The Manchester band’s catchy, well-executed pop-punk stumbles on generic songwriting and bland ballads.

Unwanted

Pale Waves may go through the motions of big emotions, but they never quite sell the feeling. Three albums in, the Manchester quartet has earned a reputation for pristine-sounding replications of past generations’ heartbreak anthems, bouncing through styles as if curating their own hyperactive, self-soothing post-breakup playlist. On their previous record, 2021’s Who Am I?, they took comfort in the sounds of early-2000s pop-punk, and on their latest record, Unwanted, they lean even further into it. With the help of producer Zakk Cervini (Blink-182, All Time Low), the band strides into darker territory, amping up the guitars and calling on heavier sounds from the era.
Pale Waves aren’t the only act mining this sound for inspiration. Dirty Hit labelmate Beabadoobee uses its aesthetics as a palette to paint a personal dreamworld; Willow embodies its brazen attitude to unpack modern anxieties. And while Unwanted may be pastiche, it occasionally earns its place among a crowded field of mainstream sellouts, aspirational TikTokers, and even the prototype herself. These are precise, catchy, well-executed pop-punk earworms. The bustling, Avril-inspired “Unwanted” revels in pop-punk’s contradictions, providing a sugary hook with a dark, rippling undercurrent of anger. Lead singer and songwriter Heather Baron-Gracie cleverly sets us up, singing “You’re so good” before the guitars tear in to help her finish the thought: “At making me feel like nothing, making me feel unwanted.”
Despite these flashes of wit, the band’s Achilles’ heel is Baron-Gracie’s generic songwriting, which becomes most apparent when the tempo slows. “Without You” packs changing seasons, a burning candle, and an ocean of tears into one bland, cloying ballad. The story behind “The Hard Way” is affecting—the lyrics explore complex feelings of guilt in the aftermath of a classmate’s suicide—but the anti-bullying message lacks the specificity and emotive delivery necessary to transcend cliché. Coupled with a gauche TikTok challenge, any weight the song has dissipates. When Pale Waves strip back the drama and let the songs speak for themselves, it’s much more effective. The ambling “Numb” sets us in the center of a depressive daze with only Baron-Gracie’s restrained vocals and a few gentle plucks of her electric guitar to guide us. When she belts out “let me be free” at the chorus, it’s genuinely moving.
Less convincing is the ambitious diatribe “You’re So Vain,” where Pale Waves seemingly attempt to reunite Lavigne and ex-husband Deryck Whibley by combining the mocking talk-sing verses of “Girlfriend” with a riffy, Sum 41-inspired chorus. As compelling as these ideas are, they don’t quite mesh. Still, the stylistic variety would have been welcome on some of the more cookie-cutter tracks—the consecutive “Alone” and “Clean” blend together with near-identical melodies and song structures. The quartet also rarely lets their songs breathe—vocal-free moments are few and far between. One of the album’s strongest moments comes at the end of “You’re So Vain” once guitarist Hugo Silvani is finally given the opportunity to shred out, following a wordless chorus of “da da da”s.
Despite Unwanted’s valleys, Pale Waves know how to make a good pop song. The band channels Paramore on brash lead single “Lies”: propulsive percussion, distorted vocals, and a brisk tempo are the perfect vehicle for an angsty kiss-off to a self-centered partner. With a big hook and a punchy bassline, even the shallow melodrama of “Ripped out my heart and left it bleeding” can’t halt the momentum. It’s the oldest cliché in the book, and the rare moment when Pale Waves muster enough spirit to make you want to believe it.


Tango in the Night is the final album the band would record as an infamous quintet. It's a pop and production masterpiece, yet remains this monolithic, lucrative idea of a Fleetwood Mac record.

Tango in the Night

It started with “Sara.” The first two Fleetwood Mac albums to feature Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks—the self-titled album and Rumours—featured production typical of the pop-rock generated in Los Angeles in the ’70s. They were professional and pristine, exhibiting an instrumental and emotional warmth that was, in terms of the actual recording technique and the cerebral atmosphere of the people making the records, a product of isolation. On their next record, Tusk, Buckingham shifted the balance of Fleetwood Mac’s studio pop. He deliberately produced his songs so that they sounded trebly and makeshift—as if they were translated from brain to tape as quickly as possible—and produced Nicks’ and Christine McVie’s songs with a lush and carefully-sculpted dimensionality. “Sara,” a song Nicks wrote to a daughter she never had, is so gently shaped that every instrumental and vocal materializes in the song like vapor in the atmosphere. At the Blockbuster Music Awards in 2001, Nicks said that when she writes songs, she tries to “make little worlds” for the listener. Whether intentional or not, this sensibility invaded Buckingham’s production of the song; “Sara,” as it appears on Tusk, is its own world, a complete environment, a beach house built out of sighs.
The follow-up to Tusk, 1982’s Mirage, was a kind reflexive scaling back; both Warner Bros. and Buckingham wanted to regenerate the success and the coherent atmosphere of Rumours. It didn’t take. The band members had already drifted too far from each other: Nicks sang country-western and synth-pop songs; Buckingham quoted Pachelbel’s Canon; McVie’s formal romanticism began to take on a crystalline quality; the production flowed in the direction of their individual fascinations. After a brief tour, the band went on hiatus. Nicks released two successful solo albums; McVie and Buckingham put out one each. In 1985, Buckingham had begun work on an additional solo album, when Mick Fleetwood suggested Buckingham fold his new songs into the more monolithic, more lucrative idea of a Fleetwood Mac record.
The resulting album, Tango in the Night, is exactly that: a monolithic, lucrative idea of a Fleetwood Mac record. It was recorded over eighteen months between 1986 and 1987, mostly at Buckingham’s home studio in L.A. Buckingham devoted himself to the record, laboring intensely over its songs, its sounds, and the integrity of its design. Recording technology had advanced substantially since the early ’80s, and Buckingham found the methods by which he could determine the shape and temperature of a Fleetwood Mac song had expanded.
“Most of the vocal parts were recorded track by track,” he told the New York Times in 1987. “The voices used in the textured vocal choirs were mostly mine. I used a Fairlight machine that samples real sounds and blends them orchestrally.” Out of these newly available materials, he could practically build an entire band, which was useful at the time. Mick Fleetwood was almost entirely consumed by his cocaine habit, and the band had been experiencing an internal drift for years. “Constructing such elaborate layering is a lot like painting a canvas and is best done in solitude,” Buckingham added.
The album’s artwork, “Homage a Henri Rousseau” by Brett-Livingstone Strong, is so lush and romantic that it walks a fine line between formal elegance and kitsch, blending the terrestrial with the celestial. It’s an accurate illustration of Tango in the Night’s sound design, of the glitterings and humid shimmers that Buckingham placed in the songs. He made each track on Tango just as he produced “Sara”: less an arrangement of bass, guitar, drums, and vocals than a complete world, a living panorama. There’s a phenomenal wholeness to the recordings on Tango that seems like a superficial compensation for how deeply fragmented the band was at the time.
After Nicks resurfaced from her cocaine addiction at the Betty Ford Clinic, she visited Buckingham’s studio for a few weeks. Three of her recordings figure into the finished Tango, only two of which were written by her. Her voice, invariably hoarse after years of cocaine abuse, often warps or fails the already incomplete material. She howls her way through “Seven Wonders,” a song written mostly by Sandy Stewart. (Nicks receives credit because she misheard “All the way down you held the line” as “All the way down to Emmiline”; for Nicks—and I don’t disagree—sometimes accident and authorship are indistinguishable.) For all of its bluster, the song is not only enhanced by the incidents of its arrangement but is the incidents of its arrangement; try to imagine the song without its synth hook and hear the rest of it evaporate. On “When I See You Again,” Nicks’ voice almost crumbles and shatters into atoms. “Stevie was the worst she’s ever been,” Buckingham told Uncut in 2013. “I didn’t recognize her...I had to pull performances out of words and lines and make parts that sounded like her that weren’t her.” Fittingly, each verse and chorus that Nicks sings sounds generated by a different uncanny assemblage of Stevie, among them one who sings in a kind of mutilated whisper. After the bridge, Nicks completely disappears. Buckingham finishes the song.
Buckingham’s songs on Tango are less knotted than they were on Tusk and Mirage, newly permissive of space. The first single, Buckingham’s “Big Love,” is a song that inadvertently simulates the essential failure of the album. It is devoted to a totally abstracted and imaginary form of love, while Tango in the Night is devoted to a totally abstracted and imaginary form of Fleetwood Mac (neither of which could be assembled in reality). The song’s arrangement feels austere and detached, a byproduct of the narrator’s alienation, but it’s also decorated with overlapping, pointillist guitar phrases. Even the empty spaces on Tango feel like deliberately-wrought emptinesses—for instance, the airy synths that hover over the verses of McVie’s “Everywhere,” or Buckingham’s title track, which through its sense of space imparts the feeling of rowing through fog and mystery.
Still, it’s McVie whose work is most realized by Buckingham’s impressionism. Her “Everywhere” is the best song on the record. Like “Big Love” it too is about encountering an idea too big to contain within oneself (love, again). But where “Big Love” apprehends it with icy suspicion, “Everywhere” responds with warmth, empathy, and buoyancy, describing a kind of devotion so deeply felt that it produces weightlessness in a person. Its incandescent texture is felt in almost any music that could be reasonably described as balearic. Elsewhere, “Isn’t It Midnight,” McVie’s co-write with Buckingham and her then-husband Eddy Quintela, seems an inversion of the values of “Everywhere,” a severe ’80s guitar rock song that gets consumed by a greater, more unnerving force by its chorus, as if it’s succumbing to a conspiratorial dread. “Do you remember the face of a pretty girl?” McVie sings, and Buckingham echoes her in an unfeeling monotone (“the face of a pretty girl”) while behind him synths chime in a moving constellation, UFOs pulsing in the dark.
This is the essence of Tango in the Night: something falling apart but held together by an unearthly glow. More of a mirage than Mirage, it is an immaculate study in denial (its most enduring hit revolves around McVie asking someone to tell her “sweet little lies”). It’s a form of dreaming where you could touch the petals of a flower and feel something softer than the idea of softness. In this way, Tango seems to emerge less from Buckingham’s pure will and imagination than from a question that haunts art in general: How can one make the unreal real, and the real unreal?
The remaster of Tango in the Night isn’t as topographically startling as last year’s Mirage, where new details seemed to rise out of the mix as if in a relief sculpture; it sounded good on CD in 1987. The reissue does sound warmer and brighter, and the instruments feel less digitally combined, which lifts background elements to the surface, like the seasick drift of the bass notes in “Caroline” and the coordinated staccato harmonies in the title track. The reissue also includes two discs of b-sides, demos, and extended remixes, several of which were previously unreleased. “Special Kind of Love” is described as a demo but sounds like a completely developed Buckingham song, gentle and simple, with every edge expressively filigreed; it could’ve been a potential second sequel to “You and I.” “Seven Wonders” appears in an earlier, more relaxed arrangement, with Lindsey’s guitar warmly swanning between the notes that would eventually be reconstructed in perfect digital isolation by a synthesizer.
The demos also reveal the ways in which the songs could fold into and out of each other. On the “Tango in the Night” demo you can hear Buckingham, at the edge of every chorus, begin to invent the trembling choral part that opens “Caroline.” Nicks’ eventual solo track “Juliet” is present in two of its primordial forms—as the instrumental “Book of Miracles” (credited to both Buckingham and Nicks) and as a five-minute “run-through.” The run-through is especially curious, reducing “Book of Miracles” to a formulaic blues-rock over which Nicks’ voice produces a just-barely musical static, full of wobbles and distortions and exclamations. After the take she says, ecstatically, “I thought that was wonderful! I didn’t play! I did not play because I am so smart!”
Nicks exhibits a strange, dissonant giddiness in this moment that isn’t present in any of the band member’s memories of the recording process. At the time, in his interview with the Times, Buckingham imaginatively described Tango in the Night as a restorative process. “This album is as much about healing our relationships as Rumours was about dissension and pain within the group,” he said. “The songs look back over a period of time that in retrospect seems almost dreamlike.” Twenty-six years later, Buckingham summarized the experience to Uncut in more severe terms: “When I was done with the record, I said, ‘Oh my God. That was the worst recording experience of my life.’”
The jealousy and resentment he felt toward Nicks for the success she experienced in her solo career, and the prevailing feeling that his architectural work on the band’s records went unnoticed and unappreciated, had built to a flashpoint. Later in 1987, the band met up in anticipation of the promotional tour for Tango, for which they had already secured dates and signed contracts. At the meeting, Buckingham announced he was quitting the band. “I ﬂew off of the couch and across the room to seriously attack him,” Nicks told Classic Rock in 2013. “...I’m not real scary but I grabbed him which almost got me killed.” They spilled out of McVie’s house and into the street. Buckingham ran after Nicks and threw her up against a car. She “screamed horrible obscenities” at him, and he walked away, from the moment and the band. What’s left, after these harsh fragments of reality are swept away, is Tango in the Night: a remarkably complete album, a lavish garden growing out of negative space. Just a dream.


