Two new tapes, one recorded a year ago and one laid down more recently, highlight Chief Keef's move from street-rap hitmaker to something far stranger.

Chief Keef / Gucci Mane: Back From the Dead 2/Big Gucci Sosa

Back From the Dead 2/Big Gucci Sosa

Listening now to Finally Rich, Chief Keef’s capstone 2012 release and only album with Interscope, it’s striking how easily the hits seemed to come to the then–17-year-old star. Even its unheralded album tracks hit a sweet spot of purposeful insouciance that promised a career in the spotlight. With songs selected and sequenced largely by Young Chop, Finally Rich is a creative success (if only a modest commercial one) because it sells Chief Keef as a hitmaker. In the pre-Internet industry, perhaps that's just what he would be. But today his interests lie elsewhere, and his path since has been a defiant refutation of any direction but his own.
To make a case for Chief Keef’s more recent music is to wander into a catch–22. Though short, defensive explanations ("he’s got good hooks," "it’s just turn-up music") are tempting, they undersell his breadth; any lengthy defense is dismissed out of hand for overthinking music unworthy of the attention. But Chief Keef has not only sustained creatively in the waning spotlight of his initial breakthrough, he’s become one of the more original young voices in hip-hop. Over the course of the past two years, his music has been in a state of continual reinvention. His latest tape, Back From the Dead 2, is a bold step in a dark new direction. Largely self-produced, it again redefines his sound, pushes his rapping to the foreground, and makes his older records—including the recent Big Gucci Sosa, much of which was recorded more than a year ago—seem quaint.
Though reminiscent of his earlier rap style, Big Gucci Sosa is a mediocre record, and shows the futility of pining for Chief Keef’s supposed golden era of 2012. Admittedly, his biggest records from this time had an immediacy that trumped everything else out there. But Big Gucci Sosa lacks the songwriting of peaks like "Love Sosa", parachuting Keef verses into the one-dimensional pulp-gangster formula that’s been Gucci Mane’s collaborative stock in trade since 2011. Not that Keef is the album’s weak link. On standout "Darker" (which has been in circulation for at least a year), Keef completely washes his mentor.
He stands out again on "Paper", the only song on both Big Gucci Sosa and Back From the Dead 2, if only for a callback to Lil Wayne’s infamous "lasagna" lyric (this one’s about spaghetti). Thankfully, it’s the only pro forma trap record on the latter tape. Sixteen of BFTD2’s 20 tracks are produced by Chief Keef himself. For his first steps into rapper-producer territory, he shows promise—though it’s tough to imagine most of these beats working outside the context of a Chief Keef album, as they are primed to frame his vocals. He’s cultivated a consistent sound; each beat is of-a-piece, with brooding synthesized string and chorale patches moving in beefy quarter notes to conjure a grim yet electric atmosphere. Where the production on 2013's Almighty So had the pace and bleary color of city lights sliding up a rain-drenched windshield, Back From the Dead 2 prowls through back alleys, preferring gritty textures and coiled energy.
In jazz improvisation, there’s a saying that if you screw up, make sure to do it loud—a confident mistake isn’t really a mistake at all. In keeping with this notion, Keef’s production has an amateurism-as-aesthetic element not unlike late ‘90s Swizz Beatz records. The seams show—cymbals take a full beat to decay, waveforms distort, and though he conveys a range of moods, he doesn’t yet have the facility for much rhythmic variation. But Keef’s commitment to the beats’ functional effect blurs the line between "mistake" and mastery—whether through misunderstanding, willful mutation, or both, there’s a savviness and sophistication to the album’s sound. Like many aspects of his musical approach, his conviction makes the unconventional connect.
The main sonic shift from his recent work to this tape is rhythmic. Through loosies released to iTunes and YouTube, Keef’s 2014 output varied from the sudden roller coaster effects of the low-pass filter ("Gucci Gang", "Sosa Style") to the intricate, nimble rhythms of 12hunna’s production ("Hundreds", "Make It Count"). On Back From the Dead 2, tracks like "Whole Crowd" and "Wheres Waldo" seem to float forward, while more groove-driven records like "Farm", "Sets", and “Wayne” are relentless, creeping ahead on four-beats-per-bar tip-toes. It’s not monochromatic; "Faneto" has the feel of a '70s Chinatown sequence, "The Moral" sounds like music from Castlevania, and “Blurry” is all searing exultation. But when compared with this summer’s dynamic, uptempo sound, Keef’s beats are deliberate, the grooves often static—creating a stark contrasting canvas for the dynamism of his delivery.
Keef's rapping holds the project together. His earliest records, like "Everydays Halloween" and "John Madden", hit particularly hard because of a central contradiction: his voice was at once an unbothered flatline and a tool of projection. Keef had Gucci Mane’s nonchalant flow, but his voice popped to the front of the speaker without sacrificing that sense of effortlessness. As he’s evolved, Keef’s detached from that behind-the-beat pocket and shifted to a more aggressive style—one freed from the rhythmic grid other artists treat as a requisite constraint, without being untethered from it altogether, a la certain Lil B releases. This unpredictability lends a chaotic tension to the music.
His lyrics are more effective for their blunt economy—he gets more mileage per syllable (as on the cleverly brutal "Faneto": "Talkin’ out his neck, pistol to his throat/ Blow this motherfucker, he gon’ choke"). He’s unafraid to use space, preferring the compositional effect of short burst phrases, rather than long, familiar cadences. (E–40’s new single "Choices (Yup)" is an example of a more traditional rapper working in this style.) Like King Louie, he will lock into a particular pattern for several lines, using extreme slant rhymes ("I just hit a stain, finagle/ I just hit a stain, finito"), as if trying to demolish the distance between words themselves, or to camouflage his thoughts. He’s made rhyming a word with itself into an art form of its own—he likes to complete the circuit early, or to let words stay static while the meaning shifts ("Nigga don’t slip, you lose it, then you lose it").
Over the course of his career, critics have suggested Keef was a diminished version of every rapper from Waka to Lil B to Soulja Boy. These comparisons now seem absurd; grappling to describe something truly new, we look to the past, and inevitably fall short. Today, Chief Keef is in rarefied air for street rap—a creative voice with an original, cohesive aesthetic. True, in the media spotlight, interest in him is at low ebb: for a certain hipper music listener, he’s not weird enough, eclipsed by the gender-bending, manic Lil Wayne disciple Young Thug. For hip-hop heads, Keef is too weird—and so we end up with a straightlaced (if energetic) street rapper named Bobby Shmurda. Yet to the grassroots, among a new generation of stars, he sits at street rap’s aesthetic center, not its margins.
The subtext of this music remains deeply bleak; there are numerous shouts to his murdered cousin, and it’s extremely disconcerting how casually Chicago rappers refer to kush blunts by the names of fallen enemies. Yet at its heart, there’s a playfulness, both explicit ("I can cut my dreads and sell them on Ebay") and artistic—witness the poetic run-on about money midway through "Wheres Waldo". He plays his own narrative close to the vest, letting his story loom below his elliptical rhymes like ice cubes in a glass. Nonetheless, moments of clarity burst through suddenly, crackling with significance: "And I’m still rollin’ dice, no monopoly/ I can’t be controlled, this ain’t no colony." That line comes from "Wayne", which sounds like a hit rap single turned inside-out to reveal its rotten core—Rae Sremmurd’s evil antithesis. Malevolent and psychedelic, Back From the Dead 2 is Chief Keef’s own "Down 2 Tha Last Roach" blown out to album-length proportions.


Chelsea Wolfe dives headfirst into sludge metal and creates a unique space where sweetness can be heavy and contact is always uncomfortable.

Hiss Spun

On her sixth official full-length album Hiss Spun, singer-songwriter Chelsea Wolfe attempts to find reconciliation with global-scale suffering by turning to her own personal scars in a heaving wail of guitars. Over her last two albums, 2013’s Pain is Beauty and 2015’s Abyss, Wolfe and her right-hand multi-instrumentalist Ben Chisholm steadily dialed-up the heaviness, first by transplanting Wolfe’s gothic folk approach onto an electronic/industrial bedrock and then by adding shades of doom. For Hiss Spun, their first outing with Converge guitarist/producer Kurt Ballou at the boards, Wolfe and Chisholm dive headfirst into sludge metal.
Wolfe is, of course, hardly the first musician to express a sense of being overwhelmed, or to employ forceful sounds as a buffer. And with Ballou onboard, Hiss Spun abrades more than her past work. But much like the last BIG|BRAVE album pushed beyond the soft/harsh dichotomy, Chisholm, Ballou, and Wolfe carve out a space where ear-pleasing sweetness can be heavy. They also leave ample room for Wolfe’s voice, which never fights against the crushing weight of the sounds around it. Ditto for Chisholm’s noise collages, presumably the “hiss” of the title and one of the album’s most distinguishing features. (Fittingly, Chisholm re-worked sounds from both the band’s personal space and historical sources like the Enola Gay’s bomb blasts.) It also helps that much of the riffing comes courtesy of Troy Van Leeuwen whose unparalleled finesse has graced Queens of the Stone Age, Failure, and A Perfect Circle.
Wolfe explains in the Hiss Spun press release that she “wanted to write some sort of escapist music, songs that were just about being in your body, and getting free.” Throughout the album, she keeps her lens trained on the body, even as she gradually widens her scope from painful intimate contact to mass tragedies like war and ecological ruin. On “Vex” and “The Culling,” for example, Wolfe uses the phrase “bled out.” Neither song is entirely clear about what or who their protagonists struggle against, but the image of blood subtly connotes something different in each song. On other songs like “Particle Flux,” “Offering,” and “Static Hum,” ravaged landscapes are hard to tell apart from individual trauma.
All throughout, proximity and intimacy—with one’s own thoughts and memories, with people who cause injury, the lingering presence of a lost “twin”—is always uncomfortable. “I’ve spent, in different beds/Many moons/And that’s the way I prefer it,” Wolfe sings over a low simmer of downtempo metal on “16 Psyche.” She continues: “I feel it crawl up my legs/Let me wrap you in these thighs/It gets me out of my head again.” Wolfe is a particularly melodious singer, which doesn’t clash with the music so much as it makes the turmoil that inspired it sneak up on you. In some spots, it never seems to materialize at all.
As much as Wolfe broods, the songs don’t illuminate her pain all that much. The people and travails she sings about dwell in the periphery of the music like flickering shadows. Heavy music has long been the province of people who find catharsis in confronting demons. Wolfe, Chisholm, Ballou, and their guests take a more indirect path. The sound they make is certainly foreboding, but one can also walk away from this album feeling more settled than disturbed. Being grounded, after all, is what Wolfe was going for. That you have to work in order to appreciate what she went through to get there is what makes Hiss Spun so intriguing.


