British producer JR Seaton's debut album as Call Super turns sharply away from dancefloor functionality and towards headier expressions. His efforts result in one of the most evocative sound worlds that techno's seen this year.

Suzi Ecto

Even in Berlin, techno is never quite the monolithic entity that it might seem. The formula may be dead simple—a four-to-the-floor beat plus a handful of shadows and metal shavings—but the proportions are always in flux. And as they shift, so does the music's relationship to the dancefloor; so do its imaginative possibilities. Last September, the British producer JR Seaton told Red Bull Music Academy, "I can probably see myself making stuff that is less to do with clubs in the future." He had been living in Berlin for four years, and while the city's techno community had drawn him to the city, he was circumspect about the way that club music's strictures can hinder an artist's development. Just a year later, his prediction is already coming true: after a string of EPs that established him as a clever, capable techno producer—part interpreter, part torchbearer—his debut album as Call Super turns sharply away from dancefloor functionality and towards headier expressions.
It's still body music, particularly if you turn it up loud enough that it gets ahold of your ribcage. But it's not so much party music, necessarily. The first thing you may notice is the relative scarcity of four-to-the-floor kicks; there's plenty of pulse running through Suzi Ecto, but it moves in fits and starts. Seaton's obvious affinity for classic electro is a factor, but these aren't the textbook whipcrack rhythms of Kraftwerk and Drexciya. They're softened up and sanded down; there are few grooves here, just bursts. Many of the drum sounds, like the dry, boxy toms of "Okko Ink", sound like they come from a Wurlitzer on the fritz, and even the most regular beats come across like metronomes buried deep in a pile of leaves. In "Fold Again at Last", an unsteady rhythm of glassy, conga-like tones is all but drowned out by metallic locust buzz.
Ah yes, that buzz: the whole album is alive with it. Seaton has talked about the way his creative process puts the signal chain front and center—that is, his compositional style is less a matter of putting beats and notes in neat rows than generating electronic sounds and sending them careening through a series of effects. It's part alchemical reaction, part Rube Goldberg contraption, and one side effect of his method is the omnipresent crackle and hiss. Not all hums are created equal, however, and it's a sign of Seaton's careful approach to sound design that his buzz sings in a way that's very different from, say, the flat, affectless hiss of Actress. Indeed, while his gunked-up machine aesthetics relate to contemporaries like Actress, Lukid, and the L.I.E.S. stable of basement-rave noiseniks, what distinguishes Suzi Ecto is its sparkling clarity. There are tiny chirping noises everywhere, like a forest full of birds and crickets, all made out of metal. Gloomy, abstracted electronic music rarely sounds so insanely detailed; for all its haphazard qualities, everything feels carefully, even obsessively, crafted.
It's a wonderfully penumbral set, sumptuously grayscale in a way that gives its rare bursts of color all the more impact. In "Okko Ink", a snippet of saxophone seems to have been rolled out on waterlogged tape and tacked up in the background, and in "Sulu Sekou", there's a melancholic clarinet melody that faintly recalls Djivan Gasparyan's "I Will Not Be Sad in This World". It's almost incongruous, this Fourth World outburst nestled among the metal shards, except that it's not, and that, in turn, is a testament to the breadth of Seaton's vision for techno. He's created the most evocative sound world that the genre has seen this year, and the peak-time dancefloor's loss is our gain.


Math-rock band returns after 11 years with not just a good reunion album, but also the most immediately satisfying record in their entire catalogue.

In Prism

The alt-rock reunions we've seen over the past decade have generally fallen into one of three categories: the notoriously combative legends who've let time-- or lucrative post-reunion guarantees-- heal all wounds (the Pixies, Dinosaur Jr.); the post-punk pioneers collecting on the debt owed to them by a new generation of spiritual offspring (Wire, Gang of Four, Mission of Burma); or the fleetingly successful 1990s-era acts who don't have anything better to do (Urge Overkill). But the sudden, surprising return of Polvo (or, at least three quarters of its original line-up) after a 12-year absence does not adhere to any of these scripts. As a band that bridged late-80s SST-schooled indie-rock and more abstract, angular 90s math-rock, Polvo's legacy feels very much frozen in time-- they're not a band whose influence is especially apparent among contemporary indie-rock acts; their popularity never extended beyond the campus-radio crowd; and there's no juicy back-story to propagate their myth. They were simply a very good band that made some very good records, and then just plain stopped.
But Polvo's first album in 12 years presents a different kind of reunion rationale-- one that's less about extending a legacy as rewriting it. Like Hüsker Dü, the Minutemen, and Sonic Youth before them, Polvo reached their critical peak with an epic double-album statement, 1996's Exploded Drawing, which saw them successfully unraveling their bee-swarm guitar buzz to explore the polarities of their sound, from psychedelic-folk lullabies to brutalizing post-hardcore. But instead of answering their Daydream Nation with their Goo (i.e., a more streamlined, approachable set), Polvo took a hard left on 1997's Shapes, a hodgepodge of contorted classic-rock riffage and fractured-folk interludes that, in hindsight, anticipated the current vogue for Arthur-endorsed new-school psychedelia, but at the time felt like a directionless drift into the unknown, one from which Polvo never returned. Until now.
In Prism thus feels like an attempt to chart an alternate course for Polvo post-Exploded Drawing, in which the band harnesses its psychedelicized sprawl into a precise, laser-focused tracklist, where even the eight-minute excursions feel brisk and purposeful. Ten years of recording-technology advances also means that Polvo has never sounded more radiant; liberated from the murky, mid-fi production of the band's older records, Ash Bowie emerges as a forceful, almost swaggering vocalist on In Prism's blast-off opener "Right the Relation", which, despite its cryptic allusions to Polvo's history and ethos ("We see the beauty behind imperfection... I kill my creation to right the relation") is the band's most forthright, unfussy rocker to date. And, if this were 1997, you could easily imagine "Beggar's Bowl" becoming the band's crossover calling card on alt-rock radio, thanks to seismic, Led Zep-like convulsions and an uncharacteristically funky "Another One Bites the Dust"-style break that showcases the muscular time-keeping of new drummer Brian Quast. Remarkably, Polvo achieve these breakthroughs without sacrificing any of their signatures, such as spastic structural shifts and eerie, spidery guitar leads where you can feel the strings bend. They've just organized them in such a way that their aggressive and melodic impulses complement rather than fight against each other.
Of course, you'd expect a new Polvo album to deliver at least a couple of corkers. But where In Prism truly distinguishes itself-- not just as a surprisingly good reunion album, but also as the most immediately satisfying front-to-back album in the entire Polvo catalogue-- is in its quieter, headier stretches. Where the extended running times of "D.C. Trails" (6:57) and "Lucia" (8:15) may seem to indulge the band's old free-form tendencies, each is carefully constructed on an upward arc: the former cruises on a pleasingly lysergic jangle-pop tip before climaxing with a fireworks-worthy guitar jam; the diregy, doom-metal build up of "Lucia" makes the song's sudden transition into a melancholic, tambourine-rattled pop song all the more effective and affecting. In Prism could be the first Polvo album where the melodies leave as lasting an impression as the noise around them, with Bowie tapping into a more guileless mode of expression that rarely revealed itself before.
It's only during the prolonged middle breakdown of the drifty, eight-minute closer "A Link in the Chain" that In Prism acquires an air of ponderousness. But by that point, Polvo's comeback coronation has been handily earned. If no one was really asking for a new Polvo album at the start 2009, In Prism's dreamy discord feels perfectly in tune with that of contemporary psychedelic iconoclasts like Deerhunter. And if Polvo's reformation initially defied the traditional logic for indie-rock reunions, In Prism ultimately sets a new standard for them: don't just make it sound like you never left, but rather make the past seem like a mere warm-up for what's to come.


Jilian Medford’s third album is bigger, brighter, cleaner, and more ambitious. Even when she’s hollering, she sounds dwarfed, standing vulnerable but unafraid amid towering emotions.

Show Me How You Disappear

Jilian Medford started Ian Sweet in 2014 while studying at Berklee College of Music, and after graduating, she put together a band for the spiny, hushed songs she was writing. Her debut, 2016’s Shapeshifter, moved with the same restlessness she brought to her singing, which shifted nimbly and unpredictably between belt and squeak. Her songs felt simple enough on the surface; brightly colored and acidic, they filtered the touchstones of a comfortable early-2000s childhood (skating, Michael Jordan, Nickelodeon Slime Time Live) through the brittle anxieties of 2010s early adulthood. But she often seemed to be twisting their structures on purpose, as if trying to wring new information from old shapes. On 2018’s Crush Crusher, she parted ways with her band and dove deeper into textures, producing a muted indie-pop album that felt halfway between a waking dream and an unfinished sketch. Through it all, she’s seemed like a roving mind in search of a target, scanning her inner horizons for material strong enough to satisfy her.
On her third album, she’s found it. Show Me How You Disappear is bigger, brighter, cleaner, more ambitious than anything she’s done. Working by herself with a number of handpicked producers, including Andrew Sarlo (Big Thief, Empress Of) and Andy Seltzer (Maggie Rogers),  Medford sights some big feelings, swings, and connects. The album scales heights and punches the air upon reaching them, and the best songs swell in your chest like prime-era Broken Social Scene.
Medford has slowed the metabolism of her music, simplifying and amplifying her gestures in the process. “Power” clicks reliably along well-worn quiet-LOUD-quiet rails, exploding into distortion at the chorus until the wish in its lyrics—“I want to feel the power of knowing/Nothing/Nothing/I want to feel the power of holding/No one”—shines overhead like stadium lights. The chorus only comes around twice, but it burns so bright that it leaves an after-image.
In interviews surrounding this record, Medford has alluded to suffering from acute anxiety, which led her briefly into an outpatient facility. While there, she discovered the transformative power of mantras, a revelation she plugged directly into her songwriting. “I want to stop, I want to,” she stutters on “Dumb Driver”; “I want to get better, better, better” on “Get Better.” “I’ll start saying your name/Saying your name backwards so I’ll forget it,” she repeats on “Drink the Lake,” and the poignancy snowballs as the phrase loops—a resolution so frail it requires constant reinforcement.
The self-annihilating danger of codependency has lurked in Medford’s lyrics since the beginning—the repeated chorus of “Hiding,” a standout from Crush Crusher, was just “I forgot myself in you”—but where her earlier music felt knotted and interior, a monologue directed toward a sidewalk, her new songs meet you right in the eyes. The second half of that “I want to get better, better” couplet is, “But in my mind, I’m still lying in your bed.” As she sings, a synth wails overheard like a klaxon announcing a jailbreak. This is what unwanted disappearance into someone else feels like, the music suggests—a national emergency, even if no one else even notices.
Medford has cited some big-tent influences (the specter of Coldplay was raised) and you can hear her ambitions playing themselves out in the margins of the production. The treated drums and processed vocals in “Dirt,” for example, or the intriguingly deformed whistle on “Sword” that sounds like a curdled version of the one from Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” testify to imagined festival stages. The reverb is cavernous—when the guitars and synth tangle on “Dirt,” the slow-curling dry ice is implied. Her voice rings clear in the mix, but even when she’s hollering, she sounds dwarfed, standing vulnerable but unafraid amid towering emotions.
Those emotions, and their sometimes-terrible clarity, resonate above all. “I see it now, I see it/So much more than before/I see everything,” she repeats, with wonder, on the final track. Her lyrics still wander in long, conversational loops—“I’ve been dreaming of basketball hoops/And sitting on couches with you, it tricks me into feeling like you’re still around,” she sings on “Dumb Driver”—but the bad feelings on Show Me How You Disappear are pure in their simplicity. Missing someone hurts. Longing is nourishing and exhausting, Medford suggests, and sometimes you can’t decide if it’s the point of existence or the only thing keeping you miserable.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


A decade into their career, Baroness continue to take chances. On this double album, that means experimenting with length and adding a new focus on melody. It's an epic record that is heavy in a new way.

