Longtime vocal contributor to the likes of Zero 7 and Massive Attack returns with her fourth solo album, a user-friendly, electronics-free easy-listening session featuring a little Beck and a lot of ballads.

Some People Have Real Problems

Each of Sia Furler's albums has been released on a different label, but it should come as no surprise that her fourth, and most promising, comes on Starbucks' label Hear Music. (It also should be no surprise that Hear Music has helped make this her most commercially successful record.) The Adelaide-born English crossover, who has worked with Jamiroquai, Massive Attack, and Zero 7, has been a likeable, clean-voiced accessory for years, but she got her first (independent) big break when "Breathe Me", off 2004's Color the Small One, was featured in the final episode of Six Feet Under and caused a minor that. Some People Have Real Problems tries to be something else: brazen yet fun, sophisticated yet goofy. Composed in large part by Sia in conjunction with her supporting instrumentalists, the songs are full of bounce, springtime, and California cool. And Beck is featured on two tracks, "Academia" and "Death By Chocolate". But it doesn't help.
From the start, Problems nods to both Sia's résumé and to her neighbors on the latté bar: Feist's playful, smokey ballads and Zero 7's drum-and-bass slugs. "Little Black Sandals" screams failure just by mentioning a pair of shoes in its title (see: Katherine McPhee) and the R&B reaches are dreadful. "Lentil" is brave and explorative by rhythm and melody, inserting a pinch of Regina Spektor-via-Tori Amos into the mix. Still, the chorus is too bland and the rhythm too slow. This andante dullness is prevalent on the album, as if Norah Jones were going about stealing Feist's audience.
has potential, but where this song could actually use the heat and the punch of percussion, there is none. "The Girl You Lost to Cocaine" is stellar, but like Esthero before her, Sia so often concedes to choruses that are rote and thin on the ground, packed full of airy, electrified harmonies. I want soars, climbs, and surprising bridges; instead there are puffed up harmonies and a tad of decoration from the brass and keys. The anticipation of the chorus is enough to play the song on repeat for a couple of days, but the chorus is still there, irritatingly memorable, and, in fact, it seeps into every part of the song, dominating the subtle inventions of melody and Sia's clear talent for deft hops around the scale. "Electric Bird" is a winner, though it, too, has stock elements in its alternatively languorous and rushed lyrics, pumps from the brass, and tricky shifts into minor key. "Playground"'s all click-clacking and hand-clapping and more overused vocal multi-tracking. I'd venture to say Sia has not penned a single song without this feature.
The perfect balance-- and the potential that few of the tracks reach-- is uncovered on "Soon We'll Be Found", which is sexy and balladic, yet dark and raging. It's surprising, colorful, and complex. But there are too many attempts at this type of song, and not enough of the springtime fun suggested on the ridiculous cover. If Sia spent more time at the piano, and/or hired Robyn to write her a couple of tracks, the results could be marvelous. But as it stands, Sia is not aware of her potential-- or rather, her options.


The lush, veteran noir-soul band-- reconstituted as a five piece-- here reconciles its well-established affinities with a more pastoral presentation.

The Hungry Saw

"Too many deaths and betrayals, too many lies," sings Stuart Staples on the seventh Tindersticks album, providing a handy episode update for those finally just joining the Nottingham noir-soul sextet. But, as it appears in the context of the breezy piano-rolled folk lullaby "The Flicker of a Little Girl", the line sounds less like an advertisement for Tindersticks' signature brand of sorrow than a repudiation of it-- that after nearly two decades of pondering love and all its attendant emotions (jealousy, misery, numbness), Staples regrets to inform you he's all out of regret.
But then Staples hasn't so much turned a new leaf as had one turned for him: In 2006, half of his band turned in their resignation papers, most notably Dickon Hinchcliffe, who, in the most reductive rock-speak, was the Richards to Staples' Jagger (if Keith was a violin player and wrote a mean brass arrangement). And amid a career marked by label changes, Tindersticks-- reconstituted as a five piece-- once again find themselves with a new North America benefactor: Constellation Records, whose godspeed-dominated roster is becoming increasingly populated with former major-label-bankrolled eccentrics (Vic Chestnutt, Carla Bozulich) seeking artistic refuge and a second (or third) wind.
Ironically, Tindersticks' first offering to the most notoriously non-conformist indie label this side of Dischord is an album that feels remarkably in tune with contemporary British pop music's neo-soul slant. Though for Tindersticks, this is hardly a product of calculated trend-spotting: The band have been leavening their blue-eyed/black-lung balladry with classic soul touches-- warm Hammond organ tones, tambourine-rattled rhythms, female back-up singers— as far back as 1999's un-ironically titled Simple Pleasures, an album that, at the time, seemed to pale next to the string-swept dramatics that defined Tindersticks' epochal first three albums. But nine years on, that move seems brilliantly prescient-- to the point where, now, it's not a stretch to envision Staples selling The Hungry Saw's first single, the nocturnal soul knockout "Yesterdays Tomorrows", to Amy Winehouse and retiring a happy man.
Naturally, that song appears second on the new album's tracklist (following a typically solemn introductory piano piece), because Tindersticks have always been a second-song band, opting for low-key opening tracks before delivering a bold follow-up strike-- from the devastating "A Night In" on 1995's self-titled second album, to the simmering "Heard It Through the Grapevine" strut of "People Keep Comin' Around" on 2001's Can Our Love… to the raging pocket symphony "Say Goodbye to the City" on 2003's Waiting for the Moon. But in The Hungry Saw's case, the early appearance of "Yesterday Tomorrow"-- with its booming drumbeat, lustrous organ tones and brassy accents-- seems designed to assert that Hinchcliffe's departure has not diminished the band's cinematic scope. With that business settled, the record turns increasingly more restrained, as it reconciles the band's well-established soul affinities with a more pastoral presentation, in the spirit of Staples' recent solo efforts.
Of course, Staples' bruised baritone has always formed the emotional core of just about every Tindersticks song. However, the band's most arresting moments have come when Staples' vulnerable voice seems on the verge of being swept up by the musical maelstroms stewing around him, and, with few exceptions, The Hungry Saw doesn't really try to test his fortitude: with their smoky, solitary atmosphere and muted string arrangements, "The Other Side of the World" and "All the Love" are textbook Tindersticks ballads-- and beautifully rendered ones at that-- but they don't ever go for the throat like their closest antecedent, Waiting for the Moon's stunning orchestral set piece, "My Oblivion".
Instead, The Hungry Saw's temperate approach feels like the work of a band who are grateful for a new lease on life, but not sure exactly what to do with it, proffering brief experiments that amount to little more than amusing curios (the self-explanatory "The Organist Entertains") or instrumentals that sound like guide tracks waiting for a vocal supplement (the tremoloed psychedelic samba of "E Type"). The laissez-faire feeling seems most pronounced on "Mother Dear", a fog-covered hymnal guided by muffled organ tones and a subterranean drum stomp that-- just after Staples utters the line "it's not so serious, after all"-- is mischievously interrupted by arrhythmic blues riffing that suggests the band has a sense of humour about their downcast demeanor. It's immediately followed by "Boobar", which for its opening 20 seconds, suggests another solitary Staples serenade about lost love, before slowly blossoming into a wonderful Spectorized call-and-response finale. If The Hungry Saw teaches us anything new about Tindersticks, it's that these moments of levity no longer serve as brief, incongruous respites from the bleakness, but instead form a series of steps toward an end goal of contentment-- as epitomized by closing track "The Turns We Took". The titular line is completed by the words "…to get here"-- "here" being a soothing, string-swirled Velvet Underground groove over which Staples catalogues a lifetime of cruel twists and-- perhaps speaking for the entire band-- decides there's no shame in walking the straight line.


The Louisville-based foursome White Reaper traffic in bouncy pop-punk, full of stuffy-nosed sneers and bubblegum-blowing vowels, that recall classic acts like the Dickies. At their best, they locate that revered midpoint between "nerd" and "numbskull."

White Reaper: White Reaper Does It Again

White Reaper Does It Again

The Dickies are a great band: trailblazing, deceptively sophisticated, vastly enjoyable, and wholly underrated. It's hard to imagine White Reaper not sharing this opinion. White Reaper Does It Again, the cheekily titled debut album by the young, Louisville-spawned foursome, traffics in much of the same elements that the Dickies pioneered in the late '70s: bouncy pop-punk underpinned with classic songcraft; hockey-rink-ready keyboards. In particular, White Reaper's singer/guitarist Tony Esposito sings almost exactly like the Dickies' Leonard Graves Phillips, all stuffy-nosed sneers and bubblegum-blowing vowels.
Luckily, the Dickies aren't the only influence on Does It Again—nor does the album's derivativeness in any way dampen its snotty, romantic charisma. On "Friday the 13th"—the only song on the album in a minor key—an ominous opening by keyboardist Ryan Hater sets the tone for a campy horror-meets-new-wave mash-up. And on "Candy", Esposito and company splice in some Sweet-style glam-rock swagger. "On Your Mind" even goes so far as to directly lift the melody from the original power-pop wellspring: The Who's "The Kids Are Alright".
It's all pulled off credibly, though, with plenty of perspiration and wild-eyed reverence poured into the pastiche. Bassist Sam Wilkerson and drummer Nick Wilkerson are brothers, and rhythm is clearly in their DNA; "Wolf Trap Hotel" simply rages, shearing off all subtlety in a flurry of adenoids and adrenaline. But even when things get as breakneck as they do on "B.T.K.", Esposito's hooks are piercing, precise, and endearing. And when, on the slower, more supple "Sheila", he lets himself cut loose, his vocals approach full-on croon.
Barring a couple of forgettable, filler-feeling tracks like "Don't You Think I Know?", the biggest drawback of Does It Again is the production. It doesn't sound bad, but the washed-out reverb and pushed-to-the-front keyboard creates a distance that the band sounds like they are constantly fighting to push through. Songs this punchy should land effortlessly. Still, Esposito's yearning and dissatisfaction come through clearly: "I've got it bad, you know/ Give me a double dose," he sings on "Pills", and it doesn't matter what he's singing about. It's our job to fill in that blank. White Reaper knows how to work that ambiguity, just as its navigates its unabashed influences to locate that perfect midpoint between "nerd" and "numbskull."


The grunge mainstays return with another record full of unexpected twists, turns, jokes, diversions, and ideas.

