Chief Keef's major label debut stays true to the mixtapes that got him noticed, and proves that the young Chicago rapper has more potential than his detractors might have hoped.

Finally Rich

Finally Rich is Chief Keef's major-label debut, but truthfully, there's not a whole lot to distinguish it from the free mixtapes he made while on house arrest at his grandmother's place in Chicago's Washington Park neighborhood. Those tapes, first passed around among southside high-schoolers, were what landed the now-17-year-old rapper his Interscope deal, and apart from a few random A&R'ed guest spots, the label appears to have stayed out of his way.
That's a good thing. Chief Keef's music sparked a lot of arguments this year. His youth, his rapid rise, and his association with Chicago's epidemic of gun violence made him 2012’s flashpoint for discussions about what was wrong with hip-hop. But he established a simple sound that proved powerfully effective and addictive, and he also showed that it was a sturdy enough blueprint to support multiple songs. If Waka Flocka Flame woke up tomorrow utterly drained of the will to live, he might sound like Chief Keef -- all the unilateral forward motion and aggression, none of the audible joy. Young Chop's crisp snares and hi-hats mimic Lex Luger's (minus the tricky syncopation) while Keef mutters through a thick wall of processing.
There's nothing to add or subtract to this sound that could substantially improve it. Fellow Chicagoan Kanye West found that out the hard way when his Michigan Avenue makeover of "I Don't Like" was given a public dressing-down by Young Chop the day after it hit the web. Finally Rich benefits from some professional tweaks in the mix, but otherwise leaves Keef's sound untouched. And in addition to succeeding on its own terms, it proves that Keef has a lot of potential-- much more than his detractors might have hoped.
Based on a simple four-note earworm, the hook on album opener "Love Sosa" has the feel of something sung under the breath, and after hearing it once or twice, you'll probably find yourself doing just that. There's an unquantifiable line separating the maddeningly catchy from the simply maddening, and Keef has a natural knack for walking it. "Hallelujah", also produced by Young Chop, is one the album's more involved productions: Its blaring horns gesture towards Waka's "O Let's Do It" over Hammond organ licks that feel smuggled out of Houston rap. "Diamonds" has a similar feel, with gunfire, horn and string stabs, and a manic carnival-ride synth line all rolling out like evenly spaced 8-bit Donkey Kong barrels.
"Hate Bein' Sober", the album’s forthcoming single, is the catchiest moment and perhaps the most pop-focused song Keef’s ever made. It features 50 Cent, who sounds at home for the first time on a pop-rap hit since "I Get Money". Out of the handful of big names on Finally Rich, 50's appearance makes the most intuitive sense: Keef built his mystique, in part, on the idea that he was back from the dead, and 50 was the first rapper to overtly sell himself as an unkillable Terminator-like figure. His patented sing-song sloganeering sounds current again here, maybe because Get Rich or Die Tryin' came out when Keef was in elementary school and is part of his basic musical vocabulary.
Speaking of which: Chief Keef isn’t a lyricist. At all. His lyrics on Finally Rich are almost entirely composed of rudimentary gangsta-rap boilerplate, which he treats more like a graffiti bomber than a rapper, tagging his beats with slogans meant for maximum impact and minimal scrutiny. If there’s anything the odd jumble of industry rappers who show up on Finally Rich share, it’s this casual approach to lyrics. French Montana, who pops up on "Diamonds", is most famous thus far for literally inventing a word he didn't even say. And Wiz Khalifa fails to make an impression (as usual) when he drops in on "Hate Bein' Sober".
Some of the material filling out Finally Rich is already a year old, including the ubiquitous "I Don't Like" and another of Keef's earliest YouTube hits, "3Hunna", which now sports a Rick Ross feature. The album feels, promisingly, like a progress report on Keef's developing voice rather than a forced "arrival." This has downsides, as there are amateurish moments where some intervention might have been welcome: "No Tomorrow"'s  vocals barely match up with the beat, while "Laughin to the Bank" takes a bassy "HAWH HAWH HAWH" vocal hook and flogs you into submission with it. It feels specifically designed to make older rap fans massage their temples.
But there are also hints of where Keef’s sound could go next: "Kay Kay", produced by K.E. On The Track, is gentle and pretty, built from rolling piano and airy synths. And "Citgo" is as close to an uplifting song as Keef’s ever written. Produced by Young Ravisu, it floats on new age synths while Keef sings a warm, sweet melody. The lyrics are still riddled with violence, but the ugliness of the sentiments don't survive the sunlight of song's major key. It's not a redemptive moment, exactly, but it is a transformative one. "[My sister] thought I was going to be some kind of motherfuckin' screw-up or something," Keef says on the intro to "Ballin", in a clip taken from an interview. "They thought I was going to be like, bad all my life…I gotta job now, I gotta daughter too." On an album single-mindedly devoted to painting Keef as pitiless and cold, it’s a brief glint of the dimensions this ruthlessly effective album barely touches on.


The pop-punk stalwarts resist political commentary in lieu of making the most convincingly carefree Green Day record of the new millennium.

Father of All...

Green Day have spent the last decade trying to shake the burden of importance. The trio’s 2004 smash American Idiot didn’t just reinvigorate their career, it elevated them from fading ’90s alt-rock holdovers to a big-tent attraction with voice-of-their-generation prestige. Sixteen years later, it’s still astounding to think that Green Day somehow recorded one of the defining rock albums of the George W. Bush era. But that critical breakthrough also created stifling expectations for the records that followed. Rock-opera grandeur and solemn political protest were never the most natural fit for a pop-punk act whose breakout hit was about masturbating out of sheer boredom.
Save for 2009’s spiritual sequel 21st Century Breakdown, everything Green Day has recorded since has been an attempt to reclaim some of their former irreverence, starting with their low-stakes 2012 trilogy ¡UNO!, ¡DOS!, and ¡TRÉ! and continuing with 2016’s tepid Revolution Radio. Each of those records attempted a leaner, meaner reboot of the band, yet they all stopped well short of Father of All Motherfuckers, the most convincingly carefree Green Day record of the new millennium. At just 26 minutes, it’s the band’s briefest album ever—a full five minutes shorter than even 39/Smooth—and it pointedly resists political commentary on the times, as prime for comment as the times may be. It’s as if the band imagined what shape an American Idiot: Trump Edition might take, then made the exact opposite of it.
In its early stretch, Father of All... is sometimes barely even recognizable as Green Day. On the title track, a bluesy retro-stomper in the Black Keys mold, Billie Joe Armstrong trades his lippy sneer for a Jack White falsetto, while the Hives-esque “Fire, Ready, Aim” imagines the kind of rock-revival makeover Green Day might have attempted in the mid-’00s if their rock-opera muse never struck.
From the candied guitar compression of Dookie to the Blu-Ray clarity of American Idiot, top-dollar production has always been Green Day’s secret weapon, and here, as ever, they aren’t shy about deploying it. “Oh Yeah” plays directly to hockey arenas (it can’t be a coincidence that the band just inked a two-year partnership with the NHL). But Father of All... really comes to life when it stops giving its throwback rock the beer commercial treatment and just plays it for straightforward kicks. Lots of bands channel Big Star and the Replacements, but few do it with the verve of “Meet Me On The Roof” and “I Was a Teenage Teenager,” Green Day’s most fetching and youthful songs in ages. The trio sounds reinvigorated, more like hungry newcomers staking their claim than a band a quarter-century removed from their major-label debut.
It’s a genuine blast hearing Green Day lock-in with music this peppy and spirited, at least for a little while. The album aims for instant gratification and achieves it so efficiently that it can’t help but burn fast. They band have no secrets to share; they reveal them all upfront, and its most eager hooks can begin to grate after just a few spins. But there are worse things than a record that doesn’t play the long game. Father of All Motherfuckers asks for almost none of your time and makes good on it. Who knew Green Day had a record this humble left in them?

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With loose, psych-pop grooves and empathetic lyrics about growing up, Greta Kline and her band enter a phase of tenured inquisitiveness.

Inner World Peace

Despite being meek in sound, Frankie Cosmos songs frequently capture the emotional rush of viewing something larger than life firsthand: the triptych of reds, yellows, and greens atop a mountain range; the explosive joy and laughter of friends reuniting for the first time in years; the realization that you’re a cog in the machine, but that however trivial your role may seem, there’s beauty in carrying it to fruition. The band draws out these ruminations with stripped-back indie rock and lyrics sung barely above a whisper. On Inner World Peace, Frankie Cosmos’ fifth studio album, singer-guitarist Greta Kline turns that sense of wonder inward, viewing herself with a newfound sense of empathy that comes with age.
If she was once heralded as a teenage wunderkind who viewed songwriting as her version of microdosing, then Kline is now entering a phase of tenured inquisitiveness, where no stone goes unturned in the search to understand why she is who she is. After years of dodging the perceived formalities of adulthood—9-to-5 desk jobs, owning a car, looking forward to showering—Kline opens herself up to the unavoidable truths of your late 20s. “I’m regressing at light speed/I don’t still play the guitar every day,” she confesses. “I had a magnetic personality once/But I got too tired to keep it up.” As unfamiliar as this transition feels, it’s entirely normal; adjusting is the hard part.
Throughout Inner World Peace, Kline questions what it means to grow up and how to know if you’re doing it correctly. As she susses out in “One Year Stand,” no matter what your maturation process looks like or how many faults you fix, you can’t escape former iterations of yourself. She likens this sensation to being a cast-iron pan: Even if you try new meals and take on new flavors, seasonings from years prior will always be embedded into you. Kline puts her own spin on these signs of growing up, imbuing innocence and wonder into the framing. On “Wayne,” she relaxes her face to prevent wrinkles, only to break out crow’s feet while smiling around her crush. Throughout “Prolonging Babyhood,” she mocks her resistance to responsibilities, from feeding herself mashed-up broccoli to thinking about the future in any capacity. By stamping her feet down one last time in jest, Kline bids adieu to the stubbornness of her early traits and commits to bringing only the best parts forward with her.
Inner World Peace benefits from that introspection in its ability to groove. These songs bend and stretch like they’re toying with psych pop, even though the music is still delivered through Frankie Cosmos’ now-trademark minimalism. It’s that Stereolab-esque refrain repeating at the end of “A Work Call,” Alex Bailey’s roving bass and guitar parts straight out of the ‘60s in “Fragments,” Lauren Martin’s airy synth warbling like a ripple of smoke in “Fruit Stand.” The better you begin to understand yourself, the easier it becomes to move about the world. That looseness is at the heart of Inner World Peace, both in music and lyrics. “Aftershook” encapsulates it best; Kline sings about balancing emotional awareness and hopefulness while reconciling with her past. Around her, Bailey, Martin, and drummer Luke Pyenson lay down jazz-influenced psych-rock more fit for Crumb, but they snap back into their classic sound with each chorus. It’s like watching the band grapple with two versions of itself—the established, demure teenagers and the nebulous adults—to decipher the healthiest combination.
At the start of this year, Frankie Cosmos invited fans to enter the “FC Universe” with a project called How Do You Feel About Making the Song, a Tumblr devoted to interviews with bandmates, collaborators, and friends. Kline conducts each entry like a child attending a Take Your Kid to Work Day, asking about the fundamentals of their jobs with a genuine desire to learn. Extra emphasis is placed on the way fate and change have affected their careers. Inner World Peace seems like another attempt to navigate these turning points, dotted with uncertainty. By the end of the album, Kline is left to reflect on what she’s learned. “I am doing my best,” she sings quietly, as if resigned to the fact. That’s when she asks the evergreen question: “Will it always be like this?” The answer, as always, is up to time.