At a time when the remaining bands of their vintage are locked into the album-retrospective tour circuit or releasing pro-forma records, Primal Scream’s 11th full-length sees them keeping pace with 21st-century pop, recruiting guests like Sky Ferreira and Haim.

Chaosmosis

In their 30-year career, Primal Scream have demonstrated a savvy for keeping themselves current. They joined the anorak convention with their cut "Velocity Girl" on the C86 compilation; helped push acid house into the mainstream with 1991's rave-rock symbiosis Screamadelica; and then pushed rock to new extremes with 2000's punktronica assault XTRMTR. That drive still animates them today: At a time when the remaining bands of their vintage are locked into the album-retrospective tour circuit or releasing pro-forma records, Primal Scream’s 11th full-length, Chaosmosis, sees them keeping pace with 21st-century pop, recruiting new-school divas Sky Ferreira and Haim in an admirable attempt to keep their median audience age on the shy side of 40.
In the Scream discography, Chaosmosis’ closest antecedent is 2008’s Beautiful Future, another modestly scaled, melodically focussed record loaded with then-au courant collaborators (Bjorn Yttling, CSS singer Lovefoxxx, Josh Homme). However Chaosmosis is the band’s most lyrically intimate, earnest and heartfelt record to date, which is something of a new look for a group that usually deals in PLUR platitudes and politicized screeds.
The album’s most affecting songs—like the simmering synth-pop of “(Feeling Like a) Demon Again” and the beautifully aching tropical-soul serenade “I Can Change”—find a dejected Bobby Gillespie surveying the wreckage of a broken relationship, and provide rare glimpses of the sunken eyes that he normally shields behind his wraparound sunglasses. And while the showdown with Ferreira on “Where the Light Gets In” initially suggests a replay of Gillespie’s prior tryst with Kate Moss on “Some Velvet Morning,” its knockout chorus thrusts the song to the ranks of the Scream’s best singles.
The aforementioned tracks make good on Chaosmosis’ promise of a modern-pop makeover. But when the hooks aren’t as sharp (like on the morse-code electro of “Carnival of Fools” or the chillout comp–ready “Autumn in Paradise”), the album’s temperate energy and mid-tempo pacing threaten to render the band indistinguishable from the synth-smeared indie-pop acts filling up the medium-font tier on a Coachella bill. And in lieu of any unifying principle, other songs offer the faintest echoes of past glories. From the house pianos and bongo breaks on down, the opening “Tripping on Your Love” is a shameless Screamadelica simulacrum that asks nothing more of the Haim sisters than to shout out that hokey title ad infinitum. “Golden Rope” is the obligatory ’70s-Stones rehash (complete with a Bobby Keys-style sax solo and “hallelujah!” hosannas), but delivered with a lumbering chug that suggests even the band are getting bored with this mode.
Of course, Primal Scream have always been wandering spirits. But they’ve always sounded fully committed to whichever path they chose, no matter how misguided it may be. Chaosmosis, by contrast, is encumbered by an uncharacteristic restraint and tentativeness. The bracing, sometimes violent collision of rock ‘n’ roll and dance music that’s powered Primal Scream’s best work has been melted down here into mercurial droplets—shiny and radiant, to be sure, but ultimately non-descript.


Jim Jarmusch and Jozef Van Wissem's third collaboration this year bears their shared, strong sense of magic and mystery. It's a story told through Jarmusch's feedback-addled guitar parts and the Dutch lutist's forlorn playing.

Jozef van Wissem / Jim Jarmusch: The Mystery of Heaven

The Mystery of Heaven

Jim Jarmusch's films often give life's bit-part players a central role. There's Eddie from Stranger Than Paradise, played by former Sonic Youth drummer Richard Edson, whose weatherworn existence revolved around placing bets at the dog track. Ghost Dog deposited an ice cream salesman played by Isaach De Bankolé as the best friend of the titular character. The musical choices for Jarmusch's films, so often pivotal to the action, reflect his decision to cast Hollywood stars alongside relative unknowns. The Broken Flowers soundtrack featured contributions from Mulatu Astatke, Marvin Gaye, and Sleep. His forthcoming vampire feature, Only Lovers Left Alive, will pull another musician out of the shadows, with Dutch lutist Jozef Van Wissem providing music for the film. The Mystery of Heaven is the pair's third musical collaboration this year, following Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity (on Important) and Apokatastasis (on Van Wissem's own Incunabulum label).
The story of how this duo met, in a chance meeting on a New York City street, where Van Wissem pushed a CD into Jarmusch's hand, feels like it was pulled directly from one of the director's movies. The music they make together retains certain tenets of those films, too. There's a strong sense of magic and mystery, all delivered with a beautiful simplicity. If you strip away the stylistic heft of Jarmusch's films, there are often deceptively basic human emotions underpinning the narrative, albeit ones revealed through the eyes of emotionally damaged individuals. The tracks on The Mystery of Heaven reach down to the same spot, as told through Van Wissem's forlorn lute playing and Jarmusch's feedback-addled guitar parts. Their only diversion is to employ actress (and Only Lovers star) Tilda Swinton to provide a stern spoken word passage over "The More She Burns the More Beautifully She Glows".
Much of this record is a gentle advance on the ideas of Concerning the Entrance Into Eternity, with Jarmusch again taking a back seat to Van Wissem's lead. It's a meditative piece, and one that passes naturally from bristly, repetitive motifs ("Flowing Light of the Godhead") to more subdued material ("The Mystery of Heaven"). Even when they reach peak noise, about two thirds of the way through "Flowing Light", it's more hypnotic than aggressive. This is material with a firmly contemplative edge to it, casting a spell only broken with the occasional fluffed note or lapse into accidental dissonance. There's a definite sense that this was recorded live and with little practice beforehand. The title track feels sloppy and aimless at times, perhaps deliberately so. But this is music that benefits from a certain amount of discipline, such as the feral splendor of "The More She Burns", where the pair sync up perfectly following Swinton's wonderfully haughty vocal.
The fact that Jarmusch worked on this album with an actress and musician involved in his next movie makes this feel like an important step toward that project. There's even a filmic feel to some of the work here, particularly in the two versions of "Etimasia", which echo with a lonely, lovelorn ambiance. It makes sense that Jarmusch would want to break away from music that could superficially resemble "soundtrack" work, and he mostly has achieved that on his various collaborations with Van Wissem. But the versions of "Etimasia" on The Mystery of Heaven shift closer to a place in which he's become more comfortable since his nascent musical efforts in the no wave scene. It's one of stark, pensive thought, populated by characters who don't make connections easily, whose attempts to make sense of the world are largely a solitary pursuit. At its best, this music feeds into a similar sentiment, pushing close to the kind of deep introspection at the heart of Jarmusch's films.


The inescapable Portland rapper continues to go beyond the usual rage rap expectations, bending his voice without ever making it feel gimmicky.

Up 2 Më

Yes, it’s happening again. Another generation of rappers who grew up on Chief Keef, Young Thug, and Future, armed with melodies soaked in AutoTune and lyrics that range from incredibly melodramatic to what can simply be put as vibes have become the obsessions of SoundCloud communities. But it’s a bit more knotty this time. The scene has become so sprawling and expansive, populated by subgenres and collectives that almost exist in their own worlds and complicated by the looming presence of deep-pocketed record labels throwing a bag at whoever can get a song to pop on TikTok.
But no matter what corner of the app you’re completely immersed in, Yeat has been inescapable this summer. Behind a mixtape called 4L, singles like “Sorry Bout That” and “Mad Bout That,” and a viral snippet turned breakout single (“Gët Busy”), which got everyone from Lil Yachty to Drake to recite the line “This song was already turnt, but here’s a bell,” the Portland 21-year-old has fast become the face of rage. It’s a style defined by production that sounds like an eruption of pyrotechnics: think Playboi Carti’s Whole Lotta Red, which has essentially become the blueprint. Most of it isn’t any good. Usually, it’s so unbelievably hollow like Carti protégé Ken Car$on’s Project X, or just a shameless ploy for streams like Trippie Redd’s Trip at Knight. Why the hell is a sound lazily categorized as “rage rap” so boring?!
Thankfully, Yeat’s Up 2 Më is not. Similar to lead single “Gët Busy,” the best Yeat songs feel like a steady build to one euphoric moment. On “Turban,” it’s the way he screeches “Tonka truck” like he’s being exorcised; “Hëy” starts out relatively unmemorable, and by the midpoint, he sounds like a riled-up pitbull; the rippling bass thuds on “Ya Ya” fuse together with his Travis-like “oohs” and ad-libs. He’s melodic, but not in the way where you want to hear him perform a guitar ballad; instead, it’s the ability to bend and shape his voice without ever making it feel gimmicky.
Unlike so much of the music done in this style over the last six months, Yeat’s inspiration feels like it refreshingly goes beyond Whole Lotta Red. Specifically, the way Future screeds about addiction and temptation over Metro Boomin and Southside beats that sound like the world is caving into a black hole on DS2. It’s not to say that Yeat’s lyrics are particularly well thought out—more often than not, they resemble the time he wails “Yeah, this perky got me snail, you should call me Gary” on “Trëndy way,” but occasionally, real emotions cut through the bullshit. “This could be my last song, ho/It feel like I’m dying on the edge, ho/Yeah, I be taking percs just for my head, ho,” he croons on “Lët ya know.” Later, he bounces between reckless drug talk and slight introspection on “Bak on ëm” over what sounds like a Back From the Dead era Young Chop instrumental.
The rage beats are the real issue on Up 2 Më. There are over 20 (yes, 20) producers credited on this mixtape, yet aside from a few standouts, the production is stuck in the same box. It’s a problem that’s more noticeable on Project X and Trip at Knight because Carson and Trippie don’t elevate the staleness with distinct vocal quirks like Yeat so often does. But it’s clear the subgenre could use a burst of creative energy. Maybe they could look to digicore, another community that has quickly formed on SoundCloud. The way many of those producers lean on distortion, glitching, and pitch changes would be an energizing twist to beats that are too polished and formulaic. But I wouldn’t bet on that. There’s too much money to be made and deals to be signed, and therefore any additional weirdness will take a backseat. Up 2 Më might be as good as it gets.

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The long-awaited collaboration between Minneapolis-St. Paul hip-hop pioneers Muja Messiah and I Self Devine is mostly an act of collage, with pro-black, anti-police sentiments dominating its most lucid moments. The most striking part of 9th House, though, is how it's equal parts loose and specific to its environment.

