The new entry in Springsteen’s Live Archives series is the most unusual offering so far: two acoustic shows from 1990 that find him alone onstage for the first time since his commercial breakthrough.

Bruce Springsteen: The Christic Shows, November 16 & 17, 1990

Bruce Springsteen’s most cinematic, far-reaching songs begin with specifics—“Born down in a dead man’s town,” or “I come from down in the valley,” or “Here in Northeast Ohio, back in 1803”—before zooming out to illustrate how their characters and locales encapsulate bigger things: their class, their country, their generation. His ability to bring grand themes down to earth allows his greatest songs to light-up arenas while also feeling deeply personal, and it explains how he achieved a massive audience that still reveres him like a cult artist.
Springsteen’s personal writing hit a peak on 1987’s Tunnel of Love, the lonely, autumnal follow-up to the massive Born in the U.S.A. Think of it as an ’80s precursor to Lemonade: an artist responding to a groundbreaking pop-culture phenomenon with something deeply intimate and coyly autobiographical. Unlike the Vietnam vets and working-class heroes who dominated Born in the U.S.A., the protagonist throughout most of the songs on Tunnel of Love was an unhappy man entering middle age and confronting his failing marriage and his life choices. Following the tour after the album, Springsteen divorced his actress wife, moved to L.A., and fired the E Street Band, his loyal crew of lifelong friends and collaborators. Tunnel of Love was also followed by a five-year hiatus from releasing music or touring—the longest break yet in a career heretofore defined by his incessant work ethic.
The Christic Shows, the latest and arguably greatest release yet in Springsteen’s ongoing Live Archive series, was recorded in the middle of this hiatus. A long-standing fan favorite in bootleg form, the set compiles Springsteen’s one-off acoustic sets in support of the public interest law firm the Christic Institute, performed in the fall of 1990 at L.A.’s Shrine Auditorium. It remains an essential if uncharacteristic portrait of Springsteen as a live performer, capturing his first solo shows since his rise to fame, following two decades spent building his reputation as a tireless showman and charismatic bandleader
Alone on stage and unburdened by rockstar trappings (or “all the macho posturing that I have to do,” as he calls it) Springsteen sounds equally thrilled and uncomfortable. Throughout these sets, his songs are reframed as private, neurotic musings, so that even the audience’s presence begins to feel intrusive. “If you’re moved to clap along, please don’t,” he states at the beginning of the second set. “I’d appreciate as much quiet during the songs as possible.”
Accordingly, the overriding mood throughout The Christic Shows is almost oppressively introspective. Night one’s rendition of “Darkness on the Edge of Town” embodies neither the cathartic chug that propelled the 1978 studio rendition nor the frantic pulse of later solo versions. It’s a tentative performance, placed near the beginning of the set like Springsteen’s attempt to pump himself up. Conversely, the languid, dreamlike sprawl of 1982’s “Mansion on the Hill” is replaced here with a propulsive, nervous energy: perhaps the result of a narrator now faced with living in (and paying the mortgage for) his own mansion on a hill.
As on his finest albums, the sequencing is impeccable, highlighting and building upon particular themes across his discography: adjusting your beliefs in the face of disappointment, finding fulfillment within society, growin’ up. The setlist isn’t exactly a crowd-pleaser, favoring quieter album cuts over sing-along favorites, but Springsteen still slips in a few treats for the super-fans. The crowd roars when he mentions how “The big man joined the band” in “Tenth Avenue Freezeout,” a moment that feels as close as these shows come to pandering, given that Springsteen was currently doing everything in his power to distance himself from his mythical E Street origin story.
More subtle is the closing line of 1973’s seldom-performed “Wild Billy’s Circus Story” (“All aboard, Nebraska’s our next stop”), fading right into the murder ballad title track from Nebraska—a darkly humorous juxtaposition, given the songs’ jarring shift in tones. It’s the kind of playful pairing that Springsteen’s album-oriented E Street tours rarely made room for. Here, he seems delighted to pull from obscure corners of his discography and watch different characters interact, subversively toying with his canon in the process. It’s telling that he performs over half of Nebraska, but not “Dancing in the Dark,” “Badlands,” or “Born to Run.”
With most of the hits out of the picture, Springsteen has space to work through some new material, playing spirited renditions of songs that wouldn’t make the cut for his next album (“Red Headed Woman,” “When the Lights Go Out,”) and one that shouldn’t have (“57 Channels (And Nothin’ On)”). Other new songs, like “Soul Driver” and “Real World,” later found on 1992's often-derided Human Touch, are high points, offered here in their stripped-back, definitive versions. The latter performance is a reminder that in 1990, Springsteen was just coming into a new version of his voice—a sad, country croon, somewhere between the vocal-chord-shredding grit of Born in the U.S.A. and the rootsy twang seemingly bestowed upon him by the cowboy hat from the Ghost of Tom Joad era. Hearing these performances—especially with this crystal-clear remaster that brings the crisp, percussive shimmer of Springsteen’s guitar into focus—you can imagine the fans in attendance were confident that another studio masterpiece was on its way.
This was not the case. When Human Touch was released in spring of ’92 (along with its far-better sister album, Lucky Town), it was Springsteen’s worst-received release by a long shot. Unlike his defining works, Human Touch had little personality, trading in Bruce’s everyman for a decidedly generic “any man.” Like Weezer’s Green Album or the second season of “True Detective,” Human Touch found Springsteen hiding behind genre tropes and clichés, retreating in fear of having revealed too much. Most heartbreaking was what happened to songs like “Real World” and “Soul Driver,” as they were rendered unrecognizable by superfluous bells and whistles (technically a pan flute, but the less said about that the better). You almost wish someone would have convinced Springsteen to pull another Nebraska and just release these live performances instead and let the full-band studio versions exist only in our imaginations.
Maybe that’s what his enthusiastic audience was trying to express at these shows, as they repeatedly ignore Springsteen’s requests for silence and shout toward the stage. In one deeply revealing moment, within the first few songs, a fan yells “We love you!” as Bruce tunes his guitar. He sighs in response, calm and deliberate, as if he had been rehearsing for this moment, “But you don’t really know me.” It’s slightly shocking to hear Springsteen take an antagonistic turn toward his fans, but he had a point. Indeed, the 41-year-old, mulleted Californian in these recordings is a very different person than the scruffy romantic who summed up his mission statement in 1975, “I want to know if love is wild... I want to know if love is real.” Opening both shows with Tunnel of Love’s heartbroken centerpiece, “Brilliant Disguise,” Springsteen sings like a man with more adult concerns on his plate. He wants to know if love can last. He wants to know himself.
Accordingly, the following decade would find Springsteen eventually reuniting with the E Street Band and returning to New Jersey, where he and his second wife, bandmate Patti Scialfa, would raise a family. After spending his career searching for a happy ending—a way out, a promised land, a beautiful reward—he finally got one, and it dropped him back right where he started. Still, in its awkwardness and beauty, The Christic Shows is a fascinating portrait of the artist in a period of transition, raising questions that, in hindsight, he knew the answers to all along.


When he was 44 years old, Tom Petty released his second and greatest solo album. It is a crucial entry to his catalog, one whose songwriting is elegantly spare, personal, and intuitive.

Wildflowers

In the opening verse of “To Find a Friend,” Tom Petty lays out the narrative for his long, messy, exquisite solo album Wildflowers:

In the middle of his life
He left his wife
And ran off to be bad
Boy, it was sad

Petty was 44 when he released his second solo album in the autumn of 1994. He was headed toward a rough divorce from Jane Benyo, his wife of over two decades, with whom he had two daughters. According to Warren Zanes’ biography Petty, he was also on the verge of a pretty serious heroin addiction. At the same time, music was flowing from him like never before: song after song, constant waves of inspiration, words writing themselves. For two years, he practically lived in the studio. Legend has it, the hour-plus album was originally slated to be twice as long with an additional disc of material attached. The release of that music—an archival project that was allegedly one of Petty’s final endeavors—is uncertain. For now, at least, we have Wildflowers.
Wildflowers is not Tom Petty’s tightest album, nor his easiest to listen to. There’s hopelessness and anger; disappointment and regret. Its disparate modes—blues, country, folk, power-pop, torch songs—are connected by the roads, both literal and figurative, that led him to where he found himself: lonely, middle-aged, digging through his consciousness as one would ransack a room to find a small, lost object. “You were so cool back in high school,” he sings smoothly in the last song before switching to his frank, Southern speaking voice: “What happened?” He asks the question and deflates with no hint of poetry or romance, let alone an answer.
Unlike most of his classic rock forebearers, Petty never quite had a “lost era.” He never floundered like Dylan in the ’80s or Springsteen in the ’90s. Instead, he attacked and retreated more consistently. That’s partially why Wildflowers—which followed his commercially successful but creatively scatterbrained record with the Heartbreakers, Into the Great Wide Open—doesn’t receive the widespread accolades of similar later-career masterpieces like Time Out of Mind. Yet, Wildflowers is just as crucial to his discography. It’s impossible to understand the span of Petty’s work without considering these songs: the haunted singalongs that sat next to each other with the stacked, collage-logic flow of a killer concert setlist.
In tone and structure, Wildflowers recalls Neil Young’s 1970 album After the Gold Rush. Petty’s lyrics are simple and intuitive (“In the middle of his life/He left his wife”), spoken as plainly as possible. Yet every word comes alive, speaking multitudes. “Don’t be afraid anymore,” he sings in one song, “It’s only a broken heart.” Young once sang something similar, employing the second-person to place himself as the distanced narrator, the wiser voice offering sage advice. But did anyone buy it? You don’t write songs like these when you’re standing back trying to see the big picture: You write them when you’re in the middle of it, unraveling, talking to yourself, looking for a friend.
Wildflowers was recorded with Rick Rubin, one of Petty’s defining producer partnerships along with Jimmy Iovine and ELO’s Jeff Lynne. But while Lynne spoke to the pop romantic in Petty—the one who envisioned the immortal opening chord of “Free Fallin’” as an army of acoustic guitarists in tie-dye t-shirts playing simultaneously on a cliffside at dusk—Rubin spoke to the nihilist. There’s an unexpected aural twist in nearly every song on Wildflowers: the devastating, string-accompanied outro of “It’s Good to Be King” that makes for the most gorgeous 60 seconds on any Tom Petty record; the seemingly improvised spoken asides during the guitar solos in “Honey Bee”; the warm synths laid over “Time to Move On” that make it sound like he’s singing from underwater. And while it would be reductive to say that Rubin simply lent Petty a loose, stripped-back approach, Petty’s music had never sounded more nakedly reflective of his mental state.
Discussing the making of the album in a recent interview, Rubin recalled Petty playing him a tape of demos, interrupting to pick up his guitar and write an entirely new song on the spot, inspired by hearing his own words played back at him. The album, decades later, still reflects that persistent intensity. In his lyrics, Petty sometimes suggests a sense of spiritual enlightenment (“We gotta get to a higher place”), but it comes out anxious and impatient (“We gotta leave by night”), as if the answer was just on the tip of his tongue, in the next song, the next word. “I’m afraid of that album,” Petty admitted to Rubin. Sometimes he sounds out of control, driven by something deep within him. His daughter Adria once said that, upon hearing the record, she instantly knew that her parents’ marriage was over. It’s all there in Petty’s voice, desperate to be understood and echoed by those who heard their own sad story in it.


