Playing more like a label-mandated promotional release for an up-and-coming artist than a thorough retrospective of one of rock's contemporary greats, this best of showcases the arc of Buckley's career in a chronologically scattered and not-particularly-enlightening way.

Jeff Buckley: So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley

So Real: Songs From Jeff Buckley

There's little use in debating whether or not Jeff Buckley's legacy is best served by a seemingly endless stream of posthumous releases. Buckley's music and persona are cemented in the pop music canon even before the repackaging, re-sequencing, or re-mastering. And given that Buckley only released one proper LP in his lifetime, it makes sense that these reissues-- including the latest, So Real-- offer little in the way of either consistency or deeper perspective.
Playing more like a label-mandated promotional release for an up-and-coming artist than a thorough retrospective of one of rock's contemporary greats, So Real showcases the arc of Buckley's career in a chronologically scattered and not-particularly-enlightening way. Buckley's three best-known releases-- the Live at Sin-e EP, Grace, and the unfinished Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk-- each encapsulates a distinct moment in Buckley's career, and together constitute a fairly complete snapshot of his musical goals and aspirations. This compilation, however, demonstrates no such personal depth, showcasing Buckley's talents while omitting his inspired missteps.
There's very little new that can be said about the cuts taken from Grace and Live at Sin-e. The choices are even pretty obvious: "Lover, You Should've Come Over", "Grace", "Last Goodbye", and "Hallelujah" from the former; "Mojo Pin" and "Je n'en Connais Pas La Fin" from the latter. Mediocre outtake "Forget Her" and a sped-up "road version" of "Eternal Life" are culled from the still-freshly-released "Legacy Edition" of Grace. The only at all questionable omission here is that of "Morning Theft", a fan favorite and by far one of the strongest tracks on Sketches.
The three tracks chosen to represent Sketches-- "The Sky Is a Landfill", "Everybody Here Wants You", and "Vancouver"-- all speak to the largely unacknowledged influence of D.C. art-rockers Shudder to Think on Buckley's later work. After the release of Grace, Buckley spent some time playing bass in Shudder guitarist Nathan Larson's underrated Mind Science of the Mind project, and the influence is apparent in Sketches' flashes of inspired, angular weirdness. Listening to "The Sky Is a Landfill", in particular, it's clear that Buckley was beginning to explore a more discordant and subversive approach, even if he hadn't quite figured out how to execute it. One can see why Buckley wished to re-record the songs that were released as Sketches-- while his vocals are in prime form, his band lacks the cohesive, communicative energy that makes Shudder's Pony Express Record so amazing.
You can hear Buckley growing more lyrically adventurous too, with similarly mixed results. The straightforward, lovelorn words of "Last Goodbye" and "Lover, You Should've Come Over" perfectly suit that era of Buckley's material. The more impressionistic lines of "The Sky Is a Landfill" and "Vancouver" are a striking contrast; ambitious, overreaching, and occasionally very awkward and clumsy. No matter how many live albums, B-sides, and covers surface, the unbelievably sad truth remains that the record Sketches hints at-- a more sinister, dissonant and explosive take on Buckley's heart-on-sleeve romanticism-- will never be heard.
The inclusion of a single previously unreleased track (a fairly predictable cover of the Smiths' "I Know It's Over") hints that this compilation is meant for completists as well as newcomers. Unfortunately, it doesn't have much to offer either. Buckley's legacy is necessarily imperfect, inconsistent, frustrating, and exhilarating, and the "best-of" treatment ultimately does nothing to bring out the best in his work.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a folk classic that came to the world stage with a perspective crystallized in society’s margins.

Tracy Chapman

A spotlight comes up on Tracy Chapman as she moves into the a capella song “Behind the Wall.” She sings from the point of view of a neighbor hearing a woman screaming in the apartment next door. Her trembling contralto soars and then, just as quickly, falls into a whisper. Between verses, she lets the air settle into silence before charging into the dark scene once again. The last lines—“The police/Always come late/If they come at all”—ring off into nothing. Chapman wrote the song in 1983, while she was still a student at Tufts University and busking in Boston for distracted passersby. Within five years, she would perform it for a television audience of 600 million in a packed Wembley Stadium for Nelson Mandela’s 70th birthday benefit concert.
Alone on that massive stage, guitar in hand, she allowed the echoing mic and screaming crowd to amplify the quiet of the song. And as she sang with that magnetic calm, she built an atmosphere as intimate as each listener’s childhood bedroom. “Behind the Wall” was the second of what was supposed to be a three-song set. But then, as the legend goes, serendipity gave the world another glimpse of this commanding artist. Just before Stevie Wonder was supposed to perform, a piece of his sound equipment went missing, and he refused to go on stage. Chapman agreed to take his place. It was in that surprise second set that she played “Fast Car.”
On her self-titled debut, which had been released on Elektra two months earlier with only modest sales expectations, “Fast Car” is a counterbalance to the weightiness of “Behind the Wall.” The low verses mix bleak recognition with quiet hope before building to a chorus so wistful, so joyfully tender it can transport you to a time in your life when you were younger and maybe a little less scared. Most of the people watching her performance at Wembley did not arrive knowing Chapman’s power, and most likely had never heard of her before. But they experienced in real time her ability to lift hearts into people’s throats. She performed her songs the same way she had on the streets for years: alone and brilliantly exposed.
We’ve witnessed the worst this world can throw our way, Chapman suggests on her debut, at times through her working-class characters. But the album creates a world where no force exists without a counter. The worst of what we’ve endured, she also offers, makes righteous justice inevitable. It’s a worldview that many could tune into. By the end of the summer of 1988, a few months after the Nelson Mandela tribute, Tracy Chapman was a platinum album and the singer was a star.
Some credited her rise to fame to that fateful Wembley appearance. Others speculated audience dissatisfaction with the ever-elaborate status quo of pop music of the time had something to do with the singer’s wild popularity. But however this folk- and blues-heavy singer-songwriter album became a hit in the synth- and glitter-flecked late ’80s, Chapman came to the world stage with a perspective crystallized in society’s margins. The only thing that critics struggled with as much as her unexpected success was uncovering how this plainly dressed, androgynous, Black woman with a voice as warm and woody as a bassoon created one of the best folk albums in a generation.
Chapman was as self-effacing in real life as she was singing from behind the characters in her songs. She hated interviews, almost never bantered on stage, and wasn’t shy about her displeasure at being coded a “protest singer.” And unlike folk artists like Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, to whom she is often compared, Chapman’s music wasn’t as explicitly confessional as much as it was a portrait of the environment that first fostered her stark but fiercely optimistic worldview.
Born in 1964, Chapman grew up in Cleveland during a time when economic and social pressures were visibly bursting through. The schools were struggling to become integrated, the demographic makeup of neighborhoods was shifting, white people were fleeing to the suburbs, and the African American residents that remained faced housing discrimination and scarce economic opportunities. Fires frequently dotted the streets, the result of arson and also property owners looking to clear out abandoned buildings, while a series of riots and strikes crippled neighborhoods and school districts. By Chapman’s 12th birthday, Cleveland had earned the nickname Bomb City for the simple reason that people were setting off a lot of them there.
It was in a Black neighborhood in this roiling cityscape that her mother Hazel raised Chapman and her older sister by herself. Together, the family sang along to Top 40 radio and Hazel’s collection of jazz, gospel, and soul records, including Mahalia Jackson, Curtis Mayfield, and Sly Stone. Meanwhile, television exposed a young Chapman to the country music stylings of Buck Owens and Minnie Pearl on the show “Hee Haw.” She was already playing ukulele and started writing songs by age 8, took up guitar at 11, and at 14 wrote her first song looking at the troubles in her city. She called it “Cleveland 78.”
Though Chapman left Cleveland while she was still a teenager, having earned a scholarship to a private, Episcopal boarding school in Connecticut, her debut offers a working-class, undeniably Black perspective. There’s “Across the Lines,” in which Chapman describes, over halting guitar strums and a twinkling dulcimer, a segregated city breaking out in a fatal riot. Sparked by news that a white man assaulted a Black girl, the incident is ultimately blamed on the victim. “Choose sides/Run for your life/Tonight the riots begin/On the back streets of America/They kill the dream of America,” Chapman sings in a stoic murmur. There’s “Mountain O’ Things” where she voices the dubious dreams sold to the American poor. “I won’t die lonely,” she sings against a soft marimba and hand drum beats. “I’ll have it all prearranged/A grave that’s deep and wide enough/For me and all my mountains o’ things.”
Yet, for all the violence and hopelessness Chapman captures in her lyrics, there’s an equal measure of radical and at times naive conviction that a more just world is on its way. “Why?” asks basic questions about widespread injustices—“Why is a woman still not safe/When she’s in her home”—before answering with an insistent assurance that “somebody’s gonna have to answer” for the destruction modern society has wrought. “Talkin’ ‘Bout a Revolution,” the opening song, is arguably the clearest view into Chapman’s political ethos. It’s a simple folk-pop anthem with a fervent, bright-eyed assurance that “Poor people gonna rise up/And get their share.” These brazen statements of faith in a better future emerge as encouragements for the downtrodden to continue on. Only someone who has seen society’s murky underbelly can convince you of its redeemability. She wrote the song when she was 16.
The dreams of social justice running through the entire album offset Tracy Chapman from its top-selling contemporaries. But with the eponymous words of “For You” resonating into the final seconds, love emerges as the underlying motivation for survival. Love is what all the figures she gives voice to ultimately want. And thanks to Chapman’s careful wording—the lover of the “checkout girl” from “Fast Car” is never gendered, while the only gendered part of the downbeat and mysteriously desperate “For My Lover” comes with the line “deep in this love/No man can shake”—it’s a body of work that one can easily read centered on queer desire. Chapman was notoriously private about her own sexuality and romantic life, even as she created love songs that welcomed all listeners to share in its subjectivity.
After its release, critics praised the album for its overtly political focus, hailing it as popular music’s return to authentic artistry. But Tracy Chapman didn’t change the course of a Top 40 ecosystem in tune with the era’s glorification of wealth and greed. Rather, the album was produced in isolation from popular music, and in defiance of it. She wasn’t a herald of change within the industry so much as she was an example of the innovation to be found outside of it. In pop music at the time, there was no archetype with which to classify the kind of artist Chapman was. And so, as she shrunk away from the spotlight, so did the gritty environment that contextualized her and her work.
Though the album showcased a descendant of white artists like Baez and Dylan, it also showed one who drew from the spiritual folks stylings of Odetta and the influence of blues singers like Bessie Smith. Nevertheless, once she rose to fame, critics debated the relative Blackness of her music, her audience, and by extension herself. In 1989, Public Enemy’s Chuck D summed up a sentiment some critics touched on regarding the perceived whiteness of her audience frankly for Rolling Stone: “Black people cannot feel Tracy Chapman, if they got beat over the head with it 35,000 times.” The lack of nuance leveled at her music and identity highlighted just how far outside of the mainstream her artistry was rooted, and just how little mainstream outlets understood about Black artists and audiences, even as Tracy Chapman held steady on the Billboard charts.
And while a wave of socially critical singer-songwriters did follow her—like Ani DiFranco, Melissa Etheridge, Liz Phair, and Fiona Apple—it would be several more years before another Black woman with an acoustic guitar, Lauryn Hill, caught the world’s sometimes unwanted attention. Chapman exposed a hole in expectations of who could be the voice of a generation, an entry point through which women in popular music entered and beat their own path. As Chapman reached for innovation through her own diverse musical influences, she and her debut album stand as evidence of the futility of boxing Black female artists in.
At times, the footage of her on stage at Wembley reveals an artist trying to draw as little attention to herself as possible. She looks down and away, stands in one spot, her guitar strap blends into her shirt, which blends into the stage. But through her set, as she weaves chilling silence between ribbons of rapturous melody, it feels like a threat to look away.