The Bride Screamed Murder

From the first 90 seconds of The Bride Screamed Murder (the sort of trashy B-movie title perfect for the group's school-binder-metal MO), it seems like this most recent incarnation of the Melvins-- longtime mainstays Buzz Osborne and Dale Crover, backed by Big Business' Jared Warren and Coady Willis-- is content to stay the course and follow the return-to-form lead of their last two albums. That said, staying the course isn't exactly what the Melvins are best known for, so while the transformation of "The Water Glass" mid-track from state-of-the-art sludge into an honest-to-goodness marching song is unexpected, the fact that the Melvins opted to switch gears isn't a shocker. After all, it's following those sorts of counterintuitive impulses, for better (various B-sides from their 1997 AmRep singles collection) or worse (their Leif Garrett-flavored cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit"), that make this band worth a damn as it proudly trudges into its third decade.
Unfortunately, The Bride Screamed Murder is one of those cases where taking the road less traveled leads to nowhere. Some fans might beg to differ, of course. They'll roll with the punches offered by indecisive three-in-one tracks like "Inhumanity and Death” and "Electric Flower". Maybe they'll view the arch grunge moves of "Hospital Up" as a pithy meta-commentary, and get a chuckle out of the tune's Spinal Tap jazz odyssey rooster-crowing coda. They might also get a kick out of the twerpy ending to "I'll Finish You Off", where someone's scat-tastic be-bopping leads to the "My Sharona" hook is banged out while "My Generation" is sung over it. When it turns out that such an ending actually foreshadows a lugubrious Flipper-like stumble through "My Generation", what was a brief moment turns into a seven-minute-long joke.
However, if that all doesn't sound appealing to you, you'll probably hear The Bride Screamed Murder as an album full of unfinished sketches and lazy doodles masquerading as proper tunes. The digressions will either come off as failed experiments or unfunny jokes, a handful of good ideas undercut by either their context or their brevity. Any patience engendered by the Melvins' countless good works will be tested by those willing to slog through this scattershot mess. The Bride Screamed Murder is the sort of album one might expect from a long-in-the-tooth group trying to rediscover its purpose and rejuvenate itself. That it comes on the heels of what seemed to be the band's rejuvenation makes it all the more disappointing.


After three blockbusters, the megastar turned introspective on her fourth album, plumbing the depths of depression. Considered a disappointment at the time, it’s become one of her most beloved LPs.

Janet Jackson: The Velvet Rope (Deluxe Edition)

The Velvet Rope (Deluxe Edition)

You don’t typically stand outside an actual velvet rope unless you have a pretty good idea that what’s past it is worth the wait. Listeners went into Janet Jackson’s sixth album, 1997’s The Velvet Rope, eager to breach the facade Jackson had put up in public for decades. Behind her fixed grin, so broad she compared it to the Joker’s, was pain. Have at it, went the messaging.
The three preceding albums (all blockbusters) that Jackson cut with former Time members Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis—1986’s Control, 1989’s Rhythm Nation 1814, and 1993’s janet.—were all bold statements. They said FAMILIAL INDEPENDENCE, SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS, and SEXUAL LIBERATION, respectively. The Velvet Rope was no less conceptual, but its statement was more like a testimony, as its concept concerned introspection. On the title track, the album’s first song, she invites listeners “behind my velvet rope” to take a look inside her mind. “I needed to do this album for myself, for people to know what was going on with me,” she told the Washington Post in 1998.
Twenty-five years after its release, the culture seems more amenable to Jackson’s invitation than ever. And so Jackson and Virgin are offering more Rope, having recently released a deluxe edition of the album commemorating its silver anniversary that contains B-sides and a slew of remixes from the era. It all sounds fresh for something a quarter century old, thanks in part to the resurgence of retro-leaning house music in contemporary pop and Jackson’s refusal to chase trends (the closest the record comes is a slight dusting of skittery Timbaland influence on some of its syncopated percussion).
The Velvet Rope’s apparent influence has been referenced enough that the album represents a standard for maturation in pop stardom. It is frequently cited by fans as their favorite Janet record. At the time of its release, though, it was a relative disappointment—its U.S. sales were just half of janet.’s six million copies. That was bad news for Virgin, which had just re-signed Jackson for $80 million, the largest record deal at the time.
Today, the album can be approached without the constrictors of expectation that a megadeal brings. Its artistry can be taken on its own terms, but it’s important to remember just how brazen it was at the time for Jackson to release a frequently downcast album working through depression—one that had few obvious singles on it. The chill on The Velvet Rope’s first single was audacious. “Got ’Til It’s Gone,” featuring Q-Tip, was not a smash. In a retrospective interview with The Boombox, Jam described pop radio’s shunning of “Gone” as a “surprise” but chalked up the icy reception to the Afrocentrism of the accompanying video, which depicts apartheid-era South Africa and features Jackson with her iconic natural, asymmetrical ’do.
Jackson described The Velvet Rope as her “most personal” album, and in ensuing coverage, it was compared to the work of Joni Mitchell, whom Jackson asked personally for the right to sample “Big Yellow Taxi” on “Gone.” (The notoriously cantankerous Mitchell agreed, perhaps because years before, Jackson had praised Mitchell’s Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm in an interview—the album’s “best review,” according to Mitchell.) On The Velvet Rope, Jackson sometimes holds herself accountable with a grasp as tight as Mitchell’s but she generally paints with broader strokes. She gets lonely. She feels empty. She’s scared to fall in love. It’s as though Jackson took to heart what Kris Kristofferson told Mitchell after hearing Blue: “Joni, keep something to yourself.” The overall effect, much like Mary J. Blige’s 1994 classic My Life, conveyed real pain while leaving enough space for listeners to slide their own experiences between Jackson’s words. It’s a pop approach to soul-bearing, optimized for consumption. Jackson ponders the human need to feel special repeatedly on The Velvet Rope—though doing so as a celebrity on a much-hyped album is tantamount to pop-star existentialism, Jackson assumes the same status as her listeners for most of the album. That is, until the final interlude, “Sad,” in which Jackson murmurs, “There’s nothing more depressing than having everything and still feeling sad.” It’s certainly ironic, but having nothing and still feeling sad is undoubtedly more depressing.
On The Velvet Rope, Jackson’s then-secret husband René Elizondo Jr. received his first songwriting credits, though Jackson told Rolling Stone in 1998 that he’d been a co-writer on “almost all my songs since Rhythm Nation.” She nonetheless kept up the velvet rope around their marriage, which wouldn’t be confirmed publicly until the announcement of their divorce in 2000. (The Velvet Rope was their last full-length collab.) And though Jackson revealed all sorts of would-be private matters during the album’s promotion—taking coffee enemas to clear “sad cells,” a nipple piercing, her tattoo of Minnie Mouse giving Mickey a blowjob visible on the November 1997 cover of Vibe—there was “one incident” that occurred when she was four and a half years old responsible for some of the trauma exorcized on The Velvet Rope that she refused to detail. This era was not a confessional free-for-all. It was considered, modulated, art-directed revelation. The stakes were clear, though, especially when it came to the further sexual exploration that began on janet. In the words of Ayanna Dozier, who wrote the 2020 33 1/3 book on The Velvet Rope: “There is great power in Janet using her status as a Black popular artist to openly trouble our social interpretation of Black women’s sexuality and the respectable images that informed what images of Black womanhood were acceptable in the late 1990s and early 2000s.”
There’s a near military precision—like that which influenced Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814 aesthetic—to the task of probing Jackson’s mind. As much as The Velvet Rope is a departure, it is very much a Janet Jackson album—kaleidoscopic in its range, stitched together with interludes, perfectly tailored for her small and sweet voice. So much of what goes on is all in her narrators’ heads—she forges a relationship with an internet stranger on the frenetic “Empty,” replays abuse on the furious “What About,” looks back in regret at a halted relationship in “Got ’Til It’s Gone.” Before she gets tied up, blindfolded, and anointed with hot candle wax in “Rope Burn,” she’s “Lyin’ here wearin’/Just my imagination for you.” The production can be effectively blunt. “Empty” is full of clattering percussion—it was often labeled as jungle-inflected at the time, but it’s clearly a precursor to footwork from today’s perspective—and “I Get Lonely” is sparse until its blaring chorus.
The Velvet Rope is plainspoken but not without nuance. The slow jam “Anything,” which features exhaling synths that recall quiet-storm chestnut “Moments in Love,” by Art of Noise, lines up a litany of demands (“Hold me/Kiss me/Show me/You wanna be with me…”) before getting to the point and submitting: “I will do anything/You ask me to/Anything/Anything.” It’s not merely an anthem fit for a bottom (as Jackson has said she is)—it’s a bossy bottom anthem. With a handful of words, Jackson illustrates the complexity within even the most seemingly straightforward sexual power dynamics. The message of “Together Again”—“You don’t have to hold on to the pain to hold on to the memory,” as recited in the preceding “Memory” interlude—plays like the product of enlightenment after deep processing of grief. It’s almost easy to overlook the tragedies that inspired it—perhaps the single most joyous piece of (commercial) art about AIDS, which killed several of Jackson’s friends—and get lost in the stomping, radio-friendly beats, intentionally recalling the music Jackson heard at Studio 54 as a child. Sonically, it’s the most bubblegum moment on the album, but as an expression of hefty introspection, it more than earns its place. And if that’s not Diana Ross-y enough for you, there’s “My Need,” which is based on a muddied sample of “Love Hangover” simmering in hi-hats.
Whereas Rhythm Nation and janet. both addressed racism explicitly, The Velvet Rope, self-consciously edgy as it was, took on homophobia in “Free Xone,” a rave-up in the half-song/half-track tradition of janet.’s “Throb.” The sound is somewhere between “Housequake” and “Batdance” as Jackson sets a scenario in which a guy is shunned for his sexuality (“That’s so not mellow,” she mutters, upholding the inherent values of the regularly chill Velvet Rope and referencing the Archie Bell & the Drells sample at hand). But Jackson spends most of the song’s time rhapsodizing a “free xone” with “no rules” and “one love.” “Free Xone” is more invested in imagining utopia than complaining about social ills. Also, quite controversially, she kept some of Rod Stewart’s gender specificity intact in her gently bumping cover of “Tonight’s the Night” (“’Cause I love you girl,” she sings as he did), leading many in the press to speculate if this marked a coming-out. MTV asked if it bothered her that the pro-queer sentiment might alienate some listeners and Jackson responded with a shrug: “Not everyone is going to like me and not everyone does and I understand that.” Having the biggest record deal on the planet was not a reason to avoid risks—it was a reason to take them.
The original album only tells some of the full story, though. Included in the deluxe reissue is vital ephemera, including the heavily played “TNT Remix Edit” of “I Get Lonely,” featuring Blackstreet. As Teddy Riley, the most influential producer of early ’90s R&B, worked on it with Timbaland, the most influential producer of late ’90s R&B, the skittering fast-slow rerub represents a formal passing of the baton. Historic. Also included is the “Jimmy Jam Deeper Remix” of “Together Again,” which reimagines the song as a ballad (as it was reportedly conceived initially). The “Ummah Jay Dee’s Revenge Mix” of “Got ’Til It’s Gone” puts the song in the hands of Dilla, whose remix of the Brand New Heavies’ “Sometimes” inspired Jackson’s original. He outfits Jackson in some woozy harmonic work, nudging the song into more avant-garde territory.
The included house mixes are a who’s who of ’90s major-label remixers with underground roots—Frankie Knuckles, David Morales, Armand Van Helden, Masters at Work, Tony Humphries, Tony Moran, Jason Nevins—that indicate the unlikely club reach of The Velvet Rope. Via these pepped-up revisions, the self-consciously mellow album’s first four singles all went Top 10 on Billboard’s club play chart, with two of them (“Together Again” and “Go Deep”) hitting No. 1. By not including the Roni Size remix of “Go Deep,” though, the set forfeits the opportunity to draw a line from Janet’s filtration with drum’n’bass to the contemporary mumble jungle represented by the likes of PinkPantheress. Oh well, find it on YouTube.
The Velvet Rope’s press cycle was uncommonly long, and as it went on, people wrote and wrote about its relatively disappointing chart performance. The dek on David Ritz’s 1998 Rolling Stone piece read: “After being told her album was a flop and her tour was a bust, she did what she knows best—she worked harder.” The ensuing tour, directed by Jackson herself, was credited as pulling the era together (rumors of its bust, according to Ritz, were greatly exaggerated). The two-hour show was nonstop spectacle, a blur of Jackson’s hits and outlandish costumes that found The Velvet Rope material perfectly integrated into her catalog. If anything, the album’s songs rounded out the taste profile with some sour.
To hear Jam tell it, no one at Virgin pushed back on the relatively difficult material. “They loved the record. They knew it was gonna be tough to get, but they really championed it,” he told The Boombox. Its creation alone meant success for Jackson, who reported that she had purged demons through her art. “I never liked myself before. I hated myself. I can honestly say that I like myself now,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 1998. Incidentally, “Got ’Til It’s Gone,” the supposed flop first single, is now one of her most played songs on Spotify, with 75 million streams. It has more listens than most of her No. 1 singles. This suggests that it’s not that she picked the wrong song to lead the album, it’s that the whole creative venture was ahead of its time. We’re still catching up.


