Reconnecting with his heartland rock roots, John Rossiter interrogates his artistic impulses and creates his most magnetic and direct record to date.

The Fool

Here’s an incomplete cast of characters that populate The Fool, Young Jesus’ provocative seventh album: a pair of washed-up outlaws, an elderly man entirely reliant on his children, a doctor who gets caught creeping on his patient’s social media, and, on “MOTY,” a menagerie of garden variety misogynists, hypocrites, and insecure momma’s boys fronting as alpha males. Oh, and the person who gets lost in their memories of being abused as a child and comes to, decades later, standing over a dog they’ve just beaten.
Yet, the most unnerving characters are the ones John Rossiter allows us to believe are himself—artists who’ve witnessed the life-saving powers of art firsthand and seen it curdle into condescension, delusions of grandeur, and revulsion towards the people most like him. While Rossiter hasn’t confirmed whether any of The Fool is autobiographical, it’s an unsparing, indelible product of a man who had to question every one of his artistic motivations before making the most vital album of his life.
Rossiter’s interrogative approach—to pop music, to literature, gender norms, to the social contract, to truth itself—serves as the connective tissue throughout Young Jesus’ fascinating discography, which has earned legitimate comparisons to the Hold Steady, Talk Talk, and Albert Ayler. But there’s also the one remnant of Rossiter’s formative era as a hard-drinking Midwestern garage rocker: the impulse to blow everything up on the verge of a conventional success. After 2015’s Grow/Decompose brought Young Jesus’ initial phase as Chicagoland barstool bards to a wider audience, Rossiter moved to Los Angeles and did what transplants do: experimented with spirituality, got into free jazz, and started book clubs. A trilogy of exploratory albums followed, each one tantalizingly close to a masterpiece. But due to burnout—or just the sense that Young Jesus’ incarnation as a post-rock jam band had become its own kind of formula—Rossiter disbanded the group and released the stripped-down Shepherd Head; like all Young Jesus albums, it felt transitional, but this was the first time that Rossiter lacked conviction in his direction.
The Fool does not have that problem. The opening duo of “Brenda & Diane” and “Two Brothers” brings Young Jesus back to their roots—gleaming acoustic strums and brassy synth washes, a gruff guy singing imperiously of the downtrodden trying to protect their dignity, the sort of things that gets called “heartland rock” in 2024; surely someone as studious as Rossiter recognizes the evocative nature of their respective titles. Whereas most of Young Jesus’ work on Saddle Creek trafficked in dialectics, arcane philosophical tracts, and 15-minute jam sessions, The Fool gets right to the point, with Rossiter putting his trust in direct statements—“True love is a little bit like hell,” the goddamn American Dream, concepts dismissed as cliche until time and experience reveals their enduring truth. Towards the end of “Two Brothers,” Rossiter meets a humble gardener who works the Earth to get closer to God, which would’ve been too pat of a literary device had Rossiter not temporarily quit music to study permaculture.
Even as The Fool shapeshifts into meditative jazz-pop, torch song, and frisky folk-rock, there isn’t a second of passive listening to be had; Rossiter and his new cast of collaborators confront and engage the listener as if their undivided attention essential to keeping the unorthodox mix from collapsing on itself. He might not be the most technically proficient singer, but Rossiter’s fearless—no tonal or emotional register is out of his range. To accurately express the decade's worth of thwarted desires packed in the chorus of “Rabbit,” you don’t hit the notes, they need to be smashed to bits. On “Sunrise,” Rossiter plays the role of a singer who believes they communicate directly with God, but not so far gone they lose their sense of humor—“Don’t think I take it light/Yeah I bought some new pants!” In the rare times when Rossiter takes on a more subdued tone, the mix is riddled with found sound, bursts of noise, and curious harmonies that all hit like a sudden burst of cortisol from the shame of pressing an accidental “like” or experiencing the first pangs of a vulnerability hangover.
“Rich” is that very feeling extended to about six minutes. The narrator is the product of ill-gotten gains that have produced lawyers, schizophrenics, bankers, anorexics, active and sober addicts, completed suicides and four others that “tried, but we didn’t get far.” And now, an artist who sees far too many white guys just like him, overcompensating for their privilege and competing for “the purest of all.” Calling out the hypocrisy of indie rock trust funders isn’t brave on its own, but “Rich” calls into question why and if these conversations are even worth having—does generational wealth create generational trauma? Why is it assumed to preclude the ability to make great art? Is the glorification of poverty a subtle form of condescension? “And the worst of it all is that art saved my life,” Rossiter intones during the final verse, where his voice eventually undergoes an Irishman-style de-aging to bring them back to the time they bought their first guitar and deviated from the path of McKinsey internships, law school, feckless philanthropy, and everything else that makes the rich a different kind of miserable than everyone else.
The thorniest question posed by The Fool is why I’d expect, or even want “Rich” or “Dancer” to be explicitly about Rossiter. Even if that would require him owning some embarrassing truths, it would actually work to Young Jesus’ benefit, placing The Fool in a lineage of indie rock lifers making a mid-career transition to full disclosure and achieving new heights of respect and acclaim. But this is yet another impulse that Rossiter has challenged—“Wanted to write about the bad men that I’ve known,” he moans during “Am I the Only One,” before he questions whether this would be just another way to reinforce his own self-image.
Too often, “therapeutic” and “confessional” music is viewed as praiseworthy by default, where the unburdening of one’s own flaws is an end unto itself rather than a means of shedding ego and shame to foster connection. When the recurring character of Eloise sees a ping from her Instagram page, she doesn’t screenshot it to shame her doctor; she thinks of her father and her brother and the loneliness that moves them to scroll through a stranger’s pictures. “MOTY” (i.e., “Man of the Year”) starts cynically, in judgment of Great Men, and ends with Rossiter finding strength in the presence of the good men in his immediate circle.
Perhaps the most daring song Young Jesus wrote during this process could’ve offered a more tidy first-person narrative had it made the final tracklist. “Another album in the books,” Rossiter sings on the B-side to “Brenda & Diane,” acknowledging up front how this one might be received differently than his previous six—“to Mom and Dad: I know it hurts.” It’s called “Hollywood Ending,” a title that bears more weight given Rossiter’s experience writing for television. Instead, we got The Fool, an album that offers its emotional reckoning as a messy and necessary new beginning for Young Jesus.


On what is only his second official live album in his 20-year career, the celebrated electronic producer demonstrates his range—and his mastery of tension and release.

Four Tet: Live at Funkhaus Berlin, 10th May 2018

Live at Funkhaus Berlin, 10th May 2018

Is there a producer more generous than Four Tet? While Kieran Hebden kept up a steady flow of records through much of the 2000s (not to mention a number of collaborative releases with the late jazz drummer Steve Reid), since rebooting his own Text Records imprint in 2007, he’s rewarded his fans with an abundance of music. He uploaded some of his earliest productions as a 38-minute deep dive, cobbled together nearly two decades of one-offs into a handy compendium, then made another for his other handle, Percussions. Beyond his own productions, Hebden openly shares his wide-roving tastes, regularly digging into his collection for an NTS Radio residency, not to mention nearing a thousand songs on his Spotify playlist.
So nonchalantly upping the 17-track Live at Funkhaus Berlin, 10th May 2018 in late August represents a continuation of his low-key, generous ways, despite the fact that up until that point, his only previous official live album was a Copenhagen set Domino released on CDR back in 2004. That particular show found him pushing his Rounds material to the absolute limit as he unlocked the ways his laptop could become an improvising instrument in its own right—a path he would explore on albums like Everything Ecstatic and alongside Reid. In comparison, Funkhaus doesn’t rework his tracks extensively so much as show how his last four albums’ worth of explorations—from Bollywood to trip-hop, new age to 2-step anthem—can all tidily hang together.
The nearly two-hour show primarily draws from his post-Domino catalog (though he dusts off a classic from Rounds), taking two tracks apiece from Pink and Beautiful Rewind and pulling primarily from last year’s New Energy. Four Tet remains one of the rare electronic producers who thrives on dismantling his music before a sold-out crowd, juggling and rejiggering the components into something new, so it’s not quite as breathtaking to hear him stay well within the confines of the heady “Planet,” which opens the show. Nudging elements of the original in the mix rather than exploding the space around it, he also keeps “Parallel Jalebi” pretty much as is, lingering amid the breathless R&B ululations and skittering rhythms more or less as we recall them.
Some 20 years into his career as a live artist—and more recently as an in-demand DJ—Hebden has mastered tension and release, deftly moving between peaks and comedowns in his show. He also knows when to luxuriate in a beat, as on an expanded take on New Energy highlight “Two Thousand and Seventeen,” the thrumming strings and downtempo beat so laid-back as to become narcotic. While the tempo picks up from there, the set also enters into a bit of a lull: The details that distinguish “Ocoras” and “Lush” on record blur together live, at least until the chopped pirate-radio shouts and tumbling snares of “Kool FM” finally break through, one of the high-energy breakouts of the show.
Hebden speeds up those jungle breaks and shoves them right into the giddy flickers of Rounds crowd favorite “Spirit Fingers,” which dissolves far too soon, at the four-minute mark, into “LA Trance.” It’s on this somewhat inconspicuous New Energy track that Hebden unearths the most promising new terrain: Its ripples are contemplative and expansive, yet it builds up to a pulsing peak. Amid the already extended “Morning Side,” Hebden drops in some haywire energy at the midway point, finding dubby new spots to burrow into. No matter the dizzying detours he takes, he always winds his way back to the sample of Lata Mangeshkar, the legendary Indian playback singer whose haunting voice buttresses the track. It’s a fitting conclusion for the show, overshadowing the dulcet encore “Daughter” and some four minutes of clapping. It’s a bountiful offering for fans, even if the set ultimately offers few true surprises.


The songwriter’s first album of new music in 13 years is wise and economical. At 71, John Prine is a virtuoso at understatement, finding the joy in the mundane, and writing about what it means to be alive.

