The UK singer-songwriter’s 1998 album remains a phenomenon that defies explanation: a modest collection of love songs recorded in his bedroom by an Everyman who was suddenly Everywhere.

David Gray: White Ladder (20th Anniversary Edition)

White Ladder (20th Anniversary Edition)

David Gray was once renowned for how famous he wasn’t—a singer-songwriter’s singer-songwriter, denied mainstream success in a way that registered as injustice by his cult of fans and admirers. Abandoned by EMI after 1996’s self-deprecatingly titled Sell, Sell, Sell did the exact opposite, the British musician recorded his fourth album, White Ladder, in his apartment and released it on his own IHT label; the record subsequently achieved the rarefied level of ubiquity where its omnipresence became one of its defining characteristics.
In a snide yet mostly positive review of White Ladder’s 2000 reissue, NME imagined Gray’s “eyes-closed sincerity” soundtracking mortgage ads until the end of time. “A whole generation of couples stared meaningfully into each other’s eyes as they performed their first wedding dance to ‘This Year’s Love,’” The Guardian quipped in 2010. “Without reverting to excessive hyperbole, there wasn't a home in Ireland that didn't own a copy of David Gray's breakthrough album,” one local paper claimed. In a nation that produced U2, the Corrs, and Clannad, White Ladder remains the best-selling album of all time.
By 2001, Gray was on a level with Eminem and Britney Spears—at least in the sense that his music was used alongside theirs to torture prisoners at Guantanamo; Haj Ali, photographed as a hooded prisoner of war in Abu Ghraib, claimed that he was stripped, handcuffed and forced to hear a loop of “Babylon” so loud that he feared his head would burst. Twenty years later, that Gray never really felt as famous or infamous as Eminem or Britney Spears only enhances White Ladder’s aura as an isolated incident that defies explanation: a modest collection of songs about lost love, drinking, and drinking over lost love, by an Everyman who was soon Everywhere.
Adding 1998’s state-of-the-art electronic beats to his sturdy, occasionally sappy folk-pop gave White Ladder an air of novelty, even if it was hardly anomalous during a time when the coffee house and the club converged into a veritable subgenre: Think, for instance, of Everything But the Girl’s Walking Wounded, or Beth Orton collaborating with William Orbit. Though “Sail Away” featured production from Marius de Vries, a collaborator of Bjork and Madonna, White Ladder wasn’t intended as a reinvention. The newly aerodynamic production contrasted with Gray’s endearingly po-faced image, emphasizing what he already was: a self-described sincere guy with a guitar, and also a man slightly out of time, someone watching from the periphery as others less burdened by regret lived, laughed, and danced without care. Paul Hartnoll of Orbital weaponized the four-on-the-floor thump that brings “Please Forgive Me” to a climax into an unlikely Ibiza smash, while the single “Babylon” was given an industrial remake. But on White Ladder, these underlying elements of dance music sounded like they were being experienced from a safe and sad distance, a drum’n’bass track muffled by a midnight cab’s dull engine roar. The synthetic percussion of White Ladder betrays its origins as a home-recorded folktronica album—the hollowed-out trip-hop drums of “Nightblindness” bear the requisite influence of Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls,” while the lightly carbonated shuffle of “Silver Lining” makes Gray sound like he’s suspended in a glass of OK Cola for six minutes.
“Please Forgive Me” was also included in the pilot of Scrubs, more indicative than its club cameos of the album’s future in meet-cute media. Half of its 10 songs were released as singles, so White Ladder clearly worked as a collection of episodes that could be experienced discretely and repeatedly. There’s no linguistic subtext to any song on White Ladder: Recall that Gray’s sincerity and plainspokenness are his main selling points, but the lack of specificity leaves space for emotional interpretation. “This Year’s Love” likely did soundtrack countless wedding dances and many drank alone to it. The pleas of “Sail Away” are either bravely passionate or absolutely desperate; “We’re Not Right” can either be a blithe acceptance of alcoholism’s grim fate or an agent for change. “Babylon” tells a story with a clear conflict and resolution that still leaves room for projection—to tell someone you love them or that you loved them or even that you wish you had told them these things. “If you want it, come and get it for crying out loud,” and whatever it was, you could get it: “Babylon” was a festival anthem disguised as a counterbalance to the monsters of Glastonbury.
The frontloading of its biggest, most unabashedly optimistic hits lends White Ladder a narrative thread: As I always imagined it, here was a skeptical romantic hitting the bars with a precarious hope of finding connection; slowly sulking into the corner while his friends laughed and flirted; bitterly going home to commiserate with his favorite records. It all ends with an unfathomably sad, nine-minute cover of Soft Cell’s “Say Hello, Wave Goodbye” that interpolates Van Morrison’s “Madame George” and “Into the Mystic.”
White Ladder might not exist without Dave Matthews; Gray promoted the album while opening for Matthews, a close friend and a notable influence on White Ladder’s more grating vocal tics—on the title track, when Gray wheezes, “There’s no rhyme or reeeeeason,” a John Popper harmonica solo wouldn’t be entirely unexpected. Eventually, Gray made the relationship officially symbiotic when White Ladder became the inaugural release on Matthew’s ATO Records, the eventual launchpad for similarly rootsy sensations like My Morning Jacket and Alabama Shakes.
A curious thing happened: Gray’s album, clearly adult-contemporary in both sound and subject matter, became a hit with people a decade younger than the 30-something singer-songwriter. “Gap-year students mouthed the lyrics to ‘Sail Away’ as they backpacked around Nepal. Young professionals listened to ‘Babylon’ as they assembled Ikea furniture in their riverside development flats,” The Guardian observed; in the same article, Gray groused at the way White Ladder’s commercial success had led him to be “dismissed as slight.”
To counter that dismissal, the subsequent compilations The EPs 1992-1994 and Lost Songs 95-98 wisely capitalized on Gray’s sudden fame while reminding new fans of his humble origins. The right-sizing of his public persona was made explicit by 2002’s muted and morose A New Day at Midnight, which began with a song called “Dead in the Water.” A New Day at Midnight still sold well, if not quite at White Ladder levels: 4x platinum in the UK instead of 10x, and in America, gold instead of platinum; likewise, the chart success of 2005’s Life in Slow Motion could only be considered disappointing by the standards of White Ladder. Life in Slow Motion was Gray’s last major-label album before Draw the Line brought him full circle four years later, without a label and recording in his own studio (albeit an upgrade from his apartment to a studio once owned by the Eurythmics).
While White Ladder was virtually inescapable in public spaces during the early 2000s, its influence has dissipated in the time since, though it is audible in the crystalline, cosmic folk of Amen Dunes’ 2018 album Freedom. Gray himself suggested that he had paved the way for folk-pop idols like Ed Sheeran and James Blunt. “When I started out, a man with a guitar baring his soul wasn't in vogue at all. Suddenly, it's everywhere!” Gray exclaimed in 2011, despite soul-bearing guitar men being the primary vessel for acclaimed rock music for the past 50 years.
Yet he’s not totally wrong. Man or woman, guitar or no guitar, the world will always be full of people who believe that they’re the only ones truly baring their soul, doing so in a way that brings them constant misunderstanding and disappointment at their jobs and relationships, an exception in a world where dishonesty and artifice are the rule and guys like David Gray get dropped from their label. And then an album like White Ladder comes along to sell millions of copies and offer the hope that living the exact same way can be the best revenge.

Buy: Rough Trade
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Much-missed underground hip-hop producer returns with an offbeat old-school mix taken from the archives of Traffic Entertainment Group.

Echo Party

For a dude who's been pegged as an old-school throwback, Edan's had this odd habit of turning hip-hop chronology into some kind of broken kaleidoscope. Just listen to the congealing synthesizers on "'83 Wildin" or the absinthe jazz piano of "Ultra '88 (Tribute)" from 2002's Primitive Plus and try to figure out just how they might've played in their real-world titular years-- not to mention 2005's Beauty and the Beat, which took its Bomb Squad-in-Beatles-wigs premise to a bewildering, psychedelic extreme. The fact that Edan's only rarely managed to create anything as memorable since then-- indeed, much of anything at all-- has remained one of underground rap's more nagging absences. And his first major undertaking in four years turning out to be a 29-minute mix might feel like more of a stopgap than the long-anticipated follow-up that fans have almost given up waiting for.
Except that Echo Party is, as stopgaps go, completely deranged. Traffic Entertainment Group got the idea to set a mostly idle Edan loose on their old-school hip-hop archives for the purposes of creating a mix, and some two years' worth of mysterious alchemy later, the end result is, for good and bad, one of the weirder attempts to revamp the concept of an early-80s hip-hop tribute. It starts out conventionally enough-- a recognizable post-disco clap-break with some familiar vintage rockin'-it-shockin'-it lyricism, albeit sourced from a 12" with more crackle than a burning sheet of bubble wrap. Then a creaky sounding piece of vintage electronics comes squeaking in like some kind of robotic slide whistle, the introductory break gets backspun into a sort of hissing slurp-beat, and things just go more haywire from there.
Not to say that Echo Party isn't well-constructed. The mix does a surprisingly good job of maintaining a tight, steady momentum for most of its length, and there's more than its fair share of percussive breakdowns-- sourced from hip-hop, funk, disco, and go-go rhythms-- that prove Edan's ear is just as finely tuned to a great straight-up beat-drop as it is to the psychotropic inner-space quirks that've been his calling card. And it's not purely obscurantist thanks to appearances by the fondly remembered Mr. Magic and Spyder-D. But it does seem to draw from some of the odder corners of the epoch: "Rapper's Delight" basslines gone filthy, session-band noodling, raps about ditching this doomed planet for a life in outer space. And there are almost no moments where an MC's line is left unmolested-- lines get flipped and reversed, chopped up into haywire-synapse stammers, and tossed down into dubbed-out concrete bunkers so their voices can justify the mix's name.
And the further Echo Party goes along, the deeper it descends into full-blown chaos, since Edan doesn't just stop at manipulating the sounds that already existed on the wax he had to work with. Aside from pulling a few odd tweaks with tape manipulation and reverb, Edan layers over his own instrumentation-- self-aware sloppy guitars, wobbly drum machines, banks of diseased-sounding synthesizers-- and pours it on to the point where most of the mix's last half diverts from the old-school mix premise and turns into a disorienting, almost grotesque flare-up of distorted fuzz and horror. And yet it still keeps that b-boy pulse going steady-- somehow, against all laws of nature and physics, though you might have to strain to focus on it. You could put together some pretty fucking alarming uprock routines to this. (An aside: the melody to b-boy national anthem "Apache" does appear-- but, along with a brief interpolation of the Rolling Stones' "Miss You"-- it comes via kazoo.)
Twenty-nine minutes does feel a bit short for a full-length-priced CD-- and ferchrissakes, get the CD, because the liner booklet that comes with it is a ridiculously elaborate typewritten transcript of every single thing that happens in the mix and it looks like some kind of rogue producer's shack-concocted manifesto. And this still isn't quite the official third full-length that people have been waiting for; Edan doesn't actually pick up the mic to rap on this thing (though he robotulates his voice near the end to thank you for listening). But if you've ever wanted to hear classic cuts from the dawn of hip hop turned into hallucinogenic setpieces that knock and clang like glitched-up King Tubby, Echo Party should justify whatever the hell it is Edan's been doing with his time over the past four years.


