The third album from the British fuss-rockers features tastefully trimmed string arrangements, chamber woodwinds, and terminal boredom.

RELAXER

Like many bands who stumble unexpectedly into massive success, alt-J have endured their fair share of withering backlash. Witness this parody video, in which two men munching rice cakes quickly assemble a note-perfect parody of an alt-j song called "Put It In My Butt"—it went viral. alt-J themselves mostly responded to this mockery with humility, good humor, and grace (they made that rice cake video into their Twitter avatar). The trio seems like a reasonably well-adjusted group of guys, truly, and unworthy of focused animus: You may as well rage at the way an immaculately designed suitcase clicks shut.
Bad music, after all, earns its distinction. You have to seize someone by the lapels, dominate their senses, to give them the chance to despise you. It requires, if not bravery, then at least audacity, and alt-J have never been audacious. The biggest offense one could take is the way Joe Newman sings through his nose, like a mean-spirited hobbit mocking the singing voice of another hobbit. But it is instantly easy to hear how 2012’s An Awesome Wave managed its bloodless coup, one distracted pair of earbuds at a time—most of the album is a comforting jumble of clicks, coos, and hums. The music had no center, but its edges were soothing, and if you had a few hours to kill at a laundromat, it synced pleasingly with your silently tumbling socks.
Their beige and mostly tuneless second album maintained this modest course through the choppy seas of festival bookings and departing band members, but on RELAXER, alt-J have, just maybe, grown a little *used *to success. They feel, perhaps, ready to stretch, to dip their toes into new styles and ready to take a few, you know, risks.
And this must be how we find ourselves confronting “Hit Me Like That Snare,” the fourth song on RELAXER and the first proudly, magnetically awful thing they’ve ever done. Committed alt-J fans are probably already used to Joe Newman’s unique touch with sexual imagery—for such an unassuming group, they sing often, and zealously, about fucking, or at least what fucking might be like, as interpreted by a befuddled AI. But because all words turned to consonant-free mush in his mouth, millions of festival-goers were likely and mercifully unaware they were dancing to a chorus of, “In your snatch fits pleasure/Broom-shaped pleasure” (”Fitzpleasure”). He may as well have been warbling roast chicken recipes.
On “Hit Me Like That Snare,” Newman appears to be trying to earnestly to swagger. Each word is ruthlessly audible as he sets the most ludicrous sex scene in rock history:

I’m at the door at a quarter to four
Poppers popping baby might take some more
I’m fucking loose, you’re gorgeous, I don’t care
Come closer, baby, slap me like that snare
‘Moon Shaped Pool’ plays in the velvet cell
Green neon sign reading ‘Welcome to hell’
Leather slings fall like oxygen masks
We’re going down, fuck my life in half.

The idea of an album full of this sort of blazing wreckage is perversely exciting, in the same way that a screaming, relationship-ending fight technically enlivens a bad party. But alas, RELAXER doesn’t have the lunatic conviction to embrace oblivion. The rest settles safely back into the mild, featureless middle distance, a realm of tastefully trimmed string arrangements, chamber woodwinds, and terminal boredom. They’ve cut back the anxious fidgets, clicks, and buzzes that textured their music and relinquish any claim to idiosyncrasy they might have had.
“Last Year” is a sedate meditation on death and grief featuring a placid vocal turn from English singer-songwriter Marika Hackman and an immaculately recorded oboe solo, which the song pauses for respectfully like a row of baby ducks crossing its path. “House of the Rising Sun” dials back the heat of the folk standard to the temperature of rapidly cooling tea. “3WW” begins the album with a soft-lit minute of finger-picked guitar before introducing a sound in the background that sounds suspiciously like someone snoring.
The truth is that alt-J have never had an identity, really, apart from Newman’s mangled lyrics and the fidgety, distracted arrangements of their songs. RELAXER shows us what remains after those quirks are dialed back: some perfectly nice, perfectly blank lads who have no idea why they are standing in front of you and even less of an idea what to say.


The punk electronic music Powell makes is crude, queasy, sometimes shockingly ugly, and often quite funny, in a madcap, slightly threatening way. It thrills and it mystifies in equal measure.

Sport

The conventional wisdom says that punk and electronic music aren’t supposed to mix, but the two genres have a long, proud history together. Suicide, Devo, Throbbing Gristle, Big Black: All of them put electronics at the center of their practice and made a fearsome racket while doing it. And why not? Electronic instruments are the ultimate DIY tools. As Mute Records founder Daniel Miller, of the electronic post-punk act the Normal, put it, “The thing that pissed me off about punk was you had to learn three chords to be in a punk band. If you had a synthesizer, all you had to do was press one key.”
Oscar Powell makes electronic music that is both techno and punk all at once—and yet, a little like Schrödinger’s cat, it is also neither. It flickers unstably between the two genres, running acid squelch against lumpy drum samples, and drilling bursts of harsh, digital noise into basslines that still wear the stink of a Lower East Side basement, circa 1983. There’s a palpable sense of two worlds colliding. The timbre and heft of many of his sounds testifies to their provenance: The room tone identifies them as products of chilly practice spaces or cheap recording studios, and the guitars have the tinny sort of clang that you only get with old, scratched-up 7 inches. But it all takes place in the airless, deathless netherworld of the computer, with short snippets of fluid, human timekeeping chopped up into infinitely repeating loops, and a riot of voices—talk-show clips, shouts, muffled dialogue, and, at one point, what I’m pretty sure is Mark E. Smith's nasal sneer—scattering like the fragments of a malfunctioning hard disk.
Powell has never made any secret of his influences. Instead of punk’s “kill yr idols” maxim, he taps directly into their energy via song titles like “Wharton Tiers on Drums,” a reference to the no-wave musician and record producer, and “No U Turn,” presumably after the iconic drum ‘n’ bass label. He sampled Suicide’s Alan Vega on “Should’ve Been a Drummer,” and he sampled Big Black on “Insomniac.” He’s clearly immune to the anxiety of influence—perhaps to any kind of anxiety at all. When Big Black’s Steve Albini sent Powell a sternly worded email in response to a request for permission to sample the recording—“I detest club culture as deeply as I detest anything on earth,” wrote the cantankerous Chicago producer, “so I am against what you’re into, and an enemy of where you come from”—Powell blew it up and pasted it to a billboard above a busy London thoroughfare. The irony, of course, was that had Albini actually listened to Powell’s scabrous, mangled beats, he probably would have liked them.
The artists Powell tends to reference aren’t just any punks; they’re artists who never really fit in anywhere. That’s an instructive way of looking at his own work, caught as it is between two opposing systems, not quite at home in either one. Like his heroes, he values qualities like risk and danger, qualities he has said he finds missing from contemporary electronic music. He shares with his influences a certain provocative, even anarchic spirit, one that colors and informs virtually every aspect of the project, in ways that can seem both incredibly dumb and remarkably thoughtful. A video for “Jonny [ft. Jonny]” features crowdsourced footage of fans bashing open watermelons with their foreheads; yet in lieu of a typical press campaign for the album, he opted to post his email address on a billboard, and then answered each of his correspondents’ queries personally, often giving them links to unreleased songs. That contradiction—the knuckle-dragging, tongue-in-cheek trickster vs. the generous, WYSIWYG plain dealer—is a big part of his appeal.
Powell used to work in advertising, and there is no doubt that he is an exceptionally savvy salesman of his own work. But Sport, his debut album, goes deeper than mere provocation. What we find here is a fully formed aesthetic, far richer, far livelier, and far more fun than the tentative mood-pieces he offered on his earliest singles. A few songs are noticeably more sophisticated than his earlier work: “Frankie [ft. Frankie]” and “Jonny [ft. Jonny]” massage gravelly synthesizers, heavy metal solos, and rollicking rockabilly grooves together with husky vocals from HTRK’s Jonnine Standish in a way that recalls electroclash, of all things—but fucked up and broken down, a zombie farce of turn-of-the-millennium dance-punk fusions.
Throughout, Sport is crude, queasy, sometimes shockingly ugly, and often quite funny, in a madcap, slightly threatening way. It thrills and it mystifies in equal measure. The music is riddled with glitches, but these aren’t the sleek, hyper-aestheticized clicks and cuts of highbrow minimal techno; they’re the sounds you get when you jiggle the patch cable in its socket, or when the pads on your sampler are gummed up with beer. The steady spray of found vocal samples—a woman griping, “I hate a few things, yeah”; a young man slurring, “Fuckin’ kick-ass!”—gives the impression of a television showroom broadcasting a dozen skate videos at once. The haphazard way it’s all stuck together, with palm-muted guitar licks pasted over stumbling kick drums and dissonant keyboard mashing, often resembles little more than shreds videos, those parody clips where rock performances are overdubbed with hamfisted skronk and sly Foley effects.
Shreds videos are about creating an off-kilter alternate universe, a Bizarro World where pop stars are hapless clowns, and Sport does something similar with dance music, stripping of it of its sophisticated patina and returning some of the rough-and-tumble rush that Powell remembers from his teenaged days, taking drugs and dancing to jungle. By pulling the rug out from underneath our assumptions, he gets us moving again. For all its sardonic sense of humor, the album never feels like it’s laughing at the listener. It just refuses to take itself, or anything, seriously—even, or especially, punk. After all, what could be less punk than sports?


This live album documents the meeting of two avant-garde legends, but it is not exactly a "super duo." The curious chemistry these two share is subtler and possibly more rewarding than that.

