The young polymath’s latest album is mostly a slog, the sound of an artist with a blurry vision and too many resources at his disposal.

ERYS

Last spring it was announced that Jaden Smith will play an “alternate reality version” of Kanye West on an upcoming TV series. He won’t have to study much for the role. The rapper, designer, and Twitter theoretician has been closely following in the Chicago MC’s footsteps for years, adopting both his creative bravado—he recently stated that his fashion icons are Pharrell, Batman, and the Greek god Poseidon—and bombastic style of conceptual thinking.
This creative mode has inspired the 21-year-old to take on some notably big-hearted projects, including a vegan food truck catered toward the less fortunate in downtown Los Angeles and a paper-carton water company that’s reportedly helping the dire situation in Flint, Michigan. It also led to a debut album that was hugely ambitious in sound and scope (Smith cited 2016’s The Life of Pablo as its primary inspiration) but failed to show any potential beyond its shiny production value. ERYS, his newest, is even grander, a galaxy of beat switch-ups, vocal effects, and genre mash-ups that drown his voice in a soupy sonic mixture.
A huge chunk of the project is devoted to Jaden doing everything he can to alter his voice, drenching it in staticky reverb, pitching it down a handful of octaves, or layering it underneath the harmonizing of guest vocalists. When it is distinguishable, it’s stiff and empty, used to deliver stale references like, “Star Wars with the clique, I’m Han Solo with the rips/Kobe with the pass, had to hit it no assist.” It gets even cheesier on the flimsy trap anthem “Mission,” where he fires off a limp diss at XXL Magazine’s annual “Freshman Class” by rapping, “Man, they look at me and know that I’m the freshest,” a gee-whiz boast that could have been ripped from one of his dad’s albums in the ’80s.
Things get worse when he tries to mask his flaws as an MC by overcooking the production. Unlike fellow Kanye disciples Tyler, the Creator and Travis Scott, Smith doesn’t practice balance in his curation; he mashes together his favorite artists’ sounds in the hopes of stumbling upon symmetry. The first four tracks aim to capture the goosebumps of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy but instead form a grating mass of Auto-Tuned bridges, piano build-ups, and big drum fills that never arrive at a climax. Not much later, on the backend of “Again,” he imitates the soft guitars, pitch-altered vocals, and sparse drums of Frank Ocean’s Blonde but fails to capture any of the work’s intimacy. Meanwhile, his collab with Kid Cudi, “On My Own,” with its boilerplate organs and stomping kicks, sounds like a Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven leftover.
Smith fairs better when he stops trying to recreate the revolutionary work of his idols and lowers the stakes. The loosest track on the album, “Summertime In Paris,” which features his sister Willow, is also its most successful: a breezy, guitar-driven tune that gets by on simplicity rather than grandiosity. “Summertime is meant to fall in love, I could fall asleep and stare in your eyes/We’ll dance all night,” Smith hums warmly on the chorus. Willow joins him on the second verse as the two siblings revel in their nostalgia. Not even a clunker of a line by Jaden tarnishes the endearing moment. While nothing about “Summertime” is groundbreaking, at least it sounds fun.
Beyond a few other fleeting moments of experimentalism on ERYS—the second half of “K,” when the buzzing of an electric razor slowly morphs into a heaving trap beat, or “Fire Dept,” a decent ode to the fast and distorted energy of SoCal punk—it’s mostly a slog, the sound of an artist with a blurry vision and too many resources at his disposal. In an interview a day after its release, Smith stated that he wanted ERYS “to change the world”; in reality, it’s the least memorable thing he’s done this year.


Keeping their winning streak alive, the Hold Steady plug into something special for a fleeting unplugged EP.

Live at Fingerprints

"You have to see them live" is a phrase that's probably hurt more bands than it's helped. For every Bruce Springsteen or Metallica, whose epic performances helped fuel massive record sales, there's been a Phish, whose cult-like concert experiences never quite convinced outsiders to shell out for more than tickets. You don't need to see the Hold Steady live to get what they do, but it helps. In person, at least the collective experience confirms that you're not the only one buoyed by the band's infectious nostalgia, boundless enthusiasm, outsized personalities, and monster riffs.
Fortunately for the Hold Steady, you get the loud, proud, gloriously unironic idea pretty well from their records. Live, the extra volume, stage moves, and banter only enhance the vibe the group's three records have offered and more or less perfected. Unfortunately, that rarely goes for live records as well, which almost never come close to capturing the experience of attending a show. That the Hold Steady nonetheless opted to release a live EP doesn't come as a surprise compared to the decision to release one of their infrequent acoustic sets.
Still, Live at Fingerprints-- recorded at a Long Beach in-store performance-- underscores something that's easily missed in the Hold Steady's recorded output: It's not the performances that make the band so special, it's the songs. Minus the amplification, and plus such un-rock'n'roll accoutrements as accordion and what may be a washboard, this handful of songs (mostly) from last year's Boys and Girls in America is a blast. Banter and all, it adds up to more than a souvenir or quick cash-in by showing the Hold Steady are far more versatile than some might give them credit for.
It certainly helps that Craig Finn's vocals are up-front and clear, easily made out with the din ratcheted down, the racket better suited to the back porch than the arena stage. Unlike many of rock's would-be poets, Finn doesn't take himself too seriously, but at the same time the conviction coursing through "Cattle and the Creeping Things" and the sentiments he's trying to convey come across as honest and heartfelt. And then there's the banter, where Finn and his bandmates (but mostly Finn) mock themselves with the same big-hug love with which they embrace rock history.
Talking about the "Chips Ahoy!" video: "We were playing this song in Costa Mesa, and it occurred to me that "how am I supposed to know that you're high if you won't let me touch you' and 'how am I supposed to know that you're high when you won't let me dance' are two things I've said in real life, and it was to two different people." On "Citrus:" "All the best Led Zeppelin songs are about citrus fruit." It makes you wish there was an indie-rock "Storytellers".
"Citrus", and the gentle take on "You Can Make Him Like You", would make Finn's sensitive hometown hero Paul Westerberg proud, as would the bluesy "You Gotta Dance With Who You Came to the Dance With"-- and not just because it's a drinking reference, either. These songs, stripped to their bare emotions and sharp punchlines, capture the spirit of the left-behind, the guys and girls hanging out in the parking lot because they couldn't get into the sold-out show, kids awkwardly eyeing one another as they split a case of beer and talk about why they love the band they're not watching. Live at Fingerprints is essentially a quick taste of what those kids missed, and if there's a drawback to the disc it's that, at a scant five songs, the tease is over far too soon.


On his seventh solo album, the Constantines member trades straight-ahead country rock for joyful, junk-shop irreverence, reveling in his peculiarities while offering an unmistakably homey atmosphere.

Volcano Volcano

Over his two decades in Canada’s indie-rock trenches, Steven Lambke has often thrived in supporting roles. As the second singer-guitarist for soul-punk rabble rousers the Constantines, he chipped in with a song or two per record to give Bry Webb’s moonstruck howl a rest. And ever since that band entered its semi-permanent state of hiatus at the end of the 2000s, Lambke has devoted much of his energies to running the excellent Toronto imprint You’ve Changed Records, which he co-founded with roots-rock shapeshifter Daniel Romano. Beyond acting as the faucet for Romano’s never-ending flow of material, You’ve Changed has introduced artists like the Weather Station and Nap Eyes to wider audiences, while using its platform to make Canadian indie rock less of a straight white boys’ club, releasing albums by queer grunge-pop duo Partner, country spiritualist Fiver, and Indigenous avant-rock artists like Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and Status/Non-Status. (He also brought a similarly conscientious curatorial expertise to his former role as the Creative Director of Sackville, New Brunswick’s annual indie love-in, Sappyfest.)
But amid all his behind-the-scenes gruntwork, Lambke has never stopped making music; since the mid-2000s, he’s released six solo albums (among other projects), initially under the Baby Eagle banner and more recently under his own name. As the Constantines grew into their Neil Young phase on their later records, it became clear that Lambke had a quieter, more introspective side, and his earliest solo efforts functioned as reservoirs for a growing repertoire of mellow campfire ballads and laid-back country shuffles. Over the years, as the Cons faded further from view, he got more comfortable with turning up the volume a few notches, yet he remained beholden to a ragged ’n’ rustic rock tradition clearly rooted in Neil’s “Ditch Trilogy” days. But Lambke’s quizzical lyrics and inherent peculiarities have always kept him from settling into a familiar singer-songwriter archetype. As the Constantines member responsible for that band’s most agitated, serene, and cosmic songs, Lambke has a mercurial voice that contorts itself in surprising ways, veering between comforting, plainspoken whispers; a dazed, Dylanesque twang; and an ebullient, high-pitched creakiness that can make him sound like an elderly 10-year-old boy, childlike and wizened in equal measure.
Where 2019’s Dark Blue drifted toward straight-ahead country rock, Lambke’s seventh album, Volcano Volcano, takes a U-turn from folk-festival respectability and retreats into joyful, junk-shop irreverence. The album was created with assistance from Romano, his bassist David Nardi, Merge Records artist Carson McHone, and Cons keyboardist Will Kidman, but it’s a group effort that has the feel of a hermetic home-recording experiment—probably because Lambke took the bed tracks and slathered on the sort of cheap supplementary instrumentation (sleigh bells, shakers, tambourines) that gets handed out at kindergarten circle time. Listening to the record feels like a visit to an old neglected family cottage—it’s covered in cobwebs, dead bugs are caked across the window screens, and the front-porch floorboards are rotting away, but once you get inside and light up the fireplace, it feels like home.
Lambke spends much of Volcano Volcano pondering natural phenomena, finding strength and inspiration even in their most frightening forms. On the quietly ascendant title track, volcanoes are far from cataclysmic; instead, they offer a potent metaphor for a different kind of uprising, where power in society flows from the bottom up and, as Lambke optimistically sings, “the world is reordered from below.” Throughout the album, he looks upon some of the planet’s creepiest critters—spiders, bats, crabs—with a sense of awe and envy, as they inhabit the sort of oblivious utopia we can only dream of, unencumbered by human folly and ignorance. “Lucky stars, a golden grommet/Vomit in the garden bucket/Look out, snakes have always shouted/And there’s spiders too!” he sings atop the sleigh-belled sway of “April, May, and June,” reframing a messy backyard scene as a veritable springtime Christmas carol.
At times, Lambke’s hand-shaken instrumentation sounds louder in the mix than his voice or guitar, lending these humble, homespun tunes a cinematic dimension: On the twangy psychedelic serenade “Truth Marks,” the relentless rattle of maracas doubles as a nighttime chorus of crickets. But their presence also evokes the old Constantines custom of distributing tambourines to fans in the crowd, and it highlights the participatory quality that unites Lambke’s myriad musical endeavors, where anyone with a dollar-store noisemaker can be part of the band. Nowhere is that communal spirit more deeply felt than on the album’s ecstatic, tambourine-battered peak, “Every Lover Knows.” Channeling the spirit of some gospel-gilded classic-rock nugget from 1971, Lambke works himself up into a mad preacherman lather as he cries, “The truth is/Every truth is tested/By the world until it’s busted, twisted, or frayed/As every lover knows.” Far from an admission of defeat, “Every Lover Knows” is a battle cry for romantic radicals, a don’t-let-the-bastards-get-you-down anthem that doubles as a warning to the haters: This volcano is ready to blow.


