The Pakistan-born, U.S.-based musician draws on the migrant’s deep well of loss and longing, weaving traditional South Asian musical forms into lushly textured folk, ambient, and dream pop.

TALISMAN

Five years ago, Zeerak Ahmed was going through a rough time. The Pakistan-born, U.S.-based musician, artist, and academic—who performs as Slowspin—would spend hours in bed, struggling with a constantly aching throat and a heart that felt “unbearably heavy.” Unable to sing, she would exhale slowly in drawn-out musical notes, trying to ease the pain and center herself. It wasn’t until months later, jamming at her friend Shahzad Ismaily’s Brooklyn studio, that she found the Urdu words from an old Sufi kalam coming unbidden to her lips: “Hamari, kuch yaad bhi hai hamari (Do you have any memory of us)?”
That moment of serendipity—inherited poetry emerging from subconscious depths and surfacing on a sea of improvised sound—gave birth to her new album TALISMAN. Recorded over three days of exploratory sessions at Ismaily’s studio and three subsequent years of painstaking production, TALISMAN draws on the contemporary migrant’s deep reservoirs of loss and longing—for a homeland that has changed in their absence, for the lost certainty of a non-hyphenated identity—and connects them to the devotional yearning of Sufi saints and Bauls, minstrels who have wandered South Asia for centuries searching for a path to the divine. Over 10 unhurried songs, folksy finger-plucked guitar, ambient synth washes, and empyrean strings coalesce into lush textural soundscapes, windows into the shared dreamworld of seekers across the ages. Ahmed’s lilting, incantatory vocals—often melancholic, sometimes incandescent—guide us down this mystic’s yellow brick road, a charismatic presence offering succor to fellow pilgrims on their journey into the unknown.
Opener “Holay” begins with Ahmed’s voice swirling in sun-dappled loops, drifting in leisurely counterpoint to co-producer Grey McMurray’s resonant piano and Alison Shearer’s ethereal flute, while Greg Fox’s drums rumble in the backdrop, like distant, arrhythmic storm clouds. The Urdu lyrics, borrowed from an old dadra (a semi-classical Hindustani vocal genre), speak of separation from a lover gone far away. Ahmed hails from Karachi’s muhajir (literally, immigrant) community, Muslims from across North India who were uprooted in the bloody chaos of India’s Partition and displaced across a freshly drawn border. She draws on that inheritance of generational trauma here, and through the rest of the album, as she repeats the song’s heartsick refrain, her voice shading each repetition in overlapping hues of meaning and emotion.
The ghosts of ancestral loss and displacement also haunt tracks like the lovesick “Piya”—centered on Ahmed’s wounded vocals and the raspy scrape of fingers sliding down a guitar’s neck—and the more distant ache of the meditative “Lilt and Forget.” As the record progresses, the red-hot pain of loss gives way to the dull throb of acceptance, and a grim determination to forge new paths into the unknown.
“Trails” brings Lovecraftian, new-weird visual imagery into conversation with these old-world dreamscapes, as Ahmed’s woozy falsetto traces a luminous path over staccato drums and grandly sweeping synths, a lonesome presence wandering a labyrinthine maze. Sinister tension rises on the Hindustani classical-tinged avant-pop of “In These Eyes You Reside” before giving way to a newly assured sense of self on closer “Belong,” as Ahmed reclaims her many identities and far-flung roots.
On lead single “Hamari”—sprung from that first sentence emerging unbidden in the jam room—TALISMAN’s many threads of personal and familial history, cultural inheritance, and syncretic devotion come together in perfect harmony. The lyrics borrow from a Purbi devotional poem originally written by Muslim Sufi poet Nawab Sadiq Jung Bahadur Hilm, invoking the Hindu god Krishna, in an example of the cross-religious syncretism that once characterized the subcontinent’s cultural traditions. Ahmed came by the song through her Hindustani classical gurus, in the form of a thumri—a light classical vocal style—from her family’s original homeland of Uttar Pradesh, now across the border in India.
The thumri itself is a form on which many of the conflicts and tragedies of contemporary South Asia left its mark. Originating in the 19th century in the decadent, slowly collapsing empires of North India, it was sung by courtesans as they danced for audiences of aristocratic men, blending erotic titillation and devotional desire in equal measure. Though their lives were circumscribed by patriarchal notions of honor, caste, and class, these courtesans found space for artistic self-expression in the thumri, with its emphasis on imbuing phrases with multiple meanings. This proto-feminist history is inscribed in the form, but it’s been obscured by over a century of patriarchal sanitization in service of competing religio-nationalist projects, which pushed the thumri to the margins of the Hindustani classical canon.
Ahmed’s recent academic and curatorial work has focused on female folk musical traditions in South Asia, and her experiments with thumri and dadra on TALISMAN are strongly informed by that archival work. By taking the thumri and recontextualizing it for contemporary music—ambient, dream pop, guitar-based folk—she is excavating this buried alternative history. These centuries-old songs and traditions send down fresh roots into new soil on TALISMAN, still aching for home but open to new possibilities for growth, new histories to write. Much like Ahmed herself, and millions of others in the South Asian diaspora. “They tell me not to plant things where they don’t belong,” Ahmed sings in understated defiance on the closing “Belong.” “What if that’s all I know?”


On this hybrid album of jazz and Afrobeat, long-time Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen makes the complex sound effortless. Rarely has percussive innovation sounded this downright satisfying.

The Source

Making your way through the formidable back catalog of long-time Fela Kuti drummer Tony Allen—one that spans nearly half a century—is a revelatory, sometimes head-spinning journey. Allen’s work has traversed styles that on the surface have little in common beyond his unique rhythmic presence. In the past 10 years, for example, Allen has tackled everything from Afrobeat (on solo album Film of Life), dreamy French pop (with Charlotte Gainsbourg), downbeat indie rock (with The Good, the Bad & the Queen), and techno (with the Moritz Von Oswald Trio). This range is a testament to both Allen’s redoubtable drumming skills and his ability to rein in his percussive ego in support of the job at hand.
Curiously, though, for a drummer who absorbed so much of his percussive knowledge from the work of Max Roach and Art Blakey, there was little place in Allen’s catalog for actual jazz until 2017. In May of this year, he released a tribute to Blakey and his Jazz Messengers on legendary jazz label Blue Note. That EP, which saw Allen filter Blakey’s hard swing through his own Afrobeat elasticity, serves as a brilliant precursor to The Source, with which it shares label, musicians, and influences. More importantly, The Source shares a fascinating musical hybridity with the Blakey EP. It’s a continuation of the cultural back-and-forth between African music and jazz that, decades ago, saw Blakey absorb West African musical influences on albums such as 1962’s The African Beat, and Allen mold the influence of jazz into the Afrobeat sound.
But The Source isn’t a jazz album, per se: Allen’s drums don’t typically swing so much as jitter and jiggle, with boundless syncopated rhythms that sound like a giant squid menacing a drum kit. Nor is it an Afrobeat album, with Allen’s band comprised largely of Parisian jazz musicians plus Cameroonian guitarist Indy Dibongue; Damon Albarn makes a low-key contribution to “Cool Cats.” Rather, this is an album that straddles jazz and Afrobeat in an elegant push-and-pull that sometimes edges closer to the former, sometimes wanders closer to the latter, and often sits joyfully in the middle.
On “Wolf Eats Wolf,” for example, a scratchy Afrobeat groove—all sputtering, percussive organ and ecstatic brass riffs—gives way to a wandering trombone solo. Album opener “Moody Boy” goes in the other direction: a scattered, jazzy introduction that sounds semi-improvised, dissolving into chicken-scratch guitar rhythm and tough funk drums. The hybrid tone of the band is hugely important to this mix, with the Afrobeat licks of Dibongue’s choppy guitar style balanced by the more classically jazz texture of Mathias Allamane’s double bass.
Freed from the role of support act, Allen is the unequivocal star of The Source, wallowing in the wonderful freedom of rhythmic expression. His unique drumming style rarely resorts to repetition as it alternately responds to and drives changes in the music. The result is a percussive masterclass, from the nervous energy of “Bad Roads,” where Allen’s mongrel rhythm puts a jazz beat onto an Afrobeat motif, to his deceptively complex skills on “Tony’s Blues.” On the latter, a drum pattern that initially appears out of joint pulls into glorious rhythmic focus with the introduction of the other musicians, who play in careful staccato dabs. In this mix, Allamane proves vital, his melodic bass riffs anchoring a musical blend that at times—as on the aptly named “Push and Pull”—threaten to float off into the ether. The one time Allamane is set free, his solo on “Cruising” is a joy, a rock solid bassline loosening into elastic bent notes, like a plastic packet slowly melting on a fire.
What saves The Source from being an album uniquely for drum nerds is the songwriting. The 11 tracks here—all written by Allen with saxophonist and long-time collaborator Yann Jankielewicz—may understandably not live up to jazz standards like “Moanin’” and “A Night in Tunisia” that appear on A Tribute to Art Blakey & The Jazz Messengers. But there are some fine musical motifs, including a delightfully itinerant chord sequence and jump-cut riff on “Push and Pull,” the moody, merry-go-round melody on “Tony’s Blues,” and a playfully menacing riff that emerges four-and-a-half minutes into “On Fire.”
Perhaps the greatest attribute of this album, though, is how it makes the complex sound effortless. The Source may draw on Afrobeat and jazz to create something intricate and expansive, but the results are never contrived or academic. In this, The Source mirrors the musical skills of Allen himself, a man who tackles rhythmic mazes like a walk in the park, making this release both a fine addition to his catalog and a load of genre-bending fun. Rarely has percussive innovation sounded this downright satisfying.


The Houston rock band’s third album captures a certain kind of painful, melodic bliss that comes in the wake of a crisis.