John Cage / Sun Ra: John Cage Meets Sun Ra: The Complete Concert

John Cage was a quotable artist. On the subject of albums, he once remarked that “records ruin the landscape.” Elsewhere, in a treatise collected in his 1961 book Silence, the composer offered some opinions about jazz. The genre “derives from serious music,” he wrote, “and when serious music derives from it, the situation becomes rather silly.” Given those harsh judgments, it makes sense to venture an opening question about Cage’s one-off appearance alongside swing-and-improv icon Sun Ra. If Cage himself thought jazz unsuited for “serious” contexts and recordings lame, why should this document of their 1986 shared bill be anything other than a curiosity?
John Cage Meets Sun Ra: The Complete Concert has an answer for that wariness—and the album gradually emerges as something greater than a footnote. That’s not because the pairing results in an “avant super duo.” As it happens, the two artists tend to trade off soloing, and only play together audibly at one point during this hour-plus set, recorded at Coney Island. Yet despite the arms-length embrace, the overall concert has a surprisingly seamless quality.
The entire show, released here in full for the first time, shows how Cage’s own performances and improvisations were capable of more supple surprise than his most attention-grabbing pronouncements. The composer of 4’33” talked a lot about his ideas—in particular his insight that there is “no such thing as silence”—but the spare, tender nature of his wordless vocal solos here creates a stronger impact than many theoretical explanations. This newly complete representation of the show also draws strength from the flexibility and invention of Ra’s playing.
Ra focuses on one synth here—the then-new Yamaha DX7. Though the instrument’s timbral range is limited, Ra manages to whip up a wealth of approaches during his portions of the show. “Untitled Keyboard Solo 1” opens with some sci-fi movie tones; eventually, Ra accelerates into sprightly figures, before steering into dense chords and drones. His third untitled solo makes psychedelic use of the DX7’s effects, with chords sounding sampled and spun in real time.
Ra’s solos can be sequenced into a compelling EP on their own. But it’s his ability to meet Cage more than halfway that helps hold the entire gig together. He provides the sparest wisps of accompaniment imaginable during his one collaboration with Cage, on the track “Empty Words and Keyboard.” And on tracks like “We Hold This Myth to Be Potential” and “The Damned Air,” Ra provides poetry recitations to go with his playing. His voice is off-mic—the physical editions of the album helpfully give his texts in full—but the way this recording limitation can focus a listener’s attention works perfectly next to Cage’s contemplative silences and delicate mumblings. Likewise, a short duet with singer and frequent Ra collaborator June Tyson is beset by amplification problems, though the noise-damaged result works, in context.
John Cage Meets Sun Ra: The Complete Concert isn’t an ideal entry point into either artist’s catalog. For Ra, you’d first want to explore early albums such as Jazz in Silhouette and Angels and Demons at Play (as well as gonzo triumphs like Other Planes of There). Cage’s key works have been interpreted by elite classical performers like Joseph Kubera and Third Coast Percussion. But this minor addition to both oeuvres has a quietly mind-blowing feel—particularly since another meeting between Cage and a jazz luminary, Joseph Jarman, was never documented. Instead of ruining the landscape, a recording like this one contributes to it. By contradicting one of Cage's rhetorical excesses, the album gently improves our understanding of the valid connection between divergent careers in American experimental music.


The Chicago rapper takes a step further into the mainstream on his third album, an ultimately hopeful exploration of how trauma manifests.

Hall of Fame

Like Chief Keef, Lil Durk, and many others before him, Polo G’s early success was quite literally a ticket out of town. Not long after recording his major-label debut Die a Legend, the northside Chicago rapper packed up his family and moved to Los Angeles in an attempt to avoid fulfilling the prophecy of his album’s title. And while going to LA to work in music is a common migration, it tends to be as much of a survival tactic as it is a career move for Chicago rappers. Polo G remains a fervent booster of his hometown, but the move has clearly changed his perspective. How could it not?
To that end, his latest LP Hall of Fame is as much Hollywood as it is Chiraq. Polo’s style of melodic drill—sparse compositions comprising soft piano melodies and gentle guitars atop booming basslines—is tailored to convey emotion, an intentional diversion from the bleak murder raps of drill’s first wave. His Auto-Tune croon of a flow blurs the lines between hook and verse, with few wasted moments; almost every song is at or under three minutes. And by this point, Polo has helped shift drill so far into the mainstream that twinkling ballads like “Epidemic” have as much in common with Ed Sheeran as they do Lil Durk.
But wherever you go, the memories of lost loved ones follow, and death continues to loom large in Polo’s music. His career has been defined by an exploration of the depths of his trauma to cope with funeral fatigue and the creeping normalization of people around him dying young. Upon the release of Die a Legend, he lamented to Pitchfork, “After a kid in our school dies at 13, no therapists are there. We just deal with it ourselves.” It’s not a tragedy, but an inevitability. Two years later, Polo has put out the most hopeful—and commercial—record of his career. While his first two LPs coped with death (often with pills), Hall of Fame finds him facing forward: Father to a young son, poised for fame and looking to leave behind the drugs that would numb his pain but take his friend.
Polo is far from the first rapper to show a sensitive side, but his perspective feels particularly empathetic and self-aware. He doesn’t just lament the violence that colored his upbringing—he seems to understand better than most how that trauma manifests, coloring his verses with poignant moments that tell entire stories. “Ain’t no limit in these streets/Can ride a bike, you old enough,” he raps on “Black Hearted.” He still wields considerable talent as a lyricist, dropping brazen one-liners as deftly as he transitions from gun-toting villain (“Aim for the head, that chopper spray/We get ’em gone”) to mixtape-making loverboy (“I got a playlist for your heart, girl, pick a song”)—sometimes in the same verse. But he also seems to be running out of ways to describe familiar scenes, like the image of blood soaking into a white t-shirt on both “Boom” and “RAPSTAR.”
To take a step further into the mainstream, Polo taps an array of producers, and while he has a strong ear, his distinct taste in instrumentals lends itself to homogeneity, with tracks like “Go Part 1” teetering on the edge of generic. “Broken Guitars,” featuring his protégé Scorey, is a notable exception, though its crunchy guitar textures and Polo’s soaring emo vocals might sound more at home on a Lil Peep or Juice WRLD record. That track’s producer, the nascent WIZARDMCE, has likely the largest influence on the sound of Hall of Fame outside of Polo himself. The five tracks he produced are some of the record’s strongest, even if they do get buried in the 20-deep tracklist. By track 20, Polo’s vivid revenge narrative “Bloody Canvas” feels out of place. And though it serves as a thematic bookend with opener “Painting Pictures,” its bleak depiction of cyclical violence is an awkward coda to a record that’s often wistful but mostly optimistic.
It would be easy to read Hall of Fame as the inevitable result of a young artist’s career being shaped by major label A&Rs. The bloated tracklist is stuffed full of stars from hip-hop and pop’s mainstream. And indeed, many of the knocks on the album are rooted in the trends and tactics of the major label machine. But a closer look reveals decisions made with as much of Polo’s intention as Columbia’s. Take “RAPSTAR,” the ukulele-driven hit single that recently topped the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. It’s co-produced by Einer Bankz, a YouTuber who courted viral fame via acoustic ukulele performances with what seems like every rapper on the planet, and who has made videos for Polo’s last two album rollouts. When fans rabidly consumed the impromptu acoustic version of “RAPSTAR,” it was Polo who campaigned hard to make the studio version an official single, blowing up Columbia’s rollout for Hall of Fame in the process.
Though Polo has proven he can carry an LP on his own, the guest stars help infuse Hall of Fame with new energies. Wayne’s light and limber verse on “GANG GANG” is a refreshing return to form, and Roddy Ricch’s appearance on “Fame & Riches” helps pick up the pace after the saccharine serenades of “So Real.” But Nicki Minaj’s contribution to “For the Love of New York” should probably have stayed in the can; from the first bar, she sounds too exhausted to even bother rhyming different words.
On the whole, Hall of Fame is missing the sense of urgency of Polo’s debut. Years and miles away from the streets that shaped him, this was perhaps inevitable. If Die a Legend was an insular, tightly woven portrait of a teenager manifesting his future, Hall of Fame is a cluster bomb aimed squarely at the mainstream, chock full of everything he could think of that might help him graduate to the next tier of stardom. Somewhere among those 20 tracks is a good album, but at this stage in his career, chiseling it down to perfection almost seems beside the point. Consider the “RAPSTAR” video in comparison with early clips of Polo, pre-record deal with short hair and lanky limbs, and it quickly becomes apparent how much he’s grown in just two years. He’ll probably always be looking over his shoulder—after his recent run-in with the police, it’s clear he has good reason to. Yet even as he plays the game, serving up consumable bits for his label to package and sell, the heart remains in the music, buried under gold chains, wounded by the past yet hopeful for the future.

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Sam Beam brings Iron & Wine full circle on his sixth album, using the warm acoustic instrumentation of his early work and some of the most moving singing of his career.

Beast Epic

One of the many vivid images in the 2004 Iron & Wine song “The Trapeze Swinger” is of dogs “running circles ’round the well.” These same animals have an affinity for soaking in the rain and running after trains, acting on impulses rather than with the measured decision making you’d expect from humans. But the speaker sees himself in the cyclical motion of the dogs. Later, on the 2010 “Walking Far From Home” B-side “Biting Your Tail,” a similar idea crops up more explicitly: “Know that peace is the shape of a circle/’Round and ’round you go/Biting your tail.”
The sixth Iron & Wine album is titled Beast Epic, referring to narrative verses where the characters are animals with human emotions. The record doesn’t take this concept literally, but Sam Beam—who began recording as Iron & Wine about 15 years ago—has himself noted that stories where animals act like people are good vessels for thinking about life in general. Beast Epic also finds Beam returning to Sub Pop Records. It was that label’s co-founder Jonathan Poneman who took a chance on Beam’s intimate home recordings in 2002—in part on the recommendation of future Band of Horses leader Ben Bridwell—allowing Iron & Wine to help define the direction of Sub Pop and indie rock as a whole for the rest of the 2000s. A move like covering the Postal Service’s “Such Great Heights” helped broaden a genre where breathy acoustic folk and pulsing radio-ready synth pop could be flip sides of the same coin.
Iron & Wine didn’t remain a stripped-down bedroom project for long; by his third album, 2007’s The Shepherd’s Dog, he’d developed a rollicking full-band sound. It wasn’t the same Iron & Wine that listeners had fallen in love with, but the growth was symbiotic to the festivals Beam was starting to play. Moving to Warner Brothers for 2011’s Kiss Each Other Clean, Iron & Wine hit number two on the Billboard 200—but that record’s glitchy electronic moments, Motown horn sections, and James Taylor-breeziness all worked to divorce Beam from the humble songwriting he’d become known for.
So when Beast Epic opens with a few seconds of Beam counting off under his breath and gently tapping the rhythm on the body of his acoustic guitar, it’s like wrapping a warm blanket around a cold body. It is the sound of Iron & Wine returning home, ending one chapter and beginning another. Beam knows this: In the record’s forward, he writes, “The ferris wheel keeps spinning and we’re constantly approaching, leaving or returning to something totally unexpected or startlingly familiar.” He finds comfort in retracing his own steps. This doesn’t mean sacrificing production value or abandoning the use of outside players, but everything here takes a backseat to Beam’s melodies. When subtleties appear—the vocal harmonies that underscore the emotional swells of “Bitter Truth,” the despondent violins and dusty pianos echoing from what sounds like another room in “Summer Clouds”—they are in service of songs that could stand comfortably without them. Working as his own producer with a live recording style and few overdubs, Beam has never sounded more in control.
Even the album’s most sweeping production, the slow-building single “Call It Dreaming,” remains focused as Beam adds percussion, cello, and keys to his pristine and determined vocals. When the album closes with the fragile “Our Light Miles,” and Beam attempts to lob a delicate falsetto as a big finish, it cements Beast Epic as some of the best singing of his career. This paves the road for the aged wisdom he imparts in his reflective lyrics, as ideas pirouette with the grace Beam has learned. “Bitter Truth” details a relationship dissolving without rose-tinted lenses, with the speaker able to communicate wordlessly while noting “nothing makes silence like experience.” “Summer Clouds” is woozy and whisky-breathed in its romance and introspection; Beam sounds more melancholy when he notes “by the end we leave somewhere too long to ever wander back/by the end we give someone too much to ever close the hand.” When he asks “where all this love fits in the world,” there’s a fear that maybe there’s not much more to give.
Still, Beam provides solace by offering up many of the familiar touchstones of his songwriting. Jesus pops up repeatedly, and “About a Bruise” is an ode to the South, with a choir proclaiming “This is Alabama.” At this point in Beam’s career, meditations on death, on family, and the imprint of living in the Bible belt are like fingerprints, with the difference being the number of years that have informed it all. It’s that cyclical passing of time that informs the music video for “Thomas County Law,” where a man that once sang about “our endless numbered days” plans his own funeral. Beam looks resolute as he sets up chairs, picks lilies, and digs his own grave. He mouths lyrics that arrive at acceptance with both who he is and what he’s done; he deserves all the peace that comes with traveling full circle.


