Given the hundreds of thousands of words hunted and pecked in the service of M.I.A.'s 2005 debut *Arular*, the odds on her delivering more grist for the mill with her followup were probably somewhere between slim and Amy Winehouse. Sure, *Arular*\-- which has quietly sold 130,000 copies in the U.S.-- ultimately didn't seem to make much of an impact on the public at large, but the bountiful texts woven into its rich backstory worked like so much rockcrit catnip; momentarily setting aside the problem of M.I.A.'s own hazily defined personal politics, that album had the effect of nudging the critical

Kala

Given the hundreds of thousands of words hunted and pecked in the service of M.I.A.'s 2005 debut Arular, the odds on her delivering more grist for the mill with her followup were probably somewhere between slim and Amy Winehouse. Sure, Arular-- which has quietly sold 130,000 copies in the U.S.-- ultimately didn't seem to make much of an impact on the public at large, but the bountiful texts woven into its rich backstory worked like so much rockcrit catnip; momentarily setting aside the problem of M.I.A.'s own hazily defined personal politics, that album had the effect of nudging the critical forum back towards the kinds of issues it doesn't grapple with nearly enough. Issues that feel more important than ever as our traditional notions of genre and geography melt away, namely: How we square our desire for freshness and fun with the ugly politics of cultural tourism, or whether we bother at all; how the internet works like a hall of mirrors on identity and meaning; whether there's really any such thing as an empty visceral gesture.
If Arular provided a platform to discuss those things, Kala certainly invites us to continue the conversation. For all the scrutiny and cynicism aimed at her in the past 18 months, M.I.A. hasn't dialed herself down in the slightest. If anything, Kala finds her puffing out her chest and asserting herself more strenuously than ever, half-baked agit-prop and all. When she boasts on the stomping, Bollywood-sampling opener "Bamboo Banga" that she's "coming back with power/ Power," you get the sense that by "power" she means "courage of conviction." Regardless of how you square with her politics, her willingness to continue the muckracking is admirable, if not dimension-adding. Don't forget, she's rubbing elbows with the likes of Interscope and Timbaland now; for all the choices she might have made and the audiences she might have aimed at, the fresh-sounding, adventurous, and not-exactly-accessible Kala is the kind of record that obviously demanded a defined personal vision. Taken in concert with her understandable blasting of Pitchfork for perpetuating the male-led ingenue myth a few weeks ago, this campaign's single biggest revelation is turning out to be M.I.A. herself.
In contrast to her comparatively sparkly and streamlined debut, Kala is clattering, buzzy, and sonically audacious. While it still sounds, for lack of a better word, as digital as its predecessor, the primarily Switch-produced album paradoxically reaches further than the produced-by-committee Arular in terms of its overall palette of sounds. From the disco bassline and gloopy Eurovision strings of the swimmy Bollywood cover "Jimmy" to the hairy didgeridoos and pitched-up elementary school raps (courtesy of Aboriginal schoolboy crew Wilcannia Mob) of "Mango Pickle Down River" to the bubbling synths of the gloriously woozy "20 Dollar", this represents a significant expansion of M.I.A.'s already big tent of sounds. It also signifies her expansion as a performer. Where Arular saw her make the best of her fairly limited vocal abilities, Kala finds her reaching further outward, either by singing sweetly, as she does capably on "Jimmy", by peppering her chatter with sudden, free-floating melodies ("20 Dollar"), or by simply putting even more emphasis on the elastic qualities of her usual sing-songy delivery, as she does on the pinched-nose baile funk of "World Town" and the celebratory first single "Boyz"-- a triumph of her rhythmic patter if there ever was one.
On paper, M.I.A.'s politics still register as conflicted as ever. She's as enamoured with her own empty sloganeering as she is disapproving of the western world's, and as likely to remind us that AK47s cost $20 apiece in Africa ("20 Dollar") as she is to adorn the chorus of her summer songs with cash register ch-chings and gunfire clatter ("Paper Planes"). An easy hybrid of island patois and Westernized slang, most of her lyrics register as being primarily in service of their rhythms, anyway; as with Arular, the things M.I.A. insinuates are often more rewarding than those she actually says. For example, bits and pieces of standard whitebread indie rock tunes turn up like whack-a-moles all throughout Kala. "Bamboo Banga" pinches a verse from Jonathan Richman's 1976 middle American driving anthem "Roadrunner" only to flip the metaphor from cars to desert animals; "20 Dollar" knowingly pilfers the bassline to New Order's "Blue Monday" before throwing in a lyrical nod to Pixies; even the island-tinged nursery rhyme of "Paper Planes" borrows from the Clash's "Straight to Hell". Whether we're meant to infer anything larger (perhaps about colonization and cultural re-appropriation) from these little morsels is, of course, entirely up to us. But at the very least, it tells us that M.I.A.'s intuition always leads her to interesting places.
And make no mistake, she's in here. While there was a time when you might have been able to argue that Arular wasn't the product of a singular vision, this album makes it increasingly difficult, if not outright impossible, to say that about her output anymore. Even more interesting than how an artist acquires a listenership is what they do once they have it. With Kala, M.I.A.'s made it abundantly obvious where her interests lie, and it's not in toppling 130k. Who dares call her an opportunist now?


Childbirth is a group consisting of Julia Shapiro (Chastity Belt), Bree McKenna (Tacocat), and Stacy Peck (Pony Time). Women's Rights plays like an album created to deflect hopelessness with crude humor, and Childbirth are indiscriminate in their choice of topics, as long as they're ripe for comedy.

Women’s Rights

Julia Shapiro (Chastity Belt), Bree McKenna (Tacocat), and Stacy Peck (Pony Time) open their album screaming "Childbirth!" and "Women's rights!". Peck pounds her drum kit while Shapiro draws out each phrase, McKenna joining in on the latter. It's a puzzling forty seconds, and at first the track feels either unnecessary or like a joke. But if it is a joke, it feels both vital and too close to home when you consider that 241 representatives of the GOP recently voted to defund Planned Parenthood.  It's just as well the punk trio keeps shouting on repeat as if the subject had no meaning.
Ultimately Women's Rights plays like an album created to deflect hopelessness with crude humor, and Childbirth are indiscriminate in their choice of topics, as long as they're ripe for comedy. They'll tackle anything from online dating to Seattle's influx of tech culture, brought to you by Amazon (All band members reside in the PNW). Shapiro opens "Tech Bro" with a cheerful guitar riff only to begrudgingly admit, "I'll let you explain feminism to me/ Tech bro, tech bro/ If I can use your HDTV," proving that you can be disgusted by gentrification, but intrigued with its trappings at the same time. During "Siri, Open Tinder", McKenna's backing vocals are reduced to the simple instructions "Swipe left!" or "Swipe right!" only to exclaim, "Which one are you?!" upon encountering a group photo. All over the album, repeated lyrics are interrupted with one liners to highlight peak ridiculousness.
However, it's not just dudes under attack here. Tracks like "Let's Be Bad" and "Breast Coast (Hangin' Out)" – where lyrics like "Hanging out/ Doing stuff/ With my boyfriend" and "I love him cause he's hot", read like a dig against Bethany Cosentino – are perfect for all the times when perfectly curated Pinterest boards, UGG boots, and pictures of pumpkin spice lattes on Instagram make you want to scream. In order to level the playing field, we're gifted the single "Nasty Grrls" – a laundry list of disgusting habits that "nice young ladies" shouldn't indulge in, like wiping away boogers and never washing bras, amongst others transgressions of hygiene. (Hate to break it to you, but we do dip everything in ranch.)
Then, of course, there's the matter of the band's namesake. They're quick to point out that once you've reached spawning age, women's conversations are downgraded to a competitive arena. Take "More Fertile Than You" where Shapiro outright brags, "I've got eggs by the dozen and you got none". But by far, the highlight of the whole album is the hilarious and dark "Baby Bump".  The line, "I'm that horrifying person from your past/ I'm a party creep/ Why are we still friends?" delivered by a snide friend to an expectant mom, rings painfully true. Those of us who choose to abstain from motherhood often feel we become nothing more than grubby, little deviants who snort coke off a key in your bathroom. When will we settle down?
With all of these cultural touch points, it's clear that Childbirth are not concerned with maintaining relevance over the next ten years. Women's Rights is an album created entirely for the moment, which keeps the spirit lighthearted even when they're dealing with heavy-handed subject matter. You know exactly what they're referencing, and they're quick to make you laugh. The problem is, it's easy to feel clobbered by the album's bluntness and their variety of topics don't differ much from the first record. Shapiro and McKenna's back-and-forth calls get tedious and the feeling become less "Well, that's funny!" and more "Okay, we get it". But there's a point somewhere in there, too. Women are subjected to such a barrage of expectations and judgements that it's fucking exhausting even when it's funny, and sometimes you have to mock everything because you feel powerless to change it. It makes you so angry that you have to keep repeating yourself.


The pop star’s compilation features Cardi B, Chance the Rapper, and Stormzy in a sometimes nice but hopelessly transparent attempt at a hip-hop crossover.

