Vancouver’s the Courtneys capture the shambolic spirt of New Zealand bands like the Clean and write effortlessly catchy songs about heartache and longing.

II

The Courtneys are charmingly droll. The Vancouver trio includes but one Courtney, née Courtney Garvin, who rips vivid fuzz-guitar riffs alongside bassist Sydney Koke and singer/drummer Jen Twynn Payne. Their music—a bit gray, slightly lopsided—recalls velvety 1980s kiwi acts such as the Clean and Look Blue Go Purple. Crucially, though, the Courtneys bust out of the ramshackle Dunedin sound with bold, driving arrangements and thrilling pop sense. They have covered U2’s “I Will Follow” live and mention the influence of Teenage Fanclub and Big Star. Accordingly, the Courtneys feel like a punkish band with clearly-outlined emotions and a cheekily arena-rock spirit. On their supremely catchy second album, II, they lock into a real groove. They tactfully pair simplicity and strength. They make sad songs sound like a blast.
Something about the presence of a singer/drummer always communicates a discernible vulnerability. It emphasizes just how badly this person wants a voice—enough to carry both a tune and a beat—and turns a song into an act of conviction. To a degree, this amplifies the reaching emotionality of II. Singing in her endearingly nasal tone across the album, Payne is—to borrow a phrase from That Dog—totally crushed out.
Payne has said II is “75% about crushes,” which feels like a modest appraisal. Though there are more oblique songs about iron deficiency, the movie Lost Boys, a distant Virgo, and alien abduction, the bulk of II is about longing—the harshest emotion. “Can’t get you out of my head/Even through the miles,” Payne sings wistfully on “Silver Velvet.” It feels like driving into a sunset, and the bubblegum sentiment at its heart (“And nothing you say!/And nothing you do!/Can stop me from thinkin’ about you!”) sounds squarely fit to be shouted into hairbrush-microphones everywhere. Through the many disarming hooks of “Minnesota,” she pines, “I never wanted you to go/But you had to.” Likewise, “Country Song” is liminal: “I know I’m going but I don’t know when,” Payne sings.
Among all of these uncertain feelings, the music of II is appealingly concrete. II is a lovesick album, but its songs lift off. There’s a steadiness to its build, a comforting antidote to all of the unsteady urges. Even the seven-minute jam of “Lost Boys” is sharp and measured, never losing itself. The sun-streaked riffs of “Tour” pry open like a window on a long highway drive. It sprawls, capturing the restlessness that comes with transience, grounding a self-help mantra: “What you are and what you want to be/It takes a long time.” On “25,” Payne fruitlessly chases the object of her affection, and she evokes the true emotional horror of a two-sided gemini: “I’m a gemini/And I change my mind/Always change my mind.”
As Payne attempts to cope with heartache, the chorus of “Minnesota” is distilled yearning. “If you go away/I hope that you will know,” she sings, “That I’ll miss you so/Not easy to pretend it’s not hard to let you go.” These are evergreen subjects within an evergreen sound, to be sure, but II proves their cyclical natures—especially given its remarkable energy. The songs are viscerally anguished, but they don’t wallow. There’s an essential, breezy levity to the music; the parts require one another. The whole of II moves forward and on.
The democratic alchemy of the Courtneys makes this music feel humbly triumphant—like they collectively work through the confusion that Payne describes. Speaking with Westender, Garvin shared a story that underscores both their wry humor and this internal logic. She is a 2D animator by day, and once, Nickelodeon asked her to pitch a series. Garvin devised a cartoon based on the Courtneys, but differences with the network kept it in limbo. “If you have a show with three characters, one needs to be the leader and the other two have simplified characteristics,” Garvin said. “I just realized right away that wasn’t going to work for our band. It’s really important that we’re very equal.” They animate an egalitarian spirit on II instead.


Scottish band curate the latest edition of this venerable comp series, offering a diverse range of selections that includes funk, jazz, soul, hip-hop, lounge, tropicalia, IDM, Afropop, classical, classic rock, and reggae, as well as their own cover of the Brazilian song "Casaco Marron".

LateNightTales

Once a furtive marker of recognition among like-minded obsessives, Belle and Sebastian have increasingly attracted casual listeners. Recent full-length The Life Pursuit completed the break with the band's outsiders-as-insiders origins, becoming their first album to reach the UK top 10. With the latest installment in the LateNightTales compilation series, previously curated by the Flaming Lips and Four Tet, the Scottish group poses an inevitable cred-salvaging question: But have you seen their records?
Oh, sure, they've got it all: funk, jazz, soul, hip-hop, lounge, tropicalia, IDM, Afropop, classical, classic rock, reggae, country reggae, reggae funk (but not reggaeton), and a hazy spoken-word piece by comedian David Shrigley in which an old woman dishes about her husband's "apparatus." It's never clear which specific band member chooses each track. No matter: Stuart Murdoch & Co. throw down the pop archivist's gauntlet impressively, though it often feels they're trying too hard to impress.
Like the recent Rough Trade Counter Culture comp, the disc is too varied for many one-sitting listens, but as a crate-digging exercise it yields a few directions for further exploration. The plaintive vocals of Greek troubadour Demis Roussos on his sparse 1972 ballad "O My Friends You've Been Untrue To Me" should appeal to Antony and the Johnsons fans. California soul singer Mary Love's uptempo mid-1960s also-ran "I'm in Your Hands" has the energetic appeal of the best Motown. Gal Costa's Caetano Velosi-penned 1969 "Lost in the Paradise" is swooning, horn-drenched bossa nova, while Ramsey Lewis's funky jazz entry from the same year, "Uhuru", features Earth, Wind & Fire founder Maurice White on kalimba. Erick and Mondrek Muchena add a taste of Zimbabwe amid the dusty rhythms of "Taireva". To be fair, Tom Middleton already picked the Peddlers' sub-Sinatra crooner "On a Clear Day You Can See Forever" for another compilation series, Family's The Trip, but this song remains the only good argument for a new Austin Powers sequel.
Other tracks fall deeper into novelty territory. Elsie Mae and the barrel-voiced Walter Jackson each turn in powerful performances, but their material-- a tepid "Rescue Me" knock-off and an overwrought soul weeper, respectively-- explains their lack of wider fame. It's hard to say what Belle & Sebastian were thinking when they mashed up Johnny Cash's mariachi-laced "Ring of Fire" with the West Kingston skank of the Ethiopians' "Freeman", but Butch Cassidy Sound System's "Cissy Strut" works with the classic Meters tune.
Where the compilation intermittently succeeds is in building a foggy, buzzed late-night atmosphere, true to its title. Rehash's opening "Gratuitous Theft in the Rain" sets the scene with David Axelrod-like loops, bringing to mind Rjd2, whose heartbreaking Deadringer hidden track and single "Here's What's Left" also appears. Madlib's Lootpack offers the slinky "Questions". A dancefloor rendering of the Stylistics' "People Make The World Go Round" by Paperclip People, aka Carl Craig, achieves a futuristic Herbertian sheen that almost transcends its smooth-jazz sax. Contrast that with Novi Singers' Polish-language vocal jazz. The electronic textures of Múm's "Green Grass of Tunnel" and Space Jam's 1998 12-inch "Let Your Conscience Be Your Guidance" prove even more immersive.
No worries, a few tracks also conjure the band's own sound. On "Get Thy Bearings", from 1968's Hurdy Gurdy Man, unlikely indie-yuppie precursor Donovan floats his fey, Murdoch-like vocals atop jazzy instrumentals fit for Astral Weeks, which was released the same year. Big Star's "Watch the Sunrise", from 1972's #1 Record shares the gawky acoustic glow of "Mayfly" or "I Don't Love Anyone". Stereolab melds "Eleanor Rigby" strings and joyously fuzzy guitars on 1993 touchstone "French Disko". Steve Miller Band's "Fly Like an Eagle" sounds kinda like how haters described The Life Pursuit, except this time it really is flatulent mid-70s astro-blooz, which no amount of so-unhip-it's-hip trend-speculating (BTW sooo unhip) can salvage.
So it goes: Eclecticism and obscurantism provide the tale of the tape in record-collector apparatus-measuring contests. By this standard, Belle & Sebastian's LateNightTales is a prodigious success. The band's lone recording here, a breezy, overlookable cover of "Casaco Marron" by Evinha-- a member of Brazilian a cappella group Trio Esperanca-- seals the victory, pyrrhic as Plutarch. Belle and Sebastian's fan culture may have always encouraged vinyl fetishism, but the misplaced machismo in this nugget-flaunting display seems gauche given the delicate wit of the band's original compositions. Dudes, you're not losing your edge.


Fire Records' 4xLP reissue of Half Japanese's ½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts demonstrates how the Fair brothers' caveman racket anticipated the work of acts such as Daniel Johnston and Beat Happening; it's a brilliant mix of loud punk blasts, shapeless rants, heartfelt confessions, and minimal experiments.

