On a new tape marking his release from prison, the Los Angeles rapper and folk hero sounds battered but resilient, mixing studio sessions with tracks recorded over the phone from inside.

Free 03

The late 2010s were a tumultuous time for 03 Greedo. In 2016, after six years of floating his Auto-Tuned melodies on the Watts mixtape circuit, he was arrested on drug and firearms charges that initially came with a 300-year prison sentence. The litigation didn’t stop his constant stream of music, which struck a nerve nationally with the release of The Wolf of Grape Street in March 2018. That April 30, he accepted a plea deal for the charges and was sentenced to 20 years in prison—another in a long line of rap stars whose ascents hit the turbulence of the American legal system.
Greedo spent the past four and a half years behind bars, an eternity in rap time, before his release on parole last week. He reportedly recorded more than 3,000 songs before the start of his sentence, and released a fraction of that number over the years he was locked up until the music drip stopped with the three-track 03 Inna Key EP in August 2021. He opens Free 03, which arrived three days ahead of his release, the same way he has in the past: from behind the gravelly static of a jail phone. After an ominous automated message from the prison phone company, he laments the rap icons lost while he was away—Young Dolph, PnB Rock, Takeoff, and fellow Angelenos Nipsey Hussle and Drakeo the Ruler—before brushing the dirt off his shoulders to begin his new era: “It’s probably my last lil’ tape where it’s gon’ have this sound,” he announces. Free 03 blends this celebratory post-prison rush with the emotional fallout from his sentence: a collection of songs that grooves and seethes, always remaining focused on greener pastures.
Given that Greedo has been out for less than a week, it’s safe to assume Free 03 is a mix of songs from that stash of thousands and others recorded during his last days in prison. The tape combines different styles and moods to create what’s essentially a Greedo sampler, like 2018’s sprawling God Level in miniature. “Took a Little Minute” and “No Free Features” commit to hard-nosed, almost breathless rapping over rattling drums and pianos; the bubbly horniness of tracks like “Pourin” and “I Can’t Control Myself” shares space with the slinky paranoia of “Breakfast.”
Most of the vocals on Free 03 are clear and crisp, which makes the handful of tracks recorded through the jail phone all the more jarring. “Today” turns a croaked interpolation of the Ice Cube classic “It Was a Good Day” into a middle finger to fake shooters and crooked cops. On “Hype,” Greedo’s breakneck verse and ad-libs—all recorded over the phone—are interrupted by a “you have one minute” message from the phone company. Even on the verge of Greedo’s release, closing track “If I Die” plays out as a list of his fears (“One of my niggas will probably fuck my baby mama”) and dying wishes (“Leave [my casket] open, even if my face get blasted”). The song’s haunting “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” mentality is reflected through Free 03’s frenetic sequencing. Longing, concern, and pangs of hurt dovetail on every verse.
South Central producer and Mustard affiliate Mike Free matches Greedo’s range, his varied beats landing somewhere between the hyper-focus of RonRonTheProducer’s work on Load It Up, Vol. 1 and the versatility of Kenny Beats’ production on Netflix & Deal. Free moves from anxious piano melodies (“Today,” “If I Die”) to breezy Mustard-inspired ballads (“I Can’t Control Myself”) to moody synth bangers (“Hype”) like he’s guiding listeners through a tour of Greedo’s career. In lesser hands, the tonal jumps might make Free 03 feel unfocused or scattershot, but instead they match and heighten the writing’s rush of blurred emotions.
These days, not a month goes by without a rapper facing prosecutors who split hairs over song lyrics or getting carried off on a stretcher. Greedo is aware of how lucky he is to be out and breathing, and on Free 03, his voice doesn’t sound at all weathered by the turmoil he’s experienced. He sounds anxious but ready to return to the world, keeping his guard up but making his intentions clear. Vocals on the older and newer songs clash sonically—an occupational hazard, all things considered—but both work to show the L.A. folk hero’s resilience. Greedo is now a free man, having served nearly a quarter of his original 20-year sentence. Free 03 captures both the joy and the trepidation that come with that freedom.

CORRECTION: Free 03 came out three days before 03 Greedo’s release from prison; it is not his first post-release tape. This review has been updated.


At 80 years old, Carla Bley remains a vital force as a pianist, composer, and improviser, mixing knowingly wry moments with a sense of mystery.

Andando el Tiempo

Bandleader, pianist, and composer Carla Bley’s prowess isn’t difficult to identify or appreciate. From the outset of her long career, she has created memorable tunes like “Ida Lupino”—a song that appeared on an early album by her onetime husband Paul Bley (and which also appeared on avant-guitarist Mary Halvorson’s recent set of covers). Though when it comes to her full-album statements, she's more difficult to pin down. Her humor can move between the slapstick and the wry. She may stage a straightforwardly goofy album cover, or else use musical quotations in performance in a manner that feels both knowing and politically sincere—as with her work in the late Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra.
That mixture of immediacy and mystery quickly earned Bley a following in the worlds of jazz and new composition, one that has remained ardent over the decades. On 2013’s Trios, Bley took the step of letting in an outside producer—Manfred Eicher, the head of ECM Records (which has distributed Bley’s independent label offerings). That album looked back at some of Bley’s past compositional work with a trio that included her longtime bassist and partner Steve Swallow, as well as saxophonist Andy Sheppard.
The same players and producer come together again for Andando el Tiempo, this time to tackle an all-new program of music by Bley, with most of the set devoted to the three-movement composition that gives the album its title. The pianist’s liner notes tell us that sections of this work each “represent stages of recovery from addiction.” Opening track “Sin Fin” finds Bley’s piano spiraling through abstracted tango riffs, her harmonic interplay with the other instruments occupying a frustrated-sounding middle ground, never sounding either totally ebullient or fully despondent. Keening, sorrowful phrases set the tone for a slower middle section, “Potación de Guaya.”
The third movement launches with a striking bit of contrast: a joyous sweep of the piano’s keys, suggesting a strutting exit from the world of addiction. (Bley writes that this bit represents a return to “a healthy and sustainable life”). But all is not automatically set to rights by virtue of the narrative arc; staggered bits of phrases, repeated with a stubbornness, suggest the effort that goes into Bley’s happy ending.
Not everything on the album is this weighty. When titling “Saints Alive!,” Bley says she was inspired by the “expression used by old ladies sitting on the porch in the cool of the evening when they exchanged especially juicy gossip.” The gently swaying piece doesn’t seem particularly scandalized—instead sounding warmly conversational (especially in the communion between Bley’s chords and Swallow’s tender, high-register bass playing). It seems like a song that might be destined to reach “jazz standard” status, alongside “Ida Lupino,” a few decades down the road. Even when she’s not throttling into avant-garde theatrics (as on her early-career highlight Escalator Over the Hill) or writing music for Pink Floyd drummer Nick Mason, the casual strangeness of Bley’s aesthetic has been a constant. At 80 years of age, she remains an individual—and still composes like a born melodist, too.


At its best, the fifth album from the UK indie-rock stalwarts is sleek, catchy, and enjoyably overwrought, the sound of a snappy hype band no longer burdened by relevance.

Always Ascending

Given their avuncular status in British rock, it’s easy to forget that Franz Ferdinand swept into the previous decade as indie-rock insurgents. Driving their self-titled 2004 debut was a desire to “make records that girls can dance to,” a superficial pronouncement with subtext: Here was a band to reject British indie’s boys-club culture, slyly mock scrappy romantics like the Libertines, and establish a smart, sexy, metropolitan counterpart.
Soon after their arrival, two albums by rising bands refashioned Franz-ian principles to broaden the UK indie-rock scene. Hot Chip’s second LP, The Warning, elevated their funk and disco flourishes by making songs people actually danced to, rather than stiffly thrusting their shoulders; one-upping Franz’s playful homoeroticism, meanwhile, Wild Beasts’ Limbo, Panto crafted an entire aesthetic from fragments of shattered machismo. Outwitted on both fronts—and outsold by Arctic Monkeys—the adopted Scots released a pair of uneventful albums in the next eight years, followed, in 2015, by FFS, a fun if forgettable collaboration with art-pop mavericks Sparks.
For their fifth album, Always Ascending, Franz frontman Alex Kapranos says he wants to “make dance music but play it as a raw band”—a revival of their founding principle, even as they say goodbye to their founding guitarist, Nick McCarthy. But anyone hoping the fresh blood would restore a sense of mischief might be disappointed: The return of synths and disco-ish atmospherics serves, unsurprisingly, to obscure the fact that a nontrivial reinvention still eludes them. But to their credit, Franz Ferdinand are persistently resourceful, and in their theatrical suave and helter-skelter choruses there lingers an obvious knack for starting fires armed only with indie-pop panache.
The best song here is also the most classically Franz in spirit, albeit rendered via sci-fi rockabilly in several undanceable time signatures. After some repetition of a ridiculous hook—”I’m a lazy boy/Yes, a lazy boy/Lazy in the evening boy,” etc.—“Lazy Boy” becomes both a satire and exemplar of pop inanity, syncing with the artificial heartbeat that’s always pulsed through their finest work. “Am I gonna get up-ah?” asks Kapranos’ showboating protagonist, loosely channeling Mark E. Smith. “Never!” he answers, winningly.
The effect dwindles on would-be anthems like “Finally,” which has just enough pizzazz to redeem the serviceable songwriting, while the title track shows what happens when their nerdy ideas overflow, to sometimes joyful effect. “The shepherd misleads so you think you’re transcending,” Kapranos chants, punning on the Shepard tone—a seemingly unending aural illusion—escalating in the song’s background. “It’s never gonna resolve,” he yelps in the chorus, laboring the metaphor a little. But it’s all sleek, catchy, and enjoyably overwrought, the sound of a snappy hype band no longer burdened by relevance.
Some problems arise when they pivot to the current state of things, threatening to veer into an Everything Now moment. There’s the Tinder-skewering “Glimpse of Love,” which whips together a glittery new-wave confection before throwing up a chorus of smug irony: “I need love, so someone better bring me a photographer.” That song’s sibling is “The Academy Award,” a gorgeous and gloomy ballad with the subtlety of Father John Misty writing for late-’60s Scott Walker. Its chorus—“The Academy Award for good times goes to you”—comes off less like social commentary than an unsolicited dad joke, but the chanson mood is dusty and French enough to charm.
In truth, charm might be Franz Ferdinand’s last unblunted asset in 2018. Unwilling to plunge into something more personal, or at least cannibalize their obsolescence for material, the band behind Always Ascending sound unspectacular, their pop sensibilities shorn of the epicurean flair that made them iconic. It’s not that they lack ideas—songs like “Huck and Jim” hint at a band more musically and politically raucous—but while the purpose is there, it all sounds gray and spectral, the mild offerings of a contrarian pop gang who lost interest in showing off.