The band’s sixth album pivots back to a more melodic, sincere, and effortful style, attempting once again to find a genuine connection.

WE

During Arcade Fire’s appearance at Coachella last month, Win Butler got a little emotional. He was introducing “Unconditional I (Lookout Kid),” a tender single from the band’s new album, WE. Unlike 2017’s Everything Now, its lyrics made no effort to meet our present moment of desensitized irony and online overstimulation. And unlike 2013’s Reflektor, no shiny synths or disco beats contrasted with the heartland quiver of his voice. Instead, the bandleader, who’d turned 42 the previous day, stood with an acoustic guitar and sang earnest bits of advice to a young person, asking the audience to accompany him with a childlike, wordless refrain. Soon, the sentiment proved too much. He hid his face behind his hands, and his bandmates stopped to let him collect himself.
From the beginning, Arcade Fire were built for moments when raw feeling overtakes us. They recorded their debut album, 2004’s Funeral, in their early 20s, a time when our perspective on death and aging, our parents and our hometown, becomes more fragile and complex, when the divide between childhood and messier, serious adulthood feels dramatic and irreversible. Some of the band’s coping mechanisms now seem like youthful affectations—the period costumes, the whimsical on-stage antics—while others proved enduring. The core of the band remains the duo of Butler and Régine Chassagne, who co-write the songs and share lead vocals in addition to being married parents of a 9-year-old son, and their best songs still seem designed to be sung as loud as possible, eyes closed, from the heart of a massive crowd.
These principles define WE, an album that reclaims the band’s trademarks after a decade spent fighting against them. Butler and Chassagne wrote the whole record on guitar and piano at their home in New Orleans, ensuring the bones were established before presenting it to their bandmates. The same way that vivid flashes from childhood haunted their earliest songwriting, the couple now let their history as collaborators flicker through the music: They’ve claimed that pieces of the multi-part lead single “The Lightning” date back to Funeral, while aspects of the also multi-part “End of the Empire” first materialized when they were in college.
Part of the band’s charm always came from the buzzing, lived-in atmosphere of their records. They sounded too big for every room they played in: voices clipping in microphones, instruments crowding the stage. Co-produced by Nigel Godrich, these songs open up a larger space. There has never been so much silence on an Arcade Fire record, offering a sense of dynamics that makes slow-build anthems like “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole)” and quiet turns like the title track feel equally momentous. Godrich draws attention to the negative space on the outer edges of the songs, adding a newly vulnerable counterpoint to the sonic peaks. At times, they sound jarringly intimate, even humble.
And yet, this is still Arcade Fire, and you are unlikely to hear a more ambitious major label rock album in 2022. The lyrics touch on spiritual deliverance and the actual apocalypse; the credits list strings, horns, harp, congas, djembe, fiddle, and Peter Gabriel; influences include Dark Side of the Moon and Martin Luther King Jr. The entire record is structured as a journey from introspective angst (the first side is labeled “I”) to communal transcendence (the second is “We”) as if trying to put the pandemic to bed single-handedly. It’s been a long time since I’ve heard a record try so desperately to move me, which isn’t inherently a bad thing. After all this time, Arcade Fire seem to have learned their imperfections are easier to gloss over when the music sweeps you up and away with it.
The band’s last three albums channeled their grand scope into sprawling tracklists, but on WE, they attempt to pack it into every song, not content until each one feels like it could become the peak of their live set. Clearly recognizing this approach would become exhausting stretched across a long-form project, they wisely structure the album in movements, ensuring no two of its seven songs occupy the same color palette or mood. If you prefer the band in jittery neons, the Chassagne-led “Unconditional II (Race and Religion)” will be the ecstatic highlight; if you miss the baroque, indie-film drama of their early days, “The Lightning” will be a refreshing hit of adrenaline; if you want a strummy singalong for your next road trip, kick off the playlist with “End of the Empire” and watch the landscape blur.
All of this is to say, WE badly strives to be another classic Arcade Fire album, something that can appeal to all factions of their fanbase and reignite the spark, nearly two decades into their career. Occasionally, the attempt is almost enough to make it feel like one. But like any presentation this effortful, there are times when you want only to avert eye contact and make it stop. The belabored coda to “End of the Empire,” which touches on Dante’s Inferno to sell a long, cheeky metaphor about “unsubscribing,” must have felt like an epiphany in the recording studio: an “Are we allowed to do that?” sense of glee, fulfilling a latent wish for Butler—who has come off as stern and humorless in so much of his songwriting—to join the Lonely Island. But this brand of satirical theater is a lot less funny when the guy singing seems to have tears in his eyes, pleading for approval.
At the end of the grand, pulsing opener “Age of Anxiety I,” Butler plays a little trick, layering his voice with two warring premonitions: “It’s all about you,” goes one. “It’s not about you,” snipes the other. It’s a fleeting refrain meant to conjure a sense of paranoid self-interrogation, although with the music that follows, it ends up sounding somewhat indecisive: a songwriter tossing his subject matter in the air and hoping it lands. The “I”/”We” structure is a handy tool to sort the new material, but it also becomes a crutch for a band that has so triumphantly merged the two perspectives. As a result, the tone is uncharacteristically distant: Does he want to comfort us, critique us, or rock our souls? Why is he still so mad at the internet? Or, to return to that lyric in “Age of Anxiety I,” what is it all about?
In a sense, every Arcade Fire song is about the same thing, and any of their records could share a title with this one. They are singing about us, with a rare ability to transform and unite. When you listen to The Suburbs, they are driving through your hometown. When we listen to Funeral, we are feral kids in the snow, our uncut hair long and symbolic as it blows in the post-apocalyptic wind. On Neon Bible, I am vaguely wary of the government. These records were able to reach the same climax as their live shows, when the band wanders into the audience, making each fan feel like an auxiliary member.
All of those albums invited similar criticism to this one—clunky lyrics, emotional overreach—but WE is the first time the band seems to wrestle with those concerns in the actual music. During the first verse of “Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole),” Chassagne responds to each of Butler’s lyrics with a muted “yeah.” It’s not the type of call-and-response an audience can participate in but rather a quiet insistence: “Not bad—what else you got?” Beneath the album’s social critique and sci-fi scenery, WE zeroes in on a more personal battle. Set to music that aims to play like a compact highlights reel, multiple lyrics address being “midway through life,” and nearly every song returns to crises of confidence and identity. These are fitting quandaries for a band who has reached a vast divide between how they see themselves—arch, self-aware—and how they’re seen by others—earnest, full of wonder—which could explain their recurring difficulty in presenting their art to the world, why they’ve made such a habit of apologizing for album rollouts.
Arcade Fire struggle to have it both ways. They want to lower the stakes for themselves, but they also want to write the album that summarizes the past two years of pandemic life, drawing on a 1924 dystopian novel, a 1958 epic poem about America, and every David Bowie song that’s longer than five minutes. They want to remind you they’re the same empathetic songwriters who made you cry to your iPod in your childhood bedroom, but they also want to be the first indie band to work “New phone, who’s this?” into a lyric. They want to play to their strengths, but they only occasionally remember what they are.
To their credit, they mostly remember in the second half of the record, where the songs become more modest and refined, the writing more confident and precise. This is when Butler and Chassagne look into each other’s eyes, and maybe to the world, and beg, “Don’t quit on me/I won’t quit on you.” Just after that is “Lookout Kid,” and even if it’s the closest this band has come to matching the treacly sentiment of its more cartoonish imitators, the lyrics present the clearest effort to transcend the band’s ongoing creative rut. With its fatherly wisdom and jaunty, springtime bounce, you can see why the whole thing moved Butler to tears as he looked to his audience: his muse, the sea of faces he’s watched from this same vantage point as they’ve multiplied and moved on, so close and so far away. “There are things that you can do that no one else on Earth could ever do,” he promises them. He knows it’s a two-way street and he’s fighting like hell to live up to his end.


From start to finish, this is Mac Miller's most refined and well put-together project. He sounds like someone’s troubled little brother made good: from the album’s opening horns, you can sense that this is a victory lap of sorts, a homecoming.

GO:OD AM

Who is Mac Miller? On Blue Slide Park, he was a childish "frat rapper" who made dumb jokes about smoking weed and referred to the vagina as a "cooter." On the claustrophobic Watching Movies With the Sound Off, he was rapping in a pitched-down voice alongside Earl Sweatshirt and Ab-Soul about friends lost, drugs consumed, depression, and the trappings of success. And on the transparent, relaxed GO:OD AM, he sounds like someone’s troubled little brother made good: from the album’s opening horns, you can sense that this is a victory lap for Mac, a homecoming.
From start to finish, this is his most refined and well put-together project. Getting through the 16 tracks on Blue Slide Park was like an endurance test, and even the deeper and much-improved Watching Movies started to sound interchangeable before it ended. The beats on GO:OD AM have a New York, boom-bap feel, with lots of jazz samples and harder drums, and it’s both more varied and more upbeat, from the trap-sounding beats of  "When in Rome" or the Chief Keef-featuring "Cut the Check" to love songs like "ROS" or the Miguel collaboration "The Weekend". Miller said he recorded 400 songs for Watching, and sometimes you couldn’t help but wonder about the selection process ("Objects in the Mirror"?) but on GO:OD AM, he’s learned to self-edit.
Lyrically, Mac offers a music industry "Scared Straight". "I’ve seen some motherfucking shit," he warns on "Two Matches". The interlude before "God Speed" includes a voicemail from his brother, checking in on him at a low point in his life, and later on in the song, he admits: "White lines be numbing them dark times/ Them pills that I’m popping, I need to man up/ Admit it’s a problem, I need a wake up/ Before one morning, I don’t wake up." It’s funny to hear a 23-year-old who just kicked his habit and could be considered a kid himself refer regretfully to "all the kids doing drugs" on "In the Bag", but Mac has enough of his sense of humor intact to keep the album from playing like a D.A.R.E. campaign on wax.
On "God Speed", the album’s standout track, he pays tribute to the close friends in his Most Dope Family, especially his right hand man Q, and it’s genuinely touching. "Everybody saying I need rehab/ So I’m speeding with a blindfold on/ It won’t be long before they watching me crash/ And they don’t wanna see that," he raps, thanking the people that got him through the toughest time of his life. He’s never preachy, though: He sounds refreshed and rejuvenated, like someone who has been going for daily walks, eating veggies and drinking fruit smoothies every day.
Many songs here reference his status as a white rapper, signaling his awareness of the rap game’s perception of him: "I’m a white rapper/ They always call me shady," he says on "Brand Name", just a few minutes into the album. "I know niggas think you white and you not about to go in with these bars," chimes in Domo Genesis on "In the Bag". There’s a kind of authenticity to him that has been there since the beginning, if you look for it: He doesn’t rap about breaking the law, because he’s not about that life. He’s a corny white rapper (meant as a compliment) who loves his family, friends, and hometown. We might not learn a lot of specifics about him, but there’s a lot of honesty in his music if you look for it.


