The trio’s first album in 14 years is a genuinely compelling new take on the punchy country sound that’s always made them stand out. But its links between the personal and the political are foggy.

Gaslighter

Without making explicitly cause-oriented music, the artists now known simply as the Chicks acquired a reputation for provocation. To take on Nashville as a trio of unknown women singers and instrumentalists requires guts, and they always appeared fearless—a defiant posture in itself. Seemingly uncompromising, they won over country’s capital with catchy, bold music that hewed to the genre’s strong roots while simultaneously propelling them to megastardom.
But lead singer Natalie Maines’ offhand comment objecting to the Iraq War in 2003 changed the group’s relationship with Music Row entirely. What had been seen as titillating spunk was suddenly an existential threat, a gauntlet thrown down in a genre where the most widely accepted political statements are conservative. The response was so virulent that it made the mere existence, and persistence, of the Chicks a protest—one that defined their acclaimed 2006 comeback album, Taking the Long Way, and its oft-punned lead single “Not Ready to Make Nice.”
Now the Chicks are finally back with Gaslighter, a follow-up that, for better or worse, is philosophically unmoved. Their dukes are still up, but in the intervening 14 years their opponents have left the ring. Now their battles are scattered, with what seem to be good intentions sometimes awkwardly and ineffectively conveyed along the way. While they’re ready to fight on matters personal and political with the same jaw-dropping technical skill that’s always made them stand out, it’s with little of the incisive clarity and precision that defines their best work.
Take “Gaslighter,” the album’s opener and lead single. The exceptionally bright track has the same outspoken tone, vocal harmonies, and foot-stomping chorus of some of the Chicks’ most beloved songs. But its central, titular refrain relies on the implications of “gaslighter,” the runner-up for the 2018 word of the year, for a hint of subversion—even though its overuse in contemporary political rhetoric has sapped the term’s power.
While the song seems to be about Maines’ ex-husband, it serves the Chicks’ political position as well. “I think most everybody has a gaslighter in their lives somewhere,” the band’s Emily Strayer told the Associated Press. “But, yeah, it was so weird how it echoes our current administration.” In trying to offer a righteous indictment, “Gaslighter” ends up suggesting a depressingly familiar trope: how Americans oversimplify political alignment by looking at it through the lens of their romantic lives.
The trite, foggy expression of the very real links between the personal and the political continue back-to-back on “For Her,” an ostensibly encouraging song that Maines directs to her younger self before reverting to rallying cry cliché (“Stand up, show up/For her, for her”), and “March March,” a performative protest song that name-checks a laundry list of contemporary issues including gun violence, global warming, and underfunded public schools without convincingly engaging with any of them. Notably absent from its concerns is systemic racism, a possible oversight that the group attempted to address with a video spotlighting the names of Black people killed by police and otherwise, released amid protests following the death of George Floyd. And though Maines told the New York Times the group had “wanted to change it years and years and years ago,” the Chicks only dropped “Dixie” from their name mid-album rollout, after those same protests prompted new conversations around Confederate monuments and symbolism.
These aimless attempts distract from some of the more interesting aesthetic experiments on the album, which was produced by the Chicks in partnership with pop monolith Jack Antonoff. “Texas Man” and “Tights on My Boat” both strip the Chicks’ sound down to its essence to great effect—banjo, strings, and the group’s vocal harmonies filtered through a pop groove and otherwise left alone is a genuinely compelling new take on the punchy country sound they spent a decade’s worth of albums cultivating. Beachy hymn “Julianna Calm Down” is a signature anthem that’s fully outside of country, but in a way that doesn’t feel forced. All three, co-written by buzzy hitmaker Julia Michaels, also have some of the album’s most distinctive hooks.
The group’s core elements—Maines’ singular voice, those crystalline harmonies, their remarkable talent as instrumentalists—endure, and because of that, much of the album charms. What’s missing, despite a team that includes some of pop’s most sought-after collaborators, are memorable songs that stand up to the sky-high bar the Chicks set for themselves all those years ago. Without a clear target, their formerly devastating blows just don’t quite land the same way.

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Buy: Rough Trade
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Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Today, we revisit U2’s daring 1993 album, a staggeringly weird and strangely intimate political pop experience.

Zooropa

Around the world, a resurgence of fascism. In Germany, gangs of skinheads brutalize immigrants. In France, Le Pen’s far-right Front National brings hate to the ballot box. Muslims die, en masse, in intractable foreign wars, and their deaths slip from the front page to the second. So much news. So much of it bad. All of it relayed to us, instantaneous, on bright, beguiling screens.
So goes the introduction to nearly every review of U2’s Zooropa published in 1993. Very little has changed if we’re talking geopolitics; everything has changed if we’re talking U2. Zooropa wasn’t the band’s last risky move—that would be the 1997 flop Pop, or maybe the non-consensual downloading of 2014’s herpetic Songs of Innocence onto every iPod in the free world—but it was, probably, their last successful one. The album’s sleeve is a bright collage of purples and pinks, blues and yellows; on every album since, they’ve opted for greyscale.
Zooropa was born on a break between legs of Zoo TV, a tour-as-television-spectacle spanning continents and playing provocatively with light and color and character. U2 intended to record a companion EP to Achtung Baby, something to spur ticket sales as Zoo TV continued into its second year. Instead, they made an odd hybrid of live album and avant-garde experiment. Recording engineer Robbie Adams fashioned loops of music from Zoo TV soundchecks; aided by producers Flood and Brian Eno, the band turned these loops into strange new songs unmoored from genre. “Yeah, ‘alternative,’” said Bono, rolling his eyes as he bested Nirvana, R.E.M., and Smashing Pumpkins for Best Alternative Music Performance at the 1994 Grammys. Maybe he’d have preferred to lock horns with Ozzy Osbourne and Meat Loaf in the rock categories.
There’s a bit of bog-standard rock balladry on Zooropa, but it is, otherwise, a record of staggering weirdness. On the lead single, “Numb,” The Edge reads a dystopian laundry list in staid monotone: “Don’t answer, don’t ask, don’t try and make sense,” Bono wails in operatic falsetto. Deep in the mix, a member of the Hitler Youth hits a drum in a sample from Leni Riefenstahl’s propagandistic Triumph of the Will. (On the Zoo TV tour, U2 had used footage from the film in anti-fascist video collages full of burning crosses and swastikas.) Following the grim “Numb” is “Lemon,” a song in which Bono grieves for his mother, though you’d never guess it from the way he coos “whisper” and “moan,” sounding a little like Donna Summer, a little like Prince. A toy piano tinkles over the voyeuristic “Babyface.” A brass sample, sourced from the 1978 Soviet folk compilation Lenin’s Favourite Songs, opens “Daddy’s Gonna Pay for Your Crashed Car.” Strangest of all, Bono cedes lead vocal on the final track to Johnny Cash, who walks like a Colossus over the hymnal static of “The Wanderer.”
Odd as these songs were, they fit perfectly into Zoo TV’s post-apocalyptic assault on the senses. The band’s mainstays wound up sounding silliest. The celestial opening of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” the Martin Luther King, Jr. sermon punctuating “Pride (In the Name of Love),” the gorgeous addiction-dirge of “Running to Stand Still”—all were wildly incongruous with the sight of square-jawed Bono covering Elvis in gold lamé fuck-me pumps and little red devil horns. The alternate reality of this tour was so complete, so utterly impenetrable, that the traditional became aberrant. Bono delighted in donning those horns, that lipstick, and transforming into his devilish alter ego, MacPhisto. Inspired by C.S. Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Bono sought to put his own spin on James 4:7: mock the devil, and he will flee from you. MacPhisto is Satan as pithy, aged Vegas lounge lizard. He cracks wise; he congratulates the Vatican for doing his work for him. When Zoo TV played Bologna, MacPhisto placed a telephone call to Alessandra Mussolini onstage, and left a message on her answering machine: “I just wanted to tell her she’s doing a wonderful job filling the old man’s shoes.”
Bono’s nightly dance with the devil, though parodic, did rankle some of his more devout followers. U2 has been a band of unabashed religiosity since their very inception, singing in liturgical Latin and offering post-punk takes on Psalm 40. But their Christianity has very little in common with the North American evangelical breed. The band formed in Dublin at the very height of the Troubles. English bassist Adam Clayton and Welsh guitarist The Edge are both Protestants, while drummer Larry Mullen, Jr. is Irish Catholic. Bono’s home was interdenominational—his mother Anglican, his father Catholic. And so, in U2’s catalog, faith supersedes denomination, and the band is unafraid to denounce the pain wrought by organized religion. For nearly every worshipful “Yahweh” in U2’s catalog, there is some other vent for disbelief—a “Wake Up Dead Man,” an “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For,” a “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” Bono sang hymns, but he took unapologetic shots at snake-oil televangelism, too: “The God I believe in isn’t short of cash, mister.”
What distinguishes Zooropa from these moments of religious critique is the album’s streak of genuine agnosticism. MacPhisto may have been satirical, but “The First Time” is deadly serious, imagining a prodigal son who returns only to reject his father’s love:

My father is a rich man
He wears a rich man’s cloak
He gave me the keys to his kingdom
Gave me a cup of gold
He said, “I have many mansions
And there are many rooms to see.”
But I left by the back door
And I threw away the key

