On their first new album in over a decade, Manchester’s funkiest post-punk band offer an imperfect distillation of their 40-year legacy, updating their classic sound with nods to contemporary beat-driven music and political strife.

ACR Loco

Since releasing their ninth studio album Mind Made Up in 2008, Manchester mainstays A Certain Ratio have been taking stock of their history and settling themselves comfortably in the present. Last year’s ACR: BOX tracked their evolution from the icy post-punk of their 1979 debut 7" to a rhythmically expansive sound informed by R&B, go-go, and acid house; meanwhile, a series of commissions from artists like Maps and ShadowParty had them reworking contemporary songs according to their own funky, minimalistic vision.
Apparently fired up by their archival and studio work, the band recorded ACR Loco, their first collection of new songs in 12 years. The album distills A Certain Ratio’s 40-year legacy, potently if imperfectly, while also bending modern beat-heavy music to their collective will. ACR Loco is built on the taut yet fluid rhythms of A Certain Ratio’s core trio—drummer Donald Johnson, bassist/vocalist Jez Kerr, and multi-instrumentalist Martin Moscrop—and spins off variously into motorik disco (“Berlin”), clattering samba-meets-electro (“Taxi Guy”), and gooey jazz-funk (“Get A Grip”). The otherwise tranquil opener “Friends Around Us” slides into a drum’n’bass breakdown for its final minutes, and the low vocal tones and disco bridge of “Supafreak” sound like the band has spent time with Hot Chip’s catalog.
ACR Loco’s embrace of both modern and present is exemplified on its guest list, which features old Mancunian friends like Smiths drummer Mike Joyce as well as current names like Gabe Gurnsey of Factory Floor. Each of them makes adjustments to assimilate into ACR’s essential chemistry. When Maria Uzor of the synth-pop duo Sink Ya Teeth appears on “Get a Grip,” she eschews the cool remove of her own work for a more combustible approach, in keeping with the music’s roiling energy.
Singer and ACR touring member Denise Johnson is the only contributor who exerts her own gravitational pull on the trio—as she has since her first appearance on 1990’s acr:mcr, bursting through the baggy funk of “Be What You Wanna Be” with a towering melody. Her earthy tones sell the rather lightweight message of unity on “Family” (“Brothers and sisters/We are family/One world united/Love, peace, harmony”) and provide human counterweight to a robotic vocoder on the silly “Bouncy Bouncy.” Sadly, ACR Loco was the band’s final collaboration with Johnson before her death at 56 in July. She appears on only four tracks on ACR Loco, and makes a deep impression each time.
Several songs seem to address the state of post-Brexit England, the album’s only modern preoccupation that feels awkward or strained. A Certain Ratio have never been the strongest lyricists, but ACR Loco’s calls for togetherness and resistance are especially flimsy. The punky bluntness of a line like “We all need to come together to fight/Fight greed/They’re inventing pain/For short term gain” loses its efficacy when paired with the limber go-go (and goofy title) of “Bouncy Bouncy.” Opener “Friends Around Us” centers on an unsteady proclamation: “We have no idea our meaning without friends around us.” ACR fare better when Kerr is singing to a loved one or, on “Get A Grip,” giving something like a dispatch from a psychedelic trip.
The occasional clumsiness of ACR Loco is easy to forgive in light of the album’s musical pleasures. After a deep dive into their back pages, A Certain Ratio found a powerful formula: paying heed to where they came from while keeping the door open for more all night parties in their future.

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With a large group of collaborators, Alexis Georgopoulos has crafted a pulsing, eclectic, wonderfully breezy album of ethereal psychedelia.

Zebra

Alexis Georgopoulos has never been terribly secretive about his influences. Over the past 11 years of his solo career as Arp, he has gleaned from, paid homage to, and straight-up aped any number of his forebears. He has channeled the burbling arpeggios of the Berlin school, the labyrinthine art rock of Brian Eno, the crystalline fingerpicking of Durutti Column, and even the smoldering guitar fuzz of Flying Saucer Attack. But on Zebra, the New York musician’s first major solo album since 2013’s More, there is a song that might cause even longtime Arp-watchers to steal a second glance at their media player, wondering if there weren’t some kind of metadata mix-up. Over a gently swaying drumbeat, a pair of synth chords initiates the first stirrings of déjà vu; then a contrapuntal melody practices a sneaky bit of sleight-of-hand before Georgopoulos unveils a lilting mallet melody—and the big reveal. It’s not a cover; more like a Petri dish of brightly colored Balearic pop cloned straight from the DNA of its source: Tears for Fears’ “Everybody Wants to Rule the World.”
This is new territory for Georgopoulos, but it is also a logical extension of his tendencies. He is a magpie with an uncanny ear for detail, a quality that has only become more pronounced the further his stylistic pendulum has swung. When Arp started out, the project was inspired mainly by the arpeggiated synthesizer music of Tangerine Dream and their ilk; by More, Georgopoulos’ interest in Brian Eno’s early albums had him nailing not just those records’ general vibe but many of their particulars: the snaky guitar tone, pistoning piano, vocal tics, and even titles.
But “Fluorescences,” while one of ZEBRA’s joyful highlights, is also an outlier. Georgopoulos’ influences have never felt quite so well integrated, nor his ideas so original, as they do across the rest of the album. On 2014’s Pulsars e Quasars EP, it was as though the effort to escape his influences was driving him to extremes of course correction, sending him careening between guitar noise and jangle pop. ZEBRA covers even more ground, but it coheres much better. Every song is its own miniature world, yet they all hang together like the stars of a single galaxy.
The album’s primary mode is a kind of airy, bright art pop in which marimba melodies ripple across a turquoise expanse of Mellotron, and fretless electric bass and acoustic guitar drip like moisture down a just-finished glass of Campari. It’s possible to detect hints of Talk Talk’s ethereal psychedelia in the playful weave of woodwinds, electronics, and earthy hand percussion. The tracks in this vein are less songs than excuses to luxuriate in a warm bath of tone and bubbling texture. They range from the pulse minimalism and Moog solo of “Parallelism” to the patch of shade that is “Ozu,” a sketch for saxophone and Mellotron that is so unassuming, I didn’t notice it until after a dozen or more listens to the album.
Then there are the detours, like “Fluorescences,” the synth-pop curveball, and “Nzuku,” which applies the Moog-and-marimba palette to jazzier ends; both of these more ebullient songs suggest an attempt to time-travel back to the terrace of Ibiza’s Amnesia discotheque circa 1984, when ECM and krautrock fell into rotation alongside records by Grace Jones and Wally Badarou. A pair of comparatively restrained tracks, “Folding Water” and “Moving Target,” are deployed like pencil cross-hatching to fill in the space between the record’s extremes. “Folding Water” is the lone link back to Georgopoulos’ time in the funk-punk band Tussle: It sounds a little like an outtake from Talking Heads’ Remain in Light where most of the mixing desk’s channels have been muted, leaving only puttering drums and glinting dub accents.
All of it makes for a wonderfully summery sound with Mediterranean overtones, languid as a post-meal nap and salty as a harborside kiss. It builds to a gentle climax with “Reading a Wave,” the album’s penultimate track, in which David Lackner’s keening saxophone soars above contrasting pulses—rolling jazz drums, liquid piano chords, tumbling synth squiggle—like a kite above the surf. It can’t be overstated how musical it all is. To make the album, Georgopoulos availed himself of a larger crew of collaborators than ever before—there are three percussionists, a bassist, a keyboard player, woodwinds, guitar—and it’s tempting to wonder if that isn’t what it took to get Georgopoulos out of his record collection and out of his head. If previous Arp records sometimes felt like columns of boxes to be checked, lists of footnotes to be collated, on ZEBRA, analytical listening gives way to the pure pleasure of being in the moment; it’s a celebration of community, of togetherness, of the magic of collaboration. In reaching out to others, Georgopoulos is discovering his own voice for the first time.


Foxygen seemed to pack a career’s worth of triumphs and travesties into the last two years. *...*And Star Power translates all the exhilaration and exhaustion the band has experienced into an unwieldy 24-song splatter that often sounds like a band at war with itself.

