This EP prelude to Mykki Blanco's forthcoming debut album sees her rapping markedly improved from 2012's Cosmic Angel. Still, Blanco comes off extremely defensive about her art, adopting all kind of voices, mannerisms, and characteristics (a la Nicki Minaj) to throw shade every which way.

Mykki Blanco: Betty Rubble: The Initiation EP

Betty Rubble: The Initiation EP

Over six months after the release of her last mixtape, Mykki Blanco-- the female alter ego of Michael Quattlebaum-- is beginning to prove much more than just a walking talking point. Last year’s Cosmic Angel showed a dextrous rapper with fury to spare, a whirl of energy when she didn’t drown in her own ambition. After taking on an exhausting and seemingly endless international touring schedule, Blanco has earned a reputation as a powerful live performer. She harnesses this energy well for her first official follow-up, Betty Rubble: The Initiation, an EP-sized prelude to her official debut album that sees her rapping markedly improved.
The Initiation starts strong with “Angggry Byrdz”. Like the video game it’s named after, the beat is cartoonish, all plasticky plink-plonk sounds that Blanco pirouettes around with ease. As always, she’s got a bone to pick with, well, everyone, spitting, “Look at them angry birds/ Tryna shit on every word.” If you didn’t already get the feeling that Blanco was automatically defensive about her art, The Initiation makes it pretty damn clear. But in a world where drag queen feistiness is the subject of a popular reality show, Blanco is both caricature and cut-to-the-bone reality. You wouldn't fuck with her.
The rest of the EP is an up-and-down affair that loses the razor focus of its opener. More sprawling than your usual eight-track release, the clumsy experimentalism of Cosmic Angel remains despite Blanco's improved chops. She adopts all kinds of voices, mannerisms, and characteristics, flitting through personalities with the hummingbird hyperactivity of Nicki Minaj, especially on “Crisp Clean”, where her distinct rasp is contorted and choked like a crazy straw. Things get druggy and paranoid on the Supreme Cuts-produced “Bugged Out”, while Matrixxman’s “Ace Bougie Chick” is a jaunty summer jam with all the winking charm of Lil Wayne’s “Comfortable”. But even this one has a sinister undertone: its playful chorus goes “but you gon’ keep on fucking me/ And nobody has to know,” reminding us of the grim reality that being a gay black man is still an unspeakable position for so many.
Blanco’s rapping is unmistakably stronger, flowing faster and more naturally than ever before, but when she’s not in full force she has trouble keeping getting from point A to point B. The grumbly “Feeling Special” feels like it’s dragging itself from bar to bar, and the rapped-in-Latin title track, while daring, falls a little flat. In typically unusual form, The Initiation’s most engaging track features no actual rapping at all: “Vienna” is simply spoken word over an electro beat. A hilariously detailed story about a tour stop in Austria starring “this waifish Persian pretty boy named Sammy Nagasaki,” it oozes with warmth and humour, qualities that her acid-barbed lashings sometimes lack.
The Initiation is a stepping stone for an artist who’s looking increasingly important. Quickly sharpening her stock as a rapper, Mykki Blanco is so much more than the gimmick some have tried to make her out to be. And though The Initiation isn’t turning down any of the camp, it’s a deadly serious manifesto from an artist who wants you to discard your preconceptions and set fire to them. To those familiar with gay culture, Blanco’s outsized aggression is not just welcome, it’s maybe even standard. But there’s a world out there to whom Blanco is an anomaly, a spectacle-- and if she keeps up this ascent, they’re about to be shocked and surprised in exactly the way you begin to sense Quattlebaum wants.


On his second LP since being released from prison, Gucci revisits the darker, weirder style of his classic period but keeps the clear-eyed outlook of his new, healthier lifestyle.

Woptober

Prison can change anyone. Enough time isolated from the world, treated as subhuman and discarded like garbage is soul-breaking and creatively stifling; it would be hard for anyone to maintain sanity or balance, regardless of a strong belief that one day you’ll be back on the outside. When Gucci Mane was finally freed from the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana back in May, it was a joyous moment for his fans but it was unclear what effect being gone since 2013 would have on the rapper and the music. Seeing his dramatic weight loss and new healthy regimen on Snapchat was a shock but a welcome one, if it meant avoiding the vices that had nearly destroyed him.
During that time in prison, the one thing that kept Gucci’s name relevant in music—beyond the success of the younger artists he had supported, like Young Thug and Migos—was the steady stream of mixtapes that were able to come out using his unreleased music. Since being freed, he’s taking over the reins and is making up for lost time with the release of Woptober, three months after his first post-prison album Everybody Looking. Woptober is more attuned to the classic Gucci Mane aesthetic than Everybody Looking; The production is colder, murkier and with heavier bass, with Gucci slinking and swimming through it with precision and clearheaded insight. Songs like “Wop” and “Hi-Five” highlight this with an icy, brooding sound; and Gucci feels perfectly at home there. Despite the newfound clearness of his voice, likely a result of those shed pounds, it still has that guttural allure. On Woptober, Gucci can be fun and playful, grimy or poignant and thoughtful and sometimes he’s all of these things at once.
Woptober gets off to a great start with “Intro: Fuck 12”: the Phantom Of The Opera piano keys giving the song a ghostly, demented air while Gucci comes in strong, focused and charismatic: “I ain't never been embarrassed, I ain't never felt fear/I got post-traumatic stresses like I can't shed tears,” The album proceeds with this laser focus and thoughtfulness throughout. Everybody Looking, while a good record, was more celebratory, a big “welcome back” party for Gucci. Woptober goes back to the dirtier, oddball style that Gucci became successful with but this time, it’s more disciplined and perceptive. On the album’s best track “Dirty Lil N***a”, Gucci takes a moment to relate to the fictionalized street kid he’s spent the song rapping about. “The streets don't kill him, then the law gon' get him/Better listen to me kid, it's a fucked-up system/Y'all might don't feel him but I damn sure feel him/Cause I was just in a jail cell fucked up with him.” It’s the same avenue that Boosie has always taken—somber but not preachy or self-righteous, and it suits Gucci Mane well as a rapper who’s always been good at reaching out to young artists and understanding youth culture.
The album’s first single “Bling Blaww Burr” is a much brighter affair, a club record more memorable for its infectious ad-libs than anything else. It is the stale kind of party record Gucci can make in his sleep and a Young Dolph feature can only do so much for it. “Money Machine” is boosted by a better beat and a guest appearance from Rick Ross. Woptober slogs towards the end, but it moves too quickly to feel like a chore to sit through. It has all the markings of what we’ve come to expect from Gucci’s music only this time—rather than drowning in his addictions—he’s found a way to integrate drugs and violence into his new outlook. new life outlook. It’s a great strategy and, if he plans to continue pushing music out at such an accelerated clip, it’s hopefully just a taste of what’s to come.


Drawing on its members’ diverse backgrounds and distinguished resumes—including work with Broadcast, Gruff Rhys, and Zongamin—the London band tilts its psychedelic pop toward a utopian future.

The Age of Immunology

When the Brussels-bred, London-based musician Cathy Lucas was 12 years old, she learned some startling news about her family: She was supposed to have had a twin sister. But at some point in her mother’s pregnancy, the twin embryo was absorbed into Lucas’ own, through a process called fetal resorption. And though it’s the sort of event that many pregnant women don’t even realize has happened, it can have profound effects on the living child, who may experience deep feelings of survivor’s guilt.
For Lucas, that sadness has been offset by a fascination with the notion that her phantom sibling somehow lives on inside of her, as a facet of her personality. It’s a concept that not only inspired the name of her psychedelic pop outfit, Vanishing Twin, but also its guiding aesthetic. This is a band that fearlessly floats in the hazy space between the real world and an imagined one, blurring the line between warmly nostalgic and eerily haunted.
Vanishing Twin began as Orlando, the experimental solo project Lucas launched in 2015 after a stint playing violin and mandolin for London indie-pop hopefuls Fanfarlo. But as she embarked on her inner-space explorations, she amassed a seasoned flight crew that includes Japanese bassist Susumu Mukai (aka electro-funk producer Zongamin), Italian drummer Valentina Magaletti (whose credits include Bat for Lashes and Gruff Rhys’ Neon Neon project), former Broadcast sound manipulator Phil M.F.U. (a.k.a. Man From Uranus), and Parisian avant-garde filmmaker Elliott Arndt on flute and percussion. The group’s cosmopolitan membership initially reflected its mission to synthesize psychedelic traditions around the globe, from tropicalía to kosmische rock. But as Brexit has stoked the fires of xenophobia across the UK and beyond, Vanishing Twin now stand as a model of the inspired cross-cultural pollination that results when you encourage open borders and open minds. On The Age of Immunology, they respond to our tense present by using strange sounds from the past to light the way to a utopian future.
The Age of Immunology takes its name from a 2002 book by A. David Napier that examines how the logic of medicine—i.e., ridding the body of foreign agents—is reflected in reactionary social attitudes towards the Other in all aspects of life. More so than Vanishing Twin’s 2016 debut, Choose Your Own Adventure, the new album foregrounds the group’s international spirit: Where its predecessor positioned Vanishing Twin as eager heirs to Stereolab and Broadcast’s bottomless milk crate of Free Design and BBC Radiophonic Workshop records, The Age of Immunology better highlights the individual personalities and nationalities that inform the group’s unique alchemy.
Lucas’ elegantly stoic voice remains the orienting focal point in Vanishing Twin’s panoramic, ever-expanding sound world. On the enchanting opener “KRK (At Home in Strange Places),” she issues the calming siren’s call that guides the song’s Brazilian psych-jazz drift. And with the divine “Magician’s Success,” she rallies the band for a hit of narcotic northern soul that suggests the first step toward toppling the forces of darkness is to picture the better world that awaits after they fall. (“The noise of hope/Is like a racket in my heart,” she sings, before letting us savor the emphatic follow-through: “Imagine that!”) But Lucas is also the sort of lead singer whose presence is amplified by her absence—after letting the band float atop the seasick disco rhythm of “Cryonic Suspension May Save Your Life” for nearly four minutes, she coolly emerges for a lone extended verse that snaps the song into taut, militaristic funk.
While Vanishing Twin have reined in their wandering tendencies in service of more sculpted songcraft and laser-guided hypno-jams (like the bewitching Can-meets-Congotronics trance of “Backstroke”), they’re still redefining their methodology as they go. On The Age of Immunology, Lucas’ star turns are supplemented by lead-vocal cameos from Mukai (on the meditative, Japanese-language title track) and Phil M.F.U. (whose new-agey drone-folk opus “Invisible World” imagines a parallel universe where Mark E. Smith detoxed, mellowed out, and decamped to an ashram). One of the album’s most sublime moments belongs to Arndt, who grabs the mic on “Planéte Sauvage” to wax rhapsodic in French about the namesake 1973 sci-fi cartoon. As the song’s stuttering West African groove gets massaged by lush synthetic strings and Lucas’ wordless harmonies, this absurdist exercise gradually fortifies into a showcase of the band operating at peak strength. Vanishing Twin started as a vehicle for Lucas to explore her unresolved feelings about the sibling she never had, but with The Age of Immunology, it’s become a communal celebration of the second family that’s helped fill the void.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The rapper-producer’s new mixtape creates its own solar system, one where Hannah Montana samples and Jersey club orbit around the triplet suns of Afrobeats, emo, and rap.