The elusive UK group’s third album in just over a year—to be made available online for only 99 days—renders Black trauma in the eerie, sing-song cadences of children’s rhymes.

NINE

The nursery rhyme “London Bridge Is Falling Down” is secretly about the spirits of the dead. The centuries-old children’s tune doubles as a macabre tale of children being walled inside the London Bridge, or buried under its foundation, to ensure that the structure never crumbles. At least that’s the theory advanced by Alice Bertha Gomme, a noted British folklorist and scholar of children’s games. Like the fables of the Brothers Grimm, whose bloody tales were sanitized for bedtime retelling, many nursery rhymes have equally disturbing origins. On NINE, the elusive British group SAULT channel childhood rhymes—not just their repetitive, earwormy melodies but also their ominous undertones—into songs with a deceptively simple air that are laden with grief.
NINE is SAULT’s third album in just a little over a year, and it builds on the penchant for mystery that they established with their first two albums, 5 and 7, both released in 2019 under a cloak of anonymity. The album will be available—whether as a stream, download, or CD/LP—for just 99 days. Where their first albums were rooted in neo-soul and funk, 2020’s Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise) borrowed liberally from Afrobeat and the blues. With NINE, they add new layers—of mystery but also flippant humor—to their sound.
We laugh when things are funny but recently, particularly over the past year and a half, I began buckling over when things were neither humorous nor joyous. Laughter made more sense than sadness. It required more physical exertion, and helped me move when I wanted to hide in a crawl space. It’s that energy of laughing because everything is terrible that beats through the brief opener, “Haha,” an a cappella chant that resembles a playground rhyme set to syncopated handclaps. “How about/Ha ha ha ha/How about/Ha ha ha ha,” runs the refrain, leaving little inkling of its origin story. Are we laughing at a joke or a person? And “how about” what exactly? That man, that dog, them Yankees? The meaning is as cryptic as the band, but they do offer a hint: “How about the love.” Looking around the globe today, that four-letter word is as urgent as it is furtive, and while SAULT are private, the grief they sing of has been projected onto the world stage, stoking a sadness that could make you want to disappear. It’s the type of misery that elicits a desperate ha ha ha ha. How about the love, right?
UK rapper Little Simz is luminescent on “You From London,” sitting in the pocket where bold ambition meets calm disregard for convention. “Ain’t no thinkin’ twice when you’re living life the rebel way, huh/We don’t know L.A./You ain’t knowin’ Shoreditch Overground, ’bout to run away,” she spits over a beat that evokes Corinne Bailey Rae summer aesthetics with a take-no-shit mindset. Simz projects a sunny disposition amid trying external factors: “I know killers in the streets, but I ain’t really involved/We don't wanna cause any grief/But we get triggered when hearin’ the sound of police.” The somber “Alcohol” reflects on the battle to conquer destructive vices and fight against the impermanent bliss of chemical comfort, bringing to mind Kendrick Lamar’s bleak “A.D.H.D.”: “Oh alcohol/Look what I’ve done,” Cleo Sol sings mournfully; “Oh alcohol/It was only supposed to be one.”
“London Gangs” is set to a retro bass-and-drum loop that sounds like it’s playing through faulty speakers. The mood is anxious and hectic, with the energy of commuters moving from one subway to another during the morning rush hour. Clarity comes on “Fear” and “Bitter Streets,” with the latter’s swelling strings and foot-tapping percussion cushioning a meditation on despondency and resignation. Sol movingly channels what happens when the choices from our youth trap us in situations we can’t escape without violence or wrenching loss: “Your energy/Takes away the best of me/I remember when we were young/You made friends with a gun,” she sings, her tone deceptively chipper. In moments like this it’s clear how much NINE is concerned with the ways that relationships and loyalties are formed, group labels are distributed (“RIP postcodes/Revenge is all you know”), and those affected weather the storms.
Heavy weather hangs over NINE—“I can’t really fool with all that rain out there,” chirps an excited American on “You From London”—but on the closing “Light’s in Your Hands,” temperature takes on a more metaphorical aspect, as the measure of frigid, unwelcoming circumstances. During a break in the gospel-inflected song, the sample of a man’s voice breaks in over piano and wordless background harmonies. “When you think about it, I never really had a childhood—I was constantly on edge, constantly on edge,” he muses. “Looking back, I can identify it as anxiety. Because I'd walk into school, not knowing what the temperature is—it’s like, there might have been a falling out in the hood, and now this, you know what I’m saying?” The song’s specifics are hyper-local, but zoom out of London, and these narrators and their lives weave themselves into the fabrics of Black stories across the globe. In SAULT’s music, trauma takes on the repetitive cadence of a children’s rhyme, and to know it is to laugh through it.

Buy: Rough Trade
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On its adventurous new album, the Gothenburg quintet expands on its pitch-perfect blend of post-punk, jangle pop, and shoegaze.

För Allting

Since Makthaverskan formed in 2008, their keen-edged brand of dream punk has remained uncannily consistent. Across their last three full-length releases—held together as a kind of conceptual trilogy—the Gothenburg quintet has curated a mostly unchanging, pitch-perfect blend of post-punk, jangle pop, and shoegaze. Their latest album, För Allting, keeps the same essential framework but expands on it, encompassing a full-bodied reflection on regret and stagnation.
In contrast to the languid, meditative moments from 2017’s III, the songs on För Allting return to the youthful bite of the band’s early music with newfound urgency and attention to detail. Although every song is still steeped in classically dreamy textures, the band substantially varies its musical palette. The synths on “Caress,” a new element in their repertoire, suggest an intimate fondness for Power, Corruption, and Lies; the storm-tossed “Lova” takes on a serrated, gothic tone; closer “Maktologen” explodes in a Close Lobsters-like expression of pure C-86 joy. Both “Tomorrow” and “Ten Days” deviate from the indie pop formula with tremendously cathartic breakdowns—the latter brings a post-punk revival edge in its beautifully bitter outro, like something out of a classic Western film. Even the ambient transition tracks “(-)” and “(--)” form a lush, thoughtful susurrus in and of themselves.
Romantic tracks like “These Walls” and “All I’ve Ever Wanted to Say” bring the band closer to a shoegaze sound. Frontwoman Maja Milner has a voice seemingly built for dream pop—thin but strong, hitting a violent edge as easily as the flick of a butterfly knife. Her vocals narrow with accusation as she laments “but you used to be mine” on “Lova” and denounces “all of this world’s sorrow” on the sweetly misanthropic “Tomorrow.” Her sonorous lyrics are never complex but they’re never sophomoric, either; her euphoria and grief sound arresting and empathetic through the speakers.
Milner’s lyrics remain visceral, but there’s a gentler tilt to her writing now. While the lyrics of II were characterized with incisive fuck you’s, För Allting is more subtle, carrying the taut restlessness of a waiting room. Milner’s tone  is urgent and existential. The lead single “This Time” is suffused with a sharp, wistful regret, one only brought about with age: “This time it’s too late/This time it won’t matter,” she admits. “This time I said things I shouldn’t have said.”
At this stage in Makthaverskan’s career, it could be easy for them to hit a ceiling: It’s common for contemporary dream pop bands to grow complacent with their sound and begin repeating themselves. But more than a decade after their debut, Makthaverskan still find a way to retain their ‘80s influences and joyful pop formula while reshaping their identity and evolving. On För Allting, there’s more room to breathe and more time to bask in their endless disquiet.

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The latest collection from synth-pop retrofuturist and punk intellectual John Maus contains grander, darker songs than his previous albums. It’s a thrill to encounter his singular voice.