...And Star Power

Embedded within the detailed credits to Foxygen’s …And Star Power is this revelation from guitarist/band co-founder Jonathan Rado: “During our recording process, our only true heated argument was over this song.” The identity of the song in question is immaterial; the very fact Rado felt the need to downplay any perceived infighting with vocalist/foil Sam France speaks volumes about the reputation their band has acquired—one that’s unruly enough to seemingly require some liner-note damage control. Following the release of 2013’s critical success We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic, Foxygen seemed to pack a career’s worth of triumphs and travesties into a single album cycle—and, as such, …And Star Power translates all the exhilaration and exhaustion the band has experienced over the past two years into an unwieldy, 24-song splatter that often sounds like a band at war with itself. It’s as if Foxygen is issuing a challenge to all the rubberneckers in the audience by saying, “You think we’re a trainwreck? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”
Coming from a band that has chalked up its many concert cancellations and onstage meltdowns to tour-induced fatigue, …And Star Power aptly approximates the dislocating sensation of strung-out, sleepless nights in posh hotel rooms that have had the Do Not Disturb sign dangling on the outer-door handle for several days, with moments of lucid (if bleary eyed) introspection regularly giving way to flashes of fever-dream psychosis. The raucous opening warm-up exercise is titled “Star Power Airlines”, a nostalgic nod to that bygone era when rock bands could become popular enough to acquire their own jet fleets, but also a telling indicator of the many random recording locations—from the Chateau Marmont in L.A. to The Magic Shop in New York—that lend this album a whirlwind tour itinerary of its own.
Despite its double-album girth, …And Star Power feels less like a ’70s-rock masterwork than a ’90s indie patchwork in the tradition of Pavement’s Wowee Zowee, Sebadoh's III, the Olivia Tremor Control’s Dusk at Cubist Castle, and Ween’s earliest brown-outs. This is an album you get lost inside—you don’t so much listen to its four-sided sprawl as free-fall into its increasingly deranged depths. Its kitchen-sink messthetic (parts of which were rendered in Rado’s actual kitchen) encompasses pristine power pop, stoner country-rock, a four-part title-track suite (overture included) that introduces the band’s punk-alter-ego-cum-pirate-radio-station Star Power, space-age bachelor-pad synth doodles, Lou Reed-copping junkie poetry, acid-folk rambles reminiscent of Syd Barrett, Feelies-esque jabber-jangle; and a song that sounds like Suicide crashing a Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach party. And that’s all before we’ve even reached Side Three (the one accurately subtitled “Scream: A Journey Through Hell”).
In its most fully realized moments, …And Star Power is the album Todd Rundgren could’ve released between Something/Anything? and A Wizard, a True Star, its best songs striking an uncanny balance between the exquisite balladry of the former and the progged-out fantasias of the latter. True, the Runt referentialism is beyond blatant: lead single “How Can You Really” is a perfect mirror reflection of “I Saw the Light”, while “Star Power IV: Ooh Ooh” distills the candlelit intimacy of “It Wouldn’t Have Made Any Difference” into a quick post-coital cuddle. (The press release for …And Star Power actually summarizes the album’s ethos—“rock and roll for the skull"—by quoting Patti Smith’s original Creem magazine review of A Wizard, a True Star. Even this band’s self-aggrandizement comes second-hand.)
But for all their shameless appropriation, Foxygen have become increasingly assured and accomplished songwriters, outfitting standouts like “Coulda Been My Love” (the ironically serene source of the intra-band acrimony mentioned at the top of this review), “Cannibal Holocaust”, and “Everyone Needs Love” not just with silken soft-focus melodies and heavenly harmonies, but ever-evolving arrangements that steer the songs into surprising, splendorous new directions without losing the throughline. At their best, a Foxygen song is like that drunk who seems destined to topple over, only to turn their stumble into a perfect pirouette.
If We Are the 21st Century Ambassadors of Peace & Magic completed Foxygen’s long-gestating evolution from private recording project to proper band, …And Star Power expands their universe to even greater degree, placing them at the epicenter of a modern psych-rock constellation that includes the Flaming Lips, Of Montreal, White Fence, and L.A. fuzz-popsters Bleached, all of whom make guest appearances here. (And, as if to acknowledge their place on the storied madcap continuum, they give shout-outs to Skip Spence and Kim Fowley in the liners.) At certain points, Foxygen’s generosity of spirit goes beyond merely accommodating a cameo to outright handing over the reins of their album to third parties: the brass-knuckled “Star Power III: What Are We Good For” begins with a Kevin Barnes dispatch live from the corner of Lexington and 125, and Foxygen even admit in the liners they’re entirely not sure what he’s yapping about. The Lips’ Steven Drozd is credited with composing the analog-synth strut “Mattress Warehouse”, while the adrenalizing freakbeat rave-up “Brooklyn Police Station” features White Fence’s Tim Presley in so many different capacities (bass, guitar, harmonies), it’s no surprise the song ends up sounding like it was plucked outright from one of his albums.
Tellingly, the self-produced …And Star Power is Foxygen’s first Jagjaguwar release made without their mentor Richard Swift behind the boards, and while the album shows France and Rado can no doubt craft classic-rock-radio-caliber songs without his compositional expertise, their reactionary attempts at punky aggression and noise experimentation come off as half-baked. Particularly in the album’s back half, it starts to feel like Foxygen decided to make …And Star Power a double album before writing the necessary number of songs to justify one, stuffing the gaps with frivolous filler that wouldn’t be able stand on its own outside of the record’s crazy-quilt framework. And so the lo-fi doom-metal-drone-cum-garage-skronk of “Cold Winter/Freedom” (the wrought-iron gateway into the aforementioned “Scream” side) rambles on for six tuneless minutes, while counterpart track “Freedom II” and “Talk” drive their Nuggets-schooled grooves into the ground through incessant, nonsensical hollering and abrupt structural shifts that don’t so much yield a dramatic effect as betray their lack of direction. Such regressions may be intended to serve as the freaked-out flipside to …And Star Power’s more meditative material, but Foxygen’s “Journey Through Hell” ultimately sounds less like therapeutic catharsis than aimless dicking around for yuks in the practice space.
But for Foxygen, such violent pendulum swings prove to be the musical manifestation of an eccentric spirit they once conveyed lyrically. What ultimately elevated We Are the 21st Century beyond mere classic-rock karaoke was France’s playfully wry observations, which infused Foxygen’s retro affinities with a distinctly modern-day sensibility and irreverence. …And Star Power, however, works the other way: the anarchic sound world is grounded by more sobering songwriting, with France’s once-prominent voice left to float in the psychedelic soup—which means you won’t find any instantly quotable zingers here on par with “No Destruction”. But while France’s words may be more nondescript this time out, the band’s tumultuous recent history suggests platitudes like “You’ve got to hang on”, “How am I going to make it with you?”, and “Where must we go again to become friends?” are genuine, necessary pleas for sanity and serenity.
Accordingly, the impenetrable “Cold Winter/Freedom” is preceded by an endearing little snippet of an eight-year-old France’s earliest recording forays, wherein he acts as the on-air announcer for his own imaginary radio station. “Hold onto your butts and get ready!” little Sam declares, and, in essence, …And Star Power is Foxygen’s attempt to recapture that sort of innocence and wide-eyed enthusiasm after a prolonged, public struggle to keep their shit together. But the retroactive warning is nonetheless appreciated: …And Star Power is a long, bumpy ride back to where Foxygen once belonged, and, at times, your butt is bound to feel sore.


On their third LP, Arcade Fire prove they can make grand statements without sounding like they're carrying the weight of the world.

The Suburbs

Arcade Fire never aim for anything less than grand statements. That quality has played a huge role in making them very, very popular; it's also their greatest weakness. Funeral was wracked with agony and grief, but what made it one of the transcendent records of the 2000s was that it avoided easy answers. It proposed that the fight of our lives is just that, a fight, but a winnable one. But when they turned that same all-or-nothing intensity outward on Neon Bible, otherwise propulsive and elegant songs were sometimes bogged down by overblown arrangements or pedantic political statements. You'd figure an album bluntly called The Suburbs that focuses on The Way We Live might repeat some of Neon Bible's worst tendencies. Instead, it's a satisfying return to form-- proof that Arcade Fire can still make grand statements without sounding like they're carrying the weight of the world.
The metrics of The Suburbs are misleading: At 16 tracks, including interludes and multi-part songs, it might seem like Arcade Fire are shooting for their Sandinista!, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, Kiss Me, or Sign O' The Times-- a band at the peak of their powers reacting against the walls closing in by blowing everything up and trying anything. But the album actually plays out more like Bruce Springsteen's The River, a generously paced collection of meditations on familial responsibility, private disappointments, and fleeting youth, much of which takes place in moving vehicles*.* It also reintroduces much-needed levity to an act that can be overbearingly self-serious. On the deceptively chipper chamber pop of "Rococo", Win Butler borders on patronizing, evoking Nirvana's "In Bloom" and using the title word as a sword to skewer an easy target: the hipster more concerned with following trends than locating a genuine understanding in the world around him. But the point is that Butler values directness and truth, and throughout The Suburbs, what he lacks in poetry, he makes up for with honesty.
There's a tension between the uneasily resolving chords and lightfooted piano shuffle on the title track, as Butler sings in a restrained falsetto: "Sometimes I can't believe it/ I'm moving past the feeling." As The Suburbs plays out, that "feeling" is one that lived on Funeral and is dying here. The initial fantasy of Funeral was escaping the neighborhood, dancing beneath the police lights, and living on misbehavior. The Suburbs can be seen as the update decades later, with those same kids having kids of their own, and moving back to and struggling in the same neighborhoods.
The heavy-handedness that marred some of Neon Bible mostly resulted from Butler's warning us of destruction caused by the lies of authority figures-- shady cultural impresarios, corrupt church leaders, politicians all too eager to push the button. But what makes The Suburbs a more humane and empathetic record is that Butler and Régine Chassagne have come to terms with how the pain of our day-to-day lives more often results from the lies we tell ourselves. At the outset of "We Used to Wait", staccato, minor-key piano chords evoke anxiety. The song is a simple lament about the exhaustion from a relentless pace of life that demands everything immediately. But as Jeremy Gara's steady drums lift the piece into cathedral drama, it's obvious that there's a deeper concern than the antiquation of letter-writing. By the time the narrator finds himself with "the lights cut out... left standing in the wilderness downtown," it's a sad reminder that giving up your dreams for a reliable job that pays your way and corrodes your soul isn't even a reliable option anymore. Soul-sucking work was at least once a dependably secure and profitable enterprise. Now what do we do?
The bulk of The Suburbs focuses on this quiet desperation borne of compounding the pain of wasting your time as an adult by romanticizing the wasted time of your youth. As bleak as the lyrics are, though, they're buoyed by the band's leanest, loosest songwriting yet. These songs are busy, but never overly complicated, subtly nudging at their boundaries while allowing wide lanes for Butler's perfectly memorable melodic turns. The framework is familiar: Arcade Fire's trademark of decorating AOR with orchestral fringe ("Ready to Start", "Empty Room"), sun-baked Harvest gold ("Wasted Hours", "Suburban War"), and in the record's highlights, pulsating electro ("Half Light II [No Celebration]", "Sprawl II [Mountains Beyond Mountains]").
But The Suburbs is a record that seeks to build, and it reaches a monumental peak at its closure. Both parts of "Sprawl" act like a conversation between lovers and a treatise on what makes Arcade Fire tick: Butler's despondence on "Sprawl I (Flatland)" matches the desolate atmosphere that surrounds him-- returning to a mall-spackled hometown is an admission of defeat. But as with their first two albums, the penultimate song towers over what came before: "Sprawl II" is an Arcade Fire song through and through, balancing a sort of defiance in the midst of crushing circumstance ("These days, my life, I feel it has no purpose/ But late at night the feelings swim to the surface"). It's a rare and thrilling example of the group stepping out of their musical comfort zone, an airy disco bounce evoking "Heart of Glass" that serves as further evidence of just how crucial the often underappreciated Chassagne is in tempering Butler's grimmer outlook.
That said, the relative concision of Funeral and Neon Bible didn't allow for a whole lot of wiggle room. And while it's somewhat heartening to hear something allowed to be a "minor" Arcade Fire song, they're still, well, minor. "Month of May" strains too much for a ragged punk glory while the folky, Neil Young-ish strummer "Deep Blue" doesn't develop its Kasparov vs. IBM metaphor into more than an afterthought. And as The Suburbs reaches its second half, there's certainly some thematic redundancy-- surely, there's already a drinking game revolving around Butler's use of "the kids."
There's also the possibility that The Suburbs can be seen as a lesser Arcade Fire album if you mostly value rock music for its escapism. This is another 2010 example of a Boss-indebted band (see also: the National and Titus Andronicus) making epic outpourings of modern disillusionment and disappointment for people who can commiserate and return to fretting about their jobs and bank accounts once the house lights go up. But just because the concerns of The Suburbs are at times mundane, that makes them no less real. And that Arcade Fire can make such powerful art out of recognizing these moments makes our own existences feel worthy of documentation. By dropping Neon Bible's accusatory standpoint, The Suburbs delivers a life-affirming message similar to Funeral's: We're all in this together.


