New remasters of the country singer’s first three solo albums highlight his unique blend of honky-tonk, rockabilly, and Tex-Mex influences—a sound that could only have come from his native West Texas.

Joe Ely: Joe Ely / Honky Tonk Masquerade / Down on the Drag

Driving across West Texas can feel a little like piloting a Mars rover: life signs minimal save for the stray prairie dog, an endless sky suffocating overhead. The cities of Amarillo and Lubbock appear like distant waystations on the horizon, first as hazy mirage and then as reality. Even within those denser zip codes, a profound alienation hangs in the air, a truly physical awareness of how distant your existence is from the rest of the state. Yet the isolation of West Texas has served as an incubator for a distinct kind of futurism, one best symbolized by the Cadillac Ranch installation outside Amarillo: a slash of modernism cutting against a landscape that’s flatter than Hank Hill’s ass.
This barren country gave birth to early rock pioneers like Buddy Holly and Roy Orbison, whose electrified guitars were signal conductors connecting remote listeners to the big city, like telephone wires across an empty highway. As a teenager in Lubbock in the early 1960s, singer-songwriter Joe Ely proved particularly receptive to the transmissions of rock’n’roll. Though his music might be branded Americana, Ely has always had a rockabilly soul, emphasizing the shared rhythm-and-blues roots that country and rock sprang from. In a career that stretches back more than 50 years, Ely found success as both a regional superstar and international cult favorite, even if mainstream American recognition often seemed to elude him—a songwriter’s songwriter, as they say.
New remasters of Ely’s first three solo albums—Joe Ely (1977), Honky Tonk Masquerade (1978), and Down on the Drag (1979)—by engineer Dave Donnelly blow the dust off a rich body of work. It was these records in particular that made Ely—alongside artists like Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, and former classmate Terry Allen—a pillar of the progressive country scene that revolved around public television’s Austin City Limits. Their audience may have been the same, but the West Texas sound had a few crucial differences from the “gonzo” music brewed up at the Armadillo World Headquarters. Where Jerry Jeff and friends brought the folk and jazz of the West Village down south to Austin, Ely went south of the border, borrowing from the sounds of Tejano music and Mexican norteño. The result is pure Tex-Mex fusion, with a penchant for waltz time and as much accordion as steel guitar. It’s the soundtrack of a region that’s always been a cultural crossroads of blended influences—by way of norteño, Ely’s songwriting especially highlights the polka and waltz traditions that German and Eastern European immigrants brought to Central Texas, a region where the Czech kolache remains a long-standing breakfast staple.
Much the way the Panhandle exists between the Southwest and the Midwest, Ely’s music straddles countless lines. He’s a hardcore honky-tonker clearly influenced by the western swing of Bob Wills, but not someone you’d consider a country neotraditionalist; a rockabilly revivalist, but not a nostalgia act like the contemporaneous Stray Cats; a cowboy poet who keeps his tongue slyly tucked in his cheek but never gets too clever. Honky Tonk Masquerade in particular is as revelatory as an oasis in the desert, a midway point between the rough-and-tumble party of outlaw country and the more self-consciously literary “alt-country” of lyricists like Lyle Lovett and James McMurtry.
Ely’s musical career formally began with the Flatlanders, a group filled out by high school pals Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock. The trio would become something like the Velvet Underground of Texas music—“more a legend than a band,” as the title of a compilation would describe them years later. Their hippie-adjacent cosmic sound, all group harmonies and neo-Buddhist koans, is a far cry from the rough and rowdy ways of Ely’s solo work. Before the group reformed in the 1990s, Ely gave their songs his own interpretation; Honky Tonk Masquerade’s version of “Tonight I Think I’m Gonna Go Do Town” adds a baritone grit where Gilmore’s voice is gentler.
After the Flatlanders’ first run, Ely would live the kind of rambling life that makes for good country music, imbuing his work with both a droll absurdity and a deeper sense of yearning—the odd jobs he kept during the mid 1970s included time as a roadie for the Ringling Brothers Circus. As a solo performer, Ely would cut his teeth on the same dive-bar circuit as bluesmen like ZZ Top and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and that raucous energy has remained at the core of his music.
With his first solo albums, Ely became a surprising sensation in Europe, where he befriended the members of the Clash on tour. If you listen closely to the Spanish-language vocals on “Should Or Stay or Should I Go,” you can even hear Ely’s drawl doing backup duty, the first of many jam sessions between the two bands. What Glen Campbell was to the Beach Boys or Dylan to the Beatles, Ely became to the Clash, kindred souls whose mutual genre-bending sensibilities fostered an organic exchange of collaborative energies. In line with punk’s primal instincts, Ely was also returning to the origins of rhythm and blues, with a delinquent spirit and mod-leaning look not too far removed from the California cowpunk of X and the Gun Club, part ranch hand and part Lynchian highway drifter.
Ely’s 1977 self-titled LP is sparse compared to the fuller sound of subsequent records, but it demonstrates the development of his hybrid style and an ear for textured production. It’s also the most Flatlander-esque of his early solo work, with tracks like “Treat Me Like a Saturday Night” bearing the distinctive wistfulness of Jimmie Dale Gilmore. The record is still grounded in acoustic guitar, but the big-band sound Ely became known for is bubbling underneath, with a cameo from the Muscle Shoals horn section on “Johnny’s Blues.”
On the Butch Hancock-penned “She Never Spoke Spanish to Me,” Ely plays with Tex-Mex flavor more for novelty’s sake, but by Honky Tonk Masquerade, the norteño influence had become integral, with accordionist Ponty Boone joining the band full time. The classic lineup of Ely’s live band—Jesse Taylor on electric guitar, Lloyd Maines on steel, Gregg Wright on bass, and Steve Keeton on drums—had at this point become a well-oiled machine, as central to his sound as Ely himself. The production on Honky Tonk Masquerade aims to replicate the tactility of live performance; you can almost hear the pick against the strings on the opening riff of “Cornbread Moon.” The Jerry Lee Lewis impression on “Fingernails” even turns his body to an instrument, like an old Mickey Mouse cartoon: “I keep my fingernails long, so they click when I play the piano.” The steel guitar work by Lloyd Maines—an institution of Texas music in his own right who, among many other credits, played on Wilco’s A.M. and fathered Natalie Maines of the Chicks—is especially foundational to the Ely style, the main source of the honky-tonk flavor that distinguishes his solo tunes from the Flatlanders; the picking on “Because the Wind” is like the sound of weeping. It’s not all country-and-western pastiche, though. “Boxcars” makes for a foreboding hobo ballad that could have been covered by Tom Waits, with a fuzzy electric guitar subbing in for the wail of a train whistle.
Ely’s warbling delivery suggests someone who sincerely loves country music but can see through its tropes, affecting a character in the pursuit of a greater sincerity—he even breaks into a slight yodel to embody the heartbroken patsy of “I’ll Be Your Fool.” There’s a distinctive swagger in his voice that could only come from Texas, and he has a rascally sense of humor. On “West Texas Waltz,” he playfully acknowledges that some of his stylings might be a little old-fashioned, encouraging his listeners to “bind up their bunions” and “dance away the arthritis.” The cover of “Honky Tonkin’” transforms Hank’s sinful original into a strutting dancehall bop, the kind of big-band jam that sounds like it could last until the cows come home, if not for the fade-out.
While Joe Ely and Honky Tonk Masquerade were recorded by legendary Nashville guitarist Chip Young, for Down on the Drag he recruited Bob Johnston, who cut countless classics by Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash—perhaps an indication of the kind of artist Ely hoped to become, a lyrical auteur drifting between genres but beloved by all. The title expresses Ely’s complete immersion in the Austin scene: “The Drag,” where Ely imagines himself down and out, is an overcrowded thoroughfare on the edge of the University of Texas campus. “Standin’ at a Big Hotel” is classic gonzo sound in the vein of Jerry Jeff Walker, while “Crawdad Train” works in a touch of Delta blues. The drumming on Ely’s records always sounded a little more forward in the mix than other country of the era, but Down on the Drag indicates his more rock-facing turn with its emphasis on percussion; Steve Keeton serves as a strong backbone on songs like “Crazy Lemon” and “Fools Fall in Love.”
Despite the radical transformations country music has undergone in the last 50 years, Ely has somehow weathered them all. In the ’70s, Ely was opening for Carl Perkins and Merle Haggard; by 2000, he was touring with the Chicks. As often as his music looked to the past, Joe Ely was regularly on the cusp of the future, in the tradition of his amplified forefathers. The unexpected cameo from a Moog synthesizer on “Fingernails” foreshadows Ely’s later experimentation: After his honky-tonk period, Ely would dabble in “computerized” music with Hi-Res, a bedroom pop album produced on an Apple II in the vein of McCartney II or Neil Young’s Trans. And in a parallel to his many unexpected musical friendships, Ely’s long nights of technological tinkering led him to become virtual pen pals with Steve Wozniak.
More than any name-brand hit ever could, those fertile relationships with creatives and performers of all stripes speak to the quality of Ely’s work, revealing an understated influence felt far beyond the West Texas plains. He’s the kind of artist you want as your jam partner or back-up vocalist, an effortlessly talented musician who also knows how to function as a member of a band. But these new remasters make the case for Ely as a leading man in his own right, separate from his many cameos, as a singer who embodies the inherently hybrid nature of Texas culture. As his English comrades in the Clash did with genres like reggae and lovers rock, Ely absorbed the musical diversity of his native landscape and synthesized a new blend, equal parts reverent and unholy.


As U.S. Girls, Meghan Remy buries simple melodies and vocal hooks under layers of noise and echo. But her third full-length is significantly cleaner than her previous two, the increased clarity revealing true pop gems.

