The UK singer-songwriter and producer’s vision of pop is spare yet sumptuous. His new album features Panda Bear and Carly Rae Jepsen, but the real draw is the mellow, déjà vu quality of the music.

Affection

The backstory of a Bullion song is never obvious. All that’s legible are stray details—a name, a place, an age—silhouetted in the warm light of emotional afterglow. In “Hula,” my favorite song from 2020’s We Had a Good Time, he hinted at stolen moments on dancefloors in Tokyo, Mexico, and Berlin (no further context; guess you had to be there) and asked, out of nowhere, “Are people in pain where you are?” That a bittersweet synth-pop track so perfectly suited for swaying cheek to cheek coincided with the onset of the novel coronavirus made the question feel uncannily apropos.
The British singer, songwriter, and producer born Nathan Jenkins similarly blends the vague with the vivid on “Your Father,” one of the standouts on his new album, Affection. Over characteristically subtle production—a fistful of agates for a synth line; flashing shoals of guitar and sax—he sketches out the blurriest fragments of a private memory, then twists the focus ring: “Your father/Listened to/The whole of/The White Album/As he waited to collect us.” No matter how many times I rewind the line, I can’t quite make sense of it. I can see it: chaperone, tape deck on the dashboard, an hour that Dad spent killing time while the kids got up to who knows what. But the specifics are indistinct, known only to Jenkins and the “you” of the song. Bullion’s vignettes are just that: sharp in the center, darkened around the margins of the frame.
But you don’t come to Bullion’s music for the stories, really; you come for the sound, and he has never sounded more in control of his craft than on Affection. Since the late 2000s, Jenkins has been developing an idiosyncratic style that’s hard to sum up, in spite of its elegant restraint. You could call it retro-conscious electro pop with one foot in UK dance music; you could also simply call it pop, or at least the kind of pop you’d expect from someone who’s produced Carly Rae Jepsen and Nilüfer Yanya. He calls it “Pop, not slop”—also the name of a long-running playlist he maintains on Spotify.
Whatever that term may lack in precision or pith, the playlist efficiently triangulates Jenkins’ musical coordinates. It’s full of sophistipop, electrified yacht rock, Japanese city pop, mellower strains of new wave, and, above all, the odd curveball from ’70s rockers who greeted the next decade by spending major-label money on top-of-the-line synths and drum machines. Bullion’s music is steeped in the liminal areas where genres blend promiscuously and digital reverb bleeds across acoustic guitars and gridded click tracks. If his tales feel like strangers’ snapshots found in a box at the flea market, his songs have an equally vintage tint, shot through with a déjà vu quality that makes them feel like you’ve heard them before, but can’t quite place where.
In the listener-friendly tradition of pop music, Jenkins keeps his songs around the three-minute mark, and sometimes shorter. “Cinch,” the album’s sleekest encapsulation of yearning, is a scale model of bittersweet, just two minutes of pulsing arpeggios, wordless coos, and a delicious little twist in the chord change that gets me every time. His arrangements are more pared back than ever; why use two synths when one will do? But his sounds have never been more sumptuous. The keys drip with liquid texture, glow like runway lights through a rain-spattered window; voices sail into earshot on flying carpets of reversed reverb, giving songs the feeling of moving backward and forward at once.
Jenkins delights in toying with expectations: “A City’s Never,” featuring an unusually understated Panda Bear, bookends a single verse in a chorus as spotless as an electric-vehicle showroom, then twists up the bassline in its final moments, slyly throwing a toylike wrench in the works. Other songs feel like conduits for fleeting moments of joy: You may come to “Rare” for Jepsen’s heart-warming vocal harmonies, but it’s the 18-second guitar solo near the end that keeps you hitting replay. Just once does he go a little gonzo, with the fiddle and harmonica of “World_train,” featuring Charlotte Adigéry—probably my least favorite song here, though I applaud the gung-ho spirit. And sometimes a song that seems otherwise unremarkable, like the strummy “Open Hands,” suddenly assumes a more vivid shape, as though its strings had been pulled taut.
Jenkins executive-produced Avalon Emerson’s & the Charm, in which the American DJ reinvented herself as the frontwoman of a group, and he assumes a similar role here, roping a dozen or so session players and backup vocalists into streamlined songs that spin like tightly wound clocks. You can visualize the imaginary band on stage—here’s the drummer, there’s the bassist; the keys are mapped across left-hand chords and right-hand leads. A human sense of scale abides, even on songs that are almost certainly computer-assisted studio concoctions. A surprisingly large number of guitarists are on hand, given the instrument’s unobtrusive role—but when a solo like the one Joe Newman plays in “Your Father” floats to the surface, it lights up the room. Bassist Ben Reed, who played on Frank Ocean’s Blond and Endless, deserves a nod as the album’s stealth MVP; his work can be muscular, lithe, and lighthearted, sometimes all at once. He brings livewire funk to the glistening “Affection,” dutifully powers the middle-school slow dance of “Rare,” quickens the pulse of “Your Father” like a brand new crush.
The guest singers never steal the spotlight. Panda Bear’s Noah Lennox comes closest, only because he has such a distinctive drawl, but Jenkins does something clever with the mix that leaves Lennox’s voice trailing his own, like an angled shadow. Jepsen and Adigéry also lie low, inconspicuous as friendly ghosts. Jenkins’ presence is affable, modest, and muted—almost like a backup vocalist on his own songs. He sings with his head voice, slightly nasal, but there’s no shortage of warmth or tenderness in his tone. More than anything, he knows the value of simplicity.
Take “Once, in a Borrowed Car”: There are no verses, just a chorus that’s repeated five times, with minuscule variations. “Bullet down the highway,” he sings, drawing out the first word until it feels like a speeding projectile caught in slow motion; “Body blow/The body knows/Rushing to your location/To seek affection.” In those five slim lines, we’re transported into the act of desire itself. We may not know where he’s going, or to whom, or what force caused that body blow, but it hardly matters. For three minutes and change, between the blushing close harmonies and hiccupping piano solo, that desire feels as real as the blood pumping in your veins.


Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit Boz Scaggs’ 1976 hit album, a record whose ineffable tragicomedy called for its own system of measurement.