Danielle Bregoli’s leap from meme to rapper continues with her debut mixtape that leans heavily on mimicry and trails dreadfully behind the current sound of hip-hop.

15

When Danielle Bregoli went viral as the “Cash Me Outside” girl in early 2017, few people expected, much less wanted her to stick around. Memes, by their nature, are supposed to be disposable. But music executive Adam Kluger saw a way to capitalize on the widespread attention surrounding the unruly Floridian teenager, even if she had more haters than fans. He took on the role of Bregoli’s manager with a vision. “The initial idea was to brand her,” he says in an interview with The New York Times. “To take this villain—relentless, crazy-attitude kid—and just brand her as this supervillain.”
In August 2017, Bregoli uploaded her debut single, “These Heaux,” as the rapper Bhad Bhabie. And with it, Bregoli became the youngest female rap artist to break the Billboard 100 chart. Only a few days later, she inked a multi-album recording deal with major label Atlantic Records. Kluger’s strategy had worked. As a meme, Bregoli’s prickly personality was easy to dismiss—people loved to make a punchline out of the 13-year-old white girl who flirted with delinquency and said that she got her accent from “the streets.” But everything that made her so cringe-worthy on “Dr. Phil” actually made her a more marketable rapper. On “These Heaux,” her loud, confrontational personality translates seamlessly into a no-fucks-given rap persona, as she fires off bars about “dick-riding” hoes. It’s a tale as old as the American music industry: Labels are quick to pour money into white artists because they’ll be more “palatable” for a mainstream white audience. Bhad Bhabie gets to be a supervillain: she’s bad and is celebrated for it. She gets to leave Boynton Beach, Florida, put a down payment on her own house, and pay off mom’s mortgage. Meanwhile, black girls with brash attitudes and big mouths don’t get viral off of “Dr. Phil”—and they certainly don’t get million-dollar record deals.
On 15, her first mixtape as Bhad Bhabie, Bregoli doesn’t show much versatility past her well-established tough-girl character. She’s successful in imitating the sound of today’s rap hits; most of the songs on 15 come across like they’re specifically engineered to be placed onto Spotify’s “RapCaviar” playlist. The beats are glossy “type beats” programmed by no-names to sound exactly like something prominent producers Tay Keith and Metro Boomin would make. And through her major-label resources, established rappers like YG and Lil Yachty are paid to bolster Bregoli’s credibility, while buzz-worthy up-and-comers like Dallas’ Asian Doll, Atlanta’s Lil Baby, and Miami duo City Girls make it seem like she’s hip by association. And Ty Dolla $ign, the most on-demand crooner of 2018, contributes another one of his magical hooks on the syrupy R&B tune “Trust Me.” The resulting tracks are catchy but formulaic, trailing behind the current sound of hip-hop.
She raps like how she talks, with a ridiculous accent that’s informed from AAVE, her South Florida upbringing, and her Brooklyn-raised mom. On the Lil Yachty-featuring “Gucci Flip Flops,” Bregoli cranks up her theatrical “blaccent.” “Fuck it, hit your bitch in my socks/This a big watch, diamonds drippin’ off of the clock,” she drawls, overemphasizing each consonant and morphing vowels like she’s trying to lap peanut butter off the roof of her mouth. Her unconventional pronunciation is the most interesting thing about the song. But it’s not so much a testament to her originality, as it is an extension of her knack for imitation.
In her essay “Who Really Owns the ‘Blaccent,’” critic Lauren Michele Jackson suggests that blaccents used in comedy (like Awkwafina’s Peik Lin in Crazy Rich Asians or Ilana Glazer’s “Yas Kween” in “Broad City”) is not so much an “evocation of blackness” as it is other factors like “power, imperialism, commerce, the digital age.” She asserts, “There are blaccents built from blaccents, but maybe not from blackness itself.” The same could be said for Bregoli’s delivery, which isn’t interesting simply because she necessarily sounds black. It’s notable because it’s a mimicry and exaggeration of what she thinks a rapper, a hood rat, or a bad bitch would sound like. She intensifies her accent for performances and switches it off for interviews. But in terms of rap technique, Bregoli doesn’t have much to offer besides borrowed flows.
In a refreshing moment of vulnerability, Bregoli finally gets real about her life in the nearly seven-minute closing track, “Bhad Bhabie Story.” It recalls a more quiet section of the original “Cash Me Outside” interview, where Dr. Phil asks Bregoli about her father Ira Peskowitz, a deputy sheriff for the Palm Beach Police Department who left her and her mom when Bregoli was only 2 years old. Bregoli fires back one-word answers, avoiding eye contact with a steely gaze and pretending like she’s unaffected by the questions. But when Dr. Phil asks, “Does he have another family?” Bregoli’s eyebrows scrunch together and she nods without a word, looking like she’s fighting back tears. She finally illustrates her current relationship with her dad in the opening lines of “Bhad Bhabie Story” as she raps: “Reached out to my dad/We met at the mall on some other shit/Pissed off by his tattoos ’cause they had the names of his other kids/Like fuck me, I don’t exist?” It’s one of the rare instances on 15 that she reveals that she has real emotions underneath her hard exterior—and it’s fascinating.
Looking further into Danielle Bregoli’s story, it becomes more clear why she acts like she’s invincible. On top of the estranged relationship with her father, Bregoli’s mom Barbara Ann was diagnosed with cancer in 2007. Bregoli was only 4 years old when she started helping take care of her mom. Although Barbara Ann is in remission now, the cancer came back several times throughout the years. “I think the second time I had it she was 11, and she was real mad,” Barbara Ann says in an interview with Dazed. “To be honest with you, that’s when all the craziness started.” The hostile, loud-mouth Bhad Bhabie is like protective armor for Danielle Bregoli, a teenage girl who’s been hurt, dejected, and had to grow up fast. But 15 only offers glimpses of the real Bregoli, while the Bhad Bhabie on display is one-dimensional, painfully predictable, and derivative of what a rapper is expected to be like.


The Chinese-born, Vancouver-based electronic musician’s debut album fuses disparate moods, styles, and experiences into a varied set of songs that touch on ambient dub, synth pop, and left-field house.

Yellow River Blue

Yu Su’s Yellow River Blue nods to China’s famous Yellow River, which flows alongside her hometown of Keifang, in the country’s Henan province. The album was inspired by a 2019 tour across China that took the Chinese-born, Vancouver-based electronic musician from the country’s coast to the Tibetan Plateau, and it’s easy to envision that river’s meandering journey while listening to Yu Su’s little worlds of sound. Her music is a network of stylistic tributaries that unfolds with elegance, never too busy yet still containing an abundance of striking sounds. Yu Su’s work shapeshifts gradually over time, widening and opening itself to new elements: the classical piano she studied as a child, the textures of ambient, the punchy beats of dance music, and instruments from her homeland.
Yu Su’s work is evocative of the dancefloor but exists apart from it, or maybe even beyond it. Tempos and moods lean toward downtempo; she blends overtly synthetic textures with stringed instruments and soft piano, stretching out stuttering textures with dub delay. In the years since she discovered electronic music at a Floating Points concert in Vancouver, Su has made music for both clubs and art galleries. “When I DJ or make music and when I make sound installations it’s completely different stuff,” she has said, “so I wanted to combine those things and blur the lines between those codes that were designed to separate people.” Yellow River Blue reflects a range of potential moods and spaces. The big drums of “Melaleuca (At Night),” with shades of left-field ’80s pop like Yellow Magic Orchestra, sound like they might have been crafted for slow-motion dancefloors; “Klein” could be the soundtrack to a mist-filled installation; while a track like “Dusty” seems designed for listeners to drift inside their own minds.
There’s occasionally an almost vaporwave-like tenor to Yu Su’s sound, like the heavenly waiting-room music of “Touch-Me-Not,” or the grimy, vaguely chopped-and-screwed “Klein,” whose clanging percussion and trippy whirlpools are right out of a deep cut by Dean Blunt or Actress. While Yu Su’s debut EP strolled casually along, “Xiu” aggressively jump-starts the album with pounding drums and intensifying rhythms, though it remains grounded in the calm of her fluttering voice. The mixture of naturalistic sounds and electronic textures lends an energy reminiscent of trip-hop or the ambient psychedelia of artists like Future Sound of London.
The passage of time is a central element of Yu Su’s work. Sounds start out clear and gradually become distressed until the point of disintegration. On “Touch-Me-Not,” a full choir of synths begins to stutter before slowing to a static-ridden crawl. For all the quieting ambience of her music, Yu Su’s compositions can leave you feeling slightly on edge, unsure of how the beats might morph or the tempo might subtly adjust. But at times her music can be unexpectedly bright, almost cheerful. Closing cut “Melaleuca (At Night)” bounces atop glittery keyboard riffs and crisp snaps; “Dusty” builds from gentle nighttime chirps into a slow-motion breakbeat anthem. Dub is a steady presence, particularly on “Futuro,” which recalls the buoyant cadences of vintage Seefeel.
In addition to the titular reference to the landscape of her childhood, Yu Su also frequently draws on timbres, instrumentation, and pentatonic scales traditional to Chinese music, further rooting the album in a sense of place. Throughout Yellow River Blue, you can clearly hear Yu Su joining together different parts of her life, and that fusion of disparate styles is part of what makes Yellow River Blue so inviting. Created with an exacting sense of compositional precision, it nevertheless wanders like a slow-moving river, offering a new discovery around every bend.

