The English producer’s full-length debut is full of cresting arpeggios and massive supersaws. It’s an ambitious ode to the ecstasy of trance music.

Revanchist

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, between dreamy cloud rap, the prog aspirations of Brainfeeder, and the commercial convergence of trap-EDM, the lines between hip-hop production and electronic experimentation were blurred like never before. Perhaps the most zeitgeisty example of that confluence was Kanye West’s Yeezus, which brought leftfield producers like Arca, Hudson Mohawke, and Evian Christ into the mainstream. Yeezus wasn’t startling only because of its abrasiveness; it was just so unexpected to hear the biggest rapper in the world entrusting his sound to a new generation of electronic beatmakers. Christ was a relative unknown before his contribution to album cut “I’m in It,” but even though that credit pushed him into the spotlight, the artist born Joshua Leary largely avoided a career as a more traditional producer-for-hire. Instead, he threw himself into the rave, honing his craft as a DJ by way of his long-running Trance Party club night.
Leary’s formal debut album, released a decade after that Kanye co-sign, still features the atmospheric layers that made his beats so bewitching back then. But you won’t find any trap hi-hats here; Revanchist is a ghostly love letter to the pure melodrama and overstimulating sensation of trance music. Opener “On Embers” hits you directly in the chest with massive supersaws, but Christ is just as captivated by moments of silence; indistinct gospel-house vocals hum, resembling shadowy figures silhouetted by smoke machines. “Yxguden” slowly builds with a cresting wave of synth arpeggios, before Bladee’s angelic falsetto and a thumping beat drop in tandem. “Free-free-free falling” are the first intelligible words on the album, evoking the unrestrained release that Christ nudges us toward.
Christ’s palette recalls the glittering stadium schmaltz of Y2K-era trance producers like ATB and Paul Van Dyk, but he amplifies the exhilaration by drawing everything out, letting the euphoric textures simmer. Like Burial did for hardcore breaks and junglism, Leary deconstructs familiar genre tropes and reverse engineers them into alien signals, extracting nuanced emotions from underneath the flashy exterior of pop music. Though tracks like “Yxguden” indulge in the outright ecstasy of vocal trance, Revanchist often denies us immediate catharsis to instead linger in the haze.
Thanks to his focus on live experience versus recorded music over the last few years, Christ’s work has grown slower and contemplative, more conducive to late-night comedowns than warming up the crowd. He approaches trance music less like a DJ weaving discrete tracks together, and more like the composer of a video game soundtrack conceptualizing sound as a spatial environment—Leary cites the iconic PlayStation 1 racing game WipeOut, which featured big beat tracks from the likes of Orbital and the Chemical Brothers, as a vital gateway to his love of dance music. The mammoth trap beats of 2014’s Waterfall EP were straightforward in their construction, where Revanchist is ambitious and structurally complex, trusting the listener enough to follow sounds that evolve in unexpected directions. “The Beach” is an endless swell with no way out, teasing a drop that never quite comes, as a distorted feminine voice bleeds into a rising tide of looping synth arpeggios and bass tones. The voices that Christ weaves in on tracks like “Silence” are lilting and warm, but strange too, mutated into misty choral chants; over the celestial piano of “With Me,” Swedish vocalist Merely stretches out her words, just like Leary’s synths reverberate with streaks of echo.
“Nobody Else” opens with a punishing four-on-the-floor rhythm: It’s like hearing the muted pounding of a rave in the distance and following the sound through the darkness. A chopped-up sample of Clairo’s “North” ebbs and flows before dissolving into pure feedback; at times, the beat disappears completely, nearly drowning in a whirlpool before Leary reels it back in. His sound is defined by its extreme peaks and valleys: On “Xkyrgios,” a raging jungle breakbeat unexpectedly breaks for moments of soothing clarity, like a clearing in a murky forest, only to thrust you back into the thick of the rave without warning.
While Christ has allegedly reunited with Kanye West in the studio, Revanchist positions him as more than just a producer working with a vocalist. Here, he’s an experiential sound designer, drawn to voices for their textural properties. In its heyday, trance music was often derided for its overt sentimentality, fueled by anonymous divas singing easily translatable lyrics about universal emotions. Although Leary flirts with that emotional sincerity, his vision of trance is like a fading memory that finds its own distinct beauty in the fuzzy edges. The “trance revival” has been promised for years, but Revanchist proves that the genre’s comeback isn’t just a phase; it takes this music as its own language rather than a nostalgic artifact, a living thing that can always be retranslated and redefined.


Towkio is an associate of Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa, a part of their SaveMoney group, and on his debut, he attempts to follow in their path to success. Featuring Chance, Mensa, Donnie Trumpet, Kaytranada and others.

.Wav Theory

Preston Oshita—who records as Towkio—does not want to settle for just good enough. Last year the 21-year-old acknowledged to the Chicago Tribune that following the respective successes of fellow SaveMoney members and childhood friends Chance the Rapper and Vic Mensa, there are high expectations for him on his first full-length release. He addresses them directly on *.Wav Theory'*s Chance-featuring second track "Clean Up": "I get it get it, your friends did it, they famous/ And you rap, too, so when you gon' make it?" On his debut, he attempts to find a voice that is distinctly his own, to varying results.
Towkio's best trait is his ability to craft an effective pop track. He can flow nimbly, but the content of his lyrics often veers toward saccharine, rendering him more vocalist than rapper. "I Know You", for example, is a simple love song, but FKJ's smooth production and Towkio's catchy sample-aided chorus make up for less creative lines ("And I could take you there/ Like two shoes, girl, we make a pair"). On "Free Your Mind", Towkio rides a house beat, offering some basic uplifting words ("I can free your miiiiind!") alongside Donnie Trumpet's horn playing and breaking into short, catchy clips in the third verse. He knows how to keep the listener's attention, even if he has not yet figured out how best to provide substantial lyrical depth.
Towkio's attempts at wisdom tend to read as buzzwords or markers for profundity, rather than anything meaningful. The title track that opens the album features dial-up sounds and waves crashing, as well as the various connections among "The brain, [which] controls the heart/ The mind, [which] controls the brain/ The sun, [which] controls the moon/ [And] the moon, [which] controls the waves." Although admirably starry-eyed, the concept is generally lost on an album largely consisting of poppy, dancey love songs. Towkio finds his way to some genuine emotions on the Kaytranada-produced "Reflection", the story of a cocaine-addicted woman he still loves. The song digs deeper because of its tight narrative, attention to detail, and grounding in reality, in addition to Kaytranada's melancholically danceable beat.
As a pure bar-for-bar rapper, Towkio relies too heavily on backpack similes and punchlines to convey hackneyed ideas, as on "Clean Up": "I give them monkey bars, them bitches hold weight/ The game like 'Madden' in '08, I swear it's fucked up." On "God in Me", however, he compares himself playfully to an "infant or a puppy," not something you would catch more self-conscious rappers doing. Unfortunately, he ends up losing the beat—a reminder that he is anything but a finished product.
The Social Experiment's Peter Cottontale serves as the mixtape's executive producer, alongside Towkio himself, and the Chicago quartet's sound is apparent throughout, with official credits on five of the 12 songs. The songs on the tape strike as either "cool" ("RN", "Reflection", "Break You Off") or "happy" ("Clean Up", "Free Your Mind", "Heaven Only Knows"). Because Towkio deals in abstractions, there is little conflict or tension on the album, and the ideas with which he is grappling exist in the clouds. He admits as much on "Break You Off": "What we have in common is the conscious/ So I speak on the subjective 'cause the rest is nonsense." Towkio's nebulousness leaves .Wav Theory as an enjoyable album that asks few questions and gives few answers.


Edward Droste follows his group's lo-fi debut Horn of Plenty by employing a fulltime band, moving to Warp, and expanding his ambition and sound. The result is a major step forward for the group, as well as one of the year's best records.

Yellow House

Consider Grizzly Bear's cover of Yes' "Owner of a Lonely Heart", recorded some time ago and included on Sorry for the Delay, the mini-album collection of demos and early recordings released earlier this year. It finds leader Edward Droste struggling to meet the challenge of the song's strange angles and tricky construction with just an acoustic guitar, mostly by piling on intricately arranged vocal harmony. He slowed the song to half-speed, in part because half-speed is how Grizzly Bear like to do things, and in part because he needed the extra time to get the voices just so. Ten years ago such a cover may have seemed like an ironic appreciation of a corporate rock standard; that Grizzly Bear looked to the pop Yes back then is key, because it suggests that Droste is not afraid to get complicated and that he believes in the potential of widescreen sound.
This faith in something bigger is all over Yellow House, the band's second full-length and debut on Warp. It's not what you might expect from Grizzly Bear after hearing the apartment-recorded Horn of Plenty, the 2004 debut that was essentially a Droste solo record. Grizzly Bear seemed there like any number of post-Microphones indie bands stuck in the realm of lo-fi for lo-fi's sake, ready to let pinched, tinny sound create intimacy when the songs themselves couldn't quite manage. None of this early Grizzly Bear material is bad, but it has a tendency to drift away completely once the music stops, and after the remix companion to Horn of Plenty came out, people seemed to lose interest in the originals.
That's all behind us. Grizzly Bear are a full band now, Droste being joined again by Christopher Bear (on drums, the only holdover from Horn of Plenty), Chris Taylor (on electronics, woodwinds, and bass) and Daniel Rossen (who sings, contributes to songwriting, and plays guitar). They're still recording themselves, but they've grown more ambitious and seem to have acquired some decent gear. The studio this time was a living room in Droste's mother's place near Cape Cod; their own private Big Pink is, indeed, yellow, and they apparently had a lot of time to think about arrangement. No question this grander sonic space is where they belong. Opening track "Easier" lays it all out: flutes, a descending intro tapped out on a rickety upright, sustain pedal to the metal, a smear of fake strings (Mellotron?), and then the acoustic picking and Droste's voice, clear and full-spectrum for the first time and sounding, finally, like it should.
The following "Lullabye" is the album's calling card, the production this time supporting a meandering tune that skips up the side of a mountain. Grizzly Bear exhibit here a tendency that recurs throughout the record, of showing the seams in their songwriting and dividing the songs into mini-suites through jarring moments that signal a shift in emphasis. A discordant guitar tears "Lullabye" in half, separating the tuneful opening, which sounds like a lost Disney tune written to send a rosy-cheeked imp off to sleep, from the dark tower that looms behind. The second half's swirling harmonies and crashing drums evoke a Bob Ezrin-sized edifice that would leave a four-track recorder in a dozen pieces before the first brick was laid.
Such attention to detail and the larger well of resources improves Grizzly Bear at both ends of their range. The quieter songs sound better laced with effects and with the guitar and voice ringing true, and the climaxes carry greater weight. Another example of the latter is "Plans", which begins with a modest shuffle, picks up a chorus of whistling dwarves and some horns on loan from Tom Waits, and finally piles on some go-go nightclub percussion and laptop dissonance as it begins to buckle under its own weight. The imagination of its arrangement is impressive, as is the perfect 30-degree slope upward to its peak.
That's one end of the spectrum. But then they slip in something like the regal waltz "Marla", which was written by Droste's aunt in the 1930s and carries the sparkling dust of its vintage. Grizzly Bear infuse the song with a palpable atmosphere, the live instruments mixing with indistinct sounds courtesy of Chris Taylor's slippery electronics. He seems to be filling a role here similar to David Sitek in TV on the Radio, folding in odd noises at just the right moment to color the tunes in a very specific way. So "Marla", with its strings and accordion, suddenly opens up at the two-minute mark, when an echoing memory of a "sweet" big band 78 streams in for just a few seconds. "On a Neck, On a Spit" contains similar tweaks during its crashing instrumental break, with hard-to-peg wails that could be voices or could be strings but jack up the drama regardless.
Beyond production, Grizzly Bear have stepped up their songwriting in every way, assembling melodies that proceed in a logical fashion but never sound overused or overly familiar. Yellow House is a much better record than we could rightfully have expected from these guys, better, even, than we could have imagined them making. And I find myself wondering how much further they might go, whether another layer of sheen and more production possibilities would push them to even greater heights. There are still moments here where the sound isn't quite all it could be. More money, a better studio, and who knows what might happen. And hey-- what's Trevor Horn going for these days? Ah, a question for another day. For now, we have Yellow House, one of the year's best records.