HNPM

Rapper-producer Jim Legxacy opens “miley’s riddim,” the third song from his latest project HNPM (homeless nigga pop music), with two blasts of early 2010s nostalgia. The first is the drop from Iroking.com, a Nigerian digital streaming service that catered to all kinds of African music in the 2010s; the second is a sped-up sample of Miley Cyrus’ “Ordinary Girl,” a single from her Hannah Montana days. The source material couldn’t be more disparate, but with little more than a story of crumbling love and a shuffling Afrobeats drum break, Legxacy manages to join them as links in the same chain. The track is just one example of the amorphous, generation-spanning pool of references familiar to anyone molded by the internet: the kind where American Football demos share space with Drake freestyles and songs from Disney Channel Original Movies in the same iTunes library. homeless nigga pop music encapsulates this deep referentiality, creating a solar system that orbits around the triplet suns of Afrobeats, emo, and rap.
This brand of fusion isn’t the only thing that sets Legxacy apart. Rappers like Rico Nasty, Kenny Mason, and Polo Perks have consistently reminded us that rap and emo are capable of meeting in the middle. But it’s the way that the London rapper-singer’s gossamer, self-produced arrangements clash with his melancholy stories of love and innocence lost that add weight to his ballads and raps. Take “dj” and “old place,” which pair tales of rekindled relationships with shimmering takes on drill and Jersey club rap. On “Eye Tell (!),” Legxacy tries and fails to get over an ex by confiding in friends; its bouncy, stringy beat sounds as fit for Fireboy DML as it is for Dave or J Hus.
Most of homeless nigga pop music’s early singles leaned aggressively on a formula that paired guitar licks and recognizable samples, so it’s a relief to hear Legxacy pull other tricks (both old and new) out of his bag. Several songs shift on a dime, revealing darker cores underneath their sparkling shells. Early highlight “block hug” begins with a meditation on heartbreak and Black masculinity (“She told me hood niggas don’t cry/So when she broke my heart, I had the straight face”), which morphs into a moody drill beat that Legxacy proceeds to rip through like he’s Central Cee. The title track sheds the singing and guitars entirely, trading them for pointed storytelling over a smooth chunk of soul. He’s not the first rapper to sound as comfortable crooning as he does doling out bars, but there’s an urgency and freshness to his approach that gives it a golden shine.
Lyrically, Legxacy flips the script on typical stories of romance, but what truly makes his music spellbinding is how the nostalgic references amplify his scene-setting. The beat for “candy reign” doesn’t work just because it’s built around a prominent sample of the Soul for Real classic of the same name; it excels because it twirls around vocal samples from UK rappers and his own friends, all while his ode to budding love rubs up against the immortal hook of the original track. Or take the echoing guitar strings and crunchy bass of “call ur dad,” which sound airlifted from an Algernon Cadwallader song, and the way that they brush against Legxacy’s effortless vocals. It doesn’t feel like a cheap grab for remember this? points, nor does it resemble empty genre pastiche. These flourishes sound like more refined takes on his 2021 album CITADEL and his 2020 EP BTO!; here, the arrangements and samples tell as much of a story as the lyrics do.
Earlier this month, Legxacy tweeted something that’s as close to a manifesto as he’s ever offered: “genres are not even real, music is not even real, it’s jus like air with seasoning on it.” It’s a lighthearted but truthful statement, one that dovetails with the sense of freedom and experimentation that courses through homeless nigga pop music. Legxacy doesn’t just acknowledge sounds from other cultures and traditions, he rearranges them to paint a fuller picture of himself. As he sees it, music is a colorful jungle gym that’s his to conquer.


At its best, Hannah Merrick’s stream-of-consciousness songwriting feels like sitting shotgun with her as she crosses the country, taking in the sublime and the absurd in equal measure.

Big Swimmer

If you think of other artists while listening to Big Swimmer, that’s not lost on King Hannah. Singer Hannah Merrick namedrops Bill Callahan, titles a song after John Prine, and recruits Sharon Van Etten on two songs; the album, Merrick’s second, is clearly the product of those influences. It’s easy to hear echoes of Callahan’s dry humor and Van Etten’s plaintive vocals; Cassandra Jenkins’ meditative jams and Courtney Barnett’s stoned observations come to mind as well. It’s all in service of Merrick’s meandering writing style, which finds meaning in small vignettes borne from traveling America. At its best, Swimmer feels like sitting shotgun with the duo of Merrick and guitarist Craig Whittle, like a tour vlog set to music. Because it’s so laid-back, Swimmer doesn’t necessarily try to transcend its inspirations, but it’s charming in its own right.
Merrick spends much of the album going on tangents in a low deadpan voice, as though recording exhausted voice memos documenting a given day’s journey. A lot of those tangents are genuinely funny, like the job interview that opens “New York, Let’s Do Nothing:” “He said, ‘So tell me something about you’/I said, ‘Well I’m a singer, musician too’/He said, ‘Oh no, not another one.’” Elsewhere, the commentary gets lost amid wandering musings on vending machines, as on the eight-minute “Somewhere Near El Paso.” In the album’s most compelling moments, the observations lead somewhere: Merrick increasingly ruminates while watching true-crime documentaries on “Suddenly, Your Hand,” despairing at the callousness of serial killers without being able to pull away. Merrick apologizes for her obsession right at the end (“And I’ve said it before and I will say it again/I’m really sorry for all the moods that I get in”), but Whittle’s closing guitar solo carries on long after, prolonging the fixation.
Whenever the album breaks out of its stream-of-consciousness flow, it shows a clearer sense of identity. Merrick’s secret weapon is her soaring singing voice, effectively contrasting the Sprechgesang of much of the record. On the title track, Merrick plays with her vocal phrasing, speeding up and slowing down like a human tape machine, which makes it more striking when she draws out the line, “If it feels right to do so,” on the refrain. On “Lily Pad” and “Davy Says,” Whittle turns his guitars up: The former is an intentional Slint homage (complete with a reference to the Spiderland album cover) and the latter a straight-up catchy pop song. The tighter song structures are a welcome salve against the duo’s tendency to meander. “Lily Pad” changes course halfway through, and that shift hits harder for its abruptness.
The levity of Merrick’s lyrics occasionally goes overboard. In between the terrifically tense guitar breaks on "Milk Boy (I Love You),” she watches as a parent threatens his child, and the descriptions are haunting until a baffling lyric about Dallas Buyers Club nearly sinks the whole song: “They reminded me of McConaughey/In that film about AIDS that didn’t win enough.” (For the record, it won three Oscars from six nominations, one of which went to Jared Leto.) The sweetest song on the record, and one of the best, is the much lower-stakes closer: “John Prine on the Radio” is literally about chilling out to your favorite music, but it has the most focused songwriting on the whole record. When Merrick harmonizes with herself, it’s plainly beautiful, with no snark deflating the earnestness. On an album insistent on speak-singing across America, documenting every place visited and song listened to, the moments of sincerity are the most distinctive.


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 an overlooked masterpiece from 1971, one that helped define the essence of Japanese rock.

