The divisive pop star still gets bogged down in melancholy, but the charm of Post Malone’s third album is in his versatile voice and his ability to make a great hook inside pretty much any song.

Hollywood’s Bleeding

Nothing about Post Malone suggests “career pop musician” but that is exactly what he has become. Speaking purely in numbers, he’s just about the most ubiquitous pop musician alive: His songs multiply in the culture right now like kudzu or prairie dogs. He takes Jimmy Fallon to the Olive Garden and Medieval Times; he sells his own limited-edition Crocs. He emerges from Rolls Royce crashes unscathed and touches cursed objects on episodes of Ghost Adventures. Pop music is a little bit like Post Malone’s very own Hanna-Barbera cartoon right now, and he is somehow both Shaggy and Scooby.
There are plenty of valid reasons to bemoan his dominance. He is kind of a sentient keg stand; he has a pretty lazy and unexamined relationship with hip-hop; there is strong evidence that he might not exactly be the sort of person who thinks through his actions. But if you can wriggle free from all that for just a moment, there is a lot to appreciate in his music. There could be, and have been, far worse pop hegemonies, and in a few years, when his cherubic-face-tatted mug has receded somewhat, the virtues of his music will become more apparent.
Yes, the lyrics can be infuriatingly lazy, particularly when he’s tracing over hip-hop tropes about the Mille on his wrist or the 50 carats on his fist. But Post Malone’s choruses are just stupefyingly good. Each one sounds like it could furnish a down payment on a personal helipad. Hollywood’s Bleeding has about 10 titanium-grade hooks on it, choruses so immediate they erect stadiums in your head while they play—“I’m Gonna Be,” “Staring at the Sun,” “Allergic,” Enemies,” “Myself,” “Wow.” He seems to almost belch these out: “Got so many hits, can’t remember ’em all/While I’m taking a shit, look at the plaques on the wall,” he yawns charmingly on “On the Road.” “Sunflower,” his Swae Lee duet that hit No. 1 at the beginning of this year, shows up again outside of last year’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse soundtrack, and its presence here among all these other soon-to-be Top 10 hits feels almost like arm-twisting. We get it.
He is also a sneakily agile singer, switching from red-faced howling to smoky crooning to something warbly and strange in between these two poles. He uses all three of those voices plus a surprisingly lithe falsetto on “Allergic,” which features a chorus that feels like a down-the-middle split between 2003 Fall Out Boy, 2002 Weezer, and 1983 Billy Joel. It is an immaculate pop construction, and the words—“You’re friends with all my demons/The only one that sees them/Too bad for you”—are just delivery systems for the thrill.
Post’s music comes from that zone of confusion where hip-hop and alternative rock overlap. Artists keep wandering out of this spot, which widens every year, but it’s hard to imagine the vortex producing someone as ready for algorithmic dominion than Post. Depending on how hard you squint, his music sounds alternately and suspiciously like Stone Temple Pilots or Sugar Ray or Everlast or Rae Sremmurd or Def Leppard or Tame Impala. The team behind this sound—a chewed-up ball of the last 25 years of rap and rock radio—consists of Louis Bell, Frank Dukes, and Post. Together, they made most of the brightest and most memorable tracks on last year’s Beerbongs & Bentleys, and having established their winning formula, they work it relentlessly on Hollywood. There is no streaming playlist he could not plausibly land on.
There are two kinds of Post Malone songs: Useful and Not Useful. Post Malone’s best and dumbest songs (usually one and the same) are intriguing for the appealing note of panic in them: He might have been singing “She got beautiful boobies” but the way he sang it, it sounded like secret code for Please, the combination to the safe, they have my family. This is Useful Posty, and there is a lot of UP ROI on Hollywood’s Bleeding. “I’m Gonna Be” is a standard inspirational “be yourself” anthem on paper, but Post bellows the hook with a conviction that suggests a trap production of the musical Cats. He sings the hook to “Internet” with the same lunatic gusto—the message is “the internet sucks lol” but he and co-writer Kanye make it sound like a luxury ocean liner going down.
Moody Posty, by contrast, is not Useful Posty. On the title track, he moans about his demons and wonders who will be at his funeral; nobody needs melancholy despair from the guy who headlined a Bud Light Dive Bar Tour. There are too many brooding fashion-plate numbers in general (“Die for Me,” “On the Road”) and they bog the album down. The aforementioned “Circles” is kind of pretty, kind of smooth, kind of sad. It is not a vehicle for Useful Posty: It sounds like a demo that someone meant to hand directly to Sheryl Crow and accidentally sent to Bobcat Goldthwait. His hair sounds combed. Washed, even.
When he’s not wasting time trying to glower, he proves himself surprisingly versatile. “Myself” is a co-write with Father John Misty, of all goddamn people, a wry song about not being about to slow down to appreciate the spoils of success—or, to hear Post tell it, “We slammed butts and Bud Lights to write a cool, top-down, summer cruising song about doing all this shit, being everywhere, but not having the time to fully enjoy it.” Post’s silly-putty voice twists once more until, voila, somehow he’s dirtbag Randy Newman, cruising through the perverse California night. His voice is both malleable and unruly—just as Led Zeppelin attempting reggae somehow managed to sound just like Led Zeppelin, Posty sounds Post-y no matter where you put him.
There are a lot of guests on Hollywood’s Bleeding, and all of them sound engaged; when you are this famous, artists tend to give you their first verse, not their fifth or 10th. Rising star DaBaby crushes his turn on “Enemies”; Halsey, on the otherwise drab “Die for Me," breaks into her boyfriend’s phone, finds all the girls in his DMs, and takes them all home. And then there is the power ballad “Take What You Want,” featuring Travis Scott and Ozzy Osbourne. Osbourne sounds pristine and ageless as always; his towering vocals seem teleported directly from the same studio session as “Mama, I’m Coming Home.” Post takes over the hook from Osbourne the second time around, and he holds his own against the cyclone of his vocal take—remarkable, considering that by the time the song is over, you have forgotten Travis Scott existed at all. And then: a guitar solo. Not any guitar solo, but one so ludicrous it needs a rider stating it can only be played while straddling twin burning Camaros. It is screamingly wretched and undeniably mind-blowing and the most fascinating musical decision I have heard on a pop song all year.
It makes me think about Rick Ross circa 2010, happy and audacious, enlisting full symphony orchestras for him to rap over, but not before demanding a cigar. There is no one else on earth who would attempt to put such a thing on a pop album destined to break streaming records. These moments—when he dares to suck, gloriously and bravely—is when Post Malone ascends.


Only four months after his exceptional major label debut Islah, Baton Rouge rapper Kevin Gates returns with a mixtape that plays like a compilation of B-sides or outtakes from the Islah sessions.

Murder for Hire 2

Baton Rouge rapper Kevin Gates is relentless, both in style and in work ethic. He’s released his latest mixtape, Murder For Hire 2, only four months after his exceptional major label debut, Islah, which is quietly one of the best-selling rap albums of the year thus far, and clearly among the best-made ones. Gates took a sideways route to commercial success, amassing a devoted cult following through his plainspoken and unflinchingly honest raps and a prickly online presence that’s just as confounding. “You know I got a lot of record labels tryin' to sign me / They say if I'm a risk, it's detrimental to the profit,” he rapped on Murder For Hire closer “Khaza.” But his antics haven’t even moderately budged the bottom line, and this sequel is further evidence of a winning formula: stay true to yourself and deliver a reliable product.
Murder For Hire 2 serves as both a true followup to its predecessor and an Islah epilogue. There are lots of similar flourishes to the latter—haunting piano keys, dips into gravelly singsong, and some dynamic cadences—but it models the former’s loose structure, playing like a compilation of B-sides or outtakes from the Islah sessions. Even so, it’s quite a formidable collection of records with some of the rapper’s most forceful and vital flows. Over time, Gates has slowly grown as comfortable in his stylistic tendencies as he is in his own skin; he knows exactly what a good Kevin Gates song sounds like and the specific set of ingredients that go into making one. His acute eye for detail is as effective reliving addiction (“Great Example”) as it is recounting old gun fights.
“Off Da Meter” finds Gates at his most complex, measuring his rising fame against the sadness set upon him by a grief-stricken life (In the hook, he sings, “Getting 50 Gs a feature, my show price is going up / Hard to deal with this depression lately I've been throwing up” before later delivering the equally complicated appraisal: “God love his children, he's awesome / He sent me an angel who's flawless / Got shot in my mouth in '05 / Knocked out my teeth, it was awful”). Kevin Gates is often best playing the fragile thug, letting his shortcomings manifest as bite-sized ugly truths in passing, and on MFH2 he plays up this dichotomy. “The Prayer,” aptly produced by the Villains, revisits facing 25-to-life as a 25-year-old hustler, chastising the futility of “internet beef” in the process. On “Lil Nigga,” a song devoted to camaraderie, he professes his affection for those in his inner circle, then, within seconds, he tracks down and nabs the man that shot him, dispensing his own brand of street justice. He tightropes the divide between hardcore goon and thoughtful companion better than any of his peers, even making the gap indistinguishable at times. "Believe in Me" is vintage Kevin Gates: raw to the point of being tender and exposed.
The hooks aren't quite as catchy or well-written on Murder For Hire 2 as they have been in recent months, and he phones it in on "Fuck It," which repurposes OT Genasis' "Cut It" into a rather bland and affectless replica, but overall the tape is a welcome addition to the Gates canon. It works well as a snack-sized accompaniment to the bigger prize. Just because Gates is only a few months removed from the biggest success of his career doesn’t mean there’s even the slightest chance that he plans on slowing down. “Moving on, better thoughts, cleaner weed, cleaner living / Kitchen bags at the cleaners, even made a cleaner killing,” he raps on “Showin' Up,” continuing to push onward and upward, carrying his momentum forward. He’s an unstoppable force with an indomitable will, and he’s on the verge of becoming rap’s brightest sleeper star.


The beloved Arizona emo band’s latest is a solid, self-aware effort, missing only a few risks.

