Best Coast's Jon Brion-produced second album finds the band leaning toward alt country and working in a more stripped-down mode, with Bethany Cosentino's voice front-and-center.

The Only Place

Yearning has been at the root of a lot of great singles. Pop music articulates desire, and you don't think about how much you want something unless you can see it dangling in front of you, just out of reach. Crazy for You, the first full-length by Bethany Cosentino and her Best Coast collaborator Bobb Bruno, got a lot of mileage out of yearning. Her songs structures were basic; her production consisted of the reverb-heavy, fuzzed-out nods to 1960s pop; and her lyrics found her pining for boys and feeling sad about being alone. There was nothing profound about Crazy for You, but there was something affecting; Cosentino was able to tap into a very specific kind of angst and articulate it in the simplest possible terms. Sometimes you want a song to untangle complex feelings and help you figure out how to get through what ails you. And sometimes you're lonely and bored and sitting there thinking about how you wish your cat could talk. For those moments, Best Coast was there.
It helped that Crazy for You was a little sloppy. Some music hides behind reverb and fuzz, but for Best Coast, the relaxed imprecision of the sound kept the music grounded. The rote chord changes and melodies and predictable lyrics (you've never heard "crazy" rhyme with "lazy" until you've heard Cosentino do it) were bumped around just enough by the messy production to keep things interesting. Best Coast's new album, The Only Place, is another story. Produced by Jon Brion, the sound is dry and comparatively spare; the guitars jangle and twang rather than fuzz; and Cosentino's voice, still strong and clear, is front and center. After their garage-rock beginnings, Best Coast are making a bid for alt-country singer-songwriter territory à la Neko Case, a musical sphere where the nuts and bolts of songwriting and storytelling are paramount. But it proves to be a poor fit. While shifts away from atmosphere and in the direction of personality and songwriting are often a sign of growth, here the clarity and sonic directness accentuate Best Coast's weakest quality: lyrics.
In every instance where there's an obvious choice to be made, one clearly dictated by the formula of a song structure or rhyme scheme, that's the one Cosentino makes. This lack of care makes the record hard to identify with. It feels robotic instead of relatable, and when your medium is straightforward singer-songwriter pop, that's a serious issue. The problems were apparent out of the gate with the title track, a love letter to California: It has no specificity and comes off like a tourism jingle. "We got the ocean/ Got the babes/ Got the sun/ We got the waves" is a couplet Mike Love would dismiss as shallow. It doesn't help that Cosentino has a strange aversion to bridges; it's hard to channel the classic songwriting forms of the 50s and 60s if you never write a middle eight. Virtually every song is verse/verse/chorus/verse/chorus/verse/chorus, and the resulting album feels longer than its 34 minutes.
You might be thinking, "Hey, you could say the same thing about the Ramones," and there's something to that. "Complicated" does not equal "better." But as a whole, The Only Place strains for maturity and sophistication. There are songs about feeling alienated ("I don't want to be how they want me to be" is a nice line) and overwhelmed ("Last Year") but there's no spirit to match the ambition. What's odd about all this is the presence of Brion; in interviews, Cosentino has indicated that he pushed her to work, to move from writing instinctually and try and create something outside of her comfort zone. But there's little evidence of stretching here. And with its slow and mid-tempos and generally plodding delivery, there's no energy to balance out the blandness.
The album does have its charms. Cosentino is still in fine voice, and she continues to have a warm and agreeable persona. The songs here are reasonably catchy and tend to stick with you with repeated plays. Cosentino also has a decent ear for pastiche. She channels 1970s AM gold on "Dreaming My Life Away" and adds some nice backing vocals to the "Stand by Me" chords on "How They Want Me to Be". The closing ballad "Up All Night", which appeared a couple of years ago in blown-out, lo-fi form, has the same feel as Santo and Johnny's immortal "Sleep Walk". You can almost see the wheels turning here: the same descending chords, some darkly romantic atmosphere. If the original is called "Sleep Walk", how about we call this one "Up All Night"? That sort of thinking permeates The Only Place, a grinding sense of marks being hit while inspiration is in short order.


Atlanta rapper Young Thug marries the hook-bending sensibility of Future, the pill-addled yawp of Danny Brown, and the playful irreverance of Lil B with the guiding aura of Lil Wayne's experimental period. When he finds the right balance on 1017 Thug, it makes for some of the best, most fun-loving rap of the year.

1017 Thug

In a landscape where Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame have proven to be, at the very least, reliable dispensers of either captivating displays of slurry brilliance and/or music that makes you want to slam your hand through a cinder block, Brick Squad's own Young Thug stands out as an unquantifiable wild card. His style-- which marries the hook-bending sonic sensibility of Future, the pill-addled yawp of Danny Brown, and the playful irreverance of Lil B living together under the guiding aura of Lil Wayne's experimental period-- is hard to define, and he uses this mystique in memorable ways. But, more often than not, he doesn't quite put that enticing package together. David Drake called Thug's 2012 mixtape I Came From Nothing 3 a "a dense, ambitious attempt to cultivate an entirely new rap style" while also calling it "frequently frustrating, shifting from eye-openingly original to inconsequential from track to track." Much of the same can be said about Thug's newest entry, 1017 Thug.
If it weren't for the moments Thug does puts the puzzle together, 1017 Thug could be easily dismissed as an erratic experiment-- many songs never get started and don't stick, and the ones that do get something spinning sometimes don't end up anywhere memorable. The thing is though, when Thug finds the right balance, it makes for some of the best and most fun-loving rap of the year, songs with multiple entry points that can't help but splatter and seep into the corners of your brain. Three songs, in particular, take you to these dizzying highs, "2 Cups Stuffed", "Nigeria", and "Picacho". That trio of tracks is essentially a crash course in what constitutes a brilliant, potential-flexing entry from Thug, especially when couched between more phoned-in thought bubbles like "Condo Music" and messy, meandering joints like "Shooting Star".
"2 Cups Stuffed" is without a doubt 1017 Thug's Wake-The-Fuck-Up moment, a song that builds from an unshakeable, wheeling hook into Thug's chanting, delirious demand for syrup. "Uno! Dos! Cups stuffed! UNO! DOS! CUPS STUFFED!" It's repetitive in the way that a hammer's thud might be repetitive. It's great.
Following up the annoying-by-design "Murder" is "Nigeria", a watery, Gucci-featuring track that sounds like Thug is calling from the corner of the club, maybe even the bathroom stall, maybe underwater. "Nigeria", an ode to the potent Nigerian strain of marijuana, gives Thug license to travel around the globe, to Jamaica, to Siberia ("Also cold in Siberia," Thug shivers). It's a good example of the tension Thug creates, batting the trope around in a playful way, while at the same time seeming a little dangerous and unhinged, adrift in the fog of drugs and his nasal fiending is the only thing cutting through the mist. It's something else.
Curious synths provided by producer Jay Neutron lead you into the bizarro universe of "Picacho", a pastiche where Young Thug envisions walking up to peers in the club and bellowing "Pikachu!," maybe even while wearing that red ballcap Ash wears. It takes its title from either the most well-known Pokémon, a cat/rat mixture that doubles as a tesla coil, or from the phenomenon of mixing up yellow-colored cough syrup with the more common purple-colored stuff. I'm not sure it matters.
"Picacho" is a good example of just how far Thug will stretch his voice and cadence, sometimes even leaping into a register that Mel Blanc didn't know existed. It's probably the best thing on the mixtape. It's pretty incredible.
One of the strangest things about 1017 Thug is just how flat the more high-visibility collaborations fall; none of the tracks produced by Brick Squad load carriers Lex Luger or 808 Mafia leave a mark, and even Gucci's appearance on the standout "Nigeria" proves that he and Thug aren't exactly cut from the same patterned leather. 1017 Thug, at its height, excites the imagination; if Thug can sensibly pour these influences and touchpoints into songs like "Picacho" and "2 Cups Stuffed", can radio omnipresence be that far behind? It might take more mixtapes than it should to find out.


Sade's 1992 album is a luxurious world of its own. Their most monolithic album is an ocean of quiet storm, R&B, and jazz-pop that surrounds Sade Adu's timeless expressions of desire and heartache.