The Strokes' fifth album is more immediately appealing than their last two records as they sound like they’re genuinely trying here, and having fun. At times it feels like a mixtape the Strokes made for themselves: 11 songs, 11 different genre experiments.

Comedown Machine

Comedown Machine accomplishes in 38 minutes what nearly a decade and a half of backlash and schadenfreude could not: make the Strokes look like total nerds. This isn’t so much of a revelation as it the culmination of what’s been happening ever since First Impressions of Earth. They got one classic album and another great one exhausting a sound that evoked decades of New York squalor chic through indestructible songs and contradictory images: garages where Orange amps are parked next to Benzes, a trust-funder’s highrise apartment lousy with beer cans and leather jackets, dive bars frequented by models and rock stars. Everything since has taken cues from styles more associated with parents’ basements, musty vinyl shops, and convention centers: dinky synth-pop, surf rock, prog and the weird science of countless 1980s New Wave bands. This flipping of the script can actually be seen as a canny move, recasting the Strokes as lovable underdogs: where they once defined effortless cool, the deeply uncool Comedown Machine smacks of effort.
That goes a long way towards making Comedown Machine more immediately appealing than their last two records; the Strokes sound like they’re genuinely trying here. The functional cover art of Comedown Machine suggests some kind of mixtape the Strokes made for themselves, 11 songs that turn out like 11 different genre experiments viewed through the unmistakable prism of their inhuman rhythmic precision and pinched EQ’ing. There are a couple of Is This It? throwbacks (“All The Time,” “50/50”) that turn out to be among the least satisfying things here, too flabby to fit into those same jeans from a decade prior. Otherwise, you get elastic funk (“Tap Out”), dubby dream-pop (“80s Comedown Machine”), unidentifiable Latin-tinged Casio presets (“One Way Trigger”) and plenty of soft-rock sheen that creates an ouroboros effect of the Strokes sounding like Phoenix when they were trying to sound like the Strokes.
Credit where it’s due: the guys sound like they’re having fun again. At least that’s the gist you get from the numerous, in-studio “throwaway” moments: the flubbed soloing that introduces the otherwise vise-tight “Tap Out” and the labored laughing that closes out “Slow Animals” only take up a few seconds, but they reinforce the idea that this isn’t Julian Casablancas’ de facto solo project despite it sounding closer to Phrazes For The Young than any Strokes LP*.* But you also sense that the rest of the band getting antsy, issuing challenges to themselves to keep things interesting. Albert Hammond’s solos are charmingly anachronistic, a throwback to when tidy solos were a regular occurrence in three-minute pop songs. But they still can’t shake their tendency to stubbornly hammer at awkward riffs (“Happy Ending”) and clunky chord changes ("Welcome To Japan").
Still, the limitations of Comedown Machine's protracted diversity all come back to Casablancas, a man with wide range as a listener and extremely narrow range as a musician. In both lyrics and tone, he’s best at playing the laconic cad: So when he barks “you’re going too fast” on “All the Time” as a callback to “Reptilia” and the hotseat urgency of Room On Fire, it sounds forced. On the opposite end, the highlight of Comedown Machine is when he asks “What kind of asshole drives a Lotus?” on “Welcome to Japan”; you half expect him to do the “this guy!” routine as a punchline.
That’s the kind of thing Casablancas does better than anyone. Unfortunately, most of Comedown Machine finds him doing anything but that. “Tap Out” features at least two of Casablancas' most elegant melodies, but his wispy coo turns them into mush. When he takes the opposite tack to channel his inner Tom Waits, he doesn’t fare much better; no one was asking what the Strokes would've sounded like in the Victrola era, but "Call It Fate Call It Karma" answers it anyway. If this all smacks of effort, at least they are not taking the easy way out. It’s the 10th anniversary of Room On Fire and in light of what came after, a reissue would surely bring more praise than the initial Is This It? Yes It Is assessment. Or, they could’ve followed the lead of fellow fashion plate/occasional hitmaker Suede and made it a point to sound like their old selves after a long, dry spell.
Still, it’s frustrating for anyone who still puts stock in the idea that the Strokes could and should be one of America’s biggest rock bands. After all, they feel like stars even if the numbers don’t back it up and reigning champs like the Black Keys have about as much charisma and sex appeal as a General Tire. Of course, Black Keys are writing much better songs than the ones on Comedown Machine and if the Strokes seem unfashionable in 2013, that's the true reason.


Leonard Cohen's latest live album since he returned to the road in 2008 is a concert film and triple album captured in September 2013 at the Irish venue now known as 3Arena. The songs you know and plenty of songs you should know better are probably here, as is Cohen's joyful interaction with the audience and his gift for interpreting his own work.

Live in Dublin

"Are you humoring me?" asks Leonard Cohen with a warm grin shortly after the first intermission of Live in Dublin, a new concert film and triple album captured in September 2013 at the Irish venue now known as 3Arena. He's partway into "Tower of Song", originally from 1988's I'm Your Man, where he plinks out a rudimentary keyboard solo over canned percussion, in between vocals about Hank Williams a hundred floors above him and being "born with the gift of a golden voice." He adds, "If these are the crumbs of compassion that you offer to the elderly, I am grateful."
If audiences have been humoring Cohen, who was 79 then and is 80 now, for his age, they've been doing it for decades; on "Tower of Song", he also admits to having an "ache in the places where I used to play." In fact, Live in Dublin is only the latest live album since Cohen returned to the road in 2008, having been swindled out of his savings by a manager. He previously released the closely similar CD/DVD collection Live in London, documenting a show from that first year of touring. And there was 2010's Songs From the Road, compiling a somewhat different set of songs from various 2008-2009 performances. Whether Field Commander Cohen: Tour of 1979, Cohen Live (drawing from 1988 and 1993 tours), or Live at the Isle of Wight 1970, live material from the supposedly not-so-golden-voiced songwriting giant is hardly lacking.
There's still plenty to recommend on *Live in Dublin—*in all earnestness, at that. For one, though Live in London has shipped more than 200,000 copies worldwide, odds are that for many who might like this package it will be their first live Cohen recording. Besides, compared with the already-magnificent London set it adds several songs that wound up on 2012 studio album Old Ideas, making this a closer to exhaustive document of the perhaps no-longer-touring artist's legacy; though you'll probably get more replay value out of the audio component, the quality of the video—billed as Cohen's first to be shot in high-definition—is a noticeable improvement. Mostly, though, anyone curious about Live in Dublin might at least want to stream the audio or rent the video because, whatever similar releases came before, it's one monumental tower of song.
Nothing here changes the foundations of Cohen's narrative, but as with any archetypal legend, it's made for retelling. The Jewish-Buddhist poet from Montreal whose songs are often best known through others' covers reminded crowds on his money-making tours that—despite a perhaps overstated reputation for aloofness (watch him doing standup comedy in 1965's Ladies and Gentlemen... Mr. Leonard Cohen)—he's a gifted and generous interpreter of his own work. His speak-singing style has grown deeper and gruffer, but not unbecomingly so, particularly amid so much use. His songs, as former backup singer Jennifer Warnes once told the author of a 1994 Cohen biography, aim to reach "the place where God and sex and literature meet," but his work since returning has had mostly just the artist's advancing years in common with death's-door albums such as Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind or Johnny Cash's (Cohen-covering) albums with Rick Rubin. He's still more of the darkly humorous standup comedian. Yes, he skips off stage.
For all the talk of literature that attaches itself to Cohen, it's striking when digesting his work at such great length how greatly he prizes the concept of song. His most famous composition, "Hallelujah", in a verse left out of the Shrek-immortalized John Cale (and thus Jeff Buckley) versions but kept in here, envisions standing "before the Lord of Song, with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah"; toward the end of the Dublin encore, he refers to the joy of being "united with you in the spirit of song." Whether on 1967's "Suzanne", where "you touched her perfect body" (but only "with your mind"), or 1974's "Chelsea Hotel #2", where "we are ugly but we have the music," physical reality can be a flawed vessel for this spirit. On "Anthem", a song from 1992's The Future that featured on Trent Reznor's Natural Born Killers soundtrack and precipitates Cohen's first traipse off the Dublin stage, he sings, "Ring the bells that still can ring/ Forget your perfect offering/ There is a crack, a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in." Perfection is impossible, he explained around the time of song's release, noting that imperfection is "where the resurrection is."
Cohen's fatalism doesn't prevent him from at least striving toward perfection. Longtime collaborator Sharon Robinson, who sang backup during the recent shows along with English duo the Webb Sisters, in her new photograph book On Tour with Leonard Cohen describes the concerts as a "detailed snapshot" of Cohen's life's work, "meticulously put together" and requiring "a Zen-like focus." The virtuosity of the backing band, which includes an additional six musicians along with the singers, is a further expression of Cohen's graciousness onstage. Despite the self-conscious artifice of "Tower of Song", the rest of the performances are based in rootsier music, whether American folk, rock, jazz, and blues or European traditions (Spanish guitarist Javier Mas also plays lesser-known instruments including the bandurria, the laud, and archilaud). Cohen's willingness to stretch his songs to their limits with instrumental and vocal solos means these concert recordings can't be as lean as 2002's The Essential Leonard Cohen—the Dublin set consists of 30 songs lasting about three hours, and the video portion adds three Old Ideas tunes performed in Canada—but in ringing the bells that still can ring, it's perhaps truer to Cohen's philosophy.
One more aspect setting Live in London apart from studio Cohen was his joyful interaction with the audience, and if anything that has intensified on Dublin. By the encore's opening "So Long, Marianne", he's eliding words in the chorus as if startled by the crowd's jubilant belting of the 1967 song; "You sing so pretty," he says. And much as Cohen is willing to trust his songs to cover artists and to world-class bandmates, he also brings "the spirit of song" by closing the night with someone else's: "Save the Last Dance for Me", most famously recorded by the Drifters in 1960 (none other than Lou Reed worked with Doc Pomus, who cowrote the song with Mort Shuman, and Reed has said the song was written on the day of the wheelchair-bound, polio-stricken Pomus's wedding, to a Broadway actress and dancer). By this point in the recording, my first time experiencing the concert, I was expecting something sublime, and that's what I got, though not in the way I expected: The stage lights shine on the audience members, who do much of the hook-singing work for Cohen. Forget your perfect offering.
Cohen is a genially commanding stage presence, falling on his knees at crucial moments and doffing his cap for his accompanists' solo turns. The Old Ideas songs, sprinkled throughout the set at just the right intervals, are naturally at home, capped with the wry God-speaking-to-a-man-named-Leonard "Going Home". Otherwise, the songs you know and plenty of songs you should know better are probably here. There's the apocalyptic The Future title track and the organ-drenched take on 1969's "Bird on the Wire", the smoldering Robinson co-write "In My Secret Life", off of 2001's Ten New Songs, and the same pair's bleak 1988 I'm Your Man collaboration "Everybody Knows" (used by Guns N' Roses as  intro music on some Use Your Illusions shows). I'm Your Man's disco-funk "First We Take Manhattan", covered by backup singer Warnes with Stevie Ray Vaughan as part of her influential 1987 tribute album Famous Blue Raincoat, runs right into a powerfully restrained take on that album's title track, originally from 1971's Songs of Love and Hate ("Sincerely, a friend," Cohen signs off this time).
Paradoxically, on the songs at greatest risk of overexposure, it's often the instrumental interludes, not Cohen's poetry, that make my hair stand on end, further justifying the songwriter's faith. This is especially the case for "Hallelujah", bringing to mind another less-covered lyric—one that underscores where Cohen differs from the trickster likes of Dylan: "I've told the truth/ I didn't come to fool you." For the last time, no, the good people of Dublin weren't humoring him. There might not be a single perfect, all-encompassing Cohen recording, but there's this. "You can add up the parts/ But you won't have the sum," he sings on "Anthem", and despite his failed tax-avoidance retirement strategy, I'm inclined to trust the Zen priest in the bolo tie and fedora.