No.6 Collaborations Project

The rumors are confirmed: Ed Sheeran finally married his longtime girlfriend, Cherry Seaborn. In an interview with radio host Charlamagne tha God—really, an hour of small talk recorded at the studio of Sheeran’s countryside home in Suffolk and released alongside the album in lieu of any major press—Sheeran fills us in with blissful references to their life together. He’s ditched the good-natured, drunken shenanigans that once led to a scar on his cheek from the sword of an actual British royal in favor of nesting with the person he calls “his lady.” Please congratulate Ed Sheeran on his graduation to matrimony, to becoming an absolute wife guy.
Therein lies the conceptual premise of the bulk of the guest-laden No. 6 Collaborations Project. There’s “I Don’t Care,” an early single featuring Justin Bieber and maybe the best effort on No.6, a vector of the dancehall-lite rhythms sounds Sheeran debuted on 2017’s “Shape of You.” Bieber, a fellow newlywed, shares in Sheeran’s swelling melodies and loving truisms: “I don't care when I'm with my baby, yeah/All the bad things disappear.” Then there’s “Cross Me,” featuring Chance the Rapper and a hook fashioned out of a sample of PnB Rock’s 2017 XXL Freshman cypher, a well-meaning if slightly paternalistic ode to their respective partners.
But the change in Sheeran’s marital status has not inspired a shift away from the chip on his shoulder: I’m not a cool guy, I’m a regular guy, is the subtext of his career thus far. No.6 opens with a heavy-handed, Khalid-assisted reminder that he is not one of the “beautiful people,” a catchy calculation appropriate for the sad-pop dominating the charts. “Antisocial,” featuring Travis Scott and his signature skittering drums, begins with a bizarre instruction: “All you cool people, you better leave now.”
In an album defined mostly by banality, “South of the Border,” featuring Camila Cabello and Cardi B, is an actual bizarre moment. It’s a Latin-pop fantasy—Sheeran sings of someone’s “caramel thighs” and “curly hair”—punctuated by Cardi’s suggestion that “Ed got a little jungle fever.” Huh? Maybe unintentionally, the raceplay points directly to the elephant in the room: Though he built his fame on confessional, earnest acoustic guitar songs, Ed Sheeran loves black music, and he wants you to know it.
Unfortunately, on No.6, that appreciation largely manifests as the belief that he is a competent rapper. On one song, “Take Me Back to London” featuring Stormzy, his flow bears a suspicious resemblance to “Bitch Better Have My Money”–era Rihanna. (Sheeran has settled plagiarism lawsuits on at least three occasions and will go to trial on a fourth this September.) There, and elsewhere, his raps are cringey and simplistic, with all of the subtlety of a plot-driven song written by Lin Manuel Miranda: “It's that time/Big Mike and Teddy are on grime/I wanna try new things, they just want me to sing/Because nobody thinks I write rhymes.”
Being a fan of rap doesn’t mean you can rap. I would never delude myself into thinking I could run a kitchen just because I’ve spent years watching “Chopped.” Alongside 50 Cent and Eminem, both way past their prime as rappers, Sheeran sounds even more out of his depth on “Remember the Name”: “Yeah, I was born a misfit, grew up 10 miles from the town of Ipswich/Wanted to make it big, I wished it to existence/I never was a sick kid, always dismissed quick/‘Stick to singing, stop rappin’,’ like it's Christmas.” Those unnamed haters were right and No.6 confirms that Sheeran is better off sticking within his skillset. “Feels,” which ingeniously unites Young Thug and J Hus, and “Put It All on Me,” which offers Ella Mai a warm piano to shine over, are legitimately irresistible.
In a 2014 Vibe cover story, in which a reporter witnessed him freestyle over beats including YG’s “My Nigga,” Sheeran was described as having a “hip-hop soul.” A couple years later, Stormzy, with whom Sheeran has something of a friendship, took it further. “Even with his rapping he can execute it well,” he told GQ. It didn’t quite come out of nowhere. In the early days, he’d experimented with what a collaborator describes as “singing rap.” And in 2011, after independently releasing a handful of EPs in the style of alt-folk-rock singer-songwriter forbearers like Jason Mraz, he convinced grime greats like Wiley and Jme to participate in his No.5 Collaborations Project album, after which No.6 is modeled. Over the years, he’s performed multiple Nina Simone covers, recorded a song in the Ghanaian language of Twi, and told Billboard that Justin Timberlake, unparalleled in the cultural phenomenon of “blue-eyed soul,” was “pretty close to a direct inspiration.”
Nearly eight years, 150 million albums sold, and dozens of arena-headlining tour dates after No.5, he’s employed a similar ethos but with the expanded budget and superstar access of his status as one of the world’s best-selling artists. Like the original compilation project, much of No 6. is as bad in theory as it is in practice. Pop music has drawn from black cultural expression since the dawn of its existence, becoming increasingly absorbent in recent years. As hip-hop and diasporic genres like Afropop, dancehall, and dembow have framed the dominant modalities of contemporary radio, inspiration and appropriation have become business moves as much as artistic choices. But few releases have been as baldly transparent and destined for ubiquity as No.6, which has all the conspicuous mining of a Drake album, but very little of the finesse or cultural fluency.


MF Doom is an ever-evolving oddity. Since starting his career spouting bouncy, Brand Nubian-esque black\n\ power verses with his ...

Vaudeville Villain

MF Doom is an ever-evolving oddity. Since starting his career spouting bouncy, Brand Nubian-esque black power verses with his late brother Subroc and rapper Onyx in the collective KMD, Daniel Dumile has gained weight, smoked hallucinogens, drank libations, and developed a new style to match his rapidly deteriorating voice. Now, in a new arena of arrhythmia and soft beats, MF Doom staggers into a telephone booth somewhere underground and falls out as Viktor Vaughn.
A joint project between Doom and Sound-Ink, Vaudeville Villain's storyline follows the everyday life of super-villain/beat scientist/drug dealer/stick-up kid Vik Vaughn. Not surprisingly, it plays out much like any other Metal Face project: Doom's sick flow is tied to a fractured cadence, a slurry, guttural delivery, obscure pop culture references ("Unfrozen caveman, look over the contracts") and beautifully simple idioms and metaphors. Although best known for his more whimsical material, this album has Doom frequently coming off like Wu without the pretension, branching out into more evolved song structures (choruses!) and unusually focused topical and narrative tracks.
The pieces here run a larger gamut of topics than the shit-talking he mastered on Operation: Doomsday. Situations faced by our favorite masked rhymer this side of '93 Ghostface include the courtship of an underage girl ("Let Me Watch" with Apani B. Fly Emcee), a drug deal gone horribly awry ("Lactose and Lecithin"), an argument with a Chinese restaurant owner ("Raedawn") and the hilarious gunning down of a lame open mic night. While most underground emcees are content to rhyme about their intelligence, the evils of commercialism, and the general populace's lack of cognizance, Vik finds the perfect balance between complex songs and simple delivery, never hitting you with guilt trips or preaching to the choir.
There's no exaggeration made when you hear someone referring to Metal Face as one of the best writers in rap: "Modern Day Mugging" has Doom turning a tired theme like, well, robbing people from a ghetto cliché into a comedic spectacle, delivering a how-to for all aspiring thugs and thugettes: He only carries a .45 with "no bullets, no clip" that has "black electrical tape over the hole in the handle" but still manages to cause a fellow citizen to "run his chain like an errand." After detailing clever break-in methods, he plays the fall guy, getting shot by one of his elderly victims and claiming that he "woulda let her have it if he had the ammo."
In another example of Dumile's pen prowess, he teams up with former Anti-Pop Consortium rhymesayer M. Saayid for a cartoonish recollection of their education ("Never Dead"). Doom claims, "If I don't study, I'ma cheat off Peter Parker," and then teams up with schoolmate Saayid to run and gun on a search for Doom's stolen Donkey Kong game. Throughout the course of the song, they buy fireworks and indulge in Guyanese strippers in Chinatown, and Doom finds a guru who teaches him "that the roach is never dead," hypothetically cultivating the future super scientist on which this album is based. Songwriting doesn't often come this lush, detail-minded or captivating in hip-hop these days, but it's no surprise that the best songs in the genre are coming from an 80s transplant that claims to be "a really big fan of Dan Aykroyd."
As expected on an album from one of the current greats, the soundscapes on Vaudeville Villain fail to keep pace with the classic lines being dropped left and right. This is Doom's first album consisting entirely of guest productions, and it quickly becomes apparent that he sounds better over his own work. Relatively unknown producers King Honey, Max Bill, and Heat Sensor offer a cohesive sound, but fail to really hit on a mood that suits Doom's drunken master assault. But there are moments where it all comes together brilliantly: Heat Sensor's "Raedawn" is an electronic burner that writhes and lurches like a malfunctioning robot, stuttering out from of a pit of molten drums and sinister bells. King Honey's "Let Me Watch" is a pier-walking rock-skip across the ocean, equipped with a lumbering, Prince Paul-ish jazz loop and bassline. Rjd2 also drops by with the album's showstopper: "Saliva" delivers a triumphant string section, jubilant vocal sample, and bombastic horns across a subtle breakbeat backdrop.
Despite its admittedly slight flaws, Vaudeville Villain goes head-to-head with Doom's other 2003 project, King Geedorah's Take Me to Your Leader, for what stands as the hip-hop album of the year thus far. Unless his collaboration with Madlib (MadVillain) or his official MF Doom LP on Rhymesayers prove to be flawless ventures, this album will come out not just among the year's greatest, but also among the best in his catalog.


Along with Nevermind, released a half year later, R.E.M.’s Out of Time was the early-’90s major-label ideal: A blockbuster that multiplied the band’s following without losing existing fans.