Although weaned on prog-metal, educated in classical music at Harvard, and once viewed as a representative of the indie rock set, Weezer's Rivers Cuomo prefers to write simple music that can be easily enjoyed by a mass audience. It was one of many elements that defined him in the beginning, on his band's hugely popular 1994 self-titled debut (*The Blue Album*), if one of few remaining characteristics defining his music today.

Following poor initial sales of the record's follow-up, the more introspective cult hit *Pinkerton*, Cuomo famously retreated from the public eye. Over the next five years, the band would remain

Weezer (Red Album)

Although weaned on prog-metal, educated in classical music at Harvard, and once viewed as a representative of the indie rock set, Weezer's Rivers Cuomo prefers to write simple music that can be easily enjoyed by a mass audience. It was one of many elements that defined him in the beginning, on his band's hugely popular 1994 self-titled debut (The Blue Album), if one of few remaining characteristics defining his music today.
Following poor initial sales of the record's follow-up, the more introspective cult hit Pinkerton, Cuomo famously retreated from the public eye. Over the next five years, the band would remain silent, cultivating goodwill and an ever-growing army of fans. But most of that goodwill has deteriorated since their re-emergence in 2001, in the wake of three mediocre-to-awful albums that were, in many ways, the opposite of what made Cuomo's band so adored in the first place.
Sadly, the once burned-out Weezer continue to fade away: Those first two records capture their decade in 75 minutes of near-perfect power-pop: straight-faced irony, eccentric sincerity, meta references, and bipolar guitar distortion from ordinary-looking outcasts who became stars and then complained about it. Punk that's too catchy to offend. Pop that's too smart to cop to itself. And, uh, emo. After Pinkerton, the deluge; rap-metal and post-grunge wound up so thoroughly conquering modern rock that now even staunch rockists are making excited noises about "American Idol" winner David Cook. Hey, somebody's supposed to save mainstream rock'n'roll, right?
Not these guys. Beginning with 2001's so-so Green Album and plumbing Jules Verne depths with 2005's terrible Make Believe, the band began to take on some of the most infuriating characteristics of the very bands that had replaced them during their absence: intelligence-insulting songwriting, cookie-cutter dynamics, questionable facial hair. At the very least, The Red Album (as Weezer have nicknamed their latest) is a first step toward rehabilitation-- a tacit admission that recent discs, with their empty universality and recycled riffs, had a problem. But it's not a return to glory unless you consider 2001 their glory days.
Judging by appetizing first single "Pork and Beans", The Red Album could've been almost as funny and catchy as Pinkerton's "El Scorcho", only from the perspective of a married man coming up on 40. It's as if last year's demos compilation, Alone, helped Cuomo remember how to do this stuff right. His sarcastic mention of super-producer Timbaland's chart magic is as hilarious as it is on-point-- especially after Madonna's dreadful, Tim-helmed #1 single, "4 Minutes". Jacknife Lee (who co-produced the album along with Make Believe overseer Rick Rubin) lets the chorus explode from the mix in a way that little on the radio does anymore. It demands to be sung by millions of uncomprehending bar-goers.
With an opening Rogaine reference, "Pork and Beans" also establishes The Red Album's main theme. Already a self-described "old man" on Pinkerton, Cuomo is focused these days on reliving his lost youth-- probably the same reason some of us still listen to Weezer albums. Lead track and third single "Troublemaker" starts back in school, a faint whiff of existential angst and a surging bridge helping to redeem a vapid chorus and monotonous, familiar-sounding guitars. The laughably bad "Heart Songs" is The Blue Album's nostalgic "In the Garage" schmaltzed up as a sort of name-dropping "Circle of Life"; if Nirvana had "the chords that broke the chains I had upon me," kudos to Cuomo for swiping them on the otherwise forgettable teenage prankfest "Everybody Get Dangerous" (to quote: "boo-yahhh").
At this point, Weezer is as much a brand as a band. When Cuomo relinquishes the mic, The Red Album could be by any group of modern-rock mediocrities. Longtime guitarist Brian Bell gets throaty and twangy like a poor man's Rob Thomas on repetitive non-apology "Thought I Knew", backed by bland acoustic guitar and a TR-808 drum machine. Bassist Scott Shriner speak-sings in creepy stalker mode on "Cold Dark World", with Cuomo swooping to the rescue on the choruses. "Automatic", led by original drummer Pat Wilson, returns to the faceless crunching of 2002's Maladroit.
Not that Cuomo needs other voices to reveal that The Red Album is hardly the work of idiosyncratic auteurship the first couple of singles could've suggested. He sings on peppy, tempo-switching "Dreamin'" and the grandiose finale, "The Angel and the One", but for all their background-friendly polish, both are typical, vacuous latter-day Weezer tracks.
The Red Album's most ambitious song adapts the Shaker hymn "Simple Gifts". The melody, played first on piano recalling Pinkerton's "Across the Sea", is more obvious than the Erik Satie snippet Cuomo ganked for The Blue Album's "Surf Wax America", but now, as then, the theft isn't the point. "The Greatest Man That Ever Lived (Variations on a Shaker Hymn)" is the warped genius let loose, from half-rapped intro to Queen bombast to baroque a cappella. Like the YouTube culture the "Pork and Beans" video depicts so well, the song-- and this album-- relies on a high quantity of short-lived pretty good ideas to distract from a shortage of great ones.


The soul legend presents her loosest and most daring album in years, an affectionate tribute to the underappreciated blues and folk songwriter Randall Bramblett.

LaVette!

Bettye LaVette sings “Lazy (and I Know It),” from her new album LaVette!, like she’s telling a joke and just realized it’s not funny. “One time I had a day job,” she declares over a bluesy, clock-watching crawl. She draws out those syllables into a languid lament, then switches to comical, matter-of-fact sing-speaking for the next line: “It didn’t thrill me.” It’s a funny yet grave moment, acknowledging the bizarreness of one of the finest song interpreters of the era being confined to a cubicle all day, while reminding you that there’s a real-life danger in dwindling away behind a desk. “Day job for three months, coast for nine,” she strategizes. “Catch me in a nightclub at closing time.”
The song was written by Randall Bramblett, a member of Chuck Leavell’s Georgia fusion group Sea Level as well as a celebrated sideman with Bonnie Raitt, Gregg Allman, and Widespread Panic. In the liner notes for LaVette!, her new album of Bramblett covers, she declares him to be “the best writer that I have heard in the last 30 years.” It’s obvious that she sees him as a kindred soul: a born artist who’s not cut out for day jobs, 401(k) plans, corporate ladders, or anything else that might get in the way of making music all day. These songs speak to the same kind of obsession that motivated LaVette after Atlantic Records dumped her in the 1970s and before she cemented a comeback in the 2000s. “I ain’t got no plan B,” she sings on the breezily funky “Plan B,” an anthem for anyone who doesn’t have a fallback. “Rhythm and blues in the back of my mind/Champagne and a joint would do me just fine.”
While LaVette has recorded several albums devoted to one scene or one artist, LaVette! is different. On 2010’s Interpretations: the British Rock Songbook and her insightful 2018 Bob Dylan collection Things Have Changed, there was a thrill in hearing her remake iconic songs and bend them to her will. Those albums allowed you to gauge and appreciate how completely she could rearrange familiar patterns, how she could raise new questions and introduce new implications, and how she could get away with rewriting Dylan’s lyrics.
Bramblett is no Dylan, no Who, and no Elton John, which means his songs won’t be as familiar to listeners as “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Love, Reign O’er Me” are. So on LaVette!, there’s no sense of her reinventing a popular song or challenging our perception of a popular artist. That’s no criticism: This is her loosest and most daring album in years, an affectionate tribute to an underappreciated figure that could easily be renamed Bramblett! In LaVette’s hands, he emerges as a deft stylist who mixes various strains of Southern music with slyly evocative turns of phrase, self-denigrating humor, and big questions about existence and spirituality.
She locates an absurdism running through his lyrics, darker notes of chagrin and suspicion. On the manically percolating “Hard to Be a Human,” LaVette wonders if the Big Man Upstairs might be responsible for our failures and foibles: “First He made the mountains, then He filled up the seas,” she sings, her delivery growing more sardonic with every word. “But He lost His concentration when He started working on you and me.”
As though arguing for Bramblett’s impact and importance, LaVette and drummer, producer, and musical director Steve Jordan assembled a band of big names for this album. Steve Winwood and Hi Rhythm Section veteran Rev. Charles Hodges both play the Hammond B3 organ, pianist Jon Batiste turns “Mess About It” inside out with a double-time piano solo, and jazz bassist Pino Palladino holds everything together with Jordan on drums. Together, this devises a palette that draws from country and blues, gospel and rock, funk and jazz, and folk and swamp, subtly mirroring the pan-Southern sound that Bramblett has been refining for decades now.
Larry Campbell’s pedal steel adds a country stateliness to the breakup song “I’m Not Gonna Waste My Love,” as though weeping on LaVette’s behalf, while John Mayer makes himself useful by channeling Stax guitarist Steve Cropper on “In the Meantime,” a ballad of regret and resilience that’s one of the album’s saddest songs. “I’m dreamin’ dreams of my used-to-be,” LaVette sings, as though reeling back in time to her years in the wilderness, “Tellin’ everybody I’ll be just fine.” While she has a reputation for making familiar songs sound utterly new, here she finds a way to make Bramblett’s songs tell her story, to let them speak for her. She rewrites his songs simply by singing them.


UK producer Simon Green, now based in New York, was at the forefront of the downtempo electronica scene that bubbled up in the late 90s and early 2000s. His fifth studio album as Bonobo features guest vocals from Erykah Badu and a haunting sense of déjà vu.

