The Chicago bassist and guimbri player turns in a minimalist mountain of an album, one whose slow pace and gradual changes prove unusually mesmerizing, even sublime.

Joshua Abrams / Natural Information Society: Mandatory Reality

Mandatory Reality

A recent New York Times story on productivity proposed shifting emphasis from time-management strategies to something called “attention management”: “the art of focusing on getting things done for the right reasons, in the right places and at the right moments.” Chicago bassist and bandleader Joshua Abrams has practiced his own kind of attention management over the course of his career, not as a means to more productive ends but as the goal itself. As he told Pitchfork a few years ago: “I encourage everyone who’s playing to keep that sense of driving on the road without knowing how far it is to your destination. So keep alert but stay patient, and we can get to a focused place, where we feel like it can go on forever.”
Abrams has roots spread across Chicago’s creative music scene, having worked with post-rock bands, singer-songwriters, electronic producers, and free-jazz players, but his Natural Information Society, with its ever-changing lineup, is where he has given the freest rein to his wandering instincts. Perhaps that sense of attentiveness his music inspires come from Abrams swapping his acoustic bass for the three-stringed guimbri, a lute from Northern Africa whose resonant low end and buzzing resonance are conducive to trance states. With each successive release from the band comes the suggestion that the songs can go longer and push deeper, and with Mandatory Reality, Abrams and his cohorts strain against the confines of recorded music. The 81 minutes that these four pieces inhabit—all put down in real time in complete takes with no overdubs—push both the ensemble and the listener into an immersive and sublime space.
The octet that Abrams has convened for this iteration of NIS has its roots in Windy City jazz, from woodwind players Nick Mazzarella, Jason Stein, and cornetist/ flautist Ben Lamar Gay to legendary percussionist Hamid Drake. Drake’s presence on tabla and frame drum here makes clear a through line stretching back to the worldly spiritual jazz of Don Cherry, yet the music itself drifts closer to the classic minimalism of early Philip Glass and Steve Reich. But where those minimalists were driven by New York’s speedy metabolism, the 20-plus minutes of “In Memory’s Prism” are exquisitely slow, like tai chi or a record played back at 16 rpm. It’s so languid that you feel not so much like you are listening to a band so much as walking among them.
“Finite” might be the most gorgeous entry in the NIS catalog, all 40 gradual, unhurried, undetectable minutes of it—a musical mountain. Abrams’ thrumming guimbri is soon joined by Drake’s tabla and Ben Boye’s considered piano, a mixture suggestive of a liminal space between Indian classical, Chinese court music, and Dixieland jazz. When the horns enter, each sounds a note in a cycling motif. With almost every turn in the cycle, new tones emerge, like the shuddering drone of Lisa Alvarado’s harmonium and Stein’s bass clarinet. Each horn extemporizes on the original figure, and the vibrato on a gorgeous sax solo 10 minutes in conjures Coltrane while also echoing the subliminal buzz of Abrams’ guimbri. “Finite” spends the first half accruing more details as solos emerge out of the foliage, never quite stepping to the fore so much as being glimpsed among the piece’s open spaces. It feels as connected and individualized as birds chirping in a garden.
Just as Gay provides a burnished, hushed cornet solo near the midway point, the piece starts to turn, and Abrams’ guimbri figure is slowly eroded away. As steady as the buildup has been, the group’s hike back down the mountain is just as gradual, the underlying bass pulse paring back and each phrase growing shorter. Nearly 40 minutes from where we started, they align on a single pulse.
“If our music’s political, it’s because it offers the possibility of slowing down,” Abrams has said. With the amount of time spent taking in the sheer size of these canvases, a certain effect does take hold, one that’s increasingly rare in our experiences of art, much less our daily lives. Perhaps that’s what the title is meant to suggest: The music moves so slowly as to impart the notion that this sense of pause, of dilated attention, might itself be the mandatory reality, rather than the one that clutters our waking lives from every possible angle.
Just as abruptly, the last quarter of the album plunges us amid the onrush of “Shadow Conductor,” the band’s rapid-breath, flickering eighth notes like a particular antsy take on Music for 18 Musicians. The sudden ratcheting up of speed between pieces is the album’s only real disruption, a moment of hastiness that at first seems unearned. After over an hour of totally becalmed drift, the bustling pace here at album’s end feels like leaving a day spa only to squeeze onto a rush-hour train. You might find yourself simply wishing the album extended just a few minutes longer.


Kelela’s latest collection of remixes is an adventurous victory lap, plunging deeper into her world of aqueous R&B.

RAVE:N, the Remixes

In the beginning, Kelela aspired to sound like a remix. The artist once said that her interest in the form came from the attention to detail in UK garage and 2-step reworks, as well as the potential they offered to beam a singer’s vocals into radically new contexts. Together with her collaborators, Kelela sought to transpose the sensuality of R&B onto hard-hitting but finely crafted dance beats, mapping sleek hooks onto blasted-out electronics. The word most critics used to describe her music was “futuristic,” but in hindsight, her early recordings seem emblematic of a current of creativity that crackled in the air throughout the 2010s: one that was musically omnivorous, ultra-tactile, conceptually heady, and internationally minded. To revisit interviews published around the time of Cut 4 Me’s release is to encounter a world of cross-genre optimism, fueled by dreams of forging new connections across Black and queer club scenes worldwide. Back then, Kelela was the diva uniquely poised to bring those sounds to a wide audience.
Fast forward 10 years. Kelela now exists among the upper echelons of stars called “mother” online; she is lovingly teased by fans for her inability to find a weed plug or protect her Twitter account from scammers trying to sell PS5s. She is a senior figure in a landscape of young musicians drawing on regional club music to great success. Last year’s Raven demonstrated how fully Kelela’s sound had transformed over the last decade of her career, as speaker-rattling R&G had been gradually phased out in favor of vaporous ambience. These new songs had formed, pearl-like, around a kernel of pain and insecurity, a “rustiness” she attributed to feeling exploited for her voice. Having accomplished the difficult task of piecing together a fractured sense of self on that record, Kelela’s latest collection of remixes is both a victory lap and something of a memory trip. Apart from reminding us of her career-long talent as a curator and executive producer, it’s her most uniformly satisfying and adventurous remix collection to date.
In the past, Kelela remixes have traditionally split the difference between full-blown reimaginings and particle-collider deconstructions, with the latter tending to represent the more fun but overall weaker tracks in this category (think of MC Bin Laden’s Brazilian funk overhaul of “Rewind” or Divoli S’vere’s ballroom makeover of “Truth or Dare,” which were more compelling for their audacity than as actual pieces of music). RAVE:N, on the other hand, is distinct: Each track deepens the aqueous world of the original record. It seems inconceivable that “Contact” should work without its full-bodied Baltimore club pulse, but Karen Nyame KG manages to transform the song into something gorgeously weightless, placing Kelela’s vocals over an airy bed of synths and the faintest Afrobeat percussion, as if she were levitating. DJ Manny and Loraine James’ intricate drum programming adds some nervous ballast to their respective spins on “Divorce,” but the real magic lies in how they fold and layer the vocals so that the song’s depressive undertow and tortured thoughts come into greater conflict. It would be foolish to try and replicate the oceanic pull and release of the title track, so Agazero pitch shifts the singer’s voice and imposes a beat for the formidable Bbymutha to tear into, matching Kelela’s battle weariness with her own fierce resolve.
RAVE:N bears the distinction of being the most kinetic Kelela release in a very long time. Beats that once sighed now absolutely slap, as the singer’s creative partners excavate the record’s submerged drums and detonate them for all of their latent force. LSDXOXO’s rework of “Sorbet” flips the track’s barely perceptible thump, recasting the toe-curling bliss of her lyrics into a breathy dancefloor command to go harder and harder. SUCIA!’s take on “Bruises” is deceptively minimal, substituting the original’s prominent kick drum with idling piano, until the chorus launches into hyperdrive with an absolutely scorching drum break. As the blankest slates on the record, “Washed Away” and “Far Away” are the most remixed songs here, with Ethereal, DJ Swisha, Suutoo, and DJ LHC all imposing a ground floor of percussion for the singer (and guest vocalists Liv.e and Ms. Carrie Stacks) to mournfully and triumphantly scat over. However, each producer’s approach runs a little too parallel; they lose their distinction when placed next to each other.
What is most striking about RAVE:N is the feeling that Kelela has made good on her early hype as a futurist in the best possible way, through a clear influence on a legion of like-minded artists. A.G’s rework of “Happy Ending” features among the record’s very high points and could easily have slotted among the best of any of her previous releases. The producer colors the song’s headlong pursuit of romance with shadows, as the ecstatic, pitch-shifted vocals crest and recede over roiling waves of grime bass. Her version is musically inventive, emotionally attuned, and contains glimmering traces of Kelela’s music that go far beyond its source material. Like many songs on RAVE:N, it bridges “far away” feelings with an intimate understanding of the singer’s greater artistic project.


Sufjan Stevens has always written personally, weaving his life story into larger narratives, but here his autobiography is front and center. Carrie & Lowell is a return to the stripped-back folk of Seven Swans, but with a decade's worth of refinement and exploration packed into it.