Kazemachi Roman

In 2007, Rolling Stone Japan declared Happy End’s Kazemachi Roman to be the greatest Japanese rock album of all time. For a band that can boast such an accolade, Happy End still isn’t all that well-known in the West. If you’re a hardcore J-rock fan, you probably think Happy End aren’t as interesting or cool as noisier artists from the 1970s like, say, Flower Travellin’ Band. Today Happy End are celebrated in Japan, yet Kazemachi Roman sold fewer than 10,000 copies the year it was released, and it’s still not available on streaming services. By this point, Happy End should be as documented and famous as Love or even Os Mutantes, but they are rarely if ever mentioned in the same breath.
When Happy End first formed in Tokyo in late 1969, the Beatles were basically kaput, which should give you an idea of how much had already happened in Western popular music. In Japan, pop music transformed more slowly, to some degree because it was constantly being measured against the West.
Aside from fringe experimental psychedelic outfits like Speed, Glue & Shinki and Les Rallizes Dénudés, Japanese countercultural pop music in the mid-to-late ’60s was largely divided into two camps. On one side were “Group Sounds” acts, basically the Japanese equivalent of bands you’d find in the Nuggets box set; they combined skunky garage rock with kayōkyoku, a mix of Western scales and traditional Japanese music. The other faction was folk, either “campus folk” amateurs trying to reconstruct mid-’60s West Coast coffeehouses, min’yo artists attempting to re-create indigenous and traditional Japanese music, or unvarnished protest folk in the vein of early Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Language was another demarcation: Group Sounds bands would often sing or perform covers in English, on some level in the hopes of appealing to American listeners, while folk acts sang in Japanese, a purposeful act of resistance toward U.S. cultural dominance.
The members of Happy End weren’t interested in either side, let alone the debate itself. Actually, they thought it was all pretty lame. Guitarist Shigeru Suzuki puts it bluntly in a 2014 documentary for the Japanese TV station NHK BS Premium: “Honestly, I thought Group Sounds was pretty boring. In the end, it was just an extension of the traditional Japanese ballad. The folk musicians had good melodies, but … their rhythms were just boring.” At heart, Happy End felt that in trying so hard to either win over America or defy it, both sides were defined by their relationship to the West. The message of rock’n’roll might be universal, but the music is inescapably Western; you had to bring Japan to rock’n’roll, rather than try to force rock’n’roll to be Japanese.
Happy End only existed for three years, but the band’s enduring legacy is creating dynamic rock music that was essentially Japanese, exemplified by their 1971 masterpiece, Kazemachi Roman. Sung entirely in Japanese, the songs don’t initially sound innovative—it’s crisp, melodic, and swaggering folk-rock that recalls the Band, Little Feat, or the Kinks in the late-1960s. But Happy End refashioned early 1970s folk-rock into their own style marked by conceptual, compositional, and emotional depth. The album signaled to Japanese artists and audiences that you could make pop music influenced by the West while maintaining a distinctly Japanese identity, a breakthrough that permanently altered the trajectory of Japanese pop.
Like all legendary bands, Happy End emerged from a cosmic alignment of supernatural talents. There was Suzuki, an 18-year-old guitar prodigy. Singer and guitarist Eiichi Ohtaki didn’t have Suzuki’s chops, but he was a skilled songwriter and musician in his own right. Drummer Takashi Matsumoto wrote the lion’s share of the band’s sly and surreal lyrics. And then there was Haruomi Hosono, primarily the bassist but also an adept multi-instrumentalist and arranger who, along with Ohtaki, was Happy End’s other main songwriter.
Hosono and Matsumoto had played together in the psych-blues band Apryl Fool, which was even more short-lived than Happy End. Loosely associated with Group Sounds, Apryl Fool covered American songs like Bob Dylan’s “Pledging My Time” and sometimes sang in English, but they stood out with original, Japanese-language material suffused with lysergic vibrations.
Apryl Fool lasted less than a year and released only one self-titled album, splitting up in late 1969. Mere weeks afterwards, Hosono and Matsumoto became session players and met Suzuki; the famous Japanese folk singer Nobuyasu Okabayashi then recruited the trio, along with Ohtaki, as his backing band. It didn’t take long for the four musicians to figure out that they were destined for greater things than “Nobuyasu Okabayashi’s backing band.”
Ohtaki and Hosono both grew up listening to the Far East Network, a radio station that broadcast to American GIs stationed in Japan after the war. The two were particularly obsessed with Buffalo Springfield. “Buffalo Springfield was pretty hard for me to grasp,” Hosono says in the documentary. “I thought, ‘How could I create a sound like that?’ … I discovered that they valued their ‘roots.’ It wasn’t just the music, it was Western culture and literature.”
Hosono was amazed that Buffalo Springfield had not just one, but three talented singer-songwriters. He and the other members of Happy End envisioned an equally gifted group of musicians in which every person would write songs and sing; instead of mimicking Buffalo Springfield’s “roots,” they would channel their Japanese history and culture. Suzuki had no songwriting experience, and Matsumoto was solely a lyricist, but they were nearly at the point of making their ambitions a reality.
Multiple sources cite Happy End as the first rock band to sing entirely in Japanese, which is empirically untrue. However, Happy End was the first to bend the rules of their native tongue to glom on to the rhythms of rock’n’roll singing. As University of Chicago professor Michael K. Bourdaghs details in his book Sayonara Amerika, Sayonara Nippon (the title of Happy End’s final song), most of Happy End’s lyrics were written in desu/masu, which he explains is “a more polite yet also more conversational form of Japanese conjugation.” Happy End manipulated the cadence of their lyrics to fit the melodies and rhythms of their music, most conspicuously when, as Bourdaghs describes it, “relatively meaningless syllables are extended to remarkable length.”
Released in August 1970 on the experimental label URC, Happy End’s self-titled debut is considered by some to be their finest moment—most notably by impassioned musician and Japrocksampler author Julian Cope. (The album is sometimes referred to as “Yudemen,” meaning “boiled noodles,” which is written on a storefront sign on the cover.) While it demonstrates its members’ near-instantaneous telepathic interplay, Happy End today feels a little like the band was trying to replicate Buffalo Springfield instead of taking inspiration from them. Some songs, like “Kakurenbo” and “Juuni Gatsu no Ame no ni,” sound exactly like late-’60s Stephen Stills and Neil Young sung in Japanese.
Happy End was far from a commercial hit, but it had a huge impact in the Japanese music press. The Japanese New Music Magazine anointed it the best album of 1970. Naturally, with anything that receives overwhelming acclaim, there’s an inevitable backlash. In this case, it even had a name, the infamous “Japanese-language Rock Controversy” (“Nihongo Rokku Ronsō”). Most notoriously, Yuya Uchida, who produced and managed the Flower Travellin’ Band, believed Happy End’s approach posed two problems: By singing in Japanese, they were alienating global audiences, and because of the unusual style of their singing, the words were too difficult to understand. Happy End couldn’t relate to Uchida because they didn’t share his objectives. “He was thinking about business,” Hosono says in the documentary. “We were just experimenting, without thinking about how it would appeal to the rest of the world.”
For Happy End’s follow-up, the band wanted to refine its sound and deepen its fundamental Japaneseness. Matsumoto devised a concept album that would revolve around a changing Tokyo. In the West, the city seems impossible, vast, intricate—a puzzle box of nesting dolls of rooms within rooms within tunnels within buildings within buildings, surrounded by mountains in one direction, water in another, and imperceptible horizons everywhere else. But as Italo Calvino writes in the 1973 postmodern novel Invisible Cities, “the sum of all wonders is an endless, formless ruin.” Had that sentence existed at the time, it’s one Matsumoto might have used to describe what he dreaded about Tokyo’s future. To him, the real wonder occurred in the Tokyo that existed before the Olympics, the quainter Tokyo of his boyhood.
Beginning in 1952, when the U.S. occupation of Japan began to diminish (the occupation hasn’t really ended; approximately 30,000 troops remain in Okinawa today), Tokyo transformed amid a rapid blur of development and displacement, especially en route to the 1964 Summer Olympics. In fact, Matsumoto and his family were forced to leave his childhood home, which was razed for the construction of a new highway in his neighborhood of Aoyama.
Matsumoto didn’t only bemoan new development, he disliked what postmodernity had done to the shape and character of the city. “First the streetcars disappeared,” he says in the documentary, referencing the tramway that used to operate between the Shibuya and Shinbashi neighborhoods. “It felt good to ride along at a leisurely pace like that.” The easygoing rhythms of pre-1960s Tokyo life corresponded to an increased level of community. When Matsumoto was expelled from his home he lost contact with all his middle school friends, who were likewise displaced by the new road. He describes the aftermath as “like a piece of your heart is missing.”
Kazemachi Roman is widely considered to be a paean to Tokyo prior to the 1964 Summer Olympics—a drawing of the Tokyo streetcars features prominently in the gatefold of the record cover—yet as Moritz Sommet argues in his essay, “Framing the Tokyo Cityscape,” the concept is far more layered. Matsumoto wrote in 1985, “I made it an indicator of this act to project my personal panorama of the city in my memory, which I called Wind City, and which had been erased by that other city.” Wind City was his memory of a triangle connecting the Aoyama, Azabu, and Shibuya neighborhoods. The title of Kazemachi Roman literally means “Wind City Romance.”
Matsumoto and his bandmates weren’t hawking, in his words, “idle mourning.” Instead, they would create a new way of seeing by grafting their childhood memories onto 1971 Tokyo as it was. Bourdaghs refers to this as Happy End’s “Copernican revolution,” in which addressing the problems of history requires holistically taking on the present, rather than hashing out the past or working toward an uncertain future. As Matsumoto wrote in 1971 about the name “Happy End,” Japanese youth were living through the instability of identity, neither fully committed to a hegemonic West nor a Japan trying to appease it. The only solution was to “seek out our own Japan.” The “happy end” was one in which his generation could start over.
And musically, as they polished and focused their craft, Happy End would assemble something of the moment, something that broke away from Japanese rock up to that point. You can hear it immediately on Kazemachi Roman’s monster opening track, “Dakeshimetai” (“I Want to Hold You”). It begins with acoustic guitar, bass, and drums all playing in 4/4, but in alternate syncopations, a jerky march that coalesces all at once into a steady, galvanizing rhythm when Ohtaki’s vocals kick in. In a bridge between the second and third verses, Happy End run everything through a phaser, a passage of psychedelic trickery momentarily intruding like an acid flashback.
In Matsumoto’s first verse, a protagonist, likely a fictionalized version of himself, reminisces about the city of his youth while viewing the present-day metropolis before him: “A faint light is flowing in through the window/Flying away to the far-away countryside/I take a hard drag of my cigarette and/I think of you.” It’s a showcase of Happy End’s habitual use of irony—it scans as Matsumoto referring to another person, when he’s really describing his relationship with his boyhood.
Double meanings are all over Kazemachi Roman. “Haikara Hakuchi” (“Westernized Idiot”) opens with a short jam on a traditional taiko drum before crashing into a rollicking rock rave-up, Ohtaki growling Matsumoto’s pointed dig at glib Japanese youth imitating foreigners: “I am so stylish under a bloodstained sky/Playing with your emotions, drinking a Coca-Cola.” Yet Matsumoto playfully constructs the words so that they are also about spitting up blood (“Hai” = lungs, “kara” = from, “haku” = to vomit, “chi” = blood). The song curdles into black humor in the absolutely badass line, “I am so stylish while spitting up blood/It’s only twilight in your skull.” But Happy End follow “Haikara Hakuchi” with “Haikara, Beautiful,” a 30-second Beach Boys-esque incantation in which the band keeps repeating that Westernization is beautiful. The song is credited to Bannai Harao, a popular fictional detective in Japanese mysteries.
Humor and duality are undercurrents of Matsumoto’s expressionistic, bucolic, and dreamy imagery, and his imagery and the music often dovetail in sublime moments. “Natsunandesu” (“It’s Summer”) is meant to evoke the season in all its blurry, floating beauty. Hosono weaves a finger-picking melody around slow-moving double-tracked drums, singing in curling arcs in a mellow baritone about being stopped by a dusty wind “on a white path, between the fields in the country,” where the summer is “eye-splittingly dazzling” and “cicada-crying.” “Natsunandesu” is the song that most acutely emanates the warmth and richness of Kazemachi Roman’s production; the band recorded the album on an eight-channel setup, which was state-of-the-art technology at the time. (To get a sense of how oaken and sticky Kazemachi Roman can sound, I highly recommend listening to the Los Angeles-based record store In Sheep’s Clothing’s “room recording” of an original pressing of Side B.)
“Kaze Wo Atsumete,” (“Gather the Wind”), Happy End’s biggest hit, is Kazemachi Roman’s buoyant acme, the most literal depiction of Matsumoto’s “Wind City.” Aside from the drums, Hosono performs all the instruments and sings the lyrics, yielding a sunny melody and mid-tempo rhythm that feel like a stroll through city side streets, with a wrinkle of yearning in the bridge and chorus that adds a thin film of melancholy.
Matsumoto composes the verses on “Kaze Wo Atsumete” as discrete passages: The first positions the protagonist seeing a tram roll through an open street in the morning; the second portrays “A city that was flying scarlet sails/Lying at anchor”; and in the third the narrator looks upon skyscrapers out of the window of a coffee shop. Hosono sings a chorus of “I want to gather the wind…and run across the blue sky.” After each verse, the chorus means something different. In the first, Matsumoto wants to run forward and celebrate the joy of his surroundings; by the end, he wants to run backward in time to the joy he experienced.
If you know “Kaze Wo Atsumete” or Kazemachi Roman, most likely it’s because the song is sandwiched between Phoenix’s “Too Young” and Brian Reitzell and Roger Manning Jr.’s “On the Subway” on the soundtrack to Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation. Due to the film’s popularity, Happy End was suddenly and belatedly exposed to a global audience. In the NHK BS Premium documentary, Hosono says that Americans have stopped him on the street and started singing “Kaze Wo Atsumete.”
Those encounters belie Kazemachi Roman’s initial reception. Though it was also an overwhelming critical success, due to URC’s small-scale distribution the album failed to reach many people. In a last-ditch effort to gain a larger audience, Happy End flew to LA with a considerable amount of money in an attempt to approximate the West Coast rock albums they loved. They linked up with Van Dyke Parks and members of Little Feat, but confronted even more hostility from Americans and American musicians than they did in Japan. Happy End dissolved two months before the February 1973 release of their final album, confusingly and perhaps ironically titled Happy End.
It didn’t take long for the members of Happy End to find individual success. Before he died at the end of 2013, Ohtaki had a long career as a solo artist and songwriter (his 1982 album A Long Vacation sold more than a million copies and is widely beloved in Japan). Suzuki became an in-demand session guitarist. Matsumoto forged a multifaceted career as a record producer, songwriter, and novelist—he is the third-best-selling songwriter in Japan. And of course Hosono is one of the most influential figures in Japanese pop music history, as a solo artist, session musician, member of the pioneering electronic group Yellow Magic Orchestra, and composer. All of these people were major figures in city pop, the sleek, glittery, R&B-influenced style that dominated Japanese popular music in the late 1970s and 1980s.
In hindsight, Kazemachi Roman’s canonical stature can be traced to its connection to city pop. For most people, “nostalgia” conjures the cheap sentiment of half-baked kitsch, when the word is actually a Greek compound of “homecoming” and “pain.” Just as city pop embraced American style as an underhanded way of calling attention to its artificiality, Kazemachi Roman pioneered a new Japanese rock through the true definition of nostalgia, pining for the Tokyo that existed before it became beholden to commerce, preserved in a sepia-toned portrait of four prodigal musicians fortuitously united and seizing the moment.