The New York band takes the downtempo R&B so familiar from mood-based playlists and makes it strange, using microtonal tunings and fretless bass to tweak synth pop’s conventions.

192

If you’ve spent any time recently poking through streaming services’ editorial playlists—particularly ones with the word “chill” in the title—you’re likely acquainted with the so-called Spotify sound. It’s moderately paced, laden with jazzy major 7th chords, and smooth as the rounded edges of a plastic phone case. Though it’s the default instrumental palette for those taking care not to interrupt your late-night cram session, New York quintet Erica Eso have managed to use the sound’s unobtrusiveness to their advantage, crafting hushed alt-R&B that’s replete with avant-garde sleight of hand. 192 is their third and best album to date, lifting the synth-pop zeitgeist’s hood and tinkering with the engine underneath.
Led by composer Weston Minissali, who previously played synthesizer in quirky prog outfit Cloud Becomes Your Hand, Erica Eso’s songwriting probes the gaps between Western 12-tone intervals. The band uses microtonal keyboards and fretless bass to conjure harmonies that are familiar but subtly askew. “Yolk,” 192’s second single, orbits a fractured drum-machine beat, assembling organ chords note by note. Even Minissali’s verses feel fragmented, their stuttering syllables spilling from one line to the next. “I’m covered in yolk, the tide’s comin’ in/I got so close an animal screamed,” Minissali sings, contrasting visceral imagery against the band’s airy textures.
“Y.L.M.E.” establishes a similar juxtaposition early on, depicting Erica Eso’s music as an escape from the sustained tragedy of life in the 2020s: “I paint a pretty picture when I’m at home/While my nation’s jaws recoil, spit blood and foam.” Minissali trades lines back and forth with co-lead singer Angelica Bess, intertwined voices fading in and out of focus; a sense of uncertainty grows within the band’s bubble of ambient synth. On “Opening Tumble,” the band’s tempo undulates beneath the song’s cozy refrain, shifting like a waterbed.
Entering the record’s final stretch, the band reins in its glitchy rhythms to make a celebratory, krautrock-inspired sprint to the finish line. On “O Ocean,” Nathaniel Morgan and Rhonda Lowry lay down a classic motorik groove, providing a clean canvas for the rest of the band to splash with vaporous sound design. It’s the record’s steadiest tune, only making two brief detours into pitched-down half time, but it’s an earned break from their more cerebral songcraft—an opportunity for Minissali and fellow keyboardist Lydia Velichkovski to unload their unused patches and riffs in a single cathartic burst.
Two-part coda “Acclaimed Evacuation” continues this foray into early-’70s prog rock, but Erica Eso adhere a bit too closely to the grandiosity of their influences, sacrificing their loose, exploratory appeal. The first movement, a quasi-orchestral interlude, is uncharacteristically formal for the group. Blunting the creative force of “Pt. 2,” it’s almost cinematic, peppered with pizzicato strings and fluttering tones that resemble telegraph messages.
On the surface, Erica Eso appear to be an outlier on Chicago’s Hausu Mountain Records: a proper indie-rock band among a roster of experimental musicians who revel in abstraction. While their work doesn’t immediately resemble the glitchy Sega Genesis soundscapes of Mukqs or the metal-infused smooth jazz Fire-Toolz, the intent is still the same: to incrementally tweak the familiar—the pedestrian, even—until it yields the unease that lay dormant all this time.


After the complex programming of last year’s Patterns of Consciousness, the Berlin-based composer explores new realms with her modular synthesizer, incorporating cello, voice, and doom-laden drones.

Caterina Barbieri: Born Again in the Voltage

Born Again in the Voltage

The modular synthesizer is experiencing a renaissance. A new generation of fans has embraced the instrument, revitalizing the careers of old masters like Suzanne Ciani and Morton Subotnick and heralding new innovations like Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith’s kaleidoscopic pop. As modular systems become more affordable for young producers, they have permeated the electronic scene from the dancefloor to the chill-out room. Since releasing her breakthrough album, Patterns of Consciousness, last year, the Italian-born, Berlin-based virtuoso Caterina Barbieri has become one of the modular synth’s brightest and most singular new voices.
Created using the deceptively minimal set-up of just sequencer and harmonic oscillator, Patterns of Consciousness found Barbieri employing light-speed arpeggios and repetitive synth melodies designed to scramble the listener’s sense of perception. The subtlest variations deliver an overwhelming impact, while mind-altering, algorithmically complex patterns allow her to play with perceptual expectations. But none of that immaculate math accounts for the cathartic and often deeply emotional weight Patterns shows in moments like 16-minute closer “Gravity That Binds.” Barbieri’s new album, Born Again in the Voltage, was recorded from 2014 to 2015, prior to Patterns, but it offers an equally compelling perspective.
If each of Patterns’ alternately maximalist and meditative soundscapes acted as universes unto themselves, the four tracks on Voltage feel like one carefully arranged suite. The album opens far from any kosmische tones with “Human Developers,” where Barbieri employs a Buchla 200 modular system (her weapon of choice throughout Voltage) to produce sinister drones more in line with Dylan Carlson’s guitar on Earth 2. Antonello Manzo’s cello only adds to the doom-metal atmosphere as Barbieri’s drones crash and rumble like a rocket engine before the heaviness boils up into clusters of melody. Lift off.
At the heart of the album are two tracks showing Barbieri’s skill in sculpting drones to convey tremendous feeling. A tense, mournful duet with Manzo’s cello on “Rendering Intuitions” picks up the pieces following the quaking opener and then rises into the brighter “How to Decode an Illusion,” which reveals a slowly evolving melody. The track’s raw synth tone and gentle progression give it a quality similar to the aliens’ greeting in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, while waves of white noise hiss and  hover in the background, far enough away to seem soft. It’s a striking shift from the album’s opening.
Barbieri’s trajectory over those first three tracks is as carefully plotted as Patterns’ algorithms, but Voltage’s joyous finale comes as an unexpected explosion. The jubilant nine-minute track “We Access Only a Fraction” bursts with dizzying patterns and surging energy, creating the kind of overwhelming rush the album previously held back—and out of which comes Barbieri’s own voice. It’s the first instance of singing in any of the composer’s recorded work (her debut, Vertical, includes a spoken-word contribution from fellow composer Ellen Arkbro), but her featherlight vocalizations dance over the whirling arpeggios as if they’ve always belonged there. It’s an astonishing  moment, a track pulled from the past that leaves her future excitingly open. It all confirms Born Again in the Voltage as an essential document of contemporary modular-synth music from one of the instrument’s great new explorers.


On her promising, impressively self-produced second EP, Margaret Sohn addresses youthful self-doubt with flair, pairing punchy indie rock with subtle electronic flourishes.

Impostor EP

In her book Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, the poet and critic Cathy Park Hong winces thinking about the time she’s logged at insufferable, majority-white poetry readings. You can envision the scene: the pathetic whoops following a routine “How’s everyone doing tonight”; the nauseating mmms of recognition; the grainy, solemn “poet’s voice” intended to patch over defective writing. But worse than white peoples’ self-seriousness, Hong thinks, is the shameful reality that she still performs for their approval. At the readings, she radiates difference. No matter how hard she strives to meet the craft’s lofty ideals—transcending identity, speaking boldly to the universal—Hong can’t escape her particularities as an Asian woman.
Racial alienation, sweeping artistic standards, the nagging suspicion of one’s own fraudulence—all of this comes to the fore on Margaret Sohn’s second EP as Miss Grit, Impostor. Despite training at the guitar for 16 years and studying music technology at NYU, the 21-year-old Sohn felt so uneasy about the initial praise for her debut, Talk Talk, that she imagined herself as “someone who was impersonating a musician.” Her sense of disjuncture—between her real and imagined selves, between her Korean and white identities—originated from her awkward upbringing as a mixed person growing up in white suburban Michigan. On her promising, impressively self-produced six-song EP, Sohn addresses youthful self-doubt with flair and polish.
Lyrically, Sohn is somewhat withholding, maintaining the taut composure of an outsider sizing up strangers at a party. “Buy the Banter” is a pitiless, almost Machiavellian analysis of power relations: “Our work pays the water tank for nothing,” she growls, willing herself rather opaquely to keep playing the ruling class’ games. Rather than divulging intimate feelings, or probing past events with serrated humor, her preferred strategy is to let pointed mantras accumulate weight and then dissolve through repetition. Across the last three or so minutes of the grungy “Blonde,” the only statement she provides is one of resignation: “I have nothing to say.” It’s offered mildly at first, as if she’s merely shrugging off a speaking role in a class presentation. But after a 40-plus-second instrumental break—during which crashing drums and guitars meet funky, computerized flourishes—it returns again with heightening anguish. By the very end, pitch-shifted to a sludgy crawl, her wail has completely deflated.
This trailing outro—which could be abridged slightly—parallels the pile-up of slowly disintegrating “nobody”s at the end of Mitski’s “Nobody.” Each persisting “no”—no-body, no-thing—is a cruel diminishment, returning again and again to batter its subject into oblivion. Sohn shares the older indie rocker’s steely poise and inwardness; their similarities show clearly on the existential “Don’t Wander,” where the arrangement skips forward with synthetic burbles and light clacks, but it’s Sohn’s searching, echoing voice that guides the song forward: “Reaching out for my own hand,” she sings tentatively, as if trying to make out shapes in fog. Sohn’s other obvious forebear is St. Vincent, whose influence can be found in the EP’s wiry guitar work and leaping, choral-like melodies. Sohn, like St. Vincent, refuses to pack her songs into tidy, predictable shapes, instead allowing them to sprawl and rip.
The guitar-based arrangements on Impostor are Sohn’s bolder friend, roughening up her observations, imbuing them with gravity. “Dark Side of the Party” is her early-twenties social-anxiety anthem, in which she side-eyes sparkling water and struggles to get wasted. The opening is blustery and swirly, like you’re watching, dazed, as light scatters from sequins onto the floor. Stabs of electric guitar counterbalance somewhat saccharine confessions—“I can’t tell hearts from spare parts,” she cries—and the big, explosive comedown at the chorus perfectly mirrors the chaos of being shoved around. Even better is Impostor’s thrashing, magnetic title track, on which Sohn confronts her fear of fraudulence most directly, speaking as if her thoughts are racing on stage: “They’re clapping awfully loud/For no tribulations or trials.” Like “Blonde,” “Impostor” cools down at the billowing outro, all atmospheric glitter and gentle guitar strums. “Let ’em smile,” she murmurs, before pivoting to a bolder claim: “Let me smile.” Despite her fears, Sohn is not a fraud impersonating a musician—just a musician, finally grasping what it is she has to say.