Moments of Clarity

Narrow Head’s previous album, 2020’s 12th House Rock, had a grim outlook. It was a document of total depression, its lyrics populated by apathy, self-loathing, and substance abuse. Accordingly, it sounded dirty and grungy, calling back to ’90s alt-metal with a hefty dose of numb shoegaze. Around the time that album came out, vocalist and guitarist Jacob Duarte was in crisis, dealing with friends dying and the “spiritual trials” that come with it. The re-evaluation of his perspective and priorities prompted by that experience fuels Moments of Clarity, the Houston band’s third album.
While that last record called to mind an inward angst, Moments of Clarity is anthemic and explosive. The tones are bigger and smoother, Duarte punches his lines and elongates his vowels, and the Britpop-ish sneer he tended to sing with on 12th House Rock is gone, replaced with a blissful coo. “The Real,” a big highlight, feels, if not quite ecstatic, then at least emphatic, as Duarte sings: “How good does it feel/To be you, to be real?” The electronics-tinged “The World” has that effect too, as Duarte imparts advice to someone more lost than he is. “The Comedown” offers this conclusion to kick into gear its mammoth outro: “You should know I’m getting older/I lost myself and it feels so good.”
Confusion and angst sit alongside revelations like these, creating a muddy emotional mix. “Trepanation” is Duarte imagining, or begging for, a hole drilled in his skull. “Fine Day” and “Moments of Clarity” are bitter breakup songs, while “Breakup Song” is serene and accepting. Even the aforementioned chorus on “The Real,” when taken in the context of the rest of the song’s lyrics, could easily read as sarcastic—it’s the earnestness in Duarte’s voice that sells it as otherwise. He pulls a similar trick on the stirringly poppy “Sunday”: “Fall in love, see things through/And I know I’ve had enough of it.” Is he pledging to the idea or writing it off? These contrasts and ambiguity create a tension that pays off with the release of each big, triumphant hook.
Tension and release are key to the instrumentation too. In the vein of alt-metal bands like Quicksand and Helmet, upfront, weighty bass guitar gives everything a steady drive, pinning songs down while guitars lurch from restrained verses to unleashed, enveloping choruses. “The Real” and “Trepanation” do this best, the former driven by its momentum and the latter its simple yet burrowing vocal melody. “The Comedown” goes for the slow-boil approach, pulling the tempo down and taking almost two minutes to kick in with an absolutely crushing guitar sound.
Generally, the heaviness on this album is more about creating or sustaining a vibe than it is a source of vitality. There are tastes of a more biting heaviness on “Trepanation,” “Gearhead,” and particularly on “Flesh & Solitude,” which features screamed backing vocals and churning guitars. These are highlights of the album, platforming its darkness in the same way the catchy parts do its light. The musical middle grounds between these poles are where the album is weakest—“Breakup Song,” “Caroline,” and “The World” aren’t particularly memorable, musically or otherwise. But at its best, Moments of Clarity is an effective illustration of the process of clawing your way to some meaning, knowing that otherwise you’ll be destroyed.


Following their Internet hit "Go Outside", Cults prove they have the dexterity and songwriting to make a varied and memorable album.

Cults

When Cults' "Go Outside" first appeared on the web last year, it spread like wildfire. It was catchy and sweet, the kind of sing-along that felt like it was pulled from the air, with a sentiment perfect for anyone stuck in an office or addicted to the Internet. But how many communal sing-alongs can a band make before the approach goes stale? Cults have opted not to find out. "Go Outside" is on their debut album, and it still gives you your entire recommended daily allowance of vitamin D, but its dreamy drift is just one side of a band that proves it has the dexterity and songwriting chops to make a varied and memorable album.
Much has been made about the speed with which Cults signed to Columbia, as if they're the first group to release a debut album on a major. That kind of rapid ascent isn't anything new, but the speculation that came with it-- online chatter pronouncing them destined for the one-hit-wonder bin-- now looks grossly off the mark. At the center of the band's appeal is singer Madeline Follin's youthful alto. She has a tone that creates the impression you're listening to a precocious tween fronting a band well versed in Phil Spector's Back to Mono and three decades of climactic indie pop. The 1960s girl-pop element of their sound is pretty evident on the surface-- "You Know What I Mean" even borrows its verse melody from the Supremes' "Where Did Our Love Go"-- but what they've done with it is pure 21st century, cutting it with synths, guitars, and softly integrated samples.
The samples, of cult leaders speaking to their followers, could have been a distraction had they chosen to make a big deal out of them, but they're woven tightly into the album's sonic fabric and processed to varying degrees of decipherability, which turns them into an effective textural element. Those voices bounce around in the intro to "Oh My God", originally released last year as part of Adult Swim's singles program, but subtly remixed for the LP. The music hasn't changed here but the beat is amped up, and the bass has been moved forward in the mix, giving the song a much more powerful groove to support its melody. And if Follin's lyrics aren't necessarily deep-- "I can run away and leave you anytime/ Please don't tell me you know the plans for my life"-- she delivers them with relatable and affecting conviction.
This taps into a vein of petulance that runs through the album. "I don't need anyone else," from "Never Saw the Point", may read as a tossed-off line, but in a strangely positive way, it feels like the record's main message. Even the eternally sunny "Go Outside" ends on the lyric, "I think I want to live my life and you're just in my way." These are teenage sentiments, the kind of things you feel dumb for saying and thinking once you've navigated into your mid-twenties, but they're also universal sentiments during that stage of life when you're trying to figure out what kind of person you're going to be. Cults' use of elements borrowed from traditionally teen music-- girl groups, 50s prom-pop, bedroom indie pop-- plays along with the lyrics to create a little world where one minute Follin is singing a frustrated "fuck you" ("Never Heal Myself") and dreaming of escaping the next. Even the more formal pop explorations play to teen melodrama. The surging Spector pop of the record's anthemic opener "Abducted" compares falling in love to being kidnapped, and gives the other Cult, Brian Oblivion, a brief lead vocal to play the abductor.
At just over a half hour, Cults feels like the perfect length-- just long enough for the bus ride to school (or to work). But more importantly, it executes what it sets out to do masterfully while allowing the group room to grow and mature. They've also set themselves up to take their sound and subject matter in any number of possible directions in the future, and that's a good position for a young band to find itself in. Cults built up a lot of goodwill last year on the strength of just three tracks; on their debut album, they've rewarded it.


The new album from Tigers Jaw is their major label debut, but it’s also the debut of a major label, as the first release on producer Will Yip’s new Atlantic imprint Black Cement.

spin

Few emo hot takes pack more heat than “In Reverie is the best Saves the Day album.” Following the band’s evergreen classics Through Being Cool and Stay What You Are, and preceding an ongoing back-to-basics course correction, it’s a complete outlier—the sole album Saves the Day released on the major label DreamWorks, shifting from Lifetime worship into midtempo, floral power-pop and intricate jazzy chords. It was an album that alienated old fans and failed to gain new ones in equal measure. Tigers Jaw’s Ben Walsh recently called In Reverie his favorite album of all time. That’s a hell of a hot take and seemingly a statement in light of spin, which is not just Tigers Jaw’s major label debut, but the debut of a major label.
As the inaugural release of producer Will Yip’s Atlantic imprint Black Cement, spin might be seen as a trial balloon for the commercial viability of revival-era emo and a purity test for those who’ve been around before “the emo revival” had a name. Though, if there are Tigers Jaw purists, they would’ve jumped ship three years ago. 2014’s Charmer was transitional, with 60% of the band’s original lineup deciding to amicably bow out, perhaps to follow the muse of witch house, but only after they finished recording. Described by the band as “equal parts Fleetwood Mac and Brand New,” Charmer was certainly more polished and subdued than their giddy, pop-punkish self-titled debut and landed in Billboard’s top 50, standing alongside Turnover’s Peripheral Vision, Title Fight’s Hyperview, and Balance and Composure’s The Things We Think We’re Missing as proof of Will Yip’s credentials as a producer and A&R in terms of visualizing the new sound of alternative rock.
Charmer sounded like a bold reconfiguration, but compared to spin, it was a dry run. The perspective and songwriting of Brianna Collins and Walsh have matured; at the very least, the band now has a clearer idea of what Tigers Jaw 2.0 is meant to accomplish. spin is 12 confident, minor variations on the Tigers Jaw style that withstood the past three years—the jangle of old indie rock, the stylization of new indie rock, and the simultaneously introspective and community-minded concerns of the fourth-wave emo bands for whom they’re something of an authority figure.
The stereo-panned acoustics that introduce “Escape Plan” are not the first time Tigers Jaw have overtly referenced the Microphones, though it blooms into an expansive crescendo that shows how Bleed American and The Glow Pt. 2 have comfortably coexisted as primary 2001 influences in this scene. With its unusually steady vocals, “Blurry Vision” is the most beautiful exchange between Collins and Walsh, reflective of the more wistful, empathetic tone of spin.
While many of their peers are reasserting the grungier and brattier variants of the Buzz Bin, Tigers Jaw remain above the fray but true to their roots. The shoulder-swinging rhythmic drive of their earliest days is maintained regardless of Yip’s even-handed production, as “Bullet,” “Brass Ring,” and “Guardian” hit cruise control at 75 mph. And for all of the balance and composure shown throughout spin, Collins sounds fully aware that she’s written Tigers Jaw’s best melody for the chorus of “June,” barely concealing her enthusiasm to get through the verses so she can dive right into it.
The exuberance of “June” almost qualifies as experimental within the new iteration of Tigers Jaw and especially spin. As with Charmer, most of the highlights come early, leaving spin to feel just as front-loaded, albeit with a longer and stronger front. Stuck towards the end, “Window” or “Same Stone” come off as vaguely redundant. Still, in light of Walsh’s statements on In Reverie, Tigers Jaw might not be interested in the same grandiose ambitions of some of their peers. As with Saves the Day, Tigers Jaw is a band rooted in pop-punk and emo trying to evolve alongside their fans in a logical way. And by staying the course after their risky pivot rather than retrenching, they’ve done their heroes one better.


The Los Angeles–based musicians explore the spaces between their respective styles, yielding an ethereal, richly textured fusion of neo-classical and musique concréte.