Love Deluxe

In the mid-’80s, a new kind of jazz-pop emerged in the UK, mostly assembled by former members of post-punk and new wave bands. They blended jazz, bossa nova, soul, and some of the swollen negative space of dub into a sleek and buoyant composite. The sound was streamlined and modern, inasmuch as anything that scans as “modern” is just an effectively redesigned past. It was initially embodied in records by Working Week, the Style Council, Everything But the Girl, and—the only band included in this brief genre that, as of 2017, still records and plays together—Sade.
Sade began as a reduced lineup of the Latin jazz band Pride. Stuart Matthewman auditioned for Pride after reading an ad in a magazine seeking a saxophone player for a “fashion conscious jazz-funk band.” At the audition, he met Sade Adu, then one of Pride’s backup singers; after Matthewman joined the band, he and Adu started writing together. As Pride eventually fragmented, the band Sade solidified, with the final lineup including bassist Paul Denman and keyboardist Andrew Hale. During the sessions for their first record, Diamond Life, they would listen to Gil Scott-Heron, Marvin Gaye, and Nina Simone, and try to synthesize the sounds into a more seamless design. Often the mixture would produce crisp staircases of soul, like “Your Love Is King,” or liquid-crystal pop-funk, like “Hang on to Your Love.” Sometimes they slipped into a less material space; in live performances of the Diamond Life B-side “Love Affair With Life,” Hale’s piano, Matthewman’s saxophone, and Adu’s voice are held together by the song’s vast margins, given a ghostly shape by its silences. They were capable of producing a floating, haunted kind of music, and over time their attentions and their albums grew more absorbed by it. Just two albums later, on 1988’s Stronger Than Pride, songs like “I Never Thought I’d See the Day” and “Love Is Stronger Than Pride” seem to flow out of and recede back into a gently-constructed nowhere.
As their first U.S. Top 10 hit “Smooth Operator” described the jet-setting lifestyle of a debonair, dangerous, Don Juan-type, Sade came to signify a kind of cosmopolitan exotica—where one could travel to distant places on luxury airplanes, absorb an endless, glossy flow of champagne, and slowly sift through a hangover in a hotel bar. Their music was a portal through which one could effortlessly simulate such an experience, a virtual vacation in which the more severe physical edges of reality had been dissolved. Sade had also acquired, through their numerous love songs, the reputation of a generally romantic band. In reality, Adu’s songs are less romantic in form than they are glassy vehicles for a more introspective melancholy, seamless projections of love, devotion, and heartbreak that also seem to have just barely escaped the inner depth that produced them.
In 1992, Sade returned to the studio after a short break following their tour for Stronger Than Pride. They worked for four months, a shorter and less dislocated session than the ones that generated some of their previous recordings, and the album they made, Love Deluxe, is their most monolithic in sound. It is made of inhales. The album title comes from Adu’s concept of love: “The idea is that it’s one of the few luxury things that you can’t buy,” she said in an interview at the time. “You can buy any kind of love but you can’t get love deluxe.”
It’s this sense of blissful abstraction in which the album swims, a total slipstream of feeling and experience and longing in which one can lose themselves and their contexts. The band plays with an almost fluid dynamism, audible in the oceanic churn of Matthewman’s guitar on “No Ordinary Love,” or in the way Hale’s synth work tends to add long, drowsy auras to his piano chords. Matthewman is, in interviews, often quick to diminish the actual abilities of the band, and suggests they are guided less by supreme talent than by interplay. “I think one of the reasons we’ve been successful at what we do is that we’re all decent musicians, but we’re not great musicians,” he said. “I think we all play really well together.”
Sade had played against drum machines before, but Love Deluxe was the first time they recorded an album almost entirely without a live drummer, and the particular yawn and lurch of the programmed beats on Love Deluxe somewhat align it with the parallel development of trip-hop. Massive Attack’s Blue Lines had come out just a year earlier, and the distance between snare hits on songs like “No Ordinary Love” and “Cherish the Day” seems to open a space in which lushness and dread merge. (Trip-hop feels like a spiritual continuation of jazz-pop, but with the dub element having swallowed and warped everything else beyond recognition; it produced its jazziness less through polished holistic productions than through the harsh collision of samples.)
There’s also crispness, a vacuum-sealed quality to the percussion that links it to the Dallas Austin-produced R&B of the mid-’90s, e.g. Madonna’s “Secret.” The drums act as a skeleton around which the rest of the notes pulse, drift, and fuse into an immaculate surface, all of which feel like sensitive responses to the lunar gravity exerted by the band’s eponymous singer. The arrangements bend around Adu’s voice, its narcotic pull, the way that its range sounds finely sifted out of other potential vocal material, perfectly decanted.
By 1992, Adu had arrived at a particular economy in her expressions of desire and heartache; “No Ordinary Love” is a song about a relentless, almost sacrificial devotion, which seems to consume and replace the person giving it. “I gave you all that I had inside and you took my love/You took my love,” she sings as the band designs a kind of pulsing, amniotic fog around her vocal. In the music video, Adu plays a character that resembles the Little Mermaid; she sits on the ocean floor, reading a wedding magazine among great muscles of coral and fluttering plantlife. Lured by a sailor to the surface, she evolves legs and a wedding dress, and walks down a dock while throwing handfuls of rice over herself. She enters a dive bar, orders a glass of water, and pours salt into it, a visible gesture of survival which disconnects her from the people around her. She never encounters the sailor above water. It’s a perfect visual embodiment of a Sade song, in that it conveys the total isolation of desire, Adu’s mermaid caught not exactly in love, but in the continuum of fantasy and abstraction. In the end, she sits by the dock, consuming water from a bottle.
On Love Deluxe, Adu also writes her own character studies, though distinct from her earlier attempts in “Smooth Operator” and “Jezebel”; here she’s so thoroughly embedded in the perspectives that it becomes hard to distinguish her, or even them, from the feelings conveyed. “I collect ideas in my head all the time,” Adu said in an interview at the time. “The things that most depress you are often the things that you write about.” In “Feel No Pain,” she describes the suffocation and paralysis of unemployment; “Pearls” focuses on the trials of a woman in Somalia and the dignity of survival; “Like a Tattoo” forms itself out of the perspective of a war veteran Adu met in a Manhattan bar. “I remembered his hands,” she sings, “And the way the mountains looked/The light shot diamonds from his eyes.” It’s hard to tell whether Adu is remembering the soldier, or if she’s the soldier remembering someone he killed, or if the perspective has totally collapsed and is flowing back and forth unconsciously, less a documentary of something that happened than a kinetic sculpture of it, depicting an emotional vastness that floats somewhere beyond experience.
“Like a Tattoo” and “Pearls” are the most amorphous compositions on Love Deluxe; given their spartan instrumentation—one drumless, the other buoyed by strings—they feel as if they’ve been severed from their greater contexts and are floating in their own darknesses. But this darkness swells throughout the record, and marbles even the luminous compositions with shadow; it flows into Matthewman’s saxophone, which fills the margins of “Bullet Proof Soul” with smoke; it causes me to be unable to tell whether the guitar in “Cherish the Day” is spilling honeyed light into the song or is instead weeping.
Of course, this darkness could be native to the grammar Adu revisits most: love. This is a love with its genome completely unfolded, so that even when she sings of incandescent romantic delight, as on “Kiss of Life,” one is able to catch a glimpse of its origin, whether in loneliness, desire, or obsession. Conversely, in songs like “Cherish the Day” and “Bullet Proof Soul,” one is able to apprehend love’s expiration point, what it inevitably shores up against: its death. “It’s not hard to find love, it is to keep it,” Adu once said. “It’s something which is like [one of] the more mysterious things in life. It’s like death and it’s like birth, and it can’t really be completely explained.”


Best known for his music’s starring role in films like Amélie, the composer aims to become the auteur here—maybe a little too much.

ALL

Yann Tiersen doesn’t make music exclusively for films, but his sound is so visual and highly dramatic that you would be forgiven for misconstruing his body of work as one big soundtrack. His résumé galvanizes the impression: Tiersen’s earliest albums drew heavily from screen and stage, his debut even based on Tod Browning’s 1932 weirdo classic, Freaks. The title track of his next album wound up on the The Dreamlife of Angels soundtrack, while another song appeared in the Juliette Binoche film Alice et Martin. And, of course, there’s the whimsical French film Amélie, wherein director Jean-Pierre Jeunet culled music from Tiersen’s first three albums and put it before millions. “The hard part was making a selection,” Jeunet said around the time the movie was released, “because all Tiersen’s tracks worked with the film’s images.”
Following the austere piano and field recordings of 2016’s EUSA, the swooping gestures of ALL might again lead you to imagining crane shots and heart-stirring montages. For the album, Tiersen not only played every instrument but also traveled to far-flung locales to capture very specific field recordings, including booking a transatlantic flight so as to return to the spot along California’s Lost Coast where a mountain lion once chased him. He recorded a violin part there. If that sounds precious, that has been Tiersen’s method since the start. Gorgeous and overstuffed, ALL features Tiersen’s tearjerker melodies and his tendency to crowd them from all sides.
A lovely piano line introduces “Tempelhof,” followed in the background by kids at play. The piece takes field recordings from Berlin’s shuttered airport, which now houses the country’s largest refugee shelter; these displaced children still able to play makes for a bittersweet sound. If you needed to score a scene where a parent looks from a window and gazes at their growing child, this would be catnip. But midway through the piece, Tiersen adds all sorts of curlicues, from fuzz guitar and gongs to birds and weird radio frequencies, elements that dampen the song’s wistful impact. Tiersen often veers toward overstatement, as when synth squiggles, drones, harmonized vocals, jaw harp, nylon guitar, zither, baby cries, bird calls, electronic effects, strings, and finally a choir dogpile the otherwise elegant interplay between piano and shortwave radio on “Pell.”
In addition to this panoply of instruments, Tiersen uses lots of vocalists singing in Swedish, Faroese, and Tiersen’s native Breton. The voices suggest solemn hymnals, even when the lyrics are to be felt rather than understood, as on the stirring climax of “Koad.” They sing, somewhat nonsensically, “Where is the life now? The truth in pieces… How can we live like this?” Likewise, why does Tiersen need a full choir to count in the background of “Bloavezhioù” as church bells clang?
Through nature-based song titles and instruments mixed with field recordings, ALL conveys an overarching theme of environmentalism and humanity’s place in the wilderness. When “Beure Kentañ” gives way to nearly three minutes of bird sounds, for instance, it’s as lovely as what you’d encounter on a hike. But then there’s “Usal Road,” the one where Tiersen hauled his recording rig to the site of the mountain lion encounter; such indulgence obliterates the music’s solemnity.
ALL’s loveliest moment comes on “Heol,” where whispered lyrics in Breton tell a parable about a locked castle and “the golden key of language” that opens it. With each new sound, from twanging guitar and orotund choir to brass fanfare and dizzying strings, Tiersen builds tension, rising toward a peak wrapped with light. It feels positively uplifting—and also destined for an e-commerce commercial preaching connectivity.


The UK folkie's Wiliam Orbit-produced LP gets the remastered, reissued, and expanded treatment, and it turns out to be a pleasant surprise.

