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Miles Davis: The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions

The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions

Miles had a new girl. Her name was Betty, and she told him all about what the kids were listening to. Being a singer herself, she had some connection to the inside world of pop and soul, but mostly, she was just a lot younger than him, and was probably instinctively more drawn to that music than Miles was. It's not as if Miles was completely out of touch with popular trends, but on tour and in the studio as frequently as he was, one could hardly blame him for receiving information second-hand.
Betty told him all about Jimi Hendrix, Sly Stone, and the Fifth Dimension (hopefully in that order), and he was keen to investigate the new sounds. Years later he would brag about being able to put together a rock band that would blow all the others away, but he approached the idiom cautiously and methodically at first. Additionally, Miles was getting insider info from his drummer, Tony Williams. Tony was younger even than Betty Mabry, and although he'd come of age deep inside one of the most popular bands in jazz (even if jazz's popularity wasn't what it had been ten years previous), he had his finger very much on the pulse of hip new music. Tony had especially enjoyed the new funk from James Brown and the boogaloo grooves being played by Jimmy McGriff and Richard "Groove" Holmes' bands. Betty and Tony were playing a key role for Miles Davis in the late 60s, even beyond their personal and performing ones.
The Complete In a Silent Way Sessions release details a six-month stretch in 1968-69 when the various advisors in Miles' life would see their seeds sprout into fauna so full of life and outrageous fertility that the face of his idiom would be forever changed. Of course, the final product of all this investigation and experimentation has been the subject of countless essays on Miles' genius, but it bears closer inspection to reveal that the trumpeter didn't just up and create this music out of thin air. He spent months in the studio rehearsing on tape, midwifing his ideas. In late '68, Miles was a painter using one canvas to try and retry his masterpiece, continually repainting over areas where, though the ideas were fresh and the colors vibrant, the concept was yet immature.
As a palette, Miles chose only the best primaries from two continents. At the time, Wayne Shorter, Tony Williams, and Herbie Hancock were mainstays from his second great quintet. Bassist Ron Carter had become so busy with sessions in New York that Miles had to find a replacement. In between gigs in England, he saw Dave Holland's band opening for Bill Evans. Miles was immediately struck by the young bassist, and sent word via Philly Jo Jones and his manager (Miles had the best connections) that he wanted Dave. Elsewhere, when it became apparent Hancock was going to have trouble making a recording date, Williams recommended the young Boston native Chick Corea as a replacement. This quintet (Davis, Shorter, Williams, Holland and Corea) produced the first tunes on this release in September 1968.
"Mademoiselle Mabry" is a sprawling ode to both Miles' new girl and Hendrix's "The Wind Cries Mary." Miles had started using electric keyboards in the studio almost exclusively by that time, and Corea's relatively conservative figures (when they aren't directly quoting the Hendrix tune), are the dominant timbre in this piece at first. He hadn't picked up the Fender Rhodes piano that would color almost every tune Miles performed thereafter, and the primitive sounds produced here betray the band's uncertainty about where the tune (or their sound) was going. Davis takes the first solo, similar to his exploratory efforts on Miles in the Sky earlier that year, over a non-groove from Williams' toms and Holland's steady, if rather static, low-end line. One of the reasons sets like this are great is that you really get a feeling for the musicians' progress during that time, and if this tune is any indication, things had only just begun to get interesting.
"Frelon Brun" gives a much better idea of the revolutionary sounds ahead. Williams wastes no time in hammering out a hard funk break from the kit, and Corea had apparently already learned the importance of the repetitive chordal vamp to this music. Davis takes a short solo, as if testing the waters, which is followed by Shorter's seemingly more confident strides in funky acid soul. The music actually ends up closer to what the band played after Bitches Brew than anything on In a Silent Way.
Two months later, Miles reconvened with the same musicians, adding Herbie Hancock on Rhodes to form a sextet, to begin the next phase of the trip. The band played music closer to Miles' vision on "Two Faced": mystical, impressionistic soundscapes courtesy of the two-keyboard attack, subtle, though insistent drumming from Williams, and a by-then typically moaning, weary head covered by Davis and Shorter. The band was also not afraid of stretching the tunes out to 10, 15, or 20 minutes if it meant they'd find something useful along the way. Miles (with the help of producer Teo Macero) had discovered tape edits from progressive pop records of the time (Sgt. Pepper being a chief influence), and this tune, similar to "Shhh/Peaceful" and "In a Silent Way/It's About That Time," was constructed from several stop/start fragments.
Later the same month, Miles found yet another missing ingredient in keyboardist (and über-influence on the sound of all resulting jazz-rock fusion) Joe Zawinul. The two men had known each other for several years prior to these sessions, but Miles could only admire the Austrian's playing from afar. Zawinul had made great strides in uniting jazz and soul with Julian "Cannonball" Adderley's band in the mid-60s, even scoring a pop hit with "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy." He also brought an earthy sense of melody and classicism to the mix, and would ultimately become a major architect for the sound of Miles' band.
"Splashdown," a previously unreleased piece of tense, Rhodes-led jazz-funk, was recorded with the first three-keyboard version of the band. However, Zawinul's influence wasn't really apparent until sessions from a couple of days later, when the band played two of his compositions: "Ascent" and the subsequent concert staple, "Directions." The former seemingly caught the band in transition, with its theretofore-unprecedented use of tonal clusters and rootless "comping" from the keyboards, and an absence of any drum pattern at all, save an odd tambourine pulse. "Directions" was another story altogether, as the band busts out of the peaceful into the wild. This was the most "rock" Miles Davis had sounded like up to that point, and the two versions of the tune on this set are very similar to what Miles' concerts would sound like from '69 through the early 70s. Also of note on this session is that drummer Jack DeJohnette made his first appearance with a Miles Davis band in the studio, lending his distinct, high-energy stomp to the proceedings.
The band went on the road for a few months after that, and returned to the studio in February 1969. More changes: John McLaughlin had been recruited on guitar (another Tony Williams recommendation), and Williams had returned on drums. This time around, Miles was looking for what he called a "groove album." The strategy was that the band would play a tune (on this session, "Shhh/Peaceful" and "In a Silent Way"), based on charts, but were free to explore what regions the performance yielded to them. Afterwards, Miles and Teo would evaluate the pieces, and form the "groove" in Miles' head from whatever was on tape.
The original, previously unreleased version of "Shhh/Peaceful" from that session will shock most people accustomed to the legendary In a Silent Way version. First of all, there's an exposition and melodic theme that was completely discarded in the proper version. Also, the famous robotic hi-hat pattern doesn't even begin until almost five minutes in. One of the surprises (some might even say disappointments) of this set is the realization that this music wasn't just the product of Miles' muse; there were hours of sessions and rehearsals before the band, Miles and Teo discovered what it was they were looking for. The humble beginnings of this tune still have much in common with straight jazz, though with a markedly progressive bent.
The same session yielded two versions of "In a Silent Way." The first is very different to what ended up on the album, with a faux-bossanova beat and Holland's light-footed bassline supporting the classic melody line. The second version is the version that was used on the album, with McLaughlin's heavenly solo statement of the main theme, and Miles' delicate answer. The band also performed "It's About That Time" (definitely a fruitful afternoon) in what was essentially the final version, complete with tape edits and loops compiled by Teo.
Two days later, Miles was back in the studio. He had a couple of new pieces, "The Ghetto Walk" and "Early Minor," neither of which ended up on In a Silent Way. The first tune is a hard funk almost-blues featuring Joe Chambers laying down a slinky groove on drums, while McLaughlin, Shorter and Miles give up equally subversive solos. Most interesting is the middle section trip-down, wherein the ghost of the session two days prior sneaks in with a little atmospheric feather float. "Early Minor" is another Zawinul original that's indicative of the kind of hyper-impressionism he would play (with Shorter) with Weather Report shortly after making Bitches Brew with Miles. It's also confusing as to just why this didn't make the cut for the original In a Silent Way release, because it features similar cascading Rhodes figures, and very nice, gentle pulse keeping by Chambers.
The set ends with the LP versions of "Shhh/Peaceful" and "In a Silent Way/It's About That Time." Miles fans didn't get to hear everything that came in between this album and its predecessor, so the sessions documented on this collection will make the leap from the cautious dabbling in rock textures of Miles in the Sky and Filles de Kilimanjaro to the full-blown jazz-opera of Bitches Brew. These recordings seem a lot more logically arranged and planned. This is good and bad: while few people would doubt the genius of Miles Davis as a player, composer and bandleader, it's evident that he was running on blind faith more than once during that time, and that he was learning on the go as much as his sidemen were.
Part of the mystique surrounding this album, for me, has always been that it seemed to come out of nowhere, like a beacon of uncanny originality and visionary foresight. Apparently, it did have roots, and while the music will always be some of my favorite from Miles, I can't honestly say that seeing the blueprints for his magic translates to the same sheer joy as did the end results. But, it's still magic music, and it's still Miles. The worst thing you could ever say about a set like this is that it's almost too educational, and of course, that's not really a criticism, is it?


Reissue of the seminal, Brian Eno-curated No Wave compilation.