Out of Time

It was probably overstated, but a few years ago the podcast 99% Invisible made a provocative argument for R.E.M.’s Out of Time as the most politically significant album in American history—not for its content, but for its packaging. The band, the story goes, was wary of releasing the CD in a longbox, the superfluous cardboard packaging that compact discs came in during the format’s early years, so an idealistic Warner Brothers executive pitched them on the idea of putting that wasted packaging to use. The back of the box would include a Rock the Vote petition lobbying senators to support a bill enabling citizens to register to vote at DMVs or through the mail. Those petitions flowed into Congress by the thousands, and the bill eventually passed, leading to a historic influx of new young voters.
The podcast’s numbers are a little fuzzy, so it may be a stretch to directly credit R.E.M. for the bill’s passage. But if nothing else, the story speaks to the band’s stature at the time. In 1991, R.E.M. weren’t just huge; they were important, and the Rock the Vote petition certainly wouldn’t have had the same impact if it hadn’t been packaged around such an enormously popular record. Out of Time gave the band their biggest hit single, netted them three Grammys, and eventually sold more than 18 million copies worldwide, numbers that insured the band the capital to do more or less whatever they wanted for the rest of their career. Along with Nevermind, released a half year later, it was the ideal every major label aspired to during their great independent-artist grab of the early ’90s: a blockbuster that multiplied the band’s following without ticking off existing fans.
Out of Time is a weird entry in R.E.M.’s discography, although in fairness the same can be said of almost every album R.E.M. released during that stretch. Numb from a year on the road, the band largely cast aside the usual electric guitars to fiddle with other instruments, most prominently the mandolin, which Peter Buck claimed he was still teaching himself when he stumbled upon the riff for “Losing My Religion.” Twenty-five years later, that single remains the most perfect pop song R.E.M. ever crafted, but it was hardly a fluke. The longing harpsichord on the album’s other great ballad, “Half a World Away,” is almost as enchanting, while the Beach Boys-bright “Near Wild Heaven” is almost overwhelming in its beauty and generosity. The whole record is flush with violins and cellos, revealing a range and sophistication that none of its predecessors had ever even hinted at.
Of course, Out of Time is sometimes remembered as much for its stylistic overreach as much as it is for all that elegance. It’s the album with “Country Feedback,” the rawest expression of sheer remorse the band ever captured on tape, but also the album with “Shiny Happy People,” a song that to this day many R.E.M. diehards would just as soon will out of existence. On one side it’s got bassist Mike Mills’ most sublime lead vocal turn on string-swept “Texarkana”; on the other it’s got KRS-One on “Radio Song” wailing like the Big Bopper over a wacky organ lick. Somehow, making one of the fiercest rappers of his era sound like such a colossal clown remains the album’s most perplexing legacy.
A quarter century removed from its release, though, those missteps are easy to write off as endearing period trappings. If anything, the album now sounds more like the masterpiece it felt just short of at the time, a work nearly on par with its more universally regarded, nocturnal sequel Automatic for the People. Warner Brothers’ anniversary reissue gives the album the usual deluxe treatment, with a second disc of demos mostly of interest for the glimpse they provide into the band’s process. “Losing My Religion,” for instance, is presented as both a somewhat uncertain instrumental and as a lean, string-less rock song. You can also hear Michael Stipe not quite hit the high notes on an early version of “Near Wild Heaven.”
Much more worthwhile is a third disc included on pricier versions of the reissue: a live, Unplugged-esque performance for a West Virginia public radio broadcast. Since the band had opted against a big tour behind Out of Time, they sound refreshed and just a little under-rehearsed. Stipe’s reverential, beat-poetry recitation of KRS-One’s “Radio Song” verse aside, the band goes out of their way not to take themselves too seriously. Mills leads a demure rendition of the Troggs’ flower-power standard “Love Is All Around,” then Billy Bragg and Robyn Hitchcock join in to bring some honky-tonk rowdiness to a giddy cover of Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s “Dallas.” R.E.M. were one of the biggest bands in the world, but even coming off of their most high-minded record to date—and performing on a day that West Virginia’s governor had christened “R.E.M. Day,” at that—they still sounded like the same gang of old friends who drunkenly recorded a jingle for their favorite barbeque spot for an early B-side. The weight of their newfound importance would eventually take a toll on the group. It hadn’t yet.


Sophomore release on Goner records builds confidently on the experimental, 1960s-inspired lo-fi rock of last year's self-titled debut.

Ty Segall / Lemons

Ty Segall's self-titled debut was released last year on Castle Face Records, the label run by Jon Dwyer of Thee Oh Sees. His follow-up, Lemons, is out just a few months later on Memphis-based Goner Records, run by the Oblivians' Eric Friedl. Pretend his next one is out on Siltbreeze and it's not hard to triangulate Segall's sound. His short, sharp songs peal out of the garage without raising the doors, sending 1960s rock riffs crashing through splintered, smart-ass lo-fi buzz. After spending time in San Francisco's the Traditional Fools, Segall went way solo, playing early shows all by himself: Alone on stage, he strummed a beat-up guitar, howled his lyrics, and worked a kickdrum with a tambourine duct-taped to it. He has recently started playing with a band, but still believes that all a song really needs is whatever one person can strike, strum, sing, or shake.
This no-fuss, no-frills DIY philosophy defines both of his albums, but especially the rough-and-tumble Ty Segall. It actually sounds like the product of one man, all the instruments he could carry, and an hour's worth of studio time. It kicks off with the guitar and tambourine strut of "Go Home", with Segall's vocals drenched in harsh reverb that doesn't conceal but enhances the song's concise melodies. He's enamored with 60s pop rhythms, so you could conceivably do the Shag or the Mashed Potato to "The Drag" or "So Alone". But his is a limited, limiting set-up, and at times his run-throughs sound obligatory. He apes Jon Spencer aping Elvis Presley on "Pretty Baby (You're So Ugly)", saving the song only with a breakneck distortion chorus. Ultimately, Ty Segall sounds like a test run, a document of an artist discovering what all he can do by himself, which makes moments like the whistled outro on "Watching You", so reminiscent of Sergio Leone, all the more endearing.
Musically and chronologically, Ty Segall and Lemons make a good pair, not only because together they add up to about 50 minutes, but because the latter builds confidently on the experiments of the former. Segall coaxes a greater range of sounds from his set-up, touching on a bit of psychedelic country on "Rusted Dust", frenzied gutter-punk fury on "Johnny", and hallucinatory desert rock on the Captain Beefheart cover "Drop Out Boogie". "In Your Car" stomps with the brat-menace of Black Lips, and the instrumental "Untitled #2" builds its surf rock from the ground up, establishing a fast rhythm section of rimshots and acoustic strums before introducing the barreling lead guitar and wiping out spectacularly at the end. Buffed to a relative shine, these songs are leaner, more frenetic, and simply more imaginative.
With this one-two punch, Segall enters a lo-fi field crowded with artists mining similar influences for inspiration and making similarly compact noise. What distinguishes him from his peers, however, is his ability to instill his songs with a palpable creative zeal, as if the final recordings were less important than the process of performing them. All of his noble goals of prolificacy and spontaneity would be meaningless if his energy and excitement didn't cut through the noise loud and clear.


Earlier this month, the Chicago rapper Lucki Eck$, then just 19, released his third mixtape, another collection of murky, tonally somber music. The lovingly crafted X is unrepentantly bleak, and stylistically provocative, combining Earl Sweatshirt's insistent misanthropy with a kind of rap game senioritis.

X

It's easy to be reductive when discussing, or processing, Lucki Eck$' music. Earlier this month, the Chicago rapper, then just 19, released his third mixtape, X, which scans like a pretty unsurprising extension of the aesthetic of his previous two mixtapes. Eck$' is murky, tonally somber music: the kind that is borderline overwrought, sometimes irksome in its refusal to get up from under its own weight, even for a minute. Affect-wise, there are resonances with the recent work of Earl Sweatshirt (Eck$ acknowledges the debt, being "high as fuck off of that Earl Sweatshirt and Max B" on "Mac N Cheese"). The Odd Future alumnus' April album has been widely acclaimed, but has also spawned its share of categorical dismissals: usually, by listeners with limited patience for self-serious grand tours of the dark recesses of the post-adolescent mind ("I do like shit, and I do go outside," essentially). Eck$' tape is even more unrepentantly bleak, and stylistically provocative, combining Earl's insistent misanthropy with a kind of rap game senioritis; greasy, caution-to-the-wind flows and half-baked reflections are the order of the day.
Appreciating Eck$' songwriting prowess and overall discipline—and crediting that he is something other than a one-trick pony, wielding tape-echo-heavy ambience as his primary weapon—requires closer listening. The rapper has altered his sound and focal points significantly over the course of his three releases; just compare the croaked axioms and eerie washes of X to his comparatively chipper 2013 debut, Alternative Trap. Though that tape sags under an excess of small-time pusherman shop talk and viscous reverb clouds, Eck$' delivery is usually liltingly melodic; in hindsight, the influence of the then-rising Chance the Rapper is unmistakable (the title is a play on Acid Rap: statement-of-purpose as mixtape title and invented Soundcloud genre tag). Eck$' breakthrough track from the project, "Count on Me", is driven by quaint pizzicato strings straight off of an Andrew Bird record. 2014's Body High, in turn, found Lucki smearing the colors on his sonic palette, shunting the lithe, nursery-rhyme hooks off to the side to accommodate more longform lyrical throughlines and rap over Björk—it's a drastically more difficult record.
But somehow, it feels easier to lock in with the spare, dead-eyed X than either of these other two tapes; certainly, it's Eck$' most lovingly crafted release to date. The production operates in the same general realm as the previous material. The key chordal material is manifested in waves of impressionistic, mostly unidentifiable sound. Samples, when they crop up, are treated heavily, mimicking the crackly sound of aged 78s; otherwise, they are slowed down and phased in the mode of a vintage DJ Screw mix. But generally, on X, the drum sounds and patterns are crisp, moving closer than Eck$ has yet come to trap that is not "alternative" at all. They swing rather than plod, topped by careening cymbal purrs (the beat for the Chance-featuring "Stevie Wonder" is partially the work of Young Chop, the veritable Charlie Parker of Chicago drill production).
Eck$' rapping bends to this newfound clarity. He's clearly storyboarding his ideas, or at least considering his next step more carefully on the spot. Song structures shift smoothly with new gestures in the production, or don't, when there's still life in just one sticky idea to squeeze out: Highlights "Lowlife" and the "Still Tippin'" sampling "Still Steal" build up momentum around deadly simple, plaintive refrains and narrow locked grooves. Elsewhere, Eck$ builds toward denser, more symphonic moments—see the sinister synth bass that builds under the tabla-driven "Mac N Cheese" (toward the line "Got nightmares starring you") or the lush "None Other", with its thinly sliced soul sample and tap dancing 808s.
His verses, narratively, also seem to unfold with the expressive contours in the music. Tales of wasted hours, bad relationships, and ill-advised benders build toward unexpected admissions: "I contradict often, I get it from my family/ So you can't blame me, baby, it's in my blood/ So if I'm disrespectful, just know that it's all love," he half-snickers on "Still Steal". Self-doubt and, at worst, self-loathing is the constant subtext, lurking behind every self-mythologizing moment, allowing Eck$ to push beyond the "posted up on that corner like I been waiting on a ride or something" braggadocio and caricaturish anti-heroism of his preceding tapes.
If nothing else—right down to Eck$ assuming some of the production duties—the key to X's success is its palpable, overarching poise and control. Hearing attitude-for-its-own-sake and sloppiness as the locus means buying into the central illusion, confusing content for form. Sure, this is, for all intents and purposes, bleary Tumblr-ripe rap which coalesces loosely, begging for the use of "drug-addled" as both a general descriptor and an excuse for its surface eccentricities. However, there's a lot more to this music than slacker posturing; step in closer, and you'll discover the care in Eck$' design, and one of the year's strongest vanguard hip-hop albums.


Inspired by the rugged yet serene beauty of Ireland’s west coast, the singer-songwriter’s tranquil psych-folk explores communion with nature, family, and ourselves.

