Six years after their scrappy debut, the pop-punk band Potty Mouth return with an arena-sized follow up that sounds like a major-label effort without all the compromises.

SNAFU

Potty Mouth’s scrappy debut full-length, 2013’s Hell Bent, sounds like it was recorded in a practice space, so the upgrade on their sophomore album SNAFU is immediately obvious. The drums are mixed to arena size, and the surfaces gleam with studio polish, thanks in part to engineer Courtney Ballard (Good Charlotte, All Time Low, State Champs). Like pop-punk icons Blink-182, Potty Mouth started out in punk before discovering their knack for glossier, more melodic pop songwriting. SNAFU, arriving after six years of label limbo, aims for a Buddha to Enema of the State leap — they even offer their own “What’s My Age Again?” with “22,” a song about not wanting to “wake up 22.” The opener “Do It Again” evokes the hard-charging “Dumpweed,” and if they aren’t cracking the kinds of juvenile jokes that Tom DeLonge and Mark Hoppus did, the energy is similar: youthful determination and self-deprecation.
After establishing the band in Northampton, Massachusetts, singer-guitarist Abby Weems, bassist Ally Einbinder, and drummer Victoria Mandanas saw their lives as musicians speed up while working on new music. Potty Mouth signed a record deal, released a grunge-tinged self-titled EP, and toured with bands like Beach Slang and Against Me! In 2016, they moved to Los Angeles to record a new batch of songs. But suddenly, their relationship with their label turned sour after the label requested they try a different sound, jeopardizing Potty Mouth’s creative control and their future. Instead of clinging to the deal, Potty Mouth chose to part ways, essentially rebuilding a new set of resources on their own. From this situation, the album title arrived: SNAFU, or a “Situation Normal All Fucked Up.”
The album’s opening string of songs lean into their choruses, sounding a little too indebted to acts like Veruca Salt and Garbage. But once the Green Day-like squeal of guitars on “Liar” kicks in, Potty Mouth find their stride, as if motivated by each other’s delivery. SNAFU is filled with moments like these, where the joy of jamming with best friends results in irresistibly catchy hooks. They blow a raspberry at the end of “22,”  a reminder to not take themselves too seriously, while the impromptu collaborative origins of “Fencewalker”—a song Weems co-wrote with the Go-Go’s Gina Schock, one of her personal idols, after they invited Potty Mouth on tour—serves as a reminder that they deserve to be taken seriously, too. It’s a fine line of knowing one’s worth, and they balance it well on SNAFU.
Instead of toughening up on this album to prove they can go big musically without the guidance of a major label, Potty Mouth embrace what makes them stand out as a unit and as individual members. Weems’ shows off  her aggressive guitar tones and a sneering falsetto on “Dog Song.” Einbinder grounds “Plastic Paradise” with her guttural bass and sugary backing vocals. And then there’s Mandanas, giving Travis Barker a run for his money with quickening drum fills on “22” and the hollow echo of floor tom hits on “Massachusetts.” The energy is gleeful and unencumbered, even when the sound feels fit for bigger stages. They sound like a major label band without any of the compromises.
Potty Mouth decided to release SNAFU and an accompanying comic book on Get Better Records, a DIY record label co-run by Einbinder and her partner. Their audacity paid off: By way of declaring independence, Potty Mouth found both their  bravado and secured their future. “They said, ‘Give us more of that something outré to sell,’” Weems sings on the flashy “Smash Hit.” It’s her suckerpunch of a response that sounds more gleeful than anything else on the album: “Oh well, mademoiselle.”


Inviting producers like Kaytranada, James Blake, and DJ Paul into the fold offers a refreshing canvas for a rapper whose technical prowess and stark songwriting deserve a varied landscape to thrive in.

$oul $old $eparately

Freddie Gibbs’ gruff, menacing voice has the innate ability to blend with its background. It’s part of why his last three records—Alfredo, Bandana, and Fetti, produced either by the Alchemist or Madlib—felt more like snugly fitting puzzle pieces than curious experimentations. When he bares his soul about the costly pressures of trying to maintain his rap independence on “Skinny Suge,” he’s draped by the Alchemist’s usage of a heavenly guitar progression from German artist Volker Kriegel, to the point where it’s impossible to separate the emotionality of the lyrics with the romantic sample.
Settling into a groove with legacy producers whose names ring out in the annals of rap history made it difficult for Gibbs to buck expectations as to what his projects could sound like. The thrill of surprise dissipated with each album’s hyperfocus. You begin to expect the peaceful nature of David T. Walker strings on “Something to Rap About” or the Sylvers’ angelic shrieks on “Palmolive,” relying on only Gibbs’ nimble flow and cadence variances to make each song feel unique. Now Gibbs departs from the comfort zone that he’s built for himself on $oul $old $eparately, inviting in producers like Kaytranada, James Blake, and DJ Paul into the fold. It’s a refreshing canvas for a rapper whose technical prowess and stark songwriting deserve a varied landscape to thrive in.
Understanding that change is difficult for people, Gibbs provides fan service early in the album to listeners he’s picked up in recent years. The Alchemist’s two-faced, jazz suite on “Blackest in the Room” feels as though it could be ripped from Fetti. Instead of blistering through the track, Gibbs employs a methodical flow that creeps along a dreamy Michel Ripoche sample, rattling off references to Black iconography “Training Day Denzel” and Fred Hampton with a measured fury. The track is a proverbial layup: “Black Forces so his brain ain’t leave a stain on my shoe,” he raps, pairing brutal depictions with the serene vocal sample to create a haunting juxtaposition with a sinister aura.
Even though Gibbs strays away from the Alchemist and Madlib, he retains the soul that’s set him apart from much of rap’s mediocrity and malaise. Instead of a uniform set of boom-bap production that sounds like Blaxploitation flick soundtracks, there’s a grab-bag of sounds for Gibbs to mold. “Grandma’s Stove,” with its musings on his public perception as a “deadbeat daddy” and drugs as a form of escapism, draws additional sensitivity from the somber drumbeat and Musiq Soulchild’s crooning. Kelly Price’s angelic vocal runs on the intro “Couldn’t Be Done” coincide with triumphant horn sections and a pitched-up Norman Feels vocal loop to give the song a celebratory, gospel-esque tone. The James Blake-produced “Dark Hearted,” with its continuous vocal echoes and murky piano beat, makes Gibbs’ bars about homicide and abandonment feel like bad memories he wishes to flush away. His voice dives in and out of the pockets with precision, skillfully playing with the cadence to craft a symphony with the track’s intermittent hi-hats.
Part of Gibbs’ allure stems from his unflinching honesty, turning $oul $old $eparately into a mediation on how his life has morphed with stardom. It’s a double-edged sword: It gets him into a laundry list of beefs outside of his raps that get old rather quickly, while also making it possible for him to address the reputation he’s earned in his songs. Much like how his music interacts with his controversy, you have to make an effort to sort through the nonsense in the vignettes, like when the polarizing Joe Rogan appears in a voicemail at the end of “Rabbit Vision.” But when he homes in on his own words and self-critiques, he’s razor sharp. He combines the groovy rhythms of the Madlib production with his conspiratorial ramblings as a cover on “CIA,” hiding the album’s thesis in the final track. “I did this album off pages ripped out my diary/Confessions and hard lessons, killers confide in me,” he spits, considering how he’s matured and grown over the years. “Rabbit Vision” is a personal sermon, with the J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League’s rousing piano production granting Gibbs the space to reflect on his life journey. He deals in the concrete, refusing to sensationalize his drug-slinging escapades and numerous bouts with public figures.
The album’s sound meanders through regional influences, taking on the form of whoever guest stars on the track with ranging success. Moneybagg Yo’s visit on “Too Much” feels generic and stale, with the pounding bass and braggadocios bars destined to become club background noise. “Lobster Omelette” could have been a standout on God Forgives, I Don’t, as he and Rick Ross’ delivery drips with luxurious energy, deserving to be listened to from a giant pink hotel on Miami Beach. The ascending harp scales of “Gold Rings” provide a beautiful foil for Gibbs and Pusha T’s abrasive verbosity, ensuring that the duo’s shooting percentage remains pristine. Even the other legends that appear are equally as motivated as Gibbs: DJ Paul, Raekwon, and Scarface all maintain their established, elevated quality. Through it all, Gibbs displays an unwavering comfort among legends—the balance between technical agility and hard-nosed intensity ensures that each beat he floats over, whether it be DJ Paul’s horrorcore stylings or DJ Dahi’s whirring electronic beeps, feels familiar, never foreign.
For the past six years, Gibbs’ consistency has manifested in cohesive projects that often blended easy-listening production with in-your-face raps into an intoxicating combination. By electing to embark on a variety of sonic directions, he’s challenging the listener to remember the days of Shadow of a Doubt and ESGN, allowing for his raps to take precedence by deviating from production expectations. At its core, $oul $old $eparately is a full-circle exhibition that allows Gibbs a minute to rest on his laurels: His comfort zone is whatever studio he finds himself in.


The young Maryland rapper presents a deft, stylish, and unique introduction to his career.

