The Men retreat to their caustic roots with a raw and furious album that, while often predictable, is still a prime example of how well they rage.

Devil Music

The story of the Men goes something like this: In 2011, the Brooklyn four-piece, led by guitarists and singers Mark Perro and Nick Chiericozzi, release Leave Home on Sacred Bones, the band’s second and first widely-available LP. Its strangely inviting blend of post-hardcore, noise-metal and shoegaze is a shot in the arm to the genre. The band’s profile rises. And then—surprisingly, inexorably—the Men ditch the art-punk game for classic-rock traditionalism over the course of three short years, embracing Tom Petty, the Band, and Crazy Horse for three often-brilliant records.
By 2014, the end of that initial prolific run, the Men (by then a quintet) had charted a straight path from indie rock's outer reaches (Leave Home) to its catchier, college-rock middle ground (2012’s near-perfect Open Your Heart) to something approaching dad rock for drunks (2013’s New Moon, 2014’s underrated Tomorrow’s Hits). In that time, the Men drove steadily away from noise and bombast toward harmonies and hooks, without entirely scrubbing away the grime that first defined them.
Devil Music spins the car around 180 degrees and heads roaring back toward the psych-punk abandon of the Men’s early years. Released on the band’s own We Are the Men Records, and the crew’s first since parting ways with producer/multi-instrumentalist Ben Greenberg, the caustic, stubbornly lo-fi Devil Music sizzles like a hot coal—the Stooges, MC5, and Mudhoney compressed into an angry little ball.
On first listen, the album’s nine tracks can sound a little half-baked, like the band simply set up some recording gear in their practice room and ran through a few songs they had yet to entirely finish. Which is pretty much what they did: The quartet tracked nearly everything on Devil Music, including vocals, live to 1/2-inch tape in their basement practice space over the course of a single weekend. Some of the lyrics were improvised on the spot. While the feral recording quality is certainly an asset, the songwriting isn’t as nuanced or well-considered as it is on their best tracks—“Open Your Heart,” “Half Angel Half Light,” “Different Days.” Lead-single “Lion’s Den”—in many ways the record’s mission statement—is a stumbling panic attack of screeching guitar, crashing cymbals, and skronking sax.
So, yes, the melodies are harder to find. Though clearly that was the point: The Men weren’t trying to make a record you could sing along to. Devil Music is sweat, heat, and brute force above all. The song titles themselves suggest what the music does to your body: “Hit the Ground,” “Fire,” “Gun,” “Violate.” “Dreamer” is an amphetamine rush of Motörhead riffs and narcotized synths; the snarling, feedback-drenched guitars on “Violate” sound like they might rip through your chest, like Lou Reed’s paint-peeling solos on “I Heard Her Call My Name.” The Men sound exhausted by the urban grind, yet defiant. “I’m sick and tired of the city ’cause it gives me no place to hide,” Perro half-screams on “Fire.” On “Hit the Ground,” he vows to burn the whole place to the ground.
Ragers are in the Men’s wheelhouse, and they pull these songs off with savage aplomb. The addition of that skronking sax, which pops up throughout the record, is a welcome addition to the Men’s manic sound. Few other bands display such a giddy, almost childlike enthusiasm for rock ‘n’ roll catharsis. And Devil Music is an endearing testament to that passion.
Yet it’s disappointing that the Men felt compelled, for really the first time, to look backward. A band that built a legacy out of defying expectations and embracing a grab bag of genres for each new record—folk, classic rock, post-rock, noise, SST indie—returns to their scuzz-punk beginnings to make the most uniform album of their career. The Men are at their best when they’re testing the limits of their abilities, singing harmonies and writing hooks that wrench them out of their comfort zones. For all its wrath and fury, Devil Music feels safe and predictable. It’s a hell of a party, but it’s one we’ve been to before.


Aesop Rock teams up with NYC underground rapper Homeboy Sandman for a short EP. The two have a distinct chemistry that mirrors Rock's fellow Def Jux alum El-P's connection with Killer Mike.

Lice EP

In the years following the decision to put Def Jux on what now seems like a permanent hiatus, Aesop Rock has found formidable creative partners in both Kimya Dawson as The Uncluded and fellow DJX alumnus Rob Sonic in the criminally underappreciated outfit Hail Mary Mallon. But there’s a kind of magic that happens between himself and fellow New York rapper Homeboy Sandman, a kinship in their respective approaches to the craft of rhyming that unites them despite their contrasting styles. Aesop has a penchant for gliding across the rooftops of beats while Sandman flows through them like a spirit, creating an off-kilter duality that updates the classic MC duo format. And both characteristics intersect one another with a surprising sense of fluidity on the duo’s debut EP Lice.
"On a tour of the wild frontier lying awake/I tell myself it’s all to broaden my societal take/And while I sorta still believe it I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’d like to curl up on Long Island and die," he confesses on "So Strange Here", preceded by Sandman, who opens the song lamenting on the shallow nature of today’s hip-hop fan: "Thought they loved me for my bars and my hooks/It turns out they love me cause of where I'm from and how I look." On closing track "Get A Dog", producer Charles Hamilton transforms a sample nicked from rap-metal has-beens Linkin Park into a genuine banger as Aes reels off devastating couplets: "Yapple Dapple, rappers like crabs in a barrel/Get trapped and blanched and snap crackled/I’m Ginsberg interning at the Magic Castle/I’m Bob Ross, happy accidents and rad afro." And then he tags out to Homeboy to hit the listener with this knockout punch in the fifth verse: "My skin is amber like a ripened bud/My adversaries tryna spill my capillaries full of Viking blood."
Within an all-too-brief span of five cuts and 17 minutes, Aesop Rock and Homeboy Sandman utilize the differences in their distinct abilities with a pad, pen and microphone to achieve a creative sense of oneness arguably on par with the connection enjoyed by El-P and Killer Mike. And like they did with the last two Run The Jewels records, the duo made this impressive extended player available for free right over here. Let’s just hope that the score to the upcoming Dave Bautista star vehicle Bushwick isn’t the only thing on Aesop Rock’s docket in 2016. Indeed, a proper full-length from this most formidable new tag team is only right and natural.


On their full-length debut, the New York duo of Praveen Sharma (Percussion Lab, Braille) and Travis Stewart (Machinedrum) nimbly incorporate current bass music trends and arrive at a sound that's familiar and rich.

Sepalcure

Bass producers tend to treat innovation like daily prayer: If not duly performed at regular intervals, some ill-defined Very Bad Thing will happen. The thirst for innovation is such that some scene-watchers have likened current bass music to post-punk, stratifying its sounds in search of growth. Previous British dance movements-- drum'n'bass and garage-- found such terrifying end-games that the bass scene has made a constant effort to never stop swimming. To brand an artist as someone who simply executes, however masterfully, is to damn him with faint praise. Increasingly, bass producers have looked backward (thumping, linear 4/4 bangers) or forward (mutated footwork fever-dreams), largely ignoring (as Pitchfork writer Philip Sherburne put it in discussion), the fertile terrain between Burial and Joy Orbison.
On their debut full-length for Scuba's Hotflush label, New York duo Sepalcure nimbly incorporate current trends but arrive at a sound-- politely mysterious rhythms put to life by haunted vocal samples-- that's familiar and rich. Sepalcure is a collaboration between two dance veterans, Praveen Sharma and Travis Stewart. That their album scans as a bit of a melting pot should not surprise. Sharma runs dance media hub Percussion Lab and records misty, retro-futuristic house as Braille. Stewart hops genres as Machinedrum, whose footwork-fusion album Room(s) is widely regarded as one of the year's best dance releases (I regret underrating its idiosyncrasies).
Admittedly influenced by the scores of talent massing on forward-thinking bass labels like Hotflush and Hessle Audio, their collaboration was the result of boredom and opportunity (Sharma's girlfriend, visual artist Sougwen Chung, was studying abroad; she handles all of the group's visuals). Some combination of serendipity and skill saw the duo's first tracks fall into the hands of Mary Anne Hobbs and Paul Rose (Scuba); two well-received EPs later, a short two-week recording session birthed Sepalcure.
That Sepalcure is so balanced and organized can be attributed to the experience and seeming calm of its principals; that it sounds so lively and inviting is the greater achievement. While syncopated rhythms-- pattering cymbals and kicks with now-familiar handclaps-- and probing bass sponge up dubstep's urban paranoia, Sharma and Stewart add plenty of more explicitly emotional touches to their work. How else to explain the Who's "See Me, Feel Me" stretched transparent over, um, "See Me Feel Me"? (And how the hell did that sample get cleared?) Or the hammy Italo-disco pianos that build up under the fingernails of "Hold On" and "Yuh Nuh See"? Sepalcure's moody haze and mid-song shifts prevent it from being dance-floor fodder ("The One" is a welcome exception), but neither is it music by which to lonesomely stare at rainstorms.
Vocals play a prominent role throughout. During their best moments, Sharma and Stewart subject rave-y house divas to dubstep's pinched nausea, turning the gospel-like fervor of their sources into grimy hymns. (Those new to the group should acquaint themselves with early single "Love Pressure".) "Breezin" is especially devoted, its tremulous refrain-- "Mountains high and low!"-- ascending above its buzzy synths. The duo recorded many of the instruments live, and there is a punch especially to the pianos (electric and acoustic) that their contemporaries frequently lack. They layer these instruments expertly, and tracks such as lead single "Pencil Pimp" and "Eternally Yrs" function as bass-y, house-y suspensions: discrete parts bound by weightless float. Tufts of melody chunk off "Yuh Nuh See", as its meticulous, six-note sequence snakes around a vocal hum and sprinkled, choral beauty.
Straightforward descriptions of Sepalcure-- a finely manicured mix of dubstep, house, UK funky, and footwork-- make it sound pedestrian, even contrived. The reality is anything but; Sharma and Stewart have found an alleyway that few other producers have traversed in 2011. Bass producers can treasure-hunt all they want, but increasingly it feels like someone should stay behind to stack the doubloons. Stewart is moving to Berlin, casting doubt on Sepalcure's future. If they never record again, their collaboration may mirror their achievement here: an evolutionary moment, familiar and brief enough to gloss over, rich enough to return to.


The third album by Icelandic composer, Björk producer, and Bedroom Community founder Valgeir Sigurðsson is a score for a Stephen Petronio ballet that pits emotive chamber music (including piano from Nico Muhly) against furtive electronic frequencies.