The North Borders

A sense of déjà vu haunts The North Borders, UK producer Simon Green’s fifth studio album as Bonobo. It’s almost 15 years since he first appeared with the shy-footed but prescient “Terrapin”, which later appeared on his debut album Animal Magic and helped him find a name at the forefront of the downtempo electronica scene that bubbled up in the late 90s and early 2000s (a period when ambient pop albums like Air’s Moon Safari and Röyksopp’s Melody A.M. were scoring top 10 positions in the UK charts). Drawing on the noodling notions of jazz and trip hop, downtempo became the clubbing generation’s default after-hours music: the sound of a thousand compilation CDs made for slinging on after the club or soothing heads the morning after the night before.
Bonobo stood above the rest because his compositional touch was so instinctive: deftly coaxing complex emotions from machines while employing acoustic instrumentation sparingly to devastating effect. Throughout the 2000s he built on his reputation for sonic storytelling, culminating in his exquisite 2010 album Black Sands. Yet with The North Borders, Green appears to have hit a stumbling block. The balance is skewed and he all but drowns his knack for emotive instrumentation in the kind of introspective production that marked his formative period.
A number of tracks feature a stock approach to progression and release. They begin as densely layered, moody affairs, caught up in themselves and in the past. It’s only in the final minute or so that the underlying instruments are allowed to sing, and when they do the track finally feels alive in the present moment. On opening track “First Fires”, it’s the strings that finally rise above the cloudy production in the closing minute or so that provide the track with an anchor. There’s some truly lovely arrangement towards the end of “Sapphire”, when a chorus of reed instruments purr sagely to one another. Then again on “Ten Tigers” those heart-serrating strings tease in the background only to momentarily-- fantastically-- bloom as the track fades.
The problem is not so much that these instrumental flourishes are too little, too late, but that the tracks that hold them feel over-worked, the layers so dense as to stifle the ideas. “There's nobody there telling me when to stop, so often I end up adding a bunch more elements to the track after I originally thought it was done,” Green said recently. “I often have an idea and it starts splintering off into a whole lot of directions; I'm interested in exploring every single one of them.”
Green recorded the album in his new home of New York, following an extensive year and a half touring Black Sands, and you can hear his exhaustion in the album’s confusion. On one hand he appears to reach for dialogue with the chime-led melodies of Caribou and Four Tet on album standout “Cirrus”, a truly joyful, free moment on the album. But on the other hand, it finds him seeking refuge in a realm he knows inside out: lolloping, jazz-inflected soundscapes. While it sounds like he had fun collecting sounds on his travels-- from a truck’s air brakes to train doors closing on the subway-- they are lost in his layering. Even his track with Erykah Badu feels like a missed opportunity: it’s a sweet enough jam but she’s so deep in the mix on “Heaven For The Sinner” that she slips frustratingly out of focus. While for all intents and purposes The North Borders screams “easy listening,” it’s doesn’t half tie itself up in knots. At its worst-- the limp and dated bumble of “Jets”-- it feels like Bonobo-style music.
That said, his work with new singer Szjerdene has more energy: “Towers” breathes easier, while “Transits” has a narrative depth that largely evades the rest of the album. While it’s exciting that Green will be performing the album live with Szjerdene and a 10-piece orchestra, I can't help feeling he was playing safe by not fully embracing his orchestral exploration in the album’s recording. The North Borders is not a bad album-- for the most, it’s as inoffensive as those decade-old chill-out compilations-- yet a frustration persists because Bonobo is better than this.


The house producer Maya Bouldry-Morrison, aka Octo Octa, both describes and comforts anxiety. On this new LP, her candied synths and incandescent songs spiral towards infinity.

Where Are We Going?

Several years ago, the producer Octo Octa compiled a mix beginning with one of the earliest house singles, Marshall Jefferson as Hercules’ sinister “7 Ways.” “Visually touch the body in front of you,” Jefferson commands, “caress it with your eyes, drink it in slowly.” He savors the words like a cobra does movement. There are enough layers of dominance and submission to delight Throbbing Gristle. Octo Octa’s own work swims the gulf separating dance music’s utopian, transcendental side from the bodies grinding up against capitalist demands and social alienation—and perhaps each other, too, if a night’s shape allows. She describes and comforts anxiety.
You could call that an acquired skill. Before Maya Bouldry-Morrison was Octo Octa, her solo material drew more from the drums-frenzied school of techno. Her early records often borrowed R&B a capellas, like “I’m Trying,” which reduced Amerie’s “1 Thing” to abashed moans. Her use of compression could be subtly disorienting, giving different sounds tangible presence for only a moment, like ghosts.
With her new album Where Are We Going?, Bouldry-Morrison’s aesthetic has grown more resolved. Her candy-bright synths remain, but the songs have grown increasingly circuitous, elaborating on their own structures. “Adrift” sends a pulse descending through the depths of murky reverb; “Fleeting Moments of Freedom (Wooo)” keeps circling back and starting over again, as if spiraling towards infinity. (It would explain the deadpan title.) Unlike earlier Octo Octa records, vocals are rare, often abstracted—“No More Pain (Promises to a Younger Self)” distorts Mariah Carey over hip-house drums like a kite in a wind tunnel. This distracted introspection is the kind you only experience while dancing, as when the brooding “On Your Lips” makes a synth’s timbre blush incandescently.
Where Are We Going?—the question could be asked in rhetorical despair, or outside a club flirtatiously at 3 a.m. This is the first Octo Octa album since Bouldry-Morrison came out as trans, and on the second part of its title track she interrupts the glistening piano melodies with a refrain: “Do you feel better? Are you going to feel better?” As she turns this interrogation back towards the listener, it reminds me of the vocal samples on DJ Sprinkles’ Midtown 120 Blues, which placed beautiful deep house and historical grievances in dialectical intimacy. Bouldry-Morrison never feels bound to offer an answer, but through the vivid ambivalence of her music, you can sense a warming to new possibility. It’s like someone catching sight of themselves at a mirrored corner of the dance floor, smiling faintly, and returning to the party.


After two heart-rending albums about the death of his wife, Phil Elverum documents a new kind of heartbreak in a set of duets with Julie Doiron.

Mount Eerie / Julie Doiron: Lost Wisdom pt. 2

Lost Wisdom pt. 2

We cling, briefly, to bits of good news, reminders that happiness still exists outside of corrupt power vacuums. The 2018 marriage of songwriter Phil Elverum and actress Michelle Williams felt like some flotsam floating in a sea of prevailing despair. It was an offering of hope for and from people who needed a second chance. A decade ago, Williams’ estranged partner and her daughter’s father, Heath Ledger, died from a drug overdose. And in 2016, Elverum’s wife and his daughter’s mother, Geneviève Castrée, died after a yearlong battle with cancer. The fallout of Castrée’s death—Elverum’s struggles with solo fatherhood, self-identity, and an aversion to artistry in the face of actual crisis—became the thread of two subsequent albums (2017’s A Crow Looked at Me and last year’s Now Only), harrowing explorations of what it means to be the survivor.
But on Lost Wisdom pt. 2, Elverum reckons with a different sort of lost love: an impending divorce. Less than a year after their small ceremony, news leaked that Elverum and Williams had separated. These eight songs are as close as either has come to a public explanation. In one sense, Lost Wisdom pt. 2 is the third volume in a lovelorn trilogy that began with A Crow, the album on which Elverum faced off with Castrée’s death as though it were a monster, sitting in the same crowded room. Here he is again, a single man squaring up to impossible sadness, telling us about how many text messages invaded his space when word of the split went public. But this is also the sequel to Lost Wisdom, a 2008 series of duets with patient songwriter Julie Doiron, the great singer of Eric’s Trip. On these songs, she is his foil and confidant, the friend keeping him company as he cycles again through stages of grief.
Elverum’s writing on Lost Wisdom is less direct than that of A Crow or Now Only—there are no wrenching tales about the backpack his wife ordered for their daughter before she died, no existential eruptions outside of Skrillex’s tour bus in the Sonoran Desert. It is mostly coded with suggestion and allusion, with Elverum calling Williams not by name but by situation—their vulnerable moment in a bookstore’s second-floor nook, their uncomfortable conversation about growing unease with the need for privacy amid the surveillance of paparazzi. Elverum confesses his wonder-at-first-sight moment with Williams, calling her “a god who walks among us…angelic, miraculous.” He saves the savage details for himself, like when he confesses to showing up at a widow support group unkempt, smelling like salmon, and on the verge of a breakdown.
But that kind of specificity is the exception for Lost Wisdom, where raw feelings are shrouded in symbol and simile. Perhaps because the circumstances of Elverum’s last two albums were so extra-ordinary, these sad songs feel, at times, pedestrian in their drama. However exquisitely rendered they may be, and however strange their circumstances may seem, these are breakup songs. When the guitar suddenly conjures Bon Iver’s “For Emma” a minute into “Love Without Possession,” it all seems a tad obvious and bathetic—a flinch from the sting of an ember cast by the bonfire of love, as Elverum’s steadfast metaphor would have it.
Doiron’s presence, though, is a welcome balm, warming these cold realizations and offering Elverum a steadying hand for some of the most difficult moments. She trails his voice into the final verse of “Belief,” when the impending breakup reframes his life: “Homelessness enthroned us and all the kids, wind-blown.” And she harmonizes with him for every word of the deathly still “Pink Light,” a beautiful bit of poetry where Elverum wonders if this world will keep spinning without him.
What’s more, Doiron’s voice reminds us that there are two parties to this heartbreak, two people contemplating what it means to move past a failed partnership. They deliver the final verse of “Real Lost Wisdom”—an answer to “Real Death” and to the question of what we can learn from colossal hardship—slightly out of sync, like actors split between screens, singing the same epiphanies to one another from different sides of the world. During “Enduring the Waves,” they sing crisscrossing lines, each offering a different take on the same pained realizations. The effect is as vertiginous as heartbreak itself. At one point, Doiron revisits a line from a Galway Kinnell poem that reportedly gave Williams hope after Ledger’s death. “‘The wages of dying is love,’ like the poem says,” she softly offers. “It almost was,” they answer in close harmony. It is a mutual admission that no one here is to blame, a moment of astounding grace for a world always in need of more.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In a few short years, Sia has gone from subverting the mainstream to being the mainstream. In light of that transformation, you'd expect more than an almost play-by-play recreation of her most recent highlights. Her new album This Is Acting can't help but feel like the big-budget sequel to 1000 Forms of Fear's sleeper-hit success.

This Is Acting

At the age of 40, Sia Furler has been through more career phases than her most of her contemporaries combined. By the time "Chandelier," one of the best Top 40 pop ballads of the decade, made her a global superstar, she had already been frontwoman of Australian '90s jazz-fusion band Crisp; vocalist for crossover lounge act Zero 7; and  a modestly popular solo artist, whose 2006 song "Breathe Me" was featured in the finale of the HBO drama "Six Feet Under." That's a lot, so when "Chandelier" took off, there was an excitement to seeing this relative underdog succeed so wildly in a traditionally sexist and ageist industry, all without bowing to cookie-cutter concepts of what pop stars should be.
This Is Acting, the follow-up to this surprise attack on the Billboard charts, can't help but feel like the big-budget sequel to 1000 *Forms of Fear'*s sleeper hit. As the much-hyped backstory makes clear, almost every song on the album was written by Sia but rejected by another artist, from Adele to Rihanna to Beyoncé. Most songwriters would perhaps choose not to draw attention to the fact that they've had an album's worth of material passed over by some of pop's biggest names, but to Sia's immense credit, This Is Acting doesn't necessarily sound like a slapdash collection of demos or B-sides. It's a complete piece of work, and one that serves as a commentary on the intersectionality of art and fame by someone who has recently acquired a new level of notoriety. But the sacrifice here is the personal flair that gave her previous album a spark of creativity and set it apart from the songs she had already been writing for other pop stars. In a few short years, Sia has gone from subverting the mainstream to being the mainstream, and in light of that transformation, you'd expect more than a play-by-play recreation of her most recent highlights.
She remains a vocal powerhouse, capable of injecting vitality into even the most formulaic numbers. That aching, slip-sliding, cracked voice reinvogorates the military-drums-and-anthemic-chorus formula on lead single "Alive," and even amidst the record's slow moments, the character of her voice reels you back in: "Broken Glass" seems like a typical, by-the-numbers ballad, until not one, but two belted key changes rescue it from blandness. The Kanye-produced "Reaper" falls a little flat, missing the punch that its intended artist would have provided (Rihanna, in case you were wondering), but it's balanced by the pseudo-reggae lilt of the charming and pleasant "Cheap Thrills."
"Sweet Design," however, hints at the epic-banger party record Sia could put out if she so chose. It's an explosion of the playfulness Sia became popular for (sort of a spiritual cousin of "Buttons" from 2008's Some People Have Real Problems); when she sings "Word travels fast/ When you've got an ass like mine[...]/ Where the mens at?" it's strangely hilarious, irreverent, and above all, fresh-sounding, a song that definitely fares better in her hands than anyone else's. As her star continues to rise, hopefully Sia will concentrate on just that: saving the best for herself.


