender. The first words of "Hope There's Someone" and of the album "Hope there's someone who'll take care of me/ When I die" feel more lonesome than just about anything and then there's the rapturous promise of "For Today I Am A Boy"' that "One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful woman/ One day I'll grow up and be a beautiful girl".
I Am a Bird Now's majesty didn't come easily: Antony's self-titled debut was released five years ago on David Tibet's Durtro label, but only now has he found the perfect mix between style and substance. More stripped down than earlier offerings-- most of the focus is on piano and voice, although violin, viola, cello, sax, and flute are also heard-- there's no missing Antony's thoughtful words.
There are a number of guest vocal spots-- Devendra Banhart (gypsy incantations in the beginning of "Spiralling"), Boy George ("You Are My Sister"), Rufus Wainwright ("What Can I Do?"). All of these powerful singers are overshadowed by Antony's angelic chops, though Boy George ends up turning in a surprisingly moving performance. His duet with Antony explores private memory, brotherhood/sisterhood (regardless of gender), relationships, empowerment ("I was so afraid of the night/ You seem to move to places/ That I feared"), and wish fulfillment. (Really, grab the hankies.)
For his part, longtime Antony fan/champion Lou Reed does a little spoken "I was lying in my bed last night" intro and some chunky guitar chords on the doo-wop horn swagger of standout "Fistful of Love", which works itself up to a frothy Otis Redding devotional to love's bruises and the comfort of a familiar fist: "I accept and I collect the memories of your devotion on my body".
The mingling of friends is a treat but, heart in his hand, Antony can more than ably go it alone-- even though he spends so much of I Am A Bird Now fearing solitude and celebrating those rare perfect connections. Then again, in this carefully laid out record, the final track, "Bird Gurl", leads quite dramatically to full-fledged climax as our hero searches for and finds wings, finally taking a solo flight. Contrast this with the pathos of the opener's fear of falling asleep and that "middle place" between light/life and darkness/death. Of course, when the album begins again, so does the reality of perhaps having nobody to hold an aching dying head. But then, so does Antony's riveting trip towards his airborne epiphany. And on the cover, Candy's flowers remain in bloom.


An alternate version of Ghostface’s 2013 album 12 Reasons to Die, produced by Detroit’s Apollo Brown, features beats that suit the rapper’s strengths more closely.

Ghostface Killah / Apollo Brown: The Brown Tape

The Brown Tape

It was 2013, and the excitement was almost tangible. Though he was an inarguable hall-of-famer, Ghostface Killah hadn’t gotten close to a compelling front-to-back listen in years. Now he was set to collaborate with Adrian Younge, the film editor and producer who blessed the 2009 film Black Dynamite with a Morricone-worthy score. These two soulful nostalgics, Starks and Younge, were making a high-concept album, 12 Reasons to Die, with RZA on board as executive producer. It was the perfect combination, like a joint fever dream birthed by the ghosts of Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Gordon Parks Jr. And the first single, “Rise of the Ghostface Killah,” which unfolded a tale of a murderous ghost-slash-superhero taking the life of a mafia capo and disappearing in a swarm of killer bees, seemed to justify the hype.
But when the album arrived, the two artists seemed strangely out of sync. Younge soared, mixing funk, trip-hop and psychedelia, and lacing tracks with gloriously campy touches like the Greek chorus singing about roads of glory and winds of fury on “Revenge Is Sweet.” Ghost remained earthbound, uninspired, continuing the trend that had started with 2010’s Apollo Kids and carried over to too many of his Wu-Massacre and Wu-Block verses.
Part of the problem was that, for all of Younge’s strengths, his beats were designed to amplify a narrative that the rapper didn’t seem all that interested in substantiating. It emerged, eventually, that the two hadn’t worked together directly. Younge had recorded his beats to tape on his own, using an analog setup and live instrumentation to get the snap and crackle just right. Only later did Ghost lay down the vocals at a studio in New York, working off a script provided by the producer.
Younge wasn’t the only one enlisted to work with Ghost’s Twelve Reasons acapellas. As the release date neared, Apollo Brown, a Detroit producer with a fetish for the classic New York sound, was commissioned to create an alternate version, which, five years later, is being reissued by Mello Music Group. The Brown Tape, as it was called, was released as a limited-edition bonus cassette at the time and briefly placed online, where it caught the ear of the traditionalists Brown’s music is meant for. Where Younge tailored the production toward the album’s b-movie mash-up themes—the story of a crime boss betrayed and murdered, only to return as a vengeful phantom—Brown crafted his beats explicitly to cradle Ghost’s rhymes.
His style, a humble package of instrumental loops and well-placed samples over boom-bap blacktop, is a truer companion to latter-day Ghost’s low-stakes bars, illuminating lyrical quirks that were overshadowed on Twelve Reasons. The most compelling details of the album’s story line have to do with Logan, the honeypot who betrays Tony Starks. Under Brown’s care, the two songs setting up the seduction and betrayal flash with unexpected emotion. Cappadonna still out-raps Ghost on “Center of Attraction,” but both rappers’ feelings somehow sound more genuine over Brown’s piano keys. The tender rasp in Ghost’s voice is accentuated; Cappadonna’s frustration with his oblivious friend is palpable.
Brown nods toward ’70s funk on “An Unexpected Call” and “The Sure Shot,” standout beats that also spotlight Ghost’s best vocal performances. Even so, for all his devotion, the producer has what you might call a 9th Wonder problem. He’s an adept sample slinger with a good ear and a respectful attitude, who lacks ideas that would set him apart from his predecessors—in his case, RZA, DJ Premier, and other architects of hip-hop’s second golden age. That makes The Brown Tape less incongruous than its fraternal twin, but also less ambitious, less head-turning.
Beats like Brown’s could sing in the hands of a hungry rapper. But by 2013, Ghost was no longer that man, and with the reissue of the tape, that fact is front and center. Today, he’s pushing 50, has three classic solo albums under his belt and is a crucial part of several other legendary records. His legacy is secure. But even he seems to have tacitly acknowledged his own slipping standards. He’s spent the last few years mostly working with collaborators known for their instrumental music, rather than their rap production, hoping, perhaps, to slide tastefully into the background. The style that he helped birth 25 years ago, once known for its rawness, has become respectable in middle age, and so has he.