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On his latest solo collection, the Hold Steady frontman summons vast emotions from different points along the way to rock bottom.

A Legacy of Rentals

Jimmy Webb was taking a solitary drive when he came up with the idea for “Wichita Lineman,” one of the loneliest, most romantic songs in the history of pop music. As the young songwriter watched endless phone lines passing along the highway, he noticed a lone figure working among them and considered what might be going through his head, way up among the clouds. “Look there’s this great soul, and there’s this great aching, and this great loneliness inside this person and we’re all like that,” Webb reflected decades later. “We all have this capacity for these huge feelings.”
Craig Finn seems to reach a similar conclusion wherever he goes—and he goes to some pretty depressing places. On his latest solo album, A Legacy of Rentals, the 50-year-old songwriter summons vast emotions from different points along the way to rock bottom. In “A Break From the Barrage,” our protagonist is passed out drunk and alone at a superhero matinee in a movie theater at a suburban mall. In “The Year We Fell Behind,” a couple is despondent and overmedicated in their neglected home, where the air grows thick with houseflies and unspoken resentment. In the closing song, the narrator stands among the wreckage after a wild party and surveys the destruction: “This is what it looks like when we’re joyful,” he reminds himself.
Taking inspiration from songs like “Wichita Lineman,” Finn worked with producer Josh Kaufman to coat the music in a sweet, sentimental glow that adds a layer of longing and wonder to his solitary stories. It is his first release to prominently feature strings—a 14-piece orchestra arranged by Trey Pollard at Richmond, Virginia’s Spacebomb studio. And although they have worked together in the past, Cassandra Jenkins’ presence feels newly crucial to the push-and-pull of these narratives. In elaborate story-songs like “Messing With the Settings” and “A Break From the Barrage,” she adds bursts of melody between the desperate spirals of Finn’s spoken-word delivery; on a more traditional ballad like “The Year We Fell Behind,” their voices fall into a kind of round, reaching a climax in the closing 90 seconds that feels uniquely beautiful within his catalog.
Granted, the word “beautiful” means something different in these songs than any of Finn’s past records. With his most recognizable project, the Hold Steady, acoustic instruments and tender subject matter often appeared like intermissions—a moment to catch your breath, to briefly let in the light to see what these characters were blocking out with their reckless behavior and emotional grandeur. A Legacy of Rentals follows what Finn has called a trilogy of solo records—2015’s Faith in the Future, 2017’s We All Want the Same Things, and 2019’s I Need a New War—and it feels like a fresh start, building from those albums’ increasingly adventurous sound and their turn toward unglamorous, real-life characters.
The writing remains the main attraction in Finn’s work, and both as a storyteller and a rock songwriter, he has never sounded more in control. From the beginning, he had a gift for meticulous, vivid world-building, and his wordplay has gotten tighter as his subjects have come down to earth: “He dreams of sweeping vistas/And machines that sweep the streets,” goes a line in “Curtis & Shepard,” which tells us everything we need to know about the central character’s suffocating lifestyle. Riding a groovy bassline and drum loop that finds the middle ground between “Walk on the Wild Side” and “Streets of Philadelphia,” the density of his rhymes builds with the music, bringing us into the character’s mind as opposed to merely narrating the view.
In a 2021 interview, about a year after lockdown first started, Finn discussed the way it had impacted his songwriting, which for so long was based on traveling and meeting people—hearing their stories, leaving his comfort zone, following conversations to surprising ends. In a press release for the album, he notes that his partner is a hospital nurse, and in the early stages of the pandemic, he was advised to live separately from her to avoid contamination. Coupled with the deaths of several close friends during this time, the circumstances led to an uncommonly dark collection in his body of work, which often strives for hope, celebration, and community. These days, he’s more likely just to shut the blinds and go back to bed: “When the devil starts to show up in your dreams/Then it’s hard to get your dreams back,” he observes sadly in “The Amarillo Kid.”
And yet, “The Amarillo Kid” is one of the most upbeat songs here, with the kind of hummable, singalong chorus that Finn usually reserves for the Hold Steady. The same way his writing is dense with layers and allusions—note each use of the term “fish tank,” and the perspective from which each character observes it—the music often complicates his message, creating a new source of tension. I keep returning to those closing moments of “The Year We Fell Behind,” where Finn and Jenkins’ voices build to a haunted call-and-response. “The devil makes his money on the small moves,” she sings. “All at once has never been his style.” In the background, the strings crescendo toward a happy ending but the chords never resolve for too long, creating the effect of a never-ending stairwell. On any given listen, you might imagine their voices climbing upward or tumbling down, growing increasingly in sync or drifting apart. Finn knows the truth is always somewhere in between.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Teedra Moses’ silken debut, a cult classic of 2000s R&B.

Complex Simplicity

The mid-2000s were an explosive era for women in R&B. The decade of shiny-suit rap had elevated hook queens to star status, while the maturing neo-soul movement was becoming more playful and varied. The energy of a new millennium had inspired a more direct approach, and as the Neptunes began to define pop radio, beats across the board were acquiring a spacy sheen. The R&B mixtape circuit was thriving like never before, with DJs and labels alike aware that even crooned ballads had to pop with the streets first. New sounds seemed to evolve across every subgenre, no matter if the artist was established or emerging. There were big, shiny soul statements (Beyoncé, Amerie, Nicole Wray), songwriting innovators rooted in tradition (Keyshia Cole, Brandy), a whole crop of Mary J. Blige-informed mixtape one-offs (Deemi was my favorite), and of course Mary J. Blige herself. The pop-R&B spectrum was particularly fruitful, defined by an experimental, gossamer production aesthetic that gestured towards the synth smoothness of the early ’80s, glossed up by technological advances in production.
The clear citadel of this shift was Mariah Carey’s 2005 masterpiece The Emancipation of Mimi—a suite of songs whose high-shine production elevated the glittering effervescence of Carey’s harmonic range and triple-time cadences. It arrived just after Kelis dropped the gleaming Tasty, and just before The-Dream came along and blasted radio playlists with candy paint. But the influential, somewhat obscure indie-label predecessor to all of this was Complex Simplicity, the full-length debut from the lithe-sounding singer and songwriter Teedra Moses, a low-key powerhouse from New Orleans. Released a year before Emancipation, Moses’ album exemplified a sea change, and continues to enjoy cult classic status among R&B obsessives and fellow musicians alike.
Moses had spent years writing the songs that would become Complex Simplicity, but by the time it dropped, she and her producer collaborator, Paul Poli, were already influencing the charts with other artists. Working alongside a young vocal arranger named Shaffer Smith, who would eventually be better known as Ne-Yo, the duo had co-written “Still in Love,” the opening track on Nivea’s 2001 debut, as well as the sensual, charango-sampling “Dip It Low” for Christina Milian. (In a neat example of 2000s messiness and the insularity of the music industry, both Nivea and Milian would later marry, then divorce, The-Dream.) “Dip It Low,” a nasty midtempo dance single that practically body-rolled its way onto the charts, remains Milian’s biggest hit and one of the marquee tracks in a mid-2000s crop of airy, dancefloor-focused singles by burgeoning pop starlets like Ciara, Cassie, Teairra Marí, and Nina Sky that borrowed chutzpah from hip-hop and crunk. These women were starting to break out of the familiar R&B rubric of love and heartbreak, proving their relative youth wasn’t a hindrance to demanding what they wanted, and getting it.
But Moses was 27, writing all her own music, embarking on her second career—she had abandoned a path as a fashion stylist after breaking her leg on the job—and already a mother to twin sons with the rapper Ras Kass. The confidence endemic to a little life experience broke through in her songwriting, and though she wrote evocatively about matters of the heart, there was a depth of soul and resonance within her easy, airy soprano. On “You’ll Never Find (A Better Woman),” which sweetened a majestic boom bap and a verse by Jadakiss, she made plain the painful nuances of an on-again/off-again relationship (a “ghetto love affair”), its chorus as much an admonishment to her man as a reassurance to herself. The vocal arrangements formed simple poetic stanzas, an ode to her inner conflict:
You’ll never find
A better woman
Or a bigger fool
[Tell me what you know about breaking up and getting back together]
You’ll never find
A better woman
Or a bigger fool
[Tell me what you know about love]
The track worked on radio at the time, or at least it did on New York’s then-legendary Hot 97, in part because of Jadakiss’ ubiquity, but also because the songwriting was both of the moment and timeless. Though Moses grew up with a gospel singer mother who tried to keep her away from most secular music, she matches vocal runs and vibes with ’80s soul, and felt indebted to Aaliyah: “I didn’t really want to come in and change nothing,” she told Vibe in 2019. “I just wanted to make an album that sounded like ‘Rock the Boat.’” The slinky sensuality of that classic is stamped all over Complex Simplicity, whether on a molasses-tempoed entreaty to love (“Be Your Girl,” which she later admitted was about her fantasy crush on Nas), a sultry song about sticking in a difficult coupling solely because of her man’s stroke game (“Backstroke,” though the track is hardly about being dickmatized), or just grappling with age-old existential questions of legacy and the afterlife (the stunning, melancholy “Last Day”). Even “Take Me,” a Raphael Saadiq-featuring love jam that showcases his signature classic-soul pocket, mirrors the mahogany rollick of an Aaliyah B-side, with Moses chirping out the chorus in a nostalgic fever dream. She practically cascades: “Take me/Back to the day/When you made me fall.”
While each track is silken and polished, Complex Simplicity remains totally approachable, Moses’ diaristic lyrics arranged as if the phrasing pauses are exactly where she turned the page in her notebook. On “Caution,” which she credits Ne-Yo for helping spiff up, she slips into a Cherrelle-style groove and vamps around her own irresistibility: “I don’t think you realize/That you/You don’t even have a chance/When I spit my G at you I bet you won’t know how to act.” And the tense crunk track “You Better Tell Her” details her reaction when that attraction goes south with infidelity: “Listen daddy, I’m too cute to fight/You better get that bitch told tonight.”
Lil Jon produced the latter track with a minimalist, dirty-South crunch, and the crunk godfather’s presence might paradoxically explain why Complex Simplicity followed the trajectory of a cult classic. At the time, New York-based record label TVT was acting as a clearinghouse for the crunk explosion and Southern rap stars in general, releasing hit records by Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz and the Ying Yang Twins, as well as albums by Yo Gotti, Jacki-O, and Pitbull’s entire pre-megaclub discography. (Pitbull and Lil Scrappy appear on a remix of “You Better Tell Her.”) While their crunk stable was solid, they weren’t known so much for R&B, a genre with a reputation for difficulty in breaking new talent—women artists, for one, cost labels more money in the form of styling and glam that men weren’t expected to maintain.
Compared to its major-label counterparts, TVT’s promotional abilities were necessarily limited. Moses dropped just one Hype Williams-directed video, for “Be Your Girl,” and opened on a small, Seagram’s-sponsored tour with CeeLo and Tweet before TVT went bankrupt, having lost a fight over Pitbull’s back catalog. Still, Complex Simplicity has reverberated through the years and its impact remains widely felt: Kaytranada’s 2018 take on “Be Your Girl” helped establish the producer as a maestro of the R&B club remix, and a wide range of singers like Katy B and Ari Lennox have cited Moses as an influence. (In January, SZA called Complex Simplicity a “flawless fuckin masterpiece.”)
Yet as Moses has evolved—three albums and several mixtapes in, she continues touring and releasing fantastic singles—it seems like Complex Simplicity’s cult status worked out the way it was supposed to. Moses sees the record almost like a personal blueprint: She told Vibe that in 2004 she had been a “little broken girl singing those songs, acting so tough,” and has now grown into the “confident woman that people thought they were listening to.” In retrospect, the album feels characteristic of a young woman just beginning to understand her own complexities and grasping to come into her own—a lilt of trepidation, perhaps, when asserting her man will “never find a better woman,” where one might expect a growl—but at 27, who isn’t? The certainty in her melodies and musicianship was always unwavering. The emotional resonance still hits. The timelessness is why it remains one of the best albums in R&B.