Silk Degrees

Whoever you are, wherever you are, as you read this sentence, a used vinyl copy of Silk Degrees is sitting in the closest record store to you. It is not in great condition, and it is not expensive, and it was first owned by someone at a time when a lot of people owned vinyl records—and a lot of those people owned Silk Degrees. There are certain albums that go down so smoothly—inhaling the busy sounds of pop radio and exhaling their own cool, irresistible blend—that they seem to open a permanent slot in the greater public consciousness, sailing like a ship into a harbor in the clouds. Some albums belong to everybody.
Boz Scaggs’ seventh solo album, released just after Valentine’s Day 1976, is one such album. After it hit, the Ohio-born, Texas-bred, California-based songwriter described his ascent to stardom with the quiet contentment one finds after a long vacation, or a particularly inspiring ayahuasca trip. “It was an enormous satisfaction to have a hit record,” he would say decades later, “and I wish it at least once for every musician.” None of his albums before or after reached the same level of success, and while he’d have his share of hits (especially on 1980’s Middle Man) and artistic achievements (2001’s Dig, 2013’s Memphis), his career in the mainstream is largely defined by the meticulous, glimmering sound of these 10 songs.
If you know Silk Degrees but don’t know much about Boz Scaggs, it is at least partially by design. Before its release, he was largely a critical favorite, first for his contributions to an early, underrated iteration of the Steve Miller Band, and later for the solid if slightly anonymous albums under his own name. Within five years of the release of Silk Degrees, he would retire from the music industry—and not in the casual sense of working behind the scenes, making quieter records for smaller audiences, but in the more literal sense of retreating, spending time with his family, starting that restaurant and concert venue he’d always dreamed about.
Even as Silk Degrees slowly took over the world, casting Scaggs as one of the most successful figures in pop music in the late ’70s, he never had much interest in fame. In his early 30s when it was released, he quickly grew tired of giving interviews and presenting himself as the sleek, solitary, well-dressed icon from his album covers. “Maybe people need heroes?” he offered in 1978. “I’m tired of that.” The line of work did not come naturally: He had already quit playing guitar in the studio, turning his parts over to more qualified session musicians; he didn’t enjoy life on the road and resisted embarking on major tours. He said his dream role was to be a competent bassist, somewhere in the background. “I’m not a real ambitious person by nature,” he confessed.
All this may reek of false humility from someone who sold millions of records and contributed a hit song to a John Travolta film, but Scaggs’ lack of ego speaks to the particular triumph of Silk Degrees. As a songwriter, he operated by feeling, by tempo. Writing most productively with young keyboardist and session player David Paich, he composed the album piece-by-piece, like a DJ building a set: Let’s start with something upbeat then take it into overdrive—OK, now something slower so they can catch their breath. (Unsurprisingly, the album has, for decades, proven a fertile source for sampling.) The lyrics were written last-minute, more to sustain the mood of the music than to capture any distinct narrative. This approach is most noticeable in “Jump Street,” a rollicking outlier where a dark collage of imagery about city life culminates with him howling, “I wish I was dead.”
For Scaggs, the process involved as much listening as writing. One day, Paich was playing one of his own compositions, intended for a solo album, when Scaggs heard a progression of two chords that obsessed him for weeks. Eventually, he started imagining his own song. It became “Lowdown,” the first track on Side B. This is the song that turned Silk Degrees into a slow-burn hit, released as its second single, first gaining traction on an R&B station in Cleveland, then eventually peaking at No. 3 on the Billboard charts.
Listening to “Lowdown” today, you can imagine how Scaggs felt when he heard those chords. It builds gradually, organically, a good idea snowballing in a small room. First, there’s a disco beat, played by Jeff Porcaro, one of several musicians who turned in a career-making performance on the album. Then comes David Hungate’s suggestive ribbit of a bass line, and then those two moody chords, played by Paich on a Minimoog. Eventually there are flutes, Motown backing vocals, a spacy synth freakout, and an electric guitar solo from Louie Shelton that sounds like nobody clued him into what chords he’d be playing over. How many times have I listened to this song and I still can’t tell you the structure, or the order that any of this occurs. It’s less a pop song than a killer party, a story you piece together from blurry photos the next morning.
Such is the beautiful, foggy logic of Silk Degrees, evident in both the music and the words. Scaggs’ lyrics are often indecipherable: a soulful slur of moans and vowels with occasional context clues. “3 a.m., it’s me again,” go the opening lines, and each detail feels crucial. It’s easy to imagine these songs—so romantic, so doomed—being sung in those sleep-deprived hours when everything feels a little hazy, a little desperate. And “again”—there’s a level of intimacy and urgency. We have heard from this person before, and this will not be the last time.
The ballads are what helped push Silk Degrees into something approaching a standards collection: The closing “We’re All Alone” was sung by everyone from Frankie Valli and Rita Coolidge, who both had hits with it, to Michael Jackson and Scott Walker, who did not. These artists were likely drawn to the song for its bittersweet vocal melody and formally beautiful structure—those descending seventh chords that make it feel like it’s constantly changing keys. Scaggs sings it near the limits of his upper register, giving the song a strange, existential loneliness. “Harbor Lights” is just as gorgeous, although it would be even more difficult to replicate the success of Scaggs’ version—a wobbly, late-night swoon that rocks back and forth before suddenly finding its sea legs with the bossa nova coda in the last 45 seconds.
Often the backing band, who would join forces under the name Toto shortly after touring Silk Degrees, stands toe-to-toe with Scaggs, fulfilling his ambition of being just one voice in a collective sound. Some of the most memorable parts are isolated choices from the musicians and arrangers: Porcaro’s opening drum fill of “What Can I Say” introduces the record as if swinging open the door to a California beach house, greeting you a little drunkenly, swaggering, mid-conversation, cocktail in hand. And the horns in “Georgia,” punctuating a string section that hovers in mid-air, ground the song and help make it sound like the last-ditch telephone call that Scaggs describes in the lyrics.
For all of the album’s highlights—the immortal “Lido Shuffle,” a punchy cover of Allen Toussaint’s “What Do You Want the Girl to Do”—“Georgia” is its emotional peak. It’s Scaggs’ finest turn as a lyricist—the half-rhyme of “Christmas in your eyes” and “moonlight through the pines,” the ambiguity of what precisely the narrator did that landed him in jail; the juxtaposition of one of his most beautiful melodies and one of his most depraved stories. It is Silk Degrees at its most luxurious and most tragic, striking a balance that no other album of its era matched.
This juxtaposition defines the poetry of Silk Degrees, whose title itself resists interpretation. “I have this box full of bits of paper, cocktail napkin scribblings, bits of wisdom,” Scaggs explained of its inspiration. “‘Silk Degrees’ was a phrase I’d had around in that box for a long time.” He had thought about using it for one of his previous records but something told him it wasn’t right, not quite yet. It’s perfect for these songs, whose mood is so cohesive and identifiable that Scaggs introduced his own system to measure it.
There are scenes in his lyrics that fit the bill—say, making love in the woods just before getting arrested, mistaking police lights for the moon. But like the films of David Lynch or the paintings of Edward Hopper, the aesthetic of Silk Degrees transcends art and seeps into the real world. Anything can be measured in silk degrees: say, a car running out of gas on a remote highway just in time to catch the sunset, or a couple breaking up in a casino, lit by the glow of slot machines. Songs by other artists—Neil Young’s “On the Beach,” Steely Dan’s “Pearl of the Quarter”—also work in his system, as evidenced by Scaggs’ laid-back 21st century cover versions.
Of course, the title can also conjure a useful way to compare the textures of bedsheets, and the commercial appeal of this music, produced by the then-unstoppable Joe Wissert, was initially its most obvious virtue. “Does the world need another white singer/songwriter dabbling in neo-Philly sweet soul?” Vivien Goldman asked in an early review. “I listened to this album over and over and over, hoping to be able to say yes. Now the answer is a qualified yes.” I feel her pain. The job of a critic becomes somewhat difficult when approaching something as smooth and universal as Silk Degrees. And yet, as it has aged, the album feels increasingly divorced from its moment in pop culture, and its more mysterious qualities—the abstract melancholy of Scaggs’ voice, the late-night twinkle of the band—are what pull you in, making it feel like your own, no matter how many people owned the LP before you did.
If I were reviewing this album in 1976, I might feel compelled to note that a lot of the music sounded derivative. Scaggs himself has always been open about his influences, from the Los Angeles contemporaries he studied closely to old standbys like Ray Charles, Jimmy Reed, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. His interviews often proceed like condensed summaries of music history, and so do his recent albums: After a tentative comeback in the late ’80s, Scaggs built up to a quicker pace with records that have taken the shape of tributes to styles, genres, and cities. He speaks about his voice as an instrument he grew more comfortable with later in life, as he got to know himself better.
It’s a quiet legacy but a notable one. Scaggs is a singer in the traditional sense, which means he is an interpreter. It’s this quality that allowed him to make a name for himself in the hippie scene of San Francisco in the 1960s—where he wore suits and was often pegged for a narc—and record his finest album at the peak of the disco era. He has always been adaptable, always thriving when presented with a challenge. If any cynicism remains about the success of Silk Degrees—for what it’s worth, Scaggs has always expressed disdain for terms like “blue-eyed soul” and “yacht rock”—it is impossible to ignore the devotion in his performances, the way these songs dug deeper the more people they reached.
There’s an excellent bootleg of a July 1976 show at Central Park on the Silk Degrees tour, a recording that was broadcast on the radio just as the album was gaining steam. Have you ever been at a concert where the momentum courses through the audience—the band’s been at it a while; the energy is translating; every song seems to burst out, slightly faster than what feels natural? Scaggs keeps his cool but you can tell he feels it. Before he introduces “Georgia,” a low rumble echoes across the stage; he glances heavenward: “Oh, it’s gonna rain a little bit! Yeah! Let’s all get electrocuted!” The crowd laughs. It’s summer in the city and the sky’s looking stormy—that’s Silk Degrees. “I’m ready to go if you are,” he drawls into the mic. He might be tempting God or he might be cuing the band. These songs leave it up to you to fill in the blanks. The man on stage is already gone.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Here We Go Magic's latest turns songwriter Luke Temple's anxiety of non-commitment into an aesthetic of sorts, with the results proving strangely medicated.

A Different Ship

The songwriter Luke Temple's existential crisis is a familiar one: He's so thoughtful about his options that he can't commit to any of them. His last two albums with Here We Go Magic (2009's self-titled and 2010's Pigeons) sounded like the work of musicians who not only weren't sure who they wanted to be, but who could entertain the possibility of being several different things from song-to-song-- a liberal mindset maybe more admirable in a friend than an artist. It's not surprising that the best thing the band has put out yet-- a twitchy krautrock song called "Collector"-- outlined Temple's fascination with people capable of fixating on a single thing, and even then, he confessed that his fascination was "mild."
A Different Ship, the band's third album, makes a go of turning the anxiety of non-commitment into its own kind of commitment. One song is called "How Do I Know"; another is called "Make Up Your Mind". The first line Temple sings is, "It's hard sometimes to be close," and throughout, he makes an effort to keep his distance. He hums, he floats, he glides politely over the mix. The band splits its time between airy ballads and dry, hypercaffeinated stuff built from layers of interwoven guitars and synths-- music that creates a revisionist history of the 1980s where tightly-wound bands like the Feelies and Devo cohabitate with yacht rock. The title track alone may herald some kind of subterranean Sting renaissance.
It's an impeccably polished and careful record. But like a shirt buttoned all the way up to the neck, sophistication can wear a guy out. Whatever rough edges the band naturally cultivated on their first two albums have been neatly shaved off and sanded down with the help of producer Nigel Godrich, who makes everything sound vacuum-packed and expensive. Thinking about Godrich inevitably makes me think about Radiohead. The creeping irony of "Everything in Its Right Place" is that it sounded like something, somewhere, was desperately wrong. The paradox here is that the band pretends at anxiety in a way that seems perfectly comfortable. It's George Clooney playing Woody Allen.
Twice on the album, Temple admits to "believing" in things: One is "action"; the other is Mary, whom he likes in part for her "calm delivery." I get the feeling he's aware of the music's even-handed character, which is as present in its sound as in his writing. And while there are moments when it comes together beautifully, like the way the carefree coda and rippling synthesizers on "How Do I Know" defy the song's rigid rhythms, a lot of this stuff feels strangely medicated. In melancholy hours it has inspired visions of bombs with their wicks dipped in water, or car commercials where good-looking creative professionals pull absently into suburban driveways.
I think of this old line about how staying in the middle of the road is the best way to get run over. That's not entirely true. Bon Iver and Real Estate practically live there, and they're doing fine. But it's strange to hear music so alternately mellow and obsessively ornamented. At least we can guess that Temple's worries may be winding down.


The Montreal indie band Stars have stretched hushed electro-pop into scrambling arena rock for nearly 20 years. They sound revived and more emotionally mature on their eighth album.