On his stripped-down second solo album, the Parquet Courts frontman finalizes a messy divorce with his adopted hometown, ruminating on vanished cityscapes and piercing memories.

Several Songs About Fire

New York City courses through Parquet Courts’ discography. The quartet that tapped the streets’ pulse on 2021’s “Walking at a Downtown Pace” has long captured the full spectrum of life in the city, from heady exploration to sheer exhaustion. For a subset of listless transplants of a certain age—those who moved there long after the Meet Me in the Bathroom years—Parquet Courts were their house band. Now their frontman, A. Savage, finds the house in flames.
Savage has said that Several Songs About Fire is an album about escape—“a burning building.” It’s shot through with impending departures and monumental changes. Given that the 37-year-old musician finally decamped to Europe after completing the record, it’s tempting to consider it his “Why I Left New York” essay. (“The cantos of my New York years/Are scribed in ink that disappears,” he purrs in “My My, My Dear.”) By turns ruminative and jocular, he grapples with reminders that nothing is permanent: condo conversions, changing seasons, dead friends. Yet while all this might suggest the brainy fury Savage built his name on, his new album plays less like an anxious lifeboat and more like a meditative breadcrumb trail from an old life to a new one, destination unknown.
Savage’s last solo record, 2017’s Thawing Dawn, offered a ragged and occasionally twangy iteration of Parquet Courts’ ’70s rock fixations. Several Songs About Fire is more restrained; the acoustic songs and electric rave-ups alike are simple and sturdy, anchored by his guitar and vocals and tastefully augmented by saxophones, pianos, and a spare, no-frills rhythm section. The material came together in writing sessions in England with Modern Nature’s Jack Cooper and on tour with Cate Le Bon; Savage then recorded the album in 10 days with John Parish in Bristol. That sense of movement is inscribed in its swinging cadences and propulsive drums; the slightly off-kilter rendering of well-worn rock’n’roll tropes suits an album about looking back at home from far away.
Savage’s New York might be a ghost town, population one: “Hollowed face stranger/Just who might you be?/In the mirror, something’s crying/With the same eyes as me,” he sings in the first song’s opening lines. In track after track, he mulls over memories of neighborhood characters and late-night hijinks, contemplating all the ways that the city can grind you down. The lone exception is “Riding Cobbles,” a lighthearted fantasy of European idyll. Several Songs About Fire plays out like a long, messy divorce from an adopted home.
Musically, though, there’s nothing shaggy about Several Songs About Fire. “My My, My Dear” and “David’s Dead” are sharp and hooky—strangely jaunty, even, in light of their downcast lyrics. Most songs, however, unspool slowly and with intent, as Savage takes time to refine both his melodies and his images. He rarely raises his voice anywhere near the commanding bark he usually favors, which makes it all the more powerful when, in the denouement of “My New Green Coat,” he finally pushes into his strained upper register: “Reasons to stay, I’m uncounting them/Because you are the reason that kept me/And I’m taking what’s left of me.” The song is the closest the album comes to offering resolution in its long arc of loose ends. Several Songs About Fire’s snapshots and fragments coalesce here in the picture of a man striking out on his own, not sure what he’s looking for or what he’ll find, only certain that there’s no use in continuing to sift through the ashes.


Originally released in 1988 on SST, Soundgarden’s full-length debut returns in expanded and remixed form on Sub Pop.

