The latest in a long line of box sets and anthologies collects the pioneering disco duo’s core albums. Despite the songs’ deep familiarity, they still represent pop at its most triumphant and complex.

Chic / Sister Sledge: The Chic Organization 1977-1979

The Chic Organization 1977-1979

There’s probably never been a 10-dollar investment that yielded multi-million-dollar, multi-platinum, multigenerational returns quite like Chic. After slipping Alexander Hamilton’s portrait to the elevator operator so he wouldn’t say anything to the studio bosses, “Sesame Street” touring guitarist (and Black Panther) Nile Rodgers and journeyman R&B bassist Bernard Edwards snuck into Sound Ideas studio after hours to cut their first song, “Everybody Dance.” With a fascinating heritage in jazz, soul, psychedelia, and funk—while also taking direct inspiration from Roxy Music and KISS—Chic were simply tagged “disco,” and their swift rise and Icarus-like fall mirrored the genre’s own course. The dismissal by rock critics continues: Eleven times they’ve been nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and 11 times they’ve been snubbed.
In the span of 22 months, between 1977 and 1979 Chic went from haute couture to passé, and by the start of a new decade, they were deemed all but dead. (Though they released four more albums in the 1980s, just try naming a single from them.) That isn’t to say they were no longer relevant. In reality, Rodgers and Edwards were just starting to exert their enduring influence on all kinds of popular music. Tireless as sherpas, they ushered seemingly everyone up the charts in the new decade: Diana Ross, David Bowie, the B-52’s, Duran Duran, INXS, Madonna. They powered hip-hop from its its Bronx birth through its Hamptons coming out and continue to exert sway over dancefloors, from the dustiest to the shiniest. When Rodgers appeared alongside Pharrell and Daft Punk, it guaranteed at least another decade of inescapability.
Like almost everything in the wake of Rodgers “getting lucky” in the new century, these already comprehensively repackaged hits get another go. We already had a box of their biggest singles and a two-disc set of dance numbers whose title quoted Daft Punk outright. Now comes the latest repackaging of Chic’s catalog, using five CDs (or six pieces of vinyl) to frustratingly under-document their truly prodigious productivity. A handsome, hefty, and redundant set, The Chic Organization 1977-1979 does little more than bundle up their ubiquitous hits and multi-million-selling albums from that heady time in an exhaustive format that’s still woefully incomplete. There are three iterations of “Everybody Dance,” “Dance, Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah),” and “My Forbidden Lover,” but no room to shine a light on their sorcery for the likes of Norma Jean and Sheila & B. Devotion. During this period, Rodgers and Edwards did function like a business, diversifying their portfolios and working with an array of artists. Were it not for some useless remixes, the import-only Savoir Faire set, from 2010, remains the closest to capturing the essence of Chic.
Still, no matter the box set’s shortcomings, the genius of Rodgers and Edwards can never be contained nor re-stated enough, and in addition to the brilliant songs that have been heard ad nauseam, The Chic Organization still makes the case for more. Building on the formidable legacies of Hamilton Bohannon and Eddie Kendricks’ “Girl You Need a Change of Mind,” Chic’s innovation was to re-cast the breakdown part of old R&B songs as the meat of the song. But every Chic song also had to contain another element: the Deep Hidden Meaning, or DHM. “All our songs had to have this ingredient… understanding the song’s DNA and seeing it from many angles,” as Rodgers put it in his autobiography, Le Freak.
So call Rodgers and Edwards the Watson and Crick of groove; they stripped it down to its most basic building blocks, twisting it in such a way to reveal something both primeval and elegant. Chic exhibited complex simplicity at its finest. According to that same theory, style could be substance, the backing band could be the rock stars, and the background was the foreground. Why else craft a silky vibe laced with cocktail-party chatter on “(Funny) Bone” and then, right at the end, winkingly add, “The whole world is a circus, don’t you be the clown”? Is it that the in-store music overheard at Uniqlo recently sounded like Chic? Or that Chic can always cagily slide in as background music?
Is it even possible, four decades later, to hear “Le Freak,” “Good Times,” “He’s the Greatest Dancer,” and “We Are Family” free from the filters of over-familiarity and over-sampling that automatically kick them from the conscious mind to the subliminal? It’s unlikely, but the set’s most curious aspect is the slotting of Sister Sledge’s third album alongside Chic’s classic long-players—no doubt the result of Rodgers’ estimation that the album is the finest he and Edwards ever wrote, “the best example of DHM perfection.” Go to enough weddings and “We Are Family” might seem too clichéd, possibly even tarnished by visions of your aunties flashing an overbite as they get funky on the dancefloor. But those are the pitfalls of achieving pop perfection: The song (and then-19-year-old Kathy Sledge’s awesome lead vocal) are today as ingrained in family ritual as Thanksgiving dinner.
That theory of DHM allowed all manner of paradoxes to delectably tussle right on the silken surface of Chic’s music, making it still feel alluring so many generations on. “Everybody Dance” was nothing but “do-do-dos” and musical calculus, “a mixture of harmonically extended chords” and “two strict chromatic movements in the bass,” as Rodgers put it. They could turn “fuck off” into a catchy earworm and list fashionable designers in a way that bequeathed either status or hollowness, depending on how you read the lyrics. “Good Times” remains ecstatic and despairing, its string stabs as thrilling as they are nerve-jangling and anxious, an aural metaphor encompassing the full spectrum of cocaine’s effects. “At Last I Am Free” is a gaseous, glorious, zero-gravity ballad, as liberating as it is exhausted. “My Feet Keep Dancing” is a dancefloor anthem in the vein of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? Referencing fads like the Savoy, Studio 54, Depression-era lingo, the Latin Hustle, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Chic flashed a deep knowledge of history, including the foresight to know that their time—or even time itself—was not for long. “Our overhead was low, and the return on investment was very high,” Rodgers says of their artistic endeavors. “Our early investors and business colleagues all did very well indeed.” And Chic continue to pay dividends.


The Nigerian-born, London-based musician pulls from blues, highlife, post-punk, and more on a short, fiery EP that details the struggle to rise above the pain of the everyday.

Ífaradá EP

Loshh Aje has PMA in spades. The Nigerian-born, London-based musician doesn’t recoil from the world as it is, and, in his music, searches for a way to express the inherent joyfulness of the struggle to feel okay. That’s how, deep into this winter of our discontent, he has managed to produce this EP full of unremitting fire, a collection of tunes that confidently argue against the idea that our current problems will form the permanent fabric of our lives. The traditions that influence him lead him to take this path; it’s one that doesn’t look away from hierarchies of exploitation, but it also does not allow history to cast its shadow over one’s every step. On his latest EP, ÍFARADÁ, he refuses to halt the progression of his celebration of life even as he confronts racial oppression.
To do this, Loshh goes all over the place musically, and this short EP manages to take its inspiration from ’00s post-punk revival, ’70s highlife, and straight-up blues. Take “Faji,” an elemental take on Lovers Rock that floats on a gnarled guitar melody and subdued horns. Over this aquatic dub, Loshh exhorts the listener to “Faji right now,” which (according to him) means “to enjoy to de fullest.” He speaks of “oppression for a long time” and says “we’ve been helpless for a long time/so let us faji.” It might sound desperate at first, but it isn’t a paean to dissolution as much as it’s a passionate sideswipe against the pain of the everyday.
Most of these songs occupy that uneasy space of rave and reflection that Linton Kwesi Johnson mapped out in records like Bass Culture and Forces of Victory. On “Revolution,” his casual condemnation of England’s participation in the slave trade parallels Johnson’s non-plussed recognition of imperial rot in “Inglan Is a Bitch”. Voice and guitar form the background to most of these tracks, and Loshh follows the twists and turns his guitar makes. Built around what sounds like the ca-ching of a cash register, sinuous album opener “É Beré” is the Loshh at his most Afrobeat. A whirring groove—a swell of congos horns, and strings—lifts Loshh up “to the moon and stars” and a guitar solo that appears at the midpoint takes him to the outer reaches of consciousness. From on high, Loshh muses on a place where he won’t be judged by the color of his skin, and where Black women are supported and loved. To punctuate his point, he screams, and his voice and the guitar become distorted in tandem; it almost sounds like he’s being transported to the place he dreams of.
Elsewhere on the album, Loshh feels content to merely make you move. The medley “Í” switches back and forth between gentle keys and gospel organ depending on what mood Loshh is in; when he confesses to just wanting to help his mom out you hear the former, and when he just wants to lose himself in forward movement you hear the latter. A song like “Feelam” radiates energy with its rolling drumbeat and high energy guitar, and the Rain Dogs-like atmosphere of  “Brown” matches its boozy flirtation with self-reflection (“Look into my mind and tell me what you see/A beautiful soul?”).
On ÍFARADÁ, Loshh carries himself with the gravitas of a preacher, commanding you to reject what is inhumane without falling into despair. It’s a difficult ask, but it’s one that seems necessary at a time where much of the dominant discourse can lock one into a parade of pessimism. Loshh doesn’t ask you to ignore what is wrong with the world, and, in fact, he spends much of the record detailing the litany of horrors that have led us here. Yet, his way of engaging with this is through embracing the possibilities for joy inherent in this life. It is for that reason that he is ready to fight all that stands in his way.

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Infused with his own rapping, the debut album from Teklife’s youngest member makes a strong case for the way footwork has been strengthened, not diluted, as its form has loosened up.