Leonard Cohen's 12th studio LP is a spare, low-key album rooted in blues and gospel-- maybe the closest thing he's made to "folk" music since the early 1970s.

Old Ideas

Old Ideas is, in its own tender, smirking, Leonard Cohen-y way, a clever title. In one sense, the ideas here are ones we've heard from Cohen before: Life is a nostalgic, sorrowful experience punctuated by the occasional joke; language can clarify as much as it can obscure; and lust is one of the highest forms of prayer. In another sense, Cohen is telling us that the ideas on this album-- home, healing, origins, and endings-- are ideas that take on a starker, more metaphorical weight as time goes on. We can trust Cohen to know: Over the past 77 years, he has, in a graceful but inevitable way, become old.
Cohen's voice has always sounded deep, flat, and naturalistic-- the kind of performance that attempts to sound like it's no performance at all. To describe the changes in it over the past 10 or 15 years, I defer in part to those little booklets that come around the necks of good Scotch: A powerful body of peat smoke with a briny finish. In essence, a whisper-- the voice of a voice whose center has been carved away. Old Ideas doesn't remind me of Bob Dylan as much it does of late Johnny Cash records, or even Charlie Louvin's Steps to Heaven: documents of voices so heavy and close that to hear them is to smell the singer's breath and see the gradient of yellow on their teeth.
It's easy to think of Cohen as a folksinger since "folksinger" is common shorthand for musicians who tend to privilege words over music. Cohen, though, tends to go where his musical collaborators and arrangers lead him, whether it's grimy dive-bar ballads, disco, bare-bones guitar blues, or orchestral elaborations. For a Zen monk who started his career as a poet, Leonard Cohen has used a lot of synth horns.
Old Ideas is a spare, low-key album rooted in blues and gospel-- maybe the closest thing he's made to "folk" music since the early 1970s. Backup singers sing passionate, wordless melodies; the bass sounds like the big, upright kind. I think it's his first studio album in 20 years to not rely exclusively on drum machines for percussion. The musical setting suits the state of his voice, which is meant as a mixed compliment: One of the great things about hearing his 1980s and 1990s albums was trying to reconcile his heroic presence with all the Casios. Some of the best moments on Old Ideas-- like the bizarre foregrounding of synthesizer during the album's first thirty seconds-- prove that Cohen and his collaborators have the wits to remind listeners that as soon as tape is rolling, nothing-- no croak, no wail, no plea-- is all-natural.
Cohen's voice alone, though, is a gorgeous, singular instrument. It carries in it a quality that is difficult to discuss without either becoming sentimental or appealing to the misguided idea that just because you play an acoustic guitar or sing close to the microphone, what you do is more honest than someone who attempts to create an experience of truth in some other way. It's a voice that mimics states of human yearning: The point at which we start to sound too tired or worn-down to speak, the point at which we start to cry, the way we whisper to people whom we are very, very close.
Maybe it's only context that makes me think that songs such as "Show Me the Place", where his voice becomes so weak it nearly falls silent in the middle of a line, is anything more than maudlin. Maybe the past 40-plus years of music serve as some kind of apology, as though to publicly reckon with the fact that according to the World Bank you are fast approaching life expectancy is something Cohen-- or any human being-- needs to earn their right to.
This is not the best album Cohen has put out. It is also not The Bucket List-- certainly not cheap or trivial or trading on his age alone. The songs are decent, the singing is stunning. He claims to be naked and filthy. He claims to be a lazy bastard. He claims to have been a slave for love. But he has claimed these things before. He is as old as he has ever been.


The South Florida rapper carves out his own lane within the genre known as SoundCloud rap, displaying considerable versatility as he channels the pain and confusion of youth.

TA13OO

In the chaotic arena that is SoundCloud rap, Denzel Curry has etched out his own distinct realm. Presumably he doesn’t mind being tagged as a SoundCloud rapper, as murky and hard to define as that term is. It was just in May that Curry went to the mattresses to uphold his version of the genre’s history, using Twitter and interviews to torpedo Smokepurpp’s claim to have fathered the movement. “You Spelled RVIDXR KLVN Wrong,” Curry responded to a Complex tweet quoting Smokepurpp’s claim to have “birthed” the genre. (RVIDXR KLVN, for the uninitiated, is the collective formed and led by Spaceghostpurrp—no relation to Smoke—that Curry was once a member of.) The scramble to write the narrative of this odd corner of the internet is on, and it turns out hip-hop is no better at policing online than governments or large-scale social media platforms.
Smokepurpp, Ski Mask the Slump God, XXXTentacion; South Florida has been a colony of a style of rap that is at once extremely cursed, wrought of iron, played to the bone. SoundCloud rap as a genre—as opposed to rap music posted to SoundCloud—usually means scuzzy production, punchy bars, hooky choruses, anarchic shock tactics, and, more often than not, deeply troubled stars. Curry—straight out of Carol City, Miami Gardens—can tune his voice to a manic setting, spitting on devastating beats that sound just two degrees short of blasting out speakers. But he brings a level of emotional resonance and elegance to his writing that isn’t typically associated with the form. Curry’s music ripples with the kind of pain that liquifies the heart and chills the soul. The cover of his third full-length, TA1300 (which, for some reason, is “Taboo,” stylized) features Curry in menacing face paint, looking like he’s about to commit a heist in Dead Presidents or hunt humans in The Purge. But this is a 23-year-old kid who a few years ago hit the road in the aftermath of dealing with his brother’s death. He understands the need for masks.
Everything impressive about Curry’s burgeoning artistry is distilled into the song “Taboo.” Detailing his relationship with a young woman who grew up suffering horrible abuse, the rapper lays out the emotional distance that needs to be bridged between two damaged people. In his fractured state, Curry offers a shoulder to cry on, a partner to pray with, and unconvincingly plays with the idea of sex as a healer. Over bluesy guitar plucks, he veers from forceful rapping to soulful singing, showcasing a voice capable of conveying the full gamut of sentiment, while the vocal effects placed at the end of bars suggests the erosion of his spirit. And he positions this song as track number one! As a table setter, that’s a bold move.
The first third has the most surprises. Curry describes the album as being split into three sections: the light, the gray, and the dark side, though there isn’t a whole lot of brightness to the opening segment. Finatik N Zac’s production on “Black Balloons” might bounce like the kind of mid-1990s rap hit that would have gotten plenty of MTV rotation, but Curry spends his verse pondering suicide (“Soon black balloons pop/That’ll be the day the pain stops.”) The song plays as a reminder that pain often bubbles beneath a veneer of extraversion—the tears of a clown are often the most acidic. It’s a theme he frequently returns to. Take “Clout Cobain,” from the gray section: a reminder that Kurt resonates with kids too young to have copped In Utero first time around.
Away from the tracks with heavier themes, the battering “Sumo” fully immerses in SoundCloud rap’s core tenets, with Curry’s shit-talking one-liners extremely on point: Saying you’ve got pockets like a sumo is the hilarious long way round to describing the size of your money clip. Curry also finds a synonym for “bricks” in Shaq’s free throws before name-dropping wrestler Rikishi. “Sumo” even makes a sample of Lil Jon’s yells of “WHAT!” sound fresh 14 years after Dave Chappelle made it uncool.
Some ears will never adjust to songs like “Sumo” or the noisy, head-banging number “Black Metal Terrorist.” The dissonance of these tracks owes a debt to rap metal, Aphex Twin, and Yeezus, in no particular order. On top of the chaos, Curry’s voice is clean and youthful, carrying the kind of power once deployed by a 16-year-old Chief Keef. It’s the menace of guys who are young, dumb, and with precisely zero scruples.
There are moments when Curry’s dedication to the album’s core strengths slides away. On “Sirens,” the switch between fiery rapping and clean pop hook doesn’t quite mesh with the beat, making it a rare moment when his vocal instincts fail. It’s an all-in socially engaged number featuring, among other things, some stray shots fired at serpent-in-chief Donald Trump, which, though undoubtedly unfeigned, feels a little perfunctory in a world where rap music is frequently providing the most trenchant critiques of Trump’s America.
It’s when he sticks to the highly personal that Curry’s music is devoid of all cliché—the power of his performance, the veracity of his pen, and the color of his wordplay make him an expert at voicing the tribulations of this doomed condition we call being young. All of this makes him impossible to place in the broader SoundCloud rap domain. Signs point to an artist who will outlast any single distribution platform—or any of the genres named for them.


