After a 12-year absence, the singer-songwriter returns with a raw, unadorned celebration of survival.

Riderless Horse

Note: This review includes details of suicide and abuse.

Nina Nastasia’s cryptic lyrics used to read like horrible mysteries she warned against solving, protecting the listener by sparing the details. “We never talked about the thing we witnessed,” she sang on the opening lines of 2003’s Run to Ruin, honoring that silence by lasting the entire album without elaborating. Where other songwriters’ power came from specifics, Nastasia drew hers from obfuscation.
On Riderless Horse, her first album after a 12-year absence, she’s no longer disguising the traumas she’s writing about. As she now discusses openly, for more than two decades she was in an abusive relationship with her late manager and creative partner Kennan Gudjonsson, which degraded to such a degree that she eventually retreated not just from music but from the world. “We didn’t want anyone to see how ugly things could get, so we increasingly isolated from our friends and family,” she wrote in a statement accompanying the album. For a time she was all but confined to the small New York City studio apartment they shared.
Gudjonsson had been there quite literally from the beginning of her career (that’s him alongside her on the cover of her 2000 debut Dogs, which he helped finance). He introduced her to producer Steve Albini, who became her go-to collaborator and one of her biggest evangelists. Gudjonsson’s fingerprints are all over her first six records, from the funeral accordion accompaniments to the haunted string accents—all his creative decisions, Nastasia says. It’s a variation of a story that’s played out with sickening frequency throughout music history: He helped her realize the greatness he saw in her. He also controlled and abused her.
In January 2020, Nastasia left him. The next day he died by suicide. That’s more grief and trauma than one album could ever process, so Riderless Horse doesn’t try to be the definitive account. Instead, over its unadorned 34 minutes, it simply documents why she had to leave—and sometimes, in the process, why she stayed. In plainspoken lyrics, with only her sparse, acoustic guitar accompanying her, she captures not only their fights (although she says Gudjonsson was never physically abusive, these songs are thick with images of bruises, blood, and broken bones) but also moments of tranquility and tenderness. “I will go with you wherever/Digging holes for buried treasure/End the day with just our dirty feet,” she sings with unexpected affection on “Blind as Batsies.” She’s volunteered herself for a delicate task, memorializing the man she loved while exposing his demons.
There’s a way you expect an album born of these circumstances to play: fragile, grief-stricken, almost oppressively sad. But Riderless Horse rarely lingers on pain. More often the album is a celebration of survival, with Nastasia occasionally sounding euphoric about her new sense of freedom. “Oh, the water is fine and I feel like I’m happy for the first time,” she beams on “Lazy Road,” one of several hopeful, soft-picked folk tunes. Decades of cramped existence in New York have done nothing to curb her gift for conjuring the boundless skylines and inviting back porches of Appalachia.
The album never breaks its focus on Nastasia’s voice, which is as raw and radiant as ever. On “You Were So Mad,” it soars with defiant fury. Albini’s lovingly bare production remains, but all the embellishments of its predecessors—the nocturnal accordions, the skeletal drums, and cautionary strings—have been peeled away, as if to underscore Gudjonsson’s absence. She doesn’t need them. Riderless Horse is Nastasia’s seventh album, but in a sense it’s a debut. For all its anguish, it’s underpinned by the joyful realization that she’s finally free to record on her own terms.
If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts or know someone who is, we recommend these resources:
National Suicide Prevention Lifeline
http://www.suicidepreventionlifeline.org
988


Buoyed by a fresh coat of synths and a streamlined energy, the Decemberists’ latest is a curious middle-of-the-road album, teasing a number of directions without committing to any of them.

I’ll Be Your Girl

Late on I’ll Be Your Girl, there’s “Rusalka, Rusalka / The Wild Rushes,” a narrative suite based on an old Slavic parable about a mermaid who seduces men only to trick them into drowning. Over eight minutes brimming with dramatic tension and florid prose, Colin Meloy profiles two victims, one a willing sacrifice aroused by his fate, the other naïve and unsuspecting. “Your brow tressed in flowers, pale in a liminal moon,” he sings, setting up each death with the patience of a master storyteller, relishing the suspense until the track finally erupts into fits of grandiose, polyphonic folk.
The Decemberists used to live for these sorts of epic, carefully scripted flights of historical fantasy. A decade ago the band might have even dedicated an entire album to this murderous mermaid—you can almost hear the Baltic instrumentation and picture the lithographed cover art—but here the song is just a pit stop on an album that otherwise avoids the excesses of yore. Since hitting peak fancifulness on 2009’s The Hazards of Love, the Decemberists have streamlined their music into something more direct and less fussy. Rather than carry on like the world’s most overqualified LARP convention house band, they’ve adopted a nomadic approach, running with whatever muse that presents itself at the moment. It’s a bittersweet tradeoff: They had to evolve to keep things fresh, even though whatever they do next is unlikely to be quite as memorable as what came before.
Even more so than the two albums that preceded it, I’ll Be Your Girl is a grab bag, teasing a number of directions without committing to any of them. As part of their drive to shake things up, the band subbed out longtime producer Tucker Martine for John Congleton, an indie ringer and chameleon who feeds on sonic extremes. It’s not the most natural fit—his best projects, like his bristly collaborations with Xiu Xiu, St. Vincent, and Swans or his own unnerving albums with Paper Chase, have more of an edge to them than anything in the Decemberists’ catalogue—but pairing him with a fellow music obsessive like Meloy presents some intriguing possibilities. If any combo can conjure an aesthetic that's novel and specific, it should be this one.
The record presents its boldest idea upfront, with a run of opening tracks that tease a potentially radical synth-rock reinvention for the group. Meloy has cited New Order and Depeche Mode as influences, but the vast, rolling synthesizers on “Once in My Life” are closer in spirit to Berlin’s “Take My Breath Away” or Pretty in Pink-era Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark, reference points that aren’t nearly as glamorous on paper but are far more interesting in execution. For a while, there’s an almost subversive thrill in hearing those gaudy, artificial synthesizers bleed through the group’s once folky, acoustic sound. Within a few songs, though, the shock of the new wears off, and the band begins to default to familiar influences. Three consecutive songs give off strong whiffs of R.E.M.: “Severed” (it’s got a moody, “Driver 8” sort of vibe), “Starwatcher” (very Document), and “Tripping Along” (the album’s Automatic for the People moment).
I’ll Be Your Girl is intermittently political in its own way, even though beyond the special thanks to Special Counsel Robert Mueller tucked into the liner notes, it only addresses politics in the broadest sense. Instead, Meloy captures the general frustration that the world is just kind of shitty right now. “For once in my life…could just something go right?” he sings, invoking the first of the album's many Charlie Brown-isms. He takes that same chipper nihilism to silly extremes on the record’s most confounding inclusions: a pair of “fuck everything” anthems inexplicably executed like kids songs. The sickly sweet “Everything is Awful” is basically a novelty romp—Meloy’s answer, perhaps, to that manic theme from The Lego Movie—while “We All Die Young” sets a dopey Jock Jams beat to a Kidz Bop cheer-along.
Taken on their own, those songs aren’t too much of a stretch. Plenty of Decemberists fans have aged into parenthood, and it’s really not hard to imagine a future where like They Might Be Giants, another favorite of the “Wait Wait... Don’t Tell Me!” set, they begin recording kids albums. Judging
from I’ll Be Your Girl, they’d probably be great at it. But the fact that they’ve basically sandwiched a
couple of kids tunes into the same album as a suite about a killer sex mermaid only highlights how confused and directionless this band is right now. Where they once specialized in meticulously plotted albums, now they mostly seem to be winging it. They’re still making some alluring music, yet their albums have never sounded more disjointed.


On Big Bossin Vol. 1, Detroit underground hero and Texas-based producer Cardo Got Wings work together to make a smooth, technicolor tribute to classic LA gangster rap.

Payroll Giovanni / Cardo: Big Bossin Vol. 1

Big Bossin Vol. 1

If Detroit underground hero Payroll Giovanni and Minnesota-born, Texas-based producer Cardo Got Wings swerved any further West on Big Bossin’ Vol 1, they’d splash down into the Pacific. The pair’s panoramic portrait of a mid-level hustler leans so heavily on classic LA gangster rap, Bay Area hyphy and hood movie mythology, it’s impossible to picture these narratives taking place anywhere else but California. Call it Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas music—a nostalgic throwback to a time when pop culture was loaded with images of palm-treed pavements, side-held pistols and fingers curled into a ‘W’ that comfortably files alongside Kendrick Lamar and DJ Mustard’s modernized takes. Chance the Rapper’s gospel-swathed Coloring Book has been called the sound of the summer, but it’s *Big Bossin’ Vol 1 *that’ll fill the Lowriders with octane.
Payroll’s a member of Doughboyz Cashout, whose contract with Jeezy’s CTE World imprint has more or less come to nothing, but the group has countered the stasis with concrete-tough mixtapes that bite like the Michigan winter. On Big Bossin’ Vol 1, Cardo brings in the sun. Behind the boards on all 18 tracks, his beats are built to feel like westside classics, with melodic synthesizers, silky vocoders, sour whistles, James Worthy-sized handclaps and female background vocals.
The emcee proves the perfect foil for Cardo’s grooves. His relaxed flow is slowed a couple of knots as he sinks into the beats, evoking the swagger of Too $hort and the smoothness of the late Mac Dre–if the two West Coast legends had been compelled to rap about selling drugs on every song. Pitching himself as a rags-to-riches neighborhood baron, Payroll chronicles a life of drug deals, bright jewels and warm pistols. But Big Bossin’ Vol 1 is more self-aware pastiche than hard-boiled realism. There’s no creeping menace, ten crack commandments, or cutting moral center.
The outline might be familiar, but Payroll brings his own literary deftness. His fluid rapping is matched with a close eye for detail and sharp turn of phrase. “Sell Something” sees him lay out an origin story as he recalls finding an eighth-ounce of cocaine at age 15: “It was like the crack gods were like, ‘Here young dog’,” he spits wryly. On “Day in the Life,” he recycles the concept of Ice Cube’s “It Was a Good Day,” replacing the basketball games and Goodyear Blimp with police sightings and handguns. Moving from the mundanity of his morning routine, to the tension of almost gunning down two innocents, Payroll’s storytelling paints pictures in clear technicolor.
“Successful” is the clearest iteration of Payroll and Cardo’s collaborative sparkle. The beatmaker recycles the opulent keys and fat bassline previously gifted to Nef the Pharaoh on pop number “Betta Run.” In Payroll’s hands, it’s reimagined as a brash hustler’s anthem. The rapper plays the grinning Don, laying out by his pool in the Cali sun, counting the fruits of the come-up. It’s a sound as timeless as a Bukowski novel; as iconic as the Hollywood sign. Together, the duo have coaxed out their respective strengths on Big Bossin’ Vol 1. At a time when the West is enjoying a creative surge, a couple of young outsiders are helping to carry the weight.