Still Trippin’

For as long as non-Chicagoans have been listening to footwork, the form has been presented as something of an outsider art. Early reviews, circa Planet Mu’s Bangs & Works comps, threw around descriptors like “alien.” There’s certainly a learning curve when it comes to acclimating to the intensity of the sound, with its reckless polyrhythms and chaotic sampling techniques. In fact, it’s easy to imagine that sense of inaccessibility was exactly what a lot of early adopters liked about the music; it’s fun to belong to an exclusive club. As the Teklife crew has spent the 2010s on an evangelical mission to spread footwork’s gospel worldwide, there’s been some concern that the genre’s increasing popularity might iron out the unorthodoxy that made it so thrilling. If anything, the opposite has been true; footwork’s evolution hasn’t been linear so much as it’s expanded in a dozen fractured directions, creating a fascinating composite of what footwork can be.
The late DJ Rashad’s Double Cup is commonly understood as the genre’s crossover moment—a work that proved footwork could transcend the dancefloor functionality of its origins and flourish in the full-length album format. But the movement hasn’t seemed to shake that outsider status in the same way that, say, dubstep once did. I wonder if that’s in part because of the way it continues to be framed as an anomaly within the dance-music underground—understood as a niche concern rather than placing it within the broader spectrum of electronic music at large, even as guys like DJ Earl release songs with Oneohtrix Point Never. That should change with Still Trippin’, the long-awaited debut album from Teklife’s youngest member, DJ Taye. More than any footwork release to date—Double Cup included—it offers a vision of just how naturally, even gracefully, its signature sounds can live in the world. Taye makes it look easy for footwork to coexist with more popular styles without sacrificing its hardcore essence. His album is at once beyond footwork and of it completely—a case for the form being strengthened, not diluted, by the push and pull of influences over the years. And in that sense, it is a tribute to Rashad, who knew that before anyone else did.
Taye is not the first footwork producer to incorporate their own raps into tracks, a tradition that extends back to early-1990s ghetto house, but he is pretty easily the best at it, having originally gotten into music as an aspiring MC and rap producer. “Trippin,” with arpeggiated 8-bit synths that sound like how the beginning of a mushroom trip feels, might be the biggest formal leap for Teklife since Double Cup—not just for Taye’s Three 6 Mafia-inspired bars, but the overall structure. With verses, bridges, and choruses, the track takes the outward shape of a pop or rap song but remains undeniably footwork; that’s partly because of how Taye treats his own vocals, warping and chopping them to correspond with the hyper-technical drum programming. But while the album’s rap-oriented moments head-fake towards more traditional song structures, they’re complicating them, too. “Get It Jukin” lets Chuck Inglish’s verse breathe, drums riding low in the mix before climaxing into a percussive fireworks display. This is not the simple halfway point between two genres, but a rap song understood through the framework of footwork; the “hook” is not the words, but the rhythms, which communicate for themselves.
Lest you think Taye had abandoned the straight-up works, there are songs like “Truu” or “Bonfire,” two DJ Paypal collaborations that ground Still Trippin’s fusion experiments in the raw energy of footwork as it existed a decade ago, in basements and at Battle Groundz. A third Paypal collab, “Pop Drop,” might be the strangest juke track I’ve ever heard, warping a familiar Dance Mania tempo into increasingly unpredictable patterns, like a game of Bop It played on an MPC mid acid trip. “Need It,” with Teklife mainstay DJ Manny, doesn’t sound like any footwork song you’ve heard before; over stuttering breakbeats, a delirious acid bassline, and subtly encroaching dubstep wubs, a chipmunked vocal sample splits into two parallel paths in real time. It’s a feat that it all manages to remain legible, the track’s constantly moving parts at once informing one another and getting out of each other’s way. In a sense, the footwork element lies in the construction that could only come from a dancer’s perspective—an intuitive sense of rhythmic grace that transcends songwriting logic.
Years ago, listeners often responded to footwork by asking questions: Was it meant to be functional rather than formal? What setting was it meant to be heard in? How the hell do you dance to it? Still Trippin’ begs a different question: Why isn’t everyone rapping or singing over footwork beats? It represents not a shift in how footwork should sound, but an expansion of how it could sound, bigger than Chicago but Chicago to the core. And it makes early concerns about accessibility seem petty. One thing way cooler than membership in an exclusive club is making the world as weird as you want it.


Keen pop instincts, a good sense of space, and a penchant for self-sabotage: That’s the Beta Band, epitomized by this 20th-anniversary reissue of their earliest works.

The Three EPs

At a key moment in Let It Beta—a fly-on-the-wall chronicle of the sessions for Heroes to Zeros, the final bow from beloved Edinburgh oddballs the Beta Band—the business of making music creeps into the frame. The label is looking for a single, for artwork approval, for anything, and the Betas won’t budge. The Nigel Godrich-mixed Heroes arrived to near-universal praise but fair-to-middling sales, the fate of most every other Beta Band record. They broke up less than a year later, amid rumors they were in hock to the label for 1.2 million pounds. “Bands like us should be the norm,” frontman Steve Mason sneered to The Guardian in 2001. “There should be something really crazy, like… a guy whose album is the sound of him sawing his limbs off with a rusty spoon. And he only makes four albums: one for each arm and one for each leg.”
The Beta Band never got around to that fourth album. By the time they bowed out in 2004, they had the air of a band the industry had found, salivated over, and torn apart limb by limb. The Betas were never huge; their second album spent precisely one week on the U.S. charts, peaking at No. 200. Still, there was a period right around 2002 when no Case Logic was complete without “Beta Band” scrawled across at least one Verbatim CD-R.
But their career always moved in fits and starts: Their label insisted on spackling their rush-released debut in a thick coat of paisley, leading Mason to call it “fucking awful.” They gave famously standoffish interviews. They came at their label boss at every opportunity, even namechecking the unlucky sod during a song. They carried themselves at once like a band who wanted to be very famous and a band who just wanted to be left the hell alone. In that push-and-pull—between all-out experimentation and commercial appeal, delicate songcraft and wild-eyed sonic tinkering, expanse and intimacy—the Beta Band legend was born. That essence is captured anew on a twentieth-anniversary reissue of their first three EPs.
After recording Champion Versions, the first of the band’s fabled EPs, the band decamped to London, where a roommate took their demo to Parlophone A&R representative (and future Warner UK president) Miles Leonard. Parlophone issued Champion Versions, the first and most immediate of the EPs, in July 1997. The Patty Patty Sound, the strangest, followed in March 1998, with the musical midpoint of Los Amigos del Beta Bandidos landing in July. After the EPs arrived as a set in September, the buzz at home and abroad was instantaneous. The Betas went from playing the basement of the International Students House in London to the second stage at Glastonbury.
The breadth of the Betas’ powers are on display through these Three EPs, from the rousing chipmunk hosannahs of “She’s the One” to the lonesome howls of the late-EP stunner “Dr. Baker.” Whether you came from High Fidelity expecting wall-to-wall uplift à la “Dry the Rain” or you’d been taken in by the wild-eyed press notices, The Three EPs were likely not the record you expected. Slinking grooves, oddball folk tunes, deconstructed house rhythms, exotic flits, yawning mantras, real raps in fake Japanese: It’s all swirling around somewhere in this multi-hyphenate hodgepodge. Maybe half of these dozen tracks meet the qualifications of what most people would consider “a song,” with the rest given to wriggling sound-collage and expansive Floydian drift.
Somehow, it all works. The British press was particularly keen on anointment in those days, but what separated the Beta Band from scads of contemporaries was their unbelievable range. A few turns toward the light, and they could have been Coldplay; another two steps into the abyss, and they could have been the Orb. On these EPs, they managed to be both—and all points in between. The EPs don’t relegate their more outre excursions to swirling one-minute intros, either. They take up serious space, even sneaking into some of the most pop-oriented material. Look no further than the choir of helium-sucking Masons that close out not-a-dry-eye devotional, “She’s the One.” Keen pop instincts, a good sense of space, and a penchant for self-sabotage: That’s the Beta Band.
Mason’s lyrics—all quotidian vignettes, pep talks, and good old-fashioned gobbledigook—are an ideal foil for the music’s spectral weirdness. Sometimes he sounds like Ray Davies just up from a nap; sometimes, as on the haunting “Dr. Baker,” he’s a one-man Tabernacle Choir, his voice ringing out over some great expanse. Richard Greentree’s elegiac low-end work glides between acid jazz and Astral Weeks. Synth player and sampler-tender John Maclean is everywhere and nowhere, laying out the terrain with big swaths of sound and then populating it with bits of static. The mark of hip-hop on The Three EPs has always seemed a bit overstated, but the lingua franca was certainly a tool in the kit.
The remastering job for this reissue is largely unobtrusive; sound was never really the issue, though this edition is a bit cleaner, a touch hotter. The label’s claim that this is the first time the EPs have been issued on vinyl is, however, misleading. Yes, it’s the first time on vinyl for these brand new remasters, and, yes, this is the first time the The Three EPs have been sold together on vinyl. But 10 seconds on Discogs proves that the original, non-deluxe variety is not exactly in short supply. (While there is no bonus music here, this edition does come with a reprinting of the band’s Flower Press zine, far rarer than an OG VG+ Patty Patty Sound.)
This set never lent itself to the vinyl format, anyway. A 78-minute odyssey, The Three EPs is suited to uninterrupted listening. In college, we’d throw the CD on during a study session (of course) and wonder aloud if this was still the Beta Band halfway stop “The Monolith.” Getting up to flip these eight sides every ten minutes or so breaks that spell; there’s no way to get lost in the slipstream when you’re making that many trips to the turntable. If you’re anything like me, you’ll gaze admiringly at the deluxe edition nestled on your shelf while you load the record on Spotify.
These crackling, chameleonic EPs still seem to hold secrets, surprising and confounding in equal measure. A lot has changed in 20 years, but the very existence of the Beta Band—four rave-damaged, dub-inflected, spacecase pop savants, briefly given the keys to the kingdom—is still enough to spin your head. “I always imagined we’d be as big as Radiohead,” Mason told The Guardian in 2004. The music industry was not always kind to the Betas, but the Beta Band’s work after these EPs, built with an ostentatious arsenal of vintage equipment, wouldn’t exist without major-label patronage. Yet the Betas are precisely the kind of band the risk-averse majors would likely never sign now. Maybe Mason was right all along: Bands like this should be the norm.


Megan Thee Stallion’s debut is steeped in sex, pimpin, and power; it sounds like a once and future Houston rap classic.