No New York

Historical reissues plug timelines and help unpack tendencies during eras of revival, but without the original contexts in place, the full-fledged whallop of revelation just isn't there. Even if the listener's approaching the sounds for the first time, they've ineluctably heard the ingredients' echoes. To at least maximize the effects of an aesthetic overlap, the timing of the reissue ought to be dead-on. So, though welcome and much appreciated, thank you, Lilith's officially licensed reissue of Brian Eno's 1978 No New York No Wave sampler, which he did for the Island subsidiary Antilles, has appeared a tad late. (It's more than surprising that sans some Japanese bootlegs, the compilation hasn't yet been given the royal treatment-- hey Rhino, where were you?)
Yes, bands are still exhibiting No Wave tendencies (and thanks to labels like Audika, Acute, and Table of the Elements classic Lower Manhattan music of all sorts is making the rounds again), but it was circa 2002 that the post-No New York moment bubbled most briskly. S.A. Crary's 2004 documentary, Kill Your Idols, covers that time period, pairing grainy live footage and interviews with the old guard (Suicide's Marvin Rev, Glenn Branca, Lydia Lunch, DNA's Arto Lindsay) and '80s noisemakers (Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, Michael Gira) with newer technicolor footage and Q&A;'s with 2002's acolytes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Black Dice, Liars, et al. If you missed the film, you still might've caught some of this via the call-and-response of Vice's Yes New York compilation. Also around that time, the resuscitated Ze Records reissued its 1981 Mutant Disco compilation and other samplings on N.Y. No Wave and various James White/Contortions reissues. Soul Jazz provided the even more extensive (and less disco-flavored) New York Noise, 1979-1982 and last year No More Records' popped-up to offer the definitive 32-track DNA on DNA, which includes all of the DNA tracks from No New York. Ditto for Mars' The Complete Studio Recordings: NYC 1977-1978, out on G3G/Spooky Sound in 2003.
No Wave itself sprung up namelessly circa 1977 as a reaction to punk, new wave, and New York City itself. One of No Wave's more outspoken progenitors, Lydia Lunch famously dissed punk as no more than "sped-up Chuck Berry riffs". James Chance has said that "No Wave" came from the name of the compilation, but it's also supposedly first coined by the Soho Weekly News, the "no" turning "new wave"'s glossy dance party into nihilistic shorthand. Whatever the proper christening date, Eno was taken by the scene and compiled and produced No New York, which featured four tracks each from four bands-- James Chance and the Contortions, Teenage Jesus & the Jerks, Mars, and DNA. Eno recorded it lo-fi and cracked to fit with the bands' on-stage ravages. In the original pressing, the lyrics were hidden on the inside of the record sleeve, so you had to take the sleeve apart if you want to sing along. Stylistically, the bands scowled through a paranoid blitz of spastic free-jazz, art noise, jarring vocals, anti-melody, sweaty sexuality, shredding guitar, a technically adept amateurism, and Dadaist deliveries that fucked with disco (check out DNA's synth) and funk to create a sort of mangled punk avant-garde.
When held up to close scrutiny, No New York's stars are more different musically than genre masturbators would have you believe, but they were connected through friendships and shared hangouts like CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. Original DNA member Gordon Stevenson left the band to play bass for Teenage Jesus & the Jerks. DNA's named came from a song by Mars. Lydia Lunch and James Chance were dating-- he quit Teenage Jesus in '78 to do his own thing. Bands who weren't as intrenched in the loop-- Red Transistor, Static, Theoretical Girls-- were left off the comp. The whole thing didn't last very long or produce much of a paper trail. Sumner Crane's brilliant boy/girl quartet Mars released a 1980 live EP and a 1986 compilation, 78+, though the band had dissolved by 1978. Besides last years' compilation-- and impossible-to-find 7"'s-- DNA had only one 10-minute full-length, 1980's A Taste of DNA. Lydia Lunch and James Chance have been better represented, especially Lunch who became a regarded spoken-word artist and author.
This compilation begins with the most accessible participants, James Chance & the Contortions. Skronking through sax-based punk-funk, Chance is often compared to James Brown, but I'd rather look into my magic ball and say "Jon Spencer." Sporting a pompadour and Was (Not Was) suits, he made a suitable poster boy for the movement, and appeared on the cover of the first issue of the East Village Eye. As a performer, he was known for being confrontational, which got him rejected from straight-up jazz circles. Musically, he tends to grab an idea and stick with it, as on "Dish It Out"'s unrelenting bass, drums, guitar, organ, and sax overlay. "Jaded" delves into freer jazz implosions and "Flip Your Face" shreds sounds over mid-tempo beat. His signature tune, "Contort Yourself", isn't here, but Eno's production makes these tracks some of my favorite in the Chance/White/Black oeuvre-- some of the later material felt too slick.
Darker and less colorful, Teenage Jesus and the Jerks were fronted by vocalist/anti-guitarist Lydia Lunch, who was 16 when she joined the band in 1976. Early reviews dismissed Lunch as dreadfully amateur; nowadays, she sounds pretty tuneful screaming her gritty, anti-suburbia salvos. Teenage Jesus was known for frantic, tossed-off 10 to 15-minute sets, but here they keep it molasses slow, Lunch screaming her vocal lines over tribal drumming and minimal fuzziness. The pace pick up for the excellent 34-second rampage, "Red Alert", but otherwise expect a claustrophobic plod.
One of the more intriguing sets comes from the least known crew, the boy/girl quartet Mars. The band's founder, Sumner Crane, who died from Lymphoma in 2003, was one of the true visionaries of this period. You'll find Daydream Nation and Lightning Bolt hiding out in the moody guitar riffs of the excellent opener "Helen Fordsdale"; "Hairwaves" drifts to China Burg's ambient vocals over a fractured and spacious backdrop; "Tunnels" is a Crane-like static; "Puerto Rican Ghost" is shouting, repetitious drum rolls, and all sorts of chaos.
DNA shows up in early guitar/drum/synth form. Later, when Robin Crutfhfield left to form Dark Day, he was replaced by Pere Ubu bassist Tim Wright, and the group became both sturdier and more fucked up. These pieces hit like shrapnel, though Lindsay doesn't display the more crazed (and autistic) vocal exercises of A Taste of DNA's "Blond Red Head" or "Lying on the Sofa of Life" or Mori's drumming-to-something-else-in-a-different-room percussion. On "Egomaniac's Kiss" Lindsay scowls ("trying to eat that self real slow") and rattlesnake shushes along with catchy synth, simple drums. More caustic, "Lionel" and "Size" ride regurgitated synth-- the instruments shift focus halfway through, as if following the fissures of a non-demarcated fault-line. "Not Moving" is Joy Division stuck in a factory cog, slowly quartered.
The most remarkable quality on these recordings is this unselfconscious feel, something painfully lacking in the star-fucking neo-No Wave groups. In Kill Your Idols, it's interesting to see Lunch, Lindsay, and others speak so eloquently about what it was they were trying to do. They have the benefit of hindsight, but as it unfurled and quickly disappeared, No Wave was still a real reaction plugged into a time/place. In part because there's less product, No Wave hasn't been as festishized as punk. Around 1982, bands had disappeared or sub-divided and different fragments of No Wave ended up in places like the Downtown jazz scene of John Zorn, Fred Frith, Bill Laswell, and Elliott Sharp; the noise crews of Swans, Sonic Youth, Live Skull; and dance-punk disco via Bush Tetras, Golden Palominos, Konk, Liquid Liquid, Arthur Russell, and ESG. Compare that and that to Yes New York's already dated cast of the Strokes, Radio 4, Longwave, the Natural History, and the Fever, and you'll realize New York really hasn't seen anything of the likes of these folks (and that includes No Wave's neighbors and offspring) since the last bits of that early, less gentrified Lower Manhattan feedback dried up.


The Vermont indie-rock quartet’s debut album pits airy dreamscapes against raw realities, frolicking in the tumult of uncertainty.

Wild Guess

Tell a teenager that their 20s are for “living,” and they might envision flashy movie montages: rooftop parties, sloppy smooches, city lights whizzing by through back windows. Tell the same thing to that same person once they’ve actually reached the age, and they may sigh. Fleeting youth must fight fledgling adulthood at some point—just ask Robber Robber. Since co-founders Nina Cates and Zack James ditched Brattleboro for big-city Burlington, they’ve taken to pitting airy dreamscapes against raw realities, scoring the havoc with searing, expansive indie-rock stompers. On Wild Guess, the Vermont four-piece’s debut album, the carnage is supercharged: Rough-edged songs melt into soupy squalls, with alien truths nestled in heaps of amorphous noise. It’s hectic, bumpy, and full of treasures that reveal themselves over time. It sounds a lot like what growing up feels like.
Robber Robber tread a thin line between hearty indie and rough-edged post-punk, melding the former’s airiness with the latter’s angst. Back in the 2010s, teenaged Cates and James played in a short-lived group called the Snaz, in which off-kilter garage rock buttressed precocious tales of teenage girlhood. Since their departure, the two have made notable additions to their sound—among them, guitarist Will Krulak and bassist Carney Hemler—though Wild Guess confirms they haven’t left any of their scrappy bite in those small-town rehearsal rooms. Perched somewhere above the havoc, Cates wanders through hypnotic epics with an aloof hush, like Trish Keenan testing microphones in the middle of a crowded Guitar Center. Perhaps the best example is “Seven Houses,” a torrential onslaught of downpicking, cymbal crashes, and bass fills that grumble like a starving Godzilla’s gut; for all its tension, there’s respite in her delivery, a wispy narrator frolicking in a bad dream. In the final minute of “Until,” a charming guitar ballad that bridges Crazy for You and Pod, Cates drawls, “Hold on,” until all that remains is a single sickly string obeying her directive to the bitter, distorted end. It’s one of several moments where you feel like you’re in the room with them.
The longer you sit with Wild Guess, the more it might seem to exist in a funhouse, where time and space are freakishly malleable. While Cates deadpans from the corner, her bandmates rumble at the fore, churning out foreign grooves that tick like broken clocks. It’s a disorienting dichotomy, but a rewarding one, too—often, it feels as if the band is inviting you to eavesdrop, to peer behind the mic and pick apart the musical assembly line. This is particularly fun on a track like “Dial Tone,” where guitar and drums make spirited conversation while Hemler’s bass occasionally interjects, a shy friend raising a shaky finger. It sounds like dinnertime in a dysfunctional household—that is, until the overdrive clicks on, and all interlocutors are rasping in unison, holding it for a few fiery seconds before hushing as if nothing happened.
Lead single “Sea or War” rides breakneck percussion into elegiac highs; rather than stack ingredients like the shoegaze it invokes, this song deconstructs at the middle, building back up element by element. You can picture yourself front row at the show, swivel-necking to figure out which sound is coming from where. “Unsteady at the edge and falling in,” Cates sings. Twenty-somethings will be pleased to find that the view from the precipice isn’t all that bad.


Pioneering harpist Dorothy Ashby established the instrument’s place in post-bop jazz. Younger pays tribute to Ashby’s achievements, covering her songs and tracing her influence on contemporary hip-hop.