9th House

You can scoff at astrology and still be moved by 9th House, the long-awaited collaboration between Minneapolis-St. Paul hip-hop pioneers Muja Messiah and I Self Devine. The record’s title and some of its window dressings gesture at Jupiter’s movements, but the artists find themselves planted firmly in the Twin Cities streets they’ve defined and documented over the past two decades.
For those unfamiliar, Muja made a name for himself in the early 2000s with a string of show-stealing guest verses, before his solo LPs—like last year’s God Kissed It, the Devil Missed It—solidified him as the Cities’ sneering id. (He’s also written verses for several of your favorite yacht-owning rappers.) I Self Devine’s legacy stretches back even further: together with DJ Kool Akiem as the Micranots, he was one of the first genuine Minneapolis stars, to the point where his nod helped solidify Rhymesayers in its infancy.
Rapping together for the first time at length, it’s quickly apparent that Muja and Chaka invert the old duo dynamics. The two MCs still present the point and counter-point on a single theme, but where the variance in many a group setting has come from each rapper’s writing, it’s evident on 9th House mostly in the tone of the vocals. Self is gruff, guttural, and earnest, and Muja’s voice is the audio equivalent of that .gif where Birdman rubs his hands together in front of doves and an explosion.
That’s seen most clearly on "Arrow Dynamics": Muja’s "Diagnosed: ADHD/ For white folks, that’s a disability" and Self’s "Well-dressed niggas get hit, like, ‘Where the product at?’/ White trash pulling dime sacks out their Prada bags" complement each other, while in more similar hands they might combine to be too on-the-nose. The song’s hook, though, converges at the group’s de facto mission statement: "Gun up on my hip, I won’t bust it at my nigs/ But I guarantee I’m shooting at the cops, though." It’s clear, and it’s potent.
And it’s morbidly prescient: On November 15th, a Minneapolis police officer shot and killed a 24-year-old black man named Jamar Clark. Multiple eyewitnesses say Clark was handcuffed when the fatal shot was fired; police deny that he had been handcuffed, but have yet to release video of the incident. Protesters reacted swiftly, shutting down the I-94 freeway and, more recently, occupying the 4th Precinct in North Minneapolis. It was there that five protesters were shot, apparently by a small group of white supremacists. (No one was critically injured.) The following night, more shots were fired at those assembled. At the time of this writing, hundreds of people remain in the blocks surrounding the precinct, and thousands have marched through downtown Minneapolis demonstrating against Clark’s killing, the absence of video evidence, and the police response to the subsequent shootings.
Muja has even inserted himself into the protests, demanding answers in Mayor Betsy Hodges’ foyer and clarifying that he’s a “concerned citizen” unaffiliated with any political movement. That sounds about right: 9th House is mostly an act of collage, with pro-black, anti-police sentiments dominating its most lucid moments. There’s malt liquor, gold slippers, and promises to "suplex label reps," but when the MCs cut through, they do it with a knife that’s carefully pointed. On "IOFWUCUC" (an acronym for "I Only Fuck With You ‘Cause You Crazy"), Self raps, "Dreaming of peace and violence/ Don’t wanna be a martyr/ Defiance in my blood running as clear as water." For two men who would seemingly expect their closest confidants to read between the lines, some anxieties are made refreshingly clear.
The most striking part of 9th House, perhaps even more than its politics, is how it's equal parts loose and specific to its environment. The former quality is thanks to beats from J.Hard, M¥K, and Orko Eloheim, the latter to the Holiday Inn on Eleventh Street and Rashad McCants. In an unsettling time for Minneapolis-St. Paul, 9th House is the record the Cities have created for themselves.


While the Oakland rapper still has a knack for melody and easy charm, her album’s larger-than-life narrative is more mechanical and generic than it is fun.

No Explanations

In February, Kamaiyah released Got It Made, her first independent album after exiting a joint deal with Interscope and YG’s 4HUNNID. The album was a spirited declaration of independence, fueled by Kamaiyah’s lingering frustration with major label over-management and underinvestment. “I don’t need nobody else/I don’t need nobody’s help,” she rapped on “Pressure,” one of the album’s many defiant mission statements. No Explanations, her follow-up after September’s joint tape with Capolow, is cast in the same mold, again championing autonomy and self-reliance—with diminishing returns. Kamaiyah’s songs of freedom have become increasingly humdrum; though she’s in control, she doesn’t sound free.
“I’m a boss … that’s going to be my new narrative,” Kamaiyah said in an interview earlier this year. She meant it. Where Got It Made spun independence as a limitless, open-world quest, No Explanations narrows the vision. Kamayah wants to be a boss so badly it’s all she talks about, leading to songs and verses that feel more actuarial than expressive. “Once I hit the billboards, I’mma be going nuts/Been here four years plus, but still feel like one,” she says on “Scared to Lose.” On the pensive “Bend da Corner,” she mourns her lack of visibility: “Since I been rapping, still ain’t charted high.” She’s not the first independent artist to bemoan the vagaries of success, but her obsession with making it overdetermines her writing. She sounds like a shareholder rather than a creator.

To Kamaiyah’s credit, she believes in the brand. Where her previous music was indebted to the past and awash in nostalgic samples and grooves and homages to her Oakland roots, this record’s main reference points are Kamaiyah herself. “Don’t bring your bullshit to my house,” she warns on the brassy “Big Step” after running down her Oakland bona fides. “I don’t swang Chrevolets/Bentley, now I’m paid/Money green, count change/Different league, got it made,” she sings on “Bape Hoodie,” referencing Got It Made. No Explanations is full of mythmaking in this vein, Kamaiyah declaring herself anointed and untouchable. One song is literally titled “Chosen.”

The production helps sell this turn, trading the twerk-ready bounce and warm melodies of her past music for brash anthems and lush lounge bops. Multiple songs end in blown-out outros and plush suites reminiscent of DJ Quik and DeBarge. Champagne and Chanel get frequent mentions. The new Kamaiyah, we’re told, is larger than life, spending big, bossed up.

This shift might be more engaging if it sounded less mechanical and generic. Kamaiyah’s catalog is filled with celebrations, tapping into the full spectrum of feelings that accompany success: relief, ecstasy, joy. But too often the writing on No Explanations has more inertia than momentum or texture. The way she spins in place on “Art of War” is characteristic of the album as a whole. “I’m just one of a kind and I know it/Trying to knock me off my pivot and it’s showing/I’m a top tier bitch, I’m the coldest/To knock off raw shit, I’m appointed,” she says, her self-affirmations accumulating but not building.

There’s a thin thread of recovery buried beneath all the bluster. The sheer abundance of chest-puffing suggests Kamaiyah is trying to remind herself of her talent despite her years in major label purgatory. On “Go Crazy,” a funky song with a playful Bay Area bounce, Kamaiyah briefly removes her armor. “Swear I been lost my mind since I lost little Nate/Then some years down the line, fucked around and lost James,” she sings, her voice dropping a register as her boasts become wearied sighs. Moments like this add weight to her obsession with moguldom but are frustratingly rare. Though Kamaiyah hasn’t lost her knack for melody or easy charm, on No Explanations, the narrative too often obscures the person.

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This eclectic two-disc mix spans multiple decades and includes both the familiar and the underground-- all without being showy or keeping the listener at arm's length.

How to Kill the DJ [Part Two]

It's considered an unassailable virtue to have eclectic taste in music. That's how most everyone likes to think of himself, as the person who likes a bit of everything (the good parts, presumably) and subconsciously understands musical connections that extend beyond the boundaries of genre, scene, or geography. The appeal is demonstrated in the story of early hip-hop, which-- as it's usually told-- is the story of DJs who would throw on whatever rocked the party, be it Aerosmith, Chic, or some uptight German dudes obsessed with robots who happened to be so stiff they were funky. This mythical late 70s/early 80s period can be seen as the DJ's Garden of Eden before the Fall (before serious money became involved, I guess), to which so many yearn to return.
In practice, though, eclecticism in a DJ mix isn't always all its cracked up to be. If you've ever actually played music for a crowd of people gathered to have a good time to your selections, you know most of them aren't at all interested in the wild and crazy shit in your crate. One indulgent misstep and the dancers disappear faster than if someone lit a stinkbomb in the center of the floor. Most people who go out want to dance and feel good to something familiar, so club nights are accordingly designed to let them know what they're in for.
Ultimately, the thing about the eclectic DJ set is that's it's really, really difficult to pull off. Without the parameters of a micro-scene to guide you, the DJ has to know his records backward and forward to understand how pieces cut from different saws might snap together. When it works, though, it's something. On the evidence of their first official mix CD, JD Twitch and JG Wilkes-- who since 1997 have been the resident DJs at the Glasgow club Optimo (Espacio)-- do diversity beautifully.
How to Kill the DJ [Part Two]-- the sequel to Ivan Smagghe's excellent 2003 Tigersushi release-- is actually a two-disc set, with the first given over to a mashed-up approximation of the what the club sounds like in full swing, and the second containing 18 tracks representing what might play as people are filing in. This 75-minute continuous mix is a miracle of licensing, with 42 indexed tracks from 50+ artists, including big names like Love, Suicide, and Gang of Four, and many lesser-knowns familiar primarily to followers of a specific scene (Ricardo Villalobos, Loose Joints, Akufen).
On paper it looks like an ADHD sort of mix, with many selections lasting only for 30 seconds or so, but the Optimo DJs generally keep the transitions smooth and have an uncanny knack for building bridges between disparate sounds. Keep an eye on the CD player and it's often surprising when one track ends and another begins. How to Kill the DJ is a true collage, where the tiniest musical fragment has a job to do. So the seven seconds of Basic Channel's "Phylyps Track 2" solo exists to connect the throbbing techno of Luciano and Quenum's "Orange Mistake" to the industrial synth pop of Crash Course in Science's early 80s track "Flying Turns", which then leads to a brief snippet of the Revolting Cocks' heavy "On Fire" and then the Superpitcher Schaffel mix of the Quarks' gothic/sleaze "I Walk".
With all the uber-hip records flying around How to Kill the DJ never feels analytical or showy. So even when the pre-teens from the Langley Schools Music Project show up to do "Good Vibrations" in the middle of the CD, which would normally seem a guaranteed vibe-killer, the indulgent gesture feels earned. Besides, it's Twitch's set closer before he gives the decks up to Wilkes, and when the latter starts his set off with the insanely danceable D.C. go-go of "The Word" by the Junkyard Band, all is forgiven.
If the first CD is an approximation of a club mix, the second comes across simply as a mix CD, the kind you or I might make for a friend. No themes are overt connections, just 18 tracks of music that hang together. Angelo Badalamenti's gorgeous and unsettling theme for Mullholland Drive opens, other highlights include Arthur Russell's "Another Thought", Lee Hazelwood and Nancy Sinatra's spooky "Some Velvet Morning", Sun City Girls' "Opium Den", and Os Mutantes' "A Minha Menina". It's a record collector's mix, no question, filled with tracks that have all been labeled "cool" at some point. But as a collection of good songs that sound great together on one CD, it's a convincing argument for the power of good taste. Combine that taste with skilled editing and you've every right to be as eclectic as you want to be.