Protector

Throughout “Day Out of Time,” the closing song on Irish singer-songwriter Aoife Nessa Frances’ second album, brush strokes on a snare drum call to mind the hiss of surf lapping in a cove. It’s slight, almost imperceptible, but it epitomizes the healing backdrop to Protector. Written and recorded during an extended stay on Ireland’s windswept west coast, the follow-up to Land of No Junction reaps lucidity from family bonding and fleeing the city in search of peace. With it, Frances’ psych-folk soliloquies arrive like postcards from a friend who’s just beginning to open up.

In early 2020, shortly after the release of her debut, Frances started to write songs with the defined delicacy of birdsong at dawn. Trading Dublin for her father’s home in rural Clare, she spent the summer reconnecting with family and embracing solitude, too. “I got up every day before sunrise and took my guitar to a place where nobody could hear me,” she said in press materials, on the daily routine that proved a wellspring for new material. Teaming up with co-producer and multi-instrumentalist Brendan Jenkinson and drummer Brendan Doherty, Frances soon sought fresh inspiration and even more seclusion. Relocating to a cabin in the village of Annascaul, Kerry, the trio crafted a record that feels like an emergence from the duskier corners of her debut.
While the heart-stopping landscape of Clare provided the spark, Protector finds its muted mystical power in everyday activity. “I took a boat to Mayo/Swam out off the island/And waited for the sun to set and bathe my answers,” she opens “This Still Life,” one of several songs whose gentle flow evokes early morning swims on Inch Beach. Above a weave of Crumb-like organ and warbly guitar arpeggios, Frances’ diaristic account hones in on what she has called the “tension between wanting to float away and wanting to assert yourself.” “Soft Lines” marries an Arcadian anecdote in the present with the kind of low-key transcendent imagery that characterized Land of No Junction. “Making my way to the shoreline/Red hue, kiss the divine/As I count the hours out of here,” she muses, shining warm light on the psychic pain of wanting to be in two places at once.
Like its predecessor, Protector channels the energy of a different time—and west coast—entirely. From the foothills of the Slieve Mish Mountains, “Only Child” carries a heavy Laurel Canyon glow, its two chords every bar as spacious as a Jessica Pratt record or David Crosby circa If I Could Only Remember My Name. “Emptiness Follows,” a lush peak featuring harp, strings, and Villagers’ Conor O’Brien on trumpet and flugelhorn, captures Protector’s defining sense of lived-in comfort. The decision to put Frances’ vocals right up front in the mix—inspired by Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson—ensures that even when she doesn’t show a full hand lyrically, her words always sound within reach.
On paper, Frances’ year-and-a-half journey could read as pure escapism. On record, it sounds like someone running toward—not away—from life. “I left the city/Out of this town/Went for the back road this time around,” she offers on highlight “Chariot,” each syllable evoking the rich emphasis of Victoria Legrand in the early days of Beach House. Guided by soft-focus mellotron and a shuffling bossa nova beat, Frances’ closing words (“I know everything has an end/So I see all my family and friends”) reveals the “back road” to be a path to, rather than an escape hatch from, a mindful platonic love. It may not always be plain sailing, but by sourcing the time and space for serenity, Protector makes a pitch for authenticity that leaves room for ambiguity.


After an overdose nearly ended her life, Demi Lovato sings powerfully and directly about her past and who she wants to become.

Demi Lovato: Dancing With the Devil…The Art of Starting Over

This review contains mentions of rape and sexual assault.

At the 2008 American Music Awards, Demi Lovato—then Disney’s leading lady for her star turn in Camp Rock—smiled as a red-carpet reporter asked about the inspiration behind her pop-punk solo music. “Believe it or not, being 16, I’ve been through a lot,” she answered with a dignified giggle. “Come on, how much heartbreak can you have at 16?” the man insisted. “Oh, a lot,” Lovato immediately retorted.
Over the next few years, as she dutifully performed the role of a chaste pop star—albeit one fascinated by metal music—Lovato struggled under the immense pressure of the media and music industries (child stars, we so often forget, are workers). Behind the scenes, Lovato struggled with an eating disorder, self-harm, and substance use. She recently revealed that she was raped at the age of 15; though she reported the assault to adults, the perpetrator continued to work alongside her. After entering a treatment facility for the first time at 18, Lovato was transparent about her struggles with addiction and recovery.
In the summer of 2018, after six years of sobriety, Lovato relapsed. On July 24, she overdosed on opioids, causing three strokes, a heart attack, multiple organ failure, pneumonia, permanent brain damage, and lasting vision problems. As she explains in the recent documentary Dancing With the Devil, the drug dealer who supplied Lovato that night sexually assaulted her and left her for dead. It is a miracle that she survived.
Arriving alongside the documentary and a blitz of confessional interviews, Lovato’s seventh album, Dancing with the Devil…The Art of Starting Over takes control of the narrative. Across 19 songs, the 28-year-old leans into her personal struggles; the pop star who once professed a desire to “be free of all demons” has seemingly accepted the reality that she must live alongside them. On the power ballad “Anyone,” Lovato tries to find solace in her art but comes up short. “A hundred million stories/And a hundred million songs/I feel stupid when I sing/Nobody’s listening to me,” she belts. Written before her relapse, it’s a cry for help from a place of loneliness and desperation. The slinky “Dancing with the Devil” outlines the precipitous slope that led to overdose: “A little red wine” became “a little white line,” and then “a little glass pipe.” “ICU (Madison’s Lullabye)” relives the moment when Lovato woke up in the hospital, legally blind and unable to recognize her little sister.
After this somber three-song prologue, Dancing with the Devil expands to reveal the person Lovato is—or aims to be—today; there is a lot of shed skin, rewritten endings, and references to reaching heaven. While Lovato’s previous record, 2017’s Tell Me You Love Me, dabbled in pool-party R&B and electropop, here she explores an array of influences from “The Art of Starting Over”’s soft rock to a haunting cover of Gary Jules’ haunting cover of Tears for Fears’ “Mad World.” “Lonely People” aims for a stadium singalong with a chorus that name-drops Romeo and Juliet, undercutting the positive vibes with the starkest of closing thoughts—“Truth is we all die alone/So you better love yourself before you go.”
At nearly an hour long, the album attempts to cover a vast amount of ground, airing out years of trauma and reconfiguring Lovato’s public identity. She offers a state of the union about her recovery—she’s “California Sober”—and her sexuality. On “The Kind of Lover I Am,” a sequel of sorts to her 2015 bi-curious anthem “Cool for the Summer,” Lovato fully embraces her queerness and her overflowing heart. “I don’t care if you’ve got a dick/I don’t care if you got a WAP/I just wanna love/You know what I’m saying,” she says at the outro. “Like, I just wanna fucking share my life with someone at some point.”
Lovato is certainly not the first pop star to speak out about the music industry’s perpetuation of sexual and emotional abuse; much like Kesha, her gut-wrenching disclosures refuse to be pushed under the rug for fear of bad publicity or isolating a fanbase. But even when Lovato strikes an upbeat or optimistic tone, it’s difficult to look beyond the tragedy at the album’s core. The synthy “Melon Cake” takes its name from the birthday dessert Lovato’s team served her in the years preceding her overdose: a cylinder of ripe watermelon frosted in fat-free whipped cream and topped with sprinkles and candles. Even as Lovato confidently declares that melon cakes are a thing of the past, the image is so depressing it’s difficult to focus on anything else, especially on what is intended to be a fun song. But isn’t that what so many of us do to survive? We attempt to reframe our traumas as lessons learned; we use humor as a defense mechanism; we move on because dwelling in guilt or shame furthers the destructive spiral.
One of the rare moments when Dancing With the Devil moves beyond a 1:1 recreation of Lovato’s life is “Met Him Last Night,” a slinky duet with Ariana Grande. Both artists have lived through horrific tragedy and responded with elegance and empathy, writing songs about their experiences both for themselves and anyone who might see their own trauma reflected back. But “Met Him Last Night” does not aim for catharsis, at least not explicitly. Instead, the two blasély trill about lost innocence and deception in the shadow of “him,” apparently Satan. It’s the closest thing to escapism on an album wholly focused on hard reality.
On the other end of the spectrum is the music video for “Dancing With the Devil,” which recreates the night of Lovato’s overdose and the subsequent battle for her life in the ICU in startling detail. There’s the machine that cleaned her blood through a vein in her neck, the duffle bag presumably full of drugs, and the sponge bath that softly traces over the “survivor” tattoo on her neck. Even though Lovato co-directed the video, stating that sharing her lived experiences is part of her healing process, the visual feels almost unnecessarily voyeuristic: an artist recreating their worst moment with the assumption that it speaks for itself.
Dancing With the Devil asks you to trust that what Demi Lovato went through is enough. The music will undoubtedly reach listeners who struggle with their own burdens and look to Lovato as a role model, just as they have since she was that teenager on the red carpet, forced to justify the depths of her lived experience. This taking-off-the-makeup moment brings us closer to her than ever before: the four-part documentary rollout, the multiple album editions, the no-holds-barred press tour. But the diaristic nature of the music, and the blunt force with which it is delivered, showcases Demi Lovato the person and sidelines Demi Lovato the artist. It is an unenviable position: to have a story so harrowing that the emotional catharsis we feel in real life overshadows what she wanted to create on the album.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A new box set of the legendary post-punk label’s first two years gathers chestnuts from Joy Division and the Durutti Column alongside rarities, oddities, dead ends, and some stunning graphic design.

