The Los Angeles producer’s house and techno is hyper-attuned to the nuances of timbre, giving his music a captivating textural focus even when emotion is in scant supply.

Dead Start Program

The Los Angeles producer John Tejada’s hyper-crystalline house and techno suggest a deeply-rooted fascination with sound as raw material. While his beats remain relatively unspectacular, four-to-the-floor fare, it’s his antiseptic timbres, vacuum-sealed arrangements, and meticulously programmed synth textures that stand out. He knows how to fine-tune the internal order a track so that lushnessness overflows. His high-fidelity sounds feel both piercing and immersive, and focused engagement with them has the concentrated intensity of an hour in a sensory deprivation tank.
Dead Start Program is his 13th album and his fourth for Cologne’s Kompakt label, and it features several tracks that productively mine the psychedelic qualities of precision. “Duty Cycle” is equal parts moody and euphoric, like squeegeeing the few last drops of dopamine out of your brain after dancing for 12 hours straight. “Heal,” is rigid, focused, and mathematical, propelled by a sense of spring-loaded tension. It’s easy to imagine that the elated aggression of “Hypochondriac” would be well received at an angry rave. Meanwhile, “All at Sea” emits bracing energy, making good use of nervous, circuitous patterns of dissonance and a cluttered sense of space.
Although the record has a number of aesthetically appealing moments, Dead Start Program never quite coalesces. Tracks like “Autoseek” and “Quipu” express germs of potentially compelling musical ideas; they point to a strain of gloomy romanticism but aren’t moved to elaborate this feeling with much specificity. The implied grandiosity doesn’t quite land.  Others, such as “Loss,” a slightly awkward take on dubstep, and “Telemetry,” which sounds like a first experiment with a piece of software, come across more like sketches that were discarded as quickly as they were assembled.
Ultimately, the album doesn’t make a ton of particularly interesting formal decisions or engage a compelling set of feelings; the overriding mood is a familiar mixture of agitation and melancholy, tinged with slight boredom. The record often ends up sounding like an indistinct memory of itself. There is an over-reliance on club-music melodies, phrasings, and sequences so ingrained in the collective consciousness that they almost sound like readymade loops, which makes certain tracks sound perfunctory. Tejada’s 2011 album Parabolas brought a unique sensibility and impassioned spark to old forms, but that urgency doesn’t carry over here.
Dead Start Program does reward close listening in certain respects. Tejada’s affinity for neatly organized arrangements of luminous synths remains infectious. He lets notes ring out at length, which isn’t so common in dance music these days. His choice of radiant sounds gives these songs a lustrous, polychromatic quality. Although the record’s melodies might not always glow with personality, the way his synths stand out in the mix has its own transfixing quality. His emphasis on tightly defined patterns makes the focus on tone and resonance all the more pronounced. But Tejada’s careful systems management needs to be complemented by a greater sense of emotional exigency to really come alive.


With a sound so omnivorous and open to influences that span decades and styles, Stereolab have carved one of the more intriguing and rewarding catalogs of the past 15 years; their new horn-laded album, Chemical Chords is one of their strongest outings in some time.

Chemical Chords

Part of the fun of following Stereolab over the years has been following the declarations of mastermind Tim Gane, who has an uncanny ability to plant contextual seeds of albums in advance. The albums don't need it necessarily, but from the beginning-- when Stereolab paid prescient tribute to the likes of Neu! and Martin Denny-- on through to their present triumphant twilight, Gane has always come across as an ideal kind of character: a mix between a thoughtful critic and an excitable collector geek who gets off on trying out the ideas he hears on records he loves. Before 2004's Margerine Eclipse, Gane talked about using puddles of rhythm as the basis for songs that sparkled like reflections. For the new Chemical Chords, he's spoken of making good on an affinity for Motown.
To mention it more than once is to overstate the degree to which Chemical Chords actually does sound like Motown, but another part of the fun of following Stereolab is listening in for subtleties of inflection. With a sound so omnivorous and open to influences that span decades and styles (not to mention planets), the Stereolab discography has become a series of churning extrapolations on a steadfast set of ideas. And Chemical Chords counts among the best of those extrapolations, no matter how familiar that original set of ideas has grown in time.
"Neon Beanbag" opens on a jaunty note, with organs on harpsichord settings and Laetitia Sadier doing her scat-minded best to summon the spirit of doo-wop. The Motown influence is hearable in the way the guitar slides around from chord to chord, in swing-time and not embarrassed to fall a bit behind the beat if it means racking up style points. "Three Women" follows with a little extra wiggle and the kind of bulbous two-note bass-line that might have come out of Detroit in the days before funk changed things.
Horns figure into many of the songs on Chemical Chords, all of them intricately arranged but most surveyed rather impressively as accents more than as subjects themselves. To that end, the whole album has a lightness of touch that makes it sound warm and comfortable, especially after the sad weight evident on the also-excellent Margerine Eclipse. The songs sound tossed off in the best way: not as sketches that could have benefited from more time or care, but as songs that just presented themselves in the studio and submitted to being laid down in simple terms.
"Valley Hi!" is a driving pop song with a catchy lean, with Sadier singing in a trance of falling melodies delivered with her special brand of disinterested zeal. "Silver Sands" bounds along with circles of loopy xylophone. "Nous Vous Demandons Pardon" sounds like three or four different moody Emperor Tomato Ketchup-era tracks fitted together in a deft assemblage. And then there's "The Ecstatic Static", a cosmic rendering of Brian Wilson chords pushed along at a pregnantly plodding tempo, with strings falling out and martial drums angling in: It draws on every era of Stereolab's past without seeming concerned with anything more than what might sound cool in the next measure.


On his debut album under a new alias, Chicago’s Conor Mackey focuses his varied interests on knotty electronic music, merging a panoply of subgenres into one pummeling package.

Lexicon

Conor Mackey’s music has assumed different shapes over the past decade: proggy jazz fusion, math rock, high-speed electro. With each new turn, the Chicago composer’s studies in music theory and composition have informed the meticulousness of his approach. That foundation came through most clearly in his work as a guitarist in the five-piece Monobody, in which he built complex instrumental vistas around a moody blend of post-rock and jazz. Late last year, handling the twitchy, synth-heavy production for fellow Monobody member NNAMDÏ’s Are You Happy EP, he adopted the alias Lynyn, and on Lexicon, his debut album under the moniker, Mackey veers sharply in yet another direction, creating knotty electronic music that merges a panoply of subgenres into one pummeling package.
Lexicon moves in volatile fits and starts, whipping from sprawling IDM to disorienting digicore to muscular jungle. Mackey knows how to slowly set up the intricacies of his songs—each of Lexicon’s chaotic polyrhythms is tightly constructed for maximum impact. The frenetic “Stumbling” lays down a headache-throb beat ready-made for warehouse raves; early standout “Uja End,” meanwhile, stacks every element with geometric detail à la Aphex Twin, slowly dialing up echoing strings, syncopated drums, and an undercurrent of slippery synths. Each texture combines into a cohesive, head-spinning whole, establishing a sense of gratifying balance to the pandemonium.
Mackey occasionally slows things down with mellow, downcast synths, which wind like faint whispers through “In Dust” and “Memory.” These reflective highlights offer a brief cooldown from the tangled rhythms and intensity that can drag down some songs. “Vnar Rush” exhaustingly rides an eerie sample into infinity amid a hornet’s swarm of synths; closer “Puffling,” where breakbeats merge with the sound of glasses clinking together, feels anonymous to a fault. It detracts from the moments when the album shows a more playful sense of personality and character in the music’s modular architecture.
When Mackey does lean into his quirks, Lexicon shines. On “Amund Vise,” he splices distorted vocal melodies, one of the few instances of voice on the album, into the thudding drum patterns, giving the song a vital boost of energy—and a crucial element of humanity. The ascendant voices and melodies break through the clatter like a sunbeam, providing a respite that elevates Lexicon to breathless heights.


Dave Grohl’s six-piece finds common cause between gaudy disco-pop and willfully absurd arena rock on an album-length collection of Bee Gees covers and live-in-studio Medicine at Midnight cuts.