Valgeir Sigurðsson: Architecture of Loss

Architecture of Loss

I attend several contemporary dance performances a year and encounter a few more through recorded scores. Based on this limited sample, it seems almost mandatory for modern choreographers to power dancers with blends of acoustic classical instruments and electronic tones by the likes of Ben Frost or Gavin Bryars. The third full-length by Icelandic composer Valgeir Sigurðsson, a score for a ballet by Stephen Petronio, is a textbook case of this approach. Architecture of Loss pits gravely emotive chamber music against furtive electronic frequencies. Drawing from the ballet's concepts of loss and forgetting, it's like something sneaky by Anton Webern and something subliminal from Touch Music playing in synch: bold, yearning themes often break free, but feelings of occlusion and indeterminacy linger.
Except for his production and engineering work with Björk and many others, Sigurðsson is best-known for founding the influential Bedroom Community label, a lightning rod at the juncture where the ambition of classical music meets the aesthetics of indie music-- though it's reckless to breezily dispense with the purview of a label that launched the recording careers of people as individually diverse (yet collectively related) as Frost, Nico Muhly, and Sam Amidon. All of the label's different strands gather in Sigurðsson's music, which can be sweepingly neo-romantic and sweetened with folk melodies à la Bartók while remaining alert to the possibilities of microtonality, mechanization, and minimalism.
Muhly plays piano on Architecture of Loss, and his fans will find much to admire in Sigurðsson, whose piano writing treads the line between the "Moonlight Sonata" and "Mad Rush". His string writing is more astringent, full of naggingly prolonged notes and wrenched transitions. Using a small ensemble, a deliberately limited vocabulary, and electronic processing, Sigurðsson doggedly transforms minimal material, much of it focused on the viola, stepping out of its habitual niche below the violin and above the cello for a star turn. The viola's dominance speaks to the album's equivocal nature; the space it explores between high and low, violence and calm, melody and miasma. Baritone guitar and the occasional trombone ballast the low-end, while pianos, electronics, and even an aquaphone-- the coolest instrument ever, played by crack auxiliary man Shahzad Ismaily-- fill out the upper register.
In such a bright spotlight, it's a good thing that violist Nadia Sirota plays with such force and character. Very occasionally, the stridency of her tone overwhelms finer moods with a general buzzing anxiety. But mostly, Sigurðsson's cagey writing and Sirota's impetuous phrasing blend into music that appears to make sudden, inspired decisions of its own accord. Her playing is riveting on "World Without Ground", where long tones pulsing in different instruments surge over a thumping pizzicato groove. Sirota unleashes ghostly sheens and ivy-like lines that orbit the backbeat in widening arcs, adding a potent centrifugal force to the song rather than another linear one. And one of the best moments comes on "Between Monuments" when it unexpectedly bursts into a world-shaking homestretch with stomach-dropping portamentos in the viola. The recurrence of long, stuck notes feels thin by the time of "Big Reveal", but a rugged electronic scaffold and corkscrewing motivic material soon liven it up.
Not long ago, Sigurðsson was named one of NPR's "Top 100 Composers Under 40", and yet it still feels like we are only seeing the beginnings of what he can do. As a producer and engineer, he has spent a lot of time working in the background, using his technical expertise to help other people realize their visions. He even tends to play a contingent role in his own music. Of his three albums, two-- Architecture of Loss and Draumalandid-- are scores. Only his first and most ambient-influenced record, Ekvílibríum, contains unfettered original music, and even that one was partly worked around the voices of people such as Bonny "Prince" Billy. All these scores and collaborations are great, but with Sigurðsson's compositional talent proven, they can't help but feel a little like bided time. What I'm eager to hear is something with a title that isn't shared with a ballet or a film-- something more along the lines of Valgeir Sigurðsson, Op. 1.


After the breakup of Japan, this reluctant star retreated into a series of four albums—including his masterpiece—built on noir balladry, instrumental abstraction, and an abiding sense of distance.

David Sylvian: Secrets of the Beehive / Brilliant Trees / Alchemy: An Index of Possibilities / Gone to Earth

Brilliant Trees / Alchemy: An Index of Possibilities / Gone to Earth / Secrets of the Beehive

David Sylvian’s first four solo albums, newly reissued on vinyl, exude an intense but ambiguous loneliness. “I wrestle with an outlook on life that shifts between darkness and shadowy light,” he sings during his most forthright song, “Orpheus.” Throughout these records, he does battle—with his outlook, with his past, with his expectations. As a singer, he seems to avert eye contact, his peculiar baritone formal and serious, classically beautiful but wary of sounding that way. As an arranger, accompanied by masters of ambiance like Ryuichi Sakamoto and Robert Fripp, he gives himself room to wander. “The kind of people who immediately turn on a television when they are alone don’t enjoy my music,” Sylvian once observed. “It makes them terribly uncomfortable.”
Before going solo, Sylvian found himself, like Scott Walker and Brian Wilson, playing the uncomfortable role of young pop icon. Commercially successful and critically loathed, Japan were a New Romantic group in which the inventive fretless bassist Mick Karn often outshone Sylvian, the dashing frontman. Japan formed while its members were classmates in South London, and their trajectory reflects the swiftly evolving taste of precocious teenagers. When they started in 1974, they sounded like the New York Dolls. (Born David Alan Batt, Sylvian chose a not-so-subtle pseudonym.) As they rose to prominence, they sounded like Roxy Music. Eventually, they discovered the avant-garde.
That last touchstone was no phase; it has defined Sylvian’s career ever since. The sound that Sylvian explored as a solo artist—eerie, atmospheric, solitary—came into focus on Japan’s fifth and final album, 1981’s Tin Drum, and its sparse highlight, “Ghosts.” Where Sylvian’s best hooks had once come from pairing oblique phrases to new wave rhythms, he somehow found power now within the two syllables of the word “wilder,” melding them together with swelling vibrato. In a TV performance just before Japan broke up, he strips the song down to just acoustic guitar and voice, leaving long gaps of silence between each verse. “This whole year has been, like, drifting apart,” he tells the interviewer about Japan’s imminent dissolution. Speaking from the drift, he sounds confident.
All of Sylvian’s solo music has luxuriated in that space. Post-Japan, he began collaborating with Sakamoto on singles like “Forbidden Colours,” his lyrical accompaniment to Sakamoto’s exquisite theme for Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. By the time Sylvian released his solo debut Brilliant Trees in 1984, his group of musicians included Sakamoto, members of Can and Pentangle, and atmospheric trumpeters Jon Hassell and Mark Isham. The album remains his most immediate work, featuring some of his most memorable melodies (“Red Guitar,” “The Ink in the Well”) and daring explorations like the nearly nine-minute title track. It’s a remarkable opening statement, indicative of the singular world Sylvian was able to establish, even when surrounded by such rich talent.
His next two releases—the entirely instrumental Alchemy: An Index of Possibilities and the double album Gone to Earth—are more transitional. The former is a strange hodgepodge of collaborations and soundtrack material. Still believing Sylvian’s appearance and cult of personality to be his biggest selling point, a video company asked him to participate in a documentary; Sylvian responded with an abstract collage filmed in Tokyo, soundtracked by new ambient compositions included here. The record is vivid and atmospheric (particularly Side B, the longform piece “Steel Cathedrals”), but it’s more like a blueprint for the collaborative work to come. This new edition—its first complete release on vinyl—makes this reissue series more comprehensive, but it remains an album more interesting in concept than practice.
Gone to Earth is more essential. Split into an LP of traditional compositions and an instrumental companion, its scope summarizes where Sylvian had been and foreshadows his next moves. “That album was put together piecemeal,” he later reflected. “I ended up with this… incohesive collection of material that I somehow had to make sense of.” It’s a marvel how coherent it feels. Some songs border on noir balladry, like the gorgeous “Silver Moon,” while others are almost gothic, including “Taking the Veil” and “Before the Bullfight.” You can sense Sylvian peeling away the dramatic flourishes that made Brilliant Trees so bold. The ambient side, featuring guitar contributions from Fripp and Bill Nelson, offers shadows where once there were songs.
If Gone to Earth feels like a labored portrait of the artist, then its follow-up was made on instinct. Released just a year later, Sylvian’s masterpiece, Secrets of the Beehive, arrived quickly. “Each track was written in one sitting,” he has noted. Sakamoto’s string arrangements appear mostly just to vanish, and Sylvian sings uncharacteristically from behind acoustic guitar or a piano. He is a kind of live vanishing act, a singer/songwriter dissolving into fog. “September” suggests a jazz standard until it’s abruptly snuffed out in less than two minutes. “The Boy With a Gun” and “The Devil’s Own” take on varied evils but resolve without a hint of redemption. Conceptually heavy but structurally light, Secrets of the Beehive seems to forecast a storm that lingers in the distance.
The album’s quick creation involved abandoning pieces that had once seemed central to the work as a whole, and it does feel like a statement with the core scooped out. This only adds to its mysterious pull. During the brightest moment, “Let the Happiness In,” Sylvian sings over lapping percussion and a brass section that mimics foghorns. Through the dusk, Sylvian prays for the “agony to stop” as the arrangement opens into something that sounds like peace. “As a listener,” he has said, “I prefer to be taken through the stages of doubt before being shown the way out.” Few albums suspend you so completely.
All of this, of course, can seem a bit bleak. This intensity subsequently pushed Sylvian to seek spiritual guidance and shake things up creatively. Following the release of Secrets of the Beehive and his first-ever solo tour, he focused more on collaborative work, from a pair of ambient albums with Holger Czukay and two excellent releases with Fripp to music with artists like Fennesz decades later. These four records, then, mark a distinct phase of his career—likely the last time his work would be received by a mass audience, establishing a path toward the reclusive future he dreamed of.
In Martin Power’s biography of Sylvian, The Last Romantic, early manager Simon Napier-Bell recalls the young artist confiding, “I want to be a minor rock star.” It’s a humble, self-deprecating remark that rings true so many years later: His music remains a glowing source of solitude, all driven by a desire to be hidden but sought after—a celebration of all things lost and unnamed.


The Canadian producer takes steps toward stripping down his laid-back house sound, but the rosy glow of his previous releases remains.