Van Morrison’s 37th album is a thorough exploration of the blues. It’s crisp, precise, and reveals his ability to inhabit classic songs while paying respect to their form.

Roll With the Punches

There are traditionally three or four different Van Morrisons at any given time, depending on the album. His recordings in the ’00s and ’10s have attempted to reflect him from as many musical angles as can possibly fit within 70 minutes: R&B, folk, soul, and blues, sometimes interchangeably and sometimes in thoughtful combinations. It is often difficult to determine, in the course of these records, if Morrison’s relentless swerving between genres is part of a meaningful, collagist design, or if it is just him working through familiar modalities. But it’s rarely uninteresting to hear, situated next to each other, a song where Morrison sings as if he’s suspended in the slow-motion whirl of a snow globe, followed by a song where his voice chomps through the heave and shudder of the electric blues.
Roll With the Punches, Morrison’s 37th album, is his first full-length studio exploration of the blues, which is surprising if only for how much the blues has figured directly into Morrison’s life. On the album, he covers artists as stylistically diverse as Little Walter, who pushed the tonal possibilities of the harmonica into unknown, distorted regions in the 1950s, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who in the 1930s synthesized the blues into a pop-gospel idiom that prefigured rock‘n’roll. “The thing about the blues is you don't dissect it—you just do it,” Morrison said in a statement that accompanied the record’s announcement. The album does exhibit a kind of automatism, the concept seemingly born out of primal impulse. In its singular focus, Roll with the Punches resembles the only other studio album in his catalog where he unwaveringly pursued a tangent—2006’s Pay the Devil, on which he devoted himself to country standards, recording what was essentially a more gnomic version of Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.
But the territory here is more familiar and immediate to Morrison than the nostalgic and contemplative country-western vistas of Pay the Devil. On Roll with the Punches, Morrison doesn’t reach back through his own music or through the infrastructure of a genre so much as he reaches back and sifts through the texture of his own past. In this way, the album feels more autobiographical than any of Morrison’s more mystically-derived records; it’s a collection of songs that establish a narrative of Morrison’s personal relationship with music, of how he discovered the dimensions of his own voice through blues, early rock‘n’roll, and soul. Even at the age of 72, Morrison has some of that electricity he must have felt when he first started imitating these songs as a teenager, assembling his voice through listening to and simulating Lead Belly records until it began to sound harsh, percussive, slippery, tending to swim between notes instead of hitting them precisely, but also making every syllable sound as if they were drawn up from a great inner distance, like a stone rescued from the bottom of the ocean.
Morrison’s covers on Roll with the Punches express themselves primarily in the language of Chicago electric blues—that heavy Muddy Waters lurch, the guitar tones gnarled and internally knotted. It prioritizes the harmonica as an instrument; when Morrison merges T-Bone Walker’s blues standard “Stormy Monday” with “Lonely Avenue”—a Doc Pomus composition most famously recorded by Charles—he introduces a harmonica solo that achieves a near-industrial vibration, like the angry, metallic blur of sound issued by a neglected air conditioner.
Roll with the Punches also includes a new recording of Sam Cooke’s “Bring it on Home to Me,” a song Morrison’s performed with regularity throughout his career. Where a younger Morrison fills up the song with restless syllabic inventions (“If you ever...change your mind...about leaving-uh, leaving-uh me behind-uh!”), contemporary Morrison slides through the song with the unconscious ease and familiarity with which one might navigate through the furniture in the dark. “I gave you everything, everything I had in the bank,” he sings, his vocal ability considerably narrowed, but also still containing so much of the atomic instability that formed it in the first place. “Now it’s time for you, time for you to say thanks.” The lyric is a pocket of mental weather Morrison inhabits comfortably, to the point where it seems identical to the one that produces his innumerable songs about getting ripped off by the record industry, the air filled as much with conspiracy as fraternity.
But the most thrilling moment on the record is when its volume suddenly drops for “Goin’ to Chicago,” so that it sounds as if Morrison, Georgie Fame, and Chris Hill—who plucks the walking bassline which forms the song’s spine—are exchanging simple melodic ideas in the uncrowded air. Morrison sings, “Goin’ to Chicago/So sorry that I can’t take you,” and then Fame, his vocal a liquid counterpoint to Morrison’s more inflexible and geologic formations, sings, “I come from Chi-town, Chi-town is my town,” and the effect is lovely, two powerful vocalists tracing and retracing each other’s phrases just as they start to evaporate from the arrangement.
Roll with the Punches is a narrow portrait of Morrison, a chiaroscuro, Morrison surfacing in fragments through heavy shadows. There’s little sense of trajectory or transport, no string sections drawing golden light through the open space in his songs, where the coincidences of the physical world can be individual portals to the celestial. It’s crisp and precise. Morrison inhabits the songs, he delights in singing them, but he also respects them, living inside of their structures without disturbing them or re-envisioning them so that they extend elastically around him.
Of course, Astral Weeks, his consensus masterwork, is also a narrow portrait of Morrison, one in which he falls through a space so nonlinear and shapeless that there’s no sense of it beginning or ending—there’s just the falling. Roll with the Punches never falls, or even falters, exactly; it’s just a series of punches, whether of the clock or in the air, landing with consistency and specificity and only occasionally drifting into anonymity. To paraphrase Morrison himself, it doesn't pull any punches, but it doesn't push the river.


On his third album as bandleader, the star saxophonist tries to balance his habitual gravitas with a newfound sense of fun. But party music doesn’t come to him as naturally as heroic high drama.

Fearless Movement

Kamasi Washington likes to go big. The star saxophonist and bandleader’s debut album was a 3xLP extravaganza appositely titled The Epic. The follow-up, Heaven and Earth, was a bit briefer—only two hours this time—but even more ambitious. Fearless Movement, the third full-length with his name on the spine, shows signs of scaling back and relaxing. Its runtime is a comparatively lean 86 minutes. The third track is a Zapp cover; George Clinton shows up a couple tunes later on a funk jam called “Get Lit.” There are guest verses from a few different rappers, little-known names who bring throwback block-party MC energy even when their subject matter gets heady. For the first time, Washington seems interested in conveying not just big feelings like joy, struggle, and transcendence, but also something like fun—just as important, no doubt, and perhaps even more difficult to get across.
Washington became jazz’s most recognizable new face in part through his conviction that jazz writ large is a pressing contemporary concern. Though he has collaborated with high-profile musicians from outside of jazz—Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly the greatest among them—his own music communicates a populist spirit not through concessions to mainstream styles, but grand scale and sheer musical urgency. With their large ensembles, thunderous climaxes, and marathon runtimes, his records present jazz as vitally important, worth paying attention to even if you’re not a connoisseur.
This heavy import can suffocate playful invention and human idiosyncrasy, two forces as central to jazz as the composerly ambition and spiritual yearning that characterize much of Washington’s work. In theory, the relative lightness of Fearless Movement is a natural and welcome next step after his pair of zeitgeist-grabbing epics. But too often, tunes that might prance, flex, and delight remain burdened by their own gravity. Fearless Movement’s first half is filled with guest vocalists delivering songs that attempt awkwardly to be soundtracks for both revelry and deep contemplation. The album gets better when it dispenses with its noncommittal relationship to party music, freeing Washington to pursue the heroic high drama that’s still his strong suit.
The players, all excellent musicians, are drawn largely from the same crew of friends that powered Washington’s earlier work. Their default mode is full-tilt shredding, which can be thrilling and stultifying. Accompanists tend to nip at the heels of soloists rather than hang back and let them cook, an approach that pushes both sides to greater excitement when it’s working well: When Brandon Coleman’s organ dogs Dontae Winslow’s trumpet on “The Garden Path,” Winslow bobs and weaves as if to evade its pursuit, and Coleman responds by digging in even more ferociously. But when they’re all going so hard all the time, it leaves little room for the surprise of an individual outburst or the sensuality of negative space. There are two drummers playing full kits, and several additional percussionists; when one starts to settle into a pocket that might get bodies moving, the other tends to take it as a cue to start up with busy fills.
Zapp’s “Computer Love,” in its original 1986 version, presented prescient social commentary with campy good humor and an irresistible groove. Washington’s cover takes out the dance beat, doubles the runtime, and adds a solemn horn intro, as if listeners need these signifiers of seriousness to understand that there’s a message about digitally mediated relationships entwined with Zapp’s pop appeal. “Get Lit” is more squarely aimed at setting off the good times, and it nearly succeeds with its swampy rhythm section and dose of freakiness from Clinton on the hook. But when rapper D Smoke, winner of the Netflix hip-hop competition show Rhythm + Flow, shows up to do a frothy Anderson .Paak impression on the verses, it gives that feeling of mandatory celebration you sometimes encounter at office parties. It’s hard to have fun when the host seems so thirsty to entertain.
The other guest rappers are Ras and Taj Austin, sons of West Coast lifer Ras Kass, who deliver Freestyle Fellowship-style conscious rhymes over the band’s electric churn on “Asha the First.” Given Washington’s contributions to one of the greatest jazz-rap fusion records ever made, it’s disappointing that he seems content to drop a couple of verses into the middle of a jam, without much consideration for how the pieces fit together. A jazz solo and a rap verse have a lot in common: Good ones balance individual flair with consideration for the context of the larger song. The Austin brothers come across as technically skilled but lacking the thematic grasp that might help them to convincingly inhabit the music around them. Like D Smoke, their appearances can’t help but feel like incursions, breaking the sense of a holistically unified musical world that Washington so deftly created on his previous albums.
Fearless Movement is much stronger in its second half, starting with “Dream State,” an exercise in hypnotic minimalism featuring André 3000 on flutes. He and Washington have an easy chemistry, with the sax’s long expressive phrases meandering pleasantly around the flute’s looped arpeggios. Perhaps the coolness of their playing inspired the rhythm section to chill out a little: Halfway through “Dream State,” they finally enter with the album’s slinkiest and sexiest groove, its laid-back swagger contrasting nicely with the meditative stillness of the winds.
“The Garden Path” has the album’s most exuberant melody, one that immediately felt familiar and right the first time I heard it. The band goes full tilt without getting in each other’s way, just rocketing together in the same direction. When they return to the theme after a searing solo, there’s an air of real triumph, like returning home from a great trial. This is the sort of stuff Washington does best. Though it may seem more serious or less accessible on its surface than a track like “Get Lit,” it’s actually far more inviting: Washington seems to believe completely in what he’s doing, where his attempt at a dancefloor banger rings hollow. That sense of conviction, coupled with Washington’s ability to deliver on his vision, reinforces the invitation to commune with the music. You don’t want to hear someone half-step; you want to hear them commit.
Another reason Washington has resonated with listeners outside of traditional jazz channels may be the way he elevates the album itself—the sum of its arrangements, production, sequencing, and so on—to a position of aesthetic significance equal to or greater than the improvising that those traditional channels tend to value. (He’s not the first jazz player to give his music this sort of presentation, which can also help to account for why Bitches Brew, for instance, is so much more popular among rock fans than Workin’ with the Miles Davis Quintet.) It may seem strange to barely mention the actual playing here, but Washington’s music is like that: For better or worse, his albums sweep you up with a force that can seem bigger than any individual soloist, bandleader included.
As with his career at large, Washington’s strongest moments as a saxophonist tend to involve emphasis rather than invention. He’s a skilled technician; when he plays fast lines, he can come dangerously close to sounding like he’s still in the practice room, running arpeggios and scales. But he’s a master of what’s sometimes called “the cry of jazz”: the pained, ecstatic expression that emerges from an instrument or voice at a climactic moment and seems to transcend theory and technique in favor of pure emotion.
It’s there in his solo on the album-opening “Lesanu,” and again on the album-closing “Prologue.” In the latter, the band steadily ascends through a series of long-held chords, growing more frenzied as they climb, each one seeming like the last, then yielding to a new plane of even greater intensity. Washington climbs with them, wailing and growling. Eventually, he lands on a single repeated note, playing it again and again with furious and desperate resolve, as if something precious and unnamable is on the line. It’s clear that those high stakes are real in his music. In these moments of Washington’s greatest power as a player—which, it must be said, arrive a little less often than usual on Fearless Movement—it’s easy for a listener to believe, too.