The song, says Bono, is about losing one’s faith. “I’m very sympathetic to people who have the courage not to believe,” he said, in the 2006 memoir U2 by U2. “I’ve seen a lot of people around me have bad experiences with religion, be so badly abused they feel they just can’t go there anymore, which is a shame.” For a celebrity Christian of Bono’s caliber to suggest that abandoning faith is “courageous,” that “throwing away the key” is a principled act of love—this was, and remains, genuinely radical. “For the first time,” he sings at the song’s end, “I feel love.” Bono is not rejecting the Church here, and he is not rejecting Tammy Faye Bakker; he is rejecting the love of God. He is looking, instead, for human intimacy.
Toward the end of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, another wildly experimental ’90s meditation on the addictive allure of television which remains thumpingly relevant in 2020, a man swears he’ll leave the priesthood unless his brother can convince him of humanity’s goodness. This priest proposes a test: His brother must sit on the floor of a subway station and beg—not for money, but to be touched. If even one single person deigns to reach out and lay a hand on him, then mankind is worth saving, not yet beyond salvation. After nine long months on the dingy floor of Boston’s Park Street Station, a handshake finally arrives, proffered by a child: “only 14 and largely clueless… about defensive strategies outside T-stations,” having “no one worldly or adult along with him there to explain to him why the request of men with outstretched hands for a simple handshake or High Five shouldn’t automatically be honored and granted.”
The conclusion Wallace reaches here is very like the one U2 arrive at in the songs of Zooropa: organized religion is not a guarantor of sanity and wellness; human touch is, even if it comes at great personal cost. “The Wanderer” of Johnny Cash’s closing track is not out to find God, but “to taste and to touch and to feel as much as a man can”—at least, “before he repents.” This emphasis on the sensual, the physical, recurs throughout Zooropa, and not just as a counter to religious abnegation. The band warns, just as Wallace did, of the suffering that results when people are subsumed by their screens. Whether Bono is masturbating to a video vixen with “bright blue eyes” on “Babyface,” or weeping over a tape of his mother, on “Lemon,” it is abundantly clear that no amount of virtual intimacy holds the power of one real kiss, one last hug.
For U2, this idea was a genuine political commitment. In the latter days of the carefully constructed Zoo TV tour, the band set aside time for unscripted video calls, via satellite, to a besieged Sarajevo. Long before the ubiquity of Skype and Zoom, these video calls were genuinely novel—conversations held in real time, as intimate as any dialogue broadcast on a Jumbotron can be. The suffering people of Sarajevo became as real to the cheap seats as the band itself. Participants in these calls confronted the complacent West directly, forcefully. “You’re all having a good time,” said a group of Sarajevan women, one night, via satellite, to a crowd at Wembley Stadium. “You’re going to go back to a rock show. You’re going to forget that we even exist. And we’re all going to die.” It was a profoundly uncomfortable moment; “the show,” according to manager Paul McGuinness, “never recovered.” As the video-call ended, and the women on the screen faded from view, Bono turned to a silent stadium. “Tonight,” he said, “we should all be ashamed to be European.” In the absence of Jesus, every person in the stadium was forced to lay hands on the leper.
U2 would never ask their audience to confront atrocities like this again. In the mid-2000s, their vacuous activism came with consumerist demands: to purchase (RED) products, to view the Live 8 broadcast, to sport a snow-white Make Poverty History bracelet next to your canary-yellow Livestrong. People who actually lived with HIV or lived in poverty were not the spokespeople of these campaigns; Bono was, posing on the cover of Vanity Fair next to Condoleezza Rice. Though the band still performs the stunning 1995 track “Miss Sarajevo” in live performances, it is now divorced from its original context. If the recent dust-up over Dua Lipa’s pronouncement of Kosovar Albanian indigeneity is any indication, most young people are fully unaware of Serbia’s war crimes. This is history that must be taught; U2, unfortunately, is no longer in the business of education.
But Zoo TV was the perfect blend of form and content for its political moment: a direct confrontation of distant violence, a subversive refusal of God and the Devil both, a hand extended in friendship on a subway platform otherwise crowded with folks hurrying home to watch television. It was wise enough to understand that the future may be bleak, but unafraid to push forward. “I have no compass,” sang Bono, on Zooropa’s title track. “And I have no map, and I have no reasons, no reasons to get back.” He has no religion, either; nor does Cash, wandering at the album’s conclusion. “Jesus,” he sings, “don’t you wait up,” having left his home with “nothing but the thought of you”—you, another person; the same kind, perhaps, who opened the eyes of the narrator of “The First Time.” It is interesting to consider “The Wanderer” against Cash’s end-of-life masterpiece, the video for “Hurt.” Director Mark Romanek films Cash in a Dutch master’s array of delicacies in slow decay; his camera lingers on a House of Cash wrecked by neglect. And yet June is in frame, alive, looking at her husband and loving him. “I left with nothing,” Cash sings, on Zooropa, “but the thought you’d be there, too.” And there, at the very end, she was.

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Though led by a fiery performance from Mike Patton, this Slayer/Retox/the Locust supergroup doesn’t shed much new light on the players involved.

Dead Cross

On paper, the matchup of Mike Patton with former Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo, the Locust/Retox bassist Justin Pearson, and Retox guitarist Michael Crain suggests creative possibilities galore. When Patton recruited Lombardo for his avant-grind outfit Fantômas alongside Melvins frontman Buzz Osborne and Mr. Bungle co-founder Trevor Dunn in the late ’90s, the world finally got to hear Lombardo’s range in settings that were previously unheard of for a thrash drummer. 2004’s Delìrium Còrdia album, for example—a continuous, hour-plus, through-composed piece of music—leaned closer to modern classical than metal or even experimental noise.
Likewise, the Locust and Retox have employed a similarly modernist sense of composition within the tight confines of grindcore and hardcore, respectively. On 2007’s New Erections, for example, the Locust went so far as to frame grindcore as a cheeky but powerful reincarnation of jazz fusion. So it follows that the self-titled debut by Pearson, Crain, Lombardo, and Patton under the name Dead Cross would crackle with irreverent verve. Yes, the music this band makes is undeniably fun—Dead Cross bounces along with so much pep you could almost consider it a party record. But they stick to a fairly straight-ahead take on thrash and hardcore that doesn’t shed much new light on the players involved.
Dead Cross hits on all the elements you’d expect. Lombardo’s signature double-bass drum volleys and warp-speed oompah-oompah-oompah beat are both in full effect right from opening number “Seizure and Desist,” as Patton uses his now-familiar arsenal of throat acrobatics, half-singing and half-shrieking in a pointed indictment against “pimps and johns and patriot scum.” Patton makes reference to “hedge-fund ghosts,” office buildings that blow up, and a “paperwork explosion,” presumably his way of addressing the lack of official accountability and truth in a climate of rampant malfeasance. The thrashing tempo then switches gears, ending in a 40-second ambient noisescape that sounds something like digitized seagull calls echoing over a vast space—the type of thing you’d expect from Pearson and Patton.
As sonic window-dressing, the end of “Seizure and Desist” certainly whets the appetite, but it also highlights what’s missing most in this supergroup. For whatever reason, Pearson and Crain chose not to weave more strangeness into the main body of the songs. Crain in particular seems to restrain his ability to make the guitar speak in a language of exotic, video game-influenced sounds à la Melt-Banana’s Ichirou Agata. Had he pursued that direction with the same relish as he indulges his inner riff-monger on Dead Cross, he could have added a whole new dimension. Along those lines, it’s refreshing to see Lombardo return to his punk and hardcore roots after recent stints with Suicidal Tendencies and the Misfits. The breakdown part on “Idiopathic,” for example, conjures images of mosh pits at old D.R.I. shows, even though it only lasts 13 seconds. But Dead Cross makes it all too easy to forget that it was Lombardo’s inimitable sense of swing that was so crucial in vaulting Slayer to thrash metal’s elite upper echelon.
You’d expect this particular bunch of musicians to push each other out of their respective comfort zones just a bit more—even if Patton came aboard after the music was already finished. Patton is a prolific John Zorn-like figure with an irrepressible appetite for pushing boundaries via collaborations with Merzbow, Rahzel, Kaada, Dan the Automator, the Dillinger Escape Plan, and Zorn himself (to name just a few). He turns in a fiery performance across the record and other than the cover of Bauhaus’ goth classic “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” he also laces each song with timely socio-political commentary, matching the music’s freneticism with requisite disgust for the abuse of power.
Known as a “shit terrorist” during Faith No More’s heyday, Patton revels in scatological imagery on Dead Cross. But he also shows a sense of concern we haven’t quite heard from him before, which helps the album act as a reassuring, if musically safe, tonic for the woes of our time.


Despite the ostensibly humanizing presence of Rick Rubin, rock’s patron saint of prestige, these quintessentially Vegas showmen still sound like they’re firing their emotions out of a T-shirt cannon.

Mercury – Act 1

There have been other rock bands from Las Vegas, but none have embodied the city’s essence like Imagine Dragons. Packed with all the pyrotechnics and budget-busting pageantry of the Strip, each of the band’s albums has played like an imagined Cirque Du Soleil production, as if they were designed not for stereos but for stages. If you’d never seen a picture of frontman Dan Reynolds before—and, despite this band’s monumental success, a lot of people haven’t—you might guess he looks like Criss Angel.
That embrace of brute-force spectacle has made Imagine Dragons one of modern rock’s few true blockbuster attractions, one of the most streamed bands of the Spotify era. But monetizing music isn’t the same as making people care about it. With no central personality for fans to feel truly vested in, the band can seem as anonymous as the black-shirted techies that strike the Wynn Encore Theater each night. On their fifth album, Mercury – Act 1, Reynolds works to change that, teaming with rock’s patron saint of prestige, Rick Rubin, for a humanizing makeover, complete with the requisite songs about suffering and mortality that Rubin demands from all of his charges.
Rubin’s presence softens Imagine Dragons’ sound in places, and after so many albums that played like the THX sound effect drawn out for an excruciating 50 minutes, that’s a welcome change of pace. In rare moments, Reynolds’ Rubin-mandated vulnerability works to his favor, especially on album highlight “Wrecked,” which he wrote about losing his sister-in-law to cancer. Here his clumsy lyricism, usually a liability, becomes an asset. When he sings, “We were there for the ups and downs/And there for the constant rounds of chemo,” it’s touching in its plainspokenness.
Overstatement is still this band’s very reason for being, though, so for most of Mercury they fire their emotions out of a T-shirt cannon. Reynolds’ snarl-yell, his signature since “Radioactive,” is one of the most grating sounds in popular music, and he goes absolutely nuclear with it on “Dull Knives,” which stews in wall-punching rage even as it pleads for empathy: “I’m crying for help, it’s such a cliché/Invisible pain, it’s filling each day.” Even worse is “Cutthroat,” a fuck-shit-up, you-want-a-piece of-me Woodstock ’99 throwback that’s the most dirtbag thing Fred Durst never wrote. Ironically, that song is immediately followed by one called “No Time for Toxic People,” a true Spider-Man-pointing-at-Spider-Man moment: If you’re looking to cut toxic people out of your life, try starting with the ones who wrote “Cutthroat.”
Elsewhere the band’s genre hopping, the secret sauce behind their billions of streams, leads to some truly stupefying combinations. With its pillow-humping synths, “Monday” is a sleazier rewrite of Muse’s “Madness,” while the hip-hop experiment “Follow You” sounds like Post Malone covering Queen at karaoke. Dopier still is the Bleachers-styled “It’s OK,” where good intentions and implied LGBTQ allyship are undercut by goofy ’80s Vacation-soundtrack vibes and the mock-Caribbean accents of its chanted chorus. Did they really intend for the album’s big self-acceptance anthem to sound this much like Todd Rundgren’s “Bang the Drum All Day”?
It’s truly rare to hear an album talk out of both sides of its mouth so incoherently while pandering so desperately in all directions . Mercury tries to be all things to all people, but mostly it’s a headache, a grim study in just how patronizing popular music can be in 2021. Imagine Dragons do intermittently demonstrate some signs of growth, but these don’t count for much; attempts at maturity really don’t go all that far on an album that mostly sounds like a truck full of teens driving by and flashing the shocker at you.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Adrian Younge has devoted himself to loving recreations of soul through the lens of a hardcore hip-hop fan. On Something About April II, a sequel to his heavily sampled first April album, Younge emerges as someone more interested in creating new classics than new samples.