Crazed, noisy, and barely finished, the New York rapper’s latest tape digs into his mad mind and hypnotic sound.

with 2

Nobody combines serrated rap and goofy hi-jinks like Xaviersobased. In “Pediatrician,” Xavier flashes back to his kiddie days watching Noggin at the doc’s office, wearing KidRobot clothing and a SpongeBob wallet in hand, while producer mag blasts some Satan-with-IBS low-end in the “terror bass” style. The surreal combo of cute youthful references and aggro intensity is bizarrely addictive. Adorned with just enough pretty keys and airy cymbals, it throws you into a blissed trance. While January’s Keep It Goin Xav felt like a triumphant celebration of the scene surrounding his collective 1c34, with 2 goes solo and injects this kind of dazed-yet-hyper rap with a new level of screwy psychedelia.
Xavier teased with 2 so many times that it started to feel like it would never arrive. When the tape finally dropped last week, it was because someone leaked it. So Xavier just put it out himself, even though it wasn’t properly mixed yet. But this kind of crazed, barely-finished release moment is perfect for his music anyway, since it often has the feverish rawness of disheveled snippets.
If 2021’s With felt like a demolition zone of abrasive distortion, this sequel is more like a laboratory gone mad. The woozy freakiness remains, but the spiky edge has been softened. Cavernous drums echo over lost-in-reverie synth keys and vocals laced with so much delay Xavier floats through the tracks like a benevolent phantom. His wispy flow on “You See Me” coils upward like he’s slowly ascending a spiral staircase into the clouds. Yet even at its dreamiest, shards of sadness poke through. “linda.mp3” feels like mourning and moonwalking at the same time. Warm rays of synth drape Xavier as he pleads with another artist to quit drinking lean.
While the tape delivers a sizable supply of hypnotic delights, there’s not much in the way of wild surprises. nyli and xion’s twitchy-twinkly beat for highlight “what zit tooya” already appeared in a Nettspend and phreshboyswag song, and straightforward tracks like “jaded” and “Softer” sound like they could’ve been on any xaviersobased tape in the last few years. Xavier’s at his best when leaning into unstable, erratic confrontations, as on “Aight,” whose bassline brawls with the synths like Greek Gods defending Mt. Olympus. The track was produced by cranes and anarchy, a talented Florida teen who offers a glimpse of the next generation beyond Xavier: cosmically unhinged and glitch-wracked stuff that takes distorted rap as a starting point.
Despite a lowkey surge in popularity since Keep It Goin Xav, he’s still disgorging tapes that feel like DIY community zines, packed with madcap thumbnails and an all-star roster of niche producers. Nothing is out of bounds: chitchat about studying in the “1c library,” sounds of mouse clicks, or heaven-high gurgles. Violent threats and moments of emo vulnerability collide with cover art of a scowling purple fish from SpongeBob named “Mr. What Zit Tooya.” As other new-generation SoundCloud upstarts dilute their sound for wider audiences, it’s sweet to watch someone who doesn’t give a fuck. Even if it doesn’t hit all the time, the vision is thrilling.


The drums-and-electronics duo’s debut album is a gnarled hybrid of free improv, minimalist composition, and dance music that advances in fits and starts.

Methods Body

In Methods Body’s music, nothing feels fixed in place. The drums-and-electronics duo’s debut album is as slippery as the deck of a boat in a storm: Muscular rhythms in strange time signatures, microtonal prepared-piano riffs, droning feedback—they all careen back and forth, colliding, breaking into pieces. The result is a gnarled hybrid of free improv, minimalist composition, and dance music that advances in fits and starts, repetitive until it is not, knotty until it turns unexpectedly smooth.
Despite the size of their sound, Methods Body are just two people: drummer John Niekrasz and multi-instrumentalist Luke Wyland. Niekrasz studied percussion in Cuba and classical Hindustani tabla in India, and his CV boasts collaborations with everyone from drone titan Rhys Chatham to jazz pianist Marilyn Crispell to Joanna Newsom. Wyland was, until 2013, a core member of the group AU, whose fractured, brightly colored fusions of American minimalism and kaleidoscopic art rock anticipated some of Methods Body’s more song-like moments. Methods Body share a lineage with bands like Battles and Horse Lords, groups working at the intersection of rock and non-Western sonics; in places, they tap into the metallic shimmer of Indonesian gamelan, or the tube-driven glow of Konono N°1.
Though this is Methods Body’s first recorded work as a duo, they have been playing together since 2016, practicing five days a week in their shared studio and recording in remote locations: a saloon in the Mojave Desert, a cabin in the Oregon wilderness. But Methods Body feels less rooted in any particular sense of place than in the act of spontaneous creation itself; if there are landscapes here, they are represented as seen through the passenger window at 70 miles per hour, a blur of lines and vectors and splotchy color, morphing without end.
The album’s nine tracks are divided into two side-long suites. The A-side’s “Quiet Pt. 1 – They Didn’t Come Here” begins with layered reeds and sour-tuned plunks, then gallops unpredictably forward, moving in cellular fashion: Rhythmic, repetitive passages build and build, then pivot without warning. “Quiet Pt. 2 – Tell Us to Be” is a silvery reflecting pool of dissonant piano that launches into slow, skulking electric bass, half doom metal and half dubstep wobble. In “Quiet Pt. 3 – They Came Here,” a stomping, polyrhythmic groove gives way to ostinato pianos that sound like a junkyard Philip Glass. The first side comes to a head with “Quiet Pt. 5 – Anthem,” whose monster organ riffs channel ’70s prog beneath wild, guitar-like soloing. The music lumbers like beasts fighting, then pausing to suck air—moments of feral violence punctuated by seething calm.
If the A-side suite is driven by rhythm, the B-side’s four-part “Claimed Events” is an exploration of pure texture, in which piano and electronics rush like water over gravelly drums. Niekrasz favors sounds like resonant toms and the dry clatter of sticks against metal rims; Wyland wrangles plasticky, atonal sounds, bright sheets of tone that crinkle like cellophane. It’s rarely clear what the two men are doing at any given point, how much has been tracked live and how much overdubbed later—there are so many layers, it generally feels like more music than four hands are capable of producing. But the back-and-forth exchange between their playing makes clear that their music is a form of dialog.
In fact, both musicians say that language is an influence on their practice. Niekrasz, who got his MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, composes using a system he calls “syllabic notation,” translating the rhythms and tonalities of speech into drum patterns. Wyland, who stutters, finds inspiration in the cadences of broken speech. Methods Body only incorporates text in one song, but it’s a highlight of the album. In “Claimed Events Pt. 2 – Overheard,” the duo falls into what might be a funeral march—a slow, steady tom groove backed by mournful drones—that gradually gives way to an eerie chant from Wyland’s former bandmate Holland Andrews. The low, monotone chant hovers just on the far side of sense: “My friends, however, claimed events would identify them—but to overhear and accept only one month to prepare us in a very small room with rubble in one corner.” What looks dryly factual on the page, like a scrap of newspaper, takes on a weird, ritual sensibility in repetition—line breaks blurred, stresses sanded down, meaning dissolved into pure sonority. It is simultaneously the most calming and unsettling moment on an album in which all certainties feel up for grabs.


iLoveMakonnen's latest EP finds the emerging Atlanta artist—a rapper that doesn't always rap—at the center of the rap conversation, representing the most recent goal post in the ongoing expansion of what a "rapper" can be. The release features production from Metro Boomin and Sonny Digital.

iLoveMakonnen EP

Makonnen Sheran dubbed himself iLoveMakonnen when he was on house arrest in 2008. He had been headed for the Air Force, but a tragic accident with a friend's gun, which Makonnen described in heartbreaking detail to BuzzFeed, ended with his friend dead in a car shortly after their high school graduation. Sheran, who was in the car, was implicated, and his life's direction changed.
He spent his resultant exile trawling MySpace and broadening his musical tastes—the Killers, Bloc Party, Adele, and Lil B, whom he enthusiastically interviewed on his blog. He also posted rough cuts of his songs, which fumbled ecstatically toward some synth-heavy fusion of all of them. Some were raw, unformed blobs, but there were hints of an aesthetic moving beneath. He reached out to everyone he admired and began quietly laying the groundwork for his career.
All this context is already old news—at least, since Drake cleared his throat and launched Makonnen's career into the stratosphere. His latest release, the iLoveMakonnen EP, features production from Metro Boomin and Sonny Digital. He's at the center of the rap conversation, but he also represents the most recent goal post in the ongoing expansion of what a rapper can be.
Makonnen's relationship to rap is intriguing. He dips briefly into signifiers of the street—the juug, the plug, coke, Molly and lean—and throws together some bars on "I Don't Sell Molly No More". But mostly, he sings, and he does so in a rich, untrained, wobbly voice, with an expressive tenderness unheard of even in a rap world with Drake at its center. (When Drake hopped on Makonnen's "Club Goin Up on a Tuesday," he had to adopt an even-softer voice than usual.) "I wasn't trying to be no hip-hop," Makonnen told BuzzFeed, describing the development of his sound. "I didn't give a fuck about drums. But I knew what to do to get the looks I wanted to get."
The fourth song on the i**LoveMakonnen EP, "Tonight", is an airy, strobing house song, with a hip-tugging syncopated bass line and diaphanous layers of synths floating above like hand scarves. Makonnen's melodies have a theatrical swoop to them; "Sarah" has the arc and fever pitch of a Broadway power ballad, and on "Too Much", he lets his voice dip into a Nate Dogg-y basso profundo before leaping into a startlingly unvarnished higher register, his voice shaking and nearly cracking.
The mood of the EP is primarily lovelorn and wistful, with a series of songs directly addressing the girls in his life. Each of them gets named directly—Brianna, Shoshanna, Sarah—and it's hard not to attribute this behavior to Drake, who made all his long-gone exes famous. Drake probably leapt on "Tuesday" because he heard a burgeoning star bearing his direct influence, and he likely signed him directly to his OVO imprint for the same reason—as Jay Z said in the 2000 concert film Backstage, when you find your successor, you sign him.
When Makonnen raps, as on "I Don't Sell Molly No More", he sounds nothing like Drake. There is something loose and bemused in his voice: This isn't really what I do, his vocal tone says, but hey, I'll give it a whirl anyway. There are echoes of his favorite rappers, people like Gucci Mane and the all-important BasedGod, in his cadences and patterns, but the song itself is a prop, a chance to try out some juicy-sounding words. Makonnen's music fairly beams at you with this self-satisfied serenity: even his songs about selling drugs have the weightlessness of a stage full of paper-mache props.
This might sound like a criticism, but that play-acted feeling is one of the most satisfying parts of Makonnen's world. Like Atlanta's previous two rap breakouts, Makonnen has used his unique talents to build a reality-distortion bubble, a place where rap's rules slide off the sides. That bubble swelled to a big enough size that we get to pass through and explore it, and watch rap giants try to contend with it.