The Japanese DJ/producer Chee Shimizu curates a two-volume selection of obscure Japanese pop that runs the gamut from jazz fusion to New Age and prog rock.

More Better Days

It looks as if Japanese music from the 1980s is finally garnering more attention in the west. The closest parallel to this moment might be to the mid ’90s, when German rock and electronic music beyond Kraftwerk and the Scorpions began to gain some traction in the States thanks to some timely reissues. This access in turn allowed kosmische music to be more readily woven into the musical fabric of a new generation, and it was easy to hear the influence of Can, Faust and Neu! on the likes of Sonic Youth, Tortoise, Stereolab, Radiohead, and more.
But navigating Japanese major label legalese has proven to be a stumbling block for enthusiasts hoping to bring much of this music back to light. Thankfully, last year’s reissue of Mariah’s final album Utakata No Hibi hinted that a thaw might finally be occurring. It didn’t hurt that it was an out-of-nowhere underground hit, selling out multiple pressings and landing on year-end lists, not bad for an album full of Japanese drums, skronking sax, ’80s studio slickness, and Armenian vocals. Part of Mariah’s buzz stemmed from the efforts of DJ/producer Chee Shimizu, known to pass copies onto his DJ friends in the west. His Obscure Sound book likely whetted appetites and added to numerous Discogs want lists searching for more of this stuff (the choicest albums on the label go for three-digit sums).
Now comes More Better Days, a two-disc set pulled from the short-lived Better Days label (which originally released the Mariah record) and curated by Shimizu. An offshoot of Nippon Columbia Co, Ltd. in the late ’70s, the sub-label focused on the then-popular jazz/ fusion scene cropping up in the country. Ever the meticulous selector, Shimizu deep-dives into the label’s catalog and divvies up the music along two axes: Avant-Wave and Funky & Mellow. No matter your knowledge of Japanese music, the sets at the very least showcase that country’s uncanny sense of fusion, juxtaposition and impeccable aesthetics that has enchanted and informed any number of western artists, from Bowie to Grace Jones to Björk. New Age abuts blocks of jazz saxophone, shredding prog-rock guitars meets koto drumming and/or early drum machine skitters, while the next song might be dubbed-out disco or what that scene in Lost in Translation might have been like had Bill Murray done a karaoke version of “Lowdown.”
The first disc, subtitled Avant-Wave, is the perfect entry for adventurous listeners, as almost every track presents bizarre musical connections as a matter of course. People thrilled by the manic style-mashing of Oneohtrix Point Never, Grimes, and Arca will find those artists' strange sensibilities rooted here. Saxophonist Yasuaki Shimizu’s (the man behind Mariah and the similarly revered album Kakashi) “Semi Tori No Hi” is a gentle sound bath of chimes and flutes that gets punctuated by martial snares and wobbling feedback, at once serene and destabilized. Colored Music—the lone 1981 collaboration between Atsuo Fujimoto and Ichiko Hashimoto—anticipates techno on the furious “Heartbeat,” while “Ei Sei Raku” somehow combines spiky post-punk guitars, Miles’ “Rated X” organ drones, female coos and a drum break as bombastic as anything Phil Collins did in ’80s Genesis into something coherent and cool.
The furious polyrhythmic patterns of the Mkwaju Ensemble’s “Tira-Rin” and “Wood Dance” will no doubt register for a western listener as similar to Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, a piece greatly influenced by Far East music systems like Balinese gamelan. So while it’s an exotic sound to our ears, it’s just as fascinating to hear that approach to ever-shifting rhythm and tonalities as just part of the pop fabric.
Inversely, More Better Days shows what it’s like when Japanese players obsess over the likes of Steely Dan, Bob Marley, and Lalo Schifrin. “Funk Fanky” by Arakawa Band sounds like a lost ’70s cop show theme, but one that charges on for over five minutes. “Huang Di” has the bass pop of “Let’s Hear It For the Boy” before taking a sax-laced hypnagogic detour. It’s not quite as charming as it sounds. The highlights include the sleek modern funk/AOR of vocalist Eri Ohno and the contributions from a conga player named Pecker, whose dead-on reggae cover of Bob Marley’s “Concrete Jungle” were abetted by bringing the likes of Sly & Robbie, Aston “Family Man” Barrett and Augustus Pablo in for the session.
One of the major stars to come out of the Better Days imprint was Ryuichi Sakamoto, one-time member of Yellow Magic Orchestra who went on to be an early electro icon and collaborate with the likes of Iggy Pop, David Sylvian, and Fennesz, co-starred with David Bowie on Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and most recently, collaborated with Bryce Dessner and Alva Noto on the soundtrack for The Revenant. Sakamoto’s nearly four-decade career is irreducible, and his chameleonic spirit might be the closest to that of Bowie. It’s this changeling quality of his music that informs More Better Days: Sakamoto contributes the effervescent synth-pop of “Plastic Bamboo” and then slides into the background as accompanist on other songs, adding George Duke licks one moment while dissolving into an ambient haze on another. Sakamoto’s sound can be both instantly identifiable and obscure at once, but his music is always surprising. So it goes for the majority of the music on More Better Days, even if the biggest surprise now is that this era of Japanese pop is readily available again.


Jay Reatard was the kingpin of Memphis garage rock, and his best and most powerful full-length work—the record that made him a standalone rock star—was his first solo album.

Blood Visions

Jay Reatard’s reputation was to smash disco balls and get in on-stage fights—the kind of guy who tried to make people laugh by shooting bottle rockets out his ass. As wild and ridiculous as he was, he took his music seriously. He moved away from home when he was 16 and dropped out of high school, meaning most of his considerable free time was spent writing and recording music. He always had several bands going at once; he figured that if he played with each of his bands at least once a month, he’d make enough to get by. He was an excellent guitarist who got really good at recording; his collective discography was massive. It was his living, so the endless touring, huge pile of records, and even the provocations and live show destruction could be seen as business savvy. He played fast, he played loud, and in the early days of YouTube, his every move was documented.
By the time he died in early 2010, Jay Reatard had long usurped the Oblivians’ throne and ruled as the undisputed kingpin of Memphis garage rock. (He knew it, too—he quipped that getting thrown out of Gonerfest was like “kicking Jimi Hendrix out of Woodstock.”) He wasn’t just some local figurehead, either—he was the standard bearer for an entire genre. Obviously there were prolific punks before him, but Jay standardized the practice of putting out tons of music under several names in the internet age. He never seemed to oversaturate the market, either, since his audience kept coming back for more. That torch is carried today by guys like Ty Segall and Sick Thoughts’ Drew Owen. When Jay’s profile raised after he signed with Matador, he pulled artists like Hunx and His Punx and Nobunny into the spotlight with him by bringing them on tour. His absence is jarring, but his influence—both sonically and structurally—is still palpable in garage punk circles. That’s partially due to his work in the Reatards and Lost Sounds, but his best and most powerful full-length work—and the record that made him a standalone rock star—was his first solo album.
Blood Visions came together in the aftermath of the Lost Sounds’ dissolution. After Jay broke up with bandmate Alicja Trout, the band fell apart in short order. Their final tour in 2005 ended badly—there was a physical altercation between Jay and Alicja. He was in a "really, really bad place" when he temporarily decamped to Atlanta later that year. While staying in an apartment with Alix Brown and Black Lips’ Jared Swilley, he channeled everything into a murderous revenge album. (When asked if the record was about a particular girl, he revealed, “Yeah, a couple.”) He borrowed Carbonas’ practice space and knocked out most of the songs in one or two takes. Ten years later, the result is still a revelation.
The album is a portrait of a moony-eyed murderer. As a boy, he starts attacking his own family. When he falls in love, he lurks in the shadows and watches her from afar. "I won't stop until you're dead,/ because of voices in my head," he sings on "Fading All Away." This is the stuff of horror movies—love that leads to obsession, graduates to stalking, and culminates in murder. It's a narrative framed perfectly by his performance. In "Death Is Forming," as he attempts to veer away from dark thoughts, the words "death is forming" rush in at an anxious rapid-fire. With some simple studio work, Jay makes himself the narrator and all the voices in the narrator's head—the tortured and the torturer. He also offsets some of the stalking menace with power-pop riffs and tambourines, which puts "Nightmares" in the same tradition as the Ramones' Nazi love song "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World." Both songs explore the cross-section of good and evil—of love and hate.
To call Blood Visions a classic isn't just to praise its fucked-up storytelling—it's to celebrate an album stuffed with amazing hooks. The palm-muted chug of "My Shadow," the breakneck backbone of the 56-second highlight "Greed, Money, Useless Children," the loud-to-quiet blues rock stomp of "Turning Blue"—the album pivots between several rock'n'roll comfort food modes across its 29 minutes. These hooks are punchy and extremely well done—the sort of stuff that sounded incredible when he'd play them live at practically double the recording's speed. And while of course he was an amazing guitarist, his drumming is also essential here. When the instantly recognizable clacking introduction of the title track plays, it's worth noting that Jay was playing that part cold. Drumming is where he'd start—he'd do the percussion in one take and build out the song from there.
Aside from some blood-red vinyl, the album's 10th anniversary Record Store Day reissue came with a 7" featuring four demos: the title track, "Turning Blue," "It's So Easy," and "Oh, It's Such a Shame." The bonus record is far from essential, but it's an interesting glimpse into Jay's process. The percussion is thinner, the tempo slower; the main guitar hook is performed on a keyboard, and the words "blood vision" are delivered in a demonic bark. Now that he's gone, the urge to collect every single recording he ever made is strong. In this case, the extras feel definitively extra: you buy Blood Visions to listen to Blood Visions, not the preliminary sketches.
When it came time to turn in Blood Visions, Jay considered going back to his old routine—forming a new band and releasing those songs under that band’s name. The label convinced him that it should be a solo album. "This was the first record I made as an adult, when I didn't have to answer to another collaborative member of the band, so it was supposed to be like I was a big fat baby," he said of his appearance on the cover. "Now I finally get to start my life at 24." It's the perfect illustration to accompany the violent, unsettling birth of a rock'n'roll icon. Even though the guy had already amassed an impressive and sizable discography of wide-eyed rippers, Blood Visions stands as the ideal introduction to Jay Reatard the songwriter, studio perfectionist, character, and (reluctant) star.