Fever

When Megan Thee Stallion’s “Big Ole Freak” landed on Billboard’s Hot 100 in April, it was a testament to years of viral freestyles and her devoted “hotties,” whose faithful support on social media helped the song rise to mainstream recognition. The 24-year-old has been prolific—her evolution is displayed through the invention of various rap personas, such as Tina Snow, Megan Thee Stallion, and Hot Girl Meg, the turn-up queen with serious ambition on her mind. “We have so many legends and so many greats,” she recently said of her hometown of Houston, Texas. “But I don’t feel like we ever really had a female rapper from Houston or Texas shut that shit down.” With her debut project Fever, she hopes to succeed in doing just that.
At its core is the intersection of two beautiful rap legacies: the women rap tradition started by MC Lyte and Queen Latifah, and Southern rap dynasty ushered in by Houston’s Geto Boys and Underground Kings. From the first song, Megan weaponizes misogyny through the execution of bars worthy of XXL Freshman Class President. South Park’s influence, home to fellow Houston legends Scarface and Lil’ Keke, is felt throughout “Hood Rat Shit,” which transitions into an ass-and clit-eating tutorial for her male tricks on “Pimpin,” where the spirit of Houston’s pimp tradition is embedded within every word. Sinister beats by producers Concept P and KC Supreme amplify Megan’s dedication to her set and willingness to actively to engage in ghetto affairs, despite her newfound rich bitch lifestyle. The track serves as a compliment to Juicy J’s production, which empowered Megan’s passionate highlight reel of recent wins of Houston’s champ.
Reminiscent of Pam Grier’s dynasty of heroine Blaxploitation films that inspired Fever’s album cover, Megan’s sexual politics take center stage. For decades, black women in rap have been reduced to one-dimensional characters that lacked complexity, but Megan asserts herself as “Thee Stallion” and undoes the historically male-centered framework in favor of black women’s sexual narratives. Her assertiveness in the fulfillment of sexual desires and pleasures is highlighted by Southern laced samples of UGK, Three 6 Mafia, and Project Pat to illustrate a sizzurp-induced night of ecstasy, where Megan is in charge of her body, and models to “hotties” how to enjoy theirs.
“Nine times out of 10, I’m the realest bitch you know/If you ain’t want a pimp then what you fuckin’ with me for,” she raps in “Running Up Freestyle,” challenging any pimps wary of power. Megan’s delivery of perfectly executed bars are comparable to successions from a fully automatic machine gun; a carefully studied aim of fiery stanzas that could only be carried by a rapper with extensive knowledge of the genre’s early practices of battle rap. Her reign is amplified by the embrace of a rich bitch identity, who takes pleasure in ending the lives of those attempt to block her financial avenues and asserts herself as the number one pimp in “Money Good.”
Departing from Tina Snow (her pimp persona), Megan shows us more of theHot Girl Meg on “Sex Talk” where the party girl finds sweet delight in ruining her partner’s life in an endless night of cowgirl and oral sex. Although the track’s origins are rooted in sex positivity, its stanzas reveal a character who is all assertion and dominance. It isn’t until “Shake That”—a song that delightfully includes a tribute to Omega Psi Phi Fraternity Inc.’s talent for cunnilingus—that you sense a few cracks in the project, both in sound and subject, that Megan is still finding out what works and what doesn’t for her singular style. Though, imagine being heralded as the future of Houston rap, an iconic sound that marries generational, regional, and gendered heritages of her intersecting identities as a black woman from the South. It's a journey.
Just a few months ago, Megan Thee Stallion lost her mother, Holly Thomas, to brain cancer. She was one of her biggest influences, taking her to the studio when she was young to witness her laying down tracks as the rapper Holly-Wood. In the harder tracks on Fever, you can almost see Megan’s mother sparring with daughter, each of them delivering Rocky Balboa-blows to the jaw, becoming stronger together. Megan Thee Stallion is now a piece of Houston’s heart, so when you listen to Fever, you hear lean-induced nights at the strip club, freestyles in South Park, house parties at Prairie View A&M and Texas Southern University, but most importantly you’re starting to hear her. She has prepared her whole life for the opportunity to challenge the coastal elites for a seat at rap’s table, and Fever is her folding chair.

1501 Certified Entertainment / 300 Entertainment


The Danish electro-pop chart-topper’s second album is dedicated to the quest for eternal youth; too often, though, her overbearing club songs merely kick against the onset of adulthood.

Forever Neverland

MØ’s debut album, 2014’s No Mythologies to Follow, was all about savoring adolescence, a quest the Danish electro-pop singer born Karen Marie Ørsted captured in glittery production and wailing vocals. So what do you do at age 30 when you’ve made a career out of singing about being young, so much so that your Instagram handle is “momomoyouth”? Four years later—the unit of time typically used to measure a stint in high school or college—Forever Neverland is about the way adulthood yanks us out of former selves, and the way we thrash and fight against it. The title, it goes without saying, is an homage to Peter Pan.
Electro-pop is currently going through a poetry phase: Think of the Lorde lines that could pass for Anne Sexton or the incisive imagery in a Let’s Eat Grandma song. Even Halsey, a closer match to MØ in style, can sound like a Rupi Kaur poem set to a trap beat. MØ’s songs strive for a similarly literary feel—“Purple like summer rain,” she sings at the album’s outset, venturing into literally purple prose—and sometimes she succeeds. She’s at her best when her songs paint simple, concrete images: flipping through the radio in search of “old shit,” calling her mom on her drive out of Hollywood, searching for a party to crash or a bed to share or an excuse to get high. But elsewhere, the songs try too hard to earn their metaphors.
In between full–length projects, MØ contributed to the Major Lazer/Justin Bieber amalgam “Cold Water” and Major Lazer and DJ Snake’s inescapable “Lean On,” two of the most-streamed songs in recent pop. Her tracklist here reads like a who’s who of frat-party EDM: Diplo once again makes his mark, as does the former Flume appendage What So Not. They know how to build earworms, but MØ and her team also take risks to expand her reach. She attempts something adjacent to rap on “If It’s Over,” and it works; she experiments with country-era Taylor Swift twang on “Blur.” We see MØ cast through a prism, splitting into different colors. She’s done with California. She’s heartbroken. Most of the album dissolves into tingly club tracks with more texture than the average dancefloor hit.
The production is more complex than in her previous work, which may be the result of a blurry blend of producers. While her last album was almost entirely produced by the frenetic club hitmaker Ronni Vindahl, of No Wav. fame, Forever Neverland bears the thumbprints of roughly a dozen different producers. It shows. Sometimes the production screeches like Shygirl; sometimes it sounds like a less-than-palatable burst of trap kazoos. Each track seems specifically constructed to get stuck in your head, leaving you humming its tune for a week after, but it’s mostly an empty resonance. These are conspicuously competent club songs that strain for self-importance.
Even if you deleted MØ from her own music—cut out the lyrics, threw out her vocals—the tracks would border on overwhelming. Each track is its own kind of cacophony. There are moments of real shimmer here, particularly in the Charli XCX-featuring “If It’s Over.” But too much of the album is oversaturated and exhausting. Instead of cementing her place in “eternal youth,” as she shouts in the last track, Forever Neverland seems more like the lurch towards adulthood itself—going from a bang to a whimper as you haul your tired body back from the club.


Seattle artist inverts the minimal techno aesthetic of Gas-- burying the thump and emphasizing the ambience.

Glider

The style of ambient techno that Wolfgang Voigt (Gas, Burger/Ink) minted has proved to be massively influential. It gave us the Field, who leans heavily on the techno side of the Gas aesthetic, arranging pithy scraps of musical information into deathless pulsations. It also gives us Seattle's the Sight Below, a mirror image of the Field. Burying the thump and emphasizing the ambiance, Glider could have been marketed as a lost Gas album while raising only the most initiated eyebrows. It's a cunning facsimile, but a facsimile nonetheless. Luckily, Glider gets by just fine on the sensual pleasure of Voigt's style.
And there is a key distinction: While Voigt worked mostly with samples, the Sight Below creates his tracks with autonomously generated sounds. Running a guitar through a variety of looping, reverb, and delay stations, he uses the E-bow, the slide, and tentative picking techniques to circumvent the physical essence of the strings and to marshal clouds of edgeless tone. Only the 4/4 drum tracks-- consisting of cymbal snips, crisp snares, and hypnotic bass bumps-- keep these translucent songs from floating away.
The Sight Below's emphasis on melodic and rhythmic regularity makes his music serene and contemplative; it also creates a limitation. This is largely static work, with very little by way of build or release. Ideas presented near the beginning of each track tend to vary only cosmetically, then peter out. Some songs are extremely abstract: On "At First Touch", a continuous sub-tone breathes out long, celestial resonances for a few minutes, then gently rocks to a stop. The gusty, towering "Without Motion" describes itself accurately. The tracks where palpable textures are admitted tend, naturally, to be more engaging. On "Dour", fragments of discernible guitar glint through the streaming haze; on "Life's Fading Light", they seem to pull backwards against the pneumatic beat and atmospheric hum.
Glider 's derivativeness and inertia put a cap on its capacity to astonish, but it has a protracted shelf life. It's consummate mood music, which goes a long way toward compensating for its shortcomings. And the more I listen, the more esoteric divergences from Gas I start to perceive-- a different personality shining through, aloof and expansively pensive. Voigt alleged that he wanted to "bring the forest to the disco"-- the Sight Below lines up behind the velvet rope arm-in-arm with the sky.


This limited, tour-only cassette feels spontaneous yet brimming with ideas. It sounds somewhere between ghostly demos and a lo-fi avant-garde ambient composition.