Brand New Life

The community of genre-bending harpists is small. Few have the temerity to tackle the massive but delicate instrument, and those that do must grapple with its tendency to recede into the background. But most who have dragged the harp out of the classical context can trace their roots back to Dorothy Ashby, the pioneering Detroit harpist whose 1968 album Afro-Harping laid the foundation for the instrument’s role in post-bop jazz. And few embody that legacy better than Brandee Younger.
In many ways, Younger’s career mirrors Ashby’s: Each tested the harp’s limitations, blurring genre lines and forcefully establishing the instrument as a lead role in contemporary jazz. And they both became the go-to harpist for pop musicians of their era (Bill Withers, Minnie Riperton, and Stevie Wonder for Ashby; Beyoncé, Lauryn Hill, and John Legend for Younger). But while Younger had Ashby and Alice Coltrane as role models for a Black woman redefining the possibilities of a classical instrument, Ashby had no choice but to blaze her own trail, at a time when civil rights for non-whites was only just beginning to gain traction. Brand New Life is Younger’s tribute to Ashby’s achievements.
Most of the pieces on Brand New Life were originally written or performed by Ashby, including Stevie Wonder’s “If It’s Magic”—one of Younger’s first exposures to Ashby’s playing, before she even knew who she was. And she has the unique honor of being the first to record Ashby’s “You’re a Girl for One Man Only,” a shimmering ballad punctuated by Makaya McCraven’s loose, airy percussion. She transforms Ashby’s “Dust”—composed and recorded for The Rubáiyát of Dorothy Ashby, a 1968 exploration of the Japanese koto—into an infectious easy-listening dub groove with help from Meshell Ndegeocello. “Running Games” and “Livin’ and Lovin’ in My Own Way” provide the clearest evidence of Ashby’s direct influence on Younger, reimagining her original compositions with a modern POV made possible only by the elder’s groundbreaking presence.
Younger says creating the album was “a lifelong dream,” one she hadn’t quite felt prepared to make until now. But Brand New Life merely formalizes an influence on her work that has long been apparent. Younger’s flawless technique allows for a freedom of movement that gives her harp a vocal quality, whether leading a composition or in conversation with a guest vocalist like Mumu Fresh (“Brand New Life”). She pulls off intricate arpeggios that would be difficult—or impossible?—on another instrument. Occasionally her plucks and percussive strikes take on qualities of a guitar or piano, drawing from Ashby’s deep understanding of the harp’s design.
The most fascinating moments on Brand New Life lie in the cross-generational conversation between Ashby, hip-hop, and contemporary jazz. Ashby’s work has been sampled hundreds of times by producers drawn to her infusion of funk and soul into post-bop jazz; Afro-Harping, in particular, shows up on records by GZA, 9th Wonder, Mac Miller, and Flying Lotus. Pete Rock’s flip of “Come Live With Me” on “For Pete’s Sake” was among Younger’s first exposures to Ashby’s harp, evidence that contemporary artists like her and McCraven—who produced and plays drums on the entire record—are students not just of jazz, but of the music it inspired and evolved into. Pete Rock and 9th Wonder’s boom-bap turntablist contributions to Brand New Life do more than just complete the circle of inspiration; they add texture to a feedback loop that grows richer with each new interpretation.
The result is a record that scans as adult-contemporary hip-hop (in a good way!), music fueled by the joy of discovery and the shared love of an artist whose work has remained in conversation across generations. Many post-bop jazz records look to standards for inspiration, but few breathe such life into the legacy they inherit.


On her second album as Torres, Brooklyn-via-Nashville singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott shrouds her voice with feedback and heavier rock instrumentation, created alongside PJ Harvey producer and percussionist Rob Ellis. The sound is like a gauze bandage covering emotional wounds, but Scott lets the red bleed through nonetheless.

Sprinter

Questioning what you once held fundamentally true is exhausting, but in every possible way, Brooklyn-via-Nashville singer-songwriter Mackenzie Scott's intense, spiritual sophomore album as Torres suggests that this is work worth doing. Her 2013 self-titled debut felt inherently raw in its stripped-down folk-rock, a sound akin to that of her future collaborator Sharon Van Etten. On Sprinter, however, Scott shrouds her voice with feedback and heavier rock instrumentation, created alongside PJ Harvey producer and percussionist Rob Ellis. The sound is like a gauze bandage covering the emotional wounds, the profound isolation and fear of abandonment, that sit at the heart of Sprinter. But Scott lets a little red bleed through nonetheless, and for listeners, at least, that's a good thing.
An album ago, Scott told what was presumed to be some version of her own adoption story with "Moon & Back"; the song is written from the perspective of a woman who left a letter for the baby she gave up, but no names are given. Though Torres continues to write from perspectives besides her own—and it continues to prove interesting—on Sprinter, any trepidation she may have felt over first-person narrative is pushed aside in pursuit of unflinching honesty. On the album's stunning, solo acoustic closer "The Exchange", Scott is direct where before she was mysterious: "Mother, father, I'm underwater, and I don't think you can pull me out of this," she coos in the chorus. "Blew my per diem on an eighth of Blue Dream/ So I can breathe but I still can't breathe," Scott adds, revealing her coping method of choice—sativa-dominant hybrids. The song's arresting plainspokenness recalls Neko Case's memorable a cappella declaration of abandonment and rejection on The Worst Things Get, the Harder I Fight...'s "Nearly Midnight, Honolulu".
Sprinter splits its mood between depression and rage, mirrored in the album's loud-quiet musical dichotomy that is not unlike that of early PJ Harvey albums. With the aid of her co-producer Ellis (showing off his status as an underrated rock drummer who makes every beat sound crisp), Portishead guitarist Adrian Utley (who recently helped Perfume Genius also reach a musical state as real as it is deeply unsettling), and Harvey bassist Ian Oliver, Scott fully inhabits her loudest moments by inching towards post-rock and synth-rock. The album's crowning achievement, "Son, You Are No Island", forges a mystical through line from Celtic music to Hole's "I Think That I Would Die", to Godspeed You! Black Emperor, to Mica Levi's Under the Skin soundtrack. This song simmers with rage, a stick of dynamite waiting to blow, but it's Scott's restraint in delaying the explosions—first a wall of hardened distortion, then via vocal loops—that hits the hardest.
When she lets her depressive side out, Scott can ramble slightly. On "Ferris Wheel", Scott takes her time meandering through intense pining for another who's "got the sadness too" while an echoing guitar provides a woozy background twang. For such a slow pace, it goes on about twice as long as it needs to (seven minutes). On the flipside sits "Cowboy Guilt", a rare light spot that lasts less than three minutes. Scott captures the thrill of instant interpersonal connection via the quick and steady beat of a drum machine and flourishes of a music box melody.
When Scott can find the right balance of these elements—dark, introspective, midtempo, highly distorted, and in the four to five-minute range—she hits a sweet spot, like on "New Skin" and the album's title track. These are the songs where Scott seems to lay out her thesis statements with a slight nods to theology; on "New Skin", atop a formidable '90s alt-rock build, Scott offers up a conclusion she's come to already: "If you never know the darkness, then you're the one who fears the most." Identity is the thorniest of growing pains, particularly when—like Scott—you come from adoptive lineage and a Southern Baptist upbringing you're now sussing out on your own. Wherever she might be on her own personal journey, Scott sounds on her records like someone getting closer every moment to her ultimate truth.


Russell's most personal and radical statement consists simply of his folksy tenor, cello, and scant electronic microtones-- all lathered with echo, distortion, and reverb.

World of Echo

At first listen, World of Echo sounds like meaningless dreck that barely wakes up to complete a melody or enunciate a single verse of poetry. And Arthur Russell's legacy has never been richer for it.
This year's mass rediscovery and mythologization of the late Russell-- an Iowan who seemed to be swinging on a tire over the Mississippi, even when in downtown Manhattan-- was remarkable. Russell's various projects-- including Dinosaur L, Indian Ocean, and Loose Joints-- got feted as textbook examples of "mutant disco." His disco was pure clay-- bending, scraping, and glazing its rhythms, harmonies, and vocal arrangements into permanently incomplete sculptures for DJs to puzzle over. Nonetheless, he could still hypnotize dancefloors with dozens of anxious ideas that in the 1980s-- after 1979's white flight from disco-- could only have stemmed from the NYC underground.
Soul Jazz's definitive primer, The World of Arthur Russell, and Audika's studio vault dump Calling out of Context both garnered this very obtuse man some retro dignity, for good or ill. Audika now thankfully reissues World of Echo-- a collection of almost deconstructed, "rough draft" versions of his singles-- in a limited-edition package with a few b-sides and a DVD of music videos and concert footage. Recorded between 1980 and 1986-- the year in which the collection was originally released-- this material still sounds timeless. It's also Russell's most personal and radical statement: Here, he isn't cloaked in any congas and hi-hats, shouting divas, or ring-a-ding-ding Latin keyboards. It's just his folksy, muppet tenor, cello, and scant electronic microtones-- all lathered with echo, distortion, and reverb.
On these tracks, Russell creates beatless dance music that travels through outer space, making the journey his destination. His onomatopoeias and string-work are uncannily percussive and seem to be faintly picked up by radio satellite. His improvisations mine every conceivable sound from his bow and cello's amplified body: hollow thuds, window-washing brushes, chipped strings, knuckled knacks, and the boom of a floor peg dropping on concrete. However, the instrument startlingly duets with his voice, as it breathes along with him and clears its throat during his awkward moments. Whatever lyrics can be understood are stream-of-conscious blurts that exhibit pinhole views of his soul.
The opener, "Tone Bone Kone", is a baffler. Russell huffs alliterations while his cello ransacks a room to chase after a ringing UFO noise. The following, three-part "Tower of Meaning - Rabbit's Ears - Home" is a gently narcotic ballad as he hums perfectly in-tune with his tapestry-weaving chords, uttering odd lines like "I'm watching out of my ear" and letting his vocal tones overpower all semantics. The nine-minute trance of "Soon to Be Innocent Fun - Let's See" drifts through waters that mirror the moonless sky. As Russell seemingly daydreams of escape from the urban din, he shades and trickles melodies instead of fully playing them. "Answers Me" is an afterthought of "Soon" as Russell yelps in the same key, "I'm going where the islands are going," while his cello shakes its head with scrapes and mumbling harmonics.
The same restlessness drives "Place I Know - Kid like You" as Russell drenches his Hendrixian riffs in hydrochloric distortion, as he also does on the backward-looped shimmering of his bluesy space-out, "Wax the Van." That song's textures vaguely would resemble the garage-sold Americana of Sonic Youth's Sister if it wasn't for some tacky synth bloops. "Lucky Cloud" makes better use of the synthesizer as its tweaked swiggles and bare-boned tones fittingly offset growling strings. "Let's Go Swimming" eschews the fidgety Miami electro-funk of the Walter Gibbons mix for a cubistic moment where reverb-polluted drones and squeals give way to flickering chords. Russell then deadpans childlike phrases like "What country are you swimming to?" and "I'm banging on your door in the clear-blue sky" into a muffled whisper. Once the groove picks up, the music ends.
Russell's most poignant moments are when his production's playfulness articulates his fractured thoughts better than any lyrics. On "Tree House", he pits his vocals in different rooms, soaking in their acoustics, as if sneaking into his tree house to play hookey. World's finest moment, "See-Through", lets his cello's high registers criss-cross about to blanket his dazed sighs that fade into an ether like Polaroids left in the sunlight too long. It's a fitting eulogy.