Jacob Buczarski’s cerebral, complex melodic black metal is an elegy for a dying planet. There is little hope on offer here, but plenty of silvery, well-executed riffs.

Solar Paroxysm

As cheap recording tools and solo projects have proliferated, the early-2000s glut of so-called “one-man black metal bands” has fallen out of vogue with artists of all genders. But with Mare Cognitum, Jacob Buczarski offers a convincing argument that the model is far from dead. His cerebral, complex, and often startlingly lovely black metal speaks for itself; Buczarski is an accomplished musician with a clear vision for his work and the chops to back it up (the man simply loves a solo, and who can blame him?). His atmospheric black metal feels ripped straight from the cosmos, a stroke of luck for fans seeking a little soul with their shredding. On the band’s fifth full-length—and third for the I, Voidhanger label—Buczarski comes armed not only with a sterling assortment of riffs, but also a warning: He envisions the album as a cautionary tale “about what happens if we don’t shape up and, firstly, deal with our rapidly approaching doom to climate change, and secondly, pay real attention to the societal ills [of] fascism, racism, and hatred in general that are plaguing us and dragging us away from real solutions.”
Muscular album opener “Antaresian” sets the stage for an album that promises to tear Mare Cognitum’s gaze away from the heavens and cast it down upon the filth and fury of terrestrial reality. Solar Paroxysm is a requiem for a dying planet, and a condemnation of the overgrown primates blithely hastening its demise. “We have unveiled the harrowing end of our world/We have foreseen the devouring of our galaxy/And when the light has gone/So too will be our memories,” Buczarski howls in his workmanlike rasp. Rather than hew to the genre’s tired obsessions with Satan, nihilism, and the like, Mare Cognitum’s lyrics are more in tune with Neil Gaiman than necromancy: Each song on Solar Paroxysm lays out another aspect of our potentially cataclysmic future in excruciating, albeit poetic, detail. The album cover—an apocalyptic scene of heaving earth and fiery skies—offers a stark vision of inevitable collapse.
The album’s focus may come as a surprise to those unaware of Mare Cognitum’s position on metal’s political left flank, but reading between the lines has always been critical to black metal fandom, and Solar Paroxysm is no exception. There’s a deep well of disappointment in humanity, which has progressed so far and yet fallen so short. The stormy, sublime “Terra Requiem” is both the album’s beating heart and its most caustic messenger, coldly assuring us that “so great is the debt we have incurred/So too will we wilt and fade into dust/We’ll pay with the ashes of our humanity/And cease to walk upon this earth/And the earth will forget our name.” There is little hope on offer here, but plenty of silvery, well-executed riffs.
Buczarski has perfected his formula, and spends this album teasing out ways to deconstruct it. Each song tops 10 minutes and flows nearly seamlessly into the next, knitted together with the expected tremolo and blastbeats as well as a surgically precise commitment to melody and atmosphere; Solar Paroxysm may not have its head as deeply in the clouds as its supernal predecessors, but it’s still located in the same galaxy. For all its kinship with contemporary purveyors of melancholia and experimental twists like Darkspace or Spectral Lore, Mare Cognitum’s musical lineage often leads straight back to the 1990s (though, thankfully, steers clear of errant Nazis). The bright guitar melodies on “Luminous Accretion” are gorgeous, and “Frozen Star Divinization” is a particularly effective exercise in both grandeur and nostalgia. Both summon a partial comparison to the frostbitten likes of Windir or early Enslaved, ’90s melodic black metal bands whose mastery of the embryonic form helped etch a blueprint for generations to follow.
Don’t be fooled, though; Mare Cognitum is ultimately about progress and pushing forward, whether that’s into the next galaxy or the wretched depths of the human soul. Solar Paroxysm’s remarkably consistent ride ends on a high note with the commanding closer “Ataraxia Tunnels,” an elegy disguised as an intricate, bombastic final salvo. As its narrator slips away, so do the album’s last notes, lingering for a long, pregnant moment before finally succumbing to silence. Solar Paroxysm is one of the year’s strongest black metal albums, but it is also a depressingly effective reminder that there’s only so much time left.

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It’s hard to amass much of a vault off one album and tour cycle, and perhaps inevitably, a good 80% of You and I, the latest posthumous release bearing Jeff Buckley's name, consists of covers, many already released.

You and I

Here we are again. It’s been nearly 20 years since Jeff Buckley’s untimely death by drowning, a timespan in which posthumous releases of various sorts has come to outnumber his solo work more than ten to – literally – one: live albums, compilations, EP sets, and now demos. Nevertheless, the musical gravedigging will continue until the vaults are barren, which for Jeff Buckley is probably pretty soon.
It’s hard to amass much of a vault off one album and tour cycle, and perhaps inevitably, a good 80% of You and I, the latest album of the lot, consists of covers, many already released in some format. "Just Like a Woman," "Calling You" and "Night Flight" were on Live at Sin-E. Buckley’s de-stylized version of The Smiths’ "I Know It’s Over" appeared in part on Mystery White Boy and in full on Buckley’s 2007 compilation So Real. "The Boy with the Thorn in His Side" was circulating online several years prior. The new material includes a version of "Grace" that is basically a fully formed demo, while "Dream of You and I" is barely even that; the title is literal, Buckley thinking aloud about a dream he had about a band’s "space jam," which inspired him to write what’d eventually become "You and I." It’s not even a skeleton of a song so much as the first few bones, dug up before anyone knows what they belong to and before the excavation was suddenly called off.
Unlike the haphazardly curated collections of the past, You and I is an artifact with a history: part of the set of demos, recently discovered, that Buckley recorded in producer Steve Addabbo’s studio for Sony shortly after signing with the label. The covers, standards in Buckley’s numerous New York sets, form the blueprint for what would eventually become Grace, and each represents some touchstone: an influence on his style, a demonstration of his interpretive skill. It’s likely no coincidence the collection has two Smiths songs – not only are they the sort of songs a musician might hang onto from adolescence waiting for a chance to record, but if you’re out to demonstrate your singular music identity, there are far worse ways to do it than to take a track and eliminate all trace and inflection of Morrissey. Sly and The Family Stone’s "Everyday People" and Louis Jordan's "Don’t Let the Sun See You Cryin’" undergo similar transformations, from sunshine-pop to something more aloof or tortured. It’s a transformation, though, with definite limits; the version of Dylan here holds little surprises even if it’s one’s first time hearing Buckley’s take, and "Poor Boy Long Way From Home" begins as a promising demonstration of form – whether in emulating Bukka White’s slide guitar or retrofitting his voice into the genre’s confines – but the novelty gives way over the six-minute runtime to blues pastiche.
The one truly "new" bit of material here is as frustrating as it’s enlightening. "Dream of You and I" begins as an intricately woven guitar instrumental that, given the right conditions, might be spellbinding live, and the beginnings of a chorus. The bulk of the track, however, is Buckley telling a rambling story about a dream of a "spacey Deadhead band" playing something or another – "not like what I’m playing here on guitar" – in 7/4 time about a possessive lover or AIDS ("or something like that"), which may or may not resemble what’s on the record. There’s no way of knowing, and there never will be, and therein lies both the draw of such a collection as You and I and its inherent limitations.


Action Bronson’s second studio album is also the third installment of his Blue Chips mixtape series. It’s full of bare raps and funky beats, of unadorned samples and dopey swaggering.