The fourth album from Vancouver hard rock band Black Mountain rolls everything up the band has ever done—the heavy riffs, the prog ambitions, and the pop smarts—into an alternate-universe version of classic-rock history.

IV

For most rock bands, naming an album IV may imply a lack of imagination, but coming from such studious classic-rock scholars as Black Mountain, it's a gesture loaded with significance. As history has shown, hard-rock bands tend to view their discographies like batting orders, and—whether officially or otherwise— a numerically branded "IV" has come to represent the clean-up hitter stepping up to the plate with the bases loaded. It's the moment where bands capitalize on established strengths and set out for parts unknown. And Black Mountain's IV plays the fourth-album role to a tee, rolling up the weed-scented riffage of their 2005 self-titled debut, the prog-sized ambitions of In the Future, and the pop-focussed finesse of Wilderness Heart, all while embracing electronics with a zeal that suggests the band's relationship with modern music has become somewhat less tortured.
But despite its highly evocative title, IV doesn't so much relive classic-rock history as suggest a different course for it. By the late 1970s, many dinosaur rock acts had either gone disco or at least slickened up their sound to compete with it. And through that process, the synthesizer would come to represent a musical cancer to purists, the agent through which the majesty of rock got diluted into nancy-boy new wave and poofed-up hair-metal power ballads. IV, however, reminds us that technologically curious early adopters like Rush, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd were among the original synth-pop bands, using push-button machinery to expand and enhance their fantastical vision rather than cloud it. IV, accordingly, is the sound of a Black Mountain that holds 2112 and "Subdivisions" in equally high regard, that gets as much mileage out of In Through the Out Door as "Black Dog," and that has upgraded its joint-assembly surface of choice from Meddle to The Wall. It presents an alternate '80s where the progressive, guitar-powered rock that dominated the preceding decade successfully adapted to pop's synth-centric shift, instead of becoming an instant anachronism.
But even if Jeremy Schmidt's keyboard rig gets as much of a workout here as Stephen McBean's effects-pedal board, by this point, Black Mountain possess a peculiar personality that transcends their throwback stoner-rock rep. That's in large part due to the singular beauty-and-the-beard dynamic between vocalists Amber Webber and McBean, whose unnervingly calm yet often dread-ridden vocals make them sound like that strange, water bottle-hoarding couple down the road whose end-times prophecies just might be coming true. Secure in that foundation, Black Mountain can confidently send their referentialism into overdrive, pilfering their record collections for musical, lyrical and spiritual inspiration but giving it their own subversive spin.
Sometimes, the nods don't go beyond the titles. "Florian Saucer Attack" manages to pack in shout-outs to two avant icons in its three-word name, though the song itself is an exhilarating, asphalt-ripping robo-rocker that sounds like Webber doing donuts from behind the wheel of the Knight Rider's KITT. "(Over & Over) The Chain," meanwhile, has nothing to do with the name-checked MC5 or Fleetwood Mac classics—rather, its protracted, synth symphony intro lures you into some late-night occult ceremony, with McBean's squealing guitar solo unsubtly evoking the tortured cries of a human-sacrifice candidate being burned alive.
Other quotes are more subtle and sly: the splendorous electro-psych sea shanty "You Can Dream" takes its chorus refrain from Bruce Springsteen's favourite Suicide song; the acoustic-powered goth-pop of "Cemetery Breeding" wraps its meditations on dying friends in an appropriately spooked synth riff straight out of David Bowie's "Ashes to Ashes." But, occasionally, Black Mountain can't resist unabashed homage: from its droning, fever-dream ambience to its slack acoustic strums to its drowsy drum fills, "Crucify Me" is the proud, pouch-baby spawn of Big Star's "Kangaroo." (That said, McBean and Webber's gorgeous, honey-dipped harmonies imagine what could've been had Alex Chilton tightened up the song just enough to get it onto late-'70s soft-rock radio.)
When they first emerged 12 years ago, Black Mountain appeared to be the long-haired, tattooed antidote to fellow Vancouverites the New Pornographers—a supergroup ensemble corralled by a local scene veteran that stripped hard rock of macho cliché just as the New Pornographers gave skinny-tied power pop some extra width. Black Mountain are still referring to that original playbook: like early signature track "Don't Run Our Hearts Around," IV's opener "Mothers of the Sun" is a withering protest anthem sandwiched by a tectonic plate-shifting riff that leaves a greater impression than the verses and choruses. But this time out, Black Mountain redirect their bulldozing boogie into a funky, soul-clapped breakdown and laser show-worthy synth solo, showing how they've progressed beyond simple rock-and-awe tactics. And nowhere is that sense of patience more pronounced than in IV's nine-minute closer, "Space to Bakersfield," an airy, eerie sci-fi lullaby that finds McBean and Webber ominously repeating the song's two-line lyric like adrift astronauts whose oxygen supply is about to run out. Where they once aspired to be your blood-pumping druganaut, Black Mountain now excel at the art of making you uncomfortably numb.


Trumpeter jaimie branch and drummer Jason Nazary team up with producer Jeff Parker on an album of electronic jazz fusion and aqueous psychedelia.

Pink Dolphins

It’s easy to say that jaimie branch is one of the most exciting trumpeters to bubble up in recent years—much easier than saying just what kind of trumpeter she is. The Brooklyn resident honed her punk intensity and classical training in a Chicago scene where the borders between rock, free jazz, and electronic music are porous, and it shows. Yet her distinctive instrumental voice and spirit of refined anarchy make her work cohesive. She turns tense, dashing themes that wouldn’t seem amiss on an Arcade Fire song into exploded-view drawings of extended technique and free expression, her tone bleeding rainbows at the edges but almost translucently pure in the center.
Though branch has worked with a number of indie bands, including TV on the Radio and Bell Orchestre, she’s best known as the bandleader of Fly or Die, with bassist Jason Ajemian, cellist Tomeka Reid, and drummer Chad Taylor—all of them heavy players in the heady Chicago of Tortoise, Rob Mazurek, Ken Vandermark, Thrill Jockey, and International Anthem. While the quartet’s two acclaimed albums are unruly and roving, full of Dutch angles and long shadows, they are clearly acoustic jazz. Pink Dolphins, by branch and Jason Nazary, is something else, in every sense.
The album’s title comes from the pink river dolphins of the Amazon, partly in tribute to branch’s Colombian heritage but also simply for what she calls their “aquadelic” vibe. (The cover image, which branch painted, resembles a lost Basquiat design for a 1980s Trapper Keeper.) The phrase captures the music much more succinctly than my best attempt, which involved Miles Davis and Anna Meredith making a dance record after microdosing together at SeaWorld. Anteloper is a great name and all, but LSD Soundsystem was right there.
The record comes with the imprimatur of Tortoise, the band that reformatted the free energy of Chicago improv for a general audience. Drummer John Herndon added digital finishing to branch’s painted cover, while guitarist Jeff Parker served as the Teo Macero to branch’s ’70s Miles—an avowed influence, along with the giants of tropicália and funk experimenters like Sun Ra, J Dilla, and the fusion torchbearers Harriet Tubman. Like Macero, Parker stretched the definition of a producer, milling down hours of improvised sessions, soliciting new bits, and adding his own guitars and keyboards until an album emerged. Nazary’s trap kit is mixed with pads that trigger electronic effects and sounds, reinforcing a feeling of vibrational connection. The lengthening tracks are deepening waters, which branch’s solos cut across like proud sails.
With “Inia,” the album opens in an aquadelic mode, gathering something between feedback and whale song into a krautrock theme before branch’s trumpet bursts in with signature bravado. On “Delfin Rosado,” a concise showcase of her intrepid style, she works her way over a mutable landscape of mbira funk and leftfield disco to an emphatic climax of layered, stabbing peals. Her knack for trussing riffs and trills into thrilling off-center patterns is also the high point of “Earthlings,” a trip-hop blues with creepshow synths, sawtooth bass, and branch’s low-slung singing, a mix that sounds like Portishead channeling Ella Fitzgerald.
Nazary, an Autechre fan, pays tribute with the relatively dry and jittery setting of “Baby Bota Halloceanation”; in branch’s periodic improvisation, pauses are held like breaths and you never know if the next run will be a curl of smoke or a slashing beam of 16th notes. It’s an austere prelude for the superabundant closer, “One Living Genus,” which has a little of everything: soft sprays of ambient pads, sunstruck walls of psychedelic color, fragrant breezes of harmony, glitch-hop flute, a twinkle of guitar—is that a didgeridoo? The effect is pristine yet distorted, a sunny postcard horizon twisted like a filter’s cutoff knob. If there were any complaint, it would be that it ends perfectly after nine minutes and goes on for six more. But grant them the decompression after their deep dive turned up such sparkling treasure.


As Tall Friend, the singer-songwriter Charlie Pfaff makes bare-bones indie rock that processes trauma and recovery. Their modest debut cloaks its hurt in warmth.