The Australian group’s ambitious third album overflows with ideas, samples, guests, and sheer stimuli. In their sparkling music, every sound feels like a treasured memory.

We Will Always Love You

Life, death, and the cosmos set the boundaries of the Avalanches’ ambitious third album, We Will Always Love You. The record begins with a farewell voicemail—a final communication, we are led to believe, from a young woman who has passed away—and it ends with the Morse code-like bleeping of the Arecibo Message, an interstellar transmission carrying information on the human species into the infinite beyond. In between those poles, the Australian group continues doing what it has always done: spinning the sounds of disco, soul, easy listening, and other nostalgic staples into luminous, ludic shapes, turning musical collage into a sparkling, four-dimensional fantasyland.
The Avalanches are no longer the same group they were when they made their triumphant debut, 2000’s Since I Left You, folding samples from thousands of songs into a flickering, zoetrope-like illusion that netted comparisons to De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising and the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique. By 2006, with no follow-up in sight and their works-in-progress folder filled with abandoned drafts, founding member Darren Seltmann had left the band. On their sophomore album, 16 long years after their debut, they squeezed a subway car’s worth of guests onto a record already crowded with samples: among them, Danny Brown, Biz Markie, Toro y Moi, David Berman, and members of Tame Impala, Mercury Rev, and Royal Trux. On the new album, the Avalanches technically remain a duo, though Midnight Juggernauts’ Andy Szekeres has co-writing credits on every song, and the guest list is just as extensive as last time. Yet for all those changes, they sound remarkably like their youthful selves.
Whether sampling or playing their own instruments, they favor rich tone colors and ultra-vivid timbres; the high end is awash in chimes, glockenspiel, and children’s choirs. Glance at the sample credits and you may read names like the Roches and the Carpenters and Vashti Bunyan; close your eyes and what you’ll see behind closed lids are rainbows and Day-Glo, fireflies and flax—all opalescent everything, inside and out. They’re not especially mysterious samplers; often, they make no effort to hide their source material at all. “Interstellar Love” is built around a snippet of Alan Parsons Project’s “Eye in the Sky,” an inspiration so obvious it scans practically as self-parody. Yet they manage to use it in such a way that it merely colors guest vocalist Leon Bridges’ own melodies, rather than upstaging him. Few contemporary artists are so adept at wringing such potent aura from a recognizable sample, rather than simply crowbarring it into a cheap eureka moment. They’re expert manipulators of the tension between nostalgia and déjà vu, playing recognizable refrains off bits of songs you feel like you know, even if you’ve never heard them before. It is, perhaps, the opposite of a project like the Caretaker, whose soupy ambience is meant to simulate the effects of dementia: In the Avalanches’ music, every sound feels like a treasured memory.
On paper, the list of contributors might be even more eclectic than last time. Blood Orange raps and sings on one song, and MGMT square off against Johnny Marr on another. Tricky turns up a couple of times, muttering so quietly you have to lean in to hear him. Mick Jones, of the Clash and Big Audio Dynamite, duets with a cheerful-sounding Los Angeles singer named Cola Boyy on the boisterous “We Go On,” then pops up in the background of the Jamie xx-produced “Wherever You Go,” playing dubby piano behind Neneh Cherry and the Australian singer CLYPSO. There are rappers (Denzel Curry, Pink Siifu, Sampa the Great) and ranters (Jane’s Addiction’s Perry Farrell, shouting, “Love is our song!”); in “Gold Sky,” Kurt Vile stays grounded, delivering low-key existentialist spoken-word, while the Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne makes for the heavens (“Oh golden sky/A way up high/It’s where soldiers go/When they have died”). But for the most part, all these characters stay folded into the mix, even when their own personalities shine brightly through.
Occasionally, the group highlights the album’s cosmic, life-after-death themes with a well-placed sample or guest turn. In “Solitary Ceremonies,” a woman recounts communicating with the spirit of Franz Liszt (“He used to do so by guiding my hands over the pianoforte keyboard”) while falsetto harmonies glow in the background. “Wherever You Go” opens with a spoken-word snippet from NASA’s Golden Record, a recording carried aboard the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft in 1977: “We step out of our solar system into the universe, seeking only peace and friendship, to teach if we’re called upon, to be taught if we are fortunate.” The album’s most remarkable invocation of the supernatural is hidden in plain sight: “Star Song.IMG,” a 10-second blast of white noise which, when fed into a spectrograph—a program that turns audio waveforms into visual forms—yields a portrait of the Hollywood actor Barbara Payton, whose addictions led to her death from heart and liver failure at just 39. The album’s second song is also dedicated to her; she hovers over the whole project as a kind of tragic patron saint—a nod, perhaps, to Chater’s own struggle with addiction.
By any metric, it’s a lot—such a surfeit of ideas, participants, and sheer stimuli that it feels at points almost absurd. The lyrics sometimes feel like they could use an edit—Neneh Cherry rhymes “agitated” and “celebrated” with “constipated”—and some of the light-and-love philosophizing occasionally verges on hokeyness. But even though the album’s 71 minutes might be 10 or 15 too many, the short track lengths and seamless segues between songs and interludes tend to keep things moving briskly along. The most affecting moments often happen in bridges and outros and other fleeting, marginal moments when an unexpected chord change triggers a palpable jolt of joy. A few of the best songs could be mistaken for outtakes from their debut; if you could bottle a certain frequency of late-summer sunshine, it would probably resemble “Born to Lose,” which flips a snippet of Steve Reich’s “Electric Counterpoint” and a hard-to-spot Leon Bridges sample into the kind of weightless filter-disco perfection that made Since I Left You sound so effortless.
Most importantly, We Will Always Love You overflows with heart, enough that it buoys even the top-heavy moments, and the bittersweet mix of emotions feels remarkably appropriate for the current moment. Pink Siifu nails it when he reworks a melancholy couplet from the Silver Jews’ late David Berman into a line about cosmic perseverance: “I sleep three feet above the street in a pink champagne Corvette/Fly out into space, listen to the music the stars are making/Without a flicker of regret.” It’s a record that takes psychedelia not so much as a means of escape as a pledge of faith: that a stranger, better tomorrow is possible for all of us.
The interstellar message that closes the album, transmitting human DNA and earthly biochemicals in binary code, was originally broadcast from Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory in 1974, beamed out at a frequency of 2380 MHz; following a performance with the SETI-related International Space Orchestra, the Avalanches solicited a copy of the transmission directly from Frank Drake, the nonagenarian astronomer who wrote the missive with assistance from Carl Sagan. Last month, the National Science Foundation announced that after more than a half-century of service, the Arecibo Telescope had become structurally unsound and was to be withdrawn from service. Then, on December 1, cables supporting a 900-ton structure suspended above the telescope snapped, smashing the dish below. Knowing the fate of this once glittering icon of space exploration somehow makes the album’s closing gambit all the more poignant. The telescope may be destroyed, but the message is still out there, sailing past star after star, a message of hope from a crumbling world.

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Cash family and friends, plus Kacey Musgraves, Chris Cornell, Robert Glasper and others, make songs out of the late Man in Black's poetry.