½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts

“You can learn the names of notes and how to make chords that other people use, but that’s pretty limiting,” wrote David Fair in his mini-manifesto How to Play Guitar. “If you ignore the chords your options are infinite and you can master guitar playing in one day.” Listen to ½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts, the sprawling, primitive, raucous debut of Fair’s band Half Japanese, and you probably won’t be surprised that David and his brother Jad never learned to play guitar in any traditional way. But it would be wrong to assume that they couldn’t learn. Read David again: “If you ignore the chords…” Half Japanese made a choice. They weren’t clueless outsiders or deluded novices. Primitiveness was their calling, not their fate.
It was also their path to freedom. As David says, lack of knowledge can mean infinite options, and he and Jad explore a lot of them on ½ Gentleman / Not Beasts, often touted as the first (and only) triple-LP debut in rock history. That may or may not be true, but it certainly was the least likely. Before it came out, the Fair brothers had made just a few 7-inches and cassettes, recorded at home (where they lived with their parents) and released on their own label, 50 Skidillion Watts. (One of those early tapes was called ½ Gentlemen / ½ Beasts, but the Fairs changed it to Not Beasts for the box since, according to David, “we’re nice guys.”) British label Armageddon’s offer to put out a box set was so unusual that, when interviewed in the Half Japanese documentary The Band That Would Be King, the Fairs’ parents could only compare it to a then-new box set by Frank Sinatra.
Musically, though, giving Half Japanese six album sides to fill with their spilling ideas made a lot of sense. In no less than 50 songs (now 86 on Fire’s 4LP reissue), the Fair brothers injected their caveman racket-- usually crafted solely on cardboard-sounding drums and strangled guitar-- into loud punk blasts, shapeless rants, heartfelt confessions, minimal experiments, audio collages, and twisted covers of their heroes the Velvet Underground, Jonathan Richman, and Buddy Holly. Some songs sound like a suburban parallel to the concurrent, atonal no wave movement in New York (David’s chord-avoiding guitar is often a dead ringer for the dissonant shrieks of DNA’s Arto Lindsay). But Half Japanese replaced no wave’s burned-out nihilism with sleeve-worn, open-wound emotion.
Much of that emotion comes from Jad’s adolesecent voice and love-letter lyrics. On bracingly honest cuts like “Shy Around Girls”, “Dream Date”, and “School of Love”, he brings the sentimentality of a lovelorn teenager to the musical equivalent of primal scream therapy. (It’s telling that, according to later member [Don Fleming](file://localhost/ttp/::en.wikipedia.org:wiki:Don_Fleming_(musician)), David claimed that Half Japanese had two kinds of songs: “Monster songs and love songs.”) With these proto-emo bombs, the Fairs predicted a lot of future lo-fi rock, especially the home-taped ballads of Daniel Johnston and the nursery-rhyme swing of Beat Happening.
But don’t mistake Half Japanese’s naked emotion for naïveté-- Jad and David knew exactly what they were doing. That’s especially clear in ½ Gentlemen’s audio experiments, which can be surprisingly formal. The bass cycling through “Du Du Du / Du Du Du” evokes Steve Reich-style minimalism; the repeated notes and found sounds on “T / T / T / T / T” would fit on a Faust LP; the slashing guitar and wordless babble of “Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr” suggests Derek Bailey backing Yoko Ono; and “Jad Interview”, one of Fire’s bonus tracks, is a word-jazz-like vocal-collage. These aren’t random noodlings that hit on something by chance. There’s clear thought behind each construction, ironic considering how loose the more traditional “songs” are.
Another sign that Half Japanese were more clever than they looked is ½ Gentlemen’s sly sense of humor. You can hear Jad and David winking through the fake-protest chant “No More Beatle Mania” (“once was enough!” Jad screams), the drooling whine of “I Don’t Want to Have Mono No More”, and the rock-fantasy-camp scenario of “Battle of the Bands”, wherein “backup singers” Mick Jagger and Johnny Rotten are too busy watching David to actually sing. Even funnier are the prankster-ish cover versions, wherein the band rambles through classics as if blindfolded. Jad never alters his singing style throughout “Stooges Medley” (another Fire bonus track), the musical equivalent of Andy Kaufman doing impressions by merely reciting lines without changing his “Foreign Man” voice. If anyone thought Half Japanese was a hoax, David and Jad were clearly happy to feed that rumor. Yet their brazen refusal to conform to the originals captures the Stooges’ spirit more than any faithful cover could.
All this fearless amateurism can make ½ Gentlemen a brutal listen. As their career went on, Half Japanese gradually turned their monster love songs into more listenable tunes that influenced a generation of indie rockers (most famously, Kurt Cobain brought them along on Nirvana’s In Utero tour and was wearing their t-shirt when he died). But ½ Gentlemen, in its near-giddy willingness to push sound past the limits of amps and tape recorders, is more a precursor to noisy rock experiments like the kiddie nightmares of Happy Flowers, the trash-can blues of Pussy Galore, or the early splatter of Boredoms.
Still, even at its most grating, there’s always a loudly-beating heart inside 1/2 Gentlemen. It’s earnest, eager, and takes a wry view of the world that makes it endearing. And it’s so hard to predict what’s going to happen at any given point that the music never feels dated. Because it was based mostly on their own hermetic ideas, the Fair brothers’ primitivism blasts through the years, too hot for any time period to hold onto. Maybe that’s the best thing about ½ Gentlemen / Not Beasts: even today, over three decades later, you can picture Jad and David banging it out in their parents’ house, thrilled at what they’re discovering.


Moving beyond FAKA’s gqom influences, the South African musician pairs experimental club styles with operatic falsetto in a multi-sensory exploration of the nature of the divine.

Desire

Long before music became an industry, its primary purpose was ceremonial. For thousands of years, people have used song and sound to celebrate their communities and to worship their ancestors and deities. While today’s stars often thank God for their blessings and the nightclub remains a church for many, few contemporary albums embody a sense of the sacred like Desire Marea’s debut solo album, Desire. As one half of South African duo FAKA, Marea drew on local dance music sounds like gqom, but on Desire, their exploration of the divine takes them in a many-splendored multitude of  stylistic directions, often within the span of a single track: liturgical drone, galloping club beats, existential noise.
The scene is set by the resonant organ of opener “Self Centre,” a pleasing play on “self-centered” that puts the emphasis on the core of one’s being—in other words, the soul. Exultation follows in the form of “Zibuyile Izimmakade,” which means “The Gods Have Returned” in Zulu. A galloping beat, the hoot of an owl, and Desire’s operatic falsetto come together in a wave of ecstatic energy that makes a rockpool of the chest; in Zulu, Marea sings, “The Gods have returned/To tell us to stand proudly in our light.” It’s not the only spirit-catching moment. Taking its name from a Zulu word that means “rejoice” and is used to greet one’s ancestors, “Thokozani” spans from baroque harpsichord flourishes to piano house, imbued with the dynamism of the sonic collages that Total Freedom parented and popularized in the transatlantic club scene of the early 2010s.
Of course, the divine does not exist solely on another plane. The joy of existing within a body, and expressing that freely, is one of the most sacred human experiences. In an interview with writer Lindiwe Mngxitama, Marea said they wrote the album’s lead single, “You Think I’m Horny,” during a time when they were “trying to foster a sense of...tenderness[,] even with casual interactions.” Over a goosebump-inducing marimba line and a stretch of scuffed-up trip-hop, the song prioritizes intimacy over sex: “You think that I’m horny/Baby you arouse me/And I don’t even wanna fuck you/I just wanna be with you.” There’s also a sensual reference to the anime franchise Dragon Ball Z (“You are my senzu bean, healing me/From deep within/I get up again”) and a full minute’s repetition of “squeeze me” in a range of choral tones that reach transcendent heights.
In “Tavern Kween,” healing extends to the dancefloor. Marea sings in Zulu, “Those of us who live in the night/Find home under disco lights.” Featuring a hypnotizing dance-off between saxophone, trumpet, and electric guitar, “Tavern Kween” is a slow-burn disco anthem in the vein of “Blind,” and its triumphant message is unambiguous: “Hit the floor in your full majesty,” urges Marea; “You deserve to claim your joy in the world.”
What makes Desire such a standout debut is that it sounds like an artist at home in the journey of life and in lively dialogue with their craft. A pattern of flux and flexibility runs through the album’s palette, song structures, and emotional tenor. The more somber and reflective moments, like the mindscape-evoking “The Void” and “Studies in Black Trauma,” which features potent, prayer-like bars from Johannesburg rapper Gyre, are not immune to this feeling of movement, thanks to Marea’s invigorating production decisions. The latter starts out akin to a death-metal opera and moves through several sound scenes before morphing into an aural bubble bath. Along with the London composer and sound artist Klein, Marea belongs to a new generation of independent artists approaching voice, musicianship, and performance with all the senses in mind. It’s that embodied vitality that allows Desire to speak so fluently to the mind, body, and soul.


Flying Lotus' fifth album has the stated theme of the one thing every single human has in common, and just about every conceivable style of music is prone to address: the inevitability and condition of death, and how mysterious it really is. Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, Thundercat, and others contribute.

You're Dead!

Each subsequent full-length album that Flying Lotus has released seems to start with a personal connection that's grown more all-encompassing the further he gets into his career. From his year of birth, he moved on to the city he found his musical identity in, then out to the very structure of the universe, then deeper inside to the inner world of dreams and the subconscious. His fifth album, You're Dead!, has the stated theme of the one thing every single human has in common, and just about every conceivable style of music is prone to address: the inevitability and condition of death, and how mysterious it really is.
Like many people who've grown past 30 years old, Steven Ellison has lost some important people in his life. Specifically, they were artistic inspirations—from collaborators like Austin Peralta to influences like J Dilla to blood relatives like Alice Coltrane—formative catalysts that made his music and his life what it is. Coltrane in particular is frequently brought up as a familial connection to Ellison, but even if she weren't his great-aunt, her meditative way of being in the world and putting forth music as a way of spiritual connection has carried through deeply into Ellison's own art, even when it appears irreverent or cartoon-ridiculous on the surface.
The title of You're Dead! has that exclamation point for a reason, though. While the spirits of his friends, family, and peers weigh heavy throughout this album, the music itself is frequently light and sometimes shamelessly goofy, treating mortality with the irreverence and fascination of anything inescapable and unknowable. There's little that's morbid and even less that's melancholy about it. In the context of coping with The Other Side, it all feels a lot more like a wake than a funeral.
And consider the guests at this particular wake: pianist Herbie Hancock, likely legacy-minded as he continues to branch out and find new musical environments through his seventies; rappers Snoop Dogg and Kendrick Lamar, the latter whose insight towards death has the subtle heft of somebody who's cheated it while being well aware of those who didn't; guitarist Brendon Small, whose involvement in the gory cartoon absurdity of "Metalocalypse" prepped him well for an album that sounds equally informed by Slayer and Raymond Scott. Even the album art and promotional visuals, provided by the body-horror guro manga artist Shintaro Kago, revels in the idea of nightmarish evisceration and dismemberment rendered with an almost playful slapstick weirdness.
The theme sticks out as the most consistent element of You're Dead!, since it's far and away the most free-ranging FlyLo album to date. And yet the album doesn't sprawl out of control, maybe because it doesn't really have the time to: the whole record clocks in at just over 38 minutes, all jolts of sound and quick bursts of motifs. The fleeting cross-sections of chopped-to-bits fusion jazz strung together over the first five minutes—the ascendant cosmic drone and black hole collapse of "Theme", the fast-forward bop of Hancock collab "Tesla", and the careening hesher-Sharrock guitar licks of "Cold Dead"—flow from buzz-cluttered headspaces to spacious serenity so unexpectedly yet naturally that the seams never show. (The live-band personnel—including prog/jazz superdrummer Deantoni Parks, Ayler-school saxophonist Kamasi Washington, and ever-present partner/bass wizard Thundercat—do a masterful job in turning concentrated doses of high-speed, complicated chops into giddy bursts of euphoric adrenaline.) Kendrick Lamar's virtuoso obstacle-course run through the d'n'b-tweaking "Never Catch Me" is the closest there is to a centerpiece statement of the album ("Analyze my demise, I say I'm super anxious/ Recognize I deprive this fear and then embrace it"). But the tonal 180 into the buoyant, kind of tipsy/faded Captain Murphy/Snoop Dogg teamup "Dead Man's Tetris"—complete with a riff-echoing gun-cock collage and Street Fighter II K.O. SFX—is less of a jarring shock than a knowing counterpoint.
From there, the album's remaining path through prog, fusion, IDM, and ambient all feels like a necessary comedown, shot through with moments at the precipice of chaos or deliberate ugliness (like the pill-popper nightmare of Captain Murphy croak-wailing through "The Boys Who Died in Their Sleep"), but still resiliently calm in the face of death. Ellison's once-sparse use of others' voices is especially haunting at points—Angel Deradoorian's breathily manipulated into weaving through wispy psychedelic soul like some minimalist version of Pink Floyd's "The Great Gig in the Sky", or Niki Randa harmonizing at a distant horizon through "Your Potential//The Beyond". A lighter hand, even when it's punching up bass drones or pushing through dense walls of complex instrumental interplay, makes the end-of-humanity choral hymn "Coronus, the Terminator" and the pull between intense rhythm and delicate melody on "Moment of Hesitation" feel infused with just as much wonder and awe as foreboding.
There's the idea expressed through You're Dead!—intentional or otherwise—that making a life's work with the full knowledge of death as the final limiting factor is a strong motivator. Flying Lotus has the notion that death should be the only limiting factor, and when he's put out a work that wrings beauty out of that very thing, what's the point of fearing anything?