Double Dream of Spring

If you didn’t realize Deerhunter have a new release out, that’s kind of the point. A proper follow-up to 2015’s vibrant Fading Frontier is still in the works, but Double Dream of Spring is available on cassette, and that’s it. No vinyl. No streaming services. Not, by the looks of it, even a digital leak. The mostly instrumental, 40-minute tape was supposed to be on sale throughout the band’s current tour, but it sold out on the first night. The only way to hear the music was to wait in line and buy one of 300 copies at the inaugural Brooklyn show. The result, as anachronistic in content as in its format, arrives right on time.
It’s here and then it’s not. It’s vanishingly limited and—in theory, in a world of digital rips and frictionless file-sharing—infinitely available to whatever audience might be interested. Frontman Bradford Cox said the music was released on tape because of the long lead times for vinyl coupled with the flood of content that has diminished the rationale for giving away music online. He was regretful about how insanely fast the tapes sold out and said he couldn’t comment about plans for a repressing. Because the music here is (almost) all original material recorded with the full Deerhunter lineup (Cox, drummer Moses Archuleta, guitarist Lockett Pundt, bassist Josh McKay, and keyboardist Javier Morales) in their home base of Atlanta, this outing feels more substantial than most of the Deerhunter family’s other non-album releases, from a John Peel tribute tape to bedroom-recorded blog freebies.
The resulting album feels spontaneous yet brimming with ideas. It’s also a bit of a left turn: The tape tries on passions both old (krautrock jams) and new (a harpsichord). In that spirit, Double Dream of Spring is an engrossing if endearingly scraggly excursion into the avant-garde, a great, minor work from a great, major band.
Side A, which is wordless, sounds as much like spring as can be expected from a band who even managed to turn a Diplo remix into something dreadful and morbid. The warped bird calls of opener “Clorox Creek Chorus” quickly give way to standout “Dial’s Metal Patterns,” a latticework of woodwinds, keys, and clip-clop percussion that sprawls out for the next dozen-ish minutes, like Stereolab building a clock in Atlanta outsider artist Lonnie Holley’s backyard art studio. The side closes with “Strang’s Glacier,” a giddy reverie built around piano bass notes, splashing cymbals, and ethereal sighs that storm up like an eerie portent from the band’s clamorous 2007 breakout album, Cryptograms.
Side B, which has some words, is only a bit less wayward. The stately piano instrumental “The Primitive Baptists” sets up the tape’s first song with proper vocals, “Denim Opera,” and after so much build-up, it’s a thrill to hear frontman Bradford Cox belt out the rallying-cry charge, or yelp a high note on the word “believe,” singing a song about crimes and salvation. The track’s lo-fi clatter wouldn’t have been out of place on Deerhunter’s bountiful 2008 disc Weird Era Cont. Listening to this song, it’s hard to tell whether to fix a serious face or burst out laughing, and that feels purposeful.
After a couple of instrumentals that feature the buzzing of a cord being plugged into an amp and a plinking marimba, Deerhunter save their most powerful revelation for the finale: a faithful take on composer Charles Ives’ sparse 1919 masterpiece “Serenity,” with lyrics by Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier. By the end of this whole bemusing, Wonka’s boat ride of a collection, a song that Ives himself once damned as “nice” sounds a bit like an amen, or at least a bittersweet Benadryl equivalent.
Its title nods to both a hermetic 1970 book by the poet John Ashbery and that text’s namesake, a 1915 trompe l’oeil painting by Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico. These references are fair warning that we’re entering an erudite, uncanny conversation: a weird era that continues because it’s passed down between artists like folk culture. Just as relevant, though, is the “doubles” conceit, which Deerhunter neatly apply to the two-sided structure of a cassette.
Cox has said Deerhunter’s upcoming, Cate Le Bon-produced full-length will carry the working title Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?, which, strikingly enough, is also the name of one of the final essays the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote before he died in 2007. “Behind every image,” Baudrillard said, “something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination.” Double Dream of Spring is a boutique tape that most of us will only ever encounter as ones and zeroes, and for as far as that goes—whether until the next Deerhunter record, or beyond—it’s fascinating. Ephemeral though it may be, it’s also an achievement to celebrate. Even, or especially if, as Baudrillard would have it, we must ask: “Is it, in fact, the real we worship, or its disappearance?”


Following his recent collaborations with Skrillex and Four Tet, hitmaker Fred Gibson teams up with the elder statesman of ambient. Unlike that anarchic trio, this project is dutifully, dully solemn.

Secret Life

Fred again.. seemingly blinked into existence fully formed, a shining new star in the EDM firmament. His debut album, Actual Life (April 14 - December 17 2020), released late into the pandemic lockdowns, made his reputation globally by giving hope to ravers and clubbers pining for the dancefloor. Across the Actual Life trilogy, Fred again.. sampled audio from YouTube, Instagram, and FaceTime in club-ready mixes that pulled a disparate community of artists into his orbit: open-mic slam poets and established rappers, close friends and complete strangers. In the past year, Fred again.. has only burned brighter: He’s played a breakout Boiler Room set and a viral NPR Tiny Desk Concert, and formed an unlikely alliance with Four Tet and Skrillex for a riotous series of concerts at Madison Square Garden, Times Square, and Coachella.
Of course, Fred again.. did not come out of nowhere; his rise was abetted by a background that granted him access to people like Brian Eno. After a family friend netted 16-year-old Fred Gibson an invitation to Eno’s a cappella singing group, Gibson convinced Eno of his considerable production talents. Eno took him under his wing and gave him his first credits on Eno’s two 2014 albums with Underworld’s Karl Hyde. Eno’s manager also worked with Roots Manuva and landed Gibson a spot on 2015’s Bleeds; from there, he wrote and produced for high-profile projects from Swedish House Mafia, Ellie Goulding, Headie One, and Ed Sheeran. In the late 2010s Gibson worked behind the scenes on a long list of No. 1 hits, but it was Eno who encouraged him to step out on his own and complete the Actual Life albums.
Secret Life is a collaboration between Fred again.. and Eno, recorded during the Actual Life era and released on Four Tet’s Text label. The album features Fred again..’s sample collages slowed down to the ambient pioneer’s glacial pace. Eno has said of Gibson, “I didn’t really understand a lot of what he was doing. It took me quite a while to think, ‘Oh my gosh, this is really a new idea about how you can make music.’” Secret Life suggests that Eno still doesn’t understand Fred again..’s appeal. Gibson is a talented producer, but his methods are not new. His YouTube plundering has been done by the Range, his sample mangling borrows from Burial, and his vulnerable singing style recalls James Blake. Fred again..’s work is mainly impressive for the way it upcycles these techniques into the mainstream, creating dazzling new patterns in a rapidly revolving kaleidoscope of influences.
Secret Life is immaculately produced—how could it not be?—but lacks the communal spirit that made Actual Life feel fresh and accessible. The most exciting element of the Fred again.. project is Gibson’s magpie approach to gathering samples and the deceptive ease with which he deploys them. Any audio clip that crosses Gibson’s social media feed may end up in his mixes, creating the illusion of a party that anyone can join. Eno has cordoned off this egalitarian free-for-all and turned it into a museum exhibit where somber whispers are more appropriate than joyful shouts.
Many hallmarks of corporate ambient are here: slowly decaying piano notes, time-stretched vocals, lazily strummed acoustic guitar, and hazy synths, all wrapped in rustling static. There are moments when these elements come together beautifully, as with the nostalgic dreamscape that surrounds Lola Young’s soaring vocals on “Trying.” At other times, Fred again..’s songcraft struggles, and fails, to break through. A case in point is “Cmon,” which recycles Fred Again..’s “Lydia (please make it better)” (which itself samples Bad Honey’s “Hjem (Please Make It Better).” Whereas the bare-bones introduction to “Lydia” presages a bass-heavy groove, the same material stops short just as it gains momentum at the halfway point of “Cmon,” and the rest of the song staggers along on the strength of a chopped and panned vocal line with little other development.
In a puzzling move for an accomplished songwriter like Gibson, many of the lyrics on Secret Life are taken piecemeal from other songs. At times, Fred again..’s emotional delivery benefits the lyrics he has adapted, as with the minimalist take on a verse from Leonard Cohen’s “In My Secret Life” on “Secret,” which saves Cohen’s musings on loneliness and duplicity from the overdone schmaltz of the original. Elsewhere, though, Gibson unnecessarily flattens melodies, as when he strips the soul from Winnie Raeder’s “Don’t You Dare” on “Enough.” The lines “Come on home/Come on home/You don’t have to be alone” are eerily familiar when they are barely murmured on “Radio.” When Gibson reunites these words with their original melody on album closer “Come on Home,” it’s easy to recognize John Prine’s “Summer’s End,” and hard not to simply play that song instead. Borrowing lyrics is nothing new—M.I.A. quoted both the Modern Lovers and the Pixies to great effect, for example—but these songs sound more like half-remembered covers than clever appropriations.
Despite his celebrity and his apparent openness, much about Fred again..’s life remains, well, secret. Though the emotional undercurrent of the Actual Life series gave the impression of diaristic confession, its digital fragments ultimately reflected others more than himself. Secret Life multiplies this effect like a hall of mirrors distorted through Eno’s influence. Every way forward turns us back again toward Gibson’s recent work, each song providing little more than a different angle on what we’ve seen before.


Lil Wop—the newest and most adamant Gucci Mane disciple—carves his own grotty, horrorcore path on his fourth mixtape of 2017, a wildly fun but sometimes rough listen.

Wopavelli 3

On his breakthrough single “Lost My Mind,” Lil Wop reminisced about growing up wanting to be like Gucci Mane. Of course, Gucci has inspired his share of disciples, but none of them have taken their hero worship to such extremes as Wop, who not only christened himself after his favorite rapper but also had his signature electric ice cream cone tattooed on his own cheek. Even before he signed to Gucci’s 1017 label this summer, Wop was rapping about wearing a Rolex permanently stopped at 10:17—that Oct. 17 also happens to be his birthday is either a fateful coincidence or the kind of lie a determined psychopath might tell as part of an All About Eve-esque plot to infiltrate their idol’s life.
If Wop’s biography paints him as rap’s most shameless sycophant, his over the top Gucci fandom belies just how original his own vision is. The two share some of the same bone-dry comedic sensibilities, but beyond that, Lil Wop doesn’t borrow much from the elder Wop. He’s his own creation, and easily the most distinctive 1017 signee since Young Thug: a demonic, blood-crazed madman who likens himself to Michael Myers, brags about his zombie walk, and raps in the same unnerving croak as Tony, Danny Torrance’s freaky imaginary friend from The Shining. All cobwebs and sawdust, it’s a voice so pained and parched it makes you vicariously crave the drink of water he apparently denies himself between takes. It also makes his 1017 debut Wopavelli 3, for all its infectious lunacy, a very acquired taste, and a rough listen on headphones.
Wop plays on more or less the same horrorcore tropes that have periodically come into vogue since the Gravediggaz days, but he tackles them with a rare commitment to character. “Fresh as hell, I just woke up in a coffin,” he rasps on “Topgolf,” “Red tape around the trap, bitch don’t cross it.” He’s still early in his career, but already his rapping is considerably richer, weirder, and more vivid than it was on this year’s “Lost My Mind.” Wopavelli 3, his fourth mixtape of 2017, captures him just as his persona begins to click, but still in the creation stage of writing his own mythos. Sometimes he leaves open the possibility all the violence is a Percocet-fueled fantasy; sometimes he hints at a Jekyll/Hyde relationship with his body spurred by his indiscriminate drug intake. Mostly, he doesn’t overanalyze it. “I raise the murder rate, put a nigga on a plate,” he raps with typical brevity on “Murder Rate.”
Where vanguard rappers like Lil Uzi Vert and Lil Yachty have modeled themselves in part after rock stars, Wop has taken that mentality to its logical extreme. “This ain’t rap it’s hard rock,” he repeats throughout the tape, and although that’s not literally true, he taps into the same vein of showmanship and exploitation as so many ’80s metal acts. He’s aided in his spectacle by a sharp cast of producers, mostly talented upstarts like Digital Nas and Kenny Beats, who conjure a similar mix of whimsy and brutality, creating beats that fall somewhere between Saturday morning cartoons and torture porn.
Early on the mixtape, there’s a moment that Wop’s been anticipating for his entire career: his first Gucci Mane feature. If you can judge how vested Gucci is in his protégés based on the quality of guest verses, then “Paid in Full” bodes well for Wop. But as charismatic as Gucci is, he sounds irreconcilably out of place. He’s too mirthful for his surroundings, and he tips the scale a little too far toward silliness—it’s a bit like watching your favorite sitcom character wander into a slasher film for a scene. Lil Wop’s aesthetic is already so singular that it doesn’t leave a lot of room for outsiders, even ones he grew up idolizing. He may adore Gucci Mane, but with Wopavelli 3 he proves that he doesn’t need him.