Total Control are five Melbourne men dead-set on pumping life into the spiritual tradition of post-punk exploration with little regard for sonic congruity. It's easy to read into the densities of their new album, Typical System, but it's more satisfying to give yourself over to the record's bleak, peculiar breeze.

Typical System

Total Control are five Melbourne men dead-set on pumping life into the spiritual tradition of post-punk exploration with little regard for sonic congruity. The lyric sheet for their new album, Typical System, reads like stream-of-consciousness beat poetry; in between songs, it's dotted with manifesto-like musings that don't actually appear on the recordings. "Our fragile subject confuses festivity for a grave militaristic orgy, and pens a carol to document collapse," reads the note following "Bloody Glass", the minimal wave experiment that opens the album. In case you had a shard of faith that Total Control have even a strand of optimistic DNA, here's the misanthropic footnote that follows "Expensive Dog", a dramatic garage-punk blast: "In contrast to barbarous gamblers, the secure and prosperous demand companions of diseased and ill-fated breed. Mongrels prowl outside their gates." Convention is hopeless.
Perhaps these anti-conformist scripts are meta-commentaries on Total Control itself. Since the band's genre-smashing 2011 debut, *Henge Beat—*which fused oddball sci-fi New Wave and subtle beats with punk aggression and ideology—they've amassed a cultish underground following as well as some attention in the music industry. They released a blackened 7" on Sub Pop in 2012, and, had they preferred, Typical System could have been released on a label bigger than tiny Seattle hardcore outpost Iron Lung. "You don't need a safety net," sings Dan Stewart, detached frontman and resident nihilist philosopher, on System's dreary synth-pop banger of a closing track. Whether these are self-subscribed mantras or not remains open to interpretation—but Typical System invites that. Across their discography, Total Control have been so idea-driven that it is hard to not intellectualize what they do. What's the "lonely operation" raging on garage ripper "Systematic Fuck"? Does "Black Spring" refer to the free-associating Henry Miller novel—and does the song's tense, motorik quality imply that its end-times themes actually stretch eternal? Is the title Typical System an allusion to keeping underground autonomy in the face of commercial opportunity? Does it matter?
Such questions are tempting, and it's easy to read into Typical System's densities. But it's perhaps more satisfying to give oneself over to the record's bleak, peculiar breeze. The approach is not hugely different from Henge Beat—they've still got the toolbox you'd imagine from guys who variously play tough-guy hardcore (Straightjacket Nation), primitive garage-punk (UV Race and Eddy Current Suppression Ring), and electronic dance music (Lace Curtain). Above all, Total Control's fair bit of touring since Henge Beat has allowed them more technical muscle, and thus a newfound tactility and energy streak.
Typical System's dynamics surprise at most turns, revealing their strange sense of humor. The soft sax wails of the underwater "Liberal Party" find Stewart deadpanning existentially on a "Broken porch light/ Shattered sense of worth," before leading into the militaristic scream and snarl of "Two Less Jacks", which would not sound out of place on an Iceage record. Total Control benefit immensely from a knack for rhythm—their circling, lurching guitar grooves often simulate the repetition of the minimal electronic found elsewhere. A sense of duality exists within the songs: the opener "Bloody Glass" is galactic and glossy with psychic, pinging beats, but it finds Stewart berating "billionaires," "thieves," and "cowards" alike, as if they are all synonymous. Its dreary delivery makes the imagery all the more sinister: "Spitting on foreign lands/ On bloody stumps/ On glass/ We dance."
Ghosts of new wave's past audibly haunt these songs, and "Flesh War" is Typical System's most straightforward take on that sound. It's the widescreen, mechanical-sounding focal point, with synths soaring soft enough to rest your head on without worrying about getting clawed in the face. But it's not mere retro-styling. "Flesh War" looks for what's left in the endless possibilities of post-punk and says something real through it. The lyrics morbidly mutate: the "breaking" of the day becomes the cynical "break-in" of the day, and a prayer to "news" and "fame" becomes a play to "noose" and "flame." "Carve a space inside your brain," the robotic Stewart sings, "Earn enough of that cruel gaze/ And bear it 'til your back would break." "Flesh War" sounds like commentary on life under the relentless watch of overlords—further proof that electronic pop can be just as subversive as throat-shredding rock and roll. Even with their most aesthetically orthodox track, Total Control's total message is radical.


On his first album in two years, the New York producer applies an exploratory approach to ambient techno, utilizing elements of dub and post-punk to sculpt a record that feels meditative but never maudlin.

Chameleon

Anthony Naples kicked off his debut album with a fakeout. The New York producer had made his name in 2012, at just 22, with an effervescent house jam that was ranked among the year’s best dance music, and he wasted no time in reinforcing his club bona fides with a string of EPs that built upon his signature overdriven machine rhythms. But in 2015, a first encounter with his debut LP, Body Pill, was enough to make one wonder if there had been an error at the pressing plant: After two minutes of ambient scene-setting, the first song exploded into mid-tempo drums and ringing chords, almost like an homage to Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation—albeit crafted at home on a laptop.
The rest of Body Pill returned to Naples’ customary blasted-out house music, and in the years since, with the exception of 2018’s ambient Take Me With You, he has dependably concentrated his efforts on a fairly narrow context—call it music for grotty Brooklyn warehouse parties where the sun is just starting to pry its fingers through dust covered windows. But on Chameleon, his first album in two years, Naples returns to that hard-to-place territory he began mapping out in Body Pill’s first few minutes, in which guitars and drums are swirled into a liquid pool of electronic sound. The result flows together the way a silted river carves branching shapes through a river delta.
A dance producer adopting an ambient-adjacent side hustle during the pandemic might not sound like a terribly novel proposition. But Chameleon, despite what its title might suggest, never resembles the work of a musician defensively morphing his colors to suit a sudden change in the environment. The music’s meandering path has a genuinely exploratory feel; the searching synth-and-guitar counterpoints are meditative but never maudlin. The music’s playful spirit keeps Chameleon refreshingly free of any hackneyed balm-for-troubled-times baggage.
In fact, Naples, plagued by a sense that he had played it safe on his previous album, had already begun work on a new direction by the autumn of 2019. Lockdown afforded him the kind of free time—and maybe even the neuroses—conducive to making more experimental music. Feeling stir crazy, he’d strip the room of everything but a single synthesizer, microphone, and lamp before proceeding to record. To combat writer’s block, he’d pretend that the music was actually being played by other musicians, and he was just the producer tasked with sculpting their output into its final shape.
You can detect traces of those strategies in the stripped-down shape of Body Pill’s songs, and also in the record’s approach to genre, which sometimes feels almost like a kind of role play. Shades of all sorts of unexpected influences drift through the music: the phased guitars of the Cure’s Seventeen Seconds, the feathery strumming of the Paisley Underground, the chunky breakbeats of trip-hop. The album tends to zig-zag between heavier fare, led by electric bass and drum kit, and pools of the purest ambient tone. Dub and post-punk are clear inspirations, but Naples never falls back on obvious tropes. Their influence is felt only glancingly—in the muscle applied to a booming floor tom or a brief burst of analog delay that scatters a song’s parts to the winds.
Many of the record’s most intriguing tracks propose unusual collisions, like the Portastudio equivalent of a Hollywood exec’s elevator pitch. The cosmic shimmer and bluesy soloing of “Massiv Mello,” a blissed-out post-rock epic, suggests Manuel Göttsching’s E2-E4 for the jam-band circuit. “You Got What It Takes” might be Mark McGuire trying out for the Mo Wax roster. And the dazzling “Full O’ Stars” sounds like McGuire’s band Emeralds by way of Carl Craig’s Landcruising or More Songs About Food and Revolutionary Art. Craig’s pioneering approach to ambient techno is all over Chameleon. In the mid 1990s, the Detroit producer masterminded a style of electronic music in which driving rhythms were tempered by powdery textures and dreamy, drawn-out pads, and here Naples picks up that careful balance of opposing influences. Underpinning the churning arpeggios of the nominally ambient “Hydra” is the kind of seismic sub-bass that could shake Berghain to its foundations.
Despite the sketch-like feel of some of the record’s shorter songs, Chameleon feels like a unified body of work, meant to be experienced whole. The back-and-forth dialogue of Naples’ synth and guitar phrases is gestural, tentative; you can practically hear the question mark hanging in midair, and each successive track is posed almost like a response to the one before it, with themes recurring throughout—a monologue in the form of a crowded conversation. What holds it all together is a kind of relaxed restlessness. It’s never hurried or frantic, but yet it constantly changes shape, tries out new sounds, and shifts ideas around the way someone working through cabin fever might doggedly rearrange the furniture in search of clarity. For a record crafted in the claustrophobic doldrums of quarantine, Chameleon suggests almost limitless horizons.
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Kehlani’s most mature and thematically challenging album is steamy and committed, more eager than ever to bet it all on love. They’ve never sounded more comfortable in their own skin.