The Menzingers join the “post-30 punk” club, alongside Beach Slang and Japandroids. The first chorus asks “Where we gonna go now that our 20s are over?” and the LP proceeds from there.

After the Party

The Menzingers are classic rock bards with expired Warped Tour laminates, as rooted in Social Distortion and ska as they are Springsteen and Kerouac. This is their thing, and five albums in, they have it so down that it threatens to leave nothing to the imagination. Their fiercely beloved and unabashedly nostalgic dirtbag opus On the Impossible Past challenged Celebration Rock for 2012’s most accurately titled album. Its follow-up led off with “I Don’t Wanna Be an Asshole Anymore,” which emphatically slam-dunked its premise and left the rest of the dispirited Rented World to pick up the shattered backboard. And if there’s any doubt about what After the Party is getting at, the very first chorus rants “Where we gonna go now that our 20s are over?”
“Post-30 punk” feels like a subgenre of a subgenre at this point: age isn’t a number for Beach Slang, it’s a nullity, whereas Japandroids embraced maturity with the same legendary fire as their younger selves. After the Party works with more typical talking points: the buzz is shorter and the hangovers are longer. Can I hide these tattoos at my day job? Is playing Minor Threat on laptop speakers keeping it real or just lame? Am I too old to be sleeping on floors? Am I too old to be too broke to afford a hotel?
On first glance, single “Lookers” plays too much to stereotype, name-dropping Dean and Sal, “Julie from the Wonder Bar” and a hook of “Jersey girls are always total heartbreakers!” (also, lookers). Maybe it’s the “sha la la la!” in the chorus, but “Lookers” has a self-aware, sarcastic edge, an added pain of looking back on a seemingly rebellious youth and seeing just another kind of conformity. The Menzingers earn the benefit of the doubt when “Thick as Thieves” opens with a sly skewering of the songwriting process (“I held up a liquor store/ Demanding topshelf metaphors”) and “Tellin’ Lies” hits on a point where the difference between 29 and 31 really does feel like an entire decade: “When buying marijuana makes you feel like a criminal / When your new friends take a joke too literal.”
But this is a Menzingers album, so the laughs are momentary and ultimately futile deflections of fear. The narrators in these songs are people racing through their 20s who find themselves trapped in tour vans or, most of the time, relationships they can't convince themselves they deserve. “Midwestern States” provides a gutting account of a codependent and deeply-in-love couple couch-surfing across the country, unsure of when things will ever be different as their options and prospects dwindle with each passing year.
The Menzingers’ way with an anthem never fails them, even when the tough talkin’ boyfriends on “Charlie’s Army” and “Bad Catholics” lack definition beyond their bluster (“To everyone you’re such a sweet church girl/but I know your secret”), or the record’s best melody searches for the rest of a proper song (“House on Fire”). After the Party might actually be too well-designed for jukeboxes, as the relentless, face-to-the-glass production results in the sad cowpoke shuffle of “Black Mass” and the Meatloaf-inspired “The Bars” clocking in at about the same volume as everything else, denying a dynamic range that’s needed on a record that lives up to its title by sticking around one or two songs longer than it probably should.
At least it seems that way until “Livin’ Ain’t Easy.” The preceding title track could’ve easily been an exit ramp for Menzingers, a wizened, hard-earned moment of contentment where a couple looks back on their drunken nights and wake-n-bakes to a new morning, confiding, “after the party, it’s me and you.” But on the very next song, singer Greg Barnett remembers the foreclosure sign in the yard and the empty bank account, and hits I-80 to another show that will surely be the start of someone else’s debauchery. *After the Party, *though? It’s the hotel lobby and, “they’re always out of coffee.”


The debut from the UK collective is a hugely accomplished reflection of the present, a magpie-friendly collage of pop all glued together by the laconic voice of Orono Noguchi.

Superorganism

If the internet had an in-house band it might sound a little like Superorganism, a globally disparate indie pop collective whose expansive cut’n’paste musical MO reflects the utopian possibility of the online dream, minus the tarnished reality of toxic social media and fake news. Superorganism are a refreshingly modern band, one who bonded over Skype and live in a DIY studio / HQ in East London where they produce music via email, passing files back and forth like a manically inspired game of tennis. More importantly, Superorganism’s sound is a hugely accomplished reflection of the present, a magpie-friendly collage of pop that is reminiscent of the Avalanches, the Go! Team or Beck at his most light-hearted, dragged into a world where Instagram Stories have replaced dusty vinyl scratches as cultural currency.
Such a flexible approach to composition could have resulted in a sound that is closer to the smoldering chaos of free jazz than danceable indie pop. But Superorganism’s deliciously listenable debut album balances chaos with cohesion thanks to recurring musical motifs in the form of billowing guitar riffs, big choruses, and detuned synths, adorned by an ever-changing array of noises, samples, and effects. The musical beds of “Everybody Wants to be Famous” and “Something for Your M.I.N.D.” are offset by the noise of a cash register, a wheedling G-funk riff, a Champagne cork popping, vocal hooks from C’hantal’s rave classic “The Realm,” and what sounds like someone chomping down on vegetables.
While such detail is enchanting, Superorganism’s eclectic approach might sound a little too kooky over the course of an album were it not for Orono Noguchi’s fantastically world-weary vocals. The singer has said she listened to Pavement while recording the album and you can hear this in her vocal delivery and the songs’ laconic melodies: the resigned melancholy of “Reflections on the Screen” and the longing of “Nai’s March” are particularly reminiscent of Stephen Malkmus, in an album that swims with his influence. Far from being a simple ’90s throwback, however, Superorganism suggests Pavement filtered through James Blake’s kaleidoscopic musical lens and given a crash course in modern pop production, wrapped up in beats that nod to Daft Punk’s minimal funk. This unlikely fusion reaches its apotheosis on the brilliant “Nobody Cares,” a kind of grunge-pop-EDM fusion that captures 2018’s occasional air of weary stoicism in much the same way that Beck’s “Loser” did for the pointed laziness of the early ’90s.
Noguchi’s taciturn vocal style makes Superorganism’s music sound effortless, as if she dreamed up the songs between scrolling through her phone and waiting for her morning coffee. But this belies the incredible care and attention that has gone into creating this album. Bar the rather lackluster “Night Time,” the songwriting is pin-sharp throughout, matching well-observed lyrical detail like “Awkward kids putting gel into their greasy hair” (on “Nobody Cares”) with hooky and often heart-rending melodies that suggest a firm musical hand on the tiller. The production, meanwhile, is awash with tiny sonic detail, like the way the sound abruptly drops out during the chorus of “Something for Your M.I.N.D.,” leaving the listener hanging for half a beat in delicious expectation, or the CD stutter vocal effect on “It’s All Good.”
Perversely, Superorganism’s attention to detail also results in one of this album’s minor frustrations. Superorganism create fascinating visual worlds in home-made videos for tracks like “It’s All Good” and “Nobody Cares,” while their image-conscious live show sees the eight-strong group operate in matching raincoats. It feels almost a shame, then, to listen to these songs removed from their expanded sensory context. But this is a minor gripe for an album that confirms Superorganism as that rarest and most wonderful of all musical beasts: a guitar band that reflects the age we are living in by embracing the technological anarchy of the modern world, as well as their own glorious peculiarities.


UK post-punk revivalists tear up their own rulebook and start from scratch on this ambitious, darkly experimental second album.