Pushing beyond his customary dancefloor focus, the French-Canadian producer twists club influences and collaborative input into a textured, exploratory sound, both intimate and immense.

Dawn Chorus

For some time, Jacques Greene’s curious career was defined by the French-Canadian producer’s knack for fusing different modes of dance music with contemporary pop and R&B influences. Philippe Aubin-Dionne’s curatorial ears (and eyes; he previously worked as an art director) helped him navigate electronic music’s shifting trends. But where his debut LP, Feel Infinite, took an insular approach, Aubin-Dionne’s sophomore album, Dawn Chorus, treats the Jacques Greene project more like a band. Inspired by groups like Massive Attack and Slowdive, he brought on producer and Oneohtrix Point Never collaborator Joel Ford as well as contributions from Brian Reitzell, Oliver Coates, and Julianna Barwick. The result feels at once intimate yet immense—a collection of ruminative dance tracks with a shoegaze heart.
The muscular loops of last year’s Fever Focus EP, crafted for peak-hour DJ sets, made for an incremental step forward, but Dawn Chorus largely abandons the pretense of the club altogether. From the instant that the smeared rave sirens of “Serenity” go soaring across snippets of indistinct radio chatter, it’s clear that Aubin-Dionne is just as concerned with kindling introspection as he is with moving bodies. It’s a trick he pulls off differently on almost every track: Rainy field recordings envelop mid-album highlight “Sel,” and spirals of hazy, resampled textures on “Let Go” set the stage for a moody guest turn from Toronto-based singer Rochelle Jordan.
Until now, Jacques Greene’s signature move has been to lift melodies from beloved singers like Mario and Brandy, slicing them into wistful refrains. He was hardly the first to repurpose R&B vocals—what up, Burial—but Aubin-Dionne understands that the provenance of his samples is less important than the vocalists’ charismatic timbres, rendered mystical by washes of synth. Instead of falling back on familiar sources, he opts to alchemize his guests’ voices into hooks, occasionally ceding the spotlight altogether, as on “Let Go” and the acid-tinged “Night Service,” with Cadence Weapon. Unfortunately, Cadence falls a bit flat as he rhapsodizes about a night out during the bloghouse days of yore, when DJs used to play the Rapture. It’s charming but awkward.
Dawn Chorus is most compelling when the production does the bulk of the talking. Nearly a decade into his career, Jacques Greene continues to hone his sound design and arrangements. Much of Dawn Chorus was recorded at Hudson Mohawke’s Los Angeles studio, where Aubin-Dionne set out to wrangle new sounds from specific pieces of hardware used by his musical heroes. You get the sense that exploring unfamiliar equipment in new spaces has helped him find new possibilities in his own work—that by plunging himself into guitar pedals and classic French-house compression modules, he’s ushered in a new era for Jacques Greene without losing sight of his unique sentimentality. “For Love,” possibly the only track geared for the floor, turns a hit by Canadian disco outfit THP Orchestra into a pumping funky house number with a dream-pop middle eight. The expansive “Drop Location,” co-produced by Aubin-Dionne’s old friend Clams Casino, shows that the cloud rap pioneer’s chilly tendencies pair well with Jacques Greene’s newfound love of distorted drones.
The shoegaze influence is most apparent near the end of the album. Hesitant arpeggios waft through a barren Shlohmo-esque atmosphere on “Understand,” while the seven-minute closer “Stars” is a slow-burning meditation on nature and childhood, undergirded by the steady pulse of warehouse drums. Aubin-Dionne’s gleaming synthesizers ebb and flow; the woozy swells and quietly crackling drones flank the spectral spoken-word passages of another Toronto artist, Sandrine Somé. Eventually, Somé trails off, and so do the resonant pads, leaving a lone breakbeat to loop into the ether. The brooding, ambient nature of  Dawn Chorus suggests that one day, Jacques Greene just might abandon dance music altogether—but for now, it’s a form that he continues to reshape in his own way with each new release.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Fueled by earnest writing and exhilarating vocal performances, the Asheville songwriter’s third album aims for stadium-sized feelings.

All of This Will End

Indigo De Souza used to fear the reaper. Death haunted her first two albums, 2018’s I Love My Mom and 2021’s Any Shape You Take, lurking in all her relationships. Ruminating on our collective impermanence can be humbling, but for an artist preoccupied with existential doom from an early age (“Why do we die?” she asked in a childhood letter addressed to herself), it’s evidently also liberating. “Accepting you are a temporary thing is what gives way to meaning and intention and connection,” she said in a recent interview. The title of her third record, All of This Will End, is a mantra born from an obsession with finality and a reason to swing for the fences, pushing De Souza to elevate her once quiet bedroom recordings to their stadium-sized potential.
De Souza wrote her first two albums in relatively short succession, but the pandemic forced her to take space between the bursts of creativity that became All of This Will End. That period also saw the departure of her original bandmates, multi-instrumentalists Jake Lenderman and Owen Stone, which resulted in its own form of creative isolation. “I felt really scared and alone, because I had been convinced that those people were the only people for me,” she said about their exit after recording her second album.
In the absence of her former collaborators, De Souza sounds more self-assured, no longer just hinting at dance pop but embracing it with effervescent synths and propulsive electronic percussion. The subdued folk-electronica that she introduced on Any Shape You Take returns as incandescent dream-pop on opener “Time Back”; padded synths give way to ricocheting drum loops that evoke the wide-eyed exuberance of M83. “Smog,” a pillowy dance song about finding joy in the solitude of the night, reflects the pandemic delirium in which it was written, her compressed vocals softening the snap of a snare drum, recalling indietronica forebears Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. When she hits the chorus—“I come alive in the nighttime”—her falsetto wavers, clipping in its upper ranges, like a fevered bedroom performance on a Zoom rave.
De Souza’s strength as a lyricist is her ability to extract universal truths from small moments. Rather than begin her “L.A. model fuckboy” kiss-off “You Can Be Mean” at the peak of her anger, she opens with a familiar scene of pointing a relative stranger to the bathroom in her apartment, setting up a trope of a lighthearted hookup that she upends on the verse’s final line: “Thank you for trying to be polite/But, babe, I think we’re already past that.” She builds intimacy with small disclosures—“I eat too much when I’m lonely/I bury everything” on “Smog”—and even her broader declarations feel honest as a result. “And I’m not sure what is wrong with me/But it’s probably just hard to be a person feeling anything,” she sings on “Parking Lot.”
De Souza operates at an almost jarring level of earnestness, one that could be cloying if not for her elastic vocal delivery. She cuts words tersely on “Wasting Your Time,” her ode to self-doubt, but then elongates the consonants on “Not My Body” until her voice sounds like a warm hug. “Who gives a fuck? All of this will end,” she sings in a lower register on the title track, underscoring the ambiguity separating resignation and acceptance.
De Souza worked with local Asheville producer Alex Farrar and an ensemble of new collaborators who feel pivotal to the shift in her sound. Alex Bradley’s trumpet on “Parking Lot” adds triumphant warmth to a song about having a panic attack, and a chorus of whistles function like backup singers on “You Can Be Mean,” sharpening the daggers in her lyrics. John James Tourville weaves the gentle sigh of a pedal-steel guitar into the album’s latter half, and De Souza finds new depths to her songwriting in these plaintive moments. “Younger and Dumber,” the slow-burning ballad that closes the album, is unlike any song in her catalog, tender in its quiet power. Written as a letter to De Souza’s younger self, it begins as timid self-talk, her falsetto cracking, laced with the queasy nostalgia of watching home movies and mourning childhood innocence. Her voice rises, catching on the line, “Sometimes I just don’t wanna be alone/And it’s not cause I’m lonely.” She sings the last word over two notes, and as if a switch is flipped, the song gains momentum. As the percussion and the pedal steel pick up, she finds a soulful, almost mournful, power in her voice. “And the love I feel is so powerful,” she belts, as if willing it into existence.
Just as pronounced as joy and sadness is a sense of indignation; after all, in the process of grieving, anger comes before acceptance. “I’d like to think you got a good heart and your dad was just an asshole growing up,” she sings on “You Can Be Mean.” A younger De Souza might have been more forgiving, but she now knows better than to pull punches: “But I don’t see you trying that hard to be better than he is,” she sneers, twisting the knife. Any Shape You Take’s “Real Pain” featured her friends’ screams as a form of collective catharsis, but on “Always,” she owns her anger, and her pain, alone. Written about De Souza’s fractured relationship with her often absent father, the song starts as a near whisper. But about halfway through, a jolt of distorted electric guitar crashes in and De Souza’s curdled, guttural howl takes hold. “Father, I thought you’d be here,” she roars, any apprehension annihilated by her fury. “I thought you’d try,” she howls, her voice nearly breaking. It’s a discomfiting listen: In bearing witness to her agony, there’s a kind of transference of pain that occurs in her shredded screams—the sound of an artist stepping into her shadows in order to find her light.