Blue Water Road

Kehlani opens “shooter interlude,” the third track from their latest album blue water road, by loudly clearing their throat. “And I’m keeping all this part, too,” they quickly add. On the surface, it’s an innocuous moment, a bump in the recording process. But the rawness of it—choosing to leave in a blemish, an outtake—sets the stage for honest reflection. Over a bed of swelling guitars, flutes, vocal harmonies, they parrot questions they’ve received from others over the years, voicing requests for money and unasked proposals of marriage. Their interlocutors check their ego (“Don’t forget the favors that I did for you”) while pleading for connection (“Can I come over later and can I overstay my welcome?”). This meta moment is exceptionally vulnerable: Kehlani grappling with other people’s perceptions of them in public. It’s a beating heart on the floor, even by the standards of an artist who’s no stranger to a messy breakup song.
Kehlani has always portrayed love as a kaleidoscope of feeling—the lust, the trauma, stabs at commitment that evaporate like JUUL vapors. In 2020, It Was Good Until It Wasn’t explored bad relationships and one-night stands with the efficiency of spring cleaning, assessing the damage on all sides. blue water road has its share of debauchery—the deep notes when they sing “Call me daddy in front of all your bitches in the lobby” on “any given sunday” are seduction incarnate—but the overall vibes are steamy and committed, more eager than ever to bet it all on love. Kehlani has never sounded more comfortable in their own skin, selling the transition from SweetSexySavage to grown, sexy, and tender.
As opposed to the moodier atmosphere favored by artists like Summer Walker or 6LACK, blue water road has a bubbly tinge. The production, largely handled by executive producer Pop Wansel, is split between aqueous rap’n’b beats and guitar-centered pop arrangements. Even the tracks with a darker musical edge—like the strip-club love story “any given sunday”—are backed by synths and soft ad-libs that pop with champagne fizz. Kehlani’s vocal runs and rapping skill contribute to the lifted mood, expanding and contracting to the scope of each narrative. Their voice flits between the shuffling drums of the Slick Rick sample powering the angsty backseat lust of “wish i never” with the same conviction that drives the platonic remembrance of lead single “altar.” On “get me started,” Kehlani’s voice winds up and down a spiral of hi-hats and synths with hushed grace. Later, during the cheating anthem “more than i should,” their voice is sweet, forceful, moving in lockstep with the bassline.
Kehlani brings level-headed cool to this wide range of love stories, but blue water road is really impressive when it leans into the hopeless romantic hiding within the wounded player. As the album progresses, the backseat flings fade away in favor of sensual metaphors involving fruit and nights lost in their partner’s hair as they plan out a future together. “Being this close isn’t close enough,” they sigh on “melt.” They’ve always handled stories of tension and heartbreak with a delicate touch; it’s refreshing to hear that same care applied to a non-toxic companionship. Take the late-album highlight “everything,” which channels the anxiety and giddiness of a new relationship into one of the best performances of Kehlani’s career. In the song’s second verse, their voice bends around gossamer guitar licks to describe their partner’s attentiveness; the staccato bounce in the delivery of “I match your energy, match your fly perfectly/Lips lock intensively, want you extensively” flows like wine. On earlier albums, Kehlani’s cool façade felt like a defense against romantic uncertainty; now, in the throes of love, they’re unafraid to be endearing and just a little bit corny.
blue water road is Kehlani’s most mature album, as well as their most musically and thematically challenging. Its content is unabashedly queer—especially potent since this is their first release since publicly identifying as a lesbian—in a country bent on supressing non-conforming identities. It expands their sound palette into orchestral pop and easy listening that clash with the synthetic R&B and rap sounds fans have grown accustomed to. It chronicles a loose, nonlinear story that ends with love and comfort, just as the world is slowly coming back around to physical contact. But most importantly, it shows that for all the skin Kehlani has shed over the years, they haven’t even begun to scratch the surface.


The former YouTube star’s debut album establishes a decent R&B mood but proceeds to wallow in thin, underdeveloped emotions.

In Tongues EP

Before he made music as Joji, Japan-born George Miller was known for his idiot comedy characters. After he originated the smash viral “Harlem Shake” meme in 2013, Miller built his cult following making YouTube videos as Filthy Frank: a perverted, lonely man with a grating voice who, of course, loves to prank strangers. Miller’s equally horrendous persona, Pink Guy, was a horny, worm-like creep in a hot pink lycra suit who sang gross comedy songs about anal beads and thirsting after underage Nickelodeon stars. Miller himself described Filthy Frank as “the embodiment of everything a person should not be,” and still he racked up millions of views from people who found humor within the most repulsive and dark aspects of the human condition. In other words: He was a YouTube star.
And so naturally, Joji’s trying to break out of the internet box. He now writes and produces brooding downtempo R&B that exhibits a newfound introspection and sincerity. His debut EP, In Tongues, marks a natural progression into a more serious take on musicianship from a former internet comedian. His voice pulsates with soft and woozy vocal chops on top of minimal piano chords, like so many James Blake acolytes before him. And because Joji is a boy of the internet, it’s unsurprising that he seems to be most influenced by cloud-rap producers Shlohmo and Clams Casino—as evidenced by his emphasis on hazy atmosphere, organic samples, and lo-fi drums.
Joji adeptly peels off the pretense of his inane YouTube persona and reveals something tender and slightly more complex underneath. But lyrically, he circles around aimlessly with typical sad-boy subject matter: heartbreak, regret, and drugs. He shame-spirals in the dizzy “Will He,” while wondering about his ex-girl’s new man. In “Pills,” he parrots the clichés of any R&B breakup song birthed from Soundcloud: “I need you back,” flanked by mentions of Xanax and Zoloft. While Joji fails to push boundaries in terms of lyrical content or sonic palette, he does succeed in creating a fairly compelling mood that invites listeners to wallow with him. Unfortunately, the remixes that bulk up the last half of the recently released deluxe version of In Tongues hardly preserve what little emotional intensity Joji has on offer. Dallas EDM producer Medasin brings “Will He” into future-bass territory, while English experimental techno producer Actress upscales “Window” into an unrecognizable form—cleverly chucking out all of Joji’s bland lyrics in favor of some synth bloops. But ultimately, they displace Joji out of the world he’s created for himself—resulting in a hodge-podge of tracks that end as filler material.
Joji announced in December that he was retiring his YouTube channel. He outlined that the years of acting caused numerous mental and physical health issues—including “throat tissue damage” and a neurological condition that brought about stress-induced seizures. But despite its destructive nature, Joji is still very much indebted to his sordid past. His Pink Guy song “Help,” which is presented as a “parody” song about being depressed, curiously mirrors the lyrics on the Joji song “Demons.” And yeah, Pink Guy was making weird songs with names like “Hot Nickel Ball on a Pussy” and “Hentai,” but he was still playing with tropes of present-day trap and experimenting with various vocal styles. And with the freedom of knowing he would probably never be seriously critiqued, Joji made the dumbest tracks that formed the basis of skills that he used to make his first serious EP. Now, he’s just getting a little smarter about how to present all the fucked-up parts of himself.
The same unsettling horniness that drove the core of the Filthy Frank and Pink Guy’s personalities now appear to be manifesting itself in a different fashion within Joji’s material. Joji never gets explicitly sexual on In Tongues, but his songs smack of juvenile emotional dependency, like the 25-year-old man just figured out that relationships sometimes entail more than just trying to bust a nut. And based on how many songs are about the guilt from letting your partner down with your complete lack of emotional literacy, it seems like he couldn’t learn that fast enough. Joji spent a long time representing all the vile and hurtful things about being a human. Now, he’s dealing with the consequences of when that depravity keeps you from experiencing real love and intimacy. Welcome to the world outside of clicking, liking, and subscribing.


"I never was a metal head," remarked Colin Meloy in an Earlash interview last July. "It's something in my ...

The Tain EP

"I never was a metal head," remarked Colin Meloy in an Earlash interview last July. "It's something in my later years I've come to regret a little bit just because everybody has their stories of when they were a metal head. And it wasn't until recently that I started listening to Black Sabbath and started appreciating it."
Two albums and a six-song Five Songs EP into their career, The Decemberists' are beginning to seriously define their sound; a sudden plunge into, say, heavy metal, seems unlikely. Yet the first movement of The Tain EP, the band's new 18-minute composition based loosely on the 8th-century Celtic Ulster cycle's central poem "Tain Bo Cuailinge", finds Meloy and the others most immediately concerned with-- am I about to say this?-- serious Ur-metal riffage. Granted, Decemberist metal is not going to weigh down the Dominique Leones of the world, but make no mistake: Never has this band sung a flag so black, a maiden so iron.
The opening of The Tain is indeed jarring, though there's always more than meets the ear with this band, and the disc's dark acoustic guitar opening is not without foil: Pay attention to how Colin overdramatizes the dark line with his heavy plucks, disarming its sense of foreboding. When the rest of the band joins him in unison, what should be enough of a killer riff for friendly genocide is undermined by the organ's funny whir and Rachel Blumberg's gentle cymbal taps. In short, the sound is off-kilter, though not without ample deception, and only hints at the level of sophistication to come in the remaining movements.
The Decemberists have consistently proven that they understand the tensions that can be exploited in song: Morbid verses are set to straightforward, "fun" pop instrumentals ("July July"; "Chimbley Sweep"), narration is often not Colin's own, but another's ("Leslie Anne Levine"), inconsequential banalities are granted cosmic musical significance ("Song for Myla Goldberg"), sincerity is performatively lampooned ("I Was Meant for the Stage"). The Tain is no different: In fact, it's easily The Decemberists' most carefully considered and sophisticated effort yet-- to a limited degree, some of Colin's subtle musical humor even depends on cursory knowledge of its bizarre Celtic cycle namesake. In short: the cycle's most celebrated tale is how Queen Medb's army attacks the town of Ulster with the intention of carrying off their great sacred bull, and only CuChulainn, the story's hero, is able to resist the invasion and defend the town. To call a queen, as Colin does, a "salty little pisser," is a brilliant conceit, matched only by his decision to set her raid for a bull (her "shiny prize") to bombastic hard rock hooks.
When the song reaches its third movement, Colin switches the focus of his narrative to how CuChulainn, originally named Setanta, became "CuChulainn", or literally, "Hound of Cullan." As a mournful bassline sways, accompanied by occasional strums of heavily distorted guitar, Colin assumes different points of view with each passing line, and the band swells to an ironic degree of celebration upon the words, "Here come loose the hound/ To blow me down," the moment at which Setanta is attacked by King Cullan's guard dog.
This is not to say that one cannot at all appreciate The Tain without knowledge of Celtic mythology-- though, for me, personally, the interaction between the instrumentation and Colin's lyrics has always been The Decemberists' most fascinating trait. Take The Tain's ghostly fourth movement, by far the entire composition's most poignant melody. Rachel assumes vocals akin to her orphanry on "Chimbley Sweep", this time accompanied by light piano and bowed cello. The accordion finally makes its somewhat tongue-in-cheek appearance at the bridge, fighting with found sounds and music box bells. Meloy reassumes vocals for the fifth movement, which restates The Tain's original theme-- though not before he beautifully overextends himself in lines like, "Darling dear, what have you done?/ Your hands and face are smeared with blood," subjects that last word to a strange guttural contortion.
With each release, The Decemberists grow more sophisticated in their songcraft and subtler in their wit. The result, naturally, is that their releases are increasingly more demanding on the listener. Meeting a record on its own terms, though, is to a large extent a forgotten responsibility. Especially given its disorienting opener, The Tain EP is dense musically and lyrically, a bona fide grower, but certainly worth the effort to unravel it.


Covering 50 Cent, Cat Stevens, Faith Evans, and more on steelpan drums should not sound this gimmick-less. It helps that the Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band is, first and foremost, a strong funk ensemble.