U.S. Girls on KRAAK

"It's pretty much all I listen to," Meghan Remy told me when I asked her about pop music last year. "It's the only thing I am really influenced by." That might come as a surprise when you hear the music of her solo project U.S. Girls, which buries simple melodies and vocal hooks under layers of noise and echo. She's even turned pop classics like Bruce Springsteen's "Prove it All Night" and B.J. Thomas' "I Don't Have a Mind of My Own" into basement dirges. But according to Remy, her lo-fi approach is more financial necessity than aesthetic choice. "I would love to make a really clear recording," she said in the same interview. "It's my dream!"
That dream is realized on U.S. Girls on KRAAK, which is significantly cleaner and less cacophonous than her previous two full-lengths. The increased clarity reveals some true pop gems, especially the stunning "Island Song", in which Remy's expressive singing sounds both stirring and exultant, inspiring chills and smiles in equal measure. Nearly as good are tracks bearing the influence of doo-wop, Motown, country, and R&B. Remy's love of the latter is especially clear in a Residents-like reworking of Brandy and Monica's "The Boy Is Mine".
An album made solely of tunes like that would be strong enough, but what makes U.S. Girls on KRAAK great is how Remy mixes in sounds that are just as odd and idiosyncratic as her previous work. For every melodic nugget, there's a hallucinatory loop, a cloudy drone, or what sounds like the remnants of an exploded pop song-- half of a chorus, shards of a hook-- echoing in the distance. In lesser hands, alternating experiments and tunes could come off forced or gratuitous, but Remy connects them in a way that sounds natural and almost effortless. So when the creepy, voice-in-head "Wells Dubs" flows into the Patsy Cline-styled "Peotone", it's far from jarring. Instead, you can hear how Remy approaches minimalist loops and pop hooks as if they were the same thing and capable of the same infectious effect.
Remy recently signed U.S. Girls to FatCat, so even glossier, higher-fidelity work might be in her future (and will perhaps come in a longer format, as U.S. Girls on KRAAK lasts only 26 minutes). If so, this album is a perfect launching point in that direction. But it's also a triumph on its own. Remy has widened and universalized her music without losing a drop of what previously made it so special and personal.


Blending UK bass, deconstructed techno, and abstract ambient, the Bristol producer crafts stripped-back club tracks distinguished by their crystalline sound design and icy atmospheres.

Sonder Somatic

Much like the output of his labelmate Joe, the bewildering dance music that Larry McCarthy makes under the nearly anonymous name of Bruce can be hard to keep tabs on. Not only across the stereo field: Just Googling his name is something of a fool’s errand. (On Discogs, he's listed as “Bruce (40).”) Over the past five years, McCarthy has released a heady string of singles for revered, cutting-edge UK imprints ranging from Livity Sound, Timedance, and Idle Hands to Hemlock, an early James Blake booster. Outside of his iridescent, beatless entry on this year’s thrilling Patina Echoes comp, Bruce has kept a low profile since dropping three wildly divergent singles back in 2016.
Call what Bruce makes UK bass, deconstructed techno, abstract ambient, or even weightless grime, but his crystalline sound design is as breathtaking as it is emotionally evocative, putting him on a level with Objekt, Pearson Sound, and Batu. His previous productions were as likely to be dropped at peak hour as they were to soundtrack anxious insomniac states. On Sonder Somatic, Bruce straddles both worlds, emphasizing his club chops while still retaining the surreal quality of lucid dreaming.
A track like “Cacao” has the sorts of sinister kicks and bass rumbles that could make it a Berghain staple. But all around those measured thumps, Bruce riddles the negative space with a dizzying array of beeps and mechanistic whirrs, like a UFO cockpit in a crash-landing. “Ore” foregrounds that sense of space, filling it with syrup-slow dub techno, so that each element—be it a snare, photon pulse, or low-end lurch—echoes like a rock kicked into a canyon.
A pulse as big as Thanos’ heartbeat powers “Meek,” which belies its title: It’s one of the album’s heaviest tracks. Bruce pressurizes the build to a claustrophobic extreme, only to plunge it all into an ice bath. “What” is another dancefloor weapon, methodically scaling up in intensity, stretching acid arpeggio and vocal snippet into a precipitous howl. As “What” peaks, it turns as  vertiginous as one of Inception’s city blocks, throwing everything suddenly into zero gravity.
Previous singles like “The Trouble With Wilderness” were heartbreaking and pulse-quickening, with glints of sunshine and melancholy emergent. Yet much of Sonder Somatic revels in dark spaces and icy tones, suggestive of a club in the dead of winter. Even the downtempo meltdown of “Patience St Pim” takes its name from the blue-lipped Ice Elemental from “Adventure Time.” The first half of “Baychimo” finds McCarthy in Selected Ambient Works Volume II territory, an atmospheric state he excels at. But soon a submerged throb crests, a bullroarer at the midway point cracking the track wide open. Against such drum programming, the alien washes from the opening now impart a dark, haunted cast. It’s chilling, which is apt for a track named for an Arctic ghost ship. Sonder Somatic downplays his strength in crafting emotionally resonant ambience for tracks that are impressive and foreboding, if somewhat colder. But Bruce’s debut makes him a name worth remembering.


The Glasgow-based band, which released a handful of singles and the cult-classic LP Any Other City around the turn of the millennium, is legendary among critics, DJs, and post-punk completists, but far from an  indie household name. Hopefully this posthumous live album will act as a corrective.

Life Without Buildings: Live at the Annandale Hotel

Live at the Annandale Hotel

Upon hearing about Life Without Buildings' posthumous live album (which, given its total lack of press, probably happened just seconds ago), you either said "who?" or fell sideways out of your chair. The Glasgow-based band, which released a handful of singles and the cult-classic LP Any Other City around the turn of the millennium, is legendary among critics, DJs, and post-punk completists, but far from an indie household name. Of course, if you're someone who collects songs like Pokemons, part of LWB's appeal lies in that obscurity, as well as in their meager catalog-- they're the archetypal band who broke up too soon to tarnish their legacy. But mostly, Life Without Buildings are beloved because they were freaking incredible, inhabiting a personality-driven idiom with more charisma and originality than most anyone else.
LWB's spiky rock instrumentation and talky vocals place them in a lineage that begins with classic Rough Trade post-punk bands such as the Fall (aptly, Rough Trade affiliate Tugboat originally released Any Other City in 2001) and continues today with bands like Love Is All, Kiss Me Deadly, and Art Brut. As such, the band's one-of-a-kind aura isn't the product of inventing a new style. It stems largely from the vocal prowess and boundless personal magnetism of singer Sue Tompkins. Tompkins emerged suddenly from the visual art world-- LWB formed while studying at the Glasgow School of Art-- and vanished just as suddenly back into it (she warned us on "Love Trinity": "I'm not willing to leave the visual world"). But in reality, she never left it-- her singing is painterly, mirroring the typographical emphasis of her collage-based visual art.
Tompkins' style seems descended from the look, if not the political content, of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's seminal Futurist text Zang Tumb Tumb, with its onomatopoeias, contrasting font sizes, anarchic typography, and jumbled cases. She translates this page-bound aesthetic into seductively coded lyrics where meaning is sometimes ambiguous, but feeling never is, and internal logic is always apparent. Tompkins stretches words like taffy or bites them off like fingernails (often in tight contrast: "Liberty Feeeeeeeeel-up!"), shuffles letters and syllables like a card sharp (as on "The Leanover": "b-b-b-b-baby, g g g, so g g g, you you," later repeating "MBV" in a rollercoaster cadence that probably refers to everyone's favorite shoegazers), breathes into the beats, abruptly shouts out numbers, jukes, hiccups and chirps. She circles her limber tongue-twisters, feints, and attacks from unexpected angles, dicing and rearranging them with the superhuman brio of an anime ninja and a telegraphic sense of lexical rhythm.
Attributing LWB's appeal solely to Tompkins does a disservice to the rest of the band, particularly to guitarist Robert Johnson, whose style is just as strikingly colorful: Cool green and ice blue, spangled with quicksilver curlicues, the elegant lattices of his fretwork are never taken for granted by Tompkins' verbal espaliers. But Life Without Buildings were always a band who overshadowed themselves. Just as Tompkins' sui generis vocals made it easy to take their musical surroundings for granted, one song, "The Leanover", seemed so miraculous as to make the rest of their consistently fantastic music pale by comparison. As Johnson's guitar spews clouds of billowing glitter, Tompkins, with a tonal mixture of wonder, belligerence, sentimentality, and petulance, achieves the single most inspired rendition of her inimitable style. Dense with fractured refrains, seamless glides between melodious notes and spoken syllables, supple nursery rhyme cadences, peremptory vernacular, and mutating imagery ("Kiss me, break my mind, close the door/ Black steel, break my mind, close the door/ Black steel, the sight of you, falling out"), it sounded at once spontaneous and intricately composed, flirting with poetic structures (the aforementioned example resembles a corrupted pantoum). The melting elegy "Sorrow" shows that Tompkins could stunningly adapt this style for more pensive effects, but the wide-eyed effervescence of "The Leanover" remains the band's signature sound.
What's truly remarkable is that "The Leanover", as well as all the other LWB songs, appear fully intact on Live at the Annandale Hotel, with every vocal strobe and chirrup, if not carbon-copied, faithful to the complex spirit of the studio version. Recorded at the venerable Sydney venue in December 2002, near the end of LWB's career, the album finds the band experienced enough to recreate their music with confidence, yet green enough to be ecstatic about doing so. The driving "PS Exclusive" cycles through its asymmetrical refrains ("the right stuff," "the red villa," "tonio, tonio") without faltering; the fluidly hitching "Juno" keeps its dizzy flocks of pronouns in order; the plangent anthem "New Town" enlivens its chant of "I forgot" with studio-caliber tonal nuance. Unreleased track "Liberty Feelup", one of the last LWB wrote before disbanding, features an inspired performance by Johnson: a bright and rolling jangle that remains melodious even when corkscrewing into dissonance or bottoming out into feedback glides.
Tompkins' is breathlessly giddy for the duration. Glib but earnest, she's hard-pressed to make it through a sentence without breaking down into giggles. Even more than the excellent musicianship, her enthusiasm and genuine quirkiness carry the set. Typical banter goes something like this: "That was a funny ending. [Laughs nervously] Well that was our first song. [Sort of wheezes] Whoo! I'm sorry, I shouldn't say that." While Tompkins is charming and clearly having a blast, it's possible to read a burgeoning dissatisfaction with the predetermination of band life in her ongoing meta-narration. "If I look over, it's because of the set list thing," she tells someone in the audience after "Let's Get Out". And later: "We're here tomorrow, so we're gonna do the same songs in a different order," adding, "that's cheeky."
It's as if the platitudes of touring ("[insert town name] is our favorite place to play!") are too much artifice for the ingenuous singer to muster-- "We haven't seen anything of Sydney yet, so we can't even say what we think of it," she says, acknowledging the tacit contract she's too honest to honor-- compelling her back to the more remote artistic sphere of visual representation. We, the fans, are left with one irreplaceable album, one equally amazing live document, and the lingering hope that, in this day of unexpected reunions, we might yet get to see Life Without Buildings for ourselves. C'mon guys, if Slint and Dinosaur Jr can do it...