Various Artists: Johnny Cash: Forever Words

Johnny Cash: Forever Words

The poems collected two years ago in Johnny Cash: Forever Words were unsung, in every sense of the word. Gathered from handwritten letters, notebooks, journals, and manuscripts that Cash left behind when he died in 2003, the verses had never been set to music, as far as anyone could tell. Yet turning the pages of that 2016 book, it was impossible not to hear them delivered in Cash’s asphalt-dark voice, sung or spoke-sung, accompanied by his low-slung guitar and the railroad-rhythm drumbeat he favored.
Those lost songs have now become real with this 16-song tribute album, on which Cash family and friends (Rosanne Cash and Carlene Carter; Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson) as well as artists less closely associated with his legacy (Kacey Musgraves, Chris Cornell, John Mellencamp, Elvis Costello) accept the challenge of putting music to his posthumous poetry.
It’s a formidable task: Despite the plainspoken quality of his gruff, gothic delivery, Cash flat-out owned his songs, and the number of good Cash covers in the world is fairly low. (Little Richard, Ray Charles, Dwight Yoakam, Willie Nelson, and Bruce Springsteen are among the standout exceptions.)
The central question of this album is whether the artists assembled can do for Cash what he famously did for Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt,” bringing new life to the material beyond the limits of time, self, and place. But they are also charged with the task of supplying song where music never existed—to paraphrase Paul Muldoon, the editor of Cash’s collected poems, to deliver “that missing boom-chicka [that] will allow it to be completely what it most may be.”
Nelson and Kristofferson, Cash’s surviving fellow Highwaymen, lead off the album with “Forever/I Still Miss Someone,” with Nelson’s guitar Trigger wandering through a forlorn melody as Kristofferson intones what is billed as the last poem their friend wrote, anticipating his own death: “You tell me that I must perish/Like the flowers that I cherish.” What unfolds is a kind of Great American Songbook approach to Johnny Cash, traversing the country and western, mountain bluegrass, blues, and Scotch Irish balladeer range of his own work. Musgraves does a misty, harmonizing duet with her husband, Ruston Kelly, working from a letter the singer wrote to wife June Carter Cash, who died four months before him. Elvis Costello’s swoony, string-laden rendition of “I’ll Still Love You” feels like that letter’s postscript, and Carlene Carter’s “June’s Sundown” completes the romantic trio.
Some poems are aptly translated: Dailey & Vincent’s gospel bluegrass sound fits the hymnlike lyrics of “He Bore It All,” including Cash’s prelude verse from the Book of Matthew. (Cash, an ordained minister, recorded an audio version of the Bible in his lifetime, and left behind a study of Job among his papers.) In choosing “The Walking Wounded,” a bitter ballad which Cash wrote in the 1970s, Rosanne Cash gives stark voice to her father’s legacy of singing the music of the forgotten—Native American and rural and working people and those drafted in Vietnam, especially: “We make the steel, we cut the trees...You may not know us, but you’ll see/There are more than you’d believe.” In a video shot around the cottonfields of Cash’s childhood home, she wanders the present-day landscape of Dyess, Arkansas. The song also features her half-brother John Carter Cash, who co-produced the album; it’s only the second time they’ve collaborated.
Most of the songs were recorded in Cash Cabin Studios in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Allison Krauss & Union Station’s bluegrass translation of “The Captain’s Daughter” feels most true to that setting. The central character in “Jellico Coal Man,” by T-Bone Burnett, could be a Cormac McCarthy creation plodding through a Tennessee mining town, in a song that’s at once Biblical, bluesy, and brazenly dirty.
At times, the accumulation of so many voices weighs heavy on this album. There’s little room to breathe in Brad Paisley’s “Gold All Over the Ground.” It makes you yearn for the simplicity of a strong, space-giving voice, like Jamey Johnson’s barrel-chested belt on “Spirit Rider,” or Chris Cornell’s cathartic howl on “You Never Knew My Mind,” where the late grunge singer unleashes the pent-up anguish of a 1967 breakup poem by Cash.
Jazz pianist Robert Glasper delivers one of Forever Words’ most transformative moments with “Goin’, Goin’, Gone,” turning Cash’s drug confessional into a stunning R&B groove built around the refrain “Liquid, capsule, tablet, powder.” (“I was trying to describe the hell of trying to stay alive,” Cash explains in a sampled interview.) It recalls the imagination and generosity of Cash’s own work as a covers artist, suggesting his music and words as an enduring Great American Songbook in their own right, ripe for new interpretations. As he concludes in the last poem he wrote, voiced here by Kristofferson: “The trees that I planted still are young; the songs I sang will still be sung.”


The breakbeat revivalist returns to well-worn rave tropes, yielding diminishing returns.

Abraxas EP

Clubland’s recent obsession with breakbeats has thrust the idiosyncratic British producer Lone into an improbably fashionable position, with tracks like “Temples” and “Pulsar” slotting, almost despite themselves, into the trend for gritty drum breaks at a house tempo. But the longtime breakbeat revivalist’s Abraxas EP, inspired by pitched-down drum’n’bass, unwittingly sounds a warning bell for the style’s rapidly diminishing returns.
Lone’s interest in breakbeats solidified on Levitate, in 2016—an age ago in electronic music—and continued through the recent Ambivert Tools 12-inch series. To this rave revivalism he brought a gift for mystical melody and dusty atmosphere that elevated his productions above mere novelty. But as his fellow producers pile into the retro wave, these traits are almost entirely absent on Abraxas, an EP that resembles a paint-by-numbers breakbeat kit.
It’s not so much that there is little going on in the three tracks here—some of the best electronic music is made up of very little—as that there is nothing truly noteworthy: no new sounds or rhythmic inflection to put a spring in the step, no intriguing melodies or production trickery to capture the heart. Instead, Abraxas relies heavily on some of the most well-worn tropes in dance music, from the “Funky Drummer” break to choral pads, all rendered in a prosaic manner that does little to redeem them.
The Lisbon DJ Violet made the point in a recent Guardian article that breakbeats can be recycled in countless configurations, in a way that “recharges meaning as opposed to exhausting it.” But the breakbeats on Abraxas feel tired to the point of lethargy. Lone digs shallow into the store of classic breaks and just kind of leaves them there, unmolested in the mix, when a more adventurous mind might have chopped them to hell and back. Given that radically altered breakbeats were pretty much the whole point of ’90s drum’n’bass, this lackadaisical attitude is puzzling.
Equally dispiriting is Lone’s use of the Roland TB-303—the other most over-used sound in ’90s electronic music—which pops up on the EP doing very little of interest. Dillinja’s “Acid Track” and Josh Wink’s “Higher State of Consciousness” both proved long ago that 303 plus breakbeat can be a chemically potent mix. But the three tracks on Abraxas have none of Dillinja’s sheer acidic filth or Wink’s brutally effective danceability. Instead, with the possible exception of “Young Star Cluster,” the 303s on Abraxas wobble around indolently, like hippos in a mud lake.
So what else remains? The title track adds a synth melody that wafts about without ever setting fire to the curtains and the kind of “exotic” instrumental sample misused on ’90s rave records to denote globe-trotting depth. “Young Star Cluster” has a nagging kalimba melody, a halfway decent 303 squelch, and airy melodic flutters. “How Can You Tell” closes the EP with angelic synth washes à la The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld and a catchy sub-bass line. And that is that, pretty much, for a hugely underwhelming package.
As Octo Octa’s recent work shows, there is still mileage to be gotten out of reviving music’s most modish decade. But Abraxas’ lackluster approach makes you wish Lone had dug into the daredevil spirit of the ’90s rather than aping its sonic trappings. Lone has made far better music and will probably continue to do so. But lesser breakbeat revivalists should consider themselves warned by this wet blanket of a record.


With his Atlantic debut looming on the horizon and a higher profile than he's ever enjoyed, the Baton Rouge rapper Kevin Gates' newest mixtape is packed with uptempo anthems, chest-pumping bravado, and a 2 Chainz guest spot. The beats here are a little bigger than in the past and have more of a sheen to them.

By Any Means

After the kind of year Kevin Gates had in 2013—finally signing with a major label when he inked a deal with Atlantic Records, releasing two critically-acclaimed mixtapes, becoming a father for the second time—you might think that he'd be in a better mood. This, however, would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the Baton Rouge rapper. Although his unflinching, often brutal dope-boy tales can find him struggling against his naturally pessimistic impulses, Gates' default mode is one of squinty-eyed suspicion, and the world he inhabits in his music is one where human connection only leads to betrayal and trust is something that gets you killed. But even with his Atlantic debut looming somewhere on the horizon and a higher profile than he's ever enjoyed, Gates sounds unsatisfied and more than a little paranoid on By Any Means, his third release in just over a year.
This isn't to say his latest project—or Gates's music in general—is a bummer. As with his previous two releases, By Any Means is packed with uptempo anthems and chest-pumping bravado, the only difference being that here the beats are both a little bigger and have more of a sheen to them. The album splits the difference between the radio-friendly melodicism of The Luca Brasi Story and the technical experimentation of Stranger Than Fiction, inching closer to the mainstream rap radio that one imagines is Gates' ultimate goal. The production still prioritizes the kind of lower frequencies that could level buildings, and it's not afraid to take the sounds usually found at the fringes of trap beats and make them the focus. Whether it's the cathedral organs of "Arm and Hammer" courtesy of the Runners and the Monarch or the eerie MIDI blues backdrop that Dun Deal provides for bitter kiss-off "Stop Lyin'", Gates tends to select tracks just to the left of the kind of beats other rappers would typically choose from the same producers, and it gives his music the advantage of sounding familiar but fresh at the same time.
That said, Gates could rap over boilerplate trap beats and he'd still manage to put his personal spin on them. Few rappers today as using their voices as well as Gates does; he's got an instinctive grasp on when to slip from his usual melodic cadence into a balled-fist croak that sounds like he took a cheese grater to his vocal chords. He pulls out this trick on "Homicide", a harrowing tale in which he exacts revenge after a botched job leaves his friend murdered and Gates in the hospital.
Gates' ability to say one thing with his lyrics and another with his voice has always been one of his greatest strengths. He can puff his chest out while simultaneously undercutting a boast, and this works especially well on an album that finds him ostensibly closer to his goals but somehow even more paranoid and isolated, caught somewhere between sheer disbelief that he's even made it this far ("Can't Make This Up") and an overwhelming suspicion it's too good to be true, especially for someone who knows himself well enough to know that the man he used to be is always lurking around the corner. "Be cool, you must want to see me incarcerated" he raps on "Keep Fucking With Me", but over the course of By Any Means, you get the feeling that Gates' is as worried about his own self-destructive tendencies as he is any external forces out to get him. With the exception of "Movie", an absolutely heartwarming account of the birth of his children, Gates rarely sounds as if he's enjoying his recent success, even while boasting about driving around in cars he once only saw on the big screen; you can tell he's trying, but relaxing is still foreign to someone like him.
On the flip side of "Movie" is "Posed to Be in Love", in which Gates narrates beating his girlfriend after discovering that she cheated on him while he was in prison. At best, the track can be viewed as an "All of the Lights"-style exploration of male rage and domestic violence; at worst, it comes across like a frightening glimpse into Gates' misogynist attitude towards women, which has reared its head before but never as brazenly as it does here. It's the kind of track that makes it obvious that an Atlantic sign-off wasn't required, as it's the kind of song they'd be terrified that an artist of theirs—one who sells himself as much the lothario as he does the hustler—was recording. Then again, Gates has never been one shy away from exposing the worst parts of his psyche, even if it's as disturbing as it is on "Posed to Be in Love".
There's also a sense that Gates is holding back somewhat. There are only a few guests, the biggest being 2 Chainz, who sounds like he's glancing at his watch while contributing a verse and the chorus to "Bet I'm on It". It's likely that Gates is saving them for the future rather than using up that major label budget now, but he doesn't really need them anyways—he's a fascinating persona all on his own. With By All Means he completes a three-release run that's as solid as any in recent memory, even if the answer to the question of whether he has another gear in him remains unanswered for the time being.