The prolific Norwegian producer and electronic musician explores space and silence on a pair of powerful, absorbing records—one solo, the other with experimental metal vocalist Runhild Gammelsæter.

Runhild Gammelsæter / Lasse Marhaug: Higgs Boson / Context

Context

Lasse Marhaug plays enthusiastically with others. During the last three decades, the Norwegian noise musician, avant-pop producer, and provocative graphic designer has worked on around 1,000 albums. Admittedly, many of these records were relatively low-stakes affairs, straight-to-tape live sets that he mastered or one-off rendezvous eked out in tiny editions. But Marhaug is also a repeat collaborator with Jenny Hval, having co-produced Blood Bitch and Apocalypse, girl, and the creative foil for Kelly Lee Owens’ LP.8. His erstwhile group Jazzkamer made some of the century’s most indispensable metal investigations, too, pushing minimalism to maximum intensity. Despite that torrent of material, Marhaug rarely issues proper solo albums—just one, 2010’s punishing exploration All Music at Once, during the last dozen years. He thrives, it seems, on an exchange of ideas, the heat of feedback.
But two fascinating new albums—the scrupulous and disorienting solo work Context and an absorbing duo record with ultra-dynamic metal vocalist Runhild Gammelsæter, Higgs Boson—offer fresh insight into the mind of one of experimental music’s most active forces, capturing a compelling mix of intimacy and power. These are wildly different records. Marhaug is locked in a kind of cosmic tug-of-war with Gammelsæter, his rapturous electronics pulling her toward earth as she explores particle physics and the unknown with a voice that exhilarates even as it unsettles. By comparison, Context is quiet and staid, even when it hisses, churns, or jolts; it is a careful soliloquy concerning the nature of sound from someone best known for just letting it rip. Together, they are galvanizing reminders of how space and silence can be as compelling as what eventually rushes in to overtake them.
For the last quarter century, Gammelsæter has often been unfairly reduced to a curious footnote in the history of American doom, even becoming a Jeopardy! clue. As a teenage exchange student in Washington state, she formed the short-lived and great Thorr’s Hammer with Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson years before they became Sunn O))); her depths-of-hell voice made their EP, Dommedagsnatt, feel like an abyss was opening at your feet. (Seriously, if you’ve never heard it, do it.) It became a much-reissued cult favorite; the fact that Gammelsæter went on to study at Harvard, earn a doctorate in biology, and direct a string of Scandinavian biotech companies only abetted later intrigue.
Higgs Boson isn’t Gammelsæter’s first album since those Evergreen days of yore. It is, however, her most focused and riveting. Though Gammelsæter is famous for a stentorian bellow, she can also summon a whisper-soft coo, a theatrical sibilance, and even a sing-song ease. She brings all these facets to bear at once here, putting them in play with one another and Marhaug’s contortions.
Listening to opener “The Stark Effect” feels like furtively navigating a musical hall of mirrors, as Gammelsæter’s many vocal guises—the devil here, an angel there—emerge from corners you cannot see, then slink behind them. It is mesmerizing and terrifying in equal measure. So is “Hadron Collider,” where Gammelsæter speaks in a scientist’s steely voice about energy until she slips into a droning wail, as if tormented by the findings of her inquiries. “Propeller Arc” is a wondrous bit of trunk-rattling bass music for the apocalypse. She barks like a military commander in the foreground, while her voice drifts with seraphic wonder in the rear. This versatility and control put Gammelsæter in league with the likes of Meredith Monk or Diamanda Galás, pioneering singers capable of communicating more with tone than words themselves.
The key to making all these aspects of Gammelsæter’s voice work so well together is Marhaug’s facility for layering. During “Ondes Da Fase,” Gammelsæter’s sound is a composite of low drones and hissing highs, blended but discrete like the strata of sandstone. It stretches across the entire track. But phosphorescent hums and a faint beat echoing in the distance add dimension; I find myself focusing on these other elements, playing a game where I’m peering around Gammelsæter’s voice like a curtain. In “Static Case,” her interlocked whispers, roars, and incantations pirouette across squelching circuits and glowing noise. The song moves like a slow wave, resting long enough at its nodes that you sit in suspense, wondering what will come next. That’s a fitting sensation for a record that asks questions about the framework of our universe—and admits the answers might make for existential terror.
The underpinnings of this success become clear on Context, Marhaug’s set of seven spare but captivating instrumental pieces. Recorded in the Oslo studio he used for most of his career before leaving the city for Norway’s far Arctic reaches, Context was meticulously edited from hours of improvisations. Listening to it after Higgs Boson is like marveling at some gothic mansion, then somehow seeing the ornate framing behind its walls. Bursts of harsh noise, slivers of angular static, rumbles of punishing bass: Though the sounds here are every bit as intense as Marhaug’s past might lead us to expect, his patience and appreciation of space mean the results are newly delicate, the fragile skeleton of a once-formidable beast.
The marvel of the set is “Context3.” From start to finish, a massive bass thud repeatedly decays in a sequence of seven smaller hits; curdled electronics, tea-kettle whistles, and serrated drones all curl around the beat, like invasive vines crawling up that mansion’s aging foundation. The sounds clash as they compete for room, while the oblivious rhythm pounds on. They wear one another out and fade away in an epic drama condensed into six minutes. Where “Context4” feels like a scene of endless winter, “Context5” conjures the pervasive fatigue of a city soundscape and subsequent retreat. These pieces work so well because of the care Marhaug took in positioning each part, in letting tiny gestures—a subtle boost in volume, a tiny tone slipping through silence—shape a larger narrative.
With an artist as busy as Marhaug, it is tempting to see his work as scattershot or offhand, ideas executed in unapologetic sprints. In the past, it could certainly feel that way—All Music at Once, after all, felt like an expulsion of ideas, fast and ferocious. Hearing Marhaug’s evolution through this pair of entrancing records is inspiring, a parable of blunt tools being slowly sharpened into surgical instruments. Both alone and with others, Marhaug is no longer just a Norwegian noise musician shocking through sprees of abrasive sound; he is a painstaking producer, using space, time, and silence to give such abrasive sounds more power. In doing so, he’s rightfully helped restore Runhild Gammelsæter to much more than curiosity status and established a promising new platform for his own considered ideas.


We’re used to the kind of power-pop that San Franicsco songwriter Tony Molina makes by abiding certain rules and forms, but the songs on Dissed and Dismissed slyly toy with expectations.

Dissed and Dismissed

“Please note that this album runs just under 12 minutes,” the promo page for Tony Molina’s 12-song Dissed and Dismissed warns. “Just so you know.” It’s a worthwhile heads up: Hearing a Tony Molina song for the first time can be a bit disorienting. We’re used to the kind of power-pop he makes abiding by certain rules and forms—three chords, three minutes, a chorus that repeats enough times for first-time listeners to be singing along by the end—but the songs on Dissed and Dismissed slyly toy with expectations. Take “Nowhere to Go”, the crunching slacker anthem that opens the album: Two sing-songy verses followed by a harmonized, Thin Lizzy-esque solo that feels like a build-up to something… but actually just turns out to be a finale. Most of the songs (which range from 26 seconds to an epic minute-and-a-half) on the album proceed similarly. And yet, somehow, ”album” is the right word here. Dissed and Dismissed is more fully realized—and packs more of a punch—than plenty of records five times its length. Call it a half-a-half-hour of power.
Molina’s been a staple in the San Francisco hardcore scene for years now—he’s played in the bands Ovens, Caged Animal, Dystrophy, and Lifetime Problems, to name a few—but his solo work lets his sharp pop instincts shine. Initially released in early 2013 as a tape on the small Bay Area label Melters, Dissed and Dismissed became an instant cult favorite, quickly selling out its first pressing. (Later in the year, he also released the taut, self-explanatory Six Tracks E.P. as a part of Matador’s Singles Going Home Alone Series.) Now, to bide the time while he records a new full-length for Slumberland and in hopes of reaching a larger audience, the label has reissued Dissed and Dismissed.
Molina’s music combines Ted Leo’s taste in riffs, Rivers Cuomo’s record collection circa “In the Garage”, and Robert Pollard’s attention span. In one of its most subdued moments, Dissed and Dismissed includes an acoustic cover of the early Guided By Voices song “Wandering Boy Poet”, and it feels like an obvious nod to the kindred spirits who believe that a song that exceeds two minutes has long overstayed its welcome. There’s a crucial difference in the ethos of these artists, though. The brevity of early Guided By Voices tracks conveyed a certain shrug, Pollard’s demeanor always seeming to say, “I got bored with this one before I could write an ending or mix it properly.” Brief as they are, though, every one of Molina’s songs sounds finished—these are complete thoughts. The melancholy “Can’t Believe” moves through a whole sunset of tonal hues; it’s the shortest song Teenage Fanclub never wrote. Another highlight, “Don’t Come Back”, begins as a pop-punk song, ramps up to a bubblegum-hardcore breakdown, and then ends in a blaze of of signal flare riffage. It works because it’s confident, polished, and deftly executed—not in spite of any of these facts. Combining near-comic concision and hi-fi production lets Molina have the best of both worlds: These songs have a slacker sensibility, but they’re not afraid of occasional brushes with virtuosity.
Dissed and Dismissed ends just before it starts to feel formulaic. Molina’s not reinventing the wheel here, but a guy who’s clever and/or self-deprecating enough to screenprint photos of Thin Lizzy on his “Tony Molina Tour 2013” t-shirts is probably not bothered by that. These songs are too satisfying to make their limits feel like gimmicks. Only time will tell if Molina pushes beyond the stylistic boundaries he’s created for himself here. His next record comes out later this year. Maybe it’ll hit the 15-minute mark.


