The Information

During the bizarre final minutes of Beck's ninth album, director Spike Jonze and author Dave Eggers philosophize about what the "ultimate record that ever could possibly be made" would sound like. "[The songs would] change depending on what mood you're in," imagines Jonze. "Or, depending on when you listen to them at a different age, they'll mean something different." In many ways, Beck's discography embodies this idyllic malleability; from the sullen strains of Nick Drake to food'n'sex funk to broken-down blues to awkward boho-beat hip-hop, his oeuvre is a one-stop shop-- emotionally and sonically-- that defied stagnation for more than a decade. But his track record took a hit with last year's Guero, the first Beck album that cited Beck as its primary musical influence.
Ultimately, the same can be said for The Information, which is made from a similar scattershot, self-referencing pastiche. But there are key variations that give the new album a cohesion its predecessor lacked. This time, über-producer Nigel Godrich is the main collaborator, and his psychedelic studio wizardry one-ups the Dust Brothers' sample-based concoctions at nearly every turn. The record also benefits from a future-sick quasi-concept worthy of Philip K. Dick (or Thom Yorke). While still lyrically cryptic (sometimes maddeningly so), Beck injects many tracks with the distress of an attuned cultural observer raising a child in an age of phony wars, data saturation, and government-sanctioned apathy. The deadpan delivery remains intact, but his anxiousness and anger are more pointed than before.
Over a brisk groove, Beck states his frustrations on opener "Elevator Music", a damning critique of prettified American culture. The song details the troubling unreality of modern times, where the public is relegated to "fly on the wall" status, distracted by media overflow and the nine-to-five grind. "When you're down and out, pounded, and there's nothing that's real/ It's like a plastic heart too amputated to feel," raps Beck. His trademark spoken-word rambles are still rhythmically challenged and verbose, but, in context, the unorthodox flow can offer a vulnerable counterpart to the scathing precision of lines like, "If I could forget myself/ Find another lie to tell/ From the bottom of an oil well/ Cell phone's ringing to talk to my brain cells." As with most Beck songs, meanings are fluid, imprecise, and listener-specific, and The Information's strange wordplay lies somewhere between the straightforward heartbreak of Sea Change and the non-sequitur absurdity of Odelay. While the music sometimes suggests the manic hodge-podge of his mid-90s material, there's no more getting "crazy with the cheese whiz." Nearly every word on The Information has a distinct purpose.
Whether quoting the robot strut of Herbie Hancock's "Chameleon" on "Cellphone's Dead", driving a trippy krautrock beat through the title track, or scratching up the hallucinatory dub of "We Dance Alone", The Information pumps musical life into its references thanks to Godrich's space-age sheen. Yet, this upbeat liveliness is often subverted by Beck's increasingly hopeless obsession with death and decay.
With its graveyard calisthenics, windshield-wiping reaper, and roving coffin, 1994's "Loser" video made this particular preoccupation clear early on. But back then, at age 23, Beck was laughing at death and vouching for the sexiness of the netherworld. Now, at 36, there's little room for such frivolousness. Multiple appearances of words like "desert," "cremation," and "dust" ground The Information in stark morbidness. And the once-favored devil has been replaced by a more sinister "lord" who will "take his motorcade and drive us into the dirt." Religious cynicism and technological paranoia meet on "The Information", an unforgiving apocalyptic vision: "When the information comes we'll know what we're made from," sneers Beck. Elsewhere, the ill-fated "Soldier Jane" lies comatose at best, and, whispering on the slow motion ballad "Dark Star," Beck sees the American dream perishing at the hands of misguided warmongers: "A widow's tears washing a soldier's bones/ Sterilized egos, delirium sequels/ Punctured by the arrows of American eagles." Meanwhile, the album's most haunting eulogy ditches political commentary for something more personal.
Quiet and forceful, "New Round" sounds like a gift from father to son. "Every little step/ Every new direction/ The closer you will get," sings Beck, taking full advantage of his underappreciated vocal timbre. But, instead of ending up as yet another sappy "dad" song, "New Round" looks ahead to the inevitable disconnect between parent and child. "And farther away/ You'll go from where we are," he continues. Backed by spare acoustic guitars and a calm break beat, the harrowing love letter exudes a fierce passion missing from other parts of The Information.
While his lyrics offer few solutions to the current onslaught of ones and zeros, Beck encourages user-side involvement by offering blank cover art and a sheet of stickers that fans can arrange how they please (possibly a tribute to his grandfather, a founder of the similarly democratic 60s art movement Fluxus). But participation is also required to comb through the album's low points-- as in deleting the duds from your iPod. "Strange Apparition", on which Beck does a warbling Chris Cornell impression over rollicking Rolling Stones piano, is too boisterous when stacked against the album's stealthy charms. "Motorcade", on the other hand, is barely there; it's a soured tangerine dream, reliant on Godrich's aural doodads and little else. And, although Beck and friends goof around on the accompanying DVD (featuring super lo-fi videos for every song), it looks like the type of project that's more fun to make than it is to watch.
After Jonze gives his take on the ever-changing super album at the end of disc, Eggers politely disagrees. "I don't like it when they change, it frightens me," he admits. "It makes me feel like someone's pushing me from below, trying to turn me over and put me down." As he edges close to middle age, Beck is stuck between the spontaneity of old and a safer middle ground. Although The Information contains some of his most aware, intriguing lyrical head-scratchers yet, the familiar musical settings are something of a letdown from an artist famous for complete reinvention. "Thought I saw a ghost but it might have been me," he raps on "We Dance Alone", "might have been a world that was moving too fast, caught up in a future that was drunk on the past." It always used to feel like Beck was years beyond us but, as The Information attests, the universal struggle is finally catching up with him. Took long enough.


Collecting the sometimes-dismissed output of these pioneers between their masterpiece and their breakup, this box set sheds welcome light on how relevant many of these songs remain.

Cocteau Twins: Treasure Hiding: The Fontana Years

Treasure Hiding: The Fontana Years

Before Cocteau Twins released their perfect sixth album, Heaven or Las Vegas, in 1990, they had spent the previous decade building a discography as innovative and amorphous as, say, Bowie in the 1970s or Aphex Twin in the 1990s. Their catalogue of curiosities sounded nothing like what had come before. Elizabeth Fraser’s voice could do anything and did everything, groaning like a rusty switchblade being opened, soothing like a dopamine flood in the brain, performing runs like Mariah Carey and Maria Callas combined. Her partner, Robin Guthrie, played guitar and programmed drum machines with the sui generis, near-mystical ease of Mark Rothko’s painting or Martha Graham’s motion. Simon Raymonde, who joined soon after the Twins began, offered unexpected choral basslines that propelled it all.
And then, Cocteau Twins began to break down. They left the label they’d defined, 4AD, in a flurry of financial and personal acrimony… and cocaine. The birth of Fraser and Guthrie’s child had largely inspired the wonder of Heaven, but becoming parents was no panacea. The survival of their marriage and the band seemed unlikely. When a single, “Evangeline,” arrived in 1993, the first shock was its mere existence. Treasure Hiding: The Fontana Years gathers their creations for a new label after “Evangeline”—four subsequent singles, their B-sides and the albums they accompanied, a pair of lovely EPs, some typically beautiful odds and ends, and a few live sessions. But Treasure Hiding is sometimes just good, its miscellany confirming suspicions that the Twins sometimes settled for spinning their celestial wheels. Nevertheless, revelations abound.
The second shock of “Evangeline” was the sound. It begins with a guitar being picked, something more identifiable than Guthrie had ever offered. And almost never before had Fraser just sort of stood there and sang. Michael Stipe could mumble and be haled, and other guys made careers of bad poetry inspired by Burroughsian cut-ups. Fraser shaped assemblages of academic and arcane lexicons over the Beach Boys’ close and complicated harmonies, forming an inimitable style. Perhaps because she was a woman, fans sold it short as divine inspiration, while foes dismissed it as some girlie bullshit. A power ballad that could make Diane Warren proud, “Evangeline” suggests these poetics were always protective cloaks. “I had to fantasize just to survive,” Fraser announces over a tear-jerking final key change.
That directness—along with the title and unexpected singer-songwriter vibe of the accompanying album, Four-Calendar Café—carried through on “Bluebeard,” the next single. “Are you the right man for me?/Are you safe? Are you my friend?” Fraser asks over a very good imitation of the Smiths. Guthrie mostly abandons pyrotechnics for conservative comfort, but Fraser’s plain words take the risks as she ask questions we all should have for the men in our lives, our homes, our courts, our culture.
Four-Calendar Café is full of trauma’s echoes. On top of a very troubled marriage to Guthrie, a lifelong anxiety disorder, and issues of addiction, Fraser had finally decided to stare down the lingering effects of what, in Facing the Other Way: The Story of 4AD, author Martin Aston calls “sexual abuse she suffered in her youth, from within her own family.” In the icy “Theft, and Wandering Around Lost,” she sings, “My body is mine alone/And I deserve protection.” Out with the glossolalia and in with Kathleen Hanna, just sung like Karen Carpenter—these are easy-listening songs about the difficulty of being kind to yourself. At a moment when society has never seemed more divided between those who have survived abuse and those amused by its prospect, Fraser’s expressions of fury on her own terms feel timely and urgent.
A pair of EPs offered two paths forward in 1995: Twinlights is essentially Cocteau Twins Unplugged, asserting the good bones of early standards on “Pink Orange Red” and offering new odes to self-care on “Rilkean Heart.” Otherness adds the dubby languor of Seefeel’s Mark Clifford and remains fascinating. Further steps in either direction might have been fruitful, and the latter path might have even restored some critical acclaim.
Instead, they retreated for 1996’s Milk & Kisses; Fraser’s voice and Guthrie’s guitar meet halfway, both showing up but not showing off. Café’s rage has settled into turbulence, with Fraser beautifully exhibiting her linguistic filigree and Guthrie putting on a shoegaze workshop. “Half-Gifts” and “Eperdu” approach the old cathedrals of Blue Bell Knoll; B-sides like “Round” and “An Elan” are ineffable epics, not to be missed as the Twins neared their end. When Kisses closes with the bleak “Seekers Who Are Lovers” and the sound of blowing wind, it’s tough to imagine what could have been left. There wasn’t much, turns out—a few compilation appearances, a live session that doesn’t capture the fury and magic they summoned onstage. And then they split, probably for good.
More than 20 years later, it’s easy to remember Cocteau Twins for their otherworldly grandeur, their belief in turning toward beauty in the face of ugliness. That’s achievement enough. But Cocteau Twins did more. When, after years of hiding within invention, Fraser finally asked to be heard, she sang the words she needed to hear. We needed them then and now, too. The grandest of finales, Café’s “Pur” ends with words as charged as the band’s most groundbreaking music. “I’m glad you are a girl,” she sings. “You are angry and that’s OK/I am not afraid of your anger/What do you need? What do you want?/I love you, and I know that you can figure it out.”