The rapper tries to reinvent himself with his second solo album, showing off impressive range while getting hampered by personality-free songwriting.

Set It Off

Offset was always the black sheep of Migos. The Atlanta rapper was in jail at critical moments during the group’s rise, and before their blockbuster album Culture, he rarely handled hooks or opening verses. “Lost everything I had like Solomon,” he reflected on 2015’s “First Day Out,” and his music has never shaken that desperation for redemption. He raps like an athlete who was benched by an injury during a championship run, determined to make up for his absence and prove his talent. So on his solo debut Father of 4, he distinguished his music from Migos’ by ballasting the group's gaudy and ecstatic swag rap with wounded soul-searching.

For his second solo effort, Offset attempts to lean further into his de facto pariah status. “I’m Michael, I’m not no Jermaine,” he says on single “Jealousy,” signaling a grand transformation with nods to the king of pop’s Off the Wall era. Hammering home the point, he rocks Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” and “Thriller” costumes in the video for “Fan,” and he bears a single white glove on the album cover. In Jackson, he sees a blueprint for reinvention. “I just feel like Michael felt: wanting more creatively, challenging myself to be a better and bigger artist, and to leave the old stuff in the past,” he told Sharp.
In theory, such a reset is needed. By the time Migos released Culture III, they were approaching music like a legacy act, clinging to old flows and familiar concepts. Few surprises or delights lurked inside that record’s litanies of luxury goods and twisted syllables, and the guests frequently outshined the monotonous hosts. Even before last year’s fatal shooting of Takeoff forever changed the future of the group, Quavo and Takeoff’s decision to form a separate duo—one that largely stuck to the Migos formula—put pressure on Offset to succeed on his own. But despite his overtures to rebirth and new horizons, he remains a creature of habit.
On a technical level, Offset is in rare form. He’s a finesser who can strut, slide, and stutter-step across virtually any beat, a versatility that is foregrounded when he’s alone. These songs never feel as busy as Migos songs, even when Offset is constantly switching direction, as on the flow clinic “Big Dawg.” But there’s a glaring lack of purpose and personality to the songwriting. Offset spends the record narrating a life of decadence, fashioning himself as an A-list star with deep pockets, exquisite tastes, and a legion of paramours—subjects that are all Migos mainstays. While bits of charisma and vulnerability occasionally filter in, as on “Say My Grace” when he mourns Takeoff and his grandmother, these moments are overwhelmed by constant mentions of G6 flights, Chanel, and diamonds clear as water that would make for a punishing drinking game. Offset was by no means an open book on Father of 4, but the intimate theme gave his songwriting and performances direction. The concept here is essentially, I rap by myself now.

Offset’s not a bore, so his agility and the range of sounds keep the album somewhat pleasurable. To avoid retreading the gilded trap of Migos and the brooding laments of his first album, he went beyond core collaborators like Southside and Metro Boomin, who both contribute just one song. The rest are sourced from stalwarts like Wheezy and Boi-1da, and less marquee names like Aaron Bow and Offset himself, all of whom offer idiosyncratic takes on melodic rap. Thick basslines and bits of Delta blues (“On the River”), Memphis horrorcore (“Hop Out The Van”) and gangsta rap (“Jealousy,” “Fan”), and spacey trap (“Buss My Watch”) create a mood of joyful darkness. A sense of villainous liberation guides the motion: “Night vision, I can see the opps when they hidin’,” Offset raps like a lion waiting in ambush.

But the album ultimately feels like a status update, never really probing or conveying why freedom is so important to Offset. Though lines like “I would be lying if I say I ain't miss the three” and “I’m better on my own,” suggest ongoing anguish over the end of Migos and his strained relationship with Quality Control, the music doesn’t develop those feelings. If he were more of a dramatist, brooding penultimate track “Upside Down,” where he gushes in Auto-Tune about feeling his world is topsy-turvy, might have flipped all the preceding exuberance and flexing on its head. But instead, all he offers is flat repetition of the title. Sound familiar?


Visible Cloaks’ Spencer Doran curates an appealingly cohesive compilation of Japanese ambient music that, while decades old, feels uncannily suited to contemporary listening habits.

Various Artists: Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990

An under-explored element of the streaming era has been the growth of functional listening. Because we spend so much time near computers that grant us access to a virtually limitless amount of music, we are discovering new ways to soundtrack our lives. Whether it’s kids gathering around a YouTube channel to listen to lo-fi hip-hop while studying or a journalist looking for music to write to, we’re always searching for sound to keep us company. I suspect there’s a connection between that search for functional sound and the recent uptick in interest in ambient-leaning electronic music from Japan in the 1980s. Now that particular curiosity has the perfect introduction. Light in the Attic’s Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990, curated by Spencer Doran of Visible Cloaks, is the right compilation at the right time, bringing together a wide selection of the music that has been rediscovered in a highly listenable package delivered with appropriate context.
“Kankyō ongaku” is Japanese for “environmental music,” and as used here it’s an umbrella term for calm, spacious, and slightly chilly music generally built from synthesizers and sound effects. In the liner notes, Doran points out that ambient music in Japan started, much as it did elsewhere, with composers who became fixated on the work of Erik Satie, John Cage, and, later, Brian Eno, particularly their ideas about background, modes of attention, authorship, and functionality. Those ideas were integrated into culture-specific notions of environmental music—Doran highlights the use of dripping water in Japanese garden design as an example, and there’s a strong connection between some of this work and architecture—and brought to life with emerging synthesizer technology. As a listening experience, the two-hour set is deeply satisfying, sustaining a consistent mood while offering a number of textures and styles. It also feels almost eerily “now” in 2019, as it brings to mind the fetish for early digital culture that informs the work of electronic music composers like Oneohtrix Point Never, James Ferraro, and Doran’s own group.
It’s remarkable how artists from such vastly different musical backgrounds (the liner notes offer short histories for each, along with contextual explanations for each track) made music that fits into this sound world. Haruomi Hosono is a wide-ranging singer-songwriter with a clutch of eclectic albums who also made punky, danceable electro-pop with Yellow Magic Orchestra, and his track “Original BGM,” which closes the set, is 15 minutes of slow-crawling bliss, filled with long silences and simple, gradually unfolding melodies. Yellow Magic Orchestra themselves make an appearance with their remarkable instrumental interlude “Loom,” an Escher staircase of drone that sounds like it’s in a constant state of arrival.
From Hiroshi Yoshimura, a composer, writer, and theorist whose ideas were foundational for much of the music found here, comes “Blink,” a simple piece of devastating beauty built around two melodic motifs. Kitamura Masashi made his name in the 1970s prog rock scene and later formed post-punk outfit YBO², and his track “Variation III” consists of crashing waves, bells, and drum hits, bringing to mind a landscape that feels eerily like (but apart from) what we call “nature.” Toshi Tsuchitori worked as a free-jazz drummer but here contributes a piece that is mostly silence interrupted by occasional hits of metallic percussion.
That tracks from such a wide array of musicians can be brought together in a set that sounds so cohesive is a tribute to Doran’s curatorial acumen. These pieces aren’t really bound together by an overriding “scene” but rather by their clear aesthetic qualities—they are gentle, quiet, emotionally non-specific, and filled with silence. The music here also evokes the decade of the set’s title, and the tentative steps made during that era toward the digital world that surrounds so many of us.
Kankyō Ongaku is Light in the Attic’s third multi-disk box set focusing on ambient music in the last 10 years, and each is enriched by considering the differences between them, and how formats shaped the way the music was heard the first time. The 2013 collection I Am the Center: Private Issue New Age Music in America 1950-1990, focused on obscure sounds, some of which initially circulated on cassette tapes in new age shops that stocked them alongside packs of incense, crystals, and books about mysticism. The sequel, 2016’s The Microcosm: Visionary Music of Continental Europe, 1970-1986, drew heavily from the trippy kosmische music created by German musicians like Roedelius, Ash Ra Tempel, and Popol Vuh, and it felt very much like a vinyl artifact, a portrait of a time when heads of a certain stripe would entertain themselves by listening to long-form music in front of a component stereo.
Kankyō Ongaku brings to mind the compact disc, which overtook the music industry in the second half of the ’80s and still has a pretty good foothold in Japan. Early ambient music was very much an analog idea, with sounds that were blurred and vaporous, but on Kankyō Ongaku, the sounds are crisp and clean, the edges clear. Perhaps contrary to intuition, the highly “designed” nature of this music also makes it feel very human, and also increases its versatility as far as background listening for other tasks. This ambient music is not psychedelic. It never evokes outer space or the cosmos or, for that matter, the natural world, even when it uses the sound of water. It’s music for the indoors, music for doing things, there for you if you want to listen closely but also content to exist on a subliminal plane.


The Antlers singer's proper solo debut* *is the result of physical, mental and emotional therapy—a zen-like journey of a man trying to re-enter his own life.