Andrew Hung’s piercingly electronic Rave Cave 2 is an ambitious and autobiographical effort. Throughout the EP, he emulates the juxtaposing elements found in youth, a time in life when everything is confusing and you have to navigate a path through conflicting options.

Rave Cave 2 EP

Andrew Hung’s piercingly electronic Rave Cave 2 is an ambitious and personal autobiographical effort. The initial two tracks are named after places in Hung’s life—"Ashill" which Hung lists as his residence on Bandcamp, is a bright and inviting opening number. "Gladstone Park Gang" is a shout out to a park in North London, and the title itself is reminiscent of a key pastime among bored British youth: hanging out in a drab park, smoking weed, and drinking disgustingly cheap cider.
The second installment of his debut solo venture, Rave Cave 2 interweaves themes from the original but stands strong on its own, and is in fact denser and richer overall. "Ashill" forgoes the syncopated swing of Rave Cave’s opener, "Fables", but still embodies that cheeriness. Though the choppy and sharp melody initially seems out of joint with the accompanying smooth, heady synth bass, the more repetitive it becomes, the more it settles in.
Throughout this EP, Hung emulates the juxtaposing elements found in the nature of youth, a time in life when everything is confusing and you have to navigate a path through conflicting options. "Repetition vs Time" summons a childlike wonder and calm, with an intentionally cheesy chorus and boom-bap beats invoking nostalgia for playing keyboards in high school music class. Towards the latter end, the song is more reminiscent of video game menu music than anything else, but perhaps this is intentional. Hung’s littering of 8-bit grace notes is ultimately refreshing, and an apt ode to his work as one half of Fuck Buttons.
"That thing you want won’t make you happy" is distinctly melancholic in comparison to the rest of the record. It carries the melody of a more somber '90s boy band ballad, and closes with finger-picked acoustic guitar tinged with subtle reverb. "Star Ferry Dub" immediately starts off as a pounding antithesis to the previous song. It’s heavy on the ears and on the heart, flashing a raw hedonism seldom found in the Rave Cave series. The song rings in the musical themes evident throughout the EP—we are reintroduced to the 8-bit ornamentation of "Repetition vs Time" and that thumping arpeggiated bass echoing "Ashill", but this time the ghosts of these tracks are more lingering and intense. There’s so much going on at once that it’s hard to pin down, but the complexities and wide sonic scape don’t sound excessive or sloppily piled on top of one another. They’re seamless, intricate, and intoxicating. Then, the imperfect cadence fades and stutters into oblivion, leaving the listener aching for more. Andrew Hung’s story isn’t over yet.


The debut from the Chicago-based composer and clarinetist serves as a vibrant, spiritual, free-jazz document of black life as it stands today.

The Oracle

Years ago, we would record the soundtrack of our lives on cassette. A blank tape became filled with not only the music that we listened to but also what surrounded that music, the breadth of our experiences. As part of a limited edition, the Chicago-based clarinetist will release her debut album, The Oracle, on cassette tape. It evokes how the album itself was conceived—Angel Bat Dawid overdubbed, mixed, and performed almost all of the voices and instruments herself, and recorded and produced the album mainly on her cell phone as she trekked across the globe. The result is a spiritual opus of one’s refusal to accept the cards that life has dealt her.
After a brain tumor diagnosis halted her music studies at Roosevelt University, Dawid began working full-time to pay off the bills she had racked up post-surgery. This included a stint as a hip-hop producer, who teamed up with another fellow Chicagoan, rapper/producer DeLundon, to form the group Angel/DeLundon. Meanwhile, her classical training on piano and clarinet had gathered dust. In 2014, Dawid quit her job, cashed out her 401K, and lived off of that for one year as she discovered (and rediscovered) her connection to free and spiritual jazz.
The Oracle charts Dawid’s journey with improvised music and all that inspired her during her world travels. It conjures a vast, immersive aural exploration of black experiences, from the unwavering strength of the “Black Family” to the plethora of borrowed traditions, notably call and response: “Capetown” features an exchange between South African drummer Asher Simiso Gamedze and Dawid on clarinet, passionate and untempered. On “What Shall I Tell My Children Who Are Black,” as layered vocals, tinged with traditional gospel and operatic contralto, become intertwined, Dawid transforms the first line of a poem into a prophetic and resonant call. The song’s universal theme of racism in America grows more palpable, especially after hearing the line that follows: “What it means to be captive in this dark skin.”
As a direct response, Dawid counters with “We Are Starzz.” Written especially for her live set just last month at NYC’s Winter JazzFest, she delves into Afrofuturism as digital and acoustic sounds converge seamlessly, like Sun Ra’s magnum opus, “Space Is the Place.” Thematically, it not only denotes the first glimmer of hope for the future of blacks on the album, but it also marks perhaps Dawid’s own reawakening through avant-garde music in her adopted home of Chicago.
Despite her journey from London to South Africa captured on The Oracle, it’s Chicago that serves as the album’s through line. Dawid summons the spirits of the movement’s progenitors, like Sun Ra, both in her playing and in her production, to guide her through unchartered territory. Much like Sun Ra (born Herman Poole Blount), she not only surrenders her given name (Angel Elmore), but more importantly, she abandons her dependence on a score, both in life and in music. As she captures the unbridled sound of obstacles overcome, history revered, and a future imagined, The Oracle serves as a vibrant document of black life as it stands today.


Kintsugi is Death Cab's first album without Chris Walla. It was produced by Rich Costey, who has worked with Muse and Foster the People, and though it has been framed as a new beginning, little of Kintsugi gives the impression that Gibbard’s motivation to reboot Death Cab is matched by legitimate inspiration.

Kintsugi

Chris Walla quit Death Cab for Cutie last year, which means he will never again be called the band's "secret weapon." His nuanced craftsmanship served as a buffer against Ben Gibbard’s increasingly broad and bland songwriting on recent LPs Narrow Stairs and Codes & Keys, but Walla "long[ed] for the unknown" and Gibbard felt the band was becoming stagnant and "self-referential". Though Walla contributes guitar and electronic collage to the band's eighth LP Kintsugi, he abdicates the producer’s role for the first time in the band’s history—in his stead is a proper big-budget pop guy, the preposterously and perfectly named Rich Costey (Muse, Foster the People, Chvrches). But it wouldn’t have mattered if DJ Mustard or Steve Albini produced Kintsugi: as with Codes & Keys, Gibbard promises reinvention and continues to play against his strengths without developing new ones.
Gibbard’s desire to write from a less personal standpoint is understandable, considering the widespread misunderstanding that any song in the first-person has to be autobiographical—his private life is a matter of public record these days, and surely he’s grown tired of having to clarify that wasn’t him eating Thanksgiving dinner in a suburban Denver Catholic church after dad bounced or treating that girl from Silver Lake like complete shit. But even when Gibbard was clearly writing in character, the sketches were personalized, and therein lay the genius of his work—he had an uncanny ability to see things as others might, penning deeply felt and detailed lyrics, willing to risk certain sentiments and awkward phrasings to reward the listener with a richer, more complex and relatable experience. They were someone’s stories. This is why Death Cab for Cutie played the KeyArena in Seattle and not, say, Matt Pond PA or Rogue Wave or any of their other peers from the "O.C. indie" era.
But Gibbard's change in approach hasn't coincided with a change of subject; Death Cab for Cutie has not developed a political conscience, nor is Gibbard suddenly experimenting with tone poems. The same relationship breakdowns and travelogues captured on The Photo Album have gone big screen as Gibbard strives for universal, one-feel-fits-all songs meant to be shared but not owned. Take "Little Wanderer", where the narrator (not Gibbard, y’all) is stuck at home and the girl is showing him pictures of her very commonplace vacation spots (Tokyo and Paris) through Messenger. Gibbard knows how to wring pathos out of long-distance relationships; he invented a damn word for it. He can also tease out how technological improvements in communication can leave even more unsaid. And yet, here’s the chorus: "You’re my wanderer, little wanderer/ Off across the sea/ You’re my wanderer, little wanderer/ Won’t you wander back to me?" It’s startling, almost amusing, to hear a hackneyed line like that cutting against the stonefaced sobriety of his delivery and plangent reverbed guitars—every pejorative stereotype of Death Cab becomes true for four minutes.
And yet Gibbard also indulges some explicit nostalgia for older Death Cab—during the climactic kiss in the baggage claim, the song reveals itself as basically fan-fic to the video for "A Movie Script Ending". This spark of recognition happens far too often on Kintsugi, resulting in songs that just sound like an impersonal reading of better ones from the past. Solo acoustic centerpiece "Hold No Guns" wants badly to be Kintsugi’s "I Will Follow You Into the Dark", but the narrator pleads harmlessness rather than "til death do us part and then some" devotion. "Binary Sea" makes a blatant metaphorical callback to the planetary myth-making of  "Transatlanticism" and a number of previous weepy closers ("Stable Song", "A Lack of Color"). The lightly chiding tone and basic structure of  "Your Heart Is an Empty Room" is reprised for "Everything’s a Ceiling"—little of Kintsugi gives the impression that Gibbard’s motivation to reboot Death Cab is matched by legitimate inspiration.
The newly luxurious production sets Costey up as a convenient scapegoat; "Everything’s a Ceiling" and "Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)" are the newest sounds here, and they recall the pop-funk Silly Putty of the 1975 or the Neighbourhood, both of whom are currently competing with Death Cab for KROQ spins. Otherwise, Kintsug**i sounds not altogether different than Plans, with Costey's chromed-out glossiness subbed in for Walla's fragile glassiness. Costey keeps Gibbard’s voice as high as possible in the mix, just as Walla would have; the sole exception is the distorted cloak on late-album highlight "Ingenue", which is the one track that makes good on Death Cab’s hope to integrate electronic influences like Flying Lotus and Jon Hopkins without just sounding like the Postal Service. In the context of the full album, this just feels like their latest well-meaning, but ultimately empty promise of a cred infusion (see also: Can, Brian Eno).
"Kintsugi" actually refers to a Japanese style of art where broken ceramics are fused together with gold, an apt metaphor but a weirdly honest one. And yet, when Kintsugi gets broken into individual pieces, there are heirlooms worth treasuring. Advance singles "No Room in Frame" and "The Ghosts of Beverly Drive" are where Gibbard remembers to write great Death Cab for Cutie songs the way he knows how—zooming on important specifics that speak on a larger idea, trying to make sense of newly formed concepts as he’s explaining them to someone else, rather than starting with the most broad, market-tested metaphors. Maybe it’s not Gibbard driving down I-5 through Fresno Valley, maybe it’s not him doomed to live with regrets in a city he still harbors resentments towards. It probably is, but at least Gibbard is willing to share some of himself while leaving plenty to the imagination. It also helps that these songs deliver Death Cab’s proprietary chorus melodies, winding, thrilling and sunlit like the Pacific Coast Highway of which Gibbard sings so fondly.
But I get it: Death Cab for Cutie have gone platinum, they’ve hit #1 on Billboard, they’ve been nominated for a Grammy and lost to "My Humps", they’ve played the former NBA arena in the city where they started and now they’ll play the Hollywood Bowl in Gibbard’s new home. If he’s straining to go against his instincts by writing self-explanatory songs like "Good Help (Is So Hard to Find)" and "You’ve Haunted Me All My Life" with equally pat arrangements and melodies, well, he’s got cheap seats to reach now. But after 12 years of hearing him repeat "I need you so much closer" ad infinitum, that line never hurt more than it does now.