The Bristol punk band’s third album goes for fist-in-the-air righteousness but stumbles over itself at nearly every turn, resulting in a broad and unfocused attempt to speak to the moment.

Ultra Mono

At the onset of lockdown, as busy lives drained away only to be refilled with ennui and baking, Zadie Smith wrote this adage: “The people sometimes demand change. They almost never demand art.” Before the pandemic, society offered a tacit contract whereby artists, and few others, could essentially act like children: painting flowers, blowing into flutes, storyboarding plots where lurid men meet their comeuppance, yelling “A heathen! From Eton! On a bag of Michael Keaton!” into microphones—anything that might elicit joy or clarity in the general populace. Some art, Smith conceded, has political potential, but artistic urgency is nearly always a metaphor, borrowed from “the urgency of the guerilla’s demands, or the activist’s protests.” Essential workers are necessary. Art is more like baking a sourdough loaf: something to do with our long days.
Smith articulates a common misgiving about Necessary Art—one that bodes poorly for Ultra Mono, wherein Idles stage a risky foray into the form. The Bristol post-punks’ 2017 debut, Brutalism, and follow-up Joy as an Act of Resistance flirted with necessity but preferred irreverence, populating songs of Brexit Britain with cocaine connoisseurs and the far-right ghouls haunting Westminster halls. Any necessity in the music seemed, as it should, to occur by accident.
With Ultra Mono, Idles trump up the social values while continuing to occupy a peculiar British tradition: ornery blokes from outside the capital charismatically proclaiming moral truths in a tone that suggests they could also annihilate you in a bar fight. (This thing goes over particularly well at festivals.) Such groups embody the infinite promise of working-class rage—never mind their actual background—which can feel refreshing, since British class commentary rarely rises above vague talk of metropolitan elites and “ordinary voters.” In a war of subtext, we appreciate those brave or stupid enough to carry a megaphone.
The thrills and perils of flouting this social contract play out on Ultra Mono centerpiece “Model Village,” where shouter-songwriter Joe Talbot rails against a fictional village’s latent fascism, provincialist racism, tabloid-fuelled alarmism, and other moronic English values. In the process, he characterizes his villagers as “half-pint thugs” and “nine-fingered boys,” which inevitably feels a bit patronizing. Still, his willingness to slip into class stereotypes clarifies Idles’ political position: charitably as a conduit for proletarian anger, but primarily as a vent for the sort of leftists who can’t decide whether to valorize the working class or furiously condemn it for the calamities of Brexit and Boris Johnson.
Ultra Mono oscillates between the spry minimalism of “Model Village”—which bridges macho punk and, say, the Hives—and brawnier screeds aping Mclusky, albeit without the Welsh greats’ absurdism. The Jesus Lizard’s David Yow, Bad Seed Warren Ellis, and, improbably, Kenny Beats all make fairly anonymous contributions, presumably brought in to jolt the band from a creative rut. Throughout the record, promising flickers of invention—jittery electronics here, an elephantine squeal there—invariably leak into choruses built on mechanical, double-time strumming, with Talbot roaring indignantly over the top.
For a man wracked with moral outrage, Talbot sounds strangely unfocused, his characters now hollow composites and his lyrics stalled in an interzone between winking cliché and gibberish. “Clack clack clack-a-clang-clang/That’s the sound of a gun going bang bang,” he barks on “War,” with none of the astronomical flamboyance that might redeem such a line. Side B’s duskier sounds demand at least a moderately unhinged vocal presence, but Talbot is ruthless only in his efficiency. On the shoutalong “Carcinogenic,” he drones through a policy checklist—austerity, food banks, military spending, climate crisis—as if cramming for a job interview in the civil service. “Ne Touche Pas Moi” almost works as riot grrrl pastiche, until the appearance of Savages’ Jehnny Beth reminds us her own group would sooner dance the Macarena than serve threats as feeble as “This is a pistol/For the wolf whistle.”
Just as Talbot’s jabs at haters feel whiny, his declarations of solidarity, while sincere, often sound braggy. “[You’re] saying my race and class ain’t suitable,” he hollers on “Grounds.” “So I raise my pink fist and say, ‘Black is beautiful.’” Where to begin? Well, unlike civil rights matters, which demand allyship, the “Black is beautiful” movement does not seek white validation—in fact, the white gaze is exactly what it resists. To weaponize the term in this way is not a grave misstep, but it’s the sort of clumsiness that makes Idles’ good intentions feel squeamish.
Rather than plucking pretty mantras from a hat, authentic provocateurs mine injustice until they strike unpalatable truths. These may, through some magic hatch, lead to Necessary Art. Either way, I’m not sure Idles have the patience for it. “Model Village” is the one genuine provocation on a record that could otherwise have outsourced its politics to a woke publicity firm. On “The Lover,” Talbot defends Idles’ “sloganeering,” but instead of heeding the social media-era’s abundance of edifying slogans (“The system cannot reform itself”; “Every billionaire is a policy failure”), Ultra Mono charges into the discourse like a hobbyist at a rally. It’s not listening, just shouting. Not radical but restless. Not bad, just unnecessary.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On their first album in five years, Drexciya’s Gerald Donald and his long-time collaborator To-Nhan allow their habitually chilly electro to thaw a little, unexpectedly making way for a glimmer of human emotion.

Neurotelepathy

If it weren’t for the instant appeal of his music, Gerald Donald’s sprawling discography and penchant for aliases might obscure the fact that he’s been making peerless techno and electro for more than 30 years. His work with the late James Stinson as conceptual electro superduo Drexcyia blew minds and subwoofers. As Arpanet, he and Stinson (and then he alone) flipped Kraftwerk’s maybe-ironic Euro-techno utopianism for a maybe-cynical industrial music for virtual workplaces. His Der Zyklus productions bumped and bounced with the best of Detroit funk. The ripples created by a series of albums under his own name in the early 2000s deserve wider circles of listeners, as do his early, proggy workouts as L.A.M. This brutal world might not deserve a comprehensive Collected Works box set, but I sure hope we get one.
And then there’s Dopplereffekt, his duo (as Rudolf Klorzeiger, another alias) with To-Nhan, aka Michaela To-Nhan Bertel. Over the decades, the pair have undertaken electronic investigations of sex, fascism, capitalism, and other human entanglements, producing increasingly chilly output. Neurotelepathy thaws things to a kind of body temperature: It won’t break a sweat, but its cinematic swoon and crisp precision break the Dopplereffekt mold. What spills out sounds an awful lot like human emotion.
A concept album about a machine’s ability to decipher a subject’s thoughts, Neurotelepathy switches on the mechanics that come standard in much of Donald’s work. Then things get real. “Neural Impulse Actuator - Mirror Neuron” grounds itself in peppy electro, impeccably made, with a bassline that establishes unexpected grids. What appear to be recognizably human vocals swerve in, tangled with synth-y zigzags. They almost destabilize the whole endeavor, as if to say, it’s chaotic out there. As if they read my mind.
“Visual Cortex” and “Optogenetics” carry on the Carpenter-esque arpeggiated menace Donald excels in, but swap out the paranoia for stretches of panoramic wonder at what data can do. Opener “Epigenetic Modulation,” an unexpected collaboration with Kranky ambient explorer Christina Vantzou, establishes the philosophical framework. An announcer labels the audio transmission “transgenerational epigenetic inheritance” the same way Curtis McClain anointed Marshall Jefferson’s “Move Your Body” as “house music all night long,” the way SOPHIE invoked the immaterial. What you do, and what’s done to you, becomes who people can be. It might not take a mind-reader to suppose that, for someone with a legacy like Donald’s, this possibility is a blessing and a curse. And indeed, after this clear statement of intent, Neurotelepathy only gets squishier. Closer “EEG” is fleshiness made audible, like Cronenberg in its mess and revelation, and light years from Donald’s usual scientific method—dark years, maybe.
There’s pleasure, too. “Neuroplasticity” and “Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation” show off Donald’s encyclopedic collection of hi-hats and kicks, but they also iterate pop, the best empathy machine humans have ever built. Mostly, though, the buzz offsets the song cycle at the album’s center: a trio (“Cerebral Data Download to 2100 AD,” “Cerebral to Cerebral Interface,” and “Cerebral - AI Entanglement”) that opens with twinkles of melody, succumbs to a targeted downpour of bass, then reveals a shifting world with clicks that swipe as scythes through blooming fields of data. By the end, the only sounds are smoke. The achievement is a reversal: Now we’re telling machines what they think, projecting apocalypse onto our tools. The future is bleak, and we’re not even ready for Donald’s present.


Long sought after by collectors, the Spanish composer’s 1987 album of minimalism, period electronics, folk melodies, and chanted Catalan poetry is another gem in Freedom to Spend’s reissue series.

