In diaphanous compositions like color field paintings, this full-band ambient album conveys relaxation, whimsy, and a vague sense of dread.

Smartwoods

Piotr Kurek’s Smartwoods comes on gradually, then all at once. An electric guitar plucks out a tentative phrase; a harp responds with unhurried plucks; metallic taps, like steel pans, add shading. Finally, an acoustic bass draws a thick, smudgy line on the ground, while harmonized woodwinds breathe the rest of the picture into being. The stereo field fills in the way that pavement darkens, drop by drop, in the opening moments of a light rain. But here, instead of mottled asphalt, we’re presented with a sumptuous wash of color, a soft pointillism of rich pastels. Over the next 36 minutes, Kurek and his players extend that approach across seven alluringly splotchy tracks that aspire to the condition of abstract painting.
Kurek’s last album, Peach Blossom—released just this past April—was a very different affair. There, the Warsaw-based composer focused his attention on the disorienting effects of Auto-Tune and an unsteady mix of acoustic and resolutely digital timbres. Smartwoods’ palette, in contrast, is largely acoustic, emphasizing Anna Pašic’s harp, Tomasz Duda’s woodwinds, and Wojtek Traczyk’s double bass. But the longer you spend inside this odd, diaphanous landscape, the more you may come to suspect that its seeming naturalism is an illusion. Listen carefully, and the album is awash in alien squiggles.
Unassuming instrumental timbres occasionally wobble in place as though flicked by a fingertip. A minute into the first track, a pitch-shifted twinge of harp sounds like a cartoon projectile ricocheting off a bouncy castle; later in the same song, a vocoded swoosh shimmers and extinguishes like a hologram. Halfway through the album, there’s a splash of synthesizer that we haven’t heard before and won’t hear again. All of these moments display Kurek’s signature knack for defamiliarizing the conventional—and making the unfamiliar feel like second nature.
Occasionally, what sounds like a human voice murmurs a single, wordless syllable and falls silent again, as though clearing the throat for an utterance that never comes. Like the synthesized glissando that periodically plunges across King Sunny Adé’s Juju Music, these flashes of otherness are fleeting; they feel like tiny, temporary portals to another world.
Smartwoods’ broad, slightly ragtag swatches of color—reminiscent of Richard Diebenkorn, perhaps, or Helen Frankenthaler—are loose in form and ambiguous in mood. Songs can feel playful, even naive; their moderate tempos and hazy palette, frequently carried by flute or clarinet, have a relaxed, bucolic air. Yet these whimsical worlds, like those of fairy tales, are shadowed by a vaguely ominous undercurrent. There are hints of disturbance beneath the placid surface, as the music is tugged ceaselessly between consonance and dissonance. There’s a weird contradiction at play: You may find yourself wondering why, given the music’s sunset hues and dandelion-tuft drift, you feel so unsettled.
It’s not easy to get a foothold in this cotton-candy terrain. Many of the album’s tracks share the same key, and the palette remains uniform throughout. There are few hummable melodies. Kurek’s arrangements frequently sound like he has taken a passage from Talk Talk’s Laughing Stock and twisted the focus ring until there’s nothing visible beyond spongy globs of blown-out bokeh. But that apparent formlessness is also one of Smartwoods’ great achievements. Listening back to recordings of Kurek’s quartet at Krakow’s Unsound festival last fall, where they premiered this material, the live performance often sounds remarkably faithful to the album versions. That’s striking, because it means that what here sounds largely improvised, as incidental as a rock tumbler full of colored pom-poms, may well be carefully composed, mapped out note by note. There is an elusive logic snaking through this strange, elastic record, and trying to tease it out is half the fun.


More than a decade ago, a teenage Prodigy-- half of the existential Queensbridge duo Mobb Deep-- was one of the fiercest and murkiest rappers in New York. But after six years of car-crash career decisions, Prodigy's made the comeback no one saw coming.

Return of the Mac

When it quietly showed up on YouTube last November, the darkly surreal video for Prodigy's "Mac 10 Handle" felt like a glorious fluke. More than a decade ago, a teenage Prodigy-- half of the existential Queensbridge duo Mobb Deep-- had been one of the fiercest and murkiest rappers in New York. But that dark star faded quickly in 2001, when Jay-Z, onstage at Hot 97's Summer Jam, sneeringly displayed a picture of a young Prodigy wearing a dance-class uniform: "You was a ballerina/ I got the pictures, I seen ya." That blow seemed to send Mobb Deep into freefall. The next few years saw the group making a series of ill-advised moves, collaborating with the silky r&b quartet 112 and the braying producer Lil Jon on tracks that defanged the Mobb's nihilist magnetism. Later still, the apparent final nail: Mobb Deep signed with G-Unit and released the dismal Blood Money, an album that tried to replace their gritty expressionism with vindicated new-money gloating. It failed colossally.
But six months later, there was Prodigy on YouTube, muttering hazy death threats over the nervous percussion-ripples and eerie bass-burbles of Edwin Starr's "Easin' In". With its harsh, grainy film-stock, the "Mac 10 Handle" video seemed miles removed from anything on the Sucka Free Countdown mixtape. It was the image of a once-great rapper tossing away his commercial ambitions and digging instead into what we loved him for in the first place. Prodigy maintains that grizzled intensity through the entirety of Return of the Mac, a stronger comeback than anyone would ever have guessed.

Return of the Mac* is just 10 songs and four interludes, and it's over in 40 minutes, barely half the length of the average major-label event-rap album. The beats all come from the New York-based producer and frequent Mobb collaborator Alchemist, whose intuitive chemistry with Prodigy makes for one of the most fruitful rapper-producer pairings in a while. Here, Alchemist creates a warm, organic bedrock for Prodigy's cold, weary monotone; in the producer's hands, the rapper's weathered crackle of a voice feels like a natural outgrowth of the landscape. Alchemist heavily samples the lush psychedelic soul of early-70s blaxploitation film soundtracks, wringing those weeping strings and disembodied moans for maximum pathos. Over those tracks, Prodigy's violent threats don't sound gratuitous; they become the commonsense warnings of a tired old gunslinger.

Over and over on Return of the Mac, Prodigy laments his own desensitization, constantly muttering variations on one theme: "New York made me this way." Success was never a great fit for P; a sufferer of sickle cell anemia, he always had a joyless bluntness in his voice even when he was celebrating his wealth, like the money in his pocket couldn't ease the pain in his bones. So the patient hardness he displays on this LP feels much more natural. Half the time, he doesn't even bother to rhyme, but his images still resonate: "Have different colors leaking out you/ Like red, yellow, and white/ Got some stomach on your Nikes."
Lyrically and musically, Return of the Mac feels like an immersion into a pre-Giulinani New York that may never have actually existed. Slowly, a lyrical picture emerges of the old, hard New York, a place where hopelessness leads to bad faith and violence. But as at home as he might be in the squalor, Prodigy never delights in it, lamenting instead: "Niggas bodied JMJ right there in Queens/ Goes to show there's no respect for the OGs." Alchemist's invocation of that era is entirely theoretical. The producer, after all, grew up white and privileged in Beverly Hills, first coming to prominence with the Whooliganz, the rap duo he formed as a teenager with James Caan's son Scott. But even if Alchemist's New York is a fantasy dystopia learned from old movies and rap records, it meshes perfectly with Prodigy's battered memories.

Return of the Mac* isn't a rehabilitation move for Prodigy; he neither flaunts nor denounces his G-Unit affiliation, and only makes occasional passing references to 50 Cent. What it is is the announcement of a stunning and unexpected late-career renaissance; Prodigy is tapping back into the fearsome frustration that once drove him. Amazingly, P originally conceived this piece of work-- the best thing he's done in well over a decade-- as a promotional mixtape, a quick move to build anticipation for H.N.I.C. 2, his official second solo album. "This the mixtape; imagine how the album sound," he says on "Stop Fronting". But if the presumably more commercially aware H.N.I.C. 2 is anywhere near as powerful as Return of the Mac, I'll be amazed. Again.


After several excellent singles, New Jersey's Real Estate deliver on their full-length debut with a rich collection of evocative and haunting songs.

Real Estate

Real Estate were born in the depths of one New Jersey summer. Frontman Martin Courtney had just returned home to his native Ridgewood from college in Washington State, a few fresh songs in his pockets. He'd been playing music with bassist Alex Bleeker and guitarist Matthew Mondanile since high school in various forms, even covering Weezer and the Strokes records from tip to tail. But during the summer of 2008, Real Estate didn't get nostalgic for just their specific suburban nights, crushes, or favorite bands as teens-- they fashioned a tin can-and-string to memories more universal. Their self-titled debut LP is a collection of those first underwater pop songs and onward, 7" cuts and mpfrees that have been backstroking their way across the Web and into lo-fi nerdpiles. Over the past year, many of these songs have soundtracked a time when it feels like every kid in or just out of college seems to be handcrafting/clamoring for music that shuttles us back to a time before career choices, adult responsibility, and this recession.
And while the Jersey Shore has clearly become the beating heart of their current aesthetic, Real Estate captures a rock band several lengths ahead of the fuzzy beach bums with which they pine. Real Estate share tones with North Jersey indie rock titans Yo La Tengo and the Feelies, pouring those influences through warm impressions of oldies radio. Riffs are cyclical and massaged, harmonies familiar. Each song is dunked in reverb and delay, though always with serious restraint. Most importantly, all boast architecture that still allows for swaths of jamming, the feeling that every measure's unfolding as easily as life ought to.
"Atlantic City" is a fitting entrance point, an instrumental that lopes along on a humid bass line before Courtney and Mondanile (the mind behind the cassette adventures of Ducktails) begin gently braiding together strands of trebly surf guitar over Mexican güiro. Single "Beach Comber" keeps things light as Courtney looks for meaning in the sand while Mondanile pokes around with his Strat. The bedrock here (see "Fake Blues") is almost krautrock-y in the way each layer repeats itself, a bent that might prove too drowsy for some. But as is the case for much of the experience, Mondanile adds classic rock sugars throughout, taking off on a solo at the three-minute mark that unbuttons everything really gracefully.
Elsewhere, "Black Lake" is a gorgeous waltz whose slide recalls Modest Mouse's late-1990s take on the 1959 Santo & Jonny classic "Sleepwalk". Because Courtney's croon can be tough to make out at times, those watercolor frequencies lend that overwhelming sense of longing real grip, jam passages often more evocative than spaces that feature vocals. Nowhere on this debut is that better absorbed than on midpoint palate-cleanser "Let's Rock the Beach" or the six-minute shimmer of "Suburban Beverage".
With the exception of the limp "Pool Swimmers", every part remains remarkably crisp. But what sets Real Estate apart from the rest of the herd is how evergreen its beauty can be. Despite the summery song titles and the beach balling associations that might follow these guys around, this music transcends the notion of seasons. Inside the overcast tenor of "Black Lake" and the airy upstrokes of "Green River", there's much more at play here than what goes on between the months of June through September. And impressionism aside, this is a band whose chemistry and technical gifts suggest there's more coming down the pipeline: more good times to be soundtracked, and more songs and records and sounds to communicate exactly that.