Yellow & Green

When they started making burly, progressive sludge almost 10 years ago, Baroness weren't teenagers: They were grown men with a refined, nuanced approach to heavy metal. Even in 2003, it wasn't your typical Southern sludge swamp. That said, I doubt anyone listening then could've predicted Yellow & Green. The quartet's new 18-song, 75-minute double album offers a broad, rich expanse of pretty, psychedelic, occasionally heavy, mostly straight-up rock that veers easily into pop, post-rock, and lulling ambient washes. There are a number of new elements to Baroness in 2012-- frontman John Baizley is the father of a young daughter and lives in Philadelphia instead of Savannah; after the recording of Yellow & Green, Matt Maggioni came on board as the group's new bassist (which means longtime member Summer Welch is no more). The sound itself is the biggest shift, though it shouldn't come as a total surprise. They've hinted at these new avenues, and even tentatively explored a few, on their first two LPs, Blue Record and Red Album. What's surprising here is how well it all works.
There's almost always some filler on a record of this length-- it's a casualty of double albums-- but there's an impressive scarcity of it here. Even the songs that float by more humbly, or as background music, ultimately have a place in the overall dynamic by the first or second listen. And they are all songs. Take the "themes" that open Yellow and Green, respectively, the warm, aqueous two minutes of "Yellow Theme", the more drifting, airy, chilly (and post-rock anthemic) four-and-a-half minutes of "Green Theme". These are beautiful instrumentals, compositions with actual force and not more incidentals.
I recently interviewed Baizley about the record. He detailed how the group's idea of heaviness shifted from their early days to the present. He explained that "tricks" like "10 amplifiers on stage, a ton of volume, and notes on [a] guitar that were more appropriate for bass guitar" were a kind of "artifice to mask youthful songwriting." In the present, the group is more focused on subtlety: "Now that songs have become more important to us, we're trying to find the more nuanced, more appropriate-for-us idea of heavy." Yellow & Green showcases this new take in spades. As Baizley put it, "the Baroness-circa-2012 definition of heavy [is] not a tuning and it's not necessarily a volume; it's more of a feeling or an idea or some goal post that we're headed towards." And, practically speaking, the cleaner singing is a kind of survival tactic: His and backup vocalist Pete Adams' vocal cords couldn't continue along the raw, shouting path they'd set for themselves earlier on.
Baizley stressed that, although it's a double LP, Yellow & Green is not a concept record. That said, one theme certainly leaps out: that of aging, and the ways it changes our ideas surrounding music from one stage of adulthood to the next. Albums that force artists to go deep into themselves as people and as musicians tend to end up as accidental concept records, collections that document the time they pushed themselves to create, and the life they were otherwise living at that time. But this one feels very closely aligned to getting closer to 40, to feeling your bones creak a little more, your eyes getting a little weaker.
It's in the lyrics with words that fixate on disappearances, fractures, sleep, bruises, bracing for death, failing hearts, and saying goodnight to your father. Or there's the nostalgia of a line like, "when we were kids we never felt so young, take me to a hazy Sunday morning." Then again, we also get plenty of blood ("this apple makes me sick, says this pig upon the stick, it's my own blood") and water, as both baptism and drowning, or beginning and end. (A track like "March to the Sea" has water in its title, but there's something about its musicality that brings to mind early-1990s post-rock, too, and that post-Slint, June of 44-style obsession with anchors and sails.)
John Congleton, who also produced Blue, again gels perfectly with the band. Each song has levels and layers: It's an album for headphones as well as one for lighters in the middle of a smoky club. You get weird gurgles of noise, shimmering deep layers of sound, electronic swirls. "Twinkler" is like a downcast campfire greek chorus; "Cocainium" has that kind of ambiance, too, but picks up the drum beat-- it's a variation on psychedelic pop that made me think of the Turtles until the muscular bass, distorted guitars, and grungy chorus.
Baizley said the cover art, and the songs themselves, reflect the feeling of the moment before or after a disaster; of course, these are very different feelings, but I know what he means. It's not all waiting around and recovering. There's pure climactic catharsis, as you'd expect from Baroness, but these tracks work in a way Baroness songs haven't previously. Instead of explosions, billows, and howls, we get a more meditative air, even on some of the bigger rockers like "Take My Bones Away" or the rollicking "Board Up the House". Each mountain is chased with something a littler gentler. It's thrilling hearing people this technically adept holding back a little, showing restraint, and cramming what they know into a pop nugget. It's what Torche have done well in the past, especially on Meanderthal, but it's bigger, more spacious and stadium-sized here. (Like if Torche actually were the Foo Fighters.)
One of these climaxes is "Eula", the heart-crushing finale to Yellow, seven minutes of crisp acoustics, atmospheric (and anthemic) vocals, and warped chiming sounds that accompany descriptions of bones breaking, a house becoming a cage-- in other words, the end of something. But it's not: "Eula" ushers in the more pastoral Green, which also stands on its own as a great record. After the main "Green" theme comes "Board Up the House", a bit of shout-along rock'n'roll with a Radiohead-like approach to percussive filters and shifts. Elsewhere on this half there's the thorny Fahey-pop of "Stretchmarker" and a dose of chewy pop-metal via "The Line Between", another possible single. It ends with "If I Forget Thee, Lowcountry", an outro like the Yellow opening: We get that slippery, aqueous sound again.
I've always liked the elegance of the group's primary-color schemes-- topical, clearly delineated ways to make each album feel like a whole. Here, more than anywhere else, the colors aren't needed: These songs stick together well without a framework. Tracks play off each other, make echoes, and then go on. Each disc stands on its own as a powerful document; together, they genuinely earn the word "epic." During a video interview we did with the band, Baizley joked that you should go for a run, walk your dog, or otherwise take a break from Yellow & Green at the end of the first half, before venturing into the second. The halves do elegantly mirror each other-- each with its nine songs, intro, and finale-- and a pause could make sense. But I prefer listening to the entire thing from start to finish. This is an impressive effort, one that involved a lot of heavy lifting, and it's best experienced with that sort of commitment.


James Mercer & co. aim to deflect the inevitable Brafflash by crafting a more texturally diverse record than their outstanding, if uncomplicated, previous outings.

Wincing the Night Away

While indie rock has embraced grander and more elaborate productions, the Shins have remained unlikely champions of uncertainty and understatement. Unlike many of their meteorically successful indie peers, the Shins don't want to change your life-- and that's a good thing, because the band's biggest strength is an uncanny gift for conjuring a deep, vivid, and palpable sense of the familiar. Many of the Shins' best songs evoke a feeling of comfort and closeness that's immediately recognizable but rarely experienced-- intimacy is the band's best weapon, amplifying the subtle ebbs and flows of their music so that the slightest injection of unease or melancholy hits with remarkable force.
On their third Sub Pop full-length, Wincing the Night Away, the Shins take a decisive but wobbly step out of their comfort zone, and in doing so sacrifice much of this musical/emotional proximity effect. While the band has taken a good deal of criticism for sounding "too average" or "boring," the ill-suited sonic punch of Wincing the Night Away throws the singular strengths of their previous work into stark relief. The almost-live sounding Chutes Too Narrow left plenty of room for singer James Mercer's excellent vocals to guide its songs both melodically and rhythmically. But on Wincing, too-loud drums and bass distract not only from the elegant movement of Mercer's melodies, but from the delicate harmonic tensions that underlie them.
That said, the first four tracks of Wincing are unerringly solid. Echoing the striking contrast of Chutes Too Narrow opener "Kissing the Lipless", Wincing's lead track, "Sleeping Lessons", builds from sparse, muffled arpeggios to full-on rock'n'roll. While slick and robust production doesn't flatter much of the record, it works well as a counterpoint to the song's quiet initial moments. "Australia" is a peppy rocker in the spirit of Chutes' best, elevated by a newfound confidence and expressive range in Mercer's voice. Single "Phantom Limb" is pure, lush pop, boasting a chorus that plays like the aural equivalent of that optical illusion where a staircase appears to ascend indefinitely.
With the exception of the excellent "Red Rabbits", the more noticeable aesthetic departures on Wincing don't fare as well. "Sea Legs", with its intrusive synthesized drum beat and lackluster arrangement, brings to mind that unfortunate Eve 6 song about putting your heart in a blender, while "Spilt Needles" comes off as sterile and overcalculated, despite its strong chorus. Still, the album finishes strong: "Girl Sailor" surpasses "Phantom Limb" in lyrics and overall structure, making it a likely contender for the album's second single, and "A Comet Appears" is beautifully orchestrated, if not terribly memorable, making it an appropriate closer for a record that often emphasizes texture over form.
There's a time-honored imperative to encourage bands for attempting to develop and expand, and the Shins could certainly take their music in many different directions with great success. But it's hard not to notice that the least adventurous tracks on Wincing the Night Away are generally the most rewarding. In many cases, the album's more experimental touches seem at odds with the natural elegance of Mercer's songwriting, making it hard to read the album as a shoddy blueprint of what a more "difficult" Shins record might sound like. Instead, Wincing the Night Away is a lovely and well-executed album and-- for the first time in the band's career-- nothing more.


