The beguiling new album from producer Elysia Crampton is a dizzying, hyper-conceptual collection of miniatures. It highlights a number of her hallmark sounds before pushing into strange new territory.

Spots y Escupitajo

The first identifiable sound you hear on Spots y Escupitajo, the beguiling new album by producer Elysia Crampton, is a flushing toilet. The next is a creepy, Chucky-style laugh set against a revving motor, screeching tires, crashing metal, and the tinkle of broken glass. Crampton’s in a nihilistic mood, it seems—but if you’re not careful, you might miss her cues. After a mere 19 seconds, the album has already reached track three—or in this case, “Spot 3.”
Spots y Escupitajo is a set of blink-and-you-missed-them miniatures. “Spot 1” through “Spot 8” occupy only the opening minutes of the collection, and they function like a recap of Crampton’s output to date, flagging a number of her hallmark sounds in a flurry of activity before pushing outward into strange new territory. It’s a dizzying run, each over before it really registers, each dense with chaos yet familiar. Crampton may have a side hustle in the works—these spinback-laden bridges could function convincingly well between chart toppers on an adventurous Latin American radio station. The rest of the album builds on this hyper-conceptual premise, with knotty, uneasy explorations of Crampton’s emerging sound.
Spots is a difficult listen, though—a record that will surely finds more fellow-feeling in the gallery world than among casual fans. On “Battle & Screams,” thunderous destruction and cries of agony are scrambled into a grotesque shimmer via a comically low bitrate. Later, “Sombra Blanca Misteriosa (y Rara)” reads like an traveler’s audio diary overdubbed with a plunky single digit piano figure. Stark and disorienting, it raises plenty of questions about what’s being heard while remaining emotionally at arm’s length; it practically demands an artist statement.
Of course, Crampton has proven to be comfortable giving artist statements. A 2015 feature by Resident Advisor was peppered with dense quotes that swam happily in the seas of cultural theory. For example, “To go further and consider ourselves on a geological level ruptures hierarchies and taxonomical divides as we find ourselves already deeply enmeshed in the strangeness and vast timescales of the lithic.” If the rhetoric risked confounding some thinkers, the music itself—2015’s American Drift—was entrancing and accessible, dealing in tapestries of melody set against drowsy halftime rhythms. The chuckles, sound effects, and radio announcer voices (which return on Spots) floated through the EP, a fever dream of cultural identity, post-colonial trauma, late capitalism, gender, race, class.
The new album’s apt title, meanwhile, itself offers a clue into Crampton’s thinking: the self-identified “spots” are situated at the front while the *Escupitajo—*spittle—fills out the rest. An unsettling film of disgust covers these pieces, refusing to coalesce. Crampton coats her works with possible meanings and interpretations, but with few hooks. Near the end, two songs serve as the record’s spiritual apex. “Chuqi Chinchay” is built around an ode to a dual-gendered god, performed in a voice reminiscent of a video game monologue. Chintzy strings emote in the background, softening ambient gunfire and a steady stream of disheveled audio. Inspired partially by Transformers, the song evokes a potent intersection between the banality of mass entertainment and the enduring power of myths. Crampton’s explorations of our spiritual nature, tethered inextricably to our bodies, our material world, and our histories, teases out remarkable subtext from pop culture dreck, illuminating the ways ancient themes seem to manifest in even our most disposable products.
“Spittle” follows with the opposite. For nine and half minutes, Crampton wanders around a piano, sketching dreamy and dissonant figures. No voices jut in. There are no synthesizers, no samples, though some of her harmonies harken back to American Drift’s most stunning passages. Occasionally aimless, it’s nonetheless a moment of unvarnished, concept-free vulnerability amid a deluge of high-concept rigor, and it works.
Crampton’s music always feels so suffused with context, subtext, citations, and inverted meanings that it’s tempting to assume Spots has a puzzle to solve, or ever more meaning to be dug up. But Spots is an intriguing subversion that doesn’t quite stick; as with much conceptual art, the concepts often eclipse the art. Maybe they strike a chord in you that you barely knew was there. Maybe they leave you coldly comprehending, without a way in. Regardless, Spots is the type of sounds-good-on-paper work you really ought to check out once.


Though no song on the Chicago rock band’s all-covers album is particularly wild or ambitious, the collection is faithful, fine-tuned, and thoughtfully curated.

Candid

Whitney found their voice by idolizing the voices of others. This is as foundational to the band as floral instrumental arrangements, great hair, and Julien Ehrlich’s pinched falsetto. Before Whitney was a widely beloved retro-rock group, “Whitney” was their muse: a fictional character invented by co-bandleaders Ehrlich and Max Kakacek whose thoughts they channeled into their first songs. In those early days, they moonlit as the backing band for the proudly rinky-dink diva Jimmy Whispers, alchemizing their full, brass-tinged sound into the warm glow of a spotlight pointed at someone else.
The band quickly struck gold with “Golden Days,” the anthem of their 2016 Laurel Canyon-revering debut album, Light Upon the Lake. Elton John was spilling his guts to Ehrlich over the phone within months; Ehrlich gushed back to him about the singer Weyes Blood. But since that year, Whitney haven’t sounded quite so emphatically in love with their influences. Last year’s album, Forever Turned Around, was much more internal and melancholy. Their golden glow became that of embers, instead of sparks. It seems possible that they’ve scuffled with writer’s block: With their new all-covers album, Candid, Whitney have now formally released almost as many cover songs as they have originals.
Whitney approach Candid like an inspiration board with 10 portraits tacked up—Ehrlich quite directly calls it “an exploration into how we can evolve as a band going forward.” The artists whom Whitney had covered before now generally scanned with their country-soul sensibilities: Neil Young, Allen Toussaint, NRBQ, Wilco, Dolly, Dylan. Here, not exactly: On Candid, Whitney tackle pithy folksters (the Roches, Blaze Foley) and enigmatic men of introspection (Moondog, Damien Jurado), but also women of heady, swirling R&B (SWV, Kelela), David Byrne, and a 1972 instrumental interlude by the French film composer Jack Arel that might be best known as a Mick Jenkins sample.
For the most part, these covers are faithful, fine-tuned, and sound great. No track on Candid warps its original in a particularly wild or ambitious way; Whitney are more concerned with nailing these takes respectfully than fundamentally reimagining them. Impressively, the band commits to an entire nine- or 10-piece arrangement for Moondog’s spare, longing piano song “High on a Rocky Ledge” like it was there all along: Kakacek’s lilting guitar refrain leads the way, and Ehrlich doesn’t shy away from pronouncing “mädel edelweiß.” SWV’s extremely sensual “Rain” and Foley’s resigned lament “Rainbows & Ridges”—probably the two most aesthetically unalike songs covered here—are slotted next to each other at the end of the album, but Erlich’s tender singing voice seems to connect them without stretching. Only “Strange Overtones,” a highlight of Byrne and Brian Eno’s second collaborative album, lands awkwardly—dance rhythms just aren’t a natural fit on Whitney.
Candid has a second, more interesting function, though, one that’s independent of Whitney’s taste or talent as players. It has to do with the fact that most of these songs were not their creators’ most famous—they’re the ones that get buried a little further under better-known work, and all the rest of the music in the world, with each passing day. It’s not just that these picks are obscure or diverse, or that Ehrlich and Kakacek probably make outstanding playlists. It’s how they seem to select a few interesting pebbles from an infinite beach, polish them, and place them on a mantle. It’s how they pluck one of Labi Siffre’s many dozens of good songs, place it alongside one of Damien Jurado’s, and behold the pairing. This feels like the “candid” to which Whitney refer: not in the sense of frank and direct, but of capturing moments that weren’t necessarily destined for preservation.
Their inclusion of John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is the obvious exception, but a verse by Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield—Candid’s lone feature—single-handedly validates the choice. The folk-rocker and born Southerner sounds crushingly genuine as she pays loving tribute to her musical and geographical roots; after hearing Crutchfield sing it, you’ll feel almost guilty to have ever found the song’s ubiquity grating.
It nearly qualifies as Candid’s finest moment, but that title goes to the other selection here that was its original artist’s signature song, though nowhere near as successful. “Hammond Song,” the 1978 track by singing sisters the Roches, is about as underappreciated as perfect folk songs come—and, as far as modern bands not named Haim go, Whitney are maybe the most logical choice to interpret it. Ehrlich synthesizes the sisters’ three harmony lines into one melody as he takes on their fears that the song’s subject is “on the wrong track” in moving to the titular Louisiana city and leaving behind family, home, and all other prospects. Whitney have yet to truly lose their way, and it’s because they wear influences like this so well.

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Rapper G Herbo doesn't traffic in the kind of pioneering stylistic breakthroughs common to the first wave of drill artists—King Louie, Lil Durk, or Chief Keef. He is not drill's most versatile talent, preferring to play to his own strengths.

Ballin Like I’m Kobe

Can street rap really raise alarm bells? Or are profit-minded artists merely preaching to the sociological choir—did you know the hood is fucked up?—while affirming and banking off conservative America's worst stereotypes? Certainly it would be difficult to suggest gangster rap tropes are winning a PR war over middle America. But at the same time, the implicit realism of Chicago's street rap scene makes armchair cynicism about its stars' motives impossible: Ballin Like I'm Kobe is no lazy b-ball double entendre, but a reference to Jacobi D. Herring, a friend of G Herbo's who was killed in 2013, and over whose tombstone he crouches on the tape's cover. Likewise, "I'm Rollin", the tape's underground smash single, opens with a roll call of lost friends, and the drug they'd do with Herb if they were here today.
That Southside-produced track comes near the tape's conclusion, and it's the most structurally compelling on the album. This isn't the kind of hit you can force; it just happens. It sounds as if it were hewn from craggy granite, each segment of the song—the beat, the backgrounds, the chorus, Herb's rapping—grinding into place, sparks flying. It takes up an aggressive amount of space, forcing listeners to open themselves to its heft and rough edges. Formally, the record is his most innovative, one which ambitiously reimagines the rules of songcraft. Thematically, it captures the strange dissonances of what's been called drill music, its heightened stakes and tragic context contrasting starkly with its artists' armored detachment.
No other song on Ballin Like I'm Kobe feels quite so one-of-a-kind. Sometimes it's pro forma; drill records like the DJ L-produced "Gang" sound as if they could have been recorded any time within the past three years. But outside of "I'm Rollin", Herbo's doesn't traffic in the kind of pioneering stylistic breakthroughs common to the first wave of drill artists—King Louie, Lil Durk, or Chief Keef. He is not drill's most versatile talent, preferring to play to his own strengths. His more traditional approach is an ability to wring narrative pathos from the song without letting his voice's cracked shell fully break. His vocal style is ragged but forceful, and in contrast with the East Coast influences to which it might be readily compared—the LOX, say—there's a sense of Herbo's words scratching past the lines, moving with a looser, less precise rhythm, as if to suggest an anxious undercurrent. And likewise, his subject matter seldom moves toward the humor of classic New York mixtape artists, preferring to shift from the autobiographical to very real-seeming threats.
There's a tendency to approach Herb—in contrast with other artists on the scene—as if he were his genre's moral conscience, the Manichean good to drill's unmitigated baseline of evil. This reduces the genre's complexity to a simplistic binary. Herb's strength is less about moralism than it is about showing a complete human being in your speakers—an honest rendering of a morally compromised soul. These are the album's best moments. There is the DJ L-produced "Eastside", with scribbled double-time verses and contradictory tones of resignation and pride. It's an approach that works similarly on opener "L's": "The shit I been through made me heartless, all my feelings on this glock." And it's readily apparent on the melancholy "Bottom of the Bottom", which frames the rapper's aggressive approach with a crying string sample, which lends an echoing power to an atypically pointed chorus: "Now the judge hang us with a hundred years, used to hang us with a tree."