Eric B. & Rakim: Paid in Full / Follow the Leader

Paid in Full / Follow the Leader

For a second, forget everything extraneous about Eric B. & Rakim: Rakim’s G.O.A.T. status; the debate over who was actually responsible for their music; the rumor that Eric had to get a steel rod in his spine after the dookie ropes fucked his neck up. After a dozen changes of rap fashion, when kids born in 1987 are graduating from high school, do these records still hold up? Do they deserve your money when more new music than ever crowds the shelves?
Well, yes. Obviously. Especially since these new masters are retailing for a beyond-fair 10 bucks. (Whatever the quality of the material, charging nearly $20 for catalog items is robbery.) Unlike the bulked-up, slightly lardy Paid in Full reissue from 1999, this edition tacks on a few bonuses without making a big deal out of it. (Full disclosure: I am an original-sequencing purist.) And of course, the music is as essential as the James Brown whose skinny legs supported large chunks of their legacy.
It’s hard to believe, now that the Neptunes have made zen thrift signify in the nouveau-riche top 10, but these minimal and sometimes unfriendly (though never less than seductive and often galvanic) tracks represented an anti-pop move. You have to rewind back to the mid-80s—not a super time for “urban” music outside of a nascent rap scene still underground enough to need label addresses at the end of singles reviews. Luther Vandross. Anita Baker. Lionel Richie outselling all other black artists of 1984. Is it any wonder in this context that booming kickdrums, garden claw snares, bacteria-disrupting sub-bass, and tales (freaky, funny, raw, and true) seemed the only viable alternative?
Eric Barrier and William Griffin benefited by being in the right place (NYC) at the right time (just as rap began fumbling towards its own sense of importance). Their mentor, Marley Marl, had just begun to work with the digital sampler, a tentative step away from the fixed parameters of both drum machines and house bands, and towards open-ended creative theft. Marl, Schoolly D, Scott La Rock and others had defined mid-80s rap as a crash of stiff, hard, stupid (in the best sense) Linn drums and astounding B.S. rhymes. If it was hip-hop’s garage-rock—a street reaction against the first wave of crossover pop-rap—then it was all but waiting for the kind of intellectual vernacular so beloved of critics to “take it to the next level.”
Griffin threw his Kangol in the ring from the opening lines of Eric B & Rakim's debut single, “Eric B Is President”: “I came in the door/I said it before/I never let the mic magnetize me no more.” It is one of the 10 or so most famous verses in rap. Rakim’s innovation was applying a patina of intellectual detachment to rap’s most sacred cause: talking shit about how you’re a better rapper than everyone else. He was the supreme exponent of rapping-about-rapping, an almost lost art now that every MC carries a thousand pounds of crack-dealing backstory around with him.
Rakim immediately projected his self-belief—not so much messianic as matter-of-fact—that he was the best. He got away with it every time he opened his mouth and that voice came out: authoritative, burnished, possessing an unflappable sense of rhythm like a drumming prodigy. You only think of his restricted subject matter as a failing in the wake of Big, Pac, Cube, even Chuck D. You don’t go to Rakim for political insight, inner turmoil, or sex chat. You go to Rakim for an endless display of pure skill. He encourages the grading mindset. The big reason why Nas is runner-up is because he injected some pathos and fallibility into the preternatural control thing.
Skills, of course, can be their own reward, when put into the service of exciting people rather than showing off. (Okay, or a mix of the two.) And when the records are playing, it’s hard to begrudge them their 30-yard stare. Paid in Full, the debut, is more laidback and funky, though padded at seven vocals and three instrumentals. It reprised the debut single, a moody, atypical fusion full of stark dub-like dropouts, mod stutter effects, and flat production. It’s obvious why they stuck it at the end of the album; at that point, rap was moving so fast that records released six months prior were already old hat.
The second single, “My Melody,” is pre-“funky” hip-hop par excellence and a 2005 hit in waiting, with little more than a concrete cracking kickdrum and a blunt-edged bassthrob. (Of course, R’s flow would immediately mark him out as an old man amongst today’s shouters, growlers, and mumblers.) “I Know You Got Soul” let some human grit into the man-machine via JB, and momentarily fucked up everyone’s concept of the space-time continuum until cyborgizing old drummers became common enough to show up in Milli Vanilli records. “Paid in Full” was kind of light and fun, even if its subject matter was dead serious. Getting paid for studio work? Not the corner? Not the grind? The future was wide open.
Both of these albums contain too much filler to get a free “classic” pass, but the highs of Follow the Leader are as high as any rap group has gotten. The title track fleshes out Rakim’s metaphorical conceit via hellish high-speed-chase music. The beats rattle, the bass seethes, the flutes and strings screech like Blaxploitation crossed with the cheap urgency of an Italian zombie movie. But what’s scariest and most exhilarating is how, for all the track’s runaway train momentum, it feels inexorable, implacable, utterly in control of itself. Rakim’s delivery of the final verse may be the most exciting—at least in terms of breath control—slice of rap the genre has yet delivered. (And no, Twista doesn’t count.)
“Microphone Fiend” rattled sleigh bells harder than anyone until Pete Rock showed up, and the stabbing dynamics of the guitar sample harassed the ear something awful. The chopper blade beats of “Lyrics of Fury” almost render the genre it would help to inspire (jungle) redundant. In this era, when almost all rap was “fast rap,” tracks like these and “The R” were the roughneck alternative to a burgeoning hip-house, beats impacting your body as your mind swam at the density of words. Unfortunately, by the time they released Let the Rhythm Hit 'Em, an attempt to extend the deft simplicity of their debut, in 1990, they were already old news. (Perhaps best exemplified by the cover of 1992’s Don’t Sweat the Technique.) Deposed kings before they'd even hit their 30s, they’ve limped through the ensuing decade about which the most that can be said is that they didn’t scuff up their legacy too much.
These reissues add a handful of remixes (two on Paid, three on Leader), none essential. The only criminal inclusion is a truncated version of Coldcut’s remix of “Paid in Full” rather than the full seven minutes of madness. (But whatever, it’s overrated anyway.) The covers—with their gold anchor chains, manhole medallions, and customized Dapper Dan jackets—are a nice rebuke to anyone who thinks conspicuous consumption is a new-school disease. The contents are a reminder of a brief period where people thought they could become a millionaire on skills alone, where the reality of that was so far away that no one had to think about what being a millionaire would mean to the culture that nurtured those skills.


Hip-O Select begins its Motown singles campaign with this six-disc archive of Hitsville USA's baby steps, which include the label's earliest contributions from Smokey Robinson, Brian and Eddie Holland, James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, the Temptations, the Supremes, Norman Whitfield, Barrett Strong, and Marvin Gaye.

Various Artists: The Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 1: 59-61