Stars: There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light

There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light

Reflecting on his Montreal band Stars’ eighth album, co-frontperson Torquil Campbell said, “We make the small things big and the big things a chorus.” Stars stretch hushed electro-pop into scrambling arena rock, blending the Smiths’ guitar romance with bedroom soul like the product of some Mancunian Motown. Campbell, along with Amy Millan and their four bandmates, have been fiddling with their blend of heartache and hedonism, dance beats and guitar sparks, for almost 20 years now. So it’s little surprise that Campbell knows what they’re best at, even though Stars have had a run that sometimes made us wonder. If 2012’s The North was a cautious return to form and 2014’s No One Is Lost had some fun with it, then There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light finds the band with their feet on the streets and their heads scraping the sky, just where they belong.
Indispensable to Stars’ appeal is the platonic chemistry of Campbell and Millan, two different but complementary singers (he the overstated striver, she the understated virtuoso) who were like the xx before the xx, in blazing pastels instead of chiaroscuro. The greatness of their third album, 2004’s Set Yourself on Fire, is so unimpeachable that people forget about 2003’s Heart. (The throbbing “Elevator Love Letter” is still the most perfect Stars song.) “Sometimes the TV is like a lover,” Campbell sings on that album’s title track, which, like all his best lyrics, is embarrassing because it’s true. Of course, in Stars’ music, lovers are also like TV: streamlined, composited, and dramatized with a cinematic splendor that would make Baz Luhrmann blush. There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light may be the most Starry album title possible, with its unsubtle implication that love is the only real thing in a sea of encroaching artificiality, an idea made sonic in music where the rawest sentimentality is clad in the archest theater.
Airy and danceable, There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light revives our faith in Stars. We get locket-size images of yellow taxis waiting in the night, clocks chiming in empty rooms; lots of eyes and skies, boys and cars and streets. Words like “dream” and “love” are repeated until they lose all sense, or rather, infuse everything around them. The opening track “Privilege” is slinky and inviting, as Millan does slow flips around a silvery herringbone guitar. “Fluorescent Light” comes on with the particular hushed intensity that Campbell sings with when he’s planning to tug our heartstrings, but it turns into the indie-pop equivalent of a lavish club anthem.
Though Stars have reverted to a more plainly romantic, ingenuous style, you might notice, on “Fluorescent Light” and elsewhere, a more adult cast to their dynamics of desire, with more regret and ambiguity crosshatched behind the crayon strokes. “Losing to You,” where Millan and Campbell’s vocal lines cling together like lovers walking in the dark, is clearly set in an adult relationship of considerable duration, and it intuitively captures the premonitory feeling of losing someone you can’t imagine losing, but will. “Is it strong enough a bond to carry on or is there something else that’s really true?” This is a far cry from the Stars of earlier songs like “Ageless Beauty,” when they had all the answers.
The unwavering “yes” of Stars has deepened into a “maybe,” but the music still beams with conviction. Millan’s confident vocals on “Hope Avenue” make it sound like she could be a popstar in the vein of Robyn. Campbell gets a requisite U2-style burner on “Alone,” and it’s pretty glorious. The trim, popstep-inflected productions roll on through the piano-caressed “We Called It Love,” with big haymakers from Campbell (“The Maze”) and cosseting enchantments from Millan (“California, I Love that Name”) coming all the way through the end.
It’s surely significant that, for the first time, Stars turned over some control to an outsider: producer Peter Katis, who has worked often with the National. For a band like Stars, whose lifeblood and liability has always been bombast, having someone around to arch an eyebrow at them now and then must go a long way. There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light sounds like a band who defied the notion of growing up by realizing that it did anyway, and that it’s strong enough to carry on.


The similarities between the Horrors' last album and their latest are disappointing if you value how they've previously made radical transformations from album to album. Luminous is an incremental move towards the edge of the 1990s, where the band slips inside this Hacienda, coloring with sunlight and glowsticks rather than pretty in pink pastels.

Luminous

When the Horrors pick lead singles, they don’t bury the lede. Their eight-minute krautrock half-marathon “Sea Within a Sea” boasted affiliations with Portishead’s Geoff Barrow, acclaimed video director Chris Cunningham, and former the Jesus & Mary Chain bassist Douglas Hart. It left no doubt that 2009's Primary Colours intended to erase the memory of the “psychotic sounds for freaks and weirdos” that typified their shlocky shock-goth debut Strange House; two years later, “Still Life” was an obvious tell of the John Hughes-in-IMAX, cloudgazing reveries to come on Skying.
So it goes, then, with "I See You", the first glimpse of their fourth LP Luminous: you could spend all seven-and-a-half minutes of thinking of adjectives to describe this dazzling moonshot and still not come up with anything better than “luminous.” But the title of the song is even more telling, considering its likeness to Skying’s second single, “I Can See Through You”, highlighting the biggest obstacle Luminous faces; it's at turns utterly breathtaking and vaguely familiar, but in the end it just sorta sounds like Skying.
The similarities between old and new are disappointing if you value how the Horrors have made radical transformations from album to album. But in the longview, they’ve always been driven by the same instincts and ambitions: regardless of whether they were invoking the Cramps, Can, or the Cure, this is spot-the-reference record collector rock, and Luminous is the first time they haven’t completely ditched the vinyl from their last time out. It’s an incremental move towards the edge of the '90s, where the band slips inside this Hacienda, coloring with sunlight and glowsticks rather than pretty in pink pastels.
Luminous opens with about three minutes of anticipatory electronic murmuring, bongos, and birdcall before “Chasing Shadows” turns on the klieg lights and lets the beat drop for a crowd of thousands who will completely lose their shit. The gleaming acoustic guitar strums that open “First Day of Spring” could’ve been pickpocketed from Happy Mondays during their 24-hour party stupor. This is still music meant for the biggest crowd possible, only now the Horrors sound more suited for the festival grounds rather than a hockey arena.
Still, the Horrors aren’t Madchester purists like Jagwar Ma, or Cut Copy circa Free Your Mind. There’s too much composure in this hardworking, stylized music—the jeans are still black and skinny instead of baggy. It’s Screamadelica dosed on trustworthy hallucinogens, or Pills 'n' Thrills & Bellyaches if we're talking about smooth, green gelcaps rather than hairspray-tasting E tablets. Or, think of the Stone Roses, the outlier of that scene in that they always just seemed like a rock band dabbling in club sounds, utilizing extended guitar codas and the occasional mechanistic thump in the place of actual groove.
In other words, Luminous is Skying with faster tempos, which might only qualify as dance music at ca. 2000 "Britpop nights" at American bars, the setting that the Horrors truly belong in. They’re a throwback to the post-Radiohead, studio-nerd likes of Doves or Elbow, acts that attracted Yanks looking towards the UK because those bands seemed more interested in guitar pedals and electronic trickery. It’s easy enough to say Luminous sounds like a million bucks, but that’s not really a figure of speech__—__just about every moment here gives you an opportunity to itemize the recording budget, from whatever gets the bass on “Jealous Sun” to sound like a steamroller to the battery of guitar pedals that achieve the streaking comet sound of “Mine and Yours” and the quasar swirl of “Falling Star”.
And yet you wonder just how much the actual people in the Horrors have invested themselves in all of this; they come off like a band that wants to play for a stadium full of people that still don’t know the first thing about them. As with Skying, it’s a high compliment to say Luminous is a giant bowl of assorted, premium ear candy, and it’s about as nourishing, which maybe is the point. Faris Badwan’s vocals are perfectly situated within his imperious surroundings—half drama king, half complacent plutocrat—and his lyrics can read like nonsense, sounding like grand proclamations before dissipating completely the moment he moves on to the next thought. Whether it’s the hint of a bizarre love triangle on “Change Your Mind” or seemingly stern repetitions like “So now you know/ Turn away”, nothing really seems like that big of a deal.  They have have mastered their sound and vision, and hopefully they can grow to recognize their heart and soul, too.


The Canadian singer-songwriter’s third record is a fascinating outlier in her catalog, an unsparing and expansive album written in the mountains of Quebec following traumatic experiences in her life.