Surviving

Surviving is apt. Formed in 1993, and featuring the same core members since ’95, Jimmy Eat World has enjoyed a course marked by steady output, frequent touring and quiet durability. As luck would have it, they’ve hung on long enough to find themselves releasing their 10th studio album just as emo nostalgia reaches its zenith. Surviving is both occasion for a survey of the beloved Arizona band’s two-decade-plus career and a further push into arena rock; a driving, if not always transportative, selection that should tour favorably.
Their latest reunites them with Justin Meldal-Johnsen, the producer for M83 and decades-long live bassist for Beck who worked on their triumphant last album, 2016’s Integrity Blues. On Surviving, the producer guides the band’s instincts towards a heavier sound, letting noise from their guitars and Zach Lind’s drums decay. Meldal-Johnsen addresses lacunae in frontman Jim Adkins’ operative knowledge of synth sounds, as on the U2-evocative “555,” an album outlier which features some Fitz and the Tantrums-like hand-clapping. James King, co-founding member of Fitz, shows up for a saxophone solo on “All The Way (Stay),” just like he did on the Meldal-Johnsen-produced M83 sparkler “Midnight City.” Longtime collaborator and former touring member Rachel Haden, of that dog., contributes backing vocals. The track, which considers staying away from the party rather than at it (“Who really says they hope they’ll meet ‘the one’ for the first time at a bar drinking early?”) is one of the more personal allusions to recovery from addiction that Adkins, sober for six years, ventures here.
Lyrically, Surviving is as sincere as their past efforts but less specific. “You’re not alone in pain/Never alone in pain,” Adkins sings on the album’s title track. The band’s shortest LP to date, Surviving moves at a quick clip, losing some of the polish from their last outing with Meldal-Johnsen. They’re conscious when they sound too slick for their own good: The opening acoustic guitar riff on “One Mil” was recorded on Adkins’ iPhone mic in his garage. AFI frontman Davey Havok, who appears on the album finale “Congratulations,” also appears via iPhone.
“There’s no clarity in front of me,” Adkins sings on that song, which serves as a sort of curtain call. At six minutes, it somehow still feels a little short. It’s hard to imagine this iteration of J.E.W. recording another “Goodbye Sky Harbor,” that loitering Clarity closer that would take up nearly half of their latest album’s length. By Surviving’s terminus, listeners might find themselves wanting more risks. But the album on the whole is a solid, self-aware addition to Jimmy Eat World’s catalog, and if the band’s modest strivers’ outlook has proved anything, it’s that there will be another. A band whose biggest song is against writing oneself off always has work to do.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Inspired by Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly, the married Montreal duo explore themes of addiction, loss, and identity in cinematically tinged coldwave.

New Path

After his fourth wife left him, in 1970, Philip K. Dick spent several years in his California home living semi-communally with a rotating cast of mostly teenage drug users and ingesting heavy amounts of amphetamines. These experiences inspired the sci-fi author’s 1977 opus A Scanner Darkly, which envisioned a not-so-distant, dystopian Orange County, featuring a corporate-run rehab center called New-Path. For their second album on DFA, New Path, the Montreal husband-and-wife electronic duo Essaie Pas draw on the novel’s themes, including addiction, loss, and identity, while venturing down previously unexplored sonic corridors.
Although a knowledge of the source material (or Richard Linklater’s 2006 film adaptation, starring a rotoscoped Keanu Reeves) isn’t essential to unpacking the follow-up to Marie Davidson and Pierre Guerineau’s 2016 LP, Demain Est Une Autre Nuit, its depiction of a paranoid society in the throes of a national drug crisis seems grimly prescient today. The pair have said in interviews that their own and loved ones’ past struggles with substance abuse made it easy to relate to the book’s weighty topics. Subsequently, the six tracks here frequently capture the feelings of claustrophobia and despair associated with a bad trip, using unrelenting percussion, twitchy analog synths, and half-French, half-English incantations.
After working on separate projects for the past year—Guerineau has produced for Montreal acts including Bernardino Femminielli, Pelada, and Sleazy (Davidson and Ginger Breaker)—they’ve brought what they’ve learned back to their own lab. Compared to their previous record, and Davidson’s excellent club-oriented solo effort Adieux Au Dancefloor (released on Veronica Vasicka’s Cititrax sublabel), New Path finds them taking a more experimental approach to song structures. Half the tracks clock in at over six minutes, allowing the duo to build and sustain tension, and occasionally to pull their compositions apart to see how they work, like engineers with a circuit board. More than ever, there’s a cinematic quality to their music, whether in the pulsating chase-scene techno of “Substance M” or the uneasy, string-laden “Futur Parlé.” “Les agents des stups” (“Narcotics Officer”) recalls Oneohtrix Point Never’s hyperreal Good Time soundtrack, layering oscillating synths, whirring sirens, and unidentifiable all-points bulletins into a frenetic seven-minute centerpiece.
What sets Essaie Pas apart from their coldwave contemporaries is their ability to find moments of levity within the darkness. Similar to Davidson’s motorik collaboration with the London-based producer Not Waving, the hallucinatory standout “Complet Brouillé” counterbalances her ominous proclamations (“I don’t expect to live long”) with echoing laughter and distorted dial tones. The biggest departure for the duo is the ambient title track, which recreates dialogue spoken by the novel’s protagonist, Bob Arctor, after being transferred to a farming facility and put to work. While the monologue, made all the more disorienting here by its text-to-speech rendition, is delivered by a character who’s lost his friends and sanity due to drugs, it’s also tangible and vulnerable. Bird chirps creep in toward the song’s closing, but it’s too late for him to hear them.
While New Path is hardly the first album inspired by Dick’s futuristic worlds—genre-diverse artists such as Bloc Party, Gary Numan, and Janelle Monáe have referenced the prolific author in their songs—it is perhaps the one with the timeliest message. “There’s no guide or easy way to deal with such heavy realities, but as they’re rooted [in] our human condition, the least we can do is to acknowledge them,” Guerineau said in a Noisey interview. Beyond simply making surface references to scramble suits and fields of blue flowers, Essaie Pas connect to something deeper—real human emotion.


Luaka Bop compiles "the funky, fuzzy sounds of West Africa."

Various Artists: World Psychedelic Classics 3: Love's a Real Thing; the Funky, Fuzzy Sounds of West Africa

Without West African music, we wouldn't have pop as we know it. The rhythms of African traditional music and the storytelling craft of traveling griots-- relatives of the early bluesmen-- form a huge part of the ancestral basis for jazz, blues, and, by extension, rock'n'roll, reggae, and all of their modern counterparts. The modern world is a cultural vortex, sweeping disparate strands into new forms, and in the 20th century all of the musical descendants of Africa's rhythmic past-- originally spread through scattered Diaspora by the slave trade-- came flooding back to Africa cross-pollinated with European compositional traditions. In the wake of independence, many young musicians felt the need to break free from the styles their parents had danced to and invent something of their own. It was the 1960s, and ample inspiration flowed in on vinyl from the West, as did instruments, amplifiers, and recording equipment.
Psychedelia, soul, and funk are words we use to broadly describe music, but they're almost intentionally open-ended-- and all three were global phenomena in the 1960s and 70s. African musicians reared on highlife and Cuban rhumba considered them as a unified palette, drawing freely from each as well as their own traditions to create the styles we know today-- Afrobeat, mbalax, soukous, benga, mbaqanga, and so on. The variety of sounds is staggering, and most of it is still waiting to be discovered outside of Africa. With such a huge amount of music and so little means of hearing it, we have to turn to compilations to help us find our way into it and thankfully the range of choices is currently growing steadily.
The latest chance to get your feet wet comes courtesy of David Byrne's Luaka Bop label, in the third installment of their excellent World Psychedelic Classics series and the first to feature a range of artists rather than focusing on just one. Love's a Real Thing draws from across West Africa, focusing on the thrilling juncture of Africa's musical history where experimentation was the rule and Africa, unbeknownst to most Westerners, experienced its own psychedelic era, complete with attendant social upheaval, flared pants, fluorescent colors, odd hairdos, and generation gap. The songs here run a good gamut from the relatively conservative Afro-Cuban groove of No. 1 de No. 1 (the name presumably means "best of the best") to the flailing, heavy acid-funk of Ofo the Black Company.
The disc starts with a single smack of a snare drum, which sets Orchestra Poly-Rhythmo de Cotonou Dahomey's "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome" off and running with snaking guitars and jerking rhythms. Benin's best musical export are credited here without the "T.P." prefix they usually affixed to their name, an acronym for "tout pouissant," French for "all-mighty" and not at all a misnomer. Unlike most Afropop compilations, which tend to focus on one country or a specific sound, this one revels in veering back and forth between Anglo and Francophone countries, tossing heavy funk in with British Invasion-tinged soul and conga-heavy neo-traditional psych in an intentional display of stylistic breadth.
They've dug up some real gems, too, such as the title track, by Gambia's Super Eagles, a ripping soul/Britpop song full of sinewy guitar lines and dueling lead vocalists. Moussa Doumbia's "Keleya" takes the organ-heavy sound of the Malian hotel bands and throttles it with a gruff vocal attack, while Sorry Bamba's "Porry" is a brilliant, spacious Saharan riff on Cuban son, swimming in organ and stately Andalusian horns. Cameroon's Manu Dibango is an African funk superstar, but the track they've chosen here, the closing theme to his soundtrack for the Senegalese film Ceddo, is an odd, inspired choice, surrounding traditional African marimba with a slow funk burn for an ultimately majestic instrumental. Nigerian William Onyeabor's "Better Change Your Mind" is a synth-slathered prog-funk killer whose title refers not to changing an opinion so much as an entire mindset, reaching for a decidedly flower power-ish ideal of international harmony and cooperation.
Even with all the variety, there's not a weak selection here, nor anything that feels out of place. A glorious eclecticism is one of the defining characteristics of African popular music in its 1970s golden era, so it's entirely appropriate for a compilation like this to turn on a dime with every track. Beyond that, this offers plenty of other accoutrements like informative liner notes and a multimedia video for "Minsato Le, Mi Dayihome", not to mention the fact that only two of these songs are currently in print anywhere else. Simply put, this is a fantastic introduction to a broad range of vintage West African sounds, and one that's likely to please both devoted followers of African music and curiosity-seekers alike.


The solo debut from folk singer Alexandra Sauser-Monnig reveals her effortless skill as a songwriter as she delivers an homage to the betwixt and between of a relationship in its twilight.