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The infamous Beta Band frontman could have lingered in the shadow of his cult-figure fandom; instead, on his fourth solo album, he sings directly about the long process of growing up.

About the Light

Following the Beta Band’s unceremonious end in the mid-2000s, lead singer Steve Mason seemed destined to exist as a cult figure; like many shadowy eccentrics, his outré musical achievements had become intertwined with a history of mental-health struggles. But since releasing his 2010 solo debut, Boys Outside, Mason has upended the stereotype with increasing emotional clarity and political bluntness, suggesting a sincere desire to connect where his former band confounded. In the middle of writing his 2016 release, Meet the Humans, Mason relocated from his isolated outpost in the Scotland woods of Fife to Brighton. He’s since found a partner and become a dad. Back then, Mason quipped his next record would be his “Brighton Album,” reflecting his newfound stability. With About the Light, he keeps that promise, delivering the sort of ebullient late-1990s Britpop record that his former band famously avoided.
Recorded with the Smiths and Blur producer Stephen Street, About the Light forsakes the genre-blurring experimentation and mad-scientist tinkering that was a cornerstone of the Beta Band and has somewhat lingered in Mason’s increasingly accessible solo releases. Instead, Mason delivers his signature folkie-Floyd musings with the creative input of his touring band, who keep the songs tight, confining them to the southern-soul terrain of the Stones at their most spiritual and the Primal Scream songs that followed the lead. It’s a warm, welcoming sound, emphasizing how Mason’s songwriting ethos hasn’t really changed since he first strummed “Dry the Rain”  over two decades ago, ultimately transforming that casual acoustic stroll into a ticker-tape parade.
Where such tunes were once the Beta Band’s springboards into a vast sonic universe, they are an end on About the Light, with nearly every song becoming a waiting game for the moment when the horns and gospel-style backing singers come charging in. Even songs that seem destined for the outer limits find their way back to earth. The romantic reverie “Rocket,” for instance, begins as a minimalist, melodica-spiked dub skitter, but you know it’s only a matter of time before its four-chord progression balloons into a colossus. As the song explodes into guitar-solo fireworks, you get a glimpse of an alternate universe where the Beta Band kept their shit together and became perennial summer-festival headliners .
About the Light isn’t wholly fixated on domestic bliss. “America Is Your Boyfriend” opens the record with a seething indictment of the devastating Grenfell Tower fire of 2017, envisioning the death of capitalism as a New Orleans funeral march. And with the dub-side-of-the-moon drift of “Fox on the Rooftop,” Mason blurs the line between dreamlike serenity and nightmarish anxiety. But on the whole, this is the breeziest, cheekiest record of Mason’s career, at times exceedingly so. While the call-and-response motion of “Walking Away From Love” stakes the common ground between the juke joint and the church, mid-tempo soul-pop trifles like “Stars Around My Heart” and “Spanish Brigade” threaten to steer into the MOR cul-de-sac.
As a portrait of happiness, About the Light strikes its deepest chords when Mason acknowledges the long road he took to find it. During the title track, he dutifully refers to the campfire-funk template of “Dry the Rain,” only this time the climax it reaches is more emotional than musical. “Found a piece of bad luck lying by the side of the road,” Mason sings. “I had a chance to put it in my pocket/But I’m wiser, now I’m getting old.” They’re telling words from a guy who, 20 years ago, famously deflated the hype surrounding the most anticipated album of his career by deeming it “fucking awful.” (He is admittedly still unlearning the habit of self-sabotage, judging by the recent fallout from a mean tweet about British pop star Sophie Ellis Bextor.) It’s a reminder that bliss isn’t some final promised land, but a work in progress. And in sobering moments like these, About the Light delineates the big difference between simply making happy music and making music about happiness.


The South London singer Jessie Ware is a devout realist making the most of her pop-star dreams. Her commitment to both sides of that equation is what turns her debut album into a uniquely soulful masterclass.

Devotion

To begin to understand where Jessie Ware is coming from, let's look at her stuck between an acoustic guitarist and an MPC beat pusher in the back of a London taxi. As part of the simple, self-explanatory "Black Cab Sessions" web series, the 27-year-old British singer recently took her place in the middle seat and proceeded to offer a nuanced live take on "Wildest Moments", a slyly epic ballad from her debut album, Devotion. In such tight quarters, she's not quite sure where to look-- at her bandmates, outside to the street, or directly into the camera-- her head on a controlled swivel. She's capable of blasting the back window out with her voice, which consistently strikes blue notes somewhere between Sade and Whitney, but she holds back, well-aware of her unplugged environment. The performance is seriously moving, and yet Ware lets loose a few brief grins and a slight laugh, as if to say, "All this is quite ridiculous, don't you think?" And that's Jessie Ware: a devout realist making the most of her pop-star dreams-- and her commitment to both sides of that equation turns Devotion into a uniquely soulful masterclass.
If you've half-slept through just one episode of a reality-television singing competition over the last decade, you're probably somewhat privy to Ware's trajectory. The one-time theater kid started out as a backup singer before nearly giving up her musical aspirations to be a journalist. But then, thanks to a montage-ready twist of fate, she ended up singing lead on melodic bass producer SBTRKT's 2010 single "Nervous", which led to a solo label deal, which led to Ware being forced to take the spotlight. But oftentimes backup singers are off to the side for a reason, and the hard truth is that's where they will be most productive; there are only so many lead roles in the world of pop. Considering her self-described "boringly sensible" outlook and the doubt pinging around her brain ("I had to get past the idea of, like, 'Who gives a shit about what I'm gonna fucking write a song about?'"), Ware sounds more like a supporting player on paper. But then you hear her voice, and any and all limits start to fade into the distance.
Singing over futuristic electronic tracks like "Nervous" and dubstep producer Joker's "The Vision", Ware sounded strong, but also somewhat overshadowed by the showy bleeps scurrying around her. Devotion, however, marries her natural gift with throbbing instrumentation that breathes life into every single turn of phrase or sensitive vocal embellishment. The tempos bounce lightly, the drama escalates, the synth-laden ambience cascades like so many postcard waterfalls. This is smoldering music, its smoke bewitching enough to make the original fire more or less irrelevant.
The record was largely produced by three men-- Dave Okumu of UK art rockers the Invisible, Bristol electronic upstart Julio Bashmore, and singer-songwriter Kid Harpoon, who co-wrote songs on Florence and the Machine's Ceremonials-- each leaving his distinct mark without distracting from the whole. Okumu's tracks, especially opener "Devotion", are dark and dense, hinting at passion's underbelly with each deep bass hit; Bashmore's are more airy and upbeat, primed for classy dancefloors worldwide; Kid Harpoon offers the most festival-ready songs-- big hooks, bigger drums-- like "Wildest Moments". Tying the disparate sounds together are Okumu, who co-produced and played many instruments on nearly every track, and of course Ware herself, who co-wrote all but one song. Her voice is a marvel throughout, often gaining power by holding back or briefly teasing its scope while staying faithful to melody over melisma. Her words are in tune with this refinement as they chronicle the in-betweenness of love, dismissing easy pleasures for feelings that are more hard-won, confusing, and frightening.
Take the most classically "pop" song here: the weightless "Sweet Talk", which modernizes Whitney Houston's late-80s effervescence à la Beyoncé's "Love on Top". On its face, the track is all endless dimples and mesmerizing lips, but then the verses sink in: "Don't keep me with the kisses, there's never any there when I need," pleads Ware. She knows she's going to fall for the smooth nothings once again, though, and lets the keys try to cover the inevitable regret, which plays out on "Running", where Ware starts, "Your words alone could drive me to a thousand tears." The title track, with its foreboding murk, gives whiffs of a seance as Ware asks, "Ready to love but do you want it enough?/ Can we find a way to bring it back again?" Given the track's perfectly rendered storm clouds, you get the impression she already knows the answers. The idea of running comes up often on Devotion, and it's clear that Ware isn't interested in the sprints-- when it comes to love, she's angling for a marathon. And she knows marathons can be really fucking tough.
Talking about her childhood aspirations earlier this year, Ware told me, "It's so unattainable to be a singer. I'd watch 'Top of the Pops' and think I could never do that. And I didn't look like a pop star compared to the people I used to watch on MTV like J.Lo or Destiny's Child." As a middle-class Jewish girl from South London who's closer to 30 than 20, she's still nothing close to a cookie-cutter R&B breakout. Her success thus far-- and its likely continuation thanks to Devotion-- is a testament to both her talent and budding songwriting skills, as well as the wide-open field that is modern R&B, where a sensitive soul like Frank Ocean can make a star-in-a-box like Chris Brown look about as relevant as a dial-up modem. "I'm just having fun and trying to pretend I'm a pop star," said Ware, talking about her high-style videos. And while embellishment and theatricality is still a coveted and worthwhile pursuit within the pop realm, the beautiful thing is that, in 2012, Jessie Ware doesn't need to pretend more than anyone else.


The Brooklyn-based duo of harp and violin make ambient music that’s eerie, beckoning, and tinged with horror.