Quebec Place

A name like Innanet James gives a lot away. The Maryland rapper is a byproduct of the rap web, a post-regional stylist who built his base almost entirely online. He owes much of his success to a single email sent to Pigeons and Planes, which led to his breakout single, “Black,” going viral across the blogosphere. He owes his entire career to Lil Wayne, whose online mixtape Da Drought 3 inspired him to rap. As he was building his web presence in the early ’10s, he remained active locally. Under his first moniker Sails Martin, he caught an early break and became a member of GoldLink’s Squaaash Club. But when that relationship deteriorated, he rebooted, deleting all of his early music from the internet and becoming Innanet.
His debut EP, Quebec Place, named for a residential street in D.C., cashes in on the cachet he’s earned online. It’s a well-curated selection of electro soul cuts that borrow sounds from across regions to tell stories about home. He raps about paying his mama’s bills, feeling safe at his granny’s house, and treating Montgomery County like the sandbox adventure game Saints Row.  On “Jams,” he recounts being a small-time local artist, rapping, “Lost a couple friends, I ain’t McConaughey, I ain’t trip/Well I did, on the beat to tell them they ain’t shit/Sike nah, I’m in Maryland ‘cause really I ain’t rich/Where you learn real quick how real it can still get.” Things happen quickly in his raps and ideas are constantly overlapping. Nuggets about his Maryland upbringing are hidden in generalities.
Despite being influenced by a wide range of artists, among them Wayne and Cam’ron, Quebec Place is still heavily indebted to what's happening locally in the DMV—Wale, GoldLink, and go-go—which is especially evident in the cadences on “Frequency” and the bounce on “Flavour.” He distills the scene into a bubbly brew while sampling sounds from outside sources. There are traces of Ghostface in James’ writing and on “Black” his inflections mimic Vince Staples, but he isn't defined by any of his influences. His phrasing is distinct and his wordplay is incredibly elastic, perfect for his free-associative raps. On tracks like “622” and “Summer,” thoughts unfurl in snippets. His verses split and break in weird places, and he’ll randomly lean in on an off-beat, creating space that he then slingshots through to reestablish his rhythm. He has an innate sense of time and tempo, and he has strong pop rap instincts, too.
Quebec Place is a sampler of Innanet James’ unique talents, and he begins to find his footing on songs like “Jam,” where he goes toe-to-toe with DMV rapper Chaz French, both building off each other’s energy. “Girls” is a cross between Jay Z’s “Girls, Girls, Girls” and Ludacris’ “Pimpin’ All Over the World,” a cross-country roll call of his flings. He’s constantly taking cues from those before him and those around him all while becoming more comfortable in his own skin with each breath. On some tracks, he bursts through with reckless flows dictating the pace (“Frequency”); on others, he settles in, carefully stretches each syllable, packing them into open spaces (“622”). The EP builds to its closer, “Paint,” which takes a smooth soul sample and flips it into something sleek and modern, as James bounds into walls of rubbery synths. In its lyrics, he surveys his past and future, hoping to one day become a beacon of the community that made him. Quebec Place, which outlines his humble beginnings, is another good start.


On Kiid, her first full LP, Mal Devisa’s voice is raw, collected, and honest, scaling heights that you may have forgotten were there.

Kiid

Deja Carr’s voice is a force of gravity, an instrument of rare range and seemingly limitless capacity for empathy. When she howls, her vocals clip into the red, and her rapping jolts you straight awake. On Kiid, her first full LP, her voice is raw, collected, and honest, scaling heights that you may have forgotten were there.
Mal Devisa is Carr’s solo moniker. She grew up in the Bronx and, at five, moved to the college town of Amherst, Mass. Carr seems to have absorbed the intellectual rigor that is the oxygen of such a place—the societal critique in her songs and interviews is razor sharp—as well as its heart. (“I’m definitely a small town person,” Carr once said. “When I go to the city I’m like, ‘Why is no one returning my smile?’ It’s kind of sad.”) At 12, Carr attended a Girls Rock Camp lead by a former member of the ’70s outfit Fanny and started a funk band called Who’da Funk It; the group lasted until Carr was 17, and a year later, in 2014, she released her first music as Mal Devisa. Her debut EP included a cover of Feist’s “Honey Honey” as well as a remarkably classic-sounding blues ballad called “Daisy,” which appears here.
Kiid pairs that enormous, smoldering voice with spare instrumentation—Carr is mostly accompanied by her rumbling bass, with occasional piano, drums, and beats. The minimalism of the music is a foil, highlighting how thundering Carr’s alto can be. Rhythm is her primary instrument, and it follows that her grandfather was the New York City-bred jazz drummer Bruno Carr, who recorded with Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. Warmed with tape hiss, Kiid was released with no label after a successful Kickstarter campaign, and it accordingly ascribes to its own genre-skewing logic. Brilliantly sequenced, it contains two sets of five mostly acoustic tracks, capped by a booming rap song at the end of each side—declarations of unwavering autonomy, bars that leave foes present and historical in the dust. Carr’s commanding songs have the wide-open, recursive feeling of jazz and blues. The bass guitar, plucked and strummed, makes Kiid feel tactile and alive.
No matter the style, the spirits of Nina Simone and Billie Holiday lurk in all of these songs. Carr’s borderless voice has a similar way of luxuriating in every note. You would not be mistaken for hearing shades of Merrill Garbus, too. (Carr has a tUnE-yArDs tattoo.) The mesmerizing “Sea of Limbs” is performed so starkly that you can feel the dimensions of the room it was recorded in—the darkness and the tables and chairs and caverns of space. “If you swim in a sea of limbs/Don’t be surprised when someone tries to grab you,” Carr sings, wringing the stoic resolve out of such images as “Poseidon and his golden rage” and “skin like a tidal wave.” On the tender “Everybody Knows,” Carr’s melismatic singing twists syllables into sublime shapes. “Everybody knows that my heart grows deeper than the water,” she sings. “I will make a road map out of my heart.”
There are more aggressive moments on Kiid, too. The clattering, densely layered “In My Neighborhood” is grounded by sinister industrial electronics. It sounds like an anti-gentrification anthem: “Girl don’t shut your eye/This is called the world,” she snarls, “Don’t look hip enough?/That’s cause I’m not hip enough/In my neighborhood.” Kiid ends with “Dominatrix,” one of the album’s two exhilarating rap songs, erupting all of its frustration into a restless flow. It is a jarring final purge, a menacing wrecking ball of feminist defiance: “I’m a dominatrix when the bass kicks/I’m eating up the spirits like the shackles on the slave ships,” she raps. “I’m better off being a queen in size 16 jeans… or the only black woman slaying science on TV.” These moments, and particularly the boiling-point of “Dominatrix,” underscore the more quiet rage that is simmering all along.
The starry penultimate track “Forget that I.” is just Carr and piano, as if there is a sole light beaming down on her: “I am more than what you think of me/I fight fires in the dark/In the beauty of it all/I forget that I have lied/I am holding onto my own life.” Songs so precisely about survival are rarely so full of grace.
In interviews, Carr has expressed the inspiration she’s drawn from the Black Lives Matter movement; she once evoked the lyrics to “Forget that I.” when discussing the colorblindness that permeates America, the forces that make it easier to “reject people that don't look like us.” “I know for a fact that everyone is more than what I see when I look at them,” Carr said, “and maybe more than what they see when they look at themselves.” These realities naturally charge all of Kiid. Even its abstract lyrics feel politicized: On “Live Again,” when Carr repeats its titular refrain—“Why do we live again?”—the answer seems to ring out in the song's echoes.
Kiid’s opener “Fire” distills her power into its most heartbreakingly simple expression. She sings of “fire in the brains” of all those trying to make sense of our painfully nonsensical world. “Does it kill you to know that we’re all dying?” Carr sings. “It kills me to know.” Musically, it sounds classic—wise, like an old soul—and yet “Fire” is the sound of this very moment. Her lyrics ponder grave injustices, process immense breaches, and yet they are searingly lucid. Perhaps this is what makes Mal Devisa so profound: For 30 minutes, there is nothing between you and her voice.


On the ambitious new album from Ukrainian metal prodigy Markov Soroka, songs boil in their own misery. His dismal riffs and atmospheres bubble over until there’s nothing left but smoke.

Tchornobog

In 2009, a Ukrainian teenager named Markov Soroka began composing the album that would become Tchornobog, named after the demonic deity described as the Slavic god of evil. The project was inspired by a vision: “I witnessed—without any hope of my eye closing,” he wrote, “The terrible sensory overload of the black vomit of Tchornobog.” Over seven years later, Soroka—now 21 years old, the metal prodigy behind one-man bands Aureole and Slow—asks you to bear witness alongside him. The album is a series of long, genre-defying compositions in which Soroka plays nearly every instrument, inviting like-minded artists to add the occasional saxophone, cello, or background vocals. The ambition inherent in every second of Tchornobog is its driving force.
Spanning four tracks in over an hour, Tchornobog might initially seem easier to admire than it is to actually listen to. But deeper listens reveal it to be a dynamic collection of focused and expressive extreme metal. The lurching 20-minute opener “The Vomiting Tchornobog” drags itself forward with a crushing physicality. But around the three-minute mark, a surreal, reverb-drenched array of horns burst into the mix to accompany the low-end blasts from Soroka’s guitar. It’s a bone-chilling moment from a composer whose primary goal is to disorient and overwhelm.
Despite taking apparent influence from the structure of Yes’ Tales From Topographic Oceans, Tchornobog’s music is largely uninterested in progression. Soroka’s songs don’t really evolve over their epic runtimes; they boil in their own misery, his dismal riffs and atmospheres bubbling over until there’s nothing left but smoke. The tracks on Tchornobog mostly follow a similar pattern, separating two crushing halves with a slow, ominous breakdown. The moments that subvert the formula are welcome, like the jazzy interlude in the penultimate track “Non-Existence’s Warmth.” Ten minutes in, piano and mournful horns fade into the mix like a funeral procession rerouted through a desert. When their refrain is echoed in a starry post-rock outro, Soroka offers the album’s most transcendent and human moment.
While maintaining his cryptic persona, Sokora has revealed that the album partially consists of “meditations as an escapism from less than favorable situations from a troubled childhood.” The emotional intensity of the music is clear, even if Soroka keeps a distance, obscured further by somewhat monotonous production. The album’s impenetrability, however, is part of its appeal. You could imagine any of these songs being released as a standalone EP and garnering acclaim for the suffocating landscapes they invoke. Taken together, they feel like a deep unburdening from one of metal’s most promising and mysterious figures. “I believe that everyone has their own Tchornobog that they are constantly wrestling with,” he’s explained, “This is mine.” You get the sense his battle has only just begun.


iLoveMakonnen's latest falls uncertainly somewhere between mixtape and album, flipping between his established styles. All of the Makonnen sounds are here, but they are a little thinner, and more grating.

