The Neptunes of the discopunk underground have finally released their answer to Clones: the DFA's Compilation #1, for the ...

Various Artists: DFA Records Presents: Compilation #1

DFA Records Presents: Compilation #1

The Neptunes of the discopunk underground have finally released their answer to Clones: the DFA's Compilation #1, for the first time, compiles all the Brooklyn-based production duo's hype-building twelve-inches, from The Juan MacLean's straightforward electro singles "By the Time I Get To Venus" and "You Can't Have It Both Ways", to James Murphy's famously tongue-in-cheek "Losing My Edge" and decidedly less danceable "Give It Up", to The Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers"-- the track that more or less made the DFA the internationally renown playboys they are today-- and the mellow vocal dawn of its B-side, "Silent Morning", to Black Dice's danceperimental rockers "Cone Toaster" and "Endless Happiness".
With the exception of the Black Dice track, all of these songs were released last year, and by now, it's safe to say that most indie music fanatics have heard, owned on vinyl, or downloaded sketchy Ogg-Vorbis wax rips of them. This disc means iPodders can now download cleaner versions for their commutes, but after months and months of "Losing My Edge"-- witty and brilliant though it may be-- most listeners have already moved onto newer DFA releases like the new LCD Soundsystem single, "Yeah", which is currently widely available despite its vinyl-only status. At the moment, Compilation #1 to a large degree functions more as an archival folio for early DFA output; in itself, it's a fantastic comp, but perhaps it came a little too late. In time, the songs themselves will undoubtedly regain much of their initial potency, but for now, one can't help but be at least somewhat bored with the exact same song and dance.
Maybe that's one of the keys their success, though: Despite having released virtually just singles, the DFA have managed to become the most formidable production team on the indie scene. Their sole employment of vinyl-- an ever scarcer medium for a self-selecting crowd of hardcore music lovers-- created one of the most effective buzz mechanisms I can remember. Perhaps their only recent musical supply-vs-demand equals are the robber barons of Jamaican dub soundsystems. Any schmuck who's read Walter Benjamin can tell you that there's a relationship between a piece of art's exclusivity and the vitality of its aura; it's nothing new here, but the DFA is exceptionally textbook.
Moreover, this is a commendable act of self-preservation. Look at what's happened with The Neptunes: their immediately recognizable bump/grind formula made them the most relevant producers in hip-hop; but now, through oversaturation, too many commissions and not enough time to develop new musical ideas, their popularity has begun to wane. The DFA could be to all of rock what The Neptunes are to hip-hop-- there are more than a few tales of major pop stars knocking at their door-- but Goldsworthy and Murphy opt instead to issue mix albums for obscure French clothing outlets and electronic music magazines. For all intents and purposes, their exclusivity maintains their credibility, and refuses any possible allegations that they are a one-trick dancepunk pony. The compilation is indeed called Compilation #1, and implies not only more material in the future as is obvious, but a commitment to growth and diversity in their production as well. To hell with the kids; the DFA ain't losing its edge at all.


New band from former Ultimate Painting songwriter Jack Cooper blends introspective songwriting with churning experimentation in earnest search of a different plane of existence.

How to Live

British songwriter Jack Cooper’s former group Ultimate Painting paid tribute to the southern Colorado countercultural artists’ community Drop City, which formed in 1965 and was abandoned to biker gangs by the early 1970s. When Ultimate Painting imploded last year, and Cooper’s new group Modern Nature debuted with an 11-minute piece of cosmic minimalism, one might’ve expected them to dive further into the swirl. But the band’s full-length debut, How To Live, anchored by Cooper and BEAK>’s Will Young, offers a more grounded escape route, blurring ideas of city and country in search of transcendence.
If Ultimate Painting’s soft-edged psych-pop teased at the sounds of the ’60s, Modern Nature evokes the psychedelic era’s ambitions through open-ended song structures. With a mix of quietly pulsing beats, hushed guitars, and whispered vocals, the songs recast Cooper’s music as coming from someplace above the fray. There are too many pulsing Neu!-influenced drums, wild saxophone solos (by Jeff Tobias of New York jazz-noise outfit Sunwatchers), and organ drones for an algorithm to tag the forward-pushing How to Live as “folk.” But the music shares some of the ache and inscrutability of Fairport Convention and Incredible String Band. Everything—from the swirling cello of “Criminals” to the pulsing motorik throbs of “Footsteps” and “Seance”—is held together by Cooper’s quiet voice and his sweet yearning for a different plane.
The loud/quiet/loud eclecticism might feel forced if it weren’t in service of such a coherent mood, a series of scenes viewed through the same rain-spotted train window. Cooper sounds most at home when his voice seems like it’s about to dissolve into the vining parts and the woody paths behind him. “Turbulence” is the album’s most fragile moment, a lilting melody not unlike John Lennon’s “Julia,” Cooper’s voice rising over a guitar pattern and organ. At their best, Modern Nature offer glimpses into the same enlightened place they accessed on their debut EP, where introspective folk songwriting and churning classical minimalism are one and the same.
On dystopian laments like “Criminals,” How To Live might be heard as a break-up album, though with society as a whole instead of any individual partner. A handwritten liner-note zine accompanying the album underscores how the band’s name does double duty, calling on both the countryside and our current blighted sense of humanity. Modern Nature’s songs might be heard as reminders that true escape isn’t about splitting town, ghosting everybody you know, and throwing your phone in the ocean. How To Live uncovers an internal landscape just as wide open, much easier to get to, and even harder to escape from.

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This Compton chameleon borrows flows from anyone and everyone but gets away with it thanks to his sturdy songwriting.

Roddy Ricch: Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial

Please Excuse Me For Being Antisocial

If every hot rapper of the last five years was tossed into a cauldron and stirred together until they were only mildly recognizable, the end product would probably be Roddy Ricch. The 21-year-old Compton-raised crooner can’t decide if he wants to make moody and raw piano-driven street tales like his breakout single “Die Young,” motivational high school basketball warm-up anthems like “Every Season,” or polished and sunny Young Thug-inspired pop songs like his Mustard-produced “Ballin’.” Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial is not the slogan of an Etsy boutique that prints the phrase on Gildan hoodies and caps with adjustable strapbacks, but the title of his debut. The name has nothing to do with his music; it’s just an attempt to manufacture an identity or maybe inspire a few Instagram captions.
But say this for Roddy: No matter the trend he’s chasing, he usually wrings a solid song from it. Please Excuse Me for Being Antisocial begins in the most cliche way possible—with a “Dreams and Nightmares”-style intro. As soon as the first somber piano key hits and Roddy starts wailing and reflecting on his upbringing, we know exactly where the track is headed, but he hits the marks well, including the intense beat switch, the motivational flex bars, the details about how he overcame the obstacles and secured the bag. It works. So does“Big Stepper,” when he, of course, meditates on the past over an acoustic guitar-sampling instrumental. His storytelling is rote, but gets over on the warmth of the melody.
There’s not a flow Roddy Ricch isn’t comfortable borrowing. On “Start Wit Me,” Roddy fills in for Lil Baby as Gunna’s partner in listing fashion brands, a low stakes song that just fills Gunna’s weekly appearance on a major label rap album quota—there’s no way Gunna is keeping track of his features at this point. “High Fashion,” his second collaboration of the year with Mustard, is a Young Thug rip so egregious that it probably could have been generated by an AI, but he sings his heart out, and  the beat that puts a bright West Coast spin on ’90s R&B.
The few instances where Roddy breaks free from imitation provide standouts. On “War Baby,” Roddy seamlessly harmonizes with a gospel choir  like the chameleon he is. And on “The Box,” over a hard-hitting beat that sounds like a teapot is boiling in the background, he finds a new delivery and pitch nearly every 10 seconds. The track is the best example of Roddy’s versatility, which has been both a blessing and a curse. Most rappers would sell their soul for his ability to shape his melody to latch onto any relevant sound, but everything here feels so safe. Roddy’s too good a songwriter to settle for being so vapid.


A brief EP from the Sonic Youth guitarist features ruminative, unadorned acoustic performances that convey a sense of anxiety and perseverance.

In Virus Times EP

Lee Ranaldo has always shared similarities with George Harrison. Both guitarists contributed only a handful of songs per album and became the underdog favorite of a beloved band while people split their votes between the two more visible leads. Of the three Sonic Youth songwriters, Ranaldo was always the most indebted to classic rock, and his solo records thus far have looked backwards to his Beatles and Grateful Dead favorites. His brief new EP, In Virus Times, is a departure from this trend. It is a completely unadorned and ruminative listen whose title tells you all you need to know about the context.
This music was born as the pandemic gripped Ranaldo’s native New York, and it was recorded in his home while many studios were still closed. Ranaldo’s voice has always had a scholarly but friendly quality, and his beat poetry-inspired writing has often been a welcome contrast to the slacker melodies of his bandmates. But unlike much of his solo material, there are no vocals on this EP. Instead, alternating between finger-picked and droned chords on his acoustic guitar, Ranaldo manages to convey the anxiety from the ongoing pandemic and the 2020 presidential elections.
In Virus Times blends inspiration from two vastly different artists. The first is Joni Mitchell, whose unique style was a source of inspiration for Sonic Youth’s open tunings. Ranaldo conjures Mitchell’s method of letting an unanswered chord hang in the air; in fact, it’s the very first sound we hear on the EP. The second major influence is Jim O’Rourke, the producer-turned-official member of Sonic Youth. Ranaldo specifically draws from the sound of O’Rourke’s 1997 album Bad Timing, which combined John Fahey-indebted solo guitar and minimalism with a dash of dissonance. These influences are evident, but the playing throughout is unmistakably Ranaldo’s.
In Virus Times is not composed of individual songs; instead, it is broken into four parts that flow into one another but have their own designated starts and endings. The first track offers a complete journey, ending with a hopeful coda wherein Ranaldo whistles a happy little tune. He uses harmonics extensively for the next two parts, pinging high notes on the second composition and then hammering them on the third as if bittered and angry. The fourth and final part of the EP is by far the darkest, with no respite or resolution. The chords loom uneasily throughout, because that’s how Ranaldo must have felt at the time. In moments like these, In Virus Times is best understood as a snapshot of a miserable year, and one person trying to work through it.

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On her full-length debut, the provocative producer also raps, smartly using her voice as a tool in her quest to dislodge gender binaries and power hierarchies.