The building at 2648 West Grand Boulevard was like any other Detroit bungalow when Berry Gordy, backed by an $800 loan from his family, bought it and turned it into the offices for Tamla, his first record label. One can only speculate what the neighbors thought when he put up the sign that said "Hitsville, USA", but Gordy's optimism was backed by a strong business sense and proved to be well-founded: the Tamla name never became a household word, but his second label Motown did, and the rest is history. Motown grew quickly into a Motor City assembly line for hit songs, the label that put black music into white living rooms, and an institution that's taken for granted today as a part of the American cultural landscape.
Gordy wasn't exactly new to the music industry when he opened up shop; he had dabbled in management, owned a failed record store, and co-written several hits in the mid-50s for soul innovators Jackie Wilson and Etta James. It was an admittedly spotty record, but one that earned him respect amongst local musicians and performers. So Hitsville became a hangout for young musicians hoping to make it big, and the cast of characters that turned up in the label's first three years-- the period covered on Hip-O Select's new six-disc box The Complete Motown Singles, Vol. 1: 1959-61-- is incredible: Smokey Robinson, Brian and Eddie Holland (two thirds of Holland/Dozier/Holland), James Jamerson, Benny Benjamin, the Temptations, the Supremes (née the Primes, or Primettes), Norman Whitfield, Barrett Strong, Marvin Gaye. These are names writ large across even a cursory knowledge of r&b; and classic pop, and all of them helped build the label into a legend.
As this set reveals, though, there were plenty of secondary players, one-offs, novelties, experiments, and trend-hopping tangents (not to mention a ton of gospel, Gordy shrewdly realizing that the audience for it was very stable) that helped shape the label as well-- and that's part of the reason these discs are so fascinating. Of course, you know the Miracles' "Shop Around" (just Motown's 20th single, but its first million-seller) and the Marvelettes' "Please Mr. Postman" (Motown's first #1 hit), but most of what's compiled here has been otherwise lost to history, leaving whole chapters out of one of popular music's most important stories. The Swinging Tigers, Eugene Remus, Gino Parks, the Equadors, the Valadiers, and Herman Griffin are anything but well-known, some having released just a one 45, but you can hear the Motown sound developing on their singles-- several of which are real gems.
Every A-Side, B-Side, and replacement side from every single released on Gordy's Tamla, Motown, and Miracle labels from 1959-61 amounts to more than 150 tracks and almost seven hours of music, and to explore it both as it's presented here, in strict chronological order, and to jump around comparing, say "Shop Around" with Debbie Dean's answer song "Don't Let Him Shop Around", is supremely rewarding. Marv Johnson's "Come to Me", originally released on Tamla, opens things triumphantly-- not only is it a fantastic song, it was also a hit, albeit only after Gordy licensed it to United Artists, who were far better equipped to promote it nationally than he was. Barrett Strong's "Money (That's What I Want)" gave the label a national hit on just the eighth try, and it's typical of the impromptu genius of Motown's early years; the song was written by Gordy and Hitsville receptionist Janie Bradford off the cuff and recorded on the spot as two local white high schoolers stopped in on their way past Hitsville to sit in on bass and guitar. To this day, no one can even speculate as to who those two kids were, and who knows if they have any clue what they contributed to?
Novelties abound on this set as well, including a half-dozen attempts to jump on the twist bandwagon that swept the nation on 1961. Of these, the most notable are "Ich-I-Bon #1", a surprisingly sharp surf instrumental by a band called Nick & the Jaguars, and the odd minor-key story-song of "Small Sad Sam" by Bob Kayli, actually Gordy's brother Robert performing under a pseudonym. The most mystifying of all the novelties, though, is Popcorn and the Mohawks' "Custer's Last Man" (incredibly, it's not even the only song about General Custer present here). "Last Man" is a totally bizarre, even mildly offensive radio play that stretches out to a ridiculous 4\xBD, and the single most glaring example of the fact that Motown hadn't yet established its famed Quality Control department.
Other oddities are more successful, like Ron and Bill's "It", an attempt to create another "Purple People Eater" while that song was still hot, and Gino Parks' hilarious "Blibberin' Blabbin' Blues", an obvious attempt to beat the Coasters at their own "Yakety Yak" game. Parks actually proves on his second release, "Same Thing" b/w "That's No Lie", that he deserved far more than a novelty hit; the A-Side drips with soul, while the flip is like Sam Cooke and James Brown rolled into one-- gravelly, soulful crooning punctuated by startling, ear-piercing yelps of joy. No obscure act from the early days of Motown deserved fame more than the Satintones, though. A brilliant doo-wop act, they recorded five singles for the label and none took off, though all were great. Their aching, gorgeous "Angel" is one of the best songs here, and its B-side, "My Kind of Love", features beautiful harmonies and a crazy, very unusual string arrangement.
String arrangements are something of a running theme throughout these six discs. Gordy became convinced early on that they were a signifier of class and a key to crossover success, hence several songs appear in two versions-- one with strings, and one without. Gordy would pull the original single and then reissue it with the same catalog number and the new arrangement, a tactic that did manage to produce some sales, but one that also understandably drives collectors nuts.
Yet hearing alternate versions gathered in one place is fascinating. Other do-overs include the slower, inferior regional version of "Shop Around", a take on the song in which the Miracles sound almost tentative. Gordy apparently sensed that, and gathered the house band-- an early incarnation of the legendary Funk Brothers-- and the Miracles in the middle of the night to re-cut the song for the reissue, which of course would go platinum.
As a musical journey, this set is nothing short of amazing, despite a handful of mediocre cuts and a few downright awful ones. By disc six, Motown is a well-oiled hit machine, and even a few of the twist knock-offs are pretty entertaining. It's huge fun to hear Marvin Gaye trying to position himself as a sensitive interpreter of showtunes (thank God that didn't last) or to check out the truly amazing house band-- has their ever been a pop bass/drums combo as outstanding as James Jamerson and Benny Benjamin?-- cutting loose on "Snake Walk" under the name Swinging Tigers.
Ultimately, the failures are as much a part of the early Motown story as the successes, and Hip-O has done about as good a job as humanly possible chronicling it, making this the kind of package you want to wash your hands before touching. Motown went on to much bigger things and had better years, to be detailed on future sets in this series, but there's no experience like hearing the label get on its feet and find itself; for that, this is truly essential.


This world-weary garage-rock trio’s music is tailor-made for a pre-pandemic era of basement shows.

Country Westerns

Almost everything that gets romanticized about crowded basement rock shows feels like a nightmare in a pandemic: sweating bodies pressed together, shouts, whoops, and spittle all trapped under a low-slung ceiling. Country Westerns were made for such an environment. Blending world-weariness into rambunctious, twangy rock, they’re a bar band for an era marked by a painful lack of both bars and bands. Despite the bum hand, though, they overthrow pessimism and head straight for a jolt to summon high spirits out of bedeviled circumstances.
Guitarist and singer Joel Plunkett made his name alongside acts like Gentleman Jesse and The Weight, while drummer Brian Kotzur counted himself among the revolving Silver Jews personnel. (David Berman was the sole witness to some of the earliest proto-Country Westerns rehearsals.) They recruited bassist Sabrina Rush from State Champion, and her melody-focused lines round out their energetic sound with a sense of groove.
Country Westerns called upon Matt Sweeney, who has brought his brawny guitar style to Run the Jewels, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and the cult-favorite chooglers Endless Boogie, to produce. With his abiding love of great riffs, he’s a natural fit, ensuring that the band’s crackling solos emerge in complement to their restless chugging. The band coasts between good-natured rowdiness, road-dog grit, and ascetic wisdom, projecting the kind of personality that might be good company for a beer or six on the porch. Plunkett weighs getting “caught losing on a lousy day” against his own obligation to keep picking himself up again with “It’s On Me,” his guitar solo shaking loose any sense of deep regret. It’s bittersweet but tentatively positive, with Plunkett promising to “take an extra step or two” to avoid repeating past mistakes.
On songs like “Gentle Soul,” “It’s Not Easy,” and “Times to Tunnels,” they keep things relatively subdued, but the trio are at their best when they’re hitting the gas. “Time don’t heal the way it used to,” Plunkett acknowledges in his weathered voice on “I’m Not Ready,” as Rush and Kotzur settle into a hum to launch his guitar vamp. It’s in moments like these that the band’s chemistry explodes, bottling the sort of energy that can only ever be fully experienced live.
The album’s final track, a cover of The Magnetic Fields’ “Two Characters in Search of a Country Song,” makes for a tidy closing argument for the trio’s strengths. The lyrics draw on genre signifiers like Jesse James, 18-wheelers, and Calamity Jane to sketch a doomed relationship, while the guitars convey pained resolve. Country Westerns touch on at familiar frameworks without clinging too hard to the specifics. Their debut feels ragged in all the right places, a testament from a band that shoulders the weight of disappointment, lost years, and heartbreak without allowing it to become a burden.
Correction: A previous version of this review did not mention that “Two Characters in Search of a Country Song” is a cover of a Magnetic Fields song. It has been updated to clarify this.

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The pop singer’s long-awaited debut is also a comeback and reintroduction. With her plush voice and slick production, she plays it cool and also plays it safe.

DOPAMINE

Whether they admit it or not, every former girl-group singer wants their solo debut to hit like “2003 Beyoncé performing ‘Crazy in Love.’” Four years ago, Normani came remarkably close with the sprightly R&B track “Motivation.” The single, and its Aaliyah-inspired follow-up “Wild Side,” capitalized on the pageantry that made her stand out in Fifth Harmony. After two unforgettable VMA performances—the handstand-into-a-split in 2019 and the steamy Janet Jackson homage in 2021—Normani laid low; both parents were battling cancer, and shifting management due to creative differences didn’t make anything easier. DOPAMINE, her highly anticipated debut-slash-comeback album, still can’t shake the anonymity of her ensemble days, but it lays the foundation for what Normani will be known for: her Southern roots and a voice as plush as a pair of fuzzy dice.
Rather than the bubbly pop of “Motivation,” which Normani has notably tried to distance herself from, DOPAMINE trades in the suave R&B of her childhood. “Lights On” is reminiscent of the sultry yet danceable croons of noughties Janet. “Insomnia,” co-written by none other than Brandy, could slot into the R&B star’s 2002 album Full Moon. The writing is solid and witty (“Don’t even address me unless you gon’ undress me”) but musically, the primary tasting notes are understated familiarity and reverence for the past. Normani’s smooth vocals are the only quality truly unique to her, and at times even that induces a highway hypnosis effect.
Normani is at her best when she is brash and animated, channeling sounds and flows from her Southern youth. She’s got ties to Atlanta, New Orleans, and Houston all over the album: “Bling-bling-blaow” she sings of her platinum records and iced-out jewelry over a funky bassline on horn-laden opener “Big Boy,” complemented by Starrah’s Auto-Tune’d flexes. “Candy Paint” has the potential to eclipse the braggadocious aura of “Big Boy” but Normani’s laid-back flow becomes monotonous even when her tempo quickens. She leans heavily into her Texas roots on the album highlight “Still,” when she flips a testosterone-filled Mike Jones sample into a strip-club anthem for the ladies kicking up their feet and making it rain hundreds.
DOPAMINE is a solid reintroduction to Normani’s sultrier side that, unfortunately, currently exists in a similar conundrum as Dua Lipa post-Future Nostalgia: Her mysteriously cool it-girl persona is thrilling in three-minute doses, but after a couple of tracks with big hooks, you come across some filler. On DOPAMINE, the house-lite of “Take My Time,” the Kelly Rowland’s “Commander” dupe “Little Secrets,” and the James Blake-assisted “Tantrums” feel obligated to demonstrate versatility through genre experimentation. At times it feels like a solo artist searching for an identity through sound, not always through songwriting.
Though she has writing credits on a majority of the album, Normani’s solo songs often feel plucked from a communal pile. As an alum of one of the biggest American girl groups, a survivor of Hurricane Katrina, and a person who has had to confront mortality and celebrity from a young age, Normani’s story seems ripe for an album format—once she’s ready to tell it.