Fake Boyfriend's debut EP Mercy merges post-punk with the poppier indie-rock stylings associated with acts like Waxatachee and Girlpool, full of thrashing guitar blasts and churning bass.

Mercy EP

For almost a year, the band Fake Boyfriend has had no music available, their website offering only a 27-second recording titled "gimmick." "Hi, um, we’re Fake Boyfriend," a voice begins with a vacant affect, before building up to a screaming eruption "and we’re—a… GIMMICK!" The last word’s howl hovers uncertainly between complaint and celebration, but, musically, "Gimmick" is a statement of pure vocal power. Fake Boyfriend pits that power against "the preconceived notions of how women are supposed to behave and process emotions," as band member Abi Reimold, who just put out her own acclaimed solo LP, recently told Stereogum. If the songs "are about giving into your feelings," then "Gimmick" gives into and lets out its rage over the inevitable equation that Fake Boyfriend is a girl band and being a "girl band" equals being a gimmick. By yawping their self-identification with the label, Fake Boyfriend reclaims the "girl band" moniker but still acknowledges the commoditizing function it otherwise performs.
Their debut EP Mercy merges post-punk with the poppier indie-rock stylings associated with acts like Waxatachee and Girlpool, full of thrashing guitar blasts and churning bass. "Expire" has the fiercest snarl on the EP, but "Ship" best exemplifies the soft/hard, light/dark interplay of their songwriting—a juxtaposition of screaming and soft vocals.  Midway through "Ship," the chugging guitar and drums dissolve, leaving only bass as singer and guitarist Ashley Tryba shifts into narcotic tones for the 40-second bridge’s intonation: "In my dreams, in my dreams…" When the drums and guitar come back, this fugue state ends and returns the speaker to her post-traumatic reality. "I’ve got a room of my own but nothing to write/ I’ve got an anger that burns but no one to fight," Tryba sings, chants, and finally shouts—invoking the classic Virginia Woolf essay and suggesting that a room of one’s own offers no reprieve.
Throughout, Fake Boyfriend make it clear they're determined to tackle bigger ills than ex-lovers. At the Mercy release party, Tryba prefaced the performance of "Ship" with an angry redress: "This song is about the self-blame, shame, and confusion that comes after being sexually harassed… Despite what the fucking journalists say." They seem unconcerned with the rituals and niceties of getting covered or noticed by press, a refreshing resurgence of true punk ethos within the often-sycophantic world of of contemporary indie rock. This  attitude has its most potent expression in their clunky, obnoxious, unpolished, and often rapturous live shows: "Sometimes we mix Trans-Siberian Orchestra with Evanescence, and that’s us," bassist Sarah Myers once informed an audience.
Each band member plays a different instrument than she learned prior to joining Fake Boyfriend.  Far from sounding amateurish, this quality gives Mercy’s four songs their special beauty, an improvisational intimacy like two new lovers undressing each other—fumbling into just the right groove.  The compositional unsteadiness to "Bumtown," which seems to stumble and drag its way through its verses, only adds to the force of the explosion into the chorus. "Bumtown" and the hypnotic "Wax" display latent pop sensibilities that best serve Mercy as brief flashes of contrast to the album’s abrasive swirl. But they also sounds like hints at a capacity for full-throttle pop anthems as well. Who would have thought the Hole heard on 1991’s Pretty On The Inside would later produce a song like "Heaven Tonight"? On Mercy, Fake Boyfriend bristle with all manner of possibility.


Fronted by an Afghanistan war veteran turned firefighter and EMT, the Athens, Georgia, goths offer a compellingly melodic take on the genre that’s informed by the horrors of lived experience.

Inked in Red

In its darkest form, post-punk is an atrocity exhibition, drawing on horrors both real and imagined to hold up a mirror to humankind’s worst tendencies. On their debut album, Inked in Red, the Athens, Georgia, ultra-goth outfit Vision Video honor this tradition by closing with a cover of “Agent Orange,” a grim, Vietnam War-inspired song released in 1980 by the brooding Brixton dub-punk outfit Ski Patrol. Vision Video’s take is largely reverential, right down to the near-identical running times, but with one crucial difference. Ski Patrol singer Ian Lowery sings about being burned alive on the battlefield with an icy detachment that gradually thaws into hot-blooded panic, but Vision Video frontman Dusty Gannon sounds unsettled from the jump. In fact, for Gannon, singing from the perspective of a besieged soldier isn’t mere cosplay.
Long before he formed Vision Video in 2017, Gannon was a disaffected teen who joined the army to escape a life of menial labor; he eventually found himself leading a rifle platoon in the streets of Kandahar during America’s never-ending war with Afghanistan. Disheartened by his experience as a cog in the war machine, he quit the military upon his return home. Yet in his current day jobs—as a firefighter and a paramedic treating COVID-19 patients—he’s still surrounded by people suffering through the worst, if not the last, days of their lives.
Given Gannon’s background, it’s not surprising that his lyrics are filled with images of blood, death, and burning skies. What is unexpected, however, is that those dark thoughts have yielded a record full of such vim and vigor. Vision Video essentially have one kind of song, but it’s a good, highly durable one—i.e., the sort of taut, energetic, yet oddly dreamy tune that’s tailor-made for the sort of wallflower who sprints to the dancefloor the instant the DJ drops “Age of Consent” or “Primary” at Goth Night. But in Gannon, Vision Video are blessed with a singer whose voice soars instead of sulks. And when he blends his with that of keyboardist Emily Fredock, the group exhibits a radiance that distinguishes them from fellow black-lipstick aficionados.
Even as Gannon sings of heartbreak in gory, slasher-flick terms on “In My Side” (“My body’s bare in this murder scene/And it’s always there reminding me /That I feel your knife in my back”), there’s a triumphant quality to the chorus that reflects his ability to withstand the pain. He confronts his post-war PTSD in discomfiting detail on Inked in Red’s stirring title track and the haunting “Kandahar,” but the group’s sing-along hooks and soothing “Love Will Tear Us Apart” synth lines amplify the songs’ emotional resonance. Unlike more mannered peers, Vision Video leave little doubt that their unspeakable imagery is the product of lived experience rather than horror-flick fiction. “Each way I turn I’m searching for a guiding light/But there just don’t seem to be any signs of life,” Gannon sings on “Inked in Red,” suggesting he’ll never outrun the shadows of his past. But the bravado in his delivery indicates he’s going to keep trying. As a frontline worker, Gannon has devoted his post-Afghanistan life to helping other people; with Vision Video, he gets to help himself.

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There's nothing more American than marijuana and masturbation, and when you combine the two, well, that's Zen. Don ...

The Sebadoh

There's nothing more American than marijuana and masturbation, and when you combine the two, well, that's Zen. Don't let the hippies fool you, there's nothing communal about pot. It's all about that high, and the only reason you want people around when you get high is so they can witness how good pot makes you feel. They're there so they can enjoy you, not enjoy pot with you. Masturbation is that joint you save for yourself and smoke when everyone has gone home.
The beauty of Sebadoh is that they not only understand how selfish weed and wacking off are, but, to quote Malcom X, they "talk right down to earth in a language that everybody here can easily understand." There's no false conception that you're getting one band when you buy a Sebadoh CD-- you're getting a bunch of songs that sound like the person who wrote them. Sebadoh isn't a band as much as it's a means to an end.
For the most part, the ends have been worth the means. Lou Barlow's always depressed, Jason Loewenstein's always pissed and Eric Gaffney always sounded like he took a wrong turn and ended up in Sebadoh's studio instead of GWAR's. That's part of the fun. If your girlfriend just shit on your heart, Lou was there to empathize. If you felt like letting off some steam, Jason was your man. If the crank was taking a minute to kick in, Eric could kickstart it.
Then came Harmacy, by which time Eric was long gone and Lou and Jason, along with Bob Fay, decided they were a band. They weren't yet. The overproduction and cohesiveness was a wimpy kick in the nuts. No high, no climax, no thank you.
The curious thing about The Sebadoh is that it is, in fact, The Sebadoh. You get the multiple personalities and the whole unit. "Bird in the Hand" is Jason Loewenstein at full tilt, screaming like an unwelcome orgasm and clanging out arrhythmic chords. "Break Free," new drummer Russ Pollard's only song credit, sends out signals of longing without being overdrawn. "Love is Strong" is so distant and depressing that it could only have been written by Lou Barlow. Behind the personalities, though, all the songs are coming from the same place.
Some people won't take to the cohesiveness, and the added production won't make them any happier. Change scares people, especially people accustomed to the stasis of weed. The warm organ and warped guitar on "Tree" may as well be aliens bursting out of the stomachs of musicians who made an entire album as bedroomy as Weed Forestin, but the rest of the track is as soothingly analog as any Nick Drake sobber. Likewise, the sci-fi noodlings and tambourine of "It's All You" sound polished, but retain that special Sebadoh quality.
For Sebadoh, it's been a while since giving the pleasure of the two M's meant blatantly singing about them, but after a dismal attempt at coming together, Sebadoh seems to have made an album that's both communal and self- gratifying. Fuckin' hippies.


The Chicago rapper moves away from his recent commercially-minded exploits and embraces a more mature style of writing.