Sarah Davachi / Sean McCann: Mother of Pearl

Mother of Pearl

Sarah Davachi and Sean McCann’s personal and artistic lives are intimately intertwined. Working out of their shared home in Los Angeles, both artists carve out marbled slabs of sound art, each taking their own unique approach to neo-classical music. McCann has styled himself as a sort of DIY Gavin Bryars, overseeing his label Recital Program and assembling ornate passages of home-recorded chamber music to create a new kind of basement-show Baroque. Davachi takes after deep-listening gurus like Pauline Oliveros and Randal McLellan, hanging her songs on endless strings of soft organ and Mellotron chords that wrap the listener in a velvety analog glow. On Mother of Pearl, their first record together as a couple, Davachi and McCann explore the spaces shared between their respective styles of music, yielding a warm, ethereal vision of musique concréte stripped down to the very bone.
An animating principle of both Davachi and McCann’s music has been a devotion to the Fluxus art movement of the 1960s, whose philosophy might be best summed up by founder George Maciunas: “Coffee cups can be more beautiful than fancy sculptures. A kiss in the morning can be more dramatic than a drama by Mr. Fancypants. The sloshing of my foot in my wet boot sounds more beautiful than fancy organ music.” In this fashion, Mother of Pearl uncovers epiphanies in the duo’s kitchen sink as Davachi and McCann combine farmhouse field recordings, tape distortion, plinking keys, and silence itself to create an autumnal bath of golden tones. The music on Mother of Pearl is just barely there, yet its spectral ebb and flow conjures blurry images of dim, candle-lit rooms, or suns setting on ancient buildings that haven’t felt footsteps for centuries. As slight as the album may seem, Mother of Pearl’s greatest rewards come from listening closely, where all of Davachi and McCann’s textures can reveal their delicate wrinkles.
Throughout Mother of Pearl, McCann and Davachi find a gentle middle ground between the dizzying surrealism of the former’s work and the subtly hypnotic drift of the latter’s. “LA in the Rain” spends eight minutes hovering over a veil of creaking violas and twinkling piano, dancing like dust particles settling in the sunlight. Davachi and McCann constantly keep their sounds at the edge of tangibility, reveling in the tension of their elegant in-betweenness. The most sublime track is the album’s centerpiece, “Lamplighter,” where the two musicians plunge into a ghostly reverie of rumbling bass, softly ringing bells, and cycling waves of tape hiss. On the surface, it seems to convey an all-encompassing emptiness, yet there are details—like the strangely soothing tapping timbre that appears around six minutes in, or the cows that begin to moo toward the end of the track—that turn the whole piece into a balancing act between darkness and light, a richly layered world heard from the deepest possible depths.
There are limits to how microscopic Davachi and McCann can make their music while still achieving something profound; on “Band of Gold,” two guitars spiral aimlessly without ever quite achieving the textural complexity of the rest of the album. But for much of Mother of Pearl, Davachi and McCann continually create musicality from the barest of fabrics, spinning them out into loose tapestries. It’s the kind of music that seems to disappear when you first put it on, but will slowly transform your entire environment. Like reading old love letters from couples long ago, it seems to speak a private language all its own.

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The improvising guitarist’s first album for Drag City is restless and unsettling. Building on his idea of improvisation as a non-hierarchical value system, it is also a kind of protest record.

Stateless

Beyond the principle of “first thought, best thought” comes no thought at all. This is the source of improvising guitarist Tashi Dorji’s playing: the realm of pure instinct, a zone of unpremeditated action in which the fingers outpace the brain. “I generally have a theme or form or simple idea and I work from there,” he told The Wire. But that foundation, he said, “changes the moment I start playing.” When Dorji picks up a guitar, it can sometimes feel like everything and nothing is happening at once: A player in the questing, occasionally contrarian mold of guitarists like Derek Bailey and Bill Orcutt, the Bhutanese musician is capable of spiky intensity and lyrical finesse, and the two moods frequently slip back and forth without warning. Any given note might be a trapdoor to the inverse of what has immediately preceded it. Melodies flash out and disintegrate in the space of a few plucks; patterns repeat until they don’t, and everything in the rearview turns to rubble. Dorji’s pursuit of the melodic line resembles a maze-like garden of forking paths, each choice oscillating between possibility and negation. “Improvisation as a practice is always shifting, becoming and disappearing,” he recently wrote. Stateless, his first album for Drag City—his highest-profile release in an 11-year discography that numbers dozens of albums, tapes, collaborations, live recordings, and digital releases—is a fractal firehose of these transformative moments, in which nascence turns to oblivion and vice versa, over and over again.
Dorji is a committed disciple of spontaneity. He estimates that he recorded the 54-minute-long Stateless in about an hour and a half, and the only reason it took him that long is that he likes to alter his guitar’s tuning in between takes—a process that is itself as unplanned as his compositions. Born into a musical family—his mother is a flutist, her father was an influential lute player, and his cousin is a famous folk singer—Dorji grew up in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan, where he taught himself to play guitar, soaking up classic rock and heavy metal via shortwave radio and bootleg tapes from India. When he moved to Asheville, North Carolina, for college, he discovered hardcore punk and free improvisation. “Listening to [Derek] Bailey literally changed everything,” he has said. It’s tempting to seek traces of all those experiences in his playing, and it’s true that ghosts of recognizable sounds sometimes flare up—a scrap of flamenco-like strumming, a neatly woven web of American primitive, the arid melancholy of Saharan desert blues or Kenyan “dry” guitar—like a scanning radio dial briefly alighting on a long-forgotten tune. But most often, it seems, what you are hearing is the sound of his mind trying to forget what it knows.
Recorded on steel-stringed acoustic guitar, Stateless might not be Dorji’s most dissonant album—that would probably be a 2013 self-titled cassette played on a prepared instrument modified with bits of metal, chopsticks, and Scotch tape, yielding a flinty, buzzing tone—but it’s close. The mood is a long way from 2015’s reverent Appa or 2016’s meditative VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 13: Dorji attacks his strings as though searching for something he dropped in the dirt, by turns agitated and focused. From the very first two notes, the record bristles with tritones—that sharp, stabbing pair of notes that Renaissance scholars once dubbed “the devil’s interval” for its supposedly demonic properties. Stateless isn’t evil, exactly, but it’s unsettling in its restlessness. Where there is repetition, there is seldom consonance; where there is consonance, there is seldom repetition. Dorji worries away at jarring tone clusters as though trying to work out the kinks in a knotted cord; he treats dulcet passages almost apologetically, as though the pretty bits were indulgences to be left in the dust as fast as possible.
Dorji professes not to be a technically adept player, a patently ridiculous claim. He has speed, muscle, and grace, as well as the all-important sense of when not to play. Trying to chart the course of these pieces can be like chasing butterflies; recapping them is as futile as recounting the twists and turns of a dream. But moments stand out. “The Swelling Fruit About to Shatter the Husk of the Old World” is a gentle, plainspoken highlight of major sevenths and Fahey-esque fingerpicking, clanging accidentals sticking out like burrs in spun silk, and there’s a similarly gorgeous passage of classical guitar in “Statues Crumble, Heroes Fall,” where stately bass melody moves against a shimmering mist of blurred notes.
Early on, “End of State (Pt. 1)” erupts into sour-tuned “La Cucaracha” riffs, evoking car horns in gridlock before turning contemplative halfway through. Dorji typically retunes his guitar in between the various movements of his multi-part pieces, and “End of State (Pt. 2)” coaxes unusual frequencies from its altered tuning, while the opening of “End of State (Pt. 3)” glows and skips like a scratched Sonic Youth record. The final two and a half minutes of “Now (Pt. 1)” he spends hammering at a single open fifth, stretching the edges of the notes with every downstroke; the effect resembles doom metal, though there’s also a hint of Tibetan monks’ throat singing in its ragged overtones.
Dorji chose the album’s title, he told Aquarium Drunkard, while thinking about social structures that lie beyond the boundaries of the traditional nation-state. “I’m looking at it more from an anarchist’s perspective,” he said. This notion of statelessness—what he calls “a fluid, horizontal idea”—is a vision of freedom, one akin to his idea of improvisation as a non-hierarchical value system, an unfettered way of being in the world. Among the album’s inspirations, Dorji cites the anarchist text As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation, the anti-imperialist 1966 documentary The Battle of Algiers, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s classic work of postcolonialist theory, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” In the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of the spring and summer, the title “Statues Crumble, Heroes Fall” appears remarkably prescient; even without lyrics, it is clear that Stateless is a kind of protest record.
I keep thinking about all those tritones, the rickety pillars propping up the album’s canopy. Subtle as fire alarms, tritones have the effect that they do because they strike a tension that refuses to resolve. They are neither major, minor, nor a perfect fifth. Tritones disconcert because they signal rootlessness, restlessness, instability; they represent a state of affairs that cannot hold. Dorji recorded Stateless before the various upheavals of 2020, but the album anticipates the year’s mood: restive, anxious, sometimes antagonistic, and above all, searching. Beneath its rockslides of wrong notes lies the conviction that a different kind of order is possible. Dorji’s other albums may be more soothing or more conventionally beautiful, but none feel better suited to the exigencies of the present moment than this one.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Thirteen years after Trish Keenan’s death, a collection of her demos, home recordings, and voice notes offers an intimate and at times heartbreaking look at her otherworldly genius.