Cinematic / Machine Entertainment Group / 150 Dream Team


The latest from the incarcerated L.A. rapper, stemming from the same frenzied recording period just before he went to prison, is an hour of lived-in, reliable street rap that continues to shape and contour the psyche of a rapper in his final days of freedom.

03 Greedo / RonRonTheProducer: Load It Up, Vol. 01

Load It Up, Vol. 01

In a summer declared “lost” by partygoers and beach-dwellers, 03 Greedo barely felt the sun on his face. The transcendent L.A. rapper was enclosed in a cramped cell at the Middleton Unit in Abilene, TX, serving year two of a 20 year sentence for gun and drug trafficking charges. And starting on July 1, for 40 days and 40 nights, he was cut off from the outside world—no phone calls, no visits, not even fresh air—as Middleton went into total lockdown, tightening its vice grip on thousands of incarcerated people in response to the coronavirus pandemic.
At the start of his sprawling new album Load It Up Vol. 01, Greedo talks through prison phone static about the meaning of its title. It’s a mindstate—“I know I had to load up on songs and albums in order to feed my family while I was gone,” he says. It’s also lingo, a command to the album’s sole producer Ron-RonTheProducer—“Me and Ron-Ron would work from, like, 9pm to 9am, nigga playing beats. Soon as I hear some hot shit, I be like ‘load it up.’” The call ends, Ron-Ron’s tag plays, and what follows is an hour of lived-in, reliable street rap from a couple years ago that continues to shape and contour the psyche of a rapper in his final days of freedom.
Greedo’s greatest, bleakest accomplishment since incarceration hasn’t been any one album, but rather that he unfurled so much of himself into his brief months in the studio before he turned himself in. He was effectively forced to create at a hyper-accelerated pace, to drain himself into stuffy, exhausting nights with a rotating cast of rappers, producers, A&Rs and journalists just so he could feed his family and keep his name alive while the system put him away. In that stretch, he allegedly recorded dozens of projects. So far, we’ve gotten five: two tightly coiled albums with A-list producers Kenny Beats and DJ Mustard; two EPs with Travis Barker and Nef The Pharaoh; and now, Load It Up Vol. 01, with longtime collaborator Ron-RonTheProducer. It’s by far the most classically Greedo of the bunch, open and percolating and reminiscent in sound and form to projects like The Wolf Of Grape Street and God Level.
On Load it Up, Ron-Ron and Greedo tap into a brooding, midtempo groove that navigates the purple hues between trap and L.A. street rap. There are no love songs, no experiments in pop. These are lusty, self-possessed screeds that flow with the buzzing synergy of a wired night in the studio. Greedo doesn’t directly allude to his then-impending prison sentence more than a few times on this album, but his frantic race against time is noticeable. There is a palpable urgency in the way Greedo, for instance, raps through error and mumbling, as though there’s no time for retakes. On to the next song.
Still, Greedo finds fascinating ways to weave together disparate thoughts into numbing, transportive images. On “Gucci Of My City,” he compares himself to Gucci Mane—a star who, like Greedo, spent his prime years behind bars — then shrouds his whole world in the tinted glass of car windows and Gucci lenses, almost to suggest that he’d rather stay anonymous even when he’s free. And on “Scary Movie,” he draws a line through Friday The 13th and AKs, headless horsemen and hollow tips, all to paint a ghoulish picture of the projects. This is writing that isn’t writerly, full of impressionistic detail; it’s the mark of an artist constantly observing, constantly connecting.
Most rewardingly, it is still such a thrill to just listen to Greedo. For how conservative the production feels, Greedo is still wholly unpredictable, one of the best with Auto-Tune this side of Future. He’ll twist the tails of phrases into oblique, ballooning shapes (“Gwap”), launch into breathless, croaky tirades (“Choppa Hold A Hunnit”), warble on high notes while they flutter through pitch-correction (“Same Zone Interlude”). His energy is whirring and kinetic and seems to rub off on the guests—Chief Keef, Sada Baby, Key Glock, and more—who all deliver top-flight verses.
That feeling of witnessing the rapper deeply in his zone recalls earlier, more hopeful times. Such is the tragic, inescapable truth of Greedo’s pre-prison recording spree: how it ceaselessly transports you to alternate timelines and more forgiving worlds. Greedo has lost a chunk of life over drug and gun charges that could be traced back to a litany of systemic factors, including losing his father as a child, moving into Watts’ insular, oppressive Jordan Downs projects as an outcast teenager, facing bouts of homelessness, having a baby at 18, and losing his closest friend Lil Money in a gunfight. Load It Up, Vol 01 is undeniable; it’s also inextricably tied to these cold, cruel facts.

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Bitchin Bajas' second, self-titled album finds the experimental trio blending musicial personalities of the past to create their own sonic identity. There are no forced attempts at edginess, even though their simple techniques keep the music loose and live-sounding.

Bitchin Bajas

The line between homage and mimicry is so blurry that it sometimes doesn’t even exist. But is it possible to arrive at homage by jumping over the divide, and diving into the deep end of mimicry? It sounds like Bitchin Bajas are testing that theory on their self-titled double LP. Band founder Cooper Crain hasn’t been shy about his influences, citing 20th century minimalists such as Terry Riley as guiding lights. But this time around, the antecedents are clearer than ever. The aforementioned forefathers and a bunch of others (try German drifters like Cluster and Popul Vuh) pop up all over Bitchin Bajas—and since there are only eight tracks spread across the album’s 77 minutes, they get lots of space to reveal themselves.
Even though there's lots of references to be heard on Bitchin Bajas, very little of this record sounds plagiaristic. It's almost like listening to the thought processes of Crain and bandmates Dan Quinlivan and Rob Frye, rather than what they think goes on in their heroes' minds. They manage this not despite their influences, but because of them; there are no gratuitous divergences, no forced curveballs to prove the trio aren’t stealing. Their blending of past musical personalities creates a new one, much the way a thoughtful cover can change your view of the original. Bitchin Bajas journey so far into their inspirations that they find something of their own inside.
Bitchin Bajas is largely comprised of long journeys. 18-minute opener “Tilang” could exist as a single release on its own, progressing from mournful Stars of the Lid-like strings to rippling organs, whistling flutes, and harp-like glissandos. The way those sounds fold into each other recurs throughout the album, as the trio devise methods to make many voices (woodwinds, synths, xylophones) sing the same tune. The constant cross-dissolving can occasionally sound generic: “Field Study” opens with clichéd field recordings of water bubbling, birds chirping, and insects creaking. But even that piece resolves into something unique, as subtle beats make the music more about psychic relaxation than nature worship.
Relaxation may seem an unambitious musical goal, but Bitchin Bajas are proud to chase it. Crain said last year that “making music that is relaxing and comforting to us is important,” and the band even made a separate cassette version of Bitchin Bajas dubbed Relaxation Mixes that eliminates what they call “the intense peaks.” So naturally there’s little abandon on these two LPs; the trio only sound like they're losing control during the overlapping synth squiggles of the 12-minute “Bueu”.
But Bitchin Bajas' relaxation plan works because they’re committed to it. There are no forced attempts at edginess, even though their simple techniques keep the music loose and live-sounding. This purist approach puts them in the company of other recent post-new age wanderers—bands like Emeralds and Mountains, who are best when they sound most committed to their laid-back causes. For all their reverence toward the past, Bitchin Bajas know how to live in the present – there’s no knowing distance here—so at its best, Bitchin Bajas doesn’t give you ideas about sounds, but the sounds themselves.


The Kinks legend uses Americana to blaze a path through both America's rock’n’roll history and his own. Its back-to-basics energy and prosaic storytelling make it his best solo album in years.