Various Artists: Use Hearing Protection: Factory Records 1978-79

Use Hearing Protection

“I don’t want to rock the boat, I wanna fucking sink it.”
This unofficial motto of Factory Records appeared in an early catalog for the label, typewritten just below their address on Palatine Road in Manchester and just to the right of designer Peter Saville’s now-iconic logo: an image of a man plugging his ears with his index fingers, rendered in blurry triplicate to give the impression that he’s vibrating.
It was a prescient statement for Factory, considering the poor business decisions that its owners made throughout the label’s 14-year run, moves that ended up torpedoing the whole business in 1992. But in 1979, when the maxim was printed atop a list of the first 10 “releases” (not all of them recordings) that the imprint’s founders Tony Wilson, Alan Erasmus, Rob Gretton, and Martin Hannett had given a catalog number to, it was the perfect youthful rallying cry: the kind of slogan you’d find carved into the runout groove of a 45 packaged in a hand-folded, hand-stapled sleeve, released by one of the dozens of tiny DIY labels that cropped up in the wake of UK punk.
The four men who started Factory were inspired by the explosion of young, hungry artists in their home country, particularly the Sex Pistols, whose snarling 1976 performance at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall famously lit a fire in the bellies of a number of future legends in attendance. But while the music Factory presented to the world early on was often raw and unformed, the label gave it all a far more professional sheen through Saville’s stunning, minimalist design work. Even if the art offered little indication of what the music might sound like, whether at the concerts they booked in 1978-79 at the Russell Club or on the first batch of records they released, the stark show posters and cover art still have an undeniable allure. (Just ask anyone who has repurposed the sleeve art of Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures for a t-shirt design in recent years.)
The new box set Use Hearing Protection: Factory Records 1978-79 has a similarly unconventional appeal. Its hulking size and spare, bright yellow design, featuring the same ear-plugging logo from their catalog, give no indication of what’s inside, but practically beg shoppers to handle it. What does lie within are recreations of the first 10 numbered items in the Factory catalog, including their first four vinyl releases, a DVD of a Joy Division-soundtracked film titled No City Fun (aka The Factory Flick), and various ephemera: concert posters, stationery, and, of all things, artist Linder Sterling’s rough sketches for a wooden abacus to track a woman’s menstrual cycle. Along with a book featuring photos from the era and an oral history of each item within, this beautifully designed package neatly reflects the way Factory combined the slapdash, try-anything approach of the times with careful curation and thoughtfully designed aesthetic.
The Factory nights that Wilson et al booked at the Russell Club were proof of this. Saville’s poster announcing the first batch of shows was instantly eye catching; its precise industrial design looking more like a warning poster found near a building site. The concerts being promoted were the opposite, promising odd pairings like the itchy dub-inspired sounds of the Durutti Column with the winking pub rock of Jilted John (aka comedian Graham Fellows) or Pete Shelley’s loose experimental project the Tiller Boys with the tightly wound attack of Joy Division.
This approach extended to A Factory Sample, the double 7" that was the first Factory Records release. Three sides of the records were taken up by artists who were Russell Club regulars. Joy Division offered up two tracks (“Digital” and “Glass”) that proved to be the transition between the agitation of their Warsaw days and the more ruminative sound of their debut full-length. Though signed to Rough Trade, early industrial trio Cabaret Voltaire lent a pair of tunes to Factory (the atmospheric “Baader Meinhof” and the Joe Meek-meets-Scientist blurt “Sex in Secret”) that codified their unsettling methodology. The Durutti Column’s tracks, meanwhile, are the only studio document of the project’s early lineup, which generated a blur of sprechgesang vocals, wobbly rhythms, and processed guitar.
Rounding it out was a true outlier: comedian John Dowie. His goofball pub rock odes to “Acne” and “Hitler’s Liver” feel entirely out of place next to such artful music and inside Saville’s austere silver sleeves. As author Mick Middles put it in his book Factory: The Story of the Record Label, it turned the record from “a base from which a new label would evolve” into “a simple hotch-potch.” Not that it felt so at the time of A Factory Sample’s release in January 1979. The initial run of 1,000 copies sold out quickly, necessitating a quick repressing of 4,000, and apparently four months’ worth of assembling each copy by hand. Those were all snapped up as well.
The folks at the label didn’t allow themselves any time to bask in the glow of this early success, as they were already pushing two other singles into the world—the debut 7"s from A Certain Ratio and Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (OMD)—and facilitating the sessions that would yield Unknown Pleasures (from which the makers of No City Fun would pluck three songs to soundtrack their Super 8 footage of Manchester street life). All would be on the shelves by mid-1979.
The level of activity that Factory Records kept up in its earliest years set a template for the label up until its demise in the early 1990s. Wilson and his cohort barreled forward blindly, making snap decisions that would wind up biting them in the end. The label was forced to file for bankruptcy after their failed attempts to sell off their most lucrative assets—the catalogs of Joy Division and New Order—to another label. The problem was that, per a rough contract they signed early on, the bands owned the rights to their music.
What Factory had going for it, especially in those early days, was a sharp ear for talent. A Certain Ratio, a band managed by Wilson, were months away from finding the funk/soul sound that turned them into a vital influence for LCD Soundsystem and the Rapture, but their first recorded material was an intoxicating blast of massive bass attack and granulating guitar rhythms. OMD, on the other hand, stood well outside the moody, postmodern sounds of everything else Factory had put a number to that point. In fact, according to the notes accompanying this set, Wilson hated the music and only agreed to release it at the urging of his wife, Lindsay Reade, to help push them to a major label. OMD’s sole Factory single does find sonic connection to the rest of the label’s output via Martin Hannett’s production, which bathed the Kraftwerk tribute “Electricity” and the tart, Human League-like flipside “Almost” in gooey layers of reverb and delay.
And, of course, there was Joy Division, the label’s then-crown jewel signing. With Hannett at the helm, they set a new template for post-punk with Unknown Pleasures. The producer recorded their taut, rhythm-heavy compositions over the course of two weekends and then spent another weekend mixing the tracks and turning them into atmospheric harbingers of mental and emotional decay. Where Joy Division’s live performances had been sweaty, blunt-edged affairs, Hannett made the music feel like getting slowly squeezed between two rubber mats.
Like that album, nearly all the musical material found within Use Hearing Protection has been reissued in some form or other in the 40 years since its initial release. Their repressing may seem unnecessary to some, but the work that curator James Nice and designer Howard Wakefield put into the details of this set render it exceptionally appealing. The sleeves of Unknown Pleasures and OMD’s single are in their original textured form, and the Factory posters are big and suitable for framing. Some rarities are also included, including a double-CD set featuring an interview with Joy Division, Wilson, and Gretton, and a 12" white-label single of a proposed release by the Tiller Boys. Neither are necessarily essential listening (the interview is upended by the clatter of crockery and the sounds of the men eating), but they’re nice to have in physical form.
Factory Records and its various keepers sprinted ahead for the next 12 years, landing a few huge hits (“Blue Monday,” Pills ’n’ Thrills ’n’ Bellyaches) and many more middling releases as they went. (For a more complete picture, check out the other commemorative boxed set being released next month, Factory Records: Communications 1978-1992.) But for the brief window captured for posterity in Use Hearing Protection, the energy and promise of what Wilson and his friends felt in those vibrant days of the late ’70s radiates from every inch of this set.


After debuting with her hit single "Whip My Hair," Willow Smith (daugher of Will and Jada Pinkett Smith) left her music career. Five years later, she emerges with a precocious, fitfully interesting new record that shows growing pains in between bursts of inspiration.

Ardipithecus

It's been five years since Willow Smith released "Whip My Hair," her undeniably catchy, exuberant debut single. It was light. It was fun. It was a good song. At nine years old, she was the youngest-ever signee to Roc Nation: perhaps not an astonishing fact given who her parents are, but hitting the limelight before middle school can be tough on the psyche no matter how silver your spoon is. Therefore, it was a pleasantly surprising decision when, a few years later, Willow decided to bail on starring in a remake of Annie, canned all follow-ups to her burgeoning music career, and focused on growing up with whatever artistic integrity the world would allow her. Although still in the public eye, giving increasingly mature and existential interviews, and sporadically releasing music online, Willow has now released what amounts to her first official album, Ardipithecus (which is "a genus of an extinct hominine that lived during Late Miocene and Early Pliocene in Afar Depression, Ethiopia," according to Wikipedia, FYI), and the fact that it is such a pointed departure from her earlier musical forays is a surprise to no one.
Nepotism and talent aren't mutually exclusive, but behind all the psychic awakenings and blossoming chakras, something about Ardipithecus remains unbaked. The potential is there, definitely—Willow's complete subversion of R&B/pop tropes (shaved head, age-appropriate sexuality, asymmetrical fashion) is a breath of fresh air, and comes off as totally natural, not the posturing of someone pretending to be cooler than they are. Her vocals are untrained, but not gratingly so, coming off as throaty and confident even when she misses notes. The current alternative R&B landscape is filled with artists who may not be the most powerful vocalists (Frank Ocean, FKA twigs) but more than compensate with lyrical style and production skills. It's clear that this is what Willow aspires to; however, by focusing so heavily on her mystical lyrics and desire to express her worldview, the overall production value takes a backseat. Can the spiritual musings of a high school student, albeit one with above-average life experience, sustain themselves for an entire record? And furthermore, is Willow's persona enough to detract from her somewhat forgivable artistic shortcomings? Even after multiple listens to Ardipithecus, frankly, those questions persist.
Ardipithecus' problems are even down to its track sequencing—by the time the album picks up at "Stars," an uptempo, synth-lead collaboration with frequent musical partner JABS, you're already twelve songs in, many of which aren't complex or structured enough to hold much of your attention. "Why Don't You Cry," the record's lead single, is also its closer, a puzzling decision which, again, seems much too little too late after a full listen. It's a shame, because many of the ideas within Ardipithecus are solid, just shoddily executed. Willow is able to flow from tribal chanting (the fast-paced and shuddering "Natives of the Windy Forest," an early highlight) to more traditional R&B leanings ("IDK," a song that proves that when her lyrics about mortality and spirituality are slightly subdued, the effect can actually be arresting), which is no small feat. But at the same time, Willow has written and produced the whole album pretty much by herself, and it shows. When she sings, on opener "Organization & Classification," "I'm just a teenager/ But I feel angrier than a swarm of hornets," it's a painfully unnecessary statement, because literally no other type of person would follow it up with a song that's unironically called "dRuGz," which includes the line "I'm the heroin inside the syringe/ And I'm not going in/ I'm just the girl."
But if you were Willow Smith, would you care? Her crown as Most Woke Millennial is secure, and her mission of completely abandoning her pop past has definitely been accomplished. In the same way that the leap between ages 10 and 15 is gigantic, so is the leap between 15 and 20, and in another five years, if not sooner, it's absolutely plausible that Willow could deliver the polished, brilliant record she is clearly capable of. It's just that, in between bursts of inspiration, Ardipithecus is largely a record of growing pains.


In the tradition of Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, Spiritualized, and Slowdive, this Carpark duo-- singer/organist Victoria Legrand and guitarist Alex Scally-- crafts lovesick, narcotized rock with lots of depth and sweep.