Carrie & Lowell

Sufjan Stevens' new album, Carrie & Lowell, is his best. This is a big claim, considering his career: 2003's Michigan, 2004's stripped-down Seven Swans, 2005's Illinois, and 2010's knotty electro-acoustic collection The Age of Adz. He's also had residencies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, collaborated with rappers and the National, donned wings and paint-splattered dayglo costumes, and released Christmas albums. But none of those side projects were ultimately ever as interesting, or effective, as when Sufjan was just Sufjan, a guy with a guitar or piano, well-detailed lyrics, and a gorgeous whisper that could reach into a heartbreaking falsetto.
Part of what makes Carrie & Lowell so great is that it comes after all of those things—the wings, the orchestras—but it feels like you're hearing him for the first time again, and in his most intimate form. This record is a return to the sparse folk of Seven Swans, but with a decade's worth of honing and exploration packed into it. It already feels like his most classic and pure effort.
By now the album's main narrative is well-known. Carrie & Lowell is titled after Stevens' mother and stepfather. Carrie was bipolar and schizophrenic and suffered from drug addiction and substance abuse. She died of stomach cancer in 2012, but had abandoned Stevens much earlier, first when he was 1, then later, repeatedly ("when I was three, three maybe four, she left us at that video store," he sings on "Should Have Known Better"). His stepfather, Lowell Brams, was married to Carrie for five years when Sufjan was a child. As a testament to the importance of his role in Stevens' life, Brams currently runs Stevens' label, Asthmatic Kitty, and shows up repeatedly in the record, most poignantly on the title track, where Stevens frames those five years as his "season of hope."
Stevens has always written personally, weaving his life story into larger narratives, but here his autobiography, front and center, is itself the grand history. The songs explore childhood, family, grief, depression, loneliness, faith, and rebirth in direct and unflinching language that matches the scaled-back instrumentation. There are Biblical references, and references to mythology, but most of it is squarely about Stevens and his family. A few of the songs ("Carrie & Lowell", "Eugene", "All of Me Wants All of You") mention the summer trips to Oregon that Stevens made, between the ages of five and eight, with Carrie, Lowell, and his brother. There are Oregon-specific references to Eugene, the Tillamook Burn forest fires, Spencer Butte, the Lost Blue Bucket Mine, and swimming lessons with a man who calls him Subaru. These were moments when Stevens was closest to his mother, or at least in most constant proximity to her, and he recorded some of Carrie & Lowell's tracks on an iPhone in a hotel in Klamath Falls, Oregon, as if trying to find a way to recreate those moments one more time.
Other songs focus on an adult Stevens coping with the aftermath of those early years, and the blankness his mother's distance and death left in him. He beats himself up for not trying harder to be closer earlier. On "Should Have Known Better" he sings "I should have wrote a letter/ Explaining what I feel, that empty feeling." He talks about his own drinking ("Now I'm drunk and afraid/ Wishing the world would go away") and drug abuse, disconnected relationships ("You checked your text while I masturbated"), self-loathing, and emptiness ("In a manner of speaking I'm dead"). There are suicidal thoughts (arm cutting, driving a car off a cliff, drowning, and questions like "Do I care if I survive this?"), which he pushes away with his faith and by focusing on the wonders around him ("Sea lion caves in the dark," the hysterical light of Eugene, Oregon). There is a lot of blood. Some broken bones. Tears. There is also a constant need to be closer—to his mother, to himself, to the world around him—even when it seems useless: "What's the point of singing songs/ If they'll never even hear you?" ("Eugene"). The other main character here is his brother, Marzuki Stevens, and his daughter, Sufjan's niece, who provides the one true moment of joy on the record: "My brother had a daughter/ The beauty that she brings, illumination" ("Should Have Known Better").
As he told Pitchfork, "With this record, I needed to extract myself out of this environment of make-believe. It’s something that was necessary for me to do in the wake of my mother’s death—to pursue a sense of peace and serenity in spite of suffering. It’s not really trying to say anything new, or prove anything, or innovate. It feels artless, which is a good thing. This is not my art project; this is my life." On the second to last track, "No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross", he sings, in falsetto, "Fuck me I'm falling apart," and it is maybe the barest, most honest declaration you'll hear on a record this year.~~
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His relationship, or lack thereof, with his mother is complex: He never hates her. He feels her everywhere: She passes through him as an apparition, and everything comes back to her in one way or another. "I love you more than the world can contain/ In its lonely and ramshackle head," he sings. He doesn't cast blame. "Fourth of July", a tender song about her death, is filled with terms of endearment ("my little hawk," "my firefly"), and questions about how he can raise her from the dead and then make the most of his own life, before he ends the song by repeating, soberly, "We're all gonna die."
The lyrics here are masterful and carefully shorn, and the music is as well. Stevens is joined by Laura Veirs, S. Carey, Thomas Bartlett, and others, but they come off as ghosts in the room around his carefully constructed soundscapes, compositions that tastefully blend acoustic and electronic elements that grow deeper with each listen. There are pianos, organs, starry washes, smears of synthesizers, clicking percussion, unidentifiable pulses, doubled vocals, soaring background harmonies, and quickly picked acoustic guitars that will remind you of Elliott Smith. In the past he'd get showy with multi-part suites or huge arrangements; the writing here is just as ambitious, but never showy. You often forget the music's there, but when you don't, it's catchy, inventive, melodic, seamless. The haunting production, too, is minimal but fathomless.
Stevens has been making music for a long time, and Carrie & Lowell shines a light back on the rest of his oeuvre. You realize the story of Michigan's "Romulus" is heartbreakingly real, down to its references to Oregon ("Once when our mother called/ She had a voice of last year's cough/ We passed around the phone/ Sharing a word about Oregon"), and that desperate desire for even one touch: "Once when we moved away/ She came to Romulus for a day/ Her Chevrolet broke down/ We prayed it'd never be fixed or be found/ We touched her hair." He loves his mother, and is ashamed of her, and can't stop loving her. It's one example of many, and when you re-listen to the past albums, and songs like "The Seer's Tower" and its once mysterious "Oh, my mother, she betrayed us, but my father loved and bathed us," it acts as a skeleton key to what was once an ineffable sadness. As he put it in "John Wayne Gacy, Jr.": "Even in my best behavior I am really just like him/ Look beneath the floorboards for the secrets I have hid." Here are those secrets laid bare.
There is a photo in the booklet of a young Stevens, at the table, eating a banana. It's one of a few photos in the booklet that seem to depict some of those Oregon summers: a beach spotted with rocks, a small half-painted wooden house near trees and hills. His look is not happy or sad; he's just a kid at a table, eating. But there's something melancholic there, something maybe you add onto it after listening to Carrie & Lowell, but something real nonetheless: His mother is standing beside him. She's not looking at him, but she's there. (She appears in three shots, and in none of them can you see her eyes.) You imagine Lowell took the picture (on the back of the booklet you see his reflection in the mirror of a photo taken of Carrie crocheting). It's a haunting feeling that that little kid, years later, would create a masterpiece so knowing about suffering, sadness, death, and loneliness. In that photo, though, he's still a kid, with all those kid hurts, trying to make sense of the world. And, at least for that moment, he's close to his mother. And it seems like maybe he's happy.


Mtendere Mandowa, a veteran (and cult favorite) of the L.A. beat scene, gathers fresh collaborators for a set of effortless, shape-shifting tracks that make time stand still.

Anicca

Creative collectives come together through a combination of will and serendipity to make superstars out of those who might otherwise be cult figures, and cult figures out of those who might otherwise never have made music at all. In Los Angeles, starting in 2006, the Low End Theory night at the Airliner was that kind of scene. Many of the names that emerged from there are well known. Then there were artists like Mtendere Mandowa, better known as Teebs. To those who followed what was happening at Low End, he was up there with Flying Lotus and Nosaj Thing, partly thanks to the strength of his 2010 Brainfeeder album Ardour. The record sounded like what would happen if you could plant hip-hop beats in the soil and plug headphones into the flora that emerged.
Teebs was a visual artist first; the Low End movement helped him to understand himself as a musician, too. But by 2014, some of the scene’s bigger names had moved onto bigger things. That year, Teebs released an album called  E S T A R A. It was perfectly pleasant. But it felt as if it had been too long since someone pushed him toward anything new.
Now, he’s back with Anicca, his first album in five years and his strongest musical offering since Ardour. In lieu of the collaborators with whom he first attracted notice, Mandowa has gathered a new assemblage—some are familiar names, and some of them relative newcomers. Anicca sparkles when it features them, and also when it doesn’t. Teebs benefits once again from a vibrant musical scene, this time one that he’s gathered himself.
Teebs’ music begins as beat music and grows from there. The opener, “Atoms Song,” is a good example: It starts with a simple keyboard loop, going around and around. But then synths drift in like wind, elements disappear and reappear, a string section paints the song with light. Before you know it, seven and a half minutes have gone by and a lovely sonic sunshower has come down.
One of the things that differentiates Anicca from E S T A R A is its sense of propulsion. There’s constant movement here, and while everything is lovely, nothing lingers too long or lends itself to stasis. Mandowa’s collaborators help keep things moving. Sudan Archives, one of the most exciting Stones Throw prospects in a minute, leans forward over a thumping beat on “Black Dove,” maintaining momentum even when she slows the tempo. “Studie” is replete with all the warmth of early Panda Bear, who arrived at a sound similar to Teebs’ through an entirely different route and who appears on the track to sing, once again, about the perils of social status: “Tripping on the social climb get in line.” (It’s been nice to see Panda Bear start to be understood as a beat-music pioneer in his own right.)  Another standout collaboration comes later in the album as Pink Siifu leads “Daughter Callin’” over a shuffling beat that sounds like great, late-period Dilla.
Teebs doesn’t need other artists to sound inspired.  The softly vibrating “prayers ii” seems at first like a standard beat until you realize how the percussion is tempered by strings and synths, the space between each beat breathing and expanding. It’s a track where the time signature isn’t as obvious as you might initially think. “Slumber” opens with a canvas made of strings, shifts its focus to keyboard, and then redoubles the strings; as the keyboard acquires more and more urgency, the strings grow louder and you can just barely hear what sounds like a human voice low in the mix.
That might be Mandowa’s daughter, who was born the year after E S T A R A came out and whose voice appears on Anicca, along with sounds created by her mother. Where Ardour was influenced by loss—Teebs’s father died during the making of the record—the new album sounds like the work of a man obsessed with family, and willing to bring his collaborators into his own. Perhaps realizing that scenes dissolve, that friends and colleagues move on, helped Teebs to understand just how important it is to make the best of connections while they’re still available. The word “anicca” refers to the concept of impermanence, and this gorgeous album does move along. It’s over before you know it. While you listen to it, though, time disappears entirely.

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Trading his High Aura’d alias for his own name, the Providence experimental musician finds evocative depths in the small, transitory details of slowly evolving drone pieces.