Scrapping big-name guests and harnessing the live fury they've shown in recent years, the Chems make their best LP in more than a decade.

Further

Back when people were still figuring out what electronic dance albums were supposed to be, the Chemical Brothers worked out a durable and recognizable formula, and they stuck with it: dancefloor bangers up front, woozily expansive psychedelic tracks at the end, big-name collaborations wherever possible. That formula served them well through three classic albums (Exit Planet Dust, Dig Your Own Hole, and Surrender) and one pretty good one (Come With Us). But they stuck with it two albums too long. The duo's last two full-lengths, 2005's Push the Button and 2007's We Are the Night, were, respectively, a spotty mess and an outright disaster. After an album like that, it's time to blow things up and start again, and that's what they've done with Further.
Further doesn't open with a banger. In fact, there's barely a single track among the album's eight that could be termed as such. There are no hackneyed stabs at British chart relevance, like 2005's clumsy and pandering but (let's face it) successful Q-Tip collab "Galvanize", which still gets play as go-to-commercial music during NBA games. Further features vocals on about half of its tracks, but they're all anonymous, mostly used to repeat one mantra or another over and over. And rather than attempting some sort of crossover-dance smash, the Chems do something new here: an album-length suite of warm, gooey utopianism, one that never smashes you over the head with obvious hooks or high-concept floor-fillers. It's a slow, patient piece of work, all vibe and no frenzy. The drums don't kick in until a couple of minutes into track two, and they sound glorious when they finally do. Further is a retrenchment move, and it's a good one.
That retrenchment works best during the album's first two tracks. Opener "Snow" has no drums at all; it's all sculpted guitar feedback and bass-based motorik pulse, and it calls up memories of Spacemen 3's Playing With Fire or Panda Bear. Female voices repeat a couple of phrases over and over: "Your love keeps lifting me," "lifting me higher." Slow bursts of fuzz build and build, and then we're suddenly at track two. "Escape Velocity" is a marathon blissout, with vintage synths piling on top of each other, as well as what might be a chopped up sample of the Who's "Baba O'Riley" synth arpeggios. The Chems pack a ton of peaks and valleys into the track's 12 minutes, and the end result is a great piece of giddy zone-out music, something that will probably kill when the Chems take it to the festival circuit this summer.
Nothing else on the album reaches the starry-eyed heights of those first two songs, but the vibe remains intact throughout. "Another World" has a soul-sample lope; it could be dusty backpacker hip-hop before the raved-out synths kick in. "Wonders of the Deep" lives up to its title with a burbling, impressionist keyboard lifted straight from an 80s PBS nature documentary. "Horse Power", the hardest thing here, is sort of a low-key big beat take on clipped, staccato Detroit techno, with a vocoder refrain and a horse-whinny sample that made my wife bust up laughing out loud. The whole album works something like an expansion on the last three fuzzed-out tracks from Dig Your Own Hole. The Chems aren't in the same do-no-wrong zone they were when they recorded that stuff, but Further brings them closer than anyone could've reasonably expected. That late-career slump? It's over now.


Los Angeles beatmaker Ringgo Ancheta engages with classic ’80s R&B and boogie funk, pairing his adventurous sound with themes of self-actualization and human connection.

Body Wash

Ringgo Ancheta’s come-up story is an increasingly familiar type—the independently educated bedroom producer, influenced by friends and family, whose DIY approach led him towards Los Angeles’ beat scene. What might make that story a bit more curious than others’ is that Ancheta’s path began on a rural New Jersey commune, where he grew up in the ’90s. And in the late ’00s, it brought him to run in a crew called Klipm0de alongside future Kendrick Lamar producer/collaborator Knxwledge. The intrigue of those formative experiences is borne out clearly in his music. Mndsgn’s releases, from his contributions to 2011’s Bitches Brew-mutating compilation Blasphemous Jazz to his 2014 headswimmer of a Stones Throw breakthrough Yawn Zen, have darted from reference to reference in a way that would make his next move unpredictable, but he ties them all together in a way that makes perfect sense.
Perhaps due to a healthy dose of L.A. sunshine, Body Wash has Mndsgn engaging with classic ’80s R&B and boogie funk. At some points, it sounds as if he’s channelling the synthesized soul of SOLAR Records in-house producer, Leon Sylvers III. It might seem like a big leap from the gleaming, crackling FlyLo-isms of his clanky 2014 work, but Ancheta’s curious, philosophical approach is more than ready for it. Mndsgn emerges here as a sort of koan-dispensing, prog-funk astronaut, and it’s made some of his more tenuous strengths feel a lot more natural.
That starts with his voice, typically a restrained, almost introverted murmur that often sounds like he’s scanning for something far on the horizon. Accordingly, Ancheta tends to lean towards themes of self-actualization and human connection in his lyrics. “Cosmic Perspective” and its references to “searching for the right way” and heading for “the land of music” are vintage Zen funk worthy of mid ’70s Lonnie Liston Smith. Even at its clearest, Mndsgn’s voice is an almost detached entity that expresses these realizations as they happen. (When he multitracks his own voice, it sounds like the “ohhhhh” of a person finally getting it.) A running theme, to paraphrase “Ya Own Way,” is getting from where you’re at to where you’re going, whether chronologically, mentally, or geographically. Ancheta holds fast to this idea, offering a means of connection and solidarity through uncertainty.
Pairing that sense of direction-seeking with a deep dive into West Coast funk is a natural fit. But Body Wash also refocuses some of his familiar tendencies into new modes. As someone young enough to have dreamed of contributing to Stones Throw before even thinking it was possible, Mndsgn makes clear his debt to the label’s mid-to-late-’00s adventurousness, even as he recombines their sounds into his own thing. Think of the slightly-off-kilter, human-touch rhythms of Dilla, only rerouted to little chirpy synth riffs instead of the drums—or Dâm-Funk with the extended-voyage drifting drawn into more concise sketches.
Half the cuts here don’t make it to three minutes, but they still drill into your mind with ease. There’s a three-part “Searchin” suite that runs through a “Shalamar goes to the Moon” masterclass in neo-boogie—you can hear it shift from disco to g-funk to Jam/Lewis while still cohering as its own thing—in less than seven minutes. If the elusive destination that Ancheta’s music has been trying to reach turns out to be a 1981 roller-rink party, it’s been a journey well-spent, and only makes the next destination more eagerly anticipated.


The Richmond, Va., band Windhand's second album, and first for Relapse, shows all the signs of an attempted doom metal classic. The dual guitars are enormous, the rhythm section is relentless, and the voice of Dorthia Cottrell settles over it all like a dense fog.

Soma

Soma shows all the signs of an attempted slow metal classic: On their second album and first for Relapse, Richmond, Va., quintet Windhand coughs up three low-tempo burners, follows them with a foreboding acoustic creak, and aims to end with its longest and strongest-- a 14-minute rumbling insurgency called “Cassock” and the 31-minute astro fade “Boleskin”. The record spotlights every asset of the band, too. The dual guitars are enormous, with the tube-amp tones delivering the riffs in massive waves and presenting the solos less as interruptions and more as big, breaking-news events. The rhythm section is relentless; swollen bass pushes between every deep groove, underlined and emphasized by ubiquitous cymbal splatter. And the voice of Dorthia Cottrell-- Windhand’s lugubrious and bewitching frontwoman-- hangs above it all, her dark-minded tunes settling over the monolithic music like a dense, mountainous fog. Her haunting turn as a solo singer-songwriter serves as the record’s surprising centerpiece. It’s a quiet coup within an otherwise very loud and insistent marathon.
While Windhand understand the sound and the structure of their liminal stoner rock and doom metal, the actual songs on Soma fall short of their forebears. Of these six tracks, only “Woodbine” offers a truly compelling hook, with Cottrell singing a loving if laughable ode to Satan-- “Come on, Satan, surround me”-- with the hidden verve of a pop singer. The band traces her motion perfectly, strengthening the thread of melody rather than swallowing it. Oftentimes, though, Windhand treat the songs like kids too excited to have a new coloring book, their heavy hands drawing so far outside the lines that the shapes themselves become obfuscated. During “Orchard”, for instance, Cottrell moves in interesting dynamic arches, howling her lines only to slink suddenly behind them. But Asechiah Bogdan and Garrett Morris crowd her out, filling so much of the space with a rote weedian riff that she’s barely there at all. The same applies to “Cassock”, where her two short verses seem almost like add-ons for a piece simply meant as a showcase for Windhand’s tempo range--mid-tempo to something slightly faster to something slightly slower to something a bit faster still to the silent end.
If that sounds tedious, it can be. That’s another problem with Soma. Windhand consistently take their time to do very little, a flaw epitomized by the relatively punch-less one-two combination of “Cassock” and “Boleskin”. The latter builds from an acoustic intro into a riff that’s, once again, very plain. There’s one great, squealing solo and another good one, but Windhand mostly plod along, restating their case until the tune becomes more nuisance than mantra. Even on shorter numbers, that sense of fatigue reoccurs because Cottrell's effects-laden voice and hooks are pushed so far afield. The band’s self-titled 2011 debut didn’t feature an acoustic track from Cottrell because it didn’t need it. Well-paced and less burdened by its own seismic sounds, that five-song record felt urgent and varied, giving its guitar leads more to do than circle back and forth. “Heap Wolves” was a quick dose of Sabbath-baiting perfection, while the 11-minute “Summon the Moon” took care to anchor its length to an indelible chorus. But Soma feels impregnably monotonous. When Cottrell’s multi-tracked coo arrives without distraction at the start of “Evergreen”, the break feels more like a necessary respite than an interesting diversion. You might find yourself wishing she’d just keep singing.
Earlier this month, a Spin interview with Morris opened with this proclamation: “I don’t want to get pigeonholed as a ‘doom’ band.” On Soma, Windhand actively fight against that identity but lose, the collection's songs turning into stylistic slogs even as the band ostensibly works to avoid that end. Following their two-year-old debut, their deal with Relapse, and their colossal split with fellow Richmond heavies Cough, Windhand were poised as one of the year’s potential metal breakthroughs. But Soma sits still, paralyzed by the weight of a sound that’s too big for this promising band to manage, at least for now.