Pep Llopis: Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonautes

Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonautes

Some of the best reissue labels, like Soul Jazz, Numero Group, and Light in the Attic, made their mark by unearthing sounds that most of us never knew existed. They give names to them and put frames around them—a taxonomical project that has brought us essential compendiums of Ohio proto-punk, private-press new age music, and psychedelic country from the early ’70s, to name just a few pins in our ever-expanding musical atlas. RVNG Intl.’s Freedom to Spend imprint takes the opposite tack. Instead of creating alternative canons, it’s plucking obscure records from the ether and presenting them as standalone curios. Co-founders Pete Swanson, Jed Bindeman, and Matt Werth are interested, they say, in confusing the timeline, in sidestepping the historical frame to engage strangeness and wonder head-on.
For its first few releases since re-launching earlier this year, after a trial run nearly a decade ago, Freedom to Spend has swung its lens widely. First there was Eye Chant, a 1986 album of synthesizer music recorded in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania by Michele Mercure (aka Michele Musser); then came the Seattle electronic musician Marc Barreca’s Music Works for Industry, a 1983 cassette of sleek electro and wry anti-capitalism. The label’s third release stems from the same time period and thousands of miles to the east: the Mediterranean city of Valencia, Spain. Pep Llopis’ 1987 album Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonautes makes for a good opportunity to meet the label’s challenge of listening without prejudice. Mixing the sounds of classical minimalism with period electronics, folk melodies, and chanted poetry in Catalan, it’s the most unusual thing they’ve put out yet.
Long a sought-after prize by record collectors, the album is, fittingly enough, driven by the spirit of the quest. Llopis began writing the music after the dissolution of his previous band, the progressive rock group Cotó-en-Pèl, sent him sailing across the Mediterranean, island-hopping from Menorca to Crete, Lesbos, and Santorini. Inspiration from Wim Mertens and Philip Glass spun in his head along with the Greek music he had brought back from the Aegean; it was an encounter with the Valencian poet Salvador Jàfer’s collection Navegant obscur that pointed him toward the final form of the piece, in which Jàfer’s poetry—not so much spoken as chanted—infused the music with the dark, swirling pulse of the open sea. Llopis and his ensemble performed a version of the piece at Valencia’s Poiemusia, a 1986 festival of contemporary composition and poetry, and he recorded the album in early 1987, utilizing a limited set of instruments—cello, flute, clarinet, vibraphone, marimba, and keyboards—and with Jàfer himself reciting the text, accompanied by the late actress Montse Anfruns. The album was released later that year on Madrid’s Grabaciones Accidentales, home also to the Iberian Fourth World sounds of Finis Africae.
All these points of reference can help orient you within Poiemusia’s waters, but the listening experience itself requires few footnotes. Llopis’ work makes no secret of its debt to composers like Glass, Mertens, and Steve Reich: Throughout most of the album’s five tracks, contrapuntal arpeggios spin like wheels within wheels, with diverse acoustic and electronic timbres fusing into a sumptuous sound as dynamic as the play of light on choppy water. (The lone exception is “Nits de Cristall,” a beautiful, piano-led piece that brings Satie and Debussy to mind.) Minimalism’s sense of moving while standing still is balanced by a forceful compositional hand that emphasizes major shifts from passage to passage—not unlike jibing and tacking in the wind.
Both individually and as a set, the five tracks have a strong narrative feel, with chapter-like arrangements and mirroring sections. “El Vell Rei De La Serp” begins with a lengthy passage of bowed cello and gentle flute before shifting into tumbling pulse-minimalism mode; after five minutes of rising pitch and growing complexity, all the instruments drop out save a faint whistle, and a two-minute coda brings us back to the flute-and-cello theme of the opening. In a similar maneuver, the whole album is bookended by the drifting synths that suggest the stillness of the harbor that lies on either side of the journey.
The text, however, is not narrative. Jàfer’s impressionistic poetry emphasizes striking visual imagery—“Bees and slugs, honey and liquefied wax”; “Mysteries, algae, lips”—and its incantations begin to assume an almost liturgical feel. You don’t need to understand Catalan to appreciate the sonority of the voices, particularly when they are subtly processed through vocoder-like effects. Swirled into the music, the voices contribute to an overall effect that is like painting in sound and word, and just enough of the text cuts through to trigger unexpected associations in the listener’s mind. (“Moriré amb l’enyorança/De no ser un jaguar,” goes one particularly potent line which is bound to resonate, whatever your degree of exposure to various Romance languages.) Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonauts is an album of oceanic currents, of cultural exchange, with a shape dictated by the rhythms of both the sea and the journey. Despite its late-’80s provenance, it still sounds both futuristic and faintly medieval. It might as well be a message in a bottle washed up with no returning address—a fine example of Freedom to Spend’s vision of historical music that strikes home like a bolt from the blue.


Following last year's brilliant but sadly ignored Segundo, Domino Records releases Argentinian indie/electronic folk artist Juana Molina's second pleasant outing.

Tres Cosas

In a past life that came to a close sometime around 1996, Buenos Aires' Juana Molina was a well-known comedienne and television host, something akin to Argentina's Tracey Ullman, or say, Carol Burnett. It was a role she dutifully fulfilled for almost seven years before succumbing to a twerk of conscience and retreating to Los Angeles in the hopes of starting again, this time as a musician.
Tres Cosas is Molina's third full-length since she abandoned television outright in the mid-90s, but her past as a successful comedian still clings closely to her brand. The obvious reason for that is because it's a compelling backstory in its own right, the kind of anecdote that journalists and publicists don't easily forget. But in the context of her work as a musician, the dogged funnylady characterizations begin to make even more sense; modest, meandering and resoundingly uncommercial, Molina's is just not the kind of music you would anticipate from a former star of any kind.
Conceived as a bare-bones response to 2000's comparatively elaborate Segundo, Tres Cosas consists of breathy, wafer-thin Argentinean folk that occasionally flirts with the vanguard. Excepting the underwater synth piece "Filter Taps" and the gonzo pitch-wheel bonanza of "Yo Se Que", everything here hinges on Molina's nimble voice and a guitar, and yet it'd be misleading to stop at calling it acoustic music.
Part of Molina's appeal-- and this is what's getting her namechecked by more than just the world music set-- lies in the way her songs incorporate subtle additions like xylophones, strings, synths, loops and ambient washes without ever changing shape. One gets the sense from tracks such as "No Es Tan Cierto" (which slyly sneaks a xylophone and some sparse percussion behind its opening guitar motif) and the beautiful "Curame" (a three-shades blend of guitars, keys and vocals) that she's seeing the spaces in her songs and arranging them to match. The end result is a record of mixed materials that still sounds natural; a far cry from some of folk music's more hamfisted attempts at acoustic/electronic collusion.
Because Molina's compositions tend to be guided by stream of consciousness, sing-songy word trails, some of them need lots of time to fully take root; others-- like the clumsy "El Cristal"-- may never germinate at all. On the whole, however, Tres Cosas is still remarkably lean in fat. Neither particularly immediate nor eager to please, it's also absolutely nothing like a punchline, but who said Molina had to be funny anymore?


When Neil Young gets angry, he gets impulsive. The Monsanto Years, his latest album, is a screed against big agribusiness and the corporations that support it, but it is ultimately less a call to topple an evil empire than an expression of helplessness in trying to fight it.

The Monsanto Years

When Neil Young gets angry, he gets impulsive. Mere days after the May 1970 massacre at Kent State, he had branded Richard Nixon a mass murderer; nearly 20 years later, he was redrafting George Bush Sr.'s inaugural address into a state-of-the-union screed dripping with so much bitter sarcasm, some conservatives still mistake it for an ad hoc national anthem. Those songs remain FM-radio staples to this day because their raging invectives still sting like a ripped-off bandage, decades removed from the moments that incited them. But the topical material that Neil has rush-released in recent years has turned both more lyrically obvious and musically frivolous; whether dramatizing 9/11 valor in a goofy bar-band grind or calling for Dubya's head with a cheery choral sing-along and chirpy cavalry-charge trumpets, these songs' shelf lives can be measured in weeks rather than years. As much as his legacy is tied to the politically charged tumult of the late '60s and early '70s, Neil has always been more compelling when playing the rugged, inscrutable individualist rather than the man-of-the-people populist—the urgency to get his message out tends to override the sublime lyricism and unnerving ambiguities that have yielded his most resonant, timeless work.
On his new album, Neil revisits an old pet cause: the plight of the American farmer. But 30 years after he co-founded Farm Aid to save cash-strapped field workers from foreclosure, the terms of war have changed. The Monsanto Years fixes its crosshairs on the GMO-pimping agribusiness behemoth that has a stranglehold on the world's seed (and, by extension, food) supply, forcing farmers to comply their strict terms or be litigated into destitution. And, here, the buckshot splatter extends to other entities contributing to the suppression of the average American: Wal-Mart, Chevron, Citizens United, and even Starbucks (though in the latter case, the company insists it's just an innocent bystander). But despite the dawn-summoning optimism of the opening eco anthem "A New Day for Love", The Monsanto Years is ultimately less a call to topple an evil empire than an expression of helplessness in trying to fight it. As the album trudges through its treatises on corporate bullying, compromised democracy, and environmental degradation, Neil's not so much standing up for the embattled farmer as embodying the withered voice of one.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the sound of the album hearkens back to Neil's immediate post-Harvest period, a time when the narrative concision and electric-guitar savagery of his early work was giving way to a certain fuck-it-all sloppiness and sundazed cynicism. His amped-up backing band for this set, the Promise of the Real (fronted by Willie Nelson's sons Lukas and, when performing live, Micah), never approaches the trance-inducing psychedelia of Crazy Horse, but they make for a solid Stray Gators substitute, encouraging the sort of rough'n'tumble rave-ups and slack-rock jams that defined early '70s detours like Time Fades Away. The appealing looseness of their performances proves to be the saving grace of an album too often hamstrung by heartfelt but hackneyed messaging.
While the loping, whistle-hooked "A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop" and cowpunk stomp "Workin' Man" playfully highlight the absurdity of Monsanto's strong-arm tactics,  extendo-rants like "Big Box" forsake the rich characterization of Neil's most incisive social commentaries for worn-out catchphrases ("too big to fail"), broadstroked scenery ("Main Street's boarded up") and the blunt simplicity of a Change.org pitch ("people working part-time at Wal-Mart/ never get the benefits"). The album's preference for critique over craft is epitomized by the awkward ubiquity of the very word "Monsanto," which is wedged into several songs even when Neil can't be bothered to find anything to rhyme with it. (On the otherwise poignant seven-minute title track, a breezy "Mambo Sun" groove is tripped up by each utterance of the company name, delivered with all the grave weightiness of a movie villain appearing to the sound of dun-dun-dun.)
With much of the songwriting on The Monsanto Years taking the form of hastily scribbled screeds, the most revelatory moments come when Neil grapples with the paradox of making complex politics more pop-song palatable. The album's most immediately engaging track—the raggedly glorious "People Want to Hear About Love"— isn't a protest song but a song about protest songs. Sure, its call-and-response structure provides Neil with another opportunity to check off all of his key talking points: the fragility of the environment, political corruption, the link between pesticides and autism, and so on. At the same time, it shrewdly addresses those concerns within the context of a more existential dilemma: that is, in a cultural landscape craving feel-good entertainment, The Monsanto Years' brand of straight-shootin' rock'n'roll activism is going to be a tougher sell than a Pono.