Dee Gees - Hail Satin

In late February, less than two weeks after Foo Fighters released their 10th album in more than a quarter century as a band, the arena-rock placebo Medicine at Midnight (rumor has it Bill Gates put a chip in it!), they unceremoniously unveiled a disco alter ego. Billed, semi-funnily, as the Dee Gees, the Dave Grohl-led six-piece premiered their cover of “You Should Be Dancing” on BBC Radio 2. Grohl—ever the candid every-dude—said that the falsetto experiment was inspired by last December’s fascinating HBO documentary about the Bee Gees—never mind that he hadn’t actually seen it.
The stakes could hardly have been lower. The results were hard to fault. Recorded with one-man multi-platinum mint Greg Kurstin, the veteran band’s stab at the Bee Gees’ nuke-proof 1976 hit—the first in a run of disco-pop smashes that would appear on the next year’s gazillion-selling Saturday Night Fever soundtrack—is muscular but essentially faithful. When Grohl channels Barry Gibb’s horndog dancefloor exhortations (“My woman gives me pow-wah!”), it feels as self-consciously silly as disco’s monocultural phase gave audiences a license to be, from Studio 54 to suburban strip malls. Thoroughly harmless, it’s kind of a hoot. It would’ve made a fine novelty single.
Hope you’re ready to boogie down: “You Should Be Dancing” is merely the opening track on an entire album attributed to the Dee Gees, a Record Store Day exclusive titled, semi-funnily, Hail Satin. The rest of side one is devoted to loud but loving covers of four other numbers from the Gibb brothers’ massive songbook. The five tracks on side two are straightforward live-in-studio renditions of Medicine at Midnight cuts. Yes, this seems superfluous: How many Bee Gees covers by Foo Fighters does the world need? Yes, it’s also conceptually muddled: What do live versions of new Foo Fighters songs have to do with Bee Gees covers or wide-lapeled leisure suits? But it’s hard to get too worked up about all this when nobody else seems to be. Take a chill pill, Disco Stu.
Give Foo Fighters credit for their Bee Gees song selection. They don’t rehash “Stayin’ Alive.” They know their lane, and they steer clear of the British-Australian trio’s 1960s country-soul or ’80s adult-contemporary balladry. They home in on that whirlwind period when the Bee Gees were, by a good distance, the biggest act in the world—the Beatles after the Beatles, the Kings of Pop before the King of Pop. The trouble is, this is familiar territory, dated since the early days of the Walkman, so without at least some level of reinterpretation or examination, Hail Satin risks becoming little more than the tightest ever live-band karaoke.
Probably the best argument for expanding the Dee Gees project beyond an individual song is Foo Fighters’ punchy take on “Shadow Dancing,” a weirdly haunting 1978 chart-topper—it was pivotal to Marlon James’ Booker Prize-winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings—that was actually recorded by Andy Gibb, younger brother of the three original Bee Gees, in collaboration with his siblings. Drummer Taylor Hawkins gamely sings lead on this, a fitting choice, and the backing vocalists playfully fill in for the horn and string sections. “Shadow Dancing” must have been inescapable when all things Bee Gees-involved ruled the radio, but Foo Fighters help make fresh sense of it here.
Beyond that, if you’ve heard one eminently competent Foo Fighters cover of a hugely successful disco song, perhaps you’ve heard them all. When they charge back into two more Saturday Night Fever staples (the chicken-scratch funk of “Night Fever,” the twinkling sentimentality of “More Than a Woman”), it’s like they’re repeating the same joke with slightly different inflections, wondering if this time they’ll elicit a laugh. The frenzied gallop of “Tragedy,” a successive 1979 chart-topper, helps illustrate how small of a leap it was to synth-metal like Europe’s “The Final Countdown,” but it also betrays the limits of the Dee Gees’ fidelity to their source material (the original’s signature “explosion” sound effect is nowhere to be found). So much of the Bee Gees’ appeal lay in their brotherly harmonies, their vast production resources, and their particular historical moment, none of which can be fully recreated here, no matter the band’s enthusiasm.
Although Grohl trumpeted Medicine at Midnight as Foo Fighters’ equivalent to Bowie’s Let’s Dance, you had to squint to discern much extra degree of disco-tude. The musical whiplash on side two of Hail Satin is like going from watching John Travolta do the hustle in white polyester to watching him mispronounce the name of Idina Menzel at the Oscars. “Making a Fire” and “Shame Shame” both have a certain strut, but not like that, and the juxtaposition with such universally enjoyed songs as the Bee Gees’ greatest hits would do no band’s new music any favors.
The buttons really go back over the chest hairs on “Waiting on a War,” a Medicine at Midnight highlight that ramps up from winsome power-pop strums to blazing hard-rock barrage seemingly just to show Foo Fighters can pull it off (or to jolt awake the cheap seats). From there, all obvious disco-band pretenses are put back on mothballs. On “No Son of Mine,” Grohl bites off syllables like James Hetfield clamoring for “Fuel.” On “Cloudspotter,” he spits his big dumb rock lyrics (“Refuse me while I kiss the sky”) with so much hammy fervor that you want to buy him a $16 draft beer. Even without the roar of a Madison Square Garden crowd, the live-in-studio feeling helps remind you that he doesn’t just know how ridiculous this is—he’s reveling in it.
If Grohl has gotten around to watching The Bee Gees: How Can You Mend a Broken Heart, the unfailingly likable musician surely has some sharp things to say about it. The Gibb brothers—Barry, as well as the late Robin, Maurice, and teen idol Andy—were the mainstream face of disco during the years revisited by this album, much as the three Nirvana members embodied grunge for a pop audience more than a decade later; the Miami Sound presaged Seattle’s sound. Grohl also recently went viral by telling Pharrell that his drums on Nevermind were “disco beats, dude,” raising tantalizing questions about the blurred lines (ugh, sorry) between genres, the delicate and sociologically fraught interplay between culture and craft. And Hail Satin tacitly represents a growing awareness, even among the “Led Zeppelin didn’t write tunes everybody liked, they left that to the Bee Gees” generation, that much of the disco backlash was rooted in racism and homophobia.
Hail Satin is too inconsequential to support serious arguments. And this isn’t a speech out of The Last Days of Disco. But more than anything, the Dee Gees record suggests that disco-pop and arena rock are united less by their drum beats than by their shared embrace of the gaudy and willfully absurd. They’re welcoming spaces for people who maybe wouldn’t ordinarily line-dance or flash metal horns to act knowingly goofy, to join in on a communal gag. For all the deserved cachet accrued over the past couple of decades around scenes like the Loft and Paradise Garage or unsung auteurs like Arthur Russell, it’s about time that the Bee Gees are getting their reappraisal as well. Disco lovers in 2021 don’t have to worry about losing their edge. They should be dancing, yeah.

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Ambient composer Sarah Davachi departs from her usual mix of instruments and electronics on an album that (mostly) focuses on the sound of single instruments.

All My Circles Run

The ambient music that Sarah Davachi makes is profoundly thermal. Thick and sonorous, it pushes up, welling up from silence, weaving harmoniums, string instruments, and electronics together in ways that feel indivisible, if not eternal. And even where her recordings bring slightly different pressures to bear—the soft, rippling Barons Court, the sloshy, church-organ languor of Dominions—the overall effect is similar: a benign hypnosis, the will to dissipate, a gentle weightlessness. To succumb to any entry in the Vancouver composer’s growing discography is to wade idly into the surf at low tide, only to suddenly find yourself 15 yards away from the shore.
Synthesizers—Rolands, Buchlas, EMSs—have been integral to Davachi’s sound since The Untuning of the Sky, her 2013 debut. Now, in an aesthetic dare worthy of two successive flips of an Oblique Strategies card, All My Circles Run goes synth-free, with each of its five tracks (largely) centered on a separate instrument.
Circularity is embraced wholeheartedly here. “For Voice” swirls an angelic multi-track chorus into a gorgeously smothering aria, as vocal iterations seize, then relinquish the foreground as if in a slow-motion round; the slow-drawn scrape that opens “For Strings” yields to a braided, harmonized drone. After interlocking a frayed, reverberating series of guitar figures destined to disintegrate over time, “Chanter” undercuts its own meditative drift with a two-note, interrogative counterpoint. “For Piano”—all aching, pecked tones, enervating whirr, and field-recorded backdrop pacing circuits—recalls Sontag Shogun, a Brooklyn-based trio who commingle elements of classical and carefully-chosen samples into something mournfully beautiful. Even with the new focus, this version of Davachi isn't a fundamentally altered one—her meditative warmth remains intact.
The real shift is one of artistic precision and a sense of amplification. Instead of viewing a passing scene out the window, we're looking now at the world through a microscope. That's especially true on “For Organ,” the album’s true centerpiece. Kneading and pitch-shifting wobbly, revolving tones until only a ringing, hypnotic din remains, the song seems to crack itself open and flood with brilliant melodic light; it brings to mind, ironically, Matmos’ synth-opus Supreme Balloon. On that record, Matmos temporarily set aside conceptual pranks to embrace the synthesizer's possibilities; the result was music achingly beautiful and crystalline, winking just slightly. With Circles, an insidious, sublime gambit that pays off handsomely, Davachi’s particular asceticism achieves a similar effect by pulling in an alternate direction. Like Brian Eno at his solo best, it's the sort of ambience that doesn't flood, that hovers precariously somewhere between the conscious and the unconscious, barely-there and indisputably present.


New recordings of the horror auteur’s iconic film themes, from Halloween to Assault on Precinct 13 and beyond, highlight his influential approach to music.

John Carpenter: Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998

Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998

Even if you have somehow never seen a John Carpenter movie, you know what one sounds like. One of America’s finest living filmmakers, the master of horror—among other genres—has directed at least half a dozen high masterpieces, including Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, and In the Mouth of Madness. In 1978, with the prototypical slasher Halloween, he helped create a form that’s been emulated ever since; a decade later, with They Live, he fashioned a camp-cult classic of such depth that philosopher Slavoj Žižek has held forth on its significance. Even Carpenter’s most execrated pictures are noteworthy. (Revisit 2001’s Ghosts of Mars, if you haven’t lately. It’s magnificent.)
Carpenter’s work as a composer is equally remarkable. This fact is not to be understated, given that music-making was, in essence, a part-time job for most of his career. The spare drum-machine rhythms, chunky synthesizer riffs and snarling guitars that he used in his films have become a staple horror idiom, deployed by countless directors since the 1970s as a quick way of conjuring an unsettling atmosphere. Halloween’s unrelenting 5/4 keyboard twinkle is a permanent fixture of the popular imagination, while the blood-rush throb of the Assault on Precinct 13 theme is scarcely less iconic.
Anthology: Movie Themes 1974-1998 is a “nearly comprehensive survey” of Carpenter’s original film scores, newly recorded by the director with his son, Cody Carpenter, and his godson, Daniel Davies—the same collaborators who helped make his 2015 standalone album Lost Themes. Like that record, which helped restore interest in Carpenter’s music as his film career went dormant, Anthology is a bold, often dazzling throwback, a grand suite rendered in crystalline keyboards and lavish synths. Unlike Lost Themes, its pleasures are instantly familiar: these themes haven’t vanished anywhere. It’s impressive, then, how well Anthology works as a coherent, standalone album—not merely a greatest-hits set, but a vivid set of haunting, bleakly atmospheric music.
In interviews, Carpenter tends to trivialize his composing work, and he can be comically modest in speaking of his musical ability. “Why would I be an influence?” he has balked. “I can barely play.” His father taught at the Western Kentucky University and was a capable violinist, but as a child Carpenter didn’t have the knack; discouraged, he gave up learning early, and to this day he credits himself with little more than jamming, as if his entire oeuvre as composer were a matter of luck. “I take the movie and synchronize it with a keyboard and then I begin improvising,” he once explained of his method. The results he describes as “an afterthought.”
Yet even early on, Carpenter’s film music showed an accomplished technique—similar to the skill he exhibited behind the camera, as noted by the critic Dave Kehr in a review of Halloween: “As a director, he prefers invisibility over the stylistic intrusions favored by most junior auteurs: His camera placements are expressive without being obtrusive.” The same holds true of the scores. Minimalism is the presiding mode of Carpenter’s music, particularly in the early films, and clarity is its defining virtue. His percussion tracks often comprise little more than a steady metronomic tick-tick-tick; his melodies, always memorable, have a spartan elegance.
This simplicity was at first partly functional: Carpenter wanted to achieve a passably professional sound quickly and on a budget. (“The score for Assault on Precinct 13 was finished in one day,” he told The Quietus in 2012. “Halloween took three days.”) And yet the effect of this plainness—in common with a number of other electronic musicians who composed for film at the time, including Vangelis, Giorgio Moroder, and Tangerine Dream—is wildly intense. In both “temperament and emphasis,” to quote Kehr on Halloween once more, “Carpenter lunges straight for the jugular.”
Decades later, the heavy thump of Carpenter’s analog synth in Assault still quickens the pulse, and the Halloween piano, however widely imitated or parodied, still stands arm hairs on end. And no matter how many times you’ve heard these pieces, the dynamic arrangements and performances on this album thoroughly rejuvenate them.
Carpenter has elected to organize Anthology aesthetically rather than chronologically, which gives the album an appealing sense of balance. We begin vigorously, with one of the director’s personal favorites: “In the Mouth of Madness,” the raucous hard-rock number that both introduces and concludes Carpenter’s underrated gothic horror coup of 1994. From there we proceed to “Assault on Precinct 13” and, less legendarily, “The Fog,” among the most evocative of Carpenter’s themes—relish that nimble, gently ominous keyboard. “Santiago,” from the minor horror-western Vampires, is comparatively guitar-forward but muted, while “Porkchop Express,” from the rollicking farce Big Trouble in Little China, cuts loose in keeping with that film’s rock-n-roll gusto. These tracks’ jangly verve is a reminder of the musical diversity of Carpenter’s scores, sometimes wrongly pigeonholed as one-note.
Anthology rounds into splendor as it reaches its end. And into covers, of a kind: First, the subtle majesty of “The Thing,” originally recorded for the film by Ennio Morricone. There’s no mistaking the slow rumble of the track as it appears here for anyone but Carpenter, who advised Morricone on his score to begin with, and reclaims it here quite effortlessly. The climax of the compilation is a lovely rendition of Jack Nitzsche’s “Starman,” the rapturous theme from Carpenter’s only straight science-fiction drama—which, as this celestial, synth-symphonic piece of music underlines, is also a touching romance. It’s astonishing what he could do with a side hustle.