Broadcast: Spell Blanket - Collected Demos 2006 - 2009

In 1975, a time-traveling being from a distant but familiar realm left an indelible imprint on Trish Keenan’s mind. The titular character from Sky, one of a crop of bizarre British sci-fi shows supposedly made for children in the ’60s and ’70s, speaks with a cold, eerie affect, his voice warped slightly by tight echo. When exercising his telepathic powers, Sky stares down the barrel of the camera, his eyes and splayed palm imbued with a crude chroma-key glow. James Cargill, who formed Broadcast with Keenan in 1995, spoke of Sky’s deep influence on the band during a 2009 interview with XLR8R. He cited the show’s cocoon of white noise and paranoid, spectral atmosphere as key building blocks to Broadcast’s brand of retro-futurist psychedelia. In promotional photos, Keenan often emulated Sky, bathed in oversaturated colors and stretching her hand toward the viewer. She always seemed extemporal, as though her icy contralto and surrealist lyrics were beamed in from some far corner of time and space. When Keenan died of pneumonia in 2011, it was tragic not only for the sudden loss of a brilliant, exploratory musician, but because a portal to some other dimension had been permanently closed.
On what would’ve been Keenan’s 43rd birthday, a mere eight months after her death, Cargill posted “The Song Before the Song Comes Out” to his SoundCloud page. The 40-second recording features an out-of-breath Keenan singing a quick tune, seemingly struck by inspiration in the middle of a walk. In the background, beneath a soft static buzz, you can hear her footsteps keeping time. The melody unspools gracefully, as if it’s a lullaby she’s known her whole life, the occasional fudged note a product of overthinking the intrinsic. Despite its brevity, the demo recording captures what made Broadcast so special: the hypnagogic interplay of childlike melodies and the noise surrounding them.
In November of 2011, Cargill told The Guardian that he was constructing a new Broadcast record from Keenan’s massive trove of home recordings. It would be a monument to her preternatural talent, a fitting cap to the too-short Broadcast arc. That album never came, but for several years, Cargill kept a tradition of sharing one or two of Keenan’s demos on her birthday. It was a gift to perpetually heartbroken fans who trawled Soulseek and YouTube for any unheard scraps of the band’s particular magic. Over time, the links died and Cargill’s blog posts slowed to a trickle, but devoted heads doubled as archivists, preserving the songs on YouTube and Reddit. In 2022, Warp continued the fan service and deepened the band’s legacy by releasing Maida Vale Sessions, a selection of the band’s BBC studio recordings, along with reissues of two previously tour-only LPs, Mictotronics and Mother Is the Milky Way. Now, with Spell Blanket: Collected Demos 2006-2009, we finally get to hear what an album of new Broadcast material could have sounded like. It compiles 36 demos (including “The Song Before the Song Comes Out,” “Petal Alphabet,” and “Tunnel View,” all of which Cargill previously posted) into a warm and sprawling 65-minute tribute to Trish Keenan, providing an intimate look into her otherworldly genius.
Spell Blanket is an expansive sonic feast, swiftly—but intentionally—oscillating from minute-long loop fragments and textural studies to more fleshed-out, properly arranged songs. There’s a noticeable flow in energy, which gives the collection more of a proper album feel than a mixtape or thrown-together compilation. “My Marble Eye,” a 32-second clip of pirouetting organ, leads directly into “Roses Red,” an unsettling three-minute pop song where guitar figures tumble around modal vocal melodies, a bed of feedback writhing like angry snakes in the background. The acid-dipped folk of “Fatherly Veil,” which features some of Keenan’s most ambitious and layered vocal work, sits between the quick tape-delay workout of “Tell Table” and the hard-panned drum-machine study of “Dream Power.” Quick cuts aren’t foreign territory for Broadcast; Spell Blanket’s collagist technique mirrors the scrapbook approach the band explored in its later releases. The stylistic swings can sometimes be jarring, but they ultimately illustrate the breadth of Keenan’s musical curiosity.
At times, the naked vulnerability of these scratch recordings makes Spell Blanket a heart-wrenching listen. It’s overwhelming to hear such a torrent of Keenan’s music 15 years after what would be her final works. The chorus of “I Want to Be Fine” is gorgeous, a crushing shout of Sisyphean yearning catapulting over spare plucked guitar. She delivers the devastatingly simple line, “I want to be fine,” with her trademark stoicism, like a single tear rolling down a plastic mask. It’s hard to hear the occult sermon chant of “My Body” without feeling chills, as if we’ve walked into Keenan’s former bedroom with ghost-hunting equipment and received a clear transmission from beyond. Once the thrill of new Broadcast material subsides, the nagging recognition that we’ll never hear fleshed-out versions of these songs or know what she could’ve made next settles like a thick, immovable fog.
Despite being a collection of demos, Spell Blanket feels like an appropriate conclusion to Broadcast’s discography—the final album they never got the chance to make. Among other things, it reveals that the group was a folk band at heart. The songs’ largely acoustic makeup takes away none of their power; it’s conceivable that they might even have embraced a more pastoral sound, had they continued. The band never stayed still, which Cargill lovingly confirmed in that Guardian interview: “We would've changed again. That was what I liked about doing [Broadcast]. We never got repetitive.” The bootlegged audio of their final shows in Australia hinted that the band was on the cusp of something new, as Trish’s looped vocals and Cargill’s cosmic synths felt distinct from anything they’d done previously; perhaps they were newly cognizant of the unconscious role shows like Sky and Children of the Stones played in their craft.
As it is now, the Broadcast story is one of steady reduction, a band that pursued a specific idea and peeled away unnecessary layers in its service. Their records went from full-bodied, swinging ’60s psych to brittle, dying-battery synth pop, from a quintet to a duo to one person’s four-track tapes and MiniDiscs. The most prominent instrument on Spell Blanket is Trish Keenan’s beautiful voice, the steady center of Broadcast’s music, the key to its mystical appeal. We are lucky to have shared time and space with Trish; the door to her universe might now be closed, but Spell Blanket gives us one last generous peephole glimpse into its immense, singular beauty.


The cheesy new age sounds on this obscure album from 1988, discovered by a YouTube algorithm and recently reissued, have become a touchstone for producers because of their intense irony and nostalgia.

Digital-Dance

There’s a form of listening and musical discovery that’s familiar to anyone who uses YouTube on a regular basis. Find a song you like, press play, free your hands from the wheel, and let the website’s algorithm lead you from video to video. It’s how George Clanton, and many others like him, discovered Software, a little known German electronic duo from the late 1980s. Clanton, the co-founder of the label 100% Electronica, came upon Software’s song “Island Sunrise” during a YouTube listening session a few years back, and was gobsmacked.
“Island Sunrise” is the overwhelmingly relaxing centerpiece song of Software’s 1988 album Digital-Dance. It starts with the sounds of waves gently breaking along a shoreline, and then seconds later it opens up, and bubbles of synthesizer chords and saccharine MIDI strings color the track in warm pastels. It’s a sensorial feast, but it’s also overly serious to the point of being a little goofy. It is, without a doubt, a song that evokes all the beautiful and tired images we have of the beach, all with sounds that seem stock and generic. It’s easy to hear why Clanton was so taken with it—“Island Sunrise” is immediately strange and old fashioned, a dusty time capsule from a bygone era.
Software was composed of the artist Michael Weisser and the musician Peter Mergener. From 1985-1998, the duo produced over thirty releases for Klaus Schulze (of Ash Ra Tempel and Tangerine Dream) and Michael Haentjes’ experimental label Innovative Communication, each displaying a consistent aesthetic vision. Their albums bore this specific kind of psychedelic digital art—part collage, part M.S. Paint tomfoolery—that in years since, has become the palette for niche electronic music. Their sound, which changes slightly to fit the world they want to create in their music, is synth-driven new age that also pulled from the campy tropes of late-’80s pop. Apparently, Weisser and Mergener’s musical identity was inspired by a science fiction novel the former wrote where in the future “music [was] created by computer-based laser stimulation of protozoans.” As Weisser has said, each of the albums they created was an attempt at creating “new sound-galaxies,” and to him, what they did wasn’t actually music, but something more aspirational, like fine art.
The music found on Digital-Dance is in line with Weisser and Mergener’s artistic goals, incredibly opulent—almost hifalutin. Made up of seven tracks (plus two bonus songs) that stretch out across an hour, Digital-Dance contains songs that sound like the ill-begotten lovechild of Barry Manilow’s tropical easy listening and John Carpenter’s sci-fi synths. Opening track “Oceans Breath” is supposed to set the scene for the album—seagulls croaking overhead, breeze in the background. Then plinks of vibraphone and windchime come in right before a blaring saxophone solidifies the tone. Like cotton candy, the sensation is sweet but instantly fleeting.
Saxophones are a constant on Digital-Dance, but they hew closer to Kenny G. than Sonny Rollins. Elsewhere, on songs like “Waving Voices” or “Magnificent Shore,” hair metal guitar solos and overblown percussion recall all the pumped-up drama of a Phil Collins track. Even the album’s best song, “Island Sunrise,” can, after several listens, feel like soundtrack music for a beachside action movie watched out of boredom on a pirated feed of Cinemax.
Yet the album seems purposefully contrived and generic: In order to create the world of the “beach,” Weisser and Mergener had to pull from the crudest and most direct musical metaphors for that environment. It’s why this is an album laden with laid-back synths, stock sound effects, and all manner of cheesy instrumentals. As music made specifically for conjuring up a mood—it’s extremely effective. Digital-Dance has become a touchstone for micro-genres like vaporwave (a scene of which George Clanton is part of), and part of that comes from how these songs feel both intensely ironic and nostalgic under a new light.
Why Digital-Dance became the magnum opus of their discography is, of course, pure coincidence. In fact, Digital-Dance’s latter-day prominence is less a story about how timeless Weisser and Mergener’s music is (it isn’t), but how YouTube has helped saved them from the dustbin of history. The video Clanton found was uploaded just a little earlier by the musician Ryan M Todd, who in turn discovered Software’s “Island Sunrise” on a mixtape he received from Dâm-Funk called Chart Toppers. Todd uploaded the video because of the scarcity of Software’s music at the time, and Dâm-Funk, keen to this scarcity before Todd, found *Digital-Dance *during a vinyl shopping spree in Berlin with his Stones Throw labelmates in 2008.
Through both serendipity and YouTube’s algorithm, Clanton and others found Software, as a result of Todd and Dâm-Funk’s interaction. Even if Software’s music found itself on YouTube through some luck, they’ve become famous because of how attenuated their songs are to a sense of escapism. Like the much maligned new age records of the ’70s, which are now in vogue again, the “tropical” ambient of Software can feel new just by virtue of how old it sounds. They weren’t original or innovative (Harumi Hosono and Midori Takada made “beach” records of their own years earlier), but the songs make you want to make you kick your feet up, and imagine yourself a world away.


On their fourth album together, Xiu Xiu and Larsen create a sense of cinematic whimsy anchored around a mythological creature who helps with household chores.

Puff O’Gigio

Xiu Xiu and Larsen, or XXL, lace their bruising collaborative music with a prankster’s humor. For two decades, Xiu Xiu founder Jamie Stewart has added a sly silliness to his noise-pop Petri dishes of human brutality, once rhyming “vigorous” with “pig-orous.” The scuzzed-up post-rock of Italian four-piece Larsen, meanwhile, skews outré. They once recorded a whole album with Swans’ Michael Gira while shrouded by a dark screen, while 2016’s breathtaking Of Grog Vim used instrumentals to frame the narrative of the supposed visionary for which it was named.
XXL’s largely instrumental fourth album, Puff O’Gigio, is a clash of experimental tics and post-punk throb, pulling the outlandish tendencies of both bands into vivid widescreen frames. In the past, XXL’s three albums split the difference between Larsen’s hypnagogic soundscapes and Xiu Xiu’s overblown melodies, with bright hooks that could sometimes pass for Stewart’s own darkened pop. Recorded in one week during December 2016 in Turin, Puff O’Gigio gathers these impulses with a more even-handed approach. Now 13 years since their debut together, Ciautistico!, XXL has reached a new crest of collaborative motion.
Puff O’Gigio thrives on a cinematic sense of whimsy, telegraphed by the album’s titular figure—“a mythological, genetically modified character” that they say is a chimera of the Italian translation of Smurf and Ed Sullivan’s mouse marionette, Topo Gigio. XXL suggest these 11 tracks inhabit “the same colorful, intersectional world as the character,” but that underplays this album’s boundless sense of scale; Puff O’Gigio is only the steward at the threshold of some bright, bleeding fantastical realm.
At moments, this album teems with sun-guzzling optimism. The exploratory “Welcome to My Planet,” for instance, opens with a haunting high pitch before a flurry of bleeps announces a hypnotic guitar pattern, a ruckus of chatter, and a nonsense melody from Larsen’s Paolo Dellapiana. Conjuring Thom Yorke’s deepest trances, the effect is oddly serene. “Ghost Maid” delivers punch-the-air joy, with kaleidoscopic synths shooting through a vortex of bass. Larsen’s Fabrizio Modonese Palumbo offers a spoken-word ode to a benevolent ghost who helps with household chores—presumably, Puff O’Gigio itself. His words pierce the veil with emotion: “There is no way to embrace you/There is no way to feel you when you land on my fingertip.” This love song to an imagined creature hits you unexpectedly, evoking a deep yearning for human connection.
With its looming soundscapes and twitch-inducing rattles, Puff O’Gigio sometimes feels like an uneasy phantasmagoria or the exploration of some alien landscape where unseen nasties lurk in the dark. “Polar Bear Boogie Part 01” plays up the eeriness with droning electric guitars that recall Six Organs of Admittance, while the seesaw of carnivalesque synths and low-end rumble during “Queen of Koalas” envelops you like quicksand. Most sinister of all is the minimalist shadowplay of “To Carol Rama,” a Stewart-led horror that recalls Shirley Jackson’s nightmare-inducing tale, “The Lottery.” “Why curse Satan as the cause of all of your troubles?” Stewart whispers grimly through vocals layered with wraith-like hiss.
As it plays off a sense of wonder and a creeping notion of menace, Puff O’Gigio feels like it’s always shifting beneath you, a sense captured by an album cover that could be a satellite view of some unknown geographical formation or a distorted image of an earlobe. It’s an apt fit for a record where frequencies oscillate with a sense of embryonic discovery; by embracing the fantastical, XXL find a new frequency of their own.