The Tree of Forgiveness

John Prine wants a cigarette, but he can’t have one. In the last 20 years, he’s had cancer twice. Sometimes he considers standing next to smokers outside restaurants just to get as close to that experience as he can, that smell, that ritual. He’s 71 years old now. He could be retired from songwriting and no one would blame him. But it’s tough to quit two 50-year-old habits, so he’s got a new album out called The Tree of Forgiveness, his first collection of original songs in 13 years.
But gone is the John Prine who, in his 20s, wrote both the saddest song in the world, “Sam Stone,” and the saddest song in the universe, “Hello in There.” That sweeping heartbreak, that pain, has turned more peaceful with age. Bob Dylan once said that Prine’s “stuff is pure Proustian existentialism. Midwestern mind trips to the nth degree.” That’s probably fair, but on this album, Prine’s writing is more economical. He doesn’t say anything he doesn’t need to, leaving the space in his songs to do it for you. He lets the mood talk.
This album does not contain a line like “Jesus Christ died for nothin’, I suppose.” It contains lines about porches and washing machines and shadows on ceilings. But in their own quiet, ramshackle ways, they’re about being alive and what it means to be alive. There’s a hard-won wisdom to all these songs, a wisdom that can only come with age, where pork chops can be one of the most important things in the world, where joy and divinity can be found in the everyday, on a porch, looking at clouds. It takes age to realize that truth, the thing we fight so hard to find, can be mundane.
It’s the air around these songs that’s existential, a sense of loneliness and the enormous weight of time passing. When I finished this album for the first time, I thought of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Not any lines, but a stage direction: They do not move. Prine may be reflecting on the past and the future an awful lot, but this is not one of those albums where an old man ponders death. It can’t be, because Prine has always done that, and he doesn’t do it any more or less than usual. It’s just a new album by John Prine, a humble but respectable one. If there hadn’t been a 13 year absence of new John Prine songs, you couldn’t even call it a return to form, because his form has never left him.
Even with production by David Cobb, who’s worked with younger singer-songwriters Jason Isbell and Sturgill Simpson, Prine doesn’t pull a single stunt. This is essentially an acoustic album with the same chords and melodies Prine always uses, plus occasional spare and tasteful backing from his regular band along with folks like Isbell and Amanda Shires. The album’s just a little over half-an-hour long, and it’s all of a piece, conveying casual imagery that meanders from the hands-in-pockets wistfulness of drifting and kicking on trash cans (“Knockin’ on Your Screen Door”) to turning on the TV and looking out your window.
Throughout, he has a virtuoso grasp of understatement. On “Summer’s End,” a heartbreaker about lost love, he wrings enormous pathos out of a chorus as simple as this:

Come on home
No you don’t have to
Be alone
Just come on home

The best two songs are the ones where he didn’t use a co-writer. The first is “The Lonesome Friends of Science,” a reflection on the end of the world with a quintessentially Prine digression about how Pluto, demoted as a planet, is now an old has-been, hoping he’ll get recognized in a Hollywood sushi bar.
The other is the album’s closer, “When I Get to Heaven.” It’s a farewell hootenanny that sounds like a daydream. When he dies, he wants to do all the stuff we’d all like to do. He’s going to see his mom and his dad and his brother. He’s going to take his wristwatch off. But he really, really wants you to know exactly one thing. When John Prine gets to heaven, he’s going to smoke a cigarette that’s nine miles long.


The debut from the Berlin-based producer explores at the idea of power in the world and within themself, tiptoeing the line between exuberance and terror.

Power

Since 2011, Lotic has played in a space of heightened contrasts, embracing the hyperreal potentials of electronic music much like their contemporaries Arca and Sophie. And like those producers, Lotic has moved from a tight focus on the more formal aspects of their music—the serrated edges of a given synthesizer patch or the structure of a mangled club beat—to a broader, more comprehensive look at narrative and affect. Made during a period of instability and homelessness, Power, their debut album, weaves Lotic’s voice into the palette established by 2015’s Heterocetera and Agitations EPs. Those records were certainly evocative, both in their jagged, glitching sounds and in track titles like “Trauma” and “Slay,” but they felt like they were hinting at a thematic core that never fully surfaced. There’s a difference between making music around yourself and making music about yourself. On Power, Lotic gets personal.
The nameless weight that stalked Heterocetera and Agitations lets up somewhat on Power. Lotic’s voice—most often presented as a whisper or a murmur, more a rhythmic tool than a vehicle for melody—cuts through the tension inherent to their production style. Hearing a flurry of hi-hats and the growl of a square-wave synth can be alienating, albeit thrilling, without an explicitly human element to latch onto; by lacing the voice into their work, Lotic offers a hand to the listener, as if saying, “I’m here with you.” Some of the most fascinating moments on Power arise when Lotic’s voice comprises the song’s backbone. A repeated vocal measure begins “Hunted,” and it sets the tempo for the big band beat that later stomps in. The voice is not the accessory, rather it’s the director of the action; the words Lotic says don’t merely glance off the instrumentation, they invite the drum rolls and queasy synth lines to keep pace with their urgency.
“Brown skin, masculine frame/Head’s a target/Acting real feminine/Make ’em vomit,” Lotic whispers, caught in the uncanny space between feeling in control of their presence and being acutely aware that their existence as a black transfeminine person puts them in danger. They collapse the word “masculine” to the space of a single syllable, then elongate “feminine” as if it’s something they’re showing off for a crowd. Around their words, the percussion veers between threatening and celebratory, as the experience of moving through the world as a trans person often is, simultaneously. There is so much joy in manifesting as you really are, and then there is the world.
The album tiptoes that line between exuberance and terror. Strings climb an octave over a lurching, ramshackle drum pattern on “Distribution of Care,” then, at the song’s midpoint, flip directions and began tumbling down toward an uneasy bassline. The drums pick up speed soon after the reversal, as if closing in on a target. Elsewhere, moments of softness and levity emerge: On “Fragility,” tubular bells map a sweet melody against an industrial scrape of percussion, and on “Heart,” Lotic duets with Argentinian artist Moro, singing an unstable melody that vaults sporadically into the head voice, as though both artists were seized by unexpected moments of tenderness. “I’ll give you my heart/If I can trust you,” they each sing alternately. It’s a disarming moment on a dense album, a raw edge left unsmoothed.
Power’s closing track, “Solace,” sees Lotic at their most emotionally exposed. Rather than dance among nervous, complex percussion, their voice floats among thick slabs of bass, gentle chains of synthesizers, and deep, gnashing drums that apply and then relieve pressure as they appear and disappear. “It’s gonna be okay,” Lotic repeats, their syllables long and syrupy, as if they were self-soothing after trauma. Toward the end of the song, their vocals seem to blend with their surroundings—it can be hard to pick out where a wordless backing voice ends and a high note on a keyboard begins. That confusion feels less like a dissolving of the album’s human presence and more like a reconciliation of it, an exposition of the emotional within the technical. On Power, Lotic re-harnesses their production proficiency toward a trickier goal than what they’ve attempted in the past. In the center of their elaborate electronic constructions, they’ve staged their deeply human terrors and triumphs, and traced the way the power structures of the world flow around them.


Featuring artists like Superchunk, the Mountain Goats, and Iron & Wine, this 25-song benefit compilation for the beloved North Carolina venue Cat’s Cradle boasts far more riches than a charity project requires.

Various Artists: Cover Charge: NC Artists Go Under Cover to Benefit Cat’s Cradle

Things change slowly at Cat’s Cradle, the storied North Carolina rock club that turned 50 last year. It took half that time to meander from a basement in Chapel Hill through several nearby locations to its current home in a Carrboro shopping center, half a mile from where it began in 1969. One thing you can say about North Carolinians: We grow deep roots. It’s a testament to the Cradle’s history that some of the area’s biggest bands recorded covers to help the iconic East Coast tour stop outlast the pandemic. The result is Cover Charge, a whopping 25-song set with far more riches than a charity project requires.
Carrboro, the former mill town that started collecting artists when Chapel Hill got expensive, is central in the music scene, but nobody ever talked about the “Carrboro sound.” When the Cradle moved there in 1993, the club was already inextricable from Chapel Hill and indie rock. Hell, it could probably move to Durham (like Merge Records did) or Raleigh—the other cities that make up the loose conurbation we call the Triangle—and still not shake the association.
The Cradle began as a coffeehouse-folk spot, and like most midsize rock clubs, it has grown into more polyglot bookings—shy of techno, anyway, which throbs at one of its former haunts, now Nightlight. But the early ’90s cast a long shadow. In that myth-clouded time, Cradle denizens like Superchunk, Archers of Loaf, Squirrel Nut Zippers, and Ben Folds put Chapel Hill on the map for more than UNC basketball. Major-label A&Rs showed up to find the next Nirvana, who of course had played the Cradle, and national magazine writers showed up to construct the new Seattle. Sonic Youth enshrined the club’s name in a song called “Chapel Hill,” and Merge was setting the national indie-label mold. A hodgepodge of weird little bands were being mashed into a canonical sound.
It’s natural that this brief but influential era radiates through Cover Charge. It could only begin with Superchunk, whose members founded Merge and defined the snotty, rambunctious pop-punk most associated with Chapel Hill. They’re also the rare golden-age band that has lasted without hiatus; their effortless cover of The Go-Go’s’ “Can’t Stop the World” shows why. And it’s inspired to conclude with The Veldt, who risked being forgotten beyond the great “Soul in a Jar” until their reformation several years ago met with a critical renaissance, in a climate more open to a Black shoegaze-soul band than those lily-white days were. They imprint their lush but desperate sound on their cover of Madonna’s “Dress You Up.” The leap isn’t as far as it seems—in the ‘90s, even Madonna was checking for Chapel Hill bands.
In between, Cover Charge spans a range of great moments in Triangle music history, the keenest bridging then and now. The name The Mayflies USA probably only means anything to a subset of late-’90s indie fans. By the time they came along, national attention had largely moved on and the internet was about to redraw the landscape of regional scenes. Archers and Polvo had just broken up, and Superchunk had a string section. The Mayflies were the new national buzz-band most likely to carry the torch. Their sleek, soaring sound almost seemed like a repudiation of their squalling predecessors, so it’s interesting to hear the very early-‘90s vibe they bring to The Smiths’ “There Is a Light that Never Goes Out,” like a handshake across the decades.
Though Archers are finally releasing some good new songs 10 years into their reunion, they don’t show up—but Eric Bachmann does, and his duet with one of the Triangle’s best contemporary singer-songwriters, Skylar Gudasz, is an unexpected and delightful choice. In his folksy Crooked Fingers mode, Bachmann reminds us that his Archers croak is a decision, not a limitation, and the duo’s tender version of The Everly Brothers’ “All I Have to Do Is Dream” is the freshest moment here.
This only scratches the surface of Cover Charge, which is stocked with other scenes and eras that have passed through the Cradle. There’s the ‘90s alt-country surge that gave us Tift Merritt, who thankfully is included, and Ryan Adams, who thankfully isn’t. There’s the motley ’80s college rock before the indie-rock boom: the jangle-pop of The dB’s, the jammy Americana of The Connells, and the chicken-fried rockabilly of Southern Culture on the Skids, a retro strain that Flat Duo Jets carried on into the alt-rock ’90s.
This list doesn’t even touch on some of the biggest names here, such as Durham residents The Mountain Goats, Hiss Golden Messenger, and Iron & Wine, or many of the last decade’s vanguard: Mandolin Orange and Mount Moriah, Mipso and The Love Language. It doesn’t touch on soul singer Faith Jones’s brilliant rendition of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” which breaks open the song’s ’60s time capsule to spill into the turbulent modern world beyond the Cradle’s walls, or the Marshall Crenshaw cover by Florence Dore that incited the whole project. It’s just too much, in a wonderful way.
I don’t remember for sure what my first indie-rock show was, but the first one I remember was at the Cradle. I don’t remember The Comas’ set, but I’ll never forget the underwater feeling of the sound and lighting. I became a Comas stan, an indie-rock snob, and a music journalist at the Cradle, all in a short span, and then its tastes broadened with mine to encompass Ghostface and James Blake and onward.
In short, when I die, I want to find myself on the Cradle’s smoker’s patio. It and many venues like it across the country need your help. This comp is no waste of money even if you’ve never set foot in Carrboro, and every venue exists in an ecosystem that feeds bands from one place to the next. It’s imperative to keep them all alive so they can continue to change slowly and change lives for 50 more years.