Americana

As suggested by the title Americana, the former Kinks frontman is a cultural and musical paradox. The most emphatically English of all the British Invasion bandleaders, Britpop’s beloved father argues throughout his new album (and 2013 autobiography by the same name) that he spent much of his band’s 32-year career chasing the American Dream.
Even so, many of the Kinks’ most enduring hits—from 1965’s “A Well Respected Man” to 1977’s “Father Christmas”—drew explicitly from England’s class system, customs, and culture. While nearly every major UK act downplayed their Englishness once psychedelic pop morphed into acid rock, the Kinks defiantly celebrated it with Anglo-specific artistic peaks so out of step with the times they doubled as commercial failures, like ’68’s The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society.
But back in 1964, when Sir Ray and baby brother Dave practically invented heavy metal with “You Really Got Me” and “All Day and All of the Night,” the Kinks were imitating black American bluesmen. Then, when they partnered with master mogul Clive Davis and toured America almost nonstop through the late ’70s and early ’80s, much of their output so aped U.S. arena rock that nearly all of it bombed back home. Principally played by Ray Davies and the Jayhawks, the rowdiest chunks of Americana echo the wild riffs that animated those fist-pumping anthems.
Quoted at length in Americana the book, “The Great Highway” and “Wings of Fantasy” both lyrically and musically recall those road-hog years when Davies aimed to reclaim the mass audience (and dollars) the U.S. establishment denied him during the British Invasion’s reign. Flaunting soupy arrangements of straightforward power chords, these cuts aren’t Americana as the rootsy genre is now defined, but they sure sound American–nearly a Coors ‘n’ tailgate reference away from bro-country.
Yet most of Americana avoids the hammy growling that marred earlier Davies solo records like 2006’s Other People’s Lives and 2007’s Working Man's Café, even though, as the book reveals, some of its songs predate those albums. On the opening title track, Davies so abandons his usual music hall delivery and near-Cockney accent that he’s barely recognizable. Having finally achieved West End success with 2014’s still-running jukebox musical Sunny Afternoon, Davies redirects his theatricality into Americana’s narrative. Like the book, it forgoes chronology as it zigzags from childhood dreams of Wild West buckaroos to delusional Hollywood aspirations; back to the Kinks’ maiden voyage to America, when their long hair and pervy moniker initially marked them more threatening than the Stones; and forward to being shot in 2004 by a mugger nearby his adopted New Orleans home.
No matter where he dwells, Davies remains an outsider, and that alienation unites Americana’s jumble of eras and places. On “Poetry,” he kneels in gratitude at the local KFC for the abundance that corporations bestow upon us. This is Davies in Dylan mode, hyperbolic but as dazzling with prosaic details as his student Jarvis Cocker. And unlike his previous post-Kinks cohorts, the Jayhawks steer clear of Nashville gloss while conjuring the appropriate C&W-tinged folk-rock fare. Keyboardist Karen Grotberg even duets with Davies on “Message from the Road,” evoking the tumbleweed kitsch of Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood while still pulling heartstrings.
Preceded by a quote from the book about his New Orleans neighbor, the late Alex Chilton, “Rock ‘N’ Roll Cowboys” provides the other poignant highlight. It’s a eulogy for rock’s rebels as well the music itself that’s delivered as a bittersweet bluegrass waltz, and it extends a metaphor of the formerly outlaw genre as a vanquished frontier. “Your time’s passed, now everyone asks for your version of history,” he mournfully croons. “Do you live in a dream, or do you live in reality?” He poses the question without answering it himself; there’s no need.


The New York-based composer offers two experimental, evocative pieces featuring cello, viola, and double bass to uniquely recreate and interact with the spaces in which they were recorded.

Lea Bertucci: All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

All That Is Solid Melts Into Air

The two compositions on New York-based artist Lea Bertucci’s All That Is Solid Melts Into Air are the product of the two spaces in which they were recorded: ISSUE Project Room’s 22 Boerum Place theater in downtown Brooklyn, and the cavernous main room of the Knockdown Center in Maspeth, Queens (both cornerstones of New York’s experimental music and performance communities). As an instrumentalist, Bertucci generally works with woodwinds, but here she composes and conducts for strings. These challenging, durational works tease a range of sounds and narratives out of these instruments, experimenting with how they resonate in the distinctive spaces in which they were recorded.
“Cepheid Variations,” with Leila Bourdreuil on cello and Jeanann Dara on viola, was written for the 22 Boerum Street theater when Bertucci was a resident at Issue Project Room, premiering there in early 2015.It begins as a delicate conversation between cello and viola, conducted initially in sustained, crystalline harmonics. This picks up, occasionally, in miniature palpitations of rushed sound, until Bordreuil and Dara’s instruments meet, ringing out. From there, a sort of dissolution occurs, the sound of bowed strings swallowed by scraping and whining. Bertucci enters the score with live tape manipulations, lending texture but also upending the sense of familiarity and solidity afforded by a richer-sounding and more recognizable string instrument. Her concrete sound moves in space quite differently from the strings, and the juxtaposition of the two instills an unsettling and thrilling sense of multidimensionality.
“Double Bass Crossfade” is the more conceptual of the two pieces, relying not just on resonance in space, but on a pair of players’ movement through it. To record, James Ilgenfritz and Sean Ali were positioned at opposite corners of Knockdown Center’s massive main room, their double basses amplified wirelessly. For just over forty minutes, we’re told, they moved in the space: first toward one another, crossing paths and then journeying on to the spot opposite from where they started. In a recorded version, of course, such movement is less immediately audible, though there’s something charming about projecting an image of the two musicians traveling and interacting onto this relational performance.
They toy with scale, pulling tones from all over the bass’s register, but particularly following the splintering harmonics of “Cepheid,” “Double Bass Crossfade” maintains a physicality, a sense of weightedness. If the former resembles the auditory equivalent of a sharp graphite drawing, the latter brings to mind rough smears of oil. As the players approach one another, their instruments pick up volume and develop textures below their plaintive scrawls. The double basses begin to growl in—well, not really in harmony, but as they hit their respective low ends, their rumbling melts together, producing a totalizing effect.
Though these pieces often build to moments of breathless intensity, they both unfold in a distinctly unhurried way. One gets the sense that Bertucci arrives at her work not with an idea to impose, but a question to develop. The groundlessness of the music isn’t altogether surprising, and, as evidenced particularly well in “The Cepheid Variations,” can propel the listener somewhere new (a place that I’m not convinced even Bertucci could, or would want to, put language to). It was strange to be considering site-specificity while listening to these works in no particular place. What does it mean for a recording to hold traces of a location when those traces are largely immaterial? I think, at least, of the fact of venues so willing to be transformed through the introduction of chaotic harmonics and strange resonances, of Bertucci being afforded space to fill and warp.


The debut album from Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and drummer Tom Skinner’s new group is instantly, unmistakably the best album yet by a Radiohead side project.

The Smile: A Light for Attracting Attention

A Light for Attracting Attention

When Thom Yorke introduced his new band at their first gig a year ago, he took a moment to explain their name. “Not the Smile as in ha ha ha,” he said, his faux laugh echoing eerily, “more the Smile of the guy who lies to you every day.” Of course, no one figured that the most uncannily accurate doomsayer of the modern age was taking a sharp left to clown town with his latest project, but the Smile are not just aimed at shifty politicians, either. Their pearly grins are myriad, taking inspiration from smiles of love and deceit, bloody smiles and blissful ones, smiles that mend and smiles that destroy. At 53, Yorke has seen them all. And once again, he’s battling the absurdity of existence the only way he knows how: by offering a salve for his anxieties without letting anyone off the hook for turning everything we hold dear into one big joke.
This bid for transcendence amid chaos isn’t the only thing that’s familiar about the Smile. The trio also includes Yorke’s main songwriting partner in Radiohead, Jonny Greenwood, along with drummer Tom Skinner, whose eclectic resume includes work with jazz-funk explorers Sons of Kemet, electronic fusionist Floating Points, and UK rapper Kano. It’s the first time Yorke and Greenwood have collaborated on a major project outside of their main gig, and, not coincidentally, A Light for Attracting Attention sounds more like a proper Radiohead album than any of the numerous side projects the band’s members have done on their own.
We’ve got Greenwood’s lattice-like fingerpicking and saintly electric guitar tone. There’s Yorke’s voice, still in pristine form, wailing like an angel in limbo and gnashing like a punk who woke up on the wrong side of the gutter. There are synths and Greenwood’s sidelong orchestral flourishes signaling end times. Longtime producer Nigel Godrich is in the control room, giving each sound an immense and terrifying and beautiful glow. How about some wonky rhythms that keep your mind from slipping into passive mode? Yep, lots of those too. All due respect to the guys from Radiohead who are not in the Smile, but if A Light for Attracting Attention were presented as the triumphant follow-up to the group’s last album, 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, I’d bet that most people would have happily been fooled.
Then again, considering Radiohead’s infamous aversion to repeating themselves—a tendency that has at times brought them to the brink of self-destruction—perhaps it makes a strange kind of sense that this very Radiohead-y album isn’t an actual Radiohead album. It might be too obvious, too expected. So after recently retracing their own past with deluxe reissues, Yorke and Greenwood’s version of ripping it up and starting again takes the form of a new band plumbing humanity’s depths in a way that anyone who’s followed their old band over the last 30 years could appreciate.
The Smile spotlights the creative relationship between Yorke and Greenwood like never before. The two first met in adolescence, while attending Oxford’s Abingdon School in the 1980s: As Greenwood has told it, he was playing in the school’s drum room when Yorke, three years his senior, pushed him aside and told him to try a nearby upright bass instead. There was one problem—Greenwood had no idea how to play bass. Yorke, undeterred, said, “It’ll be fine, just attack it.” Since then, Greenwood has not only attacked but mastered many instruments in his role as Radiohead’s resident avant-garde musical guru, while also becoming one of the most progressive film score composers of his generation. Yorke still prefers a more intuitive approach. (“Jonny is absolutely adamant that I should not learn to read music,” Yorke once said. “He wants me to be the idiot savant.”) The duo’s left brain-right brain dynamic has proven to be one of the most adventurous in rock history.
A Light for Attracting Attention starts with a duet of sorts between Yorke and Greenwood called “The Same.” It’s the only song on the album that doesn’t feature any other players—no drums, no strings, no horns. On the track, Yorke offers a plea for human connection. “We are all the same, please,” he sings, emphasizing the last word like a man facing the barrel of a gun. On paper, you could imagine Chris Martin singing a line like that, but this is no hokey Coldplay anthem. “The Same” begins with a spare synthesizer throb vaguely reminiscent of Kid A opener “Everything in Its Right Place” that serves as the song’s heartbeat. But as it goes on, more and more sounds slowly surround that pulse, like so many nattering voices sowing discord. A repetitive piano figure bobs up and down. The modular tones begin to swarm and then fray at the edges. The effect is disorienting, almost frightening. Even if we are the same, the song seems to suggest, the static we drift through every day is working overtime to keep us apart.
From there, the album alternately combats the horrors of modern life with roiling anger and Zen-like serenity. It churns through an all-too-common cycle: see red, get fed up, take a few very deep breaths, do it all over again. A Light for Attracting Attention’s stiffest middle finger comes with “You Will Never Work in Television Again,” the most raucous Radiohead-related track since Hail to the Thief’s “2 + 2 = 5” nearly two decades ago. Armed with three distorted chords that could have filled CBGB in 1977, Yorke puts on his best sneer while standing up to a “gangster troll” who’s lording his power over an aspiring young woman. Given its explicit reference to former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s “bunga bunga” sex parties, this chivalrous salvo for the #MeToo era could very well be aimed at that disgraced politician, who was once convicted of soliciting sex from a minor. Or maybe Yorke was thinking of Harvey Weinstein when he wrote of a “sad fuck” with “piggy limbs.” The fact is this song could reasonably be directed at so many different terrible men. As Yorke growls out lines like, “Take your dirty hands off my love/Heaven knows where else you’ve been,” you can practically see the spittle leave his lips.
Also likely on the Smile’s shit list: the 45th president of the United States. “A Hairdryer”—with its barbs about someone who flies south for the sun, blames everyone else for his screw-ups, and spins reams of lies—certainly seems like a swipe at the magically coiffed former head of state. Does the world need another Trump diss track right now? Probably not. But will the anxious song, which skitters on the back of Skinner’s pointillistic hi-hat work, feel increasingly relevant over the next couple of years, as the world braces for the next clusterfucked U.S. presidential election? Most definitely yes. That’s part of Yorke’s power as a dystopian seer: Every description of the present seems to also foretell the future.
When the Smile aren’t venting, they’re surfing the slime, reaching for specks of pleasure and solace wherever they can find them. “The Smoke” is a beguiling waft of understated funk that sounds like a collaboration between Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti and Marvin Gaye—thanks to Yorke’s wobbling bassline and falsetto moans hinting at sensuality and self-immolation, it’s the sexiest thing he’s ever set to tape. “Free in the Knowledge,” the album’s most direct song, deserves a spot among classic Radiohead ballads like “True Love Waits” and “Give Up the Ghost.” It’s about wishful thinking in a world where authoritarianism seems so far away—until it isn’t. “A face using fear to try to keep control,” Yorke sings, before his mind tentatively turns to revolution: “But when we get together, well then, who knows?” This isn’t a call to arms, though. It’s an admission of fragility that rings painfully clear and true. The floating hymn “Speech Bubbles” mines a similar uncertainty. Over airy percussion and Greenwood’s fluttering strings and piano, Yorke sounds like a refugee with nowhere to go. As he wails about cities on fire and a sudden sense of dislocation, it’s easy to connect the words to images of Ukrainian families torn apart, waiting for the next text from a loved one left behind.
The time Yorke and Greenwood spend traveling through their own history reaches a heady apex on another weightless elegy that flows like entrance music for the afterlife. “Don’t bore us, get to the chorus,” Yorke sings over celestial synths on “Open the Floodgates,” evoking a classic rock cliché he’s spent a lifetime trying to dismantle. “We want the good bits/Without your bullshit/And no heartaches.” This internal monologue has been taking up space in the singer’s mind since at least the In Rainbows era in 2006, when Radiohead first sound-checked a version of the song. Its numbness in the face of impending death goes back even further, to OK Computer’s “No Surprises,” and Greenwood’s gently chiming guitar recalls “Let Down” from that same 25-year-old album. When the hook does arrive, it’s fraught and spare. “Someone lead me out the darkness,” Yorke repeats, as the cloud of synths begins to dissolve behind him. It’s an appeal that doubles as a pact between artist and audience—a pact that dredges resilience out from the abyss, that asks for absolution so we can receive it. A pact that, through it all, remains intact.