The former Walkmen member wrote each of these songs about a specific person, forming an archive of memories that comes alive in his elevated songcraft and dynamic voice.

Hamilton Leithauser: The Loves of Your Life

The Loves of Your Life

In a goofy teaser clip for his new album, Hamilton Leithauser seems to state the obvious: “Writing and recording music by yourself can be lonely.” This is only the former Walkman’s second solo record, following 2014’s Black Hours and a collaborative LP with Rostam. But The Loves of Your Life is far from a solitary work; it is filled with people—both those firmly planted in Leithauser’s world, and those who’ve wandered through by chance. Each of its 11 songs was written about a specific person, and while some names and details have changed, the album is a celebration of community and the relationships that make one possible. It’s an archive of memories that comes alive with the help of Leithauser’s elevated songcraft and dynamic voice.
Leithauser’s recording process likewise embraced community. Alongside pros like pianist Jon Batiste and pedal steel player Jonathan Gregg, you’ll find Leithauser’s wife Anna Stumpf, their daughters Georgiana and Frederika, and the girls’ former preschool teacher, Lacrisha Brown, all credited for backing vocals. Leithauser layers their voices expertly throughout the record, in melodies that breeze around the songs and occasionally build into a full-bodied choir. He plays tricks with his own vocals as well, burying muted harmonies and delayed echoes around the edges of the mix. On the brooding “Til Your Ship Comes In,” his voice is in full force, hitting a high Rod Stewart rasp in the chorus and warbling out like warped tape elsewhere.
The Loves of Your Life examines an assortment of relationships for which Leithauser conveys deep affection. He loves these characters and wants to understand them, even on “Here They Come,” about a friend hiding from reality in the darkness of the Union Square cinema, or “Isabella,” about a “wide-eyed” Manhattan party girl who dropped out of college long ago. The skyward melodies of “Isabella” mimic the muse: a hopeless romantic staving off adulthood with endless late nights. Leithauser doesn’t denounce Isabella, but attempts to comprehend her dreams, her loneliness. “I wanna be there with her,” he sings, “’til they all go riding home.” The coda grows and grows, Leithauser’s in-house choir lifting it up until it floats away.
On “Til Your Ship Comes In,” the sense of being surrounded by familiar faces feels like an intervention; anyone who’s dealt with a self-destructive friend or relative will recognize the theme. “You’re kidding me, right?/With that dot in your eye,” Leithauser growls, watching police lights flash in the street. The layers of vocal tracks have an encircling effect: The subject is locked in a room with people who care too much to let them out. “Everybody wants you in a different way,” Leithauser sings. A dozen voices strong, the refrain feels particularly indicting: “We call you by a different name.”
Leithauser’s knack for melody is stronger than ever, particularly on “Isabella” and the big, bittersweet “Wack Jack,” which chronicles an unresolved conflict that drove one party to walk out for good. Caleb Cressman sits in on pedal steel and Batiste lays down a nimble solo, but Leithauser does the rest: drums, bass, guitar, mandolin, synthesizers, Wurlitzer, and vocals. “‘Years from today, when your name is just a name/And my love is a couple candles, twinkling on your cake,’” Leithauser sings, quoting the lost friend’s parting words, “‘That burn won’t hurt you anymore/But I’ll still keep your picture lying in a drawer.’” It’s the kind of remark that ends fights instantly: calm, vicious, poignant.
The Loves of Your Life feels like a neighborhood that’s deeply familiar, yet so packed with life that new details emerge on each stroll. You’ll find rainbows streaking through oily puddles, lipstick-kissed cups, breeze-blown magazines, a glossy red Silverado. If you walk long enough, you’ll also get to know the people that live there. Leithauser would like you to meet them.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Beneath the thick veneer of droll affectation, this London-via-Scunthorpe band writes with uncommon poignancy about the nature of art, ambition, and success.

So Medieval

In a parallel universe—one where indie rock reigns supreme and continually seeks out poets of deadpan absurdism—critics are already celebrating So Medieval like a promising novelist’s debut splash. The blurb touts “a tale of musical ambition and romantic anguish, told through continental capers involving raw halloumi, a Formula One audiobook, and the ‘shitpost sagas’ of once-in-a-generation voice Arthur Nolan.” Our expectations are pegged to Blue Bendy’s chatty UK peers—Dry Cleaning, Squid, et al.—then sharply raised as we learn the band has “coined a formally daring new language,” perhaps positioned “between the indie disco and the next morning’s social media scroll.” Emblazoned on the back cover of this literary-musical opus are quotes from Jarvis Cocker, Yung Lean, and for some reason Zadie Smith.
In reality, the vagaries of hype have mostly eluded this London-via-Scunthorpe band, which says a little about their admittedly niche appeal and a little more about the British music media’s imperiled hype apparatus. Thankfully, the lack of actual acclaim has done nothing to deter Nolan from flooding his songs with gnomic brags, eccentric alter egos, and the non sequiturs that are his loopy lingua franca. Blue Bendy’s debut EP, 2022’s Motorbike, was two years late for the critics’ anointing of monologue-rock darlings, but unified just enough inputs to feel dizzyingly new: handclap indie-pop swarmed by Warp-inspired synth ad-libs and a preponderance of too-online slang. Fretting he might be “the only one swagging in the deep,” in a world “powered by Unreal Engine,” Nolan presented a persona akin to the Wedding Present’s David Gedge getting initiated into Drain Gang during a game of Fortnite Squads.
With So Medieval, Blue Bendy return to the province of realism, using their underdog status as a springboard to defiant, high-stakes art-rock. The story loosely follows a “memelord type” narrator throwing it all in for the band after a rough breakup. His chronicles of misery and mischief can rise to emotional rapture (Nolan calls this “dying on the mic”) or plunge into endearing hysteria, as on “Mr. Bubblegum”: “I can handle being the third-best guitar band in London,” he cries, “but baby, just let me be first at something.” Neither the melodrama nor the hubris are lost on the 27-year-old frontman, who takes a moment, on “I’m Sorry I Left Him to Bleed,” to reassure us he is in on the joke: “I’ll get better somehow/But for now I’m just the boy/You made feel like Kendall Roy—wow.”
When he is not wowing his own zingers, Nolan writes touchingly about life in a band seized by music’s contradictory demands: Success is important because it lets you make more art; art is important because it has nothing to do with success. On “Cloudy,” Nolan dramatizes the grind through a series of absurd quibbles (“I’ve got beef with a monkey account”) and indignant pleas (“We’ve been struggling for miles/Where are my memetic flowers?”) in a tone so relentlessly silly you sense he is desperately serious. The band sounds embroiled in the same scrap for a shot at majesty, sharing the Black Country, New Road playbook of minimalist-classical hooks scaled for folk-pop magnitude. The precious and grandiose converge throughout the album, each part a foil to Nolan’s dual personality. Guitarists Joe Nash and Harrison Charles slingshot between folksy humility and post-rock gusto, while synth whiz Olivia Morgan alternates sly Stereolab filigree with baroque-pop extravagance.
Nolan recently told The Quietus his “favorite role to play is drunken self-importance,” entreating us to take his voluble first-person with a pinch of salt. But an unmistakable air of ambition whistles through the album, from the forthright proclamations down to those quiet-quiet-loud structures and antic singalongs like “The Day I Said You’d Died (He Lives),” aptly described in its own lyrics as “a last big pump for the feels.” Perhaps to cover his tracks, Nolan satirizes this very ambition in such a way that pathos is never far behind. “Joe, pinch me,” he sings on “Mr. Bubblegum.” “We’re in the hands of Zara’s styling team.” Ambition, in this case, to be dressed by Britain’s twelfth-favorite clothing retailer. “Darp 2 / Exorcism” at first sounds like a fatalistic climate anthem—“It’s the car, it’s the planet, it’s everything/Come along if you’re sad to be seen”—but appears, upon inspection, to largely concern the indignity of getting dumped.
This nearly irritating self-awareness—in tandem with a lack of any edifying message—is a large part of Blue Bendy’s unlikely appeal. Nolan’s bandmates have said the lyrics are secretly “all very on the nose,” which to me suggests some of the formal abstractions and mustache-twirling metatextuality might be a cover for roguish misdeeds. But in the yarn of a Blue Bendy song, the cheeky flâneur and would-be bastard can comfortably live under one hat.
At the climax of “Cloudy,” Nolan’s narrator quits his day job for the band and alights on the slightest and sweetest of brags: “Please, for me, don’t cry,” he trills. “I made it all the way up here to the microphone, didn’t I?” Even if Blue Bendy are not to be chosen ones—are angling for little more than a perilous existence in indie-pop’s margins—Nolan suggests plugging away at a dream is a righteous pursuit of its own. This is a nice idea that he immediately flips upside-down, skipping into the sunset with a comically cynical coda: “Write a song, write a song, write a song… to drive to!” On paper, the notion of a Blue Bendy hatchback anthem sounds ludicrous. But as the band settles into its begrudging largesse, Nolan sounds, for a moment, as if he has made it.


This deluxe reissue is the holy grail that fans of Tim have dreamt of: a new mix that instantly becomes the best and most definitive album in the Replacements’ catalog.

