The Stockholm-based composer is best known for her pipe-organ compositions, but here, she uses trombone, bass clarinet, and ARP 2500 to explore the strange radiance of just intonation.

Living Torch

The pipe-organ purr that seems to open Living Torch, the absorbing new album by 28-year-old long-tone apostle Kali Malone, is a feint—a sly way of acknowledging her past, only to sidestep it. In the decade since Malone left the United States for Stockholm, she has amassed a staggeringly diverse résumé: bewitching shoegaze with rock trio Swap Babies, stately guitar hazes alongside friends Ellen Arkbro and Caterina Barbieri, and buzzing percussion-ensemble hypnosis on 2017’s Velocity of Sleep. Still, the magisterial pipe organ has been her most recognizable calling card, her trusted tool for exploring the strange radiance of just intonation.
When the first few notes of Living Torch rise, as if wafting beneath a cathedral’s towering spires, Malone seems to be picking up the meditative thread of her breakthrough pipe-organ epic, 2019’s The Sacrificial Code. But after a dozen seconds, the signal doubles, spreading like a drop of ink in water, until it recedes and returns, suddenly augmented by the muted refulgence of a sighing trombone. There is actually no pipe organ on Living Torch, which becomes clear enough during the subsequent 33 minutes of glowing, hissing, and crackling electronics and stunted brass fanfares.
The deceptive start is a reminder of Malone’s pivotal role in a vibrant if small scene that’s freeing the mighty pipe organ from its religious vows. But as Malone sculpts the sound of an electroacoustic ensemble into a piece that feels like a singular hymn to life and its end, the bulk of the sublime Living Torch is a testament to her music’s expressiveness and accessibility, no matter the instruments at hand. With happiness and sadness coiled in the same nebulous zone, this is the most charged and engrossing piece of her career.
Malone composed and recorded Living Torch during a two-year span at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (INA GRM), Paris’ foundational hub for the development of electronic music over the past seven decades. It was conceived for GRM’s iconic Acousmonium, an “orchestra” of dozens of articulated loudspeakers meant to surround listeners in meticulous sound, and premiered there in October 2021. The production process was byzantine, but the piece’s success rests on its complicated foundation. Malone wrote Living Torch in 11-odd limit just intonation, meaning every pitch is a ratio with a number that’s a multiple of 11. To get those sounds right, trombonist Mats Äleklint and bass clarinetist Isak Hedtjärn recorded their parts one note at a time, meticulously tuning each one to a computer-generated sawtooth sound wave.
Malone then stitched those bits into an extended tape piece threaded together by a variety of deeply textured drones. She indulged in the whisper and roar of the legendary ARP 2500 modular synthesizer—and not just any ARP 2500, but the unit belonging to Éliane Radigue, the nonagenarian composer who recently made her own titanic organ debut. She added the glittery hum of the Boîte à Bourdons, a newfangled French counterpart to the hurdy-gurdy and the Indian Shruti box. And, finally, Malone used a panoply of other approaches to synthesis, including one that invokes the gloom of a slowly plucked blues guitar, to shape the unexpected strata that give Living Torch such depth.
As inscrutable as Malone’s approach may seem, the results sound effortless, taking an uncommon route into familiar terrain: In Living Torch’s two movements, I hear a score for trying to hold yourself together in spite of life’s daily hardships and an ultimate awareness of your own mortality. The first side of Living Torch works like a quest for steady breath, to find and hold the center when it would be simpler to spin out. All those sounds—moaning horns, murmuring Boîte à Bourdons, hovering electronics—move independently, so that one element seems to be inhaling just as another is exhaling. Both total comfort and complete anxiety seem just one step away. The specific intervals linger between Western expectations of a major and minor chord; listening is like tottering on a scale counterbalanced by despair and delight.
That scale tilts unequivocally toward darkness during Living Torch’s second half, a 15-minute descent into the abyss. Malone uses the synthesized sound of a single guitar string to provide a rhythm, but its hangdog tone—imagine an unamplified bass, plucked with endless resignation—conjures a countdown to death. The surrounding harmonies suddenly become brittle, once-smooth tones covered in a thousand creases; the electronic hum that once purred now howls, as if screaming down any notion of survival. The sense of breathing, so central to the piece, slows until it vanishes. The final moments are like watching time-lapse footage of some beautiful flower, all soft greens and pinks and grays, lose its petals and wither into nothing.
Living Torch is the first release on either Recollection GRM or Portraits GRM since the death of the twin labels’ founder, Peter Rehberg, the musician and auteur whose Editions Mego imprint helped shape the course of modern electronic music. In 2012, Rehberg launched Recollection to dig through GRM’s archives and excavate its overlooked gems. Nearly a decade later, he started Portraits to give new generations of acolytes—Jim O’Rourke, Florian Hecker, and Okkyung Lee among them—access to the studio’s enormous resources. After Rehberg died from a heart attack at home in Berlin in July 2021, his crucial work seemed at risk. But the great French label Shelter Press agreed to give both series a new home closer to GRM’s Parisian headquarters, some 200 miles west in Rennes. Living Torch is a fitting and crucial next step, as Malone fulfills and expands the promise of her self-made early works.
Malone was only three months away from premiering Living Torch when Rehberg died, but it is hard not to hear it as an apt but unintentional eulogy. Even at its most dramatic and discordant, the music flickers doggedly with life, resisting the temptation to give in to dread. Malone has talked about how the quantitative restraints of just intonation can curb sentimental interpretations; in fact, she likes the buffer they provide. Living Torch, though, feels like a soft-hearted but honest testament to carrying on despite knowing how this all inevitably ends—one last roar, then a final slide into silence.


In the ’80s and ’90s, Alice Coltrane recorded and released an exquisite catalog of ashram music. These devotionals tell a story of womanhood and spirituality through the lens of a peerless composer.

Alice Coltrane: World Spirituality Classics 1: The Ecstatic Music of Alice Coltrane Turiyasangitananda

Ashrams, physically speaking, are not easy to reach. Traditionally set at some remove, they are expanses of nature and silence and deliberate living that involve meditation, yoga, and communal meals. They instill a pleasant buzz. To visit the Sai Anantam Ashram, which Alice Coltrane founded and directed from 1983 until her death a decade ago, required a winding and mountainous Southern California drive; one could easily miss the gate. When you approached the entrance, as Franya J. Berkman wrote in her 2010 book Monument Eternal, the music of Coltrane and her devotees floated up from speakers set beside the dirt driveway.
Coltrane’s rare ashram tapes have long been mythical. In the mid-1970s—after a rich musical life steeped in Detroit churches and bebop piano, as an accompanist to her husband John and over a decade composing her own visionary cosmic jazz—Coltrane began to retreat from public and secular life. The pain of John’s sudden death from liver cancer in 1967 set this path. “I.H.S.,” from her album Huntington Ashram Monastery, stood for “I have suffered.” Coltrane—harpist, mother of four, Black girl Virgo, a woman who conferred with Stravinsky in her meditations—had shared a life with heaven incarnate. When heaven went away, she created heaven on Earth.
In 1969, Coltrane’s life was irrevocably changed when she heard the guru Swami Satchidananda speak at a New York church. Not long after, she moved her family from suburban Long Island to San Francisco and then finally Agoura Hills, Calif. There, she founded the ashram, wrote diffuse spiritual texts, appeared on public access television, and made four collections of exquisitely singular devotional music. Coltrane producer Ed Michel, in a 2002 feature for Wire magazine, recalled how she flummoxed her major label: “When Alice wanted to record the things which were essentially chanting by her students, the Warner Brothers project supervisor would say, ‘What’s this about? Why are you doing this to me?’ I’d reply, ‘I’m not doing this to you. We’re dealing with an artist who has a will of tungsten.’”
Coltrane self-released the songs on cassette, producing only a few hundred copies of each for ashram members: 1982’s Turiya Sings, 1987’s Divine Songs, 1990’s Infinite Chants, and 1995’s Glorious Chants. Turiya Sings—the finest among them, with appealingly distant strings, as if Coltrane were mystically levitating above her lo-fi arrangements—marked the first time she sang on tape (because, she said, God had asked her to). Made with the humble intentions of nourishing her community, Coltrane’s ashram music was naturally lost in time.
With the Luaka Bop label’s Ecstatic Music compilation, selections from the tapes are widely available at last. These sublime ensemble recordings reflect not just the result but the process of deep enlightenment. Coltrane, performing with ashram members, illuminates Hindu devotionals with meditative Indian instrumentation, a sparkling Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer, droning Wurlitzer lines, and full-bodied singing evoking the Detroit church choirs of her youth. This was one of the greatest composers of the 20th century bringing a completely unusual confluence of experience (classical training, Baptist church playing, jazz, improv) to prayer songs worshipping Krishna and Rama. With their widened musical scope, they feel more like prayers for humanity.
As Berkman wrote in Monument Eternal, “[Coltrane’s songs] are at once African American and South Asian. Their histories can be traced to religious revivals spanning India’s medieval period, as well as to cultural formations that coalesced in the New World among the descendants of African slaves.” Coltrane’s spiritual fusion music reflects the borderlessness that is manifest in her open religious philosophy of Universal Consciousness. It all made for sacred music that was as exacting as it was exalted. The songs are shaped with astonishing melodic nuance, precise rhythms, and irresistible harmonies, creating a new genre for her new consciousness. You might call it “ananda gospel.”
Hers is a voice that you want to believe could heal the entire world one person at a time. Its considerable power gets at the great consequence of this music. Coltrane sings over a dense cloud of sitar and drones on “Rama Rama” and over the majesty of her dazzling harp on “Er Ra.” Listening to “Om Shanti” is nothing less than an act of self-care. Once a deep cut from Divine Songs, it’s the anchor of this comp. Coltrane’s low, lucid voice—a mix of serenity and strength that is life-giving to behold—bursts as if pouring through clouds. According to the Vedas, “om” is the sound the universe made when it was created, and it continues on humming in our ever-expanding world today. Coltrane takes this primordial “om” and makes its reverberations feel visceral. This is music that will make you feel the air clarifying in your lungs, that will sweeten your breath.
Not unlike a meditation practice, the idea with chanting is to still the mind. You repeat lines of Sanskrit together to embody rhythms and create vibrations. Several tracks—“Om Rama,” “Rama Guru,” “Hari Narayan”—place Ecstatic Music into this collectivist context, performed by a large group, clapping and shaking bells, working into a forceful trance. Like any music deploying repetition to euphoric effect—hardcore, techno, minimalism, doom metal—chanting is transcendent and endless. The recordings here elucidate the magnetic pull of these utopian ashram environments; they are the opposite of the void. Even the nearly 11-minute “Journey in Satchidananda,” which bears little resemblance to Coltrane’s similarly-titled astral jazz masterpiece, contains a peculiar release despite its funereal atmosphere and operatic drama.
There is a man named Krishna Das who was once a member of the Blue Öyster Cult. Since the ’90s, he has been considered the greatest star of spiritual music like this in the West; in 2012, he was nominated for the Best New Age Album Grammy for Live Ananda, similarly recorded with seekers at an upstate New York ashram. That collection, while gripping and lovely, underscores what is so enrapturing about Coltrane’s. The Das album is a devout performance. Coltrane, however, is not reenacting the sacred. She is searching within and pushing a personal sacred out of herself, twisting it into new shapes with audacity, conviction, and grace. Refracting the music through the complexities of her past, Coltrane’s sacred songs contain the story of a woman who suffered and survived, who led avant-garde ensembles and towering epiphanies, whose curiosity never left her.
I wonder about the people on these recordings with Coltrane. What led them to the ashram? What were they seeking? How long had they been looking? In the course of a human life, the search is never-ending. But here, in one hour, is the sound of a woman’s realized higher purpose. Ecstatic Music is her corporeal joy, and clarifies what the rest of her catalog suggests: Alice Coltrane is religion. Once you’ve felt it, the ashram is in you.