On their third LP, Moon Duo make psychedelia for the city, with even its more ascendant moments coated by a thin veil of industrial grit.

Shadow of the Sun

Psychedelia has two speeds: Either it elevates you into an altered consciousness, or it lulls you to sleep like so much television static. With Shadow of the Sun, their third full-length effort, Moon Duo often approach the former state, and only occasionally slip into the latter. Singer-guitarist Ripley Johnson and singer-keyboardist Sanae Yamada are joined on record by drummer John Jeffrey, and the consistent use of live drums—Jeffrey was only added to the band’s full-time roster after their 2013 European Tour—does a lot to imbue the winding, floating sound with some physical power.
Although Shadow of the Su**n is rooted in psychedelia, there are elements of proto-punk all over it, darkening the songs and making them more human. "Wilding", the album's standout opening track, resembles one of Jonathan Richman’s more uptempo songs, tinged with a tinny Haight-Ashbury tambourine and some wigged-out synths. Johnson’s solos, which can occasionally wander, are concise and focused here, setting an energetic stage for what’s to come.
Shadow of the Sun is psych for the city, and even in its more ascendant moments, a thin veil of industrial grit, leaning towards krautrock, keeps the record from ever really floating skyward. Their last LP, 2012’s Ralph Waldo Emerson-inspired Circles, hinted at a relationship to nature. But unlike fellow drugged-out craftsmen Brightblack Morning Light, whose hazy, shimmering songs are all palo santo and desert light, Moon Duo’s creepy synths and razor-sharp guitars never venture into more magical realms.
None of the songs on Shadow of the Sun sound new, but the familiar sounds create an atmosphere of safety that allows the more unexpected elements of the record all the more noteworthy. Occasionally, as on "Night Beat" and "Zero", the synths reach horror-movie levels, toeing the line between new wave and pure camp. The riff to "Slow Down Low" is more Bethany Cosentino than Jerry Garcia, and the song’s precise, languid gentleness accomplishes what psych does at its best; it transports the listener to that place just outside of reality, where it’s ok to drop out and just float for awhile. It’s a shame that this effect isn’t more consistent throughout Shadow of the Sun, but in the moments when the campy, dirge-like darkness lifts, it shines bright.


Sirens is a thoughtful study in contrasts, both musical and political. It's only Nicolas Jaar's second LP, but it is the mark of an enduring electronic composer.

Sirens

There are only about 45 seconds left on Nicolas Jaar’s new album Sirens when something astounding happens. Heralded by a selection of drums and birdcall synths, a gospel cry arrives, shrouded in distortion and punctuated by sharp arrhythmic drumming. The most useful words to describe this are the silliest and most hyperbolic: awesome, transcendent, timeless or more accurately, out-of-time. It begs for pretension, for the vocabulary of divinity and “high art,” for references to religious philosophers and poets of the West that you barely remember from college, Milton and Kierkegaard, Eliot and Blake. And though there are many similarly striking moments on Sirens, this one stands out for its brevity and particular beauty. It is a moment thoroughly earned by the album that precedes it, and in less than a minute, it’s gone.
This moment—a supernova flash of prodigious skill—can be seen as something of a stand-in for Jaar’s career to date. In 2011, when Jaar was just 21, he released his debut album, Space Is Only Noise**, introducing a downtempo combination of psychedelia and dance music that vaulted him into the vanguard of the world’s electronic artists. The record came alive in a room, its amorphous body emerging from the stereo, its limbs unfolding into every corner. His ability to conjure up what seemed like an extra dimension in his music made you aware of the tautology: space was noise, but he made noise seem like space.
The next year Jaar revealed the depth of his talent for collage with his Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1. These mixes are often superlative, but his felt more personal than most, even as it showcased his interest in referencing the texts of others. In one of many sophisticated in-jokes, Jaar, who is Chilean-American, introduced the operative sample from Jay Z’s “My 1st Song,” with Jay Z’s own voice. That vocal prepared listeners to hear the Black Album* *closer before Jaar dropped the original version, “Tu y Tu Mirar, Yo y Mi Cancion,” by the Chilean band, Los Ángeles Negros, in its place. The mix was filled with moments like these—jam-packed with allusions but still absorbing for those who didn’t catch the references.
And then, Jaar shrank away from center stage. In 2013, he started his own label, Other People, partly to foster the careers of his musician friends. Jaar is a generous collaborator—artists like Dave Harrington, his partner in the duo Darkside, have been eager to credit his willingness to help them with their own work. But the instinct to work with others may not have been purely selfless. Jaar felt enormous pressure to replicate his early success. In an interview with Pitchfork in 2013, he confessed that he was scared of releasing music that wasn’t up to those standards:
“For the first five years of making music, I did it because I had fun,” he said. “When it started to get real, I was like, ‘Now if I put out something else and it's not as good as what I did before, people will start thinking I suck.’”
So Jaar produced others’ projects and made critically acclaimed records with Harrington under the Darkside moniker. But slowly, over the last two years, he’s been creeping back toward the microphone, using his own name. First there were some extraordinary singles. Then, last summer’s Pomegranates, a slippery alternate soundtrack to an old Russian film. Then *Nymphs—*an uncollected EP, maybe?—excellent, but difficult to evaluate holistically.
*Sirens *represents a full reemergence, as close as he may ever get to kicking over the mic stand. He doesn't reveal many new tricks, but his knowledge of his own palette is masterful in every moment. More poetic and thoughtful than ever before, Jaar maintains an ability to fit seemingly disparate sounds together as if they were always meant to find each other. Add the strands of political expression that are gathered on *Sirens, *often cloaked in odd textures, in Spanish, or in cryptic lyrics, and you have a record as compelling as any of Jaar’s other works.
It opens with the track “Killing Time,” which feels like entering a labyrinth, or maybe a pyramid, something forbidding and funereal. The sound of a flag waves in the wind, keys like jagged wind chimes shatter on the floor. Nico is patient, but understands the need for progression, and though slower songs like this may linger in silence or briefly lavish attention on a particular effect, riff, or drum sound, they never stop moving.
“Killing Time,” is silent, respectful, matching its lyrics (“We were just waiting…”) And then “The Governor” which shares a post-punk edge with another song, “Three Sides of Nazareth,” jolts the record into sudden motion. Those two tracks, with their driving rhythms and clear lyrics, are the easiest to glom on to on first listen. The words are more or less affixed to the music, in contrast with other tracks like “Killing Time” and parts of “No,” where lyrics seem to dwell in the spacious labyrinth evoked by the sound. On those tracks, you’re never sure exactly where you’re going to stumble upon a sudden string of words, of thoughts.
"The Governor" is fast and loud and urgent. When I listened to it out of sequence, I wondered whether those qualities were imposed on “The Governor” because it's only fast and loud and urgent in comparison to “Killing Time,” or whether it actually is those things. These are the kind of thoughts that psychedelia provokes at its best, and Jaar adores these puzzles. It’s his obsession with setting up dichotomies and resolving them that places him firmly in a Western tradition. He’s able to work a kind of alchemy upon the raw elements of his music, making one thing into its polar opposite: hard into soft, ugly into pretty, slow into fast. Like the word “sirens” itself, (the ancient temptress, the modern alarms), his music is able to evoke opposing ideas at the same time.
These contradictions give Sirens its strength, particularly during the album’s centerpiece, the song "No." It’s the only segment of music on the digital version of the album that includes a musical element not written, recorded, performed, mixed, and produced by Nico. (It’s a Chilean harp piece, “Lagrimas,” by Sergio Cuevas.) This section helps us to understand the mystery at the heart of Sirens, represented by the line of Spanish lyrics adorning its cover. The end of “Leaves,” the entirety of “No,” and the beginning of “Three Sides of Nazareth,” orbit around two conversations. The first seems to be a recording of a young Nico speaking with his father, the artist Alfredo Jaar. They discuss a statue being attacked by lions.
The words of “No” are in Spanish, and they contain the second discussion, which serves as a parable that illuminates the first. An unhappy neighbor approaches Nico, and they discuss multiple contradictions—the far and the near, the inside and the outside. But the core of their conversation are the words from Sirens’ cover: “Ya dijimos no pero el si esta en todo.” This translates as: “We already said no but the yes is in everything,” a reference to the Chilean national plebiscite, a 1988 referendum on democracy in the country. In the referendum, on whether Chile should continue to be ruled by General Augusto Pinochet, who had seized power about 15 years earlier, voting “no” was voting “yes” to democracy.
But if, as Jaar sings, “The yes is in everything,” the idea is that we don’t need to see the future to know that nothing ever really changes, that the cycle continues whether you vote for democracy or not. In turn, it suggests that the statue under discussion between little Nico and Alfredo, (whose own complicated politics are worth noting) could very well have been of Salvador Allende, who Pinochet ousted.
There are plenty of extraordinary references on Sirens that I’m sure I missed. But, as with the Essential Mix, as with any collage, being ignorant of any of these things hardly lessens the weight of the music. What you pick up from the album is a real suspicion of power*, *from “The Governor” (“All the blood’s hidden in the governor’s trunk”) to “Killing Time” (“Money, it seems, needs its working class.”) And at the same time, Nico, through the music, exercises his own power, pulling on his listeners and compelling them to move, dance, think, and engage with one another, or sometimes to sit silently and take it all in.
Nico's aversion to authority reaches a climax with that last track, “History Lesson,” which ends with those 45 transcendent seconds that I’m still failing to put into words. “History Lesson” takes its cues from old soul and doo-wop, like the Beach Boys at their most psychedelic. Think “Feel Flows” and those unfolding, enveloping missiles of soul.
The music on “History Lesson” is almost laughably gentle at first, and Jaar employs a trick favored by both John Lennon (“Run for Your Life”) and Paul McCartney (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”), juxtaposing inviting music with disturbing lyrics. Here’s how his history lesson starts: “Chapter one: We fucked up/Chapter two: We did it again, and again, and again, and again/Chapter three: We didn’t say sorry.” And so on. The words are a harsh rebuke of any political system. But the music is tender. And the track is bleak and funny, and naïve and wise, and political and personal. It feels like everything all at once. It feels like Sirens.