Ultramega OK

Soundgarden’s ascent from Seattle’s punk scene to rock’s upper echelon wasn’t preordained, but it was probably inevitable. Their first full-length, 1988’s Ultramega OK, expands upon the promise offered by their two Sub Pop EPs, the careening Screaming Life and the glitchy, funked-up Fopp. The band’s assault is sharper and more focused, their musical ideas borrowing from blues (and blooze), punk, tape-manipulation experiments, and dredged-in-mud riffing. It originally came out on the even-then-it-was-legendary punk label SST, although its 2017 reissue on Sub Pop puts a neat little bow on the band’s long career. Soundgarden’s path led them to arena tours and classic-rock-radio canonization, and Sub Pop has grown from a fanzine into a powerhouse, persisting and thriving through multiple independent-rock gold rushes. Both entities are keenly aware of their legacies—and the fact that they’re worthy of exploration.
“Flower,” a swirling tale of a woman whose hard-partying lifestyle leads her to an early grave, opens Ultramega OK. Years after more straightforward Soundgarden tracks like the glittering “Black Hole Sun” and the hiccuping “Pretty Noose” became rock-radio staples, it’s still one of the band’s best pop offerings, anchored by a chug that blossoms out of gauzy reverb, given depth by sonics that recall a muddied-up copy of Physical Graffiti (guitarist Kim Thayil has said that the humming feedback came from him placing his guitar on the floor near his amp, then blowing on its strings). The arrangement is animated by Chris Cornell’s gritted-teeth vocal performance, which only comes into full-voiced yawp briefly. Its appeal to both sides of MTV’s late-’80s late-night rock aisle—Headbangers Ball and 120 Minutes—presaged the eventual cultural dominance of “the Seattle sound” and the alt-rock gold rush that followed.
Ultramega OK’s most instructive lesson, though, is how that craved-for aesthetic stemmed from an ever-shifting ideal. The twisted thrash of “Circle of Power,” led by a gasping vocal from bassist Hiro Yamamoto, gets extra tense because of its momentary pauses for breath; the creeping-death march of “Beyond the Wheel” is sandwiched between the tape-warp interludes “665” and “667” and a masterful vocal by Cornell to give it extra eeriness at the height of PMRC-stoked mania about “occult music”; the sludgy cover of the blues chestnut “Smokestack Lightning,” which pairs Cornell’s wail with the band’s 45-at–33 grind, flips the idea of cocky ’80s rockers taking on the blues face-first into a moss-swarmed bog. (“We learned the Howlin’ Wolf version,” Cornell told Sounds. “We didn’t know it had been covered a lot.” Yamamoto deflated Cornell’s insistence: “I did and I told you not to put it on the record. It’s a bit crass—a bit like getting B.B. King to sit up on stage with you.”) Humor was also key, as it was for so many of the band’s compatriots; crediting the album-ending patch of tape hiss and amp-unplugging to “One Minute of Silence” (an homage to his and Yoko Ono’s “Two Minutes Silence”) is one of the album’s more obvious jokes.
Skin Yard’s Jack Endino, whose list of ’80s production credits could double as an early greatest-hits list for Sub Pop, remixed Ultramega OK for this reissue; Thayil’s liner notes go into diplomatic depth about why the band was ultimately unhappy with the SST-released version of the album. Endino’s tweaks don’t render the album spit-shined, thank God, but they do accentuate certain instrumental details more clearly—the clashing guitars on the loop-de-loop slacker portrait “He Didn’t,” the snap of Matt Cameron’s drums on the paranoiac “Head Injury.” (The most notable difference between the two versions is the absence of then-labelmates Sonic Youth’s “Death Valley ’69,” a sample of which served as a radio-static-swathed transition between the sludge of “Smokestack Lightning” and the anxiety of “Nazi Driver.”)
Endino’s liner notes delve into the details of crafting the new mix—sourcing the effects unit that made “665” and “667” so immediate and freaky, fixing a missing snare hit on “Flower.” Endino also recorded the early-stage versions of a few Ultramega OK tracks that round out this reissue; they add to the story by showing how much more precise the band got in the year or so after they recorded the Screaming Life EP, with the two versions of the single-chord grind “Incessant Mace” showing how that song’s brimming dread was the result of a fair amount of experimentation.
Revisiting Ultramega OK, it’s obvious in retrospect that Soundgarden were going to clamber to an exalted position in rock. They managed to balance their mad-scientist tendencies with an innate savvy about how to craft a rock song—even when they were six minutes long and based around one chord. The album captures the band on the eve of being swept into the major-label system, and it predicts how they would wring rock hits out of unexpected building blocks.


Teyana Taylor regains control of her art across a long and complex album, one that deftly recontextualizes classic R&B and better represents the fierce persona she has honed in public.