Blue Chips 7000

Almost seven years ago, the Queens rapper Action Bronson emerged from the underground like a neighborhood goofball. If you watch the video for an early single like “Shiraz,” from 2011, Bronson’s world is hyperlocal: in a hooded trench coat and athletic shorts, he surveys olive tubs and orders sheets of prosciutto from a Bronx corner store. Back then, his flamboyance seemed grinning and poised, but out of place and maybe a bit schticky as a result. Bronson’s sideshow character may have been bombastic, but his rapping was always legitimately prodigious, crass as it was witty, and just downright fun.
Now, Bronson has become a caricature of his former self. He’s a walking TV show—he has had two on the Viceland network—and all of the lights and cameras have overfed his exuberance. Perpetually and overly stoned, he swan dives off yachts and shares street food with Mario Batali in Rome. These are the type of things he used to rap about as mythical put-ons, but now they’re captured on screen before they land in a verse. Bronson and his hedonism have grown larger than life, and his music has taken a backseat to his celebrity foodie status. On his last album, 2015’s  Mr. Wonderful, Bronson attempted to reconcile this gap by bringing his celebrity into the booth, amplifying the ridiculousness of his music with a record that tried to do too much: the tracks-long conceptual story arc bogged down the middle; the open-ended rambles let it float around. His new album, Blue Chips 7000, is just his second as a major label artist. And like many rappers before him who have turned a mixtape run into stardom, Bronson has lowered the stakes by returning to his roots.
Blue Chips 7000 is the third installment in a vintage Bronson mixtape series (all bearing the Blue Chips name), and it’s the first to ditch Party Supplies, a frenetic, campy Brooklyn producer, as the sole man behind the boards. Still, the retail album calcifies the formula the pair instigated with the mixtapes—bare raps over funky, almost kooky rare-groove loops—and Bronson remains surrounded by the producers that know him best. Accordingly, the beats on Blue Chips 7000 save its star from doing too much. “Let It Rain” jumps around like a twitching 1970s porn soundtrack before a swampy sax solo steals the show. “TANK” is the type of glitzy 1980s pop rock that Bronson has obsessed over for years. All of the beats are off-kilter, but none of them sound alike.
As much as he is a prolific emcee, Bronson is a talker. And while there are short interludes and song intros littered throughout the latest Blue Chips, once a beat kicks on, Bronson is forced to rap. On “La Luna,” he barks out orders that he needs a Towncar. “Yo, what beat is that? Ooh that shit is funky,” he wonders excitedly about the car company’s jazz-fusion hold muzak, before launching into an off-the-cuff verse over the Alchemist’s organ-laced sample flip. It’s an endearing snapshot of a guy who sometimes seems past rapping but keeps doing it because he enjoys it so much.
Blue Chips 7000 is full of unadorned samples and short on features. The reggae singer Jah Tiger toasts a slinky, quaint hook over a sunny Knxwledge loop that seems to decay back onto itself. Rick Ross pops up on the Harry Fraud produced “9-24-7000,” a shimmering and less peculiar beat than the rest to accommodate his lounging. For all the weird brags Bronson whips up, none are as casually haughty as Ross’ kicker. “I’m the label owner/I’m the only one can shelf me,” he raps as a guest on an album that has been tormentingly delayed by the label.
The gravel in Bronson’s vocals distracts from just how high-pitched and nasally it is. “Daddy back/With his long white Cadillac/Now it’s time take a nappy nap,” he wheezes, sneering on the smooth organ of “Bonzai.” There’s a sheer glee in Bronson’s voice that is sometimes soured by the things he is actually saying. He’s flirted with disgusting, inappropriate lyricism throughout his career; here, Bronson has dropped the shock value but maintained the dopey swaggering.
Sometimes it sounds like Bronson is reading deliriously from a sheet of randomly generated phrases. “The full moon make me loco/Like I sniffed a whole baseline of cocoa,” he spits on “The Choreographer,” as if his only conceit was rapping something that nobody before him had thought to. He’s still fabling over beats, too, and at one point he swears, “I might hang off the side of the mountain to trim a bonsai/Perfect 10 on the swan dive.” Then again, Bronson is a joyously wacky guy, and his ridiculous non sequiturs mesh especially well with the eccentric boogie-funk of the Westside Gunn producer Daringer’s sample flip.
Bronson has already released a few dozen songs like the one’s you’ll hear on Blue Chips 7000. But these new tracks are probably the strongest in his catalog—full of cheeky, relentless verses to match the energetic funk he’s best accompanied by—and the repetition feels strategic. For years now, Bronson has traveled the world living out his raps and overloading on new experiences. He’d probably be the first to tell you there’s comfort in ordering the same thing twice.


Borrowing a title and sometimes a tone from Gil Scott-Heron, the Chicago rapper explores religion, consensual sex, and himself.

Pieces of a Man

In the pluralistic realm of Chicago rap, one thing seems certain: Mick Jenkins will never suffer a lack of ambition. His new album, Pieces of a Man, lifts its name from the 1971 Gil Scott-Heron classic and attempts the daunting task of channeling the bohemian beatnik’s indomitable spirit. Jenkins even gives us a pretty good impression, morphing his voice to match Scott-Heron’s distinct tenor for two skits that double as live spoken-word sessions. Stepping into the role of a legend is, for sure, an audacious move, but the appeal of the South Side star has typically been for those with a taste for the maneuvering metaphors and trenchant critiques that afforded Scott-Heron his status.
Central themes have defined Jenkins’ previous full-lengths. The Healing Component, for instance, was a spiritually charged concept record focused on the impossible task of defining love. Pondering police brutality, racism, and cultural appropriation, that album took stock of social ills in the United States. Pieces of a Man plays like a more personalised counterpoint. If Scott-Heron was like a photographer, snapping society from never-before-seen angles, Jenkins turns the lens on himself. The results illuminate the title: We get all the pieces that make up the man.
Religion again plays a central role. For Jenkins, there’s no chasm between being a Christian and street kid, as Pieces of a Man captures the low-key impact faith has on Jenkins’ daily grind. Take the rumbling bass and doomed piano keys of “Grace & Mercy,” which finds Jenkins wryly thanking God for the gifts he has before throwing vague threats at unidentified enemies and detailing plans to smoke weed with the squad. On “Barcelona,” Jenkins longs for an escape from his daily bullshit and ponders the impact his lifestyle has on his spirituality: “Granny praying for it,” he raps desperately. “She say we ain’t Christian-ing right!” These moments of clarity seem summoned from the deepest crevices of Jenkins’ id.
Most striking is “Consensual Seduction,” a song about the importance of verbal consent that seems inspired by #MeToo. “I need you to tell me what you want,” croons Jenkins without sucking up the song’s romantic tension. This is one of the few moments when he engages with the current news cycle. Jenkins does, though, get help in that regard from other sources. Ghostface Killah delivers an impassioned assist on “Padded Locks” as vital as anything on his own recent album, The Lost Tapes. It might not be the most graceful presidential takedown ever, but hearing Tony Starks scream “Donald Trump is a piece of shit” has an undeniably visceral appeal.
The original Pieces of a Man was Scott-Heron’s first studio record and also one of his most pop-focused efforts, where his pointed messages were presented with pleasing arrangements and hooks that stuck. Jenkins, however, has little interest in adding pop to this tome. There are hooks, sure, but nothing like a swooning chorus. The beats are built largely around twilit, soulful organ and dinky electronics. “Gwendolynn’s Apprehension,” produced by Black Milk, puts Jenkins over a riff that sounds teased from a Game Boy. The light guitar and organ of “Plain Clothes” summon the spirit of Minnie Riperton, and Jenkins comfortably shifts to singing. Though a versatile vocalist, Jenkins isn’t actually a Tier 1 rapper. His rasp can struggle when forced to take on too much, especially amid the prominent percussion and tough orchestration of something like “Ghost.”
But this is a minor gripe within a major scheme. Chicago rap is currently undergoing a multidisciplinary creative surge: Noname mixes diary pages with cosmic jazz; Queen Key makes murderous music you can chant in the club; G Herbo and Lil Durk offer visceral depictions from the trenches; Chris Crack has rapped over soul samples as well as anybody this year. Jenkins moves above these trends, claiming a corner of the city that’s all his own. The result is a gripping portrait of one human among Chicago’s 2.7 million.


Australian singer-songwriter Grace Shaw floats between cloud rap and dream pop with the tossed-off affectations of a weary internet princess.

Butterfly Blue

In 2015, a Brisbane teenager named Grace Shaw uploaded a song titled “Suicide Blonde” to SoundCloud. Shaw’s debut single as Mallrat offered more intrigue than the ordinary lo-fi ditty: The track addresses a woman who once appeared in the music video for INXS’ song of the same name and now struggles with depression, addiction, and an eating disorder. Lyrics name-dropping Cameron Diaz and the late INXS singer Michael Hutchence were exacting and empathetic. A year later, Shaw released her debut EP, Uninvited, a skittering, upbeat collection of songs about suburban ennui and feeling like an outcast. Massive streaming success, buzzy singles, and gigs opening for Post Malone and Maggie Rogers followed. After three EPs, the now 23-year-old Shaw’s long-awaited debut, Butterfly Blue, establishes her as an artist with ambitions bigger than the bedroom-pop genre that once defined her.
Butterfly Blue is named for dueling sensations: the stomach-churning excitement of new romance and the heartbreak that so often follows. Across 11 songs, Mallrat explores desire and distance: Her songwriting is preoccupied with lovers who remain just out of reach and stars that momentarily align only to burn out. “I was in love, it’s not something you choose,” she sings on the title track. Like many young artists raised online, Shaw has an omnivore’s musical palette, citing Three 6 Mafia, SOPHIE, and Yung Lean as influences; as a child, she was captivated by Imogen Heap’s layered vocals on “Hide and Seek,” as heard on the soundtrack to The O.C. The songs on Butterfly Blue are largely rooted in the realms of cloud rap and dream pop, with the tossed-off affectations of a weary internet princess. As if to underline the influence, a faithful cover of Mazzy Star’s gauzy hit “Fade Into You” appears as a bonus track on physical editions.
For her full-length debut, Shaw teamed up with a ragtag crew of producers including Jam City, Konstantin Kersting, and Tommy English. The SoundCloud-y “Surprise Me” does nothing of the sort until everyone’s favorite shit-stirrer, Azealia Banks, appears for a truly jaw-dropping verse: “I squirted on him like a squid, now he inky-faced/He said my pussy tighter than Nicole Kidman face.” Banks’ cocksure burst of energy momentarily transforms Butterfly Blue into an entirely different record. If Mallrat briefly comes off like a guest on her own song, she regains control with the glitchy production and hypnotic chorus of album highlight “Your Love.” It concludes with a diced-up sample of Memphis rapper Gangsta Pat’s 1995 track “Killa (Part 2)”: “Hidin’ in the bushes with a mask and a pistol grip…I got a bullet with yo’ name on the fuckin’ tip.” The menacing image adds some much-needed sharpness to Mallrat’s hazy stories of romantic peril.
Mallrat has said she aspires to make music that sounds like “angelic children’s choirs and monster trucks at the same time” and Butterfly Blue is at its best when it squarely rides that line. The gothic fairytale “Heart Guitar” crackles with electro-pop sparks as Mallrat laments a lost love: “How can you give me butterflies then tie them up in knots?” she murmurs wistfully. “Teeth” bundles vague concepts of sex and power into an omnipresent specter with the distant pout of Sky Ferreira circa Night Time, My Time. More compelling is Alice Ivy’s production, which dissolves Mallrat’s vocals into a blown-out blast of reverb. The acoustic empowerment anthem “I’m Not My Body, It’s Mine” takes a softer approach, with a background loop of hushed, wordless harmonies that would make Brian Wilson proud.
On the warm and twinkly “Rockstar,” she fantasizes about marrying a famous musician who will help her forget all about an ex. The twist, however, is that in this scenario, Mallrat is a Grammy-winning superstar in her own right, and she can rely on herself: “Don’t think you’re slick for cashing in on my magic.” Tracks like “Rockstar” and “I’m Not My Body, It’s Mine” succeed because Mallrat’s strongest songwriting prioritizes specificity over impressions. It’s this close observation that allowed early tracks like “Suicide Blonde” to stand out, but too frequently on Butterfly Blue, Mallrat gets lost in loose daydreams. When she latches onto particulars, she soars.