This Moog synth album from 1976 was meant to help houseplants grow. Jury’s out on that, but it became a cult classic nonetheless.

Mother Earth’s Plantasia

The Moog changed Mort Garson’s life. Until the moment in 1967 when he attended a demonstration by the synthesizer’s inventor, he had been carving out a respectable niche for himself in the pop world, working with the likes of Brenda Lee, Cliff Richard, and Doris Day, although he might be best known for arranging strings for Glen Campbell. Once he discovered the Moog, however, Garson devoted the rest of his career to composing on the modular synth, which seems to have freed something up in him. He stopped thinking in terms of pop songs and began writing album-length compositions, like Black Mass (about the occult), The Zodiac: Cosmic Sounds (about the signs of the Zodiac), and Music for Sensuous Lovers (about… you know). Because his compositions remain open to experimentation and wonder, because Garson was a master of mood and variation, these odd, endearing albums survive as more than artifacts.
Perhaps his most beloved album, at least among crate-diggers and record collectors, is also his most whimsical. The story behind Mother Earth’s Plantasia, subtitled Warm Earth Music for Plants… and the People Who Love Them, is just as fascinating as the music. Garson conceived the album with Lynn and Joel Rapp, who ran Mother Earth Plant Boutique on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles. Joel had been a writer for My Favorite Martian, but had burned out on the TV industry. So he switched from little green men to little green plants, and the Rapps’ store, as well as their series of best-selling books, helped popularize the houseplant trend that lasted throughout the 1970s and has become commonplace today; in fact, it’s one of the few industries millennials aren’t actively killing. Plantasia was given away free at Mother Earth’s with any purchase of a houseplant; it was also included with the purchase of a Simmons mattress at certain Sears locations, although nobody remembers how that promotion came about. (Surely Music for Sensuous Lovers would have been more appropriate.)
Of course, Plantasia wasn’t intended for human ears. Or human anything. It was designed to help your indoor plants thrive and grow. This was a new idea at the time, one of those nutty beliefs from the West Coast, which in the ’70s was riddled with cults and communes and a brand-new thing called vegetarian restaurants. The idea came from a 1973 book The Secret Life of Plants, written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird and containing some hilariously specious claims: Plants can communicate telepathically, they can identify pain in others, they carry ancient wisdom in their little green cells, and they love music. The New York Times called it “the funniest unintentionally funny book of the year,” which didn’t stop it from climbing like bougainvillea up the best-seller lists and inspiring a documentary film scored by none other than Stevie Wonder.
So, what kind of music do plants like? According to Plantasia, the synthetic tones of the Moog. The same instrument that Garson applied to Satanic rituals and erotic couplings gets similarly deployed for the plant world, and while it’s not his best album (I’m partial to Black Mass, which he released under the name Lucifer), Plantasia stands out in his small catalog for its indefatigably chipper tone and its effervescence. There are no dark notes, only a palpable wonder, which fuels the high, reedy theme of the title track as well as the miniature toy orchestra that breaks into the song partway through. With its winking humor and percolating rhythms, Plantasia might turn away some human listeners, but there’s a sense of joy and possibility in songs like “Rhapsody in Green” and “A Mellow Mood for Maidenhair.” Will it actually deliver on its promise to nurture your begonia or your philodendron? Even Joel Rapp isn't quite sure: "Frankly, we do not know for sure that it will," he writes in the original liner notes. "However, we do know one thing—it couldn't possibly hurt." More than forty years later, the effect this music has on plants is less important than the effect it has on us.  It’s hard not to smile at the oddball charm of this strange enterprise.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Seamlessly weaving disparate strands of modern dance music, this mix is a pulsing paean to up-to-the-minute club rhythms as well as a headphone-dependent feast of electronic sound at its most miniaturized and luscious.

DJ-Kicks

Gold Panda's 2010 debut, Lucky Shiner, asked you to accept a number of seeming contradictions, echoing some of the great contradictory artists of electronic music as it went along. Like the work of Boards of Canada, its emotion-loaded melodies were both whimsical and mournful. Like the collage-funk productions of Matthew Herbert, it built tracks from a myriad of tiny samples, but warped them so that even field recordings and snippets of analog instruments felt denatured, computerized, alien. The production had the crammed-waveform fullness of the Field's fluffy maximalist trance epics, but the way GP put his tracks together from all those little bits somehow also recalled the fragile, handmade miniatures of not-quite-dubsteppers Mount Kimbie.
Whether or not GP would claim any or all of those acts as influences or peers, it was clear he was enjoying the same sort of freedom as they did, the freedom of belonging to no one particular electronic music niche. He drew inspiration from sounds as far-flung as the more obvious physicality of London's ever-evolving beats-and-bass subculture, the twitching and gurgling micro-syncopations of experimental techno, and the shameless and affecting melodicism of IDM. More crucially, he also found ways to layer them into something his own. On GP's new DJ-Kicks entry, he attempts to fuse these strands of modern dance, just as he did on Lucky Shiner, except this time using mostly other people's records as raw material. The result is another seeming contradiction, a DJ mix that's both a pulsing paean to up-to-the-minute club rhythms and a total headphone-dependent feast of electronic sound at its most miniaturized and luscious.
He does this quite simply, pairing left-field bangers with tracks that tend more toward the art-techno end of the spectrum, accentuating the subtleties of the former and teasing out the grooves in the latter. And in the mix's most effective moments, he mingles them until they create new hybrids, not quite dancefloor ready and always with so much to listen to that you could never call them ambient. GP draws out the strange staggering gait of Bok Bok's "Charisma Theme", what might have seemed like a slab of party-ready bashing and clonking in a mix of similar post-dubstep party tunes, by linking it with the more steely, abstract electro of Decay's "Charisma's Theme". He hears a bit of gnarled drums and synthesizer murk, clipped from a Brainiac record of all things, as the perfect perverse segue into Untold and LV's spartan dubstep. He ranges as far as he ever has on his own records, from Berlin minimal to American indie rock, divining brilliant connections between artists who seem to come from opposing aesthetic universes.
Amazingly, this rarely makes for choppy transitions. Given the wildly disparate materials used to construct it, the bubbling, slurping, rustling flow of this DJ-Kicks is a marvel, the kind of seamless weaving together of tiny sounds into a new tapestry that's been sadly unfashionable since the days of old-school micro-house mixes. And like vintage micro-house, many of the tracks take minimalism not as an opportunity for acetic reduction but a chance to revel in all the ear candy sound-as-sound qualities of electronic music, without totally skimping on the funk. Tune your ears down to its reductionist frequency, and the vinyl-esque crackle and barely audible hiss of Jan Jelinek's "If's, And's, and But's" feels as lush and wombing as any massive, bass-booming deep house jam operating on a similarly warm tip. Like the records that make it up, Gold Panda's DJ-Kicks is too interested in these (often literally) small pleasures and subtle entwinings to say it demands your attention. But in his own dogged, idiosyncratic way, he's keeping a neglected strain of dance music alive here, and while the joys are subtle, the more attention you give the mix, the deeper they feel.


Filled with ruthlessly efficient grooves, the latest EP from the Montreal producer is his most assured work yet.

Martyn Bootyspoon: Lickety Split EP

Under the Lothario-like nom de plume of Martyn Bootyspoon, Montreal’s Jason Voltaire makes sexed-up club music that’s deliberately tongue in cheek. He got his start under the influence of booty house and ghettotech fixtures like DJ Assault and DJ Funk, Midwestern producers who brought a sly, lascivious spirit to house and techno. When Voltaire discovered them as an impressionable, extremely online adolescent, something clicked: As he told FACT, “Hearing something like DJ Assault’s ‘Ass N Titties’? That’s just gonna stick with you.” But Voltaire, the son of Haitian and Guyanese immigrants, also credits an influence closer to home: the campy sense of humor that’s endemic to his native Quebec. Recalling French Canada’s history of novelty disco and other records “not to be taken seriously,” he approvingly told Radio Primavera Sound’s Line Noise Podcast, “There’s a lot of slapstick and tacky things that happen in Montreal.”
Bootyspoon’s first appearance on record, a cameo on former Montreal producer (and Kanye collaborator) Sinjin Hawke’s 2011 EP The Lights, falls under the category of things not to be taken too seriously. Over Hawke’s rapturous soundscaping, Voltaire imagined swan-diving into the oceanic depths of his object of desire, nasally ad-libbing a libidinal stream of consciousness about his “world of pretense” and “oversexed personality.” But over the past few years, Voltaire’s acumen as a producer has begun to eclipse his antics. On 2018’s Silk Eternity EP, for Hawke and Zora Jones’ Fractal Fantasy label, his heavy-lidded come-ons couldn’t disguise the force of his sternly percussive club beats, and on last year’s No. 1 Crush EP, his production got both beefier and more psychedelic. Lickety Split, for London’s Local Action label, showcases his most assured work yet and confirms that while the Bootyspoon persona is unabashedly extra, his grooves are ruthlessly efficient.
Though he was initially inspired by bare-bones ghettotech, Voltaire covers plenty of ground on these five tracks. The relentless hi-hats of the hard-charging “Lickety Split” recall the drums of the classic 1995 anthem “Flash”—a signature tune by Chicago house ringmaster Green Velvet, whose over-the-top stage presence is an obvious antecedent for Bootyspoon’s role-playing. “Resonant Freq,” though, hops the Atlantic to plug into sounds and textures more closely associated with grime, like brooding squarewave bass and stark, minor-key string-synth stabs, all of it as chilly as a spell in Wiley’s igloo. “KEYGEN 2 MI H34RT,” the record’s furthest stylistic outlier, melts down Bootyspoon’s usual club reference points into a detuned goo of trance stabs and sickly-sounding Auto-Tune.
The glue holding together these disparate ideas is Voltaire’s appealingly gravelly baritone growl. On the title track, he chops up stray syllables, breaths, tossed-off asides (“You know I’m tryna get lit”), and callbacks to the mother of all vocal fry; he’s so seductive, he can make a question like, “What’s in your Amazon wish list?” sound dirty. He’s more fanciful on “Ice Cream Mane,” where he urges, “Think about me in the summertime, because I’m cool on a hot summer’s day/I’m the ice cream man, baby/Cooler than the Atlantic spray.” His voice  grabs your attention first, and his production keeps it: With dissonant, 8-bit bleeps drizzled over a slippery electro pulse, the track is as experimental as it is effortlessly propulsive.
The most interesting cut on the EP, “Airdrop,” is largely instrumental, relegating the voice to a colorful strip of vocoded tone. Over a muted 4/4 kick, electronic marimba and synthetic bell tones pulse and clang around scattershot snares. For all the song’s percussive intensity, there are virtually no conventional drum sounds at all; the overall effect is of a kind of weaponized new age, at once bruising and meditative. A swirl of bright, glassy tones, it moves without obvious direction, unpredictable as a weather system. Far from Martyn Bootyspoon’s occasionally slapstick tendencies and typically carnal thrust, it offers a glimpse of the Montreal musician in a headier, more serious mode.