The Album

Among the many injustices Black women must endure in the U.S. is this cruel fact: We are up to four times more likely to die in childbirth than white mothers. In New York City, Teyana Taylor’s hometown, the disparity is even more staggering. People like Beyoncé and Serena Williams have shared their own experiences with maternal health, driving some coverage into the news cycle and confirming that not even fame and seven-star healthcare can vanquish medical racism. Though Taylor doesn’t call it out directly, this context skulks around the first minute of The Album, whose intro repurposes leaked audio of the 911 call that chronicled the bathroom-floor delivery of her firstborn daughter Junie in 2015. “I’m holding my daughter in my hands,” mewls husband Iman Shumpert, before scrambling to tie off the umbilical cord.
Junie, now 5, is the next voice to appear, softening the tension of her arrival into the world with a merry “turn it up!” She croons alongside her mother and Rick Ross on “Come Back to Me,” joining a club of celebrity children earning major-label royalty statements. The song is followed by another family affair; “Wake Up Love” features Shumpert, a 2016 NBA champion and part-time rapper, doing a gentle André 3000 impression. Last week, a cherubic video for the single doubled as an announcement that the couple is expecting their second child.
Since becoming a mother and foregrounding her family, Taylor has found new momentum. When her slick, sexy turn as a “protective lioness” in Kanye West’s 2016 video for “Fade” introduced her to new audiences, she seized on the curiosity about her postpartum physique to create a dance-fitness business. (Taylor was careful in interviews to push back against scrutiny of women’s bodies after pregnancy.) She has also opened a nail salon named after Junie, starred in a family reality show alongside Shumpert, and launched The Aunties, a familial production company that has directed videos for Schoolboy Q and Lil Duval.
The Album, Taylor’s third album, better represents the fierce persona she has honed in public. It is something of a corrective to 2018’s K.T.S.E., the project that concluded Kanye’s messy Wyoming spring. Taylor shined over some of her label boss’ most compelling production in years, but the men of G.O.O.D. Music fumbled her rollout and released a version she hadn’t approved herself. It recalled her early music experiences as a teen signed to Pharrell’s Star Trak label, when she was denied the autonomy she craved. This time, recording largely while quarantined at home during the pandemic, Taylor snatches her control back. “When people hear the album, they will understand what my frustration was with K.T.S.E. Trying to put a lot of emotion within seven songs is tough. To have a full album, you get to literally express yourself and every single part of you,” she said in an interview with NPR.
At 23 songs, The Album is several times longer than K.T.S.E and infinitely more complex. Taylor splits it across five sections—in addition to the family-themed first bit, there are mini-chapters that explore desire, strength, drama, and joy. This, Taylor exudes, is the project she has always intended to make. In the absence of Kanye (he only has two credits here, both left over from earlier sessions), she opts for beats from Cardiak, Ayo N Keyz, and NOVA Wav—prolific, but not quite transgressive producers whose contemporary R&B sounds ground Taylor’s tremendous vocal ability. Her speaking voice, deep and raspy, is the source, flowing into a broad range that includes a robust upper register.
The album’s best moments come when she’s at her most playful and inventive: coaxing Quavo into singing on “Let’s Build,” turning Erykah Badu’s “Next Lifetime” into a self-assured kiss-off on “Lowkey,” trading accents with Afropop star Davido on ”Killa.” It sags in the fourth section, where Taylor perhaps overcompensates for the brevity of K.T.S.E. with one too many ballads. Still, for an album that lives mostly in the slow- and mid-tempo, it frisks and frolics. Taylor has a unique talent for drawing discovery and rapture out of sexual tropes, actualizing R&B at its best.
On one song, the DJ Camper-produced “1800-One-Night,” she breathily experiments with foreplay-as-jingle. It has the smoky, neon glare of a late-night TV ad, but the single-minded focus of a long-awaited encounter: “This time I’ll let you do things with me that we wanted to/This time is your time to shine, yeah,” Taylor sings, emphasizing the mutual consent and shared desires that “we” signifies. Instead of drums, a meaty bassline and trapezing synths intertwine below Taylor, forming a trampoline that send her vocals flying.
Taylor remains fascinated with updating classic R&B, summoning an impressive tribe of elders—Badu, Lauryn Hill, Missy Elliott—for intergenerational power. The Album drips with references to recognizable hits from the ’90s and ’00s: She interpolates, references, or samples the sticky romance of Guy, the cheeky sass of Blaque, and the neo-soul warmth of Musiq Soulchild, among a handful of others. But even for nostalgia bait, The Album is extremely effective, subtly recontextualizing recognizable melodies into the present rather than relying on their familiarity for comfort. The strategy also does cynical double duty, pointing directly to the “’90s-inspired” makeup collection Taylor recently launched with MAC; it’s the sort of product tie-in that a marketing manager could only dream of. But it’s not all business. The abundance of successfully cleared features and references reads like a sly rejoinder to the sample clearance issue that blunted K.T.S.E.’s release; where her former label once failed, she doubled down. The allusion to a musical legacy does the important work of contextualizing Taylor within the genre as a masterful, almost-alternative soul singer, lest anyone else try to do it for her.


Growing up in the shadow of Mt. Erie, the lone peak stretching above Phil Elvrum's hometown of Fidalgo Island ...