Death Becomes Her

Cape Town producer Angel-Ho uses music, as she once put it, as a “medium to articulate the recurring violence on non-white bodies.” That violence is both the method and symptom of centuries of colonialism, an observation reflected in the philosophy of NON Worldwide, the transcontinental label she co-founded with Richmond’s Chino Amobi and London’s Nkisi. “It was interesting for me to have this dialogue between [these countries], considering our colonial histories,” Angel-Ho told The Fader. “And creating music that’s in resistance.” NON has created a borderless network of African artists and those of the diaspora, all set on countering oppressive colonial forces.
Angel-Ho explored these themes instrumentally on her 2015 debut EP, Ascension, a set of visceral, post-industrial beats. On her debut album, Death Becomes Her, she adds neck-snapping rap to the production, using her voice as a tool in her quest to dislodge gender binaries and power hierarchies. A black trans woman, she is Hyperdub’s first emerging pop star, a shape-shifting artist who is just as comfortable toying with experimental sounds as she is invoking Missy Elliott. On Death Becomes Her, Angel-Ho beautifully transmutes any past anguish into a colorful network of global sonics, a bold statement of trans femininity, and a rallying cry for resistance. At once, Angel-Ho shatters binaries and encompasses dualities.
The apocalyptic drums and crashing samples of “Muse to You” recall the most brutal, jagged beats from electronic envelope-pushers Rabit and Arca, both Angel-Ho collaborators. But these tracks are clearly meant for dancing, their industrial samples fluttering over pulsating grooves. And when Angel-Ho spits searing bars over these beats, as on “Pose,” she moves toward queer rappers Le1f and Mykki Blanco, both responsible for breaking barriers in their respective hip-hop scenes.
Angel-Ho also pulls the past into this challenging moment, referencing and reflecting turn-of-the-millenium R&B. She mirrors the cadence of Aaliyah’s “Try Again” during “Live” and interpolates Lumidee’s international hit “Never Leave You” (which itself incorporates the Diwali Riddim) for “Pose.” All these disparate sources stem from the African diaspora, collectively encompassing a broader experience shared by queer people of color around the world. Flipping meanings of familiar songs with her electrifying delivery, Angel-Ho bends old pop tropes, too. She repurposes the classic hook of the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” for “Live,” a pointed decision considering that trans people are persecuted at staggering rates around the globe. Angel-Ho screeches the lyrics with urgency, the contrast with the Gibbs’ cool white falsettos high. Elsewhere, she triumphantly yells “Notorious!,” referencing the Duran Duran song that Biggie famously sampled. It becomes a queenly declaration.
Angel-Ho finds power from putting herself on a pedestal, constantly comparing herself to iconic women. She’s “symphonically Björk” or dancing around like Britney. Marilyn Monroe wishes she were her, she boasts. But underneath the desire to be revered and idolized is the need to be respected. During “Muse to You,” over a pounding house beat, Angel-Ho regally announces, “No longer beaten and abused/You are the girl who paid her dues/You are the muse.” It echoes a sentiment shared by many trans women who can only avoid being targeted for violence when they publicly pass as a cis woman, fueling their aspirations to embody a female fantasy.
This idea is the basis of “Like a Girl,” whose sing-song chorus reiterates the simple sentiment of infinite pop songs before it: “I can be your girl/In this lonely world.” Sung by Angel-Ho, though, it becomes a radical statement in the face of the those who don’t believe that trans womanhood deserves to be regarded as womanhood. If she wants to be “your girl,” she can.


After expanding his palette on both the superb Woman King EP and 2005's full-band collaboration with Calexico, In the Reins, Sam Beam finally completes his gradual journey from lo-fi home recordings to a full-band setup. The gorgeous results find Beam and producer Brian Deck deftly venturing into dub, blues, and West African music, among other styles.

The Shepherd's Dog

Sam Beam's first two full-lengths under the name Iron & Wine were bare-bones, hushed affairs full of rich imagery, whispery falsettos, rhythmic finger-picking, and not much else. In the time since, Beam has gradually moved in other directions, expanding his palette on both the excellent Woman King EP-- which featured more percussion and fleshed-out arrangements-- and 2005's full-band collaboration with Calexico, In the Reins.
Beam has also toured with a group of musicians for some time now, so it makes sense that his new album would complete his gradual journey away from lo-fi home recordings. The album even teases you at its start-- it begins with a snatch of scratchy black-and-white guitar and percussion before jumping to Technicolor when the bass and drums dive in. The rest of opener "Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car" is surprising as well, at once sleek and full of clattering Americana signifiers like steel guitar, acoustic slide guitar, and tack piano.
Despite these new sounds, the core of Iron & Wine remains Beam's voice, guitar, and songwriting, which is still more suggestive than concrete, and is built mostly around strophic verse/verse/verse forms rather than leaning on choruses. Beam and producer Brian Deck deftly build on that foundation, venturing into dub, blues, and West African music (among other styles), creating a series of interstitial passages that cushion the transitions between songs. Beam also experiments with his voice, layering himself heavily on several songs.
Perhaps the most stunning arrangement is the West African juju casting of "House by the Sea", which builds from an abstract soundscape into a snaky groove led by a frenetic bass and a strangely employed baritone sax. Guitars dance atop the rhythm as Beam harmonizes with his sister Sarah on the chorus-- one of the few on the album. The album's foray into dub and reggae, "Wolves (Song of the Shepherd's Dog)", could have been a disaster if it hadn't been done so subtly, with an ear toward the musical elements that define reggae rather than the sonic character that defines it-- it's not a pastiche or a genre exercise in the least.
For an Iron & Wine album, The Shepherd's Dog is so varied that it takes several listens for everything to fully sink in, but the individual details-- such as the dramatic steel guitar at the end of "Love Song of the Buzzard" or the cascade of banjo in the middle of "Innocent Bones"-- are nearly as rewarding as the overall sound of the album. The sequencing is also well-considered, setting contrasting songs against each other and ending on the stunning and starkly emotional "Flightless Bird, American Mouth". The vocal harmony as it rises into the chorus is shiver-inducing, and the song finally delivers the sense of resolution that much of the album purposely holds back.
The Shepherd's Dog is Iron & Wine's most diverse and progressive album yet, a deft transition to a very different sound that explores new territory while preserving the best aspects of Beam's earlier recordings. It's the kind of record that just keeps pulling you back with its dreamlike flow and attention to detail: The first time I listened to it, I played it straight though again when it ended, and I can't think of a higher compliment than that.


The semi-anonymous singer has changed her mind about retirement, but almost nothing else. Her first album since 2013 sets emotional miniatures to widescreen Italo disco and dinner-for-one city pop.

Sad Cities

In the mid-2000s, a trio of Swedish stars caught the world’s attention. There was Robyn, whose ability to synthesize complicated emotions into pop made her an idol. There was the Knife, whose penchant for shredding genre boundaries made them underground heroes. And then there was Sally Shapiro, who confusingly was a woman called Sally Shapiro and also a duo with Johan Agebjörn, and who paired music originating in glamour hedonism with a singer who sounded scared of her own shadow, or more interested in it than any spotlight. Sally Shapiro arrived with a pledge of allegiance: “I’ll Be By Your Side,” a heavy pour of expertly chilled Italo disco that made her a cult favorite.
Shapiro went on to release a trio of fine albums: 2006’s Disco Romance, a stellar distillation of what Robyn might sound like if she actually preferred dancing on her own; 2009’s My Guilty Pleasure, in which both the guilt and the pleasure were slap-bass; and 2013’s Somewhere Else, which found Shapiro and a passel of other producers lost in slight, summery idylls. Attendant remix albums brought Shapiro—whose voice expresses a yearning for intense emotions without the chops to convey them, and in that way makes jewels of its flaws—to other parties, with varying results. And then, without much fanfare, it all came to an end with 2016’s glistening single “If You Ever Want to Change Your Mind.”
Nearly six years later, Shapiro has changed her mind about retirement, but almost nothing else. Sad Cities sounds exactly as you might imagine: emotional miniatures set to widescreen Italo disco, dinner-for-one city pop, hooks that don’t haunt so much as settle in like a cat in your lap. It’s self-assured in its awkward swooning, forthright in its faith in four-on-the-floor. In its own way—in its belief that its own way will triumph—Sad Cities is its own kind of triumph.
Opener “Forget About You” arrives with a sweet prelude, a few minutes of sparkling electric piano tones and sugary strings before the song reveals itself. “I miss you so/I cry when I’m on my own,” she sings. “Please don’t forget/Forget about me, my friend.” This is a bravura way to return. It’s also twee as fuck. Too distant for TikTok, too instant for a dissertation, “Forget About You” bins anything not earnest and girlish. If it’s a bit prim, well, prim is a vibe. “Believe in Me,” the second track confirms. The piano house grandeur of “Million Ways” is equally epic. “It was worth the waiting, all those cold and lonely nights,” Shapiro sighs, poised as ever, over a track that’s a quick KiNK remix away from becoming a summer anthem. As it is, it’s pure satisfaction: “Now you’re compensated,” she says, “with a billion shining lights.”
Throughout, assurance is as common as ambivalence, which makes Sad Cities feel less like a melancholy wallow and more like an adult acceptance of the truth of adolescent emotions. “It’s such a sad city,” she announces in the title track, a pep in her step; if “it’s a paradise for everyone but me,” maybe that’s because she’s actually happy. “Dulcinea” dares to sound hopeful, as heartfelt as prime ABBA with none of the heartbreak. “Life is just the way you think it will be,” she resolves. For Sally Shapiro, at home in her head, thinking is how things happen.
Well-versed in the ecstasy of dance music, Shapiro also knows the value of getting out of your head. “Tell Me How” is a warm pool of ambient house streaked with squiggles like bright-colored bath gel; “Christmas Escape” eschews the spirited jingle of Mariah and the arch glamour of Saint Etienne and instead revels in the seasonal psychedelia of Coil. Closer “Fading Away” is a black-light fever dream, mind-altering enough for a Euphoria feature but wise enough in the ways of Hi-NRG to know that a self can be reborn only after the ego death of a crowded dancefloor. Sad Cities is the same song Sally’s always been singing, entirely self-reverential, a guidebook for sticking to your (disco laser) guns. Its stubborn self-reliance sounds like hard-won confidence.


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 the liminal sex-pop of George Michael’s 1987 debut album.