To celebrate the cult classic’s 50th anniversary, a new collection of Cat Stevens’ music for the film—including songs later covered by Elliott Smith and others—finally becomes widely available.

Yusuf / Cat Stevens: Harold and Maude (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Hal Ashby’s 1971 film Harold and Maude initially flopped because its ideal audience was just being born. The script by Colin Higgins, who would later write and direct movies including Foul Play and 9 to 5, told the story of the relationship between depressed and suicide-obsessed 19-year-old Harold, played by Bud Cort, and the cheerful 79-year-old Maude, played by Ruth Gordon. Harold and Maude poked fun at those living the straight life and made pointed critiques at the military and the status obsessions of the privileged. One set piece laid out the ethical imperative of ecology and another suggested that sexual expression was a path to freedom and understanding. On paper, it seemed like exactly the kind of film the counterculture would embrace.
The timing was off, though, and the film tanked, both commercially and critically. Harold and Maude struck critics as cloying and audiences went elsewhere. But it built a cult following in second-run houses through the 1970s and reached a new audience a few years later, when the children of those who rejected it upon release found the film’s VHS box on the wire shelving of their local video rental shops. This younger cohort was just the right age to discover the movie—early to mid teens, when one experiences the first flush of existential angst and, perhaps, mixes excitement about the wonders of the world, like Maude, with moments of self-doubt and despair, like Harold. Watch it now, and you may notice that Harold and Maude looks like an indie flick from the 1980s or ’90s. An era of filmmakers, including Wes Anderson, Mike Mills, and Paul Thomas Anderson, found Ashby’s film seeping into their own work.
The surprising thing about the film’s soundtrack is that it didn’t exist until 2007. In the movie, the songs by Cat Stevens serve as a kind of Greek chorus, reflecting Harold’s spiritual development and the evolution of their relationship from friendship to romance. (Stevens, born Steven Georgiou, converted to Islam in 1978 and took the name Yusuf, but it’s his stage name that appears on this record’s cover.) The music is so integral to the story it would have been easy to assume that a soundtrack had existed all along.
But Stevens was hitting a peak in popularity when Ashby approached him about using his songs, and he worried that the soundtrack, which compiled material from the two records he released in 1970, Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman, might confuse his audience. So no official soundtrack album was issued until 2007, when Cameron Crowe assembled a limited reissue on his Vinyl Films label. Now, a different assemblage put together for the film’s 50th anniversary finally makes it widely available.
To listen to Cat Stevens is to figure out where you stand on music whose earnestness tips over into naïveté. If you love his work, you almost certainly need to have gone through a time as a young person where you obsess about what life means and what makes it worth living—to “take the world apart and figure out how it works,” as Doug Martsch put it in Built to Spill’s “Car.” And it probably helps if that surge of curiosity about exploration was accompanied by at least a little joy. And—this is crucial—you would need the capacity to look back on this heady period and feel some love and empathy for the person who dreamed those dreams. If all that comes together, you may find much to admire in this collection, which frames a world where love is better than a song, the answer lies within, you think you’ve seen the light, there’s a million things to be, and Lord, though your body has been a good friend, you won’t need it when you reach the end.
Two of these songs were sketched out before Harold and Maude but completed once Ashby had enlisted Stevens for the soundtrack, and both are inseparable from the film. “Don’t Be Shy,” just a fragment when Stevens was first contacted by Ashby, is a plea to tell the world who you are and what you need; it features a beautifully delicate piano part that sounds like raindrops. “If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out” is its companion, and Ashby thought so much of it he made recurring use of it in the film and allowed his characters to sing it on screen.
The rest of Stevens’ songs were recorded before Harold and Maude and placed on his albums, yet they, too, now belong to the film’s world. Where these pieces are mostly about human connection, “Miles From Nowhere” and “On the Road to Find Out” suggest that the search for meaning is a journey ultimately taken alone. “Where Do the Children Play?”is a song about how technology distracts us from the things that really matter. It sounds absurd when you remember it was written over 50 years ago, but the simple beauty of the melody convinces you that Stevens may have had a point. And then there’s “Trouble,” initially a deep cut from Mona Bone Jakon, which after its use in Harold and Maude became a kind of alt-folk standard.
The soundtrack works as an album because it distills the most important aspects of Stevens’ songwriting to its essence. That it contains fragments of dialogue and incidental music from the film only adds to its appeal. Once you’ve seen the movie a few times, you can’t hear these songs without remembering the scenes in which they played, like when Maude asks Harold what kind of flower he wishes to be: He chooses the daisy because “they’re all alike” and she reminds him that each of them is unique as the opening strums of “Where Do the Children Play?” enter. The added sound from the film means the LP functions a bit like one of those pre-video ’70s LPs that allowed you to “own” a version of a movie in audio form.
Stevens was an enormous star during the ascendant singer-songwriter era of the early ’70s, but his decades away from the public eye put him in an unusual position. For a long time, you’d be most likely to encounter his work on an adult contemporary radio station or in the used record bins. But the more his music was identified with Ashby’s film, the more it became a body of work worthy of rediscovery.
In the movie, “Trouble” is heard near the end, after Harold’s world has been shattered. It was always a great song, but its use in the film gave it an extra layer of resonance. In the ’90s, two artists of the generation that rediscovered Harold and Maude heard something special in “Trouble.” Elliott Smith’s cover landed on the soundtrack to Mike Mills’ Thumbsucker, and Kristin Hersh’s spellbinding take landed on her 2001 album Sunny Border Blue. You can hear in those versions what the movie and Stevens’ music—they exist as one, really—meant to those who found it later, when they needed to hear gently earnest music about fundamental human emotions.

Buy: Rough Trade


As he makes a long-awaited return to music, Bobby Shmurda’s irrepressible charisma comes up against foggy raps and some sloppy production choices.