On their third album, the first release on their own label, the Jamaican group continues to find their outernational voice; this time with vocals.

Eternal Children

While the Jamaican group made waves with previous collections of instrumentals, addressing a different, international audience than earlier productions aimed at Kingston’s dance halls, Equiknoxx’s latest finds the whole crew producing a set of songs that aim to bring together, and hold in productive tension, reggae groundings and open-eared experiments in post-diasporic Jamaican music. In merging earthy dancehall with out-there excursions, Eternal Children frequently delivers vocals that brim with sound design and abstraction that goes for the gut.
On 2016’s Bird Sound Power and 2017’s Colón Man, both released via Manchester electronic duo Demdike Stare’s DDS label, Equiknoxx distinguished themselves as whimsical, precise producers steeped in Jamaica’s musical wellsprings but inspired by reggae’s transformations in the wider world. On Eternal Children, the quirky riddims of Gavin “Gavsborg” Blair, Jordan “Time Cow” Chung, and Nick “Bobby Blackbird” Deane not only stand on their own but support a range of vocalists and genres. Rounding out the group, dedicated vocalists Shanique Marie and Kemikal ride the tracks with aplomb, speaking in tongues at once global and Kingstonian. Less a return to roots than it may seem, Eternal Children reveals that, like dancehall itself, the Equiknoxx sound is as outernational as ever.
Dancehall has always been cosmopolitan even as its artists, soundsystems, and producers prioritize downtown Kingston sensibilities. This commitment to local aesthetics has, ironically, allowed Jamaican music to flourish beyond the island, often taking forms that respond to new contexts and audiences. The Equiknoxx sound embodies their own practice of listening intently back to the echoes of diaspora—to the shifting shapes Jamaican music takes in such sites as Brooklyn, Berlin, Atlanta, and Manchester. That was already true of their instrumental work, and with the addition of vocals and lyrics on Eternal Children, the reference points multiply.
Consider “Manchester,” an ode to the city where Equiknoxx spends time working with the Swing Ting collective: The song triangulates a specific locale by sounding like several places at once. Over attenuated horn samples and chugging bass that more closely resembles the sludgy techno-dub of Stefan Betke than anything to come out recently from Jamaica, Shanique Marie recites a litany of grimey British mates while Swing Ting’s MC Fox brings UK soundsystem style to the proceedings, eagerly sending shoutouts back to the island. The chorus offers trademark Equiknoxx humor by referencing the quotidian, “Went on a tram inna Manchester,” paired with some stylish nonsense, “Ta-ta-ta-ta ta-ta ta-ta-ta-ta”—a nod to Missy Elliott’s scat-like patter on “Work It.”
Equiknoxx’s instrumentals still enjoy a certain pride of place on Eternal Children. Songs come into shape and recede again as the instrumentals accrue and reveal their strata. The group’s experimentalism is still very much on display, now grounded by verses and choruses, with their penchant for off-kilter rhythms, spacey textures, and crisp, foley-like timbres. Their attention to sculpting every element in the mix remains exacting, giving them control over the stereo field. While the number of ideas can seem dense, Equiknoxx also exercise a restraint that keeps things tense, texturally spacious, and unhurried. Jamaican rhythms and bass are a constant presence, but here they seem unmoored from any current vogues. They’re often slower, weirder, ripped from time, timeless. No doubt the album could have been released as a third collection of instrumentals (and perhaps should be), but the addition of voices adds a whole heap, as they say in Jamaica.
Eternal Children revels in Jamaican archetypes, including the rude and vulgar, an approach that no doubt will seduce some listeners and repel others. On “Grave,” for instance, Kemikal and Alozade work to channel Lee “Scratch” Perry’s inspired incantations, the absurdist stylings of Eek-a-Mouse, and the meta-dancehall Jamaican comedy duo Twin of Twins: explicit sex talk, scatological references aplenty, and disrespect for the dead are punctuated by cartoonish jungle sounds, including a cliched monkey’s “ooh ooh ahh ahh” in the middle of the chorus. The thunderous, clacking beat looming beneath them sounds as likely to have been cooked up by London’s Kevin “The Bug” Martin or to support a verse from late Hyperdub vocalist Spaceape. This is not your daddy’s dub, or his dancehall for that matter.
The vocals on Eternal Children may be a jarring and puzzling presence, especially those unfamiliar with dancehall mores and Jamaican mythologies. But several standout performances, especially by Shanique Marie, carry the album and give it a sound rooted in a history of Jamaican women getting fierce and funny on the mic. Marie pays sly tribute to this lineage while nodding to its wider influence on “Move Along” by teasing a cherished reggae melody from Deborahe Glasgow’s “Don’t Test Me,” a song made famous by a re-take with Shabba Ranks and, perhaps more so, by the Notorious B.I.G.’s interpolation of the tune on the remix of Junior M.A.F.I.A.’s “Get Money.” Incidentally, Equiknoxx recorded much of the new album at the Kingston studio of Gussie Clarke, who produced “Don’t Test Me.”
Eternal Children stands as a showcase for the formidable skills of Shanique Marie, who outshines her fellows here and deserves the wider acclaim this album may bring. But Bobby Blackbird turns in some strong takes too, especially on “Brooklyn,” a strikingly anthemic offering from the group, if one that seems to celebrate a borough frozen in time. “Ain’t no shook hands in Brooklyn” is a great line but in 2019 seems like a pre-gentrification sentiment, a throwback to the 1980s and ’90s when Jamaican culture imbued the borough with cool and deadly style. When Marie jumps into the chorus with distorted and chopped vocals, she insists that the international music and culture inspired by Jamaica over the last few decades lives and breathes and reigns, especially in places where Jamaican icons like Biggie Smalls adorn murals as local royalty. Whether Equiknoxx can reach the sizeable audience that remains in thrall to the sounds of Jamaica and its vast musical diaspora is something Eternal Children seems keen to test.

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The East Coast songwriter’s college-rock melodies and boyish vocal delivery waver between charming and cloying.

A Jump From the High Dive

From fanny packs to Pokémon Go to Mariah Carey’s 25-year-old No. 1 song, ’90s nostalgia is a hell of a drug—one that Sean Henry employs throughout his second studio album, A Jump From the High Dive. The East Coast singer-songwriter has said that he wanted to create a record that was accessible and “listenable for anybody,” an objective he accomplishes to a fault. His college-rock melodies and boyish vocal delivery waver between charming and cloying, delivering a pleasant, vapid stream of would-be earworms.
In 2018, Henry did what any burnt-out artist low on cash would do: He left New York City, where he’d resided and often performed at the now-defunct Silent Barn. Returning to suburban Connecticut, he honed his craft and invested in sharper production that boosts High Dive above its predecessor, Fink. He studied the likes of Radiohead, Oasis, and Red Hot Chili Peppers, on a mission to create his own modern guitar pop record—the kind that might’ve spawned a surprise hit 20-some years ago.
The affable electric guitar chugs of songs like “Space Kicks” and “You Fall Away” aren’t nearly as catchy as the Chili Peppers or as sophisticated as Radiohead. Rather, High Dive feels indebted to the brisk guitar pop of Foolish or Keep It Like a Secret—records emblematic of ’90s indie rock underdogs. Plenty of current artists take inspiration from that era: (Sandy) Alex G, Spencer Radcliffe, and even the Double Double Whammy founders who played in LVL UP have tapped similar nostalgia without allowing it to eclipse their individuality. While Henry’s not alone in his appreciation, hardly anything here feels new. Even the “yeah”s of opener “Can U” approximate Collective Soul’s “Shine.” It takes dedication to make an on-the-nose throwback like the boisterous “Surf Song,” but High Dive lacks any distinguishing eccentricities.
Worse, many of Henry’s lyrics are undercooked or almost comically immature. “Rain, rain, come to me/Come to me today,” he croons on “Rain, Rain,” a song he began writing at age 8 in hopes of getting Little League practice canceled. He rhymes “halo” with “lay low” and “head up” with “fed up”; earnest phrases like “I think you’re cool and I like you a lot” and “mellow like Jell-O” feel like Nickelodeon dialogue. It seems Henry wants to dig deeper, but when he turns to heavier subject matter, such as fleeting memories of his late father on “Can U,” it’s so shrouded in banality that you might miss it altogether. High Dive was conceived with high aspirations, but it runs out of steam on the very first spin.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Teen Dream is both the most diverse and most listenable of the Baltimore band's three full-lengths, and yet it never seems like a compromise.