Faith

In 1986, George Michael wandered deep into himself. He realized that, at some point in the five years he had recorded and toured with his bandmate Andrew Ridgeley in Wham!, he had completely lost track of who he was. With Wham!, Michael had achieved his childhood dream of becoming unreasonably famous; he glided across stages, and fans’ eyes waded in his direction. His enormous blonde hair looked like a work of relief sculpture, and his voice pulsed with brightness, like a lightbulb about to burst in its socket. He was one of the world’s biggest pop stars by the time his retro-pop duo fell apart; he was also 23, only just beginning to figure out who he was and what kind of music he wanted to make.
Michael felt isolated, anxious over what to do next—the future seemed elusive and unstable, as precarious as a song’s placement on the pop charts. He was sinking into what he would later characterize as an eight-month long-depression, wondering if he even wanted to return to music. In the spring of ’86, two months before the final Wham! Show at London’s Wembley Stadium, Michael released a solo single called “A Different Corner.” Accompanied by a stark, black-and-white video, it was a sad and strange song that seemed to disappear as it happened, the brief snowflakes of synth and Michael’s tenor evaporating into air. It’s as gorgeous as it is uncertain of itself, quietly stealing back every emotion it offers, leaving behind a crumpled blankness. “The problem was just that I had developed a character for the outside world that wasn’t me,” he said. “So I made the decision to uncreate the person I had created and become more real.”
A little over a year later, he drew a thick, Princely scribble in empty space. It would become the first single for his solo debut, 1987’s Faith, a song called “I Want Your Sex.” A near-total photonegative of “A Different Corner”’s lustless vacuum, built out of the boiling dark of the clubs Michael loved to dance in, “I Want Your Sex” employed a sudden fluency with sexuality to define his post-boy band maturity. He fastidiously programmed every detail of the song—even the mummified sub-rhythms that kick like pistons underneath it, which were produced by an error in a synthesizer pattern from a different track. Michael was so charmed by the accidental thicket of snares and kicks that he built “I Want Your Sex” directly on top of it. “I’ve danced to records like this for years and I buy records like this all the time but I’ve never really had the courage to make one,” he said.
The song was immediately banned by the BBC and strategically suppressed by radio, but it eventually blossomed as a single on MTV once Michael added a safe sex disclaimer to the beginning of the video. The clip focused almost inflexibly on Michael’s face, shadowed by an unfocused haze of stubble, singing in a frayed sub-frequency of his former boyish tenor, all interchanged with shots of body parts: legs walking in a garter belt, water cascading over feet and torsos, Michael writing “EXPLORE MONOGAMY” in lipstick on his then-girlfriend Kathy Jeung’s thigh and back.
In interviews about “I Want Your Sex” and its video, Michael always redirected the subject toward monogamy. He didn’t want the song to be misconstrued as an untamed celebration of casual sex in the midst of the AIDS epidemic; at the time, monogamy seemed to Michael not only a thoughtful response to AIDS but dimensionally sexy in and of itself. “I wanted to write a song which sounded dirty but which was applicable to someone that I really cared about,” he told Interview in 1988. “I mean, it is the perfect situation to really love someone to death and to want to rip their clothes off at the same time, isn’t it?” But it’s a song so sunken into its desire for someone that Michael’s cautious exploration of safe sex gets lost among the chorus’ seductive synth wobbles and the liquid blend of lust and angst with which he sings the word “sex.”
Michael himself seemed unable to glimpse “I Want Your Sex” beyond its controversy, already looking to exchange it for a different song, a different impression, a different corner of himself to exhibit to the world. In the video for his next single, Faith’s title track, a jukebox needle skates away from “Sex” and gently lowers onto the surface of a new disc. The chorus of an old Wham! single, “Freedom,” bruises slowly into the silence, played on a Yamaha DX7 synth tuned to its “cathedral organ” setting.
The melody is funereal instead of flourescent, as if Michael were entombing his teen-pop past in the bellows of a vast pipe organ. It’s among the first instances of Michael commenting on his music as he made it, embedding his songs with footnotes and reprised themes that connected with his early career. Michael became fascinated with continuity, with how things could change when they were revisited, sometimes revising his songs whole-cloth (“Freedom ’90”) or lightly modernizing them for a new decade (“I’m Your Man ’96”), making his form of pop music a rich and intertextual network of references and repeating motifs.
Out of the deep mournful glow of the organ, emerges… an acoustic guitar? Strumming the Bo Diddley beat? It sounds almost frail playing against a rhythmic skeleton of snaps, handclaps, and whispers across the snare rim. The camera drifts over Michael’s new image: leather jacket shrugging loosely from his shoulders, his gaze buried somewhere beneath impenetrable sunglasses, pretending to strum a sunburst archtop guitar.
In 1987, popular rock music was trying fill arenas with enormous waves of echo; “Faith”’s chords sounded crisp as the blue jeans pasted to Michael’s ass in the video. He was employing rock as a texture, as a signifier of history and depth, absorbing the guitar rhythms of the ’50s and ’60s just as he embedded the drums of the Motown songs from his youth in tracks like Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” It made Michael’s work as serious as it was playful, taking established songforms and converting them into modern pop.
The rest of Faith embodies this approach, a montage of different colors and tempos from pop’s unabridged past—the fluttering rockabilly of the title track, the deluxe synthetic bath of “Father Figure,” and the hardboiled synth funk of “I Want Your Sex” all occur on the same side of an album, like alternate histories talking to each other through time, all before “One More Try” wafts in like wind through an empty cathedral.
During the sessions for Faith, Michael and engineer Chris Porter occasionally recorded songs measure by measure, with Michael singing fragments of verses against a rudimentary LinnDrum pattern. Some of Michael’s songs didn’t even have physical demos before they were captured in the studio; they’d reel out fitfully from his head as they were recorded. The highlights of the darker, more club-lit corners of the album’s second side, “Hard Day” and “Monkey,” were constructed in this way, built on a program of minimal rhythmic cross-hatchings from Michael’s drum machine, his voice dancing between spotlights of synth bass.
Even through the dense programming, Michael’s voice remains at the center of the record. It always shapeshifts beyond its form, whether whispering through “Father Figure”’s garden of smoke or exchanging enthusiastic choruses with the choir that eventually materializes from it. His voice’s most powerful showcase, the peak of Michael’s career, is in the mournful procession of “One More Try.” The song technically lacks a chorus; in its place is an evolving verse whose vocal melody sounds unhinged from any of its chord changes, swimming upwards through an arctic fog. His voice starts to rapidly escalate through notes; when he sings “I don’t want to learn to/Hold you, touch you…” he hits a note of such trembling uncertainty that it bends like curved glass.
“One More Try” is lyrically tentative, a gospel-pop song that’s faintly baffled by the idea of its own salvation. It sits in the perspective of someone too wounded to open themselves up to another person, trapped in an in-between state. Faith itself seems stranded between identities in its reckless skating through genres, from rock to synth pop to the skipping pulse of clubs. It’s an album that’s divided down the center between faith and funk, an album on which the sex song is actually about monogamy—an album that reveals more of itself the more one pays attention to the drift of its details.
“I feel this is not a pop album,” Michael told SPIN in 1987. He thought Faith was more musically sophisticated, that it resembled the black pop and dance records he was listening to at the time. On “Hand to Mouth,” he displays an evolving social consciousness that seems inherited directly from Stevie Wonder and Marvin Gaye, characters and their cyclical struggles spilling through a cityscape of wavering synths. He performed black pop forms so well, with such verisimilitude, that each song migrated flexibly between radio formats—Faith was the first album by a white solo artist to top Billboard’s R&B Chart and four of its six singles floated up the Hot 100, each hitting No. 1, one after the other.
Michael planned a nine-month world tour after the record’s release, with rigorously choreographed shows. While on the road, he contracted laryngitis in Australia and over the course of the next few tour dates, his voice eroded further. A cyst began to form on his vocal cords. He needed throat surgery. He felt as though he were having a nervous breakdown. “I genuinely thought, ‘This is what happens. This is when you lose it’,” he told The Big Issue in 1996. He was growing more uncomfortable with having his picture taken; even on the cover of Faith, he’s folding himself up into the inner shadows of his leather jacket. He later said he had spent nearly a year wearing sunglasses, as if he had succumbed to the image he had invented for the album. “I think I even went to bed in them,” he said. “I just couldn’t make eye contact with strangers.”
Having produced an album more successful than anything he did in Wham!, Michael found himself stranded again, depressed, uncertain of the future. He was burdened again by the inflexibility of his image, trapped in an opaque layer of himself that was not really himself. He was 25 years old, unsure of what he should do next. Three years later, he briefly disappeared from his own music videos, leaving no trace of himself, receded to pure symbols: an exploded jukebox, and a leather jacket on fire.


Coldplay have risen to massive popularity on a potent mixture of nice-guy charm, serviceable songwriting, and edgelessness. With this, their third album, they dig in their heels and deliver more of the same.

X&Y

"Don't Panic", the opening track of Coldplay's first album, drew its title from the famous motto of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novels. Two albums later, it seems they chose the wrong Adams catchphrase; most of their recorded output is better exemplified by the Guide's description of Earth: "Mostly harmless." In their seven years together, Coldplay have risen to monumental levels of popularity on a potent mixture of nice-guy charm, serviceable songwriting, and general inoffensiveness. Unfortunately, these aren't the kind of traits that often lead to interesting music. Not that the band hasn't taken the occasional stabs at creativity and innovation; it's just that those attempts have always been carefully measured, or even nervously self-conscious.
Coldplay have never seemed intent on world domination, but as their early singles caught on, journalists came waving raves. Then, with nearly 5 million copies of Parachutes sold worldwide and their popularity on the upswing, the band's sophomore album, A Rush of Blood to the Head, found the band unsure of how to advance. Luckily for them, their decision to virtually recreate Parachutes on a larger budget paid off commercially: The album got them tagged as "the next U2," a ridiculously off-base coronation that ignores the fact that U2 recorded "I Will Follow", "New Year's Day", "Bad", and The Joshua Tree, among others, before they wandered off into the MOR wilderness.
Coldplay, meanwhile, started in the middle of the road and haven't strayed since. Granted, they've produced a handful of good songs-- "Don't Panic", "Shiver", and "The Scientist" are all fine achievements, while "Clocks" remains a great piano part in search of an equally great melody-- but their albums have yet to justify the critical hyperbole, and their third full-length, X&Y;, isn't going to be the one to lock that down. Though dressed to the nines in big guitars and faultless musicianship, X&Y; is unable to lay claim to even a single song equal to any of the high points from their first two albums, and the band's obvious desire to be all things to all people doesn't help: They long to be huge and expansive, in The Unforgettable Fire mode ("A Message"), tear-jerking AOR balladeers ("Fix You"), and hip, Kraftwerk-referencing aesthetes ("Talk"), but at heart, they're really built for easy listening, which makes their rockers feel cursory and their ballads simpering.
X&Y; is sequenced fast-song/slow-song through almost its entire running order, which means those of you uninterested in wading through doe-eyed love songs based on lazy rhyming couplets and trite resolutions have already lost half a disc's worth of music. You'll "go backwards and then/ You'll go forwards again." You'll "get lost and then get found." You'll notice that the first verse of "Swallowed in the Sea" ("You cut me down a tree/ And brought it back to me/ And that's what made me see/ Where I was coming from") is somehow meaningless, yet also cliched. Had Coldplay accompanied these lyrics with remotely interesting or memorable music, this could be somewhat overlooked; sadly, "Swallowed in the Sea" is one of several aggressively banal ballads that sink this album into a sort of neo-Carpenters abyss.
The more uptempo tracks here tend to be light years better than their leaden counterparts, if only because the louder accompaniment manages to drown out more of Chris Martin's lyrics and bring the focus to his pleasant if unspectacular vocals. Guitarist John Buckland does his part to bring life to the proceedings: He's an encyclopedia of Will Sergeant and Johnny Marr-isms, and even if most of his window dressings are little more than a distillation of tricks learned from better bands, he does a nice job of providing the illusion of a grand gesture for songs like "Square One" and "White Shadows". Martin's vocals, meanwhile, rarely command attention, content to melt into the string synthesizer and guitar reverb as if he hopes he's not imposing on you. Listening back to an earlier track like "Shiver" proves he's capable of more.
Lending to the uninspired nature is lead single "Speed of Sound"'s uncanny resemblance to "Clocks". Certainly, it rarely hurts to stick with what works, but this is not just a near-exact replica of its successful predecessor; it's also a less memorable song riding a piano hook that has so deeply infiltrated the pop-culture landscape that I've become numb to it. In fairness, the track's vocal melody outperforms the one from "Clocks" by a hair, but without a strong hook, the song fails in the one category it needs to succeed in: replay value. It's symptomatic of the rest of the album, and indeed, much of the band's catalog to date: Like Coldplay's two previous albums, only more so, X&Y; is bland but never offensive, listenable but not memorable. It may be pointless to hate them, but with this album, they've almost certainly become the easiest band on the planet to be completely indifferent to.