Dominic Maker and Kai Campos blaze another new path, but the genre vagabonds get a little lost in their sleek shoegaze post-rock album.

The Sunset Violent

Mount Kimbie are once again seeking transformation. Over the past 15 years, the UK duo of Dominic Maker and Kai Campos have swerved from post-dubstep to post-punk, techno to R&B, ambient garage to lo-fi pop, releasing DJ mixes and double albums, collaborating with James Blake and Jay-Z and King Krule and Travis Scott. Now they’re back with something slightly different: a gritty, shoegazy, post-rock album called The Sunset Violent. With help from new bandmembers Andrea Balency-Béarn and Marc Pell, Mount Kimbie dust off their guitars and turn up their distortion, hoping to become Stereolab for a new generation, an electro-rock outfit whose work is as familiar as it is obscure.
The road to Mount Kimbie’s revised sound has been winding. As underground electronic producers in the early 2010s, Maker and Campos’ experimental flair punctuated otherwise minimalist compositions: a time-warped acoustic guitar behind glassy ambient pads, arhythmic drums around synth keys. Their most recent album, 2022’s MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning, branched off into hazy R&B and hip-hop before morphing into muted, dubby club beats. Their defining work remains 2017’s Love What Survives, a new-age post-punk record heavy on overdriven guitars and grainy synths, a style well-suited to Maker and Compos’ habitual muffled abstraction.
Sleeker and safer than its predecessor, The Sunset Violent similarly provides a sturdy backdrop of fuzzy guitar and Korgs for Balency-Béarn and Maker’s melancholic vocals. The newly constituted four-piece sounds like if Sonic Youth or Young Marble Giants were wizards with the DAW, a band whose songs play like richly detailed dreams whose meaning may leave you scratching your head.
The strongest songs sparkle with a morose charm. On “Dumb Guitar” and “Shipwreck,” Balency-Béarn’s plainspoken singing wafts over murky lounge-pop, giving The Sunset Violent some much-needed friction. “Every day we’re eating out/Another date I’ll kill myself,” she deadpans on “Dumb Guitar.” Her wistful, unadorned voice is the closest thing the album has to an emotional center, especially with Maker playing the guileless sidekick role Oliver Sims perfected in the xx. It’s jarring to hear how much more alive King Krule’s baritone sounds on “Boxing” and “Empty and Silent,” how much defter his pen—a stunning feat for such a famed curmudgeon. Sometimes The Sunset Violent searches high and low for a pulse and just comes up empty.
Maker’s at his most confident on the spectacular “Fishbrain,” a song that blisters with bitterness and regret. The writing is cryptic but sharp, featuring fractured lines about bridges falling and “running out of films” to watch. When Mount Kimbie align their songcraft with a tension, a feeling, a perspective—no matter how prosaic or subliminal—their songs soar. It’s when they languish in repetitive patterns and dry melodies, like on “Got Me” and the opening half of “A Figure in the Surf,” that they’re yanked back to earth.
Having proven themselves as successful genre vagabonds, Maker and Campos’ decision to team up with Balency-Béarn and Pell suggests an attempt to home in on a more distinct, durable identity, one that ground the Mount Kimble sound in a reliable aesthetic. The Sunset Violent pushes them closer to this identity, establishing a clearer vision for what the band can be. But just as the vision begins to crystalize, it burns to black, leaving a pleasant if not entirely indelible outline.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the 2007 debut from the L.A. duo, an enchanting hip-hop classic with an almost mythological history.

