This avant-garde hip-hop stuff is spreading faster than anti-Arab sentiment on September 12th. You know the\n\ stuff of which ...

Dälek: From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots

From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots

This avant-garde hip-hop stuff is spreading faster than anti-Arab sentiment on September 12th. You know the stuff of which I speak; hip-hop built from samples harder to grasp than a wall of Jell-O, whose time signatures change faster than a 15 year-old girl's fashion sense, all strung around beats dirtier than the old man asleep at the bus stop. Innovators like cLOUDDEAD, El-P, and the Anticon Crew have been redefining what hip-hop is for years now, so it's nice that people are finally starting to take notice. If you've been paying any attention, you know what's bound to happen next: the market will glut, and innovation will make way for imitation. But first, Dälek returns to the scene, fresh off collaborations with Faust, Techno Animal and Kid606, with a sophomore album inventive enough to extend avant-garde hip-hop's stay in the limelight for, at the very least, a few more weeks.
So what is it that makes Dälek-- alongside producer Oktopus, and turntablist/producer Still-- stand out amongst a seeming onslaught of original, challenging hip-hop? Namely that their songs are set to moody musique concrète backdrops that sound like something out of a David Lynch nightmare. Yes, there are rhymes set to hand-drums and cowbells. Yes, the lyrical content would feel more at home in a lit hall than in some trash-ridden alley. Yes, there are times when Dälek opts to speak his vocals rather than rap them. And yes, he's more sensitive than your average bear. But what really separates Dälek from the rest isn't his rabid experimentation as much as the way he builds a bridge between the avant-garde and the traditional.
While his contemporaries experiment with slant-rhyme and abstract poetics, Dälek takes a comparatively standard lyrical approach (assuming you'd consider rhymes like, "Forgot our days in shackles?/ You concentrate on battles?/ I lecture graduates/ Discussing Kant till they leave baffled," standard), setting forcefully delivered rhymes to some of the strangest soundscapes that will ever be labeled 'hip-hop.' Pleas for understanding, cries of frustration, and even the occasional ray of hope weave in and out of music that owes more to 80s Western European industrial music a la Psychic TV and Nurse with Wound than it does to Grandmaster Flash or Public Enemy.
Steering clear of the purposefully vague poetic abstractions of his peers, Dälek prefers to revisit much of the thematic ground that hip-hop culture was built on. He's confused by issues of race (the album opens with a track called "Spiritual Healing," which poses the question: "Who you pray to, my God, the black God?/ Who you pray to, my God, the brown God?/ Who you pray to, my God, the white God?/ Your reaction's kind of odd for a kid who loves to nod"), frustrated by his confusion ("I vent my anger on all angles/ Would strangle angels if they'd let me"), yet certain all the while that the answers lie in the past, never ashamed to look to his predecessors for clues in his eternal quest for understanding ("Remember days of cardboard, fat lace, and Krylon?/ Microphones and twelves, tools we all relied on/ Niggas dropped a verse, the thought was one to die on/ I remember hip-hop, that's my Mt Zion").
If Dälek's skill lies largely in his ability to merge the traditional with the unusual, then perhaps it's somewhat ironic that From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots' finest moment is its most atypical. A twelve-minute epic called "Black Smoke Rises" serves as the album's centerpiece, a defining moment that sees Dälek all but abandoning any and all rules of hip-hop. "Black Smoke" is all atonal drones, hisses and shrieks that build and build, computer bleeps that pierce the atmosphere like an alarm clock pierces through sleep, ghostly vocals that linger ominously on the horizon, coaxing the nervous listener to come closer. Throbbing Gristle is the closest reference point I can manage, with Dälek playing the role of Genesis P. Orridge, calmly intoning a mantra ("Black smoke rises to a heaven I do not know/ Slowly gaze to take in our sorrow") that bobs peacefully in and out of the murky chaos. His words float through the listeners' consciousness, eventually overtaken by the building drones. The grinding noise escalates and Dälek plays the now-cliché part of the emotional emcee. But his introspective spoken words transcend the obvious. As he longs for a soul he once knew, the listener catches himself uncertain if Dälek's referring to a lover, a more innocent world, or himself.
Such ambiguity rears its head again on "Trampled Brethren," built around a vocal sample that warns, "So that we would be denied the knowledge of who we are, this was taken out of the history books several centuries ago. And, of course, it hasn't been put back yet." Standard hip-hop fare, sure. But by placing it against a backdrop of Eastern Indian instrumentation, Dälek denies the surface interpretation, reminding listeners that injustice and oppression is something happening everywhere, to everyone.
"Forever Close My Eyes" is universal in a different way. Depressed, though never whiny, Dälek embeds a refrain of, "My yesterdays don't matter now, they're gone/ Your careless expression left my wrists torn.../ Yesterdays don't matter now, you're gone/ Shattered glass of empty bottles cut my palms," in a glorious bed of e-bowed guitar feedback a la Fripp & Eno's No Pussyfooting.
As an emcee, Dälek shows off a rare versatility, equally capable of straight rhyming and formless spoken word. As a poet, Dälek has a grasp on subtlety that most will never approach. And as a collective, Dälek have achieved the seemingly impossible: successfully bridging the conventional and the experimental in a way that respects both at once. It's a risky endeavor-- one that threatens to alienate fans of both disciplines. But it's this very risk that makes Dälek's music so very affecting.


Herbert pays homage to DJ culture on his latest record, composed from sounds recorded during one night at the Robert Johnson nightclub in Frankfurt.

One Club

The first wave of DJs had to overcome an astounding number of barriers that were, in retrospect, both obvious and stupefying. The stumbling block that really sticks with me, however, was one of the first to arise: there was initially opposition-- certainly from musicians but also from patrons-- to recorded music being played in public places. The thought, presumably, was that if a crowd and venue were sufficient to support music, it should be live music. Matthew Herbert's One Club is composed from sounds recorded during one night at the Robert Johnson nightclub in Frankfurt; it is a self-professed attempt by Herbert to document the vibrancy and chaos of an ad-hoc community brought together by recorded sound. It is sort of a will-the-circle-be-unbroken?-artifact for DJ culture, if you enjoy thinking conceptually (Herbert does).
Nothing with Herbert is merely an artifact; everything is a statement. One Club aims to combat what Herbert sees as the growing corporatism in club culture. He will combat this corporatism with high art, natch, but One Club is actually one of Herbert's least overbearingly wacky ideas this decade. (It is also the second volume of this year's "One" trilogy. One Pig-- volume three, scheduled for later this year-- attempts to document the life cycle of a swine.)
Herbert functionally stopped making club music several years ago, so One Club represents something of a return to his roots, though it has little in common with the jazz-inflected microhouse he helped pioneer in the late 1990s. The points Herbert seems to be making-- that clubs are foggy, wonderful, frightening social habitats-- are elementary enough, but the way he makes them is natural. There is chatter, haze, long stretches of aggressive percussion. More than once a crowd starts chanting. I think of my bleeding-together club experiences: DJ call and response sessions ("Marcus Bujak"), bathroom breaks ("Alex Duwe"), stumbles to the bar ("Jalal Malekidoost"), and unmalicious elbows in my side while dancing ("Oliver Bauer"). In what is either a move of astoundingly precise conceptual execution or, well, compositional failure, One Club also embodies the ills of clubgoing: It is loud and too long and leaves you fatigued.
Whereas 1998's Around the House (composed of recordings of household objects) always just sounded like techno, it's actually possible that listeners could suss out One Club's source material without prior knowledge. "Loud, emotionally conflicted public event" really shines through; "football game" (the sponsorship and corporatism of which would likely cause Herbert's head to burst) wouldn't be a bad guess. One Club ran a risk of its source material and subject matter ending up in a weird feedback loop. But the best part about it is that it evokes a club experience without actually sounding like club music. Herbert's re-imagined club is capable of leaving you groggy and sore as well as excited and nostalgic, though that's probably exactly his point.


Grounded in historical horrors and gesturing darkly at personal demons, the gospel-punk band’s third album is shot through with dread.

There Is No Year

Atlanta author Blake Butler’s 2011 novel There Is No Year follows a family struck by a plague of paranormal activity. They move into a new house and reality bends around them. The hallways constrict and contract, nicking elbows and knees; the television signal is blurry for normal channels, but the premium porn station comes in crystal clear; caterpillars spawn in the mailbox. Relentlessly tactile, the book elliptically channels ennui and loneliness into weird, semi-humorous horrors that fester beneath the family’s otherwise normal life like mold.
For their third album, gospel-punk outfit Algiers, who describe Butler as a friend, have adopted the title and the mood of the book. Built around extracts from an epic poem written by frontman James Franklin Fisher, the record is saturated with dread that smolders under his scorched-earth polemics. Unlike their past records, which were awash in musical allusions and references to global struggles, There Is No Year is narrower and more internal, a shift that results in leaner, more intuitive songs. The horrors Algiers conjure—colonization, oppression, dispossession—remain diffuse, but as a unit they sound more in sync.
That focus is baked into the record. Whereas their debut was built from years of file-sharing among band members and The Underside of Power was recorded between touring and sessions across the UK and the US, There Is No Year was made in two weeks in one place. It also has only two producers, Ben Greenberg and Randall Dunn, who bring an arsenal of synths and a knack for layering sound. The result is songs that feel less leaden and overthought, like album highlight “Chaka,” which sways from a soulful disco bop to a flurry of atonal noise without the slightest bit of friction. Algiers songs have always been busy, but for once they sound loose, open-ended.

The problem with the record is that this expressive turn is half-hearted. Fisher remains addicted to vague allegory and generic revelation; his writing conjures fire and brimstone but lacks the heat of the flame, the stink of the sulfur. “We all dancing to the fire,” he warns on “Hour of the Furnaces.” “Streets are raining fire/We’ll be gone now any day,” he prophesies on “Wait for the Sound.” These moments are supposed to feel urgent, but he could be talking about climate change or Burning Man. There’s no texture to his writing, no scene-setting—just intensity. On single “Dispossession,” he sits atop a mountain, looking down on a flaming America and promising that “freedom is coming soon.” For whom? When? What does it look like? Fisher speaks like a prophet, but his visions remain frustratingly opaque.
There are times when he seems to be addressing personal demons. “Misophonia,” the poem from which the lyrics are sourced, was reportedly composed during a “protracted personal period of anxiety and lack”; the title means “hatred of sound.” A musician detesting sound could be a fascinating subject if it were developed more, but the writing is too closed off to make searching for an entry point feel worthwhile. While the rhythm section molds these lapses into more imagistic, evocative shapes (the synth fills on “Unoccupied” are killer), the tracks are still structured around Fisher’s impassioned vocals, so when he falters, the whole enterprise feels aimless.
Given the chaotic sprawl of their past work, it’s refreshing for Algiers to turn inward and attempt to ground their righteous fury in soul-searching rather than the entire history of global oppression. Unfortunately, even when invoking personal anguish they make conflict feel atmospheric instead of something rooted in bodies and experiences. There’s precedent for more cosmic and conceptual accounts of struggle. Bands like Sunn O))) (who Dunn has produced for), the Comet Is Coming, and Priests have distilled grand ideas into arresting narrative, in both word and sound. And Algiers’ audio zines, the last of which invoked the Algerian revolution to explore angst and uncertainty using thickets of drone, show that they are capable of more nuanced writing .  But they haven’t yet learned to translate the political into the personal, to turn abstract ideas into matters of the gut.