Beth Orton: Trailer Park: Legacy Edition

Trailer Park: Legacy Edition

Believe it or not, Beth Orton originally wanted to name this album Winnebago, but of course, rights issues quickly squashed that idea. The title she ended up with, she remarked in a 1996 interview, ended up working just as well: "Trailer Park conjures up the same kind of filmic American images, images of transience and dislocation... and funnily enough, when we shot the video for the first single (in an actual trailer park)... I had all these odd, rather desperate people coming up and giving me their entire life-stories in a second. Even though I didn't want them to." That image of Orton-- pitched as a new brand of British folkie-- shooing away actual "folk" while frou-frouing up their surroundings to sell to upmarket downtempo audiences, is a good one to accompany Trailer Park. Certainly much more appropriate than the cover image they decided on: Orton in Chucks, for some reason plopped down in a parking lot.
The disconnect between how Beth Orton was pitched to us and the way her music actually sounded was as vast as the barren landscape she fetishized. Instead of a lonesome troubadour traversing the desolate American West from carpark to carpark, Orton was a Norwich-born theatre chick who found herself in the midst of a rapidly-changing mid-90s UK pop scene. William Orbit spotted her in a theatre production and tabbed her to lend her plush, lonesome vocals to the opening track of the third iteration of his Strange Cargo series in 1993 (he'd also produce the since-disowned Japanese-only Superpinkymandy, technically her solo debut). From there, Orton fell in with an even higher-profile crowd: After closing out the Chemical Brothers' game-changing 1995 debut on "Alive Alone", she was scooped up by Tom and Ed's buddy Jeff Barrett, and his Heavenly imprint (at the time, most known for Saint Etienne and Manic Street Preachers) set about casting Orton in her first starring role.
While so many of the supporting cast has faded from immediate memory, Trailer Park holds up surprisingly well, and the remastered tracks still reward headphone scrutiny. Even more than a decade later, "She Cries Your Name" still sounds great, with Orbit's luxuriously gloomy string arrangement-- especially the way the cello's low-end signals the entrance of the chorus like stage curtains parting-- and the deft production hands of UK electronic scenester Andrew Weatherall and Bad Seeds' Victor Van Vugt providing the perfect context for Orton's cozy, impressionistic Americana sketches. Twelve or so years after I dismissed it as resolutely Lilithy I'm struck at how Orton's vocals on several of these tracks are much less Sarah McLachlan  than Zombies' Colin Blunstone, and how the best moments of Trailer Park find a similar middle-ground between spooky and reassuring.
Another surprise: the trip-hop rip-offs hold up the best here, and reward the remaster the most. Granted, "Tangent" and "Touch Me With Your Love" wouldn't exist without Massive Attack and Portishead, and Orton's vocals are nowhere near the level of Shara Nelson or Beth Gibbons, but that wasn't the point, either. Those basslines and atmospherics (and "Touch Me"s spoken-word) are jazz club and coffee-shop, not Jamaican dub or hip-hop, and Orton wasn't only safe from harm, harm isn't even a consideration here-- she's on her way home, she's having short and happy dreams. "Galaxy of Emptiness" is still over 10 minutes long, and still hopelessly romantic, and it still sounds as good in the background during dinner as it does on headphones after a few glasses of wine. Save the spliffs for Dummy and Blue Lines.
But how great would it have been if "I Wish I Never Saw the Sunshine", Orton's cover of the Ronettes' wonderful, Spector-produced original, would have seen the same sort of space-jazz reimagining, instead of the folky evisceration it got on Trailer Park? As much as the promotional campaign wanted to pitch Orton as a hollow-box singer-songwriter, "Sunshine", "Don't Need a Reason", and the James Taylor-esque "Whenever" remain the most generic and skippable tracks. Her Natalie Merchant side, however, retains its rewards in "Sugar Boy", "Live as You Dream", and the adorable "Someone's Daughter".
Putting nostalgia aside, the main question to ask of the "Legacy Edition" of Trailer Park, as with any re-release, is why? Aside from the obvious "the CD industry is dying quickly, let's squeeze every last drop out of it," do you need the original, nine B-sides and a three-song 1997 EP (all for around $22)? If my instincts are correct, anyone who's read this far has still got the first version-- maybe it's packed away somewhere, maybe it's hidden on purpose-- or at least selected tracks compiled on random mixtapes. At least for an afternoon, especially while the spring is springing, save your cash and spend some time with the original artifacts. It just might surprise you, too.


In a crowded—and excellent—year for West Coast hip-hop, G Perico stands out as one of the most promising newcomers.

Shit Don’t Stop

G Perico hails from deep in South Central Los Angeles—east of the Forum, west of the Watts Towers. On his breakthrough mixtape, Shit Don’t Stop, the blue-draped, Jheri-curled rapper bounces between L.A. landmarks real and imagined, haunting the bar at the Ritz-Carlton on Olympic, surveying his subjects from a stoplight on Western. More importantly, Perico channels some of California’s most colorful legends (Suga Free, Too $hort, DJ Quik, even Eazy-E), and rolls those influences into one sneering, swaggering whole. To that end, Shit Don’t Stop follows YG’s Still Brazy in providing a natural endpoint for decades of disparate rap threads that unspooled up and down the 5 freeway.
Perico’s most obvious analogue from recent years is 100s, the Berkeley rapper whose Ice Cold Perm mixtape and (especially) IVRY EP pushed pimp rap back into vogue. But 100s (whose music has mutated and who now goes by his given name, Kossisko) treated the profession as something abstract, a fever dream fueled by pager beeps and curl activator. By contrast, Shit Don’t Stop pulls the pimp into real life—not exactly an everyman, but a member of a larger, sometimes grim world. On “Million Dolla Mission,” he’s not above the law, but he makes it work for him anyway: “They booked me at the station, but I ain’t never stay/I’m a real boss, all my bail money’s paid.”
In that vein, the record’s closing song, “Streets Don’t Love Us,” is a lament for murdered friends and indicted peers, lurking Feds and nascent third strikes. It grounds Perico’s work by detailing all the forces conspiring against him; it also colors the more joyous songs by warning that the “blue Pumas, all suede” might disappear at midnight. All of this is bolstered by a story that’s already entered L.A. rap lore: earlier this year, Perico was shot in front of a recording studio in South Central. Instead of acquiescing to a lengthy hospital stay, he opted for a crude cleaning of the wound in his hip, and made it to his scheduled performance that night, blood still dripping down his leg.
And yet Shit Don’t Stop is a potent reminder that, despite the way gangsta rap is caricatured in the press and by detractors, the genre can be relentlessly fun. On “Nothin’ but Love,” Perico raps about jumping bail as if he was going to the gym; on “Dream Nigga,” he threatens to steal your girl and make her bring food stamps to pay for dinner. The second verse of “I Got Business” details a 4 a.m. encounter, where Perico reluctantly has sex with a woman (“I ain’t even ‘bout to hit it long/I just wanna give you yours and then get mine”) and then chastises her for not being courteous enough to call beforehand.
Though he’s a capable, occasionally exceptional songwriter, G Perico’s strongest asset is his voice. It clearly owes a debt to Quik and Suga Free, but it’s employed in a series of modern cadences (see: the first verse in “Dream Nigga,” where he slips into the same flow Nef the Pharaoh has been resurrecting upstate). He doesn’t break the structure of bars the way Suga Free did, but he’s nimble enough that he can hit technical passages while keeping his overwhelming cool.
Given that sort of smart, selective reverence, G Perico casts himself as a torchbearer who isn’t all that concerned about torchbearing. These are songs for long, sweltering cookouts, perilous house parties, and the maddening freeway trips in between. (As aggressively regional as Shit Don’t Stop is, it does take a stab at Master P’s “I’m Bout It, Bout It,” which, while most famously repurposed by Dipset in the early 2000s, has also been a testing ground of sorts for young rappers like Florida’s Robb Bank$). In a crowded—and excellent—year for West coast hip-hop, G Perico stands out as one of the most promising newcomers.


Armed with a blood-freezing voice, the 19-year-old Londoner Archy Marshall recorded his haunting early songs on a malfunctioning laptop, first as Zoo Kid then as King Krule. His Rodaidh McDonald-produced debut for True Panther/XL sounds roomier and warmer, but it's the same chipped-brick urban landscape Marshall prowled through on his previous work.

6 Feet Beneath the Moon

The 19-year-old Londoner Archy Marshall has the pale, fine-boned features of Ron Weasley and the rough shout of someone sent to crush your kneecaps. Unsteady, urgent, and skirting tonelessness, it leaks out of him in hair-raising bursts, a poorly kept secret in his birdlike body, and it heightens the emotional stakes of his music before you've internalized a word he's sung.  On his earliest recordings, first under the name Zoo Kid and then King Krule, he assembled a haunting, singular sound out of nothing but that voice, accompanied by some hard-strummed jazz chords on a broken-sounding electric guitar, some quiet, sputtering drum loops, and a blank wall of reverb. He sounded profoundly alone, but it was a jagged sort of aloneness, full of raw, exposed nerves and devoid of the comfort that solitude brings. "My heart got hold of my head and ripped it to its seams," he sang on "Bleak Bake", a representative sentiment.
Marshall recorded those early songs on a malfunctioning laptop; now he's on True Panther (and XL Recordings in the UK), working with producer Rodaidh McDonald. 6 Feet Beneath the Moon, his full-length debut, sounds roomier and warmer, and you can hear the music echo into the expansive room tone that McDonald brings to his work. But otherwise, this is the same chipped-brick urban landscape that Marshall prowled through on his EP. The music's surface swarms quietly with breaks, but nothing sounds busy or crowded, the way collage or pastiche-based music often does. It is muted and watery and stark, with a few intriguing elements dancing up near the top of the mix's surface: The drum track on "Ceiling" that sounds like a broken sprinkler; the muted jazz loop of "Bathed In Grey," the chirping "I just want you to know" vocal sample in "Will I Come."
Marshall's voice is pushed further to the forefront, and he explores its gnarliest crags and catches. Something in Marshall's stance reminds me vaguely of Modest Mouse's Isaac Brock; like Brock, Marshall's words seem to escape his gut like odd-angled shapes that hurt him as they exit. Also like Brock, he sounds warily intelligent, and though he projects a surly air, his songs are tender at the root. The lovely, drunken ballad "Baby Blue" turns on velvet, indigo guitar chords and a gently swooning vocal melody. Marshall has name-checked Chet Baker in interviews, and you can hear in "Baby Blue" what Baker's influence means to him: The song is flickering, low-lit, and romantic in a knowingly dime-store sort of way.
His lyrics occasionally play with clichés, and the way they emerge mangled from his vocal chords. "When positivity seems hard to reach/ I keep my mouth shut/ Because when you're going through Hell/ You just keep going," he yowls on "Easy Easy". The lyrics read terribly, but even these "Hang in There" clichés are intriguingly dented by the sound of his voice. He loves rap, and some of the word tangles here suggest an interest in the way rappers get to fling around vivid clumps of language: "The brain lives on but the vibes are dead/ Corrosively tread through emotionally spoonfed purpose," from "Neptune Estate".
There are some departures here, and they don't work well: a re-recorded version of the old Zoo Kid "A Lizard State" brings in a manic horn section to crash the party and Marshall punches up some of the least appealing lyrics he's ever written with an extra pinch of Tom Waits, yowling "Where's the fucking fat bitches" and "I'm gonna tear you apart from the inside to the out." Some of his earlier material is included ("Out Getting Ribs" and "Ocean Bed") and it still rings out as some of his strongest work.
The only issue with 6 Feet Beneath the Moon is that Marshall's sound is still a little inchoate, and you get a few compelling ideas rattling around loosely like pocket change, searching for a joining place. Over the course of 6 Feet's 52 minutes, the sound loses some of its essential mystery. Marshall still has a blood-freezing voice, someone to pay attention to, but 6 Feet Beneath the Moon doesn't feel like his Big Statement, not yet.