After an intra-band breakup, the Philly noise experimentalists return with a brief, focused EP that clears away some of their elaborate studio trickery.

i’m so lucky EP

The recording of Spirit of the Beehive’s new EP, i’m so lucky, was, in some senses, a peaceful reprieve from the chaos of years past. The Philadelphia band’s distortion-scuffed early records, like 2014’s The Spirit of the Beehive, were recorded in a freezing studio while chain-smoking cigarettes, popping Adderall, and dodging the “billion” people who lived in the building. A rotating lineup settled into a core trio of Rivka Ravede, Zack Schwartz, and Corey Wichlin just in time for the pandemic. Working at a distance made for a more fragmented process, which spawned the frantic, paranoid collages of 2021’s ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH.
Now they’ve returned to working in person, in a studio that Schwartz and Wichlin built together in a vinyl pressing plant in Philly. They still indulge in stuttering sampledelia and electronic experimentalism, but i’m so lucky is relatively more straightforward and pleasant than much of their recent work. The opening pair of “human debenture” and “really happening” recalls the bleary-eyed indie rock—like Alex G’s mysterious early experiments—that was bubbling within the Philadelphia DIY scene when they were first coming up. Even when they detour through distressed noise rock in “human debenture,” it feels sleek and approachable.
But this polish and efficiency conceals a different kind of disarray. In 2022, Ravede and Schwartz broke up after a romantic relationship that lasted over a decade. At first, neither was sure if the band would continue. “For the first three or four months after it ended, it was pretty rough,” Schwartz said in a statement. But they pressed on, and used these songs to process some of the confusing feelings—both the pain and the lasting tenderness—in the wake of their dissolution.
Their lyrics remain elliptical and elusive, but from the fragments that do surface, it’s clear that they’re working through some heavy emotions. On “natural devotion 2,” a sequel to a yearning 2015 song, Ravede sings about a relationship that’s gradually receding into the past. “Now I feel the shadow of your touch,” she sings. “The years return to memory for us.” On the blown-out, sludgy “tapeworm,” Schwartz screams about the insatiable appetite of the parasite, “eating all and then register the bereaved who are left with nothing.” It’s an intense contrast between nostalgia and bitterness, and like most breakups, this one seems to have inspired a little of both.
Because it’s only four short tracks, one imagines that i’m so lucky only scratches at the surface of this complicated period in the band’s life, but it feels clear-headed and complete in its own way. The intensity expressed in these songs is felt all the more directly because they aren’t clouded in compositional contortions or studio trickery. The record’s very existence feels like a commitment to trudge on together, even though things have changed. On i’m so lucky, Spirit of the Beehive stare directly at the chaos, unsteady but unafraid.


Electronic producer James Holden has remade himself into a bandleader on his new album—a collection of self-described “folk-trance” recorded with improv ensemble the Animal Spirits.

James Holden / The Animal Spirits: The Animal Spirits

The Animal Spirits

Like most electronic producers, James Holden is a man of few press shots. But the photograph that accompanies the English musician’s radically different new album—a moonlit trance bacchanal recorded live with an ensemble of improvisers dubbed the Animal Spirits—gives us a strong hint of his strange new direction. Dressed in the drab grey overalls of an industrial technician, Holden seems to have wandered out from the concrete towers behind him, lured towards us by strange forces lurking in the long grass. With clouds brooding above and a crackle of electricity in the air, there’s a sense that something revelatory is happening, a machine-builder heading into the unknown.
Holden’s lengthy career in electronic music, which began in 2000 with a progressive dance hit that hailed him as a teenage wunderkind, has been a constant battle against dancefloor conservatism. It’s taken a long time for him to shake off his reputation as a master of melodic euphoria, as perfected on his tear-jerking 2004 remix of Nathan Fake’s “The Sky Was Pink.” And since 2006, he’s been leading his own self-described “rebellion against dance music,” armed with wonky mixes, loose timing, and chaotic systems. But seen from the perspective of The Animal Spirits, Holden’s back catalog also reveals itself to be a determined, nearly two-decade-long exploration of every possible facet of “trance”—first as a genre, then as a state of mind.
With 2013’s The Inheritors, his long-in-the-making second album, Holden brought his modular synthesizer to life through computer systems that could mimic the subtly shifting rhythms of a human player. In the last few years, Holden has only released collaborations: three swirling folk dances with Moroccan Gnawa musician Maalem Mahmoud Guinia, and a 47-minute tribute to minimalist shaman Terry Riley with tabla player Camilo Tirado.
The Animal Spirits is an album-length amalgamation of all of these collaborative projects, expanding his live setup with Tom Page to include saxophonist Etienne Jaumet (who previously lent his freeform skronk to The Inheritors), cornetist Marcus Hamblett, multi-instrumentalist Liza Bec on recorders and North African ghaïta, and Lascelle Gordon of free jazz group Woven Entity. It’s also his most dramatic rejection yet of anything resembling “dance music” in the functional, DJ-led sense. The album was recorded live in one room at Holden’s Sacred Walls studio in London: single takes, no overdubs, no edits. While his modular synth still guides much of the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic material, Holden occupies the role of bandleader rather than frontman, simply laying the stage for his collaborators’ off-the-cuff creativity; he specifically names Don Cherry and Pharoah Sanders as inspirations, drawing a link between the universal preoccupations of their spiritual jazz albums and the sense of ritual abandon at the heart of what Holden calls “folk-trance.”
In tribute to the Eastern influences of Cherry and Sanders, the album opens with a loose incantation by a feral-sounding choir; you can picture them shaking out their limbs and stretching their tongues as they “om” and “ah” over shakers and bells, which bleed into the second track, “Spinning Dance.” Here, the pagan barn-dance really gets going—clapping hands and drum rolls lay an unstable foundation, as Bec’s treble recorder trills its way through the gaps, drunk on moonshine and tripping over hay bales. “Pass Through the Fire” is a ritual performance, drums landing like a dozen pairs of feet shimmying round the burning pyre, while Holden layers his noisy synths against the chunky blast of Jaumet’s saxophone. It’s absolutely silly, but also incredibly loud, and the sheer volume is enough to carry us into their bacchanal.
Holden’s North African inspirations are audible on the outrageously titled “Thunder Moon Gathering,” where organs and brass coalesce into a snaking, freeform melody, and the closing track, “Go Gladly Into the Earth,” which riffs on the topsy-turvy organ playing of Ethiopia’s Hailu Mergia. Occasionally, however, the ensemble travels on straighter tracks. The cycling arpeggios of “Each Moment Like the First” call back to the krautrock influence running through The Inheritors, though Page’s live drums add a layer of unnecessary fuss. On that track, there’s a sense that playing loose doesn’t always come easily; halfway through, a handful of noisy synths interrupt the groove for no particular reason, a blurted improvisation that feels too self-aware.
Mostly, however, the clumsiness and chaos feels built-in. The foundational edict of Holden’s “folk-trance” mission—that repetition brings about an altered state of mind—remains true no matter how loose the rhythm, how un-griddable the swing. The leap Holden has made from The Inheritors is colossal—now a bandleader of a live ensemble rather than a solitary synth programmer, he has opened the door to an entirely different sort of career for himself, one where concerns for the dancefloor shrink away to nothing, and the possibilities of repetition are infinite.


The fourth album from the French Canadian producer explores the claustrophobic interior life of the club in frighteningly, sometimes comically deadpan detail.

Working Class Woman

“Workaholic Paranoid Bitch” is a great appellation for Marie Davidson. When this song makes an appearance towards the end of Working Class Woman, she’s tired as all hell. Davidson, who is also one half of the darkwave duo Essaie Pas, has spent nearly six years of her career as a solo artist, using her work as a platform to critique what happens inside of clubs and their surroundings. She excels at putting people in their place: Her 2016 album Adieux au Dancefloor (“Farewell to the Dancefloor”) took down drug-addled fans and techno scensters who were too cool to care. The record was a brutal exposé with a title that felt like both a threat and an inside joke. To listen to Davidson’s music is to be unsure whether or not you’re supposed to laugh or be genuinely frightened for your life.
On Working Class Woman, Davidson continues to explore the claustrophobic interior life of the club in frighteningly deadpan detail. The images here are even more incisive than they’ve been in the past, inhabiting a transgressively feminist comic style of writing not unlike that of Virginie Despentes or Chris Kraus, and with a sound somewhere in between the spoken word electroclash of Miss Kittin and the dreamy dissonance of Julee Cruise. That comedy shows itself as early as the album’s first track, “Your Biggest Fan.” In an unsettling miasma of chopped up vocal samples in French, German, and Italian textured by bulging synths she personifies a fan trying to strike up conversation: “I love your music! Wait, do you play in a band? Yeah I totally saw you!” But then she steps back and bluntly asks, seemingly apropos of nothing, if Working Class Woman is about taking risks. The lines between seriousness and humor are blurry, and that’s kind of the point, where the album excels is in Davidson’s ability to very much intentionally confuse her listener. Working Class Woman is a bold-moves-only album where feminist theory and house music are inseparable. If you’re not paying attention, you are going to miss something.
Davidson’s bluntness mutates throughout the course of the album. In some of the most uncomfortably funny moments, it takes the form of sex, placing Davidson in the hedonistic headspace of a Berlin nightclub at six in the morning. Take “The Psychologist,” where she has a conversation with a disembodied male voice, responding to his questions with sexual self-reflexivity. Or perhaps on “Work It,” where she plays the role of what could be interpreted as both a dominatrix and a SoulCycle instructor: “Tell me how does that feel?/Is sweat dripping down your balls?/Well then you’re not a winner yet!” She goes there, and does so with strident electronics that sound like a woodpecker drilling its beak into a lead pipe.
Thankfully, Davidson doesn’t hide behind irony for the entirety of this record. She never over-relies on a single set of muscles, she flexes them all. On the album’s final track, “La Chambre intérieure,” she takes us to a room where we bare witness to memories of life in a much more bucolic version of her native Québec. There’s no dark humor for Davidson to enshroud herself in, what we see instead is wind turbines spinning in the breeze, tractors, children laughing—an expanse of North American sprawl that is breathtakingly bleak. The synths here are more introspective and subdued, swapping out high BPM bangers for something that moves at the pace of a marathon runner’s resting heartbeat.
In the album’s final moments, Davidson soberly explores what it means to love, and what it means to exist, and to be alive at this very moment in time. All lofty ideas, sure— but then again, this is a record slated in a milieu of chaos, loftiness, and beauty. It would be simplistic to say this album is just a critique of dancefloor culture, there’s more here. She’s also critiquing herself, and in the moonlit glow of her gear, sequencers and all, despair transforms into possibility: “J’existe vraiment,” (I really exist), she whispers.