The Bay Area turntablist and producer delivers a mammoth double album—half instrumentals, half rap collaborations—aimed at the decade’s widespread feeling of creeping dread.

Our Pathetic Age

DJ Shadow has long been obsessed with dystopian landscapes, and since the late 1990s, the Bay Area turntablist and hip-hop producer (aka Josh Davis) has released plenty of electronic music grounded in apocalyptic themes. But his ambitious new album Our Pathetic Age isn’t rooted in science fiction; it’s intended as a reflection of the now.
When announcing the record back in September, Davis spoke of a wide-ranging concept reflecting a world plagued by “rampant homelessness” and “generational poverty.” Citing institutional failure, widespread feelings of anger and confusion, and an entertainment culture grounded in distraction, he offered his mammoth double album—the first half all instrumental, the second dedicated to rap collaborations—as an attempt to find “light in darkness” and bring it to a generation seemingly glued to their devices.
The album’s opener, “Nature Always Wins,” appears to represent the sheer noise of social media, with Davis stirring up wave upon wave of gloomy sounds—maybe synths, maybe metal guitars—that conjure visions of electrodes flickering up a fiber-optic cable. The mood is ominous and sometimes chaotic: “Slingblade” attacks minor-key synths with stabbing snares, and “Intersectionality” whips new-wave arpeggios into a frenzy, capturing the ferocious back-and-forth energy of a fiery online debate.
As promised, the music flips between darkness and light: The funkier, euphoric bursts of bass driving the much more colorful “Rosie” and “Beauty, Power, Motion, Life, Work, Chaos, Law” prove that Davis hasn’t completely lost his optimism. But it’s a shame these lighter moments aren’t more frequent. The music really soars only when Davis stops trying to channel the paralyzing bleakness of the surveillance state and allows a bit more spring into his step.
The shifts in tone on the second disc are frequent. On the weeded-out summertime gem “Taxin’,” Dave East warmly reflects on climbing out of the “gutter,” while Run the Jewels’ El-P and Killer Mike endearingly pay tribute to their mothers on the strong “Kings & Queens,” a lush, soulful shot of nostalgia. But on “C.O.N.F.O.R.M,” Shadow’s old Quannum associates Gift of Gab and Lateef the Truth Speaker, along with relative newcomer Infamous Taz, compare life online to The Matrix (yawn), lament that no one memorizes phone numbers anymore, and rail against internet grocery stores. And “Rain on Snow,” featuring Wu-Tang philosophers Ghostface Killah, Inspectah Deck, and Raekwon reflecting on the modern world, boasts a beat so dated—its distorted bass and turbo-charged synths are a sound Shadow has been recycling since UNKLE’s Psyence Fiction—that you find yourself waiting for one of them to start rapping about the Y2K bug.
Shadow deserves credit for spotlighting so many enigmatic underground characters, something he has done throughout his career, but the overabundance of ideas and conflicting styles quickly becomes jarring. Our Pathetic Age reflects the way much of Shadow’s post-Endtroducing material has lacked structure, with the producer happy to throw ideas at the page, even if many of them don’t stick. It’s ironic that the album’s scrambled nature might also be a casualty of the information overload of the always-online world that DJ Shadow set out to critique. Perhaps that’s the point, but it means this album, a whopping 91 minutes long, can be a real slog to sit through. After a while, it’s hard to resist the urge to simply log off.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Queens rapper Homeboy Sandman's new EP White Sands combines Sandman's scalpel-wielding deadpan with the production of Paul White (Danny Brown's Old). White Sands is a self-contained universe with a lot to explore.

White Sands

If indie-rap heads weren't sure what to make of Homeboy Sandman as the calendar flipped over to 2012, they've had so many opportunities to figure him out that anybody still left behind has just about lost. We're talking six releases of note in just over 24 months—Subject: Matter, Chimera, First of a Living Breed, Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent, and All That I Hold Dear all dropped through 2013, with White Sands, his first release of 2014, making it half a dozen. If you've ever tried to commit yourself to getting into Sandman's dryly incisive style—all scalpel-wielding deadpan and internally knotted wit and ha-ha-wait one-liners—there're more fresh entry points than Sonny Corleone post-tollbooth.
But if you're not converted yet, why not go for the EP produced by the man who helped get Danny Brown's “Wonderbread” permanently lodged in countless listener's brains? Paul White's contributions to Old authoritatively put White on the radar, but his years' worth of previous work included a couple collaborations with Homeboy Sandman that already set a positive precedent. Sandman's White collabs on the Chimera EP breathed vividly through minor-key Michael Mann glow (“Look Out”) and VHS-fidelity late-summer soul murk (“They Can't Hang (Word to the Mother)”). And his spot the next year waxing anxious over a stargazing shuffle beat on White's Watch the Ants endcap “Find a Way” made it clear they had a mutually beneficial set of styles going.
Hence *White Sands—*even the title's slick wordplay makes this team-up seem preordained. Sandman's clear-eyed, clinical yet humane dissection of daily experience benefits from a similarly subdued production that holds just a few ripples of detectable tension beneath. White's sound here is the kind of thing worth conjuring up when attempting to figure out if there's such a thing as a Stones Throw house style: you get obscuro-soul beats filtered through quaver and hiss on some old-cassette shit, sawn-off basslines and snares that sound like baseball bats against padded walls, and vocals pitched up until they sound just the right side of bewildered. That, plus there's a goofy streak somewhere in there. I'm sure there are slower fadeouts than the dying-battery nod-off of “Fat Belly", but none I can think of that're accompanied by enthusiastic food crunching noises.
Granted, those crunching noises come after a bunch of verses relating to Sandman's vegan/organic/health food diet, which reclaims almond milk and lentils from hippie-dippie yuppie-shopper punchline status and flips it through his own eat-right lens in the tradition of A Tribe Called Quest's “Ham 'n' Eggs”. From there on out there's ample proof that Sandman's blend of straight-up rhyming, conceptual thrust, and worldbuilding storytelling is yet again on point. In doses of little interconnected one-liner details, unspooling over “I Saw a World” or “Bad Meaning Good", his negative-space-heavy hard-stop flow lets the snapshots come into focus. Bigger-picture stories feel like they could go on for another half-dozen verses—there's devastating depth to the broken woman depicted at the core of “Echoes” (“Her mother once beside herself with worry/ Now she wander right beside her none the wiser/ She didn't recognize her”). Sure, White Sands is something of a self-contained universe, another one-producer release in the tradition of "EL RNTC" collab Kool Herc: Fertile Crescent and the M. Slago-helmed All That I Hold Dear. But it's a universe with a lot to explore.


One half of Clipse, and the only guy remotely resembling a street rapper at Kanye West's G.O.O.D. Music imprint, offers his first commercially released solo album, a collection of ruthlessly professional rap music.

Fear of God II: Let Us Pray

As a solo artist, Pusha-T has a home in popular rap, but that doesn't mean he also isn't out of place. After an infamously torturous decade or so in the industry, Pusha now resides comfortably at G.O.O.D. Music, the imprint run by Kanye West that most notably houses guys like Common, Kid Cudi, and Big Sean. Pusha is the only guy remotely resembling a street rapper at the label, and though it's hard to figure out exactly what role he plays in the context of the label or even the genre writ large, it's a marriage that probably makes more sense than not. The days of Pusha, Drug Kingpin are long gone and have been for a while.
Maybe the rapper that Pusha most resembles now is Rick Ross. Though Pusha's cocaine-dealing past is bona fide (or close enough that no one bothers to question it), his identity as a drug dealer is now merely an imagined idea, a cachet that he rides but one that's far back in the rearview. The act of selling drugs, and the burdens and spoils that come with it, rarely enters his music anymore, and when it does, it rings as hollow as Ross' claims that you can call him up right now on his iPhone and score some dope. But of course it doesn't really matter if Pusha and Ross slip into personas either old or imagined, because a lack of proper reality or authenticity in rap has never dragged down music that was good in the first place. Where the Pusha of old was a witty and smart street hawk, the Pusha of the last five years or so has mirrored Kanye's and Ross' obsessions with luxury. If anything, it's in his ability to bridge the gap between those two rappers that Pusha finds his identity; he is as comfortable rapping about a yacht that a drug dealer might own as he is rapping about a scarf that a fashion designer might own.
But as Pusha has inched his way into the elite of rap, his music (including the material he recorded with his brother as Clipse after their 2006 album Hell Hath No Fury) has become exponentially less vital. He raps about luxury because he's a rich and famous rapper, and that's what rich and famous rappers do, and while there's nothing inherently wrong with that move, it's decidedly dulled the impact of his writing. Pusha has always carried himself with the bravado and ego of a star, and that was galvanizing when in his early years he played the role of a dealer-turned-rapper. But as a regular rapper who pops bottles in penthouses with a bunch of other rappers, that egotism has become commonplace, if not off-putting.
Yet here's the funny thing about Fear of God II, his first commercially released solo album: It proffers that, well, maybe none of that even matters. Pusha's rapping still noticeably pales in comparison to his peak years, and it would be hard to argue that there is any justification for the album's existence beyond Pusha needing to do something-- yet the stakes are so low that the sheer listenability of the album can sneak up on you. Its quality is mostly a testament to Pusha's connections and his ear for beats, but the rapping is sufficiently competent enough that the album never drags, which is less of a backhanded compliment than it might read.
It doesn't seem like much thought was put into sequencing (French Montana shows up on two straight tracks) or thematic cohesion ("Feeling Myself", the album's one slick R&B song, is followed up by the metallic jitter of the HHNF throwback "Raid"), but that strangely only intensifies the strength of the album, which is that Pusha collected seven or eight great tracks and then mostly got the hell out of the way. The process of releasing a rap album through a major label is so arduous now that albums often arrive in stores pushing 20 total songs with almost the same number of guests. Fear of God II's brevity is both refreshing and crucial to its success, and it likely speaks to Pusha's self-confidence that he felt comfortable clipping the tracklist at 12.
This is ruthlessly professional rap music, and though that might seem like the baseline for releasing a major-label rap album, 2011 has been an awful year so far big-box releases. Pusha may be a fish out of water performing on a weepy Kanye ballad or being in a crew with John Legend, but releasing a major-label album with consistent rapping, great beats, a rational guest list, and a sane running time qualifies as a minor miracle right now.