Radiohead renaissance man Jonny Greenwood makes his Hollywood film score debut with this soundtrack to director Paul Thomas Anderson's latest outing, set in a desolate California town circa 1920.

Jonny Greenwood: There Will Be Blood OST

There Will Be Blood OST

The first hint that Jonny Greenwood might make a gifted composer came in 1997, when, bored with the syrupy, provincial strings that dominated the tail-end of Britpop, he channeled Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki for the arrangement on OK Computer's "Climbing Up The Walls". Essentially a wall of quarter notes played against each other, that noisy squall stood out in dramatic opposition to the "Bittersweet Symphony"s of the world. Where the traditional rock approach had always been to use strings to amplify melody and opulence, Greenwood was using them to create discord and ambience; in other words, he was playing orchestras like he played his guitar.
While his interest in what he's since referred to in interviews as a "wrong" string sound manifested in later Radiohead highlights like "How to Disappear Completely" and "Pyramid Song", his compositional talents didn't become readily apparent until his imaginative score for 2003's sweeping documentary Bodysong. A lush mixture of strings, pianos, percussions, electronics, and otherwise unrecognizable textures, *Bodysong'*s sprawling fourteen tracks allowed Greenwood to indulge in a level of experimentation and free-jazz complexity that wouldn't have otherwise fit on a Radiohead record.
Since then, Greenwood's graduation to mainstream film work has been pretty much inevitable, but even still, he'd probably be the first to admit that a Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights, Magnolia, Punch-Drunk Love) project represents a pretty plum debut. Regardless of how you feel about Anderson as a director, few of his contemporaries manage to weave original music into the fabric of their films quite as devotedly. To score an Anderson project is to have a starring role in it; that this particular film-- a loose adaptation of Upton Sinclair's Oil!-- is set in a desolate California town circa 1920 only makes the task that much bigger.
After his initial contact with Anderson, Greenwood apparently wrote hours and hours of music for the film; in the end, the duo pared the score back to a very tidy 33 minutes, a small portion of which was lifted from Greenwood’s 2005 BBC-commissioned suite Popcorn Superhet Receiver. Nonetheless, this is all new ground for Greenwood. If the fidgety Bodysong was proof that he isn't ever likely to be short of ideas, There Will Be Blood feels tighter, more disciplined, and lonelier than anything he's done before.
Piano, percussion, and Greenwood's beloved Ondes-Martenot all feature, but it's the strings that take center stage here. While Greenwood has always been vocal about the originators and inspirations behind a lot of his techniques (Penderecki, Gorecki, and Messiaen come up often), There Will Be Blood's string arrangements nonetheless sound vanguard and exploratory in the context of Hollywood film scores. From the goosebump-inducing glissandos on opener "Wide Open Spaces" to the spiralling staccatos on "Future Markets" to the creeping dissonance in "Henry Plainview" (there's that "wrong" sound again), Greenwood's alien, experimental sensibilities lurk around each corner.


The first EP of a forthcoming trilogy from the pop icon is all over the place. It misuses her talents and makes for a largely unrewarding listen.

She Is Coming EP

Everyone who’s paid attention to pop music this decade, even just a tiny bit, has likely had some small piece of their brain melt away, replaced forever with Miley Cyrus Discourse. The moments are there still, probably forever: Twerking. Foam fingers. Weed. Molly. Dolly. Nicki: “Miley, what’s good?” Happy Hippies. Dead Petz. Liam Hemsworth. Robin Thicke. The time she told Billboard she was done with hip-hop because it was “too much Lamborghini, got my Rolex, got a girl on my cock”; then walked that back after realizing it sounded ever so slightly insulting toward the genre she’d flung herself at; then released a few soft-rock singles so studiedly contrite it’s a wonder she didn’t go Mandy Moore and offer past buyers refunds; then declared herself “over it” before the album even came out.
Why so fickle? Sales, partly (it’s easy to be over an album when the singles underperform) but also an underlying restlessness, especially with anything uncontroversial. In retrospect, the money quote in that Billboard story was near the beginning: “People stare at me anyway, but people stare at me a lot when I’m dressed as a fucking cat.”
On She Is Coming, Miley Cyrus is not literally dressed as a fucking cat, but figuratively she might as well be. Nary a minute passes where she doesn’t remind us that she’s nasty, evil, unholy, obscene, a witch, a freak. She Is Coming is the first of three EPs that, along with the forthcoming She Is Here and She Is Everything, will eventually become a full album. EP trilogies like this are increasingly common, providing fans (and streaming services) with a steady drip-feed of new content, and providing labels with live A/B testing of musical styles: redefining yourself live without having to commit. Miss the days of Mike WiLL Made-It? He’s back, with more guest rappers. Relieved when Miley abandoned rap for chaste country songs? Mark Ronson follows up last year’s “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” with another one. Fan of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”? Ru is on “Cattitude.” The stylistic whiplash is kind of like Charli XCX’s Pop 2, except not for experiments but for the many ways Miley Cyrus is back on her bullshit.
We’ve heard Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Petz; this is Miley Cyrus and Her Dead Horse. “Unholy” is a book-report summary of “We Can’t Stop”; “Mother’s Daughter” is like Katy Perry’s “Swish Swish” and “Dark Horse” cooked together with a sprinkle of heartland corn. “Cattitude” is a RuPaul song that Cyrus crashes in a pussy hat; she may call herself nasty upwards of a dozen times, but she leaves the actual nastiness to RuPaul. Then, looming in the middle of the album, is the Ghostface Killah-featuring “D.R.E.A.M.” If you have even a glancing familiarity with the Wu-Tang Clan original, you know what’s coming. (Actually, you can probably think of about three things the D might stand for, each worse than the last.)
But after an over-languid beat—the “C.R.E.A.M.” sample and Ghostface don’t come in toward the end, as if consciously distancing themselves from the song—and a truly puzzling first verse (“You’re in my bed uninvited/It’s fine ‘cause I’m in the mood/Hope you don’t mind if I spike it”) the only surprise is how anticlimactic it sounds when Cyrus sings the inevitable: “Drugs rule everything around me.” Cyrus has one of pop’s lustier, more robust voices, but here and elsewhere she rushes and swallows her lines, as if somehow ashamed.
For a six-track EP, She Is Coming is remarkably repetitive, but it does manage a few OK spots. “Mother’s Daughter,” produced by Andrew Wyatt (Miike Snow), has a decent enough beat and the bridge gets in a good hook, albeit one nicked off Frank Ocean’s “Swim Good.” Swae Lee and Mike WiLL manage some late-summer languor on “Party Up the Street,” particularly the sumptuous “Downhill Lullaby” strings at the end. And while Cyrus isn’t exactly doing the most on “The Most,” it’s the best she's coasted on a country-ish arrangement since “The Climb.” But there’s the thing, the elephant in the room: The Cyrus family got its largest infusion of goodwill in decades after Billy Ray Cyrus joined the remix to “Old Town Road,” which has been No. 1 for nine weeks now. Not only is a 57-year-old more believably at the nexus of rap, country, and virality, but he’s also charting higher. SHE IS COMING, the title proclaims; problem is, people are already there.


Two-disc deluxe version of the legendary indie band's Geffen debut adds outtakes, B-sides, rehearsals, and demos.

Goo [Deluxe Edition]

Never let it be said that Byron Coley (storied zinester cum storied music critic, and renowned Friend of Thurston) isn't above street-teaming when the occasion calls for it. That there's also a brief essay/anecdote by Sonic Youth's A&R; guy inside this Deluxe Edition package of Goo doesn't keep Coley from doing his civic duty, heaping praise upon this album's shoulders via wonky descriptors like "Mountain-on-Ketamine" or "a puzzle ballad about the road to oblivion." However, amidst all the polysyllabic polish, Coley offers a bit of truth: "[S]ome long-time fans were already croaking that the band was moving in a rockist direction, leaving behind the avant-noise roots that had marked their early history. Of course this was a load of happy horseshit. Sonic Youth had been rocking the fuck out from the git-go; they were just doing it in a language that most people didn't understand."
Indeed, if 1991 was the year punk broke, then 1990-- the year Sonic Youth supposedly bit the wax tadpole-- was when punk decided to step off the ledge. No doubt there were folks at the base of the wall, trying to cushion the impact. And, of course, they all ended up with egg on their face, and Goo in their lap. Fifteen years later, things have and haven't changed -- hair bands abound, but instead of Aquanet and spandex, they accessorize with chain wallets and MySpace accounts. And while Sonic Youth will never be ready for their close-up, there's stuff getting play on the radio stations that doesn't sound all too different from the more accessible moments offered on this here album. An album which, of course, doesn't sound all too different from the stuff SY was offering the kids prior to cashing Geffen checks, aside from those oh-so-important production values. Byron says howdy.
Thanks to the wonders of remastering, the gaudy glory of Goo is brought to the forefront. Thurston and Lee making like Lou and Sterling on "Tunic", the seven-second radio-dial montage leading into "Mote", the bombastic hissyfit at the end of "Mildred Pierce"-- all new-to-you, brought to you now in hi-def quadrophonic Technicolor! And thanks to this being the Deluxe Edition, you can compare and contrast the bright and shiny Goo against the storied and mythic Goo demos, which sound like, um, demos. You might prefer the ramshackle charm of "Animals" over the hit-it-and-quit-it tightness of the finished product ("Mary-Christ"), but you have both here, so there's no need to really choose. My ears prefer the Hollywood 70mm treatment over the handheld shaky cam cuts, but there's something to be said for the three-minute fuck-you danging at the end of "Blowjob" (aka "Mildred Pierce"). Also, the instrumental version of non-album cut "Lee #2"-- a gentler, twangier Sonic Youth-- has it all over the previously unreleased version that makes the mistake of adding words.
As for the non-demo bonuses, they're there. The kick to be had listening to Thurston and Kim talk beat over snippets of Goo (as part of some flexidisc promo)-- woot to the Watt shoutout, T-- but there's a good reason it's at the end of the second disc. Elsewhere, the Youth cause a ruckus, cover the Boys Beach and Neon (with Lee, of course, playing the part of Brian Wilson in the former), and there's a bit of that catchy rockist stuff that some of the fans probably still can't stand. "Can Song" is three minutes of dirty booting that's hard to resist. That Thurston felt the need to preface the track-- now called "The Bedroom", previously released as a concert-recorded B-side-- with a question about your mom being a skinhead is something best left between him and his therapist. Old transgressive habits die hard, I guess, just like punk supposedly did, way back when Sonic Youth deigned to pitch and shift their rock and roll to a decidedly bigger demographic and fuck it up for everyone. And fuck it up they did, thank God.