First Fire • At Dawn

John Kolodij saw the slowly unraveling instrumentals he made for nearly a decade as High Aura’d as the soundtrack to spaces he barely knew. In 2017, he told Tiny Mix Tapes that as he sat at home working on his music, he’d often imagine himself in far-off lands—“in a desert, at the edge of an ocean, nighttime in Sonoma, crossing a footbridge in Miami”—and try to make pieces that fit those landscapes. It was his way, he says, of trying to “score everyday life,” and his years of recording with that idea as a guidepost resulted in an evocative, strikingly visual body of work. High Aura’d’s pieces were minimal, but there were always suggestions of memory, adventure, and kaleidoscopic imagery woven into the gentle drones.
For First Fire • At Dawn, Kolodij left the High Aura’d banner behind in favor of his given name, but his instrumentals still follow in the transportive tradition of his earlier pieces. As with a lot of amorphous music, there’s certainly joy in just drifting along to the slow-panning movements of the record’s two side-long pieces, following the arc from noise to melody and back again. But First Fire • At Dawn is special, even among Kolodij’s accomplished catalog, because of the delight it seems to take in small, transitory details, the shimmery liminal spaces that naturally emerge as its tracks build and boil.
“First Fire” is the more austere of the two pieces, opening with the stark wheeze of a grayscale drone that slowly grows in scale and momentum throughout its nearly 18-minute runtime. By the time it peaks, around the 13-minute mark, the music resembles something more like a snowblind black-metal riff than the ominous rumble that started the song. The instrumental accumulation is glacial, but if you pay close attention there’s beauty to be found in the growing maelstrom. The nimbus-like billowing of Kolodij’s guitar work often creases and coalesces into striking shapes, revealing complex harmonies and churning melodies in the depths of the drone. These moments appear for just a second, then pass, a tactic that makes these pieces feel illusory but engaging: You lean closer to hear what other secrets might be lurking in the murk.
The record’s other side, “At Dawn,” is gentler. Built around the mantra-like repetition of a simple banjo melody and some placid guitar work, it’s a stretched-out, twisted-up sort of Americana, similar to Charalambides’ distressed blues or the Appalachian fog of the composer Ross Gentry’s music as Villages. But even though its form is more recognizable at first, “At Dawn” is just as focused on the shape-shifting details that give “First Fire” color. The track begins with the twittering of field recordings of birds, which then make little appearances throughout, adding micro-melodies and a sense of real-world groundedness to the loping instrumental. As the piece unfolds, Kolodij’s contributions are joined by some gasping fiddle work from Anna RG of the experimental folk duo Anna & Elizabeth and glittering mallet percussion from the composer Sarah Hennies.
If, as the song’s title suggests, it’s meant to be a companion to early morning quietude, these contributions from Kolodij’s friends are the ornamentation that lends that time of day its strange magic: The string flourishes hang delicately like fog on a lake, a vibraphone glinting like dew on the grass in the half light. As soon as these moments of bliss appear, they vanish, blending into the blustery ambiance and the sound of rushing water. First Fire • At Dawn relishes in these moments, in the ways their details can appear then evaporate, almost as quickly as you can perceive them. He has said his music has always been about astral trips to far-away lands, but First Fire • At Dawn is less about the destination than the journey itself. You stare outside as the landscape changes—every moment you’re somewhere new.

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The experimental producer and composer’s score for the prairie gothic film is luminous, faintly menacing, and clouded with uncertainty.

Jim O’Rourke: Hands That Bind (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

In Kyle Armstrong’s Hands That Bind, horror is hiding in plain sight. The film, which premiered in 2021 and is due for theatrical release this fall, is set amid desolate Alberta farmlands—a space whose relentless flatness you might assume allows for few mysteries. Straight roads stretch endlessly toward the horizon; barns outnumber trees by a wide margin. Any approaching threat ought to be visible from miles away. But in the world of this carefully paced prairie gothic, unsettling events arrive from out of nowhere, leading to more questions than answers. Who, or what, is mutilating the farmers’ cattle? Who’s in the black sedan making ominous drive-bys? And what are those lights swirling in the sky?
The crucial question, which drives the film’s grippingly human drama as well as its more cryptic events, is philosophical in nature: whether we can ever truly be certain about anything. “My opinion isn’t going to solve anything for you, because my opinion is that I don’t know,” remarks a bartender played by a scene-stealing Will Oldham, as he turns off a Scratch Acid song on the stereo. “Certainty is the rare exception to the rules of life. Whatever’s easiest to swallow is what most folks gravitate towards. Even if you lie to yourself, as best as you can, and look for something you call true, well, whatever your theory is, it’s probably wrong.”
Jim O’Rourke’s soundtrack is perfectly calibrated to this unforgiving space squashed between parched fields and blown-out sky. His palette—detuned piano, watery vibraphone, and a muted, amorphous shimmer that might be harmonium or synthesizer—matches the film’s dusty tones of beige and pewter and mobile-home brown. A high-end fizz resembles the incessant whine of crickets; the occasional spritz of static mimics the strange electrical phenomena on screen. Closer in spirit to the longform drone works of his Steamroom series than the fingerpicked Americana of Bad Timing or the mischievous classic rock of Simple Songs, O’Rourke’s instrumental score is, much like the landscape of the film, flat, faintly menacing, and miserly with its details. (Another comparison point might be the Boxhead Ensemble’s 1997 soundtrack to the film Dutch Harbor: Where the Sea Breaks Its Back, featuring O’Rourke alongside Chicago luminaries like Ken Vandermark and Douglas McCombs.)
It begins gently enough, with a high, lonesome harmony reminiscent of a freight train’s distant whistle. An acoustic bass plucks out a tentative melody. These opening passages move with pastoral ease. But the music quickly sours, clouded with uncertainty, as dark, shapeless figures clamber up from the lower register to disturb the tranquil upper reaches. Light is one of the film’s unspoken subjects—the implacable sun beating down on sere crops, the bokeh-like orbs cutting curlicues in the night sky—and O’Rourke’s soundtrack has similarly luminous properties. He favors soft attacks that come on like a backlist mist, and streaks of dissonance that flash out and disappear, swallowed up in the dull radiance.
The 38-minute score cycles through just a handful of themes and motifs, stirring them occasionally, as though to keep them from sticking. Halfway through, with “A Man’s Mind Will Play Tricks Upon Him,” brushed cymbals and plucked bass kick up a groove beneath a chiming piano melody; it’s one of few places where the record approaches anything resembling a song. But the moment is fleeting. In the concluding “One Way or Another I’m Gone,” the drumbeat returns, but this time there’s no lightness to it. It plods sullenly as jabbing tritones, a constant throughout the album, hint at a nameless evil. The soundtrack ends as it began, hovering in a nebulous interzone, neither major nor minor—ambiguous, ambivalent, unresolved.


Age has mellowed rap’s most audacious fabulist, and on the sequel to his breakout debut he settles into his luxe sound like a pair of velvet slippers.

Port of Miami 2

Rick Ross’s 2006 debut Port of Miami was almost humble compared with what followed it. He indulged in plenty of Scarface fan fiction, yes, but the florid touches that would make Ross a superstar were a few years away. In retrospect, the gap between Port of Miami and “B.M.F.” is the difference between the first Fast & Furious, which was mostly a bunch of street races, and the newer ones, where they’re dropping cars out of helicopters and wrestling nuclear warheads away from international cyberterrorists.
Perhaps the time was right for a sequel to Port of Miami, because over the last half decade, Ross has begun to return to Earth. Age has mellowed the rapper, taming the audacity that fueled his brush with greatness. He’s grown out of action-movie theatrics and toned down the chest-beating bluster of his early ’00s peak as he’s retreated ever-further into gilded luxury rap. He was once one of rap’s all-time great fabulists, but he no longer seems to have the energy to sustain any fantasy that requires him to change out of his velvet slippers and smoking robe.
On Port of Miami 2, Ross no longer raps with an air of invincibility, either. When he suffered a pair of seizures on a plane in 2011, he brushed them off on 2012’s God Forgives, I Don’t as a product of an in-flight blowjob. To the extent that Ross even allowed himself to consider the afterlife back then, it was only to imagine it as another opportunity to show off his finest ride (“On the highway to heaven, can I let my top down?” he rapped). Compare that to Port of Miami 2’s emotional centerpiece “I Still Pray,” which opens with the image of Ross waking from a coma, tubes lodged in his throat. “You could have the biggest clique, but you gon’ die a loner,” he chastises himself. “What good is all the wealth, shitting on yourself?” On the album cover he clutches a photo of his manager Black Bo, who died of cardiovascular disease in 2017.
Ross remains a sharp writer. On “Vegas Residency” he castigates Kanye’s MAGA moment (“Went from battle raps to now we wearin’ MAGA hats/Dade  County, nigga, mansions up in Tamarac/Never golfing with the Trumps and I give you my word”). And Port of Miami 2 offers a bounty of other pleasures, too, including fiery guest spots from Jeezy, Meek Mill, and the late Nipsey Hussle, who cuts down Tekashi 6ix9ine from beyond the grave on “Rich Nigga Lifestyle.” Even Wale, who’s sounded absolutely lost for much of the decade, locks in on “Act a Fool.” And then there’s “BIG TYME,” which lives up to its all-caps title, granting listeners the pleasure of hearing Swizz Beatz hype-man over a Just Blaze beat.
Ross records are always great for moments like that. Other rappers give their fans red meat; Ross serves his Kobe. And yet there’s no getting around it: His presence is dulled. Ross used to put his back into his grunts, stringing together verses from contemptuous snarls. But too often on Port of Miami 2, he locks into the flow of least resistance and simply lets it ride, hiding behind his production instead of asserting his dominion over it. And while his music remains sumptuous as always, that luster alone is no longer enough to wow. You can only hear Ross turn the studio into a Cigar Aficionado cover shoot so many times before it loses its thrill.


Wolf Parade co-vocalist and keyboardist Spencer Krug's side project completes the progression from rickety, insular lo-fi to well-dressed, multi-hued glam pop.