Featuring YOB bassist Aaron Riesberg, Too Many Winters is a welcome throwback, taking cues from ’80s power and doom metal in a way that is actually refreshing.

Too Many Winters

Mixing doom metal and noise rock was prevalent in the mid-2000s—when classic Amphetamine Reptile had as much cultural cachet as classic Earache—but it is somewhat of a relic even now. However, this is the mode of Portland’s Norska, who are mostly known as a side band for YOB bassist Aaron Rieseberg, which is why their recording history is sporadic. Too Many Winters, their second full-length following a split with Fister and a self-titled record, isn’t rife with reinvention, yet still shows Norska as a capable band who wield from familiar—and a few not-so-familiar—sources.
Both YOB and Norska are adept in stretching their energy out through spaced out, hammering thrusts. The doomier tracks that comprise most of the album are as potent as the more raging “Samhain” and “Eostre.” If anything, “Samhain” is where spindly guitar patterns and crushing doom coexist best with each other, especially in its first verse riff that’s weighted enough to roll with Portland’s Orange-Amp orators, yet flexible to bend into something more jangle. Winters’ key strength is that it doesn’t overstay its welcome; those 37 minutes fly by even by doom standards. Its economy is necessary—had they leaned even just an inch more towards the doom side, it would be too plodding, too lost. Even when they turn nearly ambient in the middle of closer “Fire Patience Backbone,” it doesn’t detract from the flow. When they come tearing back in towards the end, it’s all the more furious.
Norska takes cues from ’80s power and doom metal that aren’t immediately evident, but are enough to set them apart. Jim Lowder’s voice soars towards the end of “Samhain,” and combined with backing vocals, it sounds like Manilla Road arranging gang vocals. Expansive yet rough-edged, it elevates what is normally a stylistic tribute to a past not that long ago, while still grounded enough to not conflict with their more earthbound rawness. Even before Lowder’s vocals kick in, the guitar on “Samhain” turns from Jesus Lizard-worship into more classic Thin Lizzy leads, interlocking melodies that lift spirits. In the title track and “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” Lowder morphs his roar into a bellow, and with an airier guitar when he does so, Norska turn into Candlemass recorded from a distance. While Norska is mostly known in relation to YOB, Lowder carries most of the weight on here, motioning different directions with his vocals. Among bands of this style, cribbing from Neurosis is so common that taking influence from more traditional metal is actually refreshing.
If metal was increasingly multifaceted nearly a decade ago when it came back into critical prominence (and it always has been, even with a few dominating bands), it’s even more so now. Norska’s particular band has been swept away by an increased focus on death metal, less clear-cut forms of experimentation, more traditional ’80s revivals, and even synthwave bands with legit claims to metal. Winters may be a bit behind the times, but it’s well-executed enough to starve off any lingering nostalgia for Scion Rock Fest.


The incarcerated Watts rapper’s latest is a loosely movie-themed collaboration with producer-of-the-moment Kenny Beats.

Netflix & Deal

As 03 Greedo’s 20-year prison bid continues, so too does his bid to remain relevant. He stashed a lot of music away in anticipation of a long hibernation, and his latest is Netflix & Deal, a 13-track collaborative tape with rising producer Kenny Beats. Greedo said that the project is based on movies he watched while he was dealing, and you only have to be half-paying attention to know he meant that literally. These are songs very loosely inspired by his streaming queue, usually about or related to selling drugs in some way. It isn’t the strongest work from either artist, but the white EDM DJ turned rap producer and the face-tatted trap rapper from Watts make a good odd couple.
Greedo leaned heavily on his melodies for Still Summer in the Projects, but from the rapid-fire mumbles of “Traffic” to the staggered chants of “Aye Twin,” his raps are center stage here. Greedo has said that making music isn’t a conscious process for him, but this time he at least had some external stimuli: he would watch scenes from his favorite movies on his phone in the studio and then hop in the booth to apply them to his raps.
The tape does enough to earn its title, but some of the duo’s most impressive connections come when they aren’t trying to make good on its premise.  Greedo remains one of the best rappers working, even behind bars, and his style is all-purpose: “Payback” flips Big Tymers’ “Still Fly” into a stunter’s anthem, while he pairs off with Maxo Kream for some respect-the-shooter flaunting on “Beg Your Pardon.”
Kenny Beats has a way of punching up a rapper’s sound without losing his own: adding more bite to Rico Nasty’s mosh-raps, bringing suavity to Freddie Gibbs's pusher chronicles, warping Atlanta trap for outsider Key!, pushing Vince Staples toward the bounce of SoCal radio. But Greedo told him to set all the “Greedo shit” he’d prepared to the side and give him something else. It’s clear he wanted to branch out in as many directions as possible in his limited time —as he puts it in the making-of doc, “You gotta show ‘em as hard as you would’ve been, in a short period of time.” Thus, Kenny lets Greedo rummage through his recent releases like a kid at a Redbox kiosk. Freddie, Key!, and Vince all appear, and it’s a bit like binging the last two years of Kenny Beats with Greedo offering director’s commentary.
The vibe is more couch potato than cinephile, and the tape works because it doesn’t take itself too seriously. There are Home Alone bars, some character-actor bars you’d expect (Blow’s George Jung) and some you wouldn’t (Stitch from the animated Disney franchise), bars running through the Brad Pitt IMDb, and rapper-movie inception bars (in which Greedo thinks he’s Paid in Full’s Rico, a character played by Cam’ron). Songs like “Blue People” and “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” construct entire snappy hooks out of nothing more than titles. With Netflix & Chill, 03 Greedo and Kenny Beats never try to make a movie; they’re content to be distracted and charmed by them, and that preoccupation becomes contagious.


As Voices From the Lake, Italian producers Donato Dozzy and Neel reinvent typical techno structures wholesale. Rarely can an album be this intimidatingly detailed, warmly inviting, and totally indifferent.

Voices From the Lake: Voices From the Lake

Voices From the Lake

Since its inception, Munich's Prologue label and its stable of artists have been associated with a brand of techno focused on deep wells of subterranean rumbling and liquid synth washes, an ambient, texture-oriented sound once dubbed "headfuck techno" and that has become ubiquitous. Prologue has a secret weapon in Donato Dozzy, whose own productions could range from relatively chugging techno ("Menta"), pastoral daydreams (his remix of Tin Man's "Nonneo"), and any manner of ambient synth kosmische material. His Voices From the Lake project is a collaboration with fellow Italian Neel, and solves Prologue's predictability problem by reinventing typical techno structures wholesale.
Voices From the Lake emerged in 2010 as the name for a semi-anonymous Neel mix, proffering up more than an hour of elegantly paced ambient techno. The moniker appeared on Prologue last year with a four-track EP of spiritually throbbing techno. Their self-titled album is the fruit of a live set worked up by the duo played at Japan's infamous Labyrinth, the mountain-set festival with which Dozzy has long been associated, and removes most of the conventional techno signifiers of both contributors' past work in favor of a webbed crawl that takes trance's steady chug and applies it to a new-agey palette of discrete, delicate textures.
Kick drum? What's that? The first thing you'll notice about Voices From the Lake is that it seems to be made out of meticulously detailed glass shards, a brittle and dissolute sort of rhythm that forms out of synchronous elliptical patterns rather than the rigid time signatures of techno. There's a pulse there, but it's soft and hidden, like you'd have to peel back a thousand layers to get closer to these songs' beating heart. The result is something that sounds strangely alive and heavily dynamic, where patterns shift and forms morph so subtly and patiently that it's hard to tell exactly what's going on at any moment, like a fractal that actually changes shape as you go further down to its core. This gives the album an unusual flow that feels like stationary floating in space, 70 minutes of beautifully constructed breathing music so painstaking you can't tell where one track begins and another ends if you aren't watching your music player: It just is.
That's not to say Voices From the Lake doesn't change over its running time, because dip your fingers into the world music vortex of "Vega" and then look to the submerged rave of "Twins in Virgo", and you'll find yourself in two very different wading pools of bubbling beats. There is one defining moment on Voices that stands out above all others, the pair's rework of the previously-released Dozzy track "S.T.".  After almost 30 minutes of percolation and vibration, a single bassline emerges, a gently ascending and descending chord progression that harbors an unusual impact for something that sounds so airy and ephemeral. Those particulate low frequencies flood the canvas of a work painted mostly in dot matrix with broad strokes of emotion.
In terms of taking "techno" to unconventional extremes of sound design and structure, Voices From the Lake most immediately recalls Ricardo Villalobos and Max Loderbauer's exhaustive Re: ECM double album from last year, but Voices has more emotional resonance and a rhythmic plot that feels more inviting, even if it's no less difficult to figure out. But barring that mid-album explosion of melody, this is a record that eschews the politics of techno linearity, replacing the rise-rise-rise-rise-peak-blowout-descend progression with one that puts all the tension and shift into pockets and sounds so small that it sounds more like a vibrant ecosystem of microorganisms than "beats."
Voices From the Lake is a triumph of care and exactitude, the kind of well-executed work of art that feels effortless despite its obvious complexity. Rarely can an album be this intimidatingly detailed, warmly inviting, and totally indifferent. In its seeming quest to map out rhythm to an unimaginable infinity, Voices From the Lake manages to be everything at once: It's some of the most inventive techno in ages, it's some of the prettiest ambient you'll hear on any German techno label, and it's a unique kind of entrancing that would feel hokey if it weren't so undeniably attractive.