Drink More Water 6

Fame on the Internet, particularly at the nexus where music and memes are consumed, accelerates in dog years. It’s been fewer than two calendar years since "Tuesday," but the once-ubiquitous summer 2014 jam feels positively ancient in a world full of Lil Yachtys, Lil Uzi Verts, and Kodak Blacks. Particularly troubling is the shuffling pace of iLoveMakonnen’s output since then—following up his solid eponymous debut EP with a mixtape, Drink More Water 5, that, while slight, was just enough to float interested parties. (It helped that it was free.) November’s iLoveMakonnen2 was good, but it wasn’t hard to squint and wonder if the appeal was fading just a tad.
This is a standard dilemma for an artist like Makonnen at this crossroads, but he exacerbates the problem by frequently flipping between wildly different personalities—brash trap-rapper, which feels a little hollow; emotional rap singer, which suits him better; and an off-key pop artist, which might actually be his best mode ("Tuesday" was neither rap or R&B, after all, but essentially a pop song).
He refined the balance of all of these elements on Drink More Water 5, but it seemed unlikely to connect with anyone not already into what he’s doing. The sixth installment straddles a frustrating line between straight-up mixtape (which would temper fan expectations, somewhat) and an official album (because it is for sale on iTunes). Like everything else he's done since 2014, it feels inherently insecure, the movement of someone unsure how to keep pushing forward. All of the Makonnen sounds are here, but they are a little thinner, and more grating.
Constant experimentation doesn’t mean an artist is getting better, and consistency is not a crime. But the trap-rap songs have grown tiring, and the songs of that stripe here, like "Big Gucci" and "Sellin," are more chores than bangers. When Makonnen decides to stretch and aim for an alchemy of pop songwriting and emotive singing, he’s still more than capable of producing something that can be direct and moving. The best song here is the one that nails this dynamic the sharpest, the Sonny Digital-produced "Want You," which rides a beat not entirely unlike "Tuesday" for a good two-and-a-half minutes. (Speaking of biting yourself, "Uwonteva" is nothing more than a way-worse retread of the fun "Trust Me Danny.")
The mild psych touches on the ballad "Turn Off the Lies" (geez that title) punch up the track, but it can’t help but feel a little staid, a too-late seasoning on a dry piece of meat already turning rubbery. At 11 tracks, it's longer than 2 and lacks the experimentation of Drink More Water 5, and it drags. The tape just kinda ends, with no resolution. And that damning lack of resolution is something that's haunted Makonnen for these two long years—sure he can put together memorable hooks and a sometimes head-turning lyric ("I take you to the movie and I treat you like a groupie—and you don’t mind"), but it's starting to feel one-dimensional.


A decade-plus after splitting from Cash Money, Juvenile reunites with Birdman for a shockingly strong late-career-reunion record.

Birdman / Juvenile: Just Another Gangsta

Just Another Gangsta

Juvenile is in a strange place. The Pen & Pixel-inspired covers, sample-free beats, and signature ad-libs of his prime era are ubiquitous on Soundcloud, but the New Orleans vet’s own steady output over the past 13 years has gone largely ignored. Reality Check, his underrated album from 2006—the first one he released after an acrimonious and very public split from Cash Money—is the last time he seemed to command a national spotlight, and the four LPs he’s released since then (one more under Atlantic, and then one on E1 followed by a pair on some combination of J. Prince ventures) have come and gone rather quietly.
Birdman, meanwhile, has spent a not-insignificant part of this decade in court. Despite having one of the greatest catalogs in the history of rap music, Cash Money has long been the subject of rumor, innuendo, and lawsuits. (Through all this, Baby’s persisted as one of his era’s sharpest A&R’s –– the high-water mark this decade being Tha Tour Pt. 1, the incomprehensibly good mixtape that paired Young Thug and and Rich Homie Quan, neither of whom have released any other music through Cash Money Records.) Given that Juve split from his original home a decade and a half ago, and given that his departure is widely seen as the rupture that spelled the end of its golden era, it’s sort of shocking that he would team back up with Birdman and CMR for a late-career reunion. What’s maybe less shocking is that the record is extremely good.
Juve’s always been a gifted writer –– he can make cold-blooded threats sound funny, but more importantly, he's as good as any rapper since Biggie at letting shame and sorrow bubble beneath his verses without them explicit. He also has that once-in-a-generation voice that makes everything sound like the blues. Both those skills are on full display here. There’s “From Tha Block,” a slinking summer anthem full of organ stabs and references to Juve’s lawyer and his similarities to Matlock; there’s “Broke,” which treats insurance fraud the way folk songs treat factory closings. The way he stretches words like “uzi” and “D’usse,” on the hook for “One Two,” turns them into pointed, pained scraps you can’t get out of your brain.
This is nominally a collaboration album, but Birdman is deployed appropriately—as a capable but limited supporting player. Just Another Gangsta smartly declines to pander to the rap radio of the moment, sticking with a sound palette that flatters Juve, but does make some shrewd casting decisions: the closing song, “Dreams,” features a rising Memphis rapper with an elastic voice named NLE Choppa, and “From The Bottom” has an excellent turn from a young Louisianan named Jay Lewis, who for some reason goes uncredited. It would be tempting to frame Just Another Gangsta as the beginning of a renaissance for a legendary rapper and for the sound and era he represents, but the truth is smaller, less mythic, and more invigorating: Juve never stopped being this good, he just needed the right opportunity.


The ten sparse protest songs on Neil Young's strange and scrappy new album address the dissemination of fake news, the mistreatment of America’s indigenous people, and the water crisis in Flint.

Peace Trail

“Things here have changed,” announces a computerized voice at the end of Peace Trail, the scrappy and strange new album by Neil Young. The song is called “My New Robot” and it might be about a recent divorcee taking comfort in the presence of “Alexa,” the voice-activated feature of Amazon’s new household device Echo. But those four words at the end, which introduce a barrage of online sounds (requesting to swipe your card, enter your pin number, your mother’s maiden name) hint at the bigger picture behind the record. As a songwriter, Neil Young has always thrived in shaky times. Whether it’s the deflated hippy dreams of his mid-seventies Ditch Trilogy or the road-weary breakup anthems that comprised 1992’s Harvest Moon, Neil’s best work often feels like a gut reaction to turbulence.
More than any album since 2006’s Living With War—the Bush-era treatise that called for impeachment and looked to Obama as a beacon of hope—Peace Trail is a product of its time. Its ten sparse protest songs address the dissemination of fake news, the mistreatment of America’s indigenous people, and the water crisis in Flint. As suggested by his open letter about Standing Rock, Young remains a vigilant and thoughtful observer, staying up to date on important issues and fighting for what he believes is right. And while the songs on Peace Trail are unquestionably timely and occasionally poignant, Young’s songwriting-as-immediate-response sometimes fails him. His musings throughout the album often scan as non-sequitur sentimentality (“Up in the rainbow teepee sky/No one’s looking down on you or I”) or just plain non-sequitur (“Bring back the days when good was good”). You get the sense his goal here was to finish the songs as quickly as possible (maybe so he could perform nearly half the album at Desert Trip Festival), when a few more days of editing might have resulted in a more powerful listen.
The same hurried approach Young takes with the lyrics, however, actually benefits the overall sound of the record. After last year’s Monsanto Years, Young has ditched his Promise of the Real backing band, whose tentative roots rock recalled, at best, a small town Crazy Horse cover band. On Peace Trail, he’s accompanied by two session musicians who mostly make themselves scarce. Most songs feature only Neil’s acoustic guitar along with unobtrusive bass and delicate, brush-stroked drums. It results in an album that feels refreshingly unlabored and current. On two tracks, Young even adopts an Auto-Tune vocal effect (maybe something he picked up from jamming with D.R.A.M.?). On Earth, the bizarro live album he released earlier this year, the effect was used as a commentary on inorganic food; on Peace Trail, it’s no joke. In the nearly-spoken-word “My Pledge,” Young’s Auto-Tuned harmonies aid the inscrutable narrative (which seems to connect the voyage of the Mayflower with our attraction to iPhones and maybe also the death of Jimi Hendrix?) with a disorienting layered effect.
Two of the most effective songs on Peace Trail happen to be the ones least directly associated with the headlines. “Can’t Stop Workin’” offers an insight into Young’s creative process, borrowing a chord progression from his estranged colleague David Crosby while also hinting at a possible reunion: “I might take some time off,” he sings, “for forgiveness.” “Glass Accident,” meanwhile, uses breaking glass and the dangerous mess it makes as a metaphor for lack of accountability in the U.S. government (“Too many pieces there for me to clean up/So I left a warning message by the door”). Even more than the disquieting, if distractingly literal, narratives of tracks like “Show Me” and “Indian Givers,” these songs examine Young’s values at this stage in his career and illustrate his strength in communicating his concerns. And while Young’s voice has certainly never sounded older than it does here, there’s something youthful about his energy. Besides the fact that his two-album-a-year-clip keeps him in pace with your Ty Segalls or John Dwyers, his music is guided by a restless determination to cover new ground and speak his mind. “Don’t think I’ll cash it in yet… I keep planting seeds ’til something new is growing,” he sings in the title track: it’s long been both his gift and his curse.


The long-running Minnesota band’s 11th album is a distillation of their manifold strengths, largely comprised of pastoral accounts of American beauty curdling into something coarser and sadder.

XOXO

Minnesota’s durably excellent Jayhawks have existed long enough to run the gamut from insurgent roots-rock heroes to their current stature as pantheonic middle-age warhorses, all without ever changing much about their Poco-meets-the-Faces first principles. More than three decades from their debut, XOXO, the band’s 11th studio album, is a distillation of their manifold strengths, executed with the subtle precision of a one-time power pitcher who now gets by on off-speed stuff and guile.
XOXO is largely comprised of pastoral, shopworn accounts of American beauty curdling into something coarser and sadder, the personal indignities of aging merging with the endless discouragements of our cultural and political moment. The haunting ballad “Homecoming” penned by founding member and functional bandleader Gary Louris, strikes a fatalistic note in an opening couplet that could apply to everything from climate change to encroaching mortality: “Yeah, the room is closing in/The air is getting thicker/It’s hard for me to breathe.” Elsewhere, “Ruby,” written and sung by keyboardist Karen Grotberg, is a piano-based character sketch evoking Van Morrison’s Veedon Fleece by way of Sandy Denny’s enchanted folk, an opulent melody suffused with last-day-of-Summer melancholy.
The number of different voices featured on XOXO reflects the more collaborative measures taken during the Jayhawks’ writing process, with all four members taking on lead vocal duties at different points over the course of the LP’s 12 tracks. It’s a calculated risk that winds up working, suggesting something like the Byrds’ brilliantly successful full-scale reinvention Sweetheart of the Rodeo or even the Lindsay and Stevie version of Fleetwood Mac. When the seething Grotberg composition “Across My Field” gives way to the insouciant disco of Louris and drummer Tim O’Reagan’s “Little Victories”, it has the character of a quiet evening at home that suddenly turns into a debauched shore leave weekend.
One Jayhawks anomaly is their periodic weakness for ersatz chamber music taken to unrewarding ends. On XOXO it appears in the form of the ponderous four-and-a-half-minute “Illuminate”, a song apparently dedicated to making monkeys of Trump supporters while simultaneously making a very thin, or at least elliptical case against him. Much better is O’Reagan’s unambiguous “All The Young Dudes” sequel “Society Pages,” a psychedelic public service announcement that asks the ultimate litmus question: “Are you here/For all the young queers?”
While the prevailing mood of XOXO is world-weary resignation, sprightly tracks like the Burrito Brothers-style scarlet woman homage “Bitter Pill” and the exhilarating Radio City-inspired power trash of “Dogtown Days” go some lengths to demonstrate that the Jayhawks remain rough and ready as ever. Long purveyors of old-soul music, they've now persevered long enough to render their timeless melodies with the finely-honed perspective of genuine old souls. XOXO is a battle-scarred but unbroken collection, worthy of being filed alongside venerable mid-career milestones like Wildflowers and Time Out of Mind. Once counted as standard-bearers for the prefabricated genre known as “Americana,” the Jayhawks’ mosaic of woozy memory and wooly panache now comprises a version of American music all their own, stretching out endlessly like a Midwestern summer's night.