Pitchfork: You opened for Wilco recently. How was that?
Greg Saunier: When I was in the audience, watching their show ...

The Runners Four

Pitchfork: You opened for Wilco recently. How was that?
Greg Saunier: When I was in the audience, watching their show, they would start a song, and people next to me would start hugging each other because they loved that song. And I thought that was something that I would really aspire to. To do something where music becomes-- and this sounds ridiculous or pretentious or something-- but where music becomes more than just good music.* * *
Any band taking cues from Wilco-- let alone the best band in the world-- that's hard to stomach. Says Dominique Leone, "You don't always have to sound poignant to make poignant music." But I appreciate Deerhoof's challenge here: to comb hair without cutting it, to wash face without popping all the pimples, to be the best band in the world, but beyond that, to be the most lovable, too.
So tomorrow, Deerhoof put on their Tuesday best and release their first straight-up guitar-rock album-- short, dense songs packed into familiar forms, full-bodied vocals for unabashed, often gut-punching melodies, less herk-jerk, less of that house-of-cards spirit that coursed through Reveille and Apple O. Some people will miss that.
Milk Man, Pt. 2? Not really. Deerhoof aren't holding back here so much as redistributing their energies; where before we found cute in the grotesque, now the opposite. My offer: I'll concede that Milk Man was poppy, watered down, desperate love shit if you'll actually listen close to The Runners Four and realize that it's onto something else entirely-- by turns jubilant, confused, afraid, angry, sad, relieved, all pretty poignant, yes. They've made us a hugging record. Nothing ridiculous or pretentious about hugging.
Almost twice the length of their other LPs, The Runners Four plays not as one big song, but as three swoops of six or seven. That first swoop (from "Chatterboxes" to "Odyssey") might dishearten the diehard, at least initially. Drummer Saunier, famed for his freakish battery, barely touches the set, but in his absence we get compositional tension, which is sometimes more intense than Saunier's top-down. Dueling guitar lines bristle close in the rub ("Chatterboxes"), and harmonics stab away at Chris Cohen's existential pirate ballad "Odyssey": "Pirates on an odyssey/ We ask the captain 'What will be?'" Now pirates count for some of the biggest douchebags this world has ever seen, but they get scared, too-- people forget that.
"Wrong Time Capsule" starts swoop #2 with Runners' most on-the-sleeves guitar riff, a cry to echo singer Satomi's dejected message in a bottle: "Don't forget me yesterday/ 'Cause today's no place to stay." The trill stays fever-high with unison chants on guitars and vox ("Scream Team"), folksy-bluesy confessions/comeuppance on "After Me the Deluge" ("Middle love I did do you harm whenever I want to"), up to "Siriustar", Deerhoof's sparse-to-gigantic guitar anthem, like nothing they've written before. I think it's about a werewolf.
The next third dips into more emotionally resonant stuff-- the furthest capitulation of Deerhoof's animalism so far, where lyrically they can guess the emotions of all things living (people being chased by spies) or non-living (lightning rods). We can wonder, as they do, if lemons are sad when we eat them, stuff like that, though Deerhoof make sure to push things inside-out, rescuing something human from the rumination. Runners' gut-puncher, the third swoop rounds out with "You're Our Two" as needly guitar lines sandwich Satomi's image-heavy paranoia: "Cast afloat on icy water/ Can I really leave?" then "Ark sailing/ Believe all fools or die."
A somber if slightly perplexing note to end on, it's the right one for this album. But Deerhoof don't leave us there. Instead they give us "RRRRRRight", a chirpy, stark, primitive cut á la "Come See the Duck". Of course, after an album so unafraid to ask for our love, Satomi's ga-gas and oompah-oompahs feel somewhat inconsequential. Then I saw Deerhoof play the song live and understood why they have it here: The song is ginger, a palette cleanser as much for us as for them. Love what happened, they ask, forget what happened, start all over again.


DJ Snake is best known for his endless sugar high “Turn Down For What.” His solo album has a few successfully ridiculous tracks but mostly makes you question the need for its existence.

Encore

DJ Snake is a young French DJ and producer best known for his endless sugar high of a song “Turn Down for What,” and, up until now, his big moments have felt worth the tooth rot. Other big time producers from, Afrojack to Zedd, make mostly humorless music. Their drops and major keys work for clubs of course, with huge dynamic shifts that play to the pit of your stomach the same way a roller coaster does. The genius of them is they also work for partying on a smaller scale, like for at-home pregaming. EDM’s lack of subtlety isn’t a fault—it’s the entire point. For the genre, you can often replace questions of “good” and bad” with “useful” or “useless.” EDM is a tool as much as it is a type of music. DJ Snake has taken EDM’s inherent grandeur and played around in its sandbox. “Turn Down for What,” especially, turned the dial past eleven. Its over the top aggression is written into its rhythms. The song has Lil Jon barking at you. It’s ludicrous, and excellently so. After billions of of plays, it’s still not old, as it well overshoots its modest ambitions. In other words, at his best, DJ Snake under-promises and over-delivers.
Unfortunately, we don’t get much of DJ Snake at his best on Encore. Clearly DJ Snake has the ability to make some serious earworms: “Sahara,” with Skrillex, adds an element of surprise, in the form of tablas and chanting. It’s got a predictable buildup and inevitable drop, before some very “Turn Down” esque synth jabs take over. It’s dumb fun. “Ocho Cinco,” the album’s most successfully ridiculous track, mostly eschews vocals (like “Sahara”) and utilizes what basically sounds like a nail gun for most of its drums. It sounds appropriate for driving your car into a wall. Same with “Propaganda,” which follows a similar formula of exuberant pummelling.
But instead of just riding out that vim and vigor, he looks to make a real album, more songs with choruses and verses. Why? There’s a fish with a bicycle comparison to be made here. The album is simply not the format for DJ Snake. The conventional song barely is. He makes tracks. Instead of being, at least, a collection of great, standalone singles, the album is riddled with ill-advised rap songs and bad ballads. At best, “Let Me Love You,” the collaboration with Justin Bieber (who knows his way around silly EDM beats) is forgettable. Jeremih, on “The Half” sounds half awake on the beat’s video game bloops. Closer “Here Comes the Night” with Mr. Hudson is actually pretty good in that slick Ryan-Gosling-movie-credits way. But how a clunker like “Future Pt 2” with limp vocals from Bipolar Sunshine ended up next to these songs is anyone’s guess. Can no one working on these records tell how bad they are?
Ultimately, the question that remains with Encore is really just: Why does this exist? The party tracks on here are exceptional at doing what they do. The guy can make a banger. Surely those songs would have the life they deserve on computer screens and in subwoofers however they’re released. The “Turn Down for What” video has half a billion YouTube views! It’s digestible. In what way does an uneven album help DJ Snake or his fans? Is his ambition to be a producer and songwriter? It probably shouldn’t be. No one needs these wet noodle ballads. They’re inoffensive, sure, but they’re completely unnecessary. Not sure what made him turn down.


The 25-year-old Norwegian musician is a chameleonic vocal force. Her debut cushions heartache in shadowy, serpentine melodies and shoegaze guitars.

Back in the Tall Grass

The coldest moment of Nora Shikoswe Hougsnæs’ debut album Back in the Tall Grass illuminates a breakup in pale blue light. When face-to-face closure doesn’t satisfy her, she sifts through her ex-partner’s online profile, scavenging for connection. A ghostly organ accompanies her on “Two Heads in a Room” as she succinctly captures the moment: “There’s a war between my tenderness for you and the fact that I don’t love you anymore.” She’s sad, not because of the breakup, but because she’s seeking comfort in virtual stalking. Her matter-of-factness drills in the brutality.
As Shikoswe, Hougsnæs brews frothy dream-pop that tucks epiphanies in striking vignettes. The 25-year-old Norwegian musician has been releasing whimsical, surreal music for three years now; 2016’s The Hour of the Body EP indulged morbid curiosity and drew inspiration from René Magritte. On Back in the Tall Grass, she trades her more eccentric interests for an equally uncomfortable exploration of heartbreak. Her prickly vocals are smoothed over and veiled in echo, without the breathtaking intimacy of “This Here,” or the playfulness of “Marie.” Instead, Back in the Tall Grass is haunting and sedate. At her best, Shikoswe elevates her pensiveness into a cosmic, existential query.
With just over a dozen tracks to her name, Shikoswe is already a chameleonic vocal force whose high, clear tone resembles Annie Clark or Kate Bush. Back in the Tall Grass strips away the raw piano and nature sounds of her earlier work, using shadowy, serpentine melodies and shoegaze guitars to cushion the blows of lost romance. Balmy synths and angelic vocals wash over these songs like swirling auras; the echoey reverb and seductive, Cocteau Twins-esque dream-pop produces a warm, psychedelic glow reminiscent of Tame Impala. Withdrawn in the mesh of hazy effects, her voice at times sounds apathetic or consumed by memory. On the title track, she drags herself alongside a weepy keyboard melody, singing, “I was so sure you were gonna let me go for a moment.” A melancholic vortex of synths enshrouds her as she hovers like a phantom, unwilling to accept that it’s over.
Shikoswe doesn’t reveal where her relationship went wrong, or what could have salvaged it. Instead, the album is a mirage of melancholy and grief. Sometimes her understanding of love feels aloof: On “From the Start,” she compares her relationship to flunking out of school. It’s a strange comparison—connecting with another person shouldn’t feel like passing a test. But maybe this is shame and self-indifference rising to the surface. Though she takes all the blame, at times she seems strikingly detached.
Sometimes the magnetic haze surrounding Shikoswe’s music overwhelms her writing and prevents the emotional strife from resonating. The hypnotic current of “Good Intentions” overshadows the significance of the lyrics, and the aching ruminations about death on “Some Days” feel awkward amid choir-like synths. Still, Back in the Tall Grass is a reminder that breakups breed both agony and personal understanding, and Shikoswe finds peace in the end. “Don’t weigh yourself down,” she sings on the closing “Swimming,” absolving herself of guilt by recognizing her own insignificance: “Take a minute and consider that/We are all so small.” At first it’s jarring, then it’s comforting.