Buy: Rough Trade
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With features from Future, Quavo, Young Thug, and T.I., French Montana returns newly motivated with his sophomore album, which acts as a funnel for everyone’s strongest qualities but his own.

Jungle Rules

French Montana has spent a decade and several record deals trying to close the gap between his flamboyant lifestyle and his boring raps. The chromatic and gaudy world he navigates IRL isn’t usually reflected inside his verses. French names exotic pets after Roman dictators and spends fortunes on luxury concept cars imported from his native Morocco to Calabasas. There are videos of Akon buying him a Maserati and a $120k basketball shootout with Rick Ross, DJ Khaled, and Meek Mill; the raps should write themselves. It’s one of contemporary rap’s biggest riddles: How can a character so fit for the Kardashian Extended Universe be the least interesting person on every high profile release he’s ever been a part of? The overstuffed and dull Excuse My French was just a microcosm of a larger problem: This guy has no vision and no imagination. He’s consistently a hanger-on—to Max B, to Diddy, to Ross, and then to Khloe—who flourishes as a premium space filler. Until recently, there hasn’t been much validating his seat at the table.
The stink of his big-budget major label debut stuck with him, but to French’s credit, he’s persisted, making himself visible when others might have vanished. In the four years between Bad Boy releases, he churned out a mixtape series that peaked with Wave Gods last February, and he was building momentum for a proper Excuse My French follow-up. MC4, a mixtape sequel turned album, was supposed to be his big comeback. But despite tracks with Drake, Kanye, and Nas, and the phenomenal Kodak Black-led “Lockjaw,” it was repeatedly delayed. French cited sample clearance issues when it was pushed back. (L.A. Reid later admitted that it was delayed simply because there wasn’t any buzz for it.) In a bizarre turn, Target shipped the album unprovoked on the original release date. MC4 soon ended up online, and was subsequently shelved before finally becoming a retail mixtape. After parting with MMG and going home to Morocco for the first time in years, French Montana returns newly motivated with his sophomore album, Jungle Rules, which acts as a funnel for everyone’s strongest qualities but his own.
Well-produced but protracted, Jungle Rules is a marvel of excess that often works in spite of French Montana, who seems content to let others do the heavy lifting. His voice is rarely the standout and is the least necessary. Many of French’s best songs find him rapping about death and overindulgence inside warped carousels fashioned out of vocals from Adele, Florence and the Machine, La Roux, Lana Del Rey, and Utada Hikaru. Jungle Rules returns to the well—on “Whiskey Eyes,” “Too Much,” and “White Dress”—but wildly mixes in trap, dancehall, and pop rap. After turning a corner on Wave Gods, his writing has regressed to hollow swaggering.
He really needs listeners to know he purchased Selena Gomez’s $3.3 million mansion in Calabasas (even though he never stays in it), which is cool even by rap standards, but all he manages to muster are Selena shoutouts and outright mentions of the buy. When the bars aren’t goofy (“And that’s why the bitches fuck with me/‘Cause a nigga flip-flop like he standin’ on the beach”) they’re sadly drab (“I pray we live/For a thousand years/And if I hurt you/Baby, drink Cîroc for your tears”). His idea of a romantic gesture is hoping aloud a woman doesn’t get famous, unable to hide his selfish ulterior motives with lazy writing. And its hypocritical coming from someone who has actively sought out famous women and whose entire identity hinges on being adjacent to celebrity.
Why aren’t there raps about his return to Morocco? Or about his bizarro album release mishap, which is unprecedented in the streaming era? Why is “Got jerked my first deal, and I told ‘em ‘Suck a dick’/Once I made my first mil’, I told them ‘Fuck a brick’” the closest he gets to unpacking his tumultuous major label journey on his comeback album? How can a 18-track album say so little? The most interesting material in his life gets misused or goes unmentioned.
That isn’t to say French is incapable of mustering up any insights about his fascinating life or giving more of himself. If Wave Gods and MC4 proved anything, it’s that he can be effective when concise, and on Jungle Rules there are flashes of that same acuity. On “Formula,” he raps, “My homie Chinx got murdered/Nobody seen, nobody heard/They left us on the corner, wanna kill us here/Now, Nino in the Carter with the Cartier/My homie Max got a hundred years/His mama body dry, can’t cry no tears.” “Too Much” condenses mass incarceration into four lines.
But there isn’t enough of that to fill the hour. French has relied heavily on guests throughout his career, and they dictate things here too, creating an uneven play-through. Swae Lee dominates “Unforgettable,” which is ironically named given French’s contributions. Sandwiching French between the Weeknd and Max B exposes how monotonous his melodies can be. He isn’t an equal for Future or Quavo or Thug or T.I., who all steal the spotlight with more memorable performances. “Formula” is a poached Alkaline song woefully repurposed. “She Workin” would be much better off as a Marc E. Bassy song. On “Bring Dem Things” he gets upstaged by both Pharrell the Rapper and a mismanaged sample of Organized Konfusion’s “Stress.”
Jungle Rules doesn’t answer any of the questions that have circled French Montana his entire career, chiefly: Can he be a leading man and can he be as interesting on wax as he is in the day to day? He has evolved quite a bit since Excuse My French, coming up with moments of sharpness, but he is still limited in what he can do. His music flattens the showy life he lives. If there’s a case to be made for his vibrance, it isn’t this.


The Chicago rapper is something of an outcast in his hometown’s hip-hop scene, delivering slick punchlines over boom-bap beats. His third project in four months is his best, but he’s got room to grow.

Being Woke Ain’t Fun

The prevailing narrative of Chicago rap does not allow for an eccentric like Chris Crack. His music neither bears the whiff of patchouli of the influential YouMedia and Young Chicago Authors open mics, nor does it share the permanent gun-violence scarification of the erstwhile drill scene. It is not the pastel proselytizing of Chance the Rapper; it is not the thundering L-train rumble of G Herbo. (Certainly, it is not the stuttering, mid-life crisis of Chicago’s prodigal son and number-one Charlie Kirk fan, Kanye West.) In a city where other rappers tend to be painfully cloying or brutally blunt, he’s acerbic and salty. Crack makes elemental, soul-looping boom-bap for the late aughts—no Wild Style, just wild shit-talking. With Being Woke Ain’t Fun, his third project in four months, Crack is attempting to further carve out this niche, one punchline at a time.
Luckily for Crack, a number of fellow Chicago outcasts have joined in on his harangues. Ugly Boy Modeling, Gzus Piece, and MC Tree—with whom Crack has a pair of commendable EPs, TreeSwag and Tree + Crack—add bite, but it’s Vic Spencer who’s Crack’s most potent foil. Their albums together, Who the Fuck Is Chris Spencer?? and Blessed, have coincided with Crack’s artistic growth; he no longer runs roughshod over beats like a seven year-old riding a sugar high, and instead sits calm and measured in the pocket. On “Coochie Nectar” and “Plair, Nephew, Pleighboi,” Spencer’s gravely baritone and dyspeptic demeanor offer a counterpoint to Crack, who’s high-pitched and punchy. Spencer claims to be eating “quesadillas with your bitch”; Crack, after asking rhetorically whether the Feds are tapping his phone, answers, “Man, fuck them niggas.” They’re tremendous assholes together, like Statler and Waldorf, or Rick Mahorn and Bill Laimbeer, or Ernest Hemingway and a daiquiri.
Still, the album feels overburdened by guest features—not for their lack of quality but their frequency. Of Being Woke’s 11 songs, over half include other rappers. It seems less like a Chris Crack solo project than it does an inspired bullshit session at Crack’s house, scored by August Fanon’s production. It sounds spontaneous, but spontaneity doesn’t always equal unbridled brilliance.
With Being Woke Crack tries to tread a very thin line between remarkable productivity and rushed, slapdash workmanship. On occasion, his album lands on the wrong side of that divide. Crack is a markedly improved rapper from his early tapes, but he’s still mostly unconcerned with choruses or sequencing; depending on your tastes, two-minute bursts of rap are either pleasant little kernels or too-thin bits of nothing. (While I generally like them, the experience can leave me empty.) The album’s most glaring weakness, though, is the inertia and uniformity of many of Fanon’s instrumentals. His soul loops often lack the richness of their source material and, instead of building and releasing tension, they tend to float by like clouds of vapor. Fanon’s capable of getting it right—the cascading drums of “Explanation Kills Art” are exceptional—but his beats on Being Woke are not his finest.
For those curious about Crack, Being Woke Ain’t Fun is a fairly straightforward introduction to his solo milieu. It’s likely Crack’s best album to date but, given his recent efforts—May’s Let’s Just Be Friends and July’s This Will All Make Sense Later—it’s one he’s likely to surpass. Maybe now, after a summer of slick punchlines over soul samples, the narrative of Chicago rap will allow for an eccentric like him to flourish.


Leave Me Alone, the debut LP from the Madrid-based garage-pop quartet Hinds, is a record of human contradictions, the admissions of vulnerability, and the realization that these things are beautiful.