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Shimizu’s long career has encompassed jazz fusion, city pop, and the omnivorous experiments of his group Mariah. This unreleased 1984 album showcases his electronic work at its most experimental.

Kiren

Yasuaki Shimizu’s endless curiosity has fueled decades of tireless creative endeavors. As a child, he learned to play multiple instruments—violin, clarinet, piano, guitar, percussion—but landed on the saxophone as his primary vehicle for expression. Ornette Coleman and Rahsaan Roland Kirk would influence his playing, but he soaked up all the musical education he could. Radio in hand, he’d dial in from his home in the Japanese countryside to hear sounds from across the world: chanson and flamenco, rock and canzone, music from Africa and music from the Middle East. He loved it all, but could just as easily walk to nearby rice paddies and revel in the insects orchestrating their own song. Nothing was off limits, which meant everything could inspire. As he grew older, local record stores would import more sounds from overseas. He never dared emulate them, though: “[I] had no interest in imitating that genius,” he once confessed. “I perceived it more as a way to expand my own sonic vocabulary.” He was determined to carve his own path.
By the late 1970s, Shimizu’s musical voraciousness allowed him to work in a variety of modes. He was part of hard-bop and jazz-fusion ensembles, contributed to classic city-pop records like Taeko Ohnuki’s Sunshower and Minako Yoshida’s Monochrome, and produced pop albums for singers like Yumi Murata and Naomi Akimoto. There was the Saxophonettes, originally conceived as a solo project to create moody renditions of American jazz standards. He also had his band Mariah, which served as an especially productive testing ground—their four records contain everything from prog-rock epics to dreamy exotica, new-wave freak-outs to art-pop brilliance. The LPs under his own name are numerous, but Kakashi and Music for Commercials are major standouts: The former is a thrilling crystallization of his poppier, melodic inclinations while the latter is a collection of ambient vignettes that feels like a proto-Donuts. Somewhere in the middle of all this is Kiren, a hitherto unreleased studio album from 1984. Another testament to his unbridled ambition, it’s mesmerizing for newcomers and longtime fans alike.
Kiren stands out for more than just its sonics. Unlike most of Shimizu’s releases, it wasn’t intended for a record label. Instead, it was the product of the freedom he had while collaborating with Aki Ikuta, the late producer who was instrumental to his music’s sound. You can hear his boundary-pushing ideas on “Momo No Hana.” It begins with an extended passage of queasy ambience before Shimizu throws in additional noises to subvert expectations: high-pitched synth tones, a spectral growl, and a noise that sounds like a warped Banjo-Kazooie voiceline. Then there’s an instrument that recalls his affection for Indian classical music, and then a plunderphonic loop that anticipates Oneohtrix Point Never’s Replica shockingly well. “Ore No Umi” is just as bewildering. It has this chintzy guitar loop low in the mix. A marimba quietly enters, and then the song charges forward with a minimalist pulse. Like the glam-rock pastiches found on early Mariah records, “Ore No Umi” thrives on a winking playfulness, though here it’s with a riff on Steve Reich—Shimizu approximates his ideas for a single element in this tapestry of layered rhythms. Anchored by a tumbling beat and bursts of sax, it’s triumphant and fun and a revelatory depiction of Shimizu’s ingenuity.
As Shimizu recently told Bandcamp Daily, he considers Kiren part of a trio including Kakashi and Mariah’s Utakata no Hibi. He was on a real hot streak at this point in his career. On these three albums, recorded between 1982 and 1984, Shimizu was increasingly coming into his own; Kakashi is more progressive than the jazz excursions of 1981’s IQ-179, and Utakata no Hibi is considerably more cohesive than the first three Mariah records. One could compare those two LPs to other new wave-inspired art-pop acts from Japan—Chakra or Haniwa-Chan or Jun Togawa’s Yapoos—but with a stronger emphasis on rhythm, atmosphere, and texture, rather than pop songwriting. Kiren might be considered a culmination of these ideas, but funneled into a wholly instrumental album. He describes it as “the dance inside the image of myself,” and on the longform percussion-based jam “Kagerofu,” its patient unfurling and rhythmic insistence feel like he’s peeling back layers to get to his musical core.
Shimizu’s musical identity, though, was constantly expanding. Even on this dance-focused LP, he arrived at his goal from different angles. “Peruvian Pink” is one of the grooviest songs, but it barely contains percussion. Instead, its foundation is a slick bassline and a repeating synthesized warble. As he plays sax in varying degrees of intensity, the music becomes increasingly cinematic, like a slow-motion montage via deconstructed boogie. “Ashita,” on the other hand, takes the post-punk tendencies he’d explored in the past and makes them tastefully carnivalesque, letting squelching rumbles and marimba melodies take center stage. Elsewhere, “Asate” employs a robotic lurch while “Shiasate” shoots for exultant, regal glory.
Across these seven tracks, Shimizu homes in on a sound that bridges his numerous interests. He looks back fondly on this era: “At that time, I could recognize that all of the various scattered elements I had been interested in since I was a child were collecting together inside of me, and becoming a single organic material.” His description of this album as living is illuminating—particularly given that it remained hidden from public ears all these years. Shimizu spent his entire life invigorated by sounds from around the world; with Kiren, he was able to partake in this ecosystem, to contribute something that was unmistakably his own.


On her solo debut, the Norwegian electronic musician uses synthesizer and piano to sketch suggestively abstracted scenes veiled in fog. The songs can feel like they’re transcribed from a forgotten language.

From a Story Now Lost

In the decade or so since she graduated from the Trondheim Conservatory of Music, Anja Lauvdal has built up a formidable discography: The Norwegian pianist and electronic musician has played in more than a dozen groups, backed Jenny Hval in the studio and on stage, and racked up a slate of duo and trio recordings that tug at the frayed edges of jazz. But to find her fingerprints on a record, you have to know where to look for her. Her keys are the connective tissue in the music of Skadedyr, a 12-person collective of jubilantly unbridled free improvisers; on Finity’s Jazz på engelsk: Finitys Destiny, she ducks beneath tuba and saxophone, blocking chords and smearing digital pads on a set of smoldering Destiny’s Child covers. In a trio formation like Moskus she’s easier to pick out, but her contributions—on synths, cembalo, vocoder, piano, and what’s credited simply as “samples”—are so mercurial that keeping up with her is like trying to get a bead on a fast-moving octopus. Even on a duo record like this year’s All My Clothes, with the drummer Joakim Heibø, her touch is slippery and sparing, as though determined to resist being pinned down from track to track—perhaps even from note to note.
From a Story Now Lost, Lauvdal’s solo debut, offers the chance to witness her musical ideas up close, but she remains a mysterious presence. Across 10 tracks totaling barely half an hour, she uses synthesizer and piano to sketch suggestively abstracted scenes veiled in fog. The title suits the music and the mood: These 10 instrumental pieces feel like songs transcribed from a forgotten language, or dreams whose unraveling only accelerates as you strain to piece them together.
It’s not a completely solo affair; American experimental musician Laurel Halo sits in the producer’s chair. The two artists worked in tandem on the album’s creation, with Lauvdal recording sketches and improvisations that Halo would then rework and send back for the Norwegian musician to iterate upon once more. With a CV that ranges from club tracks to filmic ambient to compositions for piano and electronics, Halo is just as versatile as Lauvdal, and her presence here is no easier to pinpoint. That could well be by design; this is, after all, Lauvdal’s show. But these pensive, unstable pieces feel in keeping with Halo’s own predilection for hazy shapes, particularly as evidenced on her 2020 Possessed soundtrack, or in her World Without Heroes, a set of fluid, meandering interpretations of Ursula K. Le Guin’s translation of the Tao Te Ching.
The album begins with a softly unfurling chord of unclear provenance; in the background, there’s a faint metallic clanking, like the lid rattling on a boiling pot. A subliminal hint of melody stirs just below the surface of long, languid synthesizer tones. Things rarely get much more definitive than this, and every time they do, entropy quickly reasserts itself. In “The Dreamer,” a boldly declarative theme suggests a half-remembered film score before plunging back into the murk, shrouded by birdsong, crickets, and what might be the clanking of cowbells in the pasture. Much of the album, in fact, feels like it takes place behind a scrim of white noise and August ambiance.
There’s a worn, crinkly feel to texture of the music, as if the tape had been pulled from its reels, wadded up, and left in a dank basement for a season or two before being smoothed out and fed back into the machine. Repetition is at the heart of many of these tracks—the skipping tones of “Fantasie for Agathe Backer Grøndahl” vaguely recall Oval or Jan Jelinek—even though Lauvdal’s loops tend to morph as they go, mutating with every jittery repeat. Even in the absence of obvious melodies, Lauvdal’s meditative, softly rounded tones have a way of working themselves into your mind. The smeared pipe organs of “Darkkantate” evoke dusty beams of light illuminating mossy pews in a ruined abbey. The ruminative piano of “Clara” recalls Grouper but without such an intense feeling of despondency—it’s less morose than simply lost in thought.
Ultimately, From a Story Now Lost’s emotions are as ambiguous as its amorphous shapes. In “Xerxesdrops,” which taps into a similar affective register as Harold Budd and the Cocteau Twins’ The Moon and the Melodies, a watery, wandering piano melody traces circles over sluggish, detuned synths; it might sound sad if you want it to, but in another mood, it could also pass as airy, hopeful, or simply distracted, mirroring the toe-scuffing shuffle of an absent mind. From a Story Now Lost offers a provocative update to Brian Eno’s hoary maxim about ambient music: Forget about the balance between ignorable and interesting—perhaps ambient also ought to be as stone-faced as it is steeped in feeling.