On his solo percussion LP, Jamire Williams shows himself to be an inspired crafter of sound, capable of building entire worlds from just his drum hits.

///// Effectual

It’s not easy for drummers to get the spotlight, especially if they’re the non-singing kind—no matter how prodigiously talented they may be. For every Ahmir “Questlove” Johnson (the Roots) or Damon Che (Don Caballero), there are hundreds of anonymous men and women who pound the back beat while their bandmates take center stage. After years of playing back-up to others, including many in the Leaving and Brainfeeder label nexuses (and, curiously, accompanying Wordpress founder Matthew Mullenweg in his senior recital as a jazz major), drummer Jamire William’ establishes his voice on solo debut ///// Effectual, a surprisingly satisfying record composed almost entirely of his own drumming.
///// Effectual isn’t the first time Williams has put himself out front. Previously he lead the jazz/hiphop/rock band ERiMAJ, who released one more or less overlooked record in 2012; though he was a principal songwriter, he was also just a member and not the group’s singer. But on ///// Effectual, Williams strips away the instruments and melodies, leaving behind only his percussion, both live and looped, all the while posing a direct question about what exactly classifies as a “song.”
Williams adorns a handful of his tracks with melodic accoutrements but ten of ///// Effectual’s fifteen cuts are just in-your-face drum hits. ///// Effectual begins with a sharp, two-handed snare snap on “WHO WILL STAND?” that summons the aforementioned Questlove and his opening to the Root’s “The Seed (2.0).” The similarity is striking, but Williams’ version is a stoned, hazily recorded drummer-on-his-own practice session that gives way to open space instead of a tight rhythm and blues. It’s remarkable how such a short snippet of sound can leave such an imprint, but it sets the stage for ///// Effectual in an odd and effective way.
What most distinguishes Williams’ tracks is a strangely hypnotic and claustrophobic quality , made more striking by the fuzzy recording quality. The fluid compositions sometimes evoke classic solo performances like Max Roach’s “The Drum Also Waltzes” or Tony Williams’ “Echo” stretched out and explored. “Selectric,” with its thudding, dystopic programmed drums, sounds like 21st-century version of Billy Cobham’s “Anxiety,” while the uncharacteristically tight “[ Selah ]”—featuring extra percussion by producer Carlos Niño—gives “Funky Drummer” a run for its money.
An even better reference point for ///// Effectual might be Antonio Sanchez’s magnificent 2014 soundtrack to the film Birdman. There, drums were similarly arranged around musique concrete samples, conjuring an entrancing, insular world that can simultaneously propel or make crazy anyone who dares listen for too long. The skittering pitter-patter of the hi hat on “Illuminations” mirrors Sanchez’s “Almost Human,” and the slow snare brushes of “wash me over (Pollock’s Pulse)” could just have easily been swapped into Birdman with the subtitle “(Keaton’s pulse).”
Yet despite the success of Williams’ solo performances, the album’s numbers featuring additional instrumentation (from other musicians) are without doubt the album’s most listenable. GB (aka Gifted & Blessed) contributes to three of them, the most compelling of which is “TRUTH REMAINS CONSTANT,” which marries an anxious tom thump and cymbal crash rhythm with an airy Oberheim synthesizer. The result recalls pastoral bedroom IDM like Boards of Canada’s “Everything You Do is a Balloon” or cLOUDDEAD’s “(Cloud Dead Number Five) (1)”. Eventually Williams’ drums disappear and the synths are left to rise, giving the sensation that you’re in a hot air balloon about the disappear into the clouds.
Better still are the album’s deliciously paced two closing moments: “collaborate With God,” featuring French composer and Frank Ocean collaborator Chassol and its subsequent remix by Miguel Atwood-Ferguson, provider of strings for Niño and others in the Brainfeeder/Leaving headspace. Of the two, the Chassol-only version is preferable, remaining a Jamire Williams track in feel. The latter, while excellent, is dominated by the Atwood-Ferguson strings and shifts the backdrop to something more like moody spy music.
On ///// Effectual, Williams shows himself to be both an inspired composer and tasteful crafter of sound. He can build whole worlds worth spending time in with nothing but drum hits. But, as the fuller tracks suggest, he might  make something even deeper and richer if he allowed even one or two more primary colors into the frame. *///// Effectual *provides a powerful blueprint to build on.


Former Sonic Youth guitarist Thurston Moore has said his new album is steeped in positivity, with the implication that he’s having too much of a good time in his new life in England to dwell on the past. My Bloody Valentine's Deb Googe and former SY drummer Steve Shelley contribute.

The Best Day

The Best Day is not the first music Thurston Moore has released since becoming the most famous—and, in some circles, most reviled—divorcé in American indie-rock. It is, however, the first time he’s released a song-oriented album under his own name since his highly publicized split from long-time wife/bandmate Kim Gordon. And given that Moore’s traditionally used these solo albums to explore more intimate, emotionally resonant songcraft than Sonic Youth’s gnarled guitar jams normally accommodate, it’s not totally unreasonable to expect he’d use this opportunity to reflect upon the recent upheaval in his personal life in a more poetic way than contentious interview sound-bites allow.
But with Sonic Youth officially on indefinite—or is it infinite?—hiatus, The Best Day proves to be not so much a revelatory, introspective antidote to Moore’s best-known band as a serviceable, equally high-voltage substitute for it. The album may not approach the metal-meltdown extremes of last year’s one-off with Chelsea Light Moving, but it does leave the drumstick-scraped guitars and humming amplifiers plugged in, displacing the acoustic quietude of 2007’s Trees Outside the Academy and 2011’s Demolished Thoughts with a distinctly Sonic Youth-ian discord.
Now a London resident, Moore has built a backing band that’s a transatlantic mirror image of the Youth’s classic formation, complete with a certified queen-of-noise bassist in My Bloody Valentine’s Deb Googe and a Lee Ranaldo-esque guitarist foil (James Sedwards of long-running U.K. math-punk trio Nought) schooled in both classic-rock tradition and avant-garde experimentation. (Playing the role of drummer Steve Shelley is… Steve Shelley, who—given his unwavering Hoboken allegiances—is presumably being paid in frequent-flyer points.) As such, The Best Day proves to be more of a demonstration of this line-up’s intuitive dexterity than a snapshot of Moore’s inner psyche—it's not so much a break-up album as a celebration of breaking free.
Moore recently told Rolling Stone that, from the album title to the quaint 1940s-era cover shot of his mom hugging a dog, The Best Day is an album steeped in positivity, with the implication that he’s having too much of a good time in his new life in England to dwell on the past. But it’s a contentment that’s not so much communicated in the lyrics—which adhere to a familiarly cryptic combination of street-hassle spiel and Catholic-block symbolism—as in the freewheeling spirit that permeates these recordings. (Ironically, the few acoustic-based songs that seem to speak most loudly to Moore’s personal preoccupations—like the cassette fetishism of “Tape” and the grrl-power solidarity statement "Vocabularies”—actually feature lyrics penned by London-based poet Radieux Radio, with whom Moore previously collaborated on a 7''.)
Showing off his newly minted supergroup like a recently acquired sports car, Moore leads with his two most imposing, open-ended tracks: Clocking in at a respective eight and 11 minutes, “Speak to the Wild” and “Forevermore” bracingly announce Moore’s return to sprawling, Sonic Youth-scaled guitar odysseys, with an alluring, live-in-the-room ambience that makes it feel like you’re curling up on the pillow weighing down Shelley’s kick drum. But these colossal songs emphasize what separates this line-up from Sonic Youth as much as the similarities. Even when compared to the Youth’s more even-keeled post-2000s output, there’s an almost ominous steadiness to Shelley’s playing here, as he and Googe lay down a locomotive, locked-groove foundation for Moore and Sedwards' six-string entanglements that’s ultimately closer in spirit to CCR’s extended “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” overhaul.
The FM-radio flashbacks don’t end there: the only way to make the title track’s Keith Richards worship more obvious would be to call it “Stones” (had Moore not already used that name a decade ago), while even the stripped-down “Vocabularies” is centered around a chugging riff oddly reminiscent of “Smoke on the Water”. But while the loose, carefree nature of The Best Day supports Moore’s claim that he’s having “so much fun” playing with his new band, the top-heavy sequence gives the album a lopsided feel, with its two opening monster tracks establishing an immersive intensity that the shorter, scrappier songs in its wake never quite recapture. (Though “Grace Lake”, an instrumental that follows a similar chiming-to-churning course as way-underrated 1998 Sonic Youth epic “Wildflower Soul”, comes close.) Tellingly, in a recent interview, Moore admitted he positioned “Germs Burn”—a more oblique manifestation of his unyielding Darby Crash obsession—as The Best Day’s closer not because its contrast of gleaming guitar jangle and hardcore-inspired staccato phrasing makes for a particularly dramatic finale, but simply because he was unhappy with his vocal performance on it and wanted to bury it. All of which suggests that, with The Best Day, Moore is really laying the groundwork for a better tomorrow.


The Natural is the best of Kool A.D.’s 10 (!) projects released in 2016, setting aside his deconstructive tendencies in favor of structured songs with intriguing, clever, and funny rhymes.