Beach House

Summer songs have simple blueprints, syndicated by open windows in June; winter's about bells, strings, and digital sounds, anything with a sharp edge; spring's pretty simple if you start with a seed. Autumn, though, that's a tougher proposition. Those records are few and far between, and worth all the more for it. Beach House aren't called that for the same reason the Beach Boys are, but rather to evoke the desolation of the season after. I'm no synaesthetic but this stuff pretty much screams amber, orange, translucence, and late-October trembles, and I'll be glad to have it in my life over the next couple of months.
Baltimore's Beach House are singer/organist Victoria Legrand and guitarist Alex Scally. Because they come from such a well-defined tradition-- the boy-girl duo making lovesick, narcotized rock with lots of depth and sweep-- it's pretty much impossible to listen to this, their debut, without making certain connections. Bands like Mazzy Star, Galaxie 500, Spiritualized, and Slowdive will come to mind, but this is neither pastiche nor homage. While a lot of their sounds and shapes are the same, Beach House's recipe of fairground waltzes, ghosted lullabies, and woodland hymnals feels more intimate than those of their forerunners. The Hope Sandovals and Jason Pierces of the world mostly wanted to make their songs bigger than their heartaches, to rub out messiness with beauty; Beach House play their songs for a much smaller room, and aren't afraid to stare down a mistake if it comes bounding back in echoes.
At no point during Beach House's 35 minutes does it ever sound like the work of more than two people. Mostly, those people even sound human. Flubbed notes, missed cues, and empty spaces mottle these songs; the instruments speak with imperfection and the music hums impassively along. Our first sign that the sand is cold comes quickly; opener "Saltwater" shivers to life with a sputtering drum machine, some decaying organs, and, eventually, Legrand's baleful vocals. She sings clearly, without affect, and produces notes that trail off with uncommon power, not unlike Nico, to whom she's often compared.
Slide guitars and thick swathes of organs make up most of the instrumentation, the latter bolstering the simple percussions and chintzy bossa nova rhythms with their own pulses and slow oscillations. While this is one of those records that hangs together like a fog, certain moments still peek out. The musty "Auburn and Ivory" marries a creeping harpsichord with Legrand's upper-register coo; "Master of None" temporarily breaks the album's strangely ritualistic spell with Legrand's most soulful vocal; closer "Heart and Lungs" fades out on a bed of gorgeous harmonies. And the best thing here is so good it's scary: with its languid slide guitar, wheezing organ and churning chorus, "Apple Orchard" already feels like a classic, and almost-- but just almost-- worth losing the warmth.


Singer-guitarist Alicia Bognanno sounds tensed and ready to strike on the Nashville-based grunge torchbearers’ second album (and first for Sub Pop).

Losing

For all its earth tones, all its ripped jeans and flannel and grit, the Nineties grunge scene flew close to the surreal in its lyrics. Courtney Love divided herself into inanimate objects like a Hans Bellmer photo on Hole’s “Doll Parts”; Mary Timony became a sickly plant on Helium’s “Pat’s Trick”; and Kurt Cobain went from building trees and planting houses to crawling back up into the womb by the umbilicus on Nirvana’s “Breed” and “Heart-Shaped Box,” respectively. It was a freaky time for rock—at least on the page.
Today, the Nashville band Bully reenacts the canonical grunge sound faithfully, which makes sense: lead singer and guitarist Alicia Bognanno, who does double duty as her own band’s producer and recording engineer, learned her chops during an internship at the studio run by Steve Albini, the guy behind the boards for Nirvana’s In Utero and PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me sessions. But Bully avoid performing strictly as a period piece thanks to Bognanno’s lyrics, which sidestep grunge’s fantastical poetics in favor of more personal accounts. “I think when I first started writing it was abstract, and maybe that was an excuse for me not to hone in on what message I was really trying to convey through a song,” Bognanno recently told Hero Magazine. “I’ve got to sing the lyrics every night for the next two years, so they should matter to me.” Instead of recreating the Rorschach blot scream-a-thons of the ’90s, then, Bully choose to inflate that decade’s raw timbre with words that feel intimate and necessary.
The band’s second album, Losing, is grimier and less sugar-slick than their 2015 debut, Feels Like, where songs like “Trying” and “Milkman” offered hooks so punchy they bordered on pop-punk. Here, by contrast, Bognanno seems frozen in the moment where she’s poised to jump but hasn’t left the ground yet, tensed and ready to strike as she sings out the snags in her interpersonal malaise. More second-person pronouns pepper her lyrics than ever, whether she’s figuring out how to traverse a toxic relationship or nursing one hell of a crush. Her sandpaper scream is still the most immediately arresting element of Bully’s music; when, on “Running," she seethes, “You say I’m running/But I don’t care/I’ll admit it/I get anxious too/Just like you,” it lands less like a confession and more like an uppercut.
Like Smashing Pumpkins did at their peak, Bully tease dimensionality out of their music by emphasizing the similarity, and then the space, between Bognanno’s voice and the guitars that squall around her. She oscillates between a clean head voice and that gutting scream just as bright lead guitar lines poke through the power-chord murk every so often, whether as a placeholder between verses on “Running” or as a way of painting atmosphere, Weezer-style, on “Guess There.” On “Not the Way,” Bognanno even initiates a kind of call-and-response with Bully’s guitars, her scream echoed by a low, grinding chord. She’s the kind of vocalist who doesn’t just float above the rest of the band, but gets down in the dirt to tangle with their sounds. They’re not just backing her up; they’re egging her on to her most cathartic moments.
That catharsis comes full-throttle on “Seeing It,” the heaviest track Bully has recorded so far. The lyrics dart around the singer and someone else, and a secret that’s hanging between them. “I laid down in my bed/Replayed it all in my head/I closed my eyes and I erased your face from my mind,” Bognanno sings. “I didn’t want to/I should put this on you/I didn’t want to.” She drags out that last “to” like a rusty chain while she breaks into the song’s main riff on her guitar, and then, when she asks, “Is it true?/I quit seeing it in you,” the “you” erupts like a firework. Her words stay deliberately vague, but there’s a later couplet that strikes a nerve: “Such a blurry place to be/Stuck in your own body.” These words recontextualize the lines that have come before and the rage with which they’re sung, making “Seeing It” sound less like a breakup song and more like a retelling of embodied trauma, or at least an indirect way of screaming at someone who’s hurt you.
If “Seeing It” touches on some heavy shit long left unspoken—enduring creeps as a woman in the music industry, or really just in the world—then Losing’s closer, “Hate and Control,” finishes the thought with extra barbs. “What is it about me that makes you so uncomfortable?/Can we just exist without your hate and control?” Bognanno asks, and then later answers her own question: “You don’t like it when I’m angry/Tough shit, learn to deal.” It’s a salve for anyone who’s been trying to get free, and particularly anyone who’s gotten yelled at for it. Bognanno puts her anger on full display, inviting everyone who’s felt the same to join in and scream along.


The second album from the Spanish singer is a remarkable feat, seamlessly linking flamenco’s characteristic melodrama to the heart-wrenching storytelling of modern, woman-flexing R&B.

El Mal Querer

Global bass, the internet-centric underground scene that began flourishing around the world in the late 2000s, emerged when young producers took their countries’ folk traditions and updated them for a millennial dancefloor. They used new technology to connect previously collapsed musical boundaries: Cumbia became digitized (Colombia, Mexico), salsa got remixed (Puerto Rico, New York), pow wow drums went electric (Canada), and some producers even transmogrified Andean pan flutes into intellectual bangers. Global bass became a precursor to the increasingly boundless way pop music works now, even as it became flattened into limp and canned versions of what some people dreadfully termed “trop-house,” not to mention the overall poisonous creep of EDM into its bloodstream.
The concept, though, is still intriguing: As the internet homogenizes individual music cultures into a big studio-quantized mishmash, how do musicians retain the singularity of the hyper-local, often dissipating histories of their cultures? And alternately, is it preferable to take a rigid approach to that hyperlocality—or at least a defensive stance towards cultural specificity—if it stifles the kind of musical creativity that fosters a genre’s evolution.
One approach—a very successful one—lies in El Mal Querer, the relentlessly gorgeous album from Rosalía Vila Tobella, a 25-year-old Spanish singer with one foot steeped in her Catalan history and the other hypebae-sneakered foot sidling into the future. Rooted in flamenco—the Arabic-influenced Andalusian music which she has studied since a young age—El Mal Querer is a dramatic, romantic document that seamlessly links that tradition’s characteristic melodrama to the heart-wrenching storytelling of modern, woman-flexing R&B. Flamenco music carries the sound of Spanish history within it—you can practically hear the migration patterns—and Rosalía uses it to tell the story of a doomed relationship across 11 songs, each one serving as a new chapter. It is one of the most exciting and passionately composed albums to appear not only in the global bass tradition but in the pop and experimental spheres this year.
Thrillingly, Rosalía has figured out a way to situate her classical training alongside Justin Timberlake and Arthur Russell samples, glossy synths and hip-hop swing. With co-production from the Spanish producer El Guincho, El Mal Querer’s already delivered two hits—first, the slinky, hypnotic “Malamente,” where Rosalía’s honeyed voice works in counter-rhythm to flamenco-influenced syncopated handclaps. (Her stardom was definitely aided by the song’s video, in which she executes slick choreography while wearing a fluffy fake-fur jacket and tracksuit as a kind of Spanish answer to Rihanna.)
“Malamente” and its follow-up—the yearning jealousy bop “Pienso en Tu Mirá”—might imply a more radio-friendly album, but Rosalía is true to her hybrid ethic, and keeps it folkier as she maneuvers through the album’s heartbreak narrative. Even the astonishing “De Aquí No Sales,” which replaces the handclaps with samples of revved-up motorcycle engines as a downbeat, is more in the vocal tradition she was raised in. It alludes to the pared-down instrumentation of classic flamenco—a guitar, a clap, a stomp—but the emotion is sampled and patched directly into her voice. She has a lot to say, and does so with the drama and intensity flamenco requires: On that song, she declaims powerfully about domestic abuse and the justifications abusers use, while the bad-romance arc comes to a climax. “Mucho más a mí me duele, de lo que a ti te está doliendo,” she sings: This hurts me more than it hurts you.
A studious sense of tradition pervades Rosalía’s approach on El Mal Querer. The narrative of the album is based on The Romance of Flamenca, a manuscript from the 13th century about a woman whose lover keeps her locked up in a tower—“el mal querer” can be translated to something like “the bad desire.” Perhaps this is a defiant rejoinder to those who might be resistant to a new take on a timeworn style. In “Reniego,” based on a classic flamenco melody, the production is pared down, and her soprano bursts like fireworks, electric and elastic, the agony and pull of destructive romance coursing through it. The melismas sound easy for her, as if to prove she can do it, before going down more experimental roads again, playing around with pop ballad-style synths, vocoder, and a cheeky allusion to reggaeton’s dembow pulse by way of flamenco handclaps. It’s an adventurous foray and deceptively pretty: None of this, from the way her voice sprints across her angular harmonies to the complex rhythm patterns that weave through them, is easy. With Rosalía’s sense of grace, though, it sounds like it could be.