Dawnbreaker

The persistent pluck of guitar strings is the sound of all that’s fleeting: Robert Johnson’s desperate attempt to flag a ride in “Cross Road Blues,” Bob Dylan’s peripatetic lovers in “Tangled Up in Blue,” Phoebe Bridgers’ trek down “Scott Street.” The meandering strings call to mind a stumble towards or away from some urgent place, a march that mirrors the slap of two feet. Daughter of Swords’s Dawnbreaker, the solo debut from Alexandra Sauser-Monnig—one of three singers in the North Carolina folk trio Mountain Man—is the latest album to chronicle these liminal blues, a 10-song homage to the betwixt and between of a relationship in its twilight. In these folksy riffs on well-trod terrain—heartbreak, confusion, hope that looks like the horizon on an open highway—Daughter of Swords adds a layer of nuance and tenderness to the panoply of songs that came before. It’s hardly a new vista, but Sauser-Monnig’s intimate, earthy songs make the view memorable all the same.
Sauser-Monnig can draw the perfect shape of a bruised heart with a blindfold on. There are country ballads (“Easy is Hard”) that conjure sleepless nights listening to the radio on without a single misplaced, derivative note. “Shining Woman” soundtracks the narrator’s admiration of a bicyclist climbing California’s Highway 1,  recognizing the role of other women’s kindness and inspiration during lovelorn, dejected times. “Long Leaf Pine,” which conjures an afternoon in the North Carolina woods near Sauser-Monnig’s home, marks the record’s highest achievement, an old-fashioned incantation adorned in harmonies that wears its list of flora and fauna like a ceremonial wreath: blackberry, muscadine, snake, rabbit, all ordered such that anyone from the region could almost teleport to a certain lake, a certain peace that feels like sadness.
Sauser-Monnig’s vocals land lightly, more chickadee than cardinal. She is dexterous and pliant as a willow. It follows that the best songs on the record don’t force a compromise between instrumentation and melody, as with “Human,” whose wistful simplicity is searing. “You can’t will a love to life/But you can do the loving thing/Make like a bird and fly,” she sings. Backed by the simple strums of a guitar, it’s a moment of held breath, like a prayer.
Dawnbreaker has its imperfections. The record’s second half has more heft than its first, where the poppy levity of “Gem” and “Shining Woman” seem hesitant compared to the sparer, more intimate arrangements that suit her best. But even when it falters, Daughter of Swords’ debut captures the sun passing through a hot car in a nowhere town, the Big Gulp melting in the cupholder, the stops on a trajectory whose end is never entirely clear. It’s a record so precise as to be sensory, whose arrangements of harmonies, guitars, and lonesome trills are like the intake of breath before a faltering step.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Wedding the experimental free-folk of "New Weird America" to the more conventionally song-focused SF freak-folk movement, Six Organs of Admittance mastermind Ben Chasny comes into his own on this, his first-ever studio-recorded LP. Richly textured and three-dimensional, School of the Flower straddles the line between moody ambient madness and vintage sunlit psych-folk.

Six Organs of Admittance: School of the Flower

School of the Flower

A contemporary master of midnight ragas, acoustic noise, and finger-picking polysyllables, Ben Chasny doesn't snag as many magazine covers as Devendra Banhart, but there's no doubt the Oakland guitarist is an equally compelling-- albeit more taciturn personality. For starters, Chasny overlaps his Six Organs of Admittance moniker's Buddhist origins with paganism, astral projections, prophetic dreams, surrealism, and a reverence for outsider folk masters. Then, of course, there's his day job as a psych monster in Comets on Fire, his craggy partnership with Deerhoof co-founder Rob Fisk in backwoods experimenters Badgerlore, a touring/recording relationship with Current 93's David Tibet, and a brief European tour with Joanna Newsom this April. As lazy as it is to pin Banhart to one specific scene or motif, Chasny proves even more difficult to jam within the confines of the "New Weird America" tag. It's like pigeonholing John Fahey's ghost.
Now add to all of that an obvious knowledge and love of Southern Lord metal/drone and early 1990s noise. Unlike those who list Vashti Bunyan and Harry Smith as forebears, Chasny cites Ghost, Dead C, Keiji Haino, the Japanese noise label PSF Records, and the vastly underrated contemporary avant guitarist Loren Conners. In the same breath, he talks about the importance of complimenting your Incredible String Band forays with Fushitsusha, Sunn 0))), the radio on white noise, and Skullflower. So while there's no doubt he works within a folk tradition on some level, instead of tagging Chasny with the full-on f-word, it makes more sense to link him with Supreme Dicks or Tower Recordings or other acoustic-minded experimenters.
Either way, Chasny's incredibly prolific by any standard. In 2004, his Six Organs ouput alone included For Octavio Paz-- a shadowy collection of mostly instrumental steel and nylon guitar pieces (with lovely bells and chimes)-- along with the reissues of 2000's Manifestation and 1999's Nightly Trembling. The year before he turned Nikki Sudden with Compathia and his self-titled 1998 debut received the reissue treatment. As Lou Barlow once taught by example, being so prolific can present a dud-heavy obstacle course, but thus far Chasny's yet to lay an overcooked egg. Better yet, his newest foray (the first for Drag City) is his strongest, most satisfying effort to date.
Though his past home-recorded output never felt thin, School of the Flower is his first recorded in a studio (gone is the borrowed cassette 4-track) and the result is a dense, more three-dimensional sound. It's also his most tightly composed effort, a Zen balance between Compathia's lullabies, For Octavio Paz's melancholy six-string intricacies, and Dark Noontide's drifting, fractured downer psych universe. If you haven't heard Six Organs yet, this is where to start.
The album begins with the raucous "Eighth Cognition", wherein Sunburned Hand of the Man/Cold Bleak Heat drummer Chris Corsano does what he does best, sluicing up an elegant dust storm part tornado/part precision rap. The churning, cymbal crash lasts for a little over a minute before suddenly dissipating and blending into the fragile "All You've Left", one of Chasny's gorgeous falsetto ballads.
Taking the whirlpool of "Eighth Cognition" whirlpool a bit further, the 13-and-a-half-minute title track is a guitar/drum meltdown Chasny says was inspired by John Cale and Terry Riley's seminal 1971 collaboration, Church of Anthrax. On it, Chasny's guitar turns into an infinite loop under which Corsano's free to blow to and fro. Inititating a different sense of motion, "Saint Cloud" drifts patiently along Chasny's soft chants and dense "Ohm"'s, some sort of droning, increasingly spiraled feedback, and crisp repetitious strings.
The spare "Words For Two" and "Home" (the later with a star-kiss, Loren Connors-style guitar launch) are Chasny's tightest, most affecting vocal-and-guitar pieces to come gliding 'round the holy mountain. There's also a thoughtful cover of Gary Higgins' folk classic, "Thicker Than a Smokey" from the 1973 album, Red Hash, which was recorded briefly before he went to prison on a two-year, nine-month sentence for possession of marijuana. Chasny's take perhaps lacks the distant small-town melancholia of the original, but when he sings its haunting opening-- "What do you intend to do young man? Where do you intend to go?"-- there are still chills. Chasny has often covered it live and decided to "throw it on the record to put the word out so we could find Gary Higgins." In fact, Zach Cowie at Drag City started writing all the Gary Higgins' he could find and eventually located the red-haired folkie, who just signed a contract with Drag City to reissue his lost 1973 masterpiece. (Like the best records, School of the Flower's legacy extends beyond just its songs.)
As intimated earlier, School of the Flower blooms and dies rather quickly. Put more prosaically, the whole thing runs its course in just under 40 minutes. This might seem like a minimalist shame for amped-up drone junkies, but really it's a tasteful (and very very welcome) gesture. More practically speaking, when Chasny reaches the final jangling sustain of the guitar coda lullaby "Lisbon," he still hasn't made a misstep or tapped a wrong note, so who can blame him for achieving something so sublime and not wanting to fuck it up? Whatever its duration, School of the Flower is one of those rare, understated but compulsive collections you'll want to listen to on repeat until it's time to blow out the incense, dump the wine in the sink, and step fuzzy-headed into the imperfect sunlight of the prosaic, but suddenly potentially transcendent world.


A decade ago, I loudly expounded upon Beat Happening's Spartan beauty to a pack of rabid, cynical post-hardcore friends ...

Beat Happening: Music to Climb the Apple Tree By

Music to Climb the Apple Tree By

A decade ago, I loudly expounded upon Beat Happening's Spartan beauty to a pack of rabid, cynical post-hardcore friends of mine who, try as they might, could only see childish amateurism in Bret Lunsford, Calvin Johnson, and Heather Lewis's rustic childhood sing-alongs. I was a teenage devotee. When naysayers complained that Dreamy was hollow, I explained that Beat Happening didn't need a bassist because Calvin's voice was deep enough to supply endless roots. When Mel Bay graduates groaned about the primitive rock drumming and simple guitar strums, I wrote essays in the school paper about why the trio's minimalism eloquently flew in the face of cheesy rock star excess; and besides, the Olympians perfected a dark, perverse sweetness I only ever really saw in my favorite books.
In the sparest of tunes about hot chocolate boys, holding hands after sex, or eating wild cherries and french toast at cemeteries, Beat Happening's songs were dumpster-diving romantic. Live, Calvin's oddball dances and wide-eyed charisma created a dose of creepy punk-confrontation-cum-childhood-trauma and was more unnerving than the faceless dudes next door wallowing in a generic sea of uninspired tough-guy Sam Ash tropes. Subsequently, these darker, headier aspects of Beat Happening's poetry were lost to twee-pop groups like Cub, Bunnygrunt, and dozens of pixie-stix-sucking copycat dorks who misinterpreted the trio's outer-id lyricism as a call for lunchbox-toting kindergarten cuddlecore.
Though I'm no fan of Bret, Calvin, or Heather's later work, as Beat Happening they epitomized a Blake-as-teenage-punk philosophy. Their aesthetic was so pared down that it barely allowed room for a misfire from their formative bare-bones autism in the early 80s to 1992's fleshed-out grand finale, You Turn Me On. Second maybe only to Fugazi in my formative musical worldview, and ripe for a reconsideration by youngsters who perhaps only know the autumnal anthem "Indian Summer" through Luna's soporific cover, the band's entire output was collected on last year's Crashing Through-- titled after a track from 1988's Jamboree-- a retrospective seven-disc box set complete with an extensive 96-page booklet authored by fellow salad-day traveller Lois Maffeo.
Music to Climb the Apple Tree By, which was included with that box set, compiles fifteen songs recorded between 1984 and 2000, including the original version of "Nancy Sin" and the four dense, acrobatic tracks that comprised the band's 1988's split EP with Screaming Trees. Other highlights include Beat Happening's newest, but equally spare compositions: "Angel Gone" and "Zombie Limbo Time" from 2000's Angel Gone seven-inch, and the still-great "Foggy Eyes", which was first included on their self-titled 1985 debut and later covered on the 1991 Beat Happening tribute Fortune Cookie Prize by Seaweed in a version predictably raucous enough for even the most macho of naysayers.
Fifteen tracks, of course, is but a tiny blip in a lengthy oeuvre, and despite my high opinion of Beat Happening, Music to Climb the Apple Tree By, like most hodgepodge singles collections, not only ends in a preposition, but lacks narrative cohesion as though waiting for the rest of the sentence to show up and complete the thought. I'm a stalwart fan of original album sequences, especially the way songs play off one another after years of close proximity; the new placement of these tracks doesn't feel correct somehow-- it's more like the ahistorical, catch-all desktop of an MP3 fanatic than those fully realized rainy-day adventure stories for which I enjoyed Beat Happening the most.
Most kindly put, Music to Climb the Apple Tree By works as a reminder of a particularly great band, and it had me cycling obsessively through the lost corners of my record collection for my copy of Dreamy. If this is your first listen, use these tiny pop moments as the impetus for a more complete investigation of a band you should already know by heart.