The Natural

In 2016,Victor Vazquez (aka Kool A.D.) released 10 albums, a staggering output that that rivals 2010s Gucci Mane or mid-’00s Lil Wayne. Across 282 tracks, he sang his own praises more than ever, maybe hoping to will his oft-repeated (however ironically and/or seriously) “best rapper in the world” claim into reality. Unfortunately, Vazquez was sometimes derailed by the actual music. Many songs and plenty of freestyles were lazily thrown together, likely by design. For example, “Arts & Leisure” (from July’s 100-song Zig Zag Zig) is just a pitched-up version of a 2012 Action Bronson collaboration. Vazquez’s final album of the year, The Natural, is also the best of the 10, setting aside his deconstructive tendencies in favor of structured songs with intriguing, clever, and funny rhymes. The project lives up to its title, showcasing a nonchalantly brilliant rapper.
The Natural is cohesive, with all of the beats courtesy of frequent collaborator and fellow Bay Area resident Amaze 88. Sample-driven and blissed-out, the instrumentals keep the album moving when Vazquez threatens to drift off into the free-associative abyss. Leaning on his natural ability as the album’s concept, Vazquez sounds relaxed, effortlessly connecting thoughts. Nothing sounds forced, and he occasionally finds depth (“I feel the need to transmit my intellect along with the folly of my pride”) and humor (“the Scritti Politti scrivener”). He loves repeating himself, whether it is his own lyrics or those of others, and he may be realizing that if he wants to continue using his own bars over again in various songs, he needs to come up with some new signature phrases.
Vazquez often buries insight in his lyrics to equalize the ordinary with the profound: All thoughts are valued on a Kool A.D. album. The Natural continues the trend, as he juxtaposes a line like, “Live for the common good of people, not capital” (“The Natural”), with a later one on “Lay Up” where he intentionally mispronounces “library” and brags about oral sex. It flattens the scope of rap, insisting that words are inherently meaningful and meaningless, and lines are just combinations of sounds and musings. Or, as he raps on “Fatwa”: “I speak with no notion of convincing you of anything.” It’s an impulse that both pushes forward and undermines Vazquez’s work: He understands the art form conceptually possibly like no other, and his continued output demonstrates a near-addiction to rap, but too often it serves as an excuse to deliver inferior product that works only theoretically.


Channeling stripped-back pop songs into hushed folk arrangements, the Seattle singer-songwriter’s 15th album confronts life’s impermanence in terms tender yet unsentimental.

What’s New Tomboy?

On his 15th album, Damien Jurado confronts impermanence with arresting frankness. Across What’s New, Tomboy?’s 10 songs, a close friend perishes onstage, a plane smashes into the side of a mountain, and a long sought-after romance promises a dark comfort: someone to die with. Jurado may examine the unpleasant, but his observations are aren’t needlessly morbid or cynical, nor tortured or overwrought. Instead, Jurado allows these reflections to drift by like a steady current, never lingering long enough to invite undue scrutiny. In this 30-minute collection of vivid impressions, Jurado positions his voice at the front of the mix, braced by subtle and warm folk arrangements. His words are still just above a whisper, but they’re impactful as ever.
What’s New, Tomboy? is, unsurprisingly, a quiet album, but it is noticeably less quiet than its predecessor, 2019’s In the Shape of a Storm, which also featured 10 brief entries. But while those songs were built entirely around acoustic guitar and Jurado’s tempered chest voice, What’s New, Tomboy? features an expanded palette courtesy of multi-instrumentalist Josh Gordon. Gordon was present on In the Shape of a Storm (playing high-strung guitar), but here he lays down bass, electric guitar, drums, Hammond organ, Rhodes, and more. Jurado extends himself as well, adding Mellotron and percussion to his usual repertoire. The effect is hushed but rich, and Gordon’s presence adds levity to Jurado’s melodies: His guitar licks on “Arthur Aware” and opener “Birds Tricked Into the Trees” twinkle as they refract off Jurado’s dusky voice.
Gordon might be the reason that What’s New, Tomboy? at times sounds like a stripped-back pop record. Jurado recently admitted to Aquarium Drunkard that in the past year he’s become a first-time Beatles fan (“at 47 years old!”), suggesting that this may have partly influenced the simple structure of these new songs; there’s also a McCartneyesque feel to Gordon’s basslines. But despite What’s New, Tomboy?’s enlivened arrangements, the most interesting element is his lyrics, packed with fragments of daily life and ruminations on death. Mid-album ballad “Fool Maria” relays a series of contradictory images, at first lovely and then tragic. He likens a woman’s eyelids to a closing curtain “that lets you know it’s over.” “We are fiction as it’s written/The bleeding ink on paper,” Jurado sings, accenting his words with fingerpicked guitar. “Quiet as an aeroplane/Before it hits the mountain.” It’s like Jurado has baked a fish into a birthday cake—you eat a forkful of something sweet only to bite into a pungent and unpleasant surprise.
Jurado doesn’t have a regimented writing schedule; his songs show up when he’s occupied with other things, whether that’s laundry, television, or even sleep. Avoiding the process is the process, and it’s likely the reason his lyrics sound so inspired and original. On the driving “Arthur Aware,” banshee-like backing vocals swirl around the dark fable, and a character named Mr. Will shares a cryptic secret: “I keep all of my prized reflections/In glass jars from the coroner,” he says. “And when I get bored of looking at myself/I trade the gray for the shade of someone else.” Singular passages like this are marbled throughout the album, and they don’t sound like belabored phrases that have been erased and rewritten a thousand times. Instead, they seem to have appeared to Jurado fully formed while he was walking through the grocery store—slippery thoughts that will dissolve if not documented immediately.
If Jurado’s ideas are fleeting and intangible, that might be because he thinks life is, too. On “Ochoa,” Jurado sings to his late friend and longtime collaborator Richard Swift, who died in 2018 of complications from alcohol addiction. “Absence tunes the choir/Symphonies of you,” Jurado sings, again disrupting a serene image with a death knell: “You turn to sing, you’re gone/The show must go on.” But Jurado is quick to comfort his lost friend with the knowledge that he won’t be long behind. This sentiment is reinforced on “The End of the Road,” perhaps the album’s best song. Here death is lassoed to devotion. Gordon’s walking, bulbous bassline guides Jurado and his partner down a winding one-way street. We all know what’s at the end of it, but Jurado makes time to take in the bewildering scenery along the way.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their second album of the year, the ever-mutating Aussie psych-rock outfit embrace throwback thrash metal to soundtrack the end of life on Earth.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard: Infest the Rats’ Nest

Infest the Rats’ Nest

Heavy metal demands true devotion. It disdains the hipster tourist; it maintains purity through its own antifa(lse metal) movement; it requires that at least 85 percent of your wardrobe be given over to black band t-shirts. King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, on the other hand, are non-commital by nature—the ever-mutating Aussie psych-rock outfit are synonymous with impulsive aesthetic shifts, resulting in a deep, frequently updated discography in which no two albums sound alike. But even by the Gizzard’s scatterbrained standards, 2019 has yielded two albums so diametrically opposed, you’d think one of them was mislabeled. Following the whimsical electro-glam boogie of April’s Fishing for Fishes, the Gizzard return with Infest the Rats’ Nest, an album that embraces the contentious stance that metal isn’t necessarily a way of life, but a passing mood we all feel from time to time.
Infest the Rats’ Nest’s throwback thrash isn’t just a matter of Gizzard king Stu Mackenzie upgrading his favorite Lemmy band from Hawkwind to Motörhead; it’s a raging response to a world where even the most despairing UN climate reports barely make a blip. King Gizzard are no strangers to getting heavy, but Infest the Rats’ Nest is their most succinct and single-minded statement to date, presenting a vision of modernity where fleeing Earth to begin civilization anew in outer space looks less like sci-fi and more like docudrama. And when devising a soundtrack to imminent eco-pocalypse, drug-resistant disease, and furious contempt for the planet-killing powers that be, only the most merciless metal will do.
With a handful of members tending to other musical and familial obligations, Infest the Rats’ Nest finds the Gizzard in a rare power-trio formation: Mackenzie is backed by fellow guitarist Joey Walker and drummer Michael Cavanagh. As a result, the album forsakes thrash’s technical precision and more grandiose, prog-inspired qualities for a gritty immediacy redolent of the genre’s early days. While jackhammer beats and gratuitous shredding abound, the album also shrewdly connects the dots between thrash and its ’70s-metal forebears: The murderous charge of “Planet B” (as in: “there is no”) peels down the asphalt laid by Deep Purple’s “Highway Star,” while “Mars for the Rich” mimics the bloozy, brontosaurus chug of Black Sabbath’s “Hole in the Sky.” But if King Gizzard’s take on thrash still bears their stoner-rock stamp—particularly on the sludgy “Superbug”—Mackenzie treats the occasion like heavy-metal Halloween, abandoning his natural singing voice for a Venomous bark that favors hook-free howls and minimalist rhymes (“Counterfeit! Hypocrite!”; “Auto-cremate! Self-immolate!”) to hammer home his doomsday prophecies. (Only lines like “shoot the dingo while the shit goes out the window!” remind you that you’re still listening to Australia’s most proudly absurd rock group.)
Coming from a band that was singing wistfully about birdies just a few months ago, Infest the Rats’ Nest is a convincing display of metal muscle. But as heavy as the album is, it feels slight in the context of the band’s catalog, lacking both the unpredictable detours of their biggest rock-outs and the insidious melodies of their more pop-focused work. At their best, King Gizzard absorb an array of seemingly incompatible influences into a sound uniquely their own, with a careening momentum that ensures you’re never really sure where they’re taking you. Infest the Rats’ Nest, on the other hand, is a rock’n’roll spin class—intense and relentless, to be sure, but ultimately fixed in the same spot. Even when the album’s second side introduces a conceptual narrative about a group of people who escape Earth to live on Venus (spoiler: things do not end well), it doesn’t venture anywhere—musically or thematically—it hasn’t already been. As the Gizzard’s two releases this year respectively prove, they’re not afraid to push their sound to its most playful and punishing extremes. But it’s always been more thrilling to hear them excavate the uncharted territory in between.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In 1980, Grace Jones decamped to Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas where she worked with producers Alex Sadkin and Island Records’ president Chris Blackwell, as well as a crack team of session musicians rooted by the rhythmic reggae force of Sly & Robbie. Across three critical and commercial hit albums, with 1981’s Nightclubbing as her pinnacle, Jones reinvented herself while also altering the face of modern pop.