Josiah Wise’s second album is an eager, effervescent tale of romance, outlining a genealogy that stretches from gospel to the shiny, gossamer R&B of the ’90s and ’00s.

DEACON

When Josiah Wise’s gothic gospel project serpentwithfeet first appeared in 2016, its atmospheres were decidedly dank. His debut EP, blisters, produced with the grim electronic composer Haxan Cloak, had the foreboding of a horror movie and the fearsomeness of scripture. The first lyrics we heard through his silken falsetto were hair-raising: “It’s cool with me if you want to die,” he cooed on “four ethers,” “And I’m not going to stop you if you try.” The production was similarly unnerving; the story of serpentwithfeet felt deliberately written with gruesomeness lurking around every corner.
Yet Wise has always been a romantic, mingling the exquisite with the sensual. On blisters, he imagined anointing himself with the humors souring in his lover’s belly; on serpentwithfeet’s first full-length album, 2018’s soil, he compared his devotion to that of an angel to a god. With his new album, DEACON, the focus is on joy rather than pain, and the ambiance is less creepy and more confectionary. Here, serpentwithfeet tosses out the phantasmagoria but brings the same imagistic instincts to stories with happy endings. A night shared with a lover in a club or a bedroom can feel supernatural, too, and Wise details these baffling encounters without dulling their wonder. The titular deaconship can be understood to mean that serpentwithfeet is our guide to forces that defy understanding.
Wise first experimented with using the gospel idiom to profess romantic devotion on soil, but lyrically and musically, the narratives remained blood-soaked. By contrast, DEACON is airy, even sunny. Over a tumbling blues piano figure on “Malik,” Wise preaches about the object of his affections: “Blessed is the man who wears socks with his sandals.” “Amir” is built on a tender harp sample that sounds like it could be a reprise to the harpsichord-driven “Angel of Mine.” The first half of the album is made up of these giddy dispatches from a relationship’s honeymoon phase. Especially on the hummable “Same Size Shoe,” Wise explores plain contentment with the same descriptive finesse he once dedicated to tragedy. Here, the “good news” is simply the bliss of a Black love that doesn’t require translation, where intimacy goes uninterrupted by misunderstanding.
Near the album’s midpoint, dark forces arrive to interrupt Wise’s reverie. In “Sailors’ Superstition,” he sees the beginning of the end on the horizon, bidding his partner to keep their love low-key, not to “whistle on [their] ship” and tempt the “rascals of the air.” Anyone who’s seen a horror movie knows this is the moment when something finally goes wrong. But then, in an inversion of classic serpentwithfeet style, the Nao-assisted “Heart Storm” arrives to split the sky open, dispelling the gloom before it gets a chance to take hold.
Musically, DEACON outlines a genealogy from gospel to the shiny, gossamer R&B of the ’90s and ’00s, sounds that Wise grew up on. When the tracks aren’t built around claps or snaps, the percussion is often squelching and organic, reminiscent of Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins’ productions for artists like Destiny’s Child and Brandy; both styles inject vitality into Wise’s lyrical imagery. His trademark serpentine runs capture the ecstatic improvisation of gospel, retaining both spontaneity and rigor. Every harmony carries the significance of a choir. Where Jesus Is King just barely had the gall to chop-and-screw gospel while leaving its textures conservatively intact, Wise reawakens the gospel influence already present in pop music, reasserting its sturdiness in conversation with newer sounds.
DEACON is a brief and light album, not leaving quite the impression of serpentwithfeet’s earlier work. The editing-down of the lyrical drama is a refreshing change, but some of the stark songwriting and compositional tenacity of Wise’s earlier work seems absent. Opener “Hyacinth” and later track “Old & Fine” feel unfinished, as if lacking a dramatic arc. There is, though, a distinct pleasure that comes from hearing the towering instrument of Wise’s voice wrap around these simpler songs.
Nowhere is that more true than on “Fellowship,” the album’s closer, where the vision of happiness sounds downright normie (“Christmas movies in July with you”), even a little twee (“our fascination with Prosecco”). But it pays off when, in a Sampha- and Lil Silva-assisted chorus, Wise surrounds the romantic and erotic love that drives the album’s narrative with a chorus of platonic support: “I’m thankful for the love I share with my friends.” Their soulful ad-libbing evokes the most comforting moments of choir singing; it sounds immediately like something you would skip to the end of a lesser song to hear. It’s a gesture of warmth more affecting than any literary allusion or gory image.
DEACON could use a few more awe-inspiring moments, but by celebrating simplicity, it enshrines the Black, queer love at its center as something blessedly uncomplicated and precious. Love doesn’t need tragedy to be great, and neither does serpentwithfeet. On DEACON, Wise proves his musicianship can stand on its own—no melodrama required.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


This revelatory survey of the music of Northern Brazil from the 1970s and ’80s is by turns alien and familiar, sacred and profane, always raw and thrilling.

Various Artists: Jambú e Os Míticos Sons Da Amazônia

Jambú e Os Míticos Sons Da Amazônia

Joaquim Maria Dias de Castro—better known as Mestre Cupijó—was already an accomplished bandleader in his hometown of Cametá, a small city in the northern Brazilian state of Pará, when he ventured upriver to live in an Amazonian quilombola community among the descendants of escaped slaves. There he absorbed siriá, the traditional sound of those mixed-race communities, where African, indigenous, and mestiço cultures commingled for generations, and he returned to Cametá determined to modernize that sound, blending it with elements of the Colombian cumbia, Dominican merengue, and Cuban mambo that had spread across northern Brazil in the 1960s, carried across the jungle by distant radio signals.
“Despedida,” captured live in a Cametá nightclub in 1973, represents the first recording of modern siriá. An invigoratingly raw blend of bashed drum kit and bittersweet horns, it is the closing song on Jambú e os Míticos Sons da Amazonia, Analog Africa’s fascinating new survey of the bygone sounds of Belém, the capital of Pará and the gateway between the Atlantic and the Amazon. But in many ways, Cupijó’s story serves as a prelude to this compilation. Analog Africa first turned its eye to Brazil in 2014 with Siriá, an anthology of Cupijó’s music, and Jambú, the result of label co-founder Samy Ben Redjeb’s digging expeditions in Belém, widens the lens to focus on carimbó and lambada, sister sounds to siriá that also incorporate a mixture of indigenous, Afro-Brazilian, and Portuguese influences.
With the exception of giants like Pinduca, a legendary figure who first modernized and electrified carimbó, many of these artists will be unfamiliar to all but the most dedicated students of Brazilian music (for several, it is their first time appearing on streaming services), and the music is uniformly thrilling, blending the syncopated shuffle of carimbó—a beat, originally played on hollowed-out tree trunks, that’s part galloping horse, part drunken stumble—with trance-like woodwind melodies, throaty sing-alongs, flickering rhythm guitar, and the overdriven sonics you might expect from a genre whose pioneers ran their electric guitars through church PAs powered by car batteries.
It’s hard to put your finger on exactly what is so gripping about this music, what gives it a quality at once alien and familiar. “Jambú” refers to a medicinal Amazonian herb frequently mixed with cachaça, to reportedly powerful effect, and that stimulated/sloshed dichotomy plays out in a kind of rowdy melancholy: The beats surge like floodwaters, the percussion clatters like a thumped table covered with empties, the singers’ voices have the ragged edge of sun-up on no sleep. The slippery trills and eerie, modal sax melodies of songs like Messias Holanda’s “Carimbó de Pimienta” and Verequete e o Conjunto Uirapurú’s “Da Garrafa uma Pinga” remind me, in their mercurial moods, of Ethiopian jazz.
The compilation’s excellent liner notes detail the clubs and bars where this music took shape in the 1970s and 1980s, and quite a few of these songs make no bones about their mission as straight-up party music. Pinduca’s “Vamos Farrear” is a rousing toast with a sly twist (“Let’s drink cachaça, everyone/Let’s party/The cachaça is tasty/No one will get drunk”); the irresistible “Coco de Bahia” is a tribute to the coconuts of Bahia, Brazil that’s loaded with winking double entendres. Such wordplay runs through many of these songs, as do snapshots of rural life in remote farming communities: Vieira e Seu Conjunto’s lilting “Melô do Bode,” which hinges on the double meaning of “bode” (“goat”/“problem”) is about a troublesome animal he can’t wait to unload.
Throughout, a captivating mix of the profane and the sacred holds sway, particularly in the acoustic “pau e corda” (“stick and chord”) style of Verequete e o Conjunto Uirapurú. Verequete, the “King of Carimbó,” was a devotee of Candomblé, a regional religion with African roots; he took his name from a vodun, or divinity, in the jejes-nagós cults of Mina. Relying on traditional instruments like curimbó drum, saxophone, banjo, sticks, triangle, ganza, and afoxé, Verequete’s band offers not just a testament to carimbó’s pre-electric roots but also its roof-raising qualities. And Janjão’s “Meu Barquinho” is a song about the orishas Zango and Yemanja, while his album Carimbó e Outras Mirongas was meant as a call to preserve the cultural heritage of Brazilian Candmoblé and other folk-religious forms.
To the uninitiated, Jambú may sound at first nearly as incomprehensible as it is exciting. The first dozen times through, I had trouble making sense of the overloaded midrange and upper register: the horns, guitars, call-and-response vocals, and insistent shakers and maracas. But eventually, it all settles into place, yielding both a rich diversity of complementary styles—just compare the rollicking, jazz-band madness of Os Muiraquitãns with the spindly elegance of Mestre Vieira’s brand of lambada and guitarrada—and a riveting glimpse at styles and cultures long ignored by the official history of Brazilian popular music. Jambú is the next best thing to a seat in Mestre Cupijó’s dugout canoe. Decades after he ventured upriver, he takes the rest of us with him.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork may earn a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)


Haim’s impeccably crafted mix of influences—soft rock’s incandescent glow, R&B’s sensuality, the spiky-yet-polished effervescence of pop-rock—come together seamlessly on their winning full-length debut.