With glowing synths and lyrics about labor and death, the New York duo’s fifth LP is a tastefully small reflection on modern anxieties.

Plum

Molly Hamilton and Robert Earl Thomas’s first few albums as Widowspeak had a darkness running through them. The Brooklyn duo released their 2011 self-titled debut on Captured Tracks, home of like-minded bedroom jangle bands like Wild Nothing and Beach Fossils. Widowspeak and their counterparts cast a vintage haze to match the sepia-toned filters of early Instagram. Their skillful, moody interpretations of ’70s psychedelia and sad ’90s rock evoked a dreamy sense of yearning, like nostalgia for nothing in particular. Plum, Widowspeak’s fifth LP, is resigned to more modern anxieties. It’s a tastefully small album, breezy and immediate, written and recorded before the pandemic. The band focus less on collaging retro influences and more on introducing new elements into their palette.
Plum is a memento mori painted in rich hues: Fruit ripens and shrivels. Our jobs sustain us and kill us. Time is our most valuable asset and we waste it away. Glowing synth notes and guitars give “Breadwinner” the hypnotic coziness of Mazzy Star as Hamilton describes a lover’s daily slog, working late hours and longing for pure, uncomplicated romance. Acknowledgments of the past appear as faint, cloudy memories. “Amy” simmers like a desert mirage, a pulsating bass backing Hamilton’s breathy coo as she sings about a silhouette, maybe a girl she once knew: “Summer fruit, cherry tattoo/So easy-going, like your mom was there for you.”
But Widowspeak’s musings on envy and exhaustion aren’t complaints. They don’t bemoan our lives’ impermanence. Plum wavers between calm acceptance and a bright downward spiral, chasing fires before they fizzle. Hamilton swaddles reflections on labor and death in honeyed tones. “Try not to see it as a curse/You think that things are getting worse/The only body I was given/The only life that you’re living,” she whispers. “Even true love; you can’t take it with you.” Existential panic has the hum of meditation.
Widowspeak flirt with a certain strain of retail indie rock, the kind that plays softly over racks of bohemian-inspired tunics and overpriced candles—the equivalent of a stylishly distressed Fleetwood Mac T-shirt. But instead of feeling trapped in vague approximations of ’60s and ’70s aesthetics, Widowspeak’s vibes come with a sharp vision. Among the inspirations for Plum, the band cite YouTube playlists of pop songs remixed to sound like they’re playing in abandoned malls, David Byrne’s kooky 1986 film True Stories, and the celebrated 20th-century food writer M.F.K. Fisher. But you can also hear subtle flickers of the duo’s contemporaries: Big Thief’s heavy emotional undertow and deft guitar work echo through Thomas’s fingerpicked melodies, and “Even True Love” offers a shadier take on Real Estate’s sunny acoustics.
Plum stretches far beyond a boutique clothing store, but it doesn’t take enough risks to really widen Widowspeak’s scope. Some riffs nag when they intend to mesmerize, and not all the clichés land. Perhaps the familiar refrain of “Money”—it “doesn’t grow on trees”—could’ve worked if the spindly guitar had a stronger driving rhythm, or maybe the strums would’ve been more effective beneath a more novel quip about living to work. By the time Hamilton suggests that we “tune out platitudes like these” in the last verse, her advice falls flat. The sleepy arrangements of the final two tracks, “Jeannie” and “Y2K,” fade into the background. But loud isn’t their aim, and Plum’s special, big moments stand out against the quiet. Widowspeak’s  capitalist critique becomes a mirror of the chaos that permeates our daily rhythm—buying, selling, making, doing.

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The Los Angeles quartet’s new record turns to nature and childhood past by blending plaintive psychedelic rock with sweet folk melodies.

Hour of Green Evening

Childhood can feel powerfully dramatic as you stumble across one revelation after another, and even insignificant discoveries may stay in our minds decades after they occur—a broken playground swing that nobody repaired, your first taste of a candy you now detest. Kenny Becker, frontman of the Los Angeles quartet Goon, wanders around such memories on the group’s second record, Hour of Green Evening. A noticeably softer record than Goon’s 2019 debut, Heaven is Humming, and recorded with a completely new lineup aside from Becker himself, Goon glide through sweet indie-folk numbers as though they’ve been doing this for years.
Building on Paint by Numbers, Vol. 1, an EP of hazy pandemic recordings released earlier this year, Hour of Green Evening is a wistful record that blends plaintive psychedelic rock with lilting melodies and arrangements. Becker sings folk tales about his childhood, peering beyond the blissful innocence of those early years to notice the quiet solitude in the nature around him. The rest of Goon—along with an assist from Spoon’s Alex Fischel on keys—add to the scenery, conjuring the same idyllic dreams that Becker describes. “In a past life you softly slept through waking hours/And in the boughs/Beams of sound play a welcoming,” he sings in lead single “Angelnumber 1210,” his voice floating lazily as drums and guitar keep a steady pace.
Nature is the throughline to these memories, as Becker treats every mention of greenery or the weather with gentle care and sweeping grandeur. In “Another Window,” he croons about nighttime blooming “over the ivy in a row”; on “Buffalo,” the sight of hedges on a sidewalk remind him of “sharing grassy knees” with someone from his past. These references turn folkloric on “Wavy Maze,” a standout that recalls the band’s grungier material. Dizzying and dissonant, the track sounds like a dark Grimm fairy tale with its plodding guitars and oscillating synths, contrasting blurring recollections with gothic descriptions. “When I was small/Saria’s ageless song played along,” Becker sings, referencing the in-game journey of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The song builds in intensity, carrying on its mystic path before climaxing with a scream of pent up frustration.
Hour of Green Evening might have benefited from more of that wilder teenage thrall, but for the most part, what the music lacks in rowdiness it makes up for in emotional complexity. “Emily Says” carries the adolescent anger of “Wavy Maze” into adulthood as Becker sings of a depression that persists in a loving marriage: “Emily says, ‘Hope still appears’/And though I know in my heart it’s right/Feeling like hurting myself tonight,” he laments while his voice moves toward a soothing peak. Looking back into memories brings up these types of contradictions—we remember a detail that someone else might not, or we reinterpret feelings of events long after they end. Goon takes these nuances into account and chooses to embrace the memory anyway.


Phil Ochs’ second album is a work of long-steeped fury at his country’s sins, naked in its scorn for a system showing its many fissures; still, it guards a flickering, tenacious hope.

I Ain’t Marching Anymore

Though the cover shot of I Ain’t Marching Anymore is a graveyard of grim political rhetoric—Phil Ochs slumped against a wall of torn Barry Goldwater and Kenneth Keating posters, their slogans shredded and inscrutable—the back cover essays comprise a beatnik rhapsody for the ages. Written by Ochs and the critic Bruce Jackson, they deliver the sort of earnest, overly verbose salvo only a Greenwich Village protest-folk record could deliver: a dense scrum of cheers to the Movement, jeers at the invertebrates in Congress, and navel-gazings on the quest for truth in art, with a track listing and credits seemingly wedged in as afterthought.
Midway through all the eager pulpit-pounding, though, the 24-year-old Ochs takes a turn both petulant and self-effacing, listing the most frequent complains that have been lobbed at him in his short career:

There’s nothing as dull as yesterday’s headlines.

Don’t be so ambitious.

Sure it’s good, but who’s gonna care next year?

I bet you don’t go to church.

Don’t be so negative.

I came to be entertained, not preached to.

That’s nice but it doesn’t really go far enough.

That’s not folk music.

Why don’t you move to Russia?