Safely Nobody’s

Near the end of Tall Friend’s modest, 16-minute debut album Safely Nobody’s, there’s an exchange that could have been pulled from a much more grandiose work. Singer-songwriter Charlie Pfaff receives a call from the hospital from their mom, who wishes them a happy birthday and says “now you’re all grown up.” It’s the kind of well-meaning platitude that parents share with their kids without thinking much about, but the words land with unintended weight. “But mom,” Pfaff sings, in the small, naked voice of so many K Records artists, “I have been grown since I was small.”
In a big screen adaptation of Pfaff’s life, this would be a moment meant for the Oscar highlight reel, a tearful confrontation that ends with the child spelling out the failings of their parent. Pfaff doesn’t have any interest in big moments, though. Instead they let that exchange speak for itself, leaving the listener to fill in the specifics of their lost childhood. Safely Nobody’s is filled with memories like this, the faintest outline of anecdotes that say everything Pfaff wants them to in a minimum of words, set to bare-bones indie rock that’s just as selective as Pfaff’s prose.
On a record Pfaff has described as “a documentation of me packing up and unboxing many, many years of hurt,” Pfaff’s mother looms the largest. It’s her voice that opens the album, by way of an alarming voicemail that gives some insight into her mental state. She’s called to tell Charlie everything will be OK, a reassuring message that’s undermined by its weepy delivery. “I love you so much,” she sniffles, her voice breaking before she hangs up. It’s only a few seconds long, but it speaks volumes—one can only imagine what life must be like with a voicemail box full of these messages. Pfaff’s dad figures into the album, too, but mostly by way of absence or disinterest. When Pfaff hears one of his free jazz records on “Apoptosis,” it is the sound of rejection (“you loved its chaos, but mine’s just tiring.”)
Pfaff’s themes of trauma and recovery overlap heavily with some of the best emo records of the last few years, and like many emo acts, Tall Friend shares a drive to turn their pain into something constructive—or at least to offer a little consolation to anybody who may be in the same boat. Tall Friend doesn’t share emo’s tendencies toward drama and discord, though. As if to create a sense of security, Safely Nobody’s draws from a more welcoming palette of indie rock. A bit of Chan Marshall’s ache creeps into Pfaff’s voice on the Moon Pix-esque “Natural Things,” while the kinked guitars of “Radio” and “Apoptosis” look to Modest Mouse’s sinewy early records, without ever boiling over the way those albums did. The music is itself comforting, calibrated to offset the sting of Pfaff’s lyrics. Even as it opens old wounds, the closer “Small Space” breezes by with the sunny whimsy of a Pavement B-side.
Like Sufjan Stevens’ Carrie & Lowell, a similarly mournful account of a parent unable to live up to their own expectations, Safely Nobody’s doesn’t cast villains. It cloaks its hurt in warmth and gentle humor, never demonstrating any overt resentment. The album’s arc isn’t toward blame or forgiveness, but rather self-sufficiency. In the final moments of “Small Space,” Pfaff likens themself to a plant surviving whatever conditions the world throws at it, able to “take the harsh light and turn it into energy.” It’s far from a happy ending, but on a record about being failed by the people closest to you, figuring out how to subsist on your own is a victory.


It was ahead of its time back in 1982, but now Laurie Anderson's debut (and especially its centerpiece "O Superman") sounds just right for a world gone totally wrong.

Big Science

"In September 2001, I was on tour and played 'O Superman' at Town Hall in New York City," writes Laurie Anderson in the liner notes to her newly reissued Big Science. "The show was one week after 9/11, and as I sang, 'Here come the planes/ They're American planes,' I suddenly realized I was singing about the present."
"Suddenly?" Methinks Anderson is being a touch disingenuous. On the night of September 11, 2001, Anderson was performing at the Park West in Chicago. The air was heavy with dread, confusion, and anger. Waiting for the show to begin, the crowd was talking amongst itself, conversations running the gamut between those three poles. Anderson herself had allegedly spent much of the morning on the phone with her partner Lou Reed, who was back in New York-- and supposedly sitting on the roof of their building watching the Twin Towers burn-- though she made nary a mention of the day's events once she started performing.
The crowd was dead silent throughout, but when Anderson began "O Superman" you could hear the room shift as the already menacing song took on new layers of eerily contemporary meaning. "Hello? Is anybody home? Well, you don't know me, but I know you. And I've got a message to give to you. Here come the planes. So you better get ready." The lyrics chimed out like an answering machine message sent to the future, picked up several decades too late.
That song's mix of politics, Zen-like aphorism, and sentimentalism hit like a punch to the gut as the nation stood on the precipice of the unknown, and the toll the collapse of the Twin Towers would truly take on this country-- and the world-- hadn't quite settled in. So: "suddenly?" No, surely Anderson recognized the renewed power of her (sole) unlikely hit well before she made it home to New York City. Then again, the almost mystically timeless song was in a way always about the shifting "present." Anderson writes that "O Superman (For Massenet)" was inspired by a composition from Jules Massenet's opera Le Cid, "O Souverain", which in turn reminded Anderson of Napoleon's fall at Waterloo. She had also taken into account the bungled U.S. rescue mission in Tehran. It's a song of military arrogance, failure and the price we all pay, recorded for a modest $500 with an NEA grant. In 1981, it went to No. 2 in the UK.
Big Science comprises songs from Anderson's also quite prescient United States project, a multimedia performance art piece cum opera ("It seemed like everyone I knew was working on an opera," she recalls) that depicted America on the brink of digital revolution and capitalist nirvana, where the dollar trumped tradition and the apocalypse-- cultural, political, technological-- loomed large. In fact, given its themes and presentation, much of Big Science sounds every bit about "the present" as "O Superman" does, and its idiosyncratic execution (with stylistic nods to the minimalists and pal William S. Burroughs) has helped the disc weather the passage of time remarkably well. It's less a document of the early 1980s than it is a dark glimpse of the future recorded at the dawn of the Reagan era.
Anderson's ingenious move, musically, was utilizing the vocoder not as a trick but as a melodic tool. It's the first thing you hear on Big Science, looped in "From the Air" like some bizarre man-machine synth. The rest of the track revolves around a circular pattern of blurted sax figures and hypnotic drums. There's virtually nothing about it that screams its age as Anderson intones a wry announcement from a (caveman) pilot of a plummeting flight. "There is no pilot," she speaks. "You are not alone. Standby. This is the time. And this is the record of the time." It's a metaphor for every frightening thing about 20th (and now 21st century) living you can think of, and in its spare way it's enough to scare you silly.
The gloomy ghost town future-music of the title track sounds like the rueful ruminations of someone who sees the end of the world on the horizon and can't help but to chuckle a little at their impending doom. The austere soundscapes of "Walking & Falling" and "Born, Never Asked" convey a similar chilliness laced with a despair at once aloof and oddly wistful. "Example #22" is like a Can/Yoko/Eno chop-shop, its funky wordless denouement part chant, part celebration of the absurd.
In fact, one of the elements that makes Big Science so special is Anderson's sense of humor. In "Let X=X", Anderson offers, with a wink, "I can see the future, and it's a place-- about 70 miles east of here." It's a perverse punchline to some cosmic joke, and the human element back and forth of "It Tango" does little to dissipate the feeling that on Big Science it's the machines that are getting the last laugh at the expense of their masters. The future was yesterday. The future is now. Welcome to the future.


Channeling slasher flicks and Dante’s Inferno, the Austin band’s second album of 2021 is a roiling cauldron of scorched-earth sludge and hardcore that doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Christfucker

Previous Portrayal of Guilt album titles contained words like “pain,” “suffering,” and “alone.” Not this one, which slaps together the poles of holy and profane into something a rebellious middle schooler might carve into a desk. Christfucker doesn’t wholly abandon the band’s preferred subject matter, but as its title suggests, the agony depicted within is more campy than bleak. The music, uglier and more reliant on brute force than the rest of Portrayal of Guilt’s discography, follows suit. The result is oddly refreshing: an artsy, accomplished band turning their second album of the year into a pulpy slasher flick.
January’s thrilling We Are Always Alone had its fair share of blood, flames, and death, but its comparatively existential concerns—“I am trampled by thoughts, weighed down by memories,” “I think about my life and begin to cry”—are like Thoreau to Christfucker’s Dante. After a brief, noisy intro, the band careens into “The Sixth Circle,” a song every bit as hellish as its Divine Comedy namesake: “Pale bodies line the floor on the night of this ritual/Lured by lust, poisoned by fear/Tortured and beaten.” Ensuing songs tell of tongues caressing wounds, “euphoric pain” inflicted by devils, and sick fantasies of unending suffering. Christfucker wasn’t billed as a concept album about corrupting the messiah through sadomasochism, but it could be.
Meeting vocalist and guitarist Matt King’s lyrics at their repulsive subterranean level are the band’s most earth-scorching compositions to date. It’s always been tricky to define Portrayal of Guilt in terms of genre: Are they screamo? Post-hardcore with sludge and grindcore leanings? They further muddy the waters here, splashing noise, industrial, and black metal into their roiling cauldron of influences. But perhaps more indicative of Christfucker’s character are the elements the band have drained out: The space or gentleness that balanced out past highlights such as “Daymare” and “It’s Already Over” are gone, as are all traces of screamo’s traditionally epic guitar leads. The spindly guitar tone that opens “The Sixth Circle” and “Dirge” and pops up in a few other mid-song transitions could be described as “clean,” but take one listen to that twangy skronk and tell me it isn’t the most ominous sound on the album.
While Christfucker may not be delicate or even very intricate, it’s clearly still the work of a band capable of operating in those modes. Drummer James Beveridge remains one of the most fluid players in heavy music, his finesse apparent when he manages to outfit even the most knuckle-dragging beatdowns with flurries of ghost notes. The more orthodox grooves and song structures give bassist Alex Stanfield a chance to slam the strings like he’s in a D-beat band, and while King isn’t granting us his customary full palette of guitar tones, his riffs are the only thing keeping Christfucker in the realm of melodic music. Contributing to the album’s jagged edges is producer Ben Greenberg (of current tourmates Uniform). He and noise expert Mack Chami fully flex their chops on the intro and the booming “Bed of Ash,” and an undercurrent of their harsh static courses throughout. In an era when so much music sets out to address “these troubled times,” which feel hellish enough, Christfucker envisions a more cartoonish garden of sin and punishment, one deserving of ridiculously fun breakdowns and a “horny” tag on Bandcamp rather than solemn, joyless observations of societal decay.

Buy: Rough Trade
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The Savannah, Ga. metal band Kylesa have been experimenting with their sound for almost 15 years, sometimes to bland results. But their new, self-produced seventh album, Exhausting Fire, is unique to their catalogue: There are moments on it that could possibly close a John Hughes movie.