Project Pablo: There’s Always More at the Store EP

There’s Always More at the Store EP

The Canadian house producer Patrick Holland likely baffled more than a few heads when he admitted in a recent profile that one of his biggest youthful influences was not dance music but the Dave Matthews Band. But perhaps that’s not so strange. There’s no obvious through line from the jam band to Project Pablo, Holland’s primary production handle, but both share an inclination for breezy, melodic, jazz-inflected grooves. Though the Vancouver native now calls Montreal home, his aesthetic hews closely to the laid-back sound of West Coast labels like Mood Hut and Pacific Rhythms.
Since releasing a promising debut on the now-shuttered 1080p cassette label in 2015, Project Pablo has kept up a steady stream of singles on labels ranging from Brooklyn’s Let’s Play House to Lone’s Magicwire to Holland’s own Sounds of Beaubien Ouest. There’s Always More at the Store showcases a few new wrinkles to his sound while also reminding us that he can also easily bang out a cool beat, too. “Napoletana” is closest to his recent run: crisp snares and hi-hats, slinking bass, and zigzagging keyboard line, with some gorgeous, hazy chords behind it all. It’s catchy, but one gets the notion that Pablo has dozens of unreleased jams just like this.
Elsewhere he moves into new areas. “Remind Me Tomorrow” features a minimal-techno pulse echoing in a metallic corridor. It’s about as chilly as Pablo can get, but a warm glow soon suffuses it, thanks to a fuzzy synth wash and a winsome motif that arises midway through the track. “Last Day” is a pleasant enough ambient piece for piano and guitar, but rather than letting it develop, he treats it as a mere interlude. Maybe Holland will risk giving such ruminations a bit more space to evolve in the future.
Echoing pings and programmed drums ricochet around the EP’s headiest entry, “Less and Less.” The track playfully dances between tingling electro, the charming sound of the Canadian Riviera, and Basic Channel’s dubby minimalism; it’s all held together by a sidewinding, minor-key synth melody. The eight-minute closer “I Heard You Breathing” features Holland’s slipperiest beat here; paired with an eloquent melody, it’s a fine example of his increasingly streamlined productions. But throughout the track runs a nagging high frequency that squeals like the unoiled wheel on a shopping cart, or a whistling tea kettle left on the stove. It’s one of the lone instances in Project Pablo’s growing yet generally chill discography that actually feels a bit unnerving.


In addition to eight previously unreleased songs, this double LP remixes and remasters two early albums born from the macabre, witty, and wonderful mind of Sadie Dupuis.

Speedy Ortiz: The Death of Speedy Ortiz & Cop Kicker...Forever

Blood, guts, and pus streak Sadie Dupuis’ songs like a biohazardous Pollock. Her band, Speedy Ortiz, celebrates the tenth anniversary of their debut LP (2011’s The Death of Speedy Ortiz) with The Death of Speedy Ortiz and Cop Kicker… Forever, a 22-song treatise on the trials and tribulations of the flesh. Dupuis’ songwriting has always been the beating, bleeding heart of Speedy Ortiz. Melodically capricious and lyrically eviscerating—one line refers to a “backseat seppuku, gutting more than the core”—Dupuis entices, threatens, and confesses with a glibness that belies her vulnerability. The grim and witty expressionism she brings to her songwriting has put Dupuis in a class of her own.
In addition to eight previously unreleased songs, this double LP remixes and remasters two early releases, The Death of Speedy Ortiz and Cop Kicker, which were both released by Dupuis in 2011. Back then, she had yet to tour with artists like Liz Phair and Foo Fighters; even as Speedy Ortiz blossomed from a solo project into a fledgling band, they had mostly played festivals and smaller venues alongside indie-rock contemporaries. Revisiting the ironic, acerbic charm of the band’s origins with a more mature, developed approach, the reissues clean up the bedroom-pop fuzz of Dupuis’ earlier home recordings while adding the heft and complexity of a full band.
Dupuis has a way of marrying the macabre with the earnest. Seconds after making a relatively cliché boast about being “a different breed,” she poses a stranger, more unguarded question: “Will you eat me when I die?” The specter of death flits through the Speedy Ortiz catalog, and Dupuis uses the body’s impermanence to illustrate her darkest, most unsettling thoughts. On new track and album closer “Son Of,” she describes lying under a bus where “18 wheels slash across me as penance for all my killings.” Even one of the more conventional indie-pop songs, the eponymous “Speedy Ortiz,” lingers on an image of “flies on the ceiling/Mating and molting.”
Previously, Speedy Ortiz sounded more muted, suspending Dupuis’ vocals over the band’s fuzzy instrumentals. And it worked: Her barbs, even when delivered gently, undercut the softness of the songs, drawing you in close to be cut by each and every one. On The Death of Speedy Ortiz and Cop Kicker… Forever, the sharper production allows the full force of Dupuis’ emotion to burst through. The sinister, vengeful confidence in lines like, “Ate the other children hatching from my mother/Baby, won’t you let me feed” ramps up as the guitar slides into a screech.
Speedy Ortiz’s more acoustic leanings also benefit from the remastering, as vocals become more intelligible and instrumentation more clean-cut. Throughout the twisted lullaby “Ken Ohki,” Dupuis’ voice becomes louder and less distorted, though still relatively tinny, while each strum of the guitar creeps with a twangy unease. It feels far more removed and distant, apt for lines like, “Not like I shaved you/Or drained you and sold all your organs o’erseas;” the sheer depravity of it all is a welcome foil to the soothing rhythm of the song. Each element of “Frankenweenie” feels amplified and somehow sharpened; each of Depuis’ minuscule, dissonant inflections seem to stick out over the eerie, congealed guitar.
The standout of the previously unreleased songs is “Let’s Get Evicted,” a lilting, craven love song where Dupuis murmurs her idea of sweet nothings to a lover who presumably shares her unconventional perspectives: “Let’s kiss off a cliff/Take a nap in a grave/Let’s get evicted and torture our enemies,” she croons sweetly. Suicidal tendencies and human rights violations aside, though, “Let’s Get Evicted” is Dupuis at her most hopeful: her most willing to throw bodily limitations to the wind and forge connections, fleeting as they are.

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Noel Heroux of Hooray for Earth enlists his wife, Jessica Zambri, for a bombastic, exhausting album that betrays a deep desire to emulate Funeral-era Arcade Fire.

Mass Gothic: I’ve Tortured You Long Enough

I’ve Tortured You Long Enough

Mass Gothic’s second album begins and ends with a window. At first, the window is dark; by the end of the record, it’s merely big. Presumably the sun has come up. Between “Dark Window” and “Big Window,” this project from Hooray for Earth’s Noel Heroux exudes so much bombast as to become exhausting. While the first Mass Gothic record was essentially a Heroux solo outing, I’ve Tortured You Long Enough loops in his wife, Jessica Zambri, who co-wrote the album and sings throughout. The couple adopts a dynamic reminiscent of Win Butler and Régine Chassagne—at many points, I’ve Tortured You betrays its deep desire to be an early Arcade Fire release—but their songwriting choices don't support their incessant swings for the rafters.
The album introduces itself with a rhythmic figure pilfered from the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey,” an homage Heroux already paid on Hooray for Earth’s “Last Minute,” from 2011’s True Loves. The Scottish band has clearly colored his approach to songwriting and production: Their haze and grit can be heard throughout his projects, and with Zambri he continues to work in their retro mold. I’ve Tortured You has a delightfully textured production style that blurs guitars, drums, and synths together like a painted background, allowing the singers’ voices to vault to the top of the mix. But Psychocandy balanced its blunt fuzz with a light touch. “Just Like Honey” is both noisy and delicate. I’ve Tortured You loses that nuance, blowing out its engines at every turn.
Power ballads generally work because they couple their enthusiasm with a certain disarming strangeness. The enthusiasm has to be grounded in something new, something that justifies the excitement. Arcade Fire’s lyrics on Funeral and Neon Bible conjured up imagery of primitivist utopias, of love alchemizing the mind. More recently, Lorde’s compositional whirlwind “Green Light” swirled together great white sharks and light-up dance floors. The words earned their delivery. Heroux and Zambri use a similarly dramatic vocal style to Butler, Chassagne, and Lorde, but their lyrics weigh down their songs. Their couplets are either trite, like “While you lift me in the air/There’s time only to love you,” from “Call Me,” or baffling: “Undersea where the viper glows/And the tragedy isn’t one I know,” Zambri narrates on “The Goad.” So a snake bioluminesces and nothing happens.
I’ve Tortured You never lets up on its fist-in-the-air rock eruptions. No small acoustic numbers punctuate the record; there is no time to regroup. Even within songs, Heroux and Zambri follow safe, predictable progressions. Multiple tracks reiterate a single vocal melody for their entire duration: no verse, no chorus, just the same stanza over and over. By the end, the window imagery that frames the album feels like a self-conscious metaphor. “I am looking out there/Big window,” Zambri repeats on closer “Big Window.” She does not tell us what she sees. Over pounding drums and roiling electric guitar, she issues the record’s final lyric in a voice that sounds like it wants to rouse stadiums: “It never happened.” The “it” has no antecedent. Again, we’re left with a blank space where emotion should be.


It's taken nearly a decade for L.A.'s Gaslamp Killer to release his debut album, though he's hardly been slacking in the interim. Breakthrough summarizes his recent creative mode pretty definitively, manifesting in a high-quality dose of doom-struck instrumental hip-hop.