Something About April II

For most of his career as an artist, composer, multi-instrumentalist, and band leader, Adrian Younge has devoted himself to a particular brand of soul, heavily indebted to the blaxploitation sounds of the early '70s, starting with his soundtrack to 2009's Black Dynamite—a theatrically-released spoof of the genre. While the movie was a sendup of the tropes of all things superfly and jive, the soundtrack was an earnest homage, full of wah-wah's, the vibes and echoes of Curtis Mayfield, Isaac Hayes, James Brown, and 24-Carat Black. His next effort, 2011's Something About April (presented by his band, Venice Dawn) was also a soundtrack. Though it was full of psychedelic, trippy funk, doo-wop, and rhapsodic horns, it also called in the talents of the Funk Brothers' guitarist Dennis Coffey and Italian cinematic funkateers Calibro 35, and incorporated lessons learned from studying Ennio Morricone, resulting in a project that was more tender and nuanced. But the film—about a love affair between a young interracial couple in the '60s—did not exist, and the album brought to the fore Younge's "extreme obsession" (his own words) with the soundtrack format.
Something About April II represents a return to this love for Younge, who masterminded two audio stories of Shaolin soul fronted by Ghostface Killah (Twelve Reasons to Die and its sequel), as well as projects with Souls of Mischief and the Delfonics in recent years. Where A**drian Younge Presents the Delfonics showcased what Younge was capable of as a producer when aided by strong songwriters, April II highlights his accomplishment on his own terms. For all of his leanings on history and reverence for the musical past, Younge has always been a child of hip-hop. The first April record was crafted by someone clearly in love with breakbeats and seemed to aspire to become new sources for crate diggers. (Tellingly, that album was used as source material twice on Jay Z's Magna Carta Holy Grail—"Picasso Baby" and "Heaven"—and Younge's compositions provided the samples for DJ Premier's and Royce da 5'9"'s PRhyme album.) But on Something About April II, Younge emerges as someone more interested in creating new classics than new samples.
As always, the music here leans heavily on a roughly five-year slice of Black soul from '68-'73 with Younge helming a Hammond organ, Fender Rhodes piano, vibraphone, and the Selene, a one-of-one hi-tech lo-fi Mellotron keyboard of his own creation. But the songs here are more fully formed than anything he's done on his own. "Sandrine," featuring frequent vocal collaborator Loren Oden, is breezy, with acoustic guitar and a lyrical confidence unseen in Younge's earlier work. "Let's treasure every moment that we share/ Cherish what we have for all time," Oden sings, stretching out and deepening the last two words into a small riff that sounds like it belongs in another song, but fits perfectly. A pair of duets by Laetitia Sadier (of Stereolab) and Bilal—"Step Beyond" and "La Ballade"—benefit from Sadier's cool phrasing, placed atop deep bass grooves that are smart enough to play the background and strong enough to disappear when they're not needed. When Younge revisits blaxploitation aesthetics—"Winter Is Here," with Israeli singer/songwriter Karolina; "Magic Music" featuring Raphael Saadiq; Karolina and Sadier's "Hands of God"—it's with an obeisance that dares to push things outward into soaring vocals and complex arrangements, making everything sound familiar and new.
The music on Something About April II, although teasingly short—most numbers here clock in under three minutes—sounds like music for music's sake, not existing solely for samples or as reverence. Even when left largely to his own musings—on the instrumental "Sea Motet" and the sparsely accented "April Sonata"—Younge presents whole thoughts that move with a fluidity that he's seldom exhibited in the past. In short: he's gotten better at everything he does.


The Newark rapper is as cold and calculating with people as he is with his money. Everything’s an asset or a liability, no in between.

Bulletproof Luh

Mach-Hommy thinks a lot about what his labor is worth. Very little of the Newark MC’s music is available online, and the physical editions are always limited. His last project, the seven-track EP Fete Des Morts AKA Dia De Los Muertos, mostly produced by Earl Sweatshirt, costs $111.11 to download on Bandcamp. If you don’t know anything else about Hommy, that’s pretty much by design: He’s done only a handful of interviews, and in those few he’s revealed almost nothing about himself. His songs don’t have videos. He has almost no social-media presence. Rap is mostly a business strategy for him, as he’s made quite clear. “I’m here for the bag, son,” he said when asked what he hoped to get out of his art in a rare interview. “I’m here for the fucking bag of money, you dumb ass.”
Hommy’s latest release, Bulletproof Luh, is one of his more affordable works. Vinyl packages are available for between £40 and £160—yes, those numbers are in pounds. The raps themselves are far from an afterthought, but it’s easy to believe they were created largely with the intention of securing the bag. “They say I’m wrong for wanting all of these things/Gimme my dough, fuck the karma, we kings,” he raps on “Fubar.” His whole method is all about creating value, as he’s put it before, controlling “the dispensation and the interaction.”
Released on Valentine’s Day, Bulletproof Luh is in large part about Hommy’s relationships with the women in his life. These aren’t love stories, though. He’s as cold and calculating with people as he is with his money. Everything’s an asset or a liability, no in between. On “Grease,” he spits game at a potential partner, then lays out the prerequisites for being with him, which mostly just means understanding she isn’t a priority. “Regina” takes the persuasion a step further, addressing his target by name and flattering her. She loves coke, but she never bought crack from Hommy, which seems to impress him. “Yvonne” delves into the backstory of a woman who’s described as a femme fatale using her influence to manipulate powerful men. “Everybody knows that girls with big smiles/That wear nice clothes run the world with style,” he raps on “Open Sesame.” Hommy seems infatuated with these women, fixated enough to be intrigued by them but not enough to love them.
As always, he’s meticulous with his raps. His verses are often transactional, sometimes even economical, both in how he writes and how he interacts with his characters. His stories are compact, packed with info, yet they remain loose and free-flowing, taking natural turns. It’s the little things that give them dimension. His descriptions are vivid, particularly when they’re delivered as quick asides. “My white ingenue/Au jus, it’s too gushy,” he raps on “Regina,” dipping in and out of French; “Shawty got legs like fine Cabernet,” he casually mentions at the start of “Open Sesame.” On “Honey Roasted,” Hommy’s jetsetter raps snap in and out of place as he interpolates John Denver’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane” and spits breathless phrases with ease. His flashbacks mimic the shades of memory: Some details are crisp and others are vague, worn down by time. “My favorite cousin gave me a pair of Adidas, Lakers color, and some rubbers/Some gun with seven shots and it was foreign/A Makaveli top to match the decorum/Very fresh with the forums,” he raps on “Apple Juice.” His vignettes have depth and shape.
The production on Bulletproof Luh is rich and expressive. The entire record feels plush, the verses stitching neatly into the fabric of his soul samples. Pitched voices wail as he strings together come-ons and sells his playboy persona, on “Apple Juice” and “Yvonne,” especially. There’s no outsourcing here: As his Bandcamp page puts it, all of the songs were “produced by Mach-Hommy for Mach-Hommy,” as if he’s Marc Jacobs, taking full credit for his work. Hommy is constantly letting listeners know he has both creative control and quality control. Everything about his music exemplifies his core belief: Build something and make your own value.


Madonna’s spectacular fourth album revealed just how grand, artistic, and personal a pop star could be at the very height of her fame.

Like a Prayer

Today is Madonna Day in the Pitchfork Reviews section; in honor of her birthday, we reviewed four of her key records.
Read the reviews of Madonna’s blockbuster 1989 album Like a Prayer and you’ll see a lot of confession-related imagery—not because of how her career had been steeped in Catholicism, but because of the narratives surrounding the superstar as she geared up to release her fourth album. She tried to act on screen in Who’s That Girl and on stage in David Mamet’s Speed-the-Plow; she turned 30; her tabloid-dominating marriage to bad-boy actor Sean Penn had ended. “Was this to be her atonement?” brayed the subtext.
These were ideal conditions for listeners to use an album by pop’s most notorious—and most famous—woman as diary pages, but to at least one interviewer, Madonna bristled at the concept. “People don’t see that you can take some of your experiences from real life and use part of them in your art,” Madonna told Vogue in May 1989. “They try to make everything an absolute truth.” Yet elsewhere, she also noted that Like a Prayer was in part about her taking greater control of her narrative. “My first couple of albums I would say came from the little girl in me, who is interested only in having people like me, in being entertaining and charming and frivolous and sweet,” Madonna told Interview in May 1989. “And this new one is the adult side of me, which is concerned with being brutally honest.”
While Madonna was no shrinking violet during the first chunk of the ’80s—the decade of Madonna wannabes, MTV Video Music Awards-ready wedding dresses, and “controversial” her officially recognized prefix—Like a Prayer does showcase her growth as a pop artist, from the gnarled guitar that opens its title track all the way through its warped-tape closer “Act of Contrition.” She takes more chances lyrically and musically, and while they don’t always work, they do give a glimpse at her restlessness and increased willingness to take musical chances, whether she’s bringing in Prince or letting her voice’s imperfections into songs or taking on heavy, personal-life-adjacent topics.
“Like a Prayer,” with its lyrics of redemption derived from spiritual surrender or some sort of sex act (or a combination of the two) and roof-raising gospel choir, shimmies and saunters, Madonna using its lite-funk building blocks to anchor a giddy sing-along. “Express Yourself” is led by one of Madonna’s most bravado vocals, ready-made for lustily singing along with in a mirror or on a tense solo elevator ride. Though it’s worth noting that the version on Like a Prayer sounds anemic compared to the utterly superior Shep Pettibone single remix, which foregrounds the cowbell and makes the bouncing-ball bassline a go-on-girl counterpoint to Madonna’s message.
“Till Death Do Us Part,” on first blush, comes off like a breakup-themed update of earlier Madonna synth-pop offerings, like True Blue’s “Jimmy Jimmy,” or Like A Virgin’s “Angel.” She sings of feeling bereft over chiming synths and popping guitars—“When you laugh it cuts me just like a knife/I’m not your friend, I’m just your little wife,” she sighs. But the glittery vibes and hopped-up tempo take on a sinister edge in later verses, sounding more glassy-eyed as Madonna’s world-weary alter ego narrates the dissolving love and as the disturbing imagery—fading bruises, growing hate, flying vases—piles up. The final verse, which describes the circular nature of abusive relationships and which punctuates the titular phrase with the sound of shattered-glass, only adds to the song’s despair. Its follow-up “Promise to Try”—a slowly building ballad directed toward a young girl who’s struggling with the death of her mother—is mournful, the loneliness it describes sitting uncomfortably close to the cycle depicted in “Till Death.”
The windswept textures of “Oh Father”—loping pianos, drooping strings—give Madonna’s voice room to move. It swoops and swerves in a childlike voice as she sings of an ambivalent father-daughter relationship. Madonna’s mezzo, which wobbled on low notes and sometimes felt stretched in its upper registers, was often tsk-tsked by her critics, but her vulnerable vocal on “Oh Father” also shows why her music was so beloved; even if she’s singing of characters, as she claimed to Vogue, her gasps and shivers gave voice to the complex dynamic so many children have with their parents—whether biological, by marriage, adoptive, or spiritual.
That was, in part, an outgrowth of Madonna performing in the studio with her backing musicians. “We had every intention of going back and fixing the vocals, but then we’d listen to them and say, ‘Why? They’re fine,’” she told Interview. “They were a lot more emotional and spontaneous when I did them with the musicians… There are weird sounds that your throat makes when you sing: p’s are popped, and s’s are hissed, things like that. Just strange sounds that come out of your throat, and I didn’t fix them. I didn’t see why I should. Because I think those sounds are emotions too.”
The emotions on Like a Prayer aren’t all fraught. “Cherish” is a feather-light declaration of devotion that calls back to Cali-pop outfit the Association while updating Madonna’s earlier exercise in retroism “True Blue”; “Dear Jessie” engages in the reaching toward sounding “Beatles-esque” that was in vogue at the time, pairing fussy strings and tick-tock percussion with images of pink elephants and flying leprechauns. “Love Song,” meanwhile, is a synth-funk chiffon co-written by none other than Prince, one of Madonna’s few pop equals at the time. The two of them feel locked in an erotically charged session of truth or dare, each challenging the other to stretch their voices higher while the drum machines churn. Prince also played, initially uncredited, on “Like a Prayer,” the sauntering pop-funk track “Keep It Together,” and the album-closing “Act of Contrition,” a two-minute maelstrom that combines Prince’s guitar heroics, backward-masked bits from the title track, heavy beats, and its title inspiration, the Catholic prayer of… confession.
So maybe Madonna’s protests that Like a Prayer wasn’t autobiographical were a bit of a ruse—or just another way to keep the minds of America’s pop-watchers thinking about her music as she gave them an album where she was less afraid to show her flaws, more willing to try on new personas that had bits of her selves attached. After all, as she told The New York Times in 1989, “What I do is total commercialism, but it’s also art.” Like a Prayer straddles those two ideals with gusto, with even its less satisfying moments adding to the heat given off by the MTV era’s brightest star.