On their latest album, the ensemble that made their name in scrappy performances on the sidewalks and street corners of New York City and Chicago turns muted, spare, warm and still.

Book of Sound

Hudah, Cid, Baji, L.T., Yosh, Rocco and Clef and Smoove—eight sons of the jazz trumpeter, astral jazz pioneer, and black American icon Phil Cohran—grew up on Chicago’s South Side living apart from their peers. They were raised as vegans. They wore homemade clothes and hand-me-downs to school. And they lined up sometimes before dawn every morning for practice. Cohran taught his sons to play their horns young, in some cases shortly after they learned to walk, and they would line up as a family for “long tones,” where they emptied all the breath in their bodies into their horns, generating one rich drone that greeted the sunrise.
It was a meditative practice that you can hear take up root in the often boisterous and molten-hot music they make now, as Hypnotic Brass Ensemble. On Book of Sound, their latest album, the group that made their name in scrappy performances on the sidewalks and street corners of New York City and Chicago turns muted, spare, warm and still. It is their first without drums on Honest Jon’s label, and it is also the group’s most open tribute to the legacy of their father, whose interest in Afrocentric philosophy and astral jazz runs like a river through American culture. Cohran passed in June of 2017, and Book Of Sound is, at its warmest and best, a living, breathing document of his philosophy.
The music rings with the familiarity of family and the reverence of loving disciples, and much of it overtly references their family lives. The track called "Morning Prayer” is literally that, a drone around F based on the morning drone the sons played each day. It fans out like sun rays through Venetian blinds. Bits of chant and additional instrumentation are provided by their mothers, Aquilla and Maia. “Kepra” moves with the moves with the rhythm of breath, and “Now” mingles their own voices with the sounds of their horns.
The compositions are clean and uncluttered, with one or two melody lines interlocking and circling each other over an unchanging bassline, a structure that establishes and builds rather than twists. The brothers play in even-breathed tones that dilate like gas lamps or hover like Rothko paintings. The goal of these pieces is replenishment and clarity, not surprise. The rich changes of “Midnight” evoke a sense-memory fingerprint somewhere between Duke Ellington’s “Autumn Leaves” and John Coltrane’s “Naima,” and they raise more goosebumps the more they repeat, cresting in feeling as Aquilla’s spiraling soprano enters the mix.
Not all of the pieces on the album soar as high or reverberate as deeply. A few, like “Purple Afternoon” or “Heaven and Earth,” simply sit still for a few minutes, not quite accreting meaning or power as they do. But they are small moments, and they feel like worthwhile dead spots in an album this intimate, this bare, and this generous.


After a decade of home recorded releases on smaller labels, Ariel Pink jumps to 4AD and makes the best record of his career.

Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti: Before Today

Before Today

Most people who follow Ariel Pink were introduced to him by 2004's The Doldrums, the first non-Animal Collective release on that band's Paw Tracks label. From the beginning, Pink was presented as an outsider, a recluse who obsessively recorded at home and had compiled hundreds of unheard songs. The notion that he was a supremely strange person making music in his own world was fully supported by the string of albums, singles, and EPs that followed. First, there was the music itself, which saw Pink using an ultra lo-fo recording set-up to re-imagine cheesy AM radio jingles and lost new wave tracks as surreal, art-damaged pop. His music could be bizarre and disturbing, with warped voices and dark subject manner evoking loneliness, bad drugs, and alienation; it could also be sweet and even sincere, celebrating the pleasure of a well-rendered verse melody and a good chorus.
Then there was the fact that the recordings themselves had apparently been excavated from a cache of material from another time: The vast majority of the music he's released since 2004 was written and recorded years earlier, mostly between 1998 and 2002. So a certain amount of mystery was part of the package, and the recordings weren't giving anything away. His releases never struck me as possessing the level of genius his most ardent supporters hear in them, but that was OK, because he didn't seem like he was setting out to make masterpieces.
Something unusual has happened to Ariel Pink since he first started sharing those tapes with the wider world, though. Think of it like the cliché about The Velvet Underground & Nico, but on a smaller, more craft-y scale: His records didn't reach a lot of people, but many of those who heard them were inspired to start home recording projects of their own. So as different kinds of lo-fi music bubbled up from the indie underground in the last couple of years-- from more placid chillwave to roughed-up garage rock to abstract instrumental music-- and many of these bands were talking about his influence, all of a sudden Ariel Pink started looking way ahead of the game. And now, he's been given a chance to do something few artists working on his scale ever do: record an album more or less professionally for a large independent label and enjoy all the increased attention such a leap provides. He did not waste the opportunity.
Oddly, the difference in fidelity isn't what sets this record apart from earlier Ariel Pink releases. While much of the tape hiss that marked those records is gone, along with the degraded audio quality that came off those old, decaying cassettes, this is still a pretty modest-sounding LP, recorded simply and cleanly but not, from the sound of it, expensively. Haunted Graffiti, which began as an abstract concept, has also turned into a full band featuring experienced members who've spent years playing in established independent acts, and each took care to get their various parts right. The vocal harmonies overlap just so, the guitar fills are in the right places, the drumming is tight and precise, and bassist Tim Koh in particular colors the songs with striking rhythmic and countermelodic depth. It turns out that these details make a big difference, even while the album adheres to the hazy overriding aesthetic of Pink's earlier records. The fact that this is, in a sense, Ariel Pink's first group of songs created to be released together and presented as a whole-- as an album, rather than as a collection of songs recorded years ago-- sets the table for a new focus.
We know from interviews that Ariel Pink grew up absorbing throwaway pop from the 70s and 80s, finding a way to make it all fit into his cracked worldview. Something overlooked about those songs, though, is that the people writing them were pros who knew something about intros, codas, and middle-eights, how a certain kind of chord change can cause the turnaround to the chorus to hit a little harder. Ariel Pink's best songs are surprising, and there's a real sense of musical delight on Before Today; the sections sound logical but never predictable, and there are wild bridges and short bits that emerge seemingly randomly but wind up taking the song somewhere unexpected. So "L'estat (Acc. to the Widow's Maid)" goes from a rollicking organ-led opening section to a catchy call-and-response chorus hook the Monkees might have liked to a short double-time instrumental section to a jubilant coda, and all the while the stitches never show. Songs like "Little Wig" have so many interesting interlocking parts that they can almost feel proggy, despite their relative brevity and tight pop structures.
Since a number of these songs exist in earlier versions on other records, it's easy to hear how they benefit from Before Today's more worked-over approach. "Beverly Kills" was a fine song in its original incarnation on the 2002 edition of Scared Famous (it also appeared on last year's Grandes Exitos comp), but it has so much more power here. Opening with roller-rink keyboards, a popping bass, and car chase sound effects, it feels loose and casual until the falsetto vocals snap into place, sounding suddenly like Philip Bailey on a lost Earth, Wind & Fire jam. The delicate soft rock of "Can't Hear My Eyes", also heard twice before in slightly cruder forms, benefits greatly from just a few more dabs of production mousse. It's a song that wants to be slick, bringing to mind carefully layered singles by Alan Parsons Project, complete with swells of synthetic strings and a smooth sax interlude.
And then there's "Round and Round", one of indiedom's most unifying and memorable songs in 2010, which is barely recognizable from its early four-track incarnation as "Frontman/Hold On (I'm Calling)". It's another song of smartly integrated units of melody, any one of which might be built out into a great song of its own, but which together become something astonishing. Its circular bassline doubles with low-chanted voices that build up tension and mystery, a connecting section that opens the song up with a high-pitched plea, and an interlude section with a ringing phone and some jazzy keyboards, all of which build to the massive sing-along chorus. "Round and Round" was mastered at Abbey Road, and not a cent of that cost was wasted. It is endlessly replayable.
Alongside these grabbier tunes are tracks that retain the uncanny, otherworldly sense that has been a constant thread through Ariel Pink's music. Best among these is "Menopause Man," which goes from grim deadpan verses to a fascinatingly beautiful chorus that sounds beamed in from another era, yet remains elusive and difficult to place. But even given the varied style and tone on Before Today-- there's a queasy instrumental and a faithful cover of the 60s garage rock song "Bright Lit Blue Skies"-- it feels of a piece and uniformly strong, and there's so much going on that it only seems to improve the more you listen to it.
It's a rare feat for artists to maintain a truly unique sound while taking their music in a direction that appeals to a wider audience. For those who've been following along for a few years, this is a groundbreaking record that condenses and amplifies Ariel Pink's most accessible tendencies. But the brilliant thing about Before Today is that no prior knowledge of his catalog is required. Newcomers can dig into this record and absorb all of these weird and wonderful songs now, and save the backstory for another day.


A few months ago, A$AP Rocky's career seemed mired in purgatory as his major label debut continued to be pushed back. But LongLiveA$AP actually delivers on and even exceeds the promise of 2011's LiveLoveA$AP mixtape, preserving Rocky's immaculate taste while smartly upgrading his sound.