On his debut album, Ro James delivers a pleasant but only sporadically exciting R&B affair.

ELDORADO

Ro James made a relatively big splash late last year with the single “Permission,” a smooth dedication to consensual sex that managed to be both steamy and responsible. “Come on, give me that green light/You can let your hair hang down, but only if it feels right,” he purred over a sample of Willie Hutch’s “Brother’s Gonna Work It Out.” It was a magnetic debut and a fresh, comforting spin on a slow jam.
The rest of James’ debut album, ELDORADO, rarely matches that high. The follow-up to James’ Coke, Jack, and Cadillacs trilogy of EPs, it is a pleasant but only sporadically exciting R&B affair, one that only hints at his soulfulness and youthful exuberance. The German-born, American-raised James has raw talent but is clearly still forming his identity, and working to streamline his songwriting; he’s occasionally but passively engaging, like a subway singer might break through the commuter haze with a quick burst of melody. In James’ case, when he breaks free of Miguel cosplay, he can be riveting.
“A.D.I.D.A.S. (All Day I)” encapsulate much of the record; it’s serviceable but feels recycled, down to the lascivious acronym. The same could be said for the dizzying electro track “GA$,” which pulses along on reverberating synths and heavily processed falsetto yelps. It smacks more than a bit of Prince and the Weeknd, all its components familiar to the point of fatigue.
However, ELDORADO does have standout moments of lush, heartfelt R&B. The guitar-laden “Last Cigarette” is a gorgeous song about leaving one relationship in search of the right one, in the hope that the next love might be the one that lasts. “Looked her in the eyes, say goodbye/This is my goodbye/I walked through the door to explore/‘Cause I wanted more reasons to be loved” is a heart-wrenching moment of vulnerability. In the interlude for “Bad Timing” James harmonizes sleepily, “A nigga got a baby already, and I'm barely making it/I ain't faking it/Girl, I ain't ready.” It’s a rare, welcome show of complicated feelings on an R&B record caught up mostly in ideals of love and sex. ELDORADO needed more of this open emoting.
Considering R&B’s current state of eating its own tail, largely favoring artists who attempt to tap into nostalgia instead of innovate, any injection of fresh style is welcome. James has the potential to be that artist in the future. More than anything, ELDORADO is reminiscent of Frank Ocean’s The Lonny Breaux Collection: a hit-or-miss early set of songs that showed a faint blueprint of who the artist would eventually become. To his credit, ELDORADO has its moments, but James still needs to dig deeper.


This free set collects unreleased tracks from Kieran Hebden's project that were initially created between 1997 and 2001. Containing many elements that he would explore in more detail later, 0181 proves that consistency is Hebden's strongest asset.

0181

Last November, BBC Radio 6 DJ Gilles Peterson released a mix that Kieran Hebden had done for the station back in 1999. It was the same year that the then-young producer had released his debut album Dialogue under the moniker Four Tet, and the set was quick to reveal the him as a quirky experimental producer whose approach built on the sound of his post-rock high-school band Fridge. This high school, it turns out, was the Elliott School in Putney, a visual and performing arts school that counts members of Hot Chip, the xx, and William Bevan of Burial as alumni (all three would later collaborate with Four Tet). Which brings us to 0181, a collection of the producer's unreleased works from those early years-- starting from 1997 through the material made around the time of his second full-length, Pause, in 2001-- that Hebden issued to SoundCloud for free last week.
0181 as a whole serves as a reminder of the cyclic nature of this kind of instrumental production. Creating the electronic music of the future involves sifting through the past to re-discover sounds. 0181 bring to mind this sort of time-shift not because the sounds within are regressive, but rather because despite their 12-16 years of being hidden away, they feel surprisingly fresh. Made public as one long 38-minute track, 0181 has the flow of a mixtape, a wide-ranging showcase for Hebden's early production flair. Unconnected in any real way beyond their sequencing are hushed melodic interludes, moments of ambient static, jazzy constructions, and the naked bones of early 2-step.
At times it can be frustrating simply because the abrupt ends of some of the minute-long tracks leave us wanting more. The first thing we hear is a glimmering shower of piano keys that recalls some of Hebden's lush recent work like like Pink's "Jupiters", but then this sound dies out and we're then launched into scattered 2-step percussion. Twenty-eight-or-so minutes in you'll find folky, syncopated guitar plugs that serve as a reminder of why Four Tet was branded with the briefly fashionable term "folktronica." The jazz-inflected tracks that foreshadow Hebden's later collaborative projects with percussionist Steve Reid (The Exchange Sessions, Tongues, NYC) are where 0181 stretches the farthest and has the most room to develop, and these tracks also sound the most fixed in time. But even these moments pass quickly: around 20 minutes in, a lazy tune grooves along at the hands of a dreamy, smoky horn melody and a drum-kit, and it lasts all of three minutes.
In unearthing and presenting his earlier work now, Hebden accidentally proves that consistency is his strongest asset. His 15 years of music can easily be viewed through the lens of this scattered set, and it strikes the same chords now as it did then, in terms of both construction and feelings. All along, he's been building nuanced cinematic landscapes brimming with exploration.


Excising the weak and awkward bits that marred his other records, the Atlanta emcee's confidence here seems effortless and second-nature, his self-aggrandizement turning relentless and convincing.

King

T.I. has always been a great rapper, warm and fluid and confident, his loose elastic voice winding under tracks with force and finesse. Before every other mainstream rapper was talking about drugs, he was doing it with a weary lived-in authority, proudly defiant and sheepishly defensive at the same time, bragging about getting money but lamenting the fact that he only had one way to do it. But great rappers don't always make great albums, and every one of T.I.'s previous full-lengths had a fatal flaw: desperate grabs at radio love, grossly insincere sex-jams, cobbled-together non-cohesion, or all three. Last summer, I thought Young Jeezy's Let's Get It: Thug Motivation 101 was the album T.I. should've made. Jeezy isn't half the rapper that T.I. is, but his album-- stunning in its focus and monolithic swagger and deeply nihilistic in worldview-- had more cinematic sweep than anything his progenitor had ever done.
All that changes on King. From the opening seconds, something is different: low ominous strings, a regal horn fanfare swooping over funk guitars, and eerie horror-movie pianos welling up from some unseen abyss. The track's producer, Just Blaze, never makes tracks for Southern rappers, but here he's given T.I. a monstrous banger, something very few rappers will enjoy in their careers, and the emcee takes it like it's his birthright, stretching his drawl over the hectic boom like he just didn't have anything better to do. Over the first four tracks, nothing lets up. Texas legends UGK revisit one of their classic trunk-rattlers on "Front Back", and T.I. sounds like he's doing them a favor.
Single "What You Know" is truly epic, DJ Toomp's swollen synth woozily curling up and T.I. eating the track for lunch, beating Jeezy at the ad-lib game before delivering one of those choruses that gets stuck in your head all day and you don't even mind. And "I'm Talkin' to You" brings back Just Blaze again, laying down horn-blats with Bomb Squad urgency and T.I. coming heated and dangerous as fuck, utterly destroying some unnamed opponent ("How many different ways is it to say I'm getting cheddar more/ Than niggas twice as old, more popular and even selling more?") before busting out a head-spinning double-time flow on the last verse. When the dust finally settles, it's for "Live in the Sky", a maudlin but pretty ballad, T.I. bitterly lamenting dead friends before going on to regret his own mistakes, the storied seven felonies that mean his life could basically end after one slip-up, Jamie Foxx gingerly cooing the chorus.
And so the rest of the album goes, excising the weak and awkward bits that marred his other records. T.I.'s confidence seems effortless and second-nature, his self-aggrandizement turning relentless and convincing. If anything has been lost in his metamorphosis into aristocratically vicious Machiavellian monarch, it's his uncertainty, the touchingly awkward humility that crept into his voice when he begged neglected kids for forgiveness on Trap Muzik's "I Still Luv You".
But that stuff had to go-- as did the ugly bursts of misogyny that would occasionally surface. When he talks to women now, he's conversational and courtly. On "Why You Wanna", he leans over the languid house pianos from Crystal Waters' "Gypsy Woman (She's Homeless)": "What, he think he too fresh to show you that you're the best?/ Compliment you on ya intellect and treat you with respect?" On "Goodlife", he pulls off two miracles at once: making the Neptunes' recent schmaltzy Vegas-lounge glide sound good (not even Jay-Z managed that too often) and beating guest Common at his own fondly melancholy nostalgia game: "I was born into poverty, raised in the sewage/ Streets will always be a part of me; they made me the truest." And on "I'm Straight" he's right at home on, lazily bragging over lilting 1970s-soul flutes and wispy guitar twirls, next to a hard, greasy B.G., and a gasping, larger-than-life Jeezy. Even the album's most glaring misstep, the weak r&b; track "Hello", finds T.I. talking warmly to the girl who left him, which is nice. He can do that. He doesn't have to prove anything anymore.