Which is what you got in 1965 for leaping up onto a bench in Washington Square Park and warbling your dismay at the morning’s New York Times: you were branded an ally of the communist kleptocracy, back when that sort of charge might actually end your career. (Simpler times.) But Ochs didn’t argue these accusations; he reveled in them as proof of concept, his confirmation that he was hitting the establishment where it hurt. He labeled himself a “singing journalist,” not a folk singer like the rest of his Bleecker Street fraternity (Bob Dylan, Dave Van Ronk, Tom Paxton), and stuffed his lyrics with the up-to-the-minute topicality and op-ed lambasting of a newsman—championing a coal miners’ strike in Kentucky one verse, decrying Marines landing at Santo Domingo the next. He called the front pages like a guerrilla newsie, merging the sardonic wit of Woody Guthrie, the chatty candor of Pete Seeger, and the lone-gunslinger bravado of Hank Williams.
And in the troubled arc of Ochs’ career—in which he began as the voice of the antiwar movement and heir apparent to Dylan, then cooled into his also-ran, then sank a bitter and penniless outcast—these cries of unpatriotism were a rare constant. He died not even knowing their extent; decades after he committed suicide in 1976, at age 35, the Freedom of Information Act unearthed a FBI monitoring dossier on him, thick as a novel.
But only a true American idealist could have written I Ain’t Marching Anymore. Ochs’ second album is a work of long-steeped fury at his country’s sins, naked in its scorn for a system showing its many fissures; still, it guards a flickering, tenacious hope that the nation can reach its potential to embrace, to empathize. It is a work of nationalistic heartbreak, the deploring of a terrible fate: the requiem of a romantic with nowhere to love. It is zealously leftist, so unequivocal as to smack of propaganda over poetry, almost wholly dependent on Ochs’ inculcating wordplay: with his twangy, octave-at-best vocal range, stevedore coffee shop strumming, and modest melodies, this album grabs your throat entirely on lyrical ferocity.
But to Ochs, there was no time for subtlety. The Lyndon B. Johnson administration was escalating involvement in Vietnam, ignoring countrywide demonstrations of dissent and returning body bags by the thousands; the racial friction of the South was exploding in bombings and riots; young Americans were still rudderless from the assassination of President Kennedy, mourning that era of profound hope and their purpose within it. Ochs absorbed it all and was a true believer in tuneful social reform; as he quipped in the program notes of the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, “I wouldn’t be surprised to see an album called Elvis Presley Sings Songs of the Spanish Civil War or The Beatles with the Best of the Chinese Border Dispute Songs.” But until the day that happened, Ochs was here for us, offering 14 brisk tracks of fingerpicked guitar and unvarnished tenor, distilling the world’s chaos into a frightening thesis: An era of optimism and social promise was not only ending, but taking alarming leaps backward. But, he stressed, there was still time to reverse course.
He sets his agenda firmly in the title track—an opener that rouses and incites despite a pallor of exhaustion, regret, and fear. Over a simple acoustic strum with a subtly agitated back-trill, Ochs travels the bloody scope of American warfare, gazing wearily through the eyes of a soldier whose obedience has cost him his humanity. He begins at the War of 1812, where “the young land started growing/The young blood started flowing”; then he grips a glinting bayonet in the Civil War, pilots a plane through Japanese skies that sets off “the mighty mushroom roar.” When Ochs’ warrior reaches the “Cuban shore,” and sees the missiles looming overhead, he grinds down his heels at last. “It's always the old to lead us to the wars/Always the young to fall,” he laments. “Now look at all we've won/With a saber and a gun/Tell me is it worth it all?” In a few breaths, Ochs not only decries the cyclical carnage of war, he explores the individual in bloodshed with clear-eyed empathy and lays a wrenching argument for ethical subversion. “Call it peace, or call it treason/Call it love, or call it reason,” he quavers, “But I ain't marching anymore.” Here, his oft-nasal voice betrays a slight Scottish lilt, the result of his Queens-based family’s brief stint in Edinburgh when he was a child—a warm, global topnote to his treaty. Upon its release, “I Ain’t Marching Anymore” became a ubiquitous anthem of the antiwar movement, and Ochs’ signature tune; when he performed it outside the Democratic National Convention in 1968, hundreds of young men burned their draft cards.
Ochs may have dropped out of journalism school (at Ohio State, where his fervent political columns got him demoted from the school paper), but he retained a penchant for interviewing strangers whenever he performed, from uptown street corners to dirt roads in the deep South. Early into Side A, on “In the Heat of the Summer,” Ochs recalls scenes from the Harlem riot of 1964, his reporter’s eye for detail gleaming in the “loudspeaker drowned like a whisperin' sound” and “uniforms shoving with their sticks/Asking, ‘Are you looking for trouble?’” While touring the summer folk festival circuit, he passed through Mississippi shortly after the abductions and murders of three civil rights workers—James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner—as they registered African Americans to vote. Ochs marched up to their neighbors, pen and paper in hand; their unease and obstinance informs “Here’s to the State of Mississippi,” a scorched-earth screed that implicates rural communities for resisting social progress and denounces the lack of education and options that perpetuate the spiral of intolerance.
“Talking Birmingham Jam” is a brutal lament of the violence in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, when black residents demonstrated in opposition of the city’s Jim Crow racial segregation laws__.__ In response, President Kennedy sent the National Guard to enforce integration in its schools, catalyzing the Civil Rights Act—and the city’s public safety commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor, replied with attack dogs, high-pressure water hoses, and club-wielding cops. “Well, all the signs said ‘Welcome In’/Signed by Governor Wallace and Rin Tin Tin/They said come along and watch the fights/While we feed our dogs on civil rights,” Ochs seethes in a conversational sing-song lifted from Guthrie, excoriating Connor and George Wallace. “You see Alabama is a sovereign state/With sovereign dogs and sovereign hate.” His words echo powerful ones Martin Luther King, Jr. penned the year before, though it’s not known how deliberately. “The silent password was fear. It was a fear not only on the part of the black oppressed, but also in the hearts of the white oppressors,” Dr. King wrote of Birmingham in Why We Can’t Wait. “There was also the dread of change, that all too prevalent fear which hounds those whose attitudes have been hardened by the long winter of reaction.”
While I Ain’t Marching Anymore arrived at a fractious moment in American history, it also landed at a strong pivot for Ochs’ beloved Greenwich Village protest-folk microcosm: it was the beginning of the end for this bohemian idyll. Ochs had moved to New York three years earlier, where the same liberal ire that made him an outcast in Ohio ingratiated him instantly with the other young troubadours at the Bitter End and the Gaslight. He played peace rallies at Carnegie Hall with Dylan and palling around with Van Ronk and Paxton afterward at dimly lit poker tables, sprawling in shoddy apartments to tease out new songs. He crashed on the couch of Jim Glover, his college roommate, with whom he’d once formed a band called the Singing Socialists; Glover was now half of the sweetheart folk duo Jim and Jean. (If they sound familiar, their name and saccharine charisma—plus Ochs’ frequent irascibility toward them—were imported wholesale into Inside Llewyn Davis.)
Dylan and Ochs were the heaviest hitters in the New York scene, and their reputations preceded them; in this time, they were described by *Melody Maker *in England as the “king of protest” and “the president,” respectively. They shared a mostly cordial rivalry, one with the hierarchy firmly apparent. As the Ochs biography Death of a Rebel details, Ochs revered Dylan openly, but Dylan was mercurial in return; he once raved of Ochs, “I just can't keep up with Phil. And he's getting better and better and better,” but was also quick to call him a “turncoat” and “opportunist” for wanting fame as nakedly as he did. (Once, Dylan allegedly kicked Ochs out of a limousine, hurling the “you’re just a singing journalist” epithet back in his face as the final indignity.) But for several years, both musicians coexisted in the same topical nexus. They both flourished at the landmark 1963 Newport Folk Festival; Pete Seeger, upon hearing them perform at a counterculture newspaper office, predicted vast fame for both. In one of many overlapping lyrical examples, they both bemoaned the death of civil rights activist Medgar Evers in 1964: Dylan on “Only A Pawn in Their Game” (from The Times They Are a-Changin’), Ochs on “Too Many Martyrs” (from his debut, All the News That’s Fit to Sing). And both were well-known volatiles; Dylan was the imperious prodigy simultaneously enjoying and bemoaning society’s quick deification of him. Ochs, one year older, envied his recognition openly and had a likewise-sticky reputation as a hothead alcoholic, a handsome narcissist who’d beaten girlfriends and alienated friends.
By 1965, Greenwich Village folk had begun splintering into their separate schools of folk ideology: Ochs believed folk songwriting should affect reactionary change in politics via blunt broadcasting of information and resistance, while Dylan teased out philosophical truths through personal ruminations, and daubing that canvas with larger social metaphor. That year, as Ochs continued to file his topical acoustic briefs sourced from Newsweek and The Village Voice, Dylan fully sniffed at it, “going electric” at the Newport Folk Festival and releasing Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. (Consider the former’s oblique Side A protest, “Maggie’s Farm,” a rollicking yet not-so-dissimilar bray of sedition as “I Ain’t Marching Anymore”—though, in this case, Dylan was protesting against protest folk.) Commercial favor tipped to Dylan’s rock rancor; it would not bend back toward Ochs’ bleeding headlines. As Christopher Hitchens summarized in the Ochs documentary There But for Fortune, “Phil’s very tough, grainy songs…were far more political and tough-minded than the much more generalized, accessible ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ There was a difference between people who liked Bob Dylan—anyone could like Bob Dylan, everybody did—and those who even knew about Phil Ochs.”
But serious-minded as Ochs was, he was not without his gallows humor—the secret weapon of I Ain’t Marching Anymore. “Draft Dodger Rag” is a droll riff on shirking the call to Vietnam, spry with the impishness of a boy claiming fang marks on his homework. Ochs spits out any and every excuse that will get him discharged from duty: “I've got a dislocated disc and a wracked-up back/I'm allergic to flowers and bugs,” he wheedles. “And when the bombshell hits, I get epileptic fits/And I'm addicted to a thousand drugs.” Not all his cop-outs have aged well, exactly, by progressive standards (“I always carry a purse” sets off a modern air-raid siren), but it’s an endearing novelty. And as with all Ochs’ songs, there is a galvanizing point staked into the sand: the draft fell disproportionately to the poor, the uneducated, and minorities. Another lighter offering, comparatively, is “That’s What I Want to Hear,” a call to arms for the exploited and whiny (inert liberals being a favored punching bag of Ochs’). “You tell me that your last good dollar is gone/And you say that your pockets are bare,” he sings at a sharp but not-unkind clip. Soon enough, “Now don't tell me your troubles/No, I don't have the time to spare/But if you want to get together and fight/Good buddy, that's what I want to hear.” It is a call to action but, notably, not to knee-jerk jingoism; mobilization is easy in the first flush of fear but resistance, if taken to conclusion, will always be a pyrrhic victory. Here, Ochs tapers one of his core, conclusively patriotic theses: that he, and his listeners, should be willing to lose some comforts to keep the world turning.
The most affecting moment of the album is “That Was the President,” Ochs’ eulogy to President Kennedy that speaks to the shattered disillusionment of his generation. It’s sung as softly as an echo across wooden pews. “Here’s a memory to share, here's a memory to save/Of the sudden early ending of command,” he sighs. “Yet a part of you and a part of me is buried in his grave/That was the President and that was the man.” It aches with lack of resolution; it’s a memorial to the idealism the president fostered, whose administration itself shuttered in unfulfilled promise of its progressive agenda. (There is more than a wisp of the paternal here; Ochs’ father also died in 1963.)
Ochs’ music after I Ain’t Marching Anymore would be pocked by outside influences; he jealously watched less overtly political colleagues like Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary reach national fame, and struggled to reconcile his ardency for social reform with his craving to be a star. He watched artists advance on his back; Joan Baez’s cover of his compassionate tune “There But for Fortune” charted in the Top 50 in both America and the UK, higher than he’d ever managed. Frustrated, he retreated from earnest topicality; his next full studio album, Pleasures of the Harbor, folded in lush, Sinatra-strings and ragtime piano, adding a poppier bend to his dour character studies of empty socialites and downtrodden flower vendors. He became disillusioned with demonstrating; he and his Yippie party cohorts staged a protest at 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, during which they nominated an actual pig for president (name: Pigasus), but the mirth ended in a massive, era-defining riot between protesters and police. He retreated from New York, his wife, and his daughter, drinking heavily, heaped his flagging idealism on the communist uprisings of Fidel Castro and the Marxist Chilean revolutionary Salvador Allende. His erratic creative path onward included self-funded, unsuccessful tours through South America and Africa (where he was arrested for performing at a political rally in Uruguay, robbed and strangled in Tanzania), and attempting to replicate Elvis Presley’s 1969 comeback show in Las Vegas with his own mystifying performance in gold lamé at Carnegie Hall. He dabbled more in symphonic pop and recruited Van Dyke Parks for a country-western turn (sarcastically called Phil Ochs’ Greatest Hits), all of which fell flat commercially.
Abetted by his rampant alcoholism and persistent writer’s block, Ochs slid into a bipolar breakdown; not even the end of the Vietnam War, and its ensuing celebratory concerts, could rouse him from his nosedive. He adopted an alternate identity called “John Train” and went on paranoid rants onstage, insisting he had murdered Phil Ochs and the CIA was after him. (The miserable irony of the FBI’s monitoring.) He slept on the streets, got arrested, attacked friends. On April 9, 1976, amid the gaudy patriotism of the Bicentennial Celebration, he hanged himself at his sister’s home in Queens.
But for a moment, Phil Ochs existed in pure conviction. I Ain’t Marching Anymore reminds us to resist the dangers of acquiescence, to take to the streets to demand the country that still persists in our hearts, even if it’s not before to our eyes anymore. It would be easy to stop marching in apathy or in defeat, but Ochs pushed for something greater: a righteous, excruciating, beautiful reclamation. Small wonder his powerful polemics have been covered and updated by the Clash, Neil Young, Jello Biafra: His fight was never just his, never just of his time. And in the right hands, it will never die.