The Brazilian songwriter Erasmo Carlos remains beloved at home, but he hasn’t been widely heard outside Latin America. These three early ’70s LPs have been given new life thanks to Light in the Attic.

Erasmo Carlos: Erasmo Carlos E Os Tremendões / Carlos, ERASMO... / Sonhos E Memórias 1941-1972

Over the last half century, few countries have had as many international recording stars as Brazil. The famed names of its rich musical traditions have the same renown as its rock-star soccer players: Gilberto Gil, Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, Milton Nascimento, Tom Zé, Elis Regina, Flora Purim, Jorge Ben, Carlinhos Brown, Seu Jorge, Marisa Monte to name just one possible dream-team XI. An artist who didn’t quite resonate abroad—who never glittered in the yellow national-team jersey, so to speak—is Erasmo Carlos. At 75, Carlos remains beloved at home, but he hasn’t been widely heard outside Latin America, which is a shame. As we’re reminded by these reissues of his work from the early 1970s, his talents were enormous.
Three of his albums—Erasmo Carlos E Os Tremendões (from 1970), Carlos, ERASMO... (1971), and Sonhos E Memórias 1941–1972 (1972)—have been given a new life thanks to Seattle label Light in the Attic. A smart essay by Allen Thayer, along with his detailed liner notes and translated lyrics, provides valuable context for the package.
Born in 1941, Erasmo Carlos first gained fame with Roberto Carlos as co-hosts of the musical television show “Jovem Guarda” (young guard), which debuted in 1965 and was aimed at teenagers enamored with American rock’n’roll and the British Invasion. Erasmo, no relation to Roberto, was a heartthrob; he sported a new haircut on every magazine cover he graced. In 1968, though, “Jovem Guarda” was canceled. Times were a changing and Erasmo was at sea. “No one wanted to know me,” he said in a 2006 interview that Thayer cites.
But Carlos still had his guitar and his voice, a fantastic and versatile one. He left São Paulo and returned to his hometown, Rio de Janeiro, where the new Música Popular Brasileira and Tropicália—a creative movement to counter the CIA-sponsored military junta that grabbed power in 1964—were fomenting. Despite his teeny-bopper reputation, Carlos still had street cred among the new, edgier players on the scene, like Caetano Veloso. This was in part because of his Rio roots and in part because he had talent, much of it still undeveloped at that point.
That’s where the story of these records begins. And what a new beginning it was. Though these albums were among the least commercial and least “successful” of Carlos’ career, he is in full soul-baring mode during these years, as if he has nothing to lose. He mixes all the genres of the place and time (pop, rock, folk, samba, bossa nova, psychedelia, soul, funk) within a feijoada of horns, flutes, strings, distorted guitars, and vocal harmonies.
His 1970 effort Erasmo Carlos E Os Tremendões starts out soft with “Estou Dez Anos Atrasado” (“I’m Ten Years Too Late”), which has a goofy bombast not unlike the theme from the original “Batman” series. But the remaining tracks on the album are magnificent, filled with surprising twists and vocal leaps. “Gloriosa” boasts a catchy melody and full string arrangement, organ, flutes, and fuzzy guitar, while the gentle ballad “Espuma Congelada” ends up in distorted Tropicália territory by way of Sgt. Pepper’s. The effervescent “Coqueiro Verde” reflects Erasmo’s umbilical attachment to samba. “Teletema,” a simple ditty written for a telenovela, is a quiet showcase for the wonderful textures of Erasmo’s voice, a gift that carries all three of the recordings. He almost whispers though it—“Soft/Celestial body/Goal, half/My sanctuary/My eternity/Illuminated/My way finally”—and reveals a vulnerability and depth.
The slow tempos of “Menina” and “Vou Ficar Nú Para Chamar Sua Atençao” are perfect vehicles, too, for his keen sense of phrasing. Carlos does a gorgeous version of “Saudosismo,” penned by Veloso—who, by 1970, was in exile in London after a short prison stay in Brazil. (The song could be read as a middle finger to government authorities, who, as Thayer writes in the notes, would surely have been made aware of its existence.) It’s juxtaposed, oddly, with the familiar and patriotic “Aquarela do Brasil,” which could work as well in a documentary on the pro footballer Pelé or a Varig airline commercial. Still, Erasmo’s rendition is irresistible.
Carlos, ERASMO..., out the following year, saw a slight shift from Erasmo’s 1970 effort. It was co-produced by Manoel Barenbein, who had helmed the landmark Tropicália album just a few years prior, and featured several of its backing musicians. Carlos, ERASMO... also included “De Noite Na Cama,” written specifically for Erasmo by Veloso while still in exile. “Masculino, Feminino” is a beauty, a slow duet with the angelic-voiced Marisa Fossa that has the feel of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden—if there were red wine and Marlboro Lights. In “É Preciso Dar Um Jeito, Meu Amigo” (“Gotta Find a Way, My Friend”), written with his old partner Roberto Carlos, Erasmo has drive and urgency in his voice: “But I’m ashamed/With the things I’ve seen/But I will not be silent/Accommodated in comfort/As so many out there.” Meanwhile, “Agora Ninguém Chora Mais” is a Jorge Ben original that’s reinvented as a driving, plugged-in, harmonized group chant: “The whole world cried/But now no one cries anymore/Cry more, cry more.”
Sonhos E Memórias 1941–1972 is the most focused and measured of the three albums and serves as a kind of personal diary (Carlos was born in ’41). There are photos of Jimi Hendrix, Mick Jagger, John Lennon, and Andy Warhol on the cover, and (perhaps more importantly) a team shot of Rio’s Vasco da Gama soccer club. In “Bom Dia, Rock’N’Roll,” Carlos references Elvis, the Beatles, Chuck Berry, and Carole King and James Taylor. The music is anchored by a rhythm section that would become the jazz fusion trio Azymuth, who gained momentum later in the ’70s and into the smoother jazz ’80s. With exceptions like “É Proibido Fumar” and the second half of “Sábado Morto,” which takes an unexpected vocal turn, Sonhos E Memórias 1941–1972 feels less chance-y than the previous two albums.
After all, it was risk that got Carlos to this point. On his 1970 album, when he was at his lowest, he recorded what became a hit song, one that brought him renewed notice and enabled future work and creative freedom. “Sentado à Beira do Caminho” (“Sitting on the Side of the Road”), perhaps a wink to an American classic, is majestic. Erasmo, backed by little more than an organ and an acoustic guitar, sings as if he’s speaking directly to us, and, in the process, reassuring himself: “I can’t stay here anymore and wait/That one day suddenly you will come back to me... I’m sitting on the side of a road that has no/end.” And then this, a fulfilled wish: “I need to get this over with/I must remember that I exist/I exist, I exist.”


The fourth album from the California indie rock icon features some of her strongest songwriting, sung gorgeously and told with piercing detail.

On the Line

Good storytelling is in the details. Not long into her fourth solo album, On the Line, Jenny Lewis introduces a narcoleptic poet from Duluth, with whom she spars over everything from Elliott Smith to grenadine; a father who used to sing a little ditty about all the years he threw away on heroin; an East Side girl called Caroline, to whom a lover is bitterly lost. There’s mention of Candy Crush, Slip’N Slides, Rambo, Marlboros, Meryl Streep’s tears, Dorothy’s ruby slippers, Don Quixote, the rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the bridge in La Crosse, Wisconsin, a couple different kinds of fancy cars, one disgusting-sounding drink, and a truly staggering amount of illegal drugs.
Bursting with all this specificity, which fuels vivid scenes and impressionistic turns of phrase alike, On the Line ushers in something that has long been gestating in its creator, bit by bit with every “Does He Love You,” “Rabbit Fur Coat,” and “Aloha & the Three Johns”: Jenny Lewis has reached her troubadour phase. She’s telling tales like never before, singing live in the studio while charismatically leading a band that includes elder statesmen like Benmont Tench and Don Was, not to mention cameos from Ringo Starr, Beck, and Ryan Adams (recorded before the allegations against him emerged). Acid Tongue, from 2008, and 2014’s The Voyager shed more of that twee sensibility from Lewis’ Rilo Kiley days, edging her a little closer to a skeptical Stevie Nicks for old millennials. That journey continues with On the Line.
Something consistently wonderful about Jenny Lewis’ music, going back to Rilo Kiley, is how quickly she allows her protagonists to get carried away into daydreams, tangents of emotion, and imagined declarations. Sometimes this manifests musically, like when a song goes from lo-fi black and white to technicolor and cinematic in a flash. On the sprawling ballad “Dogwood,” she starts off so quiet you can hear ambient studio noises. She entertains a moody, Johnny Marr-ish guitar interlude, then floats into a stop the song, I just gotta sang moment, complete with warm layers of her own vocals and the percussion emitting a kind of subtle “boom.” Then poof, the memory falls away, and she’s back to just her piano and her far-away voice and her simple observation that the dogwood trees are in bloom again. How natural it sounds, Lewis playing the piano that Carole King recorded Tapestry on, quietly resigned to the fact that two human bodies in motion will stay in motion, bullshit be damned.
On the flip side of On the Line, there are a couple of songs that trade stark lucidity for abstraction, and their frivolity stands out precisely because of their position next to some of the strongest songwriting of Lewis’ career. The track preceding “Dogwood,” “Do Si Do,” splits the difference between Tame Impala and modern-day Beck (he produced it, along with two others here) and finds a catchy sweet spot musically, but the lyrics lapse into non sequiturs that don’t entirely land (“This ain’t no ghetto, Jo/You’re on the payroll!”). And closing track “Rabbit Hole” feels slightly clichéd, from the central metaphor of going down Alice’s rabbit hole with an ex to the familiar but unplaceable melody to the pop-rock production style that seems a half-decade or so too late.
There has always been a certain amount of skepticism surrounding Lewis’ more overt attempts at hit-making (see: 2007’s Under the Blacklight), and part of that stems from her uncanny ability to do both: write classic pop songs that will forever lodge themselves into your brain and pepper them with lyrics (and aesthetic markers like an emo sensibility or a chintzy drum machine) that are unshakeable in their specificity and proximity to your own concerns. Half just doesn’t seem enough, especially since Lewis gives it all in the album’s best moments. “Wasted Youth,” among the handful of songs that reckon with family demons in light of Lewis’ estranged drug-addict mother’s battle with cancer, is a plucky piano-pop tune haunted by rock’s weary soul. This manifests in a catchy, slightly eerie chorus about addiction: “I wasted my youth on a poppy, doo doo doo doo doo doo just for fun,” sings Lewis, stretching into her falsetto with a disarming delicateness.
When it’s time for the album’s toughest scene, though, Lewis stays cool and more importantly, funky. On “Little White Dove,” relaxed-fit bass grooves and stuttering drums propel a surreal hospital visit, wherein the daughter must be the bigger person and forgive the ailing mother. “I’m the heroin,” she sings, a little detached, leaning into the homonym. It is from this kind of seemingly simple line that Jenny Lewis often wrings the most emotional truth. That, too, is another sign of good storytelling.