55

The Bacao Rhythm & Steel Band is a pet project of the German instrumental group the Mighty Mocambos, a practiced collective that makes versatile deep funk. Bacao is a vehicle for bandleader and guitarist Björn Wagner's dedicated enchantment with the steelpan drum, which he and three other band members play on a new debut full-length called 55.
Steelpan drums are traditionally hammered out of 55-gallon oil barrels and inextricably linked to Trinidad, where they were invented in the 1930s, borne into the island’s calypso and soca music traditions, and have since been co-opted around the world. The metallic ping a pan makes is entirely unique for an acoustic instrument. With a series of soft strikes, players can conjure a swelling, fluttering effect; with stronger contact a pan rattles. More generally, the sustained notes obscure the player’s attack, as if the sound floated into earshot from a faraway place instead of bursting from an acute mallet strike. Conversely, it’s almost impossible to achieve the sharp briefness of a staccato. It’s a deceptively sensitive piece of metal that is easy to make loud but finicky to get right.
Wagner spent time learning the instrument and commissioning a handmade pan for himself while in Trinidad and Tobago, and Bacao released its first two songs—a pair of Meters covers—in 2007. By the following year, the group had grown more playful with its covers, releasing a stunning instrumental take on 50 Cent’s “P.I.M.P.” that sounds unmistakably like the steelpan riff at the heart of the rapper's original, now with the added appeal of a Caribbean groove and the kind of swampy horn solo expected of a Latin jazz burner.
About half the songs on *55 *are covers, all of which are immediately endearing. Since its invention and because of its timbral distinction, the steelpan has long been an instrument used for unexpected covers of popular songs. 55, which places previous singles alongside new tracks, * *sidesteps pure novelty factor in that the band is an impeccably tight funk outfit to begin with, and the pan is folded in as seasoning. Given that Wagner and his bandmates are recent converts, none of the pan playing on 55 is flashily virtuosic, but they’re deft and restrained use of the instrument—in this case both a single tenor steelpan as well as the lower registered double second pan—is nonetheless the album’s obvious calling card.
“Dog Was a Doughnut,” a delightful rework of Cat Steven’s shifty electronic original, is one of the album’s most sparsely arranged, the pan walking in awkward step with the rest of the percussion instead of standing out front. Bacao is prone to crisp mid-song breaks that frequently center percussive elements like a cowbell as much as a drum kit, but the group has the impressive coordination to move as one as well. The guitar is sometimes tucked into the groove as a jangling or ticking rhythmic element, but on tracks like “Queen of Cheeba,” a constant guitar riff becomes the woozy centerpiece of a psychedelic-tinged Latin jam. Originally a 1980s political anthem from John Holt about marijuana in Jamaica, “Police in Helicopter" digs into heavy psychedelic reggae territory instead. “Scorpio,” an oft-sampled legendary breakbeat track from Dennis Coffey, gets a true-to-form but sped-up rendition here that trades the famously overdubbed guitar motif for the sound of the featured instrument. As a groove-forward band, Bacao are shape-shifters in the best sense.
As the “P.I.M.P.” rendition suggests, Bacao are also molded by hip-hop. On “Round & Round,” they flip the smoothness of Hi-Tek’s wondrous original beat into a lazy shuffle, the pan clunkily plucking out the catchy refrain while the guitar creeps alongside. It’s “Love Like This,” a slinky cover of Faith Evans’ Grammy-nominated Bad Boy-era R&B hit, that takes the cake, accomplishing the rare intersection of unexpected and obvious. Like much of the album, “Love Like This,” which carries a cleaner bassline than the sampled original, is built by the heavy lifting of the traditional rhythm core; the pan then drives it home. The album’s original compositions are mostly impressive themselves: “Bacao Suave” is a horn-heavy, Latin-tinged jam, while “Port of Spain Hustle” offers up the slick-moving rhythm guitar and stabbing horn runs of a disco classic.
Even though the songs themselves are short, at 16 tracks, *55 *runs a touch too long, and some of the band’s early standout singles are sorely missing. Still, steelpan homages this delightfully listenable and yet devoid of schtick deserve credit. Bacao is a fantastic funk band first and foremost—the pan just adds some well-earned panache.


The omnivorous Nigerian rapper-singer makes smoothly effortless genre hybrids that feel like everywhere and nowhere all at once.

Mandy & the Jungle

Santi is the de facto leader of Nigeria’s alté (or alternative) scene, a burgeoning collection of young artists who are defined by a moody, Western eclecticism and by an urge to separate themselves from the mainstream. To listeners in the United States, however, Santi’s music will feel distinctly familiar: It’s in intimate conversation with Views-era Drake, with Benny Blanco and Diplo. Like those artists, Santi makes smoothly effortless composite pop songs that sound like everywhere and nowhere. The 27-year-old Lagosian was raised on the Western music of the late ’90s and early ’00s, along with local music he was exposed to, he’s said, by “the gateman or the house help.” He started out as a rapper, under the name Ozzy B, and slowly incorporated other genres into his music. On Mandy & the Jungle, his sound—an ultra-simple, hyper-processed rap/R&B hybrid—is the sound of the airport lounge, of the antiseptic spaces in between more-exciting locales.
With their sing-song melodies and light dancehall rhythms, tracks like “RX-64 (The Jungle),” “Sparky,” “Maria,” “Turn Down Mami,” and “Where You Been” make their way into your consciousness like air conditioning. They’re the twice-removed second cousins of seasonal favorites by artists like Baby Bash, Lumidee, and Wayne Wonder. Everything here is something you have heard, vaguely, somewhere else: “Murvlana” splits the difference between K-Ci & Jojo and Ryan Hemsworth. “Rapid Fire” includes a sudden, delightful interpolation of J-Lo and Ja Rule. And the guitar chords of “DSM” carry just the faintest echo of “Party in the USA.” This sense of constant recognition and recombination recalls Night Ripper or Feed the Animals. Like those Girl Talk albums, Mandy & the Jungle has no shortage of ear candy; also like those albums, it might make you a little sick after a while.
Santi makes sure to interpolate Nigerian music alongside American hits, but the album never really feels local to anywhere. The songs are uprooted, placeless, all the more so when they refer explicitly to places. “Morocco” isn’t about anything, North African or otherwise. (Though Santi told ID it was about “a man who stumbles upon a land filled with women who appear to have mysterious powers.”) On “Monte Claire,” Santi mentions a big night in Sweden, and the only explanation for his choice of country is either that “Sweden” kind of rhymes with “leavin’” or that Santi’s been listening to Yung Lean. These songs are the sonic equivalents of screen savers, soothing in their artificiality, but disappearing the moment you focus on them.
A few of the guests add life. On “Settle Down,” Ghanaian singer Amaarae says that “she’s swag-surfing off the San Francisco Bay,” which sounds like fun. GoldLink appears on “Maria,” perhaps the catchiest song here, and also avoids getting sucked into the Santi super-synthesis void. There comes a point where eclecticism become more depressing than impressive, and Santi’s music dances on top of that point.
Santi has emphasized that Mandy is a concept album, but the lyrics are all over the place. Lines like “Do you remember the times we had?” or “I can breathe in Morocco” or “Mama’s always chasin’ the cop car, yeah yeah” are meant to float in through your ears with minimal friction or thought. DRAM sounds like the album’s superego on “Demon Hearts,” a familiar lament about digital alienation, double-tapping and backed-up mentions; eventually he dismisses social media in favor of money. A stranger and balder example comes on “Raw Dinner” when Santi says of a woman that “she don’t taste like anything.” Too often, this album doesn’t either.


With a daring assortment of reverential and playful remixes, the drummer and producer carves a niche for himself in the world of contemporary jazz.

Kassa Overall: Shades of Flu: Healthy Remixes For an Ill Moment

When Madlib was granted access to Blue Note’s sacred archives, history inspired the Beat Konducta to create a textbook of sample-led jazz rap destined to be studied by hip-hop producers forevermore. Seventeen years after Shades of Blue: Madlib Invades Blue Note, drummer and producer Kassa Overall seizes upon the same concept, but the circumstances that inspired the making of his “remixtape” are radically different. Shades of Flu: Healthy Remixes For an Ill Moment was assembled as Kassa observed coronavirus quarantine measures in Seattle. The final product is more gonzo in spirit than Madlib’s sanctified opus, but just like his hero, Kassa takes listeners by the hand and walks them through why hip-hop is, and has always been, a continuum of jazz.
If you’re looking for other precursors, Shades of Flu has as much in common with Danger Mouse’s once heavily discussed mash-up record The Grey Album as it does with Madlib’s thesis: It’s similarly raw, underground, and chaotic. Kassa takes apart songs (mostly recorded by friends and collaborators), peers at the components inside, and finds bold new ways to put them back together. Sometimes he’ll fixate on one small snippet of the original—a piano plink, a vocal section—and loop it again and again, like a person hypnotized by a snow globe. His drums frequently drop out of the mix or veer off into wild freakouts. Madlib created smooth music you can easily picture coming out of both antique radios and modern turntables; Kassa’s experiments find a pocket somewhere in between.
Consider his new remix of pianist Sullivan Fortner’s take on John Coltrane and Duke Ellington’s “In a Sentimental Mood.” Taken from his 2018 album Moments Preserved, Fortner’s cover retained the dimly lit film noir vibes of the Duke Ellington composition. Now, here comes Kassa, who flips the track into an electro-jazz mash-up with a thumping beat. Meanwhile, the new mix of Makaya McCraven’s “Tall Tales” sees each instrument fray into the next, amalgamating into a blurry collage that feels equally inspired by the Beatles’ proggy productions and Aphex Twin’s jittering electronica.
That’s not to say Kassa can’t smooth things out when he’s in the mood. He adds a comfortingly familiar boom-bap beat to Jon Batiste’s very delicate cover of “What a Wonderful World,” while retaining Batiste’s doomed chord changes and dark mood. Cécile McLorin Salvant’s version of Steve Wonder’s “Visions” was prototypical lounge jazz—just the piano, the singer’s voice, and nothing else—but Kassa speeds her vocals up to form a lean slice of chipmunk soul that harks back to The College Dropout.
The most fascinating cut might be the reimagining of Miles Davis’ “Freedom Jazz Dance.” Kassa mixes the peppy horn riff with the distinct drum loop and vocals from Busta Rhymes’ “Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See,” emerging with an alt-hip-hop number heavily reminiscent of his collaborations with A Tribe Called Quest. It feels like a lost Busta remix, summoned from an era when serving up alternate versions of rap singles was the norm.
Of greatest personal consequence to Kassa must be his remix of Geri Allen’s “Unconditional Love.” The pianist and professor, a personal mentor, died in 2017, and Kassa handles her memory with great love by keeping the original’s swirling piano play and matching  it with a hip-hop-style drum break. It’s the closest Kassa gets to adhering to Madlib’s Shades of Blue. Because as it turns out, Shades of Flu isn’t really about Kassa emulating one of his influences, but laying out a pamphlet of his own daring ideas. By illuminating old cuts in new light, Kassa asserts his position as one of modern jazz music’s most audacious futurists.