On their debut LP, this young band from Denmark mixes post-punk clang and goth atmosphere, serving it up with a massive dose of addictive energy.

New Brigade

Here's what we know about Iceage: They are four friends, ages 18 and 19, from Denmark. Their debut LP, New Brigade, has actually been out in their home country since January, with a much smaller, limited run coming to the United States earlier this year. These are the essentials. Over the past few months, as New Brigade has been passed back and forth online with increasing enthusiasm, there has been a remarkable amount of chatter, some of it focused on their age, some of it on their music, some of it on faraway mystique.
Not long ago, a Danish daily deemed them "teenage punks full of anger and anxiety," a line galvanized by bloody post-show photos of smiling audience members published on their blog. Questions like "Are they the saviors of punk music?" have been posed, as though punk music needs saving. They just played their first show in the U.S. this past weekend, in Brooklyn. It sold out. The New York Times and The New Yorker have weighed in. They're set to return to Roskilde this summer. As you may have already realized, there's a swirl of information and interest surrounding this band right now, at the heart of which is their music.
And it turns out that New Brigade is a refreshing and extraordinary debut. These four have located a punk-rock sweet spot: mixing the black atmosphere of goth, the wild-limbed whoosh of hardcore, and the clangor of post-punk. It's a feat made all the more impressive by one very important intangible: energy. While they still have room to grow as songwriters, the energy in every atom of New Brigade's charred, sub-25-minute rush is seductive. From the moment "White Rune" starts to quake until those last tangles of guitar conk out on closer "You're Blessed", there's little escape from this record's grip. Even the foreboding mash and march of "Intro", its wordless, 46-second pulse of a prelude, is enough to make you feel like you need to fling yourself in the direction of someone else.
That said, despite the typically direct, blunt-object nature of "punk," much of New Brigade is also impressionistic. Elias Rønnenfelt's words (sung in English rather than Danish) are largely unintelligible, leaving a lot up to the heart and imagination. Rønnenfelt finds an effective way of sharing just enough room for listeners to fill in the blanks. As if mimicking the motions of his own guitar, he scythes his way through each song, usually to anthemic heights. That you can hear in the gasp of "Collapse" and starry-eyed bounce of "Remember". Even more so in aforementioned climax "You're Blessed", a song that sounds like a more irritable cousin to the poppy, post-hardcore emo that came of age here in the 1990s.
The album's grit has nothing to do with fidelity. While Iceage employ decidedly abrasive no-wave textures, New Brigade was recorded in a proper studio. The result is a recording whose snare hits and basslines announce themselves with real fury. And though a lot of this music might seem from a distance like a dozen ideas thrown together in the space of a single song, what they've done here is deceptively precise and exists on a deeply personal, unfiltered plane. All these lurches and groans and crashes and bangs and stutters and roars come together to form one consistently rousing, emotionally immediate whole. From them to you.


With a new rhythm section and tighter performances, the noisy New York band’s latest EP moves deliberately from chaos to catharsis.

Hologram

A Place to Bury Strangers have proven their longevity, if not exactly their consistency. Since the trio’s self-titled debut punctured eardrums in 2007, Oliver Ackermann and co. have continued to play mopey, loud, intense music that splits the difference between post-punk and shoegaze. Unlike their first album, though, the band’s later outings were often loose and underwritten, clomping on long past their welcome. The founder of Death by Audio, a beloved line of custom guitar pedals plus a shuttered Williamsburg venue, Ackermann may seem more interested in special effects than songwriting. Yet on the brief, satisfying Hologram EP, the Brooklyn-based artist transcends his gearhead tendencies, gracefully navigating fuzz and feedback loops as well as melodies and hooks.
And in spite of its modest 22-minute length, Hologram never feels like an afterthought. The EP has a distinct shape, with the abrasiveness of the first two songs cooling into the tight melodies of the final three. “End of the Night” and “I Might Have” aren’t exactly unprecedented for A Place to Bury Strangers, though the production feels punchier, the songs structured beneath the layers of reverb and multi-tracked percussion. The influences are the same—a low-in-the-mix drum fill sounds like the opening seconds of “Only Shallow,” and a number of moments evoke the languid aggression of the Jesus and Mary Chain. But just when his 1990s shoegazing threatens to get old, Ackermann winkingly acknowledges his predecessors: “Hello 1994,” he drones on “I Might Have,” after wistfully describing a desire to “erase the years.”
In the past, A Place to Bury Strangers’ rotating cast of a rhythm section too often relied on thumping bass guitar eighth notes and busy, clamorous drums, creating an atmosphere of wallowing menace. The band’s new drummer Sandra Fedowitz and her husband, bassist John Fedowitz—the latter a key collaborator from Ackermann’s turn-of-the-millenium project Skywave—reach for uplift instead. Sandra’s terse beat on “Playing the Part” lets Ackermann’s riff shine, while the interplay between John’s swimming bassline and a gated snare enables the splintered sweetness of closer “I Need You.” His band’s timekeeping honed, Ackermann’s hooks can breathe: The EP moves deliberately from chaos to catharsis, with tighter performances than we’ve heard from A Place to Bury Strangers in a long time.
Hologram’s meticulous sound drives home how much finesse goes into making noisy music sound distinctive. When A Place to Bury Strangers first came on the scene, bloggers and critics dubbed them “the loudest band in New York,” a limited form of praise for their varied talents. Listen to their debut today, and you might not be shocked by its volume, though the jagged beauty of the record’s songcraft and production endures. Thoughtfully constructed and paced, Hologram could have a similarly long shelf life. A guitar pedal, after all, is like an airplane—anyone can get on board, but only those with a particular set of skills and technical savvy can make it fly. Because they treat every part of the writing and recording process with care, A Place to Bury Strangers lift us off the ground and into a cracked sky.

Buy: Rough Trade
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You’ve heard sophisti-Kylie, disco Kylie, and Kraftwerk Kylie. On her 14th album, she tries on a new costume: Ready or not, here comes country Kylie.

Golden

In her 30-plus years of stardom, we’ve met many Kylie Minogues. First came vintage-pop Kylie (“The Loco-Motion”), followed by sophisti-Kylie (“Shocked”), dance Kylie (“Confide in Me”), indie Kylie (Impossible Princess), disco Kylie (“Spinning Around”), and of course Kraftwerk Kylie (“Can’t Get You Out of My Head”). While she’s never attained the imperial reach of her contemporary Madonna, she’s one of very few modern singers whose skill at reinvention merits mention in the same immortal breath. Nor is she done dreaming up new costumes: Minogue recorded much of her 14th studio album, Golden, in Nashville, with collaborators including phase-one Taylor Swift alumni Nathan Chapman and Liz Rose. There’s even space for a banjo on one of the singles, “Stop Me From Falling.” Ready or not, here comes country Kylie.
The idea for this detour apparently came from Kylie’s long-standing A&R. “I’ll try just about anything, so when he said, ‘Think of a country inspiration element,’ I said, ‘Sure!’” she recalled in a recent interview. There’s a certain record-company strategy-meeting logic behind this plan in the era of pop/disco/country hybrids from Man of the Woods to Golden Hour. For both better and worse, though, Kylie’s excursion into Nashville sounds little like either of those contemporary extremes. Instead, she borrows from the sledgehammer-subtle EDM Americana of Avicii’s “Wake Me Up,” where fingerpicked guitars meet thundering bass drums and teeth-rotting synths in the year of our lord 2013.
The music on Golden sounds ill-fitting and even cheap at times, like a deathtrap ride that has been painted bright pink to distract the potential customer. The worst offender in this regard is “One Last Kiss,” which uses what sounds like a Casio country preset rhythm for its basic structure, the cheap plastic claps throttling what is otherwise a decent piece of songwriting. The previous song, “Sincerely Yours,” is similarly lightweight, thanks to flimsy strings and a vocal hook which suggests Kylie wanted to go full “Where Are Ü Now” dolphin flute but couldn’t quite find room in the budget.
Elsewhere, Kylie gives the impression she’s trying too hard. The title track opens with a yodelling vocal line that appears to reference Ennio Morricone’s theme song to The Good, the Bad and The Ugly, in a broad, meaningless nod to American culture that ranks right up there with Europeans who get really into the NFL. Minogue’s vocal delivery sometimes seems to ape a Southern U.S. drawl, notably on the verses of “Stop Me From Falling.” The album’s lyrics, meanwhile, reference burning rubber, rodeos, and rocking—hardly home territory for a London-dwelling Australian entertainer.
The real shame is that when Kylie stays true to the dance-pop sound that has adorned many of her greatest hits, she cooks up some moments of genuine brilliance. “Dancing” has a wonderfully funny one-liner chorus (“When I go out, I wanna go out dancing”) that perfectly sums up the way a great pop song can defy mortality. “Raining Glitter,” meanwhile, combines lilting acoustic guitar, deep house beats, a whooping vocal effect, and a fabulously overblown chorus to create an exuberant cousin to the classic Spiritual Life / Ibadan remix of Beth Orton’s “Central Reservation.”
Unfortunately, these high points are never quite enough to get over the strained lonesome cowboy-isms that dominate Golden. It’s not that pop stars have to be “authentic,” whatever that means. But they do need to make us believe in them, if only for three minutes. Kylie Minogue made us believe in the spurned lover of “Tears on My Pillow” and the obsessive flirt in “Can’t Get You Out of My Head.” But on Golden, she sounds like someone playing at country music, rather than someone who understands it. Her star will doubtlessly endure this awkward release, but let’s hope country Kylie is short-lived.