To tour Son Lux’s previous full-length, Lanterns, Ryan Lott put together a three-piece band that included guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang. The avant-pop trio parlayed their onstage chemistry into Bones, which also features vocal contributions from Moses Sumney, and others. But becoming a real-deal group hasn’t radically changed the project.

Bones

It’s almost misleading to say that Bones is the first full-band Son Lux album. Ryan Lott—the film- and dance-score composer, former ad-music man, and mastermind of Son Lux since the 2008 release of At War with Walls & Mazes—has never been one to go it alone. He’s a constant collaborator, whether it be with Lorde, Boots, Shara Worden of My Brighest Diamond, or teaming up with Sufjan Stevens and rapper Serengeti for Sisyphus. To tour the material from Son Lux’s previous full-length, Lanterns, Lott put together a three-piece band that included guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang, and the trio parlayed their onstage chemistry into recording sessions for Bones.
Becoming a real-deal band hasn’t radically changed Son Lux. Lott’s vocals are still unmistakeable in their brittle breathiness, and the songs still come across like the multi-layered electronic manifestations of a classically trained pianist who studied composition in college but can’t suppress his inner beatmaker. But the collaboration with Bhatia and Chang—not to mention vocal contributions from Moses Sumney, DM Stith, Hanna Benn, Holychild’s Liz Nistico, Daughter’s Elena Tonra and others—perceptibly aerates the Son Lux sound. Lott has a tendency to pile his influences in a way that can sometimes feel suffocating, like confetti crammed into a party popper, and on Bones, his bandmates pulled the string while also adding their own crinkled strips of color to the explosion. It’s not unlike the way Dirty Projectors are unmistakably Dave Longstreth’s project, but his talented bandmates are crucial to presenting his vision.
It tends to be the words that trip up Lott. He rarely writes traditionally structured songs, and he tends to go the mantra route with the words, to varying degrees of success. On Bones, though, the questions he poses have never been more pertinent. “Are we now what we’ll be? Are we fixed or free?” he asks on “Flight.” Bones is obsessed with exploring whether we can change our station and how or when to sound the alarm. There’s an undercurrent of class warfare and oppression, but Bones is not a protest album. These aren’t Occupy anthems or the soundtrack to protests in Ferguson or Charleston. Lott isn’t railing against a specific tragedy. It’s more general, and it can apply to your issue of choice. Lott merely realizes that it’s time to start railing.
Bones soundtracks those moments or days or months or years when it feels like something isn’t right, and it becomes increasingly difficult to keep it all at arm’s length. Even for someone whom Lott calls “the most fortunate one,” it’s hard to stare at injustice, abuse, oppression, or just plain-old apathy and not be stirred to action—or, rather, stirred to thinking about action. Because that’s the emotion this album captures—that moment in between ignorance and action, when you know you should do something, and you just might.
“Am I the only one? Where are the others?” Lott sings, then concludes “I am the others.” It feels like things are about to get real. “We have the lungs and we have the air to shout,” he says, “...but we don’t.” It’s a downer, and it gets worse on “White Lies”, which starts soft and pretty despite ominous lyrics (“They take hold of our young/ They cut out our tongue”), then turns into a dark, industrial rave for the last minute. Given Lott’s film-scoring background, it’s easy to imagine the song’s coda soundtracking a scene set in a stroboscopic club from some tyrannical, dystopian future. And yet Son Lux hasn’t given up. “Your Day Will Come” lyrically reprises the opening track: “Close your eyes/ Swallow the sun/ You have only just begun.” Darkness may cover the outside world, but inside, hope is brewing.
Son Lux’s avant-pop has always leaned more heavily on avant than pop, and Bones is probably too skittery for a breakout commercial hit (though “Change is Everything” could be a dark horse). Given the album’s staccato beats, bronchitis vocals, strings that may not be strings, flutes that probably aren’t flutes, unexpected blasts of horn-like sounds that couldn’t possibly be horns, it’s not an album you can sing along to from front to back, and given the subject matter, it probably shouldn’t be. Sometimes knowing that you’re about to sing is enough.


The legendary jazz pianist’s 1968 concert at Palo Alto High School, recorded by a janitor and shelved for decades, captures some of the fiercest, most spirited versions of his quartet’s core repertoire.

Palo Alto

Thelonious Monk once said: “Weird means something you never heard before. It’s weird until people get around to it. Then it ceases to be weird.” By the time Monk and his quartet strode into the auditorium at Palo Alto High School on October 27, 1968, people hadn’t just gotten around to his oblong, minimalist take on jazz—they’d left it behind. After decades of toiling in New York’s clubs to little outside recognition, Monk had briefly tasted superstardom, culminating in a 1964 Time magazine cover. Less than half a decade later, he’d slipped to No. 6 on DownBeat’s International Critics Poll ranking jazz’s best pianists, and writers routinely dismissed his playing as stale and uninspired. Still, he was Thelonious Sphere Monk: If he was no longer weird, and no longer a superstar, he was still a legend. A legend who couldn’t afford to miss a $500 payday at a high school.
The live album Palo Alto is a grainy snapshot of Monk and his classic quartet taking a break from their two-week stand at San Francisco’s Jazz Workshop to cut loose and get paid. But just as Monk’s music was characterized by the power of its empty spaces—he’s the person who said, “It’s not the notes you play, it’s those you leave out,” a chestnut as well-worn as any of his songs—Palo Alto’s thrills are made poignant by what was happening in his life unbeknownst to the audience, and what was happening in their life unbeknownst to Monk. This is exuberant, abundant music, made by and performed for people whose lives often felt anything but.
Monk was in debt to the IRS. His wife, Nellie, took ill, then Monk did, too. A seizure in May of 1968 put him in a coma that caused him to miss several recording dates; his label, Columbia, charged him for the studio time. He needed every dollar he could earn, and Columbia’s lack of faith in his artistic vision wasn’t helping. At the time of the Palo Alto concert, his most recent album was Underground, which the label had tried to sell to the hippie crowd with a cover photo that portrayed Monk as a French liberation fighter hiding out in a Paris attic, where he could bang away at his keyboard and kick some Nazi ass in private. This did not work.
While they were admittedly disinterested in the electric soundscapes labelmate Miles Davis would begin exploring by year’s end, Monk’s quartet showed up to Paly ready to boogie. They run roughshod through “Well, You Needn’t,” a Monk composition from 1944 that was by then a standard of his sets. Though it was typically a vehicle for some of his most wobbly improvisations, here it’s played with the heavy hip-shaking shuffle of an early R&B song. The quartet takes it at a dead sprint, lapping the version they’d laid down a few years earlier on Misterioso. Monk pushes saxophonist Charlie Rouse throughout the latter’s solo, jabbing with two-note chords like he’s testing for Rouse’s most vulnerable spots; the tenor responds with a rippling line that he staples to the piano’s bumpy contours. When it’s time for Monk to take the spotlight, he dissolves the song’s theme and goes to work moving around its component parts, his fluid runs set against a supremely funky bassline from Larry Gales, who later upstages his boss with a bowed-bass solo that sketches circles around the hard core of Monk’s playing. By the time they pounce on “Blue Monk,” they’re practically splitting the difference between Fats Waller and Fats Domino. Not hip references for 1968, sure, but the thumping power of these songs suggests that the quartet was fully capable of matching the pulse and drive of the era’s heaviest groups without sacrificing the musical complexity around which Monk built his songs.
Even the quieter numbers demonstrate the physicality of Monk’s playing as much as its intricacy. The recording captures the persistent squeak of his chair as he navigates a subtly cubist rendition of the standard “Don’t Blame Me.” One of the school’s janitors recorded the concert, asking only that he be allowed to tune Monk’s piano in exchange, and his rudimentary recording captures incredible details: Gales cheerfully singing along to his own solo in “Well, You Needn’t,” Monk’s foot tapping out the beat in “Don’t Blame Me.” The tape gathered dust in the 50-plus years it spent in the private collection of Danny Scher, the Paly student who booked the concert despite being all of 16 years old, and the fidelity is understandably low.
Crucially, the tape captures the response of a rapt crowd. Scher had promoted the concert heavily in East Palo Alto, a largely Black community located just across the Bayshore Freeway from tony Palo Alto. An unincorporated area with no means for self-governance, East Palo Alto was gutted when nearly half of its small businesses were razed to make way for the freeway in 1955, while land grabs by neighboring Menlo Park and Palo Alto itself robbed it of crucial property taxes. Still, the citizens of East Palo Alto resolutely pursued Black empowerment. The town played host to a national Black Power conference featuring Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver in September of 1968, and ads for Monk’s show at Paly hung near posters promoting an initiative to rename the town Nairobi (the vote would be held mere days after the concert, failing by a two-to-one margin). East Palo Altans were understandably suspicious when a white teenager came around promising an appearance by a titan of bebop. Many didn’t buy their tickets until they saw Monk and the band roll into the school’s parking lot in Scher’s brother’s car.
Monk was a supporter of the civil rights movement, and his biographer Robin D.G. Kelley suspects that he may have worried that simply playing benefits for CORE and SNCC wasn’t doing enough for the cause. In 1963, he told a French reporter that, while he viewed himself primarily as an American, that didn’t “prevent me from being aware of all the progress that still needs to be made,” adding, “I know my music can help bring people together, and that’s what is important.”
That afternoon in Palo Alto, Monk did precisely that. As Kelley writes in his definitive biography, “[Black] and white kids from both Palo Altos” showed up at the gig, and they made their voices heard. They cheer as the band winds its way into the ending of “Blue Monk” and the quartet launches into a set-closing “Epistrophy.”
“We used to talk about how the birds can do these extraordinary maneuvers where they’ll all change the formation, something that even airline pilots couldn’t do,” French horn player David Amram once recalled of his time with Monk, and in the final moments of the song, the band takes to the sky, weaving around one another in double-time staccato bursts, Ben Riley’s cymbals glowing like a California sunset. This is not the graceful latticework and tempo-shifting they displayed at the Jazz Workshop; it’s a strafing. When Monk finally sets the song down, the crowd whistles its delight. It seems unlikely that Monk and his quartet would have known about what was happening in East Palo Alto, but they’ve clearly been buoyed by the crowd’s youthful energy, and they deliver some of the fiercest, most spirited versions of their core repertoire in response.
The notion that a great concert can end racism—or affect any kind of meaningful social change—is a convenient myth. Monk’s concert at Palo Alto High School didn’t change the fortune of East Palo Alto any more definitively than the $500 changed Monk’s own financial situation. But by offering a temporary escape from their respective grinds, it gave the artist and his audience a chance to catch their breath, shake themselves free, and revel in the sound of one of jazz’s greatest-ever combos simply enjoying themselves. As the applause rains down following “I Love You (Sweetheart of All My Dreams),” Monk speaks for the first time all afternoon. “We got to hurry back to get to work,” he says. “You dig?” For him, it’s an explanation; for the crowd, it’s an exhortation.