Below the Heavens

By the end of the 2000s, hip-hop had completed its transformation into a dominant cultural force that dictated music, fashion, and language around the world. But the economy that made it and other pop genres so wildly profitable was crumbling. The decade that began with commercial behemoths like Country Grammar, Stankonia, and The Marshall Mathers LP ended with Department of Homeland Security officials seizing the domains of MP3 blogs. By 2007, when CD sales were just over half of what they’d been seven years prior, it was clear that the online hip-hop community had the power to break new artists by bypassing the music industry’s traditional infrastructure. This is a long way of explaining how the debut album by a relatively unknown producer and a completely anonymous MC, pressed onto only 3,500 CDs by a tiny label that would soon go out of business, became one of the signature LPs of its era.
Blu & Exile’s Below the Heavens is more than an economic curiosity. Recorded over several years in the early and mid-2000s, it channels the tactile sample chops of underground rap production at that time and the writing styles of several different subgenres from the previous decade. It is conspicuously modeled after hip-hop’s canonical debuts: rooted in autobiography, shot through with a young person’s brash ambition, its moments of vulnerability carefully parceled out and couched in redemption arcs. But it revels in tension—between its author’s parents; between his favorite MCs; between the mundanity of daily life and the divine. It’s the kind of album that made other rappers household names. And it likely would have made Blu one, too, had he shown any interest in becoming one.
Blu was born in 1983 and, as a child, moved with his mother and pastor stepfather all around greater Los Angeles, between Vernon and Inglewood, Long Beach and Azusa, even across the San Bernardino County line into Montclair. Wherever they made a home, there were strict house rules, including a ban on rap records. (A smuggled cassette of LL Cool J’s Bad was confiscated almost immediately.) While his classmates were saving their allowances to buy Doggystyle and The Chronic, young Johnson Barnes was relegated to singing in the church choir, sopping up whatever pop music bled into the sanctuary.
Around 1998, when he was in the 10th grade, Blu moved to San Pedro to live with his biological father. His dad was, well, not a pastor. (“My pop a thug,” he would later rap—“I'm a son of a Blood, with blue gators on.”) 2Pac and Too $hort filled the house. But by this point, Short Dogg was 10 albums deep and the L.A. stars of the ’90s had dimmed. Pac had been murdered in Vegas, Eazy-E had died of AIDS-induced pneumonia, Ice Cube was between halves of a poorly received double album, Snoop was recording for No Limit, and Dre had yet to make Aftermath anything more than a slightly embarrassing vanity label. Suge Knight was at a federal prison in Oregon. The iconography of the Tom Bradley era—lowriders under palm trees, jheri curls under Raiders hats—had already hardened into cliché.
The album that sparked Blu’s interest in rapping came from the opposite coast. DMX’s 1998 debut, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot, seemed to beg imitation: It was viciously animated, frothing at the mouth. Blu would later say his earliest raps sounded like “a baby DMX” while his high school rhyming partner patterned himself after Brotha Lynch Hung, the horrorcore pioneer from Sacramento. But this ferocity was soon balanced out by influences that were more cerebral. By 2000, Blu had heard One Day It’ll All Make Sense, the Common album from 1997, and the self-titled debut EP by the Fresno rapper Planet Asia, released the year after. Over the next several years, as Blu continued to refine his style, these competing sensibilities—the swaggering id and the obsessive inward gaze—would tug at him equally.
After high school, Blu got on stage as often as he could, playing his own small shows and hosting others. He wrote constantly, but freestyled just as often, proud of his skills as a battle rapper. He was falling into an important L.A. lineage. In much the same way that the G-funk era’s imagery and local gang politics creeped into Blu’s music through osmosis and personal experience, his battle chops recalled the conscious-bent, open-mic ethos of Project Blowed and its predecessor, the Good Life Cafe. While San Pedro is some 20 miles south of the Blowed’s home in Leimert Park, Blu was meshing his showman’s instincts with that scene’s headier undertones—his raps became confrontational, but in the way that Aceyalone’s were, not MC Eiht’s.
In 2003 Blu met Aloe Blacc, the rapping and singing half of Emanon, his duo with the producer Exile. (The two were hanging with mutual friends and clicked while reciting lyrics from J. Dilla’s Welcome 2 Detroit.) Exile was working on a compilation album, and Blacc dragged him to one of Blu’s shows to scout the younger MC as someone who might contribute a couple of songs. Ex was impressed, gave Blu a pair of beats to write to, and immediately scheduled a session to cut those songs. The pair developed a quick chemistry. One night, Blu brought a Sesame Street record to Exile’s studio to sample. The muppet’s voice got laid over a lighthearted piano loop; Blu rapped, “I look like my mother, but I act like my pops did/Whatever he ain’t teach to me, the block did.” This was the beginning, in earnest, of the sessions for the hypothetical debut album that Blu had been dreaming about—and had quietly kept the name for—since the 10th grade back at San Pedro High: Below the Heavens.
It was not the only record Blu was writing at the time. Despite his pride in being a member of L.A.’s underground—the album title, aside from the obvious religious themes, is a reference to the underground/mainstream divide—Blu was not necessarily set on staying indie forever. In fact, a cousin who engineered for Death Row had put him in touch with Suge Knight, and had that label been on more solid financial footing, Blu might have filled the vacuum created by Pac’s death and Dre’s departure. Instead, he was working on a much smaller scale, cutting a playful, slightly genre-bending album with the Detroit rapper Ta’Raach and another, under the name Johnson&Jonson, with the producer Mainframe. Around this time, Blu began to have conversations with Stones Throw, the local indie giant that had just put out Madvillainy. But reps for that label told Blu they felt they could not service his commercial potential.
The J&J LP is an excellently arrogant knot of battle raps and sneering monologues, but Blu was determined to make Below the Heavens his widescreen debut, in the mold of Illmatic or Ready to Die. So Mainframe secured him and Exile a deal with Sound in Color, the indie label he founded as a teenager. The duo got to work on the album in a variety of studios around L.A. County, most frequently near the Sound in Color house in Long Beach. This is partly due to the convenience of being near a label’s headquarters, but mostly, one presumes, because Blu didn’t have a car. He would take the bus from his day job at a Long Beach pharmacy, toting the raps he had worked on during the slower parts of his shift.
It’s this sort of intrusion—real life into fantasy, bills into the best-laid plans—that gives Below the Heavens its unique texture. The album is, in some ways, built around its seventh song, the Tony Mottola-sampling “Dancing in the Rain.” Its first verse is kind of a working-class farce: It opens at 6 a.m. when Blu tries to call Exile but finds his cell phone has been cut off; carless, Blu is then victim to a slow bus schedule, which angers his boss, and his girlfriend won’t stop nagging him about money. When he finally clocks out, he doesn’t have enough change to take the bus back home, and is caught in a downpour at the stop. And then you arrive at the song’s title: a silver lining, a dance in the rain.
But what Blu does next is subvert the familiar arc he’s been tracing. After a shift spent daydreaming about the studio, he arrives there—burnt out and bitter. “Sometimes I hate taking trips to the lab,” he raps, before bluffing his way through a conversation with an impatient A&R and sheepishly admitting that, while many great artists supposedly used depression to fuel their best work, his simply makes him tired. The temptation, in any sort of dramatic writing, is to focus on acute moments of change; Blu instead writes about the crushing weight of every workday blending into the next, the death-by-a-thousand-cuts that ends so many artists’ careers before they begin.
None of which is to say that Below the Heavens is dour, or self-pitying. It never is—“Dancing in the Rain” ends with a phone call between Blu and a friend that reminds him why he enjoys writing, and that song is preceded by another, “Blu Colla Workers,” where the same types of economic stress are rendered as goofy sitcom problems. Despite describing himself as “mad at the world” on the album’s opening song, Blu spends much of it bouncing between happily placid (the sunbaked “So(ul) Amazin’ (Steel Blazin’)”) and exultant (“Show Me the Good Life”). His broad smile on the cover is not some sort of arch in-joke.
Below the Heavens’ other centerpiece, along with “Dancing in the Rain,” is “In Remembrance of Me,” a lush song meant to turn Blu’s life into myth. It doesn’t take much decoding to see what he and Exile are reaching for here: The first line Ex scratches in the chorus is from Pete Rock & CL Smooth’s “They Reminisce Over You.” In the final verse of “Remembrance,” Blu raps that his “mom thought that [he] was too young to make this song,” but this is of course the kind of song that only 22-year-olds write. It’s full of strange little tonal contradictions (he calls the girl he lost his virginity to “my first fuck” just a few bars before saying “I saw the whole world through that girl’s eyes”) and wistful recollections from just a few years prior (“We was full of youth,” he raps, “not yet abused by time”). Blu’s writing would change radically in the years to come, but on Heavens, he’s less concerned with granular details than the feelings that linger in their wake. Later on the album, he recounts not the particulars of an arrest, but the guilt he feels teaching his son about right and wrong with cuff marks fresh on his wrists.
The tonal balance and technical proficiency of Blu’s raps were mirrored by Exile behind the boards. The omnivore son and grandson of musicians, he came to hip-hop through the electro music that pumped through roller rinks and the rap broadcast throughout L.A. on KDAY. Ex had made his first mixtapes with Aloe Blacc in the mid-’90s, when both were still teenagers. By the time he met Blu, he was a dexterous veteran. His beats have, at times, been miscast as exercises in boom-bap revival, but they are better understood as an analog anchor to L.A.’s then-burgeoning beat music scene, which would soon turn toward electronic psychedelia. His scratches ground the LP in the past, while the rare digital touches keep it current: See the coda on “Show Me the Good Life,” a track that—fitting, given his partner’s influences—Exile had originally submitted to Common for inclusion on 2005’s Be.
For his part, Blu’s vocals are well served by his experience battling and his wealth of time on stage. He knows when to sink into a pocket and when to push a verse’s pace; he knows when, as at the end of “Juicen’ Dranks,” to extend a rhyme scheme in a way that elicits gasps from a crowd. He can be jagged or cascade over a beat, as he does while rattling off nuisances early on “Dancing.” He’s expressive without being a ham, charming when he tells a woman in a club that “slaves come with whips and chains/We gotta liberate!” as a way of explaining away his lack of money only a few songs after he used the whips/chains construction in earnest, on “Remembrance.”
His variety of flows also bridges some of the real and imagined fault lines between different schools of rap. His most forceful, muscular deliveries—opener “My World Is…,” “Simply Amazin’”—are actually the songs where he’s most reminiscent of Common, One Day being a more vigorously-rapped album than its reputation would suggest. And then there’s his singing. Maybe the residue of his days in church, Blu’s melodic sense on the hooks for “Blu Colla Workers,” “Dancing in the Rain,” and “The Narrow Path” makes those songs feel like complete records, and Heavens like the product of a lifetime’s worth of musical study.
Most of the lyrics on Below the Heavens are straightforward in terms of their construction and their meaning. But its most moving song, “Cold Hearted” is written elliptically, on the micro and macro level. There is domestic abuse in Blu’s childhood home and there is the death of a friend; there are weapons real and metaphorical. But Blu’s verse cagily circles each event, looping back and forth with seemingly anachronistic details and conspicuously repeating phrases. Five years after the fact, Blu told XXL that “Cold Hearted” was “the most personal record I ever recorded in my life,” an ode to the childhood sadness so deep it gave him his stage name.
By the end of 2006, after years of sessions that yielded around 50 songs, Below the Heavens was finally ready to be released, its meager first run of CDs pressed and sealed. On January 16, 2007, a SWAT team, carrying M-16s and supported by helicopters, raided the studio shared by DJ Drama and Don Cannon, two fixtures on rap’s mixtape circuit, on RICO charges. Like the websites that would be seized by ICE three years later, these mixtapes were in fact useful tools for major labels and their artists; the relationship was one of mutual benefit, not one-sided piracy. In any event, the walls were closing in around traditional brick-and-mortar sales and file-sharing blogs alike. Below the Heavens arrived just in time. Despite Blu’s ambivalence about the internet (“When we first got MySpace I was denying people I didn’t know… The label was like, ‘Yo, man, how are you gonna sell a record?’” he would later recall), the album became an instant sensation online. A single post on the hip-hop blog NahRight, Blu told me last year, made “about as much difference as it did when [Exile and I] went overseas” to tour.
Even though Sound in Color dissolved, Below the Heavens and its internet following made Blu an obvious, inevitable star in the eyes of major labels. He signed with Warner Bros. and got to work on an album. But instead of remaking Below the Heavens or writing its spiritual sequel, Blu tapped producers like Flying Lotus, Samiyam, and the Sa-Ra Creative Partners—linchpins of the beat music scene that was exploding out of Low End Theory, the weekly club night in Lincoln Heights. (In a fitting parallel to Blu’s own scene-bridging, Low End was co-founded by Nocando, the battle rapper and Project Blowed veteran.) The LP Blu recorded, originally titled NoYork!, got deprioritized during a period of corporate upheaval, but was probably too avant-garde for a major at the time anyway. A few weeks before being dropped by Warner, Blu handed out promo CDs of the nearly-finished record; it would eventually be released independently in 2013, in slightly abbreviated form and with a slightly abbreviated name, York.
For most artists, NoYork!/York would be the strangest record in their catalog, a clear outlier. For Blu, it was the most conventional thing he’d release for several years. See 2011’s j e s u s, a record so lo-fi as to give the term new meaning; see HerFavoriteColo(u)r, the self-produced dip into jazz and Blu’s DVD collection from 2009. He recorded a mostly self-produced solo album, referred to alternately as God Is Good and theGODleebarnes(lp), which is actually a natural successor to Below the Heavens—expansive, linear, autobiographical—and uploaded it to MySpace as one long MP3 under heavy distortion. And when a second Blu & Exile record finally appeared, it was with no announcement and little fanfare, as give me my flowers while i can smell them, a digital-only release. Much of this later music is superior to Heavens—richer in detail, less iterative, full of tics in writing and production that are wholly unique to Blu—but to hear fans muse about his debut, or to read much of his press, it’s as if little of it ever existed.
In many ways, Blu’s larger project is one about impermanence. His work can be hard to find; it disappears frequently, and the retail versions of NoYork! and flowers are inferior to their initial leaks. Many of his songs are buried under digital fuzz—a provocative, frequently effective choice, but one that surely shrinks his audience. And much of his most recent output, like his 2018 collaboration with Shafiq Husayn, The Blueprint, is clearly freestyled, unconcerned with persona or narrative structure. Even Below the Heavens, which seemed a conscious exception to this, has been retroactively nudged in a similar direction: its physical editions falling out of print, its files sloppily uploaded to DSPs with song titles that are incomplete or incorrect, some tracks disappearing from those platforms when permissions lapse or are lost in the shuffle. A certain kind of listener would look back at the album as a foundation that was never built on. But it could be more clearly seen as the first step on the journey that everyone and everything takes, back into the ether.


This is a record with nothing to prove, a vision of ambient music clad in bathrobe and slippers. You come to it to kick back, get lost in texture, and forget about time for a while.