The Atlanta rapper’s latest imagines a higher dimension where outré flexes and endless love affairs are enveloped by waves of metallic crunch and mind-expanding guitar.

LVL5 P2

From the time she was 16, Bktherula has claimed to exist at what she calls Level 5. The Atlanta rapper told The Face she gave a name to this “egoless” space above the third and fourth dimensions as she was graduating high school; to her, it’s a plane where clout-chasing and self-doubt give way to creative freedom. Since then, she’s made her own name by chiseling aspects of trap, rage, plugg, and bubbly SoundCloud sing-song rap into jagged, psychedelic hedonism. On the average Bk track, ideas flail like neon-colored bike tassels—she can roar about stealing your girl over drums and sirens one minute and sing about relationship problems over Mac DeMarco samples the next. Individual moments are thrilling and unpredictable, though early full-lengths like 2020’s Love Santana occasionally veered off course. Every subsequent Bk album has worked to plant her songs on sturdier ground. On her latest project, LVL5 P2—the second in a series that started last year—Bk imagines a fifth dimension where outré flexes and endless love affairs are enveloped by waves of metallic crunch and mind-expanding guitar.
P2 ups the ante by nudging Bk further toward popular sounds without diluting her live-wire spark. For every romantically wounded interstellar croon session like “Just Make Sure” or “The Way,” there are prickly digital slappers like opener “Code” or “Tatti,” where the boasts are outlandish (“We don’t ride with the stick, we are the stick, we livin’ scarecrow”) and no one’s girl is immune from Bk’s FaceTime call. A foray into the world of sexy drill on “Shakin It,” complete with an airy beat and feature by New York maverick Cash Cobain, makes perfect sense: The duo are essentially trying to out-horny each other. Late-album cut “Woman” is less successful, trying on producer Azure’s buzzy synths and drums and coming up as a colorless drag. It’s a shame because Bk’s kiss-offs to an ex who hears her song every time they turn on NBA 2K are snappy, but the delivery and plodding beat stymie her and guest JID’s verses.
Bk’s writing has become slightly stickier and more memorable since the “Lightweight” and “Faygo” days in 2018, but her songs rise and fall on the flows, ad-libs, and delivery. “Inasne” is built on clichés (money, drugs, women, day ones), but it works thanks to the technicolor bounce of AyeLavish’s beat and Bk’s bunny-hop cadence. It may feel like Carti homage on the surface, but the contrast between the fluctuating melodies and deadpan ad-libs sends the song swinging down to Earth and back up to the stratosphere. Little details like these—Bk racing a half-measure ahead of the beat on “Boi,” the Juvenile-indebted hook on “Tatti,” the way her voice blends with longtime collaborator SimmyAuto’s zig-zagging 808s on “Wishuwasdacrew”—are old tricks that still work wonders. Sometimes, like on “Feathers,” the gambit works a bit too well, rendering Bk as background noise on her own song.
But LVL5 P2’s hits outweigh the misses. Bk’s style has evolved a lot from the minimal, spacey thumpers that established her SoundCloud presence, and she’s spent her tenure at Warner flirting with more palatable textures without sanding down her edges too much. And while not every experiment bears fruit, it never feels like she’s being forced where she doesn’t fit. Bk may not have it fully figured out yet as far as albums are concerned, but P2’s ambition is potent enough to cause a contact high.

Correction: Bktherula is from Atlanta, not North Carolina. This review has been updated.


Since 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart, Bill Callahan has moved counterclockwise to the rest of the world’s spin. As life has become crowded with text, he has, with each record, become more laconic. His quietly devastating new album finds him in typically minimal form, this time exploring the power of human connection.

Dream River

The first thing you notice is that Bill Callahan is in no hurry. On “The Sing,” the ballad that opens his warm, weary new album, Dream River, words roll by like cloud formations on a calm day: “Drinking… while sleeping… strangers… unknowingly… keep me company.” And afterwards there’s a pause as the line hovers there, like something hanging above the doorway into the record’s peculiar, intimate universe. In the past, Callahan has compared songwriting to an act of carpentry (“There’s this huge block of silence and you carve little bits out of it by making sound”), but never before has one of his records embodied that feeling so richly. Each line on Dream River forms so slowly and deliberately it's like we're watching him whittle it out of oak.
Call it naturalism, polluted with the occasional puff of bleak humor. From his earliest days recording as Smog, Callahan has always been consumed by the natural world. To him, nature is often a taunt, a provocation, a reminder of the smallness of human life. Although he is among music’s most astute observers of human truth and absurdity, in a Bill Callahan song, being a person is often a wry, cosmic joke. The sky can broadcast all the violently beautiful hues of, oh, say, a late-summer sunset, and what’s the best we can do? Late Night With David Letterman (on Apocalypse’s “America!”) and radio interviews with Donald Sutherland (on Dream River’s “Winter Road”) and—it’s always implied, with a meta-chuckle—Bill Callahan records.
Since 2007’s Woke on a Whaleheart, the first record released under his own name, Callahan has moved counterclockwise to the rest of the world’s spin. As life has become crowded with text, Callahan has, with each record, become more laconic. As people have grown (ostensibly) more connected, Callahan’s records have increasingly embraced feelings of isolation. Those early Smog records, with their aggressive textures and anarchic sneers, thrashed in opposition to the outside world. Now Callahan sings like someone blissfully oblivious to its churn. “I set my watch against the city clock,” he sang on the opening track of his stunning 2011 record Apocalypse, chuckling with faint surprise. “It was way off.”
A quiet masterpiece, Apocalypse seemed like a culmination of Callahan’s career so far, but it also had a feeling of finality to it. On Dream River, though, the aesthetically restless Callahan has found a few new mountains to climb. He challenged himself to make a more subdued record where the only percussion comes from hand drums and brushes, but he’s challenging himself thematically, too. Dream River finds Callahan tackling a question that has haunted his music for decades: What happens if the guy who once declared, “Alone in my room I feel like such a part of the community,” makes a moving, occasionally honest-to-god romantic record about the power of human connection?
That line comes from “Ex-Con,” a song found on Smog’s 1997 album Red Apple Falls, and it’s striking to consider how much has changed in the years since. Callahan’s baritone has lowered about an octave; he used to sing through his nose but now his voice (a much richer and more resonant instrument) seems to come direct from the murkiest depths of his lungs. His arrangements have also grown more sparse, and on all fronts he’s learned how to say more with less. It’s one of many paradoxes in Callahan’s music, that in abandoning a method of singing more traditionally considered “expressive,” he’s actually learned how to express more. His delivery is animated by the subtlety of tiny gestures, which is why although there are maybe a total of three words on Dream River that a third-grader would stumble over, its musings still feel profound. “The Sing” boasts one of the album’s most undeniably quotable lines—“The only words I’ve said today are ‘beer’/And ‘thank you’”—but the real joy comes from hearing him mutter, “Beer” and “Thank you” a couple of times afterwards, each time intoning it with an almost imperceptible change in tone. Somehow, each “beer” contains multitudes.
Callahan’s learned to use negative space so well that there’s even poetry in the pauses. Take “Summer Painter,” an instant addition to his canon of great songs; for what else can be said of a song that begins, “I painted names on boats…/For a summer” and then unfurls, glacially, like an elliptical yarn spun by a leathery old shanty-dweller who has, without question, seen some shit. Callahan’s learned how to use his voice like a camera (“When the hurricane hit some found it suspicious/That I’d just since left the frame”), and here he’s shooting a wryly funny mock-epic. “Rich man’s folly and poor man’s dream,” he sings, and then pauses for effect, “I painted these.” It’s a masterful little zoom-out, and it only heightens the sense that Callahan’s playing director here, a feeling furthered by guitarist Matt Kinsey’s torrential freak-out when a storm rolls in.
The grandeur, though, is short-lived, and that’s the most profound and affecting thing about Dream River. At its core, this is a record about accepting and even embracing the smallness of human life, and how difficult that can be, given our damnably innate sense of adventure, ambition, and restlessness. For at least four minutes, though, Callahan finds peace and stillness in the form of “Small Plane.” The song is a quiet miracle; an afternoon epiphany told in dream logic and simple language to no one, because his only companion is taking a nap. And yet, what a perfect moment to take stock of things: “I really am a lucky man/Flying this small plane.” It’s a testament to simplicity, or maybe just the power of his wistful, prismatic delivery, that a songwriter once known for his delight in intricate wordplay has never sung more stirring words than these.
To call Dream River “content” or “serene” feels wrong, because there’s still a pang of longing to it. But in all of this album's searching, it does bring back one hopeful find: that maybe the closest we can come to the thrill of wilderness is the adventure of being with another person. “I see the true spring is in you,” he sings at one point, and it might just be the happiest moment on the record. For once he’s not wishing he were an eagle or a tempest or a sunset. He is just Bill Callahan, flying his small plane with a co-pilot by his side, and for the moment at least, that is enough.


In 1989, Pauline Oliveros coined the term Deep Listening to describe a practice of radical attentiveness. This double LP collects the famed original record with selections from her Deep Listening Band.