Teen Dream

Beach House's sound was fully formed at the time of their 2006 debut. They had slow, shadowy dream-pop down; at times they recalled Mazzy Star or Galaxie 500, but songs like "Apple Orchard" and "Master of None" had a dark and blurry resonance all their own. Artists that start out so assured and distinctive can run into trouble on second, third, and fourth records. Hardcore fans are there no matter what, but others may wonder: Do I need another album from this band? When I'm in the mood for what they bring, can't I just put on what I already have?
Teen Dream, Beach House's third album and first for Sub Pop, obliterates these concerns. This is both the most diverse and most listenable of their three full-lengths, and yet it never seems like a compromise. It feels like the product of careful, thoughtful growth, bringing in new influences-- bits of mid-1970s Fleetwood Mac, sparkling indie pop, even a few soul and gospel touches--- while maintaining the group's core sound. Teen Dream is a stirring reminder that good things can happen when you move out of your comfort zone.
The interplay between Victoria Legrand's voice and droning keyboards and Alex Scally's guitars is still the key element of the band's aesthetic. But here, each song has its own palette, which creates new possibilities. So the repetitive guitar figure, double-time kick drum, and crashing cymbals in the opening "Zebra" immediately suggest movement, signaling that this record will have a dramatic sweep unheard on the band's more pensive beginnings. And the whispery "ah-ah-ah" backing vocals that open "Norway" imply a new openness to the allure of pop pleasure, as that bit of ear candy finds a sharp contrast in the seasick-sounding slide that hovers over the verses. More somber ballads like "Better Times" and "Silver Soul" have the thick, churning gloom familiar from earlier records, but they acquire more force by being placed alongside tracks that allow for more light. Front to back, the arrangements and sequencing are superb.
Despite the brighter, more pop-informed sound and an album title that brings to mind the hazy nostalgia of youth, Teen Dream has a pretty sad heart. Because the music is so effective, the churn of emotions is there even when you don't know exactly what Legrand is singing about (this can happen easily with her unusual phrasing). But a closer listen reveals songs about uncertainty, doubt, and feeling beaten down by the world. "Walk in the Park" sounds romantic on paper, but this is a journey taken alone as a way to try and forget someone who is no longer around. The choppy verses, nudged along by the sort of cheap drum machine Beach House use expertly to suggest loneliness, explode sideways into a shimmering chorus that finds Legrand busting out a time-heals-all-wounds affirmation over a calliope organ. This chorus turn is a big moment that gets more affecting with more listens, lunging from resigned sorrow to an anxious plea, and it accomplishes this mood swing with a damn catchy melodic hook. A similar lift-off happens on "10 Mile Stereo", when the song shifts from its deliberate opening bars to its rushing and noisy main section that's as close as Beach House have come to true shoegaze. The gorgeous racket is affixed to a song about feeling dead inside after another failed relationship: "Limbs parallel/ We stood so long, we fell."
Though the Teen Dream lyrics are printed in the booklet, they lose their power on the page. "Real Love", from the album's less immediate but equally rewarding second half, has my favorite imagery from the record, and is also Legrand's best vocal performance. At first, it's just her and a piano, with chords that lean toward gospel. Hearing her voice in such a spare setting reinforces just how rich, earthy, and, dare I say it, soulful it really is. "I met you somewhere in a hell beneath the stairs," she sings, "There's someone in that room that frightens you when they go boom, boom, boom." There's pain in these lines, but her cracking, husky intonation amplifies it tenfold. It's easy to miss that Legrand's presence is forceful and deep rather than ethereal and angelic, but here these qualities stand out like never before, lending her darker laments extra weight.
As with Liars' Drum's Not Dead, the Teen Dream CD comes with a DVD containing videos for each of the record's songs, all by different directors. The clips range from 8mm found footage to colorful Flash collages to silly stories that clash with the music in a big way. To be honest, it's a little overwhelming to be dealing with 10 videos when you're getting to know an album, and I'm not sold on this sort of package at this point. The DVD, while it looks reasonably interesting, seems like something to spend time with later, after the record has had a chance to sink in. For now, I'm more inclined to close my eyes and imagine my own pictures for Teen Dream. The music has been inspiring some pretty vivid ones.


The ascendent Buffalo rapper combines ’90s boom-bap and a love of wrestling for his latest, which features Anderson .Paak, Busta Rhymes, and more

Supreme Blientele

Along with his brother Conway, aka Conway the Machine, Westside Gunn has the distinction of being a rapper who made it out of Buffalo, New York. After a life in the streets, Gunn, who will turn 36 later this month, only started taking rap seriously in 2012, the same year Conway survived a bullet to the head.
Gunn is a mid-’90s revivalist whose high, creaky voice makes him sound younger than he is. He established himself with releases like the 2016 album Flygod (used copies go for hundreds) and his Hitler Wears Hermes series, both released through his own Griselda Records. Along the way, Gunn has collaborated with guys like Kool G Rap, MF Doom, and Royce da 5'9", and he and Conway inked a deal with Eminem’s Shady Records last year. (They were two of the guys standing in the background during Em’s Trump-bashing BET Hip Hop Awards freestyle last fall.) Underground rap fans have gravitated toward the authenticity of Gunn’s gloriously grimy boom-bap, and while his sound might be dated, he might’ve been a true star in an earlier era.
Gunn’s sophomore album, Supreme Blientele, actually has two other titles besides the one honoring Ghostface Killah: Chris Benoit and God Is the Greatest. Chris Benoit was the professional wrestler whose disturbing life story infamously ended with him murdering his wife and 7-year-old son before killing himself in 2007. Gunn released the album 11 years to the day after the first murder, and some might feel that attaching Benoit’s name to the project is some twisted, fucked-up shit (though Gunn has long incorporated his love of professional wrestling into his music and artwork, and most of the album’s song titles have to do with wrestling).
Overall, though, the album doesn’t play out as twisted or macabre, nor is it a concept album about Benoit. It’s a mostly satisfying hunk of ’90s revivalism, working from a dusty boom-bap framework without sounding rigid. It incorporates bright, colorful jazz, neo-soul, and psychedelic sounds courtesy of producers including the Alchemist, Pete Rock, 9th Wonder, Harry Fraud, and Griselda in-house producer Daringer. Atop their beats, Gunn’s favorite topics range from his experiences with the most desperate of fiends to his taste in designer clothes. It’s street-oriented lyricism that can be simultaneously blunt and vivid, as in the repetition of “Elizabeth”: “I know some niggas got two bodies and still a teenager/I know fiends that wanna lick the resi off the razor.”
While Gunn’s sound might be insular, Supreme Blientele is full of guest features. This works both for and against it. Sometimes Gunn fades too much into the background of his own album, but the collaborations also result in some of the best songs here, whether it’s Jadakiss and Griselda rapper Benny (aka Benny the Butcher) joining on “Gods Don’t Bleed,” Benny and a Salt Bae–referencing Busta Rhymes on “Brossface Brippler,” or Anderson .Paak singing all over the six-minute soul swirl “Wrestlemania 20.” Ultimately, while this crowdedness prevents Supreme Blientele from feeling like a definitive statement from Gunn as a rapper, the album can still function as a fine entry point to the fast-growing catalog of an ascendant rap cult hero.


This self-titled debut on Daptone Records follows a tried-and-true formula for the records: Hire incredible musicians and get out of their way.

The Olympians

The self-titled debut from the Olympians is a quintessential Daptone Records release, featuring many of the label’s best musicians as commissioned by the pianist and vibraphonist Toby Pazner. Pazner has played on many Daptone records himself, but he’s also occupied a Daptone-adjacent space as the keyboardist for the soul singer Lee Fields and others. That Aloe Blacc “I Need a Dollar” song you couldn’t escape—or stop listening to—in 2010? It was Pazner who played the signature piano take.
As a listener, there’s a certain delight in chasing down session musicians in an album’s credits and threading together their careers. In jazz especially, that type of context is rewarding, knowing that this guy played with that guy and is now leading his own thing with both of them involved. This is the position Pazner is in with the Olympians, commanding a group of regulars that includes members of the Dap-Kings, Lee Fields’ band, and other players like Michael Leonhart, a noted trumpet prodigy who directs Steely Dan’s band and was formerly a house player for the now-defunct label Truth and Soul Records. The Olympians is a Pazner pet project years in the making: piling these instrumentalists on top of each other, boxing them in with smart arrangements, and then letting them out to play.
A lot of The Olympians will sound familiar to Daptone devotees, but Pazner sneaks some ambitious switch-ups into a form frequently tied to grooves, and the addition of a sparse string section lends some space and delicacy to the sound. The usual discrete building blocks are never far: chugging wah-wah guitar, a persistently syncopated horn section, impeccable percussion. Halfway through “Venus,” a characteristically lush track that leans on bowing sideline strings, the song breaks in half—silent in the middle—to reveal a bumbling, then barking, then breathy, then rambling trumpet solo I’ve listened to dozens of times. Pazner smartly deploys dexterous solos like this throughout: an airy flute cuts through the end of the swampy funk opener “Sirens of Jupiter”; the reverse delay guitar on “Mars” achieves a measured psychedelic effect in contrast to the grace of the harp runs.
There are riffs on the album that feel pleasantly misplaced or slyly repurposed, barely recognizable in their new setting. “Sirens of Jupiter” features a tucked away but recurring single-note vibraphone step down that jolts back to Menahan Street Band’s “Tired of Fighting.” Pazner, unsurprisingly, played the instrument on both songs. Later, “Europa and the Bull” opens with a first-generation drum machine ping and sighing guitar twang that evokes Shuggie Otis on Inspiration Information.
The Olympians also sometimes tries to do too much: When “Mars” gives way to “Neptune,” a slowly uplifting number that almost floats away, it sounds like a heart-attack inducing cop chase scene that cuts into a happy-ending montage. The transitions between songs sometimes feel jostled together or even like sequencing mistakes. Still, like good session musicians, the Olympians never sound out of pocket.
Pazner has a fever-dream like backstory for The Olympians that explains the mythical band name and song titles, as if this were soul music for or from the Greek Gods. Perhaps it’s a more compelling narrative than “yet another Daptone instrumental funk album,” but that latter tagline is trustworthy for a reason. The label’s house sound isn’t borne out of try-hard duplication as much as a finely tuned cast; Pazner has exemplified that approach and added some flair with a string section and his own ear. A few years ago the Daptone co-founder and engineer Gabriel Roth fessed up to a studio secret in an interview with the trade publication Sound on Sound. “The sound you want really is coming from the musicians,” he said. “And when guys have played together for a while it's not a strain to get a good sound.” Pazner knows this stay-out-of-the-way tactic well, and the Olympians make their toughest tricks sound effortless because of it.