Hidden

Bassoons, French horns, Japanese taiko drums, a children's choir, Foley samples, incantations about secret recordings, labyrinths, and knights. And that's just Hidden's first two tracks. Raise your hand if you thought These New Puritans had it in them. Just two years ago, the band from Southend-- a UK borough set where the Thames meets the North Sea-- took a stab at Gang of Four rhythms and Mark E. Smith vitriol. Their debut album, Beat Pyramid, made interesting uses of negative space and some of the record's spartan tracks turned up as killer remixes. But if anything, TNP were late to the post-punk revival party and about as likely to author a grandiose and triumphant concept album as Glasvegas.
And yet Hidden is a strikingly inventive and original rock record. Granted, nothing is ever completely new in pop music, but the album freshly synthesizes older ideas (post-rock textures, no-wave skronk, Steve Reich-influenced phasing) and current trends (dubstep's delay, chart pop's stentorian synth lines, global beats). You have to listen really hard to hear any guitars. Similar to contemporaries Sigur Rós, Nico Muhly, and Joanna Newsom, These New Puritans challenge classical and popular value distinctions by fully integrating a 13-piece orchestra. A clutch of melodic motifs and variations weave through Hidden, keeping the song set extremely tight and aesthetically cohesive, so when "Orion"'s rabid beats and gothic choir feed into orchestral palette cleanser "Canticle", the transition is fluid and unpretentious.
That's not to say the record is particularly organic-sounding. TNP frontman/songwriter/arranger Jack Barnett has plotted this work of sonic theater to the smallest detail for the biggest bang. "Attack Music" pits dancehall horns against massive beats and cooing female voices against Barnett's arch sing-speak. If possible, the drums, played mainly by Barnett's brother George, are even more spectacular on M.I.A.-shoutout "Fire-Power"-- a track which simulates the crushing of a human skull with a cracker-wrapped melon. Drums, in fact, are so central to Hidden, that Liars comparisons are unavoidable. Barnett credits Benjamin Britten's 20th century opera Peter Grimes as an influence (it was inspired by the same estuary region TNP call home), and Hidden seems to drive at some sort of human/natural world showdown. Given the fact that we're perched on the precipice of ecological Armageddon, it's probably safe to say the band has appropriately scaled their sound to their subject.
But here's the thing: While Hidden's risktaking and relentless focus are easy to admire, they're harder to love. As Leonard Cohen's "Anthem" famously goes, "There is a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in." Good luck finding Hidden's cracks. Still, the record rewards dedication: Beneath the bombast, the playful piano-driven "Hologram" is human, even vulnerable, and the electro-pop contribution "White Chords", with its Thom Yorke-channeling vocals, is unexpectedly lovely.
Hidden is a statement, but not a manifesto. A band needs considerable imagination and skill, not to mention borderline delusional levels of ambition, to attempt this kind of project and hope to be successful. So we probably won't be hearing a lot about new genres "doombeat" or "woodwindwave" anytime soon. And now that they've shown what they're capable of, we can probably expect TNP to do something totally different, if not genuinely amazing, next time around.


The North Carolina producer's shimmering, saccharine-sweet new album comes off like a mix of Passion Pit and M83. Guests include Amy Millan of Stars.

Worlds

If Porter Robinson didn’t make an album like Worlds in 2014, someone else would have. Never mind that, if one were to squint real hard, the North Carolina producer’s shimmering, saccharine-sweet new album could be seen as an antidote to the aggressive, toxically masculine culture that’s pervaded mainstream American dance culture over the last few years—a culture whose fuck-it sense of hedonism has recently resulted in fatal consequences, even as its corporate benefactors continue to cynically bleed its participants dry. Much more than a corrective gesture, the specific mix of sounds on Worlds—part synthy indie-pop, part twinkling bedroom-beatmaker fare, part festival-ready electro—comes at an excellent time. Finding a middle ground between the synthetic surge of big-tent dance music and the tart melodic tendencies of Passion Pit, Robinson’s debut album drives home the reality that mainstream electronic music carries a certain sensitivity found in chart-topping smashes, zeitgeist-capturing Ultra Fest main-stagers, and sneakily successful soft-beat auteurs alike.
Viewed through this lens, the mess of contradictions that Robinson seemingly embodies—a one-time bassface junkie who loaded his recent BBC Essential Mix with cloying indie fare, a dance superstar who’s expressed disgust regarding his own Las Vegas residency while pooh-poohing “DIY Brooklyn” and “future bass” in the same breath—untangles itself. And anyway, the expansive, wistful grandeur of Worlds is a sound that Robinson’s slowly built towards over the last few years. A practical Skrillex protegé raised, like many internet denizens, on a diet of video games and the nerdier areas of Japanese culture, Robinson’s transformation into a sky-gazing sentimentalist began not with his Beatport-crashing 2011 debut EP Spitfire, but the following year’s “Language”, a swooning single that packed shoegaze’s heady throb, American dubstep’s techy crunch, and the wistfulness of trance into six minutes-plus of bliss that slightly resembled if Tiësto had remixed the Honeydrips’ “Fall From a Height” instead of the Field.
If “Language” toyed with the idea of pushing American dance music trends into a more blissed-out direction, Worlds goes whole-hog, to the point that when buzzsaw synths, chintzy strings, and nasty basslines rear their heads near the album’s end on “Fellow Feeling”, their presence is garish and unwelcome. If we’re being real, it’s hard to justify calling most of Worlds “dance music,” as this is electro-pop plain and simple, with its guest vocalists—Stars’ Amy Millan, Owl City affiliate Breanne Duren, Canadian indie-pop duo Imaginary Cities, Sean Caskey of Australian festival-poppers Last Dinosaurs—embodying that genre’s sensibilities. Most surprisingly, Robinson himself occasionally and quite effectively takes lead vocal duties, especially on “Sad Machine”, which finds his high-range voice dueting with a Vocaloid, a digital audio tool that replicates the human voice, over a mid-tempo beat and starry-eyed melodic structure.
”Sad Machine” is one of a few tracks on Worlds that evoke, unintentionally or not, Passion Pit’s high-wire synth-pop fantasias. But above all else, the equally enduring influence of M83’s emotive electro looms over this album’s highlights. “Sea of Voices” stretches out elided vocals and fizzling ambience to an impossibly gorgeous zenith, before massive drums crash through the foreground in a manner not unlike “My Tears Are Becoming a Sea”, from M83’s still-unbeatable 2011 opus Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming; on “Hear the Bells”, a similar trick is played to equally ecstatic effect, the processing on Imaginary Cities’ vocals serving as a minor and unnecessary distraction from the rippling electronics and anthemic synth that gives the song a healthy, balanced dose of rocket fuel. Together, “Hear the Bells” and “Sea of Voices” make for two of the most transportive electro-pop singles of this year, a pair of unabashedly huge songs that, when caught in the right light, carry the potential to strike a personal chord for anyone who’s ever felt alive while looking at a city skyline at night.
The main drawback to Worlds’ sound, an impressionistic approach to mass-appeal fare, is that anyone with their ear to the (festival) ground might find these sounds to be relatively old-hat—after all, Passion Pit’s suffered a legion of imitators in their wake, and “Midnight City” has proved one of the most influential songs of the decade when it comes to guiding the tastes of major-label-signed, small-font-Coachella-poster acts. So no one’s going to refer to Worlds as “innovative”, and the sonic shift Robinson’s made here is as industry-canny as it is surprising. Regardless, the career transition he’s attempting is admirable and extremely promising, even of his peers don’t follow suit—and if they do, they certainly could use the change of pace.


Karen O and Danger Mouse have concocted a lush, vivid world on their dreamy and poignant collaboration.

Lux Prima

In the last five years alone, Danger Mouse has worked with everyone from Parquet Courts to Run the Jewels, while Karen O’s recent C.V. includes the soundtrack to kids film Where the Wild Things Are and an industrial cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Immigrant Song” in the company of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. The two of them have become serial collaborators, and they have done so many different things that it is near-impossible to accurately predict what they might sound like together.
On their new record, Lux Prima, they appear to revel in the possibility of a blank slate. O said of making Lux Prima that “when you create from a blurry place you can go places further than you’ve ever been,” while Danger Mouse talked of “looking for a place rather than a sound.” Listening to the results, I imagine that place to be Paris 1969, Detroit 1964 or Bristol 1995, a blend of Serge Gainsbourg’s orchestral grace, Motown pop hustle, and the packed and dusty sound of ’90s trip hop.
At times, the results are sublime. “Lux Prima,” the opening track, arrives on a swell of drums and synth harmonies then glides out on a wash of beatific chord changes. “Redeemer” carries the theatrical tang of spaghetti Westerns, and “Nox Lumina” closes the album in the fug of soured summer of love vibes. The album’s sound is sparse, allowing the listener to savor the interaction between elements.
It helps that Karen O is in immaculate voice throughout. Album highlight “Woman” features one of her greatest vocals, an astounding mixture of power, control, and agility that reads like a forceful fuck-you to anyone who has ever tried to mess with her. At other times her vocals are variously dramatic (“Ministry”), aquatic (“Drown”), and melancholic (“Nox Lumina”), in what must be one of the most versatile vocal performances to grace a recent pop album.
Lux Prima sounds so lush, in fact, that at times you wish that O and the Mouse had worried less about conventional song structure. The album’s weak spots are its choruses which—“Turn the Light” and “Woman” aside—feel tacked on, as if our heroes suddenly remembered that songs conventionally need choruses and acted accordingly. Karen O can write a killer hook—Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ “Zero” and “Maps” proved that a long time ago—but the lackluster hooks on “Lux Prima,” “Ministry,” and “Drown” sit like a poorly-drawn mustache on an otherwise-immaculate portrait.
Accordingly, Lux Prima works better as a journey than a destination. It never sounds better than when going nowhere fast, its charmingly anachronistic sound at odds with the sharply engineered hustle of the modern pop world. Karen O and Danger Mouse have dreamt up a vividly imagined world, and it’s a pleasure to get lost in it. With a little more freedom, it could have been divine.


Written from her own perspective, Halsey’s third album flips lonely self-awareness into a kind of strength. But some of its most compelling moments are overpowered by the tedium of modern pop.