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The third full-length from singer/songwriter/producer Natalie Mering overflows with the misty sounds of late '60s folk and '70s AM radio, but her presence in these songs is modern and slyly knowing.

Front Row Seat to Earth

Weyes Blood makes serious music, but she doesn’t take herself too seriously. Proof of that can be found in the final seconds of Front Row Seat to Earth, the third full-length from the singer/songwriter/producer born Natalie Mering. A brass band breaks through the din of hazy film samples and warped classical piano with the kind of royal proclamation that declares, “I’m here!”—just as the soiree is ending. Oops! Or look to the album’s cover. The scene—a river winding through a dystopian landscape, with Mering perched on her side in the middle of it all, clad in a stylish turquoise satin suit—is mesmerizing. Then the eye moves towards her shoes: beat-up sneakers. What the hell?
Front Row works sort of similarly. The songs overflow with tender harmonies worthy of a Roches record and ornate instrumentation (from Mering and a strong cast of contributors) that blends ’70s AM radio, the psychier end of late ’60s folk, and touches of Celtic and Renaissance music. But listen closer and there's often a slightly alien (and typically electronic) undercurrent that keeps you intrigued. It’s there in the ominous synth line that rises up from below a peaceful acoustic and tasteful woodblock and shakers in “Away Above,” and again in the deadpan background vocals that haunt “Seven Words” just below the surface of a doe-eyed slide guitar solo from Hand Habits’ Meg Duffy.
The over-the-top pinnacle of this effect comes on the knockout six-and-a-half-minute single “Do You Need My Love,” where Mering sustains a note—on the word “need”—intermittently in the song’s last half. All around her calm belt, calamity stirs: a brass band, piano chords, a thick bassline, graceful and complex percussion, and above all, an ominous synth that glows like an orb, brighter and brighter to the end. Keep in mind, this is a song that two minutes earlier, featured a breakdown comprised of psychedelic organ and thunder noises, which sounds like an oddly specific combination to anyone who hasn’t endured the Doors. At times Mering really does sound like “Enya Does the Lost Songs of Karen Carpenter (Backed by Ray Manzarek).” But thankfully her lyrics don’t also lose themselves in mystical platitudes borrowed from generations past. She cuts through the bullshit here: “Do you need someone?” she asks, walking the line between robotic and serene. “Do you need my love?”
As much of a throwback as Mering can seem, at her best she captures her era in her words. On “Generation Why,” arguably the album’s centerpiece, she actually sings the letters “YOLO” with more thoughtful care than the phrase ever deserved. Using the kind of dulcet finger-picking and flowery folk-singer phrasing that’s been easy to dismiss as wimpy for decades, Mering essentially chronicles how she learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. “I’ve been hanging/On my phone all day/And the fear goes away,” she says, trying to embrace the kids’ distraction of choice from the coming end times. Later, she surmises, almost kicking herself halfway through for jinxing it, “It’s not the past/That scares me/Now what a great future/This is gonna be.”
Even Mering’s less philosophical takes feel distinctly modern. “Be Free,” the song that sounds the most like a waltz, finds her embracing an independent approach to drifting apart that seems more* now* than of the free love era its far-out sounds might have worked within. “It’s just the two of us/And I want you to be free/Don’t worry about me/I got my thing,” she sings. As first she sounds perfectly clear (the record’s production is excellent), but by the end, in creep those alien background vocals again.
It’s this ability—to twist an homage just enough to show that you’re aware of how totally saccharine it sounds—that makes Mering shine in a way she hasn’t on her albums up to this point. She commits more fully to the world she’s building here, though 2014’s sprawling rock rumination The Innocents is not without its highlights. Her approach (not her sound) recalls Angelo Badalamenti’s lush, over-the-top score to “Twin Peaks.” It was overwhelming and kitschy, but you could tell that he knew it, particularly when paired with David Lynch’s work. Mering’s music might sound like it belongs from a bygone era, but she definitely knows it. If you listen closely enough, you can start to locate her in this fantastical backdrop—sly and assured. What, doesn’t everyone wear sneakers to the apocalypse?


German producer Aksel Schaufler, aka Superpitcher, has long been a leading light of Cologne’s Kompakt label. His eclectic new solo album renews his commitment to duration—it’s nearly six hours long.

The Golden Ravedays

Like any dandy worth his salt, Superpitcher knows how to balance dewy-eyed sensitivity with wily eccentricity. In the early 2000s, when European minimal techno tended toward resolutely functional, unsparingly Spartan beats, the German producer oozed druggy melancholy on songs like “Heroin” and “Tomorrow.” Superpitcher (aka Aksel Schaufler, long one of the leading lights of Cologne’s Kompakt label) slowed his tempos to a crawl, fleshing out spacious club anthems with fluttering Hammond organs and feathery acoustic guitars. He covered the Peggy Lee and Sarah Vaughan staple “Fever” and Françoise Hardy’s schlager hit “Träume”; his song “Sad Boys,” kissed with throaty whispers, came long before emo rappers like Yung Lean popularized the trope for a new generation. And with his remix of Dntel’s pre-Postal Service song “(This Is) the Dream of Evan and Chan,” he inaugurated an entire wave of cottony emotronica for which there was little precedent in European club music.
Over time, his quirks came to the fore. In 2007, he teamed up with Michael Mayer on the deeply irreverent (and in retrospect, largely irrelevant) Supermayer project. Six years after his debut—at the time, it felt like an eon—Superpitcher’s second album, Kilimanjaro, went gonzo with gusto, suffusing disco-indebted house tracks in see-sawing frequencies and stoned philosophizing (“Rabbits in a hurry always drink too much/Too drunk, too drunk/You’ll get used to the confusion”). And in the duo Pachanga Boys, with the similarly irrepressible Mexican producer Rebolledo, he subsequently doubled down on heady excess. Their trademark single “Time” dissolves into 15-plus minutes of hedonistic rapture; in 2013, they made headlines with a 25-hour DJ set.
Seven years after Kilimanjaro, Superpitcher’s new solo endeavor renews that commitment to duration. As if to make up for lost time, Schaufler has come up with an ambitious proposal. In the fashion of a 19th-century serialized novel, The Golden Ravedays has been trickling out in installments all year long, two tracks every month. And for whatever reason, those tracks have been, without exception, unusually long. Let’s run through the numbers: None of the album’s 24 songs is under 10 minutes, and the longest is nearly 20. The full album is just seven minutes shy of six hours long. You could hit play on the opening “Little Raver” as you were rolling away from the gate at JFK and, weather permitting, the final notes of the closing “Punky Reggae Party” would fade out right about the time your plane docked at LAX.
Along the way, Schaufler covers a lot of ground. Atop programmed pitter-patter and leathery hand percussion, he layers all manner of tricks: twangy steel guitar, twinkling harp, wolf howls, and unhinged wails. There is a surprising preponderance of Ethio-jazz saxophone. “Burkina” evokes mid-century exotica in wispy Theremin and rainforest effects, while the bluesy “Bluesin” shines thanks to its uncredited African vocalist. (A shame about the press release, which suggests a children’s book fashioned after Heart of Darkness: “Rumor has it that Superpitcher visited South Africa and adventurously traveled into the deep bush-bush where he met new friends with captivating voices who speak in enchanting tongues.”)
In sound and spirit, The Golden Ravedays represents Superpitcher’s most seamless fusion yet of sad-boy dreaminess and playful hijinks. The beats are largely atmospheric and the atmospheres positively ethereal; it’s all shot through with a subtly twisted undercurrent, like the giggly iridescence that everyday objects take on when you’re on your second or third straight day without sleep. The opening track sets up the premise pretty well. “Hey little raver/Where have you been?” Schaufler asks, in his slightly tuneless coo, over a ruminative Rhodes loop; in a dreamy sing-song, he answers himself with a self-evident reply: “Raving.” It’s morning-after music for party people still wearing traces of the night before.
Based on the highlights, that party sounds like a bacchanal for the ages. “What Do You Miss” smears slide guitar, kittenish mewling, and chorused saxes over a drawn-out dembow rhythm. “Andy,” a tribute to Andy Warhol, is crisp, slashing robo-disco bathed in sparkling harmonics. A few songs mark the welcome return of Superpitcher’s trademark velvet touch: The brooding “Hiding” is mournful ambient house, while “Pocket Love” borrows the bright synths of classic Border Community and sets them on a slow simmer. But he might be even better when he ventures further afield. “Brothers” sounds like a Daft Punk epic burnished to a brilliant gleam; the new-wave/krautrock hybrid “Protest Song” is a a weird, wooly take on minimalism that unfurls spooky whispers over thrumming toms and jaw harp, sounding a little like a jug-band Bauhaus.
Occasionally, though, he can’t quite move beyond memories of the 1990s’ home-listening electronica: “Let’s Play Doctor,” with its jazz flute and drum ‘n’ bass groove, might be something off Mo Wax’s Headz 2 compilation, and other songs are dead ringers for DJ Shadow, Röyksopp, and Kruder & Dorfmeister. And if the best tracks earn their runtime, many do not. In fact, a back-of-the-envelope tally suggests that, put together, the outros alone account for more than an hour of the album’s expanse. In other words, you could make a substantial, full-length ambient LP simply by pasting all the beatless bits together—and you’d still have almost five hours of dance music left over.
Whatever kind of reverie The Golden Ravedays is meant to induce, the album ultimately feels self-indulgent. That’s a shame, because even at his weirdest—sometimes, especially at his weirdest—Schaufler is exceptionally good company. “Punky Reggae Party,” for instance, is loopy in the best way, and on the right kind of dance floor, at the right time of silly o’clock, you might happily twirl along to its post-punk bassline and mantra-like vocals for upwards of a quarter of an hour. But The Golden Ravedays is crying out for an edited version, something to distill all Schaufler’s jokes and poems and scribbles into a manageable frame. Life is short, and Superpitcher’s music is too endearing to be turned into an endurance test.