Principe del Norte

For an album with a royal pedigree right there in its title, Prins Thomas' Principe del Norte is a record with nothing to prove. The shortest of its nine untitled tracks is nearly eight minutes long, and three run to 13 minutes or more. You don't get the sense the track lengths stem from any sort of desire to grandstand; it just looks like Thomas didn't much feel like editing himself. The whole album runs more than an hour and a half, beats halting and restarting, synths drifting willy-nilly over muted basslines, and arrangements wandering free as clouds. It is a vision of ambient music in bathrobe and slippers, slurping milk straight from the carton at the all-night grocery; it is The Dude of ambient.
Of course, the Dude was pretty cool, and so is Principe del Norte, which comes across as genial, charmingly rumpled, and totally unflappable. These songs appear to have been improvised and recorded across long studio jams, and the main compositional guideline seems to dictate only that the music is limited to what Thomas can play with his own two hands—or his sequencers—at any given moment. Take "C," which begins with patient, parallel synthesizer lines, teases with a pitter-pat beat, falls back into a beatless breakdown—mashed keys, a wrong note or two—and then ramps back up into its full chug. There's yet another false ending at the eight-and-a-half minute mark, before the arpeggios fire up again for a four-minute denouement.Disco's pulse is implicit in the four-to-the-floor beats of the album's heavier cuts ("E," "F," "G") and in faintly funky basslines that crop up here and there, but the album draws most of its inspiration from '70s German electronic artists like Tangerine Dream and Manuel Göttsching.
In his notes to the album, Thomas cites the influence of '90s ambient artists like the KLF, the Orb, and the Black Dog, but for the most part, Principe del Norte scans as a logical extension of Thomas' previous work, just with the drums dialed way down. The lone exception is the final track, "H," which might be one of the heaviest things he's ever recorded; with its thudding bass kicks, cavernous bass kicks, and monotone clatter and grind, it sounds almost like his attempt at Berghain-style techno. ("D," which uses some of the same elements, scans more as Thomas' interpretation of dub techno in the tradition of Chain Reaction.) Unlike proper warehouse techno, though, "H" retains all of Thomas' habitual characteristics—idiosyncratic, loosey-goosey, a little unkempt. Does anyone need 13-plus minutes of it? Perhaps not, but you don't come to Principe del Norte for concision. You come to kick back, get lost in Thomas' textures, and forget about time for a while. It's not music for airports; it's music for beanbag chairs, and that's just fine.


Three difficult years in the making, Gossamer is an overwhelming album about being overwhelmed, a bold torrent of maximalist musical ideas, repressed anger, and unchecked anxiety.

Gossamer

Here's an incomplete list of the subjects dealt with on Passion Pit's second album, Gossamer: immigration, alcoholism, economic disparity, suicide, mental illness, drugs, domestic abuse. So when Michael Angelakos sings, "I'm so self-loathing that it's hard for me to see," that should come across like a tremendous understatement. But two lines later, he cries "no one believes me, no not a single thing." That part cuts deep, since Passion Pit's 2009 debut LP, Manners, was an often dark and troubled record a lot of people chose not to take seriously due to its sugar-smacked synth pop and countless product placements. So it's no wonder that Angelakos' next words are "my brain is racing and I'll feel like I'll explode!" Three difficult years in the making, Gossamer is an overwhelming album about being overwhelmed, a bold and ultimately stunning torrent of maximalist musical ideas, repressed anger, and unchecked anxiety.
Perhaps it's fitting that Gossamer, so focused on failure and human frailty, should begin with a stumble. "Take a Walk" is a fairly by-the-numbers Passion Pit song. Nonetheless, there's a strange imbalance to it. The massed chorus of chipper vocals and the stoic, pavement-pounding verse feel mismatched. And while Angelakos' literal account of the financial troubles facing his family is gut-wrenching and brave, it amounts to a curious fit on an album that's otherwise entirely personal. As a one-off, it would be an intriguing character study. As the leadoff track on Gossamer, it feels misplaced.
Luckily, "I'll Be Alright" doesn't allow much time for the disappointment to register. The joy-buzzer synths and Angelakos' falsetto scan as instant-gratification Passion Pit, but on both a musical and lyrical level, it's a raising of the bar, far more complex than anything the band has done to date. Consider the combination of its surging chorus and the synapse-frying barrage of microscopic jumpcuts, and you might have the weirdest and catchiest band on Warp, and the most dejected if you're really paying attention. The first line of "I'll Be Alright" could be a retroactive assessment on the day-glo Manners, asking "Can you remember ever having any fun?/ Cause when it's all said and done/ I always believed we were/ But now I'm not so sure." The effect is initially disorienting and uncomfortable: Do you escape into the comforts of the music or give into the lurid thrill of confrontation?
Angelakos is no pop subversive. While he's been forthcoming about the autobiographical details that inspired Gossamer, within the auspices of Passion Pit, he seems incapable of dealing with them through anything other than pop's pleasure principle. This was true of the now comparatively restrained Manners, an album of strong melodies that worked in a fairly narrow stylistic range. On Gossamer, Passion Pit recast themselves as polyglots and pacesetters, tackling the currency of pop music head-on as a competitor rather than admiring it with a few well-placed press quotes. Gossamer is rife with dichotomy, one of which is that the hooks highest in fructose are lent to songs dealing with the most uncomfortable topic: money. While "Carried Away" proves Angelakos might not be Ezra Koenig in terms of cleverly deconstructing the interactions between the socially stratified, there's a thematic congruence in the occasionally forced rhyme within a song about saying all the wrong things. Later on, "Love Is Greed" is far more multi-layered than its title and hook ("If we really love ourselves/ How do you love somebody else?") initially indicate. Courtship is reduced to the search of "another person that's just yours for the taking," which is essentially a trenchant distillation of post-recession social science.
Gossamer does have humor in its perspective, but surprisingly little joy. As the penultimate track, you might expect the rafter-reaching chorus of "It's Not My Fault, I'm Happy" to deliver some kind of relief amidst the litany of disappointments and misunderstandings, but this is a record about things not working out as expected. It leads into the disquieting calm of closer "Where We Belong", where the title is explained by a blatant suicide pact ("And then I'm lifted up/ Out of the crimson tub/ The bath begins to drain/ And from the floor he prays away all my pain"). Meanwhile, "Mirrored Sea" siphons M83's rocket fuel and throws everything in reverse, a paralyzing descent into realizing the impossibility of escaping the lingering failures of youth ("Slipups in this town are like a sentence to life/ Like overhead insults or a cheating wife"). The overload of digital shoegaze abates for the message of a dispassionate vocoder: "everyone's alone."
If only it were that easy. Were Gossamer simply played out in Angelakos' head, it would probably turn out insufferably self-obsessed and tuneless like so many other "difficult" second albums. Though it doesn't make Gossamer a happy record, Angelakos writes with a truly affecting ability to make unflinching acknowledgments of his demons' effects on those closest to him. A substantial portion of Gossamer is simultaneous love letters and apologies addressed to his real-life girlfriend, and naturally they're couched within Passion Pit's most complicated arrangements to date. "You never once controlled me/ When all the others told me/ That if I kept on going I'd be dead," he sings before the platinum-plated wallop of a chorus on "Cry Like a Ghost", an admission that takes on a menacing tone as the bridge finds him awake from a blackout ("She says I screamed and that I raised my hand/ I never meant to, I wasn't even there").
Beyond that brief bit of violence, the love songs are desperate and very, very drunk. Were a more composed R&B singer given the liquid slow-jam "Constant Conversations", the sophistication of Angelakos' melodic transitions might overshadow a devastating verse detailing a remorseful alcoholic's account of a tired partner emptying drinks and issuing ultimatums: "If there's a bump in the road, you fix it/ But for me, well I'd just run off the road/ But tonight you've got me cornered/ And I haven't got a place to go." It makes the context of "On My Way" almost unbearably intimate, Angelakos proposing, "we'll consecrate this messy love," in a voice overpowering the delicate music-box arrangement of bells and whirs with promises of a better tomorrow.
And is that ever a mission statement for a record of passionate reactions to a messy life. Angelakos puts so much of himself into Gossamer that it couldn't help but be riddled with all-too-human imperfections: Sometimes you wish he'd pick a cleverer lyric, tone down the falsetto, or at least realize that it might be in his interests to try to be cool for once. Because even though Gossamer could not be more overt in its exploration of profoundly adult and bleak topics, all some people might choose to hear is how most of the melodies could still sell children's cereal.
We expect this sort of masculine reckoning from the likes of Matt Berninger, Britt Daniel, Bill Callahan, Hamilton Leithauser; gaunt, brooding men whose vocal austerity and general presence convey authority and wisdom. "Let's not try and figure out everything at once," Berninger sang on "Fake Empire", and it was a comforting statement from a guy who sounds like he's figured things out.
But Gossamer's music is meant to reflect its sense of encroaching panic, where you really feel like you'll explode if you don't figure out everything at once. Angelakos sings variations on "I'll be all right" and "everything will be OK" throughout, but they're not so much reassurance as commiseration. It's unclear whether you're supposed to cry on his shoulder or vice versa, but it actually makes Gossamer more reassuring. Anyone can manufacture hope through a slogan, but there's an empathy and humanity that simply can't be faked as Angelakos tries to figure out how to stay atop his life. It's hard to think of a more noble goal for a pop album.


The incarcerated Watts rapper’s latest release, a collaboration with Mustard, is exultant and Dionysian.

Still Summer in the Projects

Just as 03 Greedo was getting a foothold in rap, he was sent away. Sentenced to 20 years for drug and gun possession, the already-prolific Watts rapper grew more so, amassing a cache of music to sustain his relevance during a long bid. Prison, as he saw it, is no excuse for inactivity. “Everything is strategic,” he said in a Noisey documentary. “When they look at me, they have to see an icon.”
Still Summer in the Projects, the second release from this trove, comes on the heels of Greedo’s brisk tape with Nef the Pharaoh, Porter 2 Grape, and offers a bracing contrast to last summer’s heart-rending God Level. Featuring an entire slate of beats from Mustard (née DJ), Still Summer in the Projects is often exultant and Dionysian. The lyrics are full of bedroom pregames, post-club wind downs, strip-club negotiations, and trap-house sex. It is not uncommon for a coke deal to fund an all-nighter on ecstasy.
Mustard and 03 Greedo make the most of each other’s talents; Greedo’s crooning and rapping melt into the plush spaces of Mustard’s sweltering cookout beats. “Grapevine” and “Bet I Walk” have liberating, improvisational flows, but Greedo is taut and controlled on “10 Purple Summers,” reeling off lines like, “I ain’t worried about no frivolous movement,” as if he’s invincible.
Greedo has an almost supernatural way with potent, bluesy melodies. Both gruff and graceful, his singsong raps straddle the line between Chief Keef’s growls and the honeyed coos of Ty Dolla $ign. In a suite of songs across the middle of the album (“Loaded,” “Getting Ready,” “In the Morning”), he sings as sweetly as ever. He performs with a joy that almost makes you forget that he’s a ward of the Texas prison system. And that’s kind of the point.
For most of the project, Greedo dances around his prison sentence, recalling something he discussed in the Noisey documentary: No one going to prison wants to spend their last precious moments free talking about going to prison, much less rapping about it. But on the closer, “Visions,” the crushing reality finally sets in. “Locked inside a cell with no windows/Hope I make it out of this prison/I’ll be coming out with a vengeance” he croons tenderly, promising us that “once I get out, I’ll be richer.” The song closes with a heartbreaking voicemail from prison: “I’ll be back sooner than May,” he says. Even inside a Texas cell, 03 Greedo is an optimist, transmitting visions of a brighter tomorrow.