The Replacements: Tim (Let It Bleed Edition)

Tim (Let It Bleed Edition)

By late 1984, the Replacements were transforming from a shoddy Minneapolis barroom punk band into the biggest prospect in the underground alternative rock scene. They had just released their third album, Let It Be, a title that both paid homage to and took the piss out of the Beatles, which, you could say, basically summed up the Replacements’ whole thing. Whereas the Mats always hated things like parents and school and loved things like beer and getting fucked up, Let It Be offered a wider range of dynamics, tempos, and chord progressions in its nuanced songs about gender, longing, and frustration. (This was amid the joke songs about tonsils and boners.) The perfect “I Will Dare” adopted the jangle-pop shuffle coming out of the UK, the smokey “Androgynous” is glam rock without the stomp, and the spare coda, “Answering Machine,” is a yearning electric folk song, essentially the first solo Paul Westerberg track ever recorded under the banner of the Replacements.
Except for rock purist Steve Albini, who loved their snotty lo-fi records but soon found the Replacements “irrevocably lost in the maudlin cabaret of Westerberg’s folk music blatherings,” critics adored Let It Be, ranking it No. 4 in that year’s Village Voice Pazz and Jop poll. It sold well, attracted offers from major labels, and has long been regarded as, if not the best Mats album, then the most authentic Mats album. It was the pivotal moment before they “went pop” and signed to Sire, before unhinged guitarist Bob Stinson was drastically sidelined, before Westerberg took the reins of the Mats and set out to launder the strains of traditional pop through his drunken band of losers. Let It Be was a live wire, the product of four childhood friends who never graduated high school or got driver’s licenses, whose innate talent was matched only by two things: their fear of success and their desire to drown that fear in a case of Schlitz.
In comes this essential reissue of the Mats’ fourth album, 1985’s Tim, to trouble the entire narrative. The toast of this box set—which, like Let It Be, also cribs its name from a far more successful album—is an unbelievable new remix of Tim that doesn’t just challenge the notion that Let It Be was the Replacements at their peak, but usurps it to become the best and most definitive album in their catalog. Helmed by famed Ramones engineer Ed Stasium, the remix is jaw-dropping: Gone is Tim’s muddy sound, the tinny reverb on Chris Mars’ drums, and the thin low-end that masked Tommy Stinson’s bass. Every instrument is louder and closer, the mix is much more spread out, Westerberg’s sneakily complicated rhythm playing and chord voicing comes into sharp focus, and there are even a few extra Bob solos. If the previous treatments of Pleased to Meet Me and Don’t Tell a Soul were welcome surprises, this is the holy grail that fans have dreamt of. Finally, no more of the obligatory caveats about production that have plagued the album for almost four decades.
It’s now abundantly clear, both in sound and performance, that Tim is really among the best albums ever recorded…ex post facto. It’s the apex of the Mats, how they should have sounded, how they did sound, how they should be remembered sounding. As diverse as it is dynamic, Tim is full of diamond-sharp songs about the mess of young love, old love, loneliness, dead-end jobs, amphetamines, and alcohol. Rarely does a remix raise a crucial epistemological question about a small Midwestern rock band who would stumble through a bunch of pop and country covers if the audience asked them to play their “pussy set,” but here we are: Should this new remix be considered the real and definitive version of Tim?
Like the CIA one day revealing who really and definitively killed Kennedy, I’d argue it’s complicated. Here is the self-fulfilling prophecy of the Replacements: They were drunks and losers because their press releases said they were drunks and losers. So they wore the mask, played the clowns, and became lost in the version of themselves that got banned from SNL, didn’t play ball with the label, showed up wrecked to gigs, put out a mix of Tim that the band themselves didn’t much like, sabotaged their career at every turn, and by the late ’80s softly melted into a Westerberg solo project. Even if Westerberg thought he could be as big as the Beatles or the Rolling Stones—or even contemporaries who caught major label deals like R.E.M.—there was always some Midwestern fatalism dragging him down. He led a band caught in a perpetual cycle of fear, self-loathing, drinking, and destruction that amassed a cult fan base who loved them precisely because of this cycle. If you saw a Mats show, you knew they weren’t ever going to be superstars, but a part of you knew that the Mats were right and everyone else was wrong.
The reason this Let It Bleed Edition tastes bittersweet is not because of what should’ve been, but what could never have been. The box set—which also features a re-mastering of the original mix, demos from an aborted session with Westerberg’s hero, Big Star’s Alex Chilton, a pretty good live set recorded at Chicago’s Metro, and extensive liner notes from Mats biographer, archivist, and compatriot Bob Mehr—is another path not taken by a band defined by and loved for its wrong decisions. The Replacements were so innately talented and alluring that they should have been playing arenas and climbing the charts every year, but then they wouldn’t have been the Replacements. Tim, especially this remix of Tim, offers a painful glimpse at a butterfly effect, one where the Mats were maybe slightly more put-together, had a slightly larger audience, and Westerberg was slightly more recognized as one of the best songwriters of his generation.
Among Westerberg’s afflictions were his congenitally malformed pinkies, a condition called clinodactyly, which forced the self-taught guitarist to write in open tunings. There was also something wrong with the ulnar nerves in his arms that caused him pain every time he bent his elbows, which prevented him from being too showy of a player. His infamously excessive drinking aggravated his pleurisy—the same chronic illness Tennessee Williams gave to the frail young Laura Wingfield in his 1944 play The Glass Menagerie—which shredded the singer’s voice just as it was borne from his inflamed lungs. But chief among Westerberg’s afflictions was being a burnout punk who loved the ornate elegance of pop music and the slick sound of ’70s AM Gold.
“Little Mascara,” an underrated song toward the end of Tim, is a blueprint for modern pop songwriting, worthy of rigorous study by anyone looking to understand what gives a pop song momentum and what keeps a listener engaged from measure to measure. Inspired by Southern gothic stories like those of Williams and Flannery O’Connor, “Little Mascara” was the first fictional character study in the Mats catalog. The bouncy mid-tempo number describes a struggling mother pining for the love she deserves from the deadbeat father, left always with only a little mascara running down her cheek.
But the beauty of “Little Mascara” is what’s under its hood. The intro is retrofitted to become the chorus, the second verse is half as long as the first (the canny move of songwriting committees everywhere), each pre-chorus is different, and each chorus ends better than the one before it: the first circles back to the verse, the second modulates into the bridge, and the third finally pays off with the climax. It’s the kind of thing that Carole King or Quincy Jones or Jack Antonoff would marvel at, and that’s just a few of the 50 tiny choices in “Little Mascara” that give it this narrative propulsion—a beginning, middle, and end just like the short story Westerberg tells in its lyrics.
The Ed Stasium remix of “Little Mascara” also contains the most drastic change from Tommy Ramone’s original mix. The outro is a whole minute longer, stretching out the climax into the fireworks of a lost Bob Stinson guitar solo. Bob, who still worked part-time as a line cook and would send out for drugs the few times he was in the studio, only ended up on a handful of Tim songs. The two written for Bob were once thought of as the album’s weakest: “Lay It Down Clown” and “Dose of Thunder,” the former about how Peter Buck of R.E.M. liked to score speed, the latter about scoring speed more generally. Once neutered and non-committal, the pair of rockers now sounds exciting and full-throated (and fascinatingly bizarre, like how “Lay It Down Clown” suddenly modulates keys in the chorus). For every attempt at sublime control on Tim, the Replacements—and specifically Bob—were still in danger of going off the rails.
The tension between danger and vulnerability is the crux of Tim. On the other side of the spectrum there’s “Swingin Party,” a wry, loungey ballad inspired a little by Rodgers and Hart, Nancy Sinatra, and a lot by Buffalo Springfield’s “Flying on the Ground.” (In Bob Mehr’s 2016 indispensable biography Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements, Westerberg said of this song, “If you steal from everybody, nobody can put a finger on you.”) It’s become one of their biggest “hits” in the streaming era, thanks in part to Lorde’s version, a formidable match for Westerberg’s gothic humor. There’s also the unsparing “Here Comes a Regular,” the wrong kind of drinking song. Channeling the stasis inside local Minneapolis bars, Westerberg reluctantly recorded the track alone and cloistered away behind the studio’s sound bafflers. It’s cold and cutting, maybe the first time the mask of the Replacements really came off.
What remains so great about Tim, and is emphasized over and over again on this new remix, is how Westerberg delivers each song as if it’s the last thing he’s ever going to do. Wrapped up in the mythos of the Replacements is the idea that these are his last chances, a few final attempts to write the arena anthem or the greatest love song of all. The opening scream on “Bastards of Young” and its chorus—the Biblically inspired, often misheard “Wait on the sons of no one”—remain an undiminished gravitational force. Westerberg loves symmetry in his lyrics, too, giving them an aphoristic quality while singing as if his mouth is filling with blood. “The ones who love us best/Are the ones we lay to rest” is quickly followed by the gut-punch: “The ones who love us least/Are the ones we’ll die to please.” But just as foundational to Tim is “Left of the Dial,” which uses a song written by an old flame fading in and out of the radio as a symbol of transience, bliss, misfortune, and resignation. “Bastards” is a last-ditch effort at winning; “Left of the Dial” is that ghostly acceptance when you lose.
The original Tommy Ramone (née Erdelyi) mix of Tim still has a lot of character, charitably speaking, as the newly remastered version included in this box set shows. It’s not that it’s unlistenable, but it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where you’d prefer to put it on over the Ed Stasium mix now. The Stasium mix sounds like it could have been recorded yesterday, like Tommy is jumping around your living room and Westerberg is spilling beer on your carpet. It ranks high among the most revelatory revisionist looks at an album, up there with the release of Iggy Pop’s 1997 mix of Raw Power, or the Beatles’ 2003 stripped-down version of Let It Be, or even Metallica’s 2018 remaster of the notoriously muddy …And Justice for All. All three of those bands tower over the Replacements by several orders of magnitude, but in the fantasy world of alternate histories, you can imagine this version of Tim growing in estimation, another perfect, pathetic twist of fate for the Mats.
Outside of the live show here—its quality somewhere between the rip-roarin’ Live at Maxwell’s 1986 and the hissy bootleg of their 1984 CBGB showcase catastrophe—the last missing piece of Tim is “Can’t Hardly Wait.” Though it eventually appeared as a suited-up standard complete with a bandstand of horns on 1987’s Pleased to Meet Me, Westerberg worked on the song all throughout Tim’s recording process and was unsatisfied with every version he tried. There are several takes and demos of “Can’t Hardly Wait” included here, including two that were previously released, and a new acoustic rendition featuring cellist Michelle Kinney, who was then the studio manager where the Mats were recording. But listening to a new alternative mix of the “‘Tim’ Version,” hearing the same vim and vigor as the Stasium mix, is devastating, like watching a replay of refs blowing a call that cost your team the game. This was the single, this was the hit, the song that could maybe could have changed everything. Why did they have to lose? “Our ambition is to be the biggest worst band in the world,” Tommy Stinson once said. Here’s their very last chance.


Highly promising young songwriter continues to show why he's one of chillwave's rising stars.