Shifting between dense, sludge-rock epics and upbeat, melodic moments that could fit into modern rock radio playlists, Miami stoner-rockers Torche spread their wings and explore new territory while still creating their heaviest music yet.

Meanderthal

After establishing themselves as fine purveyors of metallic sludge over the course of an album and an EP, Torche's second full-length, Meanderthal, refines their penchant for volume and proves that there's more in their bag of tricks than Melvins-like metal. The record kicks off at a breakneck pace with a half-dozen tar-thick tracks. The fleet-fingered math of "Triumph of Venus" gives way to the triumphant bombast of "Grenades", a track that's barely finished before "Pirhaña"'s stop/start stomp kicks into gear. Through these six songs-- including "Sandstorm", "Speed of the Nail", and "Healer"-- nothing necessarily feels out of the ordinary when compared to what Torche have done in the past.
The hard left turn-- and perhaps the breaking point with "true" metal dudes-- comes with "Across the Shields", a tune that could find a nice home on modern rock radio. Musically, the group finds a comfortable middle ground between their speed trials and more turgid pace, allowing Steve Brooks' militant holler-- usually more reminiscent of Helmet's Page Hamilton-- to take on a melodic bent that could bring to mind anyone from Dave Grohl to Jawbox's J. Robbins. There's even an honest-to-goodness hook: "I am your armor," Brooks sings as the guitars descend. The moment stands out due to producer (and Converge guitarist) Kurt Ballou; the crisp sheen he lends to Torche's sound makes everything stand out and shimmer.
Torche follow that breakthrough with a second half that contains a quick and clean 30-second instrumental ("Little Champion"), more catchy hit-and-run slabs ("Sundown", "Without a Sound"), and a thunderous one-two punch ("Amnesian", "Meanderthal") to finish an album that shows Torche spreading their wings and exploring new territory while still creating their heaviest music yet. It's a fitting send-off to an absolutely killer rock record-- one that's likely to appeal to listeners into any stripe of heavy music from the past 20 years.


Saxophonist Anthony Braxton's collaboration with koto player Miya Masaoka is simultaneously dramatic and dreamy, swinging between free improv and ambient passages.

Anthony Braxton / Miya Masaoka: Duo (DCWM) 2013

Duo (DCWM) 2013

The composer and instrumentalist Miya Masaoka was already well-versed in experimental practices when she showed up for a 2013 gig with saxophonist Anthony Braxton. As a specialist on the koto, a traditional Japanese string instrument, Masaoka had appeared alongside visionary artists like Pauline Oliveros, in addition to presenting her own pieces on an electronically modified koto. Yet Braxton’s electro-acoustic setup managed to impress her.
“When I entered the stage area, there were six small speakers on tripods that resembled human heads on a stick figure body,” she writes in the liner notes for Duo (DCWM) 2013. “The speakers were facing in seemingly random directions, almost like people facing every which way, as if the speakers were talking to each other at a cocktail party.” Over two ensuing sets (three “experiences”), the duo improvised alongside waves of electronic tones, programmed by Braxton on the interactive SuperCollider platform.
A two-channel mix of that show, newly released on the RogueArt label, narrows the concert’s omnidirectional sonics a bit. But the most striking qualities of that performance have no trouble asserting themselves on the stereo recording. Simultaneously dramatic and dreamy, the duo’s method of swinging between free-improv and more ambient styles follows the loose script of other performances in Braxton’s “Diamond Curtain Wall Music” system. (Or, per Braxton’s preferred album-titling scheme, “DCWM.”)
The album’s first disc is the calmer one, making it the more surprising half of the show. Its lone, 50-minute track (“Experience 1”) shows the improvisers patiently building rapport with one another, and with the placid SuperCollider tones. Masaoka’s “cocktail party” analogy turns out to be an apt way to describe the unusual but convivial air of Braxton’s Diamond Curtain Wall Music system. When the SuperCollider setup enters a duo dialogue already in progress, sometimes it harmonizes ideally. And sometimes the electronic contribution feels like a less elegant interruption, requiring Braxton and Masaoka to adapt on the fly to keep the flow of conversation moving smoothly.
Duo (DCWM) 2013 contains some of Braxton’s most sumptuous playing in recent memory, and Masaoka’s range of approaches is equally advanced. She can improvise motifs on the koto that sound fairly recognizable—with strums or resonant picked lines that evoke traditional Japanese forms. And then she can attack the instrument as though it were one of John Cage’s “prepared pianos,” producing scrapes and twanging echoes. This adaptability makes her a powerful partner for the unpredictable Braxton. Half an hour in, after being spurred on by some of Masaoka’s arpeggiated chords, Braxton cuts loose with some bluesy, rapidly descending lines. Those same licks might have produced satisfied cries from jazz aficionados in a club, half a century ago. But without a vintage, swinging rhythm section supporting those notes, the exultation sings in a newly thrilling manner.
This duo concert is another artifact that underlines the benefits of Braxton's convention-resistant thinking. Some of Masaoka’s improvised themes could pass for ancient chamber-music hooks (as with some gorgeous progressions that come toward the end of “Experience 2,” on the second disc). And her ability to pivot off a wild card played by the electronics is just as keen. There are many other “DCWM” recordings in Braxton’s discography—including the twelve CDs housed in one recent (and often transporting) box set. But this duo's refined power distinguishes this entry with ease.


Mark Oliver Everett returns with another record of sadsack self-pity, without even the tinges of humor that typically color his work.

End Times

If sad bastard music is looking to nominate a new key-holder, consider End Times as Mark Oliver Everett's formal bid. Over the course of eight studio albums as Eels, Everett has made a career of feeling sorry for himself in some capacity-- typically, these misanthropic leanings have been juxtaposed against childlike flits of whimsy or coffee-black observations of varying degrees of wit. He was, for the most part, never humorless; he was gratingly self-referential and bogged-down by the Leonard Cohen-as-Eeyore thing he does. End Times does the sadness without the humor. Everett has described the album as a reaction to "the state of the desperate times we live in," and it chronicles a very personal break-up through a prism of a collective hard times. It is by all accounts a break-up album, but one that's plodding, boring, and full of icky self-pity. "Now I'm a statistic, but I'm not fatalistic," Everett's sings on "In My Younger Days", "I'm not yet resigned to fate." Like on much of End Times, the guy couldn't be further off-base.
It starts with "The Beginning", a disparate picture of a down-on-their-luck couple that still views the world as "beautiful and free." A foreboding chronicle of the unpleasantness to follow, the typical arc of a break-up tale never materializes as "The Beginning" promises. Instead, the remainder of the record refuses to delve into any emotion more complex than pity or self-doubt (save for "Unhinged", the only moment where Everett takes a break from blaming himself and musters the courage to call his lover "crazy"), until we arrive at "On My Feet", which really requires no further explanation. This isn't to say you don't kind of feel for the guy-- after all, you'd have to endure some seriously damaging emotional stuff to want to drag your fans through 40 minutes of it as well--especially without any real emotional payout.
Somehow, this makes the outlying "end of times" correlation even more disingenuous. At its least intrusive, it just feels tacked-on: "Gone Man", a rare mid-tempo bid here, effuses like it's drinking to forget, but ultimately finds Everett mulling over every misstep. When there does seem to be something to say about the breakdown (not just the break-up), it comes off even cheaper. "Paradise Blues" finds Everett back in tongue-in-cheek mode, but it blows up in his face so spectacularly, it's pure contrivance. Eventually, Everett's disassociation with himself results in a disassociation with the music, as each painfully plain entry becomes simply exhaustively dull. By the end, he's left singing to the "only friend [he] has in the world," the little bird on the back porch-- just in case you were wondering how sucky this thing could truly get.


This monumental box set collects the work of the 80-year-old composer, teacher, and electronic music pioneer: Reverberations fills a dozen discs in almost as many hours, laying substantial groundwork for every electronic drone artist and harsh noise terrorist to come.