Veteran Montreal DJ Kid Koala steps away from the turntables for an album of cosmic-themed ambient pop, assisted by Icelandic singer-songwriter Emilíana Torrini.

Kid Koala / Emiliana Torrini: Music to Draw to: Satellite

Music to Draw to: Satellite

Kid Koala rose to fame in the early ’00s as a DJ, or what today might more accurately be called a turntablist. His skill set is decidedly a traditional one: scratching, beat juggling, manipulating vinyl in real time. His signature move—adjusting the pitch of individual notes by hand in order to coax warped, theremin-like sounds out of records—extends the metaphor of turntable-as-instrument further than just about any other DJ has managed. Still, he’s known as much for his mixes as for his technique. Well before artists like Girl Talk popularized the idea of mashups, Koala was playing genre-bending, sample-heavy live sets, some of which were opening gigs for the likes of Radiohead, Björk, and DJ Shadow. Yet, despite considerable success as a DJ, he’s always seemed artistically restless, collaborating with everyone from Amon Tobin to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, joining supergroups like Deltron 3030 and even penning comics and graphic novels.
Given how melodic his playing is, it was probably only a matter of time before Koala walked away from the decks in order to try his hand at conventional instruments. 2011’s Space Cadet: Original Still Picture Score was a step in this direction; while it was composed in part on turntables, its melodies rely heavily on his own piano, bass and viola playing. Music to Draw to: Satellite represents an even bigger departure for Koala: Its songs are composed entirely on guitar, bass and synth with only occasional vinyl flourishes. What’s more, he's brought in hushed Icelandic singer Emiliana Torrini to add vocals to his compositions, a first.
Music to Draw to: Satellite takes its name from a series of events that Koala convened in Montréal and elsewhere, where he played slower-paced, less beat-oriented records and invited attendees to draw. In keeping with that idea, the album consists largely of compositions that blend ambient pop and post-rock, punctuated by electro-pop numbers that bubble without boiling over. Many of these songs are underpinned by languid basslines and glacial synth melodies. Almost none feature percussion.
This is all relatively new terrain for Koala and the majority of these tracks feel a bit tentative, more like experiments or sketches than fully fleshed-out songs. “Novachord” and “Adrift” are slow dirges that evoke celestial motion, all sustained organ chords, backwards loops and in the latter, a plodding beat that sounds like a the clicking hands of a grandfather clock. “Apoapsis” recalls the minimalist synthscapes of early Lullatone, just two simple melodies that interlock to form a soothing lullaby. “The Hubble Constant” breaks the mold by leading with dissonance: its throbbing bassline will rattle your speakers, though the low-end is gradually overpowered by a field of twinkling synth tones.
Torrini sings on seven of the album’s 18 tracks, and these veer much closer to electro-pop, so much so that they often feel at odds with the album’s ambient focus. Take the arpeggio-driven “Collapser”: while it’s undoubtedly one of the prettiest, catchiest songs on the record, it also sounds as if it could have been cribbed from the Postal Service. Many of the lyrics that Torrini sings on the album—most of which were written by Koala—could also benefit from some refinement. Torrini is no stranger to saccharine lyrics in her own work, but many of these (literally stargazing) lines feel especially precious (“When we lay there, side-by-side/Watching stars shine bright like keyholes in the sky,” “Oh, you rustle up the stardust in my head”).
Even if most of these songs don’t feel totally polished, nearly all are brimming with little sonic details that remind us of Koala’s ability to craft evocative sounds: scratches that swoosh past like gusts of wind, noises that clatter like machinery, garbled chatter that sounds like it’s being beamed in from a faraway satellite. It’s in these small moments that Koala leverages his greatest strengths. Take, for instance, his subtle scratching on tracks like “Fallaway,” which hint at the finespun avant-turntablism of Fog’s Ether Teeth. Listening to Music to Draw to: Satellite, it’s hard not to wish that Koala would lean just a bit more on his core skills, though there’s admittedly something admirable about his willingness to be seen as a novice, rather than a master.


Suck on This is a teaser for an upcoming full-length from the South African rap trio, but more often than not these days, Die Antwoord comes off as tired and trying way too hard.

Suck on This

*Suck on This *is presented to us as a stopgap for Die Antwoord’s fourth studio album, We Have Candy. MC Ninja teases the record in an interlude where he mimics geek king Napoleon Dynamite, a cultural reference so dated and worn-out that 12 years have passed and it still feels too soon to revive it. It's a neat stand-in for the South African rap trio and troll merchants Die Antwoord themselves: They may have started this act with the intention of discomfiting us  and making us think, but in 2016, they are merely wearisome.
Even though it’s hard to erase the shock rap-rave South African group’s rat-infested, toilet-sitting, loogie-hocking videos from your memory (we’ve tried), it has been two years since they released their last album, Donker Mag, so here’s a refresher: Ninja and Yolandi Vi$$er embrace “zef,” a philosophy that encourages intentional vulgarity. In doing so, they’ve created a body of work that at times can be engaging. Even now, it’s hard not to be riveted by 2010’s “Zef Side”—there’s that slow-mo of Ninja’s knock-kneed thrusts that send his flaccid penis flopping around in his Dark Side of the Moon shorts; there’s Yolandi’s severe mullet, her awkward dancing and alien-like visage. In the ensuing years, however, we’ve become inured to Twitter trolls and ALL CAP$ personalities. More often than not these days, Die Antwoord comes off as tired and trying way too hard.
In a 2012 interview about their sophomore album Ten$ion, Die Antwoord said their issues with Interscope stemmed from the label urging them to “be more generic.”  This is an ironic claim, for it's precisely what plagues *Suck on This, *their first mixtape since being liberated from their contract. While the tape includes new material along with remixes of old songs, the whole thing sounds like a retread. Nothing here is as bad as Ninja’s nasally chorus on Ten$ion’s opening track “Never Le Nkemise 1” or the unlistenable Uncle Jimmy skit, but maybe “boring” is a worse criticism than “bad.”
Sure, there are moments here that you can imagine playing well to festival crowds: If you close your eyes during the drops on “Gucci Coochie,” you can practically see the rows of shirtless bros and underbutt-showing girls in the Sahara tent at Coachella losing their minds. The best production is on the slinky, simmering “Bum Bum,” but Ninja’s line, “Bed wet, legs spread, big mess everywhere” is such a profoundly gross visual that you will be lunging for the skip button.
When it’s all said and done, the remixes are the most interesting tracks on Suck on This and God (fka DJ Hi-Tek) especially squeezes some life out of Die Antwoord’s most popular songs. He pumps “I Fink You Freaky” full of steroids, bumping up Letterman’s favorite song to a vein-popping, eyes-bulging, steam-spouting cartoon. The last 45 seconds reach such berserk Road Runner-levels, you wonder if he’s making fun of electro trap. If so, he’s beating Ninja and Yolandi at their own game. At this point, it all—even the letter that accompanied *Suck on This *claiming they didn’t know what a mixtape was—feels too contrived to be enjoyable. Maybe We Have Candy will surprise us and swerve far left, but if not, Die Antwoord’s getting muted.


Following the blues influences of his last solo album, the K Records founder’s new record offers a restless pastiche of primitive rock’n’roll, rockabilly, cowpoke ditties, and living-room dub.

Gallows Wine

K Records impresario Calvin Johnson tried the solo singer-songwriter thing for a while, but that’s not usually how people prefer to hear him. Anybody who caught one of Johnson’s acoustic coffeeshop sets around the release of his 2002 solo debut, What Was Me, might have been struck by how uncomfortably bare they could be. Johnson’s performances, heavy on a cappella, longed for some accompaniment to temper the intensity of his brutalist baritone and unblinking gaze. Some presences are just too overpowering to take in unadorned.

Johnson’s most beloved work was recorded within the conceptual framework of a band: the lovelorn pop of Beat Happening, the galactic rock of the Halo Benders, the kitchen-sink dance of Dub Narcotic Sound System. Johnson’s fairytale giant voice fares better when paired with an equally unusual instrumental accompaniment, and his subsequent solo albums have swapped What Was Me’s austere intimacy for more varied and lively arrangements.

For 2018’s A Wonderful Beast, he teamed with the Black Keys’ Patrick Carney for a pinball-machine reimagining of a blues-rock record. Some of those blues influences carry through to his new follow-up, Gallows Wine, but this time they’re just one of many modes that Johnson toggles between as part of a restless pastiche of primitive rock’n’roll, rockabilly, cowpoke ditties, and living-room dub. Recorded in Columbus, Mississippi, with the psych outfit Hartle Road, the album replaces Carney’s modernist thump with the straight-to-tape sensibilities of the earliest Sun Records releases.
In its dedication to direct songwriting and bygone strains of oldies, Gallows Wine can feel kindred to Jonathan Richman’s crooned homages to the teen music of yesteryear. Johnson even drops a “She’s my baby and I don’t mean maybe” on the closing “Crazy Legs.” But while Richman’s voice and demeanor continue to exude earnest, youthful wonder in his golden years, Johnson’s presence is more mischievous.