Snoop’s new album, the latest in a quietly prolific period as he closes in on 50, reminds us of the simple pleasures of his still-virtuosic voice when set against booming, funk-inflected production.

Snoop Dogg: From tha Streets 2 tha Suites

From tha Streets 2 tha Suites

In a skit early on Snoop Dogg’s second album, 1996’s Tha Doggfather, he bridles at someone’s suggestion that his production would grow “delicate” following the acrimonious Dr. Dre/Death Row split. “I don’t give a fuck about no beat,” he says. You, too, might be this defiant if your voice were so irresistibly pliable that you were allowed to cover Slick Rick on your debut album. And yet some of the beats on Doggfather are, in fact, delicate, leaving him unanchored from the heavy low end that was Doggystyle’s signature. It was a mistake that he would rarely make again: For the next 20-plus years, Snoop would identify the producers who could ferry him from era to era, yielding forward-thinking hits at the appropriate intervals to keep him from turning fully into a legacy act, even when it seems he would be perfectly happy becoming one.
From Tha Streets 2 Tha Suites, released last week with little ceremony, comes during a quietly prolific period as Snoop closes in on 50, and reminds of the reliably high floor that some booming, funk-inflected production and Snoop’s still-virtuosic voice provide. Streets pulls about half of its beats from the Bay Area, a fact that Snoop intermittently reflects in his slang and syntax. ProHoeZak produces and handles hook duty on the strip-club bait “Say It Witcha Booty” and on “Roaches In My Ashtray,” where he plays a serviceable faux-Nate Dogg; longtime collaborator Rick Rock is in predictably trunk-rattling form on opener “CEO.” And it’s the veteran duo the Mekanix who furnish the album’s best song, “Gang Signs,” a duet with the Sacramento rapper Mozzy so supremely bassy that its final minute, where Snoop talks idly to his engineer about how to tweak said bass and when to fly the hook back in, is as replayable as the chorus sections of many radio hits.
The more assertive fare is balanced by the lush, half-sung “Sittin’ On Blades” which, placed squarely in the middle, brings a tranquility to the album. But the rest of Streets pales slightly next to that song and “Gang Signs.” “Look Around,” the album’s penultimate song, is the one cut that scans as a genuine retread of a dozen superior ones in Snoop’s catalog. And the mogul talk, which dominates songs like “CEO” and “Get Yo Bread Up,” grows inevitably rote. Despite that the architecture––the beats combined with Snoop’s commitment to switching vocal approaches every eight or 12 bars––is a reliable safeguard against any real derailment. And then, of course, there’s the voice. Take the Eastsidaz reunion, “Fetty In the Bag.” Snoop’s opening verse has a passage of writing that grows almost comically lazy (“Twice as nice, never paying the price/Baking a cake––have a slice”) and yet retains the metronomic, head-nodding quality of his more engaged work, thanks to the gravity of his timbre and cadence. There are times Streets begs for the chip on Neva Left’s shoulder, or for a hint of I Wanna Thank Me’s sociopolitical bent. But, Streets seems to argue, summer is almost here, and to complain would be bad form.

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The D.C. band's 1994 major label debut, long out of print, has been reissued by Dischord and DeSoto, and it has aged exceedingly well.

For Your Own Special Sweetheart

The eight-year career of Jawbox could be written as a cautionary tale: indie band signs to a big label, makes two great records that eventually fall out of print, and breaks up. But listening to Jawbox's freshly reissued 1994 major-label debut, For Your Own Special Sweetheart, it's difficult to conclude they made the wrong decision by recording this album for Atlantic. The obvious reason is cold, hard cash: Sweetheart might sound unassumingly direct, but it takes a lot of time and money to make a record this precise and balanced. The other reason is more nebulous, but no less relevant: You don't jump ship from a dogmatically anti-major label like Dischord to a behemoth like Atlantic without understanding that the next thing you do had better be really, really good. While a more naïve band might have diluted its sound to seek fame and fortune, Jawbox cashed in the chips on their shoulders and made their most uncompromising and ferocious record.
Sweetheart's return to Dischord reintroduces the album as a win-win prospect: a record with a mid-90s alt-rock budget, but none of that era's corny or diminishing relics. Bob Weston's thoughtful remaster retains the dynamic range of the original while breathing new life into its low end; Zach Barocas' kick drum finally feels like a punch in the chest. The essential B-sides from the Savory EP are included as well. Even the cover art has been revised, the dated sepia toned blow-up doll image of the original replaced by a solidly cast marble figure rendered in high-contrast grayscale.
The new cover is apt; FYOSS is downright sculptural in its attention to form and structure. The brilliance of FYOSS lies not in any one melody, guitar line, or drum fill but rather in the interaction between these elements. Every song is a thoughtfully interrelated system, an organic economy of sound, rhythm, and gesture. At times, once-distant guitar parts come together with such effortless strength that you can visualize guitarists J. Robbins and Bill Barbot bending the necks of their instruments in unison. Ted Nicely's impeccable production lends a subtle sheen to the album's pop sensibility but never dulls its harsh edges, revealing a band that is well-versed in both harmony and discord (no pun intended).
At its best, FYOSS compresses the energy of hardcore into something more nuanced and deliberate. "Savory" is a masterfully constructed study in tension and release, as Robbins' simple vocal melody is made infinitely more potent by layers of dissonant guitar chords, sparse bass, and violent, propulsive drumming. Even the song's angelic chorus seems subtly unresolved and menacing, though Robbins' and Barbot's guitars chime rather than stab. The guitar "solo" consists of little more than occasional muted feedback bursts, instead serving to emphasize the monolithic force of the band's rhythm section in the absence of Robbins' vocals. The J.G. Ballard-inspired "Motorist" narrates a car crash as metallic guitars jut out from a spare, skeletal frame. "Cruel Swing" sounds exactly like you'd think, Barocas absolutely pummeling his kit over a walking bass figure that sounds like it's challenging you to a fight. Album closer "Whitney Walks" contorts the limitations of Robbins' vocal range into a uniquely seething, uneasy kind of melancholy that perfectly prefigures the song's explosive finale.
The highlight of this reissue of Sweetheart, however, may very well be Savory B-side "68". For an odd-time-signature rock song, "68" is disarmingly elegant, to the point where you barely even notice that it's chugging along in 7/4. Here, you can understand why the Dismemberment Plan were quick to cite Jawbox as an influence: The improbable chord changes and impossible rhythmic ideas on FYOSS are rendered as seamless and intuitive as possible. Though the playing here is solid throughout, nothing about the record is flashy or unattainable-- restraint and discipline consistently best self-aware complexity.
While FYOSS itself doesn't sound dated, the notion that plainly recorded guitar, bass, drums, and vocals can add up to something extraordinary sometimes does. The onslaught of radio-friendly "alternative" bands that followed Jawbox has left us understandably wary of well-produced, punk-informed rock music with no obvious quirks or departures. But FYOSS has aged well precisely because it did not pander to the aesthetic fads of its time-- mainstream or underground. Instead, Jawbox honed their sound, maximized the resources at their disposal, and made a record that hides behind no extraneous instruments, sounds, or ideologies.


Trading his customary piano for a mostly electronic palette, the Berlin composer conjures an air of stillness and solitude. The results are both meditative and, at three hours long, sprawling.

Music for Animals

Nils Frahm’s work lives in the gray area between ambient, neoclassical, and other gossamer styles of experimental music. The Berlin-based composer and producer’s output tends to recall Philip Glass and Aphex Twin in equal measure, but he has released everything from dubby downtempo to theater scores. Though he performs on a battery of synthesizers, keyboards, and electronic gizmos, he’s most closely associated with the piano, both as a performer—last year’s Old Friends, New Friends was just the latest in a long line of solo piano recordings—and as the founder of Piano Day, an international celebration of the instrument. But his new album, Music for Animals, features no piano at all. Centered on a largely electronic palette, Frahm’s first collection of fresh material in four years is more evocative of Warp Records than it is of Erik Satie.
Frahm began recording Music for Animals during the first year of the pandemic, when lockdowns put much of daily life on hold, and he seems to have found inspiration in the solitude. His tempos are uniformly slow, his track lengths long—four songs run more than 20 minutes apiece—and his patterns repetitive; he’s clearly in no hurry to get anywhere. His patience is palpable on “Stepping Stone,” where airy drones are layered with jagged washes of glass harmonica played by his wife, Nina. Her contributions inject a welcome spirit of collaboration into the otherwise introverted endeavor, which sometimes risks playing like it was conceived without an audience in mind.
As is the case with most of Frahm’s music, the pieces here are elegant and eminently tasteful, if occasionally a little too buttoned up. “Sheep in Black and White” demonstrates his penchant for tranquility, stretching out a tentative synth riff that slowly disintegrates over the course of 24 minutes. “World of Squares” offsets lush monophonic synths with cloudy strings in a way that’s reminiscent of a particularly subtle strain of ’90s ambient techno. Music For Animals is meditative and sprawling. But an essence of something cinematically sinister darts beneath its frosty surface, and this dark edge proves to be one of its more alluring aspects.
Still, at more than three hours long, Music for Animals is difficult to digest in its entirety; there’s a fine line between patient and dull. Frahm’s extended track lengths are presumably meant to foster immersion, but after a while, they come to seem indulgent. For all the sumptuousness of his materials, there’s not enough happening to merit stretching them out so long; sitting with Frahm’s hermetic album can feel like watching exquisitely hued paint dry.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit the intersection of pop and trip-hop and love and memory in a stellar record from 1996.