Shut Up I Am Dreaming

As the Wolf Parade juggernaut gathers steam, the quintet's charismatic keyboardist, Spencer Krug, somehow found time to follow his recent self-titled Sunset Rubdown EP with Shut Up I Am Dreaming, a collection of his strongest, most fully realized non-Wolf Parade material to date. Over the course of just one year, Sunset Rubdown's progressed from Snake's Got a Leg's rickety and insular lo-fi basement tape sound to a fuller-bodied EP to this exceedingly well-dressed, multi-hued glam pop.
Now operating as a full band (here, a quartet), Sunset Rubdown more closely resemble Wolf Parade but still maintain the rougher ragtag sound of their previous recordings. A good example is triumphal opener "Stadiums and Shrines II", which continues the practice of updating Krug's songs and echoing his past catalogue (all while building a personal cosmology). This version includes the same lyrics and general melody as the scrubbier slip-n-slide on Snake's Got a Leg, but otherwise it's an entirely different monster. Krug sheds the off-kilter dust-bowl harmonium and stuttering underwater feel of the original for a cleaner, less warped anthem. Now, when he sings "there's a kid in there/ And he's big and dumb/ And he's...kinda scared," instead of going by unnoticed, it'll make you lose your breath.
In his more fleshed-out, metaphysically epic form, Krug consistently finds ways to yoke disparate parts; there's so much inventive stitching, in fact, it makes it tempting to offer a play-by-play with color commentary for every song. Beyond writing catchy tunes and packing them with whispers, mallets, harpsichord, and patches of cheapskate drum machines, he's an intriguing presence. Instead of bubbling along at one level, he roller coasters and raves, mixing nonsense with sharp observations and sadness with puns. This jam-packed, unbridled sound ought to heighten the Frog Eyes comparisons, but complicated by the groups' shared tour and Krug's former role as one of Carey Mercer's band members, that contrast is a bit of a bore. Besides, Krug doesn't stick to any particular style beyond his approach to his howls.
More interesting to note: The cumulative effect of Shut Up I Am Dreaming surpasses "I'll Believe in Anything"'s ostensible perfection. That's a brilliant song, yes, but this a brilliant album, ballooning with those sorts of moments on repeat. See, for instance, the speedy ragtime re-versioning of "Snake's Got a Leg III", which feels comparable to Wolf Parade's "Dears Sons and Daughters of Hungry Ghosts"-- albeit with a scrubby sense of pathos-- or jaunty sawdust kicker "They Took a Vote and Said No". As in many of Krug's songs, there seems to be some sort of moral, as if he's writing warped and warbling Aesop Fables. Here, it's "a kid" who "wants a ride", learning that nothing comes for free and "there are things that have to die so other things can stay alive." Some fleet-fingered guitar work and crashing drums obscure the lesson; after a pause and piano line, we're handed a kick-ass axe-toting coda.
Then there's the piano-based ballad "Us Ones in Between", on which he pulls out his deck of unexpected metaphors woven with an endlessly ambient tone-generating guitar: "You are a waterfall/ Wading inside a well/ And you are a wrecking ball/ Before the building fell." Again, there's one of those tenderly surrealistic morals: "I've heard of creatures who eat their babies/ I wonder if they stop to think about the taste." Through an inversion, Krug himself becomes the creature as well as the eaten, asking, "Oh baby, mother me before you eat me." In other new turns, there are female backing vocals provided by former Pony Up! member Camilla Wynne Ingr, and on many tracks glockenspiel or xylophone tap a ringing background.
The opening piano tingle of "Swimming" churns into haunted-house circus music and then it bursts and blooms into the catchiest little music-box reprise of "The Dust You Kick Up Is Too Fine" from the debut. These echoes are everywhere, the resampling a weirdly pleasant and satisfying sort of minimalism, offering listeners a chance to see his work from various angles.
This is rich stuff and it won't be surprising if some listeners prefer Krug's maniacal flights of fancy to Apologies to the Queen Mary's sense of balance. There's obviously much to be said for Wolf Parade's addictive push/pull switch hitting-- that overflowing seep between Bowie/Eno and jittery Iggy/Springsteen-- but it's also incredibly fun watching pop songs pulled apart and restitched into tiny rococo monuments and tossed skyward. All the Wolf Parade comparisons are a drag, sorry, but they're inevitable. Plus, the context's important: Because Krug followed some of the best material on Apologies with this elegant wallop, he's looking increasingly like an important songwriter rather than just another flavor-of-the-month.


On their first album in almost six years, Kranky's drone stars explore the difference between music and sound, turning in an effort that's much more minimal and muted than 2001's outstanding The Tired Sounds of...

Stars of the Lid: And Their Refinement of the Decline

And Their Refinement of the Decline

The vanishing-point music created by drone elders Phil Niblock and, especially, LaMonte Young is what happens when a fixation on held tones reaches a tipping point. Timbre is reduced to either a single clear instrument or a sine wave, silence disappears completely, and the base-level interaction between small clusters of "pure" tone becomes the music's content. This kind of work takes what typically helps us to distinguish "music" from "sound," discards nearly all of it, and then starts over again from scratch.
Drone legends Stars of the Lid find their music drifting toward this rarefied place on their first album after an almost six-year absence. On first listen, And Their Refinement of the Decline seems a continuation of its beloved precursor, 2001's The Tired Sounds of... It is again a double CD with about two hours of music; it uses a similar palette of violin, cello, and Stuart Dempster-inspired horns to augment the electronically generated drones. Song titles again refer to brain chemistry ("Dopamine Clouds Over Craven Cottage"), altered states ("Another Ballad for Heavy Lids"), and the nuts and bolts of the music's creation (Apreludes (in C sharp major)"). And yet, upon putting on Tired Sounds of... again for comparison, I see Adam Wiltzie and Brian McBride have actually come some distance in the last half-decade. And the place they're moving to is starker, quieter, somehow even more subtle, where the tiniest amount of sound information is put upon to do the greatest amount of work. Where Tired Sounds of... sounded genteel and stately next to the raw four-track feedback fests they'd started with ("Tape Hiss Makes Me Happy" summed up their debut nicely), it now sounds about halfway between their genesis and this album; "refinement" turns out to be the perfect word.
The first thing that becomes apparent is that there's less discernible guitar here. The acoustic instruments once served as foils to the channeled electricity, but now they've taken center stage, and the horns and strings are often used in a curious way. Rather than being stretched out to push against silence with drone music proper, on tracks like "Dungtitled (in A Major)" and "The Evil that Never Arrived", flugelhorn, cello, and violin are used in short, slowly decaying bursts, keeping skeletal tunes aloft by bumping them with a chord every few seconds. The added space between the notes makes the pieces seem less forward and pervasive, like they might vanish into the air at any moment. It also cuts the drama and leaves the music more open to interpretation.
While SOTL will always be tagged as "cinematic," the music here rarely leads. You get the sense that this it could be used to color a wide array of images. The brief "Hiberner Toujours" on the second disc is a three-note phrase played on a cello with an intense vibrato and heavy reverb, first alone, then doubled, with muted electronic treatments lurking just behind. I could just as easily see it soundtracking a morning-after newsreel of a WWII firebombing or a stop-motion blooming of a flower. And then "Humectez La Mouture" extends an idea developed by the sorely missed Labradford and perfected by the Books: A deceptively simple and spacious bit of music with a neutral emotional cast is presented without additional cues and allowed to live or die on its own. Here SOTL take a couple of piano chords lightly kissed with electronics and let the progression play with small bits of shading, including what sounds like manipulated pedal steel and the dialog track from a French film. It doesn't "go" anywhere, really, and it's hard to say what it projects; the music could be crushingly sad, lightly melancholic, or even uplifting, depending on the state of mind of the hearer. It becomes a sound divorced from intention and its ambiguity is its strength.
This stripping down and moving away from easily definable mood makes And Their Refinement of the Decline a bit harder to grasp initially than any previous SOTL record. The less pronounced changes and more sparing use of dynamic range means that the music can easily slip into the background when something else requires attention. That's par for the course with ambient music, of course, but I get the sense this music is shortchanged by being functional. There's too much focus on the careful layering of sounds, and too many small but still important tweaks happening from moment to moment to let everything slide by in an undifferentiated blob of sound.
It's the rare moment when SOTL tip their hand and let more expressionistic feelings seep into the music that you understand how well the album works as a whole. The brilliant "Even if You're Never Awake (Deuxième)" is one such place, as its surges of strings are gradually cut with curled shavings of backward guitar, and some almost sub-sonic bass halfway through its 9 minutes announces an even wearier turn into the lament's final section. It "develops" in the conventional sense, as does "December Hunting for Vegetarian Fuckface", the album's final track.
After almost two hours we arrive at perhaps the most playful title ever from a band known for playful titles, and also what could be SOTL's defining statement. "December Hunting" is like the band's entire history playing out in a single piece, all the tensions in their music-- acoustic vs. electric, cryptic vs. obvious, joyous vs. sorrowful-- are articulated and probed in 17 heavenly minutes of drone without a tedious moment. It's the final and greatest example of that special thing that happens, with all due respect to their fine solo material, only when these two get together.


The jazz-folk group blends acoustic guitar and percussion with dub echo and washes of synth on a mellow, intricate EP inspired by the natural world and its Bristol, England hometown.

Tara Clerkin Trio: On the Turning Ground EP

On the Turning Ground EP

Bristol’s Tara Clerkin Band once had eight members, until five of them “un-joined,” leaving the eponymous Clerkin and brothers Sunny-Joe Paradiso and Patrick Benjamin as the Tara Clerkin Trio. Listening to the trio’s instrumental puzzles, it’s hard to imagine where you’d wedge five more pieces: This is slow, airy music that nonetheless teems with life, the jazz-folk equivalent of a Kelly Reichardt movie. Their new EP, On the Turning Ground, ambles through blissful psych-pop and washed-out breakbeats, harpsichord interludes and dubby balladry. Every new idea seems like a natural progression, as if you’d slowly wandered deeper into a verdant reserve.
Tara Clerkin Trio’s self-titled 2020 debut was chic, nonchalant city music: The sinister gem “I Know He Will” felt like a live recording captured in a jazz club that shared a thin wall with a takeaway kitchen. Throughout the record, disparate sounds garbled and interweaved, capturing a sense of higgledy-piggledy beauty. On the Turning Ground is clearly still inspired by Bristol—the opening song is called “Brigstow,” an earlier form of the city’s name, and “The Turning Ground” is animated by the kind of breakbeat usually found in its famed d’n’b clubs—but it’s more wide-ranging, too, using synthetic sounds to mimic the slowness and stillness of the natural world. Paradiso’s snare brushes on “Brigstow” sound like leaves crunching underfoot; stabs of cello and melodica are like distant bird calls. On “World in Delay,” crackling dub production becomes a mirror of Clerkin’s lyrics, which look to botanic renewal as a sign of hope: “Only flowers on the tree/A remedy/Waiting for the new copy/Does it feel nearly real?”
Clerkin’s words tend toward abstraction, but certain motifs recur. On “The Turning Ground,” she again seems to find solace in the passing seasons (“In another time/I’m new again”); on “Marble Walls” she sings of finding comfort in the echoing sounds of a church choir. Clerkin has a sweet, hard-to-pin-down voice: She’s prone to slowly, steadily drawing out syllables, like a less urbane Anna Domino, and sometimes sings with a Trish Keenan-esque sing-song quality.
Mostly, Clerkin’s voice is an essential textural element; despite its chilly production, On The Turning Ground feels profoundly hopeful, and Clerkin’s high, resonant voice, when it pops up, feels like spring blooms cropping up between patches of frost. But even in its sparsest moments, On the Turning Ground seems to nod to a universe that’s constantly growing and expanding, even when things might feel static. On closer “Once Around,” a loop of Clerkin’s guitar is slowly surrounded by more and more echo, with such subtlety that at first you might not even notice it. Eventually, washes of synth spread underneath, and cello and harpsichord eventually subsume the guitar entirely. It’s the most melancholy song on the EP, and the most beautiful—incremental change and renewal, happening before your very ears.