The challenging art-poppers led by Dave Longstreth have made their best and most accessible album, a record that's one of the year's real highlights.

Bitte Orca

I've heard Dave Longstreth cursed at length, and I've heard him compared to some of the lesser deities. In the Dirty Projectors frontman we have a fellow who fancies himself not so much a songwriter as a modern composer, a Yale grad with one of indie rock's most divisive voices. Early DPs records carry with them ambitions so grandiose it's no wonder they range from wildly inventive to practically unlistenable-- occasionally in the span of the same song.
Then there was 2007's Rise Above, which saw Longstreth and company misremembering the hell out of Black Flag's Damaged by slathering embellishment onto one of the most gloriously unadorned LPs ever. It wasn't exactly a gimmick, but-- and I say this as a fan of both of those records-- it wasn't all that far from one. In spite of its comparatively light tone and the band's tight clutch on melody and rhythm, it was art-damaged and, to some, impenetrable. However you sized it up, you had to admit it was intriguing, even if your interest level waned with every passing yelp. This has heretofore been the story of Dirty Projectors: a band so brainy, so good at the very particular thing they do, they can be hard to like.
Now comes Bitte Orca, the band's best, and certainly most likable, album by a mile. Bitte doesn't actually switch up the Rise Above formula that much: Intricate (if roomier) full-band arrangements abound, Longstreth largely sticks with his clear King Sunny Ade-meets-Jimmy Page guitar acrobatics, and he's still singing his strange, loping songs with that voice. But it whittles down the jarring time signatures and off-kilter arrangements and vocal bleats (er, for the most part) to create a triumphant art-pop record destined to please longtime fans and win him a whole slew of new ones. The key is that, rather surprisingly, Bitte Orca is one of the more purely enjoyable indie-rock records in an awfully long time; remarkable by any means, but even moreso considering the source. It's breezy without a hint of slightness, tuneful but with its fair share of tumult, concise and inventive and replayable and plain old fun. It is the sound of Longstreth the composer and Longstreth the pop songwriter finally settling on a few things together after years of tug-of-war between the two.
There are some triumphant standalone songs in the DPs back catalogue-- "Fucked For Life", "I Will Truck", and "Rise Above" spring to mind-- but never has Longstreth laid nine of them out in a row, as he does on Bitte Orca. From the chiming opening chords of "Cannibal Resource" to the supple swivel that closes "Fluorescent Half-Dome", there's a forward motion at play when you spin Bitte Orca all the way through, but it's an album of such a high uniform quality and such indelible range, practically any tune could be your favorite. Songs run the gamut from Zeppelin III-style swirl (sorta-title-track "Useful Chamber") to delicate balladry ("Two Doves", a dead ringer for Nico's cover of Jackson Browne's "These Days" and no less gorgeous for it) to R&B bob-and-weave ("Stillness Is the Move", which owes a great debt to the dearly departed Aaliyah-Timbaland braintrust) to adult-contemporary pop (no shots, "No Intention"). Apart from the ultimately transitional whoosh of the brief "The Bride", the run from "Cannibal Resource" to "No Intention" is as solid and variegated a display of songwriting acumen and instrumental virtuosity as any you'll hear this year. But it sure doesn't feel as heavy as that sentence might have you believe.
I don't dare pick one highlight-- hell, my favorites keep changing-- but I'll point to "Useful Chamber" as the best encapsulation of what Bitte Orca does so well. A woozy synth line underpins one of Longstreth's gentlest vocal performances to date, a melody line I find myself singing in all sorts of inopportune places. Roughly halfway through, the beat breaks, Longstreth half-raps a little pre-chorus pep talk, and the song explodes in sound and vision. I don't quite understand what Longstreth is going for with the song's whale-plea mantra, but when it sounds like this-- so gigantic, so effortless, so unbelievably catchy-- I could really give a fuck. It's pure bliss, tension that results in glorious release. And while the song-- like the album it features on-- sacrifices precious little of the art-pop leanings of Longstreth's past work, he's traded obfuscation for overtness on nearly all levels, channeled his frenetic energy into paring down the songwriting as opposed to putting it all into the performances, and the results positively sing.
I'm only slightly less enamored of Bitte Orca's final twofer than I am with what precedes it, though either would be a clear highlight on any of the other DPs albums. "Remade Horizon" starts a bit slow and Longstreth's voice seems a tad strained on the verse melody; despite an ebullient shoutalong chorus, it seems more an excuse for the impressive feat of vocal pummelhorsery from Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian in its second half than it does a tune's tune like the seven that come before it. It's the first time on Bitte Orca Longstreth allows chops to stand out in front of the song, and while it's neat to hear them pull it off (and is an absolute marvel in a live setting), it feels showy in a way Bitte Orca otherwise avoids in favor of direct hits. The emphasis on Coffman and Deradoorian's vocals throughout is one of the best things about the record; "Horizon" just happens to be the one moment they seem overused-- a problem of arrangement, really-- and it suffers a bit for it.
"Fluorescent Half Dome" has the opposite problem; it's a bit too simplistic getting going and doesn't quite earn its bizarre chorus. While, like most songs here, it picks up when Coffman and Deradoorian start in with their vocals, it's not quite the closer a record like this deserves. But even focusing on relative difficulty among tracks on the record seems odd: Jaw-dropping virtuosity was the best thing the DPs had going for them prior to Bitte Orca. Here, it stands behind so many other newly apparent strengths-- a testament to the leaps and bounds Longstreth has made as a songsmith and Dirty Projectors have made as a band.


This collection of B-sides, demos, and covers is terrific and revelatory in its own right. It's a trail of dropped clues to the creative process of the defiantly mercurial Olsen.

Phases

A couple of years ago, Angel Olsen performed a show inside a church revival-style tent in Luck, Texas. I’ll wager that most of us camped out on those wooden benches had never actually been to an actual revival, and the situation in which we found ourselves, below the low, pointed roof of a round canvas tarp out of which a succession of bands played on a tiny wooden platform, was more akin to a production design rendering of what a revival might look like. In fact, we were on a film set. Olsen’s concert was part of the daylong Heartbreaker Banquet at Willie Nelson’s Red-Headed Stranger ranch, the setting for his 1986 film of the same name. Outside the tent, there was a fake jailhouse, a fake opera house, people streaming by with South by Southwest wristbands and plastic cups of keg beer. Inside, as dusk fell and darkness filled the tent, Olsen went on, delivering a spare and haunting performance in tune with the murky glow of the lanterns.
It was a year between two pivotal albums for Olsen—the stunning and scarred folk songs of Burn Your Fire For No Witness, and 2016’s My Woman, writ much larger in every sense—still contemplative, but escalating in power. She seemed to summon Stevie Nicks in arena-ready songs like “Sister,” she skated backwards in a tinsel wig in the video she directed for “Shut Up Kiss Me.” Though she’s  graduated to bigger stages, backed by a full band, cracking jokes between songs, it occurred to me there in the tent that this wasn’t just a singer downsizing to a smaller venue, but that Olsen was using the setting in a hyper-explorative way, approaching the idea of a song as a transfiguring, mutable thing. It’s in that spirit that her new album, Phases, which collects a dozen of Olsen’s demos, B-sides, and cover songs recorded over the past five years, arrives now.
“[I]t’s like a diary was stolen and mass produced,” Olsen wrote in a recent Instagram post, “but that’s chill with me, I got nothing to hide.” She was being, of course, a little bit coy. By its nature, Phases isn’t as cohesive as her previous albums but, terrific and revelatory in its own right, it feels like a link between them, a trail of dropped clues to the creative process of the defiantly mercurial Olsen. Sequencing tracks out of the chronology of their recording, the album nevertheless forms its own arc—a trajectory between daring and solace, a protagonist learning what it means to risk love. Songs like the demo “Sans,” which yearns for a solution “as easy as just picking up the phone,” and “Special,” recall Exile in Guyville-era Liz Phair in their spare, strumming core—they draw fuel from their admission of longing. “Only with You” is a cry-yourself-to-sleep lullaby and lament (“You can love you can love you can lose/ Even at your own game”), but the song that follows “It’s All Right,” also from the Burn Your Fire for No Witness sessions in 2013 is a beautiful bolstering, as if the same person woke up and delivered herself a self-affirmation.
I’m partial to the dirty guitars, desert echo, and pounding drums of “Sweet Dreams,” the way Olsen turns the word alone into an incantatory Roy Orbison wail. By this point in the album, Olsen seems to be trading vulnerability and power equally. There’s nothing so risky and naked as revealing your heart’s desire, as she does in “California,” where the album crescendos. When she sings, “I’ve never felt quite so open for love/ I’ve never felt quite so open before,” her voice gapes wide, hitting a high soprano vibrato so tremulous it feels like she’s on the verge of tears. But that’s just Olsen fooling again—right when she reaches a kind of emotional and vocal free-fall, she snaps it all back, reminding you she was in control the entire time. This isn’t the story of someone defending a delusory romance—“I’m not dreaming this time”—but a person with newfound confidence and a thrill in finding herself in new territory, even at the potential cost of a broken heart.
Phases is worth it for the covers too—her take on Bruce Springsteen’s “Tougher than the Rest,” from Tunnel of Love, removes the swagger of that song for a disquieting come-on, spelling out a different definition of tough. Olsen does heartfelt justice to Roky Erickson’s “For You,” one of the most rarest and most beautiful of his solo songs; a forthright declaration of love in a jaunty Orbison-esque rhythm. Olsen’s home-recorded rendition, with a guitar and chorus, is warm and unadorned—there’s little you need to add to a line as indelible as “I’m cooked to you so rare.”
I’d always figured “Endless Road,” which Olsen regularly includes in her set lists, to be a Johnny Cash ballad I’d somehow never heard. It exists somewhere in that gruff, gothic timbre, a hymn to lonesome waywardness, dropping wholesale references to the dark folk blues of “In the Pines.” But “Endless Road,” in fact, is a cover that appeared on an episode of Bonanza, sung by Hoyt Axton, who’d guest-starred as a singing drifter. Olsen first heard it while watching rerun TV with her mother; later she learned that Axton’s mother wrote the song. In any case, Olsen plaintively identifies with the curse and blessing of being the restless seeker, refusing to be pinned down, but also acknowledging its costs. Her voice soars far past the even timbre of Axton’s delivery, reaching treacherous heights at its apex: “Till I can lay this lonesome body down.” It’s her traveling song, and the perfect closer to an album that pulls together winding, thrilling paths, united here in their searching.