With most tracks pulled from the cutting room floor of the YHLQMDLG sessions, Bad Bunny shows he’s in full command of his music, even when it’s a little rough around the edges.

LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR

Like almost everyone else, Bad Bunny’s life got derailed when the coronavirus pandemic swept across the globe. Unlike most everyone else, he was coming off a performance with Shakira at the Super Bowl and shooting scenes for his debut acting role in the new season of Netflix’s Narcos: Mexico when much of the western world shut down, sending him back home to Puerto Rico to wait out the crisis. Weeks of isolation tested the limits of his ability to entertain himself—and us—without leaving the house. As he told Rolling Stone, he grabbed some old beats, called up some OGs, and pulled up to his engineer La Paciencia’s crib to track some vocals. And less than three months after dropping YHLQMDLG, the high-water mark of his career, Bad Bunny had a new album out.
The title of that album, LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR, loosely translates to “The ones that weren’t coming out,” a play on words that references both the songs on the record as well as Bad Bunny himself, holed up in an Airbnb with his partner since March. Nine of the 10 tracks were pulled from the cutting room floor of the YHLQMDLG sessions; unfinished, unmixed, and unmastered beats with no vocals that Bad Bunny resurrected while in isolation, with a little help from his friends. Most of them appeared in some form during his marathon home quarantine concert broadcast live on Instagram earlier this month.
The record plays quick and dirty, with uncharacteristically crunchy production value and lo-fi aesthetics. Even the album cover is lo-res. YHLQMDLG was a slickly produced homage to marquesina mixtapes; LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR sounds like it could actually be one, the kind of record a teen Bad Bunny might play at one of those underground garage parties. He says he put the record together in two days, and it shows. But far from detracting from the experience, the loose grit is part of the appeal. “Reggaetoncitos” that smooth out reggaeton’s rougher edges may have helped it merge with the mainstream, but Bad Bunny’s career has been defined by pulling the mainstream closer to him, as opposed to vice versa. Even as he’s reshaped urbano in his own image, he’s shown a healthy respect and admiration for its underground outlaw beginnings, and consistently made the case that there’s room for perreo on the pop charts.
A quick glance at the guest features reveals the dichotomy of old school and new school—legends like Don Omar, Yandel, and Zion y Lennox represent the OGs, while nascent hitmaker Jhay Cortez offers a glimpse of the talent in urbano’s next generation. And while YHLQMDLG standout “Safaera” felt like a five-minute tribute to DJ Playero’s genre-defining mixtapes of the 1990s, he tips his cap to them even more directly here. “BAD CON NICKY,” his collaboration with Medellin-via-Puerto Rico reggaetonero Nicky Jam, samples Daddy Yankee’s “Donde Mí No Venga,” a seminal track in reggaeton’s history from Playero 37 that makes plain the lineage that connects reggae en español and reggaeton.
Lyrically, LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR mostly sticks to Bad Bunny’s trademark sex flexes and party jams. But even in tossed-off mixtape verses, he retains a goofy charm; “Tantos hijos que no sé cómo los crío/Y en los dedos tengo el iceberg que rompió el Titanic/Los mato flow Sosa y quedan blancos como Sammy” he raps on “RONCA FREESTYLE” (“So many kids that I don’t know how I raise them/And on my fingers I have the iceberg that sunk the Titanic/I kill them, Sosa flow and they're left white like Sammy”).
The album’s final track was the only one made from scratch during Bad Bunny’s self-imposed quarantine and offers the most literal view of his life in isolation. He compares the cause of his hermetic lifestyle to Puerto Rico’s corrupt governor, lamenting both his canceled concerts and lack of access to AutoTune. It’s also duet with his partner Gabriela Berlingeri, who has proven to be as much a collaborator as she is a paramour since the pair went public with their relationship earlier this year—she laid the reference vocals for his JLo collab “Te Guste,” and even shot his recent Rolling Stone cover. LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR is incomparable to Bad Bunny’s first two LPs: Those were two carefully crafted masterpieces, whereas this is merely an extracurricular project from a bored superstar trapped in a house for weeks on end. That it’s still this good is a reminder of his otherworldly talent.


The Killers' greatest hits collection, Direct Hits, includes singles from their four studio albums along with new songs (the M83-produced "Shot at the Night" and "Just Another Girl", produced by Stuart Price). Taken as a whole, it proves the band has fewer actual hits, let alone great ones, than you thought.

Direct Hits

You can let silly facts get in the way of seeing Direct Hits as one of the most hotly anticipated records of the past 10 years*.* Sure, the Killers have technically released four albums and a collection of miscellany that have sold over 20 million copies worldwide and the cool reception to last year’s kinda OK Battle Born suggests their days as a A-list rock band are pretty much over. But c0me on, we knew from the start that was all going to be irrelevant prelude at some point. In 2004, we had a couple of guys from Las Vegas with a careerist streak so blatant it was actually charming and Hot Fuss, an album with gargantuan singles and a complete lack of even adequate deep cuts. This pattern would be repeated three times over and as the years accrued, we fantasized of “Human” or “Runaways” being extracted from their vestigial incubators and collected on a Greatest Hits record that would be amazing. And how many other bands from the past decade can honestly claim more than four actual hits? From that point forward, it would be the only Killers album anyone would ever need, and perhaps seen as the only album they ever made. So how does Direct Hits still manage to disappoint even if we’ve already heard every single song on it?
For one thing, Direct Hits is mostly chronological. Mostly. It begins with “Mr. Brightside”, and rightfully so, since it’s not only the Killers’ best song, but also one of the 2000’s as well. And it was the band’s first single back in 2003. But it shares a complex, tangled history competing with “Somebody Told Me”, as both had multiple releases and alternate videos, targeted for different markets. “Somebody Told Me” was the song that presented the Killers as a particularly UK-friendly Next Big Thing. The plural moniker generated a tentative association with the Strokes or the Vines, who were already signaling the commercial obsolescence of the "New Rock Revival." But the Killers actually got their name from the video for New Order’s “Crystal”, and there was a requisite disco thump and a cheeky, gender-bending sexuality in the chorus that placed them as an American counterpart to bands like Franz Ferdinand. Singer Brandon Flowers wore makeup too and that didn’t hurt. “Somebody Told Me” was certainly catchy, though their libido wasn’t remotely believable even if you didn’t know they were Mormons. If Hot Fuss stalled at “Somebody Told Me”, the Killers would be remembered more fondly than their thoroughly-ethered rivals in the Bravery, but not by much.
Of course, the thought of “Mr. Brightside” somehow falling on deaf ears is more absurd than any of the faces made by Eric Roberts in its indisputably pitch-perfect video. Following in the lineage of “Is She Really Going Out With Him?” or “Jessie’s Girl”, the song itself is a karaoke classic for men grappling with the catastrophic realities of a woman choosing to have sex with someone who isn’t him. Only now, it’s given a properly dashing and desperate musical conduit and a performance by Flowers that makes the finest use of his limited range and dodgy breath control. But it was the track's second, Sophie Muller-directed video that sealed the deal, that truly unlocked the band’s potential as prime purveyors of ham & cheese—as Ryan Dombal noted, Roberts and Flowers are dueling over a game of checkers, and therein lies the Killers’ best look, stupendously simple, pure Vegas glitz, overwhelming in its accessible gaudiness. Whereas most bands musically summoning 80s teenage drama went backwards to channel John Hughes' visual aesthetic, the Killers went for the ostentatious, delightfully tacky drama of Moulin Rouge! and clearly, fellow Las Vegans Panic! At the Disco were watching.
For the rest of Hot Fuss’ album cycle, the Killers wisely followed suit: the pompous stomp of “All These Things That I’ve Done” was set to a video where Flowers co-opts his entire suburban desperado chic from Violator-era Dave Gahan and “Smile Like You Mean It” is the platonic ideal for a fourth single that can coast on the success of the previous three. Before I die, I hope to meet someone who truly believes side-B cuts like “Andy, You’re a Star” and “Midnight Show” are the heart of Hot Fuss rather than proof of the Killers’ debut being one of the most laughably lopsided albums of the past two decades. But with those hits, combined with Hot Fuss opener and de facto single “Jenny Was A Friend of Mine”, the Killers accomplished what so many wanted of them, which was make the 2000s' answer to side A of Duran Duran’s Rio.
But soon thereafter, it wasn’t enough to hear Bono and Chris Martin drop “I’ve got soul but I’m not a soldier” in their live shows as a kind of torch-sharing. The Killers wanted to be U2 or Coldplay, not in sound so much as in reputation. In short, a band whose campiness often appears to be some sort of glandular problem rather than a product of artistic intent, but are nonetheless given the benefit of the doubt and taken seriously. You might remember how this turned out, and so Direct Hits does exactly what it’s supposed to: salvage “When You Were Young” and make you forget everything that made Sam’s Town something other than Hotter Fuss. Which is to say, the Americana fixations (inexplicably reprised on Day & Age’s DOA single “A Dustland Fairytale”), the moralizing drug PSA “Uncle Johnny”, “Enterlude”, and “Exitlude”, and all the classic rock maneuvers that showed four musicians far out of their depth. At least on “When You Were Young”, their Springsteen ambitions were charming: you can spot the baldfaced “Born to Run” rip in the descending chord changes and the “Thunder Road” iconography, though Flowers’ honking vocals often make it sound more like the most compact Meat Loaf song ever written. But once again, it’s a blast to sing along with and Killers simply steamrolled any criticism the way true hits are meant to. Sam’s Town has since sold an estimated five million copies. Did you know this?  You can currently acquire many of them on Amazon for less money than a postage stamp, but that’s not the Killers' problem, is it?
It actually is, at least in the way Direct Hits plays out. By the time you’ve finished the fifth track on Direct Hits, that’s all the Hot Fuss singles and “When You Were Young”. You have 13 more to go, including a demo of “Mr. Brightside” and the Calvin Harris remix of “When You Were Young”. The big draw is “Shot at the Night”, their collaboration with Anthony Gonzalez of M83, an act that hasn’t exactly overtaken Killers in terms of arena-filling synth-pop bombast, but have certainly cut into their market share. Like Direct Hits, you know what’s coming and it’s still kinda deflating: once again, the Killers adapt only the most obvious signifiers of their charges, M83’s hollowed-out synth tones, neon synth riffs not too different than their own, and an obsession with the connotative properties of “the night.” I don’t think Anthony Gonzalez is phoning it in here, though he’s big enough to do it—similar to Oblivion, it just shows that when it comes to soundtracking blockbusters, he’s a much better boss than an employee.
Though their last truly ubiquitous single, “When You Were Young” established a problematic thread that ran through Sam’s Town, the “try everything” third LP Day & Age, and Battle Born, three very different albums that are of more or less of equal quality. There was a dissonance between what many listeners wanted out of the Killers and how the Killers saw themselves. They were in some aspects students of classic rock, though not particularly good ones, skimming the Boss, Bowie (“Spaceman”), New Order (“Human”), Journey (most of Battle Born), and the Cars (“Read My Mind”) like they were assignments handed down from their label. Likewise, many heard “are we human or are we dancer?” as a phenomenal non-sequitur, and it probably would be if Flowers didn’t make it a point to say he was actually paraphrasing Hunter S. Thompson. The Killers performed at a 2010 “Salute to the Military” show at the White House and didn’t even play the one song that contains their most well-known lyric, which is about SOLDIERS. Does Flowers' unyielding belief in his own profundity make Direct Hits even more effective as camp? Or does it make you feel like there’s a disconnect, that the Killers stopped believing there was a joke to be in on after Hot Fuss? And why weren't they any fun?
Even more damning is that most of the songs on Direct Hits stopped becoming hits. Or, at least the kind that are meant to be included on Greatest Hits collections, ones that you simply couldn’t avoid even if you tried. Chart performance is typically meaningless in 2013, but the Killers actively seek out hits and have all the resources to make them happen. If they flop on the charts, that’s on them. And yet, they did flop—“Spaceman” peaked at #67 on the Billboard Hot 100 and promptly disappeared into the void. At its most popular, “A Dustland Fairytale” still trailed 35 songs on the Modern Rock Tracks chart. Long-forgotten “When You Were Young” follow-up “Bones” isn’t even included here. The truly worthy comeback single “Runaways” stalled out at #7 on the Alternative charts behind Imagine Dragons and we were left to wonder whether Las Vegas was big enough for the both of them.
At this point, the Killers are either a phenomenally successful cult act or a headliner in serious decline, and neither seems particularly flattering for a band that’s always aiming for the cheap seats. They topped a night of Coachella back in 2009, but it was a sparsely attended weekend that stood as the festival's bottoming out. (In their defense, give it four years and their headliner gig will look more justified than that of Phoenix.) Battle Born was by far their weakest chart performance yet, but look at it this way—they moved 114,000 copies in week one, whereas Arcade Fire’s first major label record just did 140,000 with far more visibility and career momentum. And Battle Born still got voted as the #2 album in Rolling Stone’s 2012 readers poll with “Miss Atomic Bomb” clocking in as the #1 single, a testament to the diehard fanbase of Victims. (No, I did not just make up that name for the Killers' diehard fanbase, it is 100% real.) If you’re doubting their intensity, when Rolling Stone ran a similar poll in 2009 for “most underrated album of the decade,” what finished at #1? Sam’s Town.
But a Greatest Hits collection is supposed to surprise you with the familiar, to tease out how many songs from a certain band you’ve heard in the wild and make you think “wow, I didn’t realize that was all them.” Direct Hits proves the Killers have fewer actual hits, let alone great ones, than you thought and makes you wonder if they made their Greatest Hits album too early or whether they can ever legitimately put one together at all.