Impermanence

Peter Silberman headed upstate for the same reason most New Yorkers do: to get some damn peace and quiet. Problem is that he took all the noise with him. Though his work with the Antlers never had anyone confusing him with J Mascis, years of touring left Silberman with a debilitating hearing ailment that started as piercing tinnitus and evolved into a constant sound of “Niagara Falls in my head.” Even if aural healing was Silberman’s priority during his convalescence, there was no doubt what he was really working towards. His proper solo debut Impermanence is the result of physical, mental and emotional therapy, a man trying to re-enter his own life.
This is a guy who likened romantic failure to cancer and a dead dog, so the possibility of him turning this into a gut-wrenching metaphorical ordeal was very real. It’s almost more understandable that Silberman wouldn’t feel the need to dramatize his situation, given the timing of it all. “I’m disassembling piece by piece,” he moans on the record’s first line, though that describes less his own rehabilitation than affirms Antlers’ M.O. since their 2009 breakthrough. Hospice now stands as the last true exemplar of “2000s indie,” touching on Radiohead’s quasi-prog song structures, Sigur Rós’ amniotic ambiance, and Arcade Fire’s skyscraping crescendos. But since then, they’ve veered more toward the variously fanged and stoned Burst Apart, which turned out to be a tentative step towards the zonked-out laser-Floyd ambiance that defined their most recent work on Undersea and Familiars. And the process of Silberman’s reassembly has resulted in something not too far from what Antlers themselves might have put together in 2017.
“New York” is the most immediately fetching song on Impermanence, something like Interpol’s “NYC” if it was performed like the Grace version of “Hallelujah.” Silberman’s falsetto hovers over a translucent guitar, homesick for a place where he already lives: “When my nerve wore down/I was assailed by simple little sounds/hammer clangs, sirens in the park/like I never heard New York.” While he doesn’t quite have the natural vocal hops of his immediate influences, Silberman is one of the last true believers of the Buckley/Yorke school of operatic angst and he’s become just as effective as a lead instrument. For a lot of listeners, it’s a short step from Radiohead to Talk Talk and Impermanence unsurprisingly evokes Laughing Stock, the gold standard for mid-career, post-rock spiritual cleansing: “Karuna” begins with a few seconds of low amp buzz and a loosely knotted guitar chord that has to be an overt homage to “Myrrhman.”
It’s a spare album that asks for a lot of patience, if only a fraction of what Silberman needed to rehabilitate his ears in isolation. Impermanence isn’t meant to sound lonely, however; there are nearly a dozen contributors if you include Big Sur and Block Island, RI for their provision of field sounds. The most important is engineer and mixer Nicholas Principe, a frequent collaborator whose Port St. Willow project often felt spiritually akin to Silberman's work. Principe is part of a quartet that providing doo-wop vocals during “Gone Beyond,” a supremely stoned jazz riff that ends with a presumptive cue for a vinyl flip. Yet the bulk of Impermanence suggests that burning these songs to a tangible item is a necessarily evil: the credits include Tibetan bowls and ujjayi breath, and the song titles (“Karuna,” “Ahimsa”) themselves are taken from basic principles of eastern philosophy in accordance with Silberman’s continuing desire to atone for the mean-spirited Burst Apart.
Though Impermanence is unmistakably a record about Silberman’s physical ailments, the lyrics attempt to find a balance between being just about that (“I’m listening for you, silence”) and giving the listener something they can apply to their own lives (“Our bodies are temporary”). Likewise, the six songs take a long time to assess whether they’re meant to offer serenity or a path to transcendence and whether Silberman’s self-imposed musical limitations can support his most philosophically ambitious work yet. It’s not a slight to call Impermanence functional music: If it helps someone else simply cut through the noise in their head, Silberman has gotten his point across.


Five years after her brief but spectacular debut, Tierra Whack digs deep into her psyche for an anxious, dark, and raw follow-up. She remains a magnetic performer even if the music has lost some of its color.

World Wide Whack

Content warning: This review mentions self-harm and suicidal ideation.
On her 2018 short-film-as-album Whack World, Tierra Whack introduced the world to a cartoon version of herself. Her grief, romance, and existential crises were simplified and exaggerated into bite-sized rap songs with bold visuals that were part Adult Swim, part Pee-wee’s Playhouse. She didn’t shy away from pain but transmuted it into things like dogs and chicken wings. Reflected through her prismatic lens, her interior world felt surreal, and entirely her own. In contrast, the pain coursing through World Wide Whack feels like a real-life remake of the original animated movie. The record’s extended runtime allows a deeper look into Whack’s head as she tackles depression and anxiety in a straightforward, moving, and darkly funny way. But while her commitment to simplicity lends itself to a big emotional catharsis, you can’t help but feel some of her music has lost some of its color.
Fragments of Whack World can be found in the production, which is spare but encompasses a wide range of genres, from Atlanta trap to Casio-preset funk to pop ballads to her signature singsongy nursery rap. The spaciousness and austerity of the beats allow Whack’s voice to take the spotlight. She has a lot of fun modulating her pitch, tone, and accent like she’s a teenager playing dress-up at the mall. On “Chanel Pit” alone, she shifts between staccato and vibrato singing, explosive bursts in the verse and cool restraint in the chorus. As much as World Wide Whack aims to be still and real, there is still much character in her delivery.
Even though the songs are epics by Whack standards—almost every song still clocks in under three minutes—this album shares some of Whack World’s ephemerality in the sheer randomness of cuts like “Shower Song,” which does what it says on the tin (“Soap and water give me powers”), and “Moovies,” a disarmingly simple track about wanting to be treated to dinner and a show. The songs are fun, but they feel less exploratory and more like a concession to the market of likes and “For-You” pages. She’s at her most magnetic when she loosens her grip on her idiosyncrasies and tries on other people’s flows, like when she adds a little Ice Spice flippancy to a relationship post-mortem on “X” (“Just like a website, he beggin’ to link, I went to his house and sofa was stink”) or channels throwback Migos, ad-libs and all, on “Snake Eyes.”
But the playfulness takes a backseat to the rawness, which she eases into on album opener, “Mood Swings” when she hints at what’s yet to be revealed, singing, “Might look familiar, but I promise you don’t know me.” On the downward spiral of “Numb,” she gestures towards self-harm (“Long sleeves cover scars”) and suicidal ideation (“To the bridge in my car, now I’m swimming with the sharks”) before finally calling out anxiety and depression by name. And that’s only four songs in. “Imaginary Friends,” “Difficult” and “Two Night” wade deeper into the muck of these knotty feelings, how they affect relationships and daily life. By “Two Night” she’s found some comfort in gallows humor, adding a cheeky postscript to a hypothetical suicide note (“I didn’t pay the light bill this month”) and divulging that, because she’s Black, her last meal will probably be chicken and fries. Her quips are hilarious, devastating, and provocative, but when the rest of her writing isn’t as sharp, these moments of vulnerability can feel heavy-handed.
The darkness becomes pitch black by the album’s closer, “27 Club,” a song Whack says is inspired by the Mary Jane Girls’ 1983 R&B ballad “You Are My Heaven.” It’s jarring at first to hear the word “suicide” repeated like a chant, but it becomes clear that the purpose of the repetition is not to sanction the act but rather to release Whack from its hold. In an interview with Vulture, she revealed that when she started recording the song she didn’t know what it would be about. “But it came so easy,” she said. “I cried, and I was like, ‘This is what I’ve been trying to say.’”
This vulnerability World Wide Whack puts on display is truly affecting, but for a convention-busting artist as Whack, her directness feels strikingly ordinary. The unbound creativity that she displayed in just 15 minutes of Whack World—and that often bursts through on her Instagram freestyles—is reined in here. It’s not that she can’t make longer songs or open up about her struggles, but her endless reinvention made her so thrilling as an artist. It’s one thing to strip away the artifice and speak from the heart, but the beauty of letting go is the space it creates for new things to come in. For much of World Wide Whack, even when wearing new shoes and showing different sides of herself, she’s still treading on familiar ground.
Anyone in need of help can reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1–800–273–8255 or SuicidePreventionLifeline.org to chat with someone online.


The deluxe reissue of American Football's only LP benefits from unusually good timing: as self-identifying emo bands are making music that’s more mature, refined, and exploratory than anything that came before it, American Football is currently the most influential album in the genre.