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Ought’s 2014 debut, More Than Any Other Day, was an album of slowly unfurled epiphanies. Affirming moments are a little harder to come by on the more chaotic and caustic Sun Coming Down, but the album’s relentless drive and uncompromising attitude constitute their own special kind of thrill. If More Than Any Other Day was about the hard-fought, triumphant ascent, Sun Coming Down is the giddy, daredevil “wheeeeee!” down the other side of the peak.

Sun Coming Down

Pop music was built on a whole lotta "yeah." Because saying "yeah" is the most casual, innocuous form of rebellion—there is no easier way of showing you don’t give a fuck than abdicating the responsibility required to enunciate the "s" in "yes." Seeing it through to the end is a show of diligence and commitment. So when Ought singer-guitarist Tim Darcy drops a fulsome "yes" in the middle of "Beautiful Blue Sky"—the spectacular centerpiece track of his band’s sophomore album, Sun Coming Down—he’s sure to savor it. Amid a song whose chorus reads like a laundry list of 21st-century blights ("Warplane/ Condo/ New development") and excruciating water-cooler chit chat ("How’s the family?/ How's your health been?/ Fancy seeing you here!")—Darcy declares, "I’m no longer afraid to die/ Because that is all that I have left/ Yessssss," stretching out that last letter like pizza dough on a woodblock.
It’s an alarming admission, one that reads like the last will and testament of somebody who’s been so numbed by the dispiriting, clockwork demands of modern life that choosing death feels like the only empowering, self-actualizing move at their disposal. But Darcy invests his "yes" with an ecstatic sense of clarity, as if he was John Lennon meeting Yoko Ono for the first time. Though Darcy is a poet whose voluminous verbiage often overwhelms his melodies, it’s no insult to say that simple "yes" is the greatest lyric he’s written—because it so perfectly crystallizes his band’s essence and purpose.
Ought make indie rock that sounds like how urbanity makes you feel: nervous, antsy, sometimes hostile, yet intoxicatingly vibrant. And Darcy, likewise, gesticulates like a dutiful office drone who’s played by the rules his whole life but just can’t take it anymore. Ought’s 2014 debut, More Than Any Other Day, was an album of slowly unfurled epiphanies, stoking simmering tension into fiery, exultant release. Those sort of affirming moments are a little harder to come by on the more chaotic and caustic Sun Coming Down, but the album’s relentless drive and uncompromising attitude constitute their own special kind of thrill. If More Than Any Other Day was about the hard-fought, triumphant ascent, Sun Coming Down is the giddy, daredevil "wheeeeee!" down the other side of the peak.
A lot has changed for Ought since the release of their first album—not the least of which is their lead singer’s surname. (Darcy was billed as Tim Beeler the last time out.) More significantly, what was once a casual project among university roommates was promoted to workhorse touring act, and Sun Coming Down sounds like the sort of record that was hastily hashed out in between transatlantic jaunts. But that’s not to suggest the album sounds unfinished or is lacking focus—rather, the new album takes full advantage of Ought’s fully revved, road-tested engine and increased horsepower, in a strike-while-the-iron’s-hot move. Gone are the hazy ambient ballads, quirky congeniality, and taut goose-stepped grooves that, on More Than Any Other Day, counterbalanced the band’s wiry freneticism. Here, Ought doubles-down on their oft-cited early-'80s Fall and late-'80s Sonic Youth reference points, handily destroying any inkling you might have had about this band following the likes of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah or Vampire Weekend into big-tent-indie territory.
Sun Coming Down’s more aggressive attack pushes Darcy out of his usual agitated-everyman mode to deliver more cryptic narratives in a theatrical snarl that, at times, verges on Mark E. Smith karaoke. But while Ought’s influences may be obvious, you’re never really sure where they’re taking them: the fearsome rapid-fire rants, clanging guitar tangle and jackhammered drums of "The Combo" turn oddly celebratory in the wake of the song’s surprisingly cheery chorus ("Jubilation, darling!"); the bee-swarm buzz and frantic accelerations of "Celebration" are undercut by Darcy’s wonderfully fey, Fred Schneider-worthy exhortations ("Okay... let’s do it!"). Other songs are subjected to more abrupt change-ups: "On the Line" alternates between ponderous tone poem and garage-punk rave-up, before settling into a sublime third act that recalls the steady, galloping build-up of Patti Smith’s "Gloria", while "Passionate Turn"—the only time here Ought attempt to channel the nocturnal grace of More Than Any Other Day’s knockout ballad "Habit"—turns from swooning, stumbling serenade into a menacing, militaristic march for its final verse/chorus run.
Even the songs that remain locked into formation undergo subtle yet substantial mutations. The opening sprint of "Men for Miles" sees Darcy rewriting his verse melody with each pass and, as the band lean their full weight into the song’s motorik momentum, his unyieldingly abrasive guitar noise gives way to hypnotic, third eye-prying bliss. And the aforementioned "Beautiful Blue Sky" may initially sound like Ought’s answer to "Marquee Moon", but spiritually speaking, it’s their "Once in a Lifetime", a song that paints a vivid picture of cubicle-bound 9-to-5 conformity before providing you with the sledgehammer to smash it. The transmission may be a little more distorted this time out, but, with Sun Coming Down, Ought’s underlying message is the same as it ever was: you have the power within you to change your lot in life. When you feel like there’s no way out, just say "yes."


Terius Nash digs into his songwriting vault for a leisurely stroll through his single favorite subject.

SXTP4

The-Dream’s last project, 2019’s Ménage à Trois: Sextape Vol. 1, 2, 3, opened with the sound of two people fucking in a rainstorm. The singer had spent years describing sex in a variety of locales—from the beackseats of every luxury vehicle imaginable to a padded room in a psych ward—but this time he decided to cut out the middleman—himself—and just present the raw act without adornment. It set the tone: This wasn’t a record to create a dance challenge to; this was music made for one thing and one thing only. In an era when some of the biggest rappers in the world proudly proclaim celibacy, Terius Nash is a throwback to an older, more explicit era.
What came next was 39 tracks that replaced the cheeky metaphors and innuendos of his past work with straight-up filth. It never justified the king-sized runtime, but the magic of his songwriting still glimmered occasionally. His followup, SXTP4, is nearly a quarter of the length, suggesting a more cohesive affair, trimmed of fat. Instead it’s another leisurely stroll through the studio for Nash as he strings together a satisfying batch of R&B—but only really strives for transcendence once.
But what a moment that is. In many ways, “Hard 4 Me” is one of Nash’s most stripped-down tracks ever, glued together by a smattering of synths that sound like they came straight from an old Casio preset. Its emptiness leaves space for his sultry squeak of a voice, which is divine at carving out melodic pockets in the groove. Here he uses it to beckon a potential lover to come over after work and, true to recent form, he wastes no time with pleasantries: “Come straight here and take your shit off,” he asserts.
It feels like something made in about 15 minutes, but its rough-hewn finish feels like proof of Nash’s ability to sit down at any given instrument and crank out something infectious. The two tracks that precede it, “Notice” and “Spiritual,” play like alternate versions of the same song, with Nash exploring different directions he can take its chords and lyrics; it feels like we’re witnessing a Pro Tools session in real time. Its overflow cements the fact that “Hard 4 Me” is the project’s centerpiece, with the rest of the works sounding fairly low-stakes in comparison.
The opener may be the most egregious example of that, as all clues point to it being a scrapped reference track for Diddy. Not only are the Bad Boy Records’ founder’s signature ad-libs all over it, but the verses also seem to be written from his perspective, with a reference to his former partner Notorious B.I.G.’s passing woven in. On the opposite end, the closer “Coltrane” is a pile-up of piano strums that goes nowhere, bookending the album with two equally perplexing showings.
“Wee Hours,” revealed in the project’s digital liner notes to be cultivated from a Jhené Aiko demo, fairs better. On it, Nash shows off his signature vocal style where he isolates syllables and stretches and scrunches them until they become their own melodies, just like he did with the “ellas” and “ehs” of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” nearly 15 years ago now. Aiko takes the horniness baton and runs with it by boasting how she keeps hair ties and scrunchies on her just in case her hands need to be tied down. The pair make it all sound sweet, handling the hardcore subject matter with softness.
The one other notable moment here is the aptly titled “Fuck My Brains Out,” another song on SXTP4 pulled from the archives—this time in its entirety, as it was first released almost a decade ago in the leadup to his fourth album, 1977—but nonetheless continues Nash’s streak of making admirable Prince pastiche. It’s no “Fast Car,” “Yamaha,” or “Hell Mary” off Vol. 1, 2, 3, all of which were dazzling in how they reworked the Purple One’s trademark sounds into something refreshing and relevant. But its glossy finish, pounding rhythm and emphatic howls demonstrate how Nash is of a dying breed of R&B singer, one that builds roaring muscle-car engines of funk to move arenas with. He hasn’t shown that capacity fully in a while, and here he again just gives us a taste.