A year past Regulate… G Funk Era's 20th anniversary, the hip-hop pioneer Warren G is releasing the G Funk Era Part II EP, which features Nate Dogg on every track. Making a sequel to such a career- and genre-defining record might smack of desperation elsewhere, but Warren G is sincere, and his return comes in the midst of a minor G-funk renaissance.

Warren G: Regulate...G Funk Era Part II EP

Regulate...G Funk Era Part II EP

Warren G is one of hip-hop's quietest modern pioneers. Even after he helped Dr. Dre, his stepbrother, carve out a career-long groove with his sample selections for The Chronic, Death Row wanted nothing to do with him until he churned out his own Def Jam single, "Regulate", which they happily slapped their logo on after the fact. The song was his first major hit—his production and collaboration with Nate Dogg on Mista Grimm's "Indo Smoke" notwithstanding—and it has rightfully endured as his biggest.
But "Regulate" also overshadowed the rest of Warren G's output, so cleanly encapsulating G-funk that the song has become a deceptive stand-in for a frequently nuanced career. The album, Regulate… G Funk Era, was also released two years after Dre's solo debut, a post-N.W.A. team effort that pioneered a similar sound and is more frequently celebrated as a benchmark. But Regulate… was still momentous, hyper-local and ripe for national appetite at once, a sudden beam of light pointed directly on Long Beach.
Making a sequel to such a career- and genre-defining record might smack of desperation elsewhere, but Warren G is sincere with G Funk Era Part II. A year past the original album's 20th anniversary, this record may have missed its most marketable moment; in another way it's also perfectly on time. In a recent interview with Billboard, Warren G made a familiar veteran-rapper promise about bringing back a "sound that has been missing [in] hip-hop," but if anything, his return comes in the midst of a minor G-funk renaissance. Kendrick Lamar dabbled with and dissected the genre on To Pimp a Butterfly, and YG hit an unexpected stride over a Terrence Martin G-funk beat for his first post-shooting single last month. Meanwhile, DJ Quik is still tweaking and Snoop Dogg dropped the raps (again) on his last album for a smoother, adult-contemporary revision of the sound. The resurgence is part of a larger refocusing on California hip-hop, but G-funk has been brought along for the ride.
As advertised, Regulate... G Funk Era Part II sticks squarely to Warren G's roots. The production is clean, lush, and familiar, and with four tracks running just under 15 minutes long, it is pleasantly unambitious. There's no misguided attempts at recreating the original, and there also isn't a dud in sight. "My House", the first single, flips Madness' '80s hit "Our House" into a bouncing stomper. It's the same trick Warren pitched with "Regulate" and has been his strength all along, upending weirdly obvious records into unexpected slappers. Nate Dogg rebuilds Madness' hook into a dramatic street anthem and Warren, whose rapping has always been confidently breezy, lays claim to everything in sight.
The EP also serves as a tasteful tribute to Nate Dogg, who is featured on every track. "Saturday", the most upbeat number here, could anchor a barbeque anywhere in California, and Nate Dogg's vocals on the song bear out his mark as a stylistic innovator. Because of his most familiar riffs, Nate Dogg is sometimes pigeonholed as a monotonous baritone, but songs like "Saturday" not only stretch his upper register, they showcase his constant runs and clever vocal riffing.
Thankfully, this sequel rarely fetishizes Nate Dogg or his passing, and most of the songs breeze by with no mention of his death. It's best that way, as a restrained, unceremonious showcase. Jeezy's verse on "Keep on Hustlin'" is an exception, opening with a handful of bars eulogizing Nate Dogg, 2Pac, and Biggie at once before dropping an unfortunately dated reference to freeing Boosie Badazz, who has been out of jail for more than a year. The verse breaks the mood, but it's only momentary, and the rest of the EP could have believably been released at any point in the last ten years. That might be the best thing about G Funk Era Part II: it's not strained or pandering, as much as an effortless continuation. The EP might not be a foundation shaker like its namesake, but Warren G is proof that sometimes music is best when it stands still.


The Nashville songwriter returns with a comfortable set of country-pop, colored by grief and new motherhood. It feels matter-of-factly masterful.

Humble Quest

The Linda Ronstadt-in-Laurel Canyon vibe of Humble Quest might not be what you’d expected from Maren Morris at this point—though given her aerial-ballet career arc, it was hard to know what to expect. She broke out in 2016 with a secular gospel gem (“My Church”), landed a megahit with DJ/producer Zedd (“The Middle”), then joined the Highwomen, a supergroup tribute to, and rewrite of, 1970s outlaw country. Her latest record was made during the postpartum depression that followed the birth of her first child, a darkness compounded by the loss of her longtime creative wingman Michael Busbee to brain cancer and magnified by the pandemic. Yet the music on her third album is largely joyous and bright, both playful and profound, full of easy, comfortable pleasures that feel deeper for being hard-won.
To say Humble Quest is a re-embrace of country is misleading insofar as it suggests Morris, who can conjure a Texan Amy Winehouse, was ever a neat fit for the genre, or that she ever aspired to be. That said, the album is a near-perfect expression of country-pop post-Golden Hour, the high-water mark by Morris’ Lone Star pal Kacey Musgraves: music channeling the ’70s California rock that channeled classic country songcraft. Humble Quest may be filigreed with pedal steel, dobro, and mandolin, but it runs on guitars, synth washes, big drums, and bigger choruses. It’s all shaped with the help of Greg Kurstin, a master of pop-rock-soul triangulation who produced Morris’ hit “The Bones” along with projects by Adele, Sia, and Beck (whose Sea Change and Morning Phase might prove West Coast touchstones as significant for a new generation of country acts as the Eagles’ Greatest Hits has been for the past one).
Foundationally, this is Morris’ first LP without polymath producer Busbee—co-writer of her signatures “My Church” and “80s Mercedes”—who died of glioblastoma in 2019 at age 43. His absence, and his knack for supersizing country rock for the 21st century, shadow the album, starting with the lead track and first single “Circles Around This Town,” a triumphant autobiographical plaint about life as an aspiring Nashville songwriter. Referencing those early hits and echoing their car conceits, it focuses on the struggle to arrive: It’s got “a Montero with the AC busted,” a couple of “bad demos on a burned CD,” slammed doors, and the “couple hundred songs” she had to exorcize to land her breakthroughs, which she invokes just as the music drops out and the chorus surges. Busbee’s absence caps the album, too: The modest, aching piano ballad “What Would This World Do,” penned by Morris after his diagnosis but before his death, asks what the world would do without him. She’s living the answer daily, playing his piano in her basement.
If darkness colors the set, so does motherhood’s rapture. The day she discovered she was pregnant, Morris wrote “Hummingbird” with help from songwriting doulas the Love Junkies: Liz Rose, Hillary Lindsay, and Lori McKenna, mothers all. The acoustic waltz isn’t the best song in the A-list trio’s catalog, but it shows how Morris’ voice can alchemize a workaday lyric, with a sorghum flow rooted as deeply in R&B as the Patsy Cline countrypolitan she grew up karaoke-ing (check her read of “All Night” by fellow Texan, Beyoncé). Gospel and soul mannerisms are a dime a dozen among mainstream country singers, but few have Morris’ nuance and fluency; she already seems like one of the most influential stylists in modern country.
Humble Quest is abetted by Morris’ partner, singer-songwriter Ryan Hurd, who had a Hot 100 hit with last year’s “Chasing After You,” the pair’s first proper duet. Performing it adorably on the AMAs—locking eyes, getting handsy—they became country’s new first couple. Their creative bond seems strong: Besides contributing background vocals, Hurd co-wrote “Circles Around This Town” and “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” on which Morris devotedly rhymes “You like me even when I’ve been a bitch” with “You’re so good lookin’ it kinda makes me sick.” At 6’3” to her 5’1,” Hurd also seems an obvious inspiration for “Tall Guys,” a paean of punchlines by Morris, fellow Highwoman Natalie Hemby, and up-and-coming songsmith Aaron Raitiere.
The all-star co-writing roster seems key to Humble Quest’s hybrid potency. At times, it plays like a concept record about Nashville craft as much as a straight memoir, suggesting these elements cannot be separated in Morris’ world. The lead-off chorus pivots on Morris “trying to write circles around this town,” and the album demonstrates the most recent results. As the line between country and pop gets ever blurrier, Morris’ work with writers beyond the Music Row ecosystem is the most illuminating. Kurstin, who has never before produced a country album, co-wrote four songs, among them “Detour,” a folksy tribute to folks who travel roads less traveled that also credits Australian Sarah Aarons, co-writer of “The Middle” and songs by Khalid and Halsey. Julia Michaels, another writer on “Circles Around This Town,” has shaped megahits for Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber.
Even at a concise 37 minutes, there is filler: “Good Friends” and “Nervous” don’t get past their basic thematic verities, although Morris’ delivery elevates both, the former with warmly tipsy flow, the latter with a soulful rock holler recalling Janis Joplin. Humble Quest notably sidesteps issue-conscious songs like “Dear Hate,” Morris’ poignant response to the 2017 Las Vegas country music festival mass shooting, or “Better Than We Found It” (“America, America/God save us all/From ourselves and the Hell/That we’ve built for our kids”). Her evolving relationship to public activism seems evident in the title track, a country-pop “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” that seems to interrogate her own attempts at allyship, which she aspires to make “more pro-active and less reactive,” as she recently told The New York Times. The impulse is admirable: The music world, like the wider one, needs more folks putting the money where their social media mouths are. And in the end, Humble Quest lives up to its name: 11 lithe songs about love, work, and family, some great, some good, with a coherence and clarity that make it feel matter-of-factly masterful.