Manic

After decades of pop-culture hegemony, the gendered tropes around break-ups have finally been supplanted. Instead of tubs of ice cream and days spent wallowing on a couch, modern heartbreak is mitigated by the promise of a social media glow-up and encouraged by a culture obsessed with both wellness and politicizing the personal. A breakup is not the failure of a relationship, this contemporary approach preaches, but an opportunity for growth, no matter how uncomfortable. Or maybe it’s an expression of heteronormative hostility; men, we learn, are trash. Either way, pain can be a messy, divinely timed intervention from the universe. Manic, the third album by Halsey, is an unlikely, but effective, manifestation of this new convention. I can imagine many listeners finding comfort across its 16 songs, and similarly bridging angst and self-discovery to navigate personal crises of their own.
A handful of Manic’s first six singles, among them the “Cry Me a River”-interpolating Billboard No. 1 “Without Me” and the country-pop manifesto “You Should Be Sad,” are rooted in the exploration of deep pain and what Halsey has described as an interest in “female rage.” That explains the lingering influence of artists once written off as angry women: Shania Twain, Alanis Morissette, and pre-acrobatics P!nk. (That more than a third of the album’s songs were released in its lead-up points to an altogether different convention: the pop album as a compilation of market-tested singles.) Notably, Halsey describes the album as the first project she has written as herself, New Jersey’s Ashley Frangipane, and not under the protective cover of her alter ego. Unlike 2017’s hopeless fountain kingdom and 2015’s BADLANDS, Manic is not structured around an elaborate fictional framework.
For Halsey, autobiography offers opportunity; her ability to translate the arc of her life—schoolyard misfit turned aspiring bohème turned Tumblr microcelebrity turned misunderstood pop star—is among the qualities upon which she has established her career. She does well in framing some of those personal experiences as concepts, on standout songs like the pop-rock drunk-texting anthem “3am” and the melodramatic revenge drama “killing boys,” both of which manage to flip lonely self-awareness into a kind of strength. On the former, a song that deserves a bright future as a karaoke classic, she begs: “My insecurities are hurtin’ me/Someone please come and flirt with me.” Who among us hasn’t been there?
Sadly, some of the album’s most compelling moments are overpowered by the tedium of modern pop. There are painfully stretched ballads, overly sanitized rhythms, a hint of indeterminately “tropical” energy, and back-to-back booming hooks à la Sia. (Halsey’s first record company was Astralwerks, the mostly electronic label with whom Sia released an album in 2004.) Alongside guest appearances from Morissette, Dominic Fike, and Suga of BTS, Halsey’s collaborators on Manic include Greg Kurstin, Benny Blanco, and Jon Bellion, some of the world’s foremost hitmakers and shapers of the amorphous, chameleonic pop I’ve come to associate with sitting miserably in the backseat of a Lyft. Their presence here is felt a little too acutely.
Though Manic features Halsey’s take on a handful of different genres—broody pop-R&B reminiscent of her early work; alt-rock-lite that is an aesthetic match to her persona; twangy country-pop sure to find a home on certain segments of pop radio—much of it has the same reflective surface and, at some points, the depth of an oil slick. The Morissette collab “Alanis’ Interlude,” which features a reference to John Mayer’s “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” is almost too irritating to endure: “Your pussy is a wonderland,” the pair warbles, infinitely more times than necessary. It is a low point for someone who is at times a clever songwriter.
Despite some missteps, Halsey’s appeal is clear: It’s a singularly difficult time to be a young person, and she is warmly attuned to that reality. “I don’t wanna be somebody in America just fighting the hysteria,” she sings on the album opener “Ashley,” framing her personal frustrations within the broader sociopolitical context shaping our collective experiences. What does it mean to be a woman in pain in a country that dismisses you? What is the significance of loneliness in a society that seems to require it? How much compassion does a broken self deserve? On Manic, Halsey proves she isn’t quite the radical she thinks she is. But maybe she doesn’t have to be.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Basses Loaded

It's hard to think of a band that's gotten more artistic mileage out of a consistent sound than the Melvins. Since their debut Gluey Porch Treatments almost three decades ago, the Melvins have barely wavered from the lumbering adamantine groove that made them so hugely influential on countless grunge, sludge, and alt-metal acts. At the same time, the group's nucleus, frontman Buzz Osborne and drummer Dale Crover, have jumped at opportunities to experiment for the better part of their history. Most notably, over the last ten years Osborne and Crover have shaken things up dramatically, leading an ever-shifting array of Melvins lineups as if the band encompasses multiple identities at once.
In some ways, Basses Loaded is the logical culmination of this ongoing musical-chairs policy. Crover and Osborne's preference for lineup fluidity is rooted in the 2005 departure of longtime bassist Kevin Rutmanis (Cows, Tomahawk). So it follows that Basses Loaded features six different people on bass, most of whom have participated in some form of album cycle with the band. (Crover himself plays bass on four tunes, leaving the drum duties on those songs to original Melvins skinsman Mike Dillard, who returned to record and tour behind the 2013 album Tres Cabrones.) But Basses Loaded also signals trouble, with several indications that the band could now benefit from stability as much as it has benefited from freedom in the past.
Perhaps for the first time ever, the Melvins sound unfocused and—worse—like their music is beginning to lack energy. Where you can point to just about any tune in the Melvins catalog and marvel at how Crover, Osborne, and their cohorts convey passion resorting again and again to the band's trademark Sherman-tank rhythms and de-tuned guitars, Basses Loaded mostly just plods. Sure, it's gutsy to start an album off with “The Decay of Lying,” a downtempo skeleton of an arrangement that stretches out to six-plus minutes. But the song is devoid of the textural elements the Melvins normally excel at. It also lacks a climax, which leads you to question whether there's a payoff for the patience it takes to sit through it.
There are lively moments: second track “Choco Plumbing,” for example, with its soaring, '76-era KISS-inspired chorus over an odd-shaped riff. But if anything the song only highlights that we haven't heard enough lately from the Jared Warren/Coady Willis/Big Business incarnation of the band that's been phasing in and out of activity since 2006—especially in contrast to the hodgepodge of contents that makes up the rest of the album.
To say that the cover of the Beatles classic “I Want to Tell You” doesn't shed any new light on the original is an understatement. It's as if the band were vying to give us all the textbook definition of “throwaway cover tune.” Osborne has publicly professed his love of the Beatles, while their influence on guest bassist Steve McDonald's main band Redd Kross is obvious, so clearly they don't mean to be irreverent. But Osborne's snarling vocal can't help but give the song a sophomoric demeanor. Likewise, Osborne and Crover are fairly avid real-life baseball fans, but their rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is so snide you would never guess it. Here, it functions as little more than a novelty item, and barely functions in that capacity.
The real kicker here is that “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” is preceded earlier on the record by “Shaving Cream,” another old-time novelty song with a similar cadence. The song eventually switches into something resembling an electronic loop, but then devolves into outright half-assery when Osborne just shouts “I'm all fucked up / I'm all fucked up” over and over. “Planet Destructor” features the otherwise extraordinarily inventive Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle, Fantômas, Trio-Convulsant), who just absentmindedly plays a mismatched walking bassline over the verse as if he'd been playing along with the wrong tune the whole time. The gag is revealed when the whole band shifts into full-on jazz halfway through the song. By then, it's too late.
Such moves might elicit lukewarm chuckles if they were coming from a band of teenagers for an audience of teenagers, but from seasoned veterans with a dedicated following they reek of being low on ideas. Only the warped psychedelia of “Maybe I Am Amused,” which features Nirvana's Krist Novoselic, legitimately goes down avenues the band hasn't explored before. Novoselic's accordion injects shades of Eastern gypsy folk music and singer/songwriter folk into the Melvins sound, reminding us that the Melvins have remarkable range given how doggedly they've stuck to their guns.
With its variations in mood, tone, and personnel, Basses Loaded plays more like compilation of B-sides culled from multiple recording sessions spanning several years. That's not actually the case, but the album's lack of flow—and in some cases, lack of point—suggests that for this group with its vitality still well intact after 30-plus years, a re-focusing is probably in order after a very fruitful run of creative detours.


The Baton Rouge sludge-metal quartet’s fifth proper full-length marks the latest tsunami in the endless storm of defeaning sound, political fury, and overwhelming prolificness that is Thou.

Magus

In more than a decade as a band, Baton Rouge sludge-metal quintet Thou have released music at a stunning rate. Collaborations with other outré metal acts, like the Body; splits with and covers of extreme brethren of all stripes; LPs and EPs and singles—they just never stop. Their immense catalog could be summed up as, say, post-metal stoner-doom with post-rock and ambient flourishes, but the sheer volume of their output seems more essential to their identity. And throughout all that material, even well before the “Great Awokening” made it trendy, they were pushing, and practicing, progressive politics. Magus, the band’s fifth proper full-length, heralds the latest tsunami in the endless storm of defeaning sound, political fury, and overwhelming prolificness that is Thou. The album surges and undulates with the dread that it’s only a matter of time before the waves—another outrage, another onslaught, another record—crash in again.
Despite the pace at which they work, Thou have always been a precision crew. Across Magus’ 11 tracks, they fold odd meters and splashy drum fills into their thick neon sludge. But they also leave room for plenty of surprises. From the sneak-attack intro of opener “Inward” to vocalist Emily McWilliams’ entrance on “Divine Will,” there’s something around every corner—but you can’t really say that something is lurking. Lurking may, in fact, be the posture Thou assume least often. Their stance is far more conspicuous. There are countless explosive moments and precise edges here, all wrapped in squalls of fuzz.
Less volatile tracks, like closer “Supremacy,” with its portentous crash and drone, recall the early noise-rock output of the band’s new Sacred Bones labelmates the Men. The riffs on “Transcending Dualities” sizzle like the fuse on a cartoon bomb, a toothsome wah-wah effect scratching its way down the frequency spectrum. Some of the compositions are so dynamic, encompassing so many beautiful, epic, emotional moments, I had to check the tracklist to believe Thou had packed them all into the same lengthy song. The end of “Sovereign Self” harnesses the energy of a groove without feeling outright groovy and unleashes a ferocity free of any alienating, acerbic edge. Guitarists Andy Gibbs and Matthew Thudium do much of the heavy lifting on the album, riding catchy rhythms while avoiding the blues clichés to which sludge-metal bands so often default.
The lyrics (if not the recordings themselves, whose roaring vocals are mostly incomprehensible) reveal a sprawling metaphysical parable: Vocalist Bryan Funck journeys to the battered core of the human condition, examining the nature of hate by looking within himself. While the material is not exactly new for Thou, it’s certainly more refined here than it has ever been before. Thou don’t need to recalibrate their point of view with each release, because each release is still bringing them closer to the white-hot core of their Thou-ness. Their moves are geological in timescale; the slightest shift in attitude rings through the eons that follow. By that measure alone, Magus is an essential record in the vast Thou canon.
The earth-shaking revelation here is Funck’s ferocious pronouncement, on “Elimination Rhetoric,” that, “Yes, we have hatred: A searing hatred for prevailing design, a searing hatred for limiting belief, a callous disregard for ignorance.” It’s an exhilarating conclusion, if also one that short-circuits logic: When directed against the structural institutions that allow worse kinds of hate to foster, hate can be not only good, but also productive.
Pair these radical epiphanies with the serpentine imagery of pestilence, offal, and rot common to the interior landscapes Funck conjures, and you’re listening to a fire sermon that is equal parts Bashō, Virgil, and Antifa. What’s transcendent about both the music and the lyrics of Magus is the way it lives in the build-up to a war that is only just beginning. Miles away from the battlefield, Thou have already got the enemy in the crosshairs of their righteous hatred. Funck and his band are perceptive enough to know what is at stake here—what the future could be: a boot stamping on a human face forever. That’s the real fight, and Thou are ready for it.