Kevin Barnes delivers more ambitious psych-pop in the vein of Hissing Fauna or Skeletal Lamping, here with help from Jon Brion and Janelle Monáe.

False Priest

Is Kevin Barnes tired of sex? In the past three years, the waifish Of Montreal auteur has reinvented himself as a psychedelic Prince, leaving behind the innocent Elephant 6 storybook for a sweaty concoction of synthesizers and seduction. On the masterful Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?, Barnes battled depression and gave birth to a lascivious Mr. Hyde. Things only got more X-rated on Skeletal Lamping, an overstuffed orgy in both lyrical content and musical density overseen by Barnes' transvestite alter ego, Georgie Fruit. False Priest, the third part of this tarted-up trilogy, shows that Barnes is serious about his new phase, while also suggesting it might have gone stale.
For someone so concerned lately with coupling, Barnes' recording process over this period has been a largely solitary pursuit. False Priest is billed as a more collaborative effort, both on the production end with musical savant Jon Brion and in the spotlighted duets with divas Janelle Monáe and Solange Knowles. The outside influences play the role of Ritalin to Barnes' ADD, but the leaner sound reveals flaws even as it proposes ways to rebuild.
Take the duets, which offer the opportunity for Barnes' R&B fantasy camp to become reality; putting aside the fact that Barnes had already gotten pretty good at singing in duet, or trio, or chorus, with himself. "Enemy Gene", with Janelle Monáe, fares better of the two, not surprising given how her The ArchAndroid revealed Monáe as one of the few spirits restless enough to keep pace with Barnes. Turning particle physics and evolutionary biology into pillow talk, the (relatively) subdued track both features and is aptly described by Mellotron. However, Knowles' appearance, "Sex Karma", is a straightforward Jacksons pastiche built around the lamest double-entendre in Barnes' career: the John Mayer-esque leer, "you look like a playground to me."
Elsewhere, the duet is less between voices but between the musical palettes of Barnes and Brion, which prove compatible but are clearly differentiated. The letdown is that Brion's influence sounds less collaborative than cosmetic, as though Barnes showed up with a 95% complete album on his laptop and the duo merely set about punching up Of Montreal's characteristically thin sound. Still, the places where Brion's fingerprints (and gear) are most apparent are some of the album's highlights: the Wendy Carlos-style vocoder on the chorus of "Like a Tourist", the thicker guitar chug of "Coquet Coquette" and "Famine Affair", the lush, astral coda of "Our Riotous Defects".
But the first part of "Our Riotous Defects", handcuffed by funny-once spoken-word, is one of several indications that this Of Montreal era is running on fumes. The most enticing aspects of the band's R&B are the places where it deviates from the recipe: its acidic, self-loathing undercurrent, its sugar-high unpredictability. Barnes' tongue isn't quite as sharp on False Priest, and all the shock value has worn off of falsetto-funk tracks such as "Hydra Fancies" or "I Feel Ya' Strutter".
I wouldn't worry about Of Montreal, as they've proven themselves more than capable of evolving. The distance from their early tales of wax museums and mad scientists to Barnes' electro-glam hedonism is immense, but the switch produced an unlikely second, higher peak in the band's career. If False Priest signals that we may be on the downhill side of that summit, it may also contain the embryonic stages of the next ascent, just as 2005's The Sunlandic Twins contained the seeds of Barnes' metamorphosis. Should budget allow, a truer collaboration with Brion could speed the arrival of Of Montreal Mk. III, but it might also be time for Barnes to find his muse outside of the bedroom.


The fourth volume of Hyperdub's 10th anniversary retrospectives looks at the more danceable end of the imprint's wide spectrum. Along with an unearthed Burial cut are highlights from Cooly G, Kode9, and more.

Hyperdub 10.4

It's been a trying year for Hyperdub. The deaths of the Spaceape and DJ Rashad loom over every other positive development, from the reliable greatness of Burial to the continued ascension of Cooly G, Ikonika, and Laurel Halo. If the time for reflection and what-next speculation arrived with remembrances of Spaceape and Rashad, the fact that it coincides with Hyperdub's 10-year anniversary and the accompanying extended campaign to chronicle the label's arc is a dose of cold irony.
And yet it's hard not to feel hopeful. Taken in as a massive whole, Hyperdub's 10 series has done a fine job in blurring the lines between their strengths of the past and present, showing their points of origin and possible futures. And 10.4, its final installation, digs deep to showcase all the here-and-now movements set forth by the label. These two discs' worth of cuts emphasize just how danceable their canon really is, with a focus on techno, funky, and bass influences highlighting just what can result in the different hybridizations between the genres. That it does so by drawing on the core of contributors most associated with the Hyperdub continuum since the acts' early singles means the line between legacy artist and forward-thinking iconoclast might as well not exist for them.
The big pre-release buzz around 10.4 is that Kode9 finally got around to unearthing a previously unreleased Burial track. It's a strong start to the first disc's impressive run of vault material and new cuts, but it's also a curveball: "Lambeth" takes Burial's characteristic plastic snares and atmospheric crackles and ramps up the pop immediacy, UK garage roots resonating off its foggy chimes. Even its humming dark undercurrents feel warmer than usual. That's just the kickoff, though, and the first disc's succession of selections leans on the more energetic sides of core roster members.
Kode9 himself contributes "Oh", a feverish trip to Detroit that makes the bass bubble and switches up its clap beat out of left field while still keeping things fluid. Ikonika's relentless "Position VIP" reconfigures the piledriver pulse of her late-summer single to run both leaner and stronger, as though the route through Aerotropolis' vintage dance-pop tribute left her with an urge to create LinnDrum blast beats. And two Cooly G selections, "Him da Biz" and "Love Again", are a far cry from the charismatically lascivious R&B of this year's Wait 'Til Night: her voice recedes, though still resonates, behind sharp vintage techno that isn't as instantly warm as her more familiar work but makes up for it in pure energy.
Other rare tracks on the first disc come from artists who joined the Hyperdub collective after the half-decade 5: Five Years of Hyperdub, and the evolution is welcome. The boiling-chemical bassline and spring-loaded toy piano distortion of DVA's "Monophonic Nightmare" is a prime example of just how off the deep end the label's gotten when pushing the boundaries of house. At the other end of the spectrum, Walton's "Laser War" lures you in with a metallic zap-to-the-forebrain riff, only to drop it out a couple times to reveal that the real core is how he lets his drum pattern mutations run absolutely rampant. And two offerings from London collective Funkystepz ("Vice Versa" and "Fuller (Rev Vip)") are straight-up no-bullshit UK bass anthems that offer some of the collection's simplest yet deepest grooves.
As for the second disc, well, it's pretty much just gravy. As a more traditional best-of selection, it focuses on a lot of the label's most well-loved releases of the last five years, from the Tyco niteglow noir of Burial's "Street Halo" to two sides from Cooly G's first Hyperdub single, "Narst" and "Love Dub Refix", which revealed her potential for heart-tugging house and jagged UK funky from the start. There's no reason anybody invested in the first volume of this series, let alone the fourth, shouldn't have these already, though a few underrated deep cuts are always welcome. (Ill Blu's ringing stomper "Bellion" and the serpentine ragga-house of LV/Okmalumkoolkat collab "Boomslang" especially so.) But it's good to have that additional context, and while the presence of Kode9 & the Spaceape's seethingly intense "Love Is the Drug" hints at what we've lost, there's a powerful sense in 10.4 of what Hyperdub still has to come.


Album number 18 was recorded in the band’s homes during the pandemic, and trades psych-rock blitzes for a finely-woven sprawl of synth programming and MIDI sequences.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Butterfly 3000

Butterfly 3000

In 2010, Peter Gabriel shared a theory that many artists have held since time immemorial: “Happy music that is genuinely joyful is probably the hardest music to write.” That same year, King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard embarked on a journey of building a self-contained universe of demented prog and acid-fried freak-outs. It might be realms apart from “Solsbury Hill” and much of their own catalog, but the dreamy ease of Butterfly 3000 makes the Gabrielian promised land of “happy music” seem close at hand.

For all their forward motion, the Melbourne band specializes in a certain mazy non-linearity. On albums like Nonagon Infinity and Flying Microtonal Banana, they created diversion after diversion, cloaking waypoints for songs deep inside riffs and motifs. Butterfly 3000 flips the script by offering up one 44-minute suite, written mainly in a major key, and created with the intent to be listened to as one continuous piece. But the big curveball here goes beyond structure and form: Album number 18 was recorded in the band’s homes during the pandemic, and trades psych-rock blitzes for a finely woven sprawl of synth programming and MIDI sequences. What their Reddit-dwelling diehards refer to as the “Gizzverse” now allows for some serious self-restraint.

The band’s deep abiding love of ’70s rock titans like Yes and Hawkwind has never stood in the way of breaking new ground. Butterfly 3000 filters a fresh range of influences, and is the net result of sharing simple ideas—mainly modular synth loops—in lockdown. Opener “Yours” weds drummer Michael Cavanagh’s far-out 4/4 stomp with silken arpeggios, evoking Ashra or Trans Am at their most zonked. But the showpiece is “Interior People,” with its bubbling synths and unrestrained Neu! worship. It’s the closest King Gizzard have come to reimagining kosmische in their image. Mackenzie's acoustic phrases here, and on the likes of “Shanghai,” make the absence of electric guitar feel curiously trivial.