It’s important to note that Run the Jewels 2 is an album—it’s on a real label and you can pay money to own it. And the transition from mixtape-to-album explains every progression El-P and Killer Mike have made in the past year. This is the most viciously realized rap album of 2014.

Run the Jewels 2

Trigger warning: If you or someone you love is a fuckboy, do yourself a favor and steer clear of Run the Jewels 2. You will not like what you hear. Here’s a brief, but nearly complete list of people who are exempt, as handed down by El-P and Killer Mike on RTJ2: Malcolm X, UGK (Pimp C posthumously given the Lifetime Achievement Award), MJG, the Weathermen (both the hip-hop and militant factions), Gangsta Boo, Scarface (that's Brad Jordan, Al Pacino's is noticeably absent here), Zack De La Rocha, Biggie, 2Pac, Nas (ca. 1993 and also 2014, as this is being released on his Mass Appeal imprint). That’s really about it.
Otherwise, when El-P sneers, "You want a whore in a white dress/ I want a wife with a thong" during "Angel Duster", it’s a metaphor that implicates just about everybody in his blast radius—conservative and liberal politicians who hide their bullshit ideals behind "values," religious figures doing the same, beta-male types using performative tolerance as a front for their passive-aggressive misogyny, or just anyone who’s full of shit. For Run the Jewels, these people are what cocaine was to Clipse, sex to Lil Wayne, clothing to Cam’ron—their domain, their muse, a seemingly endless source of inspiration for the most viciously realized rap album of 2014 and most other years.
It’s important to note that RTJ2 is an album—it’s on a real label and you can pay money to own it. And the transition from mixtape-to-album explains every progression El-P and Killer Mike have made in the past year. Think of it as the Hell Hath No Fury to Run the Jewels’ We Got It 4 Cheap—the latter were freewheeling collaborations that introduced commercially exiled veterans to a new audience of microphone fiends and completely reframed their public perception. The sequel feels more like a statement, taking into account crucial constructs like sequencing, judiciously granted guest spots, and pacing. But Run the Jewels exchange Clipse’s unrelenting, and highly specific mean streak for a righteous anger that has a gleeful, conspiratorial edge—Run the Jewels get it and you get them.
This is one of the more readily apparent aspects of Run the Jewels’ development as a functioning group; they were a festival act from the start and RTJ2 is a rare hip-hop record that sounds like it was created with live performance in mind. They’re two guys with dexterous, booming voices over blaring production that’s percussive, abrasive, and dynamic. The first half is uncut aggression for any situation in transit, the first thing you can reach for if you’re getting elbowed on the subway or cut off in traffic driving down I-85. As RTJ2 progresses, it’s still the same detritus that filled El-P’s iron galaxy in the past, only now, the forms are recognizable and warm: dub’s echo and synth bass swiped from Amnesiac commingle on "All My Life", vocal snippets are taken from Police Academy’s Michael Winslow on "Oh My Darling Don’t Cry", and Zack De La Rocha on "Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)" before the real thing comes through to spit some goofy, try-hard "Bombtrack"-style aggro braggadocio that doubles as the best verse of his life. On the whole, RTJ2 is El-P’s most accessible and rangy production to date and he’s hit a stride that recalls Sonic Youth in 1987 or Animal Collective in 2004, the point where a celebrated noise terrorist starts to embrace and challenge their audience rather than simply testing their patience.
Run the Jewels are undeniably a crossover hip-hop act, and cognizant of their unique position—Mike and El's career-changing 2012 albums respectively came courtesy of Cartoon Network and a former blues label that spent years claiming the Black Keys as their most "contemporary" act. Both have been around long enough to recognize they share stages with EDM acts and fans with Future and Young Thug; rather than seeing them as threats, they view them as inspiration and competition, as it’s the commercial vanguard who are fucking with language and syntax as much as Def Jux and Dungeon Family ever were.
And therein is the most important lack of distinction on RTJ2, that between "old school" and "new school," "lyrical" and whatever its opposite is, as if hip-hop isn’t a living, evolving organism. El and Mike deliver both blows to the sternum and elbow-jabs to the ribs; there are hours worth of instantly quotable, clever ignorance, as in El-P’s already much-loved request that haters, "Can all run naked backwards through a field of dicks." Meanwhile, Mike’s verse on "All Due Respect" is a blacked-out, brilliant clinic in rhythm, wordplay and content—"This year, we iller than a nun in a cumshot/ Getting double-penetrated in a dope spot/ By two hard pipe hittin’ niggas/ On the orders of Marcellus to the soundtrack of 2Pac/ I beat you to a pulp, no fiction/ Tarantino flow, new Jules (Jewels) and Vincent."
Throughout RTJ2, the duo appear limitless in their vocal capacity, whether working as a tag team, storytellers, or engaging in battle-rap one-upmanship. "Blockbuster Night, Pt. 1" is all razzle dazzle alliteration, while "Oh My Darling Don’t Cry" compiles a career’s worth of flows, from "We Dem Boyz"-derived "hol’ up"s! to Adidas-scuffing tough talk to the triplet-flipping "Move that Dope" cadence. Any sort of geographical or philosophical or stylistic boundary that stood between the two no longer exists, if it ever did; El is just as likely to spit Dirty South double time raps about strippers as Mike is to wax about obscure historical figures and governmental conspiracies.
RTJ2is darker, bolder, and longer than its predecessor, though still clocking in at a bullshit-free 39 minutes; the difference between this and most sequels is that this one actually has a plot. Both El-P and Killer Mike are pushing 40, career artists spitting grown-ass raps about grown-ass problems. They came of age during a time when "the black CNN" was actually something worth aspiring to and hip-hop isn’t the one that failed to keep up its end of the bargain; I don’t know if they finally found the plane or have moved onto 24-hour coverage of the ebola panic, but these days you might as well be watching Channel Zero. Comedians are now delivering the hardest news anyway, and RTJ2 is more "Last Week Tonight", ditching the ironic distance that typified political humor and going straight for the killshot.
As with Vince Staples’ "Hands Up", "Early" is live reportage of police brutality that wasn’t directly inspired by the death of Michael Brown. Which is what makes it even more frightening. The racial dynamic of Run the Jewels is occasionally played for laughs on RTJ2; here, it's acknowledged in a powerful, unspoken way, as Mike’s role is that of the street preacher, empowered by the support of his people, whereas El plays the wilderness prophet, his madness spurred by the realization his craziest thoughts are coming to pass. Mike is harassed in his home over trivial weed possession and taken away in cuffs while the neighbors record the scene on their cell phones. Meanwhile, El-P walks the streets of New York untouched by the police, but affected by his own powerlessness. He closes his mournful verse with "They’ll watch you walk to the store they’re recording/ But didn’t record a cop when he shot no warning," concluding the cycle of violence with, "Go home, go to sleep, up again early"—the last line echoing "it was everyday America and that’s all" from Sun Kil Moon’s "Pray for Newtown", another anti-gun protest whose headlines were pulled from the past and has its relevance renewed throughout 2014 in regular and increasingly dispiriting intervals.
A similar splitscreen occurs on "Crown"; Mike’s verse is based on a true story, recalling his days of slinging cocaine to a pregnant woman just to make ends meet, praying for God to give him a lane out of this life. Once the kid is born, Mike sighs, "Heard he was normal 'til three and then he stopped talking," racked with guilt until he meets the woman a few years later and she relieves him of his burden—"I’ve been redeemed/ I found in Christ/ Whatever it take, I hope you find it, Mike." Meanwhile, El takes a surprisingly empathetic tone towards an army ensign who himself was just trying to find his own lane, pitying the man for voluntarily surrendering his free will to become a human weapon but understanding the choice in light of the mental torture. Whereas the broad scope of R.A.P. Music and Cancer for Cure made Run the Jewels seem like a one-off lark, the interaction between El and Mike on "Crown" and "Early" makes those records somehow sound incomplete in retrospect.
But these moments of reflection are wisely paced within RTJ2’s otherwise relentless assault. "Close Your Eyes (And Count to Fuck)" is the hardest, most celebratory track about starting a prison riot since "Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos"; sulfur burns and wardens are waterboarded, as, "We killin’ em for freedom cause they tortured us for boredom/ And even if some good ones die, fuck it, the Lord’ll sort 'em." The most unconventional social study occurs on "Love Again (Akinyele Back)"; as Yeezus proved, consensual, unorthodox sex is instantly heard as misogyny and the he-said, she-said hook of, "She want that dick in her mouth all day" certainly courts trouble. At least until Gangsta Boo steals the track with a verse of even greater demands and vulgarity, in the same way she made filthy Three 6 Mafia songs like "Tongue Ring" and "Hit It From the Back" sound strangely progressive in their gender politics.
Referring to "Put It in Your Mouth", the most infamous track of "Love Again"’s parenthetical namesake, El-P commented, "i feel lucky to have grown up in a time when filthy/stupid/funny rap songs could be hits like that one." RTJ2 isn’t backwards-looking or a throwback, but any record whose most notable guest appearances come from former members of Three 6 Mafia and Rage Against the Machine is nostalgic to some degree. There’s also the hovering influence of not just N.W.A. and Public Enemy, but also less critically revered innovators like the Geto Boys, Goodie Mob, and 8Ball & MJG, Southern acts whose intelligence and complexity felt natural, wisdom from stoops, liquor stores, and street corners that translated to college dorms without ever presenting themselves as "art" or "conscious" rappers.
As much as El-P and Killer Mike want to distance themselves from being seen as role models, they are; their experience just happens to sound a hell of a lot like the truth. Towards the end of "Lie, Cheat, Steal", Killer Mike digs a shallow grave for deposed Clippers despot Donald Sterling, but not entirely for his horrifying racism; what truly offends Mike is seeing the guy blubbering on TV, giving apologies he doesn’t mean in the slightest, outing himself as another "prisoner of privilege" in a system where even a billionaire isn’t in control of his destiny. And the common thread that ties RTJ2 with some of the other widely-celebrated albums of 2014—Benji, To Be Kind, and Beyoncé—is that each is an example of a seasoned artist using their financial and artistic capital to take control of the means of production and distribution, putting the least amount of distance between themselves and their vision. "Independent as fuck" indeed; sounding like nothing else and answering to nobody but its creators, Run the Jewels 2 is in a class by itself.


Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Lang's new album, Death Speaks, features Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, the National's Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, and Owen Pallett. As its title makes plain, its five love songs are in the voice of Death.

Death Speaks

In his youth, David Lang's music glowed with heat; in 2007, around his 50th birthday, he began the slow, mournful process of freezing it. A stiffening breeze ran through his music, and his works assumed the spare urgency of a life form forced to reorder its priorities to survive. His Pulitzer Prize-winning 2008 masterwork, The Little Match Girl Passion, scored for just four voices and some hand bells, huddled around a handful of close-together pitches like a body trapping heat; the highlight, "Have Mercy My God," wound slowly around just five notes, all within one octave, sending the same questioning note into the air repeatedly. Something profound had spooked Lang into a consideration of primal questions.
On his new album, Death Speaks, Lang stops dancing around the subject and invites the implied muse behind his late-period transformation to center stage. As its title makes plain, the five love songs on Speaks are in the voice of Death; the words put in Death's mouth, meanwhile, are Schubert's. "Something that has always attracted me to the songs of Franz Schubert is how present death is," Lang writes in the liner notes. "It isn't a state of being or a place or a metaphor, but a person, a character in a drama who can tell us in our own language what to expect in the World to Come."  The second the music starts playing, though, this framework disappears. When Shara Worden of My Brightest Diamond, who performs the title role, opens her mouth, you are not thinking about Schubert. You are thinking about death.
Like The Little Match Girl Passion, the instrumental forces are simple: Bryce Dessner of the National on guitar, Nico Muhly on piano, and Owen Pallett on violin and occasional backup vocals. If The Little Match Girl Passion resembled a frozen, minimalist recasting of the English madrigal, Death Speaks sounds like the stem cells of Schubert songs, attempting repeatedly to assemble themselves into form. "you will return" is set for a piano and electric guitar, played in a high register, blending together to fool the ear into hearing one harp. At the song's edges, however, the piano throws in compelling "off" notes, pricking the surface with the sound of modern, anxious thought. "I am your pale companion," Worden sings haltingly, longing palpable in her voice, on "you will return," while the music hesitates its way forward, one tangled figure at a time.
This probing reiteration of a single phrase, one that restates itself in a thousand different ways, is a trademark touch of Lang's. There is a philosophical tenor to this technique, as if the "correct" phrasing of this figure is just one more try away, and the changes, when they happen, ripple across the music more than they announce themselves. "I am walking" consists of a two-note guitar figure, with small throat-clearing interjections from the piano, while Worden and guest vocalist Pallett's vocal lines cross over each other. The final piece on the album, "Depart", a piece for cello and wordless vocals, hangs like smoke, darkening by imperceptible shades. In the pervading unease of Lang's new world, only the smallest tendrils of harmonic motion are allowed to advance the music forward.
This frozen wood is the place from which Lang's music reaches us now, and Worden's voice has maybe been never better used than as its human embodiment. Her rounded, glowing tone remains creamy even as it ascends into its highest register, and she brings an overwhelming sadness to Worden's Death, whose loneliness as she vainly pursues her charges, or even, in "mist is rising", begs them to escape-- "I love you/I love you/I love all of you/Your face/I love your face/Your form/I love your form ... Please don't make me make you follow me"-- is heartbreaking. Her Death is not just human, but humane, burdened by her task and full of compassion for those she visits. She is beautiful, but troubled, and her voice, like these pieces, rings out into a stillness, harmonic and spiritual, that feels both haunted and becalmed.


Former NYC no wavers draft famed alterna-rock producer Alan Moulder (U2, Depeche Mode, Smashing Pumpkins) for their high-gloss, ornamental new record.

23

The 23rd hexagram of the I Ching is commonly known as "Splitting Apart", the point in a cycle where upheaval and disintegration enters in. The number 23, heralded by many an occultist and rag-tag philosopher is often considered a magical number associated with change, the point in a series where new energy comes in to transform the pre-existing condition and change the trajectory. A pop example of these esoteric notions, sadly, may be beloved New York indie rockers Blonde Redhead's seventh full-length, 23.
Ironically, this career-facelift will most likely be the album that catapults this band to the red carpet-- more record sales, more exposure, higher profile tours. But serious Redhead heads familiar with the band's past forward-thinking oeuvre of magical melancholy will most likely catch a wince-able whiff of disintegration. Somewhere underneath all the high-gloss, ornamental swirlies and lacquered doilies are haphazardly camouflaged well-written songs.
Essentially, 23 consists of simply tunes much in the vein of the international trio's high water mark, 2000's Melody of Certain Damaged Lemons, which found the once angularly screeching Sonic Youth/Unwound-worshiping post-no-wavers breathing deep and relaxing. The songs are similar to 2004's almost as good Misery Is a Butterfly, which took said gems of art-pop blueness, but draped them in heavy orchestration and flirted with an almost too-lush production. Consider Butterfly the unsubtle foreshadowing: Allegedly, somewhere during the course of the making of the self-produced 23, Blonde Redhead got lost; unsure if their early mixes were going in the right direction the band brought in famed alterna-rock producer Alan Moulder (U2, Depeche Mode, My Bloody Valentine, Smashing Pumpkins) for a tune-up.
Whether the Pace twins-- Amedeo (voice-guitars) and Simone (drums)-- and foxy frontwoman Kazu Makino (voice-guitars) were already drifting toward overblown production before Moulder's involvement is unclear, but the producer's paws are everywhere. Take, for example, the title track "23" where seriously My Bloody Valentine–jonesing guitars and hypno whatzits whirl around Kazu's eyes-wide-shut ethereal unintelligible words, sounding like the coolest new shoegaze band on the block, but not the quirky subtle architects of wistfullness we've come to know and love. Another mistep would be "The Dress", where traceable stains of previous BR dance-y hanky panky (such as Lemon's "This Is Not") gets mired in electro keyboard chirps and droning draft-in-the-brain synths. You can't blame a band for trying new things: "Silently" sounds like a beach-walking Blondie track with girl-group harmonies; "Publisher" takes a Police-like drum attack and the trio's trademark minor-chord guitar lines but pads them with odd electronica effluvium; and "Top Ranking" smooshes J-pop cutesiness against Tropicalia breeziness. And then there's "Heroine", with its honey-I-shrunk-Kazu-into-a-Buggles-song samba. Innovative? Sure, but when all the day-glo splatters, candy-coated swooshes, and chocolate waterfalls obscure the individualized songs underneath, what's the point? 23 coulda/shoulda been the album where Blonde Redhead added on that much needed new wing to their mansion of moody cool craftsmanship. But instead, constructed right in front, blocking the entire view of the ornate and majestic building they took over 13 years to build, is a garish warbly and weird Frank Gehry-esque monstrosity.


After covering Sun Ra on 2017’s Bajas Fresh, the Chicago trio fires up a passel of arcane vintage synths and interprets eight more songs by the cosmic jazz legend.

Switched on Ra

Bitchin Bajas apparently have a new album coming out in 2022. But while Cooper Crain and his trio waited for their vinyl to get pressed—along with everyone else in the music industry not named Adele—they sat down and expanded on a really great idea they had on their last album, Bajas Fresh. Their version of almighty jazz pianist Sun Ra’s “Angels and Demons at Play'' was one of their most inspired experiments and, per the Spotify streaming numbers, one of their most popular. Now here’s a full album of Sun Ra interpretations made on 19 vintage keyboards and little else, available only through streaming services and on cassette, and supporting a Chicago organization that connects art instructors to prisoners at Illinois’ Stateville Maximum Security Prison.
It’s not a stretch to see Bajas cover Ra so extensively. Baja Rob Frye comes from a jazz background, and Crain has done sound for Ra’s former band, the Arkestra. Ra, meanwhile, was one of the first jazz musicians to play the electric piano on record, and his fascination with keyboards as both instruments and objects is evident on his wonderful 1969 album Atlantis, where he lovingly designated his Hohner clavinet the “Solar Sound Instrument” and then absolutely went to town on it. The title of Bajas’ album is a reference to Wendy Carlos’ 1968 album Switched-On Bach, one of the major catalysts of synthesizers’ early popularity, and while the sonics here are much more sophisticated than Carlos’, it’s an admirable act of deference for Bajas to shout her out.
In lesser hands, “psychedelic synth-drone band does Ra” could be an invitation to formless wankery or something that coasts on Ra’s cachet as an avant-music ur-freak rather than actually dealing with him as an artist. Instead, Crain and company use Ra’s music as the platform for some of their most accessible, pop-adjacent music yet. They’ve never sounded so interested in melodies, chords, and song structures as opposed to hypnotic loops. This rigorousness belies the album’s stoner-bait trappings, and if these interpretations are usually unrecognizable until the melodies come in, they’re at least honest and thoughtful about how to bring Ra’s music into a synth-centric context.
Guest Jayve Montgomery’s use of the EWI-4000, an electronic wind instrument, is likely a tribute to Marshall Allen, the 97-year-old current leader of the Arkestra and a proponent of its cousin the EVI. A more oblique but no less touching tribute comes from Daniel Quinlivan’s vocoder, which approximates the slightly insouciant voice of Ra’s favorite singer, June Tyson. She sounded like she’d been casually traveling the stars for years, fully at ease in the outer reaches of the cosmos; Quinlivan matches this quality with a goofy, almost cute vocal filter that sounds less like a portentous astral ambassador than a robot sidekick along for the ride. It’s a risky choice that works only because of a total understanding of the emotional tenor of Ra’s music.
Ra’s music often has a mottled, earthy quality, even when it’s recounting journeys across the galaxy. His compositions might lose a bit of swing in being locked so firmly into a grid of oscillators and drum machines, but Bajas make up for it with a vivid, consistent, and carefully curated palette. If you’re familiar with the Dutch art movement De Stijl, you might get a sense of what Bajas are going for, favoring bold and unsubtle swaths of color over muddied earth tones or Pollock-like melanges. While the original “Space Is the Place” bustles like an aerial expressway, Bajas introduce it with hissing clouds of organ steam, as if letting the room fill with stage fog to set the scene, before a vocoder enters to imitate the four-note theme that’s chanted incessantly throughout the original.
“Space Is the Place” and “Lanquidity,” both from Ra’s most sonically outré era in the 1970s, are the tracks that most people will recognize, perhaps because they’re the easiest sell to latter-day ears as some of his funkiest, freakiest, most pharaoh-hatted work. “Opus in Springtime” dates from one of his last sessions, in 1990. But the sound and feel of Switched on Ra is most closely aligned with the music Ra was making in the late 1950s and early ’60s, when he was calling his band the Myth Science Arkestra. Records like Angels and Demons at Play and Fate in a Pleasant Mood are full of loping, oblong-seeming music that often seems to crawl into the sunset. Bajas accordingly pace their arrangements at an ooze, and the album builds up a slow but palpable momentum over its 51 minutes.
But what makes Switched on Ra stand so tall as both a tribute and a listening experience in its own right is how it uses these compositions as the framework for something that doesn’t really sound like a whole lot else. Though they’re paying tribute to two old masters of the electric keyboard in a style that’s enjoying a lot of love right now, thanks to the reissues of albums like Mort Garson’s Plantasia and Beverly Glenn-Copeland’s Keyboard Fantasies, Switched on Ra doesn’t exploit nostalgia or vintage-synth fetishism. It’s simply another iteration of what jazz musicians have been doing for decades: treating old songs less like artifacts trapped in amber than confederations of malleable ideas on which to project a brand-new sound and vision.