Pauline Oliveros: Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970

With about 10 other people, mostly strangers, I reclined on the floor of an international hand-drum emporium and closed my eyes. We were all trying to cross the internal divide between "the involuntary nature of hearing and the voluntary selective nature of listening," which seemed like it could mean a lot of different things. To me, it was about trying to experience sounds for what they were, not what they meant. The hum of a refrigerator and the whoosh of traffic gradually drifted away from their mundane contexts, revealing the variety and interconnection of what I was conditioned to hear as generic and separate. It was harder to detach the clock's tick from turning gears and passing time. In the moments when I could, I felt very free.
The occasion was a Deep Listening session with certified instructor Shannon Morrow. Deep Listening is less of a thing you do than a way to do all kinds of things-- perform, meditate, communicate, compose, or just be in the world. It's hard to summarize but easy to grasp: a set of broadly accessible philosophies and practices for heightening your awareness of total sound. It's useful for anyone who wants to develop a musical practice or unlearn conventional sonic hierarchies.
It's also the core of the art of its creator, Pauline Oliveros, the 80-year-old composer, accordionist, teacher, and electronic music pioneer who easily ranks among the most innovative and influential musicians of the mid-20th-century avant-garde, which still strongly governs experimental music today. She wasn't the first to become entranced by the pops and whistles in the nether regions of the radio band. But she was one of the first to do something about it, focusing on frequencies instead of melodies, motions instead of rhythms, processes instead of outcomes.
Oliveros only formalized Deep Listening a couple of decades ago, but her curiosity to hear sound out to its very edges-- plus the ingenuity to pull it off-- has been apparent since she made her earliest works on a new frontier cluttered with magnetic tape, hulking computer rigs, tone oscillators, and primitive modular synthesizers. These are collected for the first time on Reverberations: Tape and Electronic Music 1961-1970, a monumental box set from Important Records.
One advantageous thing about tape music is that the performance is also the recording, so there was no shortage of material for this retrospective, which fills a dozen discs in almost as many hours. While any massive tape music collection will have its share of desultory windshear, the vision and variety of Reverberations are incredible, and feel surprisingly untarnished by 50 years of imitation. In the music, two distinct intelligences, one human and one mechanical, circle each other cautiously but inquisitively. We hear unpredictable occurrences, captured in the moment of discovery, becoming first principles for a new generation.
During the 1960s, in the musically thriving Bay Area, Oliveros counted the likes of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Loren Rush as her compatriots. She played accordion in the premiere of In C. She founded the San Francisco Tape Music Center with Morton Subotnick. She was in the thick of the pure electronic phase predating her seminal electro-acoustic work, using natural sounds and raw test signals as fodder for processing systems of her own design, which could be played almost like instruments.
This distinguished her from her contemporaries, most of whom were meticulous cutters and splicers. Her reel-to-reel delay system predicted Brian Eno's, but instead of dreamy melodies, she stuffed it full of splintering tones, working with magisterial patience through the kaleidoscope of possibilities in the particular control system. The music comes off as incidentally imagistic, but the answerless fact of sound is paramount. It's an elaborate magic show of competing frequencies, which apparently can do very weird things if you know what you're doing, as when a harmony swallows its own root notes so that we hear two absences ringing in tune.
Reverberations feels contemporary, with its twitters and howls and eerie near-vocalizations; its hypnotic flux and explosive events. It should, as it lays substantial groundwork for every electronic drone artist and harsh noise terrorist to come-- anyone who relies on signals behaving semi-predictably to tap into an intuition beyond human capacity. On the spectrum of intensity, Oliveros runs from Keith Fullerton Whitman subtlety to John Wiese violence. This speaks to a certain posture of benevolent radicalism that has been as influential as her technical innovations.
A substantial booklet of essays accompanies this release, and a revealing moment comes in one by the artist Cory Arcangel, who studied music with Oliveros. He recalls her fondly describing a performance in the 60s where she tuned oscillators to the frequency of the hall, so the sound multiplied and sent people screaming. "I want to send people screaming from institutions!" Arcangel thought. The dawn of electronic music must have been an ideal time for that, when a second horizon appeared in music above the first one we'd chased for so long. It's harder to scandalize the academy now, but people are still trying.
I can't even claim to have heard every minute of Reverberations. I tried to play it in my house from morning to night one day, and it was, of course, overwhelming. I found it more interesting to listen to the same parts and notice how they changed each time. From a Deep Listening perspective, the music is completed by its total sonic environment, which is always different. Listening to the 30-minute-plus "Angel Fix" for the first time, it took a while to realize the birdsong entwined in the loopy high frequencies came from the screen door and not the speakers.
This porous boundary between music and world is immediately associated with John Cage, but Oliveros was right there with him, if not slightly out front; she was just behind Stockhausen in developing a common tongue for electronic music. She built technology we take for granted today, listened carefully to what it had to say, and then brought it back into a humanistic and acoustic process during what may be considered her prime career, from the 70s onward. But that would be a discredit to the groundbreaking work captured on Reverberations. Eerily listenable despite its daunting mien, it also has one of the rarest virtues: necessity. If it didn't exist, neither would music as we know it today.


Having traded New Orleans for Taos, the Michigan-born singer-songwriter offers a chronicle of her wanderings. The songs roll out as though she’d written them behind the wheel on a long drive.

Safe to Run

Chance took Esther Rose to New Mexico. Around the time she released her third album, 2021’s How Many Times, she found herself in line at a coffee shop in Taos and, on a whim, asked if they were hiring. She got the job, packed up her stuff back in Louisiana, and made the long drive west. If she hadn’t become a barista in the Land of Enchantment, who knows where she might have ended up? Originally from Columbiaville, Michigan, and more recently associated with the lively country scene in New Orleans, Rose barely needs a reason to roam, much less a final destination. Her new album, Safe to Run, is a chronicle of her wanderings. “I don’t have a plan, it’s true,” she sings on “New Magic II,” her guitar tracing the highway lines to nowhere in particular. “Just to spend a little time with you/And maybe write a song or two.”
Creativity and constant motion are intertwined in Rose’s music. Full of tactile details and poetic turns of phrase, the songs on Safe to Run have the feel of road-trip musings, as though she were recording stray thoughts from an all-day drive. She worries over uncomfortable memories, ponders big philosophical questions, and puzzles over life dilemmas in songs that grow more complicated with each line. On “Chet Baker,” Rose reminisces about her wild past—those long nights in bars and longer days with frayed edges. But embarrassment and concern (“Twenty-three/Uh-huh, save me,” she sings with an palpable roll of her eyes) give way to a more charitable acceptance of her younger, more reckless self (“Now we’re pretty good”), and her tone telegraphs relief that those experiences could yield a song as buoyant as this.
Like Hurray for the Riff Raff, the Deslondes, and Silver Synthetic—three other New Orleans acts whose members contribute to Safe to Run—Rose remains grounded in country music even as she roams farther afield. Opener “Stay” drips with heavy pedal steel, and “Dream Girl” rewrites generations of country tunes about women who leave small towns for the glamor of Hollywood. Think Johnny Cash’s “Ballad of a Teenage Queen” or Vern Stovall’s “Long Black Limousine” or even Don Williams’ “If Hollywood Don’t Need You.” But Rose writes a happy—and gently subversive—ending for her character. There’s no man shaming her back where she came from, and she doesn’t return humbled or dead.
For Rose, country music is like home, which means it’s as much a place to leave as a place to stay. Especially on its second half, Safe to Run downplays the twang of her previous albums and subtly turns more pop, peppering her songs with chamber strings, drum loops, and chiming ’90s guitar. There’s nothing quite as radical as anything on the 2021 EP How Many More Times, which collected covers of Rose’s songs by Stef Chura, Shamir, Anjimile, and others. But perhaps that release gave her license to roam a little further from familiar sounds, especially in the way she uses her voice. She’s developed a sly trick of speaking a word right in the middle of a line, as though arching an eyebrow or casting a side-eye. “I’ve got two minds about you, I confess,” she tells a lover on “Spider,” then adds, “Now get undressed.” She makes the line sound both funny and sad; it’s as though she’s willing to let one mind override the other, if only for a night.
Rose has two minds about a lot of stuff on Safe to Run, including the whole notion of running. Wandering can be complicated: a natural response to a deep itch in the soul, but also a fossil-fuel extravagance. The title track—which may be Rose’s best and thorniest composition—opens as another song about travel, but gradually expands its scope to consider the environmental impact of all those miles. Fittingly, it’s a duet with Hurray for the Riff Raff’s Alynda Segarra, whose own albums juggle the personal and the public so well. “Man, to be alive seems we just consume/Everything in sight becoming fuel,” Rose sings, knowing there’s no safe place to run and no safe way to get there. She never pretends to reconcile that contradiction, but lets it hang in the air among the halting guitar and precarious harmonies. It sounds like it takes everything she has just to keep it between the ditches.


Singing about human complexity, channeling her past with Serge Gainsbourg, and grappling with the death of her daughter, the iconic singer-songwriter sounds battle-scarred but never defeated.

Oh! Pardon tu dormais…

Death stalks Oh! Pardon tu dormais…, the 14th studio album from Francophile English singer Jane Birkin. In 2013, Birkin’s daughter Kate Barry died after falling from the window of her Paris flat, and on Oh! Pardon tu dormais... Birkin directly tackles the subject in her music for the first time. It is an album, she told Vogue recently, grounded in a distinctly unsentimental idea of what makes people human: “all their defects and their cowardliness and their guilt and their complexity.”
Barry isn’t the only phantom here. Serge Gainsbourg, Birkin’s onetime romantic partner and eternal creative inspiration, haunts the record’s classically elegant arrangements, and there is a sense, on songs like “Catch Me if You Can” and “Ghosts,” of Birkin perhaps looking ahead to the end of her own life in lyrics weighed down by absence and loss. “Catch me if you can, my love/I’m almost gone from view,” Birkin sings on “Catch Me if You Can,” the devastating album closer.
The results are an emotional tour de force from an artist who has never gotten her musical due outside of France. (This album, in fact, marks the first time she has written songs in English.) Birkin’s name will forever be linked to the songs Gainsbourg composed for her in the three decades after they met, leaving her better known as an interpreter than a songwriter in her own right. But the lyrics on a song like “Cigarettes,” which addresses her daughter’s death to the tune of a haunting cabaret waltz, are both raw and poetic. You can feel the aching, angry disbelief of a grieving mother in lines like “Ma fillette s’est balancée/Sur le pavé on l’a retrouvée” ("My little girl swayed/On the pavement we found her”). It is a song of deadening sorrow.
Birkin’s voice, too, is in immaculate form. She will never be a singer of operatic technique or vocal swagger—those who know her from Gainsbourg collaborations like “69 Année Érotique” will be aware of her breathy husk of a voice, a weapon of musical stealth rather than a full frontal attack. But her performance here is understated and full of character, emotion pooling in every carefully enunciated syllable. It’s like the work of a master film actor rather than a star of the stage, sly Bob Dylan instead of eager Bruce Springsteen: underplayed and totally believable.
Gainsbourg’s musical influence, meanwhile, can be found all over the album’s arrangements, which have been put together with devout care by Jean-Louis Piérot and Étienne Daho, the latter a legend of French pop. The album’s elegant strings, gently plucked bass guitars, and hints of the baroque sound like Air (on “Pas D’accord”) or Suede (on “Ta Sentinelle”), but only in as much as these acts once borrowed from Gainsbourg’s expansive, cinematic style.
It might seem a disservice to continually compare Birkin to her late collaborator. But Birkin hasn’t shied away from Gainsbourg’s towering prestige in the three decades since his death. Her last album, 2017’s Birkin / Gainsbourg : Le Symphonique, featured orchestral versions of Gainsbourg songs, and this record is home to a number of perfectly judged salutes to his style. The title track, in which Birkin and Daho trade the barbs of frustrated lovers, recalls Birkin’s duets with Gainsbourg on songs like “Je T’aime… Moi Non Plus,” while “F.R.U.I.T.” calls back to Birkin and Gainsbourg’s “Help Camionneur!” in its references to truck drivers and hitchhiking.
She does not dwell upon her grief: The title track is both funny and tragic in its astutely observed back and forth—the opening lines translate as “Oh, I’m sorry, you were sleeping/Yes but I’m not any more, as you can well see”—while “Je Voulais Être une Telle Perfection Pour Toi!” is unexpectedly funky, its slinky break and chicken-scratch guitar recalling the opulent hotel-lounge hop of French producers like Kid Loco.
Throughout, Birkin seems to draw strength from adversity. Like Bob Dylan’s late-period masterpiece Rough and Rowdy Ways or Marianne Faithfull’s devastating 2018 album Negative Capability, Oh! Pardon tu dormais… is weary but never resigned, battle-scarred but never defeated, a work of personal reckoning marked by a frantic desire to connect, as our time slips away. None of us can cheat death; but to face it with Birkin’s fortitude and poetic skill is to score a minor victory.