Love Songs for the Streets

Will Lil Durk get another chance to be a rap star? He's the last great hope of the class of 2012, back when drill music first crumbled the city’s pavements to dust. Chief Keef’s indiscipline killed his momentum. Lil Reese sank under the weight of a charge sheet. King Louie is still around, making the kind of graphene-tough drill that sledgehammered its way into hip-hop’s collective conscious a half-decade ago. But only one rapper calls himself the Allah of Chi-Town.
Durk Banks was still in his teens when he signed to Def Jam in 2012, ostensibly becoming one of drill’s great crossover hopes. He dropped two commercially-minded albums on the label and scored minor hits with “Like Me” and “My Beyoncé,” syrupy jams that made good use of the rapper’s pop instincts. But he’s never been able to parlay any of these achievements into large-scale embracement. Or even, say, Meek Mill-esque sales. The final few steps always elude him.
Love Song for the Streets doesn’t concern itself with mainstream acceptance. Instead, we get no false starts or unwise experiments, just Durk unfiltered: nine shots of garbled Auto-Tune vocals, punchy lyricism, goofy sex jams, and hooks that stick.
Unshackled from any kind of outline, Durk’s pen game shines. His rise was dotted with blood-soaked tales that summarized much of drill’s appeal: ground-level glimpses at Chicago's South Side that colored in the outline offered by grim murder statistics. Love Song for the Streets, though, finds the father-of-two in a more mournful mood. He’s still only 24, but he raps with the weariness of someone who has seen too damn much.
“Pick Your Poison” is a robust smack down of so-called friends that abandoned him when goings got tough. “Hell yeah I hold a grudge,” Durk spits over Will-A-Fool’s dark production, “these niggas ain’t show no love.” Later, he offers some open-book revelations: “I used to chew on them xannies to get me through the times.” There’s a touch of Curtis Mayfield in Durk’s gloss-free depiction of urban living—hard times in this crazy town.
In Durk’s world, viciousness is a part of life’s mundanity. Moments of youthful innocence are precious in the “trenches”: “My uncle died in a stabbing/I moved to the A now I’m dabbing,” he raps on “Handouts.” It’s about finding something to cling onto, a thin sliver of light—in this case, a dab—in the vast darkness. Durk’s ugly-beautiful vocals punctuate one of coldest visions of Chicago.
As a front-to-back production job, Love Song for the Streets feels raw, dinky, and inexpensive. The gritty orchestration melds itself inseparably from Durk’s synthetic vocals. “No Love,” produced by S Breezy, is built on some twisted guitar notes, a thumping bass line, and lots of dead space for Durk and guest Young Thug to fill. Tracks like “Mood” have more in common with Thugger’s favored future-cop production style than the horror movie theatrics of drill, while Durk’s strong sense of melody shines on the sleazy ode to his girl, “Uzi.”
Drill was largely built around incredibly young rappers burdened with many of the troubles listeners found so thrilling. Five years later, Durk is reporting from the firestorm while trying to grow up within it. Love Song for the Streets lacks the kind of breadth required of a classic release, but as a table setter to Durk’s next episode, it gets the message across.


The acclaimed solo guitarist sets aside his beloved instrument for nearly half the tracks on his new album, seeking new routes to convey familiar moods.

Oneiric Formulary

Sir Richard Bishop is one of the most riveting and dynamic acoustic guitarists on the planet, but he’s seldom seemed interested in the tropes of the solo guitar tradition. Since his 1998 debut on Revenant, John Fahey’s own label and a bastion of stylistic misfits, the Sun City Girls cofounder has indulged a deep restless streak, making records that nod toward his six-string contemporaries before racing off in a dozen directions. In the span of a few tracks, he might conjure the endless ecstasy of Munir Bashir, the cinematic elegance of Chet Atkins, and the spare beauty of Libba Cotten. The title of Polytheistic Fragments, his staggering 2007 Drag City album, still feels like a mission statement: Rather than subscribe to one belief system, Bishop has marshalled a more useful personal theology by borrowing a bit from everything he loves.
Given Bishop’s insatiable curiosity, an album like his new Oneiric Formulary was inevitable. On his first solo outing since 2015’s Tangier Sessions, a painstaking exploration of every sound he could wring from a mysteriously salvaged guitar, Bishop doesn’t actually pick up a guitar for nearly half these tracks. Instead, he chops samples into spooky sequences as though he were RZA’s wayward understudy for “Call to Order” and surrenders himself to a nearly nine-minute morass of maligned circuits like a half-asleep Yellow Swans for “Graveyard Wanderers.” Yes, Bishop takes the guitar on a few mesmerizing turns, alternately embracing frenetic strums and pleasant licks familiar from his past. But on an album inspired by the sounds and scenes of his dreams, Bishop finally seems tired of being confined to one instrument.
Of course, realizing Bishop isn’t here just to play guitar (or even piano, where his dizzying notes recall the puffy, cloudlike shapes of La Monte Young’s music) brings an initial twinge of disappointment. Imagine the letdown of going to see Michael Jordan man the outfield or paying handsomely to hear a member of Led Zeppelin plunge into microtonal improvisation. But even without the guitar, Bishop communicates his endearing sentimentality and his boundless instrumental ambitions. The dizzying pace and radiant tones of “Dust Devils”—a game approximation of frame drum and the strident Arabic mizmar, played with a MIDI keyboard—are as gripping as his most bristling Freak of Araby pieces. And his electronic lute lines for “Renaissance Nod” recall the contemplative pace of Bishop’s piano works: Same moods, different deliveries.
Still, when Bishop grabs the guitar, you remember what you were missing. During the “The Coming of the Rats,” he thumbs out a staccato acoustic strut while fluorescent electric drones pirouette in slow-motion. It’s eerie and gorgeous, like Robert Fripp scoring some dimly lit alley scene in a gangster movie. And on “Celerity,” Bishop’s heavy strums are so fast, angular, and agile it sounds like Aphex Twin sampled him and built the track one meter at a time. Bishop somehow fits notes inside of rests that don’t seem to exist—the effect is exhilarating, like a motivational speech crammed into four breathless minutes.
Bishop seems to understand it’s still reassuring to hear his particular sort of guitar mastery, where the emotions run as deep and free as the peerless technique. To wit, he ends the mid-album triptych of songs without guitar with “Enville,” a piece so brisk and resplendent it would be the standout on almost any record by the latest generation of solo acoustic guitarists. Aside from the introduction, it’s the shortest track here, so you might overlook it between the clangor of “Dust Devils” and the speed of “Black Sara.” But listen again to how cleanly Bishop plays and how many images he’s able to evoke in about two minutes. In one moment, I picture a tree-lined pasture, birdsong dancing at the edge of the field; in another, the quiet bliss of crossing a tedious item off a too-old to-do list. Hearing “Enville,” you get why Bishop might want to write beyond the guitar now—how can one instrument get more exquisite or evocative than this?


On his second joint effort with producer Evidence, and with his habitual loop-based rap now dominating the independent sphere, the Odd Future member sounds more confident than he has in years.

Domo Genesis: *Intros, Outros & Interludes *

Intros, Outros & Interludes

Domo Genesis was one of the first rappers to have a project produced entirely by fellow Californian Alchemist, and their 2012 album together, No Idols, proved revelatory. Genesis had spent years playing the sidelines within Odd Future, a talented spitter struggling to stand out next to his more flamboyant and prodigious friends. But over Alchemist’s unfussed loops and minimal drums, Genesis’ presence hardened like magma exposed to air. He sounded invigorated, as ready to zig-zag through tangled rhyme schemes on “Elimination Chamber” as he was to slow down and pay tribute to his beloved marijuana on “Me and My Bitch.” No Idols was warmly received in its heyday, but no one could’ve predicted just how ahead of its time it would be.
Today, loop-based rap music dominates the independent sphere, and Alchemist-produced projects warrant interviews with GQ. Genesis has carved out his own niche as well, switching between the hazy boom-bap of 2017’s Red Corolla and 2018’s Aren’t U Glad You’re U?*—*his team-up with veteran rapper-producer Evidence—and the expansive live-band arrangements of 2016’s Genesis and 2018’s Facade Records. On those earlier projects, Genesis seemed lost, his gifts for rhyming merely a tool to help piece his life back together. Intros, Outros & Interludes, his second joint effort with Evidence, puts all that uncertainty in the past tense. “What I get, I deserve, I’m undeferred, I’m too ahead of the curve,” he says nonchalantly on intro track “Don’t Believe Half,” finding the worth in his peaks and valleys: “I had my head fully submerged under the current/They don’t wanna see me flourish, though.” It’s the most confident he’s sounded in years.
Even though Evidence handles all the production, Intros, Outros & Interludes feels like a mirror reflection of the Alchemist-produced No Idols. Genesis is still hungry and willing to fight for what’s his, but he’s more weathered, more cognizant of when to use his energy to bolster his strength. He rarely references specific hardships, but his delivery sells whatever lessons he’s gleaned. On “Trust the Process,” he doesn’t just work with the “weight of the world on my shoulders”—he approaches it with the strength of a Super Soldier from Marvel Comics. Genesis has a way of sprinkling in quick allusions that map out his mindstate in the fewest moves possible: He compares his skills to wrestler Booker T.’s infamous 1997 speech to Hulk Hogan on “Campfire,” and makes a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to the Righteous Gemstones on “Victories and Losses.” Even at his most dour, there’s always some fun to be had on a Domo Genesis song.
It’s remarkable how much the two have grown since the last time they joined forces. Aren’t U Glad You’re U? was an instance of two artists who clearly liked each other still figuring out how to fit in each other’s universe. Those growing pains are gone on Intros, Outros & Interludes, where their styles interlock effortlessly. Evidence’s production leans hazy and psychedelic, somewhere between a pleasant daydream and a neo-noir soundtrack. The horns and pattering drums of “Don’t Believe Half” are a soft fanfare that Genesis skips over with a smirk. “Victories and Losses” slides by on a slinky lounge-piano sample while “Reverse Card” and “Campfire” seethe with synths. Melancholy mixes with triumph to create a disorienting but inviting atmosphere.
There’s no better place for a rapper as thoughtful and precise as Genesis. He’s comfortable with his lot in life and his skills have stood the test of time. It’s a testament to his vision that Remy Banks, Navy Blue, and Boldy James—all rappers who got their start in the 2010s but took years to truly etch out their space—are all guests on Intros, Outros & Interludes. They’ve watched the modern underground mold itself after a blueprint they’ve long embraced. But unlike Joey Bada$$, who pulled a similar feat on a grander scale with his comeback album 2000, Genesis is still operating with some bite, an animating sense of purpose that goes beyond money and status. “I’m more so in that duffle than I ever been/I’m tussling with the weights, can’t let the devil win,” he says at the end of closing track “Tallulah.” On Intros, Outros & Interludes, it’s easy to believe him.


Surf-rock riffs, oddball humor, and warped Americana storytelling define the Austin band’s raucous debut.