The Worcester, Massachusetts, emotive rock band the Hotelier’s sophomore record, Home, Like Noplace Is There, burns with a five-alarm intensity. If there isn’t an intervention or a 3 a.m. phone call that must be answered, a funeral is likely to follow. These emergencies are related with rousing group chants, call-and-response hooks, and collegiate jangle.

The Hotelier: Home, Like Noplace Is There

Home, Like Noplace Is There

On the opening track of the Hotelier’s sophomore record, Home, Like Noplace Is There, Christian Holden is a man of many words: 288 of them, to be exact. And they’re all secondary to two crucial, non-verbal moments that are nowhere to be found on the lyric sheet. Heraldic horns pipe up over a waltz of cyclic, clean guitars and sustained electric organ, right before Holden sings to a friend on the ledge, “Just remember when you’d call me to come/Take a deep breath and then jump.” And the rest of the band punctuates it with a perverse, celebratory “whoa-oh-oh!” This brief moment of release dies down and after three and a half minutes of Holden twisting the same melody until it’s about to snap, his last words are “the pills that you gave didn’t do anything/I just slept for years on end” and then he gasps. What comes next is the agony of defeat, and the full-band crash is inevitable and knee-buckling every time. For the final minute, Holden is inconsolable in his failure, barely intelligible as he yells, “Grab a hold/I know I said to not/But what the fuck do I know?” and seconds later, the track cuts out abruptly. The name of this song is “An Introduction to the Album,” and is it fucking ever.
Home, Like Noplace Is There burns with the same five-alarm intensity throughout its nine songs, and the few times where the Worcester band are at a loss for words, they have no trouble expressing themselves. There isn’t a single moment of passive listening here because the relationships that fill Holden’s songs require 24/7-surveillance; they’re toxic and codependent, with people who “try to make chaos external” and are “killing the self to protect it from harm.” If there isn’t an emergency intervention or a 3 a.m. phone call that must be answered, a funeral is likely to follow. The specifics are removed, but there are lockdowns, pills, fleeting glimmers of hope, broken promises, and people who are just plain fucked to give you an idea of what’s at stake.
This all makes for common subject matter in rock music, especially within the Hotelier’s emotive punk rock. Home derives its gut-wrenching power from Holden’s narrator being someone who’s barely escaped the same tragedies, speaks the language of its victims, and is pulled between knowing that his friends and family may be beyond help and the moral and spiritual drive to be the better man. In “The Scope of All of This Rebuilding,” kinship and resentment are inseparable as Holden spits over barbed, clashing guitars, “You cut your ropes, left the umbilical.” Not caring and caring too much hurt equally, and these songs ache with guilt and real remorse. During “Your Deep Rest,” Holden can’t bring himself to attend the subject’s funeral; in the first chorus he’s merely uncomfortable, the second time around, “the sight of your family made me feel responsible.”
And yet, if you ignore the lyrics, “Your Deep Rest” is a shambling, shuffling piece of soaring pop-rock that could sneak onto any Clear Channel playlist. Home, Like Noplace Is There is emotionally relentless, but a relentlessly catchy record as well. Holden’s voice holds true to emo’s standards—passionate enough to aspire to the high notes, lacking the training and polish to hit them—though it’s malleable enough to fit within just about every variant of punk that’s gone overground. You get rousing group chants, call-and-response hooks, and collegiate jangle sliced and diced with Fugazi’s precision (“The Scope of All of This Rebuilding”) and an abrupt turn towards double-time, folkish punk of Against Me! or the Weakerthans (“In Framing”), and that’s just within five minutes.
For all of its song-by-song diversity, Home, Like Noplace Is There is constructed as a whole to mirror the endless cycle of abuse and relapse—a key lyric from “In Framing” puts it it right out there, “You retraced the same shape/Cut up and resewn/When you felt abandoned, when you felt alone.” It’s not a narrative, though each stylistic shift can serve as a plot twist. Holden manages some sense of composure during the stately first half of “An Introduction to the Album” and “In Framing,” and loses it during “The Scope of All of This Rebuilding” and the impulsively raging “Life in Drag.” The most desperate choruses are the most anthemic, as on near power-ballads “Discomfort Revisited’ and “Among the Wildflowers,” Holden recognizes what his suffering friends never do: the futility of trying to get through this alone.
Theatrical closer “Dendron” takes its title from the Greek word for “tree” and ties back to the arboreal imagery of “Your Deep Rest,” as well as its chorus with a gut-wrenching admission (“Part of your charm is the way you would push me from/All of the traps that I just couldn’t see/Figures the one that would trip you up/Would be the one that was set there by me”). Home ends with a transposed version of the melody from “An Introduction to the Album,” and it’s a brief respite, not a happy ending or even an ending. It just puts you right back where you started, prepared to fight another day.
Home, Like Noplace Is There is very much an album that works its ass off; it can’t afford to do otherwise, as the Hotelier battle addiction, ignorance, and their own past. The first line finds a flock of singing birds telling Holden to “tear the buildings down,” perhaps referring to their auspicious debut as the Hotel Year, which was beset by scene politics and industry bullshit to the point where they’re writing it out of their history to an extent. And the Hotelier are fighting against the real possibility of this record failing to reach its intended audience. Towards the end of that missive, Holden shrugs at being “emo now," knowing that word could scare away self-identifying indie rock and punk fans even though this is where you’ll find nearly all of the passionate, lyrical and hooky guitar bands on independent labels with personality, basement-show ethics and big-tent ambitions these days.
But sonically, politically, and ethically, the Hotelier are punk as fuck and perhaps in turn, Home, Like Noplace There Is can occasionally sound more exciting and unstable than “masterful.” There are slip-ups—“Housebroken” is overwrought with metaphor, and there are times when the muddy production can’t quite support their arrangements—but ones that let you know they’re only beginning to realize what they’re capable of. So this might be the sound of the Hotelier tearing the building down, but they’re working towards something monumental.


After numerous, soul-crushing comeback albums-- see, for example, this year's Stooges LP-- this reunited trio had little business releasing a record as eerily faithful to their own past as this one, but here it is, in all its low-key glory.

Beyond

A straight shot west out of Boston on I-90 will carry you, in two hours or less, to Western Massachusetts, where the country still looks like it did twenty or even 40 years ago: college towns, I-91 tracing the same lazy ladder from Springfield up through Holyoke and Northampton, Amherst and Deerfield. Out there it's taken for granted that the houses will be drafty, the winters uniformly long, and that, on any given trip to the local supermarket, one might spot Thurston or Lou or Kim or J, on-and-off locals for more than twenty years. This is the quiet corner of the American indie elite, alive and well, where the long sleep between 1983 and 2007 feels more like a light daydream, and where the gap between a record then and a record now is no bigger than the label change from Homestead and SST to Geffen or Fat Possum. Dinosaur Jr., Amherst's native sons, have no business releasing a record as eerily faithful to their own past as this one, but here it is, in all its low-key glory.
The nostalgia this thing exudes is hard to pin down. Jess Harvell's generational invocation in 2005 at the reissue of the three records the original Dinosaur lineup made in 1985, 1987, and 1988 is as good as any representation of the utter and complete solidarity and identification a certain enormous group of fans of Alternative Rock (read: everybody of music-listening age in the nineties) had-- has-- with this band. Just throw on anything from Dinosaur to Without a Sound and watch your elders go slack-jawed. Imagine our surprise when we finally became old enough and realized that the battered weariness that was always there in their music and in J Mascis' ever-thinning voice was perfectly suited to actually being a little bit old.
Beyond, the band's first record as the selfsame trio since 1988's Bug, benefits enormously-- more so even than fellow MA-veterans Mission of Burma or latter-day Sonic Youth-- from the years, experiences, successes, and disappointments elapsed between then and now. It's been an eternity since the sludgy Jurassic ooze of their debut, Dinosaur, the light-bursting-through-trees melody of You're Living All Over Me, the clean lines of Bug and Mascis' subsequent solo expeditions, under his own name and that of his old band. But none of the three ever stopped making music, whether Lou (Sebadoh, Sentridoh, Folk Implosion, and solo), J (Witch, the Fog) or otherwise (Murph?). Their music aged naturally along with them.
Beneath Beyond's crystalline production is the sublime result: years and years of weariness and aging and conflict put back into the bottle (with the same label no less-- the cover is as precise a rendering of that late-eighties SST aesthetic as anything from the actual era). Less a theme park of the past and more of an actual trip there-- think Coney Island-- Beyond is nostalgic for everything but the band's own glory days. If anything, it's an exercise in making their entire twenty-year output sound contemporary again.
It's easy to spot parallels ("Crumble" smacks of "Repulsion" to me; the guitar-work in "Pick Me Up" cribs vaguely from "Feel the Pain") but what struck me about Beyond is how little time I've spent thinking about any of their old songs since I got a copy. And I can't be the only one whose blood-pressure went up a bit when the first single, "Almost Ready", dropped-- the obvious return of Murph, picking out on the snare all the melodic nuance of J's return-to-the-big-time riff, the sanded-down and low-pitched reverie of Mascis' voice, an almost platonic ideal of a Dinosaur Jr. song. Add the follow up, "Been There All The Time", the crusading guitar line and signature self-doubt-- "Can I be there all the time?"-- and the inevitable solo and the revelation dawns: they are the exact same band they were.
Lack of a certain kind of ambition has always been Dinosaur Jr.'s style, and songs like "Crumble"-- which is built like and plays like every other slacker mope couch-song these guys have written-- reconstruct their ancient, ever-present atmosphere of escapism. The two Lou Barlow songs, "Back to Your Heart" and "Lightning Bulb", are keystones here, as well as the latest ambiguous entries into a now-infinite history of hatred and reconciliation between the band's two songwriters-- ironically, both new songs are reminiscent of nothing so much as Mascis' solo work. Mascis returns the favor on "I Got Lost", which is not recommended listening for moments of extreme emotional vulnerability, and on "We're Not Alone". The false ending on that song halfway in, its tired collapse and tentative resurrection, is either a great metaphor or just a beautiful thing-- maybe both.
The lyrics aren't the primary focus here-- and they never were for these guys-- but it's hard to argue with the generic uplift of "This Is All I Came to Do" and "Pick Me Up", throwbacks to a certain era where we all sang along to songs made up of nothing but platitudes. The record brings back the kind of push alt-rock would later turn into shove, a call to arms short of the usual pressgang.
Invert everything I just said and you get the critique: same-old things, one song seeping into another, tired nostalgia, nostalgic tiredness, ear-bleeding country-for-old-men. But for all the ubiquity of Dinosaur then and now, I can't think of one band but Dinosaur Jr. able to do what they do. If it's nothing special, perennially under-dogged and wasted, who doesn't want more of it?