Mackenzie’s lyrical themes have veered between scenes of cyborgs, altered beasts, and necromancers puppeteering the undead. On Butterfly 3000, he pares back the batshit, and peers inward to fixate on dreams and metamorphosis. By mirroring the fragmentary nature of sleep with songs that mention the lens flares of the subconscious and falling upwards through clouds of glue, the frontman becomes oddly relatable. “Black Hot Soup” suggests tasting infinity can’t happen in the land of the living and on “Blue Morpho,” Mackenzie incants about a “hand outstretched” calling his name. But it’s “Dreams” where his disdain for waking life is most lucid. Above pitch-bent melodies, its refrain (“I only wanna wake up in my dream/I only feel alive in a daze”) distills the album’s heavy-eyed energy.

As closer “Butterfly 3000” comes to a sudden halt, the microtonal magic of King Gizzard’s recent double album, K.G./L.W, may as well be a mirage. Butterfly 3000 lands like a conceptual arrival point, and makes the band’s more elaborate—and relentless—career peaks that little bit more emphatic. Above all else, it’s a reminder that King Gizzard usually peak when wandering far beyond a clear-cut path. The coming of their most concise and carefree release truly could not have been better timed.

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On his new album, the Chicago rapper known for his muted, monklike delivery struggles to realize his full potential, even when assisted by Harry Fraud’s lush instrumentals.

Virtuoso

Just a few years ago, it seemed a foregone conclusion that Valee would be a star. He materialized fully formed in 2015 as a new kind of Chicago rapper. Instead of drawing from well-established lanes—Kanye West’s soulful, sample-driven sound or Chief Keef’s hard-charging drill—he paired elements of Atlanta trap with an elegant but striking flow. Valee is a technician but an understated one, quietly tiptoeing over beats that his peers might stomp on. Before long, the entire industry was leaning in to hear what the monklike rapper had to say. A deal with G.O.O.D. Music, an EP that reworked some of his mixtape material, and a string of hot singles all followed in 2018. But while he remained active on the mixtape circuit, Valee didn’t issue a full-length or any more buzzy singles until last year. In the interim, plenty of rappers borrowed elements of his sound, to the point where his 2022 commercial debut Vacabularee felt a bit stale. With its follow-up, Virtuoso, Valee attempts to reframe his career by approaching his flow the way a chef might a rare ingredient, searching for pairings that intensify his flavor profile.
Virtuoso is a collaborative album with Harry Fraud, the New York producer best known for mixtape-era hits like French Montana’s “Shot Caller.” Fraud’s lush production cuts a sharp contrast to the woozy, minimal trap beats of ChaseTheMoney, whose style defined Valee’s early career. Everything here feels textured: the fish scale arpeggios of “Sea Bass,” the cascading keys of “Uppity,” the mournful organs of “Dutty Laundry.” You’d think Valee’s reedy voice would get lost in all those layers, but the mixing ensures that his bars float above the beats. This sample-based sound is fresh and works surprisingly well for Valee, especially since he never rapped over Kanye West production like other G.O.O.D. signees. The choice recasts him as an artist working within a Chicago lineage, rather than an iconoclastic Midwestern street rapper.
But sadly, like most mid-career rappers, Valee doesn’t sound as hungry as he once did. His delicate touch remains, though his delivery feels a bit muted, more workmanlike than fastidious. There are still a few flashes of his signature charisma: It sounds like he’s muttering under his breath over the chipmunk soul of “Vibrant,” while on “Sea Bass,” he is commanding to match the song’s ascendant tone. Even Valee’s everyman punchlines are less clever this time around. While there are a handful of solid one-liners (“My SS robotic, move like WALL-E”), there are just as many bars that are outright corny (“I slide on you like a trackpad”).
His guests pick up the slack, but the features often highlight their own skill, rather than complementing Valee’s. 03 Greedo continues his dazzling post-carceral run with a verse that raises the stakes from mere flexing to life and death (“How am I supposed to feel about my n****s getting killed/While I was out of town and doing time for doing deals?”). Longtime Fraud collaborator Action Bronson sounds right at home on “Vibrant”; eschewing the exotics that Valee favors, he raps about lifting Ford F-150s and getting sideways in Mazda Miatas. If you had to identify Valee’s exact stylistic opposite, you’d be hard-pressed to find a better fit than fellow Chicagoan Twista, who pops up on “WTF,” charging in with his beloved chopper flow before pulling back to a bouncy, old-school cadence.
Virtuoso’s most interesting feature comes from someone you probably wouldn’t imagine on a track with Valee and Harry Fraud: RXK Nephew, the relentless weirdo known for his stream-of-consciousness YouTube dumps, lack of allegiance to any style, and rambling conspiracy theories. Nephew has a tendency to invent new flows on the spot, and here he adopts Valee’s deadpan, but pairs it with a clenched enunciation that makes it sound like he’s spitting through the wire. His delivery starts out flat, but he becomes more forceful as his verses build momentum, eventually punctuating his bars with yelps. Like Valee’s rapping, RXK Nephew’s verse draws power from restraint—but it also feels menacing, inventive, and exciting in a way that Valee doesn’t.
Overall, Virtuoso is a breezy listen: The songs are short, the beats are sturdily built, and the features are well-curated. But as a showcase of Valee’s talent and songwriting, it often falls short. On a technical level, the rapping here is nowhere near the best of his career, and the hooks are often forgettable. While Harry Fraud’s production pairs well with the Chicago rapper’s form, Valee doesn’t show up with many new tricks to take advantage of these beats. The man is a dexterous, sophisticated rapper, but after nearly a decade in the game, it still feels like he has yet to realize his full potential. Even virtuosos need to continually refine their skills in order to stay relevant.


Like an American Jarvis Cocker, Craig Finn narrates tales of kids who dance and drink and screw cuz they've got nothing else to do-- and he does it all with a depth and scope rarely seen in contemporary rock.

The Hold Steady: Boys and Girls in America

Boys and Girls in America

When Pitchfork finally received a full-art copy of Boys and Girls in America, it came with a Hold Steady coaster, a wink at the received logic that Craig Finn and his cohorts are members of "America's #1 bar band." That's an ill-fitting tag for a couple of reasons; first, because the vast majority of the bars in the U.S. feature DJs and jukeboxes not bands-- let alone ones as unique and powerful as the Hold Steady.
Second, and more importantly: Although the characters in the Hold Steady's beery tales are big drinkers, you can't imagine many of them bellied up to a bar. That sort of drinking-- introspective, sometimes done alone, indoors-- is the antithesis of the imbibing in Hold Steady songs. These characters are drinking at apartment parties, at festivals, in fields, in cars. In "Stuck Between Stations", the protagonist and his friends "drink from [a] purse"; "Massive Night" has the boys "feeling good about their liquor run"; and in "Party Pit" the female character is "gonna walk around and drink some more." They're not reflective or nostalgic, and when frequent Finn heroine Holly is contemplating the past, it's with regret she can no longer get as high as she used to.
So it's no wonder that critical darlings the Hold Steady aren't exactly indie rock heroes. Marginalized to that world almost by default-- radio and video are, for the most part, unkind to new rock bands not targeted at high-schoolers-- the Hold Steady craft classic rock-indebted music that would sound better sandwiched between Born to Run and Back in Black than Illinois and Tigermilk. In other words, the more likely you are to use music as a social lubricant than as a social balm, the more likely you are to enjoy the Hold Steady.
And if you dislike this band, you wouldn't be alone. After years of making detail-heavy music with both Lifter Puller and now the Hold Steady, Craig Finn enjoyed a critical breakthrough last year with the divisive Separation Sunday-- a loosely conceptual album based around a trio of characters named Charlemagne, Gideon, and Holly-- which wowed critics with its back-alley poetry and willingness to reach the cheap seats, but left many listeners cold over Finn's gruff sing-speak vocals and his band's tendency towards licks rather than grooves.
On Boys and Girls, some things have changed that will make the band more palatable to doubters yet could disappoint Separation Sunday fans: Finn sings more than speaks, and his lyrics have a big-picture approach, allowing listeners to fill details of their own lives into the songs rather than be required to commit fully to those of his characters. Putting less emphasis on lyrical detail than in the past, Finn claims in opener "Stuck Between Stations", a paean to poet and suicide-victim John Berryman, that "words won't save your life"; later, on "First Night", he writes that "words alone can never save us." It's the difference between working more in character, creating a low-rent version of street and suburban life, and creating songs that, as Pitchfork's Stephen Deusner observed, "Finn's characters might want to listen to."
One way in which Finn does this is by ratcheting up the force and power of the music, layering guitar and trebly keys and multiple hooks on top of one another like a mid-1970s E Street Band or an E-boosted Happy Mondays. It's rock'n'roll before it was ashamed to do either, and unlike on past efforts, lyrics can sometimes be summed up by lines that approximate the effect of a chorus, even if they're presented more like a thesis statement: "I've had kisses that make Judas seem sincere," "When they kiss they spit white noise," the aforementioned "Gonna walk around and drink some more."
The lack of specificity also means Finn is acknowledging the universality of his themes, which-- although he's still mostly writing about the Twin Cities-- reflect the experiences of kids across the country. Whereas Finn's spiritual predecessors, Bruce Springsteen and Jack Kerouac (whose On the Road lends the album its title), romanticized the open road and the possibility of escape, his characters travel not to start again or get away but as a diversion, as on "Chillout Tent", in which a pair of kids so desperate for something big to happen in their otherwise humdrum lives-- he on his "first day off in forever, man" and she on a break from her studies-- awkwardly try to squeeze as much decadence as possible into a single afternoon.
Finn is less a 21st century Springsteen than he is an American Jarvis Cocker; he's the poet laureate for the U.S.'s have-nots in much the same way the Pulp singer was for the UK's common people in the 1990s. Unlike Cocker, however, Finn doesn't write angrily, perhaps a telling indication that the stereotypically British self-loathing is equitable to the "colossal expectations" and lack of discipline of the boys and girls in America. Just as one wouldn't imagine Cocker writing escapist fantasies such as "Chillout Tent", nor would Finn pen something as bitter as "I Spy".
In a sense, however, this album, thematically, is as self-aware as Cocker's work at his height of fame-- the ambitious, zeitgeist-grabbing Different Class and hangover album This Is Hardcore. But rather than moan about too many nights on the tiles, Finn channels his diminishing energy into characters older and younger than himself: His epitaph for Berryman ("he was drunk and exhausted but he was critically acclaimed and respected") and Holly's laments over stoner burnout in "First Night" could both be read as autobiographical.
They could also be seen as a lament for the type of music Finn's making, the straightforward arena rock that, these days, often settles for critical acclaim and respect rather than connecting with lots and lots of people. For all of Finn's holding his lyrics at arm's length here, he remains one of the best writers in rock, demonstrating grit and spunk and wit and intelligence in each track. Unlike many of those who've translated big, arena-ready guitars into arena-sized audiences, Finn doesn't resort to confidently sung platitudes like "It's a beautiful day!", "Look at the stars/ See how they shine for you," or "I'm not OK." He not only has a commanding, rousing voice but he also says something worth hearing, displaying gifts for both scope and depth that are all too rare in contemporary rock-- indie or mainstream.