Screen Memories

It has been six years since John Maus released new material, but the synth-pop retrofuturist and punk intellectual hasn’t just been twiddling his thumbs at home in the open plains of rural Minnesota. Deciding that he should take his responsibilities as a professional musician seriously, Maus spent two years building his own modular synthesizer, inspired by pioneers like the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Never one to take an easy route, Maus was convinced that the effort of creating electronic music from scratch could only lend his work a greater significance. Alas, despite his efforts, “it didn’t really make that much of a difference sonically,” he sighed in a recent interview, “which was a huge disappointment to me.”
Screen Memories—which will be followed early next year by another album of new material, Addendum—does indeed sound pretty similar, sonically, to 2011’s We Must Become the Pitiless Censors of Ourselves, the album that launched the former Ariel Pink collaborator into the upper echelons of indie rock fame. His strange combination of sounds and moods—combining 1980s goth-pop with baroque keyboards, horror movie soundtracks, and that perilously deep baritone—continues to be fertile soil for his songwriting, but there’s a tension in the air on these grander, darker songs.
Though the addition of the modular synthesizer hasn’t radically altered Maus’ sound, there’s a sense of greater craftsmanship in the small details. “The Combine” provides the gravest possible opening, pulling a brass symphony and a synthetic choir into a gothic crescendo as Maus warns us of impending annihilation by blind machinery: “I see the combine coming/It’s going to dust us all to nothing.” The apocalyptic mood continues throughout, but the darkness is balanced with a kind of playful absurdity—the sense of nihilistic abandon that comes from finding yourself at a party at the end of the world. He references the battlefield and the electric chair as easily as he name-checks cartoon demon Skeletor and the Super Bowl, as on the sleazy funk of “Touchdown”: “Forward drive across the line!”
Maus spent two of his six years away studying political philosophy; his PhD thesis considers the “molecular technologies of power” among other things. But despite being outwardly political in interviews (he describes himself as “left of left of left of left”), he’s wise enough, and punk enough, to understand that the stilted vocabulary of theory can’t easily be harvested for lyrics. The overall sound of the song is always prioritized, and he funnels his hyper-intelligence into bizarre phrases that lodge firmly in your brain, sometimes creating an unerasable mental image. “Teenage witch! Teenage witch!” he chants on the song of the same name, either as celebration or accusation, “Want to start a fire, witch? For that icy titty?!” At other times, he seems to have followed one of his esoteric lines of questioning to a ridiculous conclusion: “Your pets are gonna die!” he gloats over and over on the taut, new wave-ish “Pets,” before taking a huge conceptual leap backwards to consider our shared mortality on a cosmic scale: “Let this be the time of the end, standing between time and its end.”
Despite the references to imminent doom, Maus’ pessimism never stands in the way of a perky melody. “The People Are Missing” borrows a line from French philosopher Gilles Deleuze to gesture at political end-times over frantic synth-pop keys (“The camp, the ghetto, the ghetto, the camp,” he intones grimly), but the phrases themselves are immediate and thrilling, big ideas chewed into poppy fragments to consider at your leisure. The furred-up guitar riffage of “Find Out” is the closest thing to a Strokes homage you’ll want to hear this year, while “Decide Decide” seems to channel the gutter romance of Suicide through heavily echoed vocals and glittering organs as Maus contemplates the future: “It’s a dream to dream,” he coos.
After such a powerful opening, the album tails off slightly on the final stretch, ending in a haze with “Bombs Away,” a song penned by Ariel Pink and another former collaborator, Holy Shit’s Matt Fishbeck. Still, with many songs barely brushing three minutes and the whole thing coming in under 40, there’s no lack of momentum; Screen Memories is over in a flash, and begs to be played again from the beginning. Given the album’s lengthy gestation, you can understand why Maus might be disappointed with how much he still sounds just like himself. For the rest of us, though, it’s a thrill to encounter his self-assured and singular voice. While the actual apocalypse shows no signs of slowing down, Screen Memories strikes a chord in a way that most blatantly political albums never quite manage. As society crumbles, John Maus’ commitment to being John Maus is inspiring, tapping an unexpected synchronicity with our doomed world.


After her 1986 album Control and its assertion of her identity as an artist, Janet Jackson was thinking big. Rhythm Nation 1814 is a thrilling mix of social messaging and dancefloor pleasure.

Rhythm Nation 1814

The United States in 1989 was awash in conservatism, discord, and dissent—George H.W. Bush assumed the U.S. presidency after two terms of Reagan, gun violence was on the rise, the crack epidemic was in full swing. But with the imminent shift in decades, so too opened up possibilities. Grassroots organizing for Earth Day 1990 was underway, a worldwide effort for environmental awareness that seemed to singlehandedly make recycling an imperative status quo. Members of the AIDS advocacy group ACT UP protested St. Patrick’s Cathedral and crashed the New York Stock Exchange to protest regressive views and HIV drug profiteering. KRS-One created the “Stop the Violence” movement, leading to a broad coalition of rappers to cut a song, “Self Destruction,” that would benefit the National Urban League. Hope sprung anew for a fresh era, and it was all manifesting in pools of revitalized activism across the country.
In other words, it was “time to give a damn, let’s work together,” as 23-year-old Janet Jackson sang on “Rhythm Nation,” the title track of her fourth proper album, a passionate entreaty delivered with the choreography of a boxer’s pose and an iconic military kick. Rhythm Nation 1814 was the pop album that defined this moment on the brink, one that reflected Jackson’s exposure to the rise of 24-hour news, which influenced the album in the form of channel-surfing interludes and the urgency of a new political awakening. In response to what she saw as a world crumbling around her, Jackson explicitly laid out her own vision of a global anti-racist utopia, while actually creating such a space within an album that had no genre or topical boundaries. It was brawny and righteous; heard alongside her independence-asserting 1986 release Control, Rhythm Nation 1814 represented the full-spectrum actualizing of her womanhood, juxtaposing emotional, physical, and political power with the first visuals of Jackson as a dyed-in-the-wool sex symbol.
Rhythm Nation 1814 became the rare album to combine multi-platinum-selling pop music and explicit social messages without crossing the line into preachiness. The ironclad songwriting of the still-going power trio of Jackson, Jimmy Jam, and Terry Lewis had a lot to do with that—at this point, they were infusing their synth funk with looser, layered rhythms and exploring the distance between funk and metal. Her vocals were often considered breathy and lilting, but on this album, Jackson established her lion’s roar, even at her uppermost pitch. The title track incorporated the muscled riff from “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin),” connecting Sly Stone’s own sociopolitical message to hers. But its syncopated kicks and Jackson’s self-assured mission were resolutely contemporary, the result of a time when tape splicing and sampling were considered the zenith of pop experimentation.
In that sense, Rhythm not only dovetailed with a political era in hip-hop, a genre with a heavy stylistic influence on the album—Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and Salt-n-Pepa’s Blacks’ Magic bookended Rhythm Nation’s release, as did Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing—but it set a precedent for conceptual pop albums far beyond it. For one, the absurdly derided “militancy” of Beyoncé’s powerful Black Panther-alluding Superbowl performance, as well as Lemonade as both a visual epic and political statement, have clear and undeniable precedents in 1814’s militaristic, optimistic critique. (MTV aired Rhythm Nation 1814 FILM, the visual album Jackson termed a “telemusical,” in an hour-long special, a trendsetting antecedent to Lemonade and a postscript to her brother Michael’s Thriller epic. Young viewers rushed to wear metal-plated ballcaps and dangle their house keys from a single ear.) With it, Jackson demanded multiplicity in both image and genre, in a time when black women pop singers of her oeuvre weren’t often given it. Then, as now, she knew she would not be afforded that multidimensionality on good faith—she had to make it for herself.
Rhythm Nation opens with an industrial-sounding “Interlude: Pledge,” in which she, as our righteous leader, lays out her mission for social justice in a new utopia, “a nation with no geographic boundaries, bound together through our beliefs.” Behind her, disciples say words in a manner of poetry, a chorus; just after she finishes saying that she and her crew are “pushing toward a world rid of colorlines,” a man’s voice whispers the word “dance,” and that juxtaposition epitomized her approach.
Jackson’s a multimedia artist to be sure—her music was not complete without the dance was not complete without the visuals—but her particular mix of politics with dancefloor acumen and box-step swing was miraculous. The bridge for “The Knowledge,” in which Jackson and her constituents call and respond the words “Prejudice/No!/Ignorance/ No!/Bigotry/No!/Illiteracy/No!,” is the stuff of a political rally, theoretically incongruous in a pop song. And yet overlaid on a creeping New Jack Swing bassline, its stridency transformed into physicality, the cadences inspiring the idea that, shit, maybe dancing really does have the power to liberate us. In the video, she smashed glass, did a half-snake, and posed with her index finger pointing at her brain on the downbeat.
Shortening the distance between funk, industrial experiments—you can link Pretty Hate Machine’s synth clangor from that same year to Rhythm Nation’s easily enough—and New Jack Swing, Jackson was making a statement about the multitudes of her pop artistry, as well as her broader multitudes as a black woman. Where Control was about liberating herself from the expectations of her family and specifically her father, Rhythm Nation was in direct response to her label’s exhortations that she make a “Control II,” as Jimmy Jam described it, which clearly was too small a box to hold her artistic impulses. She was in full flourish, and also staking out further claim as a sex symbol, as lead single “Miss You Much,” slinky-sad “Come Back to Me,” and the image-altering “Love Will Never Do (Without You)” solidified. The former was the pop love song of the year and a smash hit with a chair-dancing video that’s still being imitated. (Ciara and Tinashe, at the least, would be forever altered.)
“Love Will Never Do” was inextricable from Jackson’s bustier gallivanting with half-clad muscle men, actor/models Djimon Hounsou and Antonio Sabáto Jr, on the beach. “I was so used to being a tomboy, covered from head to toe,” she said in I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution. “I wanted to do something different for the last video from Rhythm Nation… with the top half, I never wore something so tiny in my life. And I didn’t have on a bra.” The video, shot in high-contrast and glimmering black and white, was specifically calibrated to fashion spread specifications—courtesy of director Herb Ritts, a frequent photographer of supermodels—and moreover to match Jackson, then 23, with her emergence as a femme fatale.
This would thrust her career into an adult sensuality—by 1993, at 27, she would be posing topless on the cover of Rolling Stone. But Rhythm Nation’s arc was also explicitly historical. After much speculation about what the “1814” in the title stood for, Jackson later confirmed that it referred to the year Francis Scott Key wrote the “Star-Spangled Banner,” firmly asserting this was her new national anthem. In the “Alright” video, a song that worked alongside “Escapade” as an explicit reprieve from the social ills she addressed on the album—the permission to get loose after all that stress, a pop structure that still proves useful today—Jackson wore a zoot suit and cast ’40s and ’50s icons Cyd Charisse and Cab Calloway, the former a dance legend of the silver screen, the latter a music director who spent much of his early career as the gifted entertainment for wealthy whites in Harlem’s segregated Cotton Club. “Alright” was a pop art homage to those old timey musicals, and an implicit vision of what the world could be like, should her utopia be instated. The melody was forward-looking and comforting, a love song and with more swing and the synth horns that signified a kind of aspiration among an orchestra of agreeance. She sang:

Friends come and friends may go
My friends you’re real I know
True self you have shown
You’re alright with me

That some dismissive critics then thought the politics were separable from the love songs was an incorrect reading. Jackson’s further assertion of self was as personal-as-political as the era demanded, reflecting in part her relationship and eventual marriage to René Elizondo, done in secret to keep both the press and her former dadager at bay. She was fully growing into herself as a human, exploring her internal territory and reconciling it with the world outside, while pushing herself musically more than ever. “Black Cat,” which she wrote entirely herself, was the fully manifested example of this internal and external congealing. She threw down a slinky, sexy snarl over a rock guitar shred that was also wildly jiggy, making an unlikely dive-bar banger that spoke to both gang members and the wronged women who loved them. Another nod to history—topically, the bad boy lament could be traced back to Big Mama Thornton, the black blueswoman who invented rock’n’roll—Jackson was proving to the world she was as versatile as any other chart-topper of the day, and no move she made was without substance. Perhaps by presenting her self-made utopia, she also envisioned that the real-life dystopian one would recognize her not for what it wanted her to be, but for who she was.