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The Canadian electronic musician’s globe-trotting work mingles the familiar and the strange, mixing colorful influences from around the world and somehow landing close to trip-hop.

Multiquest Niveau 1: Camouflé

Unsettling and alluring in equal measure, RAMZi’s Phobiza series was a kind of imaginary travelogue, its title an apparent portmanteau of “phobia” and “Ibiza.” Across the course of three releases, the Canadian electronic musician mapped out an archipelago of fantasy islands and forgotten languages—a mingling of the tawdry and the exotic where bird calls, chintzy synths, and garbled voices tangled like overgrown vines. The sleeves, emblazoned with bizarre flora and fauna, were styled to resemble artifacts of 20th century ethnomusicology, and the music offered a correspondingly global web of references: oddly tuned flutes, indistinct radio chatter, and the splintered rhythms of dembow, kwaito, and footwork. If you’ve ever lain awake in a strange country, jetlagged and listening through thin walls to the sounds of a nearby market square, then you already know the sensation.
RAMZi, aka Phoebé Guillemot, is working with similar materials on Multiquest Niveau 1: Camouflé, but the new material sounds like she’s turned a corner. Guillemot has always been considerably more invested in rhythm and groove than peers like Jan Jelinek, Andrew Pekler, and Visible Cloaks, who have taken a shared interest in globe-trotting to more atmospheric ends, and Multiquest Niveau 1 is her most rhythm-centric release. Where previous records seemed to be on the verge of dissolving into the muggy night air, the new album puts its drums front and center, leaning into muscular syncopations, slow-motion breakbeats, and, on more than one occasion, deep house.
“Muskin” opens the album as though pushing through a beaded curtain into a dimly lit watering hole; saxophone riffs curl like smoke against a meditative backdrop of bells and Rhodes keys. But at barely a minute and a half long, it’s also something of a fake-out, and with the following track, “Kombat,” RAMZi plunges into the kind of propulsive cut that constitutes the bulk of the album: a bass-heavy dub groove covered in acidic synths, vaguely non-Western scales, and the occasional outburst of police sirens.
The song strikes Guillemot’s customary balance between familiarity and strangeness, and the rest of the album follows suit. On the surface, the deep-house drums and buoyant synth pads of tracks like “Balmi” and “La nuit l'été 1996” sound conventional, with echoes of Mr. Fingers. But her habit of collaging mismatched chords and samples creates weird, murky pockets of dissonance, and even the most straightforward tracks are suffused in chipmunk chirps and molasses-thick baritone vocals, pitched on each end well beyond the limits of intelligibility.
But the most unexpected influence is a far more pedestrian one: trip-hop. The album is shot through with distant echoes of acts like Kruder & Dorfmeister, Thievery Corporation, and other period purveyors of satiny aspirationalism and frequent-flyer beats, from the sitar and vibraphones of “Rubicon” to laid-back cadences that are just a stone’s throw from a Café del Mar compilation. Trip-hop, synonymous with early-’90s electronic music, is a funny case: It’s never really had a proper reappraisal. From personal conversations I’ve had over the past five years, I know that there’s no shortage of left-field electronic musicians interested in dusting off classic trip-hop and trying to make something new with it—something that resonates with the uncanny feel that distinguished, say, Portishead’s Dummy upon its arrival, more than a quarter century ago. Multiquest Niveau 1: Camouflé might be the album that finally recognizes the latent experimental potential in that most misunderstood of genres—and makes the easy-listening doldrums of “chill” safe once again for aberrant behavior.

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The L.A. singer and rapper offers a fun-forward deluxe mixtape that exudes color and energy, pinballing between personas and styles.

Lowkey Superstar Deluxe

Kari Faux’s music prizes self-possession. The time-wasters (“No Small Talk”), scrubs (“Lie 2 My Face),” and social media hucksters (“On the Internet”) who haunt her songs aren’t just pests—they’re rudderless and confused, unsure of who they are and what they want. Kari can’t relate. Her mixtape Lowkey Superstar gushes with easy confidence, her rapping and singing playful and nonchalant. The deluxe edition brings some guests into her self-assured world.
The original mixtape was born from a trip to London, where Kari bonded with producer Danio through a shared commitment to improvisation and a mutual love of DOOM. Kari has described those sessions as a restorative time that helped her move past the confessional and probing mode of 2019’s Cry 4 Help EP. “This new music is really fun and I’m a fun person,” she said in an interview. “I’m not a sad girl.” In three weeks, they recorded and finished an album and laid the groundwork for what became Lowkey Superstar.

Produced in full by Danio, the fun-forward mixtape exudes color and energy, pinballing between personas and styles. On “StickUP!” Kari chases unpaid invoices with exaggerated bloodthirst. “Stickup, bitch!” she ad-libs, sounding more excited to intimidate her debtors than collect the loot. She raps in a menacing whisper on “While God Was Sleeping,” riding the guitar loop with a metered double-time flow straight from Memphis, a connection underscored by the song’s horrorcore tale of “sex magic.”
Kari sounds everything but strained, her writing and performances lively yet effortless. In 38 seconds, “Skit” swings from resignation (“Uphill battle against patriarchy with a plastic knife/That’ll probably be the synopsis of my fucking life”) to pointed insults and delirious sex jokes. And it’s just the prelude to “McGrady,” which channels Tracy McGrady’s slick handles as well as the swaggering rap of Houston, where he spent six NBA seasons. Her nonplussed delivery carries the track, inspired by Kari’s escape from a love triangle. “I had to shake a nigga like McGrady with the Rockets,” she sings breezily, like she’s just completed the world’s most mundane chore. The self-deprecation in the tape’s title is winking; she’s emboldened by her dim spotlight.

The deluxe’s guests, remixes, and additional songs nearly double the short tape’s length, but it feels fuller rather than padded, more unruly, and entropic. After a spirited Smino verse, “Mo ‘Liquor” shifts into a Miami bass breakdown that turns the song into a void of low end, snare, and chants. It feels like a Freaknik block party has blipped through a wormhole. “Too Much, Too Fast” also features a spry transition, morphing into a slick electro-funk groove toward the end. “Slow down, bitch!” Kari shouts, following that instruction by bursting into indulgent crooning.
Kari’s singing can be a liability. Her sung verses on “Actors, Rappers & Wrestlers” and “Rapunzel” lack the charge and grace of her rapping. She’s far more skilled at using melodies to vary her flows than to belt outright or sustain a note. Her best songs leverage the litheness of her voice, using its soft timbre to wind into punchlines or flutter into nervous streams of thought. That use of melody as a vehicle for style as well as expression is an asset in an era where rappers often sing just to emote and singers often rap just to flex. Luckily, Lowkey Superstar centers her animated rapping, celebrating, in its low-key way, the quiet freedom of anonymity.

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The renowned composer-- no stranger to topical music, from the early "Come Out", which explored violence and race, to works since on cloning and the atomic bomb-- here creates a piece inspired by the life and interests of Daniel Pearl, the journalist who was brutally murdered by terrorists in 2002.