Operating under the alias Rrose, the Californian Seth Horvitz deploys the time-honored materials of techno to produce something destabilizing and new.

Hymn to Moisture

Marcel Duchamp loved aliases, in part for the creative license they afforded. As R. Mutt, he produced one of his most famous pieces: Fountain (1917), an ordinary urinal tipped on its side and signed with the fake name. Rrose Sélavy—a pun on the phrase “Eros, c’est la vie” (“Sex, that’s life”)—was another of the Dada figure’s assumed names; often described as Duchamp’s female alter ego, Sélavy authored various artworks and essays and even sat, clad in feathers and furs, for photographic portraits by Man Ray.
Rrose, the California native Seth Horvitz’s principal musical project over the past nine years, takes from Rrose Sélavy both her name and her gender-flipping, appearing in drag on stage and in press photos. But while this act of borrowing might also seem fundamentally Duchampian, Rrose is not a conceptual project. Horvitz deploys the time-honored materials of techno at its purest—walloping kick drums, flayed hi-hats, undulating waves of synthesizer—in a way that is overwhelmingly immediate, at once bone-shaking and mind-melting. Since Rrose’s first EPs, in 2011, Horvitz has worked techno’s standard tropes into an increasingly elastic form, leaning into the destabilizing effects of repetition and relishing the impact of small changes carried out gradually. This is a music of exacting precision and also profound mystery.
Hymn to Moisture, Rrose’s debut album, is of a piece with much of Horvitz’s work until now, full of ominous low-end throb, churning delay, and synths that buzz like an electrical substation. As familiar as the textures and templates might be, it’s clear from the very first track how far the project has come from the comparatively straightforward sound of Rrose’s early output. The opening “Mine” contains traces of its influences—the pinging lead nods to minimalists like Jeff Mills and Mika Vainio, while the clanging dub delay recalls Basic Channel—but nothing here is business as usual. The complex time signature defies parsing; the way the tingling, twinkling high end gradually dissolves into a dissonant wash of tone suggests a gamelan orchestra being melted for scrap. Driven forward by an insistent double-time bass pulse, the song feels like a forced march into quicksand.
Similarly queasy sensations abound. The malevolent “Bandage” sets microtonal chimes against a bristling bass synth, filters opening and closing like the petals of some hellish flower as the time signature imperceptibly shifts; the ambient “Saliva” and “Hymn to Moisture” forgo beats entirely, luxuriating in the cloudy richness of perpetually shape-shifting synthesizers. It’s not all so dark; “Horizon,” a highlight, channels the cyclical arpeggios of kraut-influenced groups like Emeralds while managing to remain somehow more techno than prog.
Even a nominally club-oriented track like “Columns” refuses to deliver the regular dopamine hits that have become de rigueur in mainstream techno. Stretching faint, dissonant drones over its unsteady pitter-pat rhythm, it’s all about the long view, right down to a foggy outro that lingers for a good two minutes once the beats have gone silent, like steam rising from wet pavement after a summer storm. In track after track, a similar impulse propels listeners across unfamiliar territory, leaving little hint of how they’ve gotten there. Where a Rrose track ends up is rarely anything like where it’s begun.
Where Rrose Sélavy provided Duchamp with an opportunity for the gender play that he found useful in drawing out hidden meanings from familiar objects, Horvitz’s use of gender is less obvious in its ends. Initially, he has said, assuming the guise “was a way for me to subvert the element of the white male techno image, which I was not comfortable representing on stage.” More recently, he has attempted to clarify what Rrose represents: “a persona, a political statement, an exploration of identity, meant to provide some magic in the performance space.”
It is sometimes easier to say what Rrose is not than what she is. But there’s something about the very uncertainty around the alias that suits the music. Although Rrose is a persona, the project doesn’t foreground personality; the artist's self-presentation couldn’t be further from the cult of stardom that typifies big-business techno these days, and the music follows suit. Listen to a track like “Dissolve,” and it’s easy to imagine what dancing to it might feel like: not celebratory, not a party, but a private activity, practically levitating, cocooned in sound and lost in space. At moments like these, Rrose represents a destabilizing force—a decentering of identity and an erasure of all the hierarchies that can make dance music such a plodding, ponderous affair. Hymn to Moisture is an exploration of the limits of perception—an ode to the way that the self, under the right conditions, can disappear into the music. If Rrose is an alter ego, then Hymn to Moisture is an ode to ego death.

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The Swedish prog-psych outfit slows down the tempo and experiments with a more expansive sound.

Skit I Allt

For most of its history, Dungen was the playground of Gustav Ejstes, who for the most part wrote all the songs and played everything on the recordings, then got the rest of the band together to play it all live. 2008's 4, which was actually their fifth album, marked the first time the quartet really played as a band in the studio, and Ejstes settled in as the pianist/vocalist/flautist. That approach continues here, and it seems to have led them in a more pastoral direction that has more in common with Songs From the Wood-era Jethro Tull and the folkier, jazzier end of 1970s European prog than the heavy psych they referenced on earlier records. Where 2004's great Ta Det Lungt had a fair amount of psychedelic punch, especially in its single, "Panda", the music here feels more like a caress.
Maybe that makes sense-- the band's name means "the Grove," after all-- but I'd say the album works best when heard as part of the band's overall output and probably isn't the place to start. The title track (Swedish for "fuck all") is the lead single, and the video emphasizes the group's recent ensemble approach, showing them playing while crammed together in a tiny room. Reine Fiske's harmonized lead guitar part is ultra-smooth and occasionally doubled by flute, which makes it interesting as a sonic throwback but also corresponds with the general lack of energy in the song, which is ultimately fairly forgettable rural psych-rock. Fiske fares better when he's let loose, and his instrumental work is one of the album's highlights. His bizarre lead on "Barnen Undrar", centered around a creative, siren-like hook, takes the song to another level, while his rough leads on the rhythmic "Brallor", one of the album's best songs, add a much-needed crunch, cutting through the sea of reverb. His acid-stained leads on the airy instrumentals "Högdalstoppen" and "Blandband", which finds him dueting with Ejstes' flute, likewise give those tracks a fire they'd otherwise lack.
"Högdalstoppen" sounds as though it's a few spliced excerpts of a much larger jam, which tells me that this could have been a much longer, more indulgent record than it is if the band had decided not to keep it to an economical 34 minutes and 10 songs. There are a few surprises-- for instance, Ejstes' double-tracked vocal on "Soda" sounds almost exactly like Elliott Smith-- but for the most part, Skit I Allt features a gentler Dungen, one that sounds comfortable as a band and perhaps at a bit of a crossroads as to where to take this sound. People who've appreciated the band's last three albums will find time for this once it has a chance to sink in, but it's not essential for people who got a charge out of Ta Det Lungt and passed on the rest.


The Animal Collective member receives production help from bandmate Josh Dibb for his darkly intense solo full-length debut.

Down There

Animal Collective's Dave Portner told us in a recent interview that Down There, his first solo album as Avey Tare, grew out of a negative emotional atmosphere: "[The record] primarily comes from being bummed out-- which, I felt like in the past two years, I've had a darker time". And indeed, in terms of both general mood and sound, Down There is among the darkest pieces of music to emerge from a member of Animal Collective. The images of the crocodile on the album's cover and in promotional photos hint at the swampy vibe, but the animal association could be extended further: You can almost see Portner's head barely above water, not exactly drowning but having a hard time holding on regardless.
Produced by fellow A.C. member Josh Dibb, the marshland sonics of Down There feel related to the smeared, strung-out electric confusion of Animal Collective's 2005 album, Feels. But to think too much about the past would be to ignore the album's distinct rhythmic tics. While Animal Collective's 2009 breakthrough LP, Merriweather Post Pavilion, was notable for its big, buzzy beats, here the pulse is more introverted and irregular. So we get the clicking dub of "Ghost of Books" and the Warp-like IDM textures of "Heads Hammock". The clatter of "Lucky 1" is panicked and freaked-out, while the straightforward pulse of "Oliver Twist" smacks distantly like the remnants of a pounding headache. The rhythms are prominent, but they don't exactly seem designed for dancing.
Down There is less accessible than latter-day Animal Collective and harder to wrap your head around, but it isn't a callback to the more difficult sound that marked the band early on. If anything, it sounds like Portner is taking a lateral step away from Animal Collective in order to work out some pressing personal issues on his own. This sense of retreat, coupled with the internally focused, claustrophobic atmosphere, brings to mind the thematic concerns (if certainly not the sound) of Neil Young's 1974 bummed-out classic On the Beach. But unlike Neil, Portner doesn't seem angry at the outside world. He's asking questions of himself, and it seems he's doing so without expecting any easy answers. "Shouldn't I be content with what I got?" he muses in "Oliver Twist", later wondering if "I'm just a thief."
Down There opener "Laughing Hieroglyphic" finds Portner touching on notions of protection and kinship, ideas common to the work of his bandmate Panda Bear's solo work. But here, there's less hope and more personal questioning: "When I get fucked up/ I do the best/ To make myself not fucked up again/ My heart and my lungs do/ Why can't I do the same for everyone I love too?" Malaise overcomes Portner in "Heads Hammock", as the phrase "I don't want to" goes unfinished, swallowed up by echoed gurgles. "Heather in the Hospital", which addresses his sister's bout with cancer, ditches internal narrative almost entirely, using emergency room imagery ("The people bandaged up/ The doctor's making rounds") as emotional armor from that beatific, bluesy shout that runs through the song. The music and lyrics here are cut from the same downcast cloth.
Portner has said that he has no plans to perform this material live, hinting that the feeling of the music isn't something that he wants to revisit every night on tour. And it's true that Down There embodies a mindset that most people are trying to get away from. But there's a fantastical bent to the album that opens up with repeated listening, the dripping, moist "weird hell" vibe that Portner's mentioned in several interviews since. The album's theme of the underworld reveals itself in the beginning of the stately instrumental "Glass Bottom Boat", where one warped voice asks another, "Hey, do you know how to get to that cemetery?" and receives the reply, "Sure, I can get you there. Just step into my boat here." The exchange brings to mind Charon, the Greek mythological figure that ferried souls across the rivers Styx and Acheron and into the deeper recesses of Hades. Portner's on that same boat later on during Down There's standout "Cemeteries", his voice reverberating off the reflecting pool of the hushed production: "Looking back on/ Old days". Throughout the record, the vogue for nostalgia that permeates so much modern indie gets inverted. Sometimes, this record says, the past is better left behind.