Panagiotis Melidis, the Greek producer who records as Larry Gus, is no stranger to chaos, as is evidenced by the mishmash of styles on his new album, I Need New Eyes. The collection's made up of immersive grooves and smartly deployed samples and features lyrics lamenting the fear of failure inherent in creative work.

I Need New Eyes

When Panagiotis Melidis, the Greek producer who records as Larry Gus, first began releasing music, his primary mode of expression was parroting other artists to create sample-heavy pastiche. His productions encompassed everything from Afrobeat to hip-hop; after signing to DFA, his first two albums for the label were somewhat unsteady attempts to turn bits and pieces into a cohesive whole, taking cues from prototypical psych pop outfits like El Guincho and Animal Collective. His last album*,* Years Not Living, was a more conceptually confident (if sometimes muddy-sounding) stew of African-influenced grooves, slathered-on samples, and his own heavily layered vocals.
Though he’s pared down the clutter and clamor somewhat since his initial DFA outing, Melidis is still no stranger to chaos, as evidenced by the mishmash of styles on his new album, I Need New Eyes. Like Years Not Living, it’s made up of immersive grooves and smartly deployed samples. But the music borders on the emotionally drippy, with lyrics lamenting the ever-present fear of failure inherent in creative work—a feeling he describes somewhat cheekily in the album’s first track as a "black veil of fail."
As a writer, Melidis is often either obtuse to the point of sounding glib ("children are all foreign shores") or absurdly abstract ("all the tigers breathe with the fires from above"). He smartly offsets his own straightforward singing with vocal samples from other sources, and his strongest songs piggyback off of other influences: "A Set of Replies" sounds like an earnest adaptation of the Pixies' "Where Is My Mind", elevated by sweetly reedy details and percussive pinging, while the sugary "The Sun Describes", with its warbling vocals and tropical percussion, is a melancholy reimagining of his early Avalanches rip, "Contours Sway".
In some ways Melidis is the consummate consumption-driven producer, whose wide-ranging tastes fuel an obsessive thirst for sounds and ideas: in interviews, he seems comfortable driving the narrative that his music is a sum of influences, gamely referencing Prince, Raymond Queneau, Marc Maron, Lucio Battisti, and Seinfeld. (The album’s title is itself a veiled reference to Proust.) He’s an artist who’s attracted to ambiguity, and who’s attributed one of his most profound moments of inspiration to listening to Madlib while in the grip of sunstroke.
Anyone seeking out that woozy, half-sick, half-euphoric feeling will find it all over I Need New Eyes. The album’s sweeping final track, "Nazgonya (Paper Spike)", is a satisfying culmination, a swirling, unambiguously warm callback to psychedelic pop. Of all the songs on the album, it’s the most straightforward, and therefore the most successful. The problem is that Melidis’ ear for busy atmospherics and his desire to say something deep don’t quite mesh; this music is like that huge spinning wheel on "The Price Is Right"—efficient, colorful, deadening.


On her sixth studio album, the former TRL star writes and sings with worldly wisdom and plaintive abandon.

Love Is An Art

Having outlived the breathless infatuations of her early songbook, TRL survivor Vanessa Carlton now seeks transcendence in the interstices: midnight walks down cold city blocks, pregnant pauses, and marginal, hard-won absolution. Demarcated by 2011’s Rabbits on the Run, a foreboding record about turning 30 amidst Manhattan’s waning charms, Carlton’s late period is highlighted by 2015’s Liberman, an arresting work rife with gothic imagery delivered at an omniscient remove. All that remains of her first singles is a theatrical flair and plaintive abandon.
While she’s scaled back on her meticulous string arrangements, she fills her songs with winding asides and interludes, confessionals which build to rapturous climaxes and end with stray bars or abandoned verses. “The Only Way to Love,” the centerpiece of her sixth full-length Love Is an Art, is a declaration which accretes in momentum and instrumental layers. The chorus surges in fits and starts; it has a bedeviling bridge and a hopeful coda. The symbolism is a bit overwritten—as ever, there’s an abundance of wayward soldiers and nautical expeditions—but the way Carlton vacillates between first and second person lends a worldly wisdom to her insights.
Carlton’s lyrics are threaded with affirmative truisms, like teenaged diaries edited by an older, wiser life coach. “This place won’t bite, but it won’t save you either,” she sings on the otherwise intimate “Future Pain,” which swells with warm guitars before culminating in a stirring instrumental breakdown. The mid-album interlude “Patience” offers assurance from an opposite shore: “You will wait for it/You will know when it’s right/Please let go/When you can’t control.” On the more enigmatic songs, Carlton scales up her narrative scope by acting as an observer rather than the protagonist, an impressionistic technique she deployed successfully throughout Liberman.
Between her allusive lyrics and percussion-free ballads, Carlton’s never quite approached easy listening, although Love Is an Art is her most ambient record to date. Since Rabbits on the Run, she’s applied a spacious reverb which burnishes her lilting voice and lends the piano a cascading effect, raising the dramatic stakes of her songs’ quiet moments. The sparse electronica and disembodied vocals of “I Can’t Stay the Same” evoke New Age, and the title track’s forceful piano chords stand in for the dizzying keyboard runs she once favored. On the songs with any drums to speak of—it’s about a 50/50 split—the snare advances at a slow, emphatic march.
As an album artist, Carlton’s been deliberate: there’s the album about fleeing her life for New York, the one about fleeing New York for her life, and the suite of wry set pieces submitted as anonymous demos. These albums were tensely plotted, almost operatic, while Love Is an Art suffers a bit from a lack of stage direction. “Back to Life” and “Salesman” are lively arrangements with luminous melodies, but their placement at the record’s end underscores the more dirge-like pace of its first half. There are a few oblique paeans to motherhood, yet Carlton remains most inspired by the switchbacks of romantic love; the anthropomorphic metaphors of “Companion Star” and “I Know You Don’t Mean It” feel too much like abstractions.
“Bad boys become sad boys, it’s only cute when you’re young,” she proclaims on “Future Pain.” By now Carlton understands the pull of self-pity, and on Love Is an Art melancholy is less an affliction than a depth to be plumbed. Coming from a songwriter who loves blindly and aches desperately, the silver linings count.


After fronting the rock band State Champion, the Louisville artist crafts a solo debut full of vivid songwriting and cosmic-slacker jams.

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band: Dancing on the Edge

Dancing on the Edge

In Kurt Vonnegut’s debut novel, 1952’s Player Piano, the author delivered one of his defining ideas through the mouth of his character Ed Finnerty: “Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center… Big, undreamed-of things—the people on the edge see them first.” Seventy years on, the Kentucky-based songwriter Ryan Davis traces life’s edges in the same spirit, contemplating the human capacities for open-hearted euphoria and harrowing pain.
Dancing on the Edge is Davis’ first record under his own name, but it’s hardly a debut: He’s fronted the ragged rock band State Champion, led Louisville’s heady Cropped Out festival, and established Sophomore Lounge, an indie label with a fierce DIY spirit. In carrying his own banner forward, Davis steps into more of a singer-songwriter role, calibrating his focus on twangy, witty tunes. With the humor and wisdom of a good-natured barfly, he shares his meditations on mortality and finding purpose in a short, messy stint on Earth.
Davis has a gift for vivid imagery and inventive turns of phrase, which he applies liberally. As evidenced by the extended metaphor he offers in “Junk Drawer Heart,” Davis homes in on the details of life with idiosyncratic precision. He says he’s seen “sunsets through each and every shade of beer,” and in shaking off the black clouds that chase him, he declares, “Constantine didn’t make Saturday night for sitting here acting like this.” Enumerating the rest would spoil the fun of their patient unfurling, but Davis’ inclinations cast him as an affable narrator of rough and rowdy environs. He hits a Kenny Powers-esque high of crass poetry when he observes the inevitability of the dirty truth coming to light: “Blacklight will find the jizz.”
Elsewhere, Davis sings openly about fear and vulnerability. Here, too, he finds moments of levity as he’s confronting his deepest existential concerns. He describes “playing ‘got your nose’ with the face of death” in “Learn 2 Re-Luv,” an accounting of imperfections with an imploring heart. The colorful moments have their poignant complements, as when he circles a more pronounced sense of hopelessness in “Bluebirds in a Fight.” He rests his observations on piano, pedal steel, and cushy bass padding, prioritizing a somber mood that diverges from the record’s prevailing mellow but restless spirit.
The loose arrangements of Davis’ backing Roadhouse Band swing further into cosmic-slacker territory than the more serrated stuff he’s delivered with State Champion. Acoustic guitars set a sanguine tone that Christopher May chases on pedal steel, and synthy flashes add more jolts of color. The harmonic twists match the exploratory spirit of Davis’ metaphors, enhanced by vocal contributions from guests like Joan Shelley, Will Lawrence, and Freakwater’s Catherine Irwin. The songs tend to lope along with the relaxed pleasure of taking the scenic route home. In the unhurried “A Suitable Exit,” he repeats the phrase “Death has loaned us to life,” while a corkscrewing fiddle line helps carry the point.
Davis makes his most ambitious swing with the 10-minute “Flashes of Orange,” where he ruminates on disappointment, scuttled luck, and yearning, sounding tortured by the chasm between dream life and cold reality. At first listen, it’s never clear where Davis is leading, but the song’s radiant warmth, overlapping waves of synth and pedal steel, and a sumptuous chorus of backing vocalists are amiable invitations into his world. Davis’ wistful, whoa-dude delivery of the title in the furthest reaches of the song is the only place where the record tips into pure goofiness, and it passes without derailing the album’s pensive disposition.
In the closing “Bluebirds Revisited,” Davis casts his eye beyond the mortal coil. “I started out a butterfly detective, then I became a teenage alcoholic, now I’m trying to get to heaven, or whatever you’d call it,” he confesses, finding some semblance of peace while “barreling forward while my memories riot behind me.” In his investigation of the human spirit, Davis has learned to embrace worry and wonder as companions for a restless heart. His place at the edge may be perilous, precarious, and occasionally lonely, but it’s got one hell of a view.