BodBoy EP

In 2014, amid a New York rap landscape increasingly devoid of mythological stories, Bobby Shmurda felt like the last of a dying breed. Though his ascension took place on the now-defunct platform Vine, Shmurda and his GS9 compatriots displayed a magnetism that could have extended past 15 minutes. The meme-ification of his signature song “Hot Nigga” (which peaked at No. 6 on the Hot 100) collided with his boisterous, bass-knocking performances on “Bobby Bitch” and Rowdy Rebel’s “Computers,” forming the summer of Shmurda. But that December, in the process of recording a formal debut, Shmurda was arrested and eventually sentenced to seven years in prison, cutting off his meteoric rise and freezing the progression of his artistry in its infancy.
The legend of Shmurda, who won acceptance from the city’s youth and old guard without pandering to either crowd, maintained his candidacy for the “King of New York” crown regardless. Without an album, his fledgling career was bolstered only by charisma and cockiness. But each track seemed to have an innate spark that made you feel as though you were witness to a bright new star. There was nothing revolutionary—just an overflowing personality laced with beats with all the bells and whistles. The new BodBoy EP, Shmurda’s first independent project since his release from prison in February 2021 and a preview of his promised debut Ready to Live, attempts more of the same. But it registers as little more than a rehashing of his previous peak, with a laundry list of boasts and threats that fail to capture the feeling from days of yore.
On paper, Shmurda follows a foolproof plan: Stick to what you know. But recreating prior success requires precise execution, and Bodboy’s sloppiness illuminates faults obscured in the fervor of 2014. “Hoochie Daddy,” a mad grab at TikTok virality with sped-up background vocals and bastardized Jersey club production, is a wholly insulting listen. “From the Slums,” with its crashing piano crescendo and pounding bass, feels ripped from a 2010s mixtape playing through a dirty earbud in Times Square. Shmurda runs tirelessly along the production’s rapid pace, interjecting breathy ad-libs that cloud his raps rather than shining through. Lines mush together, making stream-of-consciousness bars sound like your friend freestyling at the afters at 2 a.m. You don’t come to a Bobby Shmurda song for depth and capital L lyricism, but even if you can comprehend his bars, you’d be hard-pressed to find a cache of memorable phrases. His willingness to say whatever comes to mind produces some funny moments (“’Cause I was shooting in my slippers in the middle of the street,” he spits on “BodMon”), but the aimless rambles get old quick.
Yet there are joyful instances when Shmurda’s slapstick absurdity intersects with production forays into new regional territory. He treats the blaring production of “Glock Inside,” which sounds almost as if it were ripped from a Duke Deuce project, as his personal playground. The first thing we hear him say—“Jumped out my momma pussy straight into the trap”—is undeniably hilarious. His childish teasing comes off as endearing, and his one-liners shoot an acceptable percentage from the field. The hook of “Whole Brick” is a beacon that sounds like it should play every time he enters a room: When he shouts “I’m about to cop a whole brick!” alongside a legion of background voices, it feels like the celebration that his return to music ought to be.


The Philly rapper examines growth and longing with a mature assuredness, imbuing her latest album with moments of modest warmth.

Candid

Philadelphia vocalist Ivy Sole is a master of the slow burn. Her narratives unfold in the early, indefinite stages of partnership, attuned to the little signals and concessions upon which affection and submission rely. Her restrained ballads form a diametric counterpoint to the rapturous deliverance favored by dream-pop acts such as Now, Now and Carly Rae Jepsen. Where those artists’ songs alight upon a transcendent, in-the-moment urgency, Sole dwells in the languid aftermath, asking: Now what?
“See, a fault is a beginning, and a fault is an end/We could talk eroding patience, or give lips to the wind,” she raps on “Nights Like This,” a pensive confessional from her latest album Candid. While the new record shares a spare sensibility with its predecessor, 2020’s cerebral SOUTHPAW EP, its wistful instrumentals and easy transitions make for a brighter listen. On “Bamboo,” synthetic drums and muted horns are layered with a light electro-funk touch; the yearning “One More Night” is punctuated with soaring Jodeci-style harmonies. On downtempo tracks, Sole volleys between full-bodied melodies and conversational rapping. Even when she’s at her most laidback, the discursive bridges and interludes recall the winding arrangements of neo-soul maximalists like Res and Rahsaan Patterson.
The diaristic quality is curious given Candid’s lack of linear arcs. Consistent with Sole’s earlier work, the album’s digressions explore overarching themes of love and self-discovery. For all their placid ambiance, the reflections on faith and desire aren’t uncomplicated. An Ivy Leaguer raised in a Southern Christian tradition, Sole identifies as queer and non-binary; infatuation often leaves a trail of unanswered questions in its wake. “Dangerous” addresses an unrequited crush: “And if it sounds like worship, worst case, I’m a sinner/Seeking redemption in the haze of your glimmer.” Much of the album is relayed in the second person, and duets with Kingsley Ibeneche, Bathe, and Topaz Jones add dimension to missed connections, trains passing in the proverbial night.
The program is briefly suspended on Candid’s more hard-nosed rap tracks. On the double-time showcase “Chico,” Sole’s punchlines arrive with a battle rhymer’s sleight-of-hand; the Lil Wayne-inspired “Call Me” feels like a meta-exercise in mixtape acrobatics. Her wordy incantations straddle disparate traditions, but the polymath approach isn’t overly busy or scattered. While her sound complements second-wave neo-soul acts like Mereba and Yaya Bey, the compositions also resemble Oakland singer Mystic’s 2001 debut Cuts for Luck and Scars for Freedom, an eerily introspective record that balanced gospel-tinged melodies with steely rap verses. Throughout Candid, Sole examines growth and longing with an adult’s assuredness, imbuing disconsolate moments with a modest warmth. “Me and the truth, see, we’ve been closing the distance/You might hear yours, too, if you listen,” she sings on “Bamboo.” It’s music to sit with, content to let the action occur offscreen.


What Balearic revivalism does is create a single "genre" that can portray a whole host of different types of music in their best light, and here, Studio-- one of the best purveyors of nu-Balearic-- does the trick to tracks by Kylie Minogue, Love Is All, A Mountain of One, and Shout Out Louds, among others.

Yearbook 2

I'd played Studio's remix of Kylie Minogue's "2 Hearts" to a friend, promising with an evangelist's zeal that her mind would be blown. "It sounds like the Gipsy Kings," she replied in a neutral tone. It wasn't a complaint, but nor was it a compliment; perhaps she was simply commenting on the remarkable fact that someone would want to make a Kylie song sound like the Gipsy Kings, or the even more remarkable fact that Kylie herself would propagate the result. A few months later, over at her house with some friends, the familiar sound of Kylie's vocals and Studio's ringing guitars emerged in the background. The moment passed without comment, but I felt a small, irrational surge of satisfaction: somehow even "it sounds like the Gipsy Kings" had become a selling point.
Before people start rushing towards or away from this release on the assumption that they'll find a "Bamboleo" or two, I suspect "the Gipsy Kings" was shorthand for "lashings of Spanish guitar." But the style of the observation, rather than the content, is what matters: There's something about Studio that compels people to repeat this gesture, emphasizing the purposeless perversity of whatever sonic lineage they identify-- just replace "the Gipsy Kings" with "Sting" or "World Party," or whatever you like. It's not a surprising response: The most widespread and painfully boring critical line on "nu-Balearic" music is that its primary function is to render previously intolerable music tolerable-to-hipsters, redeeming Elton John or Paul Simon via the canny addition of a disco beat and some dub echo. This take isn't wrong, exactly, but it's the kind of sociological analysis that makes you hate the world a little bit more after reading it, rather like earnest discussions of how to woo soccer moms for votes. That, plus pretty much anyone who tries to take a position of knowing "I see through this" superiority towards hipsters is at first glance being hypocritical.
The kernel of truth here is this: What Balearic revivalism does is create a single "genre" that can portray a whole host of different types of music in their best light, giving a sense of second-order purpose to music whose functional purpose wasn't entirely clear previously. Perhaps it was too slow, too elaborate, either too songful or not songful enough, too cheesy or perhaps too self-important. Studio rate highly on all of these fronts: Too enraptured with grooves to be a proper rock band, but too attached to morose rock grandstanding not to be; too torpid and dreamy to be a proper dance outfit, but too in love with dancing to be anything else. More subtly, the Swedish duo's music verges on cheesy at the precise moments that it appears self-important (although it's a truism that these are frequently two sides of the same coin). Studio's self-importance is discomforting because it's never clear whether their reach exceeds the grasp or, rather, the act of reaching just a little too far is the entire point of their music. Half the thrills come from watching just how effectively they can deploy bombast.
Following on from Yearbook 1, a collection of their own songs, this second installment offers an abrupt left-hand turn by focusing on Studio's facility as remixers for others, and it's surprising to discover just how easily the Studio sound can be grafted onto the work of others with surprising versatility. Without their own despairing vocals, Studio sound less like the Cure listening to Fela Kuti on a beach in Ibiza, and rather closer to the emergent nu-Balearic norm of heavy, languorous disco grooves-- the 4x4 kick drum is surprisingly dominant, although not unwelcome. What distinguishes Studio's work from their peers, beyond their ever-present fetish for cascading sprays of iridescent guitar, is their prickly restlessness: Most of the inclusions here resist the temptation to coast on a strong groove, instead continually morphing through a kaleidoscopic succession of interlaced motifs like a Mandelbrot set.
Yearbook 2 alternates between one-offs (like the gentle summertime pop of their remake of the Shout Out Louds' "Impossible"-- the most conservative cut here) and a sort of staple Studio remix sound: mysterious, almost dark disco grooves populated by glistening synthesizers and glittering shards of the duo's trademark guitar. The quietly ominous epic treatment of A Mountain of One's "Brown Piano" and the broiling, dramatic take on Williams' "Love on a Real Train"-- they could almost be movements in a single piece-- win the day for the latter group, if only because their glowing eddies and curlicues of sound offer the most ostentatious display of the duo's strengths. As remixers, Studio are at their best when most tantric, when their grooves submit to the effervescent fluidity summed up in the title (and, vaguely, the sound) of Can's album Flow Motion, sliding inexorably forward from detail to detail on an endless plateau of simmering intensity.
Such is Studio's studio wizardry that it's easy to forget that they're also a rock band, especially when they're crafting such delicate, delectable avant-disco remixes. But it's the absence of Studio-as-themselves which ultimately makes Yearbook 2 a less captivating experience than its predecessor. On a track-by-track basis, this is as much a bonus as a drawback: Freed from the distractions of having to concoct songs, the duo can concentrate on eking out every drop of prettiness from their grooves, and there's a satisfying sense of aesthetic purity to the formal loveliness of much of their work here. But taken as an album, Yearbook 2 can seem emotionally flattened out when compared to its predecessor; there's nothing as gloriously wallowing as "West Side" or as unabashedly emotional as "Out There".
The one tune to transcend this dilemma entirely is the remix of "2 Hearts", perhaps because Studio have simply replaced one exaggerated song blueprint (moping pseudo-goth British indie rock) with another (ecstatic femme-pop). In fact, Studio's version ends up a better song than the source material, its relative spareness allowing Kylie's performance to shine with an intensity that is undetectable in the original's over-cluttered glam homage. Submerged in Studio's glittering guitar spiderwebs, supremely supine disco beats and endless layers of dub echo, Kylie's vocals are genuinely moving. All the glam ambiguity of the original is sensitively excised from this version: The song's deadpan sarcasm had no place amongst Studio's endless horizons of lovestruck earnestness. More than any other tracks here, "2 Hearts" successfully makes the argument for Studio as an in-house band for other pop outfits: a deadly-serious Scandinavian Sly & Robbie, if you will. Hopefully the duo won't be forced to make the choice between backroom boys and rock gods any time soon: More than just about anyone else they deserve to have their cake and eat it too.