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Here he goes again, looking at the stars, seeing how they shine.

Music of the Spheres

It’s been more than 20 years since “Yellow” introduced the world to Coldplay at their best: hopelessly romantic but not treacly, full of wonder but grounded in the present. The song’s cymbals crash and its lyrics pine for the stars, but it’s more than just some lovesick drivel. Chris Martin’s falsetto can sound mournful, as if the object of his affection has already moved on, while guitarist Jonny Buckland’s distorted chords are slightly sour, hinting at turmoil in the undertow. The “Yellow” video, which was filmed on the day of drummer Will Champion’s mother’s funeral, is similarly poignant. Martin saunters along a drizzly beach, enticing the sun to rise, putting a choirboy spin on the Verve’s misanthropic clip for “Bitter Sweet Symphony.” In the middle of the video, when he raises a sleeve to his left eye, it’s unclear if he’s wiping away an errant raindrop or a tear.
Since then, Coldplay have often invoked the cosmos—the stars, the moon, the planets in general—as they’ve reached for universal feelings while leapfrogging from theaters to arenas to stadiums all around Earth. They’ve also struggled to maintain the mix of paranoia and positivity that fueled their finest work; their last few records lunged from misery to ecstasy without examining what’s in between. These two trends—cosmophilia and a shift away from emotional nuance—hit a strange zenith with their ninth studio album, Music of the Spheres. There’s a loose sci-fi concept involving a distant solar system, and Martin has said he found inspiration in the Cantina Band from the original Star Wars. But the record is more akin to the franchise’s notorious prequels: overblown, cartoonish, seemingly made for 8-year-olds. Even Jar Jar Binks himself might look askance at Coldplay’s latest CGI abomination of a video, featuring dancing alien ducks among other extraterrestrials possibly kidnapped from an off-brand theme park.
Music of the Spheres is produced by Max Martin, who has essentially defined the parameters of pop music over the last quarter-century. After making his name as the go-to hitmaker of the ’90s teen-pop era, creating career-making classics with the likes of Britney and Backstreet, Max has since teamed up with established superstars like Taylor Swift and the Weeknd, helping them attain unfathomable levels of global popularity while maintaining the idiosyncrasies that made fans love them in the first place. For their part, Coldplay have never lacked in world-conquering ambition as they dutifully followed the tide of popular music away from traditional rock sounds across the last decade. So this full-album collaboration makes sense in a numbers-and-figures sort of way, especially following the band’s self-consciously modest 2019 record Everyday Life, their worst-selling LP to date.
The commercial strategy is already working. Spheres’ new single, “My Universe,” featuring K-pop kings BTS, who might be the only humans better at scaling the charts than Max right now, debuted at the very top of the Hot 100, scoring Coldplay their second-ever American No. 1. Their first was 2008’s “Viva La Vida,” a song that tactfully expanded what Coldplay could sound like after the creative dead-end of their third LP, 2005’s X&Y. Back then, Chris described Coldplay’s ethos thusly: “We can’t possibly get any bigger, let’s just get better.” The clamorous immensity of Spheres suggests the band’s philosophy has been inverted: Coldplay can’t top what they’ve already done artistically, but maybe they can score several billion more streams anyway.
For about half of the album’s songs, I would not be surprised if the creative process involved repeatedly smashing a red game show buzzer with the word “BIG” written on it. Along with the record’s hackneyed interstellar theme, Spheres’ enormity sadly chimes with what space exploration has become in real life: another meaningless hurdle for the richest of the rich to hop over, a VIP escape hatch. “Humankind” leans on a series of hollow millennial whoops, in between plasticine Springsteen chords; all gesture, no action. “Higher Power” attempts to repurpose the coked-out ’80s sounds of the Weeknd’s Max-produced “Blinding Lights” for a band that once made a pact to fire any member who got into cocaine. Featuring the din of a chanting crowd, synth-pop filler track “Infinity Sign” seems solely designed to play in the background of a FIFA video game’s menu screen.
But wait, it gets worse! “People of the Pride” is the roughest thing here, a midlife crisis jock jam where Buckland’s supposedly scuzzy guitar riff is filtered through what must be a plugin called “Dank Robot Fart.” In the song, Chris rails against a vague dictator figure who “takes his time” from a “homemade cuckoo clock” that he “makes us march around.” I think we can all agree authoritarian tyrants are bad, but so is this glorified Twitter rant.
Here is the part of the Coldplay review where we need to discuss Chris’ eternally frustrating words. To his credit, the singer has admitted he’s not a great lyricist, and that his songwriting boils down to “just a bunch of feelings.” Which would seem like a good match for the type of instant-pleasure pop Max is known for. But Max is also the progenitor of “melodic math,” a songwriting style where each line requires a certain number of syllables in order to maximize its melodic impact. Squeezing out the most efficient earworms possible sometimes means cleverness or novelty get steamrolled. Combined with Chris’ already-sketchy writing and the album’s ham-fisted instrumentation, this results in songs that don’t pinpoint a feeling but rather helplessly wave their arms in the direction of one.
“Let Somebody Go,” a duet with Selena Gomez, is an adult contemporary ballad seemingly swiped from Bryan Adams’ archives in which the pair aimlessly mope until deciding that “it hurts like so, to let somebody go.” Can’t argue with that. The crux of “Humankind” involves the revelation that humans can be... kind. Thanks to Max’s exacting formulas, a lot of these choruses will likely end up rattling around your head while you’re trying to go to sleep, but they’re so inane that you’re also likely to resent them for being there.
There are a couple of moments when these banalities briefly turn transcendent. “My Universe,” which follows a similar musical template as Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream,” bounds forward with the headiness of star-crossed infatuation. “You are my universe, and I just want to put you fi-i-irst,” Chris proclaims, adding some uncharacteristic finesse to the last word, like Mick Jagger might. Coupled with synths towering enough to be seen from the moon, an energetic turn from BTS, and an out-of-nowhere blog-house outro, the song breaks out of its market-tested shell and delivers a fleeting jolt of bliss.
The album’s best song, “Biutyful,” is also its most bittersweet. Guided by a simple acoustic guitar figure and an unfussy hip-hop beat, it is the rare Spheres track that is given any space to consider itself. Chris reacts with his most affecting vocal performance on the whole record, nostalgic and enchanting—which is especially impressive since he spends half the song pitched-up to sound like a squeaky alien. “Biutyful” is an ode to unconditional love, perhaps between parent and child, that doesn’t scream at you as much as it lets you linger inside of its dreamy gravity. “When you love me, love me, love me,” Chris sings, “I know I’ll be on top of the world, man.” It doesn’t look like much on paper, but the magic of this band at their most powerful has everything to do with their ability to turn something you’ve heard before—a phrase, a guitar echo—into something you want to hear over and over again.
There are too few of those bright spots, though. Instead, the record is more accurately represented by the video for “Higher Power,” where Chris walks toward the camera in a way that might bring your mind back to the first time you ever saw him. But he’s not on a beach, or even on this planet. He’s on a desolate orb called (checks notes) Kaotica, surrounded by a Blade Runner algorithm of a cityscape and dancing like the last wedding singer alive. There’s not much to see in his eyes except, maybe, desperation.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Asheville indie-rock quintet delivers an album’s worth of covers, revealing their influences via songs by Drive-By Truckers, Smashing Pumpkins, and Roger Miller.

Wednesday: Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’Em Up

Has there ever been a more troublesome key change than the one that occurs a minute and 40 seconds into Wednesday’s cover of “She’s Actin’ Single (I’m Drinkin’ Doubles)”? In the original version of Gary Stewart’s barroom weeper, the outlaw country legend seemed to be describing a sad, old routine—something that by now had become familiar enough for him to take a little comfort in sharing with the person on the barstool beside him. But in Wednesday’s take, listen for that turnaround after the first chorus, when the whole band starts winding up like some ancient, rusting machinery. You get the sense that tonight, for better or worse, might be their breaking point.
“She’s Actin’ Single” is just one of the songs that the Asheville, North Carolina, indie-rock quintet transforms on its new covers album, Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ’em Up. The follow-up to 2021’s excellent Twin Plagues, it’s the type of collection that, in a lesser band’s hands, might feel like a stopgap release: a low-stakes way of shaking off the jitters after a breakthrough. Instead, Mowing the Leaves feels crucial to Wednesday’s evolution, running through their influences—classic country, 1990s alt-rock and shoegaze, 2000s alt-country—to illustrate what the band draws on to create its signature blend.
Led by vocalist and guitarist Karly Hartzman, Wednesday have a knack for wrapping fragile, well-crafted songs in cozy blankets of noise. Many of their recordings are showcases for the extraordinary interplay of Hartzman and guitarist MJ Lenderman alongside lap steel player Xandy Chelmis. That key change in “She’s Actin’ Single,” for example, is propelled by whining electric leads, making the instrument sound equally dangerous and dejected—you don’t know whether to offer a helping hand or back away in case they start kicking.
If that’s the balance you look for in rock music, then the selections on Mowing the Leaves will suit you like an expertly crafted mood playlist. When Wednesday plays “I Am the Cosmos,” they make Chris Bell’s signature song feel even more doomed and alone, trading his wide-open mountain vista for a claustrophobic bedroom of warped keys and fuzzed-out guitars. In their version of Drive-By Truckers’ alcoholic’s lament “Women Without Whiskey,” they tear into action at the end of each verse: More than Lenderman’s plainspoken delivery, the moaning guitars bring to life its imagery of exorcizing demons and drinking deep in the grave.
As ambitious as these covers can be, the best moments maintain a feeling of unrehearsed chemistry, the way a familiar song at the end of a live set can break the tension. Classics by Smashing Pumpkins and Medicine are natural fits, but other choices reveal new wrinkles in the band’s sound. Their take on Roger Miller’s “Lock, Stock and Teardrops” begins with Hartzman strumming her guitar alongside Chelmis’ tentative lap steel, as if she’s teaching it to her bandmates for the first time. After a swell of feedback, you can hear them individually try to recreate its heartbroken shuffle with the tools they have on hand: an inquisitive bassline over the second verse, a chugging riff to carry the chorus, a musical break of layered solos, chasing each other toward a queasy harmony. “We tried our best to pay our respects,” Hartzman said of the experience, “but at the end of the day you can’t exactly replicate the magic of any of these tracks.” And yet, performances like these manage to feel inspired and original, capturing a magic all their own.