As he stares down a one-year jail sentence for attempting to purchase machine guns from a federal agent in a Walgreens parking lot, T.I. makes a record based on the assumption that everything's going to be all right for him-- emotionally and financially. Rihanna and Ludacris are among the guests.

Paper Trail

Clifford Harris has gotten pretty good at this self-fulfilling prophecy thing. Though 2003's Trap Musik made him a regional royal in Atlanta, 2006's King accurately predicted he'd go nationwide. That record, combined with the positive reception of his film ATL the same year, gave hip-hop the legitimate multimedia crossover star it needed as interest in 50 Cent flagged. But his predictive powers worked against him on last year's T.I. vs T.I.P., a sloppy and rushed collection loosely based on the notion that no matter how firmly the rapper entrenched himself in the pop world, anything from his hustler past-- from his hotheadedness to his felonies to his associations-- could compromise his success. Which is exactly what happened: He's now staring down jail time for attempting to purchase machine guns from a federal agent in a Walgreens parking lot.
T.I. apparently learned his lesson, and on Paper Trail, he's not taking any chances with an extraneous narrative. Although some recent mixtape tracks suggest we might be getting a 25th Hour-like confessional from Harris on his way to a one-year sentence in 2009 (or reality TV), Paper Trail bases itself on the assumption that everything's going to be all right for him, emotionally and financially. Breaking rank from his previous two efforts by writing down his lyrics again, he immediately shows a willingness to do something other than coast from hook to hook-- at least at the outset, on "56 Bars (Intro)" and "I'm Illy". Not that he's morphed into Pharoahe Monch or anything: His wordplay likens his weed to celery and his money-getting ability to the U.S. Treasury, which are pretty lame boasts these days.
The real shift in tone, though, becomes apparent in T.I.'s eagerness to please: Even with "Swagga Like Us", Paper Trail hosts as many obligatory guest R&B hookmen as rappers. The conciliatory lover's rock of "Whatever You Like", with its near-absence of rapping, spotlights a synth pluck as flirty and debauched as a coked-up celebutante as proof that this "Lollipop" thing is a full-blown trend, not just a one-off WTF. And despite T.I. making an uncomfortable number of veiled threats to bloggers, Just Blaze goes all Rivers Cuomo by cratedigging in YouTube; the internet-approved "Numa Numa" song is now a hook via Rihanna at her most robo. (The song bottoms out on listenability even before you get to the surprisingly unctuous moralizing of its second verse.) And if you justifiably figured "Porn Star" would be the album's low point, wait til Tip stoops to using a "life is like a..." device so cornball that even Travis beat him to it.
Paper Trail more often succeeds when the positivity sounds more earned than court-ordered. Beyond the fact that "On Top of the World" squashes a Ludacris/T.I. beef that threatened to get even more stupidly dangerous (though T.I. isn't above going at Shawty Lo on "What Up, What's Haapnin'"), it's a perfect pairing that makes you wonder how many awesome collaborations we missed out on. Luda's verse is infectiously joyous and quotable ("We see Samuel L. Jackson, like, 'What's up motherfucker!'") as T.I. provides the perfect foil with the weariness of someone whose fight will never be over. The same goes for "No Matter What", the most musically striking track, with Danja's churchgoing organ sighs and punched-up drums. While T.I. lords over wannabes that want to "get a beat from Toomp and make a hook like shawty," ending with a line like "I just let go and let God deal with it" may seem deflating, but in the context of a rap persona that owes its success to otherworldly confidence, it's a telling display of how little control he really feels.
For better or worse, "Swagga Like Us" defines Paper Trail. In the style of those can't-miss 90s posse cuts, T.I., Lil' Wayne, Kanye West, and Jay-Z spit over a martial beat that samples M.I.A.'s pop chart infiltrator "Paper Planes". What could go wrong? Unfortunately, one-upmanship gives way to self-assured competence and Khaled-inspired complacence. T.I. effortlessly bests them all, but in this track, you see how the album manages to be a more detailed manuscript of Tip's complexity: An impending incarceration has lit a fire under him, triggering an impulse to challenge himself. But T.I. has spent too much of his life fighting to get where he is, and Paper Trail's desire to play things chill suggests a different sort of trap than we're used to hearing about from him.


The revolutionary Philadelphia hardcore band expand the genre’s possibilities on their new EP, which feels cruelly short at only 12 minutes.

Songs to Yeet at the Sun EP

On the week Soul Glo released their new EP Songs to Yeet at the Sun, the outcome of the presidential election was largely seen as resting in the hands of Black Philadelphians such as themselves. After spending a half-decade deftly scrutinizing their tokenization in the DIY hardcore scene and the limitations of white allyship, Soul Glo surely saw the irony of this newly obsessive and granular interest.
Songs to Yeet at the Sun arrives after an entire election cycle where the Black vote was delegitimized on one side, taken for granted by the other, and seen as a monolithic body by both. “If that cop had taken a further step than just putting his hand on his gun, and shot us right there, we might never know whose side yr really on,” Pierce Jordan screamed in one of the many instant quotables from 2019’s THE NIGGA IN ME IS ME—an album whose cover commemorated their 2018 arrest in Missouri and the subsequent GoFundMe that exceeded the $15,000 bail requirement, which the band members claimed was three times the amount normally charged. Soul Glo’s music is firmly based in intersectional identity and lived experience, providing an opportunity for many to see themselves represented while challenging any attempt to label or categorize them.
Early in September, Soul Glo dropped Songs to Yeet at the Sun’s feral opener “(Quietly) Do the Right Thing” just weeks before the Breonna Taylor verdict inspired new protests in Philadelphia. Soul Glo’s songwriting is generally more in line with the Coup’s absurdist, anarchic humor than Public Enemy’s stoic militance, but the parenthetical isn’t played for laughs here. Here and elsewhere, Jordan fixates on how to operate ethically in an artistic community where clout serves as the primary currency.
But as widespread protest reignited interest in Spike Lee’s eternally resonant masterpiece over the summer, it also served as a reminder of the fear-mongering that surrounded its original release. Like Spike Lee, Soul Glo are not interested in solutions. Their music feels like the unignorable act of violence that follows after more socially acceptable forms of communication have failed. Songs to Yeet at the Sun is destructive and abrasive hardcore that nonetheless feels utopian. “(Quietly) Do the Right Thing” functions as Soul Glo’s stylistic syllabus, cross-referencing D.C. hardcore, West Coast thrash, and Midwest screamo while Jordan’s feverish, foaming vocals betray their love for Korn. The end of “29” smuggles “Great Balls of Fire” piano riffs into a post-hardcore Molotov, whereas the production on “2K” finds a common space between industrial grind, pornographic sex raps, and morbid horrorcore.
“Don’t get me wrong, but don’t get me fucked up!” Jordan announces at the very top of “(Quietly) Do the Right Thing.” He’s interested in expressing an anger and urgency potent enough to require the lyric sheet posted on their Bandcamp—and even then, the run-on sentence structure, clipped verbiage (“YT,” “yr”), and pile-ups of agitated question marks make them writhe on the screen. A collaboration with the Richmond DJ and trans artist Archangel, “2K” is about the only time where the lyrics are clearly intelligible.
Songs to Yeet at the Sun rushes forward as if written in real time, slices of life that give voice to the marginalized—Black, queer, trans, musicians, “non-essential workers”—and make them feel accessible to anyone who doesn’t immediately identify. It’s essentially a concept piece about what it means to be broke as fuck in 2020. “Microbudget all your 20s, not just the bills,” Jordan shrieks on “29,” a painfully detailed account of having to penny-pinch to afford exorbitantly priced SSRIs. Meanwhile, as marijuana becomes legalized and commercialized across the country, Jordan sees only people like Elon Musk and “each and every Punk Goes Crunk white nigga” standing to benefit. “It’s places you can cop legally, but till they drop my nigga’s charges, it don’t mean shit to me” he shouts on “Mathed Up.”
“Trump’s going to be great for punk rock!” has served as a running joke for the past four years, but it’s not the assumption of great music that prompted laughs. Rather, it’s the belief that Donald Trump somehow represented a clean break in our supposed arc towards moral rectitude rather than a logical endpoint for the American experiment. “Our era is a marketplace of contained demolitions, pleasant distractions under commercial supervision, and affordable suicidal coping mechanisms,” Jordan cries on the closing track—a sentiment true of the Obama era and the promised return to “normal” when none of Soul Glo’s demands for police reform or debt cancellation get addressed. “Joe Biden’s going to be great for punk rock!” will probably be a running joke too, but the moment Pennsylvania ostensibly tipped the election, the one thing I wanted to hear most of all was the next Soul Glo album. By the end of “I’m on Probation,” the possibilities for Soul Glo appear limitless, leaving Songs to Yeet at the Sun to feel cruelly unfinished after its 12 minutes have passed.

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Father John Misty is a consummate entertainer. On Pure Comedy, he questions the value of entertainment, capitalism, and everything else in a grueling odyssey through the psyche of Josh Tillman.