Legendary singer's first new LP in 12 years is a 2xCD record that illuminating her love for her son, her life, and everything from Elvis to the joy of washing clothes to the digits in pi-- all backed by suitably low-key backdrop of piano, a pastel rhythm section, and her own lush pallet of vocal textures.

Aerial

Non-shocker: I was disappointed the first few times I listened to Kate Bush's first new record in 12 years. Having spent some time recently wondering if the woman responsible for so much haunted, supernatural music might be producing some beacon of artistic integrity that would shine through layers of anticipation and cynicism, it was difficult to not be let down by the mundane discovery that, in fact, she's merely being herself here, writing more about everyday epiphanies than great cosmic truths. It's a pretty Zen lesson in expectation when I think about it, teaching me a thing or two about the pitfalls of hanging onto anything other than gradual enlightenment and a zero-sum world.
Aerial, a double album separated into chapters of A Sea of Honey and A Sky of Honey, is Bush's answer to a world outside expecting fireworks. That is, Aerial is no answer at all except to illuminate her love for her son, her life, and various distractions (everything from Elvis, to the joy of washing clothes, to the digits in pi). Musically, this is reflected in a uniformly low-key backdrop of piano, pastel rhythm section, and, of course, her own lush palette of vocal textures. Initially, many of the songs seem muted, passive, dated-- hardly reminiscent of Bush's previous adventures in hi-fi. Digging deeper, while the arrangements are hardly explosive-- a Renaissance string arrangement for "Bertie", birdsong in "Aerial Tal", subtle electronic touches in "Joanni"-- they're not so much dated as understated, as efficiently tied to their creator's idiosyncrasies as any in Bush's canon. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean they will leap out and grab unconverted listeners as the best moments on Hounds of Love or The Dreaming did, but then I wonder how many unconverted listeners are still following Bush's sensual trail these days.
Aerial's first disc (A Sea of Honey) begins in nondescript fashion with a torch song to Elvis (!) and a molasses-laden backing of big fat 80s rock drums, wispy synth cluster, electronic gamelan ping, and the driest rhythm guitar skank I've heard in 20 years. Still, there's a mysterious air about the song, especially as Bush cries, "the wind is whistling, the wind is whistling through the house." This song was chosen as a single, for what reasons I can't really imagine, but is a nice setup for the more interesting character study of the man with the "obsessive nature and deep fascination for numbers" on "Π". In fact, it's Bush's reading off the digits of the number that most interest me, stretching out some, crowding others into rapidly sung groups, all with some of the most expressive singing on the record. Likewise, on the piano-led ballad "Mrs. Bartoluzzi", she manages to sound fascinating while simply repeating the phrase "washing machine," and backing herself with superficially silly things like "slooshy sloshy, slooshy sloshy." I can't say I'm as taken with "Bertie" (about Bush's son) or "Joanni" (for Joan of Arc), both of which seem totally sincere, but overrun in pleasant, "tasteful" arrangements that never quite compel me enough to go back for repeated listens.
The second disc (A Sky of Honey) seems a bit more adventurous, which is fitting given that it's a song-cycle on the natural ebb and flow of life and the seasons. Beginning with a "Prelude" and "Prologue", Bush eases into her most subtly symphonic music on record, backing herself with only piano and soft, modulating synth pulse. Her teasing lines, "it's gonna be so good," referring to the passing of summer into fall, are both poetic and playful, and fit perfectly the sense of effortless euphoria throughout the disc. Still, I might have wished for a bit more spark: "An Architect's Dream", "Sunset", and "Nocturn", despite maintaining the narrative of her concept, are a bit too steeped in uber-light adult contemporary sheen for my tastes. By the time of the closing title track, my ears are lightly glazed over, and its frail "rock" section does little justice to lines like "I want to be up on the roof, I feel I gotta get up on the roof!" At one point, Bush trades cackles with a bird's song, suggesting she's quite happy with her simple life as a mother and artist. Far be it from me to criticize happy endings, but in musical terms, a comfortable, even-keeled existence sometimes comes out as isolated and ordinary art.


The Fuck Buttons member’s fourth solo album channels the horrors of the surveillance state and the creeping dread of everyday life into the most aggressive music of his career.

Animated Violence Mild

The title of Scottish producer Benjamin John Power’s fourth album as Blanck Mass, Animated Violence Mild, isn’t merely poetic word salad. If you’ve visited an arcade since the early 1990s, the phrase might be familiar from the American Amusement Machine Association’s rating system. The classification is meant to cover games that feature “violent elements that do not result in bloodshed, serious injury and/or death.” The notion of man-made, non-lethal violence finds new meaning on Powers’ most ambitious album yet. “I believe that many of us have willfully allowed our survival instinct to become engulfed by the snake [of consumerism] we birthed,” he writes in a statement accompanying his new record, identifying a kind of virtual violence against our collective interests, one which has been normalized in part by our own compliance.
This sinister current that flows beneath even our lives’ most routine interactions is thrust to the surface and cast in serrated chrome on Animated Violence Mild. The album’s title could double as a tongue-in-cheek rating for the contents therein: These are easily the most aggressive, full-throated songs Power has yet written in his nine-year solo career. Gone are the languid ambient pieces of his self-titled debut album and the overt pop inclinations of Dumb Flesh. Even the teeth bared on his previous full-length, 2017’s striking World Eater, now seem tame by comparison. Nearly every one of these eight tracks channels head-banging abandon in one form or another, with any lingering melodic sentimentality transformed into blinding chemiluminescence.
From the beginning, it’s obvious Power has no qualms prominently displaying his influences, which serves to highlight his omnivorous appetite. Tuneful industrial music of the 1980s and ’90s courses through the churning onslaught of opener “Death Drop” and rarely fades until monumental closer “Wings of Hate.” With its punchy groove and catchy synth lines, “No Dice” evokes the cadence of Nine Inch Nails’ “Terrible Lie” while entirely circumventing the classic with its opulent, sensuous arrangement. And no doubt Trent Reznor would be both proud and envious to hear how “Love Is a Parasite” repurposes The Downward Spiral’s seething energy and earworm riffs for its own apocalyptic design. Power also taps into black metal through scorched screams and electronic blast beats, nods to trap in his slower grooves, borrows the rapidfire samples of footwork, and wraps it all in ecstatic trance synths. But his stylistic combinations are so distinct and well executed that they effortlessly transcend any recognizable source material.
Two of Animated Violence Mild’s biggest standouts, “Death Drop” and “House vs. House,” kick off the record with the kind of instant momentum often reserved for punk records and hard techno DJs. It’s an overwhelming 15-minute stretch that showcases in brilliant detail all of what Blanck Mass has come to embody: bold experimentation, rhythmic intensity, explosive melody, and artful ferocity. “Hush Money” continues the thread with slightly less satisfying results. Perhaps because the halogen-bright dance tune follows two of Power’s best productions, or because it relies on a more linear and familiar structure, it’s the album’s sole dip in ingenuity. That actually says a lot about the quality of Animated Violence Mild: A track that might seem strong in another context can’t quite reach the high water mark set by everything around it.
Animated Violence Mild’s greatest success goes beyond how it manifests the intangibles of humanity’s self-automated undoing, or how it casts a melting pot of influences into singular shapes. Since Power debuted his Blanck Mass moniker in 2011, each record has been held in contrast to Fuck Buttons, his longtime duo with Andrew Hung, and rightly so. The wide scope and stratospheric heights of that group’s best work leave an indelible impression, and Power’s solo work has by turns subverted or indulged the same tendencies. For this album’s final track he seems to do both. “Wings of Hate” is dragon-sized and full of fire, hurtling towards the sun with a raw fury unmatched by Power’s other music. It’s the last in a spectacular series of definitive salvos. If previous Blanck Mass albums were each a step out from the shadow of Fuck Buttons, Animated Violence Mild shows that he’s outgrown the comparison altogether.

Buy: Rough Trade / Vinyl Me, Please
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On her debut as Eartheater, Guardian Alien songwriter Alexandra Drewchin presents a vision of psychedelic music that embraces both conventional folk elements and stranger experimentation.