Super Furry Animals frontman Gruff Rhys' latest solo project was inspired by his recent discovery that he's a descendent of John Evans, a Welsh explorer from the 1790s. The resulting LP is far more robust and widescreen-scaled than the modest, folk-oriented music Rhys has thus far released under his own name, in tune with the Super Furry Animals’ manic genre-blurring, retro-futurist mandate.

American Interior

Depending on which 20th-anniversary thinkpiece pops up in your Twitter feed at any given moment, Britpop was either a prideful display of national unity that provided the triumphant soundtrack to a post-Thatcher England, or a malignant, creatively stunting cancer that’s rotted contemporary U.K. rock music to its hollow core. But even if you lean toward the latter opinion, we can all agree on one positive outcome of the Blur-vs.-Oasis arms race: It injected Creation Records with enough cash for the label to roll the dice on Welsh wackaloons the Super Furry Animals, the rare rock band of the era that was more interested in exploring the future (and all the toxic mobile-phone radiation that comes with it) than repackaging the past. And while they never approached tabloid-level, supermodel-shagging celebrity status, their steady success in the U.K. over the past decade-and-a-half has afforded frontman Gruff Rhys the means to indulge his various whims—which are never in short supply.
Rhys’ capacious curiosity is given even greater room to roam with his latest solo project—the operative word being “project,” in the studious high-school-class-presentation sense. Its roots lie in Rhys’ recent discovery that he's a descendent of John Evans, a Welsh explorer who, in the 1790s, embarked on a solo voyage through America to locate the Mandan, an obscure tribe of Welsh-speaking Indians linked to a 12th-century Welsh prince named Madoc (who, as legend has it, touched down on our continent a good 300 years before Columbus). But rather than just update his Ancestry.com page and call it a day, Rhys booked a tour along the same path his forefather traversed. This wasn’t your standard-issue solo-acoustic campaign, but a multimedia PowerPoint presentation—booked into art galleries and lecture halls—chronicling Evans’ journey, interspersed with new songs inspired by it. Given that Evans died long before the invention of the camera, and no paintings of the man exist, Super Furry Animals’ go-to artist Pete Fowler built a puppet version of his imagined likeness to serve as Rhys’ onstage second banana and travel companion. Because that’s how Gruff Rhys rolls.
The tour is chronicled in Rhys’ new documentary with co-director Dylan Goch, American Interior, which is currently making the rounds on the festival circuit. But for those not in the vicinity of a screening, there’s this namesake 13-song companion album, which provides a vivid retelling of the story even in the absence of visuals. “100 Unread Messages” essentially serves the same function as the Raiders of the Lost Ark-style dot-to-dot maps that plot Evans’ trek in the film, detailing his initial arrival in Philadelphia, en route to St. Louis and up the Missouri River, and then down to his final resting place in New Orleans. But even this straight-forward travelogue is infused with Rhys’ ever-peculiar musings: As he explains in the film, the song is told from the perspective of someone who’s been trying to email John Evans repeatedly but, for obvious reasons, receives no reply, thereby transforming the biography of an historical figure into a comment on the mind-warping effects of internet addiction. And the track’s countrified Krautrock stomp—supplied by excommunicated Flaming Lips drummer and fellow Native-American enthusiast Kliph Scurlock—is far more robust and widescreen-scaled than the modest, folk-oriented music Rhys has thus far released under his own name, positioning American Interior as the Rhys solo release that’s most in tune with the Super Furry Animals’ manic genre-blurring, retro-futurist mandate.
Really, if this had been released as the first SFA album in five years, no fan would complain, as it encompasses several of the band’s signature modes: the ace-in-the-hole ’70s soft-rock throwbacks (“The Last Conquistador”), the nursery-rhyme funk jams with impossible-to-pronounce hooks (“Allweddellau Allweddol”), the multi-sectional, pedal-steeled prog-pop opuses (“Year of the Dog” and its instrumental-coda counterpart “Tiger’s Tale”). And by fortuitous fuzzy logic, the hair-raising, string-swept cavalry charge “Iolo” works as both a nod to the Welsh poet that backed out of Evans’ expedition at the last minute, and a sonic manifestation of Drake’s phonetically related philosophy. But the Evans narrative provides an emotional throughline that connects and grounds this stylistically free-ranging collection—for all his apparent eccentricity, Rhys has always been an exceptional balladeer, and poignant, piano-bound turns like “Walk Into the Wilderness” feel all the more affecting in the light of the real hardship that inspired it.
But Rhys’ affinity for John Evans clearly goes beyond mere blood relations—for Rhys, Evans was the original Welsh punk, who pursued his vision despite the ridicule, incarceration, and isolating loneliness inherent to the mission. And like so many of the punk icons we lionize today, Evans may have been considered a failure in his lifetime (spoiler alert: his story does not end happily), but his work proved highly influential to those that followed: historians claim his hand-drawn maps of the American northwest were crucial to Lewis and Clark’s landmark maiden expedition to the left coast in the early 19th century. With American Interior, Rhys not only follows in Evans’ footsteps but, in his own way, helps fulfill his original mission: If, years from now, social anthropologists note an unusually high concentration of Super Furry Animals fans along the Missouri, we’ll know why.


In grappling with the “mess” of our present moment, the punk legend looks relentlessly to the future, and her optimism feels alternately like a salve and a delusion.

Next Is Now

Self-indulgent though it may be, pessimism can feel like a logical reaction to our present. The scaffolding is bowing underneath our feet. What’s there to rejoice about? But Vivien Goldman—erstwhile music journalist, PR maven, and Bob Marley biographer; current NYU professor; and eternal punk legend—looks relentlessly to the future on the aptly titled Next Is Now, and her optimism feels alternately like a salve and a delusion. We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion once wrote; Goldman’s latest story is unflaggingly hopeful.
Next Is Now is a linear continuation of Goldman’s oeuvre, threading dubby new wave with funky basslines a la Tom Tom Club and treating spoken-word visions and falsetto melodies like downtown nursery rhymes. Produced by Youth (Killing Joke, the Orb, Paul McCartney) in Goldman’s native London, it incorporates vestiges of ’80s post-punk akin to her 1981 cult classic “Launderette.” Opener “Russian Doll” shares that song’s sauntering reggae tempo, but the record piles on modern flourishes, like the layer cake of synths and embellishments on “Vertigo.” Fans of her work will detect the transition from lo-fi to hi-fi most keenly on songs like “Home,” where the tinny charm of 1981’s “Private Armies” goes glossy, bright chords underpinning electronic blips and a mirage of “A neon whale/Flashing on the wall/At the corner of Houston Street & Broadway.”
But where Goldman’s 30-year-old single concerns itself with a laundromat dalliance, this track—like the others on the album—interrogates the day’s heaviest issues. “He was legal when I met him/Then they changed his status,” the song opens, narrating the tribulations of living undocumented. “My Bestie & My BFF,” which emblematizes the album’s relentless hopefulness, earnestly entwines activism and pleasure. “Meet you at the demo/Catch you at the disco,” Goldman sings, insisting that “My bestie and my BFF/We’re gonna change this mess.” Part of the charm of Goldman’s catalog, epitomized on 2016’s excellent Resolutionary (Songs 1979-1982), is the improvised, off-the-cuff nature of her delivery, which sounds like a punk version of scatting, and here, a lot of that spontaneity is lost—we’re treated to less conversation, more oratory.
The most salient protest songs traffic in specificity, like Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” with its DDT, or Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” its swinging dead so searingly visceral. An anthem like “Bread and Roses” draws its strength from its simple, vivid symbolism. What’s missing on Next Is Now, and what would elevate these songs beyond their earnestness, is a better understanding of “this mess,” whether it’s centered in time and place—America, 2021—or whether Goldman defines it through a personal lens. Gentrification lament “Home” almost gets there with its images of “Alluvial levels of home/Stacked like firewood,” but the chorus—“Home is in the air/Home is everywhere”—feels like a Seussian answer to serious grief.
The ambling “Substitute,” a wistful, bass-led ballad, is the closest we get to a personal lens, and this tighter perspective is a welcome reprieve from the generalities on other tracks. Briefly, she muses, “Why did I walk away/When I wanted to stay?/That famous ambivalence/The best seat on the fence.” Sometimes, the truest story is also the untidiest, and Goldman’s experimental work evinced that; her best songs’ visible bones and unpredictable directions lent them their undeniable allure. Reality itself probably sits somewhere on the fence between pessimism and optimism, and Next Is Now could use more of that ambivalence—less platitudes, more doubt; less triumph, more teeth.

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Nika Rosa Danilova's Zola Jesus project has always been ambitious, and Taiga is her boldest reach yet for the pop stratosphere. Ironically, the album's strongest moments come when Danilova's sights aren't set on pop music.