Rising, genre-spanning pop star Katy B's debut builds on the promise of her early singles, adding vocal finesse and feminine appeal to UK bass music.

On a Mission

Last year, Katy B was widely credited for bringing vocal finesse and feminine pop appeal to an increasingly aggro dubstep-crossover arena. She dropped a fantastic Benga-backed debut single, "Katy on a Mission", that vocally wrung out both elation and longing over his abrasive, buzzing stutter-step. And she kept that streak going with a couple of guest spots on Magnetic Man's self-titled record: The eerie come-on "Crossover" and the ecstatic jungle throwback "Perfect Stranger" were album highlights that proved her voice could breach the barrier of heavy-duty bass and plant its feet firmly atop it. Two UK top 5 hits later-- "Katy on a Mission" and the Ms. Dynamite collaboration "Lights On"-- and members of the English music press started to peg her as the next singer to bring crossover legitimacy to bass music.
Turns out that'd be selling her a bit short. After pairing up with Rinse FM's tastemaker station head Geeneus and co-producer Zinc, Katy B has used On a Mission as a chance to posit herself as a genre-spanning pop singer who isn't tied down to a single thing, no matter how well it suits her. It's a move that makes a lot of sense, since versatility is the key to a good dance album-- let the voice establish itself, and the niche will either find itself or get broadened in the process. "Katy on a Mission", "Lights On", and "Perfect Stranger" reappear here in radio-edit lengths, and these three tracks help define her as someone who can play off dubstep and funky basslines with a tone that drips with cool defiance, stings with melancholy, and still grabs at you when it's being reduced to a skeletal echo. But there's enough stylistic extension here that Katy finds a way to transcend enough signifiers to call herself pop above anything else.
The big standout here is "Broken Record", a four-on-the-floor thump with electro underpinnings and a breakdown that perks up longtime dance fans with a judiciously dropped "Amen" break. It's one of those club-tested/radio-ready tracks that sounds good anywhere, not out of focus-grouped button-pushing but the way Katy sells it: coyly yearning and melodically sweet on the verse, intense and swooping on the chorus, wracked with ambiguity throughout. And then she finds another gear when the song finally shifts into the titular hook near the end-- the way she rolls her delivery of the line "like-a-bro-ken rec-ooooord" is the stuff that song-length buildups were made for. And there's more of that going around on the other new tracks, laid out in a number of different modes-- the trapped yet defiant punchback of opener "Power on Me", the sour resentment of "Why You Always Here", the slyly perilous seduction that drives "Witches Brew". It's a repertoire that gives her the appeal of a 1990s rave diva with contemporary pop-R&B refinement, minus the Auto-Tune.
That alone would make her another noticeably talented if semi-anonymous vocalist. But she also provides a breather from pop's current fascination with vacant navel-gazing. It's not just the nods to decades-old house and jungle that provide a perspective on dance-music culture that predates the tyranny of the David Guetta era-- though Geeneus and Zinc get all the credit in the world for following up Katy's early breakthroughs with a first-rate collection of beats that reunite the disparate splinters of bass music culture past and present. What puts On a Mission over the top is Katy's way of expressing herself with emotions that extend past "wooo, druuunk" into more nuanced and detailed relationships with booming systems and the people who flock to them. As danceable as these tracks can be, the undercurrents of nuanced frustration and uncertainty in Katy's tone-- especially in the surrender of "Power on Me" and the torn-up estrangement of "Go Away"-- amplify the tricky dynamics of relationships and hook-ups to rarefied levels, creating a tension to the music that makes epics out of dissatisfaction. And when she withdraws just a bit for one of the more introspective cuts, a haunting mid-tempo meditation on love and identity called "Disappear", her caught-up bewilderment says softly and resonantly what lesser singers couldn't accomplish with overblown histrionics. A genre-bound narrative might still see Katy B slotted into a narrow role that can't quite contain her, but her voice is doing its best to prove otherwise.


This four-LP collection spans David Bowie's second-ever BBC session, in 1968, through to May 1972. Unlike other more carefully curated Bowie box sets, Bowie at the Beeb is an anatomy of how he became a rock star.

Bowie At The Beeb

Sixteen years after being released on CD, Bowie at the Beeb finally gets the vinyl box set treatment, with some scanty bonus bits: a fantastic 1971 rendition of "Oh! You Pretty Things" where Bowie and Mick Ronson perform as a duo, from the Japanese CD, and a previously unheard version of "The Supermen," from March 1970, where he's backed by the Hype. It's tempting to assume the collection of his early BBC sessions is a posthumous cash-in, except that it was announced in December, three weeks before Bowie's death, thus making it a viable part of his beautifully choreographed stage exit. While the rush to winkle out clues from Blackstar in the wake of his passing felt a bit like pointing out how a magician does his tricks, it's worth asking why he pushed us toward these formative live sessions as he knew his life was coming to its end.
Simply put, perhaps it's nothing more than a show of gratitude toward an organization whose early belief in him never wavered (and whose publicly funded existence is always under threat from Britain's Conservative government). Bowie recalled failing a 1965 audition to work with the BBC, who stated, in their classic patrician tone, "'This vocalist is devoid of personality and sings all the wrong notes.'" And yet they gave him another shot, as Bowie pointed out: "So in your inimitable manner and with tremendous enthusiasm you got me back on for another audition, which I passed the second time around, which gave me freewheeling access to a lifetime of singing all the wrong notes."
This four-LP collection spans Bowie's second-ever BBC session, in 1968, through to May 1972, after which he wouldn't record another until 1991. Rather than a sign of rupture, that 19-year gap is possibly an indirect result of the BBC's support: After Bowie performed "Starman" on the network's "Top of the Pops" in July 1972, his fame rose enormously, leading him to America, tax exile in Switzerland and Germany, and into periods of immense productivity (and, of course, druggy preoccupations). Manager Tony DeFries may not have seen the point in having him do more sessions.
Yet in the early days, back when Bowie was still an earnest Anthony Newley wannabe whose career could never get seem to get off the ground, Auntie's arms were always there to scoop him up and give him another shot. His first chances came from John Peel, and from there he trickled down through Radio 1's primetime slots; by 1970, he was being given hour-long live appearances on the station. It's an appealingly linear type of progress, and a literal one, too; unlike Five Years and other more carefully curated Bowie box sets, Bowie at the Beeb is an anatomy of how he became a rock star.
The first session here (and second, historically) was recorded for Peel in May 1968, and finds Bowie in romantic mode, though bigger ideas are taking shape: the swoony "London Bye, Ta-Ta" characterizes the influx of immigrant communities to London as two lovers who don't make it. "Karma Man" and "Silly Boy Blue" both deal with Buddhism, but the latter gives the very timely fixation a Bowie spin, as he empathizes with a monk who doesn't fit in with his community. By October 1969, there's been a perceptible shift in attitudes: "Let Me Sleep Beside You" and "Janine" are tougher in sound and spirit.
Bowie's February 1970 session with the Tony Visconti Trio—aka the Hype—starts inauspiciously. He covers Jacques Brel's "Amsterdam" competently, and the acoustic "God Knows I'm Good" is a tedious ditty about a woman being caught shoplifting. But then comes "The Width of a Circle," and Mick Ronson's first-ever performance with Bowie. Maybe the subtlety of their work together here is a sign of a tentative new relationship: Ronson's riff is much more muted and ingrained in the mix than it would be on record, but still gorgeous. Their dynamic picks up steam on "Unwashed and Somewhat Slightly Dazed," as Bowie's frustrations at the loss of his father preempt a brilliantly wiggy Ronson solo.
As David Cavanagh's excellent book on John Peel's sessions points out, Bowie was hardly gigging even by 1971, when he had had a bona fide hit with "Space Oddity": "He doesn't have a regular band, his albums don't sell, and he's prone to being in a state of artistic flux." So the hour-long, June 1971 Radio 1 performance by David Bowie and Friends at London's Paris Theater was a huge showcase, preempting the release of Hunky Dory that December. Never mind the size of his ensemble, however; the highlight is a box-fresh, solo rendition of "Kooks," played acoustically just four days after it was written to herald the birth of his son, Zowie.
Bowie always called himself a "tasteful thief," and the permeability of his brain becomes clear on the third LP of the set, which deals with late 1971 and early 1972. Bowie had just returned from New York, where he met Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, and Iggy Pop. In early 1972, his covers of "Waiting for the Man" and "White Light/White Heat" are a little unconvincing, but no matter; the transformative experience has brought out a new ability in Bowie to really sell his own songs live as he never had before, ramping up his infectious, virile energy. You can hear the Spiders From Mars hitting their stride, and a lizardy streetwise quality appearing in Bowie's voice.
Of course, all this nascent rockstardom comes to a head in The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars, which Bowie previewed live on Radio 1 a month prior to release in June '72, across two separate sessions. By this point, "Starman" had been DJ Johnnie Walker's single of the week, which earned it daily plays, and allowed Bowie to delve a little further back into his catalog for hidden greatest hits: "Space Oddity," and "Changes," where Ronson transforms the original's hammered piano riff. But in the here and now, Bowie's ravishing yowl makes an early appearance on "Moonage Daydream," and you hear him start to reach outward, beyond the intimacy of radio into the visceral performer he would become. His May 22, 1972 session ends with—what else—"Rock'n'Roll Suicide," the last song he would play live on the BBC for 19 years.
As ever, nothing was accidental. Beyond the vinyl reissue of Bowie at the Beeb, Bowie reached out to the BBC one last time before he died. His last round of Twitter follows included BBC 6Music and some of the station's flagship DJs (along with a cheeky parody account: God). The new music industry ecosystems mean that bands are no longer built up by single organizations in the same way that Bowie was by the BBC at the turn of the 1970s, which made the day of his death all the more remarkable. Like thousands of other Brits, I found out by listening to BBC 6Music DJs Shaun Keaveny and Matt Everitt announce the news at 7:08 a.m. Although they were clearly grasping for words, Keaveny landed on the perfect summation of what happens when the value of patronage is recognized and repaid: "David Bowie's music is an absolutely central tenet of what we do here at 6Music." Bowie at the Beeb doesn't always make for essential listening, but it represents a foundational part of British culture, and upholds the importance of public broadcasting as a mutually beneficial relationship.