An ominous blend of drones and field recordings, the two musicians’ debut collaboration plays out like a long-distance conversation about geologic time.

Lea Bertucci / Lawrence English: Chthonic

Chthonic

A sense of unease drives Lea Bertucci and Lawrence English’s Chthonic. Rhythms crash like boulders and high-end shapes shriek like birds. An imaginary dive beneath the earth’s crust that finds inspiration in the mysteries of the underworld, the record strikes a delicate balance between their respective styles, blending English’s blazing static and field recordings with Bertucci’s fluttering strings and wind melodies. Both artists have a tendency to sprawl, but Chthonic showcases a more compressed side of their practices, exploring the intensity of densely woven phrases.
Bertucci and English met in 2019, and Chthonic, which they created remotely, passing ideas back and forth between New York and Australia, is their first collaboration. It’s a fitting match: Both artists use music as a means of grappling with the ways that time and space shape perception, and both frequently look to the natural world and the particularities of site-specific sound for inspiration. Chthonic builds from these shared interests, painting menacing pictures of the unseen forces at work inside the Earth.
While these pieces move in cycles, they never form neat circles. Instead, they twist and turn, becoming steadily deeper and more dissonant. Strings scrape against plodding pulses; tension rolls in waves. A purgatorial air pervades the duo’s sounds, which often give the impression of being pulled by uncontrollable forces on all sides. The cramped feeling is at its most potent on “Dust Storm,” which begins with torrential rainfall before a low-end buzz slices against snippets of drone stuck in an endless loop. In the 12-minute “A Fissisure Exhales,” bright streaks echo across a cavernous expanse and are swallowed up in the darkness as if sucked into a black hole.
Chthonic can be monotonous; the mood is anxious, and there are few moments of surprise or reprise. But some unexpected passages prove powerful. On the closing “Strata,” Bertucci and English forgo the heavy-handed pressure of earlier tracks, opting instead for a soft, airy shimmer. A hint of relief comes into focus, even though a foreboding suggestion of agitation remains. In an album of crushing force, it’s the rare moment where hope shines through.


Fuzz is the proto-metal-worshipping power trio of Ty Segall, Charles Moothart, and Meatbodies' Chad Ubovich. Their second full-length is a double album—a ballsy and potentially dangerous move for a band who operate best when their songs are kept tight.

II

On an episode of "WTF With Marc Maron", Mikal Cronin spoke about the scene he, Ty Segall, and Charles Moothart came up in during high school. As he explained it, he would throw parties at his parents' house in Laguna Beach, and their small circle of musician friends would write songs and start bands specifically for the events. Different combinations of the same people were getting together and exploring different vibes. "You guys still do that," Maron observed. And he's right. This year alone, Segall has been juggling several projects. His circle of friends and collaborators (Moothart, Meatbodies' Chad Ubovich, Wand's Cory Hanson, Thee Oh Sees' John Dwyer, and Cronin) all tend to have multiple irons in the fire.
Those high school bands weren't focused on long-term sustainability; they were momentary sparks of creative energy. To this day, the best moment in the life of any new Segall project is the first spark. The introductory taste of new music from these bands offers the opportunity to parse how aesthetic and personnel differences define the music—to hear what separates it from prior work, what makes it exciting, and what the chances are that the project will outlive the confines of a 7". Segall and Moothart's band Fuzz made a strong first impression with their debut 2012 single "Fuzz's Fourth Dream". It was a showcase for Moothart's guitar solo mastery, the band's stellar hook work, the effortless way they can slink into a groove, and Segall's ace drumming. With 2013's Fuzz, the proto-metal-worshipping power trio became a proven entity—a well-oiled machine with a few strong songs. The lineup now features Ubovich, and if you only take into account his impressive work as Meatbodies' frontman, it seems Fuzz have only become more powerful.
Fuzz's second full-length, II, is a double album—a ballsy and potentially dangerous move for a band who operate best when their songs are kept tight. Their Fuzz track "Loose Sutures", for example, went a bit too loose and lost its momentum about halfway in. More than half of II's songs are over four minutes long, and the longest one of the bunch is the most disappointing of them all. The final 14-minute track, "II", is an obligatory instrumental sequel to Fuzz's instrumental closer "One". Where "One" ramps up the power and velocity of its central hook, "II" never quite figures out exactly where it's going. It changes course several times, and along the way, a question emerges—how much Fuzz is too much?
It's a bum note to end on, but before they reach that final song, Fuzz knock out some undeniable high points in their discography. Ubovich's bass provides the perfect dour counterbalance to Segall's dulcet vocal on "Let It Live". There's a premium on heaviness, and "Pollinate" certainly delivers the thudding, crashing goods. And if Fuzz occasionally felt too spare, II is where they throw everything at the wall. All three men play synthesizers, and in a few well-placed moments, they've got string arrangements courtesy of Laena Geronimo. They often change pace—tempo, emphasis, texture—at the moment a song begins to feel stale.
It also helps that they're the rare band where any of the three members could serve as the frontman. While Segall's voice is undeniably the most impressive, Moothart and Ubovich come across more gritty and grounded—perfect for songs about "teeth twisting in the heatwave." It's also refreshing to hear Fuzz bucking their former formula—their "lead singers take turns" approach goes out the window on "Burning Wreath", which features Segall and Moothart trading lines and briefly harmonizing. It's a small moment, but one that hints at how much this band are capable of when you consider how much talent they have between them.
That's why it's disappointing when, around the album's third side, Fuzz's songs begin to feel anonymous—like they're retreading ground they'd already covered earlier in the album. Segall, Moothart, and Ubovich have done an impressive job of nailing this sound, and somewhere in the stoner rock sprawl, they have enough impressive moments and great songs for a truly strong album that's about half as long. They just don't do quite enough to differentiate their approach or justify the album's 67-minute run-time. There are definitely instances of them changing things up—"Red Flag" is a two-minute punk song on an album that benefits from brief interstitials. Even considering all the high points and raw power, II falters under the weight of the band's ambition.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit a spiritually charged masterpiece from 1968, a controlled and chaotic blend of free jazz, meditative soul, and gospel.