Days Are Gone

Before Danielle and Este Haim were riding motorbikes in the sun, catching fish with their bare hands, or making potential suitors weep with heartache, they were Valli Girls. The Los Angeles sisters played guitar and bass, respectively, in the tween-pop quintet that was assembled and signed to major label Columbia in 2004, with 1980s soft-rock linchpin Richard Marx attached as a creative contributor. The results were decidedly mixed: there was the acoustic melodrama of The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants soundtrack cut "Always There in You", the cruelly ironic "Born to Lead" ("My independent voice will have its say"), and most notoriously, "It's a Hair Thing", the dog whistle-pitched theme song for the short-lived animated TV show "Trollz".
This early group wasn't the beginning of the Haim sisters' musical career—the pair had been performing covers with the rest of their family, including youngest sister Alana, since they were old enough to hold instruments. "We're just ourselves," a 17-year-old Este Haim was quoted as saying in a 2005 press release that touted the Valli Girls' debut album, Valli Nation. That sentiment wasn't entirely true: as a Fader story from earlier this year detailed, musical prodigies Danielle and Este weren't all that into playing songs that they didn't write, so they pulled out of their contract. The family band was christened with the endearingly dorky name Rockinhaim, thereafter shortened to Haim when the sisters decided to strike out on their own in 2006.
So far, the story of Haim has seemed ripe for the type of movie you'd catch playing on VH1 on a Sunday afternoon and Days Are Gone, the trio's outstanding full-length debut, is the latest plot twist. The album arrives just as Haim's impeccably crafted mix of influences—soft rock's incandescent glow, R&B's sensuality, the spiky-yet-polished effervescence of pop-rock—are more fashionable than ever. But Haim weren't just raised on these genres; they were raised to perform them; they may benefit from perfect timing, but they scan as anything but opportunistic.
Since Days Are Gone single and blog-buzz fire-starter "Forever" made the rounds in early 2012, Haim have often been mentioned alongside Fleetwood Mac; critic Ann Powers recently described their sound as an encapsulation of Billboard's Hot 100 singles of 1987, which included the Mac's Tango in the Night single "Little Lies". The comparison is not without merit—much of the dusky, ebullient "Honey & I", one of Days Are Gone's highest highs, sounds as if The Reminder-era Feist fused together the acoustic riffs of "I Don't Want to Know" and "Never Going Back Again". But Haim also channel the best elements of their current peers: Phoenix's compressed pop economics, the cool-handed spaciousness of Arctic Monkeys' recent work, and Spoon's wound-coil precision.
The latter quality is Haim's secret weapon. Along with drummer and L.A. scene fixture Dash Hutton, Haim sound as tight and in-the-pocket as you'd expect from a group of people that have spent most of their lives making music. Simian Mobile Disco's James Ford (Arctic Monkeys, Klaxons) and studio-man-of-the-moment Ariel Rechtshaid (Vampire Weekend, Usher) both receive co-writing and production credits and contribute just the right touches to Haim's sleek, streamlined arrangements. The record's mix is translucent and refreshingly bare-bones, which affords plenty of space for Days Are Gone's many indelible hooks—the twitchy R&B of "If I Could Change Your Mind", "Don't Save Me"'s rollicking bursts of euphoria, the resonant melancholia of closer "Running If You Call My Name"—to work their uncanny magic.
When you hear about the influences and consider just how slick the record can be, you might imagine Haim coming over as faceless. But the band's most unusual quality on Days Are Gone is their ability to absorb inputs and continue to sound distinct. The album's punchy title track was co-written by Jessie Ware, another artist who's made a name replicating the sounds of pop's past, along with Ware's frequent songwriting collaborator Kid Harpoon ("Wildest Moments", "Night Light"); Ware and Harpoon's style is usually easy to pick out, but it's barely felt on "Days Are Gone", as Danielle Haim's staccato delivery pops and locks where Ware's vocals would have crested and swelled. That Haim retain their identity through collaboration speaks to their confidence.
The lyrics on Days Are Gone aren't necessarily built to withstand close analysis; largely, the words function to add a bit of weight to the effortless, feather-light melodies, but Haim do know how to turn a phrase. "The Wire", especially, has some of group's most effective lines, a level-headed act of kiss-off kindness ("I gave it all away/ Just so I could say that/ Well I know that you're gonna be OK anyway") paired with a rolling melody that makes the song one of the most benevolent breakup anthems since Robyn's "Call Your Girlfriend".
Days Are Gone is so polished that Haim could easily be seen as clinical and lifeless, but their lighthearted attitude complements their recording rigor. Whether they're covering Miley Cyrus and Sheryl Crow, making "bass faces", or reuniting Rockinhaim by bringing their own parents on stage for a rendition of "Mustang Sally", Haim come over as affable, playing-to-the-rafters rock stars as well as studio pros. Taken as a whole, the project is a testament to what's most important, and Days Are Gone's divine pleasures suggest that, rock history be damned, family business doesn't always have to be dysfunctional.


Formed in 2003, Frightened Rabbit established their reputation with ramshackle anthems of heartbreak and hangovers. With the National's Aaron Dessner behind the boards, their newest is more a sensible repositioning than a reinvention.

Frightened Rabbit: Painting of a Panic Attack

Painting of a Panic Attack

Forming in 2003, Frightened Rabbit established their reputation with ramshackle anthems of heartbreak and hangovers that presented frontman Scott Hutchison as self-loathing, self-destructive, but ultimately sympathetic. By 2010, success and expanding ambition started to strain against their underdog appeal. That tension was projected onto the anxious, thickly overdubbed The Winter of Mixed Drinks. Pedestrian Verse arrived three years later, an album that isn’t widely considered their best, but it's definitive in its own way. It's the one that said “this is who we are going forward”: a major-label band that plays 2000-3000 cap rooms. Shortly thereafter, Hutchison moved to Los Angeles with his girlfriend. Sub in High Violet and Trouble Will Find Me for their respective years, and this is basically the same exact career trajectory as the National, so it’s only natural that the two bands go from sharing tour bills and a producer (Peter Katis) to sharing a studio—and so with Aaron Dessner behind the boards, Painting of a Panic Attack is more a sensible repositioning than a reinvention.
“Death Dream” immediately extinguishes any hope that Frightened Rabbit might return to the scrappy charms of Sing the Greys or The Midnight Organ Fight. He often plays the religious skeptic in his lyrics, but Hutchison sure thinks piano sounds heavenly in a church; it’s hard not to think of “Fake Empire” just from the mere tone of the reverberant chord that opens “Death Dream.” By the time the progression begins to settle, it’s pretty much impossible to not hum “stay out...super late…tonight,” as the “Fake Empire” melody fits almost exactly. While it boasts Hutchison’s most vivid and morbid poetry yet, “Death Dreams” doesn’t lift off, floating more towards the rafters like a errant balloon. So it makes for a curious opener, though it’s an accurate preview of yet another instance where Dessner’s charges end up sounding like his main band.
This can work for a newer act that’s trying to hit a similar emotional tenor to the National. On their respective sophomore LPs, Local Natives and Sharon Van Etten followed raw debuts by contrasting Dessner’s sumptuous, solemn orchestration with simmering angst, the sound of people trying their best not to crack up in public. A band less willing to exert their own personality ends up with something like Wilder Mind. Painting is somewhere in between; Dessner helps add a silvery stylization to Frightened Rabbit’s jittery indie-folk on “Break,” while late-album ballads “400 Bones” and “Die Like a Rich Boy” cover Hutchison’s barstool laments with Rag & Bone sympathy. The choral burst of “Get Out” is jarring in a strictly musical sense, more so if you once viewed Frightened Rabbit as an alternative to post-Britpop Patsavas-core like Snow Patrol and Travis. But "Grey’s Anatomy" is still chugging along and thus will need stadium-ready surges from a bearded man with a burly voice expressing an all-purpose longing about a flawed girl that won’t get out of his heart.
They’re both effective, as formula should be, reliant on devices that become cliches only within their established parameters. After The Midnight Organ Fight, Hutchison joked that he couldn’t make another break-up record because he hadn’t had one that year. But it seems like he’s recognized that fans rely on Frightened Rabbit for a specific kind of Scottish miserablism, which Painting of a Panic Attack delivers with consistency if not conviction. They don’t strike me as cynical, so I’d hate to use the word “pandering” for the way uber-Frightened Rabbit laments “Blood Under the Bridge,” “An Otherwise Disappointing Life,” and “Woke Up Hurting” play towards expectations. But it’s really difficult to do otherwise after Hutchison’s expected recriminations of god, booze, and breakups tell you nothing the titles didn’t already, and the heavy-handed rhyming of “I Wish I Was Sober” only enhances the suspicion that it’s concept-driven exercise rather than an expression of actual emotion.
Yet, the best Frightened Rabbit songs aren’t entirely defined by their despondance or desperation. What’s missing from Panic is some kind of levity or the cutting humor that once personalized Hutchison’s self-loathing. It’s admittedly impossible to gauge the legitimacy of Hutchison’s emotions; like the National, maybe Frightened Rabbit have just gotten too good at their formula for it to not seem self-aware. And too often, the title of Painting of a Panic Attack serves as an unintentional reminder of the way Hutchison comes across: like a television version of a person with a broken heart.


The reissue of Maxwell’s second album from 1998 showcases the mercurial spirit that followed the R&B auteur down new, aqueous corridors.