LongLiveA$AP

A few months ago, A$AP Rocky's career seemed mired in purgatory. The 24-year-old Harlem rapper had a spectacular 2011, snagging a still-crazy $3 million deal with RCA based on early buzz and then silencing skeptics with his breakout LiveLoveA$AP mixtape. But throughout 2012, LongLiveA$AP repeatedly failed to materialize. It was slated for July 4th, then September 11th, October 31, and eventually, sometime in December. When the final pushback happened, into the dead zone just after the new year, it began to feel like RCA was attempting to quietly jettison their investment from the corporate hull.
But LongLiveA$AP delivers on and even exceeds the promise of LiveLoveA$AP. Like that mixtape, the album is a triumph of craft and curation, preserving Rocky's immaculate taste while smartly upgrading his sound. A third of the record remains close in style to LiveLoveA$AP while most of the collaborations follow in the steps of last spring's "Goldie", which stamped producer Hit-Boy's signature Mini-Boss Musik with a screwed-up hook and gumball-spitting flow that marked it as unmistakably Rocky's. Plenty of rap-industry heavies appear on LongLiveA$AP, and they mix well with Rocky's younger comrades. More importantly, the French-braid gold-teeth kid named after Rakim never cedes the center. For someone often criticized for his lack of depth, A$AP Rocky keeps delivering in the face of skepticism.
Even the most dubious ideas succeed on LongLiveA$AP. For example, A$AP Rocky's team-up with Skrillex, "Wild for the Night", bombs your cortex with screaming lasers, stadium-sized reverb, and a reggae-derived organ lope, and the beat feels like being on the receiving end of a perfectly executed Tekken chain combo. It seems like it should be impossible to rap over, but Rocky’s sweat-free double-dutch is an easy fit. Santigold handles the chorus hook on “Hell”, one of two Clams Casino beats on the album, and it feels just as unforced.
A$AP Rocky sounds natural in every setting; along with his command of rhythm and cadence, this is his greatest gift. Whether he's showing off double- and triple-time bounce in the T-Minus-produced "PMW (All I Really Need)" or dodging RZA-styled string chops on "1 Train" alongside a collision of hot rappers including Action Bronson, Big K.R.I.T., and Kendrick Lamar, Rocky sounds utterly at home. Even when he stomps through a queasy Odd Future-style battlefield on “Jodye”, he fully owns the mold. That kind of malleability is crucial to pop stardom, and make no mistake, pop stardom is what Rocky's gunning for. His lyrics, a riot of lifestyle brands and other desirables, can feel like standing in front of a closet of prohibitively expensive designer goods: There isn't much to feel unless you consider "like three million bucks" a feeling. But besides the Girbaud jeans with hologram straps and reflectors, the Margielas with no laces, the Escada and Balenciaga and Audemars Piguet, there's a lot going on in Rocky's head.
Late-album track "Suddenly" bears a co-producing credit from "Lord Flacko," aka Rocky himself. In it, a drumless vocal sample fights its way to the surface through layers of aquatic muffling, teasing a titanic beat-drop that keeps not arriving. The song is almost all intro: When the beat finally hits, it only lingers for a few bars before disappearing again. Over this master class in tension and release, Rocky summons childhood memories in calm, expansive strokes: "Everybody have roaches, but our roaches ain't respect us," he cracks, flashing a previously unseen storytelling flair: "We had cookouts and dirt bikes and dice games and fist fights/ And fish fries and shootouts like one Sig with two rounds/ In one clip, left two down, that's four kids/ But one lived, left three dead but one split/ That one missed, that one snitched." The song is a forceful reminder of his birthplace and heritage.
Rocky’s New York story has partly been a story of how there is no coherent New York story anymore: Bay Area rappers like the Jacka convincingly channel the gray Queensbridge fatalism of Mobb Deep and Cormega while in Harlem, Rocky soaked up styles happening hundreds of miles away-- Houston screw music, UGK, Bone Thugs. But beneath the 90s-baby trappings, Rocky is a certain breed of Harlem rapper incarnate-- flashy, ambitious, and affably determined to cross over. The flamboyance and singsong rhyme patterns of the Diplomats are an obvious primary color. But reaching further back, to another Harlemite with a deceptively catchy flow, agreeable air, and penchant for colorful clothing, and you find another kindred spirit in Ma$e. Like Ma$e, Rocky tucks steely edges behind a goofy smile. He has the same unerring instinct for balancing pop smarts and street edge and a similar disregard for New York orthodoxy. He’s also consistently dismissed as a lightweight. It's true, Rocky may not be the answer to New York rap's savior complex. But he is undeniably a hit-maker and a major new rap star for a city that sorely needs one. And with LongLiveA$AP, he's beaten expectations twice.

A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA


The MPC wizard’s ethereal synths are the perfect complement to Harmony Korine’s over-the-top spectacle, playing up its impressionistic textures and humanizing its hallucinatory violence.

AraabMuzik: AGGRO DR1FT (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

It’s the end of the world, and everyone is fighting for loot drops. The chorister singing the requiem is Harmony Korine, who since Gummo has found increasingly kaleidoscopic ways to depict the beauty and horror of a society eating itself. If Spring Breakers vaulted his perverse visions into the mainstream bacchanal of red Solo cups and multi-floor EDM ragers, his latest film flips the script for a more isolated age. AGGRO DR1FT, shot entirely in eye-dilating thermal vision, is a nightmare of few words: Miami assassins hunt each other down, praying for an end to the violence as motion-capture demons haunt the skies above them. Cartoonish side characters dispense assignments with the mechanical exaggeration of Grand Theft Auto NPCs. Pole dancers spark firecrackers up and down their bodies while dissolving into a quagmire of robotic A.I. slush. Travis Scott shows up. Either you’ll think the whole thing is mind-numbingly tasteless, or you’ll find a sick truth in its garish absurdity.
AraabMuzik’s voided-out score is key to the film’s hypebeast ego-death aura. Tapping the Rhode Island producer for a project like this may seem like a throwback—he hasn’t really seen the spotlight since his days sharing festival billings with Zedd and Clams Casino (even if his trance-meets-trap 2011 debut, Electronic Dream, still sounds as euphoric as ever). But listening to his music for AGGRO DR1FT, it’s hard to fathom that he and Korine didn’t link up sooner. AraabMuzik’s bottle-service transcendence clearly inhabits the same universe as Spring Breakers, a molly-fueled fantasy reaching longingly toward the heavens. Rather than sliding his usual rapidfire MPC finger drumming into the picture, however, AraabMuzik ventures into new realms, luxuriating in a pure synth soundscape that renders Korine’s dystopian hellworld one tone at a time.
Drawing on the language of gaming and experimental film, AGGRO DR1FT deals mainly in impressionistic texture (it has more in common with one of Phil Solomon’s PlayStation elegies than the shoot-em-ups it pretends to be). AraabMuzik’s soundtrack similarly hits on the most basic sensory levels. Apparently texted to Korine in bits and pieces without seeing the movie, AraabMuzik’s score is collected as a series of loops often lasting a minute or less, alongside a handful of slightly longer tracks that take more room to stretch their legs. In the film, Korine slows these snippets down, speeds them up, and stretches them out until they glow like magma. Perusing them all at once creates the same sensation as scrolling through levels on a mission select screen.
Color is Korine’s primary weapon in AGGRO DR1FT, and AraabMuzik’s lush sketches provide deeper pigmentation to his infrared hallucinations. “The Summoning” sets the scene with morbid laser-beam synths that hover in a threatening mist; “17th Symphony” moves queasily between blurry pianos and aching chords, warbling like a ghost drifting through a graveyard. The gothic grandiosity of AraabMuzik’s church organs and bitcrushed Gregorian chants charges the madness onscreen with a bizarre sense of consequence. In one scene, the crackling loop of “The Abyss” circles round as our main assassin is telepathically tormented by a winged psychopath, imbuing the monster’s cries of “Why can’t you kill me?” with doomed gravitas.
Though AraabMuzik’s trance-y temperament contributes to the film’s clubby milieu, he pulls from far outside his wheelhouse to establish AGGRO DR1FT’s apocalyptically surreal environment. “En Route” slithers through a subterranean march that’s equal parts Jon Hassell and Lustmord, and “The Beloved” lifts everything skyward as he draws out a Constance Demby-worthy new-age drone (complete with angelic choir). The longer tracks, in particular, benefit from having time to sink deeper into the muck: The swelling brass of “The Apex” simmers with a science-fiction military suspense straight out of Metal Gear Solid, while “Theory,” with its alien sound design and distant, clanging percussion, captures an eerie tunneling feeling that anyone who’s gotten lost playing Metroid will know all too well.
Harmony Korine has built a formidable body of work out of playing in the garbage. You’d be hard-pressed to find another director with the audacity to premiere their film in a strip club, then follow it up by announcing a first-person thriller about baby-headed home invaders (with Burial supplying the soundtrack, no less). Testosterone is at war with itself in Korine’s movies, but he avoids coming off like a complete chud by knowing when and how to embrace sincerity. That’s where AraabMuzik’s lavish music comes in—not only fleshing out AGGRO DR1FT’s otherworldly tableau, but humanizing its emotions. When “King’s Arrival” appears in a late scene, it soundtracks our main assassin shooting a man in the head, who mutters as he bleeds out, “You fucking got me.” It might seem like mere video-game logic: murder taken to the point where even a victim can only shrug, as if they’d just been tagged ‘it.’ But when the hitman takes yet another life, his next target seems more crestfallen, whispering as they die, “I’ll see you in the next life.” AraabMuzik’s searing, funereal chants swirl in horror, turning what might otherwise look like nihilism into something more like a prayer for a way out.


Armed with field recordings and ancient folklore, the peripatetic electronic musician pauses to construct a resonant, mysterious portrait of the rugged Welsh landscape.