The London art-rockers’ outstanding debut is a droll album full of surreal images, bizarre obsessions, and sense memories. The cumulative effect of Florence Shaw’s narration is inexplicably wonderful.

New Long Leg

In the video for “Scratchcard Lanyard,” Dry Cleaning vocalist Florence Shaw is a floating head in the world’s smallest dive bar. Her face takes up the whole stage, a perch from which she eyes the tiny puppet DJ and the tiny puppet bartender with mild disgust and confusion. She delivers a dry monologue in a wan, extremely British tone, subtly arching her eyebrows for emphasis. The whole affair carries an air of suspicion, with the slightest hint of deer in the headlights. The shot zooms out, and there’s the full band playing animatedly beside her; zoom in again, and it’s the Flo show. It’s a clever video, one that nods to the isolation of the pandemic, the media’s tendency to focus on the girl in the band, and of course, Shaw’s restrained performance style. “Do everything and feel nothing,” she intones, barely moving.
How does someone so static become the lead singer of a noisy rock band? The better question is, how do you deny the strange, funny charisma of someone like Florence Shaw? Just hearing her thoughts, expressed in the tone of a slightly sardonic narrator, was enough for her former art school friend Tom Dowse to suggest she join his new band back in 2017. Shaw, a visual artist more than a musician, was hesitant, but she was assured she could just talk instead of sing. Largely through the specificity of her affect and observations on the world, the band’s debut album arrives fully formed, ready to evacuate the contents of your brain and replace them with the odd images, bizarre obsessions, vivid sense memories, and banal judgements that live rent-free in the mind of another.
The Sherlock Holmes Museum of break-ups, a dentist with a messy back garden, a cab driver sucking on Pop Rocks, llama plushies in a shop, a big jar of mayonnaise in the back of the fridge, a critique of format changes to Antiques Roadshow, a Tokyo bouncy ball, an Oslo bouncy ball, a Rio de Janeiro bouncy ball—these are all things you will encounter while navigating the world of New Long Leg. You could throw a competition for Shaw’s best non-sequiturs, food category (the winner: “I’ve been thinking about eating that hot dog for hours,” from “Strong Feelings”). The cumulative effect of these lines is surreally welcoming, especially when interspersed with dramatically phrased maxims like, “Never talk about your ex, never never never never, never slag them off because then they know.”
Compared to Dry Cleaning’s scrappier EPs, 2019’s Sweet Princess and Boundary Road Snacks and Drinks, the album’s production and mix are exquisitely calibrated for maximum effect. Helmed by John Parish, who’s produced everyone from PJ Harvey to Aldous Harding, New Long Leg is like a striking black and white photograph with the contrast turned up. Guitarist Dowse, bassist Lewis Maynard, and drummer Nick Buxton have always worked as a strong foil to Shaw—moody riffs and sludgy bass on loop, the steady pulse and flash of chaos to her disarming apathy—but in this picture the vocalist now appears even sharper.
The band, in turn, sounds more adventurous—darker and dubbier at times, but also fizzy with touches of indie-pop synths and guitar jangle. When Dry Cleaning first surfaced, they were variously described as post-punk in the vein of Magazine, Wire, and the Fall. Haters left YouTube comments calling them a Sonic Youth rip-off. A broad notion of “London post-punk having a moment” started to take hold among outsiders, lumping the band in with the freakier, more freeform likes of black midi and Black Country, New Road. On New Long Leg, Dry Cleaning emerge as a Rorschach test for listeners’ guitar revivalism of choice. There are echoes of Black Sabbath, the Smiths, the Strokes, even Wilco on the closest thing to a ballad, “More Big Birds.” But it amounts to something tougher and more original than merely the sum of classically cool influences—a sound that activates Shaw’s disparate imagery, making the setting seem more dangerous.
The phrase “emo dead stuff collector,” from “Strong Feelings,” could define Shaw’s songwriting approach—a personal archive of online comments, eavesdropped conversations, writing exercises, and her own reflections—but her lyrics aren’t just random clusters of phrases. She operates in media res, dropping you in on an unknown character, flipping the perspective or dreaming herself into a new headspace mid-song, decontextualizing and recontextualizing everything she uses. Take “Scratchcard Lanyard,” told from the perspective of a mother on the edge, a premise that is not necessarily intuitive but indelibly expressed nonetheless. “I think of myself as a hardy banana with that waxy surface and the small delicate flowers/A woman in aviators firing a bazooka,” Shaw coolly declares, like a woman in aviators firing a bazooka should.
Still, some of the more inscrutable moments are the funniest and most beguiling. I keep thinking of the second verse in the title track, where Shaw is asking questions about doing laundry on a ship, and she cheekily blurts out a joke she realizes is dumb the minute it escapes her lips: “Are there some kind of reverse platforms, shoes that make you go into the ground more, make you reach a lower level?” What are the possible circumstances? Has she won a free trip on a luxury ocean liner? How would reverse platform shoes even work? And what is a record that sparks these kinds of absurd questions even trying to say? Is it secret code?
By Shaw’s estimation, the lyrics and their juxtapositions are an attempt to express her worldview. The cut-up technique of the Beat Generation (and maybe a dash of Kid A-era Thom Yorke) is reimagined for the logged-on and attention-addled, those less interested in codifying their confessions than finding clarity amid cultural debris. On headphones, there’s something almost ASMR-like about it, and not strictly in the textural way of recent pop production: Shaw is right in your ear, not with a flummoxing sound clip but a picture you’ve never seen—the photographer looking at the literal junk in the margins, rather than the hero at the center, and locating a deeper truth. Unlike the distant cool of Kim Gordon’s songs with Sonic Youth, Shaw appears intimate and almost mystical, like she’s guiding a meditation class through the detritus of the mind.
The act of pressing the listener to connect the contextual dots from a random hippo to oven chips to a song called “John Wick” that has little to do with John Wick—even if there’s no right answer at all—is a rare kind of musical storytelling. And it’s one that actually benefits from the fact that Shaw doesn’t sing. After a year stuck in our own houses and brains, the comfort of a record like New Long Leg is in its challenging sense of escape. Half the time I have no idea what she’s even talking about, but that only makes me want to move closer to it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The singer’s first album in 15 years casts a fond glance back at the vintage sounds she made her name with, but a few new songs—including a Jack Antonoff production—bring her back to the present day.

Thank You

Diana Ross’ last studio album would have been no way for a musical icon to bow out. I Love You, released in 2006 to widespread indifference, was a collection of under-heated covers (and one new song) that seemed to have been picked at random out of the romantic songbook—from “Take My Breath Away” to the Beatles’ “I Will”—with little sense of cohesion. It was no wonder that Ross sounded distracted as she made her way through an hour’s worth of plasticky, gift-card soul.
Thank You, Ross’ 25th studio album, may not be up there with her very best work—those immortal Motown singles with the Supremes, her buttery smooth 1970s solo records, or the Chic-assisted disco glory of 1980’s Diana—but, by gracefully revisiting these eras while keeping a sparkling eye on the future, it offers a timely reminder of the vast pop smarts and emotional range that made Ross the diva’s diva. The title has a faint ring of finality; if, God forbid, this should prove to be Ms. Ross’ last studio album, then it would be a fitting tribute to one of the most formidable careers in American musical history.
That may sound alarmist. But it is hard to escape the notion of endings on an album that often feels like a long goodbye, which Ross dedicates to “all of you, the listeners.” When she says, “I love you,” at the end of “Beautiful Love,” her voice tingling with quiet emotion, it feels as if she is bidding adieu to the fans who have followed her since she made her recorded debut with the Supremes in 1960.
Musically, too, Thank You carries a distinct whiff of nostalgia. At times, the abrupt transitions between genres suggest Ross’ life flashing before the listener’s eyes, as she moves from silken soul (“All Is Well”) to slinky show tunes (“Count on Me”), 1990s R&B (“Let's Do It”), and disco (the title track). There’s even a nod to the classic Motown pop stomp in the horns that light up the intro to “Tomorrow.”
These nods to the past glow with the quiet satisfaction of a job well done; they’re era-appropriate and perfectly unchallenging. “All Is Well” blows by in a sugary cloud of funk-lite strings, while “Count on Me” has the warmth of a cup of cocoa at the end of a long day. It helps that Ross is in fantastic voice throughout. She may be slightly bereft of the power that once blew the roof off “Ain't No Mountain High Enough,” but her newly vulnerable tone works wonders, adding pathos to the modern Motown torch song of “Just in Case.” (Although whoever decided to use Auto-Tune on “In Your Heart” really should have a word with their ears.)
The best songs on Thank You are those where Ross stretches her wings. "I Still Believe” and “Tomorrow” show that the Motown veteran is very much at home in the world of electronic music—perhaps no surprise, given her history with disco. “I Still Believe,” produced by Jack Antonoff, starts like a show tune, all stirring piano and soft-lipped brass, before abruptly turning into a disco-house stomper, an electrifying transition that makes you want to climb atop a baby-grand piano, waving your dress shoes in the air. “Tomorrow,” meanwhile, blasts its Motown horns into fantastically odd new orbits, combining a filtered breakbeat with a pounding drum line and serpentine bass, like a bastard pop offshoot of shapeshifting UK pop act Girls Aloud.
Whether Ross continues along these bold new paths is perhaps less important than the fact that she is still creating new paths to follow. On Thank You, Diana Ross’ musical star shines strong after six decades of inspiration, offering signs of renaissance even as she teases tender farewells.