Embrya

In 2011, during the filming of his “VH1 Storytellers” episode, Maxwell attempted to describe his second album, 1998’s Embrya, and its uneasy position in his discography, the way it wriggles away from the more concrete and clarified R&B statements that surround it. “It’s one of those records where you’re like, ‘Should I have done that or should I have not done that record?’,” he said, seeming to pose the question to his own audience.
When Maxwell arrived on radio and MTV in 1996, he brought a sound back with him, the quietly storming soul music of the late-’70s and early-’80s, a genre that could hover politely in the air between neighbors at a cookout or totally collapse the air between two people in a bedroom. His debut, Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite, modeled itself after records like Marvin Gaye’s I Want You, linked sequences of seduction that either blossomed toward or shrank away from the possibility of love; it eventually sold two million copies and earned Maxwell a Grammy nod.
Now he wanted the sound he had pulled from the past to follow him and bend around whichever corner he turned. As he told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2016, “What I did with [Embrya], on purpose, was that it was the anti-Afro ’70s funk-soul record.” He resisted the notion that his music could be pinned down and examined, and he seemed to want to write music that could circulate forever, that slipped away from any attempt to capture it, like a wave of water or an anxious thought. The songs he wrote for Embrya respond to this inner stubbornness, loosen themselves from their points, spread and pale like watercolors. It was as if had he had opened a window in his urban hang suite and the ocean poured in.
Made primarily as a reaction to his own debut album, Embrya has few previous models for its itself. It is the only R&B record I’ve ever heard that’s submerged as it is. (Even the Sade records that producer Stuart Matthewman worked on periodically come up for air.) At an hour long, it spills itself across four sides of vinyl on its new reissue, released on the occasion of the album’s 20th anniversary. It can be difficult to focus on its individual hooks; they rear up and break apart like waves in bottomless lakes of songs. Flamenco guitar solos ripple and die off like pulses on a radar screen. Strings stir and resettle like clouds of silt at the bottom of an aquarium.
There’s simply not enough water metaphors on this green earth to describe Embrya. This is by design; few R&B albums, let alone albums in general, embody the liquid rush of desire as completely as it does. Maxwell’s piercing tenor is double-tracked so often that even its edges seem watery, and his lyrics crumble from the direct romanticism of Urban Hang Suite into impressions and feelings that aren’t necessarily certain of what they are; he sings words like “plush” and “blush” almost interchangeably, and they melt away in pale petals of near-meaning.
As each song wades gradually from chord to chord, it grows harder to determine one’s position in them, whether at their middles or near their ends or slipping away into new, just-forming instrumentals, as when “Matrimony: Maybe You”—a pop-jazz track smooth and untroubled as the skin of a pebble—narrowly forks into a funk workout called “Arroz con Pollo.” Which isn’t to suggest the sound of the album is uniform; its songs are as various and vivid in their depth charges of color as Monet’s “Water Lilies,” which he painted as his vision was failing and the world itself was melting into streaks of color. There are indeed verses and choruses on Embrya; there’s a deep mysterious pull in the groove of “Luxury: Cococure” from which the chorus seems to bubble upward. “Drowndeep: Hula” is one of Maxwell’s tenderest yet murkiest ballads; if its drumbeat were a little slower and dilated it might’ve produced an early draft of Massive Attack’s “Teardrop” instead. “Gravity: Pushing to Pull” finds Maxwell descending to a pressurized depth, his voice riven with low distortions. But as Embrya advances it can feel just as often like a lens is dwelling over different gatherings of sound—hands swimming up the keys of a synthesizer, basslines played so flexibly they’re invertebrate—briefly snapping them into focus before they sink back into the texture of the record.
In this way Embrya somewhat foreshadows D’Angelo’s 2000 masterpiece Voodoo, both artists searching for something even beyond the outer limits of their debut albums, both records achieving something close to perpetual motion in the slow circulation of their grooves. But where Voodoo stretches time out until it’s crisp and brittle, Embrya’s time feels thick and immeasurable and seems to pass in gradual stirrings, the liquid counterpoint to Voodoo’s spare, desiccated funk. It’s an album of traceless, amnesiac swellings, never seeming to quite know where it’s going or where it’s just been, flowing without ever seeming aware of its flowing, which is its truly remarkable achievement. According to Maxwell, Embrya is “a story that unfolds,” but it’s impossible to pick up a single thread of it and follow it to its original source; it’s all source, a concept album in which there is no concept, just feelings, impressions, intimacies and their absences, wave after wave after unending wave of them.


Whether as a commercial concession or an experimental detour, Ghost goes full-tilt R&B on his new album.

Ghostface Killah: Ghostdini: The Wizard of Poetry in Emerald City

On the face of it, a Ghostface R&B album isn't the worst idea in the world. Ghost, after all, has traveled this ground before. On his debut album Ironman, he enlisted Mary J. Blige for "All That I Got Is You", a gut-wrenching memoir of a childhood spent picking roaches out the cereal box. And on The Pretty Toney Album nugget "Holla", he straight-up rapped over an entire sweaty Delfonics oldie, his urgent yowl thrillingly banging against the song's weeping strings and punchdrunk guitars. Ghost understands how soul music works, and many of his own best records strive for transcendence as hard as any old Al Green jam. If he'd used either of those tracks as the basis for The Wizard of Poetry, we could have a classic on our hands.
But you review the album you got, not the album you wanted. Rather than either of those tracks, Ghost has built his R&B experiment, understandably enough, around the only song of his to get significant New York radio burn in recent years: The Ne-Yo collaboration "Back Like That", the sole Hot 97 concession on the otherwise hard-as-fuck Fishscale. (The Kanye-assisted remix shows up here as a bonus track even though it was already on More Fish three years ago.) "Back Like That" wasn't a bad song-- far from it-- but it's tough to imagine how Ghost thought he could make an album full of that, especially when he didn't land a single guest singer anywhere near as talented as Ne-Yo.
In fact, it's tough to imagine how The Wizard of Poetry came into existence in the first place. If it's a A&R-driven commercial Hail Mary, then how did the Def Jam authorities allow Ghost to get away with "Stapleton Sex", the squirmiest fuck jam in recent memory? "Stapleton Sex", which Ghost hilariously alleges he wrote for Natalie Portman, starts out with "My face is wet, got a hair on my tongue," and only gets more greasily specific from there. ("This ain't no R&B dick," he helpfully points out.) But if the whole album is Ghost's baby, then why is he paired up with scrub-ass R&B new jacks like Lloyd and Ron Brownz? I promise you, Ghost doesn't bang any Lloyd CDs in his car.
As a writer, though, Ghost remains fascinating and contradictory. Check, for instance, opening track "Not Your Average Girl", where he builds his perfect woman (she should be on the couch reading a book and biting a pen when she gets home, but also shoot home invaders, which seems like a tall order) before tossing all that to the side on the last verse: "We run trains on them bitches, never ice they arms." Or "Do Over", where he starts out hangdog, apologizing for every form of infidelity before revealing that he's on a bus to prison, apologizing for that, too, and signing off with this: "Thanks for your patience. You find a man. I hope he's true."
Even the halfassed songs are filled with enormously likable turns of phrase, like when Ghost interrupts a story mid-sentence to refer to himself as a "prestigious gentleman." So many great little verbal moments here: "The smell of her fragrance baffled my nostrils," "My dick is hard as a callus," "I pull out like a tooth in the back, it's rotten." A totally sincere pickup line: "I would love to have a thing like you on the team." Another: "I love it like that, stretchmark fat." And Ghost delivers all this stuff straight-faced; he doesn't do punchlines. Even when he's trying to be as straightforward as possible, his mind works in fascinating ways. You just have to wade through swamps of dreck to find those brilliant little moments.
The Wizard of Poetry has exactly one indispensable moment: the weirdly gripping story-song "Guest House", where Ghost bugs out looking for his girlfriend before finding her banging the cable guy, played by a titanically goofy Fabolous. Ghost's response: "Snatched his covers/ Had them looking like the black Adam and Eve, two sinful lovers." "Guest House" comes packed with the same plot twists and telling details and a breathless crime narrative like "Shakey Dog", but it uses them in the service of, basically, a soap opera, or a "Trapped in the Closet" chapter. It works in a way that almost nothing else here completely manages.


Madlib pays tribute to the late J Dilla, a producer with whom he created the classic Champion Sound.

Beat Konducta Vol. 5-6

Another month, another meditation on the legacy of James Yancey. It's been three years since Yancey's untimely death and his grip on the imagination and inspiration of hip-hop artists still hasn't loosened-- and somehow, for the most part, hasn't crumbled into exploitative shamelessness. You can chalk that up to most of the tribute-paying artists-- Q-Tip, Common, Busta Rhymes, Talib Kweli, ?uestlove, Erykah Badu, damn near every hip-hop artist in Detroit-- having known and respected the man on a collaborative level (and, in the case of Yancey Boys' Illa J, as family). Madlib's own personal musical tribute to Dilla is particularly faithful: They were two producer-MCs who had forged a mutual stylistic compatibility, one that began with beat-tape trading by mail and resulted in the underground classic Champion Sound, and in that album's wake they both wound up inspiring and pushing each other to expanded vistas. Donuts might have sounded like a drastically different album without the choppy, grimy aesthetic of The Unseen and Madvillainy's production mind as a creative sparring partner, and Madlib's early Beat Konducta work, the creation of which ran largely parallel to the construction of Donuts, benefited greatly from his study of Dilla's meticulous drum and bassline construction. Among all the things that were lost to hip-hop heads with Dilla's passing, the possibility of future collaborations and stylistic cross-pollinations between these two beatmaking auteurs was one of the most significant.
As an elegy, a payment of a gratefully-acknowledged artistic debt and an expansion of one man's sound, the fifth and sixth volumes of Madlib's Beat Konducta series are a stirring culmination of everything Dilla did to affect Madlib as a musician. Granted, there's little mistaking it for anyone other than Madlib: There's a constant volley of vocal snippets, lyrical and otherwise, that fit his thematic blend of fragmented quasi-narrative and off-kilter humor. Plus, his restless, loop-jostling production style is instantly-recognizable here in one of its most dubbed-out, bass-heavy and atmospherically THC-soaked incarnations yet. Still, the Dilla influence is clearly evident in a number of ways, especially the way vocals are chopped and truncated to serve as melodic hook, percussive exclamations, and reconstructed grooves for several tracks, as well as the recurring presence of that weighty, synthesized bass Dilla loved to lace his tracks with. And there's a few other flourishes-- like the air-raid siren that popped up every so often on Donuts, or the "Make It Funky" clip of James Brown saying "I don't know" used on the Slum Village track of the same name-- that range from obvious nods to what seem like elaborate in-jokes between friends.
At 42 tracks stretched across 67 minutes, this looks a bit like an unwieldy collection of fleeting ideas when the tracklisting's all splayed out in front of you. And it's a bit difficult to get a firm grasp on everything, even after several listens: There's just so many ideas Madlib's managed to cram into even the shortest minute-long loop that it's hard to point to a particular track and highlight its characteristics without taking the rest of the album into account. There's some particularly inspired standout moments that'll stick with you: the soul strings that get hacked up into hiccupping, off-beat tics on "The String (Heavy Jones)"; the way "The Get Over (Move)" actually welds the guitar riff from the Buzzcocks' "Boredom" to an archetypal Yancey boom-clap and somehow makes it make sense; the muffled/smothered beats on "Smoked Out (Green Blaze Subliminal Sounds)" where nothing's clear or amplified except a persistent tambourine slap.
But this isn't an album that benefits from a track-by-track dissection or a thorough inventorizing, even if the bulk of the beats sound attention-grabbing enough when they pop up as individual moments in a divorced, shuffle-mode context. More than any other collection of semi-instrumental productions Madlib's assembled, the combined Dil Cosby Suite and Dil Withers Suite is a complete work. The best way to listen to this album is to throw it on, zone out and keep your finger away from the controls, letting the rhythmic detours and left-field segues sneak up on you before dissolving into the next beat (abetted, every so often, by some sparse but well-placed scratches from guest turntablist J-Rocc). Before long you'll click with its flood of sounds and ideas and emotions, and the everywhere-at-once scope-- mournful and celebratory, solemn and comedic, starting from soul and circulating its way through every other vein of hip-hop production structure. Three years later, after all the eulogies for Dilla, this record stands as one of the most meaningful.