Mount Eerie

Growing up in the shadow of Mt. Erie, the lone peak stretching above Phil Elvrum's hometown of Fidalgo Island, Washington, it was probably easy to imagine it as the highest point in the world, the place where Earth met sky. Mt. Erie is a mere 1,448 ft. at its peak, barely a foothill to Everest, and yet to a child, its summit is stupefying. But in the end, the weight of years pierces the exaggerated perception of youth; there's often a cruel disparity between the remnants of distorted childhood imagery and the onset of adulthood. I don't know what, if anything, a young Elvrum might have imagined in Erie's wilderness, but I'm guessing those memories cast a long shadow.
After his three prior Microphones releases turned out, quite subconsciously, to be about Air, Water, and Fire-- respectively and chronologically-- Mount Eerie is, in Elvrum's words, an album "more consciously about mountains and earth, though it turned out to be more about space." Its nominal peak is naturally at its heart, but only as a caricature plucked from the mind of an over-imaginative young poet, twisted and ominously stretching upward as a bridge to the heavens. Above and below, the album's drama is unveiled as a five-act play in words and music, profound and surreal, made all the more so with its awesome, childlike simplicity. It's a grim myth of revelation, death, and rebirth, but written in crayon, ensuring with its bright colors that all will work out in the end.
Each track serves as a piece in Mount Eerie's continuous, linear story, and many of Elvrum's friends assume roles as the primary cast of characters: Kyle Field (of Little Wings) is Death; Karl Blau represents the birds that pick apart Elvrum's body, and K founder Calvin Johnson gives voice to The Universe itself. Mirah Zeitlyn, Khaela Maricich, Adam Forkner, and Anna Oxygen also make appearances. It's ambitious to say the least, but the contributors are up to the task, executing these whimsically bizarre roles with remarkable sincerity. Music is too often described as "cinematic," but Mount Eerie evokes that exact quality; it's almost possible to envision the sets-- a handcrafted, celestial night sky, a sparse, faux-knoll for Eerie's grassy zenith-- and though crude, they're careful and cared for. The stark sincerity of the performance lends it all a gorgeous, unrefined artistry.
The story begins with "The Sun", where the influence of classical form on this album is immediately apparent; beyond the traditional five-act arc, the music is allegorical. Like Verdi attempting to summon spring with a violin, Elvrum tackles things that are much, much larger than a simple tom, snare, or human voice. "The Sun" opens with the heart-like pulse that concluded The Glow, Pt. 2, gradually and subtly mutating to a more complex rhythm. Soon, a wash of drums fades across the channels, evoking either the rising and setting of our star, or the revolution of Earth. It builds to climax before Elvrum, in touching a capella, relates the story of his birth, whereupon he sights Death on a black ship and flees for the peak of Mt. Eerie. At 17 minutes, the track finally supernovas with a deafening drone and crash of cymbals, before the story advances.
As he scales the mountainside to a delicate acoustic strum, Elvrum "reminisces about a girl gracefully juggling [him as] a planet," and somewhere, distantly, she thinks of him. But as he climbs, day is fading: creepy tympani patterns call forth our timeless fear of night, and a Greek chorus gives voice to these feelings of isolation and worry. It's the voice of the cosmos, staring down at Phil, alone on the mountain peak. The hazy-sweet hum of the night sky is at once reassuring, beautiful, and disturbing, but it all gives way as he glimpses his Death approaching, and resigns himself to his fate: "Soon a big black cloud will come/ Soon a big black cloud will come/ And press you to the ground/ The air will leave your chest/ And you'll fade from where you're found."
The clarity of his apprehension is breathtaking, voiced by those who've shaped the story up to the moment before Death arrives with its primal, percussive bloodlust. Phil dies, and carrion birds leave the peak "empty and windy again." After the cawing, and the hiss of wind has subsided, a second mountain reveals itself, stretching further up into "The Universe"; what once seemed infinite and unknowable to mortal perception-- as abstract as a flat plane of light and darkness-- now deepens into a vast, definite expanse. "But Universe, I see your face/ Looks just like mine/ And we are open wide," Phil sings into space, which echoes his words back to him with a ghostly chorus. A titanic bass drum bellows in the distant reaches, and after his life and death, Phil finds his resting place, at home in the arms of the Universe.
I gave away the ending, but this epic is no mystery; the portents are clear from the beginning, and the listener's job is to take it all in. Excepting the heart-wrenching sight of Death in its title track, Mount Eerie never quite achieves the transcendent, lo-fi glory of The Glow, Pt. 2, but it's no less incredible a spectacle. This is a massive artistic statement from The Microphones, and though it may be cryptic-- even overwhelming at times-- it remains warm and open, thanks to the stunning intimacy that has consistently been the group's hallmark. As the truth and meaning of the universe become manifest, Mount Eerie comforts, illustrating that comprehension isn't as important as acceptance.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a true R&B classic from 1996, the spacious and grooving debut from Maxwell.

Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite

In the late summer of 1996, Harlem was a loopy place to live—a mix of everyday strivers, storefront church-folk, street preachers, and bugged-out crackheads, buttressed by sneaker shops, streetwear emporiums (like Dr. Jays), soul-food joints, and no-nonsense African hair-braiding centers. Strolling down Lenox Avenue on a Sunday afternoon, I’d tuned my Walkman radio to DJ Hal Jackson’s legendary Sunday Morning Classics broadcast on WBLS: a slow-burn funk groove with an extended intro, hula-hooping bass, creamy electric keys, and mellifluous vocalizing stopped me dead in my tracks. “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder),” the second single from Maxwell’s debut Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, sounded more like the feel-good black cookout R&B associated with ’70s acts like Frankie Beverly & Maze than the machine-programmed, sample-heavy hip-hop and hip-hop soul dominating airwaves at the time. I can distinctly remember that moment I heard Maxwell’s exquisite, subdued soul for the first time as if it beamed in from another time and place; I was lifted right off the Harlem pavement, ascending into the blue and beyond.
More than two decades after its April 1996 release, Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite—one of that decade’s constitutive R&B albums alongside Meshell Ndegeocello’s 1993 Plantation Lullabies, D’Angelo’s 1995 Brown Sugar, and Erykah Badu’s 1997 Baduizm—remains a decidedly urbane New York City record. Born Gerald Maxwell Rivera and mostly raised by his mother in Brooklyn’s gritty East New York neighborhood, Maxwell started out crafting demos on a janky Casio keyboard when he was 17. Over the next few years, he bopped in and out of NYC recording studios, formulating his sound. Maxwell cut his live chops and developed a solid reputation, crooning at nightclub venues like Nell’s in downtown Manhattan. With melodious hooks to spare, Urban Hang Suite captures the sparkling intimacy and free-flowing conviviality that characterized New York’s R&B open mic nights in the 1990s to a greater degree than almost any other album of its time.
Maxwell looked like a model. He sported a outtasight, blow-out afro and retro-bohemian fashion that evoked the Afrocentric Fort Greene coffee bars, elegant brownstones, and sandalwood-smoky poetry lounges of mid-’90s Brooklyn. While gigging, writing, and recording songs, he picked up spare change pulling shifts as a waiter at Manhattan’s Coffee Shop, a popular and chic Brazilian-themed joint in Union Square. It was there Maxwell met guitarist Hod David, who would go on to co-write “Dancewitme” and play on a number of other Urban Hang Suite tracks. Driven by talent and hustle, Maxwell landed a record deal with Columbia Records when he was 21; he remains a quintessentially New York musician.
Though it illuminates the sound of mid-’90s New York R&B lounges, Urban Hang Suite is an even more ambitious project—an 11-song concept album that’s a carnal and spiritual exploration of the mystifying terrain of heterosexual romance. It traces the entire arc of a relationship over the course of 58 minutes, from meeting to macking to break-up to reunion to marriage proposal to consummation. All this relationship drama between a single man and a single woman supposedly takes place in an unusually compressed period of time. For an album that sounds so decompressed, so languorous and so tempo-deliberate (the BPMs never exceed 100), Urban Hang Suite may be, at an even more meta-level, a profound commentary on the politics of place, space and time.
The story arc gets going with the seductive foreplay of “Welcome”, depicting a chance encounter between Maxwell and a woman, followed by the finger-snappin’ come-on “Sumthin’ Sumthin’” and the spiritually blissed-out “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder).” Heat rises as the duo moves to the bedroom: there’s hard-driving funk jam “Dancewitme” and torrid sex storm “…Til the Cops Come Knockin’.” The guitar-led ballad “Whenever Wherever Whatever”—sounding like David Gates of Bread, Sade, and Antônio Carlos Jobim got together and had a baby—suggests a dramatic mood shift.
Disconsolate and sullen break-up joint “Lonely’s the Only Company (I&II)” comes up next. But the warmly optimistic “Reunion” suggests things are looking up, and by the time we get to “Suitelady (The Proposal Jam),” Maxwell has pledged his life eternally to his lady. Two dusky smooth jazzy instrumentals, opener “The Urban Theme” and closer “The Suite Theme,” bookend the album. The dramatic album sequencing turns Urban Hang Suite into soul music as hushed erotic breathing, rhythmic like warm blood coursing through the veins, the sensual choreography of two better halves moving toward a musical vision of holy union.
Urban Hang Suite also marked the debut of Maxwell’s tenor on a recording. His vocalizing—Brooklyn Baptist church-inspired but Quiet Storm smooth—remains a timbral wonder. On falsetto-driven torch tunes like “Lonely’s the Only Company (I&II),” his luscious voice wafts out of the speakers, floating on whispery utterances and feline coos that can cause shudders like the unexpected stroke of a hand down the spine. Maxwell’s secret weapon is a slightly-serrated chest belt, which means he knows how to drive a song home and cut straight to the bone, like on the post-chorus closer of “…Til the Cops Come Knockin’.” Maxwell’s larynx, luxurious and intoxicating like streetcorner incense, remains one of 1990s R&B’s great gifts to pop.
Urban Hang Suite’s starry-eyed romantic story is supposedly based on a real-life experience. Maxwell even dedicates the liner notes to his “musze,” confessing, “I could never have done this without you.” But Maxwell never initially made public any other details about his “musze” (whom he reportedly met while working at Coffee Shop); in fact, he kept matters so under wraps that, at the time of the album’s release, gossip floated the songs were actually about his relationship with a man. “Music is my life,” he’d tell journalist Cheo Coker, “but as a profession, I don't want it to interfere with the daily routine of being a human being. Hopefully, people will respect that.” He might have been right: Maxwell’s insistence on privacy added to the album’s alluring mystique—who needs details when the musical sexiness is so off the charts?
“Chill” conveniently describes Urban Hang Suite’s atmospherics, as well as its central thematic concern. Long before Tinder-era millennials hijacked the word “chill” as a euphemism for “hook up,” the album staked out ground as makeout music that was also very much about the complex interpersonal politics of chilling, aka hooking up. In its tale of a fleeting lustful encounter that turns into a lifetime romantic opportunity, the album infiltrates the same territory as other fling-turned-serious-relationship projects like Richard Linklater’s Sunrise film trilogy (the first of which, Before Sunrise, kicked off in 1995; the entire series, prefiguring his later Boyhood, is itself a meta-commentary on compressed time) and I’d like to imagine that it maybe even carved out ground for works like Andrew Haigh’s 2011 interior and touching film Weekend.
Under the cryptic pseudonym MUSZE, Maxwell produced much of Urban Hang Suite himself and in collaboration with co-producers Peter Mokran and Stuart Matthewman. He wisely recruited Marvin Gaye’s I Want You producer Leon Ware to co-write confectionary “Sumthin’ Sumthin’” and Motown journeyman Wah Wah Watson, Gaye’s Let’s Get It On collaborator, to deliver trademark rhythmic guitar strumming. Because of its relatively restricted budget, Maxwell and crew painstakingly pre-produced, pre-planned, and mapped out large parts of the album at Maxwell’s home set-up and at other NYC recording venues before professionally tracking the material in pricier venues. Spread out over a battery of studios including Electric Lady Studios, RPM, Sorcerer, and Chung King, tracking for Urban Hang Suite began in earnest in 1994 and lasted until March 1995.
During the recording process, live musicians replayed MPC samples, early drum loops, and other demo sounds. In addition to multi-instrumentalist Maxwell and Matthewman, Urban Hang Suite’s other accomplished session players include Scritti Politti and Meshell Ndegeocello collaborator David Gamson, and Groove Collective keyboardist Itaal Shur (who co-wrote “Ascension (Don’t Ever Wonder”). The album’s precise, slick, and clean sound is a testament to the professionalism and organization with which the recording sessions were reportedly conducted. Given that self-contained polymaths in R&B and hip-hop—including Babyface, R. Kelly, Fugees, D’Angelo, and the Tony Rich Project—were increasingly becoming the norm in late 1996, Maxwell’s Columbia A&R rep Mitchell Cohen granted him a relatively large amount of creative freedom. In turn, Maxwell emerged, even from the onset of his career, as an auteur, seemingly in total control of the direction of his sound and style.