Pure Comedy

Father John Misty presents a sprawling double-feature: the skewering of an infantile generation, and the self-skewering of its author. From the mind of an apocalyptically inclined neurotic, who reads Žižek and Freud and believes humanity is condemned to moral chaos, comes Pure Comedy, a grueling, often inspired odyssey that screams to be taken as art. Across its 75 minutes, humility is scarce. In one song, having indexed the species’ flaws, he reprimands God: “Try something less ambitious next time you get bored.” It is intense, fatalistic, exhausting, and grandiose—sometimes devastating, sometimes pretentious. (Regarding love—he’s not really doing that anymore.) So yes, it is a Father John Misty album, and Josh Tillman still excels at tormenting those unlucky souls who enjoy his music.
The record is also Tillman’s first opportunity to confront pop culture from the frontline. After releasing I Love You, Honeybear, whose inquiry into romance and masculine folly won many hearts, he coasted through the last two years as an indie firebrand. He perfected theatrical cynicism, sarcastically covering Taylor Swift, trolling music sites, claiming responsibility for a stolen crystal and using the coverage to denounce health food. He shot a video with Lana Del Rey, who shares something of his postmodern mystique, and wrote for Lady Gaga and Beyoncé, who do not.
That behind him, the Pure Comedy circus kicked into gear at a New Jersey music festival last July. Instead of his songs, Tillman performed a rambling soliloquy, triangulating Trump anxiety, the obstetrical dilemma hypothesis, corporate evil, folksy escapism, and the “fucked up entertainment complex.” Along with all those themes, Pure Comedy channels the speech’s righteous delirium, a rhetorical mode Tillman finds irresistible. If his confessions favor ironic distance, his big-picture theses exude something close to rapture. “The Memo,” a highlight here, smashes together cynicism and compassion, with Tillman declaring that it’s “not self-love that kills you,” it's when “those who hate you” are allowed to profit from your vulnerability. Such sermons are typically repelling, but what saves him from insufferable smartassery—for the most part—is his ability to turn yelling at clouds into a grand form of entertainment.
Pure Comedy follows the thread of Honeybear outliers “Holy Shit” and “Bored in the USA.” The latter concealed sincerity beneath melodrama, its mockery of “middle-class problems” complicated by troubling reflections on depression. Those uncomfortable collisions—bourgeois ills explored through otherwise sympathetic characters—emerge throughout Pure Comedy.
Beneath Pure Comedy’s synth-dappled country, blue-eyed soul, and pop fashioned after George Harrison is a battleground filled with religion, pop culture, technology, and neoliberalism. To open “Things It Would Have Been Helpful to Know Before the Revolution,” a wonderful portrait of life after the climate apocalypse, Tillman nonchalantly topples capitalism: “It got too hot,” he sings, “And so we overthrew the system.” Midway in, an orchestral cacophony swirls into an outrageous chorus, which I’m sure Tillman would love to see quoted unabridged:

“Industry and commerce toppled to their knees
The gears of progress halted
The underclass set free
The super-ego shattered with our ideologies
The obscene injunction to enjoy life
Disappears as in a dream
And as we returned to our native state
To our primal scene
The temperature, it started dropping
And the ice floes began to freeze”

The indulgence is pure Tillman. But the passage, in all its mad glory, matches the size of the task, particularly in times of total dysfunction. It’s never been easier to sympathize with Tillman’s pomposity. Only in the song’s conclusion does the façade collapse, as “visionaries” start developing products that will rejoin this new society with capitalist realism. A cop-out, maybe, but who else would have copped in to begin with?
While “Revolution” is its least discreet flirtation with utopianism, Pure Comedy makes plenty of time to call bullshit on visionary capitalism. The title track swirls with religious fanaticism, secular ideology, and pharmaceutical greed into a repudiation of almost everything. In the last chorus—“But the only thing that they request/Is something to numb the pain with/Until there’s nothing human left”—the record hurtles into a chronically pleasurable near-future. “Total Entertainment Forever” is a postcard from the brave new world: Backed by sarcastically ecstatic horns, Tillman celebrates a “permanent party” where our appetite for distraction has eroded the old-fashioned human soul. His characters finish the chores, slide on the Oculus Rift, and jump into bed with the pop star du jour. He heralds the “freedom to have what you want” in a tone that suggests freedom, whatever it may be, does not look like this.
After that opening suite—“Pure Comedy,” “Total Entertainment Forever,” and “Revolution”—the music settles into a tonal plateau. Even the most gripping songs unspool with acoustic leisure, and they can be long and lofty trips. The spiritual anchor is “Leaving LA,” in which fragments of orchestral splendour—all arranged by the brilliant Gavin Bryars—are buried beneath a 13-minute pilgrimage through Father John Misty’s psyche. An unappetizing prospect, perhaps, but he writes captivating scenes; one revisits a traumatic childhood saga soundtracked by Fleetwood Mac’s “Little Lies” in a JCPenney, another a New Year’s sunset that “reminds me, predictably, of the world’s end.”
Five verses into the song, Tillman inserts a mocking female character: He’s just “another white guy in 2017,” she groans, “who takes himself so goddamn seriously.” “Leaving LA” reaches for transcendent honesty, but this lyric feels misjudged. Is this a sincere concern or an attempt to shoot down nonexistent thinkpieces? Father John Misty’s music is certainly exasperating, but it’s not due to his entitlement so much as that irrepressible impulse to outpace the listener’s criticism. The moment somebody says, “I know I’m being annoying” is often when you realize it’s true.
Tillman has, of course, anticipated this critique. His childish desire to be loved or hated on his own terms is dredged up on “A Bigger Paper Bag,” but there’s an added, delicate touch that’s endearing. “It’s easy to assume that you’ve built some rapport/With someone who only likes you for what you like yourself for,” he sings, over a woozy arrangement evoking peak Elliott Smith. “You be my mirror/But always remember/There are only a few angles I tend to prefer.” It’s a rare callback to Honeybear’s psychological burrowing, and I find myself returning to it. His sociological bombast is dwarfed by these quiet revelations.
The scarcity of such interludes doesn’t undermine the Misty manifesto, but it does mean the record’s pontifications, particularly the tired false equivalencies of “Two Wildly Different Perspectives,” can test your patience. David Foster Wallace—whose critiques on irony, entertainment, and self-consciously “hideous men” are all over Pure Comedy—once advocated for bleak fiction in dark times. Wallace said that it should “find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.” This redemptive spirit eludes Tillman. Given his off-record provocations—that a pop star’s “wearing next to nothing” strips her music of value, for instance—it’s reasonable to expect him to dream up something for us to really care about (or at least to button up his shirt). He instead settles on soothing defeatism, a litany of conquered crises whose lessons amount to, “That’s just the way it is.” Given the album’s thematic largesse, it’s almost charming. Almost. But you wonder what kind of progressive future he envisions: that which will lift society or merely flatter his own intellect.


Naming her first LP after the 1982 debut by the Descendents (who she also covers), the one-woman Oakland band offers an amalgam of punk, garage, and 1960s girl group harmonies.

Milo Goes to Compton

If you grew up identifying as a rock'n'roll kid, you’ll probably find something comfortingly familiar about West Coast artist Colleen Green. For one, there's the fact that she named her first LP Milo Goes to Compton-- a play on the title of the Descendents' first album, Milo Goes to College-- and has loaded it up with enough historical references to make it clear that there was some overlap between your high school record collection and hers. If you don't notice that album opener "Good Good Things" is also a cover of a song by the same flagship California punk band, for instance, you'll probably recognize track two as a scuzz-laden half-cover of "I Wanna Be Sedated" by the Ramones. Perhaps you'll see something of your own ideal likeness in the cartoon rendering of the 27-year-old Boston transplant that appears on the album art-- Wayfarer-style sunglasses, palm trees, sun-- and if not, then you’re probably familiar with other millennial garage rockers who’ve tapped a similar iconography.
Milo Goes to Compton, which she originally self-released on cassette tape last year, builds on the simple-as-hell, one-woman-band arrangements that marked 2011's Cujo EP. While perhaps a bit quirkier and diminutive in stature, her amalgam of punk, garage, and 1960s girl group memories feels like something you might expect from a member of the Art Fag Recordings stable, which has included Dum Dum Girls, Best Coast, Bleached, and other contemporary proponents of time-tested guitar-pop thrills. Hustling together the album's eight tracks from nothing but a drum machine, multi-tracked vox, and some fuzzed-out power chords, Green enacts the less-is-more principle on a molecular level, as though she were trying to see how many elements she could subtract from the rock band equation while still creating an overall impression of rock'n'roll.
Depending on your relationship to the rock tropes that abound here, this could feel either endearing or lazy. Lyrically, Green's shortened attention span for pretty much anything beyond crushes, marijuana, and complicated love is likely to recall Best Coast, although her delivery is deadpan enough to discount any aspirations toward belting pop diva-dom. More than sublimate heartbreak into collective exaltation, she shades these lyrical themes a bit darker than the punchy power riffs might suggest. The aforementioned Ramones classic, for example, is renamed "I Wanna Be Degraded", with Green introducing a few NSFW scenarios for the sake of illustration. Album single "Worship You", similarly, sees Green warning a romantic prospect that he had better "worship her" if he wants "to be the one I sleep with every night/ to be the one I let tie me up tight." That the song ends with her desiring to "worship" the same person isn't the only thing that makes its sentiment feel less than cut-and-dry. More striking is the fact that she sounds cool as a cucumber, as though the lyrical content of the song were only secondary, a conduit for a catchy, sock-hopping melody.
More often than not, it feels like Green is trying to hide from us, layering on the auto-harmonies so thick that you cannot even tell which vocal track is meant to be the lead. But what carries Milo Goes to Compton is less its dark-sunglasses-inscrutability than Green's economical melodic sense, which leverages minimal gestures for maximal impact-- loaded pauses included. Her cover of "I Will Follow Him", for example, would be a whole lot less fresh-sounding if it didn't contract the 1963, Little Peggy March original into a skeletal, two-note affair, jauntily layered over a mechanical groove. Likewise, part of the pleasure of listening to "Always on My Mind", is simply hearing the sound of her left hand sliding repetitively up and down the guitar neck, sounding ever-so-slightly different-- or imperfect-- with each go-around.
If we're comparing Green to other, better-known female garage rock heroes of the past few years, I’d say that the Vivian Girls sound like the most kindred of spirits. A band whose members are so unattached to their own instruments that they are willing to swap them mid-performance doesn't just reaffirm the DIY notion that anyone can make catchy, thoroughly engaging rock'n'roll regardless of technical skill, it elevates that understanding to a central facet of  their art. Green does that on the level of each individal song, and our enjoyment stems partly from sensing just how much fun she seems to be having while building them, note by note.


The Icelandic post-rockers waver between exuberance and heavy-handed melodrama on the first official recording of an 18-year-old operatic work based on a centuries-old medieval poem.