Alynda Segarra’s fantastic new album revives the folky textures of previous records to grapple with American myths and tragedies. It’s part folk-punk memoir, part spiritual invocation.

Hurray for the Riff Raff: The Past Is Still Alive

The Past Is Still Alive

In Juan Gómez Bárcena’s 2023 novel Not Even the Dead, a former conquistador accepts a mysterious quest from the colonial government of Mexico. He must leave his wife and home, but it’s going to be worth it—the job pays gold, and it should only take two weeks. Off he goes, riding horseback into numerous trials and tribulations, all the while reassuring himself: Two weeks. Two more weeks will do the trick. Two weeks is the least of his problems because he’s not only riding, he’s time traveling—advancing by decades and then centuries, tripping and stumbling into future worlds where the legends and prejudices of the past continually take on new shapes. Eventually he’s reincarnated as a migrant worker, hitching a ride on a train.
“Time can take you for a ride,” Alynda Segarra sings near the top of their ninth album, The Past Is Still Alive. Rather than horses, Segarra mostly writes about trains, because they used to hop a few themself and because of the way the train, the first rhythm of rural industrialization, runs beneath the American blues and folk music that inform their career as Hurray for the Riff Raff. That’s the shaky-steady forward momentum driving The Past Is Still Alive: part folk-punk memoir, part harm-reduction PSA, part spiritual invocation and/or world-historical séance. The location is: Out there somewhere and the time is: Don’t you know all time is connected?
The Past Is Still Alive represents a turn back toward more traditionally Americana textures after 2022’s Life on Earth, a kind of electronic rewilding project that followed the slicker, self-consciously conceptual The Navigator. The sound is dusky, naturalistic, one-third electric and two-thirds acoustic; we see softness and joy in the human experience and, lurking in the background, violence, fentanyl, and barrels of crude. Producer Brad Cook plays bass here, along with a core studio lineup including brother Phil Cook (piano, organ, Wurltizer, dobro) and drummer Yan Westerlund—what one might call the alternate-reality Megafaun, featuring two original member-brothers and the third member’s brother (behold, the ever-reaching influence of DeYarmond Edison).
Elements from Segarra’s biography appear in flashes throughout their discography but rarely as explicitly as in The Past Is Still Alive, a vivid time travelogue that reflects on Segarra’s youthful misadventures as a “dirty kid” or punk traveler with humility, nostalgia, and transhistorical perspective. In the retelling, shoplifting and dumpster diving for food represent both self-sufficiency and secret shame. And when you have no place to go, a train will take you somewhere. It’s certainly not the lifestyle for everyone: “Here’s a silver spoon, you can eat your heart out as a prize,” Segarra taunts, or cautions, on highlight “Hawkmoon,” a rollicking coming-of-age story honoring a trans mentor, Miss Jonathan, who’s assaulted and never seen again.
It seems Segarra has been thinking about the vast psychic geographies and American histories where trains (and queer punks) go that ordinary civilians usually don’t, probably singing the last three verses of “This Land Is Your Land” and not just the first half, namechecking poet Eileen Myles alongside a legendary writer of freight-train graffiti, and leading off the album with a pair of death-defying gestures: “Alibi,” summoning a friend back from the brink of addiction, and “Buffalo,” about the extinction of the Great Plains’ original movement economy. “Two weeks just to catch the buffalo,” they chant, and I picture the animals receding further toward the horizon, further still, until the day these unnamed hunters must accept that they won’t be found again. And then—the herd “one day magically appeared.” Time travel.
Segarra sounds best delivering a prophetic-sounding folk song, maybe because it’s how I first encountered their work on older cuts like “End of the Line” or “Look Out Mama.” The Past Is Still Alive’s fantastical yet sharply observed writing and revival of a more traditional sound feels like a homecoming. The album was recorded in the weeks immediately following the death of Segarra’s father, Jose Enrico Segarra, or “Quico,” who leaves behind its closing voicemails. “It’s all in the past but the past is still alive,” Segarra snarls on “Vetiver,” the title phrase showing up in a place that isn’t the title track because it’s just that kind of album: unbounded. They’re in wild form on that song, a deliciously slurry traveler’s ballad about transience and relationships also featuring a Bob Dylan banger of a pregnant phrase, “You know nothing is free/But it could certainly be.” And they continue to grow into their own poetic voice, one that climbs a little stair-stepping melody and turns on its heel with a well-timed profanity or an emphatic reminder to test your drugs. “I’d never heard a song mention Narcan,” Segarra said at a recent listening event, so they wrote one that promotes the emergency overdose reversal by name.
At last they speak to the future on “Ogallala,” the name of a Nebraska town (itself named for a tribe of the Lakota People) where the album’s apocalyptic subtext finally erupts to the surface. So effective is The Past Is Still Alive at defying time—reversing, revisiting, slipping through—that in the end I wish it were true. Brad Cook’s rich, earthy touches are all over the upcoming Waxahatchee album and Jess Williamson’s most recent, among numerous prominent credits in recent years. And Segarra’s most morose monologue does sound quite like Conor Oberst when he’s singing backup on the very Bright Eyes-y “The World Is Dangerous.” Aesthetically, in these moments, The Past Is Still Alive feels notably of the present as a contemporary indie-rock record, rather than the way I’d ideally prefer to obtain it, which is handed over by a mysterious stranger at the back of a nameless little ghost town saloon. I don’t expect that’ll happen soon, but imagine a Hurray for the Riff Raff album that’s woolier and weirder, like their take on ’70s Van Morrison, or out-of-time completely like (if you’ll forgive me for one more train joke) their very own Blood on the Tracks? I don’t believe Segarra has totally cracked that on record yet, and it’s a gift to hear them on their way. All the while I was alone, the past was close behind. If this is the end of history, then right now is the most past there’ll ever be. Hold on baby, we’re living in it.


Chicago-based trio Bitchin Bajas once again pay homage to the zone-out music of the 1960s and '70s, perfectly reconstructing the psychedelic easy-listening of the era. But this time they are carving out an even more distinct path.

Transporteur EP

On last year’s self-titled double LP, the Chicago-based trio Bitchin Bajas—which began as an offshoot of psych-rock ensemble Cave—paid expert homage to the zone-out music of the 1960s and '70s, perfectly reconstructing the psychedelic easy-listening of the era. The group—Cooper Crain, Roberty Frye, and Dan Quinlivan—got all of the ingredients right. The record’s eight compositions were perfectly dialed in, both in terms of influences (Terry Riley, Laraaji, Popol Vuh) and the vintage gear and methods required to channel them (tape machines, loops, electric organs). It was like taking a stroll through a museum exhibit, a blissed-out reminder that, at this point, ambient music has a deep and well-established history.
Bitchin Bajas appeal is that they so expertly recreate a style of music designed for simple pleasure. This might make the trio sound like some sort of New Age cover band, but that’s not exactly the case. They don't create knock-offs or copies. Instead, they apply the same compositional methods and get results that are unique, but familiar. If you've spent some time with Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, Fripp and Eno’s Evening Star, or the Kuckkuck label catalog, Bitchin Bajas will register as more of a good thing. But on the group's latest EP, Transporteur, the trio has stepped back from their influences a little. The music is still meditative and trance inducing, but it’s harder to draw a direct line to an existing work or style.
Even though it’s labeled as an EP, at 34 minutes Transporteur is a sizeable chunk of music—four pieces that almost all stretch out to around nine minutes. The tracks are still based on repetitive looping phrases, but the instrumental palate has shifted, moving away from sounds that were wedded to yesterday's mystical moment (mainly, the electric organ) and relying more heavily on sequenced analog synthesizers.
The first two tracks, "Rias Baixas" and "Planete T", hew more closely to the Bitchin Bajas' established formula. A droney loop is introduced, then augmented with lush keyboard figures. It's great and thoroughly drifty stuff, if reminiscent of pastoral German synth noodlers like Cluster.
The EP's second half moves into more distinctive territory. On "No Tabac", a percussive synthesizer sequence is paired up with flute doodles, which slowly evolve and accumulate urgency. Closer "Marimba" is particularly unusual. The process is basically the same—a burbling synthesizer loop evolves with the accumulation of additional instrumentation. Only here, the focus is on rhythm and percussion, rather than ethereal tones and pads, with seemingly random bongo-like sounds, hand claps, shakers, and additional percussive elements. At times, the music recalls Congolese electric thumb piano ensemble Konono N°1, albeit with a more overtly psychedelic bent. It’s excellent modern ambient music, exercising restraint, never crashing into a crescendo, and sustaining interest while remaining rooted in repetition.
In addition to a great record collection and a well curated studio, Bitchin Bajas have also internalized the concepts that made vintage ambient music engaging. Particularly, how tape loop-based or repetitive compositions can distort your perception of time, that they can supply a sense of stillness in motion, where seven minutes can slip by almost entirely unnoticed.


On their groundbreaking new album, the Philadelphia hardcore group mixes actionable rhetoric, absurdist humor, and breathtaking vulnerability like no band before them.