Daniel Variations

Daniel Pearl, the South Asia Bureau Chief for The Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped and subsequently beheaded in January 2002 by a group of Pakistani terrorists later linked to the September 11 attacks. That's the headline, but Pearl, like anyone, was more than a few facts printed on some newsreel: Born in New Jersey and raised in California, Pearl was the son of a UCLA professor, Judea, and a mother of Iraqi Jewish descent, Ruth. He was a passionate musician and listener, playing jazz and bluegrass fiddle, buying records by Miles Davis and Antonín Dvořák, and quoting at least one song title by bebop violinist Stuff Smith in casual conversation. In 1994, he wrote a story about a Stradivarius violin, the "Duke of Alcantara", that someone purportedly found at a freeway on-ramp in Los Angeles.
Steve Reich, considered to be one of the four major minimalists in American music, is best known for his 20th-century classical innovations with phases, processes, counterpoints, and pulses. That's the synopsis, but Reich, like most any musician worth your time, means more than four techniques spread over four decades. Born in New York, Reich is the son of a Jewish father, Leonard, and a mother, June, who sang in and wrote lyrics for Broadway musicals. After his album Music for 18 Musicians became a relative commercial success, he met his wife, video artist Beryl Korot, with whom he visited Israel. They later explored shared Jewish and Muslim ancestries in a work called The Cave, and much of Reich's work has mined similar personal interests. The politics of the day have never been far behind, either. One of Reich's most famous pieces, "Come Out", sampled the voice of a boy who had to squeeze the blood from the blue bruises on his black skin so cops would believe he'd been beaten during 1964 Harlem riots. Reich's compositions have since explored cloning and the atomic bomb.
Reich and Pearl's parallel paths meet in Daniel Variations: Conceived after a conversation between Pearl's father and Reich and commissioned in part by the Daniel Pearl Foundation, "which is dedicated to cross-cultural understanding and music," Daniel Variations is the latest in a long line of Reich pieces to combine massed voices and meticulous instrumentation. Sections one and three use lines from a conversation between Nebuchadnezzar the Great-- a Babylonian ruler who, according to Jewish and Christian texts, destroyed Jerusalem-- and Daniel, who became his adviser. "I saw a dream. Images upon my bed and visions in my head frightened me," Nebuchadnezzar told Daniel. Those sentences are repeated three times in Reich's recasting, and their orderly presentation by the 12-voice Los Angeles Master Chorale splits and stacks the syllables like the square stones of menacing palatial walls. Four minor chords-- pounded in pulses by pianos but stretched into tense suspensions by a string quartet-- offer the sense that the horizon beyond those walls will fold in, the staggered rhythms indicative of a steady tumble of troubles.
Quotes from Pearl serve as Reich's fodder for the piece's triumphant even sections, two and four: Reich employees the same instruments, but he lets the violin lead many of the turns as a tribute to Pearl's own enthusiasms. This time, four major chords bounce off of one another, countering the darkness of their counterparts, even as the chorale sings one of the final sentences Pearl spoke before being beheaded on video: "My name is Daniel Pearl." In the final and longest of the sections, the chorale presents a variation on a Stuff Smith song title, "I Hope Gabriel Likes My Music". When questioned about his belief in the afterlife, Pearl once replied with that title. "I sure hope Daniel likes my music, when the day is done," the text reads here, Pearl's words augmented by Reich. The music's bounce is at first relentless, the pianos flashing quickly as the strings flit in romantic figures overhead. Gradually, it all slows, letting the liminal message-- a musician quotes a journalist, who once quoted another musician-- settle like a luminous cloud: When you're gone, will the universe approve of your contribution?
That said, the most intriguing component of Daniel Variations is its reminder that what's often made Reich so daring is the humanist blood pumping into his scientifically executed forms. Daniel Variations doesn't eclipse Reich's past vocal works, and its message isn't one of courage, as some have suggested, as much as it is one of solidarity. Light versus dark, you know? It's smartly built and perfectly played, just like the record's second half, the instrumental dance "Variations for Vibes, Pianos, and Strings". Rhythmically and melodically, it's classic, resplendent Reich, but he's made these sounds with more vigor. Both pieces, then, are interesting without being essential, constituting the sort of record that-- thanks to the context of Pearl and Reich-- will be remembered but never mistaken as a masterwork from the composer The New Yorker once called "the most original musical thinker of our time."


A pioneer of what he once termed “weightless” bass music moves toward the outer fringes of club aesthetics on an album imbued with the apocalyptic overtones of sci-fi and speculative fiction.

Imperial Flood

It stretches the imagination to conceive of an album like Logos’ Imperial Flood as something borne out of dance music. Cold Mission, the London producer’s well-loved 2013 debut, hewed a little closer to those origins, luxuriating in the shattered glass and deep bass of its grime and dubstep influences. In subsequent collaborations with Mumdance, with whom Logos, aka James Parker, runs the label Different Circles, this approach was bestowed the term “weightless”: a sublimation of dance-music signifiers into something greater than the sum of its parts—that is, something that fights past a tendency to think about this music primarily in terms of genre pastiche.
Imperial Flood has been in the works since 2015, and it is the sort of cavernous and elegant record that one imagines could only be the product of quiet deliberation. In a sense it feels weightless, streamlined to the point of near-austerity; it reaches for something elemental to the strains of dance music that Simon Reynolds has dubbed the hardcore continuum and lets that unfold without troubling itself with dancing bodies or the excess fuzz of nostalgia. In another sense it’s heavy to the point of exhaustion, its nine tracks cohering into a thundering drama that concerns place and landscape and the faltering tropes—namely, sci-fi and speculative fiction—we deploy to explain to ourselves where we are at this odd moment on Earth.
The shudder is Imperial Flood’s dominant trope; its opening track, “Arrival (T2 Mix),” stitches together cinematic stretches of ambience with condensed flickers of anxious energy, one thing recoiling while something else unfurls. “Marsh Lantern” is marked by the same flickering quality, but melody recedes behind distant, otherworldly rumblings (something that could almost be human conversation, fed through a metallic filter) cut through with shards of silence. The quiet is what gives this album its intensity, its heaviness. The static-laced passages that lead throughout “Flash Forward (Ambi Mix)” and “Lighthouse Dub” become more electric, and subsequently more threatening, in the absence of sounds that could crowd and ground them. Even the lone full-fledged dance track, “Zoned In,” a collaboration with Mumdance, is a bare-bones acid-ish workout whose hyperactive euphorics are nonetheless concentrated, serious.
You don’t need narrative to get close to these tracks, but structurally, they unfold in a way that suggests half-sketches of stories, could-be characters crawling somewhere in the shadows. Parker has given a handful of literary references that informed the making of the album, including J.G. Ballard and the American eco-sci-fi novelist Jeff Vandermeer. In Vandermeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy, the boundaries of the “thing” that threatens humanity shift in ways that evade human knowledge and perception. Nature acts differently, but it’s still nature, sort of; horror arrives ambivalent. Some of the scarier moments on Imperial Flood are those that seem to mimic the sounds of our world: birds cawing on “Omega Point,” a vaguely insect-like chatter on “Weather System Over Plaistow.” Abstract synthetic pathos, like that of “Stentorian,” a cathartic stunner near the album’s close, arrives as a relief.
It would be fair to say that Logos is picking up a torch of some kind from Burial; Parker’s music is soaked through with feeling in a way that is linked to an acute sense of place. The shift we hear is one from melancholy realism—bleary sketches of an urban predawn—into a world where it’s hard to see or hear where we’re located without drawing on sci-fi tropes of some kind. Anxiety about the imminent dark future seems to have made it even more difficult to represent the present as “real”; meanwhile, it’s curious that these big contemporary narratives have become fixed to certain strains of future-leaning dance music. It might be a condition of UK dance music in the wake of the late critic Mark Fisher’s era-defining writings, which encouraged listeners to make deeper meanings from rave culture and its offshoots. Or maybe it’s that these rave-derived sounds—even if they’ve been condensed, reworked, and obfuscated—still hold traces of the bodies they were originally engineered to make move, so when Parker gives us these carefully rendered places, we can feel them intensely, with fear but at least not alone.


After years of mixtapes, erstwhile Odd Future rapper and MellowHype MC releases his debut album. He sounds completely unmoored, stuck somewhere between punchline rapper, storyteller, and moralist.

Fireplace: TheNotTheOtherSide

Technically, Fireplace: TheNotTheOtherSide is the debut solo album from Hodgy (née Beats). The Odd Future co-founder has been in the public eye, however, for over half a decade. He’s released six solo mixtapes and EPs, five projects with MellowHype, MellowHigh, and been prominently featured on all three OF group efforts—not to mention the “Sandwitches” verse that landed him on national TV. Still, there’s typically a reason why a rapper calls something an album after years of mixtapes. Even if the distinction is increasingly meaningless, as Drake and Chance the Rapper have both scored Grammy nominations off of releases they insist are “mixtapes,” the implication remains that the “album” is a statement piece. In addition, going solo allows an artist to explore sounds and themes that may not fit into a group’s more established aesthetic—even if Hodgy was the lone MC in MellowHype. In both regards, Hodgy offers nothing new on Fireplace, and brings into question what he offers as an artist with MellowHype dormant and the more powerful collective dissolved.
Right off the bat, Hodgy struggles to distance himself from Odd Future. After a brief intro, the first rapper to deliver on the record is Salomon Faye. It’s a move that will instantly ring a bell for OF loyalists—the widest audience for a 2016 Hodgy release—as it’s the same one Earl Sweatshirt pulled on his own debut, Doris, when the shy and sly Sweatshirt let non-rapper SK La’ Flare open his comeback record in one last effort to delay his triumphant return from Samoa. Regardless of intent, Hodgy’s decision to wait his turn on “Kundalini” is a misfire, as he and Faye share tone, pace, and message, making them virtually indistinguishable. There is no contrast or aha moment, just confusion as to why Hodgy would not want to set the tone for his first real album.
Non-distinction plagues much of Fireplace. With MellowHype, Hodgy leaned on Left Brain to create the mood. With Left ensuring a consistent vibe, Hodgy was free to express himself with more creative lyrics that rarely explored much, but had great energy. Fireplace lacks any semblance of cohesion in production, which leads to a survey of generic rap beats that ranges from a Clams Casino copycat cut like “Resurrection” to the chopped-up soul of the Knxwledge-produced “Dreaminofthinkin,” which does not fit Hodgy. There is nothing to ground Hodgy on the record, and very few of the instrumentals catch the ear, despite collaborations with big names, like Unknown Mortal Orchestra, BADBADNOTGOOD, Knx, and 88-Keys.
Without interesting beats, or at least ones that fit a defined aesthetic, all that’s left is Hodgy’s lyrical ability. To start his career, Hodgy’s greatest asset was that he was not Tyler, the Creator. He could have fun while his comrades screamed vilely, but no longer are they rambunctious teens, and lines like “I’m just like Mike, Mike-WiLL, Miley Cyrus,” and “I’m observing like I’m the fly on the wall, nigga, Pink Floyd” are just bad. The latter is on a track with Busta Rhymes, who upstages Hodgy even while on cruise control, just by varying his flow and delivery.
Throughout Fireplace, Hodgy is stuck somewhere among being a punchline rapper, a storyteller, and a moralist. On “They Want,” he raps about institutional racism, and on the closing “DYSLM,” he fights to win back the mother of his son. Otherwise, he does not maintain a consistent message throughout a track, nor does he connect ideas throughout the album. On “Glory,” for example, he declares, “The brightest light my future,” but by “The Now,” he intones, “Don’t be waiting around, go get it time is now.” There are no developments between the two moments that indicate a change in perspective: They remain empty cliches.
The only discernible advancement on Fireplace is Hodgy’s continued growth as a singer. It’s a skill he began to flex in earnest on his 2016 mixtapes They Watchin Lofi Series 1 and Dukkha, and it’s quickly become his most pleasant trait. Unfortunately, although no fault of his own, he sounds exactly like Frank Ocean circa *Nostalgia, Ultra., *and the Odd Future connection certainly doesn’t help in distancing the two. Hodgy’s singing allows him to handle hook duties on his own, but it also amplifies how bad some of the rapping is (“I’ve learned that ball is life, and I’m the goalie” on “Laguna”), knowing he could do so much more with less just by using his own abilities.
Fireplace is not even Hodgy’s first release on a major label. MellowHype’s Numbers, MellowHigh, and The OF Tape Vol. 2 all came out on Odd Future’s Sony imprint; even BlackenedWhite got a reissue via Fat Possum. After six attempts and years after the collective’s cultural peak, it’s not clear what made Fireplace the project worth declaring Hodgy’s official debut. The record lacks consistent themes and any set of beliefs beyond scattered attempts at positivity. Musically, it is hardly satisfying, as the fleeting enjoyable moments are swallowed up by a great deal of frustrating mediocrity. Fireplace: TheNotTheOtherSide does not give depth to Hodgy, does not answer why he’s any different now that he’s Beats-less, does not prove that he’s capable of carrying a project on his own. It’s disappointing, considering the potential he showed as a fiery young rapper, but that feeling is perhaps the same reason why Fireplace even exists. Hodgy is a rapper you once knew, and he’s still here for better, but mostly, for worse.