Life of Leisure EP

Did our parents give us too much self-esteem? Not that long ago, message boarders could diss and dismiss boring new bands (insert your least favorite post-punk revivalists here) for sounding like "a copy of a copy of a copy." Fast forward just a few years, and that's exactly what some of the most exciting new bands sound like.
Pastiche and intertextuality are as ancient as postmodernism-- not to mention disco, hip-hop, and the remix-- but childhood memories, in particular, are present now like never before. Today's blockbuster movies are based on yesterday's beloved toys; today's wars and political battles are sequels, too. It isn't surprising that music would reflect the zeitgeist. What's striking is how an international cohort of rising artists has successfully translated this culture of watery VCR transfers and Fisher-Price cassette rips into 1980s-inspired psychedelic music.
Names like Ducktails, Reading Rainbow, VEGA, Pocahaunted, and, especially, Memory Tapes tell you a lot about where these disparate reminiscers are coming from. Arguably, more than genre tags like "glo-fi" or The Wire critic David Keenan's "hypnagogic pop," but those labels can be useful, too. Washed Out, the solo project of Georgia (via South Carolina) multi-instrumentalist Ernest Greene, fits in almost too well with the balmy lo-fi synth atmospherics of peers like Neon Indian, Toro Y Moi, Small Black, the higher-fi jj, or the darker, heavier SALEM, as well as the more guitar-based Real Estate, Best Coast, and Pearl Harbour. Washed Out's debut Life of Leisure EP, out digitally now and on 12" early next month (another release, the cassette-only High Times, arrived September 15), isn't at the top of its class, but Greene so far is one of this fledgling aesthetic's most gifted students.
Focusing on romantic nostalgia and homespun textures, Life of Leisure does with 80s soft rock and synth-pop what Glass Candy and Chromatics did with Italo disco a couple of years ago, only Washed Out evokes summer afternoons indoors rather than the Italians Do It Better crew's early-a.m. urban stalking. Out-of-sync PBS-theme synths and videogame lasers meet funky horn breaks on opener "Get Up", as Greene's slurry vocals suggest deep pain. A sampled sax sighs mournfully behind a chopped-up voice, Cut Copy-pasteable beats, and some more indistinct singing on "Lately". Life of Leisure's six tracks, whether poppier and more approachable like "New Theory", or moody and alarming like "Hold Out", tend to cut off suddenly, which gives the EP an appealing, unfinished quality. Like hearing a work in progress: Greene has only been making music under his current moniker for a couple of months, so don't come flaming me if his live shows suck or his Dave Fridmann-produced sophomore album flops in 2013.
More than some contemporaries, though, Washed Out submerges a sense of intense feeling within its 80s-fantasy electronic ether. Greene's "copy of a copy" distance, then, comes across as a form of emotional repression. The yearning-in-utero effect is strongest on woozy centerpiece "Feel It All Around". With blurry singing, cheap-sounding synths, and a humid, syrupy flow, the track suggests an 80s synth pop hit that won't come straight out and cop to itself-- or a young man in love, too tongue-tied (or too stoned?) to admit it. "You feel it all around yourself," Greene echoes. As for what "it" is, the song never says.
If this review itself reads like a "memory of a memory" (to sample another phrase from Keenan), blame "Feel It All Around". Days after the filing of a final draft packed with trenchant insights drawn from the similarities between the track's choral drone and 10cc's 1975 hit "I'm Not in Love", it came to light that Washed Out's signature tune is actually based around a loop from Gary Low's 1983 single "I Want You". The words you're reading changed; the rating didn't. "You're soooooo... fine," it sounds like Greene's finally able to bring himself to say on finale "You'll See It", one of the EP's loveliest and most tuneful tracks; "Don't you fight it." OK, I have to go fast-forward through NutraSweet and Sylvania commercials to watch the TV movie of Alice in Wonderland with Ringo Starr as the Mock Turtle now.


On her second album, the mysterious Brooklyn rapper begins to pull back the mask with vivid reporting about the trials and triumphs of her home and the resilience of black womanhood.

Acrylic

No one ever sees Leikeli47 unmasked. The omnipresent balaclava or bandana of the Brooklyn-bred rapper may bring to mind Pussy Riot, with whom she once collaborated, or MF DOOM, who she has cited as a forebear. The enigma helped make her 2017 major-label debut, Wash & Set, a thrilling curio that hinged on a sleek, shadowy mix of rap, house, neo-soul, R&B, and dancehall. “I don’t rock with you, homie/I don’t go out my circle,” she chanted menacingly on “O.M.C.,” a gothic highlight. Leikeli has shouted out Grace Jones in song, proclaimed “Kelis is god/So is Beyoncé,” and anointed herself “notorious in Brooklyn, just like Biggie.” Still, despite the references and boasts, Leikeli remains slyly unpinned and underground.
Leikeli’s second LP is called Acrylic, a substance that is at once feminine—in relation to long, polished nails—and resilient. “When you smell the acrylic, you know just where you are,” she recently said. “You know you’re in the hood.” Acrylic celebrates black life and black love with song-length homages to her native Bed-Stuy and the person she became there. Leikeli shouts out Brownsville with spitfire tenacity on the standout “Iron Mike” and nods to the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station on a lovers-rock-tinged ballad of subway romance. Her flow is always gripping, her details novelistic: An aunt sells candy from a windowpane, an extension cord snakes across a hallway, and the lights flicker in an E train tunnel.
Acrylic is also a matriarchy, populated by independent women raising children alone. The album’s opening sketch, “Walk-Ins Welcome,” delineates a clear line between the abrasive man in his ride and the woman he’s dropping at a salon busy with “appointments on my line/nail trappin’ Cinderellas.” The song conjures an army of Leikelis rapping in schoolyard solidarity “bout that bag,” snapping their glittery fingers together. Though the subsequent title track feels delightfully campy and of a piece with “Walk-Ins,” it’s also about racist cops pulling up to her block, mocking them if only in tone. “Acrylic” adds immediate realism to an album that, in turn, reflects on the crisis of toxic water (“We don’t need to be shot up to be filled with lead”) and the perseverance that being surrounded by gun violence and drugs necessitates. On the hushed and vulnerable “Droppin’,” Leikeli raps, “I got a story to tell... I’m the baby from the dumpster.”
Still, Acrylic is wildly fun. “Girl Blunt,” which has rattled on Issa Rae’s HBO comedy “Insecure,” is a trap anthem for a generation of stoner girls “on the honor roll.” The minimally ecstatic “Full Set (A New Style)” reworks an iconic ballroom sample into a fierce loop, and the runway banger “Post That” reimagines the severe poses of voguing within self-loving selfie culture. “The way she make them angles hit/She like Bill Cunningham with dat shit,” Leikeli raps, velvet-smooth, referencing The New York Times’ late street-fashion great before name-checking photographers Richard Avedon, Andrew Dosunmu, Herb Ritts, and (with effusive joy) “Anniieee Leibovitzzzz!” Bar after bar, Leikeli is composed and cool, with subtle sugar and swag.
Across 19 tracks, Acrylic sometimes becomes exhaustively long, distracting from highlights like the grandiose, lushly produced “Roll Call.” At the center of Acrylic, it’s a meticulous ode to historically black colleges in America: “Drumline always there when we need ’em/Howard Homecoming, where we meet up,” Leikeli raps, shouting out HBCU attendees from Thurgood Marshall to Erykah Badu. Its marching-band bravado and awe-inspiring scope suggest Beyoncé’s festival-set-cum-high-art performance at Coachella in miniature.
The art for Leikeli’s “Roll Call” single included a Malcolm X quote—“The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.”—on a handmade sign, plastered to the front of a nail salon in East Flatbush that was protested after footage emerged of its staff assaulting black customers. Despite near-total anonymity, Leikeli47 is becoming a resounding voice of black womanhood. By Acrylic’s end, she raps with Nicki-like, upticking swagger: “Chewing gum, chewing gum, chew/Why would I say what I could just do?” Without providing easy answers, she leaves a trail of clues. Slowly, steadily, she pulls back the mask.


The long-delayed second album from Tinashe includes a handful of bulletproof bops but has arrived as a fragmented vision of the popstar’s many talents.

Joyride

Tinashe first announced Joyride back three years ago. It was right after the release of her major-label debut, Aquarius, an ambitious statement of dance pop, experimental R&B, and understated ballads that allowed her personality to shine through it all. Since then, her airy soprano was a proven vessel for Top 40 fodder, and her music videos and live shows revealed a performer in the mold of pop music’s greats, some of whom have gone on to tacitly acknowledge her as such. Joyride, then, would ideally nudge Tinashe closer toward becoming the household name that her unflappable single “2 On” and her telegenic charm all but fated her to be.
And yet. Following an elongated stretch of PR nightmares, canceled tours, and a stopgap companion mixtape, Joyride arrives with less than half of the seven singles released in promotion for it. This is a partial blessing—a clean slate was necessary after misfires like the grossly misjudged Chris Brown feature “Player,” or last year’s stilted and label-mandated pop ballad “Flame.” But in keeping with its confused rollout, Joyride stands as a fragmented vision of Tinashe’s talents, roving between forward-thinking R&B, paint-by-number pop, and airless filler with little sense of direction.
But this is still a Tinashe album, and those don’t come without some bulletproof bops. She takes center stage on “Ooh La La,” which coasts on a sample of Nelly and Kelly Rowland’s 2002 slow jam “Dilemma.” The track’s recurring squeak of a mattress and bump-and-grind beat make for a breezy, summer-primed R&B sex song that’s among her best. Joyride succeeds elsewhere when it draws from the same hypnagogic R&B that once earned her praise, like on the floaty, seductive “He Don’t Want It” and the So So Def-indebted deep cut “No Contest.”
The brooding title track, meanwhile, fleshed out with spacious production and a dramatic strings outro, is one of the most complex arrangements ever to appear on a Tinashe song. It was the impetus for the album—one that Rihanna momentarily purchased as an option for Anti while Joyride was in A&R purgatory. It’s stacked with an all-echoed-vocals chorus, menacingly delivered verses, and cavernous drums, nodding to Kanye’s Yeezus as much as Rihanna’s Rated R. It could have easily set the tone for an album of darkly experimental of pop-R&B, brazen and at the vanguard.
Instead, Joyride simply treads water. The dancehall confection “Me So Bad,” with a crooning Ty Dolla $ign and lazily on-brand French Montana, is the upbeat, just-fine radio grab that just might blare out of cars all summer. But in context, the song sounds like it was beamed in from a different album altogether. Lead single “No Drama”’s brash, rapped verses and lopsided beat flag it as a successor to the no-fucks pomp of “2 On,” only this time it’s hobbled by a dismal Offset verse and a joyless, repetitive chorus. The album feels flattened in a way that does Tinashe a disservice; her usual free-flowing variety of styles and textures feels oddly at a distance among Joyride’s grab bag.
The disjointedness is a shame, because Tinashe’s voice throughout remains as syrupy and adaptable as ever: She climbs to the highest reaches of her falsetto on “He Don’t Want It” and later drops to a deep, grainy tone on the hard-bitten, electric-guitar ballad “Salt.” In both instances, she sounds relaxed, even soulful. The artistry of her voice lies in those moments of versatility and charisma, but they’re too isolated across Joyride to land with the kind of impact they deserve.