This long-awaited and revamped mixtape is Keef’s most accessible and incidentally romantic project in years, a bop-filled R&B gem that shows the Chicago rapper evolving in every direction naturally.

Thot Breaker

Chief Keef’s 2015 roast “Thot Breaker” was all about having sex with some other guy’s girlfriend, about her role as a disposable means to emasculate said boyfriend, and about the vicious sport of it all. “I think I’m the youngest flexer on earth,” he proclaimed proudly, a remorseless victor.
The Thot Breaker mixtape was originally teased more than a year earlier as a playboy manifesto made in the song’s image, but like many long-awaited Keef projects—Mansion Musick, UFOverload 2, and Crashing Computers among them—songs slowly leaked out and official versions never came. When previews of rumored Thot Breaker tracks began surfacing elsewhere in 2014, it seemed like the wait for the tape was nearly over. The mixtape was eventually given a Valentine’s Day 2015 release date, with songs like “Fucked Your Ho” and “Thots Gone Crazy,” but it failed to materialize.
More than two years later, with that version of Thot Breaker now an afterthought for all but the most diehard Keef fans, the Chicago prodigy has returned to the title in surprising fashion with renewed vision and purpose. According to Keef producer CBMix, with whom he worked closely on the project, these are all new songs divorced from the original concept and context. In a bit of irony, the new and improved Thot Breaker is Chief Keef’s most romantic work; once merely a means to label himself the ultimate womanizer, he instead takes a 42-minute R&B sojourn, forging a project his contemporaries would make if only they could. The songs are carefully composed and finely layered. Inside them, he’s somehow evasive and affectionate in equal measure. It becomes the ultimate serenade for side chicks, a collection of half-ballads forsaking monogamy and reveling in the delight and confusion of short-term companionship. Never has an out-of-character moment felt more evolutionary, or more natural.
It’s telling that the new Thot Breaker cover art features a Barbie-esque figure stabbing the anthropomorphic heart from the original artwork (which seemed to represent Chief Keef, the eponymous Thot Breaker in question) between the eyes. Where early Thot Breaker cuts were apathetic and standoffish with Keef as the aggressor, these are almost genteel in comparison. “You thought that you had Turbo in your palms/You got trust issues, girl, you are not alone,” he sings on the intro. Before he was talking at women in songs, here he’s talking to them, if not to charm or comfort them, then to explain himself. So untangles this knot of feelings, assertive and doting in some instances, removed and apprehensive in others, but always engaging, and usually in conversation. It has been years since Keef was this charming, and this accessible.
Calling these “love songs” might be a bit of a stretch—after all, he does sing, “She wants me to be her man/I can’t, baby, I’ll break you” on “Grab a Star,” holding firm to his original position—but there is certainly an intimacy and a tenderness to many of them. The women he propositions are more often subjects than props, and there’s an elegance to the way he sings to each one that feels personal and loving. Don’t misunderstand: there are still plenty of angry boyfriends (and husbands) on the revamped Thot Breaker, and he’s mostly noncommittal even in the most intimate situations, but this is way more Mr. Steal Your Girl than “O.P.P.”; there’s some wooing involved.
A certain juvenile innocence is captured on Thot Breaker that escapes even the best and lightest Lil Yachty songs, and it’s, frankly, enchanting, especially coming from a drill architect. No one saw this coming. The art for his dancehall jam “Can You Be My Friend” was a hand-scribbled elementary school-style note with boxes to be checked, and the lyrics follow suit. On one of the more upbeat cuts, “Whoa,” he runs into an old flame, taking a brief stroll down memory lane, before attempting to win her over again with basic conversation starters. “Baby, I’m gon’ treat you better/I can be the sun in your rainy weather/Let’s just get together,” he pleads. “Slow Dance” moves with the clumsy wobble of a first dance at a junior prom, but his vocal runs are endearing nonetheless. “You My Number One” is easily the sweetest song he’s ever written.
When he strays from the cutesier songs, he takes dramatic turns, reimagining sad boy R&B on tracks like “Couple of Coats” and “Drank Head” and revitalizing bop with “Going Home.” Every song is an oddball assemblage of parts (particularly “You & Me,” with its wobbly synths, disembodied vocal plugins, skittish hi-hats, and snaps), but each one functions on multiple levels, and no song feels out of place. His last mixtape, Two Zero One Seven, was scatterbrained, a low stakes sampler for Keef’s wildest and weirdest musical inclinations, but the ambitious Thot Breaker shows what Keef is capable of when focused: There is no sound he can’t hone and master, no challenge too risky. Like Future’s HNDRXX before it, the mixtape dares to mix matters of the heart and pleasures of the flesh, a feat of rap balladry. Who says tough guys can’t be sensitive?


Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno recapture the dizzy exuberance that drew audiences to their early singles—but trade the weed for ice cream—on their first foray into kids’ music.

Best Kids

A debate recently broke out online over whether parents should bring their children to see live music, but it’s the kids who are really in charge. Much as teenagers with money and leisure time gave rise to a new youth culture in the 1950s and ’60s, streaming and smartphones mean that kids as young as toddlers can now influence the charts without spending a single cent. The rugrat-driven musical dystopia envisioned in Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzer-winning 2010 novel A Visit From the Goon Squad was upon us the moment a couple of wise guys from Norway thought to ask, “What does the fox say?”
In another sign of the tot-pocalypse, I recently heard a big-time producer brag that his new song would be on the lips of two-year-olds everywhere. To achieve that, though, he’d be best off securing a spot on the endless series of Kidz Bop compilations that have forced dippy hits by Lukas Graham and Magic! into otherwise musically upstanding homes. As a weary parent of a 6-year-old, with a baby on the way, I’ve found solace in the rare music my kid loves as much as I do—a list that has dwindled down to A Charlie Brown Christmas and 2015’s brilliant This Record Belongs To compilation. Sometimes, post-Lego Batman, it’s enough to settle for a millionth stream of Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.”
Best Coast gamely make their first foray into this fraught but potentially rewarding terrain with the Amazon exclusive Best Kids. The album works partly because Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno recognize that what they’ve always done well—simple lyrics and catchy melodies, delivered from a strong emotional perspective and with a punkish beach-party energy—can be translated into children’s music with only a slight shift in themes. Unlike the indie-pop class a few years before Best Coast broke out, Cosentino’s songs of weed and heartbreak wouldn’t usually be mistaken for kids’ stuff. But this smart set of originals and covers applies the band’s peppy, sun-soaked directness to more innocent subject matter. Best Kids fills a vacant space on the Venn diagram of taste between parents predisposed to like Best Coast and their finicky, Captain Underpants-replaying offspring.
After the moody disaffection of 2015’s California Nights, it’s a delight to hear Best Kids’ originals move back toward the dizzy exuberance that endeared audiences to early songs like “When I’m With You.” A standout is the appropriately sugary “Ice Cream Mountain,” which boasts a title image fit to be drooled over equally by children and amiable stoners with cats named Snack, plus an unexpected smattering of cheap synth chirps to go with its familiar surf-wax Americana. Best Coast seem to revel in this record’s lower stakes on “Cats & Dogs,” a goofy (also, woof-y and meow-y) romp that gently reminds kids that “anyone can love anyone that they want.” The clarity of vision that made 2012’s The Only Place so perfect for travel commercials serves warmer and cuddlier ends here.
That approach carries over just as cleanly on the covers. Standbys like “When You Wish Upon a Star,” “Twinkle, Twinkle,” and “Rock-a-Bye Baby” get some extra music-box touches to their arrangements, but they’re still rendered as uptempo fuzz-rockers. The sound isn’t far from the spirit of Best Coast’s debut album, 2010’s Crazy for You, whose producer, Lewis Pesacov, returns for Best Kids. “Sunshine, Lollipops and Rainbows,” most famously performed by “You Don’t Own Me” singer Lesley Gore, isn’t traditionally a kids’ song, but Best Coast’s version deftly splits the difference between “Ice Cream Mountain” and the girl-group yearning that powers the duo’s best songs.
Best Kids’ finale, a sanitized remake of “When I’m With You,” sums up both the project’s ample charm and its modest shortcomings. A spirited choir of girls who performed the song onstage with Best Coast during the all-female-identifying Girlschool L.A. festival takes the lead after the first verse, helping transform this love-it-or-hate-it indie chestnut into a road-trip-worthy family sing-along. But the lyrical switch from “sleeping alone,” in the original, to “watching TV alone” and “playing alone” is a bit awkward. As the inclusion of surf-splashed Kermit cover “Rainbow Connection”—one of the best kids’ songs ever—highlights, the truth is that kids can enjoy music that pairs deeper feelings with simple-seeming exteriors. But Best Coast can address that if they ever get to Best Kids 2. The next time the band comes through town, at least, there shouldn’t be any bickering over whether it’s OK to lug the kiddos.


This five-record retrospective box reminds us that while Lush might not have lunged for the jugular like My Bloody Valentine or Jesus and Mary Chain, they were a first-rate shoegaze band.