The Sacrifice EP

Until now, Flora Yin-Wong’s work fed primarily on the metropolis. Her debut mixtape, City God, was a club take on urban Chinese folk religion. In 2020, Holy Palm careened between samples of Tokyo and Crete and Paris; its companion book, Liturgy, traced a journey across the world to sites of urban curiosity and ancient myth—a gas fire in the Karakum Desert that has burned for half a century, a Malaysian palace of a thousand gilded horses, the faceless ghosts of Japan. On The Sacrifice, Yin-Wong retreats into isolation in the North Wales wilderness. She’s still preoccupied with the intersection of modernity and mysticism, but in the stillness of her solitude, she finds a single locus and approaches with meditative intent.
Inspired by the folklore of the Mabinogion—a collection of some of the earliest Welsh prose stories—Yin-Wong captures a resonant, primal picture of the terrain. The title of dissonant opener “Hanging a Thief” recalls the fable of Lord Manawydan’s attempt to hang a shapeshifted field mouse for eating his grain. Ambient DJ and musician Rachel Lyn’s sonorous narration carries across “Willow Bends,” The Sacrifice’s sole vocal piece, as she describes a nameless myth that’s as intrinsic to the land as its waters. When an ominous rush undercuts the words, “It was as if you could see me across the lake,” it imbues them with secrecy and dread; as Lyn meditates on “these ancient and contemporary currents, carrying their secrets from upstream,” the water she describes is heard in discordant, hostile echoes. Occasionally, its circulation is subtly broken by static, like white foam on waves.
The field recordings of The Sacrifice are reverent towards the totality of their mother environment. From whipping wind to the silence of abandoned mines, Yin-Wong’s samples are visually situated in the landscape, highlighting contrasts between the remains of industry and the pristine wilderness. Atonal piano keys mix with ghostly vocalizations on “Unhappy Disclosures,” suggesting humans in discordance with their environment; “Hanging a Thief” wars between violent, fluctuating screeches of white noise and the wide, unbroken synth tone beneath them. Battered by metallic clanks and otherworldly growls, closer “The Sacrifice” captures an intense, glacial loneliness so broad and chasm-like that it becomes claustrophobic.
The Sacrifice feels like something of a pause for Yin-Wong, a sub-chapter in her endless, restless journey. The EP is less composed than the delicacy of Holy Palm, but more exhaustive in the exploration of its subject. Though Yin-Wong is stationary, her subject is transitional, like the EP’s namesake; originally The Four Branches of the Mabinogi, a medieval misprint led to the commonly accepted collective name The Mabinogion, while The Sacrifice represents a further modernized adaptation of the title. Yin-Wong’s choice of the latest branch in the stories’ evolution reflects something increasingly lost to human words over time, yet still alive and ever-shifting.

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The Chicago-born rapper-producer’s new mixtape is woozy but tight, flaunting its open infatuation with all kinds of rap.

Have Mercy On Us

On paper, a style rooted in Playboi Carti-inspired vocals and Memphis hip-hop bounce sounds like the most played-out shit ever. But the singles and mixtapes that Chicago’s ICYTWAT has released since 2021, when he was officially reborn as a rapper after making his name as the producer of the now defunct mid-2010s rap clique Divine Council, have deconstructed these influences instead of imitating them. It isn’t the first time he’s pulled off that feat: The instrumentals he cooked up for Divine (as well as one of the essential pre-mixtape Playboi Carti songs) had the brightness of Bastard-era Tyler, the Creator chords and the zaniness of Metro Zu psychedelia, yet he was well-versed enough in those sources to dissect instead of copy them. With a darker sound in tow and his rapping at the forefront, ICYTWAT has brought that sharp ear, attention to detail, and rap fandom to his new mixtape Have Mercy on Us.
Half of the fun of Have Mercy on Us is observing how ICYTWAT has reshaped and unraveled rap of the distant and recent past. There are traces of Project Pat’s Mista Don’t Play: Everythangs Workin and Gangsta Boo’s Both Worlds *69, as well as Chief Keef’s Back From the Dead 2, Bankroll Fresh’s Life of a Hot Boy, and so much more. The feeling is similar, if less complex, to watching Kill Bill or listening to A$AP Rocky’s breakthrough LIVELOVEA$AP, two bodies of work that unabashedly stitch together dozens of popular and obscure references. That’s what really makes them original: They are love letters to the art that molded them.
Rocky is a mentor of sorts to ICYTWAT, who is an affiliate of AWGE, the Harlemite’s purposely vague label, or creative agency, or group of chic friends who shop together. ICYTWAT partially credits the brooding Memphis pulse of his refashioned sound to A$AP putting him onto ’90s underground favorites, like Skinny Pimp and Lil Yo (now known as Yo Gotti). But that’s not the only backbone of Have Mercy on Us. On “In My Glo,” producer Yahnest’s Flockaveli-era Lex Luger bells and mean bassline collide with ICYTWAT’s shrieking ad-libs, which make him sound like the melting witch in the Wizard of Oz. The crackling haze of “Shame Pt. 2” resembles an homage to one of Raider Klan’s trunk-rattling early-’90s Three 6 Mafia tributes, and his slow-moving cadence gives off shades of SpaceGhostPurrp, even if there are some struggle bars mixed in. Dig through “Waitlist” and you’ll uncover Lil Wayne in the lighter flick, Juicy J in the ad-libs, and Madlib in Yahnest’s woozy beat. Thrillingly, and like Carti, he can rattle off gibberish about money and blowjobs while still conveying emotion: Here, he sounds stressed the hell out. He’s not exactly amazing on the mic, but “Jinn Music” gets at what he does well; it’s cool and off-the-dome, but still tight.
Underwhelmingly, the mixtape isn’t self-produced. Beats from Yahnest, Siddhivalik, Polarbwoy, and others are consistently rich and layered, but much like Pi’erre Bourne, ICYTWAT says more in his beats than he ever could in his bars. Luckily, ICYTWAT doesn’t fall into the same trap as Pi’erre’s Cardo-produced misfire, because the Chicago artist chooses producers who seem to share his musical foundation. His vision is intact, even if it could have been more effective if he was behind the boards. What sets Have Mercy on Us apart from other loud, barreling Playboi Carti-inspired projects of this fly-shit-only mold, like Ken Car$on’s X or Destroy Lonely’s No Stylist, is that those releases think it’s uncool to be referential. They so desperately wish to exist beyond comparison—sometimes even beyond the confines of rap—that they come across as incurious. Have Mercy on Us isn’t afraid to be openly infatuated with rap, making it all the more refreshing.


Twenty88 is the chosen name of the duo of rapper Big Sean and R&B singer Jhené Aiko. As a pair, they complement each other well, and the battle-of-the-sexes theme manages to work on the strength of their chemistry.

Twenty88

Twenty88 is the chosen name of the duo of rapper Big Sean and R&B singer Jhené Aiko. In an interview about the group's inspiration with Flaunt, Aiko said, "It's a '70s aesthetic, but we're in the future," citing the A.I. psychological thriller Ex Machina as an inspiration. What materialized was an album of sex jams about dysfunctional relationships, which begs the question, what exactly do they think Ex Machina is about? Nonetheless, it makes sense that Sean would see his reflection in the shiny metal alloy of a sci-fi flick since his raps are often mechanically engineered—setup, setup, punchline, repeat. But on Twenty88, he is about as human-sounding as he's ever been, thanks in large part to Aiko.
As a pair, Aiko and Sean complement each other well; the former once called Drake her "musical soulmate," but that distinction is probably better suited here. The L.A. singer-songwriter has a mewing voice that nestles just into the casing of her rap counterpart's cadences. They pen verses in a similar fashion, too, curt and to the point, usually only rendering love interests as incomplete sketches; her method is to vilify and his is to write around his subject, but they are usually on the opposite end of the same conclusion: I'm right.
This is most evident on "Selfish," where they take turns putting the blame on one another, trading accusations over stringy guitar licks that loop through skipping production. The KeY Wane, Amaire Johnson, and Cam O'bi-produced opener, "Deja Vu," finds the two viewing a shared past through different lenses. This is why, when it's connecting, their collaboration works: it turns two self-centered POVs into a whole.
In that way, the album is a logical extension of the other Sean-Aiko collaborations—"Beware" from Hall of Fame and "I Know" from last year's marginally better Dark Sky Paradise. But on those songs, Jhené Aiko stayed mostly in the margins. The idea here is to juxtapose male and female perspectives, not with the hope of finding some type of balance or a middle ground, but simply to see that both voices are equally represented, and when one of them isn't spouting cliches ("What's the difference between real love and fake love/ The same difference between real titties and fake ones/ You can feel the difference," from "Talk Show") it's fully functional.
Big Sean is still fully capable of reverting back to old bad habits, and on Twenty88, he bring his fair share of clunkers ("You know that year you said I lost my marbles"/ Well I guess I turned them all to marble floors," on "Memories Faded"; "You the real real, no GMO," on "2 Minute Warning"). He's prone to rambling, will drag schemes out too long, and he isn't afraid to overcommit. But he strings together enough solid stretches to keep tracks moving. Still, Aiko is often the saving grace, holding songs together and delivering the better verses. She sells all of the longing on "On the Way," which writhes in carnal anticipation. Her warm harmonies melt into the backdrop of the thrusting "Push It." On "2 Minute Warning," she forms a chorus with famed R&B duo K-Ci & JoJo, and manages not to get swallowed up, as the song hits another gear and Sean marches through with barreling raps. They come perilously close to venturing full-on into vapid battle-of-the-sexes territory, but manage to survive on their chemistry.


On their Ralph Waldo Emerson-referencing latest album, Wooden Shjips guitarist Erik "Ripley" Johnson and keyboardist Sanae Yamada seem anxious to bolster their sound while still remaining sinister, groovy, and far-and-fuzzed-out.