With all of Stephin Merritt's cleverness and theatricality, it's easy to forget that the Magnetic Fields started out as an indie pop band. Merritt didn't really establish himself as a widely feted songwriter until 1999's *69 Love Songs*, a far-flung compendium spanning acoustic ballads and skittery electro pop tracks. Merritt continued his conceptual unification streak with 2004's *i*, but that album's all-acoustic approach felt at odds with the songs themselves. (Compare the passable album version of "I Don't Believe You" with the vastly more fun single version.) While the overdone thematic focus of *i* generally seemed flat and frustrating, *Distortion*'s

Distortion

With all of Stephin Merritt's cleverness and theatricality, it's easy to forget that the Magnetic Fields started out as an indie pop band. Merritt didn't really establish himself as a widely feted songwriter until 1999's 69 Love Songs, a far-flung compendium spanning acoustic ballads and skittery electro pop tracks. Merritt continued his conceptual unification streak with 2004's i, but that album's all-acoustic approach felt at odds with the songs themselves. (Compare the passable album version of "I Don't Believe You" with the vastly more fun single version.) While the overdone thematic focus of i generally seemed flat and frustrating, Distortion's aesthetic conceit-- conveyed by its title-- is worn well, and its blown-out sound breathes life into a collection of songs that brings together many of the best ideas from Merritt's back catalog.
In the four years since i, Merritt has had plenty of opportunities to indulge his interest in all things theatrical, and that impulse is largely played down on Distortion. Instead, Merritt explores his 1960s pop fetish more directly than he has since the early 90s. Distortion is hardly a retread, though-- its fuzzy production substantially alters the focus and nature of Merritt's music. Opener "Three Way" serves as a straightforward statement of purpose; its simple, surf-y riff is almost unimaginable without a distorted guitar tone. Throughout Distortion, the squelching, tight-focus rhythmic interplay of Merritt's music is blown out into loud, distorted drum beats and smeared guitars, introducing a new level of messy, energizing depth to Merritt's characteristically stately and considered songwriting.
These aesthetic changes resonate emotionally as well, often lending Merritt's music a previously unexplored shambolic melancholy. "Old Fools" plods along beautifully, Merritt's lugubrious voice offset beautifully by the loud, squealing guitars behind it. Indeed, while Merritt has gotten more technically adept at singing, Distortion's hazy and reverb-drenched arrangements consistently prevent him from slipping into fey preciousness. At its best, the effect is similar to that of Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers, a wall of disintegrating feedback bringing out the most rough and human tones of Merritt's well-honed voice.
While the sonic treatment of Distortion flatters Merritt's singing, the album's greatest moments belong to Shirley Simms, the finest and most nuanced singer in Merritt's orbit. "Drive On, Driver" brings to mind The Charm of the Highway Strip with its serpentine melody and roadway imagery. "The Nun's Litany" is perhaps the best song on the record, cutting Jesus and Mary Chain guitar feedback and percussion with a striking, clean organ sound. And the audaciously titled "California Girls" is irresistible, bolstered by sly harmonies just peeking out from a sea of distorted guitar fuzz.
For all its boldness, though, "California Girls" is a bit obvious and overstated in its approach. This hardly makes the song less enjoyable, though-- thankfully, cleverness isn't really the point of this record. In fact, the more laid-back and loose feel of Distortion casts its more ostensibly funny moments (see the sing-songy intro to "Too Drunk to Dream") as anomalous and weirdly charming like the goofier tracks on a Robyn Hitchcock record. For the first time since Get Lost, the conceptual conceit of Merritt's work sounds like a well-considered and-- dare I say-- fun, jumping off point for a thoroughly solid album. As such, Distortion isn't a return to form so much as a return to content.


Wet are a Brooklyn three-piece that has flitted around synthpop, Cat Power-ish folk, '90s R&B, and modern alt-R&B without quite committing to any of them. Their debut album's main problem is a common one: if you set out to be an amalgam of beloved styles, you’d better equal and preferably outdo at least a couple of them somewhere along the line.

Don't You

At some point during the past year or so, adult contemporary R&B became au courant—blame nostalgia, blame retromania, blame folks in their twenties jonesing for the music they loved when they were eight—and it’s been disorienting. Some good can come of this: smashing up the canon, rediscovering some classics that got left out of pop culture’s ongoing "I Love the '90s"*-*ization, recognizing that Diane Warren is actually kind of a national treasure. Some good albums have come of it too—Solange’s True, Jessie Ware’s Tough Love, Dornik’s self-titled. But this stuff is harder than it sounds. Done right, you salvage everything timeless and nocturnal about the genre and leave the fustiness behind. Done wrong, you’ve written more of the filler songs you’d have found buried around track 12 of a Monica album, or the ballads that used to be near-contractual requirements for pop starlets needing "mature" cuts for their records.
Enter Wet, a Brooklyn three-piece that has flitted around synthpop, Cat Power-ish folk, '90s R&B, and modern alt-R&B without quite committing to any of them, which nevertheless positions them perfectly for starring roles in Baby’s All Right showcases, BBC Radio 1 playlists, and hair-whipping clips on Khloe Kardashian’s Instagram. (This is how we 2016.) The uninformed listener might think Wet would be fun. Their band name may or may not be a gag. Their former online presence, squashed for legal reasons, was @kanyewet—it’s goofy! It’s Yeezy! It’s maybe a grab for those typo clicks, if you want to get all cynical about it! Debut album Don’t You, however, is a downbeat, decidedly unfun affair—this is the kind of album where early single "U Da Best" turns into "You’re the Best," from which you can extrapolate a lot.
The main problem with Don’t You: if you set out to be an amalgam of beloved styles, you’d better equal and preferably outdo at least a couple of them once. Wet cite Usher and SWV as touchpoints in almost every press story, but seem to have forgotten all their exciting songs, as well as everything uptempo; most of Don’t You aims for Babyface but lands somewhere around Surfacing-era Sarah McLachlan, except nowhere near as good. Instrumentalists Joe Valle and Marty Sulkow reproduce the slick sounds of background music—synth pads, polite rhythm guitar, vague drum pitter-patter—with sample-replay fidelity. Vocalist Kelly Zutrau’s thin voice has none of the sighing wispiness of Romy Madley-Croft, Tracey Thorn, or even Jennifer Paige, nor the melisma or force of basically any R&B artist Don’t You emulates; her go-to tricks are (admittedly pretty and sometimes inspired) double-tracked harmonies or a Banks-y quaver that’s plaintive the first couple times you hear it. Their songs are near-identical takes on the wallow phase of a breakup, each rendered in passive, beige indifference—one misses the emotional peaks of '90s R&B, which go all the way up to "If You Died I Wouldn’t Cry." Yet telling-not-showing lines like "when you hold me, I still feel lonely" (responsible for perhaps the best/worst Genius annotation in recent memory) are nevertheless preferable to the likes of "today, New York feels like an island," a metaphor that manages the remarkable feat of being clichéd and geographically hilarious. (Perhaps they meant upstate?)
Don’t You isn’t without standouts. "Deadwater" is well-constructed, though better as a standalone single, and skittery "All the Ways" is a standout purely by dint of having a higher tempo. But two-for-eleven does not an album make. "Don’t Wanna Be Your Girl" drowns Brian McKnight’s "Back at One" and Cat Power’s "Good Woman" in a puddle of reverb and repetition. "Weak" is an approximation of what it might sound like if Meghan Trainor traded her poodle-skirt-costume versions of the '50s for roller-rink-costume versions on "Waterfalls." Either everyone involved with "You’re the Best" developed iron deficiencies before its re-recording, or it simply blends in with the rest of the album’s downtempo sulk.
Wet, to their credit and detriment, know they’ve got competition. "Our music plays into the more general trend of artists incorporating certain elements of R&B and pop into their sound and creating something really unique," Zutrau told Interview. But of those on-trend artists, Haim have more exuberance and better studio players; the xx have more space and ambition; almost any contemporary R&B act has more imagination, more rhythm, and more interesting blues. Wet know this too: "[We’re] now adults in a time when the music playing on Hot 97 is some of the most exciting music being made right now," Zutrau said. Perhaps the future might capture a bit of that excitement; some names floated as future Wet collaborators include Clams Casino (whose "Weak" remix is more sonically interesting alone than anything on this record) and Drake producer Nineteen85. As it stands, Wet may as well be directing readers toward better versions of them. And there have never been more to choose from.


The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer’s latest installment in his Become trilogy is expansive and inviting. The piece explores resonance and the way sounds mutate, stick in our heads, or just disappear.

Become Desert

John Luther Adams has long been a naturalist outsider to the insular world of classical music. In 2014, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Become Ocean, an orchestral piece that rumbles and bursts and flutters, pointedly bringing to mind the shifting tides of the sea. Become Desert is Adams’ sequel to his mammoth Ocean. The piece offers a calmer and more inviting journey than its predecessor. Desert is wide and expansive with a stillness that makes it the most forgiving piece of Adams’ Become trilogy, which also includes the intricate and winding Become River.
Across Desert, Adams explores resonance and the way sounds mutate, stick in our heads, or just disappear. A high-pitched ringing may stick around so long that you forget it’s gone when it’s morphed into another note. Sometimes that noise comes from a chorus of women singing “luz;” other times it’s violins holding a placid tone. It’s not the sort of place you want to sit and think, as may be the case with genre-tagged “ambient music.” But there’s also not the underlying dread present in Ocean. Instead, Desert offers some intangible glimmering: Bells and chimes ring only to plop away; horns swell gently but don’t linger. It doesn’t sound designed to exist for very long.
There’s a moment midway through Desert that recalls the “Sunrise” movement of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra. The Seattle Symphony, however, dampens the drums and brass for a much humbler evocation of sunrise. It’s emblematic of the piece as a whole: The nature that John Luther Adams wants to conjure is real, not some imagined fantasy of the outdoors to symbolize the human condition. Humanity is not built to survive the desert for long stretches. An orchestral piece about the desert should, Adams’ music suggests, reflect the inability to conquer vast swaths of arid land.
A darkness surrounded John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean. Strings quivered and crescendoed as drums rolled beneath them, instilling a sense of danger. The piece has lighter moments, but they’re quickly washed away by louder passages, as when piano roars behind the horns and strings. Hearing Ocean now highlights how restrained Desert is. The various instruments become indistinguishable at times, as if they’ve all decided to float together at a higher plane instead of crashing together from all different directions to envelop the listener. Even at its loudest, Desert does not feel menacing.
John Luther Adams has assessed nature’s extremes. There’s the ocean, which is inspiring and life-giving. But it’s also a beast, an unpredictable entity that will swallow you whole if you’re not careful. And now with the desert, Adams is reverent in his portrayal, reflecting the landscape’s openness and the ephemera that may flit in and out of the frame. With Become Desert, Adams portrays a respectful image of the world, full of beauty yet unknowable.


The melodic Texas rapper attempts to step out of Travis Scott's shadow with a debut that mimics Scott at every turn.