The Toronto band returns with a supremely hooky, slightly more polished album about harnessing dread to make music to harness dread to.

THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND

There’s a visual gag in A Mighty Wind, the 2003 Christopher Guest mockumentary, that charts the career downturn of Mitch Cohen, a fictitious ’60s folkie played by Eugene Levy. As a talking head recounts Mitch’s breakdown following the dissolution of his folk duo, images of his troubled solo records flash onscreen. Their bleak titles and artwork succinctly capture the songwriter’s deteriorating mental state: Cry for Help, followed by Calling It Quits.
Look at PUP’s titles in quick succession—The Dream Is Over, Morbid Stuff, This Place Sucks Ass—and the effect is similar: a portrait of a band spiraling into exhaustion and despair, except with a cathartic grin that lights up during their shout-along gang vocals. No other punk band has taken so much glee in forecasting their own demise. Just as prestige filmmakers love making films about the anguish of making films, PUP is a band that revels in playing songs about the sheer misery of being in a band. Now, half a decade after starting their breakthrough album with a joyful ditty about wanting to murder your bandmate, the Toronto band brings us a supremely hooky, slightly more polished album about harnessing dread to make music to harness dread to.
As usual, the title says it all: THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND. With its jokey piano interludes that satirize a squabbling band’s “board of directors,” the record plays like a concept album about the mental and social deterioration wrought by a decade spent in a moderately successful punk band.
Frontman Stefan Babcock is in his mid-thirties now—“too old for teen angst, too young to be washed,” as he shouts over the grinding, post-hardcore riffage of a song called “PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy.” He lashes out at friends who haven’t listened to new music since college (“Four Chords”), feels overwhelmed by stage anxiety (“Relentless”), and is so consumed by self-doubt that he projects it onto an inanimate object. Witness “Matilda,” which Babcock wrote from the perspective of a once-beloved, now-neglected guitar that he used to play at every PUP show. “I thought we had more time/I thought I could make it up somehow,” he sings. It’s a goofy premise, and yet Babcock can’t help but imbue the track’s jangly melodicism with a sincere sense of rejection and pain. This is quintessential PUP: Everything’s a joke, until it isn’t.
THE UNRAVELING OF PUPTHEBAND is PUP’s most expensive-sounding album to date—instead of the basement where they made Morbid Stuff, they recorded in a mansion belonging to indie superproducer Peter Katis—but it doesn’t compromise their perennial underdog status. You might miss the four-dudes-in-a-room stomp of The Dream Is Over, but there are some worthy expansions of the PUP sound here. The group successfully harnesses 808 beats for “Robot Writes a Love Song” and flirts with skittering synthpop on the unabashedly tuneful “Habit”; “PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy” recalls Nation of Ulysses with its anarchic saxophone solo. Those piano interludes grow tiresome, like a mid-2000s rap skit whose joke wears thin on repeat listens, but they are mercifully brief.
And when THE UNRAVELING goes hard, it goes hard. PUP’s business is still making feel-bad vibes feel good, and it seems fair to say that business is booming. “Totally Fine” manages to contort “Lately I’ve started to feel/Like I’m slowly dying!” into one of the year’s most screamable hooks, replete with disturbingly joyous backing harmonies. “Waiting” vacillates between metallic riffs worthy of Evil Empire and a chorus that overflows with pop-punk euphoria.
These songs capture a big part of PUP’s talent: making music that captures the sentiment of depression yet never succumbs to its lethargy or listlessness. This has always been one of the animating paradoxes of PUP’s songwriting. As Babcock put it in a recent band bio, “There’s only so many times you can write a song about how much you hate yourself before you write a song about how fucking good you are at hating yourself.”
And Babcock really is good at it. As ever, PUP’s songs tend to summon emotions that begin with the word “self” followed by a hyphen: self-hatred, self-doubt, self-deprecation, self-destruction. On the darkly funny anti-anthem “PUPTHEBAND Inc. Is Filing For Bankruptcy,” he mocks an ex-musician who took a job selling insurance before leaning into the gut-punch of a kicker: "Give me two more years/Let me know if they're hiring.”
Still, Babcock knows he can’t quit this. During a surprisingly tender lull in the song’s aggression, he admits, “There’s no place I’d rather be instead/Even though everybody here is fucked in the head.” Broken and exhausted, PUP arrives at some central truth: The only thing more miserable than a life in music is a life without it.


Both naggingly familiar and singularly odd, Zomby’s previously unreleased 2008 album finds him putting his own quixotic stamp on grime’s classic eskibeat sound.

Mercury’s Rainbow

The London producer Zomby may have one eye trained firmly on the future, but he has never been one to neglect the past. His 2008 debut album, Where Were U In ’92?, was one of rave revivalism’s first major statements. Mercury’s Rainbow, an album recorded “over an intense couple of weeks” somewhere around the release of his debut (but only now seeing the light of day), finds Zomby revisiting another of his musical touchstones: the glacial eskibeat sound that Wiley pioneered in the early 2000s on tracks like “Eskimo,” “Ice Rink,” and “Ground Zero,” which drained UK garage of all its warmth, replacing heat with minimal synth melodies, corporeal bass, and sparse percussive touches.
Zomby has made no secret of his admiration for Wiley, with whom he eventually worked, in 2015, on “Step 2001.” It is tempting to see Mercury’s Rainbow as a simple homage to eskibeat, a reverent cousin to Where Were U In ’92?’s throwback rave. Wiley used a limited (if hugely distinctive) sonic palette on his eski recordings, leaning heavily on the Korg Triton’s Gliding Squares preset along with percussive clicks, clinks, and stomps that were rumoured to be taken from a Nintendo “Ice Hockey” game (but which FACT later located on E-mu’s Planet Phatt unit). Zomby avails himself of many of these sounds on Mercury’s Rainbow, with the “ice puck” clicks on tracks like “Choke” and “Static” enough to send most early-2000s ravers into Proustian revery. The vast open spaces and minimal makeup, with drum sounds replaced by a rhythmic array of thuds, taps, and clicks, are clearly indebted to Wiley. And throughout, Zomby uses the eski formula of simple bass-synth riffs that continuously evolve, jumping up and down octaves or shifting in tone.
But there is far more to Mercury’s Rainbow than mere imitation. While Zomby may borrow elements from classic eski, he also throws in new sounds, creating his own distinctive sonic palette, from the strident “yaw” vocal sample that lends percussive weight to 15 songs (Zomby calls it “a primal chant”) to the echoing splash on “Poison,” “Waterfall of Ice,” and “Patina.” Reusing the same sounds might be anathema to some electronic-music producers, but here it helps draw the album together, making for an intense, immersive listen. The celestial electronic experiments of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop also feel like an influence: the astral synth effects on tracks like “Delvaux” and “Horizon” could easily have soundtracked “Dr. Who”’s excursions into the icy darkness of outer space.
In 2008, Zomby had only been on the scene for a short while, and here he introduces some of the production quirks that would mark his later output. The brief, unexpected variation he makes on a riff in “Choke,” some 47 seconds in, pulls the rug out from underneath the unsuspecting listener—a trick he he would later employ at length on 2011 mini album Nothing. This is music that feels handmade, not machine-painted, loose rather than quantized, and the effect is head-spinning, full of shifting themes that fracture, dissolve, and remold like ice sculptures refreezing in new and unsettling shapes. When an idea has run its course Zomby simply stops, and the 16 tracks on Mercury’s Rainbow rattle by in just over 38 minutes.
Despite its minimalism, Mercury’s Rainbow sees Zomby give full reign to his considerable melodic skills, constructing both nagging riffs that elevate the song (as on the title track, “Atoms,” and “Silver Ocean”) and frequently beautiful melodies, such as the ethereal violin sound in the background of “Tet5uo” that teases the song’s sliding synth riff. These elements come together on the wonderful “Waterfall of Ice,” which combines an eerily beautiful, proto-“Stranger Things” melody with a moody descending bass riff, “ice puck” clicks, and a lone, angry hi-hat hiss.
Mercury’s Rainbow is both naggingly familiar and singularly odd. Had it been released in 2009, it might have been celebrated as a companion piece to Where Were U In ’92?; had it come out in 2014, it would have sat well with the emerging “weightless” sound of Mumdance and Logos. In 2018 it feels strangely out of time: a decade-old work by a forward-thinking producer paying homage to a musical genre that he has long since abandoned. But maybe this incongruity is appropriate. Zomby has long followed his own path, one occasionally out of step with musical fashion. Mercury’s Rainbow is both a fascinating example of British dance music’s ability to regurgitate its past and a telling work of Zomby’s singular talent.


The French-Canadian DJ Philippe Aubin-Dionne debuts his long-overdue love letter to the dance floor.