Leave Me Alone

The Madrid-based quartet Hinds makes fuzzy garage pop that seems as intrinsically linked to the warmth and sunshine of their home as California-infused idleness is to many Burger Records bands. They began as a duo called Deers after Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote met back in 2011. Inspired by bands like the Black Lips, Mac DeMarco, and the Strokes, the pair wrote woozy pop tracks about love, partying, and the complicated problems that occur when mixing the two. After releasing their first single, 2014's DEMO, Hinds completed their lineup with Ade Martin on bass and Amber Grimbergen on drums, and soon after were forced to change their name due to legal issues (Hinds means a female deer). Hinds may be aware that their casual origin story and goofy demeanor (catch them cracking beers and dancing on tables in their videos) may cause some to think they are not a serious project, so the foursome chose to challenge themselves on their debut LP Leave Me Alone, and the decision pays off.
Hinds have described the 12 tracks on Leave Me Alone as the various "faces of love" they experienced while writing their debut, and therefore is more emotionally varied than their previously lighthearted singles. While the title indicates detachment, a majority of the songs suggest the opposite, pleading quite literally on "Fat Calmed Kiddos" "please don't leave me." Leave Me Alone is a record of human contradictions, of the admissions of vulnerability, and the realization that these things are beautiful. It's no coincidence that the phrase "You're on my mind" appears on several songs; for better or worse, Hinds realize that there are some feelings that cannot be escaped.
Leave Me Alone's singles focus on their purely poppy side, from the smooth opener "Garden" to the glorious jangle of "San Diego" to the wailing harmonies of "Bamboo." The previously released "Castigadas En El Granero," which translates to "punished in the barn," is perhaps the most frenzied track on the album, which is only amplified by rapid-fire, somewhat absurd observations like "All I see is a big cow/ And now I'm eating all your corn." Another particular standout is "Fat Calmed Kiddos," a sunny whirlpool of a song with a particularly poignant chorus: "And I needed to risk 'cause I needed to try/ And I needed a breath 'cause you were out tonight."
These tracks show off what truly sets Hinds apart: Cosials and Perrote's shared vocal responsibilities, which fit together perfectly. Cosials' voice switches between a silky drawl and a Joplin-like howl while Perrote's is grounding and steady. When one is singing, the other often emphasizes or counters, the Ego and Id so to speak. The best moments on Leave Me Alone occur when Cosials and Perrote are going all-out, belting together without restraint.
But even on the "slower" songs (there isn't really a lull on Leave Me Alone, except for the midway instrumental interlude "Solar Gap") the possibility exists for the energy to be cranked up all the way. After a few final mellow jams like the spacey "And I Will Send Your Flowers Back" and "I'll Be Your Man", Hinds conclude with "Walking Home", a fuzzy and almost-tropical declaration of love. The song embraces silly metaphors like "You're the map to my toe" and "You're the rice of my bowl" before softly fading out with the words, "You're the love of my life." "Walking Home" is a lovely reminder of two important facts: that love does not need to be complicated and that Hinds are not afraid to wear their hearts on their sleeves.


In the mid-’90s Guided by Voices were a mysterious outfit from Dayton, Ohio, that the music press didn't know what to do with—a rumor as much as a band. Their Matador debut was a turning point.

Alien Lanes

The passage of time has done nothing to make the mid-’90s heyday of Guided by Voices seem any less extraordinary. Released at the height of the band’s underground popularity in 1995, Alien Lanes supposedly cost $10 to make (excluding the cost of the beer consumed as it was recorded) while garnering GBV an advance worth nearly $100,000 from its new record label, Matador. GBV’s 37-year-old mastermind and only permanent member, Robert Pollard, had already been around a while, recording several albums in the ’80s and early ’90s that virtually nobody heard. But Pollard’s latest opus was a big deal: famous mastering engineer Bob Ludwig mastered Alien Lanes. (Among Ludwig's prior credits was Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska, possibly the most celebrated "lo-fi" album ever.) Upon release, Alien Lanes was greeted with a laudatory four-star review in Rolling Stone comparing GBV to the twin pillars of ’90s alt-rock, R.E.M. and Nirvana. “The new drunk drivers/Have hoisted the flag,” Pollard sings on Alien Lanes’ opening track, “A Salty Salute.” The bravado was warranted.
Bandcamp has since normalized the idea of a bedroom tunesmith from flyover country releasing a self-recorded masterpiece to the world, and getting semi-famous in the process. Will Toledo was once a high school kid from Virginia who wrote and recorded dozens of songs in the backseat of his parents’ car, and now Car Seat Headrest is one of 2016’s biggest new indie bands.
But the lack of online distribution channels was hardly GBV’s only disadvantage before Alien Lanes. By the time GBV’s would-be swan song, 1992’s Propeller**, became a surprise critical hit, Pollard was a family man from Dayton, Ohio, who by rock‘n’roll standards was over-the-hill. By day, he worked as an elementary schoolteacher, and on weekends, he blew off steam by getting drunk in his garage and laying down weird, succinct, and insanely catchy songs informed by ’60s and ’70s prog and psych-rock on a four-track machine with guys from the neighborhood. And for many years, that was basically the extent of Pollard’s music career.
Even after GBV finally made its mark, Pollard’s unabashed devotion to the less fashionable sectors of classic rock (Peter Gabriel-era Genesis, Who’s Next, Cheap Trick) put him out-of-step with indie’s entrenched punk orthodoxy. “King Crimson with a short attention span and a sixpack,” was how Craig Marks described Guided by Voices in the Spin Alternative Record Guide, published just as the band’s notoriety was peaking. While the King Crimson comparison would’ve flattered Pollard, it wasn’t meant as a compliment in the alt-era.
What Guided by Voices lacked in traditional indie cool, it made up for in songs. So many, many songs—great songs, bad songs, OK songs that became good because they were short and worked as segues between the great songs. With 28 tracks dispensed in just 41 minutes, Alien Lanes offered up more songs than any other GBV album, and they were dense with in-jokes and non-sequiturs about a pimple zoo, the Amazing Rockethead, and Baron Von Richtofen, among other obscurities. Pollard’s method was to write five duds in order to get one perfect tune, and then release all six songs. In the end, making art was like breathing for Pollard—you can’t inhale oxygen without exhaling carbon dioxide.
GBV also had mystique to burn. After 1994’s Bee Thousand made them bona-fide indie sensations, music critics talked about the band in terms that recalled the romanticism once foisted on the Band, as it transitioned from Bob Dylan’s backing group to the rustic fantasia of 1968’s Music From Big Pink. Like the Band, GBV were perceived to be “proud brothers,” to quote “A Salty Salute”—regular, blue-collar guys who drank cheap domestic beer without irony and imbued prissy indie conventions with jocular earthiness and a refreshing lack of pretension. As far as New York City-based music writers were concerned, Dayton might as well have been situated in the middle of the woods, a la the Band’s mythical headquarters in West Saugerties. (In reality, Dayton was a good-sized Midwestern city with a population of about 175,000 in 1995.) But Pollard’s image as a hick-savant wasn’t entirely media-created—he played his own role in cultivating it.
Consciously or not, Pollard integrated GBV’s “regular guy” image into the songs and iconography of Alien Lanes like never before. On the back cover there’s a photo of GBV’s ever-shifting lineup at the time of the album’s creation, seated on a couch in what appears to be a basement. Pollard is in the middle, staring upward and looking dapper in red, white, and blue Chuck Taylors. To Pollard’s right is guitarist Tobin Sprout, the George Harrison to Pollard’s Lennon/McCartney, and bassist James Greer, a Spin writer who profiled the band and then didn’t want to leave. (Greer exited the group soon after, though he later became GBV’s biographer. Greg Demos is commonly referred to as the “classic lineup” bassist, and he’s also listed in the liner notes.) To Pollard’s left is drummer Kevin Fennell, Pollard’s former brother-in-law, and lead guitarist Mitch Mitchell, a chain-smoking Keith Richards-type who first played with Pollard in a late-’70s metal band called Anacrusis.
“When you saw them live, it was just so fucking powerful; it rocked so hard, it was physically powerful,” Matador co-owner Gerard Cosloy tells Greer in Guided by Voices: A Brief History. “I was expecting something way more low-key, like the records.” Alien Lanes seems like an attempt to rectify any “low-key” misconceptions, with songs like the caterwauling “Striped White Jets” and Who-like “My Son Cool” approximating the arena rock of Pollard’s youth. But while portions of Alien Lanes were recorded live, most of the tracks were assembled via Pollard’s usual recording methods.
For the propulsive power-pop number “Game of Pricks”—which sounds like a bootleg of an imaginary, amphetamine-fueled Beatles gig from 1965—Pollard met with Fennell and Sprout in Fennell’s basement. After running the through the song a couple of times, Pollard laid down guitar and drum parts with Fennell, and then overdubbed bass and vocals. Sprout’s job was to operate the Tascam recorder—he turned the bass knobs all the way down and the treble all the way up, per Pollard’s request—and make sure the inexpensive Radio Shack microphones scattered about the room were turned on. Once Sprout performed a quick mix, “Game of Pricks” was finished in about 30 minutes.
While he entertained an offer from Warner Bros. before opting to sign with Matador, Pollard wasn’t yet interested in making a slick, radio-friendly record. (That would happen later with 1999’s Do the Collapse, when it was probably too late for GBV to make any real commercial impact.) In A Brief History, Greer writes that Pollard expressed his desire for “a wall full of gold records” while meeting with Warner Bros. But Pollard was also insecure about the viability of his songs and paranoid about the record industry. He wanted a large audience, but GBV’s flash of indie-fame also made him squirm. “I couldn’t hide anymore,” Pollard told Marc Woodworth in 2006. “I was full of second guessing.”
“Echos Myron” sums up the jovial mood of Bee Thousand: “We’re finally here/And shit yeah, it’s cool!” But on Alien Lanes, the good vibes were replaced by nostalgia for lost innocence and crippling anxiety about what lies ahead. Dark warnings permeate the songs: “Don’t let anyone find out/Or expose your feelings” (“Striped White Jets”); “Try to be nice and look what it gets you” (“Closer You Are”); “Temptation creeps to you like rapists in the night” (“(I Wanna Be a) Dumbcharger”); “You could never be strong/You can only be free” (“Game of Pricks”). The most disturbing track on Alien Lanes is “Always Crush Me,” a nightmarishly mechanical piano ballad that reimagines Gilbert and Sullivan as a John Cale deep cut. “Always crush me/Picture my amazement/When it doesn’t always pain me/And I will reproduce faster,” Pollard yelps over clipped keyboard plunks, obliquely referencing GBV's newfound commercialism.
Elsewhere on Alien Lanes, Pollard goes out of his way to deface his most beautiful songs, whether it’s overdubbing an obnoxious snoring sound on the sparkling “Ex-Supermodel” or warping the tempo, like a Walkman operating on dying batteries, on “Chicken Blows.” What was Pollard afraid of? Whatever the answer, Alien Lanes sold worse than Bee Thousand and was generally considered inferior. “I met Kim Deal when we did Bee Thousand. She really loved that record, but Alien Lanes she wasn’t crazy about,” Pollard told Mojo in 2002. “She thought it was too much, too bombastic, but that’s what I like about it.”
“Pop for perverts,” was Robert Christgau’s assessment of GBV in 1994. The legendary Village Voice music critic dismissed them as “pomo smarty-pants too prudish and/or alienated to take their pleasure without a touch of pain to remind them that they're still alive.” I humbly submit that Christgau just didn’t understand the Midwest.
Pollard’s genius was creating a band framework in which he could become anything he wanted—specifically, a hotshot 22-year-old British rock star from 1969—while remaining exactly who he was outside of it. Alien Lanes is the sound of a man reconciling his dreams (which had come true, more or less) with his reality (which had splintered, though he tried for a while to maintain his band and his marriage). The omnipresent hiss on Alien Lanes was necessary because it was Pollard’s way of signaling to the people back home that he wasn’t getting too full of himself, a reflexive impulse bred into every middle-American.
The trebly bombast and pronounced discursiveness of Alien Lanes was read as typical indie caginess in 1995, but 21 years later, it’s this tension between Pollard’s big-time rock classicism and self-defeating sonic fuckery that’s aged best. In retrospect, Alien Lanes can be viewed as a nexus point in rock history, representing the end of an era when the record business believed that a band like this could make a million dollars, and the beginning of our current era in which rock is essentially folk music, where it’s kept alive not out of financial imperative, but because rock can act as a safe space for people who have consciously decided to ignore financial imperatives and exist outside of mainstream culture.
In my view, Alien Lanes is the greatest post-modern classic rock album ever made, because it exemplifies the songwriting and posture of classic rock while also implicitly commenting on rock’s cultural decline. This was already underway in 1995, the year after Kurt Cobain died, when the top-selling rock artists were Hootie and the Blowfish, Alanis Morissette, and Live. It was this world that Guided by Voices was tasked with taking over, though when you listen to Alien Lanes, all you hear is Pollard’s ambivalence.
In “Motor Away,” which lives at the heart of Alien Lanes both sequentially (it’s the 15th track) and spiritually, Pollard sings about the liberation of blasting down an open road in order to “belittle every little voice” in your crummy town that ever doubted your ability to escape, while also acknowledging that those people might be right. “You can’t lie to yourself that it’s the chance of a lifetime,” he sings, which is all the more remarkable for the surging, life-affirming music that surrounds it.
The point of “Motor Away” isn’t to give up hope because the destination might not end up being what you envision, but rather to enjoy the thrill ride that takes you there. On Alien Lanes, the journey is what matters—the act of creation, the party in the garage, that magical sensation of being carried to the lake, even if the lake turns out to be dry. In the meantime, do not fret. The bus will get you there yet. The club is open.