Josh Homme and co. follow their first post-Nick Oliveri album-- the quality Lullabies to Paralyze-- with a more diverse record, one that tries its best to be everything all at once, often within one track.

Era Vulgaris

It may seem cheap to bring up the departure of Nick Oliveri three years and two albums after he was fired from Queens of the Stone Age, but the more I listen to Era Vulgaris, the more I think his presence is sorely missed. I'm not advocating the guy's return, but the tradeoff between Josh Homme's reserved cool and Olivieri's crazy-go-nuts screaming was one of the group's strengths in their heyday; years later, someone for Homme to play off would still be a welcome addition to the band.
Queens of the Stone Age has been mostly Homme's show ever since, and it's been a mixed bag so far. Lullabies to Paralyze was quality, a chance for QOTSA v2.0 to retrench and carve out their own niche, even if those who were less enamored with the album's glowering charms, saw that niche as a rut-- an example of what Oliveri's loss actually meant to the group. If Era Vulgaris is any indication, the group felt the same way: This album tries its best to be everything all at once (often within one track), and in attempting to cover too much ground, the band loses focus and direction.
It's not so much that the songs themselves are weak, just that many of the choices made in them are. For instance, "Sick, Sick, Sick" would be better off simply sticking with Homme's motor-mouthed singing and riffing; instead, the song bellyflops into a flat chorus where everyone sings like they're scared of their own voices. (Since the Strokes' Julian Casablancas guests on this song, let's blame him. Why not?) Elsewhere, Homme spreads his falsetto all over "Misfit Love", where it'd be more effective in shorter bursts, while the obnoxious bridge on album closer "Run Pig Run" (it pops up twice!) kills any chance it might've had for worthy inclusion on a future edition of Guitar Hero. (Note to Activision: I am totally cool with requisite QOTSA singles "No One Knows" or "3's and 7's" bringing the rock fury and carpal tunnel.)
The most enjoyable moments on Era Vulgaris come when the band treads off the beaten path. One of the album's standout tracks, "Make It Wit Chu", is a straight-forward blues-rock number plucked from the last Desert Sessions disc.  And the album's gentler digressions, like the guitar-weeping "Into the Hollow" and the mournful "Suture Up Your Future", reveal Homme has a surprisingly palatable softer side. "Turning on the Screw" and "I'm Designer" aren't exactly groundbreaking departures from the QOTSA's usual fare, but Homme's lyrical bent adds an interesting wrinkle. No one's going to confuse him with Bob Dylan any time this century, but you could put much worse in your mouth than lines like, "My generation's for sale/ Beats a steady job/ How much have you got?" or, "You can't lose it if you never had it/ Disappear man, do some magic." It's at points like these when Era Vulgaris truly comes to life. Unfortunately for listeners, those moments are few and far between, leaving fans to trudge back to older Queens records for the fix they crave.


On their sixth album, Goldfrapp come as close as they ever have to returning to the sound of 2000's Felt Mountain, the album that originally made them famous. Touching on that record’s folkier side and running with it, Tales of Us is every bit as fragile as the romantic themes it obsesses over.

Tales of Us

Goldfrapp have spent the last decade trying on different outfits, never really letting anything stick long enough to see if it was a good look. It’s a strategy that pays off as often as it turns out distracting: they’ve struck gold (the sensual disco of Supernature), they’ve fallen flat (2008’s snoozeworthy Seventh Tree), and they’ve stumbled admirably (the uneven 80s pastiche of Head First). But on Tales of Us, their sixth album, they return to the sound of the album that originally made them famous, 2000’s fantastically witchy Felt Mountain. Touching on that record’s folkier side and running with it, the new record is a delicate affair every bit as fragile as the romantic themes it obsesses over. And while it’s not a full back-to-2000 affair, some of the duo’s unique imagination is replaced with a traditionalism that feels incongruous with the rest of their career.
Tales of Us, two years in gestation, was recorded in the English countryside, and it sounds like it. You can practically hear the fog rolling through the moonlit hills. The album digs deep into an idealized concept of English folk, full of lilting melodies that could have been taken from ancient songs (or just a Renaissance fair) and production so subtle sometimes it feels like there’s nothing beyond acoustic guitar, some strings, and Alison Goldfrapp’s typically haunting vocals. When that formula works, it’s uncommonly haunting-- second single “Annabel” has an icy mist hanging over it, and Goldfrapp proves more than effective in one of the more arresting moments on the album.
Her voice is more affected than it’s ever been on Tales of Us; she’s dead serious all the time. The sexuality of “Strict Machine” and the sly humour of “Rocket” are gone, and instead she intones with a cold and artificial mannerism, like she’s reading off a book of old plays. That mood isn’t lifted by the lyrics. Every song refers to a different character in some imagined universe, but the inherent melodrama is only exacerbated by the dead-serious delivery; it has all the emotional impact of a soap opera.
Of course, Goldfrapp have always been a band you could enjoy as much for aesthetics as lyrical content. And Tales of Us is certainly pretty on its own terms, though the songs are bare bones and aren’t placid enough to achieve the attractive wintry drift of, say, Grouper. It’s not as if the LP doesn’t have its moments: on “Alvar,” subtle electronics turn the chorus into a gorgeous smear of melody, and on first single “Drew,” her anxious vocals are riveting, especially against the unsettling backdrop of quick, fingerpicked guitar and sweeping strings. These are glimpses of the typical Goldfrapp genius, but now they’re mere flashes rather than tangible entities.
Admittedly, with a few exceptions, it’s hard to find fault with many of these tracks. A few of them, like “Simone”, are simply unmemorable, but each one has its redeeming qualities. In fact, almost any of these songs would sound beautiful on their own, or make a perfect reflective interlude on any of the band’s previous albums. But presented as a whole, Tales of Us is a dreary blur of folky pretense-- from a group that’s been through so many phases, one that lacks this much imagination is almost unforgivable. Diehard fans of Goldfrapp will no doubt find something to love here, but for the rest of us, it’s a thin record that doesn’t do much to prop up its skeletal frame.


You know, we music journalists have to contend with a myriad of internal voices while reviewing. There's the simple ...

Lost Souls

You know, we music journalists have to contend with a myriad of internal voices while reviewing. There's the simple, straightforward, credulous voice of the listener, who takes bands, songs and packages at face value. As a counter check, there's a savvier, hipper voice that considers music a constructed, made-up thing, sold to us by bands and manufacturers through advertising, press buzz and the ever-enticing promise of press photos. And, finally, there's a purely contrarian voice that plays devil's advocate, finding the easy path and countering it at every turn.
This kind of intrapersonal debating occurs with every release, but rages almost uncontrollably in the instance of a talked-up offering. Because in such a case, it becomes so important to keep oneself from being swept up in embarrassing critical groundswell without dismissing a record that might be good just because someone else likes it. Case in point: Doves' * Lost Souls * , an album currently coasting on tons of buzz. Follow us as we take a look at three different approaches to reviewing the record, while revealing the secret tricks of the reviewer's game:
__ * Step One: Snappy, Superficial Introduction * __
__ Straightforward: __ While, in the United States, electronic music is considered a new, arty, futuristic medium, it's been a part of the European palette for years. While Underworld seem spacy and abstract on these shores, they're a legit commercial force for our friends across the sea. What's more, techno's such a known quantity across the Atlantic that it's become strictly pro forma for any self-respecting rock band to incorporate a little 808 thud into their rock and roll mix.
__ Cynical: __ After the "electronica" "boom" rose and fell like Keith Flint's spiky haircut, all the big fancy record companies-- and the attendant faux-raver acts to whom they'd promised the world-- had to find a way to shore up their losses. Thus, the awkward shotgun marriage of rock to drum machines, resulting in efforts ranging from lovely (Radiohead) to dull (Smash Mouth) to bizarre (Rolling Stones produced by the Dust Brothers). All in all, the experiment can be deemed a bust.
__ Contrarian: __ Techno? Techno-rock fusion? Fuck that!
__ * Step Two: Introduce the Band * __
__ Straightforward: __ A good, if somewhat surprising, example of the Euro tech-rock fusion is the debut LP from Doves, * Lost Souls * . Where most of the fusing has gone on in the rock camp as aging amp-powered dinos struggled for relevance, Doves' effort provides a rare example of techno-schooled musicians digging in the crates for inspiration. Having made their first splash as a straight-ahead club act called Sub Sub, this trio of blokes woodshedded for a long time, started playing anachronistic instruments you strummed, plucked and hit, and ended up with a collection of damn-near-normal rock songs. Of course, the tincture of their throbbing house-kid past lurks in the shadows all the same.
__ Cynical: __ The latest group of cred-hungry beat monsters to cross this writer's desk are Doves, a frustratingly non-capitalized or articled threesome from the UK. Their record's got everything written in lowercase, there's a lot of noiry photos of a boxer, and the damn thing is called * Lost Souls * , all of which reeks of art (or, perhaps more aptly, "ahhht"). Scowling in front of a cityscape, clad in flannel, and sporting ridiculous stubblefields on their faces, Doves look like they're running as hard as they can from their bow as Sub Sub. There's a reason the single they released under that moniker never made it stateside, and I'm sure it had everything to do with the description "M People-esque," which appeared in the press kit.
__ Contrarian: __ Hairy, serious-looking songwriter types from England? Fuck that!
__ * Step Three: Flailingly Desperate Attempt to Describe the Record * __
__ Straightforward: __ * Lost Souls * is nothing if not a sprawling, ambitious effort. Padded for U.S. arrival with three bonus tracks, the disc stretches out to more than 72 minutes, and I'll be damned if it isn't a solid, engaging effort throughout. Where the increased running time of a CD is usually more beast than beauty, the breathing room allows Doves to stretch out. Few of these tracks weigh in under the five-minute mark, and most of their durations are given over to jangling acoustic guitars and mid-tempo rhythms that, in places, resemble Mogwai's moments of plaintive contemplation.
Tonally, * Lost Souls * reflects the after-after-midnight hours, as if the boys felt the need to document the hung over and blissed-out aftermath of the dancing-hours frenzy their Sub Sub days offered listeners years ago. That rarest of animals, a singing drummer named Andy Williams, wails discontentedly and virtually wordlessly over swelling and receding musical themes, while atmospheric keyboards and ominous samplework provide texture the barebones acoustic arrangements wouldn't achieve on their own.
__ Cynical: __ The heart of the problem on * Lost Souls * is its overreaching ambition. Naming the first track-- the virtually instrumental "Firesuite"-- after the famous four-song suite from the Beach Boys' * Smile * sessions gives it away instantly. Doves are, in both their tilting and endlessly sculpted sounds, after the same instrumental evocations Brian Wilson made and destroyed at the peak of his compositional powers. In most principle respects, this album is straight, rockist Brit-pop. But the samples and keyboards serve only to dress up fairly conventional songs, as if to conceal their pedestrian nature.
__ Contrarian: __ More Brian Wilson name-checking? Fuck that!
__ * Step Four: Track-by-Track Highlights and Lowlights * __
__ Straightforward: __ * Lost Souls * , despite its reach and ambition, works best in its most conventionally melodic moments. The aptly named "Melody Calls" juxtaposes a typically languid vocal against an uncharacteristically jaunty guitar riff, and the result is a little radio-ready wonder. Similarly, the title cut's deep, throbbing chords work as this melancholy work's catalytic center, distilling the band's mixture of atmosphere and song down to a kind of essence.
Among the more adventurous tracks, "Firesuite" and "Break Me Gently" work best because of their carefully planned development and the skillful use of heavily effected vocals, which flesh out what could have been almost Dave Matthews-sized swaths of dull 'jamming.' But the stately ballad at the end of the album proper, "A House," accentuates the songiness of this effort. These boys are interested in beauty, power, emotion and feeling. Not idle wanking.
__ Cynical: __ Hey! He stole my stuff! Punk.
__ Contrarian: __ Emotion and feeling?! Fuck that!
__ * Step Five: Summation * __
__ Straightforward: __ Despite its excesses, * Lost Souls * offers a novel twist on the electronics-plus-rock-equals-fun-for-trainspotters equation. The tech-rock fusion isn't dead in the water yet.
__ Cynical: __ Okay, fine. Even Brits can do something decent from time to time.
__ Contrarian: __ Fuck England!
Rating