Buy: Rough Trade
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It struck everyone as a little weird that Sub Pop would be the one to issue Sam Beam's hushed ...

The Sea and The Rhythm EP

It struck everyone as a little weird that Sub Pop would be the one to issue Sam Beam's hushed folk debut. From a distance, Beam's lo-fi compositions sounded like a Harry Smith field recording plucked away by Nick Drake with Crosby, Stills & Nash on backup. But close up it was all about the poetry: concrete, ambiguous, and laced with tender irony. Since Beam compares himself to J.J. Cale, and I'd even compare his lyrical style to Beck's Apollinaire-grade symbolism on Mutations, maybe it's not so weird that he's on Nirvana's label after all.
"I think I work with the visual a lot when I write," the part-time musician and full-time Miami film teacher once said. And The Creek Drank the Cradle was unabashedly concrete, studded with disarming pick-up lines like, "The water's there to warm you/ And the earth is warmer/ When you laugh," and, "Needlework and seedlings/ In the way you're walking." Its songs also sank into little moments still warm with loss-- small enough to get inside you, but general enough to fill you with an after-the-fact numbness recognizable as love. Mothers lost sons, daughters lost fathers, lovers lost love, and each song somehow contained a bit of each.
Strikingly, the singers on The Creek Drank the Cradle keep losing their religion, too: outgrowing the bonds of belief, losing their fear of the Lord, letting their mothers' bibles burn. One of them even looks back to see a long-extinct love as a kind of unrecoverable faith: "Found your rosary broken to pieces/ Every night by the bed you'd kiss the beads." Still, the crucifixion is the greatest myth of loss we have, and it's no shock that a lyricist soaked in southern allegory should adapt it for his own purposes. There's even a defiantly un-Christian ring to resurrection one-liners like, "Frozen, the ground refused to die/ And the guitar rose again."
But while the textures, tempos, and diction of the five short songs on The Sea & The Rhythm EP are consistent with what Iron & Wine has been-- and probably will always be-- the theme of loss has itself gone. In its place, Beam pushes trembling expectation, ecstatic abandon, and plain-faced repentance. Now, not one of these faded songs screams old-time religion, but it seems fair to wonder if there is a little revival going on here. "Beneath the Balcony" is a loping folk ballad telling the grim story of a warrior reduced to begging while some kids wait out a storm and "make sure the king won't grant the dead man one more day." At this point, it's an ambiguous parable with a crypto-Christian vibe worthy of C.S. Lewis. But when the Mother Mary appears begging with Christ on her lap, there's no question we're dealing with a gospel story. The song ends with a kid crouched behind a garbage can "who waits for the king to come/ And holds his sweating hand." Salvation, anyone?
The super-sweet title track, a hymn to sensual connection, is driven by its rare present-tense setting, but still sags. It draws its force from an ambiguity (is the "we" here lover/lover or mother/infant?) all a little too cheaply bought by come-ons like, "The milk from your breast is on my lips." Maybe the singer gets off by playing baby Jesus with grown women. Or maybe I just had to get a Jesus reference in for every song. At least I won't have to try for the last two.
The next track is a parable of sin and redemption masquerading as a nursery rhyme. Some Mexican kid-- called, you guessed it, Jesus-- was born in a truck on the fourth of July. A mobile manger for an American nativity scene. With fireworks blooming above like a star in the East, this selfless little immigrant gives the singer the best playing card in his grubby little deck. Such a pure act opens a space for Beam's trademark muffled irony, the kind of brutal understatement common on the LP but up to now absent on this EP: "He never wanted nothing I remember/ Maybe a broken bottle if I had two." Jesus covers for the singer, lets him break a five-dollar bet, and generally assumes his sins. Then, in an oddly specific twist, when the singer succumbs to temptation by secretly eloping to Vegas with Jesus' sister, the beatific child-god is there to greet them: "Naked, the Judas in me/ Fell by the tracks but he lifted me high/ Kissing my head like a brother and never asking why." Unmistakably salvific.
The last track goes down easy but is extremely hard to digest. "Someday the Waves" opens with a man waking at dawn to look down on his lover's face in wonder. The chorus seems like a sober display of faithfulness ("You pick a place that's where I'll be") until some cryptic and perverse forbearance slips in, Matthew-style: "Time, like your cheek, has turned for me." This could mean a number of things: the singer is marking time by his sleeping lover's tossing and turning; the lover's pallid complexion means the singer is running out of time; or, as the lover has patiently taken a beating, the singer has simply gotten older. The next verse promises a pie-in-the-sky day of redemption when "every aching old machine will feel no pain," but neglects to follow through with a credible image of relief.
It's the last verse that adds an oddly appropriate twist: "Waking before you I'm like the Lord/ Who sees his love though we don't know." Sure, it's a simile, but if you think about it, Sam Beam would make a great Holy Spirit. With a full-length album out by next Easter, he's got this Jew's vote for American Jesus in 2004.


On Kindred, Michael Angelakos shifts focus from the painful public self-examination of Gossamer to focus on the parts of his life that give him strength: his family, his faith, and the radiant love that springs from both. It is also his most concise effort, far from the sprawl of his first two albums.

Kindred

Keep your ears open, and you can hear Passion Pit everywhere around you: in fast food commercials and YouTube pre-roll ads you can’t wait to skip, the skewed pop maximalism of PC Music and its imitators, the glossy hybrid EDM-pop of Madeon and Zedd, even the clutter of Taylor Swift’s work with Jack Antonoff on 1989. It’s easy to take for granted now, but Michael Angelakos’ first two records shifted the pop paradigm in meaningful ways. Manners hooked up the '80s synth-pop of M83’s Saturdays=Youth to a glucose IV, piling on children’s choirs and waves of orchestration and Angelakos’ signature falsetto until it forced you into submission; three years later, Gossamer ramped up the density, scale, and emotional rawness of Angelakos’ writing, as he built glittering castles around love, death, and the redeeming power of joy. That rawness is what separates Passion Pit from its lesser contemporaries, and from bands who would seek to duplicate their success: Angelakos' songs dance on the line between sweet and saccharine, but they’re anchored by real stakes. They’re full of light because you can use a lot of it when you’re holding a candle to the darkness.
Kindred is Angelakos’ first record after conducting an unflinching, very public self-examination of his mental health and its effects on his life and loved ones, a process that dominated both Gossamer and the press cycle around the record. Instead of doubling down on that kind of reflection, Angelakos shifts focus to the parts of his life that gave him strength as he endured personal and professional turmoil: his family, his faith, and the radiant love that springs from both. It’s also his most concise record to date, a far cry from the sprawl of both Manners and Gossamer: it’s only 10 songs, and the songs themselves are more interested in speed and economy.
The best songs are the ones that really take that idea of efficiency to heart, stripping away fluff and frippery to focus on core melodic ideas or compositional concepts. This marks a major change in Angelakos’ songwriting: most listeners would agree that Gossamer’s best moments were its biggest, whether the frenzied Rustie-isms of "I’ll Be Alright" or the massive, starlit "Hideaway". That’s not the case here on Kindred, where the highlights hew closer to the soulful heartbreaker "Constant Conversations". There are a lot of moving parts on something like "Whole Life Story", a song-length apology to Angelakos’ wife for the scrutiny placed on their lives post-Gossamer, but each of them are clear and discernible rather than overwhelming, and lithe pop-funk jam "Where the Sky Hangs" sets a new record for "audible space in a Passion Pit song."
When Angelakos opts for an arrangement that recalls the density of his older work, you find yourself wishing he had opted for a similarly pared down approach. "All I Want" is a good example. Its core message—being struck dizzy and dumb by your love for someone, and rejoicing in it with a simple, gorgeous melody—is compromised by the use of every tool in Angelakos’ toolbox: whirring dervishes spat out on guitar, vocal pieces whispering like ghosts in the background, glittering doodads glued on like rhinestones. On earlier albums, the tremendous scale and layering of his songs felt purposeful, like it was meant to reflect the buzzing hornets’ nest in Angelakos’ brain; when he tries to do the same thing on Kindred it feels aimless, a choice that doesn’t move songs forward or help to advance any ideas.
This is also a very spiritual record, which shouldn't be a surprise if you've pored over Angelakos' lyric sheets before. (Consider Gossamer closer "Where We Belong", where after alluding to a suicide attempt Angelakos sings, "Who says that God exists?/ We can't see icons or myths, but/ Well, I believe in you/ Do you believe in me, too?") Opener "Lifted Up (1985)" is another glowing ode to Angelakos' wife, but it traffics in the language of apotheosis: Instead of being born, she descends from heaven, and when she threatens to float back Angelakos grounds her with the force of their love. The album is otherwise scattered with references to prayer and the exertion of subtle divine force, like the conspicuous cloud cover of "Looks Like Rain" and the baptism/savior imagery of "My Brother Taught Me How to Swim". This kind of writing isn't as obviously courageous as the work he did on Gossamer, but it still takes plenty of bravery to write frankly about faith in a medium where it's usually ignored or neglected. It takes guts to say, in effect, "I had to work really hard to get better, and embracing something bigger than myself really helped me." And while Angelakos has never been a particularly artful lyricist, he writes with a wide-eyed sincerity and frankness that makes you want to root for him.
As the first document of Angelakos' shift towards a different songwriting approach, one more focused on efficiency and pop purity than complexity or breadth, Kindred is ultimately both a transitional moment and a mixed bag. Not every song on Manners and Gossamer worked, but at their very least they had something to keep your attention, some grippy sonic piece. Kindred lives and dies on the strength of its melodies, and some of those melodies are submarined by excess rather than enhanced by it. When the album's highlights click ("Whole Life Story", "Where the Sky Hangs", "Looks Like Rain") they're as powerful and resonant as anything in the band's discography, but the chances of success feel a little lower than they were before.
It turns out that the year's best Passion Pit song, and the one that realizes the full potential of Angelakos' new ambitions, isn't even on Kindred. "Pay No Mind", a single from Madeon's excellent March debut Adventure, is the kind of the song that couldn't exist without Passion Pit in the first place—a colorful fusion of pop, funk, and EDM featuring a typically chirpy vocal performance from Angelakos. His connection to the song's lyrics is obvious, a fraternal twin of "Whole Life Story" that finds Angelakos asking for forgiveness and encouraging his loved ones to ignore the external forces swirling around them. It's catchy without relying on gimmickry, undeniably personal, and totally piercing; it's the kind of song I'd love to find more often on Kindred.