Exhausting Fire

Kylesa have been experimenting with and expanding their sound for almost 15 years. They've kept moving, which is admirable, but when the Savannah, Ga., band started out, they were already unique: a crusty sludge-punk juggernaut that mixed shout-along male-female vocals into anthems that got your adrenaline going even if you weren't paying attention to what they were saying. As time went on, they added a second drummer, and replaced some of the sludge with pop. They mentioned Built to Spill as an influence, as well as early '90s alt rock and riot grrrl. Vocalist/guitarist Phillip Cope included Beach House and Sleepy Sun on a year-end list. The thing is, as much as they tweaked the metal formula, and copped to quieter listening habits, they still basically sounded the same: even on 2013’s chillier, darker, atmospherically expansive Ultraviolet, Kylesa barreled along like Kylesa, but in a slightly less interesting way.
Which is what makes their new, self-produced seventh album, Exhausting Fire, unique to the trio’s catalogue: On these 10 songs, Cope, guitarist/vocalist Laura Pleasants, and drummer Carl McGinley often sound like a different band entirely. The Cope-fronted “Moving Day” is a mid-tempo death rock song that fits nicely between Killing Joke and Christian Death on a mix tape, and stands out as one of my favorite individual songs of the year. Previously, when Kylesa weren't speeding along, they'd stall. When they got too ambitious, you'd wish they'd get back to packing basements. It's not that anything was offensive or embarrassing—it was just bland.
Here, they’ve sharpened their songwriting on tracks that don’t immediately sound like Kylesa, so you get a nice mix of the familiar fist-pumpers along with curious diversions that work. "Lost and Confused" goes from spaced-out mellow to fist-pumping shout-along, then elegantly keeps the pedal pressed to the floor until an atmospheric coda. It's a geat song, one that's inspired a lot of air drumming at my desk this week. Or the amped-up, smeary "Inward Debate", which shows them subtly working deeper psychedelia into the double-drumming. On the longest track, "Shaping the Southern Sky", the band drifts from rock 'n' roll boogie into a cavernous desert of Meat Puppets tumble weeds that builds, over 2 minutes, to a massive rock punch that's worth the wait. Importantly, on the previously mentioned “Moving Day”, you hear Kylesa crafting a legitimate hook, one that could close a John Hughes movie.
There's a lot that echoes the Pixies here, perhaps because on Exhausting, there’s more of a mix between the vocalists: Pleasants handled most of the singing on Ultraviolet, or at least Cope took a backseat, shouting choruses now and then. She has more range than Cope in a traditional sense, but her voice isn’t that compelling alone—you ultimately need his chanted intonations against her spacier tones to keep things interesting. When they both shout, it's golden; they do that a lot here. And, often when you think a song's boring (see: "Growing Roots"), the other singer joins in and saves the day.
Some can't be saved, which happens when you keep expanding. The first movement of opener "Crusher" feels like a hangover from Ultraviolet, and the nighttime psychedelia of “Falling” limps along for 4 minutes. More often than not, though, the center holds, and it makes Ultraviolet look like a scratchpad for what they ended up doing here: radically shaking up their formula—from the inside out—and coming back with compelling results.


Featuring members of Hammers of Misfortune, YOB, and Agalloch, VHÖL are the ideal modern metal band, fusing battle-tested stylistic forms with impressive arrangements and a progressive fire that traditionalists and revivalists can't match. On their second album, the cerebral and the primal stomp heads next to one another.

Deeper Than Sky

VHÖL are the ideal modern metal band—they fuse battle-tested forms of metal with impressive arrangements and a progressive fire that traditionalists and revivalists can't match. Their personel is bulletproof—John Cobbett and Sigrid Sheie hail from San Francisco's prog-power masters Hammers of Misfortune, Mike Scheidt is the vocalist and guitar player behind YOB, and Aesop Dekker is the black metal punker from Ludicra (where Cobbett also played) and Agalloch. All four involved have a rare, vital chemistry, and Deeper Than Sky keeps that fire alive while finding more ways to bend traditional metal formulas. This is the bar metal bands have less than two months to clear if they want to unseat them this year.
One of the strongest tracks on their underrated self-titled debut was "Arising", which added a healthy dose of thrash, Thin Lizzy, and Rob Halford to VHÖL's alien version of black metal. Sky continues in this direction, with Cobbett focusing on the thrashier end of his playing. On opener "The Desolate Damned", he bends a conventional galloping rhythm just enough to render it strange. "3 AM" begins with 30 seconds of straightforward thrash, before VHÖL add choral screams and off-kilter soloing: In VHÖL's world, nothing can ever be simple.
Scheidt is primarily known as a guitarist due to the popularity of YOB, but he continues to stick mostly to vocals here, and it suits the project. He sounds more liberated in VHÖL—there's life to his "OOGHS!," his homages to Tom G. Warrior's signature grunts, and his death-thrash growls. The contrast between his rhythm and lead tones on the title track makes for a trippy thrash experience; VHÖL know how to disorient without obvious weed/space/psych/drugs signifiers. "Red Chaos" draws upon underrated Dallas thrashers Rigor Mortis, in particular their late guitarist Mike Scaccia, who also played in Ministry. Scaccia had an unrelenting rhythm hand that didn't sacrifice detail; Cobbett takes that same approach, creating soloing that isn't layered on so much as it protrudes through the rhythm.
Sky's real gem, though, is "Paino", a d-beat piano instrumental. The idea seems gimmicky in the hands of lesser players, but Sheie and Dekker lock in with each other. Like in his other bands, Dekker provides just enough muscle to elevate Sheie while still making her the center of the song. There are big-bottomed rhythms and soloing that climaxes like the volcano George Lynch posed on for Dokken's "Just Got Lucky" video. Only metal could make this high-minded absurdity work; it's the intersection of straight-faced practice and boundless joy, and it's as much of a metal song as anything run through miles of Marshalls. Leave it to VHÖL to find another dimension to the ever-bountiful combination of hardcore and metal, where the cerebral and the primal stomp heads next to one another.


With a tendency to drift, the Scottish songwriter’s first solo record in almost a decade is a quiet, graceful collection of autumnal folk music.

Heart-Shaped Scars

Dot Allison has led a peripatetic musical life over the last four decades, working with everyone from Nicola Roberts, of pop sensationalists Girls Aloud, to My Bloody Valentine’s Kevin Shields. This adaptability and willingness to experiment is the mark of a fascinatingly wayward artist whose next turn is rarely what you’d expect. But her classic remains 1993’s Morning Dove White, the lone record by her trio One Dove, a collection of glowing chill-out soul made in collaboration with the late Andrew Weatherall.
Allison mentions Weatherall, who died in 2020, as being “the biggest influence, in a mentor type way” on Heart-Shaped Scars, her first solo record in almost a decade. And if this music sounds a world away from the electronic pop of Morning Dove White, eschewing drum machines and dub bass lines in favor of acoustic guitars and the gentle sounds of nature—a sonic mixture similar to Allison’s 2007 album Exaltation of Larks— it does share Weatherall’s modus operandi of working with sympathetic collaborators to bring out the best in yourself, as well as the DJ’s occasional tendency to ramble. Allison made the album with Fiona Cruickshank, a producer who has worked as “string engineer” for Coldplay and Paul Weller, and Hannah Peel, a composer whose album Fir Wave was nominated for the Mercury Prize. Singer-songwriters Amy Bowman and Zoë Bestel also contributed, while nature itself lent a helping hand on the field recordings of birds and rivers that decorate Heart-Shaped Scars like arcadian gems.
Some of the best moments come when a graceful arrangement creeps its way around Allison’s vocals. Toward the end of “Constellations,” for example, a solitary cello spins around Allison’s voice like sparks off a Catherine Wheel. This is not to underplay Allison’s own role: her whispery voice, more Isobel than Glen Campbell, is like the faded print on a vintage magazine, with an otherworldly edge of authority. On “Long Exposure,” the opening track, she sounds right at the end of her tether, steeping the word “wrecking ball” with a velvety power. This song is Heart-Shaped Scars at its best: a gorgeously autumnal, leaf-thin slice of folk music that sits somewhere between the disquieting rural vibrations of Paul Giovanni’s soundtrack for The Wicker Man and Joni Mitchell’s Laurel Canyon gold.
There are a handful of other excellent songs, notably “Cue The Tears,” which evokes the wistful ecstasy of bucolic freedom, the long escape to the country after Morning Dove White’s big night out. Instead of being carried away by the songs themselves,  however, the smaller moments leave the greatest impressions: the fantastically ornate string arrangement on “Forever’s Not Much Time” or the descending vocal melody on “Constellations,” which drops away like a leaf falling to the ground. This ephemeral appeal may have something to do with the album’s lightweight texture. Heart-Shaped Scars has a tendency to drift. Many of these songs could lose a couple minutes in the edit without a great deal of discomfort. The six-plus minutes of “The Haunted” might be great for lying under a tree when you can’t be bothered to change the music, but the song feels stretched for every-day listening. This kind of conundrum is typical of Heart-Shaped Scars’ almost-there appeal. It is an album of quiet delights, but at times it feels like the songs are simply stretched too thin: three-star meals served with five-star service.

Buy: Rough Trade
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After two more personnel changes-- including the addition of Karl Blau on bass-- Earth return with a fresh context and complex, counterintuitive choices.

Earth: Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1

Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1

In 1991, Earth reinvented heavy metal. Extra-Capsular Extraction, the debut EP by the Washington state duo, made riffs slow, oppressive, and, perhaps most important, solitary. Suddenly, that clever little device rock bands had used to hook kids for decades was more than an accessory; it was the main event, and it was mean. "Ouroboros Is Broken", the 18-minute monster on the B-side, spewed its riff through distortion, baring claws over the industrial thwack of a drum machine before slowing down and stretching out toward forever. It was loud, punishing, and new; drone metal, the genre, followed.
In 2005, Earth reinvented themselves. After a nine-year hiatus, Dylan Carlson returned with a bigger lineup and, this time, a surprising sound. The slow motion was still there, as were the winding, deliberate riffs. But on Hex; or Printing in the Infernal Method, Earth's monolithic blast had given way to furrowed blues, the volume reduced to a gentle, living-room purr. Two years later, Earth re-recorded "Ouroboros Is Broken" for Hibernaculum, a short album that smartly recast four tunes from the first iteration of Earth in Carlson's new, infinitely arid style. That eight-minute reworking was a revelation, suggesting that not only were Carlson's riffs wonders-- maximum volume, or minimum-- but so were his control and patience. Above a steady drum trot, he bent that old theme with careful diligence, sometimes repeating notes, sometimes omitting them, sometimes letting them radiate. The metalhead knew his jazz and his Jerry Garcia. Here, he wielded those influences perfectly.
The second iteration of Earth has now been recording and touring longer than the first, foundation-shifting phase of the band. You'd be excused, then, for assuming that it's time for Carlson to slip back into the shadows or to again push restart. Rather, on Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light 1, he returns for his fourth LP with drummer Adrienne Davies, whose tasteful, robust, and slow swing has provided essential ballast for Carlson's thinly etched guitar since 2005. Carlson and Davies do make two personnel changes, though, and they prove essential: The K Records polyglot Karl Blau replaces longtime Earth bassist Don McGreevy, while the swelling organ and horns of Steve Moore are swapped for the much more versatile cello of Lori Goldston.
These shifts don't turn Earth into a new band, but they do provide a fresh context for Carlson's guitar. On the brilliantly winding "Descent to the Zenith", for instance, Goldston plays against him ever so gently, pushing against his pull, emphasizing the way his lines keep chasing their own tails. Moore's organ used to make Carlson's ideas sound bigger; here, by contrast, Goldston makes them sound smarter. On the album-closing title track, the quartet makes torpid circles for 20 minutes, the guitar, bass, and cello revolving separately around a melody. It's as mesmerizing as an early Earth marathon, just that much more intricate.
"Father Midnight" is a tease in tension, with Carlson repeatedly sliding back and forth along a melody and Davies occasionally leaning into her snares and cymbals with added oomph. It suggests that Earth are about to break character, to roll suddenly like a rock band, to get loud. They, of course, never do. Goldston and Blau are essential to that feeling, as she runs knotty strands of dissonance through Carlson's staggered figures. What's more, Blau plays bass like a songwriter, meaning that he makes choices and takes chances a simple sideman might miss. On "Father Midnight", he's the tension-baiting free radical. Blau sometimes steps with Carlson, thickening his leads and keeping it simple; but he often steps out of that role with stray notes in spots that don't necessarily belong or truncated progressions that let the band slip past. For a unit recording together for the first time, this Earth makes complex, counterintuitive choices.
It might be tempting to dismiss Angels of Darkness as a showcase for one of the electric guitar's best craftsman. Carlson's finesse, after all, has never been better than on these five tracks. A master of tone with an ear for clarity and subtlety, he makes his rests as evocative as the notes themselves. And given the band's recent, steady gestalt, it's also tempting to dismiss Angels of Darkness as just another new album from the second Earth-- you know, the quiet band that's metal only by legacy and label. This isn't a radical reinvention as much as it's a refinement; the backing band and its leader have never been better. But when has Earth's music not been about hard-fought rewards and slow revelations? In the 90s, Earth's heavy metal offered an escape, a massive shelter of volume and drone. But the intricacies of this Earth-- Carlson's harmonics and harmonies, Davies' careful builds, Blau's unexpected bass maneuvers, Goldston's adventurous versatility-- demand attention and immersion. That is, check in, not out, and you'll rarely hear four players with as much quiet command.