Diaspora Problems

Soul Glo’s rise to hardcore heroism would be greater cause for celebration if it weren’t such a damning indictment of American society. Since forming in 2014, the Philly quartet has garnered modest acclaim for airing their righteous grievances against being both tokenized and ostracized as a Black punk band, all while sparing no detail on hypocrisy within their own community, our broken health care system, generational trauma, and the false promises of higher education and upward mobility. By the time Americans en masse were starting to admit that things were as fucked up as Soul Glo had been saying, they’d put out their first widely distributed release, Songs to Yeet at the Sun, in November 2020. The message hadn’t changed, but more people were actually willing to listen. Nearly two years later, none of Soul Glo’s calls for political action have been answered in a meaningful way. “It’s been ‘fuck right wing’ off the rip/But still liberals are more dangerous,” Pierce Jordan snarls midway through Soul Glo’s staggering new album, Diaspora Problems, a ticking time bomb hurled by a band tired of waiting on solutions and taking power into its own hands.
Though Soul Glo mix radical, actionable rhetoric, absurdist humor, and breathtaking vulnerability like almost no band before them, Diaspora Problems is above all a flex. “We got big plans coming up in this motherfucker,” Jordan announced on lead single “Jump!! (Or Get Jumped!!!) ((By the Future)),” a celebration of their well-earned success and a grim recognition of how quickly it can all disappear for Black artists, whether in the churn of industry machinery or at the hands of the state. Soul Glo’s previous releases often adhered to standard hardcore specs, clocking in between 10 and 20 minutes, complete statements that nonetheless felt like they never captured the full scope of their artistry; 2016’s Untitled was the exception in exceeding a half hour, but it needed 20 songs to get there.
Accordingly, Diaspora Problems is a big album, conceived like a major label debut: horn sections, instantly recognizable and hopefully cleared samples, a half-dozen guest rappers and vocalists, and Will Yip on mixing and mastering. It begins with a bong rip approximating the rhythm of the 20th Century Fox intro. Technically, it’s more accessible than Soul Glo’s past releases, but it dares listeners to think deeply about whether the repeated hooks are theirs to shout back, whether directed at the band’s peers (“Who gon’ beat my ass! Who the fuck gon’ beat my ass?”) or those who might try to claim allyship (“I’m so bored by the left, protests, and reluctance to militarize”).
Aside from a 30-second non-sequitur of twinkle guitar that precedes the blunt force of “(Five Years and) My Family,” there are no breathers or interludes, none of the things that typically stretch a hardcore album to the capacity of a vinyl record. “Can I live?” are the first of Jordan’s many, many words on Diaspora Problems—nearly 5,500 in the lyrics sheet by my count, delivered as rapid-fire Migos triplets, scorched screamo howls, deadpan spoken word, and a very believable Johnny Rotten impression. To some extent, he can be taken literally here, as in, who will survive in America, in the face of everything that is actively trying to kill him as a financially insecure Black man. Even beyond the threat of institutional force, Jordan has spent the entirety of Soul Glo’s existence exploring the feedback loop of poverty, debilitating depression, and the impossibility of obtaining proper treatment. These pathologies dovetail in “John J,” an astute sociopolitical treatise that begins with Jordan’s memory of putting a gun in his mouth just to see what it would feel like, and then fast-forwards to a searing image of 2020’s protests: “I’m on 15th seeing 20 police run toward me to protect a bank.”
But as “Jump!!” makes bracingly clear, being an artist on the verge of a breakthrough might be the biggest threat to Soul Glo’s survival. “If I get popped before it’s clear I’m hot/Of course there’ll be someone to fill in,” Jordan frantically spits, soon elaborating on Jadakiss’ immortal line from 20 years prior—“You know dead rappers get better promotion.” Jordan claims to be “living on Juice WRLD Pop Smoke time,” evoking two Black artists who died before turning 21 and became cottage industries, a ghoulish scenario for labels generating seemingly endless posthumous content without having to consider the human being attached. The chorus links them to Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, victims of violent killings whose legacies likewise threaten to be relegated to social media symbolism and murals in gentrified city centers. The urgency in Soul Glo’s delivery ensures that Diaspora Problems never descends into nihilism.
Then again, Jordan’s question of “Can I live?” could just as easily be heard as an homage to the classic Jay-Z cut, an arch rebuttal levied at anyone who tries to find fault with Black people exploiting capitalism’s many loopholes. “They want to persecute me because I get money responsibly, ethically?” a voice announces at the beginning of the subwoofer-busting “Driponomics.” Jordan rattles off luxury streetwear brands in the chorus, honoring those who use Off-White or Supreme gear as the means or the rewards of their work: “Reselling, upselling, I’m telling you/Labor to get comfortable is only for the gullible.” Or, as the man once said, can’t knock the hustle.
All of this is nearly impossible to absorb just by listening to Diaspora Problems; it’s no slight to say that even those predisposed to the most aggressive forms of hardcore and avant garde hip-hop will need to build up the stamina to take in the whole thing in one sitting. It’s a testament to the band’s ambitions and execution peaking in lockstep that Diaspora Problems can be appreciated as both a fully visceral experience and a cerebral one. “Thumbsucker” follows a timeline of prescribed security blankets, from Wellbutrin to a cherished stuffed animal—Jordan’s family takes away his beloved Cookie to toughen him up, only to return it after he graduates college. “I was having hands put on me paired with wild mental abuse,” he reveals on “(Five Years and) My Family,” counteracting societal tendencies towards secrecy and repression, only to end with a bittersweet punchline: “You could’ve saved your money/All that you spent on therapy/You’d still have if you just came to me.” If Jordan simply read the lyrics from “Thumbsucker” or “(Five Years and) My Family,” he might be celebrated as one of our most affecting and vital poets or essayists. As is, they sound like Fishbone played at double speed, or the soundtrack to someone deadlifting a cop car and throwing it through a Wells Fargo. Or maybe they’re just the future of hardcore we need more than we’ve earned.


Dawn of Midi drummer Qasim Naqvi's latest EP unearths new, ambient-influenced grooves with a vintage Moog.

Chronology

Dawn of Midi’s 2013 album Dysnomia merged genres with ease. Members of modern jazz, contemporary classical, and electronic scenes all celebrated the trio’s memorable grooves and motifs. The exuberance of experimental dance music was easy to identify in this acoustic group’s sound. But another quality of that debut recording was its sense of control, particularly when dealing with ambient aesthetics.
Since 2013, the group’s drummer, Qasim Naqvi, has continued to work in the contemporary classical sphere. On the NNA Tapes imprint, he released a set of chamber music (performed by a student ensemble). On his latest EP, he plays and composes on a vintage Moog synthesizer—an instrument similar to the one used by Wendy Carlos on the landmark 1968 LP Switched-on Bach.
Taken individually, the six pieces on Chronology dispense small-scale hits of gorgeousness. In tandem, the tracks cohere to form a compelling suite of pieces that can subtly undermine expectations for ambient-influenced composition. Since this early Moog model was a monophonic synthesizer, capable of producing just a single melodic line at any given time, Naqvi had to multitrack his chords and harmonic designs. But this is done so subtly, the tracks all retain the feel of an intimate performance; it’s as though everything was triggered in one ruminative take.
On the opener, “Kindly Static,” Naqvi loops a single Moog tone. He turns this into an affecting minimalist composition by switching up playback speeds. Each droning note creates a new equilibrium, while the often slow pitch-bends in between carry a more reluctant, vulnerable feel. On the title track—the longest piece, which serves as the album’s emotional climax—Naqvi layers the sonic information in performances that employ different oscillators. Sometimes this results in a mellow, church-organ feel; at other points, harsher combinations provide a dramatic edge. It’s a slow-moving piece, but rich with activity.
Though it isn’t beat-focused, Chronology also has a connection with trends in electronic music that informed Dysnomia. On “Aftertouched,” another piece that uses multichannel playback trickery, Naqvi creates unpredictable rhythmic patterns from consistent harmonies. Because this particular Moog instrument was (in the composer’s words) “kind of janky,” there are stretches where you can hear signal noise in the mix, or else tones that seem less stable than others. But there’s nothing haphazard about the finished product. In “Head Within a Head,” the use of deep, floor-rattling blips works well alongside the instrument’s eccentricities. And the tone clusters that drive “Mt. Erased” have a chattering, jittery air. It’s the contrast between these pieces and the more tranquil compositions that gives Chronology its range—and its sense of purpose.


The two Chicago rappers form an alliance possibly out of convenience or shared circumstances, but their opposing styles meld into a project that can work surprisingly well.

Muddbruddas

For every national superstar born out of a regional rap scene, there are always dozens more MCs from that same community who fail to cross over. Brian Fresco & SD are not untalented, not entirely unsuccessful, but neither rapper has made it as far as some of their comrades from Chicago. Fresco came up earlier in the decade with the collective SaveMoney alongside members like Chance the Rapper & Vic Mensa, but he was soon eclipsed by their Kanye collaborations and Grammy nominations. SD was once counted among the most promising new stars of the city’s drill scene, a member of Chief Keef and Fredo Santana’s Glory Boyz Entertainment, but he maintained his independence and never really broke through because of it.
Now, two rappers who never really got their due have come together to form a new tag-team partnership: the Muddbruddas. It might be an alliance of convenience or shared circumstances, but it’s one that works surprisingly well. Brian Fresco and SD’s mutually shared lack of commercial success, at least relative to their peers, isn’t out of any lack of skill or style on their part. In some alternate timeline, Brian Fresco has an exclusive deal with Apple and SD is a critical darling and cult favorite on the level of Keef.
Fresco’s first impression of a mixtape, 2013’s Mafioso, dropped two weeks after Chance’s Acid Rap and included three separate features from The Rapper. On his debut, Fresco specialized in the same kind of soulful, slightly wonky sound that Chance cut his teeth on before becoming the rap game’s biggest wife guy. Like the rest of the SaveMoney collective’s releases, Fresco’s early work is relatively out of step with the rap movement his city was receiving the most acclaim for at that time; Mafioso is much more quiet storm than Chicago drill. So it’s fascinating to see him pair with an artist who embodies drill like few others; SD’s mid-decade releases are hallmarks of the subgenre. On mixtapes like Life of a Savage 3 and Truly Blessed, SD demonstrated that moshpit-ready ragers came as easily to him as melodic pop numbers—glittery ballads like “Big Things” and “Gossip” are still some of my favorite drill recordings.
Muddbruddas isn’t really drill, but it’s not acid rap either. Fresco brings the soul, SD the pop mentality, and the result is lowkey party rap, laidback and effortless. The synths are bright and bouncy, and the bass is plentiful. On the one hand, Muddbruddas goes for a blatantly commercial sound, drafting many of the biggest producers in rap today—808 Mafia on “Duckin,” Pi’erre Bourne on “Aretha,” CashmoneyAP on “Teef Gold”—but on the other, it’s a hard sell as a commercial prospect, with not a feature to speak of, just 30 minutes of 808s and bars.
The pair primarily operate as vocal foils to one another. On tracks like “Harley,” Fresco leans into his loose, sing-song flow that’s not too dissimilar from Chance, but SD’s presence pushes him into different flows, like “On It,” where he sounds much more frantic and leaned-forward in his voice, or “Pimp C,” on which he briefly shouts out and imitates the late Texas legend. SD’s flow has a grittier quality, not just in the gruffness of his voice but the pain it radiates—there’s a sadness to his voice that pushes against the overall jubilance of Muddbuddras, like on the more mournful “Bet On It.” When SD and Fresco meld their divergent sensibilities, the result approaches the sublime—“Bankroll” opens with SD spitting over a Clams Casino-type vocal loop courtesy of producer Mondamade da Beat, before an utterly triumphant horn hits and Brian Fresco takes charge for the chorus.
Fresco & SD have patterned themselves in the image of classic rap duos—the cover art pays homage to Clipse, and “Pimp C” is obviously something of a tribute to UGK. Though the result may not be as groundbreaking as either of those groups, by coming together as part of a tacit alliance, both members of Muddbruddas have proved their viability as artists outside their brief moment in the sun during rap’s blog years. Their project is a valuable reminder that every rap scene is so much more than its most successful stars.