Sarah McLachlan: Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

Four years before she founded Lilith Fair—a traveling music festival which prioritized the work of and the collaboration between women musicians—and just before she broke into the upper regions of the American charts with “Building a Mystery,” Sarah McLachlan was alone in the Canadian woods. In order to write and record her third album, 1993’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, the Nova Scotian singer-songwriter isolated herself and her two cats in a cabin located in the mountains of southern Quebec.  She felt incapable of writing anything for the first three months, faintly aware of something stirring inside her which routinely failed to assemble into words or songs. It was cold. Snow had accumulated on the windows of the cabin in thick columns, and the temperature sank into the negative 30s. Outside were mammoth rock formations and woods and ice and an empty dark that invaded them at night. She felt small and alone.
McLachlan had grown self-conscious about her previous two albums, considering them either too amateurish or rigid in their writing and production. Her debut, Touch, consisted of the first songs she’d ever written; in lieu of any personal experience, she adapted her lyrics largely from the material of her dreams. Her second album, Solace, expressed a confusion and displacement she associated very specifically with her early twenties, a “mourning of [her] lost innocence,” as she told Hot Press in 1994. So she settled herself within the vastness of the mountains of Quebec longing for a kind of self-annihilating perspective—to get close to herself by getting as far away from her life as possible.
In the year before she situated herself in the wilderness, McLachlan had found herself stalked by two of her fans. They followed her from show to show and wrote her letters that progressively warped into disturbing exposures of their inner psyches. One of them moved to Vancouver, where McLachlan lived at the time, and routinely materialized in her neighborhood. “[There were instances] like running into them a couple of blocks from my house, and saying they’d been there for a couple of days,” she told the Toronto Star in 1993. “It was pretty scary. I stopped answering my mail a long time ago. I had my best friend answering it for a while, and then she had nightmares so she’s not doing it anymore, either.” A court issued a restraining order against the fan, but McLachlan was considerably shaken by the experience. She started looking over her shoulder whenever she left her house, checking her periphery for any menacing, incoming blurs.
While writing the album, McLachlan kept a small journal. Every morning she’d fill three pages of it with free association, circular thoughts about coffee that would barely solidify in her head before disintegrating, but which, halfway through her second page, would evolve into a kind of accidental introspection. She would play Tom Waits records, and she would focus on the slow redistribution of detail on one of her favorite albums, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. On that record, Mark Hollis, the principal member of Talk Talk, abandoned his band’s synth-pop aesthetic and stretched his new compositions out like canvas, applying his voice to them in minimal, liquid strokes that interrupted and gave shape to the yards of silence that surrounded it.
Then spring arrived. The snow evaporated and McLachlan discovered that a river, recently thawed, flowed just behind her cabin. Small blooms unfolded on branches of the trees outside. “The whole world just blew up like I’ve never seen it before,” she said. “Everything became so amplified.” She started writing songs again, and would now routinely walk the two miles from her cabin to the studio with whatever ideas she had gathered over the course of the day. Whether it was a fully-formed song or a flicker of an idea, she and her producer, Pierre Marchand, would add musical ornaments—the scattered pulse of a drum machine, a few pale shimmers of electric guitar—until they sounded like whatever it was that Sarah McLachlan songs were beginning to sound like. The songs were located somewhere between the suggestive adult contemporary gloss of her previous albums and something as boundless and figural as Spirit of Eden, a vast stone temple in which her sourceless voice echoes and decays.
This is the image that Fumbling’s first song and lead single, “Possession,” places in my head, or rather it’s the painterly details of its sound design that submerge my head in that colossal space. “Listen as the wind blows/From across the great divide,” McLachlan sings, her voice drowsy, delayed, unraveling at the same pace as a pale ribbon of smoke, “Voices trapped in yearning/Memories trapped in time.” McLachlan wrote “Possession” about her stalker; the song actually takes place in the tortured, pressurized depths of his perspective. The lyrics reproduce the rhetorical and metaphysical somersaults that appear in devotional religious texts; the narrator of “Possession” conceives of his own desire as an empty tomb where he sits and yearns, consumed by an ancient longing.
For McLachlan, inhabiting this perspective was a way for her to convert her trauma into a kind of investigation of the often porous border between desire and obsession. (Her stalker attempted to sue her for harvesting the details of the song from the content of his letters; before the suit could ascend into any court, he killed himself.) The question that animates “Possession” is the question that animates the majority of her work since, most visible in songs like “Sweet Surrender” and “I Love You”: Why does falling in love feel like lightning forking through the body?
“Possession” begins an album significantly shadowed by sexual violence. It had begun to drone constantly in McLachlan’s life—in addition to her experience of being stalked, in the previous year she had accompanied the relief organization World Vision to Thailand and Cambodia, assisting in the filming of a documentary about poverty and child prostitution. What she saw there opened up unexpected and unfamiliar space in her. “I came away with a broader understanding of the world, of the darkness that exists out there,” is how she explained it to Maclean’s in 1994. “I’ve tried to express that as honestly as I could.” This darkness flows even into “Good Enough,” which McLachlan recently described as being about “the love and the trust and the companionship that’s shared between women”; its warm reassurances sound as if they’re responding to an abusive relationship still hovering at the song’s edges: “Don’t tell me why he’s never been good to you,” she sings. “...I’ll show you why you’re so much more than good enough.”
In several of her interviews from around the time, McLachlan describes songwriting as a form of therapy, a method of contemplating and analyzing a life experience by pulling it through yourself in reverse. ”Ice,” the most harrowing and skeletal song on the record, is where McLachlan tries to process the bottomless dark she encountered in Cambodia and Thailand. “I’ve always tried to portray a sense of hope in the songs before, but that one doesn’t really have much,” she said. The song, initially supported only by McLachlan’s vocal and guitar, is slowly circulated by saxophone phrases, which then lapse, as if responding to the song’s subject, into sustained dissonances. “The only comfort is the moving of the river,” McLachlan sings. “You enter into me, a lie upon your lips.” Her voice multiplies and wreaths the song in ghosts of itself, which make it feel more complete but no less hollowed out.
Pierre Marchand, McLachlan’s producer, was a protégé of U2 and Peter Gabriel producer Daniel Lanois; like Lanois, Marchand’s productions tend to make individual instruments sound as if they’ve been drawn through a thick bruise of pigment. Fumbling isn’t particularly swathed in reverb; there’s enormous clarity in the mix. But Marchand’s effect, via Lanois, makes each instrument appear caught in a kind of luminous aura, as if filmed by the space age lenses which gave the candlelight in the movie Barry Lyndon its plural glow. You can hear it in the guitar that McLachlan strums at the start of “Hold On”; even suspended in empty space, the chord seems to ripple and catch light like the skin of a lake.
After recording Fumbling, McLachlan toured for almost two years before she and Marchand assembled its follow-up, Surfacing, her commercial breakthrough in the U.S. It’s a simpler, more straightforward, less immersive album about love and guilt; on “Angel,” her most enduring hit from the album, she traces the slow narcotic spiral of someone’s heroin overdose with just her piano and voice. Barely a month after Surfacing came out, Lilith Fair began, which rewrote the idea of a festival as a space where women could celebrate each other, and which helped invent space on radio and on the charts for musicians like Paula Cole and Shawn Colvin. McLachlan’s music now supported structures larger than herself. Her songs became more general than liminal; they’ve rarely revisited Fumbling’s cathedral immensity, the sensation of feeling remarkably alone in a haunted space.
The title Fumbling Towards Ecstasy comes from a poem McLachlan first encountered in high school—“Dulce et Decorum Est,” written by World War I poet Wilfred Owen. The line had circulated through McLachlan’s head for years: (“Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling/Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time.”) It depicts the fluttering rhythm issued by of a group of soldiers desperately trying to secure their gas masks and helmets in a fog of poisonous gas. This is the kind of imagery McLachlan was drawn to, of tragedy and horror producing, against all odds, what felt like excerpts of grace. When she explained the title to the Calgary Herald in 1993, she said, “You can get glimpses of [ecstasy]. You can get there for a second but it’s always going to go away.” Even the most untroubled song on Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, “Ice Cream,” is suspended over a deep dread. “Your love is better than ice cream/Better than anything else that I’ve tried,” McLachlan sings against soft blushes of piano. “It’s a long way down to the place where we started from.” For McLachlan, the substance of ecstasy is its elusiveness. Its absence invents its possibility.


A$AP Twelvyy’s long-awaited solo debut wears its love for New York City proudly but is plagued with inconsistencies.

12

Jamel Phillips, better known as A$AP Twelvyy, joined up with A$AP Yams around 2006, which makes him one of the Mob’s earliest members. Yams had put out a call for young rappers willing to work with him, and Twelvyy answered, impressed by Yams’ precociously eclectic taste. A proud New Yorker and a middling rapper, Twelvyy appeared on plenty of A$AP posse tracks and various loosies for the better part of the last decade. But his debut album was nowhere in sight even before Yams’ death in 2015. The passing hit Twelvyy hard, and the LP is only now emerging in a month that will also see a new mixtape from A$AP Ferg and A$AP Mob’s new album.
That Twelvyy has eagerly mentioned these other projects in several interviews is a good indicator of his personality on the mic. On 12, a solid collection of gangster-lite rap tracks, he is never more appealing than when he’s reflecting on moments of brotherly love, or tossing off little snippets of local history. He favors sentimental, almost sappy beats that pair nicely with his fond remembrances of crew life and rarely stray from the hazy A$AP sound. There’s a minute-long skit that is dedicated entirely to a recollection of a Mob gathering in which old Ron G and Brucie B tapes were played and plenty of purple was puffed, recalled as if it were a lost paradise. The A$AP Mob has long been synonymous with Harlem swagger but it’s difficult to recall another project that wears its love for the city’s past so proudly. Twelvyy sounds most at home on tracks like “Ea$TSideGho$T” and “Sunset Park,” nostalgia-brushed pictures of New York neighborhoods where his reflexive comfort with gangster-rap tropes is burnished by the specifics of his own experience.
But inconsistency plagues the record, as Twelvyy’s character too often disappears from view. The opening lines of “Castle Hell” paint a portrait of a kid whose innocence was shattered by the violence from which his parents sought to protect him, but the song quickly turns generic, a vague tableau of guns and bloodshed in which it’s not quite clear where Jamel Phillips fits. He has no problem supplying stray details in his verses, randomly recalling various shootings on “Strapped,” or on “Diamonds,” when he remembers that, at some point, he earned the nickname Diddy. These could be points of entry, but Twelvyy declines to elaborate, turning them into non sequiturs, stories waiting to be told in full.
Much of the time, his energy outmatches his rudimental lyricism, particularly when the songs feature his A$AP Family, whose styles he frequently adopts as his own. On the bop-indebted “Hop Out,” which features Ferg, he beats the Hood Pope at his own game, his enthusiasm boosting the song up a couple of levels. “Diamonds,” with Rocky, conveys the stoned, youthful vibe of the crew’s earliest days, with Twelvyy swagger-jacking an early iteration of Flacko’s flow. On the chorus of “Periodic Table” he shouts out collectives that came before A$AP—“I was brought up by them block boys, them heat-makers and them hot boys”—and you can hear the glee in his voice.
Yams is remembered fondly throughout the record, and the lyrics of album closer “Brothers” are raw with the pain of his absence. Twelvyy’s deep affection for his visionary friend—and the environment he created—is obvious. Yams had the kind of insight and understanding to elevate an everyman rapper like Twelvyy, highlighting his particular gifts along the way. Without him, 12 feels adrift. It’s charming in its evocation of friendship, but when the rest of the group falls away, Twelvyy struggles to break out of a mold that’s already cracking from age.