Buy: Rough Trade
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You probably know Keith Fullerton Whitman as breakcore maven Hrvatski, a man who played in a few bands\n\ before ...

Playthroughs

You probably know Keith Fullerton Whitman as breakcore maven Hrvatski, a man who played in a few bands before developing an obsession with Squarepusher and deciding to probe the most hectic beats possible on labels such as Planet \xB5 and his own Reckankreuzung, as well as falling into the Tigerbeat6 orbit. You also may know Hrvatski by his pithy electronic music write-ups for the Forced Exposure website, penned while he worked in sales for the revered distributor. But the Keith Fullerton Whitman of Playthroughs has kept a lower profile. Starting last year with the 21:30 for Acoustic Guitar EP, Whitman began experimenting with subtle music based on laptop-processed guitar tones. While he's tinkered with this approach here and there, Playthroughs is his first sustained exploration of quiet sound.
If you've listened to the more drone-focused side of electronic music in the last few years, you've definitely heard the core elements that make up Playthroughs. There is no radical breakthrough in texture here, nothing to make you turn your head and say, "What the hell was that?" Playthroughs consists entirely of processed guitar, but the tones are light on harmonics, with many possessing an almost sine wave-level of clarity. As the thin drones hang in the air and shift this way and that, they harmonize with other drones and find themselves poked with fuzzy implements of static. Nothing terribly earth-shattering about this composition method.
It's true that much of Playthroughs seems familiar on the surface, but I don't think it an exaggeration to say that this record essentially perfects this particular style of music. It's an album of meticulous balance, Zen focus, and tiny gestures that carry great force, where each individual piece of sound is carefully placed to maximize impact. The first 3\xBD minutes of "feedback zwei", for example, consists of overlapping blankets of clean, piercing electronic feedback that remain in constant motion, creating new harmonic patterns with each passing second. And an unexpected cloud of pink noise slowly envelops the sound field, bathing the entire track in a warm digital mist and drastically shifting the perspective. Eventually sub-bass tones provide even more glaring contrast (be sure to listen to this track on good headphones). It all sounds simple on paper, but the emotional impact of the transformation in "feedback zwei" is completely overwhelming, never failing to produce a lump in my throat.
The five tracks on Playthroughs were designed to work together, and a similar palette is used throughout. The opening "track3a(2waynice)" (obviously titles are of no import) finds Whitman trying his hand with the phase techniques of La Monte Young and Ryoji Ikeda, showing how much weird tension can be created when two or three tones that don't quite match up. The style of "fib01a" has the easiest reference point, being quite close in texture and feel to 94diskont-era Oval, minus the CD skips and with a greater understanding of extended tones. "ACGTR SVP" contains the thickest drones on Playthroughs, as guitars processed to sound like organs swell and recede. And the closing "modena" is 17 minutes of sonic bliss, strangely beautiful electronic taps that seem to hang in the air like a handful of airborne glitter catching light in extreme slow motion.
If I were talking to you about this album over coffee somewhere, I'd probably slide my copy across the table, say, "Give it a listen and see what you think," and then change the subject. Everyone knows the problem of building something up to a friend-- after hearing "You're going to love it, it's so perfect-- incredible!" a number of times, your expectations balloon to a size that no actual experience could ever hope to fill. I'm doubly reluctant to tell you what I think of Playthroughs because of the nature of the music. When I was talking up the Boredoms' Super Ae a couple years ago, I knew it was the kind of album that grabbed the listener by the throat and shook him around the room. Love it or hate it, Super Ae had the sort of impact you could feel through your body, and I had no doubt that everyone would understand just how colossal it was. Playthroughs is an entirely different animal, with a much more understated appeal. Still, I'm writing a record review for Pitchfork here, so I have to give you my honest opinion: this is by some margin the best album I've heard in 2002, and there are only about ten weeks left.


The New Hampshire DJ folds multiple influences—trance, drum’n’bass, breaks, acid, deep house—into shape-shifting tracks that mimic the flow of an ecstatic night of dancing.

Dreams of a Dancefloor EP

Maya Bouldry-Morrison sees music as a curative force, for both her audience and herself. “I deal with depression and anxiety,” she said in a recent interview, “but when I get out on the decks, I want to translate to the crowd why music is a healing technology. I'm not always successful, but I do it because I need to hear it first.” In the past, her therapeutic missives have taken the form of exuberant vocal samples. In live shows and earlier releases, her messages often came across in chopped-up monosyllables and joyful exclamations. More recently, she’s taken a leisurely, but no less reverential, approach: 2021’s She’s Calling EP ended with a winding meditation beckoning the listener to the woods. On her latest EP, Dreams of a Dancefloor, Bouldry-Morrison—better known as Octo Octa—imparts her dancefloor revelations largely without words, carefully building layered narratives from basslines and breakbeats.
Opener “Late Night Love” is an acid-house opera tracing a rowdy night out into the bleary-eyed bliss of a post-club cuddle puddle. The song starts with a buoyant synth tapping out a fervent rhythm, a hypnotic transmission that sounds like Gershon Kingsley’s “Popcorn” ushering you to the rave. Echoes of a breakbeat shuffle in the background, suggesting the feverish energy thrumming from inside the club as you wait in the line to enter. After an extended stretch of growing anticipation, the kick drum drops, beckoning toward the sweaty dancefloor. But just as sprightly synths and layers of percussion begin to coalesce, the melody drops out, leaving just a wiry, acid-laced lead and the beating heart of the bass drum. It sounds like the eye of the storm at the center of a long night, the moment when bodies meet and the rest of the world falls away.
An adept student of trance music’s intricately building energy, Octo Octa layers synths so deliberately that the song has gradually envelops you. But unlike traditional trance, she also adds in flavors from her own musical history—drum’n’bass, house—that create episodic, almost prog-like chapters in her songs. The 12-minute “Late Night Love” is among the producer’s longest tracks, but by the end—as syncopated piano washes the scene in sunrise hues, and the night becomes morning—it’s hard not to want to remain in her dream world, keeping the party rolling into the next evening.
Within Octo Octa’s healing framework, certain rhythms impart particular benefits: Drum’n’bass is her “body music,” while her heart is more connected to house. By that logic, the shuffling beats of “Let Yourself Go!” snap the listener back into the corporeal realm after the long metaphysical limbo of “Late Night Love.” While Orbital-esque synths in the background rise and fall like crashing waves, Octo Octa darts between wobbly basslines and pitched-up diva vocals. With each pivot between the two sounds, the breaks seem to pick up momentum. By the time the percussion fades out in the last minute of the song, it’s almost as if the synths have taken flight, launching from a running start into the stratosphere.
When Octo Octa DJs with Eris Drew, her partner and T4T LUV NRG co-founder, the two rotate every three songs. Compared to a traditional one- or two-track B2B set, the stretched-out format allows the pair to build mini-narratives within their setlist, yielding a conversation that advances in complete paragraphs, rather than choppy sentences. Dreams of a Dancefloor flows in a similar way, starting with the giddy tempos of a long night out and maintaining that energy into its second act. Closer “Come Here, Let’s Commune,” marks a notable shift, slowing the pace considerably as if basking in the afterglow of the songs before.
With warm, Balearic melodies and whistling synths that evoke bird calls, it’s a subdued and sublime return to base. But even here, the seamless blend of styles calls back to the raucousness of the songs before: A slithering acid line rears in the final half, as if to suggest that another endless night is just around the corner. For Octo Octa, the club is more than just a vessel for hedonism. Across her career as a DJ, she has strived to create utopias out of booming sound systems: spaces to commune and reflect; to explore and celebrate queer identity; and to build lives that defy societal convention. Dreams of a Dancefloor is another Edenic piece to her ever-expanding puzzle of self-discovery, one that finds nirvana at the core of a never-ending party.


On his bleakly comic new album, Open Mike Eagle surveys the damage of one terrible year, using anime mythology as a lens for examining real-life pain.