Taiga

Nika Rosa Danilova's Zola Jesus project has always had lofty ambitions, peaking with last year’s orchestral career-summation Versions and accompanying Guggenheim exhibition. After that, it seemed like her vision could take her anywhere—and “anywhere,” it turns out, was Vashon Island in Washington, where her latest album was largely written. For inspiration, she reached farther out still to the taiga—a type of forest typically found in Russia, desolate enough to border tundra and resilient enough to cover large swaths of the earth. “I like that idea that [the taiga is] full of life—it’s not desert. It’s very much full-blooded, but no one’s civilizing it,” Danilova told Fader earlier this year, and indeed, the taiga’s as fitting a metaphor for Zola Jesus’s music at its best as anyone could produce: cold like a mountain, brutal in its inhospitality, but life-affirming if you take the time to burrow in.
Taiga is Danilova's “pop album,” a tag that's been somewhat overstated. Yes, it's her first full-length on the relatively deep-pocketed Mute, as well as her first with co-producer Dean Hurley (David Lynch, Danger Mouse); and, yes, she told Billboard that she wanted the album to top the charts. But Taiga doesn't sound perky, lightweight, or even radio-ready. Lead single “Dangerous Days”, originally written for the 2011 LP Conatus, has the makings of pop: a gentle throbbing beat, post-chorus synth comedowns, and lyrics that suggest a sideways view of a seize-the-day message. But it’s no closer to dance music than Conatus’ “In Your Nature”, and maybe even less hooky than fellow Conatus cut “Vessel”.
If Taiga nods at pop, it’s mostly in the songwriting–more streamlined, less atmospheric–and Danilova’s vocals, which are cleanly produced and more accessible. She’s mentioned studying Rihanna in particular, and you can hear it in the low, “Diamonds”-smacking strain of “Hunger” ; pop-approaching styles are evoked elsewhere in the vocal swoops and R&B curlicues of “Go (Blank Sea)”, the steady handclaps of “Hollow”, and the gentle-but taunting rhythm of “Dust”.
Taiga's strongest moments actually come when Danilova's sights aren't explicitly set on pop music. True to its title, “Hunger” sounds emaciated, with fuzzy brass, vague hints of a string section, and exhausted, skittish vocals; even the percussion break sounds like it’s been worn to the bone. Despite the pep-talky lyrics, it doesn’t sound like an anthem so much as a mantra clung to, half-breathless, during a fight. (“I’m not getting younger/ I use it, abusively,” is even more striking of a lyric when remembering that 25 is a fairly young age to mind the clock this desperately.) If “Hunger” sounds starved, much of Taiga sounds over-full, and not necessarily in a bad way: “Ego” calls back to Conatus by wielding film-score ambience to impressive effect, and the opening title track sets the stage with atmospherics, drops a drum-and-bass loop over it like sudden light, then stops things short with an imposing tectonic plate of a brass theme.
But too many songs on Taiga come across as filler—too small and formulaic to impress at "taiga" scale, but too leaden to reach anthemic heights. “I wanted to make a huge pop song that would break in and reach people I've never been able to reach,” Danilova told Pitchfork earlier this year. In reality, pop's never been that far of a reach for her, so what’s most frustrating about Taiga is how much more huge it could be.


The Griselda rapper’s latest album accentuates many of his strengths, highlights no unknown weaknesses, and is peppered with some of the finest tracks of what will be remembered as a golden era for The Butcher.

Pyrex Picasso

It’s easy to dismiss a rap crew’s next-in-line as a second-rate sidekick. Benny the Butcher sought to establish himself on Griselda Records around the time his cousins—company founder Westside Gunn and Conway The Machine—were hitting new peaks in their ascent. Benny, too, had spent years battling his way through the East Coast rap metro, like a hip-hop Doomguy. While Gunn and Conway recast Buffalo, New York as a gangster rap principality, optics made it seem like they were bringing a fortunate family member into the fold. But here’s the thing: Benny’s 2018 album Tana Talk 3 was a bit of a genre classic, a brutal piece of rap-noir drama over The Alchemist and Daringer’s concrete-hard beats. The message came through in 400 gigapixels: Benny was nobody’s background subordinate.
Benny has proven himself a man apart by diversifying Griselda’s sonic philosophy. The group has attracted 1,000 Wu-Tang comparisons, which aren’t inaccurate but ignore that Griselda’s grimy boom-bap comes with its own glittering flourishes and high art proclivities. Benny’s music feels less painstakingly crafted than Westside Gunn’s. Instead, he brings the blunt urgency of Kool G Rap, rich storytelling that draws from years of selling heroin, and a taste for beats inspired by the early-to-mid-2000s work of producers like the Heatmakerz and Just Blaze. Recorded in a single day back in 2019, Pyrex Picasso is part of a rush of excellent recent releases from Benny. At just seven tracks and less than 20 minutes in length, the record is skinny, the kind of seemingly inconsequential release that Griselda artists regularly drop between major projects (see Gunn’s Hitler Wears Hermes series). But it accentuates many of his strengths, highlights no unknown weaknesses, and is peppered with some of the finest tracks of Benny’s recent purple patch—an era that will be remembered as golden for The Butcher.
The specter of Dipset is palpable. “Flood the Block” features familiar slapped guitars, dramatic samples, and a reduced focus on bass, with Benny’s deliberate approach even shadowing Cam’ron’s flow. Some may lament that there’s nothing as dark and spectral as, say, “3.30 In Houston,” but for those who miss buying XXL at the bodega stand, Pyrex Picasso will satisfy their cravings. The era-specific production, handled entirely by Chop-La-Rock and Rare Scrilla, is matched with pockets of nostalgia throughout the album. But there’s no Nas-style back-in-the-day sentimentality: “PWRDRL” sees Benny reminiscing about his life when “the Towers fell,” detailing drug trafficking from Houston to Baton Rouge, and declaring, “I’m an old school n***a, my morals come from the past.”
Benny raps reliably about hustling and buying nice things with the dividends. Pyrex Picasso doesn’t feature the most densely detailed narratives he’s ever penned—instead, it relies on grand moments. Take the crushing track “The Iron Curtain”: over a gothic instrumental, Benny describes obtaining his first gun from Conway at age 14. The title track complements his cinematic writing, meshing together several movie scores at once: somber Spanish guitar, dramatic piano keys, flashes of strings that evoke images of 1970s Harlem crime flicks. Here, Benny discusses resisting authorities’ attempts to squeeze him for information—“They tried to get in my brain/Just like a neurosurgeon”—then offers a disarmingly honest summary of his life in crime: “The highs always balance out the lows.” Conway suddenly kicks in the door, veering from describing the violence in Buffalo to bragging about his sneaker collection. (As it happens, Pyrex Picasso was not issued by Griselda Records, but that fact feels irrelevant, particularly with Conway and Griselda affiliate ElCamino making two guest appearances each.)
The final track, “Fly With Me,” deserved to close out a more consequential Butcher album. Over a tweaked vocal sample that channels early Kanye, Benny sounds triumphant, tossing out a smackdown to his haters like it’s nothing at all. It’s the kind of finishing leg appropriate for an epic, which leaves some lingering regret that the songs on Pyrex Picasso didn’t form the base of a lengthier Butcher classic. But maybe “Fly With Me” can be interpreted as a lap of honor on recent wins. In an interview with The Ringer earlier this year, Benny admitted he sees himself as a star. And as hard as it is for 36-year-old street rappers who make music that sounds nothing like the zeitgeist to go global, long may Benny pursue it. Nobody is upstaging him.
Correction: A previous version of this review referred to this project as an EP. It is a full-length release.

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The Ghanaian American singer’s new EP bubbles and froths with Afropop effervescence. It’s a little more subdued than its predecessor, but no less fluid.

Amaarae: roses are red, tears are blue — A Fountain Baby Extended Play

Amaarae songs have the icy glamor of luxury photography, but none of the stillness. Guided by her fluid coos, the Ghanaian American singer’s restless Afropop constantly flows and bubbles, liquid and frothy as seafoam. On last year’s globetrotting Fountain Baby, she played a Dionysian priestess, extolling the wonders of pussy and premium goods over beats that bridged Accra, Virginia Beach, and Hokkaido. A line from “Angels in Tibet” captures her constant pairing of opulence and exertion: “Diamonds hit the sweat.” In Amaarae’s music, even the jewels get wet.

The follow-up EP, roses are red, tears are blue — A Fountain Baby Extended Play, is just as soaked and luxurious, though the mood is more subdued. The lyrics aren’t as manic; the songs don’t erupt into mall punk and dream pop; and the samples aren’t as eclectic, but an Amaarae after-party is still a romp. She continues to twist her lithe voice into sensuous and alien shapes, her indelible coolness always stemming from her boundless sense of play. For her, flexing is a love language.
The rich production, sourced from core collaborators like KZ Didit and Kyu Steed, blends alté, highlife, R&B, and house. The songs are svelte, but always textured, the airy melodies and swinging polyrhythms layered with strings, horns, and synths. If Fountain Baby was a flying circus, roses is a homecoming parade, grounded but no less colorful. The wistful “wanted” works a slinky vocal sample, breathy harmonies, and pattering drums into a gentle groove. “I’ll be wanted,” Amaarae and OVO signee Naomi Sharon sing with resolve. The affirmation is vulnerable and cocky, fit to be chanted alone or whispered to a rival.
Amaarae’s longtime admiration of Young Thug is obvious on this record. She raps in double-time on “jehovah witness,” her verses frequently erupting into giddy ad-libs and yelps. On the triumphant “this!” her slippery melodies burst into squeals of delight. “Thirty carat diamonds on my wrist/And I’m a vigilante/No fit close my case,” she shrieks, her pitch and lyrics channeling the incarcerated rapper. She’s not as chaotic or expressive as Thug, but she shares his conviction that perpetual motion is the ultimate freedom.

Of course, sometimes even unbothered playgirls get played. Beneath the splendor and swagger of these songs runs an undercurrent of longing. “Sweetie, darling/Darling, sweetie/Pick up/The phone/And call me when you miss me,” she pleads on the sun-drenched “sweeeet,” like a ghosted lover leaving a voicemail. Pet names and a chippy delivery belie her anxious pining. On “diamonds,” a humid dance cut, gleaming gemstones offer little consolation as a relationship falls apart. “Who’s that you been calling, texting/Shawty, finessing/To love me is a blessing/Guess I never learn my lesson,” she sings with resignation.
Heartbreak, joy, and self-assurance converge on highlight and explicit Jeffery Williams ode “THUG (Truly Humble Under God),” which takes its title from a moment in the ongoing and surreal YSL trial. The ballad is one of the most minimalistic in Amaarae’s catalog; it opens with a sampled prayer for blessings, then builds slowly toward catharsis. She sounds nervous the first time she sings the chorus. “I don’t fold under pressure/I don’t fall under pain/Tomorrow might be better/But I’m looking forward today,” she murmurs into a void of plangent piano and strings. But as the instruments grow bolder and the drums rush in, her voice lifts, and the hook turns exultant, as if she’s breached after a deep dive.

The pop experimentalist is always in pursuit of relief in her songs—through sex, through expression, through motion. But here, confidence alone doesn’t guarantee it, a twist that adds new tension to her bustling music. Amaarae sticks to her signature carefree debauchery for most of roses, but she remains a shapeshifter.


The Ethiopian cult musician returns with a collaborative full-band exploration that is no less hypnotic than his celebrated earlier work.