America's boldest pop star once again crafts a solo album that veers between the vanguard and the insipid.

The Sweet Escape

Is there another mainstream pop star who flits between lights-on likeability and pouty-lipped empty vesseldom as dramatically or frequently as Gwen Stefani? In the three years since abandoning the MTV rock ghetto she inhabited with No Doubt, and her subsequent self-reinvention as a certifiable pop celeb and fashionplate mogul, she's been doing wind sprints between these two incompatible personae. Nonetheless, since going solo with 2004's patchy but single-rich Love.Angel.Music.Baby., Stefani's remained above the fray of the ongoing clusterfuck between commerce and art-- and she's done it by brand-building in both the abstract sense (via her quest for pop cultural memes) and in the more traditional sense (with her clothing line L.A.M.B. scoring bonus cross-promotional hits with every in-song mention).
Of course, Stefani also deserves credit for her gutsy musical choices. The spazzy, overcaffeinated electro of past singles like "What You Waiting For?" and the sparse drumline squibbles of "Hollaback Girl" suggest she's not content to merely rack up hits; she also wants her game to be the freshest around. That's a desirable instinct in a pop star, and despite her predilection for hijacking what feels like every single empty space on The Sweet Escape to play her own hypegirl ("How sick is this?" she beams in the intro to "Breakin' Up", minutes before declaring "Don't Get It Twisted" "the most craziest shit ever"), her single-minded interest in smuggling the weirdest sounds onto TRL results in some of The Sweet Escape's finest moments.
Case in point: Lead single "Wind It Up", which wraps a "Lonely Goatherd" yodel sample from Stefani's beloved The Sound of Music around a wriggly Neptunes beat. As mainstream singles go, it's an absurd-sounding concoction that skates perilously close to the edge of utter ridiculousness, but something about the sheer nerviness of the idea ultimately sees it through. If I had to guess at a single from this year that eventually ingratiated itself to the highest number of first-time haters, this would probably be it, and in Stefani's world, that's like the Holy Grail. Unlike most pop singers, Stefani aims to win you over with oddity. (There's a reason Alice in Wonderland was her last album's most recurrant theme.)
It's a high-risk, high-reward strategy, but most of The Sweet Escape's other gonzo pop songs yield some degree of payout. "Now That You Got It" surfs on a loping hip-hop beat and a staccato piano sample while Stefani splits wailing time with a chorus of alarms. The Neptunes-produced "Yummy" earns Best Song status by moving from a skeletal rhythmic backbone and resounding "Milkshake"-pinching triangle hit into a spiralling melody line that sounds like a Sherman Brothers outtake. Also, "Don't Get It Twisted" sounds like reggaeton-polka.
Thing is, it takes real time to wring genius out of the obscure and unseemly, and time is not a luxury that Stefani the entrepreneur affords herself. As such, most of The Sweet Escape's problems arise as a result of her schedule-dicated slog back towards middle ground. With the exception of the spazzy, Akon-produced doo-wop track "The Sweet Escape" and the Keane-penned "Early Winter"-- which proves that Stefani still has the ability to elevate an otherwise ordinary rock song to another level-- everything else here has the vague whiff of tossed-off album fattener. The unofficial sequel to "What You Waiting For?", "Orange County Girl" boasts another self-writing lyric ("Don't know what I'm doing back in the studio/ Getting greedy cause he said he had another sick flow/ So I had to hollaback cause I didn't get enough/ Still feel the Wonderland, Alice and the tick tock") that, in a Charle Kaufman-aping stylee, mistakes meta for content. Elsewhere, "4 in the Morning" and "U Started It" exhume the ghosts of S Club and Debbie Gibson respectively, in turn destroying the mallpop cred that Stefani accrued with L.A.M.B.'s impeccable "Cool".
By now you get the point. One step forward, three steps sideways, one step back, The Sweet Escape continues in Stefani's proud tradition of being caught somewhere between the vanguard and the insipid. Considering this is the same person who once rolled out "Hollaback Girl" and the Harajuku girls in one fell swoop, it's not the least bit surprising, but the pockets of brilliance here are compelling enough to warrant holding out hope that Stefani's best as a boundary-pushing pop singer still lies ahead.


The grime producer teams up with a host of rising MCs for a bleak and energizing album that tries to imagine a better future.

Prole Art Threat

Prole Art Threat takes its name and credo from a Fall song; according to Anthoney Hart, who produces grime under the name East Man, the title is “a reflection of working-class creativity and how the establishment marginalize us and (perhaps on a subconscious level) see us as a threat.” To that end, he works with others to build an autonomous zone, inaccessible to the powers that be. Bare spaces and micro drum hits form its otherworldly terrain. Spend time with it, and you’ll get a sense of what type of world he and his collaborators would like to see.
East Man’s futuristic approach to grime is to strip the already elemental genre to its sparse essentials. His beats jitter out of empty space, full of unpredictable decisions. Bubbling clicks and dulled drum hits permeate the album, and the BPM rarely falls below 130. Every now and then, the vaporous reflection of one voice will float over the original for fractions of a second, giving the MC another chance to be heard. When Brazilian rapper Fernando Kep features on “Ourobouros,” even though his sped-up intonations and singsong rhymes are unique, he locks right into the mix.
Three collaborators from 2018’s Red, White, & Zero—Darkos Strife, Lyrical Strally, and Eklipse—guest here, and their precise rhymes match the liquid propellant of East Man’s music. Newcomer Ny Ny falls upon the percussive orbitals of “Who Am I?” with a sense of purpose, moving deftly around a morphing structure made up of wood-paneled knocks and phasers, maintaining stability through boasts and dares: “I’m out of the box, they can’t box me in/I’m orthodox so unique it’s a sin/I walk my own path, best believe I will win.” East Man’s productions throw up constant obstacles, like bass that drops out without warning, and echoed clatters that slice through the vocal tracks. It adds drama to the performances: any rapper who can sprint through this minefield untouched is ready for whatever dystopic future awaits.
In the liner notes to Red, White, & Zero, the writer and theorist Paul Gilroy argued that for young people in London, “The scale on which life is lived has shrunk.” It’s clear that the horizon is even more limited now than when he wrote those words two years ago; it’s tough to imagine large-scale change when you’re stuck inside your own home. On Prole Art Threat, East Man and his collaborators reject the defeatism that comes from this realization. East Man’s productions are built out of sparse material, while the improvisatory zeal of his collaborators leads them to find novel ways to communicate. Together, they seem to say that change can only come from ditching what doesn’t work, while constantly searching for what does.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


U2's first collaboration with Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois comes across as a transitional album of the highest magnitude.

U2: The Unforgettable Fire [Deluxe Edition]

The Unforgettable Fire [Deluxe Edition]

The first song on 1984's The Unforgettable Fire is called "A Sort of Homecoming"-- not just "A Homecoming". And that shade of uncertainty-- that "sort of"-- is key. Compared to U2's first three albums-- and almost everything that has come afterward-- The Unforgettable Fire is marked by a sketchy in-between-ness that works as a gracious foil to the the band's natural audacity. It's sort of stadium rock, sort of experimental, sort of spiritual, sort of subdued, sort of uncharacteristic, sort of brilliant, sort of a classic.
After their first major breakthrough with 1983's War and its anthems "Sunday Bloody Sunday" and "New Year's Day", U2 could have easily continued to perfect the fist-pumping, flag-waving arena battle cry. Instead, they sought out producer Brian Eno, a bold choice for a band looking to parlay semi-success into something Springsteen-ian. While Eno is now seen as a go-to stadium savior (see: Coldplay's Viva La Vida), back then he was still the guy who coaxed magnificent weirdness out of David Bowie and Talking Heads, to say nothing of his own work, which ranged from prog-rock insanity to elegant wallpaper. The U2/Eno braintrust has since become one of the most out-and-out successful in rock history, but The Unforgettable Fire finds the pair-- along with frequent conspirator Daniel Lanois-- feeling each other out and testing limits. The album ebbs and flows along the spectrum between the spiky, post-punk U2 of old and the impressionistic, Eno-assisted U2 they were yearning to become.
Not only were U2 and Eno an odd match musically, but their personalities clashed in a remarkable way as well. The album's interpersonal drama plays out on a half-hour making-of documentary originally released in 1984 and included in this reissue along with the remastered album and a disc of requisite B-sides and live cuts. While U2 were caricatured as honest and hardworking Irish boys who never met a stone-faced portrait they didn't admire, and Eno was the aloof London aesthete who openly mocked rock convention, you can watch the two subtly influencing each other throughout the intimate documentary. For example, after Bono is seen roiling himself into a frenzy while improvising over "Pride (In the Name of Love)"-- screaming, sweating, and flailing like a wounded lunatic in the recording booth-- Eno is nearly left speechless before he utters a totally sincere understatement for the ages: "I must say, this track is really bringing something out in your singing." The producer's unflappable cool often leads to a fatherly kindness that goes lengths to explain his lasting appeal.
The documentary, much like the album itself, humanizes U2 while fueling the idea that this band's head was completely up its own ass in the 80s. "I believe the songs are already written, and I think the less you get in the way of them the better," says Bono at one point in the film, explaining his muse, "The minute you take up that pen... you start interfering with the song-- I don't know if that sounds too spiritual." And while I'm not sure if the idea that God is writing your songs is truly "spiritual," it does sound quite presumptuous. But that's also the beauty of this band; whether in ironic or world-saving mode, their ambition is boundless. This can lead to garish stadium extravaganzas, but it can also birth something like "Bad", The Unforgettable Fire's centerpiece and one of the grandest arena-rock songs ever written.
There's no half-assing "Bad". After years of radio repeats, the track seems commonplace, which is a testament to just how much U2 have burrowed their way into the world's collective musical memory. Because this six-minute monoculture moment chronicling the torment of heroin addiction has no discernible chorus. Its hook is a burning build passed down from the Velvet Underground's "Heroin". But whereas that song ends with Lou Reed smacked up and despondent-- "And I guess I just don't know," he mutters-- "Bad" is the sound of revelation, recovery. "I'm wide awake!" belts Bono, triumphant in the face of isolation, desolation, and pretty much every other -ation there is. Once again, U2 put a patently cool underground icon-- this time it's Reed-- through their mega-band filter and end up with a song that sounds just as strong in record-collector headphones as it does to 100,000 fans physically forced to clap along by some primordial urge.
The Reed tribute is cemented on the live version of "Bad", filmed at Live Aid and included in this package, where Bono introduces the song with a little "Satellite of Love" and ends it riffing on "Walk on the Wild Side". In between, the possessed singer jumps down from his high perch onstage to slow dance with a fan, effectively bringing some punk-inspired spontaneity and compassion to an event that typified notions of classic rock heroism. The performance single-handily upped U2's stock in the global rock realm, and it's easy to see why.
So The Unforgettable Fire isn't U2's biggest commercial success (that would be The Joshua Tree) or its most rewarding artistic coup (Achtung Baby), but without it those records would not exist. It's a transitional album of the highest magnitude. The hits-- "Pride", "Bad"-- still hit, and even its sometimes-derided abstractions like "Promenade" and "Elvis Presley and America" contain enough mystery to keep unraveling 25 years later. The opener tells of an ambiguous return. And "A Sort of Homecoming" would come to define this band's fascinating internal struggle between sticking to what they know and venturing toward something undiscovered.