__ Straightforward: __ 7.3
__ Cynical: __ 6.2
__ Contrarian: __ Fuck numbers!


After serving as one of the key writers in G.O.O.D. Music, CyHi’s thoroughly slick debut album finally arrives, with features from Kanye, Pusha T, Schoolboy Q, Travis Scott, and many more.

No Dope on Sundays

When CyHi the Prynce popped up on Kanye West’s “So Appalled” seven years ago, it was the product of some gutsy in-studio self-promotion. Commissioned to write a hook, the gravelly voiced Prynce claims he waited for West to fall asleep before sneak recording a full verse that made its way to the final version. Prynce signed to West’s G.O.O.D. Music label and has since stood out as one of Kanye’s most consistently credited writers.
Despite the steady writing credits and feature appearances, G.O.O.D. Music never provided a bona fide platform for CyHi the solo artist, and so he left the label in 2015 to begin the process of releasing his long-simmering debut album elsewhere. He’s remained in the label’s inner circle as an eager little brother type, always the first to announce and overpromise new Kanye and group developments. On the first track of his debut album, he raps: “Me and ‘Ye feel like Jay and Memphis Bleek to me,” weirdly glossing over (or blissfully unaware) the bleak precedent of the bungled side-kick career he’s referencing. Good for CyHi then that his first album, No Dope on Sundays, has the weight and sheen of a major label rap record. It’s got big name features and a surprisingly well-curated batch of soulful beats. Most importantly, CyHi himself feels like the center of gravity.
No Dope on Sundays begins with a trio of five and six-minute songs that vaguely scaffold the rest of the record as a hustler’s bible pinching CyHi between the church and the streets of Atlanta. Throughout the record he raps about the violence and despair of his home, implicating himself in the drama so that he might sidestep it later. The gospel boom-bap of the long-winded “Amen (Intro)” is a backdrop for CyHi to paint his origin story in borrowed strokes, comparing himself to Leonardo DiCaprio and Johnny Depp characters just a bar apart. The occasional but persistent corniness of CyHi’s punchline lyricism could be deployed as a sort of barometer amongst hip-hop fans. What do you think when he raps a line like “My homies was crippin’ so hard, all they eat is seafood”? Or, “The only time you got the goosebumps was at a book drive”?
For all the groan-inducing puns and double entendres (”Moving weight, I’m a fat guy”), CyHi is a thoroughly slick rapper and storyteller, as capable of a tidy snapshot as he is prone to an overwrought windup. “They’ll trade a cigarette and Mountain Dew for a statement,” he growls succinctly, denouncing snitches on “Trick Me.” He has a rasp that can sound warm and husky or icy and snarling, a versatility he stretches throughout No Dope On Sundays. Those early tracks are barrage attacks of lyricism, whereas moments like “Movin’ Around” and “Trick Me” cast CyHi as a more than serviceable hook singer. Still, he hasn’t quite weeded out a certain stiffness in these crossover attempts and gets noticeably upstaged when 2 Chainz swoops into the stuttery banger and steals the show with a looser and more fun verse. Later, on “Looking for Love,” CyHi sounds entirely in his range belting out an Autotune tinged hook or leaning in during his verse to croon, “I can’t wait to put some purses on you, girl.” Kanye West tags along on “Dat Side” for a wonky banger and the album’s obvious centerpiece moneymaker.
For all the bases it covers, No Dope on Sundays benefits from swift pacing. But there are still moments where CyHi gets bogged down doing too much and too little at the same time, coddling a story you’ve heard before or quipping a one-liner you can predict a mile away. After his verse on the title track, Pusha T thanks CyHi for granting him the quiet of an inconspicuous feature. “I was tryna’ make it as conversational as possible, ‘cause it’s just conversation,” the elder emcee says after clocking a gracefully minimal performance. CyHi doesn’t have that conversational approachability to his raps. He sounds like a showman that puffs out his words with a deliberate, almost suspicious confidence. No Dope on Sundays sounds like the routine he’s been waiting years to finally deliver.


To date, Emma Ruth Rundle’s stabs at crafting a musical identity have been tentative ones. Her previous solo material has been guitar-centric and mostly instrumental, but her new solo album is different. She not only sings, but she does so a lot—and when she does, she soars.

Some Heavy Ocean

To date, Emma Ruth Rundle’s stabs at crafting a musical identity have been tentative ones. As the frontwoman of the L.A.-based projects the Nocturnes and Marriages, her eerie voice has been all but smothered by male accompanists, prog denseness, cyclonic distortion, or her own hushed delivery. The fact that she’s a stunningly supple and versatile guitarist—her skills are a vital component of the post-rock ensemble Red Sparowes—hasn’t given her that much reason to step up her vocal game. Even her previous solo material has been guitar-centric and mostly instrumental. But Rundle’s new solo album, Some Heavy Ocean, is different. She not only sings, she does so a lot—and when she does, she soars.
That’s not to say the album sounds triumphant. Some Heavy Ocean is a black hole of anti-happiness, a heart-shaped growth of dark matter. Veins of inky folk run through “Shadows of My Name” and “Oh Sarah”, songs that encompass the scope of Rundle’s acoustic prowess: On the former, she attacks her strings as if they’re barbed wire that must be breached with her bare hands; on the latter, she fingerpicks with fluid delicacy. As sharp and vivid as her playing is, though, the clouds are always near. Swathes of strings and overdriven twang cast long shadows, and the intermittent drums rattle like bones in a box. Even the two brief, ethereal interludes, “Some Heavy Ocean” and “Your Card the Sun”, seem more like frozen chunks of time than mere placeholders. Far more than anything she’s done prior, the album is a dynamic, breath-snatching statement of intent that’s part lullaby, part night terror.
The biggest leap found on Some Heavy Ocean is Rundle’s voice. On “Shadows of My Name,” her reverb-shrouded vocals dart in and out of the mix, flashing fragments of language rather than distinct lines; in the chorus, she works herself up into nerve-pinching growl that’s recalls Björk at her most unhinged. Throughout the rest of tracks—particularly the mournful yet urgent “Run Forever”—Rundle’s comes across like a student of both Chelsea Wolfe’s frigid intonation and Marissa Nadler’s gloomy coo. As a singer, Rundle now sounds whole, and better yet, she’s gravitated toward a timeless resonance. The post-metal and shoegaze sounds she’s employed before have been left for something broader. When, on “Haunted Houses”, she warns of a distance that must be kept between her and the unnamed target of her simmering wrath, she evokes Stevie Nicks; having another song titled “Oh Sarah” only reinforces that impression, although that track’s candlelit, folk-rock balladry bears just a vague kinship to Fleetwood Mac’s “Sara”.
Rundle’s lyrics, where they can be fully pieced together, are the weakest element of Some Heavy Ocean. There are only so many mentions of ghosts and graveyards that a record can take before it starts to feel cartoonishly goth, even when those motifs are woven into the music with such conviction and subtle shades of mood. That atmosphere works best when it strips away any hint of pale cliché and plunges under the ice; “Living with the Black Dog” is a droning, distorted, shadow-draped leviathan of a song, one in which Rundle breaks away from spooky folk and edges closer toward Earth’s recent forays into chthonic Americana. Not only does it conclude the album on an ominous, ambitious note, it reconciles every medium she’s worked in so far: melody, noise, softness, severity, and a sense of quiet drama and melancholy. Some Heavy Ocean stands as Rundle’s first fully realized release as a singer-songwriter—and while its monochrome scale is narrow, she makes harrowing grays out of it.


Kash Doll’s short, 22-minute album contains a lot of flex, some humility, but feels like a victory lap run before the official race has even started.