Metalepsis

Guardian Alien, the ecstatic experimentalists that singer-songwriter Alexandra Drewchin has run with over the last few years, have been described as "psychedelic." But despite that tag—and despite the fact that they had a Rastafarian extraterrestrial on one of their record sleeves—the rapturous emotional peaks and torturous noisemaking that Drewchin contributed to the group always rendered their explorations more ritualistic and earthy than that label suggests. Their interest in psychedelic experience is more ideological than aesthetic, an idea that carries through on Drewchin's first full-length release as Eartheater, Metalepsis.
Drewchin displays an all-consuming interest in blurring boundaries that burrows all the way down to the record's textural details. Leadoff track "Macro EV" dances between delicate reverse-delayed electric guitar plinks and needly loops of her own vocals, teetering on the brink between swooning and sickly. Drewchin plays with these opposing textures over the course of the record, imbuing "Homonyms"—the most tuneful and immediate of her folkier efforts—with lurching and chattering vocal exercises. She's upending the conventions of folk and ambient music—taking little excursions into harsher realms, just for good measure—gracefully crossing stereotypical divides between genres without even really letting you notice that she's done so. It's a sort of sonic jamais vu: All of the ingredients feel familiar, but the whole that they eventually make up remains alien and unattainable.
There are also moments where Drewchin intentionally jars us, delivering seemingly absurd elements (such as the minute-long Eastern European rap sample at the end of "Youniverse"). But even those play seriously in context. In the tradition of most who consider themselves experimenters, the origin of the sounds Drewchin uses become muddled. There are samples from John Frusciante solo experiments and stabbing string sections, and all manners of instrumentation both recorded and synthesized. What's a product of the organic world and what's a product of her array of electronic equipment is suddenly unclear. Her treatment lightly suggests that all of these varying parts should be treated and approached the same way, like a utopian psych-folk that embraces electronic instrumentation.
Drewchin's lyrical concerns, too, center on interstitial spaces: between the natural world and the digital ("The Internet Is Handmade"), between the subjective truth and objective reality ("Infinity"), and between the self and the cosmos ("Youniverse"). Throughout she embraces thematic abstraction and philosophical ambiguities as guiding principles. In other words, Drewchin may not have everything quite figured out, and her insistence on posing questions rather than answers elevates Metalepsis into a compelling document of postmodern (and importantly, post-Internet) confusion. Metalepsis is music that's built to overwhelm and envelop you, and maybe even, as Drewchin's moniker suggests, swallow worlds whole.


There is nothing like the debut of Jay Z, a stroke of genius chronicling the life of a 26-year-old drug kingpin from the Marcy Houses with a love for craft unrivaled elsewhere in his work.

Reasonable Doubt

He was only going to make one album. So goes the story of Reasonable Doubt, anyway, a tale Jay Z has regaled us with at every opportunity since its release on a new and unproven independent label called Roc-A-Fella Records. It was the album he made before the world was listening, with only a close crew of friends and associates at the late age of 26. Every contributor was paid in bags of cash, piles so mountainous nobody involved could be mistaken how they were acquired. It was the valedictory statement of a drug kingpin and the commencement of a brand, a lifetime’s worth of private thoughts discharged before the true business of empire-building could begin. Grand opening; grand closing.
Shawn Carter has always been fiercely protective of his first full-length, to the degree that it sometimes feels like it belongs more to him than to us. He keeps yanking it from streaming services, as if the album is a troubled prep-school kid. He’s thrown it a series of lavish birthday parties, celebrating its 10th anniversary with a full-concert performance in 2006 and commissioning a documentary to air only on his TIDAL streaming service for its 20th. He has curated its legacy so assiduously that Reasonable Doubt seems like the one part of his story about which he remains insecure, the piece of his legacy that might blink out if he didn’t take care of it.
Perhaps he’s never forgotten its relatively inauspicious release. “Ain’t No Nigga” was a hit, for sure, and the album was certified Gold on its release; solid, but hardly world-conquering in the dynastic era CD sales. Critics were impressed, but not overly so: Mainstream and non-hip-hop publications noted it was clever at times but mostly a rehash of Scarface and gangster-movie tropes. The Source gave it 4 out of 5 mics—approving, not rapturous. The smaller but more influential world of hardcore rap intelligentsia paid attention to him, but in the shadow of Biggie and Pac, Jay felt like a lesser myth. He announced the album with a statement that he was retiring and henceforth “would only be about the business.” In some alternate universe, that might’ve been it.
In Jay’s mind at least, the album certainly marked the end of an era. At this point, by his own cold-eyed accounting on the song “Politics As Usual,” he had been selling drugs for “10 years.” Along a parallel track, he had been flirting furtively with being a rapper. He linked up with Big Jaz (later Jaz-O), doing a stint as the older man's baby-faced sidekick and kicking the triplet-time “figgity-figgity”-style flows that were sweeping New York at the time. He toured, briefly, with Big Daddy Kane, and spit some freestyles for New York hip-hop radio. He was an impressive local kid, but no one’s idea of a worldwide star.
In that murky time between his puppyish Jaz-O beginnings and his sober and assured reappearance on Reasonable Doubt, he figured some things out. First, nobody wanted to hear Jay Z excited. Composed, assured, jaded, deeply unimpressed—these were emotions he could radiate without even trying, and they were truer to his nature. Gone were the endearing attempts at dancing alongside Jaz, looking like a kid at his own bar mitzvah being coaxed onto the floor. His years selling drugs had presumably hardened him, and by the time he opened his mouth on Reasonable Doubt’s opening track, “Can’t Knock the Hustle,” he had mastered an unshakable godfather pose. It is hard to convincingly telegraph “above it all” from the bottom of the food chain, but Shawn Carter had a natural haughtiness that couldn’t be faked. “You ain’t havin’ it? Good, me either/Let’s get together and make this whole world believe us,” he barked.
He also figured out how to best wield his clear, surprisingly boyish voice. The syllable chopping disappeared and his words became musical and mellifluous. Even though his voice never rose above a conversational monotone, his words sailed high and glittering over the music, which sampled butter-soft soul from previous decades, blurred memories of more innocent times. These were the lyrics he’s been painstakingly stacking together in his head for years (the “no pen, no pad” detail is another famous and well-rehearsed bit of Jay mythos), and he rolled them out, one pearly string of words after another, like he was exhaling a breath he’d been holding forever.
Lines like “By the ounce, dough accumulate like snow” were their own kind of song, and he treated each syllable with a reverent love undetectable elsewhere in his work. On “Can I Live,” he matches the “Fs” and “Ls” in the phrase “illin’ for revenues, Rayful Edmond-like” to create an irregular little mountain-peak rhythm that echoes the stuttering “expectation for dips, we stack chips” line from earlier in the same verse. He was thinking on several levels at once—how phonetics color meaning, how multiple meanings can suggest all the stories that aren’t being told. He wanted us to feel the discomfited hum of his unquiet mind, even if we couldn’t immediately follow every stray thread. What Biggie and Pac did for self-mythologizing and hip-hop, Jay undoubtedly did for the art of close reading.
The narrative that emerges from a close reading of Reasonable Doubt remains startlingly grim; seen up close, it is a masterpiece of dissociation, a graveyard of dead emotions. From the outset, Jay Z projected surface glamor: He was the first rapper to book a flight out to St. Thomas and hop on a yacht just to film a video. He was the guy who made the “Big Pimpin’” video, putting up a million dollars for the budget. But the message behind all of this flash was always clear: It was all too late for him, and the money was just cold comfort.
This is never clearer than on “D’Evils,” maybe the bleakest, saddest song ever written about the well-worn theme of the psychic toll of drug dealing. “Shit is wicked on these mean streets” could be a boast, the prelude to some exuberant Eazy-E-style tall tales, but the next line echoes in pure psychological space: “None of my friends speak, we all trying to win.” The song’s most lurid moment of violence, and maybe the most brutal scene in all the Jay discography, occurs off-camera, so to speak, only by implication: To locate a rival, Jay kidnaps the mother of his child and stuffs bills into her mouth, force-feeding her crumpled, filthy money while she weeps as he demands information. It is a gruesome scene, but Jay the writer is uninterested in the visual; he’s drawn to the contusion it leaves on her psyche and his: “Don’t cry, it is to be/In time, I take away your miseries and make it mine,” he tells her flatly. It is a chilling promise to both end her life and carry the act with him until the end of his own.
Much later in his career, further removed from the shock of his time dealing drugs, Jay would root around in the messier, more visceral stuff of his early traumas. On “This Can’t Be Life,” he opened his heart to a former girlfriend who miscarried. On “Still Got Love For You,” from Beanie Sigel’s 2001 album The Reason, he raged at his absent father, even allowing his imperial voice to crack slightly: “I’m a mess, Dad/Still I love you no less, Dad/Hope you didn’t think success would make me less mad.” But at age 26, too old to be a burgeoning rap star and far too young to be as tired as he often appeared onstage, he was still in the blast radius of his former life, and all the wounds it left on him were still open. The wide-brimmed hat concealing his eyes, the white suit and fancy cigar of the album’s cover—they were expensive gauze pads, covering a ravaged body. On “Politics As Usual,” perhaps the silkiest track on the record, he is “Cursing the very god that brought this grief to be.”
This album’s legacy is both magnificent and lonely, an immaculate crystal chandelier gathering dust in an abandoned mansion. Every line gleams, begging you to memorize it but forbidding you from loving it. Its impact was subterranean, subliminal—Kendrick Lamar picked up on the notion of “D’evils of Lucy” as recently as 2015, with To Pimp a Butterfly. Other rappers picked up on his chilly, bored pose, but his rapping was really too byzantine to convincingly imitate. It wasn’t until he slowed down his flow, breaking off glittering bits of mind that people could hold onto, that his influence penetrated and spread. Decades later, everyone flows like Jay Z, but not the Jay Z of Reasonable Doubt. That guy is still alone with his thoughts, learning to live with regrets.
Maybe this is why Shawn Carter the man seems to have such a wistful fondness for the album and the time it represented. It feels doomed in its melancholy that it will be misunderstood. “I hope you fools choose to listen, I drop jewels, bust it,” he rhymed on “Feelin’ It,” and then sneered, “Y’all don’t feel me,” a moment later. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy in rhyme, the sound of a guy baring his heart and freezing it in carbonite in the same breath. “Sometimes I hear myself moaning,” he adds later, after he’s let his guard down slightly to take a small hit of weed. It’s a startling moment of depersonalization, the sound of pain whistling like wind through the cracks in a fractured psyche.
One of the only other times Jay admits to smoking weed on record came years later, on The Black Album, a lifetime’s worth of accomplishments later. “I try to smoke weed to give me the fix I need/For what the game did to my pulse with no results,” he rapped ruefully on “Allure.” The Black Album ended his most coherent, compelling, and memorable era; the hustler makes it all the way to the beloved corporate American icon and bows out on top. He had sold out Madison Square Garden, and the entire music industry knelt at his feet. Everyone felt him. But the only place he’s ever truly wanted to get back to was here.