Don Toliver: Heaven or Hell

After becoming a fixture with Houston strip club and radio DJs, melodic Texas rapper Don Toliver was invited to a glass mansion on the water in Hawaii by Travis Scott. Together, the two made “Can’t Say,” a track on the back half of Astroworld that was Toliver’s breakout moment. Astroworld had something for everyone: Drake rapping about falling asleep after popping half a Xanax, Travis crooning over Tame Impala, a detour into the druggy haze of The Weeknd, Stevie Wonder harmonica lines. But Don Toliver pierced through the superstar glitz with his unique voice, which resembled a soulful robot.
Nearly two years later, Don Toliver is still inseparable from Travis Scott. He signed to Scott’s Cactus Jack imprint, but outside of appearances on the group album JACKBOYS and snippets passed around by those who have yet to miss a Travis merch bundle, he didn’t release much music. Toliver’s debut album, Heaven or Hell, is his first real follow-up to his Astroworld moment, but most importantly, it’s an attempt to stand on his own.
Unfortunately, listening to Heaven or Hell is like watching a younger brother mimic their older brother. Toliver’s album has all the makings of a typical Travis Scott project. It features the producers who precision-tooled his arena-ready sound (Wondagurl, Frank Dukes, and TM88), the unmistakable Mike Dean synthesizers, mailed-in guest verses from sundry Migos, and melody-heavy rap songs that can seamlessly blend into any playlist. It even has most of the same flaws: tracks like “After Party” come with verses that exist solely to fill time until the chorus. “Okay, I pull up, hop at the after party/You and all your friends, yeah, they love to get naughty,” sings Don on the hook. It works just fine, and you can imagine it playing anywhere—a Soho boutique, a Jenner Instagram story, a Rolling Loud set—but it’s hard to forget that it’s simply Don Toliver in Scott’s spot.
There’s a handful of good moments, all of which could have been reference tracks Travis passed on. “Cardigan” blends a perfectly crafted chorus with lush production; there’s a reason why fans were crying out for it after its YouTube snippet. Written out, some of Don Toliver’s hooks look like satire, “Don’t wa-wa-waste it/Don’t wa-wa-waste it,” he croons on “Wasted.” But over the grim Cássio production, reminiscent of an early Metro Boomin beat, it’s irresistible. And Don Toliver can sing; he’s spoken about the influence of R&B artists like Bobby Womack, and his 2018 mixtape was called Donny Womack. Though he rarely gets the chance to explore his emotional side, the stripped-down and soulful “Company” is the closest Don Toliver gets to staking out a style of his own.
Still, we never learn anything about Don Toliver, or why we might be listening to him. On “Candy,” he sounds lost in the production, and it’s hard not to imagine that the song would have been better as an instrumental. There are no hints of his personality, his musical taste, his daily life. Does he just wake up, go to the club, stand behind the DJ, drink too much, go home, and repeat it the next day? It’s disappointing, because it’s clear that while there might be more to Don Toliver than this, for now he seems comfortable existing in Travis Scott’s shadow.


A garage band as steeped in Pixies as Nuggets, Harlem's Matador debut is filled with bubblegum choruses flavored with booze and cigarettes.

Hippies

Young, emerging guitar rock bands are lately investing a lot of thought and time into ensuring that their pop music is as steeped in fuzz and scuzz as possible. Harlem are an Austin three-piece that opt out of messing with fuzz pedals and wear their grime on their sleeve instead. You might say they rub some people the wrong way. Their first record's title, Free Drugs, was punctuated with the following, ironically placed emoticon: ;-) Their band name doesn't do them any favors with the more politically correct. Their current press bio reads as though it came to its author on PCP, nonsense slapped together solely to give hapless music journalists migraines. :-( Their live set is comprised of as much on-stage, intra-band ribbing as their jukebox rock'n'roll. But they do seem to care deeply about one thing, and that's their songwriting.
A garage band studied in the ways of Nuggets but clearly enamored with Pixies, they are committed to crafting bubblegum choruses flavored with booze and cigarettes. Hippies, their Matador debut, showcases just how strong that commitment is from the opening bell. On "Someday Soon", sometime-frontman Michael Coomer runs us through an exchange in which his friend catches fire and asks for a little help being extinguished. The pleas are ultimately declined for kicks. It's sick but singable, the Nirvana-nodding "Torture Me" one other deliciously dark example. Coomer shares time playing guitar and drums with co-founder Curtis O'Mara, the two halving songwriting/guitar/lead vocal duties. The split provides a duality in tenor that does the record some serious good. When Curtis is in charge, as he is during the psychotropic shimmy of "Faces" or Casper tribute "Friendly Ghost", the bent is relatively hopeful. If the strep-throated Coomer has the reins, expect thunderstorms.
If Hippies has a flaw, it's only that it overstays its welcome by just a few minutes. By the time highway mood piece "Prairie My Heart" runs its haunting, three-minute course, it feels like an opportunity is missed to wrap things up. But then again, if you look at the way they've stacked hook on top of hook on top of hook, each so dangerously close to one another, it becomes clear that this is a singles parade more than an album. Also, "Stripper Sunset" jams awfully hard. It's pervy, but man does it ever jam.


Dropping knowledge is good. Pedantry, lecturing listeners and telling them what to think is bad. Those poles make up two sides bisected by a thin line, which Homeboy Sandman straddles for the entirety of his first LP with Stones Throw.

Homeboy Sandman: First of a Living Breed

First of a Living Breed

Dropping knowledge is good. Pedantry, lecturing listeners and telling them what to think is bad. Those poles make up two sides bisected by a thin line, which Homeboy Sandman straddles for the entirety of his first LP with Stones Throw, First of a Living Breed. Sand is one of the best pure lyricists around, and Stones Throw seems like a natural fit. It's the perfect place to get the kind of beats that a rapper like him thrives over-- glitchy, sideways drumlines and soul-infused sunbeats, phenotypes emerging fully-formed from the masters at Stones Throw's HQ.
But when Sand starts grandstanding on a song like "For the Kids", it's truly a waste. This is the song that Fred Rogers would have made, had he invested time in a hip-hop side project. I wish I could say that the tribute to Whitney Houston that starts the song off is tongue-in-cheek, but it's followed by such banal advice as quit smoking cigs and "go study for a quiz," "you're not an ugly duckling, you're a swan," and "the object of life ain't makin' bucks."
There's no problem with making a positive song. But there's a massive problem with making a song that's entirely comprised of advice that kids have heard a thousand times before, without even switching up the phrasings. There's only one way I can imagine this track getting any play with its target audience: in the eventuality that some desperate parents try to show their kids that hip-hop can be fun and healthy, they will no doubt turn to "For the Kids". And lessons like that turn kids on to metal.
Songs like "For the Kids" and the similarly useless "Cedar and Sedgwick" are aggravating because Homeboy Sandman is capable of so much more. When he takes a topic between his teeth and chews it, there are few rappers who can compete. In the past, on songs like "Angels with Dirty Faces" and "Mean Mug", Homeboy has taken topics as serious as homelessness or as innocuous as a scowl and constructed powerful lessons around them. These meditations were all the more puissant for the fact that the rapper seemed to be exploring them for the first time himself-- he was guiding, rather than lecturing.
Thankfully, there are plenty of songs on First of a Living Breed on which Sandman bats a topic around like a hyper-intelligent cat professor*,* seemingly confident that his students will learn something from watching the yarn unspool*.* The most casually impressive of these is the pretty piano-rap track "Couple Bars (Honey, Sugar, Darling, Sweetie, Baby, Boo)". Though it's ostensibly a pick-up song in the classic mold, Sand's slow, heavily-enunciated lyrics make for observations that are at least as amusing as a simple "Ay babay."
Lines like "I don't know if you are into sports but I am hoping so," (which comes after a Robinson Cano reference) are charming in their odd formality, and when Sand digresses, he's often pretty damn funny. "Wish I was your articles of clothes, just a particle of cotton on your cones, that'd be the most wonderful destiny ever, only possibility possibly better than being a stich on your sweater is being human and me and you together," he raps, internal rhymes going blammo. But the best part of the song is it's logical conclusion. After being so weird ("I've got you under my skin, nothin' fungal"), and going on for so long about the perfection of what turns out to be a perfect stranger, Sandman thanks the lady in question for "inspiring a hot record" whether or not she wants to take a walk with him. And therein lies the simplest of lessons: Do you, and don't sweat the response. If you're funny, that'll help.
Sandman takes on a host of more serious topics with the song "Illuminati", one of the best political rap tracks in a year positively writhing with them. Creeping production by J57 highlights the importance of listening closely, as Sand spits indisputable truth. On a song that goes as deep as this, and with my limited word count, it's best to just pick out some highlights. "Every man is not created equal, we're all created mad different, some are bad people." "Think [cops] are tapping your computer, your computer is a tap." "The war on drugs has been goin' on for awful long, folks married to the game instead of dating off and on." "We used to beat on Bush but now he's not around so people found a different bush to beat around." Though the song doesn't necessarily have a clear subject, its dual messages are simple: Don't believe what you're told and think hard.
"Show, don't tell," is the oldest, most clichéd writing advice ever, the kind of overused aphorism that I'd expect Homeboy Sandman, on one of his off-days, to spit in a song called "For the Writers". And yet, the difference between his good songs and his bad songs on this album is the difference between showing and telling. The brilliant writing on First of a Living Breed (along with songs mentioned above, there's the sunny, Oddisee-produced "Watchu Want From Me?", album opener "Rain" and exotic "The Ancient") would position the album as a candidate for one of the year's best rap records if it weren't for those drawback tracks. As it is though, we'll have to take this one as a compromised effort, and hope that, next time out, Homeboy Sandman can avoid taking us places to which we've been before.


Death Grips' fourth album Government Plates loudly reestablishes the band as a group freed by having no ideals whatsoever, making music without a past about a present with no future. It isn’t defined by dissonance, volume, or abrasion so much as discomfort, Death Grips trying to figure out how to advance a sound that won’t stay still.