When Horses Would Run

You don’t see a lot of bands with their own theme songs these days. Time was, Black Sabbath introduced themselves with a spooky dirge called “Black Sabbath,” Bad Company peddled a slow-burning anthem called “Bad Company,” and Iron Maiden ended their sets with the satanic braggadocio of “Iron Maiden.” That sort of showboating might seem gaudy among today’s more tasteful rockers, but Being Dead have an old-fashioned knack for self-mythologizing. The core members, best friends and songwriting partners, call themselves Falcon Bitch and Gumball and alternately claim to have met as coworkers at Cinnabon or chimney sweeps in the 1700s. Their long-gestating first album, When Horses Would Run, delivers a cheery singalong three-quarters of the way through: “We are Being Dead,” they sing in harmony, teeing up solos like giddy children. “We’re having a good time/We hope you’re having a good time, too!”
Steeped in the careening energy of surf-rock and mid-’60s Jazzmaster tones but open to any stylistic fancy that crosses Falcon Bitch and Gumball’s radar, When Horses Would Run is an unusually raucous and idea-stuffed debut. Its songs burrow into fantasies of warped Americana: a hippie cult that worships trees (“Treeland”) or a languid suburban satire (“Misery Lane”). Their theme song, “We Are Being Dead,” is the simplest thing here, but it’s reflective of the overarching sense of two weirdos ushering you into their own private world.
Not that it’s been entirely private. Being Dead have spent years amassing a live following in Austin and trolling interviewers. When Horses Would Run showcases the confidence of a band that’s already worked out their kinks onstage. Falcon Bitch and Gumball swap instruments often and share lead vocals on nearly every track. Songs thrillingly morph midway through. The shoplifting fantasy “Muriel's Big Day Off” abruptly segues from rollicking acid-pop harmonies to a smoky jazz-pop interval and back. “Treeland” downshifts into a woozy call-and-response breakdown where the bandmates brainstorm sacrificial offerings for trees, then explode into Sung Tongs-like banshee shrieks. The idiosyncrasies of the pair’s friendship bring an endearing quality to the ad-libs and bits of studio chatter.
Because of the comradery, and their tendencies to swap inside jokes and value humor over stuffy self-pity, Being Dead may invite comparisons to Wet Leg. But their sensibility is less sardonic and more absurdist. Quintessential American themes dominate their writing: Western violence, religious evangelism (the a cappella goof “God vs Bible,” the cryptic “Holy Team”), consumerism (“Misery Lane”), acid trips (“Daydream”). It’s all filtered through a kaleidoscope of styles and vocal approaches that are almost perverse in their jolliness.
If Being Dead have a signature sound, it’s anchored in the sun-kissed harmonies and high-octane riffage of surf rock. There was darkness and menace in surf music long before Tarantino foregrounded it in Pulp Fiction, and Being Dead tease out the genre’s violent, disturbed underbelly. “Last Living Buffalo” is a deceptively jaunty lament for the last buffalo on the range snuffed out by hunters. “I see a buffalo lying dead on the floor,” Falcon Bitch sings, assessing the capitalist greed and cruelty that ran rampant in the American West. The climax is a doomy shriek of rage: “You killed them!” the two bellow over a noise explosion. As the song reverts to its buoyant guitar line, the scene becomes just another casualty in a gory, grim history, one that these songwriters have learned to survey with a smirk.


Synth-pop auteur Nandi Rose renders nuanced, deeply compelling portrait of a woman turning away from the world just when she needs help the most.

The Caretaker

There’s always been a sense of disquiet in Half Waif’s swirling electro-pop. Engulfed by clouds of synth and feverish beats, frontwoman Nandi Rose searches for resolution to her nebulous inner turmoil, a constant battle between her desire to be known and her suspicion that she never truly will be. On her last album, Lavender, she looked outwards, hoping to find meaning in the places and people around her. On songs like “Lavender Burning,” New York represented the permanent home and stability she longed for on the road.
While writing her new album The Caretaker, Rose lived in one place (her home in the Hudson Valley) and wrote without a band. Though she grapples with the same turmoil as before—her hunger for love, her need for solitude, the loss of certain friendships—she is now coping alone. The other people on the album largely feel incidental, written into songs, as she says on “Siren,” only when she feels uninspired. Even falling in love, which she describes as “taking on the burn,” is an acquisition of someone else’s pain, a burden she carries by herself. An acutely self-aware writer, Rose realizes the emotional shortcomings of this approach. She renders a nuanced, deeply compelling portrait of a woman turning away from the world just when she needs help the most.
When she finished writing the album, Rose realized the perspective was not hers, but that of a character, someone who has been “entrusted with taking care of this estate, taking care of the land, and she’s not doing a very good job. The weeds are growing everywhere, and she’s not taking care of herself.” There are sonic ties to her home, from the bug sounds in the mix on “Lapsing,” which were recorded in her backyard, to the introductory beat on “Halogen 2,” which incorporated the sound of a train she can hear from her porch. She often sings about her home, though more as a shelter than as an estate she's capable of caring for. On “Window Place,” she anticipates an oncoming winter, a dark period of pain and loneliness that she chooses to wait out from her room, watching her life pass by as if looking out of a window. This sense of passivity permeates throughout the album, often symbolized by the passing of the seasons. Instead of taking action to address her frustrations, on songs like “Blinking Light” she waits for summer, an imagined future when she will inevitably feel better.
Rose’s best songs build into revelations, cracking the surface to reveal another truth buried deep inside. On The Caretaker, she uses this effect to portray the titular character as an unreliable narrator, someone who is trying to assert her independence, but who might be coming apart more than she acknowledges. Album highlight “Ordinary Talk” begins with a bold cry for independence: “Baby don’t worry about me/I don't worry about you.” Buoyed by a relentless drum beat, Rose sounds self-assured. But half-way through, the drums cut out and we’re introduced to her most bare emotional truths; she’s crying in her coffee and sitting in the dark. As the drums work back in and the vocals layer into an ethereal cocoon, she builds her loneliness into a spectacle, allowing it to intermingle beautifully with her desire for solitude. “Blinking Light” further heightens the tension between Rose’s self perception and reality. She sings with such resolution that she’ll be better by June that you’re genuinely startled when the chorus comes in, shepherded by her crystalline vocals: “I know what you’re thinking/I’m circling the drain.” As Rose paints an inept but tenacious character at its center, The Caretaker emerges as a deeply relatable portrayal of attempted self care.
There’s a grandiosity, almost a theatricality, to these songs, from the layered vocals to the flourishes of ornate imagery—morning stars, bodies full of thorns — to the maturity of Rose’s voice, which soars on nearly every chorus on the album. But grounded in mundane moments, the music never feels overwrought; the sun sets, the laundry gets folded, winter comes and then summer does. The instrumentation also expertly mirrors the emotional tenor of the lyrics, like the chugging beat and distorted vocals “Halogen 2,” which convey Rose’s gnawing anxiety and loneliness. As a result, the rich orchestral compositions on The Caretaker sound effortless and fluid like cursive. In crafting such complex, accessible songs, Rose reveals just how ordinary it is to feel at war with yourself, to not know what you want or how to get it.
The Caretaker is roughly divided in half by the improvised, droning synth interlude, “Lapsing,” which marks the distinction between the anxiety-ridden first half to the second half, which emits flickers of hope. Rose was listening to a lot of Robyn when writing this album and the emotional influence is clear; joy and despair intermingle beautifully on every song. The album opens with a wave of inky synth as Rose’s character endlessly runs uphill with no end to her frustration in sight. By contrast, album closer, “Window Place,” a cinematic ballad of piano, synth, and umpteen layers of reverberating vocals, sounds triumphant. She does not overcome her pain, but accepts it as transient, which feels freeing enough. The Caretaker’s fixation on the future and fumbling attempts at self care make it an eerily relevant quarantine listen. This is an album of waiting for things to get better but not knowing exactly how or why they will. At a time when our government has failed us so badly that the best response to a global pandemic is individual action, these songs validate the confusion and anxiety of tackling a colossal burden alone. But as Rose tries to comfort herself with visions of summertime, the Caretaker can ultimately provide some solace that a brighter future will come, and hope in our abilities to care for ourselves, no matter how messy the journey is.


Priests’ debut expands into a rich diorama of stinging guitar, funk, yearning indie pop, and jazz; there hasn’t been a punk debut this certain and poised since Savages’ Silence Yourself.

Nothing Feels Natural

Fire-starting D.C. punks Priests started work on their transcendent debut several years before election day, so don’t blame them if Nothing Feels Natural feels relevant in the extreme at this moment. Since debuting with Tape One five years ago, the four-piece have never stopped shredding through corrupt power hierarchies and attempting to disentangle personal freedom from consumer choice. Across two tapes, a single, and an EP, they’ve used a deranged sort of surf rock to launch lucid, grimly funny exposés of the false binaries and systemic oppressions that built America. This, after all, is the band that screamed, “Barack Obama killed something in me and I’m gonna get him for it.”
As we enter 2017, we’re in danger of tying every faintly despairing new piece of culture to the ascent of America’s Cheeto-in-Chief, as if January 20 flipped a switch that instantly soured all milk. But injustice wasn’t born earlier this month; it just became apparent to many who never had much cause to worry about it before. And the lyrics to Nothing Feels Natural show the existential weight of having spent a lifetime fighting. Priests’ debut has an entirely different energy from their previous releases, expanding into a rich diorama of stinging guitar, funk, yearning indie pop, and jazz. The leap in range and ambition from their 2015 EP Bodies and Control and Money and Power is huge: There hasn’t been a punk debut this certain and poised since Savages’ Silence Yourself.
The title works a few different ways. There’s the obvious what the fuck sensation that accompanies your early morning Twitter scroll these days, and Priests have always done a mean line in sardonic disbelief. There’s less of that on Nothing Feels Natural, though it’s no less potent: “Pink White House” is a hostile cheerleader chant about the illusion of choice, where the disorientation mounts alongside Taylor Mulitz’s spiraling bass. On the boisterously funky “Puff,” Katie Alice Greer sneers at accelerationism—the crackpot academic theory that society hitting rock bottom is good because it will surely engender radical change. And on “JJ,” she balks at how easily we let branding influence the way we construct identity. “I thought I was a cowboy because I smoked Reds,” Greer wails, as surf riffs and battered piano behind her evoke a debauched saloon caper.
Priests have always had a keen eye for fakery and bullshit, though on Nothing Feels Natural, they’re confronting ‘normalcy’, a force far more insidious than artifice, because the partisan values informing it are invisible. “It’s a long movie, a long movie/And you are not you, you are not you,” Greer exhorts on opener “Appropriate.” Adding saxophone, piano and hand percussion to their sound, they change direction from song to song much in the same way that the Clash did with Sandinista!, and commit to every hairpin turn. “Appropriate” hurtles from spiny sloganeering through nihilistic thrash to a condemned doom jazz wasteland, leaving the listener as alienated as Priests feel. The title track brings to mind rain-thrashed British indie pop, and on “Suck,” Priests try their hand at nimble ESG-indebted funk, though Greer’s frustrated pleas expose the dark underbelly of the New Yorkers’ effervescent cool. She had to stop screaming because it was killing her throat. The desperation in her singing voice might be more jarring than her howls.
Priests have always been thrillingly direct, but that hasn’t stopped their words being twisted by publicists who want to profit from them (“You hinge your success on that which you might bleed from me,” Greer sneers on “Nicki”) and guilty parties who interpret their calls for respect as personal attacks (“Please don’t make me be someone with no sympathy,” she pleads on “Suck”). Here, they sound unusually worn down by commodification, a lack of good faith from those around them, and the difficulty of surviving as a punk band: the title Nothing Feels Natural could also signify that the abyss has started to feel like home. We’re told that this is where punk thrives, at the bottom of the barrel—accelerationism, again. Priests reject that idea in the most forceful terms. Led by drummer Daniele Daniele in a relentless, disbelieving sing-speak, the terrifying “No Big Bang” peers into the void of shame and failure that accompanies creativity. On the title track, a depressed Greer satirizes the sacrifices she’d make to feel balanced again. “If I go without for days will I finally hallucinate a real thing?” she pleads. The self becomes a slippery concept: “People are born and dying inside of me all the time,” Greer sings on “Lelia 20.”
When kakistocracy reigns and George Orwell’s 1984 is a bestseller again, you might wonder if now’s the best time for Priests to get introspective. But their insistence on wriggling free from definition and feeling the weight of darkness has roots in resistance. On “Nicki,” which rings with cavernous dread, Greer intones, “I don’t make friends easily or naturally,” sliding over the consonants like an eel escaping grasping hands. Priests’ insistence on mutable identity, and their disinterest in pinning down a 10-point plan to vanquish fascism, let them slip free of those who seek to gentrify, identify, commodify. In a society where it’s becoming increasingly apparent to everyone that your words can and will be used against you, Nothing Feels Natural is a valuable philosophy.