The debut album from this New England-based producer blends ambient, techno, and house into a single sumptuous mood, suffused in tape hiss.

juneunit

juneunit’s debut album is full of familiar sounds—classic hardware synthesizers, analog drum machines—but there’s something special about this record. It beckons. It has a way of lulling the senses and then prodding you awake. It follows well-trodden paths to previously undiscovered destinations. It’s music that feels alive.
Not much is publicly known about juneunit. On her SoundCloud account, there are tracks in a similar vein stretching back three years; Jacktone, the Detroit label behind the record, mentions various unreleased albums on her hard drives, but this is her first official release, at least under this alias. The lack of context feels appropriate for music that refuses to give up too many of its secrets.
Running nearly an hour and a half—both full sides of a C90 cassette—juneunit is surprisingly long for a debut album, but it earns its runtime. It’s not a record made for cherry-picking. The cryptic titles (“enwm,” “fdsh6”) virtually guarantee that you’ll never remember the name of any given track; they’re meant to be anonymous, to blend in with the whole. There are no jarring left turns, no moments of rupture. It’s a single, sumptuous mood suffused in tape hiss, and the success of each track is the way that it subtly fleshes out the dimensions of this seemingly limitless fogbank.
Even inside this murkily lit world, juneunit finds plenty of variety.  There are jacking house rhythms, well-worn breakbeats; there are quivering acid lines and stretches of pure ambience. Sometimes her synths recall early Oneohtrix Point Never; sometimes her dense layers of filter, flanger, and chorus suggest an artist who has logged many hours listening to Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography on a loop.
If the richness of the sound is the record’s immediate sell—anyone fond of the nostalgic warble of a record like Music Has the Right to Children will fall in love here—the true mark of juneunit’s artistry is her subtlety.  It takes a while to get your bearings in juneunit’s music, but the longer you listen, the more you become aware of how many different kinds of pulses there are at work, how many different tempos. “fdsh6” sustains a feeling of being perpetually about to kick off, even though it never does. “atmw” is largely static for three minutes, just a skeletal house beat firing against swirling chords, but then halfway through, something imperceptible happens and it comes to life, flush with new layers, new voices.
Perhaps these moments are so satisfying because we recognize ourselves in their ruminative movements, as though they were metaphors for human potential. There’s something invigorating and inspiring about these late bloomers springing to fruition. We tend to think of ambient music as a refuge, a zone of safety, something to fall back upon. But in juneunit’s debut album, it might also be a springboard, a process of transformation—the search for self, set to tape.


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 a 1983 masterpiece whose sumptuous sonics and ecstatic approach to songwriting brought post-punk into a mysterious world beyond words.

Head Over Heels

In the beginning, I didn’t get on at all with Cocteau Twins. When Head Over Heels came out in October 1983, BBC radio DJ John Peel played the entire album on his show. Listening that night in my student room, the wispiness and warbling rubbed me the wrong way.
I decided to give the record another chance after reading a rave review in the NME. Suddenly, I had the key to the secret garden. What had first felt bombastic and hollow became cavernous, like stepping inside a grotto glistening with stalactites. The insubstantiality of the guitar sound, initially so frustrating, became intoxicating, like a heady fragrance. As for that wuthering voice: this was simply the sprite that would inhabit such a wonderland, singing in an alien tongue as impassioned as it was incomprehensible.
Head Over Heels is the perfect title for this record. You’re not meant to cogitate or extract profound literal meaning from these sounds, as was the case with so much post-punk in the immediately prior years. You’re supposed to tumble into its cascading bliss.
“Head over heels” also describes the state of mind of its makers, guitarist Robin Guthrie and singer Elizabeth Fraser. Guthrie has described it as an album of love songs. If so, they are veiled and opaque, hints glinting out now and then in a stray song title (“My Love Paramour”) or rare intelligible lyric (“There’s only a hair’s breadth between us”). Mostly, the feeling comes across non-verbally, as it does almost always with Fraser’s singing, through the swoony elation of her voice.
The romance sparked at a discotheque. Robin Guthrie, budding guitarist and occasional DJ at The Hotel International in Grangemouth, Scotland, was spinning records by proto-goth groups like the Birthday Party, tunes that completely emptied the floor. Except for this one girl with startling hair and jewelry made of chicken bones. Guthrie reasoned that someone who could dance that expressively might be able to sing.
For nearly all their career, Cocteau Twins have actually been triplets: Simon Raymonde took on the role of bassist shortly after the release of Head Over Heels, a role occupied in the early days by Guthrie’s friend Will Heggie. But Heggie had quit by the time it came to record Head Over Heels, so the lovey-dovey couple made the album alone together, which surely contributed to its atmosphere of almost stifling intimacy.
“The Cocteau Twins just happened and the music just happens,” Guthrie informed ZigZag magazine. Maybe this remark was another evasion from a notoriously interview-averse group, but there’s an element of truth. They wrote Head Over Heels, like all of their subsequent records, in the studio, showing up with nothing: no tunes, no titles, no premeditated sonic intentions beyond trying to make an album.
As much as he was a wannabe guitar hero, Guthrie was a wannabe producer: a fan of Phil Spector and a lover of reverb and effects pedals, which he deployed to dissolve the standard structure of guitar playing, replacing riffs with swirls and half-smothering his chord progressions in canopies of iridescent fog. The Spangle Maker, the title of the 1984 EP that followed Head Over Heels, could be a Fraser term of endearment for Guthrie, conveying the way he drapes his lover’s voice in swathes of glittering fabric. In practice, it worked the other way around: Cocteaus tracks were always built first, then Fraser would listen and thread a vocal melody through the lustrous construction.
For many fans, “In Our Angelhood” is Head Over Heels’ stand-out track. The pummeling speed and piercing vocals are the closest the Cocteaus get to punk, but in line with the title image, the overall feeling is celestial: imagine a church spire that suddenly blasts off into space like a rocket. Titles like “Glass Candle Grenades” and “In the Gold Dust Rush” outdo any reviewer’s descriptive efforts, distilling the crystal-shard shimmer of the first and the powdery sparkle of the latter. On the climactic finale “Musette and Drums,” Fraser’s shuddering vocals conjure unendurable ecstasy and Guthrie’s guitar swoops in fiery arcs like a kamikaze dragon.
Cocteau Twins’ immediate post-punk precursors were groups like Wire, the Associates, and especially Siouxsie and the Banshees, whose instrumental arrangements—with bassists often taking a melodic role, freeing guitarists to experiment with atmosphere and timbre—pushed beyond rock music’s aesthetic conventions. The Cocteau Twins sound is one step further out, in part because there’s no drummer. Once set on its course, the drum machine stays steady, maintaining its solemn procession or midtempo glide. Rather than locking with the beats to form a conventional rhythm section, the bass is like a brocade stitched along the song’s hem, decorative and harmonic rather than propulsive and bolstering. Piano and synth sometimes trickle in to fill out the sound—and on “Five Ten Fiftyfold,” an ostensibly un-Cocteaus-like saxophone can be heard buried beneath gauzy layers—but overall the guitarist and the singer dominate.
Fraser clinches this sound’s out-of-the-blue originality. Although she has Siouxsie’s face tattooed on her arm, there isn’t much vocal resemblance: the Goth goddess issued her commandments with glacial clarity, whereas Fraser’s singing is all oozy diffusion, more like a sculpted sigh than an attempt to communicate verbally. Now and then you’ll hear a trace of Chrissie Hynde’s tremolo quiver or Kate Bush’s rhapsodic flutter, but for the most part, Fraser’s style is a complete self-invention. The title of “Sugar Hiccup,” the album’s single, could almost be a description of Fraser’s singing: the action of her throat and lips as she siphons sweetness into the air. Like so much Cocteau Twins imagery, “sugar hiccup” feels obliquely sexual and utterly innocent at once, flashing back to a time when children held their breath and counted to 20. Hiccups lie on the pleasure-pain threshold, the same place where Fraser’s voice lives: rapture as rupture.
That sense of a singer abandoning themselves to overwhelming sensation, along with Guthrie’s sumptuous textures, which seem to caress the listener’s skin, may be the reason Head Over Heels soon established itself as a slow-jams staple for the clad-in-black set. In a 1986 interview, Fraser talked primly about the videos of fan-made erotica they got sent: “People giving it all this business, letting it all hang out… Every time it’s got chests in it. It’s got boobs and bums all over the place!”
Reams of poetry started coming through the mail, too—strange, given that Fraser rarely emitted a decipherable line. But while her vocalizing sometimes sounds like gibberish, Cocteau Twins songs always feature lyrics. Where other songwriters might start by putting feelings into words and then setting them to a tune, Fraser assembled lyrics intuitively, almost randomly, and imbued them with emotion through the act of singing. “The words don’t have any meaning at all, until they’re sung,” Fraser told a radio interviewer in 1994. She would sift through old books and dictionaries (sometimes in foreign languages), filling scrapbooks with exquisite-sounding or enigmatically arcane words for later use. They seem to stick together through mouthfeel more than semantic content, melting into each other and curling around Fraser’s melodies. After a long period of hyper-articulation in post-punk—the schematic critiques of Gang of Four and Scritti Politti, the prolix punmanship of Elvis Costello and ABC’s Martin Fry—what relief, what deliverance, it was in 1983 to hear a voice that dissolved definition: Singing that overflowed with a sensation of significance rather than clear-cut meaning.
Cocteau Twins were at a loss for words in interviews too, driving journalists to despair with their recalcitrance. Yet it seems perfectly possible that Fraser and Guthrie really didn’t know where their music came from. They seemed protective of the mystery, actively avoiding self-examination. And why on Earth should people who are good at making music also have an aptitude for talking about it?
Back in the 1980s, some criticized Cocteau Twins and their ilk as an airy-fairy flight from social-political urgencies. But they felt no obligation to register the existence of the real world in their music. Although they once used to rehearse in a Communist Party office, their “way out” was reverie, not revolution. As instinctive aesthetes, Fraser and Guthrie simply craved more than their surroundings could give. In one early interview, Fraser imagines her fate should she never have met Guthrie: probably working in a meat-processing plant owned by fast food chain Chunky Chicken. “Our music has always been a reflection of our desperate desire to get as much distance from where we came from as possible,” said Guthrie on a separate occasion.
On Head Over Heels, the couple created a dream world unto itself. From then on, with slight variations and incremental advances in production polish, Cocteau Twins sustained that alternative to reality across a series of mostly wondrous albums and EPs. Fans disagree over what stands as their peak. Some say 1984’s Treasure; many more favor Heaven or Las Vegas, from 1990. Most likely, these preferences are closely linked to which album you heard first.
For me, it’s always been and always will be Head Over Heels. Partly because it was my own initiation, the melting of initial resistance into infatuation. But mainly because it’s the Cocteau Twins album that perfectly balances eeriness and enchantment. Where the later records get ever more milk-and-kisses idyllic, Head Over Heels still has one pointy, buckled, black-leather foot in goth. That doesn’t mean the album sounds scary or forbidding. But it does have a feeling of mystery, an aura of secrets and ceremonies, a private language overheard and understood.