On his latest, Jidenna invokes a metaphorical highway to Africa, uniting the sounds of the sprawling diaspora. The music ranges from booming contemporary hip-hop to feather-light afropop and highlife.

85 to Africa

On a recent episode of The Breakfast Club, Jidenna shared a physics-lesson-cum-aphorism his late father often repeated: “You can’t inflate a balloon from inside the balloon. You must inflate it from outside,” he said, in what can be presumed to be an impression of his father’s Nigerian accent. “So the diaspora must take money from outside and put it in. And the continent must take money from inside and put it out.” It’s a sentiment likely familiar to the children of many African immigrants, an optimistic, globally minded philosophy with clear goals but no obvious plan of action. Jidenna’s 85 to Africa, named for the interstate highway that runs through the southeastern U.S., is an attempt to make good on that philosophy.
The promise of a metaphorical highway to Africa, solidifying the connections of centuries of sprawling diaspora, is a useful framework for an album; it’s the highway Drake cruised for much of More Life, as did GoldLink on Diaspora, Beyoncé on the Lion King bonus album The Gift, and Burna Boy throughout his career-spanning blend of afropop, dancehall, and hip-hop. You can imagine Jidenna’s highway system including stops in Jamaica and Trinidad, where dancehall and soca mingle with the U.S. and West Africa. Jidenna’s own diasporic project was evident on 2017’s The Chief, the dense debut album that followed hit singles “Classic Man” and “Yoga,” and which sprinkled in references to his Nigerian heritage. As he’s pared down his style—the bespoke, Antebellum-recalling suits have been replaced with a crisp uniform of a T-shirt tucked into a structured high-waisted trouser, and his box-dyed finger curl grown out and braided—so has his musical style been hemmed in, stripped to the modes in which he’s most effective.
The first half of the album, presumably the domain of the I-85, features Jidenna’s take on contemporary hip-hop. “Worth the Weight,” which closes with an evocative vocal sample from Seun Kuti, son of Fela and musician in his own right, expresses a vision of a united black people. The production by DJ Dahi and Nana Kwabena, the Wondaland affiliate who handles most of the sounds on the album, is cinematic and expansive, with horns, manipulated vocals, and booming drums. Unfortunately, here and elsewhere, Jidenna’s hardy, awkward rapping—“Po-po spun the wheel on misfortune, but I ain’t play that/They come round and pat-pat-pat us down but I ain’t Sajak”—doesn't quite live up to the bigness of his ideas.
Among 85 to Africa’s most endearing qualities is its cultural references, unexplained and presented as universally understood. “Babouche,” featuring GoldLink, is a jaunty ode to the swaggy slipper common in West Africa. (The song, inexplicably, has some #MeToo commentary thrown in. “You can tell a lot from appearance/You can really spot what you fearin’/I heard Morgan Freeman got a hearing/See, I never trusted that earring,” he raps.) “Sou Sou,” maybe the album’s horniest song, uses a small-group lending mechanism common in the Caribbean and throughout Africa as a conceptual starting point.
Things improve on the second half of the album, when, to follow his metaphor, Jidenna arrives in Africa. The melodies and breezy rhythms of songs like “Zodi” and “Vaporiza” are a welcome shift from his barrel-chested rapping. On “Zodi,” featuring Mr. Eazi, he simultaneously charms and razzes an astrology-minded woman, who is the type to “text the stars and crystal ball emojis.” The subject of “Sufi Woman” might be that same person, except this time she’s reading him 13th-century poetry as he luxuriates; a surprising beat, constructed out of Spanish guitar and afropop rhythms by Nana Kwabena, hovers above like a cloudless sky.
“Vaporiza” might be the album’s high point, an easy, tender love song with high-life rhythms and Ethiopian horns: “Vaporiza/I’m breathin’ easy when I’m with you,” goes the affectionate hook. In spirit, it shares a lot with one of the summer’s most ubiquitous, and unlikeliest, hits: “Fall,” a velvety love song recorded in 2017 by the Nigerian pop star Davido, suddenly broke through this year and became inescapable. The same happened with “Drogba (Joanna),” a jaunty afrowave track originally released by the Ivorian-British artist Afro B in early 2018. It feels necessary to celebrate the visibility of these songs, propelled into the mainstream without the rubric of any A-list affiliation. It would be unwise to extrapolate too much from such anomalies, but it’s hard not to feel that Jidenna’s right about something.


For his first vinyl release of new music in 25 years, Kerry Leimer makes explicit his debt to kosmische music while recasting these sounds into his own mold.

Mitteltöner

When the RVNG label went through the tape archives of Pacific Northwest composer/musician/sound artist Kerry Leimer for their 2014 release A Period of Review (Original Recordings: 1975-1983), Leimer was mostly unknown to 21st-century listeners. His last commercially available album, Imposed Order, was released in 1983 and if you were located outside of the Pacific Northwest, his string of experimental ambient albums and cassettes were hard to locate in the intervening years. What A Period of Review revealed was that—while Leimer was clearly indebted to the tape loop work of Brian Eno—his body of work showed that he was one of the few examples of American kosmische: minimal, melodic, and ethereal. Any number of musicians, ranging from Tortoise and Stereolab to Oneohtrix Point Never, have since taken up the mantle of German progressive music. But during Leimer’s early ’80s prime, Americans embracing the music of Neu!, Cluster, Harmonia, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, and the like were virtually unheard of.
Since the RVNG retrospective, Leimer has slowly returned to the spotlight, reissuing long out of print albums like Land of Look Behind and Imposed Order along the way, allowing a generation of younger fans to appreciate his craft in depth. For his first vinyl release of new music in 25 years, Leimer’s Mitteltöner makes explicit this debt to his kosmische forbears, from the German language titles (the album translates as “mid-range”) to the sounds themselves. Rather than simply reiterate these ageless sounds, he has a knack for recasting them in an original manner.
Leimer’s love of kosmische is evident from the start, as opener “Dunne Luft” condenses the earmarks of that sound into its four minutes. There’s the solar flares of guitar that arise early on in the track, fuzzy and luminous, serving less as a lead instrument and more as a sonic texture. It sounds like a sly homage to the arcing six-string stylings of Neu! and Harmonia member Michael Rother, but rather than simply pay tribute, Leimer lets pinging synths bustle underneath and processes and loops live drums to keep the track’s momentum going.
“Werbemelodie” translates as “jingle” and it has a wispy, lilting melody that makes the title seem a bit on the nose. But Leimer’s touch is light, sampling just enough of a German voice and rumbling bass for added texture and letting tones ring across the rhythm, bringing to mind the dreamy, lullaby-like chimes that Four Tet had circa-Rounds. That sureness carries onto even shorter pieces like “As Long Ago as This,” with Leimer drawing together gentle rhythms and resonant electronic timbres.
There’s a sense of calm to the piece, but also a touch of shadow, a balance which carries over to the album’s centerpiece, the nearly nine-minute “Entferntemusik.” It’s this equilibrium that always differentiated Leimer from his fellow home studio musicians of the early ’80s era. While the West Coast New Age cottage industry was on the rise, these artists were also taking some of their cues from German electronic music of the 1970s. And while those suspended, luminous tones also appeared in Leimer’s productions, he also kept some grit and a sense of disquiet intact on his compositions. The tapped guitar strings that open “Entferntemusik” (translation “distant music”) take on the properties of a distant alarm, with Leimer adding bowed metal and industrial ambience to the piece, which unfurls like smoke from a power plant, growing darker and wider.
On closing track “Cafe Florian,” Leimer pays overt homage both to Kraftwerk’s Florian Schneider and Popol Vuh founder Florian Fricke. The flickering rhythms bring to mind the blurry highways evoked on Autobahn while the ghostly melodies of the piece bear the evocative beauty of Popol Vuh. Rather than serve as mere pastiche, it encapsulates Leimer’s unique talents on his new work: drawing on a vintage sound now over forty years old and entering into middle age, while also finding a way to also push it forward.