Yene Mircha

When Hailu Mergia left Ethiopia to tour America with the Walias Band in the 1980s, he decided to stick around. Moving to Washington D.C., he started a restaurant, managed a club, and formed The Zula band. Any of these ventures could swallow the energy of one person, but Mergia also rented a studio in order to reacquaint himself with the accordion, an instrument he played in his youth. What emerged from these sessions was Hailu Mergia & His Classical Instrument, a mesmerizing combination of drum machine and accordion improvisations. While the collection was an immediate hit in Ethiopia, it did not find an audience elsewhere, so Mergia quit music and started driving a cab, practicing his keyboard on his breaks. That was the end of the story until Awesome Tapes From Africa reissued the tape in 2013 to universal acclaim, and Mergia went on an international tour. It took time, but his devotion paid off.
Two years ago, Mergia put out his first album in almost two decades, Lala Belu. Joined by Mike Majkowski on upright bass and Tony Buck on drums, Mergia showed his hypnotic powers had only grown during his time outside the spotlight. On his latest, Yene Mircha (My Choice), Mergia leads a larger group of collaborators on an inward journey.
The flute-like rustle on the opening groove “Semen Ena Debub” comes from the masenqo, a bowed lute with one string, which merges nicely with Mergia’s accordion. They trade solos, creating a joyous waltz that breaks into a rousing jam toward the track’s end, and the effect is like emerging from an empty street into a friend’s home filled with familiar faces.
Throughout, Mergia shifts comfortably between the elegiac and the ecstatic. The Rhodes solo that opens “Yene Mircha” seems like preparation for a low-key jazz standard, yet it erupts into raucous horns and dreamy guitar licks. “Bayine Lay Yihedal,” a lucid vamp interspersed with spaced-out snare, provides a brief respite from this outpouring. Mergia’s discipline makes for a series of constrained fireworks—small eruptions that pass you by on a first listen but become unforgettable the next.
Mergia turns “Shemendefer,” a synth ballad by Ethopian pop artist Teddy Afro, into a low-octane burner, keeping only the chorus and surrounding it with light piano and organ and skating along its surface with his plaintive accordion solos. Elevated by his collaborators, Mergia displays the tenacious spirit you expect from a person who walked into a studio to practice the accordion and emerged with a masterpiece. Mergia’s power to transfix seems to grow with the more collaborators he has, and their addition does not detract from his resolute sound. The onetime lone wanderer now leads newfound followers up a trail he cut for himself.


The indie rock trio Crying folds the bombast of mainstream '80s rock into their sound, and the results feel like a grinning inversion of the hetero-masculinity that’s often baked into such fireworks.

Beyond the Fleeting Gales

Knowingly or not, Crying saddled themselves with a lot of baggage when they first formed at SUNY Purchase in 2013. Early in the New York indie rock trio’s existence, guitarist Ryan Galloway took to programming synthesizer lines derived from old Game Boy software, which led many to understand them as a chiptune act. But then their name, and later their association with the Boston label Run For Cover records (“There are a lot of sad men,” Galloway said of the label in a recent interview with Village Voice) have led others to call them an emo band. Neither term is particularly damning in 2016, and they were accurate on some level, at least insomuch as the EPs Get Olde and Second Wind had their moments of sullen introspection and sugar-rush abandon.
But their debut LP, Beyond the Fleeting Gales, is different, folding the big-screen bombast of mainstream '80s rock into their sound. Toting a whole gleaming new set of synthesizers and some surprisingly complicated riffing, Gales transforms the band completely. The experience is sort of like catching a show you used to watch on a CRTV in high def for the first time. Despite the stadium-sized scale of Galloway’s thunderstruck riffs on songs like “Patriot,” a subtlety that was once elided creeps to the forefront. If nothing else, it’s a treat to hear his legato runs sounding more like “Guitar Hero” than the bit-crushed rhythm violence of their older works.
It’s a metamorphosis that’s folded into the lyrics of the record. Even the opening track “Premonitory Dream” seems to acknowledge the shock of personal transformation. Over vaporous synth pads and a guitar riff as hair-raising as anything between Rivers Cuomo and Eddie Van Halen, singer Elaiza Santos finds herself on pausing on the middle of a shoddily constructed bridge, unsure whether to go forward or back. She mulls the “risk of burdening the wood and rope I’d already passed,” and ultimately decides to press on. The ascendant riff takes off once she’s made her decision. This is music meant to soundtrack the delicate process of figuring out who you are in relation to the world around you. Openness, in this case and throughout the record, is rewarded; pushing forward is met with joy.
"There Was a Door” was released as a single on National Coming Out Day and the song is a sort of public affirmation of the self, punctuated in pitch-shifted guitar licks. Like their fellow New York riff-slingers PWR BTTM, their music can occasionally be read as a playful, grinning inversion of the hetero-masculinity that’s often baked into these sorts of guitar fireworks—a surprisingly-radical suggestion that a sweep-picked guitar solo can be for everyone, not just for oversexed cis dudes with big hair.
Beyond the Fleeting Gales is a record about these simple victories, and surprising moments of optimism reclaiming simple pleasures and pressing on in the face of an oppressive world. That’s the message at the heart of “There Was a Door.” You face a threshold; cross through and there’s peace, maybe, or at least something worth singing about.


Girl Talk's 2006 LP Night Ripper made him the of-the-moment party starter, and now his first major release as a semi-popular act-- another confluence of shameless thrills and near-overwhelming abundance-- comes off like the ultimate July 4th rooftop soundtrack.

Feed the Animals

As I was finishing an interview with Gregg Gillis in July 2006, he casually mentioned his desire to see M. Night Shyamalan's just-released fantasy movie Lady in the Water. Given the film's wretched reviews-- a pitiful 24% on Rotten Tomatoes-- and the train-wreck hype surrounding it, I thought he was kidding. He wasn't; Gillis liked some of Shyamalan's other flicks, so he wanted to check this one out. Simple. And it's this omnivorous, pleasure-seeking attitude toward pop culture that defines his work as Girl Talk. (Luckily, his taste in music is superior to his taste in film.)
Unlike mash-up makers in it to figure out the lamest way to combine two song titles, justify their existence with cheap mp3 blog Diggs, or wind up in a Cobrasnake shot with some Olsen twin look-a-like, Gillis just really likes stuffing tons of his favorite FM moments into bursts of Top 40 overload. "I'm a pop music enthusiast," he told me. Hailing from the anti-flash city of Pittsburgh, Gillis has sidestepped the Absolut-sponsored stigma associated with of-the-moment party starters ever since 2006's Night Ripper sent him on a never-ending tour of sweat-stained clubs. While his live set changes with the ebb and flow of the Hot 100, this is Gillis' first major release as a semi-popular act. Unsurprisingly, his new record, Feed the Animals, comes off like the ultimate July 4th rooftop soundtrack. Seems like those stage-crashing dates made the unassuming former biomedical engineer even more eager to indulge his hungry followers. As the recognizable samples zip by at a dizzying clip, it's as if Gillis is standing tall above the fray, screaming: "Are you not entertained?!"
Even with pop's long tail extending with each passing year, there are still new trends that recall the days when hits were hits and major labels ruled the world. While Gillis' pile-on sampling style isn't new (see: Paul's Boutique, DJ Z-Trip, the Avalanches, 2 Many DJ's, et. al), its confluence of shamelessness and abundance is unparalleled. For all its forward thinking, Feed the Animals has an old-school bent. First thing: It's an album. Many of Gillis' contemporaries couldn't be bothered with such an outdated concept, but by choosing the LP route-- instead of, say, a monthly series of hit-blending MP3s-- he's outing his traditionalist tendencies. Gillis is not just trying to just tide his fans over until the next show here, he's trying to give them something to anticipate at the next show.
Which brings us to the Three Stages of Girl Talk: knee-jerk recognition, easy-to-swallow consumption, and, finally, cemented recontextualization. When people go apeshit for his famous Biggie-Elton John pairing, they're taking pleasure in their own memories, the room's collective memory, the indisputable greatness of "Juicy" and "Tiny Dancer", and, possibly above all else, they're cheering for the Girl Talk song that combines all those things so seamlessly. In concert, these mental synapses pop at the same time, and the result is thrilling-- the apotheosis of the Girl Talk experience.
Feed the Animals offers a new round of associative concoctions ready to blow out clubs this summer and beyond. Perhaps in an effort to work his crowd up quicker and more efficiently, Gillis spikes his signature mix of current smashes, hip-hop, 1980s pop, 90s alternative, and classic rock with a slew of wedding-ready staples. There's a reason why every bar mitzvah DJ has Earth, Wind & Fire's "September" in their jam bag and, when it's coupled with Ludacris' pitch-shifted verse from Fergie's "Glamorous", it slays. Similarly, snippets from the Jackson 5, the Spinners, and a decent chunk of "Whoomp! (There It Is)" provide instant, natural highs.
Several of Night Ripper's best moments had Gillis unlocking the vulnerability of roughneck rap verses with relatively somber backing tracks, and Feed the Animals continues with these hard-soft moments. Lil Wayne gets the treatment twice: first when his "Stuntin' Like My Daddy" verse ("where I'm from we see a fuckin' dead body everyday") is put over top the ageless "Nothing Compares 2 U", and then when the hook to "Lollipop" is backed by "Under the Bridge"-- apart from some pitch issues, the latter's perfect fit is uncanny. The more typical juxtapositions are predictably hit (Lil Mama pushing shiny lips over Metallica's "One") and miss (Jay-Z's "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is...)" boasts are miniaturized by Radiohead's "Paranoid Android"), and the classic rock inclusions have a way of derailing the mix's meticulous r&b/dance flow. But that's the beauty of Girl Talk-- if you hit a lackluster patch, it's over before you can say the Band vs. Yung Joc.
Feed the Animals helps to solidify Gillis' role as the supreme 80s-baby pop synthesizer. And while others have attempted to claw up to his lofty position, no one has managed to match his unique mix of diversity, pace, and open-mindedness-- not to mention his exquisite ear for snagging the best 15 seconds of every three-minute track blaring from your clock radio. He's post-modern, post-guilty pleasure, and post-lawsuit (maybe). "The whole basis of the music is that people have these emotional attachments to these songs," he told me. "Being able to manipulate that is a really easy way to connect with people." Easy for him; good for us.


The Ohio rapper showcases the benefits of refining a long-running aesthetic while also revealing its main limitation: the looming sense that things are getting a bit stale.