Simian Mobile Disco team up with all-female singing collective Deep Throat Choir for an adventurous full-length that is their first album to prominently feature vocals in nearly a decade.

Murmurations

Over the last decade, Simian Mobile Disco have charted a singular career by relying almost solely on their own creative impulses. Despite rising to prominence amid the “bloghouse” fad of the mid-2000s, the duo of James Ford and Jas Shaw has remained largely unconcerned with passing trends in electronic music. Their fifth full-length, Murmurations, is a bit of a paradox: It’s easily the most adventurous album they’ve crafted to date. But it also takes the act full circle, connecting their bloghouse-era output with their more abstruse later career.
The album is Simian Mobile Disco’s first to prominently feature vocals since 2009’s Temporary Pleasure, which spotlighted singers like Beth Ditto and Yeasayer’s Chris Keating. But Ford and Shaw abandon their old guest-vocalist approach on Murmurations, collaborating instead with Deep Throat Choir, an all-female singing collective led by British musician Luisa Gerstein. You’ve likely heard Gerstein’s work without knowing it: “Cups,” her a cappella reimagining of the Carter Family's 1931 song “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?,” became a top-10 hit for Anna Kendrick after the actress performed it in Pitch Perfect. Along with Heloise Tunstall-Behrens, her bandmate in the psych-rock act Landshapes, Gerstein has songwriting credits on nearly half of the album.
The music on Murmurations isn't nearly as chart-friendly as “Cups,” and that’s for the best. Together, Simian Mobile Disco and Deep Throat Choir craft a hallucinatory sonic world: Vocal swells crest and crash against Ford and Shaw’s signature tick-tock techno. The combination is dreamlike—and sometimes even a bit nightmarish; this is certainly not “easy listening.” Like a virtual-reality headset, the 3D textures of Deep Throat Choir’s echo-laden exultations, layered atop Ford and Shaw’s rabbit-hole rhythms, might make listeners queasy at first. But once you surrender to the album’s off-kilter vibe, it's easy to lose yourself in it.
As is the case with so much art released in the past 18 months, it’s possible to read vague messages of resistance into the lyrics of Murmurations. On “Defender,” for instance, trippy sighs give way to a thrush of timpani rolls and glassy synths, as the Choir issue a chest-beating warning: “I see that you couldn’t care less/Don’t you know I’m a warrior.” But the album’s wordless moments prove just as engaging, from the electric frissons that course through ambient clouds on “Gliders” to the zero-gravity weightlessness of “Murmuration.”
Although they consistently put on a riveting live show, Ford and Shaw’s recordings haven’t always hit the mark in the past. Since Temporary Pleasure, they’ve composed in two modes—steely techno and studio-sound experimentation—adding new flourishes but rarely making those disparate aesthetics cohere. Their latest album marks a career high because it sees them and Deep Throat Choir successfully fusing the halves of Simian Mobile Disco’s sound into one powerful whole. On her stellar LPs Quarantine and Dust, Laurel Halo explored the many ways the human voice can be abstracted within electronic music, and a similar sense of playful inquiry suffuses even the most intense moments on Murmurations.
Earlier this year, Shaw was diagnosed with the rare disease AL amyloidosis. As of early May, his prognosis was still unclear, but the illness has already caused the duo to cancel a planned American tour. A recent interview revealed that their post-Murmurations future is up in the air. Since their bloghouse days, Ford and Shaw have been rewarding those who seek out their trend-agnostic music with sounds that are novel and enjoyable even when they don’t add up to something greater than the sum of their parts. But Murmurations represents a breakthrough. It’s thrilling to imagine where Simian Mobile Disco might go next; here’s hoping they get the chance.


A remarkable archival release captures rare vocal performances that the esteemed nun, composer, and pianist recorded in the late 1970s and early ’80s amid political turmoil in Ethiopia.

Souvenirs

Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru’s transcendent music is inextricably connected to resistance. The Addis Ababa-born nun, composer, and musician crafted her exquisite oeuvre as a way to give back to her community: The money she made from charity albums and concerts went to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, orphanages, and others who were displaced and devastated by war in her home country and abroad.
Emahoy’s music is an alchemical blend of styles, incorporating fluttering piano, violin, and organ melodies informed by Ethiopian liturgical tradition, European classical music, and her own melismatic, circular melodies that give and bend at will. She began writing music in the 1940s and continued composing until her death last March, just before her 100th birthday, amid a renewed swell of interest in her work; even corporate overlords like Amazon and Walmart have synced her music in commercials. On the new posthumous album Souvenirs, released in collaboration by Emahoy’s family and Portland record label Mississippi with assistance from historian Thomas Feng, the artist’s astonishing compositions—filled out for the first time with vocals performed by Emahoy herself—strike the soul. Sung in Amharic and taped on cassette in her family’s home in Addis Ababa during a period of political unrest, these wending, inquisitive songs are a nourishing balm and an essential expansion of her available catalog.
Recorded between 1977 and 1985, Souvenirs captures a shift in Emahoy’s songwriting that coincided with a turning point in her life. She and her family were restricted from leaving Ethiopia during the Red Terror, a campaign of repression that followed the overthrow of Emperor Haile Selassie by the Derg regime, a Marxist-Leninist military junta, in 1974. Emahoy had endured war since she was a child, having been born into a wealthy Ethiopian family who were exiled and became prisoners of war following Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935.
Even before the invasion, music had coursed through her life as a twin flame. At age 6, she was sent to a Swiss boarding school where she studied violin and piano before returning to Ethiopia. After the war, she traveled to Cairo to study under Polish violinist Alexander Kontorowicz, honing her skill at rehearsals that could last as long as four hours. She was ordained as a nun in 1948 and spent the next decade at the Gishen Mariam monastery in northern Ethiopia, occasionally returning to see her family in Addis Ababa. In the 1960s she returned to the city and continued to write for piano, organ, and violin. Her first albums, Spielt Eigene Kompositionen and Der Sang des Meeres, were recorded in Germany in 1963 as charity releases benefitting liturgical students in the city of Gondar, where she had relocated. The fruitful run of music, which included timeless songs like “Homesickness” and “The Homeless Wanderer,” became some of her best-known.
By the early 1970s, Emahoy was in her mid-50s and living in Jerusalem, finding deeper inspiration for her music within the holy city and releasing two more albums dedicated to the Ethiopian Orthodox church and an orphanage. Upon returning to her mother in Ethiopia, her musical practice diversified—she dedicated songs to family members, wrote hymns, and performed benefit concerts, broadening her music’s personal and cultural purpose up until the Derg took power. Under this new form of exile, Emahoy crafted Souvenirs. The liner notes observe that this music was likely meant to be private at the time it was made; Emahoy often recorded songs late into the night since the Derg had restricted access to evening liturgy services at the church, and these lightly scuffed reel-to-reel recordings capture errant sounds like birdsong outside of her window, adding a wistful, homespun richness.
Throughout, Emahoy’s songwriting orients toward melancholic, tremulous compositions and lyrics that evoke the natural world as a means of escape. Opener “Clouds Moving on the Sky” yearns for a safe haven, drifting on Emahoy’s melismatic runs that climb, elongate, and shift in tandem with her piano like sunlight passing over grass. “My heart has never stopped missing home,” she sings mournfully, going on to give voice to anyone displaced by war: “Why are we condemned to be tangled in the sins of others?” Her voice arcs around notes, capable of both gliding exuberance and weary contemplation. Over rippling piano arrangements on the stunning “Ready to Leave” and “Is It Sunny or Cloudy in the Land You Live?,” she dreams of travel, but her thoughts never stray far: “I couldn’t see my country’s sky,” she sings in the latter song, her voice rising to an epiphanic high. “Have I really gone so far?”
The music of Souvenirs underlines Emahoy’s pride in the beauty and breadth of life in Ethiopia; here, you easily understand her drive to keep coming home. The highlight “Ethiopia My Motherland” dances along a roaming piano melody as she paints a vivid, loving portrait, describing fields “rolling in green velvet” and trees “draped in yellow and red.” She extends her love to the soldiers, laborers, farmers, and everyone else who make up her homeland: “Could a country be missed like a person?” she asks tenderly. She continues to weave a political thread through the warm, eddying “Don’t Forget Your Country,” which references the Derg regime’s effort to eradicate illiteracy. “Our nation’s literacy campaign made history/When the young, the elderly, and men walk together/It is a great pride for the comrade who taught them,” she sings, affirming the spread of knowledge. The song speaks to Emahoy’s ethos throughout her life: ensuring the safety, wellbeing, and benefit of those within her power to help.
In 1984, Emahoy was able to secure her return to Jerusalem, where she took a vow of poverty and remained at the Debre Genet Monastery for the rest of her life. Souvenirs was recovered from Emahoy’s cell at the monastery among other boxes of cassette tapes. It’s miraculous that the album exists in the state it does—a crucial new inclusion to Emahoy’s catalog that expands on the artistry, fluidity, and beauty of her craft. You can hear it best on “Where Is the Highway of Thought?,” where a recursive piano melody guides a lulling meditation on mortality. Here, she considers that thoughts, unbound by a tangible form, can “make your flesh jealous,” but she finds some peace within the idea. “Thought, who are you?/You never get tired,” she sings, “No matter how far you travel/You never run out of ways.” With Souvenirs, Emahoy’s extraordinary life and music is certain to continue traveling in the same ceaseless manner, transforming countless lives along its path.