The German electronic musician explores deep, fluid percussive grooves in the same vein as his work with the late drummer Jaki Liebezeit.

Dead Saints Chronicles

For many years, Burnt Friedman’s music concerned itself primarily with the play of surfaces. He made hyperreal jazz, postmodernist noir, simulacral dub. He called his label Nonplace, a nod to capitalism’s dead zones; one early album, Leisure Zones, was a 77-minute soundscape that resembled the dull hum of a nearby freeway. But somewhere around the turn of the millennium, once the German electronic musician met Can drummer and all-around polyrhythmic powerhouse Jaki Liebezeit, groove assumed a central place in his music. Friedman (real name Bernd Friedmann) and Liebezeit recorded five albums together between 2002 and 2013, and the thread running through them all is rhythm—twisting and turning, tactile as a knotted rope, boasting time signatures at once impossible to parse and easy to sink into.
Liebezeit died earlier this year at the age of 78, but his presence looms large over Friedman’s new mini-album, which brims with bubbling, percussive grooves. Despite the variety of instruments assembled here—serrated synths, stubby electric bass, and guitar and reeds played, respectively, by two long-time collaborators, Joseph Suchy and Hayden Chisholm—it is, at heart, a drummer’s record. Steel pans, bells, shakers, and deep, resonant toms yield an opulent spread of timbres and textures, and everything feels suspended in a state of permanent flux. In fact, there are few held tones at all.
Instead, the music is constructed in pointillistic fashion, from a rippling array of thumps and thwacks and pinpricks of tone. Friedman has long been interested in blurring the line between human hands and computer brains—“I’m surprised that it seems crucial for many people whether tracks on Con Ritmo or Just Landed were played or programmed,” he told The Wire in 2000—and Dead Saints Chronicles’ rhythms could easily be mistaken for the work of a crack drummer. Their fluid syncopations, shifting accents, and deep-in-the-pocket grooves are far more suggestive of muscle memory than MIDI clocks.
Several tracks utilize the kinds of time signatures that are rarely heard in grid-based electronic music. “Acroagnosis” lopes along in a convoluted 9/8 shuffle, its bells and shakers rolling like an overturned bucket of ball bearings on the deck of a small boat. “Grace,” whose ostinato bass-and-drums pulse recalls Australian improvisers the Necks’ horizontal sprawl, rides a pulse that’s difficult to parse: Eighth-note cymbal taps feel soothingly steady, but a nervous kick drum wanders all over the place, tripping up efforts to count out the beat. Even a nominally 4/4 track like “Near Life” steers clear of dance music’s straight-ahead pulse, favoring high-stepping upbeats, hiccupping accents, and glancing chords that seem barely to touch the ground. And in “Wentletrap,” a steady drip of triplets played out across synths and cymbal hits perpetually threatens to turn the groove inside out. (If you squint toward the end, when the synths turn thick and squelchy, it almost resembles Depeche Mode’s “Personal Jesus,” but rearranged in beads of amber.)
Friedman seems to be in a period of looking back right now. After 2014’s melancholy Cease to Matter, the project went quiet for more than two years, and when he returned, with The Pestle, he sequenced the archival collection like a trip back in time, beginning with tracks from 2011 and 2010 and ending up deep in the early 1990s. Dead Saints Chronicles similarly draws from previously unreleased tracks, though these are more recent, dating from between 2007 and 2016. The title is borrowed from a book about near-death experiences, in which part of the author’s research entailed sifting through thousands of hours’ worth of subjects’ recorded accounts. The press text relates that Herculean archival effort with Friedman’s own listen back through his archive of DATs, but it’s hard not to also read the title as a tribute to his own late colleague, the drummer whose name miraculously translated as “love time.” Dead Saints Chronicles is a record where rhythm reigns supreme, where even the faintest and smallest element finds its foothold in a vast and overarching constellation, where no sound is not connected to each and every other sound. It’s a record not so much about timekeeping as it is infinity.


The prominent electro group releases an avant-garde opera about the life of Charles Darwin that's at times impenetrable and rapturous.

The Knife / Planningtorock / Mt. Sims: Tomorrow, in a Year

Tomorrow, in a Year

Prominent electro group releases berserk and impenetrable avant-garde opera; blank stares ensue. Sadly, this will probably wind up being the epitaph for Tomorrow, in a Year. No matter which angle you approach it from, the Knife's latest project-- a 90-plus-minute longform work about the life of Charles Darwin-- can seem bewildering. However self-consciously arty and macabre the Knife have been in the past, they've always seemed like a pop group at heart. Here nothing even remotely approaching a steady beat shows up for more than half its length. Whether Knife fans will hang on through the album's formless, screeching opening, or whether opera aficionados will simply regard this as the dabbling of pop-music dilettantes, is hard to say. What does seem certain is, like many difficult, unclassifiable albums before it, Tomorrow, in a Year is fated to be discussed more than actually heard.
Part of Tomorrow, In a Year's dilemma is that it comes contextualized as an opera. For most listeners, opera has vague, mostly derogatory connotations: old, imposing, foreign, dead, faintly ridiculous. And once you invoke opera, the Knife aren't just trying to match their fans' expectations after Silent Shout; they're implicitly demanding to be measured by the same yardstick used to size up, say, Wagner's Ring Cycle. While the designation is, in some senses, accurate-- Tomorrow has a libretto and an operatic mezzo-soprano, and the whole thing was performed in September 2009 by the Danish performance group Hotel Pro Forma, which commissioned it-- the tag is probably more off-putting than useful for listeners already struggling to locate entry points into this forbidding, oftentimes-alienating work.
Things don't get off to a flying start: Tomorrow, in a Year's first 10 minutes are a painstaking buildup of environmental noises-- a primordial soup of sound appropriate to a work about the origin of life. That's one way of putting it; another might be that it opens with the sounds of a drippy sink and a chain link fence buckling in heavy winds, followed by five minutes of patience-trying buzzing. Where you come down on this spectrum will probably depend on your level of investment, and, more crucially, your listening environment. Taking in the album in different settings gave me a little of both reactions. (At home, in front of massive speakers, following along with the lyrics: absorbing. On an iPod during a morning commute: maddening.) This is deeply un-portable music: It either demands your complete attention or invites you to shut it off.
Once through that opening stretch, your attention will frequently be rewarded. There is powerfully evocative, richly imagined music to be found here. Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer-Andersson's commitment to the Darwinian conceptual framework is complete, sometimes pushing the borders of sanity: Olof Dreijer spent time in the Amazon recording and observing different species while writing, and in "Letter to Henslow", one of the album's most supremely batshit moments, Dreijer and his sister whoop and ululate alongside actual field recordings of Amazonian birds. Dreijer's field research also turns up in his synth tones through the album, like the chittering, insectoid buzzing at the edges of "Variation of Birds".
Karin and Olof find all kinds of neat little ways to echo the unfolding drama as Darwin's observations move from geology and biology toward a unifying theory of all life. In "Geology" and "Minerals", mezzo-soprano Kristina Wahlin Momme delivers her lines in bursts of hurried singspiel as massive sheets of industrial noise grind and shudder beneath her, suggesting the shifting of the Earth's core. The disarmingly gorgeous "Ebb Tide Explorer" is a fragile collection of wisps and swells, Swedish singer/songwriter Jonathan Johansson singing in lilting two-note phrases that mimick the lazily swaying action of the seaweed he is describing.
As the story moves from Darwin's theories of all life into the details of his personal life, the relentless ominousness of the music finally lifts, and the album enters its most inviting stretch. "Annie's Box" is a spare, plangent ode to Darwin's daughter Annie, who died when she was only 10 years old. With its yawning open spaces, haunted by a single, mournful viola drone, it recalls the icy beauty of Nico's Marble Index. That's mere prologue for the one-two climax: "The Colouring of Pigeons" and "Seeds", 20 minutes of tingly alchemy that feel like the lightning-flash realization that the entire work has been struggling toward.
Anchored by a groaning cello and a rolling tribal beat, "The Colouring of Pigeons" unfolds in graceful layers, all in service to an aching, upward-arcing melody shared by Olof, Karin, and Momme. "Seeds" surges forward on a light four-on-the-floor pulse, surrounded a prismatic light show of bell sounds and a rubbery synth not far from current dubstep. At long last, it's a floor filler of sorts-- albeit one with harmonized mezzo-soprano overdubs and lyrics like, "Transoceanic pods and capsules/ Will old occupants allow for room and sustenance?"
The uninterrupted stretch of "Pigeons" into "Seeds" is the only moment on Tomorrow, in a Year where this is recognizably the work of the Knife, and not coincidentally it's the most thrilling and vital music on the record. Reconciling their boundless ambitions with their crowd-pleasing instincts, they hit upon a sweet spot that only Laurie Anderson and few others have managed to locate-- a clearing where pop and the avant-garde meet and make each other freshly strange and inviting. Who knows what kind of reception this will receive; if it's any kind of prologue to an epiphany that allows whole albums of music as inspired as "Pigeons" and "Seeds", however, maybe we'll look back at it in five years as the moment the Knife first went next level.


Remembrance is the first proper release by Suicideyear, the project of young Baton Rouge-based producer James Prudhomme, on Daniel Lopatin’s Software label. Drawing from the electronic/rap subgenre of trap and offering his own spin on the genre, the tracks on Remembrance possess chords and patterns that suggest tension, danger, and, ultimately, melancholy.