Flood Dream

LEYA, the Brooklyn-based duo of harpist Marilu Donovan and violinist Adam Markiewicz, make purposefully ambiguous music and place themselves in an ambiguous context. The duo traverses the art world and DIY noise scenes, and their music revels in the tension between elegance and disquiet, subverting the stereotypes associated with their chosen instruments. It can sound equally gorgeous or unsettling, depending on mindset and circumstance; it asks more questions than it answers.
LEYA’s second album, Flood Dream, is a refinement of the approach they introduced on their debut cassette, The Fool, in 2018. At its center is a tenuous relationship with beauty, highlighting the shifting, subjective nature of the concept itself. The duo renders beauty as it’s depicted in horror films—something that reveals a deep layer of foreboding, that foreshadows its own inevitable demise. Donovan’s harp, which she detunes at inconsistent intervals, places dissonance at the heart of every song on the album, even as Markiewicz traces long, aching melodies with his voice and violin. Each pluck of a string subtly destabilizes the song’s tonal center. The effect is visceral, like being tucked into soft bedding only to feel a spider slowly crawling up your leg.
Though their music is rooted in classical traditions, at times sounding like a fractured half-remembrance of pre-Baroque chamber music, Flood Dream is structured like popular music. These are three- to four-minute songs, not extended compositions, with Markiewicz’s voice providing melody and momentum. He cites Cocteau Twins, specifically Elizabeth Fraser’s impressionistic, purely ornamental lyrical approach, as a key influence. The focus is on the sound of his voice, its tone and emotive qualities, rather than what he’s actually saying, adding to the album’s ambiguous nature.
The harp and violin have heavy poetic associations, the harp especially symbolizing purity, grace, and refinement. Donovan’s approach to the instrument undermines those implications not only by introducing imperfection through microtonal dissonance, but also through the often-grave manner in which she plays and the way many of her phrases dissipate unresolved. “Mariah,” appearing near the end of the album, opens with Donovan’s harp surrounded by empty space as she slowly repeats four tone clusters, giving space for the wavering pulses of disharmony to reveal themselves. Album closer “Mary” ends as she traces an arpeggio upwards, leaving it hanging in the air without the final return to the root. LEYA’s work on the 2018 PornHub exclusive I Love You, directed by Brooke Candy, points to the fact that they have little interest in traditional notions of purity.
Flood Dream is bewildering, and even after many times through, listening to it can still feel disorienting. By putting beauty and discomfort on equal footing, LEYA allows for transgressive perceptions of ecstasy to emerge. This is not inviting music, but it is remarkably open, like a door left ajar to a ravaged house, eerie and beckoning.

Buy: Rough Trade
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After the unlearned pop bent of Hot Fuss and the clichéd strained seriousness of Sam's Town, the Killers return with a third album that aims to split the difference between its predecessors.

Day & Age

"Are we human or are we dancer?" That is the question. Well, that is a question. And Brandon Flowers' grammatically dubious query gets to the heart of the Killers Dilemma. Emotion or libido? Imperfect or impervious? Vegas losers or comped penthouse playboys? On "Mr. Brightside", they didn't have to worry about such binaries. Fresh, young and hammy, one of the strengths of the Killers' 2004 debut, Hot Fuss, was its unlearned pop bent. It was fizzy and silly, and there were no apologies. Then Sam's Town checked off almost every big time follow-up cliché there is: horn arrangements in place of songs, concept in place of lyrics, seriousness in place of nonchalance. If the makers of "Gossip Girl" created an HBO mini-series chronicling Dust Bowl despair, it would look like what Sam's Town sounds like.
Album number three tries to split the difference. There are funk basslines that recall 1980s Bowie and producer Stuart Price (Jacques Lu Cont)-- who helmed Madonna's return-to-dance record Hung Up-- was brought in. But the songs still take on sweeping, Springsteen-ian stakes, and first single "Human", with its high-gloss finish, is one of only a few tracks any flesh and blood being would consider dancing to. Which brings us back to that initial question: human or dancer? According to Day & Age, the answer may be neither.
Across the album, Flowers keeps himself above the fray, never wallowing too much in his own drama. There's the self-reflexive detachment of "Human", the holier-than-thou scoffing on opener "Losing Touch" ("I'm in no hurry, you go run and tell your friends I'm losing touch"), and, on "Spaceman", he actually leaves our planet for a spell with the help of an alien. The pose suggests a newfound sophistication-- no longer shall he be a slave to the petty desires of mere earthlings. Most traces of humanness on Day & Age come off oddly second-hand, as if Flowers uploaded Springsteen's or Bowie's catalogue to his internal memory and spat out a working simulacrum. This isn't all bad.
On both "Losing Touch" and "Spaceman" Flowers pulls off fine recreations of Pompadour- and Ziggy-era Bowie, respectively. But something like "A Dustland Fairytale" is the nonsensical result of a Big Rock magnetic poetry kit. "Out where the dreams are high, out where the wind don't blow/ Out here, the good girls die and the sky won't snow," sings Flowers, signifying everything but saying nothing. Similarly, "This Is Your Life" attempts to conflate stories from a couple Springsteen tunes-- take the title character of "Candy's Room" and put her out on the savage "Jungleland" streets-- and comes off like a half-hearted tribute. With his long distance relationship with down-to-earth emotions and his previous penchant for fake-looking facial hair, Flowers can be reminiscent of a latter-day Rivers Cuomo-- a weirdo trying to please himself and his audience at the same time but constantly coming up a little short on at least half of that equation.
The other three guys in the Killers have taken all that Sam's Town criticism to heart more than their lead singer. On Day & Age, the experimentalism is more scattered and more rewarding. Instead of just pressing the "huge and bombastic" button ad nauseum, they diversify: so there's the comically Caribbean "Joyride" (with full-on touristy sax solo), the Strokes-gone-samba of "I Can't Stay" and the impressively brooding (and Björk-ish!) closer, "Goodnight, Travel Well". They're aiming to please some of the time, and they do. Less radical change-ups "Losing Touch" and "Spaceman" are the most obvious contenders for the inevitably incredible greatest hits compilation. "Losing Touch", in particular, is like a best of the Killers mashup: there's the crash cymbal chorus for fist-raising, the horn-strut verse for hip sliding, the "Guitar Hero"-ready solo from underused ax man Dave Keuning.
There's no central concept here-- even the album's title is as vaguely all-encompassing as possible. This is the Killers' spitball album, the one where they try everything and see what works while Flowers grasps for a relatable tone. "When your chips are down, when your highs are low: joyride!" he sings on the so-dizzy-it's-amazing "Joyride". It's the Killers at their most carefree-- the brooding behind them, they're ready to set out with the top down and the schmaltzy sax way, way up. Frivolity suits them, why shy away from it?


Fronted by Corrina Repp and Joe Haege (Menomena, 31 Knots), the Portland quartet creates darkly lovely music-- and actual songs-- on its second LP.

A Monument

In the rocky chasm between lust and love, it's often the non-events, the not-quite-happenings, that gain emotional weight. These are the concerns of A Monument, the second LP by Portland's Tu Fawning. "If my skin had scales and colorful details/ We'd travel the roads and never go home," Corrina Repp laments on opener "Anchor". It seems possible she is a woman who literally desires to be reptilian; trailed by a dry shaker rattle, her voice slinks and coils over big drums and arid, rolling guitar, as if already propelled by a hundred tiny bones. But that wish is also the album's main hangup taken to an extreme: You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you can make some dense and darkly lovely music about it.
It may seem funny to talk about this band in terms of its lyrical themes. Tu Fawning were originally formed as some experimental woodshed for Portland musicians Repp and Joe Haege (she of a long-running solo folk career, he of trios Menomena and 31 Knots). Their 2008 debut EP, Secession, and their first proper record, 2010's Hearts on Hold, seemed like sonic moodboards more than anything else-- scraps of 1920s nightclub jazz, baroque piano flourishes, and the kind of stark percussion that's referred to as "tribal" all basted together into patchworks only generally suggestive of coherence, purpose, or an emotional core. (An exception was "Apples and Oranges", a piano-heavy, painfully frank song about trying to discern the origins of a basket of fruit but also about reconciling friendship and kindness with the soul-stealing tendencies of crippling depression.) On those first releases, strands of "oohs" and "aahs" threatened to outstrip all instances of the English language, and the words that were there were often buoyed off and away by waves of sound that rolled and arced endlessly and switched back upon themselves.
But something happened over the past few years: Tu Fawning became really good at writing honest-to-goodness songs. "Wager", the album's clear triumph, is the closest the band allowed itself to a pop single, with the giddy guitar crunch of the pre-chorus leaping straight into the wide-open arms of the big, hopeful chorus: "There'll be no confusion with this one, I'm certain." Overall, A Monument inverts the group's earlier approach, allowing the atmospherics to act in service of the songs rather than necessitating the whole endeavor. "It was another arcane soiree/ Of debutantes and men with sway," Haege sings on "To Break Into" over a swell of menacing horns and interlaced ripples of electric guitar; Repp later echoes the same verse before Haege returns with those horns again, and some eerily plaintive piano, all padded out by a crush of guitar, his voice close to a desperate growl, hers cool and smooth. "Bones", the album's final track, calls up the hallmarks of both Afro-pop and woozy, golden-era Black Sabbath, then spills into an ethereal, tempo-shifting closer, at the end of which it's not difficult to imagine Repp ascending into some bank of sun-ringed clouds, platinum-haired and beatific.
Stylistically, A Monument is no less of a jumble than anything else the band has done-- Repp and Haege and co. are just better at managing the mess than they were before. Sometimes it seems as if Tu Fawning watched the world watching Florence and the Machine (and/or Beach House, perhaps more analagous in terms of sound and general scope) and thought, "Time to step it up." Or perhaps they're just slowly becoming a better band, which is this funny thing that can happen when artists are given space and time and not crushed under the weight of popular expectation before they have a chance to know their own minds. There's a sense throughout A Monument, like the fugues and false starts that tangle at its heart, that Tu Fawning are on the edge of something-- pressed against it, blood pounding-- but, for now, remain suspended in judgement. There's something waiting for them beyond this moment, but there's beauty here, too.


Latest in a line of goth-pop artists-- think Bat for Lashes or Zola Jesus-- to emerge in recent years issues a promising Domino debut.