Government Plates

Whenever Death Grips get accused of bad intentions, they’re usually guilty of bad judgment. It’s easy to understand why people get offended by their dick moves, both literal and figurative. But for anyone invested in the group as an artistic entity, all of this retro and regressive Punk 101 chicanery serves as a distraction or a depletion from music that derives a purer shock value by sounding like it has no real precedent. If nothing else, their fourth album Government Plates is a reminder that, right, Death Grips make music! And it drops without any narrative context or controversy about its packaging, its label situation, or their disappearance from social media—like your parents, Death Grips have a Facebook page and unlike NO LOVE DEEP WEB or Sky Ferreira’s album, Government Plates boasts a cover that won’t get you temporarily booted off the site. With a lack of external talking points and most of indie rock's ire currently being directed elsewhere, Government Plates loudly reestablishes Death Grips as a group freed by having no ideals whatsoever, making music without a past about a present with no future.
And here’s the squalid moment in which Death Grips find themselves: a bottle breaks, an air raid siren serves as MC Ride’s alarm clock, and he defaces his scrambled, arrhythmic rapping with batshit shrieking. Is it meant to suggest that he’s waking up from a bad dream? Or is he just being tasered mid-verse? As you might expect, Government Plates spends about half its time expressing its paranoia and the other half justifying it; enforcers are shadowy and lurking, their use of power always theoretical and impending, spelled out in the titles for people who have no interest in engaging with the thrilling music herein. But are we to cut through the battered radio soundclash of “Bootleg (Don't Need Your Help)” and the mesmerizing drones of seven-minute closer “Whatever I Want (Fuck Who’s Watching)” with Occam’s Razor and assume it’s all directed at Epic or concert promoters?
You could do that, though Government Plates functions as a Rorschach and not just because many of these songs are ugly, amorphous inky splatter. Throughout, Ride smears words and multiple meanings unwittingly tease themselves out—darting over and through Zach Hill’s drums like they're a tire maze, Ride mutters “L.A. creeping under my skin,” or possibly “scales.” This is from “Big House”, so is the title an understood synonym for prison or a reference to how Death Grips blew Epic’s money by living at the Chateau Marmont? During “Birds”, is Ride saying “I got higher, I got fake”? Or is it, “I got hired, I got fake?”  “I got hired, I got paid”? Is it a critique of drugs, of corporate influence or a boast about how Death Grips have made a career largely out making people who give them money look stupid?
It’s easy to assume something this purposefully noided is Death Grips crafting a response, that they’ve been cornered by the music industry, expectations of fans, something on the outside. But to conclude that Death Grips are reacting to anything strips them of their unique power. You will learn nothing about how they feel about, say, about Obamacare, the NSA or Yeezus, a record that may have not been directly influenced by Death Grips but was likely aware of their existence. Death Grips may have endured a tough year, but they brought almost all of it upon themselves, and Government Plates is a pointedly proactive record that seeks out its own stimuli; and that’s why their pranks are nowhere near as interesting as their self-inflicted stunts. As with Bikram yoga or a hunger strike, artificially heightened circumstances help them realize internal purity.
So Government Plates isn’t defined by dissonance, volume, or abrasion so much as discomfort, Death Grips trying to figure out how to advance a sound that won’t stay still. “You might think he loves you for your money but I know what he really loves you for it's your brand new leopard skin pillbox hat” is a good place to start. That’s an unwieldy title that at least has room to say everything it needs to. The song itself cramps what could otherwise be a wubbed-out dubstep appropriation into a gawky 6/8 meter. Ride discovers a staggered cadence that works between corroded pinwheel synths and drums that evoke the crunch of a stomped cockroach during “Anne Bonny”. Then the beat switches just to see if he’s willing to contort himself into its spaces (he accepts).
You can certainly project anger onto Death Grips, it’s tough to imagine happy people making this kind of music.  But hey, might as well party at ground zero. Death Grips can actually be fun, or at least promise a payoff to all this stress. In that way, it recalls The Money Store, which in retrospect was the kind of album a major label would’ve been very pleased with after signing Death Grips, i.e., one with actual bars-and-hooks songs. Government Plates is also filled with hooks, if you remember that the word is also a synonym for a boxer connecting flush with your face. MC Ride is every bit as percussive as Zach Hill, and Zach Hill’s drums can prove to be a mouthpiece that’s more fluent and expressive than its human counterpart. “Two Heavens” and “Im Overflow” in particular are hip-hop as survivalist minimalism, merging little more than vocal texture and percussion into chest-puffing B-boy boasts.
And hell, Death Grips can be kinda funny, too. You can’t be this premeditated with knowing what people think about you and if it wasn’t clear that a) there is a joke and b) Death Grips is in on it, there’s a song called “This is Violence Now (Dont get me wrong)”. Remember when MC Ride namedropped Magical Mystery Tour curiosity “Blue Jay Way” and Santana’s Abraxas on The Money Store*?*  If not, the first song on Government Plates is a Bob Dylan reference. If a Dadaist Death Grips nursery rhyme sounds hilarious in concept, that’s because “Birds” is pretty much just that. Ride sneers “I cop this attitude at all times,” in a posh, flippant accent, the kind attributable to someone vapid enough to say “I cop this attitude.”
An awkward one-off upon its original release, “Birds” serves as a pivot for Government Plates, the point where “new Death Grips” starts to become Death Grips doing something legitimately new. Some parts of Government Platesare actually pretty and not in that perverse, S&M way. And during the second half, they get awfully close to proper dance music, or at least its rigorous structure and of course, this formalism makes for even more interesting tension. “Feels like a wheel” is Death Grips’ take on HI-NRG drum and bass, which is to say, it focuses less on emotional ecstasy than the artificial components and side effects of the club drug, the toxic chemicals and fried nerve endings. The only intelligible lyric is “let me live my life,” which turns the title into a double entendre, it could mean “rolling” or just being stuck. “Im overflow” about sums up how Death Grips react to stability and yet it hinges on Ride’s most straightforward battle rapping, punctuated with a yell of “hot shit!’
Government Plates isn’t here to teach you a lesson. When Death Grips are overt about what they think, they often come off like bratty teenagers, acting out against people who want to help them. Unlike the blunt, confrontational NO LOVE DEEP WEB, Government Plates lets you think for yourself and even if it doesn’t have an agenda, that doesn’t mean it’s nihilistic.  It’s music that doesn’t care about how you feel, just how you react to it. All the same, it doesn’t exist in a vacuum and when Death Grips interact with the public, they can produce something elemental, in a literal sense where the periodic table can take violent turns: oxidation, sulfur fumes, nitrous, horrible fluorescents and neon, fossil fuel. Or, maybe a hydrogen bomb, with all of its attendant amorality: Death Grips provide the power, you provide the politics.


Recorded in 1978 and shelved for two decades, what should have been the band’s London Calling befuddled record execs who didn’t know what to do with a B-movie-obsessed punk with an Elvis croon.

Static Age

When Static Age finally saw the light of day, in 1996, as part of The Misfits box set, it felt more like a time capsule being unearthed than a record release. By that point, singer Glenn Danzig had long since abandoned his corpse paint and so-called “horror punk” origins in search of bluesier, Black Sabbath-inspired pastures with Samhain and, ultimately, the eponymous Danzig. Bassist and co-founding member Jerry Only, on the other hand, found Jesus, as well as full-time work in his family’s machine shop, before converting his absurdly named Christian metal band Kryst the Conqueror into a new incarnation of Misfits in 1995, thanks to an out-of-court settlement with Danzig and the installation of a 19-year-old scab singer known as Michale Graves.
The long-overdue release of Static Age shed a painful light on the absurdity of having a kid not yet of drinking age sing Danzig’s lyrics about Patty Hearst, Vincent Price, and a Kenneth Anger book from the late 1950s. After all, the record’s thematic content was refracted through the hyper-specific lens of what a young Glenn Anzalone had watched on TV in the 1960s and 1970s, growing up across the river from New York City in the North Jersey suburbs. The 17 songs that would eventually comprise Static Age were recorded in 30 hours over the course of a few months in 1978, in a barter with Mercury over a trademark Danzig held. The result was a tight 35 minutes of catchy hardcore paired with Danzig’s rockabilly-inspired baritone vocals—what should have been Misfits’ scorching debut album, recorded a scant nine months after the band had formed. In a fairer world, Static Age would have been their breakout record, their London Calling or their Never Mind the Bollocks. Best laid plans and all.
The record ended up collecting dust on a shelf for almost 20 years, because no label would touch it. “We talked to Chrysalis Records, who were doing Blondie and Billy Idol, and they didn’t want it,” Only said in a 2015 interview. “We talked to Sire Records, who were doing the Ramones and Richard Hell, and they didn’t want it.” On paper, it’s easy to see why Misfits were a tough sell. The band’s fixation on horror B-movies and pre-Oliver Stone JFK conspiracy theories probably made them look remarkably less sophisticated, and, dare I say, less cool, than their cosmopolitan New York City punk peers. After all, Danzig was a grown-ass man singing lyrics like, “We’re teenagers from Mars/And we don’t care” and “Return of the fly/With Vincent Price/Yeah, return of the fly.” While the Ramones and Blondie were pushing gritty downtown glamour, Misfits embraced suburban ennui and built a campy aesthetic based on old black-and-white midnight monster movies. While Joey Ramone and Tom Verlaine were wispy, reedy, and slender, Danzig was a squat, solid fire hydrant of a man, and his similarly jacked bandmates resembled shop-class meatheads more likely to beat up high-school punks than start their own bands.
Although the majors turned up their nose at songs sung by a guy demonstrating a pronounced Elvis influence, about zombies from outer space, infanticide, and a grieving first lady lapping semen out of Danzig’s palm, the tracks eventually found an audience, years after the band’s early-1980s split, via various EPs, singles, and collections. Misfits didn’t release a proper debut album until 1982’s Walk Among Us, but by that point, the production was far more polished. What set Static Age apart was the palpable urgency of a young band eager to prove itself—that and an almost surgical knack for crafting infectious melodies. It helped that Danzig was so eager to show off his vocal range, rather than taking the Ian MacKaye or Henry Rollins route and just barking lyrics. A punk band can do a lot within the typical three-chord limitations when it has a frontman with velvety pipes and a propensity for showboating. On Static Age, Misfits proved themselves capable of writing catchier riffs than virtually any of their peers—never mind the subject matter. Good luck finding a group of teens over the past few decades that hasn’t broken into spontaneous karaoke when “Last Caress” kicks in on the car radio. Anyone who can resist shouting “I killed your baby today” after Danzig’s gauntlet-dropping “I got something to say” would probably fail a Voight-Kampff test.
Whether it was a calculated move or not, Static Age demonstrated just how quickly the band was evolving. The record opens with the title track and “TV Casualty,” two perfectly fine but unremarkable hardcore romps, before launching into “Some Kinda Hate.” Suddenly, we’re smack in the middle of Misfits’ deranged world: “The maggots in the eye of love/Won’t copulate,” Danzig moans, yet the Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh chorus wouldn’t sound out of place on an old doo-wop 45. Damned if he doesn’t make the celibacy of fly larvae sound heartbreaking. The journey from there down the tracklisting shows a band embracing its unrefined, weirdo, and sometimes downright dorky influences and ultimately discovering what makes it unique.
Static Age’s greatest triumph is the way it makes 90-second songs about goblins and ghouls sound legitimately dangerous, even romantic, instead of silly. It takes a real commitment to the bit to croon the line, “When new creatures rape your face/Hybrids opened up the door,” (“Hybrid Moments”) and make it sound like it was plucked from a Roy Orbison ballad rather than a deleted Simon and Hecubus sketch from “The Kids in the Hall.” Perhaps Misfits pulled it off so well was because for Danzig, the macabre aesthetic wasn’t an act, but a lifestyle. The frontman spent years living in a decrepit Loz Feliz Craftsman that looked more like a haunted house straight out of a “Scooby-Doo” cartoon than the dwelling of a bona fide rock star.
The shelving of Static Age didn’t halt the band’s success, but it did impede it. Misfits eventually played audiences of tens of thousands; it just took about 35 years of acrimony and protracted legal battles between Danzig and Only to get there. “About 40 years ago, Jerry and I got onstage in New York,” Danzig said onstage last year at Riot Fest in Denver, “and we shocked the whole fucking punk scene who didn’t know what the fuck to make of us.” Audiences eventually figured it out—it just took a few decades.