Stevie Nicks, Thundercat, Tame Impala, and Bad Bunny guest on the latest album from Damon Albarn’s cartoon band, but despite the marquee names, the record feels frustratingly like Gorillaz as usual.

Cracker Island

As a band supposedly made up of cartoon characters, Gorillaz could theoretically do anything: record in outer space; make hip-hop beats out of fish teeth; revive the lambada—an unlimited horizon. Which makes it slightly frustrating that on Cracker Island, their eighth studio album, Damon Albarn and co. do little that’s out of the ordinary. This is ostensibly the group’s Los Angeles album, inspired by a relocation to Silver Lake, and it does have a handful of very Californian guests in the form of Stevie Nicks, Thundercat, and the Pharcyde’s Bootie Brown. Overwhelmingly, though, Cracker Island leans on classic Gorillaz tropes: a handful of attention-grabbing features, a touch of hip-hop, a splash of dub, and great big helpings of Damon Albarn’s big-hearted melodies to bathe the record in misty sunshine. Classic, at least, is one way of putting it. Routine would be another.
There are bright spots: “Silent Running” and “Skinny Ape” are among the best songs Albarn has written in the last decade, sporting those little-pop-star-lost vocal performances he does better than anyone else. The melody of the verses on “Skinny Ape”, in particular, is an all-timer, delectable and dejected in one gorgeously vulnerable package.
And the guest list is elite, especially considering that Gorillaz have persuaded names like Nicks, Tame Impala, and even Bad Bunny to play second fiddle to a bunch of slightly wearing animated characters. Nicks’ enchanting rasp sandpapers some of the gloss off “Oil,” adding a cathartic depth that the song doesn’t quite deserve, while Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker brings a snoozy charm to “New Gold.” Even better is the performance of Adeleye Omotayo, a member of Gorillaz’ Humanz Choir, on “Silent Running,” where his perfectly measured voice is a celestial shadow to Albarn’s urban melancholia, a little like Peven Everett’s show-stealing turn on Gorillaz’ 2017 single “Strobelite.”
On the whole, though, the production and songwriting are more “solid!” than “exhilarating!” Gorillaz frequently default to mid-paced grooves, bright keyboard lines, guitar, and bass. (This is a band, lest we forget, who invited both the National Orchestra for Arabic Music and the Hypnotic Brass Ensemble onto their third album, Plastic Beach.) The drums sound simultaneously big yet flat, as if subtlety had been sacrificed for impact. The glossy disco of “Tarantula” is weightlessly low-key, entirely pleasant, and totally forgettable. Meanwhile, the album’s lyrical conceits—there’s something about two competing cults who live next door to each other, combined with grandad-ish complaints about social media overkill—feel incredibly convoluted, like a band in desperate need of a narrative to cling to.
The problem is that Gorillaz have become bogged down in a world of their own invention. Albarn and his animated pals helped fashion the genre-hopping world of contemporary pop across more than two decades of diverse musical guests and adventurous fusions. But Cracker Island’s slightly lackluster impact feels like a sign of diminishing returns. Gorillaz have already worked with Beck and Bootie Brown, while new invitees Thundercat and Tame Impala sound so much like the kind of people who would guest on a Gorillaz album that their appearances fail to shock, much less thrill. It doesn’t help that Thundercat’s signature bass sound is buried in the mix, where bolder production would have highlighted its sticky textures.
The exception to this lassitude is “Tormenta,” featuring Bad Bunny. This isn’t the first time Gorillaz have worked with a Latin artist—Cuban singer Ibrahim Ferrer guested on 2001’s “Latin Simone (¿Qué Pasa Contigo?)”—but Benito is the only collaborator on Cracker Island that you can’t imagine popping up on any other Gorillaz album from the last 10 years; his appearance is the only nod, in fact, to the dramatic changes in pop music that have accompanied the rise of Latin (and more generally, non-Anglophone) artists. “Tormenta” is the most interesting song on Cracker Island: a kind of ambient reggaeton full of jazzy chord sequences, water-bed bass, and an exquisitely commanding vocal performance from Bad Bunny, who sounds utterly languid while hitting all the notes and beats, like a 21st-century Frank Sinatra seducing a late-night microphone.
Dependability is a good thing in friends, trains, and accountants. In mischief-making pop bands, not so much. With “Tormenta,” Gorillaz show that they aren’t quite ready for the steady waters of the nostalgia circuit. But that song’s eccentric angles and willingness to take risks show up the slightly humdrum nature of much of Cracker Island, an album that walks a very thin line between playing to the band’s strengths and relying too heavily on old tricks.


Despite its intriguing concept, Lil Yachty’s voyage into soul and psych-rock runs aground.

Let’s Start Here.

At a surprise listening event last Thursday, Lil Yachty introduced his new album Let’s Start Here., an unexpected pivot, with a few words every rap fan will find familiar: “I really wanted to be taken seriously as an artist, not just some SoundCloud rapper or some mumble rapper.” This is the speech rappers are obligated to give when it comes time for the drum loop to take a backseat to guitars, for the rapping to be muted in favor of singing, for the ad-libs to give it up to the background singers, and for a brigade of white producers with plaque-lined walls to be invited into the fold.
Rap fans, including myself, don’t want to hear it, but the reality is that in large slices of music and pop culture, “rapper” is thrown around with salt on the tongue. Pop culture is powerfully influenced by hip-hop, that is until the rappers get too close and the hands reach for the pearls. If anything, the 25-year-old Yachty—as one of the few rappers of his generation able to walk through the front door anyway because of his typically Gushers-sweet sound and innocently youthful beaded braid look—might be the wrong messenger.
What’s sour about Yachty’s statement isn’t the idea that he wants to be taken seriously as an artist, but the question of who he wants to be taken seriously by. When Yachty first got on, a certain corner of rap fandom saw his marble-mouthed enunciation and unwillingness to drool over hip-hop history as symbols of what was ruining the genre they claimed to love. A few artists more beholden to tradition did some finger-wagging—Pete Rock and Joe Budden, Vic Mensa and Anderson .Paak, subliminals from Kendrick and Cole—but that was years ago, and by now they’ve found new targets. These days, Yachty is respected just fine within rap. If he weren’t, his year-long rebirth in the Michigan rap scene, which resulted in the good-not-great Michigan Boy Boat, would have been viewed solely as a cynical attempt to boost his rap bona fides. His immersion there felt earnest, though, like he was proving to himself that he could hang.
The respect Yachty is chasing on Let’s Start Here. feels institutional. It’s for the voting committees, for the suits; for Questlove to shout him out as the future, for Ebro to invite him back on his radio show and say My bad, you’re dope. Never mind if you thought Lil Yachty was dope to start with: The goal of this album is to go beyond all expectations and rules for rappers.
And the big pivot is… a highly manicured and expensive blend of Tame Impala-style psych-rock, A24 synth-pop, loungey R&B, and Silk Sonic-esque funk, a sound so immediately appealing that it doesn’t feel experimental at all. In 2020, Yachty’s generational peers, Lil Uzi Vert and Playboi Carti, released Eternal Atake and Whole Lotta Red: albums that pushed forward pre-existing sounds to the point of inimitability, showcases not only for the artists’ raps but their conceptual visions. Yachty, meanwhile, is working within a template that is already well-defined and commercially successful. This is what the monologue was for?
To Yachty’s credit, he gives the standout performance on a crowded project. It’s the same gift for versatility that’s made him a singular rapper: He bounces from style to style without losing his individuality. A less interesting artist would have been made anonymous by the polished sounds of producers like Chairlift’s Patrick Wimberly, Unknown Mortal Orchestra’s Jacob Portrait, and pop songwriters Justin and Jeremiah Raisen, or had their voice warped by writing credits that bring together Mac DeMarco, Alex G, and, uh, Tory Lanez. The production always leans more indulgent than thrilling, more scattershot than conceptual. But Yachty himself hangs onto the ideas he’s been struggling to articulate since 2017’s Teenage Emotions: loneliness, heartbreak, overcoming failure. He’s still not a strong enough writer to nail them, and none of the professionals collecting checks in the credits seem to have been much help, but his immensely expressive vocals make up for it.
Actually, for all the commotion about the genre jump on this project, the real draw is the ways in which Yachty uses Auto-Tune and other vocal effects as tools to unlock not just sounds but emotion. Building off the vocal wrinkle introduced on last year’s viral moment “Poland,” where he sounds like he’s cooing through a ceiling fan, the highlights on Let’s Start Here. stretch his voice in unusual directions. The vocals in the background of his wistful hook on “pRETTy” sound like he’s trying to harmonize while getting a deep-tissue massage. His shrill melodies on “paint THE sky” could have grooved with the Weeknd on Dawn FM. The opening warble of “running out of time” is like Yachty’s imitation of Bruno Mars imitating James Brown, and the way he can’t quite restrain his screechiness enough to flawlessly copy it is what makes it original.
Too bad everything surrounding his unpredictable and adventurous vocal detours is so conventional. Instrumental moments that feel like they’re supposed to be weird and psychedelic—the hard rock guitar riff that coasts to a blissful finale in “the BLACK seminole.” or the slow build of “REACH THE SUNSHINE.”—come off like half-measures. Diana Gordon’s falsetto-led funk on “drive ME crazy!” reaches for a superhuman register, but other guest appearances, like Fousheé’s clipped lilts on “pRETTy” and Daniel Caesar’s faded howls on the outro, are forgettable. None of it is ever bad: The synths on “sAy sOMETHINg” shimmer; the drawn-out intro and outro of “WE SAW THE SUN!” set the lost, trippy mood they’re supposed to; “THE zone~” blooms over and over again, underlined by Justine Skye’s sweet and unhurried melodies. It’s all so easy to digest, so pitch-perfect, so safe. Let’s Start Here. clearly and badly wants to be hanging up on those dorm room walls with Currents and Blonde and IGOR. It might just work, too.
Instead, consider this album a reminder of how limitless rap can be. We’re so eager for the future of the genre to arrive that current sounds are viewed as restricting and lesser. But rap is everything you can imagine. I’m thinking about “Poland,” a song stranger than anything here: straight-up 1:23 of chaos, as inventive as it is fun. I took that track as seriously as anything I heard last year because it latches onto a simple rap melody and pushes it to the brink. Soon enough, another rapper will hear that and take it in another direction, then another will do the same. That’s how you really get to the future.