Inspired by an expedition into Ecuador’s ancient caves, the vaunted techno producer presents an immersive ambient album designed to accompany guided trips.

Jon Hopkins: Music for Psychedelic Therapy

Music for Psychedelic Therapy

What music should soundtrack the psychedelic revolution? That’s one of many meta-inquiries bewildering neuroscientists as they work to make psychedelic-assisted therapy more widely available—and legal. The music, they’ve discovered, really matters, since it not only supports the trip but can actually shape it, steering the patient toward new mental frontiers. And yet, most clinical researchers have still been using the same choppy playlists of Brahms, Bach, and the Beatles. They wanted something better—something less familiar, more bespoke—and Jon Hopkins was determined to fill the void.
In 2018, the British electronic producer set off on a mission to conceptualize a new genre of music specifically engineered to enhance guided trips. That, he has said, is how he wound up in a cave in the Amazon rainforest, marveling at nature and thinking about synths. The field recordings from that expedition form the basis of Music for Psychedelic Therapy, his immersive soundtrack to consciousness exploration that’s timed to the length of a ketamine high. A glacial, continuous ambient piece that draws on the epic beauty of nature, it’s a thoughtful blueprint for what the future of this field might sound like: spacious, delicate, comforting, a pastel mural of sound.
The album’s function and utility are key. It’s one thing to make art inspired by altered states; Hopkins’ mountainous 2018 album Singularity is a tribute to spiritual odysseys and vision quests. It’s another to compose music to accompany such journeys, especially those conducted in supervised clinical settings where many patients are suffering from depression, addiction, or PTSD. What music will make patients feel safe while also nudging them out of their comfort zones? Should the tape exist as background music or serve as a spiritual guide?
Hopkins’ strategy is to avoid too many specifics, forgoing beats and melodies for wide open space. This vastness may verge on tedious for more sober listeners who find themselves floating in its gossamer abyss, but it gives the record an important, practical flexibility. Rather than reflect his own idea of consciousness, he constructs an expansive, pink-hued canvas upon which we can project our own. You get the impression that Hopkins is aiming to set an example, and viewing the record as a touchstone for future works. Even the modernist, academic title feels as though it’s designed to be source material, cited decades down the line.
The album’s only grounding elements are the transportive sounds of nature—the rush of water, distant bird calls, the airy echo of the cave floor—which evoke an encompassing, majestic calm. “I wanted to move the consciousness of the listener from inside to outside,” Hopkins told The New York Times, adding that the record feels more like a place than a piece of music. Remarkably, it often feels like both. When wind blows in with surround-sound precision and seems to pass right over you, you’re there. When the gentle tones and textures bounce along the background like sunlight filtering through the trees, you’re there.
In some ways, Hopkins is uniquely qualified to create such a portal. A longtime classical pianist and commercial pop producer, he’s well attuned to music’s emotional levers; “Love Flows Over Us in Prismatic Waves” is a particularly gorgeous, gradient track that feels hopeful and heartbroken all at once. Similarly, his career as a techno producer and touring DJ has made him a master at suspense and release, as evidenced on “Deep in the Glowing Heart,” the project’s most intense and confrontational moment. Celestial summits like “Ascending, Dawn Sky” and “Arriving,” each twinkling in their own uplifting splendor, feel like products of the years he spent studying transcendental meditation and controlled breathing.
There is a case to be made for psychotherapy music that’s slightly more varied and structured. Rhythms can be comforting, giving you something to latch onto, and they can draw you further into a trance state. Indigenous groups have long used drumming and chanting to soundtrack shamanic ceremonies, for example, and more contemporary playlists tend to mirror a trip’s emotional form: onset, ascent, peak, recovery. For some, Hopkins’ approach will feel overly reserved, with too-subtle variations on the same shimmering theme. Is there such a thing as too much caution? Should this music be more imposing? And what about psilocybin trips that span eight or 10 hours? There are no right or wrong answers, of course, but the sheer variety of possible preferences is an argument against a one-size-fits-all approach.
Surprisingly enough, the album’s highlight comes in “Sit Around the Fire,” which was surely Hopkins’ riskiest move. The deeply moving piano-synth track features the late spiritual leader Ram Dass speaking to a congregation in 1975. After Dass died in 2019, his foundation sought to put some of his musings to music and went digging through their archives for something “universal and uplifting.” The final clip is an affectionate, clear-eyed outpouring of love that wraps its arms around you and squeezes. “You don’t need loneliness, you couldn’t possibly be alone,” Dass says, with a matter-of-factness that feels like truth. “You don’t need doubt because you already know.”
As the author of the counterculture bible Be Here Now, Dass is a new age celebrity—he’s on the magnets by the register at bead shops or quoted in your Burner friend’s Instagram bio. Sampling him could have felt schmaltzy, a cheap way of glitzing up the record to make it more marketable. But Hopkins’ tender, respectful treatment basks in simplicity—a well-placed piano chord, a choir-like synth—lending the song a refined elegance that honors the weight of these profound, emotional experiences. When the final hums fade and tape crackles lift, you get a glimpse at the wide-eyed resolution felt when the chemical loosens its grip.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Extending Richmond’s legacy of heavy weirdness, these upstarts flood hardcore with metal and noise references—all charged by a sense of revolutionary urgency.

Good to Feel

Richmond has long held the hard-earned reputation as one of the East Coast’s premier extreme music hotbeds. The capital city’s bands regularly steamroll their competition, even making the heavy musicians of a metropolis like New York City look over their shoulders each time another crew of youngbloods comes charging from the South. We saw it with Southern riff-rock via Alabama Thunderpussy. We saw it with the thrash of Municipal Waste and Gwar. We’ve seen it in extreme metal with Inter Arma and Occultist. And, once again, we see it with punk—this time, with the hardcore band Candy.
Candy collect former and current members of several RVA contemporaries. The upstarts came crashing into view last year with an aggressive self-titled demo that foretold their stylistic elasticity. And now, on their debut LP, Good to Feel, Candy tap a deep knowledge of hardcore’s past while staking a claim on the genre’s future. Good to Feel marries the baroque, shred-happy ecstasy of Japan’s Burning Spirits school of hardcore with New York’s furrowed-brow brand of pummeling and D-beat mania. They have a healthy appreciation for hardcore’s inveterate genre-smashers, Integrity. This is a primal scream from the most maladjusted branch of the punk family tree, flirting with umpteen other genres but refusing to commit to anything except pure upheaval.
The title track immediately charges ahead, with bare-knuckle swagger ripped straight off a rehearsal demo from a Japanese hardcore band like Death Side. Candy don’t let up until the brief record ends. Good to Feel is structured so as to maximize impact, with varying song lengths and sonic deviations staving off listener fatigue, the most common hardcore pitfall. Candy keep it moving, morphing, and confronting. The caveman stomp of “Lust for Destruction” and hyper-distorted two-step of “Systematic Death” bleed into a freewheeling guitar solo. “Panic Is On” may as well have come crawling out of a Lower East Side sewer in 1985, down to the anti-authoritarian message: “Polluted minds, illusion of threats/Exploiting the masses until death.” “Burning Water” pits malevolent grind against unhinged vocals, while groovy 1990s throwback “Distorted Dreams” indulges murky, headbang-ready riffs, dragging the listener’s neck toward hell.
Candy’s spiritual connection with heavy metal leaves ghostly fingerprints all over Good to Feel. The bruising “Human Target” comes with screaming speed-metal riffs, anchored by a grimy Hellhammer impression that’s complete with a spot-on Tom G. Warrior grunt. The song skewers ongoing police brutality, singling out killer cops—“Cleansing civilians, starting from scratch/Infliction of evil on the masses/Crucify, march in line/Won’t hesitate until they die.” It’s a soundtrack for burning down the police state, which Zak Quiram repeatedly rails against. That’s why this record matters—a lyrical missile, it’s loaded with the kind of revolutionary trappings that make you want to hit the streets running.
At an efficient 17 minutes, Good to Feel may make you reach for the ‘Play’ button over and over. And repeated listens do reveal clever moments and interesting stylistic choices, like the murderous homage to Entombed’s HM2-powered death crunch that anchors “Human Target.” To that end, Candy close with “Bigger Than Yours,” a surreal tapestry of droning shoegaze and punch-drunk guitar pop that fades into a bubbling wash of harsh noise. The move may seem surprising if Candy hadn’t spent the proceeding quarter-hour establishing how little regard they have for genre conventions and orthodoxy of any sort.


Experimental electronic musicians including Loraine James, Rupert Clervaux, and Oliver Coates tackle the spooky, microtonal source material of last year’s Music for Detuned Pianos.