After years of personal squabbles and legal woes, a Nirvana box set is finally released. Originally slated for Christmas 2001, the three-CD, one-DVD With the Lights Out compiles demos, B-sides, radio performances, and other rarities.

With the Lights Out

Above my desk I have a postcard-sized picture of Kurt Cobain, a garish, iconic (and, appropriately, ironic) portrait on black velvet that someone gave me as a birthday gift a long time ago. Recently, my 13-year old brother-in-law pointed at it and asked, "Who is that?" I told him it was Kurt Cobain. "You know, the lead singer of Nirvana." This kid is a music fan. He digs Eminem, Jay-Z, and Kanye West, in particular, but Linkin Park and P.O.D. are also in the mix. He'd never heard of Nirvana.
Journalist Neil Strauss tells a similar story in the book included with this odds 'n' sods box set, of polling teenagers in a California record store and realizing only about a third of them had knowledge of Cobain & Co. Usually, this sort of unscientific rock crit device involves bands like The Replacements and is meant to demonstrate that, despite perceived greatness among fans, the group in question was denied access to the big time. But Nirvana was the global rock band for a few years not so long ago, so if it's true that Generation Z is ambivalent at best, well, that seems a little strange-- especially considering how much every popular American rock band-- the P.O.D.s and Linkin Parks, for example-- owe them.
After allowing Nirvana to lie fallow for almost a decade following the release of the live album From the Muddy Banks of the Wishkah, Dave Grohl, Krist Novoselic, and Courtney Love are now working to reverse this trend. A box set containing a promised mother lode of unreleased recordings was first discussed a few years ago, but it was delayed by legal squabbles. Eventually, Love was granted her wish to release an eponymous best-of complete with "You Know You're Right", considered the cream of the then-unreleased crop. Nirvana did little to bolster the band's legacy, though, and with its lone new song, the collection-- otherwise pulled from a tiny catalog-- was most often discussed to explain the appeal of illegal file-sharing.
Now the long-awaited box arrives, bearing three music discs, a live DVD, notes by Strauss and Thurston Moore, a wonderfully obsessive recording history (though no discography), and ugly metallic packaging that would have made Cobain, an accomplished visual artist, throw up. Only nine of the set's 51 tracks have been previously released (though many have been bootlegged), and those are culled from B-sides and compilation appearances. It's a scruffy hodgepodge of solo acoustic and full-band demos, radio shots, and live recordings, hugely variable in terms of sound, songwriting, and performance quality.
So, first, the bad news: Those hoping for a trove of overlooked gems will be disappointed, as too much of With the Lights Out sounds like nothing so much as a dull-edged instrument lifting flakes of material from the bottom of a barrel. Simply put, there's enough good stuff here for a solid single disc. Beyond padding the release to box-set length, why include a sub-Barlow stab at four-track tape manipulation ("Beans"), two versions of "Polly" to go with the four already released (every Nirvana record on Geffen except In Utero features this middling song), two demos of "Rape Me" showcasing Cobain at his self-conscious worst, and a number of live tracks that sound like they were recorded on overused speech cassettes? If tossed-off experiments and poorly recorded demos of familiar songs are fair game, one imagines the Nirvana vaults stretching into bottomless "Dick's Picks" infinity.
Still, the live and demo overkill can't erase Cobain's status as a great songwriter and (usually) one of rock's best vocalists, so there's still a fair amount of content here to enjoy. "If You Must" and "Pen Cap Chew" immortalize pre-Bleach Nirvana as self-loathing, drop-tuned stoners-- endearing qualities that never quite disappeared from their better known recordings. "Even in His Youth" has that classic combination of short, tense verses with a defusing swoop of chorus. And 1991's "Old Age" is loose and midtempo, showing Cobain stretching himself melodically, breaking free of the clipped phrases and soft/loud style that was serving him so well at the time.
Elsewhere, "Verse Chorus Verse" is a completely different song than the one released under the same name on the No Alternative compilation (that one was originally called "Sappy", and is also included here), but shows a similar easy restraint. The nine-minute instrumental jam on "Scentless Apprentice" was also worth rescuing, showing the lumbering riff monster Nirvana could summon when in the mood. Additionally, versions of four Leadbelly songs, including "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", document Cobain's strange obsession with the early folk singer.
Oddly, despite its big holiday marketing push, this is probably a set for the Nirvana fanatics in search of a complete picture of the band, particularly because many of its pleasures are purely historical. There's no definitive date on the horribly recorded rehearsal demo of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" but it's interesting to note that the structure of the song, down to the tiniest detail, was already complete. And Cobain's off-the-chain scream is completely exhilarating despite the bad sound. Same goes for "Dive", which remains powerful though the band is ragged and Cobain can't quite muster the vocal power of the Incesticide version.
About 20 of these tracks are solo acoustic demos, offering a leering look into Cobain's creative process. One thing we learn is that he wasn't a good acoustic guitarist, at least not when he was sitting at home on whatever he was on. The sloppy strumming on "Sliver" and "Pennyroyal Tea" is distracting, but not nearly as disconcerting as the solo demo of "Rape Me", on which Cobain seems to be struggling to maintain consciousness. This is where the box set makes you feel a little gross, pawing through the musical equivalent of Cobain's journals, listening to things he never intended to release.
The DVD, on the other hand, includes some more lighthearted voyeuristic moments that are the highlight of the box. The first nine tracks are given over to a 1988 rehearsal at Novoselic's mom's house, and it's a huge kick to see Cobain and Novoselic so young and goofy, hanging out with a few neighborhood dudes and jamming like any other local band. For whatever reason, Cobain sings facing a wall with his nose two inches from the simulated wood paneling. They have a ball with Zep ("Immigrant Song"), but then they bust out "About a Girl" and we remember that this is not your everyday garage band. When they crank up the strobe light and hold a bottle of Rainier up to the camera, it's adorable enough that you might feel inclined to hug somebody. Fittingly, most of the remainder of the DVD features pre-fame shows and miscellaneous tour footage; technically, it's generally of poor quality, but enjoyable nonetheless.
Though With the Lights Out is in many respects unsatisfying and shows Geffen to be rudderless with their handling of the Nirvana legacy, in the end, it's nearly enough that it documents so much material we haven't heard a million times before. And despite the complete predictability and heavy-handedness of closing the set with the solo demo of "All Apologies", the effect is still emotionally devastating. When Cobain was numb on heroin he missed the comfort in being sad, and if nothing else, With the Lights Out brings us back to this nourishing place.


Latest from the prolific and influential avant-folk artist is something of a summary record, demonstrating most of the range he's shown over the years.