The Wait & See EP consists of songs that didn't fit onto Majical Cloudz's 2015 album Are You Alone?, but nothing has changed, strictly speaking: Singer Devon Welsh’s rich, burly tenor still feels as if it is emanating from the center of your skull, and he sings his lines as if he’s maybe reading them off the page for the first time.

Wait & See EP

Majical Cloudz, a duo of two superhumanly sincere beings from Montreal named Devon Welsh and Matthew Otto, present us with a musical equation as legible as freshly painted white highway lines. Two members, two tiny dots on a massive canvas, Welsh's bottomless longing and Otto's vapor-trails electronics. Together, they explore how much mystery can be plumbed from radical transparency, and on their 2013 album Impersonator they hit massive dividends: It remains as transfixingly direct exploration of elemental stuff—trauma, pain, death, childhood, love—I've ever heard. Every time I listen to it, I feel like something has been dredged from my dreams.
In retrospect, this aesthetic might be so well-defined that there could only ever be one perfect album of it, and Impersonator was probably it. Last fall’s follow up Are You Alone? was gentler, less wracked by fear and dread, more reliant on ballads. It was lovely, but where Impersonator flirted with bathos, Are You Alone? nearly surrendered to it. The line between "raw, uncompromising emotional honesty" and "yeeesh" is razor-thin, after all, and some types of emotional outbursts only carry their full impact once.
The Wait & See EP consists of songs that didn't fit onto Are You Alone?, but it feels perched at this same divide, and again the balance feels slightly off. Nothing much has changed, strictly speaking. Welsh’s rich, burly tenor still feels as if it is emanating from the center of your skull, and he sings his lines as if he’s maybe reading them off the page for the first time. His writing hints at life-changing late-night conversations: "You said, ‘When I am dead, I will never feel this strange again,'" he sings on "Heaven." But a few releases in, his straightforward lines are beginning to sound less like powerful honesty and more like simple guilelessness, an innate and involuntary quality rather than a conscious act.
These are intangible criticisms, but music this bare traffics necessarily in intangibles. Here’s a concrete problem: The mix here sounds more conventional, and beholden to other, "normal" synth-pop, than the bizarre, featureless expanse of Impersonator and Are You Alone? On those albums, the synths didn't have clear attacks or decays; they happened in free space, so that nothing that happened felt strictly "real." Welsh’s gorgeous voice didn’t even sound quite right, like maybe he’d sung the lyrics backwards and played them forwards. It made you lean forward to listen more closely to music that was already perfectly clear: You heard what he was saying, but what was he saying? On Wait & See, Welsh and Otto have floated down to Earth a bit, and with the journey they shed a little bit of their unearthly magnetism.
The most powerful moment on the EP comes with "My Heart Soaks Up Every Drop of Your Blood," a title that feels intentionally clunky and literal. The music is at its simplest here, which is always the most vital spot for Majical Cloudz’s music. As in all of his best songs, you can’t quite tell if Welsh is being tender or murderous: "You are the seed in a pile of dust," he says, which is maybe not something you’d want whispered to you before dropping off to sleep. As always, it’s this liminal spot, somewhere between dread and comfort, that they occupy. Even if it's become more familiar to us, this is still a territory with no other real inhabitants, and at no point could you mistake this band for anyone other than themselves.


Billy Corgan reenlists the creative core of James Iha and Jimmy Chamberlain for a lengthy synth-pop excursion that is clinically competent and rarely as thrilling—or thrillingly weird—as their previous work.

CYR

At the peak of his artistic powers, Billy Corgan couldn’t bear the thought of being less popular than Pearl Jam, less revered than Kurt Cobain, and less cute than James Iha. In the mid-’90s, he saw himself as a force of divine talent, and his sociopathic competitiveness, tyrannical perfectionism, and endless personal grievances were unseen in Chicago outside of the Bulls locker room. The most generous interpretation of his current irrelevance is that Corgan has come to accept it. He’s undoubtedly noticed how the indifference towards his new music, embarrassing ticket sales, and bountiful PR gaffes barely affect the brand at this point—“Riot Fest headliner” appears to be their permanent floor. But there’s a glimpse of the old Billy Corgan in Smashing Pumpkins’ new album CYR, backed by an enthusiastic new label that will actually bankroll his dreams of an animated series. A “return to form” can’t happen without a return to proper Smashing Pumpkins optics.
The profoundly inessential 2018 album SHINY AND OH SO BRIGHT VOL. 1 has been retroactively written off as tour promo, or at least a prelude to CYR, which can be viewed as the first true reunion of the Corgan/Iha/Jimmy Chamberlin creative core since 1995’s Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. CYR is likewise being promoted as a double album, nevermind that it’s actually shorter than the 1998’s Adore or 2000’s MACHINA/Machines of God or that it arrives on streaming services as a unified block of 20 tracks.
In practice, CYR is already bisected into “singles” and “the other ones”—a whopping 10 singles were portioned out in five pairs over the past three months. The initial “CYR”/“The Colour of Love” drop was at least proof that Corgan’s populist instincts haven’t completely vanished. After a decade of unconvincingly cosplaying as a rootsy singer-songwriter, glam-rock yeoman, Rick Rubin salvage project, and an H&M soundtrack aspirant, Corgan created a role delicious enough to demand attention: corporate synth-pop impresario. Imagine him working with the same raw materials as Adore and swapping out the black cloak for a sleeves-rolled white blazer, hunched over the mixing console, forcing Jimmy Chamberlin to play with a click track, demanding another take from his female session vocalists until they heed his command of “Robert Palmer, but more neon.”
“CYR” and “The Colour of Love” are Corgan’s most convincing singles in ages, if only because he believes in their hooks enough to repeat them until they stick. Neither is really a bold new iteration of Smashing Pumpkins, just an alternate history where Corgan’s synth-pop muse is promoted to the big leagues and all the goth stuff is saved for the inevitable B-sides collections. And lest anyone think that Corgan has completely reinvented himself, that’s colour of love, not “color”—the seeming affectation of someone who believes the Queen’s English signifies art or a pledge of allegiance to touchstones Sisters of Mercy and Joy Division.
The subsequent singles slowly chipped away at the novelty, but at least demonstrated Corgan’s commitment to the bit—CYR’s lone alt-rock throwback “Wyttch” is a Guitar Center employee’s faded memories of customers fumbling through the “Thunder Kiss ’65” riff. Touring member Katie Cole and longtime collaborator/Black Eyed Peas associate Sierra Swan make the most of a rare Smashing Pumpkins supporting role, adding necessary melodic color and indicating that, indeed, other human beings were involved in the creation of a 72-minute album written and produced entirely by Billy Corgan. Ever the Pumpkins lifer, Chamberlin attributes his dry, mechanical playing to Corgan’s desire for an “early-’70s prog” sound; anyone else will just hear one of the most propulsive drummers in rock history relegated to a human metronome. The input of other members of Smashing Pumpkins has always been intentionally difficult to quantify, and without a single memorable guitar part throughout, Iha and bassist Jeff Schroeder are mere witnesses to Corgan treating CYR as his Logic X tutorial.
Corgan admitted he was initially frustrated by the learning curve of self-production until he recognized how technological limitations inspired the distinct sonic character of his formative bands. Some ear-turning elements scattered throughout are new for Smashing Pumpkins—the vaguely tropical sway of “Dulcet in E,” 808 handclaps on “Starrcraft” that could’ve been pulled from an OVO sampler pack—and they are also new to anyone toying with a DAW’s factory presets. But none of Corgan’s definitive qualities as a musician—symphonic grandeur, needling immediacy—translate to his production, which burdens CYR with out-of-the-box anonymity; a Smashing Pumpkins album that sounds like it was handed off to a guy at the Genius Bar.
The production’s clinical competency only highlights the assembly-line songwriting of CYR’s back half. Whereas the back half of Smashing Pumpkins albums are typically earmarked for oddball experiments and cult favorites, CYR doles out one three-and-a-half-minute song after another, working within nearly identical vocal cadences, song structures, textures, and even tempos eerily similar to Logic’s default of 120 bpm. Only the most blatant examples of Corganphonics break up the monotony—drawling out “swoon” for two seconds until it sounds like “swan” on the otherwise mesmerizing “Save Your Tears,” the phonetic (and incorrect) pronunciation of “Samhain” on “Wyttch.” Credit where it’s due: CYR has the least amount of filler of any supersized Smashing Pumpkins album because it has the narrowest gap between the singles and the deep cuts. I also can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t trade any random three-song run for another “Glass and the Ghost Children” just to feel something.
CYR ends up being just as immersive as Smashing Pumpkins’ masterworks, just in a modern way. It’s the sort of album that gets accused of trying to game Billboard’s streaming calculations through sheer volume, single after single blending into a curiously ambient experience with Corgan’s voice faintly present in the background like an essential oil spray. But the real failing of CYR is the same one that’s plagued him since MACHINA effectively ended his imperial phase: No matter how much he writes about the nature of true love and magick and our connection to an eternal timeline, it’s impossible to grasp what any of it actually means to Corgan on an emotional level. “Drum and Fife” remains the most resonant song he’s made in the past 20 years and it’s simply an admission that he’s going to keep doing him even if no one gives a shit. Lest anyone doubt that Corgan can’t tell the difference between spinning his wheels and being on a roll, he’s already got nearly 50 songs ready for the next album.

Buy: Rough Trade
(Pitchfork earns a commission from purchases made through affiliate links on our site.)
Catch up every Saturday with 10 of our best-reviewed albums of the week. Sign up for the 10 to Hear newsletter here.


Home to Girl Unit, L-Vis 1990, Jam City, and Bok Bok, Night Slugs increasingly looks like the most exciting thing in UK dance music; hear why now.