Feel Infinite

Feel Infinite may be the debut Jacques Greene album, but it’s hardly the first we’ve heard from the project’s 27-year-old mastermind, Philippe Aubin-Dionne. Since his breakout single on the 2010 Night Slugs Allstars compilation, the French-Canadian DJ and producer has graduated from throwing parties in his native Montreal to touring the world with a steady stream of singles and EPs on indie dance labels.
It might seem odd to release your debut LP seven years into an ascendant career. However, for a working club DJ, most money is made on the live circuit and most fans are accustomed to getting all their music for free, so it’s considered a luxury to have the time and resources to produce a full-length. Aubin-Dionne’s contemporaries Kaytranada and Kingdom followed this route, making late, full narratives reflective of their identities.
On Jacques Greene’s first LP, the narrative is of an introvert who’s found human connections in the club; he’s found an escape not from reality, but from loneliness. It’s very much of the Montreal scene that birthed his career, one that was inclusive geographically. The Turbo Crunk parties he threw with Rob Squire, Hadji Baraka, and other dance peers were defined by border-busting beats build on Southern bounce, Bay Area hyphy, and Missy Elliott, all laced with a cappella rapping.
The songs on Feel Infinite are colorful and melodic, built on simple structures. He uses a minimalist palette—often just a drum track, synthesizer, and vocal sample. Seemingly rooted in house and techno, and punctuated with R&B vocals, the album plays with the building blocks of UK bass music and gives it his own spin. Feel Infinite is the work of an internet autodidact, one who’s culled his collection from peer-to-peer filesharing and admits it freely; he’s a music nerd who follows rabbit holes on Wikipedia and taught himself modular synthesizers by reading message boards. His crate-digging goes down online, from sampling random strangers’ tunes on YouTube to recording an exotic dancer’s vocals on her smartphone, and those samples are at the heart of Feel Infinite.
From the first deep breaths of opener “Fall” to the warbled wobble of “Afterglow,” voices set the emotional tone for the entire album. Aubin-Dionne is gifted at chopping up R&B vocals on top of dancefloor thumpers, and more than ever, he seems to be aware of its emotional impact. Feel Infinite is an openly tender album, meant to evoke the liberation of sharing music in a communal space even as you listen at home, alone, with headphones. It’s his 11-song love letter to the club, the place he spent his formative years.
Though it’s no longer the premier sales unit it once was—and for dance music DJs, maybe it never was—the full-length album still holds enough cache for Aubin-Dionne to put his touring schedule on hold to hunker down and record it. He tried once before, with the sessions that would ultimately become Phantom Vibrate, but it felt forced, like he was trying too hard to make something serious. That EP felt cold and isolated, most evident in its distant, hollow vocals. He’s escaped that trap by focusing on the self-contained universes in which he’s grown into an adult: the club. Feel Infinite is warm and inviting, a taut mix of R&B love songs to finding your true self on the floor.


The Norwegian producer's latest album, prophetically inspired by Japanese nuclear power plants, is his best since 1997 ambient milestone Substrata.

N-Plants

In early February, Biosphere's Geir Jenssen made an album inspired by the architecture and potential instability of Japan's nuclear power plants. A month later, a huge earthquake and tsunami caused the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. It's healthy to be skeptical about such claims to prescience, but dissembling isn't Jenssen's style: Clearly stated intentions and ideas are a defining feature of the Norwegian ambient-house producer's decades-long career. Plus, N-Plants' sleek contours and foreboding atmosphere easily bear out his theme. Having noted the eerie coincidence, we can dispense with it and let the best Biosphere album since 1997's definitive Substrata stand on its own.
Widely regarded as an ambient milestone, Substrata represented a thoughtful dilettante hitting the reset switch. A period of fertile miscellany followed, from the processed Debussy loops of Shenzhou to the long-tone sci-fi marathon Autour de la Lune. Like Substrata, N-Plants is both a consummation and a palate-cleanser. Fully in ambient-house mode, Jenssen fashions together hazy drones, filtered synthesizers, microhouse percussion, and haunting vocal samples over classically plumb lines. Like Kate Simko's 2009 soundtrack for The Atom Smashers, the album can evoke particles of energy swarming through elegant, hulking metal curves. But this one-time archaeology student has never given up his field's patient curiosity and long view, and N-Plants can't be fully constrained by modern context. Ages of ice and stone drift through it, and the Arctic Circle is a looming presence.
Each process on N-Plants, be it a glinting synthesizer motif or a low-scudding bass line, logically catalyzes the next. Where Substrata delved deeper and deeper, N-Plants glides over level, endlessly scrolling surfaces. The tracks don't essentially change. At most, they metastasize, as on "Sendai-1", where a synthesizer plays iridescently through an aquatic atmosphere; at minimum, cycles of loops perpetually revolve, as on "Genkai-1". Either way, blissful hypnosis ensues. N-Plants is a master craftsman's reaffirmation of a fundamental but lapsed tenet of electronic ambient: You set up a conversation between the machines, and then you step out of the way.


Logic’s latest mixtape is blessedly lighter on its toes and more entertaining than his overambitious albums, doing far more with far less.

Bobby Tarantino II

If Logic could get out of his head, he’d be doing a victory lap right now. Last year, the Maryland rapper landed the biggest hit of his career with “1-800-273-8255,” an anti-suicide No. 1 hit that quite likely saved lives, considering the National Suicide Prevention Hotline reported that calls spiked after its release. The song was PSA-pop at its most critic-proof—limp art that did tangible good.
But Logic also recognizes the danger in being typecast as the “suicide song” guy. So, on his boisterous, concertedly fun mixtape Bobby Tarantino II, Logic is out to prove he’s so more than just an advocate for entirely uncontroversial causes. On the mixtape’s opening sketch, Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty make a distinction between “Mixtape Logic” and “Album Logic,” while poking some light fun at the rapper’s more sanctimonious tendencies. “I’m not in the mood for a message about how I can be whatever I want or, like, oooohhh, equality,” Rick rants. “I want some shit I can turn up.” It’s a wise moment of self-effacement that cleans the slate for Logic to actually get a little loose.
Bobby Tarantino II follows in the long tradition of a mixtape as a branding exercise, where artists try to shore up the love of die-hard fans and atone for the A&R-directed sins of their commercial albums, be they treacly R&B features or awkward EDM crossovers. Yet while Logic is far from the first rapper to have it both ways—and far from the first rapper to put out a “mixtape” on a major label and have it available on all streaming platforms—his task is a particularly tall order. Once you’ve gone full Macklemore, you can’t walk all that sanctimony back. Especially for those who only know Logic from his PG singles, it’s deeply weird hearing the “I don’t wanna die” guy rap about crucifying pussy in that same innocent, puppy-dog voice.
He’s good at this stuff, though—much better at it than he is at preachy message rap. He stacks the tape with polished, dramatic productions and understands how to use his voice against them. On “Contra,” he tames a ferocious trap beat, and he parries his way through “44 More” with a capable impression of beast-mode Kendrick. He closes the chest-beating “Yuck” with the mixtape’s greatest flex, a voicemail from Elton John, who calls to propose a collaboration. The entire tape is magnitudes fleeter, lighter on its toes, and more entertaining than any of his bloated, overambitious albums have been. Logic carries his weight on every track, even peppering the potentially sleepy Wiz Khalifa feature “Indica Badu” with some flashy double-time flourishes.
Is it cynical to pack albums with shameless pablum and then save the heat for a project like this? To his credit, Logic buys in so completely on Bobby Tarantino II that it doesn’t cross the mind much. Sure, the mixtape often feels like a pop&b genre exercise, and even at his best, Logic never shakes the sense that he’s playing on somebody else’s terrain—on tracks like “Midnight” and “BoomTrap Protocol” his writing process seems to boil down to closing his eyes and asking, “What would Drake do?” But as parrots go, Logic is a skilled one, and Bobby Tarantino II makes the case that he’d be better off putting his world-saving ambitions in check more often. The less he’s trying to do, the better he sounds doing it.


Made up of acoustic instrumentation and primitive electronics, the Montreal-based psych-folk auteur’s latest navigates a world of discord with wide-eyed optimism and withering wit.

The Zug

The evolution of Jean-Sébastien Audet—the artist formerly known as Un Blonde and currently answering to Yves Jarvis—has been governed by a curious contradiction. As the Montreal-based psych-folk auteur has reined in the crazy-quilt sprawl of earlier releases for more compact, half-hour statements, his songs have become more gloriously overstuffed. Like his previous solo effort, 2020’s Sundry Rock Song Stock, The Zug presents itself as a conventionally scaled rock album of robust two-minute tunes that push Jarvis further away from the days when he would dish out 30-second avant-gospel field recordings or linger in a Tropicália oasis for eight minutes. But he’s not so much editing ideas out as folding them into one another, compacting his beautiful mess of thoughts and sounds into tidy little boxes until they’re liable to burst.
Throughout The Zug, Audet imagines your favorite ’60s psych-rock artists going on their ashram retreats and never coming back, liberating themselves from all sense of pop song logic and crowd-pleasing obligation. He delights in transmuting the familiar into the foreign: propelled by tense acoustic strums and his double-tracked vocals, “At the Whims” could almost pass for a vintage CSNY cut—at least until the song is infected by electronic squelches, looming waves of feedback, and a jazzy guitar solo that sounds like it’s being played on a backwards loop. Audet’s melodies are bubblegum in the truest sense of the word, their defined shapes gradually mangled and stretched into infinite directions. Though “Prism Through Which I Perceive” may only clock in at a minute, it remolds itself on a line-by-line basis. While its opening salvo suggests a cosmic classic-rock hymn, it quickly downshifts into a quirky prog waltz and back again, like two different songs battling for squatter’s rights of the same vinyl groove.
Though it draws from a familiar palette of acoustic instrumentation and primitive electronics, The Zug is greatly distinguished from Audet’s previous work by its restless sense of rhythm, which lends even the album’s most scatterbrained moments—like the loopy organ doodle “Gestalt” and stuttering kitchen-sink jam “Thrust”—a frantic forward momentum. But where songs like “Projection” effortlessly fuse meditative folk and hyperactive funk like a campfire Can, “What?” sees Audet gesture toward the dancefloor, melding frisky grooves, ecstatic harmonies, and lysergic guitar solos like a pawn-shop Prince.
For all of its shape-shifting musical abandon, The Zug finds Audet delivering his philosophical musings with an ever-enhanced focus. At this point, he’s become the anti-Kurt Vile: While both artists use self-referential meta-songwriting to stake out their zen state in a volatile world, Audet forsakes zoned-out hypno-jams for bursts of quiet chaos that starkly illuminate the fine line between inner peace and external turmoil. “We’re out on the fringe/Making the best of this flight,” he sings at the start of “At the Whims,” and over the course of the record, he deftly navigates a world of disinformation and discord with a combination of wide-eyed optimism and withering wit. “Endless Tube” is a string-sweetened ode to both the wonders and horrors of the internet, while “On the Line” uses gospel aesthetics to skewer puritans whose conception of freedom doesn’t go beyond the right to be unrepentant assholes.
But while The Zug tilts toward topicality, its most fertile subject remains Audet himself. The album’s greatest moment of clarity comes with “Bootstrap Jubilee,” a breezy origin-story anthem that both celebrates Audet’s work ethic, while acknowledging the family, friends, musical communities, and privilege that abetted his ascent. Audet may be the archetypal home-recording hermit operating in splendid isolation, but his music is ultimately a vehicle for connection, inviting you to savor the people and places that keep you sane.


Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" was the Twin Peaks of its time. Just as\n\ viewers in 1990 ...