Brat Mail

Detroit native Kash Doll’s catalog isn’t that large—Keisha vs. Kash Doll and Trapped in the Dollhouse are her two prior releases—but there’s a regality to her that suggests otherwise. Her persona is a spiritual descendant of Trina, whose ribald capitalism sneers at the sight of lowly Washingtons. Whereas the idea of starting-from-the-bottom is an essential part of Cardi B’s appeal, Kash Doll minimizes that come-up narrative for a worldview that’s a bit more audacious. Her raps explain she’s better than you because it’s simply the way of the universe. The opening seconds of her breakout “2 On” remix finds her comfortable and pampered up in her bedroom, throwing out a light-footed set of lines as if to humor us.
But she isn’t ungrateful: Brat Mail, which arrived on her birthday, is an act of humility. The 22-minute project partly works as a thank you note; the audio of her acceptance speech for the fan-voted Issa Wave award from this year’s the BET Social Awards is included here. Because Kash Doll is also a boss, Brat Mail must work as a flex. The a capella intro finds her proceeding as such, throwing together a barrage of punchlines: “Any bitch think I drop dick/Get higher than Mariah, and she like a five octave.” But it’s also a reprise of her BET Cypher verse, so the self-satisfied chuckle she lets out at the end is a bit alienating.
Brat Mail often feels like a victory lap run before the official race has even started. There’s a self-congratulatory vibe that makes the effort needlessly low stakes, ultimately refracting her natural charisma in ways that sound rote. “Check,” the clear single from these nine tracks, suffers most from this myopic focus. The banger potential is squandered for a hook that’s a very barebones laundry list of tropes to keep...well, in check (her looks, this money, these hoes). To compare, Meek Mill’s song of the same name is even more repetitious, but he delivers it with a violence that emanates urgency. Brat Mail attempts to be Boss Shit, but the feeling of that idea isn’t quite imbued in the songs.
Over a series of glittery, percussive beats, Kash Doll’s queenly personality remains assertive in whatever flow she flips through. On “Dividends,” she closes her first verse with hurried spurts to get an extra half a bar to laugh at our misfortune of not being her. But she’s playful to the point where she’ll throw out misfires that we’re supposed to let slide because Brat Mall is a celebration. The “Now it's the dolly, not Parton” line that opens “Check” is the sort of pun that’s probably been toyed with by at least one Doll rapper. “Coogi sweater, bitch I'm Biggie” from “Rich Talk” is predictable and feels hewed in, like she’s run out of ideas in less than 20 minutes.
The album ends with that clip of her accepting that BET award, humbly thanking the network for the shine while reminding the audience of that Cypher performance. As the closer to an ultimately middling effort, it comes across as a coronation that’s just too soon. Brat Mail doesn’t frustrate because it hints at a talent hitting her ceiling. There’s a sense she’d do more if only she could find a reason to—because she’s the boss.


The New York singer-songwriter shifts from acoustic folk into potent pop-punk that recalls both Hop Along and Titus Andronicus.

Pity Boy

Saying “no” isn’t particularly fun for anyone—especially for New York singer-songwriter Mal Blum. So, in order to practice, they turned it into a song. On the defiant power-pop single “I Don’t Want To,” they practice the art of brazen rejection with a smile: “I don’t want to/So I won’t...at least not now,” they put it plainly. Much of Pity Boy presents a similar tongue-in-cheek catharsis, as Blum laces endearing humor into sorrowful subjects, resulting in the most personal work of their career.
Blum’s early music, such as 2010’s self-released Every Time You Go Somewhere, was mostly acoustic folk, embellished with violin, harmonica, and even toy piano; they’ve now moved into potent pop-punk. If the electric guitar had evolved into a supporting actor by Blum’s last album, 2016’s You Look a Lot Like Me, then it’s the lead on Pity Boy—complete with mixing by Hop Along guitarist Joe Reinhart. The nimble, vigorous riffs here call to mind Titus Andronicus (who Blum will support on tour this fall), ricocheting like rubber balls around “I Don’t Want To” and “Not My Job” with Blum’s vocals surging in countermelody. Fierce solos slice through “Odds” and “Gotta Go,” offering stark contrast to the toned-down strums of slow burners like “Salt Flats” and “Black Coffee.”
If there are any weak points in Pity Boy, they come when Blum’s voice strains, but their lyrics—the album’s centerpiece—mitigate that weakness. Blum’s words often divulge unsettling self-deprecation: “All that I want is for someone to take advantage of me/Because I don’t know any other way,” “I even hate the way I breathe,” “27 is 11/Just on different meds.” “Not My Job” offers a brief moment of aplomb: “If I have to, I’ll kill off my better self/Because it’s not my job to make you well,” they sing, reiterating the final words as if to assure themself, too.
Blum has been openly queer for as long as they’ve been putting out music, but Pity Boy is the most candid they’ve ever been about their sexuality and identity in their music. Here, they poignantly speak on their transgender experience, spelling it out on album opener “Things Still Left to Say”: “You don’t see me when I’m here/I’m like a ghost of myself already/If I could, I would disappear/But I’m still here,” they sing. “See Me” internalizes those sentiments, acting more as a soliloquy: “I don’t belong/Though it helps to play along/Why can’t they see me when I’m right here?” Both songs refer to Blum being non-binary, but the lyrics remain just equivocal enough to spark empathy in anyone who has felt alienated. While platitudes like “I don’t belong” can feel like “Creep” regurgitations, Blum envelops the phrase in a multi-dimensional earnestness, as the repeated use of “I’m here” delivers a steadfast assertion: despite Blum feeling they don’t quite fit in, they have every right to stick around. “You’re direct/One day, I hope that I can be like that,” goes a line in “I Don’t Want To.” That day is much closer than Blum realizes.

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The sophomore album from the brilliant producer turns the tools of footwork into an overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go.

Black Origami

Jlin’s relationship with genre has always been complicated. For as long as she has been recording, the Gary, Ind. producer has been associated with footwork, the hyperactive post-house music spawned alongside the equally chaotic competitive dance style popular in neighboring Chicago. Superficially, the affiliation makes sense. She counts both footwork godfather RP Boo and its most revered son, the late DJ Rashad, among her mentors and made her earliest appearance on the second installment of Planet Mu’s genre-survey Bangs & Works. But she built these ties at a distance; not from weekend road trips into Chicago but from hand-me-down juke tapes and, later, through Myspace messages and extended phone conversations with her influences.
This is, of course, a uniquely 21st-century phenomenon: an artist situating themselves at the center of a culture, particularly such a socially oriented one, from the comfort of their bedroom. And this outsider/insider contradiction has long been a source of power for Jlin, giving her the means to master the tools of this potent style while still operating without any obligation to its conventions. On Dark Energy, her 2015 debut, this meant stripping footwork’s stuttered-triplet-everything model down to its skeleton and draping it in frigid industrial textures; her day job at a steel mill provided critics with a too-perfect shorthand for the project’s brutalist impulses. The follow-up, Black Origami, is more difficult to define, moving further away from footwork’s literal sonic qualities while reclaiming and amplifying the genre’s already imposing physicality.
Black Origami is a gorgeous and overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go. The lone ping-pong synth squiggle that opens the album on its title track is misdirection because the 40-some minutes that follow are nearly absent of melody. It’s all perpetually escalating polyrhythmic tension, a time-stopping barrage of drum rolls and disembodied angelic voices. The only moments of calm come in the milliseconds of silence between songs.
Like her juke and footwork predecessors, Jlin tends to favor the stock digital sounds of ’90s drum machines to the warmer analog kits of the ’80s or the mutated grandchildren thereof, which now dominate contemporary urban/electronic music. This only adds to the disorienting effect of the record’s intensity, as there is nothing quite like being pummeled by hyper-vivid clavs and shakers grown in the heart of the uncanny valley. This creates a certain grace to this chaos. It’s not dance music per se, at least not in the way footwork originally was—it’s also not not dance music the way the gulps of 808 move against the many polyrhythms of “Nyakinyua Rise.” The martial undercurrent to the record builds from cross-firing drum lines and drill whistles, battle cries and elephant roars. It's like Jlin is less interested in violence than she is the precise motion and strategy of warfare. (This, too, might be read as a nod back to the battle elements of footwork.)
As listeners of electronic music have become so closely attuned to its many shifting micro-genres, their natural inclination may be to decode and map out these many moving parts. Fans of contemporary club music might try to situate it in the context of not just footwork but the similarly charged movements currently happening in Lisbon or Durban. Those more closely attuned to avant-garde corners of the electronic music world could invoke the data-dense sputtered beat structures of Autechre or Ikue Mori’s experiments in teasing humanity out of canned drum machines. An ear more rooted in traditional music might catch the strands of drum corps and school bands (c.f. the marching snares “Hatshepsut”), tribal seances, and gamelan ensembles.
The wonderful thing about Black Origami is that it’s all of these things and none of them at once. It’s a rhythm-spanning collection of contradictions and colliding worlds—the intensity of social music refracted through an introverted mind, the physical converted into digital and back again, the past told through future music and vice versa—all making the case that rhythm is too infinite, too forceful to be reduced to mere utilitarian functions. It denies listeners the question of, “What do I do with this music?” and forces them to react directly to what it does to them. It’s a pure exercise in sound-as-power, music that has no specific agenda beyond simply making itself felt.


The Brooklyn art rock trio’s choppy harmonies and sweetly free-associative tunes are a little bit freaky and more than a little bit funny.

Zigzag Wombat

Foyer Red make winsome and wide-eyed art rock for people who own a fisherman’s sweater and doodle on restaurant menus as an adult. At an earlier point in indie-rock history, they might’ve opened for Dirty Projectors, or joined I’m From Barcelona. You wouldn’t be wrong to say the Brooklyn trio’s debut EP, Zigzag Wombat, is twee, because it is. But unlike their predecessors, Foyer Red are a little bit irony-poisoned. They make fuck-you crayon rock. At its best, their debut is a little bit freaky and more than a little bit funny.
Jagged, disjointed, and pure of heart, the songs on Zigzag Wombat exist somewhere between the Suburban Lawns’ Su Tissue singing, “Oh my genitals! I’m a janitor!” and Rose Melberg talking about getting her heart broken on a Softies record. Opener “Fribbe” is 30 seconds of clarinet solo followed by choppy vocal harmonies, courtesy of vocalists Elana Riordan and Mitch Myers. They sing as if collaborating on a crossword puzzle, bouncing off each other as they complete each other’s fragments. “Swimming Pool” starts out almost reminiscent of yacht rock, with a distorted lo-fi loop that shimmers like the Aegean Sea. Then it breaks down, gets mathy, erupts into a collective scream, sounding brainy yet effortless.
As lyricists, Foyer Red favor free association. They like animals (rabbits, frogs), the world wide web (captcha codes, forgetting your password), and minor injuries (mosquito bites, blisters). The album’s titular wombat puts in an appearance on “Plutterbee,” though here the band’s try-anything approach feels too disjointed to succeed as a song. It works best when they sing about art, like on “Blue Pearl,” where they rhyme “peace of mind” with “zen like Yves Klein,” then namedrop the writer Maggie Nelson. The references are almost subtle enough to miss: The first few times I listened, I simply did not think they were speaking about the author of Bluets or the creator of International Klein Blue, but I was wrong, and I felt both trolled and charmed.
Foyer Red aren’t trolling all the time: Zigzag Wombat standout “Slander” is unmistakably lovely. A strident omnichord solo speeds through the song like a plane cuts through the sky, met by a choir of whistlers and warm-toned bass that does backflips. Like all the best twee-of-center art rock jams, it evokes a sense of yearning. It makes you want to bat your eyelashes, go for broke and kiss your crush, or just look out the window and have comically outsized thoughts about your big bright future. It’s a great frame of mind for this young band. “Shoot for the stars” is the cliché. Foyer Red ask: Idk, what if we tried to be famous?