On Gallows Wine, he giddily indulges his most pranksterish impulses. The spaghetti western kitsch of “Tony Deano” descends into sheer camp while “Blues (We Got ‘Em)” sets old-timey blues tropes against skronky swing that grows more volatile by the verse. Johnson’s usual confrontational edge is on full display, but he offsets it with jolts of levity. The instrumental “Orange Aid” casts his huffing melodica solos against dizzying funk, while the garage rocker “A Walk in the Sun” lays down a go-go tempo so infectious it makes even Johnson’s leaden voice sound light on its toes.

Johnson’s Dub Narcotic records took similar pleasure in drilling into disparate styles, but that group’s grab-bag sensibilities felt part and parcel with the ’90s, a time when acts  like Beastie Boys and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion excavated old record crates in search of unlikely currents of cool. The muses on Gallows Wine, in contrast, are so unexpected, so divorced from any possible notions of hipness, that the project stands out even in Johnson’s idiosyncratic discography. It’s one of his most esoteric, uninhibited albums, and after four decades of indulging novel whims, that’s really saying something.


On her third LP for Hausu Mountain, the Chicago experimental musician amps up the extremes of her work: It’s more crushing than ever, yet it features moments as tranquil as anything in her catalog.

Rainbow Bridge

The music that the Chicago experimenter Angel Marcloid makes as Fire-Toolz exists somewhere at the fuzzy border between peace and pandemonium. Across the handful of albums she’s released under that name over the last half-decade, she’s made room for moments of blissed-out digital ambience, technical death-metal fantasias, glitch-scoured noise, and glossy AM radio jazz—often all slammed together within a few bars. It can feel like mayhem, but Marcloid insists her songwriting has never been self-consciously designed that way. She told AllMusic that over the last few years, her music has emerged from “a much more peaceful place,” even if it comes out gnarled and complex. “I might be making something about a serene meadow, but […] to someone who just listens to it, it might shatter their world temporarily,” she says. “That’s just how it’s going to have to be.”
On Rainbow Bridge, her third Fire-Toolz album for Chicago’s Hausu Mountain, she maintains this head-spinning approach, doubling down on the extremes of her music. It’s somehow more crushing and complex than anything she’s done as under the moniker, but it’s also full of moments as tranquil and bright as anything she’s offered in her catalog. It’s a strange balance, but it’s true to the spirit of the Fire-Toolz project as a whole, which is full of pieces that feel like they’re being torn apart as Marcloid’s impulses go galloping off in different directions.
The record begins in tumult with the double-kick battery of the concussive, minute-long “Gnosis .•o°Ozing.” It is bleak, bruising, and brief, but it also contains a few glimmers of an ascendant synth lead, which lends even this short, violent intro a surprising emotional complexity; there’s a sort of hopefulness embedded in its punishment. On “(((Ever-Widening Rings)))” she unleashes a series of terrifying screams over a shuffling synth piece that sounds not entirely unlike a Peter Gabriel instrumental. Marcloid has said that her fascination with metal began with proggy groups like Dream Theater and Fates Warning, bands that were more about world-building than brutality. The heavier moments on Rainbow Bridge seem designed with the same purpose in mind. They may be more transparently metal than anything Marcloid has done to date, but she’s not just trying to pummel you, she’s presenting complicated emotions for a complicated world. It’s a careful, considered exploration of a vein that’s run through her music from the very beginning.
The slower moments of Rainbow Bridge are no less engaging. Tracks like “Dreamy #ex Code” evoke both the dizzy mysticism of new-age music and the burpy psychedelia of Animal Collective’s early collage experiments, while others draw on the humid jazz riffing that informed Marcloid’s record as Nonlocal Forecast. Even if any given moment is crammed with sounds, the record gives a lot of space to the serenity that she says informs her work. The record’s closer, “{Screamographic Memory}” is perhaps the most purely placid thing in her catalog: a collection of bell-like synth tones stretching and seeping into one another. It’s sweet and sunny, about as far from the thunderous terror that opens the record as you could imagine getting.
Rainbow Bridge was made in part as a reflection on the death of Marcloid’s cat Breakfast, which explains in part the way the record swings back and forth between beauty and cacophony. Marcloid’s work as Fire-Toolz has always been about the way that these two emotional poles can coexist, but the way we deal with death is especially complicated. Even the most intense grief is braided with moments of peace and clarity, the beautiful memories of a life well-lived. Rainbow Bridge mirrors the intensity and the confusion of these experiences and shows that even in the direst times, it’s possible to find comfort.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Compton-based, Dr. Dre-affiliated rapper steps out with a pop-rap debut that puts a futuristic spin on 90s alt-rap.

Section.80

Kendrick Lamar is a weird kid, and rap music could always use more weird kids. The 24-year-old is a Compton native with a budding and mysterious Dr. Dre connection, but there's little-to-no link to his hometown's gangsta-funk legacy in his music. Instead, Lamar is very much a product of the late blog-rap era-- an introverted loner type who's willing to talk tough but is more interested in taking a Mag-Lite to his own personal failings and what he sees as the flaws of his generation. His rap style is fluid and melodic but approachable, and his frantic tumble of syllables evokes the feeling when you're high enough that your thoughts arrive fast and interrupt each other. If one of the Bone Thugs guys had a dorky, overly sincere younger cousin who was really into Afrobeat and Terrence Malick movies, it'd be Kendrick.
Lamar does exist within a strong West Coast continuum, but it has nothing to do with Dre. Instead, he's very much within the tradition of 90s groups like Souls of Mischief or the Pharcyde-- self-deprecating and insanely talented kids who routinely ripped dizzy, slip-sliding flows over mellow jazz breaks. Section.80, Lamar's new album, arrives on a wave of blog-based buzz, but beyond a couple of ill-advised choruses, it doesn't make much attempt to present Lamar to major-label A&Rs or to a wider audience. Instead, it gives him a chance to chase his muse wherever it runs. The production, mostly from relative unknowns like THC and Sounwave, is almost uniformly excellent-- a spaced-out blur of astral horns and blissed-out Fender Rhodes, with drums that only knock when they need to. A couple of guys from Lamar's Black Hippy crew-- those guys really sound like Souls of Mischief when they get together-- show up, but the album isn't a guest-heavy affair. It's a young thinker attempting to describe the world as he sees it.
"You know why we crack babies cuz we born in the 80s," Lamar raps on the excellently emo relationship-song "A.D.H.D.", and that's a theme that comes up over and over. Everywhere he looks, Lamar sees generational symptoms of the kids who came from the era of crack and Ronald Reagan. When he looks around, Lamar sees self-hate, nihilism, institutionalized oppression. When he talks to girls, he sometimes recalls the supportively sincere Goodie Mob of "Beautiful Skin", actually counseling against cosmetics on "No Make-Up (Her Vice)": "Don't you know your imperfections is a wonderful blessing?/ From heaven is where you got it from." (Somehow, the redundant double-"from" makes the sentiment all the more adorable.) And he also recognizes self-destructive tendencies in himself: "I used to wanna see the penitentiary way after elementary/ Thought it was cool to look the judge in the face when he sentenced me." But it's not like he's some preacher/prophet figure; he says "suck my dick" often enough that it gets boring.
Given that Lamar is a talented and earnest young man with a lot to say and no big label nudging his music toward accessibility, it's only natural that he'd lose his way every once in a while. Section.80 is an hour long, and it could drop probably a quarter of its running time without anyone missing anything. And certain moments just make me wince so hard, like this one, from "Hol' Up": "I wrote this record while 30,000 feet in the air/ Stewardess complimenting me on my nappy hair/ If I could fuck her in front of all these passengers/ They'd probably think I'm a terrorist." Those few lines add up to a repellent cauldron of horniness, persecution-complex fantasies, exhibitionism, and plain old youthful Bad Idea Jeans indulgence. Dre hasn't yet taught Lamar how to hone all his best ideas into a few absolutely killer pieces of music; maybe he still will. But self-serious flaws and all, Section.80 still stands as a powerful document of a tremendously promising young guy figuring out his voice. Its best moments ("Rigamortis", "HiiiPower", "Kush & Corinthians", "A.D.H.D.") are simply dope as fuck, no qualifiers necessary.


Three tracks from the singer-songwriter’s Little Oblivions sessions further detail her dread, suffering, and sadness with great beauty and little reprieve.

B-Sides EP

Julien Baker’s music is all calamity. Scenes of suffering are laid so bare that they seem to serve as confessionals, a way of unburdening them while seeking higher ground. Dating back to her 2015 debut, Sprained Ankle, Baker has depicted emotional wreckage in excruciating detail, recalling weekday mornings blackout drunk or lonely conversations with a god she’s not sure she still believes in. Baker’s been open about her mental health struggles and history of substance abuse, but her songs need no out-of-frame context to land their gut punches. On last year’s Little Oblivions, her raw sound was blown out dramatically, adding piano, distorted drums, and banjo to her songs of self-destruction. It’s a gorgeous and impressive record, a gauntlet to get through. Baker’s voice conveys such anguish that even when her writing includes traces of optimism, her despair is deep enough to drown in.
The three songs on her new B-Sides EP were recorded during the Little Oblivions sessions and, apart from the acoustic guitar-backed “Guthrie,” could slot right into the album. In fact, “Vanishing Point” and “Mental Math” would have been indie-pop standouts on Little Oblivions. She’s at her most undone on “Vanishing Point,” turning off the headlights in her car, wishing to be “impaled on the pass.” Baker ends the song on a long-suffering note: “Don’t feel bad, I’ve always been too far down to rеach/And I was long, long gone before you got to me.” A devastating admission, to be sure, but there’s a certain clarity that comes only by wringing yourself dry.
The EP’s other highlight, “Mental Math,” describes a relationship on life support. Over a double guitar riff and four-on-the-floor kick, Baker balances quiet revelations (“You say you never had a good night's sleep/Any of the nights you spent with me”) with jarring images (“Hanging on a ledge, outside of your house/Trying not to freak out, staring at the ground/Doing math in my head, how far is it down?”). All the while, Baker’s narrator scrutinizes her motives and actions, identifying pride and a lack of patience as barriers to connection. Like Little Oblivions, the songs on B-Sides EP sound like snapshots from the most difficult day of your life, overwrought yet moving elegies about surviving through what almost killed you.
Even across three songs, Baker’s lack of levity is draining. On Sprained Ankle and Turn Out the Lights, moments of humor occasionally opened a porthole to redemption, offering a glimpse into a space unburdened by totalizing pain. B-Sides EP is less forgiving. “Used to call upon the spirit, now I think heaven lets it ring/Wanted so bad to be good/But there's no such thing,” she concludes on the brutally sad “Guthrie.” Without resilience, these songs can sag into themselves, but this isn’t music meant for direct-line healing. Baker’s songwriting captures the feeling of being at the bottom, where language fails and every thought hurts—a place that probably feels a little like oblivion.