Beauty and chaos intermingle in these early-1970s touchstones of avant-garde folk. The French-Portuguese singer’s unearthly voice and searching lyrics made them cult classics.

Catherine Ribeiro + Alpes: N°2/Âme Debout/Paix

N°2/Âme Debout/Paix

The first three records by the French-Portuguese singer Catherine Ribeiro and her inventive, psychedelic backing band Alpes are the types of elusive record-collector gems that feel like transmissions from another world. These new reissues from Anthology Recordings mark their first official release in the United States, and, up until now, their legend was due in part to their scarcity. Kim Gordon, one of Ribeiro’s most vocal supporters, recently noted that she only discovered Alpes’ 1971 sophomore album, Âme Debout, around a decade ago, possibly hipped to it by Jim O’Rourke. A lot of people arrive at Ribeiro’s music with similar stories. You hear this unearthly voice emerging from somebody’s speakers. You listen to the wild, visionary music accompanying it. Suddenly you need to know everything.
Ask Ribeiro, and you won’t find many answers. The accompanying liner notes sketch her life prior to Alpes’ debut, 1970’s Nº2, in stark terms: “It was an immense pile of waste and solitude,” is how she summarizes her formative years. In her 1999 memoir, L’Enfance, Ribeiro dives deeper. She was born in Lyon, France during wartime. Her brother died as an infant. She spent an inordinate amount of her youth hiding in the darkness of a makeshift bomb cellar. Before she immersed herself in music, Ribeiro was an actor, appearing in Jean Luc Godard’s 1963 anti-war film Les Carabiniers. In her most memorable scene, she watches her soldier husband display a series of surreal, beatific postcards from the war. The message was simple: Look how we suppress and miscast the brutality of our lives; look how we reenact that violence on others. Ribeiro swore to never make this mistake in her art.
With Alpes, Ribeiro filtered nihilism, anger, and empathy into triumphant, multi-layered collages, galloping and stuttering as though the acid had kicked in midway through a hike at sunrise. “Peace to those who howl because they see clearly,” goes one of her iconic lyrics. Ribeiro does just that, but her voice is such a versatile instrument that it cannot be limited to one mission. She laughs, she caws, she screams, she mourns, she barks, she brays. She sings about suicide, about motherhood and madness, about doomed affairs between Eastern European women and politicians from imagined countries. The music—which calcified into the sound of an identifiable avant-garde-leaning psych-folk band throughout these three LPs—touches on the swirl of 1960s rock and the theatrical swell of 1970s prog, stretching both genres to their most impressionistic extremes. As a group, Alpes can sound eerily beautiful or demonically possessed, sometimes whiplashing between those modes as if satirizing the entire scope of rock music.
Prior to the formation of Alpes, Ribeiro mostly sang folk songs. Among her first recordings was a French translation of Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.” In her home country, where solo singers were still more fashionable than bands, she summoned a backing group called 2Bis, featuring multi-instrumentalist Patrice Moullet. Their music rattled and buzzed like something wild in a too-small cage: You could hear Ribeiro trying to break free. When she rebranded as Alpes, Ribeiro fully embraced chaos. Nº2’s “Poème Non Epique” spans 18 minutes as she intones with ferocity against Moullet’s rumbling backdrop. Inspired by Malcolm Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano (and the hallucinogens Lowry reportedly ingested to complete it), Ribeiro aimed to make music that spoke to her “cravings for freedom, for incomplete epiphanies, for spontaneous careless decisions.” Smoky and uncontainable, Nº2 finds her embarking on that journey like she’d been waiting her whole life to take it.
From here, her music would grow more disciplined and more boundless. Moullet would remain the only consistent member of her band, alternating between gorgeously fingerpicked classical guitar and noisy, invented instruments like his “cosmophone,” which looks like a lyre but sounds like a buzzsaw. Âme Debout, the sparsest release of the three, peaks with its ballads at the beginning and end: “Diborowska” and “Dingue,” acoustic laments that Ribeiro sings in a frayed, desperate tone like she’s trying to tear them apart from the inside. At the center of the album is a series of tracks titled “Alpes” that feel improvisatory, almost drone-like, save for one thrashing element (Claude Thiebaut’s restless percussion in “Alpes 1,” Ribeiro’s unsettling growls in “Alpes 2”). The crescendo resolves with the wordless “Aria Populaire,” a prayer that forecasts the emotional clarity to come.
If Âme Debout was the sound of a band finding its footing, then 1972’s Paix is when they become airborne. It stands as Ribeiro’s masterpiece because it comes the closest to containing her multitudes, housing her most beautiful composition (the love song “Jusqu'à Ce Que La force de T'aimer Me Manque”) and her most wildly experimental. The music is driven by an incessant rhythm, echoed by Patrice Lemoine of the prog/space-rock band Gong on organ (maybe the sound that most directly time-stamps this music to its era). Throughout, Ribeiro gazes toward the future. The final third of the epic title track resembles doom metal in its descending bassline and Ribeiro’s spectral vocals. But instead of building to a roar, it simply sustains, melting into the closing “Un jour... la mort”—a nearly half-hour piece that’s alternately ambient and explosive, earthy and weightless.
For all its hallucinogenic qualities, Ribeiro’s work, as you dive deeper, proves to be less of an escape than a magnification: She zooms so deep into her psyche that all its turmoil appears as stillness. Unlike some cult acts, Ribeiro’s career has continued long after these quietly influential albums. Among her later recordings are faithful covers of Edith Piaf’s songbook: music that, even at its most traditional, Ribeiro can’t help but scour for its latent mayhem. Listening back to her early work, you can hear her challenging herself to find the darkness within traditionally beautiful sounds—the horror that’s always on the other side of awe. “Calm is not of this world,” she commands in “Dingue.” “What’s the point of being calm? I want to go crazy.” It’s the legacy she created, a mantra for the legions of disquieted minds who heard themselves in her voice and howled along.


Milk 'N' Cookies formed in the early 1970s in Woodmere, Long Island, a short drive from the bustling proto-punk scene in New York City. Their output, collected on this Captured Tracks anthology, was a precursor to U.S. power pop, and they helped create the "tough glam" aesthetic that continued to rear its sequined head from the New Romantics to hair metal to Britpop and beyond

Milk ‘N’ Cookies: Milk ‘N’ Cookies Box Set

Milk ‘N’ Cookies Box Set

Music, the world's universal language, is for everybody. The music industry, however, is a loosely regulated crap shoot which, while occasionally lifting a creative genius to godlike status, leaves a trail of decimated bands under its boots. For every Nirvana, there are a dozen Mudhoneys; for every Marc Bolan there is a Jobriath; an artist of essentially equal opportunity that for whatever reason—timing, money, plain old shit luck—gets left behind on the path to superstardom. However, if those artists are lucky, they can accumulate years and years of goodwill among music fans who excavate and polish these diamonds in the rough.
Milk 'N' Cookies are the latest such group to benefit from this history-revising eye. They formed in the early 1970s in Woodmere, Long Island, a short drive from the bustling proto-punk scene in New York City, where the New York Dolls reigned supreme and their brand of glam-influenced gutter rock was already beginning to burn out under its own brilliance. While most of the local bands around them were steeped in stadium rock, Milk 'N' Cookies, still in their teens, decided to record 4-track songs influenced by the British glitter rock of the era—T. Rex, Bowie, Sweet, Roxy Music, et al.—and perhaps unwittingly became precursors to U.S. power pop. They have a major hand in creating the "tough glam" aesthetic, a sort of blend of UK androgyny, N.Y. grit and L.A. glamour that continued to rear its sequined head from the New Romantics to hair metal to Britpop, and beyond.
In their very first photo shoot, Milk 'N' Cookies sport long manes of brown hair, wearing novelty bowties and clutching teddy bears, yet the songs compiled on their first LP, reissued here by Captured Tracks, are all about girls, sex, and letting loose, still slightly scandalous subjects for suburban America at that point. Frontman Justin Strauss uses a sing-song, breathy voice, like a lovesick schoolboy taunting his crush on the playground. It's not emasculating at all, more of an assertion of desire that makes every Milk 'N' Cookies song seem ripped from a teenager's diary (which they very well may have been).
Somewhat self-prophesying, "(Dee Dee You're) Stuck on a Star" addresses a girlfriend more interested in chasing a famous popstar than seeing her boyfriend's band, and the song launches the compilation on a strong note, with searing riffs from the kind of super-dry guitars and wobbly bass that scream "'70s garage" to hardcore fans. The pop sensibility is immediate: Milk 'N' Cookies rarely lets up on powerful melodies, and it's a potent throwback to a time where bands put out albums in which literally every song could be a conceivable single. The band's only official single, the mid-tempo "Little, Lost and Innocent," coyly begins with the line "She was underage/ And so was I," which is so much more disarming when sang by well-scrubbed all-American boys who would not have looked out of place in the pages of a vintage Tiger Beat. The barely legal theme reaches its apex with "Rabbits Make Love," which even has a six-bar breakdown of heavy breathing by Strauss. Despite all this heavy panting, petting, and leering, Milk 'N' Cookies never feel sleazy, just funny and playful and sexy.
After a few years of delayed album releases and relocations to London and Los Angeles (the minutiae of which are rigorously documented in Milk 'N' Cookies' 60-page booklet), Milk 'N' Cookies star ultimately fizzled, which is a shame; tracks like "Just a Kid" and "Tinkertoy Tomorrow" are tight and delicious, and hint at a career that could have rivaled the best power pop bands of the decade. This career anthology is about as complete as a collection can get, compiling pretty much everything the band ever committed to tape. A few very rough demos by guitarist Ian North are concise and enjoyable, the kind of sound that indie pop bands like Television Personalities would release on purpose less than 10 years later. An entire surviving band practice tape from 1973 is also present, which is a little trying to get through, but there's also a scorching demo of a song called "Randy Slut," which rescues disc 2 from diehards-only purgatory. For the non-connoisseur, Milk 'N' Cookies may not hold an immediate appeal, but for even the most casual '70s rock enthusiast, this collection is nothing short of essential.


Mark Kozelek’s latest diary entry of an album amounts to a rote and barely listenable slog of hackneyed impersonations, petty grievances, and prideful nostalgia.