Feel It Break

On her own and under her own name, Katie Stelmanis used to record synthetic art-pop. This was tense and jarring music, music that jumped around and demanded attention. Austra, Stelmanis' new band, makes just as much use of her stretched-out yip and her theatrical instincts, but the music is a lot warmer and more comfortable. Austra play a warm, hazy sort of electro-goth. It's synthetic and repetitive, and there's plenty of Giorgio Moroder in its DNA, but it's not dance music. Instead, it's music for a planetarium, or maybe for a mid-1980s PBS science documentary. Austra's synth riffs don't pound or undulate; they flutter and envelop. And Stelmanis doesn't sing over the top of their tracks; she emits sound from somewhere in the thick of it.
Feel It Break, Austra's debut album, is essentially made up of 11 minor variations on a single sound-- no complaint, since they're good at that one sound. It's tough to talk about Stelmanis' icy, high-pitched deadpan delivery without mentioning Kate Bush. By that same token, it's tough to talk about the band's music without mentioning Witching Hour-era Ladytron, or maybe Bat for Lashes. This is pretty and heady music, music that can subtly change the air in the room where it's playing. Drums lightly percolate rather than thud, and synth riffs hide inside each other like Russian nesting dolls, gradually revealing themselves over the course of entire songs. And the group builds these things patiently. Often, it holds back on introducing vocals or drums for more than a full minute, letting the songs' feel develop before making any radical changes.
These songs aren't entirely alike. First single "Beat and the Pulse" has a telescoping sort of push-pull to it; it's the closest the band ever comes to genuine dance music, and even it doesn't come that close. On "Lose It", Stelmanis gets a chance to stretch her huge, tremulous voice over some minimally invasive synth backing, and she sounds titanic: "Don't wanna loooooose ya." The bouncy art-pop piano on "Shoot the Water" has a certain twitchiness, bringing Stelmanis partway back to her solo days. And closing tracks "The Noise" and "The Beast" do away with percussion entirely, letting Stelmanis sing over miasmic synth fog on the former and floridly ghostly piano on the latter.
Even with those variations, though, Feel It Break still works as a monochromatic album, one content to stick with the same shade of glimmering darkness. Onstage at SXSW a couple of months ago, Austra cut a stark figure-- Stelmanis backed by two stunning, harmonizing twins, the rest of the band half-hidden at the back of the stage. Even playing in the middle of an absurdly sunny day, the band seemed to exist in some vague state of perpetual glamorous nighttime; that could've been them, not Bauhaus, serenading David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve during the great opening scene of Tony Scott's otherwise bullshit vampire movie, The Hunger. On Feel It Break, they've got that creeping cinematic synth-psych style down cold. Moving forward, I'm curious to hear what else they can do.


Jim Jarmusch and Carter Logan’s tribute to the late Dutch cinematographer Robby Müller is a meditation on the meeting of music and film.

Some Music for Robby Müller

It would be easy to understand SQÜRL, a collaboration between Carter Logan and the director Jim Jarmusch, as the musical pet project of a famous filmmaker. The duo formed a decade ago, to score Jarmusch’s movie The Limits of Control, and now SQÜRL market themselves as an “enthusiastically marginal band from New York City,” an image so coy it might make you want to bang your head on the limits of pretension. Yet music is not a new passion for Jarmusch, whose pedigree reaches back to his days manning the synths for the enthusiastically marginal Del-Byzanteens in the early 1980s—when everyone in New York had a band, as he once told The Washington Post. Like Jarmusch’s recent films, among them Only Lovers Left Alive and Paterson, his music’s ease and self-assuredness question why the knee-jerk reaction of our time is to treat earnest cultural voraciousness with cynicism.
Jarmusch, after all, is nothing if not earnest. Even the focus on material objects that pervades his recent features is less a social commentary than a reflection of its creator. SQÜRL’s new album, Some Music for Robby Müller, was developed as the score to Claire Pijman’s 2018 documentary Living the Light – Robby Müller, about the titular Dutch cinematographer; one scene features Jarmusch at a guitar store in Bushwick, searching for an instrument that “relates to Robby in some way.” (He settles on a mid-1960s Teisco Spectrum IV with a Bigsby vibrato, used on the album.) Trying to capture a person’s essence with a new guitar seems the province of an advertisement, not a filmmaker, but such is the ambiguity of Jarmusch’s recent universe: Music, film, objects, human beings, and cities all exist on the same plane, equalized by his conviction in the eternality of beautifully made things.
He conjures Müller, a friend and frequent collaborator, by using a warm guitar tone, often laden with reverb. Some Music consists of a series of sun-kissed instrumentals, bound by a song called “Robby’s Theme” and a single variation. Müller was resourceful, hated excess, and loved natural, minimal lighting sources; appropriately, Some Music is a spare record based on a few precise shifts in atmosphere.
The album is SQÜRL’s prettiest, and because of its surprising simplicity, among their best. Jarmusch and Logan strip their arrangements of all past accoutrements—gone are Jozef van Wissem’s powerful lute playing, the crunch and feedback of heavy distortion, the glass harmonica, bass guitar, and Jarmusch’s buried, punkish vocals. What’s left is a sound so direct and meditative that you can hear SQÜRL considering light’s filmic properties while they make music. Logan’s drums appear only once, on “In a Lonely Place,” their tom-heavy menace a well-chosen contrast to the album’s Americana-drenched hues. “While Vermeer Was Sleeping” evokes a lonesome mood that echoes Müller’s life—many of his movies, including the ones he made with Jarmusch, were shot on the road in the United States, fixated on the simultaneous dislocation and enchantment of the itinerant traveler.
It’s been a long time since Jarmusch sounded dislocated, on either record or film. Müller died in 2018, and maybe this album captures a feeling they once shared, or perhaps it’s a sign of what’s next for Jarmusch and SQÜRL. More than a band, SQÜRL are an idea about how music and film interact, and their enthusiasm for both mediums is as palpable as a vintage instrument. Inside the brief 30 minutes of Some Music for Robby Müller are real feelings that will outlast the fame of its creators, and all of the guitars, pedals, and vibratos that went into its creation.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Avonmore, a lush album of mostly new songs, is a fine addition to Bryan Ferry’s oeuvre, if not necessarily a terribly challenging one. Guests include Todd Terje, Nile Rodgers, Johnny Marr, Flea, Ronnie Spector, and more.

Avonmore

Throughout his post-Roxy Music solo career, Bryan Ferry has rarely stood still. Aside from an ill-advised collection of Dylan covers in 2007, his recorded output generally represents a series of assured steps forward. His last record, 2013’s The Jazz Age, allowed Ferry to play around with big band takes on his expansive back catalog, a project that could have potentially been dismal (and unnecessary), but instead came off as both fun and surprisingly inspired. Now, nearly a year later, Ferry releases Avonmore—his 15th solo album and his first collection of new songs in nearly four years.
On Avonmore, Ferry enlists the help of an all-star cast of players and producers—Todd Terje, Nile Rodgers, Johnny Marr, Flea, Ronnie Spector, Mark Knopfler, and Maceo Parker. With the exception of Rodgers (whose graceful guitar work pops up all over the record) and Terje, most of the special guests are all but invisible on Avonmore, their presence muted by Ferry’s unmistakable voice and the lush production. As Ferry has become known increasingly for his impeccable covers, it’s refreshing that Avonmore is comprised almost exclusively of original material, most of which hearkens back to his most classic sounds.
Some of the tracks could have drifted off of one of Ferry’s mid-'80s solo records. "Loop de Li" and "Midnight Train" come complete with tastefully employed chimes and a smattering of low key horns. Both are dark and romantic with the kind of breathless quality that only Ferry can offer. Going even further, "A Special Kind of Guy" is so intensely Ferry-ish that it borders on parody, as he croons "When you’re with me every problem seems to disappear/ Fields of roses burst into flower and everyone a tear." Almost no one else could get away with this, but Ferry manages to sell it perfectly almost every time.
Avonmore flounders when the music, which routinely flirts with a kind of adult contemporary smoothness, leans over into blandness. Co-written by Johnny Marr, "Soldier of Fortune" would be forgettable were it not for Ferry’s tremulous voice, which manages to make a line like "Girl stop rockin, you’re driving me insane" sound more compelling than it actually is. "Driving Me Wild" and "Lost", while not terrible, lack the surging mystique of the record’s better songs, while "One Night Stand" mines '80s tropes in the worst possible way—honking sax, a chorus of sassed up backup singers, and an un-funky Ferry going on about tiger skin rugs. It nearly negates all the amorous glamour that makes the rest of the record such a delicious swoon.
The two covers on Avonmore provide some of the weirdest surprises. Stephen Sondheim’s "Send in the Clowns" could have been rendered as a bit of grandly devastating melodrama, but instead gets mostly buried under a load of damp electronica. While it’s admirable that Ferry might give the venerable bit of camp a modern spin, the end result is something limp and mostly drama-free. He has more success with his cover of Robert Palmer’s "Johnny and Mary"—a collaboration with Norwegian producer Todd Terje that first appeared on Terje’s excellent It’s Album Time earlier this year. It’s one of the album’s most gorgeous moments, a melancholic ode to romantic ennui that actually allows Ferry to sound his age.
Ultimately, Avonmore is a fine addition to Bryan Ferry’s oeuvre, if not necessarily a terribly challenging one. At this point, Ferry’s well-documented good taste is both an asset and possibly a curse. While this new record is slick and often quite lovely—recalling '80’s masterworks like Boys and Girls or Bête Noire—one can’t help but wish that Ferry might go spend a little more time in the studio with someone like Terje. His voice remains one of the most singular and finely-honed sounds in popular music, it would just be nice to hear it dropped into new settings more often.


A mammoth, 14-CD box set released to accompany Martin Scorcese’s documentary captures the 1975 tour in all its ragged glory.