American Football

“Honestly I can’t remember all my teenage feelings and their meanings.” Any list of Great Moments in Emo Lyricism would be incomplete without this curious Mike Kinsella-sung line during “Honestly?”, the third track from American Football’s only album, released in 1999. But really...honestly? We are, after all, talking about a genre assumed to be in constant contact with the feelings of teendom—but the next line gives more context: “They seem too/ See-through/ To be true.” Rather than someone cutting themselves off from or invalidating their own teenage feelings, Kinsella’s just outside that time frame trying to figure out how the emotions and music that moved him during his formative years figure into his current life. That’s why, as self-identifying emo bands are making music that’s more mature, refined, and exploratory than anything that came before it, American Football is currently the most influential album in the genre.
This deluxe reissue of American Football benefits from unusually good timing—and unlike most solemnly revered anniversary sets, this isn’t a mobilization of fan dollars after countless inclusions in Best Of Decade lists, and it's not a case of “You had to be there” nostalgia, either. The raw 4-track demos, generous liner notes (written by guitarist Steve Holmes), and candid photographs are meant to welcome the people who weren’t “there” back in 1999, a grouping that includes pretty much everybody at this point. Still, the album's reach in 2014 is estimable: American Football recently sold out an entire weekend at Webster Hall in New York in the matter of minutes—each night they'll play to a crowd ten times bigger than any they saw during their entire existence.
Personally, it took me damn near a decade to find and appreciate American Football, and looking back, it's easy to understand why it didn’t have made an instantaneous or seismic impact upon its release. After the implosion of Cap’n Jazz, Mike’s brother Tim was the more public, combative and divisive party; meanwhile, the Promise Ring had just released Very Emergency months prior, one of emo's preliminary pushes towards the center. Consequently, American Football came together quickly, stirred up a decent amount of anticipation from a formative EP (its exclusion is the only disappointment the reissue provides), and disbanded almost immediately after the release of the LP.
Of course, hardcore fans claim plenty of one-off collectors’ items as landmarks, and in retrospect, American Football’s existence as something of a cul de sac rather than a connection to Kinsella’s later work as Owen or Owls further serves to show what a unique record it is. American Football’s greatest innovation was successfully removing any trace of punk rock while still functioning within the genre. This was a bold maneuver, since the genre's hardcore roots were about the only thing that gave its practicioners even the slightest bit of credibility. American Football weren’t the only ones headed in new directions (see: the Appleseed Cast), but whatever you think “punk rock” means, they got rid of it on American Football—there’s no confrontation, almost no distortion, no power chords, and none of the verse/chorus structure that was maintained even when emo became virtually synonymous with alt-rock.
In actuality, American Football is one of the more subtle post-rock records of its time—a variation on what the Sea and Cake and Gastr Del Sol were doing a few hours north in Chicago, but crucially operating from the heart rather than the brain. Only “Honestly?” bears some remnant of proper “rock” music, its main riff a twang-free rendering of “Rebel Rebel”. The cascading coda of “Stay Home” alludes to Slowdive's Pygmalion, while “The Summer Ends” recasts the pastoral free-form, flowing hymnals of late Talk Talk as a swooning mash note.
In the reissue's liner notes, Holmes makes numerous mentions of the band emulating Steve Reich and Miles Davis—typical namedrops for people in their early 20s who want to make it clear how seriously they’re taking music these days. There is trumpet on the record, courtesy of drummer Steve Lamos, and no one will mistake its sounds for anything the Prince of Darkness ever conjured. But Lamos’ amateur ingenuity perfectly suits the album's informality. The jarring blue note that introduces “The Summer Ends” sounds like a mistake at first, but by playing it twice the wrong note becomes the right note; it's a Choose Your Own Adventure Breakup Song that leaves its conclusion open-ended, even if you just know something*’s* forever lost. Likewise, over the glimmering motifs of “For Sure”, Lamos' sighing, brassy wail lets you know that when Kinsella whispers “Imagine us together”, the whole thing will end in tears.
Minimalism, repetition, and subtle virtuosity were rare elements amidst Cap’n Jazz’s spazzed-out arpeggios, the Vagrant label's lockstep pop, and the severe start-and-stop musicianship of Jade Tree and Deep Elm bands. So what, exactly, makes American Football emo? Upon announcing their reunion, the band explained their return by joking, “Obviously, we knew the time was ripe for three middle aged dudes to play some old songs about teenage feelings, and stand around tuning guitars for a long time." It’s actually the latter part of that statement that points to American Football's constantly shifting, implacable emotional pull. There isn’t much insight as to what inspired Kinsella’s lyrics and he didn’t emote harder or rawer than anyone else. But Holmes and Kinsella’s guitar playing is the most emotive the genre has been privy to, inverting the typical power trio dynamic and rendering Kinsella’s minimal lyrics as a platform for elaboration rather than the final word.
Very little of American Football is in a minor key and almost none of it can be performed on a single guitar, so it’s not explicitly heartbroken music, nor is it ever entirely joyous. Rather than pinpoint an emotion, the record exists on a continuum. There’s no right answer as to whether “The Summer Ends” is a devotional, a last goodbye, or some combination of the two—the ache and beauty are intertwined. Instrumental "You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon” is the album's most playful cut, and it’s similarly open to interpretation: is it about leaving soon because everyone has to eventually get on with their day after spending the night together, or is it about leaving—like, for good? Nothing suggests a typical narrative arc, but it's worth noting that the song that follows "You Know I Should Be Leaving Soon" is called “But the Regrets are Killing Me”, and after that, “I’ll See You When We’re Both Not So Emotional” (let it be said, these guys had a sense of humor). American Football operates from a mindset where everything is about to happen, and that inability to stay present is a feeling that’s neither teenage nor see-through nor false.
American Football was released in September of 1999, which lends the album a real-time immediacy: the lyrics begin in June and end in August, surely a powerful period of time for teenagers and college-bound kids (American Football were University of Illinois students at the time). Unless you’re a teacher or NFL player, though, the typical adult's day-to-day doesn’t change all that much during the summer—it’s hotter, there are dumber movies in the theater, and that's about it. And yet, those same see-through teenage feelings can still manifest during the change of the seasons, regardless of age; there are many reasons “Indian Summer” is one of the most frequently covered indie rock songs, and similarly we're only now beginning to recognize how American Football struck an emotional chord, one that’s proven to be every bit as resonant.


A twisted barbed wire sign spans the entrance to the Ben Elektra Kibbutz in Metulla, Israel. It reads: "And\n ...

St. Anger

A twisted barbed wire sign spans the entrance to the Ben Elektra Kibbutz in Metulla, Israel. It reads: "And Justice for All." There, in the country's northernmost town, pinched by Lebanon, and set in a valley as arid and colorless as an Anton Corbijn photo, my brothers and I assembled compact discs for Elektra Records, far from the reach of cable modems and CDRWs.
After long days of picking rare bloodberries from barbed bushes for the screened St. Anger covers, which Lars assured us during his weekly motivational videos would only drive hard copy sales, I stripped my soiled black overalls, checked the bunks for banana spiders and sand ants, and settled in to read a tattered copy of Karl "Geezer" Marx and Frederick "Freddi" Engels' Metal Manifesto. Few historians care to document the period in the early 1850s when the pair, influenced by the heart-wrenching blue-collar poems of Bob Seger, abandoned the Bund der Gerechten, shaved their beards, applied eye-silver and rouge, and produced a series of simpler, populist manifestos.
Often, I found myself reading the first line by Zippolight, unable to proceed further, lulling myself to sleep with its mantra:
"A spectre is haunting Metal - the spectre of Metallica."
Decades removed from its writing I didn't find the assertion particularly leveling or insightful. Rather, I was amused by its irony. Originally, Marx and Engels had hoped to shock their staid, academic readers with imagery of the undead, as with the Pushead-inked "Red Monsta" devouring Europe on the cover to their earlier Communist Manifesto. Now the word "spectre" struck me only as a reminder that Metallica had long given up the ghost. The manifesto remained only a document of arrogance and comedy. Marx continued, "Metallica is already acknowledged by all Rock powers to be itself a power." And yet, when MTV recently bestowed Metallica with "Icon" status, they could only dredge up Kelly Osbourne, Ja Rule, Sum 41, Godsmack, Linkin Park, Avril Lavigne, Limp Bizkit, Lisa Marie Presley, and Snoop Dogg in tribute.
Time had only made the rest of the text increasingly contradictory and meaningless. Marx and Engels had seen Metal as the antisocial soundtrack that could topple pop for the hearts of the young. "Pop has converted the guitarist, the songwriter, the drummer, the man behind the boards, into its paid laborers," they vented. "The Major Labels cannot exist without continually revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relation between fans and artists."
I read that last line while seated in a mule cart heading toward the Cardboard Folding Hut. Behind me, shimmering cylinders of stacked St. Anger discs stood in tight rows, an electrical current coursing through them for defense. I snapped the book shut, sickened by the absurdity. If only Marx had lived to see the sides flip over a dwindling battle line. For the first time, a technological advance-- MP3s and digital downloading-- spelled victory for the proletariat. File-sharing had become as anti-establishment as Marx had envisioned metal sounding. And Metallica, Marx's metal champion, had dropped an iron firewall between their music and their fans, who, despite their revolutionary ripping, were, for the most part, bourgeoisie boys choosing bands based on how the logos looked protractor-scratched into study hall desks. We kibbutz workers, who lived here by choice, manufacturing Metallica CDs, faced time in the Lightless Cell if found touching or "experiencing" St. Anger before its shipping date. Yet James Hetfield seemed to always sing about being locked inside a Lightless Cell as a badge of honor. Irony upon irony upon irony. Then again, Marx and Engels did grow their beards back and move on to more ambitious projects.
A banana spider bit into Ktulu the Mule's heel. The animal reared. The cart spilled its contents, the CDs and myself, into the dust. A safety cut the electrical field protecting St. Anger. As the cart master attempted to rein the bucking animal, I slipped a disc into my overalls.
After lights out (or "enjoy the black" as it was called), my bunkmates and I listened to the disc for which we had so diligently worked. What an utter mess. I saved 300 boxtops of Of Wolf and Man Cereal and bought a ticket to Israel for this? Lars Ulrich had taken the return to "real Metal" quite literally, playing a drumset consisting of steel drums, aluminum toms, programmed double kicks, and a broken church bell. The kit's high-end clamor ignored the basic principles of drumming: timekeeping.
Fittingly, Ulrich's scrapyard racket rang senselessly like quickening, imploding industry under filtered, stream-of-cliché riffing. The gimmick overwhelmed entire songs, chiming hollowly over all else. Hetfield and Hammett's guitars underwent more processing than cat food. When they both speedstrummed through "St. Anger", and most other movements, H&H; seemed to overwhelm each other with different, terrible noise. A bevy of pedals-- including the decidedly un-metal wah-wah-- jingled conspicuously like a massive charm bracelet... I mean, a string of skulls. A string of iron skulls.
A dry, crackling blooze melody squeezed out by Hammett on "Some Kind of Monster" brought to mind the time I used my practice amp as a stool in hanging a Ride the Lightning poster over my cot. The amp teetered and toppled, sending my foot right through the speaker cone. From then on I could only produce sounds exact to those on "Some Kind of Monster". I just never thought to release them during the kibbutz's mandatory "riffstorming" sessions monitored by Hetfield via satellite from his motorcycle factory. Bob Rock's bass neither bobbed nor rocked; it simply hid like an undulating grey amoeboid of sound, much like the web of hate pent inside the mind of the "Invisible Kid".
"Invisible Kid" towered as an example of Metallica's new alloy of ineptitude. In the video feeds streaming throughout the mess hall, Hetfield repeatedly reminded us of the cathartic, psychological process behind St. Anger. This implied a personal, emotional vent. However, Hetfield can only convey feeling through the persona of the implied "invisible kid" who cowers from parents and rejection in every song, mirrored in the bedrooms of their audience. Such juvenile confessionals as, "I hurt inside/ I hide inside/ But I'll show you," and, "Mama, why's it rainin' in my room," sound ridiculous coming from the mouth of a 40 year-old man. Is this how he talks to his shrink?
These muscle car confessionals and jerky, rough-edged transitions sounded not so much like metal, but Bruckheimer emo. Like Tim Kinsella, Hetfield found word pleasure in nursery puns such as "purify/pure if I" and "ominous/I'm in us." When "Frantic" cut from the grunting, "My lifestyle determines my deathstyle" refrain and shifted into the cooed "keep on searching" breakdown, it smelled strongly of sloppy pseudo-virtuoso bands like The Jazz June or Spitalfield. Emo bands found the simple process of merely moving from quiet to loud to be breathtaking. They wrote songs where beauty and melody was assumed on the count of clean guitar and picking chords, despite the fact that the two guitars had no knowledge of each other. In Metallica's case, the result was somehow worse for sounding so calculated and plotted in ProTools. ProTools had never been metal. ProTools never snorted ants up his FireWire from the side of the pool while urinating down a woman's dress. ProTools never inserted the sound of a chainsaw into the opening of "Black Metal" off the album Black Metal. ProTools never burned churches in Norway. And yet, ProTools had a major hand in assembling both "American Life" and "Frantic".
The disc ended as the sun was rising over Syria. Had it lasted that long? My comrades and I looked at each other, stupefied. Our only memory was of forced effects, laughable lyrics, and audio surgical scars. I sat up and began packing my duffel. I'd rather pick bananas. One comrade suggested smuggling the disc out of the kibbutz to leak to the Internet. If Metallica were such proud artists behind their music, unable to both allow downloading and refund money after purchase, then we should warn others. Metallica had become less a band leading a genre than a team soaking up payroll in a second-tier sport. This was NASCAR, WWE. Logos, sneers, mustaches, and beards. Hair grows back, but the Jheri Curl of insincerity, of contradiction, and of compromising a cause never straightens.