Remembrance EP

The music released on Daniel Lopatin’s Software label is Internet native. The context for this music is the digital space—that’s where the inspiration comes from, where the audience is, and how the music finds people. That’s true for a whole lot of music these days, of course, but from the name on down Software makes it explicit. Remembrance is the first proper release by Suicideyear, the project of young Baton Rouge-based producer James Prudhomme, but he’s been around online for a couple of years, putting out mixtapes, remixes, and original productions for rappers. The most widely heard of these to date is his beat for “Hurt”, for Swedish teenager Yung Lean, and it was a characteristic production: slow-to-midtempo, the brittle, rapid-fire electronic percussion fills that have come to signal “trap,” and spacey, melancholic synth lines appropriate for Lean’s “sad boy” aesthetic. Whatever else you might say about it, Suicideyear makes Internet music, work that clearly draws from the online music world’s abundance; but Prudhomme manages to put his own spin on this cluster of signifiers, finding a way to channel feelings in a distinctive way.
A couple of years back, Pitchfork contributor David Drake wrote a piece for Complex called "Real Trap Sh*t? The Commodification of Southern Rap’s Drug-Fueled Subgenre"*. *Among other things, it grappled with how ”trap music,“ emerging from a place of violence and powerlessness, could be transformed into something safe and fashionable through the magic of cultural tourism. "...The trap isn’t a genre, but a real place as portrayed through art," he wrote. "A place with real consequences." I thought of this when listening to Remembrance not because I think it comes at certain styles of rap production from an irresponsible perspective (that ship has probably sailed, anyway), but rather because Prudhomme takes very specific elements of this production, zooms in, and amplifies them until they become something else, something he can call his own. The tracks on Remembrance don’t sound like they’d be improved with people spitting over them, but they do connect to the emotional world of a certain kind of rap production, with chords and patterns that suggest tension, danger, and, ultimately, melancholy.
Which is to say that Remembrance is haunted by mortality, with synth drones that sometimes sound like organs bringing to mind the darkly meditative contemplation of a wake. Suicideyear combines the clean melodic lines of late-1990s IDM with the slow-burn anxiety of Zaytoven. The emotional range here runs from the stately grandeur of “Caroline” to the yearning “Hope Building A” to the dubbed-out and lonesome “Savior”, with its ghosted digital voices to the chiming “U S”, which sounds like the sort of music Death Waltz would have rescued from an early-’80s horror film soundtrack. There’s plenty of silence, enough for each snare clap and hi-hat flicker to carve out its own space, and there’s also an appealing uniformity to the whole. Remembrance knows the kinds of feelings it wants to evoke and how to make that happen, making for a record that possesses a very particular mood.
It isn’t until the closing track that Prudhomme tips his hand, offering up a slow and gorgeous cover of My Bloody Valentine’s “When You Sleep”. This is a risky move because MBV covers can go wrong so easily, but Prudhomme finds something new in the song, an iciness and feeling of isolation that move in opposition to the warmth found on the most oceanic of albums. It’s a neat trick that also encapsulates what makes Remembrance such a modest but ultimately captivating record, a way of taking sounds and textures from one context and transforming them into something that feels personal and close.


For his first release on Warp, the batida and electronic musician puts forth his own meticulous, otherworldly sound and reconnects with the avant-dance spirit of the label’s early years.

Crânio EP

Last year, Lisbon’s DJ Nigga Fox (Rogério Brandão) released a 12" on Príncipe Discos that stepped far outside the boundaries of batida, the genre with which he is most closely associated. Batida, an invention of the Afro-Lusophone diaspora, delivers its explosive percussion in short, sharp shocks—just a few minutes per track and then on to the next head-spinning tangle of polyrhythms. Nigga Fox’s “15 Barras,” on the other hand, was a slowly building, multi-part epic: a quarter-hour of gurgling acid, spun-out playground noise, and stuttering, double-time beats. It was just one more sign of the way that the genre, along with Príncipe, the Lisbon label most responsible for nurturing it, is evolving.
Príncipe had already moved beyond Portugal’s borders when it signed Nídia, a then 18-year-old Bordeaux-based transplant with a bright, squelchy take on the sound. When Nídia turned up on Fever Ray’s Plunge last year, it marked the highest-profile moment yet for a member of batida’s founding generation. And Príncipe recently added another stamp to its passport with the debut record from P. Adrix, a young Portuguese beatmaker whose music reflects the industrial club sounds of his adopted hometown of Manchester. Nigga Fox’s latest EP, released on the UK’s Warp label, is still another step forward.
This isn’t the first time Warp has engaged with batida. In 2015, the label released the three-volume Cargaa EPs, which featured pretty much all the major artists from Príncipe’s circle, including DJ Marfox, Nídia, and Nigga Fox himself. But the Crânio EP is the first major solo work on Warp from anyone in the crew. The raised profile hasn’t changed Brandão’s style: There’s a clear line from these six frenetic songs back to Nigga Fox’s very earliest recordings. But his artistic development over the past five years is self-evident. Crânio boasts a fatter, richer sound and more complex arrangements; he has also added the Angolan percussionist Galiano Neto to the mix. The addition of a human drummer alters his sound in subtle but interesting ways, fleshing out all his snapping, synthetic textures with warm, leathery timbres and dynamic timekeeping.
It’s been years since Warp had anything like a definable sound, but Nigga Fox’s music reconnects with the avant-dance spirit of the label’s early years, when brain-rearranging grooves met coruscating electronic timbres. The opening “Sinistro” is a slow, deliberate showcase for Brandão’s slightly unsettling sensibility, with acid-tinged triplets punctuating gravelly synth sweeps and a wordless vocal loop. It gathers intensity as it builds, and by the end, rave stabs are raining down like slow-motion lightning bolts.
But it’s “Poder do Vento” that really drives home how otherworldly Nigga Fox can sound. The title translates as “Power of the Wind,” and its central riff hits like an air cannon. The synth blasts sound a little like Joey Beltram’s iconic “Mentasm” as if rearranged by the trance deconstructionist Lorenzo Senni. Brandão extends the strangeness when, two-thirds of the way through the song, he introduces a brand-new bassline and a 4/4 kick, as though determined to knock you off your feet at every possible opportunity.
“Maria Costa” and “KRK” offer similar takes on murky, swirling dissonance, and the record builds to a climax with “WAABA-JAH,” in which flute-like sounds ripple like streamers over rattling snares and hand percussion, and snippets of voice are smeared into queasy fun-fair refrains. It’s exhilarating and almost exhausting: By the one-minute mark, between all those sliding pitches and fractured grooves, you have absorbed more information than seems possible to parse, yet he keeps piling on more. Soon it’s a riot of whirly tubes; then a washing machine with a chunk of metal thrown inside, a vortex of barely contained kinetic energy. The closing “Karma” is the record’s coup de grace: Using a theremin-like whistling and ruminative piano melodies, he turns the energy inside out. The drums are as biting as ever, but the atmospheric tones are pensive, airy, weightless, while the competing keys tussle unsteadily between consonance and dissonance. It’s every bit as intense as what has come before, but this time it’s gentle—mesmerizing evidence of Brandão’s finely controlled touch.


On her second album about environmental catastrophes in her native Kazakhstan, the London-based composer turns her attention to the radioactive legacy of the Semipalatinsk Test Site.

Polygon

Deep in the steppe of northeast Kazakhstan, at the foot of Degelen Mountain, stands a monument bearing an inscription in English, Kazakh, and Russian: “1996-2012. The world has become safer.” These words commemorate the successful containment of stores of plutonium and enriched uranium that had been abandoned in a maze of underground tunnels throughout the Semipalatinsk Test Site, the U.S.S.R.’s answer to Los Alamos. From 1949 to 1989, the Soviet Union conducted 456 nuclear tests in a region that came to be called the Polygon, exposing hundreds of thousands of nearby residents to fallout and irradiating the soil for miles around. After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R. in 1991, Kazakhstan became the first country in the world to voluntarily surrender its nuclear capability. The secretive 17-year operation to secure the site is one of the most crucial projects since the Cold War to safeguard against nuclear proliferation.
Yet the decades-long story of the Polygon—now a destination on the dark tourism map—continues. Even today, the people of the region suffer from cancer, birth defects, learning disorders and other maladies—effects of radiation poisoning that can persist for generations. The issue remains largely unknown in the West, which lends an urgency to Galya Bisengalieva’s interpretation of the history of Semipalatinsk on Polygon. In her role as violinist and leader of the London Contemporary Orchestra, Bisengalieva has collaborated with Radiohead, Actress, Frank Ocean, and the National and appeared on the scores for Phantom Thread, You Were Never Really Here, and Suspiria. But on solo projects like 2020’s Aralkum, which focused on the shrinking of the Aral Sea due to Soviet irrigation projects, she has translated the geopolitical crises of her native Kazakhstan to a wider audience. Polygon portrays the grandeur and desolation of the Kazakh countryside, offering both an elegy and a protest for its forgotten victims of the nuclear age.
Having trained in rigorous Soviet schools from a young age, Bisengalieva has said that she wants “to reimagine the violin,” to vault her own boundaries and discover new sounds with the instrument. Though Polygon features few elements—mostly violin, voice, and traditional Kazakh instruments, along with slight electronic manipulation—she produces a vast array of effects that lend these tracks the depth of a fully realized film score. Their titles describe the setting: album opener “Alash-kala” refers to the name of Semipalatinsk from 1917 to 1920, when it was an autonomous region and Kazakhstan’s cultural center. Waves of gentle ambient sound recall wind rushing across the steppe as crystalline notes sweep overhead, suggesting the rugged beauty of the landscape. “Polygon” depicts the fate of this landscape with an insistent thrumming beat and tense layers of strings—she says that she multi-tracked as many as 40 detuned violin parts—leading inexorably to a chorus of haunting voices. Suddenly, they are cut off; after an anxious delay, a percussive boom sounds in the distance and the beat is replaced by shuddering trails of static.
The Chagan nuclear test of 1965 created Lake Chagan in an attempt to deploy nuclear explosions for large-scale construction, further poisoning the region. Bisengalieva’s “Chagan” showcases the range of her violin techniques: Digitally delayed pizzicato and sharp staccato attacks echo ominously until continuously descending glissando recreates the vertiginous fall of debris. “Balapan” immediately follows with an off-kilter groove that wobbles in and out of time. Busy electronics evoke the daily life of workers in the Balapan testing facility, creating an atmosphere far more tense and hurried than the airy string arrangements elsewhere on the album.
Polygon does not rely on the location recordings that give similar pieces, like Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Chernobyl score or Bisengalieva’s own Aralkum, a tangible connection to their subject matter. With little more than a violin, she creates more abstract connections to the Semipalatinsk region. Still, each track inspires visions as vivid as scenes in an imagined documentary, their titles clues to a dramatic and violent history. The recklessness of the U.S.S.R.’s nuclear testing and the consequent suffering of the Kazakh population defies description, but the cinematic scale of Polygon communicates something of its horrors.