Morby's spare, remorseful fifth solo album evokes the world-weariness of gospel-phase Dylan.

Oh My God

Across four solo albums (and turns in bands like Woods and the Babies), Kevin Morby has always worn his influences on his sleeve. Or record sleeves if you will: Depending on your Ikea shelf space or online playlists, one might hear throughlines to Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Leonard Cohen’s New Skin for the Old Ceremony, the rock-as-savior gestures of Spiritualized and Springsteen. Or maybe you hear Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Randy Newman, and the War on Drugs instead. Depending on the line and moment, Morby can deftly emulate all of the above. The more you appreciate this rock canon, the more likely that Morby hit some of your sweet spots. Even when it came to covering the feral punk of the Germs, Morby found a way to make “Caught in my Eye” sound like a lost Dylan cut.
On Oh My God, Morby’s fifth solo album, he continues to speak in rock’s vernacular, right down to crafting the kind of spare, remorseful album that sounds like the aforementioned artists’ attempts at gospel. Even on his 2013 debut, he gave a nod to Dylan’s then-maligned gospel phase, so it’s always been latent in Morby’s music, but the world and life events that have transpired since then have brought them to the surface. Oh My God makes these strains overt and heavy-handed.
Right from the start, Morby and band are in solemn states of mind. “Oh My God” features little more than piano, organ, and Morby’s unanswered prayers to “come carry me home.” Celestial hums swoop down to accompany him and a filigree of saxophone takes over. It’s tasteful if toothless, imparting not so much a sense of salvation as a smooth jazz interlude.
Meticulous as the sound palette is throughout, favoring sustained organ chords, close-mic’d guitar strums, and the patter of hand drums, the effect starts to smudge everything together. Repetitions of phrases like, “Sing a glad song,” and, “Carry me home,” and, “Oh my God,” creep across a number of songs, each time delivered with such weariness that you wonder whether you’re listening to the same songs on repeat. The exclamation of the title soon feels as rote as a text message acronym sent out ad nauseam.
There are grim themes to grapple with in our modern world, and a recent profile on Morby suggests he too was dealing with the same awful aftermath of 2016 as the rest of us, unable to get a handle on answers. Yet rather than scrabble for hard-fought insight, Morby time and again veers off into cliché, giving us insipid lines like, “Everything we do is a mess/But oh, honey, may this mess be blessed,” and, “Fe-fi-fo.” Elsewhere you can find rhyme schemes for “pray/say/okay” and “fly/sky/cry.” Halos and horns and wings abound, but there are no stakes to be found. You start to pray that Morby sees his way to stop looking to the gods of rock’s past and just speak his own language.


Hotly hyped UK singer/songwriter Jack Garratt blends earnest bluesman's style with a light fizz of electronica and quavering voice. His debut seems forged from equal parts James Blake and Jai Paul, and somewhere inside the sentiment and bombast you can hear a sensitive man who's trying to explore his flaws and desires candidly.

Phase

Jack Garratt has only just released his debut album, but his success has been sewn up for months. Last October, the 24-year-old British songwriter/producer announced a show at London's 5000-capacity Brixton Academy for this coming April. In November, he won the Brits Critics' Choice Award for 2016; last month, the BBC Sound of 2016 poll. From the other side of the Atlantic, those might look like insignificant spoils, but in the UK, it's a case of mutually assured industry triumph: Garratt dominates radio, plays sweet televised spots at major festivals, boosts live revenues, and makes the organizations that backed him look smart. Such are the perks of signing to Island, an imprint of Universal, who have had Garratt in a development deal for years—and scooped 11 of the past 14 BBC Sound of... polls thanks to their massive spending power.
Brits are cynical of being marketed to, and even more suspicious of what looks like instant success, so Island have carefully made Garratt look Very Authentic. There's a lovelorn songwriter at the heart of his music—a side he displayed when he covered Disclosure's "Latch" in earnest bluesman fashion—that's been coated with lightly fizzing electronica. Phase seems forged from the sounds of James Blake's CMYK EP and Jai Paul's "BTSTU": subaquatic synth motifs and juddering basslines that burst into scrunching supernova choruses. There's also lots of gospel-influenced warbling and soft, bluesy piano. Whenever Garratt plays the latter, you hear his stool squeak very clearly, as if it's been amplified for effect.
Marketing aside, Phase doesn't sound unpleasant, just generic. Phase starts strong enough: The delicate, swimmy first verse of opener "Coalesce (Synesthesia Pt. II)" suddenly goes hyperdrive, gathering nastier textures as Garratt's vocals fracture and writhe. "Breathe Life" is the catchiest song, with a bright, shimmying soulful chorus that owes as much to the aforementioned Jai Paul as it does Florence and the Machine's cover of "You Got the Love." "Far Cry" is also compelling, with screaming mosquito synths and agile bass driving the hectic pace.
Things get weaker from there: "Weathered" has the unctuous sentimentality of Mumford & Sons (whom Garratt has supported in stadiums), and its lyrics are the equivalent of those manipulative commercials showing a child turn into a senior citizen in 45 seconds: "When I grow old/ The sun will cope/ Shine down on every youth stain," Garratt simpers. He has a tendency to reach for grandiose overstatements as shorthand for profundity, a tendency that gives his romantic lyrics an unwittingly sinister edge. His neediness is intense: "To love you takes every waking thought I have," he declares on "Fire." On "The Love You're Given," he sings, "I promise if you're gonna lock me out I will stay as your ghost/ But if you take the love you're given I will leave you alone," and echoes the sentiment on "I Know All What I Do": "If I ever leave you, eyes will remain."
To give him credit, he seems to recognize a certain OTT tendency within himself. On the hard-grinding "Chemical," he makes various unflattering admissions about his love: how it's "overdone, selfish, and domineering … chemical, shallow, and chauvinistic." But as with almost all his lyrics on the topic, it feels empty, drawing from overcooked cultural tropes about urgency. Somewhere within all this bombast is a sensitive man who's trying to explore his flaws and desires candidly. You sense that the thing that he needs is intimacy, a smaller scale. And it's the one luxury he's not going to get, because Jack Garratt is too big to fail.


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 high-art synth-pop of the Human League’s Dare, a prismatic album that all pop music would soon pass through.