A$AP Worldwide / Polo Grounds Music / RCA


The UK duo’s fifth album, produced by Dave Fridmann, is as good an introduction as you’ll get to their charmingly skewed perspective on the world

This Is Eggland

Among the most underrated of the riot-grrrl-adjacent bands of the ’90s and early 2000s were Babes in Toyland associates Angelica, whose best tracks were marked by a distinctly wry humor. The Lancaster, England group’s post-feminist crush lament “Liberation Is Wasted on Me,” for instance, is a long, performative sigh into a rose bouquet, a sweeping gesture toward the enlightened single crowd set to the “Be My Baby” rhythm; pause, punchline. The pummeling punk arrangement that kicks in about a minute into the song certainly doesn’t hurt matters.
Angelica’s Holly Ross went on to form the Lovely Eggs with her husband David Blackwell, formerly of the psychedelic band Three Dimensional Tanx, circa 2006, and over the past decade they’ve taken that sense of humor gonzo to cult acclaim. Representative tracks from the duo’s catalog include “Have You Ever Heard a Digital Accordion,” which features no notable digital accordion content; “Fuck It,” surely the most languid song that has been or ever will be recorded by that title; and the raucous, exhaustive bestiary of owns that is “Don’t Look At Me (I Don’t Like It).” Ever thought about someone’s “sausage-roll thumb” or “washing-line smile”? You have now.
This Is Eggland, the Lovely Eggs’ fifth album, befits its name—it’s as good an introduction as you’ll get to the group and its charmingly skewed perspective on the world. Over the years, they’ve gotten steadily heavier, from their early acoustic style to the likes of 2015’s “Magic Onion,” eventually settling on a sound that evokes psychedelic-punk touchstones like the Buzzcocks and some of the hooky, madcap glee of Charly Bliss. Or, in Ross’ own words: “It kind of sounds like a chip shop on fire.” Credit, in part, a change in personnel. Where the group’s previous albums were self-produced, Eggland brings in Dave Fridmann, known for helping the Flaming Lips and Tame Impala scale up their psychedelia to arena levels.
It’s common to the point of cliché to have a big-name producer arrive midway through a band’s career, sand down all the lo-fi edges, and replace them with studio gimmickry. But Ross and Blackwell, ever self-aware, make their upgraded sound part of the joke. “I’m With You” introduces itself with Missile Command whirs, and “Return of Witchcraft” is slathered in guitar distortion. The whiplash left-right panning of “Hello I Am Your Sun”—the opening track, and the most psyched-out song here—feels like it’s jostling you, vigorously, into the right headspace.
The defining tone of that headspace turns out to be unrelenting, gleeful pop-punk, from the swaggering riff and stop-start structure of “Dickhead” to the deadpan delivery of “Let Me Observe” to the single “I Shouldn’t Have Said That,” which mixes Ross loud and up-front. “I shouldn’t have said that—it was evil of me!” she shouts through a megaphone-like effect, with about as much remorse as Eartha Kitt. “Witchcraft” begins as a cry of joy and ends as an exorcism. “Would You Fuck” teases out a dozen or so inflections from its title, a series of increasingly wacky pulled faces. “Wiggy Giggy” does for Lancaster what the Weakerthans’ “One Great City!” did for Winnipeg. On This is Eggland, the Lovely Eggs sound like they’ve ventured out to the interplanetary shitholes of outer space and decided that the one they’ve got is quite all right.


The Uruguayan-American singer-songwriter's latest is a charmingly loose grab bag, dotted with field recordings and snippets of sampled conversation.

Introducing Juan Pablo

Introducing Juan Pablo is dotted with field recordings, snippets of real in-person or phone conversations between Juan Wauters and his family and acquaintances. It’s the first time the Uruguayan-American singer-songwriter used this technique on an album, which may come as a surprise if you’ve followed his work. Wauters’ style of songwriting already tends to feel just like those recordings: unspectacular moments captured in real time, in detail, featuring people as they are. His previous LP from earlier this year, La Onda de Juan Pablo, took that quality to a new level with songs inspired by and featuring musicians that he met while traveling across Latin America for two years—some written and recorded right there with them. Wauters’ name (Juan Pablo Wauters in full) graces the titles of both of these albums, but ultimately in more of a “the world according to…” kind of way. It’s as if the more he tries to take a self-portrait, the more those around him come into focus.
On Introducing Juan Pablo, Wauters again seeks international inspiration, but less geographically focused this time. Introducing pulls from recording sessions in Toronto, London, Paris, and Wauters’ hometowns of Queens and Montevideo, Uruguay, while alternating between English and Spanish—his standard practice before the all-Spanish La Onda. It also features covers: a brief take on “Bolero” by the early-20th-century French composer Maurice Ravel, an altered version of a standard by Uruguayan singer Jaime Roos, and a gentle spin on Queen’s “Doing Alright” on top of a stray “Bohemian Rhapsody” interpolation elsewhere. If La Onda was a single category of Wauters’ inspirations, Introducing is a grab bag, a much wider, looser look at the songwriter through the lens of what interests him.
This scattered focus ends up sacrificing some of what made La Onda such a compelling project, and the charming sloppiness occasionally bleeds too much into the writing and recording. Introducing strings together sonically sparse songs about being with and without others—and with far fewer backing musicians this time, it feels a little more “without.” “Rubia” still succeeds wonderfully on these terms, a longing love letter to someone with a memorable nose in a far-away country that Wauters drives home with one sweet, sensitively plucked acoustic melody for the outro. “Straighten Up and Lose,” an ode to risk-taking, ends the album in similar fashion with a small, high piano line made massive atop a blanket of drone. Wauters’ gift for these little musical phrases becomes the best part of Introducing. When the song “Letter” re-appears later in the album as a duet with the singer and visual artist Maxine Yolanda, whom Wauters met while traveling through Switzerland, it doesn’t feel superfluous.
At the center of Introducing is the Jaime Roos cover, “El Hombre de la Calle,” translated into English and stripped down to a rudimentary single-piano arrangement. Roos’ original is exactly the type you’d expect would strike a chord in Wauters: a folk song describing a man who’s both anonymous and everywhere, popping with details as pedestrian as “a veces compra un diario” (“sometimes he buys a newspaper”). But Wauters sings his version in first person instead of third, as if he relates to Roos’ character too much to be a neutral narrator. He swaps in several new lyrics, too, most noticeably the final words of the chorus, which he sings in a suddenly strained, almost despairing tone: “People say I’m hard to read.” He sounds like he can’t for the life of him understand why this is. It’s true, though, in part because his focus is so often pointed outward rather than inward. When he keeps his sights focused that way, figuring him out is half the fun.


German musician Stephen Mathieu created Before Nostromo in homage to Ridley Scott's original Alien. In the album's novel concept, each of the film's characters has a dream before emerging from hypersleep, and these glimmering sound-design pieces are their representations.

Before Nostromo

It's ironic that Alien's famous tagline—In space no one can hear you scream—emphasizes the silence of the void, because sound is woven into the film's innermost fibers. A nearly constant backdrop of rumble accompanies the Nostromo as it slips across that godforsaken quadrant of the galaxy. The steady drone whipped up by the ship's vibrations quietly erupts into all manner of rustle and whirr—the bleeping of the navigation system, the hissing of steam vents, and countless quavering whines of uncertain provenance—until the entire world of the film feels cocooned inside an omnipresent hum.
That buzzing matrix is the subject of Before Nostromo, a new album by the German musician Stephan Mathieu. Mathieu has been working the seam between ambient, musique concrète, and microsound since the late '90s, running vintage acoustic instruments and obsolete media like wax cylinders through electroacoustic processing and digital treatments. Mathieu describes Before Nostromo as an homage to Alien's sound design, and he has given the work a novel premise. Just prior to being awakened from hypersleep by the ship's computer, the film's seven characters—Ripley, Dallas, Parker, Lambert, Kane, Brett, and even Ash, the android—each have a dream. So does Jonesey the cat. Eight tracks, ranging from four minutes to nearly 20 minutes in length, represent those respective dreams. (A ninth, "Anamorphosis", rounds out the set; Mathieu suggests that it may be attributed to the Nostromo's other passenger, the alien.)
To record the music, Mathieu used two large gongs, piano, and shortwave radio, but none of those elements are obvious from the sound of the music, which changes colors as imperceptibly as late-afternoon light. "Entropic processes," like those Alvin Lucier used to create I Am Sitting in a Room, in which a spoken text gradually decays as it bounces back and forth between two reel-to-reel players, are key to the music's soft, rounded forms.
Using relatively modest means, Mathieu evokes a vast expanse. Rarely, though, do you hear a note being produced; sounds slink into being like shadows creeping across the wall, and they abscond just as imperceptibly. There's a brief tinkling, as of wind chimes, in "Stasis 7 (Ash the Android's Dream)"; in "Stasis 1 (Dallas' Dream)" there's a sourceless tapping that reappears in "Stasis 4 (Brett's Dream)", as if Harry Dean Stanton's character were down in the engine room, banging away on pipes. Otherwise, though, everything is as soft and sanded down as a coastline worn smooth by the millennia. His abstracted shapes genuinely resemble dreams, albeit the memories of one from which you've just emerged tugging at the edges of your consciousness.
Before Nostromo is best suited for deep listening. With so few obvious features to grasp on to, even after multiple plays you may not immediately be able to tell the difference between one "dream" and another. But that's hardly the point. These bottom-of-the-well fantasies are the headiest kind of echo-chamber music, fusing the unstable oscillations of Kevin Drumm's Imperial Horizon and Folke Rabe's What?! with the soft spectral explosion of Ligeti's Lux Aeterna and the melancholy decay of William Basinski's Disintegration Loops.
It's worth noting that Before Nostromo is a digital-only release—a format that Mathieu has dedicated himself to with religious zeal, for reasons both economic and audiophile. The album takes the form of a 24-bit FLAC (the download also includes a beautifully designed PDF booklet designed by his wife, Caro Mikalef) and it sounds unusually sumptuous, with a richness—dynamic, timbral, spatial—that is all too rare in digital music. Spend some time with Mathieu's gorgeous, absorbing tribute, and then return to Alien, and you may find yourself hearing the film as you never have before.


On a short and sprightly EP, the up-and-coming Oakland rapper and producer makes strides in both fields.