Bobbie Gentry: Chickasaw County Child: The Artistry of Bobbie Gentry

Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" was the Twin Peaks of its time. Just as viewers in 1990 asked who killed Laura Palmer, listeners in 1967 debated what the narrator and Billie Joe McAllister dropped off the Tallahatchie Bridge. Was it a stillborn baby? A murder weapon? Drug paraphernalia? Was it her doll, as the 1976 movie version claimed? Or was it, as writer Ron Carlson theorized in The Oxford American, our collective loss of innocence as the Vietnam War raged and a counterculture surged? Originally intended as a B-side to "Mississippi Delta", "Ode to Billie Joe" was an unlikely hit: With a decidedly Southern Gothic atmosphere, the song unfolds mostly at a dinner table, builds a mystery around the narrator's unspecified relationship with Billie Joe, and touches on suicide, home cooking, and the plight of rural farmers, as Gentry's guitar and Jimmie Haskell's strings swirl around the words like eddies in swampy southern creeks.
"Ode to Billy Joe" wasn't Gentry's only hit-- just the one that's still popular today, canonized by K-Tel and various cover versions both blatantly ironic and boringly sincere. Shout! Factory's new collection, Chickasaw County Child: The Artistry of Bobbie Gentry, seeks to erase that one-hit-wonder stigma by emphasizing her dusky and dramatic voice, confident interpretation, and geographically and culturally specific songwriting, all of which combined to create a unique Deep South style. By portraying her as a true artist and a legitimate contemporary of Dusty Springfield, Jessi Coulter, and even FraxE7oise Hardy, this collection intends to introduce Gentry to a new generation of listeners more familiar with the Black Lodge than Choctaw Ridge.
As a testament to her woodwind coo, Chickasaw County Child succeeds effortlessly: Deep and expressive, down-home yet sophisticated, Gentry's voice transcends the country label, which she earned in the late 60s, by incorporating a range of styles to put her songs across, from blues and folk to pop and rock and even a little mariachi on "Beverly". However, as a collection of songs meant to showcase that voice, this collection proves more complicated and not quite revelatory. Often, her vocal performance so far surpasses the material that the effect is unintentionally comical, like watching a great actor spout wooden lines. Sometimes her songwriting veers too close to precious ("Bugs") or Vegas smooth ("Marigolds and Tangerines") or just plain weird ("Refractions"), and in retrospect, many of the songs here sound dated, their production too gimmicky and, by now, kitschy. In other words, too many of the songs on Chickasaw County Child sound more like artifacts of the 70s than timeless art.
Discounting Gentry as outdated, however, is dangerous: Credited with all but two of the nearly two dozen tracks on Chickasaw County Child, she proves herself a smart, intuitive songwriter with a distinctive voice that incorporated childhood reminiscence to conceal rather than convey her autobiography. There's a lot more of her life in these songs than the lyrics suggest-- and the lyrics suggest plenty.
Obviously, "Mississippi Delta" and "Papa, Won't You Let Me Go to Town With You?" draw from her childhood spent on her grandparents' rural farm, a nostalgia that lent her a marketable wholesomeness (despite the implied indiscretions of "Ode to Billie Joe"). As her celebrity grew with her early success, Gentry eventually turned her attention from Southern youth to a less geographically centered adulthood. Consequently, her songs became less overtly autobiographical, although she still plays the lead. She may not be the title character of "Fancy", a poor girl who has no qualms about how she earned that "Georgia mansion and an elegant New York flat," but she certainly identifies with her tough-mindedness.
Following her contribution to the 1974 movie Macon County Line, Gentry retired completely and (so far) permanently from performing, refusing to give concerts or interviews and declining offers to record or collaborate. On the amazing "Lookin' In", the penultimate track on Chickasaw County Child, she describes her hectic routine: "Laying in my hotel room wantin' to be alone/ Needin' the time to rest my mind/ But they bring in another stack of papers to sign/ And L.A.'s a-waitin' on the other line." The song contains all the information we need to understand her self-imposed exile, but just like "Ode to Billie Joe", the answers it gives only draw more questions. Gentry promises confession in these songs, but she remains unknowable and irresolvable. As Chickasaw County Child makes clear, her true artistry lies not in what she revealed through words and music, but what she kept hidden-- and what her songs continue to guard so closely today.


The New York City rapper heads upstate for a steely Westside Gunn production with all the hallmarks of a Griselda blockbuster.

Kiss the Ring

Spend enough time with Rome Streetz’s catalog and you’ll find yourself thinking about infrastructure collapse. A 36-year-old rapper raised in eastern Queens, he’s the best bar-for-bar rhymer to come out of New York City in a half-decade; a resident of the Bed-Stuy neighborhood immortalized by the Notorious B.I.G. and JAY-Z, he boasts comparable expertise in the narcotics trade. In a more bountiful era, he’d have been a fixture on BET countdowns and Hot 97 drive-time blocks, back when their frequencies were beamed into every set-top box and Ford Explorer in the tri-state. Now? He delivers polished albums and white-knuckled mixtapes enjoyed by small audiences, fingers crossed that one of his breakneck sixteens will go viral.
Fortunately he’s secured a benefactor in Westside Gunn, the executive producer and “curator” of Streetz’s Griselda debut, Kiss the Ring. Where Streetz’s projects usually spotlight individual collaborators—just in 2021, he released full-lengths with DJ Muggs, Ankhlejohn, Ransom, and Futurewave—Kiss the Ring is a full immersion into Griselda’s murky waters. Gunn’s in-house producers share humble origins: Buffalo natives Daringer and Camoflauge Monk are associates from Griselda’s early days; Conductor Williams and Denny Laflare were plucked from internet obscurity. By now, they’re an assembly line engineering claustrophobic samples heedless of key signatures and equalizer settings. On “In Too Deep” and “Soulja Boy,” Conductor’s compressed loops veer offkey. It’s a steely, found-elements approach, but the effect is rather maddening—each bar sounds like it might go somewhere interesting until the inevitable reset.
By ratcheting up the difficulty levels, the producers enjoin Streetz to flex his considerable muscle. The man can rap over anything. On “Heart on Froze,” Streetz unleashes an avalanche of blistering couplets over a snare’s drumroll, his verses lending framework to the distorted bassline. “Ugly Balenciaga’s” is positively avant-garde, a tepid soup of vocal bites and squawking saxophone. In contrast, Streetz is composure personified, his impeccably patterned rhymes (“Made a nice profit pushing paraphernelia/Switched, now it’s only audio dope that I’ll sell ya/Fuck the police, never friendly with those that jail ya/Tryin’ to fuck with me results in failure”) belying a pugnacious bite.
A preternatural technician from the school of Big L and Big Pun, Streetz’s flow sheathes painstaking rhyme schemes, his inflection bestowing an off-kilter chattiness. While he favors an instinctive, punchline-centric writing style, he’s a formalist at ease with multisyllabic patterns and melodic hooks. His sensibility is best suited to Kiss the Ring’s sturdier arrangements. While the somber themes of “Long Story Short” ring familiar, the third-person narrative allows for pithy asides (“They flipped his residence, found a phone and overwhelming evidence/Karma’s a bitch, a kiss, a blessing, or it’s venomous”). The standout “Tyson Beckford” recalls Muggs’ work on Streetz’s 2021 opus Death & the Magician, sparse percussion accentuating the animated chorus and wordplay.
Kiss the Ring bears all the hallmarks of a Griselda blockbuster: dissonant instrumentals, abstract interludes, wacky ad-libs and beat tags, songs named after B-list celebrities. Like Diddy and Master P before him, Westside Gunn is a networker and financier with a knack for corralling talent. When he imparts his vision on established artists, the results can be hit-or-miss. Mach-Hommy’s vibrant Pray for Haiti bore a similar conceit to Kiss the Ring, a decorated genre master tiptoeing into Griselda’s house of mirrors, and the producers and guests reflected Mach’s idiosyncrasies back at him. By comparison, Streetz is a dour raconteur and a less mercurial presence—all of which contributed to the eerie tension of Death & the Magician. Kiss the Ring is most reminiscent of Gunn’s own freewheeling mixtapes, but the routine is a bit paint-by-numbers given Streetz’s subtler acrobatics.
The Armani Caesar duet “Armed & Dangerous,” a crass Bonnie-and-Clyde dialogue formatted like an early-2000s thug-love ballad, feels like a missed opportunity. The G-Unit era is as ripe for homage as any, but even G-Unit could poke fun at their hokey crossovers, whereas Streetz and Caesar opt to play it straight. There’s ample room for irony between their characters—Streetz as a beats-and-bars purist, Caesar as an underground sex symbol—but to cast them as infatuated lovers beggars belief. A record like Kiss the Ring has zero crossover potential in 2022. Why bother?
This lack of purpose beleaguers the album’s lesser moments, even if Kiss the Ring is one of the best pound-for-pound rap outings of the year. In days past, a rapper like Streetz—a lightning talent from the cradle of hip-hop—would have incited a major-label bidding war. Today, he’s bankrolled by a cult artist and would-be mogul intent on molding stars in his image. It’s like Snoop Dogg signing with No Limit, or Kevin Durant joining the Warriors. Streetz has executed masterworks of his own; he’s never needed a lift.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today we explore the collectivism of the Band’s 1969 self-titled album.