Nightclubbing

Like Josephine Baker nearly 50 years before her, it was when Jamaican-born Grace Jones left New York City and went to Paris in 1970 that she went from being mere Wilhelmina Agency model to international cause célèbre. Towering at nearly six feet, with an obsidian skin tone and facial features like flint rather than flesh, Grace Jones and her androgynous looks made her a sensation in the fashion world. She stalked the runways for Yves St. Laurent and Kenzo Takada, roomed with Jessica Lange and Jerry Hall, served as muse for photographers like Helmut Newton and appeared on the covers of Elle and Vogue.
Fashion world conquered, Jones then returned to NYC, habituated Studio 54 (sometimes in nothing more than her birthday suit), and conquered disco, recording three albums with the man who invented the very notion of the form, Tom Moulton. Jones’ choice of covers on those albums ran the gamut from dreck like “Send in the Clowns” to a stunning rendition of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose,” her flat monotone speak-singing voice atop a flamboyant overly-dramatic backdrop that veered often into camp. When the disco backlash began in earnest, Jones set her sights on a new realm to conquer: new wave.
In 1980, Grace Jones decamped to Compass Point Studios in Nassau, Bahamas where she worked with producers Alex Sadkin and Island Records’ president Chris Blackwell, as well as a crack team of session musicians rooted by the rhythmic reggae force of Sly & Robbie. (This group would eventually be dubbed Compass Point All Stars, supplying island grooves for everyone from Robert Palmer to Tom Tom Club to Black Uhuru.) Across three critical and commercial hit albums spanning from 1980’s Warm Leatherette through 1982’s Living My Life --with the expanded reissue of 1981’s Nightclubbing as her pinnacle-- Jones reinvented herself, while also altering the face of modern pop.
Fashion, art, and music all converged in the form of Mrs. Jones and looking out at the 21st century musical landscape, it’s easy to see her influence: Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Nicki Minaj, M.I.A., Grimes, FKA twigs, and more. Beyond that, there’s an entire subset of alternative music that draws on the template set by Jones and her Nassau backing band: Massive Attack, Todd Terje, Gorillaz, Hot Chip, and LCD Soundsystem all emulate those rubbery yet taut grooves of Sly & Robbie and cohorts, a hybrid that amalgamated rock, funk, post-punk, pop and reggae. So curiously strong was Grace Jones’s influence on pop culture of the early '80s that not only did she pioneer the androgynous look in fashion (as styled by Jones’s then-beau Jean-Paul Goude), she was even able to turn her chiseled bodyguard boy toy into an action star. It's but one of many examples of Jones' singular existence in pop culture (who else nearing retirement age could command a stage with the likes of both Lil’ Kim and Luciano Pavarotti, or perform for the Queen's Diamond Jubilee while hula-hooping?).
On the album’s opener, a cover of Flash and the Pan’s “Walking in the Rain”, Jones growls in her contralto about “Feeling like a woman/ Looking like a man.” Noirish, foreboding, sounding rain-slicked, the beat crafted by Sly Dunbar with percussionist Uzziah (Sticky) Thompson is undeniable across its four minutes. But it’s on the second disc, where many of the album tracks' running times are extended towards the sublime, that the now seven-minute song soars even higher. It also doubles as a showcase for keyboard wizard and the Nassau band’s secret weapon, Wally Badarou, a classically-trained synth session man who’s C.V. includes M’s “Pop Music” and Level 42’s “Something About You.” Badarou's extended solo evokes a tone not unlike Miles Davis' muted trumpet: gorgeous, weightless, it's as brooding and wistful as a midnight walk in the rain can be. On Grace Jones’s take on the tango “I’ve Seen That Face Before (Libertango),” Badarou mimics both Argentinean tango master Astor Piazzolla’s bandoneon and that eerie organ tone of “Runaway”.
But of course, Grace Jones is the star here. Five of the original album’s nine songs are covers, though rather than fealty to the source material, Jones sounds as if she’s shredding the songbook with her bare teeth. She treats each cover not as a singer tackling a song, but as an actor inhabiting the skin of a role. She sneers the Police’s “Demolition Man” as if she's a villainess leveling a hospital, inverting the gender and notions of sexual dominance in her lascivious take on Bill Withers’ “Use Me.” Dubbing out the zombiefied pacing of “Nightclubbing”, Jones intones Iggy Pop’s lines with the detachment of a dominatrix contemplating her cat o’nine tails, while a previously unreleased cover of Tubeway Army’s “Me! I Disconnect From You” sets it in a sleek reggae setting.
Another bonus track is labeled “Peanut Butter,” which some disco fans will recognize as the title of another Sly & Robbie & Wally track (as remixed by Larry Levan), made for Gwen Guthrie on her 1985 mini-album Padlock. But here, “Peanut Butter” is the beat that Grace Jones turned into her Top 10 single and Paradise Garage anthem, “Pull Up to the Bumper.” Originally deemed “too R&B” by Chris Blackwell, Jones finally got her hands on the pistoning riddim and turned it into one of the most profane singles in pop/dance music history. Long black limousines, commands to “pull up” and coos of “let me lubricate it” make it one of the finest parallel parking metaphors for butt-fucking. At a time wherein a song about a "gigantic" interracial lover can soundtrack a tech giant's new promotional ad campaign, one hopes that soon a car company will do the same for Grace Jones' most wanton pop moment on a record that further cemented her iconic status in pop culture.


The Richmond metal quintet’s fourth album is its most intense and most rewarding: a virtual symphony of pummeling, dissonant riffs sculpted with unrelenting precision.

Sulphur English

Sulphur English is a tempest. The unrelenting intensity of Inter Arma’s fourth album is common in metal, but its monolithic power is striking for a band long defined by its dynamics. On its previous three full-lengths, the Richmond quintet has tested a theory that the apocalypse would sound more real if it invoked the totality of the landscape: lush gardens of British folk in one corner, the winding roads of Southern rock stretching out in the distance, the wide open skies of prog above. This ability to shapeshift has yielded a catalog that feels vast but interconnected: different topographies along the same map.
On Sulphur English, with little territory left to cover, Inter Arma set fire to it all. The riffs are pummeling and dissonant, as if melting and losing shape in real time. The songwriting operates on a principle of tension and repetition. Less melodic and more aggressive than anything they’ve recorded, it’s a test of endurance through which the band seems to grow more focused with each passing minute. Yet these songs do not simply suggest Inter Arma’s dark unburdening, their primal howl after a series of masterfully composed opuses. Instead, they spiral with the patience and precision of some dismal symphony. With Sulphur English, Inter Arma expose the nightmare world that’s lingered below the surface of all their previous work.
Vocalist Mike Paparo has discussed using these songs to address his struggles with depression, and the record itself is dedicated to two of the band’s colleagues who died in recent years: Bill Bumgardner of Lord Mantis and Indian, for whom the ominous opening track is named, and Adrian Guerra of Bell Witch, whose mournful doom metal echoes through the album’s quieter moments. Its darkness feels personal, lived-in. The bluesy and exquisite “Stillness” and the funeral march of “Blood on the Lupines” touch on the classic-rock-influenced ballads from 2016’s Paradise Gallows; but where those songs were defined by their sweeping momentum, these seem to burrow deeper into themselves, unwilling to transcend.
In the absence of the band’s boundless experimentation, the heavier songs adhere to a traceable lineage of atmospheric death metal. In “Citadel,” drummer T.J. Childers—who has long been Inter Arma’s most versatile member—alternates between plodding fills and ghastly blast beats. It sounds like a sudden free fall rendered in slow motion. The album’s best moments find similar inspiration in their descent. The closing title track repeatedly collapses into slow, claustrophobic breakdowns, like a traffic jam in hell, before imploding in chaos, courtesy of guitarists Steven Russell and Trey Dalton.
From the beginning, Inter Arma have been interested in grand statements: Their songs are complicated and their albums are long, and their ambition sometimes seems limited to the sprawling tone shifts in their material. So while Sulphur English is their least welcoming album, it is also their most rewarding. Standout tracks like “The Atavist’s Meridian” and the gothic, percussive “Howling Lands” indicate a band able to capture its passing moods—helplessness, rage, devotion—and shape them into something whole, merciless yet refined. With Sulphur English, they’ve delivered a cohesive vision of internal destruction, all the more explosive for everything they’ve left behind.


The heavy-hearted G.O.O.D. Music debut from the young singer is a refreshingly new take on eclectic, lovesick soul music.

Modus Vivendi

The best moment from Kanye West’s ye, his much-maligned album from 2018, was crafted by 070 Shake. The 22-year-old singer’s chest-thumping appearance on “Ghost Town” was a glimmer of promise amid a heap of sloppy, single-take recordings, one of the few times on the album actually seemed transcendent. Her debut, Modus Vivendi, proves our ears weren’t deceiving us. The album is intensely sincere, with the New Jersey native proudly serving her soul raw atop bullish, beautiful production. It is the most compelling and complete release under G.O.O.D. Music since Pusha T’s Daytona.
The heavy-hearted vibes begin immediately on the opener, “Don’t Break The Silence.” Shake’s ambered voice rises over a floating synth and describes a lover who isn’t quite ready to break things off. “If you were liquid, you’d be bitter like wine/Till then I’ma drink, stay here for the ride,” she hums out. The feelings of desire, being desired, and all the messiness in between are at the center of Modus Vivendi, a Latin term used to describe an arrangement between two conflicting parties in the hopes of coexisting peacefully. For Shake, that harmony is elusive, not only in her relationships with women but also in her own heart. On “Terminal B,” she grapples with whether the warm feelings of a relationship can be trusted, poking at it like it’s too good to be true. “Yeah baby, she’s on lockdown love,” she murmurs before immediately second-guessing herself: “Maybe she is not down.”
All this heaviness is packaged neatly within bright melodies built for lovesick kids to belt out at Coachella and Rolling Loud. This gives her songs a tone of triumph and catharsis rather than total defeat, like on the hook for “Morrow,” where she dejectedly lets a partner know, “I don’t know if I’ll be here tomorrow,” but stretches out the last word in snappy fragments, similar to Rihanna’s ad-libs on “Umbrella.” She goes for a higher register on “Come Around,” where she cries out for someone to join her in her loneliness, like she’s trapped at the bottom of a well, yelling at a sliver of sky.
The elasticity of her voice isn’t always utilized properly here, perhaps the result of too much experimentation in the studio. On a few tracks, she ventures too far into trap-rap territory, dumbing her voice down to a mumbled delivery, like on “Rocketship,” which could serve as a Travis Scott reference track in how similar it is to his auto-tuned sound. She dips heavily into voice modulation on the album as a whole, recently telling Pitchfork that this was done to make her sound “more real.” In actuality, it achieves the opposite effect, creating a degree of separation between her in and the listener by placing a governor on the amount of emotion she conveys. At times, you find yourself yearning for her voice to be left more naked and vulnerable.
These are largely the only missteps on an otherwise richly produced album. Modus is essentially the antithesis of the half-baked works that arose from Kanye’s Wyoming sessions in 2018. It is the result of a handful of talented collaborators who provide enough eclecticism to balance out the bombastic sound of G.O.O.D. in-house producer Mike Dean. For every “Come Around” built on the same roaring synths Dean supplied for Yeezus, there’s an infectious ’80s-inspired jam like “Guilty Conscience.” “The Pines,” meanwhile, is constructed on a distorted chant similar to the one played out on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy switch-up “Hell Of A Life,” but finishes with a thunderous string arrangement, giving Dean’s sound some refreshing variance.
The most inspired works, though, come from former Stills member Dave Hamelin, who gives Shake ethereal, dreamy soundscapes to navigate through, none more pretty than the closer “Flight319.” Over astral chords that conjure images of misty daybreak, Shake encapsulates her internal tug of war by alternating between lines of confidence and shame, optimism and fear. Eventually, the drums cut out and she hits a point of reflection: “Oh, I’ll never know, how long I’ll stay, how far I’ll go.” Everything is in agreement, even if it’s just for a moment.