RESET! EP

Oakland rapper-producer ovrkast. thrives on elegant beats that split the difference between hazy, traditionalist boom-bap and the wavy, loop-based production that’s taken the rap underground by storm since Madlib’s Quasimoto days. After years of Bandcamp beat tapes and a production credit on Earl Sweatshirt’s Feet of Clay, his self-produced 2020 debut Try Again put a spotlight on his anxious and observational rapping. Though often delivered in monotone, his bars were vivid and nervy, tapping into a tension between perseverance and ennui that endeared him to peers (and old friends) like Mavi and Pink Siifu. When he pondered his mother’s advice and the mystery of a higher power beneath layers of keyboards and drums on “AllPraise,” his casual, free-associative style sounded pensive and expansive at once.
Kast describes RESET!, his first project in three years, as a palate cleanser, and the atmosphere is certainly livelier. Earlier beats had chunky loops that sometimes absorbed his vocals like a sneaker in mud, but RESET! is spare and sprightly, favoring propulsion over immersion. Opener “Seamless” glides in on a sour horn squawk, wind chimes, and a soft drum fill that Kast trots over gracefully. Once muted and distant on the mic, he’s now more likely to modulate his vocals, communicating the clash of introspection and catharsis in his words. The uncharacteristic bark and snappy bounce of a song like “SHUTUP!” plays well against the sarcastic melancholy at the core of “TBH!”: “I just owe all my feelings a break.”
RESET! becomes more potent when he mixes these emotions together. Kast’s writing still includes plenty of autobiographical soul-searching, but the uncertainty of past songs like “Face” and “Church” isn’t the focus anymore. He’s charting growth instead of fighting to keep his head above water, and the beats have more space to breathe too. It’s most evident on the title track: Floating over a flute loop and trilling hand drums, Kast raps quietly about nerves shredded by shootings outside his school, grateful to have picked up writing and beatmaking instead of a gun. A beat switch ushers in a chipmunk vocal loop as his voice gets louder and his bars become bolder; by the time a rickety drum break kicks in, he’s rapping like he made it to the top of a mountain.
The only problem with RESET! is that there isn’t more of it: only six songs, most under two minutes. None sound labored, and it’s nice to hear him rapping with more confidence. The mood shifts from chill to amped on a dime; the way he spits “I could use this beat in seven years and it’ll still be hot” on “Seamless” could toast an ice cube. He’s drawing from the same anxiety-busting coming-of-age experience as redveil’s learn 2 swim but on a subtler scale. RESET! isn’t a grand splash—just the sound of one of the underground’s most promising stars breaching the surface.


One of the first things a rock critic learns is not to emphasize the character on the other end of ...

Musicology

One of the first things a rock critic learns is not to emphasize the character on the other end of the speakers when reviewing records. This person, who is playing the tunes and singing the songs, isn't to be treated as a performer so much as the instigator of all the terrible/wonderful noise infesting the writer's world, and should be judged accordingly. That is, by the social rules of rock criticism, one shouldn't judge the musicians at all, merely their music-- and even then, only in terms of how it affects the writer, and in turn, how it might do the same for other listeners. The "argument" comes during the moments when you either agree or disagree with the writer's experience.
The next thing writers learn is that just thinking of one's own experience isn't enough, because there's a whole world out there giving clues to the real value of the music. If music "matters," it follows that its impact should be obvious outside the window; "relevance" is paramount at this stage of criticism, though since bitter humility is a daily part of any rock writer's life, it pays to phrase arguments stressing relevance in ways that don't obviously indicate its bias. This kind of criticism may seem harsh (and pretty unrelated to the actual musical experience), but it also shares much with traditional journalistic aims of reporting and immediate interpretation, and as such, is a method emphasized at most mainstream music pubs.
All of this brings me to Prince and his latest album, Musicology. What happens when, by the two most common forms of writing about music, a legend comes out looking like a drastic underachiever? Do I dare call him out on this, especially after seeing many educated people pledge their written testimonies to this stuff? I've lived with this record for a few weeks now, and by any normal measure, I fail to see how anyone could seriously call it a comeback, or a return to his intimidating good form. But that's presumptuous: Despite the tried-and-true edicts of rock crit, there really is no accounting for taste, nor is Prince's extended absence from the top of the pops a concrete sign that he no longer matters.
Yet, I know what I hear: an artist who is beyond condescending his interests to generate relevance. I hear someone who's honestly more concerned with the pristine state of his record collection than he is in buying all the latest hits. I hear someone who's probably worked out most of the bigger issues in life, and is satisfied to stay with a groove for its own sake, offering his take on things rather than arresting you with it. Prince has never been embarrassed of himself on record, but on Musicology, his direction only makes sense to me in the broadest sense of appreciating life and love. The revolution is over in this corner, and I'd bet it all he could care less what anyone thinks about it. Unfortunately, in this case, it translates to music that, while often pleasant, lacks the power of not only his best work, but also most of his successors' stuff. And since Prince's "successors" could be considered half of everything on the radio, it's tough for me to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The most interesting moments on Musicology come when Prince either hits on a good concept (like the rich white girl who can't dance paying out for the "funk" in "Illusion, Coma, Pimp and Circumstance") or drops the pretense of keeping the party going altogether. Today, slow jams are his forte: the infidelity warning "What Do U Want Me 2 Do?" beats Phoenix at their own game with smoother-than-smooth vocals and a breezy chorus that would seem to close the book on anyone else attempting lite-jazz pop in the future. "Call My Name" is hardly as distinct, but is a perfectly functional slab of loverman soul along the lines of Marvin Gaye. Typically, Prince saves his best moves for the chorus (he's still pop, through and through), as his layered harmonies impart the rather straightforward admission, "I know it's only been three hours, but I love it when you call my name."
Those songs seem a tier above others on Musicology partially because Prince isn't doing his one-man band thing. Despite that I've always thought it was cool to hear him make records mostly by himself, some of the songs here betray either a disinterest in fleshing out arrangements or an inability to pull them off. "A Million Days" has the structure of good Prince rock ballad, but the sound of half-finished demo. The synth that powers the opening sounds piped in from a home studio built about 20 years ago, and even then it's not loud enough. His guitar and vocals are lavishly spread all over the mix, but the drums are too soft and muddy, so ultimately his track comes out like a bad Lenny Kravitz throwaway. Elsewhere, "Life O' the Party" and the title track suggest nothing in Prince's life these days was born this century. Not only does he waste valuable time on the former making fun of Michael Jackson, but the track is mired in stale funk a notch below the Martin theme.
"Cinnamon Girl" is the best straight rock track on Musicology, not only because its production is on par with Prince's typically well-crafted hooks, but also because it manages to keep all the details in check via relatively simple performance. Prince's grasp is hardly lacking throughout, but for various reasons, his reach comes up short many times. "If Eye Was the Man in Ur Life" starts out as an incredible jam with metal guitar, a tight, slow beat (not played by Prince) and a glorious harmonized verse melody, before bogging down at the end with some kind of be-bop thing right out of a Blood, Sweat & Tears song. I'm all for experimentation, but this seems more like a bad case of mid-song boredom and a lack of anything better to do.
The worst part is that Musicology is probably the best Prince album since at least the "symbol" album from 1992, and possibly since Sign O' the Times. But that's misleading, since this album isn't close to Sign's league-- it's also depressing to think he hasn't made a great record in over 15 years. But don't take my word for it; look out the window, see if any of your friends are jamming to this. Failing that, chart your own experience in your own headphones. By either measure, despite a few good moments, I'm missing Prince now more than ever.


At 87, the legendary avant-garde composer revisits some of his most famous compositions with the air of a master craftsman looking back on his life’s work.

Philip Glass Solo

In 1969, Philip Glass was performing the European premiere of a daring new piece, Two Pages, when he realized that someone from the audience had joined him at the keys and was banging away beside him, in an obvious parody of the American composer’s ultra-repetitive music. Glass, who had toughened his knuckles as a boy in Baltimore, socked the interloper in the jaw—in some accounts of the oft-told story, he kept time with the other hand—and resumed playing. It wasn’t the last time an irate audience member would try to throw a wrench in Glass’ precision-tooled musical machinery. He’s had enough eggs lobbed at him to develop opinions on which projectile is worse—raw or hard-boiled.
But what a difference half a century makes. Once an enfant terrible of contemporary music, Glass, now 87, is among the most celebrated of the avant-garde’s elder statesmen, and age has clearly put him in a reflective mood. Following a spate of 75th-birthday events in 2012, he released a titanic retrospective box set in 2016 and published a smart, revealing memoir, looking back on a most unusual life in the arts: studying with the fêted French pianist Nadia Boulanger; trekking to Tibet in search of Buddhist gurus; pouring lead with sculptor Richard Serra; driving a cab until he finally made it as a composer, age 41.
Glass’ new album Philip Glass Solo is similarly contemplative. It revisits some of his most famous works for keyboard, which he recorded at home—on the same piano on which he wrote many of the pieces—in 2021, while concerts were still on hold, as part of his daily practice. (Even Philip Glass apparently finds it hard to resist the seductive pull of the quarantine album.) Dozens, perhaps scores, of pianists and organists have tackled this repertoire in the studio; Glass himself has recorded all these pieces before. What stands out here is the clear impression of a master craftsman looking back on his life’s work.
The album begins with “Opening,” the introduction to Glass’ 1982 album Glassworks. His debut full-length for CBS attempted to reach audiences beyond the art-world demimonde that had been coming to see his ensemble perform in downtown loft spaces; there was even a specially mixed cassette edition designed to sound better on the Sony Walkman, which had been introduced just three years before. “Opening” is not nearly as reduced or piston-like as earlier works like Two Pages or Music in Twelve Parts. To contemporary ears, its wistful modulations may sound more sentimental than minimalist. Where Glass once wrote with motorik intensity, his treatment of the polyrhythms—eighth notes in the left hand, triplets in right—ebbs and flows here, moving more fluidly than on the Glassworks recording.
“Mad Rush” is structurally similar to “Opening.” A lifelong student of Tibetan Buddhism, Glass wrote the extended piece to commemorate the Dalai Lama’s 1979 visit to New York City, performing it on the organ at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. He later recorded it for 1989’s Glass: Solo Piano, and returned to the cathedral’s organ for the soundtrack to the 2016 film The Last Dalai Lama? You wouldn’t necessarily guess the piece’s backstory from listening; both the music and the title evoke the kineticism of New York City, long one of Glass’ primary influences. But rather than urban chaos, the composition’s elegant clockworks speak to the importance of balance; perhaps that’s what Glass had in mind when writing music for His Holiness. “The principal thing that I’ve found [about studying Tibetan Buddhism] is that the training is extremely valuable and useful in living in a world of stress, full of negativity, what we would call evil,” Glass once said. “Bad things happen. When you live in a world that’s complicated, the training that comes with that tradition is very helpful.”
Comparing Philip Glass Solo to the composer’s previous treatments of the same pieces—particularly the four movements of 1988’s Metamorphosis, which first appeared on Glass: Solo Piano—a curious contradiction reveals itself. On the one hand, the new versions are imbued with a more measured, rubato sensibility—the kind of pensive air you might expect from a late-in-life recital. At the same time, there’s nothing mawkish or maudlin or even particularly nostalgic about them, despite the project’s ruminative context, or the pandemic that was raging outside. That’s even true of “Truman Sleeps,” from The Truman Show, one of the most poignant pieces in the composer’s catalog. (In what might be the apex of his pop-culture crossover, Glass performs it in a brief on-screen cameo in the film.) Where other pianists play up its melancholy, Glass here gives it a stately reading that benefits from the subtlest shifts in tempo and intensity; he also lays into the sustain pedal, suggestively muddying the waters and keeping its graceful changes from sounding too pretty.
What becomes clear is that not only are these performances less airily atmospheric than earlier versions, despite their more considered rubato; they are more determined, more confident, more knowing. Perhaps that’s natural; Glass wrote these pieces, after all, and here a life spent living with his creations makes its way to the tape. There’s a fascinating passage in Glass’ memoir where he describes the division between theory and practice that he encountered as a student at Juilliard. Budding composers were not expected to play their own pieces; indeed, no one assumed they might want to. “Making the practice of music and the writing of music separate activities was poor advice,” he writes. “Music is, above all, something we play, it’s not something that’s meant for study only. For me, performing music is an essential part of the experience of composing.” Philip Glass Solo offers a moving testament to the unity of the two sides of his practice. Treated to his thoughtful interpretations of his own work, recorded in the intimacy of his own home, you feel lucky to have the chance to sit with him.