Origami

If you're hearing Lush for the first time via this five-record retrospective box, bear in mind: the feathery jangle of leadoff track "Sweetness and Light" is going to sound somewhat anemic measured against the sensory-bathing production favored by Lush's modern-day successors like Beach House, Painted Zeros, and Dum Dum Girls. The same goes if you're arriving at this set straight from the brand new EP Blind Spot, Lush's first recorded output after a 20-year absence. Conversely, back in 1989-90, when Lush's debut EP Scar first made a splash, it was tempting to dismiss the English quartet's music as a Cocteau Twins knockoff—but only if you focused on skin-deep similarities rather than the character underneath the sound.
The first record in this set is Gala, a re-packaging of Scar and two other EPs released together in 1990 to function as the band's introduction to new audiences. Sequenced in backwards chronological order, Gala allowed the uninitiated to stumble onto the demo-like crudeness of Scar after being won-over by the radiant shimmer of songs like "Sweetness and Light" and "De-Luxe." Those songs came across as something of a revelation if you were unfamiliar with Lush's influences and were listening through the lens of alternative rock's transition to a hard-driving, heavy guitar-based format. With six songs produced by Cocteau Twins co-founder Robin Guthrie, Gala still has the naive air of a band fumbling for its voice in the shadow of its heroes. Nevertheless, on the first seven songs, the band throws down the gauntlet and asserts all of the traits that have established its sound as timeless.
The second record of the set is Lush's first proper full-length, 1992's Spooky. Here, it becomes quite clear that this band possessed the substance to match its style. As part of the wave of British acts that were first slapped with the shoegaze tag—Ride, Slowdive, and Pale Saints among them—Lush's music was naturally defined by its seemingly endless ripples of delay, reverb, flange, and chorus. But the almost-supernatural power of frontwoman/guitarist Miki Berenyi and lead guitarist/vocalist Emma Anderson's vocal harmonies and intertwining guitar work set Lush apart from the shoegaze pack on a number of levels.
After a brief intro, Spooky launches straight into the stratosphere with "Nothing Natural," a pinnacle moment not only for Lush but for shoegaze/alternative across the board. Although Guthrie brings his soft-focus production once again, no amount of sonic soft-pedaling can contain the band's assuredness as it aspires to—and mostly reaches—a beauty so sublime that it pumps you up as much as it takes your breath away. Sure, Lush made melancholy, ethereal music, but such was the band's range during this period that none of the songs on Spooky conform strictly to one mood.
By turns dour, impatient, hopeful, and resigned, the album never runs out of shades. Uptempo numbers like "Laura" and "Superblast!" counterbalance the more reflective moments, which hit hardest on album closer "Monochrome," a song with a swaying underwater groove. In the chorus, Berenyi sings, "And sometimes I think if I stand by the phone it may ring/ And sometimes I worry and fear what tomorrow may bring," her voice drenched in reverb so she sounds less like a human than an apparition. It is one of several moments on Spooky where Lush's music verges on mind-altering.
As the band's sole songwriters, Anderson and Berenyi each took unorthodox approaches to melody, chord structure, pacing, lyrics, and even guitar strumming. With Lush, they wove their idiosyncrasies together into a sound whose rough edge belies its delicate outer lacing. The pair was especially fond of inserting odd notes into chords that draped even their most delicate songs in a haze of dissonance. And if you refer to bootleg recordings from the band's heyday, it's evident that Lush packed a punch in concert that none of these records quite capture. Most unfortunately, you can listen to this whole reissue set and never get a sense of the assertive, even forceful playing of late drummer Chris Acland, whose suicide in October of '96 stopped Lush's career in its tracks just as Anderson was contemplating quitting and collective morale had begun wane.
Had Acland not ended his own life, it seems like an implosion was imminent anyway—which is strange considering that Lush's third and final full-length, 1996's Lovelife, triggered a spike in commercial success in the UK. By Lovelife, however, Berenyi and Anderson had abandoned what originally made their music appealing in favor of a more streamlined sound hewing towards Britpop. While a tune like Anderson's "500 (Shake Baby Shake)" distills the familiar harmonies into a tight, sugary-sweet package, which only makes the song's underlying sarcasm and faux-vapidity all the more biting, a multi-faceted muse like Anderson's wasn't best served by going down the same path as Pulp and Blur. Frankly, she and Berenyi were more capable than that.
At a crucial midpoint between the beginning and the end, 1994's Split documents the band reaching beyond the shoegaze mold but not yet pandering to pop appeal. By all accounts a difficult process that involved repeated attempts at a final mix, Split benefits from the turmoil. By that point, Anderson and Berenyi's romantic outlooks had darkened considerably, and at times—the languid, seven-and-a-half minute "Desire Lines," a plea to a person who needs help on "Undertow"—Split simulates the sensation of being emotionally lost, adrift on a sea of uncertainty and woe. On those songs, the pair's guitars are like waves lapping against the side of a boat going nowhere.
The final disc, a collection of Lovelife-era B-sides originally released (in two versions) in Canada and Japan as Topolino, largely follows in the direction of Lovelife and then veers off course with delightfully varied results. It's a breath of fresh air, for example, when Lush delve into their signature guitar glitter on "I Have the Moon." Meanwhile, on "Plums and Oranges" (one of a slew of digital bonus tracks, all of which also appear on the recent 5-cd box set Chorus), the band seamlessly transplants its classic sound onto an electronic framework—a tantalizing hint of what might have been had Lush had more time to experiment. Likewise, "Matador" and "I'd Like to Walk Around in Your Mind" see the band venturing into a pastoral English folk arena one wishes Berenyi and Anderson would have explored more.
It's frustrating, because the stripped-down simplicity of "Carmen"—a chipper rock ditty that sounds like it was rescued by the spirit of Juliana Hatfield on its way to becoming a Britpop single—proves that Lush could have sailed right past the trends of the day. In truth, Topolino serves as a postscript, rather than the meat, of a remarkable career, but its charming odds and ends reveal myriad new angles on the band. Even the instrumental cocktail jazz of "Cul De Sac" stumbles its way into grace somehow, and the album's haphazard running order caps the listening experience off on a surprisingly carefree note.
Of course, Origami establishes Lush's place in the lineage of guitar rock well before you get to the Topolino record. Anchored by Anderson and Berenyi's songwriting acumen, Lush's music didn't lunge at the jugular quite like the work of more audacious sonic innovators like My Bloody Valentine or the Jesus and Mary Chain. But, in a strange way, time has proven to be on Lush's side. Two-plus decades later, bands have gotten rather adept at reproducing the sound and attitude that this box documents so vividly. Nevertheless, Lush's body of work reminds us that all the guitar pedals in the world amount to little more than window dressing if you don't have the heart and soul to harness them. With Origami, it's perhaps more clear than ever that Lush possessed both in spades.
Correction: Due to a publishing error, this review was published with incorrect scores; they have been changed.


The Midwestern band’s fourth album cleans up their “punked-up country gunk,” giving more space to Ryan Davis’ incisive, deceptively offhand lyrics.

Send Flowers

“How many fantasies never make it past the pillow covers?” Ryan Davis sings on “My Over, My Under,” the opener of Send Flowers, the fourth album by State Champion. They’re hard to Google and nearly as hard to categorize; “cowpunk” and “alt-country” don’t quite do them justice. James Jackson Toth, of their friends’ band Wooden Wand, came closest: “punked-up country gunk.” Solid in their sonic integrity, on this outing State Champion remove a little more of the gunk to give space to Davis’ rangy ruminations, delivered mostly in spoken word that gives way to an occasional wail.
The band formed 10 years ago in Chicago when the core members—singer/songwriter/guitarist Davis, drummer Sal Cassato, bassist Mikie Poland, and violinist Sabrina Rush—were in art school. Now they’re spread out over several towns and states. They recorded their third album, 2015’s Fantasy Error, in the fields and the farmhouse of Paul Oldham’s Kentucky studio; ambient sounds of crickets bled into the mix. Davis is based in Louisville, where he runs the label Sophomore Lounge (the label’s releases also include records by Spider Bags and Wooden Wand) and has hosted the terrific festival Cropped Out almost every fall since 2010, skipping a few years when State Champion have been on tour—the main time the band members see each other these days. They continue to book their own gigs, playing house shows and DIY spaces; they remain committed to a name that yields a hilariously wide range of Internet results—choices pointed toward a life in music that isn't defined by others’ expectations. They’re old-soul enough not to be bothered with careerism, nimble enough to embrace the situations they encounter and make themselves at home.
The songs on Send Flowers suggest being on the road—a band of wandering troubadours picking up fine guest players along the way. Angel Olsen guested on their second record and Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin joined in on Fantasy Error; this outing brings Edith Frost on vocals and Christopher May on pedal steel. Star-chart the album and you’d likely peg its origin to some after-midnight hour, gas-station coffee mugs filling the cup holders of a van, when the only two or three people still awake let fly strange, salient thoughts: riffs on lives hidden beyond the lights of the highway.
Silver Jews are among State Champion’s obvious kin, and Send Flowers’ packaging duly comes bearing a blurb from David Berman: “If Bob Dylan was funny, if Tom Waits was relevant, Ryan might not be peerless at what he does best, which is writing large gregarious circles around his pitiful colleagues in the field.” Humor equips the dreamiest of these songs with necessary gravity. Before a recent State Champion show I’d been re-reading the poet James Tate’s The Ghost Soldiers, and the feeling of those poems, which swerve between absurd and realistic encounters told by wry, profound narrators, shares an affinity with Davis’ plainspoken lyrics, which are more deliberate than they appear. His lines flow in a deceptively offhand lilt, though the structures are more ornate than they seem. On “Death Preferences,” keyboard and strings create a slow, swooning drift, a melodic mask for words that sneak up on you in staccato percussive pauses; Frost and Davis harmonize over May’s lonesome, yearning pedal steel and multiple tempo switches in “When I Come Through,” a brash ballad of a wanderer’s promise to return (“Unplug the stars from the sky when I come through”). Most songs hover around six or seven minutes long: the shortest, the lovely, heartbroken lament “If You Don’t Show Me,” explodes in an excellent twang-and-fuzz guitar solo at its finish. With just seven tracks, the album leaves you wanting more.
But that’s the nature of the road, too. Travel the country enough and you become a witness to tiny changes imperceptible to people who live in those places. Davis’ narrator articulates the shifts palpably in the album’s closer, “Stonehenge Band Blues,” about a fictitious blues group who plays to “Southern Ohio’s scaredy boys and hobby-kit glue girls of now”: “What happened to all the country boys/The honky tonks are filled with boneheads/The art museums are full of noise.” The lament comes underscored by the reassurance of being played by an actual band that remains true to the idiosyncratic sound it has forged. “What happens at Stonehenge stays at Stonehenge,” goes the refrain. It might be an acknowledgement of the things in life that will go unexplained for the ages to come. Send Flowers is a tribute to those mysteries—to the small, vital impressions, and the music left in their wake.