Dare

In late 1980, the singer Philip Oakey was scheduled to go on tour and make a third record with his band the Human League. The problem was that there was no Human League. The founding members had departed acrimoniously, leaving Oakey with just the name and a lingering associate, Philip Adrian Wright, whose only role was to project slides of rocket schematics and stills from old movies behind the group’s live performances. Together, Oakey and Wright had to somehow make a new band and a new album out of nothing.
Oakey didn’t have any finished songs, just a few disconnected ideas. The recently departed synth technicians Martyn Ware and Ian Craig Marsh had written most of the music for the first two Human League records and, as far as critics were concerned, they were the real talent of the group, the masterminds behind the eerie yet often danceable synthesized music which sounded like it could’ve emanated from a post-apocalyptic nightclub or a dark alien obelisk in the desert.
Oakey, by comparison, was a pretty face, a deep voice, and an eye-catching asymmetrical haircut—one side cropped close, the other a dark waterfall of hair. He and Wright were the visual element of the band, the kitschy surfaces that made even their bleaker electronic ruminations pop. Oakey could sing but he didn't have much in the way of musical talent, and he was anxious about writing a new Human League record on his own, especially with the added pressure of delivering something more successful to the record label than their previous album, 1980’s Travelogue. “I thought we were going to fail and everyone was going to laugh in our faces,” Oakey told the Sunday Herald Sun in 2009. But Dare, the album he made with the ruins of a broken band, was a paradigm shift: It signified the end of something old—the original Human League—and the beginning of something new—synth-pop—all at once, a kind of prism that all pop music would soon pass through.
Three years earlier, Oakey had just been hired as the singer of a band called the Future, whose other two members, Ware and Marsh, had run in the same Sheffield arts circles since they were teenagers. They were all obsessed with science fiction, and many early Human League songs—for instance, “The Black Hit of Space,” about a song so dull it opens up a black hole that swallows the listener and the world around them—read as if they were pulled from a Philip K. Dick story collection. They grew up on glam rock, whose influence lingered in Oakey’s appearance, his features softened by makeup, his ear often sporting a long shimmering earring. But when Ware and Marsh heard German electronic group Kraftwerk, along with Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” they thought they were hearing the future of music. They noticed that the future didn’t seem to have any guitars. The future was a vortex of processed sound.
With the addition of Oakey’s shadowy, handsome voice, they renamed themselves the Human League and started to reconceptualize themselves as a pop band. Befitting their avant-garde origins, they worked from an indiscriminate definition of “pop,” covering advertisement jingles and themes from film scores, absorbing and refracting every kitsch artifact in their grasp. But their approach proceeded from a true love of pop culture and its ephemera; the cover of the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” on their 1979 debut album Reproduction, manages to be truly heartfelt and warm through the cold glitter of its instrumentation. Human emotions were timeless, the League seemed to say. Only the technologies that conveyed them changed.
But Ware and Marsh’s departure in 1980 left Oakey without even that bed of technology. So Wright was promoted to occasional synth player, and he and Oakey searched the Sheffield streets for new band members. Oakey had been listening to Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall and wanted to incorporate a high, androgynous falsetto into the Human League’s music, something that could hover like a spotlight over his own dark baritone. A few weeks before the tour started, he visited the Sheffield discotheque Crazy Daisy, which was hosting its “Futurist” night. Through a tangle of chic glittery people dressed like Gary Numan, Oakey glimpsed two girls—Joanne Catherall and Susan Ann Sulley—dancing in the lights. Something about their appearance and the way they moved—angular and awkward, charming and unselfconscious—mesmerized him, and he invited them to join the band even though they were both still attending high school. They were also fans of the band, and had purchased tickets to a Human League show on the very tour they were being hired for.
Catherall and Sulley were neither trained singers nor professional dancers. Their voices wavered through notes, but they glowed around Oakey’s gloom like museum light on a sculpture. Their presence added an ineffable layer of glamor to the group—where the old Human League appeared inflexible and robotic on stage, this new League blushed with movement and color. Oakey’s method of saving his band wasn’t necessarily creative or musical but utterly visual. Could anything be more pop?
Regardless, Oakey still needed to put together the pop music that would reinforce the visual shift. After the tour ended, Virgin Records sent in producer Martin Rushent to help shape the new Human League material into something not only professional but commercial. When he arrived, the band had just started work on a track called “The Sound of the Crowd,” a song Oakey and recent Human League recruit Ian Burden were building on synthesizers around a very simple, lopsided figure of thumping tom sounds. When Oakey first played the demo of it for Sulley and Catherall, it sounded simplistic and a little rickety, but they knew it was a hit—they could envision themselves dancing to it. Rushent wasn’t as impressed; he wanted more. He threw the demo out and insisted they start from scratch.
What Rushent turned “The Sound of the Crowd” into remapped the world of pop music around it. He programmed a song without much potential into a chain reaction of synthesizer and drum patterns, all pulsing together in white space. Nothing on the radio, beyond Gary Numan’s geometric synth constructions, sounded quite like it. Each sound is so clean and separated you can hear them leave different impacts on the blankness. It’s also a staggeringly simple composition, a verse and a chorus culminating in a breakdown where Oakey, Sulley, and Catherall’s voices build to a scream. But in Rushent’s hands, it’s shaped into something as modern and distinct as space-age furniture.
During the recording process, the band fused two different songs into “Love Action (I Believe in Love),” its synths sinking and creeping through like water leaking through a tar roof. Oakey broods through the whole thing, except for an abrupt monologue between the first and second chorus (“I believe, I believe what the old man said”) that reels out of him nearly at the speed of rap. None of them—not even Burden and Jo Callis, experienced touring musicians whom Oakey and Rushent had planted in front of unfamiliar synthesizers—knew exactly what they were doing, or if anything they were writing would work as a song. Rushent would listen to the rough mixes of Dare songs when he returned home from the studio and couldn’t figure out whether the album they were making was brilliant or terrible.
This is, incidentally, why Dare works so well. The songs are simple, sometimes containing only one or two melodic ideas, and synthesizers connect in lattices around them. Opener “The Things That Dreams Are Made Of” is just a few sing-songy sequences stacked on top of each other, while Oakey sings lyrics that have all the frenzied energy of travel brochure slogans: See the world—Berlin or New York! Spend money and acquire new friends! “Dare to feel! Take the chance! Make the deal!” he sings in “Open Your Heart” as two-note synth chords drone around him like rays of daylight. It works almost like an advertisement: Very little is happening, but there’s just enough to catch your eye. Dare’s title and art were modeled after an April 1979 Vogue UK cover where the word “Dare!” glowed in neon pink above the warm blush of a model’s face; in all of the variations of the album’s cover design, a member of the band presses their face against a narrow rectangle, staring out into the same glossy white void it feels like the music was born in.
But Dare is more than an advertisement for itself. There’s a hole at its center where the band abruptly slips into a dark glimmer of the old Human League. A spare cover of the theme for the 1971 crime film Get Carter opens the second side, retaining only the harpsichord line from the original, transposed here to a synthesizer so high and keening it sounds like a disembodied cry in the dark. Then the dystopian “I Am the Law” slithers into view, Oakey seeming to sing from the perspective of a police officer who believes he knows what’s best for the people he’s supposed to protect. It’s sinister and terrifying—the instrumentation creeps like the shadow of a hand over an insect. “Seconds” seems to snap the album out of this black mood, but its lyrics depict John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and eventually, the song just lapses into repetitions of the chorus: “It took seconds of your time to take his life.” Oakey runs through the shared cultural memory over and over again as if he were circling it on a track, trying and failing to see it from a new angle.
Of course, Dare isn’t remembered for the darkness that engulfs its middle, but for the frozen glow of its singles, which presaged the dawning of a new era in pop music, one where synthesizers and drum machines processed the flutter and ache of crushes, romance, and heartbreak. But the League never again achieved the world-blanketing success of Dare, especially not its fourth single and final track, “Don’t You Want Me.”
Oakey didn’t want “Don’t You Want Me” released as a single, and fought with the record company when he learned they’d selected it; needless to say, it’s ironic that the song on Dare that most wants to be wanted would be the one Oakey was most embarrassed over. For the lyric, he rewrote the plot to A Star Is Born as a duet of intraband drama between himself and Sulley. It’s perfect: the thick fog cast by the opening synth line, Oakey’s stone-faced gloom quickening into desperation in the transition from the verse to the bridge, the way Sulley’s voice gets shaky as if it’s feeling the desolate cold of the song. They ask each other the same question, yet the disconnection between them is so profound that neither person can hear it, a lonely signal sent into darkness as vast and quiet as space: “Don’t you want me?”
Oddly, the League didn’t get to participate very much in the strain of pop they helped develop. “(Keep Feeling) Fascination” and “Mirror Man” were released over the next two years, but the sessions for the follow-up, 1984’s Hysteria, were so torturous and overextended that Rushent abandoned his role as producer and was replaced by Hugh Padgham. A few years later, the band would enlist Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to write and produce one of their signature songs, the redundantly-titled “Human,” which plunged their voices into a liquid R&B soundworld and gave them another hit.
But the aesthetic and commercial successes of Dare were unrepeatable; the Human League could never be as unaware of the music they were making ever again. It’s the unconsciousness, that not knowing, that makes the record so great, that makes it sound like it’s beamed in from some vast emptiness. It was pop music that resembled the most enduring pop culture in history, things that didn’t know what they were until it was too late—the Beatles, Marilyn Monroe—massively popular figures that were absorbed as images before they were ever accepted as art. In making a record that no one involved could tell if it was any good, they made something unprecedented.


Common bounces back from the low point of his career with his best album since 2005's Be. Produced by soul-rap veteran No I.D. and featuring Nas, Maya Angelou, and John Legend, The Dreamer/The Believer has moments that recall the humanity and thoughtfulness of his mid-90s classics.

The Dreamer/The Believer

Common is confused, and who can blame him? His career has stumbled in so many directions that confusion is kind of unavoidable. He's gone from being a troubled, semi-alcoholic underground rapper, to a knit-cap, Soulquarian prince, to Kanye West's older, less-cool cousin, to now, just a friendly-looking guy who occasionally appears in Gap ads. At this point, it's anyone's guess who the "Common" on Common's records might be. The confusion reached its low point on 2008's Universal Mind Control, in which we were introduced the mortifying sight of strip-club Common. Now, The Dreamer/The Believer finds him banging his chest, demanding to know when hip-hop got all soft and sweet, and attempting to engage Drake in a war on wax.
It's a bewildering spectacle, but a painful midlife crisis can cut two ways: In one corner, yes, we have the guy responsible for a song called "Electric Wire Hustle Flower" demanding machismo credentials from the former star of Degrassi: The Next Generation. But in the other, we have the best, hardest-hitting, and most consistent Common album since Be. In fact, The Dreamer/The Believer occasionally recalls the rough humanity and humble thoughtfulness of his still-untouchable mid-90s classics Resurrection and One Day It'll All Make Sense. It's hard to know where this guy still draws his creative fire from, but there are points on this record where Common raps as if his gift for slick embedded wordplay and tactile storytelling was just in a pocket he hadn't looked in for 10 years.
Much of the album's fuel comes from soul-rap veteran No I.D., who handles the majority of the production. The Chicago producer has undergone a startling creative renaissance in the last two years: Until about 2009 he seemed destined to live out his life as local legend, the Godfather of Chicago Rap and the Guy Who Taught Kanye West. Lately, though, he's become what DJ Premier used to be: the guy you hire when you want to cozy up to Unimpeachable Authenticity. Even better, his latest work hits harder and more viciously than anything he's done before. "Ghetto Dreams", featuring a fully awake Nas, is the gulliest track Common has rapped on since "The Corner". "Blue Sky" chops up ELO's "Mr. Blue Sky" into a looping, affecting plea. "Celebrate" is the best G.O.O.D. Music BBQ-jam since Kanye's "See Me Now". And the back-firing-Hooptee snare kick on "Sweet" almost lets you peek through your fingers as Common rails against "hoe-ass" rappers and informs us that he is "to hip-hop what Obama is to politics."
Common raps so hard on The Dreamer that you can almost hear his neck veins throb. And for every bit of overcompensation-- he actually cracks a bottle over a dude's head in "Raw"-- there's something vividly rendered and honest. That kind of honesty used to be Common's territory, but he surrendered it long ago to smarminess: by Finding Forever, he only seemed capable of rapping in fortune cookies. On "Gold", he paints fond memories of his early nights: "Hats from liquor stores, to avoid syphilis/ Frivolous spending/ Drunk nights with storybook endings." "Lovin' I Lost" is disarmingly humble and open-hearted about heartbreak: "I must confess, I miss the days of you laying on my chest." Of course, there's still nothing worse than a Latter-Day Common Simile, and goofy lyrics abound. But the reason The Dreamer/The Believer sticks-- and it does-- isn't because Common reclaims some musty real-dude credentials he never had: It's because something seems to have reminded him that he's not a persona, but a real, blood-pumping human.