On this installment in a series of expanded reissues from the vaults of the late Jason Molina, love songs with raw nerves document a tender, transitional period in his career.

Songs: Ohia: Love & Work: The Lioness Sessions

Love & Work: The Lioness Sessions

Released in the early weeks of 2000, The Lioness stands as Jason Molina’s purest transmission on matters of the heart. It’s not just that the world is ending or that death seems promised with every passing minute, as was often the case on many of his essential records. There’s also this look he keeps getting from someone he really cares about. He’s not only affected by it; he’s “thrashed by the truth of your eyes.” And when it’s time for Molina to define exactly how he feels, he tells us in his wounded, earnest tenor, “Being in love means you are completely broken.” He sustains the mood throughout The Lioness, and he intends for us to feel that way, too.
The Lioness was a transitional album for Molina and his Songs: Ohia project. The records that came before were jumpier and more raw; the music that followed was smokier and more stately. In these nine songs across 40 minutes, where a series of minor chords recur like creeping waves of anxiety, he located the glacial sadness that would characterize his best writing even while crafting his simplest love songs, jukebox hopefuls he arranged like post-rock elegies. Love and Work: The Lioness Sessions is Secretly Canadian’s latest posthumous release from the vaults of Molina, who died in 2013 at age 39 from organ failure due to alcohol abuse. The package pairs the original album with 11 previously unreleased tracks—plus devastating essays from his wife, Darcie, and several collaborators, along with photos and ephemera from the era, like the two-of-hearts he taped to the studio wall while making the record. It’s a definitive document of this tender, crucial period for the open-hearted Ohio songwriter whose work has only grown more influential in his absence.
At a show in Richmond, Ind., just before The Lioness was released, Molina introduced one of his new songs by noting that fans were starting to ask questions about his lyrics. This was ironic for him, because his style was becoming more straightforward than old oblique beauties like, “My blood’s courage courses to rendezvous/With freedom.” But those curious fans were likely asking because they heard something about themselves within the mysteries of The Lioness. In these songs, Molina created portraits of couples, zoomed in so close that you can sense every nervous glance and twitch. “I watched us talking in the mirror,” he sings during “Tigress.” His writing on romantic relationships sounds patient and studied. Even at their most contented, the songs come out feeling ominous, expanding in open-ended ways. For these tunes about intimacy, Molina assembled a band that featured Alasdair Roberts and Arab Strap’s Aidan Moffat and David Gow and made him sound completely, dangerously alone.
Some of Molina’s most enduring music is here. The unaccompanied “Coxcomb Red” is an ode to physical attraction sung with such urgency that it plays like an answer to “I’m on Fire.” While Springsteen’s words evoke loneliness, Molina’s longing is as direct as a love letter: “I wanted that heat so bad,” he sings sternly, “I could taste the fire on your breath.” The span of his devotion becomes literal in the title track, where he wavers between two declarations: “You can’t get here fast enough/I will swim to you.” Swooning and hopeless in the verses and more forceful with each repetition of the chorus, the music propels and suspends his words like wind in a rainstorm. Molina was straying from his indie-folk roots and heading toward the sprawling drone spirituals he’d embrace on 2002’s Didn’t it Rain and electrify on 2003’s Magnolia Electric Co. A breathtaking rendition of the centuries-old gospel standard “What Wondrous Love is This,” the final track on the bonus disc here, showcases the clarity and timelessness he desired.
The newly unearthed material is characteristically beautiful. But Molina was a sharp self-editor, so none of these songs conjure exactly the same intensity as The Lioness itself. More tentative and mantra-like, the music sounds closer to his previous album, Axxess & Ace, whose working title of Meet Me Where We Survive was actually taken from one of these songs, “On My Way Home.” Instead of feeling like an outtakes collection, it plays like its own complete if unpolished companion—a testament to how quickly Molina evolved during his brief, prolific career. The peak arrives with “I Promise Not to Quit,” a lost classic. It stops and starts in dramatic swells, mirroring the weathered vow in its chorus: “I will work to make it work.” It’s a distillation of a dedication that seeps through every note of this set. The heart is a risky fuel to burn, but look how the fire sustains.


Terre Thaemlitz is best known as an experimental, electro-acoustic composer, and she has released difficult, conceptual works for labels like Mille Plateaux since the mid-90s. Her 2009 album is getting a no-frills reissue because of its scarcity, and it's a treatise on house music that attempts to debunk the myth that house music was an all-accepting, pan-cultural utopia.

Midtown 120 Blues

There's a contradiction at the core of Terre Thaemlitz's album as DJ Sprinkles, Midtown 120 Blues, that is difficult to resolve. The album, a treatise on house music, goes lengths to debunk the myth that house music is/was an all-accepting, pan-cultural utopia—that house music is for everyone. She does this, however, while offering up a deep house sound so sumptuous and inviting that it's easy to lose Thaemlitz's socio-political motives: a Trojan horse whose trap-door gets stuck. Midtown 120 Blues is being reissued, in deluxe packaging but with no additional or altered music, after just five years, though the record's scarcity and limited reach justify that decision.
Thaemlitz is best known as an experimental, electro-acoustic composer, and she has released difficult, conceptual works for labels like Mille Plateaux since the mid-90s. (With 2012's Soulnessless, she claimed to have released the longest-ever album, anchored by a 29-hour piano meditation.) In the early '90s, before she was releasing experimental works, Thaemlitz worked as a DJ in the type of midtown clubs that defined Times Square before it was corporatized later in the decade. These formative spaces gave a home to the different strains of house music emanating from New Jersey and New York, a sound more contemplative than that which was coming out of Chicago: slower, jazzier, more reflective. It was music made and then defined by disadvantaged communities: by latinos and blacks and the LGBT community.
Thaemlitz has produced house music under a number of different aliases, but the deconstructivist instincts that dominate her experimental works aren't as dominant here. Midtown 120 Blues travels familiar territory, working through lived-in hi-hat patterns and familiar, calming electric piano chords. It helps the medicine go down easier, sure, but there's not that much medicine. You get the sense that this style is so dear to Thaemlitz that she's less willing to fuck with it, at least on a sonic level. Midtown 120 Blues, at nearly 80 minutes, is almost womb-like in its immersion, though Thaemlitz rejects the idea of the club as a healing, safe space. You don't "lose yourself" in Midtown 120 Blues; it's a reflection on feeling lost.
Thaemlitz began documenting this scene in 1998, shortly after those clubs were elbowed out of downtown, with the Sloppy 42nds 12", her first work under the DJ Sprinkles alias. Midtown 120 Blues again took this baton a decade later, chronicling the turbulence and violation that existed in Thaemlitz's communities; it's an album that seethes, however prettily, as Thaemlitz laces her patient, supple grooves with short speeches.
One poignant segment of "Ball'r (Madonna-Free Zone)" finds her railing against Madonna, whose "decontextualized, reified, corporatized, liberalized, neutralized, asexualized, re-genderized pop reflection" of the vogue scene not only misrepresented the scene's origins but left the queen "who actually taught [Madonna] how to vogue" broke. Thaemlitz is a compelling speaker, and the hurt and anger in her voice is obvious; she's also deft enough to let the preachers, whom she often samples, do the preaching. Midtown 120 Blues feels far more personal than political.
Midtown 120 Blues is a remembrance, but it's also a travelogue, loosely documenting Thaemlitz's move from her childhood home in Missouri and her immersion in midtown's scene. "Grand Central, Pt. II (72 hrs. by Rail from Missouri)" functions largely like the KLF's Chill Out, organizing samples into an ambient collage that holds your attention even as it drifts for eight minutes. Moments like these feel like a salve for Jesse Jackson, who burns through his (sampled) vocal chords on "Sisters, I Don't Know What This World is Coming To" and the nervous, pendulous piano of "House Music Is Controllable Desire You Can Own".
Like punk music, house music was an underground phenomenon that offered an outlet to people who really needed an outlet. And like punk music, its history is romanticized to the point that the ills and misdeeds that still permeated the community are largely ignored. In the mid-'90s Thaemlitz was fired from a prominent DJ gig because she refused to play Gloria Estefan, a frequent request from the johns who would frequent the club; the johns, after all, kept the club open.
Thaemlitz quit, exhibiting the kind of principled stubbornness that has guided her career. This persists: Midtown 120 Blues will not be issued on vinyl, a medium unable to provide an accurate stereo bass response. Still, there's a fondness to Midtown 120 Blues, not least in its closing shuffle, "The Occaional Feel-Good". There is love here, however guarded. At its best, Midtown 120 Blues simultaneously acts as a corrective to house's ahistorical narrative and reminds us just how potent and beautiful New York deep house can be.


The Nigerian singer-songwriter’s second album is in constant search of innovation, fusing traditional and contemporary African music into a celebration of success and community.