In 2010, Daft Punk teamed up with composer and arranger Joseph Trapanese to score a reboot of the classic sci-fi movie Tron*.* Three years later, M83's Anthony Gonzalez has paired with Trapanese to score another sci-fi extravaganza, the Joseph Kosinski-directed Oblivion.

Oblivion OST

In 2010, the French electronic music duo Daft Punk teamed up with composer and arranger Joseph Trapanese to score a flashy but hollow reboot of the classic sci-fi movie Tron. As fuel for an action flick, it was an efficient piece of work. A full orchestra and expensive synthetic tones provided the requisite sweep and height; the expected bombast and wonder. But it was hardly recognizable as music by Daft Punk, which was odd because their usual aesthetic would have been such a dynamic fit for the movie's neon world. The dance music auteurs all but vanished behind a deluxe sheen, into the idioms of Hans Zimmer and John Williams. Three years later, the scenario is playing out again with eerie accuracy: Ryan Dombal's review of the Tron: Legacy OST would perfectly fit M83's Oblivion OST with the replacement of a couple proper nouns.
Like Tron: Legacy, Oblivion is a sci-fi extravaganza, directed by Joseph Kosinski, where awesome visual spectacles are staged around a wispy emotional core. Once again, an acclaimed French electronic act pairs with Trapanese and forsakes its artistic identity to satisfy the generic musical conventions of summer blockbusters. Trapanese's orchestration and M83's poppy electronic shoegaze blended well on Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming, the breakthrough album that opened the door for Anthony Gonzalez to make literally rather than figuratively "cinematic" music in the mainstream. The tradeoff is that Gonzalez by necessity adapts to Trapanese, the professional here, so thoroughly that it was startling to see M83 in the credits. That churning electronic fingerprint, reportedly deemed "too indie" for a Tom Cruise vehicle, is smeared out to an absurd degree. Why hire Gonzalez at all if you don't want raw indie eagerness?
Gonzalez is a masterful stylist, but an average composer at best, which makes the subtraction of his style rather fatal for the Oblivion OST as a standalone experience. The music is more unmemorable than bad, though occasionally Gonzalez's inexperience, which seems to limit what Trapanese can do as well, shows: "Tech 49" cheats its way from tense pulse to driving resolution with desultory orchestral passages, while "Odyssey Rescue" spatters an erratic path through ambiguously related parts, making us keenly aware of the missing onscreen action that would make sense of it. There are brighter spots: If you took "Waking Up" and changed the pounding timpani to synthetic toms, the string section to keyboards and arpeggiators, then you would have a generic but recognizable M83 song on your hands. And Gonzalez's signature arc, where arrangements seem to accelerate through space and then burst into flames upon atmospheric reentry, is evident in "StarWaves". But you have to listen pretty hard to hear the ghostly remains of his hand in these backdrops for chase scenes and dream sequences.
Gonzalez does get one pure M83 moment on the title track, which is taut and effervescent with heartfelt vocals from Susanne Sundfør. More like it would have made for a better album that clashed terribly with the cold, inhuman film to which it was attached. It would be foolish to conflate one instance of creative compromise with M83 being compromised in principle. Artists needn't be slaves to their own visions all the time, and there's nothing wrong with working a job for pay. The only real problem with the Oblivion OST is that it was released as M83, which isn't a neutral funnel for Gonzalez's musical craftsmanship. It's a very specific set of promises that go badly unfulfilled. Gonzalez knows this, telling Pitchfork that he would have preferred to release it as "Anthony Gonzalez and Joe Trapanese." Universal, more interested in the brand than the man, disagreed. The people who buy action-movie OSTs-- whomever they are-- should be satisfied. But to M83 fans, this will just be a cautionary tale about an indie auteur turning his back on little machines he can control and getting mauled by a huge one-- Hollywood focus groups-- which he can't.


The tenor saxophonist’s beguiling and divisive 1969 album attempted to cross-wire free jazz with rock, funk, and soul. It remains his most misunderstood record.

New Grass

No one could have predicted Albert Ayler’s turn to pop. The tenor saxophonist emerged in the mid-’60s as one of the most visceral forces of the free-jazz movement, with raw, chaotic compositions that jumbled expressions of joy and mourning until they were indistinguishable. Ayler’s respected standing in avant-garde circles made the abrupt stylistic shift of his 1969 album New Grass all the more baffling. Instead of the structureless squall he was known for, here was Ayler singing lead on AM-radio pop songs and superimposing his unhinged sax skronk over funk, soul, and rock rhythms. Freshly remastered and reissued by Third Man in its first vinyl pressing in over 40 years, the wildly mismatched colors of New Grass still don’t resemble anything else.
Ayler had signed on with highly visible jazz imprint Impulse! in 1966 at the behest of their star player John Coltrane. New Grass would be his third release with the label and the first without his brother and trumpet player Donald Ayler. Donald’s limited but eruptive playing had been integral in his brother’s music finding its highest form, but the lifestyle of the struggling jazz musician pushed him to his brink. He stopped playing in Ayler’s band shortly before suffering a mental collapse. Around the same time, Ayler had begun a relationship with Mary Parks, a poet and singer who went by the alias Mary Maria. Parks sang on New Grass, and her flower-power poetry provided the lyrics. Some familiar sidemen were on board (Bill Folwell switching from upright bass to electric and keyboardist Call Cobbs reprising the gossamer harpsichord he’d brought to Ayler’s free-floating Love Cry the year before), but the personnel consisted mostly of session musicians. Lockstep drumming, overdubbed horn sections, and back-up singers all nudged the sound towards the kind of schmaltz the music industry was churning out in the late ‘60s. As if to ease listeners in, the album begins with a high-energy saxophone and bass improvisation that leads to a spoken message from Ayler. In a mystical ramble somewhere between a prayer and a warning, he offers the hesitant disclaimer “I hope you will like this record.”
On transcendent concert documents like Bells and In Greenwich Village, Ayler’s free jazz was messy and volatile, with a drive so supernatural it barely seemed possible the music was made by earthly beings. His new songs were messy in a way that was unnervingly human; jittery, flailing, and striking out in several bizarre directions at once. The melodic signatures were the same—simple, friendly lines that evoked New Orleans funeral marches or children’s songs—but Ayler’s vibrating tone hovered in a separate orbit from his band’s standardized grooves. More jarring than the ill-fitting arrangements were Ayler’s prominently featured vocals. Unlike the wordless incantations he’d occasionally included on earlier albums, here he was leading songs with a bellowing, untrained voice that was wavering at its most controlled. The sung introduction to “New Ghosts” (a reworking of “Ghosts,” a tune Ayler recorded multiple variations of) devolves line by line into unintelligible blabbering. Park’s lyrics were mostly vague hippie platitudes, and Ayler delivered them in a manic wail that clashed with their gentle sentiments of peace, love, and progress.
The material was recorded over the course of just two days and the performances are rushed. Raved-up workouts like “New Generation” and “Everybody’s Movin’” whizz by at hyperactive tempos, the players scrambling to keep up. Ayler often stops singing mid-verse to jump into long-winded free solos, squealing euphorically as the band chugs along on autopilot behind him. “Heart Love” is the best example of the disjointed sweetness that carries New Grass, with cooing backing vocals and playful sing-song melodies gelling tenderly before Ayler blasts into a sax freakout that burns on for the majority of the song. This certainly wasn’t jazz of any kind, but was too overstimulated and confused to pass for the Woodstock-generation rock’n’roll it was trying to emulate. What was this?
The harshest reviews decimated the record, calling out the new direction as a blatant appeal to white, mainstream audiences. But if this was an attempt at selling out, it was poorly conceived. Ayler’s new sound ignored the smooth, danceable soul The Isley Brothers and Marvin Gaye were topping the charts with at the time and looked more towards the jumpy gospel and R&B of the early ‘50s and the electric blues styles he’d played while touring with Little Walter in his younger days.Compared to the riotous funk of Sly and the Family Stone or the sleek, boundary-testing fusion Miles Davis was beginning to explore around the same time, New Grass seemed uptight and a little old-fashioned. Factoring in warbly singing and discordant sax solos, it’s hard to imagine even the most out-there record exec hearing commercial potential in this strange little record.
The album’s fragile balance of excitement and anxiety speaks to the unstable place Ayler was in during the last few years of his life. Riddled with guilt about pulling his brother into a world that broke him and exhausted from years of grinding in poverty and obscurity, he grew increasingly erratic and isolated. Some friends reported calls with Ayler in which he deliriously explained visions he’d had while staring into the sun. The rest of his recorded output would consist of unfocused experiments that reflected a troubled inner world, and in late 1970 he would be found dead at age 34, in mysterious circumstances presumed by many to be suicide. New Grass signaled the beginning of a descent into darkness for Ayler, one that saw him grasping at ideals of redemption and healing all the way down.
Ayler’s 1964 debut My Name Is Albert Ayler also begins with a spoken message, one that wanders for a while before ending with the soft declaration “One day everything will be as it should be.” He would spend the rest of his life expanding on that thesis, with every phase of his music returning to themes of suffering and confusion ultimately giving way to peace. Ayler’s spiritual message didn’t change on New Grass, but grew weirder and more intimate as he struggled to deliver it in a way that could be universally understood. Similar to Arthur Russell’s hermetic dance tracks or Muddy Waters’ surreal stabs at psychedelic rock on Electric Mud, Ayler’s notion of popular music was so distanced from reality that it became its own self-contained universe.

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On their sophomore album, the combustible rock band Savages return with an examination of love as a dark, powerful messy thing. While it doesn't always hit the peaks of their 2012 anthem "Husbands," they find new highs to explore.