King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are a seven-person band from Australia who specialize in unpredictable psychedelic music. Their fifth album, I'm in Your Mind Fuzz, is out on John Dwyer's Castle Face label, and comparisons to Thee Oh Sees make perfect sense.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: I'm in Your Mind Fuzz

I'm in Your Mind Fuzz

When a band hits the stage with more than five members, you're looking at something that's bound to be either a spectacle or a complete fiasco. Sure, the history of popular music is full of excellent bands with unwieldily large lineups (Funkadelic, Talking Heads on Stop Making Sense). Sometimes, it's just a mess (various jam, nu-metal, and high school talent show bands). King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are a seven-person band from Australia who specialize in unpredictable psychedelic music. Their ranks include two drummers, three guitarists, and a harmonica player. To reiterate: They're a septet with a name that sounds like it could've been ripped from "Masters of the Universe" who make heady soundscapes punctuated by blues harp.
Ridiculous as this all sounds on paper, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard aren't wasting anyone's time with throwaway joke music. While they started as a side-project (following in the great Australian tradition where each member plays in other groups) and self-admitted "joke band", the Melbourne band have definitely paid their dues over the past four years with critically acclaimed live sets and a prolific string of records. I'm in Your Mind Fuzz is their fifth album to date, and if their discography tells a story, it's one of a band who never fully settle into one sound. Their album Oddments from earlier this year featured flashes of bubblegum pop and Hammond organ-led soul. On their debut album 12 Bar Bruise, they invoked Oblivians-style garage punk. It's never clear from the outset exactly which path they'll explore or what sounds they'll plop into the mix along the way. Horses neighing, xylophones, and instruments of unidentifiable origins have appeared in their songs, and impressively, King Gizzard always manage to wrangle the chaos into well-crafted compositions.
As usual, the band's latest collection, I'm in Your Mind Fuzz, partially recorded at Daptone in Brooklyn, isn't easily categorized. While the blues feels like an inevitable touchstone thanks to Ambrose Kenny-Smith's harmonica (disorienting as it sounds when caked in psychedelic effects), it's also got the psych pop jaunt of the Millennium. But as varied as King Gizzard are, they've established one surefire safe bet with each record: They implement their "more is more" approach for maximum impact. Their songs are dense, intricately crafted, and most importantly, powerful. It's appropriate that Mind Fuzz is out via Castle Face (in North America—Heavenly's got it out in Europe and Flightless once again have them covered in Australia), as the 17-minute ripper "Am I in Heaven?" is arguably the best Thee Oh Sees track to be released in 2014. There are easy comparisons to be drawn between the two bands—Stu Mackenzie lets out a point-perfect John Dwyer "WOO" before employing explosive, rapidfire guitar lines. And like their label overlords, King Gizz also know when to let urgency eventually give way to elation.
The album's overall lyrical concept is mind control. If they've managed to brainwash their listeners, they've done it by making a record that's hard to tune out. Take, for example, I'm in Your Mind Fuzz's absolute peak—the opening 12-minute chunk comprising the four song stretch of "I'm in Your Mind" to "I'm in Your Mind Fuzz". They churn and choogle relentlessly forward, each rafter-reaching jam bleeding into the next. The rhythm section—bassist Lucas Skinner, drummers Michael Cavanagh and Eric Moore—stay locked in the same groove across all four songs while the guitars, harmonica, and Mackenzie's vocals explore various melodies within that structure—different movements operating in the same theme.
But a steady stream of bangers comes at a price. When you open with a sprint, things eventually have to slow down, and the comedown is right where King Gizzard trip up. Immediately following the all-power introduction are a pair of tracks ("Empty" and "Hot Water") that sound like watered-down versions of what came before them. They make the save later, though, closing the album with some of their best slow jams. (Two of which are titled "Slow Jam".) And, right when it seems that they've settled into a restrained groove, they shake it up again: the speed picks up, guitar solos are delivered, vocals are augmented and distorted. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard don't do predictability.


On her sixth album, Demi Lovato finds a consistently compelling space: flinty, flirty R&B that’s just as thrilling hushed as it is at full blast.

Tell Me You Love Me

You can learn almost everything you need to know about this decade in pop by tracing the careers of last decade’s Disney kids. Selena Gomez sat at the genre’s vanguard with a mixture of massive EDM-pop collaborations and whispery solo hits. Miley Cyrus ignited a still-burning conversation about race and appropriation and flew her freak flag with Wayne Coyne before remembering Republicans buy Spotify memberships, too. Nick Jonas is an apt stand-in for a group of male pop stars who lack the transformative charisma of their musical ancestors. None of these artists have broken into the stratosphere reserved for figures like Beyoncé and Kanye West, but they’ve  more or less defined teen pop’s last eight years.
The fourth and final late-’00s Disney alum worth mentioning is Demi Lovato, the star with the most obvious musical asset—an absolute cannon of a voice—and the longest road to stability. Lovato’s struggles with mental health and addiction are well-documented at this point, in large part because she’s spoken about them with transparency. (You can always count on her for a refreshingly frank interview: when asked by Glamour about parts of her life that trigger her addiction, she said she’ll never be able to watch The Wolf of Wall Street.) Her commitment to advocacy and accountability was ahead of the curve, especially in a moment where even the most apolitical public figures are taking stands. But for Lovato, musical maturity has proven more elusive.
She has dipped her toe in almost every pop-adjacent genre since her debut, 2008’s spunky Don’t Forget. She churned out two albums of tame pop-punk while still toiling in the Disney machine; Unbroken and Demi, released after rebounding from her public nadir, leaned towards generic, clubbier fare. 2015’s Confident was a step forward anchored by an infectious hit—the bold, bi-curious “Cool for the Summer”—but Lovato still felt like a voice (and a personality) in search of material that would do her justice. With Tell Me You Love Me, she’s finally settled into a consistently compelling space: flinty, flirty R&B that’s just as thrilling hushed as it is at full blast.
Demi’s always taken to power ballads like a hammer to nails: the Unbroken standout “Skyscraper” was her first “adult” hit, and her career may have taken an entirely different shape had it not been launched by the legendary Camp Rock banger “This Is Me.” She’s never been scared of a booming vocal showcase in the Adele or Kelly Clarkson modes, and two of these showcases serve as early anchors on Tell Me You Love Me. The title track is a desperate plea for affection that gradually morphs into a declaration of self-love; “You Don’t Do It for Me Anymore” is even better, a soaring breakup anthem dedicated to Lovato’s old vices rather than an old flame. These are songs that seek to overcome you with sheer athleticism rather than construction or pacing. They’re impressive in isolation, but they also have the impact of a huge meal or a hard workout: it doesn’t take long to feel completely exhausted.
This is where Tell Me You Love Me improves on Lovato’s previous albums: It gives you enough space to see Demi as something other than a no-holds-barred belter. There’s a Kehlani-like jack-of-all-trades behind those pipes, an artist with can skilfully, successfully make hip-hop and R&B work in a pop context. Lead single “Sorry Not Sorry”—her biggest hit in nearly half a decade and climbing—is a defiant gospel-pop kiss-off that wouldn’t sound out of place in Chance the Rapper’s hands. When you listen to the album in full, the craft keeps coming. “Ruin the Friendship” smolders like something cut from CrazySexyCool; “Games” is studded with goofy, giddy ad-libs; the remarkable DJ Mustard-produced “Lonely” stuns without feeling remotely showy, growled F-bombs aside. (Lovato and Lil Wayne—poking his head in for a moody, warbling verse—make a surprisingly good team.) You can even start to hear the influence of Frank Ocean’s instant-classic Blonde trickling down into laid-back deep cuts like “Concentrate” and “Hitchhiker.”
The woman behind these songs knows herself well enough to rein in her most destructive impulses, but she still can’t help but take a series of romantic risks. Lovato isn’t precious about the bumps in her road, either: “Sexy Dirty Love” builds a pre-chorus around an extended addiction metaphor, and “Daddy Issues” is remarkably frothy for someone whose recent albums featured dramatic accounts of her relationship with her late, estranged father. (“Forget all the therapy that I’ve been through/Lucky for you, I’ve got all these daddy issues.” Fun!) She’s willing to throw away a perfectly good platonic relationship (“Ruin the Friendship”) and take an emotional leap with a stranger (“Hitchhiker”) because she knows she can always rely on herself. You want to get to know the Lovato behind Tell Me You Love Me, something you can’t definitively say about any of her other releases. It’s the first album she has made that captures the woman who stumped for Hillary Clinton and brushes off questions about her sexuality in all of her complicated and captivating glory.


William Basinski doesn’t play a single note on his new album Cascade: the tape-loop-and-delay technique that produced it is akin to Eno’s on Ambient 1: Music for Airports. It comes with The Deluge, a related studio recording where Basinski filtered Cascade through gradually elongating feedback loops, creating the sound of something being almost remembered.

Cascade / The Deluge

Brian Eno and Harold Budd loom large over all piano-based ambient music, and William Basinski’s Cascade is no exception to this rule. They spring to mind as soon as the first notes slip out, and the music reaches the same core of beatific sadness. But it gets there in its own way. After all, Budd played live on Ambient 2: The Plateaux of Mirror and The Pearl, filling metronomic piano lines with human presence, while Basinski doesn’t play a note on Cascade. The tape-loop-and-delay technique that produced it is more akin to Eno’s on Ambient 1: Music for Airports, though again, Basinski does it his way. Instead of a plush, pristine sound full of regal pauses, he unleashes a continuous scrawl of murk. This is but one of the things you think about while listening to the same Basinski piano loop for a very long time.
Cascade is very simple. A high minor arpeggio darts purposefully forward and then turns into a scatter of reflections as a midrange note tolls a few times in answer, followed by a distantly trumpeting howl. It lasts for a matter of seconds and then repeats—surge, collapse, glide—for 40 minutes, followed by a brief coda of Arvo Pärt-like sacred stillness. There is little sound in the low range, so the whole structure seems to hang over an abyss. With no variation at the macro level, the music shouldn’t describe much more than a figure skater tracing an infinity sign. But it has endless variation at the micro level, which creates the sense of a paradox—repetition that is impossible to grasp, slipping ceaselessly through your fingers.
Cascade is released alongside The Deluge, where the same piano motif is process as to become more garbled, throwing longer and longer shadows over itself, and stormy frequencies overtake the placid weather of Cascade. By halfway through, a long serpent of digital tape echo has all but swallowed the motif, but it keeps glinting through. It’s the sound of  something being almost remembered, something that’s nagging at you but won’t quite slip into focus. The comparatively brief "The Deluge (The Denouement)" splices a different fragment of piano with passages of maddened, Caretaker-like shortwave radio orchestration, with dark bass growing in under it like black mold.
Cascade is a new work, though "new" is always a slippery term with Basinski, whose oeuvre is as nested as matryoshka dolls. Not only is the loop drawn from the archive of recordings he made in the '80s, but he also already used it, in an easily recognizable form, on 92982, where it enters the piece shortly after the 40-minute mark. Is it a coincidence that you could replace the first 40 minutes of 92982 with Cascade and arrive at a new, continuous piece?
With Basinski, it’s hard to tell. He certainly doesn’t like endings—his pieces make you keenly aware that they’re just audible portions of infinite lines—and he treats little bits of captured time like bottomless wells. Disintegration Loops is his standout work because it dropped the illusion of eternity, letting us hear the tape decaying on the reels. Basinski admitted, with crushing poignancy, that things end. But on Cascade, he’s back to forestalling that knowledge through repetition, which is what gives his abstract pieces their surprising sentience and unaccountable melancholy. The machine is doing the work, but the composer has done the thinking and feeling, and that makes all the difference.