Various Artists: Night Slugs Allstars, Volume 1

Night Slugs Allstars, Volume 1

The title here has to be just a little tongue-in-cheek: The Night Slugs label has only been around for about a year, and this compilation covers literally every artist who has recorded original material for it. One way to read it is that they're all stars-- corny, I know, but the label's releases have been noticeably consistent (or at least consistently interesting) since they started coming out in January, demonstrating a cross-section of UK dance music whose influences are all over the map: southern U.S. rap, London grime, a little bit of dubstep, Detroit techno, Dâm-Funk-style electro-funk, etc. Throwing proper nouns at this music is fun for genre wonks, but the reality is that the comp works well because it makes all that variety explicit.
Still, the marks that unify Night Slugs are as obvious to my ears as the ones that vary it. Most of the label's productions are colorful and brash, working not only through layers of sound but head-on collisions of them. If the music were generally less imaginative than it is, I'd say that the urgency and pride with which it all foregrounds its glitz borders on tasteless, but Night Slugs know to whom they're appealing, and it's not the folks thoughtfully nodding their heads in the corner. Some of the synths here are noxious enough to peel paint from the walls, and though the futurist crunk of Girl Unit's "Wut" is the only song to feature an actual airhorn, airhorns are implied throughout. There is exactly one track that could probably be described as "laid-back" here-- Jacques Greene's "(Baby I Don't Know) What You Want"-- and its runner-up is called "Booty Slammer".
Night Slugs' record covers-- all designed by co-founder and label contributor Bok Bok-- are always combinations of black and one or two other colors, presented in various shades. Usually, the image is geometric and semi-architectural (a suspension bridge and car; glowing pistons spelling out words), but presented ag [#script:http://pitchfork.com/media/backend/js/tiny_mce/themes/advanced/langs/en.js]|||||| ainst a completely black background in a way that makes them look iconic, like they're without space or landscape. I mention them because they're a strong analogue for the label's musical style: Not only do the bright colors sing in the darkness, but they're given a proper spectrum. In the same way the tracks remind me that there's a lot of range to be extracted from the seemingly monotonous blast of a rave synth, the covers remind me that hot pink can get as close to purple as it can to white-- range in places you might expect to be limited. Listen to this comp more than a few times and you'll probably start to hear chasms between stuff like Bok Bok & Cubic Zirconia's "Reclash (Dub)" and Girl Unit's ever-luxurious "Wut". The palettes are similar, but the ends to which they're used-- and the moods they evoke-- are different.
People who've followed the label since its inception-- and before that, when it was just a club night-- will diddle around with arguments about what should or shouldn't've made it onto this comp. Those arguments can be fun, like: Two tracks from Lil Silva seems more generous toward Lil Silva than to us as listeners; "She Wore Velour" is a more obvious choice for Velour than "Booty Slammer"; and "Bust Broke" as a choice for Kingdom feels willfully evasive when we have "Fogs", but they're both good. On the other hand, Bok Bok gives Girl Unit's "IRL" a remix, and Jam City's "Arpjam"-- one of the comp's new tracks-- indicates that regardless of whether Night Slugs are ready to put out Volume 2 by 2012, they're not slowing down just yet.


Lou Reed and Metallica's collaborative album based on German playwright Frank Wedekind's plays about a social-climber-turned-prostitute has been preemptively crowned "The Worst Album of All Time." How bad is it? Well...

Lulu

When Metallica announced last June that they had recorded a new album with Lou Reed, fans of both artists responded with confusion, if not outright despair. But while this partnership may seem random, the two actually have a lot in common. Both abuse electric guitars; both like to wear black and be photographed by Anton Corbijn; both have indulged in lifestyles that threatened to become death-styles; both have a habit of alienating their fans by taking ill-advised stylistic detours and, by extension, both are considered by many to be class-A assholes. But while these surface similarities may provide the two parties with small-talk/commiseration fodder when, say, hanging backstage before murdering "Sweet Jane" at a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony, they're pretty miserable grounds for a full-on collaboration, especially one that spans two discs and close to 90 minutes. And yet, showing their usual proud disregard for their fans and music in general, Lou Reed and Metallica have gone and made Lulu anyway.
It'd be one thing if Lulu were being slipped into the marketplace as a low-profile curiosity, akin to a 90s-era spoken word album with some alt-rocker screeching away in the background. Instead, it's being trumpeted by its makers as a historic event. In a now-infamous interview, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich recall bursting into tears of pride during the recording sessions, while in another Reed grinningly insists that Metallica has "pushed me to the best I've ever been." It was one of many unintentional jokes in an online promo campaign that effectively ruined Lulu's chances of being taken seriously before it was even heard.
Lulu was first previewed with an especially repellent 30-second tract of "The View" that confirmed everyone's worst suspicions of the project-- namely, that Reed's crotchety, atonal poem-rants would be wholly incompatible with Metallica's fidgety riffage. The clip's most prominent lyric ("Throw it away/ For worship someone who actively despises you!") seemed to mock both artists' most forgiving fans for even clicking on the link. By the time "The View" was released in its full, five-minute ghastliness-- with Hetfield variously professing himself to be a table, a 10-story building and, possibly, the premier member of Philly hip-hop band the Roots-- the Internet had all the evidence it needed to preemptively crown Lulu the Worst Album of All Time.
But even in that regard, Lulu disappoints. For all the hilarity that ought to ensue here, Lulu is a frustratingly noble failure. Audacious to the extreme, but exhaustingly tedious as a result, its few interesting ideas are stretched out beyond the point of utility and pounded into submission-- the average song length clocks in at eight excruciating minutes. Still, it's kind of fascinating to hear two veteran entities trying like hell to excavate common ground that simply does not exist.
Lulu's source material-- a series of transgressive plays by Munich playwright Frank Wedekind about a stripper who becomes a social-climber only to wind up a prostitute-- allows Reed to set a familiar Berlin scene with "Brandenburg Gate", a would-be anthem that, with a less torturous delivery, could almost pass for something from Reed's mid-1970s songbook. Instead, we get Hetfield belting out its "small town girl" chorus like he's trying to summon the next featured attraction at a strip club.
Reed's influence also feels responsible for the ominous, omnipresent Velvets-esque string textures and a couple of curiously avant guitar solos from Kirk Hammett (see: "Dragon"). Metallica, meanwhile, inspired Reed to come up with at least one perfectly metal lyric ("I cry icicles in my stein"), while getting him to update the S&M suggestiveness of "Venus in Furs" to the bloodlusty standards of the modern-day headbanger. However, a great deal of Lulu's songs find Reed graphically describing violent, depraved sexual trysts from the female protagonist's perspective, and with lines like "I will swallow your sharpest cutter like a colored's man dick" in abundance, some dyed-in-the-denim Metallica fans could be squirming like they did when Kirk started wearing eyeliner.
Unfortunately, these small surprises can't save Lulu from the much larger issue that lies directly at its core: For most of the record, Lou Reed and Metallica barely sound like they're on the same planet, let alone in the same room; the album works neither as powerful rock music nor as an impressionistic soundtrack to a spoken narrative. Reed's monotone remains unresponsive to what's happening around him whether the occasion calls for full-torque thrash ("Mistress Dread") or dreary acoustic mood pieces ("Little Dog"), while Lars Ulrich's flailing fills during the breakdowns on "Pumping Blood" and "Frustration" are essentially drummerese for "what the fuck do I do with this?" But for all of Reed's meandering, a-melodic verbosity, it's actually Hetfield who sounds the most out of place here; beyond his self-parodic turn on "The View", he contributes intrusive back-ups to the bar-band slog "Iced Honey" and the maddeningly repetitious "Cheat on Me" like someone in the back row of a class photo trying to mug his way into the frame.
Remarkably, there is actually a light at the end of this dark, despairing tunnel-- and, not coincidentally, it's the song least connected to the Lulu concept. Clocking in at an absurd 19 minutes, "Junior Dad" is-- like almost everything else here-- too long by half, with its last eight minutes taken up by an extended string drone. But, despite its laughable title, "Junior Dad" possesses everything the rest of Lulu doesn't: a graceful, affecting melody, a logical arrangement, a pretty guitar line, a sympathetic narrator and, most importantly, a true synthesis of each principal's strengths, outfitting a Reed streetwise hymn with Metallica's stadium-sized crunch; it's like "Street Hassle" refashioned as a Black Album power ballad. "Junior Dad" is a song that seemingly does the impossible: it momentarily redeems the idea of a Lou Reed/Metallica collaboration as a plausible, potentially fruitful concept. But its late appearance also serves as a potent reminder of just how terribly that concept is executed on everything that precedes it.


Fusing dream pop and R&B, KING floats through its debut album, making easy atmospheric blends akin to Sade and Janet Jackson. KING harkens back to a time when there were clearer distinctions between R&B, pop, and hip-hop, when acts like Jodeci and SWV ruled the airwaves and the music was lighter and more sensuous.

We Are KING

In 2011, KING's debut EP came out of nowhere to almost-immediate acclaim: Prince, Roots bandleader ?uestlove, and Foreign Exchange frontman Phonte Coleman all praised the group's talent, and rapper Kendrick Lamar sampled "Hey," arguably KING's best song, for Section.80 track "Chapter Six." The group worked with singer Bilal for a song on his 2013 album, A Love Surreal, and with jazz pianist Robert Glasper, on his Black Radio LP. By 2014, at the FYF Fest in Los Angeles, the singers covered Nina Simone's "To Be Young, Gifted and Black" alongside Devonté Hynes, Moses Sumney, and Solange. The trio—comprised of Anita Bias and twins Paris and Amber Strother—has seen its stock rise significantly, although it didn't have a lot of music to speak of. Their EP had only three tracks—three wonderful tracks—but a short playlist nonetheless. Behind singles "In the Meantime" and "Mister Chameleon," KING was set to release its long-awaited first LP in 2014, but the year came and went without a full-length project. So there's plenty of interest in We Are KING, even if the singers are just on the periphery of larger mainstream circles.
Fusing dream pop and R&B, KING floats through its debut album, making easy atmospheric blends akin to Sade and Janet Jackson. We Are KING is rich and transformative, centered on hazy mid-tempo grooves that calmly evoke a surreal ambience. KING harkens back to a time when there were clearer distinctions between R&B, pop, and hip-hop, when acts like Jodeci and SWV ruled the airwaves, and the music was lighter and more sensuous. We Are KING recalls the best of that era without completely rehashing it. These sounds are remarkably modern, yet as it plays, you find yourself thinking of simpler times—that homecoming dance or first kiss—as the singers keep their voices supplanted in the backdrop. This isn't an LP of long runs or over-the-top vocal solos. It's a light touch, built to establish a meditative mood. On "Love Song," for instance, the vocalists hum softly without their words taking shape. The compositions are equally vital, and throughout the album, KING does a stellar job of letting the music breathe for its roughly 60-minute runtime.
Over its 12 tracks, We Are KING slowly reveals itself through sweet one-liners that waft in from distant places, like on "Supernatural," one of three holdovers from the group's EP. After a brief intro of scenic wails, the song becomes a synthesized ode to puppy love: "There's magic in everything you do… I'm in love with everything 'bout you." We Are KING entices us to get away from the mundane, to spend time in grand spaces without smartphones and social media. Among other things, Paris, Amber, and Anita want you to reconnect with real people on real levels, to study their nuances and embrace their intricacies. They'd rather you appreciate what's in front of you, not the artificial world just beyond your passcode. "Red Eye," a transitional cut near the album's beginning, is about pushing beyond your comfort zone. "Native Land," the album's closing track, envisions a grand journey to remote shores.
At times, the singers address worldly, more grounded issues, stuff we can all relate to. "Mister Chameleon" is a tale of smoke and mirrors, of falling in love with a person you thought you knew. "Oh, Please!" depicts a romantic chase: It's the album's most overt display of personality, and the lyrics are more pronounced. As a whole, We Are KING is seamless: It properly showcases the group's breezy aesthetic and has the feel-good creativity of black music's great luminaries. Sure it took some time to get here, but unhurried art has its own special rewards. We Are KING has long-lasting impact, much like the music it emulates.