Pauline Oliveros / Stuart Dempster / Panaiotis: Deep Listening

Deep Listening

Listening is an inherently empathetic act, requiring receptivity to the intentions of others and the natural world. Composer Pauline Oliveros wrote frequently about what it means to listen throughout her career, which spanned over half a century and encompassed electronic works, compositions for magnetic tape, improvisation, and exercises in focus and reflection designed to deepen everyday engagement with sound. She considered sound not only to be the audible vibrations of the air around us, but the totality of many vibrational energies throughout the universe. To listen is to be aware of one’s self in that collective whole.
Since her death in 2016, Oliveros’ ideas about what she called “Deep Listening” (which she described as “a practice that is intended to heighten and expand consciousness of sound in as many dimensions of awareness and attentional dynamics as humanly possible”) have become increasingly popular. In her 2019 book How To Do Nothing, Jenny Odell returns several times to Oliveros’ Deep Listening techniques as a salve to the increasingly chaotic flow of information in the Internet age. A 2016 article in The New Yorker brought her Sonic Meditations to a wide audience, saying they “make a timely case for listening as a form of activism.” Events have been staged throughout the country, from Houston to St. Paul to Washington, DC, celebrating her sonic legacy.
The salience of Deep Listening resides in its contrast to mainstream culture’s riptide trajectory towards distraction and saturation, towards siloed media and political environments. It also stands in opposition to the numbing listening habits encouraged by streaming, which positions music as a utilitarian tool for productivity, something to be ignored while your concentration rests elsewhere. Oliveros provided a secular alternative to the increasingly commodified mindfulness movement that paradoxically co-opts the posturing of meditative practice in the service of productivity and capital. Deep Listening exists as its own end, without a pretense of functionality.
Oliveros coined the term Deep Listening in 1989 to describe her collected improvisations with trombonist Stuart Dempster and vocalist Panaiotis, it would go on to become the name of the album released that same year on the under-appreciated avant-garde classical label New Albion. Important Records, which has spent nearly a decade producing impressive new editions of an array of Oliveros’ recordings, has collected the entirety of that seminal album in a new double LP, augmented by related material from a follow-up of sorts, 1991’s The Ready Made Boomerang, credited to the Deep Listening Band. The release is a remarkable realization of her ideas and demonstrates the sensitivity of the musicians to their physical environment, as well her profoundly expressive accordion playing and singing.
Both Deep Listening and The Ready Made Boomerang were recorded in a massive underground cistern in Washington State that Dempster had discovered some years before. The space, which once held two million gallons of water, has a 45-second reverberation time, and the recordings are defined by a surreal smearing of tones. Like much of Oliveros’ and Dempster’s work around this time, most of these improvisations are focused around extended drones, with Dempster’s trombone and didjeridu providing the backbone. Far from evoking any sort of stasis, these tones swell and resonate actively throughout the space, and the effect is hallucinatory. Melodic lines intertwine as they ripple and decay, and momentarily raised voices seemingly emerge from within the insistent, omnipresent root. “The cistern space, in effect, is an instrument being played simultaneously by all three composers,” Oliveros stated in the album’s original liner notes.
With the exception of “Nike,” which consists of the reverberant clang of metal on metal segueing into extemporaneous vocalizations and discordant trombone interjections, this collection is largely consonant, reveling in the resonances produced by the careful tuning of the instruments to just intonation. It would be inaccurate to describe music produced with such intensity as strictly pleasant, but there is a quality about it that feels centered and calming in a strange, otherworldly way. Pieces like “Lear” and “Ione” are meditative without falling into the trappings of new age music; instead, they enact core tenets of meditative practice—reflection, attentiveness, an openness to one’s surroundings—in a musical framework. Each musician is listening intently and reacting in kind not only to each other but to the space around them. The cistern stands in for the world, the entire universe, as they listen to its contours.
In a contemporary context, Deep Listening still sounds revolutionary. While drone, minimalism, and ambient music have proliferated in the intervening decades, few albums in those fields are as rich texturally and harmonically or have such a clarity of vision. The album remains vital largely because it embodies Oliveros’ ideas, which have themselves resurfaced as a corrective to the sinister undercurrents of social and technological advancement. If art is a way to grapple with philosophical and societal hardships, Deep Listening may resound with just as much, if not more, clarity now than when it was created.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Where Castlemania was the apotheosis of frontman John Dwyer's vision as a singer/songwriter, Thee Oh Sees' second collection of 2011 showcases the full-band version of the SF gargage rockers at the height of their powers. Now with two drummers.

Carrion Crawler/The Dream

Propulsive, careening, and at times, openly dangerous, Thee Oh Sees are like the house band for a runaway train. Much of their appeal comes from the fact that they're a machine with four equal parts: the wide-eyed, cult-leader charisma of frontman John Dwyer, the effortless cool of keyboardist/singer Brigid Dawson, the pulsating low end of Petey Dammit, and the steel-solid rhythmic anchor of Mike Shoun. With unspeakable chemistry and an instinctual bond that borders on telepathic, the band has taken its wildly cacophonous and setlist-free live show to must-see status, turning music venues populated by arm-folding spectators into anarchic riot scenes. An Oh Sees show is a place where combing the floor for your shoes when the house lights come on becomes ritualistic, where getting kicked in the face by a renegade crowd-surfer provokes a shit-eating grin instead of a scowl. Most of the band's best albums serve as recorded documents of their live sets; you can practically hear Dwyer swallowing microphones and spitting upwards to the rafters.
Castlemania-- Thee Oh Sees' first record of 2011-- made it easier to remember that the band started out as Dwyer's solo project, a vehicle forged as a left turn from the eardrum terrorism of his garage-punk cult heroes Coachwhips. Rife with kaleidoscopic woodwind arrangements and vocals akin to the green cartoon monsters that grace the cover art of many Oh Sees full-lengths, the record was a refreshingly weird slab of hallucinogenic psych-pop, a headphones record for the arty garage-rock über-faithful. (You know, the kind of people who own more than two volumes of Back From the Grave or take a road trip to Gonerfest every single year.)
The opening seconds of Carrion Crawler/The Dream feature the squawking of a saxophone-- the last remnants of Castlemania's woodwind-centered psychedelia sputtering out like smoke from a 1920s automobile that ran out of gas. Just as Castlemania was the apotheosis of Dwyer's cracked vision as a singer/songwriter, Carrion Crawler/The Dream showcases the full-band version of Thee Oh Sees at the height of their powers. Many of the album's songs have been road-tested for over a year, and Intelligence brain-trust Lars Finberg was drafted as the band's second drummer. Instead of disrupting the dynamic, Finberg fits in perfectly, occasionally adding some polyrhythmic flair, bolstering the already tight and rock-solid rhythm section. Dammit, Shoun, and now Finberg serve as the grounded basis that allow the songs to veer off on wild tangents without completely falling apart.
Having the bassist and two drummers holding everything in place gives the high end room to explore, a task in part handled by the extraordinary vocal interplay of Dwyer and Dawson. In spite of the former being the creative nucleus of the band, there is no "lead singer" designation in Thee Oh Sees-- Dwyer and Dawson singing nearly every lyric in unison. As Dawson's straight-laced vocal presence stays in line on most of the songs, Dwyer naturally plays the madman, his voice coasting below, zigzagging between, and occasionally even scaling above hers-- the latter reminiscent of the way Black Francis would often take the higher octave over Kim Deal on several Pixies tracks. Dawson provides poppy "ba-bas," while Dwyer shouts his head off on "Contraption/Soul Desert", and she's there to eerily coo while he's practically speaking in tongues on "Crack in Your Eye". But more often than not, it sounds like Dwyer is singing backup for Dawson, a testament to how equal the parts in Thee Oh Sees really are.
Scratching away at his strings with bloodthirsty ferociousness, Dwyer's guitar playing is best described in terms usually reserved for feral cats. His solos are not as much foot-on-the-monitor, spotlight-capturing moments as they are products of primal instinct. This is particularly evident on the album's two longform tracks, the two songs that combine to make up the album's title. Much like last year’s "Warm Slime"-- the audio equivalent of a pro-wrestling iron man match-- "Carrion Crawler" and "The Dream" experiment with what happens when you tighten things to a breaking point and then let go. Short blasts of distortion leave their mark throughout the album, guitar tones evoking the image of exploding paint cans in a mid-size room, adding to the unruly spirit of the band's albums and live sets. See, Thee Oh Sees understand the intrinsic value of making a huge mess.


Trent Reznor's defection from the music business might be the best thing that ever happened to him financially and ideologically. Aesthetically, Reznor's move is, so far, reminiscent of Prince's a decade ago-- his first new self-released project is a two-hour, 4xCD instrumental work.

Ghosts I-IV

When Trent Reznor got his Just Blaze on last year to produce the Saul Williams slam-opera The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, he sent it out into the world through a just-blazed distribution path, biting Radiohead's weeks-old pay-what-you want idea. Then, when not enough people paid actual money for the thing, he bitchily blogged about it. Now he's doing it again, this time under his own name. If you want the new NIN all-instrumental 36-track drone-marathon, you can pay as little as $5 or as much as $300. (Or, rather, you could have once paid as much as $300; the 2,500-copy limited run of the deluxe-packaging version of Ghosts I-IV sold out within three days.) That Radiohead model, it turns out, only works if you're a band on Radiohead's or Nine Inch Nails' level-- one with an arena-rock history and a rabid internet fanbase. Reznor stands to make millions from Ghosts, something that certainly wouldn't have been true if he'd released this two-hour 4xCD instrumental work on a major label. Reznor's defection from the music business might be the best thing that ever happened to him financially and ideologically. Aesthetically, it might be the worst.
Reznor's greatest strength has always been his ability to let his fundamental pop sensibility show through his fuzzed-out industrial signifiers and screaming-at-a-wall tantrum-rock pretensions. For all its heavily processed walls of guitar and reptilian electro lurching and cusswords, Pretty Hate Machine, still my favorite of Reznor's albums, is basically a dirtied-up Human League album (and Human League albums, it turned out, could stand to be dirtied up). The gas-masks, megaphone yowls, and apocalyptic despair of his subsequent albums were fun, but his old-school devotion to song form and titanic hooks were the real reasons I once carved the NIN logo on a treehouse wall. As a producer, Reznor knows how to stack drones on top of each other and crystallize pianos like nobody else, but those studio tricks don't add up to much when he's not welding them to actual songs. There's not a song to be found anywhere on Ghosts; nearly every one of the untitled instrumental sketches here feels emaciated and half-finished. What we're left with is two hours' worth of really good soundtrack music for American remakes of Japanese horror films.
In the 90s, Reznor played patron saint to IDM OGs, commissioning Aphex Twin remixes and signing Meat Beat Manifesto to his nothing label. In that regard, Ghosts is almost Reznor's IDM record, only he's never been all that interested in jittery side-panning drum programming or vintage-synth blob-farts. And this isn't ambient music either; nearly every piece here feels like a piece of a Nine Inch Nails song, a DVD extra to a movie we might never see. Many of the best tracks here are straight-up fuzz-rock stomps, but without the burden of lyrical conveyance or song-progression, that riffage just hangs there, churning without purpose.
Elsewhere, Reznor pits staticy drones against each other to see what happens, and often there's a built-in sense of melody and a dynamic force at work; it's just frustrating that we never hear what Reznor might do with it. Sometimes he'll bury chattering electro beats under forebodingly tortured synth-tones. Sometimes he'll offer shockingly clear impressionistic Erik Satie-esque pianos, letting them plink prettily away for minutes at a time before sending some new ominous machine-hum to molest them. Every once in a while, he'll use a riff or a bassline that I could swear he's used before but can't quite place. But even if every one of these tracks stands as a formal experiment unto itself, after an hour or two these half-formed ideas begin to bleed indistinctly into each other, evolving into puddles of vaguely ominous aural mush.
When Ghosts works best, it's as a showcase for Reznor's estimable studio skills. Plenty of the individual sounds here are just gorgeous, and Reznor even expands his palette a bit to encompass marimbas, banjos, and percussively Beck-like slide-guitar. He layers these sounds expertly, setting glassy pianos against distant roaring-siren counterpoints or interrupting a pulsing drone-hum with a surprisingly accessible bar-rock chug. But even as the tracks progress, nothing really goes anywhere or stands on its own-- even the best track here is essentially half of a really good Nine Inch Nails song. And maybe it still will be; Reznor could take the pieces here and and make great songs out of them, sort of like how James Murphy took a beat from his Nike-sponsored long-form LCD Soundsystem piece 45:33 to make the incandescent "Someone Great". Until then, though, we're left with pieces of songs, nothing more. If I were one of those early deluxe-pacakge customers, I'd want my $300 back.