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The Ethiopian keyboard maestro’s first new album in two decades radically updates a style that already sounded like the future.

Lala Belu

Before setting foot in America, Hailu Mergia and the Walias Band had already spent a decade leading revolutionary Ethiopia’s nightclub scene. With raucous sets blending funk, traditional music, and prototypical Ethio-jazz, they played to upper-crust crowds in white tuxes and bowties, at hotels that swerved the country’s strict curfew with all-night lock-ins. But local acclaim left the Walias Band hungry, and in 1981, they plotted a U.S. tour to launch their courtship of discerning westerners. The shows promised much, but the audiences, discerning little, let them drift by; after a few more years’ touring, the group’s members were exhausted, their work unrecognized. Some went home, while others resigned themselves to quiet lives on American soil.
Among them was Mergia, a keyboardist whose charisma, creative smarts, and fitful ambition had, by 1985, been made to fit in a silver taxicab, shuttling travellers to and from the airport in Washington, D.C. Anonymity suited him. When business was slow, he’d walk to his trunk, pull out a Yamaha keyboard, and slide into the backseat, where he’d skitter up and down Ethiopian scales over looping beat patterns.
It wasn’t until 2013 that Hailu Mergia reissues began popping up in U.S. record stores. The first, Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument: Shemonmuanaye, was originally recorded in Washington in 1985, after the Walias Band’s dissolution. The work of a one-man band, this mirage of electric piano, mournful synth, pirouetting accordion, and repetitive drum machine felt accordingly dislocated and solitary, with unchanging tempos that felt like no tempo, a kind of astronomical drift. Its release sparked a wider rediscovery: Two livelier reissues from Mergia’s Ethiopia years followed via Awesome Tapes From Africa, along with the kind of international tour he’d been picturing when the Walias Band touched down three decades earlier.
Mergia never stopped writing, and with Lala Belu—his first new full-length in two decades—he’s finally produced an album to stand alongside those golden-era landmarks. While he’s become a remarkably versatile songwriter, the new release contains echoes of the old, full of peculiar details that contrast the sparkly veneer of the jazz trio he’s now fronting. Back in the Walias heyday, Mergia and his electric organ would embed in the eight-piece’s tapestry, then teleport center-stage, the instrument’s abrasive grain violating the organic groove. Much of Lala Belu’s magic comes from that playful impulse. Within opener “Tizita” are three moments of textural ingenuity: first the lead accordion’s entry, with an uproarious lament that jars against sunny double-bass and a seafaring waltz rhythm; then a disarmingly rich piano, which tap-dances into the song’s peppier 4/4 suite; and a third, moments later, when a squelching analog synth blurts over the top of it all, like a shy person tumbling into the conversation at a party.
Despite his considerable history, Mergia’s dexterity here is unexpected. Seventy-one and flourishing, the keyboard maestro has radically updated an oeuvre that already sounded like the future, and in doing so, he makes it sound contemporary. This music is pretty and polished, while revivifying the formal contours of Lala Belu’s three traditional songs. Besides “Tizita,” there’s “Anchihoye Lene,” which makes mischief from accordion and organ solos dancing around a slyly flattened fifth note, and “Gum Gum,” the least eventful song here, whose masterful blend of weightless organ and gently roiling undercurrents is nonetheless captivating.
When this antic energy withdraws into reflection, it’s even more breathtaking. Mergia’s own “Yefikir Engurguro,” a solo-piano ballad, closes the record with drifting ennui and a sad gaze. It’s a deft complement to the title track, an endlessly replayable jaunt with cheery “ba-ba-ba” vocals and a misbehaving fifth bar whose puzzling rhythm demands rewinds. If these thoroughly opposed original compositions show a single philosophy, it’s one that mingles hope and resignation. Lala Belu rings out with the resilience of a onetime dreamer who’s absorbed disappointment and settled for something close to optimism.


The Norwegian artist brings her heady, personal text into the world of dance music to create an affecting, transcendental album that lives on the boundary of pop and the avant-garde.

The Practice of Love

In a statement accompanying the announcement of her seventh record, The Practice of Love, Jenny Hval admitted some trepidation about the overarching subject. “Love as a theme in art has been the domain of the canonized, big artists,” she wrote. “I have always seen myself as a minor character, a voice that speaks of other things.” Since emerging as a solo artist over a decade ago, some of these “other things” have included vampires, menstruation, gender identity, and capitalism. With those fascinations in mind, the Norwegian avant-garde artist manages to take the exhausted topic of love and transform it into something that feels both erudite and primal, a work that encourages both contemplation and movement.
Inspired in part by Valie Export’s 1985 drama of the same name, The Practice of Love looks beyond traditional definitions of love; Hval seldom mentions romance, even of the conceptual sort. Instead, across eight tracks, love is an amorphous entity. It’s finding rituals of intimacy beyond the norm. It’s celebrating otherness. It’s two friends questioning their choice to not have children over Skype. The practice of love, Hval seemingly says, is creation, survival, and community sustained and defined on one’s terms.
Written and produced by Hval after she completed an upcoming novel about the coming-of-age of a lonely Norwegian teenage girl in the 1990s, the record moves away from the experimental art-pop of her earlier work and embraces the hypnotic spirit of ’90s trance music, a world Hval says she never experienced firsthand. This new alchemy of four-on-the-floor rhythms with heady theory makes Hval’s music more accessible and affecting than ever before.
The Practice of Love eases into its grand ambitions by opening with the origin of all life: Earth. “Lions” invites a subject to search for sanctity in the trees, the grass, the clouds. “Study this and ask yourself: Where is God?” a distant, measured voice implores over rhythmic bursts of white noise. Then, as the voice’s focus shrinks towards the ants, mushrooms, and flowers of the forest, the song’s structure expands. A shuffling synth nestles against the percussion and as Hval’s voice enters the scene, “Lions” accelerates until it bursts into dancefloor euphoria.
The feeling continues on the stellar “Ashes to Ashes,” as it manifests the cerebral songwriting process as a physical act. Atop a dreamy, buoyant arrangement, Hval sings of beats burrowing into the ground and playing an instrument that is “just a shape in the earth,” of sinking her hands into the soil and tasting the detritus of memories. Despite this carnality, Hval’s voice is light, airy, and calming. “She was certain the lyrics went about burying someone’s ashes/And then having a cigarette.” Songwriting mimics a life cycle: As you exorcise the past, you move closer to your demise.
“Ashes to Ashes” and the skittering, saxophone-tinged “High Alice” are the only songs on The Practice of Love that feature Hval on her own. As on previous records, a group of guest vocalists (here, artists Vivian Wang, Félicia Atkinson, and Laura Jean Englert) provide a collage of perspectives, their voices often blending into one organism. Hval, Wang, and Englert converge on the title track, which is composed of two overlapping dialogues, one of Wang reciting the narration of a film by Hval’s frequent co-producer Lasse Marhaug, the other a conversation between Englert and Hval about existence. “I have to accept that I’m part of this human ecosystem but I’m not the princess and I’m not the main character,” Englert remarks. Many artists explore ego death, but few have made it into such a personal and physical sensation, something that reverberates through the body long after the song cuts out.
“Flesh in dissent” or the rejection of heteronormative obligation is further explored on “Accident,” a song flush with wonder. As Hval attempts to rectify the transition from being “the closest her mother came to magic” to being “no longer a mystery of life,” she envisions women simulating the various rituals of pregnancy. One woman discovers stretch mark cream in an Airbnb bathroom. When she spreads the product on her stomach, she feels no shame. “So many years. So little fruit,” she blasély murmurs later while picking at a container of dried figs. “Accident” reaches a powerful conclusion as the narrator rediscovers her magic through art: She’s “Born to write/Born to burn.” The way Hval reconciles with destiny makes you want to seek out your own.
If “Accident” is Hval at her most corporeal, “Six Red Cannas” floats off into the metaphysical. Over a thumping beat that could soundtrack a grimy techno show, she chops up a fictional memory into a meditation that encompasses female genius, songwriting philosophy, and the passage of time. While driving through the New Mexican desert on a pilgrimage to Georgia O’Keefe’s home studio, Hval somewhat unwittingly connects herself to a lineage of innovators. “I think I was trying to write to Georgia O’Keeffe/Like Joni Mitchell writes to Amelia Earhart when she is driving in the desert,” she observes, letting her falsetto spiral atop a wobbling synth. “As if a song can communicate with the spirits or awaken the dead/I mean—isn’t that what it’s for?” Nodding to Mitchell’s own desert observations on Hejira’s “Amelia,” Hval looks upward and notices six of O’Keeffe’s signature fiery red flowers streaking across the sky. As the song dissolves, the thought arises: Who else could make a banger out of conjuring Georgia O’Keeffe?
The Practice of Love concludes with its most understated track. “Ordinary” is a gauzy, spoken-word wisp about finding comfort in the familiar. “Can I only write these things, not all the other things?” a stoic voice asks. As bells, horns, and drums gradually creep in and build, the song subtly swells into an opulent trance track. But right as it reaches its peak, “Ordinary” begins to wash away until only its outlines remain. Its payoff is intimate, a fitting comedown after a record that pushes Hval towards her most emotionally vulnerable. She’s an outsider claiming a piece of the mainstream for herself without sacrificing what makes her music so special.

Buy: Rough Trade
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In 1959, Thelonious Monk recorded selections from his songbook for the soundtrack to French director Roger Vadim’s film Les Liaisons Dangereuses. The lost tapes were never released until now.