Open Mike Eagle: Anime, Trauma and Divorce

Anime, Trauma and Divorce

Open Mike Eagle has spent much of the last decade developing support networks that have enabled his modest success as an independent rapper. In 2019, it all fell apart. Hellfyre Club, the collaborative group featuring Eagle, Busdriver, milo, and Nocando, disintegrated amid business disputes. Comedy Central declined to renew The New Negroes, the show Eagle launched with comedian Baron Vaughn. And Eagle and his wife ended their marriage of 14 years, disrupting his identity as a husband and father.
Eagle isn’t cagey about the inspiration for his latest LP Anime, Trauma, and Divorce—it’s right there in the title. Before Eagle’s traumatic 2019, he’d already planned an anime-focused LP that would explore the role of fictional power fantasies in the lives of marginalized people. His theory that Black people, inheritors of generational trauma, need anime the most, suggests its fanciful depictions of power and heroism provide an escape from Black America’s grim realities. After his own series of defeats, the theory became practice: he needed the escape, too. While his raps are often set in fantastical universes sprung from his imagination, the subject matter here is chillingly mundane and relatable. He finds himself single and middle-aged, questioning the fly “art rap” aesthetic he spent much of his adult life crafting, in a deteriorating dad bod that just doesn’t seem that funny anymore.
Eagle’s fantasies are heavily influenced by two anime in particular: Neon Genesis Evangelion, a morose mecha-anime set in a post-apocalyptic society that forces trauma upon children in order to save the world, and JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, a multi-generational saga featuring a fashion-forward family that uses super-powered manifestations of energy called Stands to fight evil beings. “I’m a Joestar (Black Power Fantasy)” posits Eagle as a member of the series’ aforementioned family, imagining his Stand with a “glow like Sho’nuff in The Last Dragon.” On “Headass (Idiot Shinji),” he identifies with Evangelion’s teen protagonist, whose epically awful timing often endangers humanity. “Sweatpants Spiderman” nods to the alternate-universe Peter Parker that mentors Miles Morales in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. That Spider-Man lost Mary Jane and fell into a depressive spiral, packing pizza slices onto his waistline and crying alone in the shower before being transported across the multiverse to teach Morales how to be Spider-Man. The song frankly assesses Eagle’s post-divorce status, re-evaluating his diet, art, and finances—and feeling every one of his 39 years.
Eagle’s ability to twist his pain into knee-slapping jokes is remarkable. “I'm in a spa, got on a sweet robe, tryin’a hold onto a tree pose/It’s like seeing what my body needs, maybe that's a lot of weed,” he raps on “WTF is Self-Care,” a rundown of various wellness practices meant to cure depression. “Everything Ends Last Year,” the result of his therapist’s suggestion to “write your feelings,” is his summation of the no-good very bad year, neither fun nor funny, and absent of the verbal gymnastics of which he’s capable. Laid over a somber piano melody and a minimal orchestral arrangement, his words are sparse and concise. “It’s October and I’m tired,” he raps, one of the most relatable bars in rap history.
With a few notable exceptions, the production on Anime, Trauma, and Divorce is more somber than angry, reflecting an overall sentiment of contrition rather than resentment. Executive producer Jacknife Lee assembled beats from the likes of Caleb Stone, Gold Panda, Black Milk, and Frank Leone that ooze moodiness, with prominent synth-bass melodies and laid-back tempos. It’s dark without being punishing, unafraid of naked self-reflection but devoid of self-pity.
Eagle would be forgiven for retreating into lethargy after the year he had; instead, he made an album as bleak—and funny—as anything he’s ever done, digging deep into his sense of self with the same sardonic wit that made his breakout LP Dark Comedy so impressive. It helps that he’s not entirely alone. Alt Peter Parker found purpose counseling Miles Morales, teaching him how to use his powers and guiding him through the inevitable trauma of being a superhero. Eagle’s son Asa will undoubtedly need guidance of his own: someone to share the wisdom of their own mistakes, to lead him down a brighter path. And for the first time in his career, Eagle put him on a record, with features for Lil A$e on both “Asa’s Bop” and “Fifteen Twenty Feet Ocean Nah,” the album’s lo-fi live-recorded closer. On the latter, Asa joins his dad in a self-deprecating rap about a near-death snorkeling experience. It’s goofy, absurd, and might have been recorded with a cell phone mic. It also sounds like the most fun he’s had on record in years.

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Matthew Houck, aka Phosphorescent, follows three fine LPs of original songs with a tribute to the Red Headed Stranger, Willie Nelson.

To Willie

What could be a better cred-building exercise for a young indie-folk songwriter than to cover the works of Willie Nelson? Yet Matthew Houck, aka Phosphorescent, isn't interested merely in demonstrating the depths of his scholarship and reverence for the forerunners of his craft with his all-covers tribute to the Red Headed Stranger, To Willie. He wants, as Hot Chip might put it, to half nelson full nelson Willie Nelson, to wrestle intimately with the man's songs and what they're capable of communicating. In doing so, Houck proves himself an adept interpreter of Willie's piercing Christian grace, while indirectly revealing by the limitations of his scope-- the true remarkable human breadth of Nelson's artistry.
Houck does a couple of things extremely well, and to his immense credit he spends most of To Willie working in those veins. As he's demonstrated over the course of Phosphorescent's three very fine LPs of original songs, Houck is a master at conveying weariness, desolation, and spiritual hunger, often through a cracked, warbling bleat. That open-throated yelp is absent here, but Houck's keen understanding of fallenness and deliverance suffuses almost all of the album's best efforts. The opening "Reasons to Quit" is an addict's lament Nelson recorded as a duet with Merle Haggard (and was penned by Hag, actually), and while the original may have flashed a perverse resilience towards self-destructive behavior, Houck burrows into the numbing futility contained in a line like "coke and booze don't do me like before." It's followed, powerfully, by "Too Sick to Pray", an overlooked gem from Nelson's 1996 album Spirit that epitomizes spiritual exhaustion, with Houck sadly and perfectly putting across its overwhelming loneliness. Likewise, on "It's Not Supposed to Be That Way", desperation again cracks all of Houck's surfaces, his tremulous uncertainty echoed in the out-of-tune-sounding guitars.
The music of the church has informed Houck's own work for some time, and at his best here he treats Nelson's songs like precious, fragile hymns. "Walkin'," "The Party's Over", and "Can I Sleep In Your Arms" are all undergirded with solemnity, with the third a revelation. It might sound like heresy considering Red Headed Stranger's "Can I Sleep" is perhaps the most revered song of the collection, yet Houck arguably improves it, adding a heartbreakingly delicate lilt to the end of each verse's penultimate line that wasn't there before.
Talented and sympathetic though he may be, Houck is still working with a far more muted palette than Nelson, a fact most evident when he tackles jauntier, more clever material like "I Gotta Get Drunk", "Pick Up the Tempo", and "The Last Thing I Needed (First Thing This Morning)". Certainly it's admirable Houck didn't just pick 11 of Willie's most woebegone efforts to best suit his own forlorn MO, yet it's plain he lacks the wry humor and restless humanity of his interpretive object. Houck's impressive effort nonetheless inevitably sends you back to Nelson's originals, only illuminating their brilliance-- the sly threat of "It's Not Supposed to Be That Way"; the proud, tight-lipped terseness of "Too Sick to Pray"; the bitter wisdom of "Permanently Lonely" (which Houck does a nice job recontextualizing with spacey, narcotized synths). And, of course, there's Nelson's comic facility, which often cloaked his most devastating revelations, like how the accumulation of everyday bullshit on "The Last Thing" ("I opened the door on my knee") gives way to overwhelming loss and grief. It's simply more proof that Nelson's matchless command of so many song styles and emotional states poses a daunting challenge to any presumptive handler of his canon. Houck still deserves plenty of plaudits for nailing the ones he knows.


The UK rockers summon all their crowd-pleasing, arena-sized ambition on the first half of a double album but lack the panache to really pull it off.

Foals: Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost Part 1

Foals’ résumé is filled with roles that now look quaint for guitar bands in 2019. They emerged on a wave of hype from the British press with a Dave Sitek-produced debut on Sub Pop, a transatlantic “hipster band” when that still meant something.
Two years later, they were an imperial rock act that won the NME Best Track Award with a nearly seven-minute single as windswept and majestic as its title (“Spanish Sahara”). On their subsequent two albums, Foals became the rare UK act that managed to break America through perseverance and industry muscle: “My Number” and “Mountain at My Gates” made them inconceivable neighbors with Imagine Dragons on KROQ and Cage the Elephant and Silversun Pickups on a “Spring Fling Rock AF” package tour. This lane is all theirs if they want it, but Foals probably had greater ambitions than being the last of the Big Sentimental Boys of Britannia. They have every right to get indulgent with a double album at a point where big bands have to matter. But the “Part 1” appellation to Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost is deflating as it is foretelling—Foals are half-stepping all over this thing.
Dropping the whole project its entirety might’ve been the more impressive power move, but the split is sensible. All Foals albums get about 2/3rds of the way to true greatness and the most obvious explanation is that they all overstay their welcome by at least 10 minutes. Or, they’re nearly identically sequenced and have an identical ratio of aerobic funk-rock to ambient lunar rovers that show off the laser-lit production values. But despite the thrown gauntlet as the first part of a double-album, Everything Not Saved doesn’t ask to forget everything you knew about Foals, just to look at their discography from slightly different perspectives. The optimistic view of “Exits” is that it presents a unified theory of Foals, where the cocksure strut of “Miami” or “Total Life Forever” is given the same breathing room as “Spanish Sahara” or “Black Gold,” but it just ends up wearing out its groove about halfway through.
“White Onions” likewise melds the precision of 2008’s Antidotes to the meatier Stooge-rawk of 2015’s What Went Down and Yannis Philippakis’ increasingly anodyne lyricism: “I’m in a maze, I break the cage”—like...which one? Their assumed interest in the textures and propulsion of electronic remix culture is somewhat evident from the flashbulb-popping synths of “In Degrees,” but it’s oddly sweatless. They’re observers from the stage rather than bodies on the dance floor.
Foals have always had the chops to pull off anything that interests them. The departure of bassist Walter Gervers could’ve drastically hamstrung a band this reliant on rhythmic precision yet they’ve never made a song as bass-driven as “Syrups.” What Everything Not Saved lacks is the audacity to risk the embarrassment inherent in making a double album or the panache to withstand it. Foals’ rise notably happened while Arctic Monkeys were spinning their wheels and the 1975 were just warming up, two festival-headlining peers who boldly reinvented themselves last year. It’s fair to assume Philippakis is looking over his shoulder based on the title of “I’m Done With the World (& It’s Done With Me),” but he lacks the charisma and presence of his peers to make a schmaltzy piano ballad transcendent, subversive or something more than it actually is.
Or, Foals’ problem is that they have the same ambitions as just about every other large-font rock band these days and thus the same pitfalls. Making apolitical art feels borderline negligent, and yet it’s easier than ever to feel desensitized to the doomsaying when everything just seems to get incrementally worse. Philippakis feels the same way: “Trump clogging up my computer/But I’m watching all day,” he yelps during “On the Luna,” a line easy to miss amid Everything Not Saved’s most memorable riff and lowbrow know-how that frames Foals as the thinking person’s Red Hot Chili Peppers (“When I was a kung fu kid on the lunar/I was moonin’ at the Bella Luna”).
Everything Not Saved has been hyped as a kind of concept record to be footnoted in the Green New Deal: “In Degrees” and “Exits” could pass as torch songs for Mother Earth (“Now the sea eats the sky/But they say that it’s a lie”), yet there’s never any real sense of urgency to Foals’ crowd-pleasing Coachella-core: It’s less “the ice age is coming” and more “Iceage is up next.” And so as Philippakis sings “Cities burn/We don’t give a damn/’Cause we got all our friends right here,” on the penultimate “Sunday,” the hands-in-the-air-coda arrives right on cue, the perfunctory happy ending for a big-budget disaster flick that doesn’t need a sequel but will get one anyway.