New Zealand psych pop virtuoso Connan Mockasin's latest, Caramel, creates a stainless world that is both unsettling and fitting. Each new instrument seems to come out thick and globby, gradually dribbling out with an adult contemporary sheen.

Caramel

"I liked the idea of making a record called Caramel," Connan Mockasin told NME. "Then I made the whole record around what I thought a record called Caramel would sound like." It might not be an especially deep concept, but take a listen: His Caramel sound quickly introduces itself. The album's title track begins with a deep voice, which is pitched down and smoothed out for a flirtatious monologue in the vein of Barry White. "Oh, and what is this?" Then, there's a coy giggle before Mockasin delivers a gentle, melodic howl ("ah-oooooo") over a soulful, beatific, far-away synth. "Welcome, this is Caramel album," the voice says. In a stereotypical universe, this is the moment where you're prompted to pick up the album's sleeve. Welcome. Take a moment to study Connan's platinum hair, pencil-thin mustache, and averted gaze. There he is, dressed all in white, swaddled in pillowy fabric. His stainless world is both unsettling and fitting; everything on "Caramel" shines. Each new instrument seems to come out thick and globby, gradually dribbling out with an adult contemporary sheen.
The 30-year-old New Zealand psych pop virtuoso recorded his sophomore album in a Tokyo hotel, and this time around, he's feeling sultry. He closes out the bridge of "I'm the Man, That Will Find You" by cooing a mostly unadorned falsetto. After one careening moment of calm, he moans and launches into the belted chorus with its slinky R&B groove. It's the perfect sort of pause to force anticipation in a love song—a calm before a storm, a gaze before a conversation. Throughout Caramel, he's ready to employ sonic examples of human emotion (like sobbing and moaning), and he doesn't make those details subtle. As he proved on Forever Dolphin Love, he's not afraid to go theatrical. Like a cartoon madman, he delivered a warbling, wide-eyed plea on that record: "Please turn me into the snat". The title track of that album featured over 10 minutes of cluttered, kinetic, continuously shifting music. Connan's clearly got it in him to create a sizable, at times unsteady odyssey.
Caramel is an album that demands patience. With a concept in mind, Mockasin seemed to be taking his time, playing the long game, establishing a gradually mutating mood. His broad view seems especially evident with his five-song "It's Your Body" suite—16 minutes with one abstract narrative wherein Connan forces the listener to slow down for a few lengthy slow jams. It takes over two full minutes of soporific minimalism to break into the primary melody of "It's Your Body 1". Then, things come to a standstill with the respectively loud and quiet (and equally stagnant) instrumentals on "3" and "4", which feel similar to the dragging mid-section of "Why Are You Crying". Thankfully, there are moments where Connan springboards into some well-executed, catchy grooves, like on "Do I Make You Feel Shy" and "I'm the Man, That Will Find You".
At the end of the "It's Your Body" suite, the melody resolves into that familiar beatific synth line from the title track. There's a petite voice repeating the words "thank you Connan Mockasin". The subsequent reply is loud, bursting out in that same voice from the title track: "Ahhhh. You're very welcome." The echo from that last word is intentionally overemphasized, ending with two very blunt repetitions: "COME. [beat] COME." Then, album closer "I Wanna Roll With You" kicks in with some cartoonishly sexual moans. It's tempting in that moment to nudge Connan toward the novelty bin, but he never quite makes it there. Instead, he occupies a similar space as Ariel Pink—a guy with offbeat sonic inclinations, a loudly absurd sense of humor, and a knack for writing ultra-weird soul songs. From the hair to the warped yacht rock soundscapes, comparisons to Ariel seem inevitable. Both men are weirdos and self-recorded savants whose careers will likely continue to take them to far-out, primary colored spaces.
When the moans clear away on "Roll With You", Connan delivers some quiet, mournful vocals (followed by, yes, a spoken word monologue where he says, innocently, "Please, roll with me"). The word "caramel" is most readily embodied by this music's sensual, flirtatious leanings. Unfortunately, sometimes it seems to just mean "slow", i.e. the pace of swimming through caramel.


James Blake's follow-up to his breakthrough self-titled album incorporates more gospel and R&B elements and a wider variety of textures. He successfully splits the difference between the sultry bedroom vibes of R&B’s resurgent Quiet Storm moment and the more mundane life of a British “bedroom” artist.

Overgrown

In a well-publicized late 2011 interview, James Blake drew his line in the sand on the Great Dubstep Debates. The boy who fell for the emotional resonance of bone-disintegrating sub-bass only after years of playing piano privately came out against the American version of guys like Skrillex (whom he couldn’t even be bothered naming). Such performers, Blake contended, appealed strictly to a “testosterone-driven, frat-boy market” that couldn’t be more different from the Feist-and-Joni covers and Bon Iver duets pouring out of the Londoner who’d just turned 23. Blake argued that his music was not only more egalitarian-- appealing to women and men equally-- but was also a purer representation of dubstep as an idea. It was a misrepresentation of American dubstep’s audiences and a presumptuous statement about What Women Want, sure, but at the same time, it was hard to fault Blake for forcefully trying to stake his claim to a patch of land within a genre broad enough to incorporate a rave resurgence and a brooding folkie.
Blake’s real argument for the continued relevance of his dewy, electronic gospel-folk comes via his second LP, Overgrown. At a few points on the record, he seems to be demonstrating to the wub fetishists that he’s also capable of sonic mayhem. Whether they’re meant as representations of conflicted emotions or simply designed to get crowds moving, the codas to “Digital Lion” and “Voyeur” are as bass-first and funky as anything Blake’s done to date. The last minute of “Lion”, which credits Brian Eno as collaborator, prominently showcases Blake’s gospel fixation, his wordless vocals present to acknowledge the powerful groove. For its part, “Voyeur” is possibly his most techno-sounding track to date, though you wouldn’t know it from the opening. Blake begins in jazzy repose, dwelling on a short phrase (“and her mind was on me”) over a light piano loop and minimal bass thump. The introduction of a treated cowbell and a 4/4 thump gradually morphs the song into something resembling a club track, similar to Four Tet’s slow-building 2010 banger “Love Cry” or 2011’s simmering, sample-based “Pyramid.”
Overgrown is a showier album than Blake’s eponymous 2011 debut, incorporating more gospel and R&B elements and a wider variety of textures. In a way, it feels like Blake’s meeting himself midway between his LP and EP personas. The string of EPs he released before putting his blurred face and name on the cover of an LP cast Blake as the latest UK producer prodigy, capable of modern classical pieces and tracks built around Aaliyah and Kelis samples. On his first LP, however, Blake opted for the singer-songwriter move, making heart music instead of head music, alienating certain purists while gaining new fans who have zero interest in his work on the Hemlock label.
On Blake’s own admittedly modest terms, Overgrown is marked by extremes. The album starts in the mode of the 2011 LP on which he rued childhood relationships and pondered his dreams. On the title track, he mewls “I don’t want to be a star/ But a stone on the shore,” confessing he prefers to blend into his surroundings rather than draw attention to himself. For a guy who puts a crisp, pensive photo of himself on his album cover, it’s a questionable stance, and his delivery is self-serious enough to nearly tip over into self-parody. It pales in comparison to James Blake opener “Unluck”, though it’s saved from schmaltz through Blake’s skill at investing even the cheesiest sentiments with a palpable anxiety.
There’s showy, and then there’s “Take a Fall for Me”, a collaboration with RZA, who Blake gives free rein to smear awkward romantic imagery all over his track. It’s easy to understand why the pair would collaborate: their production styles aren’t dissimilar, both showing a fondness for gloomy, bass-heavy soundscapes rooted in R&B. Why RZA was asked to rap, however, is hard to understand. If you want to hear the phrase “tight as the grip of a squid” on a James Blake album, or an American’s stereotype of a proper British meal (fish & chips, Guinness), you’re in luck. For the rest of us, “Fall” is Blake’s first out-and-out failure, the sort of song that should have been relegated at the very least to bonus track status, and probably should have been kept private altogether.
Overgrown is not as wall-to-wall great as his debut, but fans of the first LP will still find much to admire. The most promising development is his indulged fondness for various permutations of R&B and gospel styles, best evidenced on the album’s great first single “Retrograde.” Self-described as a song about falling in love, it balances the solemn soul of Bill Withers’ “Grandma’s Hands” with periodic bursts of passion, via Blake shouting “suddenly, I’m hit!” Throughout the album, he successfully splits the difference between the sultry bedroom vibes of R&B’s resurgent Quiet Storm moment and the more mundane life of a British “bedroom” artist fond of keeping to himself. “To the Last”, in particular, tiptoes around a Sade-style smooth-soul composition, aided by the synthesized sounds of waves crashing ashore.
Blake’s deconstructive take on R&B is similar in spirit to that of How to Dress Well’s Tom Krell. In a recent interview with Pitchfork TV, Krell explained his writing process as one of locating bodily sensations that haven’t yet shaped themselves into recognizable emotions. Suddenly you’re hit, in other words, but you don’t yet know if that feeling is joy, anxiety, frustration, or terror-- you’re only aware that something’s there, and you try to freeze it, to examine it more closely, instead of simply slotting it in a category and moving on. This is exactly what Blake does so well (and, for what it’s worth, RZA doesn’t): locating these sensations, and conversing about them. On “I Am Sold”, he even manages to explain the process, by mulling a single phrase over and over, tweaking it, and approaching it from different directions: “speculate what we feel.” Instead of worrying about where he fits in a broader musical landscape, or whether he’s a “star” or not,” this is Blake’s comfort zone. Whether he’s making bass-heavy bangers, quiet meditations, or increasingly of late, something in-between, Blake is a modern master of emotional speculation.