Meltframe is a solo guitar album of covers from Mary Halvorson, one of the most exciting musicians making jazz today. It's an adventurous record, both in her song choices and her interpretive playing. In her dexterity, Halvorson acts as a bridge between the jazz of the past and the jazz of the future.

Meltframe

Mary Halvorson owns one of the more easily identifiable guitar sounds you will encounter, in any genre. That is partly due to an ingenious effect: a delay pedal that she uses as a startling, mid-note pitch-shifter. But if she didn’t have anything to offer beyond that novelty, her playing wouldn’t sustain the three modern jazz groups she currently heads (a trio, a quintet and a septet), as well as her sought-after work in various other ensembles—including two different bands led by jazz guitar luminary and occasional Tom Waits sideman Marc Ribot. With her quick, experimentalist’s mind, Halvorson resembles the great composer, saxophonist and teacher Anthony Braxton (an early instructor of hers, with whom she still collaborates). On her new album Meltframe, a set of guitar covers, she is simultaneously employing two suggestions from her former professor’s syllabus: develop a solo act, and don’t forget to engage with the past.
Halvorson is well respected in the jazz community for the speed with which she can conceive of strong ideas. In the midst of a fleet improvisation you might hear her becoming progressively enamored of some small portion of a given melody, selecting it for additional repetition within the flow of a solo. Next, she’s slowing the tempo and turning the fragment into a rollicking vamp, while switching her amplifier’s tone. As you’re appreciating the rhythmic change, you may not immediately notice that she’s also creating a new path back toward the full theme. But when she returns to the original hook, the culmination is as satisfying as any single effect she may have used for punctuation along the way.
Meltframe’s tracklist was refined during her stint as the opener for an acoustic tour by King Buzzo of the Melvins. If at first it seems like a self-consciously idiosyncratic grab bag (Duke Ellington and Ornette Coleman?), as usual, Halvorson has a plan. She links these two composers in the album’s sequencing via mournful tune-selection, but uses different methods of attack to preserve a distinction. Slide-playing and tuning quirks grace her performance of Coleman’s "Sadness" (while recalling something of the composer’s own "harmolodics" concept). Then, she slows Duke’s "Solitude" way down, using a delicate reverb to provide the sparest of pulses. Her playing shines in both performances. Nor is a conceptual subtlety the only thing Meltframe has going for it. The opening number is a finger-busting, grungy take on Oliver Nelson’s "Cascades"—a song aptly titled, given its quickly swooping figures. Those familiar with Nelson’s soulful hard-bop sound may be tempted to wrinkle a nose at the interpretive move, here, but they shouldn’t: Halvorson’s recourse to the distortion pedal successfully underlines what an imposing riff-writer this composer was. A high energy approach also predominates during the back half of Halvorson’s exciting reinterpretation of McCoy Tyner’s "Aisha" (which features on the John Coltrane album Olé Coltrane).
Halvorson also tosses recent pieces by contemporaries like Tomas Fujiwara and Chris Lightcap into her mix. These cuts don’t always carry the melodic jolt of the certified classics, but Halvorson’s performances show how today’s jazz still works with an awareness of popular textures, including indie rock (as with the noisy drone section she creates when playing Lightcap’s "Platform"). Surely, Halvorson’s most personal statements are still found on the albums where her own compositions rule. Though by liquefying some of the curatorial borders that surround jazz in the popular imagination, Meltframe refocuses our attention on an essential malleability that is the genre’s core tradition.


Nearly twenty years later, Wolfgang Voigt’s records under the GAS alias still assault our presumptions about electronic music. How can music that seems to be monotonous convey such beauty and clarity?

BOX

Earlier this summer, a story began to circulate about “Shinrin-yoku,” a coinage created by the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries in the early ’80s that basically translates as “forest bathing.” It’s not hiking or trail exploring per se (nor is it, as the name might suggest, stripping naked and bathing in a pile of leaves), so much as it is a meditation that provide its bathers “an opportunity to slow down, appreciate things that can only be seen or heard when one is moving slowly,” as one guide put it. He expects it to be a trend not unlike yoga in the future. Naturally, the documentation is sparse on the health benefits of “forest bathing,” though researchers have focused on the phytoncides given off by the plants, the so-called “aroma of the forest.”
The emergence of “Shinrin-yoku” dovetails nicely with the most recent reissues of Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project. It, too, draws on the image of the forest and the density of its landscape, perhaps even drawing its name from the vaporous, relaxing properties of said “aroma.” One of many of Voigt’s production aliases, GAS, ran for five years in total, producing four full-lengths and a handful of singles, before coming to an end in 2000 with Pop. At that point in time in the new century, there were dozens of projects that could be traced back to Voigt’s industrious, multifaceted genius—from the maniacal, Pantone minimal techno of Studio 1 to the gateway drug of Burger/Ink’s Las Vegas (one of the earliest German techno albums to see domestic release in the U.S.)– but the vagaries of Voigt’s GAS project were hard to pin down. The intent of GAS—as Voigt stated in an interview from that time—consisted of seeming contradictions: “The aim is always pop and to bring the German forest to the disco.” Or to take the club into the forest. That synergy—between the natural and electronic, the ancient and modern, the metered and the untamed, the infinite and the temporal—came together and then disappeared.
While nearly impossible to compile a linear chronology for his discography—which includes more than 160 albums and 40 aliases—in the intervening years since these pivotal albums were released, their influence has overshadowed his own prodigal body of work. So while the four original GAS records were boxed and compiled merely eight years ago, Nah Und Fern infuriated many fans in that each album was reduced to an edit on a single side of vinyl, cutting hours of music into just one hour. And so now we are being given the simply and monolithically titled Box: a deluxe set featuring ten pieces of vinyl (each album is now spread across three sides, with another piece containing his 1999 12,” “Oktember”), an art book of Voigt’s manipulated forest photos, as well as four CDs.
Box presents Voigt’s vision in its most momentous physical document to date and is a fitting monument. But it also looks back and edits the history in such a manner that brings to mind fellow countrymen Kraftwerk, who disavowed their first three albums they made before hitting upon the technological themes of Autobahn. Box also functions similarly to William Basinski’s massive 9-LP box set from 2012, arranging his archive of crumbling tape loops in a post-9/11 world as The Disintegration Loops, giving bookends and a coherent narrative to a project that during its creation and lifespan did not always bear one.
Originally, GAS was but one of Voigt’s innumerable pseudonyms, first arising in 1995 as a remix of his own sampledelic cover of T. Rex’s “Hot Love.” GAS may have ultimately been a defining quality of the moniker but it’s easy it also easy to hear in it an homage to T. Rex’s own languid “Life’s a Gas” and Voigt’s beloved glam rock. When he spun off GAS with its own 12”, it was decidedly more ambient, though there were bits of glam and disco still deeply embedded in the productions.
That history is elided completely here. As Box now posits, GAS begins two years on with 1997’s Zauberberg. It’s the first instance of Voigt presenting GAS as a unified sound and vision. There’s a blurred photo of black trees bathed in a demonic red light on the cover, as if a forest fire blazes just out of frame, and the music itself reveals—and revels in—a far more somber tone. The glitter of glam is replaced with soot, as Voigt ventures further back in time, sampling and looping late 19th century-early 20th century composers like Richard Wagner, Alban Berg, and Arnold Schoenberg. Not that you can quite make out the motifs, as he slows such works until they become dirges, the crackle of the original vinyl casting off a campfire-like warmth, putting the techno producer on ground similar to that of experimental turntable manipulator Philip Jeck.
The opening minutes of Zauberberg’s first track drifts through an indeterminate number of orchestral loops before dissolving into mist. They drift between drone and slowed melody, focal point and blur, foreground and background, sound and decay. That approach remained intact throughout GAS’ duration. As Philip Sherburne put it eight years ago, reviewing a rare live performance from GAS: “The point of GAS isn’t the moment or the riff; it’s the totality. I’d be unable to tell you the title of a given GAS track, or even the record.”
Voigt had a lot of different approaches, so many that he had to keep switching aliases to contain them. For this particular project, Voigt only has one pitch, but it’s a doozy. His narcotic way with these loops, his ability to shift them in space, to slow them down even as the pulse beneath them intensifies, to ever-so-carefully alter the repetition so that it mystifies rather than lulls, remains unmatched. He muffles his telltale kick drum so that rather than shake a club's walls, it now seems to emanate from twelve feet under the forest floor. It’s as much a haunted memory of these nearly century-old classical recordings as it is a vague impression of last night's endless party, and as such GAS exists in a purgatorial state between the two.
Despite spending nearly two decades with the albums, I’d be hard-pressed to distinguish the twenty-four tracks here. Mostly, the tints on each cover suggest the moods within. Zauberberg remains the most menacing, suggestive of being submerged in a lake or lost in the darkest hours of night. The next year, Königsforst—while still dark—suggests more glints of light. The amber glow on the cover is conveyed by the harps that plink across “II” and the majestic brass growling on “V.” Taking its title from the woods that Voigt himself grew up in, dosing on LSD as a teen and wandering amid the trees, Königsforst reconfigures Voigt’s memories as Brothers Grimm fairytale, seeing nature as an enchanted landscape.
Pop ranges the farthest of the GAS albums, it’s opening moments warm and gurgling. Elsewhere, the swells are reminiscent of New Age music, which at the time was still widely scorned. The very next year, the chiming bells that bounce around on “IV” would become the foundation of Kompakt’s Pop Ambient sound. (In a strange twist, the A-side of the original “Oktember” single is replaced here with “Tal 90,” a track credited to Tal and released on the second Pop Ambient comp, by far the gentlest GAS track on the set and an outlier in its use of guitar as its foundation.) By the time that telltale darkness returns for the last fifteen minutes of Pop, the project feels like a riddle closing in on itself, resolving on a note that’s both ominous and transcendent at once.
Box both cements Voigt’s legacy yet it also threatens to overshadow it, collecting and solidifying a haunting body of work that echoes not just through techno, but all music as the 20th century came to its end. No other project of Voigt’s created quite as much of an obsession amongst its listeners. It’s possible to hear Voigt move through post-rock, modern classical, noise and electronic: Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Max Richter, Eluvium, Tim Hecker, Andy Stott, Sunn O))), the Orb (at least in the 21st century), the Caretaker, Jóhan Jóhannsson, the Field, most entrants in the annual Pop Ambient series, they are just a few of the modern music makers who imbibed these albums and realized their own work.
Last year, Dr. Christopher Dooks published a paper/sound piece entitled “Lessons Learned in the Königsforst,” wherein the interdisciplinary artist trekked to the forest outside of Cologne, obsessed by the album that he’s used for years as a sleep aid, an album that “taps into something potentially universal to aid stress reduction, almost as a medication.” He goes on to compare Königsforst to the sound of hearing your mother’s heartbeat in utero, to the Buddhist practice of a walking meditation, to coming down off of drugs and our modern “hyper-aroused” state of existence, to the album being a possible treatment for PTSD. In chatting with Voigt about it, the producer said the project was “about childhood dreams and traumatic fantasies, about (drug) paranoia and very special trippy ‘inner ear’ tinnitus adventure worlds.” It’s a suspension of time in both its exploration of extended duration, as well as in blurring the sensations that inform childhood and intoxicated adult realms.
Clocking in at over four hours, Box can still be a foreboding listen. Many might still only hear a migraine-level thump and the hiss around it, while others can behold the infinite depths of space that Voigt suggests between each beat, luxuriating in each lurch of ghostly strings. Nearly twenty years later, GAS still assaults our presumptions about electronic music. How can music that seems to be monotonous, so uneventful, also convey such beauty and clarity? Why take a slow walk through the forest when there is so much to get done on any given day?
In explaining the health benefits of “Shinrin-yoku,” one researcher suggested that it’s not the aroma of the trees that gives such bathers a sense of calm, but rather from a sense of “awe,” be it astronauts gazing down at the earth, tourists taking in the Grand Canyon, or even a young man recalling the forest from his youth. The expanse and vastness of GAS reveals as much as the listeners are willing give to them, the level of attention and perception helping to create such awe. Whether it’s your first visit or a return trip into this world, the ability to travel into each track unaccompanied by Voigt yet find your own trail is part of what makes this music resonate decades later. In this way, GAS continues to confer such medicinal, even magical, qualities upon its visitors.