Work of Art

Asake’s on top of the world right now and isn’t coming down. On “Olorun,” the meditative opener to his second album, Work of Art, he extols the Supreme Being of the Yoruba religion before praising himself. “I’m a brand new man,” he proclaims. Ahmed Ololade’s first love was dancing, but as much as he loved feeling the music, he knew the best way to make money was to become a consummate artist. He took up singing and adopted a stage name, and after a steady stream of singles he released his first full-length, Mr. Money With the Vibe, in 2022. It became Billboard’s highest-charting debut album from a Nigerian artist. He was, undoubtedly, a star.
Asake’s first album was the culmination of ideas percolating throughout his home country. Most notably, it was amapiano—a strain of South African house music in the lineage of kwaito—that brought Asake’s Afrofusion music to another level. This regional style was already spreading across the continent—in Tanzania and Kenya, Namibia and Mozambique—and fellow Nigerians like Davido and Mayorkun were collaborating with South Africans to meld it with Afrobeats. What separated Asake from his peers was how he forged a sound all his own: He incorporated choral harmonies and string arrangements, and worked in elements of the Indigenous Yoruba music known as fújì. The opening track on his debut announced this audacious blend: “Dull” interpolated “Oke Agba” from the pioneering fújì musician Ayinde Barrister.
With Work of Art, Asake understands that his winning formula needs no adjustments. Wistful strings inject solemnity on “What’s Up My G,” and as the characteristic log-drum loop of amapiano establishes a lithe beat, he expertly switches between vocal rhythms and inflections. There are many shades to his wealth, his nimble delivery implies. And when he lists off designer brands and luxury cars, the host of voices behind him frame his braggadocio as a spiritual act. “If you don’t feel blessed, you won’t be blessed,” he recently told ABC News. It sounds like the flipside to a Yoruba òwe, or proverb: “Ẹní lówó kó ṣe bí ọba” (“Whoever has riches should act like a king”).
These two pithy statements reflect Asake’s own mindset of manifestation: His songs often read as a proposition that anyone who hustles can experience the blessings he’s had. On “Basquiat,” he makes sure to let you know that the “work of art” his album title refers to is, indeed, himself. Still, the song’s group chants remind you that celebration can and should be a communal act. Perhaps that’s why he’s so drawn to amapiano, a style of music that South African artist Thandiswa Mazwai has said reflects “how radical Black joy can be.” Inevitably, some of the most irresistible songs on Work of Art are cheery. “Sunshine” is an encouraging balm, its bubbly synths and rising vocal harmonies capturing the warmth of time spent with loved ones. “Awodi” is less summery but just as hopeful. Asake sings about rising from the slums, and his slow, patient delivery feels like he’s extending an arm to lift you up beside him.
Stories of rebirth are nothing new, but Asake’s feel revelatory because they’re in constant search of innovation. “Amapiano” sheds some light on his approach. If the amapiano coming from South Africa is more tied to the country’s dance lineage, then Asake is intent on using it in bite-sized pop song form, as an avenue for intimate storytelling. But this isn’t to say that the production doesn’t stand out: “Great Guy” turns amapiano’s flagellating bass synths into pure, rumbling texture, while “2:30” lets them resonate in a way that recalls fújì’s talking drums. Closer “Yoga” even turns traditional séga—music that originated from enslaved Africans in Réunion and Mauritius—into a contemporary plea for peace. Asake grew up listening to Nigerian artists who continually evolved the country’s music, like Fela Kuti, Ayinla Omowura, and Wande Coal. His cross-generational, intercontinental music is doing the same.


Every time it seems like conventional indie rock has gasped its last, someone builds a mansion of song that reminds us that, at its best, the genre still pulls off raw, celebratory spirit more convincingly than almost any other...

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Maybe no one told Clap Your Hands Say Yeah that first impressions are important. Or maybe they've just got massive sack. Either way, their self-released, self-titled debut CD opens with the weirdest, most potentially grating bit of snake-oil salesmanship you're likely to hear until Tom Waits puts out another record. I happen to dig the song, entitled "Clap Your Hands!" (a theme is emerging), but a maniacal carny barking over a stuttering calliope isn't for everyone. Those who persevere, though, will quickly discover that this garish foyer gives out onto spacious, elegant chambers of clean lines and soft lights.
Clap Your Hands are a five-piece from Brooklyn who're known to break out both harp and harmonica. They've recently been garnering rave press in their home city, and, over just the past two weeks, burning up the internet like a vintage Lohan nipslip. The pundits are saying Wilco (not hearing it), Talking Heads (okay), and Neutral Milk Hotel (getting warmer), but if it checks in with a number of modern and classic new wave referents, the music sings for itself: Clap Your Hands traffics in melodic, exuberant indie rock that pairs the shimmering, wafting feel of Yo La Tengo with a singular vocal presence that sounds like Paul Banks attempting to yodel through Jeff Mangum's throat. Or imagine the Arcade Fire if their music were more fun-loving and less grave.
Of course, if Clap Your Hands had a press kit, it would undoubtedly include something about "synthesizing these influences into a sound that's uniquely their own." And for once, it would be true. On the album's first true song, "Let the Cool Goddess Rust Away", a wailing vocal evokes Walkmen frontman Hamilton Leithauser, as hitching, muted guitars and singing melodic ones twist and furl over throbbing bass. On "Over and Over Again (Lost and Found)", the band veers into more Interpol-ish territory, with small, stripped guitars and bass, a thin synth wash, and lilting vocals with woozily yawning vowels. Same goes for the iridescent guitars, purring synths, and weary vocals of "Details of the War".
The record is consistently, remarkably strong, but "The Skin of My Yellow Country Teeth" in particular stands out, with its richly buzzing synth phrases, textbook Modest Mouse guitar lead (a trebly, gliding string bend skimming over the rhythm like a flat stone over a pond), contrapuntal bass, and shuffling drums. The song also features one of vocalist Alec Ounsworth's most memorable performances: He ramps up the urgency as the heavier chords kick in, his voice cracking and shifting in cascading waves as if someone were pressing his vocal cords to a fret board and bending them. "Is This Love?", with its clean, galloping guitars and fruit loop synth trills is the song most blatantly redolent of Neutral Milk Hotel (especially of the unhinged pop and careening vocals Mangum favored on On Avery Island), and its dizzily wowing vocal harmonies carry over to "Heavy Metal", where fuzzed-out bass and wheezing harmonica punch smart shapes into the fizzy guitars.
There's something really refreshing about stumbling across a great band that's trembling on the cusp without any sort of press campaign or other built-in mythology-- you actually get to hear the music with your own ears. While a lot of bands view the promotional apparatus as a necessary evil, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah prove that it's still possible for a band to get heard, given enough talent and perseverance, without a PR agency or a label. Indie rock has received a much-needed kick in the pants, and we have the rare chance to decide what a band sounds like of our own accord before any agency cooks up and disseminates an opinion for us. Damn, maybe this is how it's supposed to work!


Carlile’s sixth LP is a move toward her prestige era, a moment when she’s expected to reconcile the warring parts of herself for a growing audience.

Brandi Carlile: By the Way, I Forgive You

One of Brandi Carlile’s strongest points, to her admirers, is her ease with the tonal switch, moving abruptly from honing pin-sharp details at full volume to whispering evocative commonplaces. There’s a similar quality in her relationship to genre: Her deft straddling of country and folk suggests Americana, but Carlile is too restless for that. After the churning and most welcome rock dalliance of 2015’s The Firewatcher’s Daughter, her sixth album is on first listen a return to the acoustic arrangements she favored in the Bush II years. But hairpin turns are Carlile’s specialty, and By the Way, I Forgive You turns out to be something less than an advance but more than a retreat: It’s a move toward the prestige era of her career, a moment when she’s expected to reconcile the warring parts of herself for a growing audience.
Her collaborators this time are an impressive bunch. A Shooter Jennings credit, in Nashville circles, is the musical equivalent of a Michelin star, a welcome sign of her growing ambition. He and Dave Cobb—the latter helming celebrated albums by Sturgill Simpson, Chris Stapleton, and Jason Isbell—co-produced this LP, and they and Carlile (along with longtime bandmates and co-writers Phil and Tim Hanseroth) have got their shit together. Which is not to say there are no reaches: By the Way occasionally succumbs to the overwrought, as if Carlile were still auditioning. She should know better than to outsing orchestras, especially when the late Paul Buckmaster conducts them (“The Joke”). When the arrangement and the song are right, though, the risks pay off. The acoustic hooks, string section coda, and admissions of wanderlust on “Whatever You Do” suggest “Moonlight Mile,” and while her version doesn’t come close, Carlile’s instincts are sure: Knowing she’s singing a keeper dovetails with her narrator’s determination to stay stoic.
Using the offhandedness of the album title as lodestar, Carlile examines the wages of contrition—who needs it, who benefits, the effects on survivors. For gay men and women, reconciliation is an inevitable part of the burden of history. Or call it a whistling in the dark. Hard lives darken By the Way, recollected with the mild unease of someone who has to go home a couple times a year. “I never met a coward I don’t like,” she observes in “Whatever You Do.” An observation as criticism, for one of those cowards is Carlile herself. “Most of All” addresses warring parents whose lessons don’t fit gender expectations: The dad in this song taught her the wisdom of keeping a cool head, the mom how to fight. “Sugartooth,” the album’s catchiest number in part thanks to Jennings’ rolling keys, is a valentine to a schoolmate who’d give you the shirt off his back so long as you didn’t take his drug money. “He was a liar but not a fraud,” Carlile sings, in one of By the Way’s pithiest inversions.
If there’s one subject music-biz lifers know well, it’s the road, where payoffs come in the future if at all. Carlile’s second album, released just over a decade ago and containing her best-known tune, “The Story,” only went gold last year. Rarer still to find an artist who distills the banality of hotel rooms and mud-streaked tour van windows into approximations of wisdom. Told from the point of view of a woman whose young daughter still astonishes her, especially when this daughter breaks heirlooms, “The Mother” pivots around the declarative statement, “I am the mother of Evangeline.” No-nonsense, even curt, “The Mother” is this album’s finest moment. Loudon Wainwright III could have written it.
As the success of Isbell’s The Nashville Sound has shown, there’s an audience for records like By The Way, I Forgive You, particularly when their narratives require fictive leaps no higher than the average 2 Chainz album does. And Carlile has the kind of respect from peers that this audience goes for: With 2017’s Cover Stories project, the likes of Dolly Parton, Pearl Jam, the Avett Brothers, and Adele treated her songs as if she were John Hiatt in 1989. A weakness for vocal histrionics plagued Hiatt, too, recall. But the 36-year-old songwriter, who can count a former president as a fan, knows this is her moment. The album’s a tad awkward, like many projects steeped in the mild tea of sincerity, but By the Way, I Forgive You is the necessary next step in a shrewdly managed career. Brandi Carlile requires no forgiveness from us.


Having largely eschewed the heavy guitars that weighed down much of their output for the past decade, New Order embrace electronics again on Music Complete. They conjure the kind of synth washes and house-y piano runs that could have easily pulsed across their records during their mid-'80s heyday, making for what is arguably the most refined record they’ve released since 1989’s Technique.