Wilco's 10th album is a largely acoustic affair laden with sweet melodies, autumnal production, and childhood memories that stop just short of nostalgic.

Schmilco

A few years ago, Jeff Tweedy sang a simple song called “Low Key,” accompanied by his son, on an album he named after his wife and released on his own label. It would be hard to invent a more defining moment for modern-day Wilco. As a frontman, Tweedy’s interests have grown closer to home, his music has become more subtle, and his band has grown more comfortable. They’ve mostly abandoned their past experimental ambitions to focus on sounding smaller, more subdued. It’s telling that their longest and most expansive recent song is a hushed ballad designed to evoke the spirit of a contemplative weekend morning.
Schmilco, the band’s 10th album, is similarly low-stakes. Though it was written and recorded during the same sessions that led to last year’s nutty Star Wars, it has more in common with 2014’s Tweedy side project. It’s a largely acoustic affair laden with sweet melodies, autumnal production, and childhood memories that stop just short of nostalgic. The songs on Schmilco are wistful and quaint, zooming in on bittersweet moments with a novelistic eye for detail. In “Normal American Kids,” Tweedy recounts a suburban adolescence spent awkward, angsty, and stoned. In “Cry All Day,” he spills his guts at an open mic. In “Happiness,” he turns to his mother for approval but leaves instead with fresh existential depression, lamenting that "happiness depends on who you blame” as the band trudges lazily behind him.
With the exception of “Locator”—the only track here that channels Star Wars’ fuzzy, Jim O’Rourke-era flashbacks—Schmilco finds Wilco at their lightest and folksiest. “Cry All Day” hinges on a quiet anxiety – a little bit “Dancing in the Dark,” a little bit “Talent Show.” “Someone to Lose” and “Nope” each harbor a whimsical, bluesy edge; even the chaotic “Common Sense” retains a laid-back groove through guitarist Nels Cline’s glorious, fret-tapping freak-out. Over a decade after Wilco tacked 12 minutes of dialtone noise onto a sparse piano ballad, their idiosyncrasies are now more discreetly embedded into their music—and they still do simple, twangy power-pop better than just about anyone. On another Wilco album, the three-minute gem “If I Ever Was a Child” might fade into the background; here, it’s the sunny peak.
Even if Schmilco isn’t Wilco’s most exciting album, it’s among their most consistent and immediately gratifying. In “We Aren’t the World (Safety Girl),” Tweedy swipes the chorus from one of pop music’s most shameless stabs at universality, then subverts it by directing it at one person. This moment hints at the kind of insularity that Wilco now favors; they opt for intimacy over inclusivity, directness over dynamics. Schmilco is another decidedly minor release from a band whose best work (Being There, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot) once felt like landmarks– but it succeeds in its subtle, freewheeling self-awareness, as hinted by the punny album title and the Joan Cornellà-penned cover art. An illustrator whose surreal, wordless illustrations often depict characters resolving chaotic situations with strange contentment, Cornellà's work is a perfect fit for present day Wilco: they’ve always been low-key, but they’ve rarely sounded so joyful about it.


The Minneapolis trio’s second album is a thrilling smash and grab, packed with catchy hooks, brat-punk impishness, and irresistible gang choruses.

burnout

If Olivia Rodrigo ever played the dive bar circuit, then VIAL should be first in line as her tour opener. After forming in high school, the Minneapolis trio has spent the past five years honing its brat-punk sound and getting drunk on the thrill of songwriting as a diaristic purge. VIAL write up-front songs about abortion rights, trying to make friends, and, like any upstanding band that takes pride in its Midwestern roots, soup. No matter the subject, they sound jittery and giggly, like they’re kicking notes to each other in class and trying not to let the squeak of their Dr. Martens oxfords rat them out. Though the trio’s core is punk, they soften their edges with an alt-pop streak that sweetens their revenge songs, much like Rodrigo’s “bad idea right?” or “all-american bitch.”
The band’s second album, burnout, dances its way through aggression and impishness. For every song about no longer recognizing yourself or overcoming a breakup, there’s another about stealing Honda Civics or chronic illness flare-ups. The more melodrama, the better. “ur dad” goes for a gender-swapped “Stacy’s Mom” in the punchy style of the B-52’s, while “friendship bracelet” recounts the downfall of two BFFs with the panache of Be Your Own Pet. You can hear a smile creep on bassist Taylor Kraemer’s face as she puts on her squeakiest voice for a gossipy skirmish on the same song. When guitarist KT Branscom’s pleas to go home morph into a howl on “apathy,” they sustain the note as if a full moon had risen into view. VIAL never sound more present, though, than when plotting revenge. “I hope you trip over your laces and fall on both your faces,” Branscom snarks on album opener “two-faced,” like they can already envision it happening.
The best one-two punch of VIAL’s tongue-in-cheek songwriting arrives midway through burnout. Their tradition of airing out therapy woes through song continues here, after 2019’s “Therapy” and 2021’s “Therapy Pt II.” The third installment of this series is a 40-second tape recording in which drummer Katie Fischer and Branscom act out the beginning of a session to set up “just fine,” the album’s catchiest single. That twofer starts off in jest, but nose-dives into serious venting, with the chorus of “just fine” revolving around a depressive neutrality: “I don’t want to feel good or even happy anymore/I’m quite content with fine.” Branscom’s emotional deflation spirals out of control further when they repeat the phrase “I’m fine” so many times that the words distort with the same intent to lose meaning—and, in flashes, with a similar vocal tone—as Mitski’s “Nobody.” But Fischer’s drumming and Kraemer’s springy bassline keep things jovial, almost mockingly so, with rhythms so upbeat that fans demanded a ska version with former tourmate JER. Zoomed out, “just fine” represents VIAL’s evolution from DIY house show staple to underground TikTok darlings: punk drumming, melodic guitar, and youthful gang choruses that channel Gen Z’s coming-of-age angst.
With cheeky interludes and songs that seem to fly by faster than their already short runtimes, burnout feels closer to an EP than it does a proper full-length. That’s not to say it’s empty; VIAL know the art of writing a catchy hook and the trick of delivering it at 1.5x speed—and they make good on both throughout. burnout is a smash and grab that represents their glow-up from moody teenagers learning Nirvana’s “Territorial Pissings” to young adults confidently leading the crowd in “PISS! PISS! PISS!” chants at their own shows. VIAL are still working through tough subjects like they did on their debut album, Loudmouth, but they’re injecting more brattiness into the mix as they barrel out of control. That dialed-up combo will get your blood pumping like you’re present for the real thing.


On Boronia, the Australian duo Hockey Dad are a 2016 version of the Wyld Stallyns, if Bill and Ted had been hypnotized by surf rock instead of metal.

Boronia

In their videos, the Australian duo Hockey Dad are shown skateboarding, skinny dipping, surfing, playing video slot machines, drinking beer, and hanging out at a place called Windang Fast Chicken. A majority of the songs on their full-length debut, Boronia, are about pining for women who are way out of their league. Basically, they are a 2016 version of the Wyld Stallyns, if Bill and Ted had been hypnotized by surf rock instead of metal.
The 11 songs on the album bounce with the excitement and innocence of two best friends—singer and guitarist Zach Stephenson and drummer William Fleming—doing what they love best (or at least second-best; they do seem to be pretty good at surfing). Producer Tom Iansek captures Hockey Dad’s energy well, highlighting their electric jangle, occasional rushes of frothy distortion and lots of bubblegum-popping claps. Stephenson doesn’t indulge in much lead guitar playing, and he sings with what Fleming has dubbed a “scrawny grommy voice,”  a rare nasally rasp that puts him in the strange company of Hamilton Leithauser, Bon Scott, Billy Squier, and Joe Elliott from Def Leppard. The album opens with “Can’t Have Them,” which not only sets the nice-guys-finish-last tone that pops up all over Boronia, but also for music that would sound dangerously derivative were it not for Stephenson’s unique voice. “Can’t Have Them” sounds almost like they lifted the backing track from “Not Too Soon” by Throwing Muses and slapped different vocals on top of it, a la “Ça plane pour moi”/“Jet Boy, Jet Girl.”  Elsewhere there are moments indebted to the Strokes, Surfer Blood, and Wavves.
As for the stories of unrequited love that populate Boronia; they get old quickly. Sample lyrics include, “As I slowly lose my cool, Laura treats me like a fool, I can’t help it, she’s too perfect” in “Laura;” “I see her in my dreams, but I don’t think she sees me” in “Raygun;” and the whole of “I Need a Woman,” the chorus of which is “Don’t make me cry, I need a woman in my life.” Come on, guys: You play in a band! Cheer up! These lyrics threaten to drag the rest of the album down if you listen too closely, but Stephenson’s vocal melodies are buoyant enough to keep it all afloat if you’re playing this in the background.
Lyrically, the best moment on the album comes close to the end, when Stephenson puts his romantic pursuits on hold, and indulges in a full-on bromantic ballad. “Two Forever” is a heartfelt message that prioritizes the duo’s friendship over all the women of Boronia. “I don’t need love, don’t need no woman, don’t need that shit, ‘cause I got you, man,” he sings. Sure, it doesn’t read well, but it’s sweet and sincere, and it’s the type of mission statement that if true, could hold this band together as they get better. Hopefully, they will continue to be excellent to each other.


David Bazan reflects on small-town adolescence with an insular and empathetic album about tedium, disappointment, and simmering tension.