After dropping last year’s Piñata with Madlib and two subsequent EPs, Freddie Gibbs is back with his third full-length studio album. Shadow of a Doubt features over a dozen wide-ranging names contributing beats, from Canadian hitmaker Boi-1da to 808 Mafia’s Tarentino, and his roots and aspirations have never been clearer.

Shadow of a Doubt

Freddie Gibbs doesn’t believe in resting on his laurels. After dropping last year’s Piñata with Madlib at the helm — the rapper’s most commercially and critically successful project to date — he could have taken some well-deserved time off. Instead, he toured non-stop and played festivals, put out two EPs The Tonite Show with the Worlds Freshest and Pronto, and last but not least, became a father.
Now with little advance notice, and a raised middle finger to Q4 release schedules and anyone foolish enough to be making their best-of year-end lists early, the pride of Gary, Ind. is back with his third full-length studio album. A quick scan of the credits reveals the biggest difference between Shadow of a Doubt and his last LP—instead of one singular producer, there’s over a dozen wide-ranging names contributing beats here from Canadian hitmaker Boi-1da to 808 Mafia’s Tarentino. While the final result is less cohesive, and could benefit from trimming two or three songs, there’s no denying Gibbs’ versatility.
If there’s any question as to whether or not acclaim has mellowed the man who frequently refers to himself as both "Gangsta Gibbs" and "Freddie Corleone", look no further than the two tracks that bookend the record. The sparse, atmospheric "Rearview", which opens with a "Welcome to Los Angeles International Airport" P.A., sees the rapper offer up a bullet point summary of his career to date before dismissing would-be copycats with trademark precision. In contrast, "Cold Ass Nigga" sees Gibbs with two feet on the gas, with frequent Kanye West collaborator Mike Dean providing a suitably urgent, glitchy trap beat. It’s nothing like anything else in Gibbs’ vast catalogue (its closest spiritual companion might be "Old English", his 2014 track with A$AP Ferg and Young Thug) and it’s proof that the 33 year old is still more than willing to push himself out of his sonic comfort zone.
His lyrics capture the pursuit of the American dream like a Scorsese screenplay (drugs, sex, and all-too-frequent bloodshed included). He’s hardly the first artist to incorporate a sample from "The Wire" into a song, but he’s one of few able to do so without it coming off cliché or rote (Boi-1da and Frank Dukes’ sinister piano loops greatly help). Another highlight is the understated, introspective "Insecurities" produced by Dukes and Montreal’s Kaytranada (who teamed up with the rapper this year for the menacing one-off "My Dope House").
As for the record’s handful of guest spots, Gibbs has picked a mix of newcomers and veterans who complement but never overshadow him. Rising Miami-via-Toronto emcee Tory Lanez contributes a bleary-eyed hook to dealers’ anthem "Mexico"; elsewhere, L.A. R&B singer-songwriter Dana Williams propels "McDuck". On "Extradite", the Roots’ Black Thought’s politically charged verse is sharply juxtaposed with Mikhail’s bright, jazz-influenced production, which eventually gives way to dialogue taken from a fiery speech on Ferguson by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Then there’s "10 Times", featuring Gucci Mane floating over the beat like plumes of blunt smoke (perhaps Gibbs’ own "Freddie Kane OG" strain), before West Coast veteran E-40 swoops in to gleefully extol the virtues of a woman "thicker than a buttermilk biscuit."
On the outro of "McDuck", we hear an excerpt from an interview he did with Snoop Dogg this past summer discussing Gibbs’ background. "You just sound like you not from nowhere," says Snoop to which the rapper replies, "I created that sound." The cover artwork of Shadow of a Doubt might depict Gibbs’ face half-cloaked in darkness, but his roots and aspirations have never been clearer.


For a band whose legacy rests on the restless sprawls of their catalog, Can could also turn improvised uncut cloth into something stunningly concise. This new comp shows that lesser-known side of Can.

Can: The Singles

Some seven minutes into “Dead Pigeon Suite,” a meandering 12-minute recording that Can had never released until 2012’s The Lost Tapes box set, the freeform jam suddenly snaps into focus. Drummer Jaki Liebezeit’s drums transform into a Möbius Strip-R&B groove as hammered on an oil drum. Singer Damo Suzuki’s asthmatic exhales and ad hoc nonsense turns into a shout: “Hey you, you’re losing you’re losing you’re losing you’re losing your Vitamin C!” Later, the band would go back to the tapes and trim this portion down into “Vitamin C,” one of the heaviest b-boy breakbeat jams ever conjured—lifted by everyone from Spank Rock to U.N.K.L.E, that telltale tom roll bobbing up on the soundtrack to Inherent Vice and Netflix’s short-lived “The Get Down.”
For a band whose legacy rests in part on the relentless, restless, sidelong sprawls of their discography—from Monster Movie’s “Yoo Doo Right” through the greater part of 1971’s Tago Mago to Soon Over Babaluma’s “Quantum Physics” and “Chain Reaction”—the 23-track comp The Singles shows a lesser-known aspect of the band. In fact, Can’s biggest breakthrough came not on kosmische mind-melters like “Aumgn” but rather via a three-minute toe-tapper entitled “Spoon.” It became the theme for a television thriller mini-series, unit-shifting hundreds of thousands of copies and landing them on the pop charts. Moments like “Spoon” and “Vitamin C” showed that—albeit briefly—Can also had a knack for turning bolts of improvised uncut cloth into something stunning and concise.
The comp opens with original singer Malcolm Mooney’s farewell moment, castrato-shouting “Soul Desert” on the plodding A-side and revealing the group’s mellow, soulful (and short-lived) side on “She Brings the Rain.” Soon after, Suzuki entered the fold, providing the perfect foil for the likes of bassist/producer Holger Czukay, guitarist Michael Karoli, keyboardist Irmin Schmidt, and Liebezeit. For as high as that core group could take their spontaneous combustions, Suzuki and his pidgin yips kept the group within the earth’s gravitational field. He could turn a random phrase into a hook and something songlike would soon usher forth from the band, as on “Vitamin C.”
During their peak years—spanning from Tago Mago through Ege Bamyasi and Suzuki’s swan song with the group, 1973’s Future Days—the band operated at a supernatural level and could do no wrong, which The Singles all but confirms. Yes, the band made double-digit transportive epics during that span, but even jaunty cast-off tracks like “Shikako Maru Ten” and “Turtles Have Short Legs” show Can could shake you down in three minutes as well. The former is a svelte, snaking groove, its meter just tricky enough to avoid easy imitation. “Turtles” is a giddy, plinked piano shout-along, even if you can’t follow Suzuki’s lyrics.
It’s odd to have Can’s totemic works like “Halleluwah,” “Mushroom,” and “Future Days” cut to fit a 45—about as strange as saying that, in addition to his large canvases, Jackson Pollock also dribbled expertly onto cocktail napkins. “Halleluwah” is criminally spliced from 18-minutes to 3:38, but its magical polyrhythmic powers somehow remain undiminished. Still, such truncation puts the track in with the likes of other drum-heavy grunters of the era like Titanic and Barrabas.
Can happened upon another hit with 1976’s “I Want More.” It has little of the turbulent, gorgeous chaos of their glory days, the careening gibberish of Suzuki replaced by androgynous munchkin chants. But hearing Liebezeit stomp out a chrome-plated glam beat is a delight in and of itself, worth the extra minutes of “…And More.” Considered away from the rest of their discography, the serpentine progressive moves of “Splash” and percolating hard-rock “Vernal Equinox” are enjoyable sides. The same can’t be said, however, for the blues-rock grunt of “Don’t Say No.”
For a band that, for a time, conjured all manner of brilliance in either 3- or 20-minute increments, it’s especially agonizing that it was soon reduced to something as insipid as their 1978 single, “Can Can.” (You can almost imagine the thought process: “Let’s have Jaki lay down a 19th century can-can beat and we’ll just call it ‘Can Can’—because we’re Can and we can.”) The Singles traces both Can’s genius and how they ultimately ran out of ideas, losing all of their Vitamin C.


In the 40 years since the young Swedish composer's first proper release, the two-part, fifty-minute composition has become a cult minimalist classic. Its textures and humanity remain deeply absorbing.

Sand

The painter Viswanadhan Velu was born in a small town in Kerala, India, but made his way to Paris around the late 1960s. Following a car accident in Germany in 1976, he returned to India and traveled along the coast, collecting the sand that would form the basis of a new body of work. Viswanadhan’s art—non-representational, but, by his description, not abstract, either—has a searching quality and is broadly concerned with the elemental; in sand, he says, he found “the dichotomy between matter and meaning of being.”
Ragnar Grippe, a young Swedish composer who was trained as a cellist, landed in Paris around the same time, where he studied musique concrète with Pierre Schaeffer at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales. With the avant-garde composer Luc Ferrari, another figure adjacent to that community, he founded the studio l’Atelier de la Libération Musicale. Grippe, who drew inspiration from a number of the visual artists he met through the Cité des Arts residency, befriended Viswanadhan while the artist was working on his sand paintings. When that series was slated to go on view at Galerie Shandar (home to an eponymous record label that released numerous key minimalist works by the likes of Charlemagne Palestine, Terry Riley, and La Monte Young), the composer was asked to write a piece to accompany the exhibition. Sand, released in 1977 on the Shandar record label, was Grippe’s first proper album, and in the four decades that followed, the two-part, fifty-minute composition became something of a cult minimalist classic.
Sand opens tentatively. A variety of sounds introduces themselves over a mechanized-sounding tonal rhythm, including soft whistles, scratchy tape, bells, and fits and starts of electric guitar. It takes several minutes for anything to stick, until a wandering melody pushes respectfully through the gentle chaos. The techniques of musique concrète—represented, in particular, by that recurring mechanical percussive texture, which becomes the backbone of the composition—are foundational; Grippe approaches sound with a sense of curiosity, and without a rush to drive the piece with melody. But as Sand progresses, it develops some sense of narrative absent from the more aggressively abstract work of his GRM colleagues.
Grippe moves at an even keel through a series of sonic landscapes, ranging from futuristic, even proggy organ phrases to melodies rendered in a new-age vibrato. Sand dabbles, too, in the more colorful modes of Grippe’s American minimalist peers, using copious repetition and sometimes edging into psychedelic territory. Part 2 casts aside the base rhythm for a moment in favor of maraca, and other instrumentation remains distinct throughout: a recorder flutters in and out, emerging most purposefully in the loosely-woven final moments. It becomes an anchor as the composition unwinds itself to rest. Grippe’s piece has a strong sense of personality, and its humanity is deeply absorbing. Electroacoustic experimentation needn’t be lovely to be gripping, but here, it’s both.
Images from Viswanadhan’s exhibition at Shandar are difficult to source, as is any anecdotal documentation of how this score matched those paintings, so I’m reluctant to over-determine the relationship between the two, or to speculate how they may have activated one another formally. But the painter’s probing relationship to abstraction—a far cry from, and perhaps a direct rejection of, the Greenbergian quest for purity that characterized the avant-garde that preceded it—resonates in Grippe’s work here. Rather than reconstitute his journey, Viswanadhan used raw material he accumulated along it to create something new. And while Sand doesn’t describe an experience, per se, it hums with experience nonetheless, reveling in a strange sense of discovery.