After the two-dimensional art-school-kid clichés of Man on the Moon, kiD CuDi partially makes good on his promise to loosen up his music.

Kid Cudi: Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager

Kanye West has repeatedly called kiD CuDi his "favorite living artist" ("and not just cause he's on my label," he assured us on Twitter). CyHi Da Prince excepted, West's taste in musicians is usually sound, and CuDi is talented. His taste for forlorn melody, chilly electronics, and empty space basically brought 808s and Heartbreak into existence, and his fingerprints are visible all over Kanye's upcoming My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. As a member of Kanye's revolving door of creative inspiration, he has proven himself to be indispensable.
As a solo artist, well... his second full-length, Man on the Moon II: The Legend of Mr. Rager manages to render the jury still out. His 2009 debut, Man on the Moon: The End of the Day, was a modest commercial success but a mortifying creative face-plant, a compilation of the most two-dimensional art-school-kid clichés (I'm sad, I'm stoned, I'm deep) imaginable, over unrelievedly monotonous electro tracks. It was hard to find a more self-satisfied and less likable pop record that year. Man on the Moon II, the sequel, is still a bumpy listen, but it tweaks his formula enough to at least hint at the massive promise Kanye sees in him.
First, and most crucially, he perks up the tempo a little. After Man on the Moon came out, CuDi told MTV.com that his next album was "gonna be the complete opposite of what Man on the Moon was. Man on the Moon was so serious. This one is gonna be more playful and fun. It's about having a good time." It's not, really, unless he's referring to all his dead-eyed bragging about how fucked-up he's capable of getting. But the music is brighter: "Erase Me" is a chugging guitar-rock song with a big, slick chorus that could have sat comfortably on late-90s alt-rock radio. (It also features a Kanye verse that ends with a ridiculous "diarrhea" pun.) On "REVOFEV", he dispenses aw-shucks big-brother wisdom like, "Things might get tough/ No need to stress," over a tumble of piano chords and acid-rock guitar.
Even his trademark sadface stuff, though, is more fully realized. "Don't Play This Song" starts with a somber, harmonically rich string quartet and adds a throbbing pulse and a wailing Mary J. Blige; the track's elements shift slowly and subtly, giving the groove a fluid and hypnotic feel that Cudi echoes with his stuttering "ra-ra-ra-ra-right" delivery. CuDi's lyrics, though, still carry a wince-inducing "Bill and Ted" ring to them. The chorus of "Don't Play This Song" goes: "Wanna know what I sound like when I'm not on drugs?/ Please, please don't play this song," which I would feel comfortable interpreting as pure comedy if he didn't say, "I love the dark, maybe we can make it darker/ Give me a marker," in dead earnest on "Maniac", a song that gathers a St. Vincent sample, CuDi, and emo-rapper Cage in the same room for probably the first and last time.
Thematically, Mr. Rager is most compelling when it leaves behind moping alone in your room for moping while you're out on the town-- being a coked-up asshole. CuDi's blank, artless affect makes a more interesting vehicle for these semi-poisonous sentiments: "Hide the pain with some pussy and mimosas," he mutters on "Wild'N Cuz I'm Young". The only true biographical detail we get on Mr. Rager hints at his troubled family-- "I wish I could tell my brother/ Something for motivation to get him out that gutter/ He's leaving behind a family and a mother" ("Mojo So Dope")-- and also provides a glimpse of what CuDi's music might sound like if he provided actual emotional content instead of just gesturing repeatedly towards it.


Shielding vulnerability beneath layers of cranked-up bass, the Brooklyn rapper and singer’s new tape is music for baddies who keep in touch with their feelings.

APPETIZER

Clip is a certified fashion scenester who’s shaking ass in the deli with Ice Spice and toured with Rico Nasty. Her own music exists in a haze of cloud rap and dubbed-out digicore: hyper-online emo alt-pop for hot girls. On Instagram in April, Clip wrote: “Although my Instagram can give off that I am living the life, which I’m very grateful for the life I live, I am constantly battling with my mind and reality.” Her new mixtape APPETIZER, which collects tracks that didn’t fit last year’s PERCEPTION EP, represents that struggle. Sparkling and woozy, it shields Clip’s vulnerability beneath layers of cranked-up bass. It’s like making your way through a smoky house party where music rattles the walls, only to find your best friend crying alone on the stairs.

On APPETIZER, Clip’s narrators are caught between outward sex appeal and inner self-loathing. She begins full of energy on opening track “yeahh(L’s),” raspy-voiced over a rush of video game synths reminiscent of Rico’s “Poppin.” Atop a menacing trap beat on “maybe I Am crazy,” Clip flexes, “Got your main bitch, she in the passenger seat throwin’ ass,” then confides, “They can’t relate to our pain/You either play your cards right or get played by the game.” If “yeahh(L’s)” was Clip in denial, “riot” captures her anger, crying out “fuck my fake friends, I’m slowly dying” over a shiny, throbbing beat by producer SACHY that would’ve fit in on Lil Uzi’s Eternal Atake. SACHY produced two of Clip’s biggest songs to date (“Sad B!tch,” “FALL BACK”), and they’ve clearly hit their stride together.

The most tender moment comes on “sandy toes,” where Clip sings about feeling untouchable as she runs across the beach, oblivious to everything except the peaceful, grounding feeling of sand beneath her feet. Though the heavy bass feels like it’s swimming in Jell-O, Clip’s syrupy voice cuts right through. Her songs have always felt deeply intimate, thanks in large part to the way her voice swirls in and out, layered with effects to match the vibe of each track. She has a talent for viscerally emotional songwriting, and in this way the tape’s brevity works to her advantage. APPETIZER isn’t reinventing the realm of gritty, foggy sing-rap, but the moments that make it special are defining for Clip at this point in her career. Her perspective and style are too interesting to get lost in the mix.


On this indie pop EP, the Cape Town singer and guitarist generates warmth by pairing innocent inquiry with bright instrumentation.

M Field EP

The rollout for Matthew Field’s debut EP has been, above all, verdant. Since March, the Cape Town native—and lead singer/guitarist for the South African hit pop rock trio Beatenberg—has been issuing singles, each accompanied with a winsome collage of greens and blues. Each of the five tracks has also received a video treatment featuring Field in the outdoors, engaging in activities both mundane (taking a dachshund on an off-leash forest walk in “Fiona”) and quixotic (pushing an iceblock towards the beach as it melts in “Gargoyle”). Throughout these quirky yet determined tasks, he remains as stone-faced as a silent-era comedian. The warmth generated on M Field EP comes as much from the artist’s resolute pondering as it does from the bright instrumentation that surrounds him.
Propelled by Field’s soukous-inflected playing, the record flutters and keens. If you squint you can make out Vampire Weekend—largely due to the shared guitar lineage—but Field doesn’t share the Americans’ interest in footrace tempos and snare raps. His arrangements fizz but never bubble over; they reflect a mind running hot, turning over thoughts while seeking shade. “And I wait for your call/Then let myself fall/From the height of the day,” he sighs on “Ten Is a Number,” over an intricate mix of timekeeping handclaps, piano roll and sparkling guitar. The hazy, Mellotron-led “Leafy Outlook” (also the name of his label) paddles on a twangy ostinato and drum machine patter. The narrator despairs of being stuck at the same address, arguing with the same people. The combined effect is like overhearing someone’s glum monologue while tubing a river; you keep waiting for the scenery to shake them out of it, and surprisingly, it actually does. Overlapping voices babbling about the recording process suddenly appear, capsizing the boat and breaking the narrator’s reverie. However, tranquility returns as the narrator resurfaces, singing vocal harmonies reminiscent of the Beach Boys.
It’s playful, perhaps a bit deadpan—like the EP as a whole—and thus a worthy project for London-based producer Nathan Jenkins. Over the last year, Jenkins has helmed a number of throwback art-pop efforts, both under his Bullion alias and for other artists like Orlando Weeks, Joviale, and Hayden Thorpe. On “Gargoyle,” Bullion and Field cushion a failing relationship (“If you’re a Gorgon/I’m a gargoyle,” Field sings, not unkindly) for impact: dicing a piano figure across the stereo field, summoning a bass cloudmass only to disperse it with a funky synthline, and providing another bridge potentially focused on the recording process: “Pulling on a string/To make it sing/You got to strain/To make it work.”
On the EP’s bookends, Field counsels his friends on how to make their relationships work. In “Andrew,” he urges one friend to go it alone; in “Fiona,” he advises another to stay attached. Each song is nimble and bright, and both pair emotional certainty with a hazy sense of place. The mind is running hot again, and visuals spin out: subway tiles, a lie by the lagoon, two shadows on a rugby field. If you take these songs as conversations to decode, his elliptical approach may frustrate. As a peek into another person’s mental process, it’s charming.
And it does seem telling that the song about going solo is Field at his loosest. On “Andrew”—the arrangement for which has the melodic dexterity of Peter Gabriel—Field chases the refrains by scatting alongside his genial guitar line. “The horn of plenty,” he counsels Andrew, “you’ve got to blow it now.” Beatenberg released their last LP in 2018; in a July interview, Field said that the band was still active, but noted that each member was currently in a different city. In time, we’ll know if this EP represents the first break for greener pastures, or simply a head-clearing stroll. Regardless, this brief excursion suggests that Field has brilliant corners yet to turn.
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The Scottish group’s action flick soundtrack lacks their usual maximalist peaks but offers impressionistic sketches.