Everything But the Girl: Walking Wounded

Walking Wounded

Half a dozen Tracey Thorns slouch around a chrome-walled hotel suite in the video for “Wrong.” They all wear a snakeskin-print shirt-dress, and have the same wilted quiff kissing their brow. Hanging in the background, a handful of Ben Watts watch every move the Thorns make. There he is, her then-lover, crouching on the floor, leaning against a wall, sitting on a kitchen counter. In one shot, two of him lean over Thorn’s shoulders, miming her gentle line, “I wanted to know what he was like,” as she gazes at the floor. Each version of the two bandmates has a see-through quality to them; they are ghosts to one another and to the crowd of extras that dance around them on the chorus: “Wherever you go I will follow you/’Cause I was wrong.”
The people we love are made up equally of flesh, blood, and memories. The myriad ways time and trauma can impact a relationship and fracture one’s sense of self is the territory that Walking Wounded stalks. Released in May 1996, the eighth album from UK duo Everything But the Girl is the sound of picking up the pieces and trying to puzzle them back together—if they’ll fit at all. At the time, the UK charts were dominated by Oasis’s lad rock and the Lighthouse Family’s easy-listening hits: two very different examples of historical rehashes. Trip-hop pioneers Tricky and Massive Attack were critical darlings, but their early experimental releases skewed closer to soul and hip-hop. An opportunity to connect the dots and breath new life into pop had long been brewing.
While “Wrong,” a song about pushing love to its breaking point, elevated its tensions with a house piano riff, the lion’s share of Walking Wounded draws on downtempo, drum ‘n’ bass, and trip-hop. On paper, compressing the wide open space of those then-nascent sounds into a pop format could’ve been a disaster. But words don’t do justice to the emotional multiplicity—hurt but warm, worn but rich—of Thorn’s voice, and how seamlessly she made a home for herself amid Watt’s stark sonic architecture.
Thorn and Watt’s songwriting, which had traced feminist, left-wing, and diaristic lines on their previous seven albums, was mature enough on Walking Wounded to trawl the corners of their psyches in a way that felt in conversation with the music. It was precisely the album’s use of space that allowed them both to stretch out and reflect on what it really means to love someone, and what sustaining that connection requires.
Despite the album’s vulnerability, the dialogue that circled Walking Wounded at the time of its release focused on the indie-pop band’s seemingly sudden embrace of the dance floor. They’d experimented with jazz, bossa nova, soul, and orchestral music before, but this youthful new direction catapulted them to a previously unseen level of stardom. The story of their ascent usually goes like this: New York house legend Todd Terry’s ginormous remix of their song “Missing,” off their 1994 album Amplified Heart, led to the hasty creation of the club-inspired Walking Wounded. While Terry certainly set the stage for “Wrong,” like all come-up stories, it’s heavily abridged.
Thorn and Watt became one another’s muse more or less as soon as they met at university in 1981. They were both signed to the same label: Thorn with post-punk group Marine Girls, a favorite of Kurt Cobain, and Watt as a solo folk artist who collaborated with Robert Wyatt. As they bonded over their shared antipathy towards rock’s hegemony, a romantic and musical partnership grew. Together, they were interested in exploring hybrid sounds, not replicating the status quo. Their label, however, Blanco y Negro—a subsidiary of WEA/Warner Music—wanted pop hits and applied the kind of pressure that would eat away at anyone’s confidence. Six albums in, with the release of 1991’s lukewarm, tour-life-inspired Worldwide, their music had hit a nostalgic tone. But then, in the summer of 1992, Watt was diagnosed with an extremely rare and life-threatening autoimmune disorder called Churg-Strauss Syndrome. He had to have 80% of his intestines removed and spent months in intensive care, including a series of relapses. His recovery was long and slow, and involved a radically restricted diet.
In 1993, as he adjusted to his new life, Watt got increasingly into computers and sequencers, which was the start of his journey to becoming a producer. Midway through the year, Thorn received an invitation to provide guest vocals on what would become Massive Attack’s second album, Protection. When she first heard the music for the title track, she was struck: “I’m not sure whether I have ever heard a piece of music this slow and empty before,” she recalls in her memoir, Bedsit Disco Queen. The song she wrote for it drew on her feelings for Watt as he clawed his way back to health.
Earlier that summer, the pair had travelled to Oxfordshire to collaborate with Fairport Convention on a festival performance. Seeing the ’60s British folk group operate outside of the suffocating demands of a major label reminded Thorn and Watt of their own DIY beginnings, and helped them shed their insecurities. “Like in the old days, we were making a record again because we NEEDED to,” wrote Thorn in her memoir.
The album that followed, 1994’s Amplified Heart, addressed the distress of Watt’s brush with death from the perspective of both the patient and the caregiver (while Thorn often did the majority of the lyric writing, on this album it was 50/50). Yet sonically, it turned out closer to Fairport Convention’s yearning folk than Massive Attack’s proto trip-hop. The one song that had more of a clubby edge to it was the cowbell and acoustic guitar-led “Missing.”
While everyone agreed it should be the lead single, it was their American label that really heard the potential in “Missing”: Atlantic commissioned the Todd Terry remix, which they included on a 12" for the US market in the second half of 1994. Conversely, WEA decided it was the end of the road for the band in the UK and, just like that, dropped them.
“Missing” was not an overnight hit. It wasn’t until early 1995, when Thorn was in New York with Massive Attack doing promo, that there was an inkling that Todd Terry’s fairly loyal take on the song might have legs. (“The song was already so powerful,” Terry said later. “I just added a beat and a bassline. I’ve always felt that house music has both a radio and club feel simultaneously.”) Massive Attack’s Daddy G heard it in a club and reported back to Thorn that it sounded like a dance floor hit. Between interview commitments with Massive Attack, she wrote “Single” in her hotel room. It set a tone for Walking Wounded before the album had even swam into focus: one of struggling to be seen as—to see yourself as—an individual in the context of a relationship. Thorn would later sing the lyrics over a muted sax-sounding synth and a languid trip-hop beat: “And how am I without you?/Am I more myself or less myself?/I feel younger, louder/Like I don't always connect.”
In spring 1995, Thorn returned to New York with Watt, where they spent a couple of months working on more ideas for Walking Wounded. During that trip, they learned that Terry’s remix had blown up in Miami and, in fact, across the States, breaking out of the clubs and into the charts. Worldwide, it went on to sell 3 million copies.
In the months before “Missing” mania hit the UK, Watt had dived headfirst into London’s drum ‘n’ bass scene. He heard DJs like Fabio and Doc Scott at atmospheric drum ‘n’ bass pioneer LTJ Bukem’s night Speed, and connected with the freeform flow of the sound that Bukem has compared with jazz. His enthusiasm eventually convinced Thorn to join him at the club night. “It wasn’t a rock gig, and it wasn’t a rave—it felt like something new again,” she wrote in her memoir. “Strange and yet familiar, it felt possible.”
The mental space that these new encounters cracked open can be observed in the clarity with which both Thorn and Watt approached their songwriting on Walking Wounded. On the breezy “Flipside,” which features lyrics by Watt and scratching by Scottish producer Howie B, the moment Watt’s life got turned upside down is directly referenced: “London, summer ’92/I think I’ve changed a lot since then, do you?” In the next verse, Watt writes that he is “blasted land,” comparing himself to a coastline that’s constantly shifting at the mercy of the sea. It’s a poetic reminder that the processing of trauma can shape you as much as the incident itself.
In Thorn’s mouth, the lyrics serve to underline that Watt’s near-death experience left them both reeling, questioning everything they used to know. The flipside to “Flipside” comes in the form of a slo-mo drum ‘n’ bass number called “Big Deal.” Written by Thorn, she uses the titular phrase sarcastically in an attempt to deliver a reality check. With an air of frustration, she seems to sing of Watt’s search for answers in the club: “You say you wanna get cured, you wanna turn off your head/Oh and you say it hurts, and you feel unsure/First you doubt yourself and then you doubt her/Big deal, that's the way we all feel.” Everyone goes through trauma in some form or other, the song suggests, what matters is giving one another the space to work through it.
The strength of Walking Wounded lies in exactly that. Each Everything But the Girl album has its own style and story, but the one on which Thorn and Watt’s individual gifts shine brightest is the one on which they stripped everything back. They shared their knottiest feelings, created dialogue with skeletal new sounds, and made the record in a much more insular way than they ever had previously. Its timely sonics and emotionally wrought themes spoke as much to teenagers, myself included, as it did the band’s adult contemporaries (Bristol drum ‘n’ bass head Roni Size gave it thumbs up). Walking Wounded remains Thorn and Watt’s biggest-selling album with worldwide sales of 1.3 million. It did the kind of well that prompted U2 to ask them to be their tour support, something they ended up turning down because, well, they needed some space. Thorn and Watt’s relationship had been tied to their career from the very beginning, and it was time to listen to the cries for independence that Walking Wounded so clearly contained. Instead of going on tour, they started a family, and set the wheels in motion for their separate careers to come.


It’s Great to be Alive!, the sprawling, three-plus hour document of Drive-By Truckers’s 2014 three-night stand at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium, is a carefully curated record that does a great job pretending to be a raw, unfettered representation of a single night.

Drive-By Truckers: It’s Great To Be Alive!

It’s Great To Be Alive!