The fourth album by the Los Angeles duo is more sonically adventurous and lyrically direct while still drawing on themes of looking for faith in other people and coming up short.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness exists at an excruciating inflection point, where salvation and torture could easily be mistaken for romance. Across 12 mercurial pop songs, bandmates Avery Tucker and Harmony Tividad write, as they always have, about the ongoing and ever-brutal process of losing innocence. This time around, Girlpool’s songs—some of the most sonically adventurous they’ve ever made—are colored by reckless partying, sketchy sex, and the depressing realization that you can be complicit in your own suffering and still not have the tools to relieve yourself of it. Brilliant and unrelentingly bleak, it’s Tucker and Tividad’s finest exploration of the pressures and politics of young adulthood—a record that uses the sound and feeling of pop music to heighten the emotions contained within.
Forgiveness runs the gamut from glacial hyperpop to horned-up industrial electronics and serene country balladry, but the duo’s new stylistic breadth isn’t the focus. From the very first lines—“Do you even want me if I even have to ask?/Break it to me gently with your fingers up my ass”—it’s clear that Tucker and Tividad have moved beyond the impressionistic, if occasionally vague, songwriting of 2019’s What Chaos Is Imaginary. If the lyrics on that album often felt like transmissions from troubling, free-associative dreams, this record is more like the cold, sterile panic of waking from a nightmare. These songs are bolder and more brutal, less interested in florid wording or oblique metaphor; they express feelings of alienation and self-loathing with discomfiting clarity.
Tividad frequently uses metaphors of death or the divine to express a feeling of chaotic, helpless infatuation. Sometimes, as on “Junkie,” where she coos like Hannah Diamond over a barely-there dembow beat, the analogy is straightforward: A lyric like “I’m a sin for the saint you made me/Let your body destroy and change me” sits clearly in a lineage of songs that use worship as a metaphor for sex. But on the country-tinged “Faultline,” things feel more complicated: “My body’s just a landscape for your sin,” she sings, only to admit, moments later, that her desires have gone unchecked, too: “I wanted everything so much it grows/Until I can’t manage this appetite.” There are no heroes or villains in these songs—just lost souls, waiting for the earth to swallow them up.
If Tividad’s songs depict sex as something dissociative and indulgent, Tucker’s depict the act as a site of embodiment and self-determination, if not always in a particularly healthy way. On “Violet,” romantic attachment is fleeting but visceral—“When you held me like a doll, that’s when I felt so fucking strong/But without lust I get lost,” he sings—while on the industrial clanker “Country Star,” a sexual fantasy about a cowboy is more about self-actualization than the sex itself. The writing has grown more distinctive and abject, but Tividad and Tucker are still writing the kinds of stories they’ve always specialized in—looking for faith in other people and coming up short.
Tividad’s writing, in particular, shines on Forgiveness. Although her lyrics have always been rich in metaphor, her approach is more exacting on this record, each new image adding depth and texture to her emotions. The casual nature of her phrasing hides just how skillful her writing has become—the way she can telegraph a world of heartbreak and power imbalance with the most subtle of gestures: “Are you the moonlight that shines onto my shelf?” she asks a controlling partner in “Butterfly Bulletholes.” Later, she distills anxiety into one crushing sentence: “I wanna know how to live without a fear of life.” Tividad’s progression as a songwriter speaks to a feeling of Forgiveness as the most meticulous Girlpool album—across the board, she and Tucker have made subtle refinements like these that make the unguarded emotions of the songs hit even harder.
The production, handled by Yves Tumor collaborator Yves Rothman, fits the dank, 5 a.m. mood of the lyrics. For the most part, these songs are glassy and jagged, built on programmed beats and fluttering synthlines. It’s nothing new to use robotic electropop to convey romantic or drug-induced malcontent. But Tucker and Tividad have become so adept in their themes of forever-adolescence that it’s hard to listen to Forgiveness and associate it with something so musically amorphous as hyperpop. Even the most dramatic electronic elements, such as the harsh noise that opens the album, don’t affect the traditional song structures and innate charm. It’s easy to imagine any of these songs in the duo’s earlier styles of punk or folk; electronic music just feels like the right mode for Tucker and Tividad’s most alienated album.


The debut album from the Iranian-Swedish artist offers a fascinatingly dark take on romantic love, filled with images of violence and devastation.

Dozakh: All Lovers Hell

Dozakh: All Lovers Hell, the debut album from Iranian-Swedish artist Nadia Tehran, begins with a recording of her immigrant father, Ali Kardar, saying that he’s not afraid of death. He’s in the middle of describing a near-fatal experience during his time as a soldier in the Iran-Iraq war. “I wake up with unbelievable pain that isn’t just pain from my legs, it’s pain through my whole soul,” he recounts in Swedish. “I didn’t even realize that my leg was gone.” And with that harrowing image, Tehran sets up Dozakh, an album examining emotional purgatory and devastation in all its forms.
Dozakh means hell in Persian. But in a statement, Tehran has explained that she conceptualizes the word metaphorically, as “a place of torment one believes they are in when separated from their lover.” In accordance with this thinking, Tehran writes about romantic love as tragedy, weaving in apocalyptic images of death and violence to underscore her point. On the synth-pop song “Down,” Tehran bridges the visceral lyricism of CocoRosie with Sky Ferreira’s twisted romanticism. “I’d be the best girl that you ever had/I’d blow you when you’re sad and lick your wounds when you’ve been bad,” she sings, revealing a fascinatingly warped sense of devotion.
Dozakh is saturated with a feeling of hopelessness, but Tehran keeps things moving with deft genre-hopping. As a preteen, Tehran sang in a punk band in her small Swedish town, and she lists her YEAR0001 label mates Yung Lean and Viagra Boys as inspirations. On “Something New,” she sounds like Karen O fronting Show Me the Body, while “Jet” is a snarling takedown of immigrant stereotypes, like a more in-your-face version of M.I.A.’s “Paper Planes.” “Alcoholic Waves” is cloud rap on downers; “True romance is a drank in my cup/True romance is to light it up,” she chants in sing-song, like a depraved lullaby. No matter the style, Tehran’s music matches her nihilistic worldview.
But this universal doom and gloom is also a crutch, and Tehran’s songwriting is ultimately not sharp or precise enough to get a singular point across. There are songs about being heartbroken and disillusioned by a former partner (“High,” “Tell Nobody”), ones that have a more pointed political message (“Jet,” “Nazi Killer”), and others that simply describe haunting thoughts of death and genocide (“Come and Go”). But Tehran fails to tie these themes together, leaving it unclear how post-war trauma and romantic heartbreak are inherently connected; the only loose common thread is the pervading sense of self-destruction. Nadia Tehran’s vision of hell is terrifying. But without an incisive message, its impact dulls by the end.


For her first record in 38 years, the wonderful British folk singer Shirley Collins dazzles with a collection of macabre and mischievous songs from centuries past.