Breakthrough

Gaslamp Killer has emerged as a producer who developed his charismatic notoriety by pushing his corner of bass music into a something resembling a close cousin of acid rock. His highest-profile production gig, Gonjasufi's 2010 album A Sufi and a Killer, was psychotropic hip-hop at its most elemental, stuff so gristly and eye-peeling-- and occasionally beautiful-- that it reset the parameters for what you could nod your head to (assuming you could still remember where it was located). Pick up that same year's Death Gate EP or jump back a year to his 2009 EP, My Troubled Mind, and you can hear that sound emerge from a mindstate reared on 1980s VHS horror, hippy-biker exploitation soundtracks and car-trunk g-funk, stuff that expanded on the Left Coast underground influence of '96-era Shadow and Automator into a red-lit grindhouse. And it becomes even clearer soaking on a mix like 2009's Hell and the Lake of Fire are Waiting for You!, one of the best documents of his persistent efforts as a DJ to turn clubland crate-digger culture into an altered-state travelogue worthy of his Low End Theory bonafides. Flipping Dungen, Can, and space-age 70s European production library music in the same set as Smif N Wessun and Organized Konfusion is exactly the kind of approach that makes running in the same crowed as Flying Lotus and Teebs sound like a natural destination in context.
Breakthrough is a record that fits Gaslamp Killer well as a rundown of everything he's been able to imprint on his career so far. It's a run of occasionally disorienting, sometimes frantic, usually unnerving trips into distinct corners of psychedelic and experimental influence that spark briefly to reveal vivid life and fade out just as quickly. And it succeeds, driven as it is by up-front, iron-fisted live drumming that's mixed up into the red. He builds around that neck-snap percussion in ways that dredge up an air of constant tension, ebbing and flowing through so many different forms so quickly that it creates this air of unknowable dread; once it seems like there might be a consistent method to it, it switches focus to some other angle. Pick a style, and he'll coax out the most nerve-twisting elements of its abrasive side-- synthesized dirges that snap a wire and start sparking off into something noisier ("Meat Guilt"); Morricone panic attacks that sound purpose-built to soundtrack a splattery low-budget drive-in movie death ("Critic"); organ-driven garage funk given a stoner-metal lurch ("Dead Vets").
But calling Breakthrough the most direct line into Gaslamp Killer's singularly unhinged vision would be a bit misleading: As befitting an artist who's as important for who he's hung out with and given opportunities to as he is for what he's done on his own, this is a record that leads him to filter his ideas through a number of like-minded collaborators. Sometimes it's just a matter of finding the right piece to plug in: Miguel Atwood-Ferguson's keening strings pierce through the wall of synth-hesher fuzz on "Flange Face", Gonjasufi is his usual otherworldly presence on the spiritual admonishment of "Veins" and the outreach of "Apparitions", Daedelus incorporates touches of 8-bit vertigo into "Impulse", and Shigeto helps steer the percussive rattle of "Keep it Simple Stupid" through an analog squall that makes the title's advice sound a bit beside the point. And sometimes it's the collaborative aspect that actually drives the song itself-- Gaslamp Killer's heritage-driven enthusiasm for Turkish music, previously heard in tracks like My Troubled Mind cut "Turk Mex", is fleshed out with live instrumentation supplied by Amir Yaghmai on "Nissim".
So GLK's found a communal niche, all right, but how far deep has he worked himself in there? Because Breakthrough-- which it is and isn't-- feels like the kind of record his adventurous precedent has made into a familiar signature. It's the album that gets at his recent creative mode most definitively, the one people might figure he had in him rather than the one that changed anybody's minds about him. Which is good news, really-- expecting a dose of high-quality doom-struck instrumental hip-hop and getting it is the kind of thing only jaded fad-hoppers get disappointed over. The idea that it might draw more fans to his stylistic strengths means the potential for a subsequent breakthrough of Cosmogramma advancement can wait a bit. This one offers plenty to wrap your head around in the meantime.


T.I.'s political tenth studio album presents itself as a warning to black Americans who find themselves labeled social disruptors for simply trying to live their lives harmoniously.

Us or Else: Letter to the System

T.I.’s tenth studio album Us or Else: Letter to the System emerges from Us or Else, a six-track EP from September 2016 that found him in a revolutionary mood. The new LP, fleshed out with nine new tracks, is just the latest point on a timeline of the rapper's growing social consciousness. He has been a high-profile proponent of the Black Lives Matter movement; his album follows in the wake of his march in solidarity for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the firing of an appropriating protégée, and the calling out of a highly respected collaborator and friend who spoke irresponsibly against the movement. Most recently, he joined in the nationwide protests of Trump’s victory. Letter to the System presents itself as a warning to black Americans who find themselves labeled social disruptors for simply trying to live their lives harmoniously.
Frankly speaking, the album would have opened stronger with the third track “Black Man” instead of its actual mellowed out, preaching starter, “I Believe.” “Black Man,” a cinematic call-to-arms that includes an appropriately urgent Meek Mill feature, is one of the more unpredictable tracks on a LP that otherwise is a little too mundane and perfunctory. Quavo’s show-stealing performance on the hook—which questions the causes of police brutality, “Is it because of my people? Is it because of my sneakers?,” before surmising “It is because that I’m perfect?”—highlights T.I.’s biggest problem here. He has made himself the supporting character of his own album, placing himself towards the end of most songs, while his featured guests stand at the front lines. The decision proves costly; often, T.I.’s presence doesn’t feel significant, which is quite disappointing because he offers a polished flow throughout the project.
On the brighter side, the bevy of showcasing guest appearances—from Jacksonville-based Tokyo Jetz’s annihilating turn on “Lazy” to fellow Atlantian London Jae’s raspy flow on the backwoods baptism of “Pain”—embody two core principles of BLM: community and the advancement of future generations. With his generosity, the self-proclaimed “Grand Hustler” is repositioning himself in the vein of someone like Dr. Dre, who in 2015 introduced the wider world to Anderson .Paak on Compton. In a way, T.I.’s Us or Else: Letter to the System is his most selfless project; his exclusive partnership with and allegiance to the predominantly black-owned business Tidal, speaks louder, in some ways, than he does.
Ultimately, the album is a primer on BLM basics, something that we can tune into CNN to see Angela Rye breakdown to conservative pundits on a regular basis. The music is a little less distinguished; T.I. swings between recalling the hip-hop free-jazz stylings already perfected by Kendrick Lamar and falling back on the slicked-back southern-gentleman grit of 2014’s Paperwork. Towards the end, he offers a few stunners: “Picture Me Mobbin” is a floating, ego-boosting, cerebral bout of ecstasy assisted by the-Dream. The reflective closer “Take Da Wheel” offers a peek into his faith, as he pleads “God help me man, Lord knows I don’t want to go to jail again” over a hypnotically stifled beckoning call of “help me Jesus! Help me Jesus!” At this point, it’s not enough to take solo action, especially when you’re constantly battling on the wrong side of the system. As any black man knows, a united front is always needed for survival.


The San Francisco goth-pop band Wax Idols' second album Discipline & Desire is aloof and commanding, with an expertly honed sense of how far to take the tension it builds before offering relief.

Discipline + Desire

Two of the more interesting punk rock records to surface this year come from female-dominated acts drawing heavily from Bauhaus’s taut, aggressive postpunk side and the chilly psychedelia of early Siouxsie and the Banshees: Savages’ Silence Yourself and Wax Idols’ Discipline & Desire. Whether that’s the manifestation of something rattling around pop’s mass subconscious, or just an indicator that right now is a good time in the retro cycle to revive the few years before and after goth’s initial emergence from the first wave of UK punk remains to be seen.
Silence Yourself has been attracting more attention, but Discipline & Desire should also be essential listening for anyone in a gothic mood. It’s the poppier of the two, which makes sense if you’re familiar with Wax Idols’ first LP, No Future, a collection that sounded a bit more like Wire than the typical album emanating from bubblegum-heavy San Francisco garage scene, though it fit right in otherwise.
In the two years since No Future was released, frontwoman Hether Fortune has switched over from playing with a pickup band to recruiting a solid lineup; it's given the project a new sound that’s sleeker, darker, and more distinctive. Where the first album bristled with edgy but outgoing hooks, Discipline & Desire plays it cool to the point of ice, holding the listener at arm’s length and dangling its melodic payoffs tantalizingly just out of reach. The catchiest parts of the album are surrounded by anxious chromatic harmonies and submerged in a cloud of frigid reverb, as if to underline its overall theme that you can’t enjoy pleasure without also enduring pain.
If that sounds like a sado-masochistic approach to making music, it probably is. Fortune has a day job as a dominatrix, and it seems that Wax Idols’ stylistic evolution was the result of taking lessons she learned in the dungeon and finding ways to express them aesthetically. Discipline & Desire-- the title’s a tip-off-- is aloof and commanding, with an expertly honed sense of how far to take the tension it builds before offering relief.
Listeners generally don’t enjoy being messed with in such an aggressive fashion, and it says a lot about where Fortune’s songwriting talents are at this point that she can pull off such a feat. The opening song, “Stare Back”, is not only one of the strongest on the album, but the one that best embodies the forcible arm’s-length thing, with the band riding an anxious two-note groove and Fortune giving her vocals a particularly assertive, clipped edge. The song eventually builds to a bridge that’s as close to a resolution as the band’s willing to give it (there’s still a dissonant guitar line keeping us from getting too comfortable), but it’s not the release at the bridge that keeps bringing me back to the song, it’s the creepy groove that I can feel crawling up and down my back in a strangely satisfying way.
About halfway through the album, Fortune and company take a break from the power play to deliver three and a half minutes of unalloyed pop compelling enough to stop chatter in a crowded room. “Dethrone” sounds like the Pretenders trying to sound like Siouxsie, and it’s exactly as amazing as you would imagine that scenario to be. It seems like the goth fashion trend of the past few years is also inspiring a new goth music revival. If so, they should consider using “Dethrone” as its anthem.


The British singer and songwriter finds her niche, setting her voice at the center of modest, forthright songs that celebrate self-sufficiency and restraint.

Everyday Nothing

What happens when a precocious youth becomes just another adult? As a college student in London, Brooke Bentham’s early singles attracted buzz and earned her a deal with British indie label AllPoints. But when it came time to write a debut album post-graduation, she was burned out: “I was just lying in bed every day and just watching television,” she told NME. “I couldn’t write and I felt like a piece of shit.” She worked two retail jobs to make ends meet, drawing on the non-musical experience for lyrical inspiration. The eventual album, Everyday Nothing, is not exactly about finding beauty in the mundane; while the music is frequently beautiful, it doesn’t glorify stasis. If it celebrates anything, it’s self-sufficiency—fitting for an artist who, after spending her formative years settling on a sound, has found her niche.
To achieve this, Bentham trades art-pop producer Ben Baptie for singer-songwriter Bill-Ryder Jones. The production on Bentham’s early EPs often drowned her voice in psychedelic effects or heavy synths that didn’t necessarily complement her music, except to mirror the intoxication of her narrators on songs like “I Need Your Body.” Many lyrics on the new record are about not being intoxicated: “All my friends are drunk/I haven’t been wasted in months,” for example, or, “I don’t smoke, ’cause I dont wanna die anymore.” Ryder-Jones’ production reflects this newfound lucidity. Though there are experimental touches, like the drum machines and e-bow of opener “With Love,” Bentham’s voice is at the center. The tasteful restraint can be weirdly thrilling: “Telling Lies” combines the intimacy of a rehearsal session with what sounds like a My Bloody Valentine song playing in the background  while Bentham was recording. Other reference points include ’90s indie rock staples Yo La Tengo and Sparklehorse; younger listeners might picture Phoebe Bridgers fronting Alvvays.
If the music has obvious ancestry, Bentham’s lyrics can be harder to trace. “Blue Light” concerns itself with keeping love alive, though a line like, “You brush your teeth more than me/I feel so ashamed” suggests a deeper, self-conscious kind of fear. On “Men I Don’t Know” and “Keep It Near,” Bentham reveals exhaustion at the idea of being a full-time musician, asking why she’s “burdended herself” doing what she loves when the rewards are few and far between. When she does get sentimental, she’s restrained, as on the unexpected late-album love song “Without,” which recalls the Jo March monologue from Greta Gerwig’s Little Women adaptation: Like Jo, Bentham asserts her love and independence while simultaneously admitting that she’s unhappy.
Because the album’s scale and ambitions are modest, some of its songs blend together. It’s easy to mentally segue from the verses of “All My Friends Are Drunk” to the chorus of “Blue Light,” or to conflate mid-tempo advance singles “Perform for You” and “Control.” Still, the individual songs are strong enough that obsessing over their similarity feels like nitpicking. It was never Bentham’s intention to laugh defiantly in the face of malaise, or to talk about her coming-of-age journey as an unqualified triumph. All she meant to do was find reasons to keep writing.