Six Organs of Admittance: Luminous Night

Luminous Night

Ben Chasny is one of the more prolific musicians of the last decade. He's released one or two albums each year since 1998 under his Six Organs of Admittance banner, plus a bunch of EPs, one-offs, and 7"s, and because that didn't keep him busy enough, he's also worked with Comets on Fire, Badgerlore, and Current 93. It could be argued that he's done more than anyone to establish, develop, and fuel this whole modern freak-folk thing, even if his profile has never risen as high as some of his peers'.
Luminous Night continues Chasny's association with Chicago's estimable Drag City label, and it's something of a summary record, demonstrating most of the range he's shown over the years, from pretty acoustic guitar ramblings to ambient noodling, droning psychedelic horrors, acid folk tunes, and rumbling noise. It's heaviest on the middle three and has an overall dirge-like quality that wears a bit thin at times. The record opens with a fake-out of gorgeous acoustic plucking on "Actaeon's Fall (Against the Hounds)", a sound that harks back to School of the Flower. This is joined by jazzy flute and an even prettier surfed-out guitar before everything stops for a breath and comes back in on a decidedly more medieval note, the flute joining a viola on a positively ancient-sounding melody that occasionally lapses back into surf-jazz for a couple seconds.
Taken in the context of the whole album, "Actaeon's Fall" plays something like a palate cleanser for the extended exercise in existential dread that follows. Chasny's oddly deadpan, almost British-accented voice makes a good instrument for brooding, and he almost makes a point of separating his brand of acid folk from his hippie forebears by confronting his personal failings head-on, declaring, "I'm a vengeful man," on "Anesthesia" as harshly droning guitars crowd in around him. He wraps himself in thoughts of death on "Ursa Minor", singing, "Love can't keep death at bay/ Good people dying everywhere/ When shadow's your doctor the price you pay/ Is asking if god is even there."
Chasny is careful to cut through the pallor of the densest tracks with small splashes of color, like the tabla that drives "Bar-Nasha" or the piano that wafts through the electronic haze of "Cover Your Wounds With the Sky". Eyvind Kang leads "River of Heaven" with a haunting viola solo played in a style that sounds half European Renaissance and half Syrian. Genuinely haunting moments like that forgive some of the album's more egregious indulgences in drifting noise and intentional obfuscation (see the brown guitar squall in the middle of "Enemies Before the Light"). But really, half the fun of Six Organs is hearing Chasny get away with being over-the-top on the strength of his sheer talent. Luminous Night doesn't challenge School of the Flower or The Sun Awakens for Six Organs' best albums, but it is a solid addition to a big catalog that gets more interesting all the time.


The Canadian band’s third album is a wistful and familiar soundtrack to winter malaise.

Someday Is Today

Living Hour hail from Winnipeg, Manitoba—a city they describe as an “inland island that floats on infinite prairie ground”—and their lush pop songs speak as much to their own rural isolation as the universal, endemic kind. It’s a duality that shows up in many forms on their third album, Someday Is Today, which nods at mid-aughts indie while trudging into cathedral pop akin to Beach House. The terrain isn’t new, nor is it particularly varied. But at their best, Living Hour offer a soundtrack to malaise that feels both timeless and timely.
Built on Sam Sarty’s smoky vocals, the strongest songs on Someday Is Today lead with magnetic atmosphere and melodies, venturing briefly into fuzz and dissonance only to return to an earworm. Though these songs were recorded over a seven-day span in the depths of winter, as temperatures dropped to negative 30, many have the warm quality of a story whispered over dark liquor in a corner booth, confessional and intimate. “December Forever” opens with a progression of insistent chords and plinking keys before introducing a catchy, hummable refrain: “You get what you want/Make it an afterthought,” Sarty sings, somewhere between resignation and disdain. Slow-burning opener “Hold Me in Your Mind” soars rafter-high on reverberating keys and cinematic, carouseling harmonies, with eerie descriptions of headlights, satellites, and surveillance. The warbling final notes could be emanating from a UFO or the console of a car parked across a dark, empty lot.
Other tracks evoke a 20-year-old indie pop heyday that feels pleasantly familiar. “Feelings Today,” a duet with Jay Som, hearkens to fellow Canadians Broken Social Scene, while the duet on “Exploding Rain” pays homage to Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. But Living Hour’s lyricism studs these recognizable sounds with unexpected gems, lending songs like “Lemons and Gin” additional luster. “A hundred watts in every bulb above my head/Dandruff on each shoulder again/I’m staring at the frozen meat with polished floors,” Sarty sings, establishing a physical landscape that feels as freezer-burned as her emotional one. Winter comes up often, fittingly for a prairie record. “I remember walking home on ice,” Sarty recalls on “Middle Name,” while the title of “December Forever” is less an endorsement of the month than a lament.
Elsewhere, the potency falters and the emotional through-line gets derailed. “Miss Miss Miss,” with its “Sexual Healing” drum machine intro, is a weird bossa nova paean to a nightclub, a tonal disjunct from the material that bookends it. “Hump,” meanwhile, rests on a strange middle ground between sludgy minimalism and brightness. Living Hour often tow a successful line between disaffectedness and melancholy, but the record’s sharp edges arrive when they lean too far in either direction, reading as lethargy or sentimentalism. Still, to everything there is a season, and Someday is Today mostly succeeds in its paeans to frostbitten numbness, its flatness as wistful as the rolling plains and as familiar as the freezer aisle.


Gwen Stefani's first solo album in a decade finds her keeping up with new pop sounds while writing from a new perspective: the quintessential divorcee, fresh off a messy split.

Gwen Stefani: This Is What the Truth Feels Like

This Is What the Truth Feels Like

For a generation of quirky girls, No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani was the Grimes of 1995. She had the kind of look that parents hate (her hair was pink, or blue, or no-way-that’s-natural blonde, her midriff was perpetually exposed) and a punk-ish sneer, and she was at her finest when she was all riled up. She was also, crucially, a product of the post-grunge alternative landscape, in which an Orange County ska band could edge up their sound and land a song on the Top 10 for 15 weeks. As popular music tastes shifted, so did Stefani—and shrewdly, for a time. She first tested the solo waters in 2000, duetting with Moby on the deadpan banger “South Side” before moving on to an even more unlikely partner in crime, Eve, with “Let Me Blow Ya Mind” (i.e. the “Fancy” of 2001). Around this same time, No Doubt’s new wave sheen turned towards Jamaican dancehall, which made Stefani’s own pivot towards hip-hop feel more natural. In hindsight, that hip-hop lean—like Stefani’s other acts of cultural appropriation—was questionable taste-wise, not least because it encouraged Fergie. But like much of her career up to that point, Gwen had enough attitude to pull it off.
Stefani’s first solo album, 2004’s* Love. Angel. Music. Baby., had a few legitimately great singles, the kind of radio hits that take a surprisingly long time to wear out. She also drew inspiration from unexpected places; one of those songs reinterpreted Fiddler on the Roof for the Juicy Couture crowd, another singlehandedly ensured that the word “bananas” would never again be misspelled by millennials. Her 2006 Neptunes-assisted follow-up, The Sweet Escape*, was essentially a dashed-off photocopy of its predecessor without the hits; given that weak showing, and then the eventual No Doubt reunion, it started to feel like Gwen solo was no longer a priority, at least until she joined the cast of "The Voice." No one joins "The Voice" if they’re just trying to hawk their (mostly tasteful) clothing line. By the time a concrete announcement heralding Stefani’s solo return arrived, she had repositioned herself towards the current mainstream once again.
So who is Gwen Stefani in the year 2016? You might say she’s an ageless pop star dealing with her personal drama not just in the tabloids, but on record. While this is a familiar and effective strategy for selling albums, it’s also a jaded way to perceive This Is What the Truth Feels Like, in part because Stefani—who co-wrote every song—seems to be genuinely torn over her own identity here. Long forgotten is the novelty that initially came with watching Gwen go full “TRL” and bring her inspiring weirdness to the masses. Here, she plays a different kind of role model: the quintessential divorcee, fresh off her messy split from Gavin Rossdale. Stefani forces herself to look forward as she navigates the thrill and insecurity of dating for the first time this millennium (ostensibly hand-in-hand with he who shall not be named), but sometimes, she just can’t help looking back in anger and regret.
As she did on her first two solo albums, Stefani spends a bit of time trend-hopping through current Top 40, from the spacious trap-lite of “You’re My Favorite” to the Bieber-hits-the-islands vibe of sext ode “Send Me a Picture” to “Asking 4 It,” where Fetty Wap slur-raps the album’s sole feature atop an unconvincing beat. These are decent tracks that affirm her ability to keep up with big pop of the moment (or rather, of a year ago), but musically, they are unremarkable, and fail to match the unique specificity of her early solo hits. There’s only one “Gwen Gets Back On the Horse” song that really works—second single “Make Me Like You,” a disco confection that captures the deliciously complicated feeling of falling hard when you least expected.
Stefani’s focus on the good times alternates with songs where she expresses cartoonish anger by awkwardly rapping and shouting non-sequiturs (“Naughty,” “Red Flag”), and neither mode plays to her strengths as a songwriter and signature vocalist. Her best songs are the ones in which she is audibly upset—sometimes pissed off, sometimes sad, but best-case scenario, both. No Doubt’s “Don’t Speak” was a heartbreak anthem with a twinge of anger, but with Truth lead single “Used to Love You,” Stefani—now 20 years wiser—flips it. “You can keep all the memories,” she tosses off nonchalantly, but still she sheds a tear as she backs out their driveway for the last time. It’s a rare moment on the album where you can pick out Stefani from a sea of other pop singers.
“Used to Love You” might be the greatest song Stefani has been involved in since “Don’t Speak,” at first twinkling all sad-sweet like Dev Hynes DJ’ing a prom slow-dance in an ‘80s teen flick. But by the end of the song, it has grown into something resembling a secular take on “Like a Prayer"'s climax, its sheer size threatening to teeter over the top. As the strings and the choir build around her, Stefani curls her voice up into a bow to emphasize the “used to” in “used to love you,” conveying both vulnerability and strength as she often had two decades ago. More than a decade has passed since Gwen Stefani first went pop, but it’s the fleeting moments like this—where she reminds us why we used to love her—that redeem This Is What the Truth Feels Like.


Originally credited to the Costello Show, this is a newly reissued and expanded version of the 1986 LP that saw Declan ditch the Attractions and return to his pub-rock roots.