After a decade of searching for the intersection of hip-hop and country and a star turn on Cowboy Carter, the Virginia-born singer finds much more than a party on his third album.

Shaboozey: Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going

Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going

In mid-April, after struggling for a decade to find a new intersection between country and hip-hop, Shaboozey released “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” amid the wave of adulation that followed Cowboy Carter, the Black country maypole on which he appeared twice. It seemed like the epitome of a one-hit wonder. A near-universal anthem about despising your job that barely begets survival and drowning in as many rounds as the bartender can summon, it became a near-universal sensation, streaming three million times in 24 hours and charting all around the world. After all, how could a whistle-out-loud interpolation of a 20-year-old J-Kwon smash that nodded to the Black roots of Jack Daniels while towering atop the lily-white country chart not be a flash in the pan, some glitch in the Music Row matrix? This was surely Shaboozey’s “Achy Breaky Heart” and “Combination Pizza Hut and Taco Bell,” his mainstream introduction and farewell all at once.
But Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going does not feel like a mere receptacle for one of the year’s most unlikely hits. Shaboozey’s remarkably assured third album is a sophisticated self-help journey that only occasionally masquerades as a good time. He has spent a long while trying to find some space where the sounds of hip-hop and country could overlap, where the defiant swagger, nostalgic circumspection, and quivering heartbreak of both genres could fuse together. The parties of “A Bar Song” and “Drink Don’t No Mix” offer the same sort of escapes that he suggests in “East of the Massanutten” or “Let It Burn,” where the Great American West becomes the frontier for fleeing, respectively, the persecutions of the South or an abusive relationship. Shaboozey seems to always be asking how we can last a little longer and live a little better in this strange place, even as he’s grinning while reaching for another shot.
If you’re the type of listener who writes off the last dozen years of mainstream country music, especially its best-selling bro-country core, as bullshit, Where I’ve Been will at first sound like a tough hang. He uses Auto-Tune to exaggerate the contours of his drawl during cowboy-coopting opener “Horses & Hellcats,” a trick he nevertheless smartly returns to. He favors processed, billowing harmonies that emphasize his epiphanies, as on “Highway,” the frustrated testimonial of a traveler almost broken by the choices that make him alone. And he inches toward rap, his voice oozing over the second verse of “Vegas,” where he stares into the bottom of his emptied cup and empty life with deep shame. “Came out of the gutter, covered in dirt/Got it all over me,” he offers, each brief pause landing like another jab into his own ribs.
Wait: Songs about the wrong end of the bottle and the weary traveler far from home, plus references to the mighty strides of beautiful Palomino horses and Dan Post boots? Indeed, Where I’ve Been is, in some regard, a wildly reverent country album, from its opening sonic triumvirate of whistling wind, pedal steel, and acoustic guitar through its banjo-traced closing trot complete with a fiddle solo. Every song here hinges on the acoustic guitar, whether it’s the rhythmic R&B-style loop that anchors “Drink Don’t Need No Mix” or the massive, major-chord strums of “Anabelle.” Shaboozey purportedly wrote an entire country album before Lady Wrangler, his chimerical 2018 major-label debut that flopped in part because he could not decide how its constituent pieces cohered; Where I’ve Been works so well because he starts clearly with country, then rearranges it to fit his needs.
Those needs almost invariably involve what’s next and better. This forward gaze is the true hip-hop element of these 12 songs. “East of the Massanutten” is a remarkable piece of work. He alludes to the Confederate king of guerilla warfare, John Mosby, to justify his drive to head west and seek out “a land full of dreams/With milk, gold, and honey/Just waitin’ for me.” It’s an emancipation song, as are “Anabelle” and “Let It Burn,” overdue goodbyes to lovers who will not stop wrecking your life. “My Fault,” his gorgeous duet with Noah Cyrus, is a radical counterpart to Waxahatchee’s “Right Back to It”; rather than return to a relationship’s welcoming stability, both parties seek it by striking out separately to escape a cycle of “bar games” and blackouts. “Last of My Kind” first offers a whiff of retrograde nostalgia (and Paul Cauthen’s Kid Rock-lite cameo does not help), but its unique brand of survivalism ultimately promises a kind of readiness for whatever shall come. It also reads, gloriously, like a Black rejoinder to the dog-whistle paranoia of Hank Williams Jr.’s “A Country Boy Can Survive.”
Where I’ve Been ends with “Finally Over,” a bedraggled riff about the battles between perseverance and forfeiture, self-doubt and belief, heaven and hell. Is this album, he seems to wonder, his music-industry exit, the last gasp of the label deals? This is terra firma for country, where the paradox of rural folk seeking big-city fame has long created compelling existential tension. It’s astonishing that he wondered aloud on this track if he should sell his soul for “another viral moment” just before “A Bar Song” soon made him very famous. But this, thankfully, is the work of someone with more to give than a mere viral moment. Rooted in the past but keyed to the idea of finding a better future by whatever means necessary (leaving, burning, boozing, fighting), Where I’ve Been, Isn’t Where I’m Going epitomizes not a one-hit wonder but a songwriter who has found both his mode and his moment at the exact same time.


The four early-'90s LPs in this box set remain Red House Painters' most magical records, and some of the most beautiful works of Mark Kozelek's career. If you're someone who's been put off by his feuds and outbursts, put aside those reservations—these records deserve it. Even after all these years, that mystery somehow still remains.