The first in a series of pointedly social records from Erykah Badu, this fascinating, sonically adventurous album finds her exploring a post–Civil Rights landscape in which African-Americans have been left to sort out how to have a cultural identity as part of a nation that had, up until very recently, been a dedicated adversary. Madlib, 9th Wonder, and Shafiq Husayn are among the producers.

Erykah Badu: New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War

New Amerykah Part One: 4th World War

The American media and public have spent a fair bit of the past months being fascinated and appalled by various remarks from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of Chicago. Those months have also seen a fairly warm critical reception for Erykah Badu’s terrific new album—one whose notions and ideologies sometimes come from the same nexus as Wright’s. Badu’s theology is different, of course: more personal, more scattered, less Christian, laced with Five-Percenter notions. And Badu salutes Farrakhan explicitly, rather than just nodding politely across the South Side. But there’s an odd echo in her wording on that one: “I salute you, Farrakhan/Because you are me.” Less than a month after this record’s release, Wright’s most notable acquaintance was describing the reverend as someone who “contains within him the contradictions—the good and the bad—of the community…. I can no more disown him than I can disown the Black community.” He is me? Until he hits the press club, anyway.
New Amerykah is the first in a series of pointedly social records from Badu, and “you are me”—or maybe we are we—could be its motto, or possibly its intended effect. I don’t bring up politics for nothing. That attitude, and a lot of the record's concerns, have their roots in the same era that animates Rev. Wright—those Civil Rights and post–Civil Rights moments when African-Americans were left with some strange, heavy tasks: sorting out how to have a cultural identity as part of a nation that had, up until very recently, been a dedicated adversary, and sorting out how to clean up the wreckage that had accumulated in the meantime. A lot of the critical love for New Amerykah seems rooted in a love for the music of that period—a time in which popular Black artists made records filled not only with visionary, avant-garde sounds, but with a social expansiveness, a fire and ambition to say something important to and for a community. Reviews put this record in a line with those artists: Sly Stone, Marvin Gaye, Miles Davis, Stevie Wonder, Funkadelic; you could tie it even more easily to a lot of smart-guy late-’80s hip-hop digging into the same ideas. Nobody who’s been paying attention will be surprised at the thought of that mantle being picked up by a woman.
This album doesn’t just have the personal and social ambitions of those old records—plenty of charmless “nu-soul” records aspire to that—but some of the sonic ones, too. Big tracks aside, it’s an awfully static record, which gives it the kind of high-art “difficulty” that we critics have been known to like. The beats, by hip-hop producers like Madlib, 9th Wonder, and Shafiq Husayn, trail sneakily by, leaving Badu—without the aid of verses, choruses, or much structure at all—to scribble all over them in her perfect/imperfect voice. (One track, “My People,” is mostly just a repeated mantra; the rest of Badu’s vocal scribbling is buried far back in the mix, like an incidental decoration.) These things should pose problems; one of the chief wonders of New Amerykah is that they don’t. Instead, they allow for a sense of intimacy and freedom. At the end of one already-great track, there’s an offhand doodle that’s one of the most amazing pieces of music I’ve heard all year: It’s just Badu, with some chatter in the background, singing her mother’s history in unison with a muted trumpet. But you can hear the two musicians working happily to stay in unison, all through a complex jazz run, even trying to match their vibratos; you can imagine the takes where they miss it and laugh a little. It makes a little joke, and it closes on a terrific line about her mother’s resilience—“Even though it was hard, you would never ever know it”—and in the end I can't think of a nobler use for recording equipment.
It’s those personal moments that sell things, even more so than in Badu’s back catalog; credit usually goes to her gift of a voice, which she uses impressionistically instead of composing, but it’s always been her keen writing about people that gives her tracks much of their shape. The trumpet comes at the end of a track called “Me,” which despite the title is more candid than narcissistic—a gorgeous, sunny, soft-soul beat over which Badu sings about getting older, getting thicker, having two kids with different fathers. That candor is also a lot of what sells Badu’s social concerns, which could otherwise sound like a laundry list of Black-community struggles: poverty, urban violence, bad policing, AIDS, the psychological hard spot of teenage girls, complacency, and get-mine nihilism versus hope for something else. These things get filtered through Badu’s head into real scenery instead of placeholders, and folded in among other things that seem remarkably sincere and personal: mourning for the late producer J Dilla, an earnest belief in hip-hop as a uniting culture, and that we is we attitude. Even the beats wind up feeling earnest. The bulk of them are dark, blunted, woozy, and paranoid; the exceptions are light, breezy, calm. But all of them feel like walking out onto an empty big-city sidewalk in the hours after sunrise, when everything’s chilly, dewy, and strange.
There are times, as the album drags on, where that static darkness really does become a problem—where the record begins to seem indulgent, half-finished, or slapped together. Part of the marvel of it, though, is how she still pulls this off, every bit of it, on sheer... Baduizm: Even when she seems wrong, or dippy, or maybe a little batty, she's still a ridiculously compelling and likable personality. This is something no one should criticize in music: recognizable, complex, three-dimensional character. Neither should we be too skeptical about people inclined to laud this as a strong new flash of old-style, socially engaged R&B: Those ambitions are worth praising, and those eras worth looking back on, so long as it doesn’t come along with the mean-spirited, bad-faith complaint that “all” of today’s Black music is “just about guns/sex/money,” or with this free-floating idea that the experiences of Black people must always be treated as a socio-political “issue.” Badu’s difficult and complicated, and not even in a self-absorbed way—it makes for good, deep records and shows that’ll never start on time. (“Time is for white people,” she recently joked to Blender, one-upping the old line about running on African Time.) I don’t know if we’re still voting for public policy based on who we’d rather have a beer with, but it occurs to me that I don’t know many people who wouldn’t love to grab a drink with Badu.


Sweden’s God Mother blend black metal, d-beat, grind, math rock, and more, contorting tradition rather than kowtowing to it. Their hellish new album offers occasional glimpses of greatness.

Vilseledd

As in life itself, a proper introduction to the Swedish wrecking crew God Mother and their new album, Vilseledd, starts with a well-rounded breakfast. The video for “Weak,” the LP’s potent, whiplash-inducing centerpiece, puts a nightmarish spin on the typical Scandinavian spread. Its menu features toast and pancakes slathered with neon goop, pork and beans drowning in sludge, and a bag of cereal dumped haphazardly on the table, among other delights, all served up by people with a melting faces. God Mother’s music is the sonic equivalent of this hellish Nordic feast. Although the band draw heavily from locally-sourced styles like black metal, d-beat, and death’n’roll, they’d rather contort tradition than kowtow to it.
On their 2015 debut Maktbehov, God Mother spliced together the aforementioned genres with an all-American, Frankensteined approach: Pig Destroyer’s sludgy grind, Converge’s melodramatic hardcore, and especially the Dillinger Escape Plan’s freewheeling math rock are prominent in their DNA. Many groups would buckle under the pressure of such an explosive juggling act, but not God Mother. They toggle between bone-crushing barnstormers and slow-churned stoner metal with remarkable technical proficiency. That Ben Weinman, Dillinger Escape Plan’s soon-to-be-former guitarist, signed them to his Party Smasher Inc. label (with the bold cosign “Torch, officially passed”) is fitting considering the two groups’ mutual, attention-challenged mindsets. But God Mother don’t explore enough uncharted territory on Vilseledd to fully justify their characterization as next-generation freak-metal luminaries.
To wit, the quartet are miles ahead of their peers where well-rounded cruelty is concerned. From 30-second, hyper-condensed grindcore (“Enkla Svar,” “Dödfödd”) to rabid hard rock (“Caved In”) to tormented sludge (“Burdenless”), God Mother’s arsenal here runs deep and diverse, their fearsome chemistry amplified further by the punishing mix. Sebastian Campbell’s larynx-lacerating screams periodically pierce guitarist Max Lindström’s pointed riffs like a bayonet dipped in poison, threatened all the while by bassist Daniel Noring and drummer Michael Dahlström’s bifurcated percussion. “De Ovälkomna” and “By the Millions” are less songs than warzones: cramped, chaotic spaces where friendly fire is embraced with open arms and ample blast beats.
The main problem with this thrilling firefight is that we’ve heard much of it before, however unpredictable the arrangements seem at first. “By the Millions” and “No Return” play out as hot-wired Converge songs, the lurching arrangements and staggered riffs shamelessly plucked from the grooves of 2001’s Jane Doe. The tremolo licks that open “Acrid Teeth” and “Charlatan” are nearly indistinguishable from each other: the kind of Darkthrone-esque noodling you’d expect from a garden-variety black metal band.
Vilseledd might not paint God Mother as agents of the hardcore zeitgeist, but it does offer the occasional glimpse of greatness. “Burdenless,” the album’s five-minute shape-shifting closer, traps the album’s disparate influences in a mucky web, where they promptly fester like A-grade Neurosis. Besides providing a much-needed respite from God Mother’s bludgeoning zig-zags and recurrent fake outs, the song provides convincing evidence that the band’s protean tricks may be more unified than they let on. A little bit of discipline goes a long way.