Detuned Reworks

Max de Wardener’s Music for Detuned Pianos is such an exquisitely singular album that reworking it feels like deconstructing ice cream: largely unnecessary, potentially destructive, and unlikely to yield results as perfectly palatable as the original product. And yet, six short months after the release of Detuned Pianos, on which composer de Wardener used unorthodox tunings to create deliciously spooky acoustic vignettes, we have Detuned Reworks, featuring remixes by six UK producers drawn from the leftfield club scene and experimental electronic music. The results are often intriguing, sometimes exasperating, and occasionally revelatory.
Perhaps the biggest discovery to be made on Detuned Reworks is how extraordinarily potent the original album’s piano parts are when untethered from their mother album. Composed by de Wardener and performed by pianist Kit Downes, their otherworldly melodies are the musical equivalent of truffle oil: powerful sensory agents to be splashed across the mix, rather than employed in great quantities.
London experimental-music whirlwind Loraine James wields piano notes like weapons in her predatory remix of “Foxtrot,” slashing snatches of waspish playing across irregular electronic beats like swords through grapefruit, while experimental polymath Rupert Clervaux sets two lines from “Deranged Landscape” against each other in rickety patterns, then feeds off the results, adding sparse but effective drums to the uncanny mix. Composer and cellist Oliver Coates’ “Blue Slime Mix” of “Blueshift,” meanwhile, takes a dribble of the original’s nautical piano wobble and uses it as a base for an excruciatingly nervy acoustic drone, which builds like the headache-inducing tension of a really bad day at the office.
It’s not so much that these reworks are improvements on de Wardener’s original songs; rather, the producers pull de Wardener’s work into their own orbits. Clervaux nudges “Deranged Landscape” from its camp on the borders of Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II toward the suggestion of a basement jazz club, while Call Super masterfully manipulates cinematic album opener “The Sky Has a Film” into a syrupy, house-indebted number that deserves to be heard on expensive speakers at the start of an adventurous night out.
The reworks that don’t succeed are those where the producer fails to stamp an identity onto the original work, leaving it in a ponderous halfway house. Coby Sey is a promising artist whose warped vision of modern music would seem to fit with Detuned Pianos’ witchy universe. But his remix of “Bismuth Dream” is a little too blandly beautiful, a betrayal of the original’s unsettling gloom rather than a transformation of it. Manchester producer Herron comes across as if intimidated by the source material, using echoing snatches of piano and an awkward electronic beat that don’t even seem on talking terms, let alone in collaboration.
If there is a whiff of regret to this generally fascinating album, it’s that de Wardener didn’t push the boat farther out, both stylistically and geographically, in his choice of remixers. It would be fascinating to see what someone like 100 gecs or Angolan producer Nazar, for example, might do with Detuned Pianos’ slippery source material. As it stands, though, Detuned Reworks is an avant cheerleader for Music for Detuned Pianos’ considerable charms, sending you back to the original album with a hungry ear and newly sharpened mind.

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Oakland rapper the Jacka's new album suggests he should be recognized as one of the last decade's strongest writers—both within and outside of hip-hop. He makes accessible music that could easily appeal to a wide audience, but What Happened to the World will most readily reach those who still value hip-hop as an art form of evocative lyricism.

What Happened to the World

In a recent interview with NPR, Chris Rock suggested that the real "rapper's rappers"—much like the "comedian's comedians"—are, at some level, dysfunctional—and when it comes to ranking his favorites, he doesn't like to "reward dysfunction." Rakim was Rock's example ("He's dysfunctional 'cause he couldn't get into the studio—he had a chance to make a record with Dr. Dre and he quit. Somewhere in his mind, he would love to have 30 hits"). There's a germ of an idea here that feels correct: oftentimes the artists who most shape the medium aren't necessarily meant to be stars. But the notion that an artist who fails to cross over was never meant to be truly successful begs the question, the flipside of a famous artist rationalizing their success after the fact. To read hip-hop's history in this way ignores the massive structural changes that have worked to obscure the genre's creative spine. The rapper's rappers, the genre's true innovators, are as often victims of the market's arbitrary whims as they are their own flaws.
The Jacka came out of one of hip-hop's most creatively vibrant regional scenes. One-fifth of the respected Pittsburgh, Calif. Mob Figaz crew, the group arose in the wake of Mac Dre's post-penal second wind, and were prepared to sign to his Thizz Entertainment label when the rapper was murdered in Kansas City in 2004. The Bay's hyphy movement followed, as national attention focused on the dry, manic production style of producers like Rick Rock, and the culture that surrounded it: the drugs and the dreads, ghostriding the whip and thizz faces. While national attention focused on hyphy's production novelty, street rap fans in a network of Bay-affiliated cities from the Pacific Northwest to Kansas City became obsessed with Jacka's potent skill with the pen—particularly with the release of 2005's classic The Jack Artist. The arc of his career—the moment when every verse he dropped felt like a vital piece of the puzzle—lasted about four or five years. But this year's What Happened to the World is his best record since 2009's Tear Gas, and suggests that whatever his potential for national stardom, the Jacka should be recognized as one of the last decade's strongest writers—both within and outside of hip-hop.
What Happened to the World is a leisurely-paced record, moving at the speed of syrup. (The one exception, the uptempo "MOB 4 Life", is perhaps the record's only misfire). The production is of-a-piece and by and large Jacka still has a gift for a good chorus melody, but the heart of the album is in its star's lyrical performance. Jacka is a minimalist as a writer, an artist for whom saying a little implies a lot. Although those looking for club records or pop hits in the real-world sense might look elsewhere, Jacka still has an open, inclusive pop ear—this is accessible music which could easily appeal to a wide audience. Nonetheless, the album will most readily reach those who still value hip-hop as an art form of evocative lyricism. One of Jacka's strengths is a gift for potent and original imagery, as on "2 Dungeons Deep": "Got the Wesson poppin' like meat in the pot fryin'/ Better have respect like the vet when he feed lions." Even at his most brutal, he sidesteps cliché ("When the trigger squeeze we only leave bones, like a Lynx home," "This Canon not for pictures but it still will make your center fold") in the service of triggering powerfully rendered ideas.
For those just discovering the Jacka's work, it helps in some ways to think of him as the West Coast's answer to mixtape legend Max B: born within a year of each other, the two share similar influences (Slick Rick's melodic nonchalance seems an obvious common touchstone), and their sing-song choruses helped both become regional stars just as the old super-producer system began to break down. Their fundamental approach was both hip-hop and pop, and they reimagined New York's commercial golden era—roughly 1998-2003—for a new time or place. Where Max's style had the kind of implicit politics of music from the have-nots, Jack was more explicitly informed by both his identity as a Muslim and a tradition of the left coast's political radicals, particularly rappers like Ice Cube, Kam, and Paris. At the same time, there can be no question that his identity was first and foremost as a gangster rap artist, with all of its morally compromised implications. But it's what makes his approach so uniquely effective.
The bulk of Jacka's career feels like an attempt to reconcile principle and morality with a lifestyle that has made such stances untenable—on third song "See It Thru" (as throughout the record) he brings the contradictions together directly: "Hard times, trying to be cool, I made the bed I slept.../ Ill whip come through the night, though I'm a piece of shit." Rather than running from hip-hop's love of the fast life, of drugs, of materialism, he embraces their attraction. Criticisms of hip-hop's glorification of drugs and violence ignore that those things often glorify themselves; they are self-evidently appealing. One could argue Jack tries to have his cake and eat it too, but his fundamental realism one-ups hip-hop's typical righteous/ignorant dichotomy. "On Methazine", a record about promethazine addiction, manages to make the drug feel like a panacea for all that aches, physically and spiritually, but ends with these words: "Tell myself I'll put away the cup when the summer's gone/ Shit ridiculous, finna be Christmas and we still ain't done," spiraling into the sample's numb warmth, before shifting to the chorus: "Fuck with me, let's talk some more, 'cause I know everything/ But it's hard to notice when I'm leaned on Methazine."
Through the loose sketches of his sparse verses, the album is more than an attempt to reconcile good and evil within; it also refuses to let the outside world off the hook. In attacking his own moral failings, it gives strength to his assault on a wider system. ("Weed Farmer" is perhaps the closest a pro-pot record has come to "Nature of the Threat" in rap history.) Husalah's final verse to close the record has a dark poetic charge: "False hope tossed the rope around them tree limbs/ Horrific strange fruit hang from loops in deep Southern winds." But the album is more than its political content, too: it's a personal statement of vitality from an artist now in his 30s, who may be removed from the travails of his youth but still wrestles with their consequences. "We hit the club, takin' pictures bitches stalkin the kid/ I had the time of my life, I'll never be young again/ But now I only think money 'cuz I'm finally a man."


The Pro Era rapper finds the middle of the road on his latest project, chasing hot sounds in lieu of finding his own.

IIWII (It Is What It Is)

As a rapper and producer, Kirk Knight is serviceable at best. He’s a Swiss Army knife, able to bend his vanilla rap style to any production that supports him. His 2015 debut, Late Night Special was a largely tame affair, side-stepping around the thick ’90s air that continuously threatens to engulf Pro Era’s existence. Three years, a collaboration album, (Nyck @ Knight) and an instrumental project (Black Noise) later, IIWIIarrives limply. The rhymes are cool, the beats are OK, and, taken together, it’s mostly tolerable. Truly, it is what it is.
There’s no electric presence to counterbalance the vanilla spirit of his music. Kirk firmly abides by the unspoken rap subgenre rules, refusing to deviate from well-worn pathways to forge interesting trails of his own. IIWII may be only 12 tracks but it feels like it’s dragging its feet to get to the end. His stabs at a hodgepodge of popular styles are just grasping at straws. The album can try and emulate what’s hot to win over fans of all types, but, at the end of the day, the lack of unique options makes it more boring than captivating.
IIWII, very badly, wants to be larger-than-life. “M.O.,” an inspirational, shit-talking diatribe, kicks things off with gusto. It careens along with a decent amount of pep, but its delivery of hashtag #bars are eye-rolling. The inspirational talk works when it curses you out with intense, spit-fire locution, but stingers like “Fly on the wall, I’ve been buggin’ out” will send fresh waves of Big Sean-level cringe trickling down the shoulders.
To be fair, knocking Kirk for his lack of explosive lyricism would be in bad faith. He revealed to UPROXX that his songwriting approach has evolved from just studying the thesaurus, with him focusing more on making relatable music as opposed to the nostalgic flow-heavy rap of his Pro Era cohorts. But there are plenty of artists that easily inject freshness into simplistic rhymes—hell, J. Cole rapped about folding clothes and found a way to make one of life’s most boring tasks sound tolerable.
Kirk’s problem isn’t the intelligence behind the bars or the flows; it’s the energy that drives the train. He chugs on methodically without any surprise, risk, or invention behind it. Occasionally, he shakes things up with melodies like on “Leverage” and “Downtime” where he supports the chorus with smooth vocals for just long enough to marinate the songs without simmering away some of their flavors. But elsewhere, like on “Full Metal Jacket,” the lack of creativity makes it feel like he’s pulling us through the mud. Kirk Knight’s heart is right there underneath his obsession with traditionalism. But chasing every hot sound doesn’t make up for the fact that he doesn’t have one of his own.