Ghetto Music

In a 2007 interview with JazzTimes, trumpeter Eddie Gale spoke about the impetus behind his debut album, Eddie Gale’s Ghetto Music, a record so ambitious that not even Blue Note knew what to do with it. It was 1968, and the venerated jazz label was running on the fumes of the hard bop era with swanky, romantic tunes that didn’t address the despair and unrest unfolding outside: a quagmire in Vietnam, the fight for equal rights in the U.S., the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. Gale’s album was something else: it conveyed fire, intensity, and most of all, Blackness. “At that point, I didn’t know of anyone who was playing with two drummers and two bassists,” he said. “It just made sense to have this action going on from my love of African music and my time back in the marching band.” Ghetto Music synthesized these touchpoints, honoring the continent’s polyrhythmic arrangements while offering a warm embrace to African Americans fighting bigotry and classism. It was the sound of joy, sorrow, and awakening, funneled through a masterful 41-minute blend of free jazz, meditative soul, and gospel.
Gale’s journey to Ghetto Music began three years prior when the 24-year-old—who had been reared in the bebop stylings of pianist Bud Powell and trumpeter Kenny Dorham—grew fascinated with the burgeoning free jazz movement, a frenetic style that eschewed traditional chord changes for strident improvisation and spiritual connection. By 17, Gale started taking trumpet lessons from Dorham, then started jamming with jazz stalwarts like Max Roach and Art Blakey, all while developing his own style on the horn. This free jazz, dubbed “The New Thing,” confused listeners and critics whose descriptions reeked with elitism. Some fusty jazz critics didn’t want the genre to evolve, and this music—with all its dissonance and ear-piercing shrieks—was far removed from the ’40s and ’50s, where clean-cut performers played smooth melodies in cramped supper clubs.
But “The New Thing” was about bringing jazz to people who couldn’t afford expensive tickets and the two-drink minimum. It was from and for communities that needed healing, and evoked the earliest days of the genre when untrained Southern musicians used their instruments to lament discrimination through atonal screeching and wails. In the ’60s, the most famous performer of this new style was John Coltrane, the renowned saxophonist whose 1966 album, Ascension, was far different than the acclaimed, and more melodic A Love Supreme. His embracing of the subgenre brought wider recognition to fellow saxophonists Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, and Archie Shepp, all of whom influenced Gale to find a similar path. He was introduced to Sun Ra in the early ’60s by drummer Scoby Stroman, who was working with the experimental pianist. Gale was soon brought into the Arkestra’s vaunted horn section and played alongside Pat Patrick, John Gilmore, and Marshall Allen, where he learned how to experiment on the trumpet while keeping in the pocket of Sun Ra’s cosmic expanse. In the Arkestra, the bandleader stressed the importance of musical discipline, planting the seeds for the controlled chaos of Ghetto Music.
Gale’s big break came in ’62, when he appeared on “Space Aura,” the third track on Sun Ra & His Solar Arkestra’s Secrets of the Sun LP. Three years later, Gale scored a bigger placement when he played on Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures, the pianist’s first album for Blue Note, now a linchpin record in the annals of free jazz. Then, after a star turn on organist Lee Young’s Of Love and Peace, Blue Note co-founder Francis Wolff asked Gale if he wanted to record his own music. He assembled a sextet that included drummers Thomas Holman and Richard Hackett; bassists Judah Samuel and James “Tokio” Reid; and flutist/tenor saxophonist Russell Lyle; along with an 11-person choir called the Noble Gale Singers. They convened at the famed Van Gelder Studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on September 20, 1968, and recorded Ghetto Music in one day.
The album title itself was an act of rebellion. When people conjure the term “ghetto,” they think poor, dangerous, and Black, coating it in broad, racist strokes. Doing so ignores the community existing there, the togetherness spurred by the dearth of resources afforded to it. Instead, Ghetto Music was meant to celebrate Gale’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn and others like it. “It comes from all of us that lived in that area of the city,” he once said. “That lived this life of music, going to school, learning and growing up. It was all-encompassing.”
Ghetto Music was written as a dramatic presentation accentuated by costumes and acting; between its choral chants and prayerful aura, it was an album that could’ve worked just as well in the Theater District and The East, the famed Black cultural center and venue in Bed-Stuy. Anxious moments were met with equally calm ones, offering a nuanced portrayal of Black life beyond its depiction in the news. Simply put: Black people weren’t taking any more shit from white people; the tenants of nonviolence were giving way to militant-minded retaliation. As the thinking went, brutality would be met in kind; the days of “We Shall Overcome” gave way to James Brown’s “Say It Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud” and Sly & the Family Stone’s “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey.” Along with that thinking came a new, unflinching pride; the tenor was less about what whites have done wrong and more about looking within for the unification and construction of an isolated Black world.
Where other music jabbed its finger in the chest of the oppressor, Ghetto Music felt like a comforting hug for the oppressed. This is what “The Rain” does when Gale’s sister Joann sings of finding the resilience to move on from distress. “I must leave, so so long,” she coos sweetly, her voice tearful and despondent. “Wipe the tears away from your eyes.” Conversely, “Fulton Street,” a break-neck arrangement with thunderous drum rolls and blistering trumpet wails, is twitchy and nervous, the sense of speeding down the road and beating the yellow signals. The song stops and starts at various intervals, only heightening the intensity; in its silent moments, Gale blasts into his upper register; when followed by cascading drum fills, it’s the sound of a fully pressurized Brooklyn summer day.
Compare that to the mournful “A Understanding,” where Gale plays in a lower register and the choir imparts a slow and solemn tone. It’s as if the weight of injustice has gotten to him and the band, and only the faint recollection of happiness remains. Such thoughts aren’t surprising in this context; riots broke out in the city as a result of King’s assassination in Memphis, along with a student uprising at Columbia University related to the construction of a new gym that residents thought would exacerbate segregation in Harlem. Closer to Gale’s home, a battle over school decentralization in Ocean Hill-Brownsville led to racial tensions over how children were being taught in poorer neighborhoods. Gale funneled these struggles into a singular vision informed by his dismay, though not mired in it. Instead, he used such instances to propel himself and the band forward, blasting into aggressive rhythms rooted in the tenets of Black Nationalism. The instrumental “A Walk with Thee” speaks directly to Gale’s past and present—the marching band student and Sun Ra disciple. Between its military-style ra-ta-tat-tat drums and wistful chanting, it’s a festive jaunt that works equally in open air and at West African nightclubs, the feeling of a crew in lockstep. “The Coming of Gwilu” signals a rebirth, or in this case, the actual birth of Gale’s son, Gwilu. Here, the call-and-response chanting is part of a ritualistic birthing ceremony that, with its 13-minute runtime, comfortably ushers the boy into this world. It lets him know he’s protected from harm.
Gale followed Ghetto Music with Black Rhythm Happening, a 1969 companion album with a nonet and bigger guest features (Coltrane collaborator Elvin Jones played drums and Jimmy Lyons played alto sax) that split the difference between funk and jazz. It refined the edges a bit: While songs like “Mexico Thing,” “Ghetto Summertime” and “Look At Teyonda” (about his daughter of the same name) harbored the raw spirit of Ghetto Music, they landed softer on the ear. Conversely, Gale’s first album encompassed the unrest that threatened his existence, letting it unfold in a billowing haze of combative grooves.
Following the release of Ghetto Music and Black Rhythm Happening, Gale was dropped from Blue Note when co-founders Wolff and Alfred Lion lost control of the label. By the time these albums arrived, jazz had given way to funk as the most popular genre in Black music. Even jazz music’s biggest stars—Miles Davis and Herbie Hancock—had started to blend the genre with psych-rock and funk, which led to an amorphous sound that pushed the sound into bigger venues. Gale’s music was overtly radical; his name didn’t ring as loudly as Pharoah and Ayler in the chronicles of underground free jazz. It seemed the landscape wasn’t ready for a Cecil Taylor-approved, Sun Ra-trained trumpeter who could play straight-ahead and avant-garde in fancy concert halls and on the street. The jazz police couldn’t figure him out, so instead of taking time to dissect Ghetto Music’s dense layers, it was easier to move on to something more palatable. Parts of it were tough to endure if you weren’t of the people, and in an era where jazz was fading from mainstream view, Ghetto Music has mostly gone unappreciated.
Ghetto Music was the genre’s future, and would go on to influence several like-minded bandleaders some 50 years later. You hear traces of Gale in the robust spiritual jazz of Kamasi Washington (who, like Gale, uses multiple drummers and choir) and the jazz-electro-funk hybrid of Damon Locks’ Black Monument Ensemble. And where Gale’s feverish tilt surfaced in Pink Siifu’s 2020 album, NEGRO, Ghetto Music’s inward-looking lament textured Sault’s emotive UNTITLED (Black Is). All these artists employ the same “for us by us” ethos, which, to my ear, closely resembles Gale’s first and best LP as a blueprint for what Black Liberation jazz could sound like. After decades in relative obscurity, Ghetto Music was reissued in 2017 and introduced to a new generation of listeners. “The Rain” and “A Understanding” can be heard in director Shaka King’s Oscar-winning 2021 film, Judas and the Black Messiah, which detailed the plot to kill Black Panther activist Fred Hampton.
In the early ’70s, Gale moved to Palo Alto, California, left the music business, and went into teaching. He continued to perform throughout the years and even appeared on a few noted late ’70s Sun Ra albums (Lanquidity, The Other Side of the Sun, and On Jupiter). Yet nothing else he released had the groundbreaking impact of Ghetto Music—a sweltering and comprehensive masterpiece, a high-water mark for Black love and freedom, a time capsule and summation of 1960s Brooklyn as a beacon of spirit and creativity. All these years later, it still captures the essence of the neighborhood it aimed to serve. “It didn’t sound like anything that came out before or after,” trumpeter Steven Bernstein told The New York Times in the 2020 obituary for Gale, who died that year at the age of 78. “Total outlier. It’s 6/8 vamps with two bass players and two drummers, unison melodies in the horns, and then incredible choirs that are bringing blocks of music.” Indeed, Ghetto Music is still a lightning rod record worthy of deeper study and recognition. With Black life still under siege, this record remains a trek toward inner peace and understanding.


The appealingly unpredictable debut from the Norwegian duo thrives off the dueling forces of unease and temptation.

Believer

Smerz’s tightly coiled synth pop is designed to keep you on edge. Henriette Motzfeldt and Catharina Stoltenberg place their zombified vocals atop ruptured synths and murky breakbeats, creating an air of chilly menace. On Believer, the Norwegian duo’s first full-length for XL, Smerz take this sound to even harsher places;  as with 2018’s off-kilter Have fun EP, the music works best when it glowers, throwing you off balance and getting under your skin.
Believer’s title track throbs with a looped, saw-toothed synth and stomping trip-hop beat that’s the hardest the pair have ever made. Mid-album highlight “Rain” (one of several tracks sung in their native Norwegian) moves with similar swagger, propped up by a lopsided beat and ominous strings that sound lifted from Homogenic-era Björk. There’s a creeping insistence to this music, thriving off a dual sense of unease and temptation, and the best songs blur the line between hedonism and anxiety.
Smerz recorded Believer over three years in Copenhagen, drawing on their youth in choirs as well as current academic pursuits in music composition and mathematics. Tensile MIDI harp samples bristle against actual violins and cellos, creating a digital and acoustic orchestra that lends Believer its appealing unpredictability. The minimalist interludes sprinkled throughout are intentionally theatrical (there’s a hearty round of applause on “Grand Piano”), complicating the album’s momentum with patches of eerie stillness. “The favourite” and “Versace Strings” are melancholy and full of echo, so it’s like hearing the trilling keys and Motzfeldt’s operatic voice from within a sprawling theater.
Believer dances along a tense, agitated line and doesn’t settle for long. “Flashing” includes Motzfeldt and Stoltenberg’s most expressive vocal performance, reeling off what sounds like a yearning inner monologue: “I don’t see you get close/About the things that I say that matter most.”. The passionate vocals stand out from the rest of Believer, with its glassine pop-R&B delivery. Smerz’s usual brooding, dead-eyed vacancy, punctuated with mumbled interjections, has a magnetic pull in concentrated blasts, but it can also feel like a slight crutch when songs like “Flashing” and the album’s interludes prove they can go in different, evocative directions at a whim. Believer flourishes in those moments, showing the full breadth of what Smerz can do.

Buy: Rough Trade
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!!! were always a ray of California sunshine piercing the paranoid gloom of their dance-punk milieu. Their ninth album shows how dashingly they’ve ripened into their vintage influences.