Carlos Niño's music charts an invisible continent where hippy jazz meets new age music and underground hip-hop meets airy, Laurel Canyon-style folk.

Carlos Niño & Friends: Flutes, Echoes, It's All Happening!

Flutes, Echoes, It's All Happening!

Like most interesting places, Los Angeles lives in contradiction of itself. The things that make it seem superficial also make it seem happy and industrious, a place where people are always freewheeling from one rad thing to the next. Los Angeles challenges you to take it seriously and wonders—in wounded earnestness—why you can't. It is one of the least believable places I've ever been and a place I consequently never want to leave.
Flutes, Echoes, It's All Happening!, by Carlos Niño & Friends, is a very Los Angeles album. Niño is a hub of the city's musical subculture, one of those people whose primary contribution seems to be his ability to connect other people. Over the past 20 years, he has hosted three radio shows and worked on over 50 albums, charting an invisible continent where hippy jazz meets new age music and underground hip-hop meets airy, Laurel Canyon-style folk. (Lately his shows have been focused on the perennially great Dublab.) Along with the vocalist Dwight Trible, he leads a big band called Build an Ark, whose loose, ever-shifting roster of players—inspired by groups like the Sun Ra Arkestra—turns the model of the 1930s jazz orchestra into a metaphor for equality and collectivity. He has helped arrange the music of J Dilla for chamber orchestra and participated in an album-length tribute to tea. Though many of the projects he's worked on credit him as an artist, I'm still not sure what he plays. At the time of writing, he is 39.
Flutes is the fourth of Niño's "and friends" series. Pieced together using fragments and sketches Niño had worked on over the past few years, it's a loose, comfortable and often deliberately comforting experience, the kind of music that makes room for the listener rather than reaching out to be heard. As with Niño's other archive-related releases, the range is wide but the journey is easy. “Metamaravilla," with its bird sounds and untamed cascades of violin, follows a line from the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel through to the postwar exotica of Les Baxter, music designed to transform familiar rooms into wilds of which the listener had only dreamed. "Alice's Chord" is presumably a reference to the pianist, harpist and composer Alice Coltrane, whose loose rhapsodies turned jazz into a metaphor for inner space. (Her husband, John, hovers over the Kamasi Washington–featuring “Joyous Gratitude," as does his collaborator Pharoah Sanders). You can see why guys like Madlib belong here, and where Niño's interest in hip-hop stems from in general: Not as a party-ready extension of funk and disco, but as music that uses groove and repetition as a way to leverage meditative states.
Like any good curator, Niño is proposing an alternative history, one where the sound of a style isn't as important as the spirit behind it, where black and white have more in common than they might otherwise realize, where you can hear the new-age pioneer Iasos digress about the benefits of hanging out near waterfalls alongside a little free jazz. (Negative ions. It's negative ions.) In that sense, the diversity of Flutes often ends up being more interesting than the material itself. I like it best when I listen to it less as music than as a blueprint to how music might be made, a map of Niño's place in the universe. “I don't feel like I'm a citizen of the United States," he told the L.A. Weekly in 2009. “But I do relate to California." California seems to relate back.


Rivers Cuomo’s latest is a tribute to his hair metal heroes, but it never goes all that hard.

Van Weezer

Turning 50 hasn’t tempered Rivers Cuomo’s inner child. The Weezer frontman still writes about romance in the language of a smitten teenager, and a quarter century after “El Scorcho,” he’s still biting rap lingo and chasing whatever the kids are into. His best and worst songs alike resound with the simplicity and shamelessness of youth. Cuomo’s Peter Pan syndrome is why many mortified fans bailed on Weezer years ago, but it also accounts for why so many loyalists have stuck around, even as the band’s discography has barely managed the dire hit-to-miss ratio of late-period Simpsons: Weezer is one of the last bands of their generation that still sounds young.
Delayed a year by the pandemic, along with its corresponding Hella Mega arena tour with Green Day and Fall Out Boy, the band’s latest Van Weezer is even more nostalgic than usual. “Even if we blow up, we’re never gonna grow up,” he sings on “I Need Some of That,” between recounting memories of lazy summer days cruising around on 10-speeds and cranking Aerosmith. As its title promises, the album extrapolates on a foundational piece of Weezer lore: Cuomo’s teenage love of hair metal, first teased way back on The Blue Album with Kiss posters on his wall.
The band has touted Van Weezer as a return to the harder edged rock of 2002’s Maladroit, perhaps the most fondly remembered of Weezer’s dozen post-reunion albums, but in the two decades since, they’ve grown into a considerably kitschier band. Where Maladroit’s guitars winked at the camera occasionally, Van Weezer’s two-handed tapping revels in its hamminess. And for all its pyrotechnic guitars and arena stomp, Van Weezer never actually roars all that hard. The title promises Van Halen, but the volume rarely exceeds Rick Springfield. Paired with Cuomo’s eternally boyish voice, the result is a cuddly, Build-a-Bear tribute to ’80 metal, with little of the rowdiness this music embodied in its heyday. The only parents this metal could piss off are ones with strong opinions about Pinkerton.
At this stage, though, dopiness is a Weezer feature, and as their recent albums go, this is one of the better ones. Coming on the heels of the clock-punching covers record The Teal Album, you could be forgiven for assuming Van Weezer was born more of algorithmic opportunity than personal passion, but it’s never as cynical as that. “The End of the Game” and “All the Good Ones” fully commit to their bedazzled riffs and fist pumps, living up to the album’s promise of dumb, goofy kicks. Weezer are having fun here, and anybody enticed by an album called Van Weezer probably will, too.
There are some stinkers, of course. “1 More Hit” is Cuomo’s latest cringe song about addiction, while “Precious Metal Girl” never overcomes the titular pun. But on the whole this is Cuomo’s most melodically generous batch of songs since 2014’s near return-to-form Everything Will Be Alright in the End, and that stickiness makes up for a lot. When the bright surf harmonies kick in on “Sheila Can Do It,” Blue Album fans will feel sensory throwback as vivid as Proust’s madeleine. Melodies like this are at the heart of the other reason so many fans have remained loyal to this group: Weezer never produced a better copy. Inconsistent as they are, the band that most reliably conjures the pleasures of early Weezer is still Weezer themselves.
Buy: Rough Trade
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Amy Klein’s solo debut, after stints as the grinning rhythm guitarist in Titus Andronicus and several other projects, feels like the demo that your college roommate’s band just made.

Fire

Amy Klein has always come across as a force of extreme positivity in all of her artistic endeavors, whether it be as the grinning rhythm guitarist for Titus Andronicus or as the thoughtful activist author of a multitude of poems, personal essays, and critiques she has self-published or had published in esteemed outlets over the years. Taking all of this together is what makes it so difficult to accept that her solo debut doesn’t come close to delivering upon these promises. It’s a lot like listening to your friend’s band in college: You have several great conversations with this person; you share a lot of the same interests in art, literature, and film, and you’re so proud to see your friend up onstage that you overlook the imperfections of the performance when you first see the band live. You just want it to be good, but it is not.
That’s exactly what’s going on with Fire, and it’s frustrating. Klein’s band, which includes Sandy Davis on bass, Yoed Nir on cello, and Colin Brooks on drums (who also played in Leda, a previous project that Klein led), sounds proficient enough, but Klein’s jangly rhythm guitar is too high in the mix. The band are at their best when the jangle drops out and they work through instrumental interludes, like on “Yes Men,” which scorches like ‘70s Crazy Horse, and incidentally includes Klein’s strongest vocal performance on the album. The album was produced, engineered, and mixed by Kevin McMahon, who has done powerhouse production work on all of the Titus albums, in addition to working with dozens of other indie rock royalty of previous eras such as the Walkmen, Swans, and French Kicks, but you wouldn’t know it from here. The levels are a distractingly big problem here: When you set the volume at the beginning of the album, you’ll need to lower it again when Klein’s karaoke-level vocal comes in. Where her voice has always been strong as a writer, her voice as a singer doesn’t hold up to the scrutiny that placing it this high in the mix invites. Putting her voice so front-and-center may showcase her artistic bravery, but it also removes the evocative mystery that defined Klein's vocals on previous productions like Hilly Eye and even her own solo demos.
Thematically, Fire seems to deal with coming of age a lot, but the lyrics don’t feel as precise as Klein’s written poetry, and often devolve into cuteness, cliché, or general clunkiness. On the title track she inexplicably paraphrases “The Boys of Summer,” and on “Ocean Grove,” she relays that “Hope works down at the pizza place/she’s giving up.” Klein’s melodies are sometimes memorable, like on the chorus of “Twenty-Seven,” but some of the songs feel like everybody laid down their basic tracks, and then a few days later Klein brought in her poetry book and just tried to force every single syllable of pre-written words into the songs, discovering the melody as she went along. Lead single, “American City” is a prime example of this.
This would be a much better album if somebody had just stepped up and encouraged Klein to revisit the mix, and give the vocals one more shot. Maybe she can do just this, as we are living in the Kanye era of album revision. But until that happens, Fire stands as a lesson to actually tell your college friends who play in bands that their music may sound good for a demo, but you have some suggestions for when they go into the studio for real. You just want it to be good.