The New York producer’s ambitious album is a dark, surreal, jazzy collage about resistance and hope.

Slauson Malone 1: A Quiet Farwell, Twenty Sixteen to Twenty Eighteen

The defining words that linger on Melvin Van Peebles’ 1971 film and soundtrack Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song are, “They bled my mama, they bled my papa/Won’t bleed me, won’t bleed you.” The line is from “Won’t Bleed Me,” a story of a black man living in a world where the white man has all of the authority (sounds familiar). Van Peebles’ message is one of resistance and hope, a connection he shares with Jasper Marsalis, aka Slauson Malone, who lightly sings that exact quote on “Won’t Bleed Me: The Sequel” and in part molds his ambitious album, A Quiet Farwell, Twenty Sixteen to Twenty Eighteen, after Peebles’ groundbreaking independent film.
Slauson Malone comes from the genre-neglecting New York collective of Standing on the Corner, whose music is often a response to the social issues negatively impacting the oppression of blackness and its culture. But at the end, they leave you with a sense of hope and optimism, felt deeply in the music of rappers like MIKE and Medhane. In this scene, Slauson Malone is the steady backbone, sprinkling his sample-heavy touches throughout. A Quiet Farwell, Twenty Sixteen to Twenty Eighteen is Marsalis’ first album since departing Standing on the Corner, for which he creates a surreal sound of memory, and a soulful foundation to send a message of his own.
Like a jazz musician or a restless composer, Marsalis reinterprets the same song four different times here, titled “Smile.” Through this miniseries within his album, he discovers a defining mantra: “Smile at the past when I see it.” It’s a bar spit by a reflective Caleb Giles over a bright piano riff on “Smile 1,” restated with less energy by Los Angeles rapper Maxo on “Smile 2,” before dreary guitars and Quasimoto-style pitch alteration on Marsalis’ vocals feel like a descent into a dark portal on “Smile 3” and “Smile 4.”
At times—with short songs that hover around a minute, abrupt beat switches, and a refusal to hide his influences—Marsalis begins to emerge like a youth-injected Madlib. There are moments where it's easy to get lost because Marsalis is unconcerned if anyone can keep up. It can feel like you’re listening to a YouTube playlist of snippets. But the snippet-like approach isn’t a distraction from Marsalis’ message given we’re in an era where some (me) can go days only listening to leaked clips of Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert.
And, refreshingly, Marsalis’ music is not all message. His arrangements are engaging despite their density, using collaborations to make every song feel like a moment of its own. He spreads a fresh set of meditative voices across the project (See: Medhane, Pink Siifu, and Taphari) and adds extra life through contributions from cellist Nicky Wetherell and violinist Maya Balkaran.
Above all, it’s an album that rewards close, undistracted listening. Marsalis’ music inspires deep-digging into yourself (or Google) because when you’re lost in a song, replaying it, you pick up on new details each time, and realize every sound has a purpose. Whether the sounds are mournful sirens and screams or a saxophone riff on “(Fred Hampton’s Door Into Farewell Sassy) Na” that makes it feel like you’re the only attendee at a cigar-scented jazz club.
The beautiful part about the New York underground where Marsalis emerged is that they’re conscious of their brashness and unbothered if their message doesn’t knock down every door. Marsalis remains unbroken in a world made to demoralize a young black person like himself before they get the chance to reach this type of creative breakthrough. In an archived interview, Melvin Van Peebles said there were two responses to Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, “Those who got their game uptight, dig it out of sight, the others run for cover.” With any luck, Marsalis will garner a similar response.


Like the best lo-fi music, this debut LP manages to convey a sense of intimacy, as if it's a one-to-one conversation between the artist and the listener.

BiRd-BrAiNs

When you talk about lo-fi more or less inspired by folk, the best stuff always carries with it a sense of discovery. Cheap and tinny acoustic music should feel like something you stumbled upon, like maybe you dug it out of an old drawer or rescued it from the freebee bin in the thrift store. And then the force of the music should sparkle through the grit and hiss and distortion and make you think you understand something about the person making it. It's a romantic notion, one not necessarily based in reality. But the best music in this vein manages to convey a sense of intimacy, as if it's a one-to-one conversation between the artist and the listener.
That's how BiRd-BrAiNs feels. It's the debut album by Merrill Garbus' tUnE-yArDs (she's the lone member of the band) and it was recorded on a digital voice recorder and assembled using shareware mixing software. Garbus' primary instrument is ukulele, the tone of which is thin and trebly and lonesome, the sound you usually get from a barrel-scraping demos collection issued long after someone is dead. To this she adds her own field recordings-- the sound outside her window, a child being asked about blueberries, indistinct creaks and clatter-- along with occasional percussion that seems to consist of whatever nearby could be smacked or shaken. Some songs loop these elements into mini-epics that bring to mind an early, crude version of Juana Molina's one-woman-band aesthetic; others sound like they're being whispered around a late-night campfire burning a few tents over. The "production" is rough, and not always in an appealing way. The sub-demo quality's most annoying attribute is the blocky digital clipping that happens whenever the voice recorder is overloaded, which is often. So if you don't have a tolerance for cut-rate sonics-- and this isn't even the warm analog stuff-- forget about it. But if you do, the best songs on BiRd-BrAiNs can sneak up on you.
The ultimate draw is Garbus' voice, which can be husky and serious or else pitched up to make her sound like a kid humming to herself to pass the time. She's got a respectable amount of power and range, but more importantly, she sings with abandon. Take "Sunlight", a track that made its way around as a pre-release mp3. On it she begins low and sensual, purring the verses like a 1970s folkie about to lay down something heavy as a for-real drum kit bangs out a half-funk loop and an electric guitar scratches along. And then the song pivots and Garbus explodes into the chorus. Each successive "I could be the sunlight in your eyes, couldn't I?" is more desperate than the last, the frantic plea of someone who has never been seen. It's cathartic even as it leaves you hanging, the sort of song that begs for repeat plays.
Only one other song matches "Sunlight", and I'll get to it in a moment, but several others come close. "Lions" is both charming and creepy, halfway between a singsong schoolyard rhyme and a graveyard blues. The wordless vocalizations in the folk-hop "Hatari" could fairly be described as yodeling, but Garbus sells the warble with her fearlessness (here's someone who never bothered to wonder if she might be annoying people, and her boldness gives her an edge.) "There is a natural sound that wild things make when they're bound" is "Hatari"'s closing line, which is a perfect description of Garbus' unhinged mode. In between the best moments are some formless stretches populated with a few decent songs that never quite fulfill their promise. Still, the time spent collecting and assembling (BiRd-BrAiNs was put together over two years) turned up a few things worth holding onto.
Like "Fiya", the second-to-last song, which manages to grab the best elements of everything that came before. We get a simple and pretty melody on the verses, the "seems like it's always been around" kind of tune Devendra Banhart wrote so effortlessly on Rejoicing in the Hands and Niño Rojo. And then there's a subtle build, where additional instruments are folded in and the clutter increases the track's intensity. The structure is a perfect match for "Fiya"'s theme, which is about transforming extreme self-loathing into something else. "What if my own skin makes my skin crawl?", Garbus wonders. She concludes that a relationship's failure only makes sense if she is, in fact, "nothing at all." And then she moves on to singing "You are always on my mind" four times, toying with the canonical phrase (it almost sounds like "were always on my mind") and making it her own before finally letting loose with that "wild thing" sound.
Her amazing wail answers her earlier question: What if your own skin makes your skin crawl? Well, maybe you try and turn those feelings into something. Like, say, write and record a terrifically moving song called "Fiya" in your living room. You'll feel a little better. And then those of us who understand those shitty feelings can sit around and listen to "Fiya", and we'll feel better too. That's what the intimacy of home-recorded music is all about.


2xCD set of arena-friendly songs about California, sex, and having sex in California is split between slightly askew mid-tempo pop and regrettable relapses into funk and muso noodling.