Thelonious Monk: Thelonious Monk: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960

There have been many exceptional eras in jazz history—we’re in one now, in fact—but no one year reverberated like 1959. Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, John Coltrane made Giant Steps, Charles Mingus released Mingus Ah Um, and Ornette Coleman barnstormed into New York and unleashed The Shape of Jazz to Come.
Thelonious Monk, as Rushmore-worthy as those others, put out no less than three albums, all in a variety of settings: the large ensemble At Town Hall; 5 by Monk by 5 with his quintet; and the solo Thelonious Alone in San Francisco. If these were not as monumental as the aforementioned—or as brilliant as his own Brilliant Corners from 1957—then they showcased his vast breadth as a truly original pianist, bandleader, and above all, as a writer. His many virtues are underscored again with the unveiling of yet another recording he made that year: the soundtrack for Roger Vadim’s film Les Liaisons Dangereuses, itself an adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ 18th century novel. Improbably lost to the world, the recordings were never released on their own until now, on the centennial of Monk’s birth. If 1959 was a summit in jazz, it may also have marked, on balance, Monk’s annus mirabilis.
Thelonious Monk: Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960—a limited-edition double-LP and 2xCD set—was produced by Zev Feldman, François Le Xuan, and Frederic Thomas for the independent Sam Records and Saga labels with full permission from Monk’s estate. It’s bolstered by notes from scholars including Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, as well as photographs from the session, which took place down the block from Carnegie Hall at Nola Penthouse Studio on 111 West 57th Street. (Monk being Monk, he wore a conical hat during the date.)
Jazz had such pan-cultural appeal in the late 1950s that Duke Ellington had a cameo in Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder, for which he also did the music; Mingus scored John Cassavetes’ directorial debut, Shadows; and Miles did the memorable soundtrack for Ascenseur Pour L’Échafaud. Even Vadim, whose personal life was more interesting than his life’s work—his two autobiographies were titled Memoirs of the Devil and Bardot, Deneuve, and Fonda: My Life With the Three Most Beautiful Women in the World—used the Modern Jazz Quartet to compose the music for another of his erotic dramas, No Sun in Venice, two years earlier.
Despite some personal and professional issues he was dealing with, Monk was in top form on this mid-summer day—spry, full of wit, his ideas delightfully unpredictable as ever. The photos show that his wife Nellie—his rock—was there as was his patron, the Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter. His band was made up of Sam Jones on bass, Art Taylor on drums, tenor saxophonist Charlie Rouse, who would go on to be his loyal soldier for years to come, and another tenor, Barney Wilen, which is how these tapes were discovered. The producers found them while combing Wilen’s archives in search of unreleased material the Frenchman might have left behind.
By the time Monk agreed to record, there was no time to write original music so he dipped into his own songbook: two versions each of “Crepuscule With Nellie,” “Well, You Needn’t,” “Light Blue,” and “Rhythm-a-Ning” (the first of which sounds as nimble and alive as any he’d done). Monk did no less than four versions of “Pannonica,” plus “Ba-Lue Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are,” “Six in One,” and the hymn “We’ll Understand It Better By and By.” What might have been monotonous in other hands provided ample opportunity for Monk, who wrote music with acres of room for his improvisational pivots.
Indeed, the music works better as an album than a soundtrack, though it’s clear Vadim had real affection for jazz. “Crepuscule With Nellie” plays over the opening credits, followed immediately by “Well, You Needn’t,” and soon after “Bolivar Ba-Lues-Are.” There’s even a scene with jazz musicians Kenny Clarke, Kenny Dorham, Paul Rovère, Barney Wilen, and Duke Jordan, who also composed music for the film (though it’s not included in this set). But the soundtrack often intrudes and overwhelms some sections of the movie, whether during a party scene or at a ski resort or in a bedroom.
On Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960, Monk is a heavyweight engaging with a middleweight, and middlebrow, in Vadim, whose career was more defined by his romantic conquests than his artistic content. But that’s not on Monk. And his work here, in the middle of 1959, is as thought-provoking as anything he recorded in that prodigious year.


A decade after their last album, Grandaddy pick up where they left off, for better and for worse.

Last Place

Some Grandaddy songs are about technology. Nearly all of them are about junk: Alcoholic robots and broken household appliances outlive their usefulness and are left to rust. But the same basic fate awaits lost kittens, lonely spacemen, forlorn miners, and hollowed-out cities of rural California, eulogized by a band whose fuzz pedals, analog synths, and withered harmonies always sound like they’re about to give out. And much like Jed the Humanoid, Grandaddy themselves fizzled and popped, and then they just stopped with 2006’s Just Like the Fambly Cat, essentially a Jason Lytle solo album. Given their dedication to documenting entropy, a “triumphant comeback” isn’t the sort of thing one expects from this band. But as Last Place makes clear, the creeping sense that we’ll all just end up in a pile of our emotional and physical baggage never goes out of style.
Lytle had kept busy since disassembling Grandaddy a decade ago: After moving to Montana to escape the relative bustle of the Central Valley, he released two solo LPs, produced Band of Horses, hooked up with Monsters of Blog Rock supergroup BNQT, and found a sensible benefactor in new label head Danger Mouse. But Grandaddy are still a state-of-the-art 2000 band, the sum of slack-motherfucker indie rock, the mid-fi experimentalism of Sparklehorse, and just enough of Mercury Rev and Flaming Lips’ late-’90s prog sweep. Most crucially, The Sophtware Slump countered the pre-millennial tension of trip-hop, Timbaland, and Radiohead with Y2k’s definitive ¯\(ツ)/¯ album, speaking to people who came of age during the tech boom and felt like the 21st century could only promise shinier distractions from the same old pervasive suburban boredom.
If Last Place doesn’t exactly sound happy about that fate coming to pass, at least Lytle’s learning to deal. “Way We Won’t” begins the record with him accepting loss as some schmo living atop a box store, enjoying the “tropical smells and back-to-school sales,” the best most people can hope for in adulthood. This unusually zippy pop song is immediately followed by “Brush With the Wild,” also patterned after the closest thing Grandaddy had to a crossover hit (“Now It’s On”), making for the most vigorous eight-minute stretch of music they’ve ever committed to tape. At least musically, that is; lyrically, the trademark weariness remains. “We had a thing, whatever it’s called,” Lytle moans, which is the most Grandaddy way possible to depict a busted romance. “The Boat Is in the Barn” continues the theme: he’s just another hoarder of junk, hanging onto their shared possessions and memories in hope of keeping the past alive, while the ex gingerly deletes pictures from her phone.
Last Place’s first side sounds familiar, but it also promises a new kind of Grandaddy album: an uptempo collection of skewed pop songs without any kind of higher conceptual calling, music that is laid back but not insensate. While “Chek Injin” is Grandaddy at their most punk rock, that surge in energy only goes so far, placing them somewhere in the orbit of Wilco’s Star Wars. As Lytle yells, “please keep going, please keep fucking going,” like he’s trying to siphon one last drop of gas with his mouth, it becomes an unintentionally meta moment, as it’s the last time Last Place strives for any kind of forward momentum.
“I Don’t Wanna Live Here Anymore” and “That’s What You Get For Gettin’ Out of Bed” are pleasant, tuneful throwbacks to a pre–2k indie rock sarcasm, but they spend several minutes reiterating the point immediately made by their titles. The rest of Last Place just ties up loose ends: “You know it’s all a metaphor for being drunk and on the floor,” Lytle sings on “Jed the 4th,” over-explaining prequels that couldn’t possibly be interpreted any other way. “A Lost Machine” aspires to the same Floydian excess as “He’s Simple, He’s Dumb, He’s the Pilot,” but unlike “are you giving in, 2000 Man?,” “everything about us is a lost machine” generates less meaning with every repetition.
Taking the long view, Last Place might actually be a concept record about Grandaddy itself, as it recreates the trajectory of their previous four albums in miniature: quirks slowly congeal into banality, back roads are avoided in favor of familiar scenery. And then it ends like Grandaddy once did, with what essentially amounts to a Lytle solo project (“Songbird Son”). They sound exhausted, right where we left them.


The minimalist drone-riff masters pare away excess and focus on the seismic repetition that made their best work so resonant, creating a new peak in their long discography.

Full Upon Her Burning Lips

“I would hear riffs from bands that I liked, and I’d want them to keep playing that riff,” Dylan Carlson recalled recently. “I was always wondering what would happen if you just stuck on that one riff.” That such a simple idea could spawn a varied, lasting musical career seems impossible. Yet over three decades, Carlson’s band Earth have crafted a rich discography by doing just that. Early on, they stretched single chords into minimalist epics—inspired equally by La Monte Young and Black Sabbath—to coin a drone-metal style later perfected by descendents Sunn0))). But even as Earth’s sound has grown since returning from a late ’90s hiatus, Carlson remains infatuated with the power of repetitive riffs.
Though he and drummer Adrienne Davies have been constants in Earth Mk II, many musicians have flowed in and out of the group over the past 15 years. That culminated in 2014’s Primitive and Deadly, their first record to include vocals, courtesy of guests such as fellow Seattle veteran Mark Lanegan. Five years later, perhaps sensing their expansion had hit a ceiling, Carlson and Davies have finally made a record by themselves. Full Upon Her Burning Lips fits the cliché of the “stripped down, back to basics” album, with Carlson intentionally limiting his sonic options and the duo refocusing on elemental repetition. But Earth’s previous explorations earned them the right to reset, creating a new peak in an already highlight-filled discography.
Full Upon Her Burning Lips hits that upper echelon not just through signature repetition, but also the quality of the riffs themselves. Lately, Carlson has insisted that repetition by itself isn’t enough (“[the riffs] should be something that you want to hear again,” he said), and the range of memorable hooks throughout these ten tracks is indeed crucial. Take the wiry curve in “Cats on the Briar”, the hints of funky groove in “Exaltation of Larks,” the beatific circles in the meditative “Descending Belladona” and the poignant denouement “A Wretched Country of Dusk.” Full Upon Her Burning Lips might actually be more catchy than what many consider to be Earth’s best album, 2008’s The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull. Though the confident swing of these songs can feel contemplative or even languid, the duo’s knack for adding small shifts and subtle accents injects a lot of tension.
In that, credit is due to Davies’ drumming as much as Carlson’s guitar and bass playing. The way she both leads and supports the songs’ winding paths remains impressive, especially since they could easily drag. Her precision calls to mind drone legend Tony Conrad’s early epiphany that playing slowly is actually harder than playing fast, and “the secret of playing well was playing more slowly.” Davies has recently acknowledged the challenge “to get it as slow as you can get, but still have your momentum.” It’s a task she masters throughout So Full Upon Her Burning Lips, mixing serenity and accuracy into a force that both controls and propels Earth’s music.
That forward motion makes So Full Upon Her Burning Lips more than just a return to a classic sound. There are enough surprises here that what could’ve been just a comfortable glance backward. That’s clearest on “The Colour of Poison,” which opens with a rare Carlson move: chopping up chords rather than letting them ring out, which in the Earth universe counts as a seismic event. But a few minutes in, he turns back with a riff that ranks among the band’s most overtly Sabbath-styled. John Peel’s iconic assessment of the all-time kings of repetition, the Fall, is apt here: “They are always different, they are always the same.” It’s a big thing to say about any band, but in the 30 years since Carlson first struck an Earth chord, he and Davies have earned it.