Havasu

At age 12, David Bazan moved from Phoenix, Arizona to a town younger than himself. Lake Havasu City incorporated in 1978, evolving from a former Army Air Corps camp to a tourist trap fueled by international jet ski competitions and a brick-by-brick reconstruction of London Bridge. Bazan would be long gone by the time MTV Spring Break filmed on location in 1995. A terraformed community of affordable housing and immediate opportunity, Lake Havasu City held obvious appeal for a family like Bazan’s that would repeatedly uproot itself; Havasu is the second album of a planned Pedro the Lion pentalogy, each entry based in a city where Bazan grew up. On the opening track, “Don’t Wanna Move,” a shy, insecure, 12-year-old Bazan sits in the backseat, staring at pregnant storm clouds and internalizing a newfound sense of betrayal and injustice (“Still keep it hid and grit my teeth like you showed me/Still hope it’s not too late for someone to know me”).
Based around the riff of Phoenix closer “Leaving the Valley,” “Don’t Wanna Move” introduces the most minimal and insular Pedro the Lion album yet, as well as the most provocative: Bazan makes the formative experiences of being 13 years old feel inextricable from the tedium. He had no choice if Havasu was to be honest about the impact of leaving the ninth-most populous city in America for a town of about 24,000. The melodies of “Don’t Wanna Move” and “Too Much” seem to find their footing in real time, tracking Bazan’s awkward development as a social being in his new environment. After nearly three painstaking minutes dissecting the minutiae of woodwind embouchures and middle-school orchestra politics, “First Drum Set” speeds up, righting itself with a rudimentary yet joyous backbeat. It would be a little too cute if it weren’t the first time Havasu shook off the intentional torpor that Bazan attributes to both the 109-degree average summer heat and his own burgeoning awareness of depression.
When Bazan revived the Pedro the Lion project with Phoenix in 2019, following a 13-year hiatus, he tempered expectations by staying firmly within sturdy, midtempo power-trio indie rock. Havasu is even more explicit about setting his experimental leanings aside; it was originally planned as a synth album, a tribute to the barren landscape, prefab architecture, and popular music of late-’80s Arizona. But the crackling, dehydrated tones Pedro the Lion extract from their Les Pauls and austere drums do a better job of conjuring the parched expanse of Lake Havasu City than a Nord Lead ever could. The spindly, searching guitar figures of “Don’t Wanna Move” imagine Spirit of Eden if Mark Hollis sought deliverance in the American Southwest. Based on little more than a droning, four-note figure that repeats through its entirety, “Stranger” mesmerizes like heat refracting off blacktop.
For the most part, Havasu strives to build on Phoenix, a continuity that enriches itself and its predecessor and deepens Pedro the Lion’s backstory. In the band’s first iteration, Bazan was a conflicted man asking a lot of questions and pointing a lot of fingers. Whereas their 1998 debut It’s Hard to Find a Friend took an accusatory tone towards those who would sacrifice their principles for social acceptance, on Phoenix highlight “Quietest Friend” and the new album’s “Own Valentine,” Bazan empathizes with his younger self as someone who used manipulation to fill a void of self-esteem. “First Drum Set” is a sequel of sorts to Phoenix’s “Yellow Bike,” a jubilant awakening to possibilities outside his immediate surroundings; describing music as “sports about my feelings” is one of Bazan’s funniest lines yet and a reminder of its poignance for adolescent outcasts. Phoenix’s “Circle K” now foreshadows a heartbreaking scene on “Stranger” where Bazan again escapes into junk food for comfort, “eating my shame” at the snack bar after being shunned at a couples skate.
If Pedro the Lion 2.0 feels limited by Bazan’s softer, sweeter approach, it’s an indulgence he’s earned. Bazan has spent the past 20 years risking criticism and ex-communication to speak honestly about politics, sex, alcoholism, and God. As evidenced by the 2019 documentary Strange Negotiations, which followed him from house show to house show, he has been revered but not always rewarded. Yet Havasu truly sparks when his indignation returns on “Old Wisdom”: “You’re not allowed to see it/But you always had a choice/Between making a disciple/And knowing your little boy,” he moans, giving a voice to a skepticism towards parental figures (spiritual or otherwise) that his 13-year-old self understood but couldn’t express. Up to that point, Bazan describes himself as a passive participant in his own life, and by the end of Havasu, the Bazans are again packing the moving van, fretting about the security deposit, and demanding young David “keep a flexible attitude” as they head for Santa Cruz. But the simmering tensions have already started to creep in. Though Bazan spends most of Havasu processing his childhood, he’s slowly revealing the man he’d become.

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Lupe Fiasco reunites with producer Soundtrakk for a jazzy, subdued album that weighs the challenges and indignities of sustaining a career in the arts.

Samurai

Toward the end of The Last Samurai, Helen DeWitt’s 2000 novel about a single mother and son bouncing around the poverty line as the latter searches for a suitable father figure, that son has a conversation with a brilliant but difficult pianist. “Why don’t you make a CD?” the son asks. The pianist replies: “No one would buy the kind of thing I’d like to put on a CD and I can’t afford to make a CD that no one will buy.” The Last Samurai is hailed by critics and sold well over 100,000 copies. But due to contract math that would make Q-Tip blush, DeWitt ended up owing her publisher money. Before long, the book fell out of print. In the decades since, DeWitt’s fiction has focused on the material lives of artists as they struggle to navigate capitalism and psychological collapse.
Once an ascendant pop star and critical darling with a seemingly clean trajectory, Lupe Fiasco has seen his career has grow similarly tangled in the last 15 years. Since the public feud between him and his former label, Atlantic, over his third album, 2011’s Lasers, Lupe has remained nearly A-list by reputation, but with plummeting chart positions that suggest an audience segmented from the rap mainstream. He’s spoken frequently and eloquently about not only the business minutiae that has complicated his decision-making, but the ways hip-hop—and music writ large—is devalued compared to so-called fine art. (“If I want to read the next book by Helen DeWitt, I can just write it, and read it, and then write another one,” the Last Samurai author told The Believer in 2012. “Painters do that and nobody objects.”)
Samurai, which arrives almost two years to the day after Lupe’s eighth album, Drill Music in Zion, has plenty in common with that project: It’s produced entirely by longtime collaborator Soundtrakk, skews jazzy and subdued, and is slight (even slighter, in fact, at just 30 minutes). Its title was inspired by a moment in Asif Kapadia’s 2015 Amy Winehouse documentary in which the late singer leaves a voice message for producer Salaam Remi describing herself as a samurai battle rapper. For Lupe, the metaphor seems tidy: a motivated master working in relative isolation, honing a blade.
The album is conspicuously breezy. Lupe’s singing voice, a staple of his style as far back as The Cool, has only grown more pliable: See the way he moves between cadences and harmonies on the hook and verses of “Palaces,” each smartly shaped and carefully rendered. Elsewhere he flits, without apparent effort, between other modes of technical wizardry, like the staccato syllable latticework that dresses up pedestrian writing on the second verse of “No. 1 Headband” or the passage on “Mumble Rap” that begins with the line, “With a style similar to riding around looking for an arrest to resist.” It feels as if there’s some great, centrifugal force pushing down on the middle of each bar.
And yet this musical ease seems at deliberate odds with the torture Lupe describes, in first- and third-person, of trying to hack a career in the arts. There are the shows where the “front row the only row” (“Bigfoot”); there is the line on “Outside” where he says, “My business bone is connected to my ethics”—defiant from one angle, quixotic from another. Lupe lapses in and out of Amy Winehouse portraiture, and when he raps, on closer “Til Eternity,” about a beehive that “survived in a wreck,” it’s both a reference to her signature hairstyle and a metaphor that echos the ones he introduces earlier on the album. “We think we’re fortresses, made of stone,” he croons on “Palaces,” “but we’re just palaces made out of flesh and bone.” Despite the loftiness of “palace,” he presents this fragility without romance—or at least, with full knowledge of the forces conspiring to puncture it at every pass.


Folkie and electro supergroup-- including Bon Iver, Megafaun, members of the Rosebuds, and leader Ryan Olson-- tackle 80s R&B and Lite FM fare.

Relayted

Gripe about hipster irony all you want, but was there ever any point when the indie/punk underground wasn't dealing in smartassed self-parody? There have always been artists who find humor in making certain styles into grotesque caricatures and using them to point out the absurdity, or greatness, in a genre. The punchline works best when the setup's serious enough to work without it. The problem of irony comes when you're dealing with a setup that most people will probably mistake for the punchline itself.
And once you've been tipped to the tone of Relayted, the debut album from the two-dozen-plus-member supergroup Gayngs, well, good luck coming to terms with the slow-jam soft-rock pastiche that's just been dropped on you. Air had a tricky enough sell of it 12 years ago when they tried to convince indie kids that Moog-lounge AM pop was cool. And if the jet-set 1970s fromage of Moon Safari was a tricky kind of chic, imagine it dialed a decade ahead into mid-80s Lite FM fare. If you're not rolling your eyes yet, be patient: You have about 28 seconds before the album's first Skinemax saxophone wail.
But Gayngs take this stuff seriously, and if you concentrate really hard, maybe you could, too. It helps that pretty much everybody involved in the band has bona fides, whether in Minneapolis' electro-pop scene (brainchild Ryan Olson of Digitata; Zack Coulter and Adam Hurlburt of Solid Gold; members of Lookbook) or North Carolina folk-rock (the Rosebuds' Ivan Howard; all three members of Megafaun). That elbow-ribbing saxophone actually comes courtesy of Michael Lewis, from much-lauded Twin Cities jazz trio Happy Apple. And there are a lot of strong voices that fade in and out of this thing, too. P.O.S. absolutely kills it on the tense, Pendergrass-gone-Portishead slow-boil of "No Sweat", with fellow Doomtree alumna Dessa providing an almost subliminal background counterpoint. And the distant, breathy vocal that sounds like it's emanating from the sunset-hued beach of some early Michael Mann film makes leadoff track "The Gaudy Side of Town" sound disarmingly earnest. That's Justin Vernon of Bon Iver. Dude apparently listens to Bone Thugs, go figure.
So we're looking at a lot of serious-artist personnel for an album that might seem pretty conceptually farcical otherwise. And while some aspects of this album seem at least somewhat detrimentally tongue-in-cheek-- word has it that every track was recorded at 69 BPM, which does leaden the energy levels a bit-- Relayted doesn't stumble strictly because of its soft-rock and indie-soul leanings. Far from it: The original core trio of Olson, Coulter, and Hurlburt envisioned some kind of tribute to the legacy of 10cc, which explains all the "I'm Not in Love" vocal reverb and a straightfaced cover of 10cc vets Godley & Creme's 1985 single "Cry". And it sounds credible, even when it's transmuted into jittery, guitar-addled new wave ("Faded High") or Blade Runnerish soul-jazz ("Ride"). It's only when the extended ether-frolic vibe is rattled by some misplaced short-and-sharp pop-length numbers-- the mid-album stretch of "False Bottom", "The Beatdown", and "Crystal Rope" skews a bit too forceful-- that the seams actually start to show.
So Relayted is both better than it had any right to be, given the concept, and about as good as you could expect from the musicians involved. It has all the signs of a gag that got out of hand-- three guys from Minneapolis bantering about soft-rock namedrops who eventually found themselves surrounded by enough smart, likeminded musicians that it somehow wound up destined to sound at least somewhat heartfelt. It's a joke told in reverse, with a potentially cheesy setup that often comes with a surprisingly poignant payoff. Go into this expecting irony, and it might turn your stomach. Take it sincerely, and it'll hit you about a foot higher.