The electropop band's second LP doubles as its attempt at kicking and screaming its way out of punchline hell.

Odyssey

Why exactly was I supposed to hate Fischerspooner again? They dress like spangley futuristic mime robots, which I suppose is sort of annoying, but that really doesn't have anything to do with their music. They bankrupted their record label and waited way too long to put their first album out, but again, all that stuff is strictly extra-musical. They actively and knowingly marketed themselves as electroclash, but Fischerspooner has much more in common musically with the Scissor Sisters than Miss Kittin or A.R.E. Weapons. They've never managed to make anything as great as their first single, but then "Emerge" was such a dizzy, searing monster jam that it'd be hopeless to hold any group to that standard forever.
So the only real reason I can think of to hate Fisherspooner is the vwerdle-vwerdle-vwerdle oscillating synth-bass sound they use on every single song. This can grow tired after an entire album, but it's a good, malleable sound, as effective on breathy, luxuriant opium-disco tunes like "A Cloud" as on swooping, lazy filter-Fleetwood-Mac tracks like "Happy". And plus you can ratchet up the pitch a bunch on the chorus and the song will automatically sounds way more intense.
On Odyssey, the group piles on huge, clattering drums, mournful house pianos, deliriously sleazy strutting white-funk guitars. The album's production is clean enough to sterilize needles; everything has a lavish, glossy cocaine sheen. The group has recruited help from pop-music pros like Mirwais (who produced Madonna's "Music", which is fucking awesome) and Linda Perry (who wrote Pink's "Get This Party Started", which is fucking awesome). They got the now deceased Susan Sontag to write the lyrics for "We Need a War", which is nice, but it's not like anyone ever listens to the lyrics on Fischerspooner songs.
Odyssey is Fischerspooner's attempt at kicking and screaming their way out of punchline hell, so it's a bit of a surprise how good everything sounds. The deluxe, swirley disco tracks that begin the album slide nicely into the brittle new-wave funk and imperiously sighed synthed ballads. All of this builds beautifully to the group's cover of the Boredoms' smeary psychedelic symphony "Circle". It's something of a shock hearing the Boredoms' messy drum-circle monolith translated through Fischerspooner's glammy synths, but the group approaches the song with the majestic fervor it demands, and the result is a truly gorgeous pileup.
Odyssey isn't a great album: Many of the vocal hooks are weak and underfed, the group never finds the widescreen abandon of "Emerge", and there's that synth burble on every song. But the group has managed to come up with an appealingly grand, ridiculous epic, more than anyone could reasonably expect from these forgotten freaks. So find some other band to hate. May I suggest Kings of Leon?


Unlike the previous Alone iterations, Alone III: The Pinkerton Years feels like an actual Weezer album rather than Rivers Cuomo's yard sale. It's a bracing, imperfect reminder of a time when music was something Cuomo couldn't live without.

Rivers Cuomo: Alone III: The Pinkerton Years

Alone III: The Pinkerton Years

You'd think Alone III: The Pinkerton Years would work like Rivers Cuomo's past installments of vault clearance: In exchange for being offered these very #rare and #based freestyles, you, Weezer Superfan, will not do something so petty as to question the need for their release. Ah, but note the subtitle: "The Pinkerton Years." It's a powerful but potentially dangerous sales pitch. Alone III comes sidelong with The Pinkerton Diaries, a $75 (and thus collectors-only) volume that compiles Cuomo's "journals, emails, letters, photos, and school papers" from the Pinkerton era and offers "an intimate look into the writing and recordings of Rivers Cuomo from 1994-1997." Which threatens not only redundancy but a complete undermining of Pinkerton's integrity*.* "I thought Pinkerton was Cuomo's diary," you might be thinking. "He was holding back on us? Editing?" Does this compromise the perceived purity of such a powerful record?
Then again, Pinkerton has always been accompanied by a healthy serving of half-truths, tall tales, and revisionist history. But you can see why so many want to give it a protected status: Cuomo was far more embarrassed by its Billboard failure than anything he actually said on Pinkerton, and his output since then has been the work of someone with severe commercial abandonment issues. But Alone III doesn't feel like a cash-in like the Pinkerton reissue or 2010's Memories Tour, in which the band (minus bassist Matt Sharp) played their first two albums in full. No, this is something else entirely. With its whiplash sequencing (26 tracks in far less than an hour), low production values, minute-long asides, and pause-record tape overdubs, Alone III seems to ask: What would've happened if Rivers Cuomo had wanted to be Robert Pollard or Lou Barlow for the rest of the 90s?
So if you value these archaeological digs as an opportunity to construct an alternate band history, Alone III is easily Cuomo's most worthwhile project since*,* well, Pinkerton. But what's truly surprising is that it satisfies in actuality as much as it does in theory, and not just because it puts a bunch of Pinkerton songs in the mix. Alone III actually deconstructs that record by spreading out into three sections, providing anchors for Cuomo's mini-suite ambitions rather than the lead-up to Pinkerton's autobiographical payoff ("Across the Sea", "The Good Life"). Fully formed but raw-as-hell versions of "Getchoo" and "Tired of Sex" mesh easily with Cuomo's off-the-cuff material and allow Alone III to exist in its own orbit as a no-fi, freewheeling, and ultimately fun record that either Geffen or Weezer wouldn't allow themselves to ever release in the midst of the record industry's then-booming economy.
Even with the impression that Cuomo is dipping into his private stock, a lot of this will be familiar to non-diehards, like the two-minute surge of "You Gave Your Love to Me Softly" that leans to the latter side of "pop-punk" and could've replaced "Why Bother?" on Pinkerton with a 180-degree attitude change. And it's tough to imagine Weezer ever pulling off something like "Lisa". Its blues-bend Kiss riffs would've been employed too smirkingly, its charming chorus harmonies polished to anonymity, and its lyric about a workplace crush ("I wish I didn't work for you/ All we ever seem to do is business/ Read and sign and fax this") extended beyond its means into dad-humor.
So those are the reasons why III is the most like an actual Weezer album of any of the Alone records, and the least like a Cuomo yard sale. But the real pleasure is in how Alone III casts the creative up-ramp to Pinkerton as an inspired if not always productive time for Cuomo-- you can practically visualize his brain giddily whirring with a flood of new ideas and classicist ambitions. Sure, there are 50-second sketches that have limited replay value outside of Alone III, but they keep the end-to-end listen brisk and pleasurable. Elsewhere, some songs are so self-explanatory and complete that they don't need much elaboration ("I'm So Lonely on a Saturday Night"), others crash into a dead end ("Oh God, I'm Hungry", "The End of My String"), and of course, some are just flat out unlistenable ("What Is This I Find?").
In a Spin interview leading up to Pinkerton's re-release, Cuomo expressed why he enjoyed going back to these tapes even though he's far more excited by his new material, saying "I was really touched by the emotion in my voice… there's so much sensitivity and pain." Alone III's last track would seem to reiterate that: On "One Glorious Moment", Cuomo gives a post-operation captain's log, confiding to a tape recorder, "I actually peed for the first time on my own… it was a glorious moment. I'm going to try to set up some music to listen to, goodbye." That candor can be seen as being every bit as self-obsessed and pandering as Hurley or Death to False Metal, but that last line sticks out. Alone III is a bracing, imperfect reminder of a time when music was something Cuomo just couldn't live without.


Building a hypnotic counterpoint between a bright chamber-music ensemble and groaning analog synthesizers, composer Elori Saxl’s debut is an investigation of emotion and seasonal change.

The Blue of Distance

Much has changed in music since Antonio Vivaldi unveiled his set of four concerti, The Four Seasons, some 300 years ago. Yet composers’ awe and fascination for the ecological cycle remains undiminished. Edvard Grieg’s To Spring? The Mamas & the Papas’ “California Dreamin’”? DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s “Summertime”? All are paeans to the strange wonder of something as inevitable and elementary as, say, the first warm day of spring, or the humid ecstasy of summer.
In its own way, so is The Blue of Distance, the quietly mesmerizing debut album by Elori Saxl, a Brooklyn-based composer and filmmaker with an interest in how technology alters humans’ connection to nature. Saxl wrote the first half of the album in mid-summer, during a blissful stay in the Adirondack Mountains. She wrote the second half months later, in northern Wisconsin, her mood darkened by winter. “I was staying at my family’s place on an island in Lake Superior surrounded by ice and gray skies, and I was feeling pretty low,” Saxl said. “I would look at photos from my summer and try to remember what it had felt like to be there and then to write music from that now-distant place.”
This would be an intriguing academic exercise, but Saxl’s music—which builds a hypnotic counterpoint between a bright chamber-music ensemble and groaning analog synthesizers—works on an emotional level as well. The Blue of Distance is unusually beautiful, drawing on the gushing orchestral minimalism of 1970s Steve Reich (“Blue,” “Memory of Blue”), the dramatic harmonics of Philip Glass’ Glassworks (“Wave II”), and even Matmos’ flair for found-sound samples. Saxl incorporates processed recordings of wind and water, but instead of foregrounding these natural sounds, she manipulates and molds them into quasi-beats. A track’s only rhythm section, so to speak, may be the sound of water flowing beneath ice.
The “summer” half of the record is rich with bubbling strings and buoyant woodwinds, based around music written for an 18-person chamber orchestra. There are no vocals, but Saxl’s melodic gift shines through, propelling the gorgeous, oboe-driven “Wave I.” The “winter” half is more brooding and spacious. By her own judgement, Saxl failed to replicate the emotions of summer: “That process didn’t work,” she writes, “but what resulted was perhaps more interesting: a distorted version of the original experience.” On “Memory of Blue,” the swelling strings feel distant and strained, as if the composer’s own memory were fading in and out.
Ambient music is sometimes associated with reverent stillness, but one of the best qualities of The Blue of Distance is its constant, pulsing movement. The modular synths of “Blue” chug and whirr like steam locomotives. The ascending cello scales of “Wave II” are always in motion, seamlessly morphing from bowed strings to pizzicato notes; below, a percussive loop rustles and clangs like rusty machinery. (This loop, strangely enough, resembles the field recordings from Panda Bear’s 2007 classic “Take Pills.”) Only the final track, a seven-minute drone, lacks this sense of movement. It’s the album’s least compelling piece, drifting off into a melancholic sigh.
Listening at home, I find myself longing to hear the album in actual motion—on an airplane or a speeding train, peering out at lakes or mountains like those that inspired Saxl. In a time of quarantine, that’s a distant fantasy—fitting, perhaps, for an album so focused on interrogating the limitations of memory and technology to create real sensation. Luckily, The Blue of Distance is expressive enough to conjure a sensory experience of its own.

Buy: Rough Trade
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