Bob Dylan: Bob Dylan: Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings

Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue didn’t last long. From its conception to its dissolution, it spanned just under a year, not long for a career that’s about to enter its seventh decade. Maybe that’s why Dylan professes ignorance about the inspiration for his roving carnival in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story by Martin Scorsese, a lengthily titled documentary that recently premiered on Netflix. In one of the new interviews for the film, the singer-songwriter claims, “I’m trying to get to the core of what this Rolling Thunder thing is all about, and I don’t have a clue because it’s about nothing! It’s just something that happened 40 years [ago]—and that’s the truth of it.”
Other people remember a lot about Rolling Thunder, though. Since the waning months of 1975—when Dylan roamed New England with a ragged band of musicians, playing small venues at the drop of a hat—the revue has been the thing of legend among Dylan conoscenti. Much of its mystique lies in the way the superior first incarnation of the tour only lasted about as long as a torrid summer squall. A second leg followed in 1976, but by all accounts Dylan was ornery and withdrawn—a contention supported by Hard Rain, a ’76 live set that was the only official document of Rolling Thunder until selections from the 1975 shows were compiled, in 2002, as the fifth volume of Dylan’s ongoing Bootleg Series.
Certainly, The Bootleg Series, Vol. 5 is easier to digest than The Rolling Thunder Revue: The 1975 Live Recordings, a 14-CD box released to accompany the Scorsese film. Containing Dylan’s sets from the five professionally recorded Rolling Thunder concerts, along with three discs of rehearsals and a disc of oddities taken from the tour, the box assumes a high level of interest from the listener: A set that runs for ten and a half hours is not for dabblers. This ungainly sprawl suits the Rolling Thunder Revue, which was meant not as a mere evening of entertainment but rather an immersive theatrical experience.
Much of that heightened sense of drama diminishes on record, but it can still be felt, and the big box occasionally does an excellent job of suggesting the circus taking place both on and off stage. All those rehearsals help build the atmosphere. Here, Dylan and his band of old folkies, new rockers, and unknowns get acquainted, playing folk chestnuts and songs he’d just cut for Desire, which wouldn’t be released until after the first leg of the tour wrapped up. Harmonies are ragged and tempos tentative, but the bonhomie is palpable. What’s also evident is the nature of Dylan’s singing: open-hearted, bold, and clear, qualities decidedly lacking on Before the Flood, a double-album souvenir of his 1974 return to the stage.
The concerts excerpted on Before the Flood were intended to be a spectacle. Dylan had rarely played live since his motorcycle accident in 1966, and he was supported by the Band, who had made the transition from his backing band to stars in their own right. Although the ’74 tour was a wild success, Dylan grew tired of playing arenas, and that boredom, combined with personal unrest, was the catalyst for his attempt to re-create his coffeehouse roots via the Rolling Thunder Revue. Surrounding himself with figures from his past—his old advocate and paramour Joan Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Bob Neuwirth, and Roger McGuinn—Dylan also roped in new blood. He wound up having a drink with Mick Ronson, late of David Bowie’s Spiders From Mars, so he invited the guitarist to become part of the unruly band that would eventually become known as Guam. He saw Scarlet Rivera wandering the streets of New York with her violin in hand, so she brought her into the fold. Most importantly, he happened to stumble upon Jacques Levy, the director of 1969’s Off-Broadway hit Oh! Calcutta!, and the pair hit it off so well, they wrote most of Desire together and decided it was time to put on a show.
Levy staged the Rolling Thunder Revue as an old-fashioned circus, encouraging Dylan to indulge his theatrical side—the singer often performed in a face caked with white makeup—and that sensibility trickled through the entire production. Thanks to its ever-expanding cast of characters and guerrilla marketing—the troupe often arrived in town without warning and without its star attraction mentioned by name—the Rolling Thunder Revue gave off the suggestion that anything might happen. Like all theater, that was an illusion. Particulars may have changed on a given night, but the skeleton of the show was immutable, something that this big box—which boils four-hour extravaganzas down to only the sets involving Bob Dylan—makes plain.
Each night, Dylan appeared at three specific times during the show: strolling onstage unannounced to sing “When I Paint My Masterpiece” with the band, playing a duet set with Baez, then closing the show on his own. For each of the three phases of the Revue, he stuck to a largely static setlist. Departures from the norm were rare, and many are featured on the final disc, which is ragged enough to live up to Rolling Thunder’s reputation. Some of these tracks were captured at odd locations—a lean, almost rollicking version of “Simple Twist of Fate” was performed at a Massachusetts mah-jongg parlor, an empathetic cover of Peter La Farge’s “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” given at a Native American reservation—while others provide a variation on a familiar tune, such as a slow churning “Isis” in which the band seems on the verge of collapse. In this context, a nearly whispered hotel-room take on Smokey Robinson’s “The Tracks of My Tears” and a rampaging version of “It Takes a Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry,” featuring Robbie Robertson on guitar, act as revelatory grace notes, showing how heartbreaking and galvanizing the Rolling Thunder Revue could be.
Still, the heart of the box sets lies in those five full concerts, all sharing the same basic momentum, all distinguished by passion. The vigor doesn’t belong to Dylan alone. The Guam band is unwieldy and enthusiastic, taking the time to let all their disparate voices mesh. Rivera’s careening gypsy violin lends an earthy wildness to the proceedings, while Ronson’s guitar pulls the music back into focus whenever it threatens to get too folky. Dylan matches Ronson for electrifying verve, singing with a jovial bravado and untrammeled freedom that’s distinctly different from the primal howl he used during his fabled 1966 tour with the Band. Despite this kinetic kick, the Rolling Thunder Revue is at its core a hootenanny, a down-home bash that’s equally earnest and corny. Its folkie heart is evident by Joan Baez’s role as Dylan’s co-star and foil. Baez helped bring Dylan to stardom during the peak of the folk boom in the early 1960s, and here she’s determined to let the audience know that they’re on equal footing, harmonizing and sometimes dominating Dylan during their duets.
However briefly it happens, hearing Dylan happily share the spotlight underscores the charms of the Rolling Thunder Revue, specifically how he sought solace in a communal setting. If the tour was solely about reconnection, it would’ve been little more than a footnote in Dylan’s history, but the nostalgia act was strictly surface-level; the form may have been familiar, but the individual performances were thoroughly, thrillingly of the moment. Dylan plays with a wild-eyed fervor that’s partially inspired and partially shtick, and he’s surrounded not by sycophants but old friends who acknowledge his bullshit and find it amusing. Why else would they sign up to play in the Rolling Thunder Revue? By design, the tour erased the barrier separating ruse and reality, and that deliberate, wicked conflation is as quintessentially Dylanesque as the fact that it lasted for a matter of weeks and then disappeared, its vibrant spirit never again conjured by its maker.


Protean future-funk production steals the show on this collaboration between two veterans of the Bay Area hip-hop scene.

Del the Funky Homosapien / Amp Live : Gate 13

Gate 13

When a rapper and a producer collaborate on an album, it’s usually the beat maker who is working in service of the MC, humbly delivering a metronomic base tailored to the rhymes. This isn’t the case for Gate 13, which teams up two Bay Area fixtures, rapper Del the Funky Homosapien and producer Amp Live (formerly of the crew Zion I), and adjusts the formula so that Amp Live’s funk-forward beats dominate the listening experience.
Del’s cartoonish brogue remains one of the warmest, most likable voices in hip-hop. Throughout the album, he raps more economically than he has in the past, and this concise style allows his imagery to shine. Over the powerful snares of “Run Free,” he recounts a caper that finds the narrator chasing his foes onto a fire escape. “They tried to climb down to the fourth floor,” he raps at the story’s climax. “My posse shoot ’em down, now they skydiving.” On “Wheel of Fortune,” he takes out inferior MCs like he's playing a video game: “I know some kung fu/Tiger style, crane style, they gonna get pummeled/Down, down, left, left, punch/That shit’s fire all around.”
But it’s Amp Live’s production that makes Gate 13 distinctive. The short opener, “Attention (Intro),” is like an overture: Deep, squelching bass tones, melodic keys, and spacey ambient effects set a future-funk mood for the album. Clipped snares and sci-fi synths follow on “Wheel of Fortune”—but after a minute of bubbling into a groove, the song slows to a reggae tempo for a short instrumental passage before seamlessly transitioning back to its original sound. Del’s voice is present, but it’s the instrumental soundscape that dictates the shifts in mood.
The album is full of inspired hip-hop production like this, with beats that transform throughout individual tracks, rather than just locking into a trusty boom-bap rhythm. “Run Free” showcases bass tones and drum patterns that recall, at various moments, Run-D.M.C.’s “Here We Go (Live at the Funhouse),” Dead Prez's “Hip-Hop,” and N.W.A.'s “Dopeman,” without plagiarizing them. Amp Live subtly adds and removes hi-hats throughout the melancholic “The Glow,” building and then slowing the track’s momentum. The introduction of a squiggly synth riff heightens the drama of Del and guest rapper Eligh’s most braggadocious lines in “On the Ball,” in which Del warns sucker MCs, “It’s easy to catch a rat/Just put some cheese on the trap/Shipwrecked, they wanna raft/’Bout to take a piranha bath.”
It seems appropriate that Amp Live gets the final word on Gate 13, with “Lateral Thinking,” an instrumental track that begins with monstrous, noisy wobble bass tones straight out of a free-jazz jam, then lets celestial synths smooth the way to mellow guitar lines and a rolling 808 beat. When the album closes by fading to static, it’s as if the beat maker is pulling the plug on his own dynamic creation. Del may be the MC in this duo, but Amp Live’s production speaks just as loudly as the rhymes.


The Brooklyn band’s latest is one of their best, a shifting and teasing kind of electro-funk that exists on their own plane of gravity.