Several years removed from their turn-of-the-decade peak, Delorean's frothy dance-pop has soured somewhat.

Muzik

Lo-fi bedroom punk, chillwave, Balearic, Hipstamatic, Merriweather Post Pavilion, whatever—just about everything responsible for the indie zeitgeist at the turn of the decade craved a return to innocence. This is why nostalgia for that time feels doubly sad: it’s escapism into a time that was already escapist. The frothy, sugar-spun dance-pop of Barcelona quartet Delorean was emblematic of those years, as captured on Ayrton Senna EP and Subiza. Now that it's 2016, Delorean get with the times and give us a comedown album. I’m just not sure that was their intention.
It sure doesn’t sound like Muzik was meant to do say or do anything radically different than Delorean’s most recent output. Though the production and instrumentation is more purely electronic this time around, Delorean are exactly what they’ve been since their reinvention and breakthrough—a band that retained the earnestness and economy of their emo/indie-rock origins while writing with techno and house tools. Muzik continues to reduce their reliance on swirling ambience, a logical progression from 2013’s Apar, itself a sleeker, more streamlined rendering of Subiza’s screamadelia. And while Ekhi Lopetegi has long been a Ph.D candidate in philosophy, Delorean’s not what you would call lyrical. These are guided meditations on the universal subject matter you’d expect from music of this sort.
On the title track, Lopategi chants “Music’s got a hold on me/It’s shaking the ground where I am,” and it’s surprising that Delorean took this long to engage in this kind of time-honored meta exercise, paying tribute to the songs that made them fall in love with club culture and presumably adding to that canon. And yet, no Delorean single to this point has proven less capable of supporting this kind of sentiment, the synthesizers and percussion so wan and monochromatic, you’d think they were going for a coldwave rebrand.
You can’t call it minimalism when the arrangement tries to trigger the same physical and mental incapacitation as “Real Love” or “Infinite Desert”; it’s more like they’re following an involuntary austerity pledge. After confidently striking out from Delorean’s cocoon of reverb on Apar, Lopetegi has returned but the rest of the band hasn’t, giving Muzik a curiously unbalanced, deflated mix. This isn’t the “alone in the club” feeling captured in crossovers like the Streets’ “Blinded By the Lights”, Jamie xx’s “Loud Places” or dozens of Drake and Weeknd songs. This is the sound of arriving at the club too early and wondering if it’s going to be this dead all night.
That’s the enduring sensation of Muzik, of waiting for something to happen. You wait for some insight into how Delorean’s creative process has evolved over the past three years. “Push” is damn-near an homage to the Side-B deep cuts of Hot Chip’s The Warning and the pitch-shifted vocal overdubs that signify their most recent engagement with electronic music would’ve been dated on Apar. You wait for these breezy beats to build towards a rush, for the arrangements to build rather than cruise. Every song on Muzik is given a functional, imperative title and at a certain point, they all start to feel like placeholder names for stems meant for a subsequent remix, though even their frequent collaboration Pional can’t make an honest jam out of “Muzik.”
Maybe the saddest part about all of Muzik is the inevitability: “Summer of Love,” “Summer of Drugs,” “Deadbeat Summer,” none of it lasts, just more proof of “Endless Summer” as one of pop culture’s most pernicious myths. Even in Delorean’s best songs, the hooks saw this coming: “will we ever meet again?”, “I would never be the same again.” A primary principle of dance music is to live in the moment *because *it won’t last forever, rather than in spite of it. Muzik is what it sounds like when you realize the moment has already passed.


Newly reissued by the BBE label’s J Jazz series, the Tokyo pianist’s 1979 album is more traditional than its contemporaries in the Japanese jazz scene, but it overflows with character.

Kemo-Sabe

When pianist Masao Nakajima put out Kemo-Sabe in 1979, Japanese jazz was going through an electric fusion boom. Blue Note imitation was dead; artists dashed toward free improvisation, post-modal impressionism, and deep spiritual jazz. Musicians were transplanting elements of electronic music, rock, Afrobeat, flamenco, and funk into their arrangements; no boundary was being left untested. Against this backdrop, Kemo-Sabe was a stylistic outlier: a classically acoustic jazz album. Not that Nakajima was a staunch traditionalist. He’d once owned synthesizers and a Hammond organ, but he sold them all to fund a formative trip to the U.S. The innovation on Kemo-Sabe comes in the dynamic interplay between the quartet, the airy grooves, and the virtuoso soloing. The tools—piano, bass, drums, and sax—may have been standard, but the results are a reminder of the freewheeling individualism that broke loose in Japanese jazz.
UK label BBE has reissued Kemo-Sabe as part of its wonderful J Jazz series, which covers the relentlessly inventive period in Japanese jazz from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Its attention turns to Nakajima after the title track was previously included on the compilation J Jazz Volume 3. Born in 1950 in Ōta, a special ward of greater Tokyo, to a councilman father and mother who sang classical music, Nakajima started playing piano at age 7 and became interested in jazz around 12 or 13, when he was exposed to visiting foreign artists on television and radio; Erroll Garner, Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson, and George Shearing were among his early favorites. At 16, Nakajima was already the resident pianist in a jazz live house, his clear talent making him well placed for the creative explosion in Japanese jazz that was to come. By the time he recorded the first album under his name in 1979, he already had over a decade of experience as a session player, touring musician, and musical director, and was just back from a year in the U.S., where he worked on Robin Kenyatta’s disco-inspired fusion album Take The Heat Off Me.
Joining him for the Kemo-Sabe sessions was bassist Osamu Kawakami, who had previously collaborated with scene heavyweight Sadao Watanabe. On drums was American Donald Bailey, known for playing on Jimmy Smith’s Blue Note records as well as recording with Roy Ayers; he spent five years in Japan, part of a wave of American musicians picking up work in the happening scene. Though Kemo-Sabe was initially intended for a trio, Nakajima invited Toshiyuki Honda, leader of the popular fusion group Burning Waves, to play flute and saxophone on a few songs. Yet if the quartet appeared to be swiftly assembled from assorted components, the play on Kemo-Sabe is slick and well tuned, melodic and textured, seamlessly moving from dramatic to sensual depending on the steward’s whims.
The record kicks off with the title track, penned by Mike Nock, a New Zealand pianist and then member of Bay Area electric fusion group the Fourth Way. Taking no time to heat up, we’re dropped into the set right as Honda’s sax swoops over Nakajima’s staggered piano keys. The band expertly hits the crescendos of the catchy composition; Kawakami and Bailey get a turn at the forefront of the arrangement over its second half. There’s an immediate change of tone on the velvety noir piano piece “Beloved Diane,” the one Nakajima original, suitable for quiet neighborhood diners when the street lamps light up outside. None of the six songs stretch beyond six and a half minutes, keeping the album moving at a snappy pace.
Like most Japanese jazz of the era, the production on Kemo-Sabe is warm and inviting. Take the rendition of Herbie Hancock’s autumnal smooth-jazz number “Tell Me a Bedtime Story.” Quincy Jones had recorded a version the previous year with Hancock on electric piano; here, Honda’s graceful flute lights the way, fluttering like candlelight.
Though all the players get to showcase their best stuff at different times, Nakajima leaves his own apex for the conclusion: His version of the old Leonard Bernstein number “My Love” places his piano front and center as he caresses the keys. There’s a sense of adventure and romance in his play as he wanders off on his own path before seamlessly finding the melody once more. It puts the seal on a set that deserves consideration in any framing of the era. While his contemporaries were tying tradition up in knots, Masao Nakajima made a record that masquerades as classicist but overflows with character.


The latest LP from Moon Duo builds on their psychedelic formula—corroded guitars, kraut rhythms, steely grit—and allows them to indulge their most sinister tendencies.

Occult Architecture Vol. 1

Four albums deep, Moon Duo have grown somewhat predictable. The collaboration of Wooden Shijps’ guitar-warlock Ripley Johnson and keyboardist Sanae Yamada has always been built on a steady but enjoyable mix of elements: corroded guitars, loopy keyboard lines, krautrock rhythms, and psychedelic strains conjuring both the whirling cosmos and droning abyss. Their new album Occult Architecture Vol. 1 does little to alter the formula, but the key to Moon Duo records has always been the strength of the compositions. And those already onboard with the band won’t be disappointed by the seven tracks here.
Touted as representing the depths and changes of the seasons, Occult Architecture Vol. 1 delves into the bleaker corners of winter and allows Moon Duo to indulge their most sinister tendencies. Like many a great Moon Duo song, opener “The Death Set” is at once swaggering, sexy, and foreboding. Much of their music is low-key cinematic; it’s hard to hear “The Death Set”’s distorted, slow-motion whoosh or its bone-rattling beat and not imagine a character’s dramatic entrance into an unnerving nightclub. Elsewhere, like on “Cold Fear” and “Will of the Devil,” they use queasy electronic textures to flirt with gothier territory.
Well past the lower-fi nature of their earliest work, Moon Duo still don’t operate with a ton of dynamic range. But they use those heart-palpitating rhythms and lacerating keyboard lines to build blown-out, end-times epics littered with subtle twists. Johnson’s death-drive guitars propel “Cult of Moloch” forward unwaveringly, but interjections of synth and a second, spiraling guitar part make the song feel like it’s reaching for spiritual corners of nature. Closer “White Rose”—one long synth ride—has a similar effect, winding down a road into the distance. Moon Duo haven’t gone full-on mystic, however; the new album maintains the steely grit of its predecessor, Shadow of the Sun. Theirs is music still meant for barreling down desert highways in a stolen car, or for the grind and smog of a third-tier industrial city.
That said, Moon Duo isn’t the kind of group to make albums with literal thematic angles. Their style has limits, but discernibility is maybe not the point. Moon Duo’s precise mix of traditions and sounds conjures a nihilistic cool, an image of leather-jacketed outlaws chain-smoking in dark alleyways in seedy cities. Occult Architecture Vol. 1 is a good record that’s at its best when Moon Duo fully give in to these seductive inklings, like on “The Death Set” or “Creepin.’” Sure, we’ve heard the riff from “Creepin'” before, but it’s nice to hear it again.