Reissued for its 25th anniversary, this dynamic and momentous release from the Philadelphia rock band features some of their highest peaks.

Bardo Pond: Amanita (25th Anniversary Edition)

Amanita (25th Anniversary Edition)

You can learn a lot about Bardo Pond from their choice of cover songs. Their interpretations of Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” Pharoah Sanders’ “The Creator Has a Master Plan,” and Roxy Music’s “In Every Dream Home a Heartache” reflect a group who play the long game, valuing slow builds and subtle climaxes. It also reveals an obsession with mind expansion of the highest order: While drug references litter the Philadelphia-based psychedelic rock band’s song and album titles, they’re handled in a non-cloying manner. Amanita muscaria, the mushroom after which their 1996 album is titled, has both poisonous and hallucinogenic properties. The implication is clear, but no over-the-top images appear on the album cover, nor do proselytizing lyrics blast you with mycological advocacy. The music is the drug, Bardo Pond convincingly insinuate.
While some of Bardo Pond’s many albums tend toward a monolithic buzz-drone, Amanita, which is being reissued on vinyl for its 25th anniversary, displays the band at their most dynamic. As guitarist Michael Gibbons notes, “Amanita was a manifesto of everything we were trying to do. It was really a template for everything we did later... There were songs, but they were still rooted in our free-improv base.” At their core, Bardo Pond are minimalists who maximize their limited range of sounds. Most of their songs move with a stolid grandeur, with brothers John and Michael Gibbons’ guitars accruing dense masses of fuzz and loosing rigorously sculpted scree, conjuring an electrical storm above mushroom clouds rising at one-quarter speed. Vocalist/flautist Isobel Sollenberger essentially turns her voice into a second flute: Her singing, which often seems like muffled howls in a tornado, acts as a conveyor of ineffable feelings, as affecting and ethereal as her instrument. Bassist Clint Takeda and drummer Joe Culver provide a deceptively seductive undertow, though their efforts usually get subsumed by the Gibbons’ towers of electric guitar.
The clarion call introducing Amanita’s 10-minute opener “Limerick” prepares you for a momentous experience. The Gibbons brothers intertwine their timbral gradients and unifying noise with melody in a solemn display of fraternal telepathy. What often gets overlooked about Bardo Pond, though, is how sensuous their sound is, due to Takeda and Culver’s subliminally prodding rhythms and Sollenberger’s filigreeing of the higher frequencies. Speaking of which, “The High Frequency” is the album’s peak. After a false start, the band locks into a groove and the rhythm section creates a sense of magic-carpet-riding bliss that sounds as loose and nonchalantly trippy as the Beatles’ “Flying.”
The music on Amanita often emphasizes Bardo Pond’s carnal side. “Tantric Porno” stands as one of the sweetest cuts in their vast discography. It’s one of the few songs on which the bass at least partially takes the lead, its methodical undulations lending a mellow frisson in the root chakra. “Rumination” follows a similar path, exuding an eerie desolation before blooming into a familiar, gnarly Gibbons bro guitar duel. “Wank,” meanwhile, is lascivious in its woozy, stoner-rock way, with Culver shifting into an alpha-male strut on his kit.
The relatively sprightly “Sentence” might be the closest Bardo Pond ever came to indie-rock conventionality, with the lead guitar squealing in the vicinity of Stephen Malkmus. A kernel of a college-radio hit lurks beneath the mammoth, down-tuned boluses of guitar and blurred, stoned vocals, and the lyrics—“Collarbone figure eights/Sentenced to a lifetime in the ocean”—exemplify Sollenberger’s elliptical thoughts.
The bonus tracks on this edition, “Clean Sweep” and “Brambles,” are striking anomalies. The former moves through Slint-like passages of ominous tension and brief spurts of rampaging noise rock while the latter is a lurching funk-rock song that steadily gains impact and chaos. These sorts of fractious dynamics rarely surface in this most even-keeled of rock units.
After relative commercial success with Liz Phair and Pavement and a partnership with Atlantic Records, Matador had the luxury of taking risks on low-commercial-potential acts like Bardo Pond in those mid-’90s boom times. The iconic indie label was quickly rewarded with Amanita, one of the band’s grandest releases and one worthy of this remastered and expanded edition on two slabs of purple vinyl. The label also plans to reissue the group’s three other Matador titles and a rarities comp. For a band who have accumulated a surplus of adulation and cred in the intervening years, it feels like a karmic victory.

Buy: Rough Trade
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After nearly breaking up and instead making their best album in years, the once-restless Japanese trio become something new again: self-satisfied.

LφVE & EVφL

New Boris albums once offered joyous upheaval and a sense of shock. At their best, and sometimes their worst, they ventured into whatever forms fit their loose-fitting creed of “Heavy Rocks.” Pink, one of the band’s early, essential breakthroughs, moved from the reinvented shoegaze anthem “Farewell” into wild-eyed D-Beat and squalid noise-rock, as if beating a gleeful retreat from perfection. Sure, there have been gimmicks and missteps along the way, but Boris’ restlessness has often been rewarding and contagious.
But it is hard to muster much more than a shrug for LØVE & EVØL, Boris’ double-album debut for Jack White’s Third Man Records. LØVE & EVØL finds Boris at a strange career crossroads—or, rather, just beyond it. Three years ago, they recorded what was meant to be their farewell album but instead stumbled into Dear, their most ecstatic and aggressive LP in years. Boris sounded reborn, their vows renewed. LØVE & EVØL, however, suggests that the euphoria of this second honeymoon has faded. These seven anemic songs find Boris becoming something new yet again—self-satisfied.
They remind us of a lot of their best tricks: Wata’s solos, like the one that leads the lumbering “LOVE” out of its torpor, still streak across these tracks like a rainbow somehow appearing against a moonless night sky—few guitarists sound so rapturous with a trick so simple. And in its ascendant second half, “EVOL” recreates the band’s most disorienting and beautiful effect—the ability to drop down in tempo, key, and distortion and still shoot for the stars, as if the rules of gravity have been temporarily reversed.
Those little moments of wonder stud songs that, by and large, feel like adult-coloring-book versions of Boris triumphs past. “uzume” is a surging wall of noise, with wave after wave of distortion and drums moving ever inward, but it lacks the wild radiance of their earlier drone experiments. Closer “Shadow of Skulls” lingers in the same space for 12 minutes without shifting into anything heavenly or heavy. It plods ever-onward because Boris don’t know what else to do with it—a fitting end for an album that adds little but another entry into an already-enormous catalogue
The band once served as a generational gateway to the worlds of international psychedelia and doom-adjacent metal. Accessible and enigmatic, they drew you in, making you sort through alternate editions of their records to find the next weird gem. But accessing the world’s musical extremes is easier than it was even a decade ago, with point-and-click access to infinite wormholes. Boris, meanwhile, simply feel staid, a band that missed its best chance to take a bow.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Jessy Lanza’s new EP features remixes from former collaborators and tourmates DJ Taye and DJ Spinn of Chicago footwork crew Teklife, Morgan Geist aka Storm Queen, and Leon Smart as DVA [Hi:Emotions].

Oh No No No Remixes EP

To cap off a busy 2016, in which she released and toured behind her sophomore effort Oh No, Jessy Lanza dropped the Oh No No No Remixes EP. On Oh No, co-produced with label mate Jeremy Greenspan of Junior Boys, Lanza explored a breadth of genres from pop to new wave on the way to establishing her own neatly curated sound—one that thrives in the overlap between electronica and R&B. She explored the angst of romantic entanglement usually associated with the latter genre, but her penchant for vibrant synthpop melodies and stuttering drum patterns transformed anguish into a danceable incentive.  Just as it says on the tin, this EP puts a new spin on three tracks from the album: “I Talk BB,” “Could B U,” and “Going Somewhere.” The remixes come courtesy of former collaborators and tourmates DJ Taye and DJ Spinn of Chicago footwork crew Teklife, Morgan Geist aka Storm Queen, and Leon Smart as DVA [Hi:Emotions].
While Oh No leaned into the chaotic musings about a budding romance, the EP soundtracks the left-brain, logical analysis. Geist adds a light touch to “I Talk BB,” brightening up the album version with synths and a drum machine. Lanza’s breathy falsetto from the original serves as an instrument on the remix, blending in with the beat rather than standing apart. This holds true when “Could Be U,” the ambient outro to Oh No, is given the Teklife treatment by DJs Taye and Spinn. There are brief hints of Lanza’s voice over a subdued but frenetic drum pattern, which is similar in tone to the original despite the slight increase in tempo, but it seems like she’s not necessarily the star of her own EP. The remixes don’t pounce at the chance to celebrate the upper reaches of her voice—used often, instead of the modal register, to express uncertainty and anxiety on the originals.
This point is hammered home on the final track, DVA [Hi:Emotions]’ take on “Going Somewhere,” one of the more upbeat compositions on Oh No that also highlights Lanza’s range, removes her vocal almost entirely. For seven and a half minutes, the track plays out like the audio from some kind of immersive art installation, interpolating snippets of Kim Kardashian’s voice with haunting synth lines and R2-D2-esque droid sounds that mimic most reality shows' warped relationship with the truth (“I just wanna impress you,” Lanza repeats, a relatable impulse that can turn psychotic if it becomes a compulsion).
The Oh No No No Remixes EP makes for good ambiance, but they don't say much on their own. They set a relaxed mood, and they function as a mellow, cohesive mini-supplement to the album. But the EP is more of a showcase for Lanza’s collaborators and less a celebration of her voice and everything that made Oh No so good. It’s likely that fans of the latter record, where her songwriting and vocal talent take center stage, will stick with it instead.