Stadium Arcadium

Double albums can be fearless declarations of self-indulgence, an idea dump for a band looking to expand its boundaries, give the secondary members a few chances to songwrite, or share that gestating song cycle about warring clans of magical elves with the world. The Red Hot Chili Peppers don't seem to be likely candidates for any of the above, having spent a two-decade career trafficking in progressively diluted funk songs about California, sex, and having sex in California. Then again, they've given their record the preposterous pseudo-Latin title of Stadium Arcadium (what's next, a music review book called Thesaurus Musicarum?), so maybe the shirtophobic quartet is ready to let their art-rock flag fly.
Probably for the best, that's not the case; through two-plus hours of music, the emphasis here is on the Stadium. Like many of their peers from the heady peak of alternative rock-- your Grohls, Cornells, and Billie Joes-- the Peppers have eased into a comfortable life traveling down the middle of the road. Kiedis, Flea, & co. can even stake a truly rightful claim to the territory now christened Adult Album Alternative, having practically induced labor on the genre with the mega-hit "Under the Bridge" and their subsequent string of ever-so-slightly askew mid-tempo pop. Fitting examples abound on Stadium Arcadium, catchy tunes that will ensure a long tenure for the album at the front of the store. The band's sin, however, is one of self-denial: If the Red Hot Chili Peppers have pretty much mastered a marketable style, why bludgeon us with an unwieldy and inconsistent approach for 1/12th of a day, nagged by an annoying tendency to detour through affirmations of their technical talent and loyalty to funk-rock?
It could've been worse, as the sessions that led to Stadium Arcadium reportedly yielded enough material for a triple album. So the band has shown some ability to self-edit, but not enough to save the record from typical double-album bloat, the islands of good tracks floating amidst the should-a-been B-sides. Conveniently-- or perhaps subconsciously-- the set is still front-loaded, with the first disc containing most of the highlights, like the expertly paced sunset anthem of the title track or the one-peak-after-another rave-up of "Torture Me".
But sprinkled throughout the first disc, and coming to a head in the second, are products of the band's compulsive need to tip the light-bulb hat to their younger selves, most notably half-baked funk tracks "Hump De Bump" and "Warlocks". Whereas poor production values and drug-fueled exuberance once excused their George Clinton worship, 20 years on, in Rick Rubin's sterile environment, the band sounds like they're in jamband training camp, filling in all the empty spaces with blippityblap reminders of Flea's virtuosity and John Frusciante's desire to use every effects pedal ever invented (potentially the primary motivation for making this a double album).
Isolated to the occasional compulsory workout, these excesses could be ignored, but when they slip into the over-long outros of straightforward soon-to-be-singles, the band's lack of perspective is obvious. Rubin, producing his fifth consecutive RHCP release, appears unwilling or unable to push the band into any kind of challenging territory, settling for inserting a great treated-drum breakdown in the middle of "Readymade" that he'll probably mine the next time Jay-Z rings him up. Brief moments where the band takes on a new identity, like the Fleetwood Mac-style finale of "Wet Sand", are fleeting, while other experiments (the spoken-word of "Death of a Martian", the bizarre background vocals of "Animal Bar") simply derail right as soon as they leave the station.
Maybe the Mac are an appropriate guidepost for the Chili Peppers, potential guides for how to sublimate a once-renowned rhythm section into slick California contempo-pop-- hell, they even made a similarly uneven double album! But keeping one foot in the funk of their origins and becoming mired in muso leanings is a ball and chain for the band's current incarnation as radio-pop darlings, a period that has now lasted twice as long as their goofball early days. By trying to incorporate all these personas, Stadium Arcadium can't help but grow as distended as the name suggests, revealing a band too proud to merely play the game they've already solved or use the added space to risk a less worn path.


The Dillinger Escape Plan / Mike Patton: Irony Is a Dead Scene EP

Irony Is a Dead Scene EP

Sometime last year, omnipresent vocalist and Ipecac label owner Mike Patton teamed up with one of hard rock's current hottest commodities, the Dillinger Escape Plan (DEP), to record a four-song EP while the band was between singers. But the significance of this pairing goes beyond simple collaboration. It is historical. Here's why:
Love him or leave him, Patton's influence on underground metal and hardcore, particularly through Faith No More, is undeniable. His influence on mainstream rap-rock is similarly undisputed, serving as the template for vocalists like Korn's Jonathan Davis. There's a list of side-projects and guest appearances too long to mention, boasting an acclaimed cast of cohorts: John Zorn, Dan the Automator, Dave Lombardo (Slayer), Duane Denison (Jesus Lizard), and Melt-Banana, among others. And at the foundation of the legend, there's simply the mad genius of Mike Patton, a.k.a. "Hardcore Pavarotti", with his immense vocal range and penchant for perplexing artistic expression. He may be too much to handle sometimes, but it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call the man an icon.
And then there's the Dillinger Escape Plan: With only one release under their belts (the three-song EP Under the Running Board) at the time, this band laid down perhaps the seminal recording for the now flourishing math-metal genre, blending elements of math-rock, metal, and hardcore with a tip of the hat to modern jazz. Highly technical and intelligent, but still tenacious and punishing, 1999's Calculating Infinity set a high-bar for the genre, and garnered loads of praise for the New Jersey upstarts.
In 2001, while searching for a new vocalist to replace the departed Dmitri Minakakis (who took lead vocals on Calculating Infinity), DEP butted heads with Patton to produce this four-track EP. For a meeting of the minds of this caliber, you might assume there had to be some give and take, but here, the two parties complement each other perfectly by blending their two distinguished sounds into one primal force: DEP's cerebral approach interlocks with Patton's more visceral leanings, making for a seamless, happy medium of intense technical proficiency and quirky, creative flourishes. This one is on par with DEP's finest, yet it's more accessible-- and more importantly, it surpasses everything Patton's done since Faith No More's Angel Dust.
Patton himself hasn't changed. The cartoon-baritone hyper-rap on "Hollywood Squares"-- in addition to the Snarf melody-- tells you the eccentric Patton of old hasn't gone anywhere. Similar spastic rap stylings on "Pig Latin" further reinforce the point. And just in case you still aren't convinced, he sports a multi-faceted, all-natural Richard D. James impression on the band's rendition of "Come to Daddy". Yet, unlike most of Patton's other recent projects, including Tomahawk and Fantômas, DEP refuse to reflect the strained caricature of his vocals in their music. There is no "goof" in hardcore punk, and the band hasn't compromised-- these are, after all, the guys who shat on stage during a performance at the August 2002 Reading Festival.
The band's calculated proficiency stands in stark contrast to Patton's right-brained outlandishness; while Patton is busy stammering about "your mother, your father," and God-knows-what else on "Pig Latin," DEP are furnishing him with flawless funk-metal. The multi-faceted ass kicking of "Hollywood Squares" relies on the band's patented, eruptive math-metal passages to break up a modicum of Patton weirdness. And even "Come to Daddy", which may sound like a bad idea in theory, comes off with supreme ferocity: Chris Pennie's drums simply decimate iBooks.
The complete package is neither arcane nor peculiar. Patton and DEP have managed to find a midpoint between two styles that speaks to both sides of the brain. The only unfortunate thing is that we'll likely never again witness the two in action together; last year, Dillinger hired vocalist Greg Puciato who, despite handling his growling duties admirably, doesn't near possess Patton's vocal range or ambition. So it's just as Patton himself once mused: "You want it all but you can't have it." Four songs will have to suffice.


On Timber Remixed, the likes of Tim Hecker, Fennesz, and Oneohtrix Point Never tackle Bang On a Can co-founder Michael Gordon’s driving and rhythmic work for wood planks.

Mantra Percussion: Michael Gordon: Timber Remixed

Michael Gordon: Timber Remixed

Contemporary classical music and remix culture have not always been natural partners. Remix albums dedicated to pieces by Steve Reich or Philip Glass often sound more dutiful than imaginative—despite the fact that the minimalist school of composition has inspired countless approaches to electronic music. It's proved a tough problem to solve, yet the attractive idea of placing beat-oriented classical works in the hands of cutting-edge producers generally ensures that new proposals will be forthcoming.
Timber Remixed is the latest entrant in this field. It carries some familiar drawbacks, but also some ingenious stretches. On this double-album set, the work under electronic re-consideration is a percussion piece by veteran composer Michael Gordon. A co-founder of the influential Bang On A Can collective, Gordon’s approach to polyrhythmic complexity led the minimalist movement into some new territory, starting in the 1980s. His 2009 work Timber requires six percussionists to navigate a wide array of patterns, while each playing only a single simantra—otherwise known as a 2x4. (Their varied lengths can produce different pitches and overtones, a possibility first exploited by composer Iannis Xenakis.)
Still, boards are boards. And the limited instrumental range of a “wood plank ensemble” might suggest a static experience. Unless the composition itself is really something. The consistent feel of discovery that is evident on the 2011 premiere recording of Timber is due to Gordon’s talent for upending expectations. Rich and bizarre tapestries spring up all over the nearly hour-long piece. Pointedly, Gordon’s beat layers don’t build up in a process-oriented way that might help you anticipate what’s coming next. Rhythmically, Timber is a work of jagged surprise—even when this quality is masked by the surface simplicity of the wood-struck tones.
The original release of Timber was performed by the Dutch group Slagwerk Den Haag. Timber Remixed offers two different recordings by the American group Mantra Percussion. On the first disc, a studio recording by Mantra is remixed by twelve different electronic artists. This coterie includes names that are well-known outside the field of new-classical—like Fennesz and Oneohtrix Point Never—as well as underground luminaries like Ikue Mori. The second disc of Timber Remixed presents a complete, live performance of the original piece.
It’s a smart move to append a full performance of Timber to the remixes. In this way, the relative star power of Tim Hecker will guarantee that people actually check out Gordon’s music. Though while it is ably played, the live version here isn’t quite on the level of the first release—which to my ears still sounds like the the best vehicle for the composer’s designs. The live take on Timber Remixed features more sustain, and more bass-heavy pulsation. These qualities serve the composition’s most propulsive passages well. But they also rob Timber of some textural variance. (The original take by Slagwerk Den Haag has a drier sound that makes the piece’s eccentricities stand out better.)
As a result, Timber Remixed is defined more clearly by its remixes. Tim Hecker’s rethink has been billed as a reference to Steve Reich’s “phasing” compositions. And his piece does sound like Gordon as imagined by Reich, circa 1967. But by reaching back to a period of minimalism before Gordon’s ascent, this remix ignores some of what makes the composer’s music distinct. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s leadoff track has a light-touch approach that involves stretching a few drones atop Mantra’s studio playing. It’s an attractive sound, but you’d be just as well served to listen to Gordon’s music straight up.
Composer Sam Pluta’s take, which follows next, shows how much can be gained by discarding the central, wood-tone nature of Timber. After starting out with the collective sound of the simantras, Pluta transmutes and twists the percussion notes into purely electronic washes of sound that still retain Gordon’s melodic patterns. After this feat of filtering out the percussion from a percussion piece and keeping it recognizable, Pluta adds crackling beats back to the mix, for a bit, before closing with harmonics that hit like amplifier feedback.
Other acts with audacious approaches to this assignment include Oneohtrix Point Never and Deerhoof’s Greg Saunier. The former blends in synthesized choral accompaniment; the latter fosters a madcap flow by isolating samples and pushing them to extremes of timbre and tempo. HPrizm’s remix uses quick dynamic shifts to create an unstable, foreboding environment.
Some of the final entries move so far away from the source material that you’d be hard pressed to identify them as Gordon remixes in a sonic lineup. (That’s the case with Hauschka’s entry, which goes heavy on the prepared-piano.) Driving too far afield from all the elements of Timber can seem as unrewarding a choice as expressing undue fidelity to the piece. Though thanks to the most creative works on the first disc, this crossover project still shows that it's able to do justice to Gordon’s work, while also suggesting some promising avenues for future, cross-genre collaboration.