Odin’s Raven Magic

The end of the world looms as Odin, Norse deity of war and death, joins his fellow gods for a banquet. His trusty ravens, Huginn and Muninn, traverse barren fields, gathering the world’s wisdom while the gods feast and watch for omens. This portentous meal is the subject of a poem written in the traditional style of Edda, the collection of Icelandic mythology and prose dating back to the 13th century, and of Sigur Rós’s Odin’s Raven Magic. On the eight-part operatic work, the Icelandic band funnels its serene, immersive style into theatrical storytelling, evoking a lively yet uneasy scene with eerie harmony and cinematic scope that wavers between exuberance and heavy-handed melodrama.
Odin’s Raven Magic is something of a myth itself—though Sigur Rós first performed it live 18 years ago, it’s never received a proper recording. Before now, only fragments of the lengthy work hovered around the internet, captured by eager audiences at crowded shows. This uninterrupted rendition was recorded live in 2004 at La Grande Halle de la Villette in Paris; you might forget it’s a live performance until the end, when the music fades away and applause erupts.
Trading their signature bowed guitar for bowed orchestral instruments, Sigur Rós approach the long history of operas that borrow from mythology with a sense of tranquility. This music swims through melancholy and euphoria, full of grand melodies fit for a Game of Thrones feature film. The strongest moments come when there’s motion, like on “Prologus,” which highlights the orchestra’s subtle shifts between dissonance and consonance, and “Spár eða spakmál,” where a swooping choir, booming horn, and urgent percussion build a sense of exhilaration.
Sigur Rós’ performance is skilled, but their commitment to placidity limits the album’s dramatic capability. Such a menacing tale demands tumultuous color, and opera provides the perfect inspiration for over-the-top storytelling. “Stendur æva” could’ve come as a punch in the gut, but instead a lackluster choir and lilting vocals leave it feeling oversaturated. By illustrating mythology with even-keeled sound rather than diving into its turbulence, Sigur Rós glosses over the magnitude of the catastrophe they’re trying to describe.
The star of Odin’s Raven Magic, besides its folklore, is the twinkling marimba that appears throughout. This isn’t a regular marimba: Built by Páll Guðmundsson, it replaces the usual wooden slats with Icelandic stones, swapping an earthy tone for an icy one. The instrument pops in and out with a delicate, pulsating rhythm that provides an exigent backdrop, subtle yet omnipresent, like a ticking doomsday clock. It’s a recurring theme that makes its first appearance on the sing-songy “Dvergmál,” where gradual layering and generous drums create the record’s truest synthesis of post-rock sensibility and minimalist austerity. The marimba anchors the spacious sound, reminding us of the impending peril that lies beneath the serenity.
Sigur Rós’s music has always felt panoramic, and Odin’s Raven Magic is no different; its sweeping melodies harken back to landmark albums like Ágætis byrjun, but this time, the music foregrounds orchestra and choir. When the sprawling sound becomes overwhelming, it’s the hidden details that prove most tantalizing, telling the album’s story beneath the wandering melodies. Sigur Rós may be more commonly associated with relaxation, but when they allow elements like Guðmundsson’s anxious marimba to drive their music, the feeling lingers.

Buy: Rough Trade
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One of the indisputable masterpieces of shoegaze is given the expanded reissue it deserves, with bonus tracks, a live show, and detail-sharp remastering.

Ride: Nowhere [20th Anniversary Edition]

Nowhere [20th Anniversary Edition]

Along with the 20th anniversary reissue of Ride's debut LP, Nowhere, comes a thick booklet of old photos, liner notes, and a Jim DeRogatis-penned look back on the Oxford shoegazers' near-perfect debut. Flip to page 20 and you'll find a gem: a grainy shot of the foursome sitting on a bed, shoulder-to-shoulder, each with their own reading material. Vocalist/guitarist Mark Gardener is at one end, nose-deep in a copy of the cornball self-help novella Jonathan Livingston Seagull. His bandmate, songwriting foil, and eventual nemesis Andy Bell is left of center, peeking out from behind an issue of Bunty, an old British comic written for teenage girls. Bassist Steve Queralt is engrossed in now-defunct UK pop rag Number One, while drummer Loz Colbert seems rapt by the Christopher Isherwood novel perched at his thumbs. With the exception of Gardener's book, a likely reference to Nowhere opener "Seagull", it's all very English. But at the same time, there's magic more universal to unpack from this one image. The four of them look like brothers. They look like ordinary, wise-ass kids you knew or know. They look like a band.
If I asked you about My Bloody Valentine, the other most seminal shoegaze band, chances are you'd think immediately of Kevin Shields and the countless places you've heard his singular guitar vision unfurl. But while Ride are often mentioned in tandem with MBV, their footprint owes more to their songwork than their sonics, and more to the way all four members clashed and combined. They weren't visionaries or titans; they were young writers with a taste for high volumes. And they didn't situate their melodies amongst tides of effects-pedal-induced mayhem, either; they did it the other way around. Howls were there to support hooks, and the psychedelic interplay between Gardener and Bell's two guitars was far more pivotal to their mission than drapes of all-enveloping noise. But that said, Nowhere, their seismic debut full-length, found them playing with elements of the shoegaze sound as much as they ever would. While it's one of the genre's enduring moments, it's Ride's for another reason: This family of songs is their most focused.
The remastering on this edition makes that all the more clear. It starts with a sharpening. Nowhere was never an especially warm listen, and felt a little flat at times if it wasn't played dangerously loud. The new shine seems so necessary once you hear it. Each jangle and contour has been shored up and made more distinct, resulting in a richer listen. The first whinnies of "Seagull" sound even more serrated than before, and the elliptical guitar figure at its core is less muddy. Gardener and Bell's dual vocals on "Polar Bear" are now as streamlined as that song's livelier coda. And those are just two spots where you can hear again what a great all-around fit they were in the beginning. Not a note feels errant or alone, and Queralt and Colbert sound inseparable, capable of pummeling through squall and enhancing fragile passages with ease. Colbert comes on strong enough to dole out compound fractures, especially during "Dreams Burn Down" and "Vapour Trail." The latter remains immense, standing tall as the most gripping four-and-half-minutes of their career. Twenty years later, it's exciting to realize there's a lot more to be relished in between all its chimes.
Such is the case for much of the first disc. When Nowhere first arrived in late 1990, Ride had already released three outstanding EPs (Ride, Play, and Fall) that year alone. The original North American release added three bonus tracks from Fall, which are joined here by three additional tracks from the album sessions: the workman-like trio of "Unfamiliar", "Beneath", and "Sennen". The new edition also includes "Today", a beautiful, acoustic-based torch song that plumes for miles and miles. Count it up and that's 23 songs of fantastic quality, all culled from an opening stretch so fertile, the band would have a much easier time crafting early setlists than they ever would replicating that initial spark.
Though the booklet is nice and the remastering essential, what makes this anniversary package most intriguing is its second disc: a live set from a Los Angeles show at the Roxy in Spring of 1991. Ride didn't come close to making a splash in the States like they did at home, but on this night, if audience noise is any indicator, their reception was electric. Through headphones, it's hard to believe anyone on stage spent a moment gazing at their shoes, as the legend goes. Rifling through just half of their catalog at the time, they sound like wild elephants throwing their weight around. It's a terrific, thunderous recording and you can quickly get a clear sense for why their live show garnered as much excitement as it did then.
At the same time, the nature of what they were trying to accomplish as a band really comes through in full. The more abrasive tones of MBV and Sonic Youth were clearly an influence as they first started to write and record, but it's the from-the-gut pop screech of Dinosaur Jr. that sounds like their closest kin here. Ride's music wasn't necessarily game-changing but the songs are the kind that last. When they close with "Drive Blind", a cut from their self-titled debut EP, they abandon the song's course just two minutes in to catch a massive swell of guitar. It grows and grows and it grows some more, and then, sure enough, the volume dips, and they circle right back to where they started: a melody. They were really good at that.


Thirteen years after their last album together, the electroclash icons return to their roots.

Third Album

For a few months in the early 2000s, no self-respecting arty dance party was complete without the glacial, if faintly amused, Mitteleuropean tones of Miss Kittin, aka French DJ, producer, and vocalist Caroline Hervé. Songs like “Frank Sinatra,” with the Hacker, and “Silver Screen Shower Scene,” with Felix da Housecat, were at the brief populist peak of electroclash, a short-lived genre that brought alien glamour, DIY showmanship, and a sly sense of humor to rattling electro beats before collapsing under the weight of its own vaingloriousness around 2003.
Kittin and the Hacker’s 2001 debut LP, First Album, was perhaps the musical highlight of the electroclash years, a hooky, gothic-black work that could be laugh-out-loud funny. Their follow-up, 2009’s Two, expanded the duo’s horizons to include straight-up pop and trance-y sparkle, yet it never quite hit the same heights, and the duo went their own ways. Thirteen years on, Kittin and the Hacker are back with Third Album, promising a return to what they do best: “our roots, minimal and raw electro.”
Musical progression isn’t on the menu. Twenty-one years may have passed since First Album, but you’d struggle to notice it from Third Album’s musical makeup, which offers not so much an update of the duo’s trademark sound as a subtle finishing buff with a soft chamois cloth. The production is slightly slicker, the drums kick a little bit harder, and the overall feel is a touch more robust. But on the whole, the electro drum march, percolating Italo-disco synths, and ominous chords of First Album are present, correct, and in fine working order, leaving the more luminous elements of Two stuffed to the back of the wardrobe like a tie-dye T-shirt at the end of summer. This classically dark look suits them: Third Album is home to a host of wonderfully witchy musical moments, from the clipped acid lines and eerie chords of “Ostbahnhof” to the unnervingly beautiful synth riff that runs through “Retrovision” like an unhappy memory.
But if the music on Third Album is similar to the debut, the vocals show more adventure. Hervé’s default tone may still be the glazed and disaffected air of First Album, which she slips into like fine pajamas on songs like “Ostbahnhof” and “19.” But she actually sings on “Malade,” and the song’s chorus soars in a way that the disinterested narrator of “Frank Sinatra” would doubtlessly have considered far too much effort. On “Purist,” meanwhile, Hervé’s voice is stripped of blank cynicism and considerably more engaged, her raw and rather imperfect vocal almost punk rock in spirit.
Lyrically, too, Third Album offers departures from the worlds of nightclubs, glitz, and illicit romances. “Malade” is an astute and rather poignant French-language attack on outdated romantic ideals, while “Retrovision” offers a touchingly accepting look at the passing of time (“Now we are raving without standing/In the sunset of our life”) that brings hitherto unseen emotional depths to the Hacker/Kittin project. That these are the two best songs on Third Album is no coincidence.
For all this, Third Album doesn’t quite reach the heights of First Album. There’s nothing as obviously funny as “Frank Sinatra” (with its classic line, “Do you know Frank Sinatra? He’s dead!”) or as irresistibly hooky as “Stock Exchange,” while “Homme à la Mode” and “La Cave” are dirge-y and underwhelming. On “La Cave,” in particular, it sometimes sounds like Hervé is barking phrases at random, an allergy to rhyme and reason she occasionally succumbed to on Two.
Barring a full-blown electroclash revival, Third Album feels curiously out of joint in 2022—neither contemporary, fashionably retro, nor particularly outmoded. Its success is a sign of how little certain strands of electronic music have moved on over the last two decades, as well as a tribute to the eternal appeal of a catchy vocal over a slamming beat. And there, between stagnation and renewal, base metals and gold, we leave Third Album, a flawed but intriguing record for aging ravers, erstwhile romantics, and fading glamour-pusses alike.