The long-stroke idealization of sex as intimate connection ran counter to romance-challenged, freaky-sex tunes storming the charts around the same time, like R. Kelly’s 1995 “You Remind Me of Something” and Adina Howard’s “Freak Like Me.” While far too many hip-hop and R&B artists were busy relegating women to the status of video honeys, Maxwell promoted his debut album praising the opposite sex and, according to at least one journalist, telling interviewers he believed God was a woman. What’s more, Maxwell’s cosmological orientation was squarely rooted in R&B, not in hip-hop, which distinguished him from more ruffneck peers like D’Angelo, Ginuwine, and Mark Morrison. Maxwell was selling a bohemian throwback version of gentleman soul at a moment marked by intense commercial pressure for black male R&B artists to keep it real and pledge allegiance to the street.
While D’Angelo constructed 1995’s Brown Sugar out of low-end sonics and throwback jazz, Maxwell had admiration for the Black British artists of the ’80s and early ’90s like Sade and Omar, given that they seemed to exert more artistic control than their American counterparts. In pursuit of Sade’s autonomy as well as her atmospheric jazz-inflected sound, he recruited her collaborator Stuart Matthewman as co-writer and co-producer, as well as other members of Sade’s Sweetback band to play on the album. Mixer Mike Pela, who’d also worked with Sade, helped deliver the album’s spacious mix. More than any other artist of his generation, Maxwell made an explicit connection to Sade’s legacy in the crafting of his musical identity (it would be years before Drake and others did the same).
Maxwell himself was a product of a certain version of transatlantic blackness: he was born to a Haitian mother and a Puerto Rican father who died in a plane crash when he was three. In 1998, Maxwell, seemingly positioning himself as a hybrid of Eddy Grant and Bryan Ferry, referred to his own mellow smooth sound as “Caribbean Ambient Soul.” On Urban Hang Suite, Maxwell’s island roots might show up in the album’s sinewy bass grooves, the long instrumental rhythmic stretches, and the vaguely Latin/calypso horn arrangements. But his Caribbean roots have everything to do with his desire to overcome sandbox limitations: “As a West Indian, Puerto-Rican,” he said in an interview at the time, “I know that a lot of people in my clique are tired of being represented by one or two types of music…There's more to the urban lifestyle than that.”
The album title alone is a deft double entendre: On one hand, it evokes “suite” as in a collection of songs, and on the other, it invents “hang suite” as a hip euphemism for the celebrity hotel suite / metropolitan black bachelor pad. Film scholar Steve Cohan, writing about cinematic representations of the bachelor pad in 1950s pop culture, argues that the post-war bachelor represented a kind of “arrested development” in his inability to settle down, even as he captured an exciting new breed of masculine sophistication and sexual intrigue, a playboy alternative to compulsory married life. Rock Hudson and Doris Day’s 1959 film Pillow Talk, with its depiction of a modern bachelor pad full of nifty consumer-era technologies and gadgets designed to seduce and/or ensnare women, epitomized that dichotomy. In keeping with Hollywood studios’ compulsory hetero-romantic code, every playboy’s bachelor pad had to be transformed into—or left behind for—a heterocentric home for two.
Urban Hang Suite, crafting its own neo-soul version of pillow talk, might be the most salient and self-aware musing on the politics of the black bachelor pad/hook up spot ever. “…Til the Cops Come Knockin’”—the only song from Maxwell’s early demos that made it to the album—follows up on H-Town’s 1993 “Knockin’ Da Boots,” offering up a vision of sex so seismic it threatens to surrender private intimacy for public disturbance. “I’m gonna take you in the room, suga, lock you up in love for days,” Maxwell promises. Even more so than contemporaries like D’Angelo or Eric Benét, Maxwell has spent his career fascinated by domestic spaces like the bachelor pad and celebrity hotel room, by the black indoors, by the interpersonal politics of the boudoir. Urban Hang Suite’s videos confirm the singer’s domestic pre-occupations: Eric Johnson’s “…Til the Cops Come Knockin’” unfolds in the hotel suite/bedroom, and in Sophie Muller’s “Whenever Wherever Whatever,” a solipsistic Maxwell wanders around an apartment room doing mundane chores like brushing his teeth.
The album isn’t merely about bedroom carnality; it aspired to the status of a spiritual, existential “Black Love” album. If you’ve ever thumbed through the pages of Essence, read works by writers Maulana Karenga or Lerone Bennett Jr., or even spent 10 minutes at any corner in the ‘hood  selling black-themed books, you know about black love: the idea that intra-racial kinship between members of the opposite sex can offer relief, if not therapeutic recovery, from oppressive racism. Black love emerges as a balm that offers members of the community the chance to become healed and unbroken from systemic trauma.
Besides the torrid black-on-black macking that is “….Til the Cops Come Knockin’,” “Sumthin’ Sumthin’” soars on Afrocentric lyrics like “Honey Dew Sugar Chocolate Dumplin,” going so far as to give praise to an “ebony” sista shimmering with a “cocoa kind of flow.” Even the streetcorner slang “sumthin’ sumthin’” and the album’s titular hijacking of the word “urban” (the music business’ lazy and enduring ’90s shorthand to refer to anything black or street-centric) suggests a vision of blackness tied to notions of slick upscale living. There’s no such thing as a rural hang suite; Maxwell only ever envisioned black love as a nuevo asceticism for contemporary urbane lifestyles.
Here was the soulfully sensitive, new age black man, relishing in the carnal opportunities afforded by the bachelor pad, but ultimately in search of long-term stability and monogamy. “I feel that if romance can be re-introduced in this age,” Maxwell told a reporter in 1996, “it might save a lot of people from running around.” He’d go on to say, in a separate interview: “`Respect, commitment, monogamy...it's my trip.” He wanted to hang with women, not on women.
Given the ubiquity of ghetto-centric hip-hop and R&B in 1996, Columbia wasn’t entirely confident they could successfully market Maxwell’s throwback, boho style to a desirable young black demo, nor were they initially sure that they could effectively cross him over to an international audience. Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite debuted at No. 38 on the Top R&B / Hip-Hop Albums chart, and I can recall my surprise, at the time, that Tower Records slashed the price of the cassette format to $7.99 (most new release cassettes at the time cost more than $10). But strategic price promotion, in tandem with persistent plugging and programming on urban radio, heavy rotation of Maxwell’s videos on BET, VH1 and MTV, and a robust touring schedule (even though he was initially booed on stage while opening for Groove Theory and Fugees) afforded the fledgling album sleeper success.
Just two years after its release, the album had already gone platinum, and it captured a 1996 Grammy nomination for Best R&B Album. Though D’Angelo got out of the gate first in 1995, proving to the world that that alternative retro-R&B could catch on with mainstream audiences, the slow-burn success of Urban Hang Suite further confirmed non-single format R&B’s coming of age. It is unlikely to ever garner the critical respect of D’Angelo’s Voodoo (released in 2000 but recorded in the 1990s) if only because it never aspired to the textural engineering and scientific headphone details that have since made Voodoo’s intimate, experimental approach to R&B matter greatly to rock connoisseurs.
For an artist whose debut was so thematically focused on compressed time—the concept of the hook-up that evolves into a lifetime connection—Maxwell has been delivering new albums ever since at a turtle’s pace. He has always been about the soufflé, not the Big Mac—in his world, artistic releases take longer, but when they arrive, they nourish us with long-lasting, good taste. Maybe he’s traded in the bushy afro for a short crop and his boho Brooklyn threads for better-tailored suits, but Maxwell has never chased trends, and he’s never lowered his bar to play dress-up as a disposable factory-produced artist. Cool and classic, Maxwell has remained everywhere and barely there in the culture, simultaneously indispensable and inaccessible.
I got the opportunity to interview Maxwell in 2016; he mentioned that even though he hasn’t yet had children of his own, he half-jokingly claims all the children he’s likely to have helped bring into the world because of the album’s status as transcendent baby-making music. Maybe that’s the best reason to cherish the legacy of Urban Hang Suite: by crooning his way in between our sheets, Maxwell’s musical DNA—his uniquely chilled-out, über-romantic, black love soul sound—has embedded itself into the very fabric of contemporary pop, R&B and beyond.