Halfway through the Drive-By Truckers' new live record, Patterson Hood abruptly stops singing four minutes into “Goode’s Field Road”, a dark song with a paint-by-numbers Truckers premise: a junkyard operator makes some bad decisions and ends up committing suicide to avoid being sent to jail. “He was a god-fearing man, he was a family man, he was a hardworking man, trying to raise his family and support everybody the best he could in difficult times and a troubled economy in North Alabama,” Hood says, now preaching in front of the band’s minor-chord sludge. By the time Hood finishes expounding on various histories—social, economic, cultural—of his beloved Lauderdale County, the reason for his very un-rock 'n' roll professorial digression becomes clear: sometimes a story can’t be told in just a song.
There are two or three moments like this at every Drive-By Truckers concert, when Patterson Hood the storyteller interrupts Patterson Hood the songwriter, cramming background information that his songs—novelistic in detail, cinematic in scope—can’t quite contain on their own. That’s because at their heart, the Drive-By Truckers are a storytelling band. It’s easy enough to compare Hood to a prolific novelist and Cooley to a modernist poet, but most of their songs could just easily be labeled: based on a true story. That’s the central tenet of the Hood and Cooley’s indignant premise when they first started the Drive-By Truckers in the post-grunge mid-late 90’s: the idea that a young scrappy band can write heroic songs about their grandparents. Why look further than that?
The stories collected on It’s Great to be Alive!, the sprawling, three-plus hour document of the Drive-By Truckers’ 2014 three-night stand at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium,are tall-tales mumbled by friends at the bar, family legends passed on through generations, anecdotes from neighbors romanticized and made grand. As such, a Drive-By Truckers concert can feel like a punk staging of the Southern oral tradition that takes place on front-porches and in rocking chairs. Hood and Cooley act out the role of grizzled elders with countless tales up their sleeve, taking turns swapping their story-songs without any semblance of a setlist. That’s why Truckers shows can also be occasionally exhausting: Sometimes you might just not be in the mood to hear Grandpa Hood launch into that seven minute story about Mary Alice and her chemo treatments again.
This is hardly the first live record the Truckers has released in its near 20-year history. It is, however, the first time the band has tried to faithfully replicate what it feels like to attend a Drive-By Truckers concert. The material, which spans from “Runaway Train”, a song by the pre-Truckers late-80’s incarnation Adam’s House Cat, to a half-dozen selections from last year’s English Oceans, is performed by the slimmer, five-piece lineup the band has used since 2012, after various departures, firings and lineup changes. On stage the band has reworked much of its back-catalogue to fit its current streamlined incarnation, which has grown more sophisticated and elegant in the studio as of late (their last few records contain more piano and banjo than distorted guitar feedback). An unhinged rant like “Sink Hole” is now a precise polemic, whereas the mournful pedal-steel coda to “A Ghost to Most” is now a freewheeling, two-guitar improvisation. The modern-day Truckers are particularly good at such shape-shifting, switching from sloppy to stately from one song to the next.
It’s Great to be Alive! is the sound of a veteran band in complete command of its back-catalog. “Box of Spiders” is reimagined as a country-soul centerpiece, another song that gains multitudes when prefaced with Hood’s four minute story about his relatives. “Sounds Better In The Song” is a revelation in its prickly full-band arrangement, and “The Living Bubba,” Hood’s ode to a stubborn musician slowly dying of AIDS, sounds more moving with each passing year, an anthem of persistence and survival for a road-weary band still chugging on.
A carefully curated setlist can go a long way, and the tracklisting here benefits a great deal from some post-hoc sequencing. Tales of defeat and struggle promptly segue into stories of defiance and hope. Soul ballads bleed into rockabilly raves. A song like “Goode’s Field Road” is followed by “Uncle Frank”. Although Cooley’s “Uncle Frank” takes place more than 50 years before Hood’s “Goode’s Field Road”, the two stories may nearly be identical: North Alabama tragedies filled with depression and heartless bureaucracy that conclude with suicide. The one-two pairing serves as a quiet, powerful comment on Southern change and progress, or lack thereof. Like the best live records, It’s Great to be Alive! is a carefully curated document that does a great job pretending to be a raw, unfettered documentation of a single night.
As its partially sarcastic, partially dead-serious title suggests, It’s Great to be Alive! serves as a pointed testament to the Drive-By Truckers’ longevity and continuing relevance. A little less than half of the songs on the record come from the band’s post-Jason Isbell period, from their 2008 subtle masterwork Brighter Than Creation’s Dark onward. The subtle interpersonal drama in recent songs like  “Primer Coat” and “Mercy Buckets” are every bit as urgent as older, anthemic statements like “Tornadoes” and “Women Without Whiskey”. Musicians will forever insist that their more recent work holds up alongside their classic material. It’s Great to be Alive! is proof that the Drive-By Truckers’ discography is the rare case where such wishful thinking actually proves true.
“Tell me another story,” Cooley sings towards the very beginning of their latest live record. “Tell me about the lows and the highs.” The Drive-By Truckers spend the rest of It’s Great to be Alive! proving that they’ve always honored that modest request better than anyone.


One of the most quietly influential rappers of the last ten years maintains cruising altitude.

Wiz Khalifa: Fly Times, Vol. 1: The Good Fly Young

Fly Times, Vol. 1: The Good Fly Young

It’s been a long time since it was cool to like Wiz Khalifa. The Pittsburgh rapper’s two most streamed tracks on Spotify are a good indication of his current clout level: the Charlie Puth-featuring “See You Again” from the Furious 7 soundtrack and the Hot Topic-approved posse cut “Sucker for Pain” from Suicide Squad. Being a Wiz fan in 2019, in other words, gets you about as much respect as wearing a Harley Quinn shirt in public or slapping a Paul Walker memorial bumper stacker on your Nissan Skyline.
There’s an alternate universe in which Wiz Khalifa fell off the face of the Earth entirely, like his fellow 2010 XXL Freshman Pill, or became a full-time marijuana farmer like the fizzled-out Internet sensation Jackie Chain, who debuted a year after “Say Yeah” with his own trance-sampling single. But instead, Cameron Jibril Thomaz signed with Warner, dropped a single that sampled Alice DJ’s “Better Off Alone,” ended his relationship with Warner, released an independent mixtape that flipped everything from Camp Rock to the Chrono Trigger score, signed with Atlantic, and became a star off a Super Bowl anthem. Somehow, throughout rap’s tumultuous and transformative last decade, Wiz has persisted.
His appeal was always in his effortlessness—every syllable crisply annunciated, each bar delivered with a little melody. Khalifa claims Pittsburgh, but he’s also an army brat; his voice is accentless, and there’s little in the way of regional flair to his music. His greatest assets are malleability and flexibility, which have allowed him to try out a variety of styles and subgenres, from the relaxed stoner rap of Kush and Orange Juice to the Top 40 trap of “We Dem Boyz.”
This adventurousness has made Wiz Khalifa one of the most quietly influential rappers of the last ten years. His Taylor Gang record label revived the career of Juicy J, introduced us to Ty Dolla $ign, and he was one of the first mainstream acts to work with the likes of SpaceGhostPurrp, Chief Keef, and Thundercat. Many a millennial—this one included—learned to roll a perfect joint by watching the now-canonical “How to Roll a Perfect Joint with Wiz Khalifa.”
But at his laziest, Wiz Khalifa’s inability to commit to a single style can leave his albums unfocused, as on last year’s woeful Rolling Papers 2. Khalifa’s latest tape, Fly Times, Vol. 1: The Good Fly Young, exceeds the expectations set by his less-than-topshelf recent output and his history of incessant trend-hopping. There’s a consistency here that seems to suggest a growing maturity on the part of Khalifa who, at thirty-one, is a bit of an elder in the game.
With the exception of the TM88-assisted  “Big Pride (Bag Talk),” almost nothing here feels like a bid for a spot on Rap Caviar. Instead, Fly Times goes for something closer to the chilled-out G-funk of Kush and Orange Juice, but with more of a throwback R&B flavor: whiny keys, MIDI strings, and copious amounts of 808 cowbell. The lyrics aren’t especially profound, but that’s never really been the point of Wiz Khalifa’s music—Fly Times is about the vibe above all else.
There are collaborations with regular members of Khalifa’s stable—Problem, Curren$y, Ty Dolla $ign—but more space is given to emerging artists. Six of the tape’s fourteen tracks showcase vocalist and Taylor Gang signee Young Deji. Two feature THEMXXNLIGHT, a soulful duo of twin brothers who seem like Taylor Gang’s answer to indistinguishable, OVO-approved R&B acts like Majid Jordan and dvsn. Both artists help flesh out the atmosphere, but neither offers anything substantial. The best of the guest hooks is by Houston rapper and Sauce Twinz affiliate Sosamann on “Taylor Life.” Sosamann’s voice is everything Khalifa’s isn’t—textured, drawling, and marked by the unmistakable flavor of his hometown—and he plays foil to Wiz like Curren$y has done for a decade.
If Wiz Khalifa’s career has proved anything, it’s that stoners are like puppies: easy to please and loyal as hell. Luckily for Wiz Khalifa, the critical reception of his music has never mattered that much—so long as it burns easy and makes you feel good, even mid is acceptable.


The Birds Outside Sang is an unassuming, deeply personal record that manages to shoehorn some big ideas into three-minute pop songs. It’s an album that invites us to appreciate the mundane, to look out at the world and be awed by the majesty and fragility of it all.

The Birds Outside Sang

Emily Sprague is barely of drinking age but she can come across like an old soul, perhaps because she’s accomplished a great deal in the last few years. At the age of 17, she released a series of folk scribblings under her own name and began writing and recording with bandmates under the name Florist. Shortly after relocating to Brooklyn in 2013, Sprague was the victim of a hit-and-run cycling accident that left her in a neck brace and unable to use her left arm. Arriving two years later, Florist’s debut full-length, The Birds Outside Sang reads like a record of Sprague’s brush with mortality and slow recovery. It’s an album that invites us to appreciate the mundane, to look out at the world and be awed by the majesty and fragility of it all.
Most of its first half chronicles the misery and isolation of convalescence; its often claustrophobic sound evokes a bedroom full of stale air. Many songs are corporeal in their fixations—blood, bones, and body parts make frequent appearances, while the world outside remains fixed behind a pane of glass. "Morning birds sing songs like Mrs. Robinson/ Inside my head I’m a child again/ But there’s a pill for that," Sprague sings on the title track, the interior and exterior blurring into a medicated haze. Sprague is skilled at drawing us into her perspective with just a few words: She tends to state things plainly, in a manner that suits her often stoic delivery. Even the recounting of her accident is detached ("The rain is falling at the perfect speed/ The cars are driving at the perfect speed/ My legs are moving at the perfect speed/ My arm is moving at the perfect speed"). When she adds emphasis, it carries real weight, like the way she draws out the phrase "It’s painful" before following up with "But I don’t feel pain at all" on the haunting "A Hospital + Crucifix Made of Plastic."
Sprague wrote mostly on the keyboard while her arm was healing, and many of these songs consist of skeletal arrangements built around a single organ or synth line. Despite their simplicity, some of the album's more minimal songs are among the most memorable: the spare opener "Dark Light," the slow-burning dirge "The Birds Outside Sang," and the plunky fever dream "Thank You." Warmth creeps into the album's second half, which leans on reverb-soaked guitars and looser arrangements. There’s melancholy here too but also a much-needed goofy playfulness. "Please come quick, I’ve stuck my head in the banister again," Sprague sings on "White Light Doorway," before admitting, "I just wanted to know what it would feel like/ With one part of my body alive."
As the album’s sound thaws, Sprague perspective broadens, taking in the beauty of "tall trees," "cold lakes," and a "stone, skipping slow"; by observing the vitality around her, she learns to appreciate her own. "Thunderstorms, a friendly thing that reminds me I could be dead," Sprague sings at the outset of the record’s denouement, "Only a Prayer Nothing More." By the song’s close, she’s able to sum up the entire album neatly in a couplet: "I thought that I saw the other side/ But it was only sunlight in my eyes."
The Birds Outside Sang doesn’t break much new ground nor does it aim to. It’s an unassuming, deeply personal record that manages to shoehorn some big ideas into three-minute pop songs. In so doing, it recalls some of indie’s turn-of-the-millennium high water marks: Sprague’s reverence for the natural world recalls Phil Elverum’s work under the Microphones moniker, while the album’s shut-in, confessional feel owes a debt to early Bright Eyes. Even so, The Birds Outside Sang quietly announces the arrival of a young songwriter whose voice is very much her own. It should be interesting to watch it develop.