Tom Krell's third album as How to Dress Well is a bolder, more accomplished version of what came before in his catalog. The stylistic range of “What Is This Heart?” lends credence to Krell’s “pop, but not populist” ambitions—if he was to make a superproducer-per-song, blockbuster album, this is how it would likely turn out.

How to Dress Well: "What Is This Heart?"

"What Is This Heart?"

How to Dress Well is a project that Tom Krell conducts with a particularly modern transparency: the music he shares is meant to illuminate the music that he makes. His most recent Soundcloud mixtapes, No Words to Say and I Think Life Might Be Elsewhere (Hungover Mix), were heavy on what we’ve come to expect from him—along with his own work in progress, we’d hear a very specific set of influences, mostly R&B and hip-hop, high/lowbrow dichotomies accepted by indie culture such as Lou Reed and Miley Cyrus, Young Thug, and GG Allin. But late last year, early 2000s emo acts like the Starting Line, Taking Back Sunday and Saves the Day started to infiltrate, and surely he was trying to tell us why these bands speak to him. Whether it’s Chief Keef or Chris Conley, Krell is informed by genre but driven by expression; in his mind, pop music is anything that aspires for the most immediate and impactful connection, even if it risks embarrassment in the process. As a result, his transcendent third LP "What Is This Heart?" is a pop album of the highest caliber.
It’s easy to be skeptical, as he once treated mainstream music like an academic—pop rendered as ambient and insular experiences. His 2010 debut Love Remains didn't sound like anything else and still doesn’t, as if William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops were filled with cuts from early '90s R&B. Its follow-up Total Loss was sleek and solemn salon-soul, interpolating Ashanti but still modeled by outré, experimental artists ranging from Proem to Forest Swords to Steve Reich. The dubious term “indie R&B” already projected a degree of otherness on a white man in a primary black genre, and Krell’s egghead influences and agamous lyrics gave his detractors plenty of additional dirt.
But even in 2010, it should’ve been fairly obvious that grad students and grade schoolers alike can dream of being Michael Jackson, Bobby Brown or Beyoncé. Krell told us recently, “I want my music to be pop, but not populist—I want to be #1 on Billboard, but I want to do it on my own terms.” Previously, that might’ve smacked of indie defeatism, of wanting to be admired for sticking to his guns by contrasting it against an impossible scenario. But in 2014, unique and truly weird polyglot R&B/pop records like Beyoncé, Channel Orange and Kaleidoscope Dream have achieved runaway commercial, critical, and artistic success. It’s completely within Krell’s rights to ask, “why not me?”
So, here, Krell lets the music catch up with his extroverted candor, combining emotional risk and artistic confidence to figure out just how far How to Dress Well can go while retaining the project's essence. In retrospect, Krell’s albums sound as tentative and sketchbook as his mixtapes, as nearly everything on “What Is This Heart?” is a bolder, more accomplished version of what came before. "2 Years On (Shame Dream)” reiterates Krell's taste for unseemly reverie, as a car ride with his family turns both surreal and hyperreal, its ache presented in startling clarity—Tracy Chapman may have been on his mind as a starting point for bare, acoustic folk, but he needed to cover the uber-emo “At Your Funeral” over a Crash of Rhinos instrumental on his Hungover Mix to realize he was capable of doing it. “What You Wanted” pressurizes the subdued militance and tension of “Cold Nites” and releases it in the monstrous, pitch-shifted vocals that deface “Face Again”. The orchestral ambitions of the Just Once EP and the redlining distortion of Love Remains are removed from their headphone-intended origins and given concert hall ambience on “Pour Cyril".
The stylistic range of “What Is This Heart?” lends credence to Krell’s “pop, but not populist” ambitions—if he was to make a superproducer-per-song, blockbuster album, this is how it would likely turn out. However, Rodaidh McDonald returns to produce and retains the stained glass sound of Total Loss: bright, translucent, and nowhere near as brittle as it may first appear. More importantly, Krell’s voice is made the focal point rather than a texture. His singing can be parodied at this point, meaning that it's something established as clearly his own: demonstrative and inclusive as good karaoke, not performative in a way that’s meant to be judged. It’s spiritual, though more borne of a monastic purity than a specific religion. And now, it’s only distorted as a signature punctuation rather than using the effect as a white-out slather.
Krell makes it known that he's got chops, the kind that can handle the physical challenges of “What Is This Heart?”’s pop rites of passage—“Words I Don’t Remember” aspires for the “Purple Rain” extended coda, Krell’s wavering, breathless coo reverbed and distended to emulate an emotive, showstopping guitar solo. L.A. Reid should’ve desperately tried to smuggle the effervescent disco-pop of “Repeat Pleasure” onto Xscape and if there was every a doubt that a HTDW song could be a legitimate smash hit rather than a deconstruction of one, there’s the arena-R&B of “Precious Love”, which tags on a gorgeous, unexpected key change that lasts about ten seconds just to stunt.
In the true spirit of How to Dress Well, “What Is This Heart?” is comprehensive and referential, littered with bits and pieces of the music that’s moved him over the years. “Words I Don’t Remember” teases its lyrical cold war with the milky chords of Diana Ross’ “Missing You”; Beyoncé's declaratory “to the left” cadence from “Irreplaceable” is utilized to express Krell’s apposite desire “to relate, to relate” on "Precious Love". Meanwhile, the spirit of “Very Best Friend” is so plainspoken and eternal that it has to be some roller rink obscurity from his youth, the source of which Krell is keeping from us all.
For the duration of How to Dress Well’s existence, Krell’s obsessive devotion to pop music has served as a connection he can trust, as he lowers himself into the depths of unanswerable questions about spirituality and death. While that love remains, Krell’s breakthrough on "What Is This Heart?" is a staggering paradox: as long as he holds onto that tether, he’ll probably never get to the bottom.
While Krell is sometimes still that college freshman listening to Jimmy Eat World with a “Childhood Faith in Love”, he writes about love like the philosophy Ph.D. student that he is—much of this album recognizes a pop cultural paradigm where love is presented as a panacea, the single most important thing a person can acquire. But the problem is that it’s so often conveyed through consumer products that love becomes one itself—something meant to be obtained, consumed, and replaced, a simple prop to occupy one’s time.
Krell recognizes his own complicitly in this situation both as a human and as someone who makes pop songs in How to Dress Well. The first words of “Words I Don’t Remember” are, distressingly, “You know that I love you, baby”, and he confesses with palpable guilt, "Said 'it was you' for the rest of our lives", referring to the joyous centerpiece of Total Loss.  “& It Was U” was indicative of how the brief flickers of happiness on past HTDW albums only served to remind you of the surrounding, oppressive presence of death and depression. Though "What Is This Heart?" is by far Krell’s lightest, most melodic album, his lyrics are constantly prodding at a pervasive societal problem: a mistrust of intimacy, fear of legitimate connection, the idea of romance as a competitive sport.
But if you think this is some kind of grad-level treatise, remember that the title of this album is phrased as a question. Krell’s pain and pleasure is borne of in situ struggle—do you say just what you want and when you want it in pursuit of an honest relationship, knowing that your most honest moments can be wicked? That’s the cruel irony at the center of “Repeat Pleasure”, where the title doesn't instantly reveal its cynical view of sex. What initially sounds like a glittery valentine becomes a "Dear John"-in-waiting, as Krell realizes our tendencies to get caught up in routine:"I say there's no one above you/ But now there's a new place above that line.…Even if you're holding on for something unchanging/ And once you got it you'll want something else." “What You Wanted” similarly provokes people who see others' hot love and emotion fade rather than continuing endlessly and assume that the same won't happen to them: "Said I know that I want it/ Know that as soon as I've got it/ It'll change, I'll hate it."  Later, on "A Power", Krell seeks sympathy and serenity rather than carnality; during a tribal, percussive breakdown and his most intense vocal performance, he sings with desperate joy, that if he doesn't share his desire to "loved and lost in all directions", he'll be sucked into, "dark, silence and the void".
Similar to Ezra Koenig, Krell can be the smartest guy in the room by having the best questions and the least amount of answers, and "What is This Heart?" does share important commonalities with the intellectually sound spiritual awakening of *Modern Vampires of the City—*their creators have always met their dull accusations of appropriation head on, and on their resepective third albums, they make them a moot point by completely upstaging the iffy subgenre they’re largely responsible for. Yes, “indie R&B” was always a condescending genre tag for unclassifiable music, but it did help focus attention on the increasing interaction between big-budget pop and the sort of recording tactics that almost always resulted in would-be Guided By Voices and Ariel Pinks. Krell asserts that Love Remains does deserve credit for changing the trajectory of indie music in the new decade, still noting that, “while everyone was praising the underground and the overground coming together, somehow that turned into there not being any underground music."
And he’s right: “indie R&B” ended up being just as stylized, hyped and victim to fashion as the big league stuff. This hasn’t been the direct cause of so many listeners rediscovering things like Sun Kil Moon in 2014, but it sure isn’t a fucking coincidence. Nor are the major influences of “What Is This Heart?”, an album that shames most of its peers musically and reveals that what the game’s been missing is, y’know, heart. Know damn well, if you love this album, you will be mocked for it, and soon—because one of its singles crests on a falsetto cry of, “even broken my heart will go on!”, and because there’s a song called “Childhood Faith in Love (Everything Must Change, Everything Must Stay the Same)”.
And it’s because like any vaccine to a ubiquitous illness, "What Is This Heart?" makes you initially susceptible and vulnerable, and that’s risky when modern discourse seeks metaphorical blood, allowing people to disclose more than ever without actually revealing anything. So make no mistake, the title of this album is a challenge as well, as How to Dress Well’s modern masterpiece is conducted with the most eternal transparency—Krell asks “what is this heart” and lets you look right into his own.