Mogwai: KIN: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

KIN: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack

KIN is a movie about a futuristic bazooka that can blast walls out of buildings and instantly turn people into dust. The music of Mogwai has been known to do the same. But as the Scottish group have amassed enough soundtrack credits to qualify as the four-headed Hans Zimmer of indie rock, Mogwai’s film scores have typically avoided their more anarchic tendencies in favor of their more ambient, meditative qualities. And while KIN marks the band’s first dalliance with a mainstream Hollywood action flick after a handful of documentary and art-house efforts, their soundtrack ultimately emphasizes a subtlety not so readily gleaned from the Comic-Con-courting poster campaign.
For all its explosions, shootouts, and motorcycle-riding aliens, KIN is essentially a gritty domestic drama about a poor Detroit family that’s still reeling from the death of its matriarch when eldest son Jimmy (Jack Reynor) returns home after several years in prison and tries to mend his estranged relationship with his grizzled construction-worker dad (Dennis Quaid). Caught in the middle is Eli (Myles Truitt), the 14-year-old adopted son who discovers the aforementioned killer gizmo while out scavenging for scrap metal, and sets the film’s road-trip narrative in motion.
KIN was made by the same production team that gave us “Stranger Things,” and at the outset, the film shares certain characteristics with the retro-’80s Netflix series—not the least of which is a young, curious protagonist who spends his free time tooling around town on a BMX. But it’s not until around 20 minutes into the film that you realize KIN is actually set in the present day—if Eli’s Detroit stomping grounds have a distinctly ’80s feel, it’s only because economic stagnation has frozen his neighbourhood in time. Likewise, Mogwai’s score leans heavily on the sinister electro-prog synths that have been a regular presence of their sound since 2011’s Hardcore Will Never Die, But You Will, but have since become an instant ’80s-flick shorthand thanks to S U R V I V E’s “Stranger Things” theme. However, if KIN’s sudden shifts between conversational, coming-of-age tale and blow-‘em-up summer blockbuster can feel as jarring as the infamous quiet/loud shocks the defined Mogwai’s signature records, the band’s soundtrack ultimately plays more of a mediating role. Subtly fusing  synthetic elements with naturalistic touches, their score is the unifying element in a film that plays like The Terminator as made by the Duplass Brothers.
So while a piece like “Scrap” sets an ominous scene with its reverberating, tremolo-like effects, soon a melancholic piano melody and brushed-snare drum beat thaw away the icy atmosphere. “Flee” follows the same playbook to loftier heights, as its circular piano pattern ascends a spiral-staircase atop a juddering foundation of glitchy beats. Throughout the soundtrack, the piano comes to represent the human heart at the core of KIN’s outlandish narrative—tellingly, “Eli’s Theme” lionizes the film’s protagonist with an isolated, ivory-tickled refrain that, like the character, exudes a nervous tension while standing resolute in the face of unforgiving conditions.
But however well they reflect KIN’s mood and themes, these pieces don’t quite cohere into a proper stand-alone album. Independent of the film, they feel more like a series of impressionistic sketches that tease at the eruptions of Mogwai’s definitive work, yet stop short of hitting their maximalist potential. Even the more fleshed-out songs—like the stalking, organ-guided movement “Guns Down” and the dramatic, ethereal-to-orchestral leaps of the title track—ultimately err on the side of restraint, respectively using their thunderclouds of distortion and needling oscillations more as subliminal textures than focal points.
If Mogwai don’t hit their usual peaks here, they at least lead us to some pleasurable plateaus: “Donuts” begins with the sort of dreamy synth swells that typically trigger an EDM banger, but instead embark on a splendorous, slow-motion space-rock cruise. And following the lead of recent breakthroughs like “Teenage Exorcists” and “Party in the Dark,” Mogwai use the film’s closing credit theme, “We’re Not Done,” to further indulge their latent desire to be a shoegazing pop band. As the soundtrack’s lone vocally driven, conventionally-structured rock track, “We’re Not Done” is a glaring anomaly, yet arguably, it’s the track that’s truest to the film’s spirit. After all, KIN may not actually be an ’80s film, but it’s clearly inspired by the era’s multiplex popcorn thrillers and adapts their tropes to a contemporary context. Likewise, with “We’re Not Done,” Mogwai vividly realize a goth-club fantasy of My Bloody Valentine covering the Cure that uncannily blurs the line between past and present.


Anything Could Happen is the first album in 24 years from Bash & Pop, Tommy Stinson’s short-lived post-Replacements outfit. It’s less an exercise in reliving the past than coming to terms with it.

Anything Could Happen

Assuming you have an active Facebook account and care enough about music to be visiting this site, then you’ve probably spent much of the past week wading through an endless stream of posts from friends listing off the Top 10 records that made the biggest impression on them as a teenager. But beyond the “Spin Doctors LOL!” novelty of the exercise, the lists provided a glimpse into a pre-internet age when dramatic philosophical divisions were erected even among bands that were essentially operating in the same realm. For instance, on those Facebook lists, it was rare to see Guns N’ Roses listed alongside the Replacements—even though both were raw, raunchy ’80s-era rock’n’roll bands raised on a steady diet of the Stones, KISS, and New York Dolls. But what they symbolized—deviant decadence in GNR’s case, sad-sack disillusionment in the Mats’—made them ideological opposites to teens trying to figure out their place in the world.
The career of Tommy Stinson, however, is a case study in how those once-rigid distinctions have essentially become meaningless. Once the Replacements’ resident punk wunderkind, Stinson would go on to join Axl Rose’s recombinant version of GNR in 1998. The move was emblematic of how rock’s shift from pop-cultural force to niche concern had effectively erased the aesthetic divisions within it. After the Replacements got back together in 2013, while he was still in GNR, Stinson enjoyed the rare distinction of playing in one of the most respected rock bands in the world and one of the most popular. But now that one group has ended its reunion and the other doesn’t require his services for theirs, Stinson is getting another old band back together—if only in name.
Anything Could Happen is the first album in 24 years credited to Bash & Pop, Stinson’s short-lived post-Replacements outfit. But Stinson isn’t resurrecting Bash & Pop’s original line-up so much as reconnecting with their plug’n’play philosophy, by recording live off the floor with a proper band (featuring GNR drummer Frank Ferrer and North Mississippi All-Stars guitarist Luther Dickinson) after a couple of mostly self-recorded, studio-tinkered solo records. According to Stinson, several of its songs were earmarked for a Mats record that never got off the ground. But in lieu of new Replacements, Anything Could Happen is a decent replacement.
Stinson was in Guns N’ Roses for nearly twice as long as he was in the Replacements, but his songwriting style will forever draw from the latter band’s brew of shot glass-slamming rock’n’roll and the sort of rootsy twang that launched a thousand alt-country groups. The introductory rave-up “Not This Time” kicks open the saloon doors as vigorously as “I.O.U.” did back on Pleased to Meet Me, while the title track’s cathartic, shout-it-out hooks are evocative enough of a certain Tim touchstone that you could rename it “Bastards of Old.” And in the raw acoustic confessional “Can’t Be Bothered,” he updates the early-20s angst of “Unsatisfied” for middle-aged malaise: “The worst things seem to happen in threes/We used to the flip the bird until the bird turned to a dream/Now we can’t be bothered with any of that.”
But more than any specific Replacements record, the tone and temperament of Anything Could Happen most closely recalls Paul Westerberg’s underrated 1993 solo debut 14 Songs, which furthered his maturation as a songwriter while reapplying some of the grittiness that the latter Replacements records smoothed over. (“On the Rocks,” in particular, feels like an unsubtle echo of that album’s “World Class Fad.”) As a vocalist, Stinson is like a Westerberg who decides to call it a night after just three beers—he may not plumb the same dark-hour-of-the-soul depths as his former bandmate, but he can effectively render a relationship’s wreckage with a single brushstroke (from “Anybody Else”: “You’re trying to make a painting a Picasso/Bought a box of sidewalk chalk”) or self-deprecating sentiment (“I’m the wish that won’t come true,” he admits on the honky-tonk heartbreaker “Breathing Room”).
Anything Could Happen is an album of upbeat songs about feeling down and lucid observations about getting fucked up, split evenly between ragged mid-tempo struts and countrified, come-down laments. And for Replacements fans of a certain vintage, it offers a hit of nostalgia more potent than you’ll get from scrolling your high-school buddy’s Facebook list. But for Stinson, Anything Could Happen is less an exercise in reliving the past than coming to terms with it, having survived being in the world’s most intoxicated band, the untimely death of his brother, divorce, and working for two of rock’s most notorious control freaks. That experience has taught him that, even in life’s darkest moments, there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, even if it’s just a cigarette ember. On “Anytime Soon,” Stinson lays down a smoky, miserable-bastard blues to remind himself to quit being such a miserable bastard: “Feeling sad and lonely, yes I know I’m not the only,” he sings, before adding, “you won’t see me dangling from these rafters anytime soon.” Because as Stinson’s unlikely journey from drunk-punk underdog to arena-rock ringer has shown, anything can indeed happen.


Johnny Jewel's official soundtrack to the Ryan Gosling-directed film Lost River blends clipped, opiated pop from Chromatics, Desire, and Glass Candy, with contributions by the film's actors and ambient works by Jewel.

Lost River OST

Lost River, a film directed by actor Ryan Gosling, was ritually savaged at its Cannes Film Fesival premiere and barely recovered on its official release. Reviews were almost comically awful. It could generously be described as a striking visual work that never really gels: Gosling’s time working with Nicolas Winding Refn on Drive clearly had a profound impact, as Christina Hendricks (who had a small role in Refn’s film) stars and the soundtrack is helmed by Italians Do It Better label boss Johnny Jewel, whose contributions to the Drive soundtrack helped establish the film's neon atmosphere. Cliff Martinez technically handed the composer duties for Drive, but on the Lost River OST, Jewel gets his first real score, writing a soundtrack that runs excess of 90 minutes.
Jewel doesn’t really deal in concision, at least not in album form. His Themes For an Imaginary Film, released under the Symmetry guise, stretched to around two hours, while Chromatics’ acclaimed Kill for Love clocks in at a similar length to this score, indulging in multifarious impulses along the way. Jewel's ease with writing frosted, clipped pop songs (Chromatics' "Yes", from this album, is a great example) provides a fascinating contrast to the way he approaches bigger works. Jewel might be trying to make his own Tusk or Screamadelica, but he hasn't managed a consistent project yet, leaving behind a handful of works that sometimes fall on the wrong side of indulgence. He’s enviably talented, but with each passing album his lack of editing feels more like an Achilles heel.
The material on Lost River falls into three categories. There’s Jewel's familiar, heavily opiated glassy pop, represented by Chromatics, Desire, and Glass Candy; a stretch of drifty, incidental film music; and moments culled directly from the cast of the film, including vocal turns by actors Red Kateb, Ben Mendelsohn (channeling his inner Nick Cave), and former Possum Dixon frontman Rob Zabrecky. Jewel sequences these contrasting bits to make it sound like the music is emerging from a dream. Even the '50s R&B of Billy Ward & his Dominoes, included here in a brief interlude, sounds like it’s floating in from an abstract plane. Jewel finds unlikely common ground between his contemporary work, music for the ages, and drone-y instrumental pieces.
Again, though, Jewel's include-everything impulse works against him. Chromatics’ "Yes" is the standout, alternating between haunting and beautiful passages, perfectly strung across a tightrope of bliss and unease. But there’s no need for three versions of it to be included on the soundtrack, and the three versions of "Deep Purple" and two versions of "Tell Me" feel equally excessive. It’s a shame, because Saoirse Ronan's powerful version of "Tell Me" may have had more weight if it was just a standalone. Chromatics’ version of "Blue Moon", originally featured on the Running from the Sun outtakes compilation, works precisely because it emerges from the gloom, strikes a chord, and never returns.
There’s a trove of solo Jewel compositions outside of the song-oriented tracks here, most of them leaning toward ambient and occasionally bringing to mind Tangerine Dream’s incidental film music. Shorn of context, there isn’t much to hold onto—a tough gap to bridge whenever film music is removed from its visual stimulus. The depth and breadth of this album makes it feel archival, as if someone excavated Jewel’s vaults for material long after the film was released—possibly an unfortunate downside of the exhaustive boom soundtracks have been undergoing in the past decade or so, where every last scrap of B-movie music warrants a $45 luxury vinyl release. This is a cut above the rest, but listening to it occasionally feels like sifting through a yard sale looking for gold.