The Band

The Band’s second album might have been called America. Robbie Robertson and Levon Helm were both partial to that grandiose moniker—years later, it was one of the only things they still agreed on. Harvest was also considered, as the record was conceived as a concept album about the South that begins with the promise of spring and ends with the make-or-break finality of the fall, when a farmer pleads for deliverance from financial ruin in “King Harvest (Has Surely Come).” As it turned out, the Band left Harvest behind for friend Neil Young, who used it for his commercial breakthrough nearly three years later.
The Band surely is a record obsessed with America, made by a mostly Canadian quintet who explored this country’s roots right as the U.S. became politically and culturally unmoored in the late 1960s. Harvest would have worked as well, given Robertson’s burgeoning literary pretensions. But ultimately, this record needed to be called The Band because it’s about the Band—how these men worked together, the way their personalities intersected and completed each other, the very architecture of their friendship. The album dispels all of the assumptions we carry about how bands are supposed to work—the songwriter is all-powerful, the rhythm section is the supporting cast, hierarchies are inevitable. The Band instead operates on a paradigm in which the power comes from the bottom up and authority is dispersed evenly among compatriots.
Maybe all of the players in a band can be on equal footing, and not merely back up the resident genius. Perhaps the singers, who inspire the songwriter and transform his lyrics into colloquial truths with salt-of-the-earth nonchalance, are paramount. And what if that “resident genius” archetype is a myth anyway, compared with the reality of musicians who work together in obscurity for years until their collective telepathy makes them stars? The Band was once treasured as a communal hippie fantasy, the epitome of the era’s anti-consumerist back-to-the-land proselytizing. Except, for a while, the members of the Band truly excelled in a utopian, all-for-one, one-for-all setting. Their signature album is the closest that classic rock comes to pure socialism.
This selflessness doesn’t come at the expense of each member’s individuality. On the contrary, the five figures staring out from The Band’s brown and sepia album cover are as recognizable as the cast members of your favorite movie or TV show. From left to right, there’s Richard Manuel, the broken-hearted piano player; Helm, the indomitable drummer; Rick Danko, the affable bassist; Garth Hudson, organist and mad-scientist multi-instrumentalist; and Robertson, the guitarist, songwriter, and self-appointed orchestrator. That album cover is arguably just as influential as the music on The Band. For years afterward, wannabes would don mustaches and bowler hats inside countless bars and juke joints as an attempt to replicate what the original articles came by honestly, back when nobody cared and all these five guys had was each other.
The idea was to rent a house in the Hollywood Hills and find a happy medium between the homespun naturalism of the unreleased “basement tapes” recorded in upstate New York with Bob Dylan in 1967, and the austere slickness of the Band’s 1968 debut, Music From Big Pink, which was made at top-flight studios in Manhattan and Los Angeles. The guys wanted to get back to the informality of the Dylan sessions, so they looked for a place to create their own world free of industry professionals and “engineers and union people,” Danko later told Band biographer Barney Hoskyns. “We’d be thinking Harveyburgers, and they’d be thinking caviar.”
The Band chose a scenic mansion that had once been owned by Sammy Davis Jr., and spent a month setting up a recording studio in the pool house in the backyard. (It was a far cry from the backwoods fantasia the album evokes, the guys really wanted to get out of New York for the winter.) Meanwhile, they lived together in the main house, drawing straws to see who would get which room—egalitarianism pervaded every aspect of the Band. After an 8-track console and other equipment Capitol Records shipped over were installed, they crammed two months of work into the remaining four weeks. Each day started at around 7 p.m. when the musicians assembled to rehearse and work on getting the sounds right. Then they would eat a good meal, after which they finally began recording at around midnight, working until dawn. At Manuel’s request, producer John Simon procured amphetamines from a neurosurgeon pal up in San Francisco to keep the band’s energy up.
A photo in the album’s liner notes shows how the Band was set up in their makeshift studio—Hudson and Manuel sit at their keyboards on the perimeter while Robertson, Danko, and Helm hold the middle. The guys stare up at the camera like it’s a stranger who has suddenly intruded on a private moment. They were children hanging out in the world’s coolest treehouse, best pals who spent weeks trading jokes and shooting pool, and then imbuing their freewheeling spirit into the ultimate “hang out” album that they happened to make in the process. That sense of togetherness, and the possibility of a counter-culture in which each person is crucial and valued as such, is what makes The Band so seductive. You want to crawl up inside of this record and bathe in the warmth of the enviable bond at its core.
It’s not always clear who’s singing or playing what. Take “Rag Mama Rag”: The drummer sings and plays mandolin, the pianist is on drums, the bassist plays fiddle, the organist plays piano, and the album’s producer is on tuba, supplying the song’s de facto bassline. There’s “Rockin’ Chair,” in which the Band’s three singers—Manuel, Helm, and Danko—weave their voices in and out of conventional harmony, typical of a conversational vocal style referencing the call-and-response cadence of gospel as well as back-porch mountain music and countless barroom sing-alongs.
The brotherhood vibe carried over to subsequent recording sessions in New York City. “Jemima Surrender,” a rare co-write for Robertson and Helm, rides a loose and swinging groove supplied by Manuel, once again subbing on drums. Compare the driving yet carefree “Jemima” to the absolutely lethal “Up on Cripple Creek,” recorded at the same session, in which Helm’s lascivious vocal—and Hudson’s pre-”Superstition” clavinet riff—plays against Helm’s relentlessly funky half-time backbeat, later sampled in the early ’90s by Gang Starr. And yet, no matter where each person happened to fall in a particular song, The Band always performed as a family unit, with everyone pitching in to accomplish the task at hand, often in subtle ways that wouldn’t be apparent to anyone else.
Unlike virtually every other major rock act of its time, the Band did not live and die by guitar heroics, even though Robertson had proven on Dylan’s 1966 world tour with the Hawks that he was more than capable of quicksilver blues leads, like B.B. King having early premonitions of Eddie Van Halen. But on record, he aspired to the velvety restraint of Curtis Mayfield, always laying back, allowing only occasional solos, like on “The Unfaithful Servant,” when he felt compelled to pick some acoustic lines after being so moved by Danko’s stunning first-take vocal.
Years later, when Helm publicly feuded with Robertson over songwriting royalties, the irascible drummer couldn’t dispute that his estranged guitar player had, in most instances, indeed set pen to paper by himself while his bandmates were likely off carousing somewhere. Helm’s argument was more nuanced, positing the relative value of writing versus execution. Robertson might have done the former, but Helm was responsible for the latter. He took Robertson’s songs and turned them into living history.
This complementary dynamic is on display in “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” about a Confederate soldier named Virgil Cane who’s resigned to a downtrodden life as a poor farmer after the Civil War. It is one of the songs on which Robertson based his reputation as a budding Serious Rock Songwriter—he aped ancient American folk forms like his mentor Dylan, and successfully composed a new tune that felt like it was already 100 years old, while also commenting obliquely on the class and regional divides that are seemingly eternal in this country.
Today, “Dixie” and the empathy it has for defenders of Southern slavery makes it a thorny listen. But the tenderness and pain in Helm’s voice stand apart from Robertson’s words as an eloquent expression of profound sorrow, the type of immutable loss that’s passed down from generation to generation, as both birthright and original sin. It’s possible to both question whether a song like this needs to exist, and appreciate how Helm’s naked hurt transcends it.
Robertson is less the mastermind of The Band than a director and screenwriter, tailoring roles that play to the strengths of his of three leading men. For the sweet, humble Danko, Robertson (with an assist from Manuel) wrote the album’s most charming song, “When You Awake,” a romantic callback to the Big Pink days, which makes Danko’s wised-up turn in “The Unfaithful Servant” later in the album all the more affecting.
Manuel was the most versatile singer in the Band. On “Across the Great Divide” and “Jawbone,” he plays the captivating rogue. (Manuel’s yelping delivery of the chorus of “Jawbone”—“I’m a thief, and I dig it!”—is the album’s single best line reading, both hilarious and heroic.) But Manuel was more often typecast in the Band as the forsaken wanderer. On “Whispering Pines,” the emotional black hole at the center of The Band, which Robertson co-wrote with Manuel, his quivering tenor captured the sound of utter, near-hopeless desolation.
“If you find me in a gloom, or catch me in a dream/Inside my lonely room, there is no in-between,” Manuel sings. Hudson’s organ trails him like a concerned friend, and Helm calls out desperately during the chorus. But Manuel’s sense of isolation is impenetrable. That he expresses such extreme alienation from within the confines of this perfectly balanced ensemble, rounded out by some of his oldest and dearest confidants, makes “Whispering Pines” almost unbearably melancholy.
Manuel later died, by himself, inside of a hotel room, giving “Whispering Pines” a thoroughly dispiriting subtext. And the Band eventually devolved into acrimony, addiction, petty jealousies, low-rent one-night stands in nowhere-towns, and more premature deaths. Now, when people think about the Band, the most common reference point is The Last Waltz, Martin Scorsese’s iconic concert film about the group’s would-be farewell show in 1976, in which Robertson is placed at the center and Manuel is barely visible. Hierarchy had finally been imposed.
And yet the power of the Band’s second record is such that it can make you forget all of that for about 40 minutes. If all things must pass, even iconic bands and intractable friendships, that just makes those brief, glorious moments long ago when five singular spirits became one all the more precious.


*WALLS *mostly finds Kings of Leon back in that mode of offering up fast-food “whoa-oh” singalongs and guitars that chime as distinctly as wallpaper.

WALLS

Say what you will about Kings of Leon: They are probably one of the last groups we’ll watch go from scrappy garage-rock origins to scoring mainstream radio hits and headlining arenas and festivals with the old-school battle-stance of two guitars, a bass, and a drumkit. They are more of an actual rock band than contemporaries like the National, or St. Vincent, or Arcade Fire—those indie titans that too transitioned from the small rooms to the big fields. You know the narrative by now: sheltered Southern kids raised on religion, finding rock ‘n’ roll and sin, then sobering up and settling down. It’s a classic narrative, one that's almost too perfect in its adherence to tropes. There were all the cringe-worthy lyrics about dangerous women and the bandmembers’ own profligacy. There were also, at one point, songs that were invigorated and scuzzy and endearing enough to swat away concerns about a doofy band playing into all manner of classic bad-boy rock archetypes—the types of rock songs few others have been swinging for in the 21st century.
Those are the things about Kings of Leon that come across as real enough. But as they sold their souls over again—this time not for boozy Southern rock, but for schlocky corporate-music refrains—all sorts of questions popped up. What even is this band? “Southern Strokes turned Southern U2” is the oft-cited transition, but over time both comparisons began to feel overly generous. Instead, the Followill crew’s arena-conquering material lumped them closer to mewling radio-rock bands than the indie sphere with which they'd flirted. When it was just “Use Somebody” and Come Around Sundown, it was still easy to hope that Kings of Leon would reclaim some of the roughened charm of their earlier work. “Supersoaker,” the lead single from their 2013 album Mechanical Bull, had even hinted at a return-to-form; it had the earworm ease of the best Aha Shake Heartbreak cuts, but conveyed it with a little more clarity and control. And while the songwriting across that record proved unsteady, it was at least a turn in the right direction. It offered an image of Kings of Leon as grizzled almost-veterans, no longer forcing choruses to soar when they could be more evocative as they rumbled.
Well, then they made WALLS. It’s their seventh full-length, and it too marks a return-to-form, but this time the form they're revisiting is the soulless would-be transcendence of all the worst stuff on Only by the Night and Come Around Sundown. This is, uh, not the form they should return to. WALLS mostly finds Kings of Leon back in that mode of offering up fast-food “whoa-oh” singalongs and guitars that chime as distinctly as wallpaper.
If you’re amenable to that version of Kings of Leon, you’re in luck. “Reverend” and “Waste a Moment” join a growing lineage of songs the group has offered up in the last eight or so years, a lineage in which the names and melodies are becoming increasingly hard to distinguish from one another. Sure, these songs get stuck in your head, but they’re not exactly welcome there. The catchiness of these songs is like a party guest who is trying too hard; the choruses and big, glistening guitars have an irritating tenacity. Name almost any song on WALLS: “Around the World,” “Over,” “Eyes on You,” “Wild”—any of them could slot in as third-tier answers to “Sex on Fire” and “Radioactive” and “Use Somebody.”
There are glimmers of something else, hints of why this band has been likable to many over the years, hints of other places they could've gone. The jangling guitars and light moodiness of “Find Me” conjure a style of twilit early ’80s highway-rock that could suit Kings of Leon well as thirtysomething journeymen. And “Muchacho” is an evocative barroom lament, the kind of thing that has you picturing aged faux-outlaws refusing to cry into their whiskey in some distant desert saloon. There's more grit and gravity in frontman Caleb Followill’s delivery here than anywhere else on the album; it makes you wonder if there was more where this came from. It makes you wish for a latter-day Kings of Leon album that was more rugged. One where you can feel the miles they’ve traveled, rather than the ticket sales of the festivals they’ve headlined and no doubt hope to headline once more. Sadly, they seem content for the kind of mediocrity that designates you as the headliner Firefly and Bonnaroo call when someone else isn’t available.