This Is My Dinner

Someday soon, Mark Kozelek might write a gorgeous tune about exactly how miserable he has been for the last four years. In February 2014, Kozelek released Benji, an exquisite album that guided a lifetime of riverine melancholy into a pool of intimacy and empathy. He spun the details of his life into gold, turning idle thoughts about Led Zeppelin into an anthem for outsiders or a trip to a Postal Service show into a wry reflection on aging. The record sparked a renaissance for the former Red House Painter, who, in the previous decade, had made his most notable music by singing the songs of others.
Kozelek has long been notorious for scolding talkative crowds and fans who stared at their cell phones as he sang, but, amid that revival, something seemed to crack in an irreparable way. He soon called a North Carolina festival crowd hillbillies and demanded they shut the fuck up, sang new songs that called two female music journalists bitches for doing their jobs, and wrote a tune called ”War on Drugs: Suck My Cock” after he overheard what he dubbed their “beer-commercial lead-guitar shit” during his own festival set. Meanwhile, he made two new Sun Kil Moon albums that took the popularity of Benji as a license to tell us everything about his life. More diary extracts with soundtracks than proper albums, 2015’s Universal Themes and last year’s Common as Light and Love Are Red Valleys of Blood were painfully mundane, non-transcendent documents of Kozelek’s touring existence and his confessed obsessions.
This Is My Dinner, Kozelek’s third album as Sun Kil Moon since Benji, is at once the apogee of that approach and the nadir of his career. It is a day-by-day, flight-by-flight, fit-by-fit chronicle of a 2017 European tour that amounts to a rote and barely listenable slog of hackneyed impersonations, petty grievances, and prideful nostalgia. Kozelek speaks, sings, and sighs 8,000 words across 90 minutes in an authoritative display of musical manspreading, built on Kozelek’s fundamental belief that everything that happens to him, from the disappointment of a canceled tour stop to the elation of great Italian food, is worthy of the world’s attention. Assuredly, it is not.
Kozelek isn’t the only songwriter who has had success with this mode of exhibitionist expression, of course, where the tiniest detail or circumstance plucked from day-to-day activity can offer an unexpected insight about life, loss, or emotion at large. After the death of his wife, Geneviève Castrée, Phil Elverum turned the act of taking out the day’s garbage into a moment of quiet desolation—and a jolting reminder as to why he had to keep going. Last year, Julie Byrne used the image of crossing the western United States to express a core of existential restlessness. Vivid songwriting, whether hip-hop or country, can hinge on these lived-in details. But during This Is My Dinner, Kozelek treats his songs like status updates on a Facebook account he again tells us he does not have. You often hear about bands leaving room for the singer, building up the lyrics rather than blocking them out. In this case, you wish that Kozelek had left any space at all for what sounds like a subtle, sophisticated backing crew, anchored by the expressive drumming of the Dirty Three’s Jim White. But, no: This is about Kozelek.
Recent themes return—Kozelek’s travels of Portugal and Norway, his anxiety over mass shootings, his subservience to his moods, how he understands pain better than the rest of us, his issues with his dad, how much meaning he extracts from boxers. What’s different here, though, is just how much we learn about Kozelek’s former virility and how losing it seems more bitter than sweet. He tells us about the time a promoter called him indie rock’s Wilt Chamberlain, the basketball star who claims to have slept with 20,000 women. He tries to dazzle with bygone tales of all the ménages à trois he’s had in Copenhagen and how he just doesn’t need them anymore. He vividly recounts escaping down frigid Oslo streets after a fan’s boyfriend caught her giving him a handjob and sucking his thumb. “When you’re in your 20s, in my opinion, nothing should be off limits,” Kozelek, 51, sings. Listening to This Is My Dinner is like going to a 25-year-high-school reunion and sitting beside the sad, divorced, and bloated former jock who tells you a dozen times about his game-winning touchdown at homecoming, then winks every time a pretty classmate walks by.
Not too long ago, the party line on Kozelek held that it would be beautiful enough to hear him sing the telephone book. Time and sadness had pockmarked his tenor in ways that conveyed hidden emotion in every word, the way music lurks in the recesses of a record. But here, amid this largely hook-less morass, he sings like even he’s worn out by this mode of maudlin revelation. During the 12-minute “Linda Blair,” he compares the sound of a sick baby on a plane to the possessed Exorcist character, wishes for her health, and then impersonates her cough repeatedly for cheap laughs. Near the song’s end, which you begin to doubt will ever come, he sings a fragment of Queen’s “Somebody to Love” again and again, his voice nearly drowned by the band he’s built, as if he’s given up. During the 13-minute “Soap for Joyful Hands,” he tells us, at length, about how he likes socks, how he washes them in hotel sinks on tour, and how he wrote a “captivating song about washing socks in hotel sinks. Who else can give you that?” In a song that is barely more interesting than the phone book itself, Kozelek sounds listless and bored, his falsetto more juvenile whimper than elegant wisp. Another urban legend, debunked.
Despite this seemingly interminable prosaic mire, there are some affecting moments here, instances where Kozelek’s hyper-specificity is again heartrending. Over seesawing piano, he croons about wishing he’d hugged Elliott Smith the last time he saw him in Sweden. During the title track, he recalls a previous Norwegian tour where he got the news that his cat was dying; he calls the promoter who bought his flight back home so he could kiss her one more time by name, thanking him for that act of kindness, his voice still catching with feeling after all these years.
But then he yells an anecdote about telling an irate fan that he hopes he gets hit by a bus, blaming his outburst on a lack of sleep and demanding a free pass for being an asshole. That sudden pivot illuminates the gulf between honesty and vulnerability, between simply detailing the bad things that happen in your life and actually extracting some self-reflection from them. Kozelek spends most of This Is My Dinner drowning in the divide. Art need not atone for the sins of its creator, of course, but Kozelek sings of his issues and experiences with devilish bemusement, as if he’s telling you this is the way we all should be—unhinged, self-righteous, proud of it. It is, by and large, theater of and for one.
Against all odds, his shuffling ode to “David Cassidy,” written en route to Barcelona the day after “The Partridge Family” star died, is sweet and endearing, a frank confession of inspiration from an unlikely source. What’s more, Kozelek shows some self-awareness here, twice checking himself out loud from indulging the sort of tangents that dilute so much of This Is My Dinner. The tune smartly teases the melody of the “Partridge” theme, “Come on Get Happy,” by nestling it into the guitar’s radiant folds. But then, as though on a dare, Koz & the Boys tack on an unnecessary cover of the song itself, followed by a ragged beer-commercial rendition of AC/DC’s “Rock ‘N’ Roll Singer.” Equally earnest and disdainful, Kozelek holds single notes for 15 seconds, daring you to turn it off. On an album where he seems to delight only in the sound of himself, you don’t need extra encouragement.
The four-year landslide of Kozelek from the heights of Benji to the abyss of This Is My Dinner is a sort of necessary parable for how not to behave in a society where people who are not straight, white, moneyed, old men are getting overdue seats at the table. He insists there is revelatory poignancy and power in the banality of being unpleasant; if there is, it is only by virtue of counterexample, illuminating examples of how not to act in this world. During “Copenhagen,” Kozelek misinterprets innocent conversations with a female fan outside of a venue he’s just played as an invitation to a tryst, then pins the mistake on the woman when he realizes he was wrong. During endlessly episodic opener “This Is Not Possible,” he inconveniences those at his beck and call, musicians or hotel employees who stand idly by or re-fire the stove to make sure he still gets his tagliatelle after a late sleep. And during “Candles,” he scolds the flight attendant who simply asks that he follow the rules and close his laptop before landing, even if he is not done with “this perfect song I was gonna sing to my audience.”
Yes, these are songs, supposed expressions of a character, but they are as artless, discursive, and slapdash as a to-do list or a diary entry; the central character seems to be only a deep sense of self-pity in need of external validation. Kozelek capitalizes on playing the victim, on the theatrics of being lampooned for just telling it like it is, man. For a guy who admits, “My life is pretty good overall” while complaining about, of all things, bicycles in Copenhagen, he sure has a lot of blame to offer for anything that’s not quite copacetic.
These songs are not merely about a European tour; they are about Kozelek’s belief that he is apart from and above the rest of the world. He wants you to listen and feel bad for him, to suffer along with the travails of a moderately successful touring musician who is starting to ponder Viagra as a viable option and (by his own admission, multiple times during This Is My Dinner) cannot figure out anything else to do with his life other than write these long songs. You’ll feel bad, all right, and probably even laugh—but not for the reasons Kozelek hopes. Someday soon, he might write a song about that rejection, too.


On the third volume in his solo series, Black Thought once again demonstrates the power of his dense, winding freestyles and stretches into new, more vulnerable territory.

Black Thought : Streams of Thought, Vol. 3: Cane & Able EP

One of the most hair-raising moments in the Roots’ extensive catalog is “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction),” a muscular showcase for Black Thought. His feverish extended verse hits like a crash landing, every word a plume of flame. In the six years since the last Roots album, Black Thought has turned the intensity of “75 Bars” into his calling card, transforming freestyles and guest spots into athletic events. Streams of Thought Vol. 3: Cane and Able both continues that tradition and attempts to depart from it.
The record largely stays true to the format established by volumes one and two, privileging formless energy over structure. Roughly half the songs here are composed of one dense, winding verse. The EP also continues the convention of Thought working with one main producer. After 9th Wonder and Salaam Remi, here he teams with storied Bad Boy producer Sean C of the Hitmen, who provides a textured but unobtrusive canvas on which Black Thought can think out loud.
He’s got a lot on his mind. Personal relationships, his legacy, and race are frequent subjects, mostly in quick flashes. His writing has become showy lately, sometimes undermining its sharpness. Too often, that tendency leads him toward filler, as on “State Prisoner” where he goes full Rap God: “In conclusion, I wanna clear the confusion/Any rumors the artist you’re currently hearing is human.” Likewise, “Thought vs Everybody” begins with him on a throne (which has become a recurring image of him lately) and runs the theme of greatness into the ground. “Am I a journal or journalist? Herbal eternalist/Olympic tournament level genius author, affirmative,” he raps. He sounds more stoned than omnipotent.
The record is more interesting when the Herculean feats of lyricism take a back seat to introspection. “We Could Be Good (United)” places his marriage under a microscope, acknowledging the strain that the Roots’ grueling schedule can place on a relationship. “Magnificent” is an origin story of sorts, establishing a slope for Black Thought’s ascent from mortal to deity. Through hip-hop, he recounts, he went from drug addiction and self-harm to pride, a transformation he likens to Detroit Red and LeRoi Jones becoming Malik el-Shabazz and Amiri Baraka. “Nature Of the Beast,” a somber collaboration with Portugal The Man and The Last Artful, Dodgr, features him delicately singing of alienation and stage fright, a rare moment of vulnerability.

The record’s highlight is “Fuel,” another team-up with Portugal The Man and The Last Artful, Dodgr, that finds Black Thought seeking penitence. The lush, gospel-inflected production stretches out his cadences, making his performance less streamlined and mechanical. He remains guarded, but you can feel the weariness in his voice, the hesitance in his word choices. That ability to use words as textures as much as tools has always been a hallmark of his style; without that internal balance, a hip-hop band never could have worked. Ultimately, it’s that ingrained instinct that saves from Vol 3. from falling prey to the same monotony and excess as an Eminem or Royce album. Though “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction)” is powered by Black Thought’s exquisite prowess, it still moves like a Roots song.

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