Let It Be Blue

Cut-cut-cut-cut through like the Pana-Pana-Panama Canal-Canal-Canal. One run through those 20 staccato syllables could set them pinging around in your skull for hours, but in the chorus of “Panama Canal,” a single from !!!’s ninth album, Let It Be Blue, Meah Pace repeats them three more times for good measure. Most of the music clears away so that the words stand out in stark relief, rendered even more lethally memorable by a surge of lobster-claw clicks halfway through. This chorus pushes the needle between earworm and malware as far as it’s been in bass music since “Like a G6,” and the M.I.A.-like ululation that follows has the ring of an exultant taunt, as befits someone springing a trunk-rattling new “Lovefool” on an unready world.
Now, the Panama Canal is an artificial waterway of some 50 miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific; it has a complex geopolitical history involving several sovereign nations; and if you imagine “Panama Canal” has anything to do with that, you’re so far up the wrong tree you need a firetruck. Catchy nonsense—merrily pasted up from hedonistic yearnings, political tantrums, and coffee-buzzed wordplay—has been the offhandedly definitive leftfield dance-punk band’s stock in trade since Nic Offer founded it more than 20 years ago. Their disco-pop and global funk songs, now far removed from their origins in rock, may sound like they want to save your life, but their governing register is and ever was the dad joke. They’ve stood by the form since before it was a thing and through all that came after, and this seems entwined with the unfading longevity of their goofball chic, impervious to fashion and time.
So the invocation of one of the world’s great engineering marvels has no deeper significance than you’d expect from a band whose most iconic song’s stroke of genius was that Julio sounds a little like Giuliani, and who called a whole album Myth Takes, a lisping groaner of a pun I literally just got, 15 years late. But Let It Be Blue is an engineering marvel itself. Pieced together from swapped Ableton Live sessions, it somehow comes out feeling live, streamlined, and complete. It’s certainly not the only idealized dancefloor to have been dreamed up in semi-quarantine, but it’s a sharp self-portrait of a band on its own endearing and inimitable wavelength. Not only that, it manages something rare in dance music, discovering an invisible third option between aging with grace and clinging to youth.
The dance-punk revival that seized New York around 2002 arguably started a couple of years earlier, in Sacramento, when !!! released their debut album, though they were drawn to Brooklyn soon enough. They were the Rapture before the Rapture—hardcore kids flushed with the discovery of samplers and dance music—and they shared an early bassist with LCD Soundsystem. They also had an extremely fun side project, Out Hud, that was more deeply indebted to house and electro than the disco-punk main unit, in which they raised fleets of horns and crashing cymbals for their freewheeling live shows. They were a ray of California sunshine piercing the paranoid gloom of their milieu, Day-Glo fashion hippies singing songs for pleasure instead of well-dressed men singing songs for oblivion. Let It Be Blue shows how dashingly they’ve settled into that role and ripened into their vintage influences.
All the strutting basses, pouncing guitars, steel-hooped drums, ravey arpeggios, and playful vocal samples you expect from !!! are withheld on the opening track, “Normal People,” a hopeful-sad acoustic bagatelle that may trigger startling memories of Badly Drawn Boy and seems destined for a Noah Baumbach film. But things swiftly get back to normal on “A Little Bit (More),” if your idea of normal sounds like Claude VonStroke giving C+C Music Factory a deep workout. “Here’s What I Need to Know” is lathered in trance synths, while guest singer Angelia Garcia ties a golden ribbon on the pumping dembow of “Un Puente.” The title track somehow gets from Mr. Oizo to David Bowie by way of the Juan Maclean, and it’s one of the only times that the record succumbs to the overly fiddly temptations of file-swapping projects. There is also dramatic, straightforward Human League synth pop and fantasy disco redolent of Phoenix’s Ti Amo, and that’s just the verses and choruses of “Storm Around the World,” featuring Maria Uzor.
The flashiest song might be “Man on the Moon,” a cover of R.E.M.’s borderline novelty hit in a roller-disco style with the slacker flavor of Beck’s “Loser.” Or, if you’re a real music nerd, maybe it’s “This Is Pop 2,” in which Offer spreads the patchy suede of his voice over dark-hued electro-pop, dabbing it here and there with spot-on British new-wave tics. It’s a fan sequel to XTC’s 1978 cris de coeur about the anxiety of definition, which likewise appeared on an album with a Beatles-baiting title. A litany of contradictory statements about the genre cancel one another out until one truism shines with special significance: “This is pop, and it feels like summer.” But it feels obtuse to try to analyze !!!, who like to romp around in music history but mainly use words to lure us nearer to the bouncing cones, where the bass obliterates conversation, lest we risk what’s right there in search of some deeper meaning.


On his first Co La full-length, Ecstatic Sunshine member Matthew Papich makes bright, lightweight loop-based music for imagining you're in a perfect somewhere else.

Daydream Repeater

A couple of weeks ago, Pitchfork Editor-in-Chief Mark Richardson wrote a column on what he called "the Tumblr-ization of indie." One of his ideas was that an artist like Lana Del Rey is basically a collage-- or in his metaphor, a Tumblr-- of images and sounds she thinks are cool. In a cultural moment when the past is instantly accessible-- not to mention one in which we're used to constant reference and appropriation-- it makes sense that we start conflating "who we are" with "what we're into." Instead of creating, the artist collects. As viewers-- or listeners, or whatever-- we learn to read between the lines and explore juxtapositions. Is it possible, for example, for me to express something about myself that can't be best expressed by saying, "I'm pretty into Hawaiian slack-key guitar music and body horror movies?" Liking things-- something we all do by reflex-- becomes a creative gesture if you do it thoughtfully.
Listening to Daydream Repeater, Ecstatic Sunshine member Matthew Papich's first full-length album as Co La, I revisited an experience I haven't had since college: Walking down the street, seeing someone wearing the t-shirt of a band I like, and thinking, cool. It's comforting to know other people like the same things we do-- in this case, skinhead reggae from the mid-1960s, field recordings from the Cameroonian rainforest, cricket noises, music in major keys. It's an incredibly lightweight album-- thin-sounding, super-repetitive, bright to the point of translucence. (Though Daydream Repeater doesn't sound stylistically like Ecstatic Sunshine, people familiar with them might recognize the directive: feel good all the time, over and over again). Papich is no archeologist, nor do I think he's trying to show off his knowledge of obscure sounds-- most of the time, he doesn't even bother disguising his samples.
Whether you attribute this to laziness or naive grace probably depends on frame of mind. By techno or hip-hop standards, Daydream Repeater would be artless, but my sense is that the music on it is closer to something like Girl Talk for audiences who don't like getting the shit beaten out of them-- music that wants you to say, "Hey, I recognize that," music that makes you feel included rather than excluded.
When interviewed for a "Rising" column a few weeks ago, Papich namechecked Erik Satie, a turn-of-the-century French composer who coined the term musique d'ameublement, or "furniture music"-- basically, the foundation for what we now call "ambient." Clearly Papich wants to be part of that conversation, or he wouldn't have made the reference. Whether he adds much to it or not, I don't know. The irony of Satie's music is that, at the time, it was considered radical and antagonistic. Papich has 100 years of art to validate music as brainless and determinedly relaxing as his own.
I've listened to Daydream Repeater a lot lately, but at moments when I otherwise don't want to be listening to music. To my mind, it sounds less like ambience and more like exotica. Its imaginary world is the yacht deck without seasickness or boredom, jungles without the fist-sized bugs. It's music for imagining you're in a perfect somewhere else. Five songs are named after places: "Egyptian Peaches", "Belgian Pillow", "My Jamaican", "Siamese in Greece", "Burning One in Stockholm."
That's where the Tumblr thing comes in. Daydream Repeater plays more like a mixtape than an album-- a document of where someone's been and what they've liked. Aside from one surprising flip of "Be My Baby", Papich doesn't seem as interested in transforming his source material as much as just presenting it. Here's a reggae song I like, he says, and then plays it with some echo. A couple of minutes later, something else. In the cracks between, some aesthetic takes shape.  Some of my colleagues here seem outright frustrated by how little Papich seems to interact with his material. For a record so airy and noncommittal, I feel semi-conflicted about it. He doesn't really seem bent on invention. But I like listening to Daydream Repeater. I'd repost it.


Interspersed with birdsong, new age synth, and poetry recitations, a new EP from the English folk singer returns her songs to the elements that inspired them.

Crowlink EP

Shirley Collins’ new EP begins with the octogenarian folk singer reciting a short stanza of a poem, her only accompaniment a flock of birds and the gentle brush of a breeze. “One morning in the month of May, when all the birds were singing,” she says, bending the rhythm of the words slightly upward, as though posing a question to the listener. “I saw a lovely lady stray across the fields at break of day and softly sang a roundelay.” It’s a short, simple musing on the motivation to make art and the passage of time—which is fitting because Collins has been singing a version of this song her entire life. The new track is called “Across the Field,” but Collins has long known it as “Just as the Tide Was a’ Turning.” She learned it from her aunt and recorded it first in 1959, then again in 1967 with her sister Dolly Collins. In 1971 she recorded it once more with the Albion Country Band, a loose collective of English folk musicians including members of Fairport Convention and the Young Tradition.
50 years later, Collins has traded those human collaborators for birds, and their chirping lends the music a peculiar intimacy, as though you’re overhearing her praying in her garden. “The tide flows in, the tide flows out,” she says, “twice returning everyday.” As with many of the best moments in her unruly catalog, the song is lovely because it is so fleeting, so quiet, so undramatic. Even during her heyday in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when she was recording albums with famed producer Joe Boyd and releasing them on Harvest Records (then home to Pink Floyd and Deep Purple, among others), Collins shunned the spotlight and always insisted she was merely a conduit for the legions of unnamed English folks who collectively wrote the songs she sang.
Crowlink, like the two comeback albums that preceded it, reveals an artist who strikes beautiful and impossible balances: She makes public songs sound private; she makes the past feel very present; she honors history by pushing it forward. Released last year, Heart’s Ease ended with a thunderstorm, a windblown drone of harmonium and hurdy-gurdy, and the serene chirping of birds. It sounded as though the old songs she had been singing had returned to the elements that inspired them, and Crowlink acts as an exclamation point to that idea. The EP picks up in the same place, musically and geographically, using those same elements and extending them further. The sounds reappear throughout these five new tracks, assembled from field recordings made by Matthew Shaw at Crowlink in Sussex, as well as nearby Etchingham and Firie Church.
Collins doesn’t sing on the second track, the meditative instrumental “At Break of Day,” which foregrounds birdsong against the ebb and flow of new age synths. She’s a presence regardless, her imagery resonating throughout the notes as Shaw explores these natural and synthetic textures. Together, “Across the Field” and “At Break of Day” make for an immersive introduction to this EP, which finishes with three traditional songs, sung tenderly and calmly, with a quiet resolve. Collins delivers “My Sailor Boy” as if looking back on a long-ago tragedy—an impression bolstered by the noise like crashing waves around her. Similarly, the closing “The Briar and the Rose” is less about any specific event of loss or betrayal than how those shocks reverberate through time—in this case, a rose and a briar growing from the graves of thwarted lovers. They’re old songs made from scraps of even older ones—including references of “Barbara Allen,” perhaps the closest Collins has to a signature tune—but Collins continues to find new meanings within them and therefore new ways to sing them. So the old hymn “Through All Eternity” becomes akin to a promise to find something that persists beyond the tides: “Throughout all eternity I’ll sing on, I’ll sing on,” she exclaims, speaking not for herself but for the songs themselves.

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