The Canadian rapper and singer’s sense of playfulness is the highlight of a second album that attempts to reach beyond her raunchy sex-rap comfort zone.

Goldilocks X

You don’t have to dance to break a sweat listening to Tommy Genesis’ humid synths, murmured asides, and raps about spitting and licking and swallowing. The Canadian singer and model calls it “fetish rap,” a term she coined and an apt descriptor for both the content of her lyrics and her musical niche. Like Shygirl, CupcakKe, and Nicki Minaj, Genesis writes playfully and specifically about sex. Her best tracks are slinky and throbbing, instantly recognizable club anthems that keep popping up on TV—hissing over brassy beats in the Euphoria pilot, purring in the background of the candy-colored media drama The Bold Type. On her second album, goldilocks x, she sets out to soundtrack a spectrum of emotions wider than her trademark brashness. “I want people to relate to it, turn up to it, cry to it, fuck to it and just fucking live to it,” she told DIY.
There are still plenty of classic Tommy bangers to assert and re-introduce herself. “You don’t really know me, I’mma keep it that way,” she whispers on “Manifesto,” over producer Charlie Heat’s walloping club-ready bass. But that deliberate distance undermines the more sentimental stretch in the album’s final three tracks, which center on romance and its aftermath. Genesis experiments with almost maudlin hyperpop on “fuck u u know u can’t make me cry,” wailing the title through layers of distortion and glitchy screams. It’s a breakup track with too many stale lines for such a gifted songwriter: salt in wounds, love that sets you on fire, a tip to Frank Ocean’s “white lies and white lines.” On album closer “hurricane,” among the slowest tracks in her catalog, she interrogates a lover about an ex while a guitar trickles through the background. We don’t learn much about the people who’ve put Genesis in this pained state, or access a more fleshed-out version of the singer herself. There’s a thrill in watching a talented artist reach beyond her comfort zone, but the result is disappointingly flat.
When she’s in her element, though, she’s singular and sparkling, screeching, “You not famous, you a fetus!” at a cheating ex and singing about chewing on a lover’s earlobe. She writes about sex through a surrealist lens, body horror turned horny. “I’m taking off my skin, ooh ooh ooh,” she deadpans on the high-velocity “a woman is a god.” She narrates foreplay on “wild child,” licking toes and pulling hair, but the physicality turns sinister: “Now you sucking out my soul.”
There are marketing terms for what Genesis does—empowering, sex-positive, unabashadly queer—but those don’t capture the wink in her voice, the fun of her music. “Try to make it seem like someone cares about you,” she taunts a guy who’s pacing around outside the club on a fake phone call. She shuts down a lover’s small talk by asking frankly if they can get her wet. The inspiration for “men” might sound like faux-feminist chart kibble—Genesis polled her group chats on what they hated most about guys—but the song is clever and propuslive, with laugh-out-loud ad-libs (“Thought you was a goat boy, shoo!”) and the killer couplet: “Selfish, secretive, possessive, condescending/Even when I cum, I’m pretending.” She strives to surprise.
Her sense of playfulness and irony enchant what otherwise might be a dim, hazy record, and Genesis is at her best when she leans into it. “I finger-painted the fuck out of this album,” she said in the same DIY interview, explaining that she considers herself a conceptual artist. On “peppermint,” she raps about a sex partner’s “oozes” and juices, gliding through omnnapoetia over squelching beats. When goldilocks x reaches beyond the dancefloor and the bedroom to the hangovers and breakups—the moments when the lights flicker on and your stomach caves in—it doesn’t bring the same eye for absurdity. There’s a ridiculousness in feeling anything fiercely, a terror inherent to intimacy against which Tommy’s brazen, pointed persona is perfectly matched, but the clarity slips away just when it’s most needed.

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After the success of Ty Segall's best album, this year's Goodbye Bread, his former home, the Memphis label Goner Records, has compiled the 25-track Singles 2007-2010. It's a sort of refresher course that serves as a temporary portrait of the restless garage rocker.

Singles: 2007-2010

"When you play music and you're a person on a stage, sometimes people can put you on a pedestal, and that can do a lot of things to your head. And... what if it actually exploded all over the walls during a show?" That's Ty Segall speaking to SF Weekly earlier this year about his 2011 song, "My Head Explodes". It's a fairly straightforward description of a song that isn't terribly complicated. Guy sings. People watch. Guy's head explodes. It's not hard to picture Segall's head exploding. He sings hard and loud and with the shrill fury of a castrated animal. And he does this a lot. Since quitting his band, Epsilons, less than four years ago, Segall has become arguably the most exciting and probably the most prolific member of San Francisco's evolving garage rock scene, which also includes Thee Oh Sees, the Fresh & Onlys, and Sic Alps (with whom Segall formerly played). Since going solo, he's released five albums of original material; two split LPs; a live album; a cassette-only compilation; eight 7"s; four split EPs; a collaborative album with Mikal Cronin; and appeared on four compilation albums. The man is prolific. Trying to keep up will, if not enough make your head explode, at least incite heavy migraines.
This year's Goodbye Bread, his first release for Drag City, is easily his best, the accumulation of learned songwriting tricks and a developing melodic sense, with an emphasis on sonic clarity and the influence of some august icons, notably John Lennon and Marc Bolan. (Oh yeah, Segall recorded a tribute EP to Bolan's T. Rex this year, too.) In the afterglow of Goodbye's success, Memphis label Goner Records, Segall's former home, has compiled Singles 2007-2010, a sort of refresher course and unheard odds-and-ends set that serves as a tenacious, temporary portrait of Segall. There are hints everywhere at the songwriter Segall would become, but Singles is much more about the flail of youth than honoring tradition. In a few years, he's garnered comparisons to a wide swath of artists, from Nuggets-friendly English bands like the Troggs and the Pretty Things, to working-class American menace-peddlers like the Stooges and Ramones, to early recordings by the White Stripes (especially prevalent on this comp), down to the late Jay Reatard, a significant guidepost for Segall.
Singles is a stew mixing all of those ingredients and more. There are hints of Devo in the mechanized synth and drum tracks on early versions of "So Alone" and "The Drag". (Before forming his band, Segall often played all the instruments on his records, including drum machine.) Listen for ? and the Mysterians-like organ at the outset of "Skin", maybe the best song here. And in that voice, which vacillates from desperate howl to wallowing drone, a little Kurt Cobain, too. It's hard to know what's a relic and what's an advance here. Segall appears in love with surface imitation at times, while peeling the skin back at others. On the faux-British B-side "Fuzzy Cat", you can hear John Entwistle of the Who's gothic goof-off "Boris the Spider". The appearance of a cover of Chain Gang's coiled, minor punk masterpiece, "Son of Sam", feels like a cred grab, but an accomplished one. On "Caesar", which would later appear on 2010's Melted in more polished form, there's a little of the stomping acoustic rock that would become the underbelly of Goodbye Bread. Segall, like so many developing artists, seemed to be constantly toggling between ideas of himself.
Singles, while comprising 25 songs, is still less than one hour's worth of music-- this iteration of Segall was economical. Only now, as his ambition grows, so do the lengths of his songs. Just one here exceeds three minutes-- it's the demo version of "So Alone", which was eventually whittled down to less than two and a half minutes for Horn the Unicorn. After acclaim for the elliptical and sometimes very pretty Goodbye Bread, one might assume Segall's left the crash-and-bash of Singles 2007-2010 behind. But then, his new single, "Spiders", is all doom and drone-- a violent, glorious devolution-- clocking in just under three minutes. So much for obvious trajectories.


Composer Zach Cooper's debut album blends acoustic instruments, synthesizers and electronic effects into a shifting whole that's part chamber music, part post-rock, and part musique concrète.

The Sentence

There's a not-so-hidden message encoded in composer Zach Cooper's debut album, The Sentence: "This is for us to incite stillness in our hearts and minds." That call to mindfulness, inspired by Cooper's own meditation practice, is spelled out by the one-word titles of the album's 12 cuts, which spin acoustic instruments, electric kit, and synthesizers and electronic effects into a,shifting whole that's part chamber music, part post-rock, and part musique concrète.
For a record that advocates stillness, The Sentence covers a lot of ground. It collages together many years' worth of work, from high-school home recordings to work with the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble to assorted rehearsal tapes and—well, who knows what, really. As you might guess from songs titled things like "This," "To," and "In," the individual tracks on The Sentence function less as standalone songs than as parts of an indivisible whole, and it's well-nigh impossible to tease out which bits date to which moments. As a scrapbook, the album's timeline will be legible only to Cooper, although that's presumably partly the point of the whole exercise: to explore the way musical moments repeat, echo, and evolve across the course of a life, piling up on tape in an image of eternal now-ness.
The music's tone is largely hushed, with lots of breathy wind instruments and muted electric and acoustic guitar; there are five percussionists credited on the album, but their contributions tend to emphasize scrapes and thumps and the faraway thunder of reverberant tympani—sounds used more for color than timekeeping. Compositionally, Cooper tends to tease soft melodic phrases out of dissonant, abstract passages, like drawing smooth a tangle of thread in fits and starts. Occasionally, a startlingly beautiful vista opens up: The pensive guitar and horns of "To" sound a little like Tortoise at their most sentimental. But Cooper doesn't dwell on any one idea for very long. That lyric centerpiece is followed by a shout ("Yo, play the jam! We’re gonna jam, dude!") and a two-minute run of vibraphone, cymbal, and electronics that suggests a druggy, paranoid Raymond Scott.
When The Sentence works best, it's led forward by a combination of smart pacing and surprising ideas. But the record has trouble building and keeping momentum. "Stillness," just 3:18 long, encompasses three distinct parts separated by garbed electronics and random clatter: a watery orchestral passage, a folky meditation for acoustic guitar and monophonic synth, and solo acoustic guitar bit that sounds like it was recorded on a Dictaphone. All offer nice sounds and worthy musical ideas, but lead nowhere. Too often the album seems to lack an organizing principle, a structure to make all its discrete moments make sense, and the back half of the 32-minute album drags. It's hard to maintain much investment in a record that simply rolls on of its own accord, like a stream, oblivious to the presence of the listener.