Like Wavves and Times New Viking, this band uses lo-fi as a filter for pop sensibilities, though its approach is friendlier and less abrasive than those acts.

The Love Language

A lo-fi approach to recording obscures many things-- instrumental interplay, subtle shifts in vocal tone, lyrics-- but one thing it never masks is enthusiasm. In fact, lo-fi almost always accentuates it, which is why even the most financially solvent of bands have been known to purposefully muddy or smear their sound, sacrificing clarity for intensity and choosing mystery over transparency. If you read much music criticism you'll know (and I'm as guilty as anyone) that some of the gravest pejoratives are "tasteful," "mannered," and "polite." And of course, it's damn near impossible to sound tasteful or polite when your songs are coming through layers of hiss, distortion, and fuzz.
Embracing a lo-fi aesthetic is certainly an acceptable and useful tool for communicating your music, but ideally the tunes themselves should be strong enough to stand on their own. It would be unfair to say an album like the Love Language's self-titled debut is a failure unless you can imagine the songs would've sounded just as good had they been recorded squeakily clean. Still, it's almost invariably the case that hooks and melodies (which The Love Language luckily has in spades), and not technique, are what keeps a listener returning over and over again.
As a touring entity, the Love Language are a seven-piece band currently based in Raleigh, N.C., yet their eponymous first LP was written and recorded solely by frontman Stuart McLamb. Like recent indie breakthroughs Wavves and Times New Viking, McLamb uses lo-fi as a filter for his keen pop sensibilities, though his approach is far friendlier and less abrasive than either of those acts. Over the brief 29-minute course of the album, McLamb cycles through a wide range of indie-rock, country, and early-pop styles, all delivered with shouty charm and in-the-red verve, roughly approximating a sock-hop-era Arcade Fire. Particularly effervescent are "Lalita", which rides a bold fuzzed-out guitar line and equally demonstrative drums to somehow convey shambling joy in spite of its embittered lyrics, and "Sparxxx", which sounds like a great lost Nugget from a band of forgotten garage moptops, making endearing use of a xylophone. Suffice to say, instruments bleed into each other pretty liberally here, creating a boisterous racket McLamb only emphasizes with his heavy reliance on tambourine, most generously deployed on the punch-drunk, waltzing "Nocturne" (which is also outfitted with a neat little surf guitar lick) and the closing "Graycourt".
Lyrically this is a record undeniably tinged with romantic strife, yet, unlike lovelorn former Raleigh denizen Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, McLamb's songs are largely energetic and sprightly. Even the spare and clearly aggrieved opener, "Two Rabbits" exudes McCartney-ish charms, while the country-tinged moper "Stars" musically exudes such a bygone innocence that it's hard to evince any real emotional peril. Of course, a cringe-worthy line like "little girls tell the biggest lies" certainly doesn't help, but blessedly it's soon subsumed, like everything else, beneath sweetly obfuscating blankets.


The iconic London nightclub celebrates two decades with 20 tracks that survey the house, techno, and bass-music styles synonymous with the venue, with mixed results.

20 Years of Fabric

When London club Fabric opened in October 1999, dubstep was barely a twinkle in 2-step’s eye, Daft Punk were just a promising French house duo, and nu-skool breaks was all the rage. 20 Years of Fabric, released to celebrate two decades of the club, isn’t a comprehensive guide to Fabric’s adventures since then. There’s no grime, little dubstep, and no Ricardo Villalobos, who seemed to be permanently stuck into an eight-hour set whenever I visited in the 2000s.
Then again, there’s simply no way of jamming two decades of London clubbing into 20 tracks, however well curated, and those oversights shouldn’t detract from what is a worthy—if occasionally dull—attempt to make sense of the decades of sleepless nights and millions of electronic beats that have gone into making Fabric such an enduring institution. 20 Years of Fabric (the album) says a great deal about the past 20 years of Fabric (the club); it also offers insight into a British club culture that balances reverence for the past with an eye for the future, and where commercialism and experimentalism go hand in hand.
The club has invited 20 artists who helped shape its sound to contribute new tracks to this compilation. Uncharitably, you might group them into those representing Fabric’s past (Sasha, UNKLE and Groove Armada), present (Anastasia Kristensen, Nina Kraviz, Daniel Avery, et al), and future (new residents IMOGEN and Mantra). The imperial march of house and techno dominates, as it does Saturday nights all over Britain; the genres’ reliability is a vaguely comforting disappointment. Tracks from Call Super, Margaret Dygas, and Kraviz suggest an alternative avenue for the 4/4 sound that is giddy, hypnotic, and laced with psychedelia, but they risk getting bogged down in the methodical efficiency of contributions from Marcel Dettmann, Sasha, and IMOGEN.
Drum’n’bass, which has played a crucial role in the history of both Fabric and British nightlife, fares better. The three artists here—Special Request, Source Direct, and J. Majik—may sail closer to the ’90s tradition of chopped “Amen” breaks and rave-induced paranoia than to the precision-engineered sonics of modern drum’n’bass. But there is a serotonin-loosening rush of nostalgic futurism to their cold-blooded atmospherics (Source Direct’s “Vigilante”), melodic sub bass (J. Majik’s “The Lost Tribe”) and borderline ridiculous rave cosplay (Special Request’s “Codename Turbo Nutter”) that reminds you how vibrant the genre was in its heyday.
From here on in, things get murkier. Shackleton’s “Drawn and Quartered” has the rambling mysticism, polyrhythmic ceremony, and live feel of his Tunes of Negation project, while Pinch & Trim’s “That Wasn’t It” rides a screwball rhythm and melancholic piano chords; the two songs’ utter indifference to the drop is a reminder of how far most dubstep pioneers have moved from the genre’s gothic bass pressure. Mantra’s “Embers” is equally uncanny, if slightly more danceable. The song’s stuttering breaks and rumbling bass suggest an experimental drum’n’bass track pitched down to -8, where it connects with the bubbling synth rush and euphoric vocal loop of an ’80s rave anthem.
It is a shame that the album then descends into the moribund closing duo of Groove Armada’s “Wesley Nightshade” and UNKLE’s painfully earnest “Catch Me When I Fall (Fabric Club Mix)”: Their dual blandness splashes ketchup all over 20 Years’ increasingly spicy second half. The club has been many things over the years, not all of them successful, but rarely is it as boring as these songs suggest.
Ultimately, if you want to experience the thrills of Fabric at 20, go to the club; if you want to explore Fabric’s historical significance, your first port of call should be the Fabric and Fabriclive mix CDs, whose monthly installments were essential in mapping out the electronic music landscape of the 2000s. But if you want a warts-and-all snapshot of modern British clubbing, jammed somewhere tedium and brilliance, 20 Years of Fabric will do you right.


The latest from the gothic avant-rock band sees the four-piece loosen up and let slip the forces begging for release since their debut.

Felt

The Montreal four-piece Suuns write smoldering music that’s painstakingly assembled. They are philosopher-musicians, schooled in free jazz, no wave, IDM, and German motorik, and their records are studies in contrasts: Confrontationally limp, seductively bleak, synthetically punk. They are puritanical Dionysians, filling the air with gyrating, charcoal-dim fever dreams built by technocrats—perhaps they even smoked cigarettes before their peers and carried tattered copies of Camus from cafes to rehearsal spaces in the gothic Quebec twilight. This image is an absurd grab for context, sure, but the band’s fixations feel of a piece with it: Suuns (pronounced “soons”) are careful synthesists who, since 2007, have cultivated a sound that’s existential and sinister yet resonantly human.
If there’s a case to be made that subversion and dystopia can still fuel great left-of-center rock, Suuns make a damn convincing one. Felt, the band’s fourth full-length, is the first Suuns record to be unburdened by self-seriousness. Its predecessor, Hold/Still, gestured at the kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors they’d come to design, but the record was difficult to metabolize as a whole. Felt, however, sees Suuns loosen up and let slip the forces begging for release since their debut Zeroes QC. They showcase a swath of experimental guitar- and synth-based styles strewn through what’s become Suuns’ very particular lens: Soft-focus abrasion, wound tight and set free by the versatile producer John Congleton. This has been Suuns’ thesis since the beginning—cultivating “the sublime alchemy of idealism and conflict”—and they’ve finally struck a satisfying balance.
“X-Alt,” “Watch You, Watch Me,” and “Baseline,” a trifecta of future feeling at the front of Felt, encapsulates Suuns’ new mission best: Scorched techno-punk blurs to smiley-faced synth workout blurs to narcotic psych comedown. Nothing is what it seems, and no one musical element is in total command. Low-pitched synths flower and undulate and evaporate like storm clouds in spring. Drums rustle and tumble as single guitar notes drone in slinky repetition, smeared with cotton-light manipulation. Ben Shemie’s slack voice drifts beneath and above the fray, parched yet mellifluous. The effect works whether Suuns play slow or fast, as with shoegaze, and they are constantly searching for any place to inseam a groove.
On “Make It Real” and “Materials,” Suuns channel the German electronic composer Apparat, embracing a kind of blue-hued openness. They commune with the astral slackers Autolux, using only what’s necessary to generate a perennial bloom. Suuns’ synth hand and “default musical director” Max Henry says that Frank Ocean’s “use of space” was an inspiration, which is no strange thing, yet it grabbed me nonetheless: Until now Suuns seemed to wall themselves off as a matter of habit. Ocean’s no extrovert, but he’s an intersection for a wide array of listeners, and Felt exhibits a porousness that could also attract new and more varied fans of Suuns. Perhaps, in the end, we’ll all want it weird.