After 46 years, Neil Young unearths a lost but highly consequential album, a collection of humble, stripped-back love songs he began writing at what was arguably the artistic zenith of his career.

Homegrown

For a certain kind of music lover, there’s nothing more alluring than a “lost” album. Unlike a record that was merely “scrapped” or “never released,” the term suggests something both mysterious and not worth losing—especially when that album is fabled to be particularly emotionally raw, and especially when the artist who created it is beloved precisely for his rawness, but also for his reticence. “Sometimes life hurts,” Neil Young wrote in a blog post announcing that he was finally releasing Homegrown, an album that’s something of a unicorn among the sort of fans who read his Times-Contrarian newspaper. “This is the one that got away.”
There are a couple stories about why Young waited 46 years to release Homegrown, a collection of stripped-back love songs he began writing at what was arguably the artistic zenith of his career. In one, recounted in Jimmy McDonough’s colossal Young biography, Shakey, Young made a spur-of-the-moment decision to release the high-octane Tonight’s the Night instead after he played the two records back to back for some musician friends during a half-remembered night at the Chateau Marmont. In another, the one that Young has been telling of late, he decided that the album—recorded in 1974 during a protracted break-up with the late actress Carrie Snodgress, the mother of his child Zeke—was simply too painful. “It was a little too personal—it scared me,” he told Cameron Crowe in a 1975 interview for Rolling Stone. According to Shakey, he described Homegrown to his father as “great songs I can live without.”
Like the notoriously chaotic, honey slide-fueled On the Beach sessions that preceded it, the tale of Homegrown’s genesis, as chronicled by McDonough, is in some ways a story of rock’n’roll excess. After discovering that his wife had absconded to Hawaii on a five-day boat trip with a man the book calls “Captain Crunch,” a heartbroken Young set off on a mammoth 24-city tour with Crosby, Stills and Nash, who hadn’t released a new studio album together in four years. Nicknamed “the Doom Tour” by David Crosby, it ended up being the highest-grossing tour in history to date, with a cavalcade of indulgences that included hotel pillowcases and plates stamped with the band’s tour logo, limos hired and never used, and a giant celebratory billboard at a final stop in Long Island. (The group later said that tour was not particularly lucrative, because of the expenses.)
As relationships within the group grew strained, McDonough writes, Young chose to travel from stop to stop on his own, in a GMC motorhome he called the Mobile-Obil, often with his son Zeke and their dog Art in tow. Though the RV broke down in the middle of the tour, the decision feels like the perfect entry point to the songs Young would write during this period on and off the road, even as he was playing blown-out, not particularly inspired renditions of CSNY hits on stage: sober, elemental, and full of the contradictory emotions that come with finding one’s self suddenly uprooted from a serious partnership. “I won’t apologize/The light shone from in your eyes/It isn’t gone, it will soon come back again,” he announces on the stunning, loping “Separate Ways,” opening the album on what feels like a note of acceptance: He and his ex-partner still have “their little boy”; they will simply be growing apart. By the next song, “Try,” he’s pleading for a second chance: “Darlin’, the door is open/To my heart, and I’ve been hoping/That you won’t be the one/To struggle with the key.”
Though he recorded Homegrown with a revolving cast of players that included some of music’s biggest stars at the time (an ethereal EmmyLou Harris appears on two tracks, and the Band’s Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson chip in on drums and guitar, respectively), absent are the orchestral swells and jammy dirges that made On the Beach feel like a woozy foray into the nether regions of a high. And though a couple tracks recall the angular, nail-biting strain of amplified rock he’d minted on Tonight’s the Night—particularly “Vacancy,” a crescendo of anger which describes the look in his soon-to-be ex-partner’s eyes, and a song called “We Don’t Smoke It No More”—the dominant mode here is restraint, and a decidedly “homegrown”-sounding palette of acoustic instrumentation and slide guitar. It allows Young’s idiosyncratically simple approach to songwriting to take center stage.
“I came to you when I needed a rest/You took my love and put it to the test,” he sings over a simple plucked guitar solo on “White Line,” which boasts the album’s most painfully delicate melody. Whether the song’s refrain—“That old white line is a friend of mine”—is meant as an allusion to the open road he describes, or a euphemism for drugs, the ambiguity, combined with the bare-bones treatment, only heightens the feeling that we’re getting a glimpse of Young at his most naked and unsparing.
In some ways, Homegrown is hard to reckon with as a cohesive artistic statement. Though seven of its 12 tracks—among them “Separate Ways,” “Try,” and a gentle ballad called “Kansas”—have never been released in any official form, he’s brought nearly all of them out on stage at different points over the decades. Some—like “Love Is a Rose” and the childlike reverie “Little Wing”—have even appeared on other albums over the years, as have alternate recordings of “White Line,” “Star of Bethlehem,” and the title track. There are also a few profoundly weird moments, such as the two-minute spoken-word number called “Florida,” where, over the sound of a finger rubbing the ring of a glass, he tells a surreal story about rescuing a baby in the street after its parents perish in a hang-gliding accent.
Mostly, though, the Young we get here resembles the Young we already know: the one who we first met on his rootsy-yet-metaphysical 1972 breakout album, Harvest, then again later on Comes a Time, in 1978. This is the Young who feels most at home expressing himself with a few simple piano or guitar chords, some lonesome harmonica notes, and the ragged inflections of his nasal, warbling voice—taking what can read like surface-level observations on paper, or even straight-up clichés, and making them feel like illuminations of some distant and unknowable truth.
It’s a reminder of the qualities that make him such an excellent songwriter, and also, in some ways, an icon of 1970s, post-hippie masculinity: A laconic young anti-hero who is content to present us with brief flashes of his interiority as a stand-in for the whole, but who likes to remind us he is most at home on the open road. Perhaps it’s the slender nature of these poignant confessionals, which rarely clock in over three minutes, but when all is said and done, we’re left wanting more.

Buy: Rough Trade
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A Love Surreal is only Bilal's third studio album in 12 years. Its jazzy, muted, idiosyncratic feel, and a lack of big guest names, makes it seem like the personal project of someone who has embraced the ability to make music away from commercial expectations.

A Love Surreal

A Love Surreal is only the third studio album Bilal has managed in 12 years, a remarkable fact that testifies to a career marked primarily by speed bumps and absences. These days, he's known more as a guest or hired session gun than a solo artist and A Love Surreal feels very much like the personal project of someone who has embraced the ability to make music away from commercial expectations: jazzy, muted, idiosyncratic, and completely without high-profile guests (unless you count young jazz iconoclast Robert Glasper as such). A Love Surreal breathes some of the same insular oxygen as Todd Rundgren's Something/Anything?, another effort by someone who had figured out that he wasn't ever going to be a marquee star, and, with a shrug, closed his studio door to the outside world.
Recorded in live, spontaneous-sounding takes, A Love Surreal is a long, liquid suite, shifting through long instrumental sections during which Bilal is doing nothing but crooning wordlessly, doubling and tripling his voice into freely rippling layers. That doesn't mean it's boring or static. The mix is filled with tiny surprising sounds-- a high, pulsing keyboard whines in your head on "Winning Hand"; dusty, boxy drum programming throughout that recalls the napkin-doodle electronics taking up the back half of Shuggie Otis' Inspiration Information. There are guitars everywhere-- acoustic and sun-dappled on "Lost for Now", electric and bluesy on "Astray", stabbing Steve Cropper leads on "Winning Hand". On "West Side Girl", they clump together like wet tissues while Bilal multitracks his voice into dizzying layers around them: His harmonized vocals stack behind the verses, and the foreground is flooded with breathing, moaning, muttering, exclaiming, and whispering. He seems to gravitate naturally to smaller-scale, more granular moments like these, which make A Love Surreal mandatory headphone listening.
His sense of melody remains compellingly strange, his harmonic ear bent permanently by operatic and jazz training and his reverence towards decades of atmosphere-first psychedelic-soul LPs. A Love Surreal is short on big, arcing-rainbow melodies as a result, but one of its joys is watching Bilal warp his voice into improbable shapes: nasally and needling on "Longing and Waiting", Donny Hathaway-expansive on "Slipping Away"; "7"-era Prince raspy on "West Side Girl" and "Astray". On "Butterfly," the Robert Glasper collaboration, he lets his voice shoot into a startlingly unbounded falsetto, one that feels like it could plausibly keep climbing and climbing. The song has nothing but Glasper's free, shimmering piano and some drowsy guitar effects to mark its edges. It never ceases to be captivating.
There is very little on A Love Surreal to suggest that Bilal has his ear cocked to what is happening to the R&B landscape around him. There are no rap guest spots, despite Bilal's reliable presence on the other side of the "ft." on a decade's worth of indie-rap albums. Calling in favors doesn't seem to interest him. Having outlasted the "next D'Angelo" tag that hung on his earliest work and weathered a decade in the solo artist wilderness, Bilal seems to have found his sweet spot somewhere between "hired session gun" and "weirdo auteur."