The veteran avant-garde composer’s third album in two years places him alongside a new generation of collage artists, tying a dizzying array of stylistic signifiers into complex knots.

Stolen Car

For the past 40 years, Carl Stone has been atomizing recordings of ubiquitous and obscure music alike, transforming his source material into kaleidoscopic fantasies. His electronic compositions, stuttering and illusory, repurpose minute sonic elements from a wide variety of different genres, splicing, looping, and contorting them beyond recognition. They are referential but speak entirely with their own vocabulary, liberating Stone’s sounds from the dual constraints of expectation and commodification. Steve Reich’s “Come Out” and Terry Riley’s “You’re No Good” are antecedents, but Stone’s music is less appropriative and more celebratory. When he started experimenting in the 1970s, he was primarily splicing magnetic tape; in the ’80s, he became an early adopter of digital sampling and delay, using early Macintosh computers to manipulate recordings via MIDI. He now uses a laptop and the audio programming language Max/MSP to mince sounds and paste them back together again in shapes that only tangentially reference their original form. Regardless of the technology used, his process of weirding the dominant ways we experience different styles of music remains consistent.
After two compilations of pieces from between 1973 and 1993, Stone’s early work has recently reached a wider audience beyond the Los Angeles avant-garde scene that nurtured it. The techniques he pioneered have become increasingly relevant in the music of artists like Angel Marcloid (aka Fire-Toolz and Nonlocal Forecast) and labels like Orange Milk, where disparate stylistic elements are collaged at breakneck speeds, pushing back against the streaming era’s algorithmically derived systems of genre formation. Stolen Car, Stone’s third full-length in two years (a notable acceleration for him), sits easily alongside albums by this new wave of omnivorous experimentalists. While many of his early compositions unfolded over entire album sides, these pieces are closer to pop music in structure and length, and seem mastered to do battle in the loudness war. These are more likely sly references to contemporary pop than a capitulation to accessibility; Stolen Car is a dizzying array of stylistic signifiers virtuosically tied into complex knots.
At times it feels like Stone’s music is a secret decoder ring unlocking the infinite possibilities hidden within other recordings. “Figli” and “Ganci” were constructed using the same sample, but listening to each is a radically different experience. “Ganci” is slow and deliberate, an elongated vocal line stretched over an oozing mosaic of shadowy voices and electronic tones. It feels mournful, the repeated wordless phrase a mantra of indecipherable discontent. From there, “Figli” charges forth, frenzied and euphoric. A voice that once seemed pitiful flutters about in miniature snippets at the speed of hummingbird wings, pinging between the left and right channels in euphoric bursts. For over three minutes, its chopped melodies float weightless before a long awaited drop of steady four-on-the-floor kick transforms it into what could be (only semi-ironically) referred to as a “banger.” The track works just as well as a club-ready pop song as it does a thoroughly baffling avant-garde composition.
That deft manipulation and recreation of pop music’s emotional impact out of apparent chaos is a substantial part of what makes much of the music on Stolen Car the most fully realized of Stone’s career. On many of his early experiments the focus was on process, and he often let the loops he created unfold according to systems that weren’t necessarily reflective of the sample’s original form. Tracks like “Bojuk,” however, have distinct sections that recur, almost like a song, and the magic is in the melody itself rather than the glitchy cuts that have become his hallmark. In a recent interview with Tone Glow, Stone discussed having until recently “tuned out popular culture” after discovering avant-garde music and other forms from around the world. But even as he revels in the prismatic decimation of his source material, he seems more appreciative of song craft and rhythmic consistency than ever. It’s telling that the album’s least engaging piece, “Saaris,” is also its longest: Lacking the gleeful builds or dynamic structures that define the rest of the record, it consists of a simple muted chord progression looped for over 10 minutes.
One of Stone’s major accomplishments with Stolen Car, as in the best of his earlier work, is his ability to highlight unique sonic elements of music from around the world—pop from Asia and the U.S., European classical, folk traditions from pretty much everywhere—while simultaneously unifying them under one aesthetic framework. Listening to his music, it can be nearly impossible to determine where he may have sourced any given sound; the joy comes from abandoning any quest for provenance and listening instead with unbiased ears. Stolen Car celebrates the universality of music while acknowledging the singular attributes that make styles and traditions appealing, bringing us closer to a unified understanding of the power of listening. Better still, it does it not as an academic exercise, but with excitement and reverence.

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Calexico have always been restless experimenters, juxtaposers and journeymen, crafting a unique fusion of\n\ bluesy Mariachi, desert-rock and jazz ...

Feast of Wire

Calexico have always been restless experimenters, juxtaposers and journeymen, crafting a unique fusion of bluesy Mariachi, desert-rock and jazz, and injecting healthy doses of experimentation into the otherwise straightforward records on which they've made guest appearances. Yet, for their innovation and distinctive sound, their albums have always had their weak spots-- moments in which their ideas seemed to be running away with the band's ability to execute them. That time has passed. All of Calexico's previous strengths come home to roost on Feast of Wire, the band pushing their experiments further than ever before and pulling each of them off unfalteringly. In short, Calexico have created their first genuinely masterful full-length, crammed with immediate songcraft, shifting moods and open-ended exploration.
A brief acoustic guitar figure and pounding waltz beat open things at a crisp gait. Joey Burns quickly intones with the lines, "Washed my face in the rivers of empire/ Made my bed with a cardboard crate," immediately establishing the tension of the borderline that pulls Calexico's music in its many directions. Burns is suddenly a singer-- he's always made do with what he had, but the limitations that were once so apparent have developed into a strong and confident tenor, assertive and emotive. The music behind him feels bolder and more courageous, too, as the veil of obscurity that guarded so much of their previous releases has vanished. The detail of this album is utterly stunning, as melodies rise against countermelodies, subtle electronic processing seals guitars in amber, and instruments blend in fascinating and unpredictable ways.
The band keeps things tight and concise across sixteen tracks, and John Convertino's drums corral the rush of sound into all the right spaces, pushing the steel guitar motifs that color the background of "Quattro (World Drifts In)" up to meet Burns' vocals and beating back the bombastic strings that cascade over "Black Heart" like a desert thunderstorm. "Not Even Stevie Nicks" is pristine pop that makes me wish Burns would find more occasions to use his falsetto. It also makes me wish he'd print his lyrics, even if lines like, "With a head like a vulture and a heart full of hornets/ He drives off the cliff into the blue," convey such a rush of emotions that they virtually fill in the blanks by themselves.
He's still full of border stories, too, with narratives like "Across the Wire" packing up tales of dodging the border patrol and leaving everything you know for the abstraction of hope. "Woven Birds" is a hushed reverie for an abandoned mission that even the swallows have left to the ghosts, building to spine-tingling moments where the vocals, Melodica and vibes all meet on the same note and coalesce into a single sound. The piano and strings of "The Book and the Canal" serve as a moody pivot into the album's mostly instrumental second half, though the darkness of that piece is largely swept aside by "Attack El Robot! Attack!", which mashes Pharaoh Sanders, Portuguese guitar and German IDM into a beautiful stew of sci-fi strangeness.
"Dub Latina" and "Crumble" show Calexico burrowing deeper into jazz than ever before, with the latter featuring fluid guitar, trombone and trumpet solos squaring off against each other over a white-hot groove. "Güero Canelo" is a curious flamenco strut built around what sounds like a distorted Speak-n-Spell sample and sliding sound effects, while "Whipping the Horse's Eyes" and the closer, "No Doze", each examine big skies and desert stillness-- one with steel guitar and bowed bass, the other with bowed vibes, nylon strings, static, percussion and steel. Burns is back to a whisper on the closer, but here it strikes as though he's trying not to wake someone sleeping in the room rather than shielding the listener from his limitations.
Calexico have always threatened to make a spectacular record, and even came close on 1998's The Black Light, but having spent the last three years honing their skills has paid off for them in ways no one could have predicted. Feast of Wire calls on a stunning, finely kept arsenal of genres, textures and images to transport you to the Southwest's forgotten places and put you in the shoes of the people who stare across the border in both directions. It is the album we always knew they had in them but feared they would never make.


Himanshu Suri, aka rapper Heems, always felt like Das Racist's breakout star, if the crew had such a thing. They were all funny, but Heems was also quietly charismatic and occasionally vulnerable. His new solo album finds him summoning all of these qualities, some of the time.