Box Set

Red House Painters were fairly popular in the early '90s, but details on them were scarce. This was all before the Internet, so you basically had what a jewel box told you. It's hard to imagine at this point, but when I first heard them, I didn't know anything about Mark Kozelek, the frontman and mastermind behind the project. I'm not sure I knew his name, and I definitely didn't know what he looked like, or his personality outside of the songs. I also had no idea the band was a quartet, or that they lived in San Francisco (in Kozelek's case, via Ohio). At least for me, Red House Painters existed outside of a scene, too. They had a familiar record label with its own distinct aesthetic, but that was the only real touchstone.
Not that any of this is bad. The songs on the first four albums—1992's Down Colorful Hill, 1993's pair of self-titled albums (the first nicknamed Rollercoaster, the second Bridge, after the photographs on their covers), and 1995's Ocean Beach (here packaged with the Shock Me EP from a year earlier)—felt personal and private enough that it was easy to get lost in your own head while listening. They featured heartbreaking, personal lyrics and were accompanied by stark, often naturalistic photographs on the covers. The package came with the crystalline, spacious production and Kozelek's clear, powerful voice, and these things merged in an almost mystical way. The material felt less composed or worked over; it was more like the songs were birthed fully formed. They could drift on for more than 10 minutes, but you kind of gave up on keeping track of this kind of thing.
When old albums get reissued, which they increasingly do, the practice usually offers a chance to hear familiar songs again, sometimes with remastering, maybe a few bonuses. Some listeners are feeling nostalgic, seeking to recreate the original context in their minds, while many others are learning about the material for the first time, and aren't all that clear on the context beyond the updated liner notes. 4AD's decision to reissue Red House Painters' first four albums as a fairly spare limited-edition Record Store Day box set (on bronze vinyl, with individual album reissues on black vinyl to follow) offers a unique angle: The band's cantankerous frontman (as we can now call him after that whole War on Drugs debacle) is much better known, and known quite differently, all these years later. Now you do know exactly who Mark Kozelek is, or at least you think you do.
It's important to remember, though, that the group wasn't just Kozelek. At least not at the beginning. For the first three full-lengths, it was Kozelek on vocals and guitars along with drummer Anthony Koutsos, bassist Jerry Vessel, and guitarist Gorden Mack. (Koutsos and Vessel continued with Kozelek to 2001; Mack left in 1995 and was replaced by Phil Carney, who still plays with Sun Kil Moon now and then.) Starting with Songs for a Blue Guitar, which followed Red House Painters' last album for 4AD Ocean Beach, Kozelek basically started doing everything on his own. He released it on Supreme Recordings, a label owned by John Hughes and under the auspices of Island Records, which reminds me that he's the only person from Red House Painters who also went on to act in movies.
Even accounting for the added years and maybe some Kozelek burnout, the four LPs in this boxset remain Red House Painters' most magical records, and some of the most beautiful works of Kozelek's career. If you're someone who's been put off by his feuds and outbursts, put aside those reservations—these records deserve it. And, really, when you come back to them, even after all these years, that mystery somehow still remains. In fact, now and then I need to remind myself just who it is I'm listening to. Unlike later SKM, the vocals are treated with airier effects. The production is deep and spacious, and sounds very 4AD. Kozelek's lyrics are personal, and moving, but come cloaked in ellipses and metaphor rather than the tell-all logorrhea of Benji.
The first song we heard from Red House Painters is "24", the magisterial slowcore opener on 1992's Down Colorful Hill. It's from the point of view of someone, aged 24, worrying about growing old: "Oldness comes to rile/ The youth who dream suicide." This is a concern across all of Kozelek's work, and it's easy to imagine him worrying about these same things when he was 9 going on 10.
The start of "24" is nearly silent—gentle minimal guitar before drums come in; it almost sounds like the start of a Codeine track. These songs were demos, and are lightly touched up for the proper 4AD debut, but still sound spare and homemade and thin in the best way (a way that works with the confessional tone of the material). Red House Painters are more of a definable rock band on Colorful, though, with fuzzed guitars, martial drumming, and more basic structures; on the slinky post-rock of "Japanese to English", you can imagine them in a practice space, jamming it out. In this sense, it's less otherworldly than the next two albums.
On the anguished second track, "Medicine Bottle", he offers up some of the detail-rich run-on lyricism that he returns to later with SKM. There's a playful country western-tinged sendup "Lord Kill the Pain", which takes Kozelek's depressing lyrics to a comical extreme with lines like: "Kill my neighbors/ And all my family too/ They doubt my direction." Of course, he's likely partially serious, too. This humor is something Kozelek has maintained, even when his critics think of him as being peevish or over-sensitive.
There's the nostalgic, quietly heartbreaking "Michael", a song about someone wondering whatever happened to their best friend from years earlier with both funny ("Do you remember our first subway ride?/ Our first heavy metal haircuts?") and moving ("I remember your smile in the sun/ The day-dreaming boy without your shirt on…") details. It ends with Kozelek noting that the connection is still there: "You're the oldest juvenile delinquent bum/ My best friend."
It's the gorgeous title track that hints most at the truly brilliant second collection, Rollercoaster. It's nimble. It feels effortless. It expands to 11 minutes without seeming to push very hard. It barely matters what he's saying because of how it's paced and how it's said. On Rollercoaster*,* it felt like RHP existed outside of everything, and listening now, it still feels that way. Down Colorful Hill is an excellent, idiosyncratic debut, but it doesn't quite prepare you for the 1993 collection. Mark Kozelek produced Rollercoaster, and it's proof enough that he's the best person to be handling the knobs on his own songs: the guitar sound is perfect, songs burst and bloom, the vocals are placed perfectly like ghosts. Overall, Rollercoaster and Bridge, released the same year and featuring songs from the same session, move away from the more songwriterly approach of the other work in Kozelek's career—the production is more distant and expansive, and the instruments are given to lengthy excursions and big blasts of guitars.
There are technically 14 songs on Rollercoaster, but it's not the kind of album where you stop to note these kinds of distinctions: Each song feels like a detail in a large painting. On it, Kozelek fears the violence in his blood, remembers being an outcast, worries about getting older and losing meaning and connections ("Scares me how you get older/ How you forget about each other"), dismisses a girl in New Jersey, acts like a romantic asshole ("I still feel the sting in my hand/ From when I hit you/ I keep your picture tidy and safe in a shrine"), confesses that he's afraid to drive, and manages to do all this in moving, atmospheric anthems that resonate two decades later. The songs tend to go on forever, and it seems like Kozelek assumes if he stops, his subject might disappear.
He returns again and again to the idea of forgetting, and he doesn't leave out the details that could make him look bad: "I've had enough of the/ Brutal beatings and name callings/ To lose me to this bed/ Bruised internally, eternally." You get warts and all, even in songs that feel like they could be sonnets. He wonders a lot where people are. The 13-minute "Mother" is filled with the sort of raging fear of loss that we hear later on "I Can't Live Without My Mother's Love". The album also features "Katy Song", a classic Kozelek eight-and-a-half-minute paean to not being enough. If you ever need to cry on command, I recommend taking a listen. Rollercoaster closes with the brief, compact "Brown Eyes", a two-minute acoustic jangle of a song that suggests where he goes on Ocean Beach and onward (and, itself, ends with a lovely 40 seconds of quietly expansive drums and dainty guitars).
Rollercoaster was followed by Bridge in October of 1993; it featured songs from the same recording session as Rollercoaster, and on paper looks like an odds and sods—its eight songs include a cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "I Am a Rock", a feedbacking rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner", and a more electrified, revved-up take on Rollercoaster's "New Jersey". But Kozelek is a master of covers, and makes the songs his own; plus, there are more than enough originals here to balance it out.
The standouts here are the songs that sound most like they'd fit on Rollercoaster, the pastoral "Bubble" and the dark, strummed "Uncle Joe", which starts with the line "where have all the people gone in my life?" and finds him in pain after late-night television is over. (I've seen kids on lyric "meaning" sites likening "Bubble" to Internet dating because of lines like "I embrace the moment, I'm in love with a dream/ And toy with ideas that burn deep inside me/ Cause a picture is all you are to me/ A picture is all you'll ever be.")
Throughout, the tone is eerier and somehow more quietly violent than Rollercoaster. This comes to a head on the eight-minute "Blindfold" that moves through lyrics like "What possessed you not to include me?/ How have you failed to invite me/ How could you laugh with her in that theater?/ When you're off and I'm alone?" and ends with Kozelek howling his best grunge (nay, metal) howl, raging louder than the drums or clashing guitars around him.
The final album on the box, and his last for 4AD, is 1995's Ocean Beach. It opens with a sunny, lilting instrumental called "Cabezon", three breezy minutes of pleasant music. The album, in general, seems to be Kozelek's California record, and stands out from what came before it.
The first proper song, "Summer Dress", is in the more usual downcast Red House Painters' mode, but the songs are folkier and less amorphous; overall, this is the one RHP offering you could compare to Toad the Wet Sprocket and be basically right. The hooks are immediate, the sequencing rock-album complete: The wistful "Summer Dress" transitions to the gently fuzzed rock of "San Geronimo" which moves into the piano-led ballad, "Shadows". You get almost hippie-like noodles on the steel-guitars of "Over My Head" (before which we get studio chatter that jokingly mentions "new age windchimes") and an echo of past melancholia with "Red Carpet". It's a stately, well-composed collection, and it's beautiful. The use of feedback is delicate (even on the more searing close of "Moments", which is reminiscent of the way Yo La Tengo use feedback).
It closes with the 13-minute "Drop", one of Kozelek's best heartsick pieces: "I'd like to come home to see you/ And to catch your sickness by the bedside/ But then you'd know how much I really need you." With him it's never easy, of course, and he adds: "But then my hate for you/ Makes my feelings altogether drop." It's a masterful closer, and an example of how Kozelek can draw you into his world and make you forget time's passage, even as he obsesses over it.
For this box, its sister is the four-song Shock Me EP. "Shock Me" is a Kiss cover, though you wouldn't know it unless you'd memorized the 1977 original. You get it here in both its four-minute "electric" and 11-minute acoustic version, along with two very good, shorter songs, "Sundays and Holidays" and "Three-Legged Cat". It's great to have it in the box, though sonically, it would've made more sense to pair it with either Rollercoaser or Bridge.
Listening closely to these records now shines a light on the rest of Kozelek's career. It's the most you can hope for as far as reissues go, and it really does feel like a skeleton key returning to these albums you thought you knew so well. You think of these songs, with their fear of growing old and dying, and put them in context with all the songs from his youth he and his band have covered (by artists like AC/DC, Kiss, Simon & Garfunkel, John Denver, Paul McCartney), and where he's ended up now, singing about being old, and you realize that time itself was always the preoccupation here, as well as the inevitability of death, even in your happiest moments. And you realize, listening, that you got older, too.


Toronto's Fucked Up continue their outsized ambition with a lengthy rock opera featuring a twisted storyline and epic guitar-driven songs.

David Comes to Life

Punk rock has had its share of ambitious bands producing ambitious records-- Double Nickels on the Dime, Zen Arcade, Sandinista!, and The Shape of Punk to Come spring to mind-- but few groups in this sphere have pushed the envelope as often as Fucked Up. For the last few years, they've been releasing singles as part of a series based on the Chinese Zodiac, each of which usually runs over the 10-minute mark. For a 2007 charity Christmas single, they managed to get James Murphy, Nelly Furtado, and "Degrassi: the Next Generation"/"90210" actress Shenae Grimes (among many, many others) to appear on the same song; during a 12-hour (!) NYC concert in 2008, they got moshers to smash along to Vampire Weekend's Ezra Koenig doing Descendents covers. Their reach continues unabated on their new album, David Comes to Life, a 78-minute rock opera.
The story of David Comes to Life is fairly complicated and, at points, heavily meta. It concerns a factory worker named David Eliade who falls in love with a woman named Veronica Boisson. They conspire to build a bomb together and death, destruction, and redemption follow; along the way, the story's narrator does battle with David for control of the plot. There's a long tradition of rock concept albums that aren't easy to understand, and this one is no exception; but enjoying it doesn't depend on decoding the tale. The record is divided into four separate acts, with a narrative focus that shifts from scene to scene-- a few songs are told from the overarching narrator's perspective, while David's ex-girlfriend, Vivian Benson, offers her side of the story in the album's back half. While a few guest vocalists are employed to help out-- Cults' Madeline Follin and singer/songwriter Jennifer Castle represent Veronica and Vivian, respectively-- the story is largely told by the band's screaming frontman, Damien Abraham, aka Pink Eyes. Taking into account the album's relatively limited range-- almost an hour and a half of straight-up bashing and riffage, with moments like the jangly acoustic figure that opens "A Slanted Tone" as a rare respite-- it becomes apparent that you will need a few listens and a lyric sheet to apprehend David Comes to Life's ambition and follow its labyrinthine storyline.
Or, you could just sit back and let the record's dense, visceral blast of guitar squall wash over you. More than any single Fucked Up record, David Comes to Life is thick with walls of noisy melody. It's hard to get a handle on just how many guitar tracks are on a given song, and Shane Stoneback deserves a medal for mixing the sheer bulk of the sound into something so clear. But for all the shoegazey textures and blistering sonic assault, David Comes to Life is also direct and immediate. Hooks are piled on top of hooks, bursting through torrents of spacey noise ("I Was There") and peppy rhythms ("The Recursive Girl") alike. At points, the primal appeal of the blunt and effective riffing even brings to mind the bar-band rock of the Hold Steady.
Out front, Abraham still retains his scorched-earth bark. He's been finding ways to broaden his voice's impact, and it's never sounded better than it does here. Abraham knows his range and limitations and is finding new ways to work within them while adjusting to the band's forward lurch, in effect becoming another instrument in the mix. His stomping melancholia on "Turn the Season" feels like a gut-check, while he follows up his sole quiet moment on album closer "Lights Go Up" by shouting amidst curled screams, "I'm still in love with you/ After all of this time!" Besides the aforementioned appearances by Follin and Castle, Kurt Vile delivers a typically slack backing vocal on "Lights Go Up", too-- but, really, this is The Pink Eyes Show, and it's never been so compelling to watch.
That said, all the howling and the album's extreme length might be a tough thing for those new to Fucked Up. For people in this category, it might be best to check out Hidden World first; it's a good representation of how fun and hooky Fucked Up are when they're in the zone, and in many ways it's a simpler, spiritual precursor to this record. Regardless, David Comes to Life is absolutely worth the commitment, a convincing demonstration of what can happen when a band works without limitations.