Circles

Moon Duo don't exactly make music one would categorize as outdoorsy. For Sanae Yamada and Wooden Shjips axe-grinder Erik "Ripley" Johnson, their compellingly crafted brand of chemically treated krautrocking has felt positively subterranean, taking tried-and-true pop song templates and blasting them to smithereens with looping doses of gleefully woolly droning and guitar noise. Their previous LP, Mazes, made sure not to let too much light in, but also made plenty of accessible strides that suggested the pair wasn't only interested in being another black-light band. So it's with their follow-up, Circles, that Moon Duo seem anxious to bolster their sound while still remaining sinister, groovy, and totally far-and-fuzzed-out. Circles is a reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay of the same name, which, among other things, explores the idea of the titular shape's prominence in nature. With much of the album's conception taking place in Colorado's Rocky Mountains, there is a crisp lightheadedness that pervades much of the music here, thanks in part to its layered, rhythmically indulgent production. It's an uncharacteristically varied, psych-y noise-pop record that just plain sounds and feels great.
If there is a whiff of Gaia's presence anywhere on Circles, it's somewhere in album opener and lead single "Sleepwalker", which would otherwise sound like a regular Moon Duo track-- its shimmering, steely buzz still firmly intact-- except that the choruses ("I can see you," Yamada and Johnson croon together) feel practically star-bursted. You might think they took the transcendental thing to heart, if it weren't for the following three cuts, which account for what may be the best material of Moon Duo's career. While the repeated refrain of "I Can See" may seem exultant, what's presented instead is a foreboding amalgamation of 60s bubblegum pop and dread, like music made by a go-go booted Grim Reaper. "When You Cut", the best track from 2011's Mazes, alluded to Moon Duo's interest in becoming some sort of deranged dance band, and with this suite of songs, they pull it off in a variety of truly delectable ways. "Circles" is the most footloose thing the band has offered yet, surprsingly sunny, with Johnson actually pulling off solos that only your pleated-khaki'd, Chuck Berry-worshipping uncle would dare noodle out. In some parallel universe, Vincent and Mia could have won an even bigger trophy thanks to it. "I Been Gone" is oppositely desert-parched but no less urgent, like the soundtrack to a lost motorcycle diary. These songs pack a considerable wallop, which actually isn't much of a feat for Moon Duo. What is surprising is how thrillingly lucid they are.
It's a tough little cluster to follow, for sure, and while the back half of Circles offers its share of surprises (check out the pedal-heavy moonshiner jam "Free Action"), Yamada and Johnson do feel it necessary to explore the further reaches of their established sound, playing with the same grimy, lock-step formula they're so fond of. But as if part of some winking in-joke, there's the one-two punch of "Sparks" and "Dance Pt. 3", both of which boast virtually the same chord progression at nearly the exact same speed. It's either a humorous nod to the fact that, yeah, Moon Duo can get a little monotonous, or simply a sativa-induced oversight. It's kind of endearing either way. But despite the fact that "Sparks" has an almost mystical, campfire-lit vibe to it and "Dance Pt. 3" passes for above average, early Black Rebel Motorcycle Club, both songs block off a crucial chunk of space that could've used a more dynamic pair of songs, and kept the record's exciting sequencing in tact.
As a testament to just how fun Circles really is, though, it's a pretty forgivable hiccup, seeing as the songs are still pretty good. Besides, if it's quality boilerplate Moon Duo you're in for, look no further than the excellent eight-minute closer "Rolling Out". Like so much billowing smoke, it sounds like a party at the moontower turned cult ritual sacrifice, with more than enough space for Johnson's acid-damaged guitar to wail all over it. But "Rolling Out" is uncharacteristic of Circles on the whole, and part of the reason why it's a record that feels like something of a step up for the band. What seems like such a consistently pleasurable but perhaps stubbornly inflexible formula is consistently subverted in intriguing ways. It's a balance hard struck, being both varied and a little chaotic, yet somehow delicately balanced. Just like Emerson's view of the universe, Moon Duo's is equally "fluid and volatile." Sort of like nature herself.


On their gloomy new record, the psych-rockers the Amazing grab hold of a small range of emotions—depression, regret, angst, longing—and hang on for dear life.

Ambulance

The Amazing emerged in 2009 as blissed-out psych-folk nostalgists. Their influences—which they wore openly and proudly, like treasured thrift-store finds—all dated to the late ‘60s and early ‘70s: Hendrix, Cream, Pink Floyd, Nick Drake, Fairport Convention, pre-Buckingham/Nicks Fleetwood Mac (whom they gleefully covered on their self-titled debut). This likely had something to do with their record collections, and the fact that the Amazing shared members with fellow Swedish psych-rockers Dungen, including the group’s phenomenal guitarist, Reine Fiske. The musicianship was certainly impressive—and the vibe appropriately stony—but the whole thing felt a bit slight.
The Amazing re-emerged four years after 2011’s Gentle Stream as an almost entirely different band. On 2015’s Picture You, the reference points had jumped 15 to 25 years into the future to encompass indie and alt rock from both sides of the Atlantic—the Cure, Red House Painters, the Smiths—and the music had grown starker, bleaker, and more wrenchingly beautiful. With his brooding, impressionistic tenor, singer Christoffer Gunrup sounded far more at home amid rain-drenched city streets then the sun-dappled backcountry lanes of his band’s early years.
*Ambulance *double-downs on the gloom, dispatching entirely with the riff rock that still tickled the edges of Picture You. This is mood music in the best sense of the term: insular, all-enveloping and deeply sensuous. The Amazing grab hold of a small range of emotions—depression, regret, angst, longing—and hang on for dear life. *Ambulance *is a long walk home from the bar in the dead of winter.
All this is insinuated, never spelled out directly. Gunrup sings in English, but soaks his words in reverb and harmony, leaving them largely indecipherable (and he never reveals his lyrics to the press). The phrases that peak through the fog—“Not today, not tonight, but soon,” “I know you had to let go,” “the made-up stories and the fucked-up lies”—paint a bleak enough picture, but it’s the tension and foreboding suggested by the music itself, and the super-lush, wide-angle production, that brings Gunrup’s dramas to life, gives them meaning and specificity. The endlessly chiming guitars are so warm and thick with reverb you could cut them with a steak knife, particularly on “Tracks”—essentially one long guitar solo, deconstructed over nearly seven minutes (Mogwai would be proud)—and the glacial, epically sad “Through City Lights.” You can practically feel the breeze blowing through “Floating,” a sparkling track that recalls the shoegaze-country twang of the sorely missed Mojave 3. As ever, lead-guitarist Reine Fiske and drummer Moussa Fadera, with his jazzy little snare fills, are the band’s stars.
It’s only when the Amazing veer off the chorus-heavy Anglo-rock path that the spell is broken. The funky noir thriller “Blair Drager,” though enjoyable on its own, sounds entirely out of place here—*Ambulance *is not a record you should be nodding your head to. And the album sputters to an anticlimactic finish with two ruminative acoustic tracks that ramble and shuffle from one section to another with little purpose.
Much like Mark Kozelek, Gunrup wears his bad humor like a badge of honor, and there’s more than a whiff of self-pity hanging over *Ambulance. *But as you tend to do with Kozelek, you forgive Gunrup for his self-obsessions, and love him anyway. The dope-happy, free-spirited version of the Amazing came across like a band playing dress-up with clothes a couple sizes too big. Now the shoes fit: The group has never sounded richer, fuller, or more confident in their own narcotic powers. Misery suits them.


The debut album from the South Carolina producer and singer is a delicate, nourishing statement of ambient, operatic R&B.

Exit Simulation

Janise Robinson spent the pandemic reading a sci-fi novel that encapsulated their feeling of disconnection and left them seeking the comfort of a separate plane of existence—“the permission to imagine leaving,” as a bio notes. Exit Simulation, her first full-length album under the name Niecy Blues, is a layered dream state of prismatic guitar and synths with her strong, floaty harmonies at its nucleus. In a nourishing statement of ambient, operatic R&B, Blues searches for deeper meaning as she stumbles gracefully towards enlightenment in a free-flowing yet focused album that opens up like night-blooming jasmine.
The title track is soothing, layers wisping over each other with the delicacy of chiffon; when she sings “I get tired, I get tired,” it’s not a complaint but an observation of serene gentleness, as though she is granting herself leeway to lie down. She exhibits power in softness, small guitar melodies drifting into dub-style drums as she whispers, “It’s easier to lie.” That power resides within their voice and how carefully they can control it. It’s obvious she can sing with brawn when she wants, as she does on “U Care,” but on Exit Simulation she generally keeps her honey tones under an ambient shroud, a measure of restraint that keeps the album on an even keel. “U Care” ends with a sample of what sounds to be a church service, with a man backed by gospel harmonies belts powerfully; she has dedicated the song to her “grandaddy Willie Wrisper who has transitioned out of this earthly plane,” and describes the track as an “exploration of sorrow… of going under… then drowning… then hearing the faintest whisper. I just needed a whisper.”
Exit Simulation’s gauzy nature mimics the liminal space of prayer, during which a person appeals to that which cannot be seen, but felt. It is meditative but has explosive moments of joy. “Soma” unfurls into an impressive bit of full-band jazz improv, including vocals and saxophone from the Chicago musician KeiyaA, and gorgeous flute and keyboard trills from Aisha Mars and Qur’an Shaheed, respectively. Through it, she sings a mantra in crescendo: “Easy come, easy go/I want it to flow,” perhaps invoking a Buddhistic songwriting process, and then, “If it’s not meant to be, I’ll allow it to leave and be at peace.”
Robinson grew up in a religious home in Oklahoma, “sneaking around and listening to secular music,” and became a musician who has the range and temerity to have played Celie in the musical version of The Color Purple. Though they may have rejected organized religion, as documented in their 2021 track “Bones Become the Trees,” signs of the personally beatific are everywhere. On “Lament,” she crafts a two-minute cavern of echoing synths and then responds with a successive track, “Violently Rooted Reprise,” which shifts the earlier track “Violently Rooted” and presents her angelic voice as a cleansing moment. “I’m still around,” she sighs, then exhales into jubilance; her harmony arrangements sometimes recall those of Elizabeth Fraser (“Exit Simulation”) or Solange Knowles (“1111”), and her penchant for submerging her voice into opaque beats and barely-audible guitar strums is a great argument for gospel and R&B come into the realm of ambient (or ambient’s surer rise in the realm of R&B).
It takes a courageous musician to pull off this kind of ambient album, an intimate work excavated from the artist’s interior. On “Analysis Paralysis,” the only song where her vocals are turned up louder in the mix, it’s like she’s letting her subconscious anxiety take over the silence, showing how a person’s doubtful voice can sometimes drown out a quiet confidence. Her voice rasps, and it’s like shooting back into your body after being adrift on the astral plane. By the final track, when she hews to slightly more traditional songwriting structure—verses, chorus, guitar—for what feels like the first time, it’s luxurious, elegant. It’s the sound of transformation—perhaps for Niecy Blues but definitely for the listener.