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Toyomu is a Kyoto-based producer who assembled his own version of Kanye West's The Life of Pablo from online sources like Genius and WhoSampled when he couldn't stream it.

Toyomu: 印象III : なんとなく、パブロ (Imagining “The Life of Pablo”)

Between the piracy, the leaks, the surprise releases, and the streaming service arms race, today’s recording industry is closer to the Wild West than a longstanding global market. For years now, sheriffs at Apple Music and Tidal have struggled to convince customers in the Americas, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere to pay for their damn music already. And yet, across the sea in Japan, folks continue to play by the rules—and what’s more, they’re on track to surpass the United States as the world’s most lucrative music market. Unlike most of the world, Japan didn’t experience the Napster revolution; in fact, the supposedly obsolete CD continues to account for about 85 percent of sales. Moreover, the major streaming services (and their exclusive releases) have yet to become available in the country. In other words, while we’ve been blasting three different incarnations of Kanye West’s latest album The Life of Pablo for two months, over 127 million people have been sitting in the dark; until the album’s broader global re-release earlier this month, 2016’s most-hyped album was little more than a Dark Tidal Fantasy. What was a Kanye stan to do?
The solution couldn’t be more obvious for Toyomu, a Kyoto-based producer and ’Ye diehard: if he couldn’t listen to The Life of Pablo, he’d have to make his own version. "I thought it might be a good idea to make the whole album without listening to it," he told Pigeons and Planes. Ironically, the same digital forces that kept him from hearing the album proved key to his reinterpretation. Thanks to WhoSampled and Genius, the producer was able to assemble a complete listing of every last obscure sample and punchline featured on the record, providing Toyomu with the material for his own "Album of the Life:" 印象III : なんとなく、パブロ, or (Imagining "The Life of Pablo"). The project isn’t so much a recreation as it is an uncanny, absurd outlier among the scores of fanservice-y ’Ye mash-ups populating the internet.
The Life of Pablo—and obviously, Toyomu’s project*—*wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the internet. West has vowed never to release the project across physical formats, instead relying on streaming to drive its success. (The record recently became the first to top the Billboard charts primarily from streaming.) This has created headaches and opportunities alike: Liberated from the finality of a CD pressing, the album—like its creator, and the internet at large—remains in perpetual flux, its trappings mutable. As Toyomu put it in a Genius interview, it's "an eternity of creativity." Accordingly, the record feels more like a snapshot than like a tacit statement.
If you thought Yeezus was esoteric, just try to make it through*印象III : なんとなく、パブロ—*It makes West’s opus sound like a Rockabye Baby! installment, primarily because it sounds so inhuman. All of the lyrics are fed through Apple's text-to-voice function, giving us a record performed entirely by Microsoft Sam (known to most listeners as the stiff-sounding android that "sings" Radiohead’s "Fitter, Happier.") Obviously, the robot sucks at rapping, stripping the songs all nuance in syllable stress and meter, particularly on the standout cuts. Lead single "有名税" ("Famous)] collapses under the weight of all its lyrical moving parts, transmitting the braggadocio into paranoid-sounding pep talk. "I made that bitch famous/God damn/I made that bitch famous/Talk that talk, man" deadpans simultaneous MC/hypeman Sam, unable to distinguish between West’s rhymes and Swizz Beat’s ab libs. (A similar phenomenon lends hilarity to "ゆらゆらボックス 0" ("Waves"), with Chris Brown’s smooth tenor taking the form of a high-pitched, drunken warble.) Even "Low Lights,"—a song centered around Sandy Rivera's passionate inspirational speech—feels mechanical, her every syllable stuck to a hollow, randomly-pitched keyboard plunk in a manner that channels Wesley Willis.
The technology detracts from the latent menace in West’s raps as well, even as the established samples on "Freestyle 4" and "FML" drive the darkness home. In Toyomu’s world, the agitated, carnal queries on the former track ("What if we fucked right now?/What if we fucked right in the middle of the goddamn dinner table?") may very well have come from a curious eight-year-old. The chuckle-inducing moments are frequent (not to mention steadily grating), but there’s ample darkness lurking in the margins: On "Real Friends" and "Highlights," Toyomu digs up the angst buried within West's gospel-infused opus. Meanwhile, "I Love Kanye" is entirely devoid of its a cappella cheer, replaced by a nightmarish duet delivered atop mournful keyboards: following an eerie, monotone Japanese recitation of the track's lyrics, a choir of English-speaking androids come in to proclaim their love for West.
In terms of creepiness, however, nothing compares to "nikeezy," Toyomu’s take on "FACTS." The less-than-two-minute track transports me back to a traumatizing video from my high school physics class that simulated death by black hole. In this case, it’s Kanye who’s being sucked up by the end of it all, his repeated chants of "Yeezy, yeezy, yeezy" stretching and spinning as the rapper floats along the event horizon. The syllables collide with increasing force and velocity, until the song's "Street Fighter" sample resets the sickening cycle with a Sonic Boom. It’s impossible to listen to the track without cracking up, and yet it haunts me more than any Prurient song—not just because it’s terrifying, but because it illustrates the artist's absurdity more than any interview or album ever could. Kanye’s hubris drives our obsession with his art and persona—as well as his own destruction. The celebrity, the memes, the outbursts, the KTT stans—they’re all window dressing to distract from the void that threatens to consume him, and us.
印象III : なんとなく、パブロ may sound like a bit like an Oneohtrix Point Never album at moments, but it’s unlikely to break out of the fan-content niche any soon. Microsoft Sam’s goofy rhymes get old quick, the half-baked, discombobulated arrangements lack the nuance to compel repeat listens, and save for awesome, video-game influenced reworkings of "Fade" and "Siiiiiiiiilver Surffffeeeeer Intermission" (the latter incorporates music from the notorious, well-soundtracked "Silver Surfer" NES game), most won’t be reaching for Toyomu’s takes over West’s. That said, such surface-level aesthetic arguments distract from the album’s sterling achievements. This strange little record has certainly refigured how we view streaming’s ubiquity in the today's industry—not to mention how we perceive the "global album"—but it’s also opened the doors for transcending such barriers through creative drive and compositional savvy. If we can’t have #Tidalforall, at least we can take the power into our own hands.


The Dublin rock quartet’s second album considers the toll of living up to expectations—romantic, platonic, and societal—with a new gravitas that smothers some of the band’s fire.

Leave the Light On

Pillow Queens make the kind of noise that tends to flourish live, roared back by the faithful: burnished heartland euphoria, defiant lyricism bolstered by ragged harmonies, lashings of pride, and an unabashed love of crescendos. But when the four women self-released their debut in September 2020, four years after forming, gigs were off the agenda. Other bands might have held fast until they stood a better chance of breaking beyond their local scene; in name and theme, In Waiting extolled urgency, and so joint guitarists-bassists-frontwomen Pamela Connolly and Sarah Corcoran, drummer Rachel Lyons, and guitarist Cathy McGuinness leapt. It paid off. Their first album transcended the physical limitations of its moment—perhaps because it reminded listeners of the live energy they were missing, perhaps thanks to the writing.
Pillow Queens’ optimistic anthems-in-the-making about queerness, love, and Catholicism took this DIY band as far as a spot on James Corden’s The Late Late Show, where they sang about forsaking the promised safety of a religious upbringing for a life of adventure: “God, give me glory, or don’t/I’ll take my lot/Just start the show and/Cement your feet and take the jump,” Connolly pleaded through a tense jaw on “Liffey.” (One model for the Pillow Queens template is the boisterous, emo, Tegan half of Tegan and Sara’s classic The Con.) With normality somewhat resumed, the sense of potential in their music was theirs to realize on album two. But Leave the Light On loses a bit of puff from its lungs.
When it endures, the magic that got Pillow Queens here remains irresistible—though it’s most apparent on a song that lays out the cost of receiving that kind of attention. Their debut’s “HowDoILook” found freedom from bodily anxieties in love; on “Hearts & Minds,” being visible on stage and in photoshoots brings them roaring right back. “I’ll take it from myself, I’ll save it for the room,” Connolly sings with the kind of declarative fervor that has made Sam Fender an icon in the UK—although she compares herself unfavorably with such male artists who appear born to the stage: “He looks divine from the side/Throws himself around the light,” she sings. “Helps the healing of the brokenhearted/There’s that face again.” Meanwhile: “Now I’ve got the job,” she sighs, “suck in the gut.” The song vacillates from determination to an impending sense of defeat, then a lonely middle eight becomes a double-time sprint, sharpening, squalling, and rediscovering the carefree joy that gets bands off the starter blocks in the first place. In an era of ambivalent stardom, whether Mitski or Billie, few acts have detailed the balance sheet with as much grace.
Leave the Light On often considers the toll of living up to expectations, in romantic, platonic, and societal terms. Unfortunately, you also sometimes get the sense of it with regards to following up a beloved album, with the band revealing a new inclination toward gravitas that smothers some of their fire. Several songs lose power from excessive run times: “Be By Your Side” would be a fine opener at half the length if it simply ignited the desire that Connolly yearns to unleash (“I wanna feel every thought ’til my body drops dead”) instead of layering on cantering percussion and encore-worthy cresting guitar. “The Wedding Band,” Pillow Queens’ ode to their mutual bond, has another heart-tugging, spotlit vocal turn from Connolly but then it all turns a touch landfill, underselling what should be their us-against-the-world anthem.
That ambiguous album title expresses tenderness, bravery (perhaps when said to a new lover), and caution, and Pillow Queens have said they hope Leave the Light On “encourages duality.” There are real moments of nuance here, especially when Corcoran surveys a departing partner on the doo-woppy, bittersweet “House That Sailed Away” and greets the resurgence of old, evasive patterns with grace: “You’ll search forever/I want that for you,” she sings keenly, recognizing her ex’s immutable character instead of trying to change it.
But other songs get mired in confusion (the sweetly dissonant “My Body Moves,” about idealizing a peaceful aging process; the brooding tempest of “Delivered” wanly contrasted by knotty, oblique lyrics) or reach for serious and impersonal character studies. “Well Kept Wife” is nearly as meek as its subject, a woman buried by motherhood; “No Good Woman” offers well-meaning but soggy bonhomie as it observes a woman crushed by exploitative men and by the drinks she consumes to survive them. While Pillow Queens have said, understandably, that they want to avoid being pigeonholed, Leave the Light On seems to suffer from a case of stage fright.