The debut commercial mix CD from UK producer Harry Agius, aka Midland, transcends the typical function of a DJ mix. It’s one of the year’s best, with potential to resonate beyond dance-music diehards.

Fabriclive 94

Nothing says “peak content” like a DJ mix. Proliferating for free online, they’re a dime a terabyte. A kind of cognitive dissonance hangs over many: Suggesting club energy but far removed from actual nightclubs, they offer a simulacrum of nightlife. They also serve a more mercenary purpose: Many DJs’ mixes double as business cards; Fabric’s reasonably priced mix series is essentially an advertisement for the London nightclub, where cover and service charges might run you $38 or more. But every now and then, the elements align and something more transcendent results. That is the case with Midland’s debut commercial mix CD, one of the year’s best, and one with the potential to resonate far beyond dance-music diehards.
Midland—the UK’s Harry Agius—has been making records for seven years now, yet he’s hardly a household name. That might have something to do with the fact that he has never aligned himself with any one style. (It doesn’t help that he’s never released an album, only singles and EPs.) His early records hewed to the voluminous contours and syncopated grooves of early-2010s UK bass, but he’s also made tough, rattling techno and dreamy deep house; last year, he dipped his toe into new wave-flavored waters with the coolly melodic “Blush.” And his “Final Credits,” a sleek disco stepper that was caned for months before its official December release, unexpectedly became one of the year’s definitive anthems. Mixmag named it their No. 1 track of 2016. On YouTube, it has been played more than 547,000 times in the past nine months, and on Spotify, the song’s two mixes have netted well over a million plays.
The most immediate thing that Midland’s Fabriclive mix shares in common with his own productions is that it also covers a wide stretch of stylistic ground. Listeners who know Midland primarily from “Final Credits” may be surprised to find nary a lick of disco here. But to call it a techno mix doesn’t come close to capturing either the range or the nuance of his set. It favors muted tone colors, hypnotic grooves, and enveloping atmospheres; rattling breakbeats alternate with purring machine rhythms and extended beatless stretches, and brand-new records rub up against deep cuts from the 1990s. Emphasizing long, natural segues and subtly harmonic blends, it is intricate but never fussy, understated but never shy.
Unless you’re intimately familiar with the tracks in the mix—and, given their scattered provenance, it seems unlikely that many listeners will know more than a handful of them—it may not be immediately apparent how much of what you hear is a product of his active mixing. Listen to his selections on their own, then listen to the way they work in the context of the mix, and you can hear how he’s often layering two tracks across two, three, or four-minute stretches. Some DJs prefer to let tracks play out in full, crossfading only in the final bars, but Midland appears intent upon keeping any two given songs playing simultaneously as much as possible. At times, it seems like as soon as one record has left the turntable, he’s reaching for its successor’s replacement. Still, nothing here feels hurried or rushed. Tracks flow naturally from one to the next, their elements complementing each other the way two siblings might finish one another’s sentences. Even in the rare cases where he abruptly shifts gears—like when LFO’s dreamy ambient-techno cut “Ultra Schall” slips sideways into Kowton’s sharp-elbowed “Pea Soup”—the changes happen so naturally that you may not even notice them.
Not only does the mix progress effortlessly from one track to the next; the whole set follows a single, flowing arc, albeit one marked by a few unexpected gestural movements. Following a tentative, scene-setting introduction from the New York experimental duo Georgia, he proceeds through a series of progressively deeper tracks like Jaures’ clattering “Silence (Before Birth),” Juju & Jordash’s drifting, vibey “Monday Mellow,” and Leif’s chiming “Shoulders Back.” As talking drums strike up a kind of conversation with Leif’s bell tones, Roman Flügel’s “Warm and Dewy” marks the set’s second phase, which tumbles across a short sequence of wriggly drum tracks. Beatrice Dillon’s “Halfway” offers a rare moment of levity with a cartoon-reggae bassline that cuts through her dank, clanking drums.
Samo DJ & Pedrodollar’s bleepy, carefree “Track #3” makes a low-key setup for the set’s first big peak: Mannequin Lung’s “City Lights (Mr. Hazeltine Remix feat. Divine Styler),” a reworked 1998 tune from Los Angeles’ Plug Research label that imagines a galaxy of streetlights spreading out beneath a vantage point high in the Hollywood hills. It’s a stunning move—an obscure cut that even many techno heads may have forgotten, if they knew it at all, and used in a way that packs a real emotional punch.
From here, Midland uses Sugai Ken’s beatless “Mukashi” as a tonal palate cleanser before plunging into a long, immersive stretch of techno, much of it from the late ’90s. There are fewer stylistic surprises here than in the first half of the mix, but the selections are eye-opening and the mixing flawless. The rolling, spring-loaded techno of Santos Rodriguez’ “Road to Rio - B1”—a 1999 production by Arthur Smith, aka Artwork, of the dubstep supergroup Magnetic Man, of all things—layers in key with Slobban’s swirling “Amour!,” another unheralded 1999 production; the dubby, sci-fi atmospheres of Convextion’s “Distant Transmission” downshift into Shinichi Atobe’s nostalgic, jazz-tinged “Free Access Zone 2.”
Finally, Agius indulges in a warm-down session that he extends for nearly nine minutes: Vito Ricci’s droning “Deep Felt Music,” Jesper Dahlbäck and Mark O’Sullivan’s downbeat “When I Was Young,” and, last of all, Midland’s own deeply tranquil synth study “First Tube,” exclusive to the mix. It says something about his low-key nature that, unlike some grandstanding DJs, he’s made his own contribution to the mix the most unassuming of all; it says something about his commitment to mood-building that he serenades us out with three successive, complementary outros. As the music fades, we hear birdsong in the distance; it feels like stumbling out of the club into the morning—ears ringing, pulse slowing, the world aglow. Perhaps there’s a little bit of clubland fantasizing woven into Fabriclive 94, too; fortunately, its pleasures are as real as you could hope for.


The UK electronic musician used neural networks to wring synthetic voices into strange, unintelligible shapes. The results are by turns funny, poignant, and frightening.

Models

Lee Gamble’s Models is a cold, sad, wispy album whose songs are like ghosts trying to communicate their unfinished business, unable to puncture the barrier between their plane of existence and ours. The seven tracks on the UK producer’s new album don’t just deconstruct pop music; they obliterate it, leaving unmoored vocal bits gasping and choking in dead air, as if separated from their parent songs and starving for oxygen. There’s something curiously touching about these twitching, disembodied songs; you almost want to pick them up and try to put them back together again.
There’s not a single actual human voice to be found across the record’s 32-minute runtime. Instead, Gamble assembled an arsenal of synthetic voices, which he then fed through neural networks that scrambled the syllables beyond recognition. At times, the results resemble human language, as when “She’s Not” repeats its title over and over like an overzealous trained parrot. Others are pure generative gibberish. Once you realize which pop song Gamble is atomizing on “XIth c. Spray”—hint: it’s an early hit by an American pop star whose last name rhymes with “spray”—the contrast between familiar melody and alien language becomes funny, poignant, and frightening. You almost feel sorry for the artificial voice as it performs the function it was created to perform, endlessly and unthinkingly, with no comprehension of how ridiculous it sounds.
Gamble’s production feels just as incorporeal as the voices. Composed of endlessly circling rave melodies and chord progressions that lead nowhere, it harkens back to the ambient jungle deconstructions on his 2012 album Diversions 1994-1996 and conjures the same feeling of cavernous emptiness. His productions may not be composed by AI, but they don’t exactly sound human either, with “Purple Orange” daringly disappearing into silence in its opening seconds. (Many listeners may find themselves checking their volume settings.) Even unmistakable nods to Hyperdub labelmate Burial on “Juice” and Boards of Canada on “Blurring” feel less like references and more like errant bits of cultural detritus that Gamble just happened to scoop up while digging, WALL-E-like, through a post-apocalyptic wasteland. The album’s one moment of stunning beauty—a wash of Ashra-like guitars at the beginning of “She's Not”—seems totally divorced from the rest of the music here, which proceeds from such inhuman logic that the idea of “beauty” seems as foreign to it as it would be to a crocodile.
Yet there’s something reassuring about Gamble caressing AI for its flaws. The existential concern around AI stems largely from its potential to displace work and money from actual creatives; to a lesser extent, the technology raises questions about expressive authenticity: How much of an artist’s soul comes through in music generated by an intelligence beyond the artist’s control? Gamble deals with this problem by using AI in a deliberately inhuman, even ridiculous, way and calibrating his production to match it. He has compared the voices to Elizabeth Fraser, whose unintelligibility has become a meme, but even at her most inscrutable, you could usually suss out what the Cocteau Twins singer was feeling. With the strange quasi-intelligence that stares back out of this music, it’s anyone’s guess.


On her debut solo album, the Breeders’ original bassist blends her signature instrument with minimalist electronics and rippling pools of piano, Mellotron, and acoustic guitar.