The crassly political EP from Andy Gill struggles to capture the power found in the band’s most potent statements.

Complicit EP

Gang of Four’s 40-year interrogation of complicity has been so thorough, pretty much anything the UK post-punk band has undertaken—signing to EMI, licensing a song to Microsoft, watching their original bassist join the Artist Relations team at Apple Music—became a sort of praxis. You could even view the band’s middling recent years—during which every original member departed save for guitarist Andy Gill—as a meta-narrative about the kind of brand maintenance required by late-stage capitalism. So when Gill came across a clip of presidential daughter Ivanka Trump parrying a CBS interviewer’s question about complicity regarding her father’s white-nationalist policies, how could he not reappropriate it?
Cannily, Gill made his response the centerpiece of the band’s latest project, the rather thin Complicit EP. The brittly funky “Ivanka (Things You Can’t Have)” forswears any legit commentary, settling for that very 21st-century form of discourse: dunking on someone. “Ivanka” feints at inhabiting her headspace, using a quote from the CBS interview (“I don’t know what it means to be complicit”) as a jump-off for some decently snide, but not particularly illuminating barbs. Then, like your Democratic uncle replying to a Chris Hayes tweet, things go off the rails. “In the morning Daddy wants me in his room/It’s where we get together,” winks singer John Sterry, “It’s not true that Daddy calls my name in stormy weather.”
Amazingly, that isn’t the only song on the EP inspired by a television broadcast. Like a Marxist version of Ivanka’s father, Gill has also drawn creative energy from the endless time-fill of cable news. Opening track “Lucky”—the product of Gill watching “six white men in suits arguing about the stock markets”—is a thumping, treble-fuzz indictment of capitalism’s meritocracy myth that lands some glancing blows against its current captain. Gill enlists backing singers to provide the kind of ersatz-funk frisson found on 1982’s Songs of the Free; on the bridge, bassist Thomas McNeice affects some nauseating dubstep wubs. He gets to do some vintage post-punk bell-ringing on “I’m a Liar,” a wind-buffeted slog through our current digital winter. Sterry attempts some prophet-without-honor poignance (“They said I’m a liar/’Cause no one believes when the place is on fire”) before succumbing to the watery vocal processing.
Though the band is planning a full-length follow-up, Complicit doesn’t suggest that we’ll see much of Gang of Four’s particular strengths. In their prime, few acts were better at chronicling the thousands of ways we are induced to sell ourselves—and each other—out. Certainly no one else could make that kind of interrogation sound so crackling and immediate. Complicit, however, is content to thumb its nose at particularly vile actors instead of considering the script they’ve been handed.


After another three-year break, Cursive return with a straight shot of melodramatic misery and despair, leavening the shouty intensity with orchestration.

Mama, I'm Swollen

Since the release of their breakthrough album, The Ugly Organ, in 2003, Cursive have taken three-year sabbaticals between recordings. Fans waited until 2006 for Happy Hollow, which showed the quartet developing in leaps and bounds musically while earnestly exploring themes such as the conflict of religion in North American society and the depressing blandness of suburban life. It signaled an enterprising departure for the group, both lyrically and melodically, and seemed to open up abundant possibilities for their future development, as though Cursive could go in any number of directions. So it's a little disappointing that their latest full-length, Mama, I'm Swollen, rarely strays far beyond the most palpable and predictable emo-punk. It's a straight shot of melodramatic misery and despair from beginning to end.
During a tour in 2007, original drummer Clint Schnase left Cursive and was replaced by Cornbread Compton of Engine Down, whose fantastic beats really make their mark on Mama, I'm Swollen. Singer Tim Kasher, also of fellow Saddle Creek band the Good Life, has more than proved his mettle as a lyricist in the past. Here he turns his attention to an obsession with hell, the worthlessness of humanity, and the Peter Pan Syndrome of adults who want to "live life duty free" ("Cavemen") or fuck away their fears ("From the Hips"). Kasher's words, like his vocal delivery, veer from whisper to anguished yowl. At times he is on top form, particularly on "We're Going to Hell" and "Mama, I'm Satan". But lines such as "I'm at my best when I'm at my worst" and "Every record I've written has left me smitten/ It's a career in masturbation" sound like they belong in a teenager's journal and feel somewhat pathetic coming from the mouth of a 34-year-old-- an opinion that Kasher is no doubt slamming throughout the record in his defense of social nonconformity. All the same, it's a bit humdrum in light of what he's capable of.
Musically, Cursive's range is subtler here compared to their previous albums, but there are some satisfying occasions when everything pulls together nicely. Shifting time signatures keep the more straightforward songs from getting dull, and there are plenty of thoughtful guitar hooks interlaced with brass sections, strings, and an intermittent flute. Unfortunately, it's the occasional appearance of these additional instruments that sparks the most excitement while listening to this record. The final song, "What Have I Done", a tale of a man holed up in an El Paso motel scratching lyrics on paper plates instead of writing a great novel, turns out to be the album's most memorable track. It impresses with its swell of electronic ambiance, growling bass, and triumphantly dejected chorus as Kasher keeps screaming "What have I done, what have I done, what have I done!" until he is out of breath.
Considering their devout following, Cursive fans are likely to be divided by Mama, I'm Swollen. There is of course a huge market for their kind of angst-ridden emo, and in many ways-- particularly lyrically-- this album sounds like it's been lifted straight from the emo handbook, which may well satisfy many listeners. For the less committed, however, the lack of the band's usual wit and musical inventiveness will be missed.


Despite Kevin Barnes' role-playing-- he again here inhabits the figurative skin of alter ego Georgie Fruit-- the story on this album is its relentlessly schizophrenic composition, with nearly an hour of song fragments fused into 15 tracks.

Skeletal Lamping

If there's any lingering suspicion that alter ego Georgie Fruit was merely an offhand whimsy by Kevin Barnes-- just tongue-in-cheek self-mystification-- Skeletal Lamping will clear things up. Last year's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? was so rich with cathartic pop goodness it's easy to forget Barnes supposedly morphed into a middle-aged African-American transsexual midway through the album. And he hasn't yet changed back. Longtime fans still hoping for a return to The Gay Parade or Cherry Peel days of innocence may want to stop reading, because Skeletal Lamping roofies Hissing Fauna's back half to live out Barnes', er, Georgie's sexual fantasies.
However, the story with Skeletal Lamping isn't Barnes' role playing, but its relentlessly schizophrenic composition. Although broken into 15 tracks, the album seems like nearly an hour of song fragments. The pop hooks are still there, but like the similarly kaleidoscopic material of the Fiery Furnaces or even Girl Talk, Skeletal Lamping can be utterly exhausting, even at its most fun-loving.
The album starts harmlessly with the fractured but hummable one-two punch of "Nonpareil of Favor" and "Wicked Wisdom" before "For Our Elegant Caste"-- which contains one of the most annoying choruses of the year-- kicks off the album's convoluted middle section. Excepting the 90-second Elton John coke crash "Touched Something's Hollow", this middle portion whips the listener through a rollercoaster of orgasms, hangovers, and euphoria, leaving no time in between for a breather. Georgie's funk persona-- he played in a 70s funk band named Arousal apparently-- feels most apropos on the Prince bedroom ballad "St. Exquisite's Confessions", but the laidback tempo doesn't allow Barnes to spew his typical 100 hooks per minute, making the track his most by-the-numbers genre hop.
The brief teases of Barnes' melodic mastery will probably frustrate even more than Lamping's clunkers. Single "Id Engager" closes the album on a surprisingly carefree note, concluding the twisted sexual odyssey with the one song that could've passed prima facie on Hissing Fauna. The stunning chorus on "Plastis Wafers" meanders through disco and cock rock with equal grace, but requires the listener to suffer wandering passages that help push the track over seven minutes. "Wicked Wisdom" finds Georgie not yet a full-blown lothario, and his sympathetic naiveté, whether lamenting his struggles to connect with girls or flaunting his puppy love, is reinforced by gumball hooks ranging from power-pop to psychedelic melodrama.
Ultimately Skeletal Lamping registers as a misstep, but not without loads of silver lining. For one, Kevin Barnes has established himself as the anti-Christ to the polite, erudite indie world, and for all this album's shortcomings, it's a breath of fresh air for those bored by ivory tower indie rock. For that matter, with an overblown live show replete with costume changes, skits, video screens, etc., Of Montreal's hardly pretending to be an album-oriented act anymore, making Lamping feel like a soundtrack to a much more interesting movie. Coming off his magnum opus, it's understandable Barnes takes a victory lap here, but his mad genius-- no matter how outwardly freewheeling and escapist-- sounds better wrung through some semblance of a conventional pop filter.