Lodestar

Shirley Collins is so deeply woven into the folk tradition, her own life story could be the dramatic tale of a forgotten threnody. Lodestar is Collins’ first album in 38 years, her first since she regained her ability to sing. Back in the late ’70s, following her divorce with her husband Ashley Hutchings, leader of the Albion Country Band, Collins lost her voice and retired from music. The doctors diagnosed her with dysphonia, but you might put it more fancifully; heartbreak robbed of her powers, just as some capricious faerie might steal away a child.
A working-class woman from rural Sussex, Collins learned traditional English songs passed down from her grandmother and aunt and soon fell in with the early folk revival. After meeting the song collector Alan Lomax at a party, she traveled with him across America, collecting music from foundational figures such as Bessie Jones and Mississippi Fred McDowell. The journey was serialized in her book America Across The Water, and some of the recordings found their way into the Coen Brothers’ seismic O Brother, Where Art Thou soundtrack. Today her admirers are legion: from Will Oldham to Billy Bragg to Current 93’s David Tibet, who was instrumental to coaxing Collins back to the stage in 2014. But as the comedian Stewart Lee—another long-time fan—writes in the liner notes, Collins’ music is “egoless,” her voice a conduit for these ancient and timeless songs. Never has this been so obvious as it is on Lodestar.
At 81, Collins’ voice has grit and grain, both old and strangely ageless. There is the sense that she has stood still, and folk has revolved around her. Recorded in Collins’ front room in her cottage in Lewes in rural Sussex, Lodestar is comprised of interpretations of English, American, and Cajun songs dating from the 16th Century to the 1950s. She is surrounded by a small coterie of collaborators, chief among them musical director/producer Ian Kearey of Oysterband and Ossian Brown and Stephen Thrower, members of Cyclobe and both formerly of the English post-industrial group Coil. Speaking of Lodestar, Kearey resists easy comparison to Johnny Cash’s latter-day recordings with Rick Rubin, but there are clear parallels. Essentially the trio’s role here is to curate an atmosphere that gestures back to Collins’ storied past, while authentically capturing her in the here and now.
There are fiddles, mandolins, and picked guitars, with Brown adding a droning hurdy-gurdy here, and a church pipe organ there. On several songs, there is something Collins simply refers to as “The Instrument”—a unique hybrid of a mountain dulcimer and a five-string banjo, which she commissioned back in the ’60s and played on 1968’s The Power of the True Love Knot. An opening 11-minute piece titled “Awake Awake—The Split Ash Tree—May Carol—Southover” weaves a rich web, tying together apocalyptic balladry, wailing hurdy-gurdy, Pagan carols, and the jingling bells of a Morris dancer. As Lodestar opens up, the theme of death takes hold—although life in these songs is cheap, and people perish in matter-of-fact ways.
“Cruel Lincoln” is the tale of a mason conned by a landowner, who returns to seek revenge. In the background, you can hear the birds sing in Collins’ garden, even as the tale of butchery unfolds: “There was blood in the kitchen, there was blood in the hall/There was blood in the parlor where the lady did fall.” On “Death And The Lady,” which Collins first recorded with her sister Dolly in 1970, a wandering woman comes face to face with the Grim Reaper; but the quaver in Collins’ voice lends this version a faltering quality, only intensifying its sense of somber fatalism.
If her voice is smaller now than back in the day, Collins is still capable of surprising range. A take on the old Cajun lament “Sur Le Borde De L’eau,” popularized by the Louisiana guitarist Blind Uncle Gaspard, is truly haunting. But a spry mischief runs through the nonsense song “Old Johnny Buckle,” in which the Johnny is given medical advice to rub his wife’s injured leg with gin, but drinks it instead, and is consequently sent to hell. This seam of black humor persists into “The Rich Irish Lady,” a song about a wealthy woman who spurns a doctor’s romantic advances, then falls ill and throws herself at his mercy. Not only does the doctor deny her, he announces that he will dance on her grave, and as the track segues into a manic Kentucky fiddle piece titled “Jeff Sturgeon,” you can imagine Collins kicking up her heels in her front room, cackling her head off.
Many of the recordings Collins made in her song-collecting days were of aged singers, transmitting the tales and melodies they themselves learned in their youth. Back then, she was their custodian, but after a lifetime carrying them, she sounds at one with them; they have grown around her, and she has grown around them. That Lodestar exists at all feels like a minor miracle. That it is so exquisitely done is a small blessing on top.


Essential for superfans, this collection of Sylvester’s earliest known recordings illuminates how he would become a disco superstar.

Sylvester: Private Recordings, August 1970

Private Recordings, August 1970

Before he became a queer disco icon, Sylvester had already cast himself in a movie “in which he was the fabulous star.” Between joining the Disquotays—a glamorous gang of teenage drag queens and trans women—and meeting Hi-NRG dance music producer Patrick Cowley, Sylvester found a spotlight with the San Francisco-based performance art stage troupe the Cockettes. They provided the opportunity to showcase his formative jazz, blues, and gospel influences, looking back to the 1930s and ’40s while dressing the part. In this intimate collection of his earliest known recordings, the 22-year-old Sylvester learns songs as the tape rolls, his signature falsetto sounding fully formed.
According to his biographer, sociology professor Joshua Gamson, Sylvester wasn’t a perfect fit for the LSD-laced hippies he joined in the early 1970s: “He usually stood a few feet back, among the Cockettes but never quite one of them.” While they dropped acid and painted their faces in psychedelic colors, Sylvester sipped champagne and wore pretty dresses like Josephine Baker. He met an ally in Cockettes piano player Peter Mintun, who shared Sylvester’s love of vintage fashion and popular songs from the Prohibition Era. With his pencil-thin mustache and the keys to his father’s 1936 Ford Coupe, Mintun drove Sylvester around San Francisco, snapping the time-warping photos that accompany this album.
One summer afternoon in 1970, Sylvester and Mintun sat down with a collection of sheet music, setting up a fancy microphone and a tape recorder next to an upright piano. Their recordings weren’t intended for public consumption, just used to learn songs they would perform in the Cockettes’ midnight shows. If there’s a throughline to be found in their chosen cuts, it’s the theme of love and loss as represented by changes to the environment. George and Ira Gershwin’s “A Foggy Day” turns London’s pea-soup air pollution into a metaphor for loneliness. The narrator of “Stormy Weather,” written by The Wizard of Oz composer Harold Arlen, laments the rain “since my man and I ain’t together.” Even the clear skies of “Happy Days Are Here Again” have a trace of melancholy as Syvester stretches notes out over twinkling keys. Yet in the snippets of conversation between him and Mintun, they sound like two friends at ease.
As the afternoon goes on, both the song selections and performances become more playful. On their incomplete reading of “Viper’s Drag,” a ragtime number adapted by Fats Waller from the original version by Cab Calloway, Sylvester’s wordless scats can’t keep pace with Mintun’s fingers flying across the keys. The session’s most lively song is the dance tune “Carioca” (“It’s not a foxtrot or a polka”), as the duo messes around, pausing to allow fellow Cockette John Rothermel to join on maracas. “Indian Love Call”—familiar thanks to the appearance of Slim Whitman’s yodeling rendition in Mars Attacks! and Asteroid City—becomes a full-throated duet before the singers collapse into giggles. The tape ends with a brief attempt at “When My Dreamboat Comes Home,” as Sylvester works out the melody in real time. We don’t hear the final version he and Mintun may have finished together, but it’s a happy conclusion to their lonely laments.
Like Stevie Nicks warming up with “Wild Heart” while getting her makeup done, this rehearsal tape feels like listening in on a casual hangout, free from the pressures of onstage performance. Sylvester’s Private Recordings, August 1970 is only essential for superfans, but there are gorgeous moments that illuminate how he would become a chart-topping star. His aching take on “God Bless the Child” surpasses the sadness of Billie Holiday as he salutes a young person with money who can “just worry ’bout nothin’/’Cause he’s got his own.” Sylvester dressed to the nines in gowns and furs while embodying the songs of an elegant diva because it’s the role he was born to play.


The songs on the Chicago bedroom-pop songwriter J Fernandez's Many Levels of Laughter are intricate, introspective, and self-contained. Rather than celebrating isolation, they use the languid, daydreamy haze of bedroom pop to hint at the pathos of wasted life.

Many Levels of Laughter

Back in 2012, J Fernandez sidelined his day job as a cartographer and released a pair of indoorsy bedroom-pop nuggets packed with Adderall-infused Byrds riffs and cabin-fever ambience. Three years and about as many interviews later, the Chicago songwriter remains elusive on his debut album, and yet easier to pin musically: the songs on Many Levels of Laughter are intricate, introspective, and self-contained, while hinting at a world just beyond the scope of the music that’s too dauntingly ordinary to warrant investigating.
While Fernandez crafts a distinctive blend of dextrous, spidery guitars and quivering organ, he’s practically anonymous as a lyricist. The record opens insisting that "Communication is a waste of time" and follows the theme. "Please don’t listen to me," he implores on "Casual Encounter", as if his presence center-stage were some kind of mistake. "Read My Mind" depicts a similar glossophobia within a muted relationship, its ambiguous opening line–"No conversation, and everything is fine"–poised between pre-breakup denial and passive-aggressive petulance. Fernandez is emotionally static, his problems less exclaimed than exhaled, so it’s no surprise when, for stretches of the record, his voice disappears entirely.
Musically Many Levels of Laughter has a neat breadth: His jauntier, jazzier passages explore the bits of Tim Buckley’s Starsailor that Doldrums bypassed on Lesser Evil, while interlude "Markers" deploys curious, playful paddling sounds against an odd, melancholy jingle. His hooks have nuance and charm–you can hear the cognitive cogs whirring behind "Apophis"’s squiggling organs, the shivery up-strokes in "Between the Channels". But even at the record’s most kaleidoscopic, Fernandez sings cautiously, as if each note were subject to stringent security checks before leaving his mouth.
"Break your habits, try a different route," he croaks on closer "Melting Down", a flash of wishful thinking as eerie, lunar synths orbit an ambling krautrock beat. As if to keep him company, a gently stirring bassline kicks in, heaving itself up the fretboard. The forward momentum is welcome, albeit akin to the flicker of daylight in a dark room as an oscillator fan tickles the curtains. After 30 minutes of cosmic despondence, though, that reprieve almost feels misplaced. Rather than celebrating isolation, Fernandez' songs use the languid, daydreamy haze of bedroom pop to hint at the pathos of wasted life.