A new EP of four songs recorded during sessions for last year’s Big Time forms a bridge between the singer-songwriter’s past and present.

Forever Means EP

After a few years of sweeping grandeur and synthy ’80s covers, Angel Olsen began a new chapter with last year’s Big Time. She gestured at Muscle Shoals warmth with flashing horns and embraced the pedal-steel twang of her beloved ’70s country stars. She also reckoned with massive changes in her personal life: coming out as queer, losing both of her parents in a matter of a few weeks, and falling in love.
When she completed the album, Olsen was left with a few recordings that didn’t make the final cut. She’s released them now as Forever Means, a four-song EP that bridges the Asheville singer-songwriter’s past and present. The arrangements swing between stark reflections that recall the best of her early material, and the full-band backdrops that have invigorated her more recent work. The former suits the open spirit of Big Time, but the busier arrangements occasionally crowd her newfound lucidity.
Olsen sounds most like her old self on “Forever Means,” which echoes the wistful introspection of Burn Your Fire for No Witness’s “Unfucktheworld.” But where the earlier song dipped into mournful solitude, Olsen savors permanent bonds here. “Forever in your eyes/I see when you shine,” she sings. Separated by nearly a decade, the songs bookend an extended period of growth and upheaval, charting what Olsen has learned about what’s worth keeping and what’s worth letting go.
“Nothing’s Free,” meanwhile, builds from a slow and sumptuous piano foundation. “I’ll never feel more sure of anything,” Olsen sings with a smoky glow, coaxing her addressee out of a cell “you thought had kept you safe.” Though Olsen offers reassurance in her lyrics, the piano melody gives the song a bittersweet twist. As the drums kick in and a brooding sax solo gives way to a howling electric organ, “Nothing Free” feels like a direct link between the high glamor of 2019’s All Mirrors and the rootsier sensibilities of Big Time.
Lavish instrumental arrangements brought panoramic scope to All Mirrors and My Woman, but “Time Bandits” and “Holding On” falter under similar flourishes. The drums on “Time Bandits” clash with the old-school atmosphere, and a tinny trumpet interlude feels out of place, as if the player had wandered over from another session. On “Holding On,” the flashy, high-register guitar solos are a magpie-like distraction from the tangled string section. Olsen’s flustered yelp burns with unfulfilled desire, but her vocal melody never quite matches her lyrics’ search for deliverance.
The varied styles of Olsen’s recent work—dramatic, delicate, raw—have reflected her own process of growth, leading to the revelation that “you can wake up one day and really be a very different person.” As a result, she embraced a “freer, more straightforward” experience while making Big Time: a sense of relief you could hear reverberating through the music. With these outtakes, Olsen zooms out and reveals some of the rockier steps along her journey toward self-discovery.


The Canadian band's sixth album proves a return to form after the disappointing run of recent years. The North conjures the ghosts of past glories without sounding forced, unspooling pleasantly and unhurriedly.

The North

Stars have always written about love, but they're equally fixated on time-- how it passes, how we wish we could slow it, how the past and present relate to each other, and how it marches on towards infinity. On "Reunion", a highlight from 2004's career high Set Yourself on Fire, Torquil Campbell's pitiful narrator looks back at his teenage years and pleads for the chance to return to those days to fix a broken relationship (but, primarily and somewhat selfishly, "to be young and wild and free"). "Ageless Beauty" from the same album attempts to bottle eternity as Amy Millan steadily consoles, "Time will hold its promise/ We will always be a light."
Words like "today" and "tonight" are thrown around liberally in the band's lyrics, but The North is steeped in nostalgia. This time, they seem to be looking back on the first half of their career, which found them upping the ante with every album (2001's electro-cosmopolitan Nightsongs, 2003's sentimental Heart, the sweeping bombast of Set Yourself on Fire) before overstuffing themselves with haughty pretension (2007's In Our Bedroom After the War) and getting lost in their own half-formed ideas (2010's The Five Ghosts).
The opener, "Theory of Relativity", announces itself with the same type of crackly, sampled audio that so memorably kicked off "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead". The album's closer, "Walls", features a bit about how "We were children/ We danced to 'Hand in Glove'", a not-so-subtle reminder that the band has ably covered not one, but two Smiths songs over the years. Stars apparently want to return to a headier, more naive time. But what's remarkable about The North is how unforced it sounds while conjuring the ghosts of past glories. It unspools pleasantly and unhurriedly, possessing the sort of sparkly glow that often comes with rejuvenation.
One of the main problems with In Our Bedroom After the War was how ham-handed its conceptual narrative was (Torquil Campbell, after all, has had quite a bit of success as a stage actor too, and he will never, ever let you forget it). Despite Campbell's worrying claims that The North is a vaguely political album-- one only has to throw on "He Lied About Death" to remind oneself how irrefutably shitty he is at writing "political" songs-- there's really not a noticeable grand theme here. But then, Stars are a band that have been capable of solid songcraft even at their lowest moments.
The album's sense of purpose means that there's plenty of room for the band to experiment, and the sonic playfulness on The North makes for an engrossing, repeatable listen. At first, the title track's shuffling duet is well-worn territory, right down to the lyrics about sleep being "my friend/ And my rival"-- and then, a bunch of soft, woozy synths slowly roll in, adding a slight layer of disorientation to the song's steady axis. "Do You Want to Die Together?"'s push-and-pull 1950s rock motif is a textbook example of how tension should function in songwriting (not to mention the latest submission for what should be one hell of a Greatest Hits for these guys), while "The 400" takes Death Cab for Cutie's "Transatlanticism", shrinks it down, and fills the surrounding space with sparse guitar noise. As with The Five Ghosts, it's Millan who grabs the real highlights here, with the "Ageless Beauty"-in-reverse "Backlines" (which, at points, smacks of UK boy band One Direction's giddy head-rush "What Makes You Beautiful") and the brittle, winding tartness of "Progress".
The Five Ghosts was Stars' dullest and most unfocused work, an album so weak you had to wonder if Stars were done. But with The North, they've exceeded expectations. They may never achieve the youthful immortality they so often sing about, but it's nice to know that they're not dead just yet, either.


On their sophomore album, the crestfallen Brooklyn duo deepen their blend of mariachi, spaghetti western soundtracks, and 90s sad-rock.

Almanac

A few months ago, the Brooklyn label Captured Tracks asked how Molly Hamilton would describe her band Widowspeak's second album to someone who's deaf. "Almanac is like moving into a big old house in the woods with sheets covering all the furniture, and then taking all the sheets off." The languidly-voiced singer may have been referring to the group's actual experience recording in an old barn in the Hudson River Valley, but the description works on a more intrinsic level as well. The crackling of a fire that begins opener "Perennials" burns off the home-recording dust that has been trailing them since their debut October Tape EP, clarifying the song's ringing guitar line and sharpening the indefinable edges of Hamilton's croon. You can practically hear the snap of the sheets as Widowspeak unveil their new sound, expanding upon the hazy, "Gun Shy"-slinging pop Americana that encouraged them to move from the Pacific Northwest to New York in the first place.
With Widowspeak, Hamilton and guitarist Robert Earl Thomas settled into uncovered ground between Ennio Morricone, Cowboy Junkies, and Neil Young. The interplay between Hamilton's lilting melodies and Thomas' stiff-legged, articulate riffs gave definition to what in lesser hands would just be sepia-toned retrospectives. Songs like the skeletal "Limbs", with haunting background vocals crawling through the wreckage of a violin, were refreshingly familiar but also shocking; like a lost photograph of a childhood memory from a different angle. More than their contemporaries and immediate predecessors trafficking in similar themes, Widowspeak were filtering everything through a more self-aware light, perfecting Amanda Petrusich's idea that Instagram makes you to feel "nostalgic for a time you never actually knew." (Even Almanac's album cover is a self-proclaimed homage to Wings, Sound of Silence, and the Carpenters LPs, with Hamilton coyly looking up at Thomas in a vintage dress undoubtedly gleaned from an overpriced Williamsburg rack.)
With a traditional framework capable of supporting layers added by co-producers Kevin McMahon and Thomas, on Almanac they further pursue Widowspeak's lines of inquiry into mariachi, spaghetti western soundtracks, and 90s sad-rock, to a certain extent abandoning their original goal to "hang back as much as possible." They coalesce the darker elements that hung around Widowspeak like an ether into something more tangible. Growling, they stalk through the album, bringing "Rhiannon"-like undertones to "Dyed In the Wool" and a sense of inevitable malevolence to the psych-leaning "Locusts". A new focus on low-range brings out even more of the "creepy Disney soundtrack folk group"-- Hamilton's original idea for a band called Widow's Peak-- behind the spidery banjo and baroque accordions in "Thick as Thieves".
Hamilton's interest in eschatology also influenced the record, which she wanted to record before the forecasted Mayan apocalypse: on the churning "The Dark Age", she preaches, "We have ourselves to blame/ We had our years to play.../ It's getting kind of late/ Don't know what you're waiting for." It's an electric song, with Thomas' guitar solo bursting to the surface like a churchgoer being released from possession by Hamilton's priest. "Ballad of the Golden Hour" turns on another epic shift, segueing seamlessly but suddenly from a slide guitar's anthemic strumming to something more sinister. Before the bridge, Thomas starts climbing up and down the scale with predatory guitar licks until Hamilton slows down the song's verse and rhythm. Her use of indelibly associated phrases like "as the crow flies," "as good as gold," and "long in the teeth" punctuate the song with almost cinematographic vividness, although it's a pity they come at the expense of subtler lyrical moments elsewhere like the double entendre "We made the bed/ And built our legs."
Those moments of instrumental and idiomatic grandeur suggest that Widowspeak is almost mythologizing itself, especially during Almanac's more experimental second half, in which each song renders genre staples so effectively they listen like remastered B-sides. "Minnewaska" sways between Hamilton's soothing background sighs and samples of crickets, and she breathes over the ethereal torpidity of "Storm King" in the vein of Nancy Sinatra's version of "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)". Even "Sore Eyes", which comes the closest to Widowspeak's tumbleweed romanticism, intimates the band's expanded representation of itself, not unlike a cover. This is Almanac's greatest strength and also its weakness. Widowspeak is moving forward in its evolution as a band with promising conviction, but at this point they're exploring a lot of different paths. Without a singular narrative to tie it all together besides Hamilton's lovely but noncommital exhalations, it's a little too easy to lose interest. Now that the end of the world is behind us, however, Widowspeak can focus more precisely on how they'd like to be remembered.