The Atlanta rapper finally steps out of Young Thug’s shadow and showcases his own style and versatility.

Long Live Mexico

Every week, Lil Keed logs onto Instagram and spends countless hours giving fans glimpses of him recording and playing unreleased music. Fans with Young Thug avatars flood the comments with fire and snake emojis, then subsequently rip the clip and pass the snippet around social media. Since Keed emerged with his promising but ultimately undercooked 2018 mixtape Keed Talk to ’Em, the public’s relationship with the 21-year-old has been mainly through snippets. It’s a release strategy that helps rappers maintain relevance year-round and for some, like the leaked snippets of Playboi Carti, it is often the only way we experience their music. In recent months, Lil Keed has been essentially creating his debut album Long Live Mexico in real time on Instagram, building on melodies and deliveries indebted, as always, to Young Thug.
Until late last year, Lil Keed was little more than a serviceable, occasionally special, replacement Thug. Understandable, given that Keed grew up idolizing and mimicking Thug in the same Cleveland Avenue apartments in which both were raised. But on Long Live Mexico, Keed uses elements of Thug’s versatile set of flows as a foundation to build off of, specifically the high-pitched, mush-mouthed delivery. One of the album’s best tracks, “Million Dollar Mansion,” finds both rappers side by side over an airy Pi’erre Bourne beat that belongs in a dystopian sci-fi flick. Thug’s flow is squeaky-high and eccentric, while Keed’s is at a similar pitch but more subtle, eliminating Thug‘s quirkiness. Those differences don’t make Keed sound better or worse in comparison to his mentor; instead, he finally emerges as his own entity.
Despite the daunting 20-track length, Lil Keed’s delivery is hardly ever tiring. His ability to easily change pace makes it appear like he’s trading bars with a guest, like on the first verse of “Real Hood Baby” as he raps about the designer brands in his wardrobe. “Just a Dream” adds a whispery touch to his melody, despite his controversial anti-hug stance: “Yeah, I go savage mode, ho, fuck your hugs.” His hypnotic vocals make the album breeze by, though a portion of the credit belongs to his ear for selecting dreamy production. On “Snake,” the PyrexTurnMeUp and CuBeatz guitar instrumental is soothing, while Keed sounds like he recorded his verse after inhaling helium. But the album’s best beat is by JetsonMade, who pairs a mellow flute with his signature distorted bass on “Oh My God.” It’s also one of Keed’s strongest lyrical outings: “She like them Percocet things because of me/Got drugs heal pain for me/Told her drugs heal pain, but don’t OD,” he says, taking an introspective look at his own habits.
The perennial downfall of an hour-long album is the filler, the ones that could be left off. The “Make U Proud” instrumental sounds like a demo version of Omarion’s “Post to Be” and “Proud of Me” is similarly outdated, which makes sense given it’s a leftover 2015 Young Thug leaked snippet that Keed repackaged. But the one miraculous part about “Proud of Me”—and Long Live Mexico—is that now when Keed digs through Thug’s past for inspiration, he manages to sound like a new artist all his own.