A Love Letter to You 3

In the video for “Topanga,” Trippie Redd is dressed as an irreverent pastor, singing about his ability to save his damsel and tote guns. He’s not the kind of vicar to pass around the collection plate; there are pentagrams and animal skulls dispersed throughout. He levitates menacingly, his hair’s an angry shade of crimson, there’s a green serpent here as well. Neat!
Trippie Redd’s brand of emo rap is similarly hackneyed. That doesn’t stop him from making these consummate odes to heartbreak. But while his sad songs sound a touch more authentic and sensible here, the overall doom-and-gloom shtick is starting to wear thin. A Love Letter to You 3 showcases the benefits of refining a long-running aesthetic while also revealing its main limitation: the looming sense that things are getting a bit stale.
Trippie Redd’s caterwauling makes his music endearing when it connects and grating when it misses. Since the release of A Love Letter to You 2, he’s tuned-up his emotional screeches to sound a little more soothing and milky. A Love Letter to You 3 begins with “Topanga” that builds a somber soundtrack for Trippie’s most vulnerable-sounding carols yet. He sings about gunplay with newly polished vocals.  Gone are the simplistic choruses and general sleaze weighed down his songwriting; in its place is a multi-part refrain that indicates a degree of familiarity with his faults. It quickly establishes a familiar somber mood that gets further excavated throughout the project as he digs into emo rap’s fascination with brandishing pain’s outcomes. The idea isn’t novel but it’s a little more fleshed out than many of his peers.
Thankfully, he’s not chasing hits, which made Life’s a Trip an uneven slog. A Love Letter to You 3 is a blended affair of melancholy music with a gentle alt-rock atmosphere and plucky guitar strings throughout. “Toxic Waste” blooms smooth and slowly, similar to the slightly more lively “Love Scars 3.” Its consistency, aside from the drowning 808s of “1400/999 Freestyle” which feature an eye-rolling tough guy act from Juice WRLD, lends to its authenticity and flowing nature. Without the potholes, it’s a smoother ride.
But while consistency can be read as a strong point, it also makes these songs naggingly predictable. This is the third installment of his flagship series and, now, the tortured-soul act is wearing thin. “I Tried Loving” borders on pestering whining with a heartless ode about heartbreak. There’s at least four relationship-ending songs up here and they begin to bleed together after a couple of listens. Without the bright, creative spots, the doom and gloom begin to feel manufactured to adhere to an aesthetic that he seems lost without. This is frightening because when there’s nothing zippy left to snap attention to, interest begins to wane. A Love Letter 3 is hopefully a farewell for Trippie’s puppy-eyed passages. This is a rare case where the music can be technically sound, yet be largely dismissible because there’s no growth. Emo rap is a crowded space with more innovative artists than Trippie; to eat again, he’ll need to change up his hunting style.


Cursive's Tim Kasher has what is perhaps the worst great voice in indie rock. His voice doesn't gracefully ...

Cursive's Domestica

Cursive's Tim Kasher has what is perhaps the worst great voice in indie rock. His voice doesn't gracefully arc up to touch glorious high notes or frolic easily through melodic fields; it's grating, laborious, and a bit slurred. But a more earnest, volatile, emotionally charged voice cannot be found. The utter sincerity behind that which he writes, the perfect inflection and expression from the far-from-perfect vocal chords, the brains evident behind the guitar brawn: these things are what make Kasher's voice sound gorgeous.
I've come to the conclusion that the worst thing about Cursive's new record is that it's actually called Cursive's Domestica, which is painfully reminiscent of the maligned Mad Season by Matchbox Twenty. Excepting this small item, Cursive's Domestica is the bands most mature, cohesive work to date. The announcement of a new Cursive album should have come as quite a shock to the band's fans in light of the litany of reports detailing their breakup. If this were so, then the brilliant Storms of Early Summer: Semantics of Song would have been Cursive's A Series of Sneaks: a dazzling, albeit tragically ignored swan song.
Instead, scarcely a year and a half later, we have Cursive's Domestica, an album which continues the profound dialogue left off at the close of The Storms of Early Summer, but steers the band in an entirely new direction: concept album territory. No, don't hit the Back button! Cursive actually pull it off in style, faithfully cataloging their interpretation of the politics of love and the unraveling of a relationship.
Kasher, recent divorcee, claims that Domestica is not at all autobiographical. It's times like this that I wish that I knew how to scoff at something in multiple languages. Let's examine the evidence at our disposal: the album sleeve is brimming with pictures of a couple engaging in the throes of domestic life, each one depicting the woman conducting herself with complete sincerity as the male gazes despondently into the distance. The lyrics are fiery and bitter, or utterly jaded, making a mockery of the words we say and the lies we fabricate in relationships; things that one must experience firsthand in order to write about them so accurately. Let's never speak of this non-autobiographical tomfoolery again.
The Cursive sound has evolved alongside the sentiments of its frontman. Cursive have retained their razor edge, creating pulsing, rapidly evolving guitar-based music, yet they're now fueled and guided by the meaning behind the music. The cohesion of lyrics to musical intensity and songwriting is at its peak on Cursive's Domestica, as the expressiveness of the music is as volatile as any relationship, swooping down from furious to somber in a fraction of a second. The addition of new guitarist Ted Stevens has changed the candor of the rhythm section, making it more dissonant and varied in its attack. Crunching guitars and throbbing bass dominate the record, arranged shrewdly beneath Kasher's anguished screams and urgent whispers.
Cursive's Domestica is certainly one of the finest hard indie rock releases of the year thus far and has established an impressive staying capacity in my CD rotation. Kasher's intelligent, thought-provoking lyrics resonate perfectly inside the head of anyone who's ever seen love go sour. "The Martyr" is a standout anthem to those jilted with the finer sex and their perceived emotional volatility, with the ingenious refrain: "Sweet baby don't cry/ Your tears are only alibis." Songs like "A Red So Deep" rock hard while keeping emotions firmly attached to sleeve, asking bitterly, "Are you satisfied tonight?" At only nine tracks, Cursive's Domestica suffers from brevity, but not much more. If you're happily linked with a member of the opposite sex, stay away from this record. Otherwise, the world needs Cursive.


Issued for the first time are the rhapsodic, intimate, melancholy tunes of Lynn Castle, the first lady barber of L.A. who recorded these demos with Lee Hazlewood and Jack Nitzsche in the late 1960s.

Rose Colored Corner

In 1967, Lynn Castle’s image was plastered on a full-page billboard ad, heralding the release of her very first single. A full-length album, though, would not come for another fifty years. Back then in Los Angeles, Castle was known as the Lady Barber, a term that now reads a little archaic, perhaps a little campy, but at the time, it was radical. Women didn’t work in barber shops, but Castle, who also apparently styled her own magnificent, towering mane, had grown bored of setting hair in rollers. She ditched the drudgery of beauty salons for a joint on the Sunset Strip called the Rogue Barber Shop, where she specialized in cutting the long locks that dusted the shoulders of male musicians and actors of the day: The Byrds, Del Shannon, Sonny Bono, Stephen Stills, Neil Young. She wrote songs for some of them too. Hair was her day job, paying the bills for two young kids at home, but music was her dream.
For a minute it seemed as though she might be able to turn it into a career: There was the advance buzz for “The Lady Barber” (with “Rose-Colored Corner” as the B side), appearances on “What’s My Line” with Frank Sinatra and in the Sonny and Cher film Good Times, a profile in the Washington Post. But for whatever reason, Castle’s bewitching, moody songs stayed mostly unreleased for decades, until Light in the Attic’s repeat diggings into the seemingly bottomless mine of Lee Hazlewood recordings recently turned up the psychedelic cowboy’s collaborations with the lady barber. Rose Colored Corner, sourced mostly from her demo tapes, is a time capsule of a quiet, obscure side of 1960s L.A. You can picture Castle, perhaps sitting on a barstool, spotlit on a dim stage at the Troubadour, maybe, strumming her rhapsodic, melancholic tunes.
Her songs alluded to her remarkable life, which is spelled a bit more out in the liner notes, written by Hunter Lea, who co-produced LITA’s Lee Hazlewood releases. Castle spent her childhood shuttling from Catholic school to living with her father and his new family. Feeling unloved but undeterred, she sought refuge in music and boys and running away from home. While still in high school, she met a teenaged Phil Spector, who snuck into her window and played songs by his band the Teddy Bears; he took her cruising around the Valley in his blue Corvette. By 22, she was a mom and a hairdresser, and writing songs in her closet on a rosewood Martin guitar that Hazlewood gave her. Somewhere along the way, they’d become friends; in the 1950s they’d make drives to Phoenix together where they heard a young Waylon Jennings play with his band the Waylors. Hazlewood introduced Castle to legendary producer Jack Nitzsche, but it was Hazlewood who told her, enthusiastically, that her songs were quite good.
He was right. There is a smoky ache in Castle’s voice—tough and deep, wise and wistful, somewhere in between Nico and early ’70s Cher—that belies these searching ballads. Sometime after Castle’s first acid trip, she wrote a thinly veiled song about LSD for her flip-haired clients the Monkees (“Teeny Tiny Gnome” would eventually appear on the band’s rarities comp Missing Links in the ’80s). In her own songs, nature is a magical, otherworldly presence: “Diamond sundrops fall/Kaleidoscoping patterns on the floor of quiet Forest,” she sings on “Forest,” the standout opener. In Castle’s sweetly acid-tinged imagination, quite likely, there are indeed wizards in them woods.
Several of the songs that follow hover in a similar register and cadence, accompanied by Castle’s soft strumming. There’s a rawness about them, unvarnished, honest, and occasionally prone to downright laments (“What in the World Would I Do”) and the fragile confessions (“Lonesome Look-Out,” “The Stranger”). The final two songs offer evidence of what might have been if Castle’s work had gotten a full production treatment back then. Both “The Lady Barber” and the album’s second version of the title track of Rose Colored Corner were recorded one midnight by Hazlewood in the silo tank in Phoenix where he also recorded with Duane Eddy, yielding the same chorusy reverb of the Eddy sessions, with LHI Records artist Last Friday’s Fire adding fuzz guitar and organ drone. “The Lady Barber” has the kind of buoyant, rollicking tempo that chugs along in Hazlewood’s Trouble Is a Lonesome Town and the fuzz guitars; this rendition of “Rose Colored Corner,” also backed by a full band, feels anthemic.
If Castle had done more elaborate sessions with Hazlewood or Nitzsche and been granted the confidence and career boost of an album release back then—would she have won the fame of Hazlewood star Nancy Sinatra, or gone on to make records that soared a little higher, got a little weirder? Instead, Castle slipped back into introverted obscurity, contributing to B-movie soundtracks under the alias Madelynn Von Ritz, raising her kids, and continuing to record her music largely for herself. Now a grandmother in Los Angeles, she recently taught herself ProTools. But these songs, delivered in Castle’s premature world weariness, aren’t seeking instant gratification—their sorrow and loneliness finds solace in escapism and fantasy. Castle may have written out of sadness, but she’s made peace with it. When she sings “I’m happy in my rose-colored corner,” you believe her.