King of America

Back in the midst of the Thatcher era, it must have been startling to see Elvis Costello staring back from the 12-inch-by-12-inch black-and-white LP cover of King of America, looking much older than the young rabble-rouser on the cover of 1983's Punch the Clock. Instead of the enormous Buddy Holly specs that had been his trademark for years, he continues to sport a pair of understated wire-rimmed spectacles that-- along with that facial hair-- lend his visage a grave, almost academic air. Bedecked with an ornate crown and an embroidered jacket, he hides his recognizable features behind a bushy beard, and his weary eyes manage a wary look.
More surprises awaited eager listeners: On the spine, the artist was listed not as Elvis Costello and the Attractions, but, more puzzlingly, as the Costello Show. Similarly, the songs were credited to Declan Patrick Aloysius MacManus, the acoustic guitar parts to The Little Hands of Concrete. In fact, the name Elvis Costello was barely mentioned in the packaging at all, as if MacManus needed a vacation from his alter ego.
These oddities heralded an even more dramatic change within the vinyl grooves. King of America was MacManus's first album without the Attractions since his debut (they appear on only one track, "Suit of Lights"). Instead, through co-producer T-Bone Burnett, he had corralled a strong roster of impressively pedigreed studio musicians (he calls them "my jazz and R&B; heroes" in the new liner notes) that includes Jim Keltner, Mitchell Froom, and Tom "T-Bone" Wolk, as well as Ron Tutt, Jerry Scheff, and James Burton from Elvis Presley's T.C.B. band. They lent the songs a professional albeit occasionally slick feel and helped MacManus realize his country and R&B; ambitions.
What wasn't different, however, was the barbed wit and acid humor that infuse songs like "Glitter Gulch", "Jack of All Parades", and "Brilliant Mistake". Costello's career to this date is often idealized as perfectly angry-- Costello the scourge-- but it contains a very human number of mistakes and miscalculations committed, on his own admission, by a very confident artist and a very confused man. The 31-year-old singer's anger and outrage had been diluted with disappointment and experience: the band was in turmoil and on the verge of breaking up (and would after one more album); MacManus's marriage had recently ended; he had been playing innumerable live shows to counter legal woes; his previous album, GoodBye Cruel World, had been a flop (he refers to it as his worst).
The result of all this angst is a complex and conflicted album that, despite all the spit and polish, sounds lively and raucous. Intense romantic embitterment informs the wordplay of "Lovable", the willful caution in "Poisoned Rose", and the extended metaphor of "Indoor Fireworks", which is all the more devastating for MacManus's straight-faced delivery. Likewise, the idea of America-- his adopted homeland, if only temporarily-- simultaneously repulses and attracts him. On the powerful "American Without Tears", he compares his own loneliness and alienation with that of two World War II G.I. brides, as Jo-El Sonnier's accordion plays over the chorus.
Not knowing exactly what to do with such a bristly, ruminative album, Columbia Records unenthusiastically released the cover of "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood" as the first single, then promptly forgot about King of America, as did most listeners. A proper (and final) Elvis Costello and the Attractions album, Blood & Chocolate, was released before the year was out (on which Costello credited himself as Napoleon Dynamite). Rykodisc unearthed King of America almost a decade later, and Rhino is reviving it two decades later as the final installment in its ambitious and generous reissue project. While many of the 21 bonus tracks-- including the A- and B-sides of "The People's Limousine" / "They'll Never Take Her Love from Me" by the Coward Brothers, Costello's side project with T-Bone Burnett-- were included on the Rykodisc version, the real finds on this edition are the seven live tracks from one of MacManus's few shows with the King of America band. They fare respectably on the album track "The Big Light", but the band, especially guitarist Burton, blaze through covers by Waylon Jennings, Mose Allison, and Buddy Holly.
King of America may not have sounded like anything else Costello had done before, but it bears a striking, even disheartening, semblance to almost everything he's done since. In the ensuing years he has worked hard to excerpt himself from the British punk movement and to indulge his obsession with prepunk styles like classical (The Juliet Letters, Il Sogno), cocktail-lounge jazz (North), country (The Delivery Man), and Brill Building pop (Painted From Memory). This musical restlessness-- along with almost everything the middle-aged Costello has been criticized for, such as his practiced delivery, his overly calculated songwriting, and his obsession with backing musicians and collaborators-- has roots in King of America, his first and finest assertion that he has a life apart from the Attractions. For many who were initially baffled by that cover image of MacManus, this album is the beginning of a long downfall; for others, it's merely Act II in a very long, very prolific career that is unusual for having so much buried treasure.


The Atlanta rapper shows off his ear for vivid imagery and counter-intuitive production on his new project.

Anyways

During his brief career, the Atlanta rapper Young Nudy has managed to stay both versatile and consistent. His demented, hypnotic rhymes, full of violence and drugs, initially made him seem a kindred spirit to his cousin 21 Savage. But just as 21 Savage has broadened his appeal, Nudy has also pushed against the borders of his trap sound. He might not boast the flash or obvious eccentricities of his peers, but the rapper born Quantavious Thomas is quietly one of the more unique artists to emerge from his city in years.
His first tape, Paradise City, appeared in 2014, but his ascendance began in earnest in 2016 with his Slimeball series. Last year, he made his biggest splash yet with the feature-free surprise mixtape Faded In The Booth and Sli’merre, his collaborative project with producer wunderkind Pi’erre Bourne. The chemistry between Nudy and Pi’erre proved electric, and his new project Anyways expands on that mixtape’s jubilant bounce with some of the darker subject matter of his early work.
Young Nudy's taste for experimental production helps distinguish him. The dreamy, cartoonish beat for “Blue Cheese Salad” and the stoned stupor of “A Nudy Story” add unexpected shades to Nudy’s villain mystique, while “Cap Dem” sounds like it was made for Wiz Khalifa and Curren$y rather than a trap artist. These counter-intuitive choices might be off-putting to those who prefer a murkier atmosphere with their street raps, but they keep his music feeling nimble and surprising.
It helps that he raps his ass off. Anyways might be Nudy’s best technical performance, both in the variety of his flows and the calmness with which he croaks them out. On “No Go,” he manages to make giving directions to his frequent East Atlanta hangouts sound exciting. His rhymes bristle with energy, confidence, and vivid imagery (“Yellow tape surrounding you and your team/ I’m Majin Buu with the smoke, I blow the steam” he says on “Deeper Than Rap”). The trance-like quality of the production on the album lures you in, but Nudy’s commanding presence keeps you there.
Anyways likely won’t drastically alter the arc of Nudy’s career or skyrocket him to success. It’s a quality street-rap record, one that should please his fans and maybe convert a few interested parties. But there’s something undeniable about the devotion with which he chisels away at his craft, like a sculptor obsessing over the curves and crevices of his work. He might never hit superstardom like some of his peers, but he keeps finding something worthwhile to say, and surprising ways to say it.


America's Greatest Hits

America's Greatest Hits, the first full-length by Olympia hardcore act Gag, is a pitch-black album about cackling in the abyss, cracking jokes in the humorless confines of hardcore. They are deeply entrenched in the underground: The album is out on Iron Lung, the quietly reigning West Coast punk and hardcore label operated by a band of the same name; Iron Lung's drummer, Jensen Ward, accompanies members of Gag in White Wards. And Gag's clutch of tapes and EPs, which date back to 2012, demonstrate a rigorously fundamental understanding of hardcore: forbidding thickets of guitar feedback; dour, mid-tempo riffs evocative of dogged trudging and furrowed brows; and rhythmic motifs limited to lumbering backbeat and pugilistic punctuation.
That makes Gag at once highly traditional—wavering little from formal touchstones like, say, Poison Idea's original "Pure Hate"—and at odds with hardcore's prevailing inclinations today. There's none of the studied staccato blitzkrieg of Punch, no d-beat homage à la Ajax or Gas Rag. Rather, America's Greatest Hits is a sturdy and relatively unhurried exercise in stylized hostility: "Steel Forced Twin" is a strident salvo of floor-tom thud, while "Pretty Boy" is all showy strut and bratty leads. Trenchant and thuggish without relief, America's Greatest Hits is predictable but never rote; if contemporary hardcore is less in conversation with originators and more indentured to them, Gag threatens to depose its masters.
Indeed, the ghoulish jester adorning the cover of last year's Locker Room EP looks something like Gag's spiritual advisor. And America's Greatest Hits, like Gag's catalog at large, is distinguished by its humor. Historically, hardcore has prized clarity—rejecting irony and sarcasm in favor of a more imperative and sincere tone—whereas punk is more likely to traffic in farce and black humor. Gag, however, forces an impressive amount of sardonic punch lines, guttersnipe mockery, and macabre wit into its otherwise purist hardcore. In the squelched, scabrous vocals, quizzical references to shrimp, sunglasses, and Wal-Mart abound. "It's Just Me" begins, "There's no justice/ There's no justice—just me*,*" which illustrates how skillfully Gag uses the few syllables allotted each line: there's a simplistic pun, a cynical assertion, and even something of a political statement.
All throughout America's Greatest Hits, Gag fulfills the music's nearly monosyllabic requirement with a rare capacity for invention and play. But they aren't simply clever. They mix mastery and transgression. Perhaps Gag explains its perspective best: Consider one of its finest little maxims, from the 40 Oz. Rule '90 EP: "Ha ha ha/ Blah blah blah/ Either way you die." Like the very most resonant sentiments in hardcore, it's inarguable and essential. And America's Greatest Hits affirms that Gag guffaws in the face of death.


Philly artist PnB broke out last year with an appealing rapper-turned-singer swagger. His major label debut carefully balances his malleable take on R&B and street rap.