Adore Life

When Savages emerged in 2012 with the excellent song "Husbands," a lot of talk of the London band revolved around their frenetic live shows, and that they wanted you to turn your cell phones off at those shows. The second part, not an unfair request, invariably led to discussions of their manifestos and politics, which weren’t always easy to parse. Which is a positive.
Savages' music was austere, their apparent influences easy to name (Siouxsie, Wire, Gang of Four, Joy Division), but what frontwoman Jehnny Beth was singing about was more complex. She might be standing up for polyamory or breaking down the patriarchy (or both). One song, "Hit Me," which some people thought was about domestic abuse, was about rough consensual sex (as discussed by the porn star Belladonna). When you added these and other themes to their well-oiled live performances and specific visual presentation—the band in black, Beth dancing like Ian Curtis—it was difficult not to get excited about the group. But, as compelling a prospect as they were, I often found myself more interested in watching them live than listening to them at home on my stereo.
Silence Yourself is a strong record, but in hindsight, it also benefited from much of the above—the backstory, the buzz, the complementary material. So, in that sense, it’s especially interesting returning to the band two years later, after the initial adrenaline rush has passed. On the second collection, Adore Life, they’re still exciting, but the tone has shifted considerably. Not all of the songs work—a couple float by with power and grit but no real hook—but the best moments here are incredible.
Adore Life is a collection of love songs, but Beth refers to it as "a disease," among other things, and told Pitchfork that when they recorded the album, they set out to "write the loudest songs ever." It was produced by Beth's boyfriend, Johnny Hostile, which brings another sort of real-life energy to the proceedings. And, outside of a couple ballads and torch songs, they’re still amped up—maybe even moreso than before. (Check out the sweaty live clip for the excellent anthem "The Answer," which finds the audience losing their shit and their shirts.)
On Adore Life, Savages don’t always scale the heights of their signature anthem "Husbands," but they find different highs. There's the slow-release, PJ Harvey-esque ballad, "Adore," the mid-tempo but somehow manic "Slowing Down the World" (which is reminiscent of Nick Cave), the rumbling death rock of "I Need Something New." You can certainly hear Swans on these songs, too. Savages played some shows with Swans, and Gira has talked about how much he likes the band—the mutual camaraderie makes sense. The connection is there in the brutal repetitions: Note the combustible ending of "I Need Something New" or the feedback implosion at the start of "T.I.W.Y.G." It’s also there in the subject matter: Michael Gira writes violent love songs, too (his classic "God Damn the Sun," which involves addiction, threats of suicide, and general dissolution, is still one of the most romantic songs ever).
So, no, these are not "love" songs in the popular sense. Here, you’ll get a different side of flirting ("I’m not gonna hurt you/ 'Cause I'm flirting with you/ I'm not gonna hurt myself"), the messiness of love ("This is what you get when you mess with love"), lust ("Sleep with me/ And we'd still be friends/ Or I know/ I’ll go insane"), sexual fluidity ("When I take a man/ Or a woman/ They're both the same/ They're both human"), sexual discovery ("When I'm with you/ I want to do/ All the things that/ I’ve never done”), sexual power ("When I take a man/ At my command/  My love will stand/ The test of time"), jealousy/threats ("If you don't love me/ You don't love anybody"). But at its core, the album’s positive. On "Adore," where she repeats "I adore life," Beth sings, in part, about realizing the importance of life in the face of death, and deciding to just live—that kind of knowledge brings with it a kind of freedom and a sense of control.
In many ways, Adore Life feels more alive than *Silence Yourself—*in part because it feels more human, in part because it's telling you to be as loud as possible. People often talk about how serious the band is, which seems like an underhanded way of telling them to lighten up. But it’s their intensity, and the way they look at something like love as a dark and powerful thing, that makes them interesting. Plus, nobody's ever told Swans to smile.


The four volumes of William Basinski's ambient masterpiece have been gathered into a gorgeous and impressive  9xLP, 5xCD box set, including two previously unreleased live performances.

William Basinski: The Disintegration Loops

The Disintegration Loops

In the early part of the last decade, William Basinski's The Disintegration Loops was the sort of music you passed around. Once you heard it, you wanted to tell somebody about it. There was obviously the sound itself, so hypnotic that it was immediately understood as a classic of ambient music. But there was more to it.
The Disintegration Loops arrived with a story that was beautiful and heartbreaking in its own right. It's been repeated so many times that Basinski himself has grown weary of telling it: in the 1980s, he constructed a series of tape loops consisting of processed snatches of music captured from an easy listening station. When going through his archives in 2001, he decided to digitize the decades-old loops to preserve them. He started a loop on his digital recorder and left it running, and when he returned a short while later, he noticed that the tape was gradually crumbling as it played. The fine coating of magnetized metal was slivering off, and the music was decaying slightly with each pass through the spindle. Astonished, Basinski repeated the process with other loops and obtained similar results.
Shortly after Basinski digitized his loops came the September 11 attacks. From the roof of his space in Brooklyn, he put a video camera on a tripod and captured the final hour of daylight on that day, pointing the camera at a smoldering lower Manhattan. On September 12, he cued the first of his newly created sound pieces and listened to it while watching the footage. The impossibly melancholy music, the gradual fade, and the images of ruin: the project suddenly had a sense of purpose. It would become an elegy for that day. Stills from the video were used for the covers of the CDs, and eventually, the hour-long visual with sound was released on DVD. The video is included with the four volumes of the music and two new live pieces in this lavish and impressive box set.
The beauty of the music is not easy to explain. There are plenty of pieces that work in a similar way-- the beat-less drone pieces of Gas, a few of Gavin Bryars' most heartrending works, the experiments in memory by the Caretaker-- but it's hard to quantify this music's special pull. Each of the nine pieces on the original four volumes has its own character, yet all are related and function like variations on a theme. "Dlp 1.1", marked by a plaintive horn sound, has the air of a dejected fanfare, a meditation on death and loss (it was this loop that was paired with the 9/11 video). "Dlp 2.1" is more of a metallic drone, filled with anxiety and encroaching dread. The source material on "Dlp 4" sounds like a soundtrack to an educational film, not terribly far from the warble of an early Boards of Canada interlude, but the chaotic ripples of distortion make it seem even more uneasy. "Dlp 3" feels like a snippet from an impossibly lush and shimmering Debussy piece stretched to infinity and then lowered into an acid bath. The moods and textures of these pieces are all different but they become more powerful in relation to one another.
There's an irony to the four volumes of The Disintegration Loops appearing here on vinyl for the first time, since the defiantly analog origin of the music is central to its appeal. Even 10 years later, the internet is generally a poor space for contemplating the end; there are few digital metaphors for the process of dying. With Basinski's pieces, the metaphor couldn't be more simple. This music reminds us of how everything eventually falls apart and returns to dust. We're listening to music as it disappears in front of us. Hearing the music on vinyl, with its inherent imperfections, and imagining the records changing over time, lends another layer of poignancy.
Given the central idea behind the project, the length of the individual tracks is important. The first, "Dlp 1.1", is just over an hour long, and its source only lasts a few seconds. To listen to the entire piece is to hear that segment many hundreds of times, and the progression from "music" to silence happens incrementally with each play. But the loops don't fade linearly. It often takes a few minutes for the obvious cracks to appear, and then the tumble toward the void speeds up at the end, presumably because the cumulative runs against the tape head had loosened even the bits of tape that were still hanging on. The process is so gradual it focuses attention in unique way; I find myself examining each new cycle to discover what is left and what has vanished.
It's possible to use this music in the quintessential ambient sense, allowing it to play in the background while doing something else. The sound is uniform and drone-like, so you can adjust the volume and not worry about it intruding. But there is something uncanny about the emotion embedded in this music. It never feels neutral, so it's hard for me to just have it playing in the background. Part of that is what I know of how it was made, and part of that is the nature of the loops themselves. Basinski has a rare feel for mood and texture. The sounds on their own are haunting, and Basinski has a wonderful ear for how a loop can work, how to capture these bits of incidental music in a place where there's just a hint of tension that is never released.
One unexpected twist in The Disintegration Loops story is that some of the work was later performed. New music ensembles have charted the progression and decay of the pieces and scored them for a live setting, and recordings from two shows are included in this box set. (One of the performances is by the ensemble Alter Ego, who partnered with Gavin Bryars and Philip Jeck in 2007 to record a new version of Bryars' "The Sinking of the Titanic". The presence of Alter Ego reinforces the thematic and emotional connection between the two pieces.)
I was skeptical of these live versions at first, but over time they made more sense. They bring a different quality to the experience and offer a subtle twist. The key to live recordings lies in the rests. Little by little, the players have to insert a bit more silence into the piece and hold that silence as they cycle through the same phrase. And there's something especially tense and uneasy about hearing this happen in a moment with live performers. It also makes it difficult for the audience to know exactly when the piece has ended, and when it finally does, they explode with applause and, presumably, relief.
I've owned many box sets and this is possibly the most gorgeous and substantial one I've ever seen. There are CD and vinyl versions of all the music; the vinyl is heavy, and the pressings are very well done. There's a book that has liner notes from Antony Hegarty, David Tibet, Basinski himself, and others. But most of the book consists of blown-up frames from the video piece. It's almost like a flip book, as each new shot brings us a little closer to darkness. For me, it functions like a more tolerable version of the video piece, which, even after all this time, I still have trouble watching. I respect it and understand that it might work very differently for someone who was there, but it's still difficult for me to watch footage of burning Manhattan in an "art" context.
It's been said that box sets are tombstones, but this one feels like a living and breathing thing. And there's an irony in that too. The obvious observation about The Disintegration Loops is that it's about death, but of course, life gives death meaning. A couple of days ago I was listening to "Dlp 4" while riding the subway to work. For the track's early half, I was gripped by the sublime beauty of the repeating music and I was lost in my own world completely. But then as it started to break apart and silence took over I started to become aware of what was around me. I could hear the engines, the rattle of the tracks, and the voices of people in the subway car. The music had me thinking about the biggest questions-- why we are here and how we exist and what it all means. And then as the last crackle faded and the music was no more, I took in my surroundings and looked around at the faces and I was right there with everybody and we were alive.