Moon 2

Ava Luna have always moved by rapidly and with an independent time signature, but Moon 2 is the band’s most propulsive album and maybe their best. It follows 2015’s clash-clang Infinite House, 2014’s bluesy needy Electric Balloon, and a few years of shifting roles within the ensemble. Carlos Hernandez has leaned out of his leadership position; on hiatus are his commanding screams as well. Felicia Douglass is on a new job doing slippery percussion and samples as well as synth and vocals; Julian Fader found an excellent place on the synths in addition to drums. And Rebecca Kauffman has written her first song for the band, the otherworldly “On Its Side the Fallen Fire” that echoes with a Laurie Anderson state of spare stateliness.
The band’s sixth album, Moon 2 could be a sonic map of a moon, if earth had a moon that was cooler than the one we have now. The Brooklyn band digs into their namesake to gives us a tour of this planetary body’s rowdy, turbulent noisy landscape. It’s a teasing electro-funk that plays on a gravity plane where everything is a different weight, sounds melt more deeply and float off more easily.
Moon 2 is almost invitational. The band welcomes us at a distance, like they are supplying a visa for studying abroad. There are glimpses of joyful everyday errands in the side-step bounce of “Deli Run.” The velocity is unexpected, sometimes giving the feeling it has rushed you into a fraught highway merge, as in “Walking With an Enemy,” which has alien purrs from imagined fauna and an extraterrestrial stream of eerie-ass whooshes. You hear snippets from noisy parties out of apartment windows, gossip on sidewalks, grooves out of car windows, the rumble of your own engine, the screech of a scary run-in. The title song crystallizes the stomach-lurching, emotional K-turn that happens when you bump into a dangerous crush. The reggae languor of the bass wants you to swing your torso right back home, a Kraftwerk synth sympathizes with your alarm, and a panicked excuse: “Turn around, I left the oven on.”
There is spookiness on Moon 2. The shifts in mood, mercurial beats, and noncommittal melody don’t let you hang out for very long on one thing. Even though they slink by fast, the sounds are full and realized; you have the sense you’re just moving through a world that exists without you. Conversations interrupt each other and fade out, Doppler-style: Kauffman’s cavernous, clear voice runs across Douglass’ springy velvet harmonizing, and Hernandez has fun with his deep, almost militaristic authority. Sometimes, like in “Centerline,” the band is explicitly interested in position and perspective and where everyone is standing. One person lands hard back to reality (“After our lavish vacation/Charges from the mini bar/I can get you back, I mean it”) and the other is slowly thinking about how it’s impossible to know one another (“Thaw the iceberg, you will see/Your original reflection staring back at me”).
The touchstone sample for this album was a warped tape of a ’90s women’s group singing neo-pagan ritual chants that Kauffman found at a yard sale. This sense of the collective is infused into Moon 2. The band wrote and recorded the album on two cold-season trips, up to Vermont and during a blizzard on the Massachusetts shoreline. They set up a studio in the basement and ventured down solo or in small groups to work on what the people before had left behind. It was written by picking up what the others were putting down.
Ava Luna is seduced by group dynamics and interactive creativity as a theme: who goes on the deli run, who sits out, who throws in, who pays it forward, who promises. They have never shied from commixing independent sounds. In Moon 2, they have captured this utopian sort of jostling, where two people banging into each other make a great noise, and there’s a productive coincidence around each turn. They commingle, like the best neighborhoods, in the most alive cities, on way more exciting, alternative moons.


On the Berkeley rapper’s second album, he struggles with depression in stark, evocative terms, confirming his stature as one of the most intensely cathartic narrators out there.

Late 20s

Koran Streets is in mourning. His close collaborator and big-brother figure J.B. the Legend died a few years ago, and he’s still looking up to him, and for him. He sounds broken and also obviously onto something with his music—all the worse that he can’t share the epiphany. But therein lies his power. There’s a protective numbness to depression that Koran Streets avoids; when he’s emotionally collapsed he’s tender and self-aware, which he translates well as a rapper. His play-by-plays can be both detached and self-attuned.
Late 20s is the Berkeley rapper’s first long-player since his debut a couple years ago, and he remains saddled with the inertia of depression and the paralyzing effects of poverty. There’s a now-or-never urgency in his rapping, especially now that he’s had a glimpse of buzz and possible stability. Part of the appeal of Koran Streets’ hardly noticed debut, You.Know.I.Got.It (The Album), was his ability to boil down his pain. Late 20s doesn’t share that economy, but it continues Koran Streets’ streak as one of the most intensely cathartic narrators in rap.
That streak starts with his story, which is both tragic—as a child his body was horribly burned and many of his fingers amputated following a horrible accident—and inspiring: After spending most of his life as an actor, Koran Streets recently landed a pair of meaningful, well-received indie roles. He has also been to jail and back too many times. Not long ago his brother was shot during a carjacking. An ex-girlfriend had a miscarriage. A breakup left him struggling to pay the rent. He’s been making promises to his mother. Direly, he’s in his late 20s and playing catch-up.
So Late 20s feels pressing, even if it runs a bit too long and is full of distractions. The bulk of the album services diary-like brushstrokes with depressing commentary (“They say I’m dope but they don’t know that I sleep on the floor”) or inward, self-affirming nudges about self-doubt and staying motivated. The sense that Koran Streets is working on himself is present almost everywhere, even if it’s in the form of grasping for straws.
Koran Streets has been a Bay Area rapper since a child, but his recent tear has seen him back off his jumpy, rattling sound of a few years ago in favor of something slinkier. The production on tracks like “Return of the Mack” and “Rock the Party” is laid-back and funky, uplifting in both its breezy pace and sense of nostalgia. Most of the beats are languid and wistful, matching the mood. As a stylist Koran Streets has a shouty, chatty way of rapping. At his most emotional he sometimes crams too many syllables into a breathless line (the affective “Sincerely Yours”), but he’s usually punchy and sometimes locks into a mesmerizing purr of a flow (the first verse on “Fallin’ & Ballin’”).
Koran Streets also does something few rappers manage: He raps about rap without making it corny. He makes homage sound heartfelt, and he internalizes the music so completely that he can step outside of it and talk about it effectively. “Sucka MC’s” does little more than list Koran Streets’ favorite rappers with an admiring gaze and occasional note about their practicality: “Here comes the brand new flava in ya ear!/And when I heard that I thought I was Craig Mack/But late nights selling crack we would play that Jack.” 2Pac also looms large over his style—like when Koran Streets suddenly upshifts on “Fallin’ & Ballin’,” his rapping a sustained crescendo from his belly—as well as in his general raw-nerve oversharing.
Koran Streets doesn’t withhold anything, but there’s a moment early on that makes the listener complicit in the act of demanding more of him. “They say I never talk about these burns/Like what you want me to say?/You see my face?” he shouts, cutting off the conversation. But then he doubles down and tells the story in literal and emotional detail as if he had no choice. Late 20s leans on radical vulnerability, and sometimes that’s a meaningful end in itself.


On its fourth album, the Scottish trio steps back from the grandest pop aspirations and embraces a horror-movie concept without losing its signature brightness and sense of joy.

Screen Violence

Once the horror starts, you’re there until whatever end is in store for you. Maybe your phone is dead and the roads closed. Maybe you’re trapped somewhere: a haunted house, a derelict mall, a sinister academy. Maybe you’re just trapped inside your own life; perhaps you’re a band existing in a brutal industry, where failure is common and death threats are just another thing in your inbox. It’s surprising more artists don’t make horror-themed albums. It’s even more surprising when they come from groups like Chvrches, better known for their joyful anthems—and when they find joy there regardless.
Ironically, Screen Violence outshines their last few years of deliberately “happy” music, even if it’s inspired by slashers and failures and the screen-mediated deadness of post-pandemic life. (The title, though, predates COVID-19 by almost a decade; the trio considered it as a band name.) Love Is Dead, the group’s intermittently fun third album, enlisted Adele’s producers to blow their sound up to megafestival size. Then they wrote a song even songwriter Lauren Mayberry called “tacky pop crap” for EDM mascot Marshmello. The machine shows little discernment, and the next vocalist down Marshmello’s conveyor belt was disgraced Chris Brown; when the band spoke out against his replatforming, the death threats began again.
Besides a guest spot by the Cure’s Robert Smith, the new album is written, produced, and performed by just the core trio. But it’s not merely a safe return to form. The group could have delivered 10 variations on “Clearest Blue” and made (relative) bank. Instead, they let their influences sprawl widely. The breakbeats throughout “Violent Delights” and gentle strings on “Lullabies” are homages to, respectively, the Prodigy and the Blue Nile. The bridge in “Nightmares,” which submerges guttural spoken word beneath synth murk, was inspired by Kate Bush’s “Waking the Witch.” Album closer “Better If You Don’t” is a low-key rock track on which Mayberry sounds startlingly like Harriet Wheeler.
Better yet, they finally build on the darker parts of 2013’s The Bones of What You Believe as they excavate their own career. The album is full of nightmare imagery, alluding to sleep paralysis, drowning, gutting, and the “final girl”: the plucky, virginal hero in a slasher cast whose saintliness is rewarded with trauma. Granted, this is all Intro to Film Studies stuff; Carol J. Clover coined the term in 1992, and by the 2010s it was already thoroughly listicled, TV Troped, and spoofed. Fortunately, on Screen Violence, the horror concept is mostly an excuse to bring on John Carpenter for a remix and for the group to write about their experience in metaphorical rather than literal terms—in Mayberry’s words, “running for a horizon that you don’t really need, but you have to keep running for it.”
By now Chvrches have endured as many waves of harassment as they’ve released albums, and repeatedly expressed frustration at people reading unintended messages into their music. Perhaps that’s why the two most traditionally poppy songs here are the most pointed: so as to leave no room for misunderstanding. Single “He Said She Said” recounts a man’s gendered demands and mixed messages, e.g. “Look good—but don’t be obsessed.” It’s hardly subtle, and the rhyme scheme contorts certain lyrics past plausibility, but the songwriting works. The “he said”s are loud and double-tracked; almost all the “she said”s are subdued, either dissolved in Auto-Tune or replaced by a muffled lead synth. The one exception arrives with the drop: Mayberry pierces through with “I feel like I’m losing my mind!” and the chorus surges like self-assurance. “Good Girls” is a deceptively simple piece of pop clockwork with lyrics you could probably autocomplete off the phrase “good girls ____,” which makes it all the more rewarding when Mayberry busts the melody and rhythm with “but I don’t!”
These moments of clarity are rare. The album’s opening and closing tracks are sugary comfort-food pop about confusion and loss. “Violent Delights” is a fever dream of over-bright production with the comforting lyrics of a love song (“I’ll never sleep alone again”) and bleak realizations about fame (“If I disappear, they’ll say I killed myself”), both delivered as if in a daze. “Final Girl” is caught between nonchalance and fear and has two choruses: one a pop-rock sugar cube, one an escalating bit of dread in which Mayberry stares down two potential futures, girlboss and body bag.
The two best tracks are also counterparts: “California” and “How Not to Drown.” “No one ever warns you/You’ll die in California,” Mayberry sings on the former, a breakup song to Hollywood and a love song to graceful failure, so sincere that they even get away with the Rae Dunnism of “God bless this mess” on the bridge. “How Not to Drown” tells the same story—both songs dwell on fame bringing death and end with being pulled down—in an unrelentingly bleak key. Mayberry and Robert Smith sing at their most impassioned against a production that pummels and swallows them whole: “We’ll never escape this town; I wasn’t dead when they found me.” Which version of the story is true: the waking up or the nightmare? Some people find the final-girl trope to be empowering. Others, like Mayberry, just ask why she isn’t screaming.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Meat Puppets’ 15th album mirrors the Kirkwood brothers’ ethos: earthy and out of time, casual and familiar, and wholly at ease with itself.