Eat Pray Thug

What does the future look like for former members of a joke-rap group? What if things blew apart just as you stopped joking? Das Racist’s career arc was never an obvious one—sometimes it was hard to tell if they were shrugging or lunging at us—and its solo members are now puzzling their way through the aftermath of an ambiguous legacy. Himanshu Suri, aka Heems, always felt like the breakout star, if the crew had such a thing. They were all funny, but Heems was also quietly charismatic and occasionally vulnerable: On Das Racist tracks like "Amazing" or "You Can Sell Anything", he was all three at once. Eat Pray Thug, Heems’ new solo album, finds him summoning all of these qualities, some of the time, but the album as a whole isn’t vivid or well-realized enough to banish the sense that something is missing.
Heems has said in interviews that Eat Pray Thug is his most personal project. A handful of songs draw directly on his experiences as an Indian-American in a post–9/11 world, and they are sharply observed, painful, emotional, and deeply quotable. On "Flag Shopping", he offers vivid images in a halting, tom-roll cadence: "Your dad mad, cuz he lost all clients/ Dad, why you crying? I thought that we had the spirit of the lion/ He take it out on you, his belt big like Orion’s." On the album closer "Patriot Act", he adopts a short, bellowing delivery, nicked from Rick Ross at his imaginary-crime-boss peak, to spit a tangle of contradictions: "Product of Partition/ Dripped in Prada for the stitchin', proud of superstitions/ Got powder in the kitchen." Heems talked to the New York Times about his desire to reclaim rap language from the inside, and songs like "Patriot Act" show him doing just that, applying a lifelong love of hip-hop to the gritty particulars of a specific life.
Eat Pray Thug isn’t lacking in ideas, just focus, and there are long stretches where it’s much harder to connect to Heems’ persona. "Sometimes", the opening track, produced by longtime collaborator Gordon Voidwell, is about "dualities," as the rapper told both NPR and the Times, but here is an example of how that plays out in the song: "Sometimes I’m like this, sometimes I’m like that/ Sometimes I’m pretty thin, sometimes I’m pretty fat." Tossed-off lines like these lack the smart-dumb zing of his Das Racist writing or, really, any zing at all. Heems drones the word "clarity, clarity" for a few bars on the song, then deadpans: "Sometimes I write hard, sometimes I’m mad lazy/ I just repeat words like ‘clarity,’ fucking crazy." It’s DOA as a punchline, and reminds me of Encore-era Eminem, where he’d fill up entire verses with the lamest jokes he could think of simply because he could.
The most uncomfortable moments on Eat Pray Thug are like this, watching a guy try for ironic laughs and failing, and they feel like unwelcome holdovers from Heems’ previous life. Wordplay like "The great gats be the TEC-9 and AK" (from "Hubba Hubba") only remind us how good he used to be at this sort of high/low culture switch-up. "Made enough friends, like I play in the Wrens," he raps on "Sometimes", and as one of the people who actually gets that joke, I find myself unaccountably saddened that it exists outside of a chat window.
Elsewhere, Heems reaches for styles that are simply beyond his grasp as a musician. "Pop Song (Games)", "Damn, Girl", and "Home" are stabs at accessibility that fail for a more prosaic and difficult-to-circumvent reason: Heems’ voice. Landing somewhere between pained groan and mocking whine, it lacks expressive range, and it points to the biggest problem facing Heems and his fellow former members: They were, from the beginning, a fragile musical equation. None of them were naturally appealing on the mic, but the three of them together, projecting camaraderie, sent a specific message: We might not be very good at this, but we’re way better at it than you realize. They hung together, in a hangdog sort of way.
Without that camaraderie, a lot of those obvious flaws, which were built into the DNA of the group, float to the surface, and 11 tracks of solo Heems proves to be a lot to take. Together, they were a bunch of bored, antic college kids, smarter than they seemed and maybe, sneakily, smarter than everyone you knew, masking some complex feelings behind jokes. Alone, they are three adult post-wiseasses, in search of a story as good as their last one.


The companion piece to his 2021 self-titled record diverges from the innovation and technical proficiency in favor of introspection and contemplation. It is a richly detailed, deadpan elegy for his stolen youth.

Vince Staples: Ramona Park Broke My Heart

Ramona Park Broke My Heart

Vince Staples has long sought to take the shine off gangster culture. Much like a military veteran can sniff out stolen valor, he can tell which rappers romanticizing life on the street are full of shit. None of this shit is fun; it’s stressful. You don’t sign up to see your friends get killed; you survive it, or you don’t. More than a few have painted Staples as a nihilist devoid of hope, but he’s closer to a hard-earned cynic, someone who’s seen too much to believe any empty platitudes.
Staples’ new album, Ramona Park Broke My Heart, is an elegy for his stolen youth—a subtle lament for the life he’s led that also pines for the one he never did. It shares the clarity he’s exhibited since the start of his career, a perspective aged by the streets he was raised on. There are no solutions here, no grand epiphany. His home just no longer provides the same comfort that it once did. A companion piece to his 2021 self-titled LP, Ramona Park Broke My Heart diverges from the innovation and technical proficiency of earlier records, in favor of introspection and contemplation.
If Vince Staples was muted by its grayscale palette, Ramona Park Broke My Heart is colored with vivid nostalgia for the sounds of his youth. “DJ Quik” flips the G-Funk spirit of the titular artist’s classic cut “Dollaz + Sense,” drowning a vintage drum machine in gauzy atmospherics; the bass line’s electronic twang on “Magic” draws from the sound of that era more directly. “East Point Prayer” is the lone departure from Southern California, melting into melancholy chords evocative of Atlanta’s emo-trap sing-raps that guest rapper Lil Baby is best known for. Despite this, Staples manages to synthesize the work of more than a dozen different producers—many virtual unknowns—with a persistent ennui shared by all the cooks in the kitchen.
Much of that can be attributed to Staples’ delivery of lyrics that belie an existential exhaustion. The detail-rich raps serve less as a tour guide than they do a memory map. When he raps bars like, “Nowhere to go when we in the cage/Sometimes life tastes bittersweet,” as he does on “Lemonade,” who is that for? It may be a given that these lyrics about this specific neighborhood in Long Beach, California aren’t meant to be universal. But the unvarnished portraits that he paints of his hometown connect with people around the world not because those experiences feel shared, but because they feel honest, and worn with pride. The difference here is that those portraits seem to have lost some of their luster, even for him.
If there’s a single set piece that can speak to each of the disparate corners of Staples’ audience, it’s “When Sparks Fly,” the album’s most complete standalone statement. On its surface, it’s a standard street love song, built atop a sample of Lyves’s ethereal ballad “No Love,” before a different, more surprising voice emerges. This is a lover’s lament told from the perspective of a personified firearm, bemoaning his capture by the police from its hiding place. It captures a sense of longing that Staples is typically unwilling to reveal in the first person, reaching beyond the standard refrain of “free the homies” to depict how those on the outside can often feel just as trapped.
Staples’ disillusionment comes into sharp focus on “The Spirit of Monster Kody,” a 45-second skit that’s voiced by Sanyika Shakur, fka “Monster” Kody Scott, an infamously violent member of the Eight Tray Gangster Crips who wrote an autobiography about his troubled life. In his speech, Kody speaks of defying expectations and drawing inspiration from the legendary rebel Joseph Cinqué. Free of additional context, it’s powerful, even inspiring. But what Staples leaves unsaid is that despite his triumphs, Kody’s end was as tragic as his beginning—last summer, his body was found decomposing in a tent at a homeless encampment near San Diego.
Staples has been consistently clear about the distinction between his work and what an “entertainer” like Drake does. To call this album entertainment would almost feel disrespectful. This is a document of a young man’s pain, a chronicle of his disillusionment barely disguised by his deadpan voice. Even the things that once grounded him—the people and places that shaped him into who he is—look different now. Ten years into a career of recounting the decisions he made to get here, he has more available options than ever—and he finally appears ready to move on.
“I feel like a lot of my work has been an anthology of my neighborhood and my past, and I think this is kinda the end of that for me,” Staples recently told New York radio station Hot 97. This contextual clue offers some clarity to his weary tone on Ramona Park Broke My Heart, one worthy of an epilogue to what’s been a compelling depiction of an overlooked corner of the world. It might not meet the extremely high bar set by his best work, but it’s almost certainly him at his most emotionally vulnerable.


The New York-based electronic musician has done everything from shoegaze to pop to film scores, but her first solo album in 14 years is distinguished less by her range than by her ability to focus.

Desire Loop

The electronic musician Lori Scacco has contributed scores and sound design to films, video games, dance performances, and art installations; she has played in Savath y Savalas’ and Helado Negro’s live ensembles; and she has worked with clients as diverse as Doctors Without Borders and Salvatore Ferragamo. In the 1990s, she was a member of Seely, a shoegaze act with the distinction of being the first American band signed to the British independent label Too Pure, and more recently, she has made lopsided electro pop in the duo Storms. That’s a lot of ground to have covered. But Desire Loop, Scacco’s first solo album in 14 years, is distinguished less by the New York artist’s versatility than by her ability to focus.
Desire Loop is an album of synthesizer music that puts the study of color and texture at the forefront. At its core are luminous tones surrounded by a faint halo of distortion, like the high-pitched buzz fluorescent bulbs make, yet the play of timbres is constantly shifting. To close your eyes and concentrate on the feel of her sounds is to be like a child at the science museum, fingertips tracing across a scrap of fur, a polished stone, a feather, a nubby sea urchin shell.
Despite the album’s generally relaxed atmosphere and often ethereal sounds, this isn’t ambient music, exactly: Scacco’s melodies feel too prominent, her compositional impulses too strong. Repetitive figures form the foundation of these songs—“Strange Cities” glides atop a pulsing arpeggio reminiscent of Steve Reich, and “Cosmographia” opens with low, clipped tones that suggest a conversation between two lighthouses—but they are driven by a lyrical sensibility that is unusual for this kind of music. A bright, confident melody runs through the bucolic landscapes of “Strange Cities”; out of “Cosmographia”’s drone fantasia grows the kind of soft riffing associated with Boards of Canada, along with a key change of an unmistakably narrative bent. Where many synthesizer musicians are primarily concerned with mood-setting, Scacco seems just as interested in storytelling.
Her palette and her melodic choices play with déjà vu, while her synth patches briefly reveal acoustic roots before morphing into something else entirely. On “Coloring Book,” the synths sound like pipe organs might after another millennium of evolution. “Interactivity in Plastic Space” transmutes harpsichords into silvery streamers. “Back to Electric” revolves around what might be a plucked acoustic bass melody while the sounds of a fast-forwarding cassette tape squeal away in the high end. There are hints of very old traditions buried deep in Scacco’s otherwise futuristic sounds: Both “Coloring Book” and “Interactivity in Plastic Space” are in waltz time, and her consonant harmonies and simple melodies are often evocative of European folk music.
Along with tone and texture, Desire Loop draws attention to the way multiple layers of sound can be combined into a whole that suggests more than the sum of its parts. It is frequently difficult to discern exactly how many elements a given track incorporates; the mechanics of Scacco’s music are unusually veiled. In “Red Then Blue,” a base of what might be backmasked synth commingles with tones that scatter like raindrops on concrete. But peeling apart the album’s layers can help illuminate some surprising influences: At the heart of “Cosmographia” runs an optimistic melody suggestive of both Laurie Spiegel and Stereolab. The almost naïve refrain in “Tiger Song” evokes Kraftwerk, while the same song’s burbling interplay nods to Mouse on Mars. And “Strange Cities,” perhaps the album’s most satisfying track, fuses American minimalism with the cosmic soundscapes of Berlin in the 1970s. Even at its most focused, Desire Loop is proof of Scacco’s range.