Music Complete

In his new memoir, Chapter and Verse, New Order frontman Bernard Sumner recalls the exact moment that the band, having only recently changed their name from Joy Division to New Order in the wake of Ian Curtis’ death, opted for a change in direction that would forever alter their career. "Our music had become so incredibly dark and cold, we couldn’t really get any darker or colder," he says. "I remember quite clearly sitting in a club in New York one night, around three or four o’clock in the morning, and thinking how great it would be if we made music, electronic music, that could be played in one of these clubs." The rest, of course, is history. New Order would go on to become one of the most successful and innovative dance acts of all time, creating an aesthetic that split the difference between guitar-heavy post-punk and club-ready dance music. Some 30 years later, New Order continue to develop and refine the template they essentially created with surprisingly positive results.
Music Complete is New Order’s 10th studio album, and for all intents and purposes, it’s the first thing they’ve recorded since 2005’s Waiting for the Sirens' Call (2012’s long-delayed Lost Sirens was essentially a hodgepodge of Waiting outtakes). It also reflects a series of shifts within the band, created after the departure of bassist Peter Hook and reintroducing original keyboardist Gillian Gilbert back into the fold. For longtime fans, the acrimonious departure of Hook is potentially worrisome, as his melodic basslines were so integral to many of New Order’s most beloved tracks. As it turns out, they needn’t have worried too much. New bassist Tom Chapman, who formerly played with Sumner in Bad Lieutenant, creates a pretty faithful simulacrum of Hook's signature sound both live and on record. Having largely eschewed the heavy guitars that weighed down much of their output for the past decade, New Order embrace electronics again on Music Complete, conjuring the kind of synth washes and house-y piano runs that could have easily pulsed across their records during their mid-'80s heyday, making for what is arguably the most refined record they’ve released since 1989’s Technique.
The 11 tracks on Music Complete essentially touch on all the things that New Order do best, from the wistful melancholy of the record’s first single, "Restless"—a lovely "Regret"-like bummer ode to the perils of never being satisfied—to the pounding eurodisco of "Tutti Frutti", it is as if the band tried to assemble a record based on all of their most iconic vibes. In large part, they manage to succeed. On even their most classic records, New Order can be amazingly inconsistent, the truly great songs always eclipsing the simply forgettable ones. In this way, Music Complete is no exception. "Plastic" is the most inspired bit of dance music the band has recorded in years—a sprawling seven-minute bit of Moroder-ish synesthesia in which Sumner’s perfectly affectless vocal—"It’s official, you’re fantastic, you're so special, so iconic"—plays against tastefully employed bits of Chic guitar jangles and a classically New Order-ish bassline that somewhere is making Hooky's head explode. It’s really the only track on the record that belongs on the same kind of rarefied dance floor as classic New Order jams like "True Faith" and "Fine Time"—which means it’s the kind of slick, slightly chilly, and grandly magisterial electro pop that is essentially begging to be remixed into some kind of ecstatic 12” version that can play on a loop for days.
Elsewhere, "Singularity" opens with what literally sounds like an old Joy Division outtake—an ominous bassline and some warped guitar lines that sound as if they were being played in a room just adjacent to the actual recording studio—before exploding into a digitized electro banger, while "People on the High Line" could be a distant cousin to Republic’s "World", complete with chorus-echoing female backup vocals. "Tutti Frutti"—one of three tracks featuring additional vocals from La Roux’s Elly Jackson—reaches for a similar state of dancefloor euphoria and almost gets there. As always, Sumner’s lyrics are hit and miss ("You got me where it hurts / but I don’t really care/ ‘Cause I know I’m OK / Whenever you are there.") but he always manages to sell it effortlessly. In fact, effortlessness has always been New Order’s greatest trick. The best tracks on Complete are the kind of tastefully deployed dance track that the band has spent decades articulating—perfect, polished, airtight—but one can’t help but wish that Music Complete had a few more of them on board.
The record’s weakest tracks are generally the most tepid. "Academic" and "The Game", while certainly not terrible, suffer from being both unmemorable and somehow overly familiar, sounding like a dozen or so other fine but mostly unremarkable New Order tracks haunting the latter halves of previous albums. Elsewhere, "Stray Dog"—a track featuring a long spoken word passage growled by none other than Iggy Pop—would make for an appropriately larky B-side, but is something of a momentum killer when placed squarely in the middle of a pop album. The record does end on a high note though, with the swooning "Nothing but a Fool" adding the requisite dollop of perfectly-metered melancholy and album-closing ballad "Superheated" (featuring Brandon Flowers in what one can only imagine is his ultimate wet dream of a guest spot) bringing all the feelings to a charmingly earnest song about lost love that sounds like it could/should have played during the penultimate scene of a John Hughes movie (in the best way possible).
For longtime fans, Music Complete is something of a return to form for New Order—complete with appropriately chic minimalist artwork courtesy of Peter Saville. The record’s carefully considered aesthetic and meticulous production bear all the hallmarks of the band’s most iconic work. Still, it’s hard to know if anyone other than the band’s legions of devotees will find most of this material truly arresting. Music Complete certainly doesn’t do anything to diminish New Order’s formidable legacy, but it doesn’t necessarily expand upon it either. That being said, it still sounds like classic New Order, and now over three decades deep into their career, it's kind of amazing that nothing else really does.


Mastodon find their niche as a thinking man's metal band. Blending Voivod's neuro-thrash, Therion's majestic gloom, Morbid Angel's spirit of restless and morphing liquid black melody, and EyeHateGod's Southern rock gone awry, Leviathan is nothing short of supernatural.

Leviathan

Famed liberal journalist and political commentator Bill Moyers recently remarked "I believe that journalism is all about writing in the sand and whistling in the wind. The wind blows the sound away, and the sand flows over the writing. A journalist has impact on his time, if he's lucky." Sadly, for many of us at Pitchfork, our brand of journalism is often reduced to pounding sand and pissing in the wind-- particularly where metal is involved. With metal, so much effort goes into pasteurizing the product, congealing an intrinsically harsh and offensive form of expression into G-rated drivel, that our wind swallows the sound. What results seldom resembles the melodic and thematic content of sometimes brilliant modern metal albums, and instead focuses on the critic's unquenchable need for primal screams directed at a genre he/she simply doesn't get.
I've been away from journalism for the better part of two years. In that time I've sat back and stiffly scrutinized the metal landscape. So much of what I've witnessed is offensive-- both in the arenas of music and music criticism. I've seen dozens of rudderless bands ebb and flow, milking the same old derivative metal props for all they're worth. I've seen an entire genre (black metal) continue its decade-long decay into a wretched puddle of milky white afterbirth. And most notably, I've watched scores of pseudo frat boys reinvent themselves as "metalheadz." Whether it's the crystal meth or $10 dollar cases of PBR, these guys have tons of energy, a healthy appreciation for Terrence McKenna, and above all else, a whole lot of noise to make.
Unfortunately for these clowns-- and more so for the "journalists" who lap up this rubbish-- this wolf in American Eagle clothing is little more than the noise of hyperactive brats. Ample time is spent bemoaning the aesthetics of the so-called true metal as puerile, obsolete, and anachronistic, and at the same time lauding the dubious originality of bands like Isis, Pelican, and Neurosis, who seemingly missed the whole point in the first place by latching onto the very unmetal aesthetic of putting their audience to sleep.
And then a band like Mastodon comes along and just clusterfucks the entire landscape for every indie kid who thought they had the whole scene pegged. Starting with their ironically acclaimed 2002 release Remission, Mastodon's Bill Kelliher, Troy Sanders, Brent Hines, and Brann Dailor displayed considerable technicality and staggering chops. Although initially loathed by yours truly, I eventually recognized this album as a turgid-- occasionally murky-- statement from one of the most relentlessly forceful young bands on the Relapse roster.
With their 2004 beast, the aptly titled Leviathan, Mastodon finally find their niche as a thinking man's metal band. Blending Voivod's neuro-thrash, Therion's majestic gloom, Morbid Angel's spirit of restless and morphing liquid black melody, and EyeHateGod's Southern rock gone awry, Leviathan is nothing short of supernatural. Evincing a decade's worth of maturity gained in just two short years, Mastodon have authored a bombastic modern interpretation of Herman Melville's Moby Dick, the classic metaphor for mortality's eternal (and unwinnable) struggle with divine injustice.
On tracks like the blistering "I Am Ahab", the band revels in one of its most tightly structured offerings to date, showing precision and patience roaring with power chords and drummer Brann Dailor's mastery of playing both within and around the groove. With the fusion of guitar stabs and snare hits assaulting the listener like a hammer to the skull, the track evokes the unquenchable vengeance and contempt of Melville's symbolic white whale in a little over two-and-a-half minutes.
"Iron Tusk" is a particularly resonant ode to Sabbath's raw sludge rock sound; another swollen groove that just grows and flows in circles and waves. What's most impressive about this album is evidenced here: Mastodon have learned how to flaunt their musicianship and still allow a song to evolve. Their confidence is such that they're quite capable of building an awesome wall of drone and harmony and then getting the fuck of its way. Where a band like Isis seems to content to treat the audience like morons and basically repeat the same sound over and over again until it's nothing more than glorified elevator music, Mastodon stumbled onto the delicate art of weaving complexity and sophistication within an audience-respectful format.
"Megaladon" is an ode to the mythos of early 80s Maiden and Diamond Head-- and a simultaneous tip of the cap to Molly Hatchet with a wonderfully idiosyncratic, and damn near arbitrary trailer park riff before going into full throttle thrash for the remainder of the track. Fusing the narrative trademarks of King Crimson and Slayer, "Naked Burn" is one of the more beautiful pieces of Leviathan, a shifting, swaying exercise in orchestration and intelligible vox within a metal format. Marking a stark contrast with Remission, "Hearts Alive" continues Mastodon's revisitation of the new wave of British heavy metal-- and homage to the mysticism of the Viking Metal movement-- by unleashing a sweeping 13-minute epic, briefly featuring some of their most gentle vocals to date. Indeed, the addition of actual sung vocals-- while often suicidal to other metal bands-- lends a coherence and humanity to Leviathan basically alien to Remission.
Ultimately, there's very little to dislike about Mastodon. The genesis from their marginal 2001 EP Lifesblood to present day has been nothing short of stunning, and I can't imagine why anyone with even half an interest in the preservation of metal as a legitimate art form doesn't have a copy of Leviathan on his shelf. These guys aren't part of the tedious mediocrity they've been lumped in with, nor do they hold any contempt for their audience or their forefathers. They're simply one of the best things we metal fanatics have going for us, and if that's not reason enough to toss Panopticon in the trash, I don't know what is.