We Fall

It’s tempting to credit Josephine Wiggs for the Breeders’ breakthrough moment. With her iconic opening bass slide in “Cannonball,” Wiggs helped define not just one of the best songs of the ’90s, but the power of simple melodies for aspiring bassists everywhere. As the band’s original bassist, Wiggs was something of a secret weapon, imbuing records like Last Splash and All Nerve with her trademark honeyed gloom. It’s a style she’s maintained throughout her career, whether playing with influential British indie rock band the Perfect Disaster, downtempo duo Dusty Trails, or lo-fi experimental trio Ladies Who Lunch. Now she tries her hand at establishing this mood on her own. On her debut solo album, We Fall, Wiggs slows down and filters this brooding aura through the lens of minimalism and electronics, with a keen eye for emotive observationalism.
If Wiggs already climbed to the top of the alt-rock mountain, she’s now happily watching ambient minimalism bloom from between the rocks. Written, recorded, and mixed on the road by Wiggs herself, the mostly instrumental We Fall plays like a sweeping reassurance of nature’s slow growth. Softening her snappy bass tones, Wiggs blends her signature instrument with rippling pools of piano, Mellotron, and acoustic guitar. Occasionally she’s joined by longtime collaborator Jon Mattock of Spacemen 3, on Korg electribe and drums, but his fidgeting rhythms are more likely to fracture the album’s steady pace than coax it forward.
From the slow crescendo of opener “37 Words” onward, Wiggs’ first official foray into meditative experimentalism draws equally from the peaceful fluidity of Brian Eno and the modern classical fusion of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto. As warm and self-assured as her bass is here, it’s the way she toys with electronic effects that gives these songs their distinctive, sentient feeling. Synth stutters and sounds akin to vinyl pops flicker over everything, bringing to mind the gentle candor of the Books, especially in the cello-like bass of “We Fall” and “In a Yellow Mood.” On “Time Does Not Bring Relief,” she leans into these glitches, allowing the electronics to contribute as much to the ambience as the stringed instruments.
The most rewarding part of Wiggs’ debut is her willingness to let its strongest moments—the electric guitar in the background of “Turn to Moss,” the echoing droplets of double bass in “The Weeping of the Rain,” the stirring cello of “The Soft Stars That Shine”—uncoil on their own time. Scientists and hikers alike recognize the value of sitting still in nature to better see and understand its lifeforms—to wait for the worm or the bluebird, rather than hunting for it. Wiggs, who’s made a hobby of exploring while on tour, has mirrored the experience of getting lost and loving it. She didn’t bring a microphone to capture a field recording; instead, it’s as if she curled up on a rock and began taking mental notes, adjusting her own perspective to observe nature in real time. On We Fall, Wiggs replicates the continuous momentum of the environment through sound, and she leaves just enough room on the rock to join in her wonderment.


Totalling a bulky 40 songs, Terius Nash’s latest project is purposefully and hilariously indulgent, but his marathon session reveals an R&B luminary still working at the top of his game.

The-Dream: Ménage à Trois: Sextape Vol. 1, 2, 3

Ménage à Trois: Sextape Vol. 1, 2, 3

Much of The-Dream’s underappreciated body of work has been about eliminating distinctions between rap and R&B. He was a trailblazer that brought hardcore rap sensibilities to an edgeless R&B era. Now, as rappers have adapted soulful songcraft as cover for being selfish lovers, the longtime sensualist has become more interested in making a clear delineation between the two.
The whopping 40-song, triple album, Ménage à Trois: Sextape Vol. 1, 2, 3, is a full-on immersion into R&B, opening with “No Rappers Allowed,” where he declares: “I ain’t no rapper, I just fuck a lot.” On his first album since 2013’s IV Play, The-Dream re-establishes himself as a musical tour de force, all while separating himself from the rap pack. “I’m calling all bodies to the bedroom/I know all the trappers, I know all the rappers/They who you see in the club, and I’m who you fuck after,” he sings on “Bedroom.” This one’s for the bump n’ grind.
Longer than either volume of Lars von Trier’s 2013 erotic epic Nymphomaniac, Ménage à Trois isn’t a listening experience without its pitfalls. The three albums are inundating and unevenly sequenced, but they are also completely and utterly fixating. The-Dream does what he does best: make love songs that treat sex as intrinsic to romance. The key to any moment of true love, he argues, is desire, and he has a rare gift for emulating and exploring that hunger, not just in his writing but in his gently cooed melodies. “Ecstasy” is a word that comes up often on the album, and his never-ending search for it takes him through hotel lobbies, into the depths of tour buses, the backseats of convertibles, turning every sexual encounter into a pas de deux.
In his quest to capture the perfect sexual experience, The-Dream tends to get lost in the moment, and so he often writes songs during the hook-ups happening inside his songs. It’s a bit of songwriting Inception that has become his hallmark. “Nikki’s Dialogue,” which continues a long-running Prince homage featuring one of The-Dream’s most recurring characters, finds the singer forcing his estranged lover to eat crow, teasing her about a failed marriage and weaponizing the lost album Nikki: The Chronicles. On “Drop Some New Shit,” he’s coerced into making new music to incentivize a lover: “Not for them, not for her, not for him/But at least drop some new shit for me/You need somethin’ you can fuck to (I know)/Remind me why I loved you.”
For The-Dream and the women in his songs, there is often no distinction between the pleasures of intimacy and those of a perfectly articulated tune. Sometimes, the sex is so good it takes precedence. “And man, that shit’s so fat, I can see that shit from the back/I only wrote one verse and I already got off track,” he sings on “Ready,” as if literally penning his verse mid peep show. To him, pure satisfaction beats any lyric. Sometimes the pleasure is in the process and sometimes the pleasure is the process.
There’s as much dialogue as narration in The-Dream’s sexcapades, although he’s almost always paraphrasing. He gives the impression that there are conversations, personal exchanges, that his perspective isn’t the only one that matters here. On “The Paris of the West,” a casual fling comes with warnings about attachment (“I can be your everything until everything ain’t enough”).  On other occasions, his words are clearly meant as commands to his partner. “I’ma send a picture of your pussy to my ex’s DM/And you gon’ send a picture of my pussy to your ex’s DM,” he sings on “Yours and Mine,” granting him a measure of control over all involved.
The-Dream always seems to exert control in his songs, sometimes for the worse. “You want it rough, nice and slow/The only time I hit a girl is from the back/And the only time I slap a bitch is on the ass,” he says on “Super Soaker,” undoubtedly referencing two separate arrests for domestic violence in 2013 and 2014, one on charges of felony assault and strangulation, reckless endangerment, and child endangerment. Here, he’s controlling his narrative, something he does well. His meta-writing can blur the lines between his ravishing world of song, his process, and real life; in a moment like this, he goes from seducer to manipulator. There is assertive and then there is domineering, and it’s a line he has sometimes found himself straddling.
Given all he’s done, as a genre-bending pioneer and a writer for himself and others, The-Dream has a case as the King of R&B’s last decade plus, and Ménage à Trois only strengthens his grip on the proverbial throne, especially with continued nods to kings of the past (Michael Jackson, Prince, etc.) as sex totems. He carefully studied the greats and continues to honor them; his work here runs the entire stylistic gamut. The seven-minute “On the Regular” turns new jack swing into a sludgy alt R&B jam by osmosis before it opens up to reveal a piano serenade. On “Gorgeous,” he captures the swing of throwback steppers R&B. “I Like” flips trap’n’b into snap music. “Everytime I Kill Her” embodies the post-fusion slickness of Dream acolytes like Trey Songz. Recently, R&B has begun to untangle itself from rap, reversing an integrative process to which The-Dream was instrumental. But Ménage à Trois proves he’s always right at home.


By keeping things mostly in-house, Glasper's Experiment band present their most realized album yet.

ArtScience

For almost a decade, Robert Glasper has been the standard-bearer for jazz music’s fusion with hip-hop, soul, and rock, turning songs like Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and Radiohead’s “Packt Like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box” into kinetic electro-funk mashups. With his Experiment band, Glasper, vocalist/saxophonist Casey Benjamin, drummer Mark Colenburg, and bassist Derrick Hodge tend to leapfrog different genres, making music that’s rooted in jazz and R&B and impossible to peg. “My people have given the world so many styles of music,” Glasper declares at the top of ArtScience, the Experiment’s new album. “So why should I just confine myself to one? We want to explore them all.”
ArtScience follows Black Radio 2, the band’s guest-heavy 2013 LP featuring rappers Common, Snoop Dogg and Lupe Fiasco, and singers Jill Scott and Norah Jones, among many others. On it and the band’s first Black Radio album, the Glasper Experiment mostly stayed in the background, giving room to their guests to shine atop the group’s instrumentals. The formula worked: Black Radio won the 2012 Grammy for Best R&B Album, and “Jesus Children”—a Stevie Wonder remake from Black Radio 2, featuring vocalist Lalah Hathaway and actor/poet Malcolm-Jamal Warner—won the 2014 Grammy for Best Traditional R&B Performance.
For ArtScience, the Experiment keeps things in-house, handling all the vocal work themselves. Glasper himself sings lead on “Thinkin Bout You” and Benjamin—the group’s de facto lead vocalist—is front and center on “Day to Day,” “Tell Me a Bedtime Story” and “Hurry Slowly.” ArtScience feels less restrained than the Black Radio series—which, after two releases and a separate remix EP—started to feel safe and redundant. So perhaps for that reason, ArtScience doesn’t play like an R&B or jazz record; it pulls in ’80s funk and ’90s soul without landing any place in particular. For the first time, we get to hear the Experiment let go for a full project, not just on a few songs here and there.
A romantic tone flows through the album, using lyrics that speak to different stages of affection. “Thinkin Bout You” is a sweet ode to puppy love, a reminder that no matter the circumstance, true devotion can withstand long distance and everyday doldrums. Glasper’s voice is washed in bright synths, bolstering the song’s sentimental aura. On “You and Me,” Benjamin recalls a time when he wasn’t so trusting, when his heart was broken and “locked tight.” But in comes a new love, making everything better: “Can’t explain, what you do/How ya do, some kinda mystery.” In years past, the Experiment was more beat-driven; tracks like “Festival” and “Open Mind” emphasized the band’s great instrumental arrangements.
The lyrics aren’t overly intricate, but they offer just enough nuance to let the soundtrack remain the focal point. Songs like “Find You” and “Let’s Fall In Love” strive for mainstream acceptance—the former is a hard-charging bounce beat; the latter uses an Auto-Tuned, trap-infused cadence to perhaps pull in younger fans. ArtScience is the Robert Glasper Experiment’s most realized effort, mainly because they’ve stopped relying on outside talent to get their point across. They’ve created their own vibe, one that needed their own voices to truly resonate.