A mixtape made with half a dozen New York producers tilts the experimental producer’s left-field tendencies toward full-on dance music, but her signature oblique vocals remain a slippery presence.

Trinity

Alexandra Drewchin titled the fourth full-length release under her Eartheater alias as a nod to the three states matter can commonly take: solid, liquid, and gas. It’s a fitting conceit to drape over her work, which tends to melt from concrete pop forms into ominous miasma and back again. Trinity, a mixtape made in collaboration with half a dozen New York producers including AceMo and Tony Seltzer, crystallizes Drewchin’s experimental slant into a full set of dance music built around her signature oblique vocals. Without sacrificing Eartheater’s compelling strangeness, Drewchin has assembled the project’s most accessible and triumphant offering to date.
Dance beats skittered here and there on past Eartheater records, but more often than not they worked as texturing tools against the rest of Drewchin’s nebulous compositions. On “Curtains,” from 2018’s IRISIRI, a rave beat pulsed against sheets of placid harp, as though leaking into an orchestral musician’s practice session from an upstairs apartment. Trinity hews closer to the traditional dynamics of dance music: Its songs take beats for their backbones, even if those beats often lurch uneasily through dizzying arrangements. For every element on Trinity that’s easy to grasp, another repels and confuses the ear. On “High Tide” and “Supersoaker,” glassy synthesizer riffs echo late-’90s radio trance, while the blunt bass drums on “Pearl Diver” recall avant-garde strains of contemporary hip-hop.
Throughout the record, Drewchin’s voice closes off the easy access points of dance pop, which in its most mainstream incarnations tends to flood listeners with dopamine at every chorus. Layered and thinned with reverb, her singing remains slippery, her lyrics often tricky to pin down. Ostensibly these are love songs, and yet their streaks of affection drip out in confusing, contradictory ways, in double negatives and barely intelligible whispers. “I don’t wanna regret/Something I didn’t do/With you,” Drewchin sings on “Runoff”—a statement that starts out with what sounds like hesitation, which turns into abandon by the end of the sentence.
Because her presence is often elusive, it tends to beckon the ear to sink deeper into each song, to grasp at a salient phrase or an especially tuneful melody. Drewchin makes it easy to get lost in her ambiguous sound worlds, which don’t seem to have clear boundaries but always appear to be deepening in volume.
Trinity’s tensions build toward its final song and thesis statement, “Solid Liquid Gas.” Rather than end the record on an uncertain, sour note, Drewchin and producer Hara Kiri give it the sendoff it deserves—an unleashed, cathartic dance track where Drewchin’s voice clears away the mist that had clung to it. “Don’t make me wait!” she demands, her voice dense and sharp over a frothing synthesizer arpeggio. If latent desire percolates throughout Trinity, voiced in hushed tones, then “Solid Liquid Gas” gives Drewchin the chance to finally let her wanting rush out of her. It’s a blissful release that bursts past the cerebral parameters of her prior work and into new territory—the kind of song that jolts through the whole body, thrilling as it goes.


Ty Segall’s collaboration with Lightning Bolt’s Brian Chippendale has the same risky yet satisfying quality of watching acid burn through steel.

Fungus II

Ty Segall has never been a wallflower. The Southern California garage-rock prodigy rivals fellow scene members (Thee) Oh Sees in prolific output, producing a wealth of records and side projects that, in aggregate, form a wall of brash, defiant noise. His cover of Funkadelic’s “Hit It and Quit It,” from 2018’s excellent Fudge Sandwich, is emblematic of both his playfulness and his gnarly psychedelia: Popular music goes in one side of Segall’s reverse-exorcism machine and comes back fast, screechy, and rude.
Wasted Shirt, Segall’s joint project with noise rock iconoclast Brian Chippendale of Lightning Bolt, takes the alchemy a step further. The duo’s individual efforts have earned them well-deserved reputations as devoted experimentalists; their collaboration on Fungus II (they skipped right over installment I) represents two artists pulling each other closer to dangerous, interesting edges. Their brand of amelodic pandemonium has the same risky yet satisfying quality of watching acid burn through steel.
The majority of the 12 songs on Fungus II clock in around three and a half minutes, brisk heirs apparent to Black Sabbath that sound ready to soundtrack skate videos. They’re abrasive, but like so much of Segall’s oeuvre they also telegraph a kind of fanboy earnestness—the baroque, metalhead shredding that might imply an inferiority complex in the hands of a lesser musician instead reads like homage, a love letter to blown-out speakers and the hours after a killer session of “Magic: The Gathering.”
Some tracks accomplish this bombast more successfully than others. On “Double the Dream,” reverb pings in each ear as Chippendale attacks the kit and and Segall shrieks: “Dream, dream!” The song ends with the sound of tape unspooling, racing towards the next set of ears. This propulsive quality owes a great deal to Chippendale’s rabid snares and cymbals, and it’s what makes many of these tracks so bracing. “I’m my own man/Yes, I am a hostage,” Segall groans on “Fist Is My Ward,” sounding positively deranged as Chippendale’s rhythms skitter behind with frightening speed.
When every song attempts the same jaws-of-life intensity, though, a few are bound to feel comparatively dim. “Harsho,” a midtempo vision of driving with “blood on the highway/blood on the wheel,” doesn’t accomplish the same menace as the songs surrounding it. The wild acoustic strumming and heavy ramp-up two-thirds of the way through “The Purple One” would stand out on another record, but beside Wasted Shirt’s weirder, wilder fare, they’re less remarkable.
On the seven-minute closer “Four Strangers Enter the Cement at Dusk,” the pair takes another approach: a deliberately plodding, reverberating walk-up to the cataclysmic moment when both musicians let loose and embrace basement-show chaos. Lengthy, instrumental indulgence is the point; the song showcases Segall and Chippendale’s adept interplay, balancing one’s fever with the other’s sanguinity, and then trading those roles or abandoning them altogether. Their chemistry is unmistakable. Fungus II is its alien-baby result.

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The UK quartet pairs glowing synth pads and layered harmonies with a distinctly millennial approach to the possibility of total annihilation.

Walking Like We Do

The Big Moon are at their best when they don’t overthink it. On “Don’t Think,” the British quartet’s most irrepressibly joyful song to date, lead singer Juliette Jackson breathes: “If you have a gut feeling, maybe you should go with it this time.” With verses describing the kind of nothing-y Friday nights out in which you spill your pint all over yourself and hold conversations that are forgotten by morning, the bass-driven song is an ode to mindless impulses, written to encourage an anxiety-riddled generation to let go. “Just don’t think about a thing,” Jackson trills on the boisterous hook.
The band, which Jackson formed with guitarist Soph Nathan, bassist Celia Archer, and drummer Fern Ford in 2014, have made a minor name for themselves in the UK with hook-driven, Libertines-adjacent indie rock that would sound right at home on a Camden pub crawl. Their 2017 debut, Love in the 4th Dimension, was a clutch of angsty guitar songs nominated for the prestigious Mercury Prize. But when she came to write its follow-up, Walking Like We Do—alone, as she does much of the band’s material—Jackson said she “wanted to make some music that felt really soothing and cleansing, like a tonic.”
Walking Like We Do arrives in the soft glow of synth pads and layered harmonies. Inspired by the spacious pop production of Frank Ocean and James Blake, the band worked with producer Ben Allen (Animal Collective, Gnarls Barkley) in Atlanta to capture a wide-open, stripped-back sound. Nothing here is radically new—the album’s high points hark back to ’60s girl groups and ’90s pop-R&B—but it’s a departure for the guitar-heavy group, and they commit to it boldly from the first piano chords of “It’s Easy Then,” the lead single and opening track. Over a bed of bubbling synth notes, Jackson heralds their optimistic new sound—but the song’s title, and its buoyant melody, belie the darkness that prickles through its lyrics. In the full context of the chorus, “It’s easy, then/You make it hard.”
Walking Like We Do may have been born from an impulse to create “soothing” songs, but it’s inextricable from the anxious mindset that requires soothing. “Maybe it’s an end ’cause this don’t feel like a start/But every generation probably thought they were the last,” Jackson quips on “Your Light.” Her lyrics touch on what it’s like to come of age amid political and ecological catastrophe, with varying degrees of sincerity. While it’s mostly played for laughs, the bare-bones piano ballad “Dog Eat Dog” offers an earnest reflection on social injustice in the UK, specifically London’s class divide. Its bleak central image is of a pigeon eating discarded chicken on the pavement.
But the album’s surface-level observations don’t always register as heartfelt political commentary, and its most downbeat songs are its most forgettable. The understated approach means that clunkier ideas have nowhere to hide; on the airy ballad “Waves,” Jackson chews on the same musical idea a little too long. She strides more confidently across the playfully camp landscapes of “Take a Piece” and “Your Light,” where the sunny chorus describes a day so good that you momentarily forget you’re depressed.
“Your Light” is one of many flippant, tongue-in-cheek allusions to doom on Walking Like We Do, where the possibility of total annihilation is never far from mind, but also never taken entirely seriously. “Oh our data trail’s long/We’ll never die, we’ll linger on,” Jackson deadpans on “Holy Roller.” Her self-deprecating humor channels what The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino has called the “half-ironic millennial death wish,” the extremely online habit of expressing passion in the form of jokes about one’s own demise. Walking Like We Do has moments of thoughtless escapism—and a couple of earnest bum notes—but it comes into its own when it blends humor with darkness, suffusing everything with gentle, sarcastic nihilism.

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