GTTM: Goin Thru the Motions

Philadelphia rap is undergoing a generational shift. Despite all the tabloid drama, Meek Mill remains the city’s biggest star, rapping with the emotional intensity of hometown legend Beanie Sigel, but with a honed ability to land crossover hits. Yet the city’s two up-and-coming stars operate completely outside the street-vs.-pop divide that Meek observes so carefully. Lil Uzi Vert is a bratty rockstar that cannot write a bad hook and and PnB Rock wields a rapper-turned-singer swagger. Meek Mill rapped on Philly street corners and committed years to the mixtape grind, where this new wave was scooped up early by major labels, landing on success that took years for Meek to achieve.
PnB Rock went from catching regional buzz with post-prison freestyles in 2014 to signing with Atlantic Records the following year. In that short time, Fetty Wap, another rapper-turned-singer from the Tri-State area, emerged and crossed over with numerous Top 40 pop hits (“Trap Queen,” “679”). Last year they released a joint mixtape, Money, Hoes, and Flows that highlighted Fetty Wap’s charming vocal quirks set against PnB Rock’s more conventional singing voice.
GTTM: Going Through The Motions, PnB Rock’s major-label debut, carefully balances his malleable interpretations of both R&B and street rap. “Range Rover” fits a boastful trap mold (“Rollie all on my wrist/Bitch I ball no assist/Smoking weed by the zip/Whole squad yeah we lit”), but his smooth delivery pushes the song closer to acoustic Ty Dolla $ign than Migos. On the other side of the spectrum is “Notice Me,” where Rock pines for a second of a woman’s time, whose attention is buried in social media. The sentiment can feel like Drake-style shaming, but his words are empathetic when he wistfully sings: “In your hand all day, on the ’gram all day/You been tweeting, snapchatting/And I feel like I just got to ask you/Do you notice me?” PnB Rock’s delivery convey a simple a desire to find a romantic middle ground more than chauvinistic condemnation.
Song-by-song, GTTM is a charming debut, but when viewed as complete album it falls fairly flat. It opens on a sour note with the Wiz Khalifa-featuring “Attention.” Yet instead of the suave Kush and OJ Wiz, we get the boastful Cabin Fever version, full of to turgid go-nowhere cliches (“Whole lotta weed getting rolled in a paper plane/Whole lotta bitches scream my name”). Either of the following tracks—“There She Go,” “Playa No More,” and “Selfish”—would have been stronger introductions, potential hits that also offer clear introductions to PnB Rock’s worldview.
Unfortunately, tracklisting issues dog the album to its closing seconds. “New Day,” produced by frequent Lil Uzi Vert collaborator Maaly Raw, is buried as the penultimate track, where it could’ve added a bit of energy to the album’s tepid middle section. The album closes with “Stand Back,” an aggressive, calculated classic piece of East Coast street rap featuring Bronx up-and-comer A-Boogie Wit Da Hoodie. The pair share a natural chemistry, but there are no sparks here as the two jockey to see who can act the hardest. Fans in a post-iTunes streaming world can easily cull the best songs,  but it’s unfortunate the album places that burden on them. Still,PnB Rock shows more than enough heart and talent; pick through the missteps, and there's still a good new artist here, someone capable of more.


This 6xCD, DVD reissue of The Aeroplane Flies High, the 1996 Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness B-side collection, makes it the most difficult Smashing Pumpkins reissue to endure, but it’s actually the easiest to revisit*.*

The Smashing Pumpkins: The Aeroplane Flies High

The Aeroplane Flies High

Let’s can the mock suspense and acknowledge the absurdity of this rerelease as a starting point rather than a conclusion. The Aeroplane Flies High is not a beloved obscurity, nor is it a canonical album celebrating a milestone anniversary. It’s not even an album: it’s a widely available, 16-year old collection of B-sides from a double album. Granted, the Smashing Pumpkins' Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was more judiciously edited than the title would lead you to believe. It was a 28-song double album all the same, and now Aeroplane nearly quadruples in size with 90 additional tracks on top of its original 33, with a bonus DVD to boot. But while the numbers make The Aeroplane Flies High the most difficult Smashing Pumpkins reissue to endure, it’s actually the easiest to revisit. For most listeners, Siamese Dream and Mellon Collie are inseparable from the memories of living with those records at a certain age; it’s tough to rehear “Disarm” or “X.Y.U.” without recalling the specific sensory triggers of your parents' house or the details of a particularly shitty day in 10th grade when [INSERT NAME HERE] didn’t reciprocate your crush on them. Aeroplane simply reminds the listener of what it was like to be a Smashing Pumpkins fan when people were expected to pay money for music.
It was equally exhilarating and exhausting during the band’s prime. If you caught the videos on MTV and chose to take your Pumpkins fanship to the next level by exploring the deep cuts, the bootlegs, the formative guitar tablature sites, and so forth, you realized that Billy Corgan was every bit as excited about the music of Smashing Pumpkins as his audience. In fact, that probably strikes at the root of everything you’ve come to loathe about Corgan as well: he’s the biggest Smashing Pumpkins fan on earth.
So while Aeroplane was always meant as a collector’s item, Corgan made it worth your while. Even if you bought it out of obligation and never even listened to the thing, it was one of the 90s’ most handsome and unique physical packages: five CD singles with their own art design, delivered in a hypno-swirled carrying case. It was a keepsake and a conversation piece, a vinyl era throwback for kids who assumed the CD era would last forever. So even if the songs themselves were dashed off (Corgan claimed “Pennies” took literally minutes to write) or slapped together (the very literal 23-minute guitar collage “Pastichio Medley”), there was nothing half-assed about the actual product.
Separating the B-sides onto five separate CDs ensured that the collection was no mere data dump in terms of quality and presentation. If you let your ears go slack a little, every EP retains some important characteristic of its linchpin Mellon Collie single. It’s not an exact fit; with the exception of the country and western curio “Said Sadly”, Bullet With Butterfly Wings is the “covers” EP and the selections brought the new wave genealogy of that song to the fore. The keeper of the bunch is their take on Blondie’s “Dreaming”; not only does it feature a rare lead vocal from bassist D’arcy, but the requisitely light, billowy arrangement distinguishes it from their competent Cars and Alice Cooper karaoke and a fumbled cover of the Cure’s “A Night Like This” where James Iha can’t decide if he wants to perform it as a country, slowcore, or shoegaze song.
Tonight, Tonight is technically the “ballad” single-- it is the one with the strings and all. Yet, its sumptuous studio arrangement bares no similarity to its attendant outtakes which are mostly solo, acoustic performances from Corgan. Even compared to the spare and wistful lullabies from their previous odds-and-ends collection Pisces Iscariot such as “Whir” and “Obscured”, the songs here sound incomplete rather than realized minimalism. If you’re trying to fashion a four-star Smashing Pumpkins album out of the original B-sides-- and really, that seems like the entire point-- you can skip those two EPs altogether.
On the other side, everything on the 1979 single warrants inclusion. The most-beloved Smashing Pumpkins single gives these songs a certain halo effect, of course. Beyond that, the lightly carbonated college rock of “The Boy” is easily the best thing James Iha has ever written, while the whispered restraint lent to the could-be power ballad “Believe” puts it as the runner up. More intriguing is how in 20 minutes, the fluorescent and fizzy 1979 lays out an intriguing “what if?” for the Smashing Pumpkins. While Adore is known as their synth album and a sonic outlier amidst Corgan’s ambitions for Sistine Chapel art-rock, it’s still a 70-minute opus draped in black and smeared with kohl eyeliner. “Ugly” and “Set the Ray to Jerry” are two sides of a coin and together they present a fascinating alternative to Adore: the former a self-hate song driven by palm-muted, bristling guitar and the latter a love song of swirling, phased ambience. Is it possible they could’ve made a minimalist, melody-driven new wave album following in that vein? I have my doubts-- for all his generosity in the realm of B-sides and miscellany, albums are a huge event for Corgan and we’ll never know if “Set the Ray” would’ve included triple-guitar harmonies or if Jimmy Chamberlin’s barnstorming drum rolls would’ve found a way onto “Cherry”.
If you want those aspects of Smashing Pumpkins, you can head straight to the Zero EP, which, like the titular single, is the most immediately satisfying of the bunch and the quickest to lose its appeal. “God” rages with such Neanderthal impulses, it’s actually fun; it’s basically “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” if you fast forward straight to the avalanche of its coda. The relatively raw glam-grunge of “Mouths of Babes” and “Marquis in Spades” has an underdog appeal if you somehow thought Mellon Collie was hindered by its concept album ambitions or ever mistook Smashing Pumpkins as being a punk or indie band at some point; but as far as riffs or melodies or dynamics go, they’re all second-tier Corgan compositions.
That leaves us with Thirty-Three, the oft-forgotten single from Mellon Collie and the least typical of the lot. The rest of the EP follows suit, as it bears the collection’s most risky and disparate offerings; you  get the prettiest cover (“My Blue Heaven”) and the sludgiest, slowest guitar workout (“The Aeroplane Flies High (Turns Left Looks Right)”). The electro-spazz of “Transformer” segues into Iha’s ornate, porcelain art-pop offering “The Bells”. And it’s all preceded by the showstopping closer on your hypothetical Aeroplane single-CD; containing one of Corgan’s most sweet and yearning vocal performances as well as guitar solo from his father, “The Last Song” feels too crucial to be ignored and too personal to make it onto an album with Mellon Collie’s overt commercial ambitions.
And those are all things you can surmise from buying the original version of Aeroplane Flies High; the tracks have been remastered here, though liars and professional audio engineers are the only people who will claim to notice the effect. Like every Pumpkins reissue, Aeroplane is stocked with extras; the difference here is that they’re jammed onto each single seemingly at random, rather than separated into bonus discs. As a result, the tasteful and accessible arrangement of the original is compromised, negating one of its best qualities. For example, why are 15 tracks of instrumental jamming slapped onto Bullet With Butterfly Wings? And these aren’t snippets either, some go on for five minutes, and mostly prove that while Smashing Pumpkins songs are pantheon material, Smashing Pumpkins riffs are fairly easy to come by. As works in progress, they’re nothing particularly special; it’d be more interesting if Corgan granted a Creative Commons License as part of the purchase price and allowed fans to use his scraps to come up with their best Smashing Pumpkins imitation.
Otherwise, do we need the Smashing Pumpkins’ July 1995 performance at Chicago’s Double Door and their rehearsal? The DD rehearsal is spirited and ragged, notable for Corgan cracking up during “By Starlight” of all things and reconfiguring the lyrics of “God”. As far as the actual performance, you almost wish Corgan would get all Patton Oswalt on the dude who’s yelling in the middle of “Stumbleine”. Forget all of those-- head straight to “Special Winner’s Song”, which is five minutes of interactive crowd participation and an improvised rap by James Iha who is presumably drunk as shit. Hearing him yell, “D’arcy Wretzky on the motherfucking bass!” makes the whole endeavor somehow worth it because it’s one of the few times you might imagine the Smashing Pumpkins being four people who enjoyed each other’s company.
With all that said, Aeroplane gives you insight to what a tremendous strain it must’ve been to be a member of the Smashing Pumpkins-- if listening to everything on Aeroplane Flies High seems taxing, imagine playing it. And imagine that what ended up on this still somehow isn’t the sum total of their recorded output at the time. On a basic level, the supersizing of Aeroplane magnifies what it was back in 1996, a point where Corgan’s giving nature felt more like neediness, where the generosity started to lose its altruism and became an oppressive act. The deluxe reissuing of Smashing Pumpkins’ heyday has resulted in upwards of 200 bonus tracks and the ones on Aeroplane are almost entirely inessential. You learn from the eight-track demo of “Zero” that it needs vocals and it needs Jimmy Chamberlain. You learn from the live version that it doesn’t need 50% more whammy pedal soloing. If it’s easy to revisit Aeroplane without getting emotionally attached, it’s harder to talk about for the same reason. But it gets us one step closer to reevaluating Adore, the first Pumpkins record that underperformed commercially and critically, whose legacy is still somewhat in flux. And that’s a worthy cause even if Aeroplane couldn’t possibly justify its price tag.