Dusty Notes

One distinct advantage Meat Puppets have over many of their ‘80s and ‘90s-vintage peers still making a go of it after more three decades is that they always kind of sounded like they were 55. There is no collectively imprinted youth to risk failing to recapture. By 1984’s immortal Meat Puppets II, they were already perfectly weathered and weird and an anathema to punk orthodoxy, finding the bridge between the Dead and the Dead Kennedys long before it was fashionable. The band was easy enough to classify as psychedelic—not in an indulgent or Day-Glo way, but in a way that suggested guzzling buckets of homemade drugs and happening upon musical instruments which they then played at whatever speed and volume felt sustainable in the moment. Their zeitgeist moment as guests of honor on 1994’s Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York delivered Curt and Cris Kirkwood to the masses as old souls whose songs had earned pride of place alongside Bowie and Leadbelly.
The Meat Puppets’ 15th album in 37 years—their first with original drummer Derrick Bostrum since 1995, fifth since bassist Cris rejoined following fraught years of addiction and legal troubles, and third with Curt’s son Elmo playing guitar—serves as a defense of that thesis. Twenty-five long years later, the Kirkwood brothers have grown into their grizzledness. They now look like the sun-stroked prospectors they have always channeled, and Dusty Notes does what it says on the tin: It’s earthy and out of time, casual and familiar, and wholly at ease with itself. They aren’t trying to make an argument that punk and country can coexist or share DNA or an outlaw spirit; they aren’t trying to argue about anything much at all.
The loud rawk guitars that were still dominant as of their previous album, 2013’s Rat Farm, are largely confined to the background here. Of the 10 tracks, only one, the prog-metal mini-opus “Vampyr’s Winged Fantasy,” even attempts to broach raucousness or racket. The other nine, including a spirited cover of Don Gibson’s “Sea of Heartbreak” (perhaps best known via Johnny Cash’s 1996 American-recorded version and come to think of it, it’s kind of wild that Rick Rubin never fed Cash “Lake of Fire” to try out during any of those sessions, that would have been perfect, but anyway), rest comfortably on the reserved, honky-tonk side of the spectrum, some distance from their youthful shredding and shrieking or their Too High To Die-era 120 minutes of fame.
Opening track “Warranty” positively bounces thanks to its octave-jumping bassline, while banjo and mariachi horns anchor “Nine Pins” and the title track, respectively; “On” and “The Great Awakening” are mid-tempo piano-based ballads. In aggregate, none of this feels like a departure—it’s somehow a step backward and forward at the same time, mining roots as a way to age gracefully.


San Francisco duo Dodos' fifth album is their most subdued and solemn. The autumnal Carrier was inspired by the passing of guitarist Christopher Reimer, who joined Dodos for a brief period between his departure from Women and his death at the age of 26 in 2012.

Carrier

The titles of the previous three Dodos records-- Visiter, Time to Die, No Color-- provide an unfortunate and eerie foreshadowing for the band’s fifth LP Carrier. It’s the San Francisco duo’s most subdued and solemn album, inspired by the passing of guitarist Christopher Reimer, who joined Dodos for a brief period between his departure from Women and his death at the age of 26 in 2012. Though Reimer doesn’t play on Carrier, he’s a spiritual and musical inspiration that guides Meric Long and Logan Kroeber throughout, an incorporeal third member that still holds the most influence over the record’s direction. The short time in Reimer’s presence has shaken the band to its core and, understandably, Carrier isn’t always steady. But while it’s Dodos least immediate work, it lingers and resonates in ways that give it a unique place in their discography, a promising path forward rather than what can initially be heard as a return to Time to Die’s soft-focus indie pop.
The most noticeable superficial difference on Carrier is that Long has switched almost entirely to playing electric guitar. Surprising, but not sacrilege-- though Dodos broke out on Visiter as an acoustic-and-drums duo and returned to that format on No Color, they’re not wedded to that setup, having incorporated electric guitars in a live setting and even a full-time vibraphonist on Time to Die. The strange thing is that they might be the first band to ever plug in for the sole purpose of rocking less. On prior singles such as “Fools”, “Fables”, and “Black Night”, Long played his acoustic with force and resourcefulness, utilizing the resonance in alternate tunings, inverted chords and string buzz and sending the signal through looping and distortion pedals. He’s not as focused on multiplicity here, neatly lacing together pinging, high notes rather than chords or riffs. You can sense a tentativeness in the shift towards a gentler minimalism-- both the first song (“Transformer”) and the first single (“Confidence”) begin as calm and quiet meditations, Long singing in a hushed, lower range over sprightly fingerpicking before giving way to the kind of percussive jams that we’ve come to expect. But those sections end up feeling mismatched and you sense that while Dodos were ready to do away with their old habits, they couldn’t quite figure out how to replace them.
Wedged in between those songs are rewarding mergers of their new approach with their old skills. The crisp production and autumnal glow of Carrier is a world away from Women’s meat-locker severity, though Reimer’s stylistic tics as a guitarist manifests in tangible ways. There’s a dissonant, deconstructive edge to the gnarled riff and fractious rhythms driving “Substance”, and the momentum makes for a seamless transition towards the tumbling chorus and a surprising brass section. “Stranger” similarly aligns Long’s tuneful folk-pop harmonies with tensile post-punk arrangements, as silvery palm-muted loops, pitch-shifted guitars and Kroeber’s unorthodox percussive clatter encase the delicate melodic core in steely armor.
The instrumental pyrotechnics of “Stranger” are a rare pleasure here and the combustion can be missed, as the energy exerted by Long and Kroeber as instrumentalists often was the hook on past records, rather than a certain melody or lyric. It’s an understandable loss, as the songwriting process has been completely inverted. Whereas previous records evolved out of instrumental jams, the lyrics on Carrier came first. But much like the six-string switch-up, it has the exact opposite effect of you might expect. Long hasn’t become a wordier or more poetic lyricist, in fact, Carrier is Dodos’ most plainspoken album. There seems to be a “first thought, best thought” approach as he asks cosmic, open-ended questions that strike to the heart of the human experience or sensible, legible fragments that can fleshed out over equally inquisitive music.
“What does a song hold?/ Was it love?,” Long asks to open the record and there’s no impatience or pedantry in it. Carrier instead has a quiet fortitude, searching for “substance, out of reach,” to use a phrase that pops up on two separate songs. To get there, Long occasionally reaches into the past, as on the station wagon reminiscence “Family”. More often, he’s just trying to be a better actor in the present. He’s a concerned father at the beginning of the heart-welling "Relief", and a consolate husband at the end-- "So I sit with my wife/ thinking of nothing much when we fight/ and I squeeze till we dry."  Carrier’s final stretch gets a bit too wispy, but not before the suitably titled “The Current” delivers the lyric that feels like the record’s valedictory address: “If this love comes unto me/ I’m with it.”
So despite the role Reimer’s passing played in the creation of Carrier, it’s not Dodos’ answer to Tonight’s the Night-- it never feels haunted or wracked with morbid reflection, even the supposedly blunt “Death” is imbued with a sense of gratitude, seeing the natural order of things. Though Long claimed “we put our backs into this one” in an email to fans, it doesn't convey that force and struggle on the listener, subtly getting under your skin by pairing Dodos' slightest music with their heaviest emotions. A key lyric here is from “Substance”, where Long shouts “you will forget and I will remember,” and summarizes the wistful effect of Carrier when faced with the passage of time and the fragility of memory*--* it’s the kind of record for the times when you’re lost in thought about someone you might’ve known for a little while, wondering where they are and if they ever think about you.


The latest from the Melbourne electronic duo is a dawdler’s paradise, a daydream mapped to MIDI.

II

For their debut album, Melbourne’s Andrew Wilson and John Tanner came up with a relatively simple proposition: What if Balearic music—a catch-all style with ambient undertones popularized in Ibiza in the 1980s—were transplanted to the Southern Hemisphere? Claiming to have recorded their album on the West Coast of Australia, where the Swan River meets the Indian Ocean, the two musicians dove into Balearic’s deepest pools, where aquamarine strains of ambient music swirled with new age at its most beatific. Limpid synthesizers, nylon-stringed acoustic guitar, and the occasional keening clarinet solo pooled together as effortlessly as the ice melting in a Campari glass.
As Andras Fox, Wilson had previously been known for Larry Heard-inspired deep house, while Tanner’s Eleventeen Eston project had put a lo-fi spin on big-budget 1980s pop, sounding like he’d dug up a sun-baked cassette of Tears for Fears’ demo instrumentals. But as Wilson Tanner, they achieved a newfound purity. On II, they continue with their debut album’s line of investigation but add a twist to the thought experiment: What if a cold front descended upon their Antipodean paradise?
The elements of II have not much changed—their synthesizers remain fluid, their tempos bob pleasantly along, and the maritime conceit is borne out in the sound of actual waves against the prow. (The two say they wrote and recorded the new album aboard a 1950s riverboat in Melbourne’s Port Philipp Bay, utilizing “a resourceful array of weatherproof electronic instruments and a long extension lead,” which, sure!) It’s a dawdler’s paradise, a daydream mapped to MIDI. A few songs could have worked just as well on the duo’s debut: The faux-flute melody of “Loch and Key” sways lazily; “All Hands Bury the Dead” sinks into a mind-clearing keyboard refrain that’s accompanied by the sounds of birdcalls and splashing oars.
But there’s a noticeable chill in the air. “Perishable” wraps up melancholy flute and guitar in tendrils of analog delay, suggesting a kind of dubbed-out death folk.“Killcord Pts I-III” fires up churning arpeggios, drizzles in dissolving marimbas, and stews in its own juices for 12 uneasy minutes. The darkest and most adventurous of all is “Idle,” where acid-like bass tones bubble and squelch against lurching electronic rhythms and an almost inaudible layer of feedback. It’s not far from something that Aphex Twin might have put out on his label Rephlex in the early 1990s, and it makes for a provocative new dimension to the duo’s sound. After all, with sea levels rising and coastlines disappearing, blissful drifting only gets you so far.