Featuring Yung Lean and Chloe Wise, the Swedish producer’s dark and personal record imbues ambient and gothic techno with oversized feelings that find their reflection in endlessly overcast skies.

Varg2TM: Nordic Flora Series Pt. 3: Gore-Tex City

A cursory search of Spotify turns up hundreds, if not thousands, of songs with the word “leather” in the title. The word “cotton” is not quite as popular, but it still turns up a bunch, and “silk” and “satin” are also in ample supply, while Pearl Jam, Beth Orton, and the Wedding Present have all paid tribute to the homely “corduroy.” But practically nobody makes records about Gore-Tex. Gore-Tex is not cool. It is functional, practical, preventative. It is the dad jeans of synthetic fibers.
The Swedish ambient-techno artist Varg clearly knows what he’s doing by citing the microporous membrane in the latest installment of what he’s called his “most honest and personal work to date.” The artist, born Jonas Rönnberg, loves mixing up conflicting signifiers. He makes records with titles like Misantropen, and his artist alias evokes the Scandinavian black metal of his roots, but he also peppers his Instagram with Gucci purchases, rolls of cash, and bottles of Moët. On last year’s Nordic Flora Series Pt.1: Heroine, he cribbed his song titles from the lyrics to Drake’s “Controlla.” (Some of this code-switching goes both ways: OVO’s PARTYNEXTDOOR sampled one of his bleakest dark ambient tracks on last year’s “High Hopes,” an example of gothic R&B at its most desolate.)
Look beyond the trickster antics, though, and Varg’s music belongs to a proud Romantic tradition where oversized feelings find their reflection in endlessly overcast skies. Early recordings presented a sound steeped in the loamy ambient drones of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project and the flotation-tank acid of Plastikman, as well as the chattering, insectoid techno of Donato Dozzy, and Gore-Tex City ventures even further, twisting up those influences into a brooding sound that is simply and unmistakably Varg.
“Champagne Ceremonies” opens the album with gothic dread, wrapping minor-key synths in sharp-edged handclaps like concertina wire; “Yamanote Line (原宿)” is an impressionistic snapshot of Tokyo’s public transit system, with muted television voices murmuring beneath electrical zaps and a steady, rolling pulse. Many of the album’s more rhythmic tracks seem inspired by the experience of rail travel: “Platforms Surrounded by Fences (EU)” flickers like metal grates glimpsed from a speeding train, though its mood is less suggestive of Kraftwerk’s optimism than it is of the socio-political anomie facing contemporary Europe. “Snake City / Maserati Music” is not so much a song as a steady gust of wind that buffets the listener in an unending volley of sixteenth-note toms and hi-hats, and “I Hope You Are Still There (新宿御苑)” channels the same thrumming technique into something closer to the melancholy style of Autechre’s Amber. One of the few beatless tracks here, “Fonus,” with Drew McDowall and Alessandro Cortini, sounds like a memory of ambient music that is being slowly erased by the built-up din of the city—a sorrow that has forgotten its own source.
This would all be enough to make for an engaging trip into the depths of Varg’s darkest moods, but, in keeping with what his label describes as “a smirking fuck off,” he can’t resist pulling out the rug every now and then. In “Red Line II (127 Sätra C) 4,” the cryptic Swedish rapper Yung Lean warbles despondently through Auto-Tune about suicide, Adderall, and wanting to kill his landlord. It’s just the kind of collision that delights Varg—Lean’s noxious swag-rap smeared like sticky syrup across techno’s brushed stainless-steel surfaces—but it’s also a lot to swallow for someone who isn’t already a fan of Lean’s adolescent nihilism. “Forever 21 / Valium” is far more successful. Here, over pitter-pat hi-hats and new age piano, the New York artist Chloe Wise intones a piece of text from her exhibition, “Cats not fighting is a horrible sound as well.” Over drones as broad and flat as a river delta, she addresses first a bouquet of plastic flowers and then a lover, her voice flat and without affect as she skips from non sequitur to non sequitur: “Would you bleed if I cut you? Do you ever have to pee? Do you have ears? Do potted plants hear? When will you realize I am a tourist?” The music’s ominous qualities only make the text seem that much stranger, as though the quotidian had been mashed up with the symbolic—like someone’s chat history projected against an apocalyptic sky, or a brightly colored Gore-Tex jacket dropped along the roadside somewhere in Sweden’s far north.


Producer Joel Shanahan expands his palette, mingling shades of ’90s ambient techno with distant echoes of the Cocteau Twins. Even at the record’s mellowest, muted rhythms knock like a racing heart.

III

At the close of a lengthy podcast interview last year, the electronic musician Joel Shanahan was asked if he had anything to add. “Play from the heart,” he said, without missing a beat. “Treat people well.” Over the past eight years, Shanahan’s idiosyncratic techno has encompassed jazzy whimsy, cosmic drift, and moody ambience; what ties it together is its questing spirit. Even when it zigzags, it’s marked by a palpable sense of forward motion, a yen for progress. For a time, that merely meant finding his style and honing his chops. But those two dictates—to be real and to be good—underscore something essential to Shanahan’s music: the attempt to envision a better world.
Shanahan makes music under a variety of aliases, chief among them Golden Donna and Auscultation. He has roots in punk and DIY communities; in his early years performing and throwing parties in the electronic-music hinterlands of Madison, Wisconsin, he was instrumental in bridging the gap between rock kids and dance crowds. Today, in interviews and op-eds, Shanahan espouses the need for safe spaces for clubbers and fair compensation for artists.
He has also been candid about his depression, which worsened following Oakland, California’s Ghost Ship fire, where 36 people died, including several of his friends; he was on the bill that night and watched helplessly as the building went up in flames. But Shanahan has been remarkably prolific in the years since, relocating to Portland, Oregon, and putting out a steady stream of new material, much of it exclusive to Bandcamp. In March, he quietly released a new Golden Donna album that built upon his signature style of live-to-tape hardware techno in exciting ways. But III, his new album under his Auscultation alias, is something else. It sounds like a breakthrough.
Auscultation started out in 2014 as Shanahan’s ambient-house alter ego, the measured yin to Golden Donna’s ebullient yang. His self-titled debut under the alias was muted yet light-hearted, with a jazzy house lilt half-hidden beneath layers of tape hiss. The following year’s L’étreinte Imaginaire was equally hazy but more emotionally ambiguous, its chiming synths twinkling in the shadows like a Cheshire Cat smile. The first track on III, “Glowing Hearts in the Rainbow Room,” feels at first like a continuation of L’étreinte Imaginaire, wrapping ringing chords in endless reverb. But the new album boasts a more complex palette, mingling shades of ’90s ambient techno with distant echoes of the Cocteau Twins’ dream pop. All six tracks are clearly pieces of a larger whole, and a haunted air hangs over much of the album, even in moments of seeming calm: There are spectral voices and metallic shrieks, and the music teems with activity, innumerable tiny details rustling almost imperceptibly in the murk.
Shanahan seems to be testing one of ambient techno’s core assumptions, that dance music removed from the dancefloor must be soothing. Even at the record’s mellowest, muted rhythms knock like a racing heart, and the low end has the felt-but-not-heard presence of a neighbor’s house party. Shanahan’s basslines have always been his secret weapon, and here they are stealthier and more powerful than ever, cutting through the gloom like neon lights through heavy fog.
These songs are mercurial: moments of calm swiftly upended by anxious passages, and vice versa. By the album’s fourth track, “Turn Down These Voices,” it becomes clear just how complex Shanahan’s emotional terrain can be. Whimsical synth chords and swift, scratchy drum programming suggest the world’s largest, emptiest ice rink; the beat is surprisingly heavy. Plaintive, pitch-shifted voices gradually grow louder; the words are unintelligible, but the psychic pain is obvious, and despite the title’s plea, their wraithlike cries keep rising in volume until the very end.
“Fool” plays with similar contrasts, ribbons of synth twisting gently over a brisk, distorted drum pattern, the atmosphere thick and cloudy. As the drums rise in the mix, what at first felt placid turns turbulent, sneakily forceful. This is something new: ambient as a clenched fist, fingernails pressing painfully into one’s palm. The haze that has always permeated Auscultation’s music here feels like it has actual physical properties, like something to be pushed through. It suggests real bodily effort, as tangible as sweat and tears. By the time the album reaches its conclusion with the gentle, beatless “Exit,” the feeling of catharsis is unmistakable. In a medical context, auscultation is the diagnostic act of listening to sounds in the body, and on III, Shanahan makes the process of healing as palpable as the smoothness of a scar where blood once ran.

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Robyn and Röyksopp's collaborative mini-album has the epic sweep of a proper album, with contemplative instrumental passages helping frame the more conventional songwriting. The freedom they've given themselves on Do It Again is both what makes the record refreshing and what keeps it from satisfying listeners as a more streamlined full-length would.