On her new EP, Sophie Allison rents out a room just for herself, singing covers of Taylor Swift, Pavement, Sheryl Crow, and more.

Karaoke Night EP

Sophie Allison might be exactly the type of person you don’t want to do karaoke with: Instead of screeching off-key high notes four vodka crans deep, she’s making it good and making you think. On her new EP Karaoke Night, she rents out a room just for herself, singing covers she’s performed live as Soccer Mommy but never recorded until now. It’s simultaneously an homage to her varied influences and a manifesto for her own dreamy sound.
Some covers make you reimagine what the original actually means, like “Soak Up the Sun,” which Allison released in July to align with Sheryl Crow’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Crow wrote the track while recovering from surgery, and it comes across as a gleaming, upbeat anthem championing a better mindset. Allison’s version is messier and more contemplative, almost as if she’s trying to convince herself of its positivity. The chorus is a fuzzy, watery expanse, leaving only a warped memory of the original bubblegum pop. The words “I’m gonna tell everyone to lighten up” feel more ironic than earnest.
Allison’s treatment of “I’m Only Me When I’m With You” has a similar effect. Swift’s track is classic Debut Taylor, with its fiddle solo and her exaggerated country twang. Allison’s slightly slower tempo and matter-of-fact vocal delivery highlight the gravity of the situation: “I’m only me when I’m with you.” Instead of soundtracking a local hoedown in full swing, the song begins under a spinning disco ball in a barn with only four people left on the floor. Even when the beat kicks in, there’s still an element of ennui that comes through amidst its sweetness.
Other covers offer a direct line to Allison’s work. Pavement’s classic ballad “Here” is even in the same key and tempo range as “Still,” the closer to her 2022 album Sometimes, Forever. Her rendition opens the EP, and her laissez-faire delivery mirrors that of the original, but with an added sincerity: While Malkmus sings lines like “Your jokes are always bad/But they're not as bad as this” with rueful jadedness, Allison sounds like she’s still putting in effort despite exhaustion. The EP’s other bookend is R.E.M’s “Losing My Religion,” a song that has always felt oddly buoyant despite being about unrequited love. Allison leaves no question of its melancholia, changing the main chords to be more dissonant.
Each song on Karaoke Night reckons to some degree with temporality and impermanence, themes threaded throughout Allison’s past projects. “The world is full of noise/I hear it all the time” from Slowdive’s “Dagger” is the kind of quasi-nihilistic line that might have appeared in her songs “Darkness Forever” or “Crawling In My Skin.” It validates that she is not alone in her self-doubt, devotion, and existential malaise, despite how isolated she may feel sometimes. These ideas are ageless, whether they’re shared in front of a crowd or alone with a single microphone.


Kurt Wagner uses restraint with a masterful touch on his latest record, applying a light vocodor touch to his voice to illuminate the intimacy of his understated songwriting.

Lambchop: This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You)

This (Is What I Wanted to Tell You)

There’s a trick Frank Ocean returns to throughout Blonde. After smothering his voice with all kinds of effects for long stretches, he’ll cut the switch and present his voice naked, and every time it’s as satisfying as the first swipe of a wiper blade across a rainy windshield. Lambchop’s Kurt Wagner pulls that move just once on his latest album This (is what I wanted to tell you), but he makes it count, waiting until the final track “Flowers” for the big reveal: His natural, 60-year-old voice, treated so completely throughout the album you begin to forget that he hasn’t always defaulted to a digitalized croon.
Wagner traded alt-country for electronic soul on 2016’s FLOTUS—a radical swap executed so gracefully and lovingly that he somehow made it feel like a natural progression. Still, anybody who missed that record is in for a surprise. Wagner has gone all-in on his vocoded mutter, and he’s reconfigured his songwriting to accommodate it, trimming away the chamber-pop adornments and merry excesses that once distinguished Lambchop’s records to center each song around his gentle prose.
For an artist who came to electronic music so late in life, it’s remarkable how astute his impulses are—and even more impressive still considering Wagner’s background in alt-country, a genre that is rarely prone to innovation. Rather than playing up his reinvented sound on This (is what I wanted to tell you), Wagner opts for tasteful restraint. Every track is cushioned with pillowy pianos and massaging basslines. Even the album’s boldest ideas are understated. With its light, acid jazz groove, “Everything is You” calls back to Us3’s early ’90s staple “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)”—you’ll remember it when you hear it—but never pats itself on the back for its own cleverness.
The occasional echoes of Bon Iver, the most prominent indie act to use vocal manipulation as an instrument unto itself, aren’t entirely accidental, since Bon Iver’s Matthew McCaughan produced the album and co-wrote parts of it. But unlike Justin Vernon, who used digital effects to push his voice to the edge of decay on 22, A Million, Wagner processes his voice not to obscure it but to draw warmth from it. Like the music itself, his vocal treatments are fragile and unpretentious. Nothing is obscured, nothing asks to be decoded. Everything about this sound is done in the service of intimacy.
And so it is with his lyrics, which suggest wisdom even as they meditate on uncertainty. On “The Air is Heavy and I Should Be Listening to You,” he relives a couple’s argument that breaks out during a bout of Sunday house cleaning. “The air is filled with lemon-scented displeasure,” he recalls. He writes in fragments of the mundane, juxtaposing direct thoughts with half-completed ones, then padding them with imagery ported from television and cable news (among them “the man with the Nixon tattoo,” presumably Roger Stone, one of those random, unshakable visuals that will serve as a marker for this precise moment in time). On “Crosswords, or What This Says About You,” he loses his partner at the airport, so he enjoys a moment at the bar. “Seems like they used to be much larger than they are right now,” he observes, never specifying what “they” might be.
It’s such a modest album, and yet such it’s a supremely pleasurable one. Wagner sounds humbled by the world, if not the very technology he’s adopted. Before “Flowers” ends the record with a plea for love—“If I gave you a hundred dollars to record just three words, I could make the perfect song,” he sings—he’s made a disarming case for understanding that it’s hard to imagine him pulling off in a setting less masterfully intimate. Wagner’s quarter-century track record with Lambchop only underscores what a gem This is. He’s made great records before, even exciting and unexpected ones, but never one so comforting and compassionate.


A new compilation devoted to the charismatic, underappreciated Indian jazz singer captures her sizzling spirit and illustrates the breadth of her musicianship.

The Essential Asha Puthli

Asha Puthli is a spark of a person: a provocative, self-possessed diva who gargled with champagne, identified her age as “spiritually 6,000” and “emotionally 5,” and obtained a visa to stay in the United States by asking a stranger she met at the Museum of Modern Art to marry her. Unsurprisingly, the socialites and artists of the 1970s were drawn to her: The Indian jazz singer was friends with Salvador Dalí and Andy Warhol, a muse to Manolo Blahnik, and a sartorial influence for Debbie Harry.
But despite her outstanding cultural impact and kinetic vocal performances, Puthli always skirted mainstream fame. Over the last few decades, her music has had a minor resurgence: The Notorious B.I.G., Diddy, 50 Cent, and the Pharcyde all sampled her psychedelic, slinky “Space Talk,” and she’s appeared on a few electronica releases. Still, her name remains largely unknown. The Essential Asha Puthli, a new compilation from British imprint Mr. Bongo, captures her sizzling spirit and illustrates the breadth of her musicianship, spanning her gritty early covers, her bombastic disco numbers, and her winding jazz vocalizations. The compilation also serves as a document of a captivating woman learning to fully indulge her artistic, romantic, and aesthetic desires.
Puthli’s audacious personality and unabashed sensuality guide these songs, which get bolder as the compilation progresses. Her playfulness and experimental impulses shine on opener “Pain,” which she recorded in 1968 with the Indian psychedelic rock band the Savages—on it, there are wordless yelps, vocal improvisations, and lo-fi textures. By the time she recorded the disco-funk song “The Devil Is Loose” eight years later, she had refined and embodied a sweeping bravado; the song possesses the beguiling conviction of someone shrugging silk off their shoulder. When the 1979 highlight “1001 Nights of Love (Reprise)” arrives, Puthli’s confidence soars. The bubbling synth cascades as Puthli whispers and gasps about the love and sex she craves. The Essential Asha Puthli shows that as her career evolved, she learned to channel that dramatic flair into music that exudes incomparable verve.
Puthli recorded 10 albums, but when none of her music really stuck with audiences in the ’70s and ’80s, she ultimately retired and raised her son in Palm Beach, Florida. In interviews, she has cited the prejudice of American record labels as part of the reason her career stalled: They wanted her to change her name to Anne Powers, and often failed to support Indian artists who didn’t make strictly Indian music.
More recently, she has inspired a new generation of young Indian American fans and artists—like R&B singer Raveena, who featured Puthli on her album Asha’s Awakening this year. As one of the very few South Asian women working in the entertainment industry at the time, and one who boldly asserted her desires, her story resonates with young listeners.
The intrigue also comes from her unique approach to cultural fusion: Unlike her peers, Puthli generally avoids pulling directly from South Asian instrumentation, language, or spirituality. “Chipko Chipko” is the only song in Hindi on the compilation, and she mostly focuses her innovation on vocal technique. As she said in an interview with Red Bull Music Academy, she perceives connections between jazz and Indian classical music because of “the improvisation, the minor chords, the free form, the liberalness of the art.” On “What Reason Could I Give” and “All My Life,” two songs from Ornette Coleman’s groundbreaking record Science Fiction that also appear on the compilation, she drew from the Indian classical music technique of taan (fast, improvised sequences of notes) and gamak (vocal embellishments added to notes). It worked: Where another vocalist might have had a difficult time keeping up with Coleman’s meandering compositions, Puthli’s croon sandwiches effortlessly between the rumbling saxophone and flitting drum lines.
Puthli’s sense of self is so strong on this compilation that it almost feels like she could do anything—write a check, read out a grocery list—and it would be just as compelling. She’s an immensely talented vocalist, but the true thrill of her music comes from hearing her play every version of herself. In a conversation for Interview magazine, Penelope Tree once asked Puthli, “Aren’t you royalty?” She responded: “Don’t insult me, I’m divinity.” Her vision of herself was flamboyant and grandiose, and The Essential Asha Puthli confirms that it was entirely warranted.