The Toronto dance-punk duo’s new album sees them embracing maturity, bringing in more reflection, more funk, more production finesse, and—crucially—more hooks.

Outrage! Is Now

Though they were actually just broken up for five years, the gap between Death From Above’s 2004 full-length debut You’re a Woman, I’m a Machine and 2014’s The Physical World inevitably saddled the latter album with a decade’s worth of expectation. This time, with their new album Outrage! Is Now arriving three years after The Physical World, it may seem as if Death From Above, now back to their original name, have settled into a more routine working rhythm. But since getting back together in 2011, the Toronto dance-punk duo has been tentative about its future, offering little more than a we’ll-see-what-happens outlook at every step.
Perhaps as a way of curtailing anticipation this time, bassist/keyboardist Jesse Keeler and drummer/vocalist Sebastien Grainger didn’t even announce Outrage! Is Now until three weeks before its release date. Nevertheless, judging from some of the new lyrics, Grainger and Keeler might still be just as conscious of the passage of time—and their music’s place in it—as they were on The Physical World. “There’s gotta be another [...] generation/Ready for a revolution/Or a change of station,” Grainger sings on “Never Swim Alone.” And on the title track, he adds, “I’m out of rage/Maybe it’s my age [...]/Suddenly I don’t belong/To anyone/Or anything.”
If Grainger is indeed singing from his own point of view there, then it’s all the more remarkable that Outrage! Is Now makes such a convincing case study against the axiom that artists lose their edge as they age. For a pair who once lived by a Get-in-the-Van ethic and now find themselves somewhat bewildered about their transitions into settled lives of marriage and home ownership, Death From Above now sound more vital than ever.
Fans of the band’s early-2000s output should know that Keeler and Grainger no longer just bash their way through their songs in ephedrine-fueled fits of twentysomething angst. At this point, it would be foolish and disingenuous of them to try. Part of what contributes to the new material’s impact is the band’s ability to embrace their age and make it play into their existing strengths. In fact, the basic formula of vocals, distorted bass/keyboards, and drums remains pretty much the same as before. But Grainger and Keeler actually enhance the gut-punching character of their music by tempering themselves.
On Outrage! Is Now, they add manifold contours they had only touched on with their last album: more reflection, more funk, more production finesse, and crucially more hooks. When album opener “Nomad” gallops into its chorus, for example, the bass and drums momentarily stop advancing, making room for Grainger’s reverb-soaked voice to carry across the open space. The effect is not unlike when a cinematographer pans up from the ground to a wide-angle view that’s clearly intended to take the audience’s breath away. And more than half of the album’s 10 tracks contain spots where Grainger shows a penchant for sing-along melodies—the kind that, on earlier albums, he’d almost seemed to stumble on by accident.
When Death From Above formed, the original intention was to write bass and drum parts simple enough that other people could learn them while Keeler and Grainger played more complex guitar parts over top. That never happened, and instead the duo came to wear simplicity, speed, and volume as their badge of honor. Outrage! Is Now does suffer in spots from uneven pacing. The bouncy, piano-pop hook of lead single “Freeze Me” might have flowed better if it didn’t prematurely halt the momentum of “Nomad,” for example. But it’s a testament to Death From Above’s growth that they can afford three songs with traces of Bowie’s iconic “Fame” groove on the same album (“Statues,” “Never Swim Alone,” “Caught Up”) without actually repeating themselves. With Outrage! Is Now, Death From Above join the rare breed of artists who are able to capitalize on their maturity without betraying the spirit of their youth.


A new compilation celebrates the grey but lush “samba sujo” of São Paulo, with strands of native samba, post-punk rumble, Afrobeat, and blasts of avant-jazz.

Desconstrução

On the eponymous opening track of his 1968 debut, small town Bahian boy Tom Zé sang of his adopted hometown São Paulo with ambivalence. “São São Paulo quanta dor/São São Paulo meu amor” went the chorus, alternating between pain and affection in describing the smokestacks and traffic jams of the sprawling megalopolis, its bustling populace of eight million described as “crowded loneliness.” While the most populous and industrious city in Brazil, culturally São Paulo has always stood in the shadow of Rio de Janeiro. It was known as samba's grave.
But as the compilation Desconstrução proves, the musicians clustered around São Paulo’s current “samba sujo” (dirty samba) scene relish their hometown’s pallor. For those struck by the sound of Elza Soares’ A Mulher do Fim do Mundo from a few months ago, this twelve-track comp culled from the early days of the Goma Gringa Discos label is the next logical step in exploring modern Brazilian music. It features a similar cast of players and musicians from Soares’ album, including saxophonist/arranger Thiago França and Rodrigo Campos. And much like Soares’ late-period masterpiece, Descontrução places songs wild with fusion against contemplative and arresting moments of quiet.
From Campos’ hushed and simmering noise ballad “Ribeirão” to the roiling acid-rock tinged conjured by trio Metá Metá on “Rainha Das Cabecas,” each act expertly navigates through these influences to produce an exhilarating array that escapes easy classification. Most acts rotate through a stable of players, be they Juçara Marçal, Kiko Dinucci, Marcelo Cabral, Romulo Fróes, Sérgio Machado, Campos, or França, which the press release states “are not a movement, [but] togetherness in motion, always linked from one project to the next.” Almost any selection here contains strands of native samba, post-punk’s rumble, Afrobeat’s driving rhythm, blats of avant-jazz that seem to dilate space, as well as flashbacks to ’60s Tropicália, itself a mutation of Brazilian pop music interacting with outside influences.
But it’s one thing to just jump from influence to influence, and another to make each gestural leap and genre shift feline and graceful. Thiago França’s contributions might be the most deft of the set, “Space Charanga” bringing to mind the open-ended, exploratory jazz of Kamasi Washington or Charles Mingus’ own Cumbia & Jazz Fusion. It’s tight and lyrical, able to fly up into fiery spiritual jazz stratosphere while also staying firmly grounded in rhythm. Meanwhile “Na Multidão” is a quicksilver track that avoids drums entirely, drawing its pulse from filigrees of electric guitar and upright bass, punctuated with quick jabs of brass and droning woodwinds.
Serving as elder statesman for this clutch of musicians is Vicente Barreto, whose career—much like Soares—dates back to the early ’60s and also include many vicissitudes of fortune. Barreto collaborated with everyone from Vinicius de Moraes to Tom Zé on his 1978 album Correio Da Estação Do Brás. The guitars blare like sirens and grow increasingly anxious, but Barreto’s gravitas keeps the song from flying apart. The comp’s most gorgeous moment shows another side of Metá Metá. The trio’s hushed “Obatalá” brings to mind everything from early ’00s freak-folk to Gilberto Gil’s ethereal “Futurível.” With little more than a wordless whispered vocal and a plinking guitar figure that hovers over flutters of saxophone, they evoke an unspeakable beauty. Both guitar and horn teeter on the edge of extended-technique noise. But as their atonal din grows, the group strikes the perfect balance, conveying something sublime amid such noise, a bloom of color amid the gray.


Seattle trio's second album is a guitar-heavy collection of family snapshots and pretty, lo-fi messes.

Let's Drag Our Feet

Boys with perpetual colds who can kinda-sorta sing, hand claps of the generic indie variety, and the unfettered production made most odious/ingenious by Wolf Parade are three features of BOAT's second album on Magic Marker. This lengthy collection of fuzzy, crackling lo-fi jams does little more than their debut to convince us of the band's merit, but I mean that as a compliment. Their viscous sound, with each instrumental part given equally muffled or tinny weight, at times yields some heavy little rock lullabies. The makeshift, ad-lib familiarity of the songs are, as is often the case with this genre, what makes them accessible and enjoyable; for the melodies to dig to a more sophisticated depth is an added bonus; and for them to avoid the anemic desperation of Spencer Krug is all right, too.
As members of Seattle's prolific rock scene, BOAT differentiate themselves most explicitly with songs like "The Ferocious Sounds of Lobsters and Snakes/Mom, Dad, Me and You", the first part of which has been floating around the Internet for a couple of years. Here, it takes on a re-recorded cleanliness, the tempo slowed just slightly and the guitar itching for a more substantial role than the easy two-note plucks in the chorus. The lyrics here, as elsewhere on the album, are comfortingly cliché: "Don't you know, everything will be all right/ Don't you know, everything will be just fine." The song is dead simple and inexplicably addictive.
Such conciliatory ruminations appear in many tracks, but are often unintelligible thanks to the band's penchant for basements. But when the words want to reach us, they really do, albeit as adorably stupid adages: "All I want's a telephone that rings for free," "There's a lightbulb in your head/ If you break it you'll be dead," or a helpful suggestion about not being able to fall asleep if one drinks too many sodas. The lyrics are often role-playing in nature, particularly suggestive of an adult borrowing the voice of his parents to speak to his childhood self. Less enjoyable are the "ooh"s and handclaps of "Illustrate the History (When I Grow Up)", a sound too many times tried and sold, and which here says nothing new. More interesting is what follows, "The Whistle Test", which howls a little higher, a bit like Man Man's meowing habit, then slows to a trot for a closely recorded chorus with long keyboard notes that enhance the longing mood. Both the song's colorations, which alternate several times, are sophisticated, the faster portion letting the drums take the spotlight with a quick, complicated rhythm that settles down for the pleasantly dreary chorus.
The cheap production of these songs still allows for invention and different shades from the same instrumentation: the wall of noise of the synths in "Period, Backlash, Colon", the pretty vocals on "A Phone that Rings for Free", or the effects on the lovely closing minutes of "Gold Veins (This One Hotel)". Often what collects the drunken mess of the songs into an elegant pile, as in the case of "Veins", is D. Crane's vocals, which have the dexterity to volubly pack themselves in or stretch out over the course of the instruments' finicky tempos. But there are only a handful of songs that really delve immediately into our mind's ear and stay there, the rest still benefiting from their intra-song variety and general subversion to predictable structure. Showmates of the Shaky Hands, BOAT offer fewer hits but more keepsakes, with many of their songs becoming more adhesive as they simmer and soften over time.