The latest from the D.C. rapper is a focused beam of live-band and hip-hop soul that rattles loudly in our present political moment.

The Iceberg

“I'd rather die than be complacent with the way that it goes,” Oddisee declares on “NNGE,” one of several tracks from his new album that aim to unravel listeners' tightly wound spools of indifference. At 32 years old, the rapper has been working at a steady clip without much fanfare for more than a decade. 2015's The Good Fight showed his fine-tuned, live-band sound; last year brought the instrumental Odd Tape, which highlighted his beat-making, and the anxiety-laden Alwasta EP, which foreshadowed The Iceberg. “Lifting Shadows,” a song from that release where the Sudanese-American MC worries that the government might be tapping his phone, feels prescient in the light of recent actions by President Trump: “That's what makes this country great, it's built by those who bleed/It's built by those who came on boats, it's built by those who flee… So if you just try to chop us down you only hurt your knees.”
That song provides an easy bridge to *The Iceberg, *a focused beam of hip-hop soul that rattles loudly in our present political moment. On “NNGE,” Oddisee reckons with the election of the new President from the perspective of someone familiar with government-sanctioned antagonism. “What is there to fear?/I'm from black America, this is just another year.” “Like Really” also calls attention to pervasive, systemic inequality. “Why a brother get three for a sack while your brother go free for raping?” Oddisee wonders. “How you made a film about Egypt with all lead roles caucasian?” Sexism gets a similar treatment in “Hold It Back,” the idea of which “annoys [him] more than cargo shorts.”
The backdrop for Oddisee's cutting analysis is a continuation of the funky sound honed on his recent records. Limber runs from bassist Dennis Turner and quicksilver riffs from Olivier St. Louis flash through The Iceberg, and the programmed drums hit with a human player's snap. St. Louis is also a gifted vocalist—during “Rain Dance,” a glittering, four-minute head-nod symphony, he tumbles into the track from above, shaking the walls with a wail that nods to the Temptations in the early ’70s.
Live-band hip-hop has cycled back into the mainstream again after more than a decade in the cold behind acts like Kendrick Lamar and Chance the Rapper. Though in modern pop, rising tides do not lift all boats. It's not clear if the success of the Kendricks and the Chances means that other rappers with a comparable approach can ride their coattails and enjoy the benefits of more listeners without needing to compromise their methods. Having support from gatekeepers helps with that process, and at least one gatekeeper is listening to Oddisee: “Like Really” premiered on Ebro's Beats 1 program. But Oddisee has bigger fish to fry. Frequently on The Iceberg, characters seem stuck in entrenched paths dictated by America's racist history, and the album ends at a stand-off. “We can't agree on a thing,” Oddisee raps on “Rights and Wrongs.” “We both are beyond the games/But we still play.”


The most aesthetically cohesive album of Stephen Malkmus' career, Real Emotional Trash is also his jammiest-- an unabashedly rock'n'roll band album unafraid to stretch its songs past the 10-minute mark.

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks: Real Emotional Trash

Real Emotional Trash

The first line of Real Emotional Trash begs to be read autobiographically: "Of all my stoned digressions/ Some have mutated into the truth/ Not a spoof." It's the same tease that Malkmus pulled by calling his last album Face the Truth, in spite of its characteristically elusive contents. While that record featured Malkmus fully indulging his penchant for eclectic basement tinkering, Real Emotional Trash is an unabashedly rock'n'roll band album. It's the most aesthetically cohesive album of Malkmus' solo career (which is good), but also the jammiest (which, here, is bad). The record may sound like it would have been a blast to play on, but that doesn't always make for an engrossing listen.
On the plus side, Real Emotional Trash is still a Stephen Malkmus album, and it's host to all his pursuant charms and quirks. As a writer, Malkmus remains in top form; the album is rife with character-based songwriting that seems increasingly rare and valuable as songwriters increasingly grapple with overstated signifiers of sincerity. Even the album's title is characteristically apt-but-not-apt; though the material on Real Emotional Trash could hardly be considered straightforwardly "emotional" (even in comparison to Malkmus' output at large), there's a very real sense of excitement that comes from its communal sound.
The excitement is justified, too; these Jicks (Malkmus included) are stellar musicians. Malkmus shows off his band's strengths right off the bat; "Dragonfly Pie" is equal parts swaggering indie and 1970s AOR, coupling simple and memorable melodic phrases with synchronized, fuzzy guitar riffs. There are some moments of extreme understated structural elegance here; as the song's chorus emerges from a tangled verse, Sleater-Kinney/Quasi drummer (and now Jick) Janet Weiss' muscular and precise drumming lends the song a unified sense of purpose that's largely been absent from Malkmus' solo work.
Unfortunately, it doesn't last. Many of the songs on Real Emotional Trash start promising, but quickly become frustratingly repetitive and aimless. At times, the album veers satisfyingly into proggy excess or White Stripes-like forceful minimalism, but never commits to either. If anything, it sounds like the work of a band that knows how to play well together, but can't necessarily convey a purpose beyond that. "Hopscotch Willie" starts out with a pleasant verse (that actually brings to mind the melody from Sade's "Smooth Operator"), but by the six-minute mark you're, uh, well aware that you've hit the six-minute mark.
The album drags even more with its title track, one of many on Real Emotional Trash that struggles to construct an epic from just a handful of memorable moments. The song’s extended midsection deftly shows off the band’s ability to work in tandem, but it's not a gesture that rewards repeat listens. Thankfully, the album picks up with lead single "Baltimore" and the under-three-minute, almost-"Reelin' in the Years"-quoting "Gardenia", both of which use the band’s strength to put some extra oomph into already-great songs. Closer "Wicked Wanda" is great, too, incorporating enough musical curveballs to keep things interesting.
Then again, "Wicked Wanda" is a fitting end for a record that is something of a curveball itself. Face the Truth overflowed with incongruous musical ideas, but Real Emotional Trash is determinedly unified, even if it isn't always clear to what ends. At its best, the record hints at opening a whole new musical world for Malkmus-- one in which his well-worn style is effectively played down in the service of a mighty rock'n'roll band. Otherwise, it's simply a satisfying, if underdeveloped, gesture towards something much greater than itself.