The Florida rapper’s latest “sad ass album” sticks to the same tried and true formula, at times actually sounding a little more hopeful.

Beautiful Mind

On the afternoon of June 13, Rod Wave declared that his latest project Beautiful Mind would be his last “sad ass album.” Calling the Florida rapper’s music “sad” is an understatement—his songs plumb the depths of physical, financial, and emotional pain so intensely it can feel like he’s perpetually stuck underneath a rain cloud. Since at least 2017’s “Mike Tyson,” the triumphant boom of his voice has separated him from the legions of other rap crooners leaving their hearts in their Notes apps. Across three studio albums, Rod Wave has perfected his brand of rain cloud rap, in the mold of mentor Kevin Gates if his ears were stuck on the blues hymns of the Mississippi Delta. Much of Beautiful Mind follows this blueprint, but there are more specks of joy and optimism than before, a yearning to move beyond the hurdles and embrace new life experiences. If he’s as ready to “live happy travel [and] get dis money” as he claims, then Beautiful Mind makes a case as his most hopeful album to date.
That hope relies on a formula he’s polished before. Rod Wave songs tend to span a handful of subjects—bad memories, getting money, navigating haters, reminiscing on lost love, or any combination of the four. But it didn’t matter how many times you’d heard him sing about waiting at bus stops with headphones in; he sells these tried and true stories with conviction. Beautiful Mind adds a few more stories to his narrative vision board, giving Wave more chances to look forward. “Stone Rolling” starts with family problems but ends with a journey that stretches across the United States, from smoking sessions with Sauce Walka in Houston to a fantasy of settling down in the Carolina countryside with his children. His spirited performance on standout “Yungen” matches his dumbfounded lyrics about amassing a fanbase paralleled by sampled news footage of a crowded Miami concert where some ticket buyers were forced to listen from outside the venue. You can’t say that he isn’t at least counting his blessings more.
The variety is welcome, but it’s not varied enough to prevent many of the two dozen tracks from bleeding together. For every plea of hopeless romance like “Married Next Year” or “Never Find Us,” there are several bids for Wave to brood about picking up women in hotel rooms across the country like “Never Get Over Me” or “Pieces.” Sometimes, like the moment he remembers “Eviction letters traumatized me even though it was sunny” on “Better,” his writing is detailed and intimate. Other times, like on “Rockstar Heart,” Wave sounds more like the loudest kid in class reading a rushed What I Did This Summer essay.
It doesn’t help that his overreliance on piano and guitar beats—the bread and butter of pain rap but basically a meme for Wave at this point in his career—is a bit more grating than usual. Standouts like the clacking synths of “Yungen” and the deep strings twirling between vocal samples on “Me vs. The World” are few and far between, bookended by ill-advised stabs at Dawn FM-era Weeknd style radio interludes and predictable beats from usual suspects Tahj Money and Will-A-Fool. Wave’s stories are easier to invest in when the instrumentals backing them swell to the same heights; his usual combination of piano, guitar, and 808 has diminishing returns.
Despite all the hardship he’s endured, Rod Wave’s earnest recounting of his fight to the top has made it easy to root for him since the late 2010s. He’s built a fanbase loyal enough to listen to his shows in parking lots and counts Meek Mill and hip-hop’s favorite comedian Druski as friends. Pain has always been a central aspect of Wave’s music, but his blues are beginning to repeat themselves. He can’t rap about the same stormy days waiting for the bus forever. The glimmers of a brighter future that dot Beautiful Mind—or, failing that, newer bits of pain and suffering inspired by the slog of fame—are its best moments, pushing Rod Wave just a little bit closer to peace.


A veteran of UK garage and R&B, Craig David follows up his 2016 comeback by fishing for current trends to keep him relevant.

The Time Is Now

A single phrase—“Bo selecta”—encapsulates both the peak and the nadir of the British singer Craig David’s career. It  was the anthemic refrain of his breakout performance on the Artful Dodger’s 1999 garage classic “Rewind”—a song that launched David to instant stardom, followed by his 2000 debut, Born to Do It, released when he was just 19. (A decade later, it remained the fastest-selling debut album by a male solo artist in the UK.) David soon crossed over into the U.S. charts with “Fill Me In” and “7 Days,” showing how UK club music, hip-hop, R&B, and pop could all intermingle. But it was “Bo’ Selecta!”—a TV show in which the stand-up comedian Leigh Francis donned an obnoxious rubber mask to play the singer—that soon set the singer’s career on a downward spiral.
After a questionable album of Motown covers, Craig David decamped to Miami, where he no doubt heard the blueprint for his hybrid hits revisited by artists like Drake and Justin Bieber. But he was greeted as a survivor by the UK press with 2016’s Following My Intuition, and now he follows up with his seventh album, The Time Is Now. At this point, though he is only 36, David occupies the role of something like an elder statesman, having weathered both a cultural backlash and a collaboration with Sting. But outside of a few tracks where he sounds reinvigorated, he’s not quite sure how to fit in to the present pop landscape.
The Time Is Now finds Craig David fishing for a current trend—or three—to sink his hooks into, and across 15 tracks, he lands a few. He teams up with producer Jonas Blue (responsible for that tropical house remake of “Fast Car”) for the bantamweight “Heartline,” where his purr melds into the downy backdrop of tropical-house marimbas and defanged ratchet snares. It all might blow away at the slightest gust did the singer not convey just enough emotional heft to keep it grounded.
David is most successful when he finds collaborators who push him into new territory. Kaytranada makes a slick R&B groove hiccup for “Live in the Moment,” while D.C. rapper GoldLink’s double-time delivery adds a bit of grit to the singer’s honeyed hook. However unintentionally, the fact that he has known both the highs and lows of fame makes David’s carpe diem advice actually feel earned. But on “I Know You,” David acts like someone who has mistakenly stumbled into the EDM tent. Part of the blame falls to producer Fraser T. Smith, who has credits on five of the album’s tracks. While his production for Adele and Stormzy shows that Smith can do both anthemic pop and rugged grime tracks, here, and on songs like “Love Me Like It’s Yesterday,” he falls back on tired tropes like generic filter sweeps and door-chime keys.
Breezy tropical house, Latin-tinged stabs at replicating “Despacito,” EDM-friendly drops, Auto-Tuned croons—David dabbles in all of it like a man half his age. Consider “For the Gram,” a car crash of his most cringeworthy tendencies. Singing about Instagram, he awkwardly attempts to out-Drake Drake (whose own blend of hip-hop and R&B itself owes something to David’s turn-of the century suavity) with lines about hashtags, emoji, and sliding into DMs. For an album called The Time Is Now, David spends too much of his time looking like he's trying to catch up.


Peter Matthew Bauer's Liberation! marks his first time singing, writing lyrics, and leading a band; it’s also the first project he’s worked on since his tenure as bassist and organist in the Walkmen, who, in Bauer’s own words, are on a “pretty extreme hiatus.” The record is a bold stroke on a blank canvas, with songs that celebrate freedom and fear in the same breath, two emotions that definitely crop up when someone’s moving on in life.

Liberation!

Peter Matthew Bauer's Liberation! marks his first time singing, writing lyrics, and leading a band; it’s also the first project he’s worked on since his tenure as bassist and organist in the Walkmen, who, in Bauer’s own words, are on a “pretty extreme hiatus.” Taking those milestones into account, Liberation! is a bold stroke on a blank canvas, with songs that celebrate freedom and fear in the same breath, two emotions that definitely crop up when someone’s moving on in life.
Bauer’s musical palette is broad and unique, expanding past the sounds of his previous band: he implements polyrhythmic island music on the the title track, the sounds of slow 1960s beat bands on “Shiva the Destroyer”, and true American heartland rock on “Irish Wake In Varanasi (For Big Pete Devlin)”. The opening track “I Was Born in An Ashram” doubles as biographical fodder—Bauer was, indeed, born in an ashram—and as a means of setting up Liberation!'s theme shambling along the path to personal nirvana. He sings about religion and the “freedom” it affords as if he were taking part in a classic-rock exorcism, which is evident in his singing voice, moving between a Kurt Vile-esque drawl and a pursed-lip Mick Jagger croon. Accordingly, the music occasionally takes on the lo-fi pluck of Constant Hitmaker and the swagger-psych of Their Satanic Majesties Request.
Orthodox Hinduism, Scientology, Christianity, and religious hokum all receive lashings from Bauer’s sharp tongue. Rather than possessing the snide reproach of a message-board atheist, Bauer comes across as someone choosing to embrace mystery as its own religion, as terrifying as that may be. “Only you can convince yourself,” he sings on “Shaved Heads & Pony Tails”, which ma ybe the first indie rock song about a śikhā; the album's true mantra comes on the final track, where Bauer exalts over a two-chord stadium-ready tune, “You are the chapel, and everything is wonder." Elsewhere, he lets his voice go on album closer “You Are the Chapel”, dialing into the talk-anthem spirit of Bruce Springsteen, while underneath the drums thunder louder than any other instrument featured on the album. It’s a great closing anthem made even better by an errant Oasis diss: “I see you looking like Oasis/ why does anyone want to look like Oasis?”
Liberation! is most successful as a shaking off of Bauer's relative anonymity: he paints himself as a funny guy, an American wanderer, and someone eager to expel what’s been boiling underneath those bass parts for the Walkmen for so many years. Perhaps that’s why this album sounds like such an impulsive, energetic mishmash that all comes out in a fury, as Liberation! doesn’t feel dwelled-upon or over-wrought. There are points, like his off-handed “ooo’s” at the end of “Latin American Ficciones”, that could stand to be more filled out, and sometimes the bare-bones production seems too small for the ideal size of the songs. But the ramshackle spontaneity is Bauer’s charm, as the songwriting compliments the heady spiritualism of his words. Liberation! gives Bauer a voice, and the mystery of where he goes next is just as exciting for us as it is for him.