On his solo breakthrough, the former LVL UP singer comes to terms with hard times by fully embracing the indie rock he loves.

Lost in the Country

What if the worries that keep you awake at night—fear of commitment, awareness of mortality, the inevitability of loss—could, instead, motivate you during the day? That is the gist of Trace Mountains’ Lost in the Country, a brisk indie rock record that bluntly addresses our deepest concerns and transmutes them into 10 winning anthems about persevering. In the worldview of Dave Benton, the Trace Mountains singer-songwriter who gathered a studio band to shape these songs, the cure is sometimes as simple as a long walk in the woods or a solitary cry in a foreign rock club. Or maybe it’s recognizing, as he does here more than once, that funneling your sadness into a tune just to make it through another day is perfectly acceptable. Lost in the Country responds to novel modern afflictions—the inadequacy that stems from witnessing everyone else’s glamour on social media, or the generational unease of a forsaken future—with Benton’s own survival guide, as comforting for its candor as it is accessible for its instant hooks.
Benton is an acolyte of big-guitar indie rock, particularly records that counter the self-doubt and systemic confusion of early adulthood with the bliss of getting loud in a room with your pals. His sacred texts start somewhere around Dinosaur Jr.’s 1987 landmark You’re Living All Over Me, include Built to Spill’s 1994 opus There’s Nothing Wrong With Love, and run up to the War on Drugs’ 2014 breakthrough Lost in the Dream (cannily namechecked by this album’s very title). His devotion has been clear for nearly a decade, first on the hulking albums he made with the promising but departed LVL UP, and on his own as Trace Mountains. His lo-fi debut supplied pure Bright Eyes and Sebadoh pastiche. When he kicked on the amps for 2018’s A Partner to Lean On as LVL UP wound down, he seemed adrift, sad and searching for his own sound.
Musically and emotionally, Lost in the Country is a decisive step forward. Those familiar references still abound—the title track might have fit on a turn-of-the-millennium Barsuk compilation, wedged somewhere between Death Cab and John Vanderslice, while the assured solo that ends “Rock & Roll” seems salvaged from A Deeper Understanding’s scrap heap. Benton name-checks that War on Drugs album on the title track, too, reinforcing his devotion to the romantic sweep of epic rock’n’roll, recast for the budgetary constraints of someone who recently quit his bigger band. There’s a newfound poise to these songs, an effortlessness in both conception and delivery that suggests Benton’s music can mirror his heroes while capturing his own experiences, too. Even when he gilds “Cooper’s Dream” with singing saw and glockenspiel or “I Am Leaving You” with blaring surges of bright organ lines, he turns his old loves into your new sing-alongs.
That brightness lifts Benton through the darkest parts of these songs. On “Me & May” he considers the implications of a breakup, pondering the parallel universe where he’s still happy and satisfied. Benton acknowledges the regret of choosing one timeline instead of another, but incandescent harmonies and spring-loaded drums guide him to the realization that he did the best he could with what he knew—all any of us can do, he suggests, until we are “drifting into a dream.” Again contemplating the choices we’re forced to make during “Dog Country,” he reflects on leaving Brooklyn for the woods of the Hudson Valley, pondering what he might have lost or gained. Pedal steel and a bucolic shuffle comfort him like hands on his shoulders, tempering FOMO’s bittersweet sting.
Lost in the Country’s sanguine mood and full embrace of its indie-rock predecessors run the risk of making Benton sound overly hopeful or naïve, the ostrich plunging its head beneath the surface to ignore the relentless bad news. But Benton is not above or apart from any of it. Especially near the album’s end, he reveals just how low he’s been. “Fallin’ Rain” opens with Benton at his most despondent, his tone furrowed over storm clouds of dark piano chords. And during “Absurdity,” he routes his voice through a tremolo pedal until it shakes like a dead leaf in a windstorm. “We are all on our own/There is no kindness/There is only violence—and smartphones,” he sings with a tremor that recalls Phil Elverum, tenderly rattling off a litany of existential laments.
But Benton doesn’t wallow in these pits of self-pity. Instead, he uses them as opportunities to change his circumstances and outlook, to climb out and look at the world around him and tell us about the process. As he marvels at an infinite hillside during “Fallin’ Rain,” he gets lost in something bigger than himself, something that will outlast “this hopeless heartache.” An acoustic guitar and bright electronics sparkle like prisms in the sun, echoing his epiphany. Even then, Benton’s voice remains as fragile as the feelings of inadequacy and guilt he’s fighting. That vulnerability testifies to our daily battles with our deepest insecurities, even after those fleeting moments when it feels like we’ve won.
And as it enters its second half, “Absurdity” steadily rises above its misery and torpor, a languid guitar solo leading to a verse that’s as life-affirming as indie rock gets. The most involved song in Benton’s catalog, it moves seamlessly through four distinct sections, like low-stakes prog-rock, to illustrate his lifting mood. It’s a testament to his broader musical and narrative ambitions, perhaps a suggestion of how far he can push his elemental indie rock lineage.
Above a suddenly funky beat that suggests summer days spent listening to jam bands, Benton relays a breathless story about hiking among the evergreen trees on a canyon rim. He’s stunned by the sight and feels free, at least until his phone buzzes in his pocket, drawing him back into a world of “true absurdity.” But he remembers now that he’s happy to be here at all, blinking in the daylight. “I guess this means that I can be a part of the ever-unfolding daydream,” he sings, his voice betraying a wry smile. Sometimes, there’s no escaping the sense that we’re living in shit, he seems to say. But at least it means we’re alive, always with something left to fix.

Buy: Rough Trade
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This Brooklyn four-piece follows its fantastic single "2080" with a debut packed with similar moments of pan-ethnic spiritualism. Like Midlake, Grizzly Bear, and Animal Collective-- who have all recently re-shaped tribal, primitive sounds into ultra-modern forms-- Yeasayer channel both a dystopian science-fiction sensibility and deep appreciation for the natural world.

All Hour Cymbals

Over the past few years, a few of the most talked-about indie bands have been those making music with an ahistorical sense of mythic drama. TV on the Radio, Celebration, Grizzly Bear, and Animal Collective, among others, have been variously and inventively appropriating rock'n'roll's roots in ritualistic sounds, working toward individual aesthetics that merge mutual appreciations for surface and tradition. By and large, they draw upon ideas of the pre-modern (multi-part harmonies and chants drawn from religious rites, a fixation on the unseen power of the natural world), and express them through ultra-modern forms (synthesizers, electronic textures, heavy echo).
Perhaps unconsciously, these groups are working in the shadow cast by the late 1970s and early 80s collaborations between Brian Eno and David Byrne, primarily My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and the Talking Heads albums Fear of Music and Remain in Light. By surrounding Byrne's rural preacher impression on "Once in a Lifetime" with angelic new age synthesizers and ethereal harmonies, for instance, the duo pulled an affective charge from seemingly incompatible elements. The co-presence of Byrne's anxious sermonizing, a West African rhythm section and Eno's stylish ornamentation signified not only the spiritual transformation of Byrne's character, but also an important shift in pop’s approach toward its own past along with non-Western forms of music.
Brooklyn's Yeasayer are the latest entry to this group of Byrne disciples, and one of the better bands to put a new spin on his polyrhythmic convulsing. The band gained recognition earlier this year for their fantastic first single "2080", possibly because of its sonic similarities to Midlake's buzzed-about 2006 single "Roscoe". Both share a woozy, woodsy ambience, but where "Roscoe", set in 1891, was nostalgic for a rustic world, Yeasayer gazes ahead-- and not optimistically. "I can't sleep when I think about the times we're living in," Chris Keating sings, continuing, "I can't sleep when I think about the future I was born into." After two preternaturally smooth choruses, the band lives up to its name. All new age elements temporarily vanish, and the group breaks through into communalism. The sudden, fervent "yeah yeah!" pulls from the same crowded Anglo-ethnic trough as the Arcade Fire, Animal Collective, and Danielson, and establishes the band's own link between the ritualistic and the futuristic.
All Hour Cymbals, the band's LP debut, is packed with similar moments of pan-ethnic spiritualism, filtered through walls of echo and layers of gossamer synth. The album opens on "Sunrise" with a gospel-tinged a cappella vocal that wouldn't sound out of place coming from TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe and adds handclaps and austere piano. The mix is gently, gradually taken over by a droning synthetic ambience and Keating's vocals, which express his desire to merge with nature. The song's falsettoed chorus is then fleshed out with a vague Far Eastern vibe, that same sense of foreign tension reappearing later in "Worms".
This sense of apprehension lends the album a dramatic flair, best realized in "Forgiveness", which-- while reclaiming the synthetic handclap and keystroke incantation for the band's unnatural revival meeting-- calls into question the time-honored tendency to appropriate religion for personal gain. Guitarist Anand Wilder sings: "I've come to beg for forgiveness/ So forgive me," yet after pleading that "I've tried to teach by my doing, your undoing" he admits, "But my time will be your ruin." Elsewhere, "Germs" augments its earthly paranoia ("What's hurting me when I breathe/ Perhaps it's just the mold on the ceiling") with a sonic mood somewhere between Celtic and Balkan, and "No Need to Worry" is a buzzing cathedral of dread, its title only serving as an attempted calming influence.
The peak of All Hour Cymbals' tangible sense of unease, the pummeling "Wait for the Wintertime", is Yeasayer's Black Sabbath moment, transforming their chants into a dark, persistent march. Although it's not clear whether the song is the band's own origin myth, about the apocalypse, or both, the lyric, "On a cold day, you can walk forever/ On a cold day, nothing's gonna stop us," is charged with dread, only bolstered by the atonal saxophones in its climax. There and elsewhere, Yeasayer channel both a dystopian science-fiction sensibility and deep appreciation for the natural world, employing a wide, international range of sounds. The result is a unique form of indie rock world music that resists stepping into the essentialist, ethnocentric traps consistently tripped by high-minded hipsters.