Mogwai's second album, released in 1999, is getting a reissue with a bounty of bonus material that includes demos and the Travels in Constants EP. On Come On Die Young, Mogwai went about becoming the most sullen, brooding post-rock band they could possibly be.

Come On Die Young

Though few of their songs contain actual words, Mogwai have always been fond of big statements. Having emerged during the late-1990s post-rock boom, the Scottish quintet used every means possible to distance themselves from the sullen stereotype that defined so many instrumental art-rock brooders of their era. EP titles were turned into protest placards, interviews inevitably became merciless slag fests, and concert t-shirts doubled as a form of music criticism. Even the abrupt calm-to-chaos eruptions that defined the band’s 1997 debut, Young Team, seemed to be delivered with devious, mischievous grins. So naturally, the band came up with a doozy of a title for their second album (and the first to receive a proper U.S. release via Matador): Come On Die Young, a two-fingered retort to the “Live Forever” platitudes of the Britpop they so despised.
As such, it was no surprise that Mogwai’s would open the album with a song called “Punk Rock:”, even if it wasn’t a punk rock song at all. Rather, overtop a foreboding, percussion-less guitar instrumental, we hear the voice of Iggy Pop in a televised 1977 interview with Canadian broadcaster Peter Gzowski, explaining the difference between the commoner’s caricatured conception of punk and his own more spiritual, empowering interpretation of the term. But as much as it overtly asserts Mogwai’s allegiance to the rock iconoclasts of yore, the track also betrays the band’s own frustration with being misunderstood; beyond being propped up as post-rock poster boys, Mogwai had been variously hyped as the Scottish Slint and the new Pink Floyd. Tellingly, “Punk Rock:” ends on an open-ended note, with an increasingly exasperated Iggy asking Gzowski, “Do you understand what I’m saying, sir?” The question is left hanging in the ether, as if to suggest that no amount of reasoning will change the opinions of those who’ve already made up their mind about you.
So on Come On Die Young, Mogwai went about becoming the most sullen, brooding post-rock band they could possibly be, with each melancholic guitar refrain and desolate, dead-of-night snare-drum tap serving as a deliberately set breadcrumb trail to more Spiderland comparisons. But by playing to post-rock type, Come On Die Young ultimately expanded Mogwai’s emotional vocabulary. Where they once shocked with volume and dissonance, Come On Die Young disarms with elegance and grace. Even the sudden, eardrum-blasting jolts of Young Team signature “Like Herod” are no comparison to the surprise that occurs when the ominous, pressure-building hum of “Punk Rock:” dissolves into the teary-eyed tranquility of “Cody”, which sees Mogwai hitch themselves to Galaxie 500’s “Tugboat” and—thanks to a rare and surprisingly affecting lead vocal from guitarist Stuart Braithwaite—produce the most quietly devastating song in their canon to date.
By uncanny coincidence, this 15th-anniversary reissue arrives mere weeks after Slint’s more randomly timed 23rd-anniversary Spiderland box set was released, but revisiting both records in tandem highlights their differences as much as their similarities. Here, Mogwai aren’t so much copying Slint as envisioning the more expansive, exploratory band they could’ve evolved into: “Year 2000 Non-Compliant Cardia” may swipe its jagged opening strums straight from the “Good Morning Captain” playbook, but redirects them into a slumberous, opium-den psychedelia that counts as one of this album’s few moments of levity; “May Nothing But Happiness Come Through Your Door” embellishes the “Cortez the Killer”-inspired lurch of Slint’s “Washer” with glockenspieled counter-melodies and a gradually intensifying climax. And in lieu of creepily whispered Brian McMahan-style narratives, Come On Die Young sees Mogwai deploy found-sound dialogue to equally unnerving effect. The mournful “Helps Both Ways” is interlaced with color commentary from an NFL game, but far from undermining the track’s mournful tone, the chatter enhances it—the song feels like a cathode-ray-lit crime scene, as if we’re surveying the aftermath of some terrible domestic tragedy while "Monday Night Football" unsympathetically blares in the background.
So much instrumental rock music is often described as “soundtracks to movies that don’t exist,” but Come On Die Young always felt like the unofficial score to a film that did. Four months after the album was released, The Blair Witch Project hit theaters, and my memories of each tend to blur into one: there’s the shared desolate woodlands setting (the album was recorded at Dave Fridmann’s Tarbox Road Studios in Upstate New York) and chilly, frosty-breath atmosphere (thanks to Fridmann’s uncharacteristically stark, I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-Albini production), never mind the fact that Come On Die Young’s eerie cover shot of bassist Dominic Aitchison could easily pass for a still from the film. And most tellingly, like Blair Witch, Come On Die Young moves at a slow, subtle, incremental pace that can test one’s patience and make one long for the high-voltage immediacy of Young Team, but oh-so gradually ratchets up the tension. The heart-palpitating payoff finally arrives in the form of late-album colossi “Ex-Cowboy” and “Christmas Steps”, which once again see Mogwai charting new extremes of effects-pedal abuse, but without overwhelming the songs’ expertly chiseled definition.
That sense of discipline is all the more apparent when wading through the bounty of bonus material on this deluxe edition. While none of the demos here differ dramatically from their finished versions, you get a clearer picture of just how much studious fine-tuning went into the final tracklist: in its original form, “Christmas Steps” was a couple of minutes shorter, before the band wisely decided to stretch out its nerve-wracking build-up even longer; a rough-sketch version of “Punk Rock:” suggests even this seemingly simple composition underwent a few passes before achieving the right spectral ambience. (“Hugh Dallas”, meanwhile, would have been a keeper on any other Mogwai release, but its breathy Braithwaite vocal and elegiac sway drift a bit too closely to “Cody”.)
Some supplementary tracks, on the other hand, provide a welcome respite from Come On Die Young’s meticulous approach: the included Travels in Constants, Vol. 12 EP—a limited-edition release for Temporary Residence’s mail-order series—both hearkens back to the post-shoegaze drone of Mogwai’s earliest work, while anticipating the anthemic surges of the subsequent Rock Action. The EP’s mix of tremulous guitar reverberations, flute-like melodies, and pretty piano reveries may boast a decidedly different tenor and texture than Come On Die Young, but are nonetheless a product of that album’s guiding philosophy: For all its seeming ideological alignment with crash-and-burn punk-rock nihilism, Come On Die Young is the sound of Mogwai committing themselves to the long haul.


Though the Pennsylvania band favor post-rock swells, tricky song structures, and off-kilter time signatures, their restrained maximalism defies expectations.

Death of the Neon

String Machine like to think of themselves as an extension of their surroundings: The septet split time between blue-collar Saxonburg, Pennsylvania and their homebase in perpetual “next big thing” Pittsburgh. On their second LP, the bucolic and bustling Death of the Neon, frontman David Beck derives visions of wrecked cars, broken humans, and natural decline from the faded farming towns that lie in between, carved up by developers who “name their housing plan Pasture Place… and the streets after the wildflowers that used to grow there.” But in these frozen fields, Beck sees an opportunity to give the socalist ideals of the past another go. String Machine are forward-thinking, but not futurists; progressive, but not revolutionary.
Though it featured many of the same personnel, their 2016 album Threads From the Youth Fossil was essentially Beck’s solo debut. On this new record, he functions as more of a community leader than an auteur, one voice among many. It’s easy enough to describe what String Machine sound like: Name any indie rock band that referred to themselves as a collective and/or featured more than six people on stage at all times. String Machine’s DIY studio Earthwalk, modeled after Elephant 6’s approach, is home to a couple dozen Pittsburgh-area artists who variously show up to contribute strings, synths, horns, backup vocals, and the occasional Crock-Pot. Otherwise, they present as a modern affair. “I could see if my band was featured in someone’s Instagram story/I could bide my time ’til the morning/Reliving my 30 seconds of glory,” Beck twangs in the opener, holding a dead phone in a busted tour van. His imagery reads tactile and pungent on the page—he is variably a spent parcel of bubble wrap, a shattered ornament, a rotting peach, “kimchi marinating in motor oil”—but it’s all pleasantly smoothed over with harmonies and strings.
In place of the 4-track psych and classic pop-rock of Neutral Milk Hotel or Olivia Tremor Control, String Machine favor polished post-rock swells, tricky song structures, and off-kilter time signatures that bring up inevitable comparisons to the World is a Beautiful Place and I Am No Longer Afraid to Die or Saintseneca. But this band is emo only in their unabashed earnestness and their inclusion of a deceptively upbeat song about a dead dog. Whether it’s the stein-swinging chorales of “Old Mack,” the traces of digital freak-folk dotting “Engine / It’s Time,” or the mere presence of banjo, they evoke not just the chockablock sound of mid-’00s buzz bands like Annuals or Margot & the Nuclear So and So’s, but also that era’s affinity for wholesome handicraft. They recorded the album’s piano parts at a local church in the dead of winter, braving 20-degree temperatures and sustained by homemade curry.
Even if the comparisons are warranted and basically unavoidable, String Machine’s restrained maximalism defies expectations. They’re averse to overstatement, easy catharsis, or clutter for its own sake. “Engine / It’s Time” slowly bubbles up to a lather of manipulated vocals and strings that never boils over. The band white-knuckles their way through the anxious arc of “Eight Legged Dog” and takes a breather just at the point where fans of orchestral emo have been conditioned to expect a detonation. Exploratory mini-epics “Death of the Neon (Pt. 1, 2, & 3)” and “Pit of the Peach” capture barren Western Pennsylvania in the summer, taking the scenic route over sloping hills and through bleakly beautiful farmland in seemingly endless sunlight. Neither goes anywhere unfamiliar, but this is how Death of the Neon fulfills its aim of self-contained serenity. If Beck has successfully executed his vision of the album as a product of its environment, you’ll skip past the obvious genre signifiers and call it Americana.