This compilation of extra smooth, funky, and sometimes very odd songs from the heydey of Japan’s technological boom is a broad yet nuanced introduction to the genre of city pop.

Various Artists: Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1976-1986

Outside of YouTube recommendations and subreddit threads, the most common way for American listeners to discover the loosely defined Japanese genre known as city pop has remained oddly old school: through a pilgrimage to a Japanese record store. In Japan, where the CD still reigns, the Tower Records listening station is alive and well—and nudging visiting Westerners toward city pop classics from the late 1970s and early ’80s, like Tatsuro Yamashita’s For You, Eiichi Ohtaki’s A Long Vacation, Mariya Takeuchi’s Variety, and Taeko Ohnuki’s Sunshower. Though largely sung in Japanese, city pop pulls from many different types of “smooth” American music during that era—from AOR and yacht rock to boogie and jazz fusion—and unites them through meticulous playing and a near-obsessive production sheen. To fall in love with city pop as an American is to find something more interesting in another culture’s souped-up reinterpretation of your own cheesiness.
In the mid-2000s, at a listening station in one of Tokyo’s sprawling Tower stores, Andy Cabic, frontman of folk-rockers Vetiver and one of the curators behind Pacific Breeze: Japanese City Pop, AOR & Boogie 1976-1986, first stumbled upon city pop. Nearly a decade and a half later, the moment seems primed for this style of music, which despite a lack of official releases available stateside, spread online and helped inspire the internet-obsessed genre vaporwave. As nameless, faceless, genreless “vibe” muzak proliferate online, city pop might just be a kind of ground zero. But the version of city pop heard on Pacific Breeze plays up its more experimental side, via forays into exotica and cutting-edge electronics.
Part of that has to do with the compilation’s positioning of Haruomi Hosono as city pop’s main guiding force. Many of the songs feature or have ties to this ever-changing titan of Japanese pop music, whether the musicians once played in his Tin Pan Alley collective or later joined him in Yellow Magic Orchestra (YMO). Hosono has been a big focus for the archival label Light in the Attic, from his pioneering native-tongue folk rock with Happy End to his avant-garde adventures in early sampling technology.
That latter period of Hosono’s career inspired Pacific Breeze’s best track, the synthpop squirmer “Sports Men.” Originally found on 1982’s Philharmony, Hosono’s first solo album following YMO’s rise, the song is fueled by a vaguely flute-y sample that loops in an endless cheerful tootle and the musician’s own sneering anxieties over not being fit enough for a very sporty crush. It’s the one moment on Pacific Breeze where the cracks of the city pop fantasy really start to show—the dark side of a genre associated with, essentially, yuppies in Tokyo. As Japan’s post-war industrialization came to fruition as a full-on tech boom and the country ascended as an economic powerhouse, city pop emerged as the slick soundtrack for young, moneyed urban dwellers. In a way, this music was designed for all those brand new car-stereo tape decks and Walkmans being developed in Japan at the time, the pristine recordings splashing a touch of neon on the passing skyscrapers.
Japan’s burgeoning leisure class made an apt audience not just for West Coast American music, but vague, Americanized versions of tropical sounds as well. You can hear the faint echo of exotica pioneer Martin Denny, whose music was broadcast across American military radio stations in Japan following World War II, in tracks like Suzuki Shigeru’s elegant but goofy “Lady Pink Panther.” It’s moments like these—where the desire to sing in English, oftentimes just on the chorus, ends up giving the song a slight novelty feeling—that Pacific Breeze underscores its intended audience. There are a good deal of songs at least partially in English and many instrumentals scattered across the 16-track compilation, offering a slightly skewed view of city pop.
This perspective also highlights “weirder” tracks as well, instead of the more easy-listening, Japanese Doobie Brothers vibe that much of this style of music embodies. “Bride of Mykonos”—a standout synth instrumental by Hosono, Yukihiro Takahashi, Hiroshi Sato (what would have been YMO had Sato accepted Hosono’s invitation)—takes the slingshot echoes of cultural exchange one step further: the piece was commissioned for CBS/Sony’s Sound Image Series, which focused on international locales. In this one composition, you can hear traces of American pop music, Japanese technological innovation, and inspiration from both the Greek peninsula and the outer limits of space.
Pacific Breeze works best as a broad yet nuanced introduction to both Hosono’s mid-career and city pop as a whole. The mere access to this fascinating and prescient style of music fills a real void and at times evokes a surreal glee. The opening notes of honey-voiced singer Nanako Sato’s “Subterranean Futari Bocci” might make you feel as though it’s time to come on down, you’re the next contestant on “The Price Is Right.” “Midnight Driver,” from underrated city pop icon Minako Yoshida, is an amalgamation of Chic, the Isley Brothers, and the score to the SEGA Genesis game ToeJam & Earl, all just jamming out for seven and a half glorious minutes. It sounds simultaneously like the future and the past, Japan and America, the shifts of a culture in flux and the fantasy of something far too shiny to be real.


The debut album by this young doom metal outfit from Arkansas is startlingly well realized, with deep, sludgy guitar textures and proggy songs that are complemented by a sparkling melodic sensibility.

Sorrow and Extinction

Doom is a broad category, one of those descriptors that needs an extra word like "stoner," "funeral," "sludge," "death," or "drone" to help narrow things down a little. It can bring to mind the slower, low-tuned psychedelic metal of post-Sabbath American groups like Saint Vitus, Trouble, and Pentagram along with Sweden's Candlemass, UK act Cathedral, and descendants who are crustier (YOB, Asunder), more flatlining (Sunn O)))), seemingly suicidal (Loss), and exceedingly smoked-up (Sleep). Then come the backward-glancing modern traditionalists like weathered North Carolina crew Hour of 13, Rhode Island upstarts Pilgrim, and now, even more gloriously, Pallbearer.
The Little Rock, Ark., quartet sounds much older than its years on its fantastic debut LP, Sorrow and Extinction. The band released a three-song demo in 2010, but reach greater heights here, due to both sharper songwriting and better production. Really, even though they end their Sorrow thank-you list with a blushing "and, of course, Black Sabbath," they go much deeper than that. You could throw in Saint Vitus and early Candlemass (1986's Epicus Doomicus Metallicus, especially), but it almost makes more sense to reference post-Sleep duo Om for the way each song insistently, specifically reaches for a focused transcendence. That said, there's more variation and catharsis here, despite the occasional Mick Barr/all-nighter riffing. It seems like a simple formula, and maybe it is, but the execution's flawless. It also shifts subtly and continually: They mix in psychedelia, 1970s prog melodies, clean vocal harmonies, and ambient keyboards without sacrificing a certain smoked-up genre purity.
We get five songs in just under 50 minutes, each mountain of slow, majestic chords bleeding into one glorious cathedral of riffs and soaring vocals. Here is where their insistence on an overall flow pays off. The longest and best piece is the scene-setting opener, "Foreigner". It starts with tentative, pretty nylon-stringed acoustic guitars that, after two minutes, are joined by carefully played, delicate drums until everything crashes with a huge distorted crescendo. The riffs are beautiful and memorable, somehow both gentle and crushing, but the real key here is vocalist (and guitarist) Brett Campbell, who I first heard via his soaring (and surprising) guest spot on Loss' beautifully bleak 2011 collection, Despond, an album that more usually features a guttural vocal gargle.
That contrast is an essential aspect of the band, which is why when we posted an "An Offering of Grief", I mentioned the Pallbearer featured "[a] vocalist who sings." Campbell has been described as a young Ozzy Osbourne, and that influence is certainly there, but imagine if a young Ozzy had the ability to transform into Geddy Lee. This is music that would be interesting as instrumentals-- the guitars are that good-- but when you add a singer who can match that kind of dynamic surge, it goes somewhere else entirely. The songs have room to be extra patient in part because Pallbearer possess this weapon. On "Given to the Grave", for instance, we get more than five minutes of the acoustic strumming before the crunch and an ever-escalating Campbell. There's no need to rush when the climaxes are that huge, and with his voice, there's always one new wrinkle on the horizon.
The clean, anthemic feel is reminiscent of 40 Watt Sun's 2011 LP, The Inside Room. That band features vocalist and guitarist Patrick Walker of the 1990s UK doom group Warning taking five songs to just about 50 minutes, but with a more obviously introspective feel than we have here-- The Inside Room's an apt title-- with moments that feel a bit like slowcore heroes Codeine. Sorrow and Extinction isn't first-person in that way, and it's more clearly metal: This is sweeping, outdoor, mountaintop music. The lyrics have a mannered, sword-and-sorcery feel, situating death and sadness in towers, pyres, journeys, and the ancients; but even if you don't follow along with what the songs "mean," Campbell has one of those deliveries that brings shivers regardless of what he's singing.
That's the other thing that sets Pallbearer apart: As "down" and death-focused as the words and band name might be, this is uplifting stuff. (When the overlapping solos and subtle, arcing synth haze of "Given to the Grave" bring Sorrow and Extinction to an ecstatic end, you'll be thinking more about life than death, believe me.) Ultimately, it feels like Pallbearer have created their own version of a traditional jazz funeral march, or like they went ahead and invented some sort of "celebratory doom." Whatever you want to call it, the record's a triumph.