Do It Again

The first studio snippet from Robyn and Röyksopp's collaborative mini-album Do It Again, shared stealthily in a trailer video for their joint tour, gave off an unfamiliar jolt of sex and circuitry. The Swedish pop upsetter and a Kraftwerk-worthy robotic voice, something like a filthy-minded Speak & Spell, plainly stated that they wanted each other. Surrounded by hard-driven electronic beats and billowing synths, you could almost imagine them in some fantastical dance club, about to slip away into the shadows.
But Do It Again is no chance encounter, as the singer born Robin Carlsson and the Norwegian duo of Svein Berge and Torbjørn Brundtland have taken oddly related trajectories. She's the former teen-pop star who ditched her label and struck out on her own, sparking the spectacular career resurgence that led to 2010's Body Talk album trilogy; they're the early-2000s chillout-electronica guys who shrugged off easy categorization and increasingly worked more with vocalists, from Annie to the Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson. When Robyn and Röyksopp finally recorded together on a couple of tracks in 2009 and 2010, it was a meeting between two veteran acts with a gift for making broad appeal feel almost coincidental.
This Scandinavian electro-pop trio's most extensive studio team-up so far digs deeper into that shared affinity for stylistic exploration, patient offhandedness, and a communicative, dancefloor-friendly pop sensibility. Though technically an EP, the 35-minute Do It Again has the epic sweep of a proper album, with contemplative instrumental passages helping frame the more conventional songwriting. Still, the noodlier bits belie the project's origins in the respective artists' post-album creative hangovers: the freedom they've given themselves on Do It Again is both what makes the record refreshing and what keeps it from satisfying listeners as a more streamlined full-length would. Do It Again is an excellent mini-album, then, but it's easy to suspect that the masterpiece will be the tour, with Robyn and Röyksopp each performing a set and then all taking the stage together. There could be pink lasers.
Another way to approach Do It Again is as a maxi single. The title track lacks Robyn's usual knack for a strong, distinctive concept—just last year, Scotland's Camera Obscura had a charming single with the same name—but her ever-expressive, deeply felt vocals can make even strobe-lit "one more time" hedonism worth doing again. It's galloping, whooshing dance-pop, booming enough for festival EDM tents and melodic enough for spazzing out in front of laptop speakers, with an undercurrent of melancholy that makes it well worth pressing repeat. If the rest of the disc contained just remixes of "Do It Again", it'd still be some lustworthy vinyl.
But stopping at the title track would mean missing out on the rest that Do It Again has to offer. The relaxed format gives Robyn and Röyksopp space to sprawl out in some rewarding, if idiosyncratic, directions. Wordless finale "Inside the Idle Hour Club" is a moonlit synth-groove excursion that wouldn't have been out of place on Berge and Bruntland's 2010 LP Senior, and it's no slam to point out it would also be an ideal mellow interlude during a live show. "Every Little Thing" is something like a contemporary Italo-disco power ballad, as Robyn yearns in harmony with cyborg versions of herself. And the 10-minute "Monument" could turn out to be the set's most enduring track: Though the extended saxophone portion drags, Robyn's prophetic vision of the future here is unique in her catalog and deeply compelling. "When the moment comes," she intones weightily, "I can say I did all with love."
Which brings us back to "Sayit", the one with the dirty-talking gadget. Robyn serenaded a "Robotboy" on a slightly twee track from her masterful 2005 self-titled album. She was in love with a presumably metaphorical man-machine on her first Röyksopp collaboration, "The Girl and the Robot", from 2009's Junior (their other previous partnership came on "None of Dem", from Body Talk Pt. 1). When this uncanny yet euphoric, four-on-the-floor raver's Wall-E equivalent calls himself a "fuck mechanic," it's a rare moment of carnality in Robyn's discography, but it's also a silly joke. The more important phrase might be the one he utters right before: "Pleasure machine." If Do It Again is the physical artifact of Robyn and Röyksopp's union, it's extravagant and left of center, but it's above all generous. They did it all with love, for our pleasure. Or, as Robyn sings on "Do It Again", "It hurts so good."


One of music's best qualities is its talent for escaping description. Critics, because we lack the vocabulary to verbally ...

Double Figure

One of music's best qualities is its talent for escaping description. Critics, because we lack the vocabulary to verbally illustrate what we hear, approximate our explanations with obtuse metaphors and imprecise comparisons. As a relative greenhorn in the Pitchfork camp, I don't have much experience crafting the sort of riddles reviewers always speak in, so maybe it's time I got some practice. And where better to start than with Plaid's latest musical conundrum, Double Figure-- an album whose ostensible theme is mystery, and an album for which few words are suited? So, if you'll permit me a moment of intellectual masturbation:
Plaid's first LP, Not for Threes, was to M.C. Escher as their second, Rest Proof Clockwork, was to Roy Lichtenstein. On Double Figure, intended as the final instalment of this IDM trilogy, Ed Handley and Andy Turner match the mind-bending intricacy and academic precision of Threes with the vibrant palettes and playful sensibility of Clockwork. The result is an aesthetically diverse gallery of songs that, in its finest moments, calls to mind the paintings of Wassily Kandinsky and Rene Magritte-- immediately intriguing and immaculately produced, always with a cryptic sense of inexplicable urgency.
Where continuity is concerned, Double Figure reminds me of a salad made from candy bars, or a library where the books are actually ant farms-- neither of which I've actually encountered, but in literary circles, we call that poetic license. The disjointed juxtaposition of styles on this disc is so pronounced that it feels intentional; like The White Album or Jega's Spectrum, this record underscores its versatility at the expense of consistency.
While all of the tracks-- even the minute-long Tak snippets-- are autonomous, ambitiously complex entities, each of the 19 songs bear the duo's unifying, idiosyncratic stamp. And the absence of tangible themes lets listeners filter the gems from the garbage (the album doles out a healthy balance of both) without losing the plot.
When this album fails, it's not for want of trying. Handley and Turner seem to be pushing the envelope beyond their previous efforts, grafting more difficult harmonic arrangements onto the densely layered beat construction that characterized Not for Threes. But they often bite off more than they can chew. On "Light Rain," the melodies run amok and lose cohesion, and "Silversum" falls prey to the detached focus on percussive structure that plagued Plaid's debut.
Double Figure strikes gold, however, with songs like "Zala," a frenetic melange of off-kilter string synths and atmospheric melodies, punctuated by brisk snares and cymbals. "Eyen" kicks the album off in the right key, building steam from a flamenco guitar sample, wistful strings and a soft, flat bassline. Elements of chaos cautiously creep in on the instrumentation, then wash out the melodies entirely. The light drum breaks and Ennio Morricone leanings touch on the sound of "Pino Pomo" from the pair's last album, only with a less panicked and more tranquil outlook.
Plaid attempt the Funki Porcini sound with the onomatopoetically titled "Ti Bom." Jazzy breaks with clipped cymbal hits (bom-bom-ti-bom) keep the tempo while distorted horns flirt with airy hand drums in the song's upper registers. "Squance" reveals the duo's dancefloor viability with a disco-tinged drum-n-bass foray into the possibilities of stereo.
Handley and Turner flaunt their range all over this record, laying on the brooding gravity of "Sincetta" only moments before igniting the 8-bit electro of "Porn Coconut Co." But Double Figure suffers from an excess of ambition, and when Plaid aim too high, they miss the mark. This album features some of their best work to date, but also some of their greatest failures. Rest Proof Clockwork may not have tried as hard, but it worked brilliantly within its limits. Double Figure takes Plaid through a tract of uncharted territory, and their ship sometimes runs aground.


On Iceage's self-produced second album, they come off even younger, wilder, and more chaotic than on their 2011 debut, but also more experienced and nuanced. They've used their resources to hone what they already did well without abandoning their allure.

You're Nothing

When Iceage released their excellent 2011 debut, New Brigade, a large part of the discussion was dedicated to the nihilistic but crush-worthy Danish punk group's ages (at the time, ranging from 18 to 19), and the fact that they sounded much older than that. You also got stories about their bloody live shows and, later, online handwringing about them baiting controversy Joy Division-style by apparently flirting with fascist gestures at one of those shows. In the beginning, though, people were most interested in the part about four young dudes exploding out of "nowhere" (the Copenhagen DIY scene) fully formed and going on to release one of the best punk collections in recent memory. Their shows during that time were powerful in a very messy, very punk way. Two years later, they're a different band, one capable of more than shambling atmospherics and stage dives. Iceage write brilliant songs; on You're Nothing, they've found a way to clarify these compositional skills without stripping away their power.
Iceage's self-produced second album is even better than their debut. It's the quartet's first offering for the larger label Matador (the album's still being released by Escho in Denmark) and they come off even wilder and more chaotic than they did in 2011, but also more experienced and nuanced. They've honed the uncanny sense of classic punk songwriting-- the guitar sound's huge, the hooks more present, the charisma of dead-eyed, out-of-breath vocalist Elias Bender Rønnenfelt even greater. When you listen to the two records in tandem, you realize how brittle New Brigade was: "brittle" in an excellently fuzzed, rancid way, but You're Nothing is a heftier experience.
Unlike some groups who sign to a bigger label and beef up their sound in the wrong ways, Iceage used the new resources to hone what they already did well without abandoning what made them interesting in the first place. You can hear the shift on the industrial/ambient instrumental "Interlude", which helps to make Nothing darker and danker, and on "Morals", a mid-tempo piano-flecked track based on the 1960s Italian singer Mina's "L'Ultima Occasione". The odd reference fits here, building into a frenzy that finds Rønnenfelt hoarsely screaming "Where's your morals?" over militaristic rhythms. And, even with these slight tweaks, they don't fuck around: New Brigade offered 12 songs in 24 minutes, You're Nothing 12 songs in 28-and-a-half.
On the more typical Iceage songs, you get their mix of dirty punk and pulsing hardcore wrapped in an ink-black atmosphere, and Rønnenfelt's existential musings come in more powerful doses. The brilliant opener "Ecstasy", which sounds like a punk anthem mid-melt, strings together furious tempo changes, with, Rønnenfelt howling "I can't take this pressure" in the final implosion. "Coalition" is a classic rager, but you've never heard them doing doubled Sonic Youth guitar hooks like this. From "In Haze"'s clipped and twangy d-beat to the heavy bass of "Everything Drifts" to the spiraling anthemics of the title track, there are no weak spots. They chiseled things down for a reason: Great punk comes in spurts.
Rønnenfelt has said You're Nothing was inspired in part by his readings of Bataille, Genet, and the like. On these off-kilter anthems, you also imagine them reading Rimbaud, and get the sense that the group has taken Richard Hell and the Voidoids' "Blank Generation" to heart with lines like the title track's "Thats right, you're nothing/ Feel the void grow" and "Ecstasy"'s "But bliss is momentary anyhow/ Yet worth living for," along with the romantic surrealism of lines like "If I could/ Leave my body then I would/ Bleed into a lake/ Dashing away/ Disappear" from from "Morals". These are the sentiments of early 70s NYC punk made by kids who can look back on hardcore and post-punk to add fuel to it.
There was a moment at last year's Pitchfork Festival in Chicago that crystallized part of what makes Iceage fascinating: During their set, a bass head blew, then another, and then another. This is something that would usually cause a group to apologize, or blush, or throw a tantrum. But Iceage kept playing, didn't seem to sweat it, and calmly did their thing until someone else fixed the problem. Bassist Jakob Tvilling Pless looked around and shrugged it off. Rønnenfelt also kept going. In a way, it hardly registered. (Blank Generation, indeed.) It was my favorite moment of the weekend, and the most real: Iceage are a band who do these things honestly, and without thinking too much about it, and that's a big part of their power. That they back the attitude up with songs of this quality is what makes them unstoppable on You're Nothing.