Assisted by the Fall’s late Mark E. Smith, the German experimental musician explores a fusion of abstract electronics and spoken word that has little precedent in his work with Mouse on Mars.

Molocular Meditation

The final words that Mark E. Smith speaks on Jan St. Werner’s Molocular Meditation might be the most mundane thing that the phlegmatic leader of post-punk legends the Fall ever recorded: “I think that’s the lot, Jan. Thanks.”
The comment was directed at St. Werner, the producer and musician known best as one half of electronic duo Mouse on Mars, letting him know that Smith was done recording. Arriving after nearly three minutes of synthesized clangs and what sound like faulty oscillators having a heated debate, it’s an odd postscript from a singer and poet known for fiery invective and grumbling insults.
Everything else leading up to that aside is pure Smith. His coda comes at the end of “VS Cancelled,” a gentle nose-thumbing at Domino Records, the label that released the sole full-length by Von Südenfed, a collaborative project between Smith and Mouse on Mars. In the song, Smith reads an email from Domino’s general manager Jonny Bradshaw, who is dropping the group from the label. “I’m afraid it looks like we won’t be able to pick up the option. I told you times were tough.” Smith punctuates that last sentence with a rueful laugh.
One trait Smith shared with St. Werner was a penchant for reinvention. That was often by necessity for the Fall founder, considering the dozens of people who logged time in his band during its 40-year existence. But throughout the respective careers of both men, each project often seemed to begin with a clean slate, completely ignoring what came before. Likewise, Molocular Meditation has little precedent in the discographies of either artist, whether separately or together.
The album’s centerpiece is its title track, a re-edited version of a sound piece commissioned by Manchester, England’s Cornerhouse that premiered in 2014. The 20-minute work was originally conceived for multi-channel sound, which meant being in a room surrounded by St. Werner’s freeform electronic trills and hums while Smith’s growling voice spat out blank-verse poetry: “The first problem of young American males/Public speaking according to the talking ducks of Russian television/You can throw all this behind you/This is a better life here.”
Even in this mixed-down version, St. Werner’s music is enveloping and exciting. He responds to Smith’s word spouts by either buttressing them with synth wobbles or matching a frizzy melody to the rhythm of the speech, in the vein of the Books’ “Be Good to Them Always.” Or he will help punctuate a word by hitting it with an extra jolt of sound, so that when Smith draws out the syllables saying “immobile,” he’s paired with a groaning keyboard line.
Smith’s work here is more lucid than anything he did on the last few Fall albums or his guest appearance on Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach. Maybe that has to do with not having to worry about melody or keeping up with a band, but he sounds hale and inspired, evoking the spirit of William S. Burroughs’ recorded work in his delivery and unmistakable drawl.
The rest of Molocular Meditation comes from work that St. Werner was doing around the same time that he was constructing the Cornerhouse piece. Smith is also a central part of “Back to Animals,” but laid beneath waves of bioluminescent sound and rhythm. “On the Infinite of Universe and Worlds,” a commission by Finnish festival Music Nova, is less interesting: an array of arpeggiated patterns that leaves an itchy, unresolved feeling inside.
St. Werner kindly lets the late Smith have the last words on this album, and it is, again, the ideal farewell for the singer and poet. He sounds positively tickled to be throwing up two fingers at Domino Records and mocking the superfluous details in the email (“I’m in Switzerland at the moment”). It’s the perfect punctuation mark to finish the story of a truly unique collaboration.


When emcee Fly Anakin and producer Tuamie connect inside a sound infatuated with the hip-hop of the past, it becomes a launch pad to new life.

Tuamie / Fly Anakin: Emergency Raps Vol. 4

Emergency Raps Vol. 4

It would be easy to hear the lush, crate-digging loops of Tuamie and the tongue-twisting bars of Fly Anakin and write off Emergency Raps, Vol. 4 as two twentysomethings who grew up watching too many episodes of “Rap City.” And though Fly Anakin—ringleader of the Virginia-based label  Mutant Academy—is the same emcee who once said his dream was to “rap on an unreleased RZA beat from like ’95-’97,” this too is selling the producer/rapper combo short. Because when the two connect inside a sound infatuated with the hip-hop of the past, it becomes a launch pad to new life.
Fly Anakin, though capable, doesn’t pack his verses with lyrical gymnastics. The Richmond, Va. rapper is aware of a current climate that rewards brevity and straightforwardness. His rhymes are precise and purposeful. He shines on Emergency Raps, Vol. 4 with his imagery, like when he uses his nasal voice, begging for a breath on “Murray’s” to descriptively outline his journey from braids to waves: “Tried to brush it out but that don’t work/It take finesse, caress, that open palm flow breaking your neck.” In that same verse, he seamlessly transitions from his most vivid bars into flexes: “I had the 360s in about three days.” That boast was effective enough to make me stressfully recall memories of my lengthy year-long journey watching YouTube hair gurus, brushing, and not missing a night without the durag tied air-tight, to reach similar success.
Anakin’s detail isn’t a skill that could just be picked up from studying the legends of the genre, it’s a gift. Whether he is showing his appreciation for Method Man’s spot on “Shadowboxin’” by dropping in Easter eggs like, “I haven’t had a nightmare since the Wes Craven” or settling into Tuamie’s head-knocking drum-kicks and creamy soul flips on “Karl Kani” to spit about why he never lets his guard down (”I’m insecure for my own protection”). Anakin knows he’s good, which contributes to an immensely cocky presence on the mic.
Throughout Emergency Raps, Vol. 4, the old soul of Tuamie lives in his loops. Though the influence of beat-making icons like Pete Rock and DJ Premier are present, it doesn’t constrain the ATL-bred producer’s creativity—Anakin isn’t being deceitful when he boldly claims on “Katomate” that he has the “best beat selection in the underground.” Tuamie is a puppet master, knowing exactly what he wants out of the rappers he selectively chooses to grace his beats. On “HolOnHolOn,” he deliberately raises the energy level of Anakin by forcing him to compete with an overpowering vocal sample. Then on “Gold Accord” Tuamie digs into his dirtiest drums and excites Anakin into responding with his grimiest raps. And on a whim, Tuamie can surprise and utilize a gospel choir sample on a beat like “Travolt Pt. IV” ready to soundtrack a reverend exiting the Sunday morning service.
If Fly Anakin has any glaring weakness it’s finding a way to create sticky hooks and make them pop. But to Anakin and Tuamie, choruses are meaningless. This is an album about the raps and a producer in his own space flexing his sampling chops. They don’t want to soundtrack your party, they want you to put your headphones on, and take note at two artists aware of their strengths and mastering them together.


Bubblegum

That Charles Bukowski has been dead for over 10 years now is almost hard to believe-- partially because he's had more posthumous work hit the shelves than anybody this side of Tupac, but more so because of the enormous influence he continues to exert over contemporary poets and lyricists. I think it's safe to speculate that former Screaming Trees vocalist Mark Lanegan has spent his share of time on a barstool, between the pages of the Black Sparrow Press.
But Lanegan is no Chinaski-come-lately, and he's got the voice to prove it. As scratchy as a three-day beard yet as supple and pliable as moccasin leather, Lanegan's voice has evolved into a remarkable instrument, one that couldn't have been earned by easy living. It's a voice that redeems him a lot of sins, which is fortuitous because on Bubblegum his songs weave precariously between heartfelt depictions of the seedy life and hardboiled cliche.
On previous solo albums, like 1998's Scraps at Midnight or 2001's masterful Field Songs, Lanegan explored various pre-rock forms like blues, gospel and country to mesmerizing effect. But his recent cameo with Queens of the Stone Age seems to have revived his tooth for the harder stuff, so with the help of guests like Greg Dulli, Dean Ween, Stone Agers Josh Homme and Nick Oliveri, and, yes, Izzy friggin' Stradlin, Bubblegum features a partial return to Lanegan's grungier days of yore. The seamy din generated by this revolving ensemble provides a well-matched backdrop for the relentless parade of petty violence, drug deals gone sour, and squalid love affairs portrayed in these songs.
That's not to say that the whole thing comes off perfectly. Noisier tracks like "Can't Come Down" or the clanking "Methamphetamine Blues" sound undigested and vaguely dated-- almost as though they were written for Girls Against Boys' FreakOnIca album, which is about as succinct a definition of "misfire" as you could want. "Methamphetamine Blues" is particularly rough, as Lanegan briefly goes Ian Astbury on us, calling out to his female back-up singers, "Rollin' children, keep on rollin'." (They respond by calling him "daddy.") I keep waiting for him to belt out, "C'mon li'l sister!" here, but alas, he leaves me hanging.
Fortunately, these occasional clunkers are more than outnumbered by the album's highlights, which include a pair of smoldering duets with PJ Harvey-- "Hit the City" and "Come to Me"-- either of which could slip unnoticed as a bonus track onto Uh Huh Her. It's also hard to not be delighted by "Sideways in Reverse" and "Driving Death Valley Blues", Lanegan's most bare-knuckled rockers since the demise of his former band. Additionally, he has few peers, particularly in his age bracket, when it comes to tackling moody, blues-infused numbers like the opening "When Your Number Isn't Up" or the Tom Waits-ish "Like Little Willie John".
Throughout Bubblegum, Lanegan proves himself adroit at navigating the back alleys of Babylon, but after the record's umpteenth reference to loaded shotguns, '73 Buicks, and goin' cold turkey, one can't help but think he might eventually want to take a stab at some new material. So far, his voice has proven to be well-